We have just seen which country is truly the West’s beacon in the Levant. The land where one of the official languages is a European tongue and where elections are decided by the Christians (such as the President has to be), who have ensured the defeat of anti-Christian fanatics. ~David Lindsay

This is one of a couple of posts Mr. Lindsay has written recently that I am having some trouble understanding. For example, what can it mean to say that “the Christians” ensured the defeat of anti-Christian fanatics when most Lebanese Christian voters still supported the Hizbullah-allied FPM led by a Maronite? What can it mean to apply the name “anti-Christian fanatics” only to Hizbullah, which is allied with the largest party of Christians, when the March 14 coalition includes the largest Druze party? The Druze community derives from those medieval Muslims who glorified the Fatimid Caliph al-Hakim as God on earth, who just happened to be one of the most zealous anti-Christian Muslim rulers in history and who demolished the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The governing coalition also enjoys the patronage of the Saudis, who are not all together Christian-friendly. Of course, this goes to illustrate how clear lines are hard to draw in Lebanese politics, as there are Christians and “anti-Christian fanatics,” if you will, on both sides of the spectrum and in both political coalitions, and it should remind us that we need to be wary of developing rooting interests for any faction in the internal conflicts of another country. If it is not in Israel’s interest to be regarded as the vanguard of the Enlightenment in the region, neither is it good for Lebanon or for our understanding of Lebanon to see the transitory vicissitudes of its electoral politics as having any grander civilizational significance.

Scott Richert and Richard Spencerhave been debating the murder of George Tiller. It will hardly come as a surprise that I entirely agree with Scott on this question, which will make some of what I have to say a bit redundant, but Richard has erred in his most recent post on something quite important that needs to be addressed more directly. Answering Scott’s remarks on regicide, Richard writes:

Were he [Tiller], however, performing abortions while holding the title of Baron of Wichita, then his murder would be just. Ditto if he were a soldier in an invading army performing abortions. Though I’m not sure where this leaves the status of Kathleen Sebelius and Barack Obama, two sovereigns who in their respective territories use the power of the state to engage in something Richert considers murder. Furthermore, would Richert like to argue that Bonhoeffer and Stauffenberg were justified because they attacked Hitler while he was head of state, but then would have sinned greatly if they, say, shot down a man who was operating a concentration camp?

There is a lot that Richard gets wrong here. Despite his complaints that Scott has misread his earlier remarks about just war, which would be easier not to misread if Richard stopped talking about pacifism, Richard keeps conflating conditions of war and peace, the status of combatants and non-combatants, the difference between members of the military and civilians, and those in power and those subject to it. Tiller was not a cog in some machinery of coercion and mass murder; he was not a soldier or agent of a government engaged in mass murder.

Were Tiller someone in authority and he was using the apparatus of the government in the commission of murders, his authority would be de-legitimized and would no longer be deserving of respect or obedience, and for the common good and the restoration of peace violence might justifiably be used against him. As an act of self-defense for the polity against illegitimate and abusive government, it might then be permissible to kill, so long as there were no peaceful remedy that could be used hold such a person accountable. Like war, this would have to be a last resort, especially considering the potential consequences for civil strife and disorder that could follow. What is important to remember about this is that such an action would be exceptional and would have to be in response to extreme circumstances. The obligation to submit to civil authority, even a negligent one, is not one that can or should be lightly tossed aside.

Likewise, the command not to murder is absolute, and for killing to be anything other than murder it has to be done under very specific circumstances by lawful authority. Killing is rarely justified, and we should be striving to raise barriers to make it harder to do this or to rationalize it rather than seek out loopholes that permit us to find more and more excuses for it. What has to remain foremost in our minds is that respecting the sanctity of life means that we as private citizens cannot presume to decide who deserves to live or die. This is the role appointed to those in authority, who legitimately wield power in order to restrain and punish the wicked, and even then only under certain circumstances. Their failure to restrain and punish does not give us license to take over for them and to shed blood, because we are not permitted to shed blood except in defense of ourselves, our family and our neighbors.

Lebanon’s voters have handed a clear defeat to the Hizbollah-led March 8 Alliance. In a smoothly run and peaceful election, the pro-Western March 14 Alliance emerged with a clear majority of 71 seats, compared to 57 seats for its rivals. The results elicited a nearly audible sigh of relief from Arab capitals, as well as from leaders in Europe and North America. ~Paul Salem

No doubt Mr. Salem is correct that our allied governments in majority Sunni countries and governments in the West were relieved by the election result, but consider how different the election outcome might seem to the publics of various Muslim countries around the world. They know that the Phalangists, for example, are members of the March 14 coalition, and they will remember that the Phalangists were allied with the Israelis during their invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and were directly involved in the massacres that forced Sharon from ministerial office at the time. They now see the Western world and the dictatorships of the Arab world rejoicing that these people and their allies remain in power. What will these people conclude from this? Nothing to our benefit, I’ll wager.

A great deal has been said about Obama’s changing of the tone, which has prompted calls for changes in substance as well, but what does the world see most Westerners celebrating? What does the world see many Westerners trying to credit Obama with? The preservation of the status quo in Lebanon. There has been no move to “the West” in Lebanon: the final numbers for government and opposition are virtually identical to 2005. In other words, there has been virtually no movement at all. To his credit, the President refrained from saying something stupid and congratulating the winners as some vanguard of freedom, but this has not stopped his cheerleaders and friends from doing this for him.

There are a lot of questionable claims being made about these elections. For starters, take the claim above that the opposition is “Hizbullah-led.” The March 8 Alliance itself is, yes, but not the opposition as a whole. Hizbullah is a major partner in the opposition, but if these numbers are at all correct they still have several fewer seats than the FPM. This is partly a function simply of the demographics of Lebanon, the sectarian representation built into Lebanese politics, and the requirements of the Doha agreement. In any case, FPM is the largest party in the opposition at the head of the Change and Reform group. Their presence in the government, had they won, would presumably have been greater. Then again, I suppose “Maronite-led” doesn’t sound quite so menacing. What everyone seems to keep omitting from their commentaries is that the Druze leader Jumblatt has said that Hizbullah will probably be invited to join a national unity government. What does that do to simplistic binary analyses of what’s happening in Lebanon? It destroys them.

Like Moran, McDonnell is counting on his roots in Northern Virginia to help him. But, like McAuliffe, he’s directing his ad spending toward pricey D.C. markets. This means that by the fall, he’ll be better positioned in voters’ minds than either Democrat was. ~Amy Walter

Put another way, McDonnell is not necessarily very strong outside of northern Virginia, and he will end up wasting his money in a media market where he will likely be trailing for the entire election. A McDonnell-Deeds race is not what the Virginia GOP could have been hoping for. All those rural areas of the state filled with registered Democrats who have grown weary of the GOP are much more vulnerable to Deeds. Republicans should reflect on what happened in MS-01 when they ran the suburbanite against the better-known small-town Democrat. Virginia Democrats who run in statewide races have relied on the D.C. suburbs in the north to put them over the top; Webb just squeaked by thanks to their support. Deeds hails from the southwest, which should give him a better chance of making inroads in the Valley and the Southside than Webb managed to do. At first glance, it seems as if all the advantages–name recognition, money, support in the north–belong to McDonnell, but Deeds is starting out modestly leading the AG (and that according to Rasmussen) and he has something of the same profile as the outgoing Tim Kaine. During the Warner and Kaine years, Virginia has been moving more reliably into the Democratic orbit, and it is not clear what McDonnell can do to change this. In the end, governors’ races can turn on local issues and the individual candidates, so McDonnell may not necessarily be burdened by his party affiliation,

Matt Steinglass attacks other foolish misreadings of election results. In this case, he is discussing the recent European elections as seen from Finland:

What happened in the elections was two things. First, support shifted away from the social democrats, and towards the Christian democrats. And second, a small right-wing party that’s descended from the 1950s-era agrarian/farmers party, whose main platform is anti-immigrant and anti-Europe, picked up a lot of votes, and in fact that party’s charismatic leader was the single largest vote-getter in the elections, pulling about 130,000 votes (which is huge in 5-million-strong Finland). But that party still isn’t actually in the government, and it has no positive governing agenda. And even if it did, that governing agenda would almost certainly have nothing to do with free-market economics.

This is an important point. With the exception of perhaps Vlaams Belang in Belgium, most anti-immigration, anti-Europe and “far-right” parties in Europe are not economically liberal, and the economically liberal parties are not anti-immigration or anti-Europe. Across much of Europe, as in this Finnish example, artisanal populist, peasants’ or farmers’ parties have tended to be equally skeptical of market liberals and the transnational European political project. Our populists, such as they are, tend to be wedded to our peculiarly continental nationalism, which in the European context would make them pro-Europe “federalists,” which is why it may be less surprising, if not less irrational, for most of our populists, especially on the right, to embrace market liberalism, while it is left to the fairly marginal decentralists, both right and left, to argue against political and economic consolidation.

There is some evidence that market liberals had some success in the European elections, but this is mostly because those parties also benefited from anti-incumbency sentiment. In Germany, for example, the Free Democrats almost doubled their share of the vote over the previous election, but this was, like so many other gains by smaller parties in the EP, a product of discontent with the CDU-SPD coalition government. Unlike the Finnish example, German voters interested in protesting against the government could not vote for either major party and many of them settled for one of the main opposition groups. It seems that most of the support that the Union lost went straight to the Free Democrats, but this does not exactly herald a massive rejection of Christian Democratic ideas about social solidarity.

As long-time readers know, I have been willing to give Obama credit for his diplomatic moves and his interest in emphasizing conciliatory measures designed to thaw relations with a number of other states that the previous administration had treated mostly as adversaries and threats. I have had positive things to say about his approach towards Russia, his appearance at the Summit of the Americas and, with significant qualifications, even his speech in Cairo, but I cannot think of anything more misleading than to claim that the Lebanese election outcome was meaningfully influenced by the speech in Cairo.

Cynthia Tucker has claimed that the speech had some significant influence:

The president did, it seems, change some minds in the Middle East.

On Sunday, an American-aligned coalition won a surprising victory in Lebanon’s parliamentary elections, pushing back a challenge by Hezbollah, which had been widely expected to win a majority of seats. There were undoubtedly many factors at play — Lebanon’s politics are fractured and Byzantine — but Obama’s well-received speech has been credited with making a difference.

Let us think through this for a minute. Suppose for a moment that it is true that the speech “made a difference” and changed some minds in the region–why do we assume that a March 14 victory is proof of the speech’s influence? What possible connection is there? March 14 is a coalition that was very openly aligned with the previous administration and remains very closely aligned with Saudi interests. It was already the governing coalition. At most, voters stayed with the devils they knew. There had been expectations that they would be defeated, but pre-election predictions can often be mistaken, especially when they do not take increased turnout into account. Perhaps if turnout had remained lower, the outcome would have swung the other way, and Ms. Tucker would now be doing her best to persuade us that Obama’s speech had no influence on the opposition’s victory.

March 14 is a predominantly Druze and Sunni coalition supplemented for the most part by smaller Maronite and other Christian parties. Most everyone seems to agree that it was Aoun’s bungling during the campaign that alienated key Christian votes, who ran into the arms of the governing coalition. To the extent that one can imagine that the speech had any impact on the voting behavior of pivotal Christian voters, I suppose one might identify the reason for this influence on the passing remark Obama made about treatment of Maronites, which might have dovetailed with existing fears about Hizbullah, but it seems awfully strange that this remark would have worked to drive Christian voters away from the largest Christian political organization in the country.

Why else would Christian voters who backed March 14 rather than the opposition coalition, which included Michel Aoun‘s Free Patriotic Movement, have come away from a speech that was entirely about Islam and “the Muslim world” with any changed opinions about anything? This is the most generous explanation I can conjure up, and it is a real stretch. Is it not far more reasonable to assume that these voters ignored or simply didn’t care about Obama’s speech and based their decision to switch support to March 14 on their own distaste for Aoun’s cavorting with the Syrians and Iranians? Most of the commentary on Obama’s alleged influence on the Lebanese outcome seems to be little more than examples of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy at work. Lebanon had almost no place in Obama’s speech, much to my dissatisfaction, and except for the reference to the Maronites one would have to look very hard to find any statement that would have been relevant to Lebanese voters.

More to the point, Obama’s supporters and everyone who wants to see a diplomatic track with Iran succeed are doing themselves no favors by playing up the influence of the speech in Lebanon, when Iran figured much more prominently in Obama’s speech and the Iranian election seems unlikely to yield a similarly welcome surprise. If Ahmadinejad loses, it will be in large part because his pie-in-the-sky domestic spending program scarcely materialized, unemployment has worsened and economic conditions remain bad for his core supporters among Iran’s poor. He ran as a sort of economic populist, and has not delivered much to his voters. At the same time, he has played the buffoon in international affairs, which can hardly have helped his image at home. If he still manages to prevail because of the divided opposition, he will be able to claim vindication, and all of the people pushing this far-fetched claim about Obama’s influence in Lebanon will be at pains to say why Obama’s speech could help defeat Hizbullah but failed to do in the Iranian demagogue. The end result will be to judge the effectiveness of Obama’s speech by internal political events in other countries over which he could not possibly have any control and over which he has relatively little influence. It is a guaranteed way to set Obama up for failure, and as has happened so often it is his friends and allies who are doing this to him.

The new Pew survey has a lot in it to discuss, but for the moment I would like to focus on the foreign policy section. As Jim Antle observed in his post on the survey’s treatment of social conservatism, there are potentially problems in Pew’s definitions and questions as there usually are in these surveys, and this applies to the questions on foreign policy as well. For example, the statement, “It’s best for the U.S. to be active globally” is a statement that seems set up to maximize agreement. After all, how many people are interested in passivity and inaction as such? While this kind of statement can help reveal the public’s vague and unformed sentiments and attitudes, it doesn’t tell us all that much about how the public thinks the United States should be acting around the world. It is worth noting, then, that even now there is just a slight majority that completely agrees with this statement (51%), which is almost entirely a product of Democrats who were dissatisfied with Bush and are now content with Obama, and it is essentially identical to the figure from 2003 near the height of post-9/11 hysteria and panic about foreign threats. No doubt, as Iraq has disappeared from the headlines and the recession has occupied more of the attention of most Americans, concerns that the U.S. continues to be hyperactive abroad are going to fade.

The survey does not show anything like instinctive or habitual “isolationism,” which is the bogey interventionists use to mobilize their supporters. Indeed, 90% agree to some extent with the general statement. What it does show is a divided country in which at most half of most demographics believes that an active U.S. role abroad is “best.” There is a much lower floor of support for this statement among women, Democrats and independents. Agreement has increased the most among these groups over the last two years, but this shows how weak their agreement with the statement really is. There has been a drop-off in Republican support as well from 54% in 2003 to 47% now, bottoming out at 44% two yeas ago. Significantly, the strongest agreement with this statement comes from college graduates. Their agreement has not dipped below 51% over the last six years, and now stands at 62%.

On the face of it, this would indicate that half of the country is on board with America’s present role in the world. The relevant political point here is that the other half has almost no representation in government. Nonetheless, in the same survey 78% agreed that “we should pay less attention to problems overseas and concentrate on problems here at home.” This is again a very simple statement with which it is easy to agree, and it does not tell us what most Americans think would be the proper balance between the two. It is an encouraging sign that an overwhelming majority thinks that our priorities are out of order and our attention is too focused on foreign problems. As the survey report notes, this figure of 78% is significantly lower than it was in the early ’90s, but it remains remarkably high considering that the U.S. is engaged in two military campaigns and a larger, ill-defined Long War of which these campaigns are ostensibly a part. This suggests that there is no pressing concern about impending “existential threats” from abroad.

The “peace through military strength” question seems designed to elicit a favorable response from Republicans, many of whom would probably agree with any Reagan formulation regardless of what it was, so it is perhaps no surprise that Republicans overwhelmingly agree with this (75%). What is interesting is the difference in agreement among age groups. Back in 2002, a slim majority of 18-29 year olds agreed with this formulation (51%), but now just 38% agree. This is the largest drop in any age group, and helps explain why 18-29 year olds have fled the GOP in large numbers over the last five years. 45% of this group voted for Bush, and just 32% backed McCain. There are undoubtedly other factors that worsened Republican fortunes among so-called Millennials, but inasmuch as they regard the Iraq war as the product of a “peace through military strength” mentality they have turned against both that view and the party that espouses it most fervently. It seems improbable that they will be won back by redoubled hawkishness and nationalistic bluster.

I find myself compelled to keep writing about this subject. The continuing objections to Sonia Sotomayor as a racist and practitioner of identity politics simply baffle me. Her record on discrimination cases alone seems to show that the latter charge is bogus, and the other charge is so absurd that I can’t believe it continues to circulate. As if to show just how absurd the charge of racism is in this case, Jeffrey Lord sums up his view with a statement that I think can only be called crazy:

Were this nomination a Hollywood script it would be pitched as Birth of a Nation meets the Weather Underground.

Conservatives write things like this, and then they wonder why minorities flee from them in droves. What inspires someone to liken the judicial nomination of a rather boring, conventional center-left Puerto Rican judge to a film that glorifies the KKK and a modern domestic terrorist organization? Given Lord’s past writings, obsessive anti-racism run amok seems to be the answer here, but while he may be one of the most vocal Lord is hardly alone. During this entire debate, we are hearing endlessly about the importance of merit and why merit must never be outweighed by identity considerations. All right. We are reminded again and again of the hope that everyone will be judged by character and not by race. That sounds reasonable. So why is it that Sotomayor’s critics seem to be going out of their way to ignore her merits and her achievements and have been fixating on questions of identity and identity politics to the exclusion of almost everything else? Perhaps deep within the cocoon, articles that earnestly claim that Limbaugh and Martin Luther King are fighting the same fight seem credible, but what everyone else sees is little more than a collective panic that an Hispanic has been appointed to the Supreme Court. Her critics have been railing against her allegedly faulty judgment, but they have managed to make their arguments so poorly that it is the soundness of their judgment that most people are bound to question.

No less remarkable are the descriptions her critics offer about her. According to Shelby Steele, who writes on almost nothing except for subjects related to race, she is “race-obsessed.” Andrew chimes in and refers, apparently without any irony, to the “constant, oppressive consciousness of her identity” and goes on to say that “the harping on it so aggressively so often does strike me as a classic mode of victimology deeply entrenched in her generation.” What evidence do we have that her consciousness of her identity is either constant or oppressive, or for that matter where is the evidence that she “harps on it” aggressively or otherwise? She talks about it, she refers to it, she takes pride in it, she thinks that it matters–this is not obsession or aggression.

As you have probably noticed already, two new blogs have joined the TAC line-up: Dan McCarthy’s Tory Anarchist, and the group blog PostRight. Dan is a colleague of many years, and I have always enjoyed the writing he has done on his blog, so I’m pleased to see that he will be doing more of it again. I’m looking forward to engaging with the arguments at PostRight, which I think my rather unusual mix of readers from across the spectrum will find very interesting. If you haven’t already, go take a look at the new arrivals.

Setting aside the banal fact that the judicial system is a part of our democratic process, there is a clear, straightforward and well-known way to overturn Roe v. Wade– pass a constitutional amendment criminalizing abortion. ~Freddie deBoer

It’s a curious thing about such “banal facts”–sometimes they aren’t facts at all, but rather baseless assertions. The judiciary is part of our constitutional, formally republican system, but it is the one branch of government that is as far removed from “the democratic process” as can be. All of the things that we are supposed to prize about the judiciary–its independence, its (theoretical) adherence to the rule of law and its (theoretical) safeguarding of constitutional protections against the other branches–are not only undemocratic, but they are sometimes explicitly anti-democratic. It is set up this way in order to prevent ochlocracy and passions of the moment from destroying fundamental constitutional protections in fits of panic or anger. What Roe does, as Freddie knows full well, is to ground abortion in one of these fundamental protections, which therefore cannot be infringed upon by statute or referendum. To say that Roe doesn’t take the question out of the democratic process would be to say that the right that the Court discerned, or rather imagined, in 1973 isn’t considered legally to be the same kind of constitutionally protected right as any of the others. However, to admit that a constitutional amendment is required to make abortion illegal is to acknowledge that it is the same, and it is to grant that the right guaranteed by Roe is outside of anything like the normal democratic process as constitutional rights would have to be. If constitutional rights are still potentially revocable as part of the constitutional process, that isn’t what anyone means when he says that something is or isn’t subject to the democratic process.

Judges are not wholly unaccountable to the people, but in practice federal judges are never impeached for their rulings. This would be seen as political interference and a violation of the judiciary’s independence. In many cases, this arrangement is probably better than many alternatives, but like any ultimately unaccountable institution the Court can abuse and has abused its power, and it can do so in no small part because of the power it already arrogated to itself. Even to the extent that new appointments to the Court indirectly reflect the views of the majority at a given moment, the judges in question are expected not to serve as reliable representatives of their faction or ideological clique, but are instead supposed to respect precedent. This is particularly true of conservative judges, and it is especially true when it comes to their views on Roe. Even in those limited, roundabout ways that elections might influence the composition of the Court and affect how the Court rules on cases related to abortion, elections have their smallest effect on this specific question. Freddie knows all of this, so who is he trying to kid?

The amendment process is a somewhat indirectly democratic means to make changes to that system. This makes the amendment process a slow, drawn-out, but nonetheless democratic remedy to perceived flaws in the system. The amendment process is extremely slow and arduous because there was once a quaint idea that dramatic changes in the power and scope of government could and should only be achieved through this process. Likewise, there was an assumption that there needed to be numerous obstacles to amending the fundamental law to make it more difficult for majoritarian tyrannies to strip people of their constitutional protections. Once the Court began discovering rights, or, if we want to be less pejorative, extending the protections of existing rights in new ways, what had once been within the power of state legislatures and electorates to regulate as they saw fit was placed behind a series of huge obstacles that cannot be overcome without the building up of super-majorities throughout the entire country in favor of a certain position. That would all be well enough if the right in question were not so constitutionally dubious and morally outrageous, since this process is supposed to be extremely difficult and it is supposed to require the support of most of the people, but the so-called right we’re talking about is both of these things.

Each time someone proposes a federalist compromise on this question to return the issue to the individual states, defenders of the status quo insist, as one might expect they would, that the guarantees of constitutional rights cannot be left up to the states and the people, because they understand that returning the question to the political sphere and the democratic process would lead to at least some restrictions that they argue are violations of fundamental protections. For the most part, it seems to me that supporters of Roe are usually quite proud of the fact that the “right to choose” is no longer subject to the democratic process, and they are frequently alarmed by anything that threatens to return it to its former status. One cannot argue that there is both a constitutional right at stake and also argue that the entire issue remains subject to the democratic process.