It’s been a long weekend (joint birthday dinner with my brother and family, lots of kid stuff ranging from t-ball meeting for Littlest Guy to teaching Middle Guy how to do the brakes on his car (he’s not mechanical, but I figure he ought to know how they work).

And now a little time to write.

Rereading Trent’s comment and the entire message stream, it seems like there are three levels on which I want to respond. I’m not going to get to finish here and now, but what I want to do is set out the three levels on which we’re arguing, make my high-level case, and then as I have time to do it in more detail, dig deeper into at least one of the levels over the next few days.

So without further ado, here are the three levels:

1) . Trent writes:

You visibly itch when the subjects of morality and spirituality are brought up, just like most Democrats and Europeans.

That, BTW, is why most liberals, democrats and Europeans get on so well.

I’m gonna grit my teeth a bit on this one, Trent; actually you don’t know squat about my attitudes toward morality or spirituality, and the tone of brittle superiority sits kind of badly with me.

The dual-edged role of morality in politics is a complex one; and I’ll discuss my view of it more below in 3); but many liberals and Europeans don’t ‘itch’ when it’s brought up, they just differ from your standards, as I may.

2) Actual actions in France. Recent news (the new Franco/German proposal, for example) supports my suggestion that the true French goal is not only to block a U.S. invasion, but establish itself contra the U.S. as a player in the Middle East. Friedman’s much quoted column on replacing France with India as a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council includes the quote:

Throughout the cold war, France sought to differentiate itself by playing between the Soviet and American blocs. France could get away with this entertaining little game for two reasons: first, it knew that Uncle Sam, in the end, would always protect it from the Soviet bear. So France could tweak America’s beak, do business with Iraq and enjoy America’s military protection. And second, the cold war world was, we now realize, a much more stable place. Although it was divided between two nuclear superpowers, both were status quo powers in their own way. They represented different orders, but they both represented order.

…

And the whole French game on Iraq, spearheaded by its diplomacy-lite foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, lacks seriousness. Most of France’s energy is devoted to holding America back from acting alone, not holding Saddam Hussein’s feet to the fire to comply with the U.N.

The French position is utterly incoherent. The inspections have not worked yet, says Mr. de Villepin, because Saddam has not fully cooperated, and, therefore, we should triple the number of inspectors. But the inspections have failed not because of a shortage of inspectors. They have failed because of a shortage of compliance on Saddam’s part, as the French know. The way you get that compliance out of a thug like Saddam is not by tripling the inspectors, but by tripling the threat that if he does not comply he will be faced with a U.N.-approved war.

Mr. de Villepin also suggested that Saddam’s government pass “legislation to prohibit the manufacture of weapons of mass destruction.” (I am not making this up.) That proposal alone is a reminder of why, if America didn’t exist and Europe had to rely on France, most Europeans today would be speaking either German or Russian.

I also want to avoid a war – but not by letting Saddam off the hook, which would undermine the U.N., set back the winds of change in the Arab world and strengthen the World of Disorder. The only possible way to coerce Saddam into compliance – without a war – is for the whole world to line up shoulder-to-shoulder against his misbehavior, without any gaps. But France, as they say in kindergarten, does not play well with others. If you line up against Saddam you’re just one of the gang. If you hold out against America, you’re unique. “France, it seems, would rather be more important in a world of chaos than less important in a world of order,” says the foreign policy expert Michael Mandelbaum, author of “The Ideas That Conquered the World.”

…emphasis mine

The French are motivated by a different set of interests serving a different set of constituencies than we are and have. Their interests are often not only in opposition to ours – acutely and subtly – but defined by being in opposition to ours, and we need to take that into account as we try and manage our relationship with them.

All of Europe is showing the cracks of a shotgun wedding between liberal democracy and bureaucratic despotism. It doesn’t work well, as we should be thoughtful about their experience as we consider (hey, Hillary!!) walking down the same path.

Trent suggests:

You have a distinct point about French crime and the GSIGN, but it isn’t the point that you think you are making….
The difference between the crime America faced in the 1970’s and the crime France (and other European states too include Britain) faces today is that the criminals from the French “cities of darkness” hate the very concept of France and French culture in general.

American criminals in the 1970s were not a threat to America physically or existentially.

Trent, were we alive in the same 70’s and 80’s? The era of the SLA? Of the Crips and Bloods and Blackstone Rangers? The rise of black street gangs to a position of armed dominance of large portions of our cities? Did I miss the part where Monster Kody wrapped himself in a flag and declared his loyalty to American core values?

As I noted, crime in France (and England, and the Netherlands, and Italy, and to a lesser extent, Spain) is passing the point where it is tolerable to the average citizen, and the liberal-bureaucratic state is thrashing about for a solution, and hasn’t found one. At this point, I envision a massive crackdown, with widespread violations of civil liberties and massive deportations. I think it will start soon, and that we will have one or two seminal events…a Sari Ribicoff…to start the political ball rolling.

The French nationalist “God” had failed so the French elites adopted a new one, what is now referred to as Transnational Progressivism. They look to me to be about 3/4 of the way from nationalism to “full Tranzie.” That is why you keep seeing things like the unilateral Ivory Coast intervention popping up from time to time in French foreign policy.

At home, the French seem to have made the full transition to Tranzie. The repeated punishment of white Frenchmen for defending themselves of their women from Muslim criminals, while letting off said criminals, is a tool of social control. Conditioning Frenchmen to rely on the GSIGN, the government anything but themselves is not western.

Well, for much of Europe (as opposed to England and the U.S., the citizen has relied on the state for physical defense for quite some time. The American notion of self-reliant self-defense would be quite alien to a typical Frenchman, not because they have been ‘operant conditioned’ by some secret bureaucracy, but because their culture does not go back through the Magna Carta. Interesting choice of descriptive terms as well, Trent…’white Frenchmen’…Norman Frenchmen don’t think of themselves as ‘white’, they think of themselves as ‘French’. The African immigrants talk about ‘les blancs‘. But I’ll let you amplify your intention on that one…

3) The role of morality in politics. Look, this is a worthy subject for a major book or a PhD thesis, not just a blog post written after putting the Littlest Guy to bed and cleaning the kitchen. But I do want to stake out some ground here with the promise to try and come back and mine it a bit deeper later on.

I’ll suggest that morality and spirituality in politics is central and absolutely necessary, on one hand, and incredibly dangerous on the other. I’ll follow with the assertion that the genius of the American Foundation was that it both provided a sphere for a politics centered on moral and spiritual values, and that it explicitly denied morality and spiritual values a seat at the political table.

This was a brilliant bank shot which has led to the American genius of assimilation and to the cultural openness which has made us the dominant force in the world for over a hundred years.

For myself, I am immediately cautious when presented with a self-proclaimed ‘morally driven politics’. I look to the left and see Pol Pot and Lenin (I don’t believe Stalin was driven by any morality but greatness, but I do believe that Lenin was a True Believer), to the right I see the Spanish Inquisition. Each was so absolutely assured of the deep morality of their ends that any means would not only suffice but were required to attain them. More recently, I look at the young faces of the war protesters, driven by an absolute impulse to morality that seems to preclude any rational thought; their fantasies are echoed in the interviews I read with the mujdaeen.

I am more temporizing than they are, simultaneously more suspicious of human nature and more trusting of my fellows to find their own paths.

Walter McDougall, author of Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter With the World since 1776 had a great essay in the late 90’s on Religion in Diplomatic History. He says:

Finally, our notions of history are skewed by the tendency of Western intellectuals to think in dialectical terms. Thus, we set realism and idealism, or secularism and religion, against one another as if they were mutually exclusive. In fact, the most profound students of Christian moral theology from Thomas Aquinas to Niebuhr argued that whatever is “unrealistic” (hence contrary to natural law) cannot by definition be moral! Applied to statecraft, this means that to expect utopian results from diplomacy and war is inevitably to invite immoral consequences – whether the crusade in question is one of self-righteous knights or innocent children led like lambs to the slaughter. Courage borne of religious faith may expand the bounds of the possible, but politics, as Bismarck said, remains the art of the possible. A truly moral approach to statecraft, therefore, takes human nature as it is, respects limits, and acknowledges the contingency of all human creations. It is one that pursues and upholds international order, seeks peace but prepares in extremis to fight, practices proportionality of force, receives defeated enemies back into the fold, and is honest and realistic about one’s own ends and means. For there is no virtue in stupidity or dishonesty, however lofty one’s motives. As Winston Churchill observed, “The high belief in the perfection of man is appropriate in a man of the cloth but not in a prime minister.”

This line of thought suggests that the sort of reasonable, restrained balance of power system founded in Westphalia, promoted by philosophers such as Hugo Grotius, Samuel Pufendorf, and Immanuel Kant, and nurtured by such hard-headed diplomats as Talleyrand, Metternich, and Palmerston, was not the antithesis of a “Christian” politics, but rather the best possible expression of it, especially by contrast to the religious wars that preceded it and the even more vicious era of nationalist and ideological wars that followed. Anglican historian Herbert Butterfield made the point presciently in 1954 when he wrote, “It is better to say that you are fighting for Persian oil than to talk of a ‘war of righteousness’ when you really mean that you believe you have a right to the oil; for you would be conducting an altogether unjust war if for a single moment you believed anything less than this.”

I’ll let the last stand on it’s own, and promise to extend this and tie it to my vision of a ‘politics of emergence’ in the next day or so.

Trent?

N.B. For the full (and updated) history of this discussion, see “Fight Night: The Dance in France.”