The Unlikely Success of Obamessianism on the World Scene

Daniel Larison makes a very strong point:  the world does not like the US because of its policies, and the symbolism of an Obama presidency will do little to heal the rifts and unavoidable tensions with the rest of the world:

As I have said before there is scarcely a more disrespectful, condescending attitude towards the rest of the world than the assumption that they can be bought off or won over with something as superficial as a U.S. President with a mixed racial background.  If the Obama fans actually believe their candidate has some legitimate policy changes to introduce, that might be a reason for other nations to respond favorably to him, but on the whole the changes on offer are, like so much else in this campaign, symbolic and aesthetic.  In the end, Obama fans project their own fantasies about “racial reconciliation” into the international sphere, implicitly likening the majority of the world to our minority populations, which is to belittle them a second time.  This relieves them of the obligation to critique seriously U.S. foreign policy, which is the source of some significant part of anti-U.S. animus, since they have already concluded that America’s reputation can be repaired in some measure simply through the election of one man. 

It sure doesn’t help that Obama knows he’s weak on foreign policy and sometimes plays the hawk, like an in-over-his-head manager playing the tyrant to rattle and silence his subordinates.  His appearance and background will do little to help him with counterparts ranging from China to Pakistan to Russia, and his lack of experience and interest in foreign affairs will provide an additional burden if he becomes the President.  George W. Bush is a good example of this problem in action: he could care less about world affairs before he became President, he’s been unduly influenced by idealistic-sounding idiots like Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld, mucking things up mightily because his ability to think critically about the sometimes conflicting advice he’s getting is severely compromised.

 

Too Complex?

Thomas Sowell reminds us that reality is often comprised of systems in action, where there are no obvious heroes and villains, nor easy entry points for political control.  His reasoning stands in sharp contrast with the sentimentality and demagoging of our politicians on issues such as gas prices:

Some people think that the reason the public misunderstands so many issues is that these issues are too “complex” for most voters. But is that really so?

With all the commotion in the media and in politics about the high price of gasoline, is there really some terribly complex explanation?

Is there anything complex about the fact that with two countries– India and China– having rapid economic growth, and with combined populations 8 times that of the United States, they are creating an increased demand for the world’s oil supply?

The problem is not that supply and demand is such a complex explanation. The problem is that supply and demand is not an emotionally satisfying explanation. For that, you need melodrama, heroes and villains.

It is clear that many people prefer to blame President Bush. Others prefer to blame the oil companies, who have long been the favorite villains of the left.

Politicians understand that. Numerous times they have summoned the heads of oil companies before Congressional committees to be denounced on nationwide television for “greed,” with the politicians calling for a federal investigation to “get to the bottom of this!”

Now that is emotionally satisfying, which is the whole point. By the time yet another federal investigation is completed– and turns up nothing to substantiate the villainy that is supposed to be the reason for high gasoline prices– most people’s attention will have turned to something else.

My question is where are all the environmentalists?  Don’t they realize rising gas prices will lead to smaller, more efficient cars, less gas usage, home-buying decisions based on shorter commutes, and overall positive impacts on our local environment and “carbon footprint” here in the US.  Sure, we’ll have fewer trucks and SUVs, carpool more, and the like. But isn’t that what they always say they want?  Some do, of course.  But environmentalist positions by Democrats are more of a pose. Class warfare apparently trumps environmental concerns in the Democratic Party.

 

Everybody Loves a Parade

It’s bad enough that the United States criticizes Russia’s elections, the methods it uses against Islamic extremists in Chechnya, and the peaceful sharing of power between Putin and his successor Medvedev, but now certain voices in the government are implying that there’s something wrong with Russia’s celebration of its victory over Nazi Germany by having a military parade. Consider the context: this was the worst, most bloody war in world history, and the Russians bore the brunt of that bloodshed, losing some 23 million people, including 11 million civilians. Further, even with the various horrors of life under the Soviet Union, the Soviet state was powerful and taken seriously on the world scene until 1989. People held down by Soviet reality could take some pride in the nation’s collective power, particularly as private life improved during the Gorbachev era. In the 1990s, under a decade of weak leadership by President Yeltsin, the Russia military went into a state of disrepair, and the Russian state became a laughing stock–a land of prostitutes, fraudsters, selfish oligarchs, military weakness, disappearing pensions, and poverty.

Today life in Russia is good, the military is strong, the economy is improving, and birth-rates are rising. In other words, life is better after Putin’s rule than before, and the nation–full of patriotic people who have always held the military in high esteem–enjoys seeing the military on display, replete with sophisticated weaponry in a state of good repair, operated by troops in a state of discipline and good order.

Interpreting this as “saber-rattling” is a typical misreading of reality by folks schooled in the high theory of foreign policy structural realism. Structural realism takes little account of a nation’s domestic life. It postulates that all states everywhere are aiming for maximum power; it does not matter if a nation is a democracy or dictatorship, nor does it matter that it has ideological and cultural attachments and predispositions. Labeling oversimplified models with fancy names does not make them any more useful; unfortunately, this kind of “crib sheet” thinking is common among Bush’s neoconservative advisers, who studied under the high priests of foreign policy structural realism at the University of Chicago.

There’s a simple truth that too much education can obscure from observers: people like a good parade, particularly when it honors a nation’s military that defeated the Nazis against great odds and after great losses. Americans, who have many criticisms of their own government, have a similarly positive view of the military as the most effective and least self-interested government institution. To look at a parade as an international affairs provocation is a typical misreading of events, though not a surprising one, considering our government’s misunderstanding of the Iraqi people, the nature of the Kosovo terrorist state, and the likely outcome of democracy in the Palestinian Authority.

The prominent display of Soviet symbols does deserve mention. What does it mean? One thing it does not mean is that Soviet-style communism, aggression, and human rights violations are making a comeback. There is no doubt that Putin and Medvedev have rejected Soviet-style control over the economy and the civil society of the Russian people. Private businesses and religious life are enjoying a renaissance. The Russian solution is not the same balancing act of liberty and order as we enjoy in the United States, but neither is that of France, Germany, and the UK, all of whom routinely prosecute conservatives for trumped up charges of “racist” speech. Putin’s positive display of Soviet symbols is part of a broader attempt at national reconciliation.  Putin, to his credit, has embraced the type of solution to national strife employed by de Gaulle after WWII and northern Americans after Reconstruction. That is, he emphasizes those honorable parts of the Soviet past, particularly the strength of its military against the Nazis, while simply setting aside the moral meaning of state control of the economy, the suppression of Russian nationalism, and other evils. This narrative is analogous to the universal recognition of the honor and bravery of the Confederate soldier in America from, say, 1876-1960. In other words, Putin knows that it’s simply too much to ask a man to piss on his father’s grave and for a nation to declare one third or more of its people criminals.  Pride, order, patriotism, and normalcy are paramount, even at the expense of historical accuracy. He’s sought to synthesize the symbols of the pre-revolutionary Russian nation, Soviet military power, and the universal desire for peace and prosperity in the public life and symbology of the new Russia.

Much of modern foreign policy concerns itself with criticizing other nations’ internal affairs, even as diplomats and analysts are steeped in a theory that studiously avoids serious understanding of the character of the world’s peoples and their domestic politics.

 

Bacevich on Iraq

Andrew Bacevich–West Pointer,  conservative, father of KIA 1st Lt. Bacevich–criticizes the war in a way that should be persuasive to conservatives, including conservatives like me who initially supported the war for punitive reasons. Namely, it’s now clearly a waste of resources and a strategic error to continue on this course. It’s important not to continue this path, even though leaving Iraq would violate a normally good means to discover good policy: staying would enrage liberals.

Just because many anti-American liberals oppose something, doesn’t make it right. This war, like others, might be wrong for reasons pacifists and unpatriotic globalists don’t appreciate. As Bacevich observes, the war is a strategic failure and will continue to murmur along without any real progress indefinitely:

The costs to the United States of sustaining this dependency are difficult to calculate with precision, but figures such as $3 billion per week and 30 to 40 American lives per month provide a good approximation.

What can we expect to gain in return for this investment? The Bush administration was counting on the Iraq War to demonstrate the viability of its Freedom Agenda and to affirm the efficacy of the Bush Doctrine of preventive war.

Measured in those terms, the war has long since failed. Rather than showcasing our ability to transform the Greater Middle East, Operation Iraqi Freedom has demonstrated just the opposite. Using military power as an instrument for imprinting liberal values in this part of the world has produced a failed state while fostering widespread antipathy toward the United States.

Rather than demonstrating our ability to eliminate emerging threats swiftly, decisively, and economically—Saddam Hussein’s removal providing an object lesson to other tyrants tempted to contest our presence in the Middle East—the Iraq War has revealed the limits of U.S. power and called into question American competence. The Bush Doctrine hasn’t worked. Saddam is long gone, but we’re stuck. Rather than delivering decisive victory, preventive war has landed us in a quagmire.

I would add that the absolute worst reason to stay in this war is for some emotional notion of national honor and commitment to the troops, impulses that undergird the very unstrategic thinking John McCain and numerous buck sergeants. We don’t go to war to do the conquered a favor. We don’t stay to avenge deaths like some armed camp of Zulus. A nation goes sends its army to war to accomplish foreign policy goals. This same nation can and should withdraw these troops when it’s in our interests to do so, when those goals are out of reach, no longer important, or too costly. It’s not like Iraq is sacred American soil; this is a foreign land, half way around the world, in a very bad neighborhood, populated mostly by uncivilized people whom we do not understand and who do not understand or appreciate our soldiers’ sacrifices.

Sure, we can pig-headedly spend $20 or $30 trillion over another decade, but even if everything turns out for the best, it will be a strategic benefit worth some fraction of that. And then what? We’ll still have al Qaeda to worry about. We’ll still have North Korea. Our borders will be too porous. Our ranks of third world immigrants will remain too numerous. The Middle East will still have large numbers of pissed off young men who are given sanction to vent their anger by their religion.  The deterrent value of staying or leaving is a wash. Iran knows we won’t easily commit to a similar adventure on its territory. Russia and China will still be ascendant in their spheres of influence. Oil will still be scarce and in the hands of unstable autocrats and their resentful subjects.

Vast swaths of people all around the world will not appreciate Iraq as a model, it ends up as stable as Pakistan or Indonesia when all is said and done. Instead of seeing idealistic U.S. sacrifices for democracy, most Arabs and Muslims will perceive a marginally successful bid for power and domination of Iraq’s oil wealth. Most of the worlds peoples will continue to be more passionate about religion, nationalism, ideology, wealth, prosperity, and tribalism than democracy and the rule of law. Not only that, they’ll treat these tangible goods as more desirable than democracy–whether originating from bloody revolutions at home, or imposed from without by an idealistic and ideological United States.

 

Hillary: Do the Math

This super-delegate calculator makes it plain why Hillary cannot win.  Essentially, she would need two thirds of the unpledged superdelegates and double digit wins for the remainder of the primaries to pull it off.  I don’t think she’ll quit, though, perhaps through some small hope that a Sirhan Sirhan figure will perepetrate a deus ex machina and sort out this Obama impediment once and for all.

 

McCain’s Hatred for Russia

McCain’s mind works as follows: all situations are divided between good and evil. No one is simply mistaken, confused, immature, unwise, or, perhaps, correct in a way that McCain cannot yet perceive.  Though it’s become a bad word, there is such a thing as nuance, and it’s particularly valuable when we’re talking about relations with a large country that we’re not at war with that happens to have thousands of nuclear weapons. McCain seems to think that doubling down on the aggressive policy in the Middle East is good and brave and heroic, so he’s seeking expensive and risky confrontations with China and Russia halfway around the globe, even as he shies away from securing our own frontiers with nearby Mexico.  The latter is prosaic and humdrum, while crusades for democracy in the Caucuses, well, that’s the stuff history is made of.  (Unfortunately, that history will be entitled the Decline and Fall of America.)

McCain has the following in mind:

President George W. Bush said in 2001 that he had looked Russian leader Vladimir Putin in the eye and “was able to get a sense of his soul.” Senator John McCain says he looked into Putin’s eyes “and saw three letters: KGB.”

McCain, 71, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, favors expelling Russia from the Group of Eight club of industrial powers. He calls for forging a “League of Democracies” to confront Putin and hand-picked successor Dmitry Medvedev, who takes over tomorrow, on Russian threats against former Soviet republics and rollbacks of domestic freedoms.

The candidate’s approach to Russia signals that he has aligned himself with hard-line foreign-policy advisers who favor democracy promotion above all and rejects advocates of doing business with authoritarian regimes when it suits U.S. interests.

This election should be treated as a referendum on open borders with Mexico and a policy of quasi-war with Russia. As bad as Clinton and Obama are, neither of them is so uncompromisingly single-minded and ideological about these two very stupid passions of John McCain.

 

Not that Kind of Dialogue!

I’ve often thought the reflexive invitation to “talk it out” is a bit over-rated.  After all, in close relationships, as in the broader discussions of our communities, knowing when not to communicate is often just as important as communication itself. 

Consider Obama’s call for a “national dialogue on race.”  He doesn’t want this.  He certainly doens’t want to hear whites bitching about the petty grievances they have against minor incivilities of urban blacks, and he especially does not want to hear about the very real and very raw feelings of whites who have suffered under violent black criminals.  Most important of all, he sure doesn’t want to hear the rantings and ravings of his pastor, Jeremiah Wright, even though the pastor’s statements in recent weeks are identical to what Obama’s heard for the last 20 years, as Steve Sailer reminds us today of by quoting a lengthy passage from Obama’s first book.

Gregory Rodriguez makes a very good point that Obama is quickly running away from the very dialogue he claimed America needed.  Rodriguez writes:

Right about now, his much-heralded tutorial on race relations is looking more like Richard Nixon’s “Checkers” speech than the Gettysburg Address. Because, after last Tuesday’s formal renunciation of his ties to Wright — and presumably also his white grandmother and all blacks — Obama looks not only tardy but thoroughly hypocritical. Didn’t Obama’s vaunted speech call for an open national dialogue on race, a subject he said was too important to ignore? Didn’t he urge us to address those “old wounds” that still fester today? Whether you agree with him or not, isn’t that exactly what Wright was doing last week when he reappeared in public to make more provocative statements on race and politics?

That’s no way to start a dialogue, Mr. Obama. You don’t call on people to talk and then renounce someone for speaking his mind. Because Wright didn’t really say anything new last week, it seems that his only new sin is that he called Obama’s bluff and, well, sparked another national dialogue on race. Which, of course, points to the absurdity of Obama’s call for more racial dialogue in the first place.

Obama is, if nothing else, audacious!

 

An Obama Presidency Will Radicalize Conservatives

If you think America is fine alternating between corporatist Democratic Presidents and semi-socialist, open borders Republicans, then what I’m about to say will make no sense. But if you think America is on the wrong course, that its people are demoralized, that its schools are corrupt and ineffective, that its people are more and more indebted and unrealistically materialistic, that mass immigration is fracturing our identity, that Christianity is wrongly marginalized in the culture, and that crime, disorder, incivility, and servile habits of every kind are getting worse with each passing year, then you recognize something extreme must happen. There must be an awakening. Conservative minded and patriotic Americans must be pushed to the brink, abandoning their false hopes, and approach politics in the future on the basis of hard-headed appraisals of reality. And a big part of that reality is that America is changing, its demographics engineered by mass immigration, its minority communities resentful and alienated, and the pride of its white majority sapped by a constant drumbeat of lies and exaggerations about the past under the rubric of “multiculturalism.”

Many Americans have no idea how much rage, resentment, and racism exists in America’s Hispanic and black communities. The Reverend Wright episode has allowed the general public to peer into this malevolent universe. This glimpse has frightened people that grew forgetful of why they or their parents left cities for orderly and gated suburban communities. Four years of an Obama presidency will be the best possible thing for honesty and clarity to return to America’s public life. Consider how much more forthrightly mainstream conservatives are talking about Obama and his line of bulls**t about his reverend of 20 years.

National Review’s Jonah Goldberg–not exacly a man living in Jared Taylor’s universe–had the following to say:

I am so sick of hearing talking heads saying that Wright’s sermons are nothing unusual in black churches as if that somehow makes what he says ok. It’s as if something disgusting and untrue is outrageous if one person believes it, but it’s suddenly respectable if lots of people — or lots of black people — believe it. Hogwash.

Michelle Malkin took things a step further. She mocked Obama’s campaign as the “Jive Talk Express” and said the following:

It was just this March, in his Philadelphia racial reconciliation speech, that Obama was urging us not to dismiss Wright as a “crank or a demagogue” and protesting that he could “no more disown him than I can disown the black community.”

Now, realizing how gravely his self-serving association with Wright has wounded his campaign, Obama himself has attempted to do both those things — and expects the American public to believe him when he weakly and belatedly asserts that “when I say I find [Wright's] statements appalling, I mean it.”

As those of us with non-European brains might put it: You be trippin’, Barry.

The formula of race relations since the 1960s goes something like this: when blacks misbehave, the source must be found in white racism. The worse the behavior, the worse whites must be. Black rioting in New Orleans after Katrina . . . George Bush’s fault, plus decades of “white” neglect. L.A. Riots . . . 12 years of neglect. O.J. Simpson kills two white people . . . Mark Fuhrman made racist remarks and framed O.J. Crack-powder cocaine disparity . . . whites are guilty of “institutional racism” by punishing blacks harshly who try to get rich quick in the drug trade.

This is all nonsense. There are many causes of black misbehavior and failure, but racism is no longer a significant factor in minority failure and hasn’t been for over 30 years. In spite of this, black resentment is at an all time high, inflamed by agitators like Reverend Wright. Limited government conservatism requires whites to reject this formula. It’s no longer accurate, and it’s exacerbating black failures that could be reduced by white and black elites standing shoulder to shoulder and providing moral leadership. This new generation of leadership won’t emerge, so long as whites demur to black leaders, their lame leaders consist chiefly of useless demagogues like Sharpton, Wright, and company.

It’s good that mainstream conservatives are speaking plainly about Wright, black racism, and the various lies used to support the superstructure of “white guilt.” It’s good they’re calling McCain out on pulling punches in the face of this nonsense. Four years of this trend will propel someone like me well into the middle of the conservative mainstream, and that would be a good thing. Obama’s presidency will stress and purify the conservative movement, leading to clarity on issues of culture, the welfare state, demographics, and racism that it has lost in the fog of “compassionate conservatism” under President Bush.

 

Future of Conservatism

Richard Spencer at Takimag.com makes a good point about the issues that really work for conservatives and the various ways that elites pull their punches to their detriment politically:

Political parties are pretty malleable, so I think it’s a better idea to look at what those really big issues are that could unite a broad Right coalition. Mitt Romney tried to make himself the perfect GOP candidate by standing on the thee pillars of “economic conservatism” (“free-trade”), “national security” (pro-war), and “social conservatism” (vague references to “life”). But such things haven’t proved to work too well in the recent past. 

In truth, the Big Three that have had the widest popular appeal over the past five years have instead been opposition to racial preferences, opposition to amnesty/immigration restriction, and anti-war foreign policy. Ward Connerly’s civil rights initiative of 2006, which effectively banned affirmative action in the universities, won by a landslide—even though it was opposed by youth icon Barack Obama. The only time the conservative movement really showed its teach, and has been willing to go against the GOP, was during last summer’s battle over amnesty. I don’t need to go into Iraq, which is increasingly viewed as a disaster even by Republicans (and, more importantly, Reagan Democrats.)

These issues are perhaps the only three that can unite an increasingly fracturing youth population (within an increasingly fracturing population as a whole). And better still, they’re all natural conservative issues, and ones which, with the exception of the opposition to war, don’t really work for Democrats. 

And yet, on all of these issues, the GOP has come down on the wrong side—publicly even: opposing Connerly, sponsoring amnesty, and devoutly supporting the war to the point of self-parody. 

 

Obama’s True Believers

Even Obama’s white supporters were starting to get put off by what Reverend Wright implied about Barack Obama. But they’re all back on board now . . . most especially, Andy Sullivan.  The candidate of few accomplishments–legislative or otherwise–calmed them down once again with the right words. 

He’s the candidate of hopeful words, after all.  His speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention propelled him into the limelight.  Since then he’s carefully–oh, so carefully–positioned himself for the national run.  He’s avoided controversial votes and controversial people.  Wright was the exception; he needed Wright back in the day to get an entree into South Side Chicago politics, and, Obama was loyal to him for this reason.  Obama also had an emotional connection with Wright: the reverend and the scene at Trinity gave Obama the authentic blackness he has obsessed about since high school. 

But Obama’s essentially a pundit running for president.  Where leadership, tough choices, and tangible work were required–with Wright, in the Senate, as a law professor–Obama’s nowhere to be found.  He makes mistakes of judgment because he’s unwilling to take risks.  But his true believers are always willing to be sweet talked back into his arms.  All is forgiven; in this case, 20 years of membership in a black racist church coupled with the unbelievable alibi that he never heard any of this crazy nonsense from Wright until recently, even though his talk is a core expression of black liberation theology. 

In the meantime, conservatives are castigated for suspicious that these words were opportunistic, too late, slightly dishonest, and the product of political necessity.  In the minds of Obama’s true believers, something is wrong with us for being skeptical about a smooth-talking, liberal, Chicago politician seeking national office.