Liberty & Power: Group Blog
Entries by Chris Matthew Sciabarra
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies: 10 Years and Counting
The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies was first published in the Fall of 1999; our Fall 2008 issue (running just a little late) is now out, and marks the beginning of our Tenth Anniversary Celebration.
The abstracts for the newest issue appear here; the contributor biographies appear here. There have been a few changes over at the JARS site... and more are coming. New indices for the Table of Contents and the Contributor Biographies are now on the site. Also, JARS has recently been picked up by the indexing service, Scopus.
The newest issue includes the following articles:
Mind, Introspection, and "The Objective" - Roger E. Bissell
The Peikovian Doctrine of the Arbitrary Assertion - Robert L. Campbell
Economic Decision-Making and Ethical Choice - Kathleen Touchstone
Reviews and Discussions
Re-Reading Atlas Shrugged - J. H. Huebert
Plato, Aristotle, Rand, and Sexuality - Fred Seddon
Reply to Fred Seddon: Interpreting Plato's Dialogues: Aristotle versus Seddon - Roderick T. Long
Rejoinder to Roderick T. Long: Long on Interpretation - Fred Seddon
Reply to Peter E. Vedder, "Self-Directedness and the Human Good" (Fall 2007): Defending Norms of Liberty - Douglas J. Den Uyl and Douglas B. Rasmussen
Rejoinder to Douglas J. Den Uyl and Douglas B. Rasmussen: Difficulties in Norms of Liberty - Peter E. Vedder
Enjoy!
Cross-posted at Notablog.
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
Saving the Free Market from Itself
This morning, President George W. Bush announced further "unprecedented and aggressive steps" that will help to "shore up" financial institutions and the U.S. economy during this time of crisis. He's delighted that globally, governments are moving to "strengthen" market institutions by providing more "liquidity," that is, by "purchasing equity" in major banks worldwide. The Federal Government will now purchase equity shares in this country's banks as part of its "$700 billion financial rescue plan." Oh, the banks will be able to buy back these shares with money from "private" investors when they get back on stronger financial footing. And, in addition to stepped up efforts by the FDIC, the Federal Reserve Bank will become a "buyer of last resort for commercial paper."
Inflate, inflate, inflate! And let's coordinate this on a global scale, if our national efforts are too puny!
Finally, Bush said that his economic advisors, led by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, will provide further details on how this "rescue plan" will take shape:
They will make clear that each of these new programs contains safeguards to protect the taxpayers. They will make clear that the government's role will be limited and temporary. And they will make clear that these measures are not intended to take over the free market, but to preserve it.
Up is Down. Right is Left. Freedom is Slavery. We come not to bury the "free market," but to save it... just the way FDR saved capitalism!
But, to paraphrase another Savior of the Free Market, who enacted wage and price controls to save "capitalism" from itself... "Let us make one thing perfectly clear": There is no free market. And the "capitalism" they are "saving" has nothing to do with "free markets." Call it "state capitalism," or "corporatism," or "neofascism." Call it whatever the hell you want... but don't call it a "free market."
As I argued recently, the state and the banks are virtual extensions of one another, two aspects of the same structure, a "state-banking nexus," if you will. The effective nationalization of financial institutions in this country is just a continuation of a long history of government intervention.
Cross-posted at Notablog.
Wednesday, October 1, 2008
A Crisis of Political Economy
I have just published a rather hefty tome on my Notablog, entitled "A Crisis of Political Economy." Lots of links therein, and thanks especially to some of my colleagues here at L&P who gave me so much from which to draw!
Comments always welcome.
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
WTC Remembrance, 2008 Installment
Since 2001, I have posted an annual 9/11 remembrance at Notablog. This year, my subject is firefighter Eddie Mecner. The essay is posted here.
Tuesday, August 26, 2008
DNC, Moore, and Laissez-Faire Capitalism
The Democratic National Convention began last night, providing a few high moments for the party faithful. But I got a few chuckles while catching up on my reading last night.
Michael Moore tells the New York Daily News: "At this point, we need to try anything---and Obama is anything. And if he doesn't do the job we can throw the bum out in four years." (Just don't forget the old maxim: the job of the new president is to make the last president look good. Granted, a President Obama would have to go a long way to achieving that goal.)
Oh, and in a very interesting NY Times magazine article on "Advanced Obamanomics," David Leonhardt calls Obama a "free-market loving, big-spending, fiscally conservative, wealth redistributionist." A study in contradiction. What else is new? The article contains this classic howler:
The government has deregulated industries, opened the economy more to market forces and, above all, cut income taxes. Much good has come of this---the end of 1970s stagflation, infrequent and relatively mild recessions, faster growth than that of the more regulated economies of Europe. Yet, laissez-faire capitalism hasn't delivered nearly what its proponents promised. It has created big budget deficits, the most pronounced income inequality since the 1920s and the current financial crisis.
Laissez-faire capitalism? Laissez-faire capitalism?
It's a fairly typical exercise by contemporary political pundits; every so often, just "free-up" the mixture of regulation and market forces in the everyday see-saw of mixed economic policies and then blame laissez-faire capitalism for the mess.
Anyway, after some truly rousing Olympics in Beijing, the real political Olympics have only begun; pass the popcorn.
Cross-posted to Notablog.
Saturday, August 23, 2008
The More Things "Change"...
I just posted a few musings on the upcoming nominating conventions of the two major U.S. political parties at Notablog. Check it out here.
Sunday, August 10, 2008
After Multiculturalism
Today, I posted another installment in my SITL series; I discuss a new book by John F. Welsh, entitled After Multiculturalism: The Politics of Race and the Dialectics of Liberty. Though today's entry is a detailed review of sorts, I had provided a blurb for Welsh's book, which appears on the book's back jacket. I wrote:
John F. Welsh provides a comprehensive survey of libertarian and individualist thought on race and multiculturalism. Examining such thinkers as Ayn Rand, Murray Rothbard, Lysander Spooner, Albert Jay Nock, and Max Stirner, Welsh's provocative book demonstrates the analytical power of dialectical-libertarian perspectives. Exploring multiple, interconnected levels, Welsh offers a fundamentally radical critique of racism in all its guises, while challenging current models of thinking on this volatile subject. This is truly a much-needed addition to the growing scholarly literature.
To read my larger discussion, take a look at Notablog.
Tuesday, July 8, 2008
New Spring 2008 Journal of Ayn Rand Studies
Just a little note to inform readers that the newest issue of The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies has been published; you can check out its table of contents, with links to abstracts and contributor biographies here.
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
Socialism After Hayek
Today at Notablog, I post Part 2 of my series on how my "Dialectics and Liberty" work has been engaged in the scholarly literature. I examine a fascinating book by Theodore A. Burczak entitled Socialism After Hayek, which advances the discussion of a post-Hayekian socialism that takes into account those "intractable Hayekian knowledge problems."
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Marx, Reason, and the Art of Freedom
Over at Notablog, I begin a series in which I discuss how my own "Dialectics and Liberty" work has been treated in the literature. Today, I revisit a book by Kevin M. Brien, entitled Marx, Reason, and the Art of Freedom, whose second edition deals with a review I wrote back in 1988.
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
New Journal of Ayn Rand Studies + Call for Papers
The newest issue of The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies has been published; readers can check out the table of contents, with links to abstracts and contributor biographies here.
I'd also like to take this opportunity to post the journal's "Call for Papers" on the topic of "Ayn Rand, Objectivism, and War." Details and deadlines can be found here and here.
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
Rudy Giuliani: A Preliminary Autopsy
I have posted a few reflections on the collapse of Rudy Giuliani's campaign at Notablog.
So much more 2008 political theater to come...
Friday, January 18, 2008
IESS Entry on "Objectivism"
I've authored an entry on Ayn Rand's philosophy, "Objectivism," which appears in the new International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, a 9-volume, 4000-page work published by Macmillan Reference USA, edited by William A. Darity, Jr. (Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2008). The article can be found in Volume 6: Oaxaca, Ronald - Quotas, Trade, pp. 6-8, but the people at Gale / Cengage Learning have been kind enough to give me permission to post the PDF of the article on my home site.
You can access the essay as a PDF document here.
Cross-posted at Notablog.
Wednesday, December 5, 2007
L&P Inside Higher Ed
L&P is mentioned in today's Inside Higher Ed, where I also plug a few L&P member blogs. Take a look at Scott McLemee's piece, "Around the Web."
Thursday, September 20, 2007
Conference Board Review: Atlas at 50
There are several essays out there discussing the forthcoming 50th anniversary of Ayn Rand's novel, Atlas Shrugged. One such essay, written by A. J. Vogl, editor of The Conference Board Review, was just published in the magazine's September-October 2007 issue. (Vogl interviewed me, among others, for his article, and a summary of my own comments appears here.)
There will be more on the golden anniversary of Atlas in the coming weeks, so stay tuned.
Cross-posted at Notablog.
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
WTC Remembrance, Annual Series
This year, as part of my ongoing annual series, "Remembering the World Trade Center," I have posted the newest installment, a Notablog exclusive: "Charlie: To Build and Rebuild."
It tells the story of Charlie Pomaro, who, as a young man, helped to build the Twin Towers, and who, in 2001, helped to pick up the shattered pieces.
An index of previous installments in the series is available in today's Notablog entry here.
Tuesday, August 14, 2007
New Journal of Ayn Rand Studies
Just a note to announce the publication of the new issue of The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, which features contributions from some of our esteemed L&P associates, including Stephen Cox and David T. Beito.
For information on the new issue, check out the table of contents and abstracts here and the contributor biographies here.
I'm also delighted to announce that the Jounral has entered into an electronic licensing relationship with EBSCO Publishing, the world's most prolific aggregator of full-text journals, magazines, and other sources. For further information, see Notablog.
Monday, June 25, 2007
Atlas Shrugged Companion Published
I have finally received my own copy of a new book edited by Edward W. Younkins entitled Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged: A Philosophical and Literary Companion, published by Ashgate.
L&P readers will note the presence in the volume of several L&P contributors: Lester H. Hunt, Steven Horwitz, Robert L. Campbell, Peter Boettke, Stephen Cox, Roderick T. Long, and yours truly.
I have not read the new Younkins anthology yet, but the range of topics, from the philosophical, political, and aesthetic to the literary, economic, and historical, is quite impressive.
See Notablog for further details.
Wednesday, April 18, 2007
Miklos Rozsa: A Centennial Celebration
Granted, this is not directly relevant to either Liberty or Power, but I have been celebrating the centennial of composer Miklos Rozsa's birth at Notablog. For those who are interested, check out the various links in today's post.
Monday, March 26, 2007
Dialectics and Liberty (in German)
I recently heard from Matt Jenny who, with a few of his libertarian friends, runs a small German left-libertarian groupblog named paxx:blog, which includes a webzine, paxx:zine. The webzine has already published translations of articles by my Liberty & Power Group Blog colleagues, Roderick T. Long (a German translation of "Beyond the Boss: Protection from Business in a Free Nation") and Sheldon Richman (a German translation of "U.S. Hypocrisy on Iran").
This week I join Roderick and Sheldon with a German translation of "Dialectics and Liberty" (links to the English PDF), which appeared in the September 2005 issue of The Freeman. The German translation can be found here.
Cross-posted to Notablog.
Friday, March 23, 2007
Ayn Rand Goes Swedish
Just a note to let readers know that there's a new issue out of the Swedish magazine Voltaire, which focuses on Ayn Rand. Guest editor Mattias Svensson translated a revised version of my own essay, "Atlas Shrugged: Manifesto for a New Radicalism." Read more about this issue and its contents here.
Tuesday, December 19, 2006
Joseph Barbera, RIP
I grew up on a steady diet of Hanna-Barbera cartoons, among other favorites, including "The Flintstones," "The Jetsons," "Yogi Bear," "Jonny Quest," and "Huckleberry Hound."
So when I found out about the passing of Joseph Barbera, I paused for a moment to recall all the joy his wonderful animation brought me.
And this passing comes after the recent passing of Chris Hayward, a writer responsible for many of the characters featured on "Rocky and Bullwinkle," among other timeless TV shows (hat tip to David Beito).
Cross-posted to Notablog.
Friday, November 17, 2006
New Fall 2006 Journal of Ayn Rand Studies
The new Fall 2006 issue of The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies has been published. The issue includes essays from contributors such as Steven H. Shmurak, Marc Champagne, Fred Seddon (two from Fred!), Algirdas Degutis, Susan Love Brown, David Graham & Nathan Nobis, Kirsti Minsaas, Greg Nyquist, Gregory M. Browne and Roderick T. Long. And I'm delighted to report that with this issue, Roderick joins the Editorial Board of JARS!
Check out the abstracts for the new issue here, and the contributor biographies here.
Read more at Notablog.
Wednesday, November 1, 2006
Mid-Term Elections, 2006
I've received a bit of email from people who were wondering why it is I have not commented on the upcoming mid-term elections. "Sciabarra, you're a political scientist, for Chrissake! What do you think?"
Well, let's leave aside the question of how much science goes into politics: It's always nice to know that some people find value in what I say. But with all due respect: There's not a dime's worth of difference between the Democrats and the Republicans. I have not changed my views of this two-party, two-pronged attack on individual freedom by one iota: A Pox on Both Their Houses! In truth, however, the modern Democratic Party has always been honest about its Big Government agenda. But the "small-government" GOP has long embraced the politics of Big Government. As the majority party, they are a total, unmitigated disaster for individual liberty, whether they are religious rightists or so-called "progressive conservatives"—who are actually much truer to the GOP's 19th-century interventionist roots than so-called "Goldwater" or "Reagan" Republicans (those who embraced the rhetoric of limited government, while still paving the way for a growth in the scope of government intervention). You have to chuckle when even Hillary Clinton sees the hypocrisy: "The people who promised less government," she said, "have instead given us the largest and least competent government we have ever had."
Still, I must admit that my political perversity would like very much to see the Bush administration get a royal slap across the face, such that the Democrats take the House of Representatives and, at the very least, close the gap in the GOP-controlled Senate. This is purely a strategic desire: Party divisions can have utility in frustrating the power-lust on both ends. In any event, I think it's probably true that the GOP will suffer a setback, and I have been saying so for over a year.
Please understand, however: THIS WILL DO NOTHING TO CHANGE THE CURRENT DOMESTIC OR FOREIGN POLICY DISASTERS. I don't mean to shout, but with regard to foreign policy alone: The Democrats handed this administration the current foreign policy debacle on a silver platter. They will not challenge one inch of the Bush administration's Iraq policy or its ideological rationalizations for that policy: that "democracy" can be imposed on societies that have little or no appreciation of the complex cultural roots of human freedom.
Either way, I'll be watching the results of politics-as-bloodsport on Tuesday, November 7th.
Cross-posted at Notablog.
Tuesday, September 5, 2006
Remembering the World Trade Center: Sixth Installment
Today, I add the sixth installment of my "Remembering the World Trade Center" series. Whatever one's views of the historical and political causes and consequences of September 11, 2001, I believe it is important to "Never Forget."
As the fifth anniversary of that day approaches, I post this tribute to:
Cross-posted to Notablog.
Friday, August 11, 2006
Ayn Rand at 100
A new book entitled Ayn Rand at 100, edited by Tibor Machan, makes its debut on Wednesday, August 16, 2006. And it is being published by the Liberty Institute in India!!! The book synopsis states: "Eminent authors discuss the impact [Ayn Rand] has had on their contribution to philosophy and, most importantly, Rand’s Indian connection."
A reprint of one of my Rand Centenary articles appears in the anthology, along with an essay by one of my L&P colleagues, Roderick Long. Here's the Table of Contents:
Preface : Tibor R. Machan: Ayn Rand at 100
Chapter 1: Bibek Debroy: Ayn Rand - The Indian Connection
Chapter 2: Tibor R. Machan: Rand and Her Significant Contributions
Chapter 3: J. E. Chesher: Ayn Rand’s Contribution to Moral Philosophy
Chapter 4: George Reisman: Ayn Rand and Ludwig von Mises
Chapter 5: Robert White: Ayn Rand’s Contribution to Liberal Thought
Chapter 6: Roderick T. Long: Ayn Rand and Indian Philosophy
Chapter 7: Chris Matthew Sciabarra: Ayn Rand - A Centennial Appreciation
Chapter 8: Fred Seddon: Ayn Rand - An Appreciation
Chapter 9: Elaine Sternberg: Why Ayn Rand Matters: Metaphysics, Morals, and Liberty
Chapter 10: Douglas Den Uyl : Rand's First Great Hit, The Fountainhead
Cross-posted to Notablog.
Saturday, June 10, 2006
Privatizing Gay Marriage
I am a bit behind in my newspaper reading, so I was particularly surprised by an article published in Thursday's New York Daily News. Written by Rabbi Michael Lerner, "The Right Way to Fight for Gay Marriage" argues that all unions should be privatized. Lerner, who is chair of the Network of Spiritual Progressives, writes:
... marriage ought to be taken out of the state's hands entirely. Let people be wed in the private realm with no official legal sanction. Then, religious communities that oppose gay marriage will not sanction them, and those like mine that sanction the practice will conduct it. Rather than issuing marriage certificates or divorces, the state would simply enforce civil unions as contracts between consenting adults and enforce laws imposing obligations on people who bring children into the world.
This approach is far more likely to be a winning strategy for those who wish to beat back the assault on gay rights.
I suppose what is most surprising to me is that a genuinely libertarian argument for privatizing marriage made it to the Op Ed of one of the most highly circulated daily newspapers in America.
Cross-posted to Notablog.
Monday, May 22, 2006
New Spring 2006 Journal of Ayn Rand Studies
It gives me great pleasure to announce the publication of the Spring 2006 issue of The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies. The issue features a dialogue on Ayn Rand's ethics, with contributions from Tibor R. Machan, Frank Bubb, Eric Mack, Douglas B. Rasmussen, Robert H. Bass, Chris Cathcart, and fellow L&P'er Robert L. Campbell. In addition, there are articles covering topics in epistemology (Merlin Jetton) and literature (Kurt Keefner and Peter Saint-Andre). Other contributors include fellow L&P'er Sheldon Richman on Thomas Szasz and Ayn Rand; Max Hocutt on postmodernism; Steven Yates on capitalism and commerce; and David M. Brown on the new Ayn Rand Q&A book.
For subscription information, see here.
Cross-posted to Notablog.
Tuesday, April 18, 2006
An Interview, Conducted by Jason Dixon
I've been super busy putting the finishing touches on the forthcoming Spring 2006 issue of The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies. But I've finally had the opportunity to publish, as a Notablog exclusive, an interview of me conducted by Jason Dixon.
Interested readers can check out that interview here. And the comments section is open here.
Wednesday, March 22, 2006
Iraq: A Perception Problem?
Today, ABC's "Good Morning America" reported on the Bush administration's claim that "negative" stories on the war in Iraq are playing right into the hands of the "enemy," and that the press is to blame for the sagging public support of the war. Bush's declining poll numbers are the result of negative publicity.
Such sagging public support, of course, has nothing to do with any erosion of the public's faith in the administration's competence, eh? Or the fact that Iraq is steeped in sectarian conflict, careening toward civil war? Nah. Nothing to do with those things.
On one level, of course, Bush is absolutely right: The press tends to focus on car bombs and murders and kidnappings as news. Well. DUH. Pick up any newspaper and the story is the same locally. Watch any local news broadcast and the story is the same there too. The news often reads or sounds like a police blotter. That has been the tendency in local news for as long as I've been alive. Why on earth would this tendency be different on a national or global level? Crime is news in this culture, and whether the criminals are local thugs or foreign ones, the play's the same.
But there is no direct correlation between news coverage and public perception, unless one believes that people are sheeple. Interestingly, even though NYC newspapers and newscasts focus on local crime all the time, it has not altered the public perception that crime is down in the Big Apple, as part of a long-term trend. And there is a good reason for this public perception: Crime is down. In reality. There were over 2,600 people murdered in NYC in 1990; that number dropped to under 600 by 2004. Whatever the continuing negative focus of the press, the reality of life in this city has inspired people's positive perceptions.
Perhaps the Bush administration needs its own reality check. The downturn in public opinion on the Iraq war is not simply the result of press brainwashing. The public perception has changed because things in reality are not going as well in Iraq as the administration claims.
I guess the administration is just frustrated with the "reality-based community." And here they thought that they created their own reality.
What is the administration's alternative? Planting positive stories in the press? Paying off journalists who ask sympathetic questions? Or maybe the press should simply be "embedded" into an official Ministry of Propaganda.
Sigh.
Cross-posted to Notablog.
Monday, March 20, 2006
Chris Tame, RIP
I just received a phone call from Sean Gabb of the Libertarian Alliance. Sean tells me that my pal, Chris Tame, passed away at 3:37 pm, London time. Having battled cancer these many months, Chris's passing was, as Sean describes it, peaceful.
I'm very sad to hear this news, and I extend my deepest condolences to his friends and family. I was fortunate enough to speak with Chris last week; it was a "goodbye" phone call, as he knew the end was near. I will miss his almost daily "Ayn Rand Watch" postings, his warped sense of humor, and, most of all, the intellectual engagement. But I know that his legacy will live on.
A press release will follow from Sean very soon. (I've added that release at the Notablog post here. Kenneth R. Gregg has also added it to the comments section here.)
Update (23 March 2006): Sean Gabb has published an Obituary for Chris Tame here and here.
Chris Tame: 1949-2006
Saturday, March 18, 2006
Chuck Hagel vs. Neocon Numbskulls
Yesterday, I posted at Notablog a brief piece that cited a fine principle enunciated by GOP Senator Chuck Hagel:
You cannot in my opinion just impose a democratic form of government on a country with no history and no culture and no tradition of democracy.
Yeah. How 'bout that?
Read more of my mini-rant here.
Wednesday, March 8, 2006
Meme of Four
Steven Horwitz has tagged me for the "Meme-of-Four" (dammit indeed!)
Okay, here goes.
Thursday, February 2, 2006
The Kings of Nonviolent Resistance
It is no longer news that Coretta Scott King, the widow of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., passed away this week. She was 78.
An advocate and practitioner of nonviolent resistance, Martin Luther King Jr. once uttered a classic statement: "I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear."
While a lot of discussion has ensued over the nature of the "love thine enemy" philosophy that seems to underlie King's statement, I think there is a truth therein, which was made even more apparent by King's wife. Coretta Scott King often repeated her husband's maxim: "Hate is too great a burden to bear." But she added: "It injures the hater more than it injures the hated."
I've talked about the effects of hating in other posts dealing with everything from Yoda to my articulation of "The Rose Petal Assumption," so I won't repeat my reasoning here. Suffice it to say, there is an internal relationship between hatred, fear, anger, and suffering, and, often, the transcendence of one brings forth the transcendence of all.
I think what the Kings focused on was not "loving one's enemy" per se, but the practice of a positive alternative in one's opposition to evil. Nonviolent resistance is not equivalent to pacifism. It is not the renunciation of the retaliatory use of force; it entails, instead, the practice of a wide variety of strategies—from boycotts to strikes, which remove all sanctions of one's own victimization. One refuses to be a part of a cycle that replaces one "boss" with another. One repudiates real-world monsters, while not becoming one in the process. For as Nietzsche once said: "Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you."
Nonviolence is not a social panacea, and sometimes it is absolutely necessary to use violence in one's response to aggression. But much can be learned about how to topple tyranny from the lessons provided by the theoreticians and practitioners of nonviolent resistance.
It's fitting that today I've marked Ayn Rand's birthday, for Atlas Shrugged is one of the grandest dramatizations in fiction of the effectiveness of fighting tyranny through nonviolent resistance. It is no coincidence that, while writing her magnum opus, Rand's working title for Atlas was "The Strike." Of course, Rand was no theorist of nonviolence, but her novel is instructive.
For further reading on the subject of nonviolence, let me suggest first and foremost the books of Gene Sharp, founder of the Albert Einstein Institution. See especially Sharp's books, The Politics of Nonviolent Action and Social Power and Political Freedom.
Cross-posted to Notablog.
Thursday, January 5, 2006
International Encyclopedia of Economic Sociology: Libertarianism
As I mentioned here and here, I wrote an entry on "libertarianism" for the International Encyclopedia of Economic Sociology. The entry surveys those who have contributed to a libertarian "sociology," thinkers such as Herbert Spencer, Carl Menger, F. A. Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard, and Ayn Rand.
I am pleased, today, to publish that entry, with permission from Routledge, on my website:
Cross-posted to Notablog.
Wednesday, January 4, 2006
International Encyclopedia of Economic Sociology: Karl Marx
I just received my copy of the International Encyclopedia of Economic Sociology from Routledge. Some time ago, I told the story of how I came to author two articles for that newly published reference work. The 2006 volume includes two essays authored by me: one on "Karl Marx," the other on "libertarianism."
Today, with permission from Routledge, I publish an HTML version of the essay on "Karl Marx." Given my comments today in this thread, I am happy that the essay on Marx highlights one of the most appealing aspects of his work: his use of dialectical method. Readers should point their browsers to the following link to take a look at the essay:
Tomorrow, with permission from Routledge, I will publish my Encyclopedia article on libertarianism. Stay tuned!
Cross-posted to Notablog.
Tuesday, December 20, 2005
Philosophers of Capitalism
Okay, more shameless self-promotion...
Today, I received my copy of a new book edited by Edward W. Younkins, entitled Philosophers of Capitalism: Menger, Mises, Rand, and Beyond.
The book features contributions from a number of friends and colleagues, including, of course, Ed Younkins himself, along with Sam Bostaph, Doug Rasmussen, Barry Smith, Walter Block, Richard C. B. Johnson, Larry Sechrest, and Tibor Machan, among others. Some of the articles were previously published; my own is a revised version of a piece I wrote for Philosophical Books, surveying "The Growing Industry in Ayn Rand Scholarship."
You can order it from Laissez Faire Books or Amazon.com.
Cross-posted to Notablog.
Tuesday, December 13, 2005
The 9/11 Money Trough
I have been following the week-long series in the New York Daily News focusing on the "9/11 Money Trough," the entirely predictable corrupt financial feeding frenzy generated by the infusion of massive government funds in the months and years after the attacks on Manhattan. It brings to mind what Errol Louis said about the promised revitalization of New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina; he said that billions of dollars were about "to pass into the sticky hands of politicians. ... Worried about looting? You ain't seen nothing yet."
Well, we've seen it here in NYC. I highly recommend the series to readers.
Cross-posted to Notablog.
Friday, December 9, 2005
Bill Bradford, RIP
I am very deeply saddened to report that my dear friend Bill Bradford passed away on Thursday, December 8, 2005 at the age of 58. He was the founder of Liberty magazine and a founding co-editor and publisher of The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies. He died at his home in Port Townsend, Washington, surrounded by family and friends, after many months of battling cancer.
Stephen Cox, the new senior editor of Liberty, has announced that "an upcoming issue [of the magazine] will feature a commemoration of Bill’s life. His work will continue."
I've posted a bit more at Notablog, but hope to contribute my thoughts more formally to that upcoming commemoration.
Rest in peace, friend.
Monday, December 5, 2005
The Freeman: Dialectics and Liberty
The September 2005 issue of The Freeman includes my essay, "Dialectics and Liberty," which offers an introduction to dialectical method and its role in the works of such writers as F. A. Hayek and Ayn Rand. That essay finally makes its cyber-debut today! Another in a series of essays and interviews on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the publication of my books Marx, Hayek, and Utopia and Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical, the article is available as a PDF here:
Cross-posted to Notablog.
Sunday, December 4, 2005
Antiwar Masters of Horror
I've long been a fan of so-called "horror" films, in addition to sci-fi and fantasy.
Unfortunately, the Showtime series "Masters of Horror," thus far, has been a bit of a disappointment to me; it's a mix of schlock and gore, with just a few thrills thrown in for good measure. I prefer horror to have a purpose, maybe a bit of "Twilight Zone"-like morality play at work. At the very least, it should be suspenseful, rather than predictable.
I did enjoy Friday night's episode, "Homecoming," directed by Joe Dante, which made a few biting political points. For me, the funniest right-wing caricature was played by Thea Gill, who was a "skank"-like right-wing pundit, curiously comparable to Ann Coulter. It was quite a change for Gill, who portrayed the mild-mannered Lindsay in "Queer as Folk."
The Dante-directed "Homecoming" gives us a zombie tale, in which fallen soldiers come back from the dead to right the wrongs of a Presidential administration that involved them in a no-win war. No spoilers here; if you haven't caught the episode, check it out.
Cross-posted to Notablog.
Friday, November 18, 2005
The Illusion of the Epoch
President Bush and his VP have been railing against the "Democrats" for "rewriting" the history of the 2002-2003 march toward war. (Some good commentary on this can be found here, here, and here.)
In the meanwhile, the critics keep a comin' and most of them, indeed, were former champions of the war. Vietnam combat vet, and current Democratic Congressman John P. Murtha, who supported the war, now calls it "a flawed policy wrapped in an illusion..."
The flaws have been legion. And the illusion? Well, H. B. Acton once spoke of communism as "the illusion of the epoch." For me, the biggest illusion of this epoch is a neoconservative one: that it is possible to construct a liberal democracy on any cultural base whatsoever. Now, I'm not looking to re-open the tired debate over whether it was right or wrong to go to war in Iraq; but even the politicians realize that the time has come for a debate about the future of that war.
But that won't stop the administration from its tarring of critics, like Murtha, as a "Michael Moore ... liberal" because he is questioning the wisdom of the war. Except the charges won't stick this time, because even though the President doesn't read polls, apparently, the politicians in his own party are reading the handwriting on the walls of the Pew Research Center and the Gallop organization. The American people are becoming increasingly pissed off over this war and its conduct. And if current trends continue, the party in power, gerrymandering notwithstanding, is going to suffer in the 2006 midterm elections.
I'm tickled, of course, that the administration puts such a priority on "consistency" in its defense of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq. As the ineffectual John Kerry said, effectively, during one of the 2004 Presidential debates: Consistency is great... but "you could be wrong!" Cheney is so busy reminding opponents of the war about how they've changed their positions that he doesn't even recognize how far he's come over the last decade or so.
Cross-posted to Notablog.
Thursday, November 3, 2005
Iran, Again
After last week's pronouncements by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that Israel should be "wiped off the map," there's been a lot of saber rattling about Iran. (I've written on the subject of Iran a number of times over the past few years; see here, here, and here, for example).
There is nothing shocking or unexpected about Ahmadinejad's rhetoric. The Iranian theocrats have been talking like that for years. Their overthrow of the US-backed Shah was a clarion call for fundamentalists across the Islamic world to mobilize against both Israel and the United States. Many others in the Islamic world have uttered the same view, including those who reside in countries that are, ostensibly, current US allies.
The fact is, of course, that US actions in Iraq have emboldened the Iranian regime significantly; some are even suggesting that the US was the "useful idiot" for Iranian foreign policy goals to undermine a hostile Baathist regime in Iraq, substituting a friendlier Shiite majoritarian theocracy in its place. With the antagonistic Taliban held at bay in Afghanistan on its eastern flank, and Hussein gone on the western side, Iran has emerged as a central geopolitical power in the Middle East—and was made so in significant part as the direct result of actions taken by the United States, purportedly in our own defense.
But it is a state that is in a deepening cultural crisis, a crisis that will have profound political ramifications over time.
Today, I've read an interesting NY Times essay about "Our Allies in Iran." It's the kind of title that is meant to surprise. The writer, Afshin Molavi, makes some very important points. Molavi states:
The new president's confrontational tone threatens to deepen the isolation of Iran's democrats, pushing them further behind his long shadow. Western powers have a dual challenge: to find a way to engage this population even as they struggle to address the new president's inflammatory rhetoric. By the time Mr. Ahmadinejad was elected in June, a sustained assault by hard-liners had left Iranian democrats disoriented and leaderless, their dissidents jailed, newspapers closed and reformist political figures popularly discredited. But democratic aspirations should not be written off as a passing fad that died with the failure of the reform movement and the replacement of a reformist president, Mohammad Khatami, with a hard-liner, Mr. Ahmadinejad. The historic roots of reform run deep in Iran, and support for democratic change remains widespread.
Iran's modern middle class, which is increasingly urbanized, wired and globally connected, provides particularly fertile soil for these aspirations. The Stanford University scholar Abbas Milani has described Iran's middle class as a "Trojan horse within the Islamic republic, supporting liberal values, democratic tolerance and civic responsibility." And so long as that class grows, so too will the pressure for democratic change.
Molavi warns, however, that war against Iran could have an adverse effect on that country's "democracy-minded middle class," providing "additional pretexts for the regime to frighten its people and crack down on dissent." Anything that undermines Iranian contact "with the foreign investors, educators, tourists and businessmen who link them to the outside world," says Molavi, undermines the movement toward political and cultural reform. That movement requires a strong private sector and a growing civil society in Iran, which can be encouraged by an extension of the global market. Such an extension would nourish "a strong and stable middle class" and the "inevitable winds of change" so crucial to peace and prosperity in the region.
It is ironic that those who speak glowingly about the need for "democratization" in Iraq as a key to Mideast peace are the same people who now speak about the need for military action in Iran, which would most assuredly sabotage the trends toward democratization in that country.
The saber-rattlers tell us that they are worried about the long-run problem of a "nuclear" Iran. Fair enough. But they don't seem to worry about the long-run consequences of military intervention in Iran, given the current context in Iraq, a context that the saber-rattlers themselves did much to create. As Arthur Silber writes here:
We now have a voluminous record, in news accounts, in government documents and in other forms, to prove beyond any doubt that the Bush administration gave almost no attention to the aftermath of the Iraq invasion. No one had any serious question about our taking down the Saddam Hussein regime, except about how long it might take and the details. Despite that certainty, we know that the Bush administration did not listen to many of its own experts and planners about what should be done once Saddam was gone. To put the point simply, the Bush administration never seriously addressed the multitude of inordinately complex issues encompassed in the question: What then?
This much is true, and this much we can agree with, as Arthur puts it: "Iran is run by viciously destructive and dangerous leaders." But as people clamor for military action against Iran, they are not asking and answering the crucial question: "What then?"
I often wonder, for example, how the Shiites in Iraq, with whom the US has cast its political lot, would deal with a US military strike against Iran. How long would it take for a strike against Iran to destabilize the situation with the US's Shiite-Iraqi allies? The Sunni insurgency against the Shiites in Iraq has been awful; I can't even begin to think of the conditions that might arise should a Shiite insurgency unfold against the US—a Shiite insurgency aided and abetted by its own ideological brethren in Tehran.
And what then? In addition to the internal combustion of Iraq, might there not be counterattacks from other Arab governments? Might not the Mideast be thrown into further chaos? And what if additional US troops are needed to "finish the job" started by planes and missiles? Where are these troops coming from? How long before military conscription is reinstituted?
As Richard Cohen tells us today in the New York Daily News, in the Middle East, "bad could get worse."
The central problem in the Middle East is not strategic. The central problem is not the spread of nuclear weapons of mass destruction. The central problem is the spread of ideological and cultural weapons of mass destruction. And these weapons have been manufactured at a maddening pace for generations by countries like Saudi Arabia, a US "ally." As Jason Pappas reminds us (see here and here), the Saudis have been funding the worldwide proliferation of the very jihadist ideology that targets Western values and institutions.
But the odds are very slim that there will be any fundamental change in the relationship between the United States and Saudi Arabia. That's because the House of Sa'ud remains a key player in US global political economy (see here). The dismantling of that neocorporatist politico-economic system is not likely to happen anytime soon.
And yet, despite its role in the proliferation of jihadist fanaticism, the collapse of the House of Sa'ud at this point could be catastrophic: it would most likely lead to the transference of power into the hands of the very worst jihadists, those who have been a by-product of Saudi education.
Yes, it's one gigantic mess of internal contradictions at work. But, currently, I have no reason to believe that a military attack upon Iran would resolve these contradictions, without engendering a host of newer and far more lethal ones.
Comments welcome. Cross-posted to Notablog.
Friday, September 16, 2005
Bush, Krugman, and the Old Deal
Today's NY Times article by Paul Krugman, "Not the New Deal," gave me a few chuckles.
With George W. Bush projecting a huge federal government effort to reconstruct Louisiana and Mississippi and other areas affected by the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, fiscal conservatives are already murmuring. But little stands in the way of this vast projected increase in government spending.
As my colleague Mark Brady has asked: "Did You Really Expect Anything Else?"
A Bush critic such as Paul Krugman is busy objecting to a Heritage Foundation-inspired plan that would include "waivers on environmental rules, the elimination of capital gains taxes and the private ownership of public school buildings in the disaster areas." But he also believes that "even conservatives" must recognize that "recovery will require a lot of federal spending." Since this will have an appreciable effect on the deficit, Krugman wonders "how ... discretionary government spending [can] take place on that scale without creating equally large-scale corruption." Given the Bush administration's penchant for awarding so much pork to favored corporations in places like Iraq, Krugman is understandably concerned about "cronyism and corruption."
This, says Krugman, is in marked contrast to the efforts of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whose "New Deal" provided "a huge expansion of federal spending" without corruption or cronyism. The New Deal, says Krugman, "made almost a fetish out of policing its own programs against potential corruption. In particular, F.D.R. created a powerful 'division of progress investigation' to look into complaints of malfeasance in the W.P.A. That division proved so effective that a later Congressional investigation couldn't find a single serious irregularity it had missed." For Krugman, FDR was committed to "honest government," because he understood that "government activism works. But George W. Bush isn't F.D.R. Indeed, in crucial respects he's the anti-F.D.R."
Is Krugman kidding me?
Throughout his presidency, Bush has looked to such American Presidents as Woodrow Wilson and FDR for inspiration. Bush believes that FDR himself "gave his soul for the process" of taking America out of the Depression and into a world war against authoritarianism.
As for the New Deal: There are no "honest government" spending programs that don't involve some kind of structurally constituted cronyism and corruption. That's just the nature of the beast. And FDR's New Deal is no exception. It was, in many ways, a paradigmatic case, no different from the "war collectivism" policies of World War I or World War II, all of which entailed using the vastly expanding power of government to privilege certain groups at the expense of other groups. Not even Herbert Hoover's response to the government-engendered Great Depression was "laissez faire" (see Rothbard's "Herbert Hoover and the Myth of Laissez-Faire" in A New History of Leviathan, and, of course, his fine book on the subject).
A cursory look at Jim Powell's recent book, FDR's Folly: How Roosevelt and His New Deal Prolonged the Great Depression reveals "why so much New Deal relief and public works money [was] channeled away from the poorest people." From its inception, the New Deal was inspired by the corporatist model of Italian fascism. Even Krugman's beloved Works Progress Adminstration was constructed on the basis of patronage schemes. Citing economic historian Gavin Wright, Powell tells us that "a statistical analysis of New Deal spending purportedly aimed at helping the poor" gives us evidence that "80 percent of the state-by-state variation in per person New Deal spending could be explained by political factors."
Mainstream politics offers no genuine opposition to FDR's Old "New Deal" or Bush's New "Old Deal," not when "conservatives" and "liberals" are united in their support for massive government intervention.
Cross-posted to Notablog.
Wednesday, September 14, 2005
The Comic Book Geek Revolutionaries
Throughout the years, I have met a number of libertarians who were, growing up (and, uh, are still...) "Comic Book Geeks." I don't know if there have been any statistical surveys correlating "Comic Book Geek" beginnings and libertarian ends. But you might want to take this test or this test to examine your own "Comic Book Geek Purity."
There are a few CBGs among us at L&P, including Roderick Long and Aeon Skoble, the latter of whom is the central focus of my Notablog post today: "The Comic Book Geek Revolutionaries."
Tuesday, September 13, 2005
New Fall 2005 Journal of Ayn Rand Studies
Today, the Fall 2005 issue of The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies has been published. It begins our seventh volume, our seventh year.
Here is the Table of Contents:
The Rand Transcript, Revisited - Chris Matthew Sciabarra
Mimesis and Expression in Ayn Rand’s Theory of Art - Kirsti Minsaas
Langer and Camus: Unexpected Post-Kantian Affinities with Rand’s Aesthetics - Roger E. Bissell
The Facts of Reality: Logic and History in Objectivist Debates about Government - Nicholas Dykes
Ayn Rand versus Adam Smith - Robert White
Feser on Nozick - Peter Jaworski
Kant on Faith - Fred Seddon
Seddon on Rand - Kevin Hill
Reference and Necessity: A Rand-Kripke Synthesis - Roderick T. Long
Reply to Ari Armstrong: How to Be a Perceptual Realist - Michael Huemer
Rejoinder to Michael Huemer: Direct Realism and Causation - Ari Armstrong
Abstracts for this issue are available here; contributor biographies can be found here.
Print-out and mail-in your subscription form today! (Shameless commercialism...)
Thursday, September 8, 2005
New Installment in My WTC Remembrance Series
I've added a new installment to my annual series, "Remembering the World Trade Center." Noted at Notablog, this newest essay is entitled:
Burke was the principal of the public high school closest to Ground Zero on September 11, 2001.
Tuesday, September 6, 2005
Santorum and Big Government Conservatism
For several years now, I have been going on and on about the continuing growth of the religious right in conservative circles. My antipathy to theocratic conservatism had been at fever pitch long before I wrote my essay, "Caught Up in the Rapture," which, with its sister essay, "Bush Wins!," predicted a Bush victory a good six months prior to the 2004 election.
In this context, a recent Jonathan Rauch essay, "America's Anti-Reagan isn't Hilary Clinton. It's Rick Santorum," has been making the rounds all over the blogosphere; it's a dissection of Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum's anti-libertarian philosophy.
What one will not find in Rauch's essay, however, are two words: "Bush" and "Iraq." In my view, Santorum's new book, It Takes a Family: Conservatism and the Common Good, is only the newest manifestation of a religious conservative movement, whose titular head is George W. Bush. Whereas the religious conservatives wish to remake the culture and politics of this country, the neoconservatives wish to remake the culture and politics of the Middle East. Together, these tendencies make for one very potent anti-libertarian, anti-individualist politics.
What hope does a religiously based conservative administration have to inspire secular, liberal democracies in the Middle East when it is at war with both secularism and liberalism at home?
I discuss these themes in greater depth at Notablog.
More on Hurricane Katrina
I don't think there is much I can add to the discussion of this horrific human tragedy. But I have a few thoughts, which I've posted to Notablog.
My best wishes to all of those who are dealing with this catastrophe.
Thursday, August 18, 2005
More Anniversary Posts
As I mentioned here, I've been celebrating the tenth anniversaries of my first two books in my "Dialectics and Liberty Trilogy": Marx, Hayek, and Utopia (which was published 10 years ago today) and Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical (which, though my second book, was published 10 years ago, this past Sunday).
In any event, over the last few days, I've had a number of new posts to Notablog, including links to an interview conducted by Sébastien Caré and an interview conducted by Sunni Maravillosa.
Today, Ed Younkins also posted his review of my book, Total Freedom (which was published five years ago); the review has generated some discussion at SOLO HQ.
Sunday, August 14, 2005
Ten Years After
File this blog entry under the category of "Self-Promotion." I suspect I'll be forgiven a bit of that by my L&P colleagues, who know my admiration for Ayn Rand.
On this date, ten years ago, my book Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical was published by Penn State Press. It was actually my second book, but it arrived four days before the publication of my first book, Marx, Hayek, and Utopia, by SUNY Press. These books, together with my Total Freedom: Toward a Dialectical Libertarianism (also published by Penn State Press), make up my "Dialectics and Liberty Trilogy."
So, this week, I'll be looking back at Notablog, at L&P, and at SOLO HQ, which publishes one of my retrospective pieces today, entitled "Ten Years After." There will be interviews posted to different sites throughout the week, and additional pieces will be published into the Fall 2005 semester.
Thanks to those readers who have given me their support, even if they didn't always agree with my conclusions.
Thursday, August 4, 2005
The Art of Cyber-Pedagogy
Yesterday, I read a really interesting article by Michael J. Bugeja in The Chronicle of Higher Education, entitled "Master (or Mistress) of Your Domain" (shades of Jerry), with the descriptive subtitle: "Creating a Web site for your latest book can showcase the work and aid your case for tenure and promotion."
I'll put aside the issue of aiding one's case for tenure and promotion. I'd like to suggest that it might actually aid one's cause (which might not actually aid one's tenure or promotion). And I think more classical liberal and libertarian scholars should consider doing it.
First, let's take a look at Bugeja's points. He writes:
For better or worse, the Internet is playing a larger role in editorial decisions about books and in promotion and tenure evaluations. It is commonplace for external reviewers to Google Web sites or troll databases before rendering their decisions on behalf of publishing houses and institutions. Search committees also are using the Web to evaluate the writing or scholarship of job applicants before inviting them to on-campus interviews. ...
I advise authors to create a Web site with the title of their texts as the domain name and to assemble other sites with domain names identifying their scholarship. ... Authors are responsible for getting their books reviewed, purchased by libraries, and adopted by professors for use in research or in the classroom. In the past, that required an author to fill out a questionnaire for the publisher, identifying editors, book reviewers, and colleagues who might have interest in the work. The Internet has changed that.
Bugeja explains how he marshalled his own resources to promote his own work. Who is a better salesperson than the person who authors the work and knows it, inside-out? He "e-mailed reviewers and technology columnists, directing them to the Web site" he had established for his book, "asking if they would like a copy. Several said yes, generating reviews and citations that I added to my site under 'latest news.' Without the site, the book would have died along with the trees that gave it life at the printing press. Instead, it went on to win a research award with reviews in top publications. That's the benefit of a book site."
Bugeja tells us that his book site boosted classroom sales too. He reminds us that those who surf the web expect some things for free. The Internet may not be a "medium for professors concerned about copyright issues or intellectual property," but Bugeja encourages authors "to share [their] pedagogies or methodologies," giving readers, potential teachers and students alike, "all manner of free information, including lectures for each chapter; sample syllabi for large, middle-range, senior, master's, and doctoral classes; end-of-chapter materials; forms for paper assignments, journal exercises, and presentations; sample midterms and final exams; a bibliography; and an index." He even provides
a 103-page instructor's manual in both Word and PDF formats. Online manuals save the publisher printing costs and allow potential users to manipulate syllabi, lectures, and other downloads. The most popular free feature on my site is a twice-monthly teaching module meant to stimulate classroom discussion. To date, I've added more than two dozen such modules to the site on content too topical to include in a new edition but nonetheless related to the concept of the work.
I especially like Bugeja's suggestion that authors archive "reviews, recent articles, and information about" themselves. I've been doing such things for over ten years now on my own site, and I've had URL forwarding for the titles of all of my books. Just try typing totalfreedomtowardadialecticallibertarianism.com or, more simply, marxhayekandutopia.com, and see where that takes you. I'll never forget how my pal and colleague, Lester Hunt, once characterized my site. Linking to it from his site, he wrote: "Chris is a true liberal. In the interest of provoking dialogue, he puts some very adverse criticisms of his controversial work on his site, together with his replies." I think that's actually very important. And I think more liberal/libertarian scholars should be doing it precisely because it documents the history of a discussion of a particular work, while also providing the basis for future dialogue.
The one thing authors should not supply, of course, is: the book. But links to services where you can order the book online are always helpful. As Bugeja puts it: "That's the point of the site, and all links lead to that outcome."
I've not yet put a syllabus for my books online, but I do have one available for use in a cyberseminar that I give now and then on my "Dialectics and Liberty" trilogy. But Bugeja has given me a good idea about developing more study guides and syllabi for my various publications so as to facilitate their use in the classroom.
It would be a good idea, I think, if those in the liberal/libertarian academy do more to develop these kinds of web resources in a more formal manner. It is one way to develop a "parallel institution" of learning, while at the same time providing a blueprint for the use of such materials in established institutions of learning. Additionally, it gives each of us, as authors of the works, a chance to frame the discussion in a way that is most likely to generate further interest in our own contributions and the contributions of our colleagues in the libertarian academy. I've seen some development of this model on the sites of some of my colleagues; in the light of Bugeja's essay, I think this is something that can benefit each of us individually and the cause of liberty more generally.
Cross-posted to Notablog.
Tuesday, July 26, 2005
Revolutionary Jokes
I really like the name of this magazine. In it, Carl Schreck reviews a new book by Bruce Adams entitled Tiny Revolutions in Russia: Twentieth-Century Soviet and Russian History in Anecdotes. I've not read the book, but it does look as if it is "No Laughing Matter," insofar as it shows how jokes served as a means of critiquing the Soviet police state.
Here are a few excerpts from Schreck's piece:
Jokes, or anekdoty, were indeed risky business in the Soviet Union, Bruce Adams maintains in the introduction to "Tiny Revolutions in Russia," his light if thoroughly entertaining recap of Soviet history told through a mix of amusing, tragicomic, baffling and plain unfunny jokes that will strike a familiar chord with any foreigner who has shared a couple bottles of vodka with a table full of Russians.
George Orwell was the first to dub jokes "tiny revolutions," but it's an especially fitting title for Adams' book, which reminds us that humor can have very serious consequences when the joke is on a totalitarian regime. The eight years Nobel laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn spent in prisons and labor camps came as punishment for jokes he had made about Josef Stalin in his private correspondence, Adams writes. "The anecdotes were necessarily underground humor shared only with close friends."
So, how about a few jokes?
When no African delegates showed up at a Comintern Congress, Moscow wired Odessa [a very cosmopolitan port city with a large Jewish population]: "Send us a Negro immediately." "Odessa wired right back: 'Rabinovich has been dyed. He's drying.'"
"Who built the White Sea-Baltic Canal?" "On the right bank -- those who told anecdotes, on the left bank -- those who heard them."
Because the BBC always seemed to know Soviet secrets so quickly, it was decided to hold the next meeting of the Politburo behind closed doors. No one was permitted in or out. Suddenly Kosygin grasped his belly and asked permission to leave. Permission was denied. A few minutes later there was a knock at the door. A janitress stood there with a pail: "The BBC just reported that Aleksei Nikolayevich shit himself."
Read the whole article here. And check out Adams' book here.
Cross-posted to Notablog.
Thursday, July 14, 2005
Paglia, Rand, and Women in Philosophy
Camille Paglia, who contributed to the anthology Feminist Interpretations of Ayn Rand, which I co-edited with Mimi Reisel Gladstein, has raised her voice in defense of women philosophers who were marginalized by a recent BBC-Radio 4 Greatest Philosopher poll that placed Karl Marx at the top. Paglia writes in The Independent:
For most of history, the groundbreaking philosophers have all been men, and philosophy has always been a male genre. Women had neither the education nor the time to pursue the life of the mind. ... Now that women have at last gained access to higher education, we are waiting to see what they can achieve in the fields where men have distinguished themselves, above all in philosophy. At the moment, however, the genre of philosophy is not flourishing; systematic reasoning no longer has the prestige or cultural value that it once had. ... Today's lack of major female philosophers is not due to lack of talent but to the collapse of philosophy. Philosophy as traditionally practised may be a dead genre. This is the age of the internet in which we are constantly flooded by information in fragments. Each person at the computer is embarked on a quest for and fabrication of his or her identity. The web mimics human neurology, and it is fundmentally altering young people's brains. The web, for good or ill, is instantaneous. Philosophy belongs to a vanished age of much slower and rhetorically formal inquiry.
Paglia is spot on with regard to a number of points here. Systematic reasoning is clearly at a disadvantage in a culture that embraces atomizing and dis-integration as the preferred mode of analysis.
But there are a number of women thinkers, says Paglia, who merit our attention. Among these: Simone de Beauvoir and Ayn Rand. Paglia writes:
Both Simone de Beauvoir and Ayn Rand, another favourite of mine, have their own highly influential system of thought, and therefore they belong on any list of great philosophers. Rand's mix of theory, social observations and commentary was very original, though we see her Romantic sources. Her system is broad and complex and well deserves to be incorporated into the philosophy curriculum. Simone de Beauvoir's magnum opus, The Second Sex (which hugely influenced me in my youth), demonstrates her hybrid consciousness. It doesn't conform to the strict definition of philosophy because it's an amalgamation of abstract thought and history and anthropology—real facts. The genre problem is probably why both these women are absent from the list. But Plato too was a writer of dramatic fiction—so that it is no basis for dismissing Rand.
It's a worthwhile read.
Hat tip to David Boaz.
Cross-posted to Notablog.
Friday, July 8, 2005
"Home" is Now London
I wrote a brief reflection piece at Notablog on the terror attacks in London. Here's an excerpt:
Suffice it to say, we have been told by the leaders of the "coalition of the willing" that "we" have to "take the war to the terrorists" and fight "over there" so that "we" don't have to face death and destruction "over here." Or as President Bush put it: "Either we take the war to the terrorists and fight them where they are ... or at some point we will have to fight them here at home."
Well, "home" is now London.
And fighting terrorists "where they are" does nothing to stem the tide of their ever-increasing numbers.
Read the whole post here.
Sunday, July 3, 2005
"If We Don't Change the World...
... the world's gonna change us."
That's what Duncan Hunter (R-CA), Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee said today on "Meet the Press."
And in that simple phrase, Hunter has summarized one of the crucial constructivist principles at the foundation of the Bush administration's stated neo-Wilsonian initiative in the Middle East.
Thursday, June 30, 2005
Iranian Death Throes?
Having seen various recent blog posts on Islam and secularization (including this one by Jason Pappas), I found this morning's NY Times essay by Abbas Milani of the Hoover Institution an interesting read. In "The Silver Lining in Iran," Milani argues, in essence, that the tightening of reactionary forces in Iranian politics is actually a sign that the reigning mullahs are in their death throes. For Milani, the ruling "cabal of conservative mullahs and Revolutionary Guards who have absconded to ivory towers with their dogma and greed for power" have ignored "serious signs of crisis [as] they masterminded Mr. Ahmadinejad's victory." This is the same President-elect Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that is being fingered by former US hostages of the 1979 embassy crisis as one of their captors.
Milani continues:
Nevertheless, contrary to the common perception, this election is not so much a sign of the Iranian system's strength as of its weakness. Last week's presidential election is only the most recent example of the tactical wisdom and strategic foolishness of Iran's ruling mullahs. ... In the process they may have unwittingly opened the door for democracy - because their hardball tactics have created the most serious rift in the ranks of ruling mullahs since the inception of the Islamic Republic. The experience of emerging democracies elsewhere has shown that dissension within ruling circles has often presaged the fall of authoritarianism.
Mr. Ahmadinejad's presidency will force a crisis not only in Iran's political establishment but also, and even more important, in its economy. Only a huge infusion of capital and expertise, along with open markets, can even begin to address the country's economic problems, which include high unemployment, a rapidly increasing labor force, cronyism and endemic corruption.
And only an "infusion" of "security and the rule of law" will help, says Milani. But the president-elect is too busy opining "that the stock market is a form of gambling with no place in a genuine Islamic society. Not surprisingly, Mr. Ahmadinejad's election brought about the single greatest plunge in the Iranian stock market's history. The day is already known as Black Saturday, and the president-elect has been scrambling to undo the damage since." As the ruling clique turns to "the old populist slogans of revolutionary justice, economic autarky and pseudosocialism, ... they have helped bring Iran one step closer to democracy."
When certain groups are threatened, it is only natural that they will fight that much harder to retain or expand their influence. I think an argument can be made that this is indeed the case in Iran, but the regime still has a lot of mileage left in its gas tank and can do a lot of damage to the growth of opposition forces.
I know that it's comparing apples and oranges to some extent, but I wish I could be as optimistic on the home-front, especially with regard to the US's own home-grown reactionaries among the religious right. One would like to think that in their successful attempts to bolster their own political power, their influence too is waning.
In any event, it will be very interesting to see how the anti-mullah, more "democratic" movement among Iranian youth (noted here in a number of posts) will proceed.
Cross-posted to Notablog.
Friday, June 10, 2005
Wilson Lives
I am way behind in my reading but finally had the opportunity to read Barry Gewen's interesting review essay from the NY Times Book Review (5 June 2005), "Forget the Founding Fathers." Gewen's focus is on "the constantly change narrative of American history" and the move toward "a globalized history of the United States." He discusses, among other books, Margaret MacMillan's Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World, which I have not read. Though I don't agree with Gewen on many points, his comments on how "American idealism can go wrong" are worth repeating:
MacMillan's focus is on Woodrow Wilson at the end of World War I. A visionary, an evangelist, an inspiration, an earth-shaker, a holy fool, Wilson went to Paris in 1919 with grand ambitions: to hammer out a peace settlement and confront a wretched world with virtue, to reconfigure international relations and reform mankind itself. Freedom and democracy were ''American principles,'' he proclaimed. ''And they are also the principles and policies of forward-looking men and women everywhere, of every modern nation, of every enlightened community. They are the principles of mankind and they must prevail.'' Other leaders were less sure. David Lloyd George, the British prime minister, liked Wilson's sincerity and straightforwardness, but also found him obstinate and vain. France's prime minister, the acerbic and unsentimental Georges Clemenceau, said that talking to him was ''something like talking to Jesus Christ.'' (He didn't mean that as a compliment.)
As a committed American democrat, Wilson affirmed his belief in the principle of self-determination for all peoples, but in Paris his convictions collided with reality. Eastern Europe was ''an ethnic jumble,'' the Middle East a ''myriad of tribes,'' with peoples and animosities so intermingled they could never be untangled into coherent polities. In the Balkans, leaders were all for self-determination, except when it applied to others. The conflicting parties couldn't even agree on basic facts, making neutral mediation impossible. Ultimately, the unbending Wilson compromised—on Germany, China, Africa and the South Pacific. He yielded to the force majeure of Turks and Italians. In the end, he left behind him a volcano of dashed expectations and festering resentments. MacMillan's book is a detailed and painful record of his failure, and of how we continue to live with his troublesome legacy in the Balkans, the Middle East and elsewhere.
Yet the idealists—nationalists and internationalists alike—do not lack for responses. Wilsonianism, they might point out, has not been discredited. It always arises from its own ashes; it has even become the guiding philosophy of the present administration. Give George W. Bush key passages from Wilson's speeches to read, and few would recognize that almost a century had passed. Nor should this surprise us. For while the skeptics can provide realism, they can't provide hope. As MacMillan says, the Treaty of Versailles, particularly the League of Nations, was ''a bet placed on the future.'' Who, looking back over the rubble, would have wanted to bet on the past?
Little has changed in our new century. Without the dreams of the idealists, all that is on offer is more of the same—more hatred, more bloodshed, more war, and eventually, now, nuclear war. Anti-Wilsonian skeptics tend to be pessimistic about the wisdom of embarking on moral crusades but, paradoxically, it is the idealists, the hopeful ones, who, in fact, should be painting in Stygian black. They are the ones who should be reminding us that for most of the world, history is not the benign story of inexorable progress Americans like to believe in. Rather, it's a record of unjustified suffering, irreparable loss, tragedy without catharsis. It's a gorgon: stare at it too long and it turns you to stone.
Take a look at the whole review essay here.
Cross-posted to Notablog.
Tuesday, June 7, 2005
Reflections on "Most Harmful Lists"
I see the debate is still raging on so many threads both here at Liberty and Power and also at Cliopatria over the topic of "most harmful books of the 19th and 20th centuries." Talk about unintended consequences!
In any event, I decided to say a bit more about this topic at Notablog. In part, I write:
I have long held that there is a distinction between "intended" and "unintended" consequences, not only in a social context, but in a textual sense as well. (The study of the unintended consequences of a text has long been a focus of those trained in the methodology of "hermeneutics," which began in the realm of Biblical interpretation and scholarship.) No author can possibly know all the interpretations and misinterpretations, applications and implications, that might result from his/her writing—given that the context of knowledge changes and that different people coming from different perspectives will engage that writing differently. This does not mean that "objectivity" is impossible in the assessment of a given work. It just means that as analysts, we need to be very careful to distinguish between original intent and unintended consequences (be they good or bad). It also means that we are probably doomed to argue eternally about the legacy of any given writer.
Readers are invited to take a look at the whole post here. Comments welcome.
Saturday, June 4, 2005
Luker and Rand
Ralph Luker posts his reply to my criticisms of his list of the ten most harmful books of the 19th and 20th centuries. A few other people have gotten in on the discussion too, including fellow HNN'er Irfan Khawaja and Grant Jones.
Luker titles his reply, "Listmania and Maturity," and then goes on to express surprise at my use of the word "obscene" to describe his inclusion of Rand's Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead on a list that includes Mein Kampf and Protocals of the Elders of Zion. He also expresses disapproval of a comment left at my blog by Technomaget, who calls Luker, in no uncertain terms, a "moron."
Let me clarify a few things.
First, I am not calling Luker "obscene" and I have not called him a moron either. What I thought was "obscene" was placing a pair of works by Rand on a list that includes titles written by mass murderers. I use "obscene" as a synonym for "offensive" and find that particular coupling of Rand and Hitler very offensive.
If Luker had called his list a list of the ten worst books he'd ever read, or a list of the ten most annoying books, or the ten most useless books, or the ten most immature books, I probably would never have noticed it. But "harmful" carries with it a certain stigma, as I explained in my L&P/Notablog post. Strictly defined it means "causing or capable of causing harm." And on those grounds, I just don't see any reasonable criterion by which to equate Rand's novels with Mein Kampf. As Grant Jones puts it succinctly: "Has any reader of her works built Death Camps?" (brings back memories of Whittaker Chambers' cry, upon reading Atlas: "To a gas chamber—go!") As we say here in Brooklyn: "Fuhgedaboudit! You gotta be kiddin' me!"
Luker states: "In a moment of weakness (it just seemed like years of agony), I read Ayn Rand and I don't worship at her shrine! My lack of admiration for Ayn Rand is well known." Well that's fine. I admire her work but I don't worship at her shrine either. And, again, I would have had little problem if Luker had simply said: "These books suck." But suckitude is not the criterion for "harmfulness," especially when one is drawing up a list of books that crosses the line into Hitler territory.
As for Rand's work being serious or unserious, I'm afraid there's nothing in Luker's post that would give me a clue as to the nature of his assessment. Luker may not like Rand's philosophy, but let me assure him that it is not a "so-called philosophy," as he puts it. It may not be a philosophy with which Luker agrees, but it's a systematic philosophy, with integrated positions in ontology, epistemology, ethics, politics, and aesthetics. It is a philosophy that includes a commitment to realism, ethical egoism, individualism, and capitalism. And it is being taken seriously by people on every end of the political and philosophical spectrum, not only in the pages of The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies but in a growing list of professional scholarly journals (see here).
If Luker would like to broaden his realm of toleration to include a few of us who were at least moved by Rand's work, let alone influenced, and who don't manifest "immaturity" or a "cult-like psychological disorder" or "delayed adolescent omnipotence," maybe we could talk more seriously. Ad hominem masquerading as psychological diagnosis is no substitute for discussion.
Cross-posted to Notablog.
Friday, June 3, 2005
The Fountainhead... Most Harmful Book?
Cliopatria HNN'er, Ralph E. Luker, gives us a list of the "Ten Most Harmful Books." I have to admit that I've got a real problem with the whole category of "harmful books," not because I believe that no book can do harm, but more because I think "harmful" comes with a stigma attached to it ... that perhaps such books should not be read. But it is the books that are most "harmful" that often require the most study.
Some of Luker's books are predictable: Hitler's Mein Kampf, Lenin's What Is To Be Done?, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and so forth. But on that list, Luker mentions Ayn Rand's two mega-novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. Jonathan Rees chimes in and thanks Luker for including Rand on that list, since her books offer "a philosophical excuse for extraordinary selfishness."
Rand's work has been an inspiration to people of all different walks of life, including individualist feminists, libertarians, conservatives, and even a few liberals, those who see in architect Howard Roark, protagonist of The Fountainhead, an exemplary model of artistic integrity, self-esteem, and authenticity. These same liberals may not like Rand's advocacy of laissez-faire capitalism, but not even they would suggest that those who have emulated Roark will be predisposed to go out and blow up public housing projects.
To be fair, I personally know a few people who were deeply harmed by some of the more "cult-like" aspects of the Objectivist movement, and by some of the brutal comments that Rand made on such subjects as homosexuality. I'm not in any way belittling the real hurt and damage that some have experienced in that context.
But all this is a far cry from the mass murder of the Nazis, Soviets, and Maoists. If the most significant policy-maker to come out of the Randian movement is Alan Greenspan---who, himself, has departed fundamentally from his earlier Randian views in favor of the abolition of the Fed ... can't we have a sense of proportion here?
Even poor Herbert Spencer, whose Evolution of Society [ed: I was wondering about that title] also makes Luker's list, wasn't the "Social Darwinist" his critics make him out to be. Roderick Long, where are you?
Mr. Luker, at the very least, couldn't you provide us with the reasoning behind your list? Right now, I find it unreasonable. For this Rand-influenced libertarian scholar, I find it obscene, quite frankly.
Cross-posted to Notablog.
Sunday, May 29, 2005
A Mothers' War
Of all the tributes that I've read this Memorial Day Weekend, this one, entitled "A Mothers' War," by Cynthia Gorney, had particularly poignant passages. The story centers on Tracy Della Vecchia, who runs a website for mothers nationwide whose children are fighting, and being injured, and dying, in Iraq. Tracy's son,
Derrick Jensen, has spent three birthdays in a row deployed in Iraq. There are about 140,000 American troops stationed in Iraq; 23,000 of them are marines. As this article appears, Corporal Jensen should be somewhere near Falluja. He is an infantry radio operator, which sounded to Tracy like a good, safe job until she found out that radio operators carry big antennas, which make them easier targets. She let me stay at her house for a while this winter partly because I am a reporter and happen to have a 22-year-old son who is not in the military. Tracy thought people like me might want to know something about what it's like to live all the time with that kind of information about your child, to go to sleep knowing it and wake up knowing it and drive around town knowing it, which makes it possible to be standing in the Wal-Mart dog-food aisle on an ordinary afternoon and without reason or warning be knocked breathless again by the sudden imagining of sniper fire or an explosion beneath a Humvee. Still. Derrick has been shipped home twice since President Bush delivered his May 2003 speech in front of the "Mission Accomplished" banner on the deck of an aircraft carrier, and shipped back twice. He has had one occasion of near death that Tracy knows about in some detail; there are others, she assumes, that Derrick has so far kept to himself. "During the first deployment," Tracy said to me once as we were sitting in her car, a lipstick-red PT Cruiser with a yellow "Keep My Son Safe" ribbon magnet on the back, "the only emotion I could imagine him having was fear." ...
Tracy's closest friends in the world right now are other parents whose sons and daughters have served in Iraq or are serving there now. Some of these parents think the war is righteous, some think it was wrongheaded from the outset and some, like Tracy, have made fierce internal bargains with themselves about what they will and will not think about as long as their children and their children's comrades remain in uniform and in harm's way. The women Tracy meets every week for dinner, each of whom has a son in the Marines or the Army, have a "no politics" rule around their table; this was one of two things I remember Tracy telling me the first time she took me to a gathering of the mothers. The other thing was that draped over a banister in Tracy's house was an unwashed T-shirt Derrick had dropped during his last visit home. I thought Tracy was apologizing for her housekeeping, which I had already seen was much better than mine, but she cleared her throat and said that what I needed to understand was that she hadn't washed the T-shirt because if the Marine Corps has to send you your deceased child's personal effects, it launders the clothing first. "That means there's no smell," Tracy said. She let this hover between us for a minute. "I've heard from so many parents who were crushed when they opened that bag, because they had thought they'd be able to smell their son," Tracy said. ...
When I woke the next morning, it was barely light outside, but Tracy was already at her computer. She was smoking at her desk, which she usually doesn't do, and her face was bleak. "I got a D.O.D.," she said. A D.O.D. is what Tracy calls a death notice from the Department of Defense. These notices come to her as e-mailed press releases, each with a headline that identifies the service the deceased American belonged to ... She had walked around with it all day ... she had known ... only that it wasn't Derrick, first because the Marines had not come to her house ... "The knocking on the door." ... Tracy jammed her cigarette into the ashtray, hard. "And the way I'd react: You've got the wrong house. I just talked to my son. This can't be right. Denial is the first thing. And knowing there's just complete and total despair in somebody's home right now. This is their Easter." She started to cry. "And I feel so grateful, and then so guilty," she said. "Nobody's going to say, 'Thank God, it wasn't my son.' But that's what we're all thinking."
Read the whole article.
Cross-posted to Notablog.
Saturday, May 21, 2005
Darth Vader and Altruism
I haven't seen "Revenge of the Sith" just yet, but I enjoyed today's column by John Tierney in the New York Times: "Darth Vader's Family Values." I especially like the fact that he cites my pal and colleague Dan Klein on "The People's Romance." Tierney writes:
The People's Romance is [Klein's] explanation for why so many Americans have come to love bigger government over the past century. Their specific objectives in Washington differed—liberals stressed charity and social programs for all, while conservatives promoted patriotism and spending on national security—but they both expanded the government in their quest for a national sense of shared purpose.
The result, though, has not been one happy community because America is not a clan with shared values. It is a huge group of strangers with leaders who are hardly altruists—they have their own families and needs. Tocqueville recognized the inherent problem with the People's Romance when he described citizens' contradictory impulses to be free while also wanting a government that is "unitary, protective and all-powerful."
People try to resolve this contradiction, Tocqueville wrote, by telling themselves that democracy makes them masters of politicians, but they soon find that the Force is not with them, especially if they're in the minority. Republicans used to rail helplessly at Democrats for taxing them for destructive social programs and curtailing their economic liberties; now Democrats complain about the money squandered on the Iraq war and the threat to civil liberties from the Patriot Act.
For those Democrats, the signature line in this "Star Wars" is the one spoken after the chancellor, citing security threats, consolidates his power by declaring that the republic must become an empire. Senator Padmé listens to her colleagues cheer and says, "So this is how liberty dies, with thunderous applause."
She's disgusted with them, but their enthusiasm is understandable. The chancellor has tapped into their primal desire to unite in one great clan with a shared purpose. They're in the throes of the People's Romance.
I'm looking forward to seeing the concluding episode of George Lucas's myth.
Cross-posted to Notablog.
Friday, May 20, 2005
Irritable Over Iran and Iraq
I have posted a few reflections on the increasingly cozy relationship between Iran and the new majoritarian Shi'ite Iraqi regime at Notablog.
Comments welcome.
Sunday, May 8, 2005
Taking the Ad Hominem Out of Art Appreciation
At Notablog, I've posted a few thoughts about how art appreciation is slowly being infected by various shades of "political correctness" coming from both the left and the right.
See "Taking the Ad Hominem Out of Art Appreciation." Comments welcome.
Thursday, April 28, 2005
Spencer, Long, and a New Encyclopedia
In light of all the good discussion on Herbert Spencer that we've seen here and here on L&P, I wanted to share some good news.
A couple of years ago, I was asked to do an encyclopedia article on "Karl Marx" for the forthcoming International Encyclopedia of Economic Sociology, to be published by Routledge. Amazingly, there was not a single entry offered for Herbert Spencer (who many view as one of the founders of sociology) or of any of the great classical liberals. I knew that Spencer had fallen out of favor with sociologists over the years, and that too many working in that discipline had a tendency to dismiss (wrongly, I might add) the work of classical liberals as somehow too "atomistic" and not worthy of the sociological imagination.
Whatever the reason, I was quite frankly shocked that nothing on Spencer, liberalism, or libertarianism had been scheduled for discussion in the encyclopedia. So, I asked the fine editor if he would be interested in one additional contribution from me: a general, broader piece on libertarianism, that is, on the relevance to sociology of theorists working in the classical liberal/libertarian tradition. The editor accepted my offer. And instead of writing a sole piece on Marx, I wrote two pieces.
The entry on libertarianism brought into the encyclopedia a discussion of the works of Herbert Spencer (to whom I devote much space, relatively speaking), Carl Menger, F. A. Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard, Ayn Rand, and others.
I've just been informed today that the encyclopedia is due out in October 2005; I'll be sure to note it here when the time comes.
Thus, this is my way of thanking Roderick Long doubly: not only for his continuing work on Spencer, but also for offering constructive commentary on my essays before they were submitted to Routledge.
Cross-posted to Notablog.
Wednesday, April 27, 2005
Same-Sex Marriage and the 2004 Election
I've written ad nauseam about Election 2004, still of the conviction that the issue of same-sex marriage (and its connection to the broader issue of "moral values") had an important impact on the outcome. I have always believed "that other issues, especially the war, had an effect in shoring up Bush's winning coalition." Still, "the anti-gay marriage ballot initiatives were promoted by GOP strategists to bolster one aspect of the winning Bush coalition"; without "the socially conservative vote," which supported those initiatives, Bush could never have won such states as Ohio—indispensable to his national electoral victory.
One recent analysis of the Presidential election comes to a similar though much more informed statistical conclusion. Gregory B. Lewis, in the April 2005 issue of PS: Political Science & Politics, concludes that the "same-sex marriage" issue "mattered ... less than some issues but more than most. ... At the state level, even after controlling for Bush's vote share in 2000 and the general conservatism of the state population, popular disapproval of homosexuality influenced Bush's share of the 2004 vote and may have contributed to party switches by New Hampshire and New Mexico." Lewis admits that "[t]he vote was close in Ohio despite relatively high disapproval of homosexuality." But the question remains: "Would it have turned out differently without same-sex marriage on the agenda?"
That question will inspire many different answers. But I think the evidence strongly suggests that without the support of socially conservative Protestant and Catholic voters, who came out en masse to vote against same-sex marriage, Bush would have lost to Kerry.
In the same issue of PS, even those with a dissenting view (such as Hillygus and Shields) argue that the "values-based appeals," though not the only crucial issue, served to reinforce Bush's appeal among his supporters. As I have argued for months, this was part of the Rove strategy: without that support among Bush's core constituency, Bush does not win re-election.
Whatever one's views on this subject, I think the implications are becoming clearer with each passing week. Social conservatives believe that the Bush administration owes them. Of greater importance is the apparent belief of the administration that social conservatives are owed.
Cross-posted to Notablog.
Monday, April 25, 2005
Democracy and Saudi Arabia
I've had a lot to say about Saudi Arabia, and about the Bush administration's Adventures in Mideast Democracy.
Well, in Episode #2,345 of this Quixotic Political Saga, the Saudi royal family, which has been a trusted US "ally," "has been under pressure from Washington to engage in political reform at a time of social tension and a two-year campaign against the state by militants associated with al-Qaeda." Today, the news tells us:
Candidates on an alleged "golden list" backed by religious clerics have swept the final round of Saudi Arabia's first nationwide municipal elections. Islamist candidates won all the municipal council seats contested in the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. They also fared well in northern towns as well as the comparatively liberal port of Jeddah, according to results released on Saturday. Women were barred from the polls, which were presented as a step towards more popular participation in public life.
Of course, the regime itself will pick "roughly half" of 1,200 councillors, which might "dilute" the power of Islamicists. Not that the Saudi regime is all that liberal by comparison. After all, this election news comes on the heels of another news story that the Saudis had detained 40 Pakistani Christians who were caught "attending a service in Riyadh" in a private home. The police also found (horrors!!) "Christian tapes and books." Since one cannot practice any religion other than Islam in Saudi Arabia, this is a crime, in case you were wondering.
I get exhausted pointing out the obvious. This is a regime that is allegedly a "friend" of the United States government. Let's put aside the prospects for democracy among "unfriendly" regimes. Of what use is procedural "democracy" when a "friendly" regime schools its citizens in a fanatical ideology of intolerance, when it marginalizes and criminalizes women, non-Muslims, and freedom itself? Of what use is "democracy" when the dominant culture would bring about a political condition that might make the current Saudi regime appear "moderate" by comparison?
Cross-posted to Notablog.
Saturday, April 9, 2005
The Apocalypse Will Be Broadcast
I've been writing about the rise of the religious right for quite a while now, most recently in connection with the re-election of George W. Bush. Starting with my essay, "Caught Up in the Rapture," I have argued that the political impact of the religious right is second only to its cultural and economic impact, which is growing significantly:
Christian merchandising is a $4.2 billion industry, which includes a $100 million video game business. The Christian book market is particularly lucrative: Evangelist Rick Warren has sold 15 million copies of his book, The Purpose-Driven Life: What on Earth Am I Here For? There are even Christian diet books that sit alongside Atkins and South Beach manuals: The Maker’s Diet helps you to lose weight by eating just like Jesus. From number one best-selling books such as The Da Vinci Code to "Joan of Arcadia" on television and "Bruce Almighty" on the silver screen, God is Hip and Hot. ... A blockbuster film such as "The Passion of the Christ"—which was condemned initially as "anti-Semitic" by some critics—has now grossed nearly $400 million. That figure does not include director Mel Gibson’s cross-promotional merchandising efforts—sales on such items as metal replica crucifixion nails and thorn-adorned necklaces and bracelets. ... [And the] 12-volume LaHaye-Jenkins work—from its first installment, Left Behind, to its action-packed finale, Glorious Appearing: The End of Days—now qualifies as the best-selling Christian fiction book series of all time[, having] sold in excess of 60 million copies in the past nine years.
Ultimately, the Left Behind series is not simply a religious narrative. It is a political one. Glenn W. Shuck, author of Marks of the Beast: The Left Behind Novels and the Struggle for Evangelical Identity, argues persuasively that "the novels have less to do with escaping and more to do with remaking the modern world" (emphasis added). It is the kind of "remaking" that Friedrich Hayek would have characterized as thoroughly rationalist or "constructivist" in its political implications.
Except that in this instance, the "Left Behind-ers" are praying that God will be the ultimate constructivist, and fix things for good. The fact that so many of them voted for George W. Bush as His messenger is not a comforting thought.
Well, God makes a prime-time appearance on NBC in a major network mini-series that begins this Wednesday, April 13, 2005. As Frank Rich puts it (hat-tip to Arthur Silber): "It's all too fitting that 'Revelations,' which downsizes lay government in favor of the clerical, is hijacking the regular time slot of 'The West Wing'" (the show aired its season finale on April 6th). Fitting indeed. The typically liberal "West Wing" is being replaced by a Left Behind knock-off that will merge an "X-Files" sensibility, an Omen-like horror quotient, and an apocalyptic scenario worthy of the Millennium Group.
In the end, of course, the Apocalypse is not the most disturbing prospect; it's the fact that the Apocalypse has become so marketable in this culture.
Friday, April 1, 2005
April, May, June, July ... Fools
So much in the news on this April Fool's Day, 2005. For example, the "final verdict" on prewar "intelligence" has been issued. It is, of course, nothing of the sort. The "final verdict" won't be issued for years and years. But this particular verdict does make it appear that there were plenty of fools running America's "intelligence" community. American "homeland security" is gravely dependent on the quality of its intelligence. That should make all of us feel very safe.
And then, on the heels of the departure of NBC's Tom Brokaw and CBS's Dan Rather, another Long-Time Talking Head will be Leaving the Airwaves—this coming December: Ted Koppel, long-time host of ABC News' "Nightline." I've actually been a fan of "Nightline" for many years, if only because it does offer an opportunity for a more comprehensive look at the news of the day, with more in-depth interviews and coverage than that offered on the nightly news broadcasts.
I'm also a religious viewer of the Sunday morning news broadcasts, but I have found them infuriating for the last few years. I spend most Sunday mornings doing a most un-Godly thing: Cursing at the TV Screen. Not only because of what is being said, but because it's the same people saying the same things. Ted Koppel puts his finger on it. As the NY Times reports this morning:
Mr. Koppel said he had been concerned about what he saw as the uniformity of all the Sunday public affairs programs—particularly when a viewer can flip from one channel to the other and see people like the secretary of defense or secretary of state interviewed on each. "That seems to be the general understanding in Washington these days," Mr. Koppel said. "The administration sets the tone and theme and presents the same guests to all the programs at the same time. I don't think anyone is served by that."
Quite honestly, let me put it another way: ARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!
There.
That felt better.
[begin rant] Why don't they just call the Sunday morning news programs: The Condi Rice Show? Or The Don Rumsfeld Show? Or The John McCain Show? Or (up until recently) The Colin Powell Show? EVERY DAMN WEEK, the same people, over and over and over again. On every channel. Sometimes simultaneously. Taped broadcasts putting to rest the maxim that one can't be in two or three different places at the same time. Who needs a Pentagon Channel? [/end rant]
April Fool's Day? The Washington establishment makes fools of all of us, every day of the year.
Cross-posted to Notablog.
Friday, March 25, 2005
The Costs of War, Part II
My post "The Costs of War" has elicited more than a dozen comments so far, raising a number of issues. At Notablog, I continue to "think out loud," taking an opportunity to expand on some of the points made in my former post, having benefited from onlist and offlist exchanges on the nature of moral complicity and responsibility in wartime.
Read "The Costs of War, Part II" here.
Wednesday, March 23, 2005
The Costs of War
Rather than clutter L&P up with my rather lengthy musings on the war and some of the moral issues raised by it, I wanted to mention that I have posted "The Costs of War" on Notablog.net. One of the issues I discuss is the issue of "moral complicity" in war. Surprisingly, I find some commonality among some rather disparate people: Ayn Rand, Ward Churchill, and Osama Bin Laden.
Comments welcome.
Monday, March 14, 2005
New JARS: Ayn Rand Among the Austrians
Volume 6, Number 2 of The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies has just been published. This Spring 2005 issue is the second of two symposia celebrating the Ayn Rand Centenary. It is entitled "Ayn Rand Among the Austrians," and it features the articles and contributors listed below. This landmark anthology surveys Rand's relationship to key thinkers in the Austrian school of economics, including Ludwig von Mises, Murray N. Rothbard, and F. A. Hayek. (Some of our L&P colleagues are among the contributors to the issue.)
Spring 2005 Table of Contents
Centenary Symposium, Part II
Introduction: Ayn Rand Among the Austrians - Chris Matthew Sciabarra and Larry J. Sechrest [a PDF version of this article is available online here.]
Ayn Rand and Ludwig von Mises - George Reisman
Ayn Rand and Austrian Economics: Two Peas in a Pod - Walter Block
Alan Greenspan: Rand, Republicans, and Austrian Critics - Larry J. Sechrest
Praxeology: Who Needs It - Roderick T. Long
Subjectivism, Intrinsicism, and Apriorism: Rand Among the Austrians? - Richard C. B. Johnsson
Menger, Mises, Rand, and Beyond - Edward W. Younkins
Two Worlds at Once: Rand, Hayek, and the Ethics of the Micro- and Macro-cosmos - Steven Horwitz
Our Unethical Constitution - Candice E. Jackson
Teaching Economics Through Ayn Rand: How the Economy is Like a Novel and How the Novel Can Teach Us About Economics - Peter J. Boettke
Reply to William Thomas: An Economist Responds - Leland B. Yeager
Rejoinder to Leland B. Yeager: Clarity and the Standard of Ethics - William Thomas
For article abstracts, click here.
For contributor biographies, click here.
For information on subscriptions, click here.
Thursday, March 10, 2005
Islam and Pluralism
There is a thought-provoking article by Reza Aslan in this week's Chronicle of Higher Education. Entitled "From Islam, Pluralist Democracies Will Surely Grow," the article asserts that "it is pluralism, not secularism, that defines democracy," that "Islam has had a long commitment to religious pluralism," and that democratic change is therefore not as unreachable a goal as some might think.
Aslan is worth quoting at length:
For most of the Western world, September 11, 2001, signaled the commencement of a worldwide struggle between Islam and the West -- the ultimate manifestation of the clash of civilizations. From the Islamic perspective, however, the attacks on New York and Washington were part of a continuing clash between those Muslims who strive to reconcile their religious values with the realities of the modern world, and those who react to modernism and reform by reverting -- sometimes fanatically -- to the "fundamentals" of their faith. ...
When politicians speak of bringing democracy to the Middle East, they mean specifically an American secular democracy, not an indigenous Islamic one.
There exists a philosophical dispute in the Western world with regard to the concept of Islamic democracy: that is, that there can be no a priori moral framework in a modern democracy; that the foundation of a genuinely democratic society must be secularism. The problem with that argument, however, is that it not only fails to recognize the inherently moral foundation upon which a large number of modern democracies are built, but also, more important, fails to appreciate the difference between secularism and secularization.
Clearly, if the Western world itself had to wait for full and complete secularism in order to achieve even a modicum of freedom, it would still be waiting. But it is a key point, I think, to insist that the secularization of the Western mind took centuries and that such secularization has been a key ingredient in the evolution toward free insitutions. Aslan continues:
As the Protestant theologian Harvey Cox notes, secularization is the process by which "certain responsibilities pass from ecclesiastical to political authorities," whereas secularism is an ideology based on the eradication of religion from public life. Turkey is a secular country in which outward signs of religiosity, such as the hijab, are forcibly suppressed. With regard to ideological resolve, one could argue that there is little that separates a secular country like Turkey from a religious country like Iran; both ideologize society. It is pluralism, not secularism, that defines democracy. A democratic state can be established upon any normative moral framework as long as pluralism remains the source of its legitimacy.
I take certain issue with some of these claims, especially since the "normative moral framework" of an "Islamic democracy" might "force the rights of the community to prevail over the rights of the individual," when the individual's behavior (e.g., drinking or gambling) goes against "Quranic commandments." Alas, if prohibitions on drinking or gambling were the only thing to worry about from within the Islamic world, then it would not be much worse than old Sunday Blue Laws or gambling prohibitions in New York State. Still, I find this nexus of rights, pluralism, and secularization to be persuasive:
... neither human rights nor pluralism is the result of secularization; they are its root cause. Consequently, any democratic society -- Islamic or otherwise -- dedicated to the principles of pluralism and human rights must dedicate itself to following the unavoidable path toward political secularization.
Aslan thinks there is a certain inevitability in the democratic-pluralistic developments in the Muslim Middle East, but I'm not so sure. "It will take many more [years] to cleanse Islam of its new false idols -- bigotry and fanaticism -- worshiped by those who have replaced Muhammad's original vision of tolerance and unity with their own ideals of hatred and discord. But the cleansing is inevitable, and the tide of reform cannot be stopped. The Islamic Reformation is already here. We are all living in it," Aslan writes.
How might the United States encourage this kind of political secularization? It's one thing to introduce procedural democratic rules into countries like post-Hussein Iraq. But it's quite another to actually achieve some sort of liberal democracy, because, as Aslan suggests, political secularization is crucial to that achievement. There are hopeful signs that this process is underway in such countries as Iran, for example. But there is something to be said about a "laissez faire" U.S. approach to Iran under these highly volatile conditions. As Stephen Kinzer writes in "Clouds Over Iran," in the current issue of The New York Review of Books:
One of my Iranian friends, a graduate student in his twenties, recently wrote this to me: "The US government is helping Iran's government with its continuing hostility.... Every time the State Department or White House speaks about human rights conditions in Iran, our government uses this against reformers. It says that reformers are supported by the United States. Many reformers are in jail because of these accusations. Many newspapers have been closed. The United States should be concerned about Iran's problems, but this policy is hurting the reform movement. Non-intervention is the best help the United States can give to Iran's people." ...
There is every possibility that in time, Iran will return to the democratic course from which the United States so violently forced it in 1953. If Americans allow events there to proceed at their own pace, they will finally see the result for which they hope. It is also the result most Iranians want: an Iran that respects the will of its people and helps to stabilize a dangerously unstable region. ... Seeking to destabilize [Iran] will intensify its leaders' sense of isolation. Attacking it will turn its remarkably pro-American population into America-haters once again. Military intervention could set off a wave of patriotic indignation that will solidify the mullahs' regime rather than weaken it, and would probably set the cause of democracy back a generation. "Regime change" would probably not even turn Iran off its nuclear course, since most Iranians of all persuasions agree that their country has at least as much right to nuclear power as Israel, Pakistan, India, and North Korea. Treating Iran as a member of the world community with its own set of reasonable hopes and fears, however, might lead it toward responsibility, peace with its neighbors, and perhaps even democracy.
Alas, this might be wishful thinking. But it is certainly in keeping with many of my own observations (archived here) about the delicate evolution toward liberal democracy and cultural secularization that is required not only in Iran, but throughout the Middle East.
Cross-posted to Notablog.
Tuesday, March 8, 2005
Foer and "The Joy of Federalism"
I'm a little behind in my reading, but I wanted to pass along a link to another interesting article by Franklin Foer (one of whose pieces I previously discussed here). In "The Joy of Federalism," Foer traces the historical development of a "liberal federalism" as a bulwark against the growth of the federal government under the Bush administration. As Foer puts it:
Like many of his predecessors, [Bush] entered office promising to rescue the states from federal pummeling. Yet his administration has greatly expanded federal power, and some conservatives have been complaining. Writing in National Review two years ago, Romesh Ponnuru observed that "more people are working for the federal government than at any point since the end of the cold war." State governments have their own version of this complaint. They say the Bush administration has imposed new demands—federal education standards, homeland security tasks—without also providing sufficient cash to get these jobs done. The Republican senator Lamar Alexander recently told The Times, "The principle of federalism has gotten lost in the weeds by a Republican Congress that was elected to uphold it in 1994."
The whole essay is worth a good read.
Sunday, March 6, 2005
A Primer on Murray Rothbard
SOLO HQ has published my brief "Primer on Murray Rothbard."
Wednesday, March 2, 2005
From Ryan to Sipowicz
I know this is old news already... but since I posted on this topic here and here back in November, I felt an obligation to report that the FCC ruled that the unedited showing of "Saving Private Ryan" did not violate its guidelines on "indecency." This should send a signal to those 66 ABC affiliates who chose not to air the film in the wake of FCC crackdowns and fines in the post-Janet Jackson Boob Era.
It's interesting that the FCC suggests that it's all a matter of context. Saying "FUBAR" ("Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition") in "Saving Private Ryan" is okay, but would probably be cause for a fine if, say, Chris Rock had uttered it on the Academy Awards broadcast. In this atmosphere, it's understandable why Steven Bochco, co-creator of NYPD Blue, which ended its 12-year run last night in a glorious finale, would be reluctant to launch such a show today. As Bochco puts it here: "I don't think today we could sell NYPD Blue in the form that it launched 12 years ago ... I had hoped, and I think probably everybody in television had hoped, that NYPD Blue would pave the way for a more open approach to programming, a more adult, 10 o'clock kind of programming. But there's no question that over the course of the last 10 years, the medium has become increasingly conservative."
Well, either way, I'll miss the drama of Andy Sipowicz and the cops at the 15th Precinct. And I'll switch over to premium cable channels if I'd like a dose of "blue" language and images.
Cross-posted to Notablog.
Tuesday, March 1, 2005
Changing Politics, Changing Culture
At "Not a Blog," I posted some musings on neoconservative ideology, and the nature of political and cultural change. As I state in my conclusion:
I am in full agreement with the neoconservatives ... that a freer world is more desirable and that it is a necessary (though not sufficient) ingredient in the creation of a more secure world; my fundamental problem with the neocons is that they do not understand the complex conditions that foster either freedom or security.
Read the whole post here.
Tuesday, February 22, 2005
Islam and Democracy
I just wanted to recommend a new article by David Glenn, "Who Owns Islamic Law?," which has been published in the February 25th issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education. It asks a key question about the relationship between democracy, Islam, and secularism: "Will Iraq's political forces manage to find a consensus about what role, exactly, Islam should play in the public sphere?"
While some insist on "authentically Islamic" enforcement of "Shariah" or "traditional religious law—in all spheres of life, from banking to inheritance to the performing arts," others argue "that lines must be drawn between mosque and state—even if those lines do not look exactly like Western secular pluralism." One professor of political science, M.A. Muqtedar Khan, insists: "'There will be no Islamic democracy unless jurists permit the democratization of interpretation.' ... In Mr. Khan's view, political elites in the Muslim world have for centuries restricted the development of democracy and political accountability by hiding behind religious principles that they proclaim to be fixed in stone." Khan is concerned "that basing government around consultation and shura ... could lead to majoritarian tyranny. 'Even if shura is transformed into an instrument of participatory representation,' he wrote, 'it must itself be limited by a scheme of private and individual rights that serve an overriding moral goal such as justice'."
Some others have observed, however,
that "secularism" has been so thoroughly discredited in the Muslim world by Kemal Atatürk's ruthlessly anticlerical regime in Turkey and by the later secular-authoritarian governments in Algeria, Egypt, Syria, and Iraq. Only in Iran, which has suffered under a clerical tyranny for decades, do reformers now commonly talk about secular pluralism.
The fundamental challenge for would-be democracy-builders in Iraq and elsewhere is the contested relationship between Islam and the public sphere ... Where religious authorities and institutions once had breathing room from the state and their own spheres of influence, ... colonial regimes brought everything under the heel of the government. (And their postcolonial successors have been happy to do likewise.) ...
This, then, is the dilemma for reformers today. Centrist Islamists and liberal reformers would like to develop a model in which Muslim institutions are independent from the government and vigorously inform public governance, but do not swallow all of society in a totalitarian project like the Taliban's. ...
Mr. Khan, meanwhile, insists that the most urgent danger of authoritarianism lies in entrusting Islamic thought and interpretation to an elite corps of scholars and jurists. ...
Mr. Khan acknowledges that his is very much a minority view. He is nonetheless excited about the current intellectual climate. "Two weeks ago I was at the Stanley Foundation and one-third of my audience was Muslims," he says. "Afterward we spent the whole night having a Muslim-Muslim dialogue. We disagreed about everything. But we did come to consensus on one point—and that is that the discussions are getting more sophisticated. There is no doubt about it."
I recommend the article to your attention.
Cross-posted to Not a Blog.
Thursday, February 17, 2005
Perversion at the NY Times
Maureen Dowd's article, "Bush's Barberini Faun," seems to have actual embedded links to such sites as workingboys.net and hotmilitarystud.com (though there appears to be some kind of login for the latter).
Did the paper know that the webmaster (and I use "master" in a narrow sense) would be embedding those links?
I don't know about you, but I'm still laughing.
Update: The links are gone. Somebody must have gotten wind of it. :)
Miklos Rozsa: A Singular Life
My Free Radical article celebrating the life and work of composer Miklos Rozsa was published today on SOLO HQ:
"Miklos Rozsa: A Singular Life"
Sunday, February 13, 2005
Boston Globe on "Ayn Rand's Campus Radicals"
Today, Christopher Shea has written a "Critical Faculties" piece for The Boston Globe focusing on "Ayn Rand's Campus Radicals," offering further evidence of the proliferation of Rand scholarship. He mentions my work and the work of other Rand scholars, as well as the important role of The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies. He also cites a forthcoming JARS essay by Austrian economist and L&P colleague Peter J. Boettke.
Cross-posted to "Not a Blog."
Thursday, February 10, 2005
Inside Higher Ed: Zizek Loves JARS
As I say in my "Not a Blog" entry here, Continental philosopher Slavoj Zizek's affection for The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies may be a sure sign, for some, that the periodical is indeed decadent. But take a look at Scott McLemee's Inside Higher Ed essay here, and "Add a Comment" if you wish.
Wednesday, February 9, 2005
Liberty and Freedom
In the light of our continuing discussion of various "Isms" (see recent additions to this conversation by Kenneth R. Gregg, "Capitalism, Mutuality, and Sharing" and Sheldon Richman's "I, Liberal"), I just wanted to bring a recent NY Times article to the attention of readers.
Historian David Hackett Fischer, author of Liberty and Freedom: A Visual History of America's Founding Ideas, tells us that "Freedom's Not Just Another Word." He speaks of a monument in Baghdad that declares, in essence, that "Freedom is not a gift from people with tanks," but something to come from within. Fischer remarks, however, that "[t]here is no one true definition of liberty and freedom in the world" on which people coming from different traditions or different places can agree. "And, yet," he writes, "there is one great historical process in which liberty and freedom have developed, often in unexpected ways." He continues:
The words themselves have a surprising history. The oldest known word with such a meaning comes to us from ancient Iraq. The Sumerian "ama-ar-gi," found on tablets in the ruins of the city-state of Lagash, which flourished four millenniums ago, derived from the verb "ama-gi," which literally meant "going home to mother." It described the condition of emancipated servants who returned to their own free families—an interesting link to the monument in Baghdad. (In contemporary America, the ancient characters for "ama-ar-gi" have become the logos of some libertarian organizations, as well as tattoos among members of politically conservative motorcycle gangs, who may not know that the inscriptions on their biceps mean heading home to mom.)
Equally surprising are the origins of our English words liberty and, especially, freedom. They have very different roots. The Latin libertas and Greek eleutheria both indicated a condition of independence, unlike a slave. (In science, eleutherodactylic means separate fingers or toes.) Freedom, however, comes from the same root as friend, an Indo-European word that meant "dear" or "beloved." It meant a connection to other free people by bonds of kinship or affection, also unlike a slave. Liberty and freedom both meant "unlike a slave." But liberty meant privileges of independence; freedom referred to rights of belonging.
It's of interest that Fischer points to an ever-evolving proliferation of meanings for both words, however (and some of this is reflected in the ever-evolving meaning of the word "liberal," for example). "Through 16 generations, American ideas of liberty and freedom have grown larger, deeper, more diverse and yet more inclusive in these collisions of contested visions," Fischer observes. For Fischer, the "rights of individual independence" and the "rights of collective belonging" are essential parts of the same fabric.
Fischer might find some agreement on this point with thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment who emphasized both liberty and the connections among social actors who constitute a civil society. But even neo-Aristotelian defenders of genuine liberalism would agree. For example, philosophers Douglas Den Uyl and Douglas Rasmussen, in their book, Liberty and Nature: An Aristotelian Defense of Liberal Order, defend the view that there is a link between free commerce and friendship, especially so-called "civic friendships" and "advantage-friendships." Their view of human freedom entails a "thick" theory of the person, fully in keeping with the rational and social character of human beings as projected by Aristotle. So, in a sense, both "liberty" and "freedom" as Hackett describes them, are entailed in any robust defense of liberal order.
Just some more grist for the mill in our definitional explorations of meaning.
Cross-posted to Not a Blog.
HomoRandian.com?
There has been a lot of discussion at L&P about a wide variety of subjects, and keeping up with it all is virtually impossible. I did note however that Bill Marina made the following comment in his Liberty and Power Group blog post, "Reflections on Homosexual Behaviors":
Wow, certainly a lot of blogging of late here at the old Liberty and Power Blog, mainly about Ayn Rand and then homosexuality ... If Blogs had meta tags like web sites, and if the name of the Blog was determined by the content, our ISP might suggest ours be called something like the "HomoRandian" Blog. Or, did La Rand make the ultimate pronunciamiento on that as well?
Well, Bill, I'm absolutely certain that there are a few HomoRandians on board here, but let's not forget that the Ol' Girl just celebrated her Centenary, and even the non-HomoRandians and the non-Randians here and everywhere—from the NY Times to the Chicago Tribune to the Philadelphia Inquirer—have focused on this once-in-a-hundred years marker. So cut us a little slack.
But since you've asked, as a matter of fact, La Rand did make the ultimate pronunciamiento on homosexuality; she thought it was "immoral" and "disgusting," and it prompted Moi to write a monograph about it: Ayn Rand, Homosexuality, and Human Liberation. Why, that might make a fine founding document for HomoRandian.com! I better go reserve that domain name right now... just so I can redirect the URL to libertyandpower.org...
Cross-posted at Not a Blog.
Saturday, February 5, 2005
"Capitalism" and Other Isms
I'm delighted to see so much discussion over the issues raised in my last post, "'Capitalism': The Known Reality." I'd like to advance the discussion a bit, and to respond to some of the discussants as well.
First, let me say that this issue of how to define "capitalism" is not an issue that is distinctive to "capitalism." In the wake of the Iraq war, I'm starting to feel as if the entire libertarian movement, broadly conceived, is in a theoretical convulsion over the very meaning of the term "libertarianism." One critic, R. J. Rummel, has gone so far as to draw a distinction between the "libertarian" and the "freedomist," a neologism if ever there were one, which is roughly his way of distinguishing between "isolationist" and "internationalist" stances. It's getting so bad that unless we start using modifying adjectives to describe our various positions, we'll end up getting lumped together with viewpoints that are anathema to our perspective.
In recent intellectual history, this was first manifested, perhaps, in the battle over the word "liberalism," which seems to have been forever lost to those who advocate "welfare-state" liberalism. It is no longer identified in the United States as synonymous with the "classical liberal" conception. Try using "neoliberalism" and a whole host of other problems result, especially since some in Europe have used that term to describe a position in which the state helps to "preserve" competition.
A similar intellectual battle is taking place in various circles over the heart and soul of "anarchism" (as some of our discussants have pointed out in recent threads) and over Rand's "Objectivism" (as I've pointed out in the concluding passages of my essay, "In Praise of Hijacking"). In this regard, I was struck by something Roderick Long said here:
Rand embraced terms like "capitalism" and "selfishness" as a kind of the-hell-with-it defiance. I'm not inclined to embrace those terms, but I confess my liking for "anarchism" expresses a similar mood.
But Rand's battle over use of the word "selfishness" is worth considering. Most dictionaries defined this term as "concern only with one's own interests," usually with the connotation "at the expense of others." Even Rand felt the need to use a modifying adjective—"rational"—to describe her ethical position: "rational selfishness." But in many ways, she was engaging in a deconstruction of conventional meanings—a transvaluation of values, if you will—which overturned traditional conceptions, replacing them with reconstructions or what Grant Gould calls "revisionis[m]" of her own. In some respects, this is entirely understandable, however. Gould is right to say here that "[u]nless we want to populate the whole three-dimensional space with technical terms that nobody will understand or remember (and I'll admit, it's tempting) we need to defer to the wider understanding of terms." Or else a parade of neologisms will follow, and we'll be consigned to a Tower of Sociological Babel.
I have argued that Rand was engaged in a grand, dialectical revolt against the kind of ethical dualism that reduced all of morality to a bout between competing sacrificial creeds: those who would sacrifice others to themselves and those who would sacrifice themselves to others. Arguing for a reverent concept of benevolent, rational "selfishness" that extolled neither masters nor slaves required the use of an established term as a means to transcend its conventional limitations. This is not an unusual problem for more dialectically inclined thinkers who often use terms that have conventional meanings, terms that have "been tainted by a vastly different, one-dimensional philosophical context," as I write in Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical:
To avoid such terms entirely, Rand would have been compelled to invent wholly new terms at the risk of becoming incomprehensible. By using known terms, she might appear to have actually endorsed one pole of a duality. Thus, in the conflict between egoism and altruism, for example, she is an egoist. In the conflict between capitalism and socialism, she is a capitalist. But such a one-sided characterization profoundly distorts Rand's philosophical project. She is not a conventional egoist. Her ethics constitutes a rejection of traditional egoism and traditional altruism alike. Likewise, Rand is not a conventional capitalist. ...
Since this is relevant to the larger issue—the meaning of "capitalism" and "libertarianism" and so forth—I'd like to quote at length from my discussion in the Rand book:
Rand's defense of capitalism is similar in form to her defense of "selfishness." In fact, Rand titled her collection of essays in social theory, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, for much the same reasons that she entitled her collection of essays on morality, The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism. Both "capitalism" and "selfishness" have had such a negative conceptual history that Rand needed to reclaim these concepts and to recast them in a new and nondualistic framework. [Nathaniel] Branden remarks that he had told Rand of his preference for the word "libertarianism" as an alternative to "capitalism," since the latter term had been coined by anticapitalists. For Branden, "libertarianism" signified a broader, philosophical characterization which addressed the issues of social, political and economic freedom. But Rand refused to renounce the concept of "capitalism," just as she rejected any attempt to couch her ethos of rational selfishness in more neutral terms.
Unfortunately, however, by using words like "selfishness" for something positive, and "altruism" for something negative, the Randian still faces enormous rhetorical obstacles.
Interestingly, though Rand's approach to capitalism is not Weberian—there is no connection made between capitalism and the Protestant work ethic, for example—her definition of capitalism is pretty much an "ideal type."
Following her literary methods, Rand seems to have extracted and emphasized those principles which, she believed, distinguish capitalist society from all previous social formations. She began with the real concrete circumstances of the historically mixed system, breaking down its complexity into mental units. She constituted her vision of capitalism on the basis of such abstraction, having isolated and identified those precepts which are essential to its systemic nature. In this regard, she eliminated the accidental and the contingent in order to focus instead on the philosophical ideals of the capitalist revolution. Such a revolution was incomplete because its principles had never been fully articulated and implemented. Rand views her own project as the first successful attempt to articulate the moral nature of the capitalist system, ideally understood, thus making possible its historical fulfillment.
Let's recall what an "ideal type" is. As our L&P colleague Pete Boettke puts it in his explanation of "equilibrium" in economics as an "ideal type":
An ideal type is neither intended to describe reality nor to indict it. It is instead a theoretical construct intended to illuminate certain things that might occur in reality; empirical investigation determines whether these phenomena are actually present and how they came to be there. In this view, disequilibrium is not necessarily a market failure; something less than perfection may yet be better than any attainable alternative. Deployed as an ideal type, equilibrium analysis allowed economists to describe what the world would be like in the absence of imperfections such as uncertainty and change. The descriptive value of the model lay precisely in its departure from observed reality, for this underscored the function of real-world institutions in dealing with imperfect knowledge, uncertainty, and so forth.
And so, Rand, and other thinkers, such as Murray Rothbard, have engaged in a similar defense of "capitalism" as a moral ideal, which is, in fact, an "ideal type," a "one-sided accentuation," as Max Weber put it, of specific aspects or vantage points. The ideal type is conceptually pure, and speaks to the essence of the phenomena at hand, even though it "cannot be found empirically anywhere in reality. It is a utopia.”
But is it utopian? That's a question for another day.
The reason I've raised the issue of the effectiveness of using "capitalism" as a word to describe the ideal libertarian social system, however, is that the conceived ideal departs significantly from the Western reality that is often described with the same word. (I like Lisa Casanova's "corporatism," but alas, even that has problems. See here, for example.) So when left-wing critics rightfully argue that laissez-faire has never existed in its purest form and that state intervention has typically marked the historical expression of "capitalism," it becomes almost an impenetrable communicative exercise with those critics, since they see state intervention as part of the essence of "capitalism."
Steve Horwitz has argued, as have others at L&P, that these rhetorical issues extend to "anarchism" as well. He prefers to call himself a "radical libertarian" (the way I've called myself a "dialectical libertarian"). But given the recent conflicts over the meaning of the term "libertarianism," I think we'll find ourselves involved in an infinite regress of "Ism Debates." Because now, instead of arguing over the corruption of the word "capitalism" (or was it always corrupt?) or the corruption of the word "liberalism," we have to face the conflicts between those who are paleolibertarians and those who are "liberventionists" and so forth, each of whom claims that the other is corrupting the -ism. The same battle takes place within conservatism, among paleoconservatives and neoconservatives and God-knows-what-else. And we've even seen here at L&P, similar battles over the meaning of the term "feminism."
In the end, I do agree with Steve that we all need to focus on "real world systems." Because, whatever we wish to call our ideal, the potential for creating that ideal—or for creating the conditions within which it might emerge—grows out of that which exists, that which is. Different contexts of meaning are part of "that which is." Since meaning is embedded in context, and different people operating in different traditions attach different meanings to their terms, the advocates of freedom have lots of work to do.
The best we can do is to define our terms as clearly as possible and to show sensitivity to the translation problem when engaging those who operate with a different model. The worst we can do is to allow others to pin on us meanings and ideals to which we don't subscribe, making us into apologists for "that which is," rather than visionaries for that which might be.
Friday, February 4, 2005
"Capitalism": The Known Reality
Reaching out to the Left has been the source of much good discussion at the Liberty and Power Group Blog. So I'd like to pick up on that thread, yet again.
After reading this comment by Jake Smith in response to my "Market Shall Set You Free" post, I took a stroll over to Kevin Carson's Mutualist Blog, which he subtitles "Free Market Anti-Capitalism." It's a provocative subtitle, actually. I've been having an ongoing discussion with a friend of mine for months about the nature of capitalism, so any subtitle that calls for "Free Market Anti-Capitalism" is intriguing on the face of it. (Kevin also has a very interesting book out, entitled Studies in Mutualist Political Economy.) He writes:
If the market and the state have coexisted historically, they can be separated logically. The question of whether class differences originally arose from successful competition in the market, and the state was then called in to reinforce the position of the winners; or whether the class differences first arose from state interference, is a vital one. The fact that the state has been intertwined with every "actually existing" market in history is beside the point; social anarchists themselves face a similar challenge—that the state has been intertwined with every society in history. The response, in both cases, is essentially the same—the seeds of a non-exploitative order exist within every system of exploitation. Our goal, not only as anarchists but as free market anarchists, is to supplant the state with voluntary relations. If the absence of something in historical times, in a society based on division of labor, is a damning challenge—well then, they're damned as well as we are.
The questions of whether state capitalism is an inevitable outgrowth of the free market, of whether decentralized and libertarian forms of industrial production can exist under worker control in a market society, etc., are at least questions on which we can approach the Left with logic and evidence. They are, for the most part, rational and open to persuasion. At the very least, there is room for constructive engagement. And remember, it is not an all-or-nothing matter. It is possible, if nothing else, to reduce the area of disagreement on a case-by-case basis.
Well, questions concerning "free-market anarchism" aside, I agree that the market and the state can be separated logically, and I also agree that the class question is a vital one. And I'm the first to advocate constructive engagement with all parties. But as I suggested here, there is a problem that must be confronted when dealing with "capitalism." Let me explain further.
So much has been said about Ayn Rand's defense of "capitalism: the unknown ideal" that we often forget that the very term "capitalism" was coined by the Left. As F. A. Hayek puts it in the book, Capitalism and the Historians:
In many ways it is misleading to speak of "capitalism" as though this had been a new and altogether different system which suddenly came into being toward the end of the eighteenth century; we use this term here because it is the most familiar name, but only with great reluctance, since with its modern connotations it is itself largely a creation of that socialist interpretation of economic history with which we are concerned.
Hayek found the term even more misleading because it is almost always "connected with the idea of the rise of the propertyless proletariat, which by some devious process have been deprived of their rightful ownership of the tools for their work."
And yet, Rand proudly took up the mantle of "capitalism," defining it as the only moral social system consonant with human nature and "based on the recognition of individual rights, including property rights, in which all property is privately owned." For Rand, this "unknown ideal" had been approximated in history but it had never been practiced in its full, unadulterated laissez-faire form. It was largely undercut by state intervention.
But we have to ask here: Did Rand—and do free-market advocates in general—redefine "capitalism" in such a way as to make it a neologism? (I address the issue of whether Rand engages in such neologistic redefinition with terms such as "selfishness," "altruism," and even "government" in my books, Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical and Total Freedom: Toward a Dialectical Libertarianism.) If real, actual, historically specific "capitalism" has always entailed the intervention of the state, are leftists onto something when they "package deal" state involvement in markets as endemic to capitalism? Of what use is it to keep claiming that libertarians are champions of "capitalism" when that system as it exists is a warped, distorted version of the ideal so many of us hold dear? (I'm leaving aside questions concerning the possibilities for the emergence of a genuinely libertarian social system.)
Now, it may be true, as Ludwig von Mises has argued, that there is a bit of "envy" at the base of the "anti-capitalistic mentality." And it may be true that some socialists would oppose market relationships regardless of the presence of the state because they oppose the very notion of individual enterprise and private appropriation. But the fact remains: Laissez-faire capitalism has never existed in its purest form. Libertarian free-market advocates know this. But even Marx knew it. He argued that existing systems were only approximations to that pure form, "adulterated and amalgamated with survivals of former economic conditions," the kind of mercantilist and neomercantilist state involvement whose "antiquated modes of production" had inhibited the progressive character of markets. (It's this aspect of Marx's work that has been captured in Meghnad Desai's book Marx's Revenge: The Resurgence of Capitalism and the Death of Statist Socialism.)
This problem of definition is not simply an epistemic one or even a semantic one. It has practical implications. When neoconservative advocates of U.S. intervention in the Middle East talk about "nation-building," about building "free markets" and "capitalist" social conditions abroad as part of the march toward "democracy," those who live in that region of the world do not understand "capitalism" as anything remotely like the libertarian ideal. (Indeed, neocons don't understand it either!) U.S. capitalism as such is equated with "crony capitalism" or with what Rand called the "New Fascism": the intimate involvement of the U.S. government in the protection of business interests at home and abroad through politico-economic and military intervention. It's not simply that the left has "package-dealt" us this bill of goods; it is what exists and it is what has existed, in an ever-increasingly intense form, from the very inception of modern "capitalism."
Indeed, one of the most insidious forms of state intervention has been in the area of money, banking, and finance. And if Austrian economists are correct that the boom-bust cycle itself is rooted in the state-banking nexus, then that nexus and its destabilizing effects have been around in various incarnations ever since "capitalism" was given its name. And this is certainly something that even Marx understood. As I put it in my book, Marx, Hayek, and Utopia,
Marx shares with his Austrian rivals an understanding of the political character of the business cycle. Yet the implications of his analysis are vastly different. While [the Austrians] argue for the abolition of central banking, and the separation of the political sphere from money and credit, Marx advocates using the credit system as a mechanism for socialist transformation.
Marx believes that capitalism, based on the dualism between purchase and sale, makes an exchange economy necessary. The exchange process makes possible the emergence of pseudotransactions through an inflationary credit system. Like [the Austrians], Marx views the state as the source of inflation. The state's central bank is the "pivot" of the credit system. Its artificially-induced monetary expansion engenders an illusory accumulation process in which "fictitious money-capital" distorts the structure of prices. This leads to overproduction and overspeculation. Real prices—those that reflect actual supply and demand—appear nowhere, until the crisis begins the necessary corrective measures.
Marx views the business cycle as an extension of intensifying class struggle. The state's ability to thrust an arbitrary amount of unbacked paper money into circulation creates an inflationary dynamic that favors debtors at the expense of creditors. The credit system becomes an instrument for the "ever-growing control of industrialists and merchants over the money savings of all classes of society." It provides "swindlers" with the ability to buy up depreciated commodities. Yet the credit system is a historically progressive institution, according to Marx. Despite its distortive effects, it accelerates the expansion of the global market and polarizes classes in capitalist society. It facilitates socialized control of production and capital investment.
One would find a very similar, though more detailed, analysis in the works of Mises, Hayek, and Rothbard, with different implications, as I've stated above.
Some of this discussion can be viewed as a complement to Arthur Silber's discussion here, and Gus diZerega's comments here. If libertarians continue to use the word "capitalism" as some kind of ahistorical ideal, if they refuse to look at the fuller cultural and historical context within which actual market relations function, they will forever be dismissed by the Left as rationalist apologists for a state-capitalist reality. That's ironic, considering that so many Leftists have been constructivist rationalist apologists for a different kind of statist reality. But it does not obscure a very real problem.
Reaching out to the Left or to any other category of intellectuals requires a translation exercise of sorts. Real communication depends upon a full clarification of terms; if we end up using the same term to mean different things, I fear we'll be talking over each other's heads for a long time to come.
Cross-posted to Not a Blog.
Wednesday, February 2, 2005
Reflecting on the Ayn Rand Centenary, Conclusion
In Part I of my reflections on the Rand Centenary, I discussed the growth of a veritable industry of Rand scholarship. In Part II of this series, I examined a particularly interesting example of "unintended consequences" in the intellectual history of our time: How Rand's ideas have influenced even those in the "counterculture" whom she would have disowned.
Popular Culture
Today, I'd like to expand on the previous parts by offering additional evidence of Rand's growing impact. The material here is excerpted from an introduction that I wrote to the Fall 2004 Journal of Ayn Rand Studies symposium on Rand's literary and cultural impact. The essay, "The Illustrated Rand," makes its electronic debut today as a PDF here. As I write:
In addition to the encouraging growth of Rand references in scholarly circles, there has been a remarkable growth in such references throughout popular culture. That development is not measured solely by her influence on authors in various genres—from bodybuilder Mike Mentzer to fiction writers Edward Cline, Neil De Rosa, Beth Elliott, James P. Hogan, Erika Holzer, Helen Knode, Victor Koman, Ira Levin, Karen Michalson, Shelly Reuben, Kay Nolte Smith, L. Neil Smith, Alexandra York, and so many others. It is measured also by the number of Rand-like characters or outright references to Rand that have appeared in fictional works of various lengths and quality. Among these are works by: Gene Bell-Villada (The Pianist Who Liked Ayn Rand); William Buckley (Getting It Right); Don De Grazia (American Skin); Jeffrey Eugenides (author of the 2003 Pulitzer-Prize-winning Middlesex); Mary Gaitskill (Two Girls, Fat and Thin); John Gardner (Mickelsson’s Ghosts); Laci Golos (Sacred Cows Are Black and White); Sky Gilbert (The Emotionalists); Rebecca Gilman (Spinning into Butter); Terry Goodkind (books in the Sword of Truth series, such as Faith of the Fallen and Naked Empire); David Gulbraa (Tales of the Mall Masters; An Elevator to the Future: A Fable of Reason Underground); Robert A. Heinlein (The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress); Orlando Outland (Death Wore a Fabulous New Fragrance); Robert Rodi (Fag Hag); Matt Ruff (Sewer, Gas, and Electric: The Public Works Trilogy); J. Neil Schulman (The Rainbow Cadenza; Escape from Heaven); Victor Sperandeo (Cra$hmaker: A Federal Affaire); Tobias Wolff (Old School); and, finally, Tony Kushner, whose play Angels in America, adapted for HBO, includes a discussion of the “visible scars” from rough sex, “like a sex scene in an Ayn Rand novel.”
The Kushner drama is not the first time that Rand’s name has been heard on television, however. Rand has made her way into countless television programs. From questions on game shows, such as “Jeopardy” and “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire,” to the canceled Fox series “Undeclared,” and such other series as “Columbo” (a 1994 episode with William Shatner, “Butterfly in Shades of Grey”), “Home Improvement,” “The Gilmore Girls” (two episodes: “A-Tisket, A-Tasket” and “They Shoot Gilmores, Don’t They?”), “Frasier,” and “Judging Amy,” the Rand references are plentiful. In Gene Roddenberry’s sci-fi series “Andromeda,” there is a colony called the “Ayn Rand Station,” founded by a species of “Nietzscheans.” In Showtime’s “Queer as Folk,” a leading character, free-spirit Brian Kinney, is described as “the love-child of James Dean and Ayn Rand.” [Rand has made a measurable impact on "Queer Culture," as I argue in my monograph, Ayn Rand, Homosexuality, and Human Liberation—ed.] And the WB’s “One Tree Hill” showcased Rand’s work in an episode entitled, “Are You True?” The main character, Lucas, is given Atlas Shrugged by a fellow classmate. Increasingly frustrated by his basketball troubles, Lucas is told “Don’t let ’em take it: Your talent. It’s all yours.” By the end of the episode, we hear Lucas’s voice-over as he walks to the basketball court: “Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark.” Reading from the John Galt speech, he tells us: “Do not let the hero in your soul perish.”
In the light of the animated motion picture, "The Incredibles," I've discussed here as well Rand's presence in illustrated media: from cartoons to comics. "The Illustrated Rand" examines this impact in much greater detail, paying specific attention to Rand's influence on such comic artists as Steve Ditko and Frank Miller:
No comic artist has been better known for incorporating Randian themes in his work than Steve Ditko, co-creator, with Stan Lee, of “Spider-Man.” Among Ditko’s comic book heroes, one will find Static, The Creeper, The Blue Beetle, and Mr. A (as in “A is A”), as well as the faceless crime fighter known as The Question, whom Lawrence has characterized as the quintessential Ditko character reflecting “the artist’s Objectivist beliefs.”
Ditko emerged from—and shaped—the “Silver Age” of late ’50s, ’60s, and early ’70s comic book art. His work is in keeping with that era’s use of the comic genre as a “vehicle for consciousness-raising every bit as much as popular films and television shows” [as Aeon Skoble puts it].
Thus, "Ditko’s appearance, like Rand’s, was of a unique historical moment." He expressed in his comics a willingness "to go to the root of social problems. In attacking government corruption, he focused on its roots in philosophic pragmatism. In attacking war, he focused on the illegitimacy of initiating the use of force." And in doing so, "Ditko’s prose is indisputably Randian ..." I provide concrete examples in the essay.
I then turn briefly to the contributions of Frank Miller, who "credits Rand’s Romantic Manifesto as having helped him to define the nature of the literary hero and the legitimacy of heroic fiction." Miller states in his introduction to Martha Washington Goes to War:
We all borrow from the classics from time to time, and my story for this chapter in the life of Martha Washington is no exception. Faced with the questions of how to present Martha’s rite of passage and how to describe the fundamental changes in Martha’s world, I was drawn again and again to the ideas presented by Ayn Rand in her 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged. Eschewing the easy and much-used totalitarian menace made popular by George Orwell, Rand focused instead on issues of competence and incompetence, courage and cowardice, and took the fate of humanity out of the hands of a convenient “Big Brother” and placed it in the hands of individuals with individual strengths and individual choices made for good or evil. I gratefully and humbly acknowledge the creative debt.
It is a "creative debt,” as I say in the article, that "is widely owed by many scholars, writers, and artists."
Concluding Thoughts
Today, on the occasion of the Rand Centenary, when every publication from Reason to the NY Times has something to say about Ayn Rand, I'd like to offer a few concluding thoughts.
As one who focuses on social theory and the prospects for social change, I believe that the most important of Rand's contributions has been her methodological radicalism: her emphasis not only on going to the root—on understanding fundamentals—but also on tracing the fundamental relationships at work within the full context of any given society. As I write in a newly published essay, "Ayn Rand: A Centennial Appreciation," which appears today in The Freeman (it's actually derived from a much more comprehensive essay that will appear in a forthcoming anthology, Atlas Shrugged: Ayn Rand's Philosophical and Literary Masterpiece, edited by Edward W. Younkins):
Rand’s radical legacy, as presented in Atlas Shrugged, led her, in later years, to question the fundamentals at work in virtually every social problem she analyzed. She viewed each problem through multidimensional lenses, rejecting all one-sided resolutions as partial and incomplete. On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Rand’s birth, it is important to remember that her conception of human freedom depended upon a grand vision of the psychological, moral, and cultural factors necessary to its achievement. Hers was a comprehensive revolution that encompassed all levels of social relations: “Intellectual freedom cannot exist without political freedom; political freedom cannot exist without economic freedom; a free mind and a free market are corollaries.”
To say that this has been Rand's most important contribution, from the perspective of social theory, is not to minimize her other contributions. Among these is Rand's ability to convey radical ideas through a literary medium. Through the years, there have been many passages in Rand's writings that have inspired me. Even in the wake of the tragedy of 9/11, I am still moved by her eerily prophetic words in The Fountainhead. She, who worshiped the skyscrapers of Manhattan as "the will of man made visible," wrote:
Is it beauty and genius people want to see? Do they seek a sense of the sublime? Let them come to New York, stand on the shore of the Hudson, look and kneel. When I see the city from my window ... I feel that if a war came to threaten this, I would like to throw myself into space, over the city, and protect these buildings with my body.
But till this day, there is one passage I always return to—also from The Fountainhead—one passage that summarizes for me the human authenticity and human benevolence that stand at the roots of Rand's vision. It is a vision of integrity, a vision of independence, a vision of social conditions without masters or slaves, fully transformative in its implications.
Howard Roark is on trial for having blown up a public housing project he created because the project's architectural design had been distorted beyond all recognition. As he stands before a jury of his peers, he prepares to defend himself. I'll give Ayn Rand the last word:
He stood by the steps of the witness stand. The audience looked at him. They felt he had no chance. They could drop the nameless resentment, the sense of insecurity which he aroused in most people. And so, for the first time, they could see him as he was: a man totally innocent of fear. The fear of which they thought was not the normal kind, not a response to a tangible danger, but the chronic, unconfessed fear in which they all lived. They remembered the misery of the moments when, in loneliness, a man thinks of the bright words he could have said, but had not found, and hates those who robbed him of his courage. The misery of knowing how strong and able one is in one's own mind, the radiant picture never to be made real. Dreams? Self-delusion? Or a murdered reality, unborn, killed by that corroding emotion without name —fear—need—dependence—hatred? Roark stood before them as each man stands in the innocence of his own mind. But Roark stood like that before a hostile crowd—and they knew suddenly that no hatred was possible to him. For the flash of an instant, they grasped the manner of his consciousness. Each asked himself: do I need anyone's approval? —does it matter? —am I tied? And for that instant, each man was free—free enough to feel benevolence for every other man in the room.
Cross-posted to Not a Blog here.
For an index to all my Ayn Rand Centenary articles, see here.
Monday, January 31, 2005
Reflecting on the Ayn Rand Centenary, Part II
Yesterday, I discussed the growing industry of Ayn Rand scholarship. Between today and tomorrow, I'm posting two articles that make their debut in cyberspace. Published first in The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, these essays discuss different aspects of Rand's growing cultural influence.
Back in the fall of 2002, I wrote a survey of Rand's impact on certain progressive rock bands, including, especially, Rush. That article, "Rand, Rush, and Rock," inspired a full-fledged symposium in the Fall 2003 issue, which dealt with Rand, progressive rock, and the counterculture. Among the contributors to the symposium were Durrell Bowman, Ed Macan, Bill Martin, and our very own Steven Horwitz, whose piece can be found in PDF here.
I wrote a rejoinder to the seven respondents in my follow-up essay, "Rand, Rock, and Radicalism." The essay can be found in PDF form here.
On L&P, we've been talking quite a bit of late about the need to build bridges to left and right. Some of what I say in the newly posted essay is relevant to this issue, since it deals with a certain ironic affinity between Rand and the 60s "nihilistic" counterculture that she despised:
The basis of that affinity lies in their shared anti-authoritarianism. Even as [musicologist] Ed Macan defends the “countercultural” roots of progressive rock, he argues persuasively that its typical left-wing politics “were never monolithic, or without self-contradictory tendencies.” Indeed, the counterculture’s anti-authoritarian elements transcended traditional left-right categorization. Macan notes that “a strain of libertarianism analogous to Rand’s was probably present in incipient form in the hippie movement,” though “it was not fully evident until after the dissolution of the hippie movement around 1970, that is, after progressive rock had already emerged as a full-blown style.” It is this same “incipient” libertarian streak that led writer Jeff Riggenbach to identify the counterculture as among the “disowned children” of Ayn Rand—disowned by Rand largely because of what she perceived as their nihilism and subjectivism. Of Rand’s renunciation of New Left counterculture, I wrote in Russian Radical:
Rand criticized the student movement for its acceptance of Hegelian and Marxian theoretical constructs; however, Rand recognized that many students ran to the Marxist camp because it was more intellectual and systematized than its social science counterparts. She claimed that if the students had been offered the Wall Street Journal and Southern racism as examples of capitalist politics, they were correct to sense hypocrisy and to move further to the left. But the New Left did not embrace the more reputable Marxist synthesis, which had retained some respect for reason, science, and technology. The New Leftists rejected ideological labels, and proclaimed the supremacy of emotionalism and immediate action. Nourished on a poisonous diet of Kantianism, pragmatism, logical positivism, linguistic analysis, and existentialism, the New Left mounted an anti-ideological assault on a system that was fundamentally anti-ideological as well.
Educated in the halls of Progressive education, the New Leftists thus reflected the bankruptcy of the Establishment they despised; for Rand, they were “the distilled essence of the Establishment’s culture, . . . the embodiment of its soul, . . . the personified ideal of generations of crypto-Dionysians now leaping into the open.”
Interestingly, however, Riggenbach argues, like Macan, that the student movement was not monolithically New Leftist. In fact, Riggenbach finds that “the student political activists of the 1960s were never except briefly and incidentally, fighting for the values and ideals of the Left. The problem was, the values and ideals they were fighting for no longer had any generally agreed-upon name of their own at the time.” For Riggenbach, those ideals were fundamentally libertarian. It is therefore no surprise to discover that Rand herself was “one of the central figures in the youth rebellion of the ’60s." For example, in the 1978 “Woodstock Census” survey of attitudes among people who were students in the 1960s, Rand was ranked number 29 out of 81 individuals named as among those who had most influenced—or who were most admired by—that generation. Among authors, she was tied for sixth place with Germaine Greer, behind Kurt Vonnegut, Kahlil Gibran, Tom Wolfe, Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus (tied for fourth), and Allen Ginsberg. Riggenbach concludes that the survey results make “obvious how little influence the leaders of the New Left actually exercised over their supposed followers."
To what was the counterculture responding in Rand’s works? Riggenbach maintains that Rand’s novels, filled with youthful characters, routinely attacked social authority figures and the “drivel” of contemporary education. Atlas Shrugged, for example, “contains perhaps the most acid-etched portrait of establishment intellectualdom ever published in America” (60). Moreover, says Riggenbach, Rand paints a portrait of a corrupting nexus of government, big business, and a scientific establishment hellbent on “employ[ing] stolen resources in the invention of loathsome weapons of mass destruction” (61)—something against which the counterculture had reacted with great ferocity. And even though Rand had rejected the concept of anarchism in her nonfiction writing, Atlas presented an alternative utopia steeped in human creativity and “without government of any kind” (63). The hippie rebels who were casual readers of Rand’s fiction, says Riggenbach, had applied her anti-authoritarianism to the context of their own lives. They presided over a form of decadence embodied in the decay of authority and the decay of the traditional—a decay to which Rand’s works contributed. It is no coincidence that their countercultural “revolution,” which called for individual autonomy and authenticity, was manifested in a style of music that was a “hybrid genre,” an “eclectic” blend of jazz, classical, and folk, transcending the racial divide of black and white.
I conclude:
So much remains unexplored in the affinities between Rand and the counterculture from which progressive rock was born, affinities that challenge the very distinctions between left and right. It is my hope that this forum will have contributed toward the advancement of this long-overdue exploration. That Rush and other progressive bands have embraced a visionary libertarian lyricism gives expression to Rand’s ultimate hope for the unity of those “homeless refugees” of American political culture: the “non-totalitarian liberals” and the “non-traditional conservatives.” In their shared repudiation of authoritarian social relations, freedom beckons.
Tomorrow, I'll post another recent article of mine detailing Rand's impact on the wider culture.
Sunday, January 30, 2005
Reflecting on the Ayn Rand Centenary, Part I
I've written so many pieces for the Ayn Rand Centenary, for so many publications, that I don't think I'll have much more to say, which might be considered "new" and "original." But, of course, not being one to keep my mouth shut, I'm sure I'll have more to say each day from now till Wednesday, February 2, 2005, when the one hundredth anniversary of Ayn Rand's birth will be celebrated in various forums from the East coast to the West coast.
Today, I came upon a piece in the New York Times Book Review section that just pissed me off. Written by Clay Risen, an assistant editor for The New Republic, "Rebuilding Ground Zero: The Struggle Between Architects and Developers at the World Trade Center" is a review of Philip Nobel's book, Sixteen Acres: Architecture and the Outrageous Struggle for the Future of Ground Zero. I'm less concerned with the politicized process of rebuilding that is the subject of Nobel's book and more concerned with the opening paragraph of Risen's review:
AYN RAND may be long discredited as a philosopher, but her ideas about architecture are still very much alive. Howard Roark, the protagonist of her objectivist fantasia ''The Fountainhead,'' is the archetypal artist-hero, rendering society's soul in concrete and steel. Since the 1940's, his image has shaped our appreciation of everyone from Frank Lloyd Wright to Frank Gehry, defining even the competition to rebuild the World Trade Center site: the struggle between Daniel Libeskind and Larry Silverstein was seen as a veritable ''Fountainhead Redux'' in which a valiant architect armed only with his dreams takes on a mega-developer.
Notice how Risen opens this article: "Ayn Rand may be long discredited as a philosopher..." stated as if it were an observation of fact.
But if Risen had been paying much attention to the academic tide, he'd discover that, after many years of being perceived as an outsider, Rand is finally being considered as a serious thinker worthy of our critical attention. This is not happening across the board and it is not happening in all academic circles but it is clearly a trend that cannot be ignored. As I have written in an article for Philosophical Books (a piece that has been revised for inclusion in a forthcoming anthology edited by Edward W. Younkins, entitled Philosophers of Capitalism):
Since the 1982 death of novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand, there has been ever-growing interest in her thought. In the immediate aftermath of her death, Douglas J. Den Uyl and Douglas Rasmussen’s edited collection, The Philosophic Thought of Ayn Rand, and the first edition of Mimi Reisel Gladstein’s Ayn Rand Companion appeared. ... Together with ... heightened cultural awareness of Rand’s life and thought, academic work has proceeded apace with some fanfare. Both The Chronicle of Higher Education and [the now defunct] Lingua Franca featured major stories on new books and research projects involving philosophy, political theory, literary criticism, and feminism, highlighting how Rand had “finally caught the attention of scholars.” ... These articles note the increase in scholarly sessions devoted to Rand’s work in such organizations as the Modern Language Association and the American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division, which includes an affiliated Ayn Rand Society.
My own Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical, published in 1995, was central to the Chronicle and Lingua Franca studies—as was my 1999 anthology, Feminist Interpretations of Ayn Rand, co-edited with Mimi Reisel Gladstein. The former book rooted Rand’s intellectual development in Silver Age Russian thought and reconstructed her Objectivist philosophy as a radical dialectical project. The latter book is part of the Penn State Press “Re-reading the Canon” series, edited by Nancy Tuana, in which nearly two dozen volumes center on questions of gender and sexuality in the works of thinkers as diverse as Plato, Aristotle, Hegel, Marx, Arendt, Sartre, Levinas, and Foucault. The Rand anthology includes original and reprinted contributions from writers across the globe, including Susan Brownmiller, Camille Paglia, Karen Michalson, and Melissa Jane Hardie.
Another measure of Rand’s growing scholarly presence is the appearance of entries on her in textbooks—in philosophy, political science, and economics—and in reference works, such as Routledge’s Encyclopedia of Philosophy and Encyclopedia of Ethics, Scribner’s American Writers, Gale’s American Philosophers, 1950–2000 (a volume of the Dictionary of Literary Biography), and Lexington’s History of American Thought. A Rand primer, by philosopher Allan Gotthelf, in the Wadsworth Philosophy Series, a volume by philosopher Douglas J. Den Uyl on The Fountainhead, and another by Mimi Reisel Gladstein on Atlas Shrugged, in Twayne’s Masterwork Series, and CliffsNotes monographs on Anthem, The Fountainhead, and Atlas Shrugged, by philosopher Andrew Bernstein, are further evidence of increased attention to Rand by professional scholars. (It should be noted too that one can find an increasing number of master’s and doctoral dissertations devoted to Rand’s thought.) [In addition, a recently published scholarly collection on We the Living will be complemented by forthcoming collections on Anthem and Atlas Shrugged,] as well as an anthology on The Literary Art of Ayn Rand (edited by William Thomas and David Kelley), a Thomas-Kelley authored study, The Logical Structure of Objectivism, and a book on induction and integration, written by Leonard Peikoff, entitled The One in the Many: How to Create It and Why. [And let's not forget monographs by some of our esteemed L&P colleagues, such as Roderick Long, who has published on Rand and Aristotle.]
One final measure of expanding scholarship on Rand is the commencement, in the Fall of 1999, of The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, co-founded by R. W. Bradford, literature professor Stephen Cox, and me. The journal is a nonpartisan semi-annual interdisciplinary double-blind peer-reviewed scholarly periodical dedicated to an examination of Rand’s work and legacy. In its contents, one will find essays by Objectivist philosophers and those sympathetic to Rand, as well as critics of Objectivism ...
Clearly, the ever-expanding scope of Rand studies suggests that philosophers of various stripes have begun a long overdue reassessment of her thought.
Say what you will about Ayn Rand but it is simply not the case that she has been "discredited as a philosopher." It seems to me that the scholarly community is finally taking notice.
I'll have more to say about this and other related topics in the coming days.
Update: Ironically, I just discovered that, today, Carlin Romano, literary critic for The Philadelphia Inquirer published a piece "Assessing Rand at Centenary." Romano mentions my work and the work of others in the piece, stating: "Even studies in academe—the sector of America most [resistant] to Rand in her lifetime—are increasing."
Friday, January 28, 2005
The Market Shall Set You Free... in the NY Times?
It's just so odd to see NYT Op-Ed pieces with pro-free-market rhetoric; so readers should check out Robert Wright's essay, "The Market Shall Set You Free." Wright has some interesting things to say:
... this Republican president doesn't appreciate free markets. Mr. Bush doesn't see how capitalism helps drive history toward freedom via an algorithm that for all we know is divinely designed and is in any event awesomely elegant. Namely: Capitalism's pre-eminence as a wealth generator means that every tyrant has to either embrace free markets or fall slowly into economic oblivion; but for markets to work, citizens need access to information technology and the freedom to use it - and that means having political power. This link between economic and political liberty has been extolled by conservative thinkers for centuries, but the microelectronic age has strengthened it. ... Given that involvement in the larger capitalist world is time-release poison for tyranny, impeding this involvement is an odd way to aid history's march toward freedom. ... Mr. Bush doesn't grasp the liberating power of capitalism, the lethal effect of luring authoritarian regimes into the modern world of free markets and free minds.
Sounds like an ad for Reason magazine!
Thursday, January 27, 2005
On the Sixtieth Anniversary of the Liberation of Auschwitz
In April of 1946, about a year after the world had discovered the nightmare of Nazi concentration camps across Europe, Ayn Rand wrote a "Foreword" to her novelette, Anthem, that reflected on the collectivist roots of the statist brutality that had made these camps possible. On the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, it is fitting to recall Rand's words:
The greatest guilt today is that of people who accept collectivism by moral default; the people who seek protection from the necessity of taking a stand, by refusing to admit to themselves the nature of that which they are accepting; the people who support plans specifically designed to achieve serfdom, but hide behind the empty assertion that they are lovers of freedom, with no concrete meaning attached to the word; the people who believe that the content of ideas need not be examined, that principles need not be defined, and that facts can be eliminated by keeping one's eyes shut. They expect, when they find themselves in a world of bloody ruins and concentration camps, to escape moral responsibility by wailing: "But I didn't mean this!"
Those who want slavery should have the grace to name it by its proper name. They must face the full meaning of that which they are advocating or condoning; the full, exact, specific meaning of collectivism, of its logical implications, of the principles upon which it is based, and of the ultimate consequences to which these principles will lead.
They must face it, then decide whether this is what they want or not.
Sunday, January 23, 2005
Quote of the Day
Claire Shipman on "This Week with George Stephanopoulos" reflects on the President's Second Inaugural Address, and its intrinsic appeal to current (Democratic) and former (neocon) leftists:
This has to be seen as an attempt to retrofit the war in Iraq with the Grand Foreign Policy Philosophy. ... People talk about this being the core of Bush; this was not his core four years ago when he chided the Clinton administration for "nation-building." ... The President's speech goes so far toward neoconservatism it bumps into Marx.
Friday, January 21, 2005
Sex Bomb
From Queer Teletubby to overly gay-tolerant SpongeBob SquarePants, the homosexual lobby has been poisoning America's youth! Or so we've been told. Fear not! The country has not quite lost its mind just yet. Word now comes that the military—whose "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy has led to a number of discharges of Arabic linguists who are gay—has rejected "a 1994 proposal to develop an 'aphrodisiac' to spur homosexual activity among enemy troops." The New York Daily News reports (as does CNN) that Defense Department spokesman Lt. Col. Barry Venable of the Army confirms rejection of the "sex bomb" proposal (with apologies to Tom Jones). "This suggestion arose essentially from a brainstorming session, and it was rejected out of hand," he said. Apparently, the idea was part of a "six-year, $7.5 million request from a laboratory at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio [oy, Ohio again] for funding of non-lethal chemical weapon[s]" that might adversely affect the "discipline and morale in enemy units."
I can't imagine what kind of lab tests this proposal may have required.
Perhaps the geniuses at the Pentagon were deterred by historical anecdotes about the military ferocity of same-sex affectionate warriors ... if we're to believe those stories concerning Alexander the Great or those ancient Spartans.
Thursday, January 20, 2005
Channeling Woodrow Wilson
Back on November 21, 2004, on ABC News' "This Week with George Stephanopoulos," conservative columnist George Will called President Bush "one of Woodrow Wilson's many, rather dangerous, reverberations." (I too have discussed the Wilsonian legacy in many previous essays; see here, here, here, here (scroll down), and here (scroll down).) And on January 9, 2005, Will observed further that the "Old Right" isolationists were against America's involvement with the rest of the world because they felt America was "too good" for the world. The "New Left isolationists," by contrast, said Will, don't want America to be involved with the rest of the world because they feel the world is too good for America—for racist, imperialist America.
Well, if snippets from the President's Second Inaugural address are any indication of his wider message, one might say that he's trying to create a transcending neo-Wilsonian internationalist answer to these opposed isolationist views. For George W. Bush, America's involvement with the rest of the world is necessary because America is too good; only America can lead the way to a new world of freedom.
"Good Morning America" host Diane Sawyer has an advance copy of the President's speech—and Bush is channeling Woodrow Wilson like never before:
The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.
In other words, the US is still fighting to make the world safe for liberal democracy. Or so its leaders say.
Given the interconnectedness of global events, it is surely the case that a world of liberty can greatly enrich our domestic experience of it. But if the US plans to be a "nation-building" crusader for the imposition of universal liberal values on foreign cultures—with no appreciation for the specific conditions such cultures face—that "nation-building" enterprise will be DOA. And since foreign policy and domestic policy are inextricably connected, the long-term consequences of such folly on domestic freedom have not been fully calculated by this President or his administration.
Now, it is true that there are potentially lethal consequences for freedom if there is another attack on American soil. Even modern-day liberal New Republic editor Peter Beinart has argued that, given the potential anti-liberal consequences of another strike on US soil, the war against fanatical Islamic fundamentalists is a necessary one. But how that war is fought—what is prudent and what isn't—remains the crucial strategic question. Especially if the answer is Freedom.
Tuesday, January 18, 2005
Building a Civil Society
So much justly negative criticism has been made of the neoconservative "nation-building" project that some kernels of truth about the need for social change in the Middle East might get drowned out by the loud public debate. Katherine Zoepf, writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education, focuses on one aspect of that need in her recent article about Syria, "Building a Civil Society Book by Book." Zoepf focuses on the work of one young publisher, Ammar Abdulhamid, who has set out "to translate the works of Western political philosophy into Arabic."
Abdulhamid is "a 38-year-old American-educated historian and novelist," the founder of "DarEmar, a nonprofit publishing house dedicated to making canonical works of Western philosophy, social science, and literature available in Arabic. His goal, he says, is to print books that will foster 'debate on a broad range of issues pertaining to civil society and democratization.'" Zoepf writes:
In most of the world, it has been a couple of centuries since publishing a new edition of John Locke could be considered risky or incendiary. But this is Syria, a Baathist dictatorship with tightly controlled news media and a stagnant publishing industry. Mr. Abdulhamid knows he must be careful. His tiny publishing venture, which is seeking support from foundations and other Western donors, just released its first books this fall. It is being watched hopefully by intellectuals within Syria, although some observers wonder whether ordinary Syrians will be interested in the sometimes esoteric writings of long-dead Western philosophers.
Abdulhamid studied at the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point in the early 1990s, and wondered why "so few of the books that are considered cornerstones of the European enlightenment" remain unavailable in Arabic. He mentions such works as The Federalist Papers, as well as the works of Descartes, Hume, Kant, Erasmus, Spinoza, and Locke. Abdulhamid blames "low literacy rates and repressive censorship laws" for keeping "the number of foreign books that find their way into Arabic translation very low." Moroever, there is no "accumulated tradition of Arab scholarship" that is directed outside the Arab world or experience. Abdulhamid argues that this is a major obstacle to the creation in places like Iraq of a Middle Eastern "beacon of freedom": "You're talking about democracy and modernity and bringing all these good things to the Arab world. But we just don't have the basic intellectual foundations," he says.
Zoepf's article focuses on Abdulhamid's efforts to commission "fresh, accessible translations of Western philosophers into Arabic ... making the books available cheaply, accompanied by critical and interpretive essays." But, in Syria, for example, the so-called "Damascus Spring" that flourished briefly after Bashar al-Assad took office in 2000, was ended with the arrest of "pro-democracy" organizers shortly thereafter. And the fact remains that "Syrian newspapers and magazines are monitored by the state, and all books must be vetted by a government panel before publication."
It is no coincidence that "free thought" is having such difficulty getting started in Syria. The Syrian constitution is nationalist-socialist, after all:
The Constitution's economic principles not only set forth a planned socialist economy that should take into account "economic complementarity in the Arab homeland" but also recognize three categories of property. The three kinds are property of the people, including all natural resources, public domains, nationalized enterprises, and establishments created by the state; collective property, such as assets owned by popular and professional organizations; and private property. The Constitution states that the social function of private property shall be subordinated, under law, to the national economy and public interests.
Such subordination effectively destroys the meaning of "private property." Murray Rothbard once pointed out that when government owns or controls printing shops and publishing, there can be no free press. As he writes in For a New Liberty, "since the government must allocate scarce newsprint in some way, the right to a free press of, say, minorities or 'subversive' antisocialists will get short shrift. ... The human right to a free press depends upon the human right of private property in newsprint. ... [T]he human right of a free press is the property right to buy materials and then print leaflets or books and to sell them to those who are willing to buy."
That's why the movement away from authoritarianism in Syria or other such regimes in the Middle East must be simultaneously a movement toward liberalization politically and economically. Striking upon important points of liberal sensibility, my colleague Richard Ebeling has stressed:
In civil society there is no longer a single focal point in the social order, as in the politicized society in which the state designs, directs and imposes an agenda to which all must conform and within which all are confined. Rather, in civil society there are as many focal points as individuals, who all design, shape and direct their own lives, guided by their own interests, ideals and passions.
Mr. Abdulhamid, in his own small way, is attempting just that kind of shift in focal point. Perhaps his published translations of John Locke will be just a beginning; perhaps he might consider translating the works of Ludwig von Mises, F. A. Hayek, Murray Rothbard, and Ayn Rand too.
Monday, January 10, 2005
Election 2004, Ad Nauseam
I have a brief exchange with Bill Bradford in the letters section of the February 2005 issue of Liberty magazine. Readers of L&P will find the discussion familiar; I argue that the evangelical and conservative Catholic vote in Ohio were crucial components of the Bush victory in that state. Bradford continues to argue that the anti-gay marriage ballot initiatives "actually reduced Bush's margin of victory." I still believe that Bradford is not giving enough credit to GOP strategists for getting out the socially conservative vote, and I don't see how Bush wins in Ohio without that group of voters.
As L&P readers know, I've never denied that other issues, especially the war, had an effect in shoring up Bush's winning coalition. But the point is that it takes coalitions to win votes. In my view, the anti-gay marriage ballot initiatives were promoted by GOP strategists to bolster one aspect of the winning Bush coalition.
Coalition-building among interest groups is the modus operandi in American politics. This is a point that our L&P contributing editor makes very clear in his fine Liberty essay, "Politics vs. Ideology: How Elections Are Won." Cox sees validity in the observation that "[t]here are such things as political 'bases,' communal sources of political identification." There are also "political ideas and social movements, and these can have noticeable effects on elections, occasionally dramatic effects." But, for Cox, most American presidential elections are "won by small margins." Cox maintains that Americans "are people of multiple social identifications." Thus, "[t]he task of the American political party is to exploit as many of these personal identifications as possible. This is not science," he argues, "and it cannot be." Indeed. We can argue over whether or not this group or that group, this bloc or that bloc of voters provided the crucial margin of victory. (I, myself, have not argued that social conservatives were the crucial bloc; but I have argued that Bush could not have possibly won without exploiting what Cox is here calling "personal identifications," in this instance, of a religious sort.)
Still, Cox is right: "Voting behavior is like other forms of human action, as explained by such economic theorists as Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises; it proceeds from individual, variable, nonquantifiable preferences." He continues:
What happens in American elections is that the party that lost the last one looks for a way to win the next one, knowing (if it's smart) that it cannot rely implicitly on any stable bloc of voters. Even the legendary strength of African-Americans' identification with the Democratic Party can easily recede sufficiently to keep most potential voters in that "bloc" away from the polls. The best that each political party can do is to go through its list of possible voters, trying to interest as many as possible, beginning with those most strongly identified with itself (at the moment) and proceeding as far down the list as its funds and energy permit. If the gay vote is sixth on the list, a party that has any possibility of getting it will try to do so, altering its own character and "ideas" when alteration is necessary to optimize its capacity for winning.
Precisely.
Cox argues, however, that
American elections are won not by stable power blocs but by shifts in party identifications among people who used to be in those blocs, until they escaped. Some of the shifts, which go on all the time, in every conceivable direction, coincide with major intellectual or social movements, the kind of movements that change large patterns of intellectual and social history. But electoral politics has its own more intricate, local, and self-adjusting patterns, the patterns of the marginal gains and losses that happen as parties hunt the all-important plurality of votes.
Again: precisely. From my perspective, Karl Rove and other GOP strategists did not take it for granted that socially conservative evangelical voters were a "stable bloc" that would vote for Bush. That's why the anti-gay marriage initiatives were so important to GOP strategy: they were a way of keeping that bloc stable. The GOP also targeted voters at the margins, which would explain how they bolstered the GOP "share" of the traditionally conservative Democratic Catholic and Hispanic-Catholic vote.
We can debate the effectiveness of Rove's strategy in terms of Bush's margin of victory. But I don't think it can be debated that, as Bradford himself puts it, "the Bush campaign followed a strategy that they hoped would exploit the ballot measure and that the ballot measure was quite popular with certain voters."
The major parties work hard to perfect the building and maintaining of winning coalitions of interest groups with which voters personally identify. It offers something to each group. As Cox states: "This is what supporters of minor parties usually do not understand. Almost every minor party is an ideological party, and that explains why such parties either remain minor or cease to exist." They don't learn how to play the game of coalition-building, an expression of what Theodore Lowi once called a system of "interest-group liberalism." "A minor party invariably has a well-disciplined set of ideological positions," Cox writes, "but it lacks the wide array of personal identifications that are necessary to unite a large proportion of American voters over a substantial period of time."
Cox does not believe that this translates into a glowing future for the Libertarian Party, since the major parties are obviously here to stay for the foreseeable future. But he argues that "[t]he libertarian idea really does offer something for rich and poor, black and white, male and female, gay and straight, Christian and atheist." Even if Libertarians can't get elected en masse, "being elected ... isn't the only way to affect the political system."
Amen.
Friday, January 7, 2005
Remembering Murray Rothbard
It was ten years ago today that Murray N. Rothbard passed away. I have long acknowledged Rothbard's impact on my own intellectual development. One of the books of my "Dialectics and Liberty Trilogy," Total Freedom: Toward a Dialectical Libertarianism, devotes nearly 200 pages to an analysis of his thought. Today, the Mises Institute publishes a fine remembrance of "The Unstoppable Rothbard."
Wednesday, January 5, 2005
Moving Toward Democracy?
As we near the long-awaited "democratic elections" in Iraq, amidst growing violence across that country, much more attention is being given to the "nation-building" enterprise. In the current Winter 2004-2005 issue of Political Science Quarterly, Eva Bellin's essay, "The Iraqi Intervention and Democracy in Comparative Historical Perspective," offers some very insightful commentary.
Bellin begins with appropriate questions: "Is military occupation likely to be the midwife of democracy? Can democracy be imposed by force from the outside?" Since this is the "assumption driving America's intervention in Iraq and posited as a potential new pillar of ambition for U.S. foreign policy elsewhere," Bellin thinks the time is ripe for a thorough historical investigation of this strategy as a means to an end.
Many nation-builders point to Germany and Japan, for example. Clearly, "indigenous 'authoritarian' culture ... need not be an insurmountable obstacle to implanting democracy." Bellin understands, however, that "Germany and Japan began with a set of endowments, many of them anticipated by democratic theory, but others peculiar to the cases' unique historical context and time, that favored democratic outcomes." Bellin states unequivocally: "These endowments are not replicated in Iraq ..." Showing an almost Hayekian flair in her understanding of the role of unintended consequences, Bellin writes:
Historical experience suggests that although military occupation may increase the likelihood of democratization, and wise policy choices certainly improve its chances, the outcome is largely shaped by factors, both domestic and international, that cannot be controlled by military engineers operating within the confines of current cultural norms and conventional limits of time and treasure.
Whereas Iraq has never developed into a truly "advanced industrialized country," Germany and Japan were "highly industrialized countries with developed economies" prior to the Second World War, needing a major infusion of financial capital after the war. Democracies rarely endure in poorly developed countries like Iraq, which have also had few "prior experiences" with representative models. Moreover, unlike Iraq, "Japan and Germany were relatively homogeneous ethnically." "Nation building" becomes far more possible in countries where the population has a firmer "national identity" and "social solidarity." To a certain extent, that lack of "national identity" is what enabled Saddam Hussein to divide-and-rule. The Hussein regime, lacking any rule-bound state institutions, learned to exploit the social divide among Shia, Sunni, and Kurdish, in order to retain power in Iraq. "Deliberate state practice of privilege and prejudice meted out along primordial lines fueled suspicion and distrust among the different communities of Iraqi society."
Bellin understands that "the rule of force" in Iraqi society has become endemic to political institutions there. It is part of the political culture as such. "As a consequence, there are few institutional remnants or habits of mind ... to draw upon to help build democracy in Iraq." With no party institutions, except those rooted in "cliques of ethnic or religious elites," and with no genuine leaders of truly "national stature" (such as Emperor Hirohito in Japan) granting their imprimatur, the quest for "vibrant democracy" is severely hampered.
The article is not available free to readers, but can be ordered online here.
Tuesday, December 21, 2004
Invisible Casualties
On a day like today, when 19 American soldiers were killed in a single blast at a military base near Mosul, “the deadliest single strike against US troops since the start of the Iraq war,” we tend to forget that there are casualties in this war that are not as easily quantified. We’ve heard, for example, that there have been in excess of 1,300 US service members killed, and well over 8,000 wounded. But there have been a reported 30,000+ “medical evacuations” from Iraq, and some of these relate to wounds that are not apparent to the naked eye.
On three successive nights last week, Nightline, hosted by Ted Koppel, featured a series entitled “Coming Home: Invisible Casualties.” These are the kinds of casualties that were once characterized as “combat stress” or “battle fatigue” or “shell shock.” But while there is no “shame” in returning to the states with one less limb, the emotional scars are all too often hidden by a military culture that deplores “weakness.” As one soldier puts it: “You don’t want ... the people who work under you to think that you’re weak.” ABC News reporter John McQuethy points out that it is never “easy to confess doubt, let alone depression. ... Even the women soldiers are discouraged from showing emotion.”
Koppel summarizes the startling facts:
It’s still a macho culture. ... And talking about it is not the best way to advance your career. But [according to the New England Journal of Medicine] an estimated 1 out of 6 combat troops returns with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). 1 out of 6. Here’s the problem. The army takes perfectly ordinary men and women, mostly men, and teaches them how to kill. In peacetime, that’s a purely theoretical exercise. Soldiers are trained how to use their weapons but they never actually have to go out and kill anyone. And except for the occasional accident during a training exercise, none of their buddies is ever killed. ... But in wartime, things are different. ... Two recent medical surveys estimate that of the roughly 140,000 troops now in Iraq, about 23,000 will come home with some sort of depression or generalized anxiety.
This is not the typical portrait that is being painted by an embedded media. As NY Times journalist Chris Hedges argues, the media is too busy peddling “the myth of war ... the myth of heroism, the myth of glory, the myth of honor. The reality of war is so revolting and horrifying that if we actually saw it, we would be disgusted.” Hedges’s book, War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, is taught regularly at West Point. In it, Hedges discusses the “intoxicating powers of violence and war.” He explains that when he covered his first war, it had all the excitement of a “first sexual experience,” something that could never be duplicated. It had a narcotic effect on him. For Hedges, “war is the most powerful narcotic invented by humankind,” and in many respects, it has a “direct correlation” to the experience of taking drugs. On the battlefield, one feels a “pumped-up” rush of adrenaline, a “combat high,” a sense of being
present in a way that you never were before, when even colors are brighter. You have these grotesque hallucinogenic landscapes where you see things that were unimaginable to you, in terms of ... what happens to human bodies, entire villages in flames. ... The concussions of explosive devices. You never sleep very well. And you can fall into these sort of zombie-like trances, and all of this can happen within a 24-hour period.
But Hedges maintains that none of the battle footage that is broadcast today truly captures the reality of war. Journalists may seek to impose a sense of order and logic on that which they report, but the situations on the battlefield are usually characterized by chaos and destruction:
You never watch somebody with their legs blown off ... bleeding to death for twenty minutes in the sand. ... When we wage war too easily, when—as a nation—we think war is a form of entertainment, that war is somehow like a video game, then perhaps we need a dose of that to understand what war actually is.
Alas, the soldiers returning from Iraq understand it. McQuethy interviewed many of these men and women, who tell us how they are suffering from assorted mental and emotional stresses, where even “loud noises like thunderstorms in the night become a crippling trigger.” Many of the more than 300,000 US troops that have served in Iraq are returning to a very unstable emotional life. Robert Ursano, who is the Director of the Center for Traumatic Stress and Chief Psychiatrist at the military’s “own medical school says Iraq today—with suicide bombers, roadside mines, and the constant threat of attack—poses a unique challenge to the mental health of American troops.” These troops are suffering under the threat of “extreme uncertainty [which] is likely to cause even deeper psychological scars.”
The soldiers operate in an environment where everything is performed under fire or threat of fire. As one soldier puts it: “Everyday, it never changes. Everyday, you’re scared.” That fear of “not really knowing if you’re going to come home. ... It’s just not knowing. That’s the worst part about it.” That, and the fact that soldiers are seeing all forms of unspeakable horror, inspiring intense feelings of fear, disbelief, agitation, and irritability, leading to decreased sleep, changes in appetite, depression, and isolation.
In essence, many of these soldiers have been reduced to a state of metaphysical uncertainty and inefficacy, which is profoundly disabling.
There is a basic human need for efficacy, a need to know that one’s actions will bring about a desired effect. In his book, The Power of Self-Esteem, psychologist Nathaniel Branden stresses that this need for cognitive efficacy
is not the product of a particular cultural “value bias.” There is no society on earth, no society even conceivable, whose members do not face the challenge of fulfilling their needs—who do not face the challenges of appropriate adaptation to nature and to the world of human beings. The idea of efficacy in this fundamental sense ... is not a “Western artifact.” ... We delude ourselves if we imagine there is any culture or society in which we will not have to face the challenge of making ourselves appropriate to life.
In the atmosphere that is Iraq, terrorism is used as a weapon to undermine certainty and efficacy as such. Its aim is to strike in unpredictable and violent ways.
Some soldiers have attempted to deal with these realities by keeping a journal. One man
described seeing an enemy fighter after he had been shot. "The left side of his skull had been blown off and all that was visible was his brain. Yes, that’s right. His brain. I do not know what to do. I have seen so much blood and death. It is enough for a lifetime." He also wrote dark poetry to calm his nerves. As death comes like the shadows creep/ We watch children suffer as parents weep/We came to give a better life/ We leave in the midst of turmoil and strife.
Journal-keeping is not the only method of calming a soldier’s nerves. The military has become proactive in assisting soldiers while they are in Iraq, and in offering additional assistance upon their return home. But there is still “the stigma of getting help for psychological problems,” which is “an enormous barrier.” True, the military has come a long way from that episode immortalized in the film “Patton” when the General, played by George C. Scott, slapped a soldier across the face, calling him a coward for manifesting “battle fatigue.” Today’s military takes the soldiers’ emotional burdens much more seriously. Troops are getting briefings and filling out questionnaires upon their return home. And they receive a second full “mental health” screening three months after their return from combat. But it often takes months for “post-traumatic stress disorder” to become obvious.
Now, I’m not concerned here with the debate over whether PTSD is a real “disease”; see, for example, Thomas Szasz. Nor am I concerned here with the cozy, troubling relationship that has developed between the military and the state-psychiatric nexus: Often what happens is that a soldier’s emotional turmoil is treated with Paxil or Zoloft before he or she is sent out for yet another tour of duty.
All that concerns me here is a simple acknowledgment of the “invisible casualties” that have consumed US troops in the Iraq war. All the more reason to think long and hard about the nature and purpose of their mission.
Sunday, December 12, 2004
Bernie, Rudy ... and George
The other day I chuckled over the "New Alert Levels" suggested (in a political cartoon) by the nomination of ex-NYC top cop Bernie Kerik to head Homeland Security. With a whole lotta stuff circulating that might have sunk the Kerik nomination, GOP strategists are now assessing the impact on the future political career of Rudy Giuliani (who lobbied hard for Kerik).
One GOP strategist (Nelson Warfield) said: "Rudy was either reckless or misinformed, and neither of those are presidential qualifications."
LOL ROFL
Friday, December 10, 2004
Peter Schwartz and the Abandonment of Rand’s Radical Legacy, Part V
In part one, part two, part three, and part four of this series, I examined issues raised by Objectivist Peter Schwartz’s new book, The Foreign Policy of Self-Interest: A Moral Ideal for America. I’ve addressed problems with Schwartz’s analysis of the U.N., foreign aid, Saudi Arabia, and the history of U.S. foreign policy. I now turn to his examination of the current war and his projection of a foreign policy ideal.
The Current War
To some extent, it can be said that Schwartz retains some vestiges of Rand’s “isolationist” predilections. He is careful to emphasize that the freedom philosophy of the U.S. “does not mean we ought to declare war on every tyrant in the world. Before we decide to wage war,” Schwartz explains, “there must exist a serious threat to our freedom. Our government is not the world’s policeman. It is, however, America’s policeman” (15). This is why, Schwartz maintains, foreign policy cannot be “divorced from the moral principle of freedom. If freedom is the basic value being safeguarded, then our foreign policy can give us unambiguous guidelines: we use our power to preserve that value—and only to preserve that value” (65). For Schwartz, then, thankfully, “it is not our business to resolve some distant conflict centering on which sub-tribe should enslave the other.” Indeed, when the proper moral goal is left undefended or undefined, “everything [becomes] our business,” and what results is an unprincipled, “ad hoc foreign policy” (67).
In terms of guiding moral principles, Schwartz’s argument is basically sound.
Moreover, by limiting the role of U.S. military action overseas, Schwartz justifiably leaves open the possibility for military response in the face of legitimate threats to security. Schwartz believes, however, that “Iraq ... was a threat to us—not nearly the threat presented by some other nations, but a threat nonetheless” (44), and on this basis, he supported the invasion of that country.
Alas, he and I disagree on this. In my view, Iraq was most assuredly not a “serious threat to our freedom” and should not have been invaded or occupied by the U.S. military. As I have argued in many essays over the past two years, Hussein could have been contained and deterred from future aggressive actions.
Though Schwartz supports the Iraq war, he maintains that it is Iran that is the “vanguard” for all those Islamic groups that are merely “parts of one whole.” Schwartz’s emphasis here on the “ideology of Islamic totalitarianism” (24)—and kudos to him for not using that tired phrase “Islamofascism,” which distorts the meaning of the word fascism—is important to note:
The promoters of Islamic totalitarianism wish to establish a world in which religion is an omnipresent force, in which everyone is compelled to obey the mullahs, in which the political system inculcates the duty to serve, in which there is no distinction between mosque and state. (25) ... America is a nation rooted in certain principles. It is a culture of reason, of science, of individualism, of freedom. The culture of the Muslim universe is the opposite in every crucial respect. It is a culture steeped in mysticism rather than reason, in superstition rather than science, in tribalism rather than individualism, in authoritarianism rather than freedom. (26)
Though Schwartz gets some crucial things right in this passage, I do think there are certain complexities he does not grasp; for example, it is not at all clear that the problems he cites are strictly the result of Islamic theology or some combination of that doctrine with specifically Arab cultures. (See this discussion with Jonathan Dresner and Gus diZerega on L&P, for example.) Schwartz readily admits too that, “[i]ronically, it was life in the Islamic countries during Europe’s Dark Ages that was further advanced and less oppressive—because the Muslims at the time were under the influence of a more pro-reason philosophy, a philosophy they subsequently abandoned” (27). In this larger ideological war, however, Schwartz argues that the U.S. “should always give moral support to any people who are fighting for freedom against an oppressive government.”
But it is Iran that remains “the pre-eminent source of Islamic totalitarianism today” (30), and it is therefore “the government of Iran that needs to be eliminated,” in Schwartz’s estimation (32). By targeting Iran, “the primary enemy,” “the chief sponsor of terrorism,” all the other “lesser” Muslim states—“Syria, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Sudan—will likely be deterred” (32-33).
I don’t believe it’s that simple. Schwartz tells us that a “principled foreign policy anticipates future consequences” (62). But, given the difficulties of invading and occupying Iraq, and the current drain on U.S. money, military, and munitions, I don’t believe that Schwartz has given much thought to the long-term consequences of invading and occupying Iran, which is nearly 4 times the size of Iraq, and has more than 3 times the population. (And if Schwartz does not envision invasion and occupation, then it is legitimate to ask if he, like some other Objectivists, envisions the decimating of the entire country—see here, for example.) Aside from the fact that a large-scale military option would almost certainly require the reinstatement of the draft and the expenditure of hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars, it would most likely short-circuit the existing and growing liberal tendencies among the vast majority of younger Iranians who yearn to topple the mullahs. It could very seriously destabilize Iraq as well. (See my various archived posts on Iran, here and here.)
It should also be pointed out that “Islamic totalitarianism” is no more of a monolith than Communism was. Just as there were deep divisions in the Communist “bloc” during the Cold War, so too are there deep divisions in the Islamic world. These divisions might be profitably exploited by U.S. policymakers, who must also be careful not to be consumed by them—as in Iraq, where Kurdish, Sunni, and Shi’ite forces might opt for civil war rather than the ballot box.
There are, of course, consequences for a policy of inaction in the face of a real or imminent threat. But those of us who have opposed the Iraq war and any current extension of that war into Iran have not embraced “inaction”; what we have embraced is a strictly delimited strategic vision focused on precise military targets, which seeks to marginalize extremist theocratic forces—and a much broader intellectual vision focused on the realm of ideas. Ultimately, this is an ideological and cultural conflict. And as Rand observed, while a military battle of any scope is like a “political battle”—“merely a skirmish fought with muskets[,] a philosophical battle is a nuclear war”—and only rational ideas will ultimately win it (“‘What Can One Do?’”).
The Folly of Nation-Building
To his great credit, however, Schwartz does recognize the futility of trying to impose liberal-democratic institutions on the Middle East, by empowering “various tribal and political factions” in occupied countries (49). Though he supported the Iraq war, Schwartz argues nonetheless that “[t]he U.S. government does not have a moral obligation to the Iraqis to make them free.” He observes insightfully:
[C]ontrary to the claims of the Bush administration, freedom is not universally desired. It does not automatically come into being once a dictator is overthrown. The history of the world is largely that of one tyranny replacing another. It took millennia before a nation—the United States of America—was founded for the express purpose of safeguarding the freedom of each citizen. Across the globe today, individual liberty is still the exception rather than the rule. Freedom is an idea. It cannot be forced upon a culture that refuses to value it. It cannot be forced upon a society wedded to tribalist, collectivist values. In Afghanistan, for example, the newly drafted constitution contains such laudable provisions as: “Freedom of expression is inviolable.” However, that same constitution mandates that “no law can be contrary to the sacred religion of Islam”—that the government be responsible for “organizing and improving the conditions of mosques, madrasas and religious centers”—that no political parties may function if their views are “contrary to the provision[s] of the sacred religion of Islam”—that the national flag feature the phrase “There is no God but Allah and Mohammad is his prophet.” Is it conceivable that, under such strictures, the individual will be allowed to think freely? Freedom is such an alien principle in that culture of entrenched mysticism that it will take many years of rational education before it is understood, let alone accepted. (50-51)
But Schwartz subverts his own good insights with a dash of myopia:
To lead the Iraqis to freedom, whether in the next year or the next generation, requires that we “impose” our values on them—i.e., that we expose them to the philosophy of a free society. They need to be given the Declaration of Independence to study. Their schools must teach the ideas of Thomas Jefferson and John Locke and Adam Smith. The Governing Council must be instructed to eject the communists and the jihadists. (51)
With all due respect, not even U.S. schools teach Jefferson, Locke, and Smith with any regularity, and if our universities ever ejected communists and other left-wing fellow travelers from the classrooms, the country’s academic population would be decimated. How on earth is the United States going to promote an individualist ideological strategy in Iraq when it doesn’t embrace one within its own national borders?
Yes, of course, I know: It’s all relative. The U.S. may not be a genuinely free society, but it is much freer and more individualist than almost any society on earth. Yes, of course, the Iraqis need to understand the principles of a free society, the social system that is “capitalism, the unknown ideal,” and the institution of private property that it subsumes. But how are Iraqis ever going to appreciate any of these principles when privatization is not on the menu for social change and crony corporatism for favored U.S. companies reconstructing Iraq is the meal of the day?
Schwartz is right to criticize the kinds of “ad hoc” policies that make for “irresolution and ineffectualness” in U.S. military campaigns (61-62). And he is right, and in sync with Rand, that the war we face is, ultimately, “a battle of ideas” (53). But how can the U.S. begin to wage this war when it has surrendered its intellectual ammunition, and routinely sabotages its own individualist political principles?
The Inextricable Connection Between Domestic and Foreign Policy
Rand argued that, to regain those principles, it is necessary to understand the inextricable connection between—and reciprocally reinforcing insidious effects of—government intervention at home and abroad. She insisted that “[f]oreign policy is merely a consequence of domestic policy” (“The Shanghai Gesture, Part III”). This led her to demand a complete “revision of [U.S.] foreign policy, from its basic premises on up,” which would entail a simultaneous repudiation of the welfare state at home and the warfare state abroad, an end to “foreign aid and [to] all forms of international self-immolation.” For Rand,“a radically different foreign policy” required a radically different domestic one (“The Wreckage of the Consensus”).
Schwartz comes close to recognizing, in an abstract way, the connections between domestic and foreign policy; he argues that America’s “philosophic default ... pervades all areas of American politics, domestic as well as foreign.” He recognizes, in one or two sentences here and there, that there is a relationship between foreign policy and “our expanding welfare state” (68). But he leaves unanalyzed all of the actual social and political relations that would make this connection fully transparent. In other words, he leaves unexamined what Rand thought crucial to the analysis.
In the end, Schwartz presents an unrealistic solution:
The challenge we face lies not in physically disarming al Qaeda, but in intellectually arming our politicians. If they truly grasp the meaning of freedom, they will readily undertake the steps to safeguard it. That is, if we can just get them to understand what it means to defend the individual’s right to his life, his liberty and the pursuit of his happiness, we will have little difficulty in getting them to defend us against the ugly threats from abroad. (69)
This won’t happen ... because it can’t happen, as long as America is ruled by a predatory political system. It is not in the narrowly defined “interests” of politicians or the groups they serve to “grasp the meaning of freedom.” As Rand argued so forcefully, the globalization of the predatory state and its neofascist political economy can only engender “parasitism, favoritism, corruption and greed for the unearned”; its power to dispense privilege, Rand emphasizes, “cannot be used honestly” (“The Pull Peddlers”). It will require far more than simply changing the views of a few politicians; it will require a comprehensive, systemic change.
What most strikes me about Schwartz’s book—and I’ve only been able to examine a few aspects of it— is that it tends to deal too abstractly, too rationalistically, with the principles of a “moral” foreign policy. That is, it provides us with good core moral premises and deduces an ostensibly moral foreign policy “ideal” for America, without paying much attention to the concrete context and historical circumstances that have led America so far astray from the celebrated ideal. Rand could also celebrate an “unknown ideal”—but rarely at the expense of a rigorous analysis of the past, and the present, the actual, as a means to evaluate the potential for real change.
I’ll offer one other observation in closing: I’m somewhat uncomfortable with Schwartz’s use of the phrase “self-interest” to describe any government’s foreign policy, especially one that exercises territorial sovereignty not over an ideal capitalist social system, but over a mixed economy, the very kind of “neofascist” or liberal-corporatist social system that Rand regarded as an institutionalized civil war. In such a system, the pursuit of individual self-interest is not even possible without sacrificing somebody else’s interests in the process. How, then, can a mysterious, ineffable government suddenly rise above this “orgy of self-sacrifice” in the realm of foreign policy and pursue the common “self-interests” of its citizenry? Governments are not separable from the groups and the individuals who compose them. “In a non-free society,” Rand stated—even in a society such as we have today, where freedom has been compromised by state intervention—“no pursuit of any interests is possible to anyone; nothing is possible but gradual and general destruction” (“The ‘Conflicts’ of Men’s Interests”).
This is not a prescription for inaction; one cannot expect everything to change before anything can be done to thwart serious attacks on America. But Rand’s insights provide us with a “warning label” for those who think that today’s government, as currently constituted, can act as a panacea for our global woes. If we are to aim for “a moral ideal for America,” then it will take more than a “foreign policy of self-interest.” It will take a veritable philosophic and cultural revolution, one that radically overturns the welfare-warfare state and its sacrificial, collectivist ideological underpinnings: root, tree, and branch.
See also Part I, Part II, Part III, and Part IV.
Visit Not a Blog.
Thursday, December 9, 2004
Peter Schwartz and the Abandonment of Rand’s Radical Legacy, Part IV
In part one, part two, and part three of this series, I examined a few topics covered by Objectivist Peter Schwartz in his new book, The Foreign Policy of Self-Interest: A Moral Ideal for America. Having discussed various problems in Schwartz’s analysis of the U.N., foreign aid, and Saudi Arabia, I now turn to his examination of the history of U.S. foreign policy.
The History of U.S. Foreign Policy
Just as Schwartz ignores the history of U.S. relations with Saudi Arabia, so too does he ignore the history of U.S. intervention in the Middle East, especially in his assessment of the current “War on Terror.” Schwartz dismisses completely the view “that America invited attack by its ‘overbearing’ foreign policy,” a view he attributes solely to “Libertarians and hard-core leftists” (33). (Schwartz has always considered “libertarianism” to be the “perversion of liberty.” I deal with his critique—not all of it misguided—in my book, Total Freedom: Toward a Dialectical Libertarianism.) This is rather surprising, considering that even George W. Bush has recognized the role that U.S. foreign policy has played in propping up authoritarian regimes in the Middle East, which have inspired reaction among the oppressed populations of that region. Even Schwartz’s Objectivist colleague, Leonard Peikoff, has recognized this regrettable U.S. history, which forms part of the historical context by which to understand the current war. The U.S. policy of propping up the Shah of Iran, for example, was, indeed, partially responsible for the rise of Islamic fundamentalism as an anti-American political force. It is not enough to say, as Schwartz does, that the Iranians simply revolted against a “Western-style state” (30). That tyrannical, despotic “Western-style state” was viewed as a client of “The Great Satan,” which is why taking American hostages was among the first criminal acts of the Iranian theocracy. Moreover, U.S. support for Iraq in its war against Iran gave implicit sanction to the Hussein regime’s pursuit of chemical and biological weapons. And U.S. support for Afghan mujahideen, so-called “freedom fighters,” in their war against the Soviets, emboldened the very forces that became Al Qaeda and Taliban warriors. As Peikoff observes, this political obscenity “put the U.S. wholesale into the business of creating terrorists. ... Most of them,” says Peikoff, “regarded fighting the Soviets as only the beginning; our turn soon came” (“End States Who Sponsor Terrorism”).
There are no such admissions in Schwartz’s monograph.
It’s not as if Schwartz is ignorant of this history. For example, back in the days leading up to the Gulf War, Schwartz was very clear in his condemnation of U.S. foreign policy insofar as it “helped [Saddam] Hussein [to] launch his aggression in the first place” (“Missing Principles in Iraq,” The Intellectual Activist, October 17, 1990). At that time, Schwartz observed that “[t]he man now likened to Hitler by [Bush Sr.’s] Administration is the same man our government eagerly courted and accommodated for years.” This is the kind of critique that is utterly missing from his current monograph, however.
What is so remarkable is that there is a glorious tradition in the Rand literature of tracing current problems back to a history of previous political intervention. That tradition is hardly recognized by Schwartz. And yet, let us not forget that in her most important foreign policy essay, Rand viewed free trade as “[t]he essence of capitalism’s foreign policy,” and its undermining as one of the “roots of war” (the title of the essay). Though capitalism never existed in its purest form, Rand argued that its historic power was revolutionary: anywhere it flourished, it overturned feudalism, mercantilism, and absolute monarchy. With the rise of collectivist, paternalist, nationalist, and imperialist ideologies, advocated by such “progressive reformers” as Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, free trade was undercut ultimately by government regulation and privilege. This had vast implications both at home and abroad. As I have written in my essay, “Understanding the Global Crisis”:
The twentieth-century history of U.S. foreign policy, according to Rand, was a history of “suicidal” failure and hypocrisy (“‘Extremism,’ Or the Art of Smearing”). Failure—because the U.S. had abdicated the moral high ground, destroying economic and civil liberties from within, and losing any rational sense of the country’s moral significance. Hypocrisy—because the U.S. often fought evil with evil. Rand maintained that Wilson had led the charge “to make the world safe for democracy,” but World War I gave birth to fascism, Nazism, and communism. FDR had led the charge for the “Four Freedoms,” but he only empowered the Soviets in the process (“The Roots of War”).
Like some of her individualist allies (loosely categorized as the “Old Right”), Rand thoroughly condemned the U.S. role on the global stage. One of those allies, a close friend of Rand’s in the 1940s, was Isabel Paterson, who was similarly opposed to U.S. interventionism abroad. Paterson’s perspective on all this is valuable and relevant because she was a mentor to Rand on the subject of politics. As Stephen Cox tells us in his superb biography, The Woman and the Dynamo: Isabel Paterson and the Idea of America (Transaction, 2004), “Paterson’s largest influence [on Rand] ... was unquestionably political” (288). Cox writes about Paterson’s attitudes toward “war and the intellectuals”—attitudes, no doubt, shared by her compatriot (see here):
One of her strongest points of agreement with other intellectuals of her generation was a concern that America would be drawn into a war by its weakness for minding other people’s business. The precedent was the Great War. Like most of the others, [Paterson] took that war as a benchmark of criminal stupidity; like many of them, she became an isolationist, of a certain kind, because she did not want to repeat the experience. (237)
Neither Paterson nor Rand were pacifists; but both were of the belief that the greatest horrors were perpetuated by the war-time attempts to collectivize human beings. “People are very seldom murderous as individuals; they become murderous when they become gullible followers of that monster, the state,” writes Cox of Paterson’s view. Paterson therefore opposed both the fascists and the communists and “advocated intervention against neither Germany nor Russia” (238). Cox quotes Paterson: “Whichever destroys the other, leaves a destroyer the less for the world” (239). Paterson was hardly amazed when Stalin and Hitler signed their “Communazi” 1939 pact, demonstrating their totalitarian commonality. And even as U.S. entry into the war became a foregone conclusion, Paterson was still fighting that “spirit of collectivism” (243), which war inspired. On these grounds, she rejected military conscription, wartime censorship and propaganda, and attacked FDR relentlessly.
Like Paterson, Rand had supported FDR in 1932. Rand actually called Roosevelt the more “libertarian” candidate, for his stance on prohibition (Barbara Branden, The Passion of Ayn Rand, Doubleday, 1986, 158). But by 1940, both Paterson and Rand, so violently opposed to the New Deal, and to FDR’s unprecedented third term desires, supported the Republican candidate Wendell Willkie. Both women became increasingly disillusioned with the Republican Party and with Willkie’s weak campaign, however. In later years, Rand’s disillusionment with the GOP extended even to Ronald Reagan; she repudiated him not only for his stance on abortion and his ties to the religious right, but also because he had “exaggerate[d] the power of the most incompetent nation in the world,” manipulating Americans with “fear” of a Soviet military build-up, something that was “not a patriotic service to the United States” (“The Moral Factor”).
One wonders how Rand would have reacted to those who, today, manipulate the Crayola palette of “Alert Levels” to keep Americans in perpetual fear of terrorist attacks.
Rand and those associated with her Objectivist Newsletter had long argued that the Soviets were parasites on the military technology of the West, and that U.S. foreign policy had stabilized the Communist regime. Again, from my essay, “Understanding the Global Crisis”:
Drawing from John T. Flynn’s book, The Roosevelt Myth, [Rand’s early associate] Barbara Branden stressed that FDR was inspired by Bismarck, Mussolini, and Hitler in establishing a liberal corporatist “New Deal” that further devastated a depressed economy (The Objectivist Newsletter, December 1962). Provoking war in the Pacific, Roosevelt used “national defense” as a pretext for resolving the unemployment problem by drafting American boys to fight and die in foreign wars, while sending $11 billion in Lend-Lease assistance to the Soviets, and developing secret post-war agreements with Stalin to surrender nearly three-quarters of a billion people into communist slavery. (Rand herself believed that this strategy made Russia “the only winner” of World War II [“The Shanghai Gesture, Part I”]. She also questioned the wisdom of entering that war’s European theater on the side of the Soviets—suggesting that a Nazi-Soviet conflict might have severely weakened the victor [e.g., see “Communism and HUAC” in Journals of Ayn Rand].)
As I have maintained, there is a quasi-Hayekian principle at work here that Rand fully acknowledged:
Government intervention in the economy and U.S. intervention abroad mirrored each other in one significant respect: each problem caused by statist intervention led to new interventionist attempts to resolve it. Just as World War I begat World War II, and World War II begat the Cold War, so too did the Cold War beget “hot” wars in Korea and Vietnam, in which more than 100,000 drafted Americans lost their lives. Vietnam especially had laid bare the inner contradictions of U.S. foreign policy. “There is no proper solution for the war in Vietnam,” Rand counseled at the time; “it is a war we should never have entered. We are caught in a trap: it is senseless to continue, and it is now impossible to withdraw” (“From My ‘Future File’”). Rand had opposed U.S. involvement in both Korea and Vietnam, and wondered why the U.S. had “sacrificed thousands of American lives, and billions of dollars, to protect a primitive people who never had freedom, do not seek it, and, apparently, do not want it” (“The Shanghai Gesture, Part III”).
Again, one should hardly wonder what Rand would have thought about the neoconservative crusade to bring “democracy” to the Middle East—this, of course, quite separate from any need to respond in kind to attacks upon the United States, like the devastating tragedy of 9/11. One thing is clear: Whatever Rand’s own inconsistencies (some of which I discuss here), her opposition to virtually all of the major U.S. wars in the twentieth century has been obscured by many of her modern-day exponents. As she wrote in her essay, “Moral Inflation”:
There still are people in this country who lost loved ones in World War I. There are more people who carry the unhealed wounds of World War II, of Korea, of Vietnam. There are the disabled, the crippled, the mangled of those wars’ battlefields. No one has ever told them why they had to fight nor what their sacrifices accomplished; it was certainly not “to make the world safe for democracy”—look at that world now. The American people have borne it all, trusting their leaders, hoping that someone knew the purpose of that ghastly devastation.
The “ghastly devastation” continues in Iraq, where, as of this date, the American people have sacrificed over $150 billion and over 1,200 lives, not to mention 30,000+ casualties requiring “medical evacuation”—all for the privilege of giving “democracy” to a country steeped in tribal, ethnic, and religious warfare.
Rand denounced regularly the pragmatist politicians who had no understanding of the long-term consequences of their amoral “range-of-the-moment” global “manipulations” (“A Last Survey, Part I”). She frequently
invoked the spirit of the Old Right critics of U.S. involvement in World War II, who had been smeared as “America First’ers” (“Britain’s ‘National Socialism’”). She despised those who had coined the “anti-concept” of “isolationism” as a means of denouncing “any patriotic opponent of America’s self-immolation” (“The Lessons of Vietnam”). ... Rand stood firmly against the “altruistic” evil of foreign “interventionism” or “internationalism” that had undermined long-term U.S. interests. She repudiated the claim “that isolationism is selfish, immoral, and impractical in a ‘shrinking’ modern world” (“The Chickens’ Homecoming”).
Rand’s insights ring true as much for our generation as for hers.
Tomorrow, the conclusion: The current war and the quest for a foreign policy ideal.
See also Part I, Part II, Part III, and Part V.
Check out Not a Blog.
Wednesday, December 8, 2004
Peter Schwartz and the Abandonment of Rand’s Radical Legacy, Part III
In part one and part two of this series, I outlined a few core points in Objectivist Peter Schwartz’s new book, The Foreign Policy of Self-Interest: A Moral Ideal for America. After discussing inadequacies in Schwartz’s analysis of the U.N. and U.S. foreign aid policy, I now turn to his examination of the problem of Saudi Arabia.
Saudi Arabia
The ever-expanding “neofascist” process that Rand identified in her critique of contemporary politics is further illustrated by the U.S. government’s socialization of corporate risk across the globe, granting corporations access to American taxpayer dollars—and the U.S. military if need be—to protect their foreign investments. Schwartz seems to approve of this. Looking at how Western-developed oil fields have been expropriated by foreign governments, such as Saudi Arabia, Schwartz would have us believe that it is the U.S. government’s duty to “safeguard American lives and property” abroad “by using retaliatory force against the initiators” (15). Hence, for Schwartz,
America could readily take over the oilfields [in Saudi Arabia] militarily (they properly belong to Western companies anyway, which developed them and from which they were expropriated decades ago by the Saudi state). The only explanation is that we have morally acquiesced to the Saudis. We are reluctant to pronounce judgment on them. We don’t believe we are entitled to assert our own standards. We have concluded that we must compromise those standards—i.e., that we have to give up some of our freedom—in order to accommodate the wishes of tyrants. (38)
Well, this is not “the only explanation.” Again, Schwartz misses the underlying dynamic at work in the current political system. That’s because, almost without fail, he focuses on moral issues acontextually; he insists on pronouncing sweeping moral judgments on various global phenomena but frequently brackets out any discussion of the actual history—the actual context—within which these phenomena have evolved. We are left, in the end, with moral generalizations that are disconnected from the concrete circumstances with which Schwartz attempts to grapple.
I’ve long argued that U.S. companies short-sighted enough to enter into contracts with foreign governments like those of the former Soviet Union or Saudi Arabia—which had/have a poor history of upholding private property rights—should not have the right to hold American taxpayers and lives hostage to their stupidity. “We” do not have an obligation to bail out Western oil companies whose property was “expropriated” by the House of Sa’ud. A cursory look at the history of oil development in Saudi Arabia would show us, in any event, that the Western oil industry has been in bed—“embedded” if you will—with their ‘expropriators’ from the beginning. Nothing much has actually changed since the Saudi government ‘took over’ the oil by successively increasing its share of the Arabian-American Oil Company (ARAMCO); U.S. administrators, technicians, and personnel are still firmly in place and U.S. oil companies like Exxon-Mobil remain at the forefront of all new oil exploration in the country.
As I’ve argued here, the formation of the Rockefeller-controlled ARAMCO depended upon a 60-year monopoly concession from the Saudi Arabian government; that government didn’t have the moral right to grant such monopoly concessions to begin with.
Let me emphasize a key point here: This was not homesteading. Western oil companies didn’t simply arrive on the Arabian peninsula so as to “mix their labor” with the land in order to attain Lockean acquisition rights. They were granted monopoly concessions in advance of drilling. Such concessions entail monopolizing all the oil in a vast land area through state force, which bars competing oil producers who might seek out oil in that area. The monopolist, in other words, uses the host government to gain control over a land mass through ownership claims granted by that government, which has no such legitimate authority to grant ownership rights (see Rothbard, The Ethics of Liberty).
ARAMCO, as such, was born of a political relationship. And the U.S. government facilitated this Saudi-Western oil arrangement over time. In the early days, the Rockefeller-influenced U.S. Export-Import Bank even paid $25 million to the Saudis to construct pleasure railroads, while Franklin D. Roosevelt provided $165 million in secret appropriations out of war funds to help in the construction of ARAMCO pipelines across Saudi Arabia. Over the years, the money made by the House of Sa’ud in granting the monopoly concession was pumped into the creation of institutions dedicated to the dissemination of fanatical Wahhabi ideology, which has been exported to the rest of the Arab world—fueling fundamentalism and terrorism throughout the region.
Schwartz himself bemoans this Saudi Arabia-U.S. alliance and the financing of “an array of Wahhabi indoctrination schools, or madrasas, where new crops of Islamic holy-warriors are continually cultivated ...” But instead of focusing on the money that drives the establishment and growth of these schools, Schwartz is simply disgusted by the “utterly perverse” U.S. “readiness to grant [the Saudis] a moral endorsement” (34). That “moral endorsement” goes hand-in-hand with a politico-economic endorsement. And this is why it is a virtual certainty that the Saudi government will never be touched by the U.S. in the current “War on Terror.” As I wrote in my essay, “A Question of Loyalty”:
And throughout this whole “War on Terror,” the poisonous soil from which Bin Laden emerged—Saudi Arabia—remains untouched. While the U.S. is busy fighting in Iraq, it sleeps with the Saudis, continuing a 60+ year-affair that most likely led the Bush administration to blot out 28 pages from a report on the failure of 9/11 intelligence, which might have embarrassed its Saudi “allies.” U.S. corporations engage in joint business ventures with the Saudi government—from petroleum to arms deals—utilizing a whole panoply of statist mechanisms, including the Export-Import Bank. The U.S. is Saudi Arabia’s largest investor and trading partner.
In the history of ARAMCO and the U.S.-Saudi partnership, we find the kind of “pull-peddling” that Rand condemned as “neofascist.” And it is the U.S.-Saudi-Big Oil Unholy Trinity that continues to sustain an autocratic, undemocratic Saudi regime, one of the breeding grounds of Islamic terrorism. Yes, that regime finds itself increasingly at odds with the fanatical elements in its midst. As I argued at length here, “the fundamentalist ideology that the House of Sa'ud has long funded and exported is now undermining its very rule. While the failure of the Saudi state at this point in time would be an utter catastrophe, those who would take power—the fanatical fundamentalists among them—are, to borrow a Randian phrase, 'the distilled essence of the [Saudi] Establishment's culture ... the embodiment of its soul' and its 'personified ideal'." (An interesting article on this subject, "Al Qaeda on the March" by Ehsan Ahrari, was published today.)
None of these complexities are even mentioned by Schwartz in his book.
Tomorrow: The History of U.S. Foreign Policy.
See also Part I, Part II, Part IV and Part V.
Check out Not a Blog.
Tuesday, December 7, 2004
Peter Schwartz and the Abandonment of Rand’s Radical Legacy, Part II
Foreign Aid and the United Nations
In part one of this series, I introduced this discussion of Objectivist Peter Schwartz’s new book, The Foreign Policy of Self-Interest: A Moral Ideal for America. I outlined briefly his core argument and suggested that it was marred by ahistorical and rationalistic elements.
One example of what I’m driving at can be found in Schwartz’s discussion of foreign aid and the United Nations. “Multi-billions in U.S. foreign aid are doled out to countries that excoriate us as corrupt hegemonists,” Schwartz asserts. “America is routinely vilified at the United Nations, while we blandly continue to provide the financial and political support which makes the existence of that dictatorship-laden body possible” (9). Now, I’m certainly sympathetic to Schwartz’s repudiation of “that disgraceful organization” (44), and of any doctrine that compels the U.S. to act only with the U.N.’s “blessing”(49). I’m less inclined, however, to accept his argument that the U.S. financially sustains the U.N. “with a variety of welfare programs” that are steeped in an “altruist” ethos. Schwartz argues, for instance, that “if Africa needs money to deal with a medical crisis, America provides it. If Mexico needs another massive loan—America arranges it. If China needs nuclear technology—America furnishes it” (10)—all on the basis of the irrational principle that America somehow “owes” it to the world. This is, for Schwartz, an internationalization of the domestic redistributive welfare state (18).
That’s true, but not really in the sense that Schwartz means it. What Schwartz doesn’t quite get is that the U.S. typically enters into these arrangements under an ideological veneer—the “altruistic injunction to think of others before ourselves,” as he describes it (10)—while, in truth, it is embracing the other side of a lethal sacrificial coin. Instead of sacrificing itself for the good of other countries, it is actually sacrificing the wealth of its own taxpayers for the benefit of politically connected corporations and foreign “client” governments. This is not simply a left-wing “materialist” assertion; it is actually a claim made by Ayn Rand herself. (And, in this regard, Rand is part of a larger tradition of individualist, classical liberal, and libertarian thinkers who have exposed the biases at work in state interventionism. See especially part two of my book, Total Freedom.)
Schwartz does not focus on this reality because nowhere in his monograph is there any mention of the complex dynamics of American political economy. And make no mistake about it: The “mixed economy” that Rand derides as “neofascist” was most definitely a political economy. Rand had identified the “business-government ‘partnership’” as the “economic essence” of the U.S. politico-economic system, which she characterized as the “New Fascism.” (On the nature of this kind of “fascism,” see here and here.) As I have written in my essay, “Understanding the Global Crisis” (the parenthetical references here are to Rand’s articles):
This was—and is—a de facto, predatory fascism, the result of pragmatic expediency and of ad hoc, incremental policies that had enriched some groups at the expense of others (“The New Fascism: Rule By Consensus”). ... In such a system, [Rand] argued, we are all victims and victimizers; the whole society becomes a “class of beggars” (“Books: Poverty is Where the Money Is”). For once the rule of force begins to predominate, the institutional means for legalized predation expand exponentially. “If this is a society’s system,” writes Rand, “no power on earth can prevent men from ganging up on one another in self-defense—i.e., from forming pressure groups” (“How to Read (and Not to Write)”).
The New Fascism therefore “accelerates the process of juggling debts, switching losses, piling loans on loans, mortgaging the future and the future’s future. As things grow worse, the government protects itself not by contracting this process, but by expanding it” beyond its national borders. Just as pressure groups had slurped at the government trough in seeking domestic privileges, so too did they benefit from a whole global system of foreign aid, involving financial manipulation (through, for example, the Federal Reserve System, the Ex-Im Bank, and the IMF), “credits to foreign consumers to enable them to consume” U.S.-produced goods, “unpaid loans to foreign governments, and subsidies to other welfare states,” to the United Nations, and to the World Bank (“Egalitarianism and Inflation”).
Note here that Rand recognizes these global institutions as constituted parts of U.S. political economy. These constituents express the neofascist “economic essence” of the system, while also perpetuating it and extending it. (A constituent, in this context, is an integrated part of a larger system, an “internally related” part, if you will; it expresses the logic of that system, and, when taken together with other constituents, makes up the system of which it is only a part.)
Rand goes further: “If looting collectivists did not exist, America’s foreign aid policy would create them.” The overwhelming profiteers of this system were those peculiar “products ... of the mixed economy,” those statist businessmen who “seek to grow rich not by means of productive ability, but by means of political pull and of special political privileges.” Rand observes “that there are firms here and there, in various businesses and industries, who are growing prosperous by trading with foreign countries, the specific foreign countries who receive American aid. In other words, there are businessmen who are selling their products to the foreign countries receiving American aid and who are paid by American funds—who are paid by the aid money granted to those countries. In other words, some Americans are draining the money, the tax money, of other Americans, into their own pockets, via a longer tour through every corner of the globe which receives our foreign aid. This tax money is taken from some citizens, handed to foreign governments and pressure groups and then [it] comes back to some of our citizens, through those successful pressure groups who have pull in Washington.” This was a “siphoning” process, in Rand’s view, a “necessary corollary of a mixed economy, or rather the necessary expression of a mixed economy, now being carried to the international scene. It is a civil war gone international; it is pressure groups using foreign countries in order to destroy our own. That is the meaning of our foreign aid policy” (“The Foreign Policy of the Mixed Economy,” tape).
Rand may have viewed this as American self-immolation in the grander scheme of things, but it is most definitely the kind of self-immolation on which parasitic corporations feast. And the iron triangle here has awful implications: the U.S. government enriches certain politically connected corporations along with the host governments that purchase those corporate goods and services. This introduces additional pressures on the U.S. from foreign lobbyists who profit from the political arrangements. Summarizing Rand’s arguments, I write:
Thus, the New Fascism exports “the bloody chaos of tribal warfare” to the rest of the world, creating a whole class of “pull peddlers” among both foreign and domestic lobbyists, who feed on the carcass of the American taxpayer, causing massive global political, social, and economic dislocations (“The Pull Peddlers”). Whereas the Left derided “capitalist imperialism” for this state of affairs, Rand recognized that capitalism, “the unknown ideal,” had taken the blame for the sins of its opposite. She lamented the internationalization of the New Fascism; given “the interdependence of the Western world,” all countries are “leaning on one another as bad risks, bad consuming parasite borrowers.” She recognized how the system’s dynamics propelled such internationalization, but advised: “The [fewer] ties we have with any other countries, the better off we will be.” Suggesting a biological analogy in warning against the spread of neofascism, she quips: “If you have a disease, should you get a more serious form of it, and will that help you?” (“Egalitarianism and Inflation” Q&A tape, 1974). In discussing a section of the 1972 Communique between the U.S. and Red China, Rand suggests a universal principle. “[L]ike charity,” she writes, “courage, consistency, integrity have to begin at home ... [w]hat we are now doing to others ... we began by doing it to ourselves. We are the victims of self-inflicted bacteriological warfare: altruism is the bacteria of amorality. Pragmatism is the bacteria of impotence” (“The Shanghai Gesture,” Part III).
Regrettably, Peter Schwartz captures none of these insidious political processes in his monograph because he doesn’t even bother to ask the relevant questions on which Rand herself focused. And his analytical myopia is not confined to the issue of foreign aid.
Tomorrow: Saudi Arabia.
See also Part I, Part III, Part IV, and Part V.
Check out Not a Blog.
New Terror Alert Levels
I wish I could find this darn cartoon on the web, but at the very least, I did clip it from the NY Times this past Sunday. It was reproduced in the "Week in Review" section from Newsday. The cartoonist Walt Handelsman depicts a guy who sees a newspaper heading: "Bernard Kerik, NYPD Vet." The guy says: "They Hired a New Yorker to Run Homeland Security." On the guy's TV set, the "New Terror Alert Codes" are posted, replacing Tom Ridge's color alerts:
1. Fuhgeddaboudit...
2. How You Doin'?
3. Osama This!
4. You Talkin' to Me?
5. @#*! Me? ... @#*! YOU!!!
Monday, December 6, 2004
Peter Schwartz and the Abandonment of Rand’s Radical Legacy, Part I
Introduction
For several years now, I’ve been engaged in a critique of the foreign policy writings of various Objectivists, who, I believe, have abandoned Ayn Rand’s radical insights on the nature of U.S. politics. For those who are not Ayn Rand fans or who don’t care one iota what Objectivists have to say on U.S. foreign policy, this week’s five-part series (which begins today) might not provide the requisite excitement. But for those readers who are classical liberals and libertarians, and who see, on a daily basis, the erosion of the noninterventionist tradition of liberalism, this series will have some merit. Suffice it to say: In fighting for Rand’s radical legacy, I’m fighting simultaneously for that noninterventionist tradition that stands opposed to the welfare-warfare state, while seeking to comprehend the inextricable relationship between the “welfare” and the “warfare” part of that equation.
In my essay, “Understanding the Global Crisis: Reclaiming Rand’s Radical Legacy,” I argued that too many Objectivist writers in the post-9/11 era were suffering from historical amnesia. It’s as if they have forgotten most of what Rand said on the issue of foreign policy; one will be hard pressed to find any quotes from Rand’s various foreign policy essays and lectures in any of the books, journals, and online periodicals to which Objectivists have contributed.
It’s not fair, of course, to suggest that a lack of references to Rand is a sign of abandonment. Clearly, these writers have been influenced by Rand’s broad ethical and political precepts, especially those concerning egoism and individual rights. But there is a disturbing pattern among Objectivist writers to ignore Rand’s actual foreign policy pronouncements, which continue to have relevance for the modern world. When such writers are writing explicitly on the subject of foreign policy, that ignorance has far-reaching implications for the quality and persuasiveness of their arguments.
This pattern is on display yet again in the newest book by Objectivist writer Peter Schwartz, The Foreign Policy of Self-Interest: A Moral Ideal for America (Ayn Rand Institute Press, 2004)—which has exactly one quote from Rand, and this quote does not derive from any of her work on foreign policy. In his preface to the Schwartz monograph, Ayn Rand Institute Executive Director Yaron Brook tells us that this work is part of a series on “The Moral Foundations of Public Policy.” For Brook, “[f]oreign policy is neither a starting point nor a self-contained field. It is, rather, the product of certain ideas in political and moral philosophy. ... It has failed because of the bankrupt moral philosophy our political leaders have chosen to accept: the philosophy of altruism and self-sacrifice” (5). Schwartz’s work goes a long way toward explaining these ideas, and it succeeds in highlighting some very important issues. (Some of this work derives from a series of articles that Schwartz published back in March and April 1986, “Foreign Policy and the Morality of Self-Interest,” in The Intellectual Activist.) Objectivist Harry Binswanger has gone so far as to say that Schwartz has provided us with “the foreign policy Bible for America and any other free society.”
Ultimately, however, the book fails to recapture Rand’s radical framework of analysis, which, from a political standpoint, seeks to understand and overturn U.S. government policies at home and abroad.
Of course, Rand’s radicalism is not primarily political; it is a methodological radicalism, a radical way of thinking upon which political and social change is built. Karl Marx once said: “To be radical is to grasp things by the root” (“The Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right”). Though Rand repudiated Marx’s communism and its collectivist premises, she championed the notion of the “radical in the proper sense of the word”; as she explained: “‘radical’ means ‘fundamental.’” For Rand, “the fighters for capitalism have to be, not bankrupt ‘conservatives,’ but new radicals, new intellectuals and, above all, new, dedicated moralists” (“Conservatism: An Obituary”).
But the power of Rand’s methodological radicalism went beyond a search for roots. In seeking to understand the system of contemporary statism, Rand shows how various factors often mutually supported one another in sustaining the irrationality and injustice of that system. It was only by clarifying the various relationships at work that we could begin to alter them fundamentally.
Schwartz’s Core Argument
Peter Schwartz certainly hopes to clarify the moral premises at work in U.S. foreign policy. Schwartz states “that self-interest can be successfully defended only if it is embraced as a consistent, moral principle—a principle in keeping with America’s founding values” (12). He continues: “Just as in ethics it is maintaining his own life that should be the individual’s ultimate purpose, in politics it is maintaining its own citizens’ liberty that should be the government’s ultimate purpose” (14). For Schwartz, “[i]n both domestic and foreign policy, the proper role of government is to protect the citizen’s basic political interest: freedom” (19). As such, Schwartz disavows “nationalism [as] a collectivist idea” (19). He rejects “diplomacy” as “the opposite of justice,” because it presumes that “we must maintain cordial relations” with dictatorships and treat all regimes with respect, regardless of their moral legitimacy (20). He renounces appeasement, and the “pragmatist” policy of buying off “allies” with economic aid. In Schwartz’s view, a practical foreign policy identifies liberty as the “central value,” and develops the “basic means” to defend it.
For those who want the “bottom line,” here it is: Schwartz may have correctly defined some key principles here, but his discussion is marred by a rationalistic streak. Such principles make the most sense only in a context where the government is strictly limited; today’s government, however, is not focused on protecting individual rights, but on doling out privileges to those who are most adept at using the political process.
Schwartz is so caught up in his pan-and-scan black-and-white picture of foreign policy that his model fails to comprehend the full widescreen technicolor portrait, which his philosophic mentor grasped with relative ease.
I will begin to explore these topics in greater detail tomorrow, in part two of this five-part series.
See also Part II, Part III, Part IV, and Part V.
Check out Not a Blog.
Tuesday, November 30, 2004
And the Answer Is...
This Jeopardy contestant had 74 consecutive wins, earning $2,520,700, for most money won and most wins recorded on a TV game show. He's the subject of an A&E Biography tomorrow night, and competes against himself in scheduled appearances on Nightline and the Late Show with David Letterman tonight. And he just lost in his 75th appearance on this classic game show.
Question: Who is Ken Jennings?
Congratulations, Ken! What a terrific run!
Update: Jennings' actual winnings totaled $2,522,700. He got that extra $2,000 for coming in second in his losing round. And Nancy Zerg, who beat Jennings on Nov. 30th, lost, and came in third, on Dec. 1st.
Sunday, November 28, 2004
God Hates Fags... But Shepard's Killers Don't
Lots of news is being generated over a 20/20 report that casts doubt on the murder of Matthew Shepard as a "hate crime." I am firmly opposed to legislating "hate crimes" and spoke out against it even in the context of the Shepard murder. And yet, while Elizabeth Vargas, the investigative reporter, uncovers a number of problems with the "gay hate" nature of the Shepard case, I have to say that I'm troubled by the inconsistencies. Vargas seems to support the current claims of Shepard's killers, who say that the murder was motivated not by hatred of gays, but by robbery, and inspired by drug use. Still, I can't see how any of the current pronouncements of these killers would stand up under interrogation.
Some of the acquaintances of convicted murderer Aaron McKinney claim, for example, that McKinney and Shepard knew each other from the drug scene in Laramie, Wyoming. Yet, McKinney denies it to Vargas. Some of McKinney's acquaintances claim that McKinney is bisexual. Yet, McKinney denies it to Vargas, though he says that now he does have gay friends. (Where? In prison? Oy.) Still, if we are to believe that McKinney did have affairs with men, why would that make him any less likely to manifest gay-hate? It would fit the description of the classic self-denying "homophobe" who gets all bent out of shape when a "fag" like Shepard places his hand on the self-denier's leg.
This same Aaron McKinney, whose new pronouncements we are being told are true, once used a "gay panic" defense at his trial, hoping to cash-in on what many perceived to be a sympathetic anti-gay culture in Laramie. Now he wants to retract that defense.
Why should we believe anything these killers say when even now they are manifesting inconsistencies? And who cares? A young man is dead. And McKinney and Russell Henderson were convicted of his murder.
As I said: I am against hate crime laws. But let's not forget that many of the ugly happenings in Laramie—including all the hoopla surrounding the trial, the Fred Phelps "Fags in Hell" protests, the bigotry, the hate—took place because of that trial. Even if there wasn't a smidgeon of "gay hate" in the souls of Shepard's killers, the fact that those killers used "gay panic" as a defense and that the gay-haters came out of the woodwork during that trial is enough to convince me that there are cultural issues of profound importance here, which cannot be denied.
Ironically, just this morning, two Sunday news shows—"This Week with George Stephanopoulos" and "Meet the Press"—examined the cultural divide on issues like homosexuality and same-sex marriage. Together with continuing stories on the religious revival in the United States (see the NY Times here and here, and discussions here at L&P), it is clear that this is an issue that just won't go away.
And how could it? Not when Jerry Falwell—who once blamed perverts for God's wrath on 9/11, only to apologize for it—is once again pointing the finger at pagans, perverts, and a "lethargic church" as the causal factors in the current jihad. Here's what the founder of the new "Faith and Values Coalition" said this morning on "Meet the Press":
I do believe, as Ben Franklin said, that God rules in the affairs of men and nations. I believe that when God blesses a nation as he's blessed America for a lot of reasons, things happen that don't happen other places. I believe that when we defy the Lord, I think we pay a price for it. So I do believe in the sovereignty of God. ... I do believe that, corporately, God deals with a nation.
Falwell added that, if people "turn from their wicked ways," God "promised three things: 1) I will hear from heaven; 2) I will forgive their sins; 3) I will heal their land. And I believe that conversely works, if we don't do that, I believe that God can judge us."
There you have it. Falwell, who praised the election of Bush as the "Christian" choice, is simply packaging his initial 9/11 message with a little less explicit venom. The USA is filled with infidel who are turning from the Lord and that's why such nightmarish tragedies will continue to befall this country. In other words, this country is going to hell, and it's all because of pagans and perverts, people like, well, people like ... Matthew Shepard.
Wednesday, November 24, 2004
Of Locusts, Lincoln, and the Lord
As millions of locusts swarmed through Israel over the weekend, some commentators are already speaking of Biblical symbolism and omens. Even here in the U.S., the debate over religion and moral values continues on an almost daily basis.
So, here comes a report (discussed here) that religious conservatives are angry about accompanying films and books at various national parks. A film depicting historic marches at the Lincoln Memorial, for example, includes images of pro-choice, civil rights, and gay marches, and it is now the target of a Christian conservative group that wants it pulled from the monument. The Rev. Lou Sheldon, chairman of "Traditional Values Coalition," was angered to see this "pro-homosexual, pro-abortion" film on view, and National Park Service personnel are being asked to edit out the offending images at considerable cost to taxpayers. An ABC World News Tonight report tells us that it's all about "who controls the portrayal of history," a drama which "has been playing out in national parks across the country" from the Lincoln Memorial to the Grand Canyon. In a bookstore at the latter site, a book is on sale which states that the Grand Canyon was formed by the Lord at the time of Noah and the Great Flood. Scientists are now protesting the inclusion of this book in a national park service establishment; they believe it is a "slap" against science.
In the meanwhile, Sheldon is gleeful; he tells us that during the Clinton administration, Christian conservatives felt as if they "lived in outer Siberia." With the Bush administration retaining power, "it's like we died and went to heaven."
Verily I say to thee, in my idea of heaven, all property is privatized and the people who own this property can show anything they want as long as their actions don't violate anybody else's rights.
As I said, this is my idea of heaven. Back on earth, however, public property exists and flourishes, and battles over the content on public display in films and books are inevitable.
Tuesday, November 23, 2004
Hurd on Same-Sex Marriage
The gay marriage debate has brought out a lot of venom on both sides of the issue divide. It's also brought out a little humor from Roseanne Barr, who, on "Jimmy Kimmel Live, commented: "First of all, if you are someone who thinks that gay sex is gross and unnatural, then you should be for their right to marry, because that will put an end to all that sex, just like it does for the straight people."
Ah, Barr puts her finger on one of the dysfunctional aspects of marriage, circa 2004. I, myself, would like to see the whole marital debate focused on privatization, though I fully understand why gays and lesbians want a piece of the pie, so-to-speak.
There's an interesting article by the Rand-influenced psychologist and author Michael J. Hurd on "The Institution of Marriage." Hurd opens his provocative essay with this passage:
If a group of people lined up to board the Titanic as it were sinking, you would say they were irrational. If these people were denied admission to the sinking Titanic because of race, creed, or sexual orientation, and then became angry over this discrimination, you would not even know what to say. "Of course," you might say, "it's irrational to deny admission for these reasons. But why would anyone want to embark on a sinking ship in the first place?"
Hurd is right, of course, that not everybody who opposes gay marriage is anti-gay. He's also correct that Bush has voiced support for protecting legal civil unions for same-sex couples, though, clearly, a few of those anti-gay marriage ballot initiatives in Election 2004 were designed to destroy even that possibility. But what is most interesting about Hurd's comments is his attack on the very institution of marriage "as we presently know it." He argues "that romantic love is a profoundly important thing for human beings," and "that voluntarily entered, non-coercive arrangements surrounding long-term love relationships must also be treated with respect by a just government. But one would hope that these legal arrangements can be implemented through much more rational means than the current 'institution of marriage' has so far delivered." Hurd reminds us of a 50% divorce rate, of emotional baggage and obligation, of sacrificial offerings, of irresponsibility, and concludes:
"Institutions" refer to prisons, courthouses and psychiatric hospitals. Love is not a building or an abstract duty to some undefined, unarticulated notion of tradition for tradition's sake, as President Bush seems to view it. Love is the personal and mutual enjoyment of two people. Their sense of commitment flows from this love. Commitment is a consequence, not a cause. Gay couples should be happy to create their own civil unions without the baggage of existing notions of marriage. Heterosexual couples would do well to follow them.
The only problem here is that there is a far more likely possibility of facing political resistance to the destruction of state-sanctioned marriage wholesale than to the notion of same-sex marriage in particular. Either way, the battle is just beginning.
Monday, November 22, 2004
Ryan Sager Rethinks Libertarianism
In "Rethinking Libertarian Minimalism" and on his blog (starting here), Ryan Sager has been lashing out at libertarians because they have, he says, an "inability" to say anything "serious ... regarding foreign policy. Pacifism combined with isolationism, as preached more or less by many at Cato and Reason is neither the popular nor the correct answer to the threat of global terrorism. And hunting Osama bin Laden, as was the Kerry solution, is, frankly, just an idiotic personalization of a phenomenon that ultimately, make no mistake about it, amounts to a historic clash of civilizations," he writes.
One of the problems, of course, "facile" or not, is that there is no such thing as a monolithic libertarian position on foreign policy; we can argue all we want about who is the "true" libertarian in all this, but that debate is fast becoming religious (like who is the true "Christian" among scores of Christian sects). Truth is, there has been an amazingly diverse response from libertarian writers on the subject of the war. Some of us favored the Afghanistan campaign, some stopped short at Iraq, while others supported the Iraq war and would like to move on to Iran and Saudi Arabia. Still others have opposed U.S. government actions anywhere, suggesting Letters of Marque as an alternative. This is evidence, I think, that a serious debate has been taking place for several years now among libertarians about the best course of action.
I can only speak for myself. In this "historic clash of civilizations," one thing is important: If one is not to merely oppose the dark forces in the Middle East, but triumph over them, one must not adopt and practice the very policies that emboldened these forces to begin with. It is not a serious solution to the long-term problem of Islamic terrrorism if libertarians merely mimic the neoconservatives, providing them with an ideological apologia for their "muscular foreign policy" goals.
True enough, Sager understands that "those of us who espouse a philosophy of limited government domestically" have faced difficulties in the post-9/11 era. But that's because most of us who espouse this philosophy understand the intimate relationship between the growth of an interventionist policy abroad and one at home. That doesn't mean that we're "mired in a pre-9/11 mindset"; what it does mean is that we are capable of applying a classical liberal mindset to today's problems in a way that seeks not to duplicate the same policy mistakes, which formed part of the context for the 9/11 catastrophe.
Sager is correct to emphasize various areas requiring deeper discussion, specifically on the question of how to encourage liberalization and democratic-liberal nation-building in deeply illiberal Middle Eastern societies. He asks: "What are the prerequisites of a free society? How can they be fostered? How can we turn over power to the people we've liberated?" I've been asking, and answering, similar questions from the beginning; one of the reasons I opposed the invasion and occupation of Iraq is that I opposed the neocon belief that it is possible to simply institute democracy without certain cultural prerequisites.
One more thing needs to be addressed here. Though Sager is willing to concede that "[p]eople of good will and good judgment disagreed about the Iraq invasion before it happened, and [that] we all have our various assessments of how it has turned out so far," he is urging libertarians to come up with a good way to fix the problem. He seems to suggest, however, that antiwar libertarians are simply "sounding more and more like Michael Moore," not quite able to truly understand the nature of this war as a "clash of civilizations."
Justin Raimondo had something valuable to say about this issue in last week's antiwar.com column, "Why We Fight," where he:
underscore[s] the self-undermining mechanism of the effort to "export democracy," as one neoconservative publicist puts it. The process of spreading a "global democratic revolution" – in the president's words – not only subverts democracy at home, but also discredits and defeats it throughout the Middle East. If "democracy" and even "free markets" are represented by foreign invaders and their local quislings, then sheer pride and instinctual nationalism will give rise to a rebellion of illiberalism. ...
The outright barbarism of the defenders of Fallujah – the beheadings, the kidnappings, the suicide bombings – is the work of a "resistance" that is in no way admirable. The various groups that have arisen in opposition to the American occupation – the Islamists, the neo-Ba'athists, the radical Shi'ites, etc. – are all of them totalitarians of either a religious or secular cast, with the former rapidly gaining the upper hand. No American peace movement worthy of the name can give them any kind of support: they are not the "minutemen" of Michael Moore's imagination, unless one views Patrick Henry as some sort of improbable early American ayatollah – which he was most certainly not. ...
Today, we oppose the occupation of Iraq, without granting the Islamist-Ba'athist resistance a single iota of moral or political legitimacy. ... Yes, it is understandable that an occupied people will fight back: but totalitarians feed on legitimate grievances, and often come to power because they seem to address them. The tragedy and irony of our war of "liberation" in Iraq is that it is empowering the very forces – and, make no mistake about it, they are dark forces – we seek to defeat. ...
Yes, we are at war with radical Islam. However, that struggle does not require the democratic "transformation" of the Middle East, but rather a recognition of the reality that we are fighting an asymmetric war against a worldwide guerrilla insurgency, not a traditional-style battle to conquer and occupy nation-states – a battle that must be won politically, primarily, and conducted militarily only in a precise and strictly limited sense. Our strategy must be to isolate the Islamists, and that requires the renunciation, not the escalation, of the foreign policy that gave birth to the jihadists in the first place.
I have some differences with Raimondo in this excerpt. I don't believe, for example, that U.S. foreign policy gave birth to the jihadists but it certainly emboldened them. Of course, I should add that some kind of cultural transformation in the Middle East will be necessary in the long-run; but, with Raimondo, I believe that it won't be achieved by the forced grafting of "democratic" institutions onto cultures that reject them. In any event, my point here is a simple one: even Justin Raimondo, whom I take to be among the most profoundly opposed to U.S. intervention abroad, is under no illusions about the dangers of radical Islam.
Sager is worried that if libertarians don't get with the prowar program, "we risk utter irrelevancy in a post-9/11 world with a tendency toward increasing state power." Alas, opposing that increase, and fighting the right battle against the forces of oppression at home and abroad, is more relevant than ever. And though relentless military battles will need to be fought, the primary battle remains philosophical and cultural. Armed with an understanding of the nature of freedom, its preconditions and effects, armed also with an understanding of the unintended consequences of political action, most libertarians are well-armed indeed to fight this battle.
Sunday, November 21, 2004
I Told You So (Again)
Just a note here to direct readers to an essay of mine posted to SOLO HQ: "I Told You So." L&P readers will be familiar with my comments there on Election 2004, since the essay is a distillation of the many things I've said here, but the comments section might be worth your attention.
Oh, and on a totally unrelated point: I never post here on my personal list of favorite songs, but today's entry marks the 40th anniversary of the Verrazano-Bridge. Taxpayer support for the project aside, it's one of my great loves in New York City. And you know you're gettin' older when you're older than a bridge.
Saturday, November 20, 2004
The Washington Nationals Are Born!
Well, after months of speculation, including input from baseball fans and sports radio hosts, the Montreal Expos, now relocated from Canada to the U.S. capital, have been renamed: The Washington Nationals. Not quite the Washington Senators of old, but how ... neutral sounding.
I guess that suggestion by one voicer to call the team the "Washington Scandals" was, uh, too descriptive of the town's political reality.
Building an Incredible Revolution
David M. Brown comments on my comments on his comments about "The Incredibles." I had stated that "illustrated media and pop culture are both prime areas for affecting (and reflecting) wider ideological change. Libertarians and individualists need to think more seriously about how to affect that change in entertaining projects that are as widely viewed and praised" as the film in question. In response, Brown makes a very good point here:
Dr. Sciabarra is right. But it's not quite a matter of hatching a plausible cultural-change game plan. Brad Bird and the other folks who made "The Incredibles" tapped a seemingly endless supply of imagination and talent, and comedic timing, and brio, along with whatever other virtues had to be enlisted to produce such swell stuff.
But maybe nurturing our own talents and potential is the ultimate secret ingredient of cultural and ideological change anyway. If we believe in certain things, it's going to show up in our expressive work. But all-important is making sure the work is good, and good as a matter of personal pride and independent vision. And as we see in "The Incredibles," "society" tends to be better off, too, when the individual aspires to admirable heights for his own sake.
There's a reason why this is important. I have been arguing here and elsewhere that politics is not a primary, but an effect of certain extra-political (social and cultural) preconditions. It's one of the reasons I have been profoundly critical of the neoconservative project to bring "democracy" to the Middle East, without those necessary preconditions in place. But that same principle is operative in the United States, where any attempt to change political institutions must proceed on certain social and cultural preconditions. That's why the "Culture War" is so important: because the warriors are arguing over the nature of those preconditions. Are they secular? Are they religious? Are they some mixture thereof? Either or neither, one or both, the point is that the preconditions need to be understood, analyzed, discussed, and debated.
But what must also be emphasized is this: Only the most constructivist among us could possibly believe that cultural change is simply implemented like some Five Year Plan. If we want to change an ideological culture, for example, there will be a delicate exchange among our intended actions (producing books, columns, novels, artworks, etc.) and the unintended consequences of those actions. Ultimately, Brown is right: Each of us needs to nurture our own talents and potentials, not necessarily because we wish to be cultural warriors, but because we have convictions that we wish to express. And if enough of us share those convictions, it will be possible to continue creating and extending a subculture of freedom that can permeate established cultural institutions and forms and the vehicles of popular culture as well. That is how a dominant cultural trend emerges ... not as a top-down edict from Court Intellectuals, not as an enforced Maoist Cultural Revolution, but as a long-term spontaneous development from the efforts of real, concrete individual men and women.
Some on the Left have understood this need to transform culture, spontaneously as it were. And it's the kind of "left-liberal" transformation that has most likely led to the religious reaction we have seen over the last several years. I wrote about this in my book Total Freedom: Toward a Dialectical Libertarianism:
Some socialist theorists recognized the logical contradiction of using the state as a vehicle for human liberation. The Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937), distrusted the state's ability to transform society. He thought that the institutions of civil society, which were distinct from the state, could enable people to transcend the coercive character of the state. By augmenting civil institutions, Gramsci argued that coercion would become superfluous as a strategic device. For Gramsci, capitalism would not perish until all spontaneous social forces were fully developed. The hegemony of capitalist institutions could be traced primarily to extra-political power structures, which act in unison to bolster political authority. The "ideological state apparatuses" of religion, education, family, law, communication, culture, political parties and trade unions all helped to maintain the predominance of capitalism. An alternative socialist system could not emerge without attaining a "counter-hegemony" in all these institutions. This "bloc of historical forces" could only develop "within the womb of the old society.”
Gramsci favored the primacy of ideological spheres over economic structures, and of civil society over political society. Hence, a political movement without corresponding cultural change is bound to fail, in Gramsci’s view. Civil society and its self-regulative social relations are the model upon which communism must be based. Rather than violently crush civil society, says Gramsci, the political sphere will be reabsorbed and transformed by civil society.
Some libertarians have learned from Gramsci. Murray Rothbard, for example, much
appreciated Gramsci’s emphasis on the “rich texture of ‘civil society,’ of non-state institutions that are in many ways more influential and determining than the State itself.” Indeed, Gramsci’s counsel that socialists achieve an alternative “cultural hegemony” may have partially influenced Rothbard, in his later years, to embrace the conservatives’ declaration of cultural war against the Left. ... Like Gramsci, Rothbard recognizes the importance of creating "parallel" institutions.
Rothbard argued that, as the systemic crises of the interventionist system developed over time, "a voluntary network of popular revolutionary organs" would be needed to take over the functions of organized struggle. This struggle, he thought, would involve building coalitions with non-libertarians—socialists or conservatives, for example—on various ideological issues. It might also require "civil disobedience or the establishment of a mass-based political party. In all cases, Rothbard insists that the 'tactics to be used' must be 'consistent with the [non-aggression] principles and ultimate goals of a purely free society.'"
So, how on earth did we get to this little discussion from our posts on a little animated movie? Very simply this. As Ayn Rand once said: "Anyone who fights for the future, lives in it today." You want a free society? Fight for its ideals today. Live those ideals. Practice them in your craft in ways that inspire, uplift, and entertain. I say this especially for the benefit of those of us who fashion ourselves as revolutionaries. Changing society, especially against awful odds, can be daunting, discouraging, even grim. But as another revolutionary of a different stripe once said: "If I cannot dance, I want no part in your revolution."
Thursday, November 18, 2004
Rand the Incredible
While we're on the subject of cartoons, David M. Brown at LFB tells us about how various reviewers are seeing the Ayn Rand undercurrents in the animated flick, "The Incredibles." In his post, "The Incredibles' Ayn Rand," Brown writes:
When the animated feature "The Iron Giant" came out in 1999, some libertarians saw a theme of man or robot versus the state, because the movie depicts the government, in the person of a repressive bureaucrat, trying to destroy an innocent and good giant robot. The Pixar production "The Incredibles," directed by "Iron Giant" director Brad Bird, boasts not only more sophisticated animation than "Giant" but perhaps a more sophisticated theme as well. At any rate, more than one reviewer is finding the footprint of Ayn Rand.
I've not seen the film yet, but have heard similar things from other colleagues and friends. If true, of course, it would not be the first time that Rand made it into animation. In my newest essay in The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, I discuss "The Illustrated Rand," that is, the ways in which Rand and her work have permeated popular culture, giving us a plethora of both positive and negative references. It's a much extended, much more developed piece than its predecessor, "The Cultural Ascendency of Ayn Rand." As I write:
Rand’s presence on television is not restricted to live action dramas or sitcoms. It has also been felt in cartoons. In a “Futurama” episode entitled “Second That Emotion,” the character Bender holds up Atlas Shrugged while commenting that, in the sewer among the mutants, they find “nothing but crumpled porn and Ayn Rand.” In an infamous “South Park” episode called “Chickenlover,” Atlas Shrugged is presented to Officer Barbrady, who has recently learned how to read, and who, upon seeing the massive size of Rand’s novel, laments his achievements in literacy.
I also discuss the more "philosophically astute ... Rand references" that have shown up on “The Simpsons.” In a terrific book (co-edited by our esteemed colleague Aeon Skoble), The Simpsons and Philosophy, authors William Irwin and J. R. Lombardo tell us about that Rand episode:
[I]n “A Streetcar Named Marge,” Maggie is placed in the “Ayn Rand School for Tots” where the proprietor, Mr. Sinclair, reads The Fountainhead Diet. To understand why pacifiers are taken away from Maggie and the other children one has to catch the allusion to the radical libertarian philosophy of Ayn Rand. Recognizing and understanding this allusion yields much more pleasure than would a straightforward explanation that Maggie has been placed in a daycare facility in which tots are trained to fend for themselves, not to depend on others, not even to depend on their pacifiers.
My JARS essay also surveys Rand references in scholarship, film, television shows, music, and comic books, especially the work of Steve Ditko and Frank Miller. Rand herself was no stranger to illustrated media; her Fountainhead was illustrated in a Kings Features serial back in 1945 and Anthem made it into Famous Fantastic Mysteries. With Friedrich Hayek's Road to Serfdom having been illustrated in "cartoon" format in Look, and Ludwig von Mises having being mentioned in Batman comics, and libertarian themes showing up in the comic book character Anarky, I'd say that illustrated media and pop culture are both prime areas for affecting (and reflecting) wider ideological change. Libertarians and individualists need to think more seriously about how to affect that change in entertaining projects that are as widely viewed and praised as The Incredibles.
Wednesday, November 17, 2004
FCC U Soon
As a postscript to my essays on the "Saving Private Ryan" fiasco here and here, there comes this story about the protests of the Family Research Council concerning the ABC broadcast. With protests also over last night's episode of "Monday Night Football Meets Desperate Housewives," this war against "indecency" looks like it's just beginning.
Monday, November 15, 2004
To Be or Not To Be ... Democracy?
I found two very interesting essays in the NY Times this weekend, the second almost a response to the first. In Robert Kagan's essay, "We Broke It, We Bought It," a review of Noah Feldman's book, What We Owe Iraq: War and the Ethics of Nation Building, he writes:
Feldman's most important quality ... may have been his deep belief in the compatibility of Islam and democracy. He belongs to a small but growing movement among scholars of Islam, a group diverse enough to include Gilles Kepel of France and Reuel Marc Gerecht of the United States, that believes the real promise of democracy lies with devout Muslims. In Feldman's first book, ''After Jihad,'' published just before he left for Iraq, he argued that the desire for democracy is widespread among Muslim believers, much more than the desire for violent jihad, and that Islamists should therefore be given a chance to rule. ...
[I]t's not only the Iraqis who have an interest in Iraqi democracy, Feldman says. The United States and Europe have for too long erred both morally and strategically in supporting authoritarian governments in the Arab world. In Egypt, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere, Islamist terrorists ''have long been motivated by their grievances against the authoritarian states in which they live.'' Feldman points out that it was a ''cadre of Egyptian Islamist terrorists, defeated and thus displaced from their traditional battle against the Egyptian state in the 1990's,'' who ''joined forces with Osama bin Laden to create Al Qaeda.'' The answer to the threat of Islamic terrorism, he says, is to engage in nation-building ''aimed at creating democratically legitimate states that would treat their citizens with dignity and respect.''
While many argue that the Iraqis are not ready for democracy, Feldman insists it is the only system that can work. Without exaggerating what elections can accomplish, he makes a practical point often overlooked by skeptics. The diverse complexion of Iraqi society, he observes, means that no single group has the power to impose peace and stability. In order to succeed, an Iraqi government must be accepted as roughly legitimate by a broad cross section of Shiites, Kurds and Sunnis. But how can American officials or any outsiders, or even any Iraqi, know what the people will consider legitimate without asking them? Democracy, Feldman writes, is ''not merely the best political arrangement,'' it is ''the only option other than chaos.'' It helps that Iraq's Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani appears to be the kind of Muslim leader Feldman is counting on: a Shiite cleric who by word and deed has so far proven himself sincerely committed to democracy. One gets the sense that Feldman and Sistani were tacit allies in pushing for an Iraqi state that can be both Islamic and free.
Feldman admits that there have been many "American mistakes," but he's hopeful that democracy will come.
How can such political institutions emerge, however, when we are dealing with what Robert D. Kaplan calls, "Barren Ground for Democracy"? Kaplan proceeds on the premise that "while democracy can take root anywhere, ... it cannot be imposed overnight anywhere." He writes of the U.S. occupation of Iraq:
What we are witnessing is a legacy of history and geography—factors often denied by both liberal and conservative interventionists—catching up with America. Had our political leaders considered such factors, I suspect, they might have avoided some of the disasters of the occupation. These factors should also give President Bush pause as he plans to "spread freedom" in his second term. ... [T]he idea that Western-style democracy could be imposed further east and south, in the Balkans, has proved ... problematic. Beyond the Carpathian mountains one finds a different historical legacy: that of the poorer and more chaotic Ottoman Empire. Before World War II, this was a world of vast peasantries and feeble middle classes, which revealed itself in Communist governments that were for the most part more corrupt and despotic than those of Central Europe. Unsurprisingly, upon Communism's collapse, Romania, Bulgaria and Albania struggled for years on the brink of anarchy, although they at least avoided ethnic bloodshed. Of course, Yugoslavia was not so lucky. Though democracy appears to have a reasonably bright future there thanks to repeated Western intervention, it is wise to recall that for 15 years it has been a touch-and-go proposition.
Undeterred, Wilsonian idealists in the United States next put Iraq on their list for gun-to-the-head democratization. But compared with Iraq, even the Balkans were historically blessed, by far the most culturally and politically advanced part of the old Turkish Empire. Mesopotamia, on the other hand, constituted the most anarchic and tribalistic region of the sultanate. ... Iraq is bordered by Iran and Syria, states with weakly policed borders and prone to radical politics, which themselves have suffered under absolutism for centuries. Western intellectuals on both the left and right underplayed such realities. In the 1990's, those supporting humanitarian intervention in Yugoslavia branded references to difficult history and geography as "determinism" and "essentialism"—academic jargon for fatalism. In the views of liberal internationalists and neoconservatives, group characteristics based on a shared history and geography no longer mattered, for in a post-cold war world of globalization everyone was first and foremost an individual. Thus if Poland, say, was ready overnight for Western-style democracy, then so too were Bosnia, Russia, Iraq—and Liberia, for that matter. ...
By invading Iraq, Republican neoconservatives—the most fervent of Wilsonians—simply took that liberal idealist argument ... to its logical conclusion. Indeed, given that Saddam Hussein was ultimately responsible for the violent deaths of several times more people than the Yugoslav dictator Slobodan Milosevic, how could any liberal in favor of intervention in the Balkans not also favor it in the case of Iraq? And because the human rights abuses in Iraq showed no sign of abatement, much like those in the Balkans, our intervention was justified in order to stop an ongoing rape-and-killing machine.
But rather than a replay of the Balkans in 1995 and 1999, Iraq has turned out like the Indian mutiny against the British in 1857 and 1858, when the attempts of Evangelical and Utilitarian reformers in London to modernize and Christianize India—to make it more like England—were met with a violent revolt against imperial rule. Delhi, Lucknow and other cities were besieged and captured, before being retaken by colonial forces. The bloody debacle did not signal the end of the British Empire, which expanded for another century. But it did signal a transition: away from an ad hoc imperium fired by an intemperate lust to impose domestic values abroad, and toward a calmer, more pragmatic empire built on international trade and technology. ...
I recommend both articles to your attention.
Friday, November 12, 2004
The Force of Morality
While many Kerry-supporting "blues" are blaming evangelicals for Kerry's loss (as if the social-conservatives were the only reason for the Democrat's denouement) and some Bush-supporting "reds" are busy denying that religious-right voters have any real electoral power (I still find it odd calling states backing the party of Joe McCarthy "red") ... it is certainly true that the Culture War is heating up. In this regard, the election was only a symptom, not a cause.
There are many ironies in this culture war. Some conservatives of a pro-war vintage are claiming that the "blues" are fear-mongers for focusing on the evangelicals; they suggest that Bush's war stance is the reason for his victory. Such a writer as Christopher Hitchens, in fact, has so downplayed the dangers of domestic fundamentalism, that he's recrafted Bush's re-election as a "secularist victory." Secularism is relative, I suppose, given that Hitchens does note correctly another irony: that some antiwar advocates, who are incensed over the domestic fundamentalists, are too busy downplaying the dangers of fundamentalism abroad.
Now, granted, the sword-wielding Islamic fundamentalists, who seek to cut off the head of licentious Western civilization, may share something with the domestic fundamentalists. But these jihadists make our domestic variety look like pansies by comparison.
Still, despite the vast differences between them, fundamentalists of all stripes seek to use the power of the state to bolster their own particular vision of morality. Jerry Falwell has already spoken of reconstituting his Moral Majority for the 21st century (yes, that's 2-1, not 1-2). Criticizing some of his conservative compatriots for belittling the fundamentalist electoral achievement, Falwell was elated that "more than 30 million evangelicals 'voted Christian' [on] Nov. 2, when 116 million Americans cast ballots. He predicted the number of evangelical voters will jump to 'at least 40 million' in 2008." And Bob Jones 3rd, president of the college bearing his name, wrote a letter to President Bush saying: "In your reelection, God has graciously granted America—though she doesn't deserve it—a reprieve from the agenda of paganism."
What is being heralded is a "moral revolution" that is attacking American "indecency" and "perversion," the kind of "perversion" that Falwell once said was a critical factor in bringing about the tragedy of 9/11 (something with which the jihadists might agree).
Nevertheless, if this were just a revolution requiring a battle over ideas, we'd all stand a better chance if we debated the issues rationally, while barring all groups from using state power to forge their ideological battles.
One of those battles took place yesterday. Last night, as I reported, "Saving Private Ryan" was to be preempted in various markets because ABC affiliates feared indecency fines from the Federal Communications Commission. Initially, it was reported that 65 ABC stations, in markets as large as Boston, Dallas, and Cleveland, would refuse to air the film. As it turned out, a little more than 20 ABC affiliates declined to show "Ryan." All of this is a long-term consequence of the FCC's war on "vulgarity" in American media, following the Janet Jackson nipple controversy. (At least some people have retained a sense of humor through all this: Dolly Parton, in concert last night at the Theater at Continental Airlines Arena, actually cautioned that she could be a lot more nasty than Miss Jackson: "If I pull a Janet Jackson, I'm gonna take out about four rows.")
Ironically, Brent Bozell, of the Parents Television Council, who mounted the post-Super Bowl protest and who applauds the FCC's fining of the indecent on TV, himself protested against this "Ryan" blackout.
Too bad Bozell! You rubbed the FCC bottle, the genie popped out, and now, you're not likely to stuff it back in. This is now creating a stultifying atmosphere for American media that is far worse than any possible fines the FCC can levy trying to force people to be "decent" and "moral."
But you can't force anybody to be moral. Genuinely moral choices are moral because they are choices, not decisions forced on people at the point of a gun. The precondition of any moral revolution is a simple maxim, one that must serve as a basic minimum for any rational discussion of values: "Leave your guns outside." As Ayn Rand said in For the New Intellectual, even people who disagree over the nature, function, and purpose of moral values must stop equating "the power of physical compulsion with the power of persuasion." That's not likely to happen, however, as long as groups, of whatever value orientation—be they right-wing religious fundamentalists or left-wing "secular" do-gooders—choose to ram their agendas down our throats.
Visit Not a Blog.
Thursday, November 11, 2004
Is Something Wrong with this Picture?
Ever since Nipplegate (the fiasco at the Super Bowl when Janet Jackson flashed a breast to a rather large TV audience), the TV networks have been a little apprehensive about violating FCC "decency standards." Well, today of all days, on the occasion of Veteran's Day, comes this report from the NY Daily News. Richard Huff tells us in his article, "Fear over 'Private' Parts," that, tonight, "a handful of ABC affiliates will not air Steven Spielberg's critically acclaimed war film"—"Saving Private Ryan."
The film is one of my favorite war films; fortunately, I live in New York City, where we, apparently, have no decency standards, so I won't have to deal with this censorial travesty. But Raymond Cole, president of ABC's affiliate in Des Moines, Iowa, remarks: "We regret that we are not able to broadcast a patriotic, artistic tribute to our fighting forces like 'Saving Private Ryan.'" Cole
cited concerns that the film would not meet the Federal Communications Commission's decency standards. "Can a movie with an 'M' rating, however prestigious the production or poignant the subject matter, be shown before 10p.m.?" Cole asked. "With the current FCC, we just don't know." ... Station managers are concerned that the FCC, which has stepped up its indecency investigations after Janet Jackson's breast was bared during the Feb. 1 Super Bowl, will go after "Saving Private Ryan," as well.
Since the movie has "many intense battle scenes" (that opening sequence is, in my view, one of the most harrowing battle sequences ever filmed), and much frank language, all the viewer warnings in the world won't quell the anxieties of some of the affiliates in this post-Nipplegate atmosphere. Initially, back in June 2002, the FCC "found no problems" with the film; but that was a different time, even if it had come just a few months after John Ashcroft spent $8,000 in taxpayer funds to cover the breasts of the Statue of Justice.
The Parents Television Council assures us that it won't file a complaint against the "Ryan" telecast, but ABC is still going to double "the number of on-air warnings about the movie's content"—in those markets where the film is actually shown.
I have only one response to all this: FUBAR.
Tuesday, November 9, 2004
The Problem of Iran
Just a note to direct attention to Kenneth Pollack's NY Times Op-Ed piece, "What the Mullahs Learned From Their Neighbors," which deals with the problem of Iran. Readers will remember that Pollack, author of the immensely influential book, The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq (Random House, 2002), backtracked from his support for the Iraq war. He has said, in quite a few articles, that he "made a mistake" in his advocacy of that war, based on "faulty intelligence." He also believes, at this time, that an Iran with nuclear weapons is possible, and that we should not assume that the Iranians would deal these weapons to Al Qaeda, a group to which it is vehemently opposed.
In today's essay, Pollack details the ways in which the international community might deal with Iran. Given my own interest in this subject, I found Pollack's essay a good read.
Monday, November 8, 2004
Conservative Crackup, Part Deux
I've written quite a bit about the "Conservative Crack-Up." David D. Kirkpatrick, in yesterday's "Week in Review" section of the NY Times revisits his April 2004 topic, telling us all how "The Antiwar Right Is Ready to Rumble." Kirkpatrick writes:
The euphoria of Mr. Bush's victory postponed the battle, but not for long. Now that Mr. Bush has secured re-election, some conservatives who say they held their tongues through the campaign season are speaking out against the neoconservatives, against the war and in favor of a speedy exit. They argue that the war is a political liability to the Republican Party, but also that it runs counter to traditional conservatives' disdain for altruist interventions to make far-off parts of the world safe for American-style democracy. ... On Thursday, Paul Weyrich, founder of the Heritage Foundation and chairman of the Free Congress Foundation, issued a call to conservatives for a serious debate about the administration's foreign policy. "The consequences of the neocons' adventure in Iraq are now all too clear," he said. "America is stuck in a guerrilla war with no end in sight. Our military is stretched too thin to respond to other threats. And our real enemies, nonstate organizations such as Al Qaeda, are benefiting from the Arab and Islamic backlash against our occupation of an Islamic country." ... "A lot of the antiwar conservatives had to hold their tongue during the campaign because the No. 1 goal was to get Bush re-elected," said Stephen Moore, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and an important conservative fund-raiser. ...
One wonders why that should have been the No. 1 goal in the first place. I suppose they all thought it was a relative question; Mr. Bush has not been much of a traditional conservative in fiscal or foreign policy matters, but Mr. Kerry offered little hope for a rightward shift.
Ugh. Like I've said before: "A Pox on Both Their Houses."
Check out Not a Blog.
"Ben-Hur" Comes to Iraq
Last February, I wrote about The Exorcist Experience in Iraq. "The Exorcist" is one of my favorite horror movies of all time, so the thought that they were giving tours of the site where the movie's opening sequence was filmed was quite fascinating to me.
Well, I've just learned that the troops in Iraq, awaiting orders for the blitz of Fallujah, have needed another Hollywood diversion: running chariot games right out of "Ben-Hur," which just so happens to be my favorite film of all time. "The First Annual 'Ben-Hur' Memorial Chariot Race" has provided the troops with some much-needed entertainment.
I can't wait for the day that the U.S. armed forces re-enact another film: "The Great Escape."
Sunday, November 7, 2004
The Base Secure ... Now Check Its Premises
I would have posted these comments in the various threads to which they relate, but I find myself wanting to address issues raised by a number of our faithful contributors.
First, I'd like to address legitimate points made by Sheldon Richman in his "Ugh" post. Sheldon puts his finger on some very important points that we should not forget. It is surely true that "the left-socialist pundits and cultural elite" have serious problems. I suppose that part of my own revulsion toward some of those on the evangelical right is rooted in the fact that the debate has shifted rightward in American politics, and it is only natural that those of us who normally would be identified as "right-wing" simply because of our support for the free market would spend some time critiquing other "right-wingers." This is not unusual; I have always believed that New Leftists of the revisionist historical variety have been among the most trenchant critics of the liberal-welfare state. Sometimes, those on the "inside" of the old left-right political paradigm are in the best position to critique other insiders.
The main problem, however, is that libertarians essentially transcend the conventional left-right dichotomy.
I agree with Sheldon that "the typical Bush voter" is most likely "not a racist, gay-bashing, theocratic fascist." The typical voter supports the war and the other conservative positions for more "common sense" reasons than those provided by evangelical preachers or neoconservative intellectuals. And I'd venture to say that Sheldon is probably correct that many of these pro-Bush voters "probably generally favor smaller government over bigger government," even if Bush has proven that he's fully a part of the "bigger government" contingent. We do not serve our purpose if we demonize the men and women on the street who are just searching to provide themselves and their loved ones with decent and safe lives. I have argued these points explicitly in my "Caught Up in The Rapture" article:
A few caveats are in order. In this discussion, I have not made any broad claim about religion, per se, as a corrupting social force. Nor have I indicted people’s right to worship or voice their religiously inspired political beliefs as they please. We live in a historical moment when people are searching desperately for guidance in the face of terrorism and war. That there are legitimate secular alternatives to religion, which might provide us with spiritually uplifting answers, does not obscure the fact that religion exists. It is not about to wither away anytime soon; it is not about to be wiped out as "the opiate of the masses." It will continue to provide many individuals with the emotional fuel they require to make sense of life’s tragic circumstances.
Moreover, this discussion is not meant to indict any particular religion or sect. That some pietists have endorsed government intervention does not mean that all pietists are "evil." Even in today’s culture, pietists are not the only religious group wreaking havoc with American politics. And there are many other non- (or anti-)religious ideological groups trying to ram their particular social agendas down the throats of the American people; some of these groups are notably secular and left-wing. That’s just the nature of the society in which we live, a society where government’s raison d’etre is not the protection of individual rights, but the dispensation of privilege. That governmental role has had the effect of multiplying the number of groups engaged in internecine competition for political or social benefits, and these groups will be inspired by any number of religious or secular ideological doctrines.
That our focus here has been on the indecent impact of religion on politics, however, does not mean that religious people are incapable of being decent. The lessons of the Old and New Testaments, with their select stories of human redemption and human dignity, have had a measurable positive impact on many good and moral individuals. That supreme atheist, Ayn Rand, once said that religion had long monopolized "the highest moral concepts of our language," such notions as "exaltation," "worship," "reverence," and the "sacred," all of which speak to legitimate, this-worldly human needs. She readily affirmed the importance of certain religious doctrines to the evolution of the ideas of individualism and freedom, and celebrated individuals such as St. Thomas Aquinas for acting as the Aristotelian progenitor to the Renaissance. ...
[However,] [t]he central issue is that more and more Americans are enraptured by a religious sensibility that is becoming increasingly influential on popular culture and on domestic and foreign policy. Religion is being used by the representatives of government and politically constituted groups as a statist tool for the remaking of the modern world. And therein lies the danger.
The Founding Fathers—most of them deist in their religious orientation—understood the supreme importance of the separation of church and state, even if they sought the entitlements of rights and revolution on the basis of the "laws of nature and of nature’s God." For those of us who understand the equally important separation of economy and state, it is clear that the erosion of these principles has led to the erosion of the very rights for which the Founders fought.
It will take nothing less than an intellectual and cultural revolution to rediscover—and implement—these sacred political principles that stand at the core of the distinctly American imagination.
On this last point, I'll cite Ayn Rand again. Rand was well aware of the fact that many people tacitly accepted certain ideas without really grasping the premises of those ideas. Her whole ethical system can be understood as a means of shifting what Michael Polanyi once called "the tacit coefficient of meaning," that is, making explicit that which is merely implicit in people's economic, political, social, or cultural ideas and/or practices. In the end, she argued that it is only by "checking one's premises" that one could begin to articulate a radical alternative. "Ideas cannot be fought except by means of better ideas," she wrote. "The battle consists not of opposing, but of exposing; not of denouncing, but of disproving; not of evading, but of boldly proclaiming a full, consistent and radical alternative."
My opposition to religious fundamentalism is no less forceful than my opposition to the secular leftists who endorse their own brands of worship. But I do stand by my view that the rising tide of religious fundamentalism in this country played a crucial role in the re-election of George W. Bush, and it is Bush's pietistic ideology, as I have argued, that is particularly troublesome insofar as he is inspired by it to mount the kinds of domestic and foreign policy initiatives that I reject.
Irfan Khawaja remarks, however, that my position that the evangelical vote was necessary to the achievement of Bush's re-election means that if we remove the evangelical vote, Bush would not have been re-elected. (For fans of internal relations, I guess we can say that this implies that the evangelical vote was internal to Bush's victory such that the removal of it would have fundamentally altered the outcome.) I'd tend to agree with that proposition if it were possible to view the situation with the proviso, "other factors being equal." Unfortunately, I do not believe it is a legitimate conclusion in a multi-causal model of voter behavior. For example, I will admit that if it were possible to separate attitudes from within a fundamentalist voter's mind, some of these voters would have still supported Bush on the question of national security quite apart from their religious convictions. But as John Arthur Shaffer suggests in his comments on Arthur Silber's post, "Don't Blame the Victim," it is not that easy to separate out specific positions from the fundamentalist, who, like any other person committed to a set of integrated ideological beliefs, sees those positions as an expression of an essential core.
Yes, people do vote for candidates for a variety of reasons, and I don't think we bolster our case by ignoring those reasons. But we also cannot ignore the core beliefs of a certain sector of the electorate that voted in overwhelming numbers for a specific candidate. It's all about checking the premises of those core beliefs, not singling out the believers as "evil," because those beliefs reflect the stated beliefs of the very man whom the believers supported en masse.
While we're pointing fingers at the liberal-left for denigrating these believers, let's put all of this in perspective. There is irony here in that the left-liberal critics ultimately agree with Karl Rove and the President's key strategists, from whom we heard the constant mantra throughout this election season: "First, secure the base." Rove dreamed of solidifying and extending that base. To a very large extent, those dreams were realized. Recognizing the brilliance of that strategy is a backhanded compliment, if you will, to Karl Rove, coming from those who decry its outcome.
And given the comments of Barry Rosenthal and Tex here, I think a persuasive case can be made that, indeed, the Rove strategy was critical to the particular success in Ohio, a state without whose electoral votes, Bush would have lost. The anti-gay marriage and anti-gay civil union amendment won in that state by a 62% to 38% vote, with a 1.2 million vote differential, as Barry reports. Bush won the state by 136,000+ votes. Exit polls reported that close to 70% of supporters of the Ohio ban voted for Bush. If that ban were not on the ballot, not firing up a certain group of evangelical voters who voted also for Bush, Kerry may have eked out a narrow victory in Ohio. Republican strategists understood this, as Tex suggests, which is why the Bush campaign encouraged the Ohio ban initiative, running advertisements on radio, by phone, and in mass mailings.
Nothing I say here contradicts points made by Irfan and others that many voters, quite apart from that fundamentalist bloc, voted for Bush because they saw in him a steady, self-confident leader in the war on terrorism. That, coupled with a very effective campaign which targeted Kerry's lack of credibility, clarity, and consistency, made for a winning formula. Rove said as much this morning on "Meet the Press." It takes a lot more than a fundamentalist base to deliver Bush the Presidency with a higher percentage of the vote than any Democratic candidate since LBJ's 1964 landslide, as Rove suggested.
But the mantra is still valid: "First secure the base." Rove did. Bush won.
Finally, I agree with Irfan on many of the points he makes about Ronald Reagan, and I agree that Reagan said a lot of awful and outrageous things during his presidency. More importantly, his practical legacy did not match his rhetorical one. Still, my admiration for Reagan remains focused on Reagan at his libertarian rhetorical best, as I express here and here. I just don't find the same libertarian rhetorical streak in George W. Bush. And perhaps, in the long run, that is best. I wouldn't want Bush to be mistakenly identified as a libertarian. Mistaking Reagan for a libertarian had its costs, after all.
Saturday, November 6, 2004
Clarifying the Bush Victory: Understanding a Multi-Pronged Threat
Folks, let's clear up a few misconceptions. Here is what I argued the other day in my first post-election analysis, "I Told You So":
I [had] suggested back then [seven months ago] that Bush's fundamentalist religious base would be fortified and that it would play a crucial role in his victory. The President clearly retained that constituency and strengthened its support.
Let's emphasize that key sentence: "...Bush's fundamentalist religious base would be fortified and that it would play a crucial role in his victory." I did not argue before, and I have not argued since, that religious zealotry is the causal factor in Bush's re-election. It was necessary to his victory, but not sufficient. And, in fact, given the complexities of the electorate, there are, without doubt, many factors that led to Bush's re-election, not the least of which is historical precedent. As I argued in my May 2004 article:
Barring any massive attack on the U.S. home front, or an utterly devastating defeat in Iraq, on a par with, say, a Shi’ite and Sunni uprising that slaughters thousands of American troops, his approval rating will most likely remain stable. Even if the foreign policy arena should collapse for Bush, history shows that, in times of war, few Presidents are turned out of office, since the electorate rarely changes horses in mid-apocalypse. ... Other things being equal, voters are not going to choose Kerry, when they’ve already got in Bush a Republican dedicated to all the conventional Democratic planks: an expanding welfare state, budget deficits, and a war abroad. ...But Kerry himself has enormous credibility problems, which I fully expect the Bush campaign to exploit.
So, why did I quote from Garry Wills, if, as my colleague Irfan Khawaja puts it, I'm merely observing that "religion ... played one significant role among others," rather than the crucial role? Simply: Because it is significant.
As I stated in my May 2004 "Bush Wins!" article, a prelude to my sequel, "Caught Up in The Rapture":
In any event, there are far more significant cultural forces at work here that, I believe, will virtually assure Bush’s victory. The character of those forces, the impact they are having on mass media, popular culture, and American politics, is [significant]. ... [T]he Christian fundamentalist movement ... is a movement whose hero is George W. Bush, and it is Bush who embodies some of its most troubling tendencies. Troubling or not, if the fundamentalists "get out the vote," Bush’s victory is assured.
So, we can argue all we want over the raw statistics, and over the significance of this or that state among the 50 contests. But there is a claim here that is simply irrefutable in my view: Without the support of his core constituency, Bush loses the election. It was necessary to his victory, but certainly not sufficient. I do not know many (any?) people who are putting all their eggs in one basket on this question, and it would be utterly foolish to make any stronger claim.
Let's retrace our steps. In my recent post, "Declaring War Against Zealotry," I stated the following:
I must say that I was a bit annoyed some months ago when I was routinely criticized by those who supported the President despite their reservations about his religious agenda, because I dared to suggest that he was using religion as a political and cultural weapon for the re-making of the modern world. When I wrote my essay about the alarming growth in evangelical Christianity as a mainstream cultural force, I knew that such growth would have vast political implications. These critics kept telling me that I was "overdoing" it. In my view, the election results yesterday are much too clear to ignore.
Here is the reason for my annoyance: When my "Rapture" essay was published, people said I was exaggerating the growth of the evangelical movement. Such criticisms were beyond the pale, in my view, because they simply did not take into account the central claims of my essay on the cultural mainstreaming of fundamentalism in this country. Here's what I said in the "Rapture" piece:
In 2004, estimates of weekly church attendance vary wildly. Some place the figure at 75 million; others believe that it is nearly double that. Either way, once we adjust the numbers for non-Christian denominations, it is clear that tens of millions of people are committed to some kind of religious observance ...
As an aside, the exit polls suggest that those "once-a-week churchgoers" gave 58% of their vote to Bush, while 41% voted for Kerry. So I don't think it a leap of faith to infer that a sizable number of individuals who claimed "moral values" as an important issue meant religious moral values rather than, say, any secular ethical standard celebrating "man's life qua man."
Here are the more important issues raised by my June 2004 study, and I quote from that study at length (deleting footnotes, which can be found in the original piece):
Throughout American cultural history, there have been many so-called spiritual surges, "Great Awakenings," which had huge political implications. Today, another spiritual surge is taking place. As Walter Kirn puts it, that surge is absorbing pop culture: "Christianity doesn’t compete with pop culture," says Kirn. "It is pop culture." In many respects, this new awakening has been a reaction to the secular left’s nihilistic relativism, one that rejects the very possibility of moral certainty. "Just as postmodernism in the arts seemed to be winning acceptance from the masses," Kirn writes, "a recycled premodernism has emerged that rejects ambiguity and ambivalence for the old Sunday-morning certainties." The premodernists—who are now characterized as "fundamentalists," though they are a pietist offshoot—have adopted the "populist, media-savvy" techniques of a thoroughly modern age to get the message out.
These fundamentalists genuinely understand the nature of mass marketing. From the sale of "Jesus is My Homeboy" T-shirts to the creation of alternative churches in coffee bars and warehouses to the publication of slick magazines and updated, modern Bible translations, fundamentalists of various stripes have tapped into pop culture and its new technologies to spread the gospel. They have even attracted niche subcultures with such organizations as the Christian Tattoo Association, which includes over 100 member shops. Some Christian bands now embrace punk and goth styles, while others put the Rap in Rapture: yes, there are even rap artists who underlay Christian-themed poetry with phat hip hop beats. While the rest of the music industry has seen a decline since the events of September 11, the Christian music market has had a 13.5% increaseperhaps a reflection of the very search for meaning that such a horrific tragedy has engendered. "God is everywhere you look in pop culture these days," observes Carolyn Callahan—in holiday cards, board games, toys, and periodicals.
Christian merchandising is a $4.2 billion industry, which includes a $100 million video game business. The Christian book market is particularly lucrative: Evangelist Rick Warren has sold 15 million copies of his book, The Purpose-Driven Life: What on Earth Am I Here For? There are even Christian diet books that sit alongside Atkins and South Beach manuals: The Maker’s Diet helps you to lose weight by eating just like Jesus. From number one best-selling books such as The Da Vinci Code to "Joan of Arcadia" on television and "Bruce Almighty" on the silver screen, God is Hip and Hot.
A blockbuster film such as "The Passion of the Christ"—which was condemned initially as "anti-Semitic" by some critics—has now grossed nearly $400 million. That figure does not include director Mel Gibson’s cross-promotional merchandising effortssales on such items as metal replica crucifixion nails and thorn-adorned necklaces and bracelets. The extremely violent content of the film seems to have inspired some churches to more realistically dramatize the redemption through most precious blood. Some of these dramatizations express forcefully a wrath for the secular "pagan" symbols of the Easter holiday. As the Associated Press reports, in one instance, at an Easter show in Glassport, Pennsylvania, children were traumatized as the actors whipped the Easter bunny and crushed Easter eggs on stage. Performers declared: "There is no Easter Bunny." One 4-year old child cried hysterically, asking his mother "why the bunny was being whipped." "It was very disturbing," said another parent. The youth minister at Glassport Assembly of God said that they were only trying "to convey that Easter is not just about the Easter Bunny. It is about Jesus Christ."
Far more disturbing, however, is the fact that traditionally opposed Protestant pietists and Catholic liturgicals have moved toward a kind of political consolidation. Laurie Goodstein argues that evangelicals and conservative Catholics "have forged an alliance that is reshaping American politics and culture." Both of these groups flocked to see the Gibson film, sensing a common "losing battle against secularism, relativism and a trend that the Christianity Today editorial brands ‘hypermodern individualism.’"
One thing that might prevent full political cooperation between these groups is the fact that many Protestants still view Catholics—who reject the Rapture—as "apostates." Indeed, in the ever-popular Left Behind book series, written by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, a Catholic cardinal actually assists the Antichrist.
My article then goes on to discuss the contents of that 12-volume book series, a "pulpy epic" as it has been called, "which has already sold in excess of 60 million copies in the past nine years." (As I remind fans of Ayn Rand in the article, by way of comparison, "Rand’s book sales have been impressive—probably around 20 million total copies of her collected works and all translations over the past sixty years—but this figure pales in comparison to the LaHaye-Jenkins series.")
So, in the end, I do agree with Garry Wills's suggestion that this specific cultural tendency is pre-Enlightenment, nay, anti-Enlightenment. I have argued, however, that Wills "overstates his case," but that does not impugn the fact that this evangelical movement is a threat to American liberty. And while it may not have guaranteed a Bush victory, Bush could never have won without the support of this constituency. Period. "The Architect" Karl Rove understood this, and worked very hard to solidify that evangelical base for Bush. He succeeded. Bush won.
Now, I don't think we should reject as trivial the observation "that religious people like Bush," as Irfan puts it. I also don't believe that we are even talking about "the country as a whole ... devolving into some anti-Enlightenment abyss." But the evidence I present in my article (from which I quoted above) documents a trend that cannot be ignored. This is not a pro-reason, this-worldly cultural movement. It is a growing religious movement that has learned to use savvy modern mass marketing techniques. And it has crucially important political ramifications.
I'd like to make one more, somewhat tangential point, in response to Irfan's claim of "little difference" between Reagan and Bush Jr. I recognize completely that Reagan was among the first to tap into the evangelical movement. But there is a key difference. Reagan tried to build a coalition of evangelicals, fiscal conservatives (so-called "supply-siders"), and "libertarian" conservatives. He was also an inspiring speaker (not a self-confessed "mangler" of the English language for sure) who more often than not used libertarian rhetoric, even if his policies were less-than-libertarian.
As I say in my "Rapture" essay:
George W. Bush, however, has virtually dropped Reagan’s libertarian rhetoric, while embracing a far more pronounced pietistic ideology. ... The Bush administration has thus become a focal point for the constellation of two crucial impulses in American politics that seek to remake the world: pietism and neoconservatism. The neocons, who come from a variety of religious backgrounds, trace their intellectual lineage to social democrats and Trotskyites, those who adopted the "God-builder" belief, prevalent in Russian Marxist and Silver Age millennial thought, that a perfect (socialist) society could be constructed as if from an Archimedean standpoint. The neocons may have repudiated Trotsky’s socialism, but they have simply adopted his constructivism to the project of building democratic nation-states among other groups of warring fundamentalists—in the Middle East.
One last tangential point: I went into the voting booth and voted for every race except for President. I refused to cast a ballot for either Kerry or Bush, and just thought a Libertarian vote was futile in this instance. But I am not at all convinced that Kerry would have done more harm to this country economically than Bush has done already, and there is some historical evidence to suggest that a Democratic President dealing with a Republican Congress would have been institutionally constrained.
All of this is moot. Bush won. As I have been arguing for many months, his victory would be derived from many factors for sure, factors that most assuredly include terrorism and not changing "horses in mid-apocalypse." But among those factors is his crucially important support from an evangelical voting bloc that has gained political leverage and cultural clout. We minimize the extent of that leverage and that clout at our great peril.
I stand opposed to Bush's fiscal irresponsibility. I stand opposed to his social conservatism. I stand opposed to his foreign policy adventures. And I stand opposed to those who see in Bush a Moral Crusader, not because I oppose morality, but because I repudiate the specific nature of that Crusade.
Friday, November 5, 2004
A Pox on Both Their Houses
I must confess that this morning's NY Times has given me a much-needed chuckle. The Op-Ed section has a group of articles written by a bunch of liberal Democrats trying to rally the spirit of the "minority party." Since I now have a little track record for my soothsaying, I'll make another prediction, though this one is a lot easier: The Democrats will never present any radical alternative to the GOP. And those who think it possible are deluding themselves.
In this spirit, Paul Krugman screams: "No Surrender!." He says that
Bush isn't a conservative. He's a radical—the leader of a coalition that deeply dislikes America as it is. Part of that coalition wants to tear down the legacy of Franklin Roosevelt, eviscerating Social Security and, eventually, Medicare.
First, I must take grave exception to calling Bush a "radical." Call him a reactionary if you will, but please don't sully the good name of radicals everywhere. Second ... puhlease! Many of the neoconservatives who now support Bush are former social democrats, full-fledged supporters of the New Deal. Nobody is going to get rid of FDR's "legacy," because it is now part of the American Third Way, one that repudiates both capitalism and socialism, while finding more "efficient" ways to deliver welfare programs. Let's not forget that this President has presided over the most expansive extension of Medicare since the days of Lyndon Baines Johnson. As I said: PUHLEASE.
In fact, Bush has a lot in common with LBJ: As I wrote here, he has endorsed all the "conventional Democratic planks: an expanding welfare state, budget deficits, and a war abroad." And let's not forget that the Democrats, including Senator John Kerry, lined up like ducks on a lake to give this President the authority to go to war in Iraq. Democratic duplicity or, worse, self-delusion, is everywhere.
Democrat Andrei Cherny wonders "Why We Lost":
On Wednesday morning, Democrats across the country awoke to a situation they have not experienced since before the New Deal: We are now, without a doubt, America's minority party. We do not have the presidency. We are outnumbered in the Senate, the House, governorships and legislatures. And the conservative majority on the Supreme Court seems likely to be locked in place for a generation. It is clearly a moment that calls for serious reflection.
Indeed, Mr. Cherny. But let's not forget that this is all partially an outgrowth of the very New Deal that your Democratic Party built, and that the Republicans learned to co-opt after decades of saying "me-too." Gone is fiscal conservatism. Gone is opposition to the welfare state. Gone is any opposition to the warfare state, which was so much a part of the Old Right (like that Grand Old Republican, Robert Taft). The warfare state opposition, in fact, has now been relegated to a small "paleocon" minority led by Patrick Buchanan, who, nevertheless, still endorses the social agenda of the evangelical Christians.
Boy, American politics is God-awful, isn't it?
Getting back to Cherny: In essence, he argues that despite "sensible and right" policies proposed by Democrats, they "don't have" and "sorely need ... what President George H. W. Bush so famously derided as 'the vision thing'—a worldview that makes a thematic argument about where America is headed and where we want to take it." This is in contrast to the old New Deal Democrat, who once "had a bold vision: we would use government programs to make Americans' lives more stable and secure." But Cherny acknowledges that even Bill Clinton declared famously "that 'the era of big government is over.'"
Alas, it's not over. What is over, however, is the illusion of the limited-government Republican. George W. Bush has succeeded, partially, because he is a Big Government Conservative. His administration has merged the techniques of the Trotskyite Left with the goals of both the evangelical and neoconservative Right. Indeed, that neoconservative Right is, itself, an emigree from the Trotskyite Left. And it takes seriously the goals of another Great Democrat, Woodrow Wilson, in its desire to make the world safe for democracy. One might say that the GOP success owes something to the ability of that party to absorb, rather than to repudiate, the legacy of Wilson, FDR, and LBJ.
Another, older, generation of Republicans was largely unsuccessful in toppling the Democrats' monopolizing of the White House from 1932 through 1968. Only a former World War II General was able to stick himself in-between the FDR-Truman years and the JFK-LBJ years. The Republicans were ultimately successful at getting elected because they adopted what Ayn Rand once called "political 'me-too-ism'," thus becoming a part of the mediocrity of the middle. She wrote, back in the early 1960s, that this me-too-ism "abjectly displayed by the 'conservatives' of today toward their brazenly socialistic adversaries, is only the result and the feeble reflection of the ethical 'me-too-ism' displayed by the philosophers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, by the alleged champions of reason, toward the Witch Doctors of morality." Now, alas, the Witch Doctors of morality are in ascendance. And just as the Republicans had once offered a "me-too" or, better yet, "I'll-get-it-for-you-wholesale" response to their left-leaning Democratic opponents, as Rand said, the Democrats have responded in kind, mostly with a promise to manage government operations more "efficiently." From Michael Dukakis, who stressed "competence" in his bout against Bush Sr. to John Kerry, who said he'd wage a more "efficient" war in his bout against Bush Jr., the Democrats have rarely offered anything substantially different from the Republicans. Their recent successes came only with Bill Clinton, who was as close to a Republican in his "New Democrat" philosophy as any Democrat is liable to get, insofar as he co-opted "Republican" themes like "welfare reform" and "balanced budgets."
These positions start to morph into one another, and nobody, nobody on either side of this divide is repudiating Big Government.
In the end, with both parties having mastered various forms of pragmatic moral appeasement, each remains a full-fledged defender of the activist state. Their constituencies may differ, their rhetorical emphases may shift, but neither party is questioning the fundamental premises upon which this politico-economic system is based. And neither will present the kind of bold, secular alternative upon which freedom might flourish.
Thursday, November 4, 2004
Declaring War Against Zealotry
I must say that I was a bit annoyed some months ago when I was routinely criticized by those who supported the President despite their reservations about his religious agenda, because I dared to suggest that he was using religion as a political and cultural weapon for the re-making of the modern world. When I wrote my essay about the alarming growth in evangelical Christianity as a mainstream cultural force, I knew that such growth would have vast political implications. These critics kept telling me that I was "overdoing" it. In my view, the election results yesterday are much too clear to ignore.
So to all my critics: You voted for this man. Do not be surprised by the long-term political consequences, which, unfortunately, will affect all of us.
Of course, the liberal NY Times has been talking about this rise of religion for a while. It has published essays by Ron Suskind, Russell Shorto, and, today, Garry Wills, all of which speak of an ongoing religious revival.
Ironically, yesterday, in his victory speech, Bush himself thanked the gay-baiting Karl Rove as "the architect" (with apologies to Howard Roark). That fact is not lost on Wills, who writes:
This election confirms the brilliance of Karl Rove as a political strategist. He calculated that the religious conservatives, if they could be turned out, would be the deciding factor. The success of the plan was registered not only in the presidential results but also in all 11 of the state votes to ban same-sex marriage. Mr. Rove understands what surveys have shown, that many more Americans believe in the Virgin Birth than in Darwin's theory of evolution.
This might be called Bryan's revenge for the Scopes trial of 1925, in which William Jennings Bryan's fundamentalist assault on the concept of evolution was discredited. Disillusionment with that decision led many evangelicals to withdraw from direct engagement in politics. But they came roaring back into the arena out of anger at other court decisions - on prayer in school, abortion, protection of the flag and, now, gay marriage. Mr. Rove felt that the appeal to this large bloc was worth getting President Bush to endorse a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage (though he had opposed it earlier).
It's interesting that some commentators think of this Bush victory as the re-emergence of an even purer "Reagan revolution." I find nothing pure in Bush's complete abandonment of Reagan's libertarian rhetoric. Say what you will about the Gipper; at least, he had libertarian rhetoric, even if his legacy was terribly mixed. Wills himself argues, in essence, that however much Reagan might be viewed as the John the Baptist to Bush-as-Jesus, Reagan was "amiably and ecumenically pious. He could address more secular audiences, here and abroad, with real respect."
In the end, Wills asks a legitimate question: "Can a people that believes more fervently in the Virgin Birth than in evolution still be called an Enlightened nation?" I do think he overstates his case, however. Yesterday was not "The Day the Enlightenment Went Out." But it was a warning shot in a much wider cultural war. And it is a cultural war that we are ultimately fighting... not only against the religious zealots at home, but also against the religious zealots abroad, who would bring death and destruction to our shores.
It is now up to those men and women of goodwill, who hold Enlightenment values, to stand tall, and to fight zealotry, of whatever stripe, every step of the way.
Wednesday, November 3, 2004
I Told You So
Bravo to the Winner! I've never been happier! Cheers to Yankee shortstop Derek Jeter, on winning his first Gold Glove.
Oh ... as for that other race. Well, let me just say it: I was right. I told you so. I know, I know, the Electoral College votes are not complete yet. But it's all over.
I do think that my reasoning for predicting Bush the winner over 7 months ago was also correct. I suggested back then that Bush's fundamentalist religious base would be fortified and that it would play a crucial role in his victory. The President clearly retained that constituency and strengthened its support.
Some people were saying that the youth vote would offset that fundamentalist base. But the youth vote was stable at 17%, contrary to predictions that it would usher in Kerry Nation. In the end, though exit poll voters named the economy (20%), terrorism (19%), and Iraq (15%) as important issues, the issue of "Moral Values" (22%) polled the highest. And 80% of those who chose "Moral Values" as the issue of the day, voted for Bush. These are not people with secular humanist moral frameworks. They are overwhelmingly religious voters.
This strategy was decisive for the Bush Electoral victory, the brainchild of Karl Rove, who, surprise, surprise, has a history of running gay-baiting campaigns, going all the way back to Bush's gubernatorial race in Texas. Interestingly, same-sex marriage bans were approved in 11 states. Two of these states (Michigan and Oregon) went to Kerry. But the other nine (Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, Montana, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Ohio, and Utah) went to Bush. Such ballot questions brought out the fundamentalist vote. One might say that they were designed to do so.
And in that crucial Ohio race—the state that is still technically in contention, but that will put the President over the top—the anti-gay marriage amendment was the most extreme proposed measure in the country. Not only does the approved amendment bar same-sex marriage; it bars even unions that "approximate marriage." The amendment passed in Ohio; exit polls show that 67% of those who voted to approve this ban also voted for George W. Bush. Those who cared most about the economy, by contrast, voted for Kerry.
The President, with a Republican House, and a firmer Republican majority in the Senate, is on his way. He's won a 51% majority of the votes cast and is in the process of squeaking out an Electoral College victory. He is also a social conservative who has disowned fiscal responsibility, a free-wheeling big spender, who has yet to veto a single bill, and who will extend the welfare state domestically and abroad, as he continues to forge a nation-building crusade to bring "democracy" to the Middle East. At the expense of American taxpayers and American lives. All in the name of a "War on Terror" that has been damaged seriously by his Iraq adventure.
In other words: Everything today is pretty much as it was yesterday.
God help us.
Monday, November 1, 2004
A Vote for Nobody Because It Won't Matter
I have read with great interest the case for Libertarian candidate Badnarik by both Roderick Long (thanks for the plug, too!) and Keith Halderman, and the case for John Kerry by Arthur Silber, and I respect all these perspectives, especially because we are all similarly critical of the current political trends.
For the first time in my life, however, I'm profoundly unenthused and/or fully disgusted by the choices. I have voted for major party candidates in previous elections, and am not opposed to it in principle. And I have also voted for the Libertarian Party candidates, at times, just to register my protest, but the Two-Party system is so entrenched that the prospect of even a symbolic third-party challenge is virtually nil. In any event, after reading Bill Bradford's take on the LP convention and Badnarik, I just get the shivers seeing so many libertarians acting like politicians.
I must confess that my mind shifts among various levels of perversity: A part of me feels that George Bush deserves to be re-elected, only because his administration, more than any other current crop of politicians, ought to stick around and be held fully accountable for the disastrous policies they've instituted, though clearly we will all be paying the price for that. Another part of me feels that if Bush wins (as I predicted back in May 2004), it better be by a slim margin, and not anything approaching a "mandate." Lord help us.
On the other hand, if Kerry wins, I am not at all hopeful. U.S. policies in Iraq have now been institutionalized. Kerry gives no indication that he will change anything fundamentally, except, perhaps, his views, depending on which way the political wind blows. Granted, under these circumstances, it might be better to have somebody who is willing to change in the face of changing circumstances. But Kerry may be in the process of changing into a Neocon Newbie; in the end, he might also be positively Nixonian in his approach to the war, as I have argued.
Still, if current trends continue, Bush might very well lose this race. I've joked about pundits who fall back on soothsaying to predict the winner, but with the Red Sox winning for the first time in 86 years, and with the Redskins losing their last home game before the Election (a Redskins win/loss correlates with an incumbent's win/loss in every Presidential election since 1936), soothsaying is about as accurate at predicting a winner as is informed analysis.
Here in New York, of course, a Blue State by Definition that Kerry will Carry, my vote won't count one way or the other. I will go into the voting booth, vote defensively on a few local races and on various bond issues, and proudly walk out without having cast a single vote for President. As the old adage goes: It only encourages them.
Sunday, October 31, 2004
Election Prediction: Dracula Wins!
Thank goodness I am not a determinist. On this Halloween comes the strange, mysterious information that both George W. Bush and John Kerry (who are ninth cousins twice removed) have genealogical links with Vlad II Dracula of Wallachia. Yes, that Transylvanian Vlad the Impaler who was the model for Bram Stoker's Dracula.
I don't know about you, but I'm taking garlic with me into the Voting Booth on Tuesday.
Thursday, October 28, 2004
New Centenary Issue of The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies
And now for a commercial break.
Volume 6, Number 1 of The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies has just been published. This issue is the first of two symposia celebrating the Ayn Rand Centenary (which is marked, officially, on 2 February 2005). It is entitled "Ayn Rand: Literary and Cultural Impact," and it features articles from such contributors as Erika Holzer, Stephen Cox, Jeff Riggenbach, Matthew Stoloff, Kirsti Minsaas, Cathy Young, Bernice Rosenthal, Alexandra York, and Chris Matthew Sciabarra. Our second Rand Centenary issue will be published in early 2005. It is entitled "Ayn Rand Among the Austrians," and will include contributions from Walter Block, Peter J. Boettke, Steven Horwitz, Roderick T. Long, George Reisman, Larry J. Sechrest, Leland Yeager, Ed Younkins, and others. For information on subscriptions, click here.
All Bets Are Off!
It's Halloween week. Last night, there was a total lunar eclipse. But despite talk of Bambino Curses, the Boston Red Sox won the World Series—first time since 1918.
Wake me up from this nightmare! As a Yankee fan, I never thought I'd see the day when the Sawx would be celebrating in Yankee Stadium to win an American League pennant. Nor did I believe that a mighty St. Louis Cardinals team, after 105 wins on the regular season, after a dramatic 7-game victory over the Astros for the National League pennant, would drop four straight and be swept by the Bosox. In the 100th World Series no less, as old as the New York City subways!
What's next, the Chicago Cubs win a Series?
What's next, a John Forbes Kerry victory?
Don't laugh. Now that the Sox won, all bets are off for Election 2004.
Indeed, a reader wrote to me to remind me of this previous L&P post, Of Sox and Socks. I had written: "Kerry said that he hopes a new White House administration will host the World Champion Red Sox, who last won a World Series in 1918. ... Please note: The fact that New York is hosting that other convention does not mean that the Yanks, like the GOP, are headed for an autumnal victory. But if I were a betting man... I'd say they have better chances than either Kerry or the Sox..."
Oh my. If ever there were an omen of a Kerry victory, this is it. Now that I've eaten crow over my tentative July 2004 guess at the Red Sox chances in October, what will it mean for my earlier prediction in May 2004 of a Bush victory?
Clearly, Kerry understands. Chester Nez, the same World War II Navajo Code Talker who blessed the Red Sox at Fenway Park in April to lift the Curse of the Bambino, blessed the Kerry campaign the other day. A favorite son obviously grasps the need for prayer in this election.
Boston fans may have finally vanquished the Bs: Babe Ruth, Bucky Dent, Aaron Boone, and Busch Stadium. Can that other Bush be far behind?
One thing is clear: the Boston fans may have finally triumphed over their inferiority complex. One of my closest friends, a life-long Bostonian, has been on a high since the New England Patriots won the Super Bowl. The Pats even beat my Jets last weekend, winning their 21st consecutive NFL game. Now with the Sox reigning supreme, and New York getting kicked in the proverbial jock cup in football and baseball, one would think that Bostonians would still be chanting "Yankees Suck" in their all-night revelry. Alas, my friend tells me he didn't hear a single Boston fan utter that famous Beantown phrase.
Perhaps they are just savoring their well-deserved win after such exemplary play. Perhaps they will be like the New York Rangers, who waited 54 years for a Stanley Cup, and who haven't been heard from since 1994. Maybe every 86 years, these Sox get to be aired out. Or maybe we're entering a new epoch altogether, one that will be reflected even on Election Day, where the divisiveness will give way to peace, tranquility, and harmony.
Fat chance. We may no longer be able to chant "19-18" in Yankee Stadium but bring on the 2005 Baseball season! Go Yanks! And to our presidential contenders: A Pox on Both Your Houses!
(Oh, and, uh, Props to the Sox... congratulations ... arrrrrrrrrghhhh ... grumble ... )
Update: The mystique of this "Cursed to First" Bosox win has the numerologists going crazy today. The last Cardinal to bat was Edgar Renteria, #3, which just happened to be Babe Ruth's uniform number. The two Red Sox players who embraced in the outfield were Gabe Kapler (#19) and Johnny Damon (#18): 19-18. The last Red Sox team to win in 1918, had 86 victories... and it's been 86 years since the last World Series win. Alas, that irony has not eluded the New York Daily News, whose back page sports headline reads: "SOX SWEEP CARDS AS CURSE TAKES YEAR OFF: SEE YOU IN 2090." Cruel.
Check out Not a Blog.
Wednesday, October 27, 2004
The NYC Subway Centennial
Today marks the 100th anniversary of the opening of the New York City Subway. It is interesting to note that the subway system began with the Interborough Rapid Transit (IRT), a private line that ran the 9.1 mile route from City Hall to West 145th street. The system has survived government unification, "King Kong," Satan (in "The Devil's Advocate"), aliens (in "Men in Black II"), and Gene Hackman's high-speed car chase in "The French Connection." And it runs 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, for the city that never sleeps. Happy birthday.
Saturday, October 23, 2004
Ayn Rand and Unintended Consequences
Justin Raimondo of antiwar.com has been spending a bit of time on the "Objectivist Death Cult" here, here, and here. I, myself, have been criticizing the foreign policy positions of many Objectivists for nearly two years, starting in the days after September 11, 2001, and extending through the Iraq war and beyond.
I did not attend the recent Cato conference on the Iraq war, but, if Raimondo's report is accurate, and I have no doubt that it is, one point made by my colleague David Kelley, Executive Director of The Objectivist Center, raises some concerns (and I will have to hear the comments and their context in order to assess them fully). As Raimondo sees it, Kelley "comes up with a real whopper: The Hayekian law of unintended consequences is not applicable to foreign policy, because there is no reason that the results of inaction are any more unpredictable than taking action." Raimondo retorts: "But couldn’t one make this same argument when it comes to domestic policy: that if we don’t, say, take 'action' to ensure that all people have government-subsidized healthcare, that there will be some horrific 'consequence' of 'inaction'? Why these universal principles supposedly stop at the water’s edge is a mystery that Kelley did not do a very good job of clearing up."
In actuality, however, Ayn Rand herself never paid much formal attention to the concept of "unintended consequences." It's not that one can find no attention to "unintended consequences" in her work. It's that her attention was much more focused on the efficacy of reason, and efficacy, by its nature, means the ability to produce an intended or desired effect. But even Rand understood that human beings were not omniscient, and that the world could never be made completely subject and predictable. To revolt against this fact is to revolt against both psychological maturity and one's own nature; Rand reserved some of her harshest criticisms for those whom F. A. Hayek himself derided as "rationalists" of the constructivist variety.
Unlike Rand, Hayek paid extraordinary attention to the unintended consequences of human action. These consequences are so much a part of what it means to be an actor in a social environment that they are, in essence, constitutive of social life. Whether we call them "side effects," "externalities," or by the more colorful term "blowback," they are an omnipresent factor of living in society. They are part and parcel of what it means to be a social actor. Every social actor has to take into account the possibility of both negative and positive externalities generated by action—or inaction (especially if one has had a history of being involved in certain sets of social relations, which continue to exert an influence on current conditions; see, for example, the U.S. role in the Middle East). One of the virtues of a private property free-market system is that it creates the social conditions whereby such social actors internalize the externalities generated, that is, take them into account. That's what it means to make actors accountable and responsible for their actions or inactions, actions of commission or omission, so-to-speak. And that's why it is not enough to enunciate a moral principle (like Rand's principle that any free society has the right, though not the obligation, to invade any slave pen) without tracing the potential costs and benefits of such actions or inactions.
Rand may have uttered that principle, but she herself understood the enormous repercussions of concretizing it. Unwilling to allow such a principle to be a floating abstraction applicable regardless of context, Rand was very careful about applying it wholesale to the conditions of the real world because she genuinely grasped the politico-economic dynamics that shaped those conditions. For example, she was opposed to U.S. entry into World War I. She was among those on the Old Right who were against U.S. entry into the Second World War; she was prepared to allow the evil twins of collectivism—the Nazis and the Soviets—to slaughter one another, before allowing one American soldier to lose his life. And, despite a virulent hatred for communism, a system from which she escaped, she was equally opposed to U.S. entry into Korea and Vietnam.
Rand grasped that there was an indissoluble link between domestic and foreign policy. She wrote: "Foreign policy is merely a consequence of domestic policy." As I explained in my essay, "Understanding the Global Crisis" (citations can be found in the essay):
When Rand called for a complete "revision of [U.S.] foreign policy, from its basic premises on up," she knew that this would entail a simultaneous repudiation of the welfare state at home and the warfare state abroad, an end to "foreign aid and [to] all forms of international self-immolation." She knew that "a radically different foreign policy" required a radically different domestic one—and that both required a philosophic and cultural revolution.
Rand had identified U.S. domestic policy as the "New Fascism." This was—and is—a de facto, predatory fascism, the result of pragmatic expediency and of ad hoc, incremental policies that had enriched some groups at the expense of others. A business-government "partnership" was its "economic essence." In such a system, she argued, we are all victims and victimizers; the whole society becomes a "class of beggars." For once the rule of force begins to predominate, the institutional means for legalized predation expand exponentially. "If this is a society's system," writes Rand, "no power on earth can prevent men from ganging up on one another in self-defense—i.e., from forming pressure groups."
The New Fascism therefore "accelerates the process of juggling debts, switching losses, piling loans on loans, mortgaging the future and the future's future. As things grow worse, the government protects itself not by contracting this process, but by expanding it" beyond its national borders. Just as pressure groups had slurped at the government trough in seeking domestic privileges, so too did they benefit from a whole global system of foreign aid, involving financial manipulation (through, for example, the Federal Reserve System, the Ex-Im Bank, and the IMF), "credits to foreign consumers to enable them to consume" U.S.-produced goods, "unpaid loans to foreign governments, and subsidies to other welfare states," to the United Nations, and to the World Bank.
Rand goes further: "If looting collectivists did not exist, America's foreign aid policy would create them." The overwhelming profiteers of this system were those peculiar "products . . . of the mixed economy," those statist businessmen who "seek to grow rich not by means of productive ability, but by means of political pull and of special political privileges." Rand observes "that there are firms here and there, in various businesses and industries, who are growing prosperous by trading with foreign countries, the specific foreign countries who receive American aid. In other words, there are businessmen who are selling their products to the foreign countries receiving American aid and who are paid by American funds—who are paid by the aid money granted to those countries. In other words, some Americans are draining the money, the tax money, of other Americans, into their own pockets, via a longer tour through every corner of the globe which receives our foreign aid. This tax money is taken from some citizens, handed to foreign governments and pressure groups and then comes back to some of our citizens, through those successful pressure groups who have pull in Washington." This was a "siphoning" process, in Rand's view, a "necessary corollary of a mixed economy, or rather the necessary expression of a mixed economy, now being carried to the international scene. It is a civil war gone international; it is pressure groups using foreign countries in order to destroy our own. That is the meaning of our foreign aid policy."
Thus, the New Fascism exports "the bloody chaos of tribal warfare" to the rest of the world, creating a whole class of "pull peddlers" among both foreign and domestic lobbyists, who feed on the carcass of the American taxpayer, causing massive global political, social, and economic dislocations. Whereas the Left derided "capitalist imperialism" for this state of affairs, Rand recognized that capitalism, "the unknown ideal," had taken the blame for the sins of its opposite. She lamented the internationalization of the New Fascism; given "the interdependence of the Western world," all countries are "leaning on one another as bad risks, bad consuming parasite borrowers." She recognized how the system's dynamics propelled such internationalization, but advised: "The [fewer] ties we have with any other countries, the better off we will be." Suggesting a biological analogy in warning against the spread of neofascism, she quips: "If you have a disease, should you get a more serious form of it, and will that help you?"
I have argued that this critique of the "New Fascism" is as relevant today as it was when Rand first presented it.
Rand's comments focused not on the historical concretes, but on the principles entailed in interventionism. Like Ludwig von Mises and F. A. Hayek, Rand predicted that the interventionist system would expand its reach, making possible an ever-deepening social fragmentation among warring foreign and domestic pressure groups. ... In Rand's view, even noble actors pursuing noble goals are defeated by this system. The New Fascism can only engender "parasitism, favoritism, corruption and greed for the unearned"; its power to dispense privilege, Rand emphasizes, "cannot be used honestly."
Note that in Rand's critique of the global statist system, she never bothered to draw a distinction between the spheres of domestic and foreign policy. In other words, these principles did not "stop at the water’s edge," to use Raimondo's phrase.
Those of us who have drawn as well from the work of Hayek understand that in the global sphere, the network of social relations is far more complex than the domestic sphere, far more likely to generate even more insidious negative externalities, given that our knowledge of other cultures is even less than our knowledge of our own.
I have had enormous differences with many of Objectivism's modern exponents on these questions; even if we come to dramatically different conclusions, however, it is my hope that more of them will begin to appreciate Rand's actual perspective on U.S. foreign policy. Unfortunately, however, I see no indication that Rand's radical critique has been fully integrated into any current Objectivist writings on the global situation. I will have much more to say about this issue in the coming weeks.
Friday, October 22, 2004
The Fall Classic
As a follow-up to yesterday's post on the Yankees' devastating loss to the Boston Red Sox in the American League Championship Series, I recommend to readers a few essays in the New York papers—2 articles in the NY Times and 1 in the NY Daily News (even perpetual Yankee critics like Mike Lupica have a couple of valuable things to say).
In Michiko Kakutani's essay, "In a Fan's Eyes, the World Turns Upside Down," the author tells us of "a breakdown in the cosmic order Wednesday night," which destroyed the "old myths, the old beliefs in curses and destiny," as "the scruffy, hopelessly jinxed Boston Red Sox, pulled off the unimaginable: toppling the once-proud Yankees in the most shaming and mind-boggling fashion ..." The "mythic sense" of the Yankees (dubbed the "Evil Empire") was shattered, says Kakutani, on a night when Bucky Dent threw out the first pitch, a date on which fans celebrated Mickey Mantle's birthday. "Karma had left the Bronx and fled north up the Eastern corridor," Kakutani tells us.
Still, this is as much about Boston's success as it is about New York's failure. And it is only success that will bury the "Curse of the Bambino" for all time. The "curse" was never about beating the New York Yankees ... though I will admit that there is nothing quite like the Red Sox-Yankees rivalry. Last year's Yankees' World Series loss to the Florida Marlins, for example, didn't hold a candle to the 7-game epic that ended with Aaron Boone's walk-off homerun in extra innings, giving the Yanks the AL crown.
But the Bosox have beaten the Yanks plenty of times. Even after their last World Series win in 1918, the Bosox have represented the American League in the Fall classic and have done so in dramatic fashion. They lost in 7 games in both 1946 and 1967, falling both times to this year's NL champions, the St. Louis Cardinals, whom they will meet again when the Series gets under way on Saturday night. They lost in 7 games in 1975 in a titanic Series with the Cincinatti Reds. And they lost in 7 games in 1986 to the New York Mets. (Just utter two words to Bosox fans, and their memories will be jarred: Bill Buckner.)
So, onward to another Red Sox-Cardinals series. It should be fun.
As for the aforementioned articles providing us with the expected Yankee postmortem, I don't agree with every point made, but I do think there is essential truth in the observation that the Yankees' boss George Steinbrenner has chased away home-grown talent, devastating the great Yankee farm system (something Buster Olney covers well in his article, "Down on the Farm"), while assembling an All-Star group that lacks the cohesiveness of the integrated teams that the Yankees fielded to 4 world championships in the 5 years between 1996 and 2000. But as I suggested in yesterday's essay, I think it is the very young generation that has been "horribly spoiled" by recent Yankee victories. Coming from this fan, who has lived through more Yankee losses than victories, I know the agony of defeat. Maybe not like a Boston fan or a Cubs fan. But s*&% happens.
So, let's enjoy this fall classic, before having to deal with another one on November 2nd.
Thursday, October 21, 2004
When You're a Loser ...
... it doesn't feel all that good. And what a loss it was for Yankee fans. But who am I to talk about losses? Not in the face of a history of enormous losses by the Boston Red Sox, who have spent nearly a century under the delusion that they are victims of the Curse of the Bambino, an alleged curse that emerged after they dealt Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees; for this, they have not won a World Series since 1918 ... and whatever their victories over the guys in pinstripes, it is only a World Series win that will vanquish that curse forever in the hearts of the Beantown faithful.
I have much more to say about this at Not a Blog. Click here.
Sunday, October 17, 2004
Welfare and Warfare, Foreign and Domestic
In a recent exchange here at L&P, William Marina laments the lack of "a real libertarian analysis of Empire," comparable to that offered by those of the New Left, like William Appleman Williams, and others.
I agree with Marina that a libertarian analysis of system is necessary, and I have suggested, in such books as Total Freedom: Toward a Dialectical Libertarianism, that a broader, comprehensive analysis of the workings of statism is crucial to our understanding of the current global crises. It is impossible to analyze foreign policy to the exclusion of domestic policy, or vice versa. It is crucial to understand how the system operates, and the historical conditions that have shaped it. Cliche though it may be, the past has implications for the present just as surely as the present has vast implications for the future.
It is comforting, therefore, to see some discussion of "The Election and America's Future," in the November 4th issue of the New York Review of Books. Some of the commentators, in fact, suggest a vague familiarity with the kinds of systemic issues I'm talking about. Mark Danner, for example, recognizes that the war in Iraq has now been institutionalized. Danner writes:
The war in Iraq, launched in the glamorous cause of ideological transformation, has now settled down into something bloody, murderous, and crude, fought on behalf of a people who are increasingly weary of its costs and bewildered by its stakes. There is no safe or easy way out, and the winner of this election, like the winner in 1968, will find his administration dogged by it from first day to last.
Gary Wills also sees similarities to the 1968 election:
What was the last election with great stakes in play? I suppose 1968. It was similar to this race, but (as it were) upside down. Both involve the problem of admitting a tragic mistake. The mistake in 1968 was a belief that where the French had failed in a long and committed colonial adventure in Indochina, we could replace them and succeed. We could do so, we thought, because we were not colonialists but supporters of indigenous freedom against world communism. We came with "clean hands." The current mistake is a belief that we could enter the Mideast with clean hands as supporters of democratic values in the whole region, in opposition to world terrorism. ... Both mistakes reflected an ignorance of the respective regions, a false view of America's reception by those being "helped," and an underestimation of American resistance to longer-term commitment than was first proposed.
It's ironic to read about Vietnam-Iraq parallels insofar as the current crop of neoconservative policymakers in Washington emerged in the period following LBJ's "Great (Welfare-Warfare) Society." As Mark Lilla argues in his essay, "The Closing of the Straussian Mind," "[t]he neoconservative impulse was originally a moderating one, arising from a sense that American liberalism needed a reality check." But if "traditional conservatism" was "anti-intellectual," Lilla writes,
neoconservatism is counter-intellectual. That is the source of its genius and influence. Unlike traditional conservatives who used simply to complain about left-leaning writers, professors, judges, bureaucrats, and journalists, the neoconservatives long ago understood that the only way to resist a cultural elite is to replace it with another. ... Neoconservatism began as an intellectual movement. It is now an essential part of Republican politics, and therefore American life.
The source of its genius and influence, indeed, and of its danger as well. (As an aside, there is little doubt that it is this sense of mission that attracts many people to Bush. The constellation of the administration's neoconservative convictions and Bush's own personal pietistic convictions may still hold the key to this election, insofar as people continue to perceive John Kerry as being a man without any convictions, NY Times editorials notwithstanding. Russell Baker remarks: "Years ago I heard Morris Udall, a liberal Democrat from Arizona, say that the same people who voted for Barry Goldwater, then the voice of conservatives, also voted for him because Arizonans liked candidates who told them, plain and outright, who they were and what they stood for.")
But if the neocon court intellectuals provide the ideological legitimacy for this nation-building mission, let's not forget that the mission itself is both a reflection and perpetuation of the corporatist system that the U.S. represents. We've seen the effects abroad in the government subsidies handed out to crony corporations intimately involved with Iraqi reconstruction. The administration talks about bringing freedom and democracy to the Iraqis, but the mission promises to make Iraq into a new Great Society project; the U.S. might very well succeed in this mission since the welfare state has historical antecedents in Iraq's past, antecedents which have engendered a "culture of dependency" in that country that continues till this day.
The mission also has vast implications domestically, not only in terms of the potential for increasing regimentation in civic culture and the growing threats to our civil liberties, but also in terms of the economic effects of war mobilization. Please note: This is not a rejection of the need for domestic security; it is simply an acknowledgment of the profound economic effects that war must have on civil society. In "Terrorbusters Inc.," an article published in today's NY Times, Louis Uchitelle and John Markoff tell us of the war's impact on the domestic economy, engendering a "Homeland Security-Industrial Complex." The emphasis on domestic security is having a huge effect on the shape of the economy as government subsidies are flowing into the coffers of corporate America:
Private-sector outlays for antiterrorism measures and to guard against other forms of violence may now be as much as $40 billion to $50 billion a year, or two or three times higher than the annual rate before 9/11. ... The federal government's contribution has also passed the $40 billion mark, double what it was before 9/11. As the spending soars, domestic security seems poised to become a significant factor in the overall economy, much the way military spending was during the cold war. "The question is: What is enough security?'' said Gordon Adams, who oversaw national security spending at the Office of Management and Budget in the Clinton administration and now heads a security policy studies program at George Washington University. "The answer is, no one knows, and fear is a powerful driver here. Since we do not know who means us harm, where they are and how long they are going to continue to mean us harm, where do you stop?'' ...
As the overall cost approaches $100 billion, domestic security is beginning to take on the characteristics of military spending in the early years of the cold war. Just as an open-ended fear of Communism drove that spending surge, the open-ended terrorist threat is driving today's spending on domestic security. ... Spending on domestic security has the potential to become a similar albatross for the economy, although it has not yet reached the proportions of the cold war era. By 1953, military outlays had risen to 14.2 percent of all economic activity from a post-World War II low of just 3.5 percent in 1948. Following a similar trajectory, but from a much smaller starting point, spending for domestic security has risen from well under half of 1 percent of gross domestic product just before 9/11 to roughly eight-tenths of 1 percent three years later. One percent, or $110 billion a year, is the point at which spending on domestic security would begin to affect the overall economy. And the nation is quickly getting there. ...
The ideological veneer that allows Bush administration officials to speak of the "free market," also allows them to champion what they hope will be commercial "spin-offs from spending on domestic security that are likely to offset some of the drag. The Internet, after all, started life as a Pentagon-financed research project, connecting military and academic laboratories." Note, however, that the corporations involved in producing domestic security are now clamoring not for the free market, but for even greater government regulation. Joseph W. McGrath, President of the Unisys Corporation, for example, "favors more regulation. Most executives in the maritime industry do, too, he said, citing a recent survey of shipping executives that showed that 75 percent supported mandatory regulation. From the maritime industry's point of view, a regulated security system is likely to speed up the movement of cargo through American ports, freeing ships more quickly for their next journey."
There is an indissoluble link between warfare and the extension of the regulatory welfare state. Libertarians need to focus more on providing the kind of systemic analysis that makes this link transparent.
Saturday, October 16, 2004
The Donald
Donald Trump was "roasted" last night by the Friars Club. One of the best lines (that is, one of the only lines fit for an online family forum like Liberty & Power) came from comic Rich Vos:
When they were putting this roast together, they asked Rodney if he'd like to do it. He said "I'd rather be dead."
Sunday, October 10, 2004
America First
A very interesting article by Franklin Foer appears in today's NY Times: "Once Again, America First." Foer talks about how conservatives, with their typical distrust of government power, have begun to turn against the Bush administration's neo-Wilsonian desires to "democratize the Middle East." The critics include George Will, Patrick Buchanan, "the libertarian Cato Institute and the traditionalist Chronicles magazine," as well as congressman Henry Hyde and conservative commentator Tucker Carlson. More importantly, Foer rediscovers the almost-forgotten anti-interventionist tradition of the Old Right, and he includes a number of modern-day heroes of contemporary libertarianism:
One of conservatism's early and now largely forgotten folk heroes was Albert Jay Nock, the flamboyant author of ''Memoirs of a Superfluous Man,'' who wore a cape and celebrated Belgium as his ideal society. In 1933, Nock wrote about ''the Remnant,'' borrowing the term from Matthew Arnold and the Book of Isaiah. By the Remnant he meant an enlightened elite that rejected the phoniness of mass society. A few historians have used Remnant as a synonym for the pre-National Review right -- a group that included the economic journalists Garet Garrett and Frank Chodorov, Ayn Rand, Rose Wilder Lane (Laura Ingalls Wilder's daughter) and, to an extent, H. L. Mencken. Nock's allusion to Isaiah works nicely for these polemicists, who issued thunderous, Old Testament-like warnings about American decline. Finding themselves at the forefront of opposition to World War II, they turned to the America First movement. Their hatred for war followed from their radical individualism. As the essayist Randolph Bourne (not a conservative) famously put it about World War I, ''War is the health of the state.'' Since these writers disliked the state, they came to dislike war, too. ...
Conservatism emerged out of the McCarthyite moment with a new enemy: that small band of conservatives who continued clinging to isolationism. National Review, for one, didn't have any place for them in its pages. ... Upon the death of the libertarian isolationist Murray Rothbard in 1995, Buckley quipped, ''We extend condolences to his family, but not to the movement he inspired.'' ... Without a home in the conservative movement, the isolationists had no choice but to search for allies in unlikely quarters. During the late 60's, they often teamed up with the New Left, becoming stalwarts of the antiwar movement. ... And a few on the New Left returned the favor, heartily embracing the apostates. In 1975, the historian Ronald Radosh (then a man of the left) published ''Prophets on the Right,'' a book championing the prescience of Robert A. Taft and other ''conservative critics of American globalism.'' ...
Buchananite foreign policy has an intellectual wing, paleoconservatism. Long before French protesters and liberal bloggers had even heard of the neoconservatives, the paleoconservatives were locked in mortal combat with them. Paleocons fought neocons over whom Ronald Reagan should appoint to head the National Endowment for the Humanities, angrily denouncing them as closet liberals -- or worse, crypto-Trotskyists. Even their self-selected name, paleocon, suggests disdain for the neocons and their muscular interventionism. ... The paleocons explicitly hark back to Garrett, Nock and the Remnant, what they lovingly call the ''Old Right.'' ...
George W. Bush entered office implicitly promising agnosticism in the long-running debate between neocons and paleocons. On the 2000 campaign trail, he promised a ''distinctly American internationalism'' that would provide ''idealism, without illusions; confidence, without conceit; realism, in the service of American ideals.'' Of course, after 9/11, Bush dispensed with this doctrinal neutrality. And in adopting a neocon foreign policy, he rallied most conservatives behind his ambitious agenda, a dramatic turnabout in opinion from the 90's.
Will this consensus hold? Already, many conservative writers seem primed to abandon it. Even when they haven't gone as far as Will or Carlson in their criticisms of the war, they have flashed their discomfort with Bush's goal of planting democracy in Iraq. National Review has called this policy ''largely, if not entirely, a Wilsonian mistake.'' With these signs of restlessness, it's easy to imagine that a Bush loss in November, coupled with further failures in Iraq, could trigger a large-scale revolt against neoconservative foreign policy within the Republican Party. A Bush victory, on the other hand, will be interpreted by many Republicans as a vindication of the current course, and that could spur a revolt too. If the party tilts farther toward an activist foreign policy, antiwar conservatives might begin searching for a new political home.
I recommend the whole article to your attention.
Cross-posted at the Mises Economics Blog.
Saturday, October 9, 2004
Here We Go Again...
The headline on the front of the Boston Herald announced this morning : "GO YANKS! We want to kick your butts on our way to the Series!" One of the few times any Boston periodical called for a Yankee victory. And the Sox fans have been salivating at the thought of avenging the beating they got in last year's historic 7-game American League Championship Series.
Well. Here we go again. The Yanks beat the Minnesota Twins, 6-5, in extra innings, and advance to the ALCS against the Boston Red Sox. Last year, the Red Sox fans took to calling their team "cowboys" (as in "Cowboy Up"). This year, Bosox star outfielder Johnny Damon said their new nickname is "idiots."
He said it. I didn't.
May the best team win.
Higgs and "Participatory Fascism"
As a follow-up to yesterday's discussion of fascism as a species of statism, I had a nice offlist exchange with Robert Higgs. Higgs' work, Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government, published in 1987 by Oxford University Press, includes a crucially important chapter on the subject of the mixed economy. Higgs asks in Chapter 10 if the mixed economy is on a march toward Socialism or Fascism. He concludes that the best descriptive term for the present political economy of the United States is "participatory fascism." Higgs reminds me that it's a term he borrowed from his friend and former Ph.D. student Charlotte Twight, who first used it in her 1975 book America's Emerging Fascist Economy.
There is an interesting myopia at work in the acceptance of this phrase, "participatory fascism," even among the friends of liberty. As Higgs explains, many seem incapable of accepting the current system as a fascist derivative, equating fascism with Nazism and the practice of genocide. In his just-published book, Against Leviathan: Government Power and a Free Society, Higgs characterizes the system as "quasi-corporatism," but, as he expresses in his correspondence with me, the system "still walks and quacks like a participatory-fascist duck."
Higgs has done a lot of important thinking about this subject, and I think his notion of "participatory fascism" captures an essential aspect of what actually goes on in American political economy.
Friday, October 8, 2004
Fascism: Clarifying a Political Concept
In light of my recent post on Islamofascism, which has generated some good comments, I thought it important enough to discuss this topic in much greater detail.
Ironically, I've just discovered this morning an Adrian Lyttleton essay appearing in the October 21 issue of the NY Review of Books. Lyttleton's review of Robert O. Paxton's new book, The Anatomy of Fascism, asks the question "What Was Fascism?"
For years, the left asserted that fascism was simply capitalism with the gloves off. It was Leon Trotsky who first argued that fascism was a degenerative form of capitalism. Likewise, Nicos Poulantzas claimed that it was an authoritarian response to the contradictions of capitalism, when democratic institutions are no longer capable of patching up the "broken barrel" that is the free market.
But the free market, as such, has never existed in countries that fully embraced the fascist model of political economy. In Nazi Germany, for example, there was a Bismarkian history of heavy state involvement in the market. Far behind in the capitalist competitive "race," Bismark attempted to usher in modernity with policies of subsidization and tariff protectionism that benefited quasi-feudal landowners and industrialists. These trends continued through the first world war and led to glaring dislocations in the structure of production. In the post-World War I era, following an almost classic Hayekian "road to serfdom," the Weimar Republic responded to escalating chaos by embracing more stringent tariff and tax policies, public works, and rigid restrictions on foreign exchange. The "free market" was never the means by which German industry attempted to recoup. Instead, German industrialists embraced the statist policies of the Nazis, who merely cashed-in on the long Prussian tradition of political interventionism.
The suppression of a competitive price structure was achieved by the Nazis through laws that blocked market entry, setting up cartel arrangements based on compulsory prices that thwarted deflationary tendencies and froze the status quo of the corporate elite. (The Nazis, of course, also used the state to freeze out Jewish businessmen and landowners, who were simultaneously blamed for the decadence of both capitalism and Bolshevism.) Economic control became a technique of mass domination as a quasi-dictatorship of industrialists laid bare the class bias of fascist "corporatism." This "compulsory order" guaranteed profits, socialized losses and enriched capital-intensive industry.
Such production controls veil and dissemble economic facts, and the capital structure is mangled in the process. Moreover, state control over banks enabled the Nazis to embark on a huge military build-up, which funneled monetary expansion into a growing military-industrial complex. An autarkic philosophy of economics, as Franz Neumann called it, led to the collapse of German purchasing power, the crowding out of capital investment for consumer goods production and a dwindling domestic market for the very bourgeoisie that gave Hitler his mass support. Workers' wages plummeted, labor unions were crushed, and German business became a parasitic class. A similar process ensued in Mussolini's Italy.
Lyttleton emphasizes correctly, in the Paxton book review, "[t]hat fascists believed in the primacy of politics and had only an instrumental interest in economics."
Hitler put it succinctly: economics was there to serve the Volk, not the other way around. Fascist regimes were not afraid to use political methods and propaganda to achieve economic results. They announced clear targets and made their successes highly visible through intensive propaganda, framed in the language of struggle. ... [A]t a time when orthodox laissez-faire economics seemed to have no solutions to offer, the activism of the fascist regimes had great appeal. It is understandable that a number of the architects of the New Deal were impressed.
Of course, laissez-faire economics had both a solution and an explanation: it was government intervention that engendered the boom-bust cycle, and it was only government intervention that could make that cycle worse. But Lyttleton is absolutely correct to claim that “it was just this emphasis” on the politico-economic aims of fascism that
makes it possible to speak of a distinctive fascist political economy, which can best be summarized as the creation of a wartime economy in peacetime. Many of fascism’s institutions were direct recreations of the ad hoc structures created to manage the economy during World War I, such as the committees or consortia run by businessmen, but sanctioned by the state, which allocated raw materials and foreign exchange. This was the reality behind the pompous facade of Mussolini’s corporate state. The “consortialist state” would be a more accurate name for it. The ideal of autarky or economic self-sufficiency was distinctly fascist, and plainly linked to the creation of a war economy. But it was also a logical choice for fascist ideology.
These very same dynamics, it should be noted, were at work in the American political context. Murray Rothbard and others have written well of “War Collectivism in World War I” (see the essay by that name in the Radosh-Rothbard collection, A New History of Leviathan). I’ve written about these dynamics in an early article on the railroads during the first world war, but these same patterns were repeated in virtually every major industry in the United States. It is utterly fitting that the Wilsonian crusade to "make the world safe for democracy" entailed, necessarily, interventionism abroad and interventionism at home. That reality is no different today, when neoconservatives embrace the same Wilsonian mission in the hopes of transforming the Middle East. It is in the march toward war that the organic unity of the warfare state and the welfare state is built, with each aspect mutually reinforcing the other. And it is in this constituted nexus, as Lyttleton suggests, that fascism overturns the essence of economic freedom:
Fascist “anti-capitalism” was not just pseudo-revolutionary rhetoric, or a nostalgic vision of a pre-industrial craft and rural economy. Fascism expressed a consistent preference for “national production” over international finance, and for an organized and politically mobilized economy over the free market. ... In the developed fascist economy, industrialists lost much of their freedom to make decisions, although ... they were not too unhappy about this, since they kept their profits and were assured of a docile labor force whose wages stayed low. Only the small businessmen who had been conspicuous among fascism’s early supporters were radically disappointed. The hierarchical organization of cartels and producers’ associations under state supervision tended to favor larger firms.
This disappointment of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois was interesting, sociologically. Barrington Moore once asked about the Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, the title of his famous book. And John Weiss in his book, The Fascist Tradition, agreed fundamentally with Moore, that classical fascism was fueled by the peculiarly twentieth-century mass response of middle-class conservative groups "threatened by rapid liberalization of the social system in which they enjoyed a privileged place." Paradoxically, these middle-class groups provided the mass support necessary for the creation of fascist states, while ceding much control to the industrialists who benefited most from fascist political economy. Moore argued further that fascism has not developed in its classical form in traditionally democratic societies because these societies were able to affect a more complete break with the feudal past and its social order of static mediocrity.
Lyttleton's review discusses some of these issues as well. Fascist movements were very much shaped by the countries in which they emerged. Different manifestations were often a by-product of a different mix of leader, party, bureaucracy, traditional institutions, and cultural heritage. In almost all cases, however, fascists "acknowledged no theoretical limits to the invasion of private life." (Lyttleton warns that, actually, "[t]he increasing intrusion of fascism into private life threatened to undermine the consensus in favor of fascism among the middle classes.") This private-public fusion is, perhaps, one reason why some commentators talk in terms of "Islamofascism," which seeks an equally comprehensive public absorption of private life. As I write here, with regard to one of fundamentalist Islam's founding fathers, Sayyid Qutb:
Pining for a theocratic Islamic caliphate, Qutb's influential "theological criticism of modern life" lamented the dualistic "schizophrenia" of the secular and the sacred, science and religion. But as is typical with religious monists, Qutb sought to collapse secular life into religion. His "deepest quarrel was not with America's failure to uphold its principles," [Paul] Berman explains. "His quarrel was with the principles. He opposed the United States because it was a liberal society" (emphasis added). The most "dangerous element" of that society was, in Qutb's view, the "separation of church and state." His version of liberation entailed an adherence to strict Islamic law ("Shariah") in defense of "freedom of conscience." But such liberation "meant freedom from false doctrines that failed to recognize God, freedom from the modern schizophrenia." It is no great leap to realize the dictatorial implications of this utopian vision, whose enforcement would echo the totalitarian projects of fascism, Nazism, and communism.
But, clearly, whatever totalitarian echoes one sees in the Qutbian vision, there are distinctions that disqualify the usage of the word "Islamofascism" to describe it, or to describe Islamic fundamentalism in general. This takes a bit more explanation, and Lyttleton's article helps.
As Lyttleton observes, "fascism was something else, something new and disquieting in its ability to mobilize positive enthusiasm and dedication, a form of modern mass politics." One of the keys to understanding fascism is its identification as "national socialism," or "national syndicalism," or more precisely, "nationalist socialism." And therein lies some of the parallels, not with theocratic Islamic fundamentalist dictatorships, but with quasi-fascist military dictatorships in the Arab world. There is a key difference between these military dictatorships and the regimes that neocons criticize typically as “Islamofascist.” The military dictatorships in Egypt, Syria, and Iraq took power in comparatively “secular” Arab countries. The whole Pan-Arab nationalist-socialist movement was opposed to the fundamentalists; in fact, as a member of the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood, Qutb himself was executed in 1966, under the Egyptian dictatorship of Gamal Abdel Nasser.
As Lyttleton points out, “[a] degree of secularization would ... seem to be a prerequisite for the emergence of fascist movements, which may appeal to religious values but use them in the service of nationalist or racist political goals.” Lyttleton continues:
In the Middle East, perhaps because Italy and Germany were seen as natural and influential allies against Britain and France, the dominant imperial powers, sympathy with historic fascism seems to have been particularly widespread. Nor can one put this down exclusively to the influence of anti-Semitism on Arab Muslims; one can find an interest in the fascist model among both the Christian Lebanese Phalange and the Israeli extreme right. [Lyttleton cites Heller’s essay, “The Failure of Fascism in Jewish Palestine, 1925-1948" from Larsen’s book, Fascism Outside Europe.] ... A more sinister long-term significance can be found in the ideological affiliations of the Baath Party of Syria and Iraq. Its founding father, Michel Aflaq, echoed fascist denunciations of “materialism” and soulless democracy. ... The two-front battle which the Baath fought against communism and movements based on the Shia majority is somewhat reminiscent of the situation in which the historic fascist movements found themselves. The Baath party-state was made possible by the secular nature of Iraqi society and by the growth of an urban middle class, financed by oil revenues. There seem to be few reasons not to call Saddam Hussein’s regime, “fascist.”
As Fitzgerald once pointed out (in a John Waterbury edited collection, The Egypt of Nasser and Sadat: The Political Economy of Two Regimes), in Latin America, as in Egypt, quasi-fascism was enhanced through the creation of industrial oligopolies that depended "upon privileges and concessions obtained by access to government so that a 'proprietary' rather than 'entrepreneurial' business ethos obtains based on control over a limited market and exclusive licenses instead of mass sales and price competition."
But all of these developments in the Middle East were a quite distinct phenomenon from “Islamofascism.” Additionally, these developments demonstrate the fact that the Muslim-Arab world is not a monolith, but a cauldron of shifting tribes. And none of the tribes—be they Pan-Arabist or fundamentalist, be they led by military dictators, monarchs, or warlords—will accept the Western imposition of the "rule of law" (which law? Shariah?) without the cultural, philosophical, or socio-psychological preconditions upon which such a Western conception can be built and nourished.
In many ways, this situation embodies what Ayn Rand once said about World War II Europe, which was consumed by the struggles of competing forms of collectivism and statism. As the evil character Ellsworth Toohey states in The Fountainhead:
Watch the pincer movement. If you're sick of one version, we push you into the other. We get you coming and going. We've closed the doors. We've fixed the coin. Heads—collectivism, and tails—collectivism. Fight the doctrine which slaughters the individual with a doctrine which slaughters the individual. Give up your soul to a council—or give it up to a leader. But give it up, give it up, give it up. ... Offer poison as food and poison as antidote. Go fancy on the trimmings, but hang on to the main objective. Give the fools a choice, let them have their fun—but don't forget the only purpose you have to accomplish. Kill the individual. Kill man's soul. The rest will follow automatically.
There is an underlying socio-psychological dynamic at work in the universe of collectivist statism. Collectivism of any sort has a deadening effect on the individual's freedom to order his own conduct, and on the sense of self-responsibility that such freedom entails. Hayek warned of this effect back in the 1940s, when he examined the "socialist roots" of Nazism and fascism:
Responsibility, not to a superior, but to one's conscience, the awareness of a duty not exacted by compulsion, the necessity to decide which of the things one values are to be sacrificed to others, and to bear the consequences of one's own decision, are the very essence of any morals which deserve the name. That in this sphere of individual conduct the effect of collectivism has been almost entirely destructive is both inevitable and undeniable. A movement whose main promise is the relief from responsibility cannot but be antimoral in its effects, however lofty the ideals to which it owes its birth.
The root of this "revolt against self-responsibility in action," as psychologist Nathaniel Branden once said, "is the revolt against self-direction in thought." When a social system emerges that is inimical to this self-direction—a system that forbids individuals the capacity to function as rational, independent beings—"psychological and physical disaster is the result."
It is thus no coincidence that the triumph of fascism in Germany and Italy was so dependent on the molding of youthful minds. Lyttleton writes:
The cult of youth was one of fascism's most successful forms of propaganda; fascist supporters were distinguished from those of other parties more by their age than their class. But the cult of youth was not just useful to the Fascists. It was a logical consequence of fascism's martial ethic and ideology of permanent struggle. It was by the molding of the new generations through the youth movement that the creation of the "new man" [the similarities to "New Communist Man" are not coincidental either—CS] devoted to the Leader and the Movement and free from all social attachments was to be finally achieved.
If we are to draw any positive signs anywhere in the Middle East for a veritable freedom revolution, it is this: Emerging youth movements in Iran may very well become a bulwark against the theocratic authoritarianism that the mullahs represent in that country. Potentially, this internally generated movement in Iran would be far more effective in the long run in establishing indigenous democratic cultural patterns, than any externally generated U.S. molding of Iraq. On this, I am in agreement with Gus diZerega and have written extensively about the Iranian context.
I also agree fundamentally with Gus that
the best way to eliminate theocratic fantasies from the Arab world is to allow them to have theocracies in power if that is what a majority wants or is willing to accept—and best, by election. That legitimates the idea that the people should decide, and while they will initially decide poorly, the misrule thugs like that will institute will in time wither the ferocity of their theology and their commitment to mindless interpretations of scripture.
In clarifying a political concept such as fascism, we can only be strengthened; understanding what the threat is, and what the threat is not, we can redouble our efforts against those forces at home and abroad that would undermine our liberty.
Visit Not a Blog.
Changes in the Intellectual Air
I find it interesting that no matter what information comes out with regard to the status of WMDs in Iraq, people on both sides of the divide of this war use that information to bolster their already established positions. I know of maybe one or two people in toto who have changed their positions on the Iraq war; one went from pro to con, the other went from con to pro. That's two people in God-knows-how-many commentators I've read on this war. No doubt there are much deeper concerns that motivate many in this dialogue. I have voiced my own concerns umpteen times. I don't think people's different positions necessarily reveal any inherent intellectual dishonesty; but it does speak to the tenacity of viewpoints on this subject.
And so, it is no surprise that when I picked up the paper yesterday and read that a CIA report agrees in essence with earlier reports from David Kay and the US Senate that there were no WMDs in Iraq, few commentators had changed their positions. The nuclear program was in disarray, post-1991, even if Hussein still had nuclear ambitions. All chemical weapons stockpiles were destroyed in 1991, and no chemical weapons production had been resumed in the years since. The regime may have had the wherewithal to restart a biological weapons program, but its existing stockpiles of such weapons were destroyed in 1991-92.
The Hussein regime was being contained. Sure, there were loopholes in the containment policy: we know all about the cash nexus of the UN "Oil for Food" program; it is quite possible that those who opposed US military action in Iraq would have lobbied for the removal of sanctions, thus freeing Hussein to develop weapons. But in the post-9/11 world, this was not likely to happen. In my view, containment was working, and whatever Hussein's intentions, an increased post-9/11 US military presence in the Persian Gulf, and in Afghanistan, provided an adequate countervailing force.
Yes, Hussein sponsored terrorists (so have US "allies" like the Saudis, but the US never invaded or occupied Saudi Arabia). In any event, how many times do we have to hear that there was no operational relationship between the Hussein regime and Al Qaeda?
The Bush administration is unpersuaded. Big surprise there. And the critics of the administration have only used the most recent report to bolster their case (as I have done).
So what of the people whose positions have shifted, over time? One recent discussion of such an intellectual evolution focuses on Christopher Hitchens, who went from leftist to neocon fan. But that shift long predated the Iraq war. It's interesting, of course, in itself, because the Hitchens switcheroo speaks volumes about the nature of neoconservatism.
Within a year after the 9/11 attacks, Johann Hari explains, "Hitchens was damning his former comrades as 'soft on Islamic fascism', [there's that irritating phrase again!] giving speeches at the Bush White House, and describing himself publicly as 'a recovering ex-Trotskyite.' What happened?"
Well, for one, this "recovering ex-Trotskyite" aims his disgust at the "theocratic fascists" of the Arab world who are among "the most reactionary elements on earth. They stand for liquidating everything the left has fought for: women's rights, democracy?" Even though he's fast and loose with that word "fascism," which he equates simply with "submission and servility," he recognizes that the worst elements in the Arab-Islamic world wish to recreate the Caliphate through a "Grand Muslim Super State," as Juan Cole puts it.
Hitchens now fully opposes the antiwar left and he is equally opposed to "the Barry Goldwater-Pat Buchanan isolationist right." For Hitchens, "neoconservatism is a distinctively new strain of thought, preached by ex-leftists, who believed in using US power to spread democracy." Neoconservatives "were saying - we can't carry on with the approach to the Middle East we have had for the past fifty years. We cannot go on with this proxy rule racket, where we back tyranny in the region for the sake of stability. So we have to take the risk of uncorking it and hoping the more progressive side wins." In other words, Hitchens "has replaced a belief in Marxist revolution with a belief in spreading the American revolution. Thomas Jefferson has displaced Karl Marx."
In this sense, of course, Hitchens is perhaps among the purest of neocons, because he encapsulates the deeply constructivist impulse that unites neoconservative and socialist. Many of the neocons were former leftists and social democrats who shifted rightward; as former leftists, they embraced central planning on behalf of Marxist ideals. As new rightists, they embrace the same kind of planning, applied to global phenomena, on behalf of "liberal" ideals. In the former instance, there are enough Misesian and Hayekian reasons to reject the means and the ends. In the latter instance, Iibertarians might accept the ends... but most of us still reject the means. I'm afraid that, in both instances, the issue of "means" is what concerns me, because serious questions about how to create social change are being swept under the rug. As I have argued over and over again, the neocons, as leftist progeny, are sweeping under the rug the pernicious influence of tribal, religious, and ethnic conflict in indigenous cultures. There was always a tension in left-wing thought between analysis and prescription. Many leftists have offered crucially important analyses of historically specific circumstances. But they prescribe the same old constructivist rationalist solutions: that of imposing constructed designs on such circumstances as if from a position of omniscience. They stand like Archimedes outside the circumstances they seek to alter. Economically, their impositions created calculational chaos. But in a new age of leftist-turned-neocon, there is no limit to the global chaos that such state-guided planning will engender, especially when it is imposed on alien cultures that have never shown any appreciation for the liberal ideals being prescribed.
Interestingly, there is little substantive difference between the means of this imposition and those means preached by traditional fascists. Of course, there is a distinction between those who would destroy individual rights and those who seek to institute the rule of law. But neither regime can be "imposed" without supporting cultural preconditions. Even the Nazis understood this; it's the kind of cultural sociology that informs such studies as Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen. I have a lot more to say about the nature of fascism in the next post.
Visit Not a Blog.
Thursday, October 7, 2004
Mario Lanza
Just a mention of an essay of mine on the singer Mario Lanza, who died 45 years ago today. That essay, "Like a Man Possessed," is a review of an extraordinary book by Armando Cesari: Mario Lanza: An American Tragedy, which dramatizes the effects on one man's life of the lethal dichotomy between "serious" art and "popular" entertainment. It also discusses the ways in which various government actions over time impacted, tragically, on one solitary life.
Wednesday, October 6, 2004
Freedom & "Islamofascism"
Columnist Zev Chafets has been a strong supporter of the war in Iraq, but in a recent NY Daily News column, he argued that President Bush is suffering from delusions if he sincerely believes that freedom can grow in Iraqi soil. "W's Wrong," Chafets asserts.
During [last] Thursday's presidential debate, President Bush told the American people his goal in Iraq is to spread liberty and freedom. The President believes the majority of Iraqis yearn for democracy and will express this by taking part in free elections and defending a representative government. This idea is Bush's main justification for the invasion of Iraq. It is the heart of his broader Middle Eastern policy. And regrettably, it is entirely wrong.
Chafets argues persuasively that, in general, "Arab civic culture ... is authoritarian, repressive and rooted in Islam." The member states of the Arab League understand that Islam is "more than just a religion; it is the focal point of Arab society, for Muslims and non-Muslims alike, permeating [Arab] culture at every level political, social and economic." As such, Islam "instructs its followers 'in all fields of life, whether they be social, economic or political,' and 'provides the Muslim with all he or she needs to know to live a good and pious life.'"
Key to this Muslim instruction is the unquestionable acceptance of authority. "Islam, after all," explains Chafets,
means "submission." Father knows best. Tribal loyalty is prized. God's laws (and those who interpret them) must be honored. Blasphemy is a life-threatening offense. In this conformist world, democracy is both unknown and unnatural. Individual choice offends the divine order of society. Gender equality is an invitation to moral madness. Infidels are obviously inferior to believers. Locating ultimate sovereignty in "the people" instead of the Koran is a mockery of God.
The Bush administration presupposes that the Iraqi electorate's march to the polls will signify "a love of liberty or Iraqi democracy. On the contrary," Chafets observes, "they will vote to further the fortunes of their own narrow tribes and sects." (Alas, there is more similarity here between Iraqi tribalism and America's "democratic" interest-group liberalism than Chafets realizes.) For Chafets, the "national security" goal should simply be to implant "pro-American rulers." Considering the US track record of empowering such authoritarian "pro-American rulers" in the past (e.g., the Shah of Iran, the mujihadeen in Afghanistan, the Hussein regime itself in its war with post-Shah Iran), I'm not as confident as Chafets of the long-term wisdom of this approach. It is responsible, at least partially, for the growth of anti-American fervor in the Middle East.
Chafets is right when he suggests that not one of the member states of the Arab League is "remotely democratic." He's not quite correct, however, to keep using the preferred neoconservative phrase "Islamofascism" to describe the Arab world. (Victor Hanson uses this word regularly; see here, for example.) On one level, the very use of the word "fascism" to describe societies that draw their inspiration from pre-enlightenment patriarchal caliphate ideology is an anachronism. But there are other usage problems here. Let me explain.
An argument can be made that US political economy is a kind of neofascism or neomercantilism or "liberal corporatism" (take your pick) insofar as it embraces the same kind of symbiotic relationship between government and business that one has always found in historically fascist systems. I argue here, for example, that Ayn Rand and other libertarians have been correct to characterize the current US politico-economic context as the "new fascism," with broad statist implications for domestic and foreign policy. I have explained further that the economic essence of fascism is the union of business and government. Clearly, however, I am careful to draw a distinction between the old “fascism” and the “New Fascism”:
What unites them is the business-government “partnership.” What distinguishes them is that the first is authoritarian, while the second is more akin to “liberal corporatism.” It retains liberal institutions and democratic procedures, while keeping much of the business-government politico-economic alliance outside the sphere of democratic control. The whole panoply of regulatory agencies, central bank manipulations, and pressure group pork-barreling has been the result of an incremental process over many years, creating a whole complex structure of privilege that cannot be altered by simply changing the political party in power. The “New Fascism” may or may not entail nationalism and extreme regimentation, though in war time (both world wars come to mind), the U.S. fully embraced “War Collectivism” in the regimentation of industry, commerce, and finance, as well as the suppression of civil liberties. All the more reason to take very seriously the consequences of a long-term policy of perpetual war.
Fascism does not entail broad economy-wide central planning, like state socialism. But cartelized banking is a key component in the nexus of "ultimate decision-making."
The system has varying degrees of centralization in different sectors and industries, but this is usually the product of ad hoc, patchwork regulation that, over time, blocks market entry and creates various monopolistic rigidities. I’m certainly open to using a different label for what I’m seeking to describe, given how “loaded” the term fascism actually is. But whether we call it the “new fascism” or “neofascism” or “liberal corporatism” or “corporate welfare statism,” the result is the same: a politico-economic structure that has evolved to benefit certain groups at the expense of others.
Now, what of the Arab world? It is authoritarian. But it is a mongrel mixture of theocratic fundamentalism, quasi-socialist command economies dominated by state-monopoly control of key resources (such as oil), and hereditary monarchy. It's simply wrong to characterize this mongrel mixture in toto as "Islamofascism." Call it theocratic statism or theocratic authoritarianism or, for its more "secular" forms, monarchical-military dictatorship, but please don't call it "fascism." Not unless you mean something historically specific, as in the "guild socialist" arrangements of Benito Mussolini.
It must be emphasized that historically specific fascism does not necessarily entail institutionalized racism and anti-Semitism as in Hitler's Germany, but it certainly entails collectivism, tribal or otherwise. (I sometimes wonder if right-wing writers shy away from using the word "theocratic" to describe the fundamentalist Arab states because the word hits a little too close to home for some of them.)
Either way, every way, no matter which way you characterize it ... I think the essential argument that Chafets makes is unimpeachable, in my view:
What is too much is to expect an ancient society to embrace values and practices it neither understands nor approves of. If success in Iraq means enticing people to renounce a civic culture that flows from their deepest Islamic beliefs, then failure is guaranteed.
Monday, October 4, 2004
Neocon Newbie
I have to agree with William Safire in his NY Times essay today, "Kerry, Newest Neocon" (and, by implication, with Jason Pappas as well). Safire tells us that Kerry's statements during last week's foreign policy debate with President Bush were the essence of "hawkish" neoconservatism. This isn't just about wiping out "terrorist strongholds" in Falluja, or changing "the dynamics on the ground," or endorsing the concept of preemptive strikes against perceived threats. It's about "embracing Wilsonian idealism," which would enable Commander-in-Chief Kerry to spread "humanitarian" wars of "liberation" from the Middle East to Africa. "His abandoned antiwar supporters celebrate the Kerry personality makeover," writes Safire. "They shut their eyes to Kerry's hard-line, right-wing, unilateral, pre-election policy epiphany."
Alas, it is sometimes the case that people long identified with certain political propensities will embrace their opposite upon achieving political power. It has long been said that only a life-long anticommunist like Richard Nixon could travel to Russia and China. If Kerry bests my six-month old prediction of a Bush re-election, I think we should all be prepared for a similar transformation in the new JFK. Whatever Kerry's most recent criticisms of Bush's Iraqi adventure (criticisms with which I am in large agreement), I stand by my observations in that article:
A President Kerry would further institutionalize the Iraq War. He might be positively Nixonian in his approach: Before Nixon committed to the "Vietnamization" of the war in southeast Asia, to troop reductions and the elimination of conscription, his quest for "Peace with Honor" actually entailed a widening of the war. Likewise, Kerry himself might actually increase the number of troops in Iraq. He will do everything in his power not to go down as the President who "lost Iraq."
In the end, I don't see any fundamental change in the direction of American foreign, or domestic, policy.
Check out the refurbished "Not a Blog."
Wednesday, September 15, 2004
Nine Innings from Ground Zero
I watched last night's HBO showing of "Nine Innings from Ground Zero." It's got some problems as a documentary, but for this Yankee fan, it had many moments of poignancy. It told the story of how baseball helped to heal many of the gaping wounds in the souls of New Yorkers in the days after the 9/11 attack.
The film mentioned that a Yankee game had been rained out the night before the tragedy. I remember it well. As I reminisce here:
I was scheduled to go to Yankee Stadium on Monday, September 10th 2001, to see the Yanks play their long-time rivals: the Boston Red Sox. But the game was rained out. I would have driven past the WTC that night. So, when I awoke on the morning of September 11th, I was convinced that Murphy's Law was second only to the Law of Identity in significance. "Sure, it's a beautiful day today," I said. "Why wasn't the sun shining yesterday?"
That sun quickly lost its shine. But those New Yorkers who found solace in sports were treated to some remarkable games when Major League Baseball resumed play some time after the attack.
The film recounts how President Bush came to Yankee Stadium to throw out the first pitch. Yankee shortstop Derek Jeter told him to throw the ball from the mound, and "don't bounce it," he warned, "they'll boo ya." Bush didn't disappoint. Nor did the Yanks, who eventually took their three home games in a World Series face-off with the Arizona Diamondbacks. Arizona may have won the series, but those three "miracle" wins at The Stadium lifted the hearts of many. This Yankee fan included. (Heck, even Boston Red Sox fans were singing "New York, New York" in tribute ... that, perhaps, was among the greatest post-9/11 miracles...)
It's a worthwhile film.
Sunday, September 12, 2004
Unintended Consequences Not Unforeseeable
While the Kerry and Bush campaigns trade charges of who is the ultimate flip-flopper, one thing these two gents agree on is to stay the course in Iraq. Today, James Dao in the NY Times asks: "How Many Deaths Are Too Many?." Dao recalls:
In the fall of 1965, the death toll for American troops in Vietnam quietly passed 1,000. The escalation in the number of American forces was just underway, the antiwar movement was still in its infancy and the word "quagmire" was not yet in common usage. At the time, the Gallup Poll found that just one in four Americans thought sending troops to southeast Asia had been a mistake. It would be three years before public opinion turned decisively, and permanently, against the war.
Four decades later, the passing of the 1,000-death benchmark in another war against insurgents has been accompanied by considerably more public unease. Polls registered a steady increase in the number of Americans who believe the war in Iraq was not worth it, peaking at over 50 percent in June. Americans, it seems, are more skeptical about this conflict than about Vietnam at roughly the same moment, as measured in body counts.
The difference, historians and experts agree, is that the "stark experience of Sept. 11 and the belief among many Americans that the fighting in Iraq is part of a global conflict against terrorism have made this war seem much more crucial to the nation's security than Vietnam ..." Death and destruction on continental American soil, coupled with the fact that there is no military conscription, have made Americans much more patient with the Iraq situation. There are other differences too. Dao writes:
In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson began a huge escalation of the Vietnam War that eventually brought American troop levels to over half a million. By 1968, the weekly death toll was over 500. No such escalation is envisioned in Iraq, where the deadliest month was last April, when 134 troops were killed. And though the 1,000-dead milestone was reached faster in Iraq, it seems unlikely the toll will keep pace with Vietnam, where it exploded after 1965, reaching over 58,000 by the war's end.
But the death tolls don't tell us the whole story. As I was reminded by the McLaughlin Report and other Sunday morning talk shows today, in addition to the 1000+ Americans killed in Iraq, and the 20,000+ US medical evacuations from that country, the possibilities for civil war are real. Tikrit, Fallujah, Karbala, Ramadi, and Najaf are effectively under the control of insurgent forces. Kurds in the North, who have had de facto "self-rule" since the 1990s, are now battling for control of oil-rich Kirkuk, outside Kurdish territory. The Shi'ite majority, which suffered under the Sunnis during the reign of Saddam Hussein, will not stand by if the Sunnis try to reassert power. The Sunnis, however, remain the predominating influence in the central and northwestern regions of the country. Baghdad, of course, is in a class by itself.
A civil war in Iraq could be a devastating blow to US "nation-building" efforts. (On the various scenarios of "Iraq in Transition," see this periodical put out by Chatham House, formerly the Royal Institute of International Affairs.) It is for this reason that presidential historian Robert Dallek suggests, "the crucial point" in Iraq will come when the US "feels it is not going to achieve its goals." But pursuit of those goals does not take place in a historical vacuum; this is a post-Vietnam generation, after all. Should the feeling become widespread that the situation is unwinnable, leading to less patience among the American electorate, and fewer military re-enlistments, a dramatic shift in the US approach will be forthcoming.
Dao reminds us, however, that
there has been significant public opposition to virtually every war America has waged, except World War II. One-third of the nation did not back the American Revolution, historians say. Congress chastised President James Polk in 1848 for starting an "unnecessary and unconstitutional" war with Mexico. New Yorkers rioted against the draft during the Civil War. The Socialist Eugene Debs went to prison, and ran for president while there, for opposing the draft in World War I. A plurality of Americans thought the Korean War was a mistake during much of that conflict. But in virtually all those cases, dissent did relatively little to prevent bloodshed. Only in Vietnam, which caused the nation's largest and most sustained protests, can it be argued that an antiwar movement hastened the end of a war.
This has had an effect on both sides of the divide:
The government has sought to sustain public support for war by encouraging positive coverage of American soldiers while prohibiting photographs of returning caskets. And antiwar groups have treated returning soldiers with immense dignity - hoping to avoid the kinds of reports about abusive demonstrators that once embittered Vietnam veterans. But one lesson neither side could have gleaned from Vietnam was the impact of 24-hour cable television and the Internet, which have brought death in Iraq closer to home than network television did in Vietnam. In the process, they have amplified the horrors of war and, perhaps, speeded up reaction to it ...
All this points to the issue of those pesky "unintended consequences" that I alluded to here. But "unintended consequences" are not always unforeseeable ones. Many of us on the antiwar side of the divide warned of these very real effects for months prior to the US invasion and occupation of Iraq. For me, at least, it was never a question of Hussein's moral legitimacy. His regime, which had benefited from US support and sanction back in the 1980s during the Iran-Iraq war, was immoral. But as the winds of war were gathering strength in the lead-up to the US invasion of Iraq, I thought then, as I do now, that it would have been possible to contain any Hussein terrorist or weapons threat. That the threat was not as "grave" as the administration proclaimed makes containment, in my view, all the more preferable.
But that is now a moot point. The US invasion and occupation of Iraq now threatens to unleash unruly antidemocratic cultural and political forces that might yet make the Hussein regime a picnic by comparison.
Wednesday, September 8, 2004
Tasteless 9/11 Toy #1
The lives of over a thousand U.S. troops have been consumed in the Iraq war, and this week marks the three-year anniversary of the attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C., which led to the deaths of nearly 3000 civilians.
Some organizations have a weird way of marking the anniversary. Here comes a story of a rather tasteless WTC toy, depicting a plane ramming into the Twin Towers. The toy showed up in 14,000 bags of candy produced by the Lisy Corporation, which issued a recall from small grocery stores around the United States. Seeing is believing, so take a look at the link above ...
Tuesday, September 7, 2004
A 9/11 Tribute
Much has been said about the politics and history of the current state of the world. In my Brooklyn neighborhood, however, one maxim remains true: "Never Forget." Whatever one's opinions about the causes or the consequences of 9/11, this exercise in historical memory is a cathartic one for those of us who survived that tragic day and continue to bear witness.
As a follow-up to a growing memoir, which includes annual posts from 2001, 2002, and 2003, I offer this interview of "My Friend Ray," a "Not a Blog" exclusive.
Sunday, September 5, 2004
Musings on McCain and Chechnya
Just saw John McCain on This Week with George Stephanopoulos. I was astonished by how the arguments he uses, and those offered by many in the Bush administration, parallel the welfare liberal sociology that we heard for several generations as an explanation for why kids go into a life of crime: that when people have no hope and no opportunity, they are prime candidates for becoming criminals. McCain simply uses that as a rationale for why young people in the Middle East become terrorists. No hope, no opportunity. So the US must simply go in there and provide them with hope and opportunity. The Great Society Goes Global! Bring in HUD!
Something else I found curious: McCain has long understood that brutal Russian policies toward Chechnya are fueling the spread of lethal terrorism there, resulting this past week in the horrific deaths of over 300 people, many of them children. Indeed, Chechen terrorists are not at war with the Russian "way of life"; they are at war, McCain understands, with Russian policies, "blowback" leading to terrible tragedies like the one at Middle School No. 1 in Beslan.
Likewise, as I have argued, here and elsewhere:
the history of US policy in the Middle East has provided, at least partially, the context for the current problems with Islamic terrorists. That is not a justification for Islamic terrorism against innocent American civilians; but it does provide, at least partially, an understanding of the context within which such terrorism has taken root and flourished. There is a difference between explanation and justification. I say "partially" because the vast array of problems in that region cannot simply be reduced to a pure product of US intervention. There are tribal, ethnic, and religious conflicts fomenting in the Middle East, which long predate US intervention—and which have now become deeply intertwined with the US presence. The US has stepped into a minefield of historical complexities, which can only generate explosive unintended consequences over the long-term.
The phenomenon of unintended consequences is equally applicable to the current Russian-Chechen situation. As George Will observed on "This Week," the current context represents a collision of nationalism, ethnicity, and religion, complicated now by the fact that the long nationalist war for Chechen independence is drawing power from Muslim separatists. But none of these factors can be abstracted from the context of policies pursued. In the long run, different policies will be necessary. In Chechnya. And in the Middle East.
Friday, September 3, 2004
"Libertarian Conservatism"? Hardly.
So, after discussing the rise of fundamentalist conservatism as a social, cultural, and economic force to be reckoned with, after dispensing with "progressive conservatism" as a viable option, I've now read George F. Will's take on the "return" of "libertarian conservatism" to the Republican Party. Will believes that if this past week's GOP convention proves anything, it is that there is a renaissance among Goldwater-type conservatives who apply the limited government philosophy to both economic and social spheres of life. Will admits that this wing of the party is "not fully ascendant." You can say that again! But Will thinks that by showcasing people like Rudy Giuliani (a complex case for this New Yorker to evaluate), Arnold Schwarzenegger, and other "moderate" voices, the GOP is sending out a message that it can be the "Big Tent" it has long advertised. (Goldwater, after all, in his later years, was an advocate of abortion rights and gay rights.)
If you'd watched some of the coverage of this convention, however, you would have heard from a lot of delegates who, quite simply, were none too thrilled by the fact that the advocates of "abortion" and "gay rights" were getting so much prime-time. It seems that ever since the Patrick Buchanan debacle of 1992, the GOP learned that it could keep its fundamentalist base intact (who are they gonna vote for? The Democrats???), while trying its best to appeal to those independent young and suburban swing voters who are more likely to be a bit more socially liberal. Clearly, this strategy is not really designed to win "big states" on the West and East coasts. The "libertarians" are, for the most part, coming out of California or places like New York, two states that will probably figure in the Kerry Electoral Vote column. But it's still a strategy that might pay off in some hard-to-call states.
Still. When, curiously, on the eve of the convention, Vice President Dick Cheney tells us how proud he is of his gay daughter Mary, while backing off from the administration's call for a heterosexual marriage constitutional amendment, the right-wing slams back. Perhaps the controversy cost poor Mary and her significant other a place on the podium, while the rest of Cheney's family joined him after his acceptance speech on Wednesday night. Whatever the reason for her lack of participation, it was a true Hegelian moment for those of us who notice such things: the absence spoke much louder than the presence.
Sorry, Mr. Will: This spoonful of "libertarian" sugar may influence some voters who would rather not take the fundamentalist and/or neocon medicine that the GOP wants to shove down the throats of the American electorate. But this prescription is not for me. I'm still voting for None of the Above.
Sunday, August 29, 2004
Brooks and the "Progressive Conservative" Project
On the eve of the Republican National Convention, in today's NY Times Magazine, David Brooks gives us a lesson on "How to Reinvent the G.O.P.." In short: The Grand Old Party should simply become the Grand Much Older Party, and embrace the genuinely interventionist roots of Republicanism.
Brooks thinks President George W. Bush is well on his way to this romantic embrace; after all, the current President is the "guy who would create a huge new cabinet department for homeland security, who would not try to cut even a single government agency, who would be the first president in a generation to create a new entitlement program, the prescription drug benefit, projected to cost $534 billion over the next 10 years." Bush is the guy who "would spend federal dollars with an alacrity that Clinton never dreamed of, would create large deficits, would significantly increase the federal role in education, would increase farm subsidies, would pass campaign-finance reform and would temporarily impose tariffs on steel."
Brooks thinks this is "the death of small-government conservatism," buying into the cliche that Republicans have finally turned away from their "old anti-statist governing philosophy." But for all the small-government rhetoric of the Reagan years, the GOP has never been a "small-government" party. And deep down, Brooks knows this.
Drawing inspiration from David Frum, Brooks argues that it was "the death of socialism" that "transformed the Republican Party just as much as it has transformed the parties of the left." In their former attempts to curtail the growth of "Big Government," the GOP resurrected Jeffersonian rhetorical themes of decentralization. "Conservatives and libertarians defeated socialism," Brooks asserts, "intellectually and then practically." But "[j]ust as socialism will no longer be the guiding goal for the left, reducing the size of government cannot be the governing philosophy for the next generation of conservatives, as the Republican Party is only now beginning to understand."
And it is Bush who has helped the current GOP generation "to come up with a governing philosophy that applies to the times," one that rejects the "obsolete" and "simple government-is-the-problem philosophy of the older Republicans." Bush's "compassionate conservative" agenda advocated "effective and energetic government." But it is only in war that Bush has begun to solidify the "progressive conservative tradition," rooted in the neomercantilist politics of Alexander Hamilton, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt. This is the politics that forged government-sponsored "internal improvements" (today, we'd call it "building infrastructure"), the government socialization of risk, government subsidies for business, government land grants for railroads, and national bank cartelization and centralization. Brooks thinks these policies facilitated trade by "open[ing] fields of enterprise," but, in reality, they have only eventuated in the 21st century "spending binge" and feeding frenzy of privilege-seeking that even Brooks sees as "a cancer on modern conservatism":
The money is appropriated in increments large and small -- a $180 billion corporate tax bill one week, a steady stream of pork projects all the rest. In 1994, there were 4,126 ''earmarks'' -- special spending provisions -- attached to the 13 annual appropriations bills. In 2004, there were around 14,000. Real federal spending on the Departments of Education, Commerce and Health and Human Services has roughly doubled since the Republicans took control of the House in 1994. This is a governing majority without shape, coherence or discipline.
Reinventing the GOP doesn't mean an end to this privilege-dispensing; it just means providing that dispensation with more "discipline." Yes, Brooks realizes, "any solution begins with culture." But genuinely "progressive conservatives understand that while culture matters most, government can alter culture." That's why we should applaud those "[g]overnment agencies [that] are now trying to design programs to encourage and strengthen marriage." That's why we should embrace "wage subsidies" and greater federal control of education to wrestle the system from "local monopolies," like unions. That's why we can use "the strong-government tradition" to improve market "competition." And finally, that's why we need "National service," to "encourage people ... to serve a cause larger than self-interest, fuse their own efforts with those from other regions and other walks of life and cultivate a spirit of citizenship."
And it doesn't end there. Brooks advocates the full internationalization of this "progressive conservative tradition" by embracing a comprehensive global nation-building enterprise. "We need to strengthen nation-states," he writes. "We are going to have to construct a multilateral nation-building apparatus so that each time a nation-building moment comes along, we don't have to patch one together ad hoc."
Somehow, Brooks thinks that this "progressive conservatism" will "rebuild the bonds among free-market conservatives, who dream of liberty; social conservatives, who dream of decency; middle-class suburbanites, who dream of opportunity; and foreign-policy hawks, who dream of security and democracy."
Keep dreaming, Mr. Brooks. The Bush administration's movement toward "progressive conservatism" or neoconservatism or theocratic fundamentalism or any other neologism we can coin has resulted in a near-irreparable conservative crack-up, which has fractured the uneasy consensus that once existed among these groups.
Nevertheless, I do believe that Brooks' "progressive conservatism" is more honest than the alleged "small-government conservatism" that dominated the GOP some 20 years ago. At least this time, the pretense of small-government ideology has been replaced by an ideology much more in keeping with the welfare-warfare statist reality that both Democrats and Republicans have sworn to preserve, protect, and defend. It's why there will be no fundamental difference whether Bush wins or Kerry wins.
It's also why I can agree with Brooks from a profoundly libertarian perspective: "It's time for one party or another to invent ... some new governing philosophy that will ... transform the partisan divide." How about one that is consistent in its understanding and application of the freedom-loving principles upon which this country was founded?
Friday, August 27, 2004
Postscript to Rapture
Just a quick note to interested readers: You might want to tune-in to ABC's "Nightline" tonight, which will center on the issues I discussed in my recent article, "Caught Up in the Rapture." This program, "Selling the Faith," which comes on the eve of the DVD release of "The Passion of The Christ," deals with the explosion in Christian marketing.
Eternal Vigilance!
NYC has already had more protest-oriented arrests in the past couple of days than Boston had during the entire Democratic convention last month. Yesterday, ACT UP activists stripped on Eighth Avenue to protest the Bush administration's AIDS policy, among other things, and were promptly carted away by the cops. Mayor Bloomberg didn't flinch: "This is New York. Of course, we had seven naked people on Eighth Ave. What's the question?"
But NYC isn't the only place trying to remain vigilant in the face of anarchy. Take the Home of the Braves. Atlanta, Georgia. Please. School administrators tried to ban some kid for wearing a T-shirt that said "Hempstead, NY 516." Apparently, the Gwinnett County's Grayson High School thought the "hemp" referred to some illicit substance. "It's important to remember that the vigilance of our administrators is important. The administrator saw a phrase on the T-shirt that raised a red flag," said the school's spokeswoman, Sloan Roach (the irony is just too obvious).
Well, the kid's family moved from, uh, Hempstead, Long Island, area code "516," to this suburb of Atlanta, and he was just wearing a keepsake from his old home town.
Thursday, August 26, 2004
Naked Boys Singing! NOT
Some Republicans are not very happy campers over Dick Cheney's words of support for his lesbian daughter, which come, curiously, a few days before the GOP convention in NYC. Apparently, the federalist idea that marriage regulations should be decided on a state-by-state basis is just not appealing to those who seek a national, constitutional amendment defining the institution in strictly heterosexual terms.
Now comes word that the organizers of the Republican National Convention have nixed the discounts offered to delegates by NYC's tourist bureau to a popular, gay-friendly, off-Broadway play called Naked Boys Singing, a riotous, hilarious production I saw a few years back.
The organizers said 'thanks, but no thanks'; the play just does not "best suit our audience," exclaimed Leonardo Alcivar, GOP convention press secretary. Apparently, though, as a testament to the Big Tent that the GOP constitutes, "about a dozen people had bought tickets" to the play. These people used "the special code offered on the Web site," and the producers of the show said that these "tickets will [still] be honored."
Not sure if these dozen people constitute the whole Log Cabin Republican contingent, but I'm glad to see that the Big Tent remains a Republican ideal.
I just wish the tourist bureau would have given theater discounts to all New Yorkers; as it is, we have to wait for the GOP to invade Madison Square Garden next week just to get a sales tax break!
The Olympic Idea
NBC's coverage of the Olympics has included a few touching human interest stories, allowing us to glimpse a spiritual subtext to the physically demanding competitions on the field. Some of these stories are of an historical nature. In one feature, Tom Brokaw detailed the Olympic games of 1944. 1944? History records that there were no games during World War II. But these games were unique.
On the 60th anniversary of a very special Olympiad, Brokaw told us of Polish officers who, after valiantly fighting the Nazis, were captured and detained at a prison camp in Woldenberg. Four of these officers are still alive, in their 80s and 90s, and testified to their remarkable experiences.
The Poles had been captured in 1939, many of their comrades slaughtered. Understanding the intimate tie between mind and body, the survivors focused on their physical fitness as a means of bolstering the mental strength they required to deal with the nightmarish conditions of Nazi internment. By July 1944, with Germany in internal turmoil, these men were granted permission, miraculously, to stage a prisoner Olympics. (Interestingly, other POWs staged Olympic games in camps close to Nuremberg in 1940.) Some 6000 individuals assembled in the camps and raised a makeshift Olympic flag, one made from bed sheets and other cloth. Even the German prison guards saluted the flag, treating it with solemnity. Men on both sides of this lethal divide, were moved to tears. Brokaw explains:
The games continued for 22 days, including soccer, track & field, and volleyball. There were tickets issued, a detailed program, commemorative stamps, diplomas for the winners. Some concessions were necessary. Boxing was reduced to 2-minute rounds, and due to repeated injuries, soon canceled. Not surprisingly, the Germans would not permit the javelin or the pole vault.
The survivors testified to the psychological value of participating in these games within the confines of their prison. They reveled in their individual achievements as athletes, gaining a respite from the horrors of a war that had consumed tens of millions of people throughout the world.
Eventually, the Germans were driven out of Poland; many of the Woldenberg prisoners were marched 300 miles back into Germany in the winter of 1945, resettled in camps there, where they were saved from liquidation by the advancing US 12th armored division. Some of the prisoners, however, remained behind, where they soon found themselves in a new prison of Stalin's making.
Those Woldenberg Olympians who outlasted the Nazis and the Communists built monuments to the "the Olympic idea transcending war." As Brokaw concludes: "They are the last ones left, men who survived on will and imagination, and a determination that the day would come when the world would not be at war, but together in peace. The Olympic flame may never have burned brighter than it did in a prison camp in 1944."
Wednesday, August 18, 2004
The Return to Olympia
I've been thoroughly enjoying watching a number of events at the Athens Summer Olympics, everything from gymnastics to the adventures of 19-year old American swimming phenom Michael Phelps and awesome Aussie swimmer Ian Thorpe (who has fins for feet: size 17!!). Thorpe won gold over Phelps the other night, but the Aussie team lost to the US team last night.
Meanwhile, today, the Olympics return to the ancient city of Olympia... for the very first time in 16 centuries. Things are not quite the same as they were back then; the word "gymnasium," after all, comes from the Greek "gymnos," which means naked, and unlike the ancient competitors, the modern ones don't perform in the nude. But, like it was back then, the Olympia venue still has no seats for spectators (the Greek "stadion," from which "stadium" is derived, means "a place to stand"). So, the spectators will stand or sit on the ground while watching such events as the shot put
This return to Olympia has some personal meaning for me as well; though I've never visited the city, it is the birthplace of my maternal grandparents, who came to America early in the 20th century. (My grandfather was actually the founding pastor of the first Greek Orthodox Church in Brooklyn, the Three Hierarchs Church, where I was baptized.) By contrast: my paternal grandparents came from Porto Empedocle, Sicily (named after the Agrigentine philosopher and poet Empedocles, whom Aristotle called the inventor of rhetoric and whose own grandfather was victorious in horse racing at the Olympics in 496 BCE). I often joke that my "heritage" is of gods... and godfathers. Still, like many, I'm one of those Greek-Sicilians with no ties to either the diner business or the mob...
Monday, August 16, 2004
Odd Couple: McGreevey & Limbaugh
My colleague, David Hinckley, long-time columnist for the NY Daily News has an interesting compendium of Talk Radio responses to the McGreevey story. Just take a look here and see how "McGreevey gets kind words from Rush (!)" ... that's Rush Limbaugh, not Rush the progressive rock band.
Sunday, August 15, 2004
Education and Nation-Building in Iraq
While commentators continue to wonder if there is any hope of avoiding catastrophe in Iraq, others, such as Christina Asquith, focus on the important story of trying to rebuild education in that war-torn country. Asquith's essay, "With Little More Than Hope, Iraqi Colleges Try to Rebuild," which appears in last week's edition of The Chronicle of Higher Education, focuses on the fact that "after 35 years of Saddam, educators contend with too much violence and too little money from the U.S. and its allies." The first issue for the universities, indeed, for all of Iraq, is the issue of security. "University presidents, who already have personal bodyguards, were concerned about radical Islamic groups, looters, death threats, and angry students," writes Asquith. "After a tumultuous academic year under U.S. guidance, the true test of whether Iraqi universities will emerge from 35 years of dictatorship and war as an independent and free-thinking system is about to begin."
The effort has been spearheaded by John Argesto, who, as leader of the American team, advised Iraqi higher education authorities, leaving them "structures for a self-governing system, including a democratic procedure for hiring and firing administrators, and a 'declaration of academic freedom and responsibilities' that forbids religious and political intimidation. Those steps were hailed as major changes after 35 years of centralized control and intimidation by Mr. Hussein's Baath Party."
But with little money forthcoming, and the omnipresence of violence, many higher educators live under a cloud of fear. In fact, Asquith observes,
dozens of intellectuals—including the former president of Baghdad University; the deputy dean of the Medical College at Basra University; and Abdul Latif al-Mayah, a political-science professor at Al-Mustansiriya University—have been assassinated by unknown assailants. Student demonstrations and Islamic militias have shut down campuses. The university presidents voted to postpone student elections in the spring, the first open voting scheduled on campuses in three decades, out of fear of student-on-student violence. In this climate of terror, few feel safe to speak freely. ...
All Iraqi universities and colleges reopened after the war, but attempting to carry on has often seemed to students and staff members like an exercise in futility. Some students and professors lost theses, lectures, and years of research in the looting. Heavy traffic, bomb threats, and U.S. roadblocks have made attendance spotty on campuses in Baghdad. With no electricity, students had no fans, air-conditioning, or lights to study at night. They were often asked to phone their professors the night before an exam to see if it was still scheduled. Professors, many of whom have received anonymous death threats and seen their colleagues assassinated, were sometimes reluctant to show up for work. Protests by students and staff members against the U.S. attack on Falluja shut down most universities in April. The University of Karbala was taken over by supporters of Moktada al-Sadr, a radical Islamic cleric, in the same month, and not even Mr. al-Bakaa, the minister, is certain of its current status. Westerners and some Iraqis traveling on highways outside Baghdad have been kidnapped or ambushed. As a result information about life on campuses in Karbala, Mosul, or Basra is hard to obtain. "It was a very difficult school year," says Hussain Ali, who graduated in June from the College of Engineering at the University of Baghdad. "The university was closed three times for more than a week. Many of us couldn't get to college because of the traffic. Professors were killed by students. The students say, 'If you don't pass me, I'll kill you.'" Worst of all, professors and students say, is that after 35 years of intellectual repression and 14 years of U.N. sanctions, the intellectual renaissance that Iraqi academics had hoped would follow Mr. Hussein's fall has not come about.
Worse still, even those American professors who have attempted to help stabilize the situation have maintained that
the issue of safety has discouraged them from pursuing projects in Iraq. ... "The security situation deteriorated so quickly it was difficult to get people's attention—and it seemed there were more pressing needs than exchanges," says Richard Couto, a professor of leadership and change at Antioch University. He visited Baghdad twice last year and proposed taking Iraqi professors to the United States for training in the latest research techniques. But over time he lost motivation, he says: "I also despaired of the hopeless mess that we seem to have made in Iraq and that there was any solid ground on which to stand and work for change."
There are goals: marketizing the structure of the universities, wiring them for the Internet, encouraging debate and inquiry. But there is still no money to bring these goals to fruition.
Of Iraq's two dozen ministries, the one for higher education was the last to receive funds, and it got the least. The Ministry of Education, which runs the country's elementary and secondary schools, has benefited from a $65-million contract won from the U.S. government by an American company for rebuilding efforts, as well as $103-million from the World Bank and $100-million expected from other donor nations. The Ministry of Higher Education, however, received less than $20-million in benefits from contracts between the United States and American universities early on, along with about $20-million from donor nations, and so far nothing from the World Bank.
Crony corporate arrangements aside, the fact is that
Iraqi higher education was in a shambles after the war. An estimated 80 percent of the country's 22 universities and 43 vocational colleges had been damaged, some beyond repair. One campus of Iraq's third-largest institution, Basra University, was a collection of empty hulks and piles of rubble. The higher-education ministry estimated a nationwide rebuilding cost of $1.2-billion. "We're not talking about libraries and labs; we need chairs," Salman D. Salman, Basra's president, said in December as he stood in a classroom with no windows or door. "We need 15,000 chairs."
Agresto had hoped to create a decentralized university system "free from religious influences," while the new Iraqi Minister of Higher Education, Ziad Abdel Razzaq Aswad, "a member of a radical Sunni Islamist group," has fought for greater centralization of the universities. "He expected professors to ask the government for permission to travel, as they had under Mr. Hussein's regime. He wanted the ministry to again control the hiring and firing of deans."
One thing Argesto aimed for was the bolstering of liberal arts to assist in the building of a democracy. But Argesto is frank: "I worry about a country where history and heritage and literature aren't prized, where philosophy and political philosophy and normative studies aren't basic parts of the curriculum. For a country to produce leaders, it has to be a country where people can think clearly and write persuasively and understand more than just their specialty."
Indeed, compartmentalization and a lack of integration are not characteristics only of American universities. Nation-building of the kind sought by the Bush administration requires the building of an integrated understanding of the free society (something the neocons know nothing of), as well as the nourishment of democratic "know-how," precisely the kind of tacit traditions and customs that Iraq has never really had.
Still, as "professors and students are struggling with a new academic discipline: democracy," they introduce such courses as "Human Rights and Public Liberties" and even Ph.D. programs on "Democracy and Human Rights," neither of which were possible under the Hussein regime. These courses are the ideological replacements for the "Baath Party indoctrination course" that was so prevalent under Hussein. "In most cases, however, students say they have been presented with no new books or ideas; they just share photocopies of lecture notes by professors who haven't left Iraq in decades."
Other troubling cultural changes are underway, however. Whereas Iraq was among the most "secular" of states in the Islamic Middle East, now, the power of radical Islam is being felt like never before.
Changing the curriculum depends first on maintaining security on the campuses and persuading students not to turn to radical Islamic groups for stability. ... Some students say the slowness of reform efforts allows fundamentalist religious groups to gain a foothold at the universities and misrepresent democracy to students who have little understanding of it. Students on many campuses say the groups have been pressuring young women to wear the Islamic head scarf and breaking up boy-girl couples strolling on the campus. Some students believe that the religious groups are behind the assassinations of professors.
"The uncertainty is fatal to freedom of speech," Asquith writes. "In April members of Mr. al-Sadr's militia descended on dozens of campuses in black clothing and armbands, holding rallies and threatening students. Even administrators were hesitant to oppose them. Many women covered their heads just to be safe." As one ministry official puts it: "Every student who has an idea thinks he also must have a machine gun. They think this is democracy. We must show them what democracy is and how to respect it."
Liberal democratic ideas and machine guns are opposites. The former cannot be instituted by the latter. But it can be readily destroyed by the latter. A free society can only flourish upon a delicate cultural latticework that will take generations to weave. What were the neocon nation-builders thinking when they embarked on this crusade?
Friday, August 13, 2004
In the News: From Gays to Greeks
The morning news has been dominated by a few stories, from the resignation of New Jersey's Governor Jim McGreevey (who came out as a "gay American" under possible charges of sexual misconduct and cronyism) to the victory of Iraqi athletes over Portugal in the soccer competition at the Summer Olympics (which gets under way, officially, in Greece, the home of its birth, this evening). The skies of Baghdad were lit up with celebratory gunfire. Considering that former Olympic athletes were tortured by the sons of Hussein any time they lost a competition, I am sure that this gunfire was the kind that any freedom-loving person could appreciate, whatever one's stance on the Iraq war. And whatever one's views of the Olympics, it is my hope that from this Friday the 13th opening until the closing ceremonies on August 29th, the focus is on athletic excellence and not on terrorist slaughter amidst security lapses.
Wednesday, August 11, 2004
Aeon Skoble is Back!
Last night, the Empire State Building dimmed its lights in honor of Fay Wray, who passed away at the age of 96. She starred in the original 1933 version of "King Kong."
That's the kind of classic black-and-white movie that my colleague, pal, and fellow Yankees fan, Aeon Skoble, would really appreciate. He's got impeccable tastes in film (we agree on so much), and also happens to be a first-rate thinker. L&P readers may remember Aeon from his provocative guest stint here about a month ago. It gives me great pleasure therefore to welcome back Aeon, who is here to stay as our newest regular blog contributor.
You can read more about Aeon on his home page. He is also editor-in-chief of Reason Papers.
It is my hope that among his first posts, Aeon will revisit our thread here, and deliver on his promise to link to a copy of his superb essay on the relevance of gay-bashing in the comics world. (And for fans of "The Simpsons," don't forget to check out his terrific co-edited anthology, The Simpsons and Philosophy.)
Welcome aboard, Aeon!
Caught Up in The Rapture
My article, Caught Up in The Rapture," was just reprinted on the SOLO HQ website. The article was written in June, and it appears in the August-September issue of The Free Radical. In many ways, it is a sequel to my recent essay, "Bush Wins!," providing a kind of sociological underpinning for my view that a Bush victory is more than likely.
Because the articles were written for a magazine that has its share of libertarian and Ayn Rand-influenced readers, I think I should provide a bit of context for the most recent essay. As readers are no doubt aware, I've been very critical of "Objectivists," who have lent their support to the war in Iraq; I believe that too many have turned their backs on Ayn Rand's radical legacy. As I have stated, those Objectivists who have supported (wittingly or unwittingly) the neoconservative "nation-building" agenda are undermining Rand's profoundly important critique of the welfare-warfare state in general and US domestic and foreign policy in particular, bolstering the efforts of established power elites.
With regard to the Iraq war, however, Leonard Peikoff, Ayn Rand's legal heir, had actually hoped that both the Clinton and Bush administrations would have invaded Iran first. Peikoff still believes, apparently, that the invasion of a "secular" state, Iraq, was the wrong war to start. Ironically, though, he argues, as do I, that there are many things wrong with the current administration, which derives much of its support from Christian fundamentalists.
Almost simultaneously with the publication of my Free Radical essay, Capitalism Magazine posts a link to a recent lecture of Peikoff's, which points to the same trends that I have written about extensively in the piece that appears today. But there are differences between the Peikoff and Sciabarra perspectives. Peikoff argues that the President's fundamentalist base is leading an assault on American culture. (He recommends a number of essays critiquing Bush's fundamentalism, including John Lewis's article "The Threat of a Faith-Based Defense of America.") Peikoff is so profoundly against Bush that he believes that "not even Hillary Clinton as President would be a threat at this juncture, not a threat to the very foundations and even existence of the United States" that Bush represents.
On the surface, says Peikoff, Bush is "basically interchangeable with Kerry," but the "big difference is this: ... Bush is working to achieve a massive entrenchment of fundamentalism into our government and political system. Kerry has no such agenda. ... Anyone who grasps philosophy," Peikoff asserts, should support Kerry, rather than the "God, faith, sacrifice, statism" of the Bush administration. For Peikoff, Bush has become an "advocate" for a "Puritan theocracy" (a point made by Arthur Silber at his Light of Reason blog for months). Peikoff asks: "Now, if this goes on for even four more years, how long do you think intellectual freedom and freedom of speech can last?" He continues: "I don't think there's the least moral justification for sitting the election out on the grounds that, well, both of them are no good. ... That is a total immoral evasion. ... One [Kerry] is normally, disgustingly bad. And the other [Bush] is apocalyptic bad..."
Alas, I don't think it is an "immoral evasion" to sit this election out; I think Bush is going to win the election, as I wrote here, and that the fundamentalist impact on American culture and politics assures that victory, especially if that voting bloc comes out in full force for its candidate. But even if Bush loses, I don't believe there is any fundamental (no pun intended) difference between the candidates with regard to the Iraq war, which has now been institutionalized. Both are ardent supporters of the welfare-warfare state, and thus far their engagement with one another constitutes a "nondebate."
That said, I do believe that the fundamentalist upsurge is profoundly affecting American culture and politics. As I write in "Caught Up in The Rapture":
Religion has been an omnipresent factor in American political culture. As Murray Rothbard has argued, ethnoreligious conflict has long impacted on the ebb and flow of American politics, influencing even the shape of political parties. In his essay, “The Progressive Era and the Family,” Rothbard wrote that the battle between pietist and liturgical Christians was often at the heart of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century political controversies. The pietist doctrine essentially rejected the “creeds of various churches or sects” and any “obedience to the rituals or liturgies of the particular church.” For the pietist, the experience of being “born again” is paramount; it is a “direct confrontation between the individual and God, a mystical and emotional conversion in which the individual achieves salvation.” Pietists, especially of the evangelical variety, were deeply dedicated to the belief that "[s]ince each individual is alone to wrestle with problems of sin and salvation, without creed or ritual of the church to sustain him, the evangelical duty must therefore be to use the state, the social arm of the integrated Christian community, to stamp out temptation and occasions for sin. ... In particular, sin was any and all forms of contact with liquor, and doing anything except praying and going to church on Sunday. Any forms of gambling, dancing, theater, reading of novels—in short, secular enjoyment of any kind—were considered sinful. ... Evangelical pietism particularly appealed to, and therefore took root among, the “Yankees,” i.e., that cultural group that originated in (especially rural) New England and emigrated widely to populate northern and western New York, northern Ohio, northern Indiana, and northern Illinois. The Yankees were natural “cultural imperialists,” people who were wont to impose their values and morality on other groups; as such, they took quite naturally to imposing their form of pietism through whatever means were available, including the use of the coercive power of the state."
Over time, the political parties reflected the split between pietists and liturgicals. Whereas the more laissez-faire oriented, nineteenth-century Democratic Party attracted liturgical voting blocs, Whig and Republican voters were predominantly evangelical pietists, making war on liquor, immigration (especially Catholic immigration), and private, parochial schools. The pietists were the driving force in the state establishment of public schools as a means to impose civic virtue. The Republican Party was soon constituted by both pietist social reformers, who advocated government intervention to impose evangelical values, and business interests who advocated government intervention to impose federal regulation on unruly states, as well as tariffs, land grants, and subsidies. The pietist-business alliance was mutually reinforcing; it spurred a Progressive movement—generally dating from the end of the nineteenth century till the outbreak of World War I—which united industrialists, scientists, social workers, academics, and technocrats, in an attempt “to control the material and sexual choices of the rest of the American people, their drinking habits, and their recreational preferences.”
Rothbard emphasizes that “all the facets of progressivism—the economic and the ideological and educational—were part of an integrated whole. The new ideology among business groups was cartelist and collectivist rather than individualist and laissez faire, and the social control over the individual exerted by progressivism was neatly paralleled in the ideology and practice of progressive education.”
With the onset of world wars and depressions, the Democratic and Republican parties soon became mirror images of one another, in terms of their common support for the interventionist agenda. But, in many ways, today’s Republican party—which has long boasted of limiting the size of government—has returned to its evangelical pietist and interventionist roots. Indeed, George W. Bush, who, as a child, attended Presbyterian and Episcopalian churches, later experienced a “reconfirmation” of faith—he has never used the phrase “born-again”—to become a Methodist, perhaps the most strongly pietistic of Protestant denominations.
The essay then analyzes the extensive cultural and political impact of the fundamentalist upsurge. I argue further that Bush has become a cultural warrior of sorts, tapping
into the rise of evangelical Christian fundamentalism as a political force. ... The Bush administration has thus become a focal point for the constellation of two crucial impulses in American politics that seek to remake the world: pietism and neoconservatism. The neocons, who come from a variety of religious backgrounds, trace their intellectual lineage to social democrats and Trotskyites, those who adopted the “God-builder” belief, prevalent in Russian Marxist and Silver Age millennial thought, that a perfect (socialist) society could be constructed as if from an Archimedean standpoint. The neocons may have repudiated Trotsky’s socialism, but they have simply adopted his constructivism to the project of building democratic nation-states among other groups of warring fundamentalists—in the Middle East.
I should point out that the essay is not an exercise in religion-bashing. But it is a call for a fundamental separation between church and state. That will require, as I say, "nothing less than an intellectual and cultural revolution ..."
My essay is published online in full (minus some nice photos that appear in the print publication) here.
Sunday, August 8, 2004
Welcome Aboard Grinder & Hagel
I am elated to see Walter Grinder and John Hagel join the ranks of Liberty & Power Group Blog, and wanted to personally welcome them aboard. Walter was so instrumental in helping to craft my libertarian education as a young undergraduate—something I will never forget—and I'm sure that my comments here will make both of these gents blush a bit.
But David reminds us correctly of the pioneering work that these two scholars did decades ago on the theory of state capitalism. Their seminal article, "Toward a Theory of State Capitalism: Ultimate Decision-making and Class Structure," which was published back in 1977 in the very issue of The Journal of Libertarian Studies, remains, for me, one of the most important essays ever written in libertarian social theory. Grinder and Hagel brought together insights from Mises, Rothbard, Hayek, Oppenheimer, Nock, and others, exploding the left-right dichotomy and forging a powerful class theory.
Their work was a profound revelation to me back in the 1970s; being bombarded by Marxist theory in college, I remember how enthusiastically I read their essays, published and unpublished, convinced then, as I am today, that it is possible to construct what I ended up characterizing as a "dialectical libertarian" social theory, one that is cognizant of historically specific conditions, while being thoroughly radical in its political implications.
I am proud to be among so many like-minded scholars here, whatever differences of opinion we might manifest (complete agreement, after all, would be so boring). I am prouder still to now have among us two gents whose work continues to inform my perspective till this day. Glad to have you!
Thursday, August 5, 2004
It's a New York Thing
With all this talk about alerts, there's one thing that remains a perennial New York (okay, and New Jersey) thing: traffic. Oh, I know, LA has its insane freeway traffic. But the other day, Denis Hamill in the New York Daily News had me roaring with laughter. Here's an excerpt from his piece, "The Easy Way Out is Closed for Summer":
The torture rides home on the Garden State and Southern State parkways were so long, I think the CIA should consider them as ways of making Al Qaeda suspects talk. Handcuff a terrorist suspect in the backseat of a Toyota next to a 3-year-old in a kid's seat on the glacial creep home from the Jersey Shore with the windows open to the stink of the Garden State's cancer alley and the clam-broth humidity of August, and he will tell you where to find Abu Musab Zarqawi - in king's English - before you reach the Outerbridge Crossing. Make him sit for 109 minutes on the Staten Island Expressway as the 3-year-old insists on playing "I spy with my little eye" while listening to an endless taped loop of Thomas the Tank Engine songs, and he'll give up Osama Bin Laden - and his prospective kidney donor - before you get to the Verrazano. Until I can afford a seaplane, with a pilot who knows how to take off and land, I'm staying put.
Read the rest of Hamill's essay, here.
Tuesday, August 3, 2004
Bush Wins!
Just a note to bring your attention to an article of mine, written this past May, which was posted today to SOLO HQ. "Bush Wins!" is my assessment of the President's good chances of being re-elected. Here's an excerpt from the essay:
... if there is anything the last year has shown, it is that events move rapidly, while Bush keeps pace. A parade of authors, whom the administration has labeled disgruntled former employees, has published one exposé after another, illustrating lapses in intelligence, homeland security, and war planning. The economy has not quite recovered from either a recession or the tragedy of 9/11. But Bush continues to give new meaning to the phrase “Teflon President.” ...
The Bush tax cuts have not been coupled with anything that might qualify as fiscal conservatism; the President has presided over an exploding federal budget deficit—the largest in U.S. history—and an expanding federal debt. In addition, Bush has signed into law the extension of Medicare prescription drug coverage for senior citizens, thus staking a claim to a traditional Democratic voting bloc. And the cost of the Iraq War alone will soon surpass the nearly $200 billion inflation-adjusted U.S. share of the costs of World War I.
That Iraqi campaign—absent the discovery of any weapons of mass destruction or any formal ties between the Hussein regime and Al Qaeda—may have hurt some of Bush’s credibility, but it has not shaken his resolve. This resolve was first punctuated with evangelical calls for a modern-day “crusade” against the “Evil Ones,” but it has since become a mission to make the world safe for “democracy” (or Halliburton and Bechtel, depending on your perspective). For a man who campaigned against the Clintonistas’ belief in the nation-building enterprise, Bush has picked up the Wilsonian mantle proudly, while extolling the virtues of a PATRIOT Act, which has been used as a weapon against privacy and in the “war on drugs.”...
Other things being equal, voters are not going to choose Kerry, when they’ve already got in Bush a Republican dedicated to all the conventional Democratic planks: an expanding welfare state, budget deficits, and a war abroad. A long and potentially nasty campaign beckons; the race may center on 17 battleground states that are not yet claimed by either candidate and so much can happen between now and Election Day. But, as of this moment, I still think Bush wins.
Read the rest of the piece here and follow the discussion thread here. I hope to post a link to my follow-up piece, "Caught Up in the Rapture," which has just been published by The Free Radical. That essay examines the troubling fundamentalist Christian cultural forces that are Bush's political base; it uses some relevant points made by Murray Rothbard years ago about the relationship between pietism and interventionism.
Monday, August 2, 2004
It's a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood...
... but it's a neighborhood that Mister Rogers would not recognize. The newest terror threats to New York City are being taken very seriously. Fears that the New York Stock Exchange and other lower Manhattan targets might be struck by Al Qaeda operatives have led the city to bolster its already-high terror alert. With my sister and friends working in or near the financial district, it took many of them quite a long time to get to work this morning. The Brooklyn Battery Tunnel was closed to Manhattan-bound commercial traffic; the Holland Tunnel and the Williamsburg Bridge have also been closed to trucks and vans. This has put the city in traffic knots, as commercial vehicles seek other means to get into Manhattan.
With a tiger on the loose in Queens the other day, with temperatures finally soaring into the hot and humid high 80s—the "dog days" of August have arrived—and with the GOP convention due here (along with tens of thousands of protesters) at the end of the month, New Yorkers remain among the most resilient of people. Still. It's not making for a stress-free existence here in the Baked Apple, and while it's reassuring to see machine-gun loaded guys and gals in battle fatigues guarding various key spots throughout the city, it gives one the feeling of a police state.
We can debate the causes of this current war. We can debate whether or not these constant terror warnings are real, imagined, or politically motivated. (I take these particular threats seriously, but that's what happens when you've lost people you knew at the World Trade Center.)
What is undebatable is that the effects of this state of affairs are being felt right here in my neighborhood. And it doesn't feel all that good.
Friday, July 30, 2004
Kerry Stays the Course
Okay, I'll admit this: John Kerry surprised me last night in that his speech was filled with terrific rhetorical flourishes and was delivered with passion, something that this candidate usually lacks. I didn't even yawn once.
Michael Goodwin wrote that Kerry needed to say "eight words" in order to connect with the American people: "We must kill them [the terrorists] before they kill us." By saying that "we need to rebuild our alliances, so we can get the terrorists before they get us," Kerry seems to have delivered what Goodwin wanted. Add to this John Edwards' promise, the night before—"we will have one clear unmistakable message for Al Qaida and these terrorists: You cannot run. You cannot hide. We will destroy you"—and you've got a ticket that is pretty much in sync with the current administration. And with regard to Iraq, they may differ on some details, but they will stay the course.
They should get a bit of a bounce after this convention... as will the GOP ticket after its convention. And then the debates. Other things being equal, I still believe that Bush comes out on top on Election Day. But three months is an eternity in politics...
Thursday, July 29, 2004
Al Sharpton and Dem Dems
Okay, I admit it, I'm a political junkie. I've been super busy preparing the next issue of The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, but I have been unable to switch off the Democratic Convention, as predictable as it has been. Switching between network coverage, cable news coverage, and gavel-to-gavel C-SPAN coverage, I've been entertained.
But I have to say that the most riveting of all the speakers was fellow Brooklynite, Al Sharpton. Of course, I cringed over a lot of his political ideology, but, for my money, his speech proved that he is still Dem Dems' biggest firebrand and best comedian. You can read his speech here, but you still had to hear him and see him, because that's the only way to appreciate a performance artist. I know that rabble-rousing is not what one expects from a Presidential candidate, and I suspect that John Forbes Kerry (called by one delegate "John Fitzgerald Kerry") will induce a few yawns tonight. But I'll be watching nonetheless (even if I still agree with George Will that "you can't slip a Kleenex" between Kerry's and Bush's position on Iraq).
Weighing in on a Foreign Policy Debate, Again
I've been following the debate over libertarianism and foreign policy and applaud the many points made by my colleagues here.
I was struck particularly by this exchange between Matt Hill and Gene Healy. Matt agrees with the principles that Gene enunciates, but asks: "what do you say to the argument that the government is taking the money anyway, so it is just a question of how it is allocated—and perhaps, one could argue, allocating it to wars in defense of other people's rights is a more worthy use of the money than funneling it into subsidies or some other government bureaucracy. This argument would seem to hold as long as taxes aren't raised to cover the cost of war."
Gene responds: "It's not like the deal on offer is 'we'll abolish HUD if you let us use the proceeds to fund wars of liberation.' If that was the deal, I'd still oppose it, for a number of reasons, not least of which is at least HUD doesn't kill thousands upon thousands of people (at least not directly)."
But this speaks to a fundamental problem with too much libertarian analysis. That analysis becomes an almost thoroughly detached rationalistic discussion of floating abstractions with no bearing on the concrete context within which we live. This is a context that can only be understood as a system of state interventionism, one that Ayn Rand and others have called "the New Fascism." This is a system that has evolved over time; I have discussed the implications of that system over and over again, in essays here and here and in countless L&P posts.
What Gene says about HUD is precisely the point, therefore. And what the pro-Iraq war libertarians seem to sidestep completely is this: There is an "organic link" between "HUD," between the forms of domestic interventionism and the forms of foreign interventionism. That is: these forms of intervention are all part of one system of interventionism, where the "domestic" and the "foreign" policies become reciprocal reflections and mutual implications of one another.
And if one traces the ways in which domestic and foreign interventions have been conjoined throughout the history of the United States, one begins to understand why war can never be taken lightly. Indeed, it becomes "politics" by other means—nay, politics incarnate, if one understands that modern politics is founded, as such, on initiatory violence.
I and many others have continued to point out how the history of US policy in the Middle East has provided, at least partially, the context for the current problems with Islamic terrorists. That is not a justification for Islamic terrorism against innocent American civilians; but it does provide, at least partially, an understanding of the context within which such terrorism has taken root and flourished. There is a difference between explanation and justification.
I say "partially" because the vast array of problems in that region cannot simply be reduced to a pure product of US intervention. There are tribal, ethnic, and religious conflicts fomenting in the Middle East, which long predate US intervention—and which have now become deeply intertwined with the US presence. The US has stepped into a minefield of historical complexities, which can only generate explosive unintended consequences over the long-term.
Of course, we don't live in a perfect libertarian world. Waiting for everything to change radically before one can do anything to combat threats to life, liberty, and property is a lethal prescription for disaster... for national suicide.
Given that interventionist states are the only game in town, therefore, I can understand why such political units must be used—in this context, under the current conditions that exist—to defeat imminent threats (or even "grave and gathering threats" as President Bush once claimed) to the rights of the citizens who reside within a state's territorial boundaries. This puts aside, for the moment, the fact that most states, even within "minarchist" Nozickian guidelines, are illegitimate. But it does require that one carefully weigh the costs and benefits of acting in response to, or in preemption of, clear threats. And because this often entails an epistemic issue, the problem of having sufficient knowledge, it is essential to acquire accurate intelligence, something I've addressed here and here.
I opposed the war in Iraq because I didn't believe that the Hussein regime was that kind of threat. That doesn't mean that I saw Hussein as a benevolent despot; he was a murderous thug, one whom the United States once emboldened in the Iran-Iraq war. And while I didn't believe the US or any nation should have taken any of his denials on faith, concerning the possession of WMDs, I did believe that it was possible to contain his actions by threat of the use of overwhelming military force. Be that as it may: the US is in Iraq, and debating the same points over and over again is, I think, counterproductive at this juncture. Those who wanted the war, got it. Those who didn't are saddled with its unintended consequences, whether we like it or not.
By contrast, however, I was for "taking out" the Taliban in Afghanistan because Al Qaeda was clearly in bed with that regime ("collaborative operational relationship" indeed), and it was responsible for the devastation of 9/11. But I could have easily predicted how poorly the US would have functioned even in that sphere, and I did, in fact, foresee many, if not most, of the problems that US military intervention would generate by extending itself into Iraq. Note, I'm not talking about the purely "military" campaign, which was a "cakewalk"—considering that neither Afghanistan nor Iraq was militarily formidable. I'm talking more about the course of events thereafter, and the overall problems inherent in democratic "nation-building." I'm talking about the fact that my own analysis was conditioned by my understanding of the system within which we are all embedded.
All the more reason for right-thinking, principled libertarians to advocate ruthlessly delimited military actions that focus on destroying specific terrorist targets, while crushing financial and other networks of terrorist support.
In the long run, in my view, a substantially redefined US role in the Middle East will be necessary—but I sincerely doubt that this will happen in any fundamental way, until or unless we achieve a substantially redefined role for the US government at home. At base, the 9/11 commission is correct: this is an ideological and cultural war. And it can only be won, ultimately, by ideological and cultural means. It is a victory that must come both at home, within our borders, and abroad—within the borders, hearts, and minds of those who live in the Islamic world.
Monday, July 26, 2004
Of Sox and Socks
Tim Russert? Tom Brokaw? George Stephanopoulos? John Kerry? Senators John Glenn and Joe Biden? With a line-up like that, one would think one was watching the Sunday morning news shows. Alas, they were all spotted in the stands, or in the broadcast booth, or on the field at Fenway Park last night. Watching the ESPN broadcast of the Red Sox 9-6 victory over my New York Yankees, and seeing John Kerry throw out the first pitch, one thing was certain: This was July. Not October.
Kerry said that he hopes a new White House administration will host the World Champion Red Sox, who last won a World Series in 1918.
All this remains to be seen. After having been swept by the Yanks in early July, the Red Sox took two games from the Yanks this past weekend, amidst bloodied brawls on the field that had the New York press screaming "Stinky Sox" and "Dirty Sox." But one must wonder if this week's Kerry Party and last night's Sox Party are just part of the Summer Wind. There's only 99 days to the November election, and I still have that feeling that Kerry and his Sox (in contrast to Sandy Berger's socks and Bill Clinton's Socks) are headed for the same Fall Fate. (Please note: The fact that New York is hosting that other convention does not mean that the Yanks, like the GOP, are headed for an autumnal victory. But if I were a betting man... I'd say they have better chances than either Kerry or the Sox...)
Saturday, July 24, 2004
First, A Revolution from Within
I've just secured a copy of the 9/11 Commission report, but have not had the opportunity to read it. Still, I was intrigued by David Brooks' comments today in the NY Times about how the commission asserts that this is not only a war on terror, but an "ideological conflict." In his article, "War of Ideology," Brooks maintains:
It seems like a small distinction—emphasizing ideology instead of terror—but it makes all the difference, because if you don't define your problem correctly, you can't contemplate a strategy for victory.
When you see that our enemies are primarily an intellectual movement, not a terrorist army, you see why they are in no hurry. With their extensive indoctrination infrastructure of madrassas and mosques, they're still building strength, laying the groundwork for decades of struggle. Their time horizon can be totally different from our own.
Yes, indeed. The problem is, of course, that in an ideological battle, one must define a fundamentally different ideology in order to fight that which one abhors. If the "ideological counteroffensive" consists of a synthesis of fundamentalist Christianity with a neocon welfare-warfare statist mentality, then America is not offering any radical alternative to Islamic fundamentalism.
Brooks is certainly right to commend the commission for its belief that "the U.S. should be much more critical of autocratic regimes, even friendly ones, simply to demonstrate our principles." It would help if the US were not in bed with so many of these autocracies; it would also help if US politicians could actually demonstrate and live up to the principles upon which America was founded: reason, productiveness, individualism, and liberty.
In the end, however, giving "an international platform to modernist Muslims" and "introduc[ing] them to Western intellectuals" would be terribly counterproductive, especially since so many Western intellectuals have been at war with such American principles for decades. (It is no coincidence that some of today's "radical" Muslims have been taught in Western, including American, educational institutions.)
We need an ideological revolution within the United States before exporting it abroad.
Tuesday, July 20, 2004
Three Cheers for the Generalists!
As a follow-up to my posts on integration and radical thinking here and here, I just wanted to note today's David Brooks' column, "Learning to Think, And Live." Brooks has a lot of interesting things to say, but here's one fine comment from his article:
[O]ur universities operate too much like a guild system, throwing plenty of people with dissertations at students, not enough with practical knowledge. Why aren't there more scholars ... who teach students to be generalists, to see the great connections? Instead, the academy encourages squirrel-like specialization. Too many universities have become professionalized information-transmission systems ...
Amen.
"The First Landing of Ayn Rand in Japan!"
In a Not a Blog Exclusive, I take a look at the publication of the Japanese translation of The Fountainhead. As I explain in the essay, I was approached by Kayoko Fujimori, who was translating Rand's 1943 classic, to help explain certain idiomatic expressions that might facilitate the Japanese translation.
The publication of this volume is interesting on many levels. For fans of great illustrators, the cover art is by Nobuyuki Ohnishi, a Japanese artist famous for his anime works. And for those who see an essential opposition between Ayn Rand and neoconservatism, there is this information reproduced in the promotional "blue belt" enveloping the book:
Ayn Rand is the fountainhead of Libertarianism, a grass-roots American people's philosophy that stands against the Neo-Conservative.
I swear: I had absolutely nothing to do with that. Apparently, many Japanese readers are interested in the globalist implications of neoconservatism, so anything suggesting opposition to it is a selling point.
Read the whole essay here.
Monday, July 19, 2004
Democrats, Republicans, and the Failure of U.S. Intelligence
A compendium of quotes from Democrats has been circulating on the Internet; some people have claimed that all these Democrats, who previously recognized the threat of Saddam Hussein, now claim that the President lied. I comment on the compendium at SOLO Yahoo Forum, and reproduce some of my comments at "Not a Blog."
My essential point: The real scandal is not that Democrats attack Republicans, or that Republicans attack Democrats; what else is new? The real scandal is how wrong both of them were, and how wrong Western intelligence has been. Check out the rest of my comments and that compendium of quotes here.
Friday, July 16, 2004
Peter Boettke Joins L&P
I just wanted to take this opportunity to welcome my friend and colleague, Peter Boettke, to the ranks of Liberty and Power as a new Contributing Editor. Pete is the Deputy Director of the James M.Buchanan Center for Political Economy, a Senior Research Fellow at the Mercatus Center, and a professor in the economics department at George Mason University. He is also an author of many books and essays, and one terrific thinker. You can find out more about him here. Welcome aboard, Pete!
Monday, July 12, 2004
A Simple Question
I've been impressed with the quality of recent discussion here at L&P over the war in Iraq, and I realize that even "nonpartisan" reports from governmental committees reek of partisanship. But with the 9/11 Commission preparing to issue its final, critical report, and with the Senate Intelligence Commission having issued its report, I really have one question for all the discussants here, a question that is being asked, it seems, of all Presidential candidates: "If you knew then, what you know now about the war in Iraq, would you have opposed (or favored) the US military campaign?"
And I mean quite simply, if you knew everything you know now, including the fact that the US would engage in a nation-building occupation, where would you stand?
I tend to think that most people in this debate have neither changed their positions nor changed the positions of their interlocutors (with the notable exception of Irfan Khawaja among recent discussants, who has spoken here of having opposed US intervention in Iraq previously, but who came to favor it). I know my own fundamental views have not changed, even if I think I've learned a lot from people on all sides of this debate. I don't think my essential concerns have altered one whit, because I do believe that most of the evidence has lent credence to my initial assumptions about the nature of the problems in the Middle East and the nature of US foreign policy.
Clearly the operative word for most people's viewpoints in this dialogue is: tenacity. So, have your views changed? Why? Or why not? Feel free to post here, or to simply think about it.
Comics Lit
While I'm still recovering from laughter over Radley Balco's "Tyranny of the Twit," I figured I'd write a far more serious postscript to my previous entry on comics. Interested readers should take a look at an essay in Sunday's NY Times magazine, written by Charles McGrath: "Not Funnies," which deals with the phenomenon of graphic novels. There's also an interesting "interactive feature" on the magazine's home page where "graphic novelists speak!"
Thursday, July 8, 2004
Comics and Conservative Critics
Yesterday, my friend Stan Rozenfeld alerted me to a column written by conservative John Podhoretz over at National Review Online, a review of the new movie "Spider-Man 2" entitled "The Best of the Worst." (I see that Franklin Harris mentioned this on July 1. Also, check out Jim Henley's lengthy July blogging on Spider-Man.)
I confess I've not yet seen "Spider-Man 2," though I did enjoy the first film in the series. And I also confess to being a bit of a comic-book geek while growing up, with a collection that included everything from Batman, Superman and Aquaman to Classics Illustrated. In adulthood, I've frequently marveled over the artistry of an Alex Ross or the intellectual complexity of graphic novels, such as Kingdom Come.
Well, Podhoretz doesn't much appreciate this form of expression. A self-confessed “anti-comic-book snob,” he dismisses comics as “the most immature and illiterate of cultural forms,” “the province of powerless boys . . . a cultural embarrassment because the common culture has unthinkingly and stupidly accepted them as an art form.” Podhoretz views this acceptance as the “natural outcome of the youth-worship that took over American culture in the 1960s . . .”
Reading Podhoretz, I almost felt the ghost of psychiatrist Frederick Wertham, who had conducted studies into abnormal behavior in young people and, in his book Seduction of the Innocent (1954), claimed that American youth had been corrupted through their consumption of comic books, which depicted latent homosexuality (Batman and Robin), fantasies of sadistic joy (Superman), and un-woman-like behavior (Wonder Woman). This eventually prompted Estes Kefauver’s judicial committee to hold congressional hearings in 1954 on the subject of “Comic Books and Juvenile Delinquency.”
Podhoretz doesn't go that far. He simply argues that comics are, well, stupid. He ridicules those who revel in the "very potent fantasy outlet" that comics provide, "a comforting outlet for those who feel totally powerless." He's just tired of hearing about
the wonders of supercharged adolescent fantasies as embodied in the comic book. They present archetypes of heroism, focus on the hidden power of the social outcast, yada, yada, yada. At best, we have been told, they are the contemporary version of the Norse sagas. Their fans use terms like "Golden Age" and "Silver Age" to differentiate them, and can go into extraordinary detail about the difference between your Marvel comic and your DC comic.
Podhoretz, not surprisingly the author of Bush Country: How Dubya Became a Great President While Driving Liberals Insane, seems to give credence to those who think the Bush people "radiate negativity." In the end, however, he simply confesses that he's just pissed off because he "didn't preserve comic books from the 1960s and 1970s in little clear plastic bags," while his friends did, and now, they've "made thousands of dollars on them by selling them to comic-book stores whose owners and managers always seem to resemble Jabba the Hut—if Jabba the Hut wore a t-shirt with a Metallica logo on it. So maybe I'm a little bitter."
Well, get over yourself, Johnny! As my colleague Aeon Skoble has written, since the 1960s, the comic genre has become a “vehicle for consciousness-raising every bit as much as popular films and television shows." The visual iconography of comics is worth celebrating. The "sequential art" that it constitutes has often provided youth with a projection of the heroic that encapsulates a romantic aesthetic. Scott McCloud, taking a cue from master comics artist Will Eisner, reminds us that the medium is rooted in epic stories, which were pictured on walls among the ancient Egyptians and the pre-Columbians, or in tapestries (e.g., the Bayeux Tapestry), or even in “collage novels” (such as those of Max Ernst).
Moreover, as Paul Buhle maintains, the increased interest in the impact of comics derives from the fact that “mass culture, from the early moments when we could take it in as children, has affected us.” Since the '60s especially, comics, as an “underground” art form, have encapsulated “resentment toward, and resistance of, authority in all forms,” which has “added up to a barely visible political aesthetic."
That some of this "political aesthetic" has been of a left-wing vintage is undeniable. But there are many libertarian and even Randian messages that are contained in the world of comics (see, for example, the works of Steve Ditko and Frank Miller). Indeed, Ayn Rand's influence on popular comics is something that I will be discussing in a forthcoming article, "The Illustrated Rand," which will appear in the first of two issues of The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, celebrating the Rand Centenary in 2004-2005. Heck, even Batman has featured a story that referenced the works of Ludwig von Mises!
And that is the point, of course: You know that ideas are making an impact when they have been filtered through "popular" art forms, including illustrated media, such as comics and cartoons.
Perhaps some people are just so irritated by comics because they sometimes project a youthful heroism and anti-authoritarianism that rubs against the reactionary grain.
Keep up-to-date with Not a Blog.
Friday, July 2, 2004
That October Feeling ... in July
It's not often that we get to call a single baseball game a "classic" in early July. But if it were possible to use that word, it would be the perfect description for last night's thriller between age-old rivals, the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox. The Yanks beat the Sox in the bottom of the 13th inning, 5-4, but not before several remarkable hits and even more remarkable defensive plays, including one in which Yankee captain Derek Jeter saved the game, making a miraculous catch on the left-field line that sent him head-first into the stands. Bloodied and dazed, Jeter walked off the field, but is scheduled to resume play tonight to face the New York Mets in the second weekend of subway series fun.
You can always count on the Yanks and Sox to provide you with intense, stomach-churning baseball moments. Last night was something special.
Check out "Not a Blog."
Thursday, July 1, 2004
The War Against Radical Thinking, Revisited
In my post, "Academic Curricula: At War with Radical Thinking," I argued that the penchant in higher education toward compartmentalization was undermining the need for integration, for context-keeping, that lies at the heart of all forms of radical, dialectical thinking.
A nice postscript to that blog entry is provided by the following book excerpt, recently published in The Chronicle of Higher Education. In their book, Debunked! ESP, Telekinesis, and Other Pseudoscience, physicists Georges Charpak and Henri Broch argue:
At every level, society is infected with unscientific thinking, with potentially disastrous consequences. In the space of a few years, the occult has gone from an individual, local craft to an international big business. This growth ... must be stopped because, once belief in the supernatural reaches a certain point, the seriousness of the damage may grow at an accelerating rate.
You can't lead people to accept the grossest errors, the biggest falsehoods, and the least justifiable reasoning without consequences. If you lead people to accept nonsense, you cannot do so without seriously inhibiting their intellectual development, without making them doubt the validity of science and all the values that come from reason. Our era is unfortunately a great example of this because of the magnifying power that the media provide the pseudosciences.
The re-emergence of occult, paranormal, or magical practices has been oddly swift—so rapid, in fact, that one must ask oneself this question: What are the favorable circumstances that have created such a need and have favored, perhaps unwittingly, its growth? For one thing, financial stakes have a great effect on this trend. But maybe the problem is more serious than that. The geneticist Albert Jacquard said it very clearly in his foreword to Incroyable ... mais faux! (by Alain Cuniot): "To transform citizens into passive sheep is the great dream of the powerful. There are many means to this end; poisoning their minds with pseudoscience can be very effective."
And, ultimately, that's what all this is about, isn't it? The trends against systematization, against context-keeping, against integration, are trends against reason, and it is only by undermining reason that the great mass of the citizenry can be turned into "passive sheep."
Try to remember that the next time one of our politicians asks us to follow his lead by an act of faith.
(See the new and improved "Not a Blog.")
US-Saudi Chickens Coming Home to Roost
As the winds of change batter the regimes of the Middle East, from Iraq to Iran—Saddam Hussein himself being arraigned today on charges for "crimes against humanity"—fundamental questions are being raised about the state of Arab culture and politics. Fareed Zakaria has written a thought-provoking article, "Islam, Democracy, and Constitutional Liberalism," in the Spring 2004 issue of Political Science Quarterly. (Zakaria, who initially favored the war in Iraq, has been doing a lot of interesting writing of late; see especially his essay, "Reach Out to the Insurgents," which Justin Raimondo discusses here.)
In the PSQ essay, Zakaria is still wedded to the unfortunate idea that the US has a role to play in the folly that he dubs "a serious long-term project of nation building" in Iraq. But Zakaria puts his finger on the significant obstacles to this project. He writes:
The Arab rulers of the Middle East are autocratic, corrupt, and heavy-handed. But they are still more liberal, tolerant, and pluralistic than those who would likely replace them. Elections in many Arab countries would produce politicians who espouse views that are closer to those of Osama bin Laden than those of Jordan's liberal monarch, King Abdullah. Last year, the emir of Kuwait, with American encouragement, proposed giving women the vote. But the democratically elected Kuwaiti parliament—filled with Islamic fundamentalists—roundly rejected the initiative. Saudi crown prince Abdullah tried something much less dramatic when he proposed that women in Saudi Arabia be allowed to drive. (They are currently forbidden to do so, which means that Saudi Arabia has had to import half a million chauffeurs from places like India and the Philippines.) But the religious conservatives mobilized popular opposition and forced him to back down.
These tendencies, says Zakaria, illustrate the fact that
[t]he Arab world today is trapped between autocratic states and illiberal societies, neither of them fertile ground for liberal democracy. The dangerous dynamic between these two forces has produced a political climate filled with religious extremism and violence. As the state becomes more repressive, opposition within society grows more pernicious, goading the state into further repression. It is the reverse of the historical process in the Western world, where liberalism produced democracy and democracy fueled liberalism. The Arab path has instead produced dictatorship, which has bred terrorism. But terrorism is only the most noted manifestation of this dysfunction, social stagnation, and intellectual bankruptcy.
One could certainly take issue with Zakaria's maxim, especially the belief that "democracy fueled liberalism"—unless one identifies "liberalism" with today's corrupt version of interest-group politics, rather than with yesteryear's classical, laissez-faire ideal. But Zakaria asks a legitimate question: "Why is [the Middle East] region the political basket case of the world?" Railing against those who would use "Islamic," "Middle Eastern," and "Arab" interchangeably, Zakaria argues that the "Arab social structure is deeply authoritarian" across religious, political, social, economic, and even educational-pedagogical spheres. Politically, many regimes in the Arab world embraced a "coarser ideology of military republicanism, state socialism, and Arab nationalism." Zakaria rejects unequivocally the view that poverty breeds terrorism, since too many terrorists emerge from such wealthy oil-rich countries as Saudi Arabia, "the world's largest petroleum exporter." Bin Laden himself "was born into a family worth more than $5 billion."
If anything, the problem is not poverty, but wealth, specifically wealth achieved by what Franz Oppenheimer used to call the "political means." It is wealth achieved by coercive, statist, monopolistic control, in this instance, of "natural resources," whereby the regimes that exercise control over them "tend never to develop, modernize, or gain legitimacy," as Zakaria puts it. "Easy money means little economic or political modernization," observes Zakaria. With "no real political parties, no free press and few pathways for dissent," authoritarian Arab societies have fomented the development of dissident Islamic fundamentalist movements, spearheaded by thinkers such as Sayyid Qutb, who used religion as "the language of opposition ... This combination of religion and politics has proven to be combustible." (Not only in the Middle East, I might add, but in the USA as well; I discuss this combustible American constellation in my forthcoming Free Radical essay, "Caught up in the Rapture," which I'll excerpt here in due course.)
The fundamentalists got their biggest break when the Ayatollah Khomeini toppled the pro-US regime of the Shah of Iran. But the most "dangerous game," says Zakaria, is being played by the Saudis. For those of us who have never been fond of the House of Sa'ud, Zakaria reminds us that "the likely alternative to the regime is not Jeffersonian democracy but a Taliban-style theocracy." He explains:
The Saudi regime ... has tried to deflect attention away from its spotty economic and political record by allowing free reign to its most extreme clerics, hoping to gain legitimacy by association. Saudi Arabia's educational system is run by medieval-minded religious bureaucrats. Over the past three decades, the Saudis—mostly through private trusts—have funded religious schools (madrasas) and centers that spread Wahhabism (a rigid, desert variant Islam that is the template for most Islamic fundamentalists) around the world. Saudi-funded madrasas have churned out tens of thousands of half-educated, fanatical Muslims who view the modern world and non-Muslims with great suspicion. America in this world-view is almost always uniquely evil. This exported fundamentalism has infected not just other Arab societies but countries outside the Arab world.
In this sense, the Saudis have emboldened the very forces that are now clamoring to undermine their power. Their "financiers and functionaries" were responsible for bolstering fundamentalist forces in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Indeed, "[w]ithout Saudi money and men, the Taliban would not have existed, nor would Pakistan have become the hotbed of fundamentalism that it is today." Until or unless the Saudis "do more to end ... governmental and nongovernmental support for extreme Islam, which is now the kingdom's second largest export to the rest of the world," this situation is not likely to change.
Thus, ideological corruptions are mirrored by economic corruptions. Indeed, the Saudi business elites owe their "positions to oil or to connections to the ruling families." Their wealth is derived from "feudalism, not capitalism," and the "political effects remain feudal as well." Zakaria argues persuasively that "[a] genuinely entrepreneurial business class would be the single most important force for change in the Middle East." This is the kind of social institution that is, thankfully, not foreign to Arab culture, which has, "for thousands of years ... been full of traders, merchants, and businessmen." Indeed, observes Zakaria, "[t]he bazaar is probably the oldest institution in the Middle East."
Unfortunately, the Saudi's quasi-feudal, neo-mercantilist regime has been fully encouraged, sanctioned, and legitimated by US foreign policy. Whatever the specific connections between the Bush family and the Saudis—and Michael Moore, Craig Unger, and Kevin Phillips have had a field day speculating about these connections—the truth remains that the United States has had an incestuous relationship with the House of Sa'ud for nearly sixty years. As I wrote in my essay, "A Question of Loyalty":
US corporations engage in joint business ventures with the Saudi government—from petroleum to arms deals—utilizing a whole panoply of statist mechanisms, including the Export-Import Bank. The US is Saudi Arabia's largest investor and trading partner. Historically, the House of Sa'ud's alliance with—and exportation of—intolerant, fanatical Wahhabism has been strengthened by the US-Saudi government partnership with Western oil companies, especially the Arabian American Oil Company (ARAMCO), a merger of Esso, Texaco, and Mobil. This is precisely the kind of "pull-peddling" that [Ayn] Rand condemned as "the New Fascism"—a US-Saudi-Big Oil Unholy Trinity that sustains the undemocratic Saudi regime. ...
[That] regime ... depends upon a barbaric network of secret police and sub-human prisons, using the kinds of torture tactics that would have made Saddam proud: routine floggings, rotisserie hangings, amputations, penis blocking, and anal molestations. Such is the "pragmatic" nature of official US government policy, which goes to war for "human rights" in Iraq, while tacitly sanctioning their eradication in Saudi Arabia.
It's this kind of pragmatism that has been the midwife to anti-American terrorism—from US support of the Shah of Iran that led to the establishment of an anti-American Islamic theocracy to US support of the Afghani mujahideen that led to the establishment of an anti-American Taliban.
Eric Margolis extends these points further in his recent discussion of the inner machinery of the US-Saudi relationship. He writes:
Saudi Arabia is a feudal monarchy owned and run by 6,000-7,000 royal princes. ... Saudi Arabia has been a U.S. oil protectorate since the late 1940s under the following arrangement: The royal family supplies cheap oil to the U.S. and its allies Europe and Japan. The billions earned by the Saudis are recycled into U.S. and western financial institutions and commercial projects, or spent on huge amounts of advanced weapons ($9 billion in recent years) the Saudis cannot operate. Saudi arms purchases are used to support friendly American and European politicians in politically sensitive states or regions.
In return, the U.S. supplies the royal family with protection against its own increasingly restive people and covetous neighbours, like Iraq. The small Saudi Army is denied ammunition to prevent it staging the kind of coup that overthrew Iraq's British-run puppet monarch in 1958. A parallel "White Army," composed of loyal Bedouin tribesmen led by U.S. "advisers," watches the army. ... [F]ar from being an enemy of the U.S., Saudi Arabia is almost an overseas American state. One-third of the population of 24 million is foreign. Saudi defences, internal security, finance and the oil industry are still run by some 70,000 U.S. and British expatriates. Some eight million Asian workers do the middle management and donkey work. The royal family is intimately linked to Washington's political and money power elite through a network of business and personal connections. The Bush family, and its entourage of Republican military-industrial complex deal makers, has been joined at the hip for two decades with Saudi power princes and their financial frontmen.
Margolis maintains correctly, however, that the Saudi state, as such, "did not finance or abet Osama bin Laden—it tried repeatedly to kill him. Bin Laden's modest funds came from donations by individual Saudis, wealthy and poor alike, who supported his jihad against western domination." What Margolis does not recognize, however, is that the fundamentalist ideology that the House of Sa'ud has long funded and exported is now undermining its very rule. While the failure of the Saudi state at this point in time would be an utter catastrophe, those who would take power—the fanatical fundamentalists among them—are, to borrow a Randian phrase, "the distilled essence of the [Saudi] Establishment's culture ... the embodiment of its soul" and its "personified ideal."
I have long argued that radical social change in the United States depends upon the uprooting of both the politico-economic system and the ideas that nourish it and sustain it. This dynamic is global in its implications, and no less operative in the context of the Saudi monarchy, one of the United States' prime "allies" in the Middle East. Fundamental change is not likely to come through further military intervention, which will only destabilize the region and further empower the fanatics. Ultimately, this is a philosophical and cultural war that must be fought at home and abroad.
(See the new and improved "Not a Blog.")
Sunday, June 27, 2004
Have a Gay Old Time!
While people on both sides of the political divide continue to argue about such things as gay marriage, hate crimes legislation, sodomy statutes, and so forth, I think it is important to note that the "Gay Pride" parades during the month of June were born of an essentially libertarian historical moment.
On June 27, 1969, 35 years ago this very day, there began a series of riots in Greenwich Village, New York City, outside the famed Stonewall Inn, a gay bar. Bar patrons had had enough with regular police raids on—and legal harassment of—the establishment, and there followed nearly a week of unrest as gays took the streets, yelling "Gay Power," and fighting back the police. The New York Daily News' headline blared: "Homo Nest Raided, Queen Bees are Stinging Mad."
The "gay liberation" movement that resulted had been a long time in the making; despite compromises along the way that have been symptomatic of the pressure-group mentality so ingrained in the body politic, the movement has been nothing less than a call for human liberation, one that tells the state to get the hell out of the way, so that people can pursue their own lives and their own personal conceptions of happiness, unencumbered by the regulations and prohibitions of an intrusive government.
Whatever one's views of any of the contentious issues of the day, that principle is one that should be celebrated, regardless of one's sexual orientation.
Today, in New York City, the streets of Fifth Avenue in Manhattan will be festive, but the parade will culminate, as it should, outside the old Stonewall, at 53 Christopher Street. Here's hoping the participants have a gay old time!
Wednesday, June 23, 2004
AFI's 100 All-Time Movie Songs
The American Film Institute's tribute to the top 100 movie songs of all time was an entertaining special, televised last night on the CBS network. One could quibble with the inclusion or exclusion of this or that song. Indeed, I was very sorry that my favorite Michel Legrand song (with lyrics by Alan and Marilyn Bergman), "What are you doing the rest of your life?, from the movie, "The Happy Ending" was totally overlooked ... even in the nominations list! Legrand's masterpiece, which was recently revisited by American Idol winner Fantasia Barrino, lost the 1969 Best Song Oscar to "Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head" from "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," but it remains one of the classics of the Great American Songbook.
In any event, one certainly cannot quibble with a list that includes everything from Harold Arlen's "Wizard of Oz" perennial, "Over the Rainbow" to Johnny Mandel's "Sandpiper" theme, "The Shadow of Your Smile." Three Cheers to AFI for a poignant trip down memory lane.
Thursday, June 17, 2004
Osama and Saddam, Yet Again
For many months now, a debate has raged about the possibility of links between Saddam Hussein's regime and Osama Bin Laden's Al Qaeda network. I doubt that this debate will be ended any time soon, but I do think that the evidence offered up till now has been tenuous and speculative at best; if such a formal link had been documented in the days leading up to the US invasion, it would have impacted considerably on my own views of that campaign, even if it would never have altered my opposition to nation building as a foreign policy goal. In this regard, I share much with the 2000 Presidential Campaign Candidate, George W. Bush
In response to a Weekly Standard piece written by Stephen Hayes, who has published a new book on the subject of "The Connection," I've written a number of brief posts (see, for example, here, here and here), and have read a lot of very interesting literature, both pro and con (see, for example, here, here, and here).
It now seems, however, that the 9/11 Commission, which has access to many confidential, classified documents, has declared, finally, that there was no operational link between Iraq and Al Qaeda.
I don't think anyone has denied that there were talks between various individuals connected to Al Qaeda and the Ba'athist regime in Iraq. But these talks never materialized into any kind of formal, "collaborative relationship," like, say, that between the Taliban and Bin Laden's thugs.
A Hussein regime, in possession of WMDs, and in a "collaborative relationship" with Al Qaeda, would have been a threat to the security of the United States, in my opinion, meriting some kind of action. That Hussein possessed neither WMDs nor a cozy relationship with Bin Laden fortifies further my judgment that this war was an unnecessary and deeply troubling drain on national security resources at a time when Al Qaeda and Al Qaeda-ism marches on.
Unfortunately, the situation in Iraq now makes US extrication impossible, practically speaking, insofar as the structural institutionalization of the US presence will not be challenged by either George W. Bush or his potential successor, John Kerry. Worse still, the "magnet theory" has failed: Al Qaeda may have been drawn into Iraq to do battle with the American "infidels," as the Bush administration predicted, but it has not departed from anywhere else on the planet; from Madrid to Riyadh, from Cleveland, Ohio to Brooklyn, New York, its minions continue to conspire. This "War on Terrorism" has many chapters left, and the outcome is by no means certain.
Wednesday, June 16, 2004
Ronnie II vs. Bush II
On Friday, as part of a flawless funeral for Ronald Reagan that ended in a touching California sunset awash in Nancy's tears, I have to say that I was very moved by the various eulogies I heard throughout the day. Still, the most pointed political criticism came from Ron Reagan Jr.. I noticed it when he first said it... and I'm glad others are noticing it all over the media:
Dad was also a deeply, unabashedly religious man. But he never made the fatal mistake of so many politicians: Wearing his faith on his sleeve to gain political advantage. True, after he was shot and nearly killed early in his presidency, he came to believe that God had spared him in order that he might do good. But he accepted that as a responsibility, not a mandate. And there is a profound difference.
Gee, who could Ronnie Jr. be talking about?
Tuesday, June 15, 2004
General Slocum Centennial
One hundred years ago today, the steamboat General Slocum had ended its excursion up the East River on the way to Long Island Sound in a nightmarish blaze that killed more than 1,000 people. It was the City's first Titanic-size disaster, 8 years before that ill-fated North Atlantic vessel hit an iceberg.
Like the Titanic, the tragedy has been immortalized in celluloid. It was "Manhattan Melodrama," the 1934 film directed by Woody S. Van Dyke, that had etched upon the silver screen the fate of General Slocum. That movie was preceded by a 1915 silent depiction, "The Regeneration," director Raoul Walsh's first feature film. More recently, "Fearful Visitation" has debuted, a documentary exploring the nature of the disaster. (A History Channel documentary on General Slocum is scheduled for tomorrow night; it features historian Edward O'Donnell, author of Ship Ablaze.)
The New York Historical Society reminds us that the disaster devastated the city's large German-American community, which had settled on the lower east side, in a section that became known as Kleindeutschland. The steamship had embarked on a day-long excursion, with many women and children of German extraction; a fire began on board as the ship passed Roosevelt Island and quickly consumed the wooden vessel, killing an estimated 1,021 people. New York City had suffered the single greatest day of lives lost prior to the World Trade Center attack.
O'Donnell suggests that the Slocum tragedy slipped into a kind of collective unconscious in the years after World War I and World War II, as mainstream American culture demonized its German citizens. O'Donnell's book, which was published last June, has begun a necessary process of historical recollection. A General Slocum Memorial still stands in Tompkins Square Park.
Monday, June 14, 2004
More on Ray and Rushmore
I think NY Daily News syndicated columnist Zev Chafets must be reading Liberty & Power. A few days after I noted Brother Ray's passing, and our very own Sheldon Richman suggested adding him to Mount Rushmore, Chafets writes that Charles and other trailblazers of the rock 'n' roll revolution, "deserve a Rushmore all their own."
Meanwhile, the tributes keep a comin'. Charles is being featured all over the radio dial, according to News columnist David Hinckley, prompting a few classic lines from R&B singer Ruth Brown. Hinckley tells us that Brown's late pal, jazz singer Billy Eckstine, once said that it is an "ominous sign for a veteran performer ... to have a flurry of his or her songs resurface on the radio. 'He said if they suddenly play more than three of your songs,' Brown muses, 'that means you're dead.'"
Brown also celebrates Charles' "great sense of humor." Hinckely reports:
"I talked to him a few months ago," said Brown. "He told me they were making a movie about his life and asked who should play me. I said, "Halle Berry." He said, "Ruth, I ain't that blind."
A Ray Charles memorial is scheduled for this coming Friday.
Sunday, June 13, 2004
The Birth of a Narcostate
I've discussed the role of Drugs and Terror and the fact that even with the best of intentions, a US invasion of Afghanistan (which I supported) can lead to unintended consequences of monumental significance. In the aftermath of that invasion, Taliban elements still exist, Bin Laden is still at large, and Afghanistan itself is inching ever closer to becoming a major Middle East Narcostate.
This morning, on "Meet the Press," Tim Russert interviewed Afghanistan President Karzai on the reality of opium production in that country. Russert quotes from the US General Accounting Office.
MR. RUSSERT: "Opium production threatened stability. The illicit international trade in Afghan opiates threatened Afghan's stability during fiscal years 2002-2003. The drug trade provided income for terrorists and warlords fueling the factions that worked against stability and national unity. In 2002, Afghan farmers produced 3,442 metric tons of opium, providing $2.5 billion in trafficking revenue. In 2003 opium production in the country increased to 3,600 metric tons, the second largest harvest in the country's history. Further, heroin laboratories have proliferated in Afghanistan in recent years. As a result of the increased poppy production and in-country heroin production, greater resources were available to Afghan criminal networks and others at odds with the central government. The International Monetary Fund and Afghanistan's minister of Finance have stated that the potential exists for Afghanistan to become a 'narcostate' in which all legitimate institutions are infiltrated by the power and wealth of drug traffickers.'"
PRES. KARZAI: That is quite possible. We have a serious problem because of drugs on our hands. We began to work against drug production three years ago, as soon as we came into government, but the first year of passing the government, we made the mistake. The mistake was that we went and paid farmers in return for destruction. This encouraged everybody else to grow poppies, thinking that if they grow poppies, we will go to destroy it and pay them for it. And if we don't go to destroy it, they will have the poppies. So we made that mistake. And last year we recognized it, and we began to destroy poppies. This year, again, we have gone and destroyed poppies.
But this is not a simple problem. We are talking of a country in which there was 30 years of war, in which there were six years of horrible drought. When I moved into Afghanistan three years ago, I saw with my own eyes an orchard of pomegranates that was turned into poppy fields; that's how serious the problem is. But we recognize and so do the Afghan people that this is a problem that can cause Afghanistan to go into serious danger. This production of poppies supports terrorism. It trivializes the economy. It undermines institution building in Afghanistan. Afghanistan will have to destroy it for the sake of the Afghan people and, also, because of the world.
But we cannot do this alone. We will destroy the poppies, but next year they will come again; therefore there has to be a plan together with the international community to provide alternative livelihood, alternative economy and better reconstruction in Afghanistan on a sustainable manner so that we over time get rid of the problem. The Afghan people don't want it. They know it is illegitimate. Our clergy, our religious community, our tribal chiefs, the government, the institutions are working against it on a daily basis, and we will succeed because we have to succeed.
MR. RUSSERT: But if 80 percent of the 27 million people in Afghanistan live in poverty and the warlords want to maintain their power, why won't the warlords allow opium to be raised because it provides money to the farmers and keeps them in power?
PRES. KARZAI: We began two and a half years ago where there was no government. The institutions were completely destroyed. In two and a half years' time, we have had the bond process. We've had the grand council, the Loya Jirga, to elect a government. We've had the grand council to create a constitution, which we did. We are now going to the next stage, which is elections. This country is moving forward. But this country has problems, too, to overcome, and we will continue to have many, many problems as we keep building ourselves.
Drugs is one of the most serious problems that occur in Afghanistan. Warlordism, as you said, is another serious problem that we have in Afghanistan. We, the Afghan people, want to get rid of them. The common Afghan man and woman that come to see me every day in my office, they ask me to get rid of these difficulties for them, especially the drugs and warlordism. And I hope the international community will stand stronger with us on both these problems.
MR. RUSSERT: But with the warlords and the drug traffickers, but for the United States' government, could you possibly stay in power?
PRES. KARZAI: Without the presence of the United States forces in Afghanistan, without the presence of the international community in Afghanistan, without the presence of the ISAF in Afghanistan, Afghanistan will not be in good shape. That is why the Afghan people keep asking for more of the International Security Assistance Forces in Afghanistan. That is why the Afghan people are asking for the deployment of NATO coalitions. That's why the Afghan people have embraced the arrival of the United States of America in Afghanistan for its liberation, because they know that we need international assistance in order to build our institutions over time, in order to build a national army, in order to build a national police. And before Afghanistan can stand on its own feet, it will be many years from now.
Whatever the validity of taking out the Taliban, because of its ties to Al Qaeda, it is clear that no thought was given to the long-term consequences of US intervention. The complicity of the US in the emergence of a warlord-dominated Narcostate in Afghanistan to "stabilize" that regime is a sobering lesson. The lessons yet to come from "nation building" in Iraq might make the Afghanistan experience pale in comparison.
Thursday, June 10, 2004
I'll Miss You, Brother Ray
Just yesterday, while watching the Capitol Rotunda Memorial Service for Ronald Reagan, I was very touched by a stirring rendition of "America the Beautiful" by the Air Force's Singing Sergeants. I remembered being touched like this before upon hearing a very different and deeply soulful rendition by the great Ray Charles.
Another day, another passing. Ray Charles, 73, an American institution, a vocalist and instrumentalist who spanned jazz, pop, gospel, blues, early rock 'n roll, and country, has died.
I'll miss you, Brother Ray.
Sunday, June 6, 2004
Reagan's Rendezvous with Destiny
Like my L&P colleagues, Sheldon Richman and Steven Horwitz, I too have some thoughts about Ronald Reagan, who passed away yesterday (on what was also the 36th anniversary of Robert F. Kennedy's assassination). There really are no words to convey the pain that a family endures watching the slow deterioration of a loved one due to Alzheimer's disease. My heart goes out to his family for their loss.
I did not vote for Reagan in 1981. So convinced was I of the horrific alternative between a wishy-washy Jimmy Carter and a Moral Majority-beholden Ronald Reagan that I voted for Ed Clark, the Libertarian candidate for President.
But in 1984, I did cast my vote for Reagan because I believed that he had achieved an important ideological shift in the terms of the American political debate. While this shift was aided by other important world figures, as Jonathan Dresner explains, Reagan's convictions and principles, his humor and optimism, enabled him to score a rhetorical victory on behalf of free markets that was unparalleled in the post-New Deal era.
If only his actual legacy had matched his rhetoric ... Indeed, aspects of that legacy were profoundly mixed, and some of his policies have had unfortunate, long-term consequences.
But Ronald Reagan had made fashionable the use of words like "markets," "privatization," and "freedom." By the time, in 1987, when he stood before the Berlin Wall and told Soviet Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev to come to the Brandenburg Gate, to "open this gate" and "tear down this wall," it was clear that he had won a crucially important ideological victory on behalf of that "shining city upon a hill."
Whether it was his poignant tribute to the Challenger crew or his much earlier speech about a "rendezvous with destiny," Reagan's words were an inspiration. Indeed, that "Rendezvous with Destiny" speech, given on October 27, 1964 in support of Barry Goldwater's quest for the Presidency, inspires us even today. Why say anything about Reagan when he himself could say it better than almost anyone?
I think it's time we ask ourselves if we still know the freedoms that were intended for us by the Founding Fathers. ... If we lose freedom here, there is no place to escape to. This is the last stand on Earth. And this idea that government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except to sovereign people, is still the newest and most unique idea in all the long history of man's relation to man. This is the issue of this election. Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.
You and I are told increasingly that we have to choose between a left or right, but I would like to suggest that there is no such thing as a left or right. There is only an up or down --- up to a man's age-old dream, the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order --- or down to the ant heap totalitarianism, and regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would trade our freedom for security have embarked on this downward course....
[T]he Founding Fathers ... knew that governments don't control things. A government can't control the economy without controlling people. And they knew when a government sets out to do that, it must use force and coercion to achieve its purpose. They also knew, those Founding Fathers, that outside of its legitimate functions, government does nothing as well or as economically as the private sector of the economy. ... No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size. Government programs, once launched, never disappear. Actually, a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we'll ever see on this Earth....
Somewhere a perversion has taken place. Our natural, inalienable rights are now considered to be a dispensation of government, and freedom has never been so fragile, so close to slipping from our grasp as it is at this moment. You and I have the courage to say to our enemies, "There is a price we will not pay." There is a point beyond which they must not advance. ... You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on Earth, or we will sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.
Saturday, June 5, 2004
Triple Crown &Titanic on "Today"
Got up this morning, in anticipation of a Triple Crown victory for Smarty Jones, and decided to turn on the Today show. Rain, rain, rain in the forecast... should be a very wet racetrack, though that didn't stop Smarty from winning the Kentucky Derby.
In-between reports from Belmont Park, one of Today's news correspondents interviewed Robert D. Ballard, who returns to the Titanic for a National Geographic special on Monday evening. Ballard was explaining how the Titanic had been damaged by tourists and salvagers. The correspondent was sad to hear all this, and wondered if this constant salvaging meant that the ship would be "damaged beyond repair."
"Damaged beyond repair"?
This is the shipwrecked Titanic we're talking about, right? Laying splintered at the bottom of the North Atlantic, right?
Ballard was infinitely polite in his response, but the expression on his face was beyond classic.
Anyway: Go Smarty Jones!
Thursday, June 3, 2004
Breaking News: The Cracker Jack Come Back!
Sometimes, it pays to stand up and fight for your principles! As I explained here, the New York Yankees thought they'd replace the sale of Cracker Jacks, at Yankee Stadium, with Crunch 'n Munch. I, along with thousands of other fans, protested this destruction of a noble baseball tradition, immortalized in "Take Me Out to the Ball Game."
Well, Cracker Jacks have returned to The Stadium by popular demand!
Candy-coated popcorn, peanuts, and a prize: That's what you get in Cracker Jack!
Bravo, Yanks!
Wednesday, June 2, 2004
Academic Curricula: At War with Radical Thinking
A provocative article entitled "Colleges Must Reconstruct the Unity of Knowledge," written by Vartan Gregorian, appears in the June 5 edition of The Chronicle of Higher Education. In this essay, Gregorian gives voice to problems of compartmentalization and fragmentation in the academy that I have long emphasized.
Gregorian is president of the Carnegie Corporation of New York and a former president of Brown University and the New York Public Library. He writes:
Today's students fulfill general-education requirements, take specialized courses in their majors, and fill out their schedule with some electives, but while college catalogs euphemistically describe this as a "curriculum," it is rarely more than a collection of courses, devoid of planning, context, and coherence. In fact, mass higher education is heading toward what I call the Home Depot approach to education, where there is no differentiation between consumption and digestion, or between information and learning, and no guidance—or even questioning—about what it means to be an educated and cultured person. Colleges are becoming academic superstores, vast collections of courses, stacked up like sinks and lumber for do-it-yourselfers to try to assemble on their own into a meaningful whole.
The fundamental problem underlying the disjointed curriculum is the fragmentation of knowledge itself. Higher education has atomized knowledge by dividing it into disciplines, subdisciplines, and sub-subdisciplines—breaking it up into smaller and smaller unconnected fragments of academic specialization, even as the world looks to colleges for help in integrating and synthesizing the exponential increases in information brought about by technological advances. The trend has serious ramifications. Understanding the nature of knowledge, its unity, its varieties, its limitations, and its uses and abuses is necessary for the success of our democracy. ...
We must reform higher education to reconstruct the unity and value of knowledge. While that may sound esoteric, especially to some outside the academy, it is really just shorthand for saying that the complexity of the world requires us to have a better understanding of the relationships and connections between all fields that intersect and overlap—economics and sociology, law and psychology, business and history, physics and medicine, anthropology and political science.
Gregorian is particularly concerned about the tendency toward "simplistic solutions" for complex problems, because each problem is often constituted by a cluster of problems, and "none ... can be tackled using linear or sequential methods." He goes on:
Yet such systemic thinking has been slow to catch on, even though the pitfalls of specialization have long been acknowledged and discussed. One reason is that, although the process of both growth and fragmentation of knowledge has been under way since the 17th century, it has snowballed in the last century. The scope and the intensity of specialization are such that scholars and scientists have great difficulty in keeping up with the important yet overwhelming amount of scholarly literature related to their subspecialties, not to mention their general disciplines. The triumph of the "monograph" or "scientific investigation" over synthesis has fractured the commonwealth of learning and undermined our sense of commitment to general understanding and integration of knowledge.
None of this is meant to disparage specialization; but specialization without "synthesis and systemic thinking" is a prescription for disaster. "Information—of all varieties, all levels of priority, and all without much context—is bombarding us from all directions all the time," Gregorian states. Indeed, those of us familiar with the liberal tradition have long appreciated F. A. Hayek's insight that the increasing complexity of society leads to an ever-increasing dispersal of information and knowledge; this knowledge is essentially dispersed, and reflected in the division and specialization of labor. But, as Gregorian insists, "the same information technologies that have been the driving force behind the explosion of information and its fragmentation also present us with profoundly integrative tools." We can see these tools at work in artificial intelligence, automated information-management systems, and electronic communications networks. Nevertheless, our computers will help us to integrate the data, but they are only as good as their human programmers. Gregorian quotes author and media critic Neil Postman: "The computer cannot provide an organizing moral framework. It cannot tell us what questions are worth asking."
This is one of the important tasks of higher education, according to Gregorian. To not guide students toward synthesizing the disparate bits of knowledge is a colossal failure, "for history shows that humanity has a craving for wholeness." It's actually far more than a simple craving, however; "wholeness" or integration is a requirement of human cognition. And it is, in my view, a virtual requirement for radical social theorizing. More on that in a moment.
The lack of coherence and integration, claims Gregorian, leads some students to "esoteric ideas, cults, and extremist programs," which seem to provide the systematization that such students lack. This is rule not only by the collective, but also by the "expert," who becomes the leader. In a world of specialized knowledge, too many students defer to such "experts" and "abdicate judgment in favor of others' opinions. Unless we help our students acquire their own identity," Gregorian warns, "they will end up at the mercy of experts—or worse, at the mercy of charlatans posing as experts." Is it any wonder that some will be attracted to militant leaders, who adopt militant ideologies and theologies?
Gregorian urges educators to develop "coherence and integrity in our curricula," and the re-affirmation of a "liberal education ... to integrate learning and provide balance..." He urges multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary learning, where the "interconnectedness" of disciplines is stressed. He suggests the development of teacher training and "the joint appointment of faculty members to several departments." He emphasizes also the connections between "learning" and "doing"—between thought and action: the importance of field study; the integration of theory, application, and experience; the exploration of topics or problems "over a sustained period of time, using multiple approaches to explore and develop responses..."
In recognizing the division and specialization of labor and knowledge as central to the advancement of "the cause of civilization," Gregorian stresses "the creation of a balance between specialists and generalists." Such generalists, "trained in the humanities, sciences, and social sciences ... can help create a common discourse, a common vocabulary among the various disciplines." Ironically, "[s]ince our society respects specialists and suspects generalists," Gregorian cautions, "perhaps the way to solve the shortage of generalists is by creating a new specialty in synthesis and systems." Gregorian cites the words of noted philosopher and essayist José Ortega y Gasset:
The need to create sound synthesis and systemization of knowledge ... will call out a kind of scientific genius which hitherto has existed only as an aberration: the genius of integration. Of necessity, this means specialization, as all creative effort does, but this time, the [person] will be specializing in the construction of the whole.
Gregorian also reminds us of T.S. Eliot's comments on Dante's Inferno, where he suggests "that hell is a place where nothing connects with nothing." That is precisely the kind of hell that the modern curriculum is creating. In the end,
we need to understand where we were, where we are, and where we are going. The challenge for higher education, then, is not the choice between pure research and practical application but, rather, the integration and synthesis of compartmentalized knowledge. On our campuses, we must create an intellectual climate that encourages faculty members and students to make connections among seemingly disparate disciplines, discoveries, events, and trends—and to build bridges among them that benefit the understanding of us all.
What lessons can we draw from Gregorian's essay? Well, it's a lesson I've been teaching for more than twenty years and it is one that speaks to the essence of radical thinking.
It has long been said that to be radical is to grasp things by the root. And yet, those who are characterized as political radicals have been criticized by some for raising "serious questions about basic purpose and meaning in society," as political theorist Harlan Wilson puts it, that seem to lend themselves to "relatively simplistic and highly controlled" answers. For Wilson, those who attempt to go to the "root" assume there are roots and that it is possible to clearly identify "malignant" and "vicious" fundamentals that gloss over "interdependence and overlapping pluralities."
But an appreciation of social complexity must be fundamental to radical social theorizing. To be radical is not to offer canned solutions for context-less problems. It is the ability to examine the roots of social problems from different perspectives and on different levels of generality. It is the ability to situate each social problem within a larger system, across time. In seeking to change a society, we can never do one thing; we need to attack that society's problems across several dimensions. This "art of context-keeping," which is the essence of what I have called "dialectical thinking," is indispensable to radical analysis. As I write in Total Freedom: Toward a Dialectical Libertarianism:
A new radicalism is first and foremost a new way of thinking. It demands that we explore the integrated principles, meaning, and promise of liberty. It demands that we ask, and answer, crucial questions about the context of liberty—those complex forces that generate, sustain, and nourish human freedom.
Some of my critics have argued that I've trivialized the nature of dialectics by identifying it with good, critical thinking. But Gregorian's article suggests that the modern curriculum militates against such "good, critical thinking," insofar as "good critical thinking" requires an awareness of context, of systematization and integration. When people are not trained to think systematically—worse: when they are trained to dis-integrate, to fragment, to atomize—they will not be apt to think of problems in their interconnections.
This has implications especially for a political process that institutionalizes ad hoc policy-making. Every piece of legislation is crafted by ad hoc considerations of pork-barreling privilege and interest-group pressure. It is as prevalent in the construction of foreign policy as it is in domestic policy. It is even etched into illusory dreams of "democratic nation-building," which focus on the external imposition of institutions or procedural rules without any appreciation of the complex personal and cultural forces that nourish and sustain them.
Let us be clear: The need for comprehensiveness in political thinking, just like the need for integration in the curriculum, is not a call for that equally illusory "synoptic" perspective that Hayek criticized as a vestige of rationalism. None of us stands like Archimedes from a synoptic vantage point to reconstruct the world in toto. All the more reason to investigate every problem from as many different perspectives and levels of generality as is humanly possible. That is the nature of radical thinking. Human survival depends on it.
Sunday, May 30, 2004
A Memorial Day Weekend Tribute to Uncle Sam
As the nation remembers its dead from wars past and present on this Memorial Day weekend, and as special attention is being focused on the opening of a National World War II Memorial, I wanted to take a moment to tell you about a man who, not unlike others of his generation, served his country abroad. His name was Salvatore "Sam" Sclafani, first cousin to my Dad, married to my mother's sister, and forever etched in the minds of our family as "Uncle Sam." Born in 1915, Uncle Sam left us ten years ago, having succumbed to prostate cancer. But it was this man who was my earliest inspiration in all matters political; he nourished in me a love of history and politics, and was the guy to whom I dedicated Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical.
My Uncle Sam was, without doubt, one of the funniest and most benevolent souls to ever grace this planet. And when you got him to talk about politics, it was like a veritable ride aboard the Coney Island Cyclone, that landmark splintery wooden rollercoaster. He was the most opinionated and outspoken critic of politicians, left, right and center, whom I've ever had the privilege to know and love.
Back in 1976, I interviewed Uncle Sam for a special project I'd done on the veterans of World War II. His comments are as precious today, as they were back then.
He remembered that "day of infamy" in December 1941. His mother labored by the stove, preparing the traditional Sunday home-cooked Italian meal. In the background, the radio played the sounds of a Swing band ... and then, a news flash came that the Japanese had attacked the US military base in Hawaii.
My Uncle had been classified in the army for the draft, but after years of working in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, he decided to enlist in the navy instead. Several days after his enlistment, he was shipped out to the Great Lakes Military Installation in Waukegan, Illinois, outside Chicago. Like a tale out of a storybook, he married his girlfriend, my Aunt Georgia, the day before he left.
From his hair-scalping at the installation to the strenuous marching, walking, running, rifle and rope exercises, boot-training was a test of his endurance. Even learning to sleep in a hammock—or as Uncle Sam reminisced, "trying to get into them, and involuntarily getting out of them"—was a chore. From Illinois, he was sent to Norfolk, Virginia for further training. He eventually became a part of the Seabees, a relatively new branch of the navy that was similar to the army corps of engineers. In learning the arts of naval engineering, these Seabees were taught everything "from building bridges and laying down airfields in record time, to advanced techniques of camouflage."
From Norfolk, Uncle Sam went on to Pleasantville, California, and then on to the Bremerton Navy Yard in Puget Sound, Washington state, where he participated in the salvage work on the USS Nevada, damaged in the Pearl Harbor raid. As they awaited orders on their next assignment, Uncle Sam's group was split into two: Group 1 was headed south—to Guadalcanal. By the mere accident of being part of Group 2, Uncle Sam ended up in the North Pacific. "We then realized," he recalled: "This is it. This isn't playing anymore. We're not training. From here on, everything is real."
Morale was remarkably good on the trip. But there was a common expression on everyone's face, he told me: an expression of suppressed horror, worry, and uncertainty. There was that constant alert for possible enemy aerial or submarine bombardment. While he remained remarkably calm, many of his newfound pals were desperately ill. "My comrades wished they had died. Men were throwing-up against bulkheads and walls and fainting on decks. They lost their appetites from terrible fear and severe seasickness."
Ten days after rough riding, the ship neared its destination. A heavy fog descended. And when the land mass came into focus, it looked like the cold, barren surface of a distant planet: no trees, no vegetation, immense mountains of stone and volcanic rock. Uncle Sam wasn't a few minutes on land before an alert signaled an imminent Japanese air attack. An earlier attack that day had destroyed the boats that lay docked around a makeshift pier. Running to take cover, the men passed an enormous hill of greenish-white pine boxes ... coffins waiting for new inhabitants. It was the kind of greeting that sobered the most stubborn among them. "A morbid, depressing and unsettling sensation came over me," Uncle Sam said. "We were finally aware that we had been sent to the notorious Dutch Harbor in the Alaskan Aleutian Islands, the closest US military base to Japan, only 600 miles away." This was a place where temperatures ranged from 12 below to 60 above. At times, many feet of snow would fall. Certain seasons brought 18-hour days, while others brought 18-hour nights. But always, there was a damp, musty fog; for the two years that Uncle Sam was stationed in the Aleutians, he never saw the sun.
Within the first week of their arrival, the new troops faced air attacks, volcanic eruptions, storms, earthquakes, and "horizontal rain," due to "winds that could blow a building across the Hudson River." Those winds, dubbed "Williwaws," were sudden and severe, up to 200 mph. Ironically, it was the difficult climactic conditions that saved Aleutian Island residents from both constant Japanese aerial bombardment and the typical diseases that infected troops stationed in the South Pacific. "American pilots remarked that there were better odds in flying 50 missions over Berlin," Uncle Sam would say, "than even one mission over the Aleutian Islands."
He remembered walking along a dirt road, when a light breeze had suddenly transformed into one of those Williwaws. By the time he had hit the deck, the wind had uprooted steel cables, boulders, and a 13-ton patrol bomber on the beach—smacking it up against a mountain. The Seabees' efforts to camouflage their work were not very successful because of these winds. "We were forced to build revetments for planes to try to camouflage them with heavy steel-cabled nets. After the first storm, all the nets went flying across the Pacific Ocean and days of work went down the drain."
But the Seabees transformed the rough Alaskan terrain, by literally leveling mountains. After laying down many miles of airfields with heavy metal stripping, the Seabees paved the way for an Aleutian air-force, since land-based bombers were now able to land.
By this time, Uncle Sam had become a Second Class Petty Officer. His days began at 5 am. His meals consisted of passable substitutes, since there were no eggs or milk. Remarkably, he gained 30 lbs. while living in Dutch Harbor. It was weight he desperately needed, as he worked hard on airfield and submarine installations. (He remembered going into one of those primitive subs: "I was qualified for submarine duty," he said, "but they were out of their minds: it was like staying in a narrow coffin, cluttered with levers, wheels, and machinery. I would never have survived!")
When his day of rigorous work was complete, he'd go back to the bunkhouses, which had been built to withstand the wind, the rain, and the war. Fighting his solitude and isolation, he found comfort with his comrades, smoking cigarettes, reminiscing of home, listening to their "Pacific sweetheart" on the radio: Tokyo Rose. Whoever she actually was, Uncle Sam had vivid memories of all the things she told them on the radio. "She'd tell us how our girls were cheating on us back home. She would say that we were very stupid to be fighting ... we were going to lose anyway. So we might as well rebel, destroy our superiors, and go home." It gave them a lot of laughs, he said, but it was hard to avoid sobbing, silently, as you listened to the Swing music she played. From the crackling of the radio speaker, came the Big Band sounds of Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, and Tommy Dorsey; more than anything "Tokyo Rose" had actually said, the use of this great music constituted a form of psychological warfare that infected everyone with homesickness, he said. "It would place us in a very depressing state. Some men cried openly."
The men of Dutch Harbor served as a diversionary force in the Battle of Midway. They prepared munitions for the bloody US invasions of Amchitka, Adak, and Attu. They played an active part in the isolation of Kiska, even though they failed to prevent the evacuation of 5100 Japanese troops, who departed in the middle of a fog-heavy July night to return to Paramishiro Harbor.
During his two-year tour of duty, Uncle Sam experienced about six Japanese air bombardments; though the attacks were only seven to eight minutes in duration, they felt like seven to eight hours. A two-hour alert would usually precede an attack, as men would frantically prepare their anti-aircraft positions. "We were told to run off the ships and scatter into the hills, where there were fox holes." Men clung to their own hopes for survival, some praying and giving substance to the old adage "there are no atheists in foxholes." You just didn't know if "that next bullet would have your name on it. Then you'd hear the incoming planes." Within seconds, bombs would be dropping, destroying installations, oil tanks, gasoline storage facilities, and piers. Raging infernos and thick, black smoke would engulf the camp. "Things flashed quickly through my head," he painfully recalled. He had fears of invading parachutests, naval bombardment, "the end of the world. In one attack, our ship, the Northwestern, was blown into a million pieces as a bomb was dropped down the smokestack. Shrapnel and other fragments went flying, as the explosion echoed through the hills and canyons."
Uncle Sam learned a few things about wars, even "good" wars. He thought it was a joke when some said that the Americans would sell you the noose with which to hang them ... until he realized that scrap metal from Manhattan Els (elevated trains) had been sold to the Japanese and used by them to create their machinery of war. He even remembered going over to a downed Japanese Zero. "And on the engine was labeled 'Pratt-Whitney Motors, USA.'"
While he wouldn't have thought twice about shooting another human being in order to survive— "quite frankly," he'd say, "it was either them or us"—he never accepted the notion that he should hate his enemy. "We had been taught to hate the enemy for their bombardment of Pearl Harbor, for their cruel and inhumane treatment of our men." But when prisoners were caught, "you'd look at these men, 'our enemy,' and see a reflection of yourself. I felt sorry for them."
In 1944, Company C was reorganized and sent back to San Francisco. As his ship neared the Golden Gate Bridge, Uncle Sam cried "like a baby. It was the most fabulous sight I had ever seen. To be on American soil again, a feeling you can't imagine unless you had been in that situation. And there, on the dock was the American Red Cross—with gallons and gallons of ice-cold milk."
The climactic changes were not friendly to Uncle Sam. He developed a mysterious illness in which his legs swelled, as he lay nearly paralyzed in pain. When it was apparent that he would be in a military hospital for months, he was given an honorable discharge. In May 1944, he finally came home to New York. For months, he had difficulty adjusting. He was immensely uptight and shuddery. He developed a fear of passing overhead planes, a fear that some New Yorkers still have for reasons that my Uncle could never have dreamed. The war had split homes and families, had taken away friends and relatives, and had damaged relationships. "You never know if you're going to come back during a war," he stated. "But if you have that luck, you can really appreciate what you left behind."
A bolder and more patriotic American you'd be hard pressed to find. But Uncle Sam had had enough with politicians. He had voted for FDR because he was convinced that the President would preserve the peace. "The President had said that American boys would not fight on foreign soil. He forgot to add: 'They'd be buried in it.'" For thirty years thereafter, Uncle Sam refused to go into a voting booth.
I come from a family of servicemen. Uncle Sam was fortunate enough to come home and to live a wonderful life, becoming a second father to me, as my own father had passed away when I was 12. But other relatives were not as lucky. My Uncle Frank was killed in the Battle of the Bulge. My Uncle Charlie survived, but was unable to talk about his war experiences for the rest of his life, having lived for years in a German POW camp. Fortunately, my Uncle Al and Uncle Georgie lived to talk about their experiences in the European theater. And my Uncle Tony remained in the army for the rest of his life.
The human cost of war is usually calculated by raw data on battle deaths, casualties, and medical evacuations. But whatever your position on the current war, it is important to remember not only those who died on the battlefield. It is important to remember, to tribute, those who survived as well, those who lived to tell us about the horrors of war, and who did the most patriotic thing imaginable: Building and sustaining their own lives in the aftermath, drawing strength from their love of family, of friends, and for life itself.
I honor their memory.
Friday, May 28, 2004
Of Bats and Rats, Pigeons and Poles
"Blowback" is not restricted solely to the area of foreign policy. Even municipalities must deal with the ancient principle that intentional human action will, by necessity, create unintended consequences in a social setting. Especially when that social setting is extended outward to encompass other species ...
Take the New York Rat. Please. The City of New York has forever been unable to control the endless copulating and populating of this rodent. It's gotten so bad in some sections of Manhattan that a gent named Manny Rodriguez, has taken to whacking some of these unlucky critters with his home-made bat. Upper West Siders are cheering this victorious vigilante, nicknamed "M-Rod," for his bat-to-rat alternative to the teams of exterminators and inspectors that are finally responding to neighborhood calls for pest control.
Another New York neighborhood has been trying to deal with what many residents term, "rats with wings." The New York Pigeon. Dubbed "Public Enemy No. 2," literally, the pigeons in the Manhattan Bryant Park area have been dropping their droppings on people for years. The City tried to control this, at first, by drugging the poor birds. When pigeons, rather than pigeon-poop, started dropping on people's heads, the City decided to stop its bird-brained narcotics program. Then, the City introduced Fake Owls into Bryant Park, which were supposed to frighten the pigeons away. But these are New York pigeons. They simply started depositing their droppings on the Fake Owls, mocking them, as if to say: "You talkin' to me?"
Then, the City came up with a really brilliant plan: They introduced hawks into Bryant Park. Yes. Real, live hawks. But the hawks didn't touch the pigeons. Instead, one of them swooped down and attacked a helpless Chihuahua, attempting to lift it into the air as it frolicked on the green. People were scurrying and screaming, and dog lovers protested.
So the City has now come up with a Bold New Initiative. City workers are now wrapping Slinkys around tree branches, which hang over sitting areas in Bryant Park. This will, apparently, stop the pigeons from sitting on the branches because it will, apparently, make them "dizzy." They will therefore have to go elsewhere to take care of their lavatory needs. Perhaps the City will install Public Poopers for Pigeons that are as well kept as the People Potties.
Meanwhile, another war looms in the outer boroughs. This one is coming to my Brooklyn neighborhood, which is home to thousands of Green Monk Parakeets. These natives of South America, like other immigrant groups, have settled in my beloved Brooklyn. Don't let their delicate, pretty appearance fool you. They are hard-working and productive, building nests on telephone poles and street lamps. But the phone company is now starting to grumble, and it is only a matter of time before it tries to remove the South American Squatters from their utility poles. Let's just hope they don't introduce Slinkies, Fake Owls, or, to the eternal fear of my dog Blondie, Chihuahua-Hunting Hawks. These Brooklyn Birds are tough; they will make the Manhattan Pigeons look like Chickens. Not to be confused with Chicken-Hawks.
Wednesday, May 26, 2004
Kush and Berry
I have a forthcoming article in The Free Radical entitled "Bush Wins!," which I'll be delighted to share with my L&P audience after it is published. The gist of the article is expressed in its conclusion:
Other things being equal, voters are not going to choose Kerry, when they’ve already got in Bush a Republican dedicated to all the conventional Democratic planks: an expanding welfare state, budget deficits, and a war abroad. A long and potentially nasty campaign beckons; the race may center on 17 battleground states that are not yet claimed by either candidate and so much can happen between now and Election Day. But, as of this moment, I still think Bush wins.
Yes, I know: This could be one of those "Dewey Defeats Truman" moments, as I say in my article. But I do find it interesting that in today's NY Times, people from various parts of the political spectrum conclude, as I do, that Bush and Kerry have much more in common than either camp would have you believe. Check out this news item, this Nicholas Kristof Op-Ed piece, and this William Safire essay, all of which point to what Safire calls "the Bush-Kerry Nondebate."
Monday, May 24, 2004
Marshalling Resources
Okay, so here's a hypothetical scenario. Let's say you live in a state that's been through hard times. The federal government comes to you and tells you, "Price no object." They're going to send you whatever you need to get yourself back on track. For the first three months, the government doles out $8.2 billion in contracts. An additional $10.5 billion is coming this summer. It's the biggest news in urban renewal since LBJ's War on Poverty. And the whole thing is going to be paid by the taxpayers. You don't have to put in one dime! Unless of course you are a taxpayer.
Actually, because your particular state has been subject to really hard times, it's not HUD (the Department of Housing and Urban Development)—with its mere $2.3 billion in available "funding opportunities" for "affordable housing"—that's assisting you. It's not even the State Department. Nah. This is for a really big job, something for which only the Department of Defense does the actual contracting, with its "emphasis on big corporations producing quality results subject to bureaucratic auditing," as Jim Dobbins ("recently retired ... US envoy to postwar Afghanistan") puts it.
So what can your state look forward to? Here's just a sampling: 7000 vehicles (a mix of SUVs, four-wheel drives, and passenger sedans). 459 Color TVs. 359 VCR/DVD players. 13,000 firefighter outfits. Hundreds of firefighter vehicles. And small things, like: 185,000 thumbtacks, 71,222 metal whistles, 9,620 desk chairs, 5,400 traffic cones, and so forth. And let's not forget $5.6 billion for electric generators, $4.3 billion for water and sewer projects, and $1 billion for roads and transportation networks.
Oh, and, since we don't want to leave the State Department out of the loop, it too will have a role to play. It's going to send you another $50 million to teach the residents of your state how to run elections (hopefully this will not entail any leftover hanging chads).
There is so much more information now available on all these wonderful Marshall Plan-like projects for your state. Montana? New York? No.
Iraq.
As Bob Port tells us in the NY Daily News, however, there has been a "lack of full transparency" on this wonderful crony capitalist project, which
breeds trouble and favors political influence, according to the Center for Public Integrity, a Washington watchdog group. Last year, the center had to file 73 Freedom of Information Act requests to unearth a list of Afghanistan and Iraqi contractors. The effort revealed confusion about what the government was buying, discrepancies in numbers and a general lack of accountability, said Bill Allison, the center's managing editor.
Who needs accountability when you're not a fiscal conservative? But if you were one, like a good Small Government Republican, you'd be opposed to all this, right!? It's only Big Government Democrats who favor Big Government Initiatives. Right?
Let's ask the Republican administration of George W. Bush.
Oh, and for those who believe that the only way to Marshall Resources for Big Forward Looking Projects like this is with Big Government Initiatives, well... it just ain't so.
Friday, May 21, 2004
US Foreign Policy: Biting the Hand that Feeds You
Chalabi, Chalabi, Chalabi. All Chalabi, All the Time. It's all over the news and even here.
I have to admit that I simply collapsed with laughter when I read this passage from today's NY Times editorial, entitled "Friends Like This":
Before the war, Ahmad Chalabi told Washington hawks exactly what they wanted to hear about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction and the warm welcome American troops could expect from liberated Iraqis. They responded in kind, picturing Mr. Chalabi — who has lived most of his life outside Iraq and who was convicted in absentia in Jordan for bank fraud — as exactly the kind of secular Shiite to lead a new, democratic Iraq. Now reality has come crashing down on both sides, and the friendship has crumbled along with self-delusion. ... Lately, Mr. Chalabi — who has no genuine political base — has concluded that anti-Americanism is the key to political popularity. ... Many people in the Bush administration have been growing angry at the way Mr. Chalabi keeps biting the hand that fed him so well for so long.
"Biting the hand that fed him." HA! That is, quite possibly, an encapsulation of the whole history of US foreign policy: Putting money and material in the hands of people who come back to bite the hand, and several other aspects of the American anatomy, that feeds them. From Hussein himself to the mujahideen in Afghanistan ... this country has a remarkable track record. Let's see what new "friend" the US will climb into bed with in the coming months.
Thursday, May 20, 2004
Human Intelligence
For two days, I sat, riveted, watching the 9/11 Commission hearings that took place in the auditorium of the New School, in Greenwich Village, NYC. These hearings were not broadcast on any of the networks nationwide, but there wasn't a single major network in this city that wasn't carrying it.
For all that has been said about yesterday's appearance by former NY Mayor Rudy Giuliani, one thing that has not been noted was Giuliani's insistence that the intelligence community needs to depend more on actual human beings to do the work of interpreting the mounds of information collected by a vast technological apparatus.
The problem, he said, was that too much of the government's efforts have gone into the technology of intelligence, but that there is no substitute for human intelligence: actual people who might infiltrate potential terrorist organizations to get the information that enables better, more accurate and effective interpretation of disparate bits of data.
When the debate centers around imminent threat or illusion, truth or lies, accurate intelligence can make all the difference between war and peace.
From Smarty Jones to Dumb Yankees
Gays are getting married legally in Massachusetts, and the dreaded apocalypse didn't happen. Three cheers for the stability of the republic, through social change, war, high oil prices, and presidential politics. We may even have a Triple Crown winner if the never-defeated Smarty Jones wins the Belmont Stakes in New York on the 5th of June! Go Smarty Jones!
Some things, however, speak to the very core of the social fabric. And so, though it pains me as a Yankees fan, I must speak out about the newest sacrilege to affect the Great American Pastime. Forget Spider-Man Logos on the Bases or the reversal thereof.
Recall the first stanza to that memorable American song, forever etched in the minds of seventh-inning-stretching fans across the nation, from L.A. to Chicago to Da Bronx:
Take me out to the Ballgame
Take me out with the crowd
Buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jack
I don't care if I never get back
Well. It seems that the High Priests in that Holy Cathedral of Baseball, Yankee Stadium, have ended their long-time affiliation with Cracker Jacks. Now, Crunch 'n Munch will be sold in place of Cracker Jacks. It seems that Crunch 'n Munch, produced by ConAgra, passed a taste test (I'll admit that Crunch 'n Munch is richer, though not necessarily better than Cracker Jacks). It also appears that Frito Lay, the producers of Cracker Jacks, moved to bags, rather than the much-preferred boxes. A ConAgra spokesman said: "We'd have no heartburn if Yankee fans started standing up in the seventh inning and singing 'Buy me some peanuts and Crunch 'n Munch'."
Well, we'd have to alter the lyrical line right after that one too, no? How about: "I don't care if I never get lunch." Or: "I don't care if I ever get punched." Or: "I don't care if I don't have a hunch!!!!!!!!!!!"
Cracker Jacks and baseball belong together. It is an internal relationship that constitutes an organic unity! What is wrong with these people!!???
Wednesday, May 19, 2004
Kristof's "Nuts with Nukes"
As my L&P readers are well aware, I've been recommending Nicholas D. Kristof's interesting NY Times series on Iran. Today's installment, "Nuts With Nukes," asserts in its very first line that there is only "one force that could rescue Iran's hard-line ayatollahs from the dustbin of history: us." Kristof argues that a confrontational position on Iran could embolden the mullahs by creating "a nationalistic backlash ... that will keep hard-liners in power indefinitely. Our sanctions and isolation have kept dinosaurs in power in Cuba, North Korea and Burma, and my fear is that we'll do the same in Iran." For Kristof, "regime change in Tehran" is a worthwhile goal, but a confrontational policy will "fail to get rid of either the nuclear program or this regime." He continues:
The only alternative is engagement — the precise opposite of the sanctions and isolation that have been U.S. policy under both Presidents Clinton and Bush. Sanctions are even less effective against Iran than against, say, North Korea, because Iran oozes petroleum and is independently wealthy. Isolation by the U.S. has accomplished even less in Iran than it has in Cuba. So we should vigorously pursue a "grand bargain" in which, among other elements, Iran maintains its freeze on uranium enrichment and we establish diplomatic relations and encourage business investment, tourism and education exchanges.
Kristof argues that a "money flood" of US investment would seriously undermine the theocratic stranglehold on the country. Quoting Hooshang Amirahmadi, the president of the American Iranian Council: "In just a few years, the conservatives would be finished."
All this remains to be seen. But there is something to be said about the intimate connection between free minds and free markets; the spread of the latter both reflects and reinforces the triumph of the former.
Tuesday, May 18, 2004
Imminence and Intelligence
New York City television is currently blanketed with wall-to-wall coverage of the 9/11 commission hearings, which are taking place today in Manhattan. Seeing these images again of the attack on the World Trade Center, listening to a re-creation of the time-line of the events as they unfolded ... well. It's still painful, especially for those of us who lost colleagues, friends, and neighbors. Kudos to the commission chair, Tom Kean, for asking for a moment of silence. All the more reason, today, to continue our discussion of the nature of the current Iraq war, which, in my view, has little to do with the Al Qaeda attack on the United States.
Replying to an essay, "Lesser Evils," written by Michael Ignatieff, Irfan Khawaja asks: "Do We Have to Get Our Hands Dirty to Win the War on Terrorism? And What Does that Mean Exactly?" Khawaja, who is currently participating in a provocative discussion with Gene Healy and Keith Halderman, raises some troubling issues about ends and means, while defending the view that there is and should be no trade-off between "liberty" and "security."
Khawaja, however, is disturbed by those who use "imminent threat" as a litmus test for military action. He thinks that "imminence" remains either undefined or too loosely defined. He writes:
One difficulty here is that it’s not clear that the concept of imminence can consistently be applied before an event as opposed to after it. It is much easier to say that something was imminent than to say that it is—a serious liability for a concept with the strategic importance that “imminence” has now come to acquire.
The issue of "imminence" is, indeed, an epistemic one. That's why the accuracy and reliability of intelligence and the effectiveness of the intelligence community are so crucially important to our assessment of any risk as a clear and present danger to the lives and liberties of American citizens. In the context of Iraq, the US had to assess the probable existence of weapons of mass destruction, the ability of Hussein's regime to deliver such weapons in a first-strike against "US interests" (something that is, in this day and age, far more difficult to define than the doctrine of "imminence"), and the ties between Hussein's regime and other groups or states that have targeted US interests in the past, specifically the ties (or lack thereof) between Hussein and Al Qaeda.
Part of that assessment would have included Hussein's own testimony, which, as Khawaja argues, could not be trusted. While I agree that Hussein was a "liar" and a "serial miscalculator," as Khawaja observes, one thing seems certain: He put a high priority on his own survival, and boasted that because he survived the first Gulf War, he was actually the victor. It is for that reason that containment under threat of assured destruction works, even with the most irrational of people. Josef Stalin was, by all measures, a paranoid liar, and a more prolific murderer than Hussein, but he was "rational" enough to know that a strike against the US would have been met with massive and catastrophic retaliation.
In the end, however, the US did not have to rely on the rationality or believability of Hussein's claims; it needed to evaluate, as Gene Healy has done, Hussein's track record and the countervailing interests at work in the region, to assess the threat level. Considering the testimony of a parade of disgruntled former Bush administration employees, who have argued that the neoconservative policy-makers were hell-bent on going to war in Iraq, knowing full well that there was no connection between Iraq and the 9/11 attack, one must wonder if claims of "imminent threat" or "grave and gathering threat" were a mere cover for a predetermined course of action.
The US government had information at its disposal, in the days leading up to the invasion, which undermined its own case for invasion. But the administration chose not to place any priority on that information, selecting only those claims that bolstered its favored conclusions, in order to justify the commitment of tens of thousands of US troops to this nation-building folly. Even Colin Powell has said that the intelligence, which drew from Iraqi defectors who had a political agenda of their own, was "inaccurate and wrong and, in some cases, deliberately misleading."
Tragically, the US government disregarded accurate information or acted on misleading information in the Iraq war, while it ignored or failed to coordinate lots of information about explicit warnings that might have prevented the September 11th attack. That attack represents one of the greatest failures of government—to preserve, protect, and defend—in US history.
Monday, May 17, 2004
The Spread of Al Qaeda-ism
There is a really provocative discussion of Islamic philosophy going on at SOLO HQ, featuring our very own Roderick Long. Check out the dialogue here, here, and here, especially.
Meanwhile, in response to the charges of those who argue that Al Qaeda is in Iraq, as if this were proof of a link between the Hussein regime and Bin Laden, I posted the following comments:
There is no doubt that Al Qaeda and Al Qaeda-aligned groups are now in Iraq. But there was no evidence of any formal relationship between Hussein and Al Qaeda; those Al Qaeda and Al Qaeda-aligned terrorist groups that did exist in Hussein's Iraq, were centered not in the Sunni triangle or the Shi'ite dominated South; they were found mostly in the Kurd-dominated Northern sections of the country. It is only now, in the chaotic aftermath of the invasion, that Al Qaeda-aligned groups are becoming more prevalent in Iraq. With the Al Qaeda-described "infidel," Saddam Hussein, now in US custody, a power-and-ideological vacuum exists, attracting all sorts of savagery.
But this is not an illustration of the simplistic "magnet theory": that by stationing thousands of US forces in Iraq, Iraq will become a "magnet" for terrorists, and the US will have simply brought the war to them, rather than being the battleground itself. Al Qaeda is not in one place at one time. And there is something far more insidious than the existence of Al Qaeda or an Al Qaeda-aligned network, and that is: the spread of Al Qaeda-ism. And therein lies the horrific scope of the problem: as this particular shade of militant fundamentalism takes root throughout the Muslim world (which has virtually no geographic limitations, since it stretches from the Middle East to the Asian Pacific to North America), Osama Bin Laden will matter less and less, except, perhaps, as a symbolic "leader" of this maniacal sect. The decentralized cells of a poisonous ideological movement will be more self-motivated to undertake localized strikes against the Great Satan.
We will never live in a risk-free world. All the more reason to embrace long-run policies that minimize the points of political and military contact, while maximizing the points of cultural and social contact, with the Muslim world. Nothing less than an ideological and cultural revolution abroad (and at home) will do.
Saturday, May 15, 2004
More Kristof, More Iran
As a follow-up to my posts on important changes in Iran, take a look at Nicholas Kristof's ongoing series in today's NY Times. In "Velvet Hand, Iron Glove," Kristof inadvertently makes a Hayekian-friendly point about how the radical dispersal of knowledge and information is contributing to the unraveling of a repressive regime. As people get information from sources other than the regime, that regime becomes more unstable. The Iranian press may not be "free," but the proliferation of the Internet, blogs, and satellite TV is having an insidious effect on the regime's legitimacy.
As Kristof puts it, if the Iranian theocracy constituted
an efficient police state, it might survive. But it's not. It cracks down episodically, tossing dissidents in prison and occasionally even murdering them (like a Canadian-Iranian journalist last year). But Iran doesn't control information—partly because satellite television is ubiquitous, if illegal—and people mostly get away with scathing criticism as long as they do not organize against the government.
Kristof continues to maintain
that the Iranian regime is destined for the ash heap of history. An unpopular regime can survive if it is repressive enough, but Iran's hard-liners don't imprison their critics consistently enough to instill terror. ... In the end, I find Iran a hopeful place. Ordinary people are proving themselves irrepressible, and they will triumph someday and forge a glistening example of a Muslim country that is a pro-American democracy in the Middle East.
TOC's Hudgins Gets it Right
As many of my L&P readers know, I have been extremely critical of a number of Randian commentators who have not shown enough sensitivity to the enormously complex issue of bringing "freedom" to the Islamic-dominated countries of the Middle East.
So it is only fair that I highlight an essay with which I do agree, in large measure. Edward Hudgins of The Objectivist Center has written an insightful essay that asks the following question: "Are the People of the Middle East Fit for Freedom?."
While Hudgins addresses the horrors and scandal of Abu Ghraibgate in fine fashion, he also argues that the "governments of most Middle East countries to varying degrees abuse and repress their own citizens, and have few mechanisms to redress abuses. Citizens of those countries who act to reform their governments often find themselves censored, jailed or worse." Hudgins sees, quite correctly, that politics is an expression of culture:
These governments reflect the values and cultures in those countries. ... The most active opponents of repressive governments often are radical Islamists who want to establish even more repressive dictatorships. Many individuals in those countries give their first loyalty to a tribe, ethnic group or religion, not to universal principles that apply to all people and at all times. Outsiders are viewed at best with suspicion and at worst as worthy of nothing but painful death.
Hudgins goes on to cite a number of surveys regarding attitudes toward arbitrary violence in the Middle East; an overwhelming majority of those surveyed in even "moderate" Arab countries believe that suicide bombings against Americans and Israelis are justified; and over 63 per cent favored Saudi Arabian, Syrian or Egyptian dictatorial models of government, rather than a US model.
Bush has argued that those who believe that the people of Iraq are unfit for freedom are a bit elitist, or maybe, even "racist," in their assumptions. (Arthur Silber demolishes "The Racist Smear," as part of his continuing examination of "The Roots of Horror," here.) While Hudgins applauds Bush's view that each individual deserves freedom, he asks, quite directly: "Are the people of Iraq and other countries in the region fit for freedom?"
For Hudgins, this is not an issue of race. It is an issue of culture, precisely what I and others have been arguing now for over a year. Hudgins writes: "Any given Iraqi, Arab or Muslim might well want to live in peace with his or her neighbors, foreign and domestic. But can we really expect limited governments that respect individual liberty and ban arbitrary force to be established in countries in which those principles are not written in the hearts and minds of ... enough of their citizens?" While Hudgins applauds those seeking to establish free societies in these countries, "we must understand," he explains, "that the people of these countries ultimately must create for themselves modern, civil societies and governments in their own cultural and historical contexts. If we fail to appreciate the limits of the ability of we Americans—the outsiders—to transform dysfunctional countries, we will only slow rather than hasten the day of those countries' true liberation."
To which I must add: Amen.
Wednesday, May 12, 2004
Iran: The Anti-Beard Revolution
As a follow-up to my posts here and here, take a look at the continuing Nicholas Kristoff series on Iran. His newest article, "Overdosing on Islam" is a worthwhile read. Kristoff tells us how the younger generation is disgusted with the reign of mullahs. As one young man puts it: "America is only Baby Satan. We have Big Satan right here at home."
The youth have even revolted against beards in a way that is reminiscent of the generation of Peter the Great (who, in his quest to Westernize Russia, actually imposed taxes and license fees on the unshaven in his war on orthodox religion). Well, at least this generation's fight is against any government intrusions of this sort.
Kristoff concludes:
There's a useful lesson here for George Bush's America as well as for the ayatollahs' Iran: when a religion is imposed on people, when a government tries too ostentatiously to put itself "under God," the effect is often not to prop up religious faith but to undermine it. Nothing is more lethal to religious faith than having self-righteous, intolerant politicians (who wince at nose studs) drag God into politics.
Iraq: Surpassing the Costs of World War I
I've made countless references to World War I and Wilsonianism in my blogging at L&P. Today's parallel comes via the Mises Economics Blog (thanks Jeff Tucker) and FEE. Check out a fine article on the "War Boom," which appeared in Monday's Washington Post. Of particular interest is this reality:
In inflation-adjusted terms, the war's cost will surpass the United States' $199 billion share of World War I sometime next year. Coming on top of three major tax cuts, that spending will drive the federal budget deficit to more than $400 billion this year. That borrowing will eventually have to be repaid in higher taxes or reduced government services and benefits.
I'm so happy that Bush campaigned last time as a "fiscal conservative." Let's see what new euphemisms the administration can invent for "fiscal irresponsibility" as the 2004 campaign takes shape.
Tuesday, May 11, 2004
Nation-Building and Psychiatry
Inspired by a recent thread on SOLO HQ, which included a tangential discussion on the purpose of criminal justice, I recalled some of Ayn Rand's comments on the subject and I'm now wondering aloud how these comments might apply to the illusory neoconservative goal of "nation-building."
In a letter to philosopher John Hospers, dated 29 April 1961, Ayn Rand wrote the following:
But you ask me what is the punishment deserved by criminal actions. This is a technical, legal issue, which has to be answered by the philosophy of law. The law has to be guided by moral principles, but their application to specific cases is a special field of study. I can only indicate in a general way what principles should be the base of legal justice in determining punishments. The law should: a. correct the consequences of the crime in regard to the victim, whenever possible (such as recovering stolen property and returning it to the owner); b. impose restraints on the criminal, such as a jail sentence, not in order to reform him, but in order to make him bear the painful consequences of his action (or their equivalent) which he inflicted on his victims; c. make the punishment proportionate to the crime in the full context of all the legally punishable crimes.
Here, Rand has endorsed ideas of restitution, retribution (or restraint), and proportionality in her general view of criminal justice. But she goes further:
What punishment is deserved by the two extremes of the scale is open to disagreement and discussion—but the principle by which a specific argument has to be guided is retribution, not reform. The issue of attempting to "reform" criminals is an entirely separate issue and a highly dubious one, even in the case of juvenile delinquents. At best, it might be a carefully limited adjunct of the penal code (and I doubt even that), not its primary, determining factor. When I say "retribution," I mean the point above, namely: the imposition of painful consequences proportionate to the injury caused by the criminal act. The purpose of the law is not to prevent a future offense, but to punish the one actually committed. If there were a proved, demonstrated, scientific, objectively certain way of preventing future crimes (which does not exist), it would not justify the idea that the law should prevent future offenses and let the present one go unpunished. It would still be necessary to punish the actual crime.
Then, in a passage that would make Thomas Szasz proud for its indictment of the nexus of state and psychiatry, Rand argues:
Therefore, "psychiatric therapy" does not belong—on principle—among the alternatives that you list. And more: it is an enormously dangerous suggestion. A. Psychiatry is far from the stage of an exact science; in our present state of knowledge, it is not even a science—it is only in that preliminary, material-gathering stage from which a science will come. B. The law, which has the power to impose its decisions by force, cannot be guided by unproved, uncertain, controversial hypotheses or guesses—and the criminal cannot be treated as a guinea pig (I am saying this in defense of the criminal's rights). C. Since the prevention of crime is a psychological issue, since it involves a man's mind (his premises, values, choices, decisions), it would be monstrously evil to place a man's mind into the power of the law, to let the law prescribe and force upon him any course of treatment involving or affecting his mind. If "the prevention of crime" were accepted as the province and purpose of the law, it would permit and necessitate the most unspeakable atrocities: not merely psychological "brainwashing," but physical mutilations as well, such as electric shock therapy, prefrontal lobotomies and anything else that neurologists might discover. No moral premise—except total altruistic collectivism—could ever justify that sort of horror.
Rand, like Isabel Paterson, fears the humanitarian who would use the guillotine to affect change:
Observe that it is I, the unforgiving egoist, who am more considerate of the criminals (of their rights) than the alleged humanitarians who advocate psychiatric treatments out of an alleged compassion for criminals. A penal code has to treat men as adult, responsible human beings; it can deal only with their actions and with such motives as can be objectively demonstrated (such as intent vs. accident); it cannot assume jurisdiction over men's minds, brains, souls, values and moral premises—it cannot assume the right to change these by forcible means.
Now, I've not worked out any theory by any stretch of the imagination, but I do wonder how Rand's comments might apply to the international sphere. Consider these thoughts pure musing on my part.
Rand once drew an analogy between a nation and an individual. In her essay, "Don't Let it Go," she argues that nations exhibit a "life style" equivalent to an individual's sense of life, and that a nation's culture is equivalent to an individual's conscious convictions. Rand writes that just as a man's course of action is determined by both tacit and articulated factors (his sense of life and his conscious convictions), so too, "a nation's political trends are the equivalent of a man's course of action and are determined by its culture."
So here is an interesting parallel: Just as the future prevention of an individual's crimes is ultimately a psychological issue, rooted in fundamental changes to a criminal's psychology (his or her premises and values), so too the future prevention of a foreign regime's crimes is ultimately a cultural issue, rooted in fundamental changes to a nation's culture. Just as a person's course of action is dependent on his sense of life and conscious convictions, so too a nation's political trends are dependent on its lifestyle and culture. That's why any fundamental change to the political trends must ultimately be rooted in cultural change. Any "rehabilitation" of a nation, like any "rehabilitation" of a criminal, cannot be imposed by writ. One can aim for "regime change," but unless one alters the culture that allowed such a regime to gain and maintain power in the first place, nothing has been changed fundamentally.
Note here: Even ruthless dictatorial regimes that do not depend upon the democratic "consent of the governed" still depend upon certain tacit cultural sanctions to maintain power. (On these points, see Etienne de La Boetie's Discourse of Voluntary Servitude.)
Note too that the above points do not prevent either (a) the punishment of criminals so that they bear the costs of their actions, or the seeking of restitution for their victims or (b) the punishment of criminal governments so that they bear the costs of their political or military actions, or the seeking of restitution for their victims (foreign and domestic). (I leave aside, for now, the anarchistic question of whether all governments are criminal, as such.)
The legal and political focus therefore is on action; it is not on a criminal's feelings, thoughts, or ideas (one of the reasons hate crimes legislation is so problematic). Seeking criminal or international justice, the focus is not on psychology or culture—even though such are the spheres wherein the fundamental power for change resides. Those spheres can and must be changed, but their alteration should not be the guiding principle of legal, political, or military policy.
Any attempt to "nation-build" without the appropriate cultural prerequisites is bound to generate the same kinds of "unspeakable atrocities" that appalled Rand in her critique of criminal "rehabilitation."
I fear that the stories coming out of Iraq are only the tip of a similarly monstrous iceberg.
Monday, May 10, 2004
Why Should We Care?
My last post on L&P raises one significant question: Why should we care? Why should any of us care whether our libertarian or classical liberal heroes are used to justify the folly that is Iraq?
It all comes down to preserving a legacy, more specifically a radical legacy: a legacy that questions fundamentals and that attempts to go to the roots of social problems. The great liberal and libertarian thinkers have long recognized the inseparable link between free minds and free markets, and between peace and freedom. In defending the profound insights of Herbert Spencer or Friedrich Hayek or Ludwig von Mises or Murray Rothbard or Ayn Rand, as they apply to the current situation abroad, I am self-consciously defending the radical legacy that they have bestowed, one that has been distorted by too many who now provide a "libertarian" veneer or apologia for an otherwise reactionary policy abroad. Such commentators, who claim to be disciples of Spencer or Hayek or Mises or Rothbard or Rand, are no different from the neoconservative Court Intellectuals guiding so much of today's foreign policy. Their legitimation of that policy makes them Court Jesters, for they have made a mockery of the liberal ideal.
I am not saying that there can be no reasonable differences among rational men and women on the subject of Iraq. I'm simply saying that those "libertarians" who have supported this insanity in Iraq have not fully appreciated or even understood the ideas to which they claim allegiance. Those of us who are libertarians should care what happens to the legacy we have been left by our intellectual fathers and mothers. Not because we owe blind loyalty to our ideological parents. But because they were right about so much.
The war we face is a philosophical and cultural war. If we sell off our intellectual armaments, we will have lost before even embarking on our mission.
And that's why we should care.
Debating Foreign Policy with "Objectivists"
As readers of L&P know, I acknowledge a great intellectual debt to thinkers such as Ayn Rand, F. A. Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard, and others. For the longest time, I identified on a personal level with Rand's "Objectivism," with its celebration of reason, purpose, and self-esteem, and of the heroic human potential, and with its emphasis on the integration of mind and body, reason and emotion, morality and prudence, theory and practice. Those ideas still inform my personal and professional life. But because of my great differences with some of the current advocates of "Objectivism," so many of whom have advocated the war in Iraq, I do not wish to be called an "Objectivist." (See, especially, Arthur Silber's superb post on The Fatal Contradiction—and the Detestable Disgrace that is "Objectivism" Today.) If this is what "Objectivism" consists of, these advocates can have it with my blessing.
But as I have argued here and here, and in all the discussions here, here, and here, these advocates have no right to the radical legacy that Ayn Rand left behind, especially with regard to her analysis of the welfare-warfare state, and of the organic relationship between domestic and foreign policy.
That legacy has been the subject of an ongoing debate on the SOLO HQ list. Today, I made a few comments there, which I'd like to share with my HNN audience. Here are excerpts from this most recent post:
Iraq lacks Western culture and a flourishing middle class and it is fractured by ethnic, cultural and tribal conflict. The British were never successful in Iraq (then, Mesopotmia), and, for similar reasons, the US will probably meet the same fate. In fact, the political culture in current-day Iraq has been so devastated by years of dictatorship that the masses are infused with an "entitlement" mentality, which is being nourished now by the dominant welfare state politics of the United States. ... Even though politics can influence culture, institutions do not change by simple writ; there has to be a predominating cultural change that drives and sustains the political one. This is what I've learned from Ayn Rand. Indeed, Rand argued that too many libertarians tried to play at politics without recognizing the necessity for a cultural foundation for freedom. Some Objectivists who accept Rand's argument with regard to the United States and the need to change American culture, suddenly go loopy when I try to apply that same argument to the situation in Iraq, where the culture is that much more hostile to individual responsibility, procedural democracy, and free institutions.
Some "Objectivists" have taken Rand's maxim that a free country has a right (though not an obligation) to liberate a dictatorship as some kind of rationalistic abstraction, from which to derive the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Rand, however, said the following:
It is not a free nation's duty to liberate other nations at the price of self-sacrifice, but a free nation has the right to do it, when and if it so chooses. This right, however, is conditional. Just as the suppression of crimes does not give a policeman the right to engage in criminal activities, so the invasion and destruction of a dictatorship does not give the invader the right to establish another variant of a slave society in the conquered country. ... Since there is no fully free country today, since the so-called "Free World" consists of various "mixed economies," it might be asked whether every country on earth is morally open to invasion by every other. The answer is: No.
Rand never argued that a relatively free US should liberate other countries. She was adamantly opposed to any invasion of the Soviet Union, the country of her birth, which she loathed, and was equally opposed to US entry into World War I and World War II, Korea and Vietnam. She believed that the nature and purpose of government was the protection of individual rights, and that the police, the military, and the law courts were essential functions: to protect individuals from domestic criminals, and foreign invaders, and to adjudicate disputes.
Once one adopts any criterion of humanitarian "liberation" as the goal of foreign policy, there is nothing to distinguish between the "liberation" of Iraq, or the Sudan, or Rwanda, or Bosnia. Using such a criterion simply gives license to the US to become the humanitarian "liberator" of the rest of the world, with all the consequent effects that such a role would have on citizens' lives, liberties, and properties. Rand herself cites the superb work of historian Arthur Ekrich in her essay, "The Intellectual Bankruptcy of Our Age":
If you have accepted the Marxist doctrine that capitalism leads to wars, read Professor Ekirch's account of how Woodrow Wilson, the "liberal" reformer, pushed the United States into World War I. "He seemed to feel that the United States had a mission to spread its institutions—which he conceived as liberal and democratic—to the more benighted areas of the world." It was not the "selfish capitalists," or the "tycoons of big business,'' or the "greedy munitions-makers" who helped Wilson to whip up a reluctant, peace-loving nation into the hysteria of a military crusade—it was the altruistic "liberals" of the magazine The New Republic edited by ... Herbert Croly. What sort of arguments did they use? Here is a sample from Croly: "The American nation needs the tonic of a serious moral adventure."
If you still wonder about the singular recklessness with which alleged humanitarians treat such issues as force, violence, expropriation, enslavement, bloodshed—perhaps the following passage from Professor Ekirch's book will give you some clue to their motives: "Stuart Chase rushed into print late in 1932 with a popular work on economics entitled A New Deal. 'Why,' Chase asked with real envy at the close of the book, 'should Russia have all the fun of remaking a world ?'"
Commenting on this passage in my SOLO HQ post, I wrote:
Is it any coincidence that the neoconservative progeny of Woodrow Wilson and Leon Trotsky should be advocating the same "humanitarian" wars "to make the world safe for democracy"? Leave those arguments to the neocons; they are most definitely not an implication of Rand's radical legacy.
For recent writings on this subject, and others, check my Not a Blog.
Saturday, May 8, 2004
Iran Update
As a follow-up to my post, Laissez Faire in Iran, take a look at Nicholas Kristoff's own follow-up article, "Those Sexy Iranians." Kristoff tells us more about a younger generation of Iranian baby boomers (60 percent of the country's population was born after the revolution) who declare: "We want fun ... There's no joy here." Kristoff states baldly: "Ayatollahs, look out." Indeed.
Also take a look at Jesse Walker's fine essay, "Iranians are Feistier than Iraqis."
Foreign Policy Debates
I've been busy engaging in a number of foreign policy debates on several lists, making many of the same points that I've made here at L&P. You might want to check out some of the more inflammatory aspects of that debate on a recent thread at SOLO HQ (see my posts, starting here and extending through here, thus far).
I should also note a first: Today, I found myself agreeing with many points made by Charles Krauthammer (!!!) on the Iraq Prison Abuse scandal... especially the stuff about sex. And for a whole lot of very interesting insights about the sexual dimensions of all this, let me also recommend to you various posts (just keep scrolling down) by Arthur Silber at The Light of Reason.
Wednesday, May 5, 2004
Laissez Faire in Iran
Last May, I wrote:
The lunacy of nation-building and of imposed political settlements—which have been tried over and over again in the Middle East with no long-term success—does not mean that there is no hope for the Arab world. Former Reagan administration advisor Michael Ledeen speaks of a rising revolt against theocracy in Iran, for example, among a younger generation that is fed up with their oppressive government. They eat American foods, wear American jeans, and watch American TV shows. I don't see how a U.S. occupation in any part of the region will nourish this kind of revolt. If anything, the United States may be perceived as a new colonial administrator. Such a perception may only give impetus to the theocrats who may seek to preserve their rule by deflecting the dissatisfaction in their midst toward the "infidel occupiers." I can think of no better ad campaign for the recruitment of future Islamic terrorists.
These religious reactionaries are, partially, the Frankenstein monsters of US foreign policy: during the Cold War, the U.S. propped up puppet dictators to do its global bidding, and its intervention was partially responsible for the rise of Islamic fundamentalism as an anti-American political force in Iran. The Iranians threw off the U.S.-backed Shah, and elevated Khomeini to a position of leadership. A hostage crisis followed, as did the US support for Iraq's Saddam Hussein in his war with Iran, and for the Afghan "freedom fighters" in their war with the Soviets, thereby empowering a group of mujahideen who were to become Al Qaeda and Taliban warriors. Such are the internal contradictions of US foreign policy that continue till this day.
While the war in Iraq dominates the headlines, with its predictably obscene by-products—e.g., the US torture of Iraqis in the very Abu Ghraib prison used by the murderous Hussein regime—the Pentagon admits that Iraq will require the presence of over 138,000 US troops "at least until the end of 2005."
But if the US wants to learn a bit about how to encourage "democracy" in Iraq, it ought to look toward "those friendly Iranians," as Nicholas D. Kristof puts it, who are fomenting a revolution in Iran, which is slowly becoming "a pro-American country." Not "pro-American" in the sense of wanting to see US troops on Iranian soil—more in terms of the culture wars, that is, the wars that matter. Kristof tells us that so many of the Iranians he interviewed have expressed a desire to come to America. They wear blue jeans, read Hillary Clinton, John Grisham, Sidney Sheldon, Danielle Steel, and, of course, Harry Potter. They watch American movies like "Titanic" and revel in such American TV shows as "Baywatch." And they have one message for the Islamic theocrats, who continue to denounce America as the Great Satan in their blitz of "propaganda": "To hell with the mullahs."
This is an important and continuing development, and a healthy one, considering the history of US intervention in Iran. As Kristof observes: "In the 1960's and 1970's, the U.S. spent millions backing a pro-Western modernizing shah—and the result was an outpouring of venom that led to our diplomats' being held hostage. Since then, Iran has been ruled by mullahs who despise everything we stand for ..." But as Kristof explains, among the younger generation, "being pro-American is a way to take a swipe at the Iranian regime."
And the regime knows it. Indeed, "[o]ne opinion poll showed that 74 percent of Iranians want a dialogue with the U.S.—and the finding so irritated the authorities that they arrested the pollster." But the mullahs couldn't arrest all of those Iranian citizens who had "responded to the 9/11 attacks with a spontaneous candlelight vigil as a show of sympathy."
The Bush administration, which has squandered much of the global good will of 9/11, needs to learn a new phrase if it wants to encourage dialogue with a younger generation of authentic "freedom fighters": Laissez Faire. Hands off! "Left to its own devices," says Kristof, "the Islamic revolution is headed for collapse, and there is a better chance of a strongly pro-American democratic government in Tehran in a decade than in Baghdad." If the administration decides to approach a looming crisis over Iran's nuclear program with the same "bring-it-on" approach that it pioneered in Iraq, Kristof states, it will only succeed in "inflaming Iranian nationalism and uniting the population behind the regime."
That's a form of "nation-building" at which the neocon interventionists might very well succeed. To the detriment of freedom.
Thursday, April 29, 2004
More on the Corruption of Rand's Objectivism
As a follow-up to my post the other day on the corruption of Ayn Rand's radical legacy, I want to strongly recommend a superb new post by Arthur Silber at "The Light of Reason": "The Self-Appointed Moralizers, and Would-Be Executioners, of Objectivism."
Wednesday, April 28, 2004
Agricultural Aggravation
Lately, everywhere I look, I keep having the same reaction: "This is insane," I say to myself. Well, here's an example of what I mean.
The New York Times editorializes today about the lavish handouts of federal farm subsidies given to American producers, which have created tensions throughout the global market. This is on the heels of another Times report detailing the "War on Peruvian Drugs," which takes as its victim the U.S. asparagus industry. Timothy Egan writes:
After 55 years of packing Eastern Washington asparagus, the Del Monte Foods factory ... moved operations to Peru last year, eliminating 365 jobs. The company said it could get asparagus cheaper and year-round there. As the global economy churns, nearly every sector has a story about American jobs landing on cheaper shores. But what happened to the American asparagus industry is rare, the farmers here say, because it became a casualty of the government's war on drugs. To reduce the flow of cocaine into this country by encouraging farmers in Peru to grow food instead of coca, the United States in the early 1990's started to subsidize a year-round Peruvian asparagus industry, and since then American processing plants have closed and hundreds of farmers have gone out of business. One result is that Americans are eating more asparagus, because it is available fresh at all times. But the growth has been in Peruvian asparagus supported by American taxpayers.
Government officials claim it wasn't their "intent" to destroy the American asparagus industry. DAMN those unintended consequences! Meanwhile, the Peruvian Asparagus and Other Vegetables Institute declares: "It is important to understand that the war against drugs is another face of the battle against terrorism, and will be successful only if new legal jobs are created as an alternative to illegal activities." Somebody should tell that Institute that the current "battle against terrorism," apparently, provides no principles by which to forge any war against drugs, since the US government virtually encourages the growth of the opium industry in Afghanistan as a means to stabilize that country in the aftermath of regime change.
Alas, stability won't be achieved anywhere: Not unless the government gets out of the business of subsidizing, prohibiting, regulating, or otherwise ruining various industries and people's lives.
Tuesday, April 27, 2004
Objectivism and the Corruption of Rand's Radical Legacy
Some of my HNN comrades have gently ribbed me and others for our admiration of the novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand. Well, I've been AWOL from L&P because I've been out and about on various "Objectivist" blogs arguing with the orthodox contingent of "Objectivism," which, in my view, has corrupted Rand's radical legacy. You can check out some of those debates by following the links on my "Not a Blog," if you're interested.
Far more important, however, is this post by fellow L&P'er Arthur Silber, which discusses "The Fatal Contradiction—And the Detestable Disgrace that is 'Objectivism' Today." Silber and I have been deeply critical of what has happened to Objectivism; we've both abandoned the term as a self-identifying descriptive label. But the truth is, despite our common abandonment of that term, we have never abandoned Rand's radical legacy. Silber tells us more about those who have abandoned it.
Wednesday, April 21, 2004
Military Fodder
I got up this morning and, while having a little breakfast, I decided to watch a bit of the morning news shows. First up was the Today show. Matt Lauer was busy interviewing Sen. Joseph Biden and Sen. Chuck Hagel about the buzz concerning the military draft. The gents were also kind enough to let us know that the administration is sitting on a $50 to 75 billion request for additional funds to maintain troops in Iraq. Biden was quick to point out that this is not money for Iraq reconstruction; it is strictly for the maintenance of troops, except that the Bush administration is a little hesitant, it seems, to bring this up in an election year.
Next, I checked out Good Morning America, which had a story on the controversial decision by the Seattle Times to run a photo of flag-draped coffins coming home from the Iraq war. Mike Fancher, Executive Editor of the Times, defended the decision of his paper; he felt the photo conveyed the respect and reverence shown to the dead. But Rep. Mike Castle (R) of Delaware said that this policy of restricting the publication of such photos has been on the books since 1991 out of respect to the families. Could it be that the Pentagon is just trying to sanitize the war for American consumption? Of course not.
Alas, we wouldn't want a repetition of the Vietnam syndrome, where daily images of death and destruction came flowing through the media, almost unfiltered, so as to turn even Walter Cronkite against the war. It prompted LBJ to say, "if we've lost Walter Cronkite, we've lost the country"
Once I'd gotten my dosage of the news shows, I opened up the paper. I read another installment of the NY Daily News investigation about the increasing number of US troops exposed to uranium dust in Iraq. The paper reports: "An independent test conducted at The News' request found that four of the men tested positive for depleted uranium, which because of its heaviness is used to make shells and coat armored vehicles. A study by the Army in 1990 linked depleted uranium to 'chemical toxicity causing kidney damage.'"
The possibility of a coming military draft. Troops in need of additional monies. Restricted access to coffin photos. And depleted uranium toxicity among military fodder. As the media gets un-embedded from the administration's ass, perhaps we'll learn more about how miserable war is—for those who are fighting it. Especially a war like this one that is causing far more "blowback" than was first anticipated.
Monday, April 19, 2004
Conservative Crackup
Following up on a fine post by Arthur Silber concerning the crackup in modern-day conservatism over the war in Iraq (and don't forget to check out Silber's post on Jim Pinkerton as well), I'd just like to highlight an article by David D. Kirkpatrick in today's NY Times, entitled "Lack of Resolution in Iraq Finds Conservatives Divided."
Kirkpatrick points out what many of us here at L&P already know:
A growing faction of conservatives is voicing doubts about a prolonged United States military involvement in Iraq, putting hawkish neoconservatives on the defensive and posing questions for President Bush about the degree of support he can expect from his political base. The continuing violence and mounting casualties in Iraq have given new strength to the traditional conservative doubts about using American military power to remake other countries and about the potential for Western-style democracy without a Western cultural foundation.
Yeah, this is the same "traditional conservative doubt" that candidate Bush himself expressed during the 2000 campaign, when he explicitly renounced "nation-building" as a goal of US foreign policy. My, how times have changed.
Back to Kirkpatrick: The neocons "championed the invasion of Iraq as a way to turn that country into a bastion of democracy in the Middle East. ... 'In late May of last year, we neoconservatives were hailed as great visionaries,' said Kenneth R. Weinstein, chief operating officer of the Hudson Institute, a center of neoconservative thinking. 'Now we are embattled, both within the conservative movement and in the battle over postwar planning. Those of us who favored a more muscular approach to American foreign policy and a more Wilsonian view of our efforts in Iraq find ourselves pitted against more traditional conservatives, who have more isolationist instincts to begin with, and they are more willing to say, "Bring the boys home,"' Mr. Weinstein said."
The war has been responsible for "upending some of the familiar dynamics of left and right." Indeed, people like William Kristol of The Weekly Standard have stated explicitly that they'd "take Bush over Kerry, but Kerry over Buchanan or any of the lesser Buchananites on the right." Kristol claims that he is even ready to "make common cause with the more hawkish liberals and fight the conservatives." He might as well, because this administration, with its welfare-warfare nation-building budget-busting deficits, Medicare reform, and constitutional amendment proposals, has spelled the total end of conservatism as it was once known. It is therefore no surprise to see his willingness to support Kerry. Kerry and Bush are almost indistinguishable in their views on the war in Iraq! As David Beito pointed out, Kerry is not an "antiwar" candidate. On his own site, Kerry publishes his recent Washington Post essay, where he writes: "Our country is committed to help the Iraqis build a stable, peaceful and pluralistic society. No matter who is elected president in November, we will persevere in that mission."
This is why I've maintained: "What does it matter who gets elected? What's the sense of it? Sure, you can register your protests by voting defensively, against this or that candidate. But until or unless this system is fundamentally transformed, it's almost immaterial who becomes President." This is why I've maintained that once a war is institutionalized, Presidents of either party almost never reverse course.
Big Deal: National Review reflects on the neocon "Wilsonian" error. Even they are now considering the long-term costs to "limited government and lower taxes" brought on by the prospect of "extended occupation." But their boys got into the White House, and, as Kirkpatrick observes, "President Bush appears to be sticking to [their] Wilsonian goals."
Of course, the problem is precisely as Colin Powell described it. In his 60 minutes interview, Bob Woodward tells us that, upon hearing of the planned Iraq incursion, Powell warned Bush of the unintended consequences (what the CIA likes to call "blowback"): "You are going to be the proud owner of 25 million people. You will own all their hopes, aspirations and problems. You’ll own it all."
More pointedly, he said: "If you break it, you own it." Yeah, Iraq was broken to begin with, under Saddam Hussein's brutal dictatorship. But it wasn't a US welfare state and it wasn't an imminent threat to US interests. As Woodward said, the administration is now faced with the awful reality that they may have achieved "victory without success." How many more Americans will have to die in the name of this "victory"?
Sunday, April 18, 2004
Today's Required Reading
Nice day of reading on L&P, and a nice day of reading in the NY Times. Check out articles by Frank Rich ("'Lawrence of Arabia' Redux") and Niall Ferguson ("The Last Iraqi Insurgency"), as well as a Jonathan D. Tepperman review of Craig Unger's conspiratorial House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret Relationship Between the World's Two Most Powerful Dynasties. Whatever your views of these essays, they're worth a look.
Friday, April 16, 2004
The Children's Crusade
Yes, David Beito and Jonathan Dresner, our Volokh Conspiracy colleagues are way behind the times. I too presented the possibility of the three-state solution on November 26, 2003. At this point, I doubt that anything will solve the mess that the U.S. has created.
I do like the fact, however, that a number of people who supported this fiasco of a war, are now grasping the insanity of it all. Perhaps someday the Volokh people will take their heads out of the Iraqi sand and come up for a much-need dosage of Liberty (& Power). Richard Cohen, whose essays I've cited here a number of times, once supported this war too. He writes in today's NY Daily News that this desire to use Iraq to "change the world" (something that has led Justin Raimondo to call the President, the "Neocon Napoleon") is Bush's Pipe Dream. Cohen writes:
Like a kid who has been told otherwise, Bush persists in believing in his own version of Santa Claus. The weapons are there, somewhere - in a North Pole of his mind. What matters more, is the phrase Bush used five times in one way or another: "We're changing the world." He used it always in reference to the war in Iraq and in ways that would make even Woodrow Wilson, that personification of naive morality, shake his head in bemusement. In Bush's rhetoric, a war to rid Saddam of his WMD, a war to ensure that Condoleezza Rice's "mushroom cloud" did not appear over an American city, has mutated into an effort to reorder the world. "I also know that there's a historic opportunity here to change the world," Bush said of the effort in Iraq. The next sentence was even more disquieting. "And it's very important for the loved ones of our troops to understand that the mission is an important, vital mission for the security of America and for the ability to change the world for the better." It is one thing to die to defend your country. It is quite another to do that for one man's impossible dream. What Bush wants is admirable. It is not, however, attainable.
Cohen concludes: "This is Bush's cause, a noble but irrational effort much like the one that set off for Jerusalem in 1212. It was known as the Children's Crusade."
Thursday, April 15, 2004
Drugs and Terror
It's reported by the NY Times that the "Islamic terrorists responsible for the Madrid train bombings financed their plot with sales of hashish and Ecstasy ..." This article, by Dale Fuchs, tells us that the terrorists used "traffickers as intermediaries," swapping "the drugs for the 440 pounds of dynamite used in the blasts ... Money from the drug trafficking paid for an apartment hide-out, a car and the cellphones used to detonate the bombs, an Interior Ministry spokesman said."
There is also this article about Afghanistan's opium poppy crop, which is skyrocketing to levels "twice as large as last year's near-record crop." The country is responsible for three-quarters of the world's opium production. The US has talked routinely about "eradication" of the crop, because the profits are used to prop up "an undemocratic narco terrorist-controlled state," benefiting warlords and a resurgent Taliban. But it is under the US watch that opium production has become the chief means to stabilize the hand-picked "Northern Alliance" regime. That profits from the sale of narcotics are now making their way into Al Qaeda coffers is therefore no surprise.
Remember those anti-drug commercials that drew a direct connection between drugs and terror, laying the blame for the funding of terrorism squarely on the plate of drug users? Those commercials told users: Stop using! Terrorism is your fault (driving many of them to drink, no doubt)!
Of course, few are suggesting that the criminalization of drug use has created a world-wide network of illicit drug producers, whose profits are derived from the very fact of government drug prohibitionism. The original Mafia itself was born in the days of alcohol prohibition. Why should current developments be any surprise?
Instead of decriminalization, we are offered, year after year, a new front in the "war on drugs," which only continues to destroy civil liberties at home, while doing nothing to diminish the profits abroad that are funneled to terrorists. Indeed, Attorney General John Ashcroft was so obsessed with prioritizing the drug war (and various "civil rights" issues) in the first seven months of his tenure, that terrorism barely registered on his radar. Now, of course, with the powers bestowed on him through the Patriot Act, he gets to use his office to eradicate drugs and civil rights all in one fell swoop.
As Nebraska attorney Don Fiedler, former director of NORML, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, has put it: "This fanning the flames of narco-terrorism is something that has some merit. ... Narcotics are one of the tools that terrorists use to fund their operations, but the other question that should come out of it, other than increasing the penalties for use, is to go and re-examine the policies in the first place."
Amen. Perhaps drug legalization should be proposed as a means of combatting terrorism, taking the profits out of the industries that fund terrorists. But this would require an extraordinary act of mental integration: Politicians would have to start thinking about the interconnections among the various aspects of a system that they continue to support. Terrorists emerge from the context of US intervention overseas; they are recruited en masse because of increasing intervention overseas; they get funding from various current (and former) US allies and from industries whose profits are derived partially from prohibitionist controls. The whole system of interventionism, from top to bottom, domestically and abroad, is reinforcing cause and effect.
Boy, it is very difficult to be a political radical. Radicals, by their nature, seek to go to the root of social problems; they trace the connections among social problems, and think in terms of fundamentals and principles. The system that they oppose is one that has been built piecemeal, brick by brick, over decades of political machinations. But the system itself blocks comprehensive reform; it promotes political tinkering as surely as it promotes atomistic thinking.
It is time to start thinking comprehensively, dialectically, as I would say; it is time to start thinking about all the things that must be done to change this system fundamentally.
Wednesday, April 14, 2004
Cohen on The Iraqi Quagmire
A very nice piece by Richard Cohen on "The Iraqi Quagmire" appears in yesterday's New York Daily News. Cohen is careful to distinguish between the Iraq and Vietnam situations, but he sees that in both cases, there is the same operative principle: "We don't know what the hell we're doing. ... The lesson of Vietnam is that once you make the initial mistake, little you do afterward is right."
Bush Redux
What's the sense of saying anything about the President's press conference? He's just going through the familiar motions and will never admit to any mistakes. Well, at least you have to give him points on stubborn commitment.
Everything he said and everything I could have said is summed up here. But for a look at some unfortunate future possibilities as the U.S. stays the course in Iraq, it is always good to look at history.
Sunday, April 11, 2004
Consequences: Intended and Unintended
There is a very good article, written by James Traub, with accompanying decorative illustrations by Peter Max, in today's NY Times. Traub's "Making Sense of the Mission" raises some very important questions—even if I don't agree with many of his answers—about the nature and complexity of nation-building in Iraq. Pointing to the failures of nation-building in such places as Haiti, Traub argues that the task is not impossible, but it "is very hard, and ... it demands a great deal of both patience and modesty—qualities that do not come naturally to American policymakers or, for that matter, to Americans."
It is ironic, of course, that "[d]uring the 2000 Presidential debates, George W. Bush mocked the idea of nation-building as a dangerous Democratic folly. The function of the American military, he often repeated, was 'to fight and win wars.' Bush gave the impression that nation-building was something Bill Clinton and his team of woolly-headed multilateralists had dreamed up. But the truth is that while the term is new, the endeavor is not ..."
Traub discusses a bit of the history of nation-building. He writes that Maj. Gen. William Nash, who first commanded the American division in Bosnia, had discovered that he couldn't separate peacekeeping from nation-building. "'The first rule of nation-building is that everything is related to everything,' Nash said, 'and it's all political.' Everything, that is, impinges on somebody's power, and in order to establish stable democratic institutions you have to deal with, and often confront, the political structures that provoked the conflict in the first place."
Ah, yes, that ol' dialectical insight, that in any given context,everything is related to everything. The problem is, of course, that we don't exactly know how things relate in any social order, and, in fact, much of what constitutes social relations is tacit and habitual, having never been formally articulated or even understood by the social actors themselves. A fundamental epistemological weakness of central planning, as F. A. Hayek has shown, is that planners cannot grasp the tacit dimension, which relates to knowledge possessed by individual actors who pursue their own purposes while situated in a particular time and place.
The same principle is just as relevant when considering foreign intervention into a country in which the locals have their own customs and habits. Unintended consequences, which are a normal part of what it means to live in society, are a particularly insidious effect of such intervention. (What we're seeing in Iraq, of course, was not necessarily intended, but many of us have been predicting the chaos for over a year. "Unintended" does not mean "unpredictable".)
There is no greater or more forceful form of political intervention than military action. Indeed, "war," observed the 19th century military strategist Carl von Clausewitz, "is the continuation of politics by other means." And like all forms of political intervention, it too generates unintended consequences. In the aftermath of the Iraq war, those who remain to keep the peace are now arguing that there is a need for "about 20 soldiers per 1,000 inhabitants to stabilize an unsettled population.'' This could translate, in Iraq, "to almost half a million troops. And yet," says Traub, "this overwhelming military force must be coupled with a nuanced awareness of local conditions. 'These places tend to be chaotic, dynamic,' said Frederick Barton, an analyst with the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a veteran of many peacekeeping operations. 'Our own institutions tend to be static. You have to head things in the right direction rather than controlling them.' One cannot easily find a peacekeeping mission that exemplifies this peculiar mix of characteristics."
While candidate Bush argued that "nation-building represented the triumph of the nanny state on an international scale," it's pretty clear that the neocon nannies have exerted a strong influence on the stated policy-making goals of his administration, which now aims to foster "political transformation, first in Iraq, then throughout the Middle East. This is, of course, a call to the most ambitious kind of nation-building." It is a call, in other words, to a formal knowledge of conditions of a complex foreign society that central planners of whatever sort will never fully possess.
And so let's not be too surprised by the unintended ripple effects that are now on display in the wake of such folly.
Wednesday, April 7, 2004
Bush League
Via Atrios (who draws from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and who provides an entertaining comments section), comes this little tidbit on President Bush, who threw out the first pitch on Opening Day for the St. Louis Cardinals:
BACK AT BUSCH: A somewhat hostile crowd complained mightily about the problems the presidential motorcade caused with regular fans trying to get into the park. A Cards employee tipped moi that the team was so concerned about Bush being booed that they piped in fake applause when he strode out to the mound. [Cardinals president Mark] Lamping flatly denied it. ...
Okay, so let's just say we believe Lamping that such fake applause was not pumped into Busch Stadium. The fact that anybody could think this is, itself, a desecration of the Great American Pastime.
Baseball fans can be among the most brutally honest in the world. Then again, honesty is not exactly a valued commodity in the world of politics, unless the honest feelings of the fans suit the politician's purposes.
When Bush threw out the ceremonial first pitch in Game 3 of the World Series at Yankee Stadium, back on October 30, 2001, he received what has been rightly described as a "thunderous cheer." That's because New Yorkers, who had been shattered by the experiences of September 11th, were still expressing their support for a man who, three days after that tragedy, had stood on the rubble of the Twin Towers to tell the world that "the people who knocked these buildings down are going to hear from all of us soon." That "King Arthur Moment," as Chris Matthews has described it, left an indelible mark in the minds of many. (Little did we know that, as Richard Clarke and others have testified, Bush, at that time, was already obsessing over Iraq, hoping to use 9/11 as a pretext for invading that country.)
The point is that baseball fans will cheer you when you deliver. But if you don't, they won't. And they'll boo you for the most mundane reasons. So, if your motorcade knots up traffic around the stadium, be prepared to be booed by honest "regular fans." It doesn't matter if your President or Pope. Even life-long Yankees fan Rudy Giuliani got used to the boos he received when he visited New York Mets' territory. Those boos turned to cheers in tribute to his humanity and leadership during a time of unimaginable horror. But Rudy actually valued the fans' honesty. Post-9/11, he remarked: "Things will be back to normal when I hear boos at Shea Stadium."
Whether we're talking about fake applause or fake turkey props for photo ops, the propaganda continues to amaze. It's pure Bush League.
Tuesday, April 6, 2004
Failure is Not an Option
As a postscript to Wendy's discussion of Al-Sadr, I would like to point out a NY Times report that "Generals in Iraq" are considering "options for more troops." Since many current U.S. troops are National Guard or reservist in origin, I'm still counting the days before the administration decides that a military draft is going to be required because "failure in Iraq is not an option."
This same NY Times report also points out that while John Kerry, presumptive Democratic nominee for President, won't make "analogies to past conflicts," his chief supporter, Senator Edward Kennedy, has boldly declared: "Iraq is George Bush's Vietnam, and this country needs a new president."
It may be, Teddy, it may be. But, really, what will John Kerry do differently from George Bush? Will Kerry really want to go down as the President who "lost Iraq"? How many more (conscripted?) troops will he commit to the conflict because "failure is not an option"? Indeed: Remember Vietnam? The Vietnam war was institutionalized by the U.S. government, regardless of which party was in power. What difference was there between Republican President Richard Nixon and Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson? Yes, Nixon was committed to "Vietnamization" and gradual troop reductions, but not before he widened the war. Despite the Mantra that the U.S. needed "Peace with Honor," tens of thousands of U.S. servicemen came home in body bags ("transfer tubes" hadn't been invented yet).
We are now witnessing the institutionalization of the war in Iraq, where "failure is not an option." The institutionalization of that goal, regardless of the means by which the U.S. hopes to achieve it, is a sure prescription for catastrophe.
A year ago, I voiced my concerns about the consequences of a U.S. occupation of Iraq, being told by a number of pro-war advocates (many of them "libertarians") that such concerns were irrelevant because an invasion was "necessary" to topple a hostile Hussein regime in possession of WMDs and with ties to Al Qaeda. I never really doubted that the invasion itself would be a "cakewalk" because I believed that the regime was a paper tiger. But my understanding of integrated, long-term thinking went beyond the month or so that it took for "Top Gun" Bush to fly onto the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln, which sported a now-notorious banner: "Mission Accomplished."
The mission could have been "accomplished" without an invasion and without the commitment of an occupying force and billions and billions and billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars. The WMDs didn't exist. The ties to Al Qaeda didn't exist. And the concerns I expressed last year are the same concerns that I have expressed this year. Merely screaming "I told you so" won't suffice, so let me revisit my own words, written in March 2003:
Iraq is a makeshift by-product of British colonialism, constructed at Versailles in 1920 out of three former Ottoman provinces; its notorious internal political divisions are mirrored by tribal warfare among Shiites, Sunnis, Kurds, and others. ... For those of us bred on Ayn Rand's insight that politics is only a consequence of a larger philosophical and cultural cause—that culture, in effect, trumps politics—the idea that it is possible to construct a political solution in a culture that does not value procedural democracy, free institutions, or the notion of individual responsibility is a delusion. Witness contemporary Russia, where the death of communism has given birth to a society of warring post-Soviet mafiosi, leading some to yearn for the good ol' days of Stalin. Clearly, "regime change" is not enough. But even if procedural democracy were to come to Iraq, it may be no less despotic than the brutal dictatorship it usurps, for majority rule without protection of individual rights is no check on the political growth of Islamic fundamentalism.
That growth proceeds. With the Sunnis killing Americans and calling for the return of Baathist butchers in central Iraq, with the Kurds wanting an independent voice in the North, and with the majority Shi'ites pressing for a more fundamentalist resistance to the U.S. in the South, the situation is deteriorating.
I do not wish to see the mass murder of American citizens to score debating points; I am second to none in my own wishes that not a single American life should be snuffed out on foreign soil. I am second to none in my own hopes that Iraq will somehow embrace a free society. But that is not what the United States is bringing to Iraq, unless one considers "crony capitalism," grafted onto cultural tribalism, to be the embodiment of a free society. As I suggest here, the attempt to impose "democracy" as a means to pacify a region is misplaced. Ludwig von Mises cautioned the Wilsonian generation of World War I that the embrace of "democracy" without a similar embrace of "a system of private ownership of the means of production, free enterprise, and unhampered market economy," only serves to extend the system of statism. For "[w]here there is no economic freedom, things are entirely different."
The U.S. stands at the apex of a far more complex system of statist intervention than existed when Mises made those comments. Success will be possible only if there is a fundamental alteration in the current system of domestic and foreign intervention, a system that has bred anti-American hostility abroad. If failure is not an option in Iraq, then it is no more an option in the United States of America.
Friday, April 2, 2004
Another Fool, Another Day
So, if yesterday was April Fool's Day, today is another historic date that people should never forget, lest they be made into fools. It was on this date, the NY Times reminds us, that President Woodrow Wilson declared war against Germany, marking the United States' entrance into World War I.
Before Congress, Wilson stressed: "The world must be made safe for democracy." And even as he promised to act with humanity toward loyal Germans, he emphasized: "If there should be disloyalty it will be dealt with a stern hand and firm repression."
World War I was one of the worst conflagrations in the history of humankind, ushering in an unparalleled era of state repression. Ayn Rand, who drew from the work of historian Arthur A. Ekirch, argued that the war was the by-product of a rise in the "spirit of nationalistic imperialism," which had "influenced the policies of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson":
Just as Wilson, a "liberal" reformer, led the United States into World War I, "to make the world safe for democracy"—so Franklin D. Roosevelt, another "liberal" reformer, led it into World War II, in the name of the "Four Freedoms." ... World War I led, not to "democracy," but to the creation of three dictatorships: Soviet Russia, Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany. World War II led, not to "Four Freedoms," but to the surrender of one-third of the world's population into communist slavery.
Rand had the advantage of judging U.S. intervention abroad by relating it to the ripple of events that followed in its wake. And that is crucially important: History is never to be judged in terms of what is happening at this very moment. It must be judged in terms of the consequences—intended and unintended—of the actions that human beings take. We can all revel in the fact that a bloody dictator, such as Saddam Hussein, has been toppled. But we do not know the shape of things to come, and if we act in ways that show no appreciation of the complex factors at work, we will be doomed to similar nightmarish results.
When Wilson declared war, 87 years ago today, he ushered in what Murray Rothbard has called "the critical watershed for the American business system," a system of "war collectivism ... which served as the model, the precedent, and the inspiration for state corporate capitalism for the remainder of the twentieth century." The economy was cartelized, prices were raised, production was restricted, monopolies were granted, labor was tamed, and whole systems (e.g., railroads) were nationalized by the government in league with corporate planners. This served as the fulfillment of the Progressive movement in America, a "triumph of conservatism" as Gabriel Kolko had called it, a triumph of "political capitalism." It is no coincidence that the Wilson administration integrated greater government intervention—including the establishment of a cartelized banking structure in the Federal Reserve and the curtailment of civil liberties—at home, with greater U.S. intervention abroad. Each became organically linked to the other.
The welfare-warfare state has matured over the past century. And so, it is also no coincidence to see the same dynamic at work in the administration of George W. Bush. Why do pro-war bloggers have difficulty grasping this fact? For example, Andrew Sullivan rails against Bush's anti-gay constitutional shenanigans. Feeling betrayed by the Bush administration, which had claimed it would never "use anti-gay sentiment to gain votes," he states: "We were all lied to." Sullivan is upset with Karl Rove for leading the way in this constitutional "brigade," and admits that he has been "culpably naive about this administration on this issue."
On this issue?
This is an administration that has led the same activist brigade into Wilsonian "democratic" nation-building in Iraq—on the basis of either faulty intelligence (in which case it has failed the test of preserving American security) or outright lies about alleged WMDs and alleged ties between the Hussein regime and Al Qaeda.
This is an administration that has forged a hugely expensive Medicare corporatist boondoggle, and countless other government programs.
This is an administration that has created the greatest government budget deficit in history.
This is an administration that has eaten away at civil liberties, all in the name of American PATRIOTism.
As my fellow blogger David Beito has stated, the "president's foreign and domestic policies are not contradictory but entirely consistent with a long Wilsonian tradition in American history." On the occasion of this Wilsonian anniversary, we need to understand the nature of this consistency—as a means to overturn the system of political economy that makes it possible.
Thursday, April 1, 2004
I Was Wrong!
Okay, I admit it. I was wrong. I am now in favor of the War in Iraq and a full, open-ended Period of U.S. Occupation. I think the invasion was justified. Forget all that nonsense about nonexistent WMDs and nonexistent ties to Al Qaeda! What matters is that we are building a democracy in the heart of the Middle East, and a powerful military base from which to launch future campaigns against Islamo-fascists who threaten Our Way of Life. And bring on Patriot Act II! Let's dispense with civil liberties! And let's finally embrace censorship. Not just against Janet Jackson's breast and Howard Stern's rantings! The real enemy is this new liberal radio network. Bah!
Tuesday, March 30, 2004
Yankee Come Home!!!
Spring is here ... a time of life, renewal, and resurrection. And there sure is a lot of resurrection going around. Even in theaters, "The Passion of the Christ" is still playing to full crowds, though it was displaced last weekend by "Dawn of the Dead." (Sarah Polley, star of "Dawn," thought it appropriate: "It makes sense that we beat 'em out. I mean, we've got more people rising from the dead. They've got one. We've got thousands.")
But the most important thing to be resurrected in the Spring is: Baseball. And today, Baseball is Back. Not in America, mind you. But in Japan! My New York Yankees just went down to defeat against the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, 8-3, in the Tokyo Dome, the first game of the 2004 Major League Baseball Season.
It was the first time in the illustrious history of the Yankees that team members wore their pinstripes in a game outside Yankee Stadium, a game in which they were not the home team (the Yankee Home Opener takes place on Thursday, April 8th).
Baseball is all about Coming Home. The Home Run. Home Plate. Home. If only US foreign policy were like baseball, we'd be welcoming Yankees from all over the world back home. Someday ...
Tuesday, March 23, 2004
The Parade of Disgrunted Former Employees
First, there was former CIA weapons inspector David Kay. He had the audacity to say "that Iraq didn't have weapons of mass destruction before the war and that U.S. intelligence agencies missed the signs that would have told them as much."
Then came Paul O'Neill, former Bush administration Treasury Secretary, who had the colossal gall to claim that the "administration was planning to invade Iraq long before the Sept. 11 attacks and used questionable intelligence to justify the war."
Now comes the President's former counter-terrorism czar, Richard Clarke, who shows utter disloyalty in claiming that President Bush himself pressured advisers to come up with a link between Iraq and the 9/11 attack. Clarke tells us that the administration was hell-bent on attacking Iraq, despite the fact that Al Qaeda was the gathering threat in the months prior to 9/11. On 60 Minutes, Clarke charged that Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz rejected any need "to deal with bin Laden ... to deal with al Qaeda." Wolfowitz went ballistic over the suggestion: "No, no, no. We don't have to deal with al Qaeda. Why are we talking about that little guy? We have to talk about Iraqi terrorism against the United States." Clarke responded: "Paul, there hasn't been any Iraqi terrorism against the United States in eight years!" And the deputy director of the CIA agreed: "There is no Iraqi terrorism against the United States." Clarke added: "There's absolutely no evidence that Iraq was supporting al Qaeda, ever."
Ever.
Needless to say, Clarke's book, Against All Enemies, is now being attacked mercilessly in a concerted White House spin campaign of Shock and Awe. Dick Cheney targeted Clarke on Rush Limbaugh's show and Condi Rice said simply that Clarke just doesn't "know what he's talking about." They're now all savaging Clarke as a "disgruntled former employee."
Kay, O'Neill, Clarke... how many more "disgruntled former employees" will there be?
Perhaps more of them will surface as the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States begins high-level hearings on the failure of US intelligence in the days before 9/11. Over 2 million pages of documents have already been examined and over 1000 interviews have already been conducted. Today, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Powell will be on the hot seat, along with the Clinton administration's Secretary of State, Madeline Albright, and Secretary of Defense William Cohen. Stay tuned!
Monday, March 15, 2004
Madrid Madness
Cross posted on the SOLO Forum here.
As most of you know, I am a staunch supporter of the War on Al Qaeda. I think the US should have staged an all-out campaign to destroy that group 11 years ago, when they first attacked the World Trade Center on US soil in 1993. They have been an imminent threat to US security and should have been squashed. (Of course, I do believe that the history of how that group became an imminent threat is important: for answers to that question, just take a look at the history of US interventionist foreign policy, which is an "incubator" for anti-American terrorism — a history of propping up regimes from the House of Sa'ud to the mujahideen in Afghanistan...)
This said, I have not been a supporter of the War in Iraq, because I believe that Iraq was (a) not an imminent threat to the US; (b) not in possession of imminently-threatening weapons of mass destruction; and (c) not in league with Al Qaeda. If it had been proven to me that the Hussein regime was an imminent threat and in league with Al Qaeda, I would have supported a war against Iraq. But I still would not have supported the Wilsonian "nation-building" campaign that the neoconservatives in the Bush administration have been championing: a campaign to build a political democracy, at the cost of many American lives, and billions of US taxpayer dollars, on the shaky foundation of a culture steeped in internecine tribalist conflict, which has no understanding of individualism or human freedom.
I have expanded on these subjects in at least two articles, and countless posts to the Liberty & Power Group blog. Check out my Not a Blog for a listing of essays, including A Question of Loyalty and Understanding the Global Crisis.
All of this said: IF it should happen that Al Qaeda was, indeed, involved in the bombings in Madrid, what did the War in Iraq do to undermine that group?
Nothing.
Absolutely nothing.
If anything, the US toppled a murderous "secular" regime in Iraq that even Osama Bin Laden condemned as a home to "infidels." If anything, the possibilities of an emerging theocratic movement in Iraq have been multiplied. If anything, Al Qaeda is simply using this US occupation as a pretext for recruiting more and more terrorists to its murderous cause.
No, I'm not "implicitly" supporting the return of Saddam Hussein — who, I believe, was being, and could have been fully contained without a US invasion. But I live in the real world as it is, not as I would like it to be. Good riddance to him and his sons and to the Ba'ath killers.
Nevertheless, for those of us who are in support of the war against Al Qaeda, opposition to the Iraq war last winter was not a vote of support for Hussein; it was a strategic decision by some of us who believed that the Iraq war was a diversion from the true sources of Al Qaeda terrorism, with its roots in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, ironically: two US "allies."
I shudder to think that the Madrid bombings, 2 1/2 years to the day after 9/11, are a prelude to a similar multi-pronged attack on NYC subways in the coming months. If that were to happen during rush hour, Al Qaeda would take out thousands of Americans. They could conceivably cripple the city's underground transportation, destroy underwater tunnels, and fracture the city's infrastructure.
And the Iraq war would have done nothing to stop it.
Thursday, March 11, 2004
Politics, Culture, and Fear
I'd like to highlight another fine Chronicle of Higher Education article, which appears in this week's issue. Jonathan Brent's "Gucci Shoes and Khachapuri: Power and Belief in Russia Today" deals extensively with a topic that has preoccupied many of us: the relationship of politics and culture in the movement toward a free society. In an era when Wilsonian central planners are nation-building in Iraq, without a firm understanding of the cultural prerequisites for political change, Brent's article is a welcome addition to the literature.
Brent interviews Alexander Nikolaevich Yakovlev of the International Democracy Foundation. A World War II vet, former Soviet ambassador to Canada, and Columbia University graduate, Yakovlev was an "architect of perestroika during the Gorbachev years ..." Yakovlev argues that, historically, the Soviet system, from the time of Lenin through the Great Terror and beyond, was based on the "institutionalization of strakh—fear—as the ruling element in the psychology of the Russian people." This is a fear, says Yakovlev, that "continues to this day in all but the youngest generation."
Indeed, fear has even shaped the historiography of the post-Soviet era. Yakovlev tells us that "an honest textbook on Soviet history could not be written for at least a generation. Why? People are still too afraid of the consequences of telling the truth ..."
Fear. The ruling element in Russian psychology. I'd venture to say it's the ruling element in the psychology of any oppressed people.
Yakovlev is hated by those "who would like to see a return to the old Communist system." He himself fears "that the windows of reform have been closing gradually over the last several years." In Russia, "[t]he past is dead, but not dead enough."
Yakovlev is one of those visionaries who had "provided Mikhail Gorbachev with the theoretical framework for the demise of the Soviet system because he thought it was better voluntarily to give up power than to retain it illegally and ineffectively." Squeezing Communism out of Russia, "drop by drop," has required a "slow turn toward truth," which is bringing "about the collapse of an entire system of belief. Truth is dangerous still, and the masses of people remain empty and disoriented. Nothing yet has taken the system's place. There is need for a new mythology. That is partly why Yakovlev believes that only the complete debolshevization of the country can save Russia from sliding backward."
But because the central government retains control, the rule of law is forever undermined, as is liberty and productivity. In the time before collectivization, Yakovlev remembers, "people had potatoes but didn't have socialism. Afterward, they had socialism but no potatoes." Now, Russian President Vladimir Putin "has wrapped himself in secrecy, closed down the only liberal television station, and changed the way elections for the State Duma are conducted—all of which, Yakovlev points out, no one intent on democratic reform would have done." Brent continues:
The last elections, marginalizing the liberal parties and endorsing Putin's vision of a strong central government, suggest that the people themselves may want despotism in the guise of democracy. A tragic outcome. Yakovlev understands that true democracy cannot be based on force—only on the shared values of an educated public. Although the Russian population enjoys an exceptionally high level of education in many areas, history is not among them. Knowledge of the history of the Stalinist past and the cold war is particularly lacking." (emphasis added)
Unfortunately, this historical blindness to "the menacing organ of the Soviet, and now Russian, government" has led to the assertion of even "greater authority in the daily life of the people." Russia is in a downward slide, in many ways. And authoritarian traditions seem to be on the upswing. "Fascist newspapers are no longer publicly on sale in Red Square, but more than 100 publish openly in Russia today. Calls for limiting the influence of Jews and members of other minority groups are a steady feature of that literature."
Yakovlev emphasizes that a democratic culture must "give heart to democratic policies. But Russia is vast, its history is long and dark, and the work of one man, or 100 men, can be swallowed up in an instant by a tide of intimidation, threat, and terror. If that happens, a precious moment for Russia and the world will have been lost."
Brent concludes:
The point at which knowledge is transformed into action is the nexus of education and political commitment. But neither knowledge nor political commitment can be sustained in a vacuum. The self-critical, democratic culture that Yakovlev seeks depends on traditions of thought that extend far beyond Russia's borders. If reform is to prevail, Russia cannot remain isolated from the West, he says. He sees Russia's sinking back into isolation as the greatest danger.
I am reminded of some points made, back in 1998, by a Hegelian thinker, David MacGregor, who sensed that my own approach to the system of thought of another "Russian Radical," Ayn Rand, had critical application to the case of Russia. MacGregor wrote:
Rand's three-tiered methodological approach, as expounded by Sciabarra, may help account for the apparent failure of unregulated capitalism in the former Soviet Union. Russia's economic and political realities are conditioned by cultural and individual factors, so that market disruption and the rise of the Russian Mafia may be traced, in Rand's schema, to cultural and personal aspects of the Russian people. The market experiment has faltered, not because of any problem inherent to it, but because residues of mysticism, collectivism, and altruism are a miserable heritage of Soviet power.
I can only add that as long as Russia is a country ruled by fear, it will never prosper. No nation can ever be built on fear. As I say in this post, there is a "reciprocally reinforcing relationship between fear, anger, hatred, dependency, malevolence, and suffering." If the Russian people, or the Iraqi people, wish to build a democratic nation, it is they who must transcend the fear. It is they who must embrace those cultural values that will sustain human life and liberty.
Wednesday, March 10, 2004
Fuhgeddaboudit!
The Brooklyn borough president, Marty Markowitz, is a bit of a comedian. Since he took office, signs have been springing up all over my hometown. When you come off a city bridge, say, the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge linking Brooklyn to Staten Island, you are greeted with "Welcome to Brooklyn" signs that feature classic "Brooklyn" expressions, like "How Sweet It Is" (for the uncultured, that slogan was coined by the Great One: Jackie Gleason).
But if you happen to have the misfortune of leaving Brooklyn, you see other signs: "Leaving Brooklyn: Fuhgeddaboudit." (And for an education on the meaning of the phrase, consult the film "Donnie Brasco.") It seems, however, that some Italian Americans are pissed off, since they consider the phrase an Italian slur. A similar sign saying "Oy Vey" was apparently, uh, Passed Over ... because some thought it might offend some Jewish residents. (Markowitz, who is Jewish, thought the "Oy Vey" sign would have been a terrific idea. Bravo!)
Sometimes the PC-minded police tap dance on my last nerve. So, for the hearing of the world: I am Half-Sicilian and Half-Greek, and a life-long Brooklyn resident, and I like the signs that say "Fuhgeddaboudit." I must use that expression 300 times a day.
You got a problem wit dat?
Monday, March 8, 2004
Scientific Desert
It's been a couple of weeks since my last post at L&P. That's what happens when you're preparing the Spring 2004 issue of The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies. (Talk about shameless plugs...) Everything takes a back seat! My goodness! Even Spring Training has arrived, and the countdown has begun to the March 30th Opening Day in Tokyo between my New York Yankees and the Tampa Bay Devil Rays.
In the midst of all this, I've come upon an interesting article that I wanted to highlight here at L&P. The piece is available only to subscribers of The Chronicle of Higher Education. Written by Daniel Del Castillo, "The Arab World's Scientific Desert" tells the story of how the region was once a leader in research, but that now it "struggles to keep up." Del Castillo writes:
Eleven centuries ago an Islamic renaissance occurred in Baghdad, attracting the best scholars throughout the Muslim world. For the next five hundred years, Arabic was the lingua franca of science. Cutting-edge research was conducted in cities such as Cairo, Damascus, and Tunis. In the ninth century, algebra (al-jabr) was invented by a Muslim mathematician in Baghdad under the auspices of an imperial Arab court dedicated to scientific enrichment and discovery. Ibn Sina's monumental Canon of Medicine was translated into Latin in the 12th century and dominated the teaching of the subject in Europe for four centuries.
Today, no one looks to the Arab world for breakthroughs in scientific research, and for good reason. According to a number of highly self-critical reports that have come out in the past few years, the 21 countries that make up the region are struggling to teach even basic science at the university level. For poor countries, such as Yemen and Sudan, the problem is a lack of money and resources. For wealthier ones, such as Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, complacency and a relatively new and underdeveloped university system have hampered progress.
One wonders how much more advanced the Saudi system would be, for example, if the Saudis spent as much money on science education as they do on Wahhabi indoctrination.
In any event, Del Castillo argues that many Arab universities are deeply "burdened with a bureaucracy that stifles innovation and bases promotion on cronyism, not research ... The lack of significant private industry throughout the region also means that universities are essentially dependent on governments to pay for research and provide jobs for their graduates." Moreover, the pedagogy is "outdated and archaic," and teacher morale is low.
Unfortunately, the appearance of specialized private universities has been met with suspicion by Arab scholars, "who question the quality and motives of for-profit institutions of higher education." What has resulted is a virtual brain drain, as "the most promising and successful Arab scientists and researchers end up in the West."
Del Castillo notes the presence of a vicious circle: "Without top-notch scientists, [the Arab region] cannot produce the research necessary to develop a strong private sector. But without a dynamic private sector, there is little money to invest in scientific research."
I have been saying for well over a year now that the Wilsonian "nation-building" project of the Bush administration is doomed to fail in the absence of a deeper movement from within the Arab world that would transform its intellectual and cultural milieu. (On related points, see today's New York Times' worthwhile editorial, "The Axis of Reconstruction.") New political institutions require new intellectual and cultural ones. These cannot simply be imposed. "Democratic nation-building" is not feasible in a tribalist atmosphere that is stifling to human knowledge and freedom. We ignore these realities at our peril.
Tuesday, February 24, 2004
The End of Conservatism
So, let's see: Massive government action at home—including a Medicaid prescription drug plan and a Patriot Act at war with civil liberties. Massive US military action overseas—including foreign occupation and "nation-building." And now: Massive legislative action—by means of a constitutional amendment defining marriage as between a man and a woman.
I'm no conservative, but there is nothing conservative about the activist methods that this President has used to enact his interventionist agenda.
Sunday, February 15, 2004
George Washington and The Peril of Foreign Entanglements
Having been intimately associated with Objectivism for many years, I find it disconcerting that in the tributes to George Washington being circulated by both the Ayn Rand Institute and The Objectivist Center, neither mentions one of the most important legacies the first President left to the young America: His Farewell Address.
In that Farewell Address, Washington warned against the peril of foreign entanglements. He understood the necessity of certain alliances in dire emergencies, but his general view of foreign policy encapsulates a wisdom that has been forgotten by today's generation of political leaders. As we near "President's Day," I thought I'd post an excerpt from Washington's famous address:
Observe good faith and justice toward all nations. Cultivate peace and harmony with all. ... In the execution of such a plan nothing is more essential than that permanent, inveterate antipathies against particular nations and passionate attachments for others should be excluded, and that in place of them just and amicable feelings toward all should be cultivated. The nation which indulges toward another an habitual hatred or an habitual fondness is in some degree a slave. It is a slave to its animosity or to its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty and its interest. Antipathy in one nation against another disposes each more readily to offer insult and injury, to lay hold of slight causes of umbrage, and to be haughty and intractable when accidental or trifling occasions of dispute occur.
So, likewise, a passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification. It leads also to concessions to the favorite nation of privileges denied to others, which is apt doubly to injure the nation making the concessions by unnecessarily parting with what ought to have been retained, and by exciting jealousy, ill will, and a disposition to retaliate in the parties from whom equal privileges are withheld; and it gives to ambitious, corrupted, or deluded citizens (who devote themselves to the favorite nation) facility to betray or sacrifice the interests of their own country without odium, sometimes even with popularity, gilding with the appearances of a virtuous sense of obligation, a commendable deference for public opinion, or a laudable zeal for public good the base or foolish compliances of ambition, corruption, or infatuation.
Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence (I conjure you to believe me, fellow citizens) the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake, since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican government. But that jealousy, to be useful, must be impartial, else it becomes the instrument of the very influence to be avoided, instead of a defense against it. Excessive partiality for one foreign nation and excessive dislike of another cause those whom they actuate to see danger only on one side, and serve to veil and even second the arts of influence on the other. Real patriots who may resist the intrigues of the favorite are liable to become suspected and odious, while its tools and dupes usurp the applause and confidence of the people to surrender their interests.
The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is, in extending our commercial relations to have with them as little political connection as possible. So far as we have already formed engagements let them be fulfilled with perfect good faith. Here let us stop. ...
Harmony, liberal intercourse with all nations are recommended by policy, humanity, and interest. But even our commercial policy should hold an equal and impartial hand, neither seeking nor granting exclusive favors or preferences; consulting the natural course of things; diffusing and diversifying by gentle means the streams of commerce, but forcing nothing; establishing with powers so disposed, in order to give trade a stable course, to define the rights of our merchants, and to enable the Government to support them, conventional rules of intercourse, the best that present circumstances and mutual opinion will permit, but temporary and liable to be from time to time abandoned or varied as experience and circumstances shall dictate; constantly keeping in view that it is folly in one nation to look for disinterested favors from another; that it must pay with a portion of its independence for whatever it may accept under that character; that by such acceptance it may place itself in the condition of having given equivalents for nominal favors, and yet being reproached with ingratitude for not giving more. There can be no greater error than to expect or calculate upon real favors from nation to nation. It is an illusion which experience must cure, which a just pride ought to discard.
Saturday, February 14, 2004
To Be or Not To Be Imminent
Some might dismiss this source as "biased" against the Bush administration, but the quotes are authentic. Take a look at this nice compendium of quotes on the WMD threat from Iraq. Very entertaining stuff for your Valentine's Day.
Friday, February 13, 2004
Friday the 13th
I've already written about Communist parasites, in an effort to draw attention to the mass internal chaos that was the Soviet Union. There is probably no greater misnomer than the word "totalitarianism," because no matter how much a coercive statist apparatus tries to control the totality of a society, such control will elude its grasp. That's because planners of all kinds—whether they be Soviet commissars or Wilsonian nation-builders—simply don't know enough to forestall the unintended consequences of their plans, which are a perennial aspect of human sociality.
Well, the knowledge problem, a problem manifested in the fragmentation of knowledge, power, and function, seems to have been felt big time in Iraq.
William Safire thinks he's uncovered yet another "smoking gun" in Iraq, which proves a "clear link" between Hussein and Al Qaeda. (There might be clearer links between Al Qaeda and Brooklyn or between Al Qaeda and flight schools in Florida, but nobody has suggested—yet—that we invade Brooklyn or Boca Raton.)
What this "smoking gun" proves, however, is that Iraq was, and continues to be, a smoldering kettle of conflicting interests, whereby different elements engage in power-plays against one another. The only difference, in this regard, between the Hussein regime and post-Hussein Iraq is that the "balkanization" process has intensified, as noted by David below, because there is no central apparatus attempting to keep it at bay. (The same balkanization has taken place in post-Communist Russia.)
Even within Hussein's Iraq, fragmentation of power and function was more the rule than the exception: the right hand didn't know what the left hand was doing. As this story in The New York Times suggests, the regime itself was ill-prepared for the US invasion partially because Hussein himself was busy deploying "Iraqi military to crush domestic uprisings rather than defend against a ground invasion..." A recently uncovered "classified log of interrogations of captured Iraqi leaders and former officers" provides us with "a scathing history of a Stalinist, paranoid leadership circle in Baghdad that guaranteed its own destruction." Hussein's government was "disconnected from reality in peace and in war." Even "members of Mr. Hussein's inner circle routinely lied to him and each other about Iraqi military capacities." (On the organic connection between war and deceit, see Arthur Silber's superb post They Are The Damned.)
Lies, deception, exaggeration, "mistakes"... inside and outside of Iraq. Even gung-ho conservative Bill O'Reilly is now apologizing for accepting the WMD claims of the Bush administration. The cloud of disinformation is almost as poisonous as the mushroom clouds we all fear.
It is ironic too that, as Maureen Dowd states, the President is busy warning us that "the greatest threat before humanity" is "the possibility of a sudden W.M.D. attack. Not wanting nuclear technology to go to North Korea, Iran or Libya, the White House demanded tighter controls on black-market sales of W.M.D., even while praising its good buddy Pakistan, whose scientists were running a black market like a Sam's Club for nukes, peddling to North Korea, Iran and Libya."
Isn't it amazing that the biggest threats in the region, Pakistan—for its export of toxic nuclear technology and Saudi Arabia—for its export of toxic Wahhabi ideology, remain among the closest of US allies?
Whereas Friday the 13th gives way to Valentine's Day, this Middle East horror story is starting to feel more and more like the movie Groundhog Day: it's just an endless replay of the same themes over and over and over again. Kinda like that broken record that President Bush talked about.
Sunday, February 8, 2004
Evidence? Who Needs Evidence?
"I don't want to sound like a broken record." Yes, that was essentially the defense offered by George W. Bush in his sit-down with Tim Russert on "Meet the Press" this morning. I wanted to scream: "But you are, George, you are a broken record."
Faced with his own statements against "nation-building," made during the 2000 Presidential campaign, Bush simply repeated his neo-Wilsonian slogans for democratizing the Middle East. He's convinced, having spoken to a "Shiia fellow" he knows, Mr. al Hakim, that democracy will win in Iraq, which is "going to be a free society where you can worship freely."
He insists too that, given the situation in Iraq, the US was dealing not with an "imminent threat," but with a "grave and gathering threat," making this not a war of choice, but a war of "necessity." "America [could not] stand by and hope for the best from a madman [Saddam Hussein]." Once a threat becomes "imminent," says Bush, "it's too late. It's too late in this new kind of war, and so that's why I made the decision I made."
Great. So, let's take responsibility for the whole world. Let's invade every country run by a madman, so that we can achieve the Utopian Dream of a Risk-Free Existence, wherein Unintended Consequences are banished from social life.
Indeed, Bush practically tells us that this "is history's call to America." His foreign policy "is one that believes America has a responsibility in this world to lead, a responsibility to lead in the war against terror, a responsibility to speak clearly about the threats that we all face, a responsibility to promote freedom, to free people from the clutches of barbaric people such as Saddam Hussein who tortured, mutilated. ... that we have found a responsibility to fight AIDS, the pandemic of AIDS, and to feed the hungry. We have a responsibility."
A responsibility? To which I'd like to ask the perennial Randian question: "At whose expense?" For with this new "responsibility" that Bush has grafted onto the American polity, the expansion of U.S. government power at home and abroad goes unchecked.
Russert himself recited the now all-too-familiar statistics: In the first three years of Bush-Cheney, the unemployment rate has gone up 33 percent. There has been a loss of 2.2 million jobs. The budget has gone from a "surplus" (which was always suspect) to a $521 billion deficit, with the debt rising from $5.7 trillion to $7 trillion. (So, what else is new? Take a look at Wilson, FDR, LBJ, and Nixon, and Bush fits in nicely with the bi-partisan expansion of the welfare-warfare nexus.)
Russert told Bush that his "base conservatives," such as "Rush Limbaugh, the Heritage Foundation, CATO Institute [are] all saying you are the biggest spender in American history."
And in the face of overwhelming evidence against him, Bush simply responded: "Well, they're wrong."
This is becoming a typical Presidential retort.
Last week, Terence McAuliffe, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, had charged that Bush went AWOL in the Alabama National Guard. The Boston Globe and the Associated Press have found no evidence that he reported to Alabama duty in the summer and fall of 1972. "There may be no evidence, but I did report," said Bush to Russert.
I see a pattern here: Regardless of the evidence, they are wrong. Bush is right.
If there's no evidence of WMDs, Bush is right (to wage war).
If there's no evidence of his service in Alabama, Bush is right (to say he did serve).
And if there is evidence that Bush is the biggest spender in American history, the evidence is wrong, and Bush is right.
Personally, I thought the cross-talk on the McLaughlin Group, which aired before the Russert-Bush interview, was a lot more entertaining, especially when Pat Buchanan fumed that nonexistent WMDs had been the pretext for a war that the neocons had planned long before 9/11.
Buchanan is wrong about a lot of things, but on this, he is so right.
Thursday, February 5, 2004
The Spread of Mammophobia
I've already sounded off about the resurgence of the American Taliban, and I'm not talking about John Walker. I'm talking about my response to Arthur Silber's fine post on the New Puritanism affecting the land in the shining light of Janet Jackson's silvery-studded right breast on the Super Bowl half-time show. American Taliban leader, the FCC's Michael Powell, who is trying to out-General his Secretary of State daddy, threatens massive government fines over the Breast Incident. (What is it with this administration and breasts? This all started when that other general, Attorney General Ashcroft, ordered the breast of the female statue of "The Spirit of Justice" covered for "aesthetic" reasons.)
Now comes word that Janet is being forced out of the Sunday night broadcast of the Grammy Awards, a "Tit for Tat" as the classy New York Post declares. And NBC has announced that it will not air a brief glimpse of an 80-year old woman's exposed breast in tonight's episode of "ER." I guess Must-See-TV just can't handle the pressure of yet another female breast in prime time.
Has this country lost its mind? Or is it just mass cultural hypocrisy that we're witnessing? Football games are routinely saturated with scantily-clad "cheerleaders" and with commercials that feature bestiality, butt-groping, promises of 4-hour erections from the drug Cialis, and Piper the Budweiser dog biting a guy's crotch; the NFL hires MTV to stage the half-time and knows what it's getting.
So now, kiddies, we all have to be punished because the sight of a breast is more outrageous than the daily body count in Iraq. (Then again, maybe Airbrushing is the New Rule of the Land with the American Taliban: Even the dead bodies coming home from Iraq are being transported in the euphemistically named "Transfer Tubes," so nobody gets too upset.)
"Iraq was a Failure of National Leadership"
Richard Cohen, who supported the war in Iraq, has a very interesting New York Daily News article worth your attention. Cohen writes:
Now that President Bush, with all the enthusiasm of a dog going to the vet, has been yanked into naming a bipartisan commission to look into intelligence failures in Iraq, I'd like to see yet another commission established. This one would look into the real failure of intelligence - not the CIA, but America's political, social and intellectual leadership. It would be instructive to examine the yahoo mood that came over much of the nation once Bush decided to go to war. The decision - its urgency - seemed to come out of nowhere. Yet most of America fell into line, and in certain segments of the media, the Murdoch press above all, dissent was ridiculed. On Fox TV, France was a called a member of the "axis of weasels" and demonstrators in Davos, Switzerland, were disparaged as "knuckleheads." Colorful stuff, but wrong and craven. ... A consensus - based on false facts, outright lies and exaggerated fears - took over the nation. ... This was no mere failure of intelligence. This was a failure of character.
Read the whole essay.
Come One, Come All to "The Exorcist Experience" in Iraq!
I have to admit, I am a big fan of the horror-film classic, The Exorcist. And though I've been very critical of the US incursion in Iraq, even I now have a reason to celebrate the occupation.
Capt. Nik Guran, who hails from a unit of the 101st Airborne Division stationed in Hatra, had been watching a DVD copy of the film when he suddenly realized "he was sitting at the location where director William Friedkin shot the opening sequence of his 1973 horror classic," reports New York Daily News columnist Denis Hamill.
Friedkin was contacted by the military and tells us that the "Army hatched this idea to turn the whole area into a tourist attraction and call it 'The Exorcist Experience'." Floodlights have already been installed to illuminate the sun temples where Friedkin filmed the scene in which Father Merrin (played by Max von Sydow) confronts the statue of Bazuzu, the Mesopotamian demon that possesses head-turning Linda Blair. It is an archaeological site that harks back to the time of Hammurabi and King Nebuchadnezzar, and Friedkin welcomes private contributions to create the theme park, which is "officially backed by the Pentagon," admission priced at $2 or $5 with a kabob lunch.
Well, thank goodness private contributions are being solicited, because the thought of yet another tax-wasting Halliburton scandal sends shivers up my silver-screen scared spine.
But why stop there? The tourist possibilities in Iraq are endless!!! Tourists can see the Sunni Triangle, where US troops face daily murderous attacks. Or maybe tourists can travel to the south of Iraq to find the home of Ayatollah Ali Sistani, who might lead the Shi'ites in a massive rebellion against U.S. forces. Or maybe tourists can actually go on a WMD-hunt, similar to the Easter-egg rolls and hunts that have traditionally taken place on the White House lawn. Oh wait: You actually have to have WMDs for "The WMD Experience," otherwise tourists might think they were deceived. At least "The Exorcist Experience" features 2,600 year-old temples that are easily located.
Monday, February 2, 2004
COMMUNIST PARASITES
It's the day after the Super Bowl. The Pats won in a Thriller. The nation is abuzz with talk about Janet Jackson's exposed breast. (Bravo to Arthur for putting all of this in perspective!) And it's Groundhog Day, and we have 6 more weeks of winter ahead!
It's also a day on which President Bush is apparently green-lighting an inquiry into the intelligence-WMD fiasco; it will be interesting to see just how cooperative the administration will be in this endeavor. How many pages will be blotted out from how many documents? How many restrictions will be placed on access to classified material? How many guidelines will be issued on the timing of the release of this material after Election Day?
In any event, as we ponder today's intelligence gaps, it is interesting to read a bit about the intelligence efforts during the Cold War. As a postscript to yesterday's Randian point that "authoritarian states enshrined the rule of mediocrity and incompetence, surviving as parasites on freer nations," here's an interesting article by William Safire on "The Farewell Dossier." Whatever your views of CIA sabotage, the story makes one point very clear: The Soviets needed to engage in systematic stealing in order to get "the radar, machine tools and semiconductors to keep ... nearly competitive with U.S. military-industrial strength ..." (On the general impotence of the Soviet Union, see another fine Silber post, here.)
So much for innovation and creativity under communism.
Sunday, February 1, 2004
THIS WEEK'S WISDOM
With bombings in the Kurdish sections of Iraq killing more than 50 people, and another US soldier killed near Baghdad, Super Bowl Sunday is not off to a good start. There were, however, some words of wisdom spoken on "This Week with George Stephanopoulos."
Among those joining regulars Farid Zakaria and George Will were former Director of Central Intelligence James Woolsey and former U.N. Ambassador Richard Holbrooke.
With the whirlwind surrounding the David Kay pronouncements on the absence of weapons of mass destruction in Hussein's Iraq, Zakaria emphasized that the US "made worse-case assumptions." Sounding a bit like Ayn Rand, who always argued that evil was impotent, that authoritarian states enshrined the rule of mediocrity and incompetence, surviving as parasites on freer nations, Zakaria stated: "We assumed that because this was an evil regime, they must be incredibly competent. They must be so smart. This was, in a way, a mirror of the mistake we made with regard to the Soviet Union." It turns out, of course, that the Soviet Union was collapsing internally, from a massive brain drain, just as the right Iraqi hand didn't know what the left one was doing.
Given the current political atmosphere, however, "the truth of the matter has been [that] for the last thirty years, the CIA has been battered by neoconservatives for being soft on the Soviets, for being soft on the Chinese," Zakaria argued. "It turned out that in most cases, the CIA estimates were not as far off as the neoconservative fantasies about Soviet strength and Chinese military strength."
Holbrooke, who supported the President's calls for "regime change," now questions the rush to war and the timing of the Iraqi incursion. "Had we known the truth," Holbrooke stated, "I would have still supported efforts to change regime. But I and many other critics of the administration always thought the timetable was weird; it was based on weather-driven factors. They had the build-up in the desert too early. They didn't want to leave the troops at a cost of $2 billion a month sitting in the desert for the long, hot summer. All of that was, in retrospect, a tremendous error in judgment. And it has left the administration with a fractured alliance, a growing anti-American sentiment in the whole Muslim world, from Iraq to Indonesia. ... And now ... the whole premise of preemptive war has been shattered, 'cause it must be based on iron-clad empirical data. 'We gotta hit them before they hit us.' It turned out they couldn't have hit us."
For those in the administration who now argue that the Iraqi campaign has put fear in the hearts of Libyans, Iranians, and others, Geoge Will says that the massive blow to credibility over WMDs has also been a massive blow to the strategic doctrine of preemption. Potential rogue nations will question whether the US will ever again have the willingness to engage in a preemptive strike. For "the doctrine of preemptive war, whatever else it presupposes, presupposes a certain threshold of certainty about what you're preempting." And the US, says Will, has not reached that threshold.
Holbrooke interjected that now that "the weapons of mass destruction assumptions [have been proved to be] completely wrong," fundamental changes must take place. The central problem is that the "people who got this wrong are the people still doing it in regard to the other members of the 'Axis of Evil' [Iran and North Korea]." They were claiming "the discovery of a weapons system which didn't exist, on the basis of which the President asked us to go to war."
And so, Holbrooke has called for an independent commission "to get to the bottom" of this intelligence failure. Good luck, Richard! The administration is looking to pull the plug on the 9/11 commission; they aren't going to be too happy to set up another commission during an election year to investigate this fiasco. But Holbrooke is right; this kind of investigation "must be done rapidly and openly. It is of the highest importance because we cannot afford to have an intelligence community that can make this kind of mistake. ... We mustn't let this happen again."
All of this, of course, is based on the assumption that "mistakes were made." It begs a more troubling question: Did the administration "sex-up" the data simply because it had every intention of invading Iraq, even prior to the horror of September 11th? On this issue, it would take more than a commission to reveal the truth.
George Will points to two ironic implications of the Iraq incursion. First, Will says, "the big winner from all this is the U.N., not just because the weapons inspectors may have done better than we thought. But also because, ineluctably, the Bush administration is now driven to say: 'Never mind the weapons of mass destruction. The war was justified because [the Iraqis] were in violation of umpteen-million UN resolutions.' Which means: A conservative administration has gone to war saying it was justified to strengthen the UN as the arbiter of international behavior."
Second, George Bush has bared his Wilsonian soul. Indeed, Will characterizes the Bush presidency as "the third-term" of the administration of Woodrow Wilson. Both Bush and Wilson have ultimately justified war "to install a transformative regime." Bush thinks this new "democratic" regime "is going to transform the region. Now, that's ambitious," says Will. "I think it's mistaken."
Amen.
The discussants agree that, with mounting Kurdish and Sunni problems, and with opposition growing from the Ayatollah Sistani and the Shi'ites, the situation is close to "spiraling out of control," as Zakaria put it. The short-term goal for transference of power by July 1, as outlined by the Bush administration, is most likely unreachable. As Will puts it, the political pundits couldn't grasp the reality of the Iowa caucuses or the New Hampshire primaries; there's no possibility that they'd be able to grasp the immense complexity of the political situation in Iraq. It took the US a while to write its own constitution, Will reminds us, after having had a long experience with the Articles of Confederation, and the whole thing nearly unraveled in the 1790s. Sounding ever like the Hayekian, Will worries that the US policy planners are exhibiting a bit too much intellectual hubris in the democratic nation-building department.
Let's hope that those Hayekian unintended consequences don't make today's deaths a picnic by comparison.
Saturday, January 31, 2004
ON GRAVE AND GATHERING THREATS
For days now, the news has been dominated by reactions to David Kay's statement that "we were almost all wrong" in the belief that Iraq had WMDs. Condoleeza Rice concedes that maybe there were no WMDs, but "Saddam Hussein had every opportunity ... to tell the world that he had destroyed them." Instead, he chose to remain silent and "secretive," allowing "the world to continue to wonder if he was sitting there with botulinum toxin and anthrax."
Now, I'm not about to defend the honor of a lying, murdering tyrant like Hussein. But, for months, Iraqi spokesmen and scientists were saying exactly that: that Iraq had no WMDs. Hussein himself denied their existence. Through a translator, the former Iraqi President told CBS News anchor, Dan Rather:
[T]he United States - the world - knows that there is nothing in Iraq [...] the fleets that have been brought around and the mobilization that's been done were, in fact, done partly to cover the huge lie that was being waged against Iraq about chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. And it was on that basis that Iraq actually accepted [the UN] Resolution - accepted it, even though [...] Iraqi officials ... had kept saying, that ... Iraq was empty, was void of any such weapons [...] But Iraq accepted that resolution ... in order not to allow any misinterpretation of its position.
Hussein also denied any linkage to Osama Bin Laden, and maintained again and again that "Iraq has not produced any such weapons [of mass destruction]."
Since UN inspectors were already in Iraq, and Iraq was submitting to an extended inspection process, and the US had surrounded that country with its military forces, where was this "grave and gathering threat to America and the world" that President Bush keeps talking about?
In the meanwhile, historian Victor Davis Hanson reiterates the pro-war case as if no stubborn facts have impinged on that case one iota. "Success in Iraq cannot be measured by how much it resembles the Connecticut countryside next month," says Hanson, "but instead by whether — in two or three years — it is a country that no longer invades others, promotes terrorists, kills its own citizens, and uses petrol dollars to acquire a strategic arsenal to threaten the West."
This is nice, as far as it goes. If the US stays in Iraq, it's true: Iraq won't be invading its neighbors (it might have to leave that job to the US military) — or using its petrol dollars to threaten the West. But it will remain a fertile ground for the growth of the very terrorism the US seeks to fight.
Hanson continues:
For all the rhetoric about American corporate profiteering — the "Afghanistan pipeline," the Halliburton bonanza, the carving up of the Iraqi petroleum pie — the ultimate cost of restoring the two countries [Iraq and Afghanistan] will be enormous, yet justifiable not in economic advantages, but in both national-security interests and, yes, moral terms. This is as it should be, since we Americans recently have had a prior relationship with both the Afghan and Iraqi nations. Unlike the British or Russians, we have never attempted to colonize them, but we are nevertheless obligated to set things right since, at critical times when we had the ability to offer aid, we chose isolationism and retreat — and thousands died as a consequence.
Isolationism and retreat? Just because the US hasn't engaged in traditional colonization does not mean that it has engaged in "isolationism and retreat" in the Middle East. The neocorporatist reality is that the US spent years propping up the Shahs, the Husseins, the Afghani mujahideen, the House of Sa'ud; it has spent years ... decades ... funneling "foreign aid" — in the form of money and munitions — to these despotic forces, while also socializing the risks of oil companies that received monopoly concessions from various host governments. Indeed, US support of ARAMCO and the House of Sa'ud created a financial dynamic that has nourished the export of Wahhabi fanaticism to the rest of the Islamic world. It is not US "isolationism and retreat" that is to blame here. It is US interventionist policy in the Middle East that has been one of the most important contributing factors to the development of Islamic fundamentalist terrorism.
Hanson decries, justifiably, "scores of mistakes" made by the US in Iraq, but this does not stop him from seeing this war as "one of the brightest moments in recent American history." On this basis, he condemns the antiwar movement as if it is constituted only by the "ossified Left."
Another case against this war has been made by principled libertarians and a few conservatives too. Such individuals have been as opposed to the "ossified Left" as to the neocons who brought us this mess.
Hanson favors nation building (calling it, instead, "nation rebuilding"). But he makes a good point against the "quest for utopian perfection," that is, "the idea that a few modern-day Jeffersons and Madisons need be present to craft a suitable constitution" for Iraq.
The truth is: I'd settle for a few American Jeffersons and Madisons in the United States! Ultimately, it will take that kind of radical cultural and political shift to save Americans from the grave and gathering threats to life and liberty — at home and abroad.
Friday, January 30, 2004
INSIDE IRAN: TWENTY-FIVE YEARS AFTER THE ISLAMIC REVOLUTION
Last night, Ted Koppel's "Nightline," which was born in the days of the Iranian hostage crisis during the Carter administration, presented an extraordinary look inside Iran. The country is basically fractured in two. Real political power is held by 12 appointed clerics and jurists, the "Guardian Council," which exercises "rigid Islamic control" and which recently disqualified most of the reformers among the candidates running for parliamentary election next month because they are "insufficiently loyal to Islam."
And yet, says Koppel, "millions upon millions of very young people thirsting for Western music, movies, and a hip lifestyle" are becoming a cultural force to be reckoned with. Even as genders are separated in public spaces and women remain covered, pro-reform forces are making dramatic strides. Having won the Presidency in 1997 and a Parliamentary majority in 2000, the reformists are giving political expression to a rising cultural rebellion against fundamentalism. It's precisely the kind of dynamic to which I referred in my post on "Hussein, Bin Laden, and Gramsci": an evolving "bloc of historical forces," as Antonio Gramsci would have called it, that is slowly sweeping away the conditions upon which political oppression depends.
On the streets, young women wear make-up, and keep pushing their veils further back off their faces. Teens are listening to Western pop music and attending spontaneous Rave parties. Home-grown heavy metal groups sometimes play concerts.
The raw statistics are ominous for the ruling class. Whereas 7 years ago, women constituted only 40% of the student population, today they constitute 64%. Their more liberal attitudes are the embodiment of a fledgling feminism. An astounding 70% of the population is under 35 and "the expectations of [this] younger generation are very high," says Presidential spokesman Abdollah Zadeh. The students, many of them from Tehran University, continue to organize pro-democracy demonstrations, while the political reformists hope to hold on to their majority and move toward a detente with the US.
And yet, fewer than a third of Iranians plan to vote in next month's sham of an election. There is no political freedom: "You speak, you go to jail," says one woman. "Since 1999," reports correspondent Jim Sciutto, "200 pro-reform newspapers have been shut down," while thousands of political prisoners have been locked into Iranian jails.
Given the strength of state police powers, says Jonathan Lyons from Reuters, it will probably take several generations of slow reform for pro-democracy forces to win out.
While it is true that cultural change evolves at a slower relative pace than political change, it is also true that cultural change of this magnitude can make political change superfluous.
What should the US do in response? Nothing. Let freedom take its course. Indeed, if there were this kind of cultural movement inside Iraq, I would be much more confident about "nation-building" in that country — a country splintered by Kurdish, Sunni, and Shi'ite tribalism.
Here is the key difference between Iran and Iraq: A nation of freedom beckons in Iran; it is fomenting from within, rather than being imposed from without, as if from an Archimedean standpoint. The Iranian clerics condemn this movement as "decadence." All the more reason to be In Praise of Decadence, as author Jeff Riggenbach would say. For decadence, in this context, signifies the decay of authority, the decay of the traditional. The Iranian students are staging a countercultural revolution; they are calling for political freedom, the rollback of clerical control, and the assertion of procedural democracy. It is too early to tell whether this counterculture will evolve into an authentically libertarian movement; but it is a blast of freedom that might very well topple the suffocating power of the fundamentalist state. It is the kind of radical change — change that goes to the "root" — that frightens Islamicists far more than the presence of a US occupying force in neighboring Iraq.
Thursday, January 29, 2004
FOREIGN POLICY AND THE CASH NEXUS
According to this exclusive ABC News report, it appears that oil contracts were awarded to quite a few individuals by the regime of Saddam Hussein from 1997 until