Month: October 2004

Michael J. Totten makes “The Liberal Case for Bush” today at TCS.

I would take issue with this:

Woodrow Wilson, good Democrat that he was, fought to make the world “safe for democracy.” There is no more noble or inspiring reason to fight. John Kerry is no Woodrow Wilson. In his most important speech, the set-piece of his campaign, he didn’t mention freedom or democracy for Iraqis. Not even once. (emphasis mine)

No more noble or inspiring reason to fight? How about fighting for hearth and home? The defense of kith and kin? The protection of the innocent and defenseless? I don’t deny that the spread of democracy is a noble cause, but the noblest? Democracy is certainly a good, but chiefly as a means to an end. And untempered democracy, as political theorists from Plato onward have argued, can be a positive bad. It may well be “the least bad” form of government, but let’s keep things in perspective here.

Also, it may be doubted that the U.S. government is charged with the spread of democracy as its primary mission. Surely its chief duty is the protection of its citizens. When this duty overlaps with the broader good of encouraging democracy elsewhere, wonderful. But prudent statecraft would seem to require a realistic assessment of how much we can contribute to this broader good.

From a story in the Philly Inquirer:



As is the case with American bourbon, Scotch whisky is an outgrowth of unlicensed distillers fighting with the government over taxation of their homemade products.

The first recorded mention of whisky in Scotland was in 1494. For the most part, it remained a homemade product for centuries, used on an everyday basis.

By the 18th century, unregulated whisky-making had boomed in numerous glens where pure spring waters needed for top-level distilling were abundant. A continual tussle went on between the British crown, which wanted to license all distillers so they could be taxed, and the distillers, who didn’t care for the crown and hated its taxing policies.

One by one, most of the illicit distillers’ operations were shut down. Those that remained reached an accommodation with the government and then began to do battle with each other for what today we call market share. The folks in Glenlivet, where more than 100 distillers plied their trade by the early 1800s, were the most market-savvy.

In the wine business, appellation – the name of the area where the wine is produced, such as Burgundy, Napa and Finger Lakes – helps identify and sell a product.

In the early days of legal Scotch whisky-making, the same held true. Distillers made a point of telling merchants not just what they made, but where they made it. Thus, Glenlivet was the first producing district most whisky consumers knew by name.

Demanding “The Glenlivet Scotch” became the discriminating thing to do. Even King George IV, a noted drunk, womanizer and gambler, got into the act by making it his favorite court drink, with a particular fondness for the product made by one George Gow Smith.

In 1880, according to historians at the University of Edinburgh, the exclusive designation “The Glenlivet” was granted to Smith in a test case to distinguish it from the 18 or so other distilleries that at one time or another appended the name to their own.

Lee Smith writing at Slate:

…while we interpret the current Iraqi occupation as a situation where U.S. troops are putting down Iraqi insurgents, another way to see the conflict—one more in keeping with the region’s history—is that we are a proxy force in a civil war: The coalition is fighting for the Shiites against the Sunnis, while our presence protects the Sunnis from the Shiites.

More

Or, Newt Gingrich call your office.

Anne Applebaum:

Seen from the perspective of the 108th Congress, which is stumbling to the end of its ignominious session this week, Newt Gingrich is a towering historical figure.

By that I don’t mean Gingrich was a paragon of virtue, or that Gingrich was a great unifier of men. I mean that Newt Gingrich, as speaker of the House, tried to do what no one has done before or since. Ten years ago this autumn he set out, quixotically, to control Congress’s apparently insatiable urge to spend the nation’s money. He tried to limit the terms of the all-powerful committee chairmen, who had so skewed the appropriations process to the advantage of their constituents. He assailed what he called the “East German socialist” farm subsidy programs that had gone unchallenged for a half-century. He even managed to pass a line-item veto, which would have allowed then-President Bill Clinton to cut pork from the then-Republican Congress’s legislation, had it not been declared unconstitutional. …



…while there is campaign talk about tax cuts and the resultant deficit, mostly from Democrats, I hardly hear anyone from either party crusading against the government spending that is equally responsible for the deficit and that will, if unchecked, force taxes up again anyway. With a few oddball exceptions, no one talks about what happens to the national economy when more activity is controlled by the government.

It’s as if campaigning against big government has become passé: It’s so old, so dull, so 1990s. It’s impossible to believe that Gingrich ever tried it, impossible to believe anyone ever will again. You’d have to be an anti-establishment nut even to want to reform a system that keeps everyone comfortable.

From Pontifications:

It is popular today, as perhaps it always has been, to assert that God reveals himself in many ways. This is of course true. But the creedal claim is more than just an assertion of divine revelation. It is a claim that Jesus of Nazareth reveals God because Jesus is God. In each generation the Church must make a stand against the Arian attenuation of the Christian confession. It’s easy to say that Jesus gives us a glimpse of the divine. Doesn’t everything? As one German philosopher responded to the charge that he had denied the divinity of Jesus: “I have never denied anyone’s divinity!” Believing that Jesus reveals “something” about God does not require my conversion, my repentance, my death and rebirth. I can believe that Jesus reveals “God,” while at the same time maintaining my preferred religiosity, without fear of being confronted by the divine Other who objectively challenges my idolatries and self-interpretations. It’s quite a different matter if Jesus is in fact the one God.

Because God has embodied himself as the son of Mary, his revelation to mankind is definitive, unique, and unsurpassable. God has no other Word to speak to us but the man named Jesus Christ. This is why the Church has always insisted that the period of revelation is closed–not because God has become silent but because all further divine communication must conform to the revelation given once and for all in the Nazarene.



More here.

Reading the pieces from the Commonweal symposium on the election that I linked to yesterday, I was struck more than anything by the fact that partisans on each side can disagree so sharply not just about values or policies, but about the facts themselves.

Here’s how Thomas Higgins, who’s voting for Kerry, describes the Iraq situation:

The majority of military and diplomatic professionals in government had grave concerns about the wisdom of going into Iraq with such flawed assumptions and poor planning. Now we are left to cope with the bitter fruit of the ideologues’ arrogance: the worst foreign-policy disaster for the United States in thirty years. It seems wholly irrational to return to office an administration that has failed so thoroughly the test of national security.

By contrast, Robert Royal, who supports Bush, says this:

My son-in-law is a Marine lieutenant in Fallujah and his e-mails to me … express disgust with domestic media coverage of the Iraq conflict, which he thinks is going far better than most Americans realize. I hope this is right. But I cannot say that I think the administration has done a first-rate job in managing the postwar situation. I supported and still support the decision to go into Iraq. … But it does not take much insight to see that the administration has occasionally let the tiller slip and has had to fumble to get a grip again. A Kerry administration would be far worse, disastrous in fact, but I expected more steadiness from this White House.

“Occasionally let[ting] the tiller slip” is a far cry from “the worst foreign-policy disaster for the United States in thirty years”! Who’s right here? Like most Americans, I only know what I read in the papers, which leaves the impression of a worsening insurgency with occasional signs of hope. But the fact that people with access to the same information can form such wildly diverging impressions about the state of affairs makes one think we’re not just divided, but inhabiting alternate realities.

This may be the residual libertarian in me, but if there’s one idea that repulses me, it’s “the politics of national greatness.” This was brought to mind by a recent article by former McCain adviser Marshall Wittmann explaining his support for the Kerry-Edwards ticket:

I am an independent McCainiac who hopes to revive the Bull Moose tradition of Theodore Roosevelt, and I support the Kerry-Edwards agenda. Don’t get me wrong — this Bull Moose is not completely in agreement with the Democratic donkey. But the Bush administration has betrayed the effort to create a new politics of national greatness in the aftermath of 9/11.

What exactly is a politics of national greatness in Wittmann’s view?

Although this new political perspective was never spelled out in specifics, its adherents (including me) envisioned an energetic federal government that would implement a foreign policy advancing American interests and human rights, along with a domestic policy that would promote national service, and an economics focused on benefiting the middle class.



If this sounds a bit like fascism to you, you’re not alone. (Okay, cheap shot.)



More Wittmann:



The modern champion of conservatives for national greatness is Sen. John McCain. In the 2000 campaign, he advocated rogue state rollback, reform of government, an economic plan that focused on middle-class tax relief, and national service. He inspired Americans “to enlist in causes greater than their self-interest.”

We see here the example of nominal conservatives falling for what John Ray correctly identified as a common leftist argument “that the individual could accomplish nothing and would earn nothing without the community of which he forms part — and that therefore he ‘owes’ the community something. That is of course true. What is hilarious is that Leftists by some amazing feat of illogicality then immediately equate ‘the community’ with ‘the government’ — which is in fact merely one part of the community, and a very parasitic part at that.”

The “national greatness conservatism” touted by Wittmann and writers like David Brooks and William Kristol envisions a government whose ambitions are far greater than simply protecting person and property as the classical liberal “night-watchman” state was supposed to do. It aims to provides spiritual uplift and a sense of identity, purpose and cohesion for the people. Thus the need for monument-building, conscription-based “national service” programs, and far-ranging projects to export “American values” to the world.

Contrast this with C. S. Lewis’ idea of the proper role of government:



The State exists to promote and protect the ordinary happiness of human beings in this life. A husband and wife chatting over a fire, a couple of friends having a game of darts in a pub, a man reading a book in his own room or digging in his own garden—that is what the State is there for.

In this view, the State exists to defend and nourish the goods of private and communal life – the lives of families, neighborhoods, churches, businesses and the other “intermediate institutions” that constitute the texture of our daily lives. An important, if modest, role.



“National greatness” reverses this order of priorities; it says that the citizen exists for the sake of the State and to promote its greatness. But to make the greatness of the nation the focus of our political efforts is to court idolatry. There are plenty of reasons to criticize the Bush administration. But in my view this is more because of its departure from traditional, limited-government conservatism than of a failure to embrace a spurious notion of national greatness.

Johny Ray makes an often neglected point:

One of the commonest Leftist arguments in defence of big government (a sophisticated example here) is to say that the individual could accomplish nothing and would earn nothing without the community of which he forms part — and that therefore he “owes” the community something. That is of course true. What is hilarious is that Leftists by some amazing feat of illogicality then immediately equate “the community” with “the government” — which is in fact merely one part of the community, and a very parasitic part at that.

More here.

It’s coming says Radley Balko.

They’ll have to pry the mug from my cold dead hands I tell ya…

An interesting essay by Roberto Rivera y Carlo:

There aren’t a lot of people like me — not as many as you might think, anyway. Oh, you hear political commentators talk about “single-issue voters,” by which they (almost always) mean voters for whom a candidate’s position on abortion is the decisive or most important factor in how they will vote. There are plenty of these folk: By most estimates, they’re between 5 and 10 percent of the electorate (and strongly favor — by at least a 3-2 margin — pro-life candidates).

But while these people can be fairly described as “strongly pro-life” or something similar, that’s not the same thing as being a “single-issue” voter. For starters, “decisive” and “most important” aren’t the same things as “sole” or “only.” I’ve spent enough time around pro-life activists to realize that if, by some (please God!) miracle, abortion disappeared tomorrow, many of them would probably vote in much the same way they do now.

That’s because abortion isn’t the only thing on which they agree with their preferred candidates. They also concur on taxes, regulations, national defense including the war in Iraq, and environmental policy, to name but a few areas. The agreement is often so complete that conservative positions in these areas are sometimes presented as being distinctly Christian — as in deriving from Christian first principles — positions.

Some of us beg to differ, which brings me back to the question of “single issue” voters. True “single issue” voters often vote for people we strongly disagree with on issues of great importance to us, so long as we agree on the issue of greatest importance.