Category: Political Philosophy

The Other War In Iraq

Instapundit has a lengthy note from a Colonel in Baghdad on the recent fighting in Basra. He observes that the driving force in that conflict was not Moqtada al-Sadr, but the lack of services being provided by the Iraqi Government. Indeed, that highlights a bigger issue: over the long term, the biggest problem in Iraq isn’t terrorism. Al-Qaeda in Iraq has been largely crushed. Moqtada al-Sadr was forced to cry uncle and is viewed by all as an Iranian stooge. While there are still acts of violence in Iraq, they’re less and less the sort of organized attacks that we’ve seen over the course of the war.

The real issue is going to be corruption. The biggest roadblock to democratization is corruption, and it’s endemic in Iraq. The Iraqis have a source of revenue in oil, and it’s enough to sustain their development. The problem is without a system of accountability and transparency, that money won’t go to where it’s needed.

Over time, we’re going to need a new “surge”—but one that focuses on working with the Iraqi government to stop corruption. We’re in a unique position to help, and working alongside the Iraqis we need to develop systems that help make sure money goes to where it is truly needed and those that steal from the Iraqi treasury are brought to justice.

Most NGOs focus on issues other than helping improve the rule of law in foreign nations—and it seems counterintuitive to think that accountants rather than aid workers can truly help developing nations. Yet, if a nation is to transition successfully from autocracy to democracy, fiscal accountability is absolutely crucial. Many democratizing states fail to democratize because the government does not act with accountability to the people, which causes the people to lose faith in government.

The US needs to work with NGOs like Transparency International and the Iraqi government to create a more democratic and accountable political and financial system for the Iraqi people. We have made great strides in terms of fighting terrorism and providing security—yet that alone won’t be enough to make Iraq a strong and functional nation. The future of Iraq hinges on the ability of the government to provide critical services while remaining accountable to the people. If it cannot do this, then the Iraqi people will be forced to turn to militia leaders for help, and Iraqi society will fragment. This does not have to come to pass, but in order to prevent it we have to start looking beyond basic security and towards governmental reform.

The Creation Of A Conservative

David Mamet has a frank and amazing essay in The Village Voice about how he ended up going from being a “brain-dead liberal” to a conservative:

I wrote a play about politics (November, Barrymore Theater, Broadway, some seats still available). And as part of the “writing process,” as I believe it’s called, I started thinking about politics. This comment is not actually as jejune as it might seem. Porgy and Bess is a buncha good songs but has nothing to do with race relations, which is the flag of convenience under which it sailed.

But my play, it turned out, was actually about politics, which is to say, about the polemic between persons of two opposing views. The argument in my play is between a president who is self-interested, corrupt, suborned, and realistic, and his leftish, lesbian, utopian-socialist speechwriter.

The play, while being a laugh a minute, is, when it’s at home, a disputation between reason and faith, or perhaps between the conservative (or tragic) view and the liberal (or perfectionist) view. The conservative president in the piece holds that people are each out to make a living, and the best way for government to facilitate that is to stay out of the way, as the inevitable abuses and failures of this system (free-market economics) are less than those of government intervention.

I took the liberal view for many decades, but I believe I have changed my mind.

Mamet’s piece is well worth reading, especially for those who are “brain-dead liberals” as it explains some of the reasons why Mamet drifted away from liberal orthodoxy. He ended up re-examining many of his old assumptions and prejudices and finding them lacking: his distrust of the military, his dislike of corporations, his view of government. He asks one of the most important questions that a person can ask about political philosophy:

And I began to question my distrust of the “Bad, Bad Military” of my youth, which, I saw, was then and is now made up of those men and women who actually risk their lives to protect the rest of us from a very hostile world. Is the military always right? No. Neither is government, nor are the corporations—they are just different signposts for the particular amalgamation of our country into separate working groups, if you will. Are these groups infallible, free from the possibility of mismanagement, corruption, or crime? No, and neither are you or I. So, taking the tragic view, the question was not “Is everything perfect?” but “How could it be better, at what cost, and according to whose definition?” Put into which form, things appeared to me to be unfolding pretty well.

Mamet hits on the fundamental difference between liberalism and conservatism as political philosophies in 21st Century America. Liberalism is an ideology that seeks perfection: we have to give everyone healthcare, we have to end poverty, we have to make everyone in the world “respect” us, we have to stop all semblances of racism. Those are the imperatives of liberalism. On their own, and as abstract goals, there’s nothing wrong with them at all. Who wouldn’t want to end poverty? Who wouldn’t want to see a world without racism, war, oppression or dominance?

Where liberals fail to understand conservatism is that they seem to think that conservatism stands for the proposition that war, racism and poverty are all fine and we shouldn’t care about them. That facile misunderstanding is why liberals never really seem to be able to engage with conservatives on a fundamentally deep level, and why liberals tend to ascribe all sorts of sinister motivations to conservatives.

Mamet, however, hints at the real basis for conservatism. We can’t cure war. We can’t end all poverty. We can’t make people into angels when they are not. The fundamental principle of conservatism can be roughly summed up into this: “sometimes life just sucks.” Even if we could fix the problems that create war, poverty, racism and injustice to do so would be to have a society robbed of free will—because the root of all these problems are found in human nature itself. That’s why Mamet rightly describes conservatism as the “tragic” view of human nature and liberalism as the “perfectionist” view of human nature. Conservatives recognize that there is no permanent solution for the ills of mankind—there are only advances which can ameliorate our conditions. We can’t create heaven on earth, we can only fumble around as best we can.

That is why liberals and conservatives don’t get along, and politically may never will. (Personally, of course, it’s a different matter. I’ve known many ardent socialists who are far more engaging than many of the people on my political side of the aisle. Sometimes one must simply agree to disagree.) A liberal sees a problem like health care and understands that the only viable solution is to make sure that everyone gets health care for free. It doesn’t matter whether or not that particular goal is attainable. It’s why liberals don’t tend to discuss things like cost/benefit analyses or economic concerns or questions of feasibility. The goal is to give everyone health care, and if that goal is not reached then the whole liberal world order breaks down. If we can’t give everyone health care for free than liberals have to tacitly acknowledge the central conceit of conservatism: that human nature doesn’t allow us to reshape society to our Platonic ideal. Then all liberalism becomes is a pale shade of conservatism. Without liberalism’s central conceit that collective action can radically transform the world, liberalism becomes rather hollow.

That doesn’t at all mean that liberals have bad motives—quite the contrary liberals almost always are idealistic in some fashion. The problem is that liberalism can never really mesh itself with reality: liberal means can never achieve liberal ends. The welfare state perpetuates a cycle of dependence. A foreign policy of naïvete emboldens dictators who subsequently move to slaughter more innocents. A government that takes it as its mission to help people ends up restricting the freedom of all.

My biggest criticism of liberalism is that it is too idealistic. If you’re absolutely convinced of the righteousness of your cause, why bother to examine your beliefs? At that point, an ideology becomes stagnant and inflexible. (It should be noted that Andrew Sullivan argues in his book A Conservatism of Doubt that conservatism is stagnating itself. His criticism aren’t always on the mark, but are worth examining.)

Liberalism today is a stagnant ideology. Liberals may win election (although usually be masquerading as moderates), but liberalism lacks any real understanding of itself. Most liberals these days begin and end their political understanding with their dislike of President Bush (who is not only not the living symbol of conservatism, but not particularly conservative at all in many respects). For one, Bush is a lame duck President. More importantly, any ideology that defines itself by what it is not is barely an ideology at all.

Mamet’s conversion from “brain-dead liberal” to conservative happened because he started to think more deeply about why he believed what he believed. This country would be much better off if more people—liberal or conservative—did the same.

An American Icon Passes

William F. Buckley, Jr.

William F. Buckley, one of America’s greatest public intellectuals and the founder of National Review, has died at his home in Connecticut. In 1955, when Buckley founded National Review there was virtually no conservative intellectual movement in America. Conservatism was an ideology that was adrift from its own ideological moorings. Buckley, along with Russell Kirk and others, helped turn conservatism into a vibrant part of America’s intellectual heritage once more.

Mr. Buckley achieved great things personally, but the movement he helped found has transformed America for the better. He was not only a best-selling author of both fiction and non-fiction, a successful television personality, and an American icon; he was also a leader for a movement that helped win the Cold War, reform welfare and enact policies that have immeasurably strengthened this country. Those achievements would have been at the very last far more difficult without the brave leadership and constant intellectual prodding of William F. Buckley.

R.I.P.

The editors of National Review have a brief statement on Mr. Buckley’s passing. At The Corner, there are plenty of remembrances of Buckley’s voluminous legacy.

Why I Don’t Believe In Intelligent Design

John Derbyshire takes a highly critical look at “intelligent design” and leads to an interesting theological argument against it:

The Myers column points up a thing I’ve said before here, and repeated as politely as I could in panel discussions with creationists: they’re not just wrong, they’re shifty. In my opinion, they wandered off the straight and narrow when they started pushing this “intelligent design” stuff. My advice to them — frequently offered but, for reasons that are baffling to me, never taken up — is to drop the i-d b-s and go back to good old Biblical creationism. At least that’s an honest point of view founded in Scripture. I understand why the move to i-d was made: to try to get out from under current church-state jurisprudence (not all of which I agree with). However, the constant strain of keeping a straight face while insisting that theirs is not — no way! absolutely not!! — a religious campaign, and talking about the mysterious-but-definitely-not-supernatural “Designer,” has corrupted them irredeemably.

Now, I don’t believe in intelligent design mainly because there’s no scientific evidence for it, but also because it’s problematic theologically as well. A belief in evolution doesn’t immediately lead one to become an atheist—no matter what the atheists say. It does mean that you can’t take the Bible literally, but with all deference to my Fundamentalist readers (and I use the term “Fundamentalist” in its exact sense, not as a slur), the Bible is not a work designed to be taken literally. To take Intelligent Design seriously one has to predispose a God (or other “Intelligent Designer,” which I presume most ID supporters to not believe is Quetzalcoatl or Zeus) that acts like a cosmic tinkerer, constantly refining His creations over time. To me—and I claim no great understanding of theology—that seems like a rather limited view of God. Why would an omnipotent being free of the constraints of space and time need to constantly refine His Creation? By reducing God to such a role seems to be an effort to diminish the Divine to something humanly understandable. Theologically, that strikes me as incredibly presumptuous.

It’s one thing to see the face of God in the great beauty of the Universe—in everything from the glory of a sunset to the amazing symmetry of subatomic particles. Nothing requires a scientist to surrender all faith to the cold rationalism of science. At the same time, the view of Intelligent Design has a God which constantly guides everything from the structure of the universe to the development of the eye, and argues that God’s Creation was somehow less than what it should have been. At least Creationists can fall back on Biblical literalism to support their views—ID supporters have to find a balance that tends to satisfy neither science nor theology.

When Passion Becomes Madness

Peter Berkowitz has an excellent piece looking at the anti-Bush vitriol that’s become commonplace in American political culture. He reminds us of why such unbridled hatred is bad for American discourse:

In short, Bush hatred is not a rational response to actual Bush perfidy. Rather, Bush hatred compels its progressive victims–who pride themselves on their sophistication and sensitivity to nuance–to reduce complicated events and multilayered issues to simple matters of good and evil. Like all hatred in politics, Bush hatred blinds to the other sides of the argument, and constrains the hater to see a monster instead of a political opponent.

That’s why so much of the left-wing blogosphere is unreadable. It’s not about analysis of policy or understanding issues, it’s about turning the other side into demons. It’s not that conservatives are wrong, it’s that they’re evil. Once you go down that route, you’re no longer engaging with the real world. Once you start painting the opposition as emblematic of all that is wrong you’re not being objective, and you’re not making arguments.

Of course, the right side of the blogosphere isn’t immune from that sort of thing—not by a long shot, but when one looks at the list of the top center-right bloggers like Glenn Reynolds, Ed Morrissey or the Power Line crew you see a group of people who are taking sides, but not trying to constantly tear down their opposition. It’s about ideas, not attacks.

Contrast that with Atrios/Duncan Black, firedoglake or Think Progress. For one, notice one thing about the content of these sites: all of them are almost entirely about President Bush. Every political issue seems reducible down to one individual. In fact, the term “Bush” appears 38 times on the homepage of Think Progress. Every issue, from Iraq to taxes are personalized.

The problem with all this anti-Bush hysteria is that it degrades the quality of discourse in American politics. If everything boils down to either hating George W. Bush or supporting him, then there’s no room for reason, compromise, or discussions of underlying values. Why bother investigating the shades of an issue when it all comes down to disliking one individual?

Berkowitz is right: this obsession is an unhealthy one. The world is bigger than a referendum on any one person, and to reduce every issue down to personal attacks is to put ideological blinders on. Such a thing is deeply corrosive to democratic discourse.

As the old saying goes, great minds discuss ideas, medicore minds discuss events and small minds discuss people. What does it say about the state of American political discourse when so much of it seems so small-minded?

The Real Face Of Fundamentalism

Jim Lindgren of The Volokh Conspiracy takes an interesting look at who fundamentalist Christians really are. As always, the popular stereotype of fundamentalist Christians all being Jerry Falwell clones couldn’t be more wrong:

Both academics and journalists sometimes depict Christian fundamentalists in the U.S. as particularly dangerous people, but these accounts seldom report what sorts of people tend to be fundamentalists in the U.S.

The group that most disproportionately belongs to fundamentalist Protestant sects is African-American females. In the 2000-2006 General Social Surveys, 62% of African-American females (and 54% of African American males) report that they belong to Protestant denominations that the GSS classifies as fundamentalist.

When one thinks of dangerous groups in the United States, religious African-American females would not be on many people’s lists. Yet of the people that I see on the streets every day, members of that demographic group are the ones most likely to be fundamentalist.

What about political party affiliation?

In the 2000-2006 General Social Surveys, 34% of Republicans are fundamentalists, compared to 30% of Democrats, not a large difference. But since there are more Democrats than Republicans, a slightly larger percentage of fundamentalists are Democrats (34%), compared to 32% of fundamentalists who are Republicans.

As to gender, in 2000-2006, 30% of women and 26% of men were fundamentalists.

So when one thinks of a typical fundamentalist in the United States in the 2000-2006 period, the image that should come to mind is that of a woman or of a Democrat. And if one thinks of which group is disproportionately fundamentalist, the exemplar is African-American females, not Republicans.

Of course, the term “Christian fundamentalist” has been distorted to be a term of derision used against any Christian that the user dislikes. However, these statistics do give a more realistic view of exactly who is included as members of Christian fundamentalist groups.

CNN is running a three-part series called “Holy Warriors” examining “fundamentalists” in both Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. As Power Line’s John Hinderaker points out, it’s likely to be yet another attempt to rhetorically conflate Christian fundamentalists with Islamic extremists:

Actually, though, the problem with today’s Islamic “martyrs” is not that its adherents are “willing to give their lives,” it is that they want to kill non-Muslims. It isn’t really a mystery why martyrdom was once considered noble; Christian martyrs like Saints Stephen and Sebastian didn’t kill anyone. Whereas today, “martyrdom” in much of the Islamic world is a euphemism for mass murder. Hence the “really bad connotation.”

Of course, everyone knows this. It’s hardly worth the trouble to point out the stupidity of confounding Christian “fundamentalism”–the most commonly accepted definition of which is a belief in the literal truth of the Bible–with Islamic “fundamentalism,” whose distinguishing characteristic is a desire to impose Sharia on the world, and kill everyone who resists.

As Lindgren quips “To be a success, at a minimum the mini-series should dispel more stereotypes than it perpetuates.” Sadly, the media is in the stereotype business, and expecting someone like Christiane Amanpour to take an honest and unbiased look at Christianity is expecting too much.

Christian fundamentalism is not the same as radical Islamic extremism: Christian fundamentalists have no interest in killing non-believers — there’s no support in Christianity for forced conversion by the sword. On the other hand, the Qu’ran makes it quite clear that Islam is by nature an expansionist religion, and the history of the Prophet Mohammad as a military leader makes that message quite clear. (Although, as with the interpretation of any holy book, there are differences of opinion. However, in general there is almost no textual support for militant expansionist Christianity and plenty of textual support for military expansionist Islam.) To conflate the two is to demean fundamentalist Christians — who represent a very large and diverse segment of American population — and to diminish the problems inherent in radical Salafist and Wahhabi Islam.

Not all fundamentalisms are alike, and the efforts to paint Christian fundamentalists as a bogeymen while paying little heed to Islamic fundamentalism is to misunderstand the basics of Christianity, Islam, and the world we live in.

“Progressives” And Progress

Thomas Sowell has a challenging editorial arguing that the left is invested in social failure:

The old advertising slogan, “Progress is our most important product,” has never applied to the left. Whether it is successful black schools in the United States or Third World countries where millions of people have been rising out of poverty in recent years, the left has shown little interest.

Progress in general seems to hold little interest for people who call themselves “progressives.” What arouses them are denunciations of social failures and accusations of wrong-doing.

One wonders what they would do in heaven.

There’s something to that argument. I certainly don’t think that progressives want to deliberately oppress people — that’s a crude stereotype. Rather, it’s more about the paving stones on the road to Hell. The “progressive” movement has the best of intentions, the problem is that the best intentions don’t translate into sound policy.

For example, in a perfect world, universal health care would be a reality. Abstracted from any concept of economics, it’s easy to argue that everyone should have the ability to get whatever health care they need whenever they need it without having to pay.

In a perfect world, I’d also like to be dating a fabulously wealthy supermodel with a Ph.D. who think I’m the greatest thing since sliced bread. Alas, we don’t live in a perfect world.

In our world, resources are finite and human needs are infinite. Exactly what constitutes a “decent” standard of living? By just about every measure, even the poor in this country live better than the fabulously wealthy did just a few decades ago. Technological progress has allowed people to live longer with a better quality of life than was physically possible just a few short years ago. Yet, the “progressive” movement still finds all manner of faults with today’s society.

And therein lies the problem.

There is no easily definable standard of what a “decent” standard of living is — it’s entirely subjective, and by nature a welfare state will always have to grow at rates that aren’t sustainable. It’s somewhat ironic that as the Democratic Party lurches leftward, following the “progressives,” the old bastion of state socialism in Europe is moving in a rightward direction. Both France and Germany elected leaders who promise the sort of reforms that would have once been unthinkable in those countries. As Europe faces extreme demographic pressure and the challenges of economic growth saddled by the weight of an unaffordable social “safety net,” reform isn’t an option, it’s a necessity.

Yet here in America, it seems like politics are moving in the other direction — towards the very same problems that Europe is facing.

The problem is that the left views the world through the lens of economic determinism. Hillary Clinton went out and said directly that poverty is not a social issue, but an economic one. The problem with that statement is that it simply isn’t true: the vast majority of poverty in this country is caused by behavior rather than economics. The key to significantly reducing poverty in this country is actually quite simple: make sure people stay in school, don’t have kids out of wedlock, and work full-time. The problem for the left is that government can only do so much to encourage people to do those things: they can’t force people to work, marry, and stay in school. The solution lies not with the state, but with communities, churches, and individuals.

The “progressive” movement keeps pushing the same old state-based solutions, all of which have already been tried. If state-based solutions were the answer, the Great Society programs of Lyndon B. Johnson would have significantly reduced poverty in America: instead both poverty and dependency increased.

It is precisely that dependency that makes “progressive” policies so potentially dangerous. The more one is dependent on the state, the more that dependency increases rather than decreases poverty. The real ticket to prosperity in this country is simple: hard work, family relationships, and spending wisely. Welfare undermines all of those things by replacing them with the government dole. The successes of the 1997 welfare reform program were in encouraging people to engage in the sort of personal behaviors that lead people out of poverty. The solution to poverty isn’t economic (although economics plays some role — the economy has to grow to keep poverty low), but largely social.

The reality is that the “progressive” movement isn’t really progressive. In many way, it’s the “progressives” who are the conservatives — they’re fighting to keep the society arrangements of the 1960s and 1970s in which there was strong state control over the economy, unions had massive amounts of political and economic power, and the leading minds viewed poverty as something that the government could fix.

However, we live in the 21st Century, and applying last century’s solutions to today’s problems is not the correct approach. What we need is a system that maximizes the ability of the individual to achieve economic and personal success free of government involvement while encouraging the behaviors that make that possible. That means strengthening America’s education system, further cementing the gains of the 1997 welfare reform plan, encouraging marriage, and ensuring that every American has a basic level of economic literacy.

So much of the “progressive” agenda takes us away from those goals. More taxes hurts the economy, and just as a rising tide lifts all boats, a sinking one strands the most vulnerable of our society. The sexual revolution has cheapened marriage, weakening the very mortar that holds our society together. Educational reform can’t happen if the government is unwilling to demand accountability, innovation, and choice — and that requires standing up to the teacher’s unions. The path out of poverty requires entrepreneurialism — which is much harder when small businesses must navigate through a complex maze of government regulations.

It’s time conservatives stopped playing defense on economic issues. We have the keys to significantly reducing poverty in this country. The values of the conservative movement are values which can lift people out of poverty. It’s said that the GOP represents the rich — well, it’s only natural that we would want more people to be rich. We can do that, but only if we’re willing to stand our ground and not take half measures that only further the problem.

The “progressive” movement won’t actually progress this country — quite the opposite. What we need now is not a defensive conservatism, but a full-throated defense of conservative values as the solution to poverty in America. That requires a leadership willing to deliver that message where it’s most needed: America’s inner cities.

We can reduce poverty in this country, and we can do it in a way that doesn’t make people more dependent, but more independent. That is the basis of the American Dream, and it is something worth defending. The only question is whether our political culture can produce the leaders willing to make it happen.

Why Democracy Matters

There’s an interesting discussion in The Corner at National Review Online about whether we should be less “liberal” (in the classical sense) in our conduct of the war in Iraq. Rich Lowry first observes that this isn’t a liberal war any more. Andrew McCarthy than argues that the sinking approval for the war is because we have no long-term plan to deal with our enemies.

However, I find Jonah Goldberg’s arguments the most compelling. His fourth argument is the vital one here:

The root causes crowd isn’t entirely off base. The Arab world is a riot of dysfunction. One of the main arguments our enemies use against us is that America doesn’t really care about democracy, we just want to guarantee the flow of oil. Does anyone doubt that America’s acquiescence to a tyrannical regime in post-war Iraq would result in anything but a propaganda coup for these people? Moreover, another tyranny in Iraq would ultimately serve as a breeding ground for precisely the forces we’re at war with. That is assuming Iraq doesn’t simply become the seat of the new al Qaeda caliphate, in which case it won’t merely be a breeding ground for terror it will be a terror state par excellence. In short, you can’t beat something with nothing. They’re something is sharia and post-mortem virgins. Our something must be freedom.

That’s the big issue here, and the one that the President understands, but has never conveyed. The root cause of terrorism is the cultural failure of the Middle East. The UN’s Human Development Report has indicated a widespread failure of Arab states to adapt to the modern world. It is this failure of modernization that motives much of the terrorist violence in the region. The people of places like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Syria, and Iran are fundamentally disconnected from any control over the lives. The state controls everything, and the only measure of power they have comes from religion — the one thing greater than the state.

Even if we secure Iraq, we still have to use soft power to guide its democratic development. The problem is that we have the wrong idea of what democracy is: we think it’s institutions when it is based upon a strong civil society. If we could magically replace the Iranian government with a perfectly formed democracy, Iran would not last long as a democratic state, because they have seen decades of oppression which has gutted Iranian civil society. Indeed, the reason why Iraq is a mess right now is because we concentrated on forming democratic institutions without laying the groundwork of civil society.

The key to defusing the suicide bomber culture isn’t to defeat it militarily — unless the US wants to wage the kind of total war against the entire Muslim world that would involve the massive destruction of life and property, a solely military solution isn’t realistic. We can kill and degrade the capacity of terrorist groups, but that won’t stop them over the long haul. We have to deprive them of the ideological oxygen that feeds them.

Goldberg is right — they have shari’a and the promise of 72 virgins. We have to offer a compelling alternative. The realpolitik solution to Iraq would be to set up a local strongman friendly to our interests — except the realpolitik solution is precisely the wrong one. We already did that when we assassinated Mossadegh in Iran and replaced him with the Shah — and look at how well that turned out for us. Our compelling alternative is to replace the autocratic and undemocratic regimes in the Middle East with regimes that respect human rights and offer democracy. Let’s face it, 72 virgins in the afterlife is compelling to a typical teenager living in an Arab state — but it’s nothing compared to the freedom to vote, to have a life, to find a girl in the here and now, and to know that you live in a state where you have the opportunity to be someone.

We on the right ignore the fact that Muslims aren’t the enemy. We have to start thinking like them to understand this war — and if you lived in a society in which you had no opportunities, you had almost no chance of getting married or even going on a date without paying a substantial dowry, you had no job, and no prospects for the future, wouldn’t you be more likely to blow yourself up if you honestly thought it meant a Paradise of unending wealth and 72 nubile virgins? We’re fortunate enough to live in a world where such oppression doesn’t touch us. They don’t. Unless we’re willing to change the circumstances that generates such feelings, we have either the choice of facing a world in which groups like al-Qaeda are a constant threat or facing a massive conflict of civilizations that we will win — at such a grave human and economic cost as to be virtually unthinkable.

Democracy matters. It not only matters, but it is the key to this war.

While it’s perfectly understandable that some on the right should be “to hell with them hawks,” that position isn’t tenable for us. We can’t just pretend that the problems of the Arab world don’t effect us — they do, and not just because we get a good amount of our oil from those places. We can’t build a wall around our country and be safe — nor should we want to.

Both the “to hell with them hawks” and the “withdraw now” left have similar positions: that we should not bother to engage with such a dysfunctional region. The problem with that temptation is that we have little choice: our world has grown much smaller in the last few decades, and even a place like faraway and dirt-poor Afghanistan can have profound impacts on our national security — whether we like it or not.

The New Victorians?

Ann Althouse has a fascinating look into the “New Victorians” in New York City — young people who are rejecting the permissive ways of the counterculture and embracing Victorian values.

The original article in The New York Observer notes:

While their forbears flitted away their 20’s in a haze of booze, Bolivian marching powder, and bed-hopping, New Vics throw dinner parties, tend to pedigreed pets, practice earnest monogamy, and affect an air of complacent careerism. Indeed, at the tender age of 28, 26, even 24, the New Vics have developed such fierce commitments, be they romantic or professional, that angst-ridden cultural productions like the 1994 movie Reality Bites, or Benjamin Kunkel’s 2005 novel Indecision, simply wouldn’t make sense to them….

“Maybe this is also fallout from the sort of these boomer ideas about what sexual freedom is,” [says a 26-year-old New Vic in Brooklyn]. This theory is a popular one among New Vic observers, just as it was popular to blame the priggishness and probity of the Old Victorians on the ill example of their Georgian predecessors. In this case, the reaction isn’t against specific syphilitic laxity and moral decay, but is rather a vague fear of too much sex (hello, STDs!) as well as the pressure for procreative sex (even men have biological clocks these days!) and the attendant nightmare of becoming—pardon the phrase—an aging spinster, lurching around New York sloshing cosmos and wearing age-inappropriate Capri pants, as in the TV version of Sex and the City and its many spinoffs….

This really doesn’t surprise me all that much. For people of my generation, the Boomer’s cultural legacy has been disastrous. The “Sexual Revolution” is much less fun in an era of AIDS, dissolving marriages, and a cheapening of relationships. A 20 something may be part of the “hook up” culture in college, but even among my social set I’m noticing that behavior is not looked kindly upon after graduation. Quite frankly, this New Victorian outlook seems to be less about some emerging trend and more about people growing up — it’s less about returning to the days of the late 19th Century and more about people realizing that there’s a greater meaning to life than the self.

We’re the generation who by and large suffered from the emotional upheavals of Boomer divorces. We’re the generation who grew up in the shadow of AIDS. The touchstone of our adulthood was the fall of the Twin Towers, and it’s our generation that’s fighting and dying in Iraq and Afghanistan. For many of us, the world is too big and too dangerous to be self-obsorbed. Issues like climate change and Darfur resonate because there’s a sense that the world has become incredibly dysfunctional at every level, and something has to be done.

The New Victorianism isn’t really a return to some antique way of life — it’s returning to values that make society civilized — treating women with respect rather than as “hos” — disposable sex objects.

In fact, that’s the biggest difference between the New Victorianism and the Old. The Old Victorians were largely a patriarchal society, although less so than some would think. Men were far more domesticated than they were now, but they were domesticated because male society demanded it. Today, it’s female society that demands that cheating cads be treated like cheating cads, that men concentrate on their careers, and that families stay together. In the Observer article it seems to be the fairer sex that’s driving this phenomenon. Again, that’s hardly surprising. The dissolution of the traditional marriage has left many women feeling adrift in a culture in which women enjoyed the fruits of the feminist revolution, but had no one to share them with. The culture of meaningless throw-away relationships just wasn’t fulfilling.

I don’t know if this cultural phenomenon will be the dominant trend in the future or not. In my social set it certainly is. However, it is an interesting societal trend to follow, especially given that it’s being driven predominantly by young women. And if there’s one thing in society that’s as close to law as anything, it’s that when young women start doing something, young men invariably follow.

(And, I’d be remiss in failing to mention that Neal Stephenson predicted all of this in his book The Diamond Age, which prominently featured a group of Neo-Victorians who sound quite similar to these “New Vicks.”)

Why Not France?

Ilya Somin has a provocative argument that there is a double standard in the way that Israel is treated in comparison to France. Somin goes through the common criticisms of Israeli policy and compares them to the actions of the French and finds that the French are hardly much better than the Israelis. So, what explains the disparity?:

It is, I think, still possible to make a left-wing case that, overall, Israeli policies are, say, 10% worse than French policies. Perhaps even 50% worse. I don’t agree with such claims, but they are not wildly implausible. However, it is utterly impossible for a fair-minded observer with typical left-wing values to conclude that Israel is 100 or 1000 times worse than France. Yet the ratio of left-wing criticism of Israel to left-wing criticism of France is far closer to 100-1 or 1000-1 than 1.5-1.

Perhaps the difference is due to ignorance. Many of those who spend lots of time and energy attacking Israel may simply be unaware of comparable French policies. Perhaps it is due to the far greater media coverage of Israel. But that only begs the question of why so many left-wing intellectuals and activists spend so much more time and effort learning about Israeli shortcomings than French ones, and why a mostly left-liberal media does the same.

Not even the alleged left-wing bias towards “underdogs” and against “the powerful” can explain the disjunction. France is much larger and more powerful than Israel (with about 10 times Israel’s population and GDP), and France’s enemies are weaker than Israel’s are. From any objective viewpoint, France’s policies are far more important than Israel’s and deserve far greater attention. Perhaps not ten times more, but certainly not 100 times less.

Is anti-Semitism the only cause of the disproportion between left-wing criticism of Israel and those of France? Almost certainly not. Perhaps it is not even the most important cause. But the other likely causes – bias against a nation perceived as more of a US ally than France, sympathy for France’s (pre-Sarkozy) anti-American rhetorical stance, an implicit belief that Jews should be held to “higher standards,” etc. – are only marginally more defensible.

To be honest, I think that singling out Jews for a “higher standard” is anti-Semitism. As Thomas Friedman once said: “Criticizing Israel is not anti-Semitic, and saying so is vile. But singling out Israel for opprobrium and international sanction – out of all proportion to any party in the Middle East – is anti-Semitic, and not saying so is dishonest.” Israel is singled out because it is a Jewish state, it is a strong ally of the United States, and because the left wing is especially susceptible to the Arab propaganda campaigns leveled against it.

There’s a difference between rational criticism of Israeli policy and the sort of anti-Semitic diatribes that frequently are used against Israel. It’s one thing to say that the settlement policy in the West Bank was wrong and should be stopped, it’s another thing to state that the Israelis as a people “stole” all their land and have no legitimate basis for being in the Middle East. There’s a difference between saying that the Israelis acted rashly in their recent war with Lebanon and playing into the canard that the Israelis secretly want to ethnically cleanse the region.

The problem is that the left has invested in a particular worldview that sees Israel as a illegitimate state and continues to justify the Palestinian cultural self-immolation. The reality is that what Israel has done to the Palestinians pales in comparison to what the Palestinians have done to themselves — and Gaza is living proof that even in the absence of the “Zionist enemy” the Palestinians cannot let go of their culturally-ingrained desire for blood and combat.

The French get a pass because they have better PR, not because they have a sterling record on human rights. The Israelis are condemned because they are a Jewish nation with close ties to the US and the Arabs have waged a very successful propaganda campaign against them for decades now. Israel is by no means a perfect nation, but when they are held to a higher and disproportionate standard while the actions of others are whitewashed, it’s hard to argue that such disparate treatment isn’t anti-Semitism with a more urbane face.