Gideon's Blog

2007-06-27T14:22:00.000-04:00

Well, I've gone and done it. I've returned to blogging.

But not here.

I've been invited by Reihan Salam to join his blog, The American Scene. TAS has been a group blog, originally with Reihan, Ross Douthat (who now blogs here as part of The Atlantic Monthly's blog stable) and Steven Menashi. Then Steven went to law school, Ross was pinched by The Atlantic, and Reihan was left alone. And, unlike Garbo, he doesn't want to be alone.

So he's expanded TAS to include something over a dozen bloggers, including yours truly.

The list includes some quite impressive individuals - undoubtedly more of them than I'm aware of. So do come and check us out. I can't promise I'll post every day. But somebody will.

Oh: my first post at TAS is this one.

2007-03-12T18:12:00.000-04:00

I guess I'm not telling my readers (if any are still checking in) anything they don't know when I say this, but I'll say it anyway: this blog is currently on hiatus, in limbo, and otherwise inactive.

It's partly that I haven't had the time, and partly that the whole form - me spouting off to the world about my puny little opinions - has become profoundly unsatisfying. Ridiculous, actually.

But I miss it. I miss being "part of the conversation" - I miss particularly the give and take with my few, cherished readers.

So I may be back, once I've figured out a way of doing this (or something like this) that still makes sense to me.

In the meantime, don't bother to check in daily or weekly, and stop hitting the refresh button. Check in every couple of months if you want to show extraordinary loyalty; if and when I start things up again, I'll either do it here or I'll mention here where I'm doing it.

And thanks, for all your attention and the insights you shared with me, over the past five years that this blog has been active.

2006-12-28T12:22:00.000-05:00

Let's see how I did on last year's predictions before going on to this year.

1. Senator John McCain will stage a significant Mountain-Muhammad confab with a major leader of the religious Right (e.g., Dobson, Colson - not Robertson, obviously) who will bless him in his quest for the GOP nomination. His GOP numbers will immediately improve and his general election numbers and image with the media will immediately drop as all concerned discover that he is a Republican. Giuliani will not run for President. The remaining GOP candidates will compete all year to position themselves as the anti-McCains. Tom Tancredo will declare that if McCain is the nominee, he will run for President as an independent. Whether or not to seize immigration as the issue on which to run against McCain becomes a major point of debate in the conservative blogosphere, but not in the actual campaign.

WRONG. Early, anyway. None of this has happened yet. At least some of it will happen in 2007. Specifically, I predict that Senator Sam Brownback will endorse John McCain for President, causing K-Lo's head to explode. As for Guiliani: he'll run if he thinks he has a shot, not if he thinks McCain has it all sewn up. He's going to announce, one way or the other, relatively late - mid-2007. The immigration-related political predictions I stand by for 2007 - if McCain is the nominee, Tancredo's head will explode, and you will see a 3rd-party challenge (Lou Dobbs?). Whether the bid gets any traction - i.e., more than 2% of the final vote total - is another story; I'd guess not. But it'll get a lot of press on the way there.

2. Kadima (Sharon's new party) will win a resounding victory in the Israeli parliamentary elections, but Sharon will still have difficulty cobbling together a coalition because (a) the parties to his right do better than expected, but they are committed to refuse to join a coalition unless further unilateral withdrawals are ruled out; (b) Labor and Meretz refuse, at least initially, to form a government with Sharon; and (c) Shinui (whose representation drops in half, but is still a factor) refuses to sit in a government with the ultra-Orthodox parties. Sharon uses his difficulties as the springboard to propose major changes to Israel's constitution making the Prime Minister more independent of the parliament. Outside of Israel, the least-noticed story about the Israeli elections is that the percentage of Labor votes coming from Arab voters hits an all-time high. Meanwhile, terrorist attacks planned in Gaza will prompt Israel to send the IDF back into the territory in a small-scale repeat of Operation Defensive Shield. Sharon will not die.

WRONG on virtually all counts.

3. Canada will finally elect a Conservative government - barely. Italy, on the other hand, will elect Romano Prodi.

RIGHT and RIGHT AGAIN.

4. Hosni Mubarak will be hospitalized for a period of days, during which speculation about the stability of Egypt will spiral out of control. Then he'll come out of the hospital to rule for several more years.

WRONG, although for all I know this happened and I just missed it.

5. Lopez Obrador will win the Mexican Presidency by a decisive margin. This will not be the end of the world, and in particular will not mean major changes in Mexican fiscal or monetary policy. But it will be the end of the period of remarkably friendly relations between Mexico and the U.S. that obtained under the last two presidencies, and a return to something resembling the historic norm - not adversarial relations, but not exactly friendly. Lopez Obrador will ostentatiously embrace Hugo Chavez and Evo Morales and will court the EU, China and Brazil as a way of "restraining" American imperialism, but this will mostly amount to rhetoric. Mexico, Bolivia and Venezuela will, however, declare that they are opposed to American attempts to combat the drug trade by military means, and cooperation in this area will be significantly affected.

WRONG, though I sometimes wonder whether an AMLO victory wouldn't have been better than the split decision that actually transpired (though, of course, I think a clear PAN victory would have been better than either).

6. Brokeback Mountain will win Best Picture. Other nominees: Walk the Line, Good Night and Good Luck, Munich, and I'm not sure what else. Ang Lee will win Best Director. Philip Seymour Hoffmann will win Best Actor for Capote. Other nominees: Heath Ledger for Brokeback Mountain, David Strathairn for Good Night and Good Luck, Joaquin Phoenix for Walk the Line, and Jeff Daniels for The Squid and the Whale. Reese Witherspoon will win Best Actress for Walk the Line. Laura Linney will also be nominated, for The Squid and the Whale, as will Judi Dench for Mrs. Henderson Presents, but I'm not sure who else. The Capote Oscar will be the second data point that will allow journalists to extrapolate a "trend" from Brokeback Mountain and 2005 will be known as the year of the "gay film breakout" in Hollywood. Someone somewhere will also notice that everyone nominated for everything this year is white. Maybe Morgan Freeman will be nominated for Best Voice for March of the Penguins so everyone can breathe easier. I should note that, of the films mentioned above, Penguins is the only one I've seen, though I really wanted to see Capote (and I suppose I will rent it).

WHO CARES? THIS IS ANCIENT HISTORY

7. Neither North Korea nor Iran will test a nuclear weapon. And neither country will be attacked by either the U.S. or any other country. Nor will either country experience regime change.

WRONG, RIGHT, RIGHT and RIGHT - [NOTE: I originally gave myself full credit on this one, since the Nork test was probably a dud, but that's cheating: they sure tested something, presumably a nuke, so only 75% credit on this one.]

8. A major terrorist incident will occur in Russia, bigger than even the spectacular events that have already occurred. The last vestiges of democratic governance and the rule of law will be eliminated in response. Nonetheless, the West will conclude, collectively, that we had better continue betting on Putin because the alternatives - chess-playing dissenters notwithstanding - are worse.

I'M GOING TO GIVE MYSELF ALMOST FULL CREDIT FOR THIS ONE; trend lines in Russia are all pointing the way I said, and, for that matter, so is the Western response, but there was no spectacular trigger.

9. Stocks will have a surprisingly strong year, led by business equipment, technology and telecom. The housing market will continue to soften and the dollar will weaken. Gains to stocks will be driven by: an upswing in business investment; an increase in corporate leverage, increasing returns to shareholders at the expense of bondholders; and utter legislative paralysis in Washington. There will be no Bernanke-panic-induced market tumble, but not because inflation is tame; inflation will be higher than anticipated by year-end.

BASICALLY RIGHT. Stocks up, but not led by tech. Housing market weaker. Dollar down against Euro but flat against Yen. Inflation signals ambiguous at year-end. There was no Bernanke panic because Bernanke was tough on inflation!

10. Tom Delay will lose his House seat. Rick Santorum will lose his Senate seat. Harold Ford will win the open Senate seat in Tennessee. Nonetheless, the GOP will hold both houses of Congress, albeit by reduced margins. This will fool Republicans into thinking they are more popular than they are.

RIGHT, RIGHT, WRONG, WRONG and WRONG. Not too bad in the scheme of political predictions.

11. Donald Rumsfeld will resign. He will not be replaced by John McCain or James Webb. So will John Snow. He will not be replaced by Larry Kudlow or James Cramer.

RIGHT, RIGHT, RIGHT and RIGHT!

12. America will not substantially withdraw from Iraq; any troop drawdowns will be largely PR stunts. The news will continue to be a wearying mix of good and bad, with no signs of an end but no sufficiently dramatic negative news to change the political dynamic in America. Iraq will remain a unitary state, but not indefinitely; Kurdistan will eventually break off, but not this year.

RIGHT, although I think it's fairer to say that the news from Iraq has gone from "mixed to bad" to "definitely bad" and the political dynamic has indeed changed. But I'm still giving myself full credit for now.

13. General Motors will fire its CEO. The new CEO will be widely expected to take the company into Chapter 11 in 2007. A Chinese company will publicly speculate about purchasing some or all of GM's brands. Pat Buchanan will cite this as evidence of the imminent end of the Republic. He will be wrong.

WRONG, but my heart was in the right place.

14. John Derbyshire will actually read the first novel in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials series, and discover that he likes it very much. He will speculate aloud in The Corner about whether he is unconsciously trying to get himself fired. Fortunately for his wife and children, he'll decide he doesn't like the third book in the series, and is kept on.

WRONG, but my heart was *definitely* in the right place.

15. Al Gore will form an exploratory committee pursuant to a Presidential campaign. So will John Kerry. The Gore announcement will be news. No one will notice what John Kerry does. (Yes, I am stealing this prediction outright from Mickey Kaus. Sue me.)

WRONG, but just early: I'll predict this happens in 2007.

16. I will try my first bottle of wine from the Gobi Desert.

WRONG.

17. One "crisis" country in the news will be The Philippines. Some combination of terrorism, corruption, domestic instability, economic crisis - the country will be in the news, because bad things will be happening. However America responds, China will emerge the more influential in that country.

WRONG.

18. A referendum will be held to break up at least one of the following countries: Belgium, Canada, Italy, Bosnia, Iraq, Spain.

WRONG, though I will give myself part credit for the hoax broadcast *claiming* Belgium had broken up! 6% of the Belgian public still believes the hoax, even after the same station that aired it owned up!

19. The German Party of Democratic Socialism will take a sharp nationalist turn. An utterly politically incorrect statement by a party leader - about deporting foreigners, or retaking Konigsberg, or something similary inflammatory - will give the party a noticeable boost to third place in the polls (very far behind the CDU/CSU and Social Democrats, but meaningfully ahead of the Free Democrats and Greens). As with Le Pen in France, the rise of the Unacceptable Right in Germany will prompt general hand-wringing and urgent calls to redouble efforts towards political union in Europe.

WRONG, so far as I know. I think I don't know enough about the complexion of German political parties to make sensible predictions.

20. Japan's economic recovery will accelerate. It's nascent pro-natal policy initiatives will also begin to bear fruit, surprisingly quickly, albeit modestly. Japanese nationalism will also be on the rise, with increasing questions whether the country should change its constitution to permit a more robust forward defense, what naval and missile capabilities are necessary to deter a rising China, and whether Japan should even become a declared nuclear power in its own right. The rising sun will be a year-long news story in 2006.

RIGHT, more or less. The recovery is accelerating, and nationalism is very plainly on the rise, complete with discussion about amending the constitution and possible nuclearization. It's too soon to know whether the pro-natal policies are having any effect at all, though, and Japan wasn't in the paper nearly as much as I thought it should have been.

21. Sam Alito will be confirmed with at least 65 and fewer than 75 votes. No other Supreme Court Justices will retire or die in 2006. Roe v. Wade will not be overturned.

RIGHT on the outcome, WRONG on the vote total.

22. Eliot Spitzer will be elected Governor of New York, as punishment for Pataki's sins. Steve Westly will be elected Governor of California, after upsetting Phil Angelides in the primary. Ted Strickland will be elected Governor of Ohio. By the end of 2006, Democrats will have elected a substantial number of Senators and Governors with White House potential - the GOP "bench strength" advantage will have evaporated. This won't matter for 2008 much, but it will in 2012, 2016 and 2020.

RIGHT except for the California prediction - though note that I was savvy enough to know that Angelides didn't have a prayer in the general, and hence based my Dem pickup prediction on the prediction that he would lose the primary.

23. Carbs will be good for you again; the new health bugaboo will be caffeine.

WRONG, I bet, though I haven't followed the health news at all.

24. Bruce Ratner will get whatever he wants development-wise. Larry Silverstein will not.

RIGHT. Atlantic Yards has been approved. And Ground Zero is still at least somewhat up for grabs.

25. I will finally write a book.

SADLY, WRONG.

2006-12-19T17:14:00.000-05:00

I wrote this post before leaving for vacation, but somehow didn't manage to post it. Now I'm back, and it's a bit stale, but I'm going to post it anyway.

The Telegraph has inaugurated an splendid new game: the Game of Never. Charles Moore explains the rules and plays a round, with some eyebrow-raising results. John Derbyshire enters the lists as well. This is, self-evidently, the best game of this sort of the year.

My own entry follows. I am embarrassed to admit that, looking at the list, I appear barely to have lived at all.

I have never

- owned a car

- owned a television set

- owned a house (I do own my apartment or, more accurately, shares in a coop)

- owned a gun

- owned a dog

(and yet, in spite of all the above, I am a registered Republican - go figure)

- studied economics, business, finance or statistics

(and yet, I make my living on Wall Street - happy face here)

- fired an employee

- quit a proper full-time job

- placed an advertisement (not even for a roommate)

- sued or been sued by anyone (my mother once sued the city on my behalf for an injury sustained on school grounds, when I was a child, but that doesn't count)

- crashed a car (I said *crashed*, not *barely bumped fenders*)

- filed for a patent (well, I'm not too surprised about this one, but I am embarrassed)

- had a negative net-worth (no, not even in college, and no, I'm not independently wealthy)

- installed an operating system (I actually have one in a box at home, which I am afraid to open)

- grown a vegetable (not sure I've successfully grown anything, but certainly not a vegetable)

- joined a proper club (i.e., the kind you have to be *accepted* into to join - again, unless you count my coop, or college, which I don't)

- been elected to anything (no, not even in high school)

- volunteered for hazardous duty of any kind

- completed the writing of a novel or non-fiction book

- memorized a soliloquy from Shakespeare

- studied Talmud (I've read bits of Talmud here and there, but never properly *studied*)

- competed in an eating contest (quite a surprise, given how long I've worked on Wall Street)

- eaten fugu (I love Japanese food, and had a colleague who frequented a joint that served the deadly fish; don't know how I missed accompanying him)

- asked out on a proper date any girl with whom I had not already established some degree of romantic or sexual entanglement (this may simply be a generational divide, but it's acutely embarrassing to me and, as a married man, it's too late to change this one)

- been responsible for the conception of a child

On the other hand, I have also never

- struck a woman

- refused to forgive someone who had wronged me and sincerely apologized

So not all "nevers" warrant only regret or perverse pride.

2006-11-29T17:06:00.000-05:00

I wonder: has Andrew Sullivan ever asked whether Joe Lieberman wears funny underwear?

Just asking.

2006-11-16T11:27:00.000-05:00

While my readership is small, I flatter myself that it is exceptionally well-read. Hence this request: suggestions for what I should read - or, more specifically, what I should read *regularly*, what I should subscribe to.

I ask because while I think I'm doing a pretty good job with books (currently reading Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made, by Eugene Genovese, a book I am enjoying very much) - two exceptions being contemporary fiction, of which I seem to read almost none, something I feel bad about, and poetry, of which I am woefully ignorant, and ashamed of that fact, and yet unable to remedy - I'm doing a much less good job with periodicals and newspapers. I subscribe to a whole bunch, and I read them less and less - and get less and less pleasure from what I do read.

So: suggestions for newspapers or magazines that I should subscribe to and read regularly. Don't bother mentioning the obvious if you're going to recommend it; I already subscribe to The Atlantic, for instance.

Thanks.

2006-11-15T13:53:00.001-05:00

Well, I upgraded to Blogger Beta and my archives no longer appear on my blog. I checked the page on Blogger that explains what to do if this happens, and it gives instructions that are not applicable to Beta. Anyone out there have any advice? Other than emailing Blogger, which I've done?

2006-11-09T14:25:00.000-05:00

Okay, I'm back from Asia. Itinerary somewhat altered: Hong Kong, Taipei, Shanghai, Seoul, no stop in Kyoto.

Impressions? Well, I do a decent Jackie Mason . . .

- Hong Kong feels like a giant shopping mall. Of course, both the hotel we stayed in and our offices in the city are in the IFC complex, the lower floors of which *are* a shopping mall, so maybe that's not a proper impression of the city as a whole. But even so, downtown felt swank but kind of sterile, while Kowloon, which I explored for a half-day, felt much more Chinese but not really in a good way - the press of humanity was too palpable. The view from Victoria Peak was impressive, though not as impressive as it would have been on a less hazy day. Any way, the hotel was excellent, as was the hotel's Cantonese restaurant - this was by far the best eating we did in Hong Kong, which surprised me, as I had heard the food in Hong Kong was generally exceptional, and my impression of the other places we ate was: it was all good, but not notably better than places in New York. Overall, Hong Kong was a bit of a disappointment.

- Taipei I enjoyed more than expected, but my expectations were low. Felt like a real city, less artificial. Also felt the Japanese influence everywhere - in the layout of the city, architecture, even the signage and preferred color combinations, and all that's a positive in my view. But I don't want to exaggerate - Taipei is not what I would call a city with a lot of charm. I just was expecting something really ugly, and it wasn't ugly - just boring looking. Mountains form a lovely backdrop to the city, but didn't get to actually see them - too busy with business and, besides, weather was rainy. The National Palace Museum I did get to see, and it was very impressive indeed; I spent about 2 hours in the collection and, I think, saw most of the highlights, including the intricately carved tiny boat made out of an olive pit and the cabbage carved from a piece of jade (weirder was the lovingly mounted hunk of mineral that looked like a slab of pork belly). My favorite items were some of the smaller Chou-era bronzes, the elegantly simple Sung pottery, and some of the masterpieces from the Ch'ing era like that olive pit boat; least-favorite stuff was classic Ming era Chinoiserie, which looks like kitch to me no matter how accomplished it is.

- I had a lively political conversation with colleague from our HK office who is herself Taiwanese and, politically, deep-blue. The green-blue divide is substantially an ethnic divide, and getting deeper for that reason - by her report, taxi drivers who are "Taiwanese" will curse at fares (like her) who speak Mandarin and are of "Chinese" ancestry. She also asserted that most Taiwanese immigrants to the U.S. are, in fact, Chinese, a claim I could not validate indepedently as yet. The politics of Taiwan and Korea have evolved in the post-cold-war world in both parallel and opposite directions. In both countries, the advent of political democracy brought about a two-party system where one party is reformist, liberal, feisty, nationalist, and traces its lineage back to the opposition to the old right-wing dictatorships, while the other is conservative and traces its lineage back to the old right-wing dictatorships. But in Taiwan, the liberal, nationalist party is pro-independence from China, hence "right-wing" in American eyes, while in Korea the liberal, nationalist party favors rapprochement with the North and a distancing from America, hence "left-wing" in Amercan eyes.

- Shanghai is not an easy city to see in a day and a half, nor is it an ideal city to see alone. It felt like it would be a lot more fun if I had visited it with a group of friends. Also if I were 10 years younger. I spent a couple of hours one night at Barbarossa Lounge and, while I was genuinely impressed with the music (which is, in itself, impressive, since this I frankly don't listen to a whole lot of trip-hop electro-funk or whatever they call it), it was pretty lonely to be hanging out there by myself. More generally, Shanghai is gaudy, in love with surface, a city where "hip" and "now" are the biggest compliments, where the past is just an asset to be leveraged to make a cooler present. It's got a bit of Vegas in its soul. There's a lot of that around nowadays - remember "Cool Brittania"? - but it always rubs me the wrong way, and Shanghai really seems to mean it. Nonetheless, it was fascinating to feel the sheer scale of the city, and the speed with which it is rising. And no one would accuse the new skyline of lacking personality - every one of the new skyscrapers seems to want to make a statement. The Shanghai Urban Planning Museum is as good a place as any to see all these statements laid out on a single page. Unsurprisingly, while the new skyscrapers have boistrous personalities, they have nothing like the charm of the old colonial architecture of the Bund and the French Concession. The dilapidated condition of the splendid mansions in the latter testifies to Shanghai's decisive preference for the new over the old - in Brooklyn, these places would be fetching top dollar prices. My top restaurant recommendation: the Whampoa Club.

- Precisely because I was worried I wouldn't like spending the whole time in the city, I arranged to take a tour to the "water village" of Zhou Zhuang outside the city. I didn't realize quite how long the tour would take - we left at 12:30pm and returned at 7:30pm, with most of that time devoted to travelling to and from the village - and I regretted losing so much possible touring time. The village itself was interesting, and a nice change from the city, but more than a little marred as an experience by its apparently total transformation into a tourist trap. Literally everyone in the village appeared to be employed either selling kitch or piloting the gondolas. Nonetheless, one could still squint and imagine what the village looked like when it was a prosperous provincial town at the height of the Ming dynasty.

- Ended up in Seoul, which was another pleasant but boring city. It was fall foliage season and the mountains and hills around the city were too lovely for the urban landscape they cradled. The people of Seoul are terribly proud of what they themselves admit is pretty much their first urban beautification project, the restoration of the Cheonggyecheon River. This used to be the main river of Seoul, then was covered by a massive highway, and over the past few years was restored as a kind of linear urban park. I spent a very enjoyable hour following a school group down the banks of the river, snapping pictures of the schoolgirls waving at me and giggling at the prospect of having their pictures taken. The food we had in Seoul - a mix of Korean and Japanese, home-style and high-style - was the most consistently excellent of the trip, as was the air quality (which, I should note, was lousy in Hong Kong and terrible in Shanghai). I had another interesting, though brief, political conversation with a Korean colleague, who expressed his view that no one in Korea is at all worried about the North, nor terribly worried about China except as an economic competitor (*everyone* in Asia is worried about China as a competitor - Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand; it's not just an American obsession by any means). I find it rather unlikely that there will be a US-Korean alliance in any meaningful sense in 20 years' time.

All in all, an interesting trip, and very worthwhile from a business perspective. But I've very happy to be home.

2006-10-28T22:25:00.000-04:00

Seems like readers of this blog ought to check in about once every two weeks: that's about how often I can say anything these days. I haven't reviewed a book in months, and I still haven't written reviews of this summer's season at Stratford.

And it ain't gonna get better any time soon. I'm blogging this from the airport, about to embark on a business trip that will take me to Hong Kong, Taipei, Seoul and Shanghai, with a side-trip to Kyoto in the middle just for fun.

Hopefully I'll have time to blog about the trip when I get back.

2006-10-19T16:13:00.001-04:00

Well, it's official: hedge funds have finally bought the country, if not the earth. John Snow, former Treasury Secretary for President Bush, has just been named chairman of Cerberus Capital Management, while Larry Summers, former Treasury Secretary for President Clinton, has just been named "part-time managing director" of the firm I used to work for, D. E. Shaw & Co (which is, I believe, now considered the largest hedge fund in the world).

Personally, all I can say is: hiring standards at Shaw aren't what they used to be. Why, I'll bet nobody even asked Summers to provide his SAT scores with his resume.

2006-10-19T16:13:00.000-04:00

2006-10-12T22:35:00.000-04:00

I consider myself to be friendly with both Damon Linker and Ross Douthat; I've been impressed with Ross's blogging for some time, and I've been eager to read Damon's book (actually, I'm kind of embarrassed not to have read it yet); so I was obviously pleased to hear that they would be debating each other over at TNR.

Unfortunately, I don't think TNR gave them enough rounds to really get going. The opening statements are promising, but there's no time to develop arguments; they have to move directly to closing flourishes. Or, perhaps, it's not TNR's fault. Perhaps neither Douthat nor Linker really wants to concede what kind of argument they are having, and so wind up dancing around each other more than truly engaging.

As I say, I haven't read Linker's book. But the more I read about it, the more convinced I am that it is, at bottom, an anti-Catholic argument. That's not intended as an insult or a conversation-closer. It sounds like an intelligent, thought-out anti-Catholic argument. It doesn't strike me as a bigoted argument, and anyhow, right-wing PC of the sort that rules criticism of particular religious traditions out of bounds cuts no ice with me. I just think that, honestly, that's the kind of argument he's making.

The closest he comes to approaching the question of whether that's the kind of argument he's making is to answer Douthat's question - is there a place for me? - with his own question - am I making an anti-Catholic argument? - when what we really want to know is whether *he* thinks he's making an anti-Catholic argument. And this also lets Douthat get away with something of a retreat into identity politics: he doesn't *argue* that orthodox Catholic Christianity is perfectly compatible with the American Republic, he just warns that if you say it isn't, then Catholics may not choose the allegiance that Linker would prefer them to make primary.

But then, it's not surprising that identity politics reared its ugly head in this debate, because this is what the culture war at bottom is about, or at least I am increasingly convinced that it is.

As one of his arguments against Linker, Douthat trots out the history of American religious-inspired political activism: abolition, social gospel, temperance, Bryan's crusade against evolution, etc. Linker responds by saying that some of these movements he also is troubled by, but that generally he's less troubled by them than by the theocons because their objectives could be defended in secular terms, and because they didn't advance a religious *ideology* in the way that the theocons do. I question whether temperance or opposition to teaching evolution could be so grounded; frankly, I question whether abolition and the social gospel can be *entirely* divorced from the profound religious motivations that lie behind even the secular formulations of these causes. But what both he and Douthat neglect to focus on is the fact that all of these movements were *Protestant* movements. (Temperance wasn't just a Protestant crusade - it was an *anti-Catholic* crusade.)

Which is, of course, only logical: America was, from its founding until roughly 1950, a Protestant country, both in fact and in self-conception. Stating that fact doesn't change or undermine the equally true fact that freedom of religion, anti-establishment and equality for citizens of all faiths were fundamental American principles from the beginning. American Jews still rightly prize Washington's letter. But the notion that the Jewish *religion* was in some sense part of the American *identity* is a 195os-era innovation, a product of the era when the Jews and the Catholic ethnics of America "became white" and America, still a "nation with the soul of a church" tried to think of itself no longer as Protestant but as a country founded on the "Judeo-Christian tradition."

Except that there is no such tradition, not in any meaningful sense. There's a Christian tradition, but Catholics, Protestants and Eastern Christians approach that tradition very differently. And Judaism is outside that tradition; Jews and Christians can, one hopes, have fruitful religious dialogue (I once said that because we cannot choose to be strangers, we must endeavor to be friends lest we revert to being enemies), but that dialogue takes place across a substantial chasm. And America was not founded upon a chasm.

The 1950s, and not the 1970s: this is the period from which Linker's "liberal bargain" dates, the bargain that let JFK assume the Presidency in exchange for his commitment not to take his Catholicism too seriously (i.e., seriously enough to impact his policymaking). The rise of a distinctive secular (as oppose to merely irreligious) subculture in the 1970s was merely the follow-on to the deconstruction of America's traditional Protestant identity that took place twenty years earlier.

This context explains why Linker is right that the theocons are different from previous religious/political movements in American history. First, and most simply, because the theocons are transparently Catholic in inspiration, where all previous notable movements were Protestant. But second, relatedly but more importantly, because all previous movements took place against the backdrop of an assumed Protestant religious identity of the nation as a whole, and spoke to the nation in terms of that identity. The abolitionists, the temperance crusaders, the preachers of the social gospel: they were not trying to restore America's religious identity; they were trying to restore America's virtue, to get her to live up to that identity. The theocons, by contrast, are trying to *determine* America's religious identity; they are engaged in identity politics. Which is why, even though their policy goals are decidedly modest, they appear so threatening to so many. Identity politics is *always* threatening, because it is hard to compromise one's identity without feeling one has compromised one's integrity.

(As an aside, there have certainly been Catholic social movements in the United States, but these tended to be identity-politics movements of the parochial kind - movements that did not so much speak to the *American* identity as attempt to defend a special *Catholic* identity against the larger culture, or to change the larger culture to make *room* for that identity. That's somewhat analogous to the mode of Muslim organizations today, in America and in Europe, and is very different from the kind of identity politics that the theocons are up to.)

Linker rightly bemoans that state of affairs, but I don't see how he's doing anything more than engaging in combat on the same field. I can tentatively agree with Linker that there's an asymmetry between his ideology and that of the theocons: that theirs is a kind of total vision while Linker's, good liberal that he is, appears to be more modest. But it's still an ideology. And it's still an ideology in the service of identity: a dispute about what *being an American* means.

Which brings me to what I think is the largest unspoken problem with Linker's position. Whether or not the theocon position *is* covertly illiberal (I'm going to reserve judgement on my feelings about that until I've read Linker's book, but I'm going in inclined to disagree), it's certainly *perceived* as such by liberals, and I think the reason is that they *correctly* read it as a species of identity politics, and that it advances an American identity with which they don't . . . identify. But the "liberal bargain" that Linker advocates fails, I think, in either one of two ways. On the one hand, Linker's liberalism may be a "thick" liberalism, a real substantive liberal identity that Linker believes in - in which case the theocon critique of liberalism as a "secular religion" has teeth. Or, on the other hand, it may be a "thin" liberalism that tries not to articulate much in the way of a substantive identity for the citizenry to unite around - in which case it is unlikely to be terribly satisfying, and will encourage the formation of strong identities that are sub- or supra-national as the primary identities of the citizenry. This is what Douthat is talking about, effectively, when he warns that Damon may not like the choices people make if you force them to choose between *identifying* with Christ or with the Republic. It may well be that such an outcome is, on balance, good for religion - or, anyhow, good for religious organizations. I'm not convinced it's good for America, though - not because we'll become decadent and immoral, but because we'll become increasingly divided as a nation.

The rubber meets the road on things like public education. Are we to have it? If we live in a libertarian utopia where we don't, then the rubber doesn't meet the road much, and we have a "thin" liberalism that shouldn't cause conservative Christians much pain. But we substantially rely on public education not only to teach reading, writing and 'rithmetic (assuming they still teach these things) but also to bind us together as a nation (something I know we don't teach much anymore). Our modus operandi for decades has been that a liberal society needs to teach the next generation to be good liberals, for its own continuity's sake. *This* is what lies behind the conviction of the actual citizens who support the theocon position that Linker's liberal bargain is not nearly as neutral, nor his liberalism as "thin", as he might claim.

Sam Huntington in his book, Who Are We?, closes with a half-hedged prediction that as America has become more racially and ethnically diverse, we will turn increasingly to Christianity as the source of our common national identity, revitalizing what is in fact the oldest strain in our identity (going back to Plymouth). I suspect he is right; indeed, I'd be inclined to hedge less than he does. What remains to be seen is whether America will make Catholicism into (pragmatically) a Protestant denomination, or whether the Catholic church will transform American Protestantism and make America, pragmatically, a Catholic country. Neuhaus's critics on the right think he's an agent of the former type of change; Linker is, effectively, charging him with trying to effect the latter type of change. I don't know who's right about that, or if either of them are, and it seems to me that, as a Jew, I probably don't have a dog in that particular fight. But that question, it seems to me, is what's really at issue in considering the ideology of the theocons, and what they mean for America.

2006-09-29T10:14:00.000-04:00

Next: I am opposed to war with Iran. I surprise myself in this, for four reasons.

First, I find nuclear proliferation to be an extremely dangerous threat in general. I have, in the past, said that preemptive action to take out the North Korean nuclear program was justified. And Iran is a more determined enemy of the United States than North Korea is (albeit also a weaker enemy in any conventional military sense), so proliferation there should be more worrying. Moreover, an Iranian bomb would assuredly lead Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Egypt down the path of nuclearization, if only to deter Iran.

Second, because I supported (at the time) the war in Iraq in part because of the WMD claims, and those claims with respect to Iran are vastly more credible than they ever were with respect to Iraq.

Third, because I am very much a friend of Israel, and I recognize that the Iranian bomb significantly alters the balance of power in the Middle East to Israel's detriment. Indeed, one cannot completely dismiss the notion that Iran would be willing to use nuclear weapons aggressively, though I myself do not think they would do this.

And fourth, because I think nuclear terrorism is the ultimate contemporary nightmare, and that al Qaeda would certainly use nuclear weapons if it had them, and that the example of Afghanistan proves that terrorist groups like al Qaeda, if they gain control of a state, may be willing to strike countries capable of massive retaliation even though that logically means that they will lose control of the state they have, which undermines any argument for deterrence against such regimes.

I should point out as well that, unlike my previous post, the topic of this one is not actually pressing, because we are nowhere near going to war with Iran. We have done nearly nothing to make such a war possible, either in terms of positioning equipment or getting the support of the American people or preparing the diplomatic ground. The tentative initial diplomatic gestures we have made have been rebuffed. The only reason *anyone* is talking about the possibility of war is that the President has said in various people's presence that he will not leave office without dealing with the Iranian nuclear problem. I don't see any signs yet that this vague promise - made basically to himself - is being translated into precipitate action.

So: why am I opposed to war with Iran?

Several reasons, which I articulate here.

1. Pakistan. Pakistan, like Iran, is an Islamic dictatorship. But there are important differences. Pakistan is, arguably, less democratic. Its people are, almost certainly, more anti-American. Pakistan has ties to al Qaeda, a terrorist group actively at war with America, while Iran is the patron of Hezbollah, a terrorist group actively at war with Israel but not with America, and which has only struck Americans as such when America was intervening in Lebanon (whereas they have incidentally struck American Jews in Israel and elsewhere in the world as part of attacks on Israeli and non-Israeli Jewish targets). And, of course, Pakistan already has nuclear weapons. America's "alliance" with Pakistan is already on its last legs. But the nuclear terrorist nightmare becomes vastly more likely if Pakistan collapses or is captured by al-Qaeda sympathetic forces. Indeed, the likelihood of nuclear terrorism originating in Pakistan must be rated more highly than the likelihood of nuclear terrorism originating in Iran. I'm convinced that an attack on Iran would mean the end of any prospect of controlling Pakistan and keeping it from going wholeheartedly over to the dark side.

2. China. The United States has a massive interest in integrating China into an international system, in enabling China to emerge as a great power without feeling the need to become a "revisionist" power. We failed in this regard with Japan in the 1920s and 1930s, with consequences that are well-known. If we fail with China, the consequences could be considerably worse. The Chinese leadership has for some time been consciously stoking Han nationalism as a way of building support for a regime that no longer espouses socialism in any meaningful sense of the word, and that has been tainted by massive corruption. We have to maneuver carefully between the Scylla of making the regime feel threatened from without and the Charybdis of making the regime feel like there's a power vacuum for it to occupy. Right now, I fear our foreign policy is achieving the worst of both worlds: making China worried about our intentions and unimpressed with our abilities. War with Iran would substantially increase Chinese perceptions of America as a threat. If the war achieved success levels similar to our Iraqi adventure, it would also deepen their contempt for our abilities. Moreover, precipitate American action in Iran would lead to a reassessment in a variety of minor Asian capitals as to the relative dangers of American or Chinese patronage. Who would want to be the Turkey of East Asia when America decides to target North Korea, or Burma, or some other state? That's going to be a question asked in Bangkok and Seoul and Jakarta and Manila, and China is poised to reap the benefit any time the answer is, "not us!"

3. We have no justification for war. Iran is not threatening to attack us. Yes, they have called for our destruction, but not in terms that constitute acts of war, and we have not implicated them in any actual attacks on our interests much less our country. Yes, they are pretty clearly cheating on their obligations under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, but there is no provision in that treaty giving the nuclear powers the right to enforce its terms by the use of arms. I'm unaware of any actual casus belli that we have against the Iranian regime, unless it is the seizure of our Embassy lo these 27 years ago. And while there is no actual statute of limitations operative in such matters, it would be outright farcical to attempt to justify an attack on Iran on *that* basis. War on Iran, then, would set a new precedent: that the United States feels it has the right to attack any country that seeks to acquire nuclear weapons. Now, one might be inclined to say: what's wrong with such a precedent? Wouldn't the world be a better place if would-be proliferators feared the wrath of the United States? Perhaps it would - if the United States were immune from any consequences of its behavior. But try to imagine what such a conclusion would feel like in Ankara, or Jakarta, or Moscow - or even in London or Ottawa or Canberra. Even if we want to be the world's policeman, the world has not elected us to the post as yet.

4. The war would be unconstitutional. A war of aggression conducted without international sanction would be a very bad endeavor indeed. (We need no international sanction to make war in self-defense, but as noted, Iran's threats to America have been almost entirely rhetorical, and mere possession of dangerous weapons cannot plausibly be construed to rise to the level of threat justifying launching a war in ostensible self-defene.) But it is also remotely unlikely that the President would undertake such a war under authorization of a proper declaration of war by Congress. And that should trouble us very much. In the last 60 years, the President has conducted numerous wars without declarations. But these have by and large fallen into recognizable categories. Korea and the first Iraq War were police actions conducted under U.N. auspices. They were arguably not "wars" between the United States and another country but situations where that other country was declared an outlaw, and America led a collective effort to bring the outlaw down under treaties which obliged us to do so. In such cases, perhaps an "authorization to use force" is more appropriate than a declaration of war, as the latter makes "personal" between America and the outlaw country a matter that we have reason to want to seem impersonal. Vietnam, meanwhile, was an effort to assist that poor country from being subverted by a revolutionary group financed by its neighbor. We escalated to full-scale war by small degrees, such that it is perhaps understandable Congress never roused itself to recognition of the crossing of that Rubicon. Finally, we engaged in a number of small wars - Grenada, Panama - that were without our traditional "sphere of influence" and were hardly large enough to dignify with the name of "war." Virtually all our military adventures undertaken since WWII - none of which have been declared wars - can be excused constitutionally under one or more of these three categorizations. The main exceptions are the last three wars our nation has fought: Kossovo, which was pretty plainly illegal as NATO had not been attacked by Serbia; Afghanistan, which was plainly legal under international law and, as well, about as justified a war as could be imagined, but which obviously should have been a declared war; and the second Iraq war, which could be justified legally as both a domestic and international matter by saying that America and the President specifically had residual authorization under the U.N. resolutions that preceded and followed the first Iraq war to resume its "police action" when those resolutions were flagrantly violated. An attack on Iran that was not conducted under an actual declaration of war would meet none of these conditions. It would quite plainly set a dangerous constitutional precedent in letting the President undertake aggressive war without the consent of the people and their representatives.

5. We would not win the war. We have not yet won in Iraq, and I see precious little chance of us doing so. Pinprick air strikes are not going to eliminate the Iranian nuclear program; at best they would set it back a few years. There is a reason that the Administration has - in a not-very-serious way - been asking questions about the utility of low-yield nuclear weapons as part of an Iran strike. The irony of conducting a nuclear first-strike as a way of preventing nuclear proliferation is apparently lost on those asking the questions. In any event, it seems clear to me that if we struck Iran from the air, we would not be sure of success, and we would quickly become embroiled in a wider war - either within Iran, because we invaded, or around the Gulf, because Iran closed the Straits of Hormuz, or attacked the Saudi oil regions, or began firing conventional missiles at our bases in Iraq, or a combination of all of these. And even though we could quickly destroy the Iranian airforce, and would win a pitched tank battle quite easily, we do not have the resources to *subdue* Iran, which has nearly three times the population and four times the land area of Iraq. We invaded Iraq on the assumption that if we had sufficient force to win a battle with the enemy in the open, we would win the war. The enemy declined to meet us, and we have been losing steadily ever since we took Baghdad. Iran will be very different, as the state is much less fragile and more capable, and the country has much more national consciousness. This might lead the Iranians to make the mistake of fighting us head-to-head, but it also might mean that the government of Iran would successfully coordinate a guerilla campaign against a U.S. invasion. Lest we think that overwhelming conventional superiority guarantees victory, we should recall the German experience in the Balkans in World War II as well as our current war in Iraq. The Atlantic conducted a wargame of a U.S.-Iranian conflict a couple of years ago, and the result was very unfavorable to the United States. If victory is defined as anything more than damaging Iran's ability to develop nuclear weapons for a decade or so, then I think victory will be elusive. If victory is defined as nothing more than this, then it seems to me that victory would be quite Pyrrhic in character - for the United States, anyway. For Israel, with much less to lose, such a victory would probably be sufficient. But we have a lot more to lose in terms of the collateral costs of conducting such a war.

6. War is not a general solution. Nuclear technology is now generally available. A host of European and Asian countries have the technical capacity to nuclearize already; several other countries could get there quickly if they felt the need. And then there is the long list of countries nominally further away from nuclearization who would love to get there quickly. The odds are that an Iranian bomb would accelerate the process of proliferation in the Middle East specifically. But the process is going to continue regardless. Between Russia, China, North Korea and Pakistan, the world has enough providers of nuclear know-how who will not kowtow to American wishes. And it is very hard to see how making war on Iran is any kind of precedent for a workable strategy of nonproliferation. We have not gone to war with Pakistan, and it is a nuclear power; we are not likely to go to war with Turkey if it decides to go nuclear. War with Iran would be a very expensive delaying action, and I'm not even clear how much delay would be achieved if what we're trying to delay is a world in which terrorists potentially have access to nuclear weapons. This is a depressing conclusion. But it does not follow from the fact that it is depressing that the conclusion is false, or that simply voting for war makes you less culpable for a bad outcome because at least you did *something* - any more than voting *against* war makes you less culpable because at least you voted for "peace." More broadly, I feel like the case for war rests in part on a kind of nostalgia for the good old days when the West could deal with threats from the South summarily. But the reason the West could do this was not just a matter of a lack of "politically correct" scruples back in said good-old-days. Nor was it merely a matter of technological superiority; we still have that in spades. It's also a matter of demographics. In 1900, Iraq had a population of about 2 million, Britain a population of about 35 million - a ratio of 17 to 1. And Britain found occupying Iraq after World War I to be an enormous pain. Today, Iraq has a population of 27 million, the U.K. a population of 60 million, a ratio of a bit over 2 to 1. And that understates the change in the ratio, as the U.K.'s population is much older than Iraq's; a ratio of males of military age would show an even more dramatic change, and a much less favorable ratio. In the heyday of Western imperialism, the West had an overwhelming demographic advantage over a South that was pre-modern, traditional, quietistic, and most of all sparsely populated. Today's South is still under-developed, but it is increasingly modern, politically mobilized and densely populated - and there are just a lot more of them. Strategies that might have worked 100 years ago are simply inapplicable today. I wish more war advocates understood this.

7. There is no rush, or it's too late. Iran is already past the point of having the capabilities to develop a weapon. They have all the technologies they need. It's too late to stop them by halting technology transfer. But they are still a few years away from a workable weapon. That means we have time to figure out an effective strategy to handle them, even if that strategy may involve a military component. This was a key point of Edward Luttwak's article in Commentary, and I take it to heart.

8. Nuclear weapons are useless as offensive weapons. Iran could not conceivably win a war by using nuclear weapons. The only rational use of nuclear weapons would be in self-defense against a conventional threat (this was America's war plan during the Cold War in the event of a Soviet invasion of Germany, and it is likely Pakistan's war plan today against a hypothetical Indian invasion), or as a second-strike capability against a decapitating nuclear first-strike. It is overwhelmingly likely that the reason Iran wants nuclear weapons is to deter other countries - preeminently us - from attacking them, and to give it greater freedom for aggressive behavior in its near abroad. America is perfectly capable of countering the latter; if Iran tries to "Finlandize" Azerbaijan or Qatar or what-have-you, that will only push many countries in the region *closer* to the United States. Until Iran has the kind of soft power that China has developed (which, on a much smaller scale, they could eventually develop - Iran has an educated population, after all, and is a better bet than any other Middle Eastern state to actually become a developed country), it is unlikely to win allies of genuine interest. If Iran tries to bully its way into regional hegemony, the strategy will backfire, even if they have nuclear weapons in their pocket. So the great risk is that Iran will do something profoundly irrational, like conducting nuclear terrorism against the United States or, more likely, Israel. This risk cannot be entirely discounted. But neither can it be a kind of conversation-ending catch-all justification for aggressive war. Those minds so dedicated to coming up with justifications for war should spend a bit more of their time figuring out how to deter Iran from doing what we are most afraid of them doing: handing nukes to terrorists. On the one hand, Iran has said some inflammatory things, and the current President is a complete nut-job. On the other hand, Iran's *actions* have been carefully calibrated, and Iran has not initiated hostilities against any country in a very long time. I certainly think we can make a strong case for a variety of coercive diplomatic measures to quarantine Iran as punishment for violating their NPT obligations. But I just can't see how we justify aggressive war on the basis that we "worry" Iran will do something crazy like nuking Los Angeles in the hopes we won't figure out who did it and turn their civilization into a shiny glass plain. In the end, the question of Iran's rationality rests on the question of whether the leadership of the regime is more like the Soviets - a bunch of dangerous radicals but aware of reality and eager to grow in power, not to commit suicide - or more like al Qaeda - maniacs whose sole principle is destruction for the sake of destruction. On the evidence of Iran's behavior for the past 25 years, I'm very much inclined toward the former rather than the latter understanding.

That's it in a nutshell. I could probably say more. I know there are answers I have not anticipated here to all of the points above. But I've been over this ground in my head a number of times over a long period. I guess my conclusion here means that I've finally left the "fold" in a definitive way. Where I've wound up, I don't know yet. I'll keep you posted, though.

2006-09-29T09:21:00.000-04:00

I'm very behind on things I want to post here. And if I have any time to post, I want to post about the productions I saw this summer at Stratford. But I feel like I need to put down a marker on a handful of contemporary matters, so here we go: the next few posts give you my opinions on a variety of matters, with hopefully at least a little bit of supporting rationale, just so you know where I stand.

First, I'm against the torture bill, strongly. The specific techniques that Andrew Sullivan never tires of talking about - waterboarding, stress positions, hypothermia - are plainly tortures. They are "civilized" tortures in that they do not cause permanent physical harm; indeed, I've read that CIA operatives trained to apply waterboarding practice the technique on each other, which they would certainly not do if they were being trained to rip out fingernails. But they are plainly tortures, in that they are designed to cause pain and suffering, and break the prisoner by making him desperate to end that suffering. That's torture.

I'm not convinced that we need to go down this road. I'm very persuaded, in particular, by the argument that by formally legalizing such procedures, you will inevitably make them routine. That's certainly what happened in Israel when "moderate physical pressure" became part of the Shin Bet's arsenal. And while I'm both skeptical of making human rights the centerpiece of our diplomacy and generally indifferent to bien pensant opinion in Europe, formally endorsing torture by the CIA is going to alienate lots of people who are our natural allies, not only people who are already disposed to be our enemies.

I recognize the moral force of the argument for torture in a "ticking time-bomb" scenario. But if we really think there's a nuke in Los Angeles, and CIA officers torture a suspect to find out where it's hidden, and those officers are sued after the fact because they got the wrong guy, the President can always pardon them and take the political heat himself. I am totally unconvinced that we need to make torture legal and, potentially, routine in order to protect CIA officers from lawsuits. I'm far more convinced that what today is restricted to a "ticking time-bomb" scenario will tomorrow be applied for purely political purposes - as, indeed, there is some evidence was already done in the first months after 9-11.

Moreover, I do not think the Administration has earned Congress's or the people's trust in terms of what this bill actually says or how it will be applied. Even if, let's say, Arlen Specter were assured by the President verbally that, for example, this bill could not be construed as a suspension of the writ of habeus corpus for American citizens deemed by an unaccountable military court to be unlawful enemy combatants, I'm not sure why he should trust that assurance. At this late date, I think Reagan's old maxim - "trust, but verify" - must be applied to any legislation proposed by this Administration. And this particular legislation especially merits such scrutiny.

Finally, I am appalled that we are even considering legalizing torture while standing resolute in our refusal to apply appropriately targeted screening techniques at points of entry into the United States. This President has been willing to go the people demanding the right to declare anyone an enemy combatant and torture that person, but he is not willing to go the people and say that ethnicity, religion, age and sex should determine who is subject to more aggressive searches before he boards an airline. I can find no good excuse, and no good moral justification, for his preference in this regard. I wish the opposition party could oppose this bill in those terms, but unfortunately they will not. So I am left hoping they will successfully oppose it in whatever terms, because this bill should be opposed, and defeated.

2006-09-26T09:57:00.000-04:00

So Japan has a new Prime Minister. Elvis has left the building. And the question on everyone's lips is (naturally enough): what pop icon will Shinzo Abe model himself on?

If I might be so bold as to make a suggestion?

You see it, don't you?

Okay, before you laugh, look: they've even got a 5th Beatle!

2006-09-25T08:33:00.000-04:00

This year's Rosh Hashanah menu was (drum-roll please . . .)

Fried whole sardines marinated in wine vinegar with onions, pine nuts and sultanas, served over greens
Chicken soup with shiitake mushrooms and chicken-and-shiitake-stuffed kreplach
Pot roast cooked in red wine with porcinis
Cabbage rolls stuffed with lamb and rice in a tomato and dried cherry sauce
Saute of butternut squash, carrots and bosc pears with mint and garlic in a wine vinegar and honey sauce
Chickpea and cucumber salad with cumin seed, preserved lemon and garlic chives
Honey cake (brought by my sister)
Plum cake (brought by my step-mother)

And best wishes for a healthy, sweet and joyous new year to you all.

2006-09-15T14:15:00.000-04:00

Things I owe my readers:

- Reviews of more than a dozen books that I've read since I last posted book reviews.
- Reviews of a dozen plays that I saw at the Stratford Festival (well, one at Shaw) in Canada this summer.

I would rather be writing these things. Actually, I would rather be writing the book I never finished, or any of the books or screenplays I never started. But that's all one: I have no time.

So: some quick thoughts on things that are easy to have quick thoughts about.

1. The Pope had some things to say about de-Hellenization, and the media has picked up particularly on his comments about Islam, and the relationship between faith and reason in Christianity versus Islam. To whit (if I may simplify): in Christianity, because of its Greek heritage, reason is allied to faith. One cannot substitute reason for faith, but one can reason to faith and within faith. (I think I have that right.) In Islam, he implies (though the Pope never explicitly endorses this view), faith is beyond reason. There is, of course, technical reason within Islam (legal reasoning, for example) and compatible with Islam (scientific reasoning). But reason as the Greeks (or Plato) understood it, Benedict implies, is not an ally of the Muslim faith.

I have no idea if this is right about either Islam or Christianity. It seems to me that much theology is more technical and instrumental in its reasoning than its practitioners admit, and that as a matter of history Christianity has had its partisans of unreason as well as reason. But I did want to address a common assumption, that Judaism works in some way similarly to Christianity in this regard. It does not - anyway, traditional Judaism does not.

To some extent, Judaism is quite analogous to Islam, in that the kind of reasoning it engages in is instrumental - predominantly, legal reasoning. Legal reasoning, like mathematical reasoning, has an irreducible aesthetic component, but I don't think I'm wrong in describing it as instrumental. The interesting question is whether the rabbis of the Mishnaic and Talmudic eras thought of themselves as reasoning within a hermetic system or with reference to a larger philosophical framework. I'm inclined to believe that the rabbis of the generation of the Mishnah were indeed reasoning with reference to a larger philosophical framework, one recognizably influenced by the Greek philosophical tradition. But I'm less sure about the generation responsible for the Gemarra, which is a much stranger text.

In other ways, Judaism is more similar to Christianity. The notion of human beings as partners with the divine is much more Judeo-Christian than Islamic. The Jewish conception of God is not quite so "near" as the Christian, but is much closer than (this is my impression) orthodox Islam's conception. As well, neither Christianity nor Judaism is possessed of Islam's horror of history; Judaism is highly conscious of its transformation through history (albeit, obviously, a strict traditionalist would interpret these historical developments differently than a religious liberal like myself) and Christianity cannot without profoundly bad conscience avoid an awareness that in its own terms it is only justified by its own pre-history (in Judaism). Both of these have some bearing on Benedict's point, though they are not identical to it.

But in other ways, Judaism is quite distinct from either Christianity of Islam. The most obvious way is very much on-point to the distinction Benedict draws. Judaism is the only one of the three major monotheistic faiths in which religious obligation is passed down the bloodline. In Islam, all people on earth are born Muslims, and need to return to their birthright faith if they hvae been corrupted by their upbringing. In Christianity, all people on earth are born in sin, and need to accept God's self-sacrifice to be redeemed and born again as Christians. In Judaism, people are born as they are - and those who are born as Jews are born with specific (and un-natural) religious obligations. And we signify this special birthright with an act of violence: circumcision. (Muslims also practice circumcision, of course - for that matter, so do most American Christians - but it signifies differently.) My point being: howsoever Judaism may (with Christianity) exalt reason as the pinnacle of human faculties, the one that brings us closest to God, and the handmaiden rather than the enemy of faith, there are some aspects of our relationship to the divine that are indeed beyond reason.

2. Steve Sailer has written a good piece on a book I have not read, John Keegan's A History of Warfare. As I say, I haven't read the book, but from Sailer's description it sounds like Vic Hanson through a glass darkly. That is to say: Keegan and Hanson agree on what makes the West different from the rest in terms of the practice of warfare; it's just that Keegan thinks this is a bad thing, and Hanson that it is a good thing.

Which raises the question: couldn't they both be right? Couldn't the Western way of warfare be intimately related to the Western tradition of free self-government (as Hanson thinks) *and* horribly and ultimately irrationally destructive, as Keegan thinks? I don't see why they couldn't, and I can easily think of reasons why they could be.

Sailer is re-reading Keegan in the context of his opposition to a confrontation with Iran. I have a lot to say on that point, and no time now to say it all. (I've said some of it already elsewhere, but I haven't put all my thoughts together in one place.) But I will say this much apropos of Sailer's fears of nuclear genocide. He should recall that, in the 1940s and 1950s, there was a similar clamor in some quarters for a nuclear first-strike against the Soviet Union. And while this sentiment never became a majority view by any means, it was far from being confined to the lunatic fringes. People forget this, but no less a luminary than Betrand Russell advocated a nuclear first-strike against the Soviet Union by the United States in the early post-war years. He understood just how evil the Soviet system was, and he understood that conflict between free peoples and Soviet Communism was inevitable. He wanted that conflict to happen on the most favorable terms to the free world, which he believed obtained when the United States had a nuclear monopoly. Once two hostile powers had the A-bomb, the future of the human species itself was at stake.

It seems to me that commentators like Krauthammer are making much the same argument with regard to Iran. In their view, it's not so much that Iran is anything like as powerful as the Soviets, or that they ever will be. It's that they don't believe deterrence will work against them. If you accept that proposition, all else follows. The question, then, is why anyone would believe that Iran cannot be deterred. Once they have the bomb - and they will get it; I fully expect that - we will have to think the truly unthinkable: how to learn to stop worrying and live with it. Which means it makes sense to start thinking about that possibility now. The refusal to consider seriously a nuclear-armed Iran, the jump to the conclusion that such a world is synonymous with the apocalypse, is the hawkish parallel to the dove's refusal to consider scenarios in which we might use nuclear weapons. Both are evasions of the real world, intellectual surrenders. Both are more likely to lead to wars - bad wars - than a realistic appraisal of risks and costs on either side of various propositions.

2006-09-01T14:25:00.000-04:00

I admit to being fascinated by the current debate over the name of the enemy. (See here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and probably a bunch of other places - personally, I've been following it in The Corner, as if you couldn't tell.

As far as fascism goes, my guide is Stanley Payne, who authored a well regarded history of fascism. If I recall correctly, the key components to fascism are:

state leadership of all sectors of society and economy, but no elimination of private property;
wartime-like mobilization of the population as a whole even in conditions of relative peace;
a social vision of an "organic" society in which classes exist but cooperate to move society forward;
a cult of youth and feeling, and especially of violence, and a consequent denigration of tradition, rationality and bourgeois order;
a hypertrophied adolescent masculinism and denigration of the feminine;
hyper-patriotism, ultra-nationalism and the glorification of the military, even tending to develop a cult of martyrdom; and
the fuhrerprinzip.

I've probably left one or two items off of that list, but it's a good start, I think. Different movements classified as "fascist" had their own special traits. Something akin to Christian fascism did develop in Romania and, I would argue, in Spain, but that would not be a fair way to describe Italian fascism, to say nothing of Nazism which was aggressively pagan and anti-Christian. Japanese militarism was accompanied by a unique racial ideology, as was German Nazism, that was not common to the southern European fascist movements. But we call these different groups fascist because they have a common denominator, whatever the distinctions between them.

So: are our current enemies properly described as "fascist" or "Islamo-fascist"?

Well, the economic ideology of bin Laden is obscure to say the least, as is his political vision. I see no evidence that any of the entities that get called "Islamo-fascist" have embraced the fuhrerprinzip, nor that they have proposed any mechanism or have any plans for the total mobilization of their various societies. Iran, for example, has a political structure far more similar to that of the Soviet Union than to that of fascist Italy or Nazi Germany, and it is far from completely mobilized - they spend about 3% of GDP on the military. The Baathism of Saddam Hussein was indeed derived from European fascist models, but the Baath was historically the enemy of Islamist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood. The ugly dictatorships in Syria, Iraq (under Saddam) and, for that matter, Pakistan and Egypt have at various times made alliances of convenience with Islamist groups and have in numerous cases actively sponsored their activities, as, for example, Syria does today with Hezbollah and Pakistan did with the Taliban and the Kashmiri terrorist groups. But a distinction must be made between patron and client.

On the other hand, Islamist groups like Hezbollah and Hamas do articulate an "organic" vision of society, albeit one that makes no meaningful reference to economic reality; they have developed a cult of martyrdom and embrace a hyper-masculinist ideology; they are driven by romantic ideas and their actions are sometimes rooted more in fantasy than in strategy; they are fundamentally youthful movements; and, interestingly given that they are religious in nature, they are basically anti-traditional as fundamentalist religion usually is.

So: are they fascist? I think that designation probably obscures more than it clarifies. What is probably more true is that their appeal is akin to the appeal of fascism; that they are popular for some of the same reasons that fascism was popular where and when it was.

But what I think is interesting in the debate is that the Corner-niks seem to be looking for some word, some concept, that will correspond to the Axis of Evil that President Bush famously identified in 2002 - something that will make it clear how the Iranian regime and bin Laden and Saddam Hussein are all parts of the same whole that is out to get us. But, in truth, the only thing that unites these disparate groups is . . . Islam. You could say, if you choose, that what unites them is "bad Islam" as opposed to "good Islam" and dress that good/bad distinction up any way you like. But *if* they are parts of a whole, *that* is the whole they are part of. There is no way I can see to square that circle, to name our enemy without making it either smaller or bigger than the folks in The Corner and, for that matter, the Administration would like.

The notion that World War II was a grand ideological conflict is belated anyway, I should mention. We were not fighting "fascism" in the abstract - we were fighting Hitler's Germany and Tojo's Japan, and we were only fighting Italy because the Duce chose the wrong side. And all of our alliances were at least in part of convenience; Roosevelt hated the British Empire, and dreaded the thought that the war against Hitler would be used by Churchill to extend its life and scope even as World War I had done, and Churchill, needless to say, hated Soviet Communism nearly as much as he hated Hitler. And our primary ally in Asia - the Kuomintang of China - had fascist tendencies. Even when we talked about the enemy in ideological terms, fascism, Nazism and Japanese militarism were the words we used for our respective opponents. The Communists were the ones who made a fetish of the word, "fascist" as the ultimate epithet - and they were as likely to hurl it against Trotskyites and other "social-fascists" as they called them as against the Nazis. It does nothing to detract from the idealism of that conflict to point out that our enemies were regimes that were trying to conquer the world - and had a decent chance of succeeding.

So who are we fighting? Certainly al-Qaeda. Certainly regimes or movements that support al-Qaeda. As well, we are newly aware of the potential danger from nuclear terrorism, and we are newly serious, or at least I hope we are, about preventing the continued spread of nuclear technology to hands that might be undeterrable - but that effort might involve as much hugging unpleasant characters and regimes, like that of Pakistan, as it does fighting them. Beyond that? We could say, with the paleo-right, that beyond that . . . nothing; we're not fighting anyone beyond that, and have no aims beyond wiping out al-Qaeda and getting better control over nuclear technology. Or, alternatively, we could say we are fighting "Islamic fascism" or "Jihadism" or "political Islam" or "Islamic extremism" or "Islamic militancy" or "Islamic terrorism" or what-have-you, and it doesn't much matter. Whichever phrase we use is close enough for government work, and whichever phrase we use there are only two bits of semantic content. One bit tells you that were fighting against some kind of violent political tendency; the other bit tells you that this tendency is to be found among Muslims. In other words, naming the enemy as such tells you we are engaged in a war for the soul of a civilization - but not our own.

Whether one can wage that kind of a war is a real question in my mind five years into the War of September 11th. I will content myself for now with pointing out that this was *not at all* the way we thought of World War II or the Cold War, the two conflicts which so many conservative pundits continually compare this one to. In World War II, the enemy was *out there* and we were out to *destroy* him. In the Cold War, the enemy was also *out there* but his tentacles reached here, and so we had two missions: to kill those tentacles and to stand guard at the walls, in each case to keep the enemy *out*.

Keeping Iran *out* in the sense of keeping them from attacking us directly should be pretty easy. We could squish them pretty thoroughly if they tried. How much a small nuclear arsenal changes this equation is a good question, and one I think no one should be too confident in answering, which makes it hard to say how much blood and treasure we should spend to avoid having to answer it. But of course, since 9-11 most of the terrorist attacks have come not from without but from within; the terrorists in London and Madrid were home-grown. It is in confronting the enemy *within* that this whole business of *naming* the enemy actually becomes important. What kind of language *separates* the terrorist recruiter from his community, as opposed to binding him to them? *That* is a good and interesting question, and one that I don't know the answer to. I suspect that "Islamic fascist" is probably the wrong answer, but that's just a hunch; I just don't think "fascist" sounds like anything more than "bad" to most people's ears, and Muslims probably hear the phrase and think it means "Muslims are bad" and nothing more. But the difficulty is that any language that would be both *precise* and *meaningful* to this audience probably has to be a native idiom, and there's no way that the authorities in London or Paris or Washington will be very persuasive using that idiom. In the Cold War, the enemy within was still *us* and we knew how to talk to and about them. In this war, that is not entirely the case, and we don't entirely know. But the exercise of trying to come up with the right language in this context seems to me to be a whole lot more productive than trying to come up with language to please ourselves.

2006-08-18T12:06:00.000-04:00

Oh, one more aside. The two dominant strains of commentary I've read on Israel's performance have been: Israel lost and this is a catastrophe; and, on the other hand, Israel didn't lose because Hezbollah was badly weakened, and if you say Hezbollah won you are buying into Hezbollah spin and letting them win the PR war.

I think I've answered the "catastrophe" position as well as I can. This was a clear and bad loss, but Hezbollah is not about to overrun Israel. As for the second, contrary argument: Hezbollah's assets are men and missiles. They don't appear to have lost any of their key leadership, and they will easily recruit more men with the propaganda victory they have achieved. And missiles are cheap; Iran has plenty, and Hezbollah still had some themselves at the end of the war, as they were launching right up to the date the cease-fire went into effect. I think the right way to score this is in terms of who achieved their objectives, and on that score it's pretty clear that Israel failed to achieve its objectives while Hezbollah achieved its objectives quite well. The other side isn't the only team to use spin, you know. Olmert and his team have every reason to want us to believe that they did a good job. The Israeli people aren't buying it. We shouldn't either.

Links to pieces I thought were good about the war:

Ze'ev Schiff in Ha'aretz
Yuval Steinitz in Ha'aretz
Yossi Klein Halevy in The New Republic
Andy McCarthy in NRO

2006-08-17T16:04:00.000-04:00

Sorry to be posting so sporadically, but I've barely been around, away much of last week and going away again today. Lots to talk about, but I'm going to stick for now to the situation in Israel.

Three things that, to me, seem pretty clear about the Israel-Lebanon war just ended:

One: Israel lost, unequivocally.

Two: It's just a battle, not the war, that was lost. Israel's security situation is marginally, not profoundly, worsened by their failure in Lebanon.

Three: The biggest setback is not to Israel's security situation but to Israel's democratic culture, and we'll see soon how big that setback was.

To the extent that Israel had anything resembling a concrete war aim in attacking Lebanon (which I don't believe they did - as I argued just before Israel launched their ground offensive, Olmert launched this war largely for domestic political reasons, and seems not to have bothered trying to figure out what the military objective was or how it might be achieved), that war aim was to cripple Hezbollah operationally, and incidentally to retrieve the two kidnapped soldiers. These aims were not remotely achieved. Hezbollah survives as an organization and will quickly rebuild both its ranks and its supply of missiles. Hezbollah's position internally within Lebanon and its clout with its Syrian patrons have both been significantly enhanced by its performance in the war. The new UN force will not forcibly disarm Hezbollah, nor will the Lebanese army. And not only have the kidnapped soldiers not been returned, their return is not a condition of the cease-fire. Hezbollah's objective was to provoke Israel into attacking, survive the attack sufficiently well to easily rebuild, and end hostilities on terms that would allow it to flourish. It achieved its aims, Israel failed to achieve its aims - so Israel lost, unequivocally.

The cost to Israel in terms of lives lost is not terribly significant. The economic cost is more so, and we'll see how badly the investment climate in Israel is damaged by the continued threat of attack. But Israel can survive both of these things. The neighboring Arab states have seen the IDF fail decisively for the first time, but they are not so foolish as to think either that they now can win a traditional ground war with Israel (to recover the Golan, say) or that they themselves can attack Israel with impunity (the leaders of the various states have a lot more to lose than Nasrallah does). What they will do is show Hezbollah more respect formally and informally, and will not again trust Israel to "solve" a terrorist problem for them.

The big cost to Israel is in terms of its relationship with the United States - or, at any rate, I hope that is the case. The U.S. gave Israel an extremely free hand in this conflict, and Israel quite clearly failed to deliver. Interestingly, I have heard from more than one Israeli the not-terribly-plausible theory going around Israel that Bush put Olmert up to this war - that we encouraged him to attack Lebanon as a sort of proxy-war against Iran. As I say, I find the story implausible. Domestic pressures are quite sufficient to explain Olmert's decision to take the war aggressively into Lebanon, and it's not at all clear how Israel bombing Hezbollah would either weaken Iran or strengthen America's position in its burgeoning confrontation with that country - and the ways in which the Lebanon war would complicate our position in Iraq were immediately obvious. This Israeli theory strikes me as another instance of a people wishing away their own failures by blaming the United States, a common enough strategy world-wide. But if it were true (and it isn't impossible, just unlikely) it seems to me that this would make the damage to Israel's relationship with the United States worse.

But, as I say, this is just a battle. Israel's geopolitical situation is not greatly changed. Hezbollah's primary strength comes from its financial backers, and these were as motivated before as they are now. Hezbollah is a Shiite power originally created by and still backed by Iran, the would-be Shiite regional hegemon. Syria, controlled by an obscure minority religious group and allied with Iran, has equal reason to be supportive. But Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan: these are all states that are dominated by Sunnis, fearful of their own restive Shiite minorities (especially in Saudi Arabia), and traditionally enemies of Iran. An Israeli victory would have met with quiet toasts in Cairo and Riyadh. But while the Israeli loss will make these powers more respectful towards Hezbollah, it will not make them into supporters.

Nor is Israel's security situation much changed. Before the war, Hezbollah threatened Israel with rockets; they will soon be able to do so again. Before the war, Lebanon could not, practically, control its territory; there is no sign that they will be able to do so now. The presence of an international force complicates Israel's ability to respond to future provocation, and that is a loss, but it doesn't actually prevent an Israeli response, just complicate it. If Hezbollah fires rockets at Israel, Israel will respond, blue helmets or no. (This is one major reason that, so far, the blue helmets have not materialized.) Hezbollah, meanwhile, has not demonstrated that they can defeat the Israeli army, much less seize and hold Israeli territory. Terrorist groups in Ireland and Algeria achieved many of their political objectives by means of terror, but they are a poor analogy to Israel because they were fighting to expel what were, effectively, colonial powers (though both Algeria and Ireland were integral parts of France and Great Britain respectively); Israel, by contrast, is fighting for its home. (The pied noirs and Protestant Irish were, of course, home, but they were not in a position to retain control of their countries without the assistance of the metropole.) So long as Israeli Jews are unwilling to be ruled (or, in the worst case scenario, be massacred or expelled by) Arabs, Israel will endure, and short of a nuclear attack that would completely change the complexion of the Israeli response (Israel reportedly has upwards of 200 atomic warheads, and was prepared to use them in 1973 when national survival was at stake) Hezbollah cannot plausibly "eliminate" Israel - its stated goal.

Nor, finally, is it obvious that Israel starts the next war in a worse position than it did this most recent one. On paper, the diplomatic end-game is surprisingly favorable to Israel. This reflects the fact that nobody but Iran actually wants Hezbollah to be victorious, and that a broad array of states recognize that Israel was, indeed provoked. (Israel has been condemned in many quarters for the conduct of the war, but in most of these she has not been condemned for "aggression" - and those who have condemned Israel for "aggression" are from the quarters that reject Israel's right to exist per se, so what can you expect.) The significance of this basically positive diplomatic context is that Israel has a clear path to resume hostilities in response to any new provocation.

All of this explains why I say that Israel lost unequivocally, but that the loss was not as significant as many commentators have suggested.

So what do I think the most significant consequences of this war will be?

I see four, all ominous for Israeli democracy. In increasing order of importance:

First, Israel is currently governed by a center-left coalition. It is not clear that there is another coalition capable of governing Israel, but it is imperative that Israeli voters hold Kadima (and Labor) accountable for the failure of this war. It is difficult to see how the electorate in Israel will square the circle they are presented with, and punish the current leadership without opting for an even less-plauible leadership. If they fail to do so, Israeli democracy will suffer in one fashion or another - either because the leadership is not held accountable or because Israel will come to be governed by an unstable or even bizarre coalition of special interest groups that hollows out the always fragile center in Israeli society.

Second, Israel is currently governed by a man who has fewer in the way of military credentials than possibly any prior Israeli leader. And he has proved incompetent in handling his first war. The lesson I expect Israelis to take home - and probably should take home - is that Israelis cannot trust their security to a Prime Minister who is not also a general. (The most optimistic scenario for the next government is that Kadima knocks off Olmert and replaces him with former Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz.) It is very hard to paint such a conclusion as a good thing for democratic culture.

Third, the class divisions in Israeli society have been brought home with a vengeance. Ehud Olmert is known as Israel's first "yuppie" Prime Minister, a proud member of Israel's overclass. His chief of staff, the man responsible for the notion that Israel could beat Hezbollah using air power alone, is similarly typecast. As happened before in the 1970s, Israelis are realizing that their leadership class is in a meaningful sense divorced from the people. The country did not have a good plan for protecting civilians, and they used the IDF not the way it has traditionally been used but more akin to the way Clinton used America's military - Olmert appeared to be more afraid of Israeli military casualties than of whether he would win or lose the war, and this will be interpreted as an expression of the elite's self-interested rather than collective-minded mentality. The same is true of the chief of staff's air-power-centric plan for dealing with Hezbollah in the first place. The same is true in spades of his decision to sell his stock portfolio before launching an attack. All of this will give a strong boost to Israeli populism, and populism is the favorite food of demagogues, not generally good for orderly democratic governance.

Fourth, and most significantly, it is worth noting that a large fraction - I suspect a majority - of Israel's Arab population supported Hezbollah in the war. Several Arab members of the Knesset vocally supported Hezbollah, and even relatives of civilians *killed* by Hezbollah's rockets were quoted supporting Hezbollah. Israeli Jews are not going to forget this. Among the Jewish population of Israel there was wall-to-wall support for the war in Lebanon - in contrast to the situation in the territories, where there are a variety of opinions and usually a clear majority in favor of withdrawing from most of Judea and Samaria. Hezbollah has no legitimate grievances against Israel; their grievance is Israel's existence. For Israeli Arabs to support Hezbollah is as much as to declare themselves not only alienated from the state and eager to change its character but an active fifth column, assisting those who would destroy Israel by violence. I have been growing steadily more pessimistic about the prospects for Israel's survival as a Jewish state with a substantial Arab Muslim minority as that minority has grown steadily more hostile to the state of which they are citizens. It is now hard to convince me that there is any plausible future but re-division of the country. The big winner, long-term, is going to be Avigdor Liberman of Yisrael Beiteinu, who has advocated "trading" the triangle region of the Galilee - the most concentrated Arab region in Israel, and also the home of the most radical Islamist groups - to the Palestinian entity in exchange for retention of key settlement blocs in Judea and Samaria (Ariel, Ma'ale Adumim, etc.). Unless this were accomplished by referendum, however, such a "trade" would be a clear violation of international law, as well as a profound violation of democratic principles, as it would entail summarily stripping hundreds of thousands of Israeli Arabs of their citizenship and forcing them to be citizens of a different polity. Nonetheless, that is where I think Israel is heading. This is the most profound reason why I think this war's most significant casualty is Israeli democracy.

Israel, for its own reasons, wants to get out of the bulk of the territories, because it does not want to suffer the fate of South Africa. Precisely because an Israeli withdrawal would also be a victory for Israel's enemies, those enemies will do everything they can to create conditions that reinforce the - plausible - interpretation that Israel has been driven out by Arab heroes and martyrs. Their attempts to create such conditions will be the spark for the next war, which will come sooner or later, probably sooner. One hopes that Israel will learn enough from their mistakes in the current conflict to be better prepared when the next conflict comes.

2006-08-01T10:23:00.000-04:00

Apologies to my long-suffering readers (if I still have any) for being incommunicado for so long. July was much busier than I expected, with business trips to London and Southern California and a surprisingly hectic schedule when in the office in New York. So, again, my apologies.

There are a lot of things I've wanted to say. Unfortunately, the topic you probably most want to hear about - the war in Lebanon and Gaza (remember Gaza? thought not) - is one that, frankly, I'm not sure how I feel about.

So perhaps I should air my thoughts in a relatively haphazard way, and see where they land.

- Israel's response, in the north especially, was, at the inception, extremely popular. Even now, there is virtually wall-to-wall support for a war with Hezbollah, albeit an increasingly loud chorus of outrage at the conduct of the war (its ineptness, not its violence).

- This should not be surprising, as the war was, to a considerable extent, launched for political reasons. The proper comparison of this war is not the 1982 Lebanon War, much less World War II (ridiculous comparisons to which continue to proliferate), but Operation Grapes of Wrath in 1996, Shimon Peres' strike on Lebanon that was intended to shore up his position in the run-up to that year's elections (it didn't work). By making that comparison, I don't mean to suggest that either the current operations or, for that matter, Operation Grapes of Wrath were unjustified. Hezbollah's naked aggression is manifestly unacceptable; Israel could with perfect justification respond with far greater force, including operations against Syria or even Iran. Justification is not the point. The point is: what is the objective of the war? It seems to me manifest that the primary objective of the war was political, and that the primary audience was Israel's own people. Prime Minister Olmert understood correctly that a failure to respond forcefully to brazen and unprovoked attacks from Gaza would discredit the idea of unilateral withdrawal, an idea he still fully intends to extend to much of Judea and Samaria. So he struck back to prove that Israel was still willing to defend itself - indeed, would defend itself more forcefully now that there were no Israeli civilians in the way (which was one of the primary rationales for the withdrawal from Gaza). And when Hezbollah responded, Olmert had to open a northern front as well.

- As I say, there's nothing unjustified about Israel's actions. But there's a problem with wars fought for domestic political purposes: they don't have a clear military objective. And once begun, the only acceptable way to end a war is to win it. And if you don't have a military objective that bears some relation to your offensive operations, then pretty much by definition you cannot achieve victory. And that's where Israel is today, on both fronts but more dramatically in Lebanon.

- Some have described this as a war to reestablish deterrence. But it is not obvious that Hezbollah is deterrable. On the contrary: so long as the political dynamic whereby Israeli responses strengthen Hezbollah's hand, there is no way to deter Hezbollah. If Israel ignores Hezbollah, they strengthen; if they respond, they strengthen. So why would Hezbollah not attack whenever war is useful to it or to its sponsors in Damascus and Tehran? Note that I am *not* saying that religious warfare is more "irrational" than other kinds of warfare, and that this is the reason they cannot be deterred. I think they cannot be deterred because it is not clear how Israel can respond in a way that clearly weakens them, and they know this. Lots of non-religious populations - Stalin's Soviet Union? Ho's North Vietnam? - have suffered immensely in war without breaking. If you that war not only will not break you, but will strengthen your position, why avoid war?

- For this reason, I am skeptical that Nasrallah or Assad or Ahmadinejad had some kind of "grand plan" in provoking this war that has either gone awry (assuming Hezbollah is suffering badly under the current campaign) or spectacularly well (assuming it isn't). No grand plan need be posited. These characters are more likely to benefit than not from disruption of the existing order. All they had to calculate is that the time was opportune to create a measure of chaos. That's not much of a plan, but it's sufficient to explain their behavior.

- Well before Israel withdrew from Gaza, I predicted that the IDF would return within a year. I nonetheless favored withdrawal and the dismantling of the settlements, because the settlements implied an Israeli *claim* to Gazan territory, and I thought that for both reasons of justice and prudence it made sense for Israel to renounce those claims. I never expected unilateral withdrawal would mean peace; I thought it would mean the continuation of war under altered conditions.

- A lot of commentators argued that withdrawal would make deterrence work better, because once they had Gaza the Palestinians would have something to lose, and would not lose that something readily. But I never bought this because the Palestinians have consistently chosen no loaf rather than settle for half. And precisely because there is no way to "eliminate" the terrorist infrastructure in a permanent way, I assumed that Israel would have to resume the occupation in order to protect its citizens from rocket attacks and other aggression. That's what's happening now, but it's not clear that Israel has set the stage for its ability to remain in place; indeed, Israel has made it pretty clear that it does not intend to remain in place.

- Similarly, after the withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000, I presumed that Israel would have to return. Israel had no territorial claims on Lebanon; its presence was entirely security-driven. Yes, the long occupation produced Hezbollah. But there was no reason to think that withdrawal would result in Hezbollah withering away, as indeed it has not. So now Israel has had to launch a full-scale war merely to "degrade" Hezbollah's capabilities - capabilities that can be rapidly rebuilt, at a fraction of the cost for Israel to degrade them. Israel's stated objectives are to make it possible for the Lebanese army and some unspecified international force to come in and "control" the region in which Hezbollah operates. But Hezbollah is more popular than ever in Lebanon, and it is inconceivable that an international force will actually use, well, force. In terms of restraining Israeli action any such force will be worse than Israeli settlements, and in terms of restraining Hezbollah they will be inferior to the Syrians who, if they chose to, certainly could force some restraint.

- Which brings us to Syria. Various hawkish voices have called for Israel to take the war to the source - that is to say: to Damascus, which never seems to suffer adequately for the wars it provokes (see, e.g., 1967, 1973). But there is no mystery about why Israel has declined to take any action against Syria directly: because the Assad regime is the best Israel could plausibly expect in that country. Were the Syrian regime to fall, it would be replaced not by a friendly Arab democracy but by one of three possibilities: a new military dictatorship (not obviously better than the current regime), a radical Sunni Islamist regime (obviously worse), or a state of anarchy such as obtains in Iraq (also obviously worse). If Israel were certain that the Syrian regime could survive a direct Israeli attack, then, perhaps, Israel might launch such an attack, which would make the Assad regime *fear* collapse and take the necessary actions to prevent it, even if these meant acceding to Israeli objectives such as reining in Hezbollah. The fact that Israel is being very careful with Syria is a testament not to Israeli weakness but to their perceptions of Syrian weakness, and their recognition that the fall of the Assad regime would be unlikely to benefit Israel. Israel will not turn decisively against Damascus until such time as it appears that Assad has been "captured" by Hezbollah, and has forgotten who is the patron and who is the client. That doesn't appear to have happened yet.

- (Side note: some*might* think it in Israel's interests for there to be an *American* effort to topple the Syrian regime, on the assumption that America can simply *impose* a more friendly government on that country. I think that since the Iraq campaign, no one serious in America or Israel still believes that America has that ability.)

- So this is how Israel got where they are. The Israeli government understood that it could not stand idly by while its citizens were murdered. But it did not want to reinstate the expensive occupation of either Gaza or south Lebanon. Nor did it want to seriously threaten the Syrian regime that it would ultimately have to count on to preserve some semblance of order. So it launched a war with no rational military objective, and it now has to figure out how to salvage the situation.

- The short-term consequences for Israel are likely to be quite negative. Israel launched this war with, initially, a surprising amount of support from Europe and the major Arab states. No one especially *wants* Hezbollah to succeed. But the botch job they've made of the campaign so far - which, in my view, stems from the lack of clarity about militarily achieveable objectives at the start - has squandered this goodwill and turned it to hostility, and undermined Israel's position with the Bush Administration as well. On the other hand, the long-term consequences are not likely to be terribly significant. The diplomatic context will have changed many times by the time the next war rolls around. The most significant medium-term consequence - for Israel - of this war is likely to be a substantial setback for Ehud Olmert, and hence for withdrawal from Judea and Samaria - precisely the opposite of the intended outcome when the operation was launched.

- The consequences for the United States could be more significant. In Iraq, Americans are fighting and dying for a Shiite-dominated government that supports Hezbollah verbally if not materially. Maintaining our position in Iraq's burgeoning sectarian conflict just got a whole lot harder; if we force Israel to stand down, we hand a victory to our enemies (not good for our position in Iraq); if we don't force Israel to stand down, we support their war against Lebanese Shiites (not good for our position in Iraq); and if we impose a "solution" in the form of an international force, then we "own" yet another crisis that can't actually *be* solved (which is incidentally also not good for our position in Iraq).

- I do not think that the manifest sympathy of the Iraqi government for Hezbollah materially constrains *Israel's* freedom of action, but it certainly should be an eye-opener for Americans, both as to the character of that regime and the nature of politics in the region. The Middle East is still, and will remain for the forseeable future, a "who/whom" region, where politics boils down mostly to who gets to do what to whom. That isn't the way the whole world works all of the time, nor is it the way one would like the world to work, but it's the overwhelmingly dominant mode of the Middle East. (Th flip side of the Iraqi government's response - and I should point out that not only the Iran-friendly Iraqi government, but also Ali Sistani, the leading Iraqi Shiite cleric opposed to sectarian war in that country, came out on the side of Hezbollah in this war with Israel - is, of course, the response of the Saudis, who, at least initially, blamed Hezbollah for the war and argued that a "proportional" Israeli response would be legitimate. This, again, is not warmth towards Israel or America, nor antipathy to terrorism, but "who/whom" - Saudi Arabia's oil region is predominantly Shiite, and the Hezbollahfication of that region is probably the worst thing that could happen to that kingdom.)

- As for the United States' democracy project: I continue to believe that elites are the motor of history, and republican governance depends on the existence of a patriotic elite willing to subordinate its private interests to the interests of the nation. The Middle East spectacularly lacks such elites, which makes successful republican governance very difficult if not impossible. How to nurture the growth of such an elite is a difficult problem as well, and I suspect an insoluble one; in any event, it seems clear at this point that adventures like the Iraq War are not the way to do it. In the absence of such elites, and of a realistic prospect for republican governance (which if it were realistic would, indeed, change the civilizational dynamics of the region), we're left with management of the conflict, which means working through the self-interested elites that exist, supporting those that seem more congenial against those that are transparently hostile. America is terrible at this sordid game, and always has been. But it's the only game in town.

- There has been a lot of commentary about how tough the Hezbollah fighters have proved. Piffle. Hezbollah is proving hard to defeat not because they are great warriors but because guerillas who have the support of the populace are *always* hard to defeat. To defeat them, you have to be either willing to destroy the populace - Israel is not, nor should it be - or able to separate them from the populace - Israel is unable to. Ironically, an authority perceived as legitimate can get away with - and get positive results from - the kind of brutality that can cause an illegitimate authority to lose a war. Thus, France lost their war in Algeria against the FLN - but the far more inept and corrupt but more legitimate Algerian military regime, the FLN's heirs, basically won their war against the Algerian Islamists, employing more than comparable brutality against a fairly comparably popular insurgency (the Islamists did, after all, win a popular election; the FLN did not enjoy majority support in polls for most of the Algerian war of independence). Hafez al Assad, the current Syrian President's father, was able to destroy the Syrian arm of the Brotherhood in about a week, with 20,000 casualties, and his regime survived; Israel's much less sanguinary and longer-lasting effort against Hezbollah has so far made Hezbollah more popular. Israel's problem fighting Hezbollah - and Hamas - is not that Hezbollah and Hamas are so mighty or so clever but that they are legitimate and popular, and Israel cannot separate them from the populace the way another legitimate authority might.

- Many pundits have pointed out that Hezbollah wants civilians casualties, and fights in such a away as to maximize such casualties on both sides. All true. They go on to argue that therefore it is perverse to reward this barbaric calculus on Hezbollah's part. True - and yet, on another level, entirely understandable. Because, after all, the reason why people are outraged by incidents like Qana is not only because they are biased against Israel, or against the West generally, or because they hold Western countries to a higher standard of civilization, or because people are just idiots. The outrage also follows from the outrage of the Lebanese people. They are not (today, anyhow) blaming Hezbollah; they are blaming Israel. This is a who/whom problem: the Lebanese don't ask whether Israel is justified, they just ask whether Israel is *other* and, if so, then its attacks are illegitimate. Lebanese outrage speaks to Israel's illegitimacy in their eyes, and the world understands that, if the war is not considered legitimate, then it is unlikely to succeed in any meaningful sense. I'm not saying people think this all through consciously. But there is simply more going on than stupidity and prejudice. There is a kind of cold wisdom operating as well.

- What to do now? Israel has just announced that it will expand its ground operations. That's probably a good thing; there's at least some chance that they will at least find out how much damage they did to Hezbollah's weaponry, and so long as Israeli troops remain in place during any cease-fire that is pressed on them they will at least know that violations of that cease fire will mean war on Lebanese territory rather than their own. And accepting more Israeli military casualties in exchange for fewer Lebanese civilian casualities is probably a trade Israel simply must make if it is to salvage anything from the current war. But within a few weeks this war will end, and I am very pessimistic that any solution imposed on the parties will end the threat from Hezbollah either to Israel or to stability in Lebanon. I ultimately don't think the most important aspect of this war is the PR war to decide who "won" - what really matters is whether there *was* a victor, whether anyone's war aims have actually been achieved, and I doubt that Israel's will have been. For that reason, I expect war, on both fronts, to recur.

- The biggest technical problem of any proposed cease-fire is how to make it difficult for Hezbollah to strike Israel. I'm not sure there's a straightforward solution to this technical problem. Shimon Peres has been fond of arguing for years that in the age of the ballistic missile, strategic depth no longer exists, and therefore there is no vital reason for Israel to retain the heights of the Golan or Samaria or the Jordan Valley. Well and good, but the corollary is that in the age of the ballistic missile, there are no borders, and Tel Aviv becomes the front line. Israel is in a novel position, but not a unique one; the rest of the world is trending their way, as it becomes easier and easier for "entrepreneurial" groups to foment violence on a large scale for low cost. Hezbollah's budget is tiny compared to any state military budget, but it can do more damage than most Arab armies have been able to inflict on the Jewish state. This is not a testimony to Hezbollah's greatness, but to the power of modern military technologies.

- But the most difficult problem for Israel is how to get the major Arab states - Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Saudi Arabia - to begin to play a constructive role. I can't think of a good reason for any of them to help Israel in any meaningful way, but they are the key to Israel's geopolitical situation, because there is no way to satisfy the radicals - including all significant factions among the Palestinian Arabs - without destroying Israel as an independent sovereign entity. Israel is not going to consent to self-destruction, and for all that Hezbollah would love to wipe Israel off the map, they can't. Israel is probably going to have to learn whether nuclear deterrence works against Iran; even if it does, an ever-bolder Iran will surely try to provoke additional wars between Israel and Hezbollah, and between Israel and Hamas, and these proxies will be ever better armed. Even so, this is the continuation of the long war of attrition that Israel has been fighting since the pre-state period, a war that looks like it will continue for another generation. That's a very sad reality, but I don't see what is to be done about it but to face it.

2006-07-05T19:13:00.000-04:00

By the way: yes, I had a very good Independence Day weekend. Spent the first chunk of it visiting dear friends who take a summer house at Bard College, where he teaches for the summer (or resides, or something) and she works with a summer theater group (or something). Anyhow, lovely people, and we had a lovely Canada Day (formerly Dominion Day, back when they were . . . dominated . . . or something) celebration with them. I admit to a twinge knowing that their decision to celebrate Canada Day is more of an anti-Bush gesture than a gesture of love towards the gentle giant to our north (they actually call their summer home Temporary Canada, and issue Temporary Canadian passports to visitors), but since my wife and I are genuine Canadophiles, I don't really feel guilty about participating. And we made patriotic restitution on our way home by visiting the Rhinebeck Aerodrome, a museum of early 20th-century aircraft featuring all sorts of planes that fought the Hun in the Great War (as well as some of the Hun's planes), and which I heartily recommend if you happen to be in the area with a small boy, or if you are a small boy, in fact or at heart. Call ahead to see if they will be doing an air show, which they were not when we visited on account of overly gusty winds. Ended the weekend with front-row seats for the fireworks at our dining room window.

It is a privilege to be a citizen of a country where they make it so easy to be happy; it is a shame so few of us manage it, and a shame I manage it myself so infrequently.

2006-07-05T18:46:00.000-04:00

The Derb has begun publishing what, based on his last outing, sound like they might be his . . . unexpurgated thoughts in The New England Review. His latest is about Robotics vs. Helotics. It's a good one, not unworth thinking about.

My quick thoughts:

- I'm not sure that we'd be able to beat Japan in the robotics "race" even if we tried. The Japanese are going to be better at robotics than we are regardless of our immigration situation, because they are better at electronic gadgets than we are. We lost virtually our entire consumer electronics industry to Japan over the course of the 1970s-1980s, and we've gotten virtually none of it back since. Why? I don't know - but we did, and we haven't, and I suspect that this is just something they are better at than we are. And helots don't sit on our heads and sing music in our ears, nor do they put on little plays inside our televisions.

- Moreover, the Japanese triumph in electronics (and their emerging triumph in robotics) is not due to some kind of techno-sclerosis on the part of the United States caused by the importation of cheap labor. Proof? America is the world leader in both computer software and biotechnological innovation. Is this because we're just "better" at software and biotech? Maybe, though I suspect that three big factors relevant to our success have at least as much to do with their weakness as they do with our strength, to whit: we speak English (giving us access to a broader global pool of talent) while they speak Japanese (giving them access to . . . themselves); we have a more open immigration policy (a lot of our high-tech companies are staffed, and even founded, by *high*-skilled immigrants from a variety of countries) while they are not the most hospitable place to live and work if you are not Japanese; and we have far more developed and open capital markets, including but definitely not limited to venture finance, while they have a famously scleroric and hidebound financial system. Japan *could* change at least the latter two of these things, but they probably won't, because they like being themselves, inefficiencies and all.

- Regardless, while robotics may or may not be preferable to helotics, it's no cure-all for a low fertility rate. And a fertility rate of below 1.3 children/woman is just plain too low, no matter what, if only because of the psychological consequences of being a nation of only children, to say nothing of the economic consequences of having such a small percentage of the population at peak levels of productivity and creativity. And then there is the national-psychological consequence of having so many elderly people. Even if we can take pills to remain more vigorous later into life, we'll never be young again. I'm 35, and I'm already acutely aware of the ways in which I feel old - changes that have happened to me only in the last 5 years. The brain is not infinitely plastic; the teenage years are probably the last opportunity to really change the way the wiring works in a profound way. By the 30s to 40s, almost everything substantial is set. If we live vigorously for another 30 years or another 60 years beyond that date, we'll live as vigorous *old* people. That is to say, among other things, as very conservative people. While an elderly-yet-vigorous robo-powered Japan might grow even mightier in terms of financial clout, how much influence will they really have over the direction the world takes? It's not so clear to me. I've made this point before: a fertility rate modestly below replacement - 1.7 to 1.8 TFR - strikes me as culturally and economically sustainable pretty much indefinitely, as is a fertility rate modestly above replacement. Either means a norm of 2-3 children per couple with a good admixture of childless or single-child families and a handful of larger families thrown into the mix. A TFR of closer to 1 means that most couples have only one child. I don't think that's conducive to societal health or an indicator of civilizational confidence.

- Enthusiasts for high immigration tend to point to 19th century America as a model, and proof that there is no choice between robotics and helotics because we're not importing helots but future burghers and yeomen who merely have funny last names and spicier food. Although constitutionally predisposed towards openness to immigration, I'm coming more and more to the conclusion that this analogy is badly flawed. In the 19th century, industrialization meant both that fewer people were needed to work on farms and that factories needed more people to work in them. There was a huge migration from the countryside to the cities as a consequence. In spite of having a higher fertility rate than European countries, America had less of a surplus rural population because we such a huge excess of arable land (and, moreover, arable land without title), and we wound up importing large numbers of European immigrants to settle the land as well as to work in the factories. Well, the burgeoning demand for people today comes from service industries like health care and in construction. These activities have to be performed on-site - i.e., even if we still have "excess" land in some sense, we can't fill it up with immigrants in the same way as we did in the 19th century because these immigrants are being imported precisely to work where the existing population lives and requires services. It's worth noting, however, that these jobs are also the hardest to automate - far harder, as Derb himself notes, than factory work, which is why we already have factory robots but don't have robots to perform a variety of personal services. Robotics, therefore, may be in part a *cause* of the trend towards helotics, and not an alternative thereto, at least in the near term.

- Moreover, I will also note that in much of the world the migration from countryside to city is still largely incomplete, and that this migration is today occurring in a period of global deindustrialization - even China is automating more and more, and consequently employing fewer and fewer people in factories. Because service economies have shown far slower increases in productivity than industrial economies, however, global deindustrialization makes it unlikely that most developing countries will be able to produce enough jobs to employ their excess population. Therefore, while it may be true that Japan may get to robotics faster than everyone else, their choice for robotics and against helotics may be extremely expensive in the short term, because the world will be producing a lot of helots for a while yet, and the robots are still very expensive (the cost of robotics is front-loaded, of helotics back-loaded - and the latter can be reduced substantially if one is willing to give up on the ideal of middle-class egalitarianism and revert to Indian or Brazilian norms in these matters). And it's not clear there's any first-mover advantage here; we, after all, invented a lot of the electronics that Japan now dominates the manufacture of. Whether or not the choice for high levels of unskilled immigration has consequences that Derb (or I) don't like for the structure of our society, I'm less convinced that the Japanese lead in robotics means they will become the superpower of the 21st century.

- The great mystery, to me, remains *why* fertility rates have dropped so low in so much of the world. Singapore is very crowded. But Australia most assuredly isn't, and they have a TFR of below 1.8 (yes, that's a lot higher than Singapore's 1.0, but it's still below replacement). I'm very skeptical of the argument that it is all a question of religiosity; fertility rates are dropping fast in much of the Middle East and in the subcontinent, the two most religious regions of the world. I am reluctantly drawing towards a Derb-like conclusion that one cause of the decline in fertility is the slow-dawning realization among humanity that we ourselves are obsolete. We need very few humans indeed to feed ourselves, and fewer and fewer to make all the stuff we use. Much of the developing world is unemployed, as is much of the youth of the developed world. We are running out of telos, and most of us are neither stoical enough to go on when we can't go on nor creative enough to make it up as we go along. Indeed, for most of us what's left is *competition for status* and that is by its nature a negative-sum game - most people must necessarily be losers - which is not conducive to the optimism necessary for family-formation. In any event, if this is right, then the only thing Japan is accomplishing by investing heavily in robotics is digging their own grave faster than the rest of us.

2006-07-05T17:59:00.000-04:00

Kudos to Jonathan Chait for writing what may be the perfect column to illustrate why I am not a liberal Democrat.

2006-07-05T10:26:00.000-04:00

Well, it's a nail-biter, but I think we can assume at this point that Calderon has won the Mexican election, contrary to my own prediction at the end of last year. I hope we can agree that this is good news. Lopez Obrador was unfairly characterized as a Chavez-wannabe, but neither was he plausibly a Lula, someone with populist roots but who had come to terms with the nature of his country's economic position in the world and the constraints of the dominant liberal paradigm (and of, well, reality).

I don't think it serves American interests for us to bet too heavily on any particular political outcome in, well, most countries, certainly not basically friendly ones like Mexico. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't invest in a process the success of which matters to us a great deal. After President Bush's reelection, I advised him to focus on three countries in Latin America: Brazil, Colombia and Mexico. Brazil is an emerging regional economic and diplomatic power; it behooves us to have a better and more substantial relationship with that traditionally neglected country. It also behooves us to show the world that we can get along very well indeed with Latin American countries that elect left-wing governments so long as those governments do not directly threaten American interests or subvert democracy. Colombia we should embrace and support, because they have been staunch supporters of America facing enemies who are our enemies as well. In this I'm preaching to the converted, of course.

As for Mexico, I argued that Bush should sit down with Vicente Fox and have a little talk, explain to him that there had to be more give and take in the US-Mexican relationship. Specifically, Fox would have to publicly tackle corruption, particularly in the army, and take real steps to control Mexico's side of the border (rather than, as currently, actually assisting traffickers in people and drugs to penetrate into the US). In exchange, the United States would commit to significant financial assistance for development that could absorb internal migrants from Mexico's south who are currently being "moved on" to the United States.

We now have another opportunity to present such a deal. America has an enormous interest in Mexican economic success, an interest that would not have been served by a Lopez Obrador victory. But it is vital that we distinguish America's interests from American *business* interests, and as well to distinguish America's interests from *Mexican* business interests. Business interests north and south of the border are indifferent to the plight of the underdeveloped Mexican south; indeed, they may be positively inclined on both sides of the border to excessive (very nearly exclusive) reliance on the "safety valve" of emigration in addressing this longstanding problem. One of the more interesting inversions of the Mexican political scene is that it was Vicente Fox of the nationalist PAN who argued that Mexicans who leave for the United States are actually Mexican patriots, and that Mexico has a legitimate interest in their success in America, while it was the leftist Lopez Obrador who took the more patriotic line that mass emigration from Mexico was a national tragedy and a sign of the failure of Mexico's political and economic system to provide opportunity at home. Calderon may be inclined, based on his background and history and the general positioning of the PAN, to govern as the representative of the business class. Ironically, it may fall in part to the Americans to prod him into being more of a *national* leader, in large part by making him aware of political reality in the United States, and the fact that the safety valve is inevitably going to close, the only question being how fast and how hard.

Calderon has been heard to say that one kilometer of road in Tabasco (was it Tabasco?) is worth ten kilometers of fence on the border in terms of ending illegal migration from Mexico to the US. Okay, we should say: we'll pay for that road in Tabasco. It'll be good PR, and it might even help. But in exchange, we expect real results: on corruption, and especially on corrupt support by the Mexican military and police for traffickers in narcotics and people. The safety valve is closing. The more Mexico does to show a good-faith effort to control the border on their end, the more good-faith effort we'll show to close that valve gently. It should be clear to Calderon that, if no such good-faith effort is forthcoming, politics on this side of the border will slam the valve shut harder and faster.

2006-06-26T17:01:00.000-04:00

I really want to hear Steve Sailer's comment on David Frum's dvar torah on parshat shelach. If you get at least halfway down, you'll figure out why.

2006-06-19T09:48:00.000-04:00

Well, that was a very enjoyable Father's Day. Brunch with an old friend (actually the fellow who introduced me to my wife, who was also Best Man at our wedding). Then went to a street fair in the neighborhood and watched our son get tossed about on the various silly street fair rides. Then a visit to the Intrepid, which Moses loved (though it is a bit complicated trying to explain World War II to someone not yet four years old). Then back to Brooklyn to my favorite neighborhood sushi restaurant for dinner. All in all, a very good day, marred only by the absence of my own father, who had a wedding to go to.

How did you spend your Father's Day? John Derbyshire and Jonah Goldberg apear to have spent a chunk of theirs arguing over whether fathers matter. To follow the argument, click here, then here, then here, then here.

Rather than take time out of my Father's Day, I prefer to steal time from work. So here's my 2c:

To Derb:

1. Many of the points you raise have to do with *personality.* Do you see a distinction between personality and *character*? I do, and I think the distinction speaks very much to where parents matter. We all have to learn how to make the best use of our (largely genetically-determined) personalities. That means learning how to maximize the value of our strengths and compensate for our weaknesses. It seems to me obvious that parents have some influence over this process, if only in that they provide us with closely-observed models to emulate.

2. Specifically, there is lots of data about how divorce negatively impacts both male and female children, even when you control for things like social status, race, and, most important, how happy the couple seems to be. Except in situations of real abuse, it seems to be the case that staying in an unhappy marriage is better for the kids than divorcing. That result strongly suggests that parenting matters in *some* fashion, even if 90% of how it matters is simply by *existing*.

3. Relatedly, there is lots of evidence from both humans and other mammals (e.g. apes, elephants) that the absence of strong male figures - such as fathers - leads to all sorts of problems with male adolescents. Again: the *presence* of a father who behaves like a father seems to matter a lot to successfully socializing the male adolescent. It may not matter much (other than to the quality of the *relationship* you have with your father) whether your father is a very hands-on parents or a more distant figure, but *the fact that he is there* seems to matter a lot.

4. Further relatedly: it's a commonplace that we replicate in our own married lives some of the patterns we observed in our parents' marriages. Have you seen research debunking this commonplace? I've seen research suggesting that one's capacity for happiness in marriage, or even happiness in general, is largely genetic. But I would be very surprised if our ability to adapt effectively to periods of *unhappiness* is entirely - or even largely - genetically determined, or unrelated to parenting. Again, this speaks to the difference between personality and character.

In sum: I think the research you're referring to is a valuable corrective to the cult of parent-ing, but you're overclaiming its significance when you use it to deny the importance of parent-hood.

To Jonah:

1. Take Derb's first point more seriously than you do. Extremism in commitment to the reality principle is no vice, and prudential deference to an illusion is no virtue. The original neo-conservatives stopped being liberals because they were mugged by reality - that is to say: the data contradicted their political pre-conceptions, and they changed their politics. You can reasonably demand that Derb's politics intelligently reflect his views about reality. Maybe he *is* sympathetic to the Progressives. (I don't think so, because I don't think he's a meliorist - unlike the Progressives, Derb isn't really interested in making the world better. Calling him a latter-day Mencken might fit the bill, though.) But demanding the converse - that he tailor his views about reality to suit his politics - is not reasonable.

2. To that end, I don't think it's adequate to simply say, "I don't care" when confronted with unfriendly scientific evidence. If one really wants to defend a particular proposition, one has to actually defend it, and grapple with what the science says that appears to undermine it. If economics seems to say that socialism is the best system for maximizing economic growth, it is not sufficient - politically, to say nothing of intellectually - to say, in effect, "this land is my land/it is not your land/you'd better get off/or I'll blow your head off." Obviously, based on my comments above, I'm with you on the question of whether Derb has over-claimed what the research means, particularly on your point about *measurement*. But the research does mean *something* and figuring out what that something is would seem to be an equal duty to figuring out what it is not, at least for anyone who cares about reality.

3. I don't think the analogy to Derb's review of P.O.D. holds. The RTL position is rooted in specific premises and chains of reasoning from those premises. Derb is skeptical of the non-scientific premises AND of the kinds of chains of moral reasoning. I don't recall Derb questioning the *science* that Ramesh uses. As for the "cold and pitiless dogma" business, the key word, I think, is the last. Derb cheerfully accepts the cold and pitiless nature of *reality.* Indeed, for that very reason he doesn't think we should make things tougher on ourselves by adopting intellectual dogmas of similar stringency. Derb might well say that the cult of parenting, and its attendant anxiety, is another one of these pitiless dogmas, albeit not so cold, to which he objects.

4. I am curious to understand how you ground your "right" to be the "author" of your daughter's "being" - that's pretty strong patriarchal language. (Not that there's anything wrong with that - I just want to understand where it's coming from.) I don't think either Hayek or Locke would go so far. Indeed, Locke's theory has a bit of a hole in it when it comes to justifying the natural family, and he winds up deconstructing it to a considerable degree when he finally gets into it. Are you a closet Filmerite?

2006-06-16T12:42:00.000-04:00

So, a fellow blogger asked me a few weeks ago, apropos of the various ways in which we are mutually unhappy with today's Republican Party: why are you (that is to say, me) still a Republican?

Which set me to thinking: why indeed? Why should I affiliate in any way with a political party or organization? Why not support candidates I like and oppose those I dislike, with my vote and/or my contributions? On the big-picture things, the things that matter most to the life and health of a nation, can one say that there actually is any identity to the two parties, or are they both mere collections of more narrowly-focused constituency groups? And if the latter, why not limit my affiliation to single-issue constituency lobbies with whom I have more or less affinity?

Well, it so happens that I do think the parties have an identity on the big-picture issues, an identity that goes all the way back to the origins of the parties and that has survived the two parties' (and the country's) massive demographic transformations over time.

Moreover, each party's identity can be represented by three simple words, words that, when connected, form an Iron Triangle that defines that party's identity for all time.

I should stress that these identities are not absolute or exclusive. The things that each party stands for are good things; there is no party of light nor a party of darkness (nor, some might say, a party of life and a party of death). The differences between the parties are one way of framing an argument about the meaning of America, an argument that will never be concluded because both sides have a point, but that needs to be continued *as an argument* if our civilization is to remain vital. To the end of continuing the argument "for the sake of heaven" it is not a waste of time to investigate what, in the deepest sense, the parties stand for.

Here are the two Iron Triangles of terms that define America's two major parties:

Republican

Nation === Liberty === Virtue

Democrat

People === Equality === Merit

When Republicans speak, they address the Nation. Nationhood posits a kind of organic unity based on a shared culture, territory, language, history. Because blood-and-soil nationalism doesn't make much sense in the American context (the land being ours *before* we were the land's) the nature of American nationalism and the American nation has always been subject to debate. Republicans, because they speak to the nation, are the ones who find this debate most significant and most worrisome. By the same token, because they are *nationalists* from their very beginning (whether you date that beginning to Lincoln or Hamilton, it doesn't matter), the absorption of the Southern conservative tradition of regionalism and localism into the Republican Party has been and will remain incomplete. One risk in speaking to the nation is that you begin to think that those who do not harken are not part of the nation; in that regard, it is notable that the Republicans, when they speak of "America" increasingly seem to identify it with Dixie, to make a regionalism into a nationalism. Among the other problems with doing this, it won't work.

When Democrats speak, the address the People. The people are an abstraction no less than the nation, but a different kind of abstraction. Both the nation and the people are conceived of as unities, but that doesn't make either an undifferentiated mass. The difference is that the nation, though unified, may have a vertically-articulted structure, whereas the people, though unified, may have a horizontally-articulated structure. The people can be composed of many peoples, but it is conceived as a single *class* and therefore can speak with a single voice. The Democrats, from their origin (whether you date that from Jefferson or Jackson, it doesn't matter) understood themselves to be the party of the people, and they have retained this identity even as, in many ways, they have lost the people. Just as the idea of the nation is predicate to the ideology of nationalism, so the idea of the people is predicate to the ideology of democracy, or at least democracy as Rousseau understood it, as an expression of the people's will. Again, this is an abstraction and a construct no less than the nation is - indeed, more so; people feel they are part of a nation because of their allegiances, whereas feeling yourself to be part of a general will is the kind of thing we associate with fascism, not democracy. Nonetheless, it is a democratic myth, and fundamental to the Democratic party.

Above all other values, Republicans stand for liberty. Liberty is what our republic was founded to secure, after all. In good old undergraduate fashion, we can identify a degree of opposition between liberty and equality, and sure enough I've assigned equality to the Democrats as their top value. Both liberty and equality can be conceived of as negative values - that is to say: valuing liberty may simply mean not interfering in someone's exercise of his liberties, and equality may simply mean not treating people differentially in any formal sense, as equality before the law and an absence of formal class distinctions. But each can also be construed more robustly. If liberty is the highest value then we should value more the person who makes the most of that liberty, structure our society so that it favors those who thrive on independence. The cult of the entrepreneur certainly partakes of such an attitude. By the same token, valuing equality above all may mean placing a high degree of concern on whether there is actual equality in society, regardless of whether a formal equality exists. Even if one doesn't go so far as to assess the justness of society based on whether classes exist at all, one may demand that a just society truly give everyone the opportunity to achieve their potential, which may require substantial interference with individual liberty (progressive taxation, forced busing, etc.) to achieve. I think it's safe to say that particularly in this more robust sense of each value system, there is a real difference between the parties.

The third word in the Iron Triangle defining each party relates to the conception of who properly leads society. We are not a direct democracy nor, properly, could we be (nor, pace the most extreme proponents of the General Will, should we be). We are a republic or, if you prefer, a representative democracy. Who, then, is fit to rule, to be the governing elite? For the Republicans, the most important determinant of fitness to rule is virtue - or, if you prefer the contemporary term of choice, character. For all that Republicans have been afflicted over and over with scandal, particularly financial scandals, they have from the beginning (again, going back as far as you like - Henry Clay had a lifetime of trouble from Whig bluenoses because he was a drinker and a gambler) conceived of themselves as the party of virtue, and their opponents as the party of rum, Romanism and rebellion. Indeed, the Republicans not only have historically understood virtue to be the key factor in whether someone is fit to govern, but have also historically been more inclined than the Democrats to schemes for the promotion of virtue in the general population (e.g., Prohibition). When they treat the question of who is fit to govern, the Democrats, by contrast, emphasize merit, or, if you prefer, ability. Go back to Jefferson and the natural aristocracy (today we would say, "meritocracy") and trace the idea down through the Progressive era to our present day: the Democrats believe that those most capable of governing, whatever class they may come from, should govern. Moreover, they believe that such natural leaders can be identified and groomed for their predestined station. It is neither surprising nor accidental that as the ideal of meritocracy has spread through the American professional class, that class has trended more and more towards the Democratic party.

Again, I want to stress that while these are Iron Triangles, that is not to suggest that the individual members of the parties - or, indeed, the parties themselves - are quite so radically dichotomous. The metaphor is, rather, intended to suggest how enduring the distinctions are, and how in each case the three concepts are mutually supporting. It is, somehow, natural for a party that emphasizes equality to be more receptive to a meritocratic elite than to other kinds of elites, and to conceive of the population being governed as a people; the Republican triangle seems to me to be equally natural, though more complimentary than mutually-reinforcing in its parts.

In any event, because I do think these identities are profound and enduring, I think that your party affiliation should ultimately come down to which set of concepts speaks most deeply to you. Individual elections are a matter of choosing the best candidate; affiliation is a matter of identity. For myself, I can say that the Republican triad - Nation, Liberty, Virtue - speaks to me more profoundly than the Democratic triad, which is why, fundamentally, I am a Republican. I don't think that makes me *right* or that the Democratic triad is *evil* - it just means the Republican way of approaching things accords better with my own way of thinking.

I want to make two more points in closing:

First, it is not clear to me that either of the parties is necessarily "conservative" or "progressive" in orientation. Specifically, as alluded to earlier, I think the Southern conservative tradition makes a very odd fit with the Republican legacy, given that it is localist and the Republican tradition is nationalist and it is fundamentally communitarian and traditionalist while the Republican tradition is more libertarian or, better, dynamist. "Liberal Republican" has come to be understood to mean "Republican who doesn't care about the whole 'virtue' thing" just as "conservative Democrat" once was understood to mean, "Democrat who defends segregation or is otherwise retrograde on racial matters." Both terms should mean something more; there should be a liberal wing of the GOP that is distinct in character from liberal Democrats, just as there should be a conservative wing of the Democratic party that is distinct in character from what conservative Republicans are all about. The fact that the parties are increasingly sorting into a European style party of the left and party of the right is a profound loss for America, and is not true to the history of either party.

Second, there is a clear interaction between religion and the triads above and between ethnicity and the triads above. It would be interesting to see how the demographics of each party changed, to what extent this reflected changes in the relative economic position of different ethnic groups, and to what extent this change in politics was also reflected in a change in religion, either actual change in denomination or change in the character of the denomination. I suspect some interesting patterns would emerge.

2006-06-15T09:45:00.000-04:00

I've got to beg to differ with Peggy Noonan on whether James Webb represents something new or not in the Democratic Party. He emphatically does represent something new: the first serious attempt by the Democrats to make a play for a variety of overlapping segments of voters - older veterans, people of Scots-Irish ancestry, "paleo-cons," working-class white men - who they've done a lousy job of winning in recent times, who may very well be up for grabs in 2008, and who could well be seduced by an intelligent Democratic pitch.

True, Webb's positions on education and health care amount to little more than standard-issue Democratic talking points. I don't suspect he has any real opinions here; there are not his issues. His call for more spending on Virginia's infrastructure sounds like traditional pork-barrel politics to me; nothing especially partisan about that. His positions on abortion and gay rights are, as Noonan admits, surely sincere, and happen to dovetail with the Democratic Party's positions on the issues. His position on gun rights is likewise sincere and (like Paul Hackett, a less impressive vet candidate who didn't make the playoffs) opposed to the Democratic Party's positions, albeit, again as Noonan admits, the Democrats have pretty much abandoned the cause of disarming America.

But none of this is what Webb is *running on.* On the issues he actually seems to care about, he's carving out a platform that could appeal to a significant and substantial constituency.

- He's running against the Iraq War not as a dove but as a realist. That is *not* where Nancy Pelosi is coming from.

- He's an advocate of "fair trade" - in this he's returning to an old Dick Gephardt Democratic religion that mostly fell by the wayside in the Clinton years.

- He favors the House approach to immigration: first get control of the border and enforce the law internally, *then* we can talk about what to do about both those aliens who are still here illegally and about what other reforms we should make in our immigration laws (levels of legal immigration, how immigrants are selected, what kind of guestworker program if any, etc.).

- He has, in the past, opposed race-based affirmative action; he backed off this a bit recently to say that he understood that there were good reasons for African Americans to receive preferences, but he reiterated his opposition to broader racial preferences, something that immediately drew fire from professional Hispanic organizations.

This does not sound to me like the traditional issue mix of the Democratic Party. It's *compatible* with the traditional issue mix in most ways, but it's not *identical* to it, and it contradicts it in some interesting ways (specifically on immigration and race). That's what makes him something new and interesting. When Noonan postulates that a really *interesting* Democrat would favor tax cuts, I wonder whether by "interesting" she means "Republican."

I should spend more time, though, on the most false claim in her piece: that Webb's critique of the Iraq war is somehow the same as the critique we've been hearing since the days of George McGovern. It emphatically is not, and Noonan should know better.

Because I find it endlessly useful, I'll make use of Mead's division of American foreign policy ideas into four types: Jeffersonian, Jacksonian, Hamiltonian and Wilsonian. I've long felt that the best way to understand this typology is as the four quadrants of a plane where one axis runs from "realist" to "idealist" and the other axis runs from "introverted" to "extroverted". Thus:

Jeffersonian: introverted idealist
Jacksonian: introverted realist
Hamiltonian: extroverted realist
Wilsonian: extroverted idealist

Classic liberal internationalism such as dominated Democratic Party thinking from Roosevelt through Johnson was a blend of Hamiltonian and Wilsonian ideas: a combination of self-interest and idealism but firmly committed to engagement with the wider world. The old pre-WWII Republican Party was divided between Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian wings (think TR and Taft): those who understood that American interests required sophisticated engagement with the wider world and isolationists who wanted to insulate the American republic from the corruption that such entanglements would entail. WWII having discredited isolationism, the post-WWII GOP was pulled between a dominant Hamiltonian framework (think Eisenhower) and populist Jacksonian impulses (think Goldwater).

The Vietnam War left the Democratic Party unable to think seriously about foreign policy at all for quite some time, and by the Reagan Presidency Hamiltonian, Jacksonian and Wilsonian foreign policy ideas all found their home in the GOP. When they finally recaptured the Presidency in the Clinton years, the Democrats had to come up with an approach to foreign policy; what they came up with is basically a hollowed-out version of their old liberal internationalism, a liberal internationalism that wasn't especially serious about advancing either our interests or our ideals, but that traded in a lot of high-flown rhetoric about being the "indispensible nation" and whatnot. Jeffersonianism, meanwhile, made a modest comeback in the GOP, but the dominant foreign policy strain in the GOP in the 1990s was Jacksonian.

Enter the Bush Administration, whose foreign policy could probably be best described as a blend of Wilsonian and Jacksonian impulses, or as Jacksonian impulses disguised with Wilsonian rhetoric. This has proved a profoundly ineffective combination; the Wilsonian rhetoric causes internal confusion about our objectives and sets us up for a variety of different kinds of failure, while it fails to persuade most international observers who see the Jacksonian impulses underneath.

The Democrats have had a hard time responding with a foreign policy of their own, partly because they have not thought seriously about foreign policy for some time and partly because they think the Wilsonian rhetoric belongs to them, so they can't bring themselves to critique the Bush Administration from a realist direction. There is a temptation in some quarters of the Democratic Party to take a Jeffersonian turn and call for a pulling back from the world, but coming from the Democrats this would surely be understood by the electorate not as a principled position but as a sign of weakness in the face of the enemy. Others - mostly people affiliated with The New Republic - have called for a return to the muscular Wilsonian traditions of the golden age of Democratic dominance. But one-upping the Bush Administration (or, say, a John McCain, current frontrunner for the 2008 nomination) on their commitment to use force to spread democracy sounds like an absolutely terrible strategy when our current "hard Wilsonian" adventure in Iraq is going so poorly.

Moreover, it is quite apparent which foreign policy tradition is currently orphaned between our two parties: the hard-headed internationalism of the Hamiltonians. Advocating a retreat from the world is both bad politics and bad policy. But if the Democrats are to convince anyone that they can be trusted in crafting a real foreign policy, one that truly does "entangle" us in the wider world, they need to convince people that they understand the concept of the national interest.

Enter James Webb. He doesn't need to prove his Jacksonian bona-fides; his biography does that for him. But this is where Democrats have usually stopped: they find some hard-bitten Jeffersonian old soldier who's got enough scars and doesn't want our boys fighting in any more of them furrin' wars and think that biography will substitute for policy. Webb, by contrast, actually has foreign policy *ideas*. He is emphatically not another war hero who's tired of war. He's got a very cogent and articulate understanding of the national interest and what we need to do to protect it. It's Pacific-centric, focused on the diplomatic and military threat from a rising China; in consequence, it's rather navy-centric (he resigned from his Sec'y of the Navy job way back when over proposed cuts in the fleet). Webb thinks we should be more aggressive in dealing with North Korea - and he means it; he's not just using Korea as a way to avoid dealing with the Middle East. He is deeply engaged in the world, particularly the world of the Pacific; his pre-war critique of the planned war with Iraq was a realist critique not a Vietnam-haunted anti-war rant of the kind that Ted Kennedy might pen.

Webb is exactly the kind of guy the Democrats need to bolster their foreign policy bonifides - not because he makes them look more Jacksonian, but because he makes them more credibly Hamiltonian - more credibly the kind of party Americans would trust with the complexity of America's international situation and the variety of our interests around the world.

And Webb's critique of Iraq is precisely the one Democrats need to make if they are going to make any headway in 2008. "Bring the boys home" will read to most Americans like weakness. "I would have run the war better" will read to most Americans like arrogance. A hard-headed realist critique is what's needed. And a guy like Webb not only has the intellectual chops to come up with that critique but has just the right biography to make people listen to it with respect.

Finally, I should note that demographically Webb is a "new" kind of Democrat as well, because he's an old kind of Democrat: a Scots-Irish uplander, the group of people that produced President Andrew Jackson, the man who put the finishing touches on the Democratic Party's identity. Americans of Scots-Irish descent have moved en masse from the Democrats to the GOP, and the Democrats probably can't win a national election without winning a significant contingent of these folks back. Webb speaks their language - heck, he wrote a book about them.

Let me be clear here: I'm not endorsing Webb. Frankly, I know enough about Allen to be inclined against him for President, but not enough about Webb to know whether he'd be preferable in the Senate (and, you know, I am a New York Republican not a Virginian Democrat). But I am endorsing running guys like Webb as a winning strategy for Democrats. And to me personally he's a very intriguing candidate.

Some questions:

- Will Webb be a single-issue candidate, or will be broaden his message beyond foreign policy? And if the latter, what will he emphasize - trade? (Likely.) Immigration? (Unlikely - Webb and Allen agree, and Webb and the national Democrats disagree.) Health Care? (Likely - I don't think you can run a Democratic campaign without talking up their most potent issue.)
- How vehement will Webb be in his criticism of the Bush Administration's foreign policy? Will he say, in effect, that Iraq was a noble idea but a stupid one - and foreseeably stupid - or will he veer off into the more paranoid direction that some Democratic (and paleo) critics have unfortunately (for them) trended? I'm betting the former, but we'll just have to see.
- Will the Democratic Party tie itself in knots over racial shibboleths (e.g., Webb's opposition to race-based affirmative action for immigrants, his speeches praising the courage of his Confederate ancestors) and therefore be unable to give Webb the support he'll need to win?
- Will Allen go toe-to-toe on foreign policy, try to dodge and change the subject to taxes or abortion or what-have-you, or try to shut down the debate with jingoistic appeals to support the President in wartime? Which tack *should* he take, politically?
- Will any prominent current or former GOP figure endorse Webb over Allen? Who? When?
- Will John McCain campaign for his potential 2008 rival if the race looks close?

If Webb gets the money he needs to be genuinely competitive, this could be a very interesting race indeed. And for Allen, an interesting race is exactly what he does not need, given that he wants to spend his time mobilizing for 2008. Yes, if he has a big tough fight with Webb and trounces him in November then Allen is even better positioned for 2008 than he is now. But if it's close, and he's bloodied, then that's not the case. And if - longshot but possible - he loses . . .

2006-06-01T09:13:00.000-04:00

You know, I don't know anything. Particularly, I never know what's going to actually attract interest to the blog. Apparently, these tossed-off reflections on the politics of the Senate immigration bill vote were pretty interesting to some people who read a lot more blogs than I do. Anyhow, thanks Steve, Ross, Jonah, Mickey, and anyone else I haven't figured out linked to it yet.

2006-05-30T14:59:00.000-04:00

Kudos to The New Republic for publishing such a convincing rebuttal of the magazine's editorial line on Darfur. My own feelings about the conflict are hardening, basically because I have yet to talk to a single person, on the right or the left, who advocates intervention who can explain how intervention would be successful. My earlier thoughts on the topic are here and here.

2006-05-26T10:27:00.000-04:00

Couple more notes on the politics of the Senate vote.

- There are five Republicans in the Senate who think they could be the next President: Allen, Brownback, Frist, Hagel and McCain. Only Allen voted against the bill. I don't think that helps Allen all that much, because he was always going to run as the most right-wing of the viable candidates. I think this vote buries Chuck Hagel, whose only hope was to be the candidate of a paleo revolt furious about Iraq. It also buries Frist, if he wasn't already six feet under. Brownback was never a serious option and, anyhow, he's running as the bleeding-heart Christian so his vote makes sense and won't make a difference to his appeal. So this vote probably helps Romney and (if he runs) Giuliani at the expense of McCain, because the (substantial) contingent within the GOP that will be furious about the bill will now consider McCain the worst of the four top GOP contenders for the nomination. McCain is doing with immigration-restrictionists exactly what he did with Christian conservatives in 2000. He'll probably figure out his mistake right about two years too late. Meanwhile, tying down Romney (and Giuliani, if he runs) on this bill specifically should be toward the top of the list of journalists' questions. The question is simple: do you incline more towards the Senate or the House approach on immigration? And if the choice is a vote for the Senate bill or a vote for no bill at all, which way would you vote? That still leaves open an answer of "I favor the Third Way on immigration" whatever that may be, but it demands an answer to a real choice now facing both Houses and the President in Washington.

- Of the fourteen GOP Senators up for re-election this year (*not* counting Frist, who is not running), ten voted against the bill. The four who voted for it: Chafee, DeWine, Lugar and Snowe. Chafee is the archtypical RINO, and Snowe is a liberal Republican, so no surprise in either case. Lugar will be Senator for life so there's nothing much to discuss here. DeWine is the interesting vote, particularly given that Santorum and Talent, who are both fighting tough re-election battles, each voted against the bill. And I don't imagine that the politics of immigration are that different in Missouri and Pennsylvania than they are in Ohio. It will be interesting to see if this vote matters (or is interpreted to have mattered in retrospect) in any of these three races.

- In any event, the contrast between the last two points is, I think, very instructive. GOP Senators facing the voters in their state voted largely against this bill. GOP Senators who want to be President voted largely in favor of this bill. That suggests a rather different balance of power between interests in the race for President as compared with the race for a Senate seat.

- Speaking of geography: I note that while Texas native President Bush has been the prime mover behind the immigration bill, both Texas Senators - Kaye Bailey Hutchinson and John Cornyn - voted against. McCain was the big gun pushing for a liberal bill in the Senate, but the other Senator from his state - John Kyl, a good friend of McCain's - voted against. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina voted in favor, while Jim DeMint, the junior Senator, voted against. Frist (Tennessee) voted for and Alexander against. Bennett (Utah) voted for and Hatch against. Gregg (New Hampshire) voted for and Sununu against. Warner (Virginia) voted for and Allen against. Craig (Idaho) voted for and Crapo against. There is a regional bias in the overall vote, of course - the Northeast voted overwhelmingly for, the South somewhat against, with the Midwest and West voting for by about the margins of the Senate as a whole. But given that the GOP pretty much owns the South while the Democrats pretty much own the Northeast and West Coast, the party split largely explains the geographic split rather than vice versa. That said, I will note that there are 21 states that elected 2 GOP Senators; of these, eleven are arguably Southern states and, of these, in seven cases (AL, GA, MO, MS, NC, OK, TX) both votes were against and in four case (KY, SC, TN, VA) the vote split. And in only one state outside of the South (broadly construed - I'm including Missouri in the South, which is questionable) did both GOP Senators vote against (that was Wyoming), while in three such states (AK, ME, OH) both Senators voted for. So there does appear to be more willingness on the part of Southern GOP Senators to vote against than on the part of Western GOP Senators. Which is interesting, given that states like Arizona (split) and New Mexico (in favor) are the ones on the front lines.

- There are rumors of a fight brewing below the surface over who will replace Frist when he retires and who will replace Santorum if he loses. The presumptive heir to Frist is Mitch McConnell, who has the support of Bob Bennett and Judd Gregg. The rumors are that Lott may try to regain the leadership if 2006 turns out to be a debacle, and that even if he doesn't challenge McConnell he may run for whip if Santorum loses (as he is likely to do). I note that McConnell, Bennett and Gregg all voted for the immigration bill, and that Lott voted against.

- Just how incented are the various parties to get a bill passed? Take it as a given that there is no chance of the House prevailing in conference; the Senate vote was lopsidedly in favor, and the House is in disarray, not to mention that nobody wants to embarrass the President by presenting him with a bill he wants to veto (which he would certainly do to an enforcement-only bill). So the practical choice is: something that looks like the Senate's bill or nothing at all. Given that the GOP Senators who are actually up for re-election largely voted against, it's hard for me to see how the Senate has a strong political incentives to get a bill passed. By contrast, the House GOP clearly feels that passing an enforcement-only bill helps them. So: do they convince themselves that passing the Senate bill enables them to go home and brag that they "did something" about immigration? Or do they decide that doing the wrong thing is worse than doing nothing at all? Phone calls over Memorial Day weekend will probably have some effect on how they answer this question. But I think at this point it's lose-lose: a bad bill will dishearten the base and weaken the GOP in November, while no bill will make it look like the GOP can't accomplish anything, and weaken the GOP in November. I don't think Mickey Kaus is right that the House could embarrass the Senate by passing a watered-down enforcement-only bill. How, precisely, does the House present the Senate with an up-or-down choice? The bill that gets voted on is what comes out of conference, right? Why do the Senators in conference agree to a bill that embarrasses them? The bottom line is: if there's no bill, the Senators who voted against and who voted in favor each think they are OK (or they wouldn't have voted that way). The antis go home and say, "we stopped a bad bill" and the pros go home and say "we passed a good bill but the House is scared of Lou Dobbs." It's the House that is most vulnerable on this issue, which is why the Senate is daring to try to strongarm them into agreeing to the opposite of what they believe, just to show they are "doing something."

- If Derb is looking for GOP Senators he can still support and who might need help this year, top of the list is Jim Talent, because he's very vulnerable but could still win his race. Other (possibly) vulnerable incumbents who voted against include: Rick Santorum (very likely to lose), John Kyl (very likely to win), and Conrad Burns (who has Abramoff problems and who I suspect will lose). I remember liking Talent when he was a House member, but he hasn't made much of a mark as a Senator, for good or ill.

2006-05-26T10:12:00.000-04:00

Writing about the immigration bill, Derb pulls his punches, as usual. But I can't say I disagree with him much. We've been told that trying to stop illegal immigration is like King Canute trying to command the tide to recede. But did we have to command the tide to become a tsunami?

2006-05-26T08:44:00.000-04:00

Well, the Senate has done it again. In the comprehensive immigration reform bill, they have passed what may be the worst piece of legislation ever, surpassing even the Medicare drug bill.

What pushes it over the edge is the inclusion of an incredibly poorly thought-out guestworker program. The program is massive. It is not focused on normalizing the status of seasonal agricultural workers (we already have a program for that, actually). And it is self-contradictory on multiple points. It's nominally for temporary workers, but President Bush explicitly rejected an amendment requiring such workers to go home when their specified term is up. It's designed for relatively low-skill employment but it extends Davis-Bacon privileges to all guestworkers. It's supposed to reduce the incentive to come in illegally by providing a clear legal path to work here, but the new process is incredibly complicated and confusing and will require a new bureaucracy to enforce (assuming it is enforced, which, based on past experience, it doubtful).

And, even ignoring all this, in my own opinion a guestworker program as such is something we should not want. We should want people who come to America to identify with America, and we should not make our economy dependent on an imported class of bondsmen. That's not what America is about.

The very attempt to be comprehensive has resulted in an incoherent mess that fails to respond to any of the various immigration questions in a coherent way.

This bill does not make it easier for large corporations to manage their global workforce and to quickly get the skilled workers they need in a timely fashion. It expands our existing hodge-podge system without simplifying it. We're still making it too hard for the people we really want to come to get here.

The bill does not comprehensively control the border, the one thing that the GOP base demands and that the country as a whole clearly wants.

The bill does not clearly reduce the incentives for people to come to America illegally. By amnestying those who are already here and creating a complex new infrastructure for bringing in guestworkers who are not intended to be on a citizenship track, the bill actually creates substantial incentives for additional illegal immigration.

Inasmuch as the reason the Senate is considering the issue is that the country is upset about illegal immigration, the bill is a massive non-sequitur.

Immigration is not my issue. There are three million immigrants in my home town, and I can't see that New York City has been hurt by them. But this legislation is an abomination.

There is something profoundly broken in Washington. This is not the first bill that has been produced in this decade that seems designed to be a disaster. The farm bill, highway bill and energy bills were hodge-podges designed to waste money and achieve little. Bush's tax bills had a few sensible core ideas but were also filled with anti-productive loopholes and loaded with gimmicks like automatic sunset provisions that no one could possibly favor on the merits; they were designed with public-relations in mind more than policy. The reorganization of the government that created the Homeland Security Department was barely thought-out and has proved a disaster; ditto for the reorganization of intelligence. And then we had the Medicare drug bill, an amalgam of the worst ideas of both parties. And now we have this immigration monstrosity.

This was not always the case. In the 1980s and 1990s, Congress was able to craft a variety of bills that basically did what they said. Reagan's 1981 tax cuts and 1986 tax reform each did basically what they were supposed to do. Welfare reform and farm-subsidies reform in the 1990s each did basically what they were supposed to do. The 1986 immigration bill, for all that it is much-criticized in retrospect, was sold as an amnesty; it failed, in large part because it was not enforced, but it was not designed to fail, nor was it structured and sold in a deceptive manner.

Something has gone very, very wrong in Washington. Occam's Razor would suggest that what has gone wrong is that the Bush Administration is completely indifferent to the legislative process. On some deep level, they don't care whether we have good laws. That is a very, very damning indictment, far more damning, in my view, than the charge that they are simply incompetent or that they are deceptive, saying one thing but intending another. It may also be an insufficient explanation; Congress, and the Senate in particular, seems almost eager to take mediocre bills and by heroic effort transform them into positively awful bills. But if the President cared about whether we have good laws, some of these laws would not be on the books. So presumably he doesn't care.

It would probably be best if no laws whatever were passed between now and January 2009. I simply no longer trust Washington to produce legislation on any topic whatever.

2006-05-26T08:36:00.000-04:00

It's funny. Until Al Gore actually started talking, I was one of those thinking, "you know, he'd be a pretty good candidate."

I mean, he won the popular vote in 2000. He never voted for the Iraq war, a war the country now believes was a pretty clear mistake. He served as VP, so he has executive and foreign policy experience. He's credible in the business community and beloved by the "netroots." And he's not Hillary. What's not to like.

Then he started talking. And reminded me that Al Gore is just about the worst politician ever to achieve such prominence, or the most successful politician ever to have such terrible political skills.

The Democratic fantasy is that Gore is the new Bobby Kennedy, the one-time insider who transformed himself into the conscience of the nation. Or, to pick an analogy from the other side of the aisle, he's the Democratic Richard Nixon: tanned, rested and ready to take the executive power that he should have gotten the first time around. And on paper, he fits the bill.

And then he starts talking.

JPod's right. If he runs, Hillary will simply squish him.

For the sake of Marty Peretz's health, I hope he just takes a pass.

2006-05-17T10:55:00.000-04:00

JPod points to an interesting piece by Glenn Reynolds on why fertility has fallen. Reynolds adds social factors that have made parenting more work and less fun to a list of economic factors offered by Phillip Longman.

But . . . fertility is falling everywhere.

Japan, China and South Korea; Thailand, Vietnam and Sri Lanka; Brazil, Trinidad and Cuba; Russia, Ukraine and Poland; Italy, Spain and Greece; Iran, Turkey and Algeria. Care to guess what these countries have in common? A total fertility rate below replacement.

Of course, there are big chunks of the world where fertility is well above replacement: chunks of the Muslim Middle East and most of Africa, as well as Malaysia, the Philippines, Paraguay and a few other places still have total fertility rates above 3 children/woman. But most of Latin America has a TFR in the 2.5 children/woman region, and still dropping, with the largest country (Brazil) already below replacement - and, contrary to popular belief, there are numerous Muslim countries that are below that 3 children/woman TFR (as noted, Iran, Turkey and Algeria are below 2 children/woman; in addition Egypt, Morocco and Jordan are all below 3 children/woman; super-fertile countries like Afghanistan and Yemen are outliers rather than the norm even in the Muslim world).

Longman thinks that the cost of kids has risen primarily because of the expense of education. That's a persuasive argument for the developed world - but for Algeria? Vietnam? Brazil? Reynolds thinks one culprit is that raising kids is more work and less fun. Again: reasonable for America, but I don't even think this does much to explain Italy or Russia, much less Iran and Sri Lanka.

Economic, social and religious factors unquestionably make a difference around the edges. Why do Britain and Sweden have a so much higher total fertility rate than Spain or Latvia? The answer probably has economic, social, maybe also religious factors; the legacy of Francoism and Stalinism probably plays in as well. Why has South Korean fertility fallen so far so fast realtive to, say, Taiwan? Again, economic and social factors probably relate to the answer. Or Tunisia's relative to Syria's? But in big-picture terms, fertility is falling everywhere, in Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu and secular societies, in rich and poor countries, and that demands a big-picture explanation that works across so many varied locations.

The two big-picture answers that have the most explanatory power are: (1) urbanization, and (2) female empowerment (and specifically access to contraception). Countries where the population is overwhelmingly urban (e.g., Japan) have among the world's lowest fertility, and urbanization seems to correlate with drops in fertility almost universally. (There are exceptions, of course; Ulster and Gaza are very dense, but have surprisingly high fertility rates because the people there view themselves consciously to be engaged in a demographic war with hated enemies.) I find it very hard to see how either of these trends - greater urbanization and greater empowerment for women - reverse themselves in any major society any time soon. And yes, that includes a world in which Islam continues to make advances against the secular world. Iran is a mullahocracy and has below-replacement fertility. Algeria is a country that voted for an Islamist regime in the 1990s and now has below-replacement fertility. These are not secular societies, not even to the degree that Turkey is (and that's not very far - Turkey's population is overwhelmingly devout and the current regime has an Islamist character, albeit a moderate one). Therefore, any effort to shore up fertility is necessarily going to be swimming against the tide. A country like Italy, with a fertility rate below 1.3 children/woman, has a real problem on its hands, and should examine the economic and social factors that might be driving fertility to such low levels. A country like Finland, with a total fertility rate just above 1.7 children/woman, probably won't be able to do much to get that level up. Finland will probably shrink until young Finns feel like there's enough elbow room (down at the southern end of the country where there are occasional warm days) to make 3-child families seem perfectly reasonable.

2006-05-17T10:43:00.000-04:00

Very sensible piece from Robert Samuelson today about immigration. I should have acknowledged the interaction between aging and immigration as another good restrictionist argument - particularly because it is usually touted as an argument *for* high immigration levels.

The usual argument is that immigration is needed to redress the looming imbalance between the number of workers and retirees. But this is false for three reasons. First, low-skill immigrants don't add as much value as retiring workers take out; the number of additional low-skill workers you'd need to generate enough value to pay for the retiring baby boomers is staggering. Second, immigrants don't come alone. They bring families - not only children, but also parents. Yes, they may bring the total fertility rate up and thereby bring somewhat more demographic balance, but bringing parents partly offsets this. Third, and most important, low-wage immigrants will themselves retire. And because they will fall in the lower end of the income distribution, their retirement will be subsidized - and their healthcare will be massively subsidized. It's this factor that pushes low-skill immigrants into the net-loss category in terms of the solvency of our entitlement programs. Mass low-skill immigration not only doesn't fix our entitlement problem; it makes it worse.

The way to solve our entitlement problem is extremely simple: we have to extend our working lives to offset the extension of our actual lifespans. Everything else is either window-dressing or a non-sequitur. (Social Security "reform" of the sort advocated by President Bush was a back-door way of cutting benefits, and I favored it for precisely that reason.)

2006-05-16T21:37:00.000-04:00

Thanks for the link, Steve.

Just to be clear about one thing, though: my post about immigration was not intended to lay out my position on the matter. Rather, it was intended to make the case, devil's advocate style, for the President's position on the matter. (Not that I'm suggesting that the President is the devil, you understand.)

Myself, I'm in the mushy middle on immigration, which really isn't my issue.

Reasons I think large-scale immigration is a good idea:

I basically buy my argument below about political stability in Mexico, though I think the immigration "valve" will be insufficient if Mexico doesn't deal swiftly and ruthlessly with its corruption problem. And while there are vast numbers of potential immigrants in China, India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Indonesia, etc., these countries are an ocean away and while we could not completely eliminate illegal human traffic from these countries, limiting that traffic should be much easier than ending migration from Mexico, and the consequences to us of political instability on the other side of the world if the emigration "valve" is shut much less meaningful.

I think all else being equal (which, of course, it never is) immigration is a net positive for the immigrant (for the many obvious reasons), for the world (because the immigrant is more productive in his new situation and productivity is what makes the world go 'round), and for the receiving country (because we garner some of the benefits of that increased productivity, though how much of the benefit it debatable).

I share the romantic notion that America's identity as a nation of immigrants is part of what makes us great; it doesn't trump everything by any means, but it's something I look on positively. I also note that New York City, my home, is profoundly dependent on immigration for its continued vitality, as New York's middle and working class is increasingly imported from abroad.

I don't share much in the romanticism of the egalitarian 1950s; a more stratified, less egalitarian society doesn't especially bother me as such, provided there is a lot of social mobility, the leading classes have a high degree of public spirit, and the truly needy are taken care of.

Reasons I think large-scale immigration, particularly of low-skill workers, is a bad idea:

I don't see any compelling reason why we need to import lots of low-skill workers when we are now a post-industrial economy shedding manufacturing jobs even faster than the rest of the world is. Importing people reduces our incentives to increase productivity (and productivity is what ultimately drives national wealth) and reduces the incentives for the countries where those people currently live to make the most of their comparative advantage (America basically should not have a textile industry any longer, and we certainly shouldn't import people to man it.)

Low-skill immigration is clearly a regressive tax in that the benefits disproportionately accrue to owners of capital and consumers of goods where the costs are born by current citizens who are competing for the same jobs.

America historically devoted a great deal of energy to assimilating newcomers, energy we are no longer willing to expend, and this must affect our assessment of how many such newcomers we can afford to take in before America begins to come apart at the seams.

The enormous current influx is straining certain communities to the breaking point, and while illegal immigration makes this burden much worse, legalizing that flow would only affect the burden at the margins, and, if it resulted in even increased volumes of people coming in, would likely make the strain worse.

There are a variety of reasons to believe that social mobility is slowing (for reasons that have nothing at all to do with President Bush's tax cuts, thank you), and that the influx of low-skilled workers now coming in will find it much more difficult to climb into the middle class than was the case for the immigrants of the turn of the century. If that is the case, then high levels of immigration dominated by unskilled laborers could indeed reproduce Latin American social patterns in the United States, something I definitely would not be happy about.

Most Americans want the overall level of immigration controlled if not outright reduced and illegal immigration ended. That sentiment should count for something.

Anyway, those are the persuasive pro- and con- arguments as I see them.

2006-05-16T17:24:00.000-04:00

By the way, I haven't commented on the President's immigration speech because I didn't listen to it or read it. The universal after-the-fact consensus is that he said what everybody expected him to say. So what's to say?

I don't think President Bush's position on immigration, by the way, is at all surprising. Here are the propositions that, I believe, the President holds to be true. They are all disputable, but I think you'll agree that if true they add up to a case for the President's position on this matter.

Mexico is undergoing a transition to being a pretty-much developed economy. Per capita GDP has grown; trade with the United States has grown (as has direct investment in Mexico); Mexico now has a multiparty system that is reasonably democratic; etc.
Birth rates in Mexico are dropping rapidly; the total fertility rate in Mexico is currently estimated at 2.4 children/woman, and still dropping; they should be below replacement in 20 years.
The current high levels of illegal immigration are a temporary phenomenon, driven by two factors: the transition in the Mexican economy (which is dislocating rural populations) and the growth in the working-age population (because there's a time-lag between dropping fertility and the end of the growth of the labor force). Mexico is currently producing more workers than their economy can employ, but if the economy continues to grow and the fertility rate continues to drop, this will cease to be the case, again within about 20 years.
The United States has a profound interest in Mexico making its economic and political transition successfully. This means two things: not making the transition more difficult and not undermining Vicente Fox's PAN, which is the most pro-American and pro-market of the three major Mexican political parties.
If we were to seriously impede the surplus Mexican labor force from finding work in the United States, this would imperial that transition and turn Mexico in an anti-American direction, both because of the loss of remittances (which are crucial to the Mexican economy) and because Mexico would now have a big under-employment problem on its hands.
The United States is a huge and rich country. We can afford to absorb another 20 million immigrants from Mexico if we want and/or need to. Indeed, immigrants are a net addition to the United States because they tend to be hard-working self-starters. Mexican immigrants are, when one controls for economic status, disproportionately small-business owners. They are also disproportionately represented in the American armed forces. Mexican immigrants benefit because the opportunities in America are greater than they are in Mexico, and all Americans benefit because Mexicans willing to work hard for low pay keep prices down. It's a win-win situation.
We shouldn't worry about any possible difficulties assimilating Mexican immigrants because they are Christians just like us. We pray together, so we'll stay together. Immigrant parents overwhelmingly want their children to learn English to participate fully in American life, so we don't have to worry about Spanish linguistic ghettos persisting over the long term.
Immigration is a much bigger strain on a state with a big welfare state like California than on a stingy state like Texas. But since we're Republicans, we don't want to encourage a big welfare state, so this is not a reason to worry about high levels of immigration.
Right now, with such a huge influx of illegal immigrants, it's very difficult for the Feds to do the most important job with respect to protecting the border: keeping out criminals and terrorists. If we legalized every migrant who only wanted a job, we'd be able to devote more resources to keeping out the bad actors who we really don't want coming here.
A lot of the anxiety over immigration is just fear of change or a reaction to the suffering felt by specific communities near the border. A guestworker program would eliminate many of the stresses associated with illegal immigration, and if we can do some cosmetic things to reassure people that we care then the inchoate anxiety will abate.
Some people just don't like Mexicans. Screw them. But more important, make it clear that it is the head of the GOP saying: screw them. The GOP cannot afford to be seen as the white male party if it is to be successful over the long term.
More broadly, the GOP must be the party of optimism, of opportunity, of openness, and of other good things that begin with "o". There is no way to make opposition to immigration look like anything but pessimism and a bunker mentality. So even if shutting the border would win a close election here or there, it's a long-term loser because it defines the GOP as the party of fear rather than the party of hope.

Maybe I'm crazy, but this is basically what I think the President believes, and, if he believes all of the above, then there's no mystery why he favors a big guestworker program and an amnesty for those illegals already here.

Like I said, every one of these points can be debated. If you read Steve Sailer's blog, I'm sure you know the whole laundry list of arguments on the other side. Immigration is really not my issue, but I've tried to get up to speed on it because it seems to be pretty darned important to a whole lot of people. Mostly I wish that supporters of high immigration levels would stop condescending to opponents, and just make their case in a rational manner, and, as well, that immigration restrictionists would drop the conspiratorial talk, the talk of "treason" and the like that really is beyond the pale. Nobody is a traitor here. I don't see any treason in the argument I laid out above any more than I see inherent racism on the part of those who favor immigration restriction. In both cases, I see rational arguments that may well be wrong on multiple levels. If we can't have a rational argument with each other, then the only people who lose is us.

I want to make one other point, and I'm afraid I'm going to offend some people by doing so, so before I do, just remember how incredibly reasonable I am and how attentive I've been to the arguments of immigration restrictionists. I think I'm fairly rare in that regard; by and large, the only people I read who give restrictionist arguments credence are people who have already bought those arguments. That mostly speaks poorly of those who are in the pro-immigration camp than it does speak well for me, but I'm looking for credit anyhow.

Here it is. A very high percentage of articulate opponents of an amnesty for illegal aliens are themselves immigrants who came here legally. They know just how hard we make it for people who are law-abiding and would make excellent citizens to become such. It's quite clear that some of the emotion in their opposition to any kind of amnesty derives from their sense of having been played for chumps: they jumped through all the hoops to do things on the up-and-up, and here eleven million people who broke the rules are getting rewarded. They don't think that's fair, and it burns them up.

It's not fair. I don't have any good argument for why it is fair, because it isn't. And I agree absolutely that if you reward bad behavior, you get more of it. That is one of the many holes in the syllogism I presented above on behalf of the President.

But I want to point out something else. Life isn't fair. All sorts of people who don't play by the rules get rewarded. The fact is that the people who are being rewarded are not that similar to you. You came here with skills, an education, and a middle-class background. Illegal immigrants overwhelmingly come here with nothing. If this is the first time you've noticed that people with little or nothing bend or break the rules that the middle class is forced to play by, then you have not lived much. And if you haven't noticed that there are plenty of instances that go the other way - enforcement of the laws against drug possession, for example - then once again, you haven't lived much.

I really don't want to sound harsh here. But speaking for myself I am much more likely to listen to the policy implications of amnesty - that it will encourage more illegal immigration, for example - than I am to listen to the argument that amnesty is an insult to those who came here legally. On one level, of course it is. But I just don't think that's a good enough basis for a political upheaval such as is being called for in some quarters.

2006-05-16T16:18:00.000-04:00

Andrew Sullivan, 11:57am. The secular religion of multiculturalism has the same tropes as a real religion. It constructs an abstract devil and posits one completely virtuous state of being. There can be no compromise between them.

Andrew Sullivan, 50 minutes later. Posts approvingly a long email from a reader about how conservative book titles are beyond parody. Exhibit A: Ann Coulter's new book, Godless. Subtitle: The Church of Liberalism.

I know, I should stop; this is too easy. But as the authentic voice of sweet reason, it bugs me that Sullivan, who claims that title himself, can't keep it straight for even one hour.

Or is this what they mean by the radical center: somebody who, instead of levying hysterical charges against the guys on the other side, levies hysterical charges at both sides?

2006-05-15T17:58:00.000-04:00

Want to know why McCain is not overestimated as front-runner for the GOP nomination? His speech in Lynchburg illustrates why. Byron York explains what McCain meant by the speech. Sounds to me like precisely the right tone. As I said a few days ago: if McCain can avoid showing contempt for his opponents, he'll solve the biggest of his problems.

2006-05-15T11:09:00.000-04:00

Major General John Batiste just bought a house on the street where my sister-in-law lives in Rochester. Sounds like he'd be an interesting fellow to have as a neighbor.

2006-05-15T10:58:00.000-04:00

"The difference [is] between a world-view, based on empirical evidence or reason or personal experience and open to debate, and a religion, based on an inerrant text or revelation or church authority and closed to doubt . . ."

The distinction drawn is Andrew Sullivan's. Now, here's my question. Sullivan claims to be a Christian - indeed, to be a real Christian, unlike Christianists who have wrongly fused a distorted understanding of their own faiths with a political agenda.

So: does Sullivan believe that Scripture is "inerrant"? Does he base his faith in "church authority"? Are his religious beliefs "closed to doubt"?

Sullivan wants to protect the liberal political order from what he sees as a threat from religious authoritarianism. But he also wants religion to import a liberal attitude towards its own truth claims from the dominant liberal political order. This is, in fact, precisely the dynamic that Peter Berkowitz teases out of John Rawls' work on religion and liberalism. It's also precisely what the theocons are reacting (if Sullivan is right, over-reacting) against.

If Sullivan would simply admit all this he would be far less annoying.

2006-05-11T11:12:00.000-04:00

This Luttig story strikes me as quite a big deal. I'm highly skeptical that Luttig would quit in this way out of simple pique at having been passed over for the Supreme Court. He's only 51; there's plenty of time for him to be appointed by a future Republican President to replace Stevens, or Ginsburg, or even Scalia or Kennedy. Luttig reportedly had lousy chemistry with President Bush, so he was never going to be appointed by this President, but what about a future President McCain, say? Moreover, I'm skeptical of the notion that he was bored or tired of being a judge. The couple of judges I know have great lives: a position of respect, lots of free time. And they don't have positions nearly as prestigious as Luttig's.

I admit, I hadn't been following the Padilla story that carefully, but the account in the Wall Street Journal is pretty persuasive that the Bush Administration undermined both the law and the position of Luttig personally with their shenanigans. And I'm not at all surprised by that. Add Luttig to the list of serious conservatives feeling deeply betrayed by the Bush Administration's overriding emphasis on politics and personal loyalty above all.

All that said, I wonder why everyone is assuming Luttig is now disqualifying himself for a future Supreme Court appointment. Who's to say that you can't return from the private sector to the public? The Executive branch does it all the time.

2006-05-11T09:45:00.000-04:00

An interesting debate about Darfur between The New Republic (eight articles in the latest issue, including this editorial), Matt Yglesias, and Jane Galt. Here's my own take:

The New Republic is wrong that you can drop prudential considerations when genocide rears its head. A society can never drop prudential considerations. Individuals can, but societies cannot, because they are responsible for more than themselves and more than the present.

Jane Galt is somewhat wrong that all that matters is the death toll, not the ethnic dimension to conflict. I'm not 100% sure why she's wrong, but I think the reason has to do with, on the one hand, deterrability and, on the other hand, the follow-on consequences in the case of genocidal conflict. If we say that the physical extermination of an enemy people is a war aim, then it is hard to see how a regime with such aims can ever be brought back into a state of peaceful coexistence. A regime that pursues legitimate aims with illegitimate means might be able to be deterred into avoiding said means or rehabilitated after defeat. A regime that pursues fundamentally evil ends can only be eliminated itself. Genocide is the paradigm of an evil, illegitimate end. I say Galt is somewhat wrong because, really, it's not clear how many cases there are of this kind of evil; the Nazis fit the bill, and so do the Rwandan genocidaires, but I doubt the Turkish perpetrators of the Armenian genocide do, or the Serbian perpetrators of the Bosnian genocide. So either we need to define genocide sufficiently narrowly that I'm not clear it makes much of an impact on policy, or Galt turns out to be more right than wrong and we have to question why ethnic warfare (which is what a broader definition of genocide would amount to) as such is so much worse than other kinds of war against civilians.

On the other hand, Galt has a good point in that the African continent has suffered numerous and horrible human tragedies with greater death tolls than the ongoing massacres in Darfur. No one has seriously proposed an international intervention to pacify the Democratic Republic of Congo's territory, where over three million people are estimated to have been killed, to which we must add mass rapes, mutilations and enslavements, a scene of horror substantially worse than the quite-bad-enough situation in Darfur. If we are not to do anything substantial about the DRC, why are we to obliged to do so in Darfur? The reason must be something other than the moral requirement to end horrible evil.

In any event, if we define genocide narrowly in this way, the situation in Sudan most assuredly does not qualify, as Yglesias indeed argues it does not. That war is an ethnic war on civilians aimed at altering the ethnic composition of Darfur. If it is genocide, then assuredly so is the Russian war in Chechnya, to pick one example. I don't recall TNR demanding war with Russia. If they do not, then the reason must be prudential. I consider my first point to have been proven.

And even if we define genocide broadly, and agree there is a categorical imperative to end it, we are left with how to marry means to ends. My mother and numerous friends of mine went to Washington to protest the situation in Darfur and demand action. I asked every person I've met who went there what precisely did they want done. I have yet to get a single answer. TNR thinks that's because liberals are so down on America and the use of force that they can't ask for military action. I think it's because no one - certainly not TNR - has offered the American people a complete spec of what "muscular Wilsonianism" or whatever we're calling it these days would require in terms of force structure.

Actually, I'd like to see that. I'd like to see a rundown of what it would cost - in men and dollars - to implement a foreign policy vision consistent with an a priori commitment to military action in Darfur. I'd like to see best, middle and worst case scenarios - best case, a few shows of force make all the bad guys quake and we get peace and prosperity on the cheap; mid case, we get no deterrent effect and, as in Bosnia and Kossovo, we never get to leave, but there are negligible casualties; worst case we get multiple Iraq-type messes in places from Burma to Zimbabwe. Actually, that's not the absolute worst case, but even taking that for the worst case would be instructive. What would America's force structure and defense budget have to look like to support that kind of foreign policy? I'm not an expert, but there are people out there who could spec it out, and I'd like to know.

I'm pretty sure the reason the world is focused on Darfur and not the DRC is that in Darfur an Islamist government is beating up on African Muslims. So making a big deal about Darfur means defending black(er) people from lighter-skinned people, and, more important, means taking on an Islamist regime while still defending Muslims. And the relation to American national interests is oblique. In somebody's mind, that makes it the perfect war: a largely altruistic effort with just the right enemies to defend just the right victims. I don't think those kinds of PR considerations should be predominant when we're talking about war.

I should stress that if we can figure out ways to put the screws on Sudan in a way that makes sense, I'm all for it. I'm skeptical that we can actually get the Chinese to be helpful and, short of that, I'm skeptical we can do much short of taking military action. But I'm certainly open to that idea. I have nothing against human rights having an important role in foreign policy. I may have something against the categorical imperative, though.

2006-05-11T09:18:00.000-04:00

It's interesting how the import of a phrase can change based on context, even as its meaning hasn't changed at all.

I may have mentioned at some point that, when we say the prayer for the State of Israel (which at my shul we sing before returning the sifrei Torah to the ark at the end of the Torah service on Saturday mornings), my custom is to add "sheh t'hi" which means "that she may be" in the first line of the prayer, as follows:

"Our Father in heaven, Rock of Israel and his redeemer, bless the State of Israel that she may be the first flowering of our redemption."

I insert the phrase as a dissent from the eschatological confidence of the unaltered line. Without the addition, the prayer avers that the State of Israel is the first flowering of our redemption - that is to say: that the Messianic Age is at hand, and the foundation of the State of Israel is the first sign thereof. I do not see how we can know anything of the kind, hence my dissenting emendation: I pray that God will bless the State of Israel that she may be the herald of the Messianic Age, rather than expressing any confidence at all that the redemption is already at hand.

This is a habit I picked up from a black hat (i.e. ultra-Orthodox) friend, who used the phrase as a way of splitting the difference between his fellow black hats who reject any theological significance of the State of Israel, and hence refuse to say the prayer, and Religious Zionists who believe, following Rav Kook, that the foundation of the State of Israel was indeed a sign that the inexorable End had begun. This friend considered himself a Zionist - indeed, a fiercely right-wing Zionist - and he thought that the foundation of Israel had great theological significance in that it made possible such future events as the rebuilding of the Temple, the reconstitution of the Sanhedrin, etc.; he just didn't think these future developments would inevitably follow the foundation of the State, and thought it appropriate to leave the future in God's hands.

So a few weeks ago, I was at lunch at a friend's house Saturday afternoon, and among the other guest was a left-wing Conservative rabbi who had lived a while in Israel. The rabbi commented to me that he noticed my inclusion of that phrase in the prayer for the State of Israel, and that I'm the only American besides himself whom he'd ever heard do that. I asked him where he picked up the phrase, and he commented that it was common currency among Masorti (Conservative) rabbis in Israel who are on the left, who want to pointedly distinguish themselves from the Religious Zionist camp that has been so profoundly involved in the settlement enterprise in the territories. These rabbis intended to indicate by adding the phrase that Israel will only herald the Messianic Age if it deserves to, that ethical behavior is a precondition, and that therefore the pro-settler right is wrong to use the language of the prayer and say: see: if we withdraw from territory then we are violating God's will, because only by settling all of the Land can the Messianic Age be brought to fruition.

Then, last week, the same rabbi came up to me after services on Saturday and relayed the following. Apparently, the same phrase has begun to turn up in extreme Religious Zionist circles. But for them it means almost exactly the opposite of what it means for the Masorti rabbis. Where previously these Religious Zionists had believed that the redemption could not be thwarted by human action, now they are worried that, by withdrawing from Gaza and preparing to withdraw from much of Judea and Samaria, the State of Israel has indeed forfeited its place as the herald of the Messianic Age. Therefore, some of these people are withdrawing from the State, preparing the ideological ground for a movement that would ultimately produce the true State of Israel on the ruins of the current, illegitimate State. Others, who are adding this phrase to their prayers, are staking out a middle ground, and by that phrase are expressing their hope that the State of Israel may yet change its ways, if not immediately than one day, and return to its proper mission, and so they are effectively praying for God to bless Israel with the will and the opportunity to return to the territories lately abandoned.

That the same phrase can mean three such different things, while in all cases retaining the larger connection between the State of Israel and Jewish eschatological hopes (albeit always deferred), strikes me as a testiment to its strength and rightness - and, indeed, a much better basis for religious "consensus" than the original, unaltered prayer. It seems to me that this is exactly what religious language should do, and that it would be a very good idea if the dissenting phraseology became the official phraseology on this point.

2006-05-10T18:05:00.000-04:00

Andrew Sullivan links to the following story about the percentage of Americans under 5 that are non-white and notices something odd: the chart at the bottom shows only 4% of children under 5 are black. Sullivan seizes this datum and begins to fantasize about a country whose black population has been replaced by brown immigrants, kind of like Sullivan's home, Washington, D.C.

But it's just a freaking typo: the percentage of children under 5 who are black and who are Asian are obviously transposed. As the chart reads currently, there would be 3 million Asian-American children under 5 and only 800,000 black children under 5 - whereas there are 38 million black Americans and only 11 million Asian Americans in total. That would certainly be a story - a colossal Asian baby boom results in over 25% of all Asian-Americans being under 5 years old, while the black birth rate drops effectively to zero over the past 5 years! But it's just a typo: clearly, 4% of children under 5 are Asian, just like 4% of the population as a whole is Asian, and 15% of children under 5 are black, slightly above the 13% of the total population.

I guess Steven Levitt isn't the only one who needs to check the data now and again. If only these people would take a turn on a trading desk. They would lose a lot of money, and maybe learn something.

2006-05-10T10:00:00.000-04:00

I've been meaning to write something for some time about McCain, and every time there's a news-based excuse I'm too busy to write anything. So I'll do it now.

McCain is the current front-runner for the GOP nomination for several reasons. First, he is not President Bush, and nobody thinks he is. Second, he seems to really want to be President. Third, he's still got a lot of credibility with certain kinds of swing voters, and even Democrats. Fourth, he's associated with clean government, and the GOP is currently suffering from (among other things) a serious K-street problem as well as some spectacular instances of out-and-out corruption. Fifth, McCain is serious about spending restraint, having opposed the Medicare drug bill, the highway bill, the farm bill and having made a career of opposing pork - all this in pointed contrast to both the President and Congress.

McCain also has big advantages over his three biggest potential primary opponents: Allen, Romney and Giuliani. Allen is way too much like Bush, and I don't think that's what the electorate will want after eight years. Romney and Giuliani pose at least as big a problem to the Christian Right as McCain does; both have more liberal records than McCain does (Rudy by a huge margin), plus Romney is a Mormon and Giuliani is a multiple-divorcee. If you look at the four of them, based on his record McCain is clearly the most conservative after Allen, and therefore the only option that is both plausibly conservative and plausibly electable. His biggest weakness relative to the field is that he's the only one who's never run anything; Allen was a Governor before going to the Senate, Romney is a Governor, and Giuliani ran a city so big it might as well count as a state. This is balanced, though, by the fact that McCain unquestionably has the best foreign policy credentials of the bunch, and we're in the middle of a war.

McCain, though, has some serious liabilities as well, some of which will matter mostly in the primaries but others that will matter in a general election. Two of these are personal, and five of them are policy-related. I'll address each in turn, and how I think McCain can address each of them.

His first personal liability is that he has evinced at times a certain contempt for his opponents. Contempt is not an attractive quality in a political leader, even when you agree with him that his opponents are wrong, if not contemptible. Contempt should be reserved for actual enemies, not for political opponents in a democratic system. And manifesting contempt for opponents within your own party whom you need to win a general election is worse than a crime: it's a mistake, and a stupid one. My impression is that McCain has done a lot to work on this particular problem, but that doesn't mean it won't recur at the most inopportune moment. Continuing to work on it is my advice. In particular, working on it with respect to everybody and not just specific previous objects of contempt is important. McCain has done a lot to mend fences with the Christian Right. Meanwhile he's showing immigration restrictionists today the same contempt he showed in 2000 for guys like Jerry Falwell.

The bigger personal problem McCain has is his devotion to lost causes, even to making himself one of those lost causes. Nothing succeeds like success, but McCain has made a career out of romantic failure. Nearly every policy cause McCain has championed has died in the legislature (campaign finance reform ironically excepted). All those spending bills I mentioned that McCain opposed? They all passed. And, most notably, his own 2000 Presidential campaign began to fall apart the moment it appeared to have a prayer of victory - namely, right after New Hampshire. I don't think Senator McCain had really ever considered that he might win, that he might become President, and he began to behave strangely during the whole period between the New Hampshire victory and the South Carolina loss. Once he lost South Carolina, he seemed happier, and he was at his happiest torpedoing (or so it seemed at the time) any future he had in the GOP, and doing as much damage as possible to the Bush juggernaut. What was this strange behavior about? Partly, no doubt, his feelings about Bush, and the fact that he let those feelings get in the way of rational decisionmaking does not speak well of him. But there's something else there, something deep inside that is part of what makes him attractive, but that if it comes to dominate will scare people away from him and cause him to lose - and that, if it comes to dominate when he is President, will be very dangerous. There is a Churchillian aspect to McCain. We would do well to remember what a weird fellow Churchill actually was, how unsuited he was to nearly any task of political life except the one that made him a national hero, leading Britain in her finest hour. I'm not sure how McCain can reassure on this score, but what I, at least, am looking for is a bit of a sign that he can play FDR - a coldly manipulative man if there ever was one - as well as Churchill.

The big risk for McCain is that his opponents will successfully attack him at one of his points of personal vulnerability in a way that successfully couples with an attack at one of his points of policy vulnerability. To that end, let me detail what I think are his five biggest areas of policy vulnerability, in ascending order of seriousness and intractability.

Guns. McCain has a history of being squishy on guns. In fact, he sponsored gun control legislation. This is totally unacceptable to the GOP base. Fortunately for McCain, this is an issue he can solve very easily, because guns are not a hot issue right now and Giuliani - his most dangerous opponent in the primaries - is even worse on the issue. I expect McCain to pander shamelessly to the NRA. In any event, in the general election, McCain vs. Clinton is an easy call for gun rights voters even if McCain doesn't pander to them at all.

Taxes. McCain voted against Bush's first big round of tax cuts, and his tax proposals in 2000 were neither serious in a policy sense nor appealing to people who vote on tax policy. McCain now champions extension of Bush's tax cuts, but his reasoning is not persuasive. What does he really believe on this issue? I think he believes that lower taxes are better than higher ones but balanced budgets are the top priority. That is to say: his tax stance is probably closer to Bob Dole's than Newt Gingrinch's. This is not enough to win over the Stephen Moores of the world. Fortunately, taxes are not the most salient issue in this campaign; fortunately as well, McCain has a relatively straightforward rhetorical out that is sufficiently in tune with what he believes and sufficiently appealing to both primary and general election voters. McCain should say that the next tax reform needs to bring back the Spirit of '86. We should lower the tax burden on businesses and families by closing loopholes and simplifying the code, lowering rates and broadening the base. I could list specific proposals I favor, but I won't do that here, both because that belongs in another post and because I don't think McCain needs to be specific. All he needs to say specifically is that he will not favor raising income tax rates or increasing the tax burden generally, and that his overall philosophy is: close loopholes, broaden the base, lower rates.

The Culture War. McCain is not a culture warrior, neither of the Pat Robertson type nor the Pat Buchanan type nor the Robert Bork type. As Bill Kristol said during the 2000 campaign, the faith-based institution that McCain believes in is America. Good. Good for three reasons: because the culture war as such is a negative for America, even if you believe one side is pretty much right and the other side pretty much wrong; good because I get the impression that for some culture warriors cultural cues have come to matter more than actual policy, which is flat-out stupid, and McCain would force them to grow up; and good because, if you are on the right, having someone in the White House who isn't actually of your faction but knows which side his bread is buttered on may be the best of both worlds policy-wise. McCain has been doing exactly what I expected him to do with respect to Christian conservative leaders: he's been pledging his fealty publicly and privately. He's even pandering now on Intelligent Design, which I personally think is a political mistake as well as atrocious policy.

I think McCain's message on these issues needs to be very simple and clear. Number one, I'm my own man. Don't expect me to give any interest group a veto on my decisions. Number two, look at my record. I've got a pro-life record a mile long. I am a strong supporter of conservative, originalist and restrained jurisprudence. I believe in hard work, traditional families, grattitude towards the military, and one nation under God. In all my years in politics, I haven't changed my views on any of these bedrock questions, and I won't change them when I am President. That message, coupled with real effort to work on that personal contempt problem, should be sufficient. If it isn't, I'm afraid in my opinion that would be an indication of lack of seriousness on the part of the Christian Right. But I fully expect it will be sufficient.

That handles the policy side and the leadership of the Christian Right. But cultural comfort does matter to voters, and McCain will need to figure out how to address it. I think what McCain needs is to have an Oprah moment. He needs to talk about his relationship with his kids. He needs to find entrees to talking about family values - maybe do a speech about military families, the strains on their lives, how military dads can be wonderful role models but also absent ones. The "values voters" are somewhat more female than male, and vastly more lower-middle and middle-class than upper-middle or higher class. Approaching these voters is at least as much about solving McCain's image problem with women as about anything else (men love McCain; women find him much less appealing). I don't think McCain should publicly or privately kowtow to Dobson or Robertson or anyone else. I also don't think he needs to call people "agents of evil." I think if he is respectful without pandering, then a bit of humanizing talk will do wonders breaking through to the actual voters in the bloc. If McCain can avoid showing contempt, and the Christian Right can avoid demanding outright fealty, this is a problem that can be solved.

(An aside on this topic re: David Souter, who always comes up in the context of anyone who is not heart and soul part of the Christian Right who wants their support. First, the lesson of Souter for people who vote of judges should be: don't vote for someone who will put Warren Rudman in charge of the selection of Supreme Court judges, and don't buy a pure stealth nominee. The lesson cannot be: don't vote for anyone who isn't himself either a member of Opus Dei or the 700 Club. Second, President George H. W. Bush nominated lots of conservatives to the Federal bench; Souter was the exception - an important exception, but an exception - to a rule that was quite friendly to judicial conservatives. Third, Anthony Kennedy is at least as problematic for judicial conservatives and opponents of abortion as David Souter, and Kennedy was selected in part because people believed he would vote the "right" way because of his Catholicism. It didn't work out that way, and that's a caution to anyone who would make their voting decisions primarily on the basis of gut cultural comfort. Finally, in the same vein, the current President Bush, who's about as culturally friendly to Christian conservatives as any President could be, nominated Harriet Miers.)

Iraq. Now we're getting to the really tricky stuff, the stuff that can't be finessed. Iraq is McCain's biggest strength and his biggest weakness. His biggest strength because, like it or not, we're at war, and McCain is someone people will trust in fighting a war. He's a warrior himself, but he's also been deeply involved in defense and foreign policy issues for decades, and has a cogent and detailed critique of the conduct of the Iraq War specifically. But there is another edge to that sword. McCain is vulnerable on Iraq in three ways.

First, McCain has a not-entirely-undeserved reputation as the guy who never saw a war he didn't like. During the Kossovo intervention, when much of the GOP was questioning why we were in combat at all, McCain was saying we needed to send ground troops. On Iraq, McCain was an early advocate of putting more troops into the conflict, and he has maintained that position. McCain seems to have a much clearer idea than President Bush that "bear any burden, pay any price" could turn out to be quite a burden and quite a price - but he still believes in that kind of rhetoric. McCain is the only prominent candidate in the GOP primary who not only cannot hedge his support for the Iraq War but, really, is almost certainly going to be arguing that we need to do more - in Iraq and elsewhere - to prosecute the war, with a very expansive conception of the war's aims. That just may not be what the country wants to hear. They certainly will want to hear that the next President will be tough and determined and committed to defending America. But they just may want tough and determined prosecution of more limited war aims than McCain will articulate.

Second, and this is a bit of a subtle point, McCain could be a bit trapped by his difficult relations with President Bush. As I said, McCain has been a strong critic of aspects of the prosecution of the war - on the issue of torture, on how many troops were and are needed, etc. But because he's percieved - still - as a disloyal Republican, he can't press these criticisms too hard for fear of being accused of attacking the President. Moreover, such criticisms amount to saying "I wouldn't have made such dumb mistakes myself" and that kind of assertion can easily be spun by opponents as know-it-all arrogance. I'm not saying this is fair, mind you, but I do think it's part of the reality that McCain faces in this campaign. This is a unique problem for McCain, I think, because I don't think President Bush has a similar relationship with any of the other candidates that would cause him to be especially sensitive to the tone of criticism. And no matter how low the President's poll numbers, he'll have some influence over how things go in the primaries and, in contrast to President Reagan's behavior in 1988, I predict President Bush will use it.

Third, and most subtly, McCain's romantic attachment to lost causes that I alluded to earlier could seriously hurt him in any debate about Iraq. Does McCain have a plan for winning the war? I doubt it - on the general principle that there is no such plan as well as on the evidence of how he's talked about the war. Is there a McCain doctrine that encompasses an undertaking as massive as he would have had the Iraq War be even knowing that there was no Iraqi nuclear program? I can't think what it might be. Has McCain articulated what America's force structure would have to be to sustain any such McCain doctrine, and has he budgeted for such a force structure? I'm pretty sure the answer is "no." If Iraq has become one of McCain's lost causes, or if the electorate starts to worry that it has become one, they will drop him like a stone, as they should.

My advice to McCain on Iraq is: change the topic. Seriously. Make it clear that this is a big world with a lot of foreign policy issues to deal with, and that he, Senator McCain, is a man who can master them. Talk about how we need to rebuild the navy. Talk about how we're going to deal with China, in military and diplomatic terms, in terms of deterrence and eliciting cooperation. Talk about Iran, North Korea, Pakistan, etc. in sober and non-apocalyptic terms, as difficult problems that require sustained attention and a strong and steady hand to address. If McCain gets into a second-guessing contest over Iraq, he loses, because if the country wants to second-guess Iraq it will pick someone with less of an Iraq record. If he is competing over who people trust more to handle American foreign policy and defense generally, I'm confident he can win.

Immigration. From tricky to impossible. Senator McCain is to the left of President Bush on immigration. And President Bush is well to the left of the GOP's center of gravity on immigration. And McCain is, without question, the furthest left candidate on immigration with a chance of winning the GOP nomination. Yes, that includes Rudy Giuliani. Giuliani certainly has a record of being "soft" on illegal immigration. But it's worth pointing out that he compiled that record as Mayor of New York City. He had no role in actually setting immigration policy. Moreover, Giuliani has a strong law-and-order reputation. He could certainly shift gears and, for example, favor building a wall and then amnestying illegals already here without meaningfully contradicting his record. That wouldn't be enough to make Mark Krikorian happy, but it would put him well to the right of McCain. Moreover, McCain's atmospherics around immigration are designed to infuriate restrictionists, where Giuliani's are more neutral - that is to say, McCain shows contempt for folks like the Minutemen while Giuliani simply gushes about how wonderful immigrants are and how we should have more of them. I'm trying to be honest here. I think McCain is clearly a superior choice to Giuliani for voters for whom restricting abortion is towards the top of the list. I think Giuliani is clearly a superior choice to McCain for voters for whom immigration restriction is towards the top of the list. And, of course, Allen and Romney don't have the baggage either of these guys have on this issue.

McCain is, I think, the only nominee who would be likely to provoke a third-party challenge focused on immigration restriction. The question is how well such a nominee would do and how much damage would be done to McCain in a general election from such a challenge. If the contest is at all close, a single-issue candidate focused on immigration could certainly flip key states to the Democrats by siphoning off must-have votes from the GOP. One would think that McCain would be certain to hold Arizona as a favorite son, but any other candidate with his set of positions would, in a contest with a serious, well-funded third-party immigration restrictionist candidacy, be fighting for his life in that state. McCain's hope would have to be that he could make such profound inroads into independent voter territory that he could afford to lose voters to a third party on immigration.

Of course, most third party gambits never even get off the ground, forget about actually catching fire once launched. If it's a two-way race with Hillary Clinton, the worry is that she can successfully get to his right on immigration (likely) and thereby induce voters who care deeply about this issue to stay home if not to vote for her outright. Of course, it's possible that McCain pulls enough independent-minded "upbeats" to overwhelm any paleo-bleeding to the Democrats, but that's a bet, not a certainty.

I'm not sure what advice to give McCain on this one. In theory, someone with as much credibility as he has with pro-immigration types would be in an excellent Nixon-goes-to-China position. But (a) McCain doesn't want to go to China; (b) immigration isn't China. Nixon was breaking with Republican anti-Communist tradition by going to China; Bush, similarly, is breaking with Republican opposition to mass immigration by strongly supporting open borders, as is McCain, so for McCain to backtrack on immigration would be like Nixon (or Bush) tilting towards Taiwan. I suspect the best McCain can hope for is for the immigration-restrictionist vote to turn out to be vastly smaller than the percentage of voters who say they favor a restrictionist policy, so that the issue lacks salience in the primaries and no third-party challenge emerges. I'm not deep enough on this stuff to know whether that is the case or not. I will say that, again, expressions of contempt towards those with whom he disagrees on this policy issue exacerbate what I expect will be McCain's most intractable difficulty in securing the GOP nomination.

It's interesting from my perspective that the conventional wisdom is that McCain's biggest problem is the opposition of social conservatives. McCain has made it abundantly clear that he will play ball with them, and I'm pretty sure they'll play ball with him, particularly since there is no obvious standard-bearer for the Christian Right to coalesce around as an alternative. I also think it's strange that some people think taxes are going to be the big issue for McCain. I think McCain's biggest issues are going to be Iraq and immigration - that is to say: the same issues that Bush has. And the big economic policy area where I think McCain should worry segments of the GOP coalition is in the area of business regulation. I expect McCain to do fine - maybe much better than fine - on budgetary and tax matters, and considerably better than Bush on spending and trade. And his credibility as someone not in the pocket of big business makes it more likely that he could succeed with market-friendly reforms to entitlements than Bush has been. But McCain is a regulator; he believes in competition, but he thinks government needs to step in to make sure the market is competitive, just like his hero Teddy Roosevelt. Sometimes McCain is right about this, by the way, but he can clearly err in a regulatory direction in ways that will annoy conservatives as well as business. All-in, I think the McCain basket on economic questions is one conservatives should grab with both hands, but he's certainly not a Club for Growth purist if that's your bag.

2006-05-03T15:38:00.000-04:00

I am now more than a month overdue for the latest book diary. Somehow, the last couple of months have not been good for book reading; I've been distracted, I guess. And, on top of that, I've been bogged down with one very interesting but very dense book that I keep putting down for breaks, which, of course, slows down my reading in general.

In any event, herewith 2-month diary, covering March and April:

The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief, by James Wood. If Leon Wieseltier had been born a Christian, and a better writer, less enamored of his own aphorisms, he would have been James Wood. They share so many key traits: a ravenous intellect, a keen ear, nostalgia for a religious upbringing coupled with mature atheistic convictions, and a somewhat ponderous cultivated gravitas. I far prefer to read Wood, but it is no surprise that he has found a happy home in the back of The New Republic, along with other crusading traditionalist modernist (less of a contradiction than it sounds at first glance) critics like Jed Perle. I enjoyed this book of essays very much, the thesis of which is that the development of the novel is closely linked to the crisis in religious belief that struck Western civilization in the 19th century. I enjoyed the book very much even though I found the thesis somewhat problematic, and many of the chapters - the first one on More, the essay on Chekhov, the essay on Eliot - only tangentially related to the theme while others - on Austen, on Flaubert, on Melville - were much more closely tied in.

My problem with the thesis is twofold. First, I'm not convinced that psychological realism depended for its development on a crisis in religious belief. I find convincing psychological realism in all sorts of pre-modern texts: in Gilgamesh; in much of the narrative portions of the Pentateuch and in First and Second Samuel and in Ruth and Job; I think there's psychological realism in Homer and the Greek dramatists, in Beowulf and Njal's Saga, in Dante and Chaucer. I'm not convinced that the individual is a modern invention, but rather individualism - there were individuals in Homer, but they are embedded in an objective moral reality whereas for a modern individualist moral reality is something that develops within an individual moral consciousness (with input, of course, from external reality). And individualism in fiction, while it is a modern innovation, pre-dates (and may pre-figure) the Enlightenment, first budding in Chaucer and Boccaccio and coming to full flower in Shakespeare and Cervantes. I'm suggesting that Wood has his causality backwards.

And I should point out as well that only in a minority of modern novels is the individual moral quest - the forming of the self as the consequence of moral choices - the heart of the matter. Shakespeare's characters may change, and become something different at the end than they were at the start. (So do Chaucer's before him; his Troilus and Cresyde are very modern heroes.) But in many modern novels this is not the case. Dickens' heroes don't really change. George Eliot's do - she's probably the paradigm case for this view of the novel, which makes it all the more interesting that she doesn't merit a chapter in Wood's book - but Tolstoy's don't (or when they do - as with Ivan Illych or Father Sergius - it is by two explicit contradictions of Wood's conception of a modern novel's moral center: they make direct connection with the divine, and their individual personalities vanish). It's not hard to make a long list of truly sublime modern novels in which it's more true to say that their character is their destiny, that all they do is "become what they are" rather than change as a result of the moral choices they make. I'm not even sure many of Jane Austen's characters really change in the sense of becoming something other than what they were at the start; it may be more correct to say that Elizabeth, Emma and Anne come to understand themselves, and that they adapt to the truth about their characters, than to say that they change in any fundamental way. Joyce's epiphanies may be more paradigmatically modern than the idea of an individualistic moral quest. Wood might think that this is perfectly consonant with his thesis, but I'm not sure it is.

My other problem with Wood's thesis is that his diagnosis of the novel's decay is unconvincing. In a nutshell, Wood blames Flaubert for everything that has gone wrong, because Flaubert elevated style to the top of the heirarchy of novelistic values. In the short term, this had some wonderful consequences, but in the long term it led writers in a Byzantine direction, away from reality, especially internal human reality. I don't disagree with this at all, but I do question Wood's notion that style, and aestheticism generally, is a substitute for religion. The important thing about the religion of aesthetics, it seems to me, is not that it is a religion but that it is a false religion, a variety of gnosticism in that rather than providing a convincing account of reality it evades reality in favor of a solopsistic construction. So once again, I feel like Wood has his arrow of causality backwards: it is not that we took refuge in aestheticism and style because we lost religion but that the decay of our ability to relate to reality, manifested among other places in the exaltation of style, had a deleterious impact on religion.

All of which leads to the most puzzling thing about the book: that it does not grapple with those modern authors who themselves in their work most insistently grappled with the question of religion in modernity. He has a great chapter on Melville (again, something of a paradigm case for his thesis) but he doesn't discuss either George Eliot (as mentioned) or Dostoevsky. Each is very surprising. Eliot is, after all, the other side of the coin from Melville as a paradigm case: if Melville was sailing off into the future haunted by a God in whom he could not quite believe nor quite deny, Eliot was resolutely marching forward to the same old Protestant tune fully aware that the music had stopped but determined to march on anyway - in the process, creating one of the few successful representations of precisely the self-created moral character that Wood sees as the peak of the novel's art and, not incidentally, almost completely abjuring any smack of style. Dostoevsky, meanwhile, created truly great art of explicitly religious intent, but at the cost of sacrificing precisely the realistic inwardness that Wood so values. If both of these omissions astonish, a lower level of amazement may be registered at the omission, among the roster of more contemporary eminences (Murdoch, Pynchon, DeLillo, Updike, Roth, Morrison, Barnes) a chapter on the explicitly Catholic writers of the second half of the 20th century - people like Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy. Personally, I think both Percy and O'Connor suffer from the same fundamental flaw that mars much of Dostoevsky's work, but I'd really like to know what Wood thinks, and how his opinion fits in to his overall thesis.

Reading through the above, I recognize that I sound just a little too much like Harold Bloom in my attribution of occult power to literature itself (though, for me, gnostic is a term of abuse, not of praise). Which makes me nervous given how thoroughly Wood was able to trash the old man of the castle in his recent New Republic cover story. But be that as it may: I think I'm right, but I don't want to give the impression that I was disappointed by Wood's book of essays, which I enjoyed very much and heartily recommend. In fact, I've bought his other book of essays and intend to read it this summer.

* * *

The remaining mini-reviews of this book diary will be a bit less . . . maxi.

The Light Fantastic, by Terry Pratchett was recommended to me by the fourteen-year-old daughter of a friend. It has been a long time since a book so reminded me of my age. This is the kind of book I would have devoured, along with its many sequels, when I was fourteen; indeed, that's about the age I was when I read its precursor, The Color of Magic, which I remember cackling to on a family car trip to who knows where. But those days are gone, gone. I wonder if I would even find The Hitchhiker's Guide funny anymore? I suspect not. On the positive side, though, Pratchett's series has not been denounced by any prominent Christian leaders, as some other fantasy novels have.

* * *

I can't remember who recommended to me The Big Picture: Money and Power in Hollywood by Edward Jay Epstein. The book was OK, but not especially well-written, and rather over-fond of Fellata-ish superduperlatives. Epstein does a decent job walking through the economics of the contemporary movie industry, but I left with more nagging questions than good answers. Questions like: how much did antitrust matter in establishing the primacy of home entertainment over theater entertainment, and what would happen if the consent decree separating studios from theater chains were ended? Why, if children's movies are crucial to Hollywood's success, do the studios make so few good children's movies? And how was the present value of cashflow from Disney's intellectual property affected by Sonny Bono's untimely death? Seriously, if I understood the book correctly, theatrical releases of movies are, economically, now treated by Hollywood as a form of advertising, which is an interesting thing to learn and does indeed reshape how one thinks about the industry. But I've never understood categorically why an industry should ever wind up being shaped that way - I understand why internet startups gave away their product, because they believed there was a first-mover advantage and therefore it made sense to lose money to make money. But I don't understand why movies would have to be treated like ads, and I could see how thinking of movies that way could really screw up the artistic side of things. Maybe all I'm asking, in so many words, is why there isn't more price differentiation between different kinds of movies. In any event, the book was interesting, but less fun than I thought it would be. It did have the virtue, though, of being a very rare book that guys in the office actually wanted to borrow.

* * *

Permit me, as a Eli, my one Harvard-Yale joke. Actually, it's not really a joke; it's an authentic observation. In any event, here is the difference between people who go to Harvard and people who go to Yale. People go to Harvard because they know that they were destined, from birth, to run the world. And it behooves them, as future world-runners, to go to Harvard so they can most efficiently hobnob with the other fellows with whom they will ultimately be running the world.

By contrast, people who go to Yale know that the world isn't good enough to deserve having them to run it.

All this is by way of prologue to the question: is there anything more Harvard then writing a book about one's Harvard experiences right after graduating, as Ross Douthat did in Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class?

Douthat is a decent writer, and there are points in this book when I got really engrossed. But overall it was a bit of a disappointment. I think the reason is that Douthat tries to steer between the Scylla and Charybdis of pure memoir and pop sociology, when in fact he should have aimed straight for one or the other. I suspect he chose not to write a pure memoir because to write a memoir one has to look back on one's past life from some meaningful vantage point and, frankly, graduating from Harvard is not such a point. There is no epiphany that strikes at the end of Douthat's Harvard career, and the attempt to make 9-11 into such is probably the least emotionally convincing part of the book. But Douthat didn't do the research necessary, nor does he have the distance nor the keen eye for detail necessary to do either a Tom Wolfe or a David Brooks treatment of his chosen topic.

Given that, by his own admission, he didn't work all that hard on his school work, I wish Douthat had smelled a few more of the roses, reported a bit more on what they smelled like. My memories of Yale are dominated by things like: the sort-of girlfriend who wouldn't wear footwear and moved into our stairway landing after being thrown out of the library; the Wagner nut who made her own clothes and held tea parties in her room; the chain-smoking Korean who to all appearances owned only one pair of pants and spent four years perched in the same spot in Trumbull courtyard declaiming the glories of Rommel's military career to assorted passersby - in other words, I remember the quirky, even freaky people. I also remember a whole lot of serious conversation, and a lot of awkward identity-formation that might better have been accomplished in high school. What I don't remember is relentless status-seeking, or obsession with money. Is that because Yale people are just, well, better than Harvard people? Yes, of course. But what I've been trying to figure out is: is it also because we slackers are just better than the children of the baby boomers who followed us? Or is it all about the lame crowd Ross Douthat hung with?

Seriously, though, I went into the book inclined already to agree with Douthat on most of what he had to say. I am profoundly skeptical about meritocracy, and Harvard is the capital of meritocracy in America. But the book, while I enjoyed it, left me with more questions than answers about its own conclusions; left me more skeptical than I had been about my own conclusions about the way we are training our elite.

As I've said any number of times: I am pretty frankly elitist. I think elites are the motors of history, and that no society can survive without a patriotic elite at its head. The deep question for our society is not whether we have an elite but what the relationship is between that elite (or, rather, elites; we're a very big country, and there are lots of competing tribes at the top) and the rest of our society. If nothing else, Douthat's book is a "good thing" because it is asking that question.

* * *

The last book on my list I really shouldn't be reviewing yet, because, after two months, I still haven't finished it. It's A Savage War Of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962, by Alistair Horne. I cannot recommend this book highly enough, but I should warn anyone who decides to open it: while extremely well-written and engrossing, it is nonetheless quite a slog. It feels, sometimes, like an almost minute-by-minute account of eight years of war. And that can get tiring.

I can't do the book justice here. So I'm just going to make a few big-picture observations about the war.

First: there are no military solutions to political problems. As Horne paints the picture, France, at least during the period that Challe was running things in Algeria, basically won the war on the battlefield. Indeed, they won it twice: they defeated the urban insurrection in the Battle of Algiers and they defeated the F.L.N. throughout the country by implementing the Challe plan. It was a brutal war, but in a military sense it was winnable. But it was not winnable in a political sense because there was no political solution that was stable over the long term. The F.L.N. would have returned under another guise ten years later even if it were crushed.

Second: no conflict is an island. France could not put the F.L.N. decisively out of business without taking the war to neighboring Tunisia at a minimum, something they were not willing nor diplomatically able to do. The Algerian War was draining the treasury and the army, and Algeria was of questionable value to France anyhow. De Gaulle understood this from the beginning. He also understood how the Algerian conflict was undermining the French state. (Ironically, precisely for that reason it gave de Gaulle the unique opportunity to reshape the French state in a stabler and more functional form, but then the same forces that brought him to power nearly toppled him.)

Third: nothing is unthinkable. The French wound up acceding to every demand of the F.L.N., when demands vastly short of what was ultimately accepted were originally deemed unthinkable. Indeed, the very rhetoric of unthinkability is, I think, a sound of profound weakness.

Fourth: terrorism works, but not for the obvious reason. Terrorism is militarily pointless. It also doesn't actually terrorize; the French who lived in Algeria did not flee the country, and the total death toll never rivaled other sources of random death like auto accidents. And it isn't actually that expensive in terms of the damage done, or wasn't then (obviously spectacular 9-11 style terrorism is different in that regard). Terrorism isn't really guerilla warfare; the F.L.N. never really controlled territory, fielded a real army, did the other sorts of things that we think of guerillas as doing. No, terrorism works because it turns individuals into collectives, and one collective cannot govern another collective, politically speaking. Civilized peoples understand terrorism to mean: I have no moral boundaries. But this is not what the F.L.N. meant. They did not mean, when they killed innocent bystanders, including children, that they would happily kill all French people, or that French people were not human, lesser beings who could be killed with impunity. Rather, they meant: the French are a single entity, and we will hurt that entity where we can. They were treating the French collectively, and the French responded in kind, with a collective punitive response that included herding villagers into concentration camps, torturing large numbers of people for information, etc. This was both necessary and intended: the purpose of terrorism was to force the communities apart, to make a political solution impossible. And this is why it works, when applied in a context similar to Algeria. (By contrast, the Red terrorism of the 1970s accomplished absolutely nothing, precisely because it was applied in such a different context.)

Lessons for America in Iraq, and for Israel in Judea and Samaria, leap out of every page. But what is most clear is the overall tragic character of the conflict, the sense that, really, things could not have progressed very differently. France could not surrender until she had proved that there was no solution that would keep Algeria French. The F.L.N. could not accept anything less than their maximal demands. And that also seems true of both our war in Iraq and Israel's attempt to disengage from the Palestinians.

The depressing thing is that Horne didn't know, when he wrote the book back in the early 1970s, what the ultimate fate of Algeria would be. The patriotic elite that (brutally and viciously) led the F.L.N. to victory turned corrupt in power, and ruined the country. After thirty years of decay, the country turned to the Islamists, ushering in a civil war that cost over 100,000 lives. Algerian nationalism was almost wholly negative; the F.L.N. had no vision for how to govern Algeria, only a determination to end French rule. It's not surprising that the Islamists ultimately grew to fill this vacuum, but Islamism is only marginally less free of content. The poverty of Arab politics only deepens with time. One can hope that Iraq proves the exception to this historic rule, but that hope has to triumph over considerable experience.

2006-04-27T10:56:00.000-04:00

Question: have Michael Ledeen and Philip K. Dick ever been seen in the same room together?

Not suggesting anything. Just asking.

2006-04-27T09:39:00.000-04:00

This seems to be Steve Sailer week at Gideon's Blog. Anyhow, I never got around to commenting on that infamous academic paper denouncing the Israel lobby. Sailer, of course, has spent considerable ink defending the legitimacy of the paper (though not necessarily every claim contained in it). He's got another post on the topic here. From where I sit, I think Sailer - and Richard Cohen - are spot-in.

I thought the paper was not especially well-written or researched, a pretty shoddy piece of work all around. I also thought it was ludicrous to call it anti-Semitic, and that its central claim - that the Israel lobby has broad reach, enormous clout, uses charges of anti-Semitism to insulate itself from criticism, and has a demonstrable impact on American foreign policy - is unarguable. The biggest problem with the paper is not what it says but what it doesn't say, namely: that the Israel lobby, while one of the most significant foreign policy lobbies, is far from unique; the oil industry is one lobby that can go toe-to-toe with AIPAC, and the Saudis, while far less public in their propaganda efforts and (consequently) less broad in their reach, are not exactly absent from the corridors of power in Washington. The Cuban lobby unquestionably exerts more influence over America's policy toward Cuba than the Israel lobby does towards our policy in the Middle East, even though the Israel lobby is unquestionably more powerful, for the simple reason that the Middle East matters a whole lot more than Cuba does and, consequently, there are lots of lobbying groups in Washington acting to counter AIPAC (not explicitly, but in practical effect) where there is virtually no counter-balancing lobby on the question of the Cuban embargo.

The biggest problem with the Israel lobby is not that it is wrong (I generally agree with it, and note that AIPAC was *not* the major cheerleader for the Iraq War), nor that it has undue influence (it has a lot of influence, but I don't see why it's undue), but that it tries, with some success, to suppress open debate. This is bad for democracy and deserves the condemnation that Richard Cohen and Steve Sailer are directing its way.

I want to point out a couple of other things Sailer said, though, that I also agree with strongly.

First, Sailer is right that the more involved America gets in the Middle East, the less indulgent it can be towards Israel. The two low points for US-Israel relations were the Eisenhower and Carter Administrations. (I think the first Bush Administration was far more friendly to Israel than is generally supposed.) Eisenhower tilted away from Israel basically because the Arab world - Egypt especially - appeared to be up for grabs between the US and the Soviets, and the US had a strong interest in trying to win that particular proxy battle in the Cold War. For that reason, Eisenhower not only tilted against Israel but against Britain in France over Suez, with lasting negative impact on Franco-American relations. It didn't do any good of course; Nasser tilted towards the Soviets anyhow. Once the Cold War battle lines firmed up, America's relationship with Israel warmed up again.

The situation under Carter was similar in that Sadat had kicked out the Soviets and tilted towards the Americans. America again had a strong incentive to tilt away from Israel in the hopes of cementing a stronger position in the Arab world vis-a-vis the Soviets, and Carter leaned heavily on the Begin government in Israel both during Camp David and thereafter. Peace with Egypt was massively in Israel's interest, as even Begin could see. Whether an opportunity was missed by Israel to "solve" the Palestinian problem after Camp David is an open question. I'm inclined to think not because the PLO had to be decisively defeated as a precondition to pursuing either a two-state solution or (far better for Israel and for American interests) the "Jordan option." But what is clear is that Begin wasn't interested in looking for a solution. Israel had not yet realized that holding onto Judea, Samaria and Gaza was not in its interests, any more than France realized in 1945 that holding onto Algeria was not in its interests. So if an opportunity actually existed, which may be questioned, it was missed. In any event, it wasn't just Carter's combination of incompetence and nastiness that soured US-Israel relations during his Presidency; it was also the result of volatility within the Arab world that made it look like there was an opportunity for the United States to gain more influence there. Again, by the time Reagan took office the lines had hardened and US-Israel relations strengthened again.

I'm far too much of a Hamiltonian in foreign policy to agree with Sailer's implicit Jeffersonianism when he says, "the American Republic could afford favoring Israel, but the American Empire cannot." But I agree with the substance of the point anyhow: when American interests require more attention to Arab sensitivities, Israel suffers, and the Iraq War unquestionably increased the degree to which American interests require more attention to Arab sensitivities. Tony Blair certainly understood this, which is why he said, before the war, that "the road to Baghdad goes through Jerusalem."

The second point of Sailer's I wanted to agree with is psychological: that many of the most ferocious neo-cons are "Israeli-wannabes" rather than more prosaically friends of Israel. That rings very, very true, and there's a good novel to be written by a thirty-something Philip Roth wannabe about right-wing baby boomer generation Jews and their psychological relationship with the Jewish State. (Heck, if I had any get-up-and go with my writing, I'd be that thirty-something Philip Roth wannabe.) To the general baby-boomer inferiority complex (remember Bush's "will we grow up before we grow old" from his 2000 convention acceptance speech) about not having been around to fight Franco, or Hitler, or Bull Connor, for some (more right-wing) American Jews one can add the inferiority complex of knowing that one had missed out on being a part of building the State of Israel, the great Jewish romantic calling of the 20th century. From personal experience, I suspect this is a not-insignificant psychological factor in the neo-con mind. Israel, as a psychological factor rather than an actual foreign country, is an elephant in the room with respect to the Iraq War. Sailer understands this nuance. He shouldn't be pilloried for that, but praised.

I want to be clear about something. I haven't changed at all in my enthusiastic support for the Jewish State and my belief that it is right and proper for America to be a great friend to Israel. But I have also changed less than might be apparent to the casual observer in my beliefs about what being a great friend entails. Being a great friend means standing by Israel when she needs us. It does not mean solving her problems for her (which we can't do) nor does it mean confusing our interests with hers (which will only get us more problems, and tempt us to solve those problems by punishing Israel). To prove that I haven't changed as much as it might seem, I'm going to quote from something I wrote (pre-blog) to friends and family (all Democrats) explaining why I was voting for Bush in 2000. (Since this was pre-blog, I can't prove I wrote it five and a half years ago, so you'll just have to trust me.)

In particular because of the current situation there [Note: this was written shortly before the new intifadeh, or Oslo War, erupted], I’m especially focused on the two candidates’ likely impact on American policy towards Israel. The Clinton Administration’s approach, I believe, has been a total disaster for the Israeli people and for the Palestinians. A real peace with the Palestinians can only come about when the Israelis and Palestinians come to agree that peace, on specific proposed terms, is in both sides’ interest. They will only come to this conclusion if they get there on their own. This does not mean that America or any other power, friendly or hostile, cannot influence the situation. But no outsider can deliver peace to the region, or secure it once signed. . . .

[Clinton's] approach to the peace negotiations in the Middle East has been to embrace Israel warmly (once it was led by someone with whom he agreed) and cajole Israel to make concessions in the interests of getting a deal on paper. He implied that Israel could securely make these concessions because they have the United States as a friend. Clinton has used the same approach on the Palestinians, but less effectively.

The result has been a dangerous psychological dependency on the United States in Israel’s Labor leadership. Too many Israeli leaders already half wished they lived in the U.S., and allowed this wish to delude themselves into believing that they lived in the U.S. But Clinton has made the problem much worse by encouraging these leaders to behave as if they were mere extensions of the U.S. This may have led them to take unwise risks because they felt that there was little downside to failure: the United States would always back them up.

But the United States can do nothing to back up Israel now, because the threat it faces is not a foreign army but potential civil war. Israel’s own army will be of little use against stone-throwing teenagers. What good is the United States going to do? The biggest threats to Israel now are the combination of its own inflated expectations, which are leading to a kind of despair as the promised peace unravels, and the threat that the conflict will be internationalized. Clinton’s embrace has contributed to the expectations, and therefore to the despair. Clinton has also contributed to the risk of internationalizing the conflict. His support for a strong world court of justice raises the risk that Israel will be officially charged with war crimes – I think this is now likely, and I have no idea how the U.S. will be able to ignore such a finding. Clinton has also actively supported the idea of some kind of UN presence in Jerusalem, which would be a disaster. His pressure to get a final peace settlement has led to the Islamization of the conflict, because Jerusalem and its mosques are now front-and-center.

It has also led to a dangerous rise in expectations among the Palestinians, a conviction that America is "in-play." Clinton’s warm embrace led some Palestinians to believe that he was going to go to bat for them against Israel in negotiations. When he didn’t, many Palestinians returned to their former conviction that America was not an "honest broker" but was biased towards the Israelis. As many Palestinians already believed this, Clinton has weakened Arafat’s own position internally by pushing him hard towards coming to Camp David, which is now seen as an act of selling out on Arafat’s part, particularly as Israel moves towards unilateral actions to protect their security in the wake of Palestinian violence.

In sum, I think Clinton has been a disaster. But Clinton is not running. Al Gore has a lengthy pro-Israel record. His VP choice is an Orthodox Jew who has been a consistent hawk on foreign policy, the leading Senate Democrat to support the Gulf War. By contrast, George Bush is an oil man from an oil state. He has actively courted Arab American votes. And his father’s administration was not known for being filled with Israel-lovers. The obvious choice on the issue is Gore.

Well, it isn’t quite as obvious as it seems. First of all, I think President Bush deserves a re-evaluation. As Vice President, he was the leader in efforts to help Jews escape from Ethiopia. He also led the effort to get the UN to rescind the Zionism-is-racism declaration. He built a U.S.-led coalition of European and Arab armies that defeated an Arab Nationalist leader on the battlefield. One can certainly quibble with how we got into the mess in the first place and to whether the war should have continued to Baghdad. But the management of the alliance and the war itself were an unarguable triumph. And the result was to significantly improve Israel’s strategic position. To the extent that peace with the Palestinians seemed genuinely possible in the early 1990s, President Bush had a lot to do with making that possible. . . .

Second, after the experience with Clinton, I seriously question whether having a "friend" of Israel in the White House is the best thing for Israel. . . .

What we know about Bush is that he’s a consensus-building kind of guy with a strong foreign policy team. He has plenty of neo-conservative advisors who are generally pro-Israel. . . . My hopeful side says that because of his pedigree and his outreach to American Arabs, Bush could work better with Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan to make sure that the renewed intifadah does not spiral out of control into a regional conflict. My fearful side worries that Bush will be more influenced by these countries than inclined to influence them, and that American policy will tilt against Israel, subtly shifting the balance of power in the region and leaving Israel with no choice but to make concessions she does not think it wise to make.

In the end, I don’t think Israel needs to worry that Bush will be a threat to her existence. All those threats are internal, and America can do little about them. And I think it would do Israel a lot of good to have someone in the White House who isn’t going to hold their hands – and it would do the Palestinians a lot of good as well; Clinton raised expectations there as much as he did in Israel. . . . The most important signal to send to Arafat is that the Jews aren’t going anywhere; if he wants another round of violence, the Jews can wait him out. But Israel cannot forget that the Palestinians aren’t going anywhere either; Israel cannot elect its own adversary. An American Administration that remembered Israel’s importance but didn’t try to solve its problems for it might have a valuable sobering effect in both Jerusalem and Ramallah.

Sorry for such a long quote. I quoted at length to point out that one can be a cheerleader for a strong US-Israel relationship without falling into the trap of thinking our interests are identical or even that it serves Israel's interests for America to behave as if our situation is similar to Israel's. And to point out that I understood this in 2000, back when I was a McCainiac, a regular subscriber to The Weekly Standard, and someone who had kind (and ignorant) words for Ahmad Chalabi.

2006-04-27T00:01:00.000-04:00

Actually, am I totally hopeless as a pundit? How'm I doing on my predictions from the beginning of the year?

1. McCain to dramatically mend fences with the Christian Right, fence mending to be reciprocated. Giuliani not to run for President. Tancredo to threaten a third-party candidacy if McCain is the nominee. I'm going to claim victory for the first part given McCain's upcoming speech at Falwell U., and we'll see how the reciprocation goes. I'm standing by my Giuliani and Tancredo predictions.

2. Kadima, led by Sharon, to win a resounding victory, but to still have trouble building a coalition. Well, Sharon is permanently incapacitated, Kadima won a less-than-resounding victory, and for all my post-election pessimism, Olmert seems to have put together a workable coalition. What do I know.

3. Canada votes for Harper, Italy for Prodi. Both right!

4. Mubarak to be hospitalized, triggering panic in capitals the world over until he recovers, which he does. Still time for this one.

5. Lopez Obrador to win in Mexico, with negative but not catastrophic consequences for the U.S. Polls are moving the other way, actually, but I stand by this one.

6. Oscar predictions more wrong than right.

7. No nuke test by either North Korea or Iran, nor any war with either, nor regime change in either country. I stand by this one.

8. Major terrorist incident in Russia followed by the completion of the reestablishment of autocracy in that country. Russia's been kind of out of the news lately. Still seems pretty likely to me, though.

9. Strong year for stocks led by tech. Dollar weakens, housing market softens. Inflation rises but no panic. These are all looking good from where I sit.

10. Delay will lose his House seat - correct! Santorum will lose his Senate seat - still betting that way. Ford will win a Senate seat in Tennessee - less likely, but I'll stand by it. GOP to hold both houses - I would not bet that way at this point.

11. Rumsfeld to resign. I must have been smoking something. John Snow to resign. Of course.

12. No meaningful troop reductions in Iraq. Standing by this one, of course. No spectacularly good or bad news to force a change in direction. Standing by this one as well.

13. GM to fire its CEO. Bankruptcy anticipated in 2007. A Chinese company to bid to buy GM's brands after bankruptcy. Looking a lot less likely now.

14. John Derbyshire to read and like a Philip Pullman novel. Hasn't happened yet to my knowledge, but maybe he's just afraid to tell Katherine.

15. Al Gore to begin preparations to run for President. Hasn't happened yet and probably won't.

16. I drink Gobi desert wine. Not gonna happen, I fear.

17. Serious crisis in the Philippines. Gosh, I hope not.

18. One of the following countries to hold a referendum on whether to split up into multiple states: Belgium, Canada, Italy, Bosnia, Iraq, Spain. Mind you, I don't predict whether the referendum passes. Too soon, I'd say, but Quebec will have another vote one of these years, and that would count if it happened in 2006.

19. German Party of Democratic Socialism to take a sharp turn to the right, and do well at the polls in consequence. I was pretty roundly mocked for this prediction. Still makes sense to me, though.

20. Japan's economic recovery to accelerate. Pretty clearly happening. Pro-natal policies to bear fruit. No evidence of this yet. Increasing nationalism and talk about changing the constitution - bits and pieces of evidence of this yet, but not yet a big news story. I stand by this one.

21. Alito to be confirmed with between 65 and 75 votes. Confirmed, yes, but not with that many votes. Other predictions for 2006 - no new retirements or deaths and no overturning of Roe - remain to be seen.

22. Spitzer to be elected Governor of New York, Westly Governor of California, Strickland Governor of Ohio. I stand by all of these. Everyone is focused on Democrats trying to take control of the House and Senate. This is the big news of 2006: after the election, a significant majority of Americans, from sea to shining sea, will be living under Democratic Governors. Dems are certain to take New York, likely to take Massachusetts, Ohio, Arkansas, could well take California, Colorado, Maryland, and could just possibly take Florida. I cannot think of a single state in the Union where a Democrat currently governs and the GOP is likely to take the state away in 2006. It's possible the GOP could pick of Pennsylvania, but I wouldn't bet that way. The Democratic bench could be looking really, really strong in a few years, and the GOP bench really regional and really weak.

23. Carbs good again; caffeine bad. I stand by this one.

24. Ratner gets what he wants, Silverstein doesn't. Don't understand the WTC deal just agreed to well enough to know whether to claim partial victory.

25. I write a book. Not yet.

2006-04-26T23:39:00.000-04:00

Good old Derb, meanwhile, had a lovely appreciation for an author I had no idea he appreciated: Samuel Beckett. It was published during my hiatus, on the occasion of Beckett's centenary. I'm glad to see there's at least one Irish writer we both admire.

My only comment, addressed more to Derb himself than to anyone else, is that there's noble precedent to follow if one would be a man of firm faith without denying one's own dread of annihiliation. So if it is morbid contemplation that has banked the fires of Derb's faith, he should take comfort that a greater hero of his than Beckett has been there, and did not lose faith in consequence.

2006-04-26T22:46:00.000-04:00

I want to talk some more about Iran, but first I suppose I should chime in on energy policy, another topic in the news.

(Actually, what I should do is stop blogging and finish that novel I abandoned eight years ago. It would be both more productive and more personally rewarding, and I obviously am completely useless as a pundit; whatever I say today, I hedge tomorrow, and when I actually make a prediction it more often than not proves inaccurate within hours, as when I predicted no action on Sudan two days ago only to read in the next morning's paper that the U.N. had approved some sanctions against individual malefactors in Sudan.)

In any event: energy policy.

If you believe in the "peak oil" graphs that show global petroleum production declining inevitably from its current peak, then you should view the massive political instability in oil producing countries that is the real cause of current high oil prices as a godsend. There is no way any government policy of any kind could create the kind of incentives to develop alternatives to petroleum that are being created right now by sky-high oil prices. And because political instability is limiting the actual amount of oil that gets pumped out of the ground in places like Iraq and Venezuela, we're buying time until the real crunch comes.

There are good reasons to disbelieve the "peak oil" graphs, including: that they don't include vast nontraditional sources of petroleum like Alberta's oil sands; that they don't allow for the possibility of a technological breakthrough that would enable us to pump more than 35% of the oil in a field out of the ground (roughly the current limit); and that they extrapolate to the globe from the situation in the United States, where companies have been free since the 19th century to explore for oil pretty much anywhere using the latest technology and excellent infrastructure, where much of the oil outside the Persian Gulf (in Central Asia, for example, or in West Africa) has been much more difficult to exploit for political and economic, not geological reasons, and continues to be so. If, in fact, the point of inexorable decline is some decades off, then current high prices are no longer a godsend. But neither are they the proper topic of energy policy; they are the proper topic of foreign policy.

Some day, the hydrogen economy will be a reality, but probably not for several decades. I don't think it's unreasonable for the government to do some planning towards that day, but that planning should, I think, be limited to three areas: funding basic research (which I pretty much always favor anyhow); studying what the major transition costs will be and whether there is a public role to play in offsetting some of these; and eliminating unnecessary regulatory barriers to the development of new electric power generation capacity (especially nuclear power, which is for all practical purposes infinite), because hydrogen is not a fuel source but a way of storing energy, and so the hydrogen economy will require much greater electric power generation than our petroleum economy does.

Apart from that, the government should do what it can to ensure that we are not militarily vulnerable to a sudden oil shock, something I think we already do. The private economy provides plenty of hedging mechanisms for individual firms to protect themselves from sudden price spikes.

There is, needless to say, no need to go to war for oil. We did go to war with Saddam in 1991 in part because we were worried about him dominating the oil fields of the Gulf. But we worried about that not because we needed to "lock up" control of Middle Eastern oil in our own hands, but because we worried what Saddam Hussein would do with all the additional power that would accrue from such an acquisition. And, more to the point, we went to war because of how he achieved that acquisition: by forcible invasion and incorporation of a neighboring country.

There are those who worry about China "locking up" access to Sudanese, Iranian or Venezuelan oil. But this is, again, not legitimately a worry about our ability to obtain oil to fuel our economy. It's about the limits of our ability to achieve our foreign policy aims in these countries in part because they own a resource that is of great value generally and of particularly great value to China, which means it is the basis for an anti-American friendship between these rogue states and China. Again, it's not an energy policy question but a foreign policy question, not a question of will there be oil for us to burn but of whether we have the practical ability to bring rogue states to heel. We aren't worried so much about our dependence on the Middle East as about one Middle Eastern tyrant's ability to become independent of *us*.

What everyone should be most encouraged by is that oil has gone from close to $10 per barrel to over $75 per barrel, and our economy keeps chugging along nicely. The oil "card" has already been played and it turns out not to be trump. High gas prices are causing pain down at the bottom of the income scale in America, but this is something that could be addressed any number of ways that do not involve either economically illiterate market interventions or frightening foreign interventions.

Or, I guess I could have put this more simply: Ronald Bailey is mostly right and John Judis is mostly wrong.

2006-04-26T09:30:00.000-04:00

Another reason I read Steve Sailer: for posts like this, which are just too dog-goned funny.

On the subject of names: my stepmother has four sisters and three brothers. For their sons, her parents chose relatively straightforward names. But for the daughters, they decided to recombine the syllables of their own names to make the kids names. The results were (I'm not sure I'm going to spell these all correctly):

Felella

Trillisita

Ellafe
Estralisa

and the most unfortunate of the lot,

Lisitril

which really should be the name of a pharmaceutical, not a person.

Of course, since my stepmother is from the Philippines, none of the girls actually got called by these names, but rather by their nicknames. Which, of course, following Philippine custom, had nothing recognizably to do with their given names. Which of the girls do you imagine was nicknamed Ping-ping? Ling-ling? Day-day? See what I mean?

I love names. I can spend hours playing with the site like this one.

This business of giving imaginative names to girls has a long pedigree - Job, for example, after God restores him at the end of the book, has new children and, in a departure from typical custom, we are told the names of the daughters but not the names of the sons. The daughters are named: Jemimah ("little dove"), Keziah ("sweet spice"), and Keren-Happuch ("horn of eyeshadow"). I have always thought that the whimsy of these names is related to the point of the Book of Job, to Job's appreciation of the abundance of life as the most adequate answer that can be made to the problem of apparently unjust suffering or "natural evil" in the world.

Incidentally, did you know that the Masons have a girls affiliate named Job's Daughters? Me neither. Isn't the internet cool?

2006-04-24T16:08:00.000-04:00

Tonight and tomorrow are Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Memorial Day. I've never much liked this particular "holiday" - if "liked" is even the word I am looking for. Jewish tradition has ascribed all the terrible things that happened to our people - the destruction of the First and Second Temple in Jerusalem, the massacre of the Jews of Mainz during the Crusades, the Expulsions from Spain, etc. - to one day of the year: Tisha B'Av, the Ninth of Av. There are other fast days to commemorate tragedies that befell Israel, but I believe they are all related to Tisha B'Av in that they are all part of a cycle of fasts commemorating the sequence of events that led to the destruction of the First Temple. Yom HaShoah, unlike these other tragedies, gets its own day. Now, admittedly, the Holocaust was just about the worst thing ever to happen to the Jewish people, and among the greatest crimes of history. But was it worse than the destruction of the First or Second Temple? No, it wasn't. (And by this I don't mean that the destruction of the Temple was worse than the murder of millions; mass-murder on a proportionally comparable scale accompanied both destructions.) By refusing to integrate Yom HaShoah into the preexisting Jewish calendar, the innovators of this memorial day did some violence to that calendar. Worse, by suggesting that the Holocaust was importantly different in kind from prior catastrophes, they built into the Jewish calendar a kind of skepticism about the utility of prior Jewish history. In that way they have contributed to the Holocaust cult, a false god that I steadfastly refuse to worship.

(I'm not against innovation as such, mind you. I don't think Yom HaAtzma'ut, Israel's Independence Day, is any more of a violation of the preexisting order of the Jewish calendar than is LaG Ba'Omer, which also falls between Pesach and Shavuot.)

Nonetheless, since it's on the calendar, I've been thinking about the Holocaust, and its only partly acknowledged impact on Jewish thinking about the world. So let me take a look at three current policy debates and how they are subtly impacted by our memory of the Holocaust, and whether that memory has made us more or less sensible and moral in thinking about them.

Darfur. There's a big protest against the ongoing genocide in Darfur scheduled for this coming Sunday. The ongoing, brutal ethnic cleansing of this region of Sudan is appalling, and calling it "genocide" doesn't seem wrong to me. I am puzzled only by two things: how did Darfur specifically become the cause celebre of the moment, and what are we supposed to do about it?

Darfur, after all, is not the only place on earth where inconvenient people are being attacked by militias with government approval. It's not the only place in Africa. Heck, it's not the only place in the Sudan! The Sudanese government has waged a 20-year civil war against the predominantly Christian and animist population of the south of the country. Something like 2 million people died in that war. Why Darfur?

The best answer is, "why not" - that is to say: good for the protesters that they are appalled by the appalling; consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. But I still think it's an interesting question. I suspect the answer is that Darfur is a genocide that pits an odious Islamist regime against poorer, blacker Muslims, and so opposing the genocide in Darfur means taking the side of good Muslims against bad Muslims.

In any event, the tougher question is: what are we supposed to do about it? I am very skeptical that international pressure will be brought to bear or that, if it is, anything will come of it. Sudan depends principally on oil exports to survive, but I somehow can't see China signing up for a boycott in order to punish a regime for oppressing a domestic minority. Just can't see it. And if they can sell oil, the regime will survive. America is not going to intervene militarily; we wouldn't even if we had the troops to spare, and we don't. I would be thrilled to hand this one over to the French, but Sudan is a former British colony, so that won't happen.

The motivation for the support for "action" (unspecified) in Darfur is the mantra: "never again." But if "never again" means "never again will a state set out to destroy a people" then, I hate to say it, "never" has happened again and again, and will continue to happen until all the world has civilized government. Genocide is the problem from hell, but it is not as unique as Elie Wiesel seems to think it is. That's part of why it's a problem from hell; if it almost never happened, it would be easier to stop.

But "never again" can be parsed in other ways.

Iran. "Never again" might mean "never again will we (Jews) let ourselves be slaughtered without a fight." Or, more subtly, it might mean "never again will we (Jews) hope for the best when someone promises to deliver the worst." Both of these senses are relevant to the current debate about Iran, another problem from hell.

Iran is, in part, a problem from hell because Iranian-American enmity - and, for that matter, Iranian-Israeli enmity - is so patently unnecessary. American and Iran have no interests in conflict, and neither do Israel and Iran. In both cases, in fact, we have common enemies; you might have noticed that America just in the last few years eliminated two regimes that border Iran and that have historically threatened that country (well, Afghanistan wasn't much of a threat, but the Taliban certainly hated Shiites). Before that, America was Iran's main guarantee of independence from Soviet encroachment or outright invasion. Edward Luttwak's persuasive argument against taking military action against Iran returns over and over to the argument that of course we shouldn't be fighting Iran because, well, in a rational world we'd be allies with Iran.

Of course, in a rational world we wouldn't have fought Germany in World War II either. Soviet Communism was a much greater ideological threat than Nazism, and America didn't have much of a dog in the fight to preserve the British Empire. The only problem is that Germany wasn't ruled by a rational leader with limited war aims. Germany was run by a madman bent on world conquest. No one could quite believe that this was true, except for Churchill, the stopped clock who was right this one time, but boy that one time was a doozy.

So: is this man the new Hitler?

That's what the debate about Iran is all about. The notion that a rational Iran would hand nuclear weapons to terrorists is ridiculous. So is the notional that a rational Iran would simply launch a nuclear strike against Israel. If Iran plans to use nuclear weapons as a shield behind which to dominate the region, I have news for it: just as an Iranian bomb would push Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Egypt to consider nuclearization, so it would also push them to consider a closer relationship with America for their defense. A nuclear Iran could be contained very effectively, if that were our objective.

The big nuclear terrorism risk was always that a terrorist group would either be able to purchase nuclear weapons (the North Korean scenario) or that they would "capture" a nuclear state (the Pakistani scenario). We worry about these scenarios because a terrorist group might genuinely not care about retaliation against the territory they had temporarily captured. We've scene that kind of behavior time and again from terrorists. Al Qaeda didn't seem fased by the American attack on Afghanistan; they expected that kind of retaliation, and expected it to earn them dividends (which never came) when the Muslim street would rise up and overthrow other regimes (Pakistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia) that had been friendly to America. If Ahmadinejad and the mullahs behind him genuinely don't care about the fate of Iran, if they welcome the apocalypse, then an Iranian bomb is not merely another factor in the balance of power; it is a world-historical catastrophe.

It is not true that all regimes behave rationally given their understanding of the situation. Imperial Japan's military leaders were fully prepared to sacrifice the entire Japanese nation rather than surrender. Hitler diverted vital men and supplies away from the front in order to pursue his aim of murdering the Jews of Europe (which, I suppose, was the only war aim he could "rationally" still expect to achieve). Fidel Castro encouraged Krushchev to wage nuclear war over the missiles in Cuba rather than back down. Would the Iranian regime behave similarly? Or would it behave more like a rational madman, like Stalin or Mao?

That's the question. "Never again" plays in by avoiding the need to answer it. Because if our mantra is "never again" then under no circumstances can we risk finding out the answer. We have to assume the worst.

That, it seems to me, is not a viable way to approach the world. But that's what lurks in the background in all the discussion about the possible need for war with Iran.

Immigration. I wrote a long post below about Steve Sailer's question: why are Jews so supportive of immigration? I don't think it's such a puzzle, and I gave my reasons. But in my answer, I neglected to say that I think Sailer, and Matt Yglesias, whom he was agreeing with, are right that Jewish memories of the Holocaust, and America's indifference thereto, are relevant to Jewish attitudes towards immigration. I don't think this is a matter of fighting the last war nor of trying to make sure that America always keeps the door open for Jews should a terrible catastrophe happen in Israel. Rather, I think it's a matter of emotional identification - we know what it was like to have the door slammed in our face, we think, and we wouldn't do that to anyone else.

Except that this is not a rational response to the real world. The people coming to the United States from Mexico, China, El Salvador, the Philippines and points further afield are overwhelmingly *not* fleeing oppression, and certainly not genocidal enemies. One can, in good standing, favor a generous asylum policy and still want that policy to be limited to those fleeing particularly awful political regimes.

Because even the most generous asylum policy can't make room for everyone with a good reason to want to leave, say, Somalia, or the Democratic Republic of Congo, or (to return to our first topic) Sudan. The International Rescue Committee, an organization devoted to helping refugees of war, oppression and natural disaster - founded, incidentally, by Albert Einstein to save Jews in Europe in the 1930s - makes a point of trying to resettle as large a percentage of refugees as possible in or near their home countries. Only a very small percentage are sent to Europe or America for resettlement. That is as it should be. How much more so for economic migrants.

There are many ways to be generous if one is feeling liberal. One way is to give to the IRC, which I do, annually. But there is a difference between liberality and irrationalism. And it is very difficult to have a rational conversation about this topic with someone for whom any discussion of ending illegal immigration conjures up the ghost of the SS St. Louis.

So: why is the Holocaust always with us?

I think there are a few reasons, some well-known, but others less discussed.

Some of the well-known reasons: because it was a *really bad thing* and, moreover, a really bad thing perpetrated by one of the most civilized countries in the world, and therefore made any rational person doubt the strength of the bonds of civilization. Because modern war is, to a horrifying extent, war against civilians (in World War I, 90% of casualties were military; in the wars since World War II, including civil wars, some have estimated that as many as 90% of casualties have been civilian) and, therefore, the Holocaust properly remains a kind of template for our understanding of man-made suffering. Because the Holocaust is still a relatively recent memory for Jews, and, while everyone thinks mostly about themselves, Jews think about themselves more loudly than other people. Because the Holocaust is not unique in Jewish history; as it says in the Passover haggadah, "not only one rose against us to destroy us, but in every generation they rise against us to destroy us."

Here's one of my favorite reasons: because the Holocaust left the Jewish people in America orphaned. Europe was the center of Jewish civilization, the place where both tradition and the rebellions against tradition were alive. America was the "treifa medina" - the unkosher realm, the place where Torah was forgotten and Yiddish was vulgarized. America was, to many immigrants from Eastern Europe, the antithesis of the old country, a place where, Gatzby-like, one could remake oneself as something other than a Jew.

And then it was all gone. In a few short years, Hitler destroyed Jewish civilization. The rebellious children in America were orphaned, never having had a chance to reconcile with their fathers and mothers in the Old Country.

Quite apart from any rational paranoia on the part of Jews conversant with Jewish history, this orphaning was bound to engender a certain measure of hysteria in the next generation. A certain fierceness of determination to do right by the memory of those lost who, honestly, you never really knew; who, honestly, you never even liked, were thrilled to have gotten away from, when you didn't know what their fate was to be.

I know this is arm-chair psychologizing, but I don't think I'm off-base. And I don't think it's a waste of time. It's a good thing, generally, for people to understand each other's thinking. If nothing else, it might dispel the more lurid fantasies that germinate when frustration meets incomprehension.

2006-04-21T15:11:00.000-04:00

I wanted to say something about Iran, something about McCain, something about America's alliance with Israel, something about Damon Linker, and probably a few other things . . . but I'm out of time. All I have time to do is apologize for not posting a book diary in March. But I have a good excuse: I didn't finish a single book in March. So April will have to be a 2-monther.

I'll leave you with an old piece of mine about counting the omer. I still like it and would love to get it published somewhere some day, if I could figure out where.

2006-04-21T15:05:00.000-04:00

BTW, apropos of both reading Steve Sailer and the Israeli elections, did anyone else notice this item?

What this reminded Sailer of was the general perfidity of Jonathan Pollard. I noticed something different. Eitan is claiming that he has *in his personal possession* key documents related to Pollard's spying. Anyone remember the bruhaha over Sandy Berger taking *copies* of classified material home in his socks? Can you imagine the uproar if an American official did something like what Eitan is supposed to have done - personally absconded with vital classified documents like that and held them as a political negotiating tool? But in Israel, profound disrespect for the state is a bi-partisan affair. The left conducts unauthorized negotiations with terrorists; the right builds unauthorized settlements on Arab-owned land. All parties in one way or another treat as their personal property. This is one of Israel's biggest problems, and is very much at the root of why they can't seem to extricate themselves from the territories, but it's not something people in America on any side of the political spectrum really understand.

2006-04-21T14:45:00.000-04:00

Next: you may have read a thing or two about the Israeli elections. I was very depressed by them initially because they illustrated yet again the fundamental un-seriousness of the Israeli electorate. The pensioners' party gets seven seats? For all that I recognize the economic pressures that have come down on recepients of state assistance, including the elderly, this really is taking interest-group politics in a proportional-rep system to a considerable extreme.

But on further reflection, I think the most important showing in the election was the performance registered by Yisrael Beiteinu, Avigdor Lieberman's party. What started as a right-wing Russian party alternative to the more moderate Yisrael B'Aliyah (Sharansky's party) has evolved into a full-fledged right-wing party. And their most important contribution to Israel's current debate is also a very dangerous, albeit inevitable one. To white: Yisrael Beiteinu favors trading the triangle region of the Galil, which is inside the Green Line but overwhlemingly Arab, for the large settlement blocs in Judea and Samaria. As such, the proposal is a violation of international law; you can't just strip people of their citizenship. And it is a momentous Rubicon to cross to even suggest that pre-'67 Israel is up for negotiation. But the proposal is not going to go away, and I strongly suspect some version of the proposal will eventually come to pass. Israel's Arab minority, especially the Arabs of the triangle region, are increasingly alienated and increasingly involved in political Islam. There is a movement afoot among Israel's Arabs to press for recognition as a national minority and a high degree of communal autonomy. It is probably in Israel's interest to encourage a starker choice: either join whatever entity emerges on the Palestinian side of the separation fence, or more fully integrate into Israeli society by, among other things, serving in the IDF. One can imagine, in the abstract, some kind of referendum process being used to formalize this choice.

But any such reform would be predicated on a more serious effort to de-sectorize Israeli society, and that in turn depends upon profound change in the political system. Israel badly needs a new constitution - not because it needs formal guarantees of individual rights (that's not what a constitution is for in the first place) but because it needs a more functional governmental structure. I'm currently reading a book about the Algerian war, and it keeps striking me as I read it that Israel really would benefit from a constitution more like the on de Gaul designed for France's Fifth Republic: a strong, directly-elected Presidency balanced by a Parliament with its own Prime Minister. Israel faces a host of existential questions that require a real mandate to resolve, and Israel's political system is structured to make such a mandate impossible to achieve. A directly-elected President that did not serve at the sufferance of Parliament (unlike the situation in the mid-1990s when the Prime Minister was directly elected, but Parliament could still bring down the government with a no-confidence vote) could receive such a mandate and act on it. If I ran the zoo, I would go further; Israel should have stronger regional governors as well, should take the education system out of the hands of the political parties, should formalize relations with bodies like the Jewish Agency and otherwise strengthen the rule of law, etc. But reform of the constitution is the beginning, the precondition to everything else. Purportedly Sharon wanted to tackle this question after the 2006 election. I have no idea what he planned, nor whether Olmert has ideas in this vein. If so, I hope he has the guts to take them forward, in spite of his (profound) political limitations.

2006-04-21T13:29:00.000-04:00

Having been absent for so long, there's just too long a list of things I have wanted to say something about. So the next few posts are going to be in kind of random order.

So here's a random start. I have readers (yes, amazingly enough) - no, seriously: I have readers who periodically ask me why I bother reading, much less linking to, Steve Sailer, either insinuating or asserting that he's an anti-Semite (or, at a minimum, has got "the Jew Thing"). My answer has always been that while Sailer seems willing to remain on friendly terms with people whom I would have to consider anti-Semites (and I've called him on this), I'm convinced that's not a fair characterization to apply to Sailer himself. Moreover, I think a primary function of journalism is to attempt to gore sacred cows. And I think it should be self-evident that there are Jewish-related sacred cows out there, and that a big chunk of the media isn't interested in goring them. When you set out to be deliberately politically-incorrect, as Sailer does, you're inevitably going to be offensive, and you may well be wrong a lot of the time to boot. That shouldn't detract from the fact that, as such, goring sacred cows (if practiced intelligently, of course) is a service to the collective intelligence of mankind. That's why I read, and occasionally link to, Steve Sailer. For those who aren't satisfied with this explanation, note that Matt Yglesias and Mickey Kaus, among others not generally associated with a paleocon sensibility (and both Jewish, I note) seem to read Sailer pretty regularly as well, and link to him occasionally too.

This is by way of prologue to a couple of comments I wanted to make on Sailer's by now somewhat stale cogitations about why Jews seem to be so pro-mass-immigration (as polls indicate they - we - are).

First, there's nothing weird about people's politics being driven by totemic issues rather than bottom-line questions. A rather lot of people died in 17th century Europe over the question of whether wine was blood and bread was flesh. Jonathan Swift found that mordantly funny in retrospect, but it was deadly serious to those engaged in the wars of religion. So I'm not sure why Jewish "nostalgia" on the subject of immigration should be a source of special puzzlement.

Second, I strongly doubt Jews - who, on average, have higher incomes that other American ethnic groups - are voting their pocketbooks by supporting high immigration levels. If that were true, then Jews would also vote consistently for lower upper-bracket income taxes. They in fact do the opposite (on average, of course).

Third, my impression is that immigration-restrictionist sentiment is strongest in areas that either have historically experienced little immigration or that border Mexico. With the exception of Los Angeles itself, my impression is that Jews do not tend to live in these places in large numbers. I bet Jews in Colorado have stronger sentiments against high immigration than do Jews in New York, and I bet white Christians in New York have much stronger sentiments in favor of high immigration than do white Christians in Colorado.

Fourth, I don't agree at all with Matt Yglesias that nationalism has been "bad for the Jews" or that Jews are, in general, post-nationalist in attitude. (I note in passing that this is a far greater slur on the Jewish character than anything I've ever read Sailer write about Jews; it is, in fact, the Old Right's primary anti-Semitic charge against the Jews.) But it is fair to say that many Jews, I would guess most Jews, instinctively believe that cultural diversity is "good for the Jews" because it is good for the Jews not to be a uniquely distinct minority. What this kind of thinking misses, of course, is that outside of the Northeast Corridor, "diversity" is precisely *not* how one would characterize our current age of mass immigration. Immigration anxiety, justified or not, is overwhlemingly centered on the mass immigration from neighboring Mexico. If the desire for diversity is a motivator for Jewish support for high immigration levels, then Jews should support not America's immigration policy, but Canada's (albeit with tougher restrictions on admitting terrorists).

Fifth, I was struck by this paragraph of Sailer's:

By laying the blame for the Holocaust on Congress in 1924 (a year that Hitler spent in jail), they can ignore the extraordinary lack of effort American Jewish leaders made during the 12 years of the Roosevelt Administration (which were coterminous with the Third Reich, 1933-1945) to get European Jews admitted as refugees. FDR was the most politically powerful President in American history and American Jews were, on the whole, wildly enthusiastic for FDR. Even though back then Jews comprised a much larger voting bloc, and one particularly well-situated in big electoral vote states to tip elections, they exerted little effective pressure on their hero to do anything for their co-ethnics. Rather than confront this history, it's so much more enjoyable today to blame it all on Congress in 1924 for not having the foresight to realize that a jailbird in Germany was going to perpetrate the worst crime in history two decades later.

Steve: has it not occurred to you that organizations like ADL and AIPAC, however much you might not like them, are precisely a response to the (partly accurate, I would say) perception of American Jews that the generation of the 1930s and 1940s, in spite of their numerical clout, were unable to save their brethren from the worst disaster in their history because they were unwilling to forcefully press their case, politically, in the media and elsewhere. You can't have it both ways, Steve.

Sixth, and somewhat tangentially, I wanted to point out the following. Sailer has often pointed out that opposition to bi-lingualism and illegal immigration are winning issues for Republicans among most Americans, and that the Hispanic vote is a lot smaller than people think. Therefore, he argues, Pete Wilson's support of Proposition 187 did not, in fact, hurt Republicans in California; what hurt Republicans in California was the internal migration of Republican-leaning whites to neighboring, less-expensive states. That may all be true, but this leaves an important element out. The Hispanic vote may not be as big as is often estimated, and may not have swung decisively in reaction to perceptions of GOP "nativism." But the Asian-American population, while much smaller than the Hispanic population nationally and in California, has much higher percentage levels of voter participation, and did swing *decisively* against the GOP *precisely* because of perceived GOP "nativism." Asians used to be described as natural GOP voters: socially conservative, small-business owners, anti-Communist. All true, and they used to split roughly 50-50 between the parties based partly on historical party affiliation (Japanese tended to be Democrats, whereas Vietnamese tended to be Republicans) and partly on economic status (poorer Chinese tended to be Democrats while richer Chinese tended to be Republicans). By the late 1990s, in California especially, Asians were voting overwhelmingly for the Democrats, to the point where they are now almost comparable to Jews in their voting patterns. So just as Jews might be happy to live among more Asians, and hence wind up supporting Mexican immigration that has totally different characteristics, Republicans running against Mexican immigration have wound up driving Asians out of the GOP coalition, contributing to the collapse of the GOP in California. I'm quite sure that the people actually charged with winning elections for the GOP are aware of this.

Seventh, and even more tangentially, in his original post on the "Jerusalem Syndrome" Sailer spends a bit of time ranting about convicted traitor Jonathan Pollard. I think it would be appropriate, in the context of such ranting, to point out that, prominently but by no means exclusively among Jewish officials, Senator Joe Lieberman has been extremely firm in his conviction that Pollard deserves his sentence and should not receive clemency, nor should he be "traded" to Israel until, at a minimum, Israel reveals everything that Pollard stole and on to whom the Israeli government subsequently passed it. That's exactly the right conclusion, and it would be nice if the paleocon Right, who disagree with Lieberman about so much, gave him credit for it, especially when the subject comes up in its more usual context.

Finally, I thought I should mention my own views on immigration. All else being equal, immigration should be a net-positive transaction for the world as a whole, and also a net-positive transaction for the receiving country. The reasoning, in a nutshell, is as follows: one can presume that an immigrant will be more productive in his new country than in the country he left, and that the benefits of this jump in his productivity will be shared between himself and his new country. This is the basic economic argument for relatively open borders, and it is the reason why it is not correct to say that immigration is *purely* a matter of redistrbution (unlike trade, which produces win-win situations).

But this basic economic argument for immigration is not the whole story. Selection effects, positive and negative, can be extremely important in the distribution of gains and losses due to immigration. A country that deliberately exports criminals is clearly going to benefit itself to the detriment of the receiving country. A country that deliberately imports highly skilled workers is clearly going to benefit itself to the detriment of the country from whom those highly skilled workers come. Welfare policies can profoundly shape the incentives for immigration, with consequences that may invalidate the assumption that immigrants will be more productive in their new country than they were in the old.

Moreover, there are externalities associated with immigration, some unquestionably negative (the transaction costs of schooling children in a new language are collectively born) and some debatably negative (is cultural diversity a good or a bad thing? there are two sides to that particular coin). And, just as with free trade but to a far greater degree, both the positive and negative externalities will be unevenly distributed. A country that imports lots of low-wage workers will produce gains, in terms of higher profits and lower consumer prices, that accrue disproportionately to those with assets and disposable income, while the costs, in terms of depressed wages and higher housing costs, will be born disproportionately by those at the lower end of the income spectrum.

What's the bottom line? I think America would benefit from a far more selective immigration policy, one that provided generous asylum for truly politically oppressed people and, otherwise, focused on bringing in people with specific skills that the economy needs at a particular time. Anyone who has dealt with the immigration system in the United States knows that it makes it extraordinarily difficult for precisely the people you think we would want here, and I don't see how that serves anyone's interests.

By the same token, I don't think it is wise for the country to be importing a large class of unskilled laborers, precisely because today's economy, unlike that of the late 19th century, is not generating such enormous demand for these workers that wages are rising rapidly even as the supply of labor grows. I'm one of the people who benefits from this influx, but I don't think it serves the country's long-term interests.

I think it is quite problematic for any country not to have proper control over its borders. I think a guestworker program is simply a mirage if we retain birthright citizenship, and I think it would be wise for us to retain birthright citizenship. Unfortunately, I suspect that solving the illegal immigration problem will require a national ID of the sort that Americans have historically rejected, and that therefore significant illegal immigration will continue.

Commentators on the question of immigration, particularly on the restrictionist side, reflect surprisingly infrequently on the unique position of the United States, in that we are the only major rich nation with a long border with a vastly poorer nation whose population exploded over the past generation. This may have something to do with the fact that America uniquely has a big illegal immigration problem, and it may mean that the problem is a tougher one to solve than restrictionists let on.

Politically, I think immigration is not going to get any traction in the near term because of the contradictions within each party on the issue.

2006-04-15T23:03:00.000-04:00

Just reassuring everyone that I'm still alive, and haven't completely abandoned this blog. I was away on business in London, then away on vacation in Utah, then very busy at work, then preparing for Passover, then celebrating Passover. Want to see the seder menu?

Sephardi charoset
Long-cooked eggs with fresh radishes and cucumbers
Chicken soup with matzoh balls
Fried fish cakes with egg-lemon sauce
Lamb shanks braised with butternut squash, figs and fresh almonds
Chicken baked with artichokes
Cauliflower-leek kugel
Celery braised with walnuts
Roast asparagus and tomatoes
Chocolate-orange cake
Date-almond cake
Various cookies and fruit

Novelty item of the night was soft matzoh, made by certifiable lunatics in Israel (the box boasted that everyone and every implement involved in the process of making the stuff was inspected by the mashgiach every 18 minutes). Cost 50% more than the usual shmurah matzoh, which is itself ridiculously expensive and, per my own religious views, totally unnecessary, machine-made matzoh being perfectly adequate, but I buy it for the effect, and I bought this soft matzoh for the novelty of it. Wasn't worth it.

Discovery of the night was a kosher barolo from, I think, Rashi, an Italian Jewish label. Very nice wine. You'd never know they boiled it to protect it from non-kosher cooties.

And a good time was had by all.

2006-03-20T13:49:00.000-05:00

Am I safe in assuming that Yale has already installed these in all campus lavatories?

2006-03-13T09:07:00.000-05:00

Spent the weekend in Rochester visiting the in-laws (always a treat for my son) and so had the opportunity to visit the synagogue we used to attend when my wife and I lived there. And the rabbi gave an interesting sermon apropos of Purim (which starts tonight). He compared the position of the Jewish community in America today with Queen Esther's position in King Ahashuerus's Persia: that is to say, a position of power or, more precisely, profound influence on those who wield power. And, he said, that power implies responsibility - specifically, the responsibility to use it to prevent grave wrong (as Esther did in acting to prevent the genocide of the Jews). He went on to urge the congregants to write letters to Congress to press for stronger action on the situation in Darfur.

Now, this is not an argument I've heard very often. Usually, when I hear a Jewish exhortation to the flock to do something about this or that injustice, and to be especially sure to take such action because you (the hearer) are Jewish, the reasoning takes one of three forms. Either (1) we Jews have suffered, so we should be acutely sensitive to others' suffering, and not accept the excuses of those who either perpetrate or ignore that suffering; or (2) as God liberated the Jews from captivity in Egypt, and as we are enjoined to imitate God in His striving for justice, we have a religious obligation as Jews to help the oppressed; or (3) Jews should be aware of our collective vulnerability, historical and continuing, and therefore for our own good always take the other side of the kinds of groups, movements and individuals who have victimized us in the past, and who could threaten us again in the future. Nothing wrong with any of these arguments. But you (or at least I) rarely hear a Jewish leader saying, in so many words, that Jews must act to prevent this or that injustice because we are powerful, and power implies responsibility.

Interesting, I thought.

2006-03-01T09:32:00.000-05:00

At the end of last month, I posted a book diary, a list and brief commentary on all the books I'd read during the month, part of an effort to help me remember what I just read, which I'm finding harder and harder to do all the time. I'm determined to keep this up at least through the end of this year, so here's the second installment.

Seven Types of Ambiguity, by William Empson. I actually started this in January but I finished it this month. I wish I had taken notes as I read this book. It will certainly require re-reading for me to fully assimilate its insights. Not being a lit-crit type, I don't know if this is a book that contemporary critics remember fondly reading as graduate students, revere as a classic without reading, understand as an important influence on more recent critics, or ignore completely. I can say that my own experience of reading the book varied considerably from page to page. When I was most familiar with the material - say, when Empson is dissecting Shakespeare - I found the book fascinating. I remember particularly a chapter that focused on the situation where a poet substitutes an unexpected word for one more expected in a given place, perhaps producing a more abstruse metaphor, and that part of the meaning of the line hinges on the readers expectation of a different word, and a more commonplace metaphor, and on one level even partially hears the expected word, and that this produces a fecund ambiguity as the expected word and its meaning and the actually chosen word and its different meaning jostle for position in the reader's mind. When I was less familiar, or totally unfamiliar, with the poems Empson treats, I found the book tougher going. I had to spend so much energy making sense of the poem for myself that I found it difficult to concentrate as well on Empson's analysis of second and third orders of meaning. Among the many reasons I think I will need to re-read this book is that I could never keep the seven types of ambiguity straight; frankly, at a couple of points in the book I suspected that Empson himself was failing to keep them straight - he began at one point to describe one type of ambiguity as basically like the previous type only more so, which really made me question whether the purported taxonomy was of any value whatsoever or whether Empson just liked the number seven.

I read four contemporary plays this month, something I don't usually do; the effort was pursuant to my potential involvement with a theatrical company, a group of Americans who studied for years at the Moscow Arts Theater in Moscow, Russia, and have now returned to America. They put on a festival in Boston last summer showcasing three contemporary plays, one from Macedonia, one from Lithuania and one from Russia; they then returned to Russia and put on an American contemporary play there. These are the four plays I read.

A Place I Have Never Been To, by Zanina Mircevska. This was my least favorite of the four plays I read. It was written in a kind of faux-folk style, a kind of cross between folk tale language and the language of not-very-good early 20th century expressionism. Around the time of the first Balkan war of the 1990s (Serbia invading Croatia), I marinated myself in traditional Balkan literature. I can't say that much of it has stayed with me, but I recognized what the playwright was drawing from, and it was a not very interesting take on a literature I don't love in the first place.

Finer Noble Gasses, by Adam Rapp. What a depressing play! Members of a rock band hang around their apartment popping pills of various color and unspecified chemical composition, watching (and smashing) television and speaking to each other in cryptic half-phrases. It's like Beavis and Butthead as written by Brecht. Or, alternatively, the kind of play lots of teenage guys would like to write, but couldn't. Which is to say: the author clearly had talent, but the concept struck me as quite adolescent. I did not enjoy this play, but I could see how it could work well theatrically.

Lucy is Skating, by Laura Sintija Cerniauskaite. This play was a fairly conventional story of a marriage in crisis told in a theatrically alienating style. The playwright has obvious talent, and is worth watching, but (again, possibly because of the translation) much of the language lacked vividness.

Playing a Victim by Oleg and Vladimir Presnyakov. The best of the four plays, and the only one with a striking theatrical conceit. The protagonist's job is to play the role of the victim in police reenactments of crimes as part of crime-scene investigations. Whether such a job exists strikes me as immaterial; it's a wonderfully redolent conceit with obvious theatrical potential. Unfortunately, the authors never take the play beyond the conceit into the realm of an actual drama. The play goes directly from setup to conclusion without passing through any plot as such, in the sense of the revelation of character (through or without action). But the Presnyakov brothers do have some talent.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, by Haruki Murakami. I cannot decide what I think about this book. On the one hand, I obviously enjoyed it very much, because I kept reading it and kept wanting to read it when I wasn't reading it. The book has passages that are startlingly vivid. And it's honestly not much like any other book I've read; the author has created a truly distinctive world and a truly distinctive voice. On the other hand, I was annoyed with the author much of the time I was readong. The book has passages - many - that are startlingly banal. And, honestly, the whole project is highly derivative. If I were to pitch the book, I'd describe it as a cross between Gravity's Rainbow and The Magic Mountain. I once described the plot of Pynchon's magnum opus as: hero goes to France, meets mysterious Continental woman with whom he has kinky sex, and from whom he learns certain esoteric facts about ballistics, then is thrown from a car and rescued by another mysterious woman who takes him to Germany, has more kinky sexw with him, and teaches him esoteric facts about rocket fuel, then pushes him out of a balloon, when suddenly he's rescued by another mysterious woman . . . etc. Murakami's book is similar: our hero is constantly having mysterious encounters, frequently with women, some of whom he has kinky sex with, most of whom are not convincing as actual characters, and so forth. As with Pynchon, there's a sense that Murakami thinks eccentricity pushed over the edge into implausibility somehow substitutes for true characterization, or constitutes characterization in our age. But Murakami is better than Pynchon on this score; the teenage girl whom the protagonist chastely befriends is, unlike the other females in the story, a real person, someone I could believe in. I was reminded of The Magic Mountain for more fundamental reasons: both books are about stasis, spiritual stasis, on the individual and the cultural level. For that reason, the protagonists of both books are really insufferable; Murakami's hero, like Mann's, has dropped out of society and is just hanging around waiting for something to snap him out of his stasis. In Mann's novel, what snaps him out is World War I. In Murakami's, the hero actually heads further and further away from any reality we recognize, into an occult world, and winds up engaging in a kind of astral combat with avatars of the forces that, we're supposed to believe, have derailed his life in the real world. I find the whole occult aspect of Murakami's novel unconvincingly psychologically; this kind of navel-gazing pseudo-action shouldn't achieve what actual action in the real world achieves for a person, psychologically, and yet in Murakami's book it does. And yet, I wondered after finishing the book whether it might not work better - for me, at any rate - if it were a movie rather than a novel. Something like this. There were numerous points in the novel, that, upon reflection, felt more like scenes from a serious anime cartoon than like scenes from a conventional novel. In any event, for all my criticisms it's a very impressive book, and I am very glad I read it.

Dead Souls, by Nikolai Gogol. This was pure fun. Gogol's hero, Chichikov, is a bit of a Gatsby, a former civil service official out to make himself in the provinces. He ingratiates himself with all the local grandees, in the process providing the author with an opportunity to satirize a variety of Russian types. And at the opportune time he springs on them his odd proposal: to purchase from them serfs who have already died, the dead souls of the title. The novel reminded me of Don Quixote in its satire and its its narratorial style. But it doesn't approach that eminence for two great reasons. First, Chichikov is entirely sane, hence we lose the wondeful double-consciousness of Sancho and the Don that is the source of greatest delight in Cervantez's masterpiece. Second, Gogol never figures out how to take his conceit to the next level. Volume I (the only volume of the story ever published in the author's lifetime; fragments of unpublished subsequent material are included in this edition, but I admit I didn't read them) ends with the revelation of what Chichikov's actual scheme was, and with a long flashback into Chichikov's origins. We never see Chichikov try to put his scheme into actual action, nor any counterpart in sublime madness to Sancho's appointment as governor. It's a small masterpiece rather than a real monument to literature, but it's a pleasure nonetheless. And it would also make an excellent movie, either as a period piece or updated to the present day.

2006-02-28T18:07:00.000-05:00

Jonah, you may want to talk to the publisher about changing the cover. Just saying.

2006-02-27T09:40:00.000-05:00

A follow-up to last night's post (which, by the way, reads to me as kind of rambling and incoherent in the cold light of day): I realize that I forgot to include any discussion of that paper by Robert McCauley that Derb linked to in his first post. Since I enjoyed the paper very much, and had a few thoughts about it, I want to correct that omission.

First off, I think the paper is broadly speaking correct. Science is profoundly unnatural, whereas religion is rooted deeply in human nature.

I also agree that science is, for that reason, more fragile, more vulnerable to extinction, than is religion in general or even particular religions. Science is dependent on institutional continuity in a way that religion - even organized religion - is less so, because individual believers can be effective tradents while the individual scientist cannot similarly carry his tradition on his back. The vulnerability of science is a sociological observation, but it derives from a truth about individual psychology.

I do think, however, that there is a bit of confusion in the paper as to the definition of religion. McCauley presumes that religion is, quintessentially, a set of beliefs - beliefs about supernatural agents and their impact on the natural world. Even "primitive" religion begins with theories about these supernatural agents and proceeds from there to invent rituals to influence these agents. My strong inclination, by contrast, is to understand religion as quintessentially a set of practices, and to find any architecture of belief to be belated. We have a deep-seated need to engage in ritual behaviors, and to tell stories; we come up with rituals and stories about the gods because we need the rituals and the stories, not because we've got a theory about why crops fail. But, to be fair, I am at least somewhat inclined to credit theories that find much of human reasoning about our decisionmaking to be belated - that is to say, to credit psychologies that claim we decide to do something without conscious reasoning and then, after the fact, use our reason to tell ourselves stories to explain why we did what we did. So religious behavior is just a special case of behavior in general for me. (Do not mistake me: I am in no way whatsoever a behaviorist. I don't understand how anyone could possibly deny the existence of mental states or their power to impact behavior. But it may still be the case that conscious mental states are belated with respect to any particular decision - decision #1 is made unconsciously but results in conscious mental states that "set up" the board, as it were, for decision #2, also made unconsciously but plainly affected by the conscious mental states that develop after and in response to - though we think they are prior and predicate to - decision #1. Is that clear?)

I probably being unfair in calling this a confusion, because McCauley alludes at a couple of points to the difference between religion "as actually practiced" and theology. But I'm not sure he sees the full implications of this distinction. Theology is quite as unnatural as science, and as likely to be in conflict with common sense and instinct as science is. I would make the following analogy: religion is a natural practice that rests on a foundation of instinctive predilection to ritual behavior, whereas theology is an unnatural, belated intellectual activity that is wedded to but also in perpetual conflict with "natural" religion, in the same way that tool-making in the broadest sense is a natural practice that rests on a foundation of instinctive knowledge of common-sense physics, whereas science is an unnatural, belated intellectual activity that is wedded to but also in perpetual conflict with "common-sense" reasoning about reality. Science is no more in conflict with "instinctive" religion than it is with common sense - that is to say: it's very much in conflict with both, but no one takes this to mean that common sense should be eradicated. By contrast, science and theology, inasmuch as they are competing totalizing systems, may indeed come into conflict, but if they do it seems to me that theology must, in some fashion, give way, because science as such by its nature cannot do so, whereas theology, because its ultimate object is to explain why things are, to impart meaning to reality rather than to make detailed and accurate predictions about how reality will behave, should be capable of assimilating whatever science discovers about how the universe works. My point from yesterday was that while theology as such should be able to do so, individual theologies may not be so capable, and thus science and religion as such should be able to live together in peace and harmony (for long stretches, anyway) but science and individual religions may indeed come into fatal conflict (or those individual religions may survive, but so transformed as to be unrecognizable to earlier generations of believers).

Science and theology are alike totalizing ways of apprehending reality. The kind of religious instinct that McCauley focuses on in his paper is not. McCauley quotes Dennett as saying that "until science came along, one had to settle for personifying the unpredictable--adopting the intentional stance toward it--and trying various desperate measures of control and appeasement." This is a perfect illustration of the category mistake that infects so much scientific writing about religion. The philosophical and theological tradition of arguments that any such attempt at appeasement is vain long predates the development of modern science; Job and Ecclesiastes are two early examples from the Western religious canon. And the natural impulse to want to appease the gods so they will take the cancer away has not been exorcized by modern science. Rather, those who are cowed by modern science's disapproval of cancer spirits may develop ritual behaviors that look for all the world religious but that are more solopsistic in nature, making of ourselves the gods to be appeased.

I don't want to sound negative; I thought McCauley's piece was a good one. As a corrective to the nurturist assumptions of cultural anthropologists and religious studies types, it's quite useful. Historians of popular culture and popular religiosity are frequently inclined to find suppressed "traditions" fighting against institutional religion when what they are probably observing is the effervescence of natural religion. But as an entry in the science vs. religion lists, I find the piece somewhat less useful.

2006-02-26T21:46:00.000-05:00

I've been following with interest Derb's debate (here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here) over Leon Wieseltier's review of Daniel Dennett's latest book. (It beats reading the news from Iraq.)

I think I know what Derb is worried about. Stephen Sondheim wrote a rather underrated work about the opening of Japan, called Pacific Overtures, in the first act of which there is a scene where the Shogun, an idiot playboy, is being cajoled to pay some minimal attention to the fact that American warships are sitting in the harbor demanding to land and receive an audience (all of which Japan's laws would prohibit). Here's a bit of the libretto where the Shogun's mother suggests calling in the priests to opine on what to do:

MOTHER
It's the Day of the Ox, my Lord.
With but three days remaining
And today already waning,
I've a few further shocks, my Lord.

To begin, let me say,
At the risk of repetition,
There are ships in the bay,
And they didn't ask permission,
But they sit there all day
In contemptuous array
With a letter to convey
And they haven't gone away
And there's every indication
They they still plan to stay,
And you look a little gray, my Lord …

Have some tea, my Lord,
Some chrysanthemum tea,
While we plan, if we can,
What our answer ought to be.

If the tea the Shogun drank will
Serve to keep the Shogun tranquil,
I suggest, if I may, my Lord,
We consult the Confucians —
They have mystical solutions.
There are none wise as they, my Lord …

PRIESTS
Night waters do not break the moon.
That merely is illusion.
The moon is sacred.

No foreign ships can break our laws.
That also is illusion.
Our laws are sacred.

It follows there can be no ships.
They must be an illusion.
Japan is sacred.

Derb is surely right that if we start to reason like this, our civilization is in for a heap of trouble. And so that's not a bad thing to spend your time worrying about.

But I think I need to point out - in an entirely friendly manner - a few problems with his style of argumentation.

First, arguments exclusively from genealogy can get opponents annoyed. They got Wieseltier sufficiently annoyed to write a rather unimpressively sputtering review. Similar annoyance got people like Peter Robinson to write sympathetically about Wieseltier's effort. Is it wise - is it likely to be rhetorically successful - in such a context not merely to allude to the genealogy of Wieseltier's arguments as if that were itself an argument, but to mock said genealogy (references to Fr. Rutland and all that)? What is gained, other than self-satisfaction?

Second, Wieseltier is (attempting) to make a philosophical argument. I think it is worth the effort to tease out what that argument may be and knock the stuffing out of it on its own terms. I've got a pretty strong commitment to epistemological pragmatism, but sometimes pragmatism is the last refuge of a lazy (or, more likely, weary) rhetorical combatant. Even if you're going to argue from consequences, you're going to get a better response if you stick to consequences germane to the particular discourse, to say, "following this line isn't going to get you anywhere you want to go intellectually" when you are debating a philosophical point, rather than, "that we are even debating this question proves my point that we are falling ever further behind the Chinese in the contest for mastery of the future of the human race" - and that's true even if you believe the latter to be true.

Finally, and most troublingly (to me) on his final contribution to the debate. Derb winds up by saying, basically, that Dennett does no one any favors by playing that village atheist, and that he ought to be more respectful of the good opinion of most people - for the good of science. I seem to recall a controversy some months ago about a piece by Gertrude Himmelfarb (also a not-very-good piece, I might add - Derb seems to be making an unfortunate habit of martyring not-very-good pieces by launching wild attacks on their authors' motives) in which Derb expressed his profound distaste for "noble lie" types of compromises. It seems very much that he is urging Dennett to tell just such a lie. Dennett thinks he knows the truth, and that it will set us free. To be fair, Derb doesn't agree with Dennett on the former point - Derb is not a tub-thumping village atheist - but he is effectively advising Dennett that even if he sincerely believes what he says about atheism and materialism, he ought to keep it to himself because most people - by nature - cannot handle such a truth. I fail to see the difference between this advice and the kind of attitude that he attributed to Irving Kristol (and, by implication, his wife), who was (Derb claimed) cozying up to Intelligent Design types for the sake of social peace. The only difference I can discern is the nature of the good being protected from the unreasoning mob in each respective case. I don't like that style of argument any more than Derb does, but I do think that's the kind of argument he's making. I'll go into why I think he winds up making such arguments further on, what might be some alternative arguments, and what their big pitfalls are in turn.

I'm going to defend Derb defending Dennett, even though Derb has not read Dennett's book and, while I haven't read this one, I've read other books of Dennett's and I'm decidedly unimpressed - and not because he's a tub-thumping village atheist. Anyone who can write a book entitled Consciousness Explained has a chutzpah problem. When you write a book with that title and, in the end, do nothing whatever to explain consciousness - that is, to reduce it to understood phenomena, to explain it in a scientific sense - you have a problem bigger than chutzpah. He "explains" consciousness entirely be means of a metaphor, leaving consciousness as such just as much of a mystery as it was before the book began. But he is adamant that now the mystery is gone, and all the "mysterians" can pack up their tents. Dennett is the worst kind of science popularizer: the kind who thinks that if you admit science can't currently explain something or other and, indeed, may have a very great difficulty ever explaining something or other, then that is just giving an "opening" to the other side in some kind of conflict. He writes as if he believes precisely what religious fundamentalists believe: that anything science cannot currently account for must have been handled by God directly. No scientist should ever believe such a thing, or they'll wind up doing very bad science; no popularizer of science should ever write in such a way, or he'll only give an "opening" to the other side in a very real conflict. I'm going to defend Derb defending Dennett because I think Derb's reasons for disliking the Wieseltier review are good ones, and that those who are defending Wieseltier are a little too secure in their own intellectual redouts for my personal taste.

Now, to a substantive defense, with important qualifications.

Derb is right on the essential merits. I've never understood what humanists like Wieseltier are criticizing, precisely, when they criticize "materialism." I know what theists might be criticizing; they might believe quite literally in divine providence, for example. In their case, my question what not be what they believe but in what sense they really believe it - my inquiry would be pragmatic: how do their decisions differ because of their belief, and does this belief appear to be efficacious in their decisionmaking. But for a humanist to criticize "materialism" is perplexing. Is Wieseltier an old-fashion Cartesian dualist? Is he familiar with the litany of problems with dualism, with its internal incoherence? Or is he a panpsychist of some kind? Where does Wieseltier think the mind comes from, if not the brain? I suspect Derb is right, and that Wieseltier couldn't care less about the answers to these kinds of questions; he's committed to some notion that there is a domain of "spirit" because, say, the Nazis and Communists seemed to be against such a domain, so the good guys must be for it; or because he has a nostalgic affection for Jewish tradition that affirms the existence of such a realm; or something. Derb's got every right to be annoyed at seeing such ill-thought-out intellectual prejudices wielded like a cudgel.

And Derb's right that the faculty of reason and the religious "instinct" could be - almost certainly are - incommensurate, and that there is no teeth in the argument that if both are products of natural selection then both are equally undermined by that genealogy. To begin with, there is a cogent - though not at all proven; actually, not even evidenced, really, just hypothesized - argument that our inclination to religious belief is a "side effect" of a cognitive property of great value rather than a property selected for in its own right. That's the argument that Dennett is sketching in his book: the ability to model the intentionality of other minds is of enormous value cognitively, but the side effect is that we infer intentionality whenever we are confronted with sufficient complexity, and religion is an example of this side effect. That's not a scientific theory at this point; it's just a logical argument that fits with what minimal evidence there is on this topic at all. But it's at least as plausible that a predisposition towards religious beliefs and practices are natural in a more robust sense - that they really were selected for because they increase fitness, not because they are a sorry side-effect of some other faculty. If this is the case, though, then the religious instinct is analogous to, say, common sense, or "folk physics" that appears to be hard-wired into us. We don't have to learn, for example, about the existence of gravity, or friction, or inertia; we are born with hard-wiring about these things, and we what we learn is how to get along with these forces as we actually make our way through the world, running and jumping and throwing baseballs and the like. But we are not born knowing the actual laws of physics, and the actual laws of physics turn out to differ in far-reaching ways from the common-sense or "folk" physics we know by instinct. And it is our faculty of reason that we use to discern the differences, because it is our faculty of reason that allows us to . . . reason. Or to access Reason, if you prefer. Reason has a certain pride of place amongst our faculties when we ask questions about how things are. To repeat, then, if religious "instincts" have been selected for in their own right, it seems far more likely that they are analogous to "common sense" rather than to the faculty of reason. Which would imply that reason should, similarly, be granted the ability to overrule what religious instincts "teach" - when the question at hand is one of how things are.

I need to dispose of one important argument, however, before moving on. It is striking that we human beings have the faculties to develop natural science - that we can, actually, unravel the rules about how things are with a very high degree of precision. That is to say: it is striking that, however hard psychologically it may be for us to deploy it, we have a faculty of reason with a high correspondence to how the universe actually works - as opposed to how we experience the universe, which is what you would expect we would have and which, in fact, any animals that manifest signs of consciousness probably have to some degree. This is a sufficiently striking fact that it has inclined some scientists - physicists and mathematicians, mostly - to understand it as proof of at least the truth of Plato's religion, though not of Moses'. It suggests an intelligence behind the existence of things, a kinship between that intelligence and our own, and a disjunction between our intelligences and the other, lesser animal intelligences with which we have made contact. But a few things need to be said about this suggestion. First, it's just that: a suggestion. It's also possible that our ability to do natural science is a happy accident, the bi-product of some other trait selected for more mundane reasons. To the extent that modern civilization requires this kind of intelligence for survival, we may now be selecting for precisely that trait, but it's not obvious to me that individual survival, as opposed to collective survival, actually depends in any way on one's ability to do math or natural science, so I doubt this is the case. Second, even if one is persuaded by this suggestion, it does not imply that there is any truth whatever to the religious beliefs that we are strongly inclined to hold. Even if it could be proved that there is an intentionality behind everything, that does not imply that there is an intentionality behind any particular thing. And it is the latter that is the meat and potatoes of religion as it has actually been lived for all of human history. Third, and finally, no analogy can be made between the correspondence of the law-governed universe to law-discerning human reason and a hypothesized correspondence between a God-governed universe and a God-knowing human soul. No such analogy can be made because science justifies itself in its own terms and has earned that correspondence. It is not at all obvious what our religions - assuming they agreed with one another on some irreducible set of axioms, which they don't - could do to earn such a correspondence for themselves.

Derb is right that Wieseltier's review is (as Wieseltier himself might formulate it) "objectively" anti-Darwinist in that it gives aid and comfort to those who want to wall off certain kinds of scientific arguments as inadmissable. But I don't think that's a very telling attack, and Derb wouldn't approve of accusations in that style made in other contexts (such as, for example, when Wieseltier has called people or arguments "objectively" anti-Semitic). The more telling point is that Wieseltier refuses to engage with Darwinian logic as such. He seems to have concluded long ago that science by definition couldn't possibly impinge on his (humanist) beliefs, and so when someone comes along saying, actually, they do so impinge, he doesn't need to engage that particular argument at all. Unfortunately, and here I get to my most important disagreement with both Wieseltier and Derb, I think Darwinian logic does impinge in a very specific way on all sorts of beliefs that, I suspect, the three of us hold in common. To take this argument further, I'm going to have to wander off into theodicy. I hope at least some of you will follow me there.

David Hart wrote a piece about theodicy for First Things last year that annoyed me to no end, and as I thought about it I decided that it annoyed me not for any reason particular to it but because I find Christian theodicy uncompelling as such, and this was a perfectly orthodox example of Christian theodicy. My initial reaction to the piece was different; I thought I was annoyed because Hart was elaborating a Manichean theodicy in that he attributed natural evil to God's "enemy" rather than to God. But, in fairness, in good orthodox Christianity, natural evil is a product of Man's Original Sin. The very nature of reality itself is fallen as a consequence of humanity's free choice to rebel. I find this theodicy unpersuasive on a gut level, I will admit. But it seems to me that the Darwinian account of creation makes it - or ought to make it - very, very hard for anyone to accept such a theodicy.

The reason is simple. The biblical account of creation, in the Christian reading, has natural evil enter the world as a consequence of human sin. Without our sin, there would be no suffering and death. In the Darwinian account of evolution, suffering and death are the preconditions to our existence. Our intelligence, and hence our ability to sin, is a faculty that was selected for in a bare-handed struggle for survival. Our religious instinct, if one is to assert that it does correspond to some objective reality as our reason corresponds to the reasoned ordering of the universe, is also the fruit of a process of natural selection. We may climb a mountain and see the face of God, but the mountain we climb is a mountain of skulls.

Put simply: natural selection is not the motor one would expect the Christian God to use to make the world go 'round.

(This is not to say that orthodox Jewish or Buddhist or Hindu theodicies are satisfying to me. Personally, I don't know a theodicy more compelling than that expressed by the whirlwind to Job: behold Behemoth, whom I made with thee . . . he is the beginning of the ways of God. If Behemoth is the beginning of the ways of God, then His ways truly are not our ways. The whirlwind does not attempt to justify the ways of God to man; the whirlwind tells man to stop expecting such a justification and get on with life, a life only possible because of God, author of all, and a life filled with wonder as well as suffering. Such an attitude isn't really a theodicy at all, which is probably why I find it more persuasive than either the attempts to justify the ways of God to man that David Hart, following Ivan Karamazov, abominates, or the orthodox Christianity that he embraces instead.)

Why do I take this digression? Because Derb would like to wall religion off from science by confining them to different explanatory realms. Religion will say absolutely nothing about how things are, and science will say absolutely nothing about why things are. The trouble is that I really do think discoveries about how things are can impact the persuasiveness of certain explanations about why things are. Which means that religion, even if it abandons any attempt to joust directly with science and accepts evolution, textual criticism, and so forth, may be threatened nonetheless by the discoveries of science.

Which leaves me with the following conclusion. If I am right that a "wall of separation" between science and religion is not tenable, because science may nonetheless threaten religion by its explanations of how things are; and if I am right that reason and science are rightly privileged in our heirarchy of faculties when we investigate the world as it is, and therefore religion must rightly yield to science in that sphere; and if I am right (and I'm agreeing with Derb here as well as in the previous point) that religion is not going to go away because human beings are born with a religious instinct (and this instinct, contra Dennett, may have survival value rather than being an unfortunate bi-product); then it follows that humanity badly needs religious leaders who take the truth - the whole truth - seriously. It seems very unlikely to me indeed that Aquinas, Averroes and Maimonides, in reconciling, as they saw it, their revealed religions with the Aristotelean science that they knew, anticipated precisely every possible challenge to be raised by science for the rest of human history. To a considerable extent, the landscape of religious thinkers today presents us with three choices: those who actively war with science; those who recycle old Scholastic arguments to reconcile science and religion as if science's challenge were unchanged in 800 years; and those who have never entertained a serious thought about such questions because they - "objectively" - treat religion as a branch of politics and/or psychotherapy. These three alternatives are not good ones - not good ones for any religious tradition and not good ones for human civilization.

2006-02-14T12:17:00.000-05:00

Well, that meme sure died quick.

2006-02-08T11:06:00.000-05:00

Good column by John O'Sullivan on the cartoons, but I wish he had dwelt longer on the arguments for a law against blasphemy. The arguments are worth airing, and seeing their implications. The most important implication is not for free speech but for freedom of religion.

"Blasphemy" is not a synonym for "offense." Blasphemy is a deliberate insult to the sacred, violating the third commandment, spuriously claiming powers or attributes properly reserved for the divinity, etc. To define blasphemy, you need to define the sacred, and the divine, and the attributes thereof. And religions do not agree about these definitions. Indeed, religions can conflict radically on these central points. For this reason, an egalitarian anti-blasphemy law cannot be conceived.

Christianity is, strictly speaking, blasphemous according to Islam. A convert to Islam makes a very simple declaration of faith: there is no God but God, and Muhammad is His prophet. These two beliefs - the unity and singularity of the divine, and the truth of Muhammad's prophecy in the Quran - are all that one can say with certainty a Muslim must affirm. According to any Muslim's interpretation of the former, Christianity is blasphemous. Christianity asserts that God was incarnated as the man, Jesus of Nazareth. The Quran explicitly instructs Muslims to reject this teaching. The Quran explicitly says that the doctrine of the trinity is blasphemous. A blanket prohibition on blasphemy would necessitate the prohibition of Christian evangelization.

Islam is, as well, blasphemous according to Christianity, or at least the Quran contains material that could be considered blasphemous. I'm thinking specifically of the fact that according to the Quran, Jesus was never crucified; instead, God replaced Jesus at the last minute with a dummy. As blasphemy, that's roughly comparable to Salman Rushdie's offense in writing The Satanic Verses, part of the conceit of which was that some verses of the Quran were dictated not by the Archangel Gabriel but by Satan. A blanket prohibition on blasphemy would therefore necessitate the prohibition of public reading or dissemination of the Quran.

Obviously, once we throw other religions into the mix the situation gets even more impossible. Jewish particularism is problematic for both Islam and Christianity. Hinduism is a problem for all monotheistic faiths; it's also a problem for Buddhism because of its characterization of the Buddha as an avatar sent to promulgate false doctrine. The LDS Church is considered idolatrous and blasphemous by most Christians. And so on and so forth.

A proper blasphemy law protects the established religion of a jurisdiction. And while arguably an establishment need not be unitary in character (I suppose you could establish the Protestant religion without establishing a particular denomination), it cannot be radically internally inconsistent and even contradictory. Which is what a law prohibiting blasphemy against any religion would effectively require: the establishment of all religions, in spite of their mutual contradiction. The only way to make an egalitarian blasphemy law work, then, would be by severe curtailment of freedom of religion, as well as speech.

Of course, since freedom of religion is impossible, I suppose we don't have to worry about that.

2006-02-07T14:22:00.000-05:00

Dan Drezner points to an interesting little survey of various countries' attitudes towards various other countries. Some things are obvious - Iran is pretty unpopular, and so is the US, and Europe and Japan are more popular - but slicing the data various ways gives some interesting other tidbits.

Here's one: some countries just have a fairly negative view of everybody. Turkey, for example, has a net-negative view of China (marginally), Britain, Russia, France, the US, India (again marginally) and Iran. They have net-positive views only of Japan. (They also had a net-positive view of Europe - but with net-negative views of every European *country* actually mentioned this should perhaps be interpreted as positive views of the EU as an institution rather than "Europeans" as a people.) Turkey is notable for having a net-negative view of so many countries *and* for a large net-negative view of the world on average. France, Finland, Germany and Argentina also have double-digit net-negative views on average, but each is only net-negative on 5 out of 8 countries, as against Turkey's 7 out of 8 (France has positive views of Britain and of France itself, as do Finland and Germany; Argentina has positive views of China and France, but strongly negative views of Britain). But other countries are widely gloomy if not so deeply so. South Korea has net-negative views of China, Russia, the US, India, Japan and (strongly) Iran; they have extremely positive views of Britain and France, which is what drags them into net-sunny territory on the world as a whole, when they really should be counted among the gloomy gusses. Mexico has net-negative views only of Britain, Russia and (strongly) the US, but there is no country they are particularly positive on; next to Turkey, they have the lowest positive views across the board of any country polled.

The most upbeat countries, in terms of their views of the rest of the world, appear to be in Africa. Every African country polled has a positive view of the US, for instance, which would suggest the Africans are especially fond of America (the non-African countries that poll net-positive on the US are Afghanistan, India, Sri Lanka, Poland the Philippines - the most positive country on the US of any polled, they like us more than we like ourselves). But in fact, the African countries have a positive view of everybody. The Nigerians have a net-positive view of every country on which they were polled except for Iran, and they have the 7th most positive view of Iran of any coutry polled (including Iran itself). They have as strongly a positive view of Japan, Britan and China as they do of the US. On average, the African countries polled have a marginally more positive view of Japan, China, France and Britain than they do of the US, though they have very positive views of all these countries. Of the six countries with the net-sunniest view of other countries among those polled, five - Nigeria, Senegal, Ghana, Kenya and Tanzania - are in Africa. The sixth - actually #2 on the sunny index - is Afghanistan, which has a net-positive view of 7 of the 8 countries on which they were polled; they only country they don't trust is Russia, and they have only a 3% net negative view of them (30% positive, 33% negative). Which is kind of amazing when you consider the history. In any event, if anyone's spinning the poll as showing how much Africans love America, discount the spin. We're popular there, but not notably so.

It's also interesting to see which countries profess self-love, and which profess more ambivalence. Here's a table showing each country that was polled about itself, how positive they view their role in the world, how negative, and what the net score is, ranked by net score:

Country Positive Negative Net
China 86% 6% 80%
Russia 69% 6% 63%
France 68% 16% 52%
Iran 68% 18% 50%
India 47% 10% 37%
Britain 63% 26% 37%
US 63% 30% 33%

China exhibits the rabid nationalism of which none of us should be surprised. India is charmingly cynical about itself, but not actually worried. Among the remaining countries polled, positive views of self are relatively similar; Russia, France, Iran, Britain and the US all fall within a 6% range in terms of self-approval. But the US and Britain (and India) have significantly lower net-self-approval ratings than the other countries on the list. Is that a reflection of sharp dissension over the Iraq war? Or lack of civilizational self-confidence? Or healthy self-skepticism? I don't know the reason, but it is notable, and it would be interesting to see how these numbers have varied over time. (I also wish they had polled the Japanese.)

Cases of unreciprocated love (or hate) are fascinating. China has strongly net-positive views of Russia. Russia couldn't care less about China. China also has extremely positive views of France, even more strong than of Russia. The French have decidedly negative views of China - among the most net-negative views of any country polled. The Russo-French relationship is similar; the Russians have wildly positive views of the French, while the French have extremely negative views of the Russians. The French, though, may just be hard to please; they have net-negative views of most countries. They don't even like the Indians, who have net-positive views of every country on which they were polled, including (barely) Iran. Interestingly, the only countries the French poll positively on (apart from themselves) are the British and the Japanese. And while we can't say how the Japanese feel (they weren't polled), the British are decidedly negative on the French. Touche! Iran, meanwhile, has strongly net-positive views of China, while China has midly net-negative views of Iran. Iran has even more strongly net-positive views of India, while Indians show no discernable enthusiasm for Iran (though they are barely net-positive in their views). But, then again, no one shows really wild enthusiasm for Iran; even the Africans range from lukewarm to strongly negative. And then there's America. We are net-negative on the Chinese, the Russians (barely), the French and (of course) the Iranians; we're lukewarm towards India and very positive towards the Japanese. But we are nuts about the Brits. We are more than twice as net-positive about the Brits as we are about ourselves. But the Brits are decidedly net-negative on us. Oh, well.

(Interestingly, Americans are the only country polled about themselves as well as other countries who viewed *any* other country more positively than themselves. We think both the British and the Japanese are a stronger force for good in the world than is our own country. Even the British - who come in second to last in net-self-love - are more net-positive on their own country than they are on any other place on which they were polled.)

The most-loved country on the list, is Japan, against whom only the Chinese and South Koreans harbor net-negative views (though the French and the Mexicans are rather stingy with their love). Unfortunately, we cannot say whether this love is unrequited or not, because Japan was not polled for their views of the world.

So much for unrequited love: who does the world love to hate? Iran gets by far the worst reviews of any country of the eight on which people were polled, followed by Russia and the US. The world has strong negative views of Iran and few positive views; the world is pretty equally divided between positive and negative views of the US and Russia, with stronger positive *and* negative feelings of the US.

Comparing views of the US with views of Iran, there are seven countries that harbor stronger net-negative views of the US than of Iran, apart from Iran itself: Mexico leading the pack (45% net-negative view of the US, versus 1% net-positive for Iran), followed by China, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Turkey and Russia (which, to be honest, hates both the US and Iran about equally, just like Argentina). This is a pretty depressing list. It doesn't take a genius to predict that Mexico is going to be an increasing headache for the United States, and an increasingly serious one. China, of course, views us as a global rival. We are still fighting in Iraq, supposedly for their benefit; the Afghans appear to be happier at the way we "abandoned" their country than the Iraqis are at the way we remain "engaged" in theirs. Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, is a traditional rival of Iran; their mutual loathing is legendary. That they prefer Iran to America is notable. Ditto Turkey, a long-time American ally who has also been a traditional rival of the Iranians, and one profoundly threatened (like Saudi Arabia) by Iran's nuclear ambitions. And Russia, of course, has practically gotten a blank check from the Bush Administration, and has suffered mightily from terrorist attacks. Like I said: depressing.

Comparing views of the US with views of Russia, meanwhile, is also interesting. China, Iran, Mexico, Iraq, Argentina, Germany, Canada, Brazil, Spain, Australia, Turkey and South Korea all have net-negative views of the US, and less-negative - or, in the cases of China, Iran and Iraq, actually positive - views of Russia. Saudi Arabia, Sri Lanka and India also prefer Russia to America, but have net-positive views of each. There are only three countries outside of Africa that strongly prefer the US to Russia: the Philippines, Poland and Afghanistan. Italy, Indonesia and Great Britain also prefer the US to Russia, but not by large margins and they are each net-negative on both of us. This is also a depressing list. China, Iran, Mexico, Iraq, Turkey: fine, we've discussed these already. Canada prefers Russia to the US? Australia prefers Russia to the US? Germany prefers Russia to the US? (All three are net-negative on both, but much more negative about the US.) The French are at least even-handed in their hatreds.

All in all, a very interesting poll. I only wish they'd polled Japan.

2006-02-06T17:28:00.000-05:00

On the other hand, I will give Larry Gonick points for creativity in his treatment of Muhammad.

2006-02-05T22:28:00.000-05:00

I've been following Hugh Hewitt's running commentary about the Danish cartoons, and I'm getting less and less happy.

To be sure I'm not misunderstood: he's quite clear that he's not questioning the principle of freedom of the press, nor calling for censorship or hate-speech prosecutions or anything of the kind. It goes without saying that he knows the rioters are the villains here. But he does very much seem to be saying that we all - cartoonists included - should censor ourselves when it comes to anything related to Islam, for the good of the war effort. We should consider whether our speech makes life easier or harder for our allies in the Muslim world, and behave accordingly.

I can see the virtue of this kind of thinking when it comes to the State Department, and by extension the government as a whole. But it betrays a profound - and revealing - confusion of categories to suggest that the press - that cartoonists - should think this way.

Someone, I forget who, suggested that publishing those cartoons was like publishing racist cartoons about African-Americans in the wake of the Watts riots. But that's not right at all. A far better analogy would be to suggest that, in World War II, we should have refrained from publishing cartoons mocking and insulting our Japanese enemies for fear of offending Americans of Japanese descent, of whom a goodly number served their country with great honor on the field of battle. (Ditto of course for Italians and Germans.) Is that really where Hewitt wants to go?

The New York Times managed to get a variety of quotes from a variety of press notables - Nicholas Lemann, for instance - who should know better, saying, in so many words, that the cartoonists were trying to start a riot, and a riot is what they got. But the cartoons were, more than anything else, about how cartoonists fear that they'll get death threats if they draw cartoons critical of Islam. (Of the twelve cartoons, two are very explicitly about this fear - one shows the cartoonist cowering as he draws - while two are simply depictions of Muhammad without any particular point, and two are criticisms of the paper itself for going through the exercise.) If they got a riot, then all they did is make their point very vividly. And the point they were making is right at the heart of what free speech and a free society is all about.

Did they set out to offend? Maybe. Because, you know, their point was that people in Europe are terrified of offending Muslims. Is there a way to make that point . . . inoffensively?

I'm afraid Hewitt's argument boils down to saying that the cartoonists' fear is their small contribution to the War on Terrorism. That would be the first time in history that a war was won by internalizing fear of the enemy. It is particularly amusing to read Hewitt defending his position by asking, "what would Churchill do."

But it's also - and although this point may pack the least punch, I think it's actually the most important one - an absolutely mad contribution for cartoonists to make. Diplomats have many weapons at their disposal; cartoonists pretty much have to make do with ridicule. It is a strange thing indeed to tell someone that the best contribution they can make to the war effort is to unilaterally disarm. Unless that someone is, objectively speaking, on the other side.

Which, I worry, is something close to what Hewitt thinks. That is to say: he's all for a free press. But he's also all for a sensitive press - generally, and not just in regard to Islam. He's one of the new breed of politically correct conservatives, much like our President; he doesn't want cartoonists offending Catholics or Evangelical Protestants or Jews or African-Americans or whatever, anymore than he wants them to offend Muslims. This is one approach to how to make a "multi-cultural" society work: adopt a book of etiquette that anathematizes offense. But this particular slope is incredibly slippery, and at the bottom lies a society where we're no longer lying only because we no longer would recognize the truth if we saw it.

2006-01-31T15:57:00.000-05:00

Last month, in my usual year-end charity posting, I mentioned a new charter school whose board I had joined: Democracy Prep, to open in Harlem this summer. We held a "friendraiser" last week, which I felt went rather well. Here is one write-up about the event, from a blog devoted to NY State charter schools (the blogger, a former education-beat reporter for the NY Daily News, is the author of this book, which I have just ordered).

Anyone interested in hearing more about the school, or who would like to know how they could help, please don't hesitate to email me.

2006-01-31T09:46:00.000-05:00

Apparently, I'm better at predicting Oscar nominations for movies I haven't seen this year than I am at predicting political events about which I'm reasonably well-informed. I made four predictions of Best Picture nominees, of which three were nominated; five predictions of Best Actor nominees of whom four were nominated; and three predictions of Best Actress nominees of whom two were nominated. That's a pretty good percentage. Was this year particularly obvious? Or was it blind luck. It can't be skill, and it certainly can't be knowledge because I haven't seen any of the movies in question.

If I actually get the winners right, I shall buy myself a chocolate.

2006-01-31T09:28:00.000-05:00

You know, I've noticed that as I age I recall less and less what I have just done. (From my youth I had always forgotten what I was supposed to do, but this forgetting what I have just done appears to be a progressive disease.) Among the many distressing examples of this disorder is my increasing inability to recall what books I have just read.

And so, as an aide to my own memoir, and hopefully for the marginal edification of my few, devoted readers, I'm inaugurating a book diary: a list, and brief commentary, on the books I've read in the past month. Herewith the first installment, for January, 2006.

(Where possible - well, actually, where convenient - I will link to the actual edition of the book in question that I read.)

The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoevsky, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. What a gorgeous translation! I first tackled this classic doorstop on a trip through northeastern Europe (Budapest-Prague-all over Poland-Riga-Saint Petersburg-Stockholm-Helsinki) in (I'm pretty sure) the Constance Garnett translation. Opening the Pevear-Volokhonsky version, I was startled by the immediacy and the humor of the writing; the lugubrious of the Garnett was almost entirely lacking. The prose had a rougher texture, something you were conscious of in an entirely good way. Is it necessary for me to say anything about Dostoevsky? He's still worth grappling with. His characters are not fully convincing as people; they still bear too heavy a burden of allegory to truly come alive (though one great virtue of this translation is that the narrator approaches the status of a real character, which greatly enhances the novel). He is still in love with death, death's power to transform souls, something that properly should be distrusted. The right answer to "Nabokov or Dostoevsky?" is still "Tolstoy." Or, "Chekhov." But he and those who love him are still worth arguing with, even when - especially when - they are profoundly wrong.

Prisoner's Dilemma, by William Poundstone. I bought this book because I very much liked Labyrinths of Reason, which I read many years ago, and was interested in learning more about John von Neumann and his work. More of the book, I would say, is devoted to biography and history than to actual discussion of game theory. Unfortunately, Poundstone is strongest in explaining game theory for the layman; the biographical sections are interesting for their content, but rather artless. The book is organized to put the biographical info up front, followed by Cold War "context" history, followed by actual discussion of what game theory is. The author's purpose would probably have been better served by alternating chapters on history/biography and math, in the manner of Prime Obsession. But I still enjoyed it at the end of the day.

The Right War?: The Conservative Debate on Iraq, edited by Gary Rosen. Rosen has collected a very good cross-section of conservative opinion on the war in Iraq from 2004 and 2005. Some of the pieces are rather too short to fully support their own arguments, but the flip side of this decision is that so many authors, with a variety of different perspectives, could be included. I had, unfortunately, read most of these pieces when they were originally published, so there was not too much new for me here. Silver lining: that meant this was a really quick read. More unfortunate was Rosen's decision to limit himself to post-war debate. It would have been useful to see to what extent people on both sides changed their tune over the course of the conflict, either because as the war progressed they changed their minds or because they did not change their minds, and (therefore) had to change their arguments. Some of the authors included refer to their earlier positions and relate their current views to what they have learned since then, but even so we are getting their own recollections of their past views rather than the straight dope. The biggest problem with this book, though, is that there is no actual debate; the various "sides" of the argument don't really engage each other beyond their initial salvos. Even when people are literally engaged in debate - as, for example, the famous Krauthammer-Fukuyama exchange from last year - the hottest engagements are not on substance but motive-questioning accusations. That is truly a shame. It does not speak well of our democracy, and in particular it speaks poorly of supporters of the war in Iraq, that the actual debate in the debate -engaging the opposition's arguments in detail and attempting to refute them - has been so thin. Silver lining: it is an excellent sign that the editor of Commentary thinks it would be a good idea if a real debate were happening, and hence edited this book.

The Facts of Winter, by Paul Poissel, translated by Paul Lafarge. Lafarge is a friend of mine, with two other books under his belt, The Artist of the Missing and Haussmann, or the Distinction, the latter purportedly a translation from the French of a 1920s-era novel by the obscure poet Paul Poissel. Poissel really got his hooks into my friend, who began, Tlon-like, to fill the world with "incursions" from Poissel, including this website and the aforementioned Fait d'Hiver. The book is successful on its own terms: Poissel is a reasonably persuasive early 20th-century French poet, and this book of "manufactured" dreams sounds reasonably like the sort of thing Poissel would write. The concluding essay about Poissel also succeeds on its own terms: as a little short-story about a literary researcher and as a commentary on Lafarge's project of creating Poissel itself. The book is full of French puns (it's a facing-page translation) most of which I don't get because, well, I don't read French. If you do, and you like the period Lafarge/Poissel are working in, you'll probably really enjoy this little book. If you are Ross Douthat, you might find the book a little too . . . nice.

Who Are We?: The Challenges to America's National Identity, by Samuel Huntington. I would spend more time on this except that, if you want to learn more about this book, you can look pretty much anywhere; it was reviewed by everybody. Huntington makes several important arguments in the book - about the nature of American identity (as a settler society, and as a Protestant nation) and about the challenge of the current mass immigration (in terms of numbers, in terms of the dominance of a single, nearby country, and in terms of the lack of confidence of the culture that is absorbing them). But this book has three very serious weaknesses. First, it is not data-heavy enough. I don't mean that Huntington needs to dump lots of tables and charts in our lap. I mean that some parts of his argument need to be backed by data, and those parts are generally backed by the plural of anecdote. Second, it is insufficiently comparative in its method. Huntington compares America's current immigration with past immigration. He does not do enough to examine how other bi-cultural societies - Canada, Belgium, Malaysia, India, Israel, South Africa - have functioned or not functioned. If we are headed in the direction of an Anglo-Spanish bi-cultural state - one of the possibilities Huntington entertains - it behooves him to explore more seriously what such an outcome might mean, rather than simply say that this would be a big change from what America has been historically (which is true). Third, and finally, he seems to have gotten cold feet in his final chapter. Huntington comes close to arguing that one of the "solutions" to the problem of American identity in a new multi-racial and multi-cultural America is a reinvigoration of America as a Christian (even Protestant) nation - that is, to center American identity not in race or secular culture or in an abstract creed but in religion. There is considerable evidence that this is precisely what is happening, to some extent consciously: that precisely because we find it harder to call ourselves a white or Anglo nation, we are, in compensation, more and more thinking of ourselves as a Christian nation - the Christian nation par excellence. This is a stratum of American identity that goes very deep down, as Huntington shows. But instead of exploring how American identity is changing to revolve more closely around this specifically Christian axis, Huntington contents himself with pointing out America's religious "exceptionalism" among industrial nations, and leave it at that. The result is a much weaker conclusion than the book's early chapters presaged. In any event, very much worth reading and debating, but far from the definitive statement on the topic.

Now I'm in the middle of Seven Types of Ambiguity, by William Empson. But I'll write about that when I'm finished with it, and the other books I read next month.

2006-01-30T18:36:00.000-05:00

Oh, and that prediction I made a while ago that Alito would get 70 votes? I meant that cloture would get 70 votes. Yeah. That's what I meant.

2006-01-30T09:53:00.000-05:00

Maybe I'm reading the wrong outlets, but there seem to be a lot of people trying to convince me that Hamas' landslide victory in the PA elections is actually a good thing. There are at least five arguments made why this is so, and all of them strike me as fundamentally wrong-headed.

1. Now Hamas is accountable. They won an election. They're running the show. Hamas has grown in strenght partly because of the obvious failure of Fatah to accomplish anything material for the Palestinian Arabs - forget not having a state, they don't even have reliable electricity and running water. If Hamas fails to achieve anything better, the people who voted for them this time will look elsewhere. Were Hamas not accountable for the (presumed inevitable) failure of their program, they would continue to gain in strength. A Hamas victory is therefore a necessary precondition to Hamas' ultimate defeat, a good thing.

Do I need to point out what's wrong with this argument? I don't mean the slightly complicated reasons why it's wrong: that Hamas may not allow another free election, which would make them not truly accountable; that Hamas' victory may not be due to Fatah's failures to deliver running water so much as Hamas' perceived success in driving Israel out of Gaza; that there is no basis for thinking that should the PA's electorate turn against Hamas they will turn to some more accommodating alternative, as opposed to an even more radical one (this is not impossible: al-Qaeda has, reportedly, begun to operate for the first time in Palestinian Arab cities, and is competing with Hamas and Islamic Jihad by trying to out-crazy them). Forget all that, and just read the last sentence again. The bit about the bad guys' victory leading to their defeat. That is the core of this argument, isn't it? Can you say it with a straight face? I can't.

2. Okay, but that's not the only way accountability could work. Hamas now has strong incentives to moderate - to keep the cash flowing from the US, Europe and Israel, for one thing. Now that Hamas has power, they'll want to keep it. If the best way to keep it is to moderate, then we may see Hamas moderate itself. And that would be a huge victory for the good guys, wouldn't it?

Yes it would. Except that I don't think the incentives to moderate are that strong. Fatah had very strong incentives to present a moderate image - and it did so. But neither Arafat nor Abbas did anything to moderate the actual radicalism of the Palestinian terrorist organizations. Arafat actively supported those allied with Fatah and reached a kind of modus vivendi with Hamas; Abbas had no clout to do anything at all even if he had the inclination. Why can't Hamas play the same game? And, if they don't play the same game, isn't that an indication that Hamas - probably correctly - perceives that the real threat to their power would come from moderation, not continued radicalism? Moderation, after all, would make them accountable. Look what happened to the last guys who tried that strategy.

3. Well, at least the mere fact that there was a free and fair election proves that progress is (or at least was) being made in spreading democracy. One would have thought that Fatah would never have permitted a Hamas victory. That they did proves that the democracy meme is spreading. And that is good news even if this particular result is bad news.

Hmm. I might give this some credence if there were evidence that anywhere in the Arab Muslim world democratization was showing signs of leading to anything but a similar result. Various people have been making happy noises about the possibility of an Assad downfall, or the minor thaw we've seen in Egypt. But the big victors if either country held a truly free election would certainly be the Muslim Brotherhood and Hezbollah. If that's the case, then this alternative argument boils down to a version of one of the two previous arguments, each of which has already proved deficient to say the least.

4. Fine. But if you are so pessimistic, then you must agree with this point: at least it's good to be rid of illusions. Now we know what the Palestinian Arabs want: the destruction of Israel. Israel should therefore have a free hand diplomatically to do what is necessary for her security.

You think so? It seems to me you are also in need of being disillusioned. Please look at arguments #1 through 3 above. Don't those look like good arguments in the arsenal of someone eager to put the onus back on Israel and the West not to blow the latest opportunity for peace? Wouldn't it be terrible if Israel built up Hamas by attacking or isolating them, letting them blame Israel rather than their own policies for the sorry state of the Palestinian Arabs? Wouldn't it be awful if Israel discouraged the moderate "wing" of Hamas by treating them as if they all were terrorists? Isn't there something ironic in the Middle East's only (purported) democracy trying to turn one of the few freely elected Arab governments into a pariah? I've heard all of these arguments already. If you are inclined to oppose Israel diplomatically, you will be supplied with plenty of illusion-maintaining arguments. Hamas' election changes nothing in this regard.

5. I see. It seems you think there are no prospects for diplomatic progress, or indeed for peace, nor do you see Israel's diplomatic position improving in any circumstances. You believe that "it doesn't matter what the goyim think; what matters is what the Jews do." Surely, then, you can see the following silver lining in Hamas' election: it will bring about the inevitable final conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs more swiftly, when the correlation of forces still favors the Israelis. The West may retain its illusions, but not the Israeli people; they will be united in their determination to resist Hamas and preserve their country, whatever it takes.

And what, praytell, does it take? I instinctively resist "the worser the better" type arguments, but I don't disagree that, at the margins, the Hamas victory will further unify Israeli Jews, strengthen the hand of those who favor unilateral separation, and weaken those who favor renewed negotiations. The impact on the right end of the spectrum is more complicated; there are certainly those who will argue that Hamas' victory is the fruit of the unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, and thus proves the follow of unilateral withdrawal, and your guess is as good as mine whether that argument will win more votes at the margin than the opposite, that Hamas' victory only proves that holding onto territories with large Arab majorities is folly because coexistence is impossible. If I had to bet, I'd bet it strengthens the separationists more than the far-right types, but it's not a sure thing. But here's something you don't hear people asking about: what is the likely impact of a Hamas victory on Israel's Arab citizen population? One can only assume that, already radicalized by Oslo and the war that followed it, they will be further radicalized. So you're trading a very marginal increase in unity among the already unified Israeli Jewish population for a potentially significant increase in division between Israeli Jews and Arabs. Remind me why this is a silver lining?

Sometimes bad news isn't good news in disguise. Sometimes it's just bad news.

2006-01-25T17:19:00.000-05:00

And yet another prediction pretty obviously going poorly: Alito's vote total. There are still purportedly 22 undecided Democrats (plus Jeffords) but the overwhelming majority will vote against Alito. There are only three real questions: will the Democrats actually filibuster; if not, how many Democrat votes will Alito finally get; and will there be any GOP defections? I think the answer to the first question is still clearly "no." Whether Alito gets more than 60 "yea" votes total, though, I am no longer sure of.

Of course, I predicted a couple of weeks ago that Alito would get 70 votes; I predicted that the only defections from the Roberts "yea" camp of 78 would be: Dodd, Feingold, Kohl, Leahy, Levin, Murray and Wyden, with the possible addition of Carper, Salazar and Chafee among the defectors possibly offset by Menendez voting "yea." So far, of my 7-10 defectors, 6 have already declared against Alito and 4 (Levin, Murray, Carper and Chafee) have not declared. But 2 that I thought would vote "yea" - Baucus and Nelson of Florida - have already declared against. The most likely to vote to confirm among the undeclared are, I think, Pryor, Lincoln, Landrieu, Dorgan, Conrad and Byrd which - assuming Chafee is the only GOP Senator to vote against - would bring the total to 60. Tradesports now puts only a 24% chance of Alito getting more than 60 votes. That sounds like low odds to me, but not by much, and the odds of him getting more than 63 votes are very low indeed. 58-63 is probably a decent market on how many votes he gets.

2006-01-25T14:46:00.000-05:00

Other predictions aren't going so well. Specifically, I am obviously out of touch on Israeli politics.

First I predicted that Sharon would not die this year. Well, he's not dead yet, but for all practical purposes that prediction was flat wrong.

Next, I argued that Kadima needed most urgently to legitimize its new leader, whether Olmert or whoever, by means of an election, if it was to hold together, to say nothing of actually winning an election. Looks like I was wrong about that: the party has closed ranks around Olmert and its electoral standing has held, without any electoral process, whether primary or caucus, being established. I keep expecting Israelis to behave as though they want to live under a normally functioning political system, but that's not the way the country works I guess.

Next, I predicted that Sharon's incapacitation might - might, mind you - give Shinui a new lease on life. Well, that was flat wrong, too: not only has Shinui gone from something like 4 to 6 seats in the polls to zero, but the party has now split in half and its founder has quit. I can't believe the religious, economic and political questions that animated Shinui are banished forever from the Israeli political scene, but it seems like their constituency is happy for the moment to vote Kadima to ensure a resolution - one way or the other - of the existential question of setting the border, and let all other questions wait until another day. Which, when I articulate it, I knew would be the case. I just thought that, since Shinui was the most obvious coalition partner for Kadima, and would more narrowly focus on religious disestablishment, economic liberalism and political reform, that enough voters would pick Shinui to keep the party alive. Looks like I was way wrong.

So, I should stop predicting, right? Wrong. Can't stop myself.

Hamas looks like they've done well in their election. They will enter the government of the Palestinian Authority. Israel will continue to speak to the PA and attempt to start negotiations, but will not speak - formally at least - to Hamas ministers. This refusal will be used as an excuse by the PA to justify the failure of these negotiations. Israel will wind up withdrawing from much of Judea and Samaria without an agreement. Hamas will not disarm, and Israel will in short order wind up in a low-level shooting war with the PA and/or Hamas. Israel will unilaterally declare its borders, which will not be recognized by anyone but Micronesia. Not all of this will happen this year, but I expect all of this to happen.

2006-01-25T11:52:00.000-05:00

Well, my track record for predictions is no longer a total wipeout thanks to the good citizens of Canada. Now let's see what the Italians do.

Oh, and I rather think Kevin Michael Grace is indulging in wishful thinking when he speculates that Harper has a "secret agenda" to break up Canada by separating from Quebec by legislation, not waiting for the Quebecois themselves to vote for separation. I do think Quebec will inevitably become a separate country, and I agree that this would be a good thing for Quebec, for Canada and, for that matter, for the United States, on my general principle that functional nation-states make better allies and are better for the state system generally than are dysfunctional states. (The same reasoning underlies my conviction that Israel must separate from the Palestinians and that the U.S. has been foolish in pushing for rapid EU expansion and against the deepening of the EU into something more resembling a sovereign state.) But it's very hard for me to believe that breaking up Canada would be a good political move, and Harper's pandering to Quebec should delay the inevitable by giving the Quebecois more reasons to stay and fewer to go, rather than hasten it.

(As an aside: one doesn't have to be a white nationalist, an ethnic determinist or even an immigration restrictionist to agree with Peter Brimelow that Canada would be a more functional nation-state without Quebec. One of the major downsides of Canada's official bi-culturalism is that it has led to official multi-culturalism, which means that there is decreasingly any "Canada" for immigrants to assimilate to, which means that immigration is, in practice, much more destructive of Canadian national identity than it would necessarily have to be in theory. Numbers matter, yes, but cultural confidence also matters. An Anglo Canada without Quebec would at least have a plausible path to constructing an identity from its Anglo-Celtic settler roots to which immigrants - who, I should note, come primarily from former British colonies like the sub-Continent - would be expected to assimilate to.)

2006-01-09T13:13:00.000-05:00

Alito prediction: he will win every vote John Roberts got, minus the following:

Dodd
Feingold
Kohl
Leahy
Levin
Murray
Wyden

Feingold and Wyden will switch because of concerns about Presidential powers, not abortion. Kohl will switch because of Feingold. Dodd, Leahy, Levin and Murray will switch because Alito is too conservative generally; I'm a little puzzled, still, that Dodd and Murray voted for Roberts, and I find it hard to imagine they'll do it again.

Tom Carper I know nothing about. He voted for Roberts and he's not on the judiciary committee (no Democrat on the committee will vote yea this time), so I'm guessing he'll vote for Alito, but I really have no idea.

Because of uncertainty about Carper, and more generally because I think it's more likely Alito loses additional Democratic votes beyond those enumerated above than that any of those enumerated vote in favor, I predict Alito gets a total of 70 votes: 55 Republicans and 15 Democrats (including Jeffords as a Democrat).

Three votes that will be interesting to watch: Chafee, Salazar and Menendez.

If Chafee votes "no" that's an indication he is not worried about a primary challenge, and is worried about the general election. I think he'll vote to confirm, but I don't think a defection is impossible.

If Salazar votes "no" that's an indication he's trying to move up within the Democratic Party. He's not up for reelection this year, and two votes for conservative Bush justices might be too much for the Democratic money-guys. This might be an opportunity for him to throw a sop to the left that they'll remember when he's talking up his prospects as a VP selection.

Menendez, meanwhile, had no opportunity to vote on Roberts. Alito is a New Jersey native and Menendez faces a tough fight to retain the seat he was appointed to by now-Governor Corzine last year. Does it help his chances to vote for Alito or against him? I don't know enough about the dynamics of that race, but it doesn't seem impossible to me that Menendez turns out to be a surprise Democratic yes vote. But it's certainly the less-likely choice.