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.

“No Mr. Blair, I can not lead it, I will not lead it.”

These were the words spoken by Robert Duvall in his magnificent performance as Robert E. Lee in the first scene of Gods and Generals as he rejects the offer of command of the new Grand Army of the Republic.  Also extraordinarily moving from that scene is when Lee laments “I never thought I’d live to see the day when a President of the United States would raise an army to invade his own country.”  These were not the words of some Reagan subcabinet official about the road to fascism today, but by the heir to one of America’s oldest families in 1861!!!

I think of all this when I look at the disgusting spectacle of the ass-kissing chickenshit David Petraeus who, far from taking the honorable course of a general asked to become a political instrument, is implementing the role with gusto.  Let us pray that we have officers with just half the honor of General Lee who can stop the escalation of this war into Iran by any means necessary.  And let there be no mistake, if, God forbid, there were a military coup to stop it, the first one to be shot would be Petraeus.

A Modest Proposal in defining our terms

This whole business about the death of the paleocon movement and the rise of “post-paleoism”, or whatever, leads me to a modest proposal of what we should call ourselves in the future.  Largely just since starting this blog, I have taken to using the word simply “paleo” as opposed to “paleocon”.

I propose that this be a substantive and permanent change.  Rather then being a mere faction in the death struggle with the neocons and the “conservative movement”, a simple paleo is anyone, from a Rothbardian to a Bircher to a Kauffmanite leftist to a boringly conventional Obamacon, who falls under Billy Apple‘s maxim of “those who lost”.  Paleo can become a catch-all for just about anyone in the broadly defined so-called “radical right”, in short for anyone in the coalition that came together around Ron Paul.

Paleo as a term transcends who is left or right, who is liberal or conservative.  It evokes the origins of the classical political labels of Tory and Whig, and is thus auspicious for the future.

A Crazed Ideologue

I hereby take back everything nice I ever had to say about Daniel Koffler.  So committed is he to the noxious idea that not wanting to force the virtual slave labor of the globalist order on third world peoples is racist (indeed he’s the only person I’ve ever seen make the argument who appears to sincerely believe it) that he actually argues that Hillary’s offensively phony opposition to free trade is a manifestation of said racism!  That’s right, the same Hillary who in very large measure is only still in the race because of Hispanic anti-black racist votes.

He goes on to ludicrously wail that Obama has to descend into the same pandering when of course he’s a more sincere believer in the system than Hillary.  But what else can one expect from someone who said he was supporting Obama because his “chief foreign policy adviser” was Samantha Power.  Larison, take note – this is someone projecting far worse delusions on to Obama than I.

Matt Welch and Daniel Koffler: the vanguard of cosmo-libertarianism.  Or is that democratic socialism?  Or is it right-modernism?