Just a Cog in the National Project
Brad Thompson’s excellent new book, Neoconservatism: An Obituary for an Idea, adroitly dissects this pernicious political philosophy. He has received some criticism for attempting to demonstrate that Leo Strauss, the philosophical godfather of so many neocons, had a certain sympathy with fascism. Indeed, while stating that he is not saying neoconservatives have fascist designs, Thompson does suggest that their philosophy could pave the way to a kind of “soft fascism.” Far be it from me to pass judgment on such academic debate, but it is interesting to consider the following from the noted neocon columnist for the New York Times, David Brooks, writing in that paper on March 10:
Citizenship, after all, is built on an awareness that we are not all that special but are, instead, enmeshed in a common enterprise. Our lives are given meaning by the service we supply to the nation. I wonder if Americans are unwilling to support the sacrifices that will be required to avert fiscal catastrophe in part because they are less conscious of themselves as components of a national project.
Everything Old Is New Again
With America in trouble, I’ve been pleased to see some fresh, innovative thinking emanating from Washington. What can brighten the country’s future?
- Anne Applebaum proposes that
Institutions should do what they are good at. And the expansion of NATO is one of the few true post-Cold-War foreign-policy success stories…
We could continue that process. The stakes are lower — 2010 is not 1990, and the countries outside NATO are poorer and more turbulent than even those that have recently joined. Nevertheless, the very existence of a credible Western military alliance remains — yes, really — an encouragement to others on Europe’s borders. This is a uniquely propitious moment. Right now there is a pro-Western government in Moldova; Ukraine’s geopolitics are up in the air; elections are due to take place in Belarus in December. We in the West might have gone sour on ourselves, but Europeans on our borders still find us magnetically attractive. But we will only remain so if we try.
- David “National Greatness Conservatism” Brooks thinks he’s found the solution: a “national greatness agenda” and a new political movement—maybe a third party!—whose “goal will be unapologetic: preserving American pre-eminence.” This movement could seek to “end the mortgage deduction and tax employer health care plans and raise capital gains taxes and cut benefits for affluent seniors.”
- Meanwhile, the Republican Party seems to think what the country needs is a good jolt of religion-infused nationalism.
With this sort of fresh, innovative thinking, maybe we can’t miss!
Brooks: Let the Bad Times Roll
I hope you missed David Brooks’ New York Times column recently extolling the virtues of excruciating pain. The op-ed, entitled, “A Case for Mental Courage,” is Brooks at his depressing, neocon worst. He starts out by describing in way too much detail the agony Fanny Burney, a early 19th century novelist, experienced when she had a mastectomy without anesthesia. “I then felt the Knife rackling against the breastbone…” and so on. Thanks for sharing, David, but, really, why? Well, because it turns out that heroism is to be found “in the ability to face unpleasant thoughts.” Hmmm. The underlying major problem that afflicts our nation, says Brooks, is that capitalism has undermined the idea that people are “inherently sinful.” Our culture “places less emphasis on the need to struggle against one’s own mental feebleness.”
It also turns out that America is too “geared toward pleasuring consumers, not putting them on some arduous character building regime.” In the good old days, Brooks intones, “this meant conquering mental laziness with arduous and sometimes numbingly boring lessons. It meant conquering frivolity by sitting through earnest sermons and speeches. It meant conquering self-approval by staring straight at what was painful.” Sign me up, David, you neocons look like a fun bunch. How is it that Mencken defined a Puritan? Someone who lives in constant fear that someone, somewhere is having a good time?
And therein lies the disconnect between most neoconservatives and America. Thomas Jefferson (someone who always liked to have a good time, if you get my drift) put it right there in the Declaration: We are going to be a nation that recognizes the unalienable right to “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.” Mastectomies sans anesthesia would not seem to fall into the category of the pursuit of happiness.
We should celebrate the fact that the pursuit of happiness is primarily an individualistic pursuit — something that rubs against the grain of neoconservatism. Some years back, Brooks wrote, “ultimately American purpose can find its voice only in Washington…individual ambition and willpower are channeled into the cause of national greatness. And by making the nation great, individuals are able to join their narrow concerns to a larger national project.” That philosophy, of course, was tried a couple of times in the 20th century and found a bit wanting. Especially if you count the tens of millions of human beings who died because of it. On the other hand, they did suffer.
Kagan Nomination: Around the Web
- Confirmation hearings are a “vapid and hollow charade”, or at least that’s what Elena Kagan wrote fifteen years ago. National Review Online invited me to contribute to a symposium on how Republican senators can keep the coming hearings from becoming such a charade, with results that can be found here.
- The First Amendment has been among Kagan’s leading scholarly interests, and yesterday in this space Ilya Shapiro raised interesting questions of whether she will make an strong guardian of free speech values. Eugene Volokh looks at her record and guesses that she might wind up adopting a middling position similar to that of Justice Ginsburg. As Radley Balko and Jacob Sullum have noted, the departing John Paul Stevens ran up at best a mixed record on First Amendment issues, so the overall impact on the Court is far from clear.
- Kagan’s other main scholarly topic has been administrative and regulatory law, and Nate Oman at Concurring Opinions warns that everything in her career “suggests that she is intellectually geared to look at the regulatory process from the government’s point of view.” Oman took an advanced seminar she taught, and brings back this cautionary report:
It was an interesting class, mainly focused on the competition between bureaucrats and political appointees. In our discussions businesses were always conceptualized as either passive objects of regulation or pernicious rent-seekers. Absent was a vision of private businesses as agents pursuing economic goals orthogonal to political considerations. We were certainly not invited to think about the regulatory process from the point of view of a private business for whom political and regulatory agendas represent a dead-weight cost.
- I’m not the only one who finds Kagan’s exclusion of military recruiters at Harvard wrongheaded, even while agreeing with her in opposing the gay ban. Peter Beinart made that argument in a widely noted post at The Daily Beast last month and now has a followup. Former Harvard law dean Robert Clark is in the Wall Street Journal today (sub-only) with an argument that Kagan’s policy was a continuation of his own and represented the sense of the law faculty as a whole. Emily Bazelon points out that the recruitment bar was overwhelmingly popular at top law schools at the time, an argument that as Ramesh Ponnuru points out may raise more questions than it answers. And Ilya Somin cautions against assuming that the wrongheadedness reflects any specifically anti-military bias.
- One of John Miller’s readers recalls John Hasnas’s wise words on “empathy” in judging. David Brooks at the Times runs with the “Revenge of the Grinds” theme. SCOTUSblog rounds up some other reactions (with thanks for the link). And Brad Smith, writing at Politico, advises us to be ready should Citizens United come up at the hearing.
Obama, American Nationalism, and the Weird Anti-Materialism of the Foreign Policy Elite
Matt Yglesias puts down the bloody shirt long enough to make the modest-on-its-face claim that “actions, not words, will clarify Obama’s foreign policy.” I don’t think that’s quite right.
In one sense, of course, it is. For the bean counters among us, the outcomes are the real metric: whether the United States remains the sole superpower on the planet; whether a diplomatic resolution can be reached with Iran; whether Obama can (assuming he has has any intention to) get our military out of Iraq; whether his spun-like-cotton-candy Afghanistan policy can stabilize that sorry land — these are the things we’ll be looking at.
But the more important thing in the short term for Obama is probably to slake the nearly-unquenchable thirst of the David Brookses of the world — and probably the American people — to have their identities stroked. To take the most recent example, Brooks, William Kristol, Robert Kagan, and the Foreign Policy Elite of whom they are avatars were in desperate need of a cold shower and a trip to the nearest confessional after Obama indulged them by unsheathing the Mighty and Awesome Totem of American nationalism — before a crowd of peacey Norwegians no less. To take another example, witness the veritable panic, the hysterical and fluttering response to the imaginary Obama “apology tour” that didn’t exist and had no affect on anything in any event.
Indeed the Foreign Policy Elite is so captivated by the rhetoric, imagery, and perhaps most importantly the identity surrounding U.S. foreign policy it hardly has time to think seriously about the material realities. There are of course examples where analysts simply misrepresent material reality — witness this ridiculous characterization of Obama’s boost in defense spending as an “assault” on the defense budget — but in general the foreign policy commentariat seems more interested in how American power makes them feel than it is on the outcomes it produces. And witness the frenzy over the Oslo speech, the “apology tour” claptrap, or the whining about Obama’s restraint from calling on the Iranian people to start a revolution.
Charles Krauthammer, in a recent essay, went so far in the anti-materialist direction to claim that “decline is a choice.” “Decline — or continued ascendancy — is in our hands.” Of course, it isn’t always a choice, says Krauthammer. The British had it coming, for example, but the crucial factors in Krauthammer’s telling weren’t imperial overextension and the relative waning of its latent power but rather “the civilizational suicide that was the two world wars, and the consequent physical and psychological exhaustion.” Thus, nations decline in large part because of sapped will — perhaps this would be the foreign policy equivalent of the “mental recession” we heard about a year ago. If this is right, keeping a careful eye on will-sapping things is more than a parlor game.
But of course Krauthammer’s charge that Obama is willfully precipitating American decline cannot be substantiated by reference to material factors, so it’s perhaps no coincidence that he takes aim primarily at Obama’s “demolition of the moral foundations of American dominance.” Krauthammer’s central piece of evidence is telling:
In Strasbourg, President Obama was asked about American exceptionalism. His answer? “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.” Interesting response. Because if everyone is exceptional, no one is.
Reading this, I was reminded of Conor Cruise O’Brien’s observation that
Ideally those responsible for international affairs ought to be able to understand and moderate the holy nationalism of their own country and to discern, even when disguised, the operations and limits of holy nationalism in rival countries as well as in third-party countries.
Unfortunately this may be too much to hope for. There are serious cognitive difficulties involved. Any nationalism inherently finds it hard to understand any other nationalism or even to want to understand it. This is particularly true of holy nationalism. Rejection of the other is part of the holiness.
All of this is enough to make you wonder then — if Obama wanted to, could he just keep the opinion columnists — and the American people — happy with a regular genuflection at the altar of American nationalism rather than by providing them with actual wars and actual crusading? Would he if he could?
David Brooks Is Confused about Counterinsurgency
Would you buy a state-building mission from this man?
Today David Brooks (in the role of Teddy Roosevelt) debates George Will (as Edmund Burke) on the subject of Afghanistan without citing him. This debate marks a high point of conservative politics where neoconservative ideology appears in concrete clarity.
First, Brooks makes clear that he is not interested in merely managing the problem of terrorism, but rather in “prevailing” in the war in Afghanistan. He argues that “only the full counterinsurgency doctrine offers a chance of success,” but then proceeds to absurdly define population-centric counterinsurgency doctrine as one in which “small groups of American men and women are outside the wire in dangerous places in remote valleys, providing security, gathering intelligence, helping to establish courts and building schools and roads.”
Either Brooks is being cute here or demonstrating his ignorance. With one word — “small” — Brooks has utterly mischaracterized what counterinsurgency is all about.
Population-centric counterinsurgency is all about large numbers of American men and women, not small numbers. The promoters of COIN in Afghanistan have recently taken to including the Afghan National Army in the count of counterinsurgents, but the textbook — and as a result, obviously oversimplified — number of counterinsurgents you’d want in a place with a population, dysfunctional national government, and geography like Afghanistan pushes well up to around half a million. It is an extraordinarily resource- and labor-intensive endeavor. If you don’t believe me, perhaps you’ll take David Petraeus or David Kilcullen as authorities on the matter.
Brooks pushes his argument further, declaring that we possess only two choices in Afghanistan: “surrender the place to the Taliban or do armed nation-building.” One paragraph later, Brooks writes of the fight against terrorism that “we shouldn’t pretend we understand how this conflict will evolve.” That Brooks does not recognize the conflict between these views is telling. See Rory Stewart for more on the swashbuckling certainty like what Brooks is displaying.
Good News: 9/11 Didn’t ‘Change Everything’
On the eighth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on New York and D.C., things are going much better than most of us dared hope in the initial aftermath of that horrible day. We’re still a secure, prosperous, and relatively free country, and the fear-poisoned atmosphere that governed American politics for years after 9/11 has thankfully receded.
Not everyone’s thankful, however. Boisterous cable gabber Glenn Beck laments the return to normalcy. The website for Beck’s “9/12 Project” waxes nostalgic for the day after the worst terrorist attack in American history, a time when “We were united as Americans, standing together to protect the greatest nation ever created.” Beck’s purpose with the Project? “We want to get everyone thinking like it is September 12th, 2001 again.”
My God, why in the world would anyone want that? Yes, 9/12 brought moving displays of patriotism and a comforting sense of national unity, but that hardly made up for the fear, rage and sorrow that dominated the national mood and at times clouded our vision.
But Beck’s not alone in seeing a bright side to national tragedy. Less than a month after people jumped from the World Trade Center’s north tower to avoid burning to death, David Brooks asked, “Does anybody but me feel upbeat, and guilty about it?” “I feel upbeat because the country seems to be a better place than it was a month ago,” Brooks explained, “I feel guilty about it because I should be feeling pain and horror and anger about the recent events. But there’s so much to cheer one up.”
The Corporate Culture at Government Motors
David Brooks comes in for his share of criticism in these parts, but he has a very astute column today about the ways that government ownership will worsen an already problematic corporate culture at a once-great company:
Fifth, G.M.’s executives and unions now have an incentive to see Washington as a prime revenue center. Already, the union has successfully lobbied to move production centers back from overseas. Already, the company has successfully sought to restrict the import of cars that might compete with G.M. brands. In the years ahead, G.M.’s management will have a strong incentive to spend time in Washington, urging the company’s owner, the federal government, to issue laws to help it against Ford and Honda.
Sixth, the new plan will create an ever-thickening set of relationships between G.M.’s new owners — in government, management and unions. These thickening bonds between public and private bureaucrats will fundamentally alter the corporate culture, and not for the better. Members of Congress are also getting more involved in the company they own, and will have their own quaint impact.
The end result is that G.M. will not become more like successful car companies. It will become less like them.
Cleveland Park Embraces Free Markets
Cleveland Park, an upscale neighborhood here in the District of Columbia, might be the last place you would expect appeals to the principles of the free market. It is, after all, the home of what David Brooks once called ”Ward Three Morality,” an outlook that celebrates government control of the economy. But not always.
Recently an entrepreneur proposed opening a new wine store in Cleveland Park. He sought the support of the advisory neighborhood commission, a local government board, before making his case for a liquor license to DC’s Alcohol Beverage Control Board. The most serious opposition to the entrepreneur’s plans seems to have come from an existing wine store nearby. According to its attorney, the existing wine store was “a beloved extension of the community.” More candidly he noted the new store would offer competition to the existing business. At this point, you might think: the Cleveland Park commission blocked opening of the new business while congratulating themselves on protecting the town from a ruthless “capitalist logic.”
Well, not quite. Peter Fonseca, the lawyer for the entrepreneur, reportedly “urged the commissioners to consider free-market principles when making their decision. ‘This is America.’” And they did: “Commissioner Richard Rothblum agreed, saying commissioners should not get in the way of free enterprise. ‘I don’t think we have any place telling people what their business plan should be.’” The commission then voted 8-0 to support the entrepreneur’s effort at the Alcohol Control Board. The appeal to “free market principles” seems to have carried the day in Cleveland Park!
Perhaps this is only the beginning. If the free market is desirable for fine wines, why not the auto industry and the banks?
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