Ponnuru and Lowry respond to their critics. I’m the sure the sphere will be all over this within hours.  But a few particularly egregious points are worth noting.

1) Ponnuru and Lowry claim that Obama rejects American exceptionalism in favor of the “Wilsonian project of relocating American greatness not in our fixed constitutional principles but in our supposed ability to transcend those principles.” This is silly for a three reason, apart from the atrocious grammar.

a) The “Wilsonian project” in no way excludes American exceptionalism. Nor could anyone who’s ever read Wilson think so.  Instead, it offers a different view of what makes American exceptional than Ponnuru and Lowry’s. That view may be unconvincing, or even pernicious. But it attributes the same quasi-providential status to the American regime that they insist on.

b) The difference between “Wilsonian” exceptionalism and the NR kind doesn’t revolve around transcendence of constitutional principles. It’s a disagreement about what those principles are, and the rank order among them.  Does the Constitution’s promise of a “more perfect union”  trump  its formal limitations of government? Are the blessings of liberty material as well as political and juridical? To condemn progressivism as hostile, as such to founding principles is to avoid the argument on the merits, and to ignore the long history of sincere attempts to articulate a left-wing conception of American values.  Regrettably, that’s the tendency of the whole piece.

c) Ponnuru and Lowry admit that Obama has explicitly acknowledged America’s exceptional principles and role. But they dismiss this with the observation that it  “would be remarkable if any president did not say such things.” Which is true enough. But in that case, the argument becomes trivially psychologizing: Obama SAYS he believes in American exceptionalism, but he doesn’t really MEAN it.  As far as I can tell, Ponnuru and Lowry present no evidence for that conclusion except some quotes in which Obama suggests that the election of a black man, namely himself, to the presidency was sort of a big deal.  I guess that can be seen as narcissistic.  But I seem to recall a similar sentiment expressed in the pages of NR and Commentary back in November.

2) The psychologizing continues a few paragraphs later when Ponnuru and Lowry reaffirm their contention that liberals, progressives, etc. support the policies they do because they  secretly think Europe is cooler. Support for mass transit is highlighted: “we suspect that much of the enthusiasm for these subsidies among liberals is based on mass transit’s association with Europe.” Well,  I know a lot of progressives and mass transit enthusiasts. And I can’t think of a single one who appreciated the reliable trains, quiet buses and streetcars, and clear bike lanes found in many European cities BECAUSE they’re European. Actually, many Americans find it pleasant and convenient to travel this way. And they wonder, not unreasonably, if it wouldn’t be nice to enjoy similar infrastructure at home. It’s true that arguments for mass transit often fail to consider the real differences of the American landscape and lifestyle.  But that’s a serious question worth debating in particular cases–what works in Berlin may also be good for New York, but probably not for Tucson –rather than the status envy of Upper West Siders.

3) Victor Davis Hanson is praised for the observation that  America exceptionalism is connected with the lack of a feudal past. Ponnuru and Lowry admit that ” Sadly, a worse institution took root here, but never became part of the national psyche.” The worse institution, of course, is slavery. But anyone who can say that slavery and the ideology of white supremacy NEVER became PART of the national psyche  really should not be taken seriously as a guide to the American character, although how large a part and for how long are open to dispute. Don’t take my word for it, though. Go back to point (1)–all you need to do is read Wilson.

That’s Countess Sophya’s (Mrs. Tolstoy’s) objection to the “Tolstoyan” movement that had grown up around her husband with his encouragement. In THE LAST STATION, we see that Sophya understands her husband’s great novels better than his ideological disciples. We also see that those novels (and the old genius himself) stand somewhere in between Sophya’s selfish obsession with personal love and the the Tolstoyan (and Tolstoy’s own) political principles–directed as they are toward a kind of selfless or disembodied love of the people or humanity as a whole. The novelist says that love is the only answer, but without being as clear as he should be (or while being very conflicted) about what love is. Women, we learn, are more realistic and less puritanical than men, and the cure for ideological fanaticism in some young men is the loving seduction of a good woman. One reason WAR AND PEACE is so realistic, we also learn, is that Mrs. Tolstoy constantly reminded her husband of what a man or woman would really do or say in this or that situation. So this movie shows us what’s wrong with even the seemingly noble intentions of ideologues, as well as the crucial and perplexing distinction between the personal profundity of great literature and the silly and dangerous utopian literary politics of even many great authors. We also learn that evildoing ideologues especially want to win control over the moment of death–purging it of wives and priests and anything else that would compromise a kind of fake Socratic nobility. Tolstoy, we’re charmed to discover, was no Socrates; he, for one thing, actually loved and liked and was endlessly aroused in all sorts of way by his wife (who gave him 13 children and apparently 48 less-than-serene years). We leave the theater with a renewed appreciation for the highest purpose of private property. This movie deserves to win almost as many awards as CRAZY HEART, and if I were Oscar tyrant I would give the best actress award to Helen Mirren.

UPDATE: Too bad Helen didn’t win. BUT it was great to see Sandra Bullock and THE BLIND SIDE and real charity honored. It was also great to see real courage in an unpopular war honored with THE HURT LOCKER. And we can say the same about the redemptive themes of our country music with Jeff Bridges and CRAZY HEART and T-Bone and THE WEARY KIND. It was also refreshing to be almost completely spared politically correct speeches and to see AVATAR limited to techno-awards and so to see James Cameron stuck in his seat watching his ex-wife getting that director Oscar.

There’s nothing more embarrassing than someone from an older generation commenting on the present one. Think of the aging hippie professor, clad in jeans and t-shirt, trying to prove his bona fides by showing he is hip to his students’ latest taste in music. It never fails but to provoke amused giggles from the back of the classroom, followed up by the inevitable tweet : “I mean this guy is so out of it; that’s stuff, like, from a month ago.”

Having repented of my foolishness a couple of weeks ago in bringing to our readers’ attention an article by Charlotte Allen on the current sexual mores of the young, I now repeat my folly by turning to the parallel issue of, precisely, the musical tastes of the young. I say parallel because the article I now commend suggests that the music of yesterday is the prolegomena to the sexual mores of today. Put more simply, who says rock says hook up. The author is the renown philosopher Roger Scruton, and the essay can be found at http://www.aei.org/article/101717 or, in the fuller version, at http://www.american.com/archive/2010/february/soul-music. And we will all await, as we did last time when the youth movement spoke up to set matters straight on the effective truth of the alpha male, for commentators still in touch with the current generation (is it X, Y, Z or AAprime?) to show us where, perhaps, Scruton may have gone astray.

Scruton is a wonderful writer and an expert on music (among a thousand or so other things that he has studied and mastered). The current essay, “Soul Music,” is highly reminiscent of the famous chapter on music that appears near the beginning of Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind. Bloom’s chapter is also on the music of the youth. Interestingly, too, Bloom and Scruton both begin from Plato, referring to the Republic. The theme is that music shapes the soul, and thus shapes the way of life or the regime. (“The ways of poetry and music are not changed anywhere without change in the most important laws of the city” Republic 424c). And sure enough, as our music has changed, so have our mores and laws, in the direction, as Cole Porter put it even before the revolution in rock, of “anything goes.” And consider for a moment not the music but the lyrics of that one:

In olden days a glimpse of stocking
Was looked on as something shocking,
But now, God knows,
Anything Goes.

Good authors too who once knew better words,
Now only use four letter words
Writing prose, Anything Goes.

The world has gone mad today
And good’s bad today,

Stop. “Good is bad today.” Porter saw not only where mores were heading, but what was to be a precise linguistic transformation.  Kool! Of course, the dictum “anything goes” would be strictly libertarian, whereas the new ethic is in fact more restrictive: it permits only that which allows anything to go, while excluding anything that does not. This is what is known as political correctness or the dogmatism of relativism.

Returning to Bloom, he was known best for his attack on rock music. One line stands out: “life is made into a non-stop, commercially prepackaged masturbational fantasy” (p.75). His chapter on music, incidentally, is commonly thought to have been the reason for which this work of theory was able to burst out from beyond the narrow circle of academic readership to find its way to the top of the New York Times best seller list, earning him the envy and enmity of the academic establishment. Not even John Rawls, in his wildest, er, philosophical fantasy could top that.

There is more to the last point about selling books than meets the eye. I can testify to this first hand, for I knew Alan Bloom, as he once jokingly said to me, “before he was Alan Bloom,” meaning before he became a household celebrity. No one can say that Bloom knew he would become famous by writing Closing, as its success remains at the end of the day one of the more inexplicable events of modern culture. Still, I think its popularity was not a one-thousand percent accident. Bloom attacked rock music in large part to create a scandal. For a philosopher to jump into the mosh pit and talk about hip hop and MTV was to make him a shock jock avant la lettre. And the purpose was not so much to sell books–though the man could sure spend money!–as to try to reach and educate a portion of the youth generation. He attacked rock–he says as much at the beginning of his chapter–because he knew that modern youth would defend it. Indeed, he thought it was about the only thing they would defend as such, i.e., not on relativistic but absolute ground. And this was the kicker in his pedagogy: Defending something absolutely and with indignation is a precondition for philosophical inquiry. You have to love something first to be capable of beginning the ascent; you have to be in the thrall of a prejudice, to cling to something absolutely, before going through the wrenching experience of giving it up and opening up to the pursuit of truth.  A student open-minded to everything would remain that way forever. “If a student can … get a critical distance on what he clings to, come to doubt the ultimate value of what he loves, he has taken the first and most difficult step toward the philosophic conversion.” (p.71) Bloom no doubt meant most of what he said about Mick Jagger, but the analysis was secondary to his “rhetorical” purpose of engaging some of his students and helping them to get some satisfaction.

Roger Scruton’s article is much more about music per se than Bloom’s chapter, but the two together make for some good reading. Make sure you get the version of the Scruton essay that contains the musical clips, and have your headphones ready.

That’s the question Michael Weingrad asks in the inaugural issue of The Jewish Review of Books.

The article has taken heat from fans of the many Jewish fantasy authors. But most of them have missed the point. Weingrad isn’t asking whether Jews write fantasy or enjoy reading it. Instead, he’s concerned with why there aren’t any compelling fantasy “worlds” that incorporate Jewish folklore and tropes the way Narnia and Tolkein’s Middle Earth develop  Christian ones.

But is that really such a puzzle? In the first place, the landscape of most fantasy novels is essentially the numinous forest of the Teutonic Dark Ages. It is not so much a Christian world as a world on the cusp of Christianity: a pagan Götterdämmerung.

Jews can, of course, appropriate this setting for literary purposes. But I don’t think it has the same imaginative gravity that it does for Christians. Similarly, the warrior values that animate a lot of fantasy are not traditionally Jewish. One could, I suppose, write a story around around a learned rabbi–but surely that would not be as interesting as one focused on knights, errant wizards, and chieftains of mounted hordes. Finally, as Weingrad notes, there’s no fantasy without evil. And Jewish teaching on this subject is extremely ambiguous; unlike some Christian doctrines, Judaism tends to deny evil as a force independent of and opposed to God.

For these reasons, Jews drawn to speculative writing may have an affinity for the science fiction over fantasy. The technological rationalism and optimism of much science fiction is also, in a way, more American–and America has offered the broadest field for Jewish literary efforts since World War II.

But Weingrad neglects a “fantasy” genre founded by Jews, and arguably shaped by Jewish preoccupations. That’s the superhero comic book invented in the 1930s by the likes of Robert Kahn–Bob Kane to you. There could never be a Jewish Narnia that would preserve the features many readers find compelling (I confess that I always vastly preferred Tolkein, whose work is richer and less didactic). But the universes of Superman, Batman, and the rest are worthy counterparts.

PS: A related question is whether fantasy is essentially conservative. One of the more interesting recent fantasy writers, China Mieville, thinks so–and has developed his urban, industrial, and democratic “Bas Lag” world as a direct competitor to Tolkein’s Middle Earth, which he considers implicitly reactionary.

ADDENDUM: I found some related arguments in the excellent post and conversation here.

1. Having nothing original to add, let me say a few thing about the excellent recent posts. I agree with Ivan the K that being a schoolmarmish professor is not a good look for the president. It allows the Republicans to seem more manly as naughty students who just won’t behave.

2. I agree with Carl in the thread along these lines: I know Woodrow Wilson and Professor Obama is nowhere near the pay grade of Professor Wilson. Wilson was quite the professor who made a number of original and important contributions to American political science. Of course he was mostly wrong, but he was so more on the remedies he recommended than on problems and shortcomings that needed attention. And even our Ralph noted below that it might be true that the progressive impetus enhanced elite public spiritedness in our country. Certainly our president has not been displaying what Wilson called real presidential leadership; he’s hasn’t unified HIS party around his mandate and vision, and he’s pretty much let the interests that dominate Congress run amok. He certainly hasn’t been following a Wilsonian foreign policy; the younger President Bush was closer to doing that. So Obama can’t be said to have affirmed or denied Wilsonian progressivism in any disciplined or coherent sense. Wilson’s books were about stuff like Congress, the presidency, the State, and the Constitution; Obama’s books were about his own audacious and hopeful journey. I actually think Wilsonian progressivism is dead, as I explained before.

3. One reason among many that progressivism is toast is that even the current welfare state is demographicaly unsustainable. Health care costs really do have to be brought under control in a environment where more and more old people are going to be dependent on fewer and fewer young and productive ones. Neither party will tell the truth about the only approach that might work. Our employed-based health care system is unsustainable and actually undesirable in our relentlessly more mobile and disloyal economy. Devolution to government won’t control costs over the long run. Devolution to the individual in a subsidized and regulated way–and in a way the sensitizes consumers to actual costs–is the only plausible way to go. Neither party will say that, because a majority of the voters are happy enough with the current employer-based situation.

4. Our former law professor president is much more like the former law professor Bill Clinton than the distinguished professor of political science Woodrow Wilson. (Minus the sleazy amorality–we have to remember that our current president is a good family man and generally not tainted by personal corruption.) What made the brainy Clinton less ideological and generally a much more competent president was working with a Republican Congress. And I think the same might well happen for our current brainy president. Genuine health care reform has to be a compromise, but neither party is incentivized to work with the other now. The president and Democratic Congress will be hurt if a reform bill with no popular mandate is forced through right now. They’ll also be hurt if they look so impotent that can’t get anything passed at all. So even if the president suddenly got all bipartisany, the Republicans aren’t about to let him out of his real sticky situation. Let’s hope the Republicans don’t blow this seemingly golden opportunity to get Congress back. As good Americans, we have to hope that our president gains this opportunity better to display his talents and do a better job of leading us.

5. These are the times to talk up American exceptionalism against the sophisticates, porchers, Europeans, and such. Even Tocqueville thought from time to time that Americans were a mixture of insane materialistic ardor and religious madness. And that’s certainly what Europeans, our sophisticates, and even our porchers think now. But we have to talk up the sustainability of the life of the Evangelical (or orthodox) workaholic family man (or woman). This guy is charitable, productive, sensible, patriotic, and does his replacement duty to his species. Without him (and her), our birth rate approaches that of, say, the France that is fading away. And this guy never thought it was a good idea to elect a president who didn’t appreciate him for who he is.

6. Meanwhile, we have to admit that the life of the bourgeois bohemian is not only less than admirable but unsustainable over the long term. And that’s because bourgeois narcissism trumps bohemianism, not to mention the personal God and public spiritedness, at every turn. On this point, Dr. Pat Deneen and ME are in total agreement.

7. I also join Carl in thinking jwc would be a good president. Despite his polemical urges, he’s basically a uniter, not a divider.

Since my computer is less than cooperative tonight I’m going to dispense with providing links and trust your techno-competence to track them down, if you like. We’ve had enough snow here in Rochester that I’ve been reduced to watching some of the Health Care Summit and I thought I might share a few observations. First, many have noticed the excruciating boredom of the entire slow motion affair including a slew of European commentators who were apparently expecting a drama ridden political Olympics. Of course, this is a ridiculous expectation but the stultifying character of the summit really does seem like a particular disadvantage to the Democrats, particulary since the central motivation was to generate some momentum for very unpopular legislation.

Maybe more importantly, Obama’s own performance has been both lackluster and revealing, so much so that even some generally favorable pundits have taken to noticing (Dana Milbank, for example). Somewhere over at NRO’s The Corner, our friend Yuval Levin has pointed out that Obama has come across as a “cranky professor”, childishly oversensitive to criticism, condescending and knowing, and just downright testy. During the campaign and for a while after, he was able to effect a certain detached, even classy magnanimity largely by hovering above the political fray, directing and chastising it at the same time. But now that he’s in the thick of it, he seems comparatively small, sort of deflated, and conspicuously ordinary. Also, for the first time  in quite a while, the Republicans look organized, well prepared, and occassionally even saavy.

Somewhere over at NRO Goldberg charges Obama with “rhetorical Keynesianism”, or the view that if he just keeps talking at the problem (throwing words versus money at it) that he will eventually win the people over. However, there’s a grating quality to Obama’s persistence, and his faux-pragmatic insistence on foregoing cheap political rhetoric is consistently and obviously nestled within his own partisan and dishonest gimmickry.

To be fair to the Democrats, the real ideological distance between the two parties makes any substantive compromise all but impossible. Obama keeps touting the bipartisanship of his bill due to the fact that a few provisions here and there are Republican suggestions, and that he may or may not be open to more, but these are still minor concessions within a piece of legislation otherwise inimical to Republican  sensibilities. There doesn’t seem to be any hope for real bipartisan collaboration partly because it’s no longer in the Republican party’s interest to concede any ground now and partly because Obama is so ideologically inelastic that he seems incapable of genuine compromise. And I probably should point out that for all Obama’s posturing as the post-partisan president, he’s considerably more divisive than Bush was, who was far more moderate and accomodating than he’s usually given credit for.