Let the robots rule

A memory, hazy: I was walking to the Fortway Fiveplex with my father. At the entrance, we came upon a gentleman in full movie-palace regalia, festooned with golden buttons and all that. He had a geri curl, a look I find very unflattering to this day. (An old Bloom County cartoon featured a member of the gang singing, “Middle of the road / Man, it’s stank / Let’s run over Lionel Richie with a tank.” Pan to the waiting record executive, with a massive autographed poster of Richie right behind him.) It seemed to my ingenuous eyes that this fellow was literally handing out cash to patrons as they entered the theater, and it occurred to me that this might be some kind of rebate. Naturally, I reached into the jar to take some for myself. What I hadn’t realized was that patrons were in fact putting money in the jar, to donate to some worthy cause (not the “Let’s-Buy-Reihan-a-Kit Kat-Fund”). And so, naturally, this fellow slapped me on the wrist, literally. I was mortified. My father was cool about it, which makes sense: he’s cool, in the beret-wearing beat generation way. (These things skip a generation.) It was then that I discovered (a) my bottomless capacity for shame and (b) my burning love of the movies. Which leads me to my baby—no, not that baby (“Billy Jean is not my lover / she’s just a girl who …”)—the … Wait. It occurs to me that I can’t disclose this idea for fear that some Hollywood fat cat moguls will steal it from me. If you are in fact a Hollywood fat cat mogul and are interested in a solid-gold sensational idea, please let me know. Your socks will be knocked off; and if you’re sockless, the sheer gale force of the idea will strip your feet of dead skin and bunions. Somehow I find this image revolting in the extreme. Instead, I will write about the election and the celebrities. (Gasp!) For reasons not dissimilar to Jacob Levy’s, I can’t see myself pulling the lever for Bush in November. (I should note that one of my great passions in school was normative political theory, and particularly the political theory of multiculturalism. Levy delivers. I waited for his book with baited breath, devoured it, and exploited it remorselessly.) The main difference between our respective positions is that I think conservatism, understood as a constellation of beliefs quite distinct from libertarianism concerned primarily with fostering self-reliant “cultures of competence,” and that doesn’t share the libertarian (and left-liberal) hostility towards limited, humane, prophylactic forms of state paternalism, would be best served by a Bush defeat. My suspicion is that Levy is indifferent to the fate of this constellation, as I’ve described it. Anyway, at the tail end of Levy’s post, he included a few caveats:

All that’s left are a) the tax cuts, which are good but something close to meaningless in the absence of spending cuts; b) a general positioning as “hawkish;” and c) annoyance at various elements of the left who I’d rather not be aligned with and certainly don’t want to listen to crowing. (I really don’t want Michael Moore to spend four years feeling like, and crowing that, he decided a presidential election.) Those aren’t sufficient reasons to outweigh the general inability to govern competently or to make good policy judgments.

Because I’m very petty—certainly more so than I’d like to be—the most trivial of Levy’s caveats, the third, has had particular resonance for me of late. As I noted earlier on, I grew up among smug lefties; and to this day, I know a disproportionately large number of smug lefties. I know a handful of smug right-wingers, but the vast majority of right-wingers I know, and I realize that this is almost certainly atypical, are thoughtful, open-minded, self-effacing, self-critical, and susceptible to evidence and persuasive argument. I mean, this is probably because I know, like, eight people who can be described as right-wing, nine if I count “knowing myself,” and several of the others are economists. And really, I’m a sucker for economists: they start with the regressions and I’m swooning. It’s pitiful. Had I grown up in, say, the Deep South among ribald Lincoln-bashing economists who would gang up periodically to beat me senseless, there’s every reason to believe that I’d be a Bolshie with a love of touch football. My sense is that our worldviews and dispositions are very contingent, which strikes me as a strong case for humility. One might think, “Aha! Reihan, you’re susceptible to peer pressure! That’s why you’ve gone wobbly!” Couldn’t be further from the truth. I leapt off the Franz Ferdinand bandwagon just as it was gathering steam, and I say good riddance. Any unreserved expressions of enthusiasm for Kerry—apart from his health care proposal, which strikes me as decent (check out Kerry advisor David Cutler’s book)—give me a queasy feeling, more now than before his speech to the Democratic National Convention (which struck me as a massive bust after what had been an unusually watchable and successful exercise in political atmospherics). If Downtown is for Democracy, government by robot is the thing for me. But seriously, back to humility: seeing celebrities—even unusually articulate celebrities like Natalie Portman, whom I continue to believe is the best thing, after “Harold and Kumar,” to happen to the movies since sound—express their shock and amazement at the fact that some have the temerity, or, polemically, the simple bad taste, to disagree with them on crucial questions irritates me in the extreme. Keep in mind that I love celebrities, and know far more about then than I’d care to admit. I think Tom Frank was, in this one respect, absolutely right:

Somehow this glitzy world of risque dresses, pseudo-transgressive stylings and velvet ropes (i.e., the things that make up “creativity”) has precisely the opposite effect on a huge swath of the American public. They hate it, and they hate everything that Hollywood has come to stand for. After all, Hollywood stars are as close as America comes to an aristocracy, and being instructed on how to be kinder and better people by pseudo-rebellious aristocrats can’t help but rub people the wrong way.

Dead on. Shrewd celebrities will make generous contributions and hope for the best. My discomfort runs deeper than that. Take Levy’s (b), “a general positioning as ‘hawkish.’” Sebastian Mallaby’s column in yesterday’s Washington Post is a solid jumping-off point for this. Mallaby, who wrote an indispensable essay for Policy Review outlining the ideal future orientation of the center-right, is a sensible, Whiggish writer, and scrupulously even-handed. The column’s basic argument is that Bush vs. Kerry is a tough call. A big part of why it’s a tough call, from Mallaby’s perspective, is that the broad outlines of Bush’s foreign-policy worldview are sound, and in an important, nontrivial way; the same can’t be said of John Kerry, who has been on the wrong side of a whole host of crucial foreign policy questions. So how can I, as a talon-bearing, don’t-tread-on-me, hawkish Neanderthal, disfavor a president I supported for a really long time, always giving him the benefit of the doubt? Here’s the anticlimactic (and conventional) answer: it is difficult, if not impossible, to imagine a second Bush administration or a Kerry administration launching any decisive armed interventions over the next four years. Our failure to send a robust force to Liberia was a sign of things to come, and the crisis in Darfur will never command the attention it deserves, let alone the resources. Colin Powell has the upper hand, and Kerry has the same gut instincts. And yet there is a chance, a slender one, that a clean break will make a difference. That remains to be seen.