There are mutliple points where the size of the US military and the scope and nature of US security commitments determine the statism of our domestic politics. Our current military, and the commitments that go with it, would, by itself, make a return to a Jeffersonian-type federal state impossible. But it doesn’t really preclude a return to Jeffersonian small government, because even the complete abandonment of American collective security arrangements and the slashing of the defense budget by any amount you might choose won’t bring about Jeffersonian small government and neither will anything else.

At the other extreme, a WWII-style mobilization would also call into being a much larger and more controlling domestic state. Let us pray (and for many reasons) that such a thing is both never again needed and never happens. But within the current parameters of American politics, the current size of the military and the scope of our security arrangements neither helps nor hinders either those who seek to expand the size and scope of the state, nor those who seek to limit the state. When it comes to controlling entitlement costs, reforming health care along either state-run or more free market lines, producing a more corporatist or competetive economy, or fostering a more or less technocratic political culture, abanonment of collective security (to either a smaller or greater degree) and cutting the military will not be central to the outcome of those struggles.

I also appreciate the distinction between America being in the wrong and being wrong. I’m certainly not defending the Zinn/Chomsky view that America is exceptionally evil.

1. Many of the examples of distinct American political culture (as distinct from Wesetern Europe) that Lowry and Ponnuru cite are pre-Reaganite. This is especially true of American attitudes toward the state. These distinctions might be figments of the imagination, but they are not figments of conservative imagination. Richard Hofstadter might have written many of the same things when it came to the role of the state in America though with a different spirit.

2. I’m not sure what fraction of conservative thinkers find Woodrow Wilson to be holy. In the 1980s, George Will could compare Reagan to Wilson, mean it as high praise, and it seemd to cause little stir that I could tell. Now, thanks largely to the work of the Claremont folks and Jonah Goldberg, I think conservative writers are more likely to see Wilson as a German-inspired enemy of American exceptionalism. I think Wilson looms much larger in the imaginations of those on the Right who are much more suspicious of collective security arrangements and American military involvements than as an inspiration to the Lowrys and Ponnurus of the world.

3. Lowry’s and Ponnuru’s are of course only one way to define an Ameican exceptionalism. One could define it by an unwillingness o engage in collective security arrangements and international organizations outside of the Western Hemisphere, a far greater localism in our politics than we currently practice and other ways. Each of these might make us exceptional from the perspective of Western Europe, but each would also have to be defended on their merits.

4. Lowry and Ponnuru never asserted that the US represented the only significant values or that all meaningful values are lost to the outside world . I don’t take them to deny the value of hope, faith and charity or that the Pope lacks any of those. They seem to have asserted that there are certain distinct and desirable elments of American political culture that they would prefer to see preserved.

5. I don’t think that they argue that Obama is un-America, though no doubt other, cruder conservative writers will do just that. One can believe that certain distinct elements of American political culture are detrimental, seek to change them, and still be American, love the USA and be willing to die for one’s country. Jim Crow might be said to have made America distinct from Norway. We are certainly better off to not have Jim Crow and, in that one limited sense, be less distinct. It again comes down to the merts of the distinctions that Lowry and Ponnuru draw.

6. I don’t take their general defense of American political culture and their generally positive view of the effect of American foreign policy on the world to imply either a junkyard dog defense of every American foreign involvement or to deny that American domestic political culture might have tolerated significant injustices in the past (slavery) or the present (Ponnuru wrote a book on that). In that sense, the article certainly does not exclude the possibility that the US could both be doing wrong and being in the wrong. To the extent that it denies the idea of the America BEING wrong in the Howard Zinn sense, then damn right.