James dissects Gerson’s argument in similar terms, and notes an important flaw that mars most of Gerson’s writing:

The premise of Gerson’s entire column, and one that seems to undergird his every thought and word, is that outrage compels action, and that if you aren’t acting — now, dammit — you aren’t outraged. In Gerson’s world, if you’re not outraged, you are paying attention, and you deserve whatever load of scorn, insult, and invective that will inspire you to do good.

This is right, but there is another aspect to this: this is always outrage about what some other government or group is doing, and the more remote and unrelated to us the better, and it must never, ever, apply to the outrageous things done by our own government in the name of national security. Hundreds of thousands dead in Iraq from the invasion, and millions more displaced? Gerson’s seemingly inexhaustible weepy compassion is not moved by this in the least. These Iraqis, no doubt, are deemed to be “better off” or their suffering has been “worth it.” One of the convenient things about being willing to meddle in everyone else’s affairs is that you appoint yourself a competent judge to determine whose lives are worthwhile and whose are worth sacrificing for some future goal.

This is something that I generally find strange about outrage directed at foreign governments or peoples for what they are doing to their own: the people who believe it is a matter of shame to neglect “doing something” about various evils overseas are usually equally confident that our government is more or less beyond reproach in whatever it does overseas or in the name of national security. Those who insist that “we” hold such-and-such regime accountable rarely want to apply the same standards or demand the same accountability from the one government they are obliged as citizens to hold to account. The perfect expression of this lopsided “morality” was probably the Albright standard concerning the consequences of the Iraq sanctions regime. Not only was the death of hundreds of thousands “worth it” in the twisted calculus of responsible, do-gooding activism abroad, but it was also not the responsibility of the “responsible” foreign powers imposing the sanctions–it is always the fault of the target of such treatment. Thus, what our government was doing could not have been something that would outrage Gerson–it would probably have confirmed him in his desire to “do something” more to overthrow the Iraqi government. I sometimes imagine that the government encourages outrage over the abuses of other governments to preoccupy citizens here with other crimes about which they can do little or nothing (except to lobby our government to “do something,” which usually means imposing sanctions or dropping bombs) to keep them too busy to pay enough attention to what our government does and, better still, to provide pretexts and ready-made propaganda to justify the next intervention. That would be all together too cynical, right? Maybe not.

This would be ugly enough if it were simply exploitative and imperialistic, but Gersonism requires that you wrap up this arrogance in smiling reassurances that it is all for a greater good. It is still a matter of a more powerful party imposing its will on another people because it can and wants to, but now we are obliged to pretend that it is being done for humane and lofty reasons. This is different from the mission civilisatrice because we really mean it this time; our hearts bleed much more genuinely than did those of the French. Besides, as Max Boot (who here represents the neo-imperialist underbelly of humanitarian interventionism) would say, there is no other way to “solve” many of these problems. As James has suggested, and as my argument against optimism says, we need to stop thinking of these situations as problems to be solved and start thinking of them as realities we face and with which we cope.

Take the case of Somali piracy, which far too many people seem to think is a perfect case for intervening. Somalia has become an ideal base for pirates because it has no functioning government. Indeed, what government it did have was deemed unacceptable and was smashed by an Ethiopian invasion we backed and armed. I was far too sanguine about the Ethiopian invasion when it began, but I see well enough now that the last attempt to “solve” the problem of Somalia’s Islamists has helped create, or has at least exacerbated, the problem of Somalia’s pirates. It is worth noting that the “restoration” of the Somali Federal Government, which had been in exile and was considered the official, recognized government of the country by all relevant international institutions, completely failed to fill the void, because all of its international legitimacy counted for nothing in Somalia. What would fill the void that would also pass muster with foreign intervetionists?

Striking at the pirate bases would be, at best, a temporary “solution” that will not make Somalia stable or governable again anytime soon. The current situation is a more or less direct result of our indirect meddling in the internal affairs of Somalia. Who honestly believes that there will be an enduring “solution” if we have another round of intervention? A “simple” plan to eliminate pirate havens today soon enough will become an enormously complicated, multi-year project to stabilize the entire Horn of Africa–mission creep is inevitable once you have granted the assumption that someone must “do something” to provide order in this part of the world and have acknowledged that this someone is usually going to be our government. This is exactly what happened the last time we were involved in a “limited” mission in Somalia, and it will happen again if we allow ourselves to get sucked back in. So accustomed are we to being told that we should be outraged by this or that in every other country that I suspect that we will never be satisfied with any outcome in Somalia (or Congo, or Sudan, or wherever) and will soon enough find something else in one of these countries that we want to stop. That this ultimately prevents the development of effective local government and necessitates continued dependence on outside powers is rarely mentioned, but it is one of the worst things about this do-gooding.

Alex Massie has said most of what should be said about Gerson’s new woe-is-Africa column, but I will add a few remarks. The irrepressible need to meddle, help and do good that Gerson is always trying to get other people to fulfill seems to require that he cluck his tongue at some insufficiently concerned villain, as if all that was needed to make the chaos of eastern Congo better was the necessary will and good intentions, and this time Britain and Germany have come in for particular scorn. Not content with damning a few Senators at a time, as he was doing over the last two years, and occasionally comparing himself to Shaftesbury, Gerson has graduated to collective guilt-tripping. German inaction, he says, is “particularly obscene,” which suggests that Gerson’s standard for moral obscenity is more than a little skewed.

Even by the incredibly elastic Joe Biden standard for when to launch humanitarian interventions (“where we can, we must”), Britain and Germany are not viable candidates, because they cannot realistically afford another overseas military mission at the present time. In any case, there is limited domestic political support for the missions they already have, and even less for new ones. If European nations are tiring of the mission in Afghanistan, which at least has some indirect relationship to their governments’ membership in NATO, who could think that they would be keen to plunge their soldiers into the confused situation in central Africa? This is something that does not trouble Gerson. Like McCain, Gerson treats issues entirely moralistically, and anyone who is not on board with his conscience-assuaging, ego-stroking activist agenda is a rotten villain, and that’s all there is to it. Besides coming across as annoying hectoring most of the time, this habit robs the attempted shaming of whatever power it might otherwise have, as Gerson tries to shame everyone about practically everything.

Rather than blustering and insisting that they must act, only to have insufficient resources and public support for the mission, these governments refuse to make a commitment they know they will be unable to honor and support for the long term. Better this, it seems to me, than the leap-before-you-look school of intervention that Gerson seems to prefer, which insists that a handful of governments send their forces to lands in which they have no significant interest right now and worry later about whether there are obtainable objectives, some satisfactory end-state within reach or the political consensus at home to sustain the mission for the many years that it will probably last.

Congo stands out as a country that has numerous deep, intractable problems. Its government in the west exercises limited control over much of the country, its army is ineffective in suppressing militias and foreign forces in its territory, and it is ringed by neighbors that have no scruples against fishing in its troubled waters. Kagame winks and nods at Nkunda’s rebels, but claims to have no control over them, while the government in Kinshasa has not done much, partly because it cannot do much, to strike at the surviving genocidaires. What will outside intervention do that is going to change this dynamic in a fundamental way? Even if Western states were willing and able to establish some buffer force to keep Nkunda in line, what would prevent that force from being pulled into a multi-sided conflict as the Nigerians were in Liberia? At what point would such a mission be deemed too costly or futile to continue? What would keep such a mission from becoming a near-permanent deployment? Obviously, at no point in his column does Gerson answer any of these questions, nor does he explain why the problems of central Africa should not be primarily the responsibility of the states involved and of the African Union.

Camille Paglia cannot let go of her vision of Palin as the experimental jazz saxophonist of language:

I was so outraged when I read Cavett’s column that I felt like taking to the air like a Valkyrie and dropping on him at his ocean retreat in Montauk in the chichi Hamptons. How can it be that so many highly educated Americans have so little historical and cultural consciousness that they identify their own native patois as an eternal mark of intelligence, talent and political aptitude?

In sonorous real life, Cavett’s slow, measured, self-interrupting and clause-ridden syntax is 50 years out of date. Guess what: There has been a revolution in English — registered in the 1950s in the street slang, colloquial locutions and assertive rhythms of both Beat poetry and rock ‘n’ roll and now spread far and wide on the Web in the standard jazziness of blogspeak. Does Cavett really mean to offer himself as a linguistic gatekeeper for political achievers in this country?

Yes, it’s a lack of historical consciousness that causes people to think that spoken English should be coherent and comprehensible. No one should be concerned about declining standards or setting an atrocious example for those learning how to use their own language. Poor grammar and disjointed sentences aren’t lamentable signs of cultural deterioration–they’re just “colloquial locutions”! In other words, Cavett’s criticisms of Palin’s use of language were entirely accurate, but are supposedly too fusty and outmoded for the hip blogspeaking kids…and Camille Paglia. Does she think that it is a tribute to Palin to say that her “exuberant” way of speaking is “closer to street rapping than to the smug bourgeois cadences of the affluent professional class”? To hear Paglia tell it, Amy Poehler did not need to perform a Palin rap song on SNL–we need only listen to Palin’s interview excerpts to hear the sounds of the street…or are they the sounds of Wasilla’s Super Wal-Mart parking lot?

Reading Paglia’s descriptions of Palin’s language, I am reminded of newspaper articles that describe crime-ridden neighborhoods as “vibrant.” This is the hyper-condescension of the anti-bien pensant person, who in this case makes a grand show of her sympathy for a target of conventional ridicule to show how even more enlightened and thoughtful she is than the merely “provincial” bourgeoisie. Paglia is worldly-wise, and she appreciates the wonderful “exuberance” of Palin, in much the same way that outsiders might praise the “warmth” of “charming” and “colorful” ethnic neighborhoods as a way of subtly reasserting their superiority while pretending to praise the people who live there. Let us hope that Palin does not make a comeback, if only to spare us more of Paglia’s Palinophilia.

P.S. “Wolf control” (i.e., cruelly running–and gunning–down wolves from the air) is now a working-class more mos? Who knew?

Look, I enjoyed Slumdog Millionaire quite a bit, but can anyone seriously say that Jamal Malik showed “Obamaesque” poise?

Llosa isn’t done yet:

That Boyle managed to tell a Bollywood story without falling into any of Bollywood’s conventions — except for a musical number during the final credits that comes as a summation of the narrative’s uplifting spirit — is one of his extraordinary achievements.

This gets it almost entirely backwards. Llosa can recognize the Bollywood story because Boyle made a non-Bollywood movie that did fall into most or all of Bollywood’s conventions. You have the lovers who are fated to be together, the oppressed, but honest young man struggling against misfortune, the Pyaasa-like depiction of poverty and exploitation, the inevitable involvement with gangsters, the predictable sermons against communal hatred, the hopeless romanticism that compels at least one of the lovers to risk everything and break all worldly ties. There is even a nod at the end to Rama and Sita as a type of enduring love, and on and on. It has almost everything except a story involving long-lost brothers…no, wait, it has that one, too! The only thing that we do not see is the obligatory shaadi, and we can assume that it is forthcoming. One of the things that you learn from watching a lot of Bollywood movies is that their conventions and the conventions of Hollywood aren’t that different. If production values separate the two kinds of film, their storylines bring them back together far more often than most Westerners realize (and not only when Indian screenwriters lift the plots from other films).

What is interesting is how Boyle managed to make a movie that is so recognizably like Bollywood movies, which many tend to feel obliged to denigrate whenever we mention them, while simultaneously winning acclaim for making the best movie of the year. Perhaps that says something about the real quality of Boyle’s film, or perhaps we are hearing all this praise for it because it has become a vehicle that allows people to appreciate something about popular Hindi cinema that they were unable to see before Boyle’s film helped make it accessible. Perhaps it took a foreigner making a movie in India that pays respect to the local cinematic traditions for the designation Bollywood to cease provoking automatic derision.

Several people have already taken a whack at the embarrassing Ruth Marcus column arguing for Caroline Kennedy’s appointment to the Senate from New York. Marcus expresses enthusiasm for something that is a sure sign of a serious sickness in our political system, which is the increasing role of dynasticism in our politics. In Marcus’ case, though, this is combined with an embrace of celebrity politics as well as what I would call fantasy politics. Not every argument for dynastic succession and office-holding is necessarily focused on the person’s celebrity, as it is not always the case that the heir is a famous socialite, and very few are tied up with bizarre fantasies of political fairy-tales. Lisa Murkowski holds her office thanks to good, old-fashioned nepotism (or, technically, filiatism), but does not benefit from any particular celebrity status, much less weird pseudo-hagiographical cults built around her father. Kennedy is a special case: she is famous because of her father, and has inherited the strange mystical adoration that some liberals still insist on showering on him, and so benefits three times over from the dynastic connection.

There have been many cases of actors entering politics, trading on either their fame or their ability to assume a pleasing role or both, but as others have already observed the actor-candidates earned their offices through campaigning and demonstrating some basic competence in matters of policy. An appointment for Caroline Kennedy would mark such a shameless embrace of dynastic politics that it might even make members of the Nehru-Gandhi family blush. What makes the Caroline Kennedy case so disturbing, and Marcus’ enthusiasm for it so appalling, is not merely that it grates against every democratic, meritocratic, and liberal instinct, but that it represents a full embrace of unreality.

Many Palin critics mocked her selection as something out of a cheesy Disney movie; Caroline Kennedy’s advocate in Ruth Marcus is openly declaring her desire to have Enchanted performed in the Senate. The blurring of politicians and celebrities, which became one of the main themes of this election, would be surpassed here by the replacement of mundane politics with fantasy. Her support for Obama, perhaps even more than Ted Kennedy’s endorsement, was deemed to be important because of nothing more than the symbolism of it and the continuation of the Kennedy myth that it represented. Were she to be appointed Senator for the same reason, it would mark another step in the tawdry, sentimental Princess Dianification of our politics.

So John Boehner, whose re-election to the leadership I condemned in my latest column, had this to say about Cao’s win:

[T]he Cao victory is a symbol of what can be achieved when we think big, present a positive alternative and win the trust of the American people.

Obviously the national GOP is going to spin this as best they can, and Boehner needs to make the most of what little good news he gets, but without taking anything away from Cao it is clear that this result was a repudiation of Jefferson and his corrupt dealings. Under normal circumstances, no Republican was going to win this seat, and everyone knows this. As even Cao’s most enthusiastic boosters acknowledge, his re-election in a majority black, Democratic district is going to be very difficult. This doesn’t necessarily say anything about the quality of Cao’s candidacy or his future in Louisiana politics, but the rapturous response to his win is beginning to feel a bit like the brief Ogonowski boomlet after the latter lost a special election by a smaller margin than some expected. The 2007 MA-05 special election was widely hailed on the right as proof that a GOP comeback was in the works–after all, a little-known challenger had run so well in Massachusetts of all places. Republicans then went on to lose another 21 seats this year. As for Ogonowski’s subsequent political career, well, the less said the better.

Cao is by all accounts impressive, intelligent and appealing, but the GOP is not going to rebuild its majority by running extraordinary candidates in deep-blue districts that will vote them out in another two years. They need instead to start recruiting decent candidates in marginal districts. It is telling that essentially no one in the party hierarchy was backing Cao and they didn’t even know who he was, which means that the most outstanding Republican House candidate this cycle was the one not actively supported by his party.

After the string of Republican House defeats, indictments and convictions, plus Ted Stevens’ conviction, Joseph Cao’s election win over the disgraced William Jefferson of LA-02 comes as a much-needed boost to the GOP. Quin Hillyer paid attention to this race several weeks ago, and his article is the best account of Cao’s biography you are likely to find. Sharp, highly-educated and successful Asian Catholics from Louisiana do seem to be the best thingthe Republicans have going for themselves, and this would be the case even if the GOP were not the ramshackle disaster that it is today.

The first I heard of Blagojevich’s arrest came through my front window from a passer-by talking to someone on his phone, “They have arrested our governor.” This is turning out to be a good week, I thought to myself. I assumed that Blagojevich was going to be brought down by whatever Rezko was giving the feds as part of his bargain with them, but the news about his trying to sell the open Senate seat for cash or other favors was like something out of a cartoon or perhaps a Northern version of Kingfish. Illinois has long had a reputation for corrupt politics, but in the last decade it seems as if it is striving to outdo all others in having crooks in office, while Louisiana is going in quite the other direction. Like Reihan, I imagine that “Candidate 5,” the person implicated as a potential buyer of the Senate seat, is probably State Sen. Emil Jones. If that is the case, it would be Obama’s ties to Jones, much more than any ties to Blagojevich or Rezko, that will cause people to look again at Obama’s Illinois connections. Jones’ role as Obama’s patron and sponsor in the state legislature has gone largely unremarked in the national media, except in John Kass‘ columns. It is not an exaggeration to say that Obama would probably not be where he is today without Jones, and if the latter were implicated it would be at the very least an embarrassment for the incoming administration.

Steve Sailer makes an interesting point with respect to the Mumbai name change that hadn’t occurred to me:

All these people are missing the essential point: Name-changing increases ignorance. People lose the thread. The libraries are full of books referring to Bombay, not to Mumbai.

Most people in America had heard of Bombay and knew it was in India. Until this terrorist attack, most Americans had never heard of Mumbai and had no idea that it was in India or that it was the large, famous city they had once heard of as Bombay, where all the Bollywood movies are made.

I might be tempted to say that it would be difficult to increase the average person’s ignorance of India, but that’s not the point. Offhand, I would say that if you knew that Bollywood movies were made in Bombay, you were already way ahead of the crowd, which didn’t know that Bollywood movies existed. So I’m not sure that these people would be terribly confused by the new name. That being said, I have objected in the past to the new ecumenical name miaphysite being applied to non-Chalcedonian Christians. The Copts want to use this name, and I don’t think it matters one way or the other. For starters, it is not meaningfully distinct from the existing, albeit pejorative, label monophysite, and it is just one more term that people have to learn about Christological differences where terminology is already confusing enough for most people. Most relevant books refer to these Christians as monophysites or by some other antiquated label (e.g., Jacobite), so relabeling all of them miaphysites to make a point is rather silly and bound to create more, rather than less, obscurity. It is likely to increase confusion, if not ignorance, and thus make it harder for people to understand the Christological controversies. Even so, the change to Mumbai is not that hard to adjust to, so I don’t quite understand why there is so much resistance.

Joe Carter draws our attention to Meacham’s latest. Meacham is so very deeply concerned about the integrity of the Faith and its intellectual seriousness, you see, and so he begins:

On the campus of Wheaton College in Illinois last Wednesday, in another of the seemingly endless announcements of splintering and schism in the Episcopal Church, the Rt. Rev. Robert Duncan and other leaders of the conservative forces of reaction to the ecclesiastical and cultural acceptance of homosexuality declared that their opposition to the ordination and the marriage of gays was irrevocably rooted in the Bible—which they regard as the “final authority and unchangeable standard for Christian faith and life.”

No matter what one thinks about gay rights—for, against or somewhere in between —this conservative resort to biblical authority is the worst kind of fundamentalism. Given the history of the making of the Scriptures and the millennia of critical attention scholars and others have given to the stories and injunctions that come to us in the Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testament, to argue that something is so because it is in the Bible is more than intellectually bankrupt—it is unserious, and unworthy of the great Judeo-Christian tradition.

It might be worth bearing in mind that Meacham is an Episcopalian and has very clear views about both homosexual “marriage” and ordination (he is in favor of both), so he has a vested interest in framing the opposing view as the “worst kind of fundamentalism,” which is just about the worst thing one Episcopalian can say about another. That interest is not necessarily disqualifying, but it colors everything Meacham has to say.

Of course theologically conservative Episcopalians are claiming that the Bible is the final authority and unchageable standard of Christian faith and life–the contrary view that the Bible is not this is not only a minority view among Christians today, but is entirely at odds with the “great Judeo-Christian tradition” that Meacham claims to be defending. The word unchangeable does make the claim more powerful, because it states that the revelation in Scripture is eternally valid and the same, but then how could it be otherwise? If Christ is the same “yesterday, today and forever,” as the Apostle wrote in his Epistle to the Hebrews, and Christ is the Word through Whom the Father reveals Himself, it stands to reason that God’s revelation recorded in Scripture will also be essentially unchangeable.

The different senses of Scripture, the complexity of its history and the history of its composition in antiquity do not contradict this claim. Indeed, the presumed complementarity of different senses of Scripture, the different ways of interpreting the Word of God, is founded on the assumption that the Word does not change, but has a richness and depth that cannot be exhausted by one kind of interpretation alone. This is one reason why, particularly in liturgical churches that interpret Scripture in the light of authoritative written tradition, patristic commentaries on Scripture are regarded as valid and authoritative interpretations until today. It is taken as given that the ancient Church and Christians today have received the same revelation. It is an expression of fidelity to the breadth and richness of the Church’s tradition to acknowledge this, and it is the farthest thing from intellectual bankruptcy to respect the intellectual and religious tradition that has recognized Scripture as such a central authority and to give its claims appropriately great weight in Christian teaching.

Having already shown that he has no grasp of any of this, Meacham proceeds with his “Christian case for gay marriage.” He puts enormous weight on the intrinsic nature of homosexuality, which is to make a quality of postlapsarian nature normative. In a fallen world, everyone has a predisposition to act contrary to our true nature, but in no other case that I can think of do we pretend that indulging such a predisposition is inevitable, much less something to be embraced and approved. Meachem is no more persuasive or credible when he cites examples of how certain passages have been abused in the past. Nowhere in his article does Meacham even begin to take seriously the central importance of denying oneself in Christian discipleship. God did not call His people to indulge their inclinations, but to deny themselves to follow Him. This is why the comparison with race is so inapt and ultimately so absurd. There is no way that, and no reason why, someone of any race could refrain from being the way he was born. Homosexuality is entirely different, in that acting on it is a matter of volition and a determination to pursue one’s own will rather than denying it. Whether or not one is born with such an inclination, that would not be a license to indulge that inclination. Meacham’s argument is essentialist and actually denies the responsibility and agency of homosexuals, which is far more of an attack on their humanity than refusing to allow them to “marry.”

The heart of Meacham’s argument does not bear much scrutiny, and we have not even come to the question of how entirely divorced Meacham’s entire argument is from a Christian understanding of the purpose of marriage. Procreation is an important part of that purpose, and joining two people from different sexes in complementary relationship is another, but beyond that it is a vocation to unite oneself to a person radically different from oneself. The uniting of complementary opposites as a type of the unity between Christ and His Church is one of the mystical meanings of marriage. The Christian conception of marriage is of two people joined into one flesh, the full expression of which is a child. Nowhere in the “great Judeo-Christian tradition” that Meacham supposedly takes so seriously is there support for his argument.

John Schwenkler and John Cole both responded to my earlier post on the call for social and religious conservatives to use reason, rather than appeals to religious teaching, in public arguments. Schwenkler is correct when he writes:

Indeed, I would say that conservatives have if anything devoted too much time to the task of “proving” things like the immorality of abortion (or the existence of God, though that’s a topic for another post) to the satisfaction of their secular peers – where exactly observers like Parker, Cole, and the rest have gotten the impression that things are otherwise is something of a mystery to me.

Many of Parker’s critics have made this point, stressing how typical reliance on reason and empirical evidence is in pro-life arguments. I alluded to this when I noted that it was not the kind of argument employed that mattered to those put off by social conservative views, but the conclusion at the end of the argument, and when I mentioned many pro-lifers’ preference to frame things in terms of rights and equality (hence their fairly frequent comparisons of their own cause to past progressive emancipation and civil rights movements, as if they hope that this will win them bonus points from bien-pensant people). In the past, Ross and I have gone back and forth over whether it made sense for pro-lifers to use philosophical language that already conceded basic claims of individual autonomy. If I recall correctly, Ross did not think this ideal, but regarded it as an unavoidable necessity if pro-lifers were going to be able to make their case to others. At the very least, we would not have been having such an argument if this had not been prevalent in pro-life arguments for some time, so Parker was railing against something that is far more rare than she supposed (if she gave much thought to the matter at all). There are some, including myself and John Schwenkler, who think more forthrightly religious arguments are more compelling, because they concede fewer important assumptions, but we are decidedly not representative (as usual).

There are a few reasons why there is a perception, or rather misperception, that appeals to religious teachings are commonplace in social conservative arguments, and therefore a self-imposed limitation on social conservative ability to persuade others. There is the tendency for people outside of a group to miss distinctions among members of that group that are both obvious and significant to those inside it. It is true that one can find, perhaps among Theonomists or staunch believers in the “Christian nation” reading of American law, direct appeals to Scripture in their arguments on public policy, but these are not representative of social conservatives generally. Among the loudest critics of impending “theocracy,” finding marginal views on the Christian right and then conflating them with the views of all Christian or, more broadly, social conservatives are common methods used to try to link all forms of social conservatism with far more intensely religious and specifically Christian arguments. What an outsider will dub the “narcissism of small differences” does not usually appear small or trivial to those inside the group. There is another tendency, closely related to the first, to lump together everyone who claims membership in that group and make sweeping statements about what “they” do. These are common habits, I’m sure I have fallen into them on many occasions, and we all tend to make such generalizations more sweeping the less we understand (or care about) the diversity within another group. Obviously, the less sympathetic someone is to the group in question, the more likely he is to make sweeping statements that cast the group in whatever he regards to be the worst light. It can also be appealing to frame opponents as being more radically different from the “mainstream” than they really are in the hopes that persuadable people (i.e., those usually paying less attention) will come closer to your side.

The preference for arguments that do not appeal to religious teachings or Scripture is based in the social conservative version of the “defensive crouch,” which recognizes the resistance to these appeals and instead tries to debate on the terms set by opponents. There is a similar move among some non-interventionists, who will critique the war in Iraq by conceding broader claims about U.S. hegemony or the official demonization of other regimes for the sake of appealing to a broader audience. While this can be useful in showing how the war has worsened things on the terms of its proponents, it is fundamentally weaker than a full-throated critique of the illegality and injustice of the invasion or a straightforward argument that the war has significantly worsened our national security, and it is not particularly more likely to persuade anyone. For instance, it is correct to argue that our invasion of Iraq has greatly strengthened Iran’s influence in the region, and one might think that this would make many of the most vocal supporters reconsider the wisdom of the war when it leads to what they must, and theoretically do, regard as a bad outcome. However, this is not what happens.

Even if they acknowledge that Iran’s influence has grown significantly as a direct result of the war, and even assuming that they always regarded Iran as the greater threat, these supporters will insist that the U.S. presence in Iraq must continue in order…to contain Iranian influence! After all, even non-interventionists think that expanding Iranian influence is undesirable, so how can they want us to leave now? All that this sort of argument will have done is to help legitimize the next round of demonization, sanctions and military action, and meanwhile it undermines arguments against a long-term U.S. presence by granting that the containment of Iran ought to be a high priority, but it might well be considered more “reasonable” and more likely to persuade because of its weakness. By pulling off a clever maneuver that temporarily succeeds but ultimately plays into the strategy of the opponent, larger objectives are abandoned and even the temporary success gained from the maneuver vanishes.

Likewise, having conceded the centrality of individual autonomy with appeals to rights theories, pro-lifers are no more likely to persuade those on the pro-choice side, as they have already admitted the fundamental assumption that pro-choicers use to defend their position as the morally superior one. Once pro-lifers have allowed the debate to be defined in terms of choice vs. coercion, or the individual vs. oppressive society, winning over people, especially those in the “persuadable” middle, will become harder, not easier.