The end of Europe? II

And thus spoke Zarathustra to the people: ".... The time has come for man to plant the seed of his highest hope. His soil is still rich enough. But one day this soil will be poor and domesticated, and no tall tree will be able to grow in it .... I say unto you: one must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star. I say unto you: you still have chaos in yourselves .... Alas, the time is coming when man will no longer give birth to a star. Alas, the time of the most despicable man is coming, [the one] no longer able to despise himself. Behold, I show you the Last Man.

" 'What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?' thus asks the Last Man, and he blinks. The earth has become small, and on it hops the Last Man, who makes everything small .... 'We have invented happiness,' say the Last Men, and they blink. They have left the regions where it was hard to live, for one needs warmth .... Becoming sick and harboring suspicion are sinful to them .... A fool, whoever still stumbles over stones or human beings! A little poison, now and then: that makes for agreeable dreams. And much poison in the end, for an agreeable death .... One no longer becomes poor or rich: both require too much exertion ....

"No shepherd and one herd! Everyone wants the same, everyone is the same: whoever feels differently goes voluntarily to the madhouse. 'Formerly, all the world was mad,' say the most refined, and they blink."

- Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Prologue (1882)

If Berlinski's is the most perceptive and charming of the recent books on Europe, Mark Steyn's America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It is surely the most blunt and original, and of all of them, the most unapologetically conservative. In spite of its title, the book is really about the apparently unstoppable decline of Europe, as reflected by its mix of overburdened economies, inability to defend itself, dicey demographics, unsustainable welfare states, and rapidly growing Muslim populations.

It is also a devastating and almost-irrefutable book, cutting through layers and layers of accumulated conventional wisdom and poisoned junk-food residue left behind by the media. It challenges everyone: realists - Steyn dismisses them as obsolete in a shrinking world; liberals - they're largely unwilling to defend their own liberalism; even neocons - can the Islamic world be reformed - really? In Steyn's view, the real problem is not the Muslims of the Middle East, but Eurabia, the alienated and anti-assimilating Muslims of Europe. America Alone is mainly a book about Europe, and only secondarily about America. The United States simply emerges as an historically normal nation-state, Europe as a doomed post-historical project. Steyn's point on this score: the US doesn't need to join the "rest of the world"; it's Europe that needs to rejoin history. It has a generation left, at most. Otherwise, save your dollars and get over there now to have a look-see: Europe is entering its museum closing time.

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The book's style does sometimes veer into Steyn's newspaper column banter. But it has several intertwined broad themes that control its arguments, and Steyn has obviously given them considerable thought. They encompass the post-1945 evolution of Western governments away from "primary" responsibilities (maintaining internal peace and order, self-defense) toward ever-more expansive "secondary" ambitions (refashioning society, labeling everyone a victim and making them objects of solicitude). From this trend arise the relentless expansion and simultaneous unsustainability of the social democratic welfare state - economically, demographically, and politically. At its heart, modern government's "secondary" impulses rest on an incorrigible tendency by elites to treat everyone else as helpless children.

In Europe, another development is being scribbled over top of the first: the basic conflict between Islam as a political project, on the one hand, and the nation-state system and liberal democracy, on the other. ("Terrorism" and the "war on terror" are merely the violent symptoms of this contradiction.) That makes the emerging conflict different in nature there from here: we view it as a foreign war - in Europe, it's headed towards expression as a civil war - not so different from the streets of Gaza or Baghdad. Finally, we have the confusion and fatuity of many liberal and leftist politicians and thinkers when confronted with these unpleasant facts. Steyn is put into the peculiar position many conservatives find themselves in these days, of defending a liberal political system that liberals themselves helped to build, yet are often unwilling to defend. So conservatives do the job that liberals won't, and conservatives end up in a strange position when they do so. That fact alone explains more about the rise of "neoconservatism" (which is really no more than a kind of "right-wing liberalism") than any number of conspiracy theories.

Steyn deftly grasps the self-destructive dynamic here and wonders if Europe can escape the end result: the dynamic of self-hatred, a manifestation of the self divided against itself. For Euro-Muslims, the divided self is a result of a double alienation, both from traditional Muslim society and from post-modern, post-religious Europe. Islamic culture (especially its Arabic core) is markedly underdeveloped in its capacity for self-examination and self-criticism. The resulting self-hatred is projected outward on to the supposed causes, the West and the allied corrupt Muslim governments. For Western post-Christian leftists (and their self-hating post-Jewish allies), self-examination and self-criticism are hypertrophied; the result is self-hatred projected inward, with typical symptoms: a paralysis of self-interested action and rational thought, the invention and invocation of fantasies ("noble savage," "social justice," etc.), and an inability to defend oneself. In Europe (not as much here), the fully-developed symbiosis draws white Europeans and alienated Euro-Muslims into an intertwining of hatred and self-hatred. The suicidal meet the homicidal.

The radical Islamic project has little traction here - it's Europe where the terror cells are being hatched and the political future is in serious doubt. The attempt to buy off the Euro-Muslims with welfare has only produced a generation of lazy, undisciplined resident aliens with no future in European society, but plenty of free time to watch al-Jazeera and think about how much they hate the infidel West. The other pole of this negative dialectic is represented by the European leaders who lack the confidence to defend themselves and their societies. America has far few Muslims to begin with, and they're better educated and integrated into American society. But there's a flip side to this, as Steyn points out: it's because Americans are comfortable with their "liberal" system (including religious freedom) and willing to defend it, that they also have no difficulty expecting immigrants to adapt themselves to it. For the most part, Europeans lack this confidence, and the result is something very different from here: a large, growing population of alienated Muslims who are neither here nor there, doubly alienated, perfect candidates for radicalization. The origins of the European lack of self-confidence are many. But note the fact that traditional national identities in Europe are being euthanized by the Euro-elites. The intended replacement is a weak EU-identity that many Europeans have difficulty taking seriously and which most Euro-Muslims don't identify with at all. The real difference between the US and Europe is not the religion the media and talking heads keep chattering about; it's that the US has a strong secular, national identity and Europe does not. Europe has not only put its religious identity to sleep; it's even putting to sleep the national identities that, a century or two ago, were supposed to replace religion.

In the long run, it might turn out that the 9/11 attacks will prove to be a turning point in European, not American, history. The attacks were planned by Euro-Muslims, not American Muslims. And their successor attacks have mostly happened in Europe. It is the epicenter of the emergent conflict.

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Although America Alone -is- a book, not a collection of newspaper columns, it's still studded with the witticisms and zingers we have come to expect from Steyn and that never fail to hit their targets:

• "In the social democratic welfare state, you don't have kids - you are the kid."
• "There are moderate Muslims, but no moderate Islam."
• "Europe is ahead of America, mainly in the sense that its canoe is already halfway over the falls."
• "The EU is a 1970s solution to a 1940s problem ... a quarter-century past its sell-by date."
• "Europe's Muslim immigrants are the children Europe couldn't be bothered to have."
• "[Daniel] Pearl's beheading was the story ... for the jihadis, Pearl [as a reporter] wasn't needed to tell some other story."
• "The non-imperial hyperpower [the US] does not garrison remote ramshackle outposts, but its most wealthy allies, freeing them from having to defend themselves .... Defense welfare is like any other form of welfare."
• "Fighting a war is not a lawsuit, its victims are not plaintiffs ...."
• "As they said of the British at Singapore [in 1942], at least four of those five guns [military, economic, diplomatic, informational] are pointing in the wrong direction."
• "[Multiculturalism] is a kind of societal Stockholm syndrome .... It doesn't involve actually knowing anything about other cultures ... It just involves making everyone feel warm and fluffy inside, making bliss out of ignorance."
• "There are three outcomes to the present struggle: surrender, destroy Islam, reform Islam. We can lose."

Bush is conspicuous by his relative absence, probably because Steyn wants to communicate the fundamental conflict and trends, and they have nothing to do with Bush. Like most conservatives, he's also probably gone through multiple stages of Bush disillusionment, and Steyn aims some bitter barbs in his direction: too wimpy, too indolent, too PC, too tolerant of the Saudis and their system of radical schools, too ready to promote big guvmint and overlook its failures.

Steyn's list of possible conflict outcomes is not exhaustive, as many conservative critics point out. But given that the world is getting smaller and smaller, and given the fact that virtually no Muslim country fits liberal-internationalist criteria as "normal," our options, both liberal-internationalist and conservative-realist, are running out.

The larger melancholy of Steyn's book, clear only in the last couple chapters, is the profoundly unhealthy relationship that has developed between the US and the rest of the developed world since 1945, and especially since the end of the Cold War. This is a world deeply dependent on the US for its military protection; its foreign policy; our demand on world markets for their exports; our ability to absorb the world's savings as investment capital into an economy that is stable, non-corrupt, and growing healthily (a combination that occurs almost nowhere else); our role as an escape for the ambitious and talented stymied in their home countries by oppressive dictatorships and stifling welfare states; a place that develops their medicines, because we still have a semi-free medical system - and so on. America far outspends the rest of the developed world in things military, but that is only because the rest of the developed world has abandoned the ability to defend itself or contribute to a common defense. Given American responsibilities, we arguably don't spend enough; what is definitely true is that they don't spend enough. They have become dependencies, not allies. This is what Steyn means by "America alone": the rest of modern civilization is in not-so-good shape. One of the reasons is a potent source of anti-Americanism: the existence of America - the idea of America - is profoundly disturbing to most of the world's elites who are always doing their best to control, if not outright shake down, the countries they rule. These countries still suffer from the very thing that led to the world wars and the near-destruction of civilization in Europe and Asia: modern economic systems functioning in the heart of (at best) semi-modern social and political systems that can't handle modernistic dynamism.

Steyn's scary vision of Europe, the Middle East, and Africa sliding into a new Dark Ages may be too negative. It's certainly only one possible future. But it is a real possibility, and it needs to be taken seriously.

POSTSCRIPT: Steyn has a Web site and a solid presence in the newspaper world, being one of the best and best-known conservative commentators. (Read his famous interview with Monica's dress.) Listen to podcasts with Steyn here, here, and here; and read a recent talk he gave at Hillsdale College.

Stimaholics Anonymous

What a strange recession hysteria we've been experiencing the last month or so. Everyone seems to have forgotten what just happened in the housing market. And it's a failure to understand what a bubble is and what to do about it. The Federal Reserve now has a disturbing decade-and-a-half record of stoking financial bubbles with too-loose monetary policy and ignoring the key truth about bubbles:

The bigger a bubble is, the bigger the collapse afterwards.
The more frenzy at the top, the bigger the mess to clean up afterwards.

With memories of the Great Inflation of the 70s still fresh, the Fed reacted reasonably after the 1987 stock market crash (a result of a sudden change in currency values and interest rates). But its reaction to the late 1994 recession scare was bad: it suddenly flooded the world with dollars and didn't stop until a few years later. The Fed's reaction to the 1997-98 Latin American-Asian crisis was materially implicated in the final phase of the 1996-2000 stock bubble. Its reaction to the 2001 recession (the mildest on record) was to keep the cheap credit spigot wide open long after it needed to be, helping to fuel a classic asset bubble in housing.

There are few signs of a recession in the offing, apart from the media's relentless and ignorant shrieking. All signs point to, if anything, inflation, not deflation and recession. The prices of gold and other commodities have risen by factors of two or three in the last few years. Deflation means a currency gaining in value, not losing (like now). Unemployment is low, below five percent. The big bump in the growth and job numbers happened in September. Jobless claims fell last month. How does that add up to a recession? *

Could it be the real problem is that two sectors of the economy, sectors with high visibility in the media - housing and finance - just drilled a hole in the ground, even though the rest of the economy is doing well? And didn't the housing bubble just suck people into buying houses who couldn't afford it? After all, a classic sign of a bubble is people buying assets just because they feel they can sell them at a higher price to someone else later. That sort of mania induces people to take foolish risks, and it described the US housing market from late 2002 until early 2007. And home ownership rates did rise to historic highs, well above the roughly 60% mark that is the historical average - even while housing prices soared far beyond anything justifiable in terms of building costs or affordability.

The Fed should continue to help larger and more solvent institutions bail out smaller and weaker ones, encouraging the liquidation of bad debt, etc. And by the way, that is exactly what the Fed was forced to do, in the end, in 1990-92 and again in 2001-02, after the "stimulus" drug had lost its effect. The Fed will be doing the same in two or three years, when the real recession arrives, ending the current economic expansion that started in late 2001. But by then, the presidential election of 2008 will be over. Influencing that election with a fantasy "economy" and a fantasy "recession" is the mainstream media's real game here.
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* Recall the definition: two consecutive quarters (six months straight) of contraction in a nation's economic output.

See, Tracy really wanted it ...

There are those of us who, last decade, were deeply impressed by the parallels between the career of a real Democratic First Lady-turned-candidate and a certain fictional high-school class presidential candidate, Tracy Flick, in Tom Perrotta's novel Election. Flick was memorably played in the 1999 movie by Reese Witherspoon. High school class president, boss's wife ... what's next?

Now that an upstart has come to challenge the One Who Is Not To Be Challenged, the parallels deepen. SlateV reports in-depth.

Empires and nations

The earlier postings on Armenians, Jews, Turks, and Israelis (and Kurds!) cut a small way into the Big Issue of empires versus nations. A century ago, much of the world's population lived in multiethnic, multireligious empires, ones rules by a dominant group defined by ethnicity and often religion, with other ethnic and religious groups subordinated in political power and civil rights. Some countries (like the United States and France) were already republics, while others, like Great Britain, had mixed republican-imperial features, a combination of aristocracy and popular representation. But the imposing, centuries-old structures of the pre-1914 era were empires like the Austro-Hungarian (dominated by Austrian Germans and Hungarians and which ruled over Christians, Jews, and even some Muslims), the Russian (which ruled over many non-Russian Christians, as well as Jews and Muslims), the Ottoman (which ruled over non-Turks and non-Muslims), and the Chinese (ethnically mostly Han Chinese, but with a mix of languages). Once empire and theocracy were the way of the world. But they have had their day.

The last century has seen a dramatic growth in the number of nation-states and the dismantling of empires, in three major waves: after World War One, after World War Two, and after the Cold War. Clearly, if we want to understand the modern world, we need to, not just note the fact, but understand the why. Let's step back and take in the basic forces at work here.

The most fundamental is the incompatibility of empire and modernity - they're as incompatible as tribalism and modernity, or modernity and theocracy. National self-rule is essential in the modern world and, indeed, one of the pre-conditions of "being modern." The political unit of a nation-state, republic, or representative democracy is a citizen, who has equal, or nearly equal, rights with other citizens. Citizens participate in society (in political life, but not just political life), a sine qua non of constituting a modern society. Political and social units are integrated to an historically unprecedented degree. Empires, with their aristocracies and monarchies, were a whole world apart. Their political basis was narrow. Their political units were radically heterogeneous and unequal: ruling castes, and conquered ruled with varying levels of granted toleration. Outside their narrow political bases, empires often had ignorant and backwards - and in all cases, helpless - populations. These were subjects, not citizens. This type of political structure is compatible with theocracy as well, although it isn't a requirement.

From the fall of the western Roman empire in the late 400s, it took 1200 years for nations-states to be accepted in principle as the organized basis of political life and, even then, only in western Europe. It took another 300 years to sort out which nations would have states, a not-entirely settled issue even now. This question lies at the root of the great partition wars of the last century, the largest being India, but also encompassing Palestine, Cyprus, and Ireland, for example.

At the highest level, this is the evolution at work in the Middle East and Africa, which the nation-state principle and practice are still not fully accepted or even understood. Outside the West, the rise of radical Islam is the main force today in conflict with nationalism. Within the West, there is increasing confusion - especially in Europe, and especially among European elites - about the necessity of nationalism, instead of empire. (The EU is, in some ways, an empire-by-stealth, what happens when nations given up their sovereignty to non-representative supernational institutions lacking democratic legitimacy.) And Europe might very well be faced with theocratic demands in another generation. Already, parts of certain European cities have seen the abandonment of state sovereignty to Islamic-tribal custom, the first such development since the end of the Middle Ages.

Europeans and some Americans might be surprised to hear this. A central postmodern myth, upon which the EU is built, is that World War Two discredited nationalism. The problem is that for the countries responsible for World War Two (primarily Germany, as well as the Soviet Union to a smaller extent) were not fighting for nationalism, but for supernational ideals, like racism. (Nothing will destroy a nation-state faster than racial ideologies - the two are incompatible.) In any case, Europe's great nationalist moment was not 1939, but 1914. Even then, the First World War was a result of the implosion of the empires of central-eastern Europe, not something about the nation-states of western Europe. These empires had started economic and social modernization before they were politically modern, which in turn created impossible contradictions that then did them in. Their final manifestations were the supernational or "pan" ideologies, like pan-Turkism, Aryanism, and other racist movements.

To be part of the modern world means, among other things, living in a nation-state. That excludes much of the social and political practice that dominated human existence for most of recorded history and all of prehistory. For those of us living on the other side of this divide, the historical reality is often forgotten. When we encounter conflicts across this divide, we look around at how we live, but don't see; hear, but don't listen.

Revisiting: What is climate?

Climate is what we expect, weather is what we get.

- Mark Twain

What is climate? Is it different from weather?

Before considering the "when" of climate, let's look at the "what" and "where." Is climate really just about the atmosphere? Not really - all the funny things water does in the atmosphere means that "weather" and "climate," at a minimum, must include the sphere of air and the sphere of water - call it the "aerohydrosphere."

Climate and weather refer minimally to the aerohydrosphere.

Just as we determined almost a year ago that local climate state required, not just temperature, but wind, water state, and humidity as well, so we conclude that "climate" defined in substance and space must include both aerosphere and hydrosphere.

But we also have learned over the last year that climate is affected by the action of plants and the interaction of geochemistry with the oceans. (These have particular importance when we're thinking about the evolution of carbon dioxide in the climate system.) When referring to these, we need to expand "climate" to include "bio" and "geo" parts.

Climate, as an extended and more complete system, is the state of the aerohydrobiogeosphere.

And in postings to come, we'll learn that the Earth's climate is affected in important ways by changes in the Sun. They form a coupled helio-geosystem.

Climate, in its most complete definition, is the state of the aerohydrobiogeoheliosphere.

Our intuitions about climate and weather are deeply tied to differences in time scale. Instead of abstract definitions, start by clarifying the ordinary language. By "weather," most people mean the changeable atmospheric state over periods of hours or days or weeks.* By "climate," most people mean the atmospheric state over months or years or decades - or perhaps longer. We run into the limits of the human life span, and that biases us into ignoring even longer time scales. But climate includes them as well.

This intuition about "climate" versus "weather" is sound enough, although it's fuzzy and needs to be made more exact. Many weather phenomena are periodic or quasi-periodic, and it's often best to consider "climate" as happening on time scales longer than the longest internal "natural" period of the system. Earth climate has only two exact periods imposed on it by external cycles, those of the day and of the year. They are imposed by astronomical cycles having fundamentally nothing to do with climate: the rotation of the Earth on its polar axis and its orbit around the Sun, respectively.

It will be helpful to define "climate," with respect to time scale of change, as:

Aerohydrospheric change over time scales longer than a year.

Anything on shorter time scales is "weather."

Now consider more carefully the issue of cycles. Besides the cycles imposed from the outside by astronomical behavior, the climate has internal periodic modes, with periods extending from months to centuries or millennia. There are also modes that flare up and die away.**

It is this sort of behavior that leads some people to believe, wrongly, that climate has a steady state, one arrived at by averaging away all periodic behaviors and waiting for transient "dying-away" phenomena to "settle down." This is a convenient conceptual picture of climate for theoretical purposes. The transport of radiation and water, in particular, can be smoothed and averaged in this way, leading to a climate steady state of steady clouds, steady evaporation, steady precipitation, steady radiative light flux in and heat flux out, and steady convection upwards.

But it is NOT the real climate - by design or by accident, we've excluded the hard part, the tricky piece due to chaos. In the atmosphere and oceans, it appears in the form of fluid turbulence, part of the larger phenomenon of convection. Such chaotic systems exhibit some behavior that's periodic, some that's "dying away" (transient), but a third behavior as well - one that never dies away, but is also not periodic. Chaos consists of a stream of unique, never-to-be-repeated events. It is the shadow that falls on all our dreams of predictability and control, the metaphysical fly in the ointment.

We can arrive at a "steady state" picture of climate only by deleting the reality of turbulence-chaos, then averaging away all other change. Real weather unavoidably is threaded by unique discrete events that prevent anyone from taking any climate as "steady" or "typical."

When we talk about an idealized climate as "steady," "typical," or lacking a unique history, we have implicitly removed turbulence-chaos. It's a useful conceptual construct. But it's not the climate we live in, the one visible outside, the unsteady parade of the unpredictable weather. The most serious mistakes made with climate, very much including mistakes by people who should know better, start here.

Perhaps a better way to state the difference between "climate" and "weather" is this:

Climate is weather with the chaos removed. Weather is climate with the chaos put back in.

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* Not coincidentally, weather is predictable up to about two weeks ahead. Most people know this, just not in their frontal lobes.

** Dying away exponentially or by some inverse power of time.

The speediest planet

The NASA Messenger spacecraft just executed its first flyby of Mercury, the first spacecraft to visit in over three decades. After ricocheting around the inner solar system a few more times, it will brake enough to execute a short rocket burn and slip into orbit around the solar system's innermost and fastest-moving planet. Messenger will be the first spacecraft to study Mercury long-term from orbit. It's already returned some very nice pics.

A lot will be learned about the formation of the solar system's inner, rocky planets. Of course, Mercury doesn't look all that different from the last visit in the 1970s. But those of us who can remember the 70s, do look different - for example, I've lost my 'fro D:-)

POSTSCRIPT: And, in this season of Hillary poking around in the racial underside of American politics and Barack trying hard to be black, let's remember Dr. King and his vision.

Mistaken identity

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are running neck-and-neck in the Democratic primaries, but to listen to the media, once you get beyond the horserace aspects of the Presidential elections this year, there's nothing more important than the fact that one candidate is "black" (although it's unclear what that means here) and the other a woman. Those mere facts are supposed to emblematic of something that no one can quite articulate.

There's both more and less here than meets the eye.

Identity politics has little rational basis, although the larger forces that drive identity politics are easy to pick out. While it's supposedly about identity expression, identity politics is really about identity weakness. People with real identities just take them for granted, and their politics is expression of their interests and principles - identity itself plays no direct role. Identity politics is for people who need politicians to mirror back to them something strictly talismanic or symbolic. It asks politicians to boost or create identity, which of course they can't. While identity politics doesn't require it, mixed with the late-welfare-state cult of victimhood, identity politics becomes a powerful expression of resentment. The welfare-regulatory state (including its media wing) encourages victimhood, so naturally we get more of it.

Until the 1960s, the most powerful form of identity politics in American life was the white supremacism of the post-Civil War South, expressed in practical form as the "Jim Crow" system. Unable to take it out on the Federal army or the Union at large, the defeated South took it out instead on the newly-freed and largely defenseless ex-slaves. (The early history of the Ku Klux Klan is testimony to this fundamental fact about the Jim Crow era.) Americans outside the South eventually acquiesced in this system, accepting the proposition that the South was "peculiar" and knew better, anyway - besides being ambivalent about race themselves. Resentment over defeat and despoilation by the North was the prime determinant of Southern politics until the end of World War Two. Even politicians who were conscious of the self-destructive nature of this system (like the young George Wallace) were unable to break with it. Only larger social change, after 1945, could undermine it. The triumph of the civil rights movement, climaxing with the 1964-65 civil rights and voting laws, also marked the end of the South's "different-ness" from the rest of the country. By this point, no one alive was left who remembered the Civil War or Reconstruction, and an end came to the days of Southern refusal to celebrate the Fourth of July (the same day as the fall of Vicksburg in 1863) or Thanksgiving (a New England holiday made national by Lincoln, also in 1863).

The most important contemporary identity politics in American life is the politics of race, although the appeal of race hustling has been fading for the last twenty years; even the mainstream media no longer jump when Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton say something. The most striking thing about Obama is that he's "post-racial." His life is a testimony to the declining importance of race in America in the last generation. OTOH, as a "black" politician, Obama seems to feel he has to play that big Race Politics Wurlitzer, because somehow, he's supposed to. Doesn't pushing those keys and buttons constantly remind everyone of the very thing we're supposed to be overcoming? The Race Politics Wurlitzer has a century-plus legacy, largely destructive, behind it. Wouldn't it be better if Obama just walked away from it? Doesn't he have any other tunes or instruments to play? Of course he does, but as the media inflate his importance beyond his slender national political career as a freshman Senator, playing old familiar tunes on a familiar instrument is tempting - sort of like comfort food.

Hillary Clinton's case is more straightforward. Her political career is built on the man to whom she is married. While she plausibly claims to have feminist beliefs, her career is no exemplar of feminism. The older custom of women occasionally getting into political power by family connections has produced a variety of women leaders - few truly bad ones, and a few (like Britain's two greatest monarchs, Elizabeth I and Victoria) who proved outstanding. Such achievements are real, but they are not feminist. OTOH, figures like Margaret Thatcher are feminist icons, perhaps in spite of themselves. They owe nothing to marriage or relatives.

There's nothing irrational about identity - it just is what it is. But identity politics is inherently irrational, and usually reactionary to boot, no matter how dressed up it is otherwise. It seduces us into a deadend of absurdities and paradoxes.

POSTSCRIPT: Having drafted this posting, I discovered that Christopher Hitchens had a short piece in Friday's Journal about just this topic. It's lucid and sensible, as Hitch typically is.

Things fell apart

... and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned.

- Yeats, The Second Coming

Joan Didion's classic Slouching Towards Bethlehem was published 40 years ago, just as American culture and politics were coming apart and the conformist liberalism nurtured by the Great Depression and World War Two caved in. Her perceptions of the Boomers (a half-generation younger than she) were uncannily on-target and ring true all these decades later. The famous title chapter, "Slouching Towards Bethlehem," dug into the hippie culture of Haight-Ashbury right around the Summer of Love (1967) and discovered anomie and profound social disconnection. But don't miss some of the other essays as well, about California dreamin', the concluding gems on places, and the sublime "Personals," especially the two on self-respect and morality - or what she called the "insidious ethic of conscience." *

What would become so characteristic of the Boomer style - the morality of private conscience versus a social ethic - was pioneered by people - the first "hipsters," the Beatniks, activists, people fascinated by hobos and the "bluesmen" - born in the 1930s and somewhat older than the first Boomers. The 1930s were the only truly radical decade in American history ("radical" in the European sense). But those who came of age in the 1950s found little attractive in the totalitarian cults of the 30s. Postwar expanding opportunity deflated political impulses, which became rechanneled instead into a radicalism of personal style, with a strong esoteric tinge - all very different from the earlier American taste for the plain and obvious. In full flower - Didion's book is a snapshot album of that moment of flowering - it would lead to an anarchy of petty and sometimes violent competing authoritarianisms, most obviously in the form of "lifestyle" and religious cults, but also the student and "new" Left and the Black Power movement. This indeed informs the Boomers' most characteristic political trait, their taste for fringe ideas and converting them into irritating crusades. Later, in middle age, the Boomer obsession with such culty ideas would turn into such causes as "global warming" and, in some respects, the war in Iraq.

Didion's point is reinforced by a thought from Lionel Trilling:

Some paradox of our nature leads us, when once we have made our fellow men the objects of our enlightened interest, to go on to make them the objects of our pity, then of our wisdom, ultimately of our coercion.

Didion firmly rejected the cult of private conscience and the incessant attachment of "morality" to every desire or need. Lest we think this makes us better people, we should remember that people rarely carry out the worst evils purely from self-interest. Such evils are always strongly tinged or even determined by a fanaticism and one-ups-man-ship often labeled "idealistic." The cult of fake absolute morality lies at the root of much of what's wrong with the Boomers, or at least their politically active wing. It's not totally new in American culture; moralistic streaks are obvious in older generations, evidenced by certain Presidents like Wilson and Carter. But never have pet zealotries become so widespread and democratized as they have in the years since 1965. It was then that, as she put it, "the whine of hysteria" came to be heard in the land.

Here we can also better understand the nature of the moral sickness, often mislabeled "moral relativism," that afflicts the Boomers and their children. The problem is not moral relativism. It is rather, too many competing moral absolutisms. The media, by serving up a fresh set of moral absolutes every day, compound the problem. It's like atonal music - the center does not hold, and there's no "key" to come home to. It's every key at once.

The arts have also bowed to cults of inner and private fantasies. Didion's deadpan-witty "I Can't Get That Monster Out of My Mind," about the decline of Hollywood movies, skewers the then-new, now-old and tiresome, system of auteur-ship that replaced the older studio system. What it allowed was directors and producers to film their private fantasies, but not necessarily good movies. Perhaps they're worth making, but not always worth watching.

So. With perhaps a little prodding from abroad, we are all grown up now in Hollywood, and left to set out in the world on our own .... Whether or not a picture receives a Code seal no longer matters much at the box office. No more curfew, no more Daddy, anything goes. Some of us do not quite like this permissiveness; some of us would like to find "reasons" why our pictures are not as good as we know in our hearts they might be. Not long ago I met a producer who complained to me of the difficulties he had working within what I recognized as the [old studio] System, although it did not call it that. He longed, he said, to do an adaptation of a certain Charles Jackson short story. "Some really terrific stuff," he said. "Can't touch it, I'm afraid. About masturbation."

Didion's politics might be described as "eclectic-liberal." But her book is essentially conservative, inasmuch as it implicitly holds culture as more important than politics. Some of her pieces (hint!) are quiet satire, an inherently conservative form.** Didion's work is often bracketed with that of Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson - the "new journalism" of the 60s and 70s. But while she was writing in and about the same period, her style is engaged but definitely third-person. She's sometimes passionate, but not the intensely subjective, in-the-midst-of-it, writer trying to erase the line between herself and her subjects.

The Boomers often still flounder in their playpen of narcissism, so well captured by Didion, and many of them will apparently never leave it. They'll grow old first.

POSTSCRIPT: And when they're sixty-four, and older, what will things look like? Take a peek with Megan McArdle.
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* This perception of the post-1965 free-fall of American culture and politics informed her title, taken from the famous poem by Yeats. The poem is frequently alluded to and short enough to read in its entirety in a minute or two. Yeats penned it in 1919, just after the First World War.

The kulturpessimismus that engulfed Europe in the 1920s and 30s took a while longer to sink in here. The fad for existentialism and nuclear-holocaust anxieties of the late 40s and 1950s were the first signs of it. But until the mid-60s, American society still largely retained the nineteenth-century faith in reason, progress, and humanity that had been killed off in Europe.

** So quiet, that in fact, some readers have mistaken Didion herself for a hip-ironic-mocker of California. But of course, if you read the book, you'll learn that from she's from California - the Central Valley - and thus the real McCoy. Perhaps Slouching Towards Bethlehem is, at bottom, the diary of a Sacramento girl come to San Francisco and New York to wonder at the hippies and ask some embarrassing questions.

The passion of Saint Barack

PRE-POSTSCRIPT: Maybe this is all part of Obama's larger, secret plan ....
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Well - now people are fully remembering what it was, exactly, they didn't like about the Clintons and their peculiar family values. Y'all remember, no?

Barack Obama currently stands between Hillary Clinton and something she badly wants. The Clinton Manipulation-Sleaze Machine, safely tucked away in a suburban garage somewhere in Westchester County for the past six or seven years, has been wheeled out, fueled up, and given a good tryout. Its first major victim this time is not the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy, but a fellow Democrat.

I wouldn't vote for Obama - when his politics are defined, he's too liberal; more often, his politics are suspiciously fuzzy and free-floating. But he's smart, eloquent, and an important turning point in American race relations - he's our first important "post-racial" politician.* As he keeps getting hit with undeserving crap flung his way by that nefarious Machine, it's hard not to feel for the guy.
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* Curiously, Obama himself seems to be not fully aware of himself in this light. There's a significant gap between what he believes and what he is.

The end of Europe? I

But it would seem that if despotism were to be established amongst the democratic nations of our days ... it would be more extensive and more mild; it would degrade men without tormenting them .... [T]his same principle of equality which facilitates despotism, tempers its rigor .... I think then that the species of oppression by which democratic nations are menaced is unlike anything which ever before existed in the world: our contemporaries will find no prototype of which will accurately convey ... the idea I have formed of it, but in vain; the old words "despotism" and "tyranny" are inappropriate: the thing itself is new; and since I cannot name it, I must attempt to define it ....

.... Above this race of men [would stand] an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications, and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent, if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks on the contrary to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness: it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances - what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living? Thus it every day renders the exercise of the free agency of man less useful and less frequent; it circumscribes the will within a narrower range, and gradually robs a man of all the uses of himself. The principle of equality has prepared men for these things: it has predisposed men to endure them, and oftentimes to look on them as benefits. ... [T]he supreme power then ... covers the surface of society with a net-work of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided: men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting: such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to be nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.

I have always thought that servitude of the regular, quiet, and gentle kind ... might be combined more easily than is commonly believed with some of the outward forms of freedom; and that it might even establish itself under the wing of the sovereignty of the people. Our contemporaries are constantly excited by two conflicting passions; they want to be led, and they wish to remain free: ... they strive to satisfy them both at once. They devise a sole, tutelary, and all-powerful form of government, but elected by the people. They combine the principle of centralization and that of popular sovereignty; this gives them a respite; they console themselves for being in tutelage by the reflection that they have chosen their own guardians. Every man allows himself to be put in leading-strings [harness], because he sees that it is not a person or a class of persons, but the people at large that holds the end of his chain. By this system the people shake off their state of dependence just long enough to select their master, and then relapse into it again .... [T]hey think they have done enough for the protection of individual freedom when they have surrendered it to the power of the nation at large. This does not satisfy me: the nature of him I am to obey signifies less to me than the fact of extorted obedience.

- Tocqueville, Democracy in America (1838)

More than a year ago and several times since then (see here and here), Kavanna took a look at the situation in Europe and came to rather negative conclusions. But there's only so much a few blog postings can convey about this profound and many-sided topic. More comprehensive are the armful of excellent books on Europe that have appeared in the last few years: Bruce Bawer's While Europe Slept (2006), Mark Steyn's America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It (2006), and Walter Laqueur's The End of Europe: Epitaph for the Old Continent (2007). Laquer's book is a shocker, a sign that the trend is serious and no mere epiphenomenon. The author of the earlier Europe in Our Time: A History (1992) - a laudatory account of Europe's post-1945 reconstruction - Laqueur's view of Europe has obviously changed in recent years.

While all these books are important, Claire Berlinski has the distinction of kicking off serious discussion in the US with a stream of articles and her book, Menace in Europe: Why the Continent's Crisis is America's Too. Berlinski writes regularly for the Washington Post, National Review, etc., and now lives in Istanbul. She's even written a couple of well-received novels. Menace in Europe was published in late 2005. Nothing has happened since to lessen its validity and much that re-validates it.

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Before starting with Berlinski's book, we need to clear away some myths that get in the way of informed discussion of contemporary Europe. There are three major misconceptions. One is that what's happening in Europe doesn't matter to America. This myth has some currency on the center and right of American politics. Two other myths are still widespread among American liberals and leftists. These are the "Europe is more sophisticated than America" myth and that stubborn urban legend, "It's all W.'s fault, and the problem will vanish when he leaves office." None of these myths is true.

What's happening in Europe does matter - Europe is the West's "other half," and if Europe fails, the United States will need a Plan B for many things. And what happens there is paralleled, in certain ways, by what happens here. Nor is it all, or even mainly, W.'s fault. European anti-Americanism has a history stretching back to the 1920s, to the immediate aftermath of part one of Europe's civilizational suicide. It surged in the 1970s and early 80s, died down afterwards, then reappeared in the late 90s, with globalization and Europe's glaring failure in Yugoslavia. While Bush's actions and political style have aggravated the problem, anti-Americanism has also dissipated somewhat compared to a few years ago - but it will not disappear when he leaves office. Fresh events and new personalities will keep the kettle boiling. As for European sophistication, read on and judge for yourself.

Part of the problem is that older Americans have a distorted picture of Europe picked up in the immediate postwar period, when much of Europe's traditional culture was still alive; and that all Americans have misleading experiences as tourists spending time admiring an older European civilization that isn't where and how most Europeans live today.

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The most painful chapter of Menace in Europe is the one on Britain. It is, in part, an excursus on Britain's Muslims, largely of south Asian origin, and the heritage of British imperialism. But it also, by comparison, makes telling observations on Britain's non-Muslim former imperial subjects and why, upon immigration to Britain, they have so few of the problems that Muslims do.

The causes are partly socioeconomic: many, although not all, of Britain's Muslims come from villages; the other immigrant groups are overwhelmingly educated, urban, and middle class. The causes are also partly connected to the history of the Indian subcontinent, spanning the whole of British-ruled India before 1947 (encompassing modern India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh). Britain's empire in India was at first strictly economic-exploitative, run by the private East India Company, the same whose tea was dumped in Boston Harbor in a well-known incident. Later it became a political entity - an empire within an empire - created at the expense of India's minority Muslim rulers, the Mughals. The British Raj, first unwittingly, later wittingly, became a powerful force on behalf of India's Hindu majority, its non-Muslim minorities, and (after 1920 or so) its women.

This mixed Anglo-Indian heritage is visible today in India, but especially in Britain, where the south Asian Hindus, Christians, Parsees, and Sikhs do well, but the Muslims often do not. The baleful heritage of the Deobandi school of Islam, south Asia's verion of Wahhabi or Salafi Islam, sticks out clearly in this generation of anti-assimilated south Asian British Muslims and their attraction to Islamic militancy.

Berlinksi's most fun chapter is that on the French port city of Marseille. Although it might surprise some of her readers (it shouldn't), her evaluation of France, the French, and France's secular republican ideal is very positive, even as she acknowledges that that ideal has probably outlived itself and met an insuperable barrier in the form of Islam.

Affectionate yet disapproving is her other chapter on France, an extended and satirical take on antiglobalization activist José Bové, exposing the layers of Europe's mystical and apocalyptic movements that stretch back 1500 years, to the origins of modern Europe. Here we are treated to the successive reincarnations of the charismatic romantic mystic, with his striking eccentricities and strong sex appeal. Until the 18th century, they were religious revolutionaries, proclaiming the coming of heaven on earth, the abolition of wealth, rank, and distinction, and (before the Reformation) demonizing the Jews as the people of Satan. The first modern (secular) revolutionary of this type was Rousseau, the founder of leftism and creator of the "noble savage" myth - the origin of all politics of adolescent rage against modern civilization. Modern Europe's angry, mystical political movements are secularized re-creations of these older religious movements, with virtually the same themes.* The chapter is a mixed-mood piece because Berlinski herself feels disturbed by the anonymous nature of globalization and questionable nature of modern factory farming and food production, harmful to animals and sometimes to humans. The spectacular British case of "mad cow disease" just underscores the point.**

The mosht dishtuurbing chapter is that covering Germany and its famous heavy metal band, Rammstein. (They're all over the Web - see here.) Berlinski uses Rammstein as a foil to explore the return of nihilistic late Romanticism - Expressionism - as a feature of German kultur. This is a crucial theme in modern German history, Germans as the people of nihilism and the people of Faust. Important German thinkers (Goethe, Nietzsche, Thomas Mann) were themselves acutely aware of this aspect of "national personality." You can't imagine Rammstein's songs sung by anyone, say, French or Italian. British and American heavy metal bands are about personal rebellion and angst. But in Germany, where music exposes the national soul, juvenile angst is automatically political, with an unmistakable esthetic familiar from the 1930s and 40s.

While French, British, and American Romantic tendencies have usually taken the form of personal rebellion, and its political form consists of delusional searching for the noble savage somewhere else - among workers, brown and black people, or among animals - in Germany, Romanticism was xenophobic from the start: the German Romantics decided that they didn't need to look elsewhere for noble savages. Rather, they felt that the Germans themselves were the noble savages, possessing deep Germanic "culture" in opposition to the superficial and materialistic Anglo-Franco-American "civilization" or the "mere barbarism" of the Slavs. This view, increasingly important in the 19th century, became, after 1918, the sickness of much of German-speaking Europe. In exploring this history, Berlinski's personal venom is evident here, understandable given her family's history in Germany. This disapproving chapter is not at all affectionate.

Germany sadly remains a crime scene still cordoned off after all these years, with people continuing to stand around and wondering what the hell happened. Germany's civilized and semi-civilized neighbors have all peered into the gloom of the dark Teutonic forest. They squint and scratch their heads.

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Berlinski's final chapter, "To Hell with Europe," seems flippant at first sight. But she doesn't mean, to hell with France, or Britain, or Germany, etc. Her point is the "persistence of national personality." When she writes "to hell with Europe," she means just that: to hell with the false unity of the EU, the pretense that Europe's real nations have been made to go away, and that Frenchmen, Britons, Germans, etc., are now all just Europeans.

The modern West has its origins in the Dark Ages that immediately followed the collapse of the western Roman empire, which was replaced with a variety of what historians once called "petty kingdoms, dukedoms, and principalities." Europe in some ways has never left that state. The barbarian peoples - the Celts, the Germans, and later, the Slavs and others - rebuilt civilization from what was left in the Roman wreckage, including the Church. Modern Europe has rejected these sources of its civilization, leaving an immense spiritual, cultural, and political void. Into the void step what Berlinski calls "black-market religion" (Bové) and "black-market nationalist hate/nihilism" (Rammstein). No pan-European unification project since the end of the Roman Empire has succeeded - not the Catholic Church, the Holy Roman Empire, the Hapsburgs, the Bourbons, Napoleon, Hitler, or the Communists - in spite of the attractive appeal of new religions and utopias. In reminding her readers of these facts, Berlinski is passing on an essential perception of modern Europe's history, its arc from origins to finish.

Berlinski recommends some sensible changes as a necessary start to saving Europe - none of them is original, as she acknowledges: reforming its deadly economic mix of overregulation and unsustainable entitlements; dealing with Islamic extremists - both as individuals and institutions - in a more consistent and punitive way; applying Western legal and social standards equally to Muslim men and women without apology. (This is one of a number of her points of admiration for the French, whose policy towards Islamic radicalism is one of zero tolerance.) Major changes will happen soon: Europe's social democratic systems will either be reformed or collapse; its demography will change dramatically in the next generation; the political unification project will fail. Some of these changes are already starting. Other possibilities are more speculative.

Menace in Europe has a fragmentary form, which might at first make it seem like a jumble. But its thematic and stylistic unity is powerful; Berlinski grabs her readers and shakes them, saying "See?" and "See?" She has a Web site of her own, and you can listen to a podcast interview with her here.
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* I mean identical in some cases. For example, the program of the anonymous German Revolutionary of the Upper Rhine, circulating in manuscript just before the Reformation, called for the expulsion or extermination of the Rhine Valley Jews, the end of Germany's economic relations with the outside world, the independence of a unified Germany from the Papacy, and the creation of a new religion mixing Christianity and a restored pantheon of old German gods. Reading it, you get confused: is it from 1500 - or 1933?

Then there's Joachim from the Italian town of Flora: his speculative tripartite theory of history, published in manuscript around 1300, postulated a three-stage historical evolution leading to an Age of Pure Spirit, where everyone would be living equally in a barracks or a monastery. The tripartite stuff sounds a little like Hegel and a lot like Marx; the equality of the barracks and the monastery, like the pre-Marxian socialists whom Marx himself ridiculed as "utopian."

In laying bare the religious and utopian origins of the modern West's extremist political movements, Berlinski and the rest of us are profoundly indebted to the works of Norman Cohn, especially his classic In Pursuit of the Millenium (1957). Cohn's work explodes the claim that these modern movements made about themselves, that they were "scientific," "progressive," or "enlightened." There's nothing scientific or enlightened about Marxism or race theories; these movements repackaged tribal, mystical, and apocalyptic ideas in a superficially modern garb of pseudoscience. Environmentalism bears strong traces of the same.

** Consider too America's industrialized food production, with its heavy use of subsidized corn, bestowing upon us the dubious blessings of corn syrup, corn feed, and ethanol.

Reading Exodus

I almost forgot my comment on the parashat ha-shavua, last week's Torah portion, Parashat Va-era. Here it is.

The second portion of Exodus (covering 6:2-9:35), Va-era contains the first seven of the ten plagues and also happens to be my bar mitzvah parshah. The haftarah is Ezekiel 28:25-29:21.

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One of the most disturbing aspects of the plagues is the "hardening of Pharaoh's heart." This is often viewed as a paradox, contradicting free will. It also seems gratuitous: why can't G-d just free the Israelites, or let Pharaoh free them? The traditional commentators have wrestled with it, as have modern ones. The answers they come up with often seem vague: "heightening the drama" is the major theme of many approaches, both ancient and modern.

But a much more satisfying answer is in the text, if we examine it carefully. Hardening Pharaoh's heart was necessary, not just to heighten the drama, but to make Pharaoh release the Israelites for the right reason, not just to make himself look good to his subjects and courtiers, or as an emotional response to the devastation of the plagues. What is the right reason in this case? To acknowledge divine sovereignty as superior to his own and admit that he was not a god. Apparent inconsistencies fall into place if we follow the text carefully with this in mind.*

In response to those plagues which caused Pharaoh to temporarily give in (although he always changes his mind once the plague had passed), the text tells us that the king allowed us to "Go, sacrifice to your G-d" (8:24). Pharaoh's responses in the other cases, although varying in scope (sacrifice within Egypt, let only the men go, etc.), remained constant in style: It is your god whom you seek to worship, not mine. This attitude always limits and qualifies his temporary cave-ins.

And to sneak a peak at next week's portion (Parashat Bo): This is why the plagues end with the plague of the first born, something that the Egyptian wizards could not manage and could not be attributed to any Egyptian god. In response to this final plague (12:32), Pharaoh adds: u-veirakhtem gam-oti (And bring a blessing on me too!), which contains his whole capitulation by implication.

Pharaoh has to admit that neither he nor any other Egyptian god is really a god. But he also has to admit that it is G-d who is doing the freeing, not himself. Otherwise, Pharaoh would have viewed himself as their liberator - and, crucially, so would the Israelites. Instead, he, the Egyptians, and the Israelites are forced to see who is G-d, who frees the slaves, and why. This is why in the Haggadah on Pesach, we sing the praises of, not Pharaoh, not even Moses, but G-d.

The haftarah has a curious confirmation: Ezekiel's prophecy (29:6) against Egypt, delivered in the year (587 BCE) before the Babylonian exile, says that, again,

"Then all the inhabitants of Egypt shall know that I am YHVH."

But the parshah itself announces it at the beginning (6:7):

"And you shall know that I, YHVH, am your G-d who freed you from the labors of the Egyptians."
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* Cf. the comment of Sforno, the sixteenth-century Italian exegete, on Exodus 4:21 and 7:3: "And I will harden his heart": Since he will be unable to tolerate the plagues, he would certainly emancipate the people - not because he accepts the sovereignty of God and to do His will - therefore He hardened his heart to be able to withstand the plagues and not to free them.

It helps to know that "harden" is chazaq in Hebrew - literally, "strengthen."

Rock the casbah

This posting isn't really about that venerable song by the Clash ... but it sounded cool :)

This weekend's Wall Street Journal had a very interesting article on the possibility of an independent and critical scholarship of the Qu'ran, similar to the sort of thing that Christian and, later, Jewish scholars achieved in the last 300 years with regards to the Hebrew and Greek scriptures that make up the Bible. German scholars at the forefront of "Oriental" research made a start from the end of the nineteenth century, until the rise of the Nazi regime. The project was suspended and much of its materials (photos of old Quranic texts taken in the 1920s and 30s) apparently lost during the war. The subject is also, of course, one of extreme sensitivity in the Muslim world. Nine years ago, the Atlantic Monthly published a prescient article on the subject, and the politico-religious minefield around it, available if you can find a print or online database copy of their January 1999 issue. (It's available on the Atlantic site only to their subscribers.)

The Journal article announces a stunning discovery: the photo archive was not actually lost. It survives and has been made publicly available. See here and here for more.

POSTSCRIPT: Here we go again with the mindcrime of publishing the Danish-Muhammad cartoons, accompanied by the same weird mixture of the medieval and the postmodern (charges of blasphemy mixed with bogus charges of victimhood). See the brilliant videos from the ludicrously misnamed Ontario "Human Rights" Commission here.

No Danes or Canadians have committed violence against Muslims because of the cartoons.

Raising the bar

Fred Thompson versus Nicholas Sarkozy? Missile gap ... mineshaft gap ... now, supermodel gap?

versus ?

And what about Kucinich? He is werid, but then again:

Running on empty

PRE-POSTSCRIPT: Another thought about Ron Paul, this time from former Reason editor Virginia Postrel. Those of us over a certain age know about the "paleocons"; under a certain age, and you don't know about them. It's not your fault. And if you are a cosmopolitan, you needn't be rootless - another political joke from us old fogeys - guess you had to be there :-0

Postrel rarely comments on politics these days, at least directly; when she does, pay attention.
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Does Iowa mean anything? And what's up with New Hampshire? The ugh of politics returns.

It was nice to see the party establishments get it in the eye, with the rejection of Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani - they deserve it. But what did Iowa caucusers pick and what does it mean? Overall, Huckabee and Obama are bad omens.

The parties have far less influence over voters' choices now than they once did. The media filled the void for more than a generation, but increasingly, no one fills that role - more and more people are tuning the media out (not a bad thing in many ways). So what we're getting is the bulk of voters less informed than ever, leavened with a small group of politics junkies. After seven years of complaints about Bush's inexperience and being domineered by an older and more experienced Vice President, we're getting the youngest and least experienced candidates. Whatever their rhetoric, they reflect a deep ignorance and indifference to serious political issues (especially foreign affairs) that have been growing since the end of the Cold War.

Another striking fact is the apparently complete changeover of the Republicans into a big-government party. In spite of his and the Congressional Republicans' love affair with growing government, even Bush didn't have what it takes to pull this off, and he's spent the last two years backtracking on the federal budget and foreign trade. But Bush and Rove made Huckabee possible. Make no mistake: that's his real significance, not the 20% or so of Republican voters who are evangelicals. Although Fred Thompson and Ron Paul still appeal to a strong remnant of small-government conservatives, that faction seems to make up no more than about 25%, a striking change from a generation ago. That's the impact of all those ex-Democrats now fully rebaptized as Republicans. The party transformed them; but they also transformed the party.

This development also explains another important fact. Although we live in a center-right country, and self-described liberals are shrinking as a proportion of voters, Republicans have been unable to translate these trends into a stable partisan majority. They reached their peak in 2002. The real winner of the last 15 years of political evolution has been "None of the Above." Voters who 10 or 20 years ago seemed to be headed toward becoming Republicans are now filling the ranks of independents, the only political grouping still growing in the United States. They make up almost 40% of voters and more than half in some states (including liberal strongholds like Massachusetts and California).

It is this development that has deprived the Democrats of the chance of becoming a majority party again, while at the same time preventing the Republicans from taking their place. Now that the Republican party is, in many ways, a party of conservative and populist Democrats ("compassionate conservatives," "neoconservatives," populist evangelicals, etc.), the right-leaning independent vote seems to be lost to them for good. That gives the Republicans a solid plurality (well over a third of voters), but not a majority. In a winner-take-all system such as ours, that creates a permanent problem: Republicans barely winning and barely able to govern; then conservative and independents abandoning the Republicans, the Democrats winning by default as a plurality but definitely unable to govern.

What do we have on the Democratic side? Candidates with little experience, struggling to increase the breadth of their appeal, with little depth. Obama right now acts more as a Rohrschach test than anything else, something he's clearly determined to maintain for as a long as he can. While he's cleverly fallen back on the Kennedyesque idealistic rhetoric of the pre-1965 era, what political beliefs he has are all post-1965. Meanwhile, there is a blatant contradiction between what Obama believes (racism is rampant, fight the Man) and what he is (a successful black politician for whom race is not that significant). Obama's friend Deval Patrick, governor of Massachusetts, suffers from the same problem, disappointing everyone by turning out to be an empty suit.

It might be better if we abandoned the two-party system as an obsolete relic at this point and had candidates just run as free agents. It seems crazy, but with both parties now permanent minorities, maybe it's not so crazy. Neither party can muster solid majorities. Instead we end up with Republicans struggling and never quite reaching majority, and Democrats elected as a minority by default when the Republicans can't put together a majority. The last two Democratic presidents were minority presidents.

Finally, it will be a wonder if the US emerges from this campaign as a serious country: winners barely out of their diapers, populism, tearing up trade agreements (how about some more unilateralism?), and semi-isolationism seem to be the order of the day.* The populism monster is the main practical thing that has undercut Republican efforts to put together a majority. The Republicans were damaged this trend once before, in the early 90s, with the rise of Perot. Do we really want to keep punishing our most experienced leaders, while falling for callow candidates who are quickly in over their heads? It's true that Obama is less experienced and has accomplished little, less than Hillary (after all, he's never been First Lady). But there's not a lot more to be said about Hillary.

Herewith, predictions. I don't know who's going to win in New Hampshire. If Romney doesn't, or at least tie, he's finished, which is too bad. If Thompson or McCain don't place first or second somewhere by March, they will drop out, which is also too bad, since they're decent candidates. The Democratic race is topsy-turvy, but Edwards might come in second. I can't see his candidacy going much further though; he'll probably drop out before the end of February. It will be Clinton and Obama. I doubt if Obama will win more than a few states, and he can't win the general election. But if Clinton doesn't win in New Hampshire, she will emerge as a seriously wounded candidate and in no shape to win in November.

All in all, the general election is shaping up as expected: definite advantage to the Republicans. But the wild card remains: who will their candidate be?

POSTSCRIPT: Ron, we hardly knew ye. And what's up with that Ron Paul guy? Is he a racist or not? Who knows? We can't read his mind. All we can do is look at his history.

Although Paul has tried to present himself as a libertarian or small-government conservative, anyone who knows anything about him knows that he's part of the self-labelled "paleoconservatives," whose best-known representative is Pat Buchanan. (The only Goldwater-Reagan style candidate running this time is Fred Thompson.) Over the years, Paul has been associated with some offensive ideas and causes. Whether he believes in them now is anyone's guess. Maybe running for president means that he's left behind the strange and parochial paleocon subculture. Just keep in mind that these are the people who were ejected from the modern conservative movement back in the 1950s, mainly by William F. Buckley, Jr., and his National Review: they include the gold standard obsessives, the anti-Zionists, the conspiracy kooks, etc. The Democrats, last time, had their own version of such crazies ("netroots") adding unwelcome baggage to one of the candidates (Dean). This time, "nutroots" has been marginalized, thankfully.

By the way, you can read what some real libertarians (David Boaz and Michael Tanner of the Cato Institute) think of Huckabee's Christian-tinged nanny-statism and (more ambivalently) about Ron Paul as a protest candidate - which has been his main role this election cycle.
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* While we're wallowing in this silliness, some pretty serious things are going on in the rest of the world - in Pakistan, Kenya, and the Persian Gulf, for example - while no one in the campaign (Thompson excepted) is talking about the entitlements crisis now only a few years away.

It's hard to escape the impression that American politics has become a frivolous exercise in self-indulgence, an indoor sport for couch potatoes, with little connection to reality. It does make good television, which, I suppose, is the point.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Further thoughts

One of the most interesting features of Ali's thinking is her view of Islam as failed social utopia. She says: I'm from a clan in Somalia; long ago we accepted Islam and following the divine will as the path to an ideal society, and we have failed. This approach marks an arresting starting point and allows her to connect the civil war anarchy she escaped with the "theologico-political problem" of early modern Europe (à la Spinoza, Hobbes, etc.), as well as the great failed secular utopias of our own time. Of course, she is a political scientist by academic training - the University of Leiden in Holland, to be exact. Her drive to understand why the modern West has succeeded and the floundering of the tribal-theocratic world she came from is why she decided on graduate school in the first place. It was academic, but not just academic.

There is a line of thinking - exemplified by Pryce-Jones' The Closed Circle - that postulates the problem of the Islamic world, not as religion, but as a failed overcoming-of-tribalism. There is a serious case to be made for this view. The tribal world is not a "civil society" - there is no voluntary, peaceful cooperation, the kind required for progress. Instead, everything cancels everything else out - the closed circle. The relation of Islam to political power is different from Christianity or Judaism: there is neither a separate state with a monopoly on power, nor a voluntary self-organized community. Religion, politics, family or clan - all are mixed together in primitive society. This gives exceptional urgency to the problem of succession to Muhammad (khalifa). Without a single, agreed-upon successor, there is no legitimacy. Yet such a figure is a necessity in classical Islamic political thought for truly legitimate political authority. In reality, there is a void, filled by plausible or implausible claimants.

A completely different example of the impact of tribal custom is the barbaric practice of female genital mutilation.* Mentioned nowhere in the Qu'ran, female genital mutilation, where it is practiced (in some Muslim countries - not all - as well as some non-Muslim ones), is intended as a kind of female-chastity protector and female-sexual-pleasure-destroyer. It's rationalized as a way to keep girls and young women "pure." This sort of tribal-custom-rationalized-by-Islam is at work in the purist Wahhabi or Salafi Islam of Saudi Arabia and the tribal code (Pashtunwali) of the Pashtuns of Pakistan and Afghanistan.** One of the basic dilemmas posed by Muslim immigration to Europe is the assertion of tribal custom in Europe's cities, in a way not compatible with the rule of law or state sovereignty. In some ways, "Talibanism" is an assertion of extreme tribal reaction against urban, middle-class life. This cycle has a long history in Islam, discussed in the classical sources such as ibn Khaldun's Muqadimah. Such ways of thinking have almost been lost to us here in the West, and so we often have a hard time recognizing them for what they really are when we encounter them elsewhere.

These are among the many not-just-academic questions that arise from Ali's Infidel and The Caged Virgin, as well as the other recent additions to the bookshelf on Islam by Muslim women. Ali's autobiography blends the personal and political in a powerful way that illuminates both, leaving the chatterboxes of post-modern academia far behind in the dust.
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* Sometimes mislabeled "female circumcision." The actual male equivalent, were it practiced, would be something like cutting off a quarter or more of the male sexual organ - depending on size, of course :)

** The link between the two is the 19th-century Deobandi school of Islam on the Indian subcontinent. Both the Salafi and the Deobandi schools were early reactions to the incipient clash of Islam and modernity, one in the context of the Ottoman empire, the other in the context of a polyreligious India under the British Raj.

Meet the thinkers: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

I just finished reading Ayaan Hirsi Ali's autobiography, Infidel. You can read here about her opinions and thoughts on politics, the West, and Islam. But in this book, she wisely chose to tell her story personally. Abstractions often wash over and through our minds - easy come, easy go - but facts and events like those of Ali's life will not wash over and through anything - they will stick in readers' minds for a long time. Infidel is a powerful book and must reading for anyone in the West who wants to understand the unfolding confrontation of Islam and modernity, and avoid diversionary rationalizing. Women, particularly young women, should especially read it. Muslims should read it as well, for a whole set of different, if overlapping, reasons.

Ali's books (Infidel, as well as the earlier The Caged Virgin) and film Submission Part I (the later parts remain unmade after her partner Theo Van Gogh's murder) don't force her own answers on her viewers and readers. But they do push unavoidable questions to the fore and provoke everyone to consider their own answers. Her attitude is a refreshing and positive contrast to the proselytizers of the "new" atheism popular of late.

Her encounters with Christianity and its concept of a covenantal or "partnership" relation between man and the divine forced her to see something contrasting about Islam, a word that means "submission" in Arabic. (Muslim means "one who submits.") Lurking around here is an old argument about whether a "social contract" style of civil government is even possible in the Muslim world. The "social contract" of Western governments has its ultimate roots in the the biblical notion of covenant. It's different from autocratic government (rooted in conquest and overlordship) or the clan-aristocratic political culture of the ancient and medieval worlds. Theocentric in its original form, the humanized covenant becomes a contract among people, reflected in constitutions and consensual and representative forms of government.

What is a consistent approach to this war for the world, this contest between Islam and modernity?* This is not a conflict we can decide; Muslims have to. But we can consistently follow the rule that sticking to our rights is the best policy: defend ourselves and maintain the firm view that peaceful interaction between Muslims and the outside world is possible - if Muslims are willing to treat non-Muslims and "deviant," liberal, and secularized Muslims as equals. That's a big "if." The decision is theirs to accept or reject, not ours. But our response to the Muslim decision, either way, should be unapologetic.

Ali's larger and unmistakable point is that the West must abandon the claptrap of multiculturalism and its attendant subcults of victimhood and noble savagery. Ayaan, daughter of Hirsi, great-granddaughter of Ali, has been there and done that, and it's no fun. People are equal; cultures are not.

POSTSCRIPT: Read Ali's brief self-explanation here at Cato (PDF), and listen to a 2007 NPR interview with her here.
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* And, by the way, these days, the world's only real war on women. Read Anne Applebaum's review of Infidel at the Amazon page.