Christopher Caldwell – November 11, 1009
WIKI: Christopher Caldwell (born 1962, Bridgeton, New Jersey)
is a journalist and senior editor at The Weekly Standard, as well as a regular
contributor to the Financial Times and Slate.
His writing also frequently appears in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, where he is a
contributing editor to the paper's magazine, and The Washington Post. He was also a regular
contributor to The Atlantic Monthly and The New
York Press in the past.
Caldwell is a graduate of Harvard
College, where he studied English literature. His wife Zelda is the
daughter of the late journalist Robert
Novak. [1]
He has five children.
He is receiving increasing attention for his contributions to public debate
of the issues of the day. The New York Times, reviewing the best journalism of
2008, includes Caldwell
for his articles questioning the morality of capitalism. [2]
Although Caldwell's 2009 book "Reflections on the Revolution In
Europe" has been accused of stoking Islamophobia,
or what the Guardian refers to as a "culture of fear", [3]
[4]
[5]
he insists that he is "instinctively pro-immigration" and conscious
of the media tendency to "sensationalise stories against Muslims". [6]
Reflections on the Revolution In Europe Immigration, Islam, and the West
Written by Christopher
Caldwell
http://www.randomhouse.ca/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780385518260
BOOK REVIEW
'Reflections on the Revolution in Europe' by Christopher Caldwell
In Europe, the
author argues, the clash between Western civilization and the Muslim world has
already been lost -- in the latter's favor.
By Tim Rutten
August 19, 2009
When an author with Christopher Caldwell's impeccable
conservative credentials glosses Edmund Burke in his book's title, it's a safe
bet that he's engaged a question whose implications he believes are absolutely
fundamental.
Burke's great masterpiece of political criticism -- "Reflections on the
Revolution in France"
-- is, after all, both the foundational text of contemporary conservatism and a
continuing inspiration to classical liberals. Caldwell's closely argued thesis
in "Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the
West" is that the massive migration of Muslim immigrants into Western
Europe now represents as much of a consequential break with Europe's cultural
traditions as the utopian rationalism of revolutionary France did for Burke.
Wherever a reader may fall on the political spectrum, those familiar with Caldwell's work as a
senior editor for the Weekly Standard and, particularly, as a columnist for the
Financial Times, know him as an opinionated but fair-minded writer of
impressive range and bracing clarity. "Reflections on the Revolution in Europe" does not disappoint, though many may find
its essentially despairing conclusion debatable, if sobering.
Those familiar with Western Europe's current
social tensions won't find much new information here, but the author's
synthesis and analysis are hard-eyed and bracing. A relatively weak,
self-doubting Europe, he argues, has allowed
mass immigration from a fundamentally alien, basically antagonistic culture on
such a scale that the continent's future is no longer its to decide. Caldwell's Cassandra is
the brilliant anti-immigrant Tory parliamentarian Enoch Powell, who sacrificed
a promising career to this issue. In fact, this book can be read as an extended
apologia for Powell's views, which became more extreme over time.
Unsurprisingly, therefore, Caldwell accepts
Samuel P. Huntington's concept of the "clash of civilizations" and
puts Western Europe on what the Harvard scholar
characterized as Islam's perpetually "bloody borders." Caldwell's assessment of
what's at stake can also be adduced from his approving citation of philosopher
Jürgen Habermas, an atheist, who after a dialogue with then-Cardinal Joseph
Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI) declared: "Christianity, and nothing
else, is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights and
democracy. . . . To this day, we have no other options. We continue to nourish
ourselves from this source. Everything else is postmodern chatter."
For his part, Caldwell does a particularly deft job of sorting through the ways
that fumbling accommodation of Europe's assertive new Muslim minorities has
accelerated the transmutation of an intellectually fashionable anti-Zionism into
a virulent new form of anti-Semitism that, according to French philosopher
Alain Finkielkraut, "will be for the 21st century what communism was for
the 20th century: a source of violence."
Though he's at pains to point out that most Americans oppose continued
large-scale immigration into this country, Caldwell
also argues that the issues raised by the mass movement of Muslims into Europe
are nothing like those connected to mostly Latino migration into the United States.
Latinos, he writes, simply speak another European language and bring with them
a culture "that is like the American working-class white culture of 40
years ago. It is perfectly intelligible to any American who has ever had a
conversation about the past with their parents. . . . [I]t requires no
fundamental reform of American cultural practices or institutions. On balance,
it may strengthen them."
The U.S. experience
On the other hand, he argues, even America's past experience with immigration
has been more dislocating: "[T]he arrival of the Irish in Boston destroyed
the Protestant culture of one of the most important cities in the history of
Protestantism. The destruction occurred not only because the Irish arrived but
also because New England Yankees chose not to live in an Irish-run city that
was increasingly violent and corrupt." Caldwell cites historian Oscar Handlin's
conclusion that "only half the descendants of the Bostonians of 1820 still
lived in the city 30 years later." Caldwell
is fond of that sort of epic -- and iconoclastic -- generalization. The problem
is that history -- like God -- is in the details, and their accumulation seems
to undercut the author's intention. One can bemoan the passing of Massachusetts' Protestant culture, but for all their
turbulence, it wasn't New England's Irish
immigrants who executed "witches," nor did the Puritan stock
surrender without a fight and simply slink away. Boston was a center of violent mid-19th
century nativism -- the place where "no Irish need apply"
ubiquitously accompanied announcements of vacant situations.
More to the point, despite the fact that Boston's eligible voters of Irish
descent increased by 197% over the period Caldwell describes, the city didn't
elect its first Irish Catholic mayor, Hugh O'Brien, until 1885 -- a quarter of
a century later. O'Brien was a pillar of the city's business establishment,
enjoyed the support of Catholic and Protestant constituents and would serve
four terms over a city government renowned for honesty in an era of endemic
civic corruption.
While these may seem like quibbles beside the larger, urgently contemporary
points Caldwell
makes, the fact is that the past is complicated but knowable -- while the
future is complex and unforeseeable as often as it's predictable.
Moreover, while authors are entitled to their arguments, it's slightly
disappointing that a commentator of Caldwell's
breadth and fair-mindedness neglects one of the inconsistencies in the
"clash of civilizations" argument to which he subscribes. Caldwell is rightly hard
on what he calls "the mediocrity of Muslim societies worldwide," the
violent malice of contemporary political Islam and the dissembling of its
covert apologists like the dubious Tariq Ramadan. The fact remains, however,
that as deadly as the Madrid and London bombings in 2004 and 2005 were,
Europe's worst post-World War II violence was visited on the European Muslims
of Bosnia by the Orthodox European Christians of Serbia. Similarly, the body
counts involved in the London bus and Madrid rail outrages
pale beside those accumulated by the utterly indigenous, deeply traditional
European fanatics of the IRA or the Basque ETA. Somehow, that all needs to be
taken into account by a writer of Caldwell's
breadth and seriousness.
Unspoken authority
As a good Burkean, Caldwell
believes in what the great man called "prejudices," which is to say
the unspoken authority of tradition, habit, family and shared cultural
predilections. In that sense, he believes the clash of civilizations already
has been lost in Europe. He also believes that
its native peoples must now choose between what Powell called "the
tragedy" of American-style cultural pluralism or a kind of quasi-Ottoman
order in which religious communities essentially are self-governing within
national borders.
History, though, has a way of confounding both Western historical determinism
and its not-so-distant intellectual cousin, the resignation of Islamic
fatalism.
timothy.rutten@latimes.com
Copyright © 2009, The Los Angeles Times
Doubt in the Age of Obama
By Christopher Caldwell
Published: November 6 2009 22:15 | Last updated: November 6 2009 22:15
The winner’s aura around Barack Obama dissipated a bit this week when his
party lost the
governorships of New Jersey and Virginia. It is tempting to see these
elections, which always come in tandem a year after the presidential one, as a
“referendum” on a new administration’s policies. They were in 1993, when
Democratic losses showed the limits of Bill Clinton’s popularity and pointed to
landslide Republican victories the following year. It is hard to assess whether
voters were sending Mr Obama “a message” on healthcare or Afghanistan or
something else. But it is not hard to assess the health of a political
movement. The hopes with which Democrats entered the Age of Obama have been
damped.
It is increasingly questionable whether there is any such thing as an Age of
Obama. The president’s constituency is personal, not partisan. His charisma
turns out to be non-transferable. On Tuesday the bloc of new voters who turned
out in droves to support him in 2008 – largely young people and minorities –
were nowhere to be seen. Not even Mr Obama himself can summon them to vote for
others. He visited New Jersey three times in the campaign’s closing weeks to
stump for Jon Corzine, the unpopular Democratic governor, describing him as
“one of the best partners I have in the White House”. But to no avail. Only 9
per cent of those who voted were under 30. Mr Corzine won them handily. But in Virginia, Democratic
gubernatorial candidate Creigh Deeds did not. There, the youth vote was also
anaemic – and Republican candidate Bob McDonnell won it by 10 points.
The energy of young people and minorities was the main grounds for arguing
that Mr Obama’s election signalled a realignment. If Democratic candidates
cannot take this vote for granted, they must win it with promises. On what? Gay
marriage? (It has been repudiated 31 of the 31 times it has been placed on
state referendums, as in Maine
this week.) More open immigration? Ethnically targeted benefits? In a time of
limited resources these are all recipes for alienating independent voters.
Which points to the Democrats’ second problem: more and more voters are
independent. A poll on the eve of the election by Ipsos found that 34 per cent
of Americans consider themselves Democrats, 22 per cent Republicans and 44 per
cent independent. If those independents split their votes as in 2008, Democrats
could expect to triumph. But in New Jersey and
Virginia,
independents broke for the Republicans by two to one.
White House spokesmen have been quick to highlight a by-election they won in
a historically Republican district in upstate New York. But that election was sui
generis. The district itself has been reshaped so that it is now rather
liberal – it went solidly for Mr Obama in 2008. Local Republican grandees
handpicked a candidate, Dede Scozzafava, who was arguably to the left not just
of the party’s activists but of the district’s voters. Most Republicans threw
their vote behind a third-party candidate – Douglas Hoffman of the
Conservatives. Ms Scozzafava dropped out of the race in the closing week and,
at the urging of the White House, endorsed the Democrat, Bill Owens, who beat
Mr Hoffman by a hair. Since Mr Owens disavows any plans of tacking rightward,
he may not hold the seat for long.
That gets to the heart of the Democrats’ difficulty. Congressional Democrats
are highly unpopular. Their approval rating has fallen to the abyssal depths in
which congressional Republicans dwell, and, according to a recent poll by
Rasmussen Reports, even below it, with 46 per cent of Americans saying they
will vote Republican next election and 42 per cent preferring a Democrat.
The problem looks fixable: congressional Democrats must wrap themselves in
the mantle of Mr Obama’s programme. But what is that? The fiscal part of his stimulus
plan consisted only of the Democratic majority’s long-standing spending
plans. His health plan was generated by party activists. Rather than rallying
Democrats behind a new ideology, as Ronald Reagan did for Republicans, he is
taking cues from partisans who were dug in before he arrived. He is following
those unpopular congressmen, not leading them. “Change” is the last thing his
presidency is about.
The president is not haemorrhaging popularity. But he is losing the support
of the centre of the electorate with astonishing steadiness. Look at the
composite poll figures on the website Pollster.com.
From its peak last December at just under 70 per cent, Mr Obama’s approval
rating has fallen by about 2 points a month, along a line you could almost
trace with a ruler. Rasmussen, whose polls proved extremely accurate on
Tuesday, has found that fewer Americans approve of the job Mr Obama is doing
(46 per cent) than disapprove (52 per cent).
It is hard to see a way out of this. Democratic strategists say the
president needs to be more energetic in pursuing his agenda – particularly his healthcare
plan. But “special interests” are no longer the big obstacle here, if ever
they were. The obstacle is that the public now disapproves of it. Eugene
Robinson, the Washington Post columnist, wrote in defence of the president:
“What many progressives (including me) sometimes see as Obama’s temporising on
issues ... might be sensible politics.” Mr Robinson mentioned public health
funding and gays in the military. It is a wise insight. But it differs little
from what Mr Obama’s harshest detractors say: that the president’s real
political programme is something he dare not avow in public. If that is right,
we can expect his support to erode further.
The writer is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard
More columns at www.ft.com/caldwell
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