Of course, this is pure nonsense.  Maistre hated scientists most of all?  He was a philosopher of science and wrote a serious critique of the materialism of Bacon, so to say that he hated scientists is absurd.  Meanwhile, no one with an iota of understanding about modern American conservatism could confuse its views with anything Maistre said, and you can be fairly sure that mainstream conservatism today has no relationship with his thought given that most mainstream American conservatives, to their discredit, find Maistre to be horrible.  Maistre was, like Burke, a fierce opponent of the Revolution, but unlike Burke he was also a leading Counter-Enlightenment figure.  Many, if not most, mainstream conservatives today prefer to define themselves ultimately as classical liberals, and they find most of European conservatism to be more offensive to them than they do American liberalism or, if they are pressed, they will treat them as two sides of the same coin. 

My earlier Eunomia posts on Maistre are here and here.

As James is beingattackedfromall sides (most especially in his own comboxes) for ridiculing the phrase “citizen of the world” as nonsense, I have to say a few more things beyond what I have already said.  The least compelling arguments advanced against James’ view are that former Presidents have used this same phrase.  Well, yes, former Presidents have used vapid phrases many times, so I suppose you could say that Obama gave a good audition for his prospective position, but what can it mean to say that one is a citizen of the world?  The most compelling argument I have seen is…well, actually, there isn’t any particularly compelling argument in support of this phrase.  That phrase implies that all “citizens” of the world have obligations of one kind or another to the rest of the non-existent world-polity, even though “citizens of the world” do not share in the same political life. 

It has become a conventional line that presumably well-meaning people say, but it has no substance, not least because it was coined by a man for whom all forms of loyalty were arbitrary and irrational*.  While its modern usage often suggests an affinity for or loyalty to other places besides or even in addition to one’s own community, the word came into being to define the repudiation of political and social bonds.  To trace kosmopolitis back to its origins is to trace it to those who believed all forms of social and political obligation to be worthless, which is often the opposite of what people who fancy themselves “cosmopolitan” actually support.  In fact, the broad and universal sort of character that acknowledges and respects the diversity of the world that people think has something to do with cosmopolitanism is more appropriately defined by such words as ecumenical or catholic.  Strangely, though perhaps not so surprisingly, those who identify with some form of cosmopolitanism tend to be the same people who would like to see the world’s political and cultural diversity reduced to a monoculture of managed democratic capitalism, which confirms that there is something essentially intolerant and destructive of established cultures and traditions in the cosmopolitan view.  The phrase is meaningless, but the idea that the phrase hints at is quite undesirable. 

*This is not a total rejection of Cynicism, which bears some intriguing similarities to modern philosophical pessimism and Christian asceticism.

Like clockwork, McCain’s campaign is responding to Obama’s Berlin speech in almost exactly the way I expected they would:

While Barack Obama took a premature victory lap today in the heart of Berlin, proclaiming himself a ‘citizen of the world,’ John McCain continued to make his case to the American citizens who will decide this election [bold mine-DL].  Barack Obama offered eloquent praise for this country, but the contrast is clear. John McCain has dedicated his life to serving, improving and protecting America. Barack Obama spent an afternoon talking about it.

Also, they are hitting Obama for his cancellation of the “inappropriate” visit to Landstuhl, which is an inexplicable blunder by Obama.  If he was not speaking to the Berliners as a presidential candidate (not credible, but that’s the official line), how can he then invoke his candidacy as a reason to not go to visit an American military base in Germany?   

P.S.  The line about being a “fellow citizen of the world” was just the most prominent example of how Obama blundered in this speech.  Obama misjudges the public mood here in the U.S. quite badly if he thinks that “this is the moment” when Americans are interested in tearing down walls and embracing globalisation.  The policy implications of this laundry list of trouble spots are serious:

Will we extend our hand to the people in the forgotten corners of this world who yearn for lives marked by dignity and opportunity; by security and justice? Will we lift the child in Bangladesh from poverty, shelter the refugee in Chad, and banish the scourge of AIDS in our time?

Will we stand for the human rights of the dissident in Burma, the blogger in Iran, or the voter in Zimbabwe? Will we give meaning to the words “never again” in Darfur?  

If voters think that electing Obama President will mean doing a lot of heavy-lifting with foreign aid, sheltering refugees in Africa and protecting Burmese dissidents and the Zimbabwean opposition party, they will not be terribly interested in putting him in that office.  I would have thought that he would have understood the public’s weariness with the Iraq adventure better than this.  Does he not understand that one important source of discontent with the war is its costliness and the diversion of resources to Iraq rather than having them used and invested here at home? 

Update: As James notes, besides being grating the claim to be a citizen of the world is also meaningless.

Second Update: In James’ defense, and to answer to the generic response that “Kennedy and Reagan said it, too!” I would just add that the phrase “citizen of the world” is meaningless no matter how many former Presidents and famous people have said it.  Worse than suggesting some “post-nationalist” attitude, the phrase is simply false: no one is a “citizen of the world,” so what can it mean to claim to be one? 

There may be critics of Obama’s speech who object to this line simply because Obama said it, but I can say that James and I aren’t among them.  I have previously objected to conservative uses of Tom Paine-isms, and will continue to do so, because I consider Tom Paine to be a dreadful source of inspiration who was frequently wrong about fundamental things.  It is also not a vindication of the phrase that the idea of being a kosmopolitis can be traced back to certain Hellenistic philosophical schools, particularly the Stoics, in an era of absolute monarchies and empires–that just drives home how undesirable and how at odds with republican liberty the idea of being a “citizen of the world” is.  Claiming to be a kosmopolitis became fashionable when active citizenship and meaningful political participation were on the wane; world “citizenship” is typically the foe of engaged citizenship in one’s own community.

A surge is really a counterinsurgency made up of a number of components.  I’m not sure people understand that `surge’ is part of a counterinsurgency. ~John McCain

Blogging will be light today and tomorrow, but this deserves brief comment.  This has already received a lot of derision, but what I found striking about McCain’s intransigence over his misunderstanding of how the Anbar Awakening happened (before the “surge,” as I have noted before) is that it grossly exaggerates any stubborn inflexibility that he has tried to impute to Obama.  “Why won’t he admit when he’s wrong?” has been McCain’s newest slogan, and it can be turned back around on him very easily. 

What most people understand by the “surge” is the increase in troop levels by five brigades.  If it were referring only to a certain sort of counterinsurgency tactics, such as those used to turn Sunnis in Anbar against the Islamic State in Iraq forces, it would not be temporary but would be ongoing, but the propaganda word “surge” itself implies that it relates to troop levels.  The “surge” as such is now at an end, because these have been returning to their previous, pre-2007 numbers.  This seems to be a case where McCain does not understand a basic aspect of the Iraq war, and does not understand that he doesn’t understand it, but will somehow magically continue to get credit for supporting something that he doesn’t understand.  In his view, based on what he says in this quote, all counterinsurgency efforts make up the “surge,” which is itself part of another, still larger counterinsurgency.  In the broad sense that the war is a counterinsurgency, the second part might be true, but the first part is just nonsense. 

Update: Regarding this question, here‘s a reminder of what McCain has actually said about Iraq over the years.

At least Mr. McCain fesses up to and explains his changes. ~Karl Rove

Rove is remarkably clumsy in his defense of McCain on his changed position on tax cuts.  The official McCain mantra today is that McCain (always heroically) opposed Bush’s tax cuts because they were not offset with spending cuts.  His reliable stooge on talk radio, Michael Medved, repeats this deception on a regular basis.  The trouble is that Rove reminds his audience why, in fact, McCain opposed them:

He’d voted against them at the time, saying in 2001 that he’d “like to see more of this tax cut shared by working Americans.”

You might think that this would be something you would want to emphasise in an election year such as this, and you might think this is a perfectly good reason to offer opposition to tax cuts, but it’s not that simple.  Before McCain could become the nominee he had to portray himself as opposed to tax cutting simply because he was such a zealous budget hawk, rather than acknowledge that he had opposed a major Bush initiative out of 1) petty resentment over his primary defeat; 2) a boundless desire to get good media coverage, which tweaking a Republican President would do; 3) phony “bipartisan” concern about the inequities of the tax plan. 

The funny thing is that this is not lost in the mists of time.  You just need to type in the phrases “Bush tax cuts,” “John McCain” and “class warfare” into any search engine and you are inundated with conservative editorials and articles against McCain’s risible excuse-making on his changed position on taxes.  Here’s a Human Events attack on McCain from January.  What’s amusing about this is that McCain could really benefit from being portrayed as a tax-cutter for the working- and middle-class and a foe of “unfair” tax cuts, but the very “class warfare” attacks on McCain during the primaries that forced him to adopt his phony explanation for opposing the 2001 tax cuts prevent him from acknowledging what his real position was.  That this is revealed in a Rove op-ed designed to show the differences between the “flip-flops” of McCain and Obama is particularly rich, but it is also inevitable given McCain’s long record of changing positions on domestic policy to suit the moment.

If it is a matter of integrity and honestly acknowledging a change in position, rather than the relative merits of this or that policy view, the last thing you would want to highlight is McCain’s changed position on tax policy.

When I am not advancing arguments for an “insular” foreign policy, I sometimes brush up on my German, so I wasn’t the least bit concerned that Obama put out his advertisements in Berlin in the native language.  I have a little theory that many of the people who endorse our “insular” foreign policy views tend to be more familiar with the cultures and languages of the rest of the world than those who would like to try to rule over it lead everyone to happiness and democracy–indeed, I suspect this is one reason we take some of the views we do–and it is remarkable how often this seems to be confirmed.  If the problem with Obama’s rally in Berlin is that it’s in Berlin, you can make the case that this is unwise and will cause a backlash here at home, but are we really supposed to expect the Obama campaign to advertise the rally using English?  Isn’t it enough that Obama can’t speak German (or pretty much any other foreign language)?

P.S.  Yglesias will be pleased to know that the flier encourages people to use public transportation.    

P.P.S.  Also, the difference between the German-language fliers and that ridiculous Vero Possumus slogan is that the people who did the German fliers actually know German, which helps a bit.

Last summer, I noted the numerous references to Nancy Boyda’s abrupt departure from an Armed Services Committee hearing featuring testimony from Gen. Keane.  War supporters kept flogging this as evidence of antiwar Democrats’ intransigence and inflexibility in the face of new evidence.  Never mind that Boyda’s frustration with administration spin on Iraq was, is, widely shared, and her gesture, while a tad dramatic, was actually appreciated in many quarters.  Now Politico has dredged up the episode in its profile of five at-risk Democratic incumbents (most of whom are freshmen elected to traditionally Republican-leaning districts in ’06) as one of the reasons why Boyda’s re-election is at risk.  At the heart of this sort of analysis is a very much inside-the-Beltway assumption that someone’s opposition to the “surge” will prove to be a major liability for Democratic candidates.  Just as I am doubtful that obsessing about the “surge” will aid McCain, I very much doubt that opposition to it is going to hurt House members.  

One small problem that I see with Politico‘s analysis is that it seems to pay no attention to the opinions of the actual people in Kansas’ 2nd District.  At last glance, Boyda was leading former Rep. Jim Ryun by 17 points in a poll last month (and she was leading her alternative Republican challenger by 30), and her approval numbers were quite good.  As Reid Wilson reported:

68% of respondents in her district said she was doing an excellent or good job, while just 21% had a negative impression of her job performance. 54% said they would definitely or probably vote to re-elect Boyda, while just 35% said they would give someone else a shot.

68% approval is usually a good sign that a House member is going to be returned to office.  If these numbers are any indication of how Kansans are responding to Boyda’s performance, those predicting or hoping that anti-“surge” Democrats in “red” districts are going to lose because of their prominent opposition to the “surge” are going to be proven wrong.

Via Ambinder, now for the most important item of the day:

No doubt, there will be a hue and cry about “ageism.”  The thing that seems strange to me is that every time someone tries to do a McCain parody of the now-infamous New Yorker cover, they end up denying the intention and context of the satire that they are parodying.  There is essentially nothing in this image that is not an exaggeration, or just a representation, of things that are true about John McCain: he is old, his wife once had a problem with prescription drugs, he is closely aligned with George Bush and he does support policies that violate the Constitution.  As a caricature, it works quite well.  As a parody of an image that is supposed to be mocking absurd claims about the Obamas, it completely fails, because the point of the New Yorker image is supposed to be that everything in it is ludicrous and false and obviously so and, more to the point, it is supposed to be exaggerating the absurd claims to their most extreme form.  (The problem with the original image, as I’ve said before, is that it did not exaggerate the claims, but simply repeated them.) 

The more of these parodies people produce, the more literally audiences may take the New Yorker image.  For all of the people who dismiss the argument that there will be people who won’t “get” the satire of the original, there are an awful lot of supposedly clever sophisticates who seem not to understand how to reproduce what the image tried to do, which suggests that they didn’t really “get” it, either.  To do a proper McCain adaptation of the image, you would need to draw an image that combined all of the false smears that have ever been circulated about him by George Bush’s campaign and others, which would mean creating a cartoon so distasteful that no one in his right mind would ever publish it.   

Update: Via Patrick Appel, it would seem that my Scene colleague Peter Suderman is too optimistic when he says:

While polls indicate that a reasonable percentage of Americans still identify Obama as a Muslim, there’s no serious, mainstream belief that he and his wife are terrorist collaborators, gun-slinging militants who pal around with mass murderers and villains.

Technically, Peter may be right, since there is no serious mainstream belief along these lines, but claims that are not far from these do seem to circulate with some considerable frequency.  As I said last week:

But the flag in the fireplace isn’t much of an exaggeration at all of various false charges that Obama has no respect for the flag or the Pledge of Allegiance or what-have-you.  The hubbub over Obama’s “endorsement” by Hamas as some kind of “proof” that he was friendly to Hamas or bad for Israel and the basic assumption shared by many Republicans that leaving Iraq is “surrender” to Al Qaeda (or something like that) aren’t exaggerated very much by the picture of Bin Laden. 

The state senator mentioned in Appel’s post has a telling quote defending his use of an image associating Obama with bin Laden:

You know, blogs are for satire and whatnot and, um, that’s why it’s up. It’s similar to the New Yorker picture. Maybe that’s why this has gotten so much attention, because of that thing that came out a couple days ago.

More than perpetuating falsehoods, the New Yorker cover will now be invoked as a defense for every image that depicts Obama unironically as a terrorist and enemy with some remark along these lines: “Hey, this is just like that New Yorker picture, so there’s no problem.”

While FiveThirtyEight still projects that Obama will win Ohio and has an explanation for some of the huge difference between Rasmussen (McCain +10) and PPP (Obama +8) on Ohio, this new Rasmussen poll from Ohio is still pretty startling in the movement that it shows relative to last month.  According to the poll, McCain has gained eight points in the last month and now leads (including leaners) 52-42.  Update: I should note that the June poll did not distinguish between results with and without leaners, so the movement in the result without leaners has not been as great: McCain has moved up two and Obama has dropped down three in the first round. 

Obama’s fav rating is down three to 50%, and he gets just 34% of whites and 77% of Democrats.  While he trails among independents 56-33, Obama also loses among 18-29 year olds 50-39.  Obviously, Republican candidates have not won without winning Ohio, so it is essential for McCain to keep whatever lead he has there.  Also, many months remain and this result may not reflect changed attitudes following Obama’s overseas trip.  On the other hand, the poll was conducted yesterday, so it is possible that the respondents saw or heard some positive coverage of Obama’s trip and still did not come away with a significantly different view of the candidate.  It is still too soon to know one way or the other.

The strange thing for me about the discussion surrounding this article is how completely centered on Washington it is, as if being a “think tanker” for the opposition party is really “going into the wilderness.”  Yes, it’s a common phrase to refer to the party out of power as being in the political wilderness, but what this means in practice is being forced to work in slightly different parts of the same city and the same buildings and generally getting less press coverage in the process.  The discussion about the article usually focuses on another Megan McArdle statement expressing some excitement at the prospect of new thinking that defeat will encourage.  Ms. McArdle has made this sort of statement before and been chided about it in pretty much the same terms she is being chidednow (my semi-defense of McArdle from before is here).  As I have said before, I will just add that there is very little fundamental disagreement here, and the people who are “excited” to go into the wilderness want to do it mainly to develop better policy ideas and arguments that will then translate into political success and legislation.  Those who would prefer to see the party they are allied with stay in power, if only in the White House, are worried that too much can happen if the GOP does not control the Presidency for just four years.  I’m sure that’s because controlling it for eight years has worked out so well for all involved.

It seems to me that the real exile that conservatives have been enduring is their exile from their homes for the sake of going to Washington for one reason or another.  My advice, as usual, is for conservatives to go home or make homes of the places where they are, stop the obsession with party politics and policy agendas and start creating the culture and the world they want to have.  That is a long, slow work of cultivation, but an absolutely necessary one.  Viewed this way, should McCain somehow squeak out a win, this will help to delay and discourage this necessary work and distract conservatives with another administration they will feel, for some reason, obliged to support and defend, or they may feel obliged to indulge in an equally consuming distraction of criticism and opposition.