Tag Archives: political theory

The Tinderbox Theory of the Republic

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Glenn Beck favored radio listeners today with excerpts from his email correspondence with Sarah Palin over the shootings in Tucson.

Both correspondents were naturally eager to distance themselves from Jared Loughner’s murderous rampage at the Safeway on Saturday, and say that they abhor violence. They come in peace. “Sarah, as you know, peace is always the answer,” Beck writes:

I know you are feeling the same heat, if not much more on this. I want you to know you have my support. But please look into protection for your family. An attempt on you could bring the republic down.[emphasis mine]

What’s most striking here is not the patently absurd notion that “an attempt” on Sarah Palin’s life would or “could bring the republic down”; it’s the very idea of the republic underlying it.

That is the idea of the republic as a tinderbox. Apparently the place is ready to explode at the slightest provocation. In Beck’s view, or self-serving conceit, most Americans are locked and loaded, ready for civil war. We are teetering on the brink of revolution. Don’t tread on us. In our distressed republic, good people have been pushed to the limit. We are ready to resist tyranny at every turn, or at least before every commercial break, and with every self-aggrandizing tweet.

And all it would take to ignite the tinderbox would be the assassination of… Sarah Palin?

Is this our Helen?

It’s unclear whether Palin thinks her face or her Facebook page could launch a thousand ships, but she shares with Beck the view that her obnoxious behavior and his are of historic importance: “Thanks to all you do,” she replies, sounding vaguely apostolic, “to send the message of truth and love and God as the answer.”

And yet even with good men like Beck out there our future is not secure: “our children will not have peace if politicos just capitalize on this to succeed in portraying anyone as inciting terror and violence”. So peace is always the answer, or at least truth and love and God are the answer, unless, of course, the “politicos” keep picking on Sarah Palin.

And if they don’t stop? Then all bets are off, I suppose; and all patriots should fear for the republic.

Assange’s Got Everybody Agitated About Anarchy

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Anarchists are back in the news again. I haven’t tracked down the first newspaper columnist to use the A-word with reference to Julian Assange, or liken him to “the anarchists of the early 20th century,” as Chas Freeman did in his New York Times editorial this past weekend. But the word has suddenly gained new currency. An old specter is once again haunting the world’s ruling powers.

One of the happier, unintended consequences of Cablegate may turn out to be a public history lesson about anarchists and the role they played in American (and European) political life before the First World War. But right now that outcome seems much less likely than another — that all the hysteria over the new anarchist threat may lead to severe restrictions on the flow of information: Palmer Raids for the twenty-first century, with the Security State raiding and policing its own Cyber-State.

This is the view L. Gordon Crovitz takes in a Wall Street Journal editorial today, labeling Assange an “Information Anarchist”:

The irony is that WikiLeaks’ use of technology to post confidential U.S. government documents will certainly result in a less free flow of information. … The Obama administration now plans to tighten information flows, which could limit leaks but would be a step back to the pre-9/11 period.
Mr. Assange is misunderstood in the media and among digirati as an advocate of transparency. Instead, this battening down of the information hatches by the U.S. is precisely his goal. The reason he launched WikiLeaks is not that he’s a whistleblower—there’s no wrongdoing inherent in diplomatic cables—but because he hopes to hobble the U.S., which according to his underreported philosophy can best be done if officials lose access to a free flow of information.

Crovitz goes on to liken Assange to “Ted Kaczynski, another math-obsessed anarchist,” and connects the “philosophy” of Assange’s writings on authoritarian conspiracy to the Unabomber Manifesto. He has to admit that Assange hasn’t mailed any bombs or killed anyone; but Kaczynski is “serving a life sentence for murder.” Ergo – nothing, really; but it sure sounds alarming, doesn’t it?

(The best Crovitz can do along these lines is to argue that Assange has put lives at risk. This is something everyone likes to say; it adds to the drama and stirs people. To his credit, Crovitz offers the example of Dr. Hossein Vahedi, an American citizen who now fears that his relatives in Iran will be targeted as a result of a leaked cable.)

In this view the state would seem justified in concealing its secrets in order to protect lives. The idea here seems to be that the American state is, mutatis mutandis, benevolent, and those who criticize the state or even seek to thwart the power of the state are likely sinister, violent or evil.

Over at the New York Times, David Brooks does not go that far, but he sees Assange as “an old-fashioned anarchist who believes that all ruling institutions are corrupt and public pronouncements are lies.” I doubt Brooks would really want to defend the counter-proposition, namely, that all ruling institutions are not corrupt and public pronouncements are true. But that’s really beside his point, and not what has him and all his fellow columnists so agitated about anarchists.

It’s really very simple. In Assange and in those who revel in the confusion and embarrassment of Cablegate, these self-appointed guardians of the public welfare see someone who wants to “disrupt the established order,” to quote Freeman. Here you may be forgiven for asking whether it is the job of the fourth estate to defend the established order. An “anarchist” like Assange forces them to declare allegiance; and their allegiance is to the power of the American super-state: these are the champions of the Pax Americana.

Still, that doesn’t keep them from reveling in the confusion and embarrassment of Cablegate. Maybe all the antidisestablishmentarianism is merely a hedge.

Be that as it may, there’s nothing terribly wrong with defending the Pax Americana: in many cases, our lies and corruption are certainly preferable to those of others. The trouble comes when those who have been entrusted with keeping the state honest by investigating its secrets and reporting on its activities turn out to be the State’s most ardent defenders, and present us only with a stark choice between raison d’etatand anarchy.

On Machiavelli, on the house

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One would think Silvio Berlusconi had read Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince. Having risen to power through sheer financial might and the application of political muscle, Mr. Berlusconi should never have expected to be loved. But the Italian Premier is as much a creation as the creator of his television empire: he mistakes his power for popularity, or at least he thinks that one should translate to the other.

Why do they hate me so much? Berlusconi asked his father confessor, after learning that his attacker, Massimo Tartaglia, had gained an enthusiastic following on Facebook and around the social web. Could it simply be that this prince of the television world really doesn’t understand the way the Internet now works, how its communities form, the fascinations that take hold and bring people together — in a moment, for a moment?

Or was it a Machiavellian ruse to garner sympathy? An old prince suffers a beating at the hands of a crazy man then confides to his father confessor with dismay that he just doesn’t understand what he did to deserve this, doesn’t understand what those young people have against him, knowing full well that the father confessor will make this confession public. “They” become the heartless enemy, without pity for the battered prince, or reverence for old age; “they” become the source of everybody’s grief.

It seems to have worked. Judging, at least, from the editorial pages, public opinion in Italy has shifted back in Mr. Berlusconi’s favor. And now another Facebook community has formed, denouncing Mr. Tartaglia’s gratuitous act of violence and shaming his supporters. Maybe Silvio Berlusconi will get a little love after all.

Be that as it may, the whole incident, which has already faded from the news, led me back to chapter 17 of The Prince, where Machiavelli argues that it is better for a prince to be more feared, than loved. “For love is held by a chain of obligation which, men being selfish, is broken whenever it serves their purpose; but fear is maintained by a dread of punishment, which never fails.” The trouble, however, is that in making oneself feared, one risks incurring the hatred of others.

The prince will avoid hatred if he “abstains from interfering with the property of his citizens and subjects or with their women,” Machiavelli writes. Roba and donne — the stuff and women of others — are untouchable; touching them, taking them, is a violation Machiavelli tellingly calls rapina — rapine.

As I read it, this is all about respecting the integrity and even the sanctity of the house, where both women and property are kept. (And forget your twenty-first century prejudices long enough to remember that in early modern Italy, women belonged to the house, even when they ventured forth from it.) The prince may more readily take someone’s life “when there is proper justification and manifest reason for it” than violate the house:

Above all [the prince] must abstain from taking the property of others, for men forget more easily the death of their father than the loss of their patrimony. Then also pretexts for seizing property are never wanting; and one who lives by rapine will always find some reason for taking the goods of others.

You can probably follow J.G.A. Pocock’s lead from this passage to later thinking about property and liberty from the depredations of princes. Whether any of this helps to answer the question Mr. Berlusconi put to his priest I’ll leave for others, with more knowledge of the Italian scene, to decide. A quick Google search for Berlusconi and rapina — which I hoped might shed some light on the issue — yields only a story about a bank robbery in Torino last February where one of the robbers wore a Berlusconi mask. The other was disguised as Mr. Berlusconi’s senior advisor, Marcello dell’Utri.

‘Mr. Rajaratnam seemed in good spirits’

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That was the report from a “friend” on October 20th. Whether Mr. Rajaratnam’s good spirits have held up despite recent events — which have ranged from the collapse of his firm, the Galleon Group, to accusations that he was funding the Tamil Tigers — is less clear; but perhaps Mr. Rajaratnam knew all along that that he had friends out there, and that his friends would rise to his defense. No need to be glum.

Friends of Raj have included, so far, a number of prominent newspaper columnists and professors of law and finance, as well as, it would appear, the entire editorial staff of The Wall Street Journal.

Most are not defending Mr. Rajaratnam himself: nobody, not even his closest friends, have stepped up to declare him innocent or incapable of any wrongdoing. Instead, we are asked to consider that what the Feds call insider trading is really another form of market transparency, or alternatively, that it is, or ought to be, perfectly legal for outsiders to trade on information provided by insiders, even if those insiders betray their fiduciary duties in providing that information.

The latter of these arguments could amount to little more than this: if you tell me a secret, and I act on that information, you may have violated a trust, but I have not. I have only acted in my own self-interest, and what else can you expect me to do? Of course this conveniently overlooks the question how I induced you to tell me the secret, or how I colluded with you in violation of a trust. Any investigation of wrongdoing at Galleon will likely focus on whether there were inducements in Mr. Rajaratnam’s network of informants and contacts, or what form collusion took. After all, we’re not really being asked to believe that these were just friendly exchanges.

Or are we? Mr. Rajaratnam cultivated friends in high places and friends with access to proprietary information, to be sure. And as L. Gordon Crovitz noted in a piece that tries to blur the line between insider and outsider trading:

Information flows these days are increasingly about networks, including information about markets shared by members of various communities. Traders use Web sites to compare notes on companies and use social media like Facebook to share information, looking for an edge. Sophisticated traders such as hedge funds draw on more selected networks such as their investors.

The word “community” is doing a lot of work here it shouldn’t do. And it’s a little hard to imagine an entire hedge fund entrusted to the fortunes of six-degree, social media friendships. The role these informal exchanges played in giving Galleon the “edge” that Mr. Rajaratnam insisted upon is most likely negligible. Instead, it seems fair to assume, Mr. Rajaratnam and his associates depended on what Crovitz calls “more sophisticated” social information networks. (If you like acronyms, call them SINs). How sophisticated, and how social, remains to be seen.

The other argument, the argument about market transparency, is usually attributed to Milton Friedman (but originates, according to Stephen Bainbridge, with Henry Manne). Friedman summed it up when he quipped: “you should want more insider trading, not less. You want to give the people most likely to have knowledge about deficiencies of the company an incentive to make the public aware of that.” The merits of this view aside — and Bainbridge has argued persuasively that its merits are slim — it paints a deliberately naive picture of the markets, with knowledgeable insiders merely lacking some incentive to inform “the public” of a company’s deficiencies.

The public? It’s difficult to say why Friedman should choose this word. No doubt about it, inside information about a company’s shortcomings, or failures, or misdeeds can serve the public, or be a public good; and in a perfect world, or even a better world, there might be real incentives and protections for those who come forward with information about companies that serves the public interest. But in our world, in the real world, who among the public, broadly construed, the publicus, would benefit from this kind of information, or even know how to benefit from it?

It’s a very small percentage of the public, and it is disingenuous to pretend otherwise. It’s a “community,” to use Crovitz’s word. But the trouble is this: this particular community is like a gated enclave, restricted, shut off from the traffic and noise of the public world. Just Mr. Rajaratnam and friends — nobody else; a very small, very closed circle, a social information network, to which only a select few are privy.

There are, no doubt, many such networks of friends and boon companions where the line between inside and outside is blurred: after all, friends don’t let friends stay out in the cold. But these social information networks are still a long way from true transparency and public disclosure, or information that is a public good, even though we have all the technology we need to make information public. What we lack is the political intelligence to do it right, or maybe just the political will to do it at all.

My own theory about Sarah Palin

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Like many people I know, I’m heading out of town for the holiday weekend, and, like many people I know, I have my own pet theory about the Palin resignation.

I am skeptical about the idea that this resignation is the first shot across Tim Pawlenty’s bow in the race for the 2012 nomination. Could Palin be misguided enough to think that resigning midway through her first term as governor will somehow enhance her credentials for the Presidency? Or even for the Senate? John McCain was widely mocked when he suspended his campaign. What about somebody who suspends her sworn duty to serve and govern midway through her first term?

There may be a lucrative TV contract waiting for Sarah Palin (many have speculated that she’s heading to Fox), or a bad reality TV series (picture a cross between The Osbournes and The Anna Nicole Show). This is a little easier to buy than the suggestion that she’s resigning because she just doesn’t like politics and the national spotlight. More cartoons about Trig? More jokes about her daughter? How could anyone be expected to govern under such conditions? Sarah Palin revels in celebrity and her own folksy megalomania, and her remark about the “full court press” coming her way may be just more evidence of the paranoia which megalomaniacs and other sociopaths often exhibit.

It seems obvious that another shoe is ready to drop, as many bloggers and even a few in the mainstream media have speculated. Max Blumenthal over at the Daily Beast sees an “iceberg scandal” coming, involving a company called Spenard Building Supplies and an indictment of the Governor herself for embezzlement.

This is the most credible theory of all, in my view. Look at the structure of Palin’s resignation. She will officially hand over the reigns of power to Lieutenant Governor Sean Parnell at the Governor’s picnic in Fairbanks, Alaska later this month. The picnic is scheduled for July 26th. The delay in the official transfer of power seems to suggest a plea bargain, or some kind of arrangement with prosecutors, so that the transition to Parnell’s tenure as governor can be made as smoothly as possible. What the people of Alaska can expect in the way of governance from now until then is anybody’s guess.

If there is an indictment in the works, no one should be surprised. Palin has a shady history, rife with charges of ethics violations. What surprises me, and what continues to surprise me from one scandal to the next, are the expressions of shock and dismay when we learn that the powerful are corrupt, or that political power is itself a form of corruption. If you want to think about this over the holiday weekend – and it seems only appropriate to do so on July 4th – you might want to consider this passage from Karl Popper’s Open Society and its Enemies.

There is no history of mankind, there is only an indefinite number of histories of all kinds of aspects of human life. And one of these is the history of political power. This is elevated into the history of the world. But this, I hold, is an offence against every decent conception of mankind. It is hardly better than to treat the history of embezzlement or of robbery or of poisoning as the history of mankind. For the history of power politics is nothing but the history of international crime and mass murder (including it is true, some of the attempts to suppress them). This history is taught in schools, and some of the greatest criminals are extolled as heroes.

After July 26th, we may have to amend that last sentence to read that some of the greatest criminals are sometimes extolled as heroines, too.

Trending Towards The Gray

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I’m watching Procter & Gamble stock today, looking for some reaction on the trading floor to the announcement that Robert McDonald will succeed A. G. Lafley as CEO. The market did not exactly raise a huzzah or hurrah at the news yesterday, which ran on the front page of the Wall Street Journal and on the AP wire. P&G finished slightly down. It was a gray day.

Maybe traders and investors are waiting for today’s official announcement before reacting, but when have you known Wall Street to wait? Maybe McDonald just isn’t seen as an inspired or inspiring choice; but I refuse to believe that. After 29 years at P&G, McDonald now serves as Chief Operating Officer of the sprawling consumer products giant. He has an impressive military background (West Point, 82nd Airborne), and a degree in Engineering. He is a logistics man. In his tenure as COO, McDonald focused on making P&G’s manufacturing and transportation network more efficient. He implemented a monitoring system to track trucks and reduce empty truck miles. And he made efforts to move production to emerging markets – another push for virtuous efficiency (or cheaper labor, depending on your perspective and your politics).

These are not the actions of an empty suit. McDonald is clearly someone with a deep and hard-earned knowledge of how P&G works and the expectation is he will make a concerted effort to institute new discipline across the company. No small task, given P & G’s size, breadth and depth: the company makes everything from my Braun coffee-grinder to dish soap, Gillette razors, potato chips, AA batteries and cosmetics; even the diapers your child is soiling right now are probably made by P&G. Imagine directing all that traffic, or simply trying to bring the whole thing into focus. The company claims people around the world use its products three billion times a day. By my reckoning, that’s about 35,000 uses every second of every day.

That makes the collective shrug yesterday over McDonald’s appointment all the more puzzling. Or maybe that shrug was the intended effect. P&G certainly could have made a big splash if it wanted to, by choosing Susan Arnold over McDonald. Arnold was often mentioned as a likely successor to Lafley until she left P & G in March of 2009 (motivated, no doubt, by the fact that she’d been passed over. The succession process had been two years in the works; the writing must have been on the wall sometime in 2008). Arnold was a P&G superstar. She started out selling dish soap (a brand assistant), and gained the highest rank of any woman in P & G’s 168-year history. But wait, there’s more: she’s openly gay, according to her profile on Wikipedia. (These are the wages of success: to have one’s sexual preferences detailed on Wikipedia.) Think Carly Fiorina meets Ellen DeGeneres. Think of the cultural capital the company would have reaped: over-the-top praise from big media outlets, eager to portray themselves as socially progressive; the lashing and futile threats of boycotts from the Religious Right. At the very least, it would have been a good day at the circus.

There may be a glass ceiling at P&G, but Arnold came pretty close to shattering it. There’s no questioning her competence, and it’s likely she was passed over not because of some institutionalized sexism or homophobia, but because of the business she was in. She came up through the beauty and cosmetics line (look for institutional sexism there, if you must), a business that flourished under Lafley; but there is a suspicion that in hard times, Cover Girl and Pantene won’t do as well as some of the more essential consumer items. Some investors had begun to question whether the acquisition of Gillette had made the company unwieldy, too big to succeed. The future of the company doesn’t lie in Arnold’s bailiwick. So it might have been as simple as that. The McDonald appointment suggests a new sobriety about the marketplace, a shift in focus or a correction of the Lafley strategy. (Since Lafley will stay on as Chairman, it’s a subtle suggestion, at best.)

But doesn’t the P&G succession story also suggest something larger and more significant? Something about the mood and tone of the country right now? I’m tempted to see in McDonald’s ascent something like the start of a trend — away from the superstar CEO, and towards the nuts and bolts operations guy. Less sizzle, more logistics. A similar restraint seems to have played into the thinking behind the choice of Fritz Henderson to lead GM through its dark days and into Chapter 11. There are doubtless other examples.

It’s sometimes said that the operations-minded are too immersed in the details to see the big picture; but sobriety, details and logistics might be exactly what we’re looking for after the housing bust, the financial crisis, the Madoff affair, the private jets, all the CNBC hype and John Thain’s $1,400 wastebasket. And it may be what we’re looking for, more broadly, in leaders: think of it as a trend toward the gray, more Ike, less Dubya. George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld could never have conceived, let alone plan D-Day; Eisenhower would never have invaded Iraq without a postwar plan. Obama is a rock star, to be sure. But many like him for his sobriety and evenness of temperament; he is unflappable, and he likes to make careful distinctions and discuss things coolly, so much so that before the elections some right-leaning pundits were praising his “conservative” instincts. (That’s over.)

Remember when Ronald Reagan famously told us it was morning in America again? Now, it seems, we’re just happy to hear that it’s a gray day and that nothing too out of the ordinary is happening.

A Specter (Not Arlen) is Haunting the GOP

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It would be either paranoid or delusional to think that Daniel Henninger had me in mind as he wrote today’s Wall Street Journal column on the ghost of Ronald Reagan, or that he even numbers me among the “joyful Democratic bloggers” who think it’s time for the GOP to leave Reagan behind. But he has managed to draw me out (and not just because I don’t want to be mistaken for a Democrat, or a blogger, or, even worse, confused with the joyful).

You can definitely count me among those who think that expecting Ronald Reagan to lead the GOP out of the wilderness is not a viable political strategy, but just nostalgia, or more waiting for Godot. I said so in a previous post and in a letter responding to a March 5th Henninger column. The letter ran in the Journal under the title “Can’t Live in the Past” and managed to generate some discussion online among adherents to the cult of Reagan; the Journal ran a response from a young woman who held Ronald Reagan in the highest esteem, even though she was a child when he was in the White House, and who took exception to my view that younger voters who turned out for Obama might not exactly be drawn in by paeans to a dead man. My position wasn’t all that far from Jeb Bush’s own: “I felt like there was a lot of nostalgia and the good old days in the [GOP] messaging. I mean, it’s great, but it doesn’t draw people toward your cause.”

I’m still not exactly sure what any of this had to do with the purported subject of Henninger’s original column, which urged Republicans to start talking about economic growth and develop a political platform around growth, but I was delighted to discover that I had managed to hit a nerve.

I’m not out to be a scourge or a gadfly, or simply to irritate. I’d wanted to start a conversation about history, and its claim on the present. Nor am I out to be a mythbuster. There’s nothing wrong with having heroes and stories of the great deeds of great men to inform and guide your politics. In the classical world, that was considered one of the functions of history. I would only caution that you had better not look too closely at those men, because they are after all, men. Even saints err, as one saint (Thomas More) pointed out after studying another (St. Augustine): homo erat, errare potuit. The longer people accept and embrace the fabled past uncritically, the denser the cloud of nostalgia grows, and the further removed your politics will be from history and what really happened.

Again, there’s not necessarily anything wrong with all that. Myths and fables have value, not just cultural but real political value. We believe — or at least we used to be brought up believing — all sorts of things about George Washington and Abraham Lincoln that won’t stand up to very close scrutiny. We even learned them in school; they were moral tales, and they taught us things about the country and about the kind of people we were, the people we should strive to be. Those stories sacrificed some precision about how things really were to tell us how things ought to have been and ought to be.

Being a Reagan Republican may eventually involve the same trade off, and require less in the way of historical knowledge of Ronald Reagan’s presidency or critical interpretation of the past twenty-five years of American political and economic history and more in the way of catechism and fairy tales. To that end, I suppose, Henninger has taken steps in today’s column to start spelling out the articles of the faith, which the late Jack Kemp reduced to a Reaganite trinity: work, save and invest.

The full Kemp phrase, of course, was “incentives to work, save and invest.” Those incentives were to be the result of a government willing to admit the social benefits of modesty — in taxation and regulation of the economy. For now, the American public has elected an immodest government.

Leave aside for the moment that work, save and invest is not exactly a battle cry on the order of we are the change we have been waiting for. Solving that problem is just a matter of working with the material. Consider, instead, the claim for Reagan’s “modesty” and the social benefits it delivered. There are probably less charitable ways to describe Reagan’s approach to taxation than modesty; and modest regulation is really a euphemism for deregulation. But for Henninger the real difference lies in the fact that the new Obama budget sets out a full blown industrial policy; and that makes Obama the enemy of entrepreneurial capitalism:

Mr. Obama’s document genuflects to “the market economy,” then argues that it won’t endure unless we “sacrifice” (through tax increases) to make “overdue investments” (which literally only means public spending) on four explicit goals: green energy, infrastructure, public health care, and education.This calls to mind the way Japan’s Ministry of International Trade and Industry guided that economy from 1949 to 2001. The Obama-Rattner strategy for GM and Chrysler — a rescue if the companies agree to the government’s desire to build more small “green” cars, presumably sold with a large tax credit — is industrial policy. Why be postwar Japan?

It is not conceivable that a Reagan or Kemp would have directed the U.S. economy’s legendary energies into building hybrid cars, windmills and bullet trains.

Republicans these days seem to paint themselves into corners very easily, and this passage proves that the wily Henninger is no exception. Criticize, if you will, the making of industrial policy; but restrain yourself enough so that you don’t start to sound like the enemy of health care reform, or the anti-environmentalist, anti-alternative energy, anti-education party. Why, instead, aren’t we discussing positive Republican ideas and contributions in those areas?

To put it another way, the Republicans would probably benefit handsomely right now from some greening (evangelicals already have), some distance from Big Oil, a serious commitment to education and research, and the honesty to admit that the American healthcare system is broken. But they’re not going there. After all, can you imagine Ronald Reagan or Jack Kemp going there? No, you really can’t. And that’s why it’s time to move on.

What’s more, the notion that Ronald Reagan was a great champion of entrepreneurial capitalism who did not and would never have indulged in setting industrial policy is a Reagan myth — a story constructed by Ronald Reagan himself. The truth is much more complex. As Robert Reich pointed out in an editorial he wrote for the Times in 1985, Reagan may have steered clear of the phrase “industrial policy,” but in the course of his first term he had initiated “a major experiment in economic planning,” and he had done so with “a heavy hand.”

Viewed as a whole, Mr. Reagan’s budget deficit, tax plan and military buildup comprise an extraordinarily ambitious plan for shifting America’s industrial base. This is industrial policy with a vengeance. But because Mr. Reagan is who he is – avowed defender of the free market from the depradations of big government -there are no voices to his right, vigorously denouncing Washington’s vulgar intrusion into the temple of the marketplace. As only Richard Nixon could open relations with Peking, so only Ronald Reagan can make economic planning respectable.

Reagan lives on and continues to haunt — and, I would add, hinder — the Republicans in part because he knew how to tell a good story about himself. He surrounded himself with good storytellers. All good leaders do that; it’s called soft power. And it’s a sign of the GOP’s intellectual poverty and lack of good leadership that they are still telling this same old story, and trying to frighten us from the future with a specter from the past.

Nostalgia Hour at the Club for Growth

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Daniel Henninger has one thing right: the Republicans had better start talking about economic growth. But first they have to stop dithering and consorting with buffoons like Rush Limbaugh or threatening to go beyond the cutting edge and get really hip hop.

Then (one hopes) they will join the conversation about growth that’s already underway in many quarters — not just within the Obama administration, but also and especially in the private sector, which, if we are to believe Henninger, is the Republicans’ political bailiwick.

But (please) the public should not have to suffer through more teary-eyed sentiments or television specials about Ronald Reagan. Nor should we be asked to consider Ronald Reagan one of the great economic minds of the 20th century. He was not; and to put Reagan on a par with Milton Friedman or Henry Hazlitt is to misread history and to ignore the difference between political leadership (which Reagan provided) and philosophical range and depth.

What’s more, invoking the ghost of Ronald Reagan and hoping that he offers a way out of the darkness is just bad political strategy, unless of course the Republicans are intent on being the party of — well — sentimental old Republicans. Many young voters (most of whom were Obama voters this time around) were born during Reagan’s second term. To them, I’ll wager, “Ronald Reagan” sounds a bit like “William McKinley” or “Teddy Roosevelt.”

We don’t always, don’t usually act from ideas

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It’s odd to read Fouad Ajami’s tribute to Samuel Huntington as Israeli warplanes batter Gaza.

Huntington is best known, of course, not for his writings about the Palestinian question, but for his 1993 thesis of the “clash of civilizations” between Islam and the Christian West, which gained so many admirers and adherents after September 11th.

For Ajami, who now counts himself among the true believers, the thesis was an assault on the globalist zeitgeist of its era, proof that the dealings of Davos man could not secure peace and prosperity throughout the world. The passage that caught my attention runs as follows:

Critics insisted that men want Sony, not soil. But on 9/11, young Arabs — 19 of them — would weigh in. They punctured the illusions of an era, and gave evidence of the truth of Huntington’s vision. With his typical precision, [Huntington] had written of a “youth bulge” unsettling Muslim societies, and young, radicalized Arabs, unhinged by modernity and unable to master it, emerging as the children of this radical age.

But here’s the rub. The application and adoption of Huntington’s clash thesis after the events of 9/11 probably did as much to obscure the motives of those 19 young men as it did to illuminate them. Were the extraordinary acts of the 9/11 attackers really an attempt to “weigh in” on the success or failure of Davos or even to advance the “clash” between Islam and the West?

To consider actions as “evidence” of a social scientific “vision” always runs the risk of subsuming them under a grand theory — where they are bound to be lost or lose any of their original complexity as well as any trace of their humanity.

People have rightly worried about this when they’ve commented that Huntington’s thesis is much too broad: to speak of Islam today as a coherent “civilization” or of the Christian West in similar terms imposes a neat social scientific model on a complex and heterogeneous reality. Look within Islam today — in Gaza, in Lebanon, in Hamtramck, Michigan — and the picture is much more complex; visit most countries in Western Europe where the youth bulge is in evidence and you will gain the same impression: people don’t simply live in ideological blocs.

Human communities, villages, towns, neighborhoods, cities are not, can never really be the societies that social scientists talk about. Or at least they are organized less around ideas and causes than social scientists would have us believe. A civilization is not a cult. Or, to put it another way, to bomb Gaza is not just to bomb Hamas. That only works in military simulations, on TV or in the grand parlors of social theorists: it’s make believe.

That the 9/11 hijackers may have thought of themselves as emissaries of a cause, even of a lost civilization, the avengers of al-Andalus, seems likely; but then they took many steps in the days leading up to the attacks that seem wholly inconsistent with that notion. Maybe they only sometimes believed that they had hitched themselves up to a great cause. Maybe nobody can consistently and always act from such a belief. In any case, it seems to me that taking their suicidal delusions, or the suicidal theology of Islamic jihad, to explain their actions is simply to rehash jihadist apologetics without ever really trying to understand them.

It may be more difficult to consider how people act with or without clear and coherent ideas, or motives, or ends in mind, and it won’t yield anything like a grand theory; but it might just get you closer to the truth.

People — you and I — don’t ordinarily act from historical theses, nor do we usually carry the weight of history with us as we plan to act, despite what Hollywood and Huntington would like us to think.

Revolutionaries and assassins and other sociopaths may, at least when drafting their apologies or ransom notes or memoires. I wonder if they can always sustain the illusion, and if they do, how they do it. I wonder, too, if they share with the political scientists the same delusion about the coherence and consistency of human action, and the relation of action to idea.

And I wonder, further, if one could — just for kicks, or even in all seriousness — correlate the emergence of a particular type of sociopath, jihadi, revolutionary, or murderer with the emergence of a “social science” or a scientific view of society.

Republican relativists

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The philosopher Bernard Williams used to counter the weak relativist arguments of his Berkeley students with the rejoinder, “Hey, I know where you’re coming from, but, you know, relativism just isn’t true for me.”

The story (which may be apocryphal, though Hilary Putnam mentions it in Renewing Philosophy) may not amount to a full-blown critique of relativism; but it’s enough to dispense with relativist arguments that confuse moral judgment with prejudice or point of view: i.e., you may think Matilda is chaste, but I just don’t see it that way; you may think that Joe is trustworthy, but I just take a different view.

Of course things get a little fuzzy when you start moving from chastity to piety to trustworthiness to moral goodness. Still, it’s worth observing that the relativist arguments mocked by Williams are common enough these days and that they go hand in hand with, or are usually marshalled in defense of, consumerist solipsism, a lack of shared principles or standards, a disrespect for convention and civility — the sorts of perils conservative writers warned against all through the culture wars of the 90s.

Odd, then, that this brand of sloppy relativism now informs the nonsensical arguments wielded at every opportunity by the McCain presidential campaign.

To take just a couple of recent examples: asked by reporters at the Des Moines Register about the truthiness of the kindergarten sex-ed smear and the charge that “lipstick on a pig” was an sexist jibe, John McCain angrily and automatically responded by retreating to a sophomoric distinction of fact from assertion: the reporters at the Register may say that McCain is being untruthful and running a smear campaign; but that’s just their assertion. He was a POW, after all, and he remains committed to the truth, their editorial assertions and observations and be damned. A nincompoop small town mayor like Sarah Palin lacks experience? That’s just what you say. I see it differently. And she sees Russia right from her doorstep.

Just yesterday, when a reporter noted that McCain himself has spoken contritely about his role in the Keating Five and the S & L crisis of the 80s, McCain’s lawyer John Dowd responded, “I’m his lawyer and I have a different view of it.” You may say he was contrite; he may have said he was contrite; but that’s just not the way I look at it — now.

The campaign resorts to these relativist contortions to make a muddle of history, so that anything whatsoever can be asserted and nothing can be observed for certain about John McCain or Sarah Palin or Barack Obama. In so doing, they lose any claim to moral seriousness while asking us to entrust them with serious questions at a serious time.

This is the cost of trying to win at any cost. Things are true by your standards, not mine; things are sleazy or indecent by your standards, not mine. There are no standards that govern what we say except those that serve immediate political needs.

Only a few conservative writers have called the campaign to task on this stuff. Richard Cohen of the Washington Post comes immediately to mind; he cited Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire to style McCain both a tragedy and a farce. Others, like George Will and Kathleen Parker, have told the truth about Sarah Palin. But that’s not quite the same thing. All these contortions and distortions, the turning of objective fact into subjective fiction, the casting of historical description as mere political assertion, are ultimately tactics that serious conservatives pretend to deplore.

Will there eventually be a reckoning? I hope there will be, but I doubt it. Right now, the John McCain campaign acts as if whatever truth you will is as good as any other, as long as CNN picks it up and runs with it or it gets you out of a tight spot with the editors of a Midwestern newspaper. That may be politically advantageous, but it is morally reckless — and destructive to our political culture.

Right now, the McCain campaign is now doing as much as, if not more than any liberal academics ever did to hasten the closing of the American mind.