Lemieux on Applebaum

by publius

I endorse, and incorporate by reference, everything Scott Lemieux says about Anne Applebaum's latest column. Especially this:

[T]he actual effect of this pox-on-all-their-houses-but-not-my-house High Broderism is to implicitly advocate the status quo without having to bother to make an argument in its favor. . . . The point of the argument, rather, is simply part of the broader war apologist long-term exit strategy: i.e. to shift the blame for the catastrophe from the people who are actually responsible for it to people who tried to stop it.

And today's column also vindicates this old Yglesias post:

A frighteningly large number of my friends seem to think Anne Applebaum is something other than a pernicious force in American life, a rightwing hack who spends her days exploiting mass killings abroad as a bludgeon against domestic progressive forces in the west.

[UPDATE: And for you Extras fans out there, I'll also include this comment (from "Chris") to Lemieux's post:

Applebaum, are you having a laugh? IS SHE HAVING A LAUGH???]

Comments

[Sebastian Holsclaw]

I get that people don't like/agree with her, but "a rightwing hack"? Really? I thought her overall politics was more on the left. Am I confusing her with someone else?

[publius]

fair enough - the right-wing hack may be a bit much. but the larger point is right on. she's seems most interested in talking about foreign aggression/genocide, etc. as part of a larger argument against western progressives.

[Ugh]

but "a rightwing hack"? Really?

Maybe this is the reverse phenomenon of the loyal bush follower's who think that if you don't find everything the administration does super peachy then you're a left wing hippie.

Here, if you don't find everything the administration does absolutely horrible, you're a right-wing hack?

[Dantheman]

Sebastian,

She's certainly right of center. Just because she wrote for Slate (which is where I first saw her, in the late '90's) does not prevent her from being one. She certainly spends most of her time attacking people to the left of center. Not a hack, though.

[KCinDC]

Maybe she could be described as a middle-wing hack, like David Broder, Brendan Nyhan, Richard Cohen, ....

[Steve]

Here's a classicly horrible Applebaum column. Key paragraph:

I can offer no scientific explanation as to why the tragedy of Darfur conjures up the specter of history's judgment and why other tragedies do not. But the answer must lie in the fact that this conflict has so few strategic or geopolitical implications. Because it seems to be in no one's "interest" to do so, a call for U.N. intervention in Darfur surely feels -- at least to Americans and Europeans who haven't followed China's involvement in Sudan's oil industry -- like an act of real charity, and not more evidence of the West pursuing its interests.

I truly can't imagine a more cynical perspective. People who care about Darfur don't really care about genocide or human rights, you see; they just want to look like they do!

[publius]

i htink she's far more right than those guys (who, when they're sitting at home, think of themselves as liberals).

she's not so much a right-wing hack in the hugh hewitt style (point taken on that), it's more that she's an anti-liberal/prog hack. what's particularly infuriating though is that she defends these attacks by citing wars, torture.

take darfur. for one, democrats aren't in power. two, the fact that people are advocating invading darfur is not, to her, a reflection that it wouldn't work, but that progressives are morally bankrupt.

it's a tricky rhetorical strategy. but at bottom, she just has a visceral hostility to liberals and an emotional attachment to the right of center. now, that's fine, but don't dress it up as moral clarity or something other than it is.

[Scott Lemieux]

She's really something worse than a right-wing hack. Better that war apologism be explicit hackery in the Kritsol mode than this "no supporter of withdrawal has ever considered the possibility that razing a state with no serious plan to create a new one might create long-term difficulties, and so everything that happens after the idiotic decision to do so is really their fault if we ever leave" routine.

[Sebastian Holsclaw]

Did you ever read her before the Iraq war? She is clearly not a right-wing anything. You can disagree with her all you want, but trying to label her right wing because of your disagreements is just weird. Can't you disagree with people who aren't right-wing? Isn't that possible?

And she makes an excellent point in the article Steve linked:

Taking a stand against genocide in Sudan does not require anyone to take a parallel stand on communism, the war on terrorism or the war in Iraq. It does not imply that you are left-wing, right-wing, pro- or anti-Bush. Once the United Nations is there, this may change: The U.S. intervention in Somalia immediately politicized what had also appeared to be an apolitical conflict. But at the moment, it is still possible to think of Darfur as an appropriate target for neutral humanitarianism.

So long as pretty much no one is bothering to do anything about Darfur, everyone can deplore the situation there. That has been the world's pose for more than 4 years while the genocide goes on and on.

[cleek]

Did you ever read her before the Iraq war? She is clearly not a right-wing anything.

people can change their politics. right ?

[Ugh]

people can change their politics. right ?

Can I just say that anyone of adult age who is moer rignt-wing now than before the Iraq war is, just, well, maybe I won't say.

[Sebastian Holsclaw]

I mention the Iraq war, because I suspect it is her views on that which convince people she is 'right-wing'. Her views on other subjects would seem (at least to me) not to be 'right-wing'. So far as I can tell, her politics have not changed in response to the Iraq war. I think people 'round here are just used to labeling those who disagree with them on the Iraq war as 'right-wing'.

[Jon H]

"So long as pretty much no one is bothering to do anything about Darfur, everyone can deplore the situation there. "

The thing is, she seems to prefer that situation: idly deploring it, but not actually doing anything lest it become politicized. God forbid.

[Dantheman]

Sebastian,

Not me. I recall reading her in Slate going back to 1998 or 1999. My memory of her columns includes bashing people as having been insufficiently anti-communist and for being too concerned with nation building in the aftermath of the Kosovo War, both of which I view as right-wing positions.

[Sebastian Holsclaw]

"The thing is, she seems to prefer that situation: idly deploring it, but not actually doing anything lest it become politicized."

I read it exactly the opposite.

[Fledermaus]

I get that people don't like/agree with her, but "a rightwing hack"? Really?

Well, in publius's defense the terms "left wing hawk" and "right wing hack" are pretty much interchangable these days.

[Jay Jerome]

"I think people 'round here are just used to labeling those who disagree with them on the Iraq war as 'right-wing'."

They have the same knee-jerk reaction in labeling those who disagree with them on illegal immigration issues too...

In reading the linked Anne Applebaum article (unfortunately the poor dear looks like an Anne Apple-core in her op-ed photo) it seems she's pretty much summed up the strategic predicaments that face us there now, and done it without subjective distortion. We're in a screwed if we do, screwed if we don't situation, fast devolving into the worst-case scenario many of us predicted way back when Bush-boob began rattling sabers about invading Iraq. (Iraq-as-Islamic-Theocracy hasn't happened yet; but it will be the next domino to fall, sooner than later is my guess). When we're gone (and we will be out of there in two years) and Maliki and whatever remnants of American sympathizers are gone (either relocated elsewhere or dead) the conservative religious zealots will take over, and you'll see Iran-2 faster than you can say 'Moqtada al-Sadr slapped silly the secular Satans.'

We all predicted Iraq was a lose-lose proposition years ago, and now we've reached the lost-lost point. We we have to extricate ourselves as best we can -- which means the lefty-loopy-liberals and the creepy-crepuscular conservatives need to stop the snarking back-stabbing petulance and come to a consensus on the best way to get ourselves out of Bush's mess...

[Model 62]

Fiscally conservative, centrist Governor Howard Dean got tagged a moonbat leftist because he was against the War.

Apparently center-left pundit Anne Applebaum gets tagged a right-wing hack 'cause she's for the War.

I guess why they call it the defining issue of the era.

[Jon H]

Isn't Applebaum married to someone in the Polish government?

Maybe the right-wing-hackdom is her spousal duty, lest anyone forget Poland.

[Gary Farber]

"fair enough - the right-wing hack may be a bit much. but the larger point is right on. she's seems most interested in talking about foreign aggression/genocide, etc. as part of a larger argument against western progressives."

I understand that it can perfectly well look like that, but given the arc of her career and work, I think this is clearly backwards: she's most interested in talking about foreign aggression/genocide because of her expertise on the Gulag, and her "argument[s] against western progressives," such as they are, are incidental to that. That doesn't make her any more correct when she engages in them, but the analysis of motive and arc by you, Matt, Scott, and others (none of whom seem to have read her books, so far as I've noticed anyone mentioning reading them, or otherwise being familiar with her before she took up columnizing), I believe is clearly incorrect.

Catching up to the comments, I have to pretty much agree with Sebastian's 05:01 PM, although I wouldn't speculate on her politics or how they may have changed in the past four years, as my mind-reading helmet remains at the shop.

But gist-wise, I agree. And I'd also agree that there's an amazingly wide tendency -- in my subjective observation -- of people on blogs to make declarations about other people's politics based on reading a single article, or handful of articles, by that person, and to leap to conclusions in an often completely unjustifiable way.

It's not uncommon to see people who have had a certain politics for decades, and done endless good work of one sort or another, condemned in endlessly long blog threads, because of one news report, when the commenters clearly know didly squat about the person in question beyond that one news report.

I'm not saying that's the case here; I'm just making a general observation that, unsurprisingly, there's a lot of conclusion-leaping often engaged in by humans, when their passions are involved.

My substantive remarks about Applebaum I just made a bit ago on Hilzoy's thread.

[CharleyCarp]

I've been reading her column for as long as it's been in the Post, and I'd appreciate any citation to a column that criticized the Administration without claiming that the opposition is worse.

I'm not saying there isn't one. I just don't remember it.

[theo]

CharleyCarp:

Well, there was the column about voting machines where she argued that since wealthy socialite Anne Applebaum doesn't bother to get receipts from ATMs, it's not necessary for voting machines to have a paper trail.

http://mediamatters.org/items/200411180010

She's a "clever" contrarian of the Kinsley/Slate.com variety. I'm sure she's great at parties.

In practice, the Kinsleyites have proven themselves to be the moral equivalent of right-wing hacks, because at bottom they're defined by the social acceptability of their views and their opposition to principled, dirty hippie thinking.