[Updated]

Writing of Evan Bayh, Ross Douthat opines:

America needs politicians who stake out interesting, politically-courageous positions on important policy questions. What it doesn’t need is politicians who occupy the safest possible ground on the great issues of the day, shift slightly left or slightly right depending on the state of public opinion, and then get congratulated by the press for being so independent-minded. [....]

Wherever the Beltway conventional wisdom settled, there was Evan Bayh — and he was rewarded for it with endless presidential and vice-presidential chatter, which has followed him, absurdly, even now that he’s announced his retirement.

In his farewell statement, Bayh complained that in today’s Washington, there’s “too much partisanship and not enough progress — too much narrow ideology and not enough practical problem-solving.” He’s right, up to a point, but his own record suggests that centrists as well as ideologues can be part of the problem, rather than part of the solution.

Reading this, it struck me that there really are two kinds of so-called "moderates" out there.  Or maybe even more. Maybe the term "moderate" or "centrist" is just a blanket term used to either applaud or tear down people with whom we agree or disagree.

For instance, that line about occupying the "safest possible ground on the great issues of the day" rushed out at me. For the purposes of Beltway moderates, that really is the case.  They occupy the safest ground.  They take the positions which will earn them the most adoration, funding, or media attention.  Perhaps Bayh was this sort of moderate.  I know very little about Bayh, and care even less.

As a self-professed ideological schizophrenic, I can see how I might be lumped into this category as well. I wonder, though, if the ground I’ve been treading is so safe.  And there are other so-called moderates who seem to be walking on similarly thin ice – like Bruce Bartlett for instance, who was all but exiled from many conservative circles, but who will never find a warm reception on the left nonetheless.  Is he speaking his mind just to play it safe, or is he doing it because he has ideas that don’t fit nicely in any of these scripted narratives we’ve been given.

[Read more →]

Jonah Goldberg has a very smart response to Jim Manzi’s reflections on “liberty-as-means” libertarians vs. “liberty-as-goal” libertarians.  I want to focus on Jonah’s post here, but you should read Manzi as well.  Jonah writes:

My own view is that the Right is intellectually healthier and more creative because its dogma remains unsettled (yes, I’ve written about this a zillion times). The Right is divided between those who are (in Irving Kristol’s formulation) anti-left and those who are anti-State. Those who believe that the government is bad because it’s working from leftist assumptions, and those who believe that the government is bad because it is the government. (Most conservatives share both outlooks to one extent or another, but usually fit more into one camp than the other. If you’re wholly in the government-is-bad camp you’re more properly a libertarian, but still on the right). There are those who believe that liberty is an end and those who believe that liberty is a means. For more than a half century now, modern conservatives have been debating and redebating the question of where to the draw the lines between freedom and order, liberty and virtue. And because that line continually needs to be redrawn given the evolution of attitudes, changes in technology, etc, conservative intellectuals (though not necessarily conservative activists, politicians and the like) are constantly revisiting first principles and philosophical assumptions or are at least capable of acknowledging the good faith of their philosophical opponents). I do not think you can say the same thing about liberals (again, as a wild generalization). What unites most, if not all, factions of the Left, from socialists to DLC moderates is a dogmatic acceptance that the government should do good when it can and where it can.  Hence the debates on the left tend to be procedural, wonkish, and technical or rankly political. The Right has such arguments as well, of course. But they do not define and dominate political discussions the way they do on the left. And that’s because our dogma is still unsettled.

I think this strikes upon a number of smart observations.  Certainly the continual re-drawing of the many lines between liberty and virtue, freedom and order, etc. is exactly the reason I enjoy reading (intellectual) conservative blogs so much more than I enjoy reading liberal blogs.  On the flip side, I think the best wonkish blogs and writers are found in the liberal corner.

Perhaps this reveals not only the strengths on both sides of the political aisle, but also the weaknesses.

I like thinking of conservatism in these terms – as an “unsettled ideology.” This gets at the bohemian conservatism I was talking about last week.  Russell Kirk was a self-described “bohemian Tory” and I think the intellectual wing of the conservative movement, with its distrust of centralized power and so forth fits that term nicely, if the red-meat activist wing does not.  The “unsettled dogma” concept seems so far removed from the conservative movement’s attempts at purity tests and activism that it’s a bit hard to reconcile the two.  And of course I’ve always been more attracted to the intellectual struggles within the ideology than with the political processes themselves, healthcare blogging notwithstanding.  But I think this can also be a trap for conservative intellectuals, or at least for bloggers with an intellectual streak (I am not really an intellectual as far as I know). More conservatives need to focus on policy and wonkishness if only to provide their ideas with a tangible foundation, but also because the effort to dismantle or reinvent the welfare state – to really limit big government – requires if anything even more policy and wonkishness than the other side.

 

Addendum: I’d like to point out that I in no way endorse some of the more caricatured views Goldberg expresses here vis-a-vis liberals.  Gross generalizations are not really my cup of tea, whether they can be applied to certain people within the larger group or not.  I will, however, note that so far the conservative and liberal response here has been hostile.  That means I’m doing something right.  Re: purity tests and so forth, it’s not so much that ideological groups shouldn’t set out some standards for membership, but that the standards become awfully silly and rigid in a political climate like the one we now have.

Indulge me, if you will, in a little self-reflection.

I would probably describe myself as a libertarian conservative. I’m pretty sympathetic to the ideas of limited, decentralized government, free markets, and a decent respect for history and the culture. One thing I can’t muster, however, is the righteous certitude that seems to characterize so many critics of this Administration. Take, for example, this editorial on the stimulus from The Washington Examiner:

Today nearly a year later, unemployment stands at 10 percent. The actual total is closer to 17 percent when you include people who gave up after months of fruitlessly searching for work. The Obama stimulus program has become the butt of jokes on late-night talk shows, thanks to revelations by this newspaper and others of the phantom nature of more than 100,000 of the 640,000 positions claimed by Obama to have been created or saved, as well as revelations about jobs saved or created in congressional districts and ZIP odes that don’t exist.

Now along comes the Associated Press with a detailed study of whether the Obama stimulus program had any measurable effect on the construction industry. The AP study was reviewed by economists at five universities. Here’s what AP found: “Ten months into President Barack Obama’s first economic stimulus plan, a surge in spending on roads and bridges has had no effect on local unemployment and only barely helped the beleaguered construction industry,”

–

Despite the evidence that federal stimulus spending does not do what its advocates promise, Obama and his Democratic allies who control Congress are determined to take another whack at the taxpayers by passing a second stimulus program, the $75 billion Jobs for Main Street Act that will spend most of its funds on — what else? — construction projects. The House approved the proposal in December on a narrow 217-212 vote, and the Senate is expected to take it up later this month. The basic reason government stimulus spending doesn’t work is this: For the government to spend $75 billion in one part of the economy, it must first take $75 billion out of the economy somewhere else. There is another name for this process — robbing Peter to pay Paul.

You’ll excuse me if I don’t find the folk economics of The Examiner’s editorial staff – “robbing Peter to pay Paul” and all the rest – terribly persuasive.

For starters, their agenda is transparently obvious: Make things seem really bad by citing a few out-of-context numbers and then suggest the stimulus – rather than, say, a terrible economic climate – is to blame. Never mind the fact that the 17 percent unemployment rate they point to is taken out of context and wildly-inflated. Never mind the fact that botched local jobs or faulty record-keeping are indictments of individual projects, not the economic logic of counter-cyclical government spending.

The rest of the editorial is hardly better. The widely-cited AP study on construction stimulus funds is, of course, a lot more complicated than The Examiner’s editorial excitedly makes it out to be. The construction industry – the actual source of the study’s data – called the AP’s conclusions “fundamentally flawed.” As for The Examiner’s contention that “federal stimulus spending does not do what its advocates promise,” the notoriously-liberal American Enterprise Institute seems to think the bill worked pretty well: “. . . substantial support from fiscal stimulus, coupled with inventory rebuilding, boosted real GDP growth in the second half of the year to an estimated 3 percent annual rate. Without fiscal stimulus and inventory building, however, growth would have remained negative–an ominous fact because the fiscal stimulus will fade rapidly by mid-2010.”

None of which is to say that the stimulus was an unqualified success. None of which is to say that liberals aren’t guilty of similar bouts of self-righteous back-slapping.  But as someone who tends toward conservative outlets, I’m shocked by frequency of similar proclamations, which seem more akin to religious mantra than anything approaching sober analysis (Shelby Steele’s latest op-ed immediately comes to mind: “But where is the economic logic behind a stimulus package that doesn’t fully click in for a number of years?” I don’t know about the logic of the stimulus package, Shelby, but I sure as hell wouldn’t turn to someone who “specializes in the study of race relations, multiculturalism, and affirmative action” for macroeconomic analysis).

In the wake of an incredibly disorienting collapse that defies just about every facile ideological diagnosis, I don’t find absolute certainty all that attractive anymore. Call me a squish or a bad team player or someone who’s unwilling to take sides when the chips are down, but the Great Recession of ‘09 has shaken my faith in dogmatic economic analysis of just about any stripe.

I was going to write a longer post on this, but one interesting consequence of Obama’s decision to escalate the war in Afghanistan (a decision I support, however tentatively) is the ad hoc redrawing of foreign policy battle lines. So you now have a hawkish Republican congressman arguing for withdrawal/some variant of the Biden “counter-terrorism” strategy while the liberal Center for American Progress downplays any disagreement with the President’s renewed military commitment.

Wow, lots to dig into with Chris and E.D.’s respective posts. In the spirit of keeping things short and sweet, though (and to hasten the opportunity for someone else to pick the ball up and run with it), I’m going to focus my first offering on Erik’s contention about the ideological tendency towards absolutism, which I think cuts nicely across both posts.

My own diagnosis would take Erik’s focus on the cultural absolutism of prevailing political and cultural perspectives and call for a quarter turn in re-identifying this malady as one of essentialism. As I’ve often griped, overtly ideological thinking seems to persistently exhibit a tendency to speak in unwarranted certitudes about having figured everything out. Much of that false certainty, by my lights, is derived from a belief in the ability to deduce the essential nature of any number of things, be they government, the free market, freedom, or democracy, via one’s particular brand of ideological calculus. [Read more →]

It’s Friday, so it must be time for me to write something about Andrew Sullivan!

Yesterday, Andrew penned a post that discussed his personal political evolution over the last few years that, I think, dovetails nicely with the short missive I provided on roughly the same topic. Lifting most of the post, really, Andrew commented,

[Matt Welch] accuses me first of being an “ideological shape-shifter.” But my own understanding of conservatism properly understood is that it is un-ideological, and actually anti-ideological. It has a predisposition to favor individual liberty and limited government and prudent foreign policy, but it is capable of adjusting pragmatically to new times and new problems. Unlike libertarians, conservatives – even those of us on the libertarian edge of conservatism – do believe government has a role beyond minimal protection. I believe in environmental protection, for example, and have done my entire life. I believe in free secondary education and government supported higher education.I’ve changed on a few issues; while I remain opposed to Roe, I’ve shifted toward accepting abortions in the first trimester; I’ve also shifted against my once unchastened belief in the utility of American military power to advance democracy (I was, however, against intervention in Somalia and Rwanda); and I’ve begun to worry that the last few decades have opened up too big an inequality gap in America for political stability in the long run.

These are shifts, yes. But they are good faith attempts to learn from mistakes and history and adjust to new circumstances.

In all honesty, it is posts like this that maintain my regard and respect for Andrew in spite of some of the more aberrant political ticks he sometimes displays (Palin, birthers, that bristling “christianist” tag). Whether I always agree with or like what he says on a given topic, it remains true in my mind that Andrew Sullivan is one of the most honest bloggers and pundits out there (and yes, I meant to put Andrew on that pedestal, Helen).

It is that honesty, Andrew’s general willingness to openly discuss and explore many sides of a particular issue and find ways of rooting out what each sides has to offer, that, I think, has generated such a broad and loyal following at the Dish. It’s certainly why, in my own case, I keep going back despite consistently reading certain posts that make me want to tear my hair out: I always feel like I’m getting the real deal at the Dish, at least insofar as Andrew, Patrick, and Chris see it.

And let’s be honest, that’s a rare and valuable thing in political and cultural discourse. [Read more →]

Due to being sequestered for four days last week, it took a little later for the recent Gallup poll that provides some fairly damning evidence against the GOP directive to stay the course to catch my eye. The mountain of that evidence continues to grow and,  as E.D. notes, the calls to double down on a notion of  remaining “true conservatives loyal to the base” are revealed as delusional given the dwindling nature of those quarters. The uncomfortable fact of the numbers is that the Republican Party in particular and conservatism in America generally need to engage in the process revisioning with an eye to revitalizing if the country is to avoid some kind of decades long liberal catechism.

Of course, there are numerous conservative pundits whose primary complaint is centered on the notion that the GOP ceased to be a conservative party in any meaningful way over the past eight years and that the corrective measures that need to take place turn a return to conservative principles proper. And while I might not be inclined to disagree with this notion that government under the Bush administration was largely conservative in name only, I don’t correspondingly think that a back to the trenches game plan is going to seal any deals. The fact of the matter is that a.) people started poisoning this well long before Bush Jr. arrived on the scene and b.) there has been so much partisan mortar fire that if you look back, the trenches just aren’t where you left them.

So the question becomes, what is it that conservatives must return to? The answer, of course, varies depending on which camp you happen to ask, and the schisms that have developed around what constitute true conservative principles aren’t so easily filled in as to avoid a meaningful discussion about what the contents of conservatism in America herein constitute. I would suggest that conservatives who deny that such a conversation need take place are operating in a land of self-constructed and reflexively reifying delusion designed to obscure the hard reality of significant concessions nestled in their future. [Read more →]

Via Andrew, Felix Salmon pokes holes in a list of necessary reforms from Nassim Taleb:

Taleb’s first principle is that “nothing should ever become too big to fail”. But all economies have too-big-to-fail institutions; they always have, and they always will. Looking at the rest of the list, how on earth do you stop the financial sector from awarding its employees bonuses, or creating complex products? Derivatives are, at heart, bilateral contracts: how can you ban two consenting adults from entering in to such a contract?

But something’s missing here too, right? Yes, Salmon is right, I don’t know how you could prevent that kind of contract, and I’m not sure you’d want to. But remember the ultimate point: these were catastrophically, economy-destroyingly bad contracts, made again and again and again, by a host of actors, across a large industry and with many different lines of investment. And they have come close to running our whole economy off the rails. So why is it weird, to me, for Salmon to now be questioning whether we can discourage these kinds of deals?

Because for years, we’ve been told that we would never have to. The stock response for so long has been that the boys in the back room were geniuses, and more importantly, that capitalism itself would prevent the kind of enormous interconnected risk that has driven us to the edge of economic apocalypse. Too many rational people working for their own best interests, under the constraints of only the profit motive, would prevent the kind of wild risk-taking and lack of basic responsibility that led us here. That was a line enforced by both economic conservatives and neoliberals, and the failure to concede it risked relegating one to the status of anti-capitalist. The markets just wouldn’t let this sort of thing happen.

Now, we’ve walked back from an era of capitalism’s inherent wisdom and self-regulatory power to the point where a blogger at the Financial Times Reuters (fixed) can ask seriously if there is a way to prevent individual capitalist actors from forging private agreements. But have we really walked back far enough? I suppose you could say that what I’ve written so far is merely a banal statement of recent conventional wisdom. What I find myself wondering at, though, is often how little many of the basic perspectives on our democracy and our economic future seem to have changed. You are just as likely to hear about the supreme rationalism of the system and the inherent strength of the competition of the self-interested now as you were before the system ate its own tail. Perhaps more, because many enthusiastic, aggressive capitalists see, in the calls for further regulation and a reevaluation of our commitment to moderation and sense, not the natural and conservative response to a genuine crisis, but the long arm of communism, reaching once again out of its grave, to strangle the hard-working John Galts of the world…. It’s a strange fact of capitalist rhetoric that those who believe most in the system seem to view it as the terribly vulnerable.

To me, the most sensible and pragmatic capitalist is a skeptical capitalist, one who recognizes the enormous power for good in the system but also recognizes that it is ultimately just a patchwork of conventions, laws and mores, cobbled together by disparate people with vastly different aims, and existing always in an uneasy tension. That, to me, is a simple statement of the reality of life, of human systems and their imperfections. It’s not a socialist screed or an endorsement of some sort of anarchistic future. Yet in the context of American political and philosophical conversation of the last decade, it’s tantamount to carrying Mao’s little red book.

We’ve lived through an era filled with belief in a kind of magic, a belief held by many who would consider themselves the most rational among us. This belief held that unlike every other system we’ve ever devised for understanding or moving through the world around us, the capitalist enterprise had within it a kind of perfection. Not that many would be so crude as to say that capitalism had no victims, although occasionally you heard just that from the more rabid of the Ayn Rand crowd. But many have and continue to talk about the great engine of currency exchange and private ownership as a self-regulating, self-repairing vehicle that, left to its own devices, will proceed inexorably closer to security and abundance towards all. Many of the people who believe that, I have to be quick to point out, believe with their whole hearts that economic growth is the real way to bring about lasting improvements in the lives of the most vulnerable and poor. To their credit, those people endorse the views they do because they think it will help the poorest.

But they’ve allowed their great enthusiasm for a worthwhile enterprise to create a lack of discrimination and an inappropriate credulity. They’ve fallen for their own utopianism. Again, very many of them have done so with entirely pure motives and in good faith. They need to evolve, though, we all do, to see that this system works only so far as we force it to work, with cajoling and nudging and, yes, sometimes strong-arming. There is no guarantee that this thing of ours has to take us to greater equality and happiness. Only people can ensure that, and only if they recognize the terrible burden of responsibility that such a powerful and totalizing system as capitalism represents.

J.L. Wall, writing in response to Scott’s treatise on 21st Century Conservatism, writes:

There’s a danger in a self-conscious tradition, and a tradition in which it’s acceptable to toss off a limb for the sake of the whole — traditions, in addition to being billion-headed rabbis (not letting that analogy go, folks), are like starfish: limbs re-grow after time. (But a limbless tradition, like a limbless starfish, is less likely to survive: it’s probably more a danger with tradition than a starfish.)

The problem, on the other hand, with an ossified tradition is that it has ceased to live and lapsed into reflexive (more or less) dogma. An ossified tradition fails because the existence of a tradition within history inherently causes changes to the circumstances of that tradition — and that can necessitate changes to the tradition itself. To borrow (again) from Eliot’s imagery, the creation of a new work of art, by its existence, alters the relation of all previous works of art within the tradition to one another, even if imperceptibly.   Any tradition that is not dying or dead is a living tradition.

So now on to William Brafford’s debut post here at the League.  In his grappling with the concept of ideology, he writes:

We all need some kind of framework for interpreting the world around us and for guessing at the consequences of our actions, and we need to acquire these frameworks from those who came before, even if we modify them in the process of application. Such a framework I prefer to call a tradition. The key feature of a vibrant tradition is its continued grappling with its own internal problems and contradictions. Traditions always change and grow over time. A tradition that ceases to do this is a dead tradition, and a tradition that is dead or near death I will call an ideology.

So this becomes an exercise in connecting-the-dots.  On the one hand we have Scott urging conservatives to embrace “self-reflective traditions.”  But while this can be necessary and good, J.L. Wall also urges caution against cutting off the “limbs” of our traditions lest they become too fragile to survive.  Then again, a tradition that cannot continue “grappling with its own internal problems and contradictions” risks dying and transforming into an ideology rather than a tradition. [Read more →]

I can utterly relate to what E.D. is saying when he writes,

Sometimes I’m overwhelmed with this sense that all of this is an exercise in futility – that there is simply too much to know, too much I don’t know, too much I don’t or can’t understand.  My ignorance on this or that subject is laid bare by the revelation of some new fact, some history unearthed that changes the entire game.

A variation on that exact same thought occupied my mind to paralysis on Saturday night, rendering all attempts at writing useless. As is my way in those circumstances, I went on a late night walk to the river by which I live to try to clear my head out and place myself in a context of space larger than my apartment affords. The goal is to provide my thoughts with some room to stretch out and hopefully arrange into some kind of meaningful constellation that might offer something in the way of insight, instead of the clustered muck they appear prior. As I sat on a park bench in the chilled night, looking at the frozen-over river stretching windingly through the centre of the city, my mind calming with the sight of each frozen breath splaying out in front of me, a familiar frustration revisited my awareness.

When I was nine my father passed away. It wasn’t a prolonged and agonizing procession through one sickness or another, but rather a brutally abrupt and sudden occurrence. One night I went to bed and when I awoke the next morning my father was gone, lost to a heart attack. Looking back now with my thirty-two year old eyes I know that there were signs that something wasn’t right, but to the nine year old me those years ago his passing struck without any warning. When I woke up that morning, I remember being able to sort of sense that things were amiss, something about the air seemed heavy and thick. Descending the stairs and walking into our kitchen my mother sat puffy-eyed and distant until her gaze found my face. Crying out loud, she pulled me in as I noticed my grandmother’s presence in the kitchen, as well — there might have been others, I don’t really remember. I began to cry, primarily because my mother was crying as she hugged my brother, who had followed me into the kitchen, close as well. I was awash in confusion, more than tears.

My father’s death left me with an early feeling of dislocation from a linear sort of stability in the world. The lesson I quickly learned was that things, even the stalwart presence of a parent, change; circumstances, even the most important, are highly contingent. But we persist.

That lesson has followed me into my adulthood and informs much of current predisposition to eschew or at least look skeptically at hard and fast political affiliations. There have certainly been times in my life where I thought I had found the end-all-be-all answer to everything in a certain political and social outlook. But as E.D. notes, “suddenly the veil falls away, and the great big universe of doubt washes over me again.” I take that doubt to be a positive thing and a lack thereof to be the sign in political identification to more often than not indicate the futile exercise of intellectual empire building. All empires fall and often times there is much damage that is inflicted in the process of their construction.

But more to the point, the building of an intellectual/political empire strikes me as an inherently absolutizing endeavour, one almost never seeks to build an empire just so that one can discover its fault lines and generally chooses instead to ignore the cracks inflicted by the imposition of reality on one’s smooth edifice. In this way it worries me that too much of our political discourse is more about our own introverted, intra-tribal battles than it is about those spheres of life that politics deeply affects.

At the end of the day I can’t help but see all of us as shivering in the tide of a stunning sea of unknowns, engaged in a beautiful struggle to make sense of our lives, our world, and our very existence. The shifting contexts of that world are nothing if not a Sword of Damocles strung precariously above any hubris we might muster in determining that we’ve figured it all out, or that we ever will.  Our persistence in trying is not in this view to be considered folly or useless, but rather to be approached with the requisite humility about our capabilities in the process. The mystery of life is the dwarfing backdrop against all of our endeavours to categorize and compartmentalize, and our tendency to ingore that mystery is the palpable frustration I feel that renders me speechless and uncertain about the worthiness of saying anything at all.

So can we construct a politics whose trajectory is as much exploratory as it is proclamatory? Can we attentuate our efforts at figuring out how we are to live together to the stage on which those lives play out? Can we engage in this beautiful struggle in a fashion that befits the enormity of our task and cultivate in ourselves a respect for the leviathan we’re attempting to birth?

On nights like last Saturday I wonder and think that I’m simply asking too much of our politics. Perhaps that frustration is destined to persist, as are we.

I found myself nodding my head when Andrew Sullivan described E.D.’s piece on the “democracy fallacy” as a summation of neoconservatism. So too, I felt, was E.D.’s post that was in direct response to my ruminations on Iraq a take down of neoconservatism, which was ironic insofar as the post I referenced and quoted was entitled, “Interventionsm = Neoconservatism? Articulating A Cleaner Interventionism” and was an attempt to formulate an interventionism beyond the canons of neoconservatism.

The hang up seemed to be on my mention of democracy in Iraq, which tied in because of the current situation in Iraq — the provincial elections were a useful and topical segue into the arena of discussion around interventionism in which E.D., Mark, and I had been previously engaged. Chris’ exploration provides a pretty persuasive argument about my over estimation of the possible outcomes of those elections in Iraq, and so in that regard I’m inclined to retreat some. I think it’s worth noting, though, that the title of the post was “Some Big Ifs”, indicating that I didn’t take the hypothetical therein presented to be a determinative prediction in any regard.

E.D. suggested that,

Scott takes an “ends justify the means” approach when musing over this matter of Iraqi stability and democracy.

Which I don’t think is exactly right. I went pretty well out of my way to acknowledge that the invasion of Iraq was as massive a blunder as common wisdom dictates and went so far as to call the decision, “a text book case of what not to do.” Insofar as the means were deeply flawed, I recognize that the ends have also been far from what one might have hoped for. My musing, then, was to wonder if the very contingent hypothetical I proposed were to come true, would it tell us something about an ability to realize an end to interventionism that could be achieved by a better formulated means. That might seem like the splitting of hairs on my part, but let me say unequivocally that at the time I deeply opposed the invasion of Iraq and that continue to see the decision as a stunning mistake both strategically and, more importantly, ethically/morally. That said, I feel obligated to observe the unfolding of events and ask questions from which we might learn something for future application, even if those questions come off as unpopular given the current political climate.

E.D. raises some serious concerns about my attempted formulation by saying,

Scott claims that “responsible interventionism is action directed at removing unwarranted impediments to the deeper forces of evolution.”  Let us for a moment pretend that our vision of geopolitical evolution is not that of an American, but rather that of a fundamentalist Islamic leader, or perhaps of  the grand maestro of terror himself, Osama bin Laden.  Would these visions align with our own?  Would the stated impediments be the same?  Or consider the Soviet interventionism into Eastern Europe during the Cold War.  To the Russians, liberalism was the impediment to “the deeper forces of evolution.”

My concern here becomes a slide into the malaise of complete cultural relativism where the differences between cultures and regions renders our ability to make any judgment about whether actions are good or bad null and void because the truth of such claims are culturally dependent. To be sure, I’m not suggesting that one ought to ignore the different cultural dynamics that form divergent world views, but neither am I willing to remain neutral on the slughter of innocent Kurds based on some notion that the actions are just the idiosyncrasies of a particular cultural perspective. But I acknowledge the tension here to be incredibly difficult to resolve, so neither do I want to address it from a place flippancy. [Read more →]