Too much certainty and not enough good faith and understanding in American politics and the world
Sebastian Malaby has a great column on the lack of trust in America and a reference to Francis Fukuyama's new book, Trust, in the Washington Post, today, that I think sums up a lot of the problems in American and international politics, these days.
I've been really frustrated with the hubris of liberal journalists, activists, and politicians in America, these days. I've read liberal after liberal completely convinced of their own strategies to resolve situations in Iraq, Iran, North Korea, among other issues, these days, without a serious enough humility about the limitations of theorizing versus complicated practical realities that has me seriously appreciating principled conservatives, right now. Especially the conservative principles of prudence and an appreciation for human limitations in a world perpetually beyond human understanding.
Andrew Sullivan is the first person I turned to because I'm pretty convinced that he is perhaps the best conservative journalist in America, right now, and is working on being one of the finest conservative thinkers in the world with his new book, The Soul of Conservativism, where he is attempting to craft an organized theory of conservative ideas and ideals that looks very promising, right now.
This recent entry citing Ghandi epitomizes why I appreciate Andrew so much.
On so many issues, Andrew's thinking and mine are fairly indistinguishable. Hate crimes against gays and African Americans and women (Andrew is gay and has been diagnosed with AIDS since 1993) are terrible things. But they also criminalize thought (while a violent or non-violent crime already exists to cover violence or destruction of property), which is a more serious problem than the hate crime, itself. Campaign finance reform is a laudable goal with a ineffective and unconstitutional means. Faith and reason are not only consistent, they are inseparable, in reality.
Andrew's consistent criticism of the Administration on its conduct of the war very early on, while supporting the President and the troops in a successful mission, his criticism of the President around its torture policies, and his support for John Kerry in the 2004 election are very powerful indicators of just how long Andrew has understood how seriously the Administration has misunderstood its position in Iraq.
I have work to do and don't have the time to go into all of Andrew's virtues as a human being or over the course of this war or his more libertarian conservative tendencies that I share, but suffice it to say that I think Andrew is perhaps one of the most principled and decent conservatives in America and in the world, today.
George Will is another favorite of mine. Andrew calls him "the best conservative writer in America today." I think George is most certainly among the best if not the best conservative journalist in the America, today. But I think Andrew may be a slightly more powerful thinker of the two. Francis Fukuyama and is one of the finest conservative thinkers I know. Francis is a policy scholar with some really powerful original policy work, e.g. multi-multilateralism. David Gergen is one of the most principled conservative thinkers and political advisors I have ever come across, with tenures in Democratic and Republican Administrations and with serious insight into American and international politics. I've always suspected that John Keegan, who is one of the finest military historians I've ever read, is a conservative, though I have never read any of his work that openly acknowledges my assumption and suspicion, and realize, today, that he, like I, may want to be thought of as an independent thinker more than an one with a particular ideological commitment. George Will and Andrew Sullivan are two of finest conservative thinkers and writers I know in America and beyond and are two of the finest thinkers and writers, period, that I know.
George's recent pieces, The Triumph of Unrealism, Questions to Guide an Exit Policy, and Togetherness in Baghdad are three of the most powerful I have seen written about the war in recent months.
William F. Buckley is another very important conservative journalist, thinker, and writer, as is John Derbyshire, Jonah Goldberg, Charles Krauthammer (though Charles' arrogance has always seriously put me off), and a million other conservative journalists and thinkers that I don't have time to reference, right now, since I'm working on deadlines.
Sebastian Malaby is a liberal whose columns have impressed me lately and there a million other liberals besides him. And Peter Beinart, of The New Republic, always has great things to say. Benjamin Barber is one of the finest international policy scholars in the business.
But right now is a period of serious hubris on the part of liberals as they are swooping in for a election upset and as their analysis gets distorted by their desire to force conservatives out of office.
If only liberals had all the answers. Or conservatives, for that matter. It would make this election and every election so much easier, wouldn't it? It would life so much easier, wouldn't it?
Alas, that world does not exist. And believing that it does is often more dangerous the plain fact that it doesn't.
I have identified as a liberal most of my life, so I think it's particularly important to criticize liberals when they are most power-hungry. I'm not a liberal, exclusively, these days, any more than I am a Christian, exclusively, these days. I am a liberal and a conservative and a Christian and a Jew and a Buddhist and a Hindu and a Muslim and an agnostic and an atheist and a secular humanist and whatever ideas that I damn well please to draw from.
I am an independent thinker, first and foremost. And a human being who identifies with and cares about other human being before that.
But when I read yet another arrogant liberal column about the war in Iraq and how much better liberals know what to do with that mess of a situation -- this most recent Trudy Rubin piece is case in point -- which they so plainly don't, necessarily, though there are many fine liberals and conservatives who have many good and not so good ideas about how to improve the situation in Iraq...
It all makes me seriously appreciate thoughtful conservatives like Andrew and George who, unlike Trudy Rubin or David Ignatius, at least have the balls to say that they don't necessarily know what to do to make the situation in Iraq better, but that thinking about how to improve the situation is a commitment that people can feel no matter what ideological gods they worship.
There are far too many great liberal thinkers and writers out there to count. Joe Nye is perhaps the best international policy scholar I have ever read. Amartya Sen is not only a Nobel Prize winning economist, he is one of the finest writers on international issues I have ever read. And Abraham Maslow, though dead, had as much influence on my thinking as any living liberal or otherwise writer. And Desmond Tutu is one the most thoughtful liberal leaders of this generation, I believe.
But the hubris of too many liberal writers, activists, and politicians, right now, in the efforts to check the hubris of the conservative Administration, but to offer very few substantial ideas to constructively deal with the problems they face -- other than to rationalize a liberal or Democratic take-over -- is really out of control, right now.
So it's nice to take a moment and appreciate why it is so important to have principled conservatives as well as liberals contributing to the public discussion, right now.
Good faith and understanding are in seriously short supply in America politics, right now. The wells of good faith are growing, but they are surrounded by a desert of cynicism and hubris and shortsightedness fueled by a far too confident commitment to pressure and force and superior power to resolve serious problems in the world. Democrats are eagerly awaiting a taste of that superior power, undaunted by a Republican party whose capture of power in all three branches of the U.S. government were unable to tackle successfully most of the very serious issues that they care about resolving. Democrats and liberals are better people, goes the reasoning. They aren't as corrupt. They aren't as rich. They know which power works and which power doesn't. And a million other rationalizations for power -- whether it resolves problems or not -- that liberals and Democrats are engaged in, right now -- which ignores the plain fact that, like every other period in humanity's history, this is a period of dissolving and disintegrating power, not force as a final solution.
Like the Roman Empire of antiquity, Great Britain at the beginning of the 20th century, and the Soviet Union at the turn of the 21st century (without equivocation between a power whose debates and traditions introduced the world to principles of civilization and protections for individual rights and a state committed to its own power over and above the freedom of its citizens), the United States is facing a dissolution of its power in world politics, as is the capacity for any group or government to willfully and arbitrarily use force to advance particular causes.
Such a dissolution doesn't mean that the United States is impotent in the field of international policy. It means that its power is derived from exactly where it should be derived: its ideals and its ideas. Force is a capacity that has power insofar as it is animated by better ideas about its use and about its limitations, including and especially a recognition that it should be used as little as possible, not as a bludgeoning tool to be wielded with every good (or bad) cause.
I have a lot to do and not enough time to elaborate on this, right now. But suffice it to say that I'm thinking a lot about our lack of humility in our own capabilities and our lack of faith in the good intentions of others, right now.
Conservatives are being appropriately humbled, right now, by the failures of this Administration and by a conservative monopoly on Federal power in America to resolve so many problems that conservatives care about.
Liberals are now also in need of a serious humbling. And their hubris is discouraging in the face of such serious problems in need of more humble and deeply considered thought rather than all-too-certain strategies for forcing our way to victory.
We need more humility and faith and understanding in politics and in the world, right now. Without it, we will continue to make similar mistakes as this Administration and as is par for the course for humanity in the face of deeply misunderstood challenges.
It is nice to note that many, many thinkers, right now, are working in that direction.
Love,
Ben
2 comments:
I agree with a lot of what you are saying, but I think we all need a new vocabulary to discuss some of these issues and writers more clearly...
A few nights ago I watched a documentary on HBO re: Barry Goldwater. It was assembled by his granddaughter and was a very positive exposition of the man.
Although I did think the doc. tended to intentionally underlook/understate some of Goldwater's chief weaknesses as a thinker (particulary re: the nature and use of nuclear weaponry), it did one thing very well... It made it quite clear that the "conservatives" of today share very little with the vision of the movement's most visible and successful pre-Reagan champion.
Goldwater wanted to keep the government out of the God business, the censorship racket and your neighbor's uterus. His brand of conservatism isn't one with which I agree on a variety of levels, but it was an intellectually honest perspective. Whether people, "in their heart, knew he was right," they certainly knew where he stood and why he stood there.
Unfortunately, as his run vs. Johnson illustrated, that kind of "true" conservatism was great for building a core following and influencing aspects of overall party policy, but it wasn't anything close to being enough to win a national election.
The GOP co-opted enough of that brand of conservatism to keep Barry's crowd in voting for the R candidates, but couldn't really get the job of winning elections done until it decided to play the family values game, too.
Going to bed with the moral majority was a betrayal of much of what Goldwater, et al, preached. It led to policies and platforms that were absolutely incompatible with BG conservatism and that directly contradicted the principles at its core.
Now, "conservative" tends to mean pro-life, pro-death penalty, pro-whatever crazy fucking military adventure anyone with an R after his name concocts, pro-tax cut, anti-social program, and anti-challenges to traditional family structures, etc. Conservative is synonymous with being against gay marriage and in favor of trying to track down and kill every last terrorist by any means necessary, even though you might be growing 'em faster than you can harvest them.
So, when you name your favorite conservative journalists, you are both making a point and, perhaps incidentally, ignoring another one.
You are pointing out that conservative thinkers can be brilliant and can make cogent arguments. That's good.
You are also inadvertently giving more credit to contemporary "conservatism" than it deserves. The guys you mentioned have all broken ranks with BushCo on Iraq and other initiatives. They don't represent "mainstream conservatism" as it is usually practiced.
George Will may be a fine writer and he has carried plenty of water for the R-crew over the years, but his perspective on Iraq is well off the beaten "coservative" path. Andrew Sullivan is the kind of conservative that most conservatives wouldn't have over for dinner. Buckley is Buckley and I think you give him too much credit (we can talk about that some other time).
Anyway, my point is that the semantics of politics matters and when you, as someone who is trying to make a difference, says "hey, here are conservatives who have it together," you really have to be explicit in stating that those guys are mavericks. Otherwise, you risk giving too much credibility to the portion of the self-identifying conservative crowd that doesn't deserve it.
And yes, the opposite is true, too. When you mention the more astute liberals out there making sense, it is incumbent to indicate that those wise folk are straying from what is really the mainstream, "vote for it in November" version of liberalism.
The D's, as a party, have hijacked meaningful liberalism and converted it into a point-scoring election strategy, just like the R's.
The one thing most of the liberals and conservatives writing on politics today and running for election next month have in common is that they lack the very thing the good guys on both sides have--intellectual honesty. That and a willingness to think in larger, more meaningful terms.
Carson,
I agree it's true that there is a whole swath of both less than intellectually honest and less than intellectually committed conservatives and liberals, out there, who are just looking to win power and elections because they're just so sure that they are right because they aren't being challenged and because they aren't challenging themselves.
But I do think that those folks end up following liberals and conservatives who are more intellectually honest and who do engage in the more challenging thinking and conversation. If you listen to dumbass conservatives, they generally mimic, at some level, what they they can understand from smarter conservatives. And the same is true amongst liberals.
But I don't think Andrew or George or Francis Fukuyama or David Gergen are out of step with mainstream conservatives. I just think they lead with their intellectual honesty. And liberals like Joe Nye and Amartya Sen or David Broder or even John Stewart do the same amongst liberals, I think (in fact, John Stewart's leadership, given some unpopular positions he and the Daily Show took when that show first started illustrate the point, pretty well, more recently, I think).
My frustration is that there are a lot of liberals, right now, who are smelling blood because they've muscled their way to power, and they are confusing winning power with resolving problems. Republicans suffered from that confusion until recently when they became more convinced that they were going to lose in this election. But the clear, plain reality, whether they wanted to face it or not, was that winning power in the Federal Government did not resolve the problems they cared about: the budget deficit, free trade, national security, etc.
I, like you, find a lot of deep and abiding wisdom in liberal thought, especially the strongest thought. But I don't believe, anymore, that they have a monopoly on that wisdom. There is much deep and abiding wisdom in conservative thought, as well, and folks like Andrew and George both draw upon that more timeless wisdom (as with the more timeless wisdom of liberalism that folks like Nye and Sen and Maslow draw upon) and they both add to that well of wisdom, I think. I learn a lot almost every time I read Will. And I learn a lot almost every time I read Sullivan. I don't always agree with them. I think both of them can be kind of suspicious and cynical, at times, which bothers me when I read it. But if that dominated their work, there wouldn't be much to yield from their writings.
The truth is that most dumbasses --liberal, conservative, radical, communist, anarchist, fundamentalist, facist, Nazi or neo-Nazi, Islamist, whatever -- most people have no fuckin' clue what they think. And too many of the absolutists of every stripe may know what they think, but it's typically one long excuse for why they are better than everyone else and why they therefore have every right to a royal prick to everyone else and to control them for their own purposes.
Almost everyone I read, Carson -- liberal or conservative -- has something of that impulse in them. But the best writers have less of it and have more thought and more realistic assessments of the world and more deep and abiding wisdom and insight to offer.
I'm obviously not arguing that conservatives have a monopoly on that kind of wisdom -- especially since I've traditionally listed three liberals -- Joe Nye, Amartya Sen and Abraham Maslow -- as my three most serious intellectual forbearers. I would include many conservatives on my long list and I would include Francis Fukuyama, Thomas Hobbes, John Stuart Mill (whose strong advocacy of the death penalty definitely puts him in a more conservative camp than I on that issue), Edmund Burke, Milton Friedman, Terry Moe and John Chubb, John McWhorter, Shelby Steele, Thomas Sowell and a whole host of conservatives, as well, on my shorter lists, these days.
I've got a million liberals I could add to that short list, as well (though when you add a million, it makes it difficult to call it a short list, anymore:). Benjamin Barber, Stephen Ambrose, James McPherson, Paul Peterson, Paul Hill, Paul Light, Sarah Lawrence Lightfoot, Madeleine Albright, Bill Clinton, Mary Wolstencraft, George Orwell, Mohatma Ghandi, Martin Luther King, Henry David Thoreau, Harper Lee and so many others I can hardly count. The list goes on forever, really. It's just that I've been less acknowledging of conservative insight because I've been a liberal most of my life.
And this period, in particular, has just convinced me that shortsightedness and pettiness and retributiveness and mean-spiritedness and smallness of vision is not something that any group has a monopoly on. And neither are the million virtues that I think are important among people and among thinkers. It really is a matter of individuals and what they do with their lives and thinking and commitments in life, I think, anymore. I've seen way too many liberals who were mean-spirited cowards, as an adult, and way too many conservatives who were kind and intelligent in my adulthood to hold any stereotypes, anymore.
I feel like what many whites and blacks must have imagined were their stereotypes of one another as children, only to have them challenged in adulthood.
When I was a kid, liberals were the nice guys, the smart guys, and the good guys. I literally assumed that if teachers or adults were nice and smart that they must be liberal, because that was my only template for looking at the world. And as I got older, I started to figure out that that wasn't true. And that many of the people I assumed were liberals because they were nice, smart, or good may have in fact been conservatives and often were conservatives who just also happened to be nice, smart and good people. And that many people who were real pricks or stubbornly ignorant identified as liberal and voted Democratic. It was the quite the eye-opener for me, leaving grad school and meeting so many different people.
I don't know. You know how it is, Carson. I still tend to see a lot of people who are more confident and laid back as liberal, although that's not always true as a million laid-back, decent country music stars who happen to be conservative constantly challenge that stereotype for me. And a lot of stuffed shirts still "seem" conservative in an intangible way that you can get a sense of without having someone say they are conservative. But, as an adult, I've met a lot of stuffy liberals who are kind of stuffed shirts about social matters and just really big on economic equity issues. So all of my stereotypes have gone out the window, in the last 5 years or so, as I meet more people from different backgrounds, ideological and otherwise.
Not all conservatives back the President. And not all liberals are big President haters (if I hold any liberal credentials at all, I am probably the President's biggest fan among that set, largely because I think he is a decent guy, down deep, who, in addition to doing a lot of good things, has just been fuckin' a lot of shit up out of ignorance and arrogance, but not because of bad intentions, necessarily).
I don't know, Carson. I don't think the types are useful anymore.
I better post this before I lose this. To be continued.
Ben
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