worship the glitch

In their way, the peoples of both Iran and the United States have both spoken—in America first by rejecting the more belligerent candidacies of first McCain and then Romney in favor of Obama; in Iran choosing, probably in the 2009 and certainly last week, the least confrontational candidate available.

Rohani threatens to deny the war party their cartoon image of an Iranian “Hitler,” one which which had been painstakingly, if dishonestly, constructed from the undisciplined and belligerent musings of his populist predecessor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Rohani doesn’t have time to open his mouth before Jonathan Tobin of Commentary warns usthat   Iran remains a “totalitarian theocracy” and Obama better not “waste more time on sanctions and diplomacy” in an effort to end  Iran’s  nuclear program. (Tobin fails to  explain that rather unique form of  totalitarianism which allows meaningful competitive elections, nor does he mention which country in the Middle East has introduced to the region a huge  nuclear arsenal.) Max Boot, also at Commentary, reminds readers that power in Iran rests with the Supreme Leader, not with the president, an interpretation of Iranian political dynamic not stressed when Ahmadinejad was president. Jeffrey Goldberg chimes in that the Iranian election was “fake.” Tobin rails about “useful idiots”—the Timeseditorial board in this instance—who prefer diplomacy to war. But one can sense the fear in the neocons: the broad spectrum of Western opinion is inclined to think the Iranian election result might be a good, not a bad thing. One can be sure a vast research enterprise is underway to find a quote from Rohani’s past that expresses something other than sheer joy at Israel’s dispossession of the Palestinians. An editor at the war-hungry Wall Street Journal is already accusing Rohani of encouraging the  murder of dissident students in the 1990′s.

The panic reminds me of the one which pulsed through  neoconservative ranks during the emergence  of Gorbachev. Then the situation was more ambiguous—the Soviets didn’t allow elections. But the neocons were unanimous (or nearly: Joshua Muravchik was a notable, and solitary exception) in presenting Gorbachev as a greater threat than previous leaders because he seemed moderate, seemed to desire the turning of bad pages and exploring new possibilities. It was a core neoconservative tenet that Soviet totalitarianism was incapable of reform and forever on the march, and in selecting Gorbachev they had found a clever new tool to lull and trick the West. Norman Podhoretz published one column—I recall struggling to write an appropriate headline for it—devoted to the Soviet leader’s devilish and mendacious smile. The danger of course was that Ronald Reagan would drop his guard, which he did, finding Gorbachev’s desire to move past the Cold War altogether credible.

Traditionalists tend to focus on forming and sustaining their own “little platoons” in freedom from governmental interference; they want to be allowed to stay outside the main stream of American culture, at least to some degree. The genuine left is more focused on how to help those people who are forcibly excluded from that main stream, who, far from worrying about how to stay out, can’t figure out how to get in. But these are general tendencies. Traditionalists can also care about the forcibly excluded, and leftists can promote the flourishing of pockets of difference.

Our ideas about what constitutes a good society may be too different for us to make common cause in the arena of electoral politics, but we should at least listen to one another more often — and explore conversations that could tell us just how far a shared commitment to civil liberties can take us.