Decline and Fall

There's been an outpouring of support for me since my last post, for which I am very grateful. Special thanks goes to Edger at OOIBC and Docudharma. He re-posted PTSD... over there and his commenters have been amazing. Thank you each and every one.

It's a funny thing: when I was a conservative, I always got a lot of "it's great that you're in the Army/defending freedom/taking it to the terrorists" but when I problematized the situation a little bit--bringing up flaws in the war strategy, expressing doubts about the war itself, pointing to past mistakes made by our government that contributed to the current situation--my conservative friends couldn't find it in themselves to acknowledge that anything was wrong. And this was in 2005, by which point you would have had to be deaf, blind, mentally retarded and/or willfully ignorant to not notice that things were looking very bad. Invariably, they would tell me that it was all the media's fault (just like Vietnam!) and that I needed to insulate myself from traitors and collaborators such as Peter Jennings.

I finally had enough of the conservative movement and its pathetic inability to look in a mirror or think critically about any of its cherished platitudes and bolted. What I had expected to find, based on years of reading the likes of Russell Kirk, David Horowitz, Lew Rockwell, Victor Davis Hanson, the AEI gaggle, The National Review (I subscribed for more than five years), Human Events (my parents subscribed throughout my childhood), and other organs of the right-wing propaganda machine, was rabid anti-war neanderthals who hated America. (I should say that by the time I left, I knew this wasn't the only face the Left had to offer.)

What I found instead was compassion, understanding, a willingness to examine one's positions, and an openness to divergent points of view that utterly confounded the dichotomies I had absorbed in my youthful Right-wing radicalism. These were good, decent people by and large. I won't claim that there is no Left-wing lunatic fringe, but I will say that the crazies have not infiltrated the Left mainstream the way they have on the Right. There is no Left equivalent of Ann Coulter, at least not in terms of attention, airtime, book sales or general publicity. This is partly because the Right has much more leeway in the current media climate, but it's also because the Left does a better job of policing itself. It's true that Coulter was kicked off The Corner, but that didn't actually affect her popularity at all. When the Left ditched Hitchens (a subject about which I remain conflicted) he stayed ditched. This is not the result of some sort of Politburo that meets in the offices of The Nation every Wednesday at 9 am to decide the fate of liberalism, it's the genuine dislike of rank-and-file liberals for those who give them a bad name.

I have no doubt that the Right will eventually come to the consensus that Bush has been a disaster, but the Left would have been dogging him all along, rather than swallowing his absolutist rhetoric so gleefully as they failed to criticize even his most abhorrent policies (torture being perhaps the most egregious). The Right did that eventually with Nixon, after all, but only because of his economic policies and supposed kowtowing to Mao. When LBJ got us (deeper) into an unwinnable and morally repugnant war, the Left ensured that he would not serve another term. When Bush did it, the Right rallied around him and invented controversies about the service of an actual warrior and patriot in one of the most cynical and depraved moments in the history of our politics. Oh, and google the term "PTSD" on "corner.nationalreview.com" to see how often that issue has come up on one of the busiest political blogs in the world. That's what happens when you substitute "support my agenda" for "support the troops."

The Right loves to talk about freedom, but it suppresses freedom of expresion within its own ranks. They barely even debate anymore. As Peter Fonda put it in Easy Rider:

[Freedom's] what's it's all about, all right. But talkin' about it and bein' it, that's two different things. I mean, it's real hard to be free when you are bought and sold in the marketplace. Of course, don't ever tell anybody that they're not free, 'cause then they're gonna get real busy killin' and maimin' to prove to you that they are. Oh, yeah, they're gonna talk to you, and talk to you, and talk to you about individual freedom. But they see a free individual, it's gonna scare 'em.

Too true. Sorry I was so wrong about you guys for so long.

Labels: conservatism, personal, politics, PTSD

Most of Glenn Greenwald's posts are indispensable, but this one is especially so. As usual, I can find nothing to contribute to it. I endorse the whole thing. So go read it.

One thing that struck me about his post was the easy way he invokes Adam Smith to describe the affinity that the warmongering classes have for wars fought far away and at very little personal danger. Here's the passage he cites, a spot-on description of all of my right-wing friends who love to sit around and watch videos of terrorists getting killed by our superior firepower:

In great empires the people who live in the capital, and in the provinces remote from the scene of action, feel, many of them, scarce any inconveniency from the war; but enjoy, at their ease, the amusement of reading in the newspapers the exploits of their own fleets and armies . . . .

They are commonly dissatisfied with the return of peace, which puts an end to their amusement, and to a thousand visionary hopes of conquest and national glory from a longer continuance of the war.

What struck me about that was how impossible I once thought such a reference could be. People like David Horowitz often claim that the Universities aren't teaching the classics* anymore, and that if students read more classics, they would learn to embrace traditional values, whatever those are. The Right has claimed the mantle of the "defenders of the classical tradition" in the campus cultural wars, but when you read passages like this, you wonder if those crusaders have actually read the books they are hawking. And yet here's a bona-fide librul, quoting a dead economist who isn't Marx or Keynes, and getting the quote right!

A decade ago I, a studious young conservative who took the ISI's admonitions to heart, began working my way through the canon. What I found then, and when I subsequently got serious about the classics at St. John's College, where that's all the students read, was that there was nothing particularly "conservative" about these books.

There's no unified set of "values" running through the great books; in fact, one of the things that makes those books so great is the way they bucked the orthodoxies of their time and pushed the debate along by the sheer force of their arguments in the face of the absurdities of their ages. Reading through the likes of Aristotle, Descartes, Hume and Kant is much more likely to cause the thoughtful student to question whatever traditions he's embraced than to cause him to instinctively reject radical changes. He's more likely to give thought to the arguments of the reformers than to shun them instinctively, as Russell Kirk might have expected him to. In short, a grounding in the classics will usually serve to make a student more skeptical of received wisdom and thus more objectively liberal (though less radical) than he would have been had he simply been fed a diet of Bill Bennett's moralizing bedtime stories.

That was certainly what I found, and what happened to me, when I went to St. John's. I entered a conservative, came out a confused moderate, and am now settling into a skeptical leftism, thanks primarily to the "orthodox" education in the classics. Perhaps I extrapolate too much from my own experience, but you can see for yourself if you ever visit the campus: the student body is as left-wing as any in the nation, despite the ringing endorsement of St. John's in the National Review College Guide. Most the alumni I know are left-wing as well.

None of this is to say that any given classic will strike the modern reader as especially liberal in the modern context, nor that Greenwald hasn't engaged in a bit of quote-mining here, but I would at least like to see the reverential intonation of the great books removed from the wingnut campus agitators' bag of tricks. The fact that a lefty such as Glenn Greenwald could so easily employ the great expounder of capitalism in one of his hateful, unpatriotic and no doubt communist posts should at least give the lie to the idea that an education in the great books lends support to conservative orthodoxies.

* I use the term "classic" and its derivations throughout to refer to the whole of the Western Canon, not just the Greeks and Romans.

Labels: academia, conservatism, reason

Ross Douthat argues that the recent study showing that liberals and conservatives process information differently shouldn't be much of a surprise, but his analysis falls short:

How could it be any other way? It isn't just that the left, far more than the right, tends to tell brainiacs what they want to hear - that they were born to rule, that the world is just waiting to be reshaped for the better by their combination of smarts and expertise. (Though of course right-wingers sometimes give in to this temptation as well.) It's that we live in a society that makes an aggressive attempt to select for intelligence in the formation of its elite, and then educates that elite in a university system that is liberal to the core - not left-wing, necessarily, or not anymore, but certainly not conservative either.... Small wonder, then, that if you're brainy in America, you probably call yourself a liberal - you were raised that way, after all.

I am willing to grant that our higher education system more often pushes students in a liberal direction than a conservative one, but this isn't because of the vast left-wing conspiracy to turn America into a socialist state. (Which is, to be fair, not what Ross is arguing here.) To the extent that there is a value placed on open inquiry in our society, this is the result of the liberal arts tradition in Western Civilization, the very thing many "conservatives" claim to be so eager to conserve. The liberal mindset is simply more Socratic than the conservative mindset.

This isn't always a good thing (toleration for ambiguity can go too far), and it certainly doesn't hold for all right-wingers and left-wingers (lefties can be as stubborn in their thinking as anyone), but it certainly shouldn't come as any surprise that conservatives are less open than liberals to new ideas. I suspect this study tracks peoples' position along the libertarian-authoritarian axis far more closely than the left-right axis.

In an apparent attempt to verify the results of the study, Jonah Goldberg posted a reader's letter at The Corner:

Hi Jonah,

God bless Bart Simpson for that brilliant turn of phrase (well, the first time *I* ever heard "craptacular" was on the Simpsons).

Anyway, a few years back I decided to go see a psychiatrist. This was after 9/11, though my depression was more about finding work during the deflation of the technology boom. I'd just had two startups die under me, and was having a lot of self-doubt.

I showed up to see the doctor, and the first thing he did was ask after my political views. Deciding I was conservative, he gave me a long talk about how he was going to free my mind from the shackles of the conservative mindset. According to him I'd be better able to see the possibilities and happiness of life when I acquired a more liberal mindset.

I paid my fee and never returned. For me, that one interview really holed psychiatry below the plimsoll line. "Craptacular nonsense" sums it up perfectly.

Oh, and a couple of years later I'm back at a technology startup, where it looks like we'll do well.

I wouldn't want to see a shrink whose main goal was to change my voting patterns either, but considering the fact that the psychology experiment he's referencing specifically found that "conservatives tend to be more structured and persistent in their judgments," isn't it just a teensy bit ironic that the reader is proud of himself for going down the same road that has already failed him twice?

Labels: conservatism

The editors of The Weekly Standard, ever vigilant in their mission to "support the troops" by parroting whatever the Administration is saying this week, have trotted out seven of their own soldiers to counter the NYT Op-Ed I linked to below. Their argument boils down to this: the guys in the 82nd (who wrote the earlier piece) are in a different part of Baghdad, so they can't see how wonderfully the surge is working. The Weekly Standard's guys trot out the same "attacks are down, political participation is up" mantra that the surge's proponents have been spouting from the beginning.

What they don't seem to get, however, is that there's no earthly reason to believe that the reductions in violence that have been seen are anything other than temporary. They cite Ramadi and the Anbar Province as exemplars of the effectiveness of counter-insurgency strategy and the effectiveness of holding territory:

Take Anbar Province. In 2006, al Qaeda controlled the capital of Ramadi and Marine intelligence officers declared the province effectively lost. A leaked Marine Corps report concluded, "the prospects for securing western Anbar province are dim and there is almost nothing the U.S. military can do to improve the political and social situation there."

Today Ramadi is peaceful and Anbar no longer a haven for al Qaeda. The tribal awakening that brought about political reconciliation and stability in Ramadi and Anbar primarily resulted from an improved security environment provided by American forces. Americans not only cleared Ramadi, they also held it by occupying over 65 outposts.

This security environment allowed local tribal leaders to stand up to their former al Qaeda occupiers, and now American and Iraqi forces are improving security beyond Anbar in places like Diyala and Babil Provinces.

This is all true, but only in a very limited sense. Take the example of Fallujah, Samarra or Baqubah. These are three cities where U.S. and coalition forces have in the past declared stable, turned over to the local Iraqis, and seen flare up again after we left. Every time we stabilize a place and turn it over to the locals, it goes to hell again. The key to the perceived success in Ramadi is that the Marines have continued to hold it. The "surge" only works when the increased presence remains.

This is the fatal flaw of all of the rosy predictions and spun statistics on the surge: it only works when it ceases to be a "surge" and becomes a permanent occupation. And even then its effectiveness is suspect, but that's a matter for another post.

The Weekly Standard is not, however, in the business of seriously critiquing the argument these soldiers have presented. Nor do they seem to care that one of the most telling critiques from the first piece goes completely unanswered in their riposte.

The soldiers from the 82nd wrote:

However, while creating proxies is essential in winning a counterinsurgency, it requires that the proxies are loyal to the center that we claim to support. Armed Sunni tribes have indeed become effective surrogates, but the enduring question is where their loyalties would lie in our absence. The Iraqi government finds itself working at cross purposes with us on this issue because it is justifiably fearful that Sunni militias will turn on it should the Americans leave.

It is the question of who or what our Iraqi partners actually support that continues to make this war a lost cause. the examples of Fallujah, Samarra and Baqubah show that the loyalties and alliances we have forged with different groups in this conflict are transient and subject to dissolution at a moment's notice. The Weekly Standard soldiers act as if the gains they have seen must be permanent, when recent history should lead them to conclude that only a fool would believe such a conclusion so early in the operation.

This is just another example in the litany of cynical, self-serving rhetoric cooked up by the masters of war to justify their continued prosecution of a war that has done more to harm America in the long run than any previous conflict.

Labels: conservatism, Iraq, politics

Via Stranger Fruit.

Labels: conservatism, humor, reason, religion, science

Several years ago, back when I was a conservative Republican (in the Barry Goldwater sense, not the Sam Brownback sense), I was paid to write. Well, I was paid to write exactly once. I got a hundred bucks from the Claremont Institute for a book review which they published thanks to my close, personal relationship with Ken Masugi, who was at the time their Director for the Center for Local Government. For the record, I still like the guy, although I'm pretty sure he doesn't know that I have gone to the dark side. So yes, I'm a paid writer.

I only bring this up because I ran across (thanks to Sully) a depressingly unsurprising announcement from Claremont: their annual Statesmanship Award in honor of Winston Churchill will be awarded to... wait for it... Donald Rumsfeld.

A Statesmanship Award. To Donald "I Don't Do Diplomacy" Rumsfeld. You have got to be kidding me.

And some people wonder why I left the Right.

Labels: conservatism

Last week I had a conversation with someone who sincerely believed that she was not born on this planet. Wanting to know how anyone could come to such a conclusion about their life, I asked her how she knew this, what evidence she had for her belief. But it turned out she had no evidence, only some sort of intangible belief. She simply smiled at me and said, "I just know."

I mention this because she is apparently not alone. Karl Rove, the power behind the Bush throne, said something yesterday so fantastically delusional that I can only imagine he would give the same response if challenged. He was asked whose idea it was to start a pre-emptive war in Iraq and responded,

I think it was Osama bin Laden's.

Osama bin Laden's. He said that. He meant it. Even though his boss and puppet recently admitted that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11. Even though there have been no operational links between Saddam's regime and al Qaeda. Even though the entire world knows this already and has known it for years.

Well, not the entire world. His comment was greeted "with a round of applause."

At what point do we get to vote no confidence in these people? Or, as Thoreau asked last week, what does it take to get fired?

Via The Questionable Authority, The Cosmic Tap, and Think Progress.

Labels: Bush, conservatism, Iraq, reason

For some reason, certain segments of the Christian world seem to think it's a good idea to demonstrate repeatedly that they are not just insane, they are standing on a street corner with a sign proclaiming the end of the world insane. This picture shows the city of Jerusalem minus the Al-Aqsa Mosque, the third holiest site in Islam. It's from the website of Christians United for Israel (CUFI). But it's not just some picture they posted there. It's the logo. The masthead. The picture they have chosen to represent their organization. But what does it all mean? I'll let Bruce Wilson at Talk to Action explain:

As a possibly intentional provocation, the elimination of the Dome Of The Rock from CUFI's website logo is consonant with [CUFI Founder and Chairman] John Hagee's repeated vilification of Islam....

John Hagee has also repeatedly discussed, publicly and in his writing, his belief that, because history is unfolding exactly as described in Biblical prophecy, the destruction of the Dome of The Rock and the subsequent rebuilding of a Jewish temple on the site is inevitable.

Actually, "standing on a street corner with a sign proclaiming the end of the world insane" doesn't cover it. They're actually trying to end the world. Thank FSM this is isn't what constitutes mainstream opinion in Israel!

But, Pastor Hagee's, and CUFI's, political positions have no counterpart within Israel mainstream society. Rather, such views are held, in Israel, by groups considered to be on the extreme political fringe. A veteran Israeli journalist consulted for this story stated that, in mainstream Israeli political sentiment, actions, conspiracies, or even thoughts concerning the destruction of the Dome Of The Rock are considered "abhorrent" and repeatedly stressed the extremely marginal nature of such beliefs within Israeli society.

Unfortunately, what passes for "abhorrent" in polite Israeli society will get you an audience with prominent members of one of the two major parties in this one. John McCain and Roy Blunt have held private meetings with Hagee, and he was a keynote speaker at AIPAC's convention two months ago. Digby, as usual, put it best:

These crazy people (and I don't care if they do it in the name of religion, they are still crazy) really believe that all-out war is a positive thing and they are doing what they can to bring that about, including meeting with important American politicians. I believe in free speech, even for nuts. But for AIPAC, John McCain and Roy Blunt to pander to and fete people who are going out of their way to provoke a religious war for their own reasons by pulling ridiculous stunts like that really should be beyond the pale.

This is a country where a shock jock, who has been making racist and sexist comments for years now, is (rightly) forced to resign, but where Christian groups who beat the drums for armageddon confirm to the Muslim world exactly what they have suspected all along: that the (conflict formerly known as the) Global War on Terror is just another religious crusade against the infidel Saracens. It doesn't matter that the vast majority of Americans wouldn't kill anyone over religion (they especially wouldn't travel halfway around the world to do so), this is what al-Qaeda and the rest of their hateful breed preach, and it's believed, and acted upon, by a large enough minority in the Muslim world to be worth taking seriously.

Digby's right: this should be a slam dunk for the Democrats. Go after Hagee and his ilk (Jerry Falwell and Gary Bauer, for instance, who are members of CUFI's Executive Board). Show America and the world that this moron does not represent America, at least the non-crazy part. Repudiate these backwards lunatics in no uncertain terms. And for the love of all that is good in the world, stop hosting these jackasses on Capitol Hill!

Labels: conservatism, GWOT, religion

This one's a few days old, but you shouldn't miss Belle Waring at Crooked Timber having a blast with a few responses to "various right-wing Morrisette-ironic talking points." I second Unqualified Offerings' endorsement of this rule of thumb:

if Solzhenitsyn recounts some practice as one employed in coercive interrogations at Lubyanka, it’s torture. So, false execution: definitely torture. Also torture: long-time standing; exposure to extremes of heat and cold; forcing prisoners to kneel or stand in painful positions; putting prisoners in cells so small they cannot stand or lie down; keeping them awake for days at a time. These practices were the meat and drink of the NKVD, who preferred them to fingernail extraction for the same reason certain American torture advocates do: they can be made to seem as if they are not torture, even though they are, in fact, actually torture.

And then there's this, which I am also only too happy to endorse:

“Liberals don’t condemn terrorist atrocities in Iraq, such as the latest chlorine bomb attacks, because they think Arabs are sub-human scum from whom nothing better can be expected.” Um, who thinks Arabs are scum now? Moving on, I have a strong sense that my condemning such attacks is pointless (still, obviously, I read about such attacks with surprise and horror and regard them as evil). Give me a lever long enough and I will…er, scratch my ass with it in a spasm of useless, self-righteous moral preening! By contrast, since I am a citizen of a democratic state, my efforts to change US policy by criticizing, say, Yoo’s depraved torture justifications may actually have some effect, however small. Additionally, it’s true that qua terrorists (rather than qua Arabs), I don’t expect much better from Sunni ultras. On the other hand, I am a US patriot. This means I have a lot invested in our city on the hill image and don’t want to see my nation’s honor dragged through the mud by a bunch of incompetent authoritarian dillholes.

You see, it's not that the left is more outraged by the awfulness of America than by the awfulness of more demonstrably awful countries, it's that the left is more outraged by the awfulness of America when America claims a certain moral high ground and then acts awfully. It pisses us off when we look at our own society and say, "gee, that doesn't look like a very nice place, does it"?

Labels: conservatism, GWOT, liberty, terrorism, torture

"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross."
--Sinclair Lewis

Who can deny that the above quote sounds mysteriously prophetic in regards to the Bush Adminostration?

David Brooks has written a column that should be a wakeup call to everyone--liberal and conservative alike--who cares about the future of this country. I don't pay for the New York Times, so I'll rely on Glenn Greenwald's and Andrew Sullivan's fiskings to get to what may very well be the heart of Brooks' piece:

Normal, nonideological people are less concerned about the threat to their freedom from an overweening state than from the threats posed by these amorphous yet pervasive phenomena. The "liberty vs. power" paradigm is less germane. It's been replaced in the public consciousness with a "security leads to freedom" paradigm...

The "security leads to freedom" paradigm doesn't end debate between left and right, it just engages on different ground. It is oriented less toward negative liberty (How can I get the government off my back?) and more toward positive liberty (Can I choose how to lead my life?).

This is the voice of the new "conservatism" (also known as "neoconservatism"), the one that constantly trumpets the threat from without in order to consolidate power in what I can only describe as the threat from within. This is the voice of "conservatism" that advocates executive privilege, the Patriot Act, McCarthyite witch-hunts against enemies of the administration (the Attorney-firing scandal is a perfect example of this), and the destruction of habeas corpus rights that have for more than two centuries served as the bedrock of our republic. Goldwater and Reagan are rolling in their graves.

Don't believe me? Here's Ronald Reagan, stumping for Goldwater in 1964:

If we lose freedom here, there is no place to escape to. This is the last stand on Earth. And this idea that government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except to sovereign people, is still the newest and most unique idea in all the long history of man's relation to man. This is the issue of this election. Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.

You and I are told increasingly that we have to choose between a left or right, but I would like to suggest that there is no such thing as a left or right. There is only an up or down--up to a man's age-old dream, the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order--or down to the ant heap totalitarianism, and regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would trade our freedom for security have embarked on this downward course.

Whe Reagan spoke those words, he was referring to the welfare state, which sought to re-organize and re-define American society in the model bequeathed to America by people who positioned themselves as the "elite" who knew better how to preserve American society than those pesky founders. In that day and age, the threat to liberty came from the left. Today it comes from the right. But it's not the right that I once knew. Which is why I am one of Rob Knop's "RUB"s--Republicans Until Bush.

Labels: conservatism, liberty, politics