From the Distant Liberal Consensus, a Defiant Conservative Yelp

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]

As I write this review, I keep hearing about Jeb Bush, campaigning for president, talking about how the invasion of Iraq and the removal of Saddam Hussein was a "pretty good deal" and castigating the Obama administration and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for failing to maintain (much less expand) America's involvement in Iraq and Syria. The ghosts of neoconservatism remain, I suppose--perhaps in part because their roots in a certain type of conservative thinking go so far back. This summer, I learned a little bit more about that.

Back in late May, a large group of local readers here in Wichita, KS--nearly all of whom very likely would identify themselves as "conservatives," though of a great variety of hues; only a couple of us were generally outsides to that identification, looking in--gathered (under the aegis of the Eighth Day Institute; many thanks!) to read and discuss James Burnham's last major writing, the rambling, revealing, often fascinating, sometimes frightening, and (I think, anyway) fundamentally mixed-up Suicide of the West: An Essay on the Meaning and Destiny of Liberalism. Published in 1964 (the same year that Stanley Kubrick's "Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb" came out, a coincidence which at least one of our members thought almost too good to be true), it is a frustrated and worried manifesto which insists on presenting itself as a clinical diagnosis of the liberal ideology, which Burnham believed not only dominated the Western world but would, unless reversed, result in its destruction. It is, in short, the sort of book which I suppose could only have been written in a world where the postwar liberal consensus seemed both utterly monolithic and utterly oblivious to the cultural and socio-economic and global consequences of its own beliefs (and who is to say that it really didn't seem so to an East Coast Trostkyist-turned-conservative academic in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s?). Unless you've never read anything except, perhaps, Chronicles magazine (and only the back issues at that), then you probably can't honestly see liberalism as such an intellectually elite and self-inclosed ideological position any longer--that accusation is made against it, of course, but anyone who has honestly considered the ideas of such liberal suspects as Lyndon Johnson, William Sloane Coffin, Martin Luther King, and Betty Friedan (just to pick some names which Burnham never mentions, despite all of them regularly making news as this book was published) can't believe that "liberalism" is a seamless, relentless unity. So reading the book was, among other things, an entrance for me into an old, mostly lost, and perhaps never really entirely real, slightly paranoid world.

A word about James Burnham. I've never made a study of the man's writings, but reading this book made clear to me the truth of the commentary on the man--both complimentary and critical--which points out that the common theme throughout all his writings over the decades was the place of "power" in any given system of thought. The man was more than a "realist" as they are commonly labeled in discussions of foreign policy and international relations; for him, it seems as though power--the wielding of it, the psychological comfort or discomfort with it, the moral appraisal of it--is utterly inseparable from any kind of political understanding, or perhaps any conception of social life whatsoever. Liberalism is a great many things for Burnham, nearly all of them bad, but the common denominator among all these bad things is that liberalism is weak. It lacks firmness. It fails to do and say and believe the hard and practical and disciplined and necessary things for civilization's survival. The fact that this kind of relentless focus on strength occasionally makes it difficult for Burnham to account for liberal successes, or makes a little disconcerting the way he deals with aspects of individuality which are not reducible to a Darwinian struggle, doesn't slow him down. Towards the very end of the book he lays it out flat: the most important thing is "military bases, strategic posts, and soldiers"; beyond or without them, "there can be no civilization, there is nothing" (pg. 344). I can only assume that John Derbyshire, Victor Davis Hanson, and other traditionalist conservatives of a particularly martial stripe are fans.

This isn't Front Porch-style localist and community-focused conservatism, that's for sure. The Cold War was a bad time for ideologies (thought really, are there ever good times?), particularly one that includes within it strands of thought dealing such humble topics and virtues as local knowledge and affection, community attachment, and so forth. Burnham saw liberalism as a world-historical force, and attempting to understand it obliged him, on my reading, to constantly reach for the civilizational, the global. He--and surely he wasn't alone--looked for some kind of systematized resistance to what he considered the essential weakness and irresponsibility of liberalism, and as a result turned (despite his protestation in the book that such was not his aim) varied particular elements of conservative thought into universal, logical necessities, the rejection of which can only be attributed to Western liberals "who hate their own civilization" (pg. 14). The result certainly included elements of traditional conservatism--Burnham unapologetically defends aristocracy and natural hierarchies, and is dismissive of broad academic freedoms and democracy, particularly when "uneducated or propertyless persons" are allowed to vote (pgs. 112, 137-140)--but while Burnham occasionally name-drops various Aristotelian or Hegelian or Christian philosophies that might ground and give contrasting meaning to those traditions, overall the feeling of the book is very programmatic, and intentionally so: there is the way things are, and then there are liberals, and figuring what why they believe the irrational things they do is a problem for him.

Who are these Western liberals? Burnham employs only a little sociology and less philosophy in constructing what he refers to as the "liberal syndrome," instead choosing to carefully build a constellation of liberal positions by examining people and institutions that "plain common-sense" tells you are liberal: Elanor Roosevelt, Eugene McCarthy, John Kenneth Galbraith, The New Republic, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the League of Women Voters, etc., etc. (pgs. 19-20). From this array of liberals and liberal doings, Burnham artfully constructs his case. I won't deny that his analysis often results in correct observations about liberalism generally: "liberalism rejects the essentially tragic view of man's fate," "most liberals...do not feel....that considerations of experience, habit, custom and traditions have any appreciable weight," "liberalism is logically committed to the doctrine...of epistemological relativism, " etc. (see pgs. 44, 57, 72). But because he does not really look seriously at liberalism as a philosophy with its own history (Locke appears only to have Burnham surprisingly express doubt in his liberal bona-fides, and the authors of the U.S. Constitution show up to be complimented for having apparently kept them mostly uninfluenced by liberal Europe's Englightenment--pgs. 41-42, 148), all these observations become reductive. Even when he recognizes the individualistic ontology that all varieties of liberal thought share, he cannot take those varieties seriously, instead insisting that shared assumptions about human nature automatically bring all liberals to much the same point on practically every possible question. He makes, in other words, the whole range of liberal ideas (incorporating all sorts of perspectives probably better described as socialism or progressivism or populism or egalitarianism) into a support structure for the mainstream Democratic party's postwar apotheosis. You can't fault Burnham for not knowing his own thesis, that's for certain.

Some chapters are better than others. When Burnham attempts to organize liberalism's "order of values" he gets, I presume unknowingly, all mixed up on the matter of "positive liberty," on the one hand denying that "improving the security and mobility" of persons can ever involve any benefit to "genuine individual freedom," while at the same time admitting his belief that becoming "more complexly and intimately related" to (and thus constricted by) bodies larger than oneself actually is an increase in one's individuality (pgs. 185, 198). Then again, his chapter on "The Guilt of the Liberal," though including a rather cheap swipe at "the abusive writings of a disoriented Negro homosexual" (clearly James Baldwin), includes some first-rate psychological investigation, very aptly pointing out how liberalism's "atomistic and quantitative" approach logically shouldn't be capable of attributing obligations to successful or rich individuals on behalf of poorer or suffering ones, thus suggesting that, when it comes to matters of racial justice or economic equality, liberals--secular ones anyway--are motivated essentially by a contorted and parasitic feelings of guilt, and not much else, so much so that they find themselves "morally disarmed before those whom the liberal regards as less well off than himself" (pgs. 218-221, 224-227). It's a strong enough piece of argument that I wonder if John Rawls, who famously attempted to create an entirely rational (and thus self-interested) scheme of liberal justice, ever read it and perhaps was influenced by it. So, while his effort overall is filled with missteps and a kind of defiantly unexamined obliviousness to the actual genealogy of belief of those liberals which so disturb him, there are plenty of sharp insights to be found throughout the book all the same.

Towards the end of the book, Burnham's near apocalyptic Cold War focus become pretty relentless. There is hardly a single postwar retreat from Western colonialism which he doesn't decry as a failure of liberal nerve in the face of communist expansion, and hardly a single example of the U.S. employing its power to shape political outcomes beyond its borders which he does not applaud. (The Spanish-American War in particular comes in for praise--pg. 293.) America's unwillingness to initiate some roll-back of international communism during the Hungarian uprising against Soviet domination especially troubles him, given that, in his view, "no better circumstances for some sort of move along the perspective could be imagined than those existing in November 1956" (pg. 306). (To Burnham, Eisenhower's weakness was clearly the fault of liberalism and not at all the fact that the Soviet Union was by then a nuclear power, since "changes in military, technical and other material factors are never able of themselves to account, causally, for policy"--pg. 313.) Ultimately, Burnham is convinced: those who subscribe to liberal ideas will spell the defeat of Western civilization because of their weakness in the face of multiple challenges, either "the drive of the communist enterprise for a monopoly of world power," or by "the explosive population growth and political activization within...equatorial and sub-equatorial latitudes occupied by non-white masses," or simply by "the jungle now spreading within our own society, in particular in our cities" (pg. 325). He gestures at the possibility of avoiding these fates by the West separating itself from liberal ideas, but doesn't seem to have much hope.

His arrival at this rather determined prognosis as a conclusion, after spending so much time attempting to develop an entirely clinical account of the liberal mindset in his book, gets me thinking: if those end points he comes to did not, in fact, occur, what does that mean? Complete aside from all the philosophically unsubstantiated and the many overly broad claims about liberalism in the book, can we say that, technically, he got liberals wrong? It would be interesting to consider the range of possible answers. Perhaps liberalism was overcome in time to bring about the Soviet Union (but then, would that mean liberalism made a comeback in America, and if so when)? Or perhaps liberalism got lucky and the USSR and international communism imploded, but Burnham's other two predictions continue to unfold? It is an interesting exercise in the sort of perennially improvable ideological debates we are all familiar with, only from the other direction: maybe liberalism can never exhibit sufficient strength to defeat its challengers, and we know this because challenges to the liberal way of life are still there. Fifty years ago is was the USSR, and today it is ISIS; the endurance of such challenges is, perhaps, all a Burnhamite conservative needs.

In the end, I think the mature Burnham, while certainly no liberal (much less a socialist of any stripe), was a poor conservative. His analytical but also anecdotal approach to ideology was fixated on broad categories of state, civilization, and race, leading him into seeing connections that simply aren't there, and by so doing moving his own often correct observations into a global framework that take conservative virtues and twist them--as the neoconservatives of the last 20 years have also done, flailing about to find some way to make sense of their diagnosis of liberalism after the Soviet Union's collapsed, and fixating on the "War on Terror." But conservatism, whatever it has to offer our pluralistic and secular world, loses its virtues (left-leaning ones included!) when it is turned into martial struggle against an ideological foe. Burham quotes Michael Oakeshott repeatedly on the epistemological dangers of "rationalism"; he and his descendants ought to be cognizant of how in attempting to undermine what they see as a comprehensive threat to the way things ought to be, they make the same thing out of themselves.

Blasphemers, Terrorists, and Liberals in Your Neighborhood

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]

Would I read Charlie Hebdo? (Assuming I could read French, that is.) Would I want anyone in my family to read it? Would I want it to be available at my daughters' elementary school library, or at the high school library, or on sale at my neighborhood QuikTrip store? Those questions aren't all the same, obviously--but neither are they, I think, completely unrelated to each other either.

As for me personally, well, I am a regular reader of The Onion. And Monty Python and David Letterman have been pretty central to the formation of my often sarcastic, mocking, absurdist, even cynical take on the world. On the other hand, I've never really taken to South Park, and I've never been more than ambivalent about the really vicious--however darkly brilliant--traditions of comedy satire out there. (Bill Hicks, take a posthumous bow.) And Charlie Hebdo's over-the-top anti-clericalism (just see here) certainly seems to fit in that category. (The cartoon above has French Jews, Catholics, and Muslim all shouting "Charlie Hebdo must be veiled!," an obvious reference to the ongoing controversy over laws banning Islamic scarves and facial veils in public in France.) I suppose I content myself with watching the Life of Brian in part by reminding myself, on some level (as the Pythons themselves always insisted!), that the film was heretical, not blasphemous. That's not an easy line to draw, obviously, but I think it's worth drawing. To be heretical is to challenge or mock an orthodoxy, an established understanding, an institutionalized structure of one's faith and way of life; to be blasphemous is to mock or attack the point or object of that faith or understanding or way of life itself. And assuming you take both 1) religion and 2) the obviously social lived reality of cultural and community formation seriously, the latter is a much greater problem than the former. So figuring out how to distinguish between them--and also, though certainly not in the same way or to the same degree, given the different contexts involved, for my family and my neighborhood--is worth doing, however uncomfortable doing so in a liberal society may be.

Of course, when you're faced with horrors like Wednesday's massacre in Paris, that discomfort also feels pretty cheap. When three men take it upon themselves to murder a dozen others because the words spoken by those others, and the cartoons they drew, seemed blasphemous to them and/or their community (or, as some have smartly suggested, when terrorists see a way to ramp up amongst the French public the sort of provocative and defensive discussions of "blasphemy" which might well rebound to their benefit), the notion of clarifying one's anti-liberalism and explaining why and how you think some speech is virtuous and some simply isn't may well be probably pointless. Stand with the cartoonists, stand with the blasphemers! In one of his best columns in a long time, Ross Douthat makes this point very well:

[W]e are not in a vacuum. We are in a situation where...the kind of blasphemy that Charlie Hebdo engaged in had deadly consequences, as everyone knew it could...and that kind of blasphemy is precisely the kind that needs to be defended, because it’s the kind that clearly serves a free society’s greater good. If a large enough group of someones is willing to kill you for saying something, then it’s something that almost certainly needs to be said, because otherwise the violent have veto power over liberal civilization, and when that scenario obtains it isn’t really a liberal civilization any more. Again, liberalism doesn’t depend on everyone offending everyone else all the time, and it’s okay to prefer a society where offense for its own sake is limited rather than pervasive. But when offenses are policed by murder, that’s when we need more of them, not less, because the murderers cannot be allowed for a single moment to think that their strategy can succeed.

There's nothing I can think to add or take away from that statement. I dislike liberal individualism, and am deeply suspicious of our (I think somewhat ridiculous) idolization of free speech. When the important liberal principle of respecting the profound plurality which modern subjectivity and technology and liberty has enabled to develop across the globe becomes (or is twisted into) a determination to stifle or discredit any attempt by any group of people--a family, a church, a neighborhood, a polity--to establish norms which sometimes (not always, but sometimes, as the democratic debate may make appropriate) may be reflected in law, then the very possibility of treating civility and community as the robust concepts they in truth are and deserve to be simply goes out the window. But none to that is relevant to what happened in Paris. Terroristic acts of violence are not in any possible way comparable to the introduction of democratically determined rules of civil society. Offensive speech, even blasphemy, becomes--as Christopher Hitchens, complete ass though he was, correctly argued long ago--a positive good in a situation when someone chooses to use violence to shortcut the process by which religiously pluralistic societies get democratically nudged in one direction of another through discourse and the collective decisions of thousands of individuals within their local groups. That gives anti-liberals a veto power that we shouldn't want anyone to have, or else freedom is done for.

One response to that, though, is to remember the argument from just a little more than a decade ago, at the time of the violence which followed the publication of blasphemous, anti-Muslim cartoons in a Danish newspaper (cartoons which Charlie Hebdo happily reprinted!). The claim made then, in essence, was that Muslims in Western Europe were living in a condition of having already had their faith and way of life "vetoed," and thus care must be taken in dismissively telling Muslim fundamentalists to eschew violence and trust in "the process." On a certain level this was, obviously, nonsense (there were numerous robust and well-established Islamic institutions throughout Europe a decade ago, and are even more today), but it wasn't utterly groundless nonsense. Anti-Islamic sentiment and outright paranoia are realities throughout the continent. The nations of Western Europe--none more so than France!--have a complicated collective relationship with their sectarian Christian pasts, and the result is a huge amount of inconsistency and frustration in how they are to accept the reality of their internal cultural transformation. (The historian David A. Bell talks at length in an old essay here about the failure of France to extend its Enlightenment ideal of republican assimilation, after so many--relative--successes throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries--to the largely Muslim immigrants who came to live within its borders in the years following WWII and continuing until today; some comments of mine about the essay are here.) So perhaps our thinking about whether we should embrace, or at least be willing to defend in the face of violence, an offensive and blasphemous publication like Charlie Hebdo should be done with a consciousness of how very Western, Christian, and liberal the mental processes by which we distinguish between merely "heretical" offensive speech, and that speech of a worse--for a faithful Muslim, anyway--kind.

The fact that we spent more than a decade (and, to a degree, still are) trapped with the "war on terror" discourse makes the ability of us to think carefully about these levels and contexts of appropriate speech doubly difficult; because the rubber so often meets the road in the case of depictions of the Prophet Muhammad or other particulars of the Muslim faith in secular, Western venues, almost every attempt to get clear on these important issues gets tangled up in the same old "clash of civilization" arguments which dominated our thinking for far too long. I contributed my part, to be sure. In long debates between those who insisted that the respect of individual liberty necessitated a rigorously neutral--and thus non-line-drawing--public square, others tried to enlist the kind of limited, carefully anti-liberal distinctions I'm talking about here into a larger meta-liberal project. Defenders of the idea of America taking on the responsibility of a liberal imperialist project in the Middle East--bringing democracy to Iraq!--would suggest that America speaking out against tendency of (Western European) secular society to engage in (often anti-Muslim) blasphemy would be a way of lessening fundamentalist suspicion of American modernity, and help us find allies.

This argument was, as they say, too clever by half; my friend Damon Linker referred to it as a "sentimental civic-religious-providential amalgam of America, Christianity, and Democracy," and while I tried to rescue the idea at the time, I can now see that Damon was right. Not to impose too many binaries upon these complicated debates, but you really probably can't fully align these two different perceptions of the relationship between individual expression and freedom, and certainly not under the aegis of some oppressive civilizational narrative. If, in the end, you're persuaded by those arguments or those experiences which lead you to hold your neighborhood, with all its cultural norms and social structures, as that which really matters most, then getting into the thick of figuring out just when and where and to what degree you're going to be content with contemptuous and blasphemous--even if funny!--speech like Charlie Hebdo's in the liberal society you live in is just going to have to be your anti-liberal responsibility. And if you're not so persuaded--if you really don't, contrary to what I wrote at the beginning of this post, make "religion and the obviously social lived reality of cultural and community formation" your priority, for whatever reason--then you're justified in looking at the rest of us suspiciously. Since, of course, depending on whatever democratic changes and cultural contexts may come, it might be your blasphemy which we start trying to dissect next.

I don't imagine there's any likelihood that this particular debate about liberty and community will ever be fully resolved so long as the modern epoch continues. In the meantime, for those liberals who are--reasonably, if not, I think, fully justly--worried that those of us who are appalled by these attacks and yet still want to say something like "I'm not defending the terrorists, but Charlie Hebdo was often indefensibly gross" will turn out to be fair-weather friends, I'll just point to those many people who have, and continue to, make these distinctions carefully and well. And for those whose anti-liberalism carries them all the way over to violent religious fundamentalism, whether Muslim or otherwise, all I can say is: don't confuse a willingness to attend to the particulars of one's community with the liberalism of fools.

Letterman on 9/11

Still, for all its flaws and limitations, this monologue, given on September 17, 2001, remains the best video memento of the attacks 12 years ago. Worth remembering.


Yakwild

Something About Which Leftists, Localists, and Libertarians (But Perhaps Not Philosophical Liberals) Ought to Agree

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]

Senator Rand Paul's filibuster of the nomination of John Brennan to be head of the CIA--something that he did in order to "draw attention to deep concern on both sides of the political aisle about the administration’s use of unmanned aerial drones in its fight against terrorists and whether the government would ever use them in the United States"--came to an end just after midnight on Thursday. I disagree with probably over 3/4's of everything Paul claims to believe: I think his libertarian ideology is fundamentally flawed, I think this reading of American Constitutional history his deeply misinformed, and I think his distrust of the federal government is grounded more in paranoia and (whether he realizes it or not) a fetishization of property and states rights than anything chastened or wise. All that being said, Paul was the wise person in the U.S. Senate last night, and as someone who ends up (while often holding his nose) voting for far more Democrats that Republicans, I found it outright embarrassing that, aside from a couple of brief supporting comments from Democratic Senators Ron Wyden and Dick Durbin, Paul's only allies all yesterday afternoon and evening were on the Republican side of the aisle, and rather marginal and dim Republicans at that (seriously...Mike Lee?). So many strong Democrats that were attentive to and tried to protest against the civil rights abuses inherent in the Patriot Act and the Bush administration's expansion of the government's war-making powers sat on their hands. Supporting one's own President (or America's quasi-imperial foreign policy agenda) trumps all, I guess.

But I suppose that isn't actually surprising, because supporting the nominees of one's President, and trusting in the technological and legal enabling of our expansive War-on-Terror global apparatus is just business as usual for both Republican and Democratic members of the political class, is it not? The Senate is a ridiculously dysfunctional institution, one which regularly defaults in favor of the business-friendly establishment, but when all is said and done it knows what it wants, and the whole reason Paul went through with this old-school, grand-standing filibuster (which basically never happens any more) was in part because the "majority seemed unfazed by giving up the day to Paul’s filibuster"; Brennan's nomination, in other words, like the administration's continued reliance upon drones, is basically already in the bag. And much of the news coming out of Afghanistan is moderately positive these days; isn't it likely that a good deal of that increase in security is the result of the Obama administration's aggressive waging of a nearly cost-free (for American soldiers, that is), drone war--made possible thanks to highly invasive, high-tech intelligence operations, of course--in the mountains of Pakistan? Who wants to get in the way of a war which is, at long last, both winding down and coming up with defensible results? And besides, isn't it simply a given that the President of the United States ought to be able to wield these kind of powers? The Constitution explicitly gives the president broad power defend the United States in the face of all sorts of "insurrections" and "conspiracies," doesn't it? (Well, actually, maybe that was the Insurrection Act which does that...or maybe it was the 2007 amendments to the Act...of course those amendments were later repealed...and anyway, there's the strict guidelines of the War Powers Resolution over there, the actual law of the land, but drones are perhaps not actually "armed forces," as specified in the law, so we can probably just continue to ignore it, as every president, both Democrat and Republican, has since it was passed over Nixon's veto.)

In the end, no doubt Senator Lindsey Graham spoke correctly--the only people who are worried about Obama's use of drone warfare and terrorist-assassination, which is clearly only an extension of Bush's prior building up of the president's war-making power, are libertarians and the left. Well, actually, no, let's that amend statement a bit--localists are opposed to it too. But we know who perhaps aren't: liberals.

By liberals, I'm not talking about the Democratic party, or any particular subset of it. I'm not talking about those often referred to as "progressives," since their concerns about civil liberties and economic justice are ones which we all ought to be in sympathy with. No, I'm talking about all the folks who, because they prioritize individual rights in the usual juridical way, basically are primarily concerned about making sure that the economic-freedom-and-equal-rights-protecting modern liberal technological order keeps operating smoothly. As was famously noted by Alasdair MacIntyre, "contemporary debates within modern political systems are almost exclusively between conservative liberals, liberal liberals, and radical liberals." Democrats and Republicans alike--indeed, pretty much the entire mainstream of political opinion in the United States, it sometimes seems--fits under this label. Some want more money spent here, some want less money taxed there, but they all are basically in agreement upon the same project: a powerful and opportunity-guaranteeing and well-defended state, which will pragmatically take care of all the messy business of maintaining one's wealth and position in a diverse and dangerous world...without bothering too much with requiring the citizens themselves to take charge. This utilitarianism, and its consequent reliance upon technology and the marketplace and bureaucracy, has been part of the American order from the beginning, despite the dissident voices ranging from the Anti-Federalists in the 18th century, the Populists in the 19th, and the New Left in the 20th. By this standard of measurement, the demand which Senator Paul was making of President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder--that they put in writing their commitment to never make use of the immense and deadly power which drone technology makes available to the President either against an American citizen or U.S. soil, at least not with the formal due process of law--was really a bridge to far. Drone warfare is working, after all! Don't you want the liberal (and by now, quasi-imperial) American project to work?

Well, I can speak for the left, sort of: no, not necessarily, not any more than we automatically want any state project to work, not when it is as susceptible as America's has been to the un-equalizing economic forces of globalized capital and the corporate marketplace. Drone warfare is just one more element in a depersonalizing and thus profoundly undemocratic process, which takes more and more equalizing authority away from the people or their representatives and puts it in the hands of those in power--and, thus, those economic agents who profit most from writing the rules of the democratic game so as to keep them there. I can, perhaps, speak for localists too, though there my cred is probably somewhat less: no, again not necessarily, not at least if the project in question is implicitly a centralizing and cosmopolitan one, making use of political authority to wage wars (and greater or lesser cost, in both lives and money) in distant lands for ideological (or corporate-driven economic) causes, obliging the economies and the family patterns and the social norms of communities to be subservient to priorities which they had no real part in choosing.

And the libertarians? I confess my suspicions there. There are, to be sure, many thoughtful people who associate themselves with that label, and do so in ways which focus on exactly the sort community-destroying, democracy-undermining government and business collaboration and centralization which localists and leftists generally oppose. But I look at Senator Paul, and it seems to me that, on the basis of what he's gone on the record saying before, that his is the unfortunately too-common neo-Confederate style of libertarianism, where the central issue is not so much democracy or even civil liberties but rather my rights--that is, keeping other people away from my stuff, my rights, my property, at all costs. That's no way to organize a decent society, in my opinion. Part of me suspects that Rand Paul-style libertarianism might be perfectly okay with drone warfare, even he was assured that the only folks that would ever be taken out by the president would be Hugo-Chavez-style strongmen who threaten America's influence over oil markets.

But that's probably unfair. The fact of the matter is, whatever the true nature(s) of the Tea Party movement which help put him in the Senate, Rand Paul yesterday stood up for a principle that I think needs standing up for--and if the libertarian argument motivated him to say something which any good leftist reader of The Nation or any good localist reader of Front Porch Republic would agree with, good for him. Drone technology, like nearly any technology--as thinkers from Wendell Berry to George Grant to Martin Heidegger have taught us--has the ability to distract us, to mask the real world from us, to everything (even human lives) into tools and checkboxes on a list. Philosophical liberals, generally speaking, just don't see this, because their notion of individuality depends, to a great extent, on just always making maximum use of the best, most cost-effective, most efficient, least demanding tools possible. That's a sad reality, and not one easy to change (especially since most us, working on our laptops and living lives in which terrorist cells and the mountains of Pakistan are fortunately just abstract notions, really kind of like tools which enable us to not bother with such things). Senator Paul didn't change any of that yesterday, but he made it clear that he was someone--whether he realized it or not (my guess is he doesn't, at least not fully)--who was willing to contemplate, via putting down some absolute limits on the president, some real change in the way things are supposed work in the liberal order to day. May his tribe (well, actually, not really, but still: the tribe of differently-thinking people who agree with him on this crucial point) increase.

Five Reasons Why I Don't Feel Much Like Voting for Obama These Days

[Cross-posted to Political Context]

The November presidential election is still five-and-a-half months away, which means there is still plenty of time for me to change my mind, and then change my mind again. About the likely outcome, of course (though given that I still think, seven months after my last prediction, that Mitt Romney is likely to win the election, I'd have to see some pretty convincing data to change my mind), but more relevantly about what I personally have to say about it. In 2008 I voted, despite some reservations, for Barack Obama to be our president, in part because I had real hopes that his presidency could bring a greater emphasis on democracy, community, and equality to the table, but probably mostly because I just couldn't stand the idea of even implicitly endorsing, by declining to support Obama, what his Republican opponent would bring, and what his election, in the face of the historic breakthrough which Obama's candidacy represented, would have meant. Today, in 2012, as cliche as it may be to admit to it, I confess: those hopes of mine have been, to a significant degree, crowded out by four years of reflection and reality. I get e-mails from MoveOn and Michelle Obama's website and other fundraisers and re-election operations almost daily, and I've long since given up on reading them. I won't say I don't care if Obama is re-elected or not (though I don't think he will be), because I do care--I'm pretty confident that, by any number of measures important to me at least, a second term for this president would be better for our country than a first term for Romney (especially with the Congress he will almost certainly have on Capitol Hill waiting for him). But as I sit here today, towards the end of May, and contemplate pushing the button on the touch-screen for Obama...well, I can think of at least five reasons why I find that hard.

1) The fact that I live in Kansas. We have six electoral college votes, and they aren't distributed the way our neighbors to the north in Nebraska do, following election returns along congressional district lines, but rather in a winner-take-all fashion, as is typical throughout the United States. And given that Kansas is a red state, by some measurements the most red state in the whole country, the odds that my vote could be the decisive one enabling the Democrats to capture Kansas and put it in the blue column this November are so ridiculously remote that I don't know enough math to be able to even begin to figure them. In other words, Obama will lose here in Kansas in November. Now I don't think there's anything wrong with voting for sure losers; I've done so a couple of times before myself, and given that voting is at least as much an expressive act as a strategic one, there might be good arguments for doing so. But at the very least, knowing that I almost certainly couldn't help re-elect Obama with my vote in November even if I wanted to, allows me a little more intellectual space to determine if I do, in fact, want to. And as of today, part of me doesn't. Why?

2) The treatment of Bradley Manning, and the Obama administration's whole approach to the supposedly-ending-but-not-really-hey-let's-just-use-drones "war on terror" and civil liberties in general. I have no doubts that President Obama, and the people around him, are far less captivated by the neo-conservative, "clash of civilizations," unitary-executive-trust-the-decider Kool-Aid which President Bush apparently imbibed, or at least encouraged those around him to imbibe, in great quantities. This White House is clearly a more rational, more responsible, more civil and careful place than the last one was. But that just makes my frustrations stronger. One of the very few areas in which an American president can act with significant freedom and authority is the shaping of foreign policy, and this presidency, for the most part, has treated the collateral damage which comes along with his power as commander-in-chief--which in many ways he has used far more effectively and intelligently than Bush ever did--in a frustratingly, sometimes infuriatingly, antiseptic and professorial way. I'm just not happy with using my vote to signify support for putting such significant power in the hands of a man who is apparently comfortable with, not just targeting American citizens accused of terrorist activities with arbitrary assassination, but also claiming the prerogative to indefinitely detain American citizens so accused without trial--even though he implies to us that he "never intends to use" the latter power. I'd like to think that my meaningless vote this November is worth more than that.

3) The contraception coverage mandate which the president endorsed as part of the Affordable Care Act. Yes, I know that essentially everyone uses birth control, no matter what their religious identification, which makes the whole controversy in some ways rather strange. Yes, I know that the imposition of a nation-wide standard of providing insurance coverage which includes contraception, including through Catholic hospitals and church-run orphanages and other religious organizations which may have theological objections to providing birth control, is arguably central to both the whole point of the ACA (which I support, despite disliking its philosophical foundations) and to respecting the rights of the women who actually make up the majority of those employed by these institutions. And yes, I know that most states already have locally imposed just such mandates upon the insurers (though with significant variety in the exceptions allowed), and yes, I know that Obama and his people have tried to work out a compromise here as well (though both the economics and the morality of the administration's "accommodation" are rather dubious). But I have to say all that doesn't change my mind--whatever gets worked out on the state level, it remains the case that the national government has both the position and the power to set the direction of American law and policy, and as one who strongly endorses the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (and thinks the the Supreme Court did real harm to this country with its overly broad decisions in Employment Division v. Smith and City of Bourne v. Flores), I really don't like seeing the national government involving itself in acts which compromise the ability of voluntary religious bodies (and to a lesser but still important degree their individual adherents) to fully define and govern themselves. No, this does not mean I'm fully on board with paranoid, historically uninformed cries about the HHS's threat to "religious freedom", nor with those 43 religious universities, groups, and organizations which have filed suit against the Obama administration over the mandate; my dislike for judicial decisions replacing democratic legislation remains strong, and so I, like some liberal Catholics, would have liked to see political pressure and negotiation continue to do their work before turning to lawsuits. (The left-leaning Catholic Michael Sean Winters, who has fiercely--and rightly--attacked the administration for supporting the mandate, recommends just such an approach here.). But if there is a point upon which I am generally willing to see courts act against popular majorities, it is to protect the limited, but vital, sovereignty of churches and church organizations; such a freedom is one of the few ways in which I agree with otherwise simplistic bromides about American exceptionalism. Ours is a country which, as Doug Kmiec rightly, if reluctantly, argues, deserves better than the sort of "episodic presidential aloofness" which we have gotten regarding religion from President Obama (remember: "above my pay grade")--and unfortunately, I don't see him changing anytime soon.

4) The profound unwillingness of President Obama, despite his occasional talk otherwise, to embrace anything other than deeply compromised, traditional liberal, economic-expansion-will-fund-the-welfare-state strategies, in the face of the most comprehensive crisis of capitalism which the industrialized world has seen in more than 75 years. Look, I know Obama and his people are basically Wall Street-friendly liberals, mostly a bunch of technology-friendly managers; at best, they might be called Rawlsians who are happy with our economic order so long as it can be made redistributive enough. I had no delusions that, whatever other hopes I had for him, he was suddenly going to come out of the closet as a populist, a socialist, or even a social democrat. But even allowing for the terrible legislative hand he was dealt after 2010, his approach to the systemic crisis which the dominance of the finance industry has wrought upon global markets has been, for the most part, very weak stuff. Where's the moral condemnation of the rapacious, exploitative system we have allowed to emerge around us, and where's the vision of what might replace it? Sure, I'd love a populist or socialist (or localist, or all three!) vision, one which exposed undemocratic, disempowering forces opposed to equality today. But failing that, how about at least a robust, pro-active defense of the progressive compromises which made what little American egalitarianism there is strong? Progressive liberals have never liked this weakness in our president's political rhetoric, because they think Republican intransigence requires a president more strongly committed to the left. And I confess that, as time has gone by, I've come to agree that they have the stronger arguments on their side: they can look at the economic data, and they see that the financial meltdown of 2008 contributed to a gap between the rich and the poor, a level of inequality in America, greater than it has been in more than a century; they can look at the outright criminality which enabled that meltdown on Wall Street, and they see no prosecutions, and no truly serious reforms (though that is at least as much Congress's fault as the administration's); they can look at the posturing over the debt-ceiling crisis, and note how we're going to play that stupid game again in 2013, even as Europe's economic house is falling apart. In any case, in the end, there is just this: I may know perfectly well that politics in the art of the possible, and achieving the kind of reforms needed simply weren't possible for Obama in the present legislative and political environment...but at least I'd like to see him say so. It is one thing to vote for a person who wants to continue to compromise and trust in civil discourse in the face of possible catastrophe; it is another thing to choose to support someone whose inability to see or acknowledge alternatives, and who thus keeps compromising over the same things, again and again, begins to sound a little like fiddling while Rome burns.

5) His essentially non-existent, do-nothing, "post-racialist" position on the continuing war on drugs and America's transformation into a segregated, mass incarceration state. I've written too much already, so I'll let a couple of smarter, funnier people complete my explanation of the difficulty I'm having with the idea of casting a symbolic vote here in Kansas to re-elect President Obama in November. First, Penn Jillette, whose contempt for Obama almost--but not quite!--gets in the way of the solid class point he's making:



And second, Michelle Alexander, who seriously wants to believe that the election of an African-American president ought to mean real changes in the way aggressive, invasive drug war policies have politically devastated a whole class of American citizens...but, on the basis of the evidence, just can't:



As I said at the beginning, there's still more than enough time for me to change my mind about all this. But for now, as I think about the current occupant of the White House, I realize two things: one, that I think he's better than his probable replacement, and two, that I nonetheless don't know if I support him enough to wave his flag with my vote this November. But we'll see.

"That a Country as Vast and as Various as Ours May Still be Experienced as a Community"

Yesterday, I acknowledged the communitarian danger lurking about in some powerful words which Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic, wrote a year after the attacks on 9/11. I also acknowledged that it was that very dangerous frisson--a thrill of reading words which made one aware of suddenly belonging, of feeling committed and conscripted and captivated--which, I think, made them powerful. Wieseltier's comments a few days ago, at "An Evening of Remembrance and Reflection", a beautiful memorial concert given at the Kennedy Center the same night we at Friends had our small commemoration, said much the same thing, though perhaps more wisely, less dangerously, though no less meaningfully (hat tip to Damon Linker):

Though we encounter it as suffering, grief is in fact an affirmation. The indifferent do not grieve, the uncommitted do not grieve, the loveless do not grieve. We mourn only the loss of what we have loved and what we have valued, and in this way mourning darkly refreshes our knowledge of the causes of our loves and the reasons for our values. Our sorrow restores us to the splendors of our connectedness to people and to principles. It is the yes of a broken heart. In our bereavement we discover how much was ruptured by death, and also how much was not ruptured. These tears lead directly to introspection.

Here is what we affirmed by our mourning on September 11, 2001, and by the introspection of its aftermath:

that we wish to be known, to ourselves and to the world, by the liberty that we offer, axiomatically, as a matter of right, to the individuals and the groups with whom we live;

that the ordinary lives of ordinary people on an ordinary day of work and play can truthfully exemplify that liberty, and fully represent what we stand for;

that we will defend ourselves, resolutely and even ferociously, because self-defense is also an ethical responsibility, and that our debates about the proper use of our power in our own defense should not be construed as an infirmity in our will;

that the multiplicity of cultures and traditions that we contain peaceably in our society is one of our highest accomplishments, because we are not afraid of difference, and because we do not confuse openness with emptiness, or unity with conformity;

that a country as vast and as various as ours may still be experienced as a community;

that none of our worldviews, with God or without God, should ever become the worldview of the state, and that no sanctity ever attaches to violence;

that the materialism and the self-absorption of the way we live has not extinguished our awareness of a larger purpose, even if sometimes they have obscured it;

that we believe in progress, at home and abroad, in social progress, in moral progress, even when it is fitful and contested and difficult;

that just as we have enemies in the world we have friends, and that our friends are the individuals and the movements and the societies that aspire, often in circumstances of great adversity, to democracy and to decency.

It has been a wounding decade. Our country is frayed, uncertain, inflamed. There is hardship and dread in the land. In significant ways we are a people in need of renovation. But what rouses the mourner from his sorrow is his sense of possibility, his confidence in the intactness of the spirit, his recognition that there is work to be done. What we loved and what we valued has survived the disaster, but it needs to be secured and bettered, and in that secure and better condition transmitted to our children. Our dream of greatness must be accompanied by an understanding of what is required for the maintenance of greatness. The obscenities of September 11, 2001 exposed the difference between builders and destroyers. We are builders. Let us agree, on this anniversary, that it is an honor to be an American and it is an honor to be free.

My Favorite Written Text for Remembering 9/11

The Fall
Washington Diarist

Leon Wieseltier
The New Republic, September 9, 2002

I have been reading collections of writings about September 11, and they are wearying: so many bruises so feebly expressed, so many people searching for a poem to protect them. Dickinson #341, perhaps? Literariness is a kind of sedative, I suppose, and in this way it differs from literature. There are circumstances, of course, in which unoriginality of feeling or form is not a shortcoming, in which the really advanced statement is the modest expression of a common sentiment, in which banality is a guarantee of decency. In a huge volume called September 11, 2001: American Writers Respond, I encounter a letter by Richard Wilbur written a few months after the catastrophe to the book's editor, declining the invitation to art:


Dear Bill,

The only thing I can say right now is this. There is no excuse for the cold inhumanity of 11 September, and there is no excuse for those Americans, whether of the left or the religious right, who say that we had it coming to us.

Dick


The poet's disinclination to make a poem is affecting. It is the truest thing in the book. But elsewhere in this book, and in the other books, there is only banality in the bad sense, and remaindered habits of dissent, and the occasional hilarity, as in the observation by Avital Ronell that when George W. Bush remarked that we were tested on September 11, he "reverted to a citation of pretechnological syntagms that capture the auratic pull of the test." Surely the syntagms were his staff's. But now it is the anniversary, and it is Elul, and I must be forgiving. I am prepared even to agree with Stanley Fish that postmodernism did not destroy the World Trade Center.

But as I leaf through A Nation Challenged, the "visual history" of the catastrophe that has been produced by The New York Times, I gasp at the sight of the picture that frightened me almost out of my mind when I saw it in the paper a year ago. Here it is again, the size of a page, and in color. It is the photograph, taken by Richard Drew of the Associated Press, of the man falling to his death from the north tower. His head faces the earth, his feet face the sky, but there is no earth in the picture and no sky, there is only the striped geometry of the "exoskeleton" of the building in the background, still intact in its spurious attitude of invincibility. The lines of the faade look like ladders without rungs. The tower is half in shadow, half in light, and the man is dropping between the shadow and the light. There is no sign of his velocity. His physical integrity is extraordinary. He is standing in the world but the world is upside-down. He does not appear to be wounded. He seems composed, a stoic in the air, except for the tails of his white shirt, which hang from his trousers like snapped wings. His hands are smartly at his side, his legs look as if they are marching. It is almost possible to make out his face. It is an African American face, a full, tender face. I do not see panic on the man's countenance. I see thought. I shudder that he may have been thinking. I do not impute philosophy to his face, only mindfulness. I suspect that his eyes are open. His direction is clear.

In our souls, we are vertical; or so we have been taught to think since the beginnings of spiritual speculation in the West. "The way of life is upward to the wise," Proverbs advises. Heaven is above, hell is below. We seek the top, we fear the bottom. When we are worthy, we ascend; when we are unworthy, we descend. The good will rise, the evil will fall. We look up to our betters and our rulers, they look down on us. The "ladder of ascension" is a central myth of salvation in Judaism, in Christianity, and in Islam. (God is "stably and permanently at the top of the ladder," Maimonides instructed.) And in the later inversions of the traditional teachings, in the almost irresistible doctrines of redemption through sin, according to which the depths are as spiritually attractive as the heights, the dream is still a vertical one. I have often worried that the grip of this directionality upon our souls is owed simply to the fact of our physical bearing. We aspire to paradise in the manner of upright beings. Levinas thought otherwise. "Height introduces a sense into being," he wrote. "It is already lived across the experience of the human body. It leads human societies to raise up altars. It is not because men, through their bodies, have an experience of the vertical that the human is placed under the sign of height; because being is ordained for height the human body is placed in a space in which the high and the low are distinguished and the sky is discovered." And we not only dream high, we also build high. The vertical conception of human greatness is nowhere more apparent than in architecture. Was there ever a structure so "ordained for height" as the World Trade Center? These buildings were extravagantly consecrated to the proposition that glory is celestial. Visitors to Windows on the World used to marvel about its God-like view of the city. A philosopher who visited the World Trade Center in the 1980s remarked upon "this lust to be a viewpoint and nothing more." To escape one's finitude, one had only to take the elevator to the 110th floor.

These associations I use to defend myself against this picture of this man who did not escape his finitude. I look at what an AP photographer brought back from the inferno—the actual one, not the one peddled by clerics—and I see an emblem of what used to be called soteriology. Too many books, I guess; but this is a way of insisting upon the scope of the horror in New York a year ago. It is also a way of turning back some of these spatial superstitions. For there is something inhumane about this metaphor of the summit. The heights can be fatal, and the exhilaration can be cruel, and this man falling from the tower is falling for no reason except the evil in the hearts of other men, and wisdom is not in the clouds, and God is not in the sky. Surely our minds can develop a view of the world that is not merely a corollary of our bodies. I would rather be ordained for truth than ordained for height.

The remarkable thing about the falling man is that he is not looking down. He is looking straight ahead. And as I say, he is in the stance of a man who is marching. There is, in other words, a strangely horizontal quality to him, which may account for his terrifying dignity. He seems to be fighting his vertical doom with his horizontal dignity. What matters to his gaze is not what is above, but what is ahead. Turn this picture of the upside-down world upside- down, and he appears even to have a sensation of purpose. He is not on a ladder, he is on a track. Regarded in this way, he looks like nothing so much as a soldier. Regarded in this way, his testament is plain.

*****

Why is the my favorite written text, out of the millions of words that have been written, from immediately in the wake of until a full decade afterward, about the attacks of September 11th? This essay was much attacked, as I recall, for taking such a horrible photograph--capturing a mere millisecond out of some doomed soul's journey towards death, a death that he didn't ask for, a death that perhaps he chose to hasten by jumping from the tower, rather than remaining to be burned alive or blown to bits--and turning it into a work of art, of philosophy, and yes, of propaganda. I confess, those are exactly the reasons why it has likely stayed with me for so long. (I didn't save a copy of the essay, and had to search to track it down for this post; but some of the Wieseltier's lines--especially "His direction is clear"--have never left my mind.) For better and/or for worse, in the days and weeks and months and years after this tragedy, we made from it something, as we always make something of all our experiences and memories, both good and bad. By the time this essay was written, the making which a majority of Americans had voluntarily contributed their memories to was mostly one of propaganda: those who died on 9/11 weren't unfortunate victims, but the first casualties in a war--they were, in essence, all soldiers, and their heroic deaths were a witness to the rest of us soldiers to get on with our duty. There was something, for me at least (though certainly not just for me; millions of others agreed with me), appealing about that kind of ideological conscription--something Rousseauian, something republican, something honorable and communitarian and good. It was abused, to say the least. But in re-reading this piece, I can still feel the pull--I can still hear a voice that tells me "Make sure the Falling Man did not jump in vain!" Wieseltier's voice is a dangerous one, even if there is really nothing necessarily dangerous in his intentions or his language (though perhaps there is). But regardless, it is perhaps that frisson of danger--of having witnessed something much larger and deeper and more meaningful and more deadly than our own lives, and in having witnessed it, having been conscripted by it as well--that makes his beautiful, thoughtful words hauntingly, dangerously attractive at the same time.

My Favorite Video Text for Remembering 9/11

"We're told that they [the terrorists who hijacked the planes and flew them into the World Trade Center towers] were zealots, fueled by religious fervor. Religious fervor. And it you live to be a thousand years old, will that make any sense to you? Will that make any goddamn sense?"

*****

Why is this my favorite, most memorable bit of video, from the no doubt millions of hours of footage, news, and commentary from the hours, days, weeks, and months which followed the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001? Partly because it's David Letterman, a man whom, though I hardly ever watch his show anymore, once had a big influence on my outlook on life. Partly because I can appreciate it on the meta-level; I can see David Letterman, the man, struggling to speak beyond "David Letterman," the personality, though not fully escaping him, because the personality and the man are too closely entwined, and besides, the man knows that it's the personality that people want and expect to see. Partly because Letterman is one of the quintessential voices of New York City; his love and sorrow for his city is real, and that comes through. But mostly, I think, because it's so very, very much of the moment: a moment of sadness and fear and confusion and resolve, a moment desperate for direction and leadership (Letterman's, in retrospect, over-the-top praise for Rudy Giuliani isn't at all much different from the way most of us in those days were looking all our elected leaders and suddenly seeing, because we wanted to see, more than was actually there), and most of all, a moment of realization that, when tragedies strike, you're probably just going to have to make up your own kind of courage, as you go along.

Remembering the Day

In about an hour, I'll be conducting a gathering here at Friends University, to commemorate that terrible day, nearly exactly ten years ago, in which close to three thousand people died in less than an hour, as planes crashed into buildings which burned and subsequently, horrifically, collapsed. 9/11 changed America in many ways, many of which--perhaps most of which--came out not so much because of the attacks, but because of our grief, terror, paranoia, and overreaction to what had just happened. The territory of the United States of America had suffered a horrendous terrorist attack, in which our own passenger jets, and our own comparative ease and freedom of traveling, working, and communicating, had been used against us. It was--to be brutally frank--a brilliant, audacious, even (Bill Maher notwithstanding) courageous attack. Also, and more importantly of course, a desperately, totally evil one. There's no apologizing for or justifying of it, and while I am more than happy to apologize for all the unfortunate ways I let my own anger and--again, to be brutally frank--my own ideological opportunism (at last, America can speak as one community, as a carrier of Western civilization, as something with an enemy which can pull us together!) stampede me into agreeing, even if only theoretically, with the notion that our "War on Terror" justified acts which bordered on quasi-imperialism...the attacks themselves still remain. I don't mourn their author's execution at the hands of American troops. Thousands were killed, and hundreds of thousands more found their lives torn apart and perhaps ruined, and millions around the work have felt the political and social and military consequences, because of what Al-Qaeda's particular form of radical Islamic jihadism, because of what Osama bin Laden and others like him promulgated. On September 11th, 2001.

I've told the story before. How the Wold Trade Center was hit by one plane, and then another, as I went about my business of getting ready for another day at my first teaching job, at Mississippi State University; how by the time I'd biked into campus people were already spreading rumors, and watching in silence CNN on televsion sets being hastily set up in classrooms and corridors, listening to the radio (how primitive that must seem to readers today, thinking about those dusty old pre-smartphone years!); how I was on the phone to Melissa on and off through the whole day, as we learned about the strike on the Pentagon (and desperately tried to contact friends in Washington DC, from which we'd move only weeks before), and swapped what little we knew (me from constantly hitting refresh on the New York Times's, the Washington Post's, and Andrew Sullivan's websites; her from switching between all the channels in our cable-enabled apartment), and absorbed the horror the the fifth largest building in the world (at the time) collapse in smoke and dust and noise. That's our story of the day; everyone has one. Except, perhaps not all the students we (myself and other faculty members) hope to be able to speak to tonight. One of my students worked at the Center for American Progress over the summer, and one of his projects was to develop a program to reach out to people like him--"Millennials," the "9/11 Generation," those who were children or adolescents or barely out of it, kids that were in high school, middle school, elementary school, the day the planes flew out of the sky. In a sense, they all have stories too--of lockdowns and tearful school assemblies, of prayers around the flagpoles and boastful claims by those looking forward to a fight. But their stories are limited, I suspect, because for the most part the aforementioned grief, terror, paranoia, and overreaction have been mostly all they've known. Multiple wars? Military tribunals? Taking off your shoes before you get on a plane? Did it really used to be different? Actually yes--maybe not entirely, but mostly, yes, it was.

So we want to tell stories, to help them appreciate the change, to help them remember the day. And, maybe even more importantly, the day before the day. Only by remembering both, I think, can we really hope to learn what 9/11 changed, and what it didn't, and what it needn't, and what perhaps we really need to change back again.

What Osama's Death Has Accomplished

Matt Yglesias and Ross Douthat, agreeing with each other. First, Ross:

[The years since 9/11 have] taught us...that whatever blunders we make (and we have made many), however many advantages we squander (and there has been much squandering), and whatever quagmires we find ourselves lured into, our civilization is not fundamentally threatened by the utopian fantasy politics embodied by groups like Al Qaeda, or the mix of thugs, fools and pseudointellectuals who rally around their banner. They can strike us, they can wound us, they can kill us. They can goad us into tactical errors and strategic blunders. But they are not, and never will be, an existential threat...We learned the lesson in every day that passed without an attack, in every year that turned, and in the way our eyes turned, gradually but permanently, from the skies and the sky-scrapers back to the ordinary things of life.

Next, Matt:

The threat to the physical security of Americans posed by terrorists needs to be put alongside the threat to physical security posed by “ordinary” criminals, by car accidents, etc. And the foreign policy significance of violent Islamists needs to be put alongside the foreign policy significance of China and India emerging as great powers on the global stage. Homeland security investments ought to meet a plausible cost-benefit test and not just take it for granted that anything done in the name of terrorism-prevention is worth doing. The primary mechanism through which terrorism works as a tactic is fear and panic, and in an ideal world the emotional catharsis we saw around the country last night should be a chance to put things on a more sustainable footing.

Yes and yes. Those of us who tumbled down the rabbit-hole of fear and gave in to the temptation of ideological grand-standing were wrong. This would be a wonderful time for the legacy of those wrong decisions to begin to be slowly put right.

These Things Happen in Kansas (on John Brown and Abortion)

I'm a Wichita, KS, blogger, and the big, horrible news of the weekend was the murder of George Tiller, the notorious, beloved-by-some, hated-by-others, late-term abortion provider, here in Wichita yesterday. So surely, I have an opinion to share, right?

I suppose--but what would anything I have to say really add? I'm not a particularly passionate voice on this matter. I mean, my views are pretty clear: I consider the act of abortion (both performing one and obtaining one) to be basically--if not in every circumstance or situation--wicked, for a variety of reasons, and I think it ought to be deterred; at the same time, I'm clearly not a strong "pro-life" thinker or voter--my disagreements with his views on abortion policy weren't enough to get me to vote against Obama, for example. There are far more determined voices out there than mine, even amongst the mainstream ones who recognize Tiller's murder for what it is: a heinous and ugly crime. Rod Dreher, while condemning the murder, forthrightly calls George Tiller an "evil man"; Hugo Schwyzer, by contrast, praises his work amongst women and calls him a martyr. You can find plenty more on both sides...and, if you're looking for rapid, wanna-be terrorists praising Miller's death, or paranoids suspecting an Obama-orchestrated pro-abortion plot, Steve Waldman and my old friend Matt Stannard have the evidence. I can't--and don't want to--touch any of that.

But a question Damon Linker asks leads Rod into making a further comment, and here I might have something to add. Damon wants to know:

If abortion truly is what the pro-life movement says it is--if it is the infliction of deadly violence against an innocent and defenseless human being--then doesn't morality demand that pro-lifers act in any way they can to stop this violence?

Leaving aside the caveats that "the pro-life movement" is a pretty broad phenomenon (indeed, depending on how you look and the numbers and define your terms, it may well include a slight majority of the entire American population), and that not all opponents of abortion even use "pro-life" language (that's me raising my hand), in general his point is a strong one--not a new one, to be sure, but a strong one nonetheless. And Rod responds:

We live in a society and a culture in which there is wide disagreement about the moral personhood of the unborn child (or, if you prefer, "fetus"). Taking another human life is the gravest crime imaginable. If one is prepared to do that, one had better believe that one has no other choice, and that the stakes are radically high. The consequences for introducing lawless violence into a society, even in a righteous cause, are unpredictable, and stands to bring about a worse evil than the evil the violence is designed to fight. Think of the anti-slavery radical John Brown. He grew weary of the peaceful tactics of abolitionists, and engaged in revolutionary violence. His cause, obviously, was just. But he helped lead the country to civil war, and mass slaughter....We need more MLKs, and fewer John Browns.

John Brown...ah, now there's a Kansas angle!

A little while ago, my oldest daughter, while working on a book report for school, asked me if John Brown was a terrorist. I had to think about my answer. Obviously, he was if we want to use the term as it is commonly employed: anyone who, without formal and presumably legitimizing (if not justifying) state backing engages in acts of violence against civilians is committing "terrorism." So by that perfectly sensible line of reasoning, those who throughout the 1990s (though not so much recently) engaged in violence at abortion clinics or who attempted (and few times, succeeded) to murder abortion provided were involved in terrorism, and the same presumably covers Tiller's murderer. Except that...shouldn't an act of terror being aiming to, well, "terrorize"? That is, a terrorist is presumably trying to accomplish his or her aims through generating an overreaction: if you murder and hack to pieces pro-slavery sympathizers, as John Brown did in Pottawotomie, KS, in 1856, then presumably other pro-slavery sympathizers will flee in fear, and others (people on the edge about slavery, perhaps?) will be too intimidated to support slavery, right? Same thing with Tiller's murder: kill a well-known abortion provider, and others, out of fear, will close their clinics and flee. So John Brown was a terrorist, and so is Scott Roeder, the man accused of the murder of George Tiller. Certainly his reputed beliefs and allegiances seem to demonstrate such.

The thing is, I ultimately told my daughter I didn't think John Brown was a terrorist, because I don't think he was trying to terrorize some select group of people into moving away or changing their ways. No, I think he believed he was on a holy war, and that holy war was to kill those who own slaves and those who supported slavery. Maybe, if you were to use Wolverine's (what, you have a problem with a comic book reference here?) classic Jim-Shooter-penned definition of terrorists--"That's what the big army calls the little army"--then this question of Brown's motivation wouldn't matter, but I think it does, nonetheless. I would put it this way--John Brown's actions in Kansas in the 1850s may have been terrorism, but he himself wasn't a terrorist; he was a crazy prophet (and aren't those sometimes the best kind?), a radical in all sorts of ways (he was a feminist and egalitarian, whose relations with blacks and Native Americans were remarkably free of 19th-century moral condescension), a man of romantic intensity and passionate ideals who wasn't so much concerned with the finer political or socio-economic points of the evil of slavery as he was with being counted as one who would follow his God's will in opposing it. This is how Adam Gopnik put it, in a brilliant essay of his on Brown:

John Brown’s insight, from the beginning, was that slavery would end only if someone ended it....Brown differed from the mainstream of Northern abolitionism in his peculiar affinity with the South—-both with the blacks he wanted to help liberate and with the slaveholders he wanted to destroy. Where [the abolitionist William Lloyd] Garrison, though utterly passionate and courageous in his denunciations, was a thorough man of the North, with lawyerly-journalistic gifts of argument and irony, Brown was a man of romantic feeling....Brown did not claim particular glory for the Pottawatomie massacre but he did not cover it up, either. What makes him a typically American idealist is not his lust for killing—-he was eager to avoid murder if he could--but his indifference to human life lost on the way toward his ideal. Like our current idealists in power, he didn’t want to kill, but he didn’t want to count the dead he did kill, either. He shrugged off the dead men in the dirt, even as one of his sons went mad at the memory.

Maybe Kansas is, for whatever reason, a generator of terrorists, of men and women who are so infuriated with the political process that they impatiently and wickedly decide to commit murder and violence to express their hatred and contempt--not to win any kind of point, or achieve any kind of real change, but just to terrorize and spit upon those who disagree with them, those who they feel like they've lost out to, in the weird (but too often validated) hope that others will be terrified of them, and will overreact and do their will for them. If so, so much the worse for my adopted state. Kansas is also, however, identified--accurately or not, fairly or not--with extremists and populists and radicals who have a different vision of things, and who are willing to take on the powers that be to see their point be made. Is that what we have here; another John Brown? I sincerely doubt it--though I'm not sure how much difference it would make if we did.

I have no sympathy for a murderer, including a murderer of a man who did things that I think to be wrong--as if anyone's life is ever to be summed up and judged one the basis of one element of it; the man was a husband and father and grandfather and church-goer and a doctor and counselor and who knows what else, all of which was taken away by one coward's bullet. And yes, I do use the word "coward" there carefully; his killer (who did the deed in the foyer of Tiller's church, which is about as despicable as it gets) did not stand there waiting to be arrested, making his case (prophetic or otherwise) against Tiller for all to hear; nor is there any indication that he was fleeing to re-unite with some dedicated anti-abortion army he'd spent that past ten years organizing out in the countryside. And even if he was, that wouldn't change my preference for the man's fate: I would have wanted to see Brown hung for his crimes too. (I confess to being an at least occasional fan of Lincoln's call for a political religion of the laws and our Constitution, in preference to the violence of the frontier.) I hope Roeder is found guilty and punished to the full extent of the law. I hope that the struggle over abortion in America doesn't descend into bitter acts of terrorist violence and government reprisals, which is really what Roeder's actions gesture towards. And if, heaven help us, a John Brown-type does appear someday to thrown down a gauntlet far more profound than anything this killer seems capable of managing, then...well, to be brutally honest, I'd likely hope that he would be arrest and convicted too, because I'd rather just be left witnessing to my family about what I believe regarding abortion than to see them caught up in another civil war. Which, I suppose, just goes to show I'm not truly part of the hard core of what Damon calls the pro-life movement after all. But then, I've admitted that already, haven't I?