One thing that being a convert to Orthodoxy in America teaches you is that there is no necessary relation between adhering to strong theological conservatism and adhering to political conservatism, and another thing that it teaches is that what you thought was political conservatism may have been woefully lacking in wisdom.  The two do tend to reinforce one another, but theological conservatism can draw one to hold views very much at odds with what conventionally passes for political conservatism in Western countries.  I say this by way of introduction to the question of whether theological conservatives who are defending scriptural authority and tradition must eschew language that is, in political contexts, normally associated with the left without being found intellectually bankrupt.     

That is not to say that Demophilus, one of James’ new cohort of pomocons, is wrong when he critiques the anti- or post-colonial language of conservative Anglicans when they reject Canterbury’s primacy as a “colonial structure.”  Then again, considering that a huge number of conservative (or, perhaps more accurately, traditionalist) Anglicans now hail from what is sometimes euphemistically called “the global South” and usually live in former British colonies in Africa and Asia, they would be more inclined to use such a language in defense of their religious traditon.  There is also some truth to the claim that global Anglicanism has had a “colonial structure,” not least since the existence of Anglicanism in most of the countries where most theological conservatives reside is a product of British colonialism, and Demophilus acknowledges this history as well. 

You might say that this is an exceedingly literal way to take this statement, and certainly the phrase is intended as a rebuke as much as a description, but one should also consider the audience that the conservatives are addressing.  They are not simply talking to themselves, but are appealing to their fellow Anglicans in language that the latter may find persuasive or at least reasonable, and nothing induces feelings of shame and remorse in liberals, whether theological or political, than to suggest that they are acting in a neo-colonial fashion.  Respect for history and contingency is valuable, but I don’t think it follows to say:

To not go through Canterbury would be, simply, to no longer be Anglican. 

If communion with Canterbury is “the basic principle of being Anglican,” I would have to suggest that “the basic principle of being Anglican” does not mean very much.  It seems to me that conservative Anglicans today are seeking to understand how to be fairly orthodox while remaining in their theological tradition, and they are concluding reasonably enough that remaining in communion with a see that puts little store by such orthodoxy may not be compatible with their own respect for scriptural authority and the ecclesiastical tradition they have received.   

Demophilus’ post also reminds me of last week’s Spectator, which carried a lengthy article on Anglicanism and what the clash within the “global” Communion has done to the Church of England.  The article seems especially relevant to this discussion, since, in addition to its reference to the Gafcon meeting, it starts off with a telling anecdote:

Some years ago a vicar gave a sermon in which he tried to explain the latest developments in the Anglican Communion to his congregation. Afterwards an old lady came up to him, a bit bemused. ‘How does all this stuff about Anglicans affect us?’, she asked. ‘Well,’ he replied, smiling warmly at the old biddy, ‘we’re all part of the global Anglican Communion, aren’t we?’ She looked still more bemused: ‘I thought we were Church of England.’ [bold mine-DL] 

Of course, to be CofE is to be Anglican in a very obvious etymological way, but as the CofE has enmeshed itself in global Anglicanism conservative Anglicans have become increasingly frustrated with ties to the CofE, because Canterbury seems to embrace or tolerate all of those trends within the Communion that they find intolerable.  Indeed, conservative Anglicans should receive some credit for pursuing what is probably an ultimately thankless task of trying to maintain some measure of theological orthodoxy in an inhospitable ecclesiastical tradition.  They are to be given credit precisely as conservatives for attempting to persist as Anglicans despite the failings of many existing Anglican institutions.  If the problem really is Anglicanism in itself, as Demophilus proposes, this necessarily defines Anglicanism to be at odds with any serious scriptural orthodoxy.  Now I am not party to the dispute, but it seems to me that this is an extraordinary claim to make when half of the Anglicans in the world believe that orthodoxy and Anglicanism can in some way still coexist.

Freddy notes Andrew Roberts’ strange review of The Post-American World, but Freddy missed what was by far the strangest remark when he talks about Zakaria’s supposed gloominess:

It’s a pretty gloomy analysis from the man who is advising John McCain on foreign policy [bold mine-DL]…

This CFR page, which is a copy of this Newsweek article, includes a mention of Zakaria’s harsh critique of McCain’s Los Angeles foreign policy address in the passage discussing “analysts not affiliated with McCain’s campaign.”  If he is acting in any formal advisory capacity, it isn’t listed on his bio page.  He is “advising” McCain in the same way that any number of pundits and public intellectuals “advise” candidates to agree with them. 

As for the review itself, it is pretty useless.  Before making the programmatic warnings about “isolationism” and “protectionism,” Roberts concedes that an Indian hegemony wouldn’t be so bad, but Chinese hegemony would be, but this completely misses the point of Zakaria’s book: no other power is going to attain to the sort of unipolar dominance of the world that the U.S. has enjoyed, but the U.S. will not enjoy it in the future, either.  That is a far cry from making declinist arguments that America is doomed to become even a second-tier power, but then perhaps the rest of us are insufficiently “pro-American” to understand these things.

Ridiculing Bernard-Henri Levy is usually more Michael’s hobby, but I’ll take a crack at it.  Citing reasons why Obama is likely to win, he had this howler in his new article:

In Florida, another swing state, he [Obama] is already campaigning against the prospect of offshore oil drilling, which has been imprudently supported by his rival.

Perhaps BHL is unaware of this, but a majority of likely Floridian voters supportsoffshore oil drilling and, perhaps not entirely coincidentally, McCain leads fairly comfortably there.  There are many other things he seems to be unaware of as he delves into American presidential politics.  He writes breathlessly:

Not to mention the setting up of a special committee (partly presided over, if you please, by Caroline Kennedy!) to help choose Obama’s future vice president. Will it be the former governor of New Mexico [bold mine-DL]? Governor Strickland, in a nod to blue-collar voters?

Bruce King has made Obama’s VP short-list, and no one told me?!  Ahem.  Bill Richardon is, alas, still the governor of New Mexico and, for our sins, will continue to be until early 2011.  As most people following the election closely in this country know, Strickland very clearly took himself out of the running.  Obama should hope that BHL is no more accurate when he describes Obama as a “meteor,” since these are things that burn up in the atmosphere or crash to earth.

On the main blog, Patrick Ford notes the latest Krauthammer column, in which he uncontroversially lauds the Colombian rescue of hostages held by FARC, but Krauthammer then refers to Colombia’s (illegal) raid into Ecuador as “your standard hard-power operation duly denounced by that perfect repository of soft power, the Organization of American States.”  If by “standard hard-power operation,” he means an illegal cross-border military action forbidden under the OAS Charter and denounced by most of the Western Hemisphere, then, yes, it was pretty standard.  From there he goes on to rattle off many of the world’s most miserable lands, as if the reality of their misery makes it obvious what outsiders, and in particular Americans, should do about them.  Throughout there is an opposition between “hard” and “soft” power, as if any state uses only one kind.  In certain circumstances, “hard” power is necessary and unavoidable.  “Soft” power may often be ineffective, at least when exercised only through the passing of resolutions and the making of speeches, but then “soft” power includes everything from both public and official diplomacy to economic relations to cultural exchanges to humanitarian aid. 

For that matter, “hard” power is not always defined by unnecessary land invasions that throw a country into chaos or ineffectual air strikes that destroy a country’s infrastructure.  Those just happen to be Krauthammer’s preferred forms of “hard” power, or so one would gather from reading his columns over the last few years.  “Hard” power can sometimes be used intelligently in a limited fashion to much greater effect, and this is probably even more true in an era of guerrilla wars and nonstate actors.  The relevant questions to be asked when deciding whether or not a state should employ “hard” power are these: does the state have interests at stake that compel it to use force, and have all other less costly, less dangerous, reasonable alternatives been exhausted?  Pretty clearly, in each of the cases Krauthammer mentions (i.e., Darfur, Burma, and Zimbabwe), America has no interests at stake, so talk of armed intervention is absurd.  Such calls for intervention are in their way as worthy of mockery as passing powerless resolutions, since they represent their own kind of unrealistic moral preening.

Speaking of Colombia, I see via Raimondo that Michael Moynihan recently wrote what one might almost call an apology for Alvaro Uribe, which makes me wonder why certain democratically-elected allied leaders who engage in heavy-handed–but effective–tactics in attempts to impose order on a fairly lawless country receive his praise and other foreign elected leaders receive withering scorn as harbingers of “Sovietization.”  Uribe’s 80% approval rating is taken as proof of solid public support, while Putin’s old 70% approval ratings were either irrelevant or proof of dictatorship.  Apparently in Latin America, we must judge local political leaders on a “steep curve,” unless their name is Chavez, for whom the usual condemnations are appropriate, but on other continents different standards are applied.

In the wake of the black Wednesday that saw the Fourth Amendment eviscerated, the ACLU is going ahead with its legal challenge against the new legislation that Mr. Bush signed this week.  Chris Hedges makes an important point about the impact the new surveillance powers will have on journalism.  While international communications of all kinds are now theoretically exposed to surveillance without meaningful oversight, Hedges applies this very specifically to the destructive effect this will have on journalists’ relationships with confidential sources.  Even if these communications are not used against the sources in some way, the fear that they could be might very well keep many of the media’s foreign sources from communicating with American reporters here.  Of course, as with every government usurpation, the point is not even a matter of whether such power will be used in such an abusive way, but that the government should not have such a power to engage in surveillance without cause and without oversight at all.  The very existence of such a power is an invitation to abuse, and in the coming years some future administration is going to remind us of this basic truth by using these powers against its critics and political opponents.

Their rationale for doing that [approving surveillance bill] is that it prevents the Republicans from depicting them as “weak,” because nothing exudes strength like bowing. ~Glenn Greenwald

This report is rather remarkable:

The campaign’s fundraising has given McCain the ability to spend more on television advertising than Democrat Barack Obama in key battleground states.

For a year in which the GOP is the political equivalent of a toxic landfill, it is a little surprising that McCain has been able to pull in as much money as he has over the last two months after a miserable start.  Certainly, had he and his campaign not dawdled and frittered away much of the last four months they would be in an even stronger position, but considering how badly everyone agrees his campaign has been run since he locked up the nomination he is doing rather well.  This is the sort of news that might make Plouffe rethink the grand strategy that involves throwing money down a hole with advertising in Alaska and Georgia.

Ambinder:

If Obama appears presumptuous and arrogant and not humble, there’s a good bet that we’ll see that reflected in the coverage back home.

Rather by definition, the proposal that he would speak at the Brandenburg Gate is presumptuous and arrogant, since it is a location usually reserved for addresses by heads of state during official visits on those occasions when it is used at all for political events. [Correction: I see that I was mistaken on this point, at least with regard to its uses by German politicians, but I think it still remains presumptuous for a foreign visiting politician to use it as his backdrop during an election season.]  As I understand it, Merkel is not inclined to give him his photo-op.  Besides, the logistical nightmare of shutting down the area around the Reichstag to host such a thing is probably not the sort of hassle that the Berlin city government and Merkel want to have.  The absurdity of the proposal will probably save Obama from showing off his arrogance in front of the international press.

Update: The proposal is controversial within Germany and has created a rift within the coalition government.  Maybe post-partisanship stops at the water’s edge?  It has drawn this perfectly legitimate and correct statement from Merkel:

No German candidate for high office would even think of using the National Mall or Red Square in Moscow for a rally because it would not be seen as appropriate.

For that matter, no candidate from another country would usually think of doing this, because it would make little sense as a way to win votes back home.  Just as a matter of political calculation, does Obama really want to send the message that he was able to give this speech at Brandenburg Gate because the Social Democrats allowed him to do it over the objections of the center-right Chancellor?  Besides being, well, socialists, the SPD is associated in the minds of most Americans with Gerhard Schroeder to the extent that they think about it at all.  Even if you believe, as I did at the time, that Schroeder was doing us a favour in speaking out against the invasion, he and his party are widely perceived as exploiters of “anti-Americanism.”  While Schroeder is long gone and getting fat off of hefty Russian contracts, that distinction may be lost on audiences back home. 

Second Update: Der Spiegel reports:

His strategists had hoped that Merkel would take the choice of Berlin and the Brandenburg Gate for the speech as a compliment.

Perhaps they also think that holding a rally at the Temple Mount when he visits Israel will be taken as a compliment by someone or other.  These must be the same clever strategists who thought a foreign jaunt would help to strengthen his foreign policy credentials, rather than draw attention to his obvious lack thereof.  At the very least, one hopes that these strategists will not be involved in running foreign policy in a future Obama administration.  As Der Spiegel notes:

But the tumult in Berlin also underscores a bit of foreign policy naivité on the part of Obama’s travel planners. Merkel’s clear choice of words may be surprising, but it wouldn’t have been difficult to imagine that the German government would give a tepid response to his plan to hold a speech at such a highly symbolic historical location.

That’s exactly the image the campaign can’t afford to project.  Then again, it was always likely to be the image that it projected on a European tour, considering that the candidate completely neglected holding hearings of his subcommittee on European affairs and hasn’t traveled much in Europe at all.  How would he and his team know what how the Chancellor would respond?  Actually, common sense might have worked.

You should be able to agree with Jackson’s point that Obama is condescending to black audiences without being, er, pro-castration*.  Since he often does condescend to the group he’s addressing even when he’s not engaged in anthropological analysis of their religious and hunting customs, it’s not surprising that he condescends to black audiences as well and that long-time activists and self-appointed “community” leaders are annoyed by it.  Of course Jackson is annoyed because he sees his waning influence–that’s obvious–and what he probably means is that he wants to be the one who talks down to black audiences.  This is very much like the “cling” business, where other elites hammered Obama for being elitist as a way of gaining an advantage over him in intra-elite competition.  It isn’t that Jackson wouldn’t also be condescending in a different way, but that he resents that he has lost status.  Likewise, Obama’s elite opponents know that the best way to undermine a rival is to feign sympathy for the people and attack the rival for his disdain.  Naturally, they have the same disdain and are quite happy to maintain the same social and cultural distance from the people whose cause they pretend to defend, but in the world of mass politics what is crucial for any member of the elite is not to be seen as revelling in that status. 

What seems like unvarnished truth-telling to outside observers often feels like an insulting pat on the head, or maybe more like a smack to the back of the head, to the people being lectured, and typically it involves endorsing someone else’s stereotypes of your group combined with head-nodding sympathy for your “plight.”  Even when there are elements of truth in what the lecturing pol is saying, it runs entirely against the grain of how mass democratic politics works.  The lecturing pol sets himself apart from and over the audience, and demands that the audience live up to a higher standard.  The ingratiating pol, the one who usually wins, is the one who does not tell you all the things that are wrong with you that you need to improve, but reminds you how alike you and he are.  It’s worth noting that he tends to address audiences in this lecturing style mainly when he already knows that they are solidly behind him, because he is still someone who avoids real political risk.  Overwhelming black support for Obama exposes them to more professorial lectures than almost any other group, because he knows that these are the voters least likely to break with him, no matter how many times he berates them, and he gets the added bonus of being the kind of black politician many whites have wanted to see.  Call it the ricochet lecture.

* John Kass provides the Chicago context.

What seems to be missing from thereactions to the latest remarks from Romney and Giuliani is any acknowledgement that these two in particular have deployed anti-Europeanism for years.  When Clinton was the frontrunner, Romney was constantly blathering about the evils of Europe that she wanted to impose on us, and his campaign strategy specifically includedbashingthe French as if the last several years had never happened.  The point is that these attacks are putting Obama in an already existing anti-European frame and taking it for granted that their target audiences will associate the perceived and imagined flaws of Europeans with Obama. 

To a degree, these two intend to portray Obama as less American, just as this sort has done to conservative critics of the war who were also against killing Serbs in unprovoked wars, but the important thing to bear in mind is that they believe that anything and anyone that does not hew to the GOP line on pretty much everything is vaguely French.  It is reflexive disdain for Europeans, which is not limited to the jingoists, that makes such framing possible.  In other words, the real problem with the remarks is more the thoughtless anti-Europeanism than just the use of anti-Europeanism to attack a particular candidate.  Any candidate at odds with the GOP will receive similar treatment, which is why focusing on how this affects Obama alone obscures the larger problem with this garbage.  I might add at this point that this is exactly how nationalism continues to distort our political life, but obviously I am trapped in the past and concerned with irrelevant problems. 

Viewed another way, associating Obama more closely with Europe does him a favour in a couple of that his own visit to Europe probably won’t do: it improbably aligns him with the history and civilisation to which Americans belong, and obscures the fact that he has rarely ever visited Europe before.  There is something very odd and ineffective about an attack that tries to make Obama seem strange and alien by saying that he is too European.  

It’s worth noting that Obama was right that more Americans should learn foreign languages, but in the context of addressing bilingualism among immigrants it was unusually clumsy.  As politically stupid things to say go, this is one of the big ones–over two-thirds of Americans support some form of English-only measures.  There are also perfectly good reasons why many Americans don’t bother to learn foreign languages.  For starters, many school systems inundate kids with Spanish classes, despite the far greater professional and scholarly value of German, French, Russian, to which you might nowadays add Arabic, Chinese and Hindi.  This is something of a vicious cycle: Spanish classes are most common, because there are more teachers available for them, and there are more teachers available for them because a huge percentage of beginning foreign-language students in the U.S. study Spanish.  Second, many Americans have no need to learn foreign languages to do their work, and obviously we live on a vast continent where English is the main language of communication for most people, which reduces the practical use of foreign language skills on a regular basis.  To some extent, you could say that I am multilingual, but my knowledge of most languages I have studied is fairly passive and oriented toward reading (which is mainly what I use most of my languages for), and this is partly a function of having few occasions Stateside to use any of them regularly.     

Update: Obama should be careful what he wishes for when urges people to study Spanish:

“Amigo! Amigo!” Mr. Bush called out cheerily in Spanish when he spotted the Italian prime minister. “How you doing, Silvio? Good to see you!”