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Is Christopher Caldwell the tankiest tankie or what? [1]

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Date: 2023-02-07  

Christopher Caldwell, conservative writer, Claremont Institute, and NY Times contributor. Also a type specimen for the tankie species, right wing edition.

The New York Times found time today (when they weren’t busy saying Biden is too old to run again and downplaying the SOTU address) to give space to Christopher Caldwell, a regular contributor to the opinion pages. (If you are wondering what a “tankie” is, see this.)

His words of wisdom:

It starts like this:

The United States’ recent promise to ship advanced M1 Abrams battle tanks to Ukraine was a swift response to a serious problem. The problem is that Ukraine is losing the war. Not, as far as we can tell, because its soldiers are fighting poorly or its people have lost heart, but because the war has settled into a World War I-style battle of attrition, complete with carefully dug trenches and relatively stable fronts. Such wars tend to be won — as indeed World War I was — by the side with the demographic and industrial resources to hold out longest. Russia has more than three times Ukraine’s population, an intact economy and superior military technology. At the same time, Russia has its own problems; until recently, a shortage of soldiers and the vulnerability of its arms depots to missile strikes have slowed its westward progress. Both sides have incentives to come to the negotiating table. The Biden administration has other plans. It is betting that by providing tanks it can improve Ukraine’s chances of winning the war. In a sense, the idea is to fast-forward history, from World War I’s battles of position to World War II’s battles of movement. It is a plausible strategy: Eighty years ago, the tanks of Hitler and Stalin revolutionized warfare not far from the territory being fought over today.

See — the only reason fighting is still going on is because Biden wants it to. If Ukraine would just give Russia a little piece of territory both sides could settle this. There is simply no way Ukraine can win against Russia. America is the real aggressor keeping the conflict going:

...Last spring, Ukraine shocked the Russian navy by using American targeting information to sink the Moskva, a Black Sea missile cruiser. Only months into the war did Russians face up to the fact that officers using their personal cellphones were regularly getting blown up. This past New Year’s Eve, a dormitory full of fresh Russian army recruits in the city of Makiivka was hit by missiles at the crack of midnight, presumably just as the young men were calling their friends and loved ones to wish them the joys of the coming year. The attack killed 89, according to Russian authorities — more than 300, according to the British Ministry of defense, which accused Russian authorities of “deliberate lying” about the attack to minimize their losses.

See, it’s the Russians who are the real victims here.

Caldwell is worried where Biden’s escalation may end taking the conflict. He warns NATO may take on a new role:

...President Biden’s own advisers are divided on how aggressively to pursue the war. Some even propose to chase Russia out of Crimea. That would promise a new kind of mission for NATO: the conquest, annexation and garrisoning of a population that doesn’t want it.

Interestingly, Caldwell had this take on the Iraq War and the Global War on Terror in 2004. Shoe on the other foot, or what?

...Bush advisers recognise this temptation. They do not want those who are uneasy about the Iraq war to use issues of crime or gay marriage or taxes as an honourable pretext for voting against the country's defence commitments. So the campaign speeches at the convention took great pains to imply that a vote against Mr Bush would be taken as a vote of cowardice, even if it could be rationalised as a desire to fight the Iraq war Mr Kerry's way. John McCain, the mild-mannered Arizona senator, made this point most clearly by closing his speech with the words: “Do not flinch. Stand up. Stand up with our president and fight. We're Americans. We're Americans, and we'll never surrender”. So perhaps the most curious aspect of the Republican convention was that so little mention was made of current events that do much to vindicate the party's own view of terrorism as an evil in itself. Even as the convention was closing, a stand-off between captors presumed to be Chechen rebels and Russian authorities reached a violent climax after the rebels threatened to kill hundreds of Russian school children held hostage in a school. This kind of terrorism is only a “tactic”, it is true, but a tactic so heinous that it would take a cold-hearted person to inquire into the narrative of grievances that purport to justify it, and a steely voter indeed to vote against an administration that has declared war on such things.

(Calling John McCain a “mild-mannered Arizona Senator” borders on insult)

Ask Ukraine what terrorism looks like — and who is doing it. Caldwell doesn’t, even as he rationalizes in The NY Times Op Ed why Russia has historic reasons to do what it is doing:

...The Russian invasion of Ukraine has to do with a complicated set of post-Cold War historical trends (like America’s striking post-Cold War rise and its more recent relative decline) and economic accidents (like the vicissitudes of fossil fuel prices). But it is also the latest chapter of an ongoing geostrategic story in which the plot has changed little over the centuries: The largest country by area on the planet has no reliable exit into the world. The most reliable route runs through the Black Sea, where it crosses the trade routes that link the civilizations of Asia to the civilizations of Europe. There, or thereabouts, Russian forces clashed with the armies of many Turkish sultans in the 17th and 18th centuries, Lord Palmerston of Britain in the 19th and Hitler in the 20th. Speaking last week at the 80th anniversary of the Soviet victory over Germany at the battle of Stalingrad, President Vladimir Putin of Russia described the present war as a similar effort. Russians say the war is about preventing the installation of an enemy military stronghold on the Black Sea, strong enough to close off what has for centuries been Russia’s main access to the outside world. Without Ukraine, Russia can be turned into a vassal state. That NATO intends to bring about the subjugation, breakup or even extinction of Russia may be true or false — but it will not sound implausible to a Russian.

emphasis added

(Never mind what the Ukrainians want.)

If you wonder why Republicans are so enamored of Putin, part of it has to be a shared paranoid view of the world coupled with a sense of grievance.

Caldwell is what passes for a Big Ideas guy on the right. (The NY Times refers to him at the top of the Op Ed as the author of “Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West.” Western civilization is in decline, don’t you know, and Islam will replace it.

Oh, and by the way, Caldwell also feels that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a big mistake that went too far. An interview in VOX from 2020 elucidated the following gems in a debate between Caldwell and Sean Illing. As Illing summarizes , The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties:

Caldwell doesn’t defend racism or the apartheid system the Civil Rights Act dismantled; rather, he argues that the civil rights movement spawned a whole constellation of other liberation struggles — for immigrants, for gay and transgender rights, for sexual freedom — that Americans did not sign up for and did not want. And the result of this steady encroachment is what Caldwell calls a “rival Constitution” that is incompatible with the original one and the source of a great deal of social unrest.

See, Republicans did NOT start the Culture Wars (although they intend to win them.) It’s all because of liberal overreach that the country is so divided.

CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL Of the book’s many narrative lines, the one that’s received a lot of attention finds the source of a lot of our conflicts in the legislative outgrowths of the Civil Rights Act. Overturning segregation meant overturning a lot of the democratic institutions of the South. Now you can argue that they were illegitimate or that they were invidious or they were exclusionary, but the federal government needed legal tools to overturn a functioning democratic system. And those tools wound up being adaptable to a whole range of other tasks. Sean Illing What other tasks? Christopher Caldwell Securing the advancement of women in corporations, securing the integration of immigrants in American society, winning rights for gays, winning rights for transsexuals. Set aside the merits of any of this, the point is that accomplishing these things involved empowering judges and regulators or bureaucrats more generally to make laws. And I think that a lot of people felt left out of that process.

Look at “Overturning segregation meant overturning a lot of the democratic institutions of the South.” and you can only marvel at a mind that can come up with that framing.

Caldwell cites Critical Race Theory as part of the problem, and then drops this:

Sean Illing At one point, you write that white Americans “fell asleep thinking of themselves as the people who had built this country and woke up to find themselves occupying the bottom rung of an official hierarchy of races.” People will read that, fairly or not, as the cry of a reactionary, someone who doesn’t recognize the country anymore and hates what it’s become. Christopher Caldwell I don’t think of myself as a reactionary, but one of the unintended consequences of civil rights was to create a white consciousness. And I think that it’s the photographic negative of what we can call intersectionality. But, as I said earlier, as long as civil rights law was focused on segregation, it was both comprehensible and it had some boundaries which I think kept the country calm. But as it spread, you started having coalitions based on rights. And the two parties evolved around this coalition-building. So you have these rights-based coalitions that unite blacks, immigrants, the handicapped, women, gays, transgender people, everyone who benefits from these new protections. But as that happens, as these coalitional pieces come together, a segment of the population gets cut out from the conversation, and that segment becomes its own coalition, which is principally white Americans.

And there you have it: white Americans are under threat in their own country.

If The NY Times wants to give him space, that’s fine — but his columns really need to run with a warning label. The Claremont Institute has become a conservative Superfund Site.

Christopher Caldwell is what you would get if you hybridized David Brooks with Tucker Carlson, with a little bit of Ross Douthat thrown in. He’s providing the pseudo-intellectual framework to support the grievance mindset of the right wing that justifies all of the violence they are doing to the democratic institutions of this country.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/2/7/2151552/-Is-Christopher-Caldwell-the-tankiest-tankie-or-what

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