Quote of the day

Tradition is the living faith of the dead, Traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. -Jaroslav Pelikan

Via Jeremiah Jenne

Quote of the Day: Realism vs Liberalism

I think this is where the prospects for liberal/realist synthesis really come into view. At its best, realism isn’t just cynicism, it’s a recognition of the important reality that other countries have their own real and perceived interests and that effective US foreign policy needs to take that into account. And at its worst, the liberal humanitarian impulse becomes less about actually helping other than about appropriating vaguely high-minded rhetoric to mass an agenda of arrogance (see e.g., Max Boot’s paen to the virtues of imperialism). Productive synthesis between this impulses can be a guide to good policy, and the useful corrective in both cases is empathy — the idea that others’ point of view should be taken seriously. -Mathew Yglesias

Quote of the Day II: Harper

This is finals period so I do not have as much time as I would like to write, so I'll quote. Here is Jeff Jedras summing up my opinion of what Harper has done the past few weeks:

But I’ve digressed. I don’t blame Jean. I blame Harper. He put the Governor-General in this position, and now a very dangerous precedent has been set: illegitimate governments that have lost the support of the people’s representatives can govern with impunity, fleeing parliament at will to avoid accountability. Mark my words: Conservatives, and all Canadians, will come to regret the precedent set here today.

What we have today, however, is an illegitimate government that has lost the moral authority to govern. As El Presidente would say, Let Me Be Clear. Stephen Harper has lost the confidence of the House. You know it, I know it, he knows it. It is a fundamental tenant of our system of parliamentary democracy that, to be Prime Minister, you must command the confidence of the House. And he does not. That is abundantly clear.

Harper may go on to govern for many years. And he may even do some good things, anything is possible. But his scorched Earth, nuclear war campaign to maintain his tenuous grip on power has besmirched and weakened the very institutions he claims to be fighting to protect.

He has stoked the fires of Western alienation by exploiting the legitimate concerns of Western Canadians for his narrow political ends.

He has stoked the fires of Quebec nationalism with his narrow-minded attacks on the Bloc Quebecois, a party that draws broad support from Quebecers not for its pro-sovereignty policy, but for its pro-Quebec policy.

He has exploited the lack of understanding many Canadians have of our parliamentary system to portray opposition parties representing the majority of the population exercising legitimate mechanisms available to them under our system of government as undertaking acts of treason that constitute a coup, thereby weakening the confidence and respect the public has in its system of government. That’s very dangerous.

And he compounded the danger by putting the Governor-General in the untenable position of having to make a decision he should never have asked her to make, further weakening our system of governance. It was only his blinding ambition and lack of respect for democracy that but her in this bind, and his inability to do the right thing.

Quote of the Day: Economy

So here’s what I’m wondering: will it, in fact, even be possible to pull the economy out of its nosedive before unemployment goes into double digits? I’m starting to wonder. -Paul Krugman

Quotes of the Day: Foreign policy

The drive for radical change everywhere else–this is a broader, but more accurate, description of what I was trying to say when I referred to pro-invasion arguments that took for granted that “our government essentially has the right to shape and dominate the politics of other parts of the world and to use force to quash resistance to its efforts.” We seek this radical change partly because we do not really understand the world and want to make it more like ourselves, and partly because it gives us an occasion to celebrate ourselves. Both are ultimately a function of pride, but this is then formalized into an entire mythology, capped off by tales of the importance of Pax Americana. The war in Iraq has been a particularly blunt, cruel application of this pursuit of radical change, but it is the pursuit of such change that led Wilson to send our men into the slaughterhouse of WWI, inspired the creation of the Great Society on the Mekong and which has propelled the Second Inaugural’s ideas of American-led global democratic revolution. Obama referred to the “mindset that led to war” in his early primary speeches on Iraq. That mindset is that the world is ours to do with as we please, and anyone who says differently is aligned with malign forces that wish us ill. This radical change is necessarily violent and aimed at the destruction or dramatic reorganization of other polities. Boundaries will be redrawn as we wish (e.g., Kosovo), regimes will be overthrown, and foreign populations will be thrown into upheaval, and it will be an article of faith that everyone affected (except perhaps the dead) are better off. The striking thing is that this is considered to be well within the bounds of normal, respectable, sane discourse, and critiques of these views are considered to be ramblings of a wild and woolly-minded fringe. -Daniel Larison

And:

This is going to necessarily depend a lot on perspective, of course, but I think a huge amount of our foreign policy vision is predicated on assumptions that are radical; our people, meanwhile, don't understand their radicalism. Anyone who has considered our foreign policy aloud in various online fora will be aware that the idea that the United States can act with impunity in any country, at any time, for any reason, ever, is one that is held by many people. And it's not even as if this is some dearly-held belief that people defend rabidly; no, it slides by as though it needs no defense. It's just the baseline assumption for many Americans who don't traffic in foreign policy debate. -Freddie

Quote of the Day: Lessons of Iraq

My own (provisional) view is that the Iraq War tells us a great deal about the limits/costs of using large-scale military force in situations where the stakes are vastly higher for our opponents than for ourselves, a great deal about America's ability, or lack thereof, to transform dysfunctional societies through occupation, a fair amount about the limits of pro-democracy sentiment as a north star for policymaking, and a fair amount about the limits of American power, period. I think it tells us less than many liberals and conservatives think about the particular incompetence of Bush's war cabinet (though clearly it tells us something on that score!), less than many liberals (and some realists) think about the importance of international organizations and their utility for crisis management in high-stakes situations, and less than many progressives and paleoconservatives think about whether the U.S. should radically scale down its involvement in Middle Eastern politics, and more broadly abandon its informal-empire commitments around the world. -Ross Douthat

Quote of the day: The Taj Mahal hotel

But for one thing: The Four Seasons and the Waldorf-Astoria could never claim the pivotal role in New York life that the Taj could claim in Mumbai.

It is not another Hilton or Sheraton in another Asian city. Its cash cow may be foreign guests, but it is equally a fixture of local Mumbai life, the aorta through which anything glamorous, sentimental, confidential or profitable passes in the city.

(...)

Legend has it that Jamsetji Tata, a nineteenth-century industrialist, was once turned away from a hotel in British-era Mumbai because he happened to be Indian. He decided, in a strange kind of revenge, to
build the best hotel in the country, outfitted with German elevators, French bathtubs and other refinements from all around the world.

The hotel became, for many Indians, a symbol of the overthrow of the indignities of the colonial age. And it became a symbol of the best that could be had in a city paved with dreams. -Anand Giridharadas

Mumbai is simultaneously the Hollywood and the New York of India, and the Taj is the center of the glamour of Mumbai for many Indians. It might be popular with foreigners, but it is a deeply Indian institution; it is where every Indian dreams to eat when they have "made it", and it is a constant reminder that Indians can and will succeed. That explains why the attacks have such a deep resonance compared to, let's say, a bomb in Assam by separatists. It is an attack on a potent symbol of a proud and strong India.

I remember talking with some train employee in Uttar Pradesh and when I mentioned I was heading to Mumbai he told me all about the Taj Mahal hotel and how beautiful it was. He was proud of the hotel, even though he lived hundreds of kilometers away, he had never seen it and he probably could not afford even a meal there.

Quote of the Day

The rebellion by American youth against the money culture never happened. Why bother to overturn your parents’ world when you can buy it, slice it up into tranches, and sell off the pieces? -Michael Lewis

Quote of the Day II

Yglesias on the bailout:

Everyone says that part of the conditions of doing a bailout is going to have to be some major restructuring of this and that. But normally Chapter 11 bankruptcy is precisely the means through which such restructuring is done. If unusual circumstances mean we can’t do Chapter 11 and we need extraordinary congressional intervention, then it seems to me that the extraordinary intervention should be aimed at making Chapter 11 possible. Of course key GM stakeholders on both the management and the union side would prefer to avoid that scenario. But the reason they’d prefer to avoid it is precisely that they’d prefer to avoid major restructuring.

Quote of the day

Horace Greeley, for those who don't or remember know their history, was the stridently abolitionist editor of the New York Tribune who in August 1862 wrote an open letter to Abraham Lincoln to tell him that anti-slavery voters like himself, whose votes gave Lincoln the 1860 election, were deeply disappointed he hadn't acted more decisively to free the slaves.

To this Lincoln famously responded:

If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I don't believe it would help to save the Union. I shall do less whenever I shall believe what I am doing hurts the cause, and I shall do more whenever I shall believe doing more will help the cause. I shall try to correct errors when shown to be error; and I shall adopt new views so fast as they shall appear to be true views.

It was the answer of a super pragmatist. He had one goal, keeping the "united" in United States, and would take whatever approach achieved it.

Lincoln is clearly Obama's presidential hero, the commander-in-chief he most aspires to emulate. He has told us more than once he's reading Lincoln now and draws comfort and inspiration from him.

(...)

So Obama, as Lincoln did with Greeley, is sending a message. He will be pragmatic. He will do whatever it takes to get the job done. -Frank James, The Swamp

Very true. It also tells us that Obama does not see himself as a mere placeholder. He intends to attempt dramatic changes. From early posturing, it seems to be heading that way, with the Baucus Health plan and talks of attempting to solve Kashmir and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict... It will be interesting to watch.

Quote of the day

There was a revolution; it just had little to do with the tenets of conservatism. The true nature of the revolution becomes apparent only in retrospect. Reagan unveiled it in remarks that he made on March 23, 1983. History remembers this as the occasion when the president announced his Strategic Defense Initiative. Embedded in Reagan’s remarks were two radical propositions: the minimum requirements of U.S. security required a status akin to invulnerability and modern technology was bringing this utopian goal within reach. Star Wars introduced into mainstream politics the proposition that Americans could be safe only if the United States enjoyed permanent global military supremacy. Here was Reagan’s preferred response to the crisis that Carter had identified. Here, too, can be found the strategic underpinnings of George W. Bush’s global war on terror. -Andrew J. Bachevich at TAC

One of the greatest public intellectual of the decade. Go read his book now.

Quote of the day

CalgaryGrit talking about some Québec provincial election polls:

It's difficult to know what to make of this without having Nate Silver explain it to me

Quote of the day

From Judith Warner in the NYTimes:

For me, this will be the enduring memory of election night 2008: One generation released its grief. The next looked up confusedly, eager to please and yet unable to comprehend just what the tears were about.

Quote of the day II

Obama's race policy during the campaign was well summed up in that NYTimes article:

“It would be difficult for an African-American to be elected president in this country,” said Cornell Belcher, a pollster who worked for Mr. Obama’s campaign and studies racial voting patterns. “However, it is not difficult for an extraordinary individual who happens to be African-American to be elected president.”

Quote of the Day

The circular firing squad will be interesting to watch in the next few weeks.

From Newsweek:

An angry aide characterized the shopping spree as "Wasilla hillbillies looting Neiman Marcus from coast to coast,"

Via Kevin Drum