Category Archives: Domestic Politics

Korea – First Impressions – Politics

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I have been in Korea 6 months. I thought it wise to wait a bit before listing impressions. I will try to focus on politics, but inevitably personalisms will creep in.

1. Foreign Policy

a. Getting Used to North Korea

When I was in grad school (Ohio State), we focused on lot on North Korea as an interesting case for deterrence theories, prolieferation, terrorist support & other rogue state activities. But here you just don’t see that stress. As several of my colleagues put it, we have been living next to NK for so long, we just don’t pay that much attention any more. Even now, with all the recent threats of war and escalation. What a surprise that was when I came here. I thought NK was the most important issue in Korean politics – and it is at a macro/abstract level – but the average South Korean seems to know more about the iceskater Yuna Kim or some celebrity scandal that Kim Jong-Il.

b. Japan

I saw one of those joke emails – ‘you know you’ve been in Korea too long when…’ One of the responses was, when you have a strange, inexplicable loathing for Japan. The IR scholar in me sees Japan as a critical democratic bulwark for SK, given its difficult neighborhood: NK, Russia and China. Yet this argument does not seem to move my students or friends much. Of much greater interest is the territorial saquabble over the Dokdo islands, and more than one person here has told me with a straight face that Japan will probably invade Korea again sometime. I can’t help but think of postwar France – restoration of Alsace-Lorraine and nuclear weapons pointed as much at Germany as the Soviet Union. Until Japan really apologizes – like the Germans did – historical memory will play a poisonous role.

2. Domestic Politics:

a. Restrained Presidentialization

Korean politics seems far less focused on the person of the president than ours. Korea is a semi-presidential system, so perhaps that accounts for it somewhat. But conversely, the National Assembly is far weaker than the Congress. So insitutionally, Korea does not seem more or less presidentialized than the US, but the media scrutiny of the daily schedule of the president is far less. I find that nice actually. It reduces the celebrity-rock star factor that can make US politics a little silly sometimes.

b.  Those Parliament Brawls

Asian parliaments are known in the West for their brawls, but I never realized how serious they can get. Wow. You Tube has some of these videos. Look for the recent ones involving fire extinguishers and the invasion of a committee room by physically removing the doors.

c. NK & the SK Right

NK really polarizes the domestic politics here. Conservative opinion particularly is staunchly anti-communist. It really does feel like a time warp back the first Reagan administration. The right is widely convinced that the Sunshine policy was a huge error. The right has also done a good job using North Korean human rights as a powerful political tool against the domestic left. In this the left is in a terrible quandry. Like Western European social democrats during the Cold War, the Korean left wants some kind of detente and Nordpolitik, but NK is simply so nasty to its people, it is hard to gain political traction. The right can easily attack the left for betraying the human rights of their ethnic brothers in the North.

3. Economics:

a. Conglomerates

Another lesson of grad school was how different Asian political economy was – particularly the role of the large conglomerates (kereitsu in Japan and chaebol in Korea). This is another one of those things I didn’t really grasp until I saw it. The logos of the largest chaebols are ubiquitous, and the western neoliberal will be disturbed to find a wide, seemingly unconnected horizontal integration. For example, SK, one the very biggest, is my cell phone provider, the owner of my apartment building, and a major gas station chain. Or Samsung – to Americans an electronics retailer. Yet here they are also in the grocery store business (?!), and they build cars as well. It is hard to imagine that successful cell phone providers somehow have a competitive advantage in gas stations too. Most western scholarship says this cross-sector agglormeration is politically protected, and when you see just how unrelated the sectors under the same logo are, its hard to disagree.

b. Imports

I must be a product of Walmart and Target. Where are rapcious, exploitative Chinese producers when you need them? So much that is cheap in the US is so expensive here. There is a very noticeable difference in the prices of imports here. In any large store, you will see the Korean brand item next to an import brand (frequently European or American), with a very noticeable price differential. A 6-pack of Miller Genuine Draft costs $10(!), and a regular dispenser and roll of Scotch tape costs $3.50. The protectionism is so obvious and expensive, I dearly hope the recently negotiated FTA gets through. And of course, the car industry is ridiculously protected. Korean cars account for the vast majority of cars driven. I don’t think I have seen a single Honda or Toyota yet. Yet Japanese cars are perfect for Korean streets – they are small, green, and fuel efficient.

Stop Obsessing over Campus Academic Freedom

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This was originally written in 2005.

David Horowitz and a state senator in Ohio have pushed hard for an academic bill of rights for students who feel ideologically oppressed by faculty. And they are correct that universities are overrun with lefty faculty.

But I don’t really have the sense that there is an intellectual repression occurring. I know this is an article of faith on the right, but I am a conservative in my (unnamed) department. If there was some conspiracy, I think I would be on the receiving end of it. I just don’t see any evidence of what Horowitz is saying. He writes "The abuse of students and university classrooms for political purposes is widespread both in Ohio and nationally." Widespread? Nationally? I can’t speak for Ohio, but nationally too? Come on. I just don’t see anything to substantiate that.
But I will go one step further and sound openly naive to the right-wing blogosphere-types. I think lefty academics care pretty passionately about freedom of speech. Yes, they may think their rural students are benighted, or that the market is exploitative, or that W is an imperialist. And they are wrong on all 3 counts. But they are liberals mostly, not stalinists. They are more committed to pluralism than indoctrination. You sorta have to be a liberal – skeptical, intellectually open, critical of the status-quo – to be an academic. Conservatives hate that kinda talk. Smart conservatives are also open and self-critical – I try to be one of them – but that is not the general ethos of conservatism, with its trust in established social matrices and institutions.

The real answers to the ideological diversity in academia that conservatives want are:

1. Find a way to make academia more attractive to conservatives as a profession. The problem is not the persecution of conservatives on campus, but their poor interest in academia. I have never felt persecuted for my views, but I do notice how few other ‘righties’ there are around among the grad students and faculty. But when conservatives do come and they are serious, they can be comfortable. Look at the University of Chicago. Strauss and Hayek have lots of disciples there who are respected. The real problem is that conservatives go into the market and make money. They don’t come to campus to research. If I had to guess why, I would say it is the low esteem accorded college professors in the US. The right seems to think we are eggheads; Democrats have been far more welcoming of the professoriate and social science in general.

2. Crack down on politically protected departments/agencies/centers/etc. The snap between Cornel West and Larry Summers is an excellent example of this. I think there is a deep sense among academics that politically correct or ideologically preferred scholarship is protected/assisted/rewarded. Multiculturalism is ensconced in academia more than anywhere else in America, and I think it drives away conservatives who see it, correctly, as soft and politicized. If state legislatures really want to do something useful for America’s universities, they should look at ethnic and women’s studies departments’ scholarship, and the racial re-balkanization of student bodies. The post-modern departments too should deploy method and rigor, produce politically neutral investigations, and be measured by their ability to publish in serious, peer-reviewed journals. Normative ‘calls to justice’ or ‘expressions of rage’ are not what we are to produce. That’s for advocates and interest groups. Scholarship means data collection and dispassionate analysis, not poetry or homilies.

Unfortunately, partisan conservatives, like Horowtiz, and the GOP broadly speaking, loathe experts and social scientists. George Will has been saying for decades that we just dress up out lefty predilections in the language of objectivity. So I imagine there is little interest in my suggestions. O’Reilly would presumably scoff when I say that academic liberals are more committed to professionalism than ideology. But many years of experience with colleagues who reject my opinions say otherwise. And without a rigorous empirical study to demonstrate ‘nationwide’ oppression, I am hesitant to hand students another tool to make my life difficult. It’s already hard enough to get them to come, take the material seriously, be polite to me and each other, accept poor grades without seeing dislike or ill-will, etc. Now we are telling them that I am an ideologue too.

I think the right has won so much within government that they are starting to turn on other institutions where the left is still dominant – universities and public TV.

Katrina May Hurt the Democrats More than Bush

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This was originally written in 2005.

The post-Katrina debate has the potential to politically damage both parties, depending on how the response failure is interpreted. I see 2 possibilities, but its likely worse for the left:

1) Katrina revives a national debate on poverty, and by extension race. It is painfully clear that the suffering of the disaster was disproportionately carried by the poor and black. If this is understood as a failure of social policy, of domestic poverty-alleviation, or even worse, as a civil rights issue, than Bush and the GOP are in real trouble. Bush has no anti-poverty agenda at all. This is less because of any GOP faith in the magic of the market (Bush is pro-business, not pro-market), than W’s surrender on any serious domestic agenda at all. Tax cuts are hardly a proactive policy. Beyond that the administration has No Child Left Behind and the Medicare expansion, but these are scarcely related to the social dislocation and confusion so prominent in the televised images.
But don’t expect the GOP not try. A standard of Rove-ism is to generate 2 or 3 policy proposals as magic bullets to answer all pesky questions in an issue area (just look at W’s Texas gubernatorial bids). So Bush will at some point try to suggest that the tax cuts and NCLB were in fact aimed at alleviating exactly the kind of impoverishment we all witnessed in New Orleans. Something like this happened when Bush shoved through the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts despite 9/11. Tax cuts help growth; we need growth to fight the WoT; ergo, tax cuts help the WoT. But I bet this won’t work this time. Too much urban plight was on display for such slipperiness to work.
So the GOP may be in serious trouble if the dominant question K leaves us is, what is the state doing to help the poor? This would be the first major national discussion on poverty since the Great Society, and the GOP is not ready for it. Proposal in the mode of 1990s welfare reform will look downright stingy.

But I doubt the debate will break that way.

First, I don’t think the country cares that much about poverty alleviation, or wants to revisit racial polarization. And the hyperbolic civil rights leadership will unfortunately accelerate that return of disinterest. There is much attention at the moment. Obama will get some good air time and say some meaningful and promising things; but then Sharpton and Jesse Jackson will start in with overwrought slavery analogies. They will attract the media’s interest with their antics, and Fox will give them generous coverage to hang themselves by their own rope. Liberals like Ted Kennedy will start talking about “Marshall Plans for our cities,” and that will doom the whole thing. The Howard Dean left has been itching for this moment, but they’ll blow it in excessive rhetoric and racially loaded guilt mongering.

Second, and perhaps as a cause of the disinterest above, the right has won the fight on poverty I think. The American economy’s growth in the past 25 years has been astonishing, and it is increasingly difficult for the left to make the ‘structural causes of poverty’ argument so dear to its activists. This cherished notion will be obvious in the left’s policy recommendations. They will show no imagination at all – think ‘Marshall plans for the cities,’ vague job creation proposals, and – always, ALWAYS – more money for schools. Yawn. No one believes this stuff anymore, and suburbanites will not be taken by such language. In the wake of Jim Crow and awful rural and elderly poverty, the New Deal and Great Society seemed like good policy. But today is the age of Walmart, cheap imported goods, and illegal immigrants taking jobs Americans find beneath them. When that last point – that the business case for illegal immigration is that our poor would rather remain jobless than take jobs they cultural/socially reject – becomes common knowledge, this debate will be over for the left. It will set liberals against one another, particularly black and Hispanic leaders. Lots of un-PC remarks will be heard, similar to Vincente Fox’s, and any electoral possibilities for a serious anti-poverty agenda will evaporate as the rhetoric becomes sharper and more racialized. This is unfortunate.

2) Katrina sparks a debate on public sector competence. It is also painfully clear that the bureaucracies of New Orleans and Louisiana don’t function. The photo of dozens of NO school buses underwater will define this debate – and likely cost Nagin his job. And Democrats will be lost – perhaps not the DLC, but the lifers in the House will be downright confused. Public sector bureaucracies in the United States are wildly less efficient than anything in the private sector. We all know this which is why we loathe USPS and BMV, call our congressman rather than the actual correct agency, and avoid townhall meetings, PTAs and the like.

And the Democrats are the most important political force blocking civil service reform of the kind that Schwarzenegger and many other governors want. Out-institutionalized by Rove and W’s massive party-building efforts, the Dems are desperate to hang onto what organizational bases they have left, and public sector unions are the biggie. Hence they will end-up defending changes increasingly recognized as necessary by just about everyone in the private sector – performance-benchmarking, easier ‘hire-and-fire,’ reduced job security, the elimination of seniority advancement, tougher benefits requirements etc. Anyone who has worked in a city, state or federal agency knows of the sloth that is protected by public sector unions like the NEA or AFSCME. If that is connected to the slow movement and corruption of the public agencies in NO/LA, the debate may turn from why didn’t the feds coordinate disaster to relief, to, how do we discipline local government to be responsive to constituents?
I bet the later is a more likely outcome. Poverty is eternal – or at least we perceive to be – so it will hardly grasp us, and decades of growth and cheap imports have pushed the poverty debate toward bad individual choices, and away from societal structures. But the debate on slothful, unresponsive, surly public sector bureaucracies would be pretty new, and it is far more attractive to the middle class which dislikes government unresponsiveness.

Obstacles to Professors in the Classroom

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This was originally written in 2006.

The Market, not the State of Ohio, Incentives Professors in the Classroom

Ohio politicians state that professors at state universities spend too little time in the classroom. But, state action can hardly alter the incentives emanant from structural changes in the economy. Why do professors teach so little, and desire even less?

1. Good research pays much better than good teaching. We live in an information and service economy, which rewards the provision of high-quality, reliable, accurate information. The best of the professoriate has a skill set – in research – that ranks near the top the contemporary economic value chain. Accredited researchers – not just professors, but consultants, lawyers, doctors, and other similar knowledge-generating professionals – are highly prized, and university salaries and benefits packages reflect this. This ‘rock-star model’ of faculty recruitment ensures generous compensation packages to acquire and retain high-quality professors. Part of that is limiting their exposure to undergraduates who, by definition, underexploit their skill set. Places like OSU wish to compete among the top tier of schools and firms for talent. Teaching is simply not a part of the incentive mix.

And there is, of course, a good reason for this. Teaching is easier than research. Most teaching assistants are qualified to teach; very few to write for publication. Most Americans have spent time in school. Most have reasonable interpersonal communication skills and a field of expertise. Yet far fewer are qualified to write a book or serious article on their area of interest.

So the mechanics are simple supply and demand. Prestigious researchers and their product are in very high demand because of the knowledge-based structure of our economy. Part of the price of holding such figures in our universities is a minimal teaching load.

2. Closely related to the financial benefits, are those of stature. Like all communities, scholars seek the affirmation of their peers. A defining book or article, along with the speaking engagements and seminars that accompany it, bring prestige. Excellence in teaching achieves nowhere near this level of recognition. No one speaks before NATO, the World Bank, or on C-SPAN by training undergraduates.

Similarly, prestige affects the ability of universities to exige teaching from their best faculty. OSU, e.g., has a reputation for football and mediocre undergraduates in the middle of a dull farm state. To attract talent from more high profile cities and universities, one must offer congenial packages. Obviously this entails a high salary, but also a reduced load. Higher caliber schools will find it easier to push researchers into the classroom. Ohio does yet have schools to rival the Ivies, and so it must pay – a lot – to recruit and hold talent.

3. Nationally, American universities and their constituent departments too feel the effects of prestige and competition. The internet has fashioned a much more efficient market for research talent. It is much easier to ‘bounce’ in and out schools now, so the competition to retain or lure away high quality faculty – and minimal teaching is always an attraction – is high. Big names – the ‘rock stars’ – expect course releases, or they simply go elsewhere.

And retaining the ‘rock-stars’ has ramifications for the local and regional community. The university system is no sleepy backwater of those who cannot do, and hence teach. Instead, major universities, highly ranked departments, and highly regarded faculty have become emblems of a city or region’s stature, its quality of life, and the dynamism of its economy. There is no doubt, e.g., that Columbus benefits enormously – in both prestige and wealth-creation – from the high concentration of young, dynamic, information age labor clustered around its university. By contrast, cities like Cleveland or Toledo, mired in lower value manufacturing, lack the cachet, infrastructure, and business opportunities necessary to attract and retain higher-end information professionals.

4. Globalization has only accelerated and sharpened these incentives. American universities are the best in the world, because they so focus on research in a global economy that most values information. Knowledge-generation is our area of specialization, and it is at the highest end of the value-chain too. Hence, the international division of labor is increasingly rewarding professors and researchers with American training. This only accelerates the extant trend away from teaching. If high quality researchers were already rewarded far more than good teachers within our national system, professional exposure to the global economy has only accentuated that comparative advantage – and hence the movement of professors into research. In brief, many people can teach, but the serious research training of a major American research school is far more scarce and increasingly rewarded worldwide. All states now face this dilemma, and only huge, and hence unlikely, financial interventions could alter the current market playing field.

Book Review: Buchanan Makes His Way Back from the Wilderness, Sort of

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This was oringally written in 2006.

An incisive critique from the right of Bush 43’s foreign policy is long overdue, and Buchanan manages it without too much unnecessary controversy.

Where the Right Went Wrong: How Neoconservatives Subverted the Reagan Revolution and Hijacked the Bush Presidency

By Patrick J. Buchanan.

(St. Martin’s Press, 264 pp., $24.95)

A Republic, Not an Empire: Reclaiming America’s Destiny

By Patrick J. Buchanan

(Regnery Publishing, 300 pp., $29.95)

In the 1990s, Pat Buchanan seemed to lose his way. A sharp and smart, if avowedly conservative, speechwriter for three presidents in the 1970s and 80s, Buchanan seemed to jump the rails as a polemicist during Bush 41. His social conservatism, perhaps without the binders a White House staff position put on his tongue, boiled over into ethnic and religious controversy. William Buckley acquiesced in calling him an anti-Semite for his controversial remarks on the value to Israel of the first Gulf War. At the 1992 Republican convention he gave his notorious primetime ‘culture war’ speech that probably cost Bush votes to Perot. And his abandonment of free trade early that decade cut his last tie with cosmopolitanism. His political and economic nationalisms melded into a somewhat disturbing American Firstism and flirtation with xenophobia. His 1996 and 2000 presidential bids were flops and his political views increasingly moved away him from respectable discourse. Smart, to be sure, but cranky.

But if the owl of Minerva brings enlightenment at dusk, then the threat Bush 43 represents to traditional conservatism has re-energized Buchanan at this late hour. In his newer work, Buchanan shows – in a way only a conservative who cares for these subtle distinctions can – how the current Bush administration is re-making the GOP and with it American conservativism. A ‘paleoconservative’ who wrote a preface to Barry Goldwater’s Conscience of a Conservative, Buchanan is badly out of step with the conservative activists of the Bush administration. He comes from the capital-C Conservative tradition in the sense of Burke, de Maistre, Disraeli, Metternich, Oakeshott, and in the U.S., Richard Weaver, Russell Kirk, and Robert Bork (many of who are named in the book). He combines an aristotelian concern for the possibilities of tyranny arising from state power (think Communism), with an augustinian sense that institutions (Church and Throne, or Church and Republic) are necessary to curb flawed mankind (think the 1960s). A devout Catholic, one imagines he believes in original sin. And while such pessimism may make his positive vision of America disturbingly strict, his deep roots in European Conservativism make him a unique critic of Bush’s big-government conservatism. Not quite the philosopher from the list above, imagine Buchanan as Burke’s bulldog for contemporary America.

The Rosetta stone for Buchanan’s work is American nationalism, the city on the hill – a Jeffersonian-Madisonian paradise of religious, independent-minded, rugged, free Americans. And this drives the three big criticism he poses of the Bush administration across these two books – an expansionist foreign policy which will terrify the rest of the world, while undermining republican freedoms and virtues at home; free-trade multilateralism which will de-industrialized the US and imbricate it in international laws and organizations that trump the Constitution; and big-government conservatism at home which balloons the budget deficit and saps rugged individualism.

Nothing so much as the Bush Doctrine and the Iraq war has ignited Buchanan in recent years. This is the best part of both books. Buchanan’s argument is two-fold. We face, in Chalmers Johnson’s great expression, ‘the sorrows of empire.’ First, terrorism, which Buchanan correctly identifies as a tactic, not an ideology, will be endemic if we seriously pursue global hegemony. This is not far-fetched; academic international relations theory has long expected other states and actors in world politics to balance the massive concentration of US power. Our democratic process and timid foreign policy goals have forestalled this. So terrorism, as the weapon of the weak, represents what little balancing there is. But if the US truly pursues a neo-imperial grand strategy, it is hardly overwrought to expect resistance in the form of more terror from alienated groups, with equally alienated states as sponsors. This is a good and interesting check to the wilsonianism of writers on the left and right speaking of the War on Terror as the first phase of ‘World War IV.’ Such language, and the long, nebulous conflict it entails, should give us all serious pause.

The second argument is more certifiably ‘paleocon.’ Buchanan makes a libertarian argument that American external interventionism undermines its ability to be a free society at home. In this, one truly sees Buchanan’s lineage with the Founding Fathers, and their 20th century exponents Robert Taft and Russell Kirk. He notes, correctly, that the expansion of the Patriot Act, the Homeland Security Department, and government spending to fund ‘empire’ threaten domestic liberties. The Economist and human rights NGOs have made similar arguments since the Guantanamo detentions began. And certainly previous wars have tossed up constrictions of freedom we today reject – Japanese internment camps and the House UnAmerican Activities Subcommittee are probably the best known

Surely this argument is correct. But if concerns about domestic liberties feel disingenuous coming from the old right, they are. This is clever, but only because so few conservatives have shown the spine to defend due process against Bush’s imperial presidency. Still, Buchanan is a poor defender. He worked for the presidency synonymous with an imperial White House and was a strong supporter of the Cold War – which spawned a national security state so freedom-encroaching that a Republican president warned of the ‘military-industrial complex.’ Perhaps as a result, Buchanan flags here. He falls back on distant quotes from Madison about the cost of armies and Reagan’s famous ‘city on the hill.’ But it is hard to cast cold warrior Buchanan and the ACLU in the same camp defending us against the encroachments of an imperial executive.

From here it is an odd non-sequitur to the next target – global governance. In the wake of castigating the US government for seeking global hegemony, Buchanan contradicts himself by suggesting we are simultaneously oozing sovereignty to international organizations. This is the biggest logic failure in the books, and marks Buchanan more as a polemicist than philosopher. But it does introduce Buchanan’s most interesting claim in the book – that “free-trade fundamentalism” is eviscerating the industrial capacity necessary to maintain US superpowerdom. This is fascinating political economy; almost no one makes such claims any longer. It is certainly correct that globalization is reducing the competitiveness of American manufacture, but the neoclassical response, of course, is that the division of labor and international specialization improve living standards. Indeed Buchanan avoids mentioning the bonanza for poor American consumers that trade and Walmart have brought.

But unlike the Michael Moore left, Buchanan knows he cannot defend protectionism in the language of economics. Mercifully, Buchanan spares us the shoddy logic and false concern of labor unions and NGOs over the ‘oppression’ foreign investment wreaks in the developing world. To his credit, Buchanan takes a clear neomercantilist stance, supported by a smart argument pulled from historian Paul Kennedy. He rejects the absolute gains reaped by all from free trade, for the relative gains to be achieved, in America’s favor of course, by managed trade. His approach, so derided in the US, is actually not quite different from Asian developmentalist strategies.

Battling the Thomas Friedman approach head-on, Buchanan argues that no great power can hang on without an industrial base. His Kennedy-esque example is 19th century Britain, stumbling before rising German power. In case of conflict, a great power must retain the capacity to produce goods and arms. It must not fritter manufacture away through trade with less developed, cheap labor states, nor indulge in ethereal white collar and service professions that produce nothing tangible. Taking a page from Marx, Buchanan sees industrialism as the highest stage of economic development. An industrial base is the root of national power, and for this claim too, there is a long pedigree in both political economy and practice.

His answer then is to manage trade with the rest of the world to insure that the US gains relative to others in the transaction. Friedman and the globalizers see free trade binding the world together, so if China grows relatively faster, it is not that threatening. We are tying her into modernity and the global economy along the way, and reducing the likelihood of future conflict. Buchanan is more cynical (or perhaps the nationalist in him wants to be). Citing similar interdependence arguments made in Europe before WWI, he prefers relative gains and economic sovereignty. And this dovetails easily with the political nationalist’s resentment at international law and organizations. The WTO, which infringes on both America’s economic and political sovereignty, comes in for special criticism.

The proper answer to this logic is not an economic one, for Buchanan seems to realize he is sacrificing absolute gains. Rather it is historical and political. Historically, Buchanan seems trapped in the Industrial Revolution. Like the late Soviet Union, he seems baffled by Digital Revolution of our generation. He does not see that America’s vast intellectual, service, and financial centers also contain elements of power. If he is correct that Britain could not grow all the food or manufacture all the weapons it needed in WWI and II, it is also true that the City of London gave her the credit to borrow hugely from around the world. Or consider that America’s high innovation economy means our military increasingly uses lasers, satellites, plastics, aluminum and other tech composites. Buchanan, like Kennedy (who predicted that Japan and the Soviet Union would be major 21st century powers) overrates the necessity of an raw coal-and-steel style industrial base. He does not see, as Wesley Clarke has, that the US military is remaking war around our economy’s comparative advantage.

The political answer is more troubling, but more important. Pursuing absolute gains, multilateralism, and cosmopolitanism are political strategies to achieve American security. They signal openness, flexibility, and warmth in an anarchic world. They mitigate anxiety, generate trust, and, today, are the likely reasons so few states balance American power. Yes, they are the reason we suffer surprise attacks like Pearl Harbor and 9/11, but they serve the medium-term interests of American power (as well as align with our values). Buchanan’s cramped, lonely vision of America would reduce these stocks of ‘soft power’ in the same way the Bush’s administration’s truculence has. On the economic merits, Buchanan’s strategic trade is simply wrong, but as a national security strategy, it is flawed at best.

The final major criticism of the Bush 43 neo-cons is the emergence of ‘big government conservatism.’ Liberals will find it comforting to know that someone on the right is still nervous about deficits, pork, and the growth of bureaucracy. As ex-leftists, neoconservatives do not resent government, so they don’t mind the New Deal or the Great Society. Again, Buchanan’s paleocon sympathies return, and for sheer peculiarity, it is fascinating to watch an admirer of Taft and Goldwater elaborate on the halcyon days of the gold standard! But much of the attack on the welfare state is pretty standard Reaganite stuff – end busing/affirmative action, balance the budget, reduce the role of the federal bureaucracy to the advantage of local communities (on education, for instance).

This would be even less remarkable were it to come from the conservatives in power. But it does not, hence it is Buchanan’s strongest claim of the abandonment of principle in the GOP. Even conservative think-tanks like Cato and Heritage, enjoying unprecedented access to power, have raised deep concern over the Bush administration’s predilection to borrow recklessly and fund new programming. Now in power, conservatives are enjoying funding their own pet programs – marriage and abstinence promotion, an FEC crack-down, the re-balancing, rather than abolition, of public television. Buchanan correctly notes the Gingrichian highpoint of small government conservatism, but cannot seem to reconcile himself to its popular failure. Americans want to retain the middle-class entitlements to which they are accustomed, but Bush 43 is unprepared to pay for.

Most of this is not beyond the pale. It is good to see Buchanan return to saner and sharper commentary. But old habits die hard. The books are stuffed with other critiques that sound like a TV pundit cutting loose. Indeed wandering from topic to topic is the major structural flaw of both books. He also indulges a few of the barbed one-liners that pull down his stature and make him so hot to handle. California is “Mexifornia;” America is “Mexamerica;” trade is making the US a “third world country.” And social science this is not. There are no citations; some of the authors he cites as authorities you’ve never heard of, and others (like Joseph Sobran, another Catholic paleocon) are really ideological allies.

That said, the books are entertaining, and designed for a basic reader with some free time. Don’t read with a pen; it is not worth it. But the state of conservative commentary today is terrible. Coulter, Hannity, Limbaugh, even Kristol have all sold their souls to the Bush administration. Fox News reads like RNC talking points. Even the Wall Street Journal and the National Review are not trying too hard anymore. Given the sorry, sycophantic state of conservative punditry, Buchanan’s work is a unique and piquant reminder that the right and the GOP needn’t be the same thing.

Movie Review: The Godfather

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CAPA Makes an Offer You Can’t Refuse

One of the joys of summer for cinephiles in Columbus must be the Summer Movie Series of the Columbus Association for the Performing Arts. (For the schedule, go to http://www.capa.com/movies/schedule.html). For 34 years, CAPA has been running old classics in the wonderfully atmospheric Ohio Theatre. If you have ever wondered what movie-going once was – before the bubble gum overdrive of the contemporary multiplex – this is probably your best shot here in Columbus. Borrowing from the original presentation (back in the 1920s) of movies as a part of a larger show, CAPA enlivens the event with piano music, a spoken introduction, a cartoon, some previews and an intermission. Contemporary movie-goers may find all this distracting and slow-paced, but it does harken back to an earlier manner of film presentation, and that is fun in itself. Before multiplexes and movie ‘theaters,’ films were presented in opera houses and ‘movie palaces.’ Kudos to CAPA for trying to hang onto to some of that.

The best film of this year’s series is The Godfather (only Dr. Zhivago comes close). As most readers of The Other Paper have probably already seen this film, and several times at that, I’ll keep the synopsis short and focus on convincing you to go see this titan one more time.

The story of course is well known. In the late 1940s, Don Vito Corleone (Marlon Brando) rules a powerful, politically well-connected mafia family in New York City. He is a family-man, however, and most of the tension in the film is generated by the admirably close family loyalties of the characters contrasted with the violent illegality of their daily lives. Deeply dividing the mafia families in New York is the question of the burgeoning trade in narcotics, and the fallout includes an attempt on the Don’s life. This brings one of the Don’s sons, Michael (Al Pacino), who had stood outside the family business, back in. Michael is capable and sympathetic (a war hero even), but when he joins the family business, we quickly see his lethalness. Much of the emotional impact of the film comes from following his narrative arc – from affable and promising young man to silent, homicidal mafia kingpin.

The rest of the movie is a working out of Michael’s rise under the shadow of his father’s assassination attempt and the inter-mafia family violence of the rising drug trade. First time viewers may be surprised that, despite the title, Brando actually has relatively little screen time and is not Don for most of the film. The story is less about Vito than the passage of power from Vito to Michael and its impact on ‘la famiglia.’ I will stop here for first-time viewers, but the denouement is justly famous.

The film is, as we all know, a landmark. It was ranked number two out of the top 100 American movies in the 20th century by the American Film Institute (Citizen Kane of course was number 1). It garnered 11 Academy Award nominations and won (only!) three. It is even the number one ‘user-rated’ film on IMDB.com! Almost any list of world or American cinema inevitably includes in its top 10.

But you say you know this already and want to know why you should go back again?

1. The script. Perhaps one reason for the film’s great vigor is the basis of its script in the excellent eponymous novel by Mario Puzo. Puzo, a professional writer (not a Hollywood hack) with purported contacts to Cosa Nostra. He brings more narrative gravity to this mob story than other good mob movies with original scripts like Donnie Brasco or Scorsese’s various efforts. Rather than re-invent the wheel, director Francis Ford Coppola wisely stepped aside to let Puzo write the screenplays for all three Godfather films. Indeed, the may be one of the few films superior to its original novel (the Exorcist also comes to mind).

2. The narrative. The story is deep, complex and rich. Good films – like good books – can withstand and reward repeated viewings, and bring you back to uncover more detail. Coppola and Puzo particularly deserve credit for identifying the drug trade as a deeply dividing traditional organized crime in the United States. As John Gotti, arguably the last don, protested on his arrest, the Cosa Nostra had some sense of proportion or “rules” (Gotti’s own term). During the film, Brando counsels one supplicant to justice instead of vengeance, and the assembled dons of the families agree that the drug trade is to be controlled. Yet as the FBI slowly eradicated the mafiosi in the 60s and 70s, into the vacuum stepped less restrained street gangs, directed by extremely vicious Latin American syndicates in the 1980s and well-connected ‘New Russians’ in the 1990s. The Godfather is a window into a world of ‘temperate’ organized crime that scarcely exists anymore and prompts us to wonder if we might not be better off with them than what followed. The film has the required length to let us meet each character and develop an empathy with them. Such a film about the Cosa Nostra works because we care about the characters and are crushed that they live so violently. A story about gangbangers is less powerful, because while they too live violently, we don’t care much about them anyway.

3. The performances. James Caan, Al Pacino and Robert Duvall were all nominated against one another for the Best Supporting Actor Oscar in 1973. Brando of course took the Best Actor Award (famous for the faux-reception speech). And in general, Coppola does an astonishing job wringing good performances from his large ensemble cast. Even Talia Shire (Rocky’s girlfriend) and those long-lost folks playing Tessio, Carlo, Clemenza, Salazo, etc. do a great job. This is not a modern, celebrity-driven vehicle. Coppola actually sublimates the egos of his cast to the requirements of the film and so improves their performances. For those who study the technique of film-making, this is a case study in solid performances across a major ensemble cast.

So is there anything wrong with the movie? One might quibble with the ‘action’ sequences. When Sonny (James Caan) beats up Carlo, you can tell his punches aren’t connecting. Similarly when Sonny (spoiler ahead) is assassinated, its hard to believe he would have survived the first few rounds to make it out of the car (for the awful death scene). But these are trivial concerns, raised by the age of CGI F/X. Perhaps a more significant narrative problem is the likely aftermath (spoiler ahead) of the closing massacre. Its hard to imagine a slaughter of that magnitude would not have brought down the combined vengeance of the remnants of all the families, as well as major police investigations. I generally find in the films, that the Corleones murder with greater impunity than is realistic, but we’ll have to trust Puzo.

Recommendation: First-time viewers: This is a no-brainer, it’s so good. But wait to see it at CAPA in widescreen and not just on DVD. Repeat Viewers: If you haven’t seen it in awhile or ever in the theater, this is an excellent opportunity. A film of this quality can withstand and reward multiple viewings, and chances to catch it in a theater are rare. Die-hard fans: So, like me, you own the DVD collection and can quote lines from all three films. Well, then just take a friend or go to see it one more time to support our friends at CAPA. 5/5 stars.