After the Future

War Obsolete?

Certainly the style practiced by our military-industrial complex is.  That was the point made by Jonathan Schell in the Impotent Omnipotence piece I wrote about the other day.   If there is one silver lining to this dark cloud in the Middle East, it's the dawning recognition in the corridors of power that after almost a century of anti-colonial, liberation-front insurgencies, well-led insurgencies almost always win against the much larger foreign occupying military powers.

That's not Vietnam syndrome; it's common sense.  It was supposed to be the lesson the U.S. learned in Vietnam and the Russians in Afghanistan. Nuclear and conventional bombs, tanks, air power and massive deployments don't work against highly motivated, well-organized guerrilla insurgencies and terrorist networks. We've got to figure out a better way to resolve conflicts--the boot on the neck technique simply doesn't get it done. The  NY Times has a piece discussing how the big thinkers in our military establishment are catching on: 

"We are now into the first great war between nations and networks,” said John Arquilla, a professor of defense analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School, and a leading analyst of net warfare. “This proves the growing strength of networks as a threat to American national security.”

In a talk that Mr. Arquilla calls Net Warfare 101, he describes how traditional militaries are organized in a strict hierarchy, from generals down to privates. In contrast, networks flatten the command structure. They are distributed, dispersed, agile, mobile, improvisational. This makes them effective, and hard to track and target.

A net war differs from all previous wars, which were about brute confrontation of forces, mass on mass — what Matthew Arnold called bloody contests of “ignorant armies” meeting on the “darkling plain.”

Net war is the battle of the many, organized in small units, against conventional militaries that organize their many into large units. These network forces are not ignorant. They are computer literate, propaganda and Internet savvy, and capable of firing complicated weapons to great effect.

This is new thinking? A guerrilla insurgency is a guerrilla insurgency, and networks have always been a part of the guerrilla m.o.  That such insurgencies have now adopted new technologies doesn't change the fundamental way they operate even if it enhances their effectiveness. If it's obvious to me, why isn't it obvious to our leaders?  Because they have too much invested in doing it the old way.   We have spent incomprehensibly vast sums of money to support a model of warfare based on conflicts between nation states, and crude though the logic might seem for those who want to believe in American high-minded purposes, there isn't as much money to be made in fighting insurgencies and terrorists.  I am hard put to come up with any rational explanation for the stupidity of U.S. policies otherwise. 

We have wasted all this money and all these lives because our model has been flawed from the beginning. But, then again, our invasion of Iraq never had much to do with fighting terrorism, did it? Our foreign policy is determined far more than most Americans want to recognize by the the crony-capitalist collusion that we call the military-industrial complex. It's the tail wagging the dog, and we'll never have a sane foreign policy until the dog starts wagging the tail.  And the dog is the American people and what is in their best interest.  The agenda of the crony capitalists running the K-Street show is not in their interests.  The main question for me is whether the American people have the will to take back control of their country, or even if they do whether it's too late.

Be that as it may, I have thought from the beginning that the idea of a military response after 9/11 was ludicrous.  That the fight against terrorism was more of a police action.  This view was dismissed by Cheneys,  Perles, and other hawks as wimpy, "liberal" thinking, of course.  Real men invade countries and bomb and kill and assert their will on the evil foe. But maybe what we're finally learning is that it's about intelligence, not primarily force. We're dealing more in the province of the FBI or some international version of it. In fighting terrorists we're hunting for gangs, networks if you will, of very cunning, well-armed international criminals, and that requires smart police work--not armies, air power, and missile systems.

Terrorists are more like the mafia than they are like an army.  The mafia has an economic agenda; terrorists have a political agenda--that's the main difference.  It's an important difference because the terrorists' political agenda leads them to attack a broader range of "political" targets.  The mafia are a threat only those who would thwart their economic interests.  But the mafia we will always have with us in one form or another, as long as there is money to be made illegally.  Terrorist have reason to fight only so long as they have political grievances.

But if there is no military solution for this problem, what is the it?  It seems to me that the basic idea is to feed sanity and starve insanity.  Right now our muscular militarism lacks intelligence and feeds the insanity, and so we make things worse. 

In the Middle East we are dealing with an enormously complex and wrenching historical cultural process in which traditionalist Mulim socieIties are struggling to adapt to the modern world.  It is not up to us to solve the unavoidable problems that are associated with social modernization.    Each society has to work that out for itself.  But we can help by supporting the factions within a modernizing society that seek to sanely, slowly grow their societies into the modern world. We are nuts if we think we can impose sanity on such societies; they have to develop it for themselves.

But our history in the Middle East has always been about what is in our interests and not the interests of the Muslim populations who live there.  We've cared more about our own political (anti-communist) and economic (oil) agenda than we have about what is good for the people in the Middle East. The historical record is quite clear about this.  The political grievances of the terrorists and insurgents in the Middle East are rooted in the political and economic policies of the U.S and other western powers dating back over a couple of centuries. 

Our troubles, for instance, in Iran now can be traced to our deposing rather than supporting Mossadegh, and that in turn has roots in the British corporate interests. What we did was criminal, but it was all justified by the insane thinking that followed from the convenient logic of the cold war. The Iranians have real grievances, and they have real reasons not to trust us.  And no matter how justified Americans feel American policy in the Middle East is, most Americans haven't a clue about what we've done there over the decades to make us unworthy of their trust. Our behaviour and policy has often been reprehensible, and what we're doing there now is part of that long, sordid narrative.  That's how it's seen from the Muslim point of view.  They have justifiable grievances.  Everyone seems to see that except Americans.

I haven't written about the Israel/Hezbollah conflict in part because it depresses me too much to think about it.  I recognize that the Israelis are in a desperate spot.  I recognize that the Palestinian stupidity and stubbornness has undermined the saner, more moderate factions within Israeli society that want very badly to work out a fair solution to just Palestinian grievances.  I recognize that sanity seems an impossibility, and so this kind of violence seems to be the inevitable insanity that must follow from the repeated rejection of sanity.  I realize that all talk of proportionality seems an abstract, ivory-tower consideration when you feel as though your very existence is at stake. 

I don't blame the Israelis because I see them as cornered animals with adrenaline-soaked brains acting predictably as any cornered animal would do. They are not in their right minds; none of us would be if we were dealing with what they are dealing with.  They, unlike Americans, have an excuse. Their existence is in jeopardy. But the Israelis can't win by the use of brute force, because they can't beat a guerrilla insurgency for all the reasons adduced above.  And I believe the increasing brutality of Israeli policies is directly associated with the frustrations that come with fighting unbeatable insurgencies.  Increasing the level of violence simply won't work whether against Hamas or Hezbollah.  And so this military action in Lebanon is in my mind as futile as our invasion of Iraq. 

The Israelis have to find another way in Lebanon and with the Palestinians, and they can't do it alone.  The forces of sanity in Israel need the support of a sane American leadership, and they will not get that for at least another two and a half years.  Or maybe considering our history in the region, someone else has to step in.  The whole thing is such a depressing, intractable mess that dates back to mistake after mistake after mistake made by the Western powers and Israel and the surrounding Muslim nations that sometimes I think the only solution would be to give everyone a drought of a memory-erasing potion.

In the long run what has to happen is similar to the program of reconciliation that was established in South Africa.  Everyone, including powers like Britain and the U.S.,  has to own up to its crimes and ask for forgiveness.  I know, considering the current players on the scene, the idea is risible. If it's ever to happen in the Middle East, it's decades off. In the meanwhile insanity rules.

The Adolescent Beltway Mind

In my last post, I spoke to the foolishness that follows from the adolescent militarist assumptions of our current leadership, and how it has come to define the conventional wisdom.  Paul Waldman speaks to it here:

A few days ago William Kristol, who is as responsible as anyone outside the Bush administration for the neocon dream of creating an empire in the Middle East—which has become the now-familiar nightmare—made clear his preference for military action against Iran, sooner rather than later. And not only that, once we start dropping bombs, the Iranian people will do their part and rise up to overthrow their government. “The right use of targeted military force,” Kristol told Fox News, “could cause them to reconsider whether they really want to have this regime in power.”

That Kristol could make such a prediction without getting laughed out of Washington, never to be invited on television again, tells us something about the miasma of inanity and insanity that envelopes our politics like a fog. Being wrong—or being an outright fool, or being possessed of not a shred of morality, for that matter—carries no cost. Only being “weak”—that is, insufficiently enthusiastic about spilling others’ blood—will earn you the contempt of the Washington establishment.

Why? Because that establishment, both governmental and journalistic, is ruled by weenies. They burn to show that they’re real men, that they’re tough and strong and mean, that they don’t cower from a fight, that they’re the ones who get going when the going gets tough. Washington is an arena of institutional and ideological competition, but it is also a throbbing mass of insecurities.

That extremists like Kristol have come to play a huge role in defining the conventional wisdom is a symptom of how Americans have lost their way.  Kristol is not a madman; he is an expert fabulist.  He has proven time and again, that if he is given the megaphone, he can say the most ridiculous things, and if he says them often enough they become accepted as conventional wisdom.  All talented propagandists understand this, and Kristol is among the best. I have often watched him do his talking head thing in slackjawed amazement.  They guy is a snake, but he knows the rules of the game, and he games the system with consummate skill.

Genuine courage is much needed in the corridors of power just now to stand up to this adolescent, macho nuttiness.  It's something we need from our elected representatives on both sides of the aisle.  And courage requires that these leaders step forward and offer sensible, adult alternatives to this militarist madness.

Why have I no hope that this will in fact happen?  Why is it that the only time anything gets done is when people take to the streets?  The answer is simple--because it's the only way the opposition gets the megaphone. You have to have media credibility, and you don't get it unless you appeal to the adolescent mind that shapes conventional wisdom within the Beltway establishment.  People like Kristol recognize that all the cool kids in the Beltway establishment are acting and thinking as if they're still in high school.  He got his media cred by appealing to the adolescent mentality that needs to prove its toughness. 

So maybe the only alternative is for a sixties type street movement which counters with adolescent slogans and street behavior. I'm becoming more convinced it's the only way some oppposition to this alarming trend toward a deepening authoritarianism and militarism can gain any traction. Just talking sense doesn't seem to get it done anymore.

Impotent Omnipotence

Today's must read is Jonathan's Schell's piece appearing at TomDispatch.  It's as good a summary as I've come across outlining the way a particular brand of  power-corrupted thinking leads to tragedy:

Of far greater importance was what happened to two kinds of war that had historically been the most important -- wars of imperial conquest and general, great-power wars, such as the First and Second World Wars. During the twentieth century the first kind had become hopeless "quagmires," owing to the aroused will of local peoples everywhere who, collectively, had put an end to the age of imperialism. The second were made unfightable and unwinnable by the nuclear revolution. It was these two limitations on the usefulness of military force, one acting at the base of the international system, the other at its apex, that delimited the superiority of the superpower. (The paradox of impotent omnipotence was even more pronounced for the other superpower, the Soviet Union, which actually disappeared.)

Very possibly, the United States, with all its resources, would have been the sort of globe-straddling empire that Joseph McCarthy wanted it to be had it risen to pre-eminence in an earlier age. It was the peculiar trajectory of the United States, born in opposition to empire, to wind up making its own bid for empire only after the age of imperialism was over. Though it's hard to shed a tear, you might say that there was a certain unfairness in America's timing. All the ingredients of past empires were there -- the wealth, the weapons, the power, hard and soft. Only the century was wrong. The United States was not, could not be, and cannot now be a new Rome, much less greater than Rome, because it cannot do what Rome did. It cannot, in a post-imperial age, conquer other countries and lastingly absorb them into a great empire; it cannot, in the nuclear age, not even today, fight and win wars against its chief global rivals, who still, after all, possess nuclear arsenals.

Even tiny, piteous, brutalized, famine-ridden North Korea, more a cult than a country, can deter the United States with its puny putative arsenal. The United States, to be sure, is a great power by any measure, surely the world's greatest, yet that power is hemmed in by obstacles peculiar to our era. The mistake has been not so much to think that the power of the United States is greater than it is as to fail to realize that power itself, whether wielded by the United States or anyone else -- if conceived in terms of military force -- has been in decline. By imagining otherwise, the United States has become the fool of force -- and the fool of history.

The point is that the militarist neo-con mentality is obsolete and must be discredited for the foolishness that it is.  The Democrats won't do this, because they fear  the GOP "official megaphone" blaring their stating the obvious truth as "weakness":

All over the world, autocratic-minded rulers, from Italy's former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi to Russia's President Vladimir Putin, have learned that de facto control of the political content of television is perhaps the most important lever of power in our day. They have learned that it does not matter politically if 15% or even 25% of the public is well informed as long the majority remains in the dark. The problem has not been censorship but something very nearly censorship's opposite: the deafening noise of the official megaphone and its echoes -- not the suppression of truth, still spoken and heard in a narrow circle, but a profusion of lies and half lies; not too little speech but too much. If you whisper something to your friend in the front row of a rock concert, you have not been censored, but neither will you be heard.

Whoever controls the megaphone controls the conventional wisdom about what  makes sense. As a result foolishness too easily becomes the conventional wisdom, and so-called moderates like Beinart, Clinton, and Lieberman, insofar as they buy into this conventional wisdom as defined by the militarists, stake out the middle ground in foolishness. Our tragedy, and the world's, is that America has been given over to a cult of "strong and wrong." It's time to understand the real world in which we're living and to develop prudent, well-thought out policies to deal with its biggest and most intractable problems and threats. Why is it that I doubt that I'll see such a shift in my lifetime?

Naive Belief vs. Seinfeld-Costanza Syndrome

Principled conservatives (as contrasted with the power conservatives that control the GOP) have legitimate concerns about the nihilism that pervades our popular culture.  I share them.  We part company, however, when such conservatives think that a remedy lies in the political sphere.  Solutions to problems in the cultural sphere need to be developed in the cultural sphere.  It's a soul problem, not a political problem. The political sphere needs to be culturally neutral--or secular. That doesn't mean that the culture ought primarily to be secular, although certainly secularists must always feel secure and respected, as anyone must regardless his beliefs or worldview.

As I said in my last post, pluralism must be embraced as a necessity in a rapidly globalizing world, and that requires that the political sphere be as neutral as possible when it comes to cultural values.  The one essential element that defines our common ground as citizens lies in the secular rights traditions developed during the high tide of Enlightenment modernity.  That is the one, great bequest that cultural era has made to the world and to future generations, and it is a legacy that must be preserved. 

Although pluralism is a necessity if sanity is to reign in a world where so many cultures, philosophies, and worldviews are rubbing up against one another, there are still many people who remain resistant to it. They resist mainly because they want to preserve the integrity of various traditional cultural forms from external encroachment. 

Multiculturalists are like those environmentalists who want to preserve biodiversity.  They fear the homogenizing effects of modernity and market capitalism, and I understand and sympathize with their concerns.  But the future does not lie in preservation of existing cultural forms, but rather in the interaction between cultures and in the various 'fusions' that will result from their cross-fertilization.  America, in my opinion, is at the cutting edge of the development for such a fusioning culture, and its success or failure will have a significant impact on the success or failure of other cultures in making the transition into the globalizing postmodern world. 

The other group that find pluralism hard to embrace is the monculturalists.  It's hard for a lot of people when their worldview is challenged by another's whose basic presuppositions about what is real and unreal, true and false, important and trivial are very different. It's hard for a lot of people to just shrug their shoulders and say, "Well, that's just their opinion."  And if they do, it's hard for them not to drift into the opposite kind of problem, which is a kind of ironic, quasi-nihilistic cynicism that might be described as Seinfeld-Costanza Syndrome.  People affected by SCS find that it is pointless to believe in or care about anything larger than their own appetites, amusements, or occasional obsessions.  This is one kind of loss of Self.  It's the particular malady of the cultural left.

The other is typical of people who  feel competing worldviews as a threat that must be defeated. In this we are entering into a strange room within the human psyche where issues revolving around power and identity fester.  People who have a relatively weak sense of individual self have a stronger need to rely on group identity.  These are people who feel relatively  powerless as individuals, and it is hard for them to separate themselves from the group in any way, and as a result any threat to the group--its worldview and values--is a threat they feel intimately as if it were a personal threat.  They suffer from an inflammation of the soul I call "Cultitis".  It's the particular malady of the cultural right.

The people in the latter group see the people in the first group as decadents, and they are right, but they are suffering from the same modern malady, which is  a diminution of Selfhood.  Selfhood is what healthy cultures produce in their citizens--its comprises a quality of independent thought and moral volition, i.e., conscience. And I think that it is self-evident that a healthy conscience leads one to understand that the flourishing of the human soul is nourished by his interdependence with others, by a deep moral imperative that recognizes that we are all in this together, and that we must all pull our own weight in contributing to the larger common good. In other words, Selfhood is neither the shallow appetitive "freedom" and self-absorption of typical of SCS, nor is it Cultitis, the dependent loss of Self in the group, whether it be conventional middle class mores or the code of the gang.

We are living in an in-between time, neither here nor there.  Neither moderns or whatever comes next.  I think of our era as similar to that of the century between 1350 and 1450, a period during which the medieval era was breaking apart and the modern era had not yet taken shape.  It was for most people of that era a miserable time to be alive, but as bad as things got, it gave way to the European Renaissance, and a remarkably fertile period during which the West emerged. But all good things must come to an end, and that era has died, and we are living now in the decaying ruins of the cultural forms created during that time. 

These forms, including democracy and the rights tradition associated with it, are weak because the cultural vitality that gave them shape is so diminished, and now we live with these forms as we live with old habits.  But my fear is that they are habits that will be easily abandoned if we are told they are no longer workable because of the terrorist threat or because some other necessity requires their abandonment. How many people are truly, deeply committed to an abstraction like the rule of law and the constitution?  How many people are suffering from SCS or group cultitis, and will have the independence of spirit to resist those who seek to undermine the rule of law and the constitution in the name of the expedience and national security?  I honestly don't know.  Have you seen the Spanish film "Butterfly"?  Watch it and ask yourself if you response would have been different than that of Moncho's family. We are all anti-fascists until we get really scared.

I have frequently adverted to Jacques Barzun's definition of decadence as an era during which a society has lost any sense of future possibility.  The culture shaped by Enlightenment modernity has lost this sense of future possibility, and there's no making believe that we can get it back.  Neither is it possible to get back the Christendom that preceded the modern age, as Pope Benedict seems to think would cure the West's problems. There is only going forward, and in going forward we must travel lightly, but that does not mean that we leave behind everything from the past.  We carry forward only that which we need to live.

In other words I see the emerging postmodern/postsecular era as integrating what's best in Enlightenment values while at the same time retrieving what  the Enlightenment rejected--namely,  religious  consciousness.  The critical consciousness developed during the Enlightenment prevents anyone from accepting naively the traditional "given-ness" of any values and worldview, which is typical of Cultitis.  But pure critical consciousness leads to radical skepticism and to nihilism, which on a popular level translates into Seinfeld-Costanza Syndrome.  I worry all the time that my son will have to battle the tendency of his generation to fall into SCS.  But what is the antidote? 

The culture of the future has to learn to believe again, but not naively, not with a sense that belief means accepting anything uncritically as a given, complete and absolute truth.  It's impossible to think that way anymore and not to fall into pathology.  But it is not impossible to recognize all the signs of grace that abound in our experience and to believe that they point to possibilities that transcend what the rational mind can deliver with certainty.  And in that spirit it is not impossible to go back with an open mind to the faiths of our fathers and retrieve what is most valuable in their bequeathal to us. For truly there is much there, and much of it forgotten, that we need now to live.

We're All Cosmopolitans Now

I think it's useful to think about the cultural sphere and the poltical sphere as separate although obviously related areas of social activity. Lot's of people tend to conflate them, as if for them our politics is in the profoundest sense a representation of their deepest sense of self or identity.  In de Toquevilles's time maybe it said something about the uniqueness of the national character, but not any more.  Our politics now are pretty much like politics everywhere in the developed world--nothing particularly special or distinguished about it. 

And that's ok, because our activity in the political sphere, while essential for solving  important social problems, is not what defines us as people; it's not the place in our society where the most important activities occur. I think there's something wrong about a society in which politics plays a disproportionate role in defining its identity and sense of purpose. Identity, meaning, purpose are properly developed in the cultural sphere, not the political.

I think that most of our social pathologies today derive from a society-wide misunderstanding in which people have been mistakenly enculturated to believe that their activities in economic and/or political spheres give their lives a sense of purpose and meaning.  Clearly for many it does.  But I would argue that in a healthy society its citizens understand that purpose and meaning are pursued in the cultural sphere in which activities center around family, food, and friends; art, music, and sport; learning, philsoophy and religion. It's where real life happens, and its where the human soul is nourished and flourishes.

Nourishment of the soul is not something that ordinarily we find to be the primary benefit of our participation in the political or economic spheres.  What we do there is important and necessary, of course, but in a healthy society they should be less important to what we do in the cultural sphere. It's a question of what comes first, and how what we care about most shapes the way we develop as human beings.

People can argue with me about it if they want, but I think that to the degree that people derive meaning and purpose primarily from economic and political activity, there is a correlative withering of the soul.  People for whom the pursuit purpose and meaning in the political and economic spheres is primary do so as compensation for having little or no soul life in the cultural.  And typically that means that  people seek wealth and power to fill up the emptiness where there should be a soul tend to dominate in the economic and political spheres because they want--need--power and wealth more than people with a healthy soul life do. And the result is that we have a soulless economics and a soulless politics whose agendas are determined by fanatics. 

There's another reason why I think it's important to think of the cultural sphere as a separate from the political. It's the only way that a  pluralistic society can flourish.  Pluralism is impossible when the political and cultural are conflated.  In my view the most important thing that American society has contributed to the world is its precocious grappling with the thorny problems associated with pluralism. American success here in this age of converging cultures is what can really make America special. It's not a done deal yet, but the success of the experiment depends on its avoiding two extremes:  multiculturalism on one end and monoculturalism on the other. Lately, we've been stalled in moving toward this goal because we have been pulled back and forth by articulate factions on both extremes.

A multicultural society is one that insists on maintaining the autonomy of different cultural groups, usually defined by language and religion, but under one government.  Canada and Switzerland have made it work, but they are the exceptions that prove the rule.  The old Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, N.Ireland, Spain, Lebanon, Iraq, India/Pakistan are the rule.  In multicultural societies where there isn't open civil war, there is usually an uneasy peace between the majority and one or more aggrieved minority groups, and everyone is walking on eggshells. 

Monoculturalism is what nativist majorities in a society want, and as a result, it's usually what separatist minorities in the same society want in order to free themselves from the oppression inflicted by the monoculturalist majority.  Monoculturalists, for complex social psychological reasons, are uncomfortable with the "Other."  And majority cultures, when they are monocultural in their attitudes, want minorities to either assimilate into their culture or move somewhere else.  Ethnic cleansing is the most recent policy designed to achieve that.  But pogroms, concentration camps, and reservations accomplished the same thing in the past. Monoculturalism is a form of social pathology in a globalizing world; it needs to be relentlessly identified as such and repudiated wherever it raises its ugly head. 

The mistake a lot of Americans make is that in their resistance to monocultural factions within American society (mainly Anglo-Protestant nativists), they want to promote the legitimacy and equality of other cultural traditions.  And some argue that, for instance, the requirement that all citizens speak English as a requirement for citizenship is a form of cultural imperialism.  This is a mistake that, while well-intended, too often leads to the Balkanization described above. We can argue about it in more detail if readers want to, but in my opinion a multicultural society if it isn't already a disaster, is one waiting to happen, and it's a path to be avoided at all costs in the U.S.  Multiculturalism is not the only or the best way to resist monoculturalism. 

The better option, and it's the one that would naturally evolve if people allow it, is the development of a pluralistic culture.  And I believe that American society can continue to lead the way for the world in developing a model for a healthy pluralism.  Pluralism allows for a multiplicity of subcultures whether they are defined by race/ethnicity, sexual preference, religion, or whatever.  Within their own worlds they should be left alone to pursue their lives according to whatever values or behavioral norms they work out for themselves. 

This is where I connect with the theme developed above about the cultural sphere being where individuals develop their souls and find meaning and purpose.  It has hardly anything to do with the poltical sphere, and acitivity in the poltical sphere should do nothing to restrict any individual or group from developing his soul in whatever way it chooses. The only rule for American citizenship is that citizens respect the rights of those in other subcultures and that they actively participate in the political sphere in which legislation is debated and written in English.  Maybe there are a few other minor things that can be added here, but the foundation is built on this very simple premise. 

Pluralism is superior to multiculturalism because it demands a certain level of compromise and assimilation.  No subculture can easily exist in isolation from the others, and when conflicts arise citizens from conflicting subcultures will go into the political sphere to seek solutions, and they should be able to expect to find there a fair, neutral political process. That neutrality is established by preserving a rigorous secularism in the political sphere. Some groups  may not  like that, but it's the price they must pay  in exchange for the stability and equity that ideally citizens will find in the poltical sphere.

I'm basically describing the way most of us live already.  And it would be common sense if it were not for the efforts of monoculturalists on the Christian right who are bent on having the political sphere operate according to the values and behavioral norms of their subculture--that's all it is, a subculture. Even if at one time it was the dominant subculture, it's not now, and will not be in the future.  The people on the Christian right knows this, and like the mullahs in the middle east, their attempt to dominate the political process is a last, depserate effort to assert themselves before they disappear into fringe-group irrelevancy. That doesn't mean that they can't cause a lot of problems in the meanwhile. 

In any event their mistake is in thinking that the political and cultural ought to be conflated, and it just can't happen if a thriving pluralistic society is to be achieved.  Any subcultural group can decry the low state of morals or the superficiality of those outside their world, and they should be free to proselytize and persuade in the cultural sphere.  And if, indeed, they offer a better way, people will be attracted to it.  But in the political sphere no group can demand that any other conform to its norms and values.  And for this reason the language in the political sphere should never be religious language or any language that derives from a particular subculture. 

The political sphere in an American pluralistic society needs to speak secularese English--it's the neutral language that is the only way  people from widely differing subcultures can communicate.  Our continued speaking of English is, if nothing else, a gesture of gratitude to the English political traditions out of which developed the first modern democracies.  And the language of secularese should be mainly rights language, the language of civil rights.  And the state's main responsibility is to define what those rights for all citizens and to protect them from any threats that come from individuals or groups.

But the point is this.  We can all pursue the life we want in the cultural sphere without insisting that others conform to our ideas about what the good life is in the political sphere.  It shouldn't be a controversial idea.  But it is so long as a basic cosmopolitanism isn't embraced by all, no matter what particular subculture any American citizen belongs to.  Cosmopolitanism while it does not at all require rejecting the  particularities of one's own subculture, it does require a healthy respect and curiosity about the subcultures of those outside one's cultural milieu.   We must all become cosmopolitans now, no matter how committed we might be to the values of our particular subculture, be it traditional, religious, or secular--it's the only sane way to live in a globalizing world. And the world needs Americans to do this well so they can see that if it can work for us, it can work for them. It's really not that hard to do, and we no longer have the luxury to do otherwise.

More on Libertarianism & Tyranny

The modern Reagan Republican Party, the modern conservative movement, if you want to know what it’s going to do … imagine a table and around it are all different groups. And on the issue that brings them to politics, not on everything, but the issue that moves their vote, what they want from the government is to be left alone. Taxpayers -- I run Americans for Tax Reform -- don’t raise my taxes. The Second Amendment community -- I’m on the board of the National Rifle Association -- leave our guns alone. Four million members of the NRA, five million guys with concealed-carry … they don’t go knocking on doors saying you should own guns; they don’t insist public schools teach books with titles like Heather Has Two Hunters. They just … leave us alone and we’re happy. The home-schooling movement, now about two million students, maybe 600,000 parents; the property-rights movement, particularly strengthened after Kelo; the business community that doesn’t want subsidies, they just want to not be taxed and not regulated. The guys who are in Washington asking for checks are not part of the coalition. . . .

Around the table you’ve got Pat Buchanan and others who look and see all the fissures on secondary and tertiary issues, and he’s right. But on the vote-moving primary issue, everybody’s got their foot in the center and they’re not in conflict on anything. The guy who wants to spend all day counting his money, the guy who wants to spend all day fondling his weaponry, and the guy who wants to go to church all day may look at each other and say, "That’s pretty weird, that’s not what I would do with my spare time, but that does not threaten my ability to go to church, have my guns, have my money, have my properties, run by my business, home-school my kids." …  Grover Norquist

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If government is necessary, bad government, at least for conservatives, is inevitable, and conservatives have been exceptionally good at showing just how bad it can be. Hence the truth revealed by the Bush years: Bad government--indeed, bloated, inefficient, corrupt, and unfair government--is the only kind of conservative government there is. Conservatives cannot govern well for the same reason that vegetarians cannot prepare a world-class boeuf bourguignon: If you believe that what you are called upon to do is wrong, you are not likely to do it very well.  Alan Wolfe

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In the last few years, I have gone from lionizing this president's courage and fortitude to being dismayed at his incompetence and now to being resigned to mistrusting every word he speaks. I have never hated him. But now I can see, at least, that he is a liar on some of the gravest issues before the country. He doesn't trust us with the truth. Some lies, to be sure, are inevitable - even necessary - in wartime. But when you're lying not to keep the enemy off-balance, but to maximize your own political fortunes at home, you forfeit the respect of people who would otherwise support you - and the important battle you have been tasked to wage.  Andrew Sullivan

This is the post I was planning to put earlier in the week, but if you don't have much time,  read Alan Wolfe's "Why Conservatives Can't Govern." It's more important and more interesting that what I'm writing here.  This is but a gloss on it.  He puts the whole business of conservative philosophy of governance in historical perspective and he makes as strong a case as I've seen why what we're seeing in Washington is not an example of bad conservative governance, but pretty much the only kind of governance that follows logically from conservative presuppositions.  Read it, and then read it again.

My goal in this post is to look at  Grover Norquist as the paradigm of the "Leave-me-alone" Libertarian faction of the the GOP which leads to the disastrous inevitable consequences that Wolfe describes.  The quote above comes from a talk he gave to folks at The American Prospect.  Read the whole thing if you have the time. He makes as reasonable a case for small government Libertarianism as you're likely to find, and he's a pretty savvy player on the Washington political scene.  It's just interesting.

In this post I am particularly interested to engage those readers of ATF who are still not convinced that Libertarianism is the unwitting ally of tyranny.  That's the title of a post I wrote in April, and it's been a theme I've pursued also here.  The point is not that people like Norquist who profess to be Libertarians want or endorse tyranny--they want just the opposite--but that  tyranny is the  unintended consequence of their philosophy or attitude or whatever you want to call it.  This is also, I believe, the point that Alan Wolfe is making. The Andrew Sullivan quote succinctly summarizes his having been forced to recognize that the embodiment of his ideals at the beginning was a sham, and that he was conned.  I respect his honesty, but he still doesn't seem to understand that the Bush fiasco is the unintended consequence of his idealistic conservatism.  My point, and Wolfe's, is that any conservative leader, even if he were the perfect embodiment of the conservative philosopher king, would fare no better than Bush.

I'm trying to make plausible something that I know for Libertarians is  counterintuitive  and hard to accept.  I don't expect you to be persuaded; my only hope is that you play with these ideas as a possibility, and see if after awhile it connects the dots for you more effectively than the mental scheme that works for you now.

Before developing my reasons for why Libertarianism is a problem, let me identify the parts of Libertarianism where I share common ground.  I am with Libertarians insofar as they think a society has lost its way when it becomes a top-down rather than a bottom-up process. I think that the quasi-anarchism of principled Libertarians (as opposed to those who just use it as an intellectual justification for their avarice) is rooted in a basic desire to have a bottom up society, where the freedom of individuals and local communities are free to pursue their interests with minimal interference from clumsy, unresponsive governmental bureaucracies. 

I'd be fine with a form of government in which the higher the level, the more passive it would be, like the supreme court, waiting only to deal with those political issues that couldn't be solved at the lower levels.  I understand people's problem with an activist court, and I understand people's problems with an activist government, especially when the government seems to have an agenda that seems more determined by bureaucratic processes than in serving people's real needs.  Some of that's inevitable, but I understand where people are coming from in their concerns about government's over-reaching.  And generally speaking, the more that can be initiated and developed locally the better. So I support that as a basic principle.  Bottom-up, good.  Top-down, bad.

But large, complex societies develop large, complex problems that too often cannot be dealt with exclusively on the local level.  And in the world we live in the real threat of tyranny comes not from the political sector, but from the economic.  For me the fundamental flaw in Libertarian thinking is its failure to recognize this.  Tyranny derives from the abuse of power, and so it follows that the greatest threat to freedom comes from those who have the greatest concentrations of power.  Look around you.  Does that power lie in the hands of Liberal congressmen and professors?  Of course not.  It lies with those factions within American society which have enormous economic power.  And the greatest threat to American democracy lies not in the power of big government if it serves the will of the broad electorate, but in the power of big government if it serves the will of those with enormous economic power.

Conservative idealists like Grover Norquist,  Andrew Sullivan, and Matthew Continetti can complain all they want about how the conservative politicians they supported betrayed their conservative ideals.  But their very advocacy of the small government, leave-me-alone Libertarianism promotes precisely the abuses that they condemn.  Their celebration of the Ayn Randian heroic industrialist and their advocacy of economic freedom, deregulation, and privatization which seem the very embodiments of the American idea, at the same time lead to its destruction. 

The Libertarians fixation with freedom and economic prosperity seems to blind them to how their emphasis of them leads to problems with the distribution of power.  They seem not to care at all about the dangers associated with the growing concentration of economic power in fewer and fewer hands.  They seem not to realize how that concentration of power is the direct result of their hard work to pull back government power as a counterbalance to economic power.  The kind of crony capitalism that we're seeing in Washington now is not caused by a failure of conservatives to live up to their ideals; it is the inevitable result of economic power moving into the territory from which good government has retreated. If the government won't stand as a counterbalance to economic power, it inevitably winds up being coopted by it.  And then neither principled conservatives nor principled Liberals get what they want--the both have to deal with a big, bloated government serving the needs of big pharma, big oil, or the big companies that make their money from military spending.

So all the Libertarians want, according to Norquist, is for the government to leave them alone.  For them the only job the government has is to make sure nobody bothers them.  Well that's fine so long as every individual minds his own business and doesn't infringe on the freedom of other individuals.  But what if some individuals organize and start to infringe on the rights of individuals?  And what if the government isn't big or strong enough to control these organized infringers?  You've got two choices--you either do nothing and let these organizations continue their abuses or you build up the government's capacity to control the abuses. 

That's the point--the only tool ordinary people have to protect themselves from non-governmental abusers of their rights is the government, and it has to be big enough to do the job.  And so when the abuse is something as huge and widespread as the Jim Crow laws in the south, when it's as huge as the monopolies and trusts that developed during the Robber Baron era, when it's as  big a problem as that posed now by the interests of oil and pharmaceutical companies which are promoting policies that are not in the interest of the common good, when it's an issue as huge and complex as global warming, what tool is there except a government responsive to the will of the people to act as a tool to fight such threats?   

This is what drives me nuts about people like Continetti, Sullivan, and Norquist.  Wolfe puts it well:

For a disillusioned idealist such as Matthew Continetti, Washington, D.C. is now filled with "people who mouth conservative principles while getting rich off conservative power." But what good are conservatives principles without conservative power? And what chance was there that conservatives could gain and hold political power without their joined-at-the-hip connection to K Street? Nearly every electoral and legislative success conservatives have enjoyed over the past six years has been crucially aided by the organizational and financial contributions of corporate lobbyists. The conservative vision of the world, because it is so hostile to government when government is so essential to the way we live now, remains unattractive to most Americans, which is why Republicans must rely on money to substitute for the large popular majorities they are unable to build and sustain. The idea that it could have been, or can be, different is a fantasy.

The  question is not whether big government is a good or bad thing--it's unavoidable in a complex world. The real question is whom does it serve? It's as if the conservative idealists are smitten by a fantasy to return the world so that it would be an ideal place like the Hobbit's Shire where the most important office is the mayor whom nobody takes seriously. But the problem is that there is a dark power gaining strength of which conservative idealists seem oblivious and against which they will be completely powerless when it is ready to destroy their happy little privatized world.   Powerless because the government that could have protected them, is now owned by a power that could care less about them and will be accountable only to itself.  That's my definition of tyranny. 

Conservatives on Their Heels

The TypePad service crashed for most of the day, and I lost a good chunk of a post I was preparing this morning. In that piece I want to address the reasons that contemporary GOP-conservatism, which is not real conservatism (see here and here), is an ideology that leads to inevitable social and political disaster. In other words, I want to talk about why it has failed and why it will continue to fail.

I haven't the energy to rewrite it now (I will later), so instead I refer you to a piece by Paul Waldman as a prologue to what I was planning to write about.  Here's his outline for a talking-points strategy about how Democrats can stop playing defense and start performing their role as the robust opposition.  That's the Dems' main role now, to stop the GOP abuses.  Whether they are the ones to lead us into the future remains to be seen; it's not going to happen as they are presently constituted.  So, as I have said before, a vote for the Democrats is the truly conservative vote at this point in our political development. Here's Waldman:

1. Conservatism has failed. The overwhelming majority of the American public now sees the Bush administration as a failure. They failed in Iraq, they failed after Hurricane Katrina, they failed on health care, they failed to deliver rising wages, they failed on the deficit, they failed, they failed, they failed. Why? Liberals need to argue that it wasn’t a product of incompetence, it was a failure of conservative governance. As Alan Wolfe put it in a recent Washington Monthly article, “Conservatives cannot govern well for the same reason that vegetarians cannot prepare a world-class boeuf bourguignon: If you believe that what you are called upon to do is wrong, you are not likely to do it very well.” 

Conservatives had their chance: a Republican president, a Republican Congress, Republican-appointed courts—in short, the perfect environment for enacting their vision with little to stand in their way—and they failed. Should we be surprised at the level of corruption? Of course not; they don’t think government is there to serve the people, so why shouldn’t they raid it for whatever they can grab? 

In short, progressives should start talking about the Bush administration’s failures not as those of a president, but of an ideology. 

2. Conservatism is the ideology of the past—a past we don’t want to return to. Liberals need to embrace the culture war, because we’re winning. The story of American history is that of conservative ideas and prejudices falling away as our society grows more progressive and thus more true to our nation’s founding ideals. Conservatives supported slavery, conservatives opposed women’s suffrage, conservatives supported Jim Crow, conservatives opposed the 40-hour work week and the abolishment of child labor, and conservatives supported McCarthyism. In short, all the major advancements of freedom and justice in our history were pushed by liberals and opposed by conservatives, no matter the party they inhabited at the time.   

Conservatism is Bill Bennett lecturing you about self-denial, then rushing off to feed his slot habit at the casino. It’s James Dobson telling you that children need regular beatings to stay in line. It’s a superannuated nun rapping you on the knuckles so you won’t think about your dirty parts. It’s Jerry Falwell watching “Teletubbies” frame by frame to see if Tinky Winky is trying to turn him gay. Conservatism is everyone you never wanted to grow up to be. 

3. Conservatives are cowards, and they hope you are, too. We’re afraid, they shout. We’re so afraid of terrorists, we have to become more like the things we hate. We’re so afraid, we have to let our government sanction torture. We’re so afraid, we have to let the government spy on us. We’re so afraid, we have to give the president dictatorial powers. We’re so afraid, we just want to rush to the arms of politicians who say they’ll protect us. 

Progressives need to frame their rejection of the fear campaign as an act of courage: Al-Qaida does not scare us, and we will not dismantle our democratic system because we are afraid. The America we love does not cower in fear, as the conservatives want it to. 

These are just a few ways progressives can begin to talk about contemporary issues in the context of the larger ideological conflict that shapes our political history. As an added bonus, when we make clear just what it is we are against at its fundamental, philosophical level, we define for the public who we are and what we stand for. 

One of the troubling contradictions in contemporary public opinion is that while on nearly every issue the progressive position is more popular, the number of people willing to tell a pollster they consider themselves “conservative” still far outnumbers the number willing to say they’re “liberal.” It wasn’t always that way, and it doesn’t have to be that way. Winning converts isn’t just about convincing people you’re right on the merits of issues, it’s also about showing them that your side is one they want to join, and the other side is one they want to avoid.

I think the word "liberal" should be retired.  Our political nomenclature has evolved to label political ideologies that have almost nothing to do with what the words mean.  Libertarians are the only true liberals, and for some reason they mostly think of themselves as conservatives.  Whatever.  The label 'Liberalism' only made sense to describe what most Democrats believed when its primary task lay in fighting an entrenched traditionalist establishment to invent something new. They aren't doing that now.  They are the establishment fighting a rear-guard backlash under the banner of Traditionalist/Christianist values and Libertarian leave-me-alone-ism.

Discernment

I spent some time this weekend reading some thoughtful conservative justifications for the war.  See for instance this interview given by First Things editor Father Richard John Neuhaus before the war and his reflections on events since then in a piece he wrote in October of 2005. This is about as reasonable a Christian justification for the Iraq War as your likely to find:

In just-war doctrine, the Church sets forth the principles which it is the responsibility of government leaders to apply to specific cases (see Catechism of the Catholic Church 2309). Saddam Hussein has for-- eleven years successfully defied international authority. He has used and, it appears, presently possesses and is set upon further developing weapons of mass destruction, and he has publicly stated his support for the September 11 attack and other terrorist actions.

In the judgment of the United States and many other countries, he poses a grave and imminent threat to America, world peace and the lives of innumerable innocents. If the judgment is correct, the use of military force to remove that threat, in the absence of plausible alternatives, is both justified and necessary. Heads of government who are convinced of the correctness of that judgment would be criminally negligent and in violation of their solemn oath to protect their people if they did not act to remove such a threat.

There's more. His argument is thoughtful, tempered, humble. After reading him, anyone would think that invading Iraq was every decent person's moral obligation. But he is careful to say that it is not his job as a theologian to make the prudential judgment whether the war was on a practical level a good idea or not:

Whether that cause can be vindicated without resort to military force, and whether it would be wiser to wait and see what Iraq might do over a period of months or years, are matters of prudential judgment beyond the competence of religious authority.

Yes, but.  His bias is toward supporting the war, and I have to ask why.  He's not some mean-spirited fanatic--he's an idealist, and I don't question his or the sincerity of many others who supported the war.  But I have to ask, how could he be so wrong?  My quarrel is not with just war theory.  I am not a pacifist, and I recognize that there are some rare situations where the use of lethal force by the state is  necessary and justified.  I am, however, sympathetic to the Mennonite argument for pacifism not for theological reasons, but for practical reasons--because no matter how just the cause theoretically, the uses of state violence almost always have unnamed or unconscious motivations which more often than not become the tail wagging the dog. 

Yes--even in wars that everyone recognizes as justified.  If we truly lived in a just international order, American leaders would have been brought before a war crimes tribunal to stand trial for the firebombing of Dresden, Tokyo, and the nuclear annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There is probable cause enough to warrant  an indictment that these were acts of terror against civilians more than they were acts of war designed to diminish the German and Japanese war-fighting capability.  That isn't to say that the war against Japan and Germany was not justified; only that  the 'good guys' in a conflict like WWII are not less likely commit atrocities just because they are Americans.  The average American is no better or worse than the average German, Japanese, or Iraqi.  Americans are not exempt from the human condition, and especially now, American leaders are particularly vulnerable to delusional thinking because of the temptations that come with virtually unchecked power. War, contrary to the right's tendency even now to romanticize it, more often brings the worst out of humans, not the best.

Once the dogs of war are unleashed, everyone involved is dragged by them to corrupt regions of the human soul any sane person would seek at all costs to avoid.   We should not be shocked by Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, Haditha.  And while those who participated in the atrocities committed there are morally responsible for their actions, those who released the dogs of war are one hundred times more responsible.  That's why the Mennonite position on war has practical moral significance, even if I would agree that violence in some instances is justified.  And I have to wonder if Fr. Neuhaus did not discern an eagerness on the part of this administration for this war and whether this did not bother him.  I know what Bush said, but does he really take it at face value?  I cannot believe he is so obtuse, especially not after everything we have learned about the PNAC push to invade Iraq since Desert Storm.  This was not a war reluctantly entered into.  It was one  the neocon militarists were salivating about for over a decade.

We have been corrupted in every war in which we've participated, and we will be in every war we will ever participate in--that's just the nature of war no matter how theoretically just the cause.  And that's why you don't go to war, even if theoretically justified, unless absolutely forced to as a last resort.  Our invasion of Iraq is all the worse because it was never a war that was necessary to begin with.  It didn't take a lot of shrewdness to see there were other possibilities.   Saddam could have been contained, but this administration wanted this war too badly. 

And the rest of us, including otherwise shrewd observers of the American scene like Fr. Neuhaus, should have smelled a rat.  We knew who the architects of the war were.  They've been around for years.  Many were around during the Nixon/Ford years; they were around during the Iran Contra crimes; they are the fraternity of "rollback" militarists and warmongers who see every problem as having only a violent solution.  They are the same powerdrunk bunch who crashed the car before, and yet we gave them the keys to the car again anyway.

This is what makes me wonder about Neuhaus's powers of discernment.  Why is he so comfortable with these people and their vision?   Why would he have reason to trust them?  Why wasn't it obvious to him that things would turn out the way they did? Even if an invasion of Iraq were absolutely necessary, these are the last people in the world you would want running it. Whether it fits some abstract criterion of just war theory is the least important factor; more important is who is pushing for this war, what is their record, and what are their motivations.  To have trusted these guys for a minute was the first big mistake. 

But even if the motivations of the war's architects were as pure as humanly possible, the choice for war would still have to be balanced against its potential for unleashing forces of evil they would have no power to control.  That, in my opinion, was the second major mistake the idealistic supporters of the war made.  They were so infatuated with their dreams to get rid of the bad guy and to bring democracy and freedom to the long-suffering Iraqis, that they thought it unnecessary to understand much about the historical cultural reality with which they were tampering. They will see us a liberators, not invaders.  Oy.

People like Fr. Neuhaus are impeccable, usually, in their reasoning, but deficient in their discernment.  And their blindness is not something that is exclusive to people who are temperamentally inclined toward the right.  We are all afflicted by it at one time or another.  But insofar as he and people like him have made the judgment that the invasion of Iraq was a just cause, I think the record now shows that their discernment was deficient, and their judgment wrong.  He doesn't quite admit to this in his comments after the interview.  The closest he comes is to say, "I don't know."  He then quotes Bush's second inaugural address as if to say, well, our intentions were noble:

The great objective of ending tyranny is the concentrated work of generations. The difficulty of the task is no excuse for avoiding it. America’s influence is not unlimited, but fortunately for the oppressed, America’s influence is considerable, and we will use it confidently in freedom’s cause.

We go forward with complete confidence in the eventual triumph of freedom. Not because history runs on the wheels of inevitability; it is human choices that move events. Not because we consider ourselves a chosen nation; God moves and chooses as He wills. We have confidence because freedom is the permanent hope of mankind, the hunger in dark places, the longing of the soul. When our Founders declared a new order of the ages; when soldiers died in wave upon wave for a union based on liberty; when citizens marched in peaceful outrage under the banner “Freedom Now”—they were acting on an ancient hope that is meant to be fulfilled. History has an ebb and flow of justice, but history also has a visible direction, set by liberty and the Author of Liberty.

Who could gainsay the sentiments expressed in this speech?  But the real question is whether such idealistic justifications for this war and for the militarization of our society point to our real motivations. This is where the failure of discernment comes--in failing to see the deeper, darker forces that are really driving our policy. 

Neuhaus, like many Americans, wanted to believe that the administration was mainly motivated by these ideals, and I don't doubt for a minute his sincerity.  I do, however, question the naivete of his judgment.  Naivete is always the result of projecting our own wishful thinking onto a situation.  It's an infatuation with our own ideas, which blinds us to reality as it is.  Our ideas may in fact be very sophisticated and elegantly developed, but nevertheless fundamentally mistaken, as when we have fallen in love with the wrong person.  No shame in that; it happens to the best of us. But it happens, and when it does, we see only what we want to see. But reality has a way of sooner or later waking us up, and forcing us to see what before we could not.  And usually the more resistant we are to seeing what we don't want to see, the more violent the shock that finally brings us to our senses. 

I think that this is the condition of the idealistic supporters of the war.  They failed to recognize that they were in the position of Little Red Riding Hood looking at the wolf disguised in grandma's nightgown.  They were seduced by the conventions, the normal reality of militaristic establishment-think that has corrupted our society in ways that remain for the most part invisible to us--although very visible to everyone else around the world. The rest of the world discerns the wolf disguised in American idealism. 

But there is still hope that this disaster will finally shake us out of our stupor and wake us up to the futility of our militarism; there is still hope that a majority of us Americans, whether traditionalists or cosmopolitans, will have the moral clarity to face the situation as it is, not as we wish it to be, to do what we can to clean up the mess we've made, and to make sure we don't make the same mistake again.  And for me that means taking the key to the car away from these militarists, and never giving it to them ever again. 

The Indian Wars

There are basically two American stories, and depending on which any given American thinks or feels is more true, so is his sense of identity shaped by it, and usually so does his politics flow from it. There are other American narratives that don't quite fit into this bi-polar division, but American history has been shaped pretty much by which one is dominant at any given time. Fear drives the plot of one of these stories; hope the other.

Ira Chernus at TomDispatch provides the outline for the fear story as told by its current bard Karl Rove:

The GOP stories are the same ones white people have been telling each other ever since they first set foot on North American shores: If you want to be safe, go to the frontier and wipe out the Indians. As former State Department official John Brown has noted, our Indian wars are not over yet.

Now Rove and his President are trying to sell the Iraq war as a frontier conflict, too. They want us to see U.S. troops as the cavalry putting down the "Injuns." Or better yet, as pioneers creating small enclaves of civilization (in Iraq they're called Green Zones) in the midst of a vast wilderness full of savages. What strength, what courage it takes to survive. But they have a job to do: They must teach the savages how to be free. And above all, like their pioneering forebears, they must have the guts to stick it out until the job is done.

How do we know our military in Iraq has such beneficent motives? The answer is simple -- they are Americans, by definition the heroes, the good guys. Every time they kill a bad guy like Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, they only prove once again what good guys they are. (In a recent Washington Post-ABC poll, 68% of Americans said that the U.S. war against Iraq has "helped to improve the lives of the Iraqi people.")

Naturally they hope, one day, to be able to go home to their loved ones and live the peaceable lives they long for. But they aren't quitters like those (Democratic) schoolmarms back East in the halls of Congress. They are real frontiersmen, with the will and the resolve to stay the course. They won't be scared off by suffering or bloodshed; sometimes -- let's be honest -- it takes bloodshed for life to get better.

That's the archetype--the Indian Wars, and insofar as it functions as the dominant narrative in our national life, we realize our worst selves as Americans.  And Americans are particularly vulnerable to the way it can be demagogued because as a nation we have lost our way and have no clear sense of our better self.  Chernus gets at this later in his article when he says:

It plays on the insecurity of Americans who feel that their lives are out of control. Karl Rove knows that (as Gary Bauer, a religious right politico, once put it) "Joe Six-Pack doesn't understand why the world and his culture are changing and why he doesn't have a say in it." So Rove constantly invents simplistic good-against-evil stories for his candidates to tell. He tries to turn every election into a moral drama, a contest of Republican moral clarity versus Democratic moral confusion.

And let's face it, it works.  And it will keep working until the Democrats--or somebody--come up with an alternative narrative that appeals to what's best in the American character rather than what is worst.  And the appeal to fear always, always triggers what is worst.  People who are good with hammers see every problem as a nail, said Abraham Maslow.  And people who are good with hammers are usually people whose fear has made them insensate brutes incapable of imagining any other alternative.

Surely there are real threats that are potent stimulants to human fear.  But a real leader, instead of fanning the flames of our fear, will help us to find a way to master it.  The mastery of fear is courage.  Courage is sobriety and clearheadedness in the face of a threat. Sobriety and clearheadedness are necessary prerequisites for finding the best solution.  And one might also say that courage is the precondition for openness to the movement of grace.  Nothing provides a more impenetrable barrier to the movement of grace than giving in to fear and flailing out at what threatens us with strategies developed by a brain soaked in adrenaline or a soul soaked in hatred.   Our Indian War mentality is precisely this.

I don't know.  Maybe fear has always been the dominant motivator in the American story.  The only thing that has changed is that after WWII, America evolved to beome the world's greatest military power, and so now all we're doing is extending the 19th Century Indian War frontier mentality to the 21st global situation.  But our hope as a nation lies in whether we can frame a narrative that appeals to our best ideals not our basest instincts.  I'm not naive enough to think that what is base in human nature can be eliminated, but there should be a competing narrative that gives people a choice, and right now there is none. The fear narrative  dominates everything in our American public life--and it even claims to have the moral high ground in doing so.  But like some noxious, invasive weed, it has choked off the growth of anything more wholesome.

I'm not saying genuine hope died, but it has withered into something rather anemic.  There were some rather crude attempts by the partisans of hope to break the fear narrative in sixties and seventies, but they were ineffective--too easy to dismiss by the fear-repressed grownups who said they knew better.  They didn't.  But our own fear has inclined us to listen to the so-called grownups who falsely promise to make the fear go away, and instead they just make things worse.  We have continuously put our trust in the hands of flat-souled, psychologically obtuse people who talk tough and don't know what they are doing.  Our own fear leads us to ally ourselves with the class bully.  He may be a crude, stupid oaf, but he's our crude, stupid oaf, and insofoar as there ain't nobody gonna push him around, nobody's gonna push me around. 

But why all this fear?  I don't know for sure, but I think that what is so noxious in the Indian War narrative has been aggravated by the guilt and the fear we unleashed since dropping the bombs on Japan.  We don't talk about it; we don't really want to think about it.  But others around the world do. And the fact is that we Americans--the good guys--dropped the bomb--twice--on innocents.  We crossed the line; we set the precedent. We're the only ones who have unleashed such horror.  So if we could do it, why shouldn't someone do it to us?  Wasn't that really the source of the fear that permeated the American psyche during the Cold War?   

I believe the American compulsion for nuclear dominance was based on the unconscious assumption that what goes around comes around.  We let the evil genie out of the bottle, now we have to arm ourselves to the teeth to prevent it from getting us. We've been living in dread of the day we will finally get what we deep down fear is coming to us.  9/11 brought that fear from deep down to something we felt with renewed intensity.  And it gave us a screen--Islamic terrorists--upon which we could project that fear.  And so now everything we do is soaked in this fear of Islamofascism.

And so for good reason now we live in dread of the really big attack--the mushroom cloud that our leaders were telling us was inevitable if we didn't take out Saddam.  And the irony is that our flailing out at him out and all the money we've spent doing so has has made a nuclear attack on American soil more likely.  The "Injuns" are madder at us than ever before, and they'll get aholt of the white man's big weapon somehow or another.  And they will deliver it not on a missile tip but in a container ship.  Iraq has distracted us from developing a clearheaded, prudent strategy for preventing such a thing, and it has diverted the funds necessary to implement such a strategy should we finally shake off our fear-induced stupor and develop one.

I'm trying to come up with the outline for a hope-driven narrative.  I have to say I'm not feeling the hope impulse much these days, and so it's hard for me to come up with anything I think anyone--even people who are groping for such a thing themselves--will find compelling.  But I think it starts with understanding who the great partisans of hope have been, and then understanding the nature of their courage and the price they were willing to pay in their confronting the partisans of fear. And then asking how can I be now what they were then? More on this another time.

Remember the Mayaguez

A U.S. cargo ship, the SS Mayaguez, was raided by a Cambodian naval force in May 1975.  Another of the Kissinger legacies in the region had been the fall of Cambodia, a month before, to the Khmer Rouge, and the new communist regime was flexing its muscles.  The ships thirty-eight American crew members were taken prisoner.  Rumsfeld, with Kissinger's concurrence, persuaded Ford to bypass diplomacy and display his toughness, first by bombing the port city of Kompong Som and then by ordering an operation aimed at rescuing the crew.  Ford denounced "an act of piracy," and U.S. Marines, like swashbucklers, swung aboard the captured ship (the first such hostile boarding at sea since 1826), only to find it abandoned.  In another foreshadowing, the Rumsfeld circle had based its action on ridiculously flawed intelligence.  Hundreds of other Marines invaded an island where the captured crewmen were thought to be.  In the battle there, forty Americans were killed--for nothing.  It was then discovered that the Mayaguez crew had been released unharmed shortly after being captured, set adrift in a Thai fishing vessel.  Despite vast difference in scale and intention the incompetent rescue attempt was a kind of overture, complete with the music of bombing for the war Rumsfeld would orchestrate Against Iraq beginning in 2003. The Mayaguez action was overwhelming popular with Americans, lethal to young U.S. soldiers--and it was unnecessary.  (James Carroll, House of War, p. 359.)

Rumsfeld was Ford's chief of staff at the time. Later that year, Ford appointed him Secretary of Defense.  It's the Republican way--promote failure in the name of toughness.  "Strong and wrong" -- pretty much sums up the GOP mentality that leads time and time again to oafish feats of muscular idiocy.  In fairness, the Scoop Jackson/Joe Lieberman/Peter Beinart wing of the Dems  are just as complicit in this brawn over brains approach.