Postmodern Conservative.

Why Huckabee and Obama Work

It's all in Twain's weird, strange conjoined twin named America. Leigh Eric Schmidt explains at the Immanent Frame. Religious faith and the therapeutic, in America, have almost since their respective get-gos both been pragmatic anti-doctrines grounded in shared experiences which unite the immanent and the transcendent in the social. How quickly we broke the Puritan -- and Hebraic -- mold. It keeps recurring -- these habits go deeper than consciousness and are very hard to eradicate -- but right now it looks like the therapeutic is quite capable of assimilating faith into its master order of contingency unless and until excessively felt pain.

The Europeans understood this -- Freud's disciples, especially -- but mystical therapeutics was made to look stupid in America as techno-industrialism and social statistics rose to unquestionable prominence. When the '60s arrived all that went out the window; but what replaced it is now becoming clearly a re-mystical therapeutics, in which particular faiths are all just another set of tools to get us through life as broken, co-dependent animals with the strange power to have overleaping experiences together -- heartsongs, you might call them. As negative as therapy is -- saying no to all Nos -- the positive that it needs to endorse everything with equal small-c catholicity is love. The argument of the era is over the ontology of real love. The terms of the argument are only in part over the God question.

Leave the Political Liberty. Take the Condoms.

In my theoretical batcave, the Pink Police State Watch Computer is going haywire: Chinese police are to stop arresting women carrying condoms. Here's the post that started this one man meme.

A Blogsensus? The Future, Almost, in Focus

Listen:

Until this gets settled for once and for all, Mitt and Rudy and McCain are top-tier competitive in states around the country and Huck and Paul are rising representatives of key new constituencies. -- Me

I don’t think Huckabee and Paul are the ideal candidates to jolt the GOP out of its ideological rut, but they’re better than nothing. -- Ross Douthat

I don’t like Huckabee, and I don’t want him to do well, but both he and Paul drive different parts of the establishment crazy and could throw the entire race into disarray, which would be a good thing for many reasons. -- Daniel Larison

[Huckabee] and McCain seemed like the authentic and comfortably principled candidates, and Huck was witty and quick on his feet as well. -- Peter Lawler

Huckabee seemed by far the most congenial candidate. Paul is much clearer; McCain soared tonight, in my view. -- Andrew Sullivan

This isn't any kind of representative sample, but it is a fascinating cross-section of a bunch of people all generally on the 'right' but with profound differences amongst them. Fascinating, that is, because on the basis of these observations some possible facts emerge:

(1) McCain isn't fading anytime soon, though he'll only win if the others kill each other off;

(2) Huckabee is for real because he has a real constituency -- Fred Thompson's plus Gersonites;

(3) The Ron Paul wing(s) of the Republican Party are now irreversibly present in GOP politics;

(4) Mitt and Rudy maintain their death grips on one another at their peril.

As I suggested some time ago, it's the Huck-Paul exchange on honor that really captures the major fissure in this race, in the GOP, and probably in the country -- and it runs right through both parties. (An amazing matchup from a dependent-variable/independent-variable perspective would be Huck and Obama -- both therapeutic candidates arguing over whether it's more therapeutic to bring the troops home to maintain our sense of honor or keep them there to maintain our sense of honor.) David Darlington agreed on Sept. 6:

I'm with James Poulos: FDT matters only to the extent he influences the line between Huckabee and Paul, the most important line in the GOP race this time around.

The big question to me now seems to be who's the anti-Huckabee, other than Ron Paul? It's not Fred; it's not Mitt (though he has time to turn that around); it's not McCain, because of the war thing and the nobility thing; and it sure as hell ain't Rudy, Huckabee's evil twin. As you can see, this poses a problem for people who want to elect a Republican president who isn't a Gersonite. Shockingly the choice would seem to come down to Mitt Romney or Ron Paul. And if Mitt can't get torture right, the anti-Huck crowd will remain fatally uncomfortable with him and split between McCain, who wouldn't know therapy if you strapped him to the couch, and Paul, who's the anti-McCain on the war. It ain't pretty.

Lots more to say but I'll pause now and ruminate for a while.

Ukraine, Future Pink Police State

Yesterday I put it this way:

But perhaps, if the Chinese perfect the science of continually but gradually expanding an elite class from which members are perennially purged by forced and natural retirement, the educated will settle, as in so many ways they already have, for burgeoning economic, social, and 'lifestyle' freedoms at the expense of political ones. [...] It's much more apparent that comfort and pleasure within one's coterie are.

Today, Andrey Slivka:

And it’s telling to watch Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych, the Orange revolution’s villain restored now to power, smiling a thousand-watt smile as he consorts with sheepish Western leaders. He knows where his bread gets buttered. Ukraine has achieved that sine qua non of the second-tier country whose elite wants to prosper in the global order — it’s managed to unlink politics from the economy.

This is the wave of the future, people, and we are helplessly, fawningly complicit.

Thru Daniel.

Shocked, Shocked

Despite enormous buying power, Medicare pays far more. Rather than buy oxygen equipment outright, Medicare rents it for 36 months before patients take ownership, and pays for a variety of services that critics say are often unnecessary.

The total cost to taxpayers and patients is as much as $8,280, or more than double what somebody might spend at a drugstore.

The high expense of oxygen equipment — which cost Medicare over $1.8 billion last year  — is hardly an anomaly.

Medicare spends billions of dollars each year on products and services that are available at far lower prices from retail pharmacies and online stores, according to an analysis of federal data by The New York Times. The government agency has paid above-market costs for dozens of items, a comparison of Medicare figures with retail catalogs finds. -- NYT

What About Those Who Swing Both Ways?

It's always nice to see Andrew burst bubbles like this, in language like this:

I'm sure you could somehow find enough bisexuals to fill half a sample and call it the "LGB community", whch is itself a total figment of left-activist imagination. But they would be no more representative of the total gay population as a bunch of Zoroastrians. Still, the poll managed to back Clinton, so it served its purpose.

Yet I suspect strongly that the number of putatively 'bisexual' people in the West will keep rising dramatically for some time to come. It's the natural result of all the main forces in our culture. But on the other hand these sexual progressives will probably be 'too normal' to squander their leisure time doing pressure group protest things. Inspiring the yet further death of gay culture?

Music to My Mouth

In LA, NY, and DC, 'tis the season to get in the spirits. Liquor, that is. Fine booze. WaPo gives tips on stocking up your winter bar (hint: go brown). NYT agrees, hailing bourbon's shot at the big time. And LAT restores a shred of hope to social dignity in my former home town, with coverage of a new round of cocktail clubs that, yeah, seem mildly insufferable, but at least have posted rules (a recurring interdict: gentlemen may not introduce themselves to ladies).

Allow me to add a few notes.

First, the NYT tasters are fools for ranking the cheap-tasting and uninteresting Knob Creek above Wild Turkey, far and away the best, and most potent, bourbon in its class. If you want something hot, spicy, and grassy, please order some rye (now much more widely available) and be done with it.

The WaPo guy, Jason Wilson, likes Makers for the price, and for a bourbon that's easier on the eyelashes than the Turkey, you can't go wrong. But for winter whiskeys I'd reach for the Bushmills, an Irish bottle that's smooth and flavorful without seeming thin (Woodford Reserve's fatal flaw) or scotchy. He suggests Tanqueray for the gin, and though he leans toward Plymouth I'd spend the extra few dollars on Tanqueray Ten -- a little more crisp than either regular Tanq or Bombay Sapphire, and with a cleaner finish. Wilson wants darker rum for the holidays, whereas I dispense with the light stuff altogether. Go with Mount Gay or Pyrat (from the makers of Patron). As I've mentioned here before, Luksusowa Polish potato vodka blows away Stoli, along with everything else save Belvedere, in my book. And whereas Wilson recommends Sauza Hornitos, of all things, for his tequila, I say either you're drinking low end or you're drinking high end. Middle-range tequila is like a mid-range sedan -- neither down and dirty nor rare and reckless, a straight-up glass of why bother. All that aside, Wilson's pretty good, especially on mixers. Chartreuse!

Last, the LAT piece speaks for itself, and rather than ruin any of the fun, I'll simply say more, please.

Just Another Day at the Movies

The therapeutic drumbeat of pop culture really is incessant, becoming, like so much cotton, the fabric of our lives. These feature reviews up at the New York Times sum up the fetish of the age in eight or nine of its most-overused terms:

A Mind Takes Flight: "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" celebrates the richness of experience.

Men Behaving Extremely: "Protagonist" explores people with obsessive needs.

Attention Poli Sci Geeks

Dan Drezner points you to Lee Sigelman & Co.'s (GWU) new blog, The Monkey Cage. I hurried quickly past the post on Running Regressions for the New York Times and found this gem:

Back in the late 1950s, 60% of the second-graders in a study by political scientist Fred Greenstein said that President Eisenhower was “the best person in the world” — even better, apparently, than Mom or Dad or that other venerated figure of the period, the police officer. That a U.S. president should occupy such a high place in the American pantheon, at least among impressionable young children, should have occasioned no great surprise in light of a Gallup Poll finding from the preceding decade: In that survey, 28% of those polled called Franklin Delano Roosevelt “the greatest person, living or dead, in world history.” Finishing second, with 15%, was Jesus.

B-A-N-A-N-A-S!

I Think this Place Is Getting to Me

I think...<gulp>...I'm getting the fear.