There's the rub

David Boaz alerts me to Bart Hinkle's column at the Richmond Times-Dispatch which gets underneath many of the troubling contradictions of contemporary progressive politics that make their agenda, as well as the neoconservatives they so loathe, largely incomprehensible.

Neocons, Progressives, and the Impulse to Bully

How About a Little Domestic Soft Power

"There are few things as mystifying as the dissonance of modern American progressivism. And nowhere is that dissonance more apparent than on the bright line dividing foreign and domestic policy.

For the past eight years, the dominant strain of progressive thought railed against neoconservative foreign interventionism. It abhorred the use of coercive hard power -- military might -- to achieve ostensibly desirable goals such as the spread of democracy. Progressives found the promotion of American values through brute force arrogant and even cruel.

Throughout the Bush years, America-the-bully was a leitmotif. 'American Bully Strikes Back,' was the headline on an October 2001 piece in Salon about the war in Afghanistan. 'Leaders who can persuade and convince fare better than those who bully and abuse," wrote H.D.S. Greenway in a 2005 review of Taming American Power, in which he denounced "neoconservative theories of social engineering.' Likewise, The New York Times denounced 'threat and brute force' in the 2007editorial, 'Bullying Iran.'

In a 2008 piece in The Nation about candidate Barack Obama's foreign policy, Robert Dreyfuss observed that 'U.S. involvement abroad, even when well-intentioned, is perceived on the receiving end as heavy-handed meddling.' He even found cause for alarm in the fact that some of Obama's advisers 'are strong advocates of using U.S. military force to intervene in cases of severe violations of human rights, including genocide.'

The progressive notion that American power projection is problematic on moral grounds and dubious on empirical ones remains strong today. In a pre-Christmas piece on The Huffington Post, Tom Englehardt recalls that in 2001 the Bush administration 'had expansive dreams and gargantuan plans. The neocons were 'desperately in love with the U.S. military and complete romantics about what it could do.' Alas, 'in the biggest dreams' we find 'the largest miscalculations.' In a same-day piece for The American Prospect, Ann Friedman despairs at the idea that American firepower can be a force for good in the world: 'To me, the answer is tragically apparent: It doesn't matter whether U.S. military intervention can be a force for humanitarianism because, in Afghanistan, it never has been and won't become one.'

Beyond American shores, progressives much prefer Joseph Nye's doctrine of 'soft power' -- which Foreign Affairs recently summed up as "one country's ability to get other countries to do want what it wants, in contrast to ordering or forcing others to do what it wants.'

Yet turn the subject to domestic policy, and what happens? Progressives eagerly embrace the use of coercive hard power to achieve their aims. Force industry to adopt a cumbersome cap-and-trade policy to reduce carbon emissions? Check. Force the country to adopt a health care 'public option'? Check. Threaten people with fines and even prison to impose an individual mandate? Check.

So much for the concern about 'social engineering' and well-intentioned but 'heavy-handed meddling.' When it comes to domestic policy, progressives are just as eager as neocons are to embrace 'expansive dreams' and 'gargantuan plans.' Just as hopelessly romantic about what the threat of force can achieve. And just as arrogant about the rightness of wielding it. (Writing on the Web site Open Left, for example, Adam Bink defends the individual insurance mandate thusly: 'I don't care if people don't want health insurance . . . .Pay up, folks.')...

...Of course, everything that has just been said about progressives could be turned with equal validity against conservatives of the talk-radio right -- many of whom think Americans should push the rest of the world around, but leave one another the heck alone.

Good luck trying to figure them out, too.

If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility. --Henry Wadsworth Longfellow"

Hinkle, of course, is right. Good luck getting progressives, or neoconservatives, who have their own troubling dissonances to account for, to own up to the contradiction.

Most people, I've come to conclude, will do almost anything to justify their uses and abuses of power. No matter the depths of hypocrisy they must go to to justify them.

Except for people over whom power is exercised.

And there, as always, is the rub that makes the difference.