Our literary editor Freddy Gray has a report in The Spectator on his experience at CPAC. The closing paragraph has an amusing scene with Freddy and the Plumber:

Outside, I bump into a bald man smoking. It’s Joe the Plumber. He looks exhausted. I scrounge a cigarette from him and we stand together puffing away. I ask him what the future holds. ‘I think I am going to take on the IRS,’ he says. ‘If not, I guess I go back to doing what I was doing.’ A young conference attendee approaches us, breathless with excitement, and asks for Joe’s opinion on the best way of reforming American democracy. Joe listens patiently to the boy’s ambitious schemes. He cracks an avuncular smile, puts out his cigarette, and says: ‘I’ll have to think about that and get back to you.’ With that, he shuffles back towards the hotel, perhaps to sort out the Republican party, or maybe just to fix a leak.

When I was participating in TPMCafe’s discussion of Charles Homans’ article on investigating the former administration’s surveillance, detention and interrogation policies, I argued for investigations and criminal prosecutions of those involved if there was evidence showing that they broke the law. Mr. Homans had argued instead for some kind of truth commission at least partly on the grounds that this process would be less politicized and would not be seen as a witch hunt. This was Homans’ proposal:

The findings of an investigation exclusively targeting a Republican administration, conducted under the auspices of a Democratic Congress, would be too easy to dismiss. Moreover, Schwarz notes, the legislative branch is deeply implicated in what the executive branch did during the Bush years, and investigating itself would be something of a conflict of interest.

This doesn’t mean that Congress should abandon the idea entirely. Instead, what Congress needs to do is figure out how to achieve the same goals while avoiding the political consequences. The best way to do this is to appoint someone else to do it, a panel that does for the wartime excesses of the Bush administration what the 9/11 Commission did for the September 11 attacks. In other words, a 9/12 Commission.

Naturally, then, the mainobjections to the truth commission Sen. Leahy has been trying to organize are that it will be highly politicized and will be nothing more than a witch hunt. Of course, the use of the phrase “witch hunt” today implies a hunt in pursuit of something that does not exist, while we are fairly certain that there were criminals in the outgoing administration who have thus far escaped the appropriate sanctions of the law. The best argument that witnesses testifying against the idea of forming a commission seem to have had is that the abuses of power and crimes in question are not as numerous as they were under Pinochet and apartheid. Now that‘s a claim to moral authority.

In my view, these criticisms and the problems in the preparation for the truth commission make the case for criminal investigation and prosecution even stronger. The complaints of politicization and persecution are going to be the same, and there are large numbers of people invested in ignoring or justifying these crimes because of their support for the decisions that led to them. There is no way to hold government officials accountable for systematic abuses of power that is not also at some level political in nature. At least if violations of the law are treated as crimes rather than unfortunate incidents to be understood for posterity, there will be some possibility of accountability and some chance that the rule of law will still apply to government officials in these matters. All signsfrom the new administration, however, are that the past is to be buried and legal remedies for past abuses are to be fought every step of the way.

Patrick Deneen on free riding (discussed below).

James Matthew Wilson on Burke.

Katherine Dalton on Wendell Berry and the land economy.

Bill Kauffman on Hoosiers.

Caleb Stegall on churches with porches.

Susan McWilliams on owning a home.

I appreciated Professor Deneen’s discussion of the problem of free-riding, and I agree that ours is a precarious position, but I would suggest that it is also paradoxically the strongest position available inasmuch as we are always trying to be very conscious of our debts and the obligations they impose on us. At the risk of sounding pompous, I submit that the main lines of criticism against this position (i.e., we are simply choosing an alternative, our choices are made possible by the very things we reject, etc.) do not amount to very much. Indeed, they are the philosophical equivalent of lecturing the penitent man that he is a sinner and mortal, which is something one has to assume he already knows, else he would not be repenting.

Like the penitent man, we have inherited our current state, our predicament, along with everyone else, and like him we are not satisfied with it. To pursue the theological comparison a bit more, let us reflect on the fallen state of man. How did it happen, and what was the cause of the Fall? Our ancestors chose to try to be as gods and willed the one thing that God had forbidden them. Individual autonomy is at the heart of the Fall, and so it is part of our fallen nature, the part that St. Maximos described as the gnomic (deliberative) will. This is how we are now, but this is not how we were created. As fallen creatures we can embrace this autonomy, celebrate it and make it one of our highest goods, as most modern traditions would have us do, or we can turn back to God and change our minds. In our case, it is also true that none of us would be where and who we are without many of the things we are critiquing and rejecting, and indeed ultimately none of us would be here at all had our first ancestors not disobeyed God, but while we should not be entirely ungrateful for our inheritance neither should we acquiesce in repeating the same errors and persisting in false beliefs about human nature and nature.

Respect for our patrimony, our inheritance, is an essential part of what we are defending here, and we are not engaged in what Niemeyer called “total critique” in that we are not particularly interested in beginning the world anew. We retain affection and loyalty for what has been handed down to us because it is part of who we are, just as Christians have always been taught to fulfill their obligations to family and polity with the full knowledge that we have a greater loyalty and an unfathomable debt to God, and it is out of that loyalty that we are obliged to reject what is unsustainable and eventually destructive of the institutions and the country to which we do owe so much.

Cross-posted at Front Porch Republic

E.D. Kain identifies a paradox in modern American conservatism that will be familiar to students of George Grant. Forty years ago, Grant wrote this in his essay, “In Defence of North America”:

It may be inded that, like most of us, the ‘right’ want it both ways. They want to maintain certain moral customs, freedoms of property and even racial rights which are not in fact compatible with advancing technological civilisation. Be that as it may, the North American ‘right’ believes firmly in technical advance. Indeed its claim is that in the past the mixture of individualism and public order it has espoused has been reponsible for the triumphs of technique in our society.

At the root of this desire to have it both ways, indeed to “have it all,” is the belief in progress. Crucial to sustaining the myth that progress is both possible and desirable is the intensified exploitation of nature through technology, which necessarily means the greater mechanization of life and the deepening dependence of everyone on this technology. In the end, this must eventually mean the exhaustion of nature and the discovery that we advanced as far as we did at the expense of later generations who will have to make do with even less. In truth, then, we have not made any permanent progress, but have prepared coming generations for a painful correction as they pay for the gains we already enjoyed. As ingenious as research into various forms of alternative energy undoubtedly is, the creation of these new technologies is an attempt to accommodate appetites rather than curb them and to evade significant changes in behavior for as long as possible. Equally important to keeping the myth alive is the obscuring or indeed denial of real costs, or indeed the celebration of devastation as proof of progress. As I said a few years ago in response to the mentality that we can “have it all”:

We know perfectly well that “material advancement” results from this system (at least for a while)–that is, if I may be so bold, precisely one of the things wrong with it. It assumes that endless material advancement is good in itself and that it has no serious, negative consequences for human life.

As Professor Deneen has argued elsewhere, the very habits we cultivate as consumers may in the end sabotage our economic and political life:

Yet, what if we were to widen our aperture a bit and consider whether a nation of self-defined consumers is a good thing? What if the very self-definition of ourselves as “consumers” – now used unselfconsciously as the one universally valid term to describe Americans (not “workers” and certainly not “citizens”) – is deeply damaging to the civic and moral culture of a nation? What if economic and political policies that promote consumption over good, hard work induce very bad habits that in turn lead to very bad economic outcomes?

As he observed again on Monday, all current policy debates are focused on how best to rehabilitate an unstable and unhealthy system and revive the bad habits that brought about its implosion, and all the while avoiding any responsibility ourselves for our role in any of it:

We are proposing – without any debate, discussion or reflection – to, as best we can, reconstitute the economic “engine” that now, and then, too, mercilessly displaces people from positions when cheaper labor can be found, and just as much has sought to collectively reshape the American and world landscape so that it is as uniform and commercially homogeneous as possible, an economy dictated by and trapped in the throes of short-term thinking. We are witlessly striving to shore up the massive concentrations of private corporate power by means of increasing concentrations of “public” power – “public” only insofar as it remains deeply beholden to, and enmeshed in, the success of those massive private entities. Rather than entertaining the possibility that a private organization that is too big to fail is perhaps for that reason too big to exist, we instead like narcotized adolescents accept that Big Daddy will take care of us in the end and we bear no special burden to consider our own complicity in what has befallen us. We are content to look elsewhere for the perpetrator of crimes against our innocence – if on the Left, to blame to greedy corporate interests (as if we have not been blithely shopping at Wal-Mart or Target or Home Depot while local shops have withered on the vine); or, if on the Right, to accuse the depredations of Government and especially Barney Frank. And, above all, we yearn to revisit our blithe state of unconscious belief that the good of life consists in getting what we want without cost, travail, or consequence.

No less important to maintain faith in progress is the false definition of freedom as the absence of restraint and restrictions. Concentrated wealth and power gain ground and are actually rewarded for their failures because they can provide “we want” (though not without cost), and for the most part we have ceased to want real liberty and independence. Lukacs observed in At the End of an Age:

Probably much more important and fundamental is something else: the decline of healthy appetites for freedom at the very time when, together with other phenomena of licentiousness, an immense coarsening of civilized life has risen all around us. In this respect–illustrated by their behavior–there is hardly any difference between conservatives and liberals, or between self-designated Rightists and Leftists.

Making a related point, Bacevich writes in The Limits of Power:

As individuals, our appetites and expectations have grown exponentially. Niebuhr once wrote disapprovingly of Americans, their “culture soft and vulgar, equating joy with happiness and happiness with comfort.” Were he alive today, Niebuhr might amend that judgment, with Americans increasingly equating comfort with self-indulgence.

And freedom has been deformed to mean self-indulgence. This brings us to prosperity, which is ultimately not a material state but a moral and spiritual one, which is to say that it is a state of happiness or flourishing. We cannot enjoy prosperity if we misunderstand freedom and if we forget this other point Lukacs made:

Freedom means the capacity to know something about oneself, and the consequent practice or at least the desire to live according to limits imposed on oneself rather than by external powers. This appetite for freedom is not extinct, not even in today’s world; but the present “cultural” atmosphere provides something very different, indeed contrary to its proper nourishment.

The task before us, then, is to create an atmosphere conducive to the proper cultivation of this healthy appetite for freedom and to make clear what liberty it is we are seeking to restore.

Cross-posted at Front Porch Republic

E.D. Kain has a Front Porch Republic-worthy post on the nature of prosperity here. I want to say more about what he has written, but for the moment go and read it.

Last, however, there is Kilcullen the apostate. With the administration whose policies he sought to implement now gone from office, Kilcullen uses Accidental Guerrilla to skewer those he served for gross strategic ineptitude. His chief finding—that through its actions the Bush administration has managed to exacerbate the Islamist threat while wasting resources on a prodigious scale—is not exactly novel. Yet given Kilcullen’s status as both witness and participant, his indictment carries considerable weight. Here lies the real value of his book. ~Andrew Bacevich

Via Yglesias

The entire review of Accidental Guerrilla is very much worth reading. On Kilcullen’s treatment of the “surge,” Bacevich observes the following:

In short, the second-order benefits of a success that Kilcullen hails as undeniable, substantive and significant turn out to be partial, precarious and shrouded in ambiguity—a pretty meager return on a very substantial American investment.

There is also an even more sobering assessment about Afghanistan and Pakistan:

Stripped to its essentials, this is a call for Western-engineered nation building on a stupendous scale—in Kilcullen’s own words, “building an effective state structure, for the first time in modern Afghan history.” Yet even that will not suffice. Given the porous Afghan-Pakistani border, unless the United States and its partners also fix Pakistan, “a military victory in Afghanistan will simply shift the problem a few miles to the east.” With this is mind, Kilcullen calls for a “full-spectrum strategy” designed to “improve governance, security, and economic conditions” throughout the region. Although he illustrates this approach anecdotally, he offers no estimates of costs or who will pay them. Nor does Kilcullen explain why the results to be achieved in Afghanistan-Pakistan, even in the very best case, would produce an outcome any more definitive than the one he foresees in Iraq.

The core insight of Accidental Guerrilla seems to be that the fundamental strategy of the Long War (state-building and social transformation to eliminate jihadism) is horribly flawed and the decision to invade Iraq was its worst expression:

Kilcullen emphasizes that accidental guerrillas fight not to reinstitute the caliphate or to convert nonbelievers, but “principally to be left alone.” What they want above all is to preserve their way of life. The vast majority of those who take up arms against the United States and its allies do so “not because they hate the West and seek our overthrow, but because we have invaded their space to deal with a small extremist element.”

Of course, rather than depicting the threat posed by al-Qaeda as small, the Bush administration chose to cast it as equivalent to Nazi Germany. The premise underlying the administration’s Long War was that the Islamic world could not be “left alone.” Instead, it had to be coerced into changing. The administration invaded Afghanistan and then Iraq to jump-start that process of change. In doing so, however, the United States was playing directly into enemy hands. The decision to go after Saddam Hussein in particular, Kilcullen writes, was “a deeply misguided and counterproductive undertaking, an extremely severe strategic error.” The ostensible success of the surge notwithstanding, the Iraq War remains a “sorry adventure.”

The improved counterinsurgency techniques now being implemented by the United States military do not redeem that error. They merely offer, in the judgment of Kilcullen the apostate, “the best way out of a bad situation that we should never have gotten ourselves into.”

Having destabilized Pakistan as much as the war in Afghanistan and the drone strikes in western Pakistan have, it may be difficult at this point to extract ourselves from the region, and Pakistani collapse would have severe consequences for all of South Asia. However, we have to start asking whether there is anything about the Long War, so called, that serves the American interest any longer. Bacevich is coming to the conclusion that there is not:

If counterinsurgency is useful chiefly for digging ourselves out of holes we shouldn’t be in, then why not simply avoid the holes? Why play al-Qaeda’s game? Why persist in waging the Long War when that war makes no sense?

When it comes to dealing with Islamism, containment rather than transformation should provide the cornerstone of U.S. (and Western) strategy. Ours is the far stronger hand. The jihadist project is entirely negative. Apart from offering an outlet for anger and resentment, Osama bin Laden and others of his ilk have nothing on offer. Time is our ally. With time, our adversary will wither and die—unless through our own folly we choose to destroy ourselves first.

I shouldn’t keep getting pulled back into the Limbaugh debate, which is becoming increasingly surreal, but some of the arguments being made in his defense are just maddening. Here’s Hanson:

When commentators bring up Limbaugh’s private life in contrast to Obama’s picture-perfect image, they only emphasize the superficial.

By commentators, Hanson means Frum, who made the unusual move for a Giuliani supporter of emphasizing the importance of the effect of a person’s private life on his public image and the image of the cause he professes to serve. Frum had the bad manners to state bluntly what everyone knows, which is that Limbaugh is hardly a paragon of restraint and self-discipline, and that he does not actually live the life of marriage and family that most conservatives think are central to any sane ethos. (To Limbaugh’s partial credit, at least he tends not to describe conservatism in moral or cultural terms, so one cannot accuse him of preaching a message he does not believe.) By comparison, as so more than a few conservatives, both sympathetic and hostile, noted during the campaign, Obama’s private life seems to be a stable one built around his marriage and children, and indeed one might say that many of the choices he made over the years were directed by a desire for stability and some measure of permanence. If we grant that symbolism, image and “branding” are what matter for most voters, which person would you want as your leading public figure?

Hanson brings up Obama’s church, which is predictable enough, but it’s an odd thing to bring up. Even on this point of comparison, Limbaugh loses by any serious conservative standard. Limbaugh made a joke during his speech the other day that God thinks He is Rush Limbaugh. Yes, it was a joke. It was also blasphemous, and just the sort of thing you might expect from a non-observant individualist. There were more than a few people on the right who held forth quite confidently about what religious beliefs Obama did and did not “really” believe, whether his conversion was sincere or politically-motivated, whether he was a Christian and if so whether he was an orthodox one. Do they think Limbaugh would stand up to similar scrutiny very well? Or would that also be superficial?

One wonders whether there were many conservatives during ’99-’00 who would have said that it was “superficial” that Bush was a reformed alcoholic, born-again Christian who had remained faithful to his wife of several decades in contrast to the President he was replacing. Maybe it was politically irrelevant, but many conservatives put a great deal of stock in the character argument as an argument for Bush (to a large extent because he had so few qualifications for the job he was seeking, as we unfortunately discovered later). In fact, during those immediate post-impeachment election years the theme of restoring integrity and dignity to the White House was an explicit campaign theme repeated time and again by supporters of then-Gov. Bush.

But why go back to 2000? Does anyone remember what happened just last year? Wasn’t it Palin’s personal biography, and specifically her family and her children, that made her the focus of such intense loyalty and support as well as criticism and hostility? Didn’t conservatives make her family life into a central argument for why she had credibility on social issues, despite her complete lack of any record on these issues when it came to policy? Didn’t conservatives primarily celebrate her because of who she was and how she lived, rather than what she had done (which necessarily wasn’t much)? However, when it comes to Limbaugh, this is suddenly a superficial way of looking at a public figure, because it does not work to the advantage of the talk show host.

Jason Peters has a post on the time-travelling Jonathan Swift to warm the heart of every Bolingbrokean. I may have something to add later about the evils of the “projecting” spirit in our own time.

Allan Carlson has an introductory post on agrarianism.

Here is Bill Kauffman on Frank Bryan, Vermont and town meetings, originally published in TAC. This is a sample:

Bryan’s central finding is that “Real democracy works better in small places—dramatically better.” The smaller the town, the higher the percentage of citizens who participate in town meeting. The only other variable with any potency is the presence of controversial items on the agenda. If town meeting is waning, as pulseless technocrats often charge, it is because “Vermont towns have steadily been losing the authority to deal with controversial issues.” Voting up or down on the purchase of a snowplow is fine, but for grassroots democracy to thrive, we must restore to small places control over education, welfare, and economic regulation.

Keep checking in over there, as there will be much more to read.

Yes, he is an entertainer — you have to be to keep an audience for 3 hours every day — but he is also a leader in thought. This may make the more nuanced among the right uncomfortable, primarily because he doesn’t confer with anyone before making his thoughts known. He’s unpredictable. It is because Rush does not confer with others that he is a leader. It is because Rush is independent that he sets himself apart. ~J.P. Freire

We [conservatives] are what is. ~Rush Limbaugh, February 28, 2009

I wasn’t sure what I should say about Freire’s post, but fortunately I was able to confer with my advisors. Oh, wait, I don’t confer with anyone before making my thoughts known, either. I guess I must be a leader, in which case the word doesn’t mean very much. Seriously, why do intelligent conservative journalists (and Freire deserved the recognition he received last week) feel compelled to say such things?

If there is one thing Limbaugh is not, it is unpredictable. Maybe that’s the smart move for someone in his business. He is very successful at what he does, so I’m sure he knows what the formula is for drawing a regular listening audience, but one thing that you can rely on with Limbaugh is that you can be sure that you know exactly what you are getting when you turn on his show. Is Limbaugh independent? Independent of what? He very reliably serves up ready-made opinions, affirms his listeners’ beliefs, flatters their wisdom and very rarely challenges them. The same might be said of many people, and it isn’t the end of the world, but why pretend that one of the most predictable men around is the opposite of what he is? In what way is he a “leader in thought”? Perhaps you could allow that he popularizes and distributes ideas for mass consumption, but this makes him a simplifier of thought, not a leader. It is a thin line between a simplifier, who makes ideas more accessible to a broader audience, and a terrible simplifier, who distorts and mangles them in service to another goal.