Go on failing. Go on. Only next time, try to fail better.

It’s really quite odd. After my ‘racist’ post nothing could be clearer to me than that I’m not myself a Democrat in good standing. And yet I hated to see Lieberman retain his chairmanship yesterday. It’s one thing to support the other party’s candidate but something else entirely to address the other party’s convention in the course of actively campaigning for their candidate! I didn’t think Lieberman should have been reelected two years ago, but given that he was I didn’t think he should have been ostracized from his Democratic affiliations. But, again, in light of the campaign he obviously should be. Perhaps there is something to be gained by forgiving and forgetting. I simply don’t see how the stance can be justified on deontic grounds. If one is affiliated with a party, one surely has a strong obligation not to do what Lieberman has done.

The logic of this position leaves me at an impasse in my own struggles. Since I could never no anywhere near supporting a Republican candidate for anything, given the current state of the party, and would have to do everything I could to support a non-Republican in any given race, I don’t see how I can count myself a Republican. So — since I don’t believe that third parties are useful in our current system — I guess that leaves me a Democrat. A ‘racist’ ‘warmongering’ ‘reactionary’ Democrat, but still a Democrat.

So what’s up with those epithets? The ‘warmongering’ I’ve blogged to death, so let’s leave that aside. Am I really a racist? Well, here’s why perhaps I am (given what the term has come to mean).

In 1988 I voted for Jesse Jackson in the Democratic primary partly because he was black. I was in fact a rather strong supporter of Jackson’s candidacy that year, not because I ever seriously thought it plausible that he’d get the nomination, much less become president, but simply because I thought he was the only ‘genuinely left’ candidate in that field. And part of what put him ‘genuinely’ on the left was the fact, not simply that he was black, but that he had actively struggled against racist oppression as one who was oppressed. In that respect, at least, I would have supported Jackson over a similarly qualified white candidate. I treated the fact that he was black and was therefore an ‘authentic’ participant in the struggle against racist oppression as a positive reason to support Jackson over his rivals.

I no longer regard such an attitude as sensible. Though I’m very happy to see an African-American family in the White House — and Michelle Obama is African-American, even if her husband’s background is more complex — I no longer regard this outcome as something it makes sense to aim for in its own right. I no longer think of myself as ‘in solidarity’ with ‘the oppressed’ in my voting behavior. I’ve come to regard politics as more complicated than that, and I prefer to evaluate candidates in terms that involve less symbolism. So my 2008 self probably would not have supported Jesse Jackson in 1988 — not because my substantive policy preferences have changed much, but because I no longer place value on the species of ‘authenticity’ that informed my politics twenty years ago.

So I don’t regard Barack Obama’s race — however we characterize it — as a positive reason to vote for him. And that amounts to the ‘conservative’ position on the relevance of race to politics that many on the left regard as ‘racist.’ So I guess it follows that I’m a ‘racist.’

Oh well. I don’t see a way back to the attitudes that informed my support for Jackson twenty years ago. They strike me as naive and more broadly inapplicable in 2008. (A candidate like Obama was simply inconceivable in 1988.) I not only support the Obama presidency in the sense that I regard it as likely that Obama will be an excellent president, but I find the image of the Obama family in the White House immensely appealing. (Could there be a more beautiful and likable family?) Still, I don’t feel this way because I place a positive value on race.

Alas, it seems you Democrats are stuck with this ‘racist.’ I don’t, however, plan to say more on the subject.

What explains my reaction to the election, I now see, is that I cannot bear to go through another period of leftier-than-thou complacency within my tribe. During the last Democratic ascendancy, my political orientation went from he’s-one-of-us enthusiastic Jerry Brown supporter in 1992 to what’s-wrong-with-him, he-must-be-a-reactionary enthusiastic Al Gore supporter in 2000, when nearly everyone I knew voted (or at least said they were going to vote) for Nader. I can’t take another round of this. Yes, you love Obama now. But pretty soon you’re going be labeling his supporters ‘conservative reactionaries.’

I was at one with you guys when we all opposed W. together. But I don’t like the looks of what’s ahead.

I was a ‘conservative reactionary’ when I argued that Gore would make a pretty good president, remember? Let’s just say I haven’t changed.

So if I can’t feel party to the victory, what can I feel?  Even apart from acknowledging that the incoming administration will make vastly better policy than the outgoing — not exactly a ‘feeling’ — I draw succor from observing that the other side’s campaign voodoo not only did not prevail but backfired.  That’s really very good news.  Moreover, it’s not something I would have predicted.

I’m sure I wanted Obama to win more than I’ve ever wanted anything political in my life.  This is the guy I’ve supported univocally since November 2006, and I’ve invested more of myself (time, money, passion) in that support than I’ve ever before invested in a political candidate.  So how do I feel now that he has — now that we have — prevailed?

Racked with dread and alienation.

I did cry uncontrollably for a few minutes this morning while trying to explain to my two-year-old what happened last night and how it was connected to the sign in our yard.  (He learned ‘Obama’ by first learning ‘Obama sign.’)

But now all I feel is a terrible anxiety.

Part of it is that my tribe has regained power, but I know I’m no longer a member in good standing of that tribe.  Oh, I agree with Obama on nearly every issue.  Apart from one vote for an old-fashioned liberal Republican running as an independent, I’ve always voted Democratic.  Moreover, I have multiple social connections to people who will serve in his administration.

(For example, I just this morning discovered that Obama’s new chief of staff not only went to my high school but was in my graduating class.  It’s a big school, so I never knew him.  When I mentioned this to my wife she said, ‘I’m pretty sure it was his brother Zeke who tried to hire me for that NIH fellowship.’  Back to Wikipedia: sure enough, Rahm and I were classmates in the 1970s and then in 2001 his brother Zeke tried to hire my wife.  It’s going to be that sort of administration.  By contrast, I no longer have anything socially in common with Republican administrations, staffed as they are now mostly by Monica Goodlings.)

Still, I cannot count myself as part of this movement.  For one thing I’m irritated with all the references to his race.  Obama is quite clearly not an African-American in the proper sense of that term.  True, he adopted aspects of African-American culture.  But it’s just obvious that the fact that he was not born into that community has helped him politically (at least, in this race).  His childhood is much more like mine in relevant respects — educated white caregivers nurture ambitious kid who excels at elite schools — than it is like the prototypical African-American childhood.  Obama seems more prototypically ‘white’ than prototypically ‘black,’ and I think that impression has figured crucially in his success (again, at least this time).  A better description of his trajectory would be ‘Former president of the Harvard Law Review wins presidency’ or ‘Former lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School wins presidency’ — nothing so terribly surprising.

Am I a ‘racist’ for making such assertions?  Perhaps some would call me that.  At the very least, I suppose I’m closer to ‘conservative’ in my take on the implications of this election for the politics of race.  I’m much more inclined to view Obama’s success in ‘post-racial’ terms — I know, a ‘conservative’ position.  I would much rather celebrate his globalized background (black African father, Muslim step-father, Kansan mother and hands-on grandparents, elementary school in Indonesia, high school in Hawaii, struggle to grasp how this points a way forward for him — that’s a truly exemplary childhood for 21st-century America). His half-blackness as such didn’t make the slightest difference to my support for him, and I think that’s the only rational position to take.

(It’s a big part of my alienation that I know that many Obama supporters would regard what I’ve just written as racist, and yet it doesn’t seem racist to me at all.  I know that my ‘just not getting it’ on this score puts me in a category with the knuckle-draggers, but being told that I’m a knuckle-dragger doesn’t help me to see where I’m going wrong.)

The other issue is Iraq and what it shows about Democratic instincts on foreign policy.  Even though I freely concede that the Iraq war has been a catastrophe, my take on why it has been a catastrophe allies me more with sane neoconservatives than with the neorealists who now dominate the Democratic Party.  It matters to me — it still matters a lot to me — that from 2003 to 2005 Democrats, including Obama, were far more invested in using the Bush administration’s failures to gain political advantage than in making life better — that is, less miserable — for millions of Iraqis.  During that time, your average Democrat did not care in the slightest about Iraqis who could not be made out to be Bush’s victims.  And your average Republican did care (however distracted he might have been by the bad arguments for intervention).  The fact that Saddam Hussein had committed — was still in 2003 committing — multiple genocides simply did not register with most Democrats, but it did with most Republicans.  So even though I believe that the Bush administration was horrifically wrong both to pursue war in 2002 and in their execution of the war for the next four years, my take on the issue makes me, in effect, a Republican.  I cannot forget that.  I cannot forget the many many times I had the word ‘warmonger’ spat in my face by Democrats for the sin of reminding them of the recent history of genocide in Iraq.  I believe that the Democratic Party has now adopted more or less explicitly the amoral ‘realist’ orientation that I used to associate with Henry Kissinger.

Perhaps Samantha Power can help change that.  Perhaps Obama’s position on the war isn’t exactly what it has seemed.  But I can’t be confident.  Your average Democrat wants our troops out of Iraq — consequences to Iraqis be damned.

So on this eve of a new Democratic administration, the first in my lifetime that I’ve supported from before the primaries, I’m thinking it’s time I stopped calling myself a Democrat.  I’m immensely relieved that a talented politician whom I genuinely like and admire, whose candidacy I’ve supported and whose policies I support on nearly every issue, has captured the White House.  But those celebrating masses?  Those folks are too happy to call well-meaning people with whom they disagree ‘racists’ or ‘warmongers.’  And now they have power!  It’s time I made my break with them, preemptively self-denouncing my multiple apostacies.

I wish Obama well, but I’m jumping ship.  Though I was happy to play my small part in getting him elected, I am not part of this movement.

John McCain is a United States Senator who specializes in foreign policy.  He quite obviously understands that when you say, in the context of diplomacy, that you will meet X ‘without preconditions’ you do not mean that you will acquiesce to X’s preconditions for a meeting.  Quite obviously, ‘without preconditions’ means without preconditions on either side.

Yet McCain has produced and distributed an advertisement that directly accuses Obama of manifesting a willingness to accept Ahmadinejad’s conditions when Obama asserts that he will meet with Ahmadinejad (assuming that Ahmadinejad is the ‘Iranian leader’ in question) ‘without preconditions.’

There is nothing subtle about this.  That is simply what McCain’s ad says: that if it is wrong to accept Ahmadinejad’s preconditions then it must be wrong to assert that you will meet with Ahmadinejad without preconditions.

The advertisement reveals, yet again, that John McCain is an evil man.  Why?  First, the ad’s claim uses a complete inversion of what McCain himself knows ‘without preconditions’ means and is therefore an egregious lie.  Second, it is a dangerous lie, since McCain is correct in assuming that some viewers are not clear on what ‘without preconditions’ means and therefore really can be manipulated by the falsehood.  But third and crucially — this is what makes the ad evil as opposed to merely wrong — McCain is one of the people, a United State Senator with diplomatic experience, to whom one would naturally turn for an accurate account of what ‘without preconditions’ means.

In sum: We depend on people in McCain’s position to be clear on what a term like ‘without preconditions’ means.  And McCain is clear on what it means.  But he sees a political advantage in manipulating the dependency relation.  And he cannot resist taking that advantage.

This is the purest abdication of his responsibilities as a political figure.  The word rarely has real-world application, but I think this ad reveals McCain as straightforwardly diabolical.

I didn’t think I could despise him more, but John McCain keeps getting more despicable.

1. When one posts sporadically, and only when moved by outrage, one’s blog will make one look constantly, not merely sporadically, outraged.

2. Though if I had to place a bet on who will win the presidential election in two weeks my choice would reveal a rather high subjective probability that Obama will win, I do not — indeed cannot — believe he will win. In fact, I do not even — do not even dare — believe it likely that he will win. If asked (and I have been) I say, ‘No, he’ll probably lose.’ I expect I’ll be enormously surprised if he does win. I find myself resignedly trying to plan for how I’ll manage under ‘the future Palin administration.’ And so forth. In fact, I’ll be utterly astonished if McCain doesn’t find a way — by hook or crook — to make off with the election (speaking metaphorically of course!).

Still, if I had to bet, I’d bet on Obama’s winning.

What does that reveal about the relation between subjective probability and belief? (Or, if you prefer, about my irrationality?)

For about half of 2003 I passionately argued with quite a few sceptical interlocutors that the Bush administration’s war against Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq could be viewed as the righting of a horrible wrong. For many years, American administrations had supported Saddam’s genocidal regime. Now, I argued, an American president was committed to overthrowing it. Sure, Bush’s arguments were completely wrongheaded: there was no link to 9/11 and no good reason to expect to find stockpiles of WMDs. The intervention could nonetheless be viewed as a liberation, I argued, and at the very least as an attempt to right a truly horrific wrong. I argued, in sum, in solidarity with Saddam’s victims — with these Arabs (among others) and Muslims (among others).

The intervention didn’t, ahem, work out so well, and I am of course a complete idiot for having trusted the Bush administration on that score. It’s an old story by now that this is a regret that I will take to my grave. Go ahead and despise me for those arguments. I fully deserve it.

But my former self would never have guessed that the Republican candidate to succeed Bush would premise the final stretch of his campaign on a claim that his opponent is a “dangerous” “Arab” “Muslim” “terrorist.” Only the first of these epithets comes directly from that candidate’s mouth, but the other three are clearly what he wants his audience to hear and therefore generally go uncorrected. (The fourth epithet comes directly from his running mate’s mouth, on the reasonable assumption that being, as she puts it, a “friend of terrorists” — note the plural — makes one a de facto terrorist oneself.)

In 2003, I believed that a Republican president could, despite his bad arguments, be viewed as a kind of savior of the Arabs (among others), of the Muslims (among others), whom Saddam had so violently persecuted. In 2008 I see that the Republican Party is actually premised on racist hatred of Arabs and on religious hatred of Muslims.

Go ahead and despise me. I deserve it. I did not understand how great an evil I was supporting for those months in 2003. These people are truly despicable, a monstrous evil, and for those months I was — practically speaking — at one with them.

I’m finding that the bits of my consciousness not devoted to work or family revolve around one thing: seething hatred of the Republican Party.  I’m pretty sure I’ve never hated anything as much as I hate these people.

I’ve never before truly ‘hated’ a politician or a party.  I don’t think it has ever been true that I hated George W. Bush — though I’ve always thought he’d be, and now think he’s been, a wretched president.  Bush is almost entirely wrong and where not wrong entirely incompetent.  But I don’t hate the guy.  Hatred seems an inappropriate attitude in that context.

I’m not naive: I can see how the McCain campaign is following in the footsteps of the Bush campaigns of 1988, 1992, 2000, and 2004.  So why am I suddenly taking it all so personally?  I think the answer is pretty simple.  The McCain campaign is itself running on raw hatred, and it feels as if their hatred is directed at me.  Let me explain.

Past Republican campaigns have at least used issues as fig leaves.  As much as one disliked the Willie Horton ad, one had to acknowledge that there was a real issue in play (generally: what to do about violent crime).  As much as one disliked Swift Boating, one had to admit (a) that Kerry’s own emphasis on his war record was an insulting stupidity and (b) that there was a genuine issue in the background of how to proceed in Iraq.

But what issue is genuinely in play this time round?  There are issues, of course, but the McCain campaign is not emphasizing them.  Attacks on Obama as unAmerican, as ‘friendly’ to ‘terrorists,’ and as lying about ‘who he is’ have nothing whatsoever to do with any genuine issue before the country.  They are smears and only smears.  McCain clearly despises the man against whom he is running, and it seems he is running on that hatred.

Here, then, is the rub: it is obvious that McCain and other leaders of the Republican Party despise those who resemble Obama as well.  And it is obvious that I myself resemble Obama in the ways that lead them to despise him.  I value my (’elitist’) education, and I value (’egghead’) expertise.  I regard my country as thoroughly imperfect — how could any country not be? — and as admirable primarily insofar as it confronts those imperfections.  I value ongoing ties — personal, political, cultural — to the rest of the world.  In attacking those attitudes, McCain attacks some of what I value most.

To that extent I can’t help experiencing the attacks as intensely personal.  Would Republicans regard my half-Canadian sons as ‘half-breeds’?  Would they mock me for trying to speak in full sentences and to know what I’m talking about before I speak?  Would they regard me as a traitor for wanting (even pre-hatred) to criticize the Bush administration?  (Of course, it wasn’t treason to criticize the preceding administration!)

Clearly, even semi-officially, yes.  The McCain campaign is running not only against everything I value about my country but — I don’t know how else to put it — against me.

As I said earlier, we no longer have a polity in this country.  We are at war with one another.  There is no such thing as compromise with the current Republican Party.  It can only be defeated.

I just donated again to the Obama campaign, but I don’t see how we can compete with a political party committed to fundamental dishonesty at every turn.  I hate to adopt the rhetorical stance of a rabid partisan, and I have never done so before.  But the non-stop lying has begun to unhinge me.

Of course, a degree of bullshit — known as ’spin’ — is endemic to our politics.  No politician can reasonably be expected to remain evenhanded and solely oriented toward the truth in what he or she asserts.  But nearly everything the Republicans are saying at their convention boils down to a straightforward lie: false, and known to be false by the speaker.

If ‘low information’ voters decide this election, as I suppose they will, the strategy will probably work.  I’d like to think journalists and pundits could make a dent in the strategy, but the strategy in effect renders them irrelevant.

It’s pure nihilistic cynicism.  (Does Giuliani really not believe that he’s a ‘cosmopolitan’ by his own definition?  Does Romney not understand that he has supported policies that count as ‘liberal’ by his own definition and would support them again if ever again elected to anything?  Has Palin simply forgotten her own eager support for earmarks?  Has the entire party forgotten that they’ve had a lock on power in Washington for six of the last eight years?)

I’d say that the whole McCain campaign is fundamentally immoral, but I think the more accurate term is amoral.  They’ve inflated dishonesty into an entire way of life.

You can’t defeat this phenomenon with arguments.

P.S. This, while eight years old, gets it about right, I’d say.

For several years now I’ve been circling round the thought that the problem with our politics is that the Republican Party has lost its conservative moorings.  A genuinely conservative party could be a sane party.  It could serve as a useful critic of and even antidote to the Democratic Party when the latter comes unglued.  So what could I — a firm liberal — do about this?  Well one thing — perhaps the best thing — would be this: declare myself a Republican.

True, I’d be vastly outnumbered.  But I do dimly remember the days when the Republican Party had a liberal wing whose center was to the left of the center of the Democratic Party.  In 1980, for example, John Anderson ran to the left of Jimmy Carter on several core issues — as an independent but without leaving his party.  I’ve thought I could contribute to the project of rebuilding this wing.  If successful, that would pull the whole party back toward the balance it lost when Reagan disastrously transformed it into a party of social resentment.

I couldn’t see a way to move forward toward a plan, but the idea did occupy my thoughts for several years — until a few months ago, when I saw John McCain transform himself from the right-wing conservative that he has always been — really, never a ‘moderate’! — into a crazed right-wing nutcase to match the rest of his party.  And now the Palin nomination confirms that the project is impossible.  As a philosopher I hate to be reduced to these slogans, but what we have here is just The Crazy Party.  (This recent unscripted speech of Palin’s (scroll down), for example, is little more than fanatical rambling.)

I suppose it is impolitic to say this aloud, but I no longer recognize Republicans as Americans.*  I suppose they have their religious fanaticism in common with many of the early settlers in 17th-century New England.  And where they’d like to take the country as a whole has much in common with the Great Awakening in the 18th century.  But that has nothing to do with my country in the 21st century.  I have nothing against religion.  But this sort of religion is just crazy talk.  Yes, I’m sure some of my 17th- and 18th-century ancestors went in for it.  But we are no longer living in that world.  In the 21st century it is fanatical bluster and bullshit.

I don’t know how I could have dreamt I could contribute to the resurrection of a Republican liberalism.  Though I don’t myself have a religion, I do now recognize that all Americans are in the midst of a religious war.

*There are of course exceptions.  I can recognize these two Republicans as my fellow citizens.

All political thinking screeches to a stop.  Another Republican is running for election.

I’d like to be reflective.  I’d like to consider the issues.  But when I see stuff like this every thought leaves my head but one: Republicans are not my fellow citizens.

Obama says “tiny compared to the Soviet Union.”  And the Republicans quote him as having said just “tiny.”  Yeah, like Iran is tiny!  What an elitist airhead!

Obama says: “They don’t pose a serious threat to us the way the Soviet Union posed a threat to us.”  And the Republicans quote him as having said just that they “don’t pose a serious threat.”

The Republicans.  My enemy.

Reading this discussion about Slate, a site I read regularly and often find stimulating, I find myself again somewhat puzzled.

Let’s try to reason it out.

My political-theoretic hero is Philip Pettit, who is in turn the political-theoretic hero of Jose Luis Zapatero, the head of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party and current Prime Minister of Spain.  (Zapatero recently hired Pettit to critique his government in light of the republican goals they both share.)

Since Zapatero is obviously right-wing, Pettit must be right-wing, and therefore so must I.

My liking Slate merely confirms it.

(And of course this confluence also confirms the truism that the American left is to the right of the European right.)

[Reading this a few months later in light of subsequent posts, I see that I didn’t make it clear enough that I don’t here mean that I really ‘hate’ Obama.  I was just, you know, acting out a bit — overstating my irritation for fun.  I do, by contrast, really hate McCain.  Wow, do I hate McCain.  What an absolutely evil man.]

A month or two ago, I thought I might start blogging again — not as much as five years ago, but maybe a couple of posts a week.  My theme was going to be Obama as republican, and I was looking forward to pursuing it.  I was reading lots of republican political theory, and I was all set to revel in the rhetorical paradox that Obama is the ‘real republican’ in the race.

(In case you’ve parachuted into this blog from outer space, let me clarify that by (small-r) ‘republican’ I always mean the political theory or tendency, not anything to do with the (big-R) Republican party, which has very little republicanism in it.)

But the bloom is now off that aspiration.  After his ‘world tour’ and recent interviews, the bloom is off my enthusiasm for an Obama presidency.  I’m now inclined to regret that enthusiasm.  In fact, I can hardly remember what I used to like about the guy.

It’s been more than one thing, of course.  But the main thing is nicely captured in this John Dickerson piece: Obama is claiming that he has never been wrong about Iraq. One problem is that’s just not true.  Everyone — at least, every politician who has sounded off — has at one time or another been badly wrong about Iraq.

But the main problem with his claim that he never claimed that the surge would increase violence in Iraq is not that either claim is false.  The main problem, the political problem, is that the first claim appears to reveal interrelated vices of stubbornness and self-deception.  I suspect Obama isn’t lying.  I suspect he remembers his position of a year and a half ago as the one he now avows.  But that would reveal that his memory is shaped by his wish for consistency with his current view.  Which in turn reveals this wish as (a) a wish to think of himself as never wrong and (b) something, since it shapes his memory, about whose existence he is self-deceived.

I confess this galls me for a personal reason.  I have agonized — both in public and even more in private — over the mistaken views that I’ve held about Iraq over the past six years.  Even when I’ve been right, as I think I was in regarding the war as a very bad idea when the Bush administration first began to push for it, it was for reasons that now strike me as ignorant or foolish.  And I did think of myself as having come round to what I (with shame) admit could only be called support (however ambivalent) for the war for roughly half of 2003, before I saw what a fool I’d again been.  I’ve been sick about all this — about both the ill-grounded opposition and the support — for years now.  But I haven’t got any better at choosing positions.

I was against the surge in early 2007.  My opposition to it was not as absolute as that of most people I know, but I thought it would probably inflame the violence in Iraq: as I said at the time, I thought it would make the war worse.  I now see I was wrong about that.  I don’t think the surge has been the miracle-worker of Republican fantasy.  In fact, if I could go back to early 2007 with what I now know I’d still argue that the surge would be a mistake.  But it hasn’t been exactly the sort of mistake that, without that knowledge, I actually thought it would be.  So while I think I made the right call, it was not for the right reasons.  As far as I can tell, that’s Obama’s predicament as well.

I passionately hate people who cannot admit mistakes of this sort.  I hate bloggers — you know who you are! (or maybe, self-deceived, you don’t…) — who blogged sympathetically about war with Saddam in 2002 and 2003 but who now pretend they were always against it.  And I hate people who thought they had everything figured out in 2002 and never felt tempted to reconsider.  ‘Tis true, this entails that I hate a whole bunch of people.  And now it seems I must also hate Obama.

Oh, I’ll vote for him.  I may even throw some more money his way. But I hate him.  All that matters is that I hate McCain — with everything he has come to represent — even more.

(P.S. Please note that my main criticism of Obama in this post derives from the observation that he is now denying that he once held a view — that the surge would increase violence in Iraq, or at least would not at all help in quelling violence (his statement admits of weaker and stronger readings) — that he is on record as having held.  I am not arguing that the surge has not increased violence.  Depending on how you define what counts as violence, arguably in the short run — i.e. through 2007 — it did.)

Two years ago I wrote this:

To my ear, if you set aside the inarticulateness (which I don’t in fact do: it matters), much of what Bush has said about our obligation to promote liberty sounds entirely just. There are evildoers in the world. Saddam was one of them, the Taliban were others, still more do their work in the Sudan, North Korea, Zimbabwe, and elsewhere. I have a rather well worked-out view of the nature of evil (which I won’t try to summarize) that I believe likewise justifies this assertion: the Bush administration is not an evildoer in this sense. (Of course, if evil = harm, then the administration does lots of evil. But that’s not the sense of ‘evil’ at issue.) The problem with the Bush administration’s foreign policy is that it is pursuing worthy goals in the wrong way. Why not, then, applaud the goals and offer correctives? Why not argue that the administration has undermined its own goals with these blunders?

I would now like to recant the claim that the Bush administration is not an evildoer in the sense at issue.  Clearly it is.  The revelations about torture and unjust detention in Jane Mayer’s book (which hasn’t even been officially released yet, but which is already being reviewed) make it clear that the administration is evil in this sense.

In fairness to my former selves, I don’t want to make it seem that I’ve been naive about the issue.  In the summer of 2004 I wrote several posts expressing my strong suspicion that the torture was happening because the administration had in some sense ’signed off’ on it.  But I didn’t feel entitled to claim to know it.  And I’ve tried to address other issues where I disagree with the administration on their own terms, without hurling the epithet ‘evil’ at them.

I’m not going to do that any longer.  Like others, I am astonished by the attitude expressed here:

“There will be no review,” [Mayer’s] book quotes Cheney staff director David Addington as saying. “The president has determined that they are ALL enemy combatants. We are not going to revisit it.”

This attitude, which was clearly widespread within the administration, is straightforwardly evil.  Of course, it is also legally, politically, and morally indefensible.  But not everything that is legally, politically, or even morally indefensible is evil.  Addington’s attitude here is evil.

Why is it evil?  Not being a fool, he must have known that the administration had captured many innocent people in its dragnets and that some at least (and probably many) of the people whom he was calling ‘enemy combatants’ were innocent of any crime.  And he must have known that it is absurd to think that the president of all people could ‘determine’ — in any epistemic sense — that these people were guilty of this most fundamental charge against them.  His stance, in sum, simply mocks the idea that the administration has any responsibility to treat justly the people it had captured — and was by the way torturing.  Such harm done with such an attitude adds up to evil.

It adds up to evil, moreover, in the very worst sense of the word.  I don’t see any difference between Addington’s attitude — an attitude that has clearly been widespread in the Bush administration — and the attitudes that characterize other evil regimes, such as the ones I mentioned in the Sudan, North Korea, and Zimbabwe.  You could argue that the harm done here is not as great as in the latter cases, and I’d have to agree.  (The unjust detentions and torture were not a genocide.  They do have that much going for them.)  But they are all instances of evildoing.

Nor am I saying there aren’t differences among the regimes.  I’m saying there is no difference in this respect: whether these regimes are evil.  In this nontrivial respect the Bush administration is on a par with the very worst regimes the world has seen.

God, I just want to strangle pundits and politicians who talk like this.

Look: Obama’s position on Iraq is as clear as it can be.  Of course he’s not going to withdraw troops no matter what else happens on the ground a year or two from now!  To make such a pledge would be idiotic.  (Such a pledge is actually impossible, since everyone knows that no rational person would follow through on it.)  What he’s pledging, and has all along been pledging, is a change in policy.

Obama’s policy will be that we should begin a systematic withdrawal from Iraq in 2009, hoping to complete it by mid-2010.  That’s called a ‘plan.’  We’re not talking about precommitment, as when Odysseus has himself tied to the mast to resist the Sirens.  We’re talking about a plan.  A plan presumes a picture of background conditions.  If the picture turns out to be false, rationality requires that you reconsider.

He simply can’t be any clearer than that.  The point isn’t that his position is perfectly clear in some fantasy sense that might allow us to predict what he’ll do in a year or two if elected no matter what else happens.  The point is that this is as clear a position as it is possible for him to have on an issue that involves such future contingencies.

What is wrong with these people?  It’s a very simple point.  Why can no one make it clearly and put a sock in these sophists?

I find I keep revisiting the theme of this post, on ‘liberal’ and ‘progressive.’  Every time I see or hear that word — ‘progressive’ — I wince and seethe.  I hate the word so much that it’s hard not to hate the people who use it to frame their politics.  Don’t they see how noxious (not to mention obnoxious!) they’re being?  The metaphor that informs the term inevitably poisons even sincere attempts at political argument.

‘Progressives’ — can’t bring myself to leave off those quotes — apparently see themselves as the directional opposite of conservatives: the former hoping to go forward, the latter backwards.  But that’s a very silly metaphor for conservatism.  Conservatives don’t want to ‘go’ anywhere at all; their conservatism opposes such metaphorical distance-spanning. (When their opposition to ‘big government’ grows unconserving legs, as so often happens, it marches them as much into a risky future as into any recognizable past.)  And it’s a worse-than-silly metaphor for the positions that ‘progressives’ uphold, which in many cases — for example, the recent privacy legislation — aim to preserve traditional American liberties against intrusion by the Sovereign (a conservative view, I’d say — and let me add that I agree with the substance of this view: I too was disappointed to see Obama support the FISA bill last month; though my disappointment is less in him than, with him, in the bill).

So the metaphor is hopelessly misleading.  But ‘progressive’ is actually worse than that because of what it implies about the discursive stance of anyone who would march under its banner.  It implies an intuitionistic smugness that is at least apolitical, if not anti-political.  It implies that being politically right is a matter of just seeing that justice requires certain things and that being politically effective is a matter of just snatching power away from one’s opponents.  Neither the seeing nor the snatching comes easy, of course.  But in neither case does it require political argument: argument aimed at winning over political opponents.  It’s tribal, not political.  It aims at enforcing orthodoxy within the tribe and at defeating one’s enemies.

How can talk of ‘justice’ refer to justice in this context?  You can argue that the tribe’s enemies are enemies only because they do not see what justice requires.  And I agree that they don’t.  I agree with ‘progressives’ that conservatives do not have the correct view of justice.  Where I disagree is at the next step, where they brand conservatives and others whom they oppose as their enemy.  And this disagreement reveals in turn that I only half agree with ‘progressives’ at the first step, since I believe that forming a correct view of justice requires not stigmatizing opponents as the enemy.  (That’s a big thought.  I’ll explain it later.)  Conservatives are wrong, but in a different way so are ‘progressives.’  And what makes them wrong is their attitude toward conservatives.  When you talk about ‘justice’ in a way that makes it clear that your main interest lies in sneering at people, I’m not inclined to regard justice as the main topic of conversation.

That’s how I interpret most ostensibly political talk in the ‘progressive’ blogosphere.  (Is there any exception besides Obsidian Wings?)  It manifests no interest whatsoever in making an argument on the issues.  It serves merely to enforce a tribal identity.  And ‘progressive’ perfectly summarizes that identity.  Because it assumes that its opponents are not even interested in justice, ‘progressive’ politics has nothing to do with politics.  At least, it has nothing to do with any politics that could count as genuinely liberal.

And there’s the rub: ‘progressive’ marks an illiberal stance — alongside ‘conservative,’ ‘theocratic,’ and ‘fascist.’  Self-styled ‘progressives’ have a lot more in common with those whom they oppose than they have with principled liberals.  (Note well: by ‘liberal’ I never mean libertarian.  When I’m talking about libertarians I always use that term.  By ‘liberal’ I mean Rawlsian liberal, ‘left-’liberal.)  A coalition between liberals and conservatives makes more sense than a coalition between liberals and progressives.  After all, conservatives are nowadays trying to conserve traditions and values that are more or less liberal in origin.  Conserving is not the right attitude to take toward these traditions and values.  In fact, it’s an illiberal attitude to take.  But at least conservatives are interested in liberal values.

The reality behind this terminological confusion yields one reason why ‘progressives’ are so ill prepared for political success.  In a liberal democracy, actually governing does not mix well with a tribal orientation.  That’s one reason why the tribal Bush administration has from the other side done so poorly.  Ours is, in fact, a more liberal polity than either conservatives or ‘progressives’ acknowledge.  You have to argue with people to build coalitions of the unlike-minded, and you have to build coalitions of the unlike-minded to make a pluralistic liberal democracy function.  That ours does function — imperfectly but fairly stably — shows why progressives cannot govern us.

How then should I react to this terminological quandary?  As a (small-r) republican, I’ve seriously considered switching parties.  But the fact that I can’t find a single (big-R) Republican I could even remotely conceivably vote for this year, or even thought-experimentally in a realistic future… means I’m not a potential member of that party.  Declaring myself an Independent would be like declaring myself an Agnostic: a pointless changing of the subject.  (You either do or do not believe in God.  And if you vote, you have to vote for someone.)  Here, at least for the present, I have only two political parties to choose from.  It would be different if I felt differently about the Greens or the Libertarians.  I doubt there could be an Uncapitalized-republican Party.  I’d be happy in a Liberal Party, but nowadays there’s no way to say ‘liberal’ in the forum without people hearing ‘progressive.’  So I’m stuck being a Democrat.

Again, I wish I could say I’m proud to be a Liberal Democrat.  But ‘Liberal Democrat’ has become just another tribal identity.  If I have to choose tribes, I guess I’m stuck with this one.  But don’t tell me it has much to do with liberalism.  ‘Liberal’ marks the ideal we should be striving to meet, but ‘progressive’ keeps preventing us from even finding that interesting.

Words and metaphors matter.  ‘Liberal’ embodies an excellent metaphor, but ‘progressive’ is contaminated by a metaphor that any liberal must regard as pernicious.

[Update, two weeks later: I now wish I hadn’t used Carlin’s death to frame these thoughts. It’s true that a big part of what I used to enjoy about Carlin’s humor was his political — or rather anti-political — schtick. My first reaction to his death was consequently to feel some discomfort at being reminded of that. So I immediately wrote this post. But it now strikes me as tacky to use someone’s death as an occasion for such reflections. And see the postscript for another qualification.]

Since he died yesterday, let me confess that one of my greatest regrets is that I spent so long agreeing with George Carlin about so much.  Not that I thought of it as specifically the Carlin Worldview, but his comedic rants — many of which I still regard as brilliant and wonderful — distilled that worldview to its essence and made it fun.

Here, for example, is a rant that from the ages of 13 to 30 I would have regarded as courageous truth-telling: big corporations control everything, and in order to control everything they need to keep American citizens dumb and uninformed.  (Again, it’s more enjoyable in Carlin’s telling!)

I can of course now see that I was doing exactly what Carlin’s tale described those others as doing.  Those others were stupid and lazy, exactly as the corporations had made them and were ensuring they’d remain.  Those others were programmed by their idiot boxes, but it never occurred to me that I was watching Carlin on the same sort of box with a stupid grin on my face too.  That my grin was a know-it-all smirk really made no difference.  Sure, I’d gone meta, and those others were stuck in first-order enjoyments.  But this species of meta is what those same corporations had made available to me.  And of course they made it available to many others as well.  Turns out most of us were smirking meta-munchers (think a refusal to eat chips in front of the TV because that’s what ‘they’ do), while the real others — the idiots after whom the box was named — were few and mostly our fantasy.

Still, what was he supposed to do?  He was a comedian.  This was how he saw things, and the way he told how he saw things never failed to amuse.  It wasn’t wrong of me to be drawn into this telling.  It would have been wrong — prissy, prudish — to keep it at arms length.  The problem lay elsewhere: in my own failure to move on from this stance, to question it exactly as it purported to question what it projected as the status quo.

Carlin was better — both funnier, I think, and less pragmatically self-defeating — when he made clearer the absurdity of the stance he was taking.  That’s the beauty of his rant against voting.  In light of the other rants I suspect he was serious and actually didn’t vote, but the joke works better — and that’s all it is — when you find it impossible to believe he really means it.

I guess I wish Carlin had taken himself a bit less seriously.  That might have helped me do so as well.

P.S. Poking around a bit more on YouTube I see that I may be misremembering his routines from the 1980s as political in ways they were not.  Was the political angle introduced only in the early ’90s, or did he simply omit it in the ‘concert specials’ (which are what I’ve been looking at) before then?  In any case, the political rants do seem continuous in spirit with the seven-dirty-words angle that made Carlin count as ‘countercultural’ — that is, as highly marketable — in the 1970s.

And, yes, this post is just a personal angle on the phenomenon well discussed here and here.

There’s something I just don’t understand about the claim in my title, and it worries me that I don’t understand it.  What I don’t understand is how sensible people could regard this as an admirable assertion.

In the fall of 2002 and early 2003 I myself opposed the prospect of war in Iraq.  I signed petitions, wrote emails to my US congressman and senators and argued with people in person — I had conservative interlocutors then! — that it would be a very bad idea to go to war with Saddam Hussein’s regime in the way that the Bush administration seemed to be proposing.  (I didn’t then have a blog.)  In those respects, at that time, I was firmly anti-(this-)war.

But by March, as the war began, everything had come to look different.  At that time, in those new circumstances (circumstances largely created by Bush’s foolish rush to war), I viewed it as a serious mistake to oppose the war in the way that I had done a few months earlier.  Since we were already at war with Saddam’s regime, I tried to look at the upside.  Since that regime was so manifestly evil, perhaps removing it by force could do some good.  There was, I thought, a chance that Bush’s strategy — a strategy that I continued to regard as having been foolish — might actually benefit most Iraqis (though it was causing inevitable harm to many innocents).  So I thought, ‘Well now I have to support this war.’  Though I opposed the war at the beginning — that is, when it could have been averted — I have not opposed the war from the beginning.

What, I wonder, was Obama’s attitude toward the war in its first few weeks?  This? — ‘I oppose this war.  This war is not one we should be waging.’  I’d have then agreed with those statements if they meant ‘Bush should not have caused us to be in this position.  There were better options last fall.’  But that’s not the most natural reading of the statements.  The most natural reading is rather ‘War with Saddam’s regime is unjust.  We should withdraw immediately.’  And on that reading, I did not then agree.

As I’ve said many times, I’ve come to regret that view.  Since December 2003 I’ve believed that it would have been better to give Saddam the great ‘victory’ he would have claimed in our backing down from the foolish stance that Bush adopted.  By the late fall of 2003 it was clear that the Bush administration was prosecuting the war in a way that was manifestly evil in a number of dimensions and arguably doing at least as much damage to the country as Saddam would have done had we backed down.  It was clear that, bad as it would have been, we needed to withdraw and not subject Iraqis to more to our ‘mismanagement’ of their affairs (to put it euphemistically).

But consider again those first few weeks of the war and forget what you know about what followed.  Is ‘I oppose this war’ an admirable assertion in that context?  I don’t think it is.  So I don’t regard it as admirable to have opposed the war from the beginning.

I support Obama despite this claim.  If it is true (and I actually suspect it is not; I suspect Obama took roughly my view) the claim bespeaks a failure of civic virtue, the heart of which lies in a commitment to engage matters as they stand here and now, without moralistic bluff or blinders.  It requires taking responsibility for a situation defined in part by how the world is — here and now — and in part by the epistemic and practical needs of one’s audience.

In late March of 2003, ‘I oppose this war’ got both wrong and in a way that continues to strike me as irresponsible.

As I almost said a couple of years ago, I’d be very pleased if pertinent parties within the Bush administration, including the president himself, were tried for war crimes.  That would, I think, be just, and the justice would please me.  Of course, it would not be an entirely good thing: people whom one cannot respect would seize upon the incident to score points that one can only contemn.  In fact, it would be agonizing.  Still, it would be just, and lo that justice would be good.

It’s probably a fantasy to think it could actually happen.  But contemplating the mere possibility puts me in touch with this observation: I am deeply deeply ashamed of my country in these respects.  And disgusted.  And angry.

In any case, not at all proud.

So that makes me — what, anti-American?  Not a patriot?  Well, I suppose it’s a cliche in my circle that patriotism is compatible with dissent.  Still, I’m not sure these cosmopolitans — the default view around here — are in position to explain what a reverence for principles as such has to do with the emotions and practical commitments their fellow citizens and speakers call being ‘patriotic.’  It looks to me like a change of subject. It looks like the view that patriotism is bunk — which may be true (I’m not quite arguing otherwise) but which rather vividly concedes the critic’s point.

What we need is something at least in the neighborhood of the attitudinal state recommended by

republican political theorists who define civic or political virtue as love of country understood not as attachment to the cultural, ethnic, and religious unity of a people, but as love of common liberty and the institutions that sustain it.  It is a particularistic love, as it is love of the common liberty of a particular people, sustained by institutions that have a particular history which has for that people a particular meaning, or meanings, that inspire and are in turn sustained by a particular way of life an culture.  Because it is a love of the particular it is possible, but because it is a love of a particular liberty it is not exclusive: love of the common liberty of one’s people easily extends beyond national boundaries and translates into solidarity.

I’m quoting Maurizio Viroli’s For Love of Country (p. 12), a book I’ve started reading today.  This, or something very like it, is the sort of patriotism we need.  It is in this sense that I love my country and that I manifest that love in shame, disgust and simmering rage.

I’m ashamed of the Bush administration, or most of it, because I believe they have acted like the opposite of genuine Americans by revealing that they do not care about American liberty — either here or abroad.  They have done so, moreover, in my name.  (Though I didn’t vote for him, Bush is nonetheless my president.)  It is they, not I, who are anti-American. They do not appear to know what this country is about.

On second thought, make that plural: they are anti-Americans.  As a patriotic American, I spit them out.  I want to see them exposed for what they are, for which ‘war criminals’ may well prove the beginning of an accurate description.

I take my title from a sidebar on the Colbert Report last night, where it referred to the end of the Democratic primaries. I mean not only that but also the end — which we can begin to anticipate — of the Bush administration. And, as if that weren’t a large enough topic, I also mean a third thing: the end of the a painfully rough patch in my politics. This post is about how the three endings fit together. And it’s about whether that rough patch can ever really end.

It’s fair to say that the Bush administration drove many previously sensible people a bit batty. I was myself driven more than a bit batty by a combination of the administration and the battiness it created in others. I kept going round and round this loop: I vehemently oppose the Bush administration, so I must argue with its members and supporters, so I must find a way to engage them, so I must generate the appearance that I do not simply dismiss them. I am, it follows, the enemy — from the perspective of those, in fact everyone I have to live with, who believe that opposing an administration, at least this administration, requires that one not stoop to argue with it.

(I wrote many posts about this phenomenon on the old blog. I can’t, for example, count the number of times I’ve been vilified for dissenting from the thesis that conservatives are simply incapable of putting a thought together: ‘So you think conservatives can think (aren’t stupid, aren’t just crazy, etc.)? Why are you defending these people?’)

The principal result of my having runs laps on this track for nearly eight years is that I can’t quite believe where I now find myself running: out in the open with all these others toward our shared goal of electing Obama. Don’t these folks remember that I am a ‘wingnut’ ‘Bush supporter’? Don’t they care that I am the enemy? I’ve been pumped by the idea of an Obama presidency since at least October 2006, viewing it as a vindication of the civic (small-r) republicanism my adherence to which made people think I supported Bush. What are all these ‘progressives’ doing in the Obama camp? Obama is not a progressive. He’s clearly a (small-r) republican, someone whose left-liberal policy preferences — which I mostly support, since on policy I join him on that ‘left’ — emerge from an argument grounded in a conception of civic virtue.

Well okay, that contrast may be too simple. One could detect a strand of republicanism in early 20th-century self-styled progressivism, and perhaps also in the civil-rights-asserting progressivism of the early 1960s. (The Great Society could be viewed as republican in that context.) But those ancient movements have little or nothing to do with today’s progressivism, which seems primarily a matter of asserting one’s status as not ‘one of them,’ you know, the horrible progress-blocking people with whom we have nothing to do: conservatives. (Imagine that funny feeling people get, that hush that falls on a conversation, when it begins to seem possible that one’s interlocutor has conservative leanings: ‘No! He couldn’t be, could he? Surely he’s one of us.’) The stance does have policy implications, and I accept nearly all of them. But I don’t accept the stance itself. I regard the stance as deeply pernicious.

Why not just let the differences go, now that we all support Obama? Because one thing Obama is not going to do if elected is stick it to the (big-R) Republicans. That’s going to disappoint a lot of his progressive supporters. Nor, of course, will he ‘triangulate’ with Republicans, which you’d think would please the progressives. But the way he’s going to omit triangulating will disappoint them too. I’m looking forward to these disappointments as marking a transformational moment in our nation’s politics. But I expect that this change in the nation will leave my corner of it seething with rage.

The expectation derives from my sense that Cass Sunstein has most accurately captured what an Obama administration will be like both rhetorically and substantively. Here are a few brief pieces: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. And here is a passage that captures the core of what I like in Obama:

I’ve just finished reading Barack Obama’s new book, The Audacity of Hope. An immediate reaction is that whenever possible, Obama likes to propose solutions that do not reject the defining principles of those with whom he disagrees–and if he finds it necessary to reject those commitments, he does so in a way that shows unfailing respect for them, and that puts their beliefs and (perhaps above all) their motivations in the most favorable light. This is true on questions involving the economy, national security, immigration, the role of religion, abortion, affirmative action, and much more. In this way, Obama’s book has the same feel as the central argument in John Rawls’ Political Liberalism, with Rawls’ emphasis on the value of achieving an “overlapping consensus” from people with diverse foundational beliefs.

I especially like the idea that what Sunstein calls Obama’s ‘political minimalism’ — a species of republican virtue, I think — coincides with a core strand in Rawlsian liberalism. I regard myself as a kind of Rawlsian republican.

Implementing this is not going to be acceptable to progressives. In fact, I hear their sceptical talk already: isn’t Obama perhaps too ‘conservative’? After all, he’s a theist. And alas he’s not the acceptable sort of theist who joins a religion only as a manifestation of social activism. (He seems actually to believe in God — yuck!) I predict with a fair degree of confidence, moreover, that as president Obama will make some of the sorts of concession to conservative argument that Bill Clinton made — only, unlike Clinton, he won’t be making them cynically. No, he’ll believe that justice actually requires them. This will make progressives hate him.

The relief that we’re finally rid of Bush may give Obama a year before the progressives turn on him. But thereafter I’m going to be right back where I’ve been with these folks: looking like a wildeyed wingnut. Except my wingnuttery will simply be an expression of my support for the Obama administration — my genuine support for an administration, this time, not mere imagined support. Of course, Obama may do stuff that I can’t support in the specific. But I expect I’ll be in broad support of an Obama administration’s goals. And I expect that after a year you’ll start hearing Obama described by self-styled progressives as a ‘conservative.’ And lots of progressives who now think of themselves as staunch Democrats in opposition to Bush will leave the party stage left.

I’m not saying the party will crack up. But I am confident that I’m going to continue to look like a ‘conservative’ to these folks. As, of course, eventually will President Obama. Obama’s not going to need the support of such progressives, whose numbers are after all vanishingly small in the national picture. But I’ll be once again screwed. I remember well the mid-1990s and how we all felt about Clinton-supporters: they were, we were sure, disgusting sell-outs. That’s how I felt, too. But next round I’ll be the ’sell-out.’

Except, I’m here to say, I’ll not have sold out. I’m here to say I support Obama for reasons I can articulate at length and that go to the heart of my politics. (I haven’t yet done so here, of course. But I will.)

You think I’m the enemy now? Just you wait.

One thought in the wake of the recent religion post. It has come to seem to me that the question of religion — that is, of whether to believe in a religion — is fairly simple: How inevitable are these narratives? Note that the question relativizes the issue. What’s inevitable for you may not be what’s inevitable for me, if we lead different lives in different places.

One way to see why this is the right question is to imagine living among devout believers. It strikes me as just obvious that if everyone around you believes the Biblical narratives, you’d be making a serious mistake to reject them. Of course, you probably won’t be tempted to reject them if you’ve grown up in such a community, but that isn’t the point. The point is that even if the narratives strike you as just as absurd as they in fact are (say I, outside the thought experiment), you ought not simply reject them. After all, what life is open to you if you reject them? Assume that you can’t exile yourself to a different community of unbelievers. You’re stuck with these people, people who will not understand you, or treat you as understanding them, if you reject the narratives round which they build their lives. Stuck there, you can’t live a human life unless you believe.

The thought experiment makes vivid how this supposedly epistemic issue — what’s the evidence? how likely is it that the narratives are true? — rests on a practical issue: how well can one live if one resolves the matter this way or that? It also clarifies that the question isn’t simply whether the narratives are true, or that if it is then truth is not simple. What do you do when the narratives begin to strike you as absurd? You reconstrue them as something other than perfectly literal. “True” doesn’t get a grip on this distinction. They’re true, but not literally. That’s a tricky distinction, because by ‘not literally true’ I don’t mean not literally-true but rather not-literally true. The narratives are true, but their truth is non-literal. In other words, the realm of the true is not exhausted by the literally true. Don’t even try to make that out. What this shows, we may note in honor of Richard Rorty, who died last week, is that truth is sometimes not a useful concept.

Doubting but surrounded by believers, you’d be a fool if you didn’t find a modus vivendi short of disbelief. And that is what generations of intelligent believers have done within each religious tradition. So you won’t have to reinvent the wheel. Don’t say you could merely give ‘lip service’ to religion. We’re imagining it’s everywhere. You couldn’t get by without genuine belief.

How then do I myself answer the question? Well, where I live it would be extremely odd to believe these narratives. Almost no one around me does. I know one or two believers, whose belief derives from their rootedness in other communities. It would be an understatement to say that where I live the Biblical narratives are hermeneutically dead: one simply can’t cite them to make sense of one’s life.

So there’s no real issue for me personally here. Religion is out of the question — an alien construction, like the Pyramids, about whose value to practitioners one can only speculate. But I do, of course, speculate. And I know that if I got stuck elsewhere everything could change. So I don’t myself reject religion. The topic simply doesn’t come up. And if it did, regularly and earnestly and inevitably, I wouldn’t reject it either, since that inevitability would warrant the doxastic indirection described above.

Does that make me a believer after all? It does mean that I’m not against religion. Or rather, that I’m against only bad religion (as I said in that earlier post). And it makes me wonder how we for whom the question doesn’t arise have replaced the narratives. Around what absurd tales have we constructed our lives? I think I know, and I think I know that they aren’t literally true.

Moral arguments about the value of religion interest me more than metaphysical arguments about the existence of God. I’ve been mulling this one on recent walks with sleeping baby: even if God did exist, it would be wrong, because infantile, to worship him. Christopher Hitchens has been giving this argument some entertaining airplay on his recent book tour, and against the thoughtlessness of that context I’m inclined to find it quite convincing. If religious worship — prayer, etc. — is what Hitchens says it is, then he’s got to be right: if God existed, we’d have a moral obligation to rebel against him (or at any rate to ignore him, which would strike him as rebellion). On regaining my wits, however, I’m inclined to emphasize that first (italicized) ‘if.’ Is religion a matter of prostrating yourself before the deity and simply ‘doing what he says’? Well, yes — apart from that ’simply’! How does one do that? Not simply, but very complexly. And the complexities also complicate the dialectical context of this argument.

Hitchens hates religion because he views it as a kind of epistemic arrogance: the believer claims to know God’s will and thus claims a justification for his actions that is unavailable to the unbeliever. But if you take the theism seriously, religion ought to entail a severe epistemic modesty. There is a pressing question of how to live, one ought to reason, and the standard for getting it right lies beyond what one can claim to know. So one ought to be extremely modest in one’s assertions about how to live. Since the standard lies in God’s will, and God’s will is inscrutable, one ought to be open to experiments in living and generally not to feel entitled to one’s prejudices. Of course, most ‘believers’ fail to follow this injunction. But that merely shows that most believers are practicing not simply religion but bad religion.

What interests me most is not that (fairly obvious) point, but this meta-moral: one can make this criticism only from a standpoint inside religion. In other words, since the only effective criticism that you can make of religion is that it’s bad religion, only religion can effectively criticize religion. Hitchens ought first to join a church or synagogue. Then he’d be able to see how poisonous most religion really is. From the outside all he can do is misunderstand religion.

So how does one take that step? By simply becoming a believer. Yet again that’s not simple but very hard, and in two separate dimensions. Set aside the problem that a practical reason for belief (’How I want to believe!’) is not a reason for belief. Assume you’re a theist and are merely taking the step into a particular scriptural faith. Here’s where you stumble afresh: those stories you’re supposed to believe still look incredibly stupid! Their most fundamental stupidity is just this idea that one can know God’s will. But they have to embrace that idea, since the revelation had to be given to someone. One important reason why most religions take this scriptural form is that it’s crucial to the theism that God be conceived as having made his canonical revelation in the past, not ongoingly to living believers. You can’t have a religion if everyone gets to tell his or her own stories, based purely on his or her own experience. You need shared narratives, and you need agreement on the locus of narrative authority. So the canonical revelation had to occur back then, not here in my living room.

But now there’s a fundamental problem: all those long dead people had their revelations in their living rooms. If they could, why can’t I? Given the theological moral drawn above, the force of this thought comes in contraposition. Since it’s incoherent to think that I could have such a revelation, then neither could they. So the stories are unbelievable in the way that miracles in general are unbelievable: good hermeneutics requires the conclusion that these folks were deluded. Actually, the problem is even more pressing here than for miracles. A miracle is merely extremely improbable. Divine revelation, by contrast, is incoherent. It is directly contrary to the inscrutability of God’s will that anyone should be entitled to believe that he knows it. But the scriptures are full of people claiming to know God’s will. So much the worse for the scriptures. What these people know, if they know anything, could not be God’s will.

So, alas, there’s no route into religion. Religions are simply unbelievable. But without a route into religion, there’s no way to appreciate just how bad a putative instance of bad religion really is. So one cannot be entitled to that criticism.

How then to criticize religion? From the outside, there’s nothing there: no thought, no mental content. Religion is other phenomena inaccurately described. So talk about it in those terms. Sometimes the other stuff is admirable stuff — an acknowledgment of finitude under infinite demands that yields a modesty that I would describe as the heart of all genuine virtue. At least as often the other stuff is abominable stuff easily redescribed in terms of envy, sadism, self-satisfaction, and other vices. So call it that.

But don’t call it ‘religion.’ That term does not denote a coherent concept.

When I was in my teens and twenties I was a devout Chomskyan about international politics, a stance that I believed meant first and foremost: do not let your own government and society off the hook. As a result I opposed most US interventions in the larger world, regarding Reagan and Bush père as masters of a mostly malignant empire. I reached this verdict not by objectively comparing regimes but by adopting as my duty a scathingly sceptical stance toward my own government. I am a citizen of the US, I reasoned, therefore I am primarily responsible for countering the wrongdoing and ideological perfidy of the US government. There was enough to keep you occupied.

My shift since those days does not amount to an abandonment of the Chomskyan stance but to making it more radical. My US citizenship is not, I realized, my most fundamental affiliation. For better or worse, I am most fundamentally this: an academic in the humanities — which of course makes me hardly ‘American’ at all. I’ve spent my entire adult life in academic enclaves. I’ve had two foreign-born wives, and my son is at most half-American. I am a US citizen only in a formal sense. My true cultural identity is Rootless Academic.

So how do I adopt the Chomskian stance in this context? By, once again, not letting my own government and society off the hook. And so I don’t. I am a Rootless Academic, I reason, therefore I am primarily responsible for countering the wrongdoing and ideological perfidy in the academy, in particular in the humanities. There is, alas, enough to keep you occupied.

Nearly everyone I have ever talked politics with has been Chomskyan to one degree or another. It is the default presumption of nearly every conversation I’ve ever had among peers that the US is a mostly malignant regime (Democrats being practically indistinguishable from Republicans). The self-critical impulse is admirable — assuming, of course, the critic is a US citizen. But it is misapplied. It’s not self-criticism to tell people what they already believe, or to make a cult of beliefs that are ‘in the air’ and merely infect you. To be a classic Chomskyan in an already Chomskyan enclave is a form of cowardice and stupidity.

The stance itself is right. You need merely understand what it demands of you.

(Clarification: I’m not saying you should support the US government (god forbid!). I’m saying you shouldn’t oppose it in that way.)

Childcare duties, combined with a pressing need to get ‘real’ work done, will continue to prevent me from regular blogging. But I thought I’d chime in with the following profound reflection: Surge, yes? No!

I’m against it. My hatred of George W. Bush, of ‘his’ war, and of everything he stands for is universal. This administration is far beyond mere failure. We are well into the realm of catastrophe.

(Less hyperbolically, my view is that the war will only get worse as long as the US continues to fight in Iraq. I don’t think a US retreat will ‘end’ the war — far from it. But I am opposed to making the war worse, which is what I believe a ’surge’ would do, and what the US military presence in Iraq continues in any case to do.)

Okay, so there I am, right alongside everyone else. Das Man — c’est moi!

Why write a post with this information? Coming out ‘against’ something that everyone is ‘against’ is pointless, right? What’s the point of my proclamation?

The point is that there is indeed no point. My proclamation leaves everything as it was. There was, all along, that postion, and I simply stepped into it. But where I stand doesn’t matter at all — even to me. All that matters are the reasons why I stand there, since it’s those I’ll cite in defending or discussing the position. If I stand with everyone else — fine. But it remains for me to explain why I’ve come to occupy that (rather surprising!) stance.

And so off we go again. It’s not, you see, for this reason but for that. ‘What! Not for the first reason? But that allies you with well known scum!’ As I said: off I go again.

In the end I wind up back where I’ve been all along, ‘defending’ the Bush administration. The proclamation from which I began now looks hypocritical. Could I mean it? That really is the question: whether I really can mean what I say when I explain myself.

On the one hand, here I am protesting that things are complicated. And there you are, refusing to let me get away with ‘defending’ scum. As I wrote in October, that’s not a conversation. All I can do in response to this recognition is go meta on you — changing, of course, the subject. When I go meta, you’ll naturally have to concede that things are indeed rather complicated and that perhaps I do have a point when I point out the pointlessness. Great: let’s have coffee and talk.

Why is it that this too will leave everything as it was? Next day, I’m back to ‘defending’ scum and you’re back to scoring points against me by pointing that out. How did it happen? How is it that people who think for a living could thus fail to be influenced by their own acknowledged conscience?

I just accidentally deleted the post clarifying the ’switching parties’ and earlier posts. Then of course I spent an hour trying to find it somewhere in the great internet. (I did not save a copy.) It’s gone. And I don’t want to try to reconstruct it. So I’ve deleted the posts it clarified as well.

It’s news to me that some people now think ‘progressives’ are to the political right of ‘liberals.’ Since it may account for a sizable portion of my current confusion about our politics, let me make a stab at sorting out my reaction to the news.

I am, and have always been, a North American liberal. (Not a libertarian — which is what passes for liberal on most other continents.) My intellectual touchstones are people like John Rawls, Ronald Dworkin, and Martha Nussbaum. (Not that I agree with all the substance of any of these thinkers. But I approach political issues in the same spirit.) I am to the right of people who think that elections are primarily an occasion for the exercise of corporate power and that American imperialism lies at the root of most evil in the world — people whom I’ve always called progressives, because that’s what they call, or at least used to call, themselves.

(Here’s a clear test case: progressives thought there was no interesting difference between George W. Bush and Al Gore in 2000. A liberal like me thought there was a huge difference. That itself is a big difference in outlook, and we do need terms to mark it.)

Now I’m told that ‘liberal’ is the ‘far-left’ term, and ‘progressive’ the ‘centrist’ term. But if you give up ‘liberal,’ moving rightward, how will you know where to stop? When progressives defined themselves in terms of their suspicions of (’right-wing!’ ‘reactionary!’) liberals like me, the label made some sense. But what sense can be made of a ‘progressivism’ to the right of American liberalism?

Then again, it does make sense that Kossacks and the like should think of themselves in these terms — clinging to ‘progressive’ but eschewing ‘liberal’ as a synonym for ‘unelectable.’ It reveals the organizing principle of their worldview: demonization of the Other Side, and determination to do whatever it takes to win power.

But what happens if the Other Side fragments into something other than Bush Co. or Rove’s plaything or WingNuts ‘R Us? What if some of those people start voting Democratic? What if they prove crucial to a new Democratic coalition? That is, after all, a result that many Kossacks say they want.

There’s no telling what will happen, since the ‘progressives’ will have to forge a political philosophy from scratch — and the metaphor of progress will give little help. Progress, we need to know, toward what? You can’t simply say ‘toward justice,’ since everyone wants that. If you you’re not a liberal or a libertarian or a conservative, and you eschew positions to the left of these, what is your conception of justice?

The only thing that’s clear is that I am not myself a progressive — whether the old left-wing species or the new centrist species. Progressives and liberals cannot see eye to eye, since progressivism — whether anti-American-imperialist or merely anti-Rovian — is a strikingly illiberal stance. 20th-century progressives thought liberal institutions needed to be remade rather than reformed, while their 21st-century namesakes view politics as the art of remaining authentically opposed to every aspect, whether liberal or illiberal, of BushWorld. Each stance strikes a liberal like me as irresponsible and dangerously apolitical.

A liberal like me wants to broaden the franchise as far and as robustly as possible and has confidence that the result will prove preferable to other arrangements (along with the certainty that it will possess more genuine political authority). A progressive would rather compromise the franchise than let policy be influenced by those with the wrong (’scary!’ ‘regressive!’) views. It’s a fundamental difference. It’s the reason I have no more in common with today’s progressives to my right than I had with yesterday’s to my left.

Interlocutor: “X is scum.”

Me: “I don’t know that X is ’scum,’ but X’s view is very wrong.”

Interlocutor: “Why are you defending X?”

Again and again I find myself stuck in the middle of this sort of political exchange. It’s as if people think politics is about keeping close tallies on who’s ’scum’ and on who’s ‘defending’ scum.

Such politics is all about exposing and hating scum. But how can those of us who hate ’scum’ (the word) and SCUM (the concept) participate?

As far as I can tell, to call someone ’scum’ is merely to express your contempt for the person. I am capable of politically motivated contempt, but when I’m invited to share it in this way I fear the next invitation might as well manifest racial or class-based contempt.

The forms of persuasion are after all identical.

No time to post, owing to the birth of our son Friday, but I do want to make one brief comment about the previous post. Reading it today for the first time since posting it a week ago (the morning of the day A. went into labor), it strikes me that it may really be impossible, in the current political climate, to make that sort of point. Even though I insist vehemently that I’m against Bush, that I would never dream of voting for him or for anyone like him, that I regard him as a war criminal and a disaster both for this country and for the world, I must be ‘giving him a pass’ and therefore ‘enabling’ him if I do not believe he’s a liar (on the important matters I discuss). In today’s climate, if you’re really — i.e. authentically — against Bush you have to regard him as morally illegitimate in every conceivable respect; and the charge ‘liar’ seems to capture that illegitimacy at the most basic level.

Now I understand the charge when restricted to the WMB claims. On that question I think there’s simply an empirical issue: did the president and key members of his administration believe that the intelligence they were getting back in 2002 and earlier was bad? I don’t think they believed it was bad. I think they should be faulted for that credulity, in part because the credulity was motivated in various ways. Still, I do think they believed that Saddam had the WMD that they claimed he had. And if they believed it, then they were not trying to deceive anyone when making the claims. If they were not trying to deceive anyone, then they were not lying.

It’s of course possible that my understanding of the empirical facts is mistaken in that case. But in the case more recently under discussion, regarding torture, I don’t think it’s primarily an empirical issue whether Bush is lying. Though I’ve been pretty distracted and haven’t followed every aspect of the story, it seems to me that the Bush administration is making a legal and moral argument that the practices that many of us find so offensive (waterboarding, and the like) are not torture. I agree with the consensus among sensible people that these arguments are outrageous and despicable. But just how do they manifest an intention to deceive? I can see how the administration believes that both the legal and the moral categories of torture are narrower than many of us think, especially when the question is posed under the cloud of terrorism. I think the administration is deeply (and despicably) wrong about that. And I can do that only if I regard them as sincere.

So I think they are culpably mistaken. Doesn’t that show that I oppose them? How indeed could I oppose them more?

One problem with the ‘liar’ charge. then, is that when you make it you aren’t really disagreeing with your opponent. In that respect I oppose the Bush administration more than those who reduce the issue to a question of their sincerity.

One reason why I haven’t posted for two weeks is that I’ve been going through another round of exasperation at our culturally inveterate inability to pursue political debate without recourse to the epithet ‘liar.’ I don’t know which I find more exasperating: the vicious politics or the failure to understand what the term you’re throwing around even means.

I considered writing yet another long post explaining my exasperation, but one of Andrew Sullivan’s readers has today done the main job for me, and more pithily than I would have:

Clinton is the more intelligent, calculating, and verbally acrobatic of the two presidents, and he knew damn well that he was splitting hairs when he denied having sex with Monica Lewinsky. Somehow, I don’t see Bush’s remarks about torture in quite the same light. They are just as disconnected from the facts as Clinton’s were, and probably have far more serious, long-term consequences than Clinton’s sleazy evasions. But Bush does not have a black belt in semantics like Clinton did ; he isn’t fudging facts, calculating consequences, chopping logic, or coolly hedging his bets based on the probability of having to defend his statement in court at some future date. I wish that were all he was doing….

I end with an ellipsis because the diagnosis goes off the rails in the next sentence: “Instead, the man actually believes his own lies.” There, once again, we see the confusion. It seems the word ‘lie’ has come for many to mean nothing more than ‘culpably false statement.’ But that isn’t what the word means in the public language. If I believe what I’m telling you, even if I’ve deceived myself into believing it, I am not lying to you. Maybe I’m lying to myself — but then self-deception is not what people have in mind when they call Bush a liar. The charge is that Bush has lied to his audience. But if he ‘believes his own lies’ then he hasn’t. It’s that simple: if he believes what he’s saying, then he isn’t lying.

Do please note two important qualifications. First, I am not claiming that Bush has never lied in his capacity as president. I am claiming merely that the cases that everyone cites — whether Saddam had WMD, whether Saddam was ‘linked’ to al Qaeda, whether the US tortures — are not instances of lying. Second (and do please read this sentence before calling me a wingnut!), in saying that Bush is not a liar I am leaving the door wide open for the change that he is much worse than a liar.

By my lights, the Bush administration has fanatically manipulated the pre-war intelligence, cynically manipulated the murky question of what counts as a ‘link’ between Saddam and al Qaeda, and immorally orchestrated flagrant violations of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, the United Nations Convention Against Torture, and the third and fourth Geneva Conventions. That’s bad, no? For rhetorical effect you could put the latter charge like this: George W. Bush is a war criminal. (I think that’s a pointless way to talk, however, since it presumes that the legal question is settled. The point is that Bush would have a hard time defending himself if the legal question were pursued.) No liar, but a war criminal. Yes, there are much worse things than lying.

So look (alas, I guess I have to put this in bold): I am not supporting Bush. You could not have a lower opinion of the man than I do. You could not feel more despair at what he has done to this country and the world. My point is merely that you do not help the anti-Bush cause by calling him a liar. The charge is, as far as we know, unjust. This injustice leads people like me who oppose him to get exasperated — and naturally merely provokes anyone with any inclination to support him.

It’s just a stupid way to do politics.

…let me be clear. (I made this point many times on the blog’s old incarnation, but I know from experience that I need to keep repeating it.)

I do not believe that the Islamists (you know, the ‘Islamofascists,’ the ‘bad guys’) are a significant threat to us Westerners. I believe that they are a threat to their neighbors and would-be fellow citizens. That’s why I’ve been hobbling alongside the Bushtrain for five years — not on it, of course, but nonetheless heading in the same direction. What Bush argues is evil and a threat is evil and a threat. Only it’s not a threat to us. Since it’s not a threat — I mean, a significant threat — to us, we do not need to undo our liberal institutions in response to it. In fact, we don’t need to do much of anything other than routine international policework in response to it — I mean, as a threat to us. The bruited analogy with Nazis and commies is entirely wrong. Nazis were a real threat to us. Commies were sort of a threat, at least at times (though we mostly overreacted). The Islamists are not at all a threat to us. (At least, they are not a threat we can’t handle with good international policework.)

That, dear reader, has always — every single hour for the past five years — been my position on the War on Terror. It’s unnecessary. It’s illiberal. Its empirical basis is simply false.

But I also believe that the Islamists pose a significant threat and must be countered — perhaps, at times, with military force. I believe this on the basis not of self-interest but of simple justice. A left-liberal anywhere must in conscience care about upholding the rights — the broad left-liberal positive rights — of people everywhere. As a left-liberal one should be especially concerned to counter evil regimes that one’s own government was formerly devoted to appeasing and enabling. And there is no better example of such a regime (minus the Islamism, though it was becoming faux Islamist) than that of Saddam Hussein, who made war — sometimes cold, sometimes hot — on all but a small minority of Iraqis for more than twenty years, in addition to menacing neighboring countries. (There’s a ‘link’ between Saddam and al Qaeda for you!)

That’s why Bush’s interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq were worth supporting, to the extent that they were. It’s why the neoconservative recognition that security at home requires justice abroad should not be scoffed at. And it’s why the entire issue needed to be reassessed in late 2003 as it became clear both that the interventions were failing and that this failure entailed huge opportunity costs for liberal interventions in future (for example, in Darfur). So the support was in retrospect a mistake — given that the intervention would be conducted by this administration. I’m happy to let you observe that that judgment puts me in alliance with sane neoconservatives (though I probably need to throw in another link to this post explaining why I am not one).

Think what you will of me in light of that mistake, but I do want readers to know that it was not ever premised on any sympathy for the rhetoric that the administration is now giving another spin as it gears up for the midterm elections. One can only marvel at the foolishness of that rhetoric.

It’s about as foolish as ‘Saddam was in his box.’ But it’s nowhere near as malevolent toward those who shared that box.

Ignatieff is right: we live in an era of tragic choices.