Will Dems dump Kerry?

It's not going to happen, because it would almost certainly result in a catastrophe:

There would be an immediate division between the Dean-Kucinich left and the Lieberman-Edwards center, which would quickly become angry and bitter, especially over Iraq policy. The culmination would be a walkout by the coalition of anti-capitalist Naderites and anti-war "Progressives" once it became clear that they weren't going to win. The remaining liberals would, of course, feel bad about this and blame themselves; expiation would take the form of sharpening and adding to the most left-leaning aspects of the party platform. Their well-meaning efforts would serve only to further marginalize the party, and would be met with scorn by the walkouts. A badly compromised John Kerry would finally end up getting the nomination, anyway, on the 7th ballot. That triumph would be capped off by a night of rioting in the streets of Boston, beginning with protests outside the convention hall over the "sell-out" occurring inside, later joined by some of the party's ghetto constituents perhaps more interested in burning cars and fighting the police than in the nuances of intra-party politics. GW would win all 50 states, a veto-proof majority in the Senate, similar gains in the House, and Democrat party registration would fall to 22%. Bill and Hillary, concluding there were not enough shards to bother trying to pick up and reassemble, and she seeing no point in being embalmed in a futile backbench Senate career, would withdraw from politics to follow lucrative and ego-enhancing opportunities in the private sector.

You read it here first.

Byron

Religious War

I'm getting tired of the tippy-toe euphemisms about "culture clash", etc. Anachronistic as it might seem to Western secularists who have left superstition behind, this is a religious war we are in, pure and simple, and secularism offers no immunity whatsoever. It's not a generalized "war on terror", it's a war between fundamentalist Islam and everybody else. (And isn't it time to get realistic about how mainstream fundamentalist Islam actually is? Is it really just a small splinter?) In Dostoevsky's "The Possessed", one of the characters gives a long speech about the sources of cultural confidence and determination, arguing that religion is always primary, that reason and science are always secondary and subordinate forces in moving peoples and nations: "It has never happened that all or many peoples should have one common God, but every people has always had its own special one. The first sign of the decay of nations is when they begin to have common gods...If a great people does not believe that truth resides in it alone, if it does not believe that it alone is able and has been chosen to raise up and save everybody by its own truth, it sinks at once into ethnographical material, and not a great people...If it loses that faith, it is no longer a nation. But there is only one truth, and therefore there is only one nation among all the nations that can have the true God..."

The Nation of Islam is a real religion in that strong sense of the word, a completely different animal from the pale, psychotherapeutic versions that we have evolved toward in the West, when we haven't given up the idea entirely. Bernard Lewis says the West is made up of countries, divided into religions; but Islam is a religion divided into countries. Separation of Church and State? That makes no sense to them, since monotheism is the bedrock foundational principle of Islam: If there is ONE God, then He must be God of EVERYTHING, period.

What the hell are we doing fighting about religion at this late date? Can this really be serious? It all seems like some remnant that belongs in the far past, something that we should not have to be messing with in Modern Times at all. But I think we have to get over that idea, because 21st Century Islam is the Real Deal. Islam was never "a religion of peace", and now it sees itself in the ascent, and it isn't into self-doubt, sarcasm, or irony. It takes itself seriously. Its populations are huge, growing, and very young; its ideal of religious commitment is extreme, meaningful, and attractive. A religious war can't be about compromise or live-and-let-live, which is why they are always so terrible. This war has barely even begun. Blither about withdrawing or finding an 'exit strategy' is absurd, just cluelessness and denial. Somebody said about the Iraq-Vietnam analogies that we should wish that this were merely another Vietnam, because this is much, much worse.

I think the question is whether the West has the cultural self-confidence and moral resources to fight and win over what's going to be a very long run. It's not clear to me where those resources are supposed to come from. Who is going to put on a suicide belt on behalf of liberal democracy? Or Presbyterianism? Me neither. When Spain was reconquered from Islam, it wasn't done under the banner of a nuanced multiculturalism, it was blood, guts, and the Sword of the Lord. When it comes to long-haul moral strength, what does the West have to draw on today? Dostoyevsky's character again: "When the conceptions of good and evil become general among many nations, then these nations begin to die out, and the very distinction between good and evil begins to get blurred and to vanish." The impacts of modernization have caused the Islamists to thoroughly understand and believe that; the Islamic fundamentalists are not only refusing to blur their conceptions, they have launched a Jihad to enforce them by violence and eradication. Meanwhile, when the leader of the most powerful country in the Western world, following a horrific attack against innocent citizens, dares even to utter the words 'good' and 'evil' in a speech, he is mocked for being unsophisticated, or condemned as a religious fanatic -- not by the attackers, but by people supposedly on our side. I don't think we can win that way.

Byron