An ongoing review of politics and culture

Three Quick Points About the California Ruling

One: it’s grounded entirely in the California Constitution. I know nothing about the California Constitution. I doubt anyone else does. That makes it very difficult to debate the legal reasoning.

Two: California struck down the ban on same-sex-marriage under “strict scrutiny” which is basically impossible to pass, so this comment is somewhat moot. But it is often argued that a distinction between “marriage” and “civil unions” in language (and hence in law) cannot be justified apart from pure animus – and, hence, would fail a rational basis test. This is only true if there is no rational reason to have a distinction in language between a union rooted in male-female complementarity and a union not so rooted. It may or may not be the case that there is no good reason, apart from animus, to discriminate between married couples and same-sex unions in any aspect of law. But as a matter of language, it’s very hard for me to see how there is no rational basis for making the distinction. (That doesn’t mean, by the way, that there isn’t an argument for erasing the distinction in language, or in law, merely that the assumption that the distinction can only be rooted in animus is not warranted.)

Three: Jeffrey Rosen decries the breadth of the decision because of its likely political consequences. I can accept (though I don’t think I agree with) a populist argument that the courts should be sensitive to public opinon to the degree that they should not make rulings – particularly rulings that break legal ground – likely to be overruled by the public. But it is a very different matter to say that the courts should be sensitive to the political impact of their rulings more generally. The Massachusetts Supreme Court got the politics right: their ruling was not overturned by the people. But from Rosen’s perspective, they got the politics wrong, because their ruling sparked other states’ citizenries to pass amendments to their state constitutions banning same-sex marriage. I should hope that we can all agree that courts absolutely should not make their decisions on such a basis, to say nothing of worrying about the likely impact on the political fortunes of Democrats or Republicans in the next election.

Conservatives and Gay Marriage

Yesterday’s California ruling is generating a predictable set of responses. I’d like to suggest a different conservative response. Or at least a different conservative political response at the federal level.

It seems to me that conservative objections to gay marriage fall into two buckets: (1) it’s just wrong, or (2) it will ultimately lead to undesirable social outcomes.

It’s easy for cosmopolitan elites to dismiss the first objection snidely by putting on a fake southern accent, but as I have argued before, it’s not so simple. Ultimately, any view of morality must inevitably rely on axioms which are based on intuition, and not subject to rational debate.

The political question, however, is what should we do when 100 million or more Americans are on either side of a passionately-felt moral debate. Increasingly, this is the case with gay marriage. According to polls, about 55% of Americans oppose gay marriage, but about 55% of Americans support civil unions. The American population is pretty much split down the middle on these issues; though it’s obvious to everybody that public opinion has been moving in favor of gay rights. Opposition to gay marriage has declined to 55% from 65% in 1996. It’s hard to find data going back much further than that, as the idea of gay marriage seemed so bizarre in, say, 1960, that nobody thought of doing a poll on it. Growing acceptance of gays is partially driven by some adults changing their minds, and partially by the increasing proportion of the population that has been raised in an environment that is more benign for homosexuals. 75% of 18 – 29 year-olds support either gay marriage or civil unions, while this is true for only about 45% of those over 65.

George Will once said that for those in his then 26 year-old daughter’s age cohort, the status of being gay was about as morally problematic as the status of being left-handed. Among 26-year-old artists in Williamsburg Brooklyn, this is likely a majority view; among 26-year-old homeschoolers in Plano, Texas, likely not. Support for civil unions is more like 65% in the East and West, and more like 45 – 50% in the South and Midwest. This geographic distribution of attitudes opens the way to a practical approach to finding a working compromise. I think we should view federalism, and more generally, subsidiarity, as the preferred political approach to this problem. If individual conservatives want to make a persuasive case to change minds about homosexuality, more power to them, but in the meantime we should embrace the idea of different states and localities behaving differently.

If subsidiarity is a working compromise designed to accommodate differing moral views, I think that it is a positive good in addressing the second type of objection: that gay marriage will ultimately lead to undesirable social outcomes. I am skeptical that gay marriage is part of a process of social breakdown, but lots of people disagree with me. We have differing theories. I accept that I might be wrong, or at minimum wrong for some times or places. It seems to me that the best way to answer this question is not to yell at each other, or even to see who can write the most elegant and persuasive books, but to let different groups of people voluntarily try different approaches and see what actually happens.

Americans have a healthy aversion to telling other people how to live. Only about 30% of Americans support a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. Why don’t we try letting people live how they want to live, and let others try to impose uniform national rules on a heterogeneous population of 300 million people?

( cross-posted at The Corner )

Hillary's Bamboo Ceiling

Despite what the polls might say about the general election, the Clinton campaign shouldn’t make much of the West Virginia primary. Not only is the Mountain State a poor proxy for the rest of the country’s “haird werking” people, but her slim advantage in a matchup against McCain will vanish once Obama’s out of the picture. The notorious cultural aversion to Obama that will deliver the primary to Hillary could blow up in her face during the general election. Those West Virginians who think that Obama is a Muslim with an atheist wife could be thoroughly convinced come November that Clinton is… oh I don’t know… A LESBIAN BOLSHEVIK WHO KILLED VINCE FOSTER!

Democrats still control the political machinery in West Virginia, but abortion is a crucial issue, even among party loyalists. The state’s truculent nationalism and its desire to participate in the project of national greatness favor the war hero candidate. So for what it’s worth, Hillary leads Obama among those who are going to eventually vote for the guy who spent the 1960’s in a bamboo cage.

Gore-Lieberman Grudge Match

No one talks about Joe Lieberman as a running mate for John McCain anymore — but they should. I was as convinced as most that Lieberman wouldn’t make sense. Given McCain’s well-documented difficulties with the Republican party’s conservative base, it seemed senseless to nominate a social liberal. But a Stuart Rothenberg column changed my mind.

But wouldn’t social conservatives, in particular, go bananas, since Lieberman is moderate or liberal on most issues other than Iraq? He supports abortion rights, generally votes with organized labor and is an unapologetic environmentalist. Conservatives would revolt, wouldn’t they?

Probably not. While there would be the usual fist-pounding from some “movement conservatives,” their anger at the selection would quickly dissipate when they saw the fury unleashed by liberals and Democratic bloggers.

I think this is exactly right. Then there is the small matter of Lieberman’s support for the surge strategy.

Wouldn’t the selection of Lieberman only emphasize Iraq and McCain’s support for the surge, making an unpopular war even more front and center for McCain?

Of course, but does anyone really believe that Democrats won’t wrap the surge around McCain’s neck if that’s in their interest? It doesn’t matter who McCain picks for his running mate. Even if he picks a governor from Minnesota or South Carolina, McCain owns the surge already.

And imagine if Obama goes on to choose Al Gore as his running mate, for all the reasons advanced by Michael Grunwald in 2006. He’s certainly a far stronger pick than Kathleen Sebelius. The danger is that a Gore pick could make Obama look like a lightweight — Bush looked shrewd when he picked Cheney, to be sure, but we know have that ugly precedent in mind. Obama has other strong options, including Ted Strickland, Ed Rendell, and Tim Kaine. But Gore would be a game-changer.

Which would lead us to the Gore vs. Lieberman vice presidential debates. What a pleasure that would be to watch!

The Cameron Critique

Yuval Levin, one of my Fourth Way comrades, is working on what is sure to be a very important piece on McCain’s domestic policy, and he made a very important point when I last saw him — conservatism, by its nature, is about reform. Reform, after all, is profoundly un-radical. It is about taking existing institutions that have strayed from their original purpose, that are failing to achieve the goals they set out to achieve, and revitalizing them. Is Social Security as it exists the best way to provide for older Americans? Did its creators anticipate the rise of two-earner households, increased longevity, and a decades-long wealth boom that has rightly raised expectations? Our patchwork healthcare regime is a byproduct of inflation-fighting efforts dating back at least to the second world war. It has grown strikingly inadequate as firms disaggregate, employment patterns shift, and the genomics revolution steadily advances. The same can be said of everything from education to policing and national defense. Hence the relevance of the Cameron project.

‘Labour has moved a lot of people from just below the poverty line to just above it and claimed success,’ says Mr Cameron. ‘The Left’s answer is to use lots of taxpayers’ money to change benefits and tax credits, so that you solve the symptom of poverty which is shortage of money. The cause of poverty is the drugs, alcohol, the crime, educational underachievement, family breakdown and worklessness.’ This distinction between causes and symptom lies at the heart of the new Tory analysis.

This is easier said than done. And that will be the true test — will Boris Johnson succeed in lowering the ideological temperature of urban politics, and he use the limited powers and resources of his office to shift the correlation of forces in favor of creative reformers in the boroughs and, most importantly, in civil society? We’ll see.

MacDonald's over-egged pudding

Heather MacDonald’s recent essay in City Journal is a classic example of what our British friends call “over-egging the pudding.” Here’s her title: “Is the Criminal-Justice System Racist?” And then the subhead: “No: the high percentage of blacks behind bars reflects crime rates, not bigotry.” Note the implication: if incarceration-rates-by-race match crime-rates-by-race, then the criminal justice system is not racist.

But that’s silly. First, incarcerations rates are just one metric among many; and second, questions like this can’t be settled by assuming the existence of an on/off switch: Racist/Not-Racist. MacDonald makes a serious rhetorical mistake in her very first paragraph: she quotes Senator Obama’s claim that blacks “are arrested at very different rates, are convicted at very different rates, [and] receive very different sentences . . . for the same crime,” and then addresses the second claim only with fifteen-year-old data and fails to address the third claim at all.

MacDonald does a pretty good job of defending her claim that incarceration-rates-by-race reflect crimes-committed-by-race, so why can’t she leave it at that? Instead, she determines to use evidence on that one point to justify the absurdly sweeping claim that the American criminal-justice system is utterly free from racism. Let’s let our claims be commensurate with the evidence we provide, please.

A Defense of Cameronism

Cameronism is a subject of particular interest to me, so I’m going to defend Cameron — and by extension David Brooks — against Peter’s thoughtful critique.

I think Peter should read Danny Kruger’s On Fraternity, which I consider the smartest political essays I’ve read in a long time. He’ll find that Kruger — and, by extension, Cameron — is concerned first and foremost with restoring civil society and the capacity for self-government by transforming remote, centrally-directed public institutions into enterprises rooted in the choices and concerns of private individuals, families, and neighborhoods. (Kruger calls this a kind of alchemy, and he’s right. But we have promising precedents, particularly in education.)

Peter anticipates this objection.

Brooks would no doubt argue that he only wants to see government strengthen those traditional community bonds, not supplant them. That’s an admirable goal, but I’m not sure it’s an attainable one. The very nature of retail politics (and competitive salesmanship in general) is to move toward bolder, grander claims — always to do and be more.

Whether or not we can have a more liberal, decentralized government that delivers a superior quality of life to the illiberal, centralized alternative is an empirical question — and that’s just the thing. Voters in market democracies, all of them social market democracies in varying degrees, make judgments on the basis of their perceived quality of life. Those of us on the liberal center-right believe, as an empirical matter, that a freer society is, generally speaking, a more prosperous, cooperative, peaceful society. That is the proposition Cameron and Reinfeldt and others in the Fourth Way movement (ha ha) aim to demonstrate. To do it, they are drawing heavily on centrist discourse, centrist defined by the preferences, habits, and prejudices of the median voter. For a partisan of any stripe, and I use the term advisedly, winning elections means using crafted language to gently nudge public opinion in your direction.

So what is Cameronism really about? It is about framing a kind of liberal conservatism that is relevant to the concerns of Britain’s median voters. The National Health Service, for example, is being hollowed out through a wide variety of surprising political forces, among them the European Union — which demands that European citizens be able to use health-care providers anywhere in the Union, and be compensated as though they were using health-care providers at home. This poses a real structural challenge. And there are also human rights arguments being deployed against bans on private provision. This could lead, over time, to a freer, more competitive sector. In the interim, it will jangle a lot of nerves. And so those of a Burkean bent seek to ease the transition.

It’s worth recalling that Thatcher never mentioned privatization in her early manifestos — the fear was that privatization would prove unpopular. The privatization of British Telecom, however, proved wildly popular, and so privatization is remembered as a great Thatcherite triumph. This is despite the fact that the privatization of BT transformed a state-owned monopoly into, for a time, a regulated privately-held monopoly — hardly the same blow for freedom that rapid technological change proved to be in the years that followed. Also, the sale of council proved to be a great advance for property ownership and, to be high-flown, freedom. Yet it’s also true that it discriminated those who never live in council homes. It was hardly neutral in its impact. It was a carefully crafted social policy aimed to achieve exactly the alchemical outcome Cameron’s Conservatives hope to achieve by adopting the so-called Swedish education revolution.

David Brooks and the Politics of Meaning

I have immense respect for David Brooks. He’s a brilliant writer, and the way he’s approached his New York Times gig – by moving beyond the generic political issue column and into the broader realm of politically informed cultural criticism – has been, I think, a great success.

So it’s no surprise that his most recent column, The Conservative Revolution, has stuck with me. Yet what’s been on my mind is how troubling I find the ideas it expresses.

Brooks starts by describing the ascendancy of British Conservatives and notes the simultaneous decline of the American right, and then explains that, between the two, “the flow of ideas has changed direction. It used to be that American conservatives shaped British political thinking. Now the influence is going the other way.”

As for why, he offers the following explanation:

The British conservative renovation begins with this insight: The central political debate of the 20th century was over the role of government. The right stood for individual freedom while the left stood for extending the role of the state. But the central debate of the 21st century is over quality of life. In this new debate, it is necessary but insufficient to talk about individual freedom. Political leaders have to also talk about, as one Tory politician put it, “the whole way we live our lives.”

That means, first, moving beyond the Thatcherite tendency to put economics first. As Oliver Letwin, one of the leading Tory strategists put it: “Politics, once econo-centric, must now become socio-centric.” David Cameron, the Conservative Party leader, makes it clear that his primary focus is sociological.

This is the lesson, Brooks argues, that the American right must learn. It makes sense that a sociologically inclined writer like Brooks would find this style appealing. And I have no doubt that there are some electoral successes to be found should the GOP broadly adopt this tack.

The problem, though, is that this grants legitimacy to the idea that people ought to seek meaning from their government. And at the same time, it encourages political parties to ply their constituents by offering meaning as their product.

Frankly, I find this idea appalling and depressing, and, when taken to its logical endpoint, diminishing of – possibly even antithetical to – the sort of small, self-chosen community bonds, those of family and neighbor, church and community, intellect and interest, which seem far more integral to society than anything shaped by even the most efficient and benevolent hand of government. To seek meaning from government and politics is to cease to seek meaning from other outlets; in Europe, secularization has generally increased with its dependence on government. Why seek community in the church when you can find it at the ballot box? Yet Brooks writes approvingly that British conservatives are “trying to use government to foster dense social bonds.” Is community now to be a public utility? It’s a vision of government as a clunky state-run Facebook.

Brooks would no doubt argue that he only wants to see government strengthen those traditional community bonds, not supplant them. That’s an admirable goal, but I’m not sure it’s an attainable one. The very nature of retail politics (and competitive salesmanship in general) is to move toward bolder, grander claims — always to do and be more. Any effort to put government in the business of aiding those bonds will, I suspect, lead to a government that seeks to simply be the bond.

Perhaps this was inevitable. In the retail world, this is an increasingly popular marketing tactic. Products are sold based on the lifestyles they represent, the ideas they seem to symbolize, the self-image they grant the purchaser. Community and culture are the primary value-adds of some of today’s most successful brands. Yet I shudder to think that our government should reinvent itself this way – cleaner, perhaps, and with a hipper, more modern sensibility too, but oppressive, in a way, and certainly more expensive – a trillion-dollar, bureaucratic Whole Foods.

Give Kids the Vote!

The great Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry returns to TAS with a stirring, persuasive call for lowering the voting age. You’d be a fool not to read it.

For as long as I remember (yes, even before that West Wing episode), I’ve supported abolishing – not lowering – the voting age barrier. Kids should have the vote. I believed so vehemently as a child, of course, but since I’ve had the vote I’ve only grown more adamant in my conviction.

I know it may seem kooky, but it’s not. Hear me out.

Millennial Messianism

The other night I caught a radio interview with the two hacks responsible for Millennial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube and the Future of American Politics, in which the authors declare the rising “millennial” generation to be the ultimate flourishing of both liberal sentiment and Democratic political power. The MySpace generation will lead us into a glorious new future of “win-win solutions,” and will leave behind “fake” social issues in favor of the ones that really matter.

Quick quiz: which of the following is not actually a reason they cited for the deep-rooted communitarian and progressive sensibilities of the millennials, and is really a parody invented by me?

1. They were encouraged to share by watching a lot of Barney.
2. They came of age during an incompetent and ideologically unmoored Republican administration.
3. They played youth sports in which everyone got a trophy, no matter how well or poorly they played.

Pencils down.

Answer #2 is the fake reason.

EDIT: For a cheap shot, check out this picture of two guys with their finger on the pulse of today’s youth.

the manifesto that isn't

I have a brief essay in the Wall Street Journal this morning on the just-released Evangelical Manifesto. Though I have the greatest respect for pretty much everyone involved in making this document, I am puzzled and even frustrated by it. In the column I explain why — my primary complaint is that it is anything but a manifesto — but I want to add just a few comments here.

One way this document is going to be read is as an attempt to write the Religious Right out of the evangelical movement. No one clearly associated with that movement signed the document, while some prominent members of the Religious Left (most notably Jim Wallis) did. The document places a great deal of emphasis on the distinction — completely irrelevant and meaningless to everyone except conservative Protestants — between fundamentalism and evangelicalism, repudiating the former and uplifting the latter. This distinction is handled in a confusing way, because without any transition the Manifesto goes from criticizing fundamentalism for being politically disengaged and “world-denying” to criticizing it for being politically triumphalistic and uncivil. (This does in fact describe the historical development of fundamentalism. but the document suggests that fundamentalism somehow manifests both tendencies simultaneously. In a piece of writing that extends itself to the highly-unmanifestoish length of twenty pages this is not quite forgivable.)

In the end, the document seems to be saying something like this: “We’re tired of being lumped in with the fundamentalists, who are always angry and rattling on about America being a ‘Christian nation’ and that kind of junk. We’re tired of being treated as the lapdogs of the Republican party. We’re followed the Republicans all these years because of one issue — abortion — and while we don’t want to abandon our pro-life stance, we think that we’ve ignored a lot of other Christian values and convictions in order to get leverage on this one matter, and now we’re thinking that that wasn’t such a good idea. And by the way, some of us have been Democrats all along. But we’re not telling you how to vote, so don’t jump to any conclusions. We just want to be seen as polite and reasonable participants in the American public sphere, unlike the red-faced old dudes you always see on TV presented as ‘the evangelical voice.’ We’re sick and tired of all that.”

I share many of the feelings that prompted this document, I admit, but I think this so-called Manifesto raises more questions than it answers, and creates more confusions than it resolves. The authors call themselves “representative evangelicals,” but are they? Or do they represent a highly educated, culturally elite subset of evangelicals? If they want to claim the name “evangelical” and deny it to fundamentalists, then what happens if the people they call fundamentalists want to call themselves evangelicals? Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University (an organ of the Religious Right if there ever was one) calls itself the world’s largest evangelical university — should it stop using that adjective? (“Evangelical,” I mean, not “largest.”)

On another front: what does it mean for evangelicals to be pro-life (regarding abortion, I mean) if they’re not going to vote pro-life? I can imagine good answers to this question, but the Manifesto doesn’t provide any. And if it’s going to be a real manifesto, not just an inside-the-Beltwayish White Paper, it really should.

And the biggest question of all: For whom was this written? Who cares, or is thought to care? I can’t figure that out at all.

Happy Israel Independence Day

60 years old already? She doesn’t look a day over 3000 . . .

Seriously, though, it has not escaped my attention that the pull of this particular holiday on my affections has waned since my grade school days – and I’d like to believe that’s for unselfish and idealistic reasons. But really, what strains that connection more than anything is stuff like this, posted by a friend who made aliyah several years ago.

It would be an improvement if I could make myself get angry. Instead, I just feel sad, and disgusted.

Denver Vice

Up now at The Guardian, my case for the Democratic party to deny Hillary Clinton the vice presidential nomination.

UPDATE: So it begins.

MORE: Ambinder isn’t hearing no, straight from a “very close friend of Clinton’s”.

Thunderbull

John Bolton wants to bomb Iran. No, seriously.

Mr Bolton said that striking Iran would represent a major step towards victory in Iraq. While he acknowledged that the risk of a hostile Iranian response harming American’s overseas interests existed, he said the damage inflicted by Tehran would be “far higher” if Washington took no action.

“This is a case where the use of military force against a training camp to show the Iranians we’re not going to tolerate this is really the most prudent thing to do,” he said. “Then the ball would be in Iran’s court to draw the appropriate lesson to stop harming our troops.”

Let me first air out a pet peeve. Apparently, in order to be a really good idea, a military operation now need only represent a step toward victory instead of actually being one. This is the kind of thing that gives postmodern conservatism a bad name.

Now then. To my further irritation, it’s not that John Bolton’s information train is jammed, it’s that the train keeps winding up at the same — wrong — station. Clear interest in not getting badly beaten in Iraq? Check. Acknowledgment of risks posed in theater by Iran? Check. Emphasis on selecting prudent courses of action? Check. It’s like he loads a perfect souffle into the oven and it comes out an ugly, bloodthirsty Critter.

Why this atavistic insistence on the pre-9/11 strategy of undeclared-war bombing runs? Doesn’t Bolton understand the nature of the threat? Seriously, it’s frustrating. The man is intelligent, thoughtful, clearsighted, and dead wrong on bombing Iran, which is not the prudent thing to do. It will not only represent a major step towards uncontrollable violence and regional instability, it will be a major step in that direction. Hell, it might actually even be uncontrollable violence and regional instability!

You want to prudently drop something on an Iranian training camp? How about thousands of leaflets saying

We know who you are. We know what you’re doing. Please stop. (Next time we won’t say please.)

All the benefits of bombing the camp, none of the unsightly general war. I, too, am incensed that Iranian efforts are going into killing American soldiers. But the war those soldiers are fighting is in Iraq, and if we want it to be in Iran, we’ve not only got to actually start a war with Iran but we’ve got to suffer the consequences. In neither case are the ends of responsible neo-imperialism served. I’m still looking for a neocon whose passionate interest in bombing Iran is overruled by the weight of prudence. There’s got to be one somewhere. …Right?

Hillary Clinton Gives a Speech

There’s Hillary Clinton, standing upright in the center of the screen, trying desperately to look happy in a racket-ball blue suit that makes her look as if she just organized a Smurf convention. “Full speed to the White House,” she says, as if she’s about to take the Acela down from New York. I don’t want to dash her hopes (okay, well, maybe a little), but trailing behind in a bitter multi-month primary is more like the Chinatown bus on a bad run.

Give more money, she instructs the audience, and then reminds the Indiana crowd of her tenuous links to the Midwest. Her mother was from Pennsylvania! That factoid only sort of made sense during the actual Pennsylvania primary (does anyone really vote for a candidate because he or she lives in the same state as the candidate’s mother?), and now it merely hangs there, awkwardly, like an out-of-fashion accessory worn two seasons past its prime.

Gas prices figure heavily into her speech, as she claims to stand “for everyone who holds their breath at the gas pump, waiting to see how much it costs today,” once again ignoring her own efforts to make filling up cars more expensive. She continues to champion a summer gas-tax holiday, and I half expect her to follow this by announcing that, as with leprechauns, she never really believed in economists anyway.

What does she believe in, then? West Virginia! And Kentucky! “I am running to be the president of all of America,” she says, despite the sad fact that she’s been rejected by more of it than has accepted her.

Yet she soldiers on anyway. “I will never stop fighting for you,” she declares, though somehow she seems to be talking not to the audience, but herself.

Classifying Myself

Ezra Klein, a celebrated blogger-wonk who needs no introduction, has some very kind words for The American Scene, our own Peter Suderman and James Poulos, and my co-author and TAS alumnus Ross Douthat, not to mention my colleague Megan McArdle and my friend Ramesh Ponnuru. He also writes,

A totally unclassifiable group of political thinkers assembled by Reihan Salam, who’s possibly the world’s least classifiable individual, period.

First, this is massively flattering to me, as I’ve long tried to be as inscrutable as possible. But I have taken a stab at classifying myself. I am a

Rawlsekian neoconservative singulatarian meliorist humanist neoliberal infosocialist Viridian postliberal incrementalist.

I also think Andrew W.K. is the greatest philosopher of our time. But don’t hold me to this. Over the past eighteen months, I have variously advocated aggressive pro-natalism, voluntary human extinction, the creation of an army of Zombie soldiers under my personal command, eliminating the payroll tax, Kalmykian independence, and, in the vein of “Jews for Jesus,” a new movement of “Muslims for Moroni.” So really, I can’t be trusted.

I’m attending a conference where I’m learning a tremendous amount — I also just saw the director of the conference do a tremendously impressive dance. I now dearly regret having missed the 1970s.

Is Santogold Opposed to Barack Obama?

Santogold, gold-vomiting critical darling, has a terrific song called “Shove It.” The chorus goes,

We think you’re a joke,
Shove your hope where it don’t shine

Granted, it seems very unlikely that “Shove It” is in fact a veiled anti-Obama tirade. But consider some of the other lyrics, which seem to echo Clinton talking points, e.g.,

And if we seem to rough it up a bit
We broke but we rich at heart

Yes, we’re tough campaigners, but we have the support of working-class whites.

Pull ourselves up now we won’t choke
It’s our time, put the lights on us

We’re less charming, perhaps, but we are ready on Day One. Also, Clinton would be the first female president — we (women) are ready for the spotlight.

Smile in your face, undermine your back
got guns for the strength they lack

While the Obama campaign presents a sunny exterior, they in fact employ brutal campaign tactics and superior resources to make up for their deficiencies, deficiencies which will become all the more salient in a general election campaign.

The question isn’t so much whether Santogold is pulling for HRC — it is whether her single constitutes an illegal campaign expenditure coordinated with Clinton’s campaign.

Disagreeing, Respectfully, with Spencer

I’ve known Spencer Ackerman for a long time, and he’s been a good friend to me over the years. Though I don’t see him very often, I will always think well of him, not least because we come from the same neighborhood and we are both huge Marvel fans. I know that Spencer cares deeply about the issues he covers, and that he is a dedicated reporter. But I don’t always agree with him, particularly when it comes to US involvement in Iraq and the nature of Iraq’s internal politics.

First, I’ll note briefly that Spencer is completely correct about Iron Man. I’ve now seen it twice, and I think it stands head and shoulders above the Spider-Man trilogy. The first two X-Men films, but the performances in Iron Man make it a notch better, Ian McKellen notwithstanding. Robert Downey Jr. was superb, as was Jeff Bridges. Gwyneth Paltrow was at her most charming. And the action sequences were stunning to watch. (Unsurprisingly, I very much enjoyed Stark’s unilateral assault on a gang of terrorist thugs who were terrorizing an Afghan village.) After seeing it on Thursday, I fled before the credits ended, as did most of the audience. This is a mistake. Stay to the end, as the names of countless personal assistants and drivers and song titles pass by: you won’t regret it. My only hope is that an Avengers film, which is to say an Ultimates film, has the kind of budget that would permit an all-star cast. Here’s hoping Watchmen) sets a strong precedent.

But when he argues that the Sons of Iraq

take our money and use it to become neighborhood warlords and gather weapons to eventually overthrow the Shiite-controlled government that we also support

Or it could be that there are transitional steps, as ex-insurgents (a) turn away from cooperating with Al Qaeda in Iraq in their anti-occupation struggle, (b) embrace cooperation with US forces as a means of strengthening their power relative to AQI and the Shia, © accept that not all Iraqi Shia are in fact agents of “the Persians,” but rather Iraqi nationalists who accept the need for minority rights, and (d) fully integrate into a broadly representative Iraqi state. It makes perfect sense that steps © and (d) would take a long time, particularly since the Iraqi Shia leadership has given Sunni Iraqis good reason to be wary. Bangladesh, for example, had a very strong moral claim in its fight for independence. And yet a sovereign Bangladesh has treated its Urdu-speaking Bengali population very poorly, as this was a Mohajir minority aligned with Urdu-speaking Pakistan. Kanan Makiya has made the point that Iraq’s failures have been rooted in a lack of Shia magnanimity. Without belaboring the point, I think there’s a coherent and persuasive case that we are seeing political maturation in Iraq.

Actually, to the neighborhood warlord point, this could be true in the sense that all states function like gangsters’ protection rackets. If Somalia is at one end of a spectrum of political order and Belgium is at the other, Iraq is in between, and quite a bit closer to Somalia, sad to say. There’s no doubt that Spencer knows what he’s talking about, and that he makes a decent point. The question for me is — which way is the arrow pointing?

Then there is the matter of Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. Spencer has very forcefully pushed back against claims that Saddam’s Baathist government had ties of any significance to Al Qaeda. Of course, a great deal depends on what one considers “significant.” It seems clear to me that Saddam had nothing to do with the planning and execution of the 9/11 attacks, and that Al Qaeda is a non-state entity that has independent sources of funding and the wherewithal to function autonomously. To suggest otherwise, at this late date, is simply daft, and Spencer is right to say so. But there’s still a great deal we don’t know. For example, the evidence from the archives of Baathist Iraq suggests that, as Eli Lake noted in March,

Beginning in 1999, Iraq’s intelligence service began providing “financial and moral support” for a small radical Islamist Kurdish sect the report does not name. A Kurdish Islamist group called Ansar al Islam in 2002 would try to assassinate the regional prime minister in the eastern Kurdish region, Barham Salih.

Ansar al-Islam is widely believed to be affiliated with Al Qaeda. Against, this isn’t evidence of a grand alliance. It is just more evidence for a straightforward proposition: that Saddam was willing to cooperate with groups of widely ranging ideological proclivities in pursuit of his broad objectives, among them hunting Americans and reducing the ambit of American power. This helps explain some of what we know, e.g., that Saddam’s intelligence service sought to build relationships with Egyptian Islamic Jihad and other Islamist groups. The Bush Administration’s rhetorical efforts to associate Saddam with Al Qaeda were clumsy and based on category error upon category error. We don’t need to defend these clumsy efforts, however, to see that Saddam was willing to employ brutal, unconventional tactics even towards the tail end of his regime.

Sex and the Single Superpower

I don’t really disagree with what Matt Yglesias is saying about diplomacy here. I’ll just point out that our unipolar moment makes diplomacy look rather different than historical models. And for that reason, non-coercive “win-win” bargains may be genuinely elusive, howsoever disposed the next President may be to seek them.

A lot of historic examples of successful diplomacy only make any sense in the context of competing major powers. The opening to China was possible because the Communist powers had broken decisively years before and by the early 1970s America had been weakened by Vietnam and social and economic turmoil and was willing to embrace a former ideological enemy as a practical ally against the greater threat of the Soviet Union. Sadat was willing to break ranks with the rest of the Arab League and make a separate peace with Israel because in the wake of failure in the Yom Kippur War and in the context of a switch of allegiances from the Soviet to the American side in the Cold War, peace was the best way for Egypt to achieve its national objectives of regaining the territory lost in 1967. There’s even a famous game – and it’s all about defeating other powers through more honorable (making alliances) and less honorable (betraying those allies) diplomatic gambits.

But we don’t live in a world of competing powers. We are the overwhelmingly predominant power in the world today. That’s particularly true in military terms, but not exclusively; Japan, China and Europe are genuine rivals in economic power, but the dollar is still the world’s reserve currency, America still has the largest economy, Japan has gone through nearly two decades of negligible growth, China has only very recently emerged as a meaningful economic power (and is still overwhelmingly poor), and Europe is not a unitary entity by a long ways yet.

That necessarily means diplomacy means something different than it did in the days of the Cold War, or in the old 19th-century days of multi-state rivalries. Negotiating with America is more like negotiating with the Roman Empire, or Imperial China, or 1995-era Microsoft. It’s worth recalling that while in retrospect the rest of the world misses the kindler, gentler hegemony of the 1990s, they didn’t like it at the time, and major diplomatic successes were few and far between in the period. The fact that the Bush Administration’s strategy of across-the-board confrontation has proven counterproductive doesn’t mean that there are a lot of win-win negotiations to be engaged in with Iran, North Korea, etc. The best we may be able to hope for is “lose less.”

It may well be a bad thing that we have this kind of global predominance. But bad facts are still facts, and it’s not practically possible to disclaim the power we have.