Category: The Dish

Fukuyama On Form

I have no doubt that Frank Fukuyama’s essay in the New York Times Magazine will prompt a lot of debate. For my part, I think he gets his analysis almost perfectly right. In retrospect, neoconservatives (and I fully include myself) made three huge errors in the last few years. The first was to over-estimate the competence of government, especially in extremely delicate areas like WMD intelligence. The shock of 9/11 provoked an understandable but still mistaken over-estimation of the risks we faced. And our fear forced errors into a deeply fallible system. The result was the WMD intelligence debacle, something that did far more damage to the war’s legitimacy and fate than many have yet absorbed. Fukuyama’s sharpest insight here is into how the near miracle of the end of the Cold War almost certainly lulled many of us into over-confidence about the inevitability of democratic change, and its ease. We got cocky. We should have known better.

The second error was narcissism. America’s power blinded many of us to the resentments that such power must necessarily provoke. Those resentments are often as deep among our global acquaintances as enemies – in fact, may be deeper. Acting without a profound understanding of the dangers to the U.S. of inflaming such resentment is imprudent. This is not to say we shouldn’t act at times despite them, unilaterally if necessary. Sometimes, the right thing to do will inevitably spawn resentment. We should do it anyway. But that makes it all the more imperative that we get things right, that we bend over backwards to maintain the moral high-ground, and that we make our margin of error as small as possible. The Bush administration, alas, did none of these things. They compounded conceptual errors with still-incomprehensible recklessness, pig-headedness and incompetence in preparing for the aftermath of Saddam.

The final error was not taking culture seriously enough. Fukuyama is absolutely right to note the discrepancy between neoconservatism’s skepticism toward’s government’s ability to change culture at home and its naivete when it comes to complex, tribal, sectarian and un-Western cultures, like Iraq’s, abroad. We have learned a tough lesson, and it’s been a lot tougher for those tens of thousands of dead innocent Iraqis and several thousand killed and injured American soldiers than it is for a few humiliated intellectuals. American ingenuity and pragmatism on the ground may be finally turning things around, but the original policy errors have made their work infinitely harder. The correct response to this is not more triumphalism and spin, but a real sense of shame and sorrow that so many have died because of errors made by their superiors, and by intellectuals like me.

What Next?

I’d also say that Frank gets it right again when he warns against too great an over-reaction to these failures. What we have done is done. The story of Iraq is just beginning, and we’d be nuts to predict catastrophe (almost as nuts as those who once predicted easy success). Democracy is vital for defanging Islamism in the Middle East, and whatever the real risk level of WMDs and terrorism, we have no alternative to patience. This will take a generation; and it will mean a period in which Islamists may well run countries and gain lethal weaponry. It will take huge skill on the part of our leaders to navigate this period without catastrophe. But the same could have been said for the early Cold War period as well.

I like Fukuyama’s distinction between Marxism and Leninism here – between the neocons who retained analytic distance and those who were eager to force historical change. But the real Leninists in this new millennium were not the neocons; they were the Islamists. Without 9/11, George W. Bush might still believe that China was our number one foreign policy challenge. Al Qaeda forced the historical process forward; we responded. A future conservative politics that both internalizes the importance of democratic change abroad, but is more attuned to the limits of military force and resilience of foreign culture is what we have to start building and re-thinking. I’d pay particular attention to repairing international institutions, restoring the executive branch’s respect for the rule of law, and ending the nightmare of torture. But we will forge no new approaches until we recognize our blatant errors in previous ones. Fukuyama does us all a favor by laying those errors out in full view.

What Blogs Are

A reader comments:

"The doomsayers [about blogs] remind me of those who in the early eighteenth century failed to understand the potential of the new form of mass media heralded by the Tatler and the Spectator–the magazine is still going strong nearly three centuries later. Anyway, these critics really ought to examine their assumptions. Why need anyone assume that "evanescence" makes something "dismal"? Few things are more evanescent than good conversation, yet few things are as good for the soul. It might be more illuminating to think of blogging as a superior form of conversation, rather than an inferior form of journalism."

That’s certainly how I view blogging and why I find it very congenial to my own worldview. I’m re-reading some Montaigne essays right now for my book. In the best translation, by Donald Frame, the text is littered with little letters, A, B, and C. These refer to different publications of the essays. Montaigne wrote and then re-wrote and re-wrote the essays again, adding layer upon layer to his own meanings. Sometimes, you can see how he is undermining one of his earlier arguments with a subsequent interpolation. At other times, he is embellishing them, or finessing them. He doesn’t remove words, he just adds. His philosophy is one of radical skepticism, and he floats his own ideas as provisionally as he assesses others.

Michael Oakeshott’s conservatism owes a huge amount to Montaigne (and Augustine), which is why one of Oakeshott’s central metaphors is exactly conversation. He believed that such a metaphor captures the dramatic, undetermined, spontaneous and organic association of people in free societies. And such an open-ended conversation is, of course, the exact opposite of fundamentalism, which, in its extreme forms, demands no interaction, merely submission to a sacred, pre-ordained text. That’s why blogging is a little retrovirus called freedom, unleashed into the wider world of media to replicate endlessly. And why the blogosphere’s very existence and potential power is one of freedom’s most potent allies in our generation’s war against fundamentalism. Churchill once spoke of sending the English language into battle. He saw it as a great weapon against tyranny. It still is – in print, but just as powerfully, in pixels.

Jimmy Carter Was Right

I thought that might grab your attention. I’m referring to one simple thing: a gas tax. Here’s an argument for why it makes sense. Money quote:

"Suppose a politician promised to reveal the details of a simple proposal that would, if adopted, produce hundreds of billions of dollars in savings for American consumers, significant reductions in traffic congestion, major improvements in urban air quality, large reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, and substantially reduced dependence on Middle East oil. The politician also promised that the plan would require no net cash outlays from American families, no additional regulations and no expansion of the bureaucracy."

Note that this proposal does not represent a net increase in taxation. It just shifts taxation around to encourage thrift and innovation. I fail to see why it’s so poisonous politically. But then I ride a bike and take public transportation. Yeah, I know: damn liberal.

Yglesias Award Nominee

"Bush has done real violence to the principle of limited government with all of his talk about how the government has to move when someone is hurting and his aim to leave no child behind. Some of his programs are, I think, easily defended on the merits. But that doesn’t change the fact that as general philosophical issue [sic], Bush has conceded that the government is there to help in a way Reagan never would have. Sure, Reagan made exceptions to his general anti-government position. Sometimes they were pragmatic, sometimes they were legitimate exceptions (conservatives aren’t uniformly opposed to all government interventions), and sometimes his deviations were hypocritical, at least in the eyes of some. But such hypocrisy was the tribute conservatives must sometimes pay to politics. Bush has conceded much of the fundamental ground to liberals when it comes to the role of government. Now the argument about governmental problem solving is technical — ‘will it work?’ — rather than principled, ‘is it the government’s job?’" – Jonah Goldberg, National Review.

Jonah said much of this before the last election. My own view is that this will soon become the conservative consensus, if it isn’t already. It will take a generation to undo the damage that Bush has done to conservatism, America’s fiscal health, and the whole idea of limited government. My prediction: we will see huge tax increases soon after Bush leaves the scene. He will insist they are a betrayal of his legacy. They will, in fact, be the logical consequence of everything he has said and done. Once they get past their loathing, big government liberals may well look back on the Bush years and wonder at the miracle of how he did what they spent two generations failing to do.

A Rabbi Joins In

Now, Moscow’s chief rabbi warns against a gay pride parade:

"Rabbi Lazar on Thursday said that anything promoting what he called ‘sexual perversions’ does not have the right to exist. ‘I would like to assure you, that the parade of homosexuals it is not less offensive to the feelings of believers than any caricatures in newspapers,’ Lazar said, linking the pride parade with the current furor over the cartoons of the Islamic Profit Mohammed published in Denmark."

Isn’t it amazing that the one thing that can unite Muslims, Jews and Orthodox Christians is hatred of gay people? Still: he didn’t advocate violence. That’s left to the Muslims.