Anti-Climacus

LINKS GALORE: My Foreign Correspondent asked how people in America were reacting to the Gore speech.

OxBlog. Joe Carter. Jared Bridges. Bill Wallo. ASV. Power Line (really good). Robert Tagorda. Obviously, these are all reasonable pro-war bloggers (I've been unable to find anything of note on MY.com, though my reading in the liberal blogsophere is not what it once was).

I do think liberals and conservatives generally agree on this characterization of Al Gore. He went a little, you know, totally insane after he lost the presidential election (and considering how big a fan of his I was beforehand--perhaps the only happily voluntary Gore voter not actually in the Gore family), I think he's been really off his game for a long while. Which is a shame, really, because I still harbor great love for his father.

Other people can comment on what they know well; I'll just point out that Gore's grasp on the political motivations of the Founders is a little, well, shaky:

"He decided not to honor... what Jefferson described as "a decent respect for the opinion of mankind.""

As Jefferson wrote: "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to [act]."

So it's a good thing Bush never bothered to state his reasons for going to war with Iraq. Oh, wait.

"And what they meant by preemption was not the inherent right of any nation to act preemptively against an imminent threat to its national security, but rather an exotic new approach that asserted a unique and unilateral U.S. right to ignore international law wherever it wished to do so and take military action against any nation, even in circumstances where there was no imminent threat."

Perhaps it's too much Thucydides, but I'm rather of the opinion that every nation gets away with as much as they think they can get away with. This is part of the reason I think international law is handicapped before it even starts (even Kant didn't think a rigorous system of international law was possible, or even necessarily normatively desirable, for pretty sensible reasons).

"Our founders were insightful students of human nature. They feared the abuse of power because they understood that every human being has not only "better angels" in his nature, but also an innate vulnerability to temptation - especially the temptation to abuse power over others."

Potentially true (I wouldn't want to get into the psychologies of Hamilton and Madison, but there's always "if men were angels, there'd be no need of government"). Odd, then, that most of the structural features of the US constitution remove political power from individuals and put it in the hands of (comparative) elites. They were concerned about abuses of power by the leadership, to be sure, but there's a very real anti-democratic tendency in American politics, and that sometimes gets lost in the leftist tendency to prattle on about how wonderful American democracy is. The problem, in short, does not cut as clearly as Gore would want it to.

"Our founders understood full well that a system of checks and balances is needed in our constitution because every human being lives with an internal system of checks and balances that cannot be relied upon to produce virtue if they are allowed to attain an unhealthy degree of power over their fellow citizens."

I'd love to get his citation for this.