Obama’s Conservative Critics Redux

I was expecting Steve Sailer’s print article on Rev. Wright to be a dreary repetition of his predictable blogs on the matter, but with this thoughtful piece he has graciously reminded me why I love him almost as much as I love TAC itself. He is good enough to acknowledge that “considering the competition, Obama may be the best candidate of the three remaining”, but ends on a peculiar note, in which he proposes that Obama give a frank and probing interview into his psyche with a respectable black journalist. Titilating as such an interview would no doubt be to us earnest race realists, I must say that Sailer’s demand has a perverse quality, for if the human psyche is not sacred when even rights to privacy are compromised by our public figures, for better or worse, nothing will be.

But now chiming in, and making me start to feel a bit bad about how hard I’ve been on Larison, is Dan Flynn, a “conservative movement” operative whose sometimes mildly interesting things to say serve only to make him the ultimate Browderist of the right. That this piece appeared on Takimag is a real disappointment – along with increasingly frequent contributions from Marcus Epstein, it seems to suggest that under Richard Spencer’s editorship Takimag is becoming increasingly of the right-Browderist persuasion. And this is not just sour grapes on my part – my Catholic monarchist friends like Frank Purcell and Charles Coulombe seem to have disappeared from it as well.

Flynn’s solipsistic prose and reach back not only to the old Socialists and the Progressive era but to the Populists and even populism generally reads like the most dry and predictable Heritage Foundation screed from the early Reagan years. Indeed the piece reads as though nothing much interesting has happened since then, and that there hasn’t been a little something called neoconservatism to upset the applecart of who is conservative and who is on the left.

As for the substantive argument against Obama’s policy proposals, they may be inspired by a species of leftist I have no use for, but they hardly, for better or worse, represent a radical departure from where we’ve been. But insofar as they might, let us just consider that with his unprecedented channeling of the power of small internet donors, Obama could be the first president since Andrew Jackson who owes nothing to America’s moneyed interests.

Curiously, neither Flynn nor Sailer go into the disturbing evidence of family influence on Obama by card-carrying Communists, especially grating to me because the most notable crowing about it by the CP itself came from Gerald Horne, who also wrote a deeply ignorant and insulting academic screed against one of the great heroes of the old right and most brilliant analytical minds of the 20th century, Lawrence Dennis. The irony here is that Dennis provides a curious psychological profile to which one could compare Obama, indeed it was Sailer who suggested that the best way to understand Obama is as the “tortured mulatto” in reverse.

This brings us to the question at the heart of this whole broadly-defined conservative discussion about Obama, which is his sincerity. He is undoubtedly the most cold and calculating son of a bitch you’ll ever meet, but at the same time there are few who would argue that he is unprincipled. The reason I take any talk of Obama as raging leftist ideologue, either neo-Shachtmanite per Brendan O’Neill or where New Left meets Popular Front per Flynn, with at best a very large grain of salt, is because he’s just too cold and shrewd a politician.

Sailer seems to agree with me on this, for as he has pointed out, Obama’s deepest Freudian motivation is out of resentment of his white Kumbaya-era liberal mother, and that is just not consistent with wanting to vindicate either the Brookings Institution or The Weathermen. Just as he has played the race card by not playing it, as I’ll never forget my aging grandfather explaining to my grandmother, he takes a similar Godfather-type approach with any of the special interests he has to deal with, from the Israel Lobby to the loony liberals, as he was really doing in San Francisco.

Finally, as to all the questions of what Obama really believes, and at what point he ceased being just another crazy Afrocentrist from the South Side, I honestly don’t know, nor would I be surprised if it turns out he never really believed in any of it. If he has outgrown the crazy ideas of his church but still feels a filial connection to it, I can very much identify. Though it was long passed my own greater disillusionment with the left when I began going to my nice little lefty shul in Park Slope, I still in many ways appreciate it as a remaining life line to the left, to its values in a setting with at least some separation from the temporal realm and into the spiritual context where it more properly belongs.

Hauntingly enough, I was just at the bookstore, where in the most recent New Republic Marty Peretz defends Obama’s relationship to Rev. Wright on almost exactly the same grounds, equating with it his own seemingly milquetoast liberal rabbi, who I’m sure can’t hold a candle to mine in the social conscience department, in both the good and the bad.

On a personal note . . .

It was two years ago today that I moved to New York.  It’s a funny thing, when a year has passed after a given milestone you’re stunned that its been a year, at two years you can’t believe its been only two years, and once you hit three years the passage of time becomes progressively more staggering.  Ah well.  Brooklyn is in the house – Excelsior!

Off his meds and out of therapy is the only way to describe it

Americans are not really fed up with Washington in 2008 as they were in 1992.

- Newt Gingrich

The only thing I miss is Ben’s Chili Bowl

I’ve been confronted a number of times since I left school with the question of whether I might have been better off staying in Washington – where I grew up – to get a writing career going.  But soon enough a story like this always comes along to remind me why I wouldn’t be.

If only TAC would move to New York . . . .

The Bizarre Behavior of The Nation

Phil tells us that The Nation is furiously denouncing anyone who would dare suggest that Obama is anti-Israel, even denouncing totally mainstream Palestinian advocates like Rashid Khalidi in the process.

Way back when I had illusions about the possibilities of a righteous left, I hated The Nation like it was nobody’s business.  Certainly even now I have no love lost for it.   But they deserve credit where its due, and historically that has included the Middle East.

What makes all of this so bizarre is the odyssey of their star columnist Eric Alterman, who went from siding with Bill Buckley’s witch hunt against alleged anti-Semites (but really just anyone who opposed the First Gulf War and George H.W. Bush’s conversion to the Henry Wallace movement) to becoming, first, the foremost defender on the left of Walt and Mearsheimer, which he followed up with his most excellent article on Marty Peretz in The American Prospect.  Alterman was even so bold as to declare, much less acknowledge, that the future of Judaism itself is at stake.

Yet the article could only run in The American Prospect, not The Nation!!!  This struck me as both odd and significant at the time, and confirmed first by The Nation suddenly taking an all but 180-degree turn when it published this negative book review by Daniel Lazare, and now with the present calumny.

There was definitely a change in party line at The Nation – I attended in September 2006 a symposium/debate on the Walt-Mearsheimer paper at Cooper Union where The Nation had one of only two or three literature tables outside.  But today, they have no problem with Obama’s relationship with their ex-terrorist friend Bill Ayers (I myself am more than willing to overlook it as well), but a pussycat of an Arab professor at Columbia is beyond the pale.

The Obama Non-Story

Yes, Obama said some inartful and stupid reactionary-leftish things in his larger remarks, but what is the argument here exactly – that its insulting or politically incorrect to say that middle America is suffering?  Hillary’s counter-argument apparently is that this is a horrible thing to say because it denies hope and optimism and a bright future for small town America.  Yea, that’s how to win those voters, by telling them that its an insult to them to acknowledge there suffering.

Let’s get our Military History analogies strait

The usually bright Leon Hadar has this long and winding comparison of the ineffectual response of the “Iraqi government” to the return of the Sadrists to – get this – the Tet Offensive!

How many turning points in Iraq have silly people in Washington compared to Tet?  I have news for them: al-Sadr’s first show of force in April 2004 was the Tet Offensive, and we’ve been in nothing but the bloody drawing out ever since.

While we’re on the subject, I’d like to propose the best analogy to the surge and most of all the countersurge, one which gives me great pride as a New Yorker – the Battle of Brooklyn.  When Washington (the insurgents) entered New York (Baghdad), the British sought to take the city with overwhelming force.  Washington’s (the insurgents’) strategy?  Relocate to the Brooklyn Heights (outskirts of Baghdad), send a few units out on a series of suicide missions as the British (Americans) advance up from the south, buying just enough time for a long, drawn out fighting retreat from Manhattan (Baghdad), allowing the British (Americans) to take the city, giving them just the pyrrhic victory necessary so that they could be bled to death in their false confidence.

It may very well be the greatest irony in the history of the world – the earliest prophet of irregular warfare would be the father of the country whose empire would be most spectacularly destroyed by it.

Ledeen the Lunatic

There is probably no better singular manifestation of all that is sick, scary, and downright evil about the neocons than Michael Ledeen.  He is good enough to remind us of this with this outrageously bald and unhinged screed claiming that rapproachment with Iran such as is being advocated by Obama and all decent Americans who want to prevent the next war has been, I kid you not, status quo American policy ever since the fall of the Shah.

Am I supposed to dignify it with a response?

Walter Block does his Seymour Martin Lipset impression

With this essay on why Jews tend to be anti-capitalist.  But Lipset, dreadfully boring and predictable as his work was, at least could arrive at a thesis by the end of one of his pieces.  The major problem with this piece, which is still pretty interesting, is that Walter defines socialism and anti-capitalism so broadly as to deprive both terms of any meaning.

Walter’s praxeological analysis, borrowing heavily from the theories of Mises and Hayek about the anti-capitalist tendencies of intellectuals, is well and good as far as it goes.  But it takes so much for granted.  First and foremost, how fleeting the phenomenon of bourgeois Jewish intellectualism has been, lasting barely a century and certainly no more than a century and a half.  This problem is compounded with a number of embarrassingly outdated thesis points like “the attraction to Communism of Jews in Hollywood and Broadway” and “the disadvantaging of Jews by affirmative action”.

With respect to praxeology,  Walter declares the following:

Most Human Action can be explained in terms of self-interest.  But the Jews, it would appear, offer evidence of being a counter-example to this general rule.

Now this is a very bold and compelling statement which an endless series of books could be written about.  Walter dismisses, a bit too conveniently in my judgement, the idea that there is something intrinsic to Judaism that manifests itself in selflessness, for good and ill.   His rationale is that the 8th Commandment (Thou Shalt Not Steal) is the indispensable foundation of the existence and veneration of private property.  This reminds me of when my father has an all too simple and obnoxiously obvious counter-argument, but as in most of those cases it is still more or less true.

But what all this conveniently ignores is the possibility of a very real fount of ideology in Judaism, and thus the possibility that the crux of the question is not praxeological but ideological.  In my previous discussion of the matter on this blog just linked, I neglected to discuss what lies at the heart of the proposition that utopian ideology is normative to Judaism.  In short, Judaism is fundamentally premised on the idea that man’s purpose on Earth is to work toward its ultimate perfection.

Furthermore, I have cause to suspect that this was in fact Murray Rothbard’s own position.  A source tells me of a correspondence young Rothbard had with an official of FEE who probably had some anti-Semitic leanings, inquiring as to wether there was something inherently Jewish about Communism.  Rothbard’s response: “Well, it’s a little more complicated then that . . .”

To his credit, Walter’s Orthodox Jewish associate David Gordon has argued vehemently against this proposition.  But I unfortunately remain unconvinced.  Supremely ironic, I know, that it is with respect to the principle of Tikkun Olam of all things that I fulfill the line in the mission statement of my very leftist shul that it be a place “where doubt can be an act of faith”.

Speaking of that nice little lefty place in Park Slope, this brings me to my final, and eminently practical, criticism of Walter’s essay.  Both points I have already made – a) that Walter takes for granted the temporary nature of so many of the phenomena he cites, and b) that he defines socialism and anti-capitalism so broadly as to deprive both terms of meaning.  What the Jews have consistently been throughout modernity, the stubborn exception of Zionism and more broadly of the larger question of utopianism we have been vexing over not withstanding, is bourgeois liberal.

In Germany the Jews consistently occupied this class, voting either Liberal or Social Democratic depending on the time and circumstance.  In the 20th century, as throughout the world, liberalism declined and eventually collapsed among the Jews to be conquered by socialism and nationalism respectively.  But as the repeal of the 20th century takes place before our eyes, it is even now beginning to happen among us Jews, and the conflict that erupts because of that, including and perhaps especially with respect to the clash of resurging bourgeois liberalism and persistent anti-capitalist values, is the truly interesting phenomenon to study.

Still Taking Rhetoric Too Seriously

This lament by Kara is a bit unfair in my judgement.  Sure it would be nice to have more direct appeals to patriotism in a context other than jingoism, but the appeal is still there.  I don’t want to suggest that rank-and-file union members in Pennsylvania don’t take what’s happening in Colombia seriously, but the idea that their only being appealed to because of somewhat stilted internationalist rhetoric, which Kara is probably reading too much into anyway, takes these woefully misunderstood voters for granted.