Category Archives: Conservatism

Illiberal Zionism Update: Beinart Nails It

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Peter Beinart is exactly the sort of liberal necessary to win the GWoT. He correctly realized that the American right is not credible in its claims to defend Western liberalism against salafi illiberalism, because too much of the GOP base is too illiberal now and sees the GWoT exactly as Bin Laden does – a theological clash of civilizations – only they are on the other side. The increasingly Christianized and fundamentalist (Protestant mostly) GOP wants to ‘win’ the GWoT as a triumph of Christianity and/or American power. They are, as Walter Russell Mead correctly notes, ‘Jacksonian Zionist,’ not liberal. No Muslim, correctly, will believe US power to be neutral, serving universalist liberalism, when Bush needed to be told that the GWoT had biblical justification and Sarah Palin insists that Israel be allowed to do whatever it wants in the Occupied Territories.

In the same vein, he makes a good case here for the growing illiberalism of Zionism and the increasing inability of liberal countries to support its religio-nationalist, rather than liberal, opposition to Islamism and Arab authoritarianism. I made exactly the same point a year ago. (It is always nice to be confirmed in one’s prejudices I suppose, but Beinart does a better job of it than I did.) Sullivan adds his usually biting and gloomy commentary.

All sides seem to be sliding toward a clash of civilizations paradigm. All the more reason for the US to focus on the battle of ideas against salafism and get out of the Middle East in the medium-term…

The Normalization of Torture, and, oh yeah, Obama is Probably the Anti-Christ…

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I stumbled across this advertisement at http://townhall.com/.

When I first saw this ad, I was just speechless. Isn’t this image downright TERRIFYING? : ‘Yeah, I’d rather be hanging out with the Khmer Rouge and breaking US law. Maybe then I can drown my victim in our nice family pool behind me; it’s all good fun. Then after that, I’ll get a slushy or hit mall for some new shoes.’ Good lord. On a t-shirt no less!

Can you imagine the moral bankruptcy of someone who would wear a casual clothing item declaiming a desire to torture? This is the sort of outfit that guy who tried to blow up the IRS would wear.

And who makes these shirts? Shouldn’t the FBI be investigating this company, ‘http://thoseshirts.com/’? If you go the website, thoseshirts.com claims this to be humor. I’m just floored that torture debate is now so normalized that it can be a conservative punch line: ‘Hey dude, it’s totally hysterical that we make those Muslims guys vomit all over themselves at Guantanamo. Far out!’ 

Consider this counterfactual: If some Muslim walked around the mall with a shirt saying ‘I’d rather be on jihad,’ wouldn’t you call flip out and call the police?

Just in case you still don’t know that waterboarding is torture and that torture is a felony, click here and  here and follow all the copious links provided. If you want the full bore academic treatment explaining why US ‘enhanced interrogation’ is really torture, read this. The point is that we must stop deluding ourselves that is stuff is not a massive human rights violation.

Honestly, I wonder sometimes if the American right realizes what its post-9/11, post-Obama freak-out/meltdown/plunge into the abyss is doing to America’s reputation in the world. If those Tea Partiers could spend just 3 months in another country, I think they’d be shocked and then hugely embarrassed at the disdain and loathing imagery like this t-shirt provokes about the US. I see it all the time when I travel in Asia. The same people who are the most dogmatic that America is the greatest country on earth are the market for ‘pro-torture products’ like this. But you can’t have both. You can’t loudly insist on America’s unrivaled awesomeness and world-historic greatness while simultaneously undercutting the evidence of that by torturing foreigners. We can’t be the only superpower if everyone hates us.

Bonus Tea-Party Freak Out Moment: After health care, 25% of Republicans think Obama might be the Antichrist. This is not conservatism anymore; this is becoming nihilism…

Can Walter Russell Mead Walk the US Right Back from Torture?

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Walter Russell Mead is an exceptional blogger in IR. If you don’t read him, you should. He can somehow write lengthy, intellectually rich, and sharply incisive posts on foreign policy almost everyday, while at the same time being one of the best diplomatic historians in the US. (Start here.) I am baffled, because my best posts take hours to write, and there is no way I could do my job well and simultaneously blog well every day. Even more amazing for a social science writer, some of his posts are genuinely moving, like this and especially the one I discuss below. Do these guys ever see their families, write even on Christmas morning, go to the movies? I just don’t know where the time comes from…

Perhaps most important politically is his conservatism. Quality conservative punditry was simply decimated by the Bush era. The rise of the Ann Coulter-Rush Limbaugh-Michelle Malkin-Glenn Beck-Sean Hannity set has done terrible damage. Glenn Greenwald has built an entire career just around lampooning and deconstructing this stuff, it’s so prevalent. And Fox News – so relentlessly craven before GOP power, so desirous of  grievance and anger, so aggressively loathesome of academia and learning – has just pushed me over the edge. As an example of the collapse of the intellectually rich conservative movement into partisan hackery, look at the great work of Irving Kristol – one the writers that thrilled my mind and pulled me into the conservative movement back in the 1990s. Then look at how low the son – once so promising as the founder of the Weekly Standard (WS) – has fallen, accusing the Justice Department last week of being the ‘Department of Jihad.’ I remember reading National Review in college, WS when I worked for a GOP congressman in the 90s, and then even Commentary after 9/11. I remember when WS was supposed to be the Right’s equivalent of the New Republic – smart, rooted in learning, not so partisan as to prevent re-consideration and flexibility. I scarcely look at that stuff anymore…

Given the right-wing echo chamber, built around Fox, talk radio, and shock-jock set, Mead plays a critical role, and I hope the pro-torture Right in the US will carefully read this. Money quotes:

The KGB undertook a ruthless and savage repression in Lithuania.  The old Gestapo prison came in handy; the communists tortured and murdered thousands of Lithuanians in padded, soundproofed cells just a few blocks from the city’s cathedral

Today the solitary confinement cells, the cells where prisoners were forced to stand in icy water and beaten brutally when they fell, the holding cells for the condemned and the execution ground are all open for visitors.  Garish and clunky Soviet high tech phones and communications devices are still in the guardrooms. [I am] standing in the cellar of the KGB prison, admiring the ingenuously designed torture cells, retracing the final steps of the prisoners on their journey from the condemned cells to the execution yard.

Visiting places like Lithuania, and seeing sights like the KGB/Gestapo HQ reminds me what the stakes are in American foreign policy.

What we do matters.  Developing American power and reinforcing its economic foundations at home, building alliances, promoting democracy, deterring aggressors: when we do these things well, people thrive.  When we fail, they die miserably, and in droves.

Hear, hear to the notion that US power is generally good for the world! I certainly agree. But maybe the Right will listen to Mead about why the US is a morally good power. It’s not some vague Hegelian metaphysics of ‘American exceptionalism’; it’s because of what we do and not do – like not torturing people like the Gestapo or KGB did, like giving people trials, even though we loathe them. Only willful blindness will allow you to feel the moral power of Mead’s description but not simultaneous sadness over Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo.

Mead’s salvo may be oblique, but it’s important, because he writes for the American Interest. Please tell the Right that torture is not some punchline, but an inversion of America’s moral identity.

Republican SotU Response: Vote for Me because I Read the Bible and my All-American Sons Love Football – Bleh…

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Part one of this post, on Obama’s State of the Union address, is here.

If Obama’s speech seemed tired and rather boring, I must say I found the Republican Response simply atrocious – Vote for me because my all-American sons love sports just like you! It was Palinism; i.e., decadent, late Bushism.

The Democrats cheering at just about every line was sycophantic and annoying. Just saying flim-flam like, ‘I want America to be the best at future technologies,’ got Obama mawkishly long applause, and after awhile it got really tiresome. Agreed.

But the GOP response was downright disastrous. Here the applause really was scripted as syncophantic. What is it with the GOP and her0-worship? Ech! They even hooted and ho-yahed for McDonnell. And did you catch the unbelievably ‘diverse’ cast of worshippers behind the governor –  a soldier, a black,a policeman, an Asian, an old woman? This is supposed to be the contemporary GOP? Of white protestant tea partiers in Virginia of all places? Good lord. I laughed out loud the first time they panned the backstop audience.

It all reminded me of the GOP 2004 convention, a) with its painfully overchoreographed image of diversity for a party whose voter base is overwhelmingly white, born-again protestant, and b) the hero-worship of W as just a regular good ole boy who rose to greatness by his wholesome American gut values. Only in Virginia, this guv made sure to tell us his beaming daughter served in Iraq, and his snappy young sons like Sportscenter. Hah! What unbelievably smarmy crap! Do Americans really fall that?

If you thought Bobby Jindal was bad last year, at least he didn’t ask his family to perform the family-values  swimsuit competition for the religious right: ‘the Scriptures say families and America are great, so vote for me!’

The riposte captured all the banality and policy bankruptcy of the current GOP. The US economy nearly melted down, and there is wide consensus that massive government intervention scarcely averted another Depression. Yet the GOP response told us only that government is going to stifle America. That’s it?! When corporate and private spending is down all over the place, and the only big source of demand in the economy right now is government? That is your answer? Government is the problem when the only reason unemployment isn’t worse is government? C’mon. How can I take this seriously as policy?

On foreign policy, McDonnell was just as bad. He could only complain that we mirandized Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. I take it to mean that we should torture the hell out of him or otherwise deny him any rights. When did torture become a litmus-test for status as a conservative?! Creepy…

I was once again struck by the utter failure of the GOP to respond seriously to Obama’s election and the scope of the financial crisis. This is still the GOP of the W years. Governor McDonnell told us nothing we haven’t heard before, and he did it in the worst Rovian fashion – a highly controlled, hyper-scripted environment filled with sycophantic, awestruck faces, the shameless exploitation of his family, an even more shameless diversity ploy, Bible citations – excuse me, ‘Scripture,’ the recitation of same points again and again, now matter what the topic of discussion, and a bullying tough guy approach on foreign policy. They should have just let Palin do the response; she really believes W was one of America’s greatest presidents ever.

If Obama came across as exasperated or tired, McDonnell broadcasted unreconstructed Bushism. Stick with the former until the GOP can finally figure out how to move on.

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Finally I must add one professorial, intellectual barb to the whole proceedings:  it was remarkably, staggeringly shallow at almost all times for anyone with a serious knowledge about or education in the big issues in American life. I spent 2-3 hours watching the State of the Union, the GOP response, and some of the punditry on CNN. I was amazed at how little genuine expertise, technical detail, or serious, apartisan/non-spin, cost-benefit analyses of policy choices were included. It was almost all just campaign spin (how will this or that play in the red states?; speaking of, will Maitlin and Carville please finally go away?!), agonizingly cheese-y anecdotes (tell the woman making brake fluid in Des Moines that America has lost its edge), inspirational vacuities (America’s promise for the future), and shameless partisan positioning (my daughter went to Iraq, and my handlers made sure to place a black and Asian behind me – look! don’t miss ‘em!).

What junk! I mean really. How unbelievably insulting. Can’t our public officials treat us as reflective, deliberative voters, instead of dupes who think you’re great because you quote the Bible? How gratingly, offensively shallow. Grrr. WE ARE NOT CHILDREN.

If you have any kind of serious education in politics and economics, this was 3 hours of your life wasted. You learned almost nothing serious about the coming year’s policy debates – other than unintended signals that the GOP is lost in time, Obama doesn’t know what to do with health care, and no one is serious about the deficit.

Most of my day is spent reading technical work in political science and economics, so I imagine this is why it seemed so jarringly childish and evasive of serious issues. But honestly, if you had read even a few articles in the Economist or Financial Times about US politics, you would have learned more. I could have given a better talk than any of those guys, and in less time. This is why we have the democratic legitimacy crisis Obama mentioned. If you treat the population like idiots, they become disaffected.

The US Conservative Meltdown in One Sentence

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So yes, we all know that Palin is a balloonhead. Even the conservative-realist Foreign Policy gave thanks on Thanksgiving that Palin has no access to US foreign policy making. I have given up reading the reviews. I don’t think anything could seriously convince me to read the book.

But Sam Tannenhaus really captures how Palin both channels and reflects the larger problem of right’s increasing abdication of seriousness about government altogether:

“On the campaign trail she discovered a power greater than public office: the power of celebrity,” writes Matthew Continetti, an editor at The Weekly Standard and the author of “The Persecution of Sarah Palin,” a book that combines besotted advocacy with an assault on the liberal media that “tried to bring down a rising star.”

“Greater than public office”: this phrase distills an emerging doctrine on the right, as its long-standing distrust of federal bureaucrats and costly programs careers off into full-scale repudiation of governance itself.

 

Yes, the logical end point of tea-parties, Fox News, the ‘Palin-as-serious-contender’ fantasy, the ‘Obama-as-Hitler’ trope, Rush, Beck, and all the rest of the 2009 conservative implosion is the growing recognition by the rest of the country that the right is not only unfit to rule, but increasingly unable to.

(Tannenhaus’ good book on recent US conservatism is here.)

More Troops – What a Surprise… Do the Kagans EVER Say Anything Else?

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Am I the only one who finds that the Kagans are relentlessly, almost ideologically, committed to US build-ups overseas, and the regular use of military power and military-related tools generally? I just read the WaPo op-ed from last week. It tells me nothing I haven’t heard from them whether on C-Span, Lehrer, or from their various websites/think-tanks for years. Certainly, Afghanistan may be worth the build-up they counsel. My own thoughts are deeply divided, so it’s not obvious that they are wrong in the op-ed. Nor are they incorrect that military leverage is the ultimate backbone for the exercise of national power. I agree there too. And I know they are a lot smarter, better travelled, and have better access than me. So I do read them usually.

But increasingly I don’t feel like I need to. I already know their answer – more soldiers, and more ‘will’ or ‘backbone.’ As Greenwald has said, these guys seems like robots. They always seem to suggest that more US force is the answer. If Russia misbehaves, we should threaten it implicitly and let southeastern Europe into NATO. On China, belligerence is the obvious way to save Taiwan. Iran should be bombed. Iraq was a great idea. Etc, etc.

It can’t be this easy. There are other tools of national power and influence – diplomacy, aid, sanctions – and these are wildly underfunded. (Compare the DoD and State budgets; the former is funded by 25-30x the latter. And forget about USAID.) I realize that soft power or whatever you want to call it is ‘soft.’ It doesn’t work too well. But counsels to war or war-like build-ups/advisors/military aid, etc, have their own massive costs that I never seem to hear about that from them or other ‘neo-cons’ (if that is where the Kagans lie). Walt has a nice 2- piece on the huge costs this sort of counsel implicitly carries. You can’t just war and war – it guts democratic freedoms at home, turns you into an imperialist abroad (whether you want to be or not), and breaks the domestic fiscus. (Not to mention that your country becomes responsible for a great deal of death and destruction, regardless of the cause it serves.) Do the Kagans ever blink for a moment when they read about the trillion dollar deficits for the next decade? I am sure they do. They are pretty bright. But is their answer simply to reflexively demand domestic program cuts to prop-up defense spending at the $6-700 billion level indefinitely? Again it just can’t be that easy.

‘Birthers’ and the Requirement of Documentation

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2009-07-24-obamabirthcertificate-thumb One of the great disappointments of my time in the US this summer was the silliness and extremism of the Republican reaction to Obama’s defeat. Instead of playing a constructive role as an opposition party, it is descending into lunacy – G Beck called Obama a racist; health means enforced abortion; Palin declared Obamacare ‘downright evil.’ This is bad for the GOP and, in the medium-term, for the country also.

Instead of taking its big defeats in 2006 and 08 as cause for a major rethink, the party and the conservative movement seem to have concluded that further movement to the right is the answer. This is also bad for the country, in that the medium-term implosion of the opposition party in a two-party system removes a critical check & balance from the system. Perhaps the most idiotic, self-destructive reaction is the birther movement. A plurality of Republicans believe Obama is not a citizen.

About the only thing I can think of to defend the birther position is that proper documentation is a broad problem in the US. There is no national ID card. SS cards do not come with a picture on it. State driver’s licenses implicitly function as our nationwide ID, but they differ widely across the 50 states, SS numbers can be removed, religiously devout are sometimes permitted to cover their faces, and many people simply do not have one. Finally, of course, document fraud is growing problem, because 20 million illegal immigrants live in the US creating massive demand for a black market in faked paperwork.

My sense is that improving US systems of ID is the meaningful take away from the birther controversy; the rest is bizarro conspiracy theory flim-flam. So, yes, Obama should have a birth certificate to prove he is a US citizen, but so should every other candidate for political office in the US. Indeed, it seems to me quite natural that anyone declaring candidacy for an office in the US should be required to show proper ID. I certainly hope that is required! I am always amazed that when I voted in the US, that I was not required to show any form of ID; I would always bring my driver’s license just in case.

That is probably the real lesson from the birther flap. It is born of the confusion over proper ID in the US and the huge presence of illegals in country. Yes, it channels the long history of rightist paranoia in US history. But it also says that the US should probably have a national ID card as most countries do. That card would be required for most public functions – voting, candidacy, driving, court appearances, etc.

Finally, in a rich irony, it is the right that has long blocked a national ID scheme. Exactly the kinds of righties who make up the birthers – radical libertarians, militia types, NRA members – are also the most vehement opponents of a national ID card, because it is seen as a step toward tyranny and government tracking of weapons ownership. So you can’t say Obama lacks his paperwork, when you think too much paperwork is the beginning of world government.

Korean ID addendum: Korea goes too far the other way with an ID card. When you buy stuff on the internet from Korean analogues to Amazon, you need to punch in your national ID. So if you order a book or movie from the internet, it is tagged to your national ID number with an e-vendor. Kinda creepy…

Tell Fox News that Gordon Brown Has Joined the Global Conspiracy

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anti-united-nations The prime minister of Britain says a lot of good things about global coordination to overcome shared, global problems in his recent op-ed. But I am pretty stunned at his concluding remark that we should ‘create the first truly global society.’

The idea of course has a lot to recommend it. The global scale of some problems (global warming, terrorism, drugs) suggests we need globally-scaled solutions, and a global society, or ideally a world government (WG), would be able to coordinate that a lot more easily than the messy, choppy circus of multilateral meetings that passes as ‘global governance’ today. When I teach International Organization, I spend a week or two on the counterfactual of WG. We talk about what the benefits might be, why it has not happened, what its prospects are, how it might be organized, etc. (If you are curious about some detailed ideas, try here.) The economies of scale and efficiency benefits of WG are basically the same as those of any integration scheme – NAFTA, the EU, ASEAN, etc. And there is a great logic question in why human political organization has risen to the level of the sovereign state, but no further. In other words, we progressed from families to tribes to city-states to nation-states, and some of our nation-states are continental-sized. But we have not moved to WG. Why not?

The best answer I can think of is nationalism. And this is why Brown’s remark shocked me so much. The big reason we don’t have a ‘global society,’ much less WG, is because no one wants it. People remained deeply psychologically wedded to their nation, even if those nations are recent, artificial, rickety, etc. Look at how much the Iraqis want the US to leave even though the Iraqi ‘nation’ feels like a myth. Or consider how hard European integration has been. Yes, there are organizational problems with the EU that hamper more integration. The EU is a bureaucratic morass that only specialized academics fully grasp, but this is a second-order reason. The EU would work better if the EU’s citizens really wanted it to, if they really felt like ‘Europeans,’ not Irish, French, Poles, etc. Then they would vote to give it real constitutional and organizational clarity. But the Eurobarometer evidence does not suggest that Europeans are shifting their cultural-national allegiance and identification from their national community to the European one.

If the postmodern, ‘we’don’t-have-militaries-anymore’ Euros can’t forge a continental identity, then how can the rest of us possibly build a ‘global society’? And certainly, the US, the audience of the Brown op-ed, is dead-set against this. The American Right thinks state health care is the beginning of socialist tyranny, and before 9/11 John Bolton called global governance the greatest threat to the United States. The American Right is deeply committed to American exceptionalism. Serious talk of a ‘global society,’ much less a WG, would provoke a huge backlash. To the US right, Kyoto was a major breach of US sovereignty, and even NAFTA may be a bridge too far. I can only imagine American conservatives flipping out on reading that line by Brown. Can you picture the Fox News hysteria if an American official actually concurred with the leader of our most important ally? Glenn Beck would be in tears again, and there’d be rioting in the streets…

US Right-Wing Meltdown Watch: “I’m so American I don’t want the President Talking to my Kids!”

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(I must credit a friend for coming up with that title.)

I am getting really nervous about what is happening to the American Right. The paranoia is getting really, really bad – Death Panels, Obama the racist non-citizen, Hitlerian healthcare. Now Obama is feeding “Marxist propaganda” to the nation’s schoolchildren?! Does anyone really believe that? WTH is happening to US conservatives? He’s black with a funny name so he’s a Muslim socialist Nazi whatever? How did we possibly get to this point?

And this is starting to leak out to the rest of the world now, you know. South Koreans heard about that guy who brought a legal firearm to a health care townhall, and it’s downright embarrassing to try to try explain it: ‘well you know, that’s the way we are; those wacky Americans.’ The ‘Obama is Hitler’ riff from the summer is also starting to filter downstream.

You can’t talk like this and expect people to take US superpowerdom seriously. If we are going to lead, and not just be some sallow, pathetic, self-involved empire-in-decline (like 1914 Austro-Hungary), we gotta clean up this kinda stuff. Don’t conservatives see this? They love American empire and dominance more than anyone, yet their post-Bush rhetoric tells the world we aren’t fit to lead, or at least, they aren’t fit to lead the US. Most rich countries have state health care; they think it’s kinda weird we don’t. That doesn’t mean we have to have it, but it does mean when opponents flip out and say ObamaCare is the beginning of the Fourth Reich, they think we’re bananas. Last week some guy got his finger bitten off at a health care townhall?! C’mon! Please! I have to explain you people to Asians out here, and it’s killing me!

Democratic systems need healthy coherent opposition parties. Especially in a 2-party system, a functional, serious opposition is a crucial check & balance. But the US conservative freak-out just goes on and on, even after 8 months of Obama’s presidency. Andrew Sullivan argued in The Conservative Soul that the GOP was at risk of becoming the first religious party in US history. In similar manner, one might say it is becoming a regional party, as it contracts to a Southern rump. Christianist rural paranoia has replaced reflective seriousness.

And stories like this are exactly why the GOP continues to contract. Does the Fox News right really believe the POTUS should not speak to the nation’s children? Isn’t that going wildly overboard? And besides, isn’t it kinda cool that the president wants to talk to kids? Isn’t that good for citizenship? And when he says he is asking for their help, doesn’t that have a ‘we’re-all-in-this-together,’ ‘ask-not-what-your-country-can-do-for-you’ vibe to it? Isn’t that a GOOD thing? Besides he’s the POTUS. Doesn’t he have the right to to speak to the citizenry, including the next generation? He did get elected; he is the PRESIDENT, right?

Oh, I forgot… he’s not a citizen, so of course he shouldn’t talk to the children! How nicely one conspiracy theory dovetails into another to create that FNC echo chamber.

*Sigh* I am running out of things to say on this. It’s just too weird. Go read Richard Hofstader’s classic The Paranoid Style in American Politics. You’ll learn about all the other wackjobs in the history of the American right – like Father Coughlin who thought the New Deal meant FDR was in league with Stalin. How nice.

Thoughts on Miguk-land after 1 Year

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I went back to the US this summer to see my family. The culture shock was, predictably, deeper than when I returned to the US while I lived in Europe in the 1990s. The cultural gap between Korea and the US is deeper than that between Europe and the US. So I feel like I noticed more this time. So here are a couple of thoughts.

1. Americans are really fat. I struggle with junk food as much as anyone, but my fellows citizens seem to be just giving up. Koreans are the slimmest people in the OECD (or at least, that’s what they tell me, and they look it), and the difference with Americans is really apparent. My girlfriend came home with me, and she was routinely shocked by the sheer girth of so many of us. We both picked up on it almost immediately as we entered the airport. A news report I saw said that 40% of Americans are obese now, not just overweight. A doctor friend said this is evolving into a ticking time bomb. In about 30 years, when all these people hit 60, the public health burden will be staggering – on top of all the other entitlement/health care problems already. The IR scholar in my can’t help but think this is bad in the long term for US power. As hegemons age they are supposed to become more sluggish and complacent, and they US population is certainly showing that. How can you lead when half your people struggle to get off the sofa? My only consolation is that Europeans and Asians especially smoke a lot. That is their own public health drain. Is it macabre to suggest that US tobacco exports to China aid long-term US power?

2. Fox News and the American Right is even more insane now than I have read about. I made a point to watch Glenn Beck, O’Reilly and Hannity while I have was home. One of the most important consequences of the GOP’s defeat last year is the opportunity for a post-Bush reconstruction. When parties suffer from major defeats like the GOP in 2006 and 2008, or the Labour Party from 1979 to 1997, it calls for a serious philosophical rethink. Labor did this and successfully modernized itself (i.e., dropped socialism after Thatcher and the end of the Cold War) under Blair. But the GOP seems to want to drive itself further and further into the wilderness. The lesson the GOP has drawn from the defeat of Bushism is that it was not pure and conservative enough. Instead of tracking to the center, the GOP is vearing even further to the right to purify itself. Instead of coming to terms with the major social changes brought on by Obama, his postracial challenge, and the Great Recession, the GOP would rather recite dated, toxic bromides. So Glenn Beck is saying Obama is a racist; Palin calls ObamaCare ‘evil’ and says it includes ‘Death Panels’ (i.e., end-of-life consultations); and the bloggers are claiming he is not a US citizen. Are you serious? This is the state of conservative commentary at a time of massive government expansion? Even the WSJ’s op-ed page is staggeringly uncreative. If this persists, serious middle class professional people will abandon the GOP. These kind of people voted for for Bush because they thought Clinton was sleazy and then to fight the GWoT. But if the GOP becomes regularly indentified with managerial ineptitude in government (Iraq, Katrina, ‘evil’ healthcare), then serious professionals will vote for Democrats. I consider myself in this group. I voted and worked consistently for Republicans in the 90s, since W’s election, I have drifted further and further. And if Fox News and talk radio become the ideological organs of the post-Bush right, then I will never go back.

3. The Great Recession is far more noticeable in the US than Korea. First, it is in the news a lot more at home. Second, people talk about it a lot more in the US. My parents and friends at home made regular reference to it in conversation, but friends and colleagues here rarely do. Third, one can see all those ‘house for sale’ signs all over the place. The real estate market in Korea does not work this way, so this very obvious and public marker of the GR is not evident. Koreans mostly live in high-rises, as I do. In general the GR has been lighter and shorter out here than at home. No one talks about 10% unemployment here; they’d be rioting in the streets (be sure to look at the picture).

4. American food is not that bad after all. Food is an important part of Korean identity, and Koreans occasionally cite as healthier and tastier than US food when they need something to throwback at an American in a conversation. And indeed, the American food in Korea is awful; its almost universally junk food chains like Burger King. So I had forgotten how good some American food is – deli sandwiches, microbrews, summer BBQ chicken. Korean food is certainly healthier on average than US food. I accept that, and I don’t care much. (Koreans do; they are nationalist about food, along with almost everything else). Unfortunately the American food that is exported is almost always the worst fast food, like KFC or McDonald’s. My sister laughed out loud when I told her that even Popeye’s Chicken is in Korea. This is unfortunate, because it gives the impression that most US cuisine is that sort of greasy, salty junk. But my family, friends, and colleagues in the US rarely ate fast food; most Americans seem to be aware of how bad it is for you; and there are a lot of non-fast food restaurants in the US. So the Cheesecake Factory, e.g., is unfortunately not in Korea, and I have never seen a proper (Jewish) deli here either. I always thought one could make a fortune in Korea if one opened a good western restaurant.