I have a review at The Daily Beast of Fed Up!, Rick Perry’s policy book from last year. I argue that he seems to identify more with the anti-federalists, and the anti-federalist-placating bits of the federalists, than he does with actual federalism. You can check it out here if you feel inclined.
Sarah Pulliam Bailey has a list of complaints with Ryan Lizza’s buzz-gathering profile of Michele Bachmann in this week’s New Yorker. Overall, the long report is a pretty impressive piece of work that blends colorful campaign diary with a deeper exploration of Bachmann’s political formation and intellectual influences. As usual, there are certain details that strike people who grew up in the evangelical movement as oversimplifications. I concur with a couple of Sarah’s nitpicks, but I’m afraid that in general she has quite seriously mischaracterized Lizza’s reporting, both by reading in implications and criticisms of Bachmann that are not in the piece, and by overlooking how often Bachmann still references many of the thinkers cited as influences. Referring to the piece as a “smear” is particularly unfortunate. Even the New Yorker‘s investigative pieces on subjects to which it is clearly ideologically opposed can never be called smears; its efforts to present the most reliable picture based on facts has earned my full respect, and are as clear in this story as any other.
First, Sarah takes issue with where Lizza places Bachmann’s views on the American political-theological spectrum. Lizza writes that Bachmann, “belongs to a generation of Christian conservatives whose views have been shaped by institutions, tracts, and leaders not commonly known to secular Americans, or even to most Christians,“ and that, “Her campaign is going to be a conversation about a set of beliefs more extreme than those of any American politician of her stature, including Sarah Palin.” (Sarah’s emphasis.)
Sarah suggests that Lizza has no basis for these claims, but I find her scorn somewhat inexplicable. True, it can be difficult for people who grew up in the evangelical world to imagine that other Christians have not heard of Francis Schaeffer. But conservative evangelicals are a fraction of American Christians, and not even all of them are very familiar with Schaeffer. I grew up with other home-schooled evangelicals who never read him, and neither had most people who attended my large, conservative Southern Baptist church. And it is indisputable that only a fraction of Christians have heard of R.J. Rushdoony, David Noebel, and John Eidsmoe. Lizza’s claim is precisely correct: Bachmann has been shaped by institutions and leaders with whom even many Christians are unfamiliar. And because her conservative evangelical education—her complete immersion in the alternative universe from the ground up—is so much deeper than that of other candidates who ostensibly share her ideas, it is absolutely fair to say that her beliefs are more extreme than those of Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, et al, no matter what unhinged things the others may say.
One of Sarah’s major contentions is that Lizza is maliciously attempting to link Bachmann with the fringe thinkers she has read, recommended and worked for in the past. Sarah calls them “attempts to prove guilt by association,” that Lizza used to “take shots.” Based on what the piece actually says and what Lizza said today on NPR, I have to say I think that’s a false charge. In his interview on NPR yesterday, Lizza repeatedly—I mean, with nearly every other breath—said that it was unfair to assume Bachmann believes everything her former mentions and influences do. He even observed that he had wacky professors he wouldn’t want to be associated with. But he correctly observes that Bachmann still references most of the people he investigated. She still says on the stump that Shaeffer’s How Shall We Then Live? changed her life, and still recommends Nancy Pearcey’s Total Truth as a “wonderful book.” She has talked about Eidsmoe, who she worked for at Oral Roberts, on the campaign trail this very year, saying her taught her “foundational” things. She was his researcher while his law school published Rushdoony, and her website recommended a pro-slavery revisionist Civil War history by J. Steven Wilkins while she was running for public office. Except for an in my opinion quite justified spike of alarm at the Wilkins book, Lizza lays all of this out quite neutrally, with scarcely a noticeable judgment. I read the blocks of his prose in question over several times, and the supposed malice and unfair suggestion is just not there.
The Francis Schaeffer part of the piece will obviously be the most controversial, and here I think Sarah may be more on the right track. First off, Lizza portrays Schaeffer as fringe because he was in fact fringe. By any measure, against the Western philosophical spectrum or the American religious one, Schaeffer cannot accurately be portrayed otherwise. I’m not sure why Sarah objects there. But she may be right that Lizza’s cursory treatment makes him sound more bizarre and extreme than he was. He spent most of his decades writing dense works of theological philosophy that, while they used as intellectual building blocks by many a modern fundamentalist, are not adequately captured by Lizza’s drive-by description of the How Shall We Then Live video series. As I’ve written before, it’s pretty clear Schaeffer became a political crackpot toward the end of his life. But I’m not sure it’s accurate to characterize A Christian Manifesto as promoting “the violent overthrow of the U.S. government,” as Lizza does, rather than recommending more garden-variety civil disobedience. (I can’t really say; I never read the copy my evangelical college gave me as a gift.) But the other Shaeffer quotes Sarah mentions that contest his support for violence, and my general sense of Schaeffer’s beliefs, suggests “violent overthrow” is an exaggeration. Coupled with a few crazy lines from How Shall We Then Live, it far from gives an adequate picture of who Schaeffer was and why Bachmann likely found him attractive.
I’m all for improving the generally overblown quality of mainstream media coverage of evangelicals. But it’s a mistake to take the inevitable condensations that are a part of journalism, or even a few genuine misunderstandings, as malice. The profoundly religious character of Bachmann’s campaigns, past and present, make it unthinkable for journalists not to explore her intellectual formation. I don’t expect them all to suddenly understand decades of evangelical culture and literature, and I respect serious, evenhanded-as-possible attempts to produce information the public needs to know. They can be critiqued, and their errors corrected, without unwarranted attacks on their motives.
Right on the heels of this, Dennis Prager has something even more irresponsible to say:
This is important to note because it gives one a clearer picture of the type of the person the Islamist is. We have here a level of moral primitiveness unknown elsewhere in the human race. There are bad people in every religion, in every country, and in every group. But we do not know of any group, let alone millions of people, who believe that murder is a proper response to an affront to their religion (or to their country or to their ethnic group).
This is in the context of a column about the American Left’s tendency to see “moral equivalency”—to say, blame the satanic pastor Terry Jones for the murders he incited in Afghanistan last week—between immoral American acts and Islamist atrocities. This (predominantly) right-wing complaint has been around since the very early days after 9/11, when anyone who dared discuss the political context of the attacks might as well have pronounced themselves a Bin Laden supporter.
Jones did a despicable, damnable thing, but however wicked it may have been, it justifies neither Islamic violence nor the tossing aside of his legal rights in this country. In trying to make the point that Islamists, and not American fundamentalist Christians, are responsible for the murders committed in Afghanistan, Prager reiterates the worst bit of that deliberate post-9/11 blindness about why Islamic terrorism exists and how the West should respond to it.
The core of the conservative argument against what they call “moral equivalency” is the pathologically murderous, morally primitive Islamist, the type of person whose evil is, as Prager put is, “unknown elsewhere in the human race.” I honestly don’t know how Prager could type that clause without immediately realizing its outrageousness. On the contrary, that kind of moral primitiveness has been on display everywhere else in the human race throughout history—history is nothing if not a long parade of people who believed in killing those who affronted their identity, from Sir Thomas More to the American colonists to the CIA. To acknowledge the fact is not to defend Islamists, it’s to realize that they hardly represent an unprecedented low in human morality.
(However sickened one is by the illegal torture, renditions, killings and support for despots that have happened at the hands of Western powers, I would like to hold onto some tenuous distinction between the actions of “legitimate” state agents and straight-up mob violence. That almost no modern society has proved itself incapable of producing hateful, deadly mob violence should make plain that Islamic hardliners are no exception.)
I bring up the demonization of Islamists by people like Prager to point out, once again, the blatantly anti-theoretical bent of an American right that wants to put Islamic grievance with the United States in a “fascist” or “psychopathic” box and promptly commence blowing it up. The examples are innumerable: Victor Davis Hanson calling Islamists “fascists” and saying the only response is “military defeat”; Jonah Goldberg calling Islam a “religion of war and bigotry”; Joseph Loconte in The Weekly Standard saying “radical Islam is the philosophical cousin to European fascism,” with which it shares a “nihilist rage.” Any attempt to understand the enemy we’re confronting, which Sun Tzu might say is one of the first tasks of conflict, is greeted by these people as “appeasement,” or “Islamoschmoozing” or “American weakness.” And they call the Islamists the blinded warmongers.
The Afghan mob murders that followed Jones’ Koran-burning should be thoroughly condemned, but they did not happen in a vacuum. Prager, like many a conservative before him, wants to prove Islamists’ inhumanity so that the West can wash its hands of its responsibility for them. In fact, these horrific murders happened within a complex historical and political context, one in which the United States is deeply, profoundly culpable. Without Western meddling—which includes the deliberate, systematic creation of the militants we now call our nihilist enemies—Islamic terrorists as we know them might well not exist. Prager and others are suggesting that we declare them “moral monsters” and substitute the real political events that sparked their acts with an almost farcical denial of history. Frankly, I expect more from an ideological tradition that prides itself on its realism.
No American individual, not even Terry Jones, is personally responsible for the people who died in Afghanistan last week. But people “who believe that murder is a proper response to an affront to their religion (or to their country or to their ethnic group)”? If Prager doesn’t see that type of people anywhere outside the Muslim world, then he isn’t looking very hard.
[Cross-posted at Patrol]
Michelle Goldberg has noticed the way the Egypt uprising is splitting the American right. On one side, the consistent side in her view, you have the neocons who have always argued that the overthrowing Arab dictators, whether by U.S. military force or the unrest of their subjects, is a good thing. On the other side you have people like Mike Huckabee, who fretted on Fox News about “how quickly the Obama administration abandoned a 30-year ally and a longstanding friend to peace.” And then there’s Glenn Beck, who knit together a cabal of every progressive villian he’s ever heard of—Code Pink, Van Jones—and blamed it for the “rioters” in Cairo.
I want to nitpick a little about the way Goldberg pegs this nutty, anti-democratic view to the religious right:
Beck, hero of the Tea Party, has become the hysterical tribune of the anti-democracy forces, linking the uprising in Egypt to a bizarre alliance of all of his bête noirs. “This is Saul Alinsky. This is STORM from Van Jones,” he warned on Monday, continuing, “The former Soviet Union, everybody, radical Islam, every—this is the story of everyone who has ever plotted to or wanted to fundamentally change or destroy the Western way of life. This isn’t about Egypt. Everything is up on the table.” It would all end, he warned, with the restoration of a “Muslim caliphate that controls the Mideast and parts of Europe,” along with an expanded China and Russian control of the entire Soviet Union “plus maybe the Netherlands.”
It sounds nuts, of course, but such fears are now rampant on the religious right, which has long seen American involvement in the Middle East in millennarian terms. In the apocalyptic view of politics that dominates the Christian right, Muslim nations are closely connected to the rise of the Antichrist, while the restoration of the Jews to the entire biblical land of Israel is key to the Second Coming. The end of days will be marked by the emergence of a one-world government and a great world war in the Middle East, culminating in a battle at Megiddo, or Armageddon, an actual place in Israel. (Beck is a Mormon, but he’s always incorporated elements of American evangelicalism into his ideology.) To side with the protesters in Egypt, at the expense of Israeli security, is to back Satan’s team in the coming biblical showdown. Thus John Hagee, the chiliastic preacher who founded Christians United for Israel, took to his website to praise Hosni Mubarak as “an American ally and closet friend to Israel,” writing, “Israel will soon be surrounded by enemies screaming for their blood. Will America support them? Our president certainly has not been supportive of Israel to this point in his administration; why would he change now?”
This sounds to me like the analysis of someone who knows their facts well but doesn’t know many evangelicals or members of the religious right. Thus, she can write a couple of paragraphs that are technically true but manage to be quite misleading about what average conservative evangelicals actually think.
First, Glenn Beck’s crazed notion that the Egyptian revolution is really a progressive plot to overthrow America is not “rampant on the religious right” just because John Hagee, a fringe pro-Israel preacher, is saying outrageous things again. When I have written presumptuously about the religious right’s political views, they have been quick to assure me that they don’t necessarily watch or agree with Glenn Beck (though other anecdotal evidence suggests some of them do). But again, the only people referenced here are Hagee and Mike Huckabee, neither of whom really speak for the rank-and-file of the religious right in any way significant enough to label their opinions “rampant.”
Goldberg is correct that a lot of evangelicals have attached apocalyptic theology to the Middle East. But unless you’re talking about Tim LaHaye or others who have made fortunes conjuring fearsome tales of the last days, most evangelicals seem to have moved on from their obsessive interest in the “end times” and realized that applying the Book of Revelation to current events is a pretty specious endeavor. Outside of the most fringe, most fundamentalist, or most isolated congregations, I promise there are not many conservative Christians wondering if the protests in Cairo are the beginning of the end.
I bring this up because I think it’s paramount that reporters who cover religious groups not make major assumptions about the way those people think. It’s incredibly easy for people socially and geographically isolated from the religious right to read a few crazy statements from high-profile evangelical figures and presume they’re expressing the general view. And it’s always a temptation for liberal journalists, myself included, to report the most extreme things they’ve heard from a conservative group without determining how significant or pervasive that view really is. I admire the work Goldberg and others have done to educate themselves about the religious right. But to really inform your readers about religious groups takes more work and less generalization.
On December 26, the New York Times reported that the end-of-life consultations stripped from the health care law (and infamously dubbed “death panels“ by everyone’s favorite Alaskan reality-TV star) are being pushed forward through Medicare regulations:
When a proposal to encourage end-of-life planning touched off a political storm over “death panels,” Democrats dropped it from legislation to overhaul the health care system. But the Obama administration will achieve the same goal by regulation, starting Jan. 1.Under the new policy, outlined in a Medicare regulation, the government will pay doctors who advise patients on options for end-of-life care, which may include advance directives to forgo aggressive life-sustaining treatment.
The story goes on to explain the regulation and Medicare’s justifications thereof, which draw on research from the British Medical Journal and the University of Colorado School of Medicine. As I understand, the goal of end-of-life consultations has always been to give aging people control over their future health care. Since many would rather not have their life prolonged by expensive medical treatment, particularly if they are in poor health, they can say so in advance and save the colossal medical costs that such life-prolonging procedures incur. The Medicare officials, according to the Times‘ reporting, are operating on the consensus of health care experts, who believe such consultations enhance the humanity of end-of-life care. (They also spare grieving family members the wrenching decision of when to “pull the plug.”)
So far so good. Then this:
Elizabeth D. Wickham, executive director of LifeTree, which describes itself as “a pro-life Christian educational ministry,” said she was concerned that end-of-life counseling would encourage patients to forgo or curtail care, thus hastening death.“The infamous Section 1233 is still alive and kicking,” Ms. Wickham said. “Patients will lose the ability to control treatments at the end of life.”
Here is another unfortunate instance of the Times throwing in a social conservative to maintain “balance.” Look through the paper’s archives and you’re sure to find dozens of iterations of this formula, on issues ranging from abortion to women’s health to repealing Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. After the story lays out the expert or scientific consensus and the generally agreed-upon facts, a random social conservative—often one without any credentials on the issue or with a trail of insane statements to their name—will be trotted out to dispute them. (A prime example is Elaine Donnelly, who has been quoted prominently in several Times stories on DADT. Donnelly operates the right-wing Center for Military Readiness and argued that repealing would DADT would lead to “forcible sodomy“ and the spread of HIV in the military.)
Who is Elizabeth D. Wickham, anyway? A quick Google reveals she has a Ph.D. in…mathematical economics and international trade theory! She and her husband co-founded LifeTree, a local anti-abortion group in North Carolina. Its website is full of conspiratorial language like “culture of death,” and attributes said culture of death to things like “the concept of hospice” and “bioethics centers.” Even in her longer, written opposition to Section 1233, the “death panels” portion of the original health care bill, Wickham has simply smeared end-of-life consultations by associating them with assisted-suicide advocate Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-OR). She has not attempted to explain how this measure will lead to the apocalyptic circumstances she constantly conjures.
This is enough, in my opinion, to cast significant doubt on her ability to give an opinion on this issue that serious readers should heed. She has no academic credentials in health care or bioethics and is disputing reputable experts without providing any facts or research. From a purely political standpoint, she is not a leader of religious conservatives, and has not, that we are told, been deployed by the provision’s political opposition. So how does quoting Ms. Wickham help Times readers understand this issue?
Even worse, it’s fairly simple to determine that Ms. Wickham is wrong about end-of-life consultations. Based on everything I read during the health care debate and since, these consultations are a humane and necessary part of health care reform, and the “death panels” logic is damnably false. Contra Ms. Wickham, there is no reason to believe voluntary consultations will result in patients “losing the ability to control treatments,” or that the legislators who supported the measure want to impose euthanasia and rationing on the country. So in effect, the country’s newspaper of record has given a no-name religious activist space to lie about a matter of public policy in which she has no apparent expertise. The Times has met its requirement to break the issue down into binary “sides,” but we’ve been subjected to the misleading spin of an ideologue.
My point here is not, of course, that dissenting or conservative viewpoints should be banned from the New York Times. In fact, this sort of drive-by citation of ideologues does a disservice both to conservatives when they actually have legitimate points and to readers who want to consider alternate perspectives. Wickham’s quote was transparently included just to establish “balance,” and readers are left without any clear idea of whether there is reason to doubt the consensus view. If there is serious disagreement, the reporter should find a credible source and thoroughly explain his or her position. If a prominent Republican or conservative leader vowed to fight the measure, then make note of it. But if there is no serious opposition, or if the serious opposition is dealing in paranoid cant, then I’d love to read a newspaper with the balls to say so.
CALLER: You mentioned that you watched the Miami-Jets game last night as I did.
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: And I wondered if you were as surprised as I was at a company sending a national add on NBC all in Spanish.
RUSH: You know what? I did not know that there was an ad all in Spanish.
CALLER: I believe it was right…I don’t want to name the company that ran the ad but I think it was right before halftime.
RUSH: Right before halftime.
CALLER: We certainly have a problem with illegal immigration and we have a huge problem with assimilation of the Spanish folk into the country, and I see this as just appalling that we would be running on national TV and national sporting events all-Spanish ads.RUSH: I ought to do a monologue about this. I think this is symptomatic of a whole bunch of things that are happening on our culture, the feminization of our culture. I see it in male, liberal sportswriters. I see how they’ve been feminized. I see how they have been feminist-ized. Our culture is more concerned with not offending our enemies today. We have a culture, if somebody attacks us, a growing percentage of our country wants to ask, “What did we do to cause this? It’s our fault.” Somehow they’ve been told and they’ve bought into the notion that America is hated deservedly. So this Spanish stuff that you see in this ad, this is just an outgrowth of America thinking it’s guilty of being so big and such a superpower that we have to reach out, we have to be nice to the people that we’ve oppressed or made angry. That’s one of the ways Obama got where he is, and I think it’s facilitating the total degradation of what used to be the American culture, because there was a distinct American culture. It’s under assault now from within.
Anyone who insists the Tea Party is not animated by a distinctively white unrest should read that whole thing three times slowly. I’ve had several conversations lately with people who insist, as Glenn Beck and other Tea Party leaders have done, that the movement is not about racism or xenophobia. I believe them. I doubt than anyone outside a small fraction of the activists who have marched in Washington openly despise black people or have personal antipathy toward the Hispanic immigrants in their hometowns. (In mine, they work for virtually every local business, and Mexican flags fly uncontroversially alongside the U.S. and Texas flags at many auto dealerships.) But one cannot listen to the exchange above and miss the clear sentiment behind the expressed concern: distinctive American culture, which happens to be the way white middle-class people who speak English live, is “under assault from within.”
People who dismiss the “white fear” interpretation of the Tea Party will no doubt accuse me of presenting anecdotal evidence, or say that Rush Limbaugh is not a Tea Party leader. That’s fair enough, and focusing on this undercurrent in no way suggests it is the only thing the Tea Party is about. But the ubiquity of the type of conversations like this “Fútbol Americano” exchange among the Tea Partiers I know, the reflexive undercurrent of hostility toward anything—Spanish, mosques, bike lanes—that is not distinctively American, gives something away. They are not just under assault from a Democratic president, but a host of vaguely-defined foreign invaders, just like Richard Hofstadter described in “The Psuedo-Conservative Revolt.” It just so happens that most of the defenders are white Christians and most of the invaders are something else. And the fact that these Americans can make wild connections between 20-second Spanish advertisements during NFL games and the “degradation” of American culture shows us something about what’s going on inside their heads.
(Image via The Rush Limbaugh Show.)
On Saturday, attendees of the 2010 Values Voters Summit selected Indiana congressman Mike Pence in its 2012 presidential straw poll. Watch five minutes of his speech and you’ll understand why. You probably won’t understand that you’re not watching a clip from one of the many Tea Party conventions, but more on that in a minute.
Pence has been married for 25 years, has three children, and has served in the House for 7 years. According to Wikipedia’s summary of his political views, he appears to be a real, Tea Party-style conservative: He always votes for tax cuts, he opposed several Bush administration programs, including No Child Left Behind, opposed TARP, and of course, opposed Obamacare. He supports unlimited engagement in Iraq and Afghanistan, opposes closing Guantanamo Bay, and opposes trying detainees in civilian court.
Pence is a decent-looking white-haired guy with a smooth speaking voice that occasionally gives hints of a drawl. He delivered his speech flawlessly, seeming relaxed and good-humored. (He favors jokes about Nancy Pelosi, but to his credit also made one about Fox News.) He began by saying he is a “Christian, a conservative, and a Republican, in that order.” Wild applause.
The speech itself was the most hard-line stump speech I’ve heard a conservative candidate give perhaps ever, though not in the John Boehner, podium-pounding “Hell No You Can’t“ mode. It wasn’t angry or even excessively passionate. But Pence effortlessly covered every shibboleth of both the Religious Right and the Tea Party. He heralded Tea Party victories around the country, including that of Christine O’Donnell, and credited the wins with pulling the current Republicans in Congress to the right. (Apparently, for Pence, being called the Party of No is a sign of the GOP’s health.) He cheered George W. Bush’s “courage” for pushing the surge in Iraq and said the CIA should be able to “fight wars like wars.” He talked about repealing Obamacare, “bondage to big government,” and obliquely opposed repealing the Bush tax cuts. For the values voter, this guy is the whole package and more.
A couple of things that struck me as noteworthy:
1) The biggest applause of the speech came when Pence lambasted Obama for criticizing settlements being constructed in the West Bank. Pence formulate the line as a superlative: “Let the world know this, if it knows nothing else: America stands with Israel.” (Emphasis mine.) The crowd shot to its feet and roared with applause. Sure, we all know Christians love Israel, but, why do they find that the most exciting line in a speech full of their favorite things? And does Pence really believe that support for Israel is the premiere value the U.S. should project to the world?
2) Though Pence insisted that Don’t Ask Don’t Tell “remain the policy of the U.S. military,” and he did use the phrase “defend traditional marriage,” he did not say “gay marriage” or “same-sex marriage.” This bit came near the end and almost seemed like an afterthought. There was no mention of Prop 8 or “activist judges,” or anything of the sort. In fact, gay marriage didn’t even rank into the top five issues the Values Voters said they’re worried about. (Abortion was first, but the rest were all economic issues.)
Observation #2 gives fuel to my theory that those who think the Tea Party is driven by some other demographic besides white evangelicals are misguided. Of course, there is no doubt that everyone in the room on Saturday, including Mike Pence, is against same-sex marriage. But the whole structure of his speech indicated that he knows what evangelicals—a huge number of whom I would bet serious money are also Tea Partiers—are angry about a lot of other things right this minute. Not just abortion and gay marriage, but trying detainees in civilian courts, health care reform, the stimulus, everything. With that much ammunition, there’s no need to pander too explicitly about same-sex marriage.
It’s also interesting that Palin came in last (of the major contenders) in the straw poll. Though I think there’s a distinct possibility she will run in 2012, I’m increasingly inclined to believe even the rightest of the right realize that would be an epic disaster, and would be happier to see her as either second-in-command or just a cheerleader for the cause. (Palin came in second in the vice-presidential poll after Pence, who won that, too.)
There’s not much original to say about the political incoherence of all this: that the cheers were just as loud for open-ended military boondoggles and tax cuts as they are for fiscal discipline. Pence shares Palin’s reflexive partisanship on behalf of Israel that may or may not be rooted in evangelical apocalyptic notions about the Middle East. Personally, I’m dismayed to see evangelicals keeping up their reputations as being some of the most steadfast supporters of war, torture, and outside-the-law detention.
The moral of the story is: can you tell the difference between Values Voters and teabaggers? ‘Cause I can’t.
Earlier this week, Rush Limbaugh devoted a significant chunk of his show to a sprawling essay by Angelo Codevilla in The American Spectator arguing that a vast American “ruling class” runs the country and shuts out dissenting views on every major issue. It circles the wagons around its liberal self, perpetuating its own ideas and protecting members of the club from competition on merit and a true marketplace of ideas.
A brief excerpt:
Today’s ruling class, from Boston to San Diego, was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits. These amount to a social canon of judgments about good and evil, complete with secular sacred history, sins (against minorities and the environment), and saints. Using the right words and avoiding the wrong ones when referring to such matters — speaking the “in” language — serves as a badge of identity. Regardless of what business or profession they are in, their road up included government channels and government money because, as government has grown, its boundary with the rest of American life has become indistinct. Many began their careers in government and leveraged their way into the private sector. Some, e.g., Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, never held a non-government job. Hence whether formally in government, out of it, or halfway, America’s ruling class speaks the language and has the tastes, habits, and tools of bureaucrats. It rules uneasily over the majority of Americans not oriented to government.
This is pretty innocuous stuff, but it comes near the beginning. If you read on, you discover that this Progressive ruling class wants to reorder the family, ruin businesses and social institutions it dislikes, and drive God out of public life, among other crimes against American values.
The tragedy of Codevilla’s essay is that it takes serious, legitimate grievances with our broken political system and turns them into culture war red meat. It spins elaborate, conspiratorial fantasies about the malicious motives of this “ruling class,” and then tries to pin them all on “progressives.” We don’t get anything close to a serious accounting of the failures of institutions ranging from government agencies to Wall Street to Congress. We only get that it’s all a big plot, and if you dig deep enough you’ll find liberals at the bottom of it—exactly what people like Rush Limbaugh and his listeners want to hear.
Magazines on the right should be deeply exploring the discontent of the “country class,” as Codevilla dubs it, and trying to determine how best to address those problems in a modern republic. But instead, this piece goes the route of the Tea Party: it lays the blame on fictitious bogeymen and allows the establishment to dismiss its grievances on the cheap.
As European debt makes headlines around the world, the euro remains in free fall and E.U. leaders feel the pressure to deal with deficits at home, the government of French president Nicolas Sarkozy is working to put the country’s pension system back in the black while avoiding popular revolt.
France has received less scrutiny than other European nations facing catastrophic debt, but its fiscal picture is only a bit better than places like Greece, Spain, and Ireland. Like other European nations, French public finances were hit hard by the Wall Street meltdown. The country’s budget deficit will reach 8 percent of GDP this year, and its public debt is at 84 percent of GDP. According to The Economist, the European Commission predicts that France’s debt could be up to 95 percent of GDP by 2020.
The famously generous French pension system, which allows workers to retire at age 60 on a high percentage of their lifetime salary, is in particular trouble. The constant focus of mostly unsuccessful reform attempts over the past two decades, it continues to balloon beyond its means. A council advising the government says the system’s deficit will be €10 billion year, and could multiply to €103 billion ($127 billion) by 2050.
Faltering pension systems are sending chills across Europe, where, as the New York Times reported on May 22, “the assumptions and gains of a lifetime are suddenly in doubt.” The secure life of social democracy, the pride of Europeans who sniff at the harshness of American capitalism, suddenly seems uncertain, and raises specters of the doomsday predictions that have been haunting France over the past decade.
The social crisis does not, however, have much to do with the reckless spendthrifts in Athens or the gamblers on Wall Street. The main culprit is population. France’s system depends on younger workers to pay for their parents’ generation as they finish out their lives in comfort and stability. For several decades it seemed to work. But now, as longevity increases and population decreases, the ratios of workers to retraitées (retirees) is slipping to dangerous levels. By 2050, according to state statistics, France will have only 1.2 workers for each rétraitée. In 1960, it was four to one.
In the age of armed Tea Partiers and conservative brick-throwers, you can always count on Texas to turn it all around. This story, from my tiny hometown newspaper, takes the cake:
Freestone County resident running for State Representative for District 8, Democratic candidate Charles E. Morgan, was arrested Thursday April 15, 2010 on a charge of phone harassment; a Class B Misdemeanor.
According to court documentation, on August 23, 2009, Morgan placed a phone call to Anadarko Petroleum Corporation’s emergency phone, wherein Morgan threatened to bring a gun to the residence of Anadarko employee Kelly Hutchinson. The recorded phone conversation was submitted to authorities by Hutchinson, who filed a complaint of phone harassment.
Morgan has been an active representative for Citizens for Environmental Clean-up (CEC), speaking before the County Commissioners Court on several occasions about installing air quality monitors and conducting a noise assessment for the county.
Where else would an armed Democratic candidate threaten a petroleum corporation with a gun over environmental disagreements?
Nothing gets me going quite like Sarah Palin’s idiotic foreign policy pronouncements, so I’m especially glad to see Will Saletan point this out:
Sarah Palin thinks Barack Obama is a wimp. She’s been going around to Tea Party rallies, invoking the spirit of revolutionary Boston and castigating Obama for failing to exalt American power and punish our adversaries. She seems blissfully unaware that the imperial arrogance she’s preaching isn’t how the American founders behaved. It’s how the British behaved, and why they lost. Palin represents everything the original Tea Party was against. …
The British hawks, like Palin, saw self-restraint as wimpy and dangerous. If Britain retreated from the tax policies that had provoked the Tea Party, they warned, the colonists would take this as “Proofs of our Weakness, Disunion and Timidity.” Miller writes, “Few Englishmen believed that the mother country could retain its sovereignty if it retreated in the face of such outrage: it was now said upon every side that the colonists must be chastised into submission.”
Daniel Larison offers another deconstruction of the infamous essay and the even weaker response:
[T]heir argument is not really with Obama’s belief in American exceptionalism, but something much more basic. They do not much care for his domestic policy, and they have a sneaking suspicion that there is something wrong with his foreign policy even though they cannot actually prove it. For whatever reason, instead of advancing policy arguments against the administration’s agenda, they have concocted a half-baked theory to make American progressivism and American exceptionalism appear antithetical to one another when any halfway honest accounting of modern domestic and foreign policy tells us that they have been complementary and closely linked. From my perspective, that is one reason to be very skeptical of American exceptionalism, but there is no real reason why anyone who believes in American exceptionalism should doubt Obama’s belief in the same.
The chorus of military criticism of The Hurt Locker keeps getting louder. A slew of Iraq veterans have dissected the its accuracy without, in my opinion, making a serious argument against it as a film. Now, a former infantryman has taken to the Atlantic to say it shouldn’t win Best Picture because its license with reality is essentially the same as soldiers who lie about their military exploits to appear heroic. (Really.)
I understand the urge for people with firsthand experience to nit-pick the movie’s accuracy, particularly as critics rave about how “realistic” it is. But that’s different from imposing an arbitrary moralism on a movie—insisting The Hurt Locker shouldn’t win an award because it did the things the medium is known for, namely making things more exciting and or condensing the timelines. The movie doesn’t purport to be a true story, and even with a journalist screenwriter and actors that underwent military training in preparation for their roles, is still very obviously a work of fiction. (One could work up a similarly lengthy list of that-would-never-happens for any of its rivals in the Best Picture category.)
Brian Mockenhaupt, the soldier writing in the Atlantic, admits that movie “nails” the setting—the heat, dust, sweat, trashy streets, curious Iraqis, etc. Which is essentially what it was trying to do. I would wager Bigelow cared more about a realistic “feel” than precisely realistic plotting. It’s sequenced like an action film, and her shaky camera is meant to convey a sense of running alongside the squad, not the phony factual authenticity Mockenhaupt imagines. We are supposed to feel like we are in the middle of one of Will James ill-advised escapades, never mind the fact that it probably wouldn’t have happened exactly as it does on screen. We feel the danger and emotion of a very intimate situation, which most war movies, with their giant casts and swelling themes, fail to capture.
The strength of The Hurt Locker is the very adrenaline rushes its military critics are complaining about. Call them Hollywood-concocted scenarios if you must, but surely they can play a role in helping us “outsiders” grasp the sensations of being on the ground in Iraq without having us believe everything we see on TV. Its punch has little to do with its alleged factual weaknesses. Thanks to this film, I now understand a tiny fraction of the terror of disarming a bomb that could dismember me at any moment. I have a glimpse of what it’s like to shift from that deadly environment to the humdrum reality of American daily life. I was not, contrary to Mockenhaupt’s read-in analysis, told “that war, as experienced by so many Americans, isn’t meaningful enough as is, but must be gussied up with outsiders’ interpretations of what makes the experience profound.”
The Hurt Locker is, as Dana Stevens wrote, “without question the most exciting and least ideological movie yet made about the war in Iraq.” None of its Best Picture competitors (other than maybe Avatar) can lay claim to such a superlative, and that’s why it deserves the statue. The Oscars are about exciting movies.
Peter beat me to recommending Ross’ great column on the health care summit, but almost everything in the Times Week In Review section is worth a read this week.
Nicholas Kristof on evangelical humanitarians expanding the definition of “pro-life”:
A pop quiz: What’s the largest U.S.-based international relief and development organization?
It’s not Save the Children, and it’s not CARE — both terrific secular organizations. Rather, it’s World Vision, a Seattle-based Christian organization (with strong evangelical roots) whose budget has roughly tripled over the last decade.
…Evangelicals have become the new internationalists, pushing successfully for new American programs against AIDS and malaria, and doing superb work on issues from human trafficking in India to mass rape in Congo.
And Frank Rich on Republican pols who got way too close to condoning the suicide attack on the I.R.S. building in Austin:
What made that kamikaze mission eventful was less the deranged act itself than the curious reaction of politicians on the right who gave it a pass — or, worse, flirted with condoning it. Stack was a lone madman, and it would be both glib and inaccurate to call him a card-carrying Tea Partier or a “Tea Party terrorist.” But he did leave behind a manifesto whose frothing anti-government, anti-tax rage overlaps with some of those marching under the Tea Party banner. That rant inspired like-minded Americans to create instant Facebook shrines to his martyrdom. Soon enough, some cowed politicians, including the newly minted Tea Party hero Scott Brown, were publicly empathizing with Stack’s credo — rather than risk crossing the most unforgiving brigade in their base.
Elsewhere we have a clash of European privacy and American speech, the terrifying things that could happen if we leave health care alone, and some typical Gore on climate change.
