Month: May 2006

The Euston Manifesto

Norm Geras launched it last night in London at a public meeting. He recalls what prompted this gathering of parts of the left to fight Islamo-fascism:

Beinart This brings me to a second end and beginning… It happened in the days immediately following 9/11. Not just simple-minded, but cold, shameful, appalling responses to the crime that had been perpetrated, parading across the pages of the liberal and left press. You know the terms of it: blowback; comeuppance; yes, a crime of course but… But what? But a crime to be contextualized immediately, just in case you might be unaware that it wasn’t the first or the worst crime in human history.

This kind of stuff, I regret to say, was coming principally from a part of the left. And in those few days, 12, 13, 14 September 2001, it became clear to me that this part of the left wasn’t a part one should have anything – or anything more, depending on where you were at the time – to do with if the left was to have a worthwhile future and merit anybody’s support.

Anyone who’s ever belonged to anything, as we all have – a family, a group, a club, a movement – will know that this involves having some quarrels. If you’re part of the left then you have your quarrels; and having been a part of the left all my adult life, I’ve had my share. But some things you quarrel about. About other things you draw a line.

And so parts of the left – including Peter Beinart’s upcoming book – refuse to be bystanders on the war against Islamist terror. If the Democrats are smart, they will follow their lead. We have real enemies out there; and they need to be uncovered, fought and killed before they kill us. And the primary victims of our enemies – ordinary Muslims across the Middle East – need our democratic support now as much as they ever have.

Clean Water or CO2

A reader writes:

Of course a global push for clean drinking water would alleviate far more human suffering than an effort to limit global warming.
We will look back on this period of history as an ugly brown stain in which we have the technology to erase water borne illnesses and we have had the technology for quite some time but still things are getting worse and worse as time goes on.
Regardless the point is, it doesn’t have to be one or the other, and suggesting so is nothing more than a cop out.

Bush, Blair, Iraq

They were different men last night – for the first time dropping all pretense that their occupation of Iraq has gone in any way according to non-existent plan. And in a strange way, that helps them. They both have expiration dates marked on their heads; they share this legacy; they remain committed to it, because they have no other realistic option. But their acknowledgment of the "ghastly" violence, their ownership of past mistakes, and the clear interest we all have in seeing the project succeed makes things in some ways less fraught. They get it now: bravado is not strength; realism is. I’m with Tom Friedman on this one. We’re three years in. Remember the Kurds? They were effectively liberated fifteen years ago. They experienced a brutal civil war before their society was able to gain some semblance of pluralist normality. The violence in Iraq was preventable – but it may also, in a horrifying way, have been a way to purge the society of the terrible grievances and divides that are the consequences of several decades of brutal dictatorship. Iraq is still the lever for real, profound change in the Middle East. It is our only real brake on Iran. It is the front line against Jihadism. Our job will not be finished in two more years; maybe not in twenty. But this is America. It can be done. Bringing the Arab and Muslim world into the new millennium is a pre-requisite for our own security and the world’s. We must finish the job.

The Last Word

In the latest round of bloggery about conservatism, I think Chait has it. My own view is that conservatism is fundamentally rooted in skepticism about the human mind and its capacity to change society. So it’s basically resistant to large-scale change, but, on the rare occasions that such change happens, is necessary and turns out okay, conservatives can live with it. Our skepticism is not absolute or ideological; it’s temperamental. Our belief in markets, for example, is not based on some idea that markets produce the most wealth. It’s based on the idea that markets devolve decision-making to the most personal, immediate level and so tend to minimize the risk of big, bad decisions, made by fallible, distant brains. Markets devolve decision-making to the people closest to the issue at hand and so lead to collective outcomes that best represent the actual choices of most people. It’s just a plus that they also generate more wealth than any other system yet devised. At the root of this is – yes – individual freedom. Why else would you want individuals’ personal choices best reflected in social or economic policy? Because individual liberty is what counts – because we can only fully know ourselves. The link between skepticism and freedom is a vital one.

In this sense, a conservative of the type I favor tends to be indifferent to things like economic growth. If faster growth were caused by a bigger government, a conservative would still back smaller government and individual freedom. Similarly, my hostility to a progressive income tax is because I believe it’s hubristic over-reach. Why should a government have the power to penalize some individuals for their relative success while rewarding others for relative failure? A government’s only concern should be raising revenue for the basic tasks of government; and it should do so by as neutral and fair a scheme as possible. Any more ambitious scheme should be queried and nit-picked until it dies. Any proposal designed to enforce some abstract notion of "social justice" would never pass the skeptical conservative’s sniff test. That’s why a conservative is also deeply suspicious of religious types in government, those keen on moralizing people according to their own views of what God thinks. Like socialism, Christianism is another form of big government hubris. Who are they to tell me what to do with my life? This is usually followed by two words dearest to the conservative heart: Buzz off.

In my upcoming book on conservatism, I put it this way:

There are many who often invoke the rhetorical bromides of "freedom" but, when pressed, acknowledge that no such thing really exists. The fundamentalist believes that humans have freedom – but only to choose the good; and he believes that a government dedicated to upholding that good, whether deduced from God or his own version of "nature", has every right, and, in fact, a duty to ensure that as many citizens as possible achieve that good. And so laws are designed to encourage virtue and discourage vice. Freedom is limited and conditional. A socialist will argue that freedom is an illusion to those people who begin with a material disadvantage, and that the state must act to remedy such a disadvantage before freedom can truly exist. The poor are not free, he argues. Those who are at the bottom of the heap of human inequality deserve substantive aid to equalize the system. And so he wants a system of redistributive justice to ensure "real" freedom.

A conservative, in contrast, will be skeptical of both arguments. He’ll want to know from the fundamentalist who exactly came up with this "good." He’ll ask why he should adhere to a view of virtue which is deduced from a religion he doesn’t share or from a "nature" he doesn’t recognize as his own. He’ll ask the socialist, in turn, why he is being forced to give up his own money and property for the sake an idea of substantive equality that sounds like a surreal fantasy to him. Who guarantees either vision – that of the virtuous or that of the substantively equal? And who says what is virtue? And by whose standard do we judge substantive equality? If inequality remains after redistribution, what then? And, by the way, how do we control a state that has the power to divest me of my income and wealth and property?

The conservative will just keep asking the questions; and will refuse to give up his freedom until he gets an answer that satisfies his skeptical soul. Which is to say, he will never stop asking; and so the political project based on virtue or substantive equality can never get started. The pesky conservative stands doggedly in the way, knowing what he doesn’t know, distrustful of those who claim to know better, querulous and quirky and always himself.

He’s really irritating, in other words. But a conservative’s natural orneriness is the cornerstone of Anglo-American liberty. And he has bossy, moralizing, certain foes to his right and to his left.

Families Unvalued

A reader writes:

It was ironic that you started to talk about bi-national gay couples while showing a picture of Cape Town. I’m an American who went to university in Cape Town and met my South African partner there. As graduation time came for me, we became worried what we were going to do, as we had been together for over a year and were (and still are) in love. My permanent address is in Connecticut, and we thought about entering into a civil union here, but then we realized it makes no difference because the Federal government doesn’t recognize civil unions, and immigration comes under the federal domain. South Africa is much more liberal in this respect.  It allows for gay and straight couples to enter into "life partnerships" for the purposes of immigration.  We seriously considered that route, but then my boyfriend received a scholarship to do his graduate degree in the states, so everything has worked out … for now at least.

We will most likely end up moving back to South Africa after we both finish grad school in the states. I’ll be leaving this country for South Africa in a few years time, as a gay refugee of sorts.

I hear more and more stories like this one. Heterosexual couples would never have to contemplate such a trauma. As soon as they get married, or even engaged, the immigration doors open. But gay people do not exist as far as the federal government is concerned. A great and definitive account of how bi-national gay families increasingly have to leave America to stay intact be found here.