Other than MANLINESS, the best political analysis I’ve read this year is the English translation of a series of lectures by Pierre Manent--A WORLD BEYOND POLITICS? (I should put an amazon link here, but that would encourage dependency and insult your intelligence.) One glimpse of Manent’s contemporary wisdom: "...the power of judges today [in many nations] rests ulimately not on the laws of the nation, not on its constitution, but on the foundation of the laws and the constitution, that is, ’human rights’ and the idea of ’humanity.’ Setting aside local laws, accepted usages, and international conventions and treaties, judges more and more claim to speak immediately in the name of humanity....[T]he new power of judges illustrates our impatience with mediations, in particularly political mediations, and our desire to recognize and achieve humanity immediately."

We can, of course, recognize Justice Kennedy’s unmediated interpretation of the single world "liberty" in the Fourteenth Amendment here in Lawrence v. Texas. We can also see that the true division in American politics might not be, as James Ceaser contends, between the foundationalist conservatives and the non-foundationalists liberals. Instead, it might between the left that insists on transforming all of life according to an abstract understanding of rights unmediated by the social, political, and religious truth about human nature and a right that insists that our understanding of rights must be mediated by that truth. It is between the "Europeans" and their American imitators who live lost in a postpolitical, postreligious, and postfamilial individualistic fantasy and Americans and their European sympathizers who think realistically of themselves not only as free individuals by as citizens, creatures, parents, children, and so forth.

The understanding of our country as divided into those devoted to mediated and those devoted to unmediated rights explains why we conservatives, despite our differences, are united in our opposition to judicial activism.

I mistakenly deleted a post linking to this WaPo article detailing the way in which funds contributed to relieve earthquake victims in Pakistan were diverted to help finance the most recent airline bombing plot.

Here. A taste:

There are still many steps of diplomacy, engagement and sanctions between today and a decision about military conflict with Iran—and there may yet be a peaceful solution. But in this diplomatic dance, America should not mirror the infinite patience of Europe. There must be someone in the world capable of drawing a line—someone who says, "This much and no further." At some point, those who decide on aggression must pay a price, or aggression will be universal. If American "cowboy diplomacy" did not exist, it would be necessary to invent it.

***

Five Augusts from 9/11, in a summer of new fears, in a war on terror that has lasted longer than World War II, public weariness is understandable. And that exhaustion is increasingly reflected in our politics. In a conservative backlash against the president’s democratic idealism. In a liberal backlash that has moved from the fringes to the mainstream of the Democratic Party. Ned Lamont, in his primary victory over Sen. Joe Lieberman, summed up the case this way: "We are going to get our troops out of Iraq ... we’re going to start investing in our own country again." Lamontism—the elevation of flinching to a foreign policy—is McGovernism, and a long way from "bear any burden, pay any price."

John Zvesper reviews a couple of not altogether inspiring books by British proponents of neoconservatism, and Norman Podhoretz reflects on the Bush doctrine. Here’s the conclusion:

So far as the implementation of this new strategy goes, it is still early days—roughly comparable to 1952 in the history of the Truman Doctrine. As with the Truman Doctrine then, the Bush Doctrine has thus far acted only in the first few scenes of the first act of a five-act play. Like the Truman Doctrine, too, its performance has received very bad reviews. Yet we now know that the Truman Doctrine, despite being attacked by its Republican opponents as the “College of Cowardly Containment,” was adopted by them when they took power behind Dwight D. Eisenhower. We also know now that, after many ups and downs and following a period of retreat in the 1970’s, the policy of containment was updated and reinvigorated in the 1980’s by Ronald Reagan (albeit without admitting that this was what he was doing). And we now know as well that it was by thus building on the sound foundation laid by the Truman Doctrine that Reagan delivered on its original promise.

It is my contention that the Bush Doctrine is no more dead today than the Truman Doctrine was cowardly in its own early career. Bolstered by that analogy, I feel safe in predicting that, like the Truman Doctrine in 1952, the Bush Doctrine will prove irreversible by the time its author leaves the White House in 2008. And encouraged by the precedent of Ronald Reagan, I feel almost as confident in predicting that, three or four decades into the future, and after the inevitable missteps and reversals, there will come a President who, like Reagan in relation to Truman in World War III, will bring World War IV to a victorious end by building on the noble doctrine that George W. Bush promulgated when that war first began.

I’ve just begun to dip into this symposium on the state of conservatism and liberalism today. From what I’ve skimmed, I don’t expect to like much of it, but I’m willing to be pleasantly surprised. Any thoughts out there?

Update: Over at The Corner, Ramesh Ponnuru and Heather Mac Donald are fussing at one another over her contribution to the symposium. I’ve put together some thoughts on it as well. When and where they’ll see the light of day, I don’t yet know.

Mark Helprin is certainly one of the best writers still at work. Although everything he writes is interesting and thoughtful, I still think his best is A Soldier of the Great War. This is a good interview with him. Note this exchange on beauty:

Don’t miss Thomas Byrne Edsall, writing in today’s New Republic online about the role of the "upscale left" in the Lieberman-Lamont duel, and why the result is bad news for Democrats in 2008.

Sample:

Mike Wallace thinks it’s perfectly reasonable to demand that Israel be relocated to somewhere in Europe and Brian Williams thinks that suicide bombers are kinda like Navy SEALs.

Newt Gingrich:

Defeating the terrorists and thwarting efforts by Iran and North Korea to gain nuclear and biological weapons must be the first goal of American policy. To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, if violence is necessary to defeat the terrorists, the Iranians and the North Koreans, then it is regrettably necessary. If they can be disarmed with less violence, then that is desirable. But a nonviolent solution that allows the terrorists to become better trained, better organized, more numerous and better armed is a defeat. A nonviolent solution that leads to North Korean and Iranian nuclear weapons threatening us across the planet is a defeat.

Daniel Henninger:

In a better world, the U.S. war on terror, at its core, would be bipartisan. That world was what Joe Lieberman’s politics represented. That world is dead. Democratic support for the Republican administration’s plans to fight these terrorists is down to about zero. This means the Democrats must have a plan of their own to defeat terror. Every Republican running for office at every level this fall should force his opponent to describe it. And if they aren’t certain about the details, they can call Ned Lamont.

Naomi Schaefer Riley:

If the religious left is serious about attracting more people of faith to the Democratic Party--Ms. Seger believes that even evangelicals will gather under the new big tent--its leaders might want to consider the kind of religion that people in America actually practice. Hint: It is judgmental. It sometimes involves public condemnation.

But of course, the religious left is less serious about a politician’s loyalty to religious belief than about his loyalty to the Democratic Party. "He’s going to run on the independent ticket," Ms. Sager notes of Mr. Lieberman, with disgust. "What kind of Democrat is that?"

The Alliance Defense Fund has written a letter to officials at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and UW-Superior urging them not to abridge the speech and associational rights of student religious groups. At issue is the conflict between university non-discrimination policies and the fidelity to their missions of groups like the Knights of Columbus and the Intervarsity Christian Fellowship.

I noted the most recent such conflict here and wrote about a previous one here.

The Inside Higher Ed piece suggests that the only issue is access to funding, not recognition (and access to university facilities) per se.

Watch the video here.

I wonder if Sondjata, who’s quite willing to accuse others of hatred, thinks this qualifies.

McKinney and her supporters continue to believe and continue to blame open primaries for her defeat:

Some voting rights advocates said that while crossover voting might be legal, it violated the spirit of the Voting Rights Act and the Constitution because it effectively negated the right of a group — in Ms. McKinney’s case, black voters — to nominate the candidate of their choice.

“There’s case law that says one party can’t interfere in another party’s primary,” said Mike Raffauf, a lawyer who filed a 2002 lawsuit in federal court against the State of Georgia on Ms. McKinney’s behalf.