Category: Keepers

I have to say that one of the most depressing features of the decline of conservative thinking in the US has been the resistance to the overwhelming data behind carbon and climate change. I don’t get it, however much I try. Check out Jon Chait’s takedown of George Will’s and Charles Krauthammer’s “arguments” on the subject. It’s deeply dispiriting. And it helps explain why the GOP is such an extreme outlier among right-of-center parties in the Western world on this issue.

There is an obvious role for conservatism here at every stage. I favor maximal skepticism toward scientific theories that might prompt us to change our lives and societies in radical ways. If there were any use for a conservatism of doubt, it would be to counter such over-reach. The calls for skepticism in this field are absolutely legitimate, given the scale of the consequences. I also favor maximal skepticism in figuring out the best way to deal with such change – a debate well worth having, but which has languished because the US right won’t even agree to the premise.

But the truth is: on this question, scientific skepticism has been abundant, while the data on the core reality continues to mount. In many ways, the skeptics have garnered more media attention than the climate-change consensus-mongers. And of course there’s always a chance that we’ll stumble upon some new evidence or theory that would throw this entire edifice into doubt (it happens). And it would be awesome. But, at this point, the overwhelming scientific consensus is clear enough, and the argument behind it powerful. The world’s climate is changing; and it will mean huge challenges for humanity’s habitat. I simply cannot see why any sane person would not wish to try and mitigate that change or prepare for such an eventuality. It’s not about ideology so much as simple prudence. Even if you view the likelihood of a much warmer planet as small, its huge potential impact still makes it worth confronting. Low-probability-high-impact events are like that. And conservatives, properly understood, attend to such contingent problems prudently; only ideologues or fools decide it would be better to do nothing and hope for the best.

More to the point, the efforts to counter climate change are mainly win-win. If solar power could run the planet, wouldn’t that be great?

So why all the mockery? If we managed to discover a new low-carbon fuel that would provide us with energy at minimal environmental cost, why wouldn’t that also be a wonderful thing? Ditto wind power or carbon capture technologies. Sure there will be waste and dead ends in a green economy. We should be attuned to that as well as the need to mitigate change for the fossil fuel industries, and the people who work in them, as best we can. But there will be lots of technological and economic gains as well. So I just don’t see the core reason for conservative resistance. (Cue the groan chorus from Corey Robin, et al.)

Then there is the fashionable tendency among conservatives to describe the habits of mind of environmentalists as alien or weird: i.e. the Greens are like the early Nazis in their love of nature; enviros treat the planet as a God; it’s all about therapy; or some secular version of sin. These observations can carry some insight, of course (the Nazis were pretty green), as well as some cheap points. Here’s what Krauthammer came up with on that theme:

And you always see that no matter what happens, whether it’s a flood or it’s a drought, whether it’s one — it’s warming or cooling, it’s always a result of what is ultimately what we’re talking about here, human sin with the pollution of carbon. It’s the oldest superstition around. It was in the Old Testament. It’s in the rain dance of the Native Americans. If you sin, the skies will not cooperate. This is quite superstitious, and I’m waiting for science which doesn’t declare itself definitive but is otherwise convincing.

Okaaay. Sure, there may well be patterns of thought among climate change scientists that echo or mimic other social movements. It’s a meme-ridden world. I’m sure some climate change scientists have beards and smoke weed and like “Orange Is The New Black”. Others may love classical music or be crypto-socialists. But that’s not an argument about the data. It’s an argument about style and culture and habits of thought behind the data. The data exist independently of all of that. And no set of evidence declares itself “definitive” either, as Krauthammer asserts. All of the evidence is obviously ongoing and more data will emerge, and more reports will be published and better understanding will result. That’s how science works. And over time, theories that work better prevail. That’s called the scientific method – and skepticism is embedded in it at almost every stage.

And that’s where we are. No amount of denial or distraction can change that fact. Either we adjust or we face the consequences. Or both. But pretending we live on another planet in another era does not seem to me to be a conservative position. It is, in Chait’s words, “absolutely bonkers.”

It’s not just a problem with the GOP. It’s an increasingly knotty problem for the British Tories, now trying to manage the rise and rise of the anti-immigrant United Kingdom Independence Party (a rough version of the US Tea Party). Alex Massie notes:

As I pointed out yesterday, the Tory share of the BME [Black and Minority Ethnic] vote in 2010 was exactly the same as their share of the vote in Scotland: 16%. True, this was an improvement on 2005 when only 11% of BME voters endorsed Conservative candidates but that’s a matter of only modest solace for Tory modernisers … Immigration is what you might term a Gateway Issue. You need to get past it before you can speak about other issues of more immediate concern to voters’ actual lives. You need to earn the right to be listened to. You need license to be heard. You need standing.

The discomfort of British Conservatives with immigration is not as easily conflated with racism as in the US. UKIP’s focus is as much on European immigrants (4,000 a week – exercizing their right to work and live where they choose in the EU) as on South Asian or Middle Eastern immigrants. And it speaks to something that I think is sometimes crudely over-looked in this debate. Conservatives in general are more attached to the status quo than liberals, more suspicious of radical change, especially when it seems to be an ideological imposition by empowered elites. And so to live in a small town which has been ethnically and culturally very English for centuries and then to see in a matter of years a sudden and palpable Polish immigrant population that instantly changes the entire cultural dynamic will inevitably lead to bewilderment, anger, loss. It’s also true that Britain, in comparison with the US, is a tiny island, with limited resources and land. Remember also that European immigrants will almost immediately be eligible for treatment in the National Health Service and many other state benefits, and you can see why this is an issue.

And so conservatives are in a bind. They would like, in some ways, to reverse history – to never have had the 1986 amnesty in the US, or to have never agreed to enter the EU. But both those changes are effectively irreversible without incurring further massive subsequent changes which would disturb the status quo even more profoundly. And conservatives have a hard time making their legitimate case for cultural stability without seeming like bigots. It’s the same thorny problem with marriage equality: a discomfort with change but an inability to offer a viable, workable alternative, which leads to an understandable assumption that all opposition to gay marriage is mere rancid KKK-style hate.

And this is an eternal conservative problem.

Conservatism at its best is an imaginative attempt to balance stability and change in a manner which makes a society more coherent, more itself. When change happens swiftly, that balance is all the more necessary but also more difficult. At some point, mass immigration or a multi-cultural society or a gay-integrated world becomes the status quo to which conservatives will become attached. But in the meantime, they are pinioned emotionally between past and future and have not found leaders in either the US or the UK that have risen to the occasion of bridging the two. Fear and anger have thereby increasingly defined the new conservative center. And it’s currently a lose-lose proposition.

In part because I’m an immigrant and gay and live in a historically black city which is increasingly integrated, my own conservatism is of the much more moderate kind. Perhaps because I am not so threatened by racial and cultural change, I saw Obama as a quintessentially small-c conservative, a living blend of black and white, a realist abroad, a pragmatist at home, an integrator rather than a polarizer. I was an outlier, we now know. But at some point, that more moderate conservatism – one that actively celebrates a multi-cultural society as a traditional American value – will win. The question is simply how tortuous the path to that future will be. Which is why we are searching the landscape for a future Republican leader who gets this (and keep bumping into versions of Ted Cruz) and searching for a British Conservative who can do the same (and sussing out Boris).

(Illustrations: two posters for UKIP in the European elections on May 22.)

[Re-posted from earlier today]

My old friends at The Economist have their nickers in a twist (look it up) about the loss of American “credibility” because there has been no military response to Ukraine, little follow-up in Libya, and a crossed red line in Syria. The leader (look it up) makes some vague and confusing statements along the way. It argues that “international norms, such as freedom of navigation, will be weakened,” if the US doesn’t somehow throw its weight around more, while simultaneously acknowledging that “America towers above all others in military spending and experience.” They concede that on Ukraine, military force would be insane and Germany and Britain have made stronger sanctions impossible as of now; they also misstate what happened in Syria. They claim that “The Syrian dictator [used chemical weapons], and Mr Obama did nothing.” Nothing? So how is it that Syria has now peacefully relinquished almost all of its chemical stockpile? And wasn’t resolving that question – and not the broader problem of Syria’s sectarian implosion – the entire point of the threatened strike? Are we supposed to prefer an option that would have dragged the US into the Syrian vortex and not guaranteed any actual success to a policy that kept us out but largely solved the problem?

The first thing to say about this is that The Economist is fundamentally a British paper. It has a vast US readership, but its DNA is British. And being British for the past several decades has meant being reliant on the US to protect its security. Of course the Brits want the US policing every nook and cranny of the world. They don’t have to pay for it; yet they get to enjoy its fruits. They argue, of course, that these are fruits for America as well. And so they are. And if anyone were even thinking of reducing America’s maintenance of international trade routes, for example, they might have a point. But policing the world with the US military is not cost-free at all – either fiscally or in more basic human terms.

Think of the Vietnam War and the Iraq War – both conceived under the influence of the hubristic fumes and the idiocy of the “credibility argument: (see Peter Beinart’s take on that particular fallacy here). Look at the country’s debt – a huge amount of which can be traced to the military-industrial complex that Eisenhower warned us so presciently about, and one that went on steroids in the first decade of this century. And look at average living standards – stagnant for three decades at least in some part because of globalization. You can argue that the US should not withdraw from the world (and I would) – but withdrawal from the world is not the same thing as prudent and sensible recalibration of resources in a debt-racked, over-extended and thereby less effective country on the world stage.

We are not, pace The Economist, still living in the post-Cold War era, when the US ran a surplus. We are living in a post-post-Cold War era where America owes inconceivable sums to China, a soon-to-be-bigger economic power. And if you want to see American influence really decline, then the best way to do that is to maintain unsustainable over-reach. You’d think Brits would have taken this lesson to heart, since that was one core reason they lost their empire as well. And history is littered with the demise of other over-stretched powers, like the Soviet Union or Imperial Spain. The future is littered with other potential over-reach victims, the most obvious of which is Greater Israel, run by many of the same neocons who drove the US into a ditch only a few years ago.

More to the point, it seems increasingly clear to me that this post-post-Cold War era is one destined to last for the foreseeable future. And the fundamentals of that era are increasingly opposed to the concept of American global hegemony.  No one can police the world today as the US did in the 20th Century. The rationale of the world’s policeman has thus radically changed. As Millman notes in a superb piece:

The rise of Japan was followed by the rise of smaller east Asian states and now the rise of the Asian mega-states, China and India. Latin America and the Muslim Middle East have grown into substantial regions, demographically and economically, and are no longer obviously under Western control (or even influence). Africa’s demographic momentum, meanwhile, will carry that continent to far greater prominence by the end of the century than it has ever achieved before.

Not only are these other powers much stronger relative to the US – an inevitable function of the success of US foreign policy in the past – but they don’t accept America’s right to dictate the contours of the global order. Russia is the most obvious example, right now. But that was the deepest lesson of the Iraq catastrophe: the Iraqis didn’t actually want the things that Americans (including me) reflexively thought they wanted. They live by different values and different priorities. The [indigenous] sect beats the [imperial] nation every time; and authoritarianism trumps democracy every time. And our attempt to force them to be live by Bill Kristol’s values only guaranteed the failure.

America’s reflexive belief that its way of the world is superior to everyone else is also increasingly, tragically, attenuated.

It will take decades to recover from the state-authorized torture and detention policies of the Bush administration and the Obama administration’s refusal to adhere to the Geneva Conventions. American democracy is widely seen across the world (and not without reason) as an oligarchy of the super-rich; its Republican hinterlands are regarded as a repository of know-nothingness; its virulent opposition to providing access to healthcare for all is seen a psychosis; its NSA is viewed as a threat to allies; its police-state airport borders the sign of a society less free than many in Western Europe. And there is no Soviet Union to point to when America is challenged on these grounds. The alternative is not obviously much worse.

Now you can go on pretending that this hasn’t happened – and isn’t still happening – as the Economist and the Beltway hand-wringers do. You can topple the Libyan regime on humanitarian grounds, just as in the olden days (except Reagan was much less interventionist). But you’ll leave a nest of Jihadists in your wake. But all this has happened – and America’s collapsing infrastructure has become an emblem of a polity in steep decline. Obama has mitigated this to a heroic extent – but the underlying reality remains. We have to let go of control; we have to stop seeing every crisis in the world as one that America has to resolve; we have to tend to ourselves before we lecture to anyone else. And this the American people understand, as poll after poll tells us. And without the American people squarely behind it, no American foreign policy can succeed.

In the Ukraine crisis you see this most vividly. We supported the Maidan revolution but its practical effect has been to render order and peace throughout the country close to non-existent. Ukraine’s reformers have some responsibility for their predicament. They pissed away the post-Soviet era in rampant corruption, military decline, and economic stagnation. They removed a democratically elected government by violence, something inimical to any hope for democratic reform. They have no coherent plan for resisting Putin’s foul expansionism. Like Morgan Stanley, they expect to be bailed out – and that helped create this crisis. I’m far from exonerating Putin. But if we fail to see the arguments behind the propaganda of the other side, we will fail.

Of course, this process of letting go will be anxiety-producing. Relative decline is never easy for a hegemon, especially one drunk on the fumes of its own self-love. There will be a backlash. But you’ll notice how few of the current critics of Obama’s vastly under-rated foreign policy don’t actually have much to say specifically about how they would better defuse these myriad ructions across the globe (and they are mere ructions compared to the past, it’s worth remembering). At some point they will begin to see that their lack of alternatives is a function of something other than their nemesis in the White House. And at some point, one can only hope, they’ll grow up.

Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal poll on foreign policy made for a stark contrast with the growing consensus among the chattering classes about president Obama’s foreign policy. Here’s MoDo channeling the frustration of many and addressing herself directly to Obama:

You are the American president. And the American president should not perpetually use the word “eventually.” And he should not set a tone of resignation with references to this being a relay race and say he’s willing to take “a quarter of a loaf or half a loaf,” and muse that things may not come “to full fruition on your timetable.”

An American president should never say, as you did to the New Yorker editor, David Remnick, about presidents through history: “We’re part of a long-running story. We just try to get our paragraph right.” Mr. President, I am just trying to get my paragraph right. You need to think bigger.

A great line. Until you ask yourself what exactly does she mean by thinking bigger. The closest MoDo comes is the following:

Especially now that we have this scary World War III vibe with the Russians, we expect the president, especially one who ran as Babe Ruth, to hit home runs.

Home-runs, please is not exactly a productive contribution to the discussion. What on earth would a “home-run” mean in Ukraine, for example? But this analysis misses one core fact: Americans, in polling, really do not want to be policing the world any more. Here’s one take-away from the WSJ poll:

That’s a record 47 percent favoring a less active foreign policy than Obama has conducted. As for the “scary World War III vibe” MoDo wants reassurance on, only 5 percent of Americans want the US out front alone on Ukraine. A quarter want to delegate the issue to the EU. And almost half want action only in cooperation with other countries. The decidedly non-interventionist public also strongly opposed a strike in Syria; wanted withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan; and still prefer, in record numbers, for the US president to focus on domestic affairs. More to the point, this non-interventionist consensus crosses party lines. Obama has, on most issues, stayed in line with popular opinion. That’s one key reason why Rand Paul has traction. And it’s one reason Hillary Clinton will be vulnerable if she appears to want to return to neocon reflexes.

The paradox, it seems to me, is that Americans also miss the glory days. They both want withdrawal from the world but feel nostalgic for the heady post-Cold War days of easy hegemony, a budget surplus and a global reputation not stained by military occupations and torture. Robert Kagan had a shrewd column a month ago on this strange confluence of a president pursuing popular policies and becoming unpopular as a result. Here’s the poll of polls on foreign policy for Obama:

The switch to disapproval happened about a year ago. Some of the subsequent shift may be due to the harsh criticism Obama received for not striking Syria after seeming to move toward it (even though the public wants to go to war in Syria like they want to abolish social security). Some of it may be due to Putin’s ugly machinations – prompting unreconstructed neocons like McCain to blame Obama for somehow encouraging it. The open wound of the Israel-Palestine question – where Obama has been very very active but without any progress at all – may also be a factor. But I suspect the bigger picture is that we’ve seen both an acceptance of a much more restrained America after the catastrophe of neocon governance and subsequent lingering unease about no longer being the sole superpower whose authoritah is always respected.

My view is that Obama has done about as good a job as possible in managing the core task of his presidency: letting self-defeating global hegemony go. That required a balancing act – of intervention where absolutely necessary and caution elsewhere. He prevented the world economy tipping into a second Great Depression, has maintained overwhelming military superiority and shored up Asian alliances even as he concedes, as we should, that China will be the dominant power in the region in the 21st Century. He rescued us from the Iraq and Afghanistan disasters, without chaos or immediate blowback. He’s successfully coordinating European responses to Russian aggression in Ukraine. It all adds up to the effective tending to a new era in which other countries and regions no longer accept American supremacy, and when US ideals – such as opposing torture – have been revealed as frauds.

This kind of pragmatic balancing act has none of the glory of the Cold War and a dispiriting (to some) element of retreat. But in many ways, this is inevitable. The staggering success of the West’s model in the last two decades is not one that can be sustained at the same pace. You don’t get to liberate Europe twice. And of course the biggest factors behind this new climate are the disastrous wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. They essentially revealed the US military as all-powerful on paper but inevitably insufficient to deal with sectarian hatred in the Muslim world, or running a “country” that cannot be run outside of a dictatorship or authoritarian figure. Even drones reached a point quite quickly at which their costs outweighed their benefits.

This is the essential context which makes sense of Obama’s pragmatic re-calibration of US foreign policy. What this picture reminds me of is the conventional wisdom about George H. W. Bush’s foreign policy at the time. In retrospect, his management of Soviet collapse was deeply under-rated, as was his decision not to invade Iraq. Like Obama, he saw China as a naturally emergent power to be coaxed rather than alienated. Like Obama, he tried and failed to move the Israelis out of their new project of Greater Israel. He was never going to be a Reagan, but in politics and world affairs, timing is everything. The difference, of course, is that Bush followed Reagan, whereas Obama followed the foreign policy equivalent of two terms of Jimmy Carter. So the bathos of pragmatism is all the more vivid this time around.

The one exception to this picture with respect to Obama is the overture to Iran. If he manages to resolve the nuclear issue in the next year, it will be a clear and revolutionary break from the past, as well as being the sanest approach to handling that poisonous but rational regime. But again, his success, if it occurs, will prompt more cat-calls from the neocons and loathing from the hard right. And it will not be greeted with the same relief as the end of the last Cold War, not least because the ayatollahs will remain in power, even if the landscape then shifts against them. Avoiding war is often not as popular as starting one. But it is what this country wants at this juncture in history, and it’s what the world needs. In the end, even queasy Americans may see the pragmatic sense in much of it. But they’ll keep it quiet if they do.

(Photo of Obama yesterday by Brendan Smialowski/Getty)