My big complaint with the Tumulty piece (and by extension the conservatives who deify Reagan) is her portrayal of the Gipper as the flawless personification of conservatism, the gold standard and Platonic form that future conservatives must aspire to if they are to regain their influence. Now, Reagan is probably as good a candidate for that task as conservatives are likely to get, but his purity is to my mind very much a mixed bag. Slashing then raising taxes, working against and working with Congress, Iran-Contra and talks with Gorbachev--these are all signs of an administration that mixed conservative idealism with the pragmatic tradition in American politics. I am by no means defending Reagan, but at least he eventually reigned in the excessive ideologues he brought into government even though they would continue to exert influence long after his departure. I still think this Washington Monthly article from a few years ago makes the best case for Reagan's legacy. It is the ideologues who rode in on his coattails who perpetuate nonsense such as Reagan's responsibility for "ending" the Cold War and "defeating" the Soviet Union that allow writers like Tumulty to claim conservatives are "victims of their own successes." They were always the purists anyway, who lack the sort of self-reflection that makes political leaders do the right thing and make the tough choices. That sort of stubborness has given us Bush and the unappeasable "conservative" movement of today which wishes to conserve little but its grip on power.

And on the non-political side, here's an interview with the guy who rendered the tear on Reagan's face.

Posted at March 16, 2007 3:35 PM in response to "Victims of their Successes"

This might be considered self-indulgent or lazy, but I'm going to reprint my thoughts on this subject from my blog:

Andrew Sullivan describes how uncomfortable he felt in the presence of anti-war demonstrators because of "reflexive hostility to American power, partisan hatred of Bush, and blindness toward Saddam's atrocities." This is all being discussed in the context of "who was right" about Iraq back then. Most of us on the left have argued that the dirty hippies were right all along, whereas the serious journalists argued that they were courageous for recognizing evil. And the neocons, well, they were never wrong (Bush fucked it up!).

Here's what I think, if anybody cares. I agree that the antiwar demonstrators were not making cogent arguments in the streets. But when have protestors ever done so? A protest is about emotion, solidarity and sending a message. Unfortunately, the message most people got was that we were suddenly back in 1968. "No blood for oil" is not a sophisticated argument against the Iraq war but protests are not arguments, per se. So while I understand where Sullivan is coming from, I think he misses the fact that there were cogent arguments being made against the war but no one noticed either because they were in awe of Bush, terrified of the false connections the administration made between Iraq and al Qaeda, or convinced that the dirty hippies were the sole voice of the antiwar movement. I knew at the time (hell, I even wrote about it) that no protest on earth (and they were worldwide) was going to stop this war. I knew Bush did not care about world opinion, just like he does not care about world opinion today. So I supported the protests even though I knew they had neither substance nor influence because stopping the war was (is) my goal.

There are valid criticisms to be made of the antiwar left. It is true that they are reflxiveky hostile to American power, as Sullivan claims, but they don't suffer from BHS and they weren't "blind" to Saddam's atrocities (don't you see how evil he is!?). I think the protestors were wrong in describing the motivations of the Bush administration (empire, oil) but that is a moot point given no one knows why the hell we are in Iraq. I certainly don't. WMDs? Nope. Ties to terrorism? Nope. Spreading democracy? Nope. battling Islamic fanaticism? Nope. I doubt even Bush knows why he's in Iraq. I would surmise that a bunch of previously unrelated interests jelled after 9/11 that made regime change in Iraq desirable. It satisfied personal vengence for Bush (Saddam took a shot at my daddy!), intellectual hubris for the neocons, and political ambitions for the GOP. I believe these people truly believed their own bullshit. I think they honestly thought they would be greeted as liberators, free markets would flourish, tyrants everywhere would shake in their boots, and the Middle East would be on its way to democracy and peace. If you read some of what the principle proponents of the Iraq war wrote at the time, they were unequivocal on these points. They really believed it. The criticism, as many pointed out before being drowned out by the drums of war, was that this was pure fantasy. I knew you couldn't just remove the dictator that was holding an artificial country together by force and expect a Jeffersonian democracy to flourish. I knew you couldn't privatize economy before using the government to modernize it. And I knew that chaos was going to ensue in the Middle East as a result.

As I've said before, I take no pleasure in having been right about these things. It makes me sick that this war was essentially unpreventable (particularly after the one man who might have stopped it, Colin Powell, forever ruined his legacy by feeding bullshit to the UN). And it's not as though one had to perfectly, accurately predict the consequences of invading Iraq. I think the spectre of those consequences were enough to make any rational person think twice about this adventure. But people didn't think twice. They took Bush at face value as he lied to the world. The scar of 9/11 was exploited most cynically. I remember when Bush gave his ultimatum speech two days before "shock and awe" and the channel I was watching jumped to Times Square after the address. The camera dispassionately watched two fratboys whoop after the speech and say something like "go get 'em W!" before heading off to debase themselves somewhere. That was the environment we were in. The reason the hippies get singled out is because they were making an unsophisticated argument at a time when unsophisticated arguements for the war were in vogue. No one listened to the nuanced, serious arguments against invading Iraq because the Bush administration had made factuality a subjective experience and independent thought tantamount to treason. The hippies were and still are a scapegoat for the opposition. That was the world we lived in back then. And despite popular opinion turning decidedly and permanently against this president and against this war, our national conversation is shockingly slow to catch up, nearly four years later.

Posted at January 23, 2007 4:30 PM in response to Street Protest? Why Street Protests?

This is a trick question, right?

The same amount, unless George Bush is no longer president (impeached).

There's no reason for Bush to change Iraq policy. He's not up for re-election and he is only looking out for himself.

The real question is will Bush abandon his political party before they abandon him.

Posted at December 15, 2006 1:45 PM in response to Money on the Table

I'm getting real sick of the suggestion that radical Islam represents a threat to Western Civilization greater than fascism or communism. In the Townhall article, Prager tries to scare us by pointing out that if only 10% of Muslims subscribe to radicalized Islam, that's still more than those who believed in Nazism, communism, etc. He could have made it 50% for all I care. The point is that x percent of Muslims believe in it, but none of them have the power of an industrialized state to execute their desires. Nazi Germany was a threat because it was roughly equal in power to the Allies. Soviet Russia was a threat because it was, briefly, roughly equal in power to the United States. Is Iran roughly equal in power to the United States? Indonesia? And what if the Middle East were to become a superstate, with enough political organization and military power to credibly threaten the West? This is all nonsense. Total, raving, John Birch-style nonsense.

People like Prager (apparently they call themselves "conservatives") desire conflict with The Other, whether it is Muslims, immigrants, Jews, blacks, women, homosexuals or anyone else that threatens their fragile and archaic identities. They are cowards and they are weak. They have no idea how to fit themselves into the modern world so they wish to destroy and purify it. And that is exactly what the Nazis wanted to do. The fact that this bigot is on the Holocaust Memorial Council would be slightly less appalling if it weren't for the presence of the man in the White House. I'm increasingly less shocked by things like this, but I can also see the unsustainability of this "conservatism." There's plenty of sypathetic bigots out there who will listen to ignorant bigots like Prager. Under principled leadership, this country will surely marginalize them and their entire program of antimodernism, rather than encouraging it with winks and nods. Real critics of modernity do so with their minds, not concentration camps.

Posted at December 5, 2006 6:57 PM in response to Congress Needs to Kick Prager Off Holocaust Council

Dowd, like many journalists, writes almost exclusively in the "game frame" identified by communications scholars and political scientists. The emphasis is rarely on policy but on politics--who's up, who's down; who's winning, who's losing. Politics isn't a game for me, and it certainly isn't a game for those who are most directly affected by policy (those with the least power in society). Dowd can be incisive but more often than not she reduces politics to a soap opera. In these troubling times we need serious criticism of our leadership, not smug little anecdotes about the lives of politicians. Frankly, anyone who is not prfoundly pissed off about the direction this country has taken in the last five years clearly doesn't care and shouldn't be in a position to comment about our current political environment.

Posted at October 25, 2006 11:07 AM in response to Open letter to M. Dowd

"They hate us for our freedoms" = "they hate us because we're Americans"

And if this is true, then what of the freedom to dissent? Or is the freedom to dissent unamerican? Lieberman really confuses me. I think he really did lose part of his ability to think rationally on 9/11 with, apparently, a good number of the American public, and the governing and media elite.

As for "Infectious Authoritarianism," that is redundant.

Posted at September 18, 2006 1:38 PM in response to Infectious Authoritarianism

I asked the question.

On the blog for the ABC "docudrama" I asked, in effect, "what is the purpose of this movie if it is not factual?" My comment was sent sent to the moderator for approval and rejected (I assume, since comments submitted since then have appeared). Not to sound righteous, but I think this question is the most dangerous one to this film because it a) does not require viewing the movie to ask it and b) the only answers can be entertainment or propaganda. Either of those answers are unsettling and offensive. I strongly hope sufficient pressure is put on Disney to shelve this movie (like the successful campaign against Sinclair Broadcasting's John Kerry "documentary" two years ago.

Posted at September 6, 2006 12:57 PM in response to FCC and ABC

Regarding changing attitudes toward science in light of technofixes.

Bear in mind that this is still pretty much at the level of pet-theory, but I strongly suspect that there is a link in the libertarian mind between innovation and freedom that, in the end, validates for them the perfection of the market. Technology, particularly the speed with which it now comes to market, validates the superiority of private enterprise over government, heightens distrust of politicians and bureaucracy, and elevates the entrepreneur to somewhere between "captain of industry" and "visionary." Wired magazine is perhaps the best example of this mindset. It is still a well-written and generally thoughtful (notable exceptions include its founder and the juvenile writings of Jennifer Granick) periodical with a unabashed optimism about humanity's potential through technology. I might be overstating or even exaggerating the point, but my feeling is that the message of Wired is that liberated individuals can triumph over archaic authority, whether they be sacred or profane.

Clearly the focus of the modern tech-savvy libertarian is on the impedance of government and politics. The X-prize contest two years ago was something I speculated on at the time: is the success of a privately-funded spacecraft going to rachet up the criticism of NASA as a bloated government program? I suppose what troubles me is that there is a real lack of historical perspective amongst this crowd. Most technological innovation in this country--indeed the innovation that made us an post-industrial powerhouse--originated in federally-funded programs or joint ventures that were transitioned to the market after costs came down. The libertarians seem to forget this. For them, government is always an obstacle, never a partner, and this certainty of thought is reinforced by the novelty of technological innovation.

I've strayed way off course here but I think it's worth noting that the fundamental schism between libertarian and traditionalist conservatives I initially discussed is very apropos here. The manner in which each observes the nature of authority leads to very different perspectives on the use of science and technology.

Posted at September 6, 2006 12:34 PM in response to A Day In Florence

I was perfectly aware when I wrote it that "scientific scepticism" is a light criticism for what has been called a "war on science" on behalf of Republicans and conservatives. What I was trying to get at was how conservatives distinguish between "good" and "bad" science, my suggestion being its proximity to authority. A good example of this would be the application of science to military technology. Even if the athoritarian sctructure of the military is subordinated to civilian authority, conservatives are happy as long as the man in the White House echoes these authoritarian tendencies. Furthermore, the application of resources toward military ends by the state demonstrates that conservatives are perfectly happy using the government to solve problems--it just depends on the problem. Sorting that out was my primary concern, since I think there is more going on here than traditional conservative animosity towards the state. The very fact that conservative animosity towards science (I don't see any evidence that they are hiding their arguments from the "light of day") is public and confident (they're assuming Middle America is in agreement with them) makes the selectiveness of conservative scientific scepticism an interesting and complex analytical problem.

Posted at September 5, 2006 2:20 PM in response to A Day In Florence

What's puzzling to me is how scientific scepticism became a "conservative" issue. Certainly that high-profile issue of evolution is clear enough to understand in terms of being a continuation of the debate on the origins of man. But denial of global warming? It's unclear how this fits into the worldview of the social conservative.

I would tentatively offer the following explanation. Conservatism, as a political movement, has benefited greatly from the intellectual work that preceded and paralleled it in journals of opinion, think tanks, new media, etc. The conservative intellectual movement struggled with and never quite resolved the tension between its libertarian and traditionalist wings, achieving consensus largely through anti-communism and opposition to the New Deal welfare state. This coalition was practical, in short, and once the movement began making political gains, the struggle was less about intellectual consistency but power; which people, constituencies, would gain the most from the fruits of electoral victory. The libertarians got to have their experiments (solutions in their mind) with laissez-faire economics and the traditionalists got to use government to make the world conform to their prejudices. But on each side, I believe, there was and is a deference to authority that unites them and it is this deference to authority that has allowed present-day conservatives to continue supporting Bush despite the abundance of evidence that he (and the Republican Congress) is ruining the country.

Science derives from authority as well, but one in which authority is earned through acceptance by the scientific community. What upsets these conservatives is that scientific decisions are being made independent of an explicitly political faction. Yes, there are scientists who politicize their findings, but it works in that order only--scientific consensus precedes political action. Global warming challenges some (un)stated assumptions of the libertarian worldview. And despite their professed faith in freedom and individualism, libertarians are quite doctrinaire about their worldview. The intellectual forebears of libertarianism are the authorities and an independent scientific consensus challenges that. And because the conservative coalition is a practical one, seemingly unconservative, uncontroversial, issues like global warming are attacked by conservatives from both the libertarian and traditionalist camps.

What's really pathetic is the failure of conservative opinion-makers and power brokers to muster the courage to admit they might be wrong. Over the course of my research into the conservative intellectual movement I have, as a progressive, come around to some points made by conservative intellectuals in the 1950s-60s. I was persuaded by evidence and argument. Today's conservatives are nothing but ideologues who can not or will not think critically. I'd like to think those that laid the intellectual framework for them would be appalled.

Posted at September 5, 2006 10:47 AM in response to A Day In Florence