Oleg Gordievsky writes about how many Russians behave as toadies to Putin, but the examples he cited, while embarrassing and often ridiculous, seem positively tame compared to the praise regularly heaped on our Presidents by their partisans. To my knowledge, no one has speculated, jokingly or otherwise, about Putin’s potential to be a Messiah or a “Lightwalkerworker,” and I am skeptical that there has ever been any Putin sycophant so delirious as Hinderaker when praising Bush as a “man of extraordinary vision and brilliance approaching to genius.” Maybe Putin has similarly fawning admirers, but I have to assume they are somehow on the government payroll. Perhaps systems with strong roles for presidents inevitably lead to this sort of flattery of the quasi-monarch, as our cousins in the parliamentary democracies do not usually fall into such excesses of leader-worship. Parliamentary leaders are readily replaceable and the electorate is not involved in raising them up to their leadership position in the same way.

It seems to me that our bad habits might be worse in that they often seem to be more expressions of real enthusiasm in praising mediocrities rather than self-serving celebration of someone who can give you patronage. Nominating conventions here in the U.S. are elaborate pieces of staged propaganda for something very much like a personality cult. While many of the speakers no doubt craft their remarks to advance their political careers, that still cannot really explain the zeal of most of the delegates and other partisans around the country. This staged propaganda moment was not always the case, but as the conventions have increasingly become more of a formality and a televised performance than a necessary political gathering the sycophancy of the attendees seems to have grown apace.

Republicans rolled their eyes at the stagecraft of Obama’s acceptance speech in Mile High Stadium, obsessing about the “Greek temple” look that was actually a reference to the Lincoln Memorial (talk about a personality cult!), but this was, I think, mostly a function of jealousy after their own relatively technically inept convention centered around an uninspiring speaker. The response to Palin seems to confirm this. There is nothing particularly edifying or attractive about flattering people in power. However, unlike in Russia’s populist authoritarian system where there may be some clear incentive to do this as a way of gaining access or employment, there is not necessarily any reward for abasing oneself before party leaders here and yet thousands and millions of people here do it on a regular basis.

Ross’ post on the Bacevich-Linker-Deneen debate makes a good point:

It always struck me that the small coterie of intellectuals surrounding First Things were exceedingly unlikely candidates for the role Linker cast them in – a near-existential threat to the liberal order, etc. – but at least he was overhyping people who had some claim to political influence. In his latest jeremiad against the illiberal menace, on the other hand, he’s moved on to targeting “paleoconservatives” like Daniel Larison, Patrick Deneen and Rod Dreher, all of whom are notable not only for being marginal to American politics as its currently practiced, but for liking it that way.

This is a fair description up to a point–we certainly are marginal and do not seem terribly concerned about this–but Ross gets even closer to the truth when he understands that the “radicals” in question understand our conservatism as “a cultural project first and a political project a distant second, if at all.” As I see it, the political project has been tried and has not only failed but has turned conservatives into supporters of many of the forces that are wrecking all those things that they should want to preserve. In the meantime, while conservatives have been preoccupied with the political project or complacent in the assumption that cultural problems had political remedies, cultural change has overwhelmed or badly compromised many of the institutions and habits conservatives sought to defend. On the whole, I think it is fair to say that we see few, if any, political solutions as these are conventionally understood. The indictment of pernicious “theocon” influence is flawed in a different way: it exaggerates the power of the theocons, who did at least have some and were actively engaged in the political process, and badly misunderstands the theocons’ own objectives.

Whenever Linker scratches a religious conservative, he thinks he finds an authoritarian underneath, much as Andrew believes he is always uncovering a fundamentalist mentality among us, and he is usually wrong. This leads Linker to identify the theocons, most of whom are actually politically liberal in a broad sense, in the same terms that he uses to describe “paleoconservatives,” many of whom are hostile to much of the broader liberal tradition, largely because both groups are often focused on questions of culture and morals. The latter are probably less likely to fling authoritarian as an epithet or an insult, and also probably less likely to conflate authoritarian regimes with fascist or totalitarian ones, but that is not very significant. Historically, authoritarian systems have been politically centralist, state capitalist in economics, have tended to be militaristic or to place inordinate importance on the role of the military, and in many cases have sought to embrace the latest modern fads and technology to demonstrate that they were on the cutting edge. All of this turns “radicals” and paleos against tendencies towards such authoritarian government when we see evidence of them here in the United States.

Blogging is still going to be very light over the next day or two. In the meantime, take a look at Prof. Fox on Red Toryism, John Schwenkler on the Linker-Bacevich debate, and Linker’s response to Prof. Deneen. My comment on the debate today is to note that Linker is correct that a society where freedom is rightly understood in terms of obedience would not be a liberal society, which is rather the whole point of conservatives’ critiquing the problems and failings of liberal society. Speaking for myself, it would be pointless to pretend that my understanding of freedom as obedience is not derived directly from Christian doctrine and specifically from Orthodox tradition. Whether this is strictly necessary or not in order to understand freedom in this way, its connection to traditional Christianity is hardly something that needs to be concealed or denied. In the end, this is what worries Linker about Bacevich and Deneen and the rest of us “radicals.” It is not that, as he claimed before, that we are hostile to “the human condition itself,” but rather to the disordered state of fallen human nature that a certain sort of liberalism celebrates as normal.

There is also Linker’s accusation that Bacevich and Deneen don’t really reject the “culture of choice,” but simply object to certain kinds of choices, which is a common refrain I have heard countless times in the often futile debates over “crunchy” conservatism. “You are just imposing your own preferences on us,” the criticism goes, which is what you would expect to hear from people who cannot grasp or do not accept that there is a natural order that is not concerned with whether you would prefer to live a certain way or not. There are limits built into our nature and into the nature of things that point to the cultivation of virtue as the sane course, but as long as we believe it to be in our power to manipulate and control nature we will delude ourselves into believing that these limits can be stretched indefinitely without consequences. Acting contrary to nature will bring its own costs, regardless of what one does or does not prefer.

Of course, there will have to be someone or some body enforcing discipline to a degree, and if Linker wants to water down and redefine authoritarianism enough to classify this as authoritarian I suppose he can do so. It is a measure of how limited and poor our understanding of politics is nowadays that the only thing Linker envisions as an alternative to laissez-faire morality is legalistic intrusion into personal behavior by the government. This fails to take into account the possibility of social regulation through customs and concepts of honor mediated through natural and religious institutions. Social stigma, reputation, protecting the family name–these are decidedly not part of the “culture of choice,” according to which none of these things has any real importance, but they are effective means of conditioning behavior without recourse to coercion or an appeal to the law.

My new column on Turkey’s relations with its Western allies is up at The Week.

For quite a while I have raised objections to trying to read specific political messages into film and TV, and more generally I have always been skeptical of the sub-set of conservative arguments dedicated to appropriating elements of pop culture. On the whole, I think the exercise is mostly futile, and to the extent that these assessments of pop culture products are at alll accurate they tend to dissuade conservatives from their own non-kitschy cultural production. “We don’t need to go into cinema or television–look at all the conservative movies and shows we already have!” These efforts tend to reinforce the “this is a center-right nation” complacency that assumes that some core cultural conservatism exists as a given in America and does not need to be actively cultivated. Worse than that, it causes conservatives to start to define what makes a film or television show “conservative” largely by how much it is loathed or criticized by their opponents, such that 24 receives embarrassing praise when it depicts a near-omnicompetent security state that breaks the law at will so long as the targets of its violence and lawlessness are terrorists.

I started thinking about this earlier this afternoon when I happened to be scrolling through The Corner and noticed their “25 best conservative movies of the last 25 years” series of posts. Besides all of my usual problems with this appropriation game, what struck me as odd about the list was how many war and terrorism movies there were. United 93, Team America: World Police (no, I’m not kidding), We Were Soldiers, Heartbreak Ridge, Master and Commander, Red Dawn (natch), Braveheart, and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (which is a sort of war movie, I suppose) are among those listed, and they still haven’t reached the top ten. The Dark Knight makes its appearance on the list with a reprise of Andrew Klavan’s surreal idea that the plot had something to do with Mr. Bush and the “war on terror.” The Lord of the Rings trilogy is framed entirely in terms of being a pro-war epic, which misunderstands the trilogy about as badly as one can:

The debates over what to do about Sauron and Saruman echoed our own disputes over the Iraq War.

Like the silly efforts to invest 300 with some contemporary political significance, this cuts both ways and could be interpreted in a way that would not suit war supporters.

[Correction in bold] John Miller cites A.O. Scott’s review of Master and Commander to give a more straightforward application of the idea of little platoons:

It imagines the [H.M.S.] Surprise as a coherent society in which stability is underwritten by custom and every man knows his duty and his place. I would not have been surprised to see Edmund Burke’s name in the credits.”

Of course every man knows his duty and his place–it is set on a Royal Navy warship! Military regimentation and conscription maintained by the discipline of the lash do not seem to me to be exactly what Burke had in mind when he was thinking of a society ruled by custom and prescription. It is telling and depressing that some movement conservatives seem to think that this is supposed to be a perfect expression of Burkean ideals. Correction: It was pointed out to me that Miller was quoting Scott’s review, not making the statement himself, which was quite evident in Miller’s post and which I missed. I apologize for the error. It is still not very encouraging that Miller thought Scott’s description to be worth quoting in the context of defining the film as conservative.

It is not just that there are many war stories included on the list. If I included films from the last 30 years, I could come up with my own list, which still would not make the films that I list “conservative” movies, but I might include on my list a few war films that offer other lessons (Gallipoli, Breaker Morant, and Bang Rajan come to mind). In themselves, the stories are not the problem. There is nothing necessarily wrong with films that try to show all aspects of warfare, including the admirable virtues of the men who fight. What is troubling is the “conservative” interpretation of many of these films and the automatic identification of reasonably positive depictions of warfare with conservative themes.

There are wide swaths [sic] of Chicago that look like something out of Mad Max ~Shawn Macomber

There are large parts of south and west Chicago that suffer from a number of problems, but I have driven around the South Side and between Hyde Park and downtown on surface streets many times over the years and I have yet to see anything that would remind me of Mad Max. Naturally, this remark is being made as part of a complaint that the city won’t permit Wal-Mart to set up shop here, which prompts me to turn John’s question around: wouldn’t it be great if many on the Right could apply to Wal-Mart’s supposed ability to “create” jobs even half of the skepticism that they constantly (and sometimes rightly) apply to the federal government’s?* Pay no attention to the independent, small businesses that Wal-Mart’s arrival may adversely affect, but focus instead on how many low-wage service jobs it will provide–opposition to making your community heavily dependent on one company for its employment and needs must simply be irrational. Just keep the goods cheap and keep ’em coming! I believe this is the approach to economics and politics that both Bacevich and Deneen find so ruinous.

*On a related note, is Michael Steele kidding when he says that government has never, as the saying goes, created a job? It seems to me that one of our long-standing complaints against all levels of government is that it has been only too good at creating them and preserving them, and one of the reasons that calls for abolishing various departments have become less and less common even on the right is that there are so many people with a vested interest in keeping these sources of employment from disappearing.

Andrew Bacevich has a short post on a future conservatism, and Patrick Deneen has a long and very interesting related response to Damon Linker at the main blog. I want to discuss this debate at greater length, but I am probably going to be too busy for most of the rest of this week to give it the attention it deserves. Briefly and not surprisingly, I agree with Bacevich’s prescription:

When it comes to the culture, conservatives should promote an awareness of the costs of unchecked individual autonomy, while challenging conceptions of freedom that deny the need for self-restraint and self-denial. When it comes to economics, they should emphasize the virtue and necessity of Americans, collectively as well as individually, learning to live within their means. When it comes to foreign policy, they should advocate a restoration of realism, which will necessarily entail abandoning expectations of remaking the world in America’s own image.

Certainly, there is a degree of radicalism in this. It is correct to say that self-restraint has to be governed by deference to authority. Deference and the unquestioning, unthinking servility Linker tries to link to it are, of course, entirely different things, and one thing that I think that paleoconservatives, or simply radical conservatives, have shown over the past several decades is a respect for lawful authority that requires resistance and criticism of abuses of authority. In practice, this means that those who defer to lawful authority are less inclined to embrace what one would recognize as authoritarian practices of the state or any other institution, because they do not judge those in positions of authority merely according to their possession of office and power but also according to their right use of these things.

Individual autonomy, based in pride, is the root of our fallen condition. Indeed, it is the cause of the Fall. That is precisely why it has to be restrained and governed. If we do not cultivate restraint and self-government within ourselves, it will eventually be imposed from without. This is why the culture of choice is so antithetical to genuine freedom, and why deferring to lawful authority is the surest protection against tyrannical abuses by all those who hold positions of authority. Prof. Deneen says this more elegantly than I have:

Again, the irony is that self-rule is the means of preventing and thwarting the expansion of the military-industrial State. It is, in fact, the greatest avenue of preventing the likelihood of an all-encompassing Leviathan. Such an alternative conception of liberty is deeply premised upon the very anthropology that Linker claims it to be uncognizant of – our propensity to “depravity,” including self-deception, pride, greed, self-aggrandizement and a willingness to reduce good to those things reducible to the monadic body. A culture that would seek to reign in our propensity to depravity would not rest either on private liberation nor “authoritarianism,” but the inculcation of the faculties and abilities of self-government. Only one who seeks private liberty in all respects would regard such cultivation of self-government as oppressive, and would ultimately have to face the reality that such thoroughgoing private liberty is purchased by means of the expansion of public power and a truly frightening prospect of authoritarianism. Already we can see that much of the American public would be willing to sacrifice liberties in the name of sustaining a growth economy that encourages near-infinite, but never fulfilled, personal satiation. This, however, is not liberty.

It is time to think differently and beyond this reigning paradigm: to think of liberty in terms of self-government; to consider that freedom is best preserved when institutions are smaller and less concentrated with destructive power; to live within the means that nature affords, without seeking its pillage or mutilation; to act with stewardship and responsibility in the world and toward our neighbors and future generations.

Patrick Deneen has an important post on protectionism and the dangers of a consumer society, and E.D. Kain ponders the interventionist nature of economic sanctions. The two seem to be concerned with very different things, but there is something that ties them together, which is why I thought it important to answer a question in the comments to Kain’s post:

Trade restrictions have the exact same effect on foreign populations regardless of your preferred political justification. So what’s the substantive difference between vindictiveness and economic nationalism?

Quite clearly, the difference is that economic sanctions imposed on “rogue” regimes are aimed at punishing a foreign population and trying to force changes in another government’s internal policies, which never works, while measures designed to protect against cheap competition are aimed at supporting domestic industries. Critics of protectionism do not deny that these supports are successful, but insist that they should not be implemented for the sake of efficiency and “growth.” Governments impose economic sanctions on the assumption that people in other countries think and act as nothing more than consumers whose loyalties can be manipulated through high prices for imports. Opposition to protectionist measures presupposes treating citizens as if they were consumers whose loyalties should be manipulated with low prices for imports. Protectionist policies take for granted that national sovereignty and citizenship are relevant factors in determing the regulation of international trade. Economic sanctions policies are based on the assumption that concepts of national sovereignty and citizenship mean as little to members of other nations as they do to globalists in the West. Does that about cover it?

P.S. Protectionist has always struck me as a strange epithet, as if it were an insult to say that you protect things. I suppose the opposite of a protectionist would be a despoiler. Now that‘s an epithet!

Glenn Greenwald and Scott McConnell have both picked up on a certain obvious double standard that will be applied in the international reaction to the prospect of Yisrael Beiteinu joining the next coalition government after tomorrow’s election. This is unfortunate, but if there is any problem here it is in the other examples of international condemnation of election results and the climate of fear and intimidation that critics of various parties want to create. Arguably, one might make an exception for Yisrael Beiteinu, whose leaders were so keen to ban certain Israeli Arab parties and whose policy positions are infinitely more offensive than anything to be found among European nationalist parties, and who therefore have the least claim to sympathy, but part of the trouble is the willingness to make exceptions to democratic norms supposedly in the name of defending democracy. So long as political parties do not call for their members to use violence, it is extremely difficult to justify banning a party or penalizing a country for including it in its government.

Of course, we are almost certainly not going to see the same outrage over Yisrael Beiteinu as we have seen in other cases, just as few in the West cared that extreme Ukrainian nationalists made up a significant part of the support for Viktor Yushchenko (he was “pro-Western”!) or that Saakashvili was a hot-headed nationalist demagogue with militant aspirations (he was anti-Russian, so all was well) or that the Croatian government of Tudjman was the direct descendant of the Ustasha. This is a simple guide for understanding when such groups are democratic and when they are anti-democratic. First of all, the “anti-democratic” parties are actually democratic in practice and in ideology–this is why some people find them threatening. They actually want the voices of their constituents heard and their views implemented as policy! Very frightening. Pro-Western “democrats” are often authoritarian in practice, or they are willing to engage in brutal treatment of their minorities, or they at least have neo-Nazi or Stalin-sympathizing supporters. Obviously these are the people the West needs to support against their enemies, and so we have and continue to do. The difference between the parties treated as harbingers of democracy and those treated as democracy’s enemies is a fairly simple one: the officially good parties are on board with what Washington and Brussels want to do, and the officially bad parties are those that object to the goals of either one or both. Pretty predictably, then, European reaction to Yisrael Beiteinu’s success is going to be fairly negative, while the U.S. response will be mildly critical or possibly even positive. If anyone thinks that this depends significantly on which party is in power in Washington, he is going to be surprised.

Let’s review the cases of the “anti-democratic” parties in Europe. In Belgium, the Flemish nationalist party, then the Vlaams Blok, was outlawed and scarcely anyone in the West so much as blinked. The party has since reformed under another name, but its popularity along with the paralysis of Belgian government that we saw for about half of 2008 are pieces of evidence that the Flemish nationalists represent a legitimate protest of the middle-class, Flemish-speaking population against a government that they have ceased to respect and which they believe does not govern in their interests. The late Joerg Haider’s party joined the Austrian government in the late ’90s, and Austria was penalized with diplomatic and other sanctions by other Western governments. This was mostly because it was more aggressive and outspoken in its opposition to mass immigration, which is a position that most center-right parties across Europe have now adopted. The FPO had the bad taste to be among the first, and the People’s Party Chancellor had the gall to respect the results of that election rather than try to form another bankrupt consensus government with the left. Recognizing that the protest that empowered the FPO was the result of a stifling consensus between the two major parties, the Chancellor brought them into the government. Le Pen’s advance into the final round of presidential voting in 2002 was widely treated as an apocalyptic event that very nearly excluded France from the civilized world, or at least that was how the media treated it. In the end, the vote was held, Le Pen lost and that was that. We should also not forget the pre-election hysteria surrounding Pim Fortuyn’s list in the Netherlands along the same lines, which more or less directly led to his assassination.

At least in the French case the election went ahead, albeit in an atmosphere of hysteria and groupthink the likes of which some communist dictators might envy, and French voters settled the matter themselves at the ballot box. In the other three, there were attempts to make an end-run around the electoral process or penalize voters in a sovereign country for voting the “wrong” way. Of course, one is free to oppose the positions these parties espouse, but it is always very dangerous when a country’s judicial system, international institutions, or foreign governments believe that they are justified in banning or punishing parties and countries that vote for them. Obviously, it is completely unacceptable for individuals to murder democratic politicians whom they regard as dangerous, but it is worth bearing in mind that such attacks do not occur in a vacuum. Would-be assassins can find justification in the exaggerated rhetoric of partisans, and things would generally be much better if we all carefully avoided stoking passions over these election outcomes.

Since I apparently haven’t talked enough about the stimulus bill, I’ll say a few words about it in connection with a topic I find to be interesting. Andrew cites a Gallup poll showing broad approval for Obama’s handling of the stimulus. Republicans receive very negative marks on the same question, which is consistent with being a wildly unpopular party that was just trounced in a second consecutive election and is loathed by more than half of the country. This brings me back to my initial reaction to the House Republican vote on the stimulus.

Suppose for a moment that all observers of the debate agreed that the House Republicans were right that the stimulus bill isn’t fast or effective enough and that it is larded down with all sorts of unnecessary spending, and let’s go one step beyond that and grant for the sake of argument that, say, a payroll tax cut alternative is far superior to what is being offered. Voting against the stimulus bill would still make no sense politically unless you believe two things: 1) the public is hostile to vast increases in spending; 2) the public judges these matters based on a high degree of wonkish detail. The first assumption is appealing to those of us who are hostile to vast increases in spending, but we make up a small portion of the electorate and are unrepresentative of the rest of the country. For that matter, such people make up a small portion of the GOP itself, which is why the sudden return of the GOP’s anti-spending enthusiasm seems so bizarre to me. Of all the times to acquire zeal for austerity, which is rarely popular in the best of times and risky even for popular majority parties, they have chosen the middle of a recession after having taken two huge electoral drubbings. This is something like discovering antiwar scruples only in the middle of an invasion. The second assumption about how the public judges the debate is simply fantastic. At most, these measures are judged by the parties’ stated priorities and their rhetoric.

During the bailout debate, the House Republican leadership voted for creating the TARP, which was also bad policy, and they were oblivious to the political toxicity of that measure among their own constituents. It’s not as if the leadership had some deep reservoir of populist credibility before the bailout. Even if the TARP had been a good idea and even if it had already had some success, it would still be perceived as nothing more than the scam and the giveaway to banks that it actually was. Even though the stimulus bill will probably have no desirable effects and will add vast sums to the debt, the stimulus and its supporters are going to continue to be perceived as acting on behalf of the public. Boehner and Cantor have twice managed to put themselves on the wrong side of public opinion on major pieces of legislation in the last five months, so again I have to wonder why it is they remain in the leadership. I have to assume it is because the members of the conference are as politically clueless as they are.

This brings me to an interesting survey of former Republicans from Pennsylvania who switched their registration last year (via Antle). Of course, most of them (54%) cited the war as a major reason, and many cited foreign policy generally and environmental issues, but 44% of those surveyed also gave taxes as their reason and 46% said their views on taxes were closer to the Democrats. That is, this 44% left the GOP in Pennsylvania because they thought it reduced taxes too much and not because it spent too much. To the extent that the GOP followed economic conservatives, it lost more voters in Pennsylvania because of that than it did because of social conservative positions. (Naturally, even though hawks and economic conservatives appear to be alienating more voters than social conservatives, the latter continue to be the scapegoats.) Most of the party-switchers identify as moderate and liberal, and just 26% defined themselves as conservative or very conservative, which on the one hand seems baffling to me given how much farther to the left of me the GOP has moved in just the last few years, and on the other it makes perfect sense considering the self-destructive embrace of Bush mainstream conservatives engaged in for most, if not all, of his Presidency.

Update: Commenting on FoxNews’ recent ratings bump, Dave Weigel says of the GOP:

They’re still losing, but now they’re doing it with more people watching.

Sounds like a recipe for success to me!