A Thinking Reed

Month: November 2007

  • Clinton and Iraq

    Michael at Levellers expresses some well-justified outrage at Bill Clinton’s recent attempts to whitewash history and portray himself as an early opponent of the Iraq war. But as I mentioned in a comment to Michael’s post, not only did Clinton not oppose the war, his Iraq policy made it much more likely than it otherwise would’ve been.

    His administration did everything it could to hype the danger posed by Saddam’s regime, talked up the threat of WMDs, officially supported a policy of regime change, etc. After 9/11 happened Saddam was already poised as the Hitler du jour in the minds of most policymakers and pundits. Clinton did as much as anyone to promote the idea of Saddam as a great menace to the U.S. and world peace.

    Needless to say, this had numerous real-world consequences, such as the no-fly zone enforcement and the UN-approved sanctions regime. The human toll of this exercise in “soft power” is disputed, but no one denies that the people of Iraq suffered terribly, not least because they were prevented from rebuilding their country’s infrastructure which had been so badly damaged during the first Gulf War. So, far from being “opposed” to war with Iraq, the Clinton administration carried on a low-grade war against Iraq for nearly ten years.

  • The Huckster and neo-populism

    As Mike Huckabee continues to gain on Mitt Romney in Iowa, he seems to be steadily moving from a second to first-tier (or at least 1 and a half tier) candidate. Whether this is a function of his performance in the debates or his Chuck Norris endorsement remains to be seen.

    Over the last couple of days I’ve read a couple of at least partly admiring profiles of Huckabee by liberal writers in Rolling Stone and The New Yorker. These writers inevitably express shock that Huckabee doesn’t seem to be a monster despite being a crazy right-wing evangelical who doesn’t believe in evolution. But beyond his personal affability, these writers pick up on the fact that Huckabee has made some enemies on the fiscal right who’ve tagged him (rather implausibly) as a big-spending liberal.

    Personally I’m not too partial to Huckabee. He hasn’t done anything to distinguish himself from the Bush-GOP line on war, torture, and the national security state. Nor am I particularly a fan of his cultural politics.

    But what does make him interesting is that he seems to be groping toward a different economics than most of his competitors. His instincts seem to be for the working class and he’s raised issues of inequality and economic security that would otherwise not even register on the GOP’s radar. Now, this doesn’t seem to translate into a particularly coherent policy stance: for instance, he’s on record as supporting a national consumption tax in place of the income tax, which is a pretty regressive proposal. But his popularity still suggests that his rhetoric is resonating with voters.

    Michael Lind, a sharp left-of-center political analyst, argued recently that the economic “center” in American politics is shifting to the left. With the end of the Cold War, libertarianism and neoliberalism appeared to define the endpoints of the respectable spectrum on economic issues, but recent years, he says, have seen a resurgence of economic populism as a force to be reckoned with:

    Libertarians succeeded in promoting deregulation and the liberalisation of trade and finance. But, partly as a result of their success, the popular anxiety caused by globalisation doomed far more radical libertarian reforms.

    Even as libertarianism was losing its political lustre, economic populism came to life in US politics for the first time since the 1930s. Unlike the reactionary populism of Patrick Buchanan in the 1980s and 1990s, the middle-class populism represented by CNN’s Lou Dobbs cannot be dismissed as marginal. The decline of libertarianism and the revival of populism are already reshaping politics in the US and similar societies.

    What formerly was the left – welfare-state liberalism – is once again the ­centre. To its left (in economic, not social, terms) is protectionist ­populism; to its right, neoliberalism.

    If this is right, Huckabee may represent the future of the GOP as it scrambles to catch up with these new realities. Most of the other candidates are peddling the same old low-tax, anti-regulatory gospel, but if voters, even Republican ones, are increasingly feeling the pinch of economic anxiety, they may not be buying.

    What was originally called the “New Right” – the blue-collar former Democrats who came into the Republican coalition in the 70s and 80s was never really distinguished by its fealty to laissez-faire. It was motivated more by cultural politics, crime, welfare, and other concerns associated with the middle and working classes. These concerns were able to fit under the philosophical tent of antistatism because it was thought that government bureaucrats were the primary villains responsible for undermining sound virtues by meddling in communities.

    Previous to this the intellectual Right was elitist, Anglophilic and often characterized by a high-church religiosity. By contrast, the “New” Right was populist, blue-collar and less committed to the virtues of laissez-faire and individualism. Christopher Lasch brilliantly criticized the co-opting of populism by laissez-faire Republicans in his The True and Only Heaven. Lasch largely accepted the populist criticism of the Left and the welfare state, but he argued that capitalism and the state work in tandem to rob ordinary working people and their communities of their capacity for self-government and self-determination. Reaganomics was not, in his view, the true ally of populism, but the apogee of liberal individualism which corrodes communities in the name of “choice.”

    If evangelical Protestants are the heirs of the old “New” Right, then the turn toward economic populism may make sense. The “economic royalists” of the GOP (as the New Yorker piece calls them) have enjoyed the support of evangelical voters without really giving them much in the way of actual power. But if these folks now constitute most of the base of the party, then the populist chickens may be coming home to roost. I don’t know if Huckabee is the right vehicle for a conservative neo-populism, but he’s at least providing an interesting challenge to the status quo.

  • Kucinich/Paul in ’08!

    In the – ahem – unlikely event that he secures his party’s nomination, Dennis Kucinich has suggested that – wait for it – Ron Paul might make a good running mate.

    “I’m thinking about Ron Paul” as a running mate, Kucinich told a crowd of about 70 supporters at a house party here, one of numerous stops throughout New Hampshire over the Thanksgiving weekend. A Kucinich-Paul administration could bring people together “to balance the energies in this country,” Kucinich said.

    The Paul campaign has demurred, however.

    Unlikely as it sounds, I’ve long thought that a left-right fusion movement based around opposition to global interventionism, a defense of civil liberties, and a genuine populist critique of government and corporate elites could provide a healthy counterpoint to our current bipartisan consensus. And who better to lead it than these two gadflies?

  • Christ’s ambiguous reign and living in hope

    Yesterday, of course, was Christ the King Sunday, the last Sunday of the liturgical year before we head into Advent. The pastor at our church delivered an excellent sermon on the different aspects of Christ’s kingship and how we can become aware of them in our lives. Jesus reigns over all things, but he reigns as the crucified one – the one who transfigures the symbols of kingship and is present to us as the one who forgives our sins (the gospel text speaks to this with special power).

    This ambiguity in Christ’s lordship is one that I think we’re often tempted to eliminate in one direction or the other. The more common is to see Christ as an earthly ruler writ large, and to downplay, or ignore, the way he transfigures our ideas of kingship. On the other hand, in some recent theology, the emphasis has been laid so heavily on Christ’s weakness and his solidarity in suffering that the Resurrection and his triumphant reign seems to get lost.

    It doesn’t seem right to say that the Resurrection simply undoes the crucifixion, as though it didn’t reveal anything special or new about God. But it does imply that self-giving love is also backed up with ultimate power. The death of Christ isn’t simply a case of a beautiful soul ground under the wheels of an unforgiving universe: it reveals what the universe, at bottom, rests upon and what will ultimately triumph.

    Holding these two aspects of Christ’s sovereignty – power revealed in weakness and his status as the one for whom “all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers” – isn’t easily done. Maybe this is another facet of living in between the times, but it’s hard not to chafe at what looks for all the world like Christ’s failure to exercise his rule over our world. I don’t think it’s sufficient to say that Christ doesn’t exercise his power that way, since we believe that he will, in some mysterious and unimaginable way, end creation’s rebellion against his rule.

    Believing in Christ’s kingship means that we believe in both his present and future reigns, and yet those reigns are different, at least in the way things appear to us. In this age his reign appears partial at best, while creation groans for its redemption. And it’s hard for us (or at least for me) to believe in that reign, and to experience it, as a concrete reality. This is one more reason, I guess, why hope is a Christian virtue: we believe not merely in an unseen reality, but that this unseen reality will – someday – manifest itself in a final and definitive way.

  • Thanksgiving re-post

    I wrote this a couple of years ago, but I think it holds up pretty well:


    It’s interesting that Thanksgiving is the only secular holiday in the American calendar that has explicitly religious overtones (we might say that holidays like 4th of July and Memorial Day have implicit religious overtones, but that’s another matter). That is, Thanksgiving implies Someone to whom we give thanks, but it’s not an explicitly Christian holiday like Christmas or Easter (i.e. it isn’t part of the liturgical calendar, is not tied to any event in sacred history, is not shared by the universal church, etc.).

    While the original Puritan thanksgiving feast was a religious event rooted in a very specific Christian tradition, Thanksgiving didn’t become a national holiday until 1863 (although many individual states had their own Thanksgiving holidays prior to that). In the early years of the Republic, days of thanksgiving were proclaimed in response to particular events, including military victories (by Presidents Washington and Madison).

    President Lincoln’s proclamation of a national Thanksgiving holiday in 1863 was prompted by gratitude for the blessings the country enjoyed even in the midst of a brutal and bloody civil war. It’s noteworthy that Lincoln spoke of it in terms that are difficult to imagine coming from any contemporary U.S. politician:

    No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy.

    It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and voice by the whole American people. I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens. And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to his tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquillity and Union.

    Nowadays politicians trip over each other to proclaim the innate goodness and downright wonderfulness of the American people. Can you imagine any politician today encouraging us to adopt a spirit of “humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience”?

    Christians have good reasons to be suspicious of civil religion, but the version articulated by Lincoln is remarkably robust compared to anemic pleas for posting the Ten Commandments in a court house or ritual invocations of “God Bless America.” The God invoked by Lincoln is not the laissez-faire God of the deists, but a mysterious providence whose will can’t be straightforwardly identified with any human cause.

    It would be a pretty radical thing to do for some public figure to suggest that we not only give thanks for all our blessings, but actually engage in self-examination to see where we have been “perverse and disobedient,” individually and as a nation. Not that I particularly want politicians to assume the mantle of the preacher, but it would be a refreshing change from the feel-goodism of so much civil religion that seeks to merely put a stamp of divine approval on the American Way of Life.

  • We’re doomed

    I’m not sure what I think about the whole Peak Oil issue, but Georgetown political scientist Patrick Deneen has thought a lot about it and has a – “sobering” is too mild a word; “apocalyptic” maybe? – post up about the relationship between oil and food and the implications that might have for world population.

  • Just doesn’t apply himself

    Report Card on the War on Terror

    via Balkinization

  • Wednesday metal – In Flames, “Crawl Through Knives”

    I know it’s Wednesday, but with the holiday coming up, I can’t promise there’ll be much blogging over the next couple of days.

    And I know I posted an In Flames video a couple of weeks back, but this is an insanely catchy song and I’ve had it stuck in my head all week. The video comes from the DVD that goes with the CD Come Clarity:

  • As we go marching or It’s the war, stupid!

    Ross Douthat offers the logical response to this Jonah Goldberg column wondering why mainstream Republicans and conservatives are down on Ron Paul (who, after all, believes most of the things conservatives are supposed to stand for) and not Mike Huckabee, who exhibits many more deviations from conservative ideology:

    [T]he reason Paul has been treated differently than Huckabee by the right-wing media is very, very simple, and it has nothing to do with size-of-government issues: Paul opposes the Iraq War (and war with Iran, waterboarding, and all the rest of what’s increasingly defined as the right-wing foreign policy package) and Huckabee doesn’t. Full stop, end of story.

    I think he’s right and it shows to what extent the war (and attendant issues) have crowded out traditional conservative concerns. The popularity of Rudy Giuliani is another example of this phenomenon at work.

    It’s illuminating to recall that during World War II there were people with impeccable progressive credentials who opposed the entry into the war and were castigated by FDR and his supporters as reactionaries. Two notable men of letters, Oswald Garrison Villard and John T. Flynn, were liberals who ended up on the wrong side of FDR and became victims of a seismic political realignment..

    Villard wrote for the Nation, was a founder of the anti-imperialist league, and advocate of civil rights. Flynn was a left-wing populist who wrote for The New Republic. Both men opposed U.S. entry into World War II and were associated with the America First committe. And both ended up breaking with their erstwhile allies who supported the war (Villard stopped writing for the Nation and Flynn was fired from his regular spot at the New Republic). They found themselves with new allies on the Right who opposed foreign intervention and both became harsh critics of FDR and his policies.

    What’s interesting is that both Villard and Flynn apparently underwent an ideological evoultion, becoming more right-wing in domestic as well as foreign policy (at least as right-wing was understood at the time). Both became sharply critical of the New Deal, calling it a precursor to an American form of fascism.

    This suggests that war has a way of bringing about political realignments. If “the Right” continues to be defined by a preference for preemptive war, the unitary executive, and “harsh interrogation techniques,” critics of these policies will find themselves to be on the Left de facto if not de jure. But it also raises the intriguing possibility of an ideological metamorphosis on domestic questions too, a la Villard and Flynn. Ron Paul, for instance, while clearly having libertarian leanings, couches a lot of his arguments in rhetoric drawn from the populist tradition. You see this when he talks about returning to the Constitution, about U.S. sovereignty, in his criticisms of NAFTA and the WTO, and so on. And this kind of rhetoric has a lot in common with Left-wing populism.

    This doesn’t mean that I agree with conservative critics of Ron Paul that he’s a “leftist,” but once one raises the kinds of questions someone like Paul raises not just about the Iraq war, but the very premises of “conservative” foreign policy, it opens the door to further questions about the foundations of American capitalism as it’s currently practiced, about police powers, about the military-industrial complex and other traditionally “left-wing” issues.

    Personally speaking, I considered myself a fairly conventional conservative in 2000 and voted (reluctantly) for Bush, but became increasingly appalled at the conduct of the administration and the support it received from organized conservatism beginning around the time of the run-up to the Iraq war. But this eventually led me to re-think the entire panoply of conservative positions and abandon many of them. If conservatives could virtually en masse be so disastrously wrong, I thought, about foreign policy and issues like torture and executive power, what else were they wrong about? Since then I’ve departed from conservative orthodoxy on enough points that I would be hard-pressed to self-idenify that way anymore (politically I’m registered as an independent). But it was the increasing self-definition of conservatism in terms of the positions connected to the war that initially pushed me into the other camp.

  • All theology is animal theology

    Christopher:

    Considering animals in relationship to God is not something extra or foreign to Christianity. In my opinion, a serious doctrine of Creation cannot ignore the rest of the living world and the Creation as a whole and finally be Christian. Even rocks glorify God. And frankly, neither can a complete doctrine of Redemption or Sanctification. Indeed, to set up one’s “serious” theology in such a way that one can ignore, dismiss, or deride creatures great and small, organic and inorganic, is a sign of the Fall and the effects of sin, alienation and division. The rest of Creation pays dearly and regularly for our lack of relational recognition and failures in thankfulness.

    Maybe this is just special pleading on my part, but I think he’s absolutely right. In fact, I’m not sure Christian theology, much less Christian practice, has even begun to move from a thoroughly anthropocentric perspective to one that is more properly theocentric. Even churches that pay lip service (or more than lip service) to “the environment” remain steadfastly human-centered in their concerns. To some extent this is inevitable, but I wonder if we end up pushing a very thin gospel that essentially addresses only human concerns, and that often in a very therapuetic individualist way. And, if so, isn’t this a denial of the Lordship of Christ over all creation?

    What would theology and practice look like if they genuinely incorporated the cosmic aspect of the biblical story that we so frequently downplay? My sense is that we in the mainline ignore this cosmic dimension out of embarassment. After all, a faith that is confined to fostering psychological well-being or political action is much more respectable than one that talks about the redemption of all creation. We have very little idea, I think, of what that would even look like.

    If mainliners want to criticize fundamentalists for believing that we’re about to be whisked away in the Rapture, leaving the earth a smoldering cinder, maybe the proper response is to have a counter-story about the destiny of creation. Not to mention a counter-story to the post-Enlightenment industrial view of nature as a vast repository of resources for our exploitation. After all, isn’t there ample biblical and theological warrant for saying that creation – including our animal cousins – has a destiny in God’s kingdom? And doesn’t that imply that it matters now what happens to creation, since those aspects of the present age that serve God’s purposes will be preserved and transfigured (in ways we can scarcely being to imagine) in the age to come?

    I actually am not sure how far we can push the de-anthropocentricizing (is that a word?) of Christian theology; this strikes me as still relatively unexplored territory. Some eco-theologians have tried it in ways that seem to me to sacrifice too much of traditional Christian belief. On the other hand, someone like Andrew Linzey is doing it in a way that builds on traditional orthdox trinitarian theology. I think this is the more promising route for a variety of reasons, maybe most importantly because traditional doctrines of creation and incarnation provides what I think is the strongest foundation for taking the created world to have permanent value for God.