Clive Davis

SELF-CONTAINED

John Lukacs's biography of George Kennan receives a generally positive review from James Traub. Not that Lukacs's portrait of the arch-realist is all that attractive:

He is honest about Kennan’s defects of thought; and yet he seems unwilling fully to accept what they imply about the man’s nature. Kennan made no secret of his low regard for the wisdom of the common man, and thus for the practice of a so-called democratic, as opposed to a professional, foreign policy. But Lukacs also notes that in the late ’30s — as Hitler’s Germany rose to power — Kennan began writing a book proposing that America adopt a more authoritarian model of government in which both immigration and suffrage would be curtailed. Kennan could not bring himself to despise Germany before, during or after the war. He was, on the other hand, "enraged" by Washington’s clumsy attempt to acquire bases in the Azores.

The predicament of ordinary people seems not to have moved him much. Lukacs quotes Kennan’s own memoirs to the effect that when the Wehrmacht marched into Prague, Kennan, then serving as a high-ranking diplomat, turned away the desperate Americans, "including a Jewish acquaintance," who came to the American legation. Lukacs characterizes this nonchalance as "cold," not "callous". Is there a difference?

While the Washington Post's notice runs along similar lines, the National Interest is much more sympathetic, even if it does reinforce the impression that Kennan was a man born into the wrong era:

For the landmark CNN documentary series on the Cold War in the 1990s, convincing Kennan to sit for a television interview was no easy task—he never owned a television and reviled the medium and its impact on American society.

SPEAK SOFTLY AND CARRY A BIG MICROPHONE

Alex Massie has some useful advice for American politicians:

Voters and interested parties around the globe hear everything the President or the leading contenders to succeed Bush say. You can no longer say one thing for domestic consumption and another for a foreign audience... Now for a spot of special pleading! Candidates for the Presidency might want to rethink how they deal with the foreign press. No-one expects McCain or Clinton or whoever to grant the same level of access to the foreign press they reserve for the NYT or WaPo, but a little more consideration and tact would go a long way.

IT COULD HAPPEN THERE?

Norm Geras saves you the bother of wading through Naomi Wolf's jeremiad about the slow drift towards fascist dictatorship in America. I had tried reading her piece, and gave up at Warning Sign Number 3, which tried to equate bone-headed Republican activists with the Brownshirts.

YES, IT CAN BE DONE

Slate's Bruce Reed, surveying the reaction to the Virginia Tech massacre, can't help noticing the elephant in the room. Why, he asks, are opinion-formers shying away from thinking about tightening the gun laws?

Across the political spectrum, commentators reached the same conclusion. Whatever they think ought to be done to prevent future tragedies, they're unanimous on one point: We're not going to do it. Even in the ivory towers, where the laws of political gravity don't apply, the dreamers were silent. For its online feature, Think Tank Town, the Washington Post asked a variety of scholars, "How can policies be improved in the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings?" All the posts had more or less the same headlines: "The Real Problem Transcends Policy," "Gun Control Doesn't Fit This Crime," "Not Every Tragedy Has a Solution," "Evil Is Always With Us."

...Granted, most of the scholars in the Post survey come from centre-rght think tanks and have ideological biases toward doing nothing. But they're not the only ones the Post asked. The centre-left think tanks on the Post's list — like Brookings and the Centre for American Progress —didn't even bother to show up. Those of us who work in think-tanks are supposed to come up with ideas with little or no chance of passage. Yet in this age of policy ennui, even people who get paid to be hopelessly unrealistic can't suspend disbelief on guns.

Democrats run away from the issue because they're convinced it's electoral suicide. Reed isn't so sure about that:

Voters aren't the obstacle to banning high-capacity clips or closing the gun-show loophole; they support those measures by broad margins. The real hurdle is finding leaders who are willing to get tough on crime, no matter where they find it—and who have the standing to prove they know the difference between hunters and criminals. Bill Clinton wasn't a lifelong hunter, like Mitt Romney. He didn't need to be. He was a Bubba. In recent years, Democrats have suffered a Bubba shortage. But Democratic Bubbas are making a comeback in the South, Midwest, and West. As they gain confidence, they will realize, as Clinton did, that real Bubbas look to cops for approval, not the NRA.

[Via RealClearPolitics]

TALKING ABOUT VIRGINIA TECH

I knew it wouldn't be long before I heard one of my acquaintances mutter, "Maybe Michael Moore was right all along." A sad thought, given that Bowling For Columbine is such a a woefully confused and deceitful piece of film-making. But if conservatives of the calibre of David Frum can't come up with a better response to the Virginia killings than this, then Moore is going to be enjoying a surge in his royalties. It's just not good enough to write about the campus deaths as if they were some baffling act of God:

There is no escaping the hardest lesson: that death lies waiting around the corner for us all. No public policy can rescue us from that grim human fact - or the equally fearful obligation to walk with courage under the burden of the reality of evil.

Although I suppose it's a shade better than Michelle Malkin's call to let students stroll  around with a gun in their lunch-box. Nobody should be gloating about America's gun problem - as Simon Jenkins notes, we in Britain have a knife culture that's seemingly second to none - but to simply make pious noises about "evil" seems a cop-out, to say the least.

As for whether everyone should maintain a dignified silence, as some bloggers (not including Matthew Yglesias) have suggested, all I can say is that if I were one of the parents of the dead students, I'd feel people had a duty to debate the rights and wrongs of gun control. I'd be much offended by the drooling 24-hour news coverage.

BTW, I've never been a rabid opponent of the kind of hunting that Rod Dreher describes so vividly. The first time I ever went to the States, I spent quite an amount of time in the backwoods of Pennsylvania, staying in a friend's house in a hamlet not far from Amish territory. I enjoyed looking at all the photos of dead deer and proud riflemen on the walls of the restaurants.  One afternoon, the mild-mannered fellow living across the street from us proudly showed me his sprawling collection of rifles and revolvers  (including a Magnum, as I recall). He had a fearsome set of razor-tipped bows and arrows, too. Much as I liked him, I did wonder what would happen if he ever had a nasty argument with his wife. As in so many townships, the locals never bothered to lock their doors at night. We didn't either. (Come to think of it, I'm not sure our front door even had a lock.)  But if I'd been living there permanently, I would have made sure I had a good set of bolts at my disposal.

CASTING THE FIRST STONE

Oxblogger David Adesnik, on Paul Wolfowitz's difficulties at the World Bank:

When romantic attachments at the office result in a serious lack of professionalism, should one say that the culpable party is unfit to lead? Or should one say that the culpable party deserves a measure of forgiveness because we all make mistakes when romance is involved? These seem to be the exact same questions we were all asking in the Clinton years, except that liberals and conservatives now have an incentive to contradict the answers they gave last time around.

DEAD BUT NOT BURIED?

Gerard Baker reads the funeral rites for neocondom, but adds a caveat:

In the end, the rise and fall of neoconservatism in government may prove not unlike that of its predecessor in the obscure ideology-turned-official-policy stakes, monetarism. Monetarism was discredited as policy because, while it offered the correct analysis, it failed as policy. I suspect the same will be said for the much derided, little-lamented neoconservatism.

He’s talking about foreign affairs, of course. But It’s worth recalling that neoconservatism has an honorable tradition in domestic policy. Who has done more to change our thinking about crime and policing, for instance, than James Q. Wilson? (As far as I recall, he was opposed to the Iraq war.) Neocons thought long and hard about civic culture, and to some extent their ideas have become part of the mainstream. Thanks to what has happened in Baghdad, all that is likely to be forgotten.

FROTHING

The Times's Robbie Millen doesn't mince his words about certain American commentators:

It's a crass trait of the American Right... to lump all of Europe - from France to Poland - together as one single cheese-eating, surrender monkey entity. You'd have thought that Iraq might have taught US conservatives that "Abroad" is a little bit more complicated than that.

Well said. Want another example of unhinged transatlantic punditry? Here's transplanted Brit, John Derbyshire wondering why Tony Blair didn't send gunboats into the streets of Teheran in order to teach Johnny Foreigner a lesson:

What on earth has happened to the British? What has happened is multiculturalism.  The British no longer feel that contempt for other nations that sustained them for so many centuries.  Or, if they feel it, they guiltily suppress that feeling, as being flagitiously "racist."

He also thinks the sailors who allowed themselves to be paraded on TV should be court-martialled, "with shooting definitely an option." Yes, really. Now, you can have all sorts of debates about the rights and wrongs of multiculturalism (I'm not at all convinced that the American version is really superior to ours, to be honest.) But doesn't it at least occur to Derbyshire that there were more complicated forces at work in this particular crisis? As for the decline of the fine sense of contempt for other nations, well, I suppose education, package holidays, David Attenborough and LiveAid, among many other things, put paid to all that. A fine thing too. Instapundit linked approvingly to Derbyshire's piece. Enuff said. When it comes to matters European, most right-wing American blogs are far interested in scare-mongering than trying to work out what's really happening.

LIBERTARIANISM IS DEAD, LONG LIVE LIBERTARIAN PATERNALISM

The movement's time has come and gone, sort of, argues NY Times columnist David Leonhardt:

Libertarianism has now arrived at an interesting juncture. The moment for its grandest ambitions seems to have passed. President Bush is no longer talking about privatizing Social Security, and his free-market approach to rebuilding Iraq has proven disastrous. The libertarians at the Cato Institute, meanwhile, are struggling to persuade people that global warming — the archetypal free-market failure — is a hoax. Yet in an irony worthy of [Ayn] Rand’s collective, the solution to climate change will probably have a libertarian tinge. The global warming debate is coalescing around a "cap and trade" solution in which energy-efficient companies would be rewarded by the market. In fact, across a range of major issues — energy policy, health care, retirement savings — a hybrid form of laissez-faire capitalism and collectivism seems to be ascendant. The market will be allowed to work its efficient magic, but government will step in to correct the market’s failures.

Is Iraq really an example of the free market in operation? One for the faithful to argue over.

SAVED FROM THE MEMORY HOLE

That newly discovered archive devoted to the history of the American CP proves that we got it all wrong, apparently. As one modern-day sympathizer touchingly puts it:

"Wherever you look where there was a struggle for peace and justice you will find the Communist Party."

We eagerly await a six-hour film on the subject by Adam Curtis.