The White Peril 白禍

Eric doesn't like being labeled, and not for the usual tiresome I'm-too-free-spirited-to-be-defined reasons:

While I can say what I think about most things, experience shows that adopting any label invites conformity to it. (Especially criticism from those who claim it.)

Once you say what you are, some a**hole will come along and say that you're not, because he is.

Similarly, once you say what you aren't, some a**hole will come along and say that you are, because he isn't.

It's convenient that (small-l) "libertarian" suits me fine, because it tends not to set people off. I like "classical liberal," but (today's left) liberals often seem to think you're trying to dress up as one of them while being a closet fascist. ("Yeah, you're a liberal in the sense that, like, Mill would have meant it," someone sneered at me once.) And while my positions on many issues align with what we now consider "conservatism," I'm not fundamentally a conservative. (Well, I am when some gross guy is hitting on me. Then I identify myself as a "conservative" in a clear, forceful tone and mention that I'm a registered Republican. You movement conservatives don't mind the fib, do you? It's to the end of preventing casual homosexual intercourse, after all. And I really am a registered Republican.)

The only problem with calling yourself a libertarian--besides, as Eric alludes to, being invited by supposed fellow travelers to engage in poker-faced debates over the most inane hypothetical situations imaginable--is that a lot of people don't understand that it doesn't mean "libertine" or "anarchist." I can't count the number of times I've had to explain that no, I don't think all governing bodies should be dissolved so we can frolic naked in meadows all day and subsist on game and wild berries. In general, though, even those who conclude I'm just a closet right-winger seem to give me a fair hearing without rancor.

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My buddy grabbed my arm the other night and asked whether I'd seen Julie Burchill's inevitable column about the new Madonna album yet. He summarized it as "If I spent four hours a day at the gym, I'd look better than that bitch!" Not too far wide of the mark:

Madonna is everywhere, reigning over the just and the unjust, friend and foe alike; loving her or hating her is as futile as loving or hating the rain, wind or snow - it'll happen anyway.

...

If Madonna didn't devote her life to harassing us, what would she do with herself all day? Remember, this is a woman with so much time on her hands that she can spend four hours a day working out. I know I'm fat, but I have to say that if I spent four hours a day working out, I'd want to look a damn sight hotter than Madonna does; those vile veiny hands, that sad stringy neck - yuck!

Madonna has the sort of body that tends toward the plump/luscious side; you can see it in her early videos. Endomorphs like that who diet and exercise themselves into having no body fat often end up with skin that has a weird stretched look.

The rest of the column is the exact same thing Burchill writes whenever a Madonna record comes out, and it's as funny (and bawdy) as usual.

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Surprise! Hillary Clinton once said something nasty behind closed doors about white, working-class Southerners (via Ann Althouse):

In January 1995, as the Clintons were licking their wounds from the 1994 congressional elections, a debate emerged at a retreat at Camp David. Should the administration make overtures to working class white southerners who had all but forsaken the Democratic Party? The then-first lady took a less than inclusive approach.

"Screw 'em," she told her husband. "You don't owe them a thing, Bill. They're doing nothing for you; you don't have to do anything for them."

And since some things never change, Clinton's spokesman responds with contempt when asked about the authenticity of the quotation:

A spokesperson for Clinton said the quote was taken out of context and did not reflect her true political philosophy. "This quote differs from the recollection of others who were in the room at the time this comment was allegedly made," said Jay Carson. "To be clear, that's not how she felt then and it's not how she feels now, and the proof is in how she has lived her life, the work she has done and the policies she has pushed and pursued over the last 35 years."

Asked to produce a witness who would say that Clinton had been misquoted, Carson wrote: "So, you've got two guys we've barely heard of remembering a verbatim quote from 13 years ago?... Sounds totally and completely reliable."

Remember the Clinton administration, when we were subjected to that kind of smear-and-spin routine almost daily when something or other threatened to blow up in the happy couple's faces? We could be mere months from going back to it!

Eric also noticed this story. (He didn't say much about it, but, then, he had to go to New Jersey, so he had plenty of pain to contend with already.)

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I don't think this post has enough parentheses.

[Added later: Or maybe I should have gone with "Your Imagination" as a title. "Love, Need, and Want You"? Maybe "When Will I See You Again"? "If You Don't Know Me by Now"? "Hate on Me"?]

I have a lot of affection for my home state of Pennsylvania. I grew up outside Allentown; my parents had the same house from the time they got married until I'd finished college. Then they moved four miles down the road, where they still are. My father was a plant worker for Bethlehem Steel while I was growing up, so there were a fair share of layoffs and lean years during the '80s.

Even though Barack Obama has been trounced already for his remarks about Pennsylvania, let me just add a bit. (Note to Tom Maguire about that headline, though: John Mellencamp is from Indiana. Keep your troglodyte-populated states straight! Then, too, I should be grateful he didn't quote "Allentown" by Illybay Oeljay, which I have something of a hangup about.) This is where the audio is, apparently, and the key paragraphs are these:

You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.

And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

I'm not sure it's possible to do justice to how retarded that is--and I say that as an overeducated, corporate, atheist, homosexual urbanite who's spent the last dozen years in Tokyo and is now happily returning to New York.

The anti-trade part I do agree with. I've had (mild) arguments with my father over protectionism for the steel industry, which simply gives the shaft to American workers and their families further down the supply chain.

The rest is ridiculous.

As far as guns go, my father wasn't big on hunting, but my uncles and cousins went regularly, and I don't think they were taking out their job-related frustrations on the deer. Sport hunting is just one of those practices that the working class has in common with the aristocracy, and there are plenty of counties in the northern part of PA that are ideal for it.

Furthermore, most rural areas are by definition somewhat less densely populated than Hyde Park, Chicago. My mother has two handguns and takes shooting lessons because my father works nights quite a bit. If someone broke into the house, she'd have to fend for herself until the township police arrived. That's been a fact of life since long before manufacturing jobs started leaving.

I also think it highly likely that commonwealth history has something to do with attitudes toward guns. In Pennsylvania, at least in eastern Pennsylvania, you spend your childhood taking field trips to Valley Forge and Gettysburg. In the borough where I grew up, there's a preserved cabin, now nearly three hundred years old, called the Shelter House, where visiting schoolkids are lectured by their elders about the fragile existence of the first settlers as they carved out new lives in unknown territory. The idea that life can be harsh and that you may have to defend yourself violently is not alien to anyone who stays awake through state history classes.

By the way, you noticed that my hometown is called Emmaus, right? My parents now live in Old Zionsville. The second-largest city in the Lehigh Valley is Bethlehem. There's a Bethel in Berks County. Down toward Lancaster there's a town called Smyrna. There's also this little hamlet in Pennsylvania called Philadelphia--have you heard of it?--the name of which is Greek for "city of brotherly love" and is a place mentioned in the Book of Revelation.

That's, you know, in the Bible. Seekers of religious freedom were numerous among Pennsylvania settlers. William Penn was a Quaker whose beliefs had riled his father and the king. In Pennsylvania Dutch country, we're famous for having Amish communities. Lots of old Moravian and Lutheran churches, too. A combination of religious fervor and tolerance is movingly woven into Pennsylvania history from day one, and people in small towns have been going to church regularly since long before the decline of the rust belt economy. The insinuation that people just kind of started turning to religion to give them a sense of shallow comfort when the layoffs started is deeply offensive. I rejected the theology I'd been brought up with years ago as an accurate explanation for the origins of the universe, but it's just plain low to take cheap shots against the faithful.

Things like "antipathy toward people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment" are so vague it's hard to know what to make of them, but I will say that people tend to associate with those who are like them in New York and San Fracisco as much as they do in Reading. And the small towns have been diversifying, slowly but surely. It takes time for people to get used to one another, and everyone has prejudices that have to be discarded in the face of experience. That's hardly some sort of distinguishing characteristic of Pennsylvania.

Eric doesn't have anything up about this yet, but when he does, it's sure to be fabulous. In the interim, on a related topic, he's posted about Mayor Michael Nutter in Philadelphia, who's had the effrontery to compare himself to the Founding Fathers in signing gun control laws:

"Almost 232 years ago, a group of concerned Americans took matters in their own hands and did what they needed to do by declaring that the time had come for a change," Nutter said as he signed the bills in front of a table of confiscated weapons outside the police evidence room in City Hall.

Jeff at Alphecca has also posted.


Added on 19 April: Eric has posted.

James Kirchik is hardly a lockstep liberal, but in this post, I think he does actually make a typical liberal mistake in typical liberal fashion. His conclusion is this:

A top concern for voters in November will be a candidate's ability to raise American prestige. Rest assured that McCain will do just that.

Given its origins, the word prestige sounds like a perfect fit for McCain to me. That aside, I think Kirchik is wrong about most voters. Most Americans don't care what people think in New York and San Francisco, for Pete's sake, let alone in Paris and Berlin.

Or that's not entirely true. As one commenter puts it (nonmilagno posting Apr 2, 2008 - 4:30 pm), "It's not necessary that Europeans like us. However, it is important that they realise we have common interests." What worries Americans is not our lack of "prestige" but that we can't always rely on other Western countries to go to the mat for Western values. I think that if a presidential candidate convincingly demonstrated that he or she could get governments of other democracies to see why the WOT affects them, too, voters would care. But proportion of American voters who are hoping they'll be able to hold their heads higher among their European and Latin American friends at brunch on Sundays is small and very geographically restricted.

Kirchik's argument about whether people care about rebuilding our reputation abroad is wrong on its own terms, but so is his assessment of how our reputation got where it is:

The truth is that much of contemporary anti-Americanism is a manifestation of disgust with George W. Bush as an individual and will immediately dissipate as soon as a new president — Democrat or Republican — enters the Oval Office in 2009. Yet also keep in mind that a similar degree of anti-American sentiment is inherent and may take a generation to disappear. Yet also keep in mind that a similar degree of anti-American sentiment is inherent and may take a generation to disappear. French anti-Americanism, for instance, springs from economic inferiority and a lost empire, was flaunted as far back as 50 years ago when Charles de Gaulle was president and George W. Bush was but a little boy. Much of South America's anti-Americanism stems from 19th century American imperialism, something that no American president will be able to change.

What the next president can do to reverse the popularity deficit is distinguish himself from the current administration's most unpopular policies. On this score, McCain already has much to his credit. He has long stood out for his proactive stance on global warming, his opposition to coercive interrogation practices of terrorism suspects, and his support for closing the prison on Guantanamo Bay, all things which anger people and governments overseas.

Given the hedging in that first paragraph, it's hard to pin down how much anti-Americanism Kirchik expects to disappear magically on Inauguration Day. What proportion is attributable to anti-Bush sentiment? I'd say less than he thinks. Europeans and Asians loved the Clintons--they were lawyers with prestigious educations who talked a lot of big-government theory, which made them easy to identify with for a lot of elites there. And yet there was still plenty of bitching about America. Too prosperous, too confident militarily, too confident culturally, too friendly with Israel. They might like to see us hobble our economy with some drastic policies to combat global warming and stuff, but I don't think the basic attitude is likely to change soon, no matter who's president.

So I don't think Kirchik's argument in favor of McCain washes. Virginia Postrel has an intriguing and more convincing analysis of Barack Obama's glamour in The Atlantic:

Obama's glamour gives him a powerful political advantage. But it also poses special problems for the candidate and, if he succeeds, for the country.

...

To rely on illusions is to risk disillusionment. If Obama the dream candidate becomes Obama the real president, he'll be forced to pick sides, make compromises, and turn "hope" and "change" into policies some people like and some people don't. Or, like the movie star governor of California, he might choose instead to preserve his glamour by letting others set the agenda. Either way, his face won't make America's worries disappear, and his cool, polite manner won't eliminate political disagreements. Some of his supporters will feel disappointed, even betrayed. The result could be a backlash, heightened partisan conflict, and a failed presidency. George W. Bush ran as a uniter, and Jimmy Carter promised national renewal.

Anne Applebaum wrote a column on a somewhat related issue last year. The headline was "What Presidents Don't Know," and her point was that some learning on the job is inevitable. Wonkish expertise and a ten-point plan for everything are less important than a realistic sense of what the candidate is getting into:

In fact, there may be some sorts of experience that are actually detrimental to a potential president. I worry, for example, about Hillary Clinton's much-vaunted travels as first lady: She came, she made carefully prepared speeches, she received polite applause. It won't be like that if she's president, and I hope she doesn't think it will be.

...

Other kinds of foreign connections could prove useful. Even aside from his specific beliefs, John McCain happens to be particularly good at speaking to (and arguing with) foreign audiences: The director of a German foundation recently complained to me that the U.S. presidential campaign was spoiling his transatlantic conferences because it meant McCain couldn't attend anymore. Meanwhile, Obama, with his African relatives and Indonesian childhood, would start his presidency riding an enormous wave of international goodwill. His differences from our current president -- he's young, black, with a more complicated background -- would win him a lot of points in a lot of places, whether or not he knows the name of the Pakistani president (and whether or not he would bomb that country, as he recently seemed to imply he would).

I remember vividly when Ann Althouse linked Applebaum's column. A lot of her commenters seemed to take the above passage as an out-and-out endorsement of Obama--which gave me pause, because I hadn't. Applebaum seemed to me to be observing two things: that any new president will have expectations and a default way of reacting to new information, and that how other world leaders respond will be an important part of that new information. She appeared to be suggesting that Obama might be able to leverage his initial warm reception; Virginia says that his glamour won't be enough to save him if he gets into trouble but that he may have a realistic sense of its limits.