Politics vs. Religion - Looking for Converts

One of the oddities of the G.W. Bush era, it seems to me, was the number of celebrity political conversions (or claimed political conversions) following 9/11. Many of the full or partial conversions seemed reactionary - Ed Koch and Ron Silver, and to some degree Dennis Miller, seemed to be excited at the idea of going to war with the Arab world, with Koch's embrace of Republicans as the only party willing to fight a war on Islam seeming to be consistent with his past statements on the Middle East.

I've never really understood why you would want to trumpet conversions such as these. To the extend that you're talking about a person who understands the issues, a more intense examination is likely to reveal that the conversion is largely limited to a single issue or is nominal. In the former case the conversion is likely to reflect a knee-jerk reaction, not a thoughtful response to changed circumstances. Otherwise you should see a shift in political thinking across the person's spectrum of beliefs, not just an announcement to the effect of, "I'm still liberal on everything else, but I'm a Republican because only they'll pursue this war to its bitter end." If it's the latter, the relabeling doesn't carry much significance. "I'm switching from Team A to Team B, but my opinions haven't actually changed."

Dennis Miller seems to fall, to some degree, into both categories. He's generally regarded as a bright guy, and he historically has included any number of obscure references into his humor in order to both convey that impression and to appeal to a more educated audience. He also had a caustic element to his humor that held no sympathy for the far left, and often seemed to take positions that were fundamentally conservative - did you ever get the impression that he favored a progressive tax code? But if you saw his monologues during his final year on HBO, it was hard to miss the fact that he had spent very little energy learning about, and even less thinking about, the Middle East. He also qualified his political conversion by insisting that he remained liberal on a wide range of social issues, such as reproductive freedoms and gay marriage. So the actual conversion was pretty narrow, and on a subject for which he had a new and shallow understanding, and that shallowness was evidenced by the new, shallow, Manichaen position he took on that narrow issue.

Not that I want to be cynical... (want doesn't actually enter into it - I am cynical)... but you sometimes also have to "follow the money". The counterpart to Dennis Miller would seem to be Arianna Huffington, although her claimed political conversion was much more broad-based. Both Miller and Huffington capitalized on their political conversions, Huffington more successfully than Miller. And with Huffington's recent sale of the Huffington Post to AOL, and her associated announced plan to try to harness as much free labor as possible to fill AOL's coffers with cash, some who previously accepted her conversion are taking another look and asking, "Was it sincere?" You could start by asking if her conservatism was sincere. Frankly, in politics, being able to fake sincerity is a valuable commodity. I suspect that if she possessed that talent, Ann Coulter would presently be a self-professed liberal - her ranting doesn't get her much face time on television and, no matter how absurdly titled, her books don't sell like they used to. Coulter does indignant, self-righteous anger quite well, and certainly there's a crowd that finds such displays to be appealing, but at best that's preaching to the choir. But it is interesting to see how these conversions have boosted (most often temporarily) the public profile of celebrities whose careers are on the wane.

The thing is, even though I see lots of evidence that high profile converts think highly of themselves and their insights, and by virtue of their celebrity they manage to get face time on the television to advance their brands, there's not a one of them whom I would point to and say, "That person gave a really good explanation for their political conversion and why their former positions were incorrect," or even for the single issue conversions, that such an explanation was offered for the one issue that supposedly pushed them over the edge.

Celebrities can be strong advocates for specific issues. Some celebrities are smart, informed people in their own right, and can be respected on that basis. But I'm not seeing the appeal of trumpeting the supposed conversion of a celebrity from one political column to another, and even less so when the celebrity's explanation for the conversion reflects that they remain weak, uninformed (even if self-impressed) political thinkers.

At The American Conservative, Clark Stooksbury recently questioned the political conversion of David Mamet,

Now he has a book coming called The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture— in which according to the the publicity material provided to Amazon.com—Mamet will “take on all the key political issues of our times, from religion to political correctness to global warming.” That sounds distressingly like the sort of right-wing tract published several times a year by conservative talk radio hosts, politicians and teenagers.

Stooksbury accepts that, as described by him, Mamet's liberalism could fairly be characterized as "brain dead" but that "His conservatism doesn’t sound particularly compelling either". Initially, Mamet claimed that his conversion to conservatism was driven by exposure to Thomas Sowell (who at least used to make interesting and thoughtful observations); now he claims that he "doesn't read political blogs or magazines. 'I drive around and listen to the talk show guys,' he said. 'Beck, Prager, Hugh Hewitt, Michael Medved.'" Ouch? But far from a surprise if you remember the column in which he explained his conversion.

From the publisher's description of Mamet's new book,

In 2008 Mamet wrote a hugely controversial op-ed for the Village Voice, "Why I Am No Longer a 'Brain-Dead Liberal'", in which he methodically attacked liberal beliefs, eviscerating them as efficiently as he did Method acting in his bestselling book True and False.

I can't speak for his arguments about method acting, but the only thing left excoriated by Mamet's village voice essay was the idea that he should be taken seriously as a political thinker. If the publisher's strongest endorsement of Mamet's credentials remains that editorial, it's reasonable to infer that this is a "follow the money" situation - that Mamet, perhaps a few years too late, is trying to cash in on his political conversion. I wouldn't be surprised if his M.O. remains the same, "I was brain-dead in my political beliefs, but the wisdom and insight of Thomas Sowell Glenn Beck has set me straight." Authors pitching to a common audience frequently exchange endorsements; I suspect that Mamet his hoping to get his favorite right-wing radio hosts to endorse his book.

Is the problem that there aren't enough strong political thinkers available, such that people see it as necessary to pretend that a little league player is qualified for the All-Star team? Are we so far into a culture of celebrity that, on the whole, we can no longer tell the difference? Or is the problem that, as compared with the most brilliant stars with which they compete, celebrities with half-baked, high school level understandings of politics actually are thinking at the same level as the professionals? ("Hi, I used to write speeches for a President but other than that have no apparent qualification to write on political issues." "Congratulations, welcome to the op-ed page of the New York Times.")

Premature Obituaries

I'm not personally going to declare a winner until after the election, but it's interesting to read the premature obituaries being penned about the McCain campaign and the Republican Party.

On the right, Clark Stooksbury describes the Republican Party as the "Party of Delusion", calling for an honest assessment of the reasons for the party's failure from inside, but expressing doubts about Republican-oriented conservatives' ability to do so:

A good example is this post from Robert Stacy McCain, who was engaged in some preemptive complaining about media spin of next week’s election. McCain describes the GOP as “the party of low taxes, limited government, traditional values and strong defense.” Only the part about taxes is accurate. the GOP would be more accurately described as the party of tax cuts, debt, cronyism, aggressive war and cultural resentment. The formula that worked for a couple of election cycles, but the party’s chickens have come home to roost.

In the referenced post, McCain also seems to expect that (the other) McCain will lose, but has words of criticism only for the mainstream media. Dan Larison is more in tune with Stooksbury,

Endorsing Obama is a vote of no confidence in the Republican Party, but in a weird way it is also an expression of what is probably utterly misguided hope that the Republicans will learn from the defeat and adjust to new political realities.

He seems to regard it as foolish to vote for Obama to "punish the GOP" out of hope "that there is some small chance that the GOP might change its ways", but presents no alternative. If you concede, as Larison does, that from a conservative standpoint "the GOP has failed so badly that it has made the unthinkable [a vote for Obama] mundane and ordinary", how could you possibly justify a Republican vote? While I recognize that there are third parties, and would not be surprised if Larison ends up voting for a third party candidate, the fact remains that our system is heavily biased against third parties and, in this election and into the foreseeable future, the two dominant parties will remain dominant.

On the left, Paul Krugman speculates on what the Republican Party will look like ("assuming that McCain doesn’t pull an upset"), suggesting,

the GOP that’s left after this election will probably be even further off in right field, even further out of touch with the rest of the country, than before.

If the Republican Party heeds those conservative intellectuals who call for it to reexamine its platform and priorities, that might be avoided. Or not. There's a possibility that if various conservative factions were invited to try to impose their brand of ideological purity on the Republican Party, the ensuing bloodshed would actually harm party unity, or that the bizarre, hybrid consensus version of conservatism emerging from the process would be a cure worse than the disease. Also, the branding issue would remain, as even a fruitful meeting of the party's best minds would have to overcome recent experience - "We're the Republican Party, and this time we really mean all those things we've been telling you we stand for all these years.... Trust us!"

But again, I'm not going to write the party off before it even loses, or after. Similar things could have been said about the Democratic Party many, many times over the past thirty years. They could have been said a year ago. No, actually, they have been - for most of the past year we've been hearing about how this election should be easy for the Democratic Party, how Obama can't "close the deal" and how the Democratic Party's only real strength lies in its ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. If Obama weren't ahead in the polls, people would be saying them right now. If Obama loses, well, I don't have to tell you, do I.

When a party seems to be destined to lose, its pessimists expect the party to be reduced to ashes and its optimists expect a phoenix to rise, but a more likely outcome is that the party somehow manages to hobble itself together, keeps its "party faithful" in the fold, and gets the benefit both of time making people forget its past, and the other party's overreaching making them once again seem like the "lesser of two evils" to the block of "swing voters" that ultimately decides elections.

If I were to speculate as to what future path the Republican Party might take that would help keep it in the minority, at risk of trying to get rich by overestimating the intelligence of our nation's people, it would be the path endorsed by Robert Stacy McCain, who offers an unabashed "defense of ignorance". For example, McCain argues,

Palin's honest ignorance of presidential-level issues was held up as evidence that she is, or was, unprepared for the vice-presidency - as if years of studying such issues were in itself qualification for the office. Evidence contradicts this idea.

Even if we assume that "evidence" contradicts the idea that years of serious study of foreign policy better qualify somebody to serve as Vice President, that does not automatically mean that foreign policy ignorance is an equal qualification to foreign policy study, let alone make ignorance a qualification for the job. And it's more than being unschooled - somebody who has lived a lifetime demonstrating disinterested in a particular subject, to the point that in her forties she is described by her supporters as "ignorant", is unlikely to ever achieve proficiency. Is it possible? Sure, but that's a gamble. McCain's observation that Palin is "a very popular and for all I know a very good governor" is fascinating - before urging the party to jump on her bandwagon, might it not make sense for him to learn enough about her that he doesn't have to qualify his endorsement of her record?

Sarah Palin is extraordinarily shrewd and is a natural as a politician. She figured out early on that some people on the McCain campaign are profoundly incompetent (hello, Tucker Bounds) and that other people on the McCain campaign are selfish and arrogant beyond words (you know who you are, sweetheart).

So if you can identify Tucker Bounds - this Tucker Bounds - and Michael Goldfarb - this Michael Goldfarb - as less than the best, you're "shrewd"? That seems like a pretty low bar - as low as the ground level bar set for Palin in the Vice Presidential debate. So really, what's the reason McCain likes (the other) McCain's pick so much?

Sarah's shortcomings on Aug. 29 have been rapidly remedied, and by 2011 could be remedied entirely. Considering that she is the strongest, most viable alternative to Jeb Bush, I would suggest that some of her conservative critics should try to befriend her, and not merely join the sneering snobs.

The only other choice being Jeb Bush, and the Bush brand having been burned so badly by his brother that, despite his having what appear to be far superior credentials, experience, intellect and interest in national and international affairs, you should saddle up the unknown horse and hope for the best?

Truly, J.S. McCain has a limited memory if he believes that the presidential nominee or eventual president can be spotted four years out. The Republican party doesn't have to hope, so much as it should expect new leadership to emerge over the next four years. If Palin turns out to be the best of the bunch, without wishing to caricature her, diminish her accomplishments, or underestimate her political skills and charisma, the party has a lot to worry about... assuming it loses on Tuesday.

But again, the election ain't over 'till it's over.