Brendan O’Neill’s article in the new TAC offers an interesting critique of an odd trend among quite a few prominent “pro-Israel” advocates in recent years, which is to define Israel and its importance to the West more or less in terms that make it a crusader state for “Enlightenment values.” As O’Neill says, this puts absurdly great pressure on Israel that no state should have to bear. Worse, it badly distorts the admirers’ understanding of Israel’s conflicts with its neighbors:

What is going on here? How can a conflict that looks to many reasonable people like a long-running national and political clash be described as a grand battle for mankind? In effect, Israel is cynically, and lazily, being turned into a proxy army for a faction in the Western Culture Wars that has lost its ability to defend Enlightenment values on their own terms or even to define and face up to the central problem of anti-Enlightenment tendencies today.

Another article would be needed to work through the problems with the admirers’ prior assumptions about the importance of “Enlightenment values” as such, but that is for another time. Even if it were true that Israel is what these admirers (idolaters?) claim, the idea that Israel is a front-line state of civilization creates at least three bad habits among Westerners. O’Neill discusses at least two of these in the article, but I hope to elaborate on them a bit more. One such habit is that if we believe that Israeli policies are helping to save the civilized world from barbarism, many of us will want to overlook misguided, counterproductive and inhumane policies for fear of undermining the civilizational bulwark. Variations on the “we had to destroy the village to save it” rationalization will be offered, except ironically this time the “village” in question will be “Enlightenment values.” Second, it would be a form of outsourcing the work of defense that, if needed, we ought to be providing for ourselves, and this outsourcing would be fundamentally unfair to Israel.

Third, it would create an opportunity to focus our energies not on the practicable but difficult work of cultural renewal at home, but rather on cheering on and defending the actions of the front-line state in an epic battle far away in which we can assert our virtue by taking the right side. It is a grim kind of escapism for those previously engaged in culture wars at home, which then ends up negatively affecting how the escapists view their own domestic political debates. In the end, they come to view otherwise natural allies in combating various cultural ills as their enemies and even as fifth columnists working for the “barbarians” because the latter do not embrace the sort of blind, full-throated support for Israel that these admirers have. The front-line state will have to compromise the “values” it is supposedly defending, while the “hinterland” or metropolitan states of the West will gradually lose them through internal cultural changes. So, on its proponents’ own terms even if it were true, the front-line idea would lead to very bad habits and outcomes. The larger problem with it, of course, is that it is sheer fantasy.

One highly undesirable consequence of defining Israel as this front-line state is that it reinforces the tendency in America to ignore Near Eastern Christians and to endorse policies that, while nominally “pro-Israel,” are directly harmful to the survival and flourishing of Christian communities in the region. This is also one of the serious problems in stressing “Enlightenment values” as the thing that Israel is defending, since drawing the line this way would exclude many Arab Christians and would probably even categorize them as part of the threat, but it also shows how selectively these admirers are willing to defend the “Judeo-Christian tradition” to which they will sometimes refer as well. Obviously, at that point the entire argument becomes even more ridiculous and the fantasy of the front-line state idea becomes completely unsustainable, or at least you would think so.

Furthermore, conceiving of differences between civilizations in terms of fronts with clearly-delineated lines and all the associated war metaphors, while dramatic and rhetorically powerful, seems to be basically misleading and encourages seeking military solutions to cultural differences that are not going to be “solved” at all, but which can become more radicalized and the source of additional conflict. If certain “values” are weakening in the West, they are not going to become stronger by endorsing entirely unrelated military and security policies in a foreign country, and they are almost certainly not going to be built up through the West’s militarizing of abiding cultural and religious differences with other parts of the world. Finally, besides being an occasion for self-congratulation and creating moral blind spots for ourselves, building up these constructs of civilization vs. barbarism abstracts political conflicts in the Near East even more when their solutions, if any exist, are going to be found in paying close attention to specific details about individual conflicts. Negotiating over territory, settlements, water rights and other technical details is already tremendously difficult without freighting every concession or proposal with the full weight of Western civilization’s fate, which would make negotiation impossible. Indeed, one gets the impression that this is half the reason for framing the issue in this way.

Speaking for the BubbleHeads*, Pethokoukis:

So what is Stewart suggesting, that we “workers” just save insane gobs of money that we squirrel away into low-yielding savings accounts and rely on those savings and Social Security for our retirement?

I’m not sure if Pethokoukis is kidding, but it seems as if he really doesn’t understand anything Stewart was saying on the show. What Stewart was objecting to was the promotion of unrealistic expectations of large, quick returns on investment. At one point, Cramer tries to push back against Stewart by citing the period 1999-2007 as a time when these sorts of returns were considered normal, as if referring back to the artificially propped-up bubble fed by the Fed helps his cause, when what it does is drive home Stewart’s point. Hence Stewart’s constant refrains about “two markets.” In one market, Stewart was arguing, long-term investors, including my family and friends and probably a lot of you reading this, were conditioned to invest in equities on the assumption that they were not unduly exposing themselves to unacceptably high risk, while in the other financial institutions and their cheerleaders were creating instruments that greatly increased risks to everyone participating in the market and caused significant losses to the responsible, long-term investors through no fault of the latter or even of most of the companies in which they were/are invested. At no point did Stewart say or imply that people should not invest in the stock market. He did dare to suggest that work should matter (and he might have added that complicated financial instruments that are so impenetrably opaque that Soros and Buffett wouldn’t touch them with a ten-foot pole are inherently unsound and dangerous), which does not necessarily mean that he rejects investing. Americans might have benefited had he made an argument for saving (as a protection against exactly the sort of sudden and severe declines in the market that we have been seeing for the last many months), but that was not the matter under discussion.

* In honor of his attack on any critic of the TARP as a “MellonHead.”

As Joe mentioned yesterday, a lot of conservatives are down on the New York Times’ choice of Ross Douthat as the latest edition to their opinion page. Liberal praise for Douthat’s “healthy skepticism for many of the trappings of modern capitalist society” probably won’t help matters. ~Jim Antle

That last sentence speak volumes. What better time than now to have a prominent conservative voice offering “healthy skepticism for many of the trappings of modern capitalist society” in a major national newspaper? What sort of sane conservatism can exist that doesn’t already have a “healthy skepticism for many of the trappings of modern capitalist society”? What does it say about all these conservatives who are so “down” on Ross that they would find this healthy skepticism to be a reason to disapprove of him? Nothing good, I’ll wager.

Quite a lot has already been said about the abortion remarks from Michael Steele’s calamitously confused GQ interview, but I would just make a few basic points: the tendency in conservative rhetoric for the last 20-30 years to outdo liberals in their advocacy of “choice” is badly flawed enough as it is, but it becomes absurd in the hands of a politician who seems not to have thought about the substance of policy or any philosophical arguments related to the matters under discussion. Ross discusses the problem of substance-free rising leaders in the GOP here. Steele’s zig-zagging between a federalist position on abortion (it should be the states’ “choice”), a status quo position (it is an individual choice) and the party platform position (federalism, no! HLA, si!) is dizzying, but what I find interesting is that Steele is receiving the third degree on this from conservative bloggers over this. For the most part, bloggers on the left are just pointing and laughing. When Palin demonstrated similar cluelessness on this very issue, the impulse on the right then was to ignore or justify her ignorance and say, “Oh yeah, what about Biden’s answer?”

Steele does not have the benefit of a verbose, mistake-prone counterpart to distract us, but even if he did the reaction to Steele would have been nothing like the response to Palin. In other words, Steele’s blunders on substance are treated as badly damaging and activists insist that they require immediate correction, while Palin’s blunders were spun as imaginatively and desperately as any politician’s answers have ever been spun. This is a bigger problem than pushing unprepared leaders into the spotlight–it is a clear preference for one kind of style, namely the combative pseudo-populist act, over whatever style Steele has at the expense of any consideration of the merits of what these leaders say. The takeaway is that Steele is being ripped apart for making statements that are not terribly different from Palin’s campaign statements on the very same issues, and somehow she is still considered a rising star by the very activists who are ripping Steele.

Greg Djerejian breaks silence to weigh in on the Freeman controversy in a thoughtful post well worth reading, and also explains what will be keeping him away from writing in the near future. It is happy news for him with the birth of a new child, but it is our loss that we will not have his insights in the months to come. Congratulations to him, and good luck to him in his MBA program.

Faced with a party that is preoccupied with symbolism and obsessed with fighting earmarks, Patrick Ruffini proposes the embrace of a GOP-backed earmark ban as a symbol of Republican seriousness. By itself, this would not be all that remarkable. Raging against earmarks is just about the only thing Republicans know how to do these days, so I suppose it makes sense to stick to what you know, but what is worse is that Ruffini is justifying this as an obvious political winner. This is just not true.

Not only do most people not know or care about earmarks in general, they are often quite fond of earmarks that go to their districts. Ron Paul sometimes gets in trouble with pundits who like to point out that he requests earmarks for his district as part of his role as their representative, but in many of those cases it is hard to see why, for example, shoring up a sea wall in Galveston, which is an area vulnerable to storm surge during hurricane season, is such a terrible or wasteful thing. Indeed, even if you are a strict constructionist, it is not so far out to think that the federal government might even have some proper role in providing for coastal defenses against natural disasters. It is also difficult to understand why representatives should not do what they can to get their constituents a share of the money that the government has taken from them. This is probably the only time members of Congress do anything remotely close to serving the interests of their constituents, and it has become the object of Republican ridicule and scorn for several years now. The problem is not that Republicans in Congress say one thing and do another, although that hardly helps, but that they think the problem is their continued use of earmarking and not their inane rhetoric about eliminating earmarks.

Not only is an anti-earmark crusade irrelevant electorally, but it could actually be directly harmful to House members when they are facing re-election. As has been pointed out elsewhere, a minority party has nothing much to show for itself at election-time if its members cannot at least bring home some bacon. If the GOP cannot soften the blow of their general fascination with austerity economics by pointing to projects they are bringing to their districts, some of their members are going to be in real danger of being voted out. If the DCCC recruits as smartly and effectively as they have in past cycles, promoting fiscally conservative Blue Dog candidates against pro-austerity incumbents, there are seats that the GOP thinks are safe that may not prove to be.

This was an odd thing to read, but it got me to thinking how well my opinion pieces for my college newspaper would hold up almost ten years later. For the most part, my post-Kosovo non-interventionism was already there, and I think I made pretty good arguments against drug war meddling in Colombia, so many of the themes in my writing were already taking shape, but there were some columns that I did in the wake of the 2000 recount that would probably make me want to beat my head against the wall. There was also my last op-ed written for the paper in the weeks following 9/11 that was simply horribly stupid in its naivete and optimism, and I would like to be able to take back large parts of it.

Good news from John Schwenkler: he has secured a teaching job, and he and his wife are expecting their second child in the fall. I’m very pleased for John on both counts. Now if he could just tell us how he managed to get an academic job in this market in philosophy, that would be really interesting.

But again, I don’t think Frum and Brooks and co. want to eliminate the base, they just think it won’t be enough in the future. ~Alex Massie

I’m not sure what Brooks thinks, and these two don’t speak for all of the reformers, but in Frum’s case this is not quite correct. Frum’s post on the significance of Bristol Palin’s marital woes concludes this way:

The socially conservative downscale voter is increasingly becoming a mirage – and a Republican politics based on that mirage will only lead us deeper into the desert.

To be precise, Frum is not exactly arguing for eliminating the base, but is saying that the base as it has been known in the past is evaporating and becoming something else. What he is recommending, as usual, is that the GOP abandon social conservatism before the socially conservative downscale voter abandons them by ceasing to exist. There may be something to this to the extent that rising generations are less likely to marry, or are more likely to marry late or marry and then divorce fairly quickly, and so one might think that they would be less likely to align themselves politically with a party that champions marriage and family (at least rhetorically). The trends he identifies are real, but his conclusions do not necessarily follow. One of the demographic reasons for declining GOP support among 18-29 year olds over the last several cycles is that Millennials are less likely to be white, married and Christian, which are the characteristics that have by and large defined the GOP voting coalition for several decades. Frum places the emphasis on marriage as the most relevant factor, which may or may not be true.

If it is true, it is very far from clear that Frum’s recommendation of dropping social conservative positions is the right one to follow. Ross and Reihan see the same problem, but have proposed an entirely different solution, which is that the GOP should adopt policies to promote and support stable marriages and childbearing. That is, they think the GOP should bother to implement policies that follow through on the rhetoric they have been using for decades. (They would probably not put it quite that way, but I think this is fair.) Their rationale for this is more than electoral strategy, though it is related to that as well, as they see the connections between family instability, lack of education and lower income and recognize the danger to the health of our political system if increasing family instability creates a highly stratified society. They argue for preventing the kind of social and economic stratification that will invariably result if these trends are not checked, whereas Frum essentially accepts that these trends are unfolding and the GOP must find some way to adapt to them. To put it another way, Ross and Reihan are interested in channeling these changes in a constructive fashion, while Frum argues for getting out of the way and going along with them.

One place where Frum’s analysis breaks down entirely is in the assumption that family instability and having children out of wedlock make people less likely to vote for a social conservative platform, when there is good reason to believe that it is precisely the instability and insecurity in private life that attract many voters to a social conservative message. Seeing the effects of chaos around them, these voters crave some semblance of order and an affirmation of norms. This is the perverse and perhaps unsustainable relationship between social disintegration and the politics of social conservatism, and I think it is a lesson to conservatives that the real work of cultural renewal is not primarily to be found in political activism but it is in combating that disintegration directly through local institutions, education and social work.

Social conservative voters have been used to win elections, but their agenda has never taken anything close to priority with the party. Part of this may be because the party’s ability to mobilize social conservative voters depends heavily on the ongoing failure to combat many of the social ills that generate social conservatives’ discontent with the current state of affairs. It may be worth pondering why it is that the period of the last decade where we have seen income stagnation and growing income inequality is also the period during which we have seen the intensification of social conservative rhetoric (if not of actual policies) and the increasing profile of socially conservative candidates inside the GOP who have, a la Huckabee, also started to offer some minimal lip service to downscale voters’ economic concerns.

Somewhere in all of this there may be some way to explain the manic reaction to Sarah Palin among rank-and-file conservatives, as her family possessed both elements of stability and instability that allowed her family life to be presented as both an ideal and as a recognizable, messy reality. Perhaps the conservative excuse-making for her daughter’s behavior was not just politically-motivated opportunism, but prompted recognition of the kind of family disruption that was only too familiar to them from their own families. Palin defenders fixated on class and education differences to explain the typically upscale conservative criticisms directed at her, but perhaps (and this is just speculation) it was actually in the differing experiences of family stability that determined whether someone was favorably inclined or critical. The identity politics that drove people to say, “She’s one of us” allowed her supporters to see her as someone very much like them and perhaps also someone who enjoyed a degree of family stability that they did not. That is, she was someone with whom they could identify, but also someone whom they aspired to imitate. Then again, this may not apply to the Palin phenomenon at all and the reasons for it may be entirely different. On that inconclusive note, I will stop.

Massie has an earlier post on this question here.

Whether the dumbing down of America or soccer came first is hard to say, but soccer is clearly an important means by which American energy, drive, and competitiveness is being undermined to the point of no return. ~Stephen Webb

Via Massie

No, I don’t think Webb is joking. At least, he says he isn’t joking. An essential element of anti-soccer jeremiads–and Webb actually labels his a jeremiad to make sure you don’t miss his prophetic purpose–is the lack of experience in actually playing soccer. For that matter, if your main experience with the game is watching (or playing in) AYSO matches at the local park, you are not going to think much of it, just as Europeans would not be very impressed if they attended nothing but Little League. At the other end, Americans are usually only exposed to soccer on television during the World Cup, and the U.S. team rarely advances to the final rounds, so most Americans have no rooting interest in a match between, say, Brazil and Germany, and they don’t know who most of the players are, because almost all of them play for European clubs. Having ignored the sport for four years, we Americans find that they are out of the loop in an ongoing conversation that the rest of the world understands perfectly well. Our own continental parochialism stares back at us, and we get annoyed.

Whenever I see or hear an American holding forth on the evils of soccer, one thing that I can rely on is that the person usually has no understanding of the sport, and Webb certainly hasn’t any. The evidence for this is clear in that Webb seems to think that soccer teaches that everyone is a winner. Who on earth has ever played soccer and said, “Yes, this game is geared towards boosting self-esteem!”? That is madness. Practice slide tackling for ten minutes and then tell me this with a straight face.

This lack of understanding is the crucial part in any tiresome exercise in sports nationalism: “Our manly sport has subtlety and form, and it reflects the true nature of the universe, whereas their stupid children’s game is pointless and boring.” The Bollywood film Lagaan actually captures this quite amusingly when Aamir Khan’s character laughs at the British cricketers for playing a glorified version of gilli danda, only to discover later that he knows nothing about the game. Europeans can make the same boredom charge against baseball (and they have), we can say it about soccer or cricket (and we have), and no doubt almost everyone outside Canada has said it about curling (but not, I think, about hockey!).

Indeed, Webb dives right in with the boredom accusation, and goes from there. Ask a foreigner from somewhere other than Japan or Latin America, and he will make the same complaint about baseball–it takes so long for every pitch, and there are these huge stretches where nothing is happening! How can you stupid Americans stand the tedium? Of course, connoisseurs of baseball know that there is almost always something happening or about to happen, because they are paying attention to things that tend to escape casual notice, and they enjoy the rhythm of the game in any case. More to the point, we like it because we have learned to like it by watching and playing it our entire lives, much as football-centric sports cultures have done with their sport. Europeans also tend to find American football boring and incomprehensible, and I’m sure it seems that way to them.

The most ridiculous charge against soccer is its alleged egalitarian ethic. This is not remotely true. The importance of skill and precision in playing soccer is hard to overestimate. Even if it were egalitarian, though, it could hardly be more obsessed with equality than the vicious leveling impulse of that quintessentially American version of car racing, NASCAR. NASCAR is plainly a joke compared to international open-wheel auto racing, partly because of the built-in leveling through all of the restrictions imposed on the cars, and this egalitarian impulse artificially keeps the superior drivers with better engineers stuck in the pack for the entire race.

Formula One has its drawbacks as a spectator sport when some teams are reliably better than the rest of the field. This is the case thanks to greater funding, better technology and better drivers hired through greater funding, but that ought to be a certain kind of conservative’s favorite organization of a sport: some benefit from built-in advantages that others can’t have, and life isn’t fair. The Ferrari and McLaren teams will always tend to make mincemeat out of the other teams, and that’s just the way it is. Yankees fans will be able to appreciate this arrangement, but it is an awfully strange one for an overwhelmingly European racing league to have. Aren’t all these Europeans obsessed with egalitarianism, or is the complaint against them this week that their societies are too stratified and class conscious? Or is it both? I must check my anti-European memos more often.

Of course, sport is supposed to represent a world in which instant morality prevails and fair competition is the rule, which is why all decent human beings hate the Yankees, just as everyone got extremely tired of Schumacher’s seemingly endless string of championships. The point is this: if you spend enough time at it, you can find the flaws and virtues in every kind of competition, and you can invest this or that sport with some allegedly definitive national or cultural characteristics that embody vitality or decadence. If done as a kind of light-hearted ribbing, it can be quite fun, but when offered as some kind of deadly serious cultural criticism it is dreadful.