Category: Current Affairs

Liberal Americans + Conservative Europeans = New Trans-Atlantic Alliance?

That’s the equation Timothy Garton Ash is hoping for.

Francis Fukuyama explains Ash’s thesis:

In actuality, he writes, Europeans are themselves
divided into Euro-Atlanticists and Euro-Gaullists; the former want
political ties with the U.S. and worry about the statist tendencies of
the European Union, while the latter see the EU as a competitive
counterweight to the U.S. and champion the Brussels version of the
welfare state. (“Janus Britain” is schizophrenically suspended
somewhere between the two.)

Americans, for their part, are divided between what have come to be
called red and blue voters. The Left (or blue) side of the American
political spectrum corresponds to the Right, or Atlanticist, side in
Europe, while such quintessentially American characteristics as
anti-statism, gun ownership, and pugnacious hostility to international
institutions are typically to be found only on the red side, the side
that tends to vote Republican.

The resulting political Venn diagram thus half-overlaps. Although
Europe is largely devoid of anyone resembling a Republican, and America
has no socialists, both Europe and America have the equivalent of
American Democrats. It is in that intersecting space that Ash sees the
“surprising future” he proclaims in the subtitle of this book—the space
where John Kerry’s America makes common cause with Euro-Atlanticists.
These two forces can, he believes, nudge the U.S. toward greater
multilateralism and Europe toward closer trans-Atlantic cooperation.

But Fukuyama thinks that Ash’s equation won’t work.

READ THE ARTICLE TO FIND OUT WHY.

Those Swingin' Catholics!

Back a little piece I blogged about the fact that Catholics are now a swing vote.

Not everybody buys this. Some pundits have argued that there simply "is no" Catholic vote (prescinding from the fact that some Catholics obviously do vote).

Ramesh Ponnuru provides some analysis supporting my contention: There is indeed a Catholic vote, and it swings.

In fact, Ponnuru provides data to suggest, it tends to determine the winner of the presidential election and leads rather than follows social trends.

Now we just gotta get it trained even better on the five non-negotiables.

GET THE STORY.

Those Swingin’ Catholics!

Back a little piece I blogged about the fact that Catholics are now a swing vote.

Not everybody buys this. Some pundits have argued that there simply "is no" Catholic vote (prescinding from the fact that some Catholics obviously do vote).

Ramesh Ponnuru provides some analysis supporting my contention: There is indeed a Catholic vote, and it swings.

In fact, Ponnuru provides data to suggest, it tends to determine the winner of the presidential election and leads rather than follows social trends.

Now we just gotta get it trained even better on the five non-negotiables.

GET THE STORY.

Red + Blue = Purple?

HERE’S AN ARTICLE BY HARVARD LAW PROFESSION WILLIAM J. STUNTZ.

He’s an Evangelical. And a professor at a way left school.

Favorite quotes from Stuntz:

A lot of my church friends think universities represent the
forces of darkness. Law schools — my corner of the academic world —
are particularly suspect. A fellow singer in a church choir once asked
me what I did for a living. When I told her, she said, "A Christian
lawyer? Isn’t that sort of like being a Christian prostitute? I mean,
you can’t really do that, right?" She wasn’t kidding. And if I had said
no, you don’t understand; I’m a law professor, not a lawyer, I’m pretty
sure that would not have helped matters. ("Oh, so you train people to
be prostitutes…")

You hear the same kinds of comments running in the other direction.
Some years ago a faculty colleague and I were talking about religion
and politics, and this colleague said "You know, I think you’re the
first Christian I’ve ever met who isn’t stupid." My professor friend
wasn’t kidding either. I’ve had other conversations like these —
albeit usually a little more tactful — on both sides, a dozen times
over the years. Maybe two dozen. People in each of these two worlds
find the other frightening, and appalling.

I’m an academic-type and a committed Christian as well, and I have some
of the same perceptions about how the two world talk past each other,
often in counter-productive ways. But some of what Stuntz suggests
strikes me as simply naive, particularly when it comes to the political
arena.

He suggests that redstaters and bluestaters can find common cause on a variety of issues, including principally helping the poor, which is a concern for both.

True.

But I find his "purple state" advocacy a little premature. For the foreseeable future, results will be very limited in making common cause between secular liberals and committed Christians for a whole host of reasons. Among them are these:

  1. However pressing the need for relieving poverty may be, committed Christians cannot ignore the blood of countless babies being shed in our land each day. The abortion issue superdominates the political map. Until that is settled on the pro-life side (such a settlement being a long, long way off), Christians cannot allow themselves to be distracted by lesser issues.
  2. There is frequently a fundamental disagreement about the best way to address the problem of poverty. Stuntz alludes to this, but I don’t think he’s got a practical solution. Just as you can’t wean committed Christians off abortion any time soon, I don’t think you can wean bluestaters off the idea of ending poverty via government handouts any time soon.
  3. The bluestaters have a worldview that is fundamentally hostile to Christianity. Until militant secularists stop trying to push religion out of public life and stop insulting the intelligence of Christians, not much reconciliation is possible.

This isn’t to say that Stuntz’s ideas aren’t worth considering (they are) or that there ain’t any common cause to be made (there is), I just think the amount for the foreseeable future is quite limited.

I understand that someone who works at such a bluestate institution as Harvard University and who attends such a redstate institution as an Evangelical church might want to get the two groups working together, but until points (1) and (3) above are addressed, it isn’t going to be possible to make much common cause on point (2).

J.M.S., Hollywood Liberal?

J. Michael Straczynski, creator of Babylon 5, is an unusually thoughtful guy. Though his political leanings are left of center, he isn’t a knee-jerk as many of the movers and shakers in Hollywood. In a recent usenet post, he addressed the current low state of political discussion in America.

Much of what he says is quite good, and I’d encourage you to read it.

I would take exception to some of what he says, though. For example, regarding chaning the current impasse, he says:

[L]et me now proceed to the problem, and explain why so much of this rests at the feet of the Republican party.

For the last twenty plus years, the Right has hammered away at one consistent theme: that liberals are bad people, that Democrats are just shy of being traitors to America.  You’ve had people like Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter out there spewing bile into the American spirit of the most hateful, false, and demonizing sort.

What happens is this: those who would like to believe this, do…and thus view the other side with hatred and distrust and the sense that they are traitors. And you don’t compromise or deal with traitors.

On the other side of the political spectrum, you have people who you’ve just called traitors who know that they’re no such thing…and when you call people disloyal traitors, they have a tendency to get real angry about it.  And you don’t compromise or deal with people who impugn your honor like that.

I think that there is a significant element of truth to what JMS is saying here. I don’t listen to talk radio or watch left/right debate TV shows because I can’t stand that attitudes displayed on them. Talk radio is filled with gloating smugness, and the left/right debate shows are filled with people yelling over each other (as well as gloating, question-ducking, and knive-twisting). I want to hear reasoned debate and disagreement, a challenging and testing of ideas, not an unrestrained snark fest.

But I have to question JMS’s laying this at the feet of the Republicans. It wasn’t Rush Limbaugh who started this style of discourse. In some ways, it has been there all through American history (I’ve got a little online project involving that which should be debuting soon), but JMS is right that there has been an uptic in it in the last few decades.

In the full version of his post (which I won’t quote here), he mentions how different things were in Nixon’s day than they are today, and he’s right. On the level of government there was more cooperation and statesmanship displayed by the parties.

But that’s when things were breaking down.

The protest movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s involved a huge amount of frankly irrational invective against "the Establishment" and those with traditional values. The media, by this point, also became infected with a rampant liberalism that it is still in denial about. The reason that Rush took off like he did and became as big a phenomenon as he did was that, as he himself put it, he was the equal time that conservatives had been denied for so long.

If the debate became more polarized after his advent, it was in significant measure because the conservative side was fighting back for a change instead of taking it on the chin as it had in previous years.

I’m perfectly happy to say that Rush and his imitators did things in an unhelpful manner and contributed to worsening the climate of discussion, but when it comes to the basic question of who poisoned the well, liberals dumped a whole load of poison in it before Rush and his ilk came along. Just listen to some of the over-the-top rhetoric that was used in the ’60s and ’70s. Listen to John Kerry’s over-the-top testimony, for that matter.

Now, perhaps one can argue that the problem went back further than this, that the level of irrational invective used by the 1970s liberals was equalled by rhetoric used by prior conservatives.

Perhaps.

We recognize the prior claim. But the reality is that Ragesh 3 has been
Centauri property for over a century. To start a war over blood spilt
so long ago – where does it end? You kill them and take their land.
They kill you and take the land back. On and on and on – a cycle of
hatred!

Seems like I heard that somewhere before.

In the present environment there is plenty of blame to spread around for the low state of social discourse. If there are Rushes and Coulters who wallow in snark, there are liberals who do so as well. Just look at the collective liberal snark fest that happened after the recent election, with the left’s pundits falling all over themselves to insult redstaters in ever new ways.

It seems to me that examining the historical eitology of the origins of the problem is less productive than simply trying to talk, today, in a calm and reasonable manner and urging others to do likewise.

Racism In Europe

There have been scattered reports in the media for a while about an increase of anti-Semitism in Europe. While I’m sure they have some skinhead hooligans over there who get sick jollies by spraypainting symbols and insults on synagogues and Jewish tombstones, I’ve suspected that the real rise in European anti-Semitism isn’t due to the influx of vast numbers of illegal (and legal) Muslim immigrants from North Africa and parts east.

Now I’m starting to wonder.

HERE’S A DISTURBING POST FROM POWERLINE ABOUT ANTI-BLACK RACISM IN EUROPE.