I think the Style Editor should apply to this.

And the Winner for the Worst Piece of Political Analysis Is…

Every once in a blue moon I come across a piece that fully captures the advanced state of decay at the heart of the World’s Oldest Political Party. It truly is difficult to know where to start with something like this. Its errors are so many and so fulsome, its analysis so riddled with the deepest sort of wishful thinking. It is like a dispatch from a parallel universe in which Constanza’s law (you remember, right? Just do the opposite of whatever your instincts tell you) has been suspended. In this universe bad instincts are followed to the hilt. It is like a lunatic at the wheel of school bus headed for a cliff saying, “Seriously, I've seen these things FLY!” He has failed to absorb the lesson of the Clinton presidency: the people will vote for Democrats only when they work as hard as they can to pretend they don't believe a word of party doctrine.

What is especially hard to believe about this drivel is that the guy who wrote is actually paid to provide strategic political advice to Democrat candidates for government. Oprah Winfrey-like, Al Quinlin suggests that the real problem with Democrats is that they have lost touch with their inner Democrat. The public, he says, hungers for “authenticity” and will vote for it in droves if only Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Chuck Schumer, et. al. will give it to them. (Yes, yes, give it to them, in the words of H.L. Mencken, good and hard.)

One can only hope that this piece is making the rounds on the DailyKos and has found its way into the reading folders of all the Democrat higher-ups in town. If the Republicans had a mole writing policy at the DNC they could not have written a more favorable strategy.

The Postmodern Moment

As Peter Leithart observes:

Japan beats Cuba in the world baseball competition. According to the NPR report, during the final game, everyone in the stands - Japanese, Cubans, American spectators - does the wave and dances to YMCA by the Village People. After Japan wins, you can hear "We Are the Champions" in the background.

The world comes together to play an American sport, and everyone is unified by American pop culture.

Welcome to postmodernism.

It's almost a caricature of postmodernism, in fact, save that it happened. And damn it, not a single Cuban defection as of this AM.

Barone il Pezzonovante vs. E.J. Dionne, The Black Knight

Michael Barone has some good stuff up on his blog. Here's a gentle tweak at the very tweakable E.J. Dionne, who essentially wrote a column defending progressives against the charge that they do very well in places with very rich people. Barone has some substantive points, but let me cut to the nyah-nyah-nyah bit:

Dionne seems to be uncomfortable also with the idea that the Democrats depend heavily on elite rich voters who are out of touch with Middle America. He points out, accurately, that that's not the entire picture. But if he's not defensive about Democrats' rich elites, why bother to write the column?

I respond: because most of Dionne's columns come out of defensiveness. Heck, he writes entire books out of a sort of weird defensiveness. [Oh, how Dr. Potomac and I chuckled when after the 1994 Congressional elections, ol' E.J. came out with his book entitled They Only Look Dead: Why Progressives Will Dominate the Next Political Era. Obviously he had begun to write the book after the 1992 elections, only to have events catch up with him. Dr. Potomac, as I recall, suggested the subtitle "But, Actually, They're Deader". I thought about "Shoot'em Again to Make Sure They're Dead." Maybe E.J.'s writing a sequel: "They're Not Dead, Just Resting." Or, "They're Not Dead, They're Just in a Vegetative State." That's E.J. Dionne: The Black Knight of the American Punditocracy, with a writing schedule based on wish-fulfillment.]

•We often (OK, maybe just me and the Style Editor) talk about the great good Godblog Get Religion...not that it needs any advertising, but Terry Mattingly has a good post up on coverage of Ave Maria University, which almost inevitably is called Pizza U., thanks to the deep pockets of its patron, signor, and podesta, Tom Monaghan, founder of Domino's Pizza. Comments, Doc C.?

• Confessing Evangelical has a post up on "Lent for Evangelicals". Frankly this is something that the Style Editor can really dig her canines into, so I will leave comments on the post to her.

Cherie Blair, et. al, v. The People

Theodore Dalrymple at City Journal is one of my all-time favorite writers. For those not familiar with work, Dalrymple is an English psychiatrist who spent his entire professional career working in the National Health Service seeing to the mental mental health needs of the British underclass. He makes a compelling argument in his best known book, Life at the Bottom, that the source of squalor and misery among Britain’s poor is a deeply engrained sense of victimhood combined with a highly developed ethic of relativism. As always, while those at the top, the “mandarins” he calls them, make a good living off of the behavioral problems of poor, English society as a whole continues to coarsen and the conditions of the poor themselves spiral downward. Life at the bottom means living with the burden of bad ideas conceived at the top.

The attached article has a hall of mirrors quality to it. Cherie Blair, Esq. is representing two Muslim girls who are suing for the right to wear headcoverings and other traditional Muslim dress to school. He points that Mrs. Blair has confused her categories. Since the long robes and head coverings are traditionally Muslim, Blair assumes that British society, by denying them the opportunity to wear those clothes to school, is engaging in cultural hegemony and oppression. The reality, Dalrymple says, is the opposite: the clothes themselves are symbols and tools of misogyny and oppression which Muslim men use to try to keep Muslim women barefoot, married at 12 and pregnant. As bad as those conditions are, the offerings of British society are equally bad: non-Muslims enjoy great freedom but increasingly convert freedom to a kind of license that is making life in many British cities intolerable. The trick, he says, is to hold freedom and discipline in balance. It is a trick the Muslim world has yet to learn and that the West,including Cherie Blair, is quickly forgetting.

David Warren

I can't really add to this; I can only commend it.

I’m sitting here icing my flab, having just returned from a most EXCELLENT time exercising my 2nd Amendment rights with some of my favorite mad libertarian and conservative running dogs, and I wish to pronounce that the heart of Conservatism is all about guns.

No? Oh well.

Is Dreher asking some good questions? He may well be. But my point simply is tone matters. Tone always matters. Tone can ruin the best questions and elevate dreck. Perhaps this is not how it should be, but it is how it is.

I work with some impassioned social conservatives, who are very upset about the state of the world. They want it to change, and they write all sorts of things to this effect. But in their op-eds and whatnot they don’t persuade. They bludgeon. And somehow this makes them not very persuasive.

The Ombudsman will be the first to tell you that tact is not one of my gifts. I fully embrace that there is a time and place for bludgeoning, but not every time and place is for bludgeoning, and it seems to me that the Crunchy Cons would do well to remember that.

Also Dr. P has a point: this is all possibly less interesting than Battlestar Galactica, which you have to admit is a frightening thought.

Meanwhile back here in Bobo Paradise, I offer this gem of an article from Thursday’s WaPo.

Also far more interesting to me than the Crunchy book is this one. I intend to give it a whirl after I finish with Flashman on the March.

We are amused.

Confronted with "Birkinstocked Burkeans," the Ombudsman is luke warm and thinks it will be a good-intentioned but ultimately fruitless attempt to reinfuse conservatism with orthodoxy. His sibling in crime, the Style Editor, is red hot with contempt and sees the entire project as self-righteous, preachy, and narcissistic. Which leaves me to play the foil and, yes, the curmudgeon.

I freely admit, after reading Crunchy Cons this past week, that there is a disingenuous element at play, claiming not to condemn others for living a less-than crunchy life but all the while asking how anyone could think one way and live another. I did think a better title would have been Look, Not Everyone Can Live Like This, But Shame On You, You Should. The book does make one feel guilty at times, and I think in many ways that is what Dreher wants. I'll leave the hand-wringing about self-righteousness to others on this site, however.

In our huff at being called out for not living life the right way, we should not lose sight at the book's broader purpose, as the O-man rightly suggested: reinjecting orthodoxy into American conservatism. By orthodoxy, Dreher means the intellectual foundations of the modern conservative movement found most readily in Russell Kirk, Richard Weaver, and others. He is making the direct charge that conservatism, now subsumed within the Republican Party, has drifted from its moorings. Once waving the banner of tradition, particularity, localism, and community, it now mouths all the modern platitudes about progress, development, globalization, and multiculturalism (resistence is futile!). Conservatives once shed tears when fields and old neighborhoods were bulldozed for renewal and housing projects; now they shed tears of joy when a new chain store opens offering toilet paper at bargain prices.

There is something to this charge. Too many Republicans think lowering tax rates is the heart of conservatism. The party bears virtually no resemblence to the themes explored in Kirk's 1953 Conservative Mind or to Richard Weaver's Ideas Have Consequences and Visions of Order. Now if conservatives are no longer grounded here, in the fertile soil that gave them birth, then where are they now grounded? What is the 2006 conservative philosophy? I'm not sure it has one. Traditionalists (of which Dreher counts himself) cling to Kirk and company, the "others" (what to call these people?) cling to whom? Our Big Government conservatism, if there is such a thing, looks more like Woodrow Wilson -- spend and regulate at home, and make the world safe for democracy.

Another question -- is this spat between CCs and "the others" the old neo-paleo fight under new ownership?

Anyhow, it is true, dear fellow editors, that I liked the book and thought its broader question an important one to ask. Because if Dreher's questions are right (and I think they are) and his answers are right (I think they are, in part), then modern day conservatism is a body with no mind.

Those who know the Style Editor well can tell you that her closely held ambition is that one day after I make sufficient dosh to support this scheme, I will own a farm where I would raise rare breed animals and heirloom plants, for the purpose of preserving their genetic pool for future generations. I even have all of my breeds picked out and happily list them for interested parties, who generally become rapidly uninterested by the time I start comparing the merits of the Large Black vs. the Mulefoot hogs.

The Style Editor she shops regularly at the local farmer’s market, only eats sausages and scrapple made from contented pigs by local producers, and buys most of her bread from local bakers. She has warm, fond memories of the small farmer and his wife who had the next property over when she was a child—it was there that the Style Editor learned to milk a cow—and thinks they were the salt of the earth. I have been known to wax eloquent on the topic of native plants vs. invasive species. If I had children, I would be a stay at home mother. (I’m not sure this counts though as that would be motivated by pure selfishness. I find the crumb crusher set highly entertaining and watching them develop is simply fascinating.) I even like to make my own granola.

So what is my opinion of the ‘crunchy cons’ dear reader? It verges so near extreme dislike that I think I will have to go drop some dollars in the penitential Lenten alms jar for thoughts unbecoming to a Christian.

Every time I read the actual Crunchy Con blog I feel a serious need to wash the sanctimony off me. I am happy to report that this blog provides the needed rinsing and also present a nice précis of how I view this group with much more humor and accuracy than I can muster.

However, I do not think the Crunchy Cons are hypocritical, a charge too easily tossed about in these heady days. I think they actually do practice what they preach. Thus, I would term them pharisaical. There they are in the front of the temple saying, now if you only did this, this and this, then God or Russell Kirk would love you like he loves us because we do all those things. It is hardly surprising. Their problem of is the problem of prosletyzing any creed that ultimately depends upon the law, and, man, do those Crunchies have laws! You can’t move for breaking them. It’s a problem that becomes even more exacerbated when the law is not a divinely instituted one, but one made up and maintained by man and apparently radically altered depending upon whim.

The more I read from them, the more I view them as the Objectivists of the Conservative movement. I remember having an interesting conversation once with a chap at a party who held the position that the Objectivists are the mystics of the Libertarians. It was a good observation. The Objectivists aren’t really all that objective. For all their claims of logic, they really do believe that they have a special truth revealed to them by the goddess Rand. They will themselves worthy of her; they are the chosen.

Likewise, the crunchy cons apparently have gotten the secret word via Russell Kirk, Wendell Berry, and Jimmy Carter and will by these practices make themselves worthy of—well—God truth be told. But as they say it’s not necessary that you believe in God to be a Crunchy Con—although it does seem awfully useful, just as it’s awfully useful to be an atheist if you’re going to be an Objectivist—then it would be accurate to say it will make you worthy of True Conservatism, however they feel about defining it that day.

Now I am more sympathetic to mysticism in Christianity than a good Lutheran girl ought to be. (Bunnie Diehl heaves a great sigh of blended pain and exasperation and starts calling around to schedule an intervention.) And I confess to having a profound admiration and respect for several mystics in the history of the church. But for all the press, mystics are human too, and there are some right stinkers among them, people whom you look at and say, “By golly if this mysticism stuff is true, it is also true that God uses every vehicle for it, which frankly is a relief to the rest of us. For’ard front and center, Margery Kempe!”

Have you read Margery Kempe? The Style Editor has, twice, once as a mere strippling of about 14 and once in college, and I look forward to never having to read her again. Both times I read Margery Kempe I was seized by a powerful sensation that coursed through my body and took control of my senses: I wanted to turn her over my knee and spank her with my hairbrush.

The Crunchy Cons remind me vividly of Margery Kempe. This is a pity for their “movement” for while the Margery has her ardent supporters—the Style Editor notes that the Ombudsman was a Kempe supporter when he read her—she also turns a lot of people off. When taking the mystic path, it is a far better practice to follow the advice of St. Francis, “Let all the brothers, however, preach by their deeds.” then shrilly proclaiming your virtue and condemning others via the Internet.

As we Lutherans like to say, “We have this one funny idea called the doctrine of vocation and this other funny idea known as the freedom of the Christian. We think that if you stick to these ideas, we will live the life that God meant for us to live on earth. Now these won’t be the perfect lives God actually meant for us to live, of course, because this here is a fallen world, and we’ll fall off the wagon a lot because we’re a poor, miserable sinners, and also we’ve got to watch that cheap grace, because that’s a great big stumbling block, you betcha. But we keep trying because it’s the least we can do for Someone who loves us so much, and we know that in His love, He will pick us up and stick us back on the wagon even if we’re going in the opposite direction. And don’t get any ideas that we’re better than everyone else, because we’re not. If our neighbor has fallen off the wagon, don’t, for goodness sake, prose on about how great it is to be on the wagon and not in the mud like our neighbor. Let’s get down and help the poor man and stick him in the middle of the wagon for a bit until his dizziness passes. Give him some bread and wine; that should help him feel stronger. Whoops, there goes the Style Editor again. Someone throw her a line!” (Bunnie Diehl relaxes and wonders if she can scale back the intervention to a mere one-on-one counseling session.)

An Orthodox priest once pithily observed about fasting, ‘Keep your eyes on your own plate.’ The Crunchy Cons would do well to follow this advice and keep their eyes on theirs.

Crunchy Cons

It is with no little trepidation that I mention the words above. If you have been following the conservative blogosphere, you know that "Crunchy Cons" is the title of a new book by Rod Dreher, and a new blog over at big-blog behemoth NRO.

I have some trepidation because the Doc tells me he has bought the book, and likes it; and the Style Editor has been fuming to me about these darn crunchy cons. Words to that effect. So it seems like the perfect thing to be talking about on a blog!

My initial take, to get things rolling, is that when some of these Crunchy Cons talk to much about lifestyle issues, I am automatically uninterested. Discussing "lifestyles" is all too post-modern, and unserious. But, insofar as it is serious, it seems a poorly named attempt to reorient American conservatism away from its love affair with Libertarianism and Populism. (The internet ain't exactly the place to do it, insofar as it is a perfect expression of both strains of American thought and culture...But let that pass.) As a serious project, it is trying to reinject Orthodoxy into Conservatism. The two are of course not synonymous: David Hume was one of the greatest Conservative thinkers, ever. Hence the sense that Rod Dreher's Crunchy-Con manifesto is Russell Kirk, a little Wendell Berry, shaken together with John Paul II. (Note that just about all of the commentators on the Crunchy Con blog are better known for their writings on Christianity than on Conservatism.) Myself, I cannot stand too much Wendell Berry, but he's a lot more substantive and truthful than Ayn Rand.

Naturally this effort is probably doomed to failure, not merely through poor execution, but also because Populism is just too strong. Me, I like the people fine; I just want to end the direct election of Senators. I would certainly prefer to be governed by the first 500 names in the Cambridge, MA phone directory than the entire faculty of Harvard; but I would also like, in that case, there to be a system of judicial review and frequent elections so I could throw the bums Abramovsky, Aaron, and Babbit out.

Canadian Bellicosity...It's Not Just an Oxymoron

Here at Dr. Curmudgeon & Company, we think a lot of David Warren, Canadian writer, savant, and columnist for the Ottawa Citizen Now he goes and writes a bellicose, chest-thumping militaristic Canadianesque column about what a fine damn bunch of soldiers the Canadians have in Afghanistan:

I am so damn proud of our Canadian guys, in Afghanistan. They have taken over a dangerous mission, and they are up to it. Our Kandahar detachment does not consist of “peacekeepers”. A person must have his brains scrambled for breakfast to think it does. For the peace is being imposed. Our guys are not “honest, impartial middlemen” between the Taliban savages and the elected government of Afghanistan. We are there to serve the latter by eliminating the former. It is a kill or be killed proposition. We are there to protect the common people; and therefore to kill the common enemy.

Well, yarr and hoo-ha to that, or whatever the Princess Pat's say (that would be Princess Patricia's Light Infantry Regiment; no jokes, please, their snipers have now set records for distance, if you see what I mean). If you're going to be accused of being a chickenhawk or armchair generalist, then you might as well fire the entire battery, hi-explosive shells, time on target.

Zinging the Pres

Those crafty devils. The House majority, long thought of as a robot army for the President, struck back today on the ports deal. The emergency supplemental appropriations bill, jammed full of money for Iraq and our other war zone, Lousiana, is a must-have for the President. The House is prepared to give the President what he wants on Iraq and Louisiana so long as the backbench gets its pound of flesh: no DPW ports management deal. This may be the first evidence that the House is under new management; that’s just the kind of clever, majority-saving thought Leader Boehner might come up with. We could do with a bit more of that kind of thing in the coming months only with guns trained on the opposition instead of the President.

Revenge as a Cold Dish

The Court’s (unanimous) ruling this week that law schools accepting federal funds must allow ROTC recruiters on campus is a matter of the things coming around after they go around. During my early years in Washington, and long before I made the intellectual and spiritual leap to conservatism, I lived through a little episode called the Civil Rights Restoration Act. In this undertaking, Congress reversed a Supreme Court ruling which held that a small liberal arts college in Illinois, Grove City, was not required to adhere to Title IX anti-sex discrimination policies just because its students received federal student loans and grants. The legal theory of the Court was that the aid flowed to the individuals rather than the institution and, therefore, the school had not received direct federal funds and was not subject to federal regulation. Congress passed legislation to override the Court’s ruling which was subsequently vetoed by President Reagan. Congress then overrode the veto attaining full victory over its nemesis, Grove City College, which although the Supreme Court said it had never actually discriminated was now legally barred from actions it hadn’t contemplated.

The Robert’s Court this week applied the gander’s sauce to the goose. The Court held that a group of law schools that had refused access to the ROTC because of the military's “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy was a violation of the Soloman amendment which requires that institutions of higher education receiving federal support, including via student loans and grants, must open their campuses to the ROTC. This reversal of fortune is a petard the liberals never expected to be hoisted by. The sheer outrageousness of the idea that if a right-thinking (i.e. politically liberal) person takes federal money they have to play by federal rules! Forget about rights, laws of the universe are being violated here: liberal policy preferences are always constitutional and if they aren’t then just change the damn Constitution.

The Court reminded the law schools that they had a number of choices: they could change their ROTC policies or they could discontinue taking federal money. Which, by the way, is what Grove City College did going so far as to set up its own student loan operation with PNC Bank which offers loans on terms that are competitive with the federal student loan program.

I must say, all this comeuppance and innovation is rather invigorating, isn’t it?

I know we poo-pooed the CPAC GOP presidential list a few weeks ago, saying there were more candidates out there and that George Allen is a phantom front-runner. Well, add these guys to the growing list, says the Union-Leader:

Mike Huckabee
George Pataki
Chuck Hagel

[insert snore here]

Man, I can't get enough of this ports deal. It reminds me that I actually really am a conservative...because, sometimes, groups of people do really stupid things, despite all this "hive-intelligence" nonsense. Sometimes, as "Publius" points out ad nauseum, the health of the republic requires a check upon the unbridled passions of the mob.

But, enough about the United States Senate. Here are some of James Lilek's most recent thoughts on the ports matter...he tries to tie together What is Now Known:

Perhaps you’re confused by the so-called “Ports Deal” flap, which is rapidly reaching “imbroglio” status. At least in the Italian papers. Let us recap.

A British firm with the quaint and bygone name of Peninsular & Oriental Steam Navigation company which controlled some American ports, and staffed the docks with Beefeaters and fierce Gurka soldiers who shot intruders on sight. They sold their interests to a company run by someone named Ladina Bin Osam, located in the fictional nation of “Dubai,” which is actually located in a PO box in Tehran. The company immediately announced plans to rechristen the docks “Martyr’s Gangways” and convert all cargo ships into troop transports that would fling plague-infected suicide bombers from off shore by means of catapults. Supporters of the deal point out that “Dubai,” which is how “Dubya” is pronounced in Arabic, is actually a great ally of the US, , despite the fact that the country’s seal shows the Twin Towers on fire, with the words “Bingo!” written below in elegant script. Pressed for comment, President Bush noted that critics should “wad up a sock and swallow it,” and that he would veto any attempt to veto the deal – unless it included $903 billion in additional spending, in which case, let’s talk.

Yeah, that's more or less it. I'll miss the Beefeaters, with those funny hats and cute little halberds...

Taking the Long(man) View

Last week I referenced a piece by Mark Steyn on the potential consequences of falling birth rates in the West. Today, Foreign Policy offers a somewhat different and, from a conservative perspective, more hopeful analysis of the issue. Phillip Longman of the New America Foundation argues that since populations with more patriarchal views on family tend to reproduce at a higher rate than social segments with liberal or modernist views, societies will inevitably become more conservative. You cannot pass along values to children that you don’t have. Liberals are selecting themselves out of the social gene pool.

Longman says:

[In] the post-World War II era, nearly all segments of modern societies married and had children. Some had more than others, but the disparity in family size between the religious and the secular was not so large, and childlessness was rare. Today, by contrast, childlessness is common, and even couples who have children typically have just one. Tomorrow’s children, therefore, unlike members of the postwar baby boom generation, will be for the most part descendants of a comparatively narrow and culturally conservative segment of society. To be sure, some members of the rising generation may reject their parents’ values, as always happens. But when they look around for fellow secularists and counterculturalists with whom to make common cause, they will find that most of their would-be fellow travelers were quite literally never born.

This is a somewhat more nuanced and more developed version of the argument that James Taranto at Opinion Journal has been making for sometime now about what he calls the "Roe effect": people who believe in abortion have abortions; those that don’t, don’t. The net result is that every year there are more more people who are likely to oppose abortion rights and fewer to support that right. As Longman says, the ruling in Roe could very well turn out to be a Phyrric victory -- in more ways than one.

NPR: My Constant Companion

I just can’t get enough of the agitprop the flows forth from the reports of National Public Radio. Yesterday, that bastion of anti-capitalist business news, Marketplace, ran a piece on Strapped, a book that claims to unpack, explain and remedy (or at least offer a remedy) for the economic bind that many 20- and 30-somethings claim to find themselves in. According to the interview, today’s yuppies are caught in a bind between their student loans and a flat job market and finding it increasingly difficult to make ends meet. At one point the interviewer asks author Tamara Draut, without any irony, “Why is it so much more difficult for your generation to make it economically than it has been for earlier generations?” (Stop and think about that. Earlier generations? You mean like the one that lived through the Great Depression?) She proceeds to explain the hardships of living the simple life in Manhattan where she and her husband periodically shed some of their CDs at the end of the month to buy groceries. “We don’t live extravagantly. You won’t find any designer clothes in my closet,” she says, as if the absence of Ralph Lauren and Donna Karan constituted the last word on penny-pinching miserliness.

Then, of course, having defined the “crisis” Draut comes forward with the solutions, which, you guessed it, are government subsidies and payments. Chief among these is “earn and learn” which amounts to working 30 hours a week while the government pays for graduate courses in high-demand fields—or not. One imagines that the proletariat drawn to Draut’s analysis would probably lean heavily toward topics like women’s studies, conflict resolution and comparative gay lit. Listen for yourself. You will be astounded.