Postmodern Conservative.

Virtual Politics, Virtual Language, Virtual Truth

Good thing I am not an illegal immigrant. There is no way out of that trap. It’s the crime you can’t make amends for. Nothing short of deportation will free you from it, such is the mood of the country today. And that is a problem.

America has a big problem with illegal immigration, but a big part of it stems from the word “illegal.” It pollutes the debate. It blocks solutions. Used dispassionately and technically, there is nothing wrong with it. Used as an irreducible modifier for a large and largely decent group of people, it is badly damaging. And as a code word for racial and ethnic hatred, it is detestable. -- Lawrence Downes, NYT

Downes' op-ed tries heroically to be fair. And often it succeeds. But only in spite of this central contention. And not often enough. Because the bottom line is that whether or not 'illegal immigrant' is an accurate, and therefore acceptable, term, is not dependent upon whether or not, or how many, racial-or-ethnic-haters use it. Racism directed at people who are of mixed European and indigenous American descent is contemptible. Ethnic hatred directed at people who are from ethnic regions north of the Isthmus of Panama is also. Use of the phrase 'illegal immigrant' is an ascription of fact. There are immigration laws. Illegal immigrants break those laws. That means they have immigrated illegally. That means -- until further notice -- that they are present in the United States illegally.

Yes: there is nowhere to hide here. You cannot jump out of your skin. Instead you must jump out of America. Your very existence in the United States is against the law. Sorry. That's the law. You don't like the law, change the law. And don't tell me that the use of the phrase 'illegal immigrant' prevents the law from ever being changed. Because if a description of fact causes people to determine that the fact should not legally be changed, then that's democracy at work. That is a problem, but it's not the problem of people who say 'illegal immigrant'. That's the illegal immigrants' problem.

Mood does not, must not, make facts unspeakable. That really pollutes the debate. Carbon dioxide starts outnumbering oxygen. That really blocks solutions. And no, Americans are not good Weberians. You will not get dispassionate technical language when the law is being violated as a matter of course by millions of foreigners with absolutely not one right to be physically present in the United States. You will get the truth.

Now for the compassionate sequence. Their willingness to take on that problem is often a reflection both of the tremendous desire to bring success and happiness to their families and of the tremendous promise, potential, power, and authority of the possibilities of a life worth living in the United States. It hurts to recognize that by legalizing illegal immigrants here, we are contradicting ourselves, making ourselves hypocrites. This hurts not just our self-esteem but our law. It admits that the law is pulling down its skirts only after they've been blown over its head. Bad show. Maybe, hopefully, lesson learned. The upside is that we take a rotten situation and make the best of it we possibly can. And then adjust decisively to make sure we never have to make the best of that rotten situation again.

And so again I go back to the grand bargain of reducing illegal immigration to ZERO -- something we can do if only we have the will -- in exchange for fining illegals here appropriately and very swiftly making citizens of them all. Citizenship ought to be an on/off switch. Either you are or you aren't. Vast gray areas put a terrible strain on not only citizenship itself but sovereignty. And I like American sovereignty. It's the only one we've got. And part of our sovereign citizenship includes the ability to accurately describe facts, regardless of whether vicious rubes latch on to them to avoid saying Wetback Is De Debil. There is language guided by civility and taste and then there is truthful language blackmailed.

Christian Democracy's Dead End in America

Look: Ross is right generally that Matt is right that

It's clear that there's a strain of Republican Party rhetoric that's similar in spirit to the Catholic-inspired Christian Democratic parties of the European center-right. Gerson, both as a speechwriter and as a columnist, clearly falls into that tradition. So, too, for most of his presidency has George W. Bush. And now on the campaign trail Mike Huckabee has taken up that banner.

But the Christian Democratic parties of the European center-right are not 'Catholic-inspired,' they are Catholic -- that's where their ingrained and habitual idea moral and intellectual idea of 'the common good' comes from -- and to the extent they depart from their Catholicism, they contribute to a parallel enervation of Christian Democratic government: local administration. Christian Democracy does not work, and I don't think it can work at all, without geographically particular citizens attending to geographically particular affairs.

We Americans might not notice this as much as we should because Swabia and Bavaria seem more or less the same size as all of Germany relative to the continental girth of the United States. But by the same token, we -- and I'm thinking Michael Gerson here, among others -- urgently need to recognize that squishy-con open-arms common-good statist Republicanism does not function in a federal nation the size and scope of the United States the way it does in a sleepy neck of the Old World woods where feudal topography and centuries-old hamlets and organic borders inherited from senescent principalities have shaped habits and sub-conscious patterns of daily life for longer than the United States has ever existed.

I do not think it can ever function that way; unlike, say, Alasdair MacIntyre -- and this as much as I find elements of the state and market contemptible -- I would not want it to function that way if it could; and I think worst of all would be 'updating' it 'progressively' to make it 'in tune with unique American values' or whatever.

Of course anyone who knows me knows this is not a knock against Catholicism or Catholic thought. And I think a fair number of Catholic thought enthusiasts and practitioners working within something sort of like the Christian Democrat tradition politically deeply understand how radically more local life has to be in America to get that sort of political arrangement to show any real life. The sort of zombie life it would be artificially goaded into by making it the latest aspiration of American nationalism strikes me as a Halloween-appropriate scare that ought to disappear back into the crypt of bad ideas by sunup tomorrow.

Gotcha, Hillary

My AmSpec colleague Philip Klein is right: on second viewing, the Dodd-Clinton exchange on Spitzer's illegals' license program is absolutely devastating. And proof that I've not been talking out the wrong end all this week about the political danger of supporting laws not because of what they are but how they make us feel.

Hillary, as if she were trying to outdo Obama or something, provides us the ultimate model for that kind of psychotherapeutic politics: opposing laws on the basis of what they are while supporting their existence because of how they make us feel. Does she or doesn't she support Spitzer's plan? "You know, Tim, this is where everybody plays gotcha. [...] I understand the sense of real desperation trying to get a handle on this[.]" Here's the whole thing:

Helpy Heroism?

Michael Gerson almost always deserves the swats he receives. But the back of my hand hovered in the air this morning (instead of swiftly descending) when I read his mockup of conservative thought today: pulled between the two 'vital' camps of libertarianism and Catholic social thought.

Having set up an arrestingly plausible schema however Gerson proceeded at once to misjustify it. The main difference between libertarian and Catholic social thought is sin, not helping people; what you must not do, not what you must. The libertarian moral credo -- I do not think this is being controversial -- is "Harm yourself only so long as you harm no one else." The Catholic moral credo -- and that of a lot of non-Catholics, too -- is "The libertarian moral credo is misleading, incoherent, and wrong." If you want to find supporters of gluttony, for example, a good place to start is with libertarians; but even more central to the split is the example of consenting de Sades (not just in pairs, of course). Libertarians cannot, and, as a matter of principle, should not, stop an orgy. The trouble is that often libertarians move from that political position to a moral position of neutrality or even endorsement of orgies. The trouble for Catholics and others is the temptation to move in the reverse direction: from moral condemnation to political persecution of, in this example, orgiasts.

Of course there are libertarians who would tolerate a ban on orgies in certain places and Catholics who would understand why a ban on orgies shouldn't be a Constitutional amendment. But Gerson is quite wrong to skip over these moral differences and focus on the much less significant difference between the thumbnail libertarian and Catholic positions on Helping People. And indeed he focuses on those positions as political ones:

As the Republican candidates attempt to prove themselves the exemplars of conservatism, they should consider what that philosophy can mean: the application of conservative and free-market ideas to the task of helping everyone.

Which brings me to helpy heroism. In an age when heroism on the old aristocratic model is either no longer available or foreclosed to almost all people almost all the time, what will gratify our very human urge to be heroes? Crises -- global warming leaps to mind -- create certain opportunities, but how much self-satisfaction can you really get out of cutting your carbon emissions by five percent or reducing your output of nonrecyclables? It might surprise no one to discover that I detect a psychologization of heroism in this democratic age of ours: the importance of feeling like a hero grows to meet the importance of being a hero. But, unlike a lot of other cases, here I don't think the importance of being a hero is going away. In fact every day we want to hear about everyday heroes; every day we want there to be heroes doing heroic things.

This forks into two different everyday heroisms. One is repeated but really exceptional: firefighters, for instance, fit here. The 9/11 firefighters are the apotheosis of this type of hero. The other is not really exceptional but also repeated: mothers, nurses, doctors, teachers, etc. You could roughly label these two types of everyday heroes as 'savers' and 'carers' -- or, in more shrinky terms, those who help cure us and those who help us cope. Heroic deeds in a democratic age are, like most deeds in a democratic age, self-referential with regard to individuals and the public together. We valorize individuals who help other individuals repeatedly.

Nothing wrong with that -- or, maybe I should say, better than some of the big alternatives. The problem is that the best heroism on this model is both the most inclusive and most far-reaching: the more of us individuals who can together experience helping cure other large numbers of individuals or helping them them cope, the better. As Gerson shows, the natural terminus of this longing is to help everyone. Catholic social thought would presumably supply the idea that there is a Good common to the nation / world / human species. And libertarian thought would supply us the science of economics that tells us how to unleash the spontaneous collective action of helpy heroes.

This has obvious political implications. But the linkup of these two different strands of thought is not obvious. One of the smartest and most famous Catholic social thinkers, the Aristotelian Thomist moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, quite bluntly states that the state and the market are fatal impediments to achieving the good life that must be affirmatively rejected by everyone who recognizes how much we humans all need one another's help. It is only a slight step to the conclusion that the state and the market prevent us from recognizing and attending to our characteristic human fragility.

Whether or not you agree with MacIntyre, Gerson's suggestion is anything but a slam dunk. It would appear to be motivated less by careful analysis than by that damned optimism thing again: the dual notions that good people given power make powerfully good things happen -- and that all that good people need to go in order to get power is to take it. This is bad enough to begin with, insofar as it respects power but forgets how to fear it. For the optimist fear is just a problem of inadequate knowledge. But then pair this optimism with a totalizing project aimed at instrumentalizing power through politics for the moral good of everyone.

Am I the only one (besides MacIntyre) who sees trouble ahead? I don't think so. The allure of heroism in unheroic times helps blind us to the misguided dangers of Gersonian Republicanism. And the availability of national political power -- of the tremendous force of the state unified with the market -- sits at the center of those dangers. There are other ways to 'include the whole country' in the American undertaking. Indeed, despite the worthiness of helping cope and cure, one of the best things about Americans has always been their ability to count themselves in.

Update: vast amounts of linkage on this subject by Joe Knippenberg.

Demtalk 4

Obama is such a halting rambler I am starting to officially tune out. He's actually arguing against giving the American people "convoluted answers." He's jumping on the Make Rudy the Bogey bandwagon. Torturous, torturous phrasing to avoid being Mean to Hill. He's seriously using the phrase "actuarial gap." Yipes.

Hillary prepares the American people for a slooowwww four-year phaseout of Bushism, spiced of course with bipartisan commissions. "Moving back toward" language again.

Obama again. Your name sounds like Osama! People might psyche out idiots! Comment. "One: Mitt flip flops. Two: I'm atypical, therefore America rocks. Three: I beat Alan Keyes. In conclusion: Americans can absorb the truth."

If anything noteworthy happens in the last segment of this debate, I'll judge its cosmic endurance by my ability to remember it tomorrow. And, no, I don't take Candidate Colbert seriously. Over and out.

Demtalk 3

Dodd: preemptively endorsing Hillary for the 1 of 2 Americans he says will vote for her. Swipes at Edwards. Have we fallen to the level of dumb beasts? "We need to elect a Democrat. A Democrat that's electable...." And that'd be...Dodd? The importance of electability is, apparently, important. Bring out the cane.

Edwards: "Nobody on this stage is pure." He's not interested in talking about anybody personally. Oh? And we're off to the universal health care races. "I'm guilty. Guilty as charged." He's stood by while the world's been ruined. But who can argue with "corruption and incompetence in Washington" -- ?

Kucinich's been smiling. No doubt. If anyone's pure up there it's the guy who doesn't have to indulge in the prerogatives of electability. He'll cancel NAFTA...and the WTO. Bush's tax cuts gone too.

Biden time, thank God. "I'm not running against Hillary Clinton." Calls Rudy the most underqualified candidate since George W. Bush. Nice line. "Noun and a verb and 9/11." Rudy "genuinely not qualified to be President." Mark these words. Flag this line of attack. I would gleefully vote for this man were I a member of his party. "Regain control in this world which is lost."

MSNBC continues whipping on Hillary to ensure their promo headline becomes true. "All Dem Candidates Sure To Whip on Hillary." One public position and one private position on Soc Sec? Hillary produces a bipartisan commission from her hat. "Change" the Bush tax cuts. "Move toward" a balanced-budget-with-a-surplus. Charming phraseology. The Republicans wanted to "decimate" a balanced-budget-with-a-surplus so they could...uh...privatize Soc Sec? Blimey. But she won't do anything until she is "approaching fiscal responsibility." Fair, but vacuous. Social Security not apparently in crisis. I appreciate dissolving fake crises. But something that's not a crisis can still be a mess. "Move us toward" language again on the rebuttal. She claims Bill's economic dividend existed in 2001. Oops.

Demtalk 2

HRC on the experience question: "My experience of 35 years as an advocate of children and families and a citizen activist." Bloody hell. The "constant obsession" of Republicans is evidence that she's making compelling policy statements. Health care for everyone. Mandatory national preschool. I got a flyer in this from DC telling me what a great savings it is for the government to force its hirelings to raise our children at ages two, three, and four. Super.

Hillary now waffling mindbendingly over her constant obsession with media secrecy. Obama wants to be, and is, called on. Why is he so indirect in his zingers? Mincing is not honorable. Why is his supposed articulateness primarily characterized by a style that alternates between halting and rambling? But then finally he admits that Republicans are obsessed with Hillary because they despise her and have nearly fatally wounded her before, and this time they will not leave the job undone.

Edwards me-toos on Hillary. Second -- or is that third? -- banana again. And suddenly: Hillary is the Tooth Fairy of the Democratic Party. A liar. A status quo-er. A throwback. He's on a roll. She's the biggest golddigger of all the fundraisers.

HRC: proud of the '90s. Blames the Supreme Court for Bush. A salvo of empty phrases. "I'm going to take ten billion dollars away from a lot of these industries." Strength. Experience. See top of this post.

The Joy of Debate Liveblogging

Joe Biden is right. Pakistan in chaos is roughly eight million times more dangerous to the United States than a few kilos of fissile material in Tehran.

To chill out our enemies and un-alienate our friends, Hillary Clinton wants to "fan out" Americans across the globe. That's it: fight anti-Americanism by...making Americans inescapable around the world. Thrills.

Kucinich appeals to -- chills! -- the Constitution.

Here's the easy answer to the Iran question. "Should it come to pass that while President Iran acts so as to make war appropriate in my judgment, I will ask Congress to authorize war with Iran." Next.

Hillary's authorizing leftover special ops to kick Qaeda ass in Iraq. Presumably this isn't The War. She's right, of course. It's easy to be right here. But for her it's all in the details. She will differ from Bush, in both directions, only in degree and only (sometimes, at home, mostly) in her choice of ends. The names change but the means remain the same.

The tragic figure of this whole campaign: John Edwards, a not stupid man with his heart in the right place who threw himself wholeheartedly into the future and has been rendered almost totally irrelevant by his celebrity opponents as a result. What is the essence of his slow motion failure? The hair? The '04 baggage? The platform? Unsolved mysteries.

Consume Your Patriotism

Support the troops. Don't listen to them. Feels better that way.

The Care Bear that Ate Itself

Megan McArdle gets this exactly right, and it's rotten:

For most people, a lot of their beliefs are consumption goods. [...] for most of us, fitting in with our friends and feeling good about ourselves are at least as strong a component of belief formation as careful reasoning from first principles. [...] [Certain people] are consuming a view of themselves as caring [....] They are consuming a view of themselves as egalitarians at a very cheap price...to them.

She goes too easy on this general phenom. Doing things in order to feel the way you want may be 'okay' by the prevailing standards of our culture. It might even be 'okay' as a matter of moral epistemology, although I for one am sure that the language of 'okay' itself, at least in this context, is seriously not okay. I think doing things in order to feel the way you want helps contribute to a weird and delusive parallel universe in which you can actually purchase and use up moments of desirable emotional experiences appurtenant to hooking up your 'real self' with your 'ideal self'. Meaning you need more and more to return to the till of flattering the illusion of your own beneficent power. Not just indefinitely, over time, but possibly with increasing intensity, too.

But no matter. I think it also has pernicious political effects. I mean specifically that it messes with our ability to habitually understand, without overly intellectualizing things, what laws are for and why it's important for them to accurately represent what we want the law to be. It's generally awful to have a lot of unenforced laws on the books, a lot of semi-enforced laws on the books, and a lot of laws advocated not for what they will cause to happen but how they will cause us to feel.