Humanity limps ahead...
After a discussion I had with a leftist debater in Illinois who says that she might be voting for John McCain, my roommate and I have been talking a lot about different candidates for the 2008 election...
And I have to say that I am feeling more than a little underwhelmed by the various political candidates...
After John Kerry's failure to articulate ideas (other than a good but predictably safe idea of involving NATO in the effort in Iraq) to improve international policy, particularly in Iraq, I've kind of given up on the foolish notion that I can vote for a candidate who will at least oppose a bad policy without a more constructive solution...my worst protest vote was for Ralph Nader in 2000 (in a state where Al Gore could not win), who would have been a terrible President, really, even as I was frustrated with how money and power were wielded brazenly by the Democratic Leadership Council and the Democratic National Committee...
And while I believe in accepting the limitations of leaders and voting for a leader who offers the best option...I have to say that I'm more than a little underwhelmed, right now, by the various people being bandied about...
Like my debater friend, Hillary Clinton is kind of scary to me...she's the schoolmarm I don't need...her desire to regulate the video game industry and her complaining that the most educated younger generation in American history are lazy are just kind of indicative of a larger nanny complex of Ms. Clinton that I find really distasteful...I've got two moms...I don't need another one...and her "leadership" during Hurricane Katrina -- which consisted of investigating the FEMA effort rather than contributing to that effort from a very powerful and influential Senate position -- just kind of reflected for me what kind of leadership she has to offer...meaning a recriminatory leadership rather than a constructive one...we have plenty of recrimination in America...an overabundance, really...and I'm just not interested in recrimination being the centerpost of American policy...
John McCain does seem a better option, by comparison, at times...the fact that he cheated on his wife and knows what its like to be forgiven is a big plus for me, ironically...his favoring of legislation to relax obstacles for illegal aliens to live in the country with peace of mind is something that endears me to him...I don't believe in hard and fast rules on torture, after discussions about the issue with military friends who are concerned that such rules make military people subject to political prosecutions when even relatively humane interrogation practices are unpopular...and I agree with George Will that campaign finance regulation is a cure that is no cure for the problems of money and power and an infringement on free speech that has been abused, as it was by Common Cause in Russ Feingold's reelection in Wisconsin, and will be abused in the future...but I understand McCain's concern for these issues and share them...
The truth is that I know that both Hillary Clinton and John McCain have their hearts in the right places...as a long-time liberal, I'm just used to rooting for the Democrat and against the Republican, and this last round of radicalism on the left has just kind of absolved me of that feeling altogether...
Barak Obama's speech at the 2004 Democratic convention, as many of my Democratic friends promised, was a nice indicator of the kind of unifying leadership that Barak might provide, even as with the other candidates, I have differences with Barak about the direction of the country...
I guess what I want in a President and in a political leader is someone who is smart and has creative ideas about how to deal with problems like North Korea, Iran, Israel, Lebanon and the rest (if one candidate would talk in any depth about soft power, I think I would be impressed)...who might have creative ideas about how to transcend our various domestic divides in ways that get us to results and not just leave us mired in good intentions...
And I guess, most importantly, I just want political leaders who can both accept peoples' humanity, better...and stay out of mine and everyone elses' lives, so much...
I want political leaders who can respect the principle of self-governance in a democracy...of self-determination in international matters...of the need for individuals and sovereign jurisdictions and self-identifying groups to lead their lives and their communities without overweaning power limiting their self-governance...
I want political leaders who take freedom and democratic discussion seriously, and not just rhetoric to be manipulated for various individuals and groups to just get what they want...
I want political leaders who hold the very basic political notion that seems fundamental to a democracy to me, which is skepticism of power and a respect for the freedoms that are fundamental to a authentically democratic people...
Much of our problem in dealing with North Korea and Iran and the Middle East and much of the world, right now, in my view, is due to our failure to respect principles of self-determination and to convince North Koreans and Iranians and most of the world that we are genuinely fair brokers in international affairs who are not looking after our own interests at the expense of theirs...which of course we are doing, often, which is exactly why so many in the Middle East are suspicious of us, as the New York Times and International Herald Tribune led with today and that Marc Sirios of Lebanon's Daily Star makes clear in his brilliant editorial...
http://www.dailystar.com.lb//article.asp?edition_id=1&categ_id=1&article_id=74278
The truth is, I'm discovering these last 6 years, is that everyone hates the other guys' autocrat...but people all want their own strong man to make the world right by their own eyes...
Republicans hate Hillary Clinton's nanny state tendencies, but they'll jump for joy for President Bush's tough stances against international allies...Democrats hate President Bush's incursions on their civil liberties, but they want revolutionary action on nationalized health care...Americans hate Vladmir Putin's curbs on a free press and savvy Americans grow weary of Putin's ongoing military efforts to keep Chechnya from breaking away from Russian rule...and those same Americans want a President who will put Russia and China in their place, both in their domestic dealings and on the international stage...Russians hate American hubris in its belief that it can persistently bully the world around international issues...but they love their homegrown autocrat who they think is taking on an out of control free press and keeping order in Russia...Iranians may express disgust with Western liberties and elect Ahmadinejad to maintain conservative Islamic values, but they are forever infuriated with what they believe is the tyranny of American and Western governments meddling in their internal affairs...
We all love freedom for ourselves...but want control over others...it's the famous libertarian refrain except that such a refrain lacks a constructive message about what we do to intervene in situations that are dangerous or more seriously problematic...
The nature of my work around least possible necessary aggression is to resolve that issue...
To argue that all people should have as much freedom as possible to promote greater self-governance in the world...a world where people are genuinely good because they choose to be, not because they are scared to be otherwise...
And yet still provide us with a responsible and intelligent way to engage and intervene to promote more responsible behavior...aggression should be avoided as much as possible...we should respect peoples' freedoms and the responsibility that they better demonstrate the more free and authentically democratic we are -- meaning in our relationships with one another far more important than in our governing -- and we should engage with one another in ways that are as least aggressive as possible and only when situations are violent or dangerous to others...drugs and guns always come to mind when I consider domestic issues that need more responsibility which comes with more respect for freedom around these issues, not less...
In international policy, we should respect matters of sovereignty and self-determination...principles that the U.S. and Israel clearly have selective respect for depending on how badly they want an outcome...invasion of a democratic country and occupation of a democratic authority on the part of Israel, and bullying with whatever means necessary to stop Iran and North Korea from pursuing weapons that they have clearly pursued more ambitiously the more they believed that a military attack post-Iraq from the U.S. was eminent to more objective observers not caught up in defending U.S. policy...
It's so funny and ironic...this is the time in my life when I am most convinced of the good intentions of all political candidates, for the most part, even as I am aware of all of their more potentially cynical motivations...and it is also the time when I am the most underwhelmed by the choices I have in front of me, as of now...
It's not just my more DeToquevillian libertarian tendencies these days that has me underwhelmed...domestic issues are one place where citizens can and do an awful lot of work very, though often not wholly, independent of government and political leaders...health care and education and other domestic efforts are ones that citizens can and do already have much impact on completely independent of the political process...in schools and non-profits and hospitals and charitable giving and churches and the thousand points of light that President George H.W. Bush referred to during this Presidency...
Drug legalization and gun rights would promote more openness, less violence, less organized crime and terrorism, and greater responsibility around both of these issues, I am wholly convinced, in ways that our lifting of alcohol prohibition have already demonstrated ("How many people kill each other over a Budweiser?" is my favorite question on this issue...a lot, was the answer when alcohol was illegal and was run by the mafia and organized crime...hardly at all since it has been legalized)...
But this is the not the place where I am most underwhelmed by our political leadership...
Where I am most underwhelmed is where is counts most...around the very serious situations in places like Lebanon, North Korea, Iran, Palestine and other hot spots in the world where Administration policy seems to have brought us no closer to solutions...but where noone, including Democratic leaders, seem to be thinking outside the box to get to better ideas and solutions...
Republicans fumble and Democrats carp...
And all the while they preach to the rest of the world that they should take responsibility...even as they all fail so miserably to do the same for themselves...
I think a lot about Martin Anderson, these days...that 14-year-old kid who died on the first day of his custody in that Talahassee, Florida bootcamp...
I think about how sad and tragic and ironic it is that he was sent to that boot camp to take responsibility for his life...
And when he died, noone took responsibility for his death...
How convinced we have become that we can force responsibility...
And how much we will deny the clear and plain reality that it does not work...
How we will deny it so much that when a 14-year-old kid dies in an institution we created to teach him that very lesson...
Noone can demonstrate that they've learned it...
Because the truth is...many if not most of us often haven't...
Because taking responsibility always involves the one thing that most people can just never often bring themselves to do...
To admit failure...
It is the reason that I hold the Economist in such high regard, these days, as an honest international news source...
Though the Economist and I often disagree about solutions to problems...the one thing I can always count on the Economist to do honestly is to acknowledge failure...
"Bad to worse" is the theme in the most recent Economist...
And they are right...
And as dark clouds circle, all I can do is hope for the dawn...
Three Brookings Institutions scholars I listened to on C-SPAN today all seemed completely convinced of the power of force to make the world safer, even as the world is clearly less safe and more threatened by terrorism and paranoid autocrats pursuing weapons of mass destruction, today, post-Iraq war, by any fair measure of that notion...
And that, I am discovering, is the way power corrupts...
People get close to it...they fall in love with the short term gains they can make from it...they wield it like the mafia Don's gun to get what they want when they want it...and they ignore all evidence that it undermines confidence in those who wield it...
Just once, as mid-term elections approach, I would love to hear one politician take Lord Acton's wisdom that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely seriously...maybe even quote it...
And this is the clearest lesson I have ever gotten in how the road to hell is paved with good intentions...
Can anyone think of any issue on which they would not think that power could be used to enforce their good intentions?
And there is the rub...
The final domestic political campaign of Soviet Premier Yuri Andropov before he died in 1984 was to curb alcoholism and improve work discipline...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andropov
It will always remain in my mind of one of the most brilliant examples of good intentions gone bad...of how much people will rationalize power and the use of force to promote favored ends, no matter how foolish and counterproductive...
And the last 6 years have been of a world, democratic and otherwise, engaged in that same poor reasoning for the sake of a million causes in search of a strongman or strongwoman to finally make the world whole...
And as the discussions of the upcoming elections and the Presidential primaries that will be upon us soon enough begin to take place...
I just wish that I could hear one Presidential candidate say that they have fresh and innovative ideas to deal with the most serious problems that government uniquely can handle, like international policy...and that they are committed to using the power that government offers as sparingly as possible, trusting Americans and the self-governing citizens of the world to care for themselves and one another as the only and necessary foundation for a genuinely democratic society...where progress happens first and foremost among people within in a free and democratic culture rather than by permission of any head of state or any parliamentary body...
For now, I have Hillary Clinton and John McCain and Al Gore and Rudy Guliani and a whole host of others to settle for...
I'm confident that will not always be so...because I'm confident that values of liberal democracy are more deeply rooted than any political leader...
But just once I wouldn't mind hearing a political leader say something to the effect of, "I am committed to using the power I am granted as little as is possibly necessary and no less"...
Not because we shouldn't follow through on good intentions...
But because the history of the world is littered with the hubris of good people who believed that they could forge good intentions into effective policy, by means of social, economic, political, legal, military and other repression...by force rather than by good ideas and free and humble efforts...
Force is necessary, at times...but it is broadly interpreted by nearly everyone as being far more necessary than it actually is and certainly far more constructive than it turns out to be...
And sadly, that same history is littered with death and destruction in the name of ideologies that promise to force submission upon those who might prefer a route of freedom to the common destination of a good and decent world...
Why free peoples persistently undervalue their freedom...why decent peoples persistently undervalue their decency...why humane peoples persistently undervalue their humanity...I will never know...
But somehow humanity always limps ahead...
Largely because things often get so bad, I imagine...that there is no other option but to change course...
We may be hypocrites, fools, and knaves...but we are generally hypocrites, fools, and knaves who want life to get better, no matter how bad things might get...
So this coming Presidential election will be my first to both genuinely respect all of the leading candidates...completely clear that none of them will offer any magic elixirs for our national and international problems (save better ideas, which would be a novel introduction, indeed)...
And completely convinced that my destiny will be decided largely by me...
And not by some large, omnipresent forces beyond me...
Including the American President and any and all elected officials...as important a role as these people play in our lives...
I can say that because I'm not Martin Andersen...
Like Martin, I too took a joyride in a relative's car at the age of 14...Martin took his grandmother's car...I took my father's car and was caught by the Haysville police, just south of our home in Wichita, Kansas, at 2 in the morning...
But there but for the grace of my father go I...
Martin's parents sent him to a boot camp...where he died his first day there...on the notion that the guards could force Martin to accept their authority...
My father talked with me...I cried to him about how people thought of me as a nerd...and how not being cool left me feeling left out...
He never punished me for it...and I never took his car or anyone else's ever again...
Two different teenagers...two different destinies...
And choices that can shape us forever...at least in the case of Martin...
Have a great weekend, everyone...
Love,
Ben
