Postmodern Conservative.

A 'Conservative' Dilemma

"Evolution. Ape evolves to man, well, what's the next step -- human to what? Some compound organism, the American Corporation, for instance, in which even the Supreme Court has recognized legal personhood -- a new living species, one that can out-perform most anything an individual can do by himself, no matter how smart or powerful he is." -- Somebody, 'probably the General,' Against the Day, Thomas Pynchon

Mend Kids' Menus, Don't End Them

I share the refined disgust for kids' menus on display at the New York Times here. But the problem -- as some of the comments suggest -- is less that restaurants have created menus specific to children but that the content and style of those menus is calibrated toward, and toward conditioning, a certain type of child. A child that eats poor quality food on a regular basis with full approval, even to the point of default, of whomever is in putative 'charge' of feeding; a child whose dietary needs come packaged as part of a psychological profile of wants, needs, and hates specific to 'kids.'

As a child who shoveled a plate of peas in his mouth at home only to run out the door to 'check the mail' and spit that mouthful of peas into the bushes, I recognize that (a) some foods are profoundly distasteful to children and sometimes remain so throughout their lives, and (b) getting a child to eat such foods is often difficult, unnecessary, crude, and unfair.

But none of that has to do with the central issue: the transformation of 'kids' into a consumers' niche focused around a specific aestheticization of food, one which provides a nutritional disservice to the young and a financial disservice to their food suppliers -- one keyed, unsurprisingly, to the use of food as a totem and training system for a whole network of 'kid'-targeted products all interlinked by a certain set of poses, attitudes, and experiences that we've become convinced are somehow the essence or even right of childhood.

What Rough and Sexy Beast Comes 'Round at Last?

Andy Ferguson, as usual, got here first, when he pointed out that Rudy has positioned himself as the candidate of "every voter who is at once pro-choice and pro-war, pro-gay rights and pro-Patriot Act, against guns and in favor of privatizing Social Security." Whatever else this is, it shouldn't be confused with libertarianism. -- Ross Douthat

It's a strain of liberaltarianism, of course, which, as I argued to a chorus of howls this winter, is simply 'cultural libertarianism.' In this muscular variant it means Sex, Drugs, and a Strong National Defense. Or, in a phrase, Team America. (But does Rudy really want to privatize Social Security?)

Adbusters and Me

On January 13, I noticed with dread a certain Innovative New Playground Plan. In their May/June issue of this year, so did Adbusters. So imagine my lack of dread when, in freshly-minted Issue #72, I read the following from Alex Gill -- a one-paragraph anti-manifesto that should serve to annihilate the smug self-confidence of the therapeutic liberal bourgeois:

Sometimes I'm afraid that when I grow up, I'll make a habit of pretending to be other people. That's the charm of twenty-first century living, isn't it? Let's play make-believe! I'll make up life stories for entirely fictional characters, with fictional friends and fictional accents and fictional personalities. I'll write books about these individuals and act each one out in real life to figure out precisely how people might react. I'll make charts and record, revise, rescript, and edit. I'll dress up and play the part, with hair and makeup and eccentric charm every night; it will all just be a mildly interesting pastime. ...like people watching. But with lying and acting and treating people like lab rats, too.

Grill 'Em Proud, Boys

Sullivan wants to return, Limbaugh style, to "excellence in interrogation." This is a great idea, but are the wages of waterboarding mere "shame and failure" - ? I thought shame and failure involved beating the life out of a guy and zipping him into a bag on a blood-spattered floor. I've helped foreign victims, who, I'm convinced, had been tortured, find their way in America, and my final verdict on waterboarding is that it's a pretty humane way to torture a person. I would much 'rather,' that is, wind up being waterboarded than being stuck in Eli Roth's Hostel. This seems like a crude point to make, but if reasonable people can differ on abortion they certainly can on fake drowning. As much as I'm foursquare opposed to torture, I'm not therefore opposed to whatever people say torture is. It remains hard to understand how excellent interrogation and enhanced interrogation don't blur into each other at their edges.

Even with a statutory definition, torture questions require judgment calls. Any Presidential candidate, it seems to me, should be able to give people a clear enough idea of where his or her calls would fall -- not in an endless stream of hypotheticals, not keyed to half the country blowing up, but based on the actual physical coercive actions involved. Not, I repeat, not because the President gets to decide what torture is and isn't, but because I have about as much hope of Congress passing good torture legislation as I have hope that Congress can pass important legislation that isn't tortured.

Run, Fred, Run

Politico gets the scoop, or something resembling it. Any man ought to be in this race who publicly admits that a "nation without secure borders will not long be a sovereign nation." I've endorsed Fred Thompson as a candidate for the nomination, if not eventually my candidate, and I hope he has enough time to salvage portions of the GOP from a full-scale abandonment of conservatism. It should be flatly clear by now that all Bush's failures have been failures to be conservative, and all of his victories except judges and taxes have been near-failures as well. People say it's naive to pour all your hopes into a non-candidate, which -- though I'm not doing it here -- stacks up curiously against what happened with Eisenhower. No, I am not "comparing Fred Thompson to Dwight Eisenhower." Yes, I am suggesting strongly that Thompson's entry into this race is significant, good, badly needed, and inclined toward a raft of surprises for us this summer and beyond.

Bush Actually Diabolical Genius, Part XXVII

Rod Dreher links to a story sure to warm the heartcockles of those who want to Do What's Right for America: Iraqi Christians creeping across the US-Mexican border -- "fleeing Islamicist persecution" -- complete with kids George and Toni. No, I am not inventing this.

Seems everyone wins except American citizens, who're losing their sovereign right to determine who exists bodily in their territory and who does not, and who seem, most depressingly of all, by and large not to care. What is the cash value of sovereignty?

...You Better Free Your Mind Instead

At Crooked Timber, Kieran Healy put the icing on what I said yesterday ... three days ago. Gee whiz:

The thing about Cheney’s rhetoric, though, is that the flow from the first to the second sentence strongly implies that he does think of them as good things. From what he says, it’s clear that the U.S. constitution and Geneva Conventions are amongst those things the graduates “know to be right,” that and that they embody ideals of “upright conduct” and express those beliefs they “consider worth fighting for and living for.” It’s just that he doesn’t seem to have any notion that these ideals themselves express rules for how to defend one’s principles without betraying them.

I suppose neither did Lincoln .... It's an old debate, not going away anytime soon. And the best way to fight it, it seems to me, is to focus on what can and cannot be done to and done with American citizens in their own country.

Freedom Isn't Free, It's an Interobjectively Held Moral Verity

Read Patrick Jackson's deconstructive Memorial Day tour de force on 'freedom' as a rhetorical commonplace. Rather than endorsing everything or even critiquing everything, I want to hone in dorkily on one specific observation he makes, then explain how I account for its significance in an important, new way. First, consider this:

by using single-quotation marks around the term 'freedom' I want to signal that I am not so much referring to the word as to the concept, with the understanding that the concept in question is not some subjective property of mind as much as it is an intersubjective cultural resource that exists for various speakers to utilize in various situations. We -- at least, we Americans -- have a vague idea what 'freedom' means and that it is both important and somehow intrinsically American, or at least that America intrinsically stands for 'freedom', although the consensus ends as soon as anyone tries to be any more specific about precisely which 'freedoms' are entailed in any given situation. In this way, 'freedom' is one of those rhetorical trump-cards available to Americans, a fact perhaps most bluntly demonstrated in President Bush's first Empire Day speech (20 September 2001) when he answered the question "why do they [the terrorists] hate us?" by claiming simply that "they hate our freedoms." End of discussion, as it were: 'freedom' has been invoked, so rational discussion ceases and we simply have to go out and kick some ass [my light edits included].

Okay -- so we know that 'freedom' is an intersubjectively constructed concept available for rhetorical use. I've touched on this exhaustively enough for now here. But then consider this:

'freedom' is basically a religious symbol in the United States, serving to sanctify courses of action as surely as if they had been blessed by someone speaking ex cathedra. As such, we ought to be very, very cautious whenever we hear it, because it so often signifies the end of anything like rational discussion.

Cautious, yes, but in a way that good Weberian social scientists are usually disinclined. We need to recognize that intersubjectivity is an inadequate way of understanding, characterizing, and analyzing 'freedom' in the American political imagination -- precisely because it is interobjectively held. I should be looking into some stuff for Patrick's fellow Duck blogger Dan Nexon right now [full disclosure] rather than laying out my theory of interobjectivity in full. But I have enough time to say that 'freedom' attains interobjectivity not because 'everyone' 'believes in' it in some way in the United States but because anyone who really takes 'freedom' seriously in the manner that Patrick describes it does not just take it as a 'social fact' on par with other things we intersubjectively construct. They take it to be, in some significant way worthy of focused inquiry, true. 'Freedom' does not merely 'exist' or 'work' or function as an 'experience' or a 'heritage.' 'Freedom' is a moral good with the moral epistemological status of a truth.

To obscure this by discussing 'freedom' as a 'value' or a 'commitment' does positive damage to our understanding of 'freedom.' To discuss 'freedom' as an interobjectivity helps us better discuss convictions of moral verity that often are Religious but certainly not need be -- unless any conviction of moral verity a religion makes, which I think we all know is flat-out untrue. Especially now, what with faith, religion, and agency at the forefront of American, European, and Middle Eastern affairs, IR theorists, political theorists, and I daresay all political and social scientists need to wrap their minds around this and remain persuaded that they are not guilty of miscegenation between 'facts' and 'values.'  That moral verities are key components of social analysis must not count for our good Weberians as itself a value -- the great failure of Weber that caused his penetrating examination of charisma to fundamentally misapprehend how much more complicated charisma is than mere power and mere agency. Patrick does us a great service by helping lay bare the usefulness of interobjectivity in a profound, topical, and heavy way. Pretty damn good for a damn good Weberian.

Conservatism as Conservation

You can, and probably should, go here and send a letter just like this:

Kaja Brix, National Marine Fisheries Service, NOAA
NMFS
P.O. Box 21668
Juneau, AK 99802

Dear Administrator Brix,

I strongly support your proposal to list the Cook Inlet beluga whale as an endangered species under the Endangered Species Act. With only 300 whales remaining, this tiny population is extremely vulnerable and in danger of extinction.

Beautiful and charming, our belugas dwindle to Thermopylan stock levels while the world is overrun with hideous flies and burgers on legs. This is far too crude and practical a world to endure without putting the ESA to what should seem strictly by the numbers to be the use for which it, and any Act like it, would be intended.

As a white, smiling mammal, I urge you to act at once to secure our belugas.

Sincerely,

James Poulos