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Continuing the trend of blogging about books I haven’t read (and probably won’t read), I’ve recently read two interesting reviews of Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas? For those not in the know, Frank’s thesis is that culturally conservative red-state voters have been duped by the GOP’s ostensible (and, according to Frank, largely fake) concern for things like abortion and gay marriage into voting for economic policies that are directly counter to their class interests.

In First Things, James Nuechterlein accuses Frank of a “vulgar leftism” that attributes mass false-conscious to the middle-American proletariat taken in by those crafty conservatives:

The concept of sincere error is largely foreign to [Frank]. Contemporary conservatives and liberals alike are not just mistaken in their understanding of politics; they are for the most part venal sellouts for whom hypocrisy and mendacity are second nature.

Not so, to be sure, with the deluded folk. Their problem is not venality but, well, a certain form of stupidity. They are apparently just too dumb not to be taken in by the “hallucinatory appeal” of backlash cultural issues. Frank, one assumes, would quarrel with this way of putting his argument, but he offers no alternative explanation for how millions of middle Americans are so blind to their real interests and so self-destructive in their political behavior. The backlash, in his own words, “is a working-class movement that has done incalculable, historic harm to working-class people.” Or consider the typically ripe rhetorical flourish with which he concludes his book: “Kansas is ready to lead us singing into the apocalypse. It invites us all to join in, to lay down our lives so that others might cash out at the top; to renounce forever our middle-American prosperity in pursuit of a crimson fantasy of middle-American righteousness.”

Nuechterlein goes on to point out (rightly, in my view) that it is entirely possible and right to vote on issues other than economic ones:

Frank is led to this bizarre binary view of contemporary American politics—people are either knaves or fools—by his insistent (if entirely unexamined) assumption that the only rational politics is a material politics. Voters who place cultural or moral concerns above economic self-interest are obviously beset by a form of false consciousness (Frank never uses the term, but his analysis presupposes it). […]

It is fair enough to question the true significance to the lives of ordinary Americans of some items in Frank’s litany of backlash issues. But consider the three that regularly come to the fore: the role of religion in public life, gay marriage, and abortion. It is not irrational or irrelevant to consider the elimination of public acknowledgment of religion a likely contribution to the loss of moral seriousness in our civic life. It is not irrational or irrelevant to view with grave concern a redefinition of marriage that would overturn the practice of millennia. And it is certainly not irrational or irrelevant to insist on that most basic of civilizational requirements: the protection of innocent human life.

Meanwhile, at Reason Jesse Walker questions Frank’s insistence that what middle America really wants is big-government liberalism (a.k.a. social democracy). He suggests that working-class middle Americans may well have good reasons for distrusting bossy liberal elites as much as bossy conservative elites. For better or for worse, many working class people stopped seeing the government as acting in their interests. This, combined with know-it-all social engineering, may have contributed to the “backlash” Frank laments as much as conservative “wedge issues”:

If liberalism, in Frank’s words, “ceased to be relevant” to this “traditional constituency,” it was at least partly because the leading liberals were acting against that constituency’s interests. The hardhats of Charlestown didn’t face a laissez-faire Democratic Party that ignored their economic interests and a Republican Party that appealed to their values. They faced a big-government Democratic Party that was actively working against them and in favor of a wealthier group. […]

In short, perhaps the Great Backlash regards liberals as an elite because sometimes, just like conservatives, liberals really do act like an elite. You can do that when you have a powerful government at your command. Back in the Progressive Era, Eastern reformers offered a platform of “scientific” management, of giant enterprises and giant government working for the collective good. This set the template for the most destructive species of 20th-century liberalism: the liberalism that bulldozed neighborhoods to build freeways, that flooded farmers’ land to erect the Tennessee Valley Authority, that drafted kids to fight in what Bob Dole so accurately called “Democrat wars.”

Relatedly, over at The American Scene, Reihan Salam ponders what a fusion of blue-collar social conservatism and economic liberalism might look like:

I start with the premise that the government is necessarily crafting family policies whenever it makes economic policies, and that we ought to bias said policies in the direction of encouraging self-reliance by building the capacities for self-reliance. This emphasis on strong families and communities, in turn, reflects a “blue-collar social conservatism” as it exists in the wider world. I’ve always associated “blue-collar social conservatism” with local democracy, and respecting the habits and mores of decent communities.

I hate to pick on Pat Buchanan since, whatever his other flaws, he’s been an early and consistent opponent of the Iraq war and the broader “maximalist” view of the “war on terror.” Still, there seems to be a persistent confusion running through his recent writings that bears on the present troubles.

In his latest book, as well as his magazine, Buchanan has peddled the conceit that the conservative movement of Reagan and Goldwater has been “hijacked” by nefarious neo-conservatives who want to send America on a delusional messianic crusade to impose freedom and democracy on the world. By contrast, Buchanan wants the USA to return to what he argues is the traditional foreign policy of the fouders – non-interventionism (a.k.a. “isolationism”).

What he often seems to do though, is to conflate Goldwaterism/Reaganism with the isolationist “Old Right” that flourished in the years between the world wars. In arguing that the necons have hijacked the movement, he implies that they represent a radical departure from the tradition of Goldwater and Reagan. But I think by anyone’s reckoning Goldwater and Reagan were far more interventionist than isolationist, and this has been true of the post-World War II conservative movement as a whole. It was founded on the twin pillars of scaling back the state at home and defeating communism abroad. Non-interventionists either broke with the movement, or kept their views on foreign policy to themselves during the Cold War (for an excellent discussion of the various factions within the postwar conservative movement, see George Nash’s The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America).

To the extent that one accepts the logic of the Old Right – that domestic statism and foreign interventionism are simply two sides of the same coin – the conservatism of Goldwater and Reagan can only seem contradictory. The neoconservatives that Buchanan deplores have resolved the contradiction by making their peace with big government at home in exchange for aggressive government action abroad.

John Henry Newman once said that Protestantism was nothing but a halfway house between Roman Catholicism and liberalism. It may be that Goldwater-Reaganism holds the same place between the Old Right and the neoconservatism, and that Buchanan is trying to take up residence in that lonely halfway house.

There’s been a minor brouhaha over Thomas Woods’ Politically Incorrect Guide to American History (n.b. I haven’t read the book). Woods, a paleoconservative and frequent contributor to LewRockwell.com and The American Conservative, apparently takes a dim view of the North’s part in the Civil War (a.k.a. “The War Between the States,” a.k.a. “The War of Northern Aggression”(!)). Woods’ revisionism and his association with the unsavory League of the South brought down the wrath of the august The New York Times, which deemed it a “neocon” revision of American history.

The improbably named Max Boot took umbrage at this and penned a polemical review of Woods’ book at the Weekly Standard. Woods’ book, Boot correctly points out, is anything but a “neocon” rewriting of American history:

It tells you something about how debased political terminology has become when a leading light of the nutty League of the South is identified in the Paper of Record as a “neocon.” The original neocons, like Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz, were former Democrats who accepted the welfare state, racial equality, and other liberal accomplishments while insisting on a more assertive foreign policy than the McGovernites wanted. In other words, pretty much the opposite of what Woods believes. Woods is a paleocon, not a neocon. His online writings (helpfully collected by the blog isthatlegal.org) seethe with hatred for everything that neoconservatism (and modern America) stands for. Just after September 11, he wrote that the “barbarism of recent American foreign policy was bound to lead to a terrorist catastrophe on American soil.” Just before the Iraq War, he wrote that the Bush administration had undertaken an “open-ended commitment” to wage “war after war against the enemies of Israel, at America’s expense.” He blames this “imperial bluster” on “the neoconservative stable of armchair generals.”

From the sounds of things, Woods falls into the all-too common trap of being unable or unwilling to distinguish between a critique of the North’s prosecution of the war and sympathy for the slaveholders of the South. It is possible and entirely consistent to hold that a) the Lincoln administration’s abridgement of civil liberties and its embrace of “total war” were unconscionable and b) slavery was a crime that cried out to heaven for vengance. Indeed, one might see behind the destruction wrought upon the South a kind of divine judgment for its sins. Also, both of these issues are distinct from the question of whether there is or was a legal, constitutional, or moral right to secede from the Union.

This is rendered more distressing because I think we could use an honest reappraisal of Lincoln’s conduct of the war, if only because appeals to Lincoln’s precedent are often used as justification for similar measures in our own time (as in the piece linked above). But this is hard to do when it’s tainted with Confederate apologetics.

For his part, Boot writes as almost a parody of a neoconservative. Is there any war he doesn’t think the US should have been involved in? It seems not, since he has recently called for a kind of helot army with which the US will spread “freedom” at gunpoint around the globe. To have to choose between Boot’s manic interventionism and Woods’ Confederate nostalgia is pretty unappealing.

Part of the reason that the NYT and Boot are both so appaled by Woods may be that the neoconservatism touted by Boot is really not that different from mainstream liberalism.

Reason‘s Tim Cavanaugh puts it well:

I think it says more about how contemporary liberals view themselves than about our “debased political terminology” that anybody at The New York Times believes a neocon “revision” of American history would even be possible, or that it would differ in any substantive way from the way that history would be written by The New York Times itself.

The genius of neoconservatism is that it’s exactly in step with the progressivist, middle-of-the-road, big state view of American history they teach in school: The Articles of Confederation resulted in a disaster that taught the founders the value of a strong central state; the Whiskey rebels were dangerous kooks, not unlike the Branch Davidians of our own time; “States’ Rights” has always been a code word for slavery; President Woodrow Wilson was a man of vision but sadly was unable to achieve his goals for an international order; the America Firsters were even kookier and more marginal than the Whiskey rebels, and the best way to deal with one is to sock him in the jaw like in The Best Years of Our Lives; many well intentioned folks on the left underestimated the danger of the Soviet Union, but the anti-communist witch hunts of the fifties were a regrettable overreaction (the Left didn’t become dangerous until the late sixties and early seventies, when it embraced separatist and militant views that undermined the politics of consensus that made this country great); real civil rights progress only came when the federal government asserted its power over the refractory states; September 11 shocked America out of its isolationism and freed President George W. Bush (an excellent man, but distressingly shortsighted in some matters) from his naive opposition to nation-building. And so on.

Leave aside how much of it you agree or disagree with. What would the neocons add to the official version of American history? That Winston Churchill should have been made King of the United States as well as Prime Minister of Great Britain? That we missed a great opportunity by not jumping into the Franco-Prussian War? That we should have intervened on Sylvania’s side against Freedonia? The folks at The Times may have a narcissistic interest in highlighting small differences, but you can’t misuse language forever. When liberals look at the neocons, they see themselves.

Surprisingly good article from Newsweek on the Pope’s suffering as a testament to the gospel of life he has consistently proclaimed.

I found it interesting to read this next to this.

There’s a lot of loose talk abroad about how Christianity has been or should be affected by, understand, or resist “postmodernism.” More often than not people either don’t define what they mean by postmodernism, or they set up strawmen (e.g. postmodernism=there is no truth!!), or they uncritically accept that we live in a “postmodern” age which entails a massive overhaul in how Christianity should be understood.

For a sober take on the matter, you could do a lot worse than to check out this essay by philosopher Merold Westphal. Westphal actually engages the ideas of people like Heidegger and Lyotard and argues that classic Christianity (not just trendy “postmodern” theology) has the resources to meet many postmodern criticisms, and that postmodernism actually offers a valuable corrective to some of the problems embedded in modernity that Christians should appreciate.

(link via Peter Leithart)

Via Michael Gilleland I see there has been a bit of a dust-up at The Conservative Philosopher resulting in Max Goss’ departure from the blog (see here and here).

Once again it seems an example of blogland taking itself a bit too seriously. But the happy result for me is that I have been directed to Mr. Goss’ blog at World magazine which looks to be pretty good.

Nat Hentoff points our attention to a recently published New Yorker piece detailing the history of the practice of “extraordinary renditions” — i.e. sending suspects abroad to countries that are less than scrupulous about the use of torture.

The New Yorker piece is here.

Kevin Carson posts on the decentralist tradition on the Left as represented by folks like E. F. Schumacher and Kirkpatrick Sale:

Today, as much as ever, the good guys on the left and right fringe have more in common with each other than with the bad guys in the corporate center. As I’ve written elsewhere, the gun rights and home-schooling people are the natural allies of people into things like human scale technology and worker self-management. It’s the statist neoconservatives of the right-center and the New Republic liberals of the left-center, fighting over control of the corporate state, who are our common enemy.

One might quibble about whether Schumacher is a man of the Left, properly speaking. He was a Catholic convert who had certain affinities with the distributism of Chesterton and Belloc (but then, were Chesterton and Belloc themselves men of the Left or the Right?).

And speaking of Sale, see his article today at Counterpunch: “Imperial Entropy”

Other works on a decentralism that transcends Left and Right that I’ve found interesting are The Vermont Papers by Frank Bryan and John McClaughry and Downsizing the U.S.A. by Thomas Naylor and William Willimon.

While I no longer consider myself a Libertarian in the ideological sense, I think the kind of “small-l” libertarian thinking represented by folks like Sale and Schumacher has a lot to offer.

One of the problems with the debate between pacifism and just war theory is that it often strays into a theoretical argument totally untethered from the biblical texts (Camassia’s complaint), or it gets mired in pulling out various bits of Scripture and using them as proof-texts.

Proponents of Just War Theory often appeal to John the Baptist’s exhortation to the soldiers in Luke 3:

Then some soldiers asked him, “And what should we do?”
He replied, “Don’t extort money and don’t accuse people falsely–be content with your pay.” (Luke 3:14)

From this it is sometimes inferred that John must have approved of the soldiers’ occupation, and, therefore, that a Christian can licitly be a soldier and engage in war-making. If John was a pacifist he would’ve told the soldiers to give up soldiering!

St. Thomas quotes St. Augustine to this effect in his article on whether war can be just:

Objection 1. It would seem that it is always sinful to wage war. Because punishment is not inflicted except for sin. Now those who wage war are threatened by Our Lord with punishment, according to Mt. 26:52: “All that take the sword shall perish with the sword.” Therefore all wars are unlawful. […]

On the contrary, Augustine says in a sermon on the son of the centurion [Ep. ad Marcel. cxxxviii]: “If the Christian Religion forbade war altogether, those who sought salutary advice in the Gospel would rather have been counselled to cast aside their arms, and to give up soldiering altogether. On the contrary, they were told: ‘Do violence to no man . . . and be content with your pay’ [Lk. 3:14. If he commanded them to be content with their pay, he did not forbid soldiering.” (ST, Part II, Q 40)*

G.E.M. Anscombe makes a similar appeal:

To extract a pacifist doctrine–i.e., a condemnation of the use of force by the ruling authorities, and of soldiering as a profession–from the evangelical counsels and the rebuke to Peter, is to disregard what else is in the New Testament. It is to forget St. John’s direction to soldiers: “do not blackmail people; be content with your pay”; and Christ’s commendation of the centurion, who compared his authority over his men to Christ’s. On a pacifist view, this must be much as if a madam in a brothel had said: “I know what authority is, I tell this girl to do this and she does it…” and Christ had commender her faith. A centurion was the first Gentile to be baptized; there is no suggestion in the New Testament that soldiering was regarded as incompatible with Christianity. The martyrology contains many names of soldiers whose occasion of martyrdom was not any objection to soldiering, but a refusal to perform idolatrous acts.

These seem like thin reeds on which to hang a doctrine of just war. First of all, many soldiers in the Roman army were not engaged in fighting, but were little more than bureaucrats administering the vast machinery of empire. So, it seems to read a lot into the Baptist’s comments to say that he was commending war as such. This is reinforced by his admonition not to falsely accuse people – it suggests that these soldiers were acting more like military police.

Secondly, we have to reckon with Jesus’ own statements on the matter, and certainly they carry more weight than those of St. John.

But more fundamentally, it seems to me that we need a kind of overarching hermeneutic for how we extract moral norms from the New Testament. That is, a rule of interpretation for deciding which pronouncements carry the most weight, how to deal with inconsistencies (real or apparent), etc.

To make an analogy, it is often said that debates about homosexuality pit those who adhere to the “authority of the Bible” against those who don’t. A more charitable way of putting it, I think, is to say that the two sides emphasize different aspects of the Biblical witness. Those who oppose the acceptance of homosexual behavior point to Paul’s statements in Romans and elsewhere that seem to condemn same-sex relations and appeal to the creation account to argue that marriage between a man and a woman expresses the will of God. But those who argue for acceptance point to the inclusion of the Gentiles as a kind of moral precedent for not letting what they regard as outmoded “purity” regulations be the norm in the church (I realize I am not presenting these positions in all their sophistication; this is for illustrative purposes only).

The upshot is that, whatever position we take, it should be informed by a coherent account of how the Bible should function as a guide our moral life, not just by adducing texts plucked out to support a predetermined position.
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*To avoid misunderstanding I should point out that Aquinas offers much more in the way of an argument than just this one text. He goes on to say:

In order for a war to be just, three things are necessary. First, the authority of the sovereign by whose command the war is to be waged. For it is not the business of a private individual to declare war, because he can seek for redress of his rights from the tribunal of his superior. Moreover it is not the business of a private individual to summon together the people, which has to be done in wartime. And as the care of the common weal is committed to those who are in authority, it is their business to watch over the common weal of the city, kingdom or province subject to them. And just as it is lawful for them to have recourse to the sword in defending that common weal against internal disturbances, when they punish evil-doers, according to the words of the Apostle (Rm. 13:4): “He beareth not the sword in vain: for he is God’s minister, an avenger to execute wrath upon him that doth evil”; so too, it is their business to have recourse to the sword of war in defending the common weal against external enemies. Hence it is said to those who are in authority (Ps. 81:4): “Rescue the poor: and deliver the needy out of the hand of the sinner”; and for this reason Augustine says (Contra Faust. xxii, 75): “The natural order conducive to peace among mortals demands that the power to declare and counsel war should be in the hands of those who hold the supreme authority.”

Secondly, a just cause is required, namely that those who are attacked, should be attacked because they deserve it on account of some fault. Wherefore Augustine says (QQ. in Hept., qu. x, super Jos.): “A just war is wont to be described as one that avenges wrongs, when a nation or state has to be punished, for refusing to make amends for the wrongs inflicted by its subjects, or to restore what it has seized unjustly.”

Thirdly, it is necessary that the belligerents should have a rightful intention, so that they intend the advancement of good, or the avoidance of evil. Hence Augustine says (De Verb. Dom. [The words quoted are to be found not in St. Augustine’s works, but Can. Apud. Caus. xxiii, qu. 1): “True religion looks upon as peaceful those wars that are waged not for motives of aggrandizement, or cruelty, but with the object of securing peace, of punishing evil-doers, and of uplifting the good.” For it may happen that the war is declared by the legitimate authority, and for a just cause, and yet be rendered unlawful through a wicked intention. Hence Augustine says (Contra Faust. xxii, 74): “The passion for inflicting harm, the cruel thirst for vengeance, an unpacific and relentless spirit, the fever of revolt, the lust of power, and such like things, all these are rightly condemned in war.”