Andrew Sullivan has another one of his tiresome “Vive La Resistance” posts, this time (indirectly) citing Ms. Mac Donald’s interview with Razib when she is at her most petulant.  For her part, like Sullivan, Ms. Mac Donald sometimes likes to target a faceless “them” who manage to embody every flaw that she perceives in religious conservatives.  First, here’s Mac Donald:

In the American Conservative piece I wanted to offer some resistance to the assumption of conservative religious unanimity. I tried to point out that conservatism has no necessary relation to religious belief, and that rational thought, not revelation, is all that is required to arrive at the fundamental conservative principles of personal responsibility and the rule of law. I find it depressing that every organ of conservative opinion reflexively cheers on creationism and intelligent design, while delivering snide pot shots at the Enlightenment. Which of the astounding fruits of empiricism would these Enlightenment-bashers dispense with: the conquest of cholera and other infectious diseases, emergency room medicine, jet travel, or the internet, to name just a handful of the millions of human triumphs that we take for granted?

But no one assumes “conservative religious unanimity.”  Just as Sullivan fabricates his enemy, the “fundamentalists,” to match his preoccupations, Ms. Mac Donald imagines that there is such a thing as an “assumption of conservative religious unanimity,” which helps her defend the position that she is defending “reason and realism” against superstitious yobs.  In a spirit similar to that Sullivan’s own incensed attack on “fundamentalism” and his claim that this mythical “fundamentalism” is taking over and displacing American conservatism (which is far more ludicrous than Ms. Mac Donald’s more modest critiques), Ms. Mac Donald gives the impression that she is doggedly fighting against the overwhelming religiosity of modern conservatism.  As I have argued earlier today, this overwhelming religiosity is not nearly as great as she makes it out to be. 

I should say that if conservatism were governed by the truths of Christianity and leavened by the wisdom of the Fathers, I think it would generally be all to the benefit of conservatism.  The alternatives have always been an acquiescence in false Enlightenment liberal understandings of human nature and society or an acceptance of the Christian understanding that man is fallen (but capable of virtue) and in need of good order and the conservative wisdom that social organisation arises from inherited customs and structures and not from contract or consent.  When conservatives belittle the Enlightenment, it is normally the social and political theories of the more radical French thinkers that they are targeting, but they are in any case objecting for the most part to false understandings of the origin of society, how polities arise and function and what the rightful sources of legitimacy and authority are.  They object to a distorted understanding of the human person and a tendency of many Enlightenment thinkers to be hostile to rooted, traditional society and its numerous institutions and customs.  They do not reject scientific method, nor do they even necessarily hold an empiricist epistemology in low esteem.  The suggestion that they reject “empiricism” entirely, and the implication that most conservatives form a mass of hidebound ignoramuses who would abandon all scientific advances are both false.  

The strangest part of this charge is the connection between the Enlightenment and, for example, “the conquest of cholera,” since the major thinkers of the Enlightenment did not cure cholera and were not even close to understanding vaccination or many of the principles of public sanitation and hygiene that helped contain outbreaks.  There were still cholera epidemics in the 19th century, many of them in the filthy, overcrowded cities of the industrial era brought to us by technological progress.  In any case, what good, one might ask, did Voltaire’s contempt for Christianity do for people dying of cholera?  That is the part of the Enlightenment that we take pots shot at most of the time, so perhaps it is no wonder that Ms. Mac Donald defends it, but what does that have to do the advance of medical and technological sciences?  Is there a new psychosomatic cure for disease achieved not through prayer, but through mocking God?  Ms. Mac Donald refers to “empiricism,” whence come all these astounding fruits.  Now suppose that we find Leibniz’s “innate ideas” more compelling and more consistent with modern neuroscience than Locke’s tabula rasa?  Do we at least get credit for not rejecting Leibniz’s differential calculus?   

Ms. Mac Donald says that she finds it “depressing” that “every organ of conservative opinion reflexively cheers on creationism and intelligent design while delivering snide pot shots at the Enlightenment.”  But this is simply untrue.  No major conservative magazine “cheers on creationism” as such, much less do they do so “reflexively.”  I have yet to encounter a serious conservative writer or scholar who accepts the Young Earth thesis.  These people do not exist.  There are conservative people writing online who believe this, and there are even academics who believe it, but those aren’t the people Ms. Mac Donald was referring to. 

On ID, National Review has no formal position, and they certainly don’t “cheer” on creationism.  With respect to ID, they have entertained arguments from both sides, but that is hardly “cheering” anything on.  At least one of their more prominent contributors in John Derbyshire has made it his business to basically single-handedly crush Intelligent Design’s pretensions to being science.  It was not a difficult task, and he succeeded quite well.  I am as much of a Counter-Enlightenment man today as you are likely to find under the age of 30, and I have ridiculed ID’s claims to being science on several occasions.  That’s because it isn’t science.  Amusingly, two of the main proponents of this intellectual swindle are none other than the grand old man of neoconservatism, Irving Kristol, and the grand dame Gertrude Himmelfarb, as Derbyshire noted last year.  As Derbyshire observed, their boosting of ID as science is entirely cynical and aimed at placating some religious conservatives.  That is hardly evidence of galloping religiosity in “every organ of conservative opinion.”  

I should note that I do not ridicule the possibility of understanding some of the claims of ID as a legitimate philosophical view on the orderliness of the universe and the implications this has for the existence of God, but that is not what ID proponents want when they push for recognition of their “theory.”  ID advocates are people who accept everything about the theory of evolution except the mythology woven around it; in place of that mythology, they would like to posit a different story, equally unproven and unproveable, for perhaps well-intentioned reasons that end up being nonetheless rather silly.  But Ms. Mac Donald might have more in common with ID proponents than she thinks, though, since they, too, enjoy playing the wounded, oppressed victim fighting against a hostile and arrogant establishment. 

As for taking pot shots at the Enlightenment, there isn’t that much of that going around these days.  More’s the pity.  I am fairly sure that I have made myself obnoxious to many movement conservatives because I go out of my way to disparage and ridicule certain assumptions of Locke and some of the more high-flown claims of the Declaration of Independence.  I take snide pot shots at the Enlightenment, but I never cheer on creationism and ID.  I wouldn’t know where to begin.  Do I start by pretending that carbon dating doesn’t exist, or do I start by pretending that saying, “God did it” serves as an acceptable hypothesis?  Neither does my blog constitute much of an “organ of conservative opinion,” though I suppose it is a small one of sorts.  

Anyway, lately it has not been the case that conservatives have been too hard on the Enlightenment–many have rather become its latter-day cheerleaders as a sort of cultural one-upsmanship vis-a-vis Islam.  The Weekly Standard has not, to my knowledge, ever made a snide remark about the Enlightenment.  If they have, it would have to have been rare or fairly mild.  What about American Spectator?  We could inquire, but I am fairly confident that the only place where you might conceivably find respectful consideration of creation science is in a publication like World, and I’m probably not being fair to them when I say that.  Did American Conservative have a big “Yes, The Earth Is Only 4,004 Years Old” editorial and I missed it?  Of course not. 

This is because it is entirely possible to accept that God created everything without having to insist upon the absolute literal interpretation of every number (many of which are clearly symbolic in any case) in the Bible.  It is also possible to accept that God created all living things while also acknowledging that evolution is a plausible explanation for how living beings change over time.  It is possible to despise Voltaire as an impious fool and loathe Locke as a treacherous stockjobbing mountebank and to view their ideas with disdain without insisting that we live in caves and eat raw meat while dying of the plague.

Since no one has yet offered me a large pot full of treasures that would keep me otherwise occupied, I thought I would point readers to an interesting article (via Razib) about the Alevi sect in Turkey.  This is one of the many sects that fill the fissiparous and wildly diverse universe of Shi’ism.  Somewhat like the Druze, they have roots in Shi’ism, but have developed into an entirely different religious group.

Speaking of fairly obscure Near Eastern sects, I was introduced indirectly to the existence of a small religious minority in Armenia through reading the beginning of Namus, one of the works of Armenian author Alexander Shirvanzade.  Namus, as I have discovered, is a Mediterranean and Near Eastern code of honour, and would seem to form part of the Pashtuns’ pushtunwalisurveyed by The Economist late last year. 

What was the obscure sect I discovered?  The Malakans (as transliterated from Armenian) or Molokans (as transliterated from Russian).  Not to be outdone by anyone else, the Molokans have their own webpage.  From what I have been able to learn about them so far, you could not find people less likely to follow anything remotely resembling pushtunwali than the Malakans, who appear to be the very embodiment of meekness and longsuffering. 

Relating this to some current events here in America, I would note that Molokans apparently also were supposed to have had a tradition of plural marriage at some point and were either pejoratively identified or otherwise associated with Mormons in the 19th century.  According to a 1993 New York Times article, the Molokans “comprise a rather late Russian sect that emerged at the close of the 18th century.”

The article continues:

Like other anti-clerical movements in Russia and in Europe, Molokan preachers focused on immediate personal contacts with God, refuting ritual and reverence for saints and icons as idolatry. They recognize as the sole fountainhead of truth the Holy Scriptures, emphasizing that both Old and New Testaments are to be viewed metaphorically not dogmatically.

Basic is meeting for prayer which reduce to hymn singing and the joint reading and interpretation of Scriptural texts. There is no hierarchy, with the congregations chaired by an Elder, usually one of the older and better educated members of the community. They resemble more the western Quakers and Baptists.

Apparently, along with other dissident sects, the Molokans were resettled in the Caucasus under Nicholas I.  This is presumably how they entered into the history of Armenia.

Update: Somehow I forgot to mention this earlier.  There is also a movie called Namus, which is based on Shirvanzade’s story.  There is now a restored version available.  From what I have heard about the story’s melodrama, it sounds as if it will be Armenia’s answer to a Bollywood plot.  Unfortunately, it is a silent film, so there won’t be any big song-and-dance numbers.

Razib’s Q&A with Heather Mac Donald deserves an extended treatment, so, as promised Saturday, I will try to start to tackle the most interesting and vexing parts of Ms. Mac Donald’s answers.  For those interested, Razib also has a new post on response to the interview.  If time permits, I’ll make a few remarks about that one, too.  I’ll take the interview questions in order, stopping along the way to comment.  Here is the first question and part of the first answer:

1) Okay, I’ll get this out of the way.  What prompted you to “come out” as an atheist in The American Conservative earlier this year?  A friend of mine suggested that you might have become frustrated with the lack of a “reality-based” conservatism during this administration, in particular in its attitude toward immigration.  Is he going down the right track? 

I wrote The American Conservative piece out of frustration with the preening piety of conservative pundits. I attended a New York cocktail party in 2003, for example, where a prominent columnist said to the group standing around him: “We all know that what makes Republicans superior to Democrats is their religious faith.” This sentiment has been repeated in print ad nauseam, along with its twin: “We all know that morality is not possible without religion.” I didn’t then have the courage to point out to the prominent columnist that quite a few conservatives and Republicans of the highest standing had no religious faith, without apparent injury to their principles or their behavior.

I can certainly understand Ms. Mac Donald’s frustration with conservative pundits’ “preening piety,” but I’d like to remind readers of a couple of things about the original article she wrote for TAC.  As I have said before, the article was part of a symposium asking what liberal and conservative and Left and Right meant, so straightaway the article’s focus on the folly of religion and its complaint that skeptical, non-religious conservatives were being somehow marginalised or culturally threatened by all of the God-talk struck this reader as odd and out of place.  However, I’m glad TAC ran the piece and provided a forum for Ms. Mac Donald to air her grievance against religion and religious conservatives, if only as a way of showing that a conservative operation full of religious conservatives was willing to entertain a variety of perspectives and to confirm that skeptical conservatives are really not the put-upon victims among conservatives that Ms. Mac Donald made them out to be.  Back then the impression one got was not that “quite a few conservatives and Republicans of high standing” had no religious faith but were nonetheless principled and decent and able to work side by side with religious conservatives, but that the religiosity overtaking conservatism was putting some sort of stranglehold on these skeptics and non-believers.  Back in August she wrote:

Skeptical conservatives—one of the Right’s less celebrated subcultures—are conservatives because of their skepticism, not in spite of it. They ground their ideas in rational thinking and (nonreligious) moral argument. And the conservative movement is crippling itself by leaning too heavily on religion to the exclusion of these temperamentally compatible allies.   

But there was, is, no exclusion going on.  To see all of the articles and books published in the last few months blaming the woes of the GOP and conservatism on religious conservatives, one might conclude that it was the religious conservatives who ought to be worried about exclusion.  Following the publication of this article, not only did virtually everyone and his brother at NR fall all over themselves to be nice and accommodating to Ms. Mac Donald, whom they showered with so many compliments that it became embarrassing for everyone watching, but we were soon reminded of the rather large number of NROniks who were themselves either confirmed skeptics or very unorthodox sorts of Christians.  The debate was not as much between the zealous believers and the atheist, but between the moderately respectful and the intensely disrespectful. 

The large number of skeptics and unorthodox folk there is not in itself necessarily a problem for conservatives (though I think it probably depends on how unorthodox the unorthodox are willing to be), or at least it isn’t a new problem if it is one (the honour roll in The Conservative Mind is a veritable Who’s Who of skeptics, heretics and eccentrics).  Still, it goes a long way towards showing that the representatives of what it still (sigh) the flagship of “the movement” are not heavily leaning on religion to the exclusion of anybody.  Some of them aren’t doing any leaning at all, while the Catholics there are presumably believers, but they are by and large believers who tend to advance, for example, pro-life arguments in terms that reasonable skeptical conservatives could appreciate.  Indeed, this is not just the case at NR.  The pro-life movement’s own use of the rhetoric of “the right to life” should remind us that, while it is Christianity that motivates so many pro-lifers, they nonetheless retreat back to precisely the rights-centric language of Enlightenment liberalism to make their arguments for the defense of the unborn.  I certainly do not say this as a compliment to the pro-life movement, but this is the way it is.  Because these people do believe in God, they also mention God, but it is the appeal to protecting human rights that is doing all of the work in their arguments.  Perhaps this is a politically clever approach, or perhaps not, but what it isn’t is an example of conservatives “leaning heavily” on religion.  If you can’t even find such a habit among pro-lifers, where will you find it?  

To say that today’s conservative movement leans too heavily on religion, one must have a rather expansive and odd definition of what religion is.  It is possible to find extreme, actually rather isolated incidents of what we might take to be religious enthusiasm sweeping the conservative world and the GOP.  The dreadful Schiavo imbroglio might be considered such a one.  Arguably, though, that affair was the result of an absolute abstract commitment to the Right to Life that was so intense that it actually became impious and contradicted a Christian understanding of the purpose of human life, namely salvation in Christ, making it an episode of impious ideological excess.  It was a classic example of what happens when decent people are given simple ideological maxims: they go too far and commit injustice.  It is possible to see this episode, usually taken as a glaring example of religious conservatism’s supposed power within the GOP, as an episode where a galivanting, do-gooding rights-based liberalism generated hysterical overreaction among activists who pushed for government interference in the private affairs of a family.  But even if we accept that this really was a case of a religious impulse dominating the conservative movement, it is the relative rarity of these sorts of episodes that tells me that religion does not usually have too much hold on the modern conservative movement and that conservatives do not usually “lean” very heavily on the claims of revelation at all.  Rather, if anything, religion has not had enough of a hold.  As a theocrat of sorts (very different from a theocon, mind you!), I might be expected to say this.  As an inveterate critic of Andrew Sullivan and his dreadful book, I might be expected to say this.  But I say it for what I think are a couple good reasons. 

First, religion, more specifically traditional Christianity (which is almost entirely what we’re talking about when we speak of religion and conservatism in America), does not function as a crutch of the modern conservative movement, but all too often the movement uses it (or in some cases the weasel word “values”) as a rallying flag when it has run out of anything else interesting to say.  That is an important distinction.  Appeal to religion is the last resort of “the movement” and not one of its dominant aspects.  Second, for the last 25 years most mainstream conservative argument has fallen into four categories, only one of which can fairly be linked to religion, which are 1) social scientific arguments about the effectiveness/ineffectiveness of government policy and/or about causes behind patterns of social behaviour; 2) arguments written in defense of Western history, culture and “values,” usually “Judeo-Christian values” (under which dubious heading the great religion of our civilisation is filed away); 3) polemics against the stupidity, hypocrisy, elitism or “real” racism of the left, the academy, the government, the media, etc.; 4) arguments about dire foreign threats that “we,” the conservatives, “get” and the daffy liberals and Europeans do not (such as Venezuela!).  You can find arguments that fit more than one of these and some that fit none, but you will be surprised to find just how few conservative essays and articles have much to say about religion, revelation or God except in the most superficial or boilerplate ways. 

Specifically religious journals, such as First Things, will obviously have a very dense concentration of arguments tied very closely to, if not completely enmeshed in, a religious worldview, but in most other journals of conservative opinion and most other conservative columns you won’t find a lot of conservative writers “leaning heavily” on religion for much of anything.  All too often, when they do feel obliged to bring it up, the arguments go something like this: “We have capitalism because of Christianity” (in other words, you should respect Christianity because it helped make us fairly wealthy as a people) or “we have liberal democracy partly because of Christian respect for the person” or “we have the separation of church and state because of Christ’s teaching” (which can be among the worst, since it is usually an argument that calls Christianity as a witness for the defense of the superiority of the secular modern West, whose superiority is affirmed precisely in its capacity for secularism and pushing religion out of public life) and so on. 

These tend to be historical arguments, and they often can have some real merit as historical arguments, but they all fall under the category of “Christianity has done you Westerners a lot of good, so maybe you should give it a break now and then.”  You know the drill, repeated ad nauseam whenever the secularist and atheists come knocking: “Christianity inspired the abolitionists!  Christianity inspired Rev. King.  See–we’re not crazy religious wackos (like the abolitionists were)!”  This is usually a plea from the lukewarm to the indifferent and potentially hostile to acknowledge that Christianity may or may not be true, but that it nonetheless has served and will continue to serve a social function and, in the context of other debates, that its involvement in political life is not necessarily harmful.  This emphasis on the social utility and functionality of religion (both of which the NROniks cited repeatedly contra Mac Donald last fall) to the exclusion and detriment of interest in revealed religion’s substantive truth-claims has become, if anything, more common since the neoconservative ascendancy began and brought with it the habits and methods of the social sciences. 

It is in the context of these arguments about the social function of “religion” that the remarks Ms. Mac Donald recounts in her opening anecdote should be understood.  For the millionth time, yes, it is possible for nonbelievers to live what most people would regard as a “moral” and upstanding life; atheists presumably can have successful marriages and they probably even love their mothers.  When people speak of the necessity of religion for the maintenance of morality, they are almost always speaking of public morality and order, and they see religion as a necessary and well-tested support for these things.  I would go further and say that it is not really possible to live a truly virtuous life without entering into union with the God who was incarnate for our sake, but the people Ms. Mac Donald met at her cocktail party were not saying this, nor would they agree with it if I presented it to them.  “That’s some kind of crazy theological argument, “they would say to me,” and that has nothing to do with conservatism.”  Specifically theological arguments do not interest many conservatives very much, and most avoid referring to them or using them if they can possibly help it.  Even for the theocons, it is natural law teaching within Western Christian theological tradition that gets most of the attention because it is presumed to be “accessible” and intelligible by anyone who can reason.  That in and of itself would be fine, but this move has been seen as absolutely necessary to even begin to draw on our Christian inheritance to make arguments about public policy or social problems to which the wider public and most conservatives would pay much heed. 

This history is not, to my mind, evidence of a heavy reliance on the truth claims of Christian revelation to advance or define conservatism.  What I have repeatedly found, much to my agitation, is a decided indifference to the actual substance of much of our Christian inheritance that goes beyond the mere “patina” of pious nonsensical mumblings about God creating all men equal (today is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, so we should pay our respects to the Dream, shouldn’t we?) or Mr. Bush’s idea, which is at once both silly and dangerous, that political freedom is God’s gift to man.  Unless conservatives can find some way to tie Christianity in to the goods that most of “the movement” is today in the business of promoting (i.e., capitalism and democracy), they often will not say much, or at least nothing so terribly religiously inspired that it would make a skeptic bat an eye.  When religion, and here again we almost always mean Christianity, has taken center stage in conservative arguments, it is usually as the violated plaintiff outraged by some PC diktat, revisionist history or public criticism by, well, someone like Ms. Mac Donald.  In these cases, conservatives will once again defend Christianity with old liberal appeals to freedom of religion or will mitigate claims about alleged past Christian fanaticism by saying, “Yes, Christianity used to have a terrible history, but out of its internecine conflicts the Enlightenment was born and helped to reform and fix all of the unfortunate elements.”  In other words, these folks are saying, “Look, we find a lot of Christian history to be nearly as embarrassing as you do, but you should realise that we’ve become so much more respectably milquetoast and inoffensive in the last few centuries, we now embrace classical liberalism with gusto, and we do charity work!”  Most of the ringing defenses of the West setting it over and against the Islamic world possess an undercurrent of skepticism that says, “Unlike the Muslims, we learned to stop talking our religion very seriously a long time ago, and we’re all much better off for it–but, of course, we still have the fight the godless liberals in the War on Christmas.”  When Cal Thomas started singing the praises of secular modernity after 9/11 (as if to show you that he was no religious fanatic like those people), you could take it as a given that religion, and specifically the great significance attached to Christianity even by some old Moral Majority hands like Thomas, was potentially expendable for a lot of conservatives when supposedly more important things (such as the fight against “medievalism” and for “women’s rights” and “tolerance”) were at stake.  In the end, I don’t see that much modern conservative reliance on religion.  The “movement” certainly relies on religious people to keep it running with their support, financial and otherwise, and to that end they have to say nice things about the value of religion now and again (and I assume most honestly believe these things when they say them), but do they “lean heavily” on religion “to the exclusion” of nonbelievers?  Quite simply, no, they don’t.

Is this man not an utter nutcase, a dangerous nutcase. After all, he is the leader of a quarter of a million Muslims in Australia.

How did the Labor prime minister, John Howard, react? “He played down the seriousness of recent statements made by the clergymen, describing it as a mere joke.” That’s perfectly clear although it comes from the garbled translation.

Will some of you out there concoct of a negotiating plan for dealing with this man? ~Marty Peretz

While The Plank offers some interesting commentary from time to time and  occasionally even some real humour, The Spine, TNR editor Marty Peretz’s blog, seems to offer nothing but the blogging equivalent of nails across a chalkboard.  I almost never look at it, but this evening I saw the title of the latest post, “Exposed Meat,” assumed (correctly) it referred to the Muslim cleric in Australia who referred in a rather unflattering way to unveiled Australian women and went on to read it.  I thought to myself: “Let’s see what he has to say about this one.”  I would have said that it was a surprise that the post was an error-ridden, poorly-written jumble, but then I remembered that this is Marty Peretz we’re talking about.  Quick, Marty, use ultramontane in a sentence! 

For the record, Mr. Peretz, Howard is the Liberal Prime Minister of Australia.  The Liberal Party is Australia’s center-right governing party and their closest equivalent, to put it in American terms, to the GOP (no offense intended to any of our Liberal Party friends).  The Australian Labor Party, led by Kevin Rudd, has a less-than-flattering picture of PM Howard on its main page that would have told Mr. Peretz after about ten seconds of research that John Howard was not a Laborite. 

In response to this, I hereby announce Larison’s Second Law Of Foreign Policy Commentary (see the First Law): If you do not know the basic political landscape of another country (i.e., which party is which, whether it is a republic or a kingdom, etc.), you are unqualified to comment on anything related to that country’s politics.

(It’s also the case that the anti-Semitism of some on the Right who were critical of the war we were headed into in 2002 enabled many of us to dismiss all of their arguments). ~Rod Dreher

I will get to responding to this in a minute.  First, some background to the post quoted above.  Rod has taken a lot of heat lately because of his recent essay on NPR’s All Things Considered.  In it, he expressed his disillusionment with the war and also with Mr. Bush and the GOP when Republican competence, which was something he had taken for granted because of past experience, completely vanished in the last several years.  For someone who had come around to the idea that the GOP was the party of serious foreign policy, the execution of the Iraq war proved particularly shocking and discouraging.  

The responses have been coming in since then.  First there was Goldberg responding with the usual ignorance and snide remarks, and then there were true lunatics like this guy.  At the same time, Sullivan and Glenn Greenwald took an interest.  This debate has prompted more posts and some reader feedback to Rod, which prompted the post from which the above quote was taken.  Now, to the response. 

In the oral essay, Rod said:

As President Bush marched the country to war with Iraq, even some voices on the Right warned that this was a fool’s errand. I dismissed them angrily. I thought them unpatriotic.

But almost four years later, I see that I was the fool. In Iraq, this Republican President for whom I voted twice has shamed our country with weakness and incompetence, and the consequences of his failure will be far, far worse than anything Carter did. 

In this post he wrote:

(It’s also the case that the anti-Semitism of some on the Right who were critical of the war we were headed into in 2002 enabled many of us to dismiss all of their arguments).

In other words, as I read these separate posts, Rod thought the conservative opponents of the war in 2002 to be unpatriotic and has since been proven wrong.  Yet in the later post he refers to the supposed anti-Semitism of a nebulous “some on the Right who were critical of the war” (who are we talking about?) as if that equally baseless, equally offensive charge had some merit to it such that it bore mentioning in the context of explaining why he and others had ignored some of the battier opponents of the war.  What exactly constituted this supposed anti-Semitism?  Who among the targeted “unpatriotic conservatives” was guilty of it, and who wasn’t?  Is it not the case that this supposed anti-Semitism was just as imaginary as the claims of paleoconservatives’ lack of patriotism?  Might it be that this “anti-Semitism” consisted of nothing more than criticism of the State of Israel, much as paleos’ supposed lack of patriotism consisted of criticism of the U.S. government and the government’s foreign policy?  In other words, weren’t a number of the charges directed at conservative opponents of the Iraq invasion the result of a commonplace nationalist confusion of the people of a country and their government according to which criticism of the latter was taken as hatred of the former?     

Something doesn’t add up.  On the one hand, there is what Rod said on NPR and wrote earlier this month and on the other what he wrote in this more recent post.  Some clarification would be very much appreciated.  Let me explain why I think this is important. 

First, let’s recap who the opposition on the Right was in 2002-03.  Most of the people on the Right warning against the invasion of Iraq on moral (the war would be unjust), historical (it would end badly; an alien culture would not be transformed), philosophical (conservatives ought to be more prone to oppose war than support it), patriotic (it wasn’t our war to fight) and even strategic (it would severely damage American and allied interests in the region and around the world) grounds fell into three broad categories: paleoconservatives, libertarians of various stripes and a relative handful of foreign policy realists.  There was some overlap between these groups (e.g., there were some realists who were also libertarians) and these people tended to move in the same circles anyway, but that was the conservative opposition, c. 2002.  

As readers of Eunomia are well aware,  National Review by way of David Frum denounced leading figures from at least two of the aforementioned groups, erroneously lumping them all together as paleoconservatives, labeling them and, by extension, everyone who agreed with them (including me and probably quite a few of the regular readers of this blog) unpatriotic and worse.  Part of the way that Frum accomplished this intellectually empty and morally dubious feat was to smear the entire group with generic charges of anti-Americanism (a charge to which anyone who does not praise the empire is liable to be subjected) as well as racism and anti-Semitism.   

This was basically SOP for a neocon hit job, but it raises a serious question: if a key part of Frum’s indictment against the “unpatriotic conservatives” is that paleos are raging anti-Semites, are we supposed to take Rod’s remark to mean that he thinks, at least as far as “some” of the critics are concerned, Frum was basically right about this all along?  If so, why does he think that?  If he does, what should the editors of NR and Frum apologise for?  When Rod has said that NR owes the gentlemen so scurrilously attacked in Frum’s piece (“Pat Buchanan et al.”) an apology for calling them unpatriotic, should they only apologise for the parts of the article specifically about the Iraq war, since it is the paleos’ opposition to the war has been vindicated?  Should they not have to apologise for the entire article, since the entire thing was trash? 

Let’s step back for a minute.  The antiwar right, as of late 2002, had three main organs for disseminating conservative and libertarian antiwar views in this country: Chronicles, The American Conservative and Antiwar.com.  The gentlemen associated with these three (with the exception of Bob Novak, who speedily denounced just about everybody else as soon as he could) were the targets of the condemnation and hate of the conservative movement’s major magazines and leading pundits; they were also routinely accused of anti-Semitism because they had the gall to notice extreme pro-Israel elements in this country as being some of the most vocal, strident and influential backers of the war (just as they had been unjustly accused when opposing the first Gulf War and noticing the same pro-Israel activists pushing for that war).  The truth of this observation was never denied (in fact, it could not be denied, which is why no attempt to do so was ever made), but simply passed by–what mattered was not that someone had correctly identified some of the leading warmongers as extreme pro-Israel activists, but the motives of those who would even bother to mention such a thing. 

This tactic of flinging the charge of anti-Semitism has usually only succeeded against people on the Right in America.  For one thing, for various reasons it has been the strange fate of most conservatives in America to hitch themselves to a vehemently pro-Israel approach to the Near East and it has become a cause for exclusion from the “respectable” quarters of the movement to say things unduly critical and true about the State of Israel.  Observers on the left here and abroad, not similarly committed to the cause of Israeli nationalism for other reasons ranging from the admirable (a desire for regional peace) to the fairly mad (leftover anti-colonialism and sympathy for jihadis), were relatively more free to acknowledge the close ties of neoconservatives to hard-line Likud politics in Israel and were able to draw some of the reasonable conclusions from this alliance of interests.  Since many leftists and a great many Europeans across the spectrum take it as almost axiomatic that the Israeli center and right are generally profoundly wrong about how Israel could best achieve peace with her neighbours, they find it much easier to believe that an American war of aggression in the Near East has something to do with people who are supportive of Likud and their sorts of equally aggressive policies vis-a-vis Palestinians.  It is even easier to believe this when it happens to be the obvious truth.  Observers in Israel have been relatively more free to note that neoconservative advocacy for the Iraq war was being done out of their (as it turns out, completely wrong) idea that invading Iraq would help secure Israel and bring peace to the Near East.  (Amusingly, the depth of neocon error on this point has since been used as proof that the neocons were never really pro-Israel and that no one could have ever advocated for the Iraq war with Israel’s interests in mind, since the belief that an Iraq invasion would be good for Israel is, as we can all see today, quite insane–yet it is nonetheless what many prominent advocates for the war believed in 2002-03.) 

With the government lacking anything like a real rationale for an invasion throughout 2002, rightist opponents of the invasion in 2002 such as myself assumed that attacking Iraq for the sake of Israel was almost the only discernible reason for why Mr. Bush was preparing the war.  Failing that, it really seemed to make no sense at all.  It might be worth noting here, as an aside, that the defensiveness of war supporters on this point is amazing, since their efforts in actively denying that Israel has had anything to do with the reasons for their support for the invasion suggest that they assume the American public would turn against any war that was being openly fought, even in part, for the security (real or imagined) of Israel.  There is a strange lack of confidence in the public’s willingness to support the country that these same war supporters regard as our “reliable ally” in the region, which is all the more bizarre when these same people take it as axiomatic in every other foreign policy debate that “the American people” support Israel.   

Strangely, today many of the same people who denounced the paleoconservatives take it as almost a given that we should attack Iran because of the threat it poses to Israel.  They are not even embarrassed to say it quite openly: the reason why we should start a war with Iran is because Ahmadinejad has threatened Israel with special vehemence and fanaticism and has therefore gone beyond the pale.  Presumably, however, if one of the paleos were to observe that a forthcoming attack on Iran was being done for Israel’s benefit, we would be condemned again as anti-Semites.  (This is usually because we follow this identical observation with an argument for why it is not America’s fight and that our wars should be fought in our national interest, which is supposedly the wrong and immoral answer.). 

Such charges of anti-Semitism over the years have really not had much to do with claiming (much less proving) anyone’s prejudice against Jewish people.  (Such a charge could never be proved in any case, since it is entirely baseless and despicable.)  They are instead the charges that you make in a foreign policy debate against those who oppose interventionist wars, almost regardless of where they are taking place, because there is an undercurrent in all interventionist argument (revealed by the constant obsession with WWII references and analogies) that says, “People who disagree with us today about the ‘new Hitler’ and the new Holocausts are the people who would have stopped us from fighting Hitler and ending the Holocaust.  Ergo, all our opponents are anti-Semites, because we assume most everyone who opposed U.S. entry into WWII were also anti-Semites.”  The very Bolshevik nature of this kind of rhetorical tactic–I say Bolshevik since this was precisely the sort of rhetorical tactic used by Trotsky et al. to try to discredit various nationalists and other anticommunists–is also its peculiar strength.  It succeeds more often than not in convincing people to not look at the truth of what is being said about someone, and it succeeds in convincing them not to look at the merits of the argument at hand.  Instead, it allows you to declare an entire political position to be inherently immoral because of the supposed prejudices of its adherents.  This is an awful way to engage in debate, since it takes for granted that your opponent is arguing in bad faith and also assumes, even if the charges of prejudice were true, that a prejudiced person cannot make perfectly valid and important arguments, which is quite obviously untrue.  People interested in understanding and truth will look to those things first.  Those interested in politically correct moral poses will place all emphasis on whether or not an interlocutor strikes the appropriate poses.  Next to this, truth is a distant second.  The latter method is the one favoured by commissars and the controllers of party discipline.  I implore everyone to reject this entirely.        

The hatred directed against these three centers of rightist dissent was fueled and aided by these spurious, disgusting accusations of anti-Semitism, since those who hurled this accusation knew that if they could tar opponents of the war with such a radioactive label–no matter how false the charge–they could effectively shut down all opposition on the Right through just this kind of intimidation.  The goal, as with almost all labeling, was control and exclusion of enemies.  The truth of the claims was not nearly so important as the effect the claims had on the dynamic of the debate.  In foreign policy debates this particular label possesses even greater power, since it was used to such powerful effect to damn the America First Committee in a similarly slimy and dishonest way and has to some degree even entered into the cultural fabric of the nation.  Because of decades of leftist and internationalist badgering over “isolationist” opposition to entry into WWII, Americans on the Right have felt a particular sensitivity to the charge of anti-Semitism because, as leftists and internationalists charged, the reason for wanting to stay out of Europe’s bloodbath had to be motivated by some sneaking admiration for and sympathy with Nazism and Nazi hostility to the Jews.  Thanks to this false and distorted view of American rightists of that era as closet authoritarians and wannabe fascists (a view imported into the midst of the conservative movement with the arrival of the neoconservatives fresh from their roots on the left), its enemies succeeded in making principled non-interventionism and the American tradition of neutrality in foreign wars politically unpalatable and tarred their adherents with the label of anti-Semitism.  In my view, to participate in the continued sliming of principled opponents of interventionist foreign policy by crediting such baseless charges of anti-Semitism is a terrible thing.  It is important to avoid lending any support to the kinds of charges that Frum made, because they were all gross distortions, lies or misrepresentations of the worst kind.  To give them unwitting support lends credibility to the interventionists who used such disreputable tactics to help push the Iraq war, when credibility is the one thing these people do not have.

So we have the beginnings of what I referred to today on the Chris Matthews’ Show: an anti-war, socially conservative surge in the Republican party. Now all you have to do is add economic populism to that mix, and you’ve got yourself a powerful electoral combination. ~Andrew Sullivan

I don’t know why it’s hard for Sullivan to get basic things right, but he has a terrible time of it here.  First he cites Noam Scheiber’s note about the AP/Ipsos numbers that purport to show that 60% of evangelicals and 56% of self-described conservatives oppose the “surge” (which seems like a more and more questionable number the more other polls I see showing 60-70% Republican support for the proposal) and misinterprets this as an “antiwar” position.  This follows his mistake late last week of believing that Brownback’s opposition to the “surge,” which is notable because of his ambitions and because of how rare it is for a red state Republican Senator to oppose the policy, was a harbinger of general GOP backlash against the “surge.”  That would be interesting, except that Sen. Brownback does not represent the mood of today’s GOP–I believe that mood is better expressed by Quin Hillyer, who finds Brownback’s anti-“surge” view (and the timing of his statement about it) to be “perfidy.” 

Of course, to be against the “surge” is not necessarily to be against the war, though all antiwar people are against the “surge.”  To be against the “surge” simply shows a certain degree of common sense and a refusal to throw more Americans into the fire to try to achieve unrealistic goals.  If these same evangelicals and conservatives are polled about their support for the war, what do you think the numbers would be?  I would bet good money that majorities of both groups, perhaps large majorities, would say that they support the war and, by extension, they would not accept the obvious alternative to “surging,” which is withdrawal.  I would love to believe that after nearly four years the groups that have shown the most die-hard support for Mr. Bush’s War have abandoned his policy and have turned against the war, but I realise that this is improbable.  I would love to think that the entirety of the 30-odd percent of Republicans who oppose the “surge” come disproportionately from evangelical and avowedly conservative quarters where there is now strong antiwar sentiment, but it actually doesn’t match the trends of their views on this war at all.  If these people are against the “surge,” it is still a very different thing from being against the war.  The antiwar candidate who thinks his natural base is made up of evangelicals and self-described conservatives will, I’m sorry, be horribly disappointed.  Whether that should be the case is an entirely different question that relates to what old fundamentalists and almost all conservatives used to think about insane “God wants us to make the world democratic” foreign policy.

As for the appeal of an antiwar, socially conservative and economically populist candidate, it might very well be strong in certain parts of the country (it would probably be dynamite in the Plains states and the Midwest), but at least one of those three is a deal-breaker for both parties’ core voters and financial supporters.  If Brownback did want to pursue such a Buchananite path (which would be so contrary to his record and so out of character for him that it makes me laugh that his name is mentioned in the same breath with some of these positions), he would have a tremendously difficult time getting anywhere againt the GOP establishment.  Indeed, that combination almost perfectly fits a Jim Webb (he is fairly socially conservative, but not enough for most social conservatives).  Except for Ron Paul, whose candidacy I will gladly and enthusiastically support if he decides to go forward with a run, there are no Republican antiwar candidates.  Brownback’s opposition to the “surge” does not begin to make him one, and evangelical and conservative opposition to the “surge” does not the beginnings of an antiwar voting bloc make.

What happened to the Condi boomlet? Ms. Rice is as smart and articulate and attractive as she has ever been. ~Susan Estrich

Therein lies the whole problem.

It will sell like proverbial hot cakes when it goes on sale in the US in June — but why? What’s the point of having so many devices on something that is still essentially a phone? Did I miss something? I thought a mobile phone was about being able to make and receive phone calls while you’re on the move. ~Dennis Marinos

Apparently Mr. Marinos and I inhabit another world in which being able to carry around a phone in your pocket is technological revolution enough for one lifetime.  It would appear that he is something of a curmudgeon, and so am I, and thank goodness for that.  The marketing genius of the iPhone, like the iPod before it (another one of Steve Jobs’ gifts to mankind that I don’t have and whose amazing reputation I don’t really understand), is that there is literally no good reason for it to exist–but technological ingenuity and the dynamo of consumerism have produced something new, shiny and intriguing to whet the appetites of consumers who have already become bored with something so last year as a “Razor” or “Chocolate” phone.  (I don’t even know what makes a Chocolate phone a Chocolate phone–I have heard the name, and that is all I care to know.)  Now a new waste of money and time approaches on the horizon–rejoice, O ye gullible and easily persuaded!  Give Steve Jobs credit for creating a massive media hype (to which even curmudgeonly critics are contributing) for a product that literally no one needs.  The last time I heard this much hype about a new innovative miracle of technology that was going to blow us all away, someone released the Segway, that ridiculous high-tech scooter, which is something that virtually no one outside of a few metro police forces uses.  A lot more people will use the iPhone, but what nobody seems to appreciate is that iPhone and Segway users will share the honour of being big dupes. 

But, the fans enthuse, you can touch the screen and select things with your finger!  It’s like magic or Star Trek or Star Trek and magic together.  You can listen to music on your phone!  Forget about the shabby world of ringtones–the future is now!  Before long, there will be Apple products that will be able to create a subspace bubble–or whatever–that will allow us to travel through time.  Who cares?  It’s just a phone.  If it has lousy reception or poor network coverage, it will actually be a step backwards from the ho-hum, boring cell phone (mine has no camera, no music, no artificial intelligence matrix to organise my daily planner and cook me breakfast) that I have grudgingly gotten into the habit of using.  (I have had the exact same cell phone for over three years now, and somehow my life has not fallen apart.)  If it works just as well as other phones, you will have to pay a lot more to get the exact thing I have.  You will also have a bunch of really impressive-sounding junk that you don’t need and will not use often enough to make it worthwhile.  Count me out.

“The imperialists don’t like us to help you progress and develop. They don’t like us to get rid of poverty and unite people,” said Mr Ahmadinejad.

“But the whole world knows that Nicaragua and Iran are together.”

Mr Ortega said he would sign accords with Mr Ahmadinejad to help reduce poverty in Nicaragua, one of the poorest countries in Latin America.

The two countries announced that they were restoring full diplomatic relations and re-opening embassies in their capitals. ~BBC News

A few months ago Michael Barone claimed that the Chavista wave had broken and that Venezuelan-style hard-core left populism was already falling out of fashion around Latin America.  The Ecuadoran presidential election already proved this thesis to be essentially incorrect.  Now the Nicaraguan government has followed closely the foreign policy lead of Caracas in tying itself to Iran, suggesting that Ortega’s act before his election was nothing more than an act and the potential for radically leftist policies in Nicaragua is much greater than Barone allowed. 

Unlike some people, I am not exactly shaking in my boots at the thought of Venezuelan empire or the prospect of a Managua-Tehran connection, and I acknowledge that relatively poor, small countries cannot afford to simply snub a country as large as Iran, but anyone who has tried to claim that the “new” Ortega has really changed all that much or has eschewed radicalism (as Barone implied in his post) has to realise that this episode shows that view to be wrong.  In any case, if this is what passes for a mild or reformed kind of leftist government in Nicaragua under the “new” Daniel Ortega, we don’t want to see what radical leftist would look like.

An even better test of Romney’s nimbleness came just two days later, in the form of a video anonymously posted on youtube.com . It showed clips of Romney debating Ted Kennedy during their 1994 Senate race — clips that showed how avidly Romney had portrayed himself as a social liberal when he first ran for office in Massachusetts. From staunchly defending abortion rights to disavowing Ronald Reagan, Romney came across back then as anything but the unabashed conservative he is running as today.

The campaign’s response was immediate, decisive — and very 21st century. Within hours, Romney did an interview with blogosphere eminence Glenn Reynolds and his wife, Helen, who asked him point-blank to explain “this YouTube video from 1994 showing you as a flip-flopper. ” They posted Romney’s answer on Instapundit, their popular blog. In addition, a video of Romney crisply responding to the Reynoldses was soon up on the campaign’s website — and on YouTube as well. Whatever one thinks of Romney’s political views, his campaign is setting new standards for responsiveness, savvy, and speed. ~Jeff Jacoby

But does anyone believe the answers he so speedily and cleverly put up online for all to see?  That’s the real question, and if the answer is no it won’t matter how much money he can raise or how speedy his Web responses are.