Now we all know that McCain likes T.R. and thinks he is like Churchill, but this new campaign ad takes things a bit far.  Besides, it doesn’t really work that well, since more screen time is devoted to two dead politicians than to the one who is actually running for office.  (It’s also possible that the comparison between the two famous men and McCain works to McCain’s disadvantage.)  By comparison, the heavy-handed “American President Americans have been waiting for” ad was much better as an advertisement for the candidate.

Ross responds to the paleoonslaught.  I would also point to Dan’s direct response to Ross’ argument as the starting point for my own reply.  Dan writes:

Bacevich has the better of the argument, at least as regards abortion. The GOP has had opportunities to overturn Roe before—at any point when Republicans controlled the House, Senate, and White House, Congress could have restricted the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction over abortion using the powers invested in the legislative branch by Article III of the Constitution, overturning Roe at a stroke. Perhaps they were right not to do so: the powers of Article III, Section 2 have rarely been used in such a manner, and the precedent could easily have boomeranged against conservatives once the Democrats took Congress. Nevertheless, if the GOP were as adamantly pro-life as pro-lifers are encouraged to believe it is, the Republican Congress could have voided Roe any time between 2003 and 2007.

This is really the heart of the matter.  For decades the GOP kept luring pro-life voters to the polls by saying, “We just need the majority in Congress and control of the White House, and then you’ll see things change.”  So these people faithfully turned out every time for candidates, some of them quite mediocre and undeserving, and finally gave the GOP the unified government it had said it needed, and in return they received nothing more than they had under Reagan at the beginning.  It was also obviously during this time that the GOP was wasting all of its time and energy launching and defending the war in Iraq, while scarcely being able to expend an ounce of political capital on anything important to pro-life conservatives.  (Oh, wait, I forgot-Schiavo!)  The question of priorities is relevant here. 

Dan re-states the issue this way:

Bacevich is not denying any of that, of course, and Douthat simply avoids the tough question implied in Bacevich’s article: what exactly can we expect from overturning Roe, and is whatever hoped-for good is to be achieved enough to justify voting for a candidate—McCain—who will perpetuate one unjust and disastrous war and probably start a few more? 

So here Dan is staking out a different position from the one Ross describes: even if it were likely that McCain would appoint another anti-Roe justice and the Court would then overturn Roe very quickly, that still may not justify supporting McCain because of his backing of an unjust war.  However, I certainly am doubtful that McCain would appoint such a justice, or that any nominally anti-Roe justice he appointed would hold to that view when it matters.  What sort of justice do we really expect McCain to appoint, when it is a question of satisfying social conservatives he probably doesn’t need to appease any longer (especially if he is going to be just a one-term President) or winning the approval of his media admirers and former Senate colleagues?  What sort of justice does Ross expect a 55-seat, combative Democratic majority Senate to confirm? 

Ross and Dan both talk about Justice Kennedy, but there was another vote to uphold Roe in 1992 that has so far gone unmentioned.  The tenure of Sandra Day O’Connor is a cautionary tale for all those who trust rather too much in certain judges (while ironically distrusting the judiciary as an institution at the same time).  When nominated, she was presented (misleadingly) as an anti-Roe justice, but proved to be nothing of the kind.  That may or may not happen with Roberts and Alito, but it’s worth noting that one of the things that made Roberts a clear favourite for the first Court appointment was his relative lack of a paper trail.  Indeed, I guessed that Bush would pick him because of this Souteresque quality. 

Part of my skepticism of Bush’s justices and McCain is simply the result of my pessimism, which I think is well-founded especially when it relates to government.  I assume that those seeking power in one form or another will exploit the hopes of others in order to get it, and will then do only as much for those others as is necessary to retain power, and in the case of lifetime appointments to the Court the justices don’t have to do anything to retain the unchecked and arbitrary power they now possess.  At the same time, I don’t think that John Roberts sat before the Judiciary Committee and perjured himself when he said that he thought that Roe was the “settled law of the land” and then went on to say, “There’s nothing in my personal views that would prevent me from fully and faithfully applying that precedent.”  To expect that Roberts is a reliable anti-Roe vote is ultimately to believe him to be a liar, in which case it is not clear why anyone would trust him one way or the other. 

A stronger, long-term argument is the one Dan made in his original, excellent article:

The blame for the Republican loss of Congress and the damage it inflicted upon the pro-life movement rests not with antiwar paleoconservatives but with Hitchcock’s friends the neocons. (Hitchcock praises The Weekly Standard in his “Catholic Right” essay.) “The pro-life movement was at least temporarily derailed in 2006 by the strong public backlash against the war in Iraq,” he writes. That’s exactly right: the Iraq War, not Joe Sobran’s support for Jim Webb, cost the Republicans Congress and derailed the pro-life movement. And who gave us the Iraq War?

Where are the expanding Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress coming from?  They are coming from, in large part, a backlash against the war.  That is not the only reason, and the GOP cannot assume that ending the war would be a panacea for its unpopularity, but it is the largest millstone around their collective neck.  So long as the GOP is so deeply unpopular and associated with the Iraq war and the entire foreign policy paradigm that led to that war, it will not even be in a position to confirm the sorts of justices Ross wants, much less “returning control over abortion law to the hands of the voting public,” which I agree with Ross “remains a necessary goal for any pro-life, socially-conservative politics that takes itself seriously as a change agent in American life.”  

If we are going to take the long view, the best hope for putting together an electoral majority that will advance the pro-life cause would be either to decouple the pro-life cause from a party committed to perpetuating illegal, foreign wars or to decouple that party from its support for such wars.  So long as they are joined together, not only will pro-life priorities take a very remote backseat to interventionist concerns (as social conservatives have always taken a backseat to the national security crowd) but pro-lifers will remain closely associated with and connected to profoundly unpopular policies.  That doesn’t even touch the question of the philosophical incoherence of the people who preach the dignity of every human life while endorsing, tacitly or not, secret prisons, torture and aggressive war.  McCain’s success would solidify this alliance between pro-lifers and interventionists, which might very easily break apart in the event of GOP defeat in the presidential race.  That is, if you like, the long-term pro-life argument for voting against McCain.    

Update: As always, Ross responds thoughtfully.  I regret if I gave the wrong impression about the occasion of Roberts’ quoted statements on Roe, which Reihan also noted were at his confirmation hearing for a seat on a federal appeals court.  Because it was an appeals court position, Ross argues:

A federal judge can’t overturn a precedent without more or less guaranteeing that he’ll be reversed on appeal, so there’s no reason not to promise to faithfully apply it; a Supreme Court Justice, by contrast, can change long-settled law if he deems it necessary.

Certainly, there would have been no reason to have expected Roberts as an appeals court judge to overturn Roe, since Ross is quite correct that such a decision would almost certainly be reversed later (by a Supreme Court full of Republican appointees), but I can think of at least one reason why someone being confirmed to a position on a federal court would say that he might overturn the precedent or modify it.  First, he might believe that Roe is bad constitutional law, and would say so when asked.  I do understand that confirmation hearings are very political, and it would have been unwise of Roberts in the context of the political atmosphere of 2005 during his Supreme Court confirmation hearings to have bluntly declared, “I’ll overturn Roe the first chance I get!”  The Republican majority in the Senate was not all that great, so avoiding confrontation made sense.  That was the era of the Democratic threat of filibustering judicial nominations, so discretion on the part of nominees is understandable.  However, if you say that it is a “settled as a precedent of the court,” that seems to be very much like saying it is the “settled law of the land.”  Settled implies that it is not open to being revisited or revised.  Now perhaps there is some important distinction between these two phrases that I am missing, but they sound awfully similar.  It’s true that the statement is anodyne, but that doesn’t mean that it lacks significance.  It is true that Roberts did not reiterate the statement about his “personal views,” which then makes you wonder why he felt compelled to say it the first time. 

Also, I can understand that many nominees don’t want to speculate about how they might rule on a certain kind of case, not least because the particulars of each case are important factors in how judges make their rulings.  But then that is why you really shouldn’t expect a Republican nominee to any federal court to give such a blanket endorsement of the authority of Roe as Roberts has given in the past.  Indeed, we are supposed to take Roberts’ less absolute affirmation of Roe‘s authority in his Supreme Court confirmation testimony as a good sign, while reading the tea leaves of what we reasonably assume are his personal convictions.  Those would be the same convictions that just a few years ago would not prevent him “from fully and faithfully applying that precedent,” but now we trust that they are going to have a significant influence on how he rules in the future.

Incidentally, this parsing of judicial nominees’ phrases, as if they were oracular utterances that carry predictions of fortune and doom, should remind everyone how completely crazy our system has become.  It is the concentration of power in the Court and the presumption that it has some authority over state law that are the root problems, both of which predate Roe and go far beyond the debate over abortion, but that is definitely a discussion for another time. 

Second Update: By way of comparison, how Scalia answered (or avoided answering) similar questions is instructive.

The 3/24 issue of TAC is online with a good cover piece by John Derbyshire on U.S. Africa policy and the inefficacy of development aid. That’s the good news.  In the same issue, I have a column laying out what a Medvedev presidency will mean for U.S.-Russian relations.  The bad news is that, as if on cue, Mr. Bush makes a point of antagonising the Russians and ensuring that the last year of his administration will be remembered for its unusually poor decisionmaking.  James doesn’t like it.

Not everyone share’s Mr. McCain’s view that the defeat in Vietnam was a “disgrace,” or that the result of a war carried out “Not In My Name” nonetheless has bearing on the worth of one’s country. ~Bret Stephens

I should hope that no one shares the view that the outcome of a war has bearing on the worth of one’s country.  That’s crazy.  The idea that your country becomes less worthy if it loses a war or withdraws from a pointless conflict is terrible.  Why, it sounds dangerously anti-American.

Another thought on Lieberman’s McCain endorsement.  Even taking into account the bizarre awe in which modern Democrats hold JFK, I thought it was extraordinary that Lieberman said that the “one, in my opinion, closest to the Kennedy legacy, the John F. Kennedy legacy, is John S. McCain.”  That’s amusing–John S. McCain. 

It’s never made sense to me why Obama would want to take on the mantle of JFK, except to get endorsements from the Kennedys of today, since JFK’s tenure was the perfect embodiment of exactly what Obama’s worst critics fear about an Obama presidency: foreign policy blunder after screw-up after unmitigated disaster.  Likewise, it escapes me why the candidate who intends to run a campaign focused heavily on national security would want to be compared to probably the worst national security President of the Cold War (unless you give Truman top billing on that list).  What was Kennedy’s record, except a litany of bad ideas, failures, disasters and near-apocalypses?  Consider: the failure at Vienna; the Bay of Pigs; the Missile Crisis (a crisis enabled to some extent by the perception of weakness at Vienna); advisors in South Vietnam.  Yes, I dare say that McCain is closest to that Kennedy legacy, and it is the best argument put forward this month for voting to keep him out of power. 

This is not someone whose legacy (the Vietnam War) one should want to attach to your candidacy if you want to win the election, but for some strange reason our first Boomer-free election is becoming an obsession with the ’60s and both campaigns are trotting out JFK’s name on the assumption that it is a good thing to be compared with him.

P.S.  As an aside, there is a certain absurdity in Joe Lieberman complaining about people “on the left” who are leading the party astray, as if he were some Zell Miller-esque yellow dog or Jim Webb in the 1980s.  The only thing more annoying than Joe Lieberman himself is his conceit, which many people indulge out of habit, that he is some kind of “centrist.”  Perhaps if we think of the political spectrum as a series of rings surrounding a cavernous abyss (or perhaps a pit like the Sarlaac), then Lieberman and McCain can fairly be called “centrists.”

You never know when Bolingbroke is going to come in handy.  In his thoughtful post on the subject, Reihan replied to one of my arguments:

(4) Daniel rejects the notion that patriotism is primarily about the state my sense is that patriotism is commonly, and properly, understood as “constitutional patriotism.” If it is not about the state as it exists, it certainly is about the state as it ought to be — an idealized allegiance to a particular regime. That’s not exactly Maurizio Virolo’s view [sic], if I recall correctly: he allows for some amount of liberal nationalism under the guise of fatherland fealty, which he sees as part of patriotism. It does roughly capture the view of plenty of “sober centrists.”

Now Bolingbroke has written, as I’m sure many already know, On the Spirit of Patriotism and The Patriot King, so he has a few things to say about patriotism.  Bolingbroke is doubly useful since, as I have mentioned before, he was the first to coin the term “unconstitutional” and laid out his theory of loyalty to the constitution and resistance to unconstitutional government.  So, first of all, the regime and the constitution are not identical, and so Bolingbroke might be said to possess “idealized allegiance to a particular regime,” or rather he has an idealised version of how the regime should conform itself to the constitution.  I think we can all agree on that much.  But is Bolingbroke therefore a “constitutional patriot”?  Is his patriotism really just his constitutionalism, or is his constitutionalism just one part of his love for his country? Having set up the problem with plenty of entertaining polemic about the evils of Walpole (bloggers have nothing on this man’s contempt for the minister), he gets to the heart of the question:

The service of our country is no chimerical, but a real duty.  He who admits the proofs of any other moral duty, drawn from the constitution of human nature, of from the moral fitness and unfitness of things, must admit them in favour of this duty, or be reduced to the most absurd inconsistency.  When he has once admitted the duty on these proofs, it will be no difficult matter to demonstrate to him, that his obligation to the performance of it is in proportion to the means and the opportunities he has of performing it; and that nothing can discharge him from this obligation as long as he has these means and these opportunities in his power, and as long as his country continues in the same want of his services.  These obligations then to the public service may become obligations for life on certain persons….

He describes the “real patriot” as someone “who bends all the force of his understanding, and directs all his thoughts and actions, to the good of his country.”  That’s a pretty high standard, actually, but we can see here clearly that Bolingbroke understands patriotism to be essentially the desire and work for the good of one’s country.  Now when it comes to how to bring about that good, his constitutionalism comes to the fore, because he assumes that there is the possibility of having either a good, well-ordered and constitutional government or one of many degrees of corruption of that government and that this affects the good of the country.  But the devotion to the constitution or the practices of the regime are incidental and secondary.  His country would never become undeserving of love, even if the government were to overthrow the constitution.  It is not the state that the patriot serves; it is not even the constitution, except insofar as the constitution protects and serves the country.  Bolingbroke speaks of the patriot’s service being dedicated to his country.  To this someone may say, “Well, obviously!  How boring, Larison!”  But for some reason many people keep wanting to move patriotism from being service to the country (presumably admirable) to service to the state (questionable or even objectionable, depending on the state).   

Reihan mentioned Viroli, whose book For Love of Country also touches on rival neo-Stoic conceptions of patriotism.  Bolingbroke participated in that side of the neo-Stoic tradition of early modernity that affirmed love of country as a “true and natural love” (du Vair), as opposed to the neo-Stoicism of Lipsius that was quite influential at the Spanish court during the era of Olivares (whose biography by J.H. Elliott is a great, if quite long, read).  Appropriately enough, dismissing love of country as irrational passion, as Viroli tells us Lipsius does, is well-suited to an imperial monarchy, not least since local patriotic loyalties (including the patriotism of the so-called “Little Castilians” who chafed at the burdens of empire) are threatening to any cosmopolitan empire.  Patriotism is also a crucial element of republicanism, which Viroli notes that Lipsius is attacking, and Bolingbroke fits into this republican tradition as well–his writings are, as Viroli notes, “replete with republican idioms,” despite his avowed monarchism and his obvious support in The Patriot King for Prince Frederick William.     As Viroli relates it, even Milton, who might be closest to the “give your heart to freedom” argument, defines patriotism very, very differently from Kateb et al.  Viroli writes, “For Christian men love of country cannot be a ‘blind and carnal love’; it must be a form of compassion, an affection for our fellows, for their and our liberty, their and our rights that has nothing in common with lust for power, wealth, and the false glory that comes from expansion.” [italics mine-DL] It seems clear to me that this has nothing whatever to do with any kind of nationalism, and to the extent that it concerns the state at all it is an almost entirely negative form.  P.S.  As a matter of general interest, here is a line of argument that will be familiar to students of the Federalists and the patriot rebels (and which has a certain relevance today as well):

Remember that the opposition in which you have engaged, at your first entrance into business, is not an opposition only to a bad administration of public affairs, but to an administration that supports itself by means, establishes principles, introduces customs, repugnant to the constitution of our governments, and destructive of all liberty; that you do not only combat present evils, but attempts to entail these evils upon you and your posterity; that if you cease the combat, you give up the cause: and that he, who not renew on every occasion his claim, may forfeit his right. 

Incidentally, he has some interesting things to say about Cato the Younger:

…but this I will say, that the second Cato driven out of the forum, and dragged to prison, enjoyed more inward pleasure, and maintained more outward dignity, than they who insulted him, and who triumphed in the ruin of their country.

As a follow-up to this post at the Scene, I should make a few clarifications.  I don’t like, and generally try not to use, the word isolationist, because the word is pretty much meaningless and leads to all sorts of misunderstandings.  The word isolationist is inherently pejorative and is an extremely loaded term, and moreover there are not actually any real isolationists yesterday, today or at any other time.  These figures are the bogeys of progressive globalists.  They are to domestic foreign and trade policy debate what “Nazi” and “fascist” are to descriptions of foreign governments targeted by Washington: convenient props to be used to justify current policy and tar opponents with words with strong negative associations.  Like these latter attacks on foreign governments, the terms “protectionist” and “isolationist” reflect the time warp and warped sense of history that progressive globalists of both parties share, in which it is perpetually the 1930s, the next Hitler is always on the rise and they must, like FDR and Churchill, boldly resist their domestic foes to prevent catastrophe, yadda yadda yadda. 

As Pat Buchanan said last week:

Isolationist is an epithet used to smear those patriots who adhere to Washington’s admonition to stay out of foreign wars, Jefferson’s counsel to seek “peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none” and John Quincy Adams’s declaration that America “goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.”

Now it is true that there is a strong sentiment, especially in the Democratic Party, that we should “mind our own business” in the world, and there is a strong backlash against free trade agreements.  What is remarkable, then, is not that the Democratic presidential candidates have been touting their antiwar and anti-NAFTA positions in an election year, but that they are still broadly extremely interventionist and supportive of free trade generally.  As on the right, you cannot actually find any living, breathing isolationists on the left; you might find some protectionists, but the are clearly not in charge of anything.  In this sense, Lieberman is going overboard by trying to make a much narrower disagreement over Iraq into the occasion for declaring that the Democratic Party left him, and not vice versa.  The problem isn’t that the Democratic Party has really turned away from the hawkish internationalism of the past, but mainly that Lieberman is so hawkish that he feels compelled to support every use of force regardless of whether it continues to make sense to do so.  However, the broader shift of the party to the left is real and it is a good development from the perspective of the progressives who are winning the internecine fights.

A couple of items to ponder for those hoping or fearing some significant change in how the U.S. relates to Israel and Palestine under an Obama administration: Gen. McPeak rejects the attacks against him here, and The New York Suneditorialised in defense of Obama against charges that he was insufficiently “pro-Israel” over two months ago.

The main American Conservative blog is now up, and the contributors are rapidly outpacing me in producing new posts.  If I’m not careful, they’re going to make me look downright lazy.  Read Tom Piatak on Jonah Goldberg, Kara Hopkins on the response to Prof. Bacevich’s Obama article, Tim Carney on lobbying, Kelley Vlahos on McCain and the new “GI Bill,” Leon Hadar on media coverage of McCain, and Michael on Obama’s prospects in Pennsylvania.

Following up on the continuing patriotism/nationalism debate, Reihan explains why he is a nationalist, and I try to explain why I am not.