Reason Magazine - Staff > Michael C. Moynihan

Crying Wolf

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 15:30:00 EDT

The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot, by Naomi Wolf, New York: Chelsea Green, 192 pages, $13.95

Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning, by Jonah Goldberg, New York: Doubleday, 496 pages, $27.95

In a May 2008 essay for The Times of London, playwright Tom Stoppard, the British son of Czech émigrés, explained his long-held contempt for his more hyperbolic comrades in the theater. “I felt myself out of patience with people who, from 1968 onwards, would denigrate this country that adopted me, this country that I’d adopted, as some kind of fascist police state. It just seemed so embarrassing that those countries that truly could be described as such were very, very different from Britain.” In Stoppard’s acclaimed 2006 play Rock ’n’ Roll, a meditation on Czech resistance to Soviet occupation, one character upbraids his daughter for her lazy use of the term, grumbling that many in her generation “think a fascist is a mounted policeman at a demo in Grosvenor Square.”

To anyone that has attended a political demonstration, trawled a blog, or attended a Western university in the past half century, the scattershot use of “fascist” will ring familiar. And almost as clichéd as accusing an ideological opponent of fascist sympathies is the accurate observation that such charges often demonstrate an utter lack of understanding of just what qualifies as fascist, other than “someone I vehemently disagree with.” As an indicator of a particular set of political beliefs, “fascism” has become a perfectly meaningless pejorative, a political cudgel that is obtuse and imprecise by design.

What, if anything, unites such disparate fascist dictators as Benito Mussolini of Italy, Adolf Hitler of Germany, António de Oliveira Salazar of Portugal, and Francisco Franco of Spain? Fascism, the historian Stanley Payne writes in Fascism: Comparison and Definition, “is the vaguest of contemporary political terms.” Few ideologies have produced so many academic volumes dedicated to establishing a singular set of definitional criteria. All of the political movements commonly associated with fascism overlap in key areas (opposition to both classical liberalism and communism, for instance) and diverge in others (the Germans rejected Italian-style corporatism in favor of what one historian called a “racist-totalitarian welfare state”).

While professional historians puzzle over the definitions, pop-culture references to Nazism continue to be flung with distasteful abandon. In a recent ad campaign, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals compared factory farming to the systematized killing at Auschwitz. In a public service television spot produced by MTV, a packed subway car is dramatically raided by a heavily armed SWAT team. At gunpoint, menaced by a pack of German shepherds, terrified passengers are hustled out of the car and onto an empty platform, where shrieking children are separated from their parents. The scene freezes, then the image morphs into an archival photo of passengers disembarking a train at a Nazi death camp. If the visual message was unclear, helpful text fills the screen: “The Holocaust happened to people like us.” Fascism is coming.

Political commentators and actors of all stripes—right and left, Christian and Muslim and atheist—accuse their enemies of harboring fascist tendencies. Radical Islamists are lazily labeled “Islamofascists,” not because they possess an interest in corporatism but because they are brutish and dumb and harbor fantasies of exterminating Jews. Pro-Palestinian groups routinely compare the actions of the Israeli military to the Nazi Holocaust. Evangelical Christians are “religious fascists” duping Americans into embracing theocracy, according to writers such as former New York Times foreign correspondent Chris Hedges, author of American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America. Creationists attempt to connect Darwinism to Nazism, while atheists counter that Nazism’s nexus with Pope Pius XII was vital to its success.

More than six decades after the death of Hitler and 30 years since the collapse of Franco’s clerico-military dictatorship in Spain, fascism has returned as the preferred insult of the intellectually careless. In the post-history decade of the 1990s, when Cold War passions deflated along with the military budget, such accusations were largely consigned to the radical fringe. To the mainstream left, Bill Clinton might have been a shameless panderer who punted on gays in the military and co-opted conservative issues like welfare reform, but he was still, after all, a liberal. But with the election in 2000 of a Republican president who greatly expanded executive power and inaugurated a Long War on Terror, it was natural that the fascism charge would once again come into vogue. But this time, after years of politico-linguistic abuse by the left, some on the right have begun to fight back, conflating fascism with the progressivism many liberals hold dear. The insult isn’t just for lefties anymore. Two recent bestsellers exemplify how fascism has evolved in our political discourse. With Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning, Jonah Goldberg, a conservative columnist and editor-at-large of National Review Online, attempts to reappropriate the word from those who employ it willy-nilly against enemies to their right. “The major flaw in all of this,” Goldberg writes, “is that fascism, properly understood, is not a phenomenon of the right at all.”

While hostile bloggers and reviewers piled on Goldberg, few noticed the runaway success of another, much more shoddily researched fascist-themed tract, this one from the feminist writer Naomi Wolf. According to Wolf’s The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot, America is barreling down the road toward a fascist future, following a path well-trodden by Mussolini and Hitler. The Bush administration’s spotty record on civil liberties and the growth of executive power aren’t temporary phenomena, Wolf argues, but portend a greater “fascist shift.” America, she writes, is in the late stages of our own Weimar Republic —it’s a partially free society nearing collapse, “on the verge of a violent police state.”

As overheated as such sentiments seem, they are increasingly infiltrating the cultural mainstream. The End of America spent 15 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and nearly six months fluttering around the Amazon top 50. Before hitting bookstores, it was awarded a coveted “starred review” from Library Journal and named the “best political book” of 2007 by The Nation’s John Nichols.

At a taut 180 pages, The End of America offers a Monarch Notes recapitulation of German and Italian fascism in an attempt to draw parallels between various 20th century totalitarianisms and the numerous “examples of [America’s] shift into a dictatorial reality.” Wolf insists this is no exercise in hyperbole. “Every argument I make is strictly on the facts,” she writes. “I am not being heated or even rhetorical. I am being technical.”

By Wolf’s estimation, there are 10 warning signs that presage a fascist takeover: A pre-fascist government will invoke an internal and external enemy, establish secret prisons, develop a paramilitary force, surveil ordinary citizens, infiltrate citizen groups, arbitrarily detain and release citizens, target key individuals, restrict the press, cast criticism as “espionage” and dissent as “treason,” and subvert the rule of law.

Several of these steps aren’t particularly “fascist” at all. Non-fascist authoritarian states such as China, Cuba, and Vietnam are known to “establish secret prisons,” “target key individuals,” and “subvert the rule of law,” for example. Nor does Wolf seriously consider the fact that many of her steps—carefully selected to hew close to the controversies of the Bush years—would also apply to previous American presidents, including the liberal titans Franklin Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Abraham Lincoln.

When asked for a single-line definition of fascism, Wolf is equally murky, telling Democracy Now host Amy Goodman last year that “one dictionary definition is when the state starts to use terror against the individual in an effort to oppose democracy. And that’s what we’re seeing in the United States right now.” Wolf would be advised to invest in a new dictionary.

By seeing no doctrinal distinctions between the various authoritarian and dictatorial regimes she invokes, Wolf instead draws upon a series of dubious parallels between American foreign and domestic policy and the crimes of Nazi Germany, East Germany, fascist Italy, Maoist China, and Stalinist Russia—all presented as evidence of the “fascist shift.”

When describing the overzealous apparatchiks of the Transportation Security Administration, Wolf recounts a familiar tale of mothers forced to sample their own breast milk to demonstrate that their baby bottles were not, in fact, transporting liquid explosives. The payoff: “In Benito Mussolini’s era, one intimidation tactic was to force citizens to drink emetics and other liquids.”

Referring to the so-called Brooks Brothers riot, during which Republicans attempted to thwart a hand recount of votes in the 2000 election, Wolf wonders, “What was it about the image of a mob of young men dressed in identical shirts, shouting at poll workers outside of a voting center in Florida during the 2000 recount that looked familiar?” Well, the Nazis wore “identical shirts” too. (Incidentally, Wolf’s footnote points to a New York Times story that makes no mention of the protesters’ clothing.) Those who objected to the Dixie Chicks’ antiwar stance by publicly destroying their CDs—private citizens, all—are likened to the Nazis’ government-sponsored burning of books.

Bush’s ridiculous May 2003 aircraft carrier stunt, in front of a fluttering banner declaring the Iraq “mission accomplished,” is compared to the Albert Speer-orchestrated Nuremberg Rallies. For Wolf, the parallels are eerie: On one occasion Goebbels thanked the obedient volk for their “support in the accomplishment of this mission.”

It’s not just these “similarities” that convince Wolf of where America is headed. Chest-puffing that she is a “student of language,” Wolf claims that soon after the 1933 Reichstag fire Hermann Goering declared that the country was to prepare itself for “kriegsfusz” (sic)—war-footing. (It’s actually spelled kriegsfuss.) In order to underline the similarities between Nazi and American rhetoric, she writes that “After 9/11, then-National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice and Vice President Cheney coined a new phrase: America was now on a ‘war-footing.’ ” This is a very odd claim; the term “war-footing” is centuries old and registers tens of thousands of results in newspaper archives dating back to the 1850s. Indeed, on September 12, 2001, before Wolf cites any administration official using the phrase, The Guardian headlined a story: “US on war footing as thousands die in hijack jet outrage.” The German word kriegsfuss also predates the establishment of the Nazi Party.

Turning from philological issues to instances of state repression, Wolf offers several alleged examples of fascist-style suppression of dissent. When former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales discussed the “collective purge of all the [U.S.] attorneys,” which resulted in the dismissal of seven not considered “loyal Bushies,” it was certainly a matter of serious concern. But it did not, as Wolf writes, amount to “a professional Night of the Long Knives,” a reference to Hitler’s violent 1934 putsch against the powerful, street-brawling brownshirts. One act provoked a media outcry and led to the perpetrator’s resignation, and the other led to the brutal murder of 100 political rivals while solidifying Adolf Hitler’s power base. Wolf commits a bewildering series of mistakes that demonstrate not even a rudimentary understanding or familiarity with the subject of fascism. Readers are told that Hitler was a propaganda master because he was “trained as a visual artist.” (He was not.) Readers are informed that the “formal extermination camps” were “not established until the very eve of war.” (They were established in 1942.) Nor did Nazi Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels “develop the practice of embedding journalists.”

Like countless leftists before her, Wolf wildly exaggerates the alleged fascism of the modern democratic Right while inexcusably minimizing the dictatorial crimes of the historical communist Left. The early Bolsheviks, she claims, don’t deserve to be sullied by a comparison to modern America, because “The Communist revolutionaries of 1917 were opposed to torture, having suffered it themselves at the hands of czarist forces.” Wolf would be advised to investigate the gruesome crimes perpetrated by Felix Dzerzhinsky’s Cheka, the secret police founded at the outset of the Russian Revolution.

Even when not flubbing or oversimplifying the broad details of fascist ideology, The End of America commits the fatal sin of contorting every sinister moment of the 20th century to ensure that it lines up with some aspect of the “war on terror.” It is clearly with Al-Qaeda in mind that Wolf wrote this stunningly ignorant passage on the construction of phantom enemies: “What matters to a fascist leader is not to get rid of the enemy but rather to maintain an enemy,” a piece of analysis that would certainly surprise the families of untermensch liquidated during the Second World War.

None of this is to suggest that concerns over the Bush administration’s view of civil liberties and expended executive power aren’t legitimate. But there exist many sober treatments of this subject, such as Jack Goldsmith’s The Terror Presidency and Charlie Savage’s Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy. To suggest with a straight face that the modern United States is on the verge of slipping into German- or Italian-style fascism is to ignore the necessary preconditions that precede such takeovers, none of which are likely to arise in the contemporary United States. Nowhere in “Bush’s America” (an almost entirely meaningless appellation) do we see the shuttering of independent media, the mass emigration of political opponents and ethnic minorities, the murder or imprisonment of those who can’t get out, the mandatory mass rallies, the introduction—or continuation—of conscription. Public debate is ferocious, impolite, and open, a fact well reflected in the president’s historically low approval rating. The publication and mainstream media promotion of Wolf’s book, including a softball appearance on Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report, would suggest that her fevered vision of a “closing society,” a modern day Weimer-like collapse, is risible.

While it is unlikely, if not impossible, that America could mutate into a fascist state in the style of 1930s Germany or Italy, this country did have a fascist moment of its own. That’s the premise of Jonah Goldberg Liberal Fascism, a disquisition on the left-wing origins and progressive embrace of fascist ideas. In his introduction, Goldberg acknowledges that his motive for writing the book was not only to dispute the common linkage of conservatism and fascism, but to argue that fascism, in fact, crawled from the swamps of the left, abetted by liberal heroes such as Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and birth control advocate Margret Sanger.

Goldberg is justified in quarreling with those who have argued that fascist economic theory is essentially an extreme form of capitalism. The economies of Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany, and the ideas touted by British Union of Fascists leader Oswald Mosley and the neo-Nazi parties of post-war Europe, in fact stood in direct opposition to free market liberalism. The often overlooked Mosley, for instance, denounced “Jewish” chain stores, and also decreed that in fascist England “chain stores which are British owned will be permitted only under licence, and to an extent which does not interfere with the Fascist system of small shopkeeper and co-operative society.” It was an argument borrowed from National Socialism.

The stubbornly persistent myth that fascism was the logical end-point of capitalism was originally propagated by left-wing Italian and German opponents to Mussolini and Hitler. For example, in his book It Could Happen Here (originally subtitled Star-Spangled Fascism in Bush’s America), the liberal columnist Joe Conason argues that when Americans in the 1930s embraced the radical corporatism of the New Deal they were in fact rejecting the fascism of big business: “And in the time of crisis, when powerful figures in the corporate elite and the Republican Party looked toward fascism for salvation, the American people chose democracy and the New Deal instead.” Such arguments, Goldberg convincingly demonstrates, are an inversion of the truth. The New Deal was the nearest America ever came to economic fascism.

Goldberg’s chapters on the authoritarian temptations of Woodrow Wilson and FDR, and the socialism of Nazi Germany and fascist Italy, draw heavily on the work of historians such as Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Götz Aly, A. James Gregor, and Stanley Payne—all of whom have underscored the socialist-fascist convergence—plus libertarian thinkers such as Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek. It is a compelling argument, and Goldberg does a great service in bringing these issues to a non-academic audience.

The parallels between Mussolini’s economic policy and the New Deal were contemporaneously noted by American socialists such as Norman Thomas, who in 1933 said that while FDR was “no Mussolini” his economic program was “extraordinarily like the Italian program.” As Goldberg notes, the Nazi daily Völkischer Beobachter praised the “National Socialist strains of thought in [FDR’s] economic and social policies,” while New Deal officials like Hugh Johnson and Rex Tugwell praised the corporatist economy of fascist Italy. Goldberg then adds the requisite caveat—one repeated throughout the book—that “nowhere here do I suggest that New Dealism was akin to Hitlerism if we are to define Hitlerism solely in terms of the Holocaust.”

But what is he suggesting by the comparison? Goldberg wants us to take seriously the fascist strains in American economic thought and governance, not “the oppression, cruelty, and tyranny of classical fascism.” Yet if corporatism and government intervention in the economy is a prerequisite for the creation of a fascist state, how to explain Francisco Franco’s Catholic fascism in Spain? As the historian Robert Paxton writes in Anatomy of Fascism, “Franco’s state intervened little in the economy and made little effort to regulate the daily life of people as long as they were passive.” The Nazi state’s economic policy was heavily interventionist but, as Stanley Payne notes, it “explicitly rejected formal corporatism.”

Goldberg then goes much further, broadening the fascist impulse to include too many elements of mainstream modern liberalism, from John F. Kennedy to Hillary Clinton. In so doing, he, like Wolf, fails to provide the reader with a single, accurate definition, relying instead on the occasional doctrinal commonality between historical fascists and his modern ideological opponents.

Goldberg writes, for instance, that “a common principle” shared by the German and American New Deals is that “the state should be allowed to get away with anything, so long as it is for ‘good reasons.’ This is a common principle among fascism, Nazism, Progressivism, and what we today call liberalism.” If we accept this concept as true, doesn’t it also apply to communist collectivization and to contemporary conservative rationalization of torture and surveillance programs?

Goldberg is also stretching accuracy by claiming that right-wing fascism is “a myth.” It is true, as he repeatedly stresses, that the left-wing roots of fascism have been deliberately obscured, but, as Payne notes, most European fascist movements, including in Mussolini’s Italy, found that “their most common allies lay on the right, particularly the radical authoritarian right.”

While clearly possessing a detailed understanding of fascist history, Goldberg’s difficulty comes in shoehorning his thesis into the narrative of 20th century American political history, using the blunt instrument of hyperbole. So John F. Kennedy, a president arguably more conservative than John McCain, is slammed for “advancing fascist themes and aesthetics in American politics.” And the short newsreel clip of a young Bill Clinton shaking hands with JFK is “Reifenstahlesque” [sic].

For Goldberg, fascism is omnipresent. He points to the The Da Vinci Code’s “ominous roots and parallels with Nazi thought,” and he claims that “hip-hop culture has incorporated a shocking number of fascist themes.” He is convinced that “Hitler would have given Dead Poets Society a standing ovation.” The film Gladiator, Goldberg writes, is a textbook example of Hollywood employing “fascistic imagery.”

At times, the contortions required to tie fascism with 21st century partisanship can bring Goldberg close to sounding like Wolf: “Fascists famously rules by terror. Political correctness isn’t literally terroristic, but it does govern through fear.” Well, yes, but being accused of racial insensitivity is rather different than seeing your family arrested on Kristallnacht.

While Hillary Clinton’s 1993 attempt at a government takeover of health care was disastrous and destined to failure, why view it as a failed bit of fascism rather than a failed attempt at generically Scandinavian socialism? And if the Clinton health care plan was socialist, does that mean that it was also fascist because, after all, both Nazi Germany and fascist Italy were economically left-wing? Is statism automatically fascism?

It is here that Goldberg’s book ultimately fails to convince. A jaunt through modern Sweden, for instance, would find an economy hobbled by state intervention and government agencies that talk endlessly about the health of the community—the folkhem, a term redolent of the Nazi concept of volksgemeinschaft. But if we then broaden the meaning of fascism to include social democratic Sweden, one wonders what country in Europe wouldn’t qualify. In his attempt to reappropriate the insult from the left, Goldberg has further diluted a term that was already almost unrecognizable.

That certain modern ideologies contain trace elements of fascism doesn’t mean that they are in any meaningful way fascist, or even pre-fascist (as the Wolfian left would have it). Not every flag-bedecked rally is Nuremberg, not every Guantanamo Bay is Auschwitz, and not every ill-conceived call for redistribution is a sign of corporatism.

It is important, in times of crisis, when an administration invokes the perennial threat of an external enemy, that a citizenry be vigilant in safeguarding civil liberties, in jealously guarding the constitutionality of invoked wartime powers. But when those self-appointed guardians collapse into “Weimar moment” paranoia, not only is the concept of fascism diluted to the point of meaninglessness, but other, more pressing liberty-related issues are subsumed by the hysteria. When both sides see creeping fascism lurking around every bit of political rhetoric and action they disagree with, then the term doesn’t need to be reappropriated or redefined, it needs to be buried.

Michael C. Moynihan is an associate editor of reason.

Hooray for Uribe

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 15:00:00 EDT

In December 1996, the Peruvian Marxist guerrilla group Tupac Amaru (MRTA) occupied the Japanese embassy in Lima, taking hostage a group assembled to celebrate the birthday of Emperor Akihito. Four months later, Peru’s strongman president, the now-imprisoned Alberto Fujimori, ordered a team of elite Peruvian soldiers to retake the building. The handful of rebels who managed to survive the initial assault, witnesses later reported, were bound, dragged into a courtyard, and executed by members of the Peruvian army. Not a single member of the MRTA made it out alive.

A rather different tactic was employed by Colombian President Alvaro Uribe, whose special forces freed 15 hostages held by the Marxist terror group FARC on Wednesday. The hostages included three American contractors and former Colombian presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt. Dressed like a group of slightly menacing Berkeley baristas, the army infiltrators disguised themselves in Che Guevara t-shirts (seriously) and camouflaged uniforms, easily convincing the FARC that they too were fist-clenching, Lenin-reading members of the jungle politburo. It was an elaborate, cleverly plotted ruse—one that was guaranteed to fool a platoon of knuckle-dragging, forest-dwelling communist revolutionaries.

And it was a stunning—and, to Latin America watchers, unexpected—success. While it is tempting to indulge in the reflexive optimism that follows such a victory, the war against the FARC isn’t over yet. Nevertheless, it is also difficult to disagree with The Economist’s immediate post-raid assessment. The operation, said the magazine, was “a disaster for the FARC and its sympathizers in Latin America who hoped to use the hostage issue to weaken Mr Uribe.” In other words, it was a disaster for not only the FARC, but also for Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, Bolivia’s Evo Morales, Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega, and Ecuador’s Rafael Correa, all of whom have expressed some degree of sympathy or ideological affinity for the group.

While outwardly congratulatory, many in Latin America and Europe could muster only lukewarm praise for the Uribe government, which is viewed by many as ideologically suspect and too friendly with the Bush administration. As one blogger at The Economist noticed, more than a few European newspapers were more interested in criticizing Uribe’s policies than they were in discussing the rescue of Betancourt. The French paper Libération championed Betancourt’s cause, The Economist noted, but “could barely bring itself to congratulate Mr Uribe and the Colombians this morning,” choosing instead to upbraid the government’s “implacable” war against the guerrillas.

In the fever swamps of the far left, the reaction was predictably full of non sequiturs about Uribe’s dubious past associations and rumor-mongering about the fortuitous timing of the operation. The left-wing radio station Pacifica devoted a significant chunk of its coverage following the raid to questioning both the “timing” of the operation (more on this in a moment) and the institutional corruption of the Uribe administration—but nothing on the FARC’s unspeakably brutal crimes against the Colombian peasantry.

A Huffington Post writer dismissed as fake the evidence gleaned from laptops captured in the raid that killed FARC commander Raul Reyes in March. The material, which was verified by Interpol and suggested connections between FARC and officials in Venezuela and Ecuador, was most likely ginned up by the “death squad President Alvaro Uribe.” (The same author recently praised Evo Morales for “turn[ing] over the tortilla of our consciousness about Indians, race and power.”)

There is an understandable desire to bludgeon Uribe’s credibility by citing, for instance, his shady family and political connections. And there is quite a bit to unpack here. While it’s unfair to compare President Uribe to the buffoonish President Chavez, his critics are indeed justified in expressing skepticism of the timing of the raid, which they claim is designed to distract the public from a very Chavista-like scandal. Uribe’s second term election victory was secured after Congress lifted a ban on the serving of consecutive terms—a victory secured through good old-fashioned bribery, say his critics. The court recently ruled against the president on this very issue, forcing Uribe to issue a furious denial.

And his accusers are also correct to criticize the positively Bolivarian attempt to hold on to power for a third term, with party activists collecting signatures to force a referendum on the issue. While not directly involved in the campaign to extend his rule, Uribe has thus far refused to eliminate the possibility of yet another presidential mandate.

And then there is “Plan Colombia”—the wasteful, destructive, and counterproductive drug war operation inaugurated by former U.S. President Bill Clinton (and expanded by President George W. Bush) and former Colombian President Andres Pastrana. Drugs and the FARC are deeply intertwined, but it is optimistic to think that an end to the Colombian drug war would precipitate the end of the guerrilla war.

So yes, the Uribe government is far from perfect—it is Latin America after all, so we must judge on a steep curve—but as even the left-leaning Guardian acknowledged this week, Uribe is indeed a "skilled politician" who "has been able to bring a degree of order, security and prosperity to the country that was scarcely believed possible when he took office in 2002."

So what to do now? With FARC against the ropes and Uribe’s popularity at all time highs, former KGB “agent of influence” Richard Gott, author of a hagiographic biography of Hugo Chavez and a pro-Castro history of Cuba, advised that a “new Democratic government in the United States in January should put pressure on Uribe to engage in negotiation.” The New York Times said much the same: “President Álvaro Uribe should now capitalize on that disarray and offer the rebels, who long ago traded the business of political liberation for drug trafficking, a political settlement.”

During his press conference with the freed hostages, Uribe himself made a vague offer to FARC, one quickly endorsed by Betancourt: “This is an invitation to the FARC to make peace, to start releasing the hostages they still hold captive.” It is rather important to note that this was not the first in a new round of negations, but a stern demand for peace, offering no reciprocal action by the government.

So let’s bring this back around to where we started. Looking at the Peruvian example of fighting a war against left-wing guerrillas, we see a protracted, bloody war that the government ultimately won, crushing both the Shining Path and Tupac Amaru, two Maoist terror organizations who demanded nothing less than the restructuring of civilization according to the Chairman’s book of insane aphorisms. And there could, of course, be little political negotiations when there was almost nothing to negotiate. That was a situation understood by the rebels, and one that prompted them to enter into the business of kidnap and assassination.

There is an important distinction that must be made between the Fujimori tactics noted above—which routinely involved extrajudicial executions and the torture and disappearance of detainees—and those of Uribe, who claims to have insisted that the FARC hostage takers not be harmed during the raid. And while his critics rail against waging war against the FARC, it is only now, with the organization in full retreat, that the government can start making demands and "negotiate." This is, in other words, fast becoming the type of "negotiation" we saw aboard the battleship USS Missouri in 1945.

All of this is good news for Colombia, President Uribe, the families of the released, and the country’s economy (the Colombian peso surged the following day). But last word must go to Betancourt, who after years in captivity wisely warned both the Latin American left and her captors to let Colombia choose its own destiny: "I think (Chavez and Correa) are important allies in this process—but on the condition of respect for Colombian democracy. Colombians elected Alvaro Uribe. Colombians did not elect the FARC.”

And with President Uribe's approval rating hovering around 80 percent, don't expect Colombians to elect the FARC anytime soon.

Michael C. Moynihan is an associate editor at reason.

The Feminist Mistake

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 15:00:00 EDT

The end of this interminable Democratic primary was to be inevitably followed by a week of incoherent postmortems detailing the real reasons for the demise of Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.). How could it be that Mrs. Clinton—a woman of significant experience, possessing that Clintonian political acumen—flamed out so dramatically?

Recall that back in 2005, Dick Morris, the prostitute-loving former adviser to President Clinton, prophesied that "as of this moment, there is no doubt that Hillary Clinton is on a virtually uncontested trajectory to win the Democratic nomination and, very likely, the 2008 election." But Republicans need not despair, Morris wrote, because "her victory is not inevitable. There is one, and only one, figure in America who can stop Hillary Clinton: Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice."

The following year, conservative columnist John Podhoretz played the dangerous game of premature political prognostication as well, with the release of his book Can She Be Stopped? Hillary Clinton Will Be the Next President of the United States...Unless. In fairness, it would have demanded Nostradamus-like powers of prediction to imagine Clinton upended by a junior senator from Illinois, peddling a particularly audacious brand of hope.

But for many obituarists it wasn't the finely-tuned campaign of Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) that dashed Clinton's plans of resettling into the White House. Nor was it her deeply unpopular vote to authorize the Iraq War. Instead, the answer was more obvious: An electorate—and pundit class—imbued with sexism, both conscious and unconscious, conspired to keep a women out of the Oval Office.

In the wake of her defeat, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof lamented that, like Obama's effusively praised speech on race, Clinton failed to start a similar conversation about gender. Indeed, "In polls, more Americans say they would be willing to vote for a black candidate for president than for a female candidate." This is true, but Kristof fails to note that the differences are slight. According to a recent poll conducted for The Washington Post and ABC News, 88 percent of respondents said that they were either "entirely" or "somewhat" comfortable with an African-American president. When asked about is they were comfortable with the prospect of a female president, the number dipped slightly to 84 percent.

As political commentator George Will recently observed, Americans would quite assuredly vote for a woman, it's just they weren't particularly interested in voting for that woman. But the modern woman-hater, Kristof explains, is a rather different breed: "The catch is that abundant psychology research shows that we are often shaped by stereotypes that we are unaware of." In other words, many might think they were rejecting Clinton based on a set of political criteria, but Democratic primary voters might, in fact, be struggling with a seething sexist subconscious. (Kristof's subconscious, of course, is more Betty Friedan than Harvey Mansfield.)

Over at The Nation, it was the back-slapping cable news fraternity that was activating our subconscious sexism. "Hillary Clinton's loss has renewed critiques that American political media is slanted, sexist and dominated by men," wrote Ari Melber, the magazine's "Net movement correspondent." "While Clinton and Obama broke barriers in the Democratic primary, swiftly dispatching white male senators with more government experience," Melber huffed, "the race was still refereed, scored and narrated by white male commentators," because "the elite opinion media continues to employ, groom and promote a commentators corps that is disproportionately white and male." (As one commenter on The Nation's website dryly noted, Melber's own magazine, a 180,000-plus circulation purveyor of elite opinion, is also disproportionately staffed by sinister white men.)

The Nation's Katha Pollitt went one further, arguing that "Clinton drew out the nation's misogyny in all its jeering glory and put it where we could all get a good look at it." Yes, the entire nation's misogyny. Pollitt called out MSNBC's left-wing host Keith Olbermann as the Archie Bunker of the punditocracy, citing his hyperventilating attacks on Clinton as an example of "men's terror of women." And those members of the sisterhood, such as Washington Post style writer Robin Givhan, who made snide comments about Clinton's sartorial deficiencies, were engaged in rank "female sexism."

And it was only a matter of time until former Clinton's campaign manager Mark Penn raised the specter of sexism. As Clinton forged ahead, all but eliminated from the race, Obamaphilic pundits and members of the Democratic party beseeched her, for the sake of unity, to accept the inevitable. "No male candidate," Penn told GQ, "has ever been told to drop out. Ever."

If we concede to Penn the broadest possible definition of sexism, and acknowledge that Clinton faced real challenges as the first formidable female presidential candidate in American history, it is nevertheless remarkable how difficult he finds it to cite specific examples of gender discrimination. When asked by GQ "where he saw sexism," Penn upbraided Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.) for comments made about Clinton publicly crying in New Hampshire, saying that a "double-standard" was being applied to her because of her gender. While no other candidate wept in front of television cameras on the campaign trail (making it, I suppose, a single-standard), Penn surely remembers that the last candidate who cried during the New Hampshire primary—Democratic candidate Ed Muskie in 1972—never recovered from his supposed display of weakness. Whether or not this is a fair judgment of one's fitness for the presidency, it is difficult to claim that Edwards' comments were sexist. Recognizing that Penn was serving up pretty thin gruel, the GQ interviewer interjected helpfully that the subtle anti-women campaign was perhaps "hard to put into words."

But none of this "sexism" could be counteracted by organized, activist feminist groups, says writer Linda Hirshman. In Sunday's Washington Post, Hirshman mapped the fractious women's movement that failed to coalesce around Clinton's campaign. The absurdities and esoterica of the "millennial feminists" produced internecine warfare and factional fighting not seen since the Spanish Civil War. In the trenches of the gender war, the slights cited by Penn are deemed inconsequential, as is the candidate on the receiving end of them. Hirshman quotes one activist: "I...don't believe that simply putting a womyn's face where a man's face once was is going to solve our problems...by Real Womyn I am talking about womyn of color, incarcerated womyn, migrant womyn, womyn at the border, womyn gripped in violence, rape, and war.'" (For those whose university experience predated the ubiquity of Woman's Studies departments, the misspelling of 'women' is deliberate, a semantic kick in the patriarchy's groin.)

The Democratic primary was a lose-lose proposition for the image of American tolerance: If Senator Obama lost, ours was an irredeemably racist country. Senator Clinton lost, and we are infected by sexism. But whether viewed through the prism of radical gender feminism or a boy's club media conspiracy, the truth is considerably less complicated. The vaunted Clinton machine—devoid of fresh ideas and facing a dynamic, inspirational opponent—simply couldn't compete. Blame the media, blame the patriarchy if you so desire, but the truth is that Americans wouldn't mind a woman as president. Just not that woman.

Michael C. Moynihan is an associate editor at reason.

Kill Joy

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Tue, 13 May 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Living under the bootheel of a dictatorship? An academic study suggests that taking a potshot at your oppressor might lead to greater democracy.

In “Hit or Miss?: The Effect of Assassinations on Institutions and War,” a working paper published last year by the National Bureau for Economic Research and several other institutions, economists Ben Olken of Harvard and Ben Jones of Northwestern look at 298 attempted and 59 successful assassinations of both autocratic and democratic leaders between 1875 and 2004. They find that “on average, successful assassinations of autocrats produce sustained moves toward democracy.” Indeed, “transitions to democracy…are 13 percentage points more likely following the assassination of an autocrat than following a failed attempt on an autocrat.” Furthermore, the “effect [of political assassination] is sustained ten years later.” A failed attempt produced a statistically insignificant decrease of one percentage point in the possibility of a successful democratic shift.

Attempts on the lives of democratic leaders, Olken and Jones found, are associated with little political change. “Democratic institutions,” they conclude, “thus appear robust to the assassination of leaders, while autocratic regimes are not.”

Yes We Can Pander!

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Fri, 30 May 2008 12:00:00 EDT

If you doubt that the big broadcast and print media outlets are, for the most, in the tank for Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), quickly skim the transcript of the Democratic frontrunner’s speech in Miami last Friday. Obama travelled to Little Havana to engage in some election-year genuflection, that ritualistic demonstration of fealty to Cuban exiles performed by almost every presidential candidate since Fidel Castro took possession of the island in 1959. Obama pandered, the media swooned—and a few interesting policy shifts were curiously ignored.

In his speech to the Cuban-American National Foundation (CANF), Obama thundered that he would only accept “libertad” for the captive nation of Cuba, and promised to pave “the road to freedom for all Cubans” by securing “justice for Cuba’s political prisoners, the rights of free speech, a free press and freedom of assembly; and it must lead to elections that are free and fair.” How this elusive goal would be achieved was rather predictably left unsaid.

After the platitudes about freedom and the obligatory Jose Marti citations, Obama staked out a handful of substantive policy positions. If elected, he said, an Obama administration would end the Bush administration’s draconian and counterproductive limits on both family travel and cash remittances sent to Cuba, a policy opposed by a majority of Cuban-Americans.

It was but one policy proposal—a good one, for sure—and the following day’s New York Times dispatch led with it: “Senator Barack Obama on Friday called for greater engagement with Cuba and Latin America, saying the long-standing policies of isolation have failed to advance the interests of the United States or help people who have suffered under oppressive governments.”

Dig deeper into the speech—and the Times account—and you'll find that there are significant limits to Obama’s policies of engagement. During his 2004 Senate campaign Obama declared that it was "time for us to end the embargo with Cuba.... It's time for us to acknowledge that that particular policy has failed." But Cubans don’t influence Illinois senate races like they do Florida presidential contests. And while another Times article declared that “Change Comes to Miami,” the real news is that Obama is merely interested in tinkering with America’s Cuba policy, not substantially changing it.

“I will maintain the embargo,” he said to cheers from CANF members. “It provides us with the leverage to present the regime with a clear choice: if you take significant steps toward democracy, beginning with the freeing of all political prisoners, we will take steps to begin normalizing relations. That’s the way to bring about real change in Cuba—through strong, smart and principled diplomacy.”

Wasn’t it this claim—a rather significant policy shift—that should have made the news? In an article headlined “Taking a new approach to Cuba,” the Los Angeles Times mentioned that Cuba had been embargoed for 47 years, and that the brave senator “plunged boldly into these uncharted political waters” by suggesting a repeal of the Bush travel and remittance policy, but didn’t find the space to mention that Obama abandoned—at least temporarily—his support for lifting the embargo.

A writer at The Huffington Post hailed Obama’s “gutsy” and “sensible” speech and noted that CANF founder Jorge Mas Canosa “was a notorious Reagan-era warhorse who made his career as a leader of the embargo-industrial complex.” On Obama’s embargo pander, it was noted, with significant understatement, that “he hasn't pronounced himself ready just yet to let go of the entire embargo.”

The Boston Globe focused on another, less newsworthy aspect of the speech: “Obama: Bush fostered Chavez rise: ‘Negligent’ foreign policy created void.” It’s a dubious claim, one belied by the chronology of Chavez’s political successes, but Obama’s denunciation of Bush’s foreign policy legacy only distracted from his own bellicose—and well-formulated—anti-Chavez rhetoric.

Sounding like a mellifluous, hope-spreading version of Otto Reich, Obama slammed Chavez’s “predictable yet perilous mix of anti-American rhetoric, authoritarian government, and checkbook diplomacy” that “offers the same false promise as the tried and failed ideologies of the past.” Bolivarianism is, he said, a “stale vision.” He warned that “Iran has drawn closer to Venezuela, and just the other day Tehran and Caracas launched a joint bank with their windfall oil profits.” Hugo Chavez is a “democratically elected leader. But we also know that he does not govern democratically.”

All of which is true, of course. By focusing on his shaky claim that it was Bush who “lost Venezuela,” almost all press reports ignored Obama’s expressed support for Colombian President Alvaro Uribe’s controversial attack on a FARC outpost in Ecuadorian territory. After the raid that killed FARC commander Raul Reyes, The New York Times editorialized that the strike “was an infringement of Ecuador’s sovereignty” and advised the two countries to “settle their differences through diplomatic means” with a guarantee “that such forays will not be repeated.”

Obama disagrees, telling his anti-Castro and anti-Chavez audience that his administration “will support Colombia’s right to strike terrorists who seek safe-haven across its borders” and advising that “strong sanctions” be levied against Venezuela for its support of FARC and Chavez be diplomatically “isolated.” The latter point confused ABC News reporter Jake Tapper, who wondered, after Obama expressed a willingness to engage Chavez without preconditions, if “he will meet with the leader of a country he simultaneously says should be isolated.”

And while accusing Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) of wanting to continue the current administration’s failed Cuba policy, Obama told the crowd that he could be counted on as supporting another failed policy—the drug war. “When I am President, we will continue the Andean Counter-Drug Program” with Colombia, though he recently opposed the passage of a free-trade agreement with the country. (Speaking of Obama’s skills as a soft-power diplomat, President Uribe responded to Obama’s opposition to the free trade agreement by saying that he “deplored” Obama’s position.)

There were other moments of hawkishness that were largely ignored. “The United States,” Obama declared, “must be a relentless advocate for democracy.” Quoting Martin Luther King Jr., he said that “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” And: “I will never, ever, compromise the cause of liberty. And unlike John McCain, I would never, ever, rule out a course of action that could advance the cause of liberty.”

But what does any of this mean? It’s easy to get the heads nodding in furious agreement: We can—oh yes we can!—liberate Cuba! But how does one relentlessly advocate for democracy without, say, irritating the likes of Hugo Chavez? As Obama said in Miami, the Bush administration’s rhetoric has “so alienated [us] from the rest of the Americas” that extreme leftism “has even made inroads from Bolivia to Nicaragua.”

Like Candidate Bush in 2000, Obama is still getting his foreign policy bearings, still trying to find that measured voice. When Miami Herald columnist Andres Oppenheimer interviewed him last year, Obama “had trouble naming any head of state south of the U.S. border, and looked like a deer in the headlights when asked about the region's headlines of the day." All that, says Oppenheimer, has changed—Obama “has finally done his homework on Latin America.”

But for those who desire the elimination of the embargo, we can only hope that, like his cynical denunciations of NAFTA, followed by reassurances to Canada that it was but a primary season pander, Obama is speaking with a forked tongue.

Michael C. Moynihan is an associate editor of reason.

The Center of Britain

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Fri, 09 May 2008 15:00:00 EDT

To get a broad sense of what Britain once was, just what necessitated the rise of Margaret Thatcher, ignore the frequently referenced punk lyrics of the late 1970s, so full of manufactured rage at the ruling class (White riot! England’s dreaming! Guns before butter!). Instead, drop Yes, Minister, the classic early 1980’s television comedy of Whitehall perfidy and ministerial incompetence, into the Netflix queue. Or just find the episode “The Compassionate Society”—season two, episode one—in which the show’s protagonist, Minister Jim Hacker, attempts to halt a massive National Health Service (NHS) hospital project which bequeathed to London 500 full-time nurses and doctors but housed not a single patient. Arrayed in defense of the plan are the usual interests: the tub-thumping left-wing union leader (a send up of the militant socialist head of the mineworkers union, Arthur Scargill), Downing Street spinmeisters, and various members of Parliament shilling for self-interested constituents. An advisor defends the project, telling Hacker that one must “sort out the smooth running of the hospital. Having patients around would be no help at all.” It was, unsurprisingly, Prime Minister Thatcher’s favorite episode.

It isn’t hyperbolic to say that this was more or less the government the Iron Lady inherited—a bloated, free-spending state, full of make-work jobs jealously guarded by union toughs. It was a system that Thatcher would help delegitimize and then effectively destroy. The heavy lifting was done (thank you very much) by those heartless Tories, though by 1997 voters decided it was time to return government to the more compassionate hands of Labour.

And Tony Blair’s “New Labour” didn’t win the 1997 election so much as they pushed the Conservative Party to the edge of oblivion. The Tories retreated having lost a massive 178 seats, its biggest defeat in almost a century. For the Conservative Party leadership, it was an existential crisis.

Pop stars that, 10 years previous, excelled in writing songs about the forgotten British miner were now popping champagne corks at Number 10 Downing Street. These would be the years of “Cool Britannia”; Red Wedge was dead. But the honeymoon of pop and politics was mercifully—and predictably—short. Noel Gallagher, guitarist of the seminal 1990s Britpop band Oasis and early adherent of New Labour, soon grumbled that the prime minister was forgetting the working class and acting like an American president. This Tony talked god, was chummy with President Bush, and fancied himself a liberal internationalist. Indeed, the rebranding of Labour, according to Blair biographer Anthony Seldon, resulted in far more criticism from the traditional left than the Tory right. Blair would govern from the center.

Fast-forward to early 2008: Prime Minister Gordon Brown is wildly unpopular and local council elections resulted in Labour’s worst showing in 40 years. Barely a week after the catastrophic defeat, a YouGov poll put Conservative Party support at 49 percent and Labour at 23 percent, its lowest rating since polling records began in the 1930s. (Though it is tempting to blame an easy culprit like Iraq, Labour was 11 points ahead of the Tories just eight months ago, and this week’s Economist leader, which asks if “Gordon Brown is doomed,” doesn’t even reference the war.)

A certain amount of this Labour collapse is attributable to a palatable alternative: Conservative leader David Cameron, the Eton-and-Oxford party boss who professes a love of The Smiths and began a recent Times editorial with the cringe-inducing line “Radiohead are one of my favourite bands.”

But it’s not the pathetic hipster pose that has attracted so much positive attention from both voters and Fleet Street journos, but Cameron's bold (some say facile and opportunistic) attempt to rebrand conservatism in the style of New Labour: "I made changes to and with the Conservative Party over the last 18 months for a very clear purpose, to get us back into the centre ground, to get us into a position where people listen to what we were saying, where we are more in touch with Britain as it is today."

It’s getting crowded in the center of British politics.

Even after his stunning local election victory, Cameron continued to burnish his centrist credentials, writing this week in the lefty paper The Independent that "If you care about poverty, if you care about inequality, if you care about the environment—forget about the Labour Party…If you count yourself a progressive, a true progressive, only we can achieve real change."

Cameron didn’t always consider himself a “true progressive.” When running for Parliament in 2000, he repeatedly dealt the social conservative card, grumbling about legislation that was "anti-family" and warning that it would force the "teaching of homosexuality" into British schools. When he took over the party leadership, Cameron jettisoned the tradition talk and spoke of welcoming gays and lesbians into the party fold, admonishing the Tory old guard for not supporting domestic partnership arrangements. The perpetually peeved Thatcherite Norman Tebbit grumbled that he didn't think "Tory supporters have gone soft, but I think the Tory leadership believes the electors are too soft to take the hard decisions which the country is now facing."

Others argue that the dash to the center—the “modernization”—is vindicated by recent electoral success and recent polling data. "The modernisers were right,” Times columnist and former Tory policy wonk Daniel Finkelstein trumpeted after the election. “Their critics were wrong."

It’s hard to argue with success.

The days following the Conservative rout saw nearly every political columnist on the island considering the future of Gordon Brown. The Spectator wondered what Brown “could learn from Hillary Clinton.” In the 1990s, when Labour was emerging from its punishing wilderness period, it took on countless Clinton operatives as consultants to micromanage its Clintonian rightward drift. But perhaps it’s time for American politicos—i.e. Republicans—to tear a page from the British political playbook.

The political landscape in America is hardly analogous to that of England. Despite Blair’s public piousness, fealty unto God isn’t a prerequisite for a presumptive prime minister. Nor do issues like abortion, the death penalty, or stem-cell research dominate the political culture. British conservatism is in many important ways distinct from its American cousin. But as many American conservatives have noted—David Frum in his book Comeback and his National Review colleague Jonah Goldberg—America too is becoming more socially tolerant and, if the Republican Party is interested in a successful future, a Cameron-like shift to the center on issues such as gay marriage and the drug war is advisable.

As political scientist Morris Fiorina points out in his book Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America, both residents of red and blue states are “basically centrists”; American's aren't "red" or "blue" but various shades of purple. As conservative commenter David Brooks pointed out in 2001, "Although there are some real differences between Red and Blue America, there is no fundamental conflict."

Pat Buchanan's declaration at the 1992 Republican convention that there was a "religious war" raging in America, a "war for the soul" of the country, seems preposterous in retrospect. With a strong majority of Americans supporting Roe v. Wade, a clear majority supporting civil unions for gay couples, and the very real possibility of the country electing an African-American president, it's time for the Republican Party to borrow from the Tories if they want to recapture the center ground.

Michael C. Moynihan is an associate editor of reason.

Flight of the Neocons

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 17:00:00 EDT

They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons, by Jacob Heilbrunn, New York: Doubleday, 336 pages, $26

In 1996 Norman Podhoretz, ex-friend of the left and high priest of neoconservatism, wrote an elegiac essay in Commentary about the movement he had helped to found. Neoconservatism was dead, he argued, but not of intellectual exhaustion or mass ideological defection. It was a victim of its own success. What had previously been a movement of political outsiders—former socialists ambling through “the middle of their journey,” in Lionel Trilling’s phrasing—was now well represented in the corridors of power: on Capitol Hill, in influential think tanks, on the Sunday chat show circuit. It was at last time to shed the neo, to announce the movement’s assimilation into the conservative mainstream. What once were ideological heresies had now become widely accepted banalities.

In They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons, Jacob Heilbrunn, a senior editor at the conservative journal The National Interest, retraces the history of Podhoretz’s movement through its wilderness years to its open embrace of the Republican Party and, post-Iraq, its ignominious decline. Heilbrunn has roots in the movement himself—indeed, The National Interest was founded as a foreign policy–focused companion to the neocon journal The Public Interest. Heilbrunn’s breezy, crisply written history eschews the rancor of many recent discussions of neoconservatism in favor of a largely dispassionate account, tracing the movement’s development from its beginnings in the far-left milieu of 1930s and ’40s New York to its death, or grievous wounding, in the White House of George W. Bush.

Those introduced to the vagaries of neoconservative theory after 9/11—that is, most ordinary Americans and nearly every European editorial writer—often overlook the fact that Bush hadn’t paid much heed to the neocons prior to September 11, 2001, and that the movement’s prospects early in the new century had been quite grim. Indeed, it appeared to be in its death throes. As the 1980s drew to a close and the Soviet Union’s desiccated empire finally dissolved, neoconservatism lost its unifying enemy. But then the terror attacks on New York and Washington, as the cliché goes, changed everything.

Heilbrunn’s adumbration of neoconservatism’s left-wing provenance makes for compelling reading—and acts as a useful field guide to the current schisms on the right. It is an exaggeration to suggest, as many pundits have, that the neocon is merely a modified Trotskyist, but many of its intellectual architects did begin their careers on the radical left. Elliott Abrams, the Iran-contra veteran who served as special assistant to the president during George W. Bush’s first term, attended the radical Little Red Schoolhouse in New York City as a child and graduated to membership in the Young People’s Socialist League (YPSL). The American Enterprise Institute’s Joshua Muravchik was YPSL’s chairman from 1968 to 1973 and later advised Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign on foreign policy issues. Onetime leftists such as Podhoretz, Irving Kristol, and countless other “New York intellectuals,” disgusted by the cognoscenti’s ambivalence toward communism, migrated, at varying speeds and to varying degrees, rightward. But not every neocon emerged from the radical left, and not all of them landed in the GOP. Neoconservatism also enchanted disaffected liberals such as longtime New York Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who never abandoned the Democratic Party (although he did ultimately break with neoconservatism).

Indeed, most early neocons had little interest in changing allegiances from the Democratic Party. “There was, and remains,” Heilbrunn writes, “a kind of aesthetic revulsion to the Republican Party amongst liberal hawks.” The neoconservative hatred of Richard Nixon—his policy of détente was, they argued, suicidal—provided ammunition for their (long since abandoned) contention that America’s best hope for a vigorous foreign policy was the Democrats. They did back Nixon against George McGovern in 1972, but afterward Podhoretz, Midge Decter, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Walt Rostow, Daniel Bell, and other liberal hawks took out an ad in The New York Times urging the Democratic Party to return to “the [foreign policy] tradition of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Adlai Stevenson, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Hubert Humphrey.”

Heilbrunn quotes the late William F. Buckley, founder of National Review and doyen of the traditional conservatives, on the neocons’ fetishization of the Democratic senator and liberal hawk Henry “Scoop” Jackson. “The neos wanted a Democrat to enshrine,” Buckley said. “They found someone who was pretty much a welfarist but was anti-Soviet.” The latter position was pre-eminent, the former tolerable. Understanding the widely held misperception of the neocon as a sort of ultra-conservative Republican, Heilbrunn asks the reader to “remember that the neoconservatives did not oppose the idea of welfare itself.”

The neoconservative house organ of the 1970s, The Public Interest, was founded in part, Buckley later wrote, because Irving Kristol “had deemed National Review…too right-wing.” In 1976 Kristol denounced the antipoverty programs birthed by LBJ’s Great Society, but he suggested that the money not be taken out of government hands and instead be used to achieve “some form of national health insurance.” As late as 1993, Kristol would advocate a “conservative welfare state” that, for instance, would “leave Social Security alone—except for being a bit more generous, perhaps.” In the 1980s, like most other neocons, Kristol did embrace supply-side economics, then fashionable among Reaganites, although it is unclear how much of the Arthur Laffer gospel he actually believed.

(In the ’90s, he would express regret over his support for the theory that slashing taxes leads to greater revenues.)

All this leftover leftism made for an occasionally awkward integration into the right. The neocons had been focused primarily on the evils of the Soviet empire, having little time for the free market. As Podhoretz noted in his obituary for neoconservatism, “The neoconservatives did not love commerce, or anything else, more than they loathed Communism.” In other words, it was an ideology short on classical liberalism and limited government—both at least theoretically conservative principles—and long on “rollback” and exporting democracy.

A year after Podhoretz’s self-congratulatory trauermarsch, Bill Kristol, son of neocon founding father Irving Kristol and editor of The Weekly Standard, and David Brooks, also of The Weekly Standard, took to the pages of The Washington Post to inaugurate “National Greatness conservatism.” Critics grumbled that it was simply neoconservatism rebranded. Kristol and Brooks called for a muscular foreign policy and argued that the GOP message of limited government fell far short of a coherent governing philosophy; the Republicans, they wrote, must reconcile themselves to a certain amount of government intervention. The liberal columnist E.J. Dionne was ebullient, proclaiming that with the advent of National Greatness conservatism, “The era of bashing government is ending.” (Proving Podhoretz’s point about the mainstreaming of neoconservatism, both Kristol and Brooks have since matriculated to the New York Times opinion page.)

Libertarians and small-government conservatives were appropriately aghast. Former Reason editor Virginia Postrel wrote a scathing response with Washington Post economics columnist James Glassman, dismissing National Greatness as “wistful nationalism in search of a big project.” The duo opined that “the Cold War is over. So what’s a national-greatness government to do? It could go looking for the next war, hope for another Great Depression, or sponsor a trip to Neptune.” National Review’s Jonah Goldberg hissed in May 2001 that the younger Kristol’s project, by then four years old, was “an allegedly ‘conservative’ cause.” Goldberg was still irritated at the tenor of Kristol’s support of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) in the 2000 presidential primaries. “During the campaign,” he wrote, “Kristol suggested more than once that to be a Bush supporter was tantamount to being a hostage to evil corporations that put profit above patriotism.” (It was a point McCain would revisit during this campaign when he told Mitt Romney that he served in the Navy “out of patriotism, not for profit.”)

To Heilbrunn, the other important characteristic of neoconservatism is its Jewish roots. In a recent Washington Post op-ed piece debunking myths of neoconservatism, Heil-brunn pooh-poohed the commonly held idea that “neocons are Israeli lackeys” as pure “bunk,” noting that, if anything, they are often further to the right than the Likud Party. But in They Knew They Were Right, Heilbrunn says neoconservatism “is as much a reflection of Jewish immigrant social resentments and status anxiety as a legitimate movement of ideas.” This is a debatable point, but one that doesn’t necessarily contradict his dismissal of the oft-cited Likud-Commentary axis.

Many of neoconservatism’s heaviest hitters are, as is often pointed out, gentiles, and many Jewish intellectuals were, and are, repelled by neoconservatism. Nevertheless, Heilbrunn argues plausibly that the movement was really born “with the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, the 1967 war, and the rise of black anti-Semitism in the United States.” The Six Day War, he writes, “gave the first real impetus to the birth of the modern neoconservative movement.” The idea that the world would sit idle as Jews were again attacked—recall that Washington’s unswerving support for Israel began only after that war—galvanized the neocons. Neither did it go unnoticed that the Soviet Union, one of the first countries to recognize Israel at the United Nations in 1949, was now actively assisting both Arab dictatorships and Palestinian terror groups.

The invocation of the Holocaust would be a frequent refrain—and a point of frequent criticism. Neoconservatives constantly cited the Shoah as a reductio ad Hitlerum debating tactic. In 1976 a neocon lobby, the Committee on the Present Danger, stated that the Soviet arms buildup was “reminiscent of Nazi Germany’s rearmament in the 1930s.” Evoking the mass murder of European Jewry, Norman Podhoretz warned in The New York Times against renewed complacency, “For if for the second time in this century, the world were to stand by while a major Jewish community was being destroyed, it would be hard to evade the suspicion that an irresistible will was at work to wipe every last Jew off the face of the earth, to make this planet entirely Judenrein.” Three decades later, in 2004, the Yale computer scientist David Gelernter hyperbolically announced in The Weekly Standard that “the world’s indifference to Saddam resembles its indifference to Hitler.” Heilbrunn could have also included a more recent reference: Podhoretz’s now-notorious essay arguing the “case for bombing Iran,” published last year in Commentary, which compared Israel’s current situation vis-à-vis Iran to Czechoslovakia’s forced immersion in Hitler’s Reich. In a brief debate with Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria on PBS after the piece was published, Podhoretz invoked Hitler four times.

Heilbrunn demonstrates that for the first generation of neoconservatives, the motive for embracing a hawkish foreign policy was this fear of resurgent Nazism. For the second generation, it was an Israel encircled by hostile neighbors, and a visceral dislike of the New Left, parts of which saw the Jewish state through the prism not of victimology but of colonialism. For the newest generation of neocons it was the mass murder of 9/11 and its attendant effects on the so-called Arab street.

In this latest iteration, Heilbrunn convincingly argues, neoconservatism would destroy itself. The Bush administration, which campaigned in 2000 on a policy of nonintervention abroad, had no intention of embracing the neoconservative outlook until the terror attacks of 2001. Condoleezza Rice, Heilbrunn writes, “hewed to her stated course of leaving nation building to the Democrats.” Some neocons shared this distaste for aggressively exporting democracy. In her famous 1979 essay “Dictatorships and Double Standards,” which blasted President Carter’s “human rights”–centered foreign policy and argued for toleration of certain America-friendly, anti-communist authoritarian regimes, the neocon heroine Jeane Kirkpatrick argued that “the belief that it is possible to democratize governments, anytime, anywhere, under any circumstances…is belied by an enormous body of evidence based on the experience of dozens of countries which have attempted with more or less (usually less) success to move from autocratic to democratic government.”

Kirkpatrick strongly supported the “rollback” policy Reagan adopted toward the Soviet Union, but she surely would have balked if, instead of merely stunting Soviet imperial advances, the United States attempted to build mini-Americas in every liberated land. “There is no inherent or historical ‘imperative,’ ” Kirkpatrick would write during the Iraq War, “for the U.S. government to seek to achieve any other goal—however great—except as mandated by the Constitution or adopted by the people through elected governments.” There is, after all, a significant difference between assisting in the abrogation of the Soviet empire and a quixotic policy of democratization.

It also worth noting, as Heilbrunn does, that the Reagan nostalgia of many neoconservatives requires a selectively deployed memory and a distorted reading of history. Reaganism held much promise for the neocon movement, though most neocons soon felt betrayed by the president’s nuanced handling of nuclear disarmament. Midge Decter declared herself “disgusted” with the administration’s willingness to sit down with the Soviet Union. Norman Podhortez called Reagan’s refusal to send ground troops into Nicaragua “appeasement” and was enraged by the administration’s “half-hearted” support of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon and the president’s apparent volte-face on arms control.

Heilbrunn recognizes that, from Nixon to Bush, the neocons actually have angered the right far more than the left. For many libertarians, paleoconservatives, and Reagan Republicans, this is certainly true. The American Conservative, a magazine that Heilbrunn misidentifies as beginning operations in the late 1990s (it was founded in 2002), is a case in point, launched in large part as a reaction against the neocon rebirth. It would have been helpful and interesting had Heilbrunn explored these internecine battles in greater detail.

To Heilbrunn, the legacy of neoconservatism is one of long-term disaster for the Republican Party, an ideological digression that “quite possibly not only destroyed conservatism as a political force for years to come but also created an Iraq syndrome that tarnishes the idea of intervention for several decades.” This sounds right. The surge has undeniably mitigated the violence in Iraq, but it seems likely that—barring a continued military presence in Iraq for “100 years,” as John McCain posited—the neocons’ nation-building project will be a millstone around the movement’s neck. The Iraq fiasco will also obscure the fact that many of their Cold War–era arguments with the left were prescient. They were right about the ineffectiveness of Great Society welfare programs and about the colossal evil of the communist bloc.

But the failures of the neoconservative approach to both foreign and domestic policy are recognized even by consummate neocon David Frum, partial author of the infamous “axis of evil” State of the Union speech. In his recently released book Comeback: Conservatism That Can Win Again, Frum concedes Heilbrunn’s point that a conservative regeneration is needed after the Bush administration’s big spending and disastrous foreign policy. While Frum is upbeat about conservatism’s prospects, Heilbrunn ends They Knew They Were Right on an ominous note: “These reckless minds…aren’t going away. Quite the contrary.”

Perhaps. But unless Iraq becomes an Arab version of Switzerland in the next decade, I wouldn’t bet on it.

Michael C. Moynihan is an associate editor of Reason.

The Killer Elite

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 15:15:00 EDT

At this point in the news cycle, it is perhaps unnecessary to reprint Sen. Barack Obama's continuously reprinted comments about those bitter, clingy, armed, pious, and disaffected voters of Pennsylvania. But in case your interest in this never-ending race waned upon the exit of Mike Gravel, here is, once again, the Illinois Democrat explaining why the rural poor are supposedly swayed by conservative—rather than liberal—populism: "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 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."

Now, let's ignore that last bit of hypocrisy—if anyone has fanned the flames of anti-trade sentiment, it's Obama—and say that it's not too difficult to agree with The Economist's characterization of these comments as a bit "snooty." The claim that religious zeal (the Christian fundamentalism is implied) or gun ownership correlates to the number of shuttered Pennsylvania factories is pretty thin gruel. Recognizing this, both Obama's current opponents, Sens. Clinton (D-N.Y.) and McCain (R-Ariz.), pounced, calling the comments "elitist" and accusing their fellow senator of being hopelessly "out of touch" with the real America.

For its part, many in the media—excepting the conservative-leaning Fox News, of course—jumped into the breach to defend their beloved frontrunner. Consider the reaction of the pundits on CNN's The Situation Room, hosted by Wolf Blitzer, to the charge that Obama displayed a hidden contempt for the armed and religious. First, CNN's house windbag Jack Cafferty denied that Obama was trading in elitism. Rather, explained Cafferty, Obama was simply acknowledging that Pennsylvania is the Saudi Arabia of America. "What happens to [unemployed] folks like that in the Middle East, you ask? Well, take a look. They go to places like al Qaeda training camps." Regardless of whether gun ownership and economic desperation are causative, Cafferty (who has his own problems with inflammatory comments) denounced previous American leaders—cough, Bill Clinton, cough—that "shipped the jobs overseas and signed phony trade deals like NAFTA."

U.S. News & World Report Contributing Editor Gloria Borger weighed in with wrist-slap for Obama's "inartful" terminology. "But," she continued, "I think he's expressing a sentiment of mad as hell voters not going to take it anymore that we've seen throughout this election." The McCain and Clinton campaigns, Borger said, were after the same thing, which is to "portray Obama as this sort of effete elitist who doesn't understand the real working class people or Independent voters."

And, finally, CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin sputtered that the whole thing was taken out of context. It was, he proclaimed, a "fake issue. I think [Hillary Clinton] is completely distorting what Obama said. And I think it's just shocking, frankly... I think [Clinton's attack] ad is a disgrace." Toobin declared that by dint of his family background, Obama was incapable of elitism: "Well, I just think it's remarkable that Barack Obama, this guy who grew up in a single family household with no money, who lived in Indonesia, who, you know, was—came from very modest upbringings, somehow he's the elitist." (While certainly not rich, it's worth reminding that Obama, the son of two university-educated parents, attended an "exclusive and prestigious" private school in Hawaii, Columbia University, and Harvard Law School.)

So in The Situation Room, there was consensus. The story was silly season stuff; a prototypically Clintonian diversion from the substantive issues.

While CNN scoffed at the thought of Obama not understanding the rural, white working-class voter, a number of pro-Obama bloggers and pundits were turning on his accusers. At The Atlantic, Andrew Sullivan linked to a column by New Criterion editor Roger Kimball, and directed readers to "check out the photo" of Kimball wearing a bowtie and sporting turtle-shell glasses. What does this elitist buffon know from elitism?

Writing in The New Republic, Jonathan Chait railed at the "hypocrisy" of certain elite media figures, saving special ire for "George F. Will [who] decided to leap to the defense of the proletariat. Yes, that George F. Will."

In case you didn't immediately understand the source of Chait's sarcasm, he clarified that Will is "the fabulously wealthy, bowtie-wearing, pretentious reference-mongering, Anglophilic fop who grew up in a university town as a professor's son, earned two advanced degrees, has a designated table at a French restaurant in Georgetown, and, had he dwelt for any extended time among the working class, would be lucky to escape without his underwear being yanked up over his ears." Oh dear. Rumor has it that, in his Georgetown estate, Will has a shelf devoted to the novels of Evelyn Waugh, that poncy, ascot-wearing Brit (boo!) who wrote florid novels about fox hunting and buggery, which Will reportedly reads while consuming expensive French food!

So here we have a class-war version of the "chickenhawk" charge. Don't advocate for war unless you have served, don't speak for the peasants if you wear a bowtie and recommend Chesterton novels to your (probably foreign) friends. Members of the right-leaning bourgeoisie are incapable of spotting and deploring such condescension directed at those who typically vote for right-leaning candidates.

Chait writes that populist, fist-shaking pundits such as Chris Matthews and Bill O'Reilly, who bully guests and interviewers with references to their "real America," blue-collar credentials, "are multimillionaires who retain only the most remote connection to blue-collar life." This is true enough. But Obama's defenders use the very same line of argumentation in explaining away his "bitter" comments. So when critics such as Toobin tell Wolf Blitzer that Obama "grew up in a single family household with no money," it is perhaps worth mentioning that it should also be tough for Obama to retain his working-class connections—if he ever had any—when he earned $4.2 million in 2007.

Though it likely had little or no effect on yesterday's loss in Pennsylvania—potentially insulted voters were leaning largely toward Hillary Clinton anyway—it is not outrageous to think that Obama's extemporaneous bit of pop sociology was indicative of a generally condescending attitude towards the Other (that was the basic point of Will's column, which found precedent for such feelings in Adlai Stevenson's failed presidential runs in 1952 and 1956). That attitude will surely be revisited in the general election.

The inclusion of guns in Obama's complaint is, I think, especially revealing. A convincing argument can be made that xenophobia is more appealing to the dispossessed and downtrodden—They're taking our jobs! They're invading our country!—and a convincing case can be made that Obama has employed similar, though not explicitly xenophobic, language when railing against NAFTA stealing American jobs. But what does any of this have to do with guns, other than to signify that these are bitter country rubes that, to paraphrase What's the Matter with Kansas author Thomas Frank, foolishly vote against their own interests?

Nevertheless, Jeffrey Toobin told CNN viewers, what Obama said "was factually accurate." But is it? As Syracuse University professor Arthur Brooks wrote in the Wall Street Journal, "It turns out [gun owners] have the same level of formal education as nongun owners, on average. Furthermore, they earn 32% more per year than nonowners. Americans with guns are neither a small nor downtrodden group. Nor are they ‘bitter.' In 2006, 36% of gun owners said they were ‘very happy,' while 9% were ‘not too happy.' Meanwhile, only 30% of people without guns were very happy, and 16% were not too happy."

So Obama's gun analysis was not only incoherent (how does one "explain their frustrations" by shooting skeet, anyway?), but based on lazy presumption and stereotype that's not that backed up by any data. And George Will might well be a fop, but his distillation of Obama's argument strikes me as reasonable: "Americans, especially working-class conservatives, are unable, because of their false consciousness, to deconstruct their social context and embrace the liberal program." In other words, Barack Obama thinks that, whether they know it or not, the gun-toting plebes of America are in desperate need of "change."

Michael Moynihan is an associate editor of reason.

The Right to be a Hate-filled Imbecile

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 15:00:00 EDT

There are a number of points on which Ali Eteraz and I agree. Despite my general hostility to organized religion, I too have little patience for Robert Spencer-type arguments that Islam is possessed with a preternatural desire to force unbelievers into a state of "dhimmitude," nor am I terribly concerned that the minarets of "Eurabia" will soon encircle the Islamisized capitals of Western Europe. As I noted in my Reason column, I have little interest—and little academic qualification—in such conversations, and will leave the discussions of Koranic interpretation to theologians and historians. But thankfully, for the sake of Jewcy's readers, there is much on which we disagree. But let me start be reiterating that I too was unimpressed by Wilders film, and his views of Islam still strike me as reductive and, to put it mildly, incomplete.

Read the rest of this column at Jewcy.com

Same As It Ever Was

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 15:00:00 EDT

On March 28, the United Nations Human Rights Council elected, by unanimous vote, a special rapporteur on the "situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967." The nominee, Richard Falk, a veteran political activist and emeritus professor of law at Princeton University, was opposed by Israel for, among other statements, equating the situation in the Palestinian territories with the Nazi Holocaust. According to a spokesman for Israeli's foreign ministry, Falk will not be allowed through passport control in Tel Aviv.

"This is a very outrageous statement to us and a personal insult to every Israeli," said spokesman Arye Mekel. "How could he then come up with an objective conclusion about what Israel does or doesn't do in Gaza?"

To the Israelis, Falk's appointment is but another indication that the Human Rights Council (UN-HRC), which replaced the corrupt United Nations Commission on Human Rights (UNCHR) in 2006, amounts to little more than a new acronym obscuring old anti-Israel bias. When the UNCHR was disbanded, The New York Times called the organization a "disgrace," conceding that, on this one point, former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. John Bolton was undeniably "right." In assembling the replacement body, former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said the new council would provide the "United Nations the chance—a much-needed chance—to make a new beginning in its work for human rights around the world." The UN-HRC, he claimed, "will breathe new life into all our work for human rights."

So has the UN-HRC purged itself of its political biases? Has it, at long last, expelled human rights violators from its ranks? Writing in the International Herald Tribune, Human Rights Watch's Peggy Hicks surveyed the recent record of the revamped council with dismay: "In its first year, the council shied away from taking action on most human rights crises, dropped its scrutiny of Iran and Uzbekistan, and managed to condemn Israel's human rights record without addressing violations by Hezbollah and Palestinian armed groups."

The nomination of Richard Falk is further evidence of UN backsliding in its commitment to fairly scrutinizing human rights. Not only has Falk served in a similar role in the past—he was on a 2001 special panel investigating Israeli human rights violations, suggesting that UN-HRC is recruiting from the old UNCHR pool—but his record is considerably worse than the recent news reports would suggest.

For instance, in 1979, not long after the inauguration of Iran's totalitarian and theocratic "revolution," Falk, then chairman of something called U.S. Citizens Concerned about Freedom in Iran, was granted space on The New York Times opinion page to shill for the incoming government of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. A month prior, Falk had flown to Paris with his comrade Ramsey Clark, the former U.S. attorney general and inveterate friend of dictators, to discuss "social justice" (Clark's phrase) with the then-exiled religious leader. Upon returning, Clark told The Washington Post that he was "deeply impressed by the nature and depth and purpose of the movement in Iran that has established the opportunity for a new freedom."

By the time Falk published his impressions of the Paris pilgrimage, the Ayatollah's gang of fundamentalist squadristi—officially known as "secret revolutionary tribunals"—was already meting out executions with little concern for due process. Nevertheless, in his Times opinion piece, Falk upbraided President Jimmy Carter for "associating [Khomeini] with religious fanaticism," and declared that "the depiction of him as fanatical, reactionary, and the bearer of crude religious prejudices seems certainly and happily false." Indeed, "his entourage of close advisers is uniformly composed of moderate, progressive individuals."

This was too much for the Times' preeminent liberal columnist, Anthony Lewis, who ripped Falk's column as "outstandingly silly." It was clear to those not blinded by ideology, Lewis wrote, that the "Ayatollah has set out, without equivocation or disguise, to turn the clock back and give Iran a theocratic regime." With hindsight, it is perhaps tempting to see Lewis's column as prescient, and Falk as merely a naïve, anti-Shah activist duped by the regime's unsophisticated propaganda apparatus. But as contemporaneous news accounts make clear, the theocratic and dictatorial character of the Khomeini clique was widely acknowledged by Middle East observers well before the hostage crisis.

Falk's conception of human rights—remember, this is what he is tasked to monitor for the UN—is also colored by his warm feelings toward Tehran. Ann Elizabeth Mayer, an associate professor of legal studies at the University of Pennsylvania and author of Islam and Human Rights: Tradition and Politics, noted in 2000 that "The international law scholar Richard Falk, who sympathizes with the Islamic Republic and who opines that ‘Islam' is entitled to have its own 'civilizational approach' to human rights, embodies the tendency to imagine that Iranians need more Islamic culture, not the human rights protections valued by people in the West."

But this is small beer compared to Falk's latest intellectual pursuit. In 2004, Falk wrote the introduction to The New Pearl Harbor by David Ray Griffin, a book arguing that the American government was behind the attacks of September 11, 2001. Of the vast trove of 9/11 "truth" material available in print and online, it was Griffin, Falk wrote in his foreword, who "has had the patience, the fortitude, the courage, and the intelligence to put the pieces together in a single coherent account." For Griffin's latest book, Debunking the 9/11 Debunkers, Falk provided a dust jacket endorsement: "David Ray Griffin has established himself—alongside Seymour Hersh—as America's number one bearer of unpleasant, yet necessary, public truths."

As media coverage of Falk's nomination has metastasized, it has unfortunately obscured news of UN-HRC's nomination of the Swiss socialist Jean Ziegler to the UN Human Rights Council Advisory Committee. A brief recapitulation of Ziegler's qualifications: In 1996, he defended Holocaust denier Roger Garaudy not only on free speech grounds—an admirable position, after all—but further celebrated his supposed scholarship. "All your work as a writer and philosopher," Ziegler wrote, "attests to the rigor of your analysis and the unwavering honesty of your intentions. It makes you one of the leading thinkers of our time." He lauded the Zimbabwean tyrant Robert Mugabe, a leader who "has history and morality with him." He offered his "total support for the Cuban revolution." He recently told a Lebanese newspaper the he "refuse[d] to describe Hezbollah as a terrorist organization. It is a national movement of resistance."

Then there's Ziegler's friendship with Libyan dictator Moammar Kaddafi. In 1989, according to a report in Neue Zurcher Zeitung (one that confirms research done by UN Watch), Ziegler helped establish the Kaddafi Prize for Human Rights. In 2002, Ziegler himself received the prize, which he shared with, among others, Roger Garaudy. Previous recipients include Fidel Castro, Louis Farrakhan, and Hugo Chavez.

Outside Turtle Bay, it is obvious that those who believe the 9/11 attacks were a government sponsored "false flag" operation and who believe in the moral probity of Kaddafi bequeathing cash prizes to serial human rights abusers have no business adjudicating human rights violations at the United Nations. In 2006, the current administration was widely criticized for opposing the establishment of the UN-HRC; the United States was the only industrialized country, besides Israel, to oppose its creation. In light of the appointment of Richard Falk and Jean Ziegler, it is similarly obvious that this was the correct decision.

While it is gratifying that the commission that long provided political cover for vile and undemocratic regimes such as Cuba, Zimbabwe, and Libya was publicly disgraced and dismantled, it is a disheartening, though utterly predictable, that its replacement is following in its footsteps.

Michael C. Moynihan is a reason associate editor.

Shoot Down Over Cuba

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 15:00:00 EDT

Rant: Take Them Back to Dear Old Blighty

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 15:00:00 EST

Last December, Ricky Hatton, a stout-chugging, ruddy-faced British boxer, was laid out on a Las Vegas canvas by the American welterweight champion Floyd Mayweather. The crowd of Union Jack–bedecked fans —“drunken dullards” and “boors,” according to The Daily Telegraph’s horrified sports correspondent—became so unruly that for the first time in its history, the MGM Grand casino shut down its archipelago of bars. Hatton’s troglodyte supporters achieved what was long considered impossible: They managed to class-down Vegas.

Drawn by a plummeting dollar, the British are arriving en masse on American shores. In the streets of Manhattan, pale-skinned men in Manchester United shirts marvel loudly at what all these iPods, “trainers,” and Nike track suits would cost them back home. While generously pumping much-needed money into the U.S. economy, the feral packs of lager louts are, one hopes, helping correct America’s long-held misperception that the English are a nation of Inspector Morse bit players—sophisticated, fastidious, snobby—especially when compared to us rubes.

We’re not quite free of our inferiority complex just yet. After a 2005 stint playing on London’s West End, former Top Gun actor Val Kilmer enthused that English audiences were “smarter” than their American counterparts because “they read books.” (This is true, though if the current British bestseller list is any indication, our bibliophilic cousins are feeding their heads with diet guides and biographies of topless models.) The American blogger Matt Janovic, enraged by his intellectual isolation in the Midwest, summed up the prevailing confusion nicely: “Face it: an English schoolgirl sounds more authoritative than the voice of most American politicians…we sound like the cavemen that many around the world (rightly) think we are.”

And the filmmaker Michael Moore, always eager to play suck-up abroad, told one English audience in 2003 that the “dumbest Brit here is smarter than the smartest American.” In other words, theirs is a nation of abeyant Evelyn Waughs.

Waugh himself bristled at such stereotypes—insisting, for instance, that in etiquette “Americans are immensely the superiors of the English.” When Esquire asked the curmudgeonly novelist to write of the “crudeness” of America’s literary milieu, Waugh demurred, arguing that the Yanks were far more “literate” than his London-based contemporaries.

It’s high time that self-hating, pusillanimous Americans everywhere revisit Waugh’s assessment. And there is no better educational tool than extended encounters with that breed of Britons known colloquially as the chav, a pejorative recently added to the Collins English Dictionary to describe “a young working class person who dresses in casual sports clothing.” (Also added, incidentally, was asbo, an acronym for youths racking up violations of the “anti-social behavior order,” a malady which midwifed the British reality show ASBO Teen to Beauty Queen.)

While Britain is fast catching up to America—and leading Europe—in illiteracy, obesity, and violent crime (despite ubiquitous surveillance cameras and an ineffective ban on handguns), the Wittgenstein references in Monty Python still shape our assumptions of British cultural supremacy. But as the English social critic Theodore Dalyrymple observed in 2004, to profess an interest in high culture in today’s Britain is to be met with accusations of homosexuality.

So before President Ron Paul restores the gold standard, it should be acknowledged that the sagging dollar is providing one useful service: a long-overdue corrective to our self-image as lesser Brits. Europeans, who ranked the English as the “world’s worst tourists” in a recent Expedia poll, have long ago disabused themselves of such stereotypes. Take a look around New York, Boston, or Los Angeles, and spot the omnipresent gaggle of chavs, waddling through the Adidas shop, shouting drunken insults in local Irish pubs, converting the currency on every product within reach. England is just America writ small.

Michael C. Moynihan is an associate editor of Reason.

Psychotic Reaction

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 07:13:00 EST

In the Soviet era, political persecution sometimes took a pseudoscientific turn: Doctors diagnosed dissidents with maladies such as “sluggish schizophrenia” and confined them to mental hospitals because they dared to criticize the state. A series of recent incidents suggests this practice might be making a comeback.

In the lead-up to Russia’s parliamentary elections in December, the government threw a handful of nettlesome political activists into psychiatric institutions. One of them was Artem Basyrov, a 20-year-old member of the opposition Other Russia coalition, who, according to London’s Independent newspaper, was detained by police in December and committed to a psychiatric institution just days before a planned anti-Putin protest in Moscow. After criticism from local and international human rights organizations, Basyrov was released from custody a month later without explanation.

It wasn’t the only recent incident of this kind. Six months earlier, authorities confined the journalist and activist Larisa Arap, a member of the opposition United Civil Front, in another psychiatric hospital. She had just published an article describing the widespread physical abuse of mental patients and had recently delivered an anti-Putin stump speech at an opposition rally. She claims to have been beaten and forcibly medicated during her 46-day imprisonment.

On December 6, 2006, Andrei Novikov, a journalist with Chechenpress and a former Soviet dissident, was sent to a mental institution because of his critical reporting, described as “publicly inciting constitutional change by means of force.” After two psychiatrists judged Novikov mentally fit, a “psychiatric commission” justified further confinement by ascribing acute “antisocial behavior” to the prisoner. The authorities finally released him a year later.