Ed Note: The discussion of neoconservatism starts here and continues here. Ali Eteraz jumps in to respond to the latest round, here.

Daniel Koffler says that when it comes to foreign policy, neoconservatism is neither liberal internationalism, nor illiberal expansionism, but really just an elitist and intellectual project, defined primarily by its belligerence, exceptionalism and (Straussian) secrecy. Koffler comes up with this third category because he is intent on showing that neoconservatism is not a "movement" like the other two foreign policy views, and therefore cannot quite qualify as a "nationalism."

All of this is a roundabout way of saying that neoconservatism is a conspiratorialLet's not give the neocons too much credit cabal. In Koffler's words: "an exclusively elite movement with limited membership."

That gives neoconservative foreign policy too much credit. Intellectual and elitist movements (even conspiracies) usually have some kind of identifiable structure to them. Yet, neoconservative foreign policy, since 2001, has been a morass of empty slogans and ambiguous declarations. It has been an idea in construction. It was never settled on where it was going. It was for this reason that it put forward nebulous ideas like "terror" and "axis of evil" and "doctrine of integration" and "with us or against us." If anything, neoconservatism is the 21^st century version of 19^th century nativism, the 1920s Red Scare and 1950s McCarthyism --- yet another instance of America panicking in the face of a global encounter.

We know this because before 9/11, and before being elected President, the Bush foreign policy shop had said that that they would not focus on international humanitarianism as Clinton had done (I believe this was in Rice's Foreign Affairs article in 2000). Yet, after 9/11, humanitarianism --- in the form of "nation-building" --- was the first thing out of the neoconservatives' mouths (which as Ahmed Rashid points out they then botched). No rhyme, no reason. That's why one day Bush was talking about Islamofascists and the next acknowledging that the term wasn't accurate, why one day we were entering Iraq because of WMD and the next day because of Saddam's links with Al-Qaeda. That's why one day we were declaring war on all state-sponsors of terror and the next day we were hobnobbing with Saudi Arabia.

Now, nearly every faction ---- from neo-conservatives to liberal hawks to libertarians (like Koffler) --- objects to understanding neoconservative foreign policy as inherently devoid of any content. Neoconservatives themselves reject this idea because they think it smacks of confusion, and my, it couldn't be that they had no idea what they were doing. Liberal hawks reject it because they feel extra guilty for being duped by a movement that had no idea what it was doing. People like Koffler reject this reading because in order to justify their preferred projects it is more effective to demonize neoconservatives as a cabal than to recognize them as people who had little idea of what to do when thrust into Hillary Clinton's 3 AM scenarios.

As much as I'd like to believe that neoconservatism was a conspiracy that broke out after 9/11, the more reasonable explanation is that the people we had in charge were utter incompetents who, when confronted by the world coming to their shores, didn't know what to do, so they did everything under the sun. Pre-emptive war? Yes, we do that! Humanitarian war? We do that too! 100 years war? That too! Nation-building? Sure, why not! Empire? Fuck yeah! (as a Bush advisor told Ron Suskind in slightly different terms). War on terror? Check! World War IV? If we include Iran, yeah baby!

The fact is, and as pitiable as it sounds, on 9/11 America got hit in the head with a mallet, and rather than taking a moment to get a sense of who we were, our government started behaving like a punch drunk boxer.

Neoconservatism foreign policy is 21^st century American hyperventilation. It is panic, and panic is a far worse characteristic in a government than institutional corruption. People like Koffler who actually oppose neoconservatism shouldn't give it historiographical credit.

Jim Henley of Unqualified Offerings and The Art of the Possible has joined the conversation on neoconservatism and its future. He's skeptical about my claim that "[t]he neocons are in a decidedly weak position" and risk becoming marginalized in the likely event of a McCain defeat in November. And rightly so; what I should have said is that the neoconservatives are now in a weaker position than at any prior point in the history of their movement, which—to be fair—isn't the equivalent of being on the brink of dissolution. Jim ably outlines the reasons their total demise is not likely, which fall into roughly three groupings:

1. The neoconservatives' ample structural and tactical advantages within the Republican party;
   
2. The woeful disarray of the internal opposition—which seems more interested at the moment in tearing itself to pieces through mutual recriminations and excommunications than in building a coalition to regain control of the GOP;
   
3. The fact that every country has and always will have a nationalist party, and that the neoconservatives have made their beliefs the default American nationalism.

Unless Barack Obama really is the messiah, it stands to reason that regardless of what happens in November, theNot This Time neoconservatives will remain solidly in power in the Republican party for the foreseeable future, and will be poised to return to government in the event of either domestic or foreign misfortune.

To see why that assumption might nevertheless be wrong, let's make some careful discriminations.

First of all, retaining control of a defeated GOP is not equivalent to retaining a position next-in-line to control of government. Suppose that Obama and the Democrats win the presidential election convincingly and reduce the Republican congressional delegation to a rump caucus of the deep south and sun belt. In such a scenario, control of the GOP may be worth nothing or less than nothing.

Two-party systems are less stable than a cursory glance at their history suggests; the reason the same two parties have competed for control of the government for the last 150 years is because a series of distinct and incompatible institutions have succeeded each other in using the names "Democrats" and "Republicans." The Liberal Party of Britain, which under Gladstone was the party of the Empire and of the sun never setting, held a strong national majority just before WWI. The Liberals then committed Britain to a war that destroyed its empire, at the conclusion of which they were virtually wiped out and relegated to a small handful of seats in Parliament, persisting tenuously and irrelevantly in a kind of unlife for decades until they were absorbed by a splinter faction of Labour. So there is precedent for major parties, even major imperialist parties, to go belly up through democratic means. This is not to suggest that the Republican party itself is in danger of going out of business, but rather that it could be reduced to an ineffectual minority for the indefinite future (the demographic dynamics, in addition to everything else, look really bad for them), in which time there would potentially be space for some other party to become the Second Party. Moreover, if the Republican defeat makes the GOP sufficiently small, it could put the neocons on roughly even terms with factions antagonistic to them, and inspire allied factions (the anti-tax crowd, the Evangelicals, etc.) to break their tactical alignment with the neocons, since the downside of the social conservatives, Chamber of Commerce Bolsheviks, and the rest not caring enough about foreign policy to intervene in any way in what the neocons do, is that they have no incentive to maintain any cooperation once they no longer profit from doing so.

Second, let's explore what is meant by 'neoconservatism' and who the 'neocons' are. It's a tricky task, trickier than it has any right to be, not least because neoconservatives rarely use the term, and even then use it more frequently to insinuate that their opponents are conspiratorial anti-semites than to say anything informative about it, and also because neoconservatism is consciously constructed by its adherents to resist straightforward definition. So it's much easier to get a handle on what it is by defining it recursively, to borrow a concept from math.

Try this: Begin with the paradigmatic examples of contemporary neoconservatives— you're looking for surnames like "Kristol," "Kagan," and "Podhoretz" here; take the rank and file scriveners of the movement, like some of the writers at National Review, a larger proportion of Weekly Standard contributors, and virtually everyone who writes for Commentary; and finally use induction to fill in the cluster of beliefs that links the movement's archetypes to its ordinary membership. The first thing to notice is that the cluster of core neoconservative beliefs are quite few in number and consist largely in negations of various liberal norms, e.g.:

• war is only justified under atypical and extreme circumstances when all other options are demonstrably non-viable;
  
• diplomacy is the first tool of foreign policy with adversarial states and is a deliberative process with no predetermined outcome;
  
• rules of ethical conduct are universal and exceptions to them only arise in exceptional circumstances, not out of some individual or country's pretensions to an exceptional identity;
  
• resources are scarce (not uniquely liberal but still an important proposition that neoconservatism, as practiced by neoconservatives, effectively denies).

Those few beliefs, however, trade on thick, idiosyncratic concepts like "national will," which are imported from the philosophical canon but warped in transit and don't actually correspond to anything within it.

Minimal reflection on these points should demonstrate the absurdity of Robert Kagan's identification of neoconservatism with the whole of the internationalist tradition, in turn identified as the entire history of non-isolationist thought on foreign affairs. (Compare: Milton Friedman and John Maynard Keynes were both capitalists.) Because neoconservatism comprises negations of basic liberal norms, it fundamentally is not compatible with liberal internationalism. Yet neither is it immediately identifiable with just any sort of expansionist illiberal nationalism, because the thickness and idiosyncrasies of its concepts make it a poor fit—ultimately, an impossible fit, because it's a cosmopolitan belief system (albeit in a perverse way), and thus eschews various concepts of blood and soil that belong, in American political history, to the paleo tradition.

In other words, neoconservatism is a very small, idiosyncratic movement; and it is entirely a movement of intellectuals. There is no neoconservative constituency within the body of a democratic polity (nor can there be—as the Converse studies show, "mass publics" cannot, in practice, comprehend ideology at anything approaching the level of sophistication a genuine commitment to neoconservatism requires). This is quite unlike ideologies such as communism, libertarianism, populism, welfare liberalism, social conservatism, even single-issue dogmatic opposition to taxes; i.e., ideologies composed first and foremost of publicly accessible beliefs with immediate mass appeal. Indeed, the neoconservative universe is so small that it excludes individuals who at least at one time were prominently identified with the movement, like Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer, and Francis Fukuyama. (What happened? The meaning of 'neoconservatism,' recursively defined by the beliefs of the neoconservatives, changed.)

Even within the movement, there is a detectable two-tiered hierarchy, a division between its theorists and its missionaries (which is true of any ideology). Hence someone like Kagan, Lawrence Kaplan, or even Paul Wolfowitz—informed, reflective thinkers, however one evaluates their thinking—is a different sort of neocon from the crew that blogs for Commentary, whose political philosophy, from what I can glean through my RSS feed, consists entirely in using and misusing words they don't know, alongside occasional sops to evolution denialism and global warming denialism, in the service of making their marginal contribution to destabilizing the globe and instigating wars. Which is to say that the true extension of robust neoconservative thought (i.e., excluding conceptually-confused, true-only-if-Gettierized propaganda) is even smaller than simple recursion suggests.

Neoconservatism is not unique for being an exclusively elite movement with limited membership. The same is true of foreign policy realism, a venerable technocratic system of belief, and there are any number of further examples (at least one for every specialized technical doctrine regarding a policy question or family of policy questions). It's hardly insidious in and of itself that neoconservatism, like realism but unlike communism and social conservatism, is strictly an intellectual movement—which is nothing but an instance of some of the Converse findings. Rather, it's just a fact that neoconservatism cannot, under any practically relevant circumstances, be a mass ideology. (What does distinguish it from other non-mass belief systems is the unusual extent to which, thanks to the Straussian influence, its adherents consciously revel in its public inaccessibility.) So the only way for it to be a successful movement on a large scale is by playing certain functional roles in a genuine mass ideology.

That's how neoconservatism provides the content of contemporary American nationalism. Its rejection of liberal norms, its belligerence, and especially its exceptionalism make it a suitable candidate for performing the function of giving nationalism a concrete platform to adhere to. But it's not the only suitable candidate for that role, and not even necessarily the most natural candidate, since it is at root a cosmopolitan ideology (though David Gelernter is working on fixing that). Hence Jim's point that there will always be nationalism wherever there's a nation is well-taken, but doesn't prejudice things in favor of neoconservatism retaining its dominant position. True blood and soil volkism can play the same role without importing anything from neoconservatism, though the result of that wouldn't exactly be an improvement on present circumstances.

On the other hand, various strains of paleoconservatism—which is much closer to being a mass ideology than neo-ism— especially the 'postmodern conservatism' James Poulos has been cultivating, reject elements of liberalism and provide grounds for national (or regional, or local) exceptionalism that are not bloodthirsty in either intent or effect. Likewise, the reformist conservatism of, say, Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam among others (Ramesh Ponnuru comes to mind as well), provides a motivation for grand unifying national projects and for fostering a spirit of special national purpose that has nothing to do with war. Which is to say that there are an array of candidate alternatives to neoconservatism for playing the role neoconservatism presently plays in American nationalism; and if any of them were to supersede neoconservatism as the intellectual movement that fills in the content of ineradicable non-liberal mass ideologies, the world would be a better, less violent place. Not necessarily because any of these alternatives is overwhelmingly compelling (none ultimately compelling to me; I'm a non-conservative cheering them along from the sidelines), but because making the world a better place relative to what neoconservatism has done is a fairly low bar to clear.

All of which is, I hope, an informative way of saying that Jim is right about point 1) that neocons are in a much stronger position structurally, tactically, and temperamentally than their GOP opponents and point 2) that the Republican factions opposed to the neocons are horrendously incompetent at the basic tasks of political organizing and too invested in internecine wars of purity, yet simultaneously too compromised by associations that the public, fairly or not, judges to be electoral non-starters, to mount a credible challenge to the neocons at this moment. Jim's point 3), however—that neoconservatism = American nationalism = the Republican party view writ large—comes apart on close scrutiny of what neoconservatism is. If it's just a catch-all for any illiberal, aggressive, exceptionalist theory of international relations, then it is indeed firmly ensconced not only in the Republican party but in America as a whole; but the perpetuation of neoconservatism so understood is therefore compatible with the fall and marginalization of the actual power players and centers of neoconservatism.

Alternatively, if neoconservatism is the ideology describable by recursion on the beliefs (sincere beliefs, that is, not doublethink or Straussian exoteric deceit) of Bill Kristol, Robert Kagan, John Bolton, Norman Podhoretz, Joe Lieberman, Paul Wolfowitz, et al., then all that prejudices our politics in favor of neoconservatism are the movement's comparative strengths, and the comparative weaknesses of internal opposition to it within the GOP. But the neocons' strengths and their Republican opponents' weaknesses are contingent qualities. The balance of power could easily tilt the other way under different circumstances. That fact provides a rationale, the only rationale I can think of at this late date, for continuing to identify as a Republican and participate in the party's internal debates, namely helping some congenial wing of the paleocons or the burgeoning reformists (I suspect that libertarian desertion of the party is too far advanced at this point for the libertarians to play a meaningful role in such disputes anymore) take control of the party's foreign policy apparatus from the neoconservatives. That would be, as my people say, תיקון עולם.

For these same reasons, ultimately, I don't share Jim's pessimism. Nationalism may be ineradicable without the eradication of the state, but that doesn't mean it's static and impossible to influence. In particular, it doesn't always have to be what it is now; in fact, it's palpably less confident, aggressive, and smothering (though perhaps by the same token more desperate) than it was even four years ago. As Ezra Klein perceptively noted a while back, the shift in the musical backdrop for this election compared to the last one is a telling analogue to the clearer air this year.

In their attempt to maintain a grip on power, the neoconservatives will of course, as Jim writes, deploy a Dolchstoßlegende; but the move isn't guaranteed to work, and in this case, the odds may well be against it, because the targets of the backstabbing allegation wouldn't just be sinister unnamed internal aliens, but the vast majority of Americans. Likewise, Jim lists the neocons' energetic commitment to foreign policy, which far outstrips that of any other GOP factions, as one of their key strengths. Not only that, but the narrowness of their agenda—their sublime indifference, at least in outward expression, to the outcome of key disputes in the party over domestic and social policy (they'd just go with the winning side in the end)—allowed them to leverage a dominant position in the party's foreign policy apparatus. What happens, though, if a monomanical dedication to a narrow foreign policy agenda becomes a political weakness?

In other words, what if—what if?—a new administration ends the war; abruptly puts a stop to its predecessor's crude and badly misplaced Hegelian language of world-historical conflicts (and also its predecessor's war crimes); quietly wages the police campaign that should have begun years ago to put al Qaeda out of business, while delivering free trade, investment in energy development, and international markets to Iran in exchange for liberalizing reforms in the society and curtailment of nuclear research; restores comprehensive arms control and establishes a comprehensive non-proliferation framework; and devotes the bulk of its attention to economic, environmental, good government, and energy supply reforms? What if that new administration comes to power by exclaiming—again and again and again and again—the need to "end the mindset that got us into war"?

What if that new administration comes to power on the strength of a resounding victory over the most prominent and vociferous exponent of neoconservatism in American political life? Without the the leader of the free world and his ministers sternly and ominously preaching Apocalypse from the West Wing every day, without the TV issuing color-coded directives about when to become terrified, with the nation's attention finally turned away from fighting World War ℵ₀, who will be there to listen to or care about the lie that Glorious Triumph was ordained to happen 6 months after t (where t=whatever time it is now)? Who will listen or care, apart from anti-warriors on both the right and left who won't have forgotten what the weasels did to our Constitution, to 4000 of our people, and hundreds of thousands of another country's people?

Nothing is guaranteed, of course, but the neocons can be defeated and marginalized, either by internal opponents within the GOP taking control, or else, if they can't be dislodged from their perch in the party, then by marginalizing the party itself. (What would a marginalized neoconservative movement look like? That it would be riven by internecine fighting is a near given, but beyond that the example of the realists is instructive. Like the neocons, the realists had no actual constituency; once the neocons superseded them as the party's technocratic elite, the realists were reduced to a small cohort of living fossils, many of whom are happy to align themselves with the neocons for a whiff of power. The moral is that there is no total redemption, and that crowd in particular is as resilient as zombies. Given enough time, they may rehabilitate themselves. But any period in which they are irrelevant and ignored is reason to cheer.)

The circumstances on the ground after a McCain defeat, especially a convincing McCain defeat, will be unlike anything the neoconservative movement has experienced. The trajectory of their prominence and influence has been uniformly upwards from the foundation of their movement, but not until this administration became a war presidency—not even under Ronald Reagan, whose greatest triumphs were knowing when to cut losses in Lebanon, and peacefully winding down the Cold War through a combination of diplomacy and spending, for which, recall, the neocons thanked him with a little Dolchstoßlegende (of course)—did they get to wield true power and put their theory into practice. We all know the rest.

Had they been less adroit in forming coalitions and accumulating power, had the realists been more alert to the threat to their position, had the neocons not been so fluent in adopting the language of humanitarian interventionism to sweet-talk the liberal hawks who ultimately eviscerated the opposition to the war preemptively (though that's another story); had they, in short, been less successful as a party-building movement, they might never have gotten to hold the reins of power. Now, thanks to their own catastrophic success, to borrow a phrase, we can clean up their toxic influence on our democracy. Maybe we won't succeed, but for the first time in a long time, we can succeed, not just at putting the crooks out of business, but at bankrupting the ideology that fueled the crimes. Yes, we can.

Julian Sanchez has no reason to fear being struck down by the gods: Bo Burnham's new "New Math" is funnier than Tom Lehrer's old "New Math"; if you think that's blasphemy, you don't know what makes either of them funny in the first place. Here's Burnham:

One quibble: "What's domain, domain, range?" Burnham asks. "A kid with too much in his pants." That's because the domain of a function is usually represented by x and the range by y. Hence "domain, domain, range" becomes «x,x,y» becomes XXY, or Klinefelter's Syndrome. But most Klinefelter's cases aren't true hermaphrodites; they're men with smaller than usual equipment. Which means that such kids usually have too little in their pants (at least if you buy into traditional gender norms).

Still, Burnham's new math is powerful stuff. It defines the unnatural log ("duraflame"), extends over complex numbers ("Santa Claus ⋅i" is an imaginary times an imaginary, so it's real), and allows the construction of a factor tree of the factors that caused his girl to leave him ("a tree full of Asian porn"). It's no insult to Lehrer to say he didn't cover that much ground. In fact, it's a tribute to Lehrer that his stuff is still so fresh forty years on with the odd update here and there. Just look at what can be done with his "National Brotherhood Week":

Oh the Feminists hate Republicans
And Republicans hate the Feminists
To mock all Feminazis
Is an old G.O.P. rule

But during Islamo-Fascism Week
Islamo-Fascism Week
You’ll see Ann Coulter On Our Backs at USC
She’s helping Muslims seek
Their Feminine Mystique
Simone De Beauvoir’s really very cool

So true. If Burnham really wants to threaten Lehrer's position, he'll have to come up with a Ratzinger-remix of "Vatican Rag." And don't try to tell me that a new arrangement of "Wehrner von Braun" for present circumstances isn't long overdue:

Maybe something like: "Don't call them torture fetishists./ Say rather they're lifelong fraternity pledges./ 'Stick foreign objects into prisoners/ And information comes out./ Who cares if it's nonsense?'/ Says Rumsfeld the lout.'"

On the other hand, nobody will ever improve on Lehrer's cheer for his alma mater:

Fight fiercely Harvard, fight, fight, fight!

Demonstrate to them our skill.

Albeit they possess the might,

Nonetheless we have the will.

Although that's not a huge exaggeration of Harvard's actual fight songs. To which the only response is, "Break through that Crimson line/ Their strength to defy." Pwns them every time.

John Schwenkler replies to my post yesterday and he's got a good point: Bill Kristol's weaseliness doesn't bear on the truth of his claim that John McCain and Barack Obama have no significant foreign policy disputes except for Iraq --- though taking Iraq as a discountable exception is a strong token of Kristol's weaseliness. John provides a number of reasons to think Kristol might be right. Some of them don't strike me as all that revealing. Obama's campaigning for Joe Lieberman in the '06 Connecticut Democratic primary was almost certainly party, senate, and incumbency hackery rather than an endorsement of Lieberman's views; Obama did, after all, endorse Ned Lamont in the general election, and who among us can't cheer Obama literally putting Lieberman in a corner and giving him a time-out as the greatest thing to happen on Capitol Hill since the Gingrich-Clinton government shutdown?

But John's general point is well-taken. Obama has indeed been shading one way, thenZoroaster: The original neocon prophet the other, sending disparate signals to disparate constituencies, with national security and foreign policy issues as much as with everything else. So somebody is bound to be disappointed by an Obama administration and it could well be me.

Still, there are reasons for anti-warriors to have the audacity of hope. If you look at Obama's rhetorically bellicose speech to AIPAC, for example, you get a clear sense of his overall political goals: first and foremost, given the venue, placating Jews who fear he might be insufficiently pro-Israeli. As Bernard Avishai notes here at Jewcy, coming out for an "undivided Jerusalem" sounds like Israeli maximalism to an American ear, but in Israel is code for the moderate peacenik position of the Labor party, whereas Likudniks speak of "united Jerusalem" (that's pretty sly if deliberate, though it doesn't get around the downside of pissing off Arabs). And his immediate climb-down with its clarification of 'undivided' should allay worries that he thinks the American government has any right or duty to intervene against the Israelis and Palestinians coming to peace on whatever terms they agree upon. But more broadly, he was trying to invert the Republicans' Bitch-Slap Theory of Electoral Politics (to use the technical term); specifically, his attack on McCain and the Republicans' obstinate refusal to engage adversarial powers diplomatically was a proxy for attacking their manhood as well as their intelligence --- overly cerebral Democrats tend to do the latter and allow the former to be done to them, which is why they keep losing. That's the point, also, of comparing the scale of the Iranian threat to the Soviet Union; the implicit message is, "what are you bed-wetters afraid of?" (it's easier to get behind this sort of thing when it has truth on its side).

There's one other reason I don't share Daniel Larison and Brendan O'Neill's pessimism about Obama's foreign policy views, namely that I don't uniformly share Daniel, Brendan, and (I suspect) John's foreign policy views. Which highlights the significance of John's last example of Obama disappointing anti-warriors, albeit not for the reason (I think) John cited it. Robert Kagan claims Obama as an ideological comrade in this op-ed. And Kagan, unlike Kristol, is an honest man; but let us not forget that Kagan claims everyone in American history who doesn't see eye-to-eye with Pat Buchanan as an ideological comrade. While Kagan identifies Obama as a kindred spirit in the Washington Post, Eric Trager of Commentary pens this woeful op-ed in the New York Post rubbishing Obama as an "isolationist" (Trager's "beg the question" error is only the fourth or fifth most embarrassing, which tells you something). To be sure, the term 'isolationism', as used in contemporary neoconservative journalism, is strictly and literally meaningless, but we have a clear enough sense of what meaning the neocons who employ it are gesturing at, i.e., finding an all-purpose epithet with which to pronounce anathema anyone who dissents from their foreign policy views, however diverse those dissents. Which is exactly what's going on with Kagan, only mean-spirited where Kagan is empathetic.

The bottom line is that the Zoroastrianism that marks all the other particulars of neoconservative thought (at least, the thoughts of actually existing neoconservatives) also marks their assessments of who is and isn't playing for their team. If you're not a neocon, you're an isolationist, and vice versa. There is no greyscale, no nuance, no universe of ideas at all more plentiful than two equal and opposite spheres in a void, just unsolicited, smothering camaraderie, or else execration. That's what animated George Bush's counterproductive "with us or against us" nonsense; and because these people take it as a point of intellectual sophistication as well as pride never to learn anything from their mistakes (or at all), it animates John McCain's platform of giving everyone on earth a choice of a black hat or a white hat, fatally undermining any international institution that won't submit to blunt force, throwing Russia and China out of the G-8, and inaugurating a new cold war.

Such reductive, binary dogmatism pervades neoconservative thinking at every level. Here's Eli Lake, "one of the reasonable ones," ditching 'Islamofascism' in favor of 'Islamic supremacism', because there simply has to be some singular common concept binding all politically-engaged Muslim fundamentalists, regardless of insuperable doctrinal and ethnic discrepancies and antipathies. What would neoconservatives who aren't as reasonable as Eli --- the ones who go apoplectic over what they think is taught in a madrassa (Perso-Arabic: 'school') --- make of the fact that Iraqi schoolchildren of the early 80s, i.e. the young Iraqi adults of today, were taught that Persians are "animals...created in the shape of humans," whom, like Jews and flies, God should not have created? To those of us outside the cocoon with a broad view of the historical and strategic picture, claims of an axis running through al Qaeda from Pyongyang to Tehran and thither to Baghdad look patently absurd, and attempts to prove its existence at this late stage laughable. But if you're as certain of The Connection as you are that you have two hands, any instance, real or imagined, of diverse actors with diverse views cooperating tactically on any scale no matter how small, no matter how briefly, no matter how many degrees separate them, no matter whether they resume fighting immediately thereafter, is bound to strike you as impressive confirmation of the pre-theoretical beliefs you can scarcely bring yourself to doubt.

The point, to make a long story short, is that what we're dealing with is not so much an ideology as an epistemic pathology whose varieties are a range of more and less virulent strains. And though there are reasons to doubt the depth and sincerity of Barack Obama's commitment not to instigate any new wars of imperialism --- including the political pressures he'll experience regardless of his sincerity; though if the career-minded pragmatic calculus doesn't favor anti-warriors now, it never will --- what Kristol and Kagan have to say isn't one of those reasons. The fact that a neoconservative asserts that anyone agrees or disagrees with his views should affect your credence exactly as much as the fact that a neoconservative asserts anything at all.

As I've noted before, taking Bill Kristol at face value, rather than with a view to theBill Kristol: Would that grin lie? agenda he's trying to advance, is perilous. So Kristol's remarks at AIPAC arguing that "[t]here are actually no [significant foreign policy] disputes...with the exception of Iraq" between Barack Obama and John McCain --- a scant month and a half after Kristol accused Obama of being a crypto-Communist, and the very same day that he accused Obama of being insufficiently patriotic --- are baffling on several levels. Fortunately, John Schwenkler very nearly found the decoder ring:

[C]ould it be - could it be? - that, sly, unscrupulous, and politically sensitive weasel that he is, Mr. Kristol is aware that, on pretty much every foreign policy issue at stake in this election (including, of course, those issues with respect to which the candidates' disagreements are obviously inescapable), the voting populace is largely in sympathy with (what are at least perceived to be) the views of Senator Obama? Could it be that Ezra Klein's greatest dream - that the media will actually report on the differences between the presidential candidates - is Bill Kristol's worst nightmare, and that for this reason he is taking steps to prevent this from happening?

That's almost exactly right up until the last point. Yes, it's true that throwing up a wall of bullshit to deflect attention from your candidate's deeply unpopular views is a potentially effective means of helping him creep to victory on the strength of contentless non-issues --- like, say, whether his opponent is an insufficiently patriotic crypto-Communist. But to conclude that's all Kristol is up to doesn't give him nearly enough credit for a long-term vision, at least when it comes to tactical moves in the Republican party's internal turf wars. Campaigning on xenophobia, guilt by association, and red-baiting has desperate and unintentionally self-parodic qualities this year that it didn't have as recently as 2004. The likelihood is that John McCain will lose; if and when he loses, the multilateral truce among neos, paleos, reformists, and GOP hacks --- which is about as fragile as the truce in Basra to begin with --- is going to shatter before Obama's victory speech ends.

The neocons are in a decidedly weak position. Fairly or not, it's their foreign policy more than anything else that has made the name of the GOP radioactive --- and even worse for Republican partisans, has destroyed the party's nearly 40-year-old, frequently decisive advantage on national security. And though the Republicans somehow stumbled into nominating their only candidate with a prayer of victory, they exposed the neocons to even more risk by choosing, in John McCain, the most prominent exponent of their philosophy in American politics. Honest neocons like Lawrence Kaplan readily concede that neoconservatism's future rests on McCain's shoulders. Kristol, on the other hand, is trying to reframe the debate to obscure its ramifications for his ideology in case McCain loses.

Apologist For Islamism?: Well doesn't he look like one? Writing at Pajamas Media, New York Post film critic Kyle Smith gives Jon Favreau's new Iron Man movie 3 out of 4 stars. Which is a pretty generous rating, considering that Smith has discovered that Iron Man and Iron Man --- both the film and the character --- are rooting for our defeat in Iraq, Afghanistan, and who knows where else. That's right ladies and gentlemen, the tentacles of the Islamofascist octopus stretch farther than you thought; indeed, they've poisoned the #1 grossing movie in America. Fortunately Smith was able to recognize the threat and sound the alarum --- otherwise Ali Jon al Favreau bin Omar might have succeeded in corroding the will of armchair amateur warriors that's so crucial to maintaining neoconservatives' paranoid cocoon our struggle against Islamic radicalism.

And how did Smith manage this startling deduction? Iron Man is "another America-as-root-of-all-evil message" because at some point along the way, Robert Downey, Jr./Tony Stark/Iron Man, a weapons manufacturer, decides to get out of the biz when he "realizes his products can't be kept out of evil hands." And not to give anything away, but the comic book Iron Man is basically an ally of the US government, and the film in no way makes any radical revision of the character.

That's. It.

Iron Man doesn't even weakly imply that the terrorists are anything but bad guys. It doesn't imply that Americans are anything but good guys. It doesn't imply that US foreign or military policy is in any way objectionable or even flawed; it doesn't imply that US private citizens are involved in objectionable enterprises. It merely suggests that if terrorists were to get hold of weapons that happen to be made by an American, they would do bad things with them.

So apparently, unless you agree that anything made in the USA is so pure, holy, and righteous that it'll repel Islamofascists like garlic on vampires, or perhaps melt them like Nazis in front of the Ark of the Covenant, then you, my friend, lack moral clarity. Don't despair though: There's no shortage of people who have the moral clarity to see that waterboarding isn't torture, and who will be more than happy to set you right.

Observing the wreckage of Smith's review, Julian Sanchez writes: "What’s intolerable is any hint of ambiguity, any hint of doubt. This is the fragile insistence of a movement that has lost its confidence."

But has the mishmash of neoconservatism, psychopathological vicarious living through soldiers in the field, and apolitical belligerent nationalism that constitute Bush Republicanism ever tolerated a hint of ambiguity or doubt? I distinctly remember the roll call of the Ships of the Decent in 2002, embarking on their Iliadic journey to Baghdad by sacrificing former comrades who voiced doubts about the wisdom of the enterprise to appease Artemis Ahmad Chalabi. (I remember because I was part of that cadre.) And I remember the Glorious Summer of War in 2003, when it was pretty much the same story, except with more smugness and premature triumphalism.

Suppose, at any time from the moment the dust of the towers settled, until... --- what time is it now? --- you suggested that invading sovereign states under conditions of dubious international legitimacy, occupying them in a manner indistinguishable from what someone seeking to stoke a nationalist uprising would have done, and establishing a regime of torture in lieu of a functioning judicial system, weren't the awesomest and decentest ideas ever. In that case, you can be sure some self-righteous scrivener would be only too happy to accuse you of cheering for our defeat.

On the other hand, there is plenty of independent evidence for Julian's claim that the war party has lost its confidence, cf. their apparent determination to run the principal exponent of their ideology for president not on any platform, not for any positive program, not against any presidential candidate, but against a few irrelevant petrified relics of the 60s radical left.

Former Jewcer Abe Greenwald is taking a bit of a beating in "Contentions"'s commentsGreasy Kid Stuff section after Andrew Sullivan linked to a Greenwald post extracting armchair political analysis from armchair psychoanalysis of Barack Obama's scandalous substitution of orange juice for coffee at an Indiana diner a few weeks ago. Sez Greenwald:

I realized what the diner incident was: it was childish. The switch from juice to coffee is a rite of adulthood. It’s not that Obama seemed to hold himself above the coffee drinkers. It’s that he seemed to lag behind them. He’s still on fruit juice while the adults are sipping bitter and bracing coffee.

Uh-huh. The tone of the comments ranged from "This is hilariously bad" to "This is the most retarded article I ever sat through to read about politics" to "God you are a vacuous twit."

But that's just being uncharitable. As one of the Commentary stalwarts puts it, "the orange juice...was mainly a device (what writers call the 'hook') to draw the reader’s [sic -- there is more than one Commentary reader] interest." And indeed, Greenwald's argument for Obama's essential immaturity is more substantive than his observation about breakfast beverage preferences. The real point (what writers call the "nut") is to call attention to Obama's proposed increase in the capital gains tax "for purposes," in Obama's words, "of fairness."

QED. That's not fair!, Greenwald notes, is the whinge of a petulant child, not a grown-up senator and would be president.

He's right. What mature adult --- besides John Rawls, and every political theorist of every ideological orientation since Rawls --- has taken the argument that considerations of fairness should constrain policy choices seriously (if only, in the case of grown-up conservatives and libertarians, to disagree)? Why, it's almost as if there's more than one side to the argument over whether to increase, decrease, or maintain the current rate of capital gains taxes and it would behoove opponents of an increase to actually make their case on its merits instead of throwing up a wall of pseudo-psychological bullshit. (My position on capital gains taxes is far from the standard liberal one, incidentally, but you don't get to take my side if you think the reason to oppose a capital gains tax hike is to help Republicans win elections.)

Still, two can play this game. As of 9:48 pm last night, on the website of the flagship magazine of the conservative movement, there were 7 mentions of "health care," 15 mentions of "Iraq," and 230 references to Jeremiah Wright. (Commentary fares marginally better --- a closer to 1:1 ratio of giddy freak show coverage to minimally significant issues, though the deluge of fact-free hackery inundating the divisor of that ratio is a thing to behold.)

What's a fitting description for pundits fixated on preachers and orange juice and flag pins and Weathermen and laughably affecting connections to rural and blue-collar communities, to the near total exclusion of any cogent discussion of two actual wars, potential future wars, skyrocketing debt, swelling generational deficits, and (literally) crumbling infrastructure? "Inane" and "irrelevant" always seemed to me to hit the mark, but --- hat tip to Greenwald for the suggestion --- "infantile" works pretty well too.

Looks like our favorite neocon fruit loop is at it again. Righteously indignant about a comment on The Huffington Post suggesting Nancy Reagan should go ahead and die in her tub (the comment was in response to a story on Reagan's recent fall), Bill O'Reilly declared that Arianna Huffington is no different than a Nazi or a KKK member. (It should be noted that Huffington, the co-founder and EIC of HuffPo, is not the author of the Reagan-targeted comment.)

Really, Bill? A Nazi? Yes, he so deftly reasoned, because they "both want people to die." Oh, Bill, you slay me. (Not like how the Nazis slew 6 million Jews, but in a funny way.)

Even Bill's O'Reilly Factor guest, treify conservative blogger Mary Katharine Ham, ended up defending Huffington, all the while seeming to quietly acknowledge that Billy boy had finally flipped his fucking lid. Click here to see the clip in all its unhinged glory:

Michael Kinsley once described the ideological michegaas of the New Republic in the 80's like this. Liberals who found fault with the magazine's staunch anti-Communism would, upon being thrown a bone, remark, "even the New Republic says..." And conservatives, who hated the magazine's position on health care, could always find something they could sink their incisors into, upon which they'd cry, "even the New Republic says..."

Jewcy has its own special relationship with its readership, half of which thinks we're warmongering Zionist neocon Straussians, the other half of which thinks we're drooling anarcho-socialists with nothing nice to say about a beautiful tradition that stretches from Moses to Sandy Koufax.

This email just came into our slush box. I wanted to share it with the first half of our readership:

Are you guys ever planning to be balanced in your articles or is everything going to be the secular Jewish perspective on any topic... which inevitably tilts toward the Left... and I know Jews... when we tilt left, we REALLY tilt left.

How about some balance. Every time I bother to read articles on your website it's like reading the Daily Kos but with a Jewish spice in this Liberal Chulant.

I have nothing against Liberals, but if you're going to be a Liberal publication, then just say so... those of us who are not liberal would respect you a lot more if you did. We'd be even pleasantly surprised if you'd have more substantive articles or debates... kind of like the Harris vs. Prager debate.

That debate was the only reason I even signed up for your newsletters and I'm "THIS" close to unsubscribing after reading the drivel about Mulsim's in America that just got published. Please... How about some balance... There is something wrong with you all if your first thought after reading that article wasn't, "Hmmm... how come this guy is ignoring the daily, hourly, by the minute anti-semitism in the Muslim media year-round." Just check out www.memri.com to see it for yourselves... Professors debating on Al Jazeera if Jews really are pigs, and all the rest of it.

Hope I don't unsubscribe... this was promising... a young Jewish e-zine... but I can't stomach it anymore.

And Eli Valley's hooded-baby-turtle penis shrunk three sizes that day.

A lengthy and fascinating interview with Joshua Muravchik is in the latest edition of Democratiya. Muravchik talks about his personal journey from the socialist left to neo-conservatism and then goes on to look at Iraq and Islamist terror and the neo-con responses.

I've been contemplating socialism and the left in some of my posts here and so this passage from Muravchik was interesting:

I kept wrestling with the central mystery of socialism. How could something that desired to make things better have instead made things so much worse? Was it that socialists were bad people? From my own experience I am still convinced that most people who embraced the idea of socialism did so from a humane feeling - they wanted the world to be kinder and gentler. Yet socialism's most important results were quite the opposite. Of course, social democrats did things to humanise society when they were in government, but the overall record of socialism, when you add up both sides of the ledger, is quite appalling. 

I concluded that the central problem is asking politics to do something it can't do - to provide the 'leap' that Marx wrote about. This ambition departs entirely from the realities of human existence, which is imperfect and tragic. Life may not be nasty and brutish but it is short and it will always have its share of sadness and disappointment. Religion offers answers to both the shortness of life and the disappointments it contains - whether or not you accept the truth of any particular religion or religion per se. Politics can't do that. If you understand that, you feel a certain constraint on what you seek to achieve in politics, which at the most can offer amelioration. But the socialist thinks that through politics you can transform human life itself. Michael Harrington - a leader of mine back then whom I admired - once wrote that socialism would create 'an utterly new society in which some of the fundamental limitations of human existence have been transcended.' [5] But no political system can do that. Worse, once you say it can you have a logically sound utilitarian argument for killing some people in order to get there. If those people are standing in the way of the new, higher, happier level of human existence, well...

By the way, if you are not familiar with Democratiya - a free-to-read, online journal of what could loosely be called 'Eustonite Internationalists' then take a look through their latest edition - including a speech from Tony Blair - and also their archive which is full of interesting and serious material.

With boy pundit Matthew Yglesias, it's difficult to discern where the attempt at serious political analysis ends and sheer buffoonery begins. Or, perhaps I mean where the sheer buffoonery ends and the attempt at serious political analysis begins. The dilemma is on full display in this post from yesterday.

First read the post, which is thankfully brief. Yglesias's premise is that the Clinton administration was doing a fine job tackling international terrorism until the Bush administration came into power. This contention -- while debatable -- is significant only insofar as Yglesias wishes to cast doubts on his own sanguine assumptions about the competency of the Clinton administration (perhaps this will this merit him an "Yglesias Award" nomination, inexplicably doled out by Andrew Sullivan for those writers daring to express views at odds with their own political constituencies). Yglesias links to a 6-year-old news story about Clinton's then-outgoing United Nations Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, who, in final statements to the world body before the inauguration of George W. Bush stated that containment of Hussein, "while it is far from satisfactory," was nonetheless necessary, expressed frustration with Hussein's refusal to allow weapons inspectors into the country, and promised that the administration of George W. Bush, like that of his father, would also have to deal with the lingering problem of the Ba'athist regime in Baghdad. There's really nothing here that's in the least controversial or was ever disputed by knowledgeable observers, except, perhaps, by the likes of Michael Moore, Noam Chomsky, Ron Paul, and, it now seems, Matthew Yglesias.

To Yglesias, Holbrooke -- now a senior foreign policy advisor to Senator Hillary Clinton and a sure bet for Secretary of State should she become president -- is damaged goods because, like nearly everyone else at the time (including, one should note, Yglesias himself), he believed that Saddam's "willingness to be cruel internally is not unique in the world, but the combination of that and his willingness to export his problems makes him a clear and present danger at all times." This statement does not at all indicate support for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and the subsequent occupation of Iraq (again, which Yglesias supported). It's merely a boilerplate expression of the policy of the Clinton administration (under whose watch the Iraq Liberation Act, making "regime change" United States policy, passed overwhelmingly in the House, unanimously in the Senate, and was enacted into law).

Though he doesn't come out and say it, this is a not-so-subtle attempt on Yglesias's part to retroactively group Holbrooke in with the evil-doers, the neo-cons, admission into whose fold today requires little more than "frequently call[ing] attention to the unprovoked aggression of despotic regimes (e.g. Iran and Syria), the violation of human rights in other countries, and advocates the moral superiority of democratic countries in international affairs." (Holbrooke, at least in the excerpts cited by Yglesias, is only guilty of the first two offenses). The word "neo-con" is now used by the net-left to describe anyone to their immediate right who doesn't agree with them. Yglesias's entire schtick is that the entire Beltway "foreign policy community" is a corrupt lot whose supposedly consensus opinions have proven a disaster for the country; his simplistic, uninformed, and self-aggrandizing view of how American foreign policy is formed groups people like Richard Holbrooke and Frank Gaffney into the same boat and assumes that nothing less than a Jacobin, intellectual purge and the subsequent elevation of Matthew Yglesias, Ezra Klein, LaRouchite Robert Dreyfuss and their ilk to prominent positions in the liberal punditocracy and the return of Zbigniew Brzezniski into the State Department will cure Washington's poisoned think-tank and diplomatic cultures and bring American foreign policy back on track.

For too long, journalists (myself included) have taken Yglesias seriously; we've treated him as someone whose writings actually merit measured and contemplative responses. Perhaps this due consideration is given to the fact that Yglesias has a perch at The Atlantic. But even bloggers (as opposed to actual journalists, who, you know, actually do things like travel abroad or pick up the phone before opining about international affairs) ought to have an elementary understanding of history and logic. The proper way to treat Yglesias is demonstrated by the indefatigable New York Sun national security reporter Eli Lake, who does not suffer fools lightly, in a comment to said post:

Matt,

How can this be? Everyone knows the neocons pressured the CIA and lied to the American public to start a needless war for Israel. Everyone knows that the State Department and the CIA knew, just knew, that Iraq was no threat whatsoever. I mean the only explanation is that Holbrooke must have been a neocon. But if he's a neocon, well what was he doing in the Clinton administration that was paying so much attention to the real threats to America? Maybe you and Matthew Duss could explain all this to[o].

Eli

By Yglesias's reasoning, anyone who expressed views similar to those of Richard Holbrooke in 2001 (meaning almost the entire Democratic Party foreign policy establishment and many liberal journalists, including Yglesias), is not "prescient" and their views on foreign policy ought be discounted. This is obvious nonsense, and I'm not sure if Yglesias is even aware that he's writing himself out of the bounds of respectable debate with such ruthlessly unforgiving historical revisionism. But this is what the vaunted "Reality Based Community" has become; a band of useful idiots better known as what Lake calls "The Credulosphere," whose collected writings, if they were a film, would be anthologized as "Say Anything."

Whatever his intent, Yglesias's logic demands that we stop listening to him. Maybe he'll just follow his own advice, make our lives easier, and stop pontificating.

What Would Plato Do?: Allan BloomIf one were looking to uncover the evolution of neoconservatism as a cultural attitude or cast of mind, one could do worse than imagine Saul Bellow's Augie March growing up to become Saul Bellow's Moses Herzog. An inner-city Romantic -- a Columbus of those near-at-hand -- gobbles up Western literature and feels his lungs expand with the air of radical hope. He then morphs, after a series of punishing defeats, into a hard-bitten pessimist clapping out angry but unsent letters to statesmen and public figures.

Augie is whiling away his time in Mexico when he encounters the haunted and hunted figure of Leon Trotsky:

I was excited by this famous figure, and I believe what it was about him that stirred me up was the instant impression he gave--no matter about the old heap he rode in or the peculiarity of his retinue--of navigation by the great stars, of the highest considerations, of being fit to speak the most important human words and universal terms. When you are reduced to a different kind of navigation from this high starry kind as I was and are only sculling on the shallow bay, crawling from one clam-rake to the next, it's stirring to have a glimpse of deep water greatness. And, even more than an established, an exiled greatness, because the exile was a sign to me of the persistence at the highest things.

Herzog is slowly losing his mind (and that's all right with him), surveying a different source of marine tranquility:

His breathing had become freer. His heart was greatly stirred by the open horizon; the deep colors; the faint iodine pungency of the Atlantic rising from weeds and mollusks; the white, fine, heavy sand; but principally by the green transparency as he looked down to the stony bottom webbed with golden lines. Never still. If his soul could cast a reflection so brilliant, and so intensely sweet, he might beg God to make such use of him. But that would be too simple. But that would be too childish. The actual sphere is not clear like this, but turbulent, angry. A vast human action is going on. Death watches. So if you have some happiness, conceal it. And when your heart is full, keep your mouth shut also.

It's easy to judge these two passages as the before and after outlooks of a man who was strongly influenced by the late classicist Allan Bloom.

Author of The Closing of the American Mind, a finely written if slightly overwrought manifesto on behalf of tradition’s army in the "culture wars" of the 1980's, Bloom had argued that the Western canon was a monument to human achievement that should never be threatened with demolition by the impending forces of relativism or identity theory. He was a student of Leo Strauss and a champion of the Athens-to-Jerusalem school of philosophy, which means his trenchant analysis of the ever-lowering standards of university education was therefore informed by a Hellenized Judaism that was itself the synthesis of competing traditions.

A well-intentioned but reckless attempt to open young minds to self-criticism, Bloom argued, had instead welded those minds shut to ancient wisdom and truth. “Truth” itself was now a scare-quoted controversy, a shibboleth invented by “cultural imperialists” looking to plunder the heritage and resources of other no less august civilizations. In this context, all human knowledge was relegated to sociology, the brute aggregation of facts, which could never be assigned moral values.

Bloom further inveighed against specialization within the academy – freshmen going premed and foregoing Plato or Rousseau – because he saw it as a deadening side effect of materialism. (For a conservative, Bloom was no fan of big-money careerism; he thought a life of the mind was its own return on tuition.)

I bring this all up because Rachel Donadio has got an interesting essay in the New York Times Book Review about how the culture wars have terminated 20 years on. I was most struck by one aspect of her research: Both the left and the right now agree that the dilution of the classical liberal arts curriculum came at too high a price.

We all know of David Horowitz’s proposed bill of Academic Freedom to ensure that Adam Smith and Bill Buckley get as much as classroom time as the Vagina Monologues. But consider the following:

Martha Nussbaum hated Bloom’s book, but now concedes the very problems he alerted us to have resulted in the “loss of respect for the humanities as essential ingredients of democracy.” She adds, “Our nation, like most nations of the world, is devaluing the humanities vis-à-vis science and technology, so constant vigilance is required lest these disciplines be cut” – sentiments with which the ghost of Abe Ravelstein, Bellow's fictionalized Bloom character in the last novel he wrote, would no doubt be nodding along.

Louis Menand says: “The big question for humanists is, How do we explain why what we do is important for people who aren’t humanists? That’s been tough, really tough.” Hasn’t it, though?

Even the dean of postmodernism, Stanley Fish, who tells Donadio that “the message the neoconservatives were putting out, that universities are hotbeds of atheism, sexual promiscuity, corrosive relativism and a host of suspect philosophies being imported from France and Germany, actually took quite strongly with the intended audience,” is hard at work on a book entitled Save the World on Your Own Time. What’s that book about?

[It] argues that academics should teach, not proselytize. In his view, “the invasion of political agendas” into the classroom in the ’60s and ’70s was “extremely dangerous,” since it meant classrooms could become battlegrounds for political demagoguery.

The hell, you say! (As a sidenote, Fish fails to account for Bloom’s atheism, his open-secret homosexuality, and his fluency in French and German philosophy – from Rousseau to Nietzsche – which he wrote had been muddled and misunderstood upon importation to the U.S.)

For my own part, I never bridled at the multiculturalist esteem granted to Toni Morrison or Chinua Achebe, writers that are typically met with as much venom by conservative critics as Dostoevsky was met with by Nabokov.

Defenders of the canon should go back and read what the canon had to put up with in its own time and place. Standards were by no means universal. Byron thought Wordsworth was a hack, Pope had his famous rivalry with Dryden. These were equally febrile “wars” that lasted decades but eventually petered out before the more discerning eyes of posterity. The one crucial catch then was that Byron, Wordsworth, Pope and Dryden all knew about the Greeks, the stories of the Bible, and had a common arsenal of literary references with which to combat one another. Not so today's readers of Beloved.

However, there is cause for optimism in a cultural landscape in which Shakespeare's Twelfth Night is "adapted" for a Caribbean setting, as it was in my old college. One of the blessings of globalization is that it has made Western literature the gold standard of those cultures whose native literature the West is now instructed to exalt, perhaps to unwarranted degrees. You have to read the dead white males before you attempt to unhorse them.

And for those who do pay tribute to a border-neutral literary heritage, Salman Rushdie, V.S. Naipal and Haruki Murakami would be unimaginable without Flaubert, Balzac and Dickens. (Where is P.G. Wodehouse nightstand reading? In India.)

Bellow’s scabrous line against the multiculturalists was: “Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans?'”

The answers have become increasingly clear: Tolstoy and Proust.

Revisiting the Canon Wars - Books - Review - New York Times

Regarding Leo Strauss, there is something particularly bizarre in the fact that the discussion always turns to politics. Not Politics in the Aristotelean sense, but everyday politics; the transient concerns and resentments of the current moment. Strauss, who thought in terms of the entirety of Western civilization, would likely have found this quite bizarre.

The truth beyond the debate over whether Strauss is the neo-con devil incarnate or simply misunderstood is that Strauss probably would not have cared one way or the other. His primary concern was, in fact, the role of the philosopher in society; both in historical and theoretical terms.

Strauss, like other Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany such as Hannah Arendt, struggled throughout his career with the question of what, exactly, had gone so horribly wrong in Germany and in the West as a whole. He was, in other words, trying to wrap his head around the fact of Auschwitz; and the sense that Auschwitz was not some horrifying aberration from the Western tradition but the fulfillment of something dark and terrible at the heart of that tradition.

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But hear the morning's injured weeping, and know why:
Cities and men have fallen; the will of the Unjust
Has never lost its power; still, all princes must
Employ the Fairly-Noble unifying Lie.

-- Auden, "In Time of War"

"Not even wrong" is how scientists dispense with bullshit and incoherence in their field. It's a riposte tantamount to telling a windy fool at a bar, "You may be right," and then walking away to finish your drink in peace. In the last five years Leo Strauss has had his legacy run through every lens of distortion and every mind given to feverish falsification -- a sad irony for the philosopher who thought that one of the greatest dangers to modern culture was "fanatical obscurantism."

Strauss' own untenderized prose, often believed to demonstrate how murky and sinister was the man behind it, is explicable by something much less sexy than his alleged adherence to lying with good intent: He was German. The sentences are long and difficult. Even in translation. Ask a German.

Now comes a fascinating look at the most misunderstood philosopher since Socrates by the very students -- "disciples" is a touch much -- he trained. The most notable of this bunch is Nathan Tarcov, a political science professor at (where else?) the University of Chicago. You should know three things about Tarcov. The first is that he was against the toppling of Saddam Hussein. The second is that he's uncovered some of the scant evidence of Strauss' well-guarded opinions on modern American politics; the old man having been quite mums throughout his career about anything other than the first shining city on a hill, Athens. Forget that he's credited, or blamed, with spawning a whole generation of Plato's Republicans.

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Christopher Hitchens has one of the most beguiling presences I've ever encountered in a media figure. He has that booming tenor that reminds one of Dylan Thomas reciting his mellifluous poetry. I hear he has a similar penchant for the 'hard stuff' as well. The words and ideas flow out of Hitchens mouth smooth as honey. Their power is almost magnetic. The high-toned English accent doesn't hurt either.

But when you step back and really examine what he's saying it's pretty much all bilge. Well, OK, maybe not all. But so much of it is that you feel that smooth, suave delivery is a betrayal or deception of sorts.

So how much does Christopher Hitchens really know about Islam? Apparently, not terribly much. He participated in a panel discussion on Warren Olney's To the Point. Towards the end of the discussion, he responded to a Muslim scholar's claim that Islam derives from the word for "peace." Here is what Hitchens said (audio):

Islam, by the way, does not mean "peace." It means "surrender," "prostration."

As even a Jew who knows any Hebrew can tell you, Islam certainly does derive from the word salaam or shalom in Hebrew. As Svend White, an Islamic studies specialist who writes Akram's Razor tells me:

...One can spin this *somewhat* by emphasizing the fact that the type of "peace" is a kind of surrender...

What is misleading about Hitchens' statement is he neglects that "Islam" connotes the peaceful "surrender" of a believer to the will of God, but not the "surrender" of a non-believer before the force or power of Islam.  Such peaceful surrender, which some see as the essence of faith, is a feature of many of the world's religions.  Hitchens is spinning Islam as a religion of violence and domination. So it's convenient to distort the religion's name as well. We see here the power of a guileful ideologue used to stir the pot of intolerance and Muslim-bashing.

Few will argue that there are not serious issues that need to be addressed between Islam and other world religions and that some Muslims defame their own religion by claiming to embody it as they kill the innocent. But Hitchens is merely a provocateur, rather than someone willing to engage in a serious dialogue on the subject.

From http://bgamall.stumbleupon.com Regarding 9/11, Bush acted as if everything was under control. He is normally a man of action. Why did he just sit in this classroom for the time that he did without taking any action? If the Bush admin allowed this attack, it must have been under control,right?

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My Anglophilia knows no bounds. One of the reasons I assiduously follow the political spats on the other side of the Atlantic is because they're so much more candid about ideological differences than what passes for partisan debate or controversy over here. You will still find the odd editor of a liberal broadsheet in London going moist in the orbs to remember the glory years of Leonid Brezhnev, or to recall how Stalin and Mao's nationalist pas de deux might have ended more amicably if it weren't for the machinations of Tito. These are old feuds that should be bygones, and they scarcely resonant with, say, the AARP readership of The Nation, a greybeard demographic that preoccupies itself more with the revisionist innocence of Alger Hiss, meaning it still denies that he was a fellow traveler and Soviet spy.

I've had my problems with Robert Service in the past, chiefly because I thought his Stalin biography was mediocre where it was orthodox and bad where it was heterodox.  But look at what happens when a scholar of Russian history writes a book called Comrades! that attempts to trace the lineaments common to all Communist regimes in the 20th century. Look at what idiot Kremlin lickspittles at the Guardian go and do to him:

All this I mentioned repeatedly in my book, but it was not quite what one reviewer, the Guardian's Seumas Milne, wanted. He denied that I stated that communist leaders unleashed a drive towards industrial and cultural modernisation. Next, he alleged that I followed a "neoconservative" agenda. He also maintained that the so-called "revisionist" school of Soviet history was not getting a fair wind in the western media.

His Stalinoid form and content of argument involved deliberate misrepresentation. It would seem that Milne and his like consider it fair game to denounce anybody who comes to a considered anti-communist standpoint as a neocon. This is a shoddy way to handle a serious political discussion. If this farrago had not come from the editor of the comment pages of one of our national newspapers, it would not be worth bothering about. What is more, Milne is typical of a more general trend that retains a nostalgia for communism, and it is a trend that ought to be repudiated.

There's barely even a conventional school of Soviet history in the western media since most of the stuff we know about the USSR comes from evidence that has only just been released and siphoned through. 

What a shame Service didn't go on record one way or the other about the Iraq war. Then Milne and his Hundred Acre Wood of Red hacks would have had easier epithets to hurl at him.