Clive Davis

"CRUNCHY" CONTINUED - 1

What a pity. Today sees the final posts on the Crunchy Cons blog set up at NRO. By an odd coincidence, I finished Rod Dreher's book this afternoon (I started it a couple of weeks ago, got distracted by work, then returned to it yesterday.) I don't know whether I really qualify as a CC  - for one thing, my religious beliefs are a lot shallower than Dreher & Co's - but I really did think it was a thought-provoking polemic: chatty without being condescending and above all reassuringly undogmatic.

Dreher may not care for left-wing Democrats, but he's just as hard on mainstream Republicans. The old Left-Right partisan divide depresses him, in fact. He's also the first to admit that there are all sorts of contradictions involved in taking a stand against consumerism. Where do we get these nice, cheap, shiny laptops from? Not from organic farms, that's for sure.

If you want to learn more, Dreher has posted a reading list. Glad to see Jane Jacobs makes the cut:

T.S. Eliot, The Idea of a Christian Society and Notes Toward a Definition of Culture.

Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences.

Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind 

Matthew Scully, Dominion.

James Howard Kunstler, The Geography of Nowhere.

Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities.

Alasdair Macintyre, After Virtue.

E.F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful.

Wendell Berry, various essay collections, including What Are People For? and Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community.

Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation.

"CRUNCHY" CONTINUED - 2

One theme running through the book is the fear that the US may not be ready for the challenges that lie ahead. Here's an extract from another of Dreher's meditations, looking back on the lessons he learned on 9/11:

When I walked out my front door on the Brooklyn waterfront and saw the towers burning, I ran for the Brooklyn Bridge, to get over to the site to cover the story. Within the hour, I stood on the far side of the bridge watching the south tower collapse. Seconds before it came down, a NY Post colleague told me not to go down there, that those things were going to fall. I looked at her with total sincerity and conviction, and said, "Come on, that’s the World Trade Center, they’re not going to fall."

Nothing that ever happened to me was as traumatic as what followed, and I’ve spent a long time since then thinking about the hour’s walk from my house to the other side of the bridge, and how my mind could not accept the full meaning of what my eyes were actually seeing. Of course, as we now know we all had ample warning that this kind of thing was being planned, and was possible. We collectively refused to take Islamic terrorism and extremism with appropriate seriousness, and in my opinion, we have not changed.

I am fascinated by wilful blindness — including my own; I have reproached myself many times for being unwilling to take seriously the warnings prior to the Iraq War that the US would inherit a fractured country that would tend to a civil war we couldn’t control. I didn’t want to see that, because I was so eager to see someone, anyone, pay for 9/11. But that’s another story. The point is, since 9/11 I have become in many ways preoccupied with the idea that some rough history is headed our way, as Peggy Noonan put it, that we are unprepared for it, and are in fact living in ways that make it difficult even to think about preparing for what could happen. I know, I know, you can’t spend your whole life worrying about what might happen, but that’s no reason to prudently prepare, and to think about ways of addressing social and individual weaknesses now, while there is time, instead of waiting for the crisis moment to be upon us.

I will never forget how clear and blue the sky over New York harbour was on the morning of September 11.

SLOWING DOWN

Apologies for the light blogging today - after-effects of a second round of root-canal.

AFTER THE ISRAELI ELECTION

How does the landscape look now? My friend, Emanuele Ottolenghi offers a downbeat assessment in National Review:

Only 63.2 percent of Israel's voters bothered to show up on a day when fateful decisions should have drawn the entire country to the ballot booth. Many who did bother to turn up, preferred the Pensioners' list — winners of an astonishing 7 seats according to preliminary results — to Olmert and his talented team. At 28 seats, his party can hardly claim a blank check for its vision. And Israel's coalitions have never been both broad and stable, unless their policy is no policy at all...

With Israel now encircled by Iran's proxies and Islamist fanatics, the last thing the country needed was an inconclusive result. It got just that. It will reap the whirlwinds of its apathy.

Stephen Pollard, who visited the country in the run-up to the poll, has an interesting take as well:

The main sense in which Israel has turned left, however, has little to do with issues of security and foreign policy. Likud collapsed not because of its stance vis-a-vis the West Bank and the Palestinians, but because it was led by Bibi Netanyahu, who as finance minister was responsible for some hugely unpopular (but wholly necessaary and successful) reforms to the economy...

Israel, it must never be forgotten, was founded as a socialist country, and in its heart largely remains that. Labour's tactics were thus bound to strike a chord with many voters who disliked the more bracing economic world which Netanyahu recognised needed to be acknowledged.

Fred Siegel's impressions, written before election day, seem to have been borne out by events:

When I got a chance to talk with former Mossad Chief Danny Yatom, I expected to hear about terrorism. But Yatom, who is running for the Knesset on the Labor Party list, made it clear that his top priority was to try and close the widening income gap among Israelis by shifting money from the military to social spending and increased investment in the country’s Arab villages...

As Likud’s finance minister, Netanyahu presided over both the revival of the country’s high tech industries and an improved budget situation... But the wealth generated by the high tech companies, combined with cuts in social spending, Netanyahu made to reduce Israel’s sprawling budget deficit, has given his opponents a powerful political weapon. Given their sacrifices in the long war with Arab intransigence, all Israelis, it’s argued, deserve a share of the good life.

NOTEBOOK

Bryan said he's a lifelong Republican, but he's afraid for Republicans to take over his town's government because he doesn't trust them to conserve the character of the town centre. Which is another way of saying the Republicans in his town were capitalists first, conservatives second.

Rod Dreher: Crunchy Cons.

WE NEED A FOX NEWS UK...

Now there's an interesting idea. I was a little rude about John Gibson the other day, but I still watch Fox more than CNN. Media people who haven't seen much of the output seem to think it's wall-to-wall Bill O'Reilly, big hair and readings from Mein Kampf. They hardly ever mention Brit Hume, Fox News Watch - a much sharper and more even-handed programme than anything on our networks - The Beltway Boys and the rest. I wonder why?

BLAIR VS KYOTO?

Is he finally turning his back on the Greens?

TONY BLAIR was accused last night of caving in to American pressure by proposing a watered-down replacement for the Kyoto Protocol...The Prime Minister will call today for a new international goal of stabilising temperatures and carbon emissions at present levels when the Kyoto agreement expires in 2012, to be achieved primarily by investment in cleaner energy technologies.

And here he is on Australian radio:

The point about climate change, and I think, again, we've got to be very frank about this, I don't believe - and this is my view - no government is going to end up sacrificing its economic growth, because the electoral pushback would just be so strong. The fact is we don't need to, however, if we develop the science and the technology and the changes of behaviour that allow us to grow sustainably.

All of which is music to the ears of EnviroSpinWatch's Philip Stott:

How wise of Tony B. to be abroad. I'm sure, however, that he now appreciates fully the hard realities of climate-change politics and economics... In the UK, we desperately need some brave politicians who will begin to stand up to the Green lobby on climate change and to call the 'global warming' bluff.

Let's be straight: the Green hairshirt just isn't going to happen, even in post-industrial, "we-have-never-been-Modern", Blighty, never mind, of course, in the rest of the world, and the idea that we can manage climate change predictably by fiddling (or, as it will inevitably prove, failing to fiddle) at the margins with just one politically-selected factor must be the most dangerous piece of sophistry currently wafting around Millbank and through the corridors of power at Westminster.

George Bush's environmental adviser, James Connaughton went on the Today programme [audio link] this morning to try to explain things. Unfortunately, John Humphrys was in one of his "I-name-the-war-criminals-in-the-White-House" moods.

COMIC TOUCH

If you bought a ticket for a fund-raiser by Ricky Gervais and then discovered he only did twenty minutes of stand-up, would you be annoyed? One critic was; another didn't seem to mind.

As I don't like RG, I guess I'd have been grateful he kept it short. But I know I'm very much in the minority on this particular subject.

FUKUYAMA, CONTINUED

I've just got hold of the book of the moment. Looking forward to reading it.

In the meantime, I'm slightly confused... I understand the main point he's making in this op-ed:

Just as it proved possible to stigmatize and eventually eliminate slavery from mainstream global norms without having first to wait for the mass advent of liberal democracy, it should be possible to effectively stigmatize jihadi terrorism without having first to midwife democracies from Morocco to Bangladesh

But I can't quite grasp what he's trying to say at the end:

Democracy promotion should remain an integral part of American foreign policy, but it should not be seen as a principal means of fighting terrorism. We should stigmatize and fight radical Islamism as if the social and political dysfunction of the Arab world did not exist, and we should shrewdly, quietly, patiently and with as many allies as possible promote the amelioration of that dysfunction as if the terrorist problem did not exist.

National Review's Rich Lowry has a query too:

If these Islamist parties become responsible governing parties or are, alternatively, rejected by their electorates if they fail to deliver, isn't that a huge deal? Isn't that the sort of connection between democratization and the fight against extremism, and therefore terror, that Fukuyama and Garfinkle say doesn't exist?

While an irritated Charles Krauthammer draws blood in his latest response on Iraq:

Fukuyama now says that he had secretly opposed the Iraq war before it was launched. An unusual and convenient reticence, notes Irwin Stelzer, editor of "The Neocon Reader," for such an inveterate pamphleteer, letter writer and essayist. After public opinion had turned against the war, Fukuyama then courageously came out against it.

Paul Berman, in the NY Times books pages, also isn't sure Fukuyama was quite as prescient as he would have us believe:

I have to say that, having read his book, I'm not entirely sure what position he did adopt, apart from wisely admonishing everyone to tread carefully.

And he ends on a mixed note:

Fukuyama is always worth reading, and his new book contains ideas that I hope the non-neoconservatives of America will adopt. But neither his old arguments nor his new ones offer much insight into this, the most important problem of all — the problem of murderous ideologies and how to combat them.

WHAT IT MEANS TO BE AN AMERICAN

Surveying the Fukuyama-Krauthammer prize-fight, the Washington Post's Joshua Achenbach unearthed this extract from Mr K's 2004 speech at the AEI. Worth remembering next time you hear another Chomskyism on the radio:

In David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia, King Faisal says to Lawrence: "I think you are another of these desert-loving English. . . . The English have a great hunger for desolate places." Indeed, for five centuries, the Europeans did hunger for deserts and jungles and oceans and new continents.

Americans do not. We like it here. We like our McDonald's. We like our football. We like our rock-and-roll. We've got the Grand Canyon and Graceland. We've got Silicon Valley and South Beach. We've got everything. And if that's not enough, we've got Vegas--which is a facsimile of everything. What could we possibly need anywhere else? We don't like exotic climates. We don't like exotic languages--lots of declensions and moods. We don't even know what a mood is. We like Iowa corn and New York hot dogs, and if we want Chinese or Indian or Italian, we go to the food court. We don't send the Marines for takeout.

That's because we are not an imperial power. We are a commercial republic. We don't take food; we trade for it. Which makes us something unique in history, an anomaly, a hybrid: a commercial republic with overwhelming global power. A commercial republic that, by pure accident of history, has been designated custodian of the international system. The eyes of every supplicant from East Timor to Afghanistan, from Iraq to Liberia; Arab and Israeli, Irish and British, North and South Korean are upon us.

That is who we are. That is where we are