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Sunday,
February 19, 2006
The End of History, Revisited
Fukuyama: After
Neoconservatism.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/19/magazine/
neo.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted
=all&adxnnlx=1140385899-tbwE/adeTci52RAgd4x9TA
-- Roland Dobbins
A very interesting, and given who wrote it, very important essay. In
reading the first part, I kept wondering, am I the only one who dares call
neo-conservatism by its proper name: Jacobinism? Am I the only one who sees the Jacobin underpinnings to the
neo-conservative political views? Recall that the difference between Trotsky
and the Bolsheviks was that Trotsky wanted Universal World Revolution Now,
not "Socialism in One Country" to build strength for a postponed
world Revolution.
[As an aside: when I look for a link to a definition of Jacobinism I find
that Google tells me that I can buy some Jacobinism on eBay. I don't know
whether to laugh or to cry.]
Suffice it to say that the Bush Doctrine that only democracies can be our
allies, and that we have the right and duty to go impose democracy on every
significant nation in the world lest we be threatened, coupled with
a naive faith that once we impose a democracy it will turn up a government
friendly to the U.S. or at least not mortally opposed to us is, in my
judgment, well described by the term "Jacobin". Note also that a form of
Jacobin philosophy is present in just about every University campus in
America. The liberal left and its Trotskyite allies are a bit dismayed that
their most powerful convert is George Bush, whom they despise as a
Deviationist and running dog of Halliburton and Big Business; but they have
no significant quarrel with Bush's professed intention not only of making
the world safe for democracy, but of imposing democracy on everyone we can
get at. We will carry Liberte! Egalite! if not Fraternite! across the world
on the points of our bayonets or pouring forth from the barrels of our
Abrams tanks. They all believe in Social Progress, and Social Engineering,
and while they would never say that political power grows out of the barrel
of a gun, most of them have never argued otherwise; that's their concession
to real-politick. They only wish it were President Clinton doing it, with
Chief Justice Larry Tribe validating his executive power.
They also believe in an ethics of intention rather than an ethics of
prudential results: that is, it is enough to demonstrate that "we meant
well" and that "we didn't personally profit from the actions we advised" to
justify intervention anywhere and at any time. Lest you doubt it, go look at
the rhetoric used to justify the US intervention in the Balkans: the very
fact that there was no discernible American interest in doing it was touted
as a virtue; and the less than utopian outcome is not our fault. We meant
well.
It is therefore odd that Bush, who is doing in spades with big casino
what Albright believed in her heart of hearts, is so thoroughly despised by
the academic Jacobins; but then politics makes for both strange bedfellows
and estranged soul mates.
Fukuyama traces some of the development of Jacobin tendencies in the
neo-conservatives; how a group largely concerned with the limits of what
social policy could do (Wilson, Moynihan, Kristol the Elder) could breed a
generation of
war hawks trying to carry democracy on the points of American bayonets,
convinced that our forces of liberation would be welcomed in Baghdad, aye
and in Damascus and Tehran as well, with children strewing flowers in our
paths (and perhaps begging for handouts from G I Joe). This account is worth
reading.
Alas, neither Kristol nor Fukuyama nor any of them seem to understand the
difference between the totalitarian dictatorships that dominated Nazi Germany and
Communist Russia -- evil empires, the both of them -- and religiously based
nationalist regimes. In the one case, as Koestler observed, a probable
sufficient condition for their collapse would be the free exchange of ideas
within the totalitarian state. In the other, that's probably irrelevant in
the short run. In the long run the West's Cultural Weapons of Mass
Destruction -- blue jeans, rap, hard rock, easy sex, birth control,
penicillin, and the lot -- will worm their way in to undermine fanaticism;
but it will take a while, and imposing them by force is probably the best
way to negate their effects. Over paid, over sexed, and over here, the Brits
said of GI Joe; now they wish they had back what they thought was the
American inspired decay of the 40's. But that's a story for another time.
The point is that the USSR was an immediate threat, with 26,000 nuclear
warheads aimed at the West. Islam threatens us with half a dozen weapons at
best, along with the threat to cut off our oil and make us use our ingenuity
to provide needed energy resources. Since the added cost of energy
independence is certainly not enormous compared to the costs of the war, it may
be time to do a new threat analysis.
Fukuyama says:
As Kristol and Kagan put it in their 2000 book
"Present Dangers": "To many the idea of America using its power to promote
changes of regime in nations ruled by dictators rings of utopianism. But in
fact, it is eminently realistic. There is something perverse in declaring
the impossibility of promoting democratic change abroad in light of the
record of the past three decades."
This overoptimism about postwar transitions to
democracy helps explain the Bush administration's incomprehensible failure
to plan adequately for the insurgency that subsequently emerged in Iraq. The
war's supporters seemed to think that democracy was a kind of default
condition to which societies reverted once the heavy lifting of coercive
regime change occurred, rather than a long-term process of
institution-building and reform. While they now assert that they knew all
along that the democratic transformation of Iraq would be long and hard,
they were clearly taken by surprise. According to George Packer's recent
book on Iraq, "The Assassins' Gate," the Pentagon planned a drawdown of
American forces to some 25,000 troops by the end of the summer following the
invasion.
Precisely. Couple to that the nearly incomprehensible believe that
Chalabi the Thief would be able to keep his literally incredible promises of
an Iraq allied with the US and oil pipelines through Jordan and Israel to
the Mediterranean, and it looked as if we would be suckers not to invade.
Note this sentence: "The war's supporters seemed
to think that democracy was a kind of default condition to which societies
reverted once the heavy lifting of coercive regime change occurred"
which is very nearly the definition of Jacobinism. Jean Jacques Rousseau,
misunderstood and elevated to the status of guru.
Fukuyama also says of his best known work
"The End of History, in other
words, presented a kind of Marxist argument for the existence of a long-term
process of social evolution, but one that terminates in liberal democracy
rather than communism. In the formulation of the scholar Ken Jowitt, the
neoconservative position articulated by people like Kristol and Kagan was,
by contrast, Leninist; they believed that history can be pushed along with
the right application of power and will. Leninism was a tragedy in its
Bolshevik version, and it has returned as farce when practiced by the United
States. Neoconservatism, as both a political symbol and a body of thought,
has evolved into something I can no longer support."
I said Trotskyite rather than Leninist, but otherwise the paragraph is
pretty close to what I wrote about Fukuyama's essay at the time he published
it; with this exception, I didn't agree on the immediacy when he wrote it,
and I don't agree in the inevitability now even with his new interpretation.
I can easily imagine high tech "modern" societies that are not liberal
democracies and don't pretend to be. I can imagine an Imperial United States
as well as a 21st Century Caliphate.
Fukyama concludes,
"What to Do
"Now that the neoconservative moment appears to
have passed, the United States needs to reconceptualize its foreign policy
in several fundamental ways. In the first instance, we need to demilitarize
what we have been calling the global war on terrorism and shift to other
types of policy instruments. We are fighting hot counterinsurgency wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq and against the international jihadist movement, wars
in which we need to prevail. But "war" is the wrong metaphor for the broader
struggle, since wars are fought at full intensity and have clear beginnings
and endings. Meeting the jihadist challenge is more of a "long, twilight
struggle" whose core is not a military campaign but a political contest for
the hearts and minds of ordinary Muslims around the world. As recent events
in France and Denmark suggest, Europe will be a central battleground in this
fight."
Not only do I agree with that, but it sounds almost as if I had written
it -- or, except for the sentence about Iraq, something I might have
written before we invaded Iraq. It reads a great deal like
The Strategy of Technology, as a
matter of fact, and very much like the initial aphorism Possony and I
used as the introduction to our book:
"A gigantic technological race is in progress
between interception and penetration and each time capacity for interception
makes progress it is answered by a new advance in capacity for penetration.
Thus a new form of strategy is developing in peacetime, a strategy of which
the phrase ‘arms race’ used prior to the old great conflicts is hardly more
than a faint reflection.
There are no battles in this strategy; each
side is merely trying to outdo in performance the equipment of the other. It
has been termed ‘logistic strategy’. Its tactics are industrial, technical,
and financial. It is a form of indirect attrition; instead of destroying
enemy resources, its object is to make them obsolete, thereby forcing on him
an enormous expenditure….
A silent and apparently peaceful war is
therefore in progress, but it could well be a war which of itself could
be decisive."
--General d’Armee Andre Beaufre
I suppose all this sounds like blowing my own horn, and I should be more
modest, and more joyful that a key member of the old neoconservative
alliance has seen the light. Another time I will; but today I can't resist
saying, Dammit, I told you so.
Fukuyama can't quite abandon his universalism; he still thinks that
"isolationism" is a terrible threat. I can't agree. Isolationism was and
will remain impossible; but there is a difference between "isolationism" and
minding our own business. There is a difference between avoiding entangling
alliances -- NATO for a start, now that it has moved to the very borders of
the much-reduced no longer totalitarian Russia -- and isolationism. There is
a difference between not becoming involved in the territorial disputes of
Europe -- including the Balkans -- and isolationism. If we devote our
resources to a strategy of technology, and develop our capabilities while
lessening our dependence on Middle East oil, we will not have to be
isolationist; but if we squander our capital in futile hopes that we will be
welcome in Damascus and Tehran, we won't have so very many choices.
But do read Fukuyama's essay. With luck it will have some
influence. There's more good sense in it than in most of the old
neo-conservative crowd.
And see mail.
And next week
==============
And if that were not enough deep thought for the day, we have:
Dr. P,
Just in case you haven't seen the latest; Fred makes
an interesting point about class differences in America. It gets me thinking
about Heinlein and his ideas about qualifications for the franchise. Who
should be allowed to vote? How should they be chosen? There has to be a
better way than simply everyone with a pulse who reaches age 18. Is this not
what this topic is really about?
http://www.fredoneverything.net/FOE_Frame_Column.htm
(you are looking for column
307)
Matt Kirchner
Fred says, in his inimitable way, precisely what Jose Ortega y Gasset said in
his 1930 The Revolt of the Masses, one of the essential (if you want
to understand the world) books of the 20th Century in my judgment. For more
on Ortega see
http://www.historyguide.org/europe/gasset.html for a good summary of his
life and some essential excerpts from his book. The book itself is actually
fairly easy reading if you get a decent translation or read Spanish, and
holds up very well indeed after seventy-five years.
The characteristic of the hour is that the
commonplace mind, knowing itself to be commonplace, has the assurance to
proclaim the rights of the commonplace and to impose them wherever it will.
As they say in the United States: "to be different is to be indecent." The
mass crushes beneath it everything that is different, everything that is
excellent, individual, qualified and select. Anybody who is not like
everybody, who does not think like everybody, runs the risk of being
eliminated.
It is illusory to imagine that the mass-man of
to-day will be able to control, by himself, the process of civilization. I
say process, and not progress. The simple process of preserving our present
civilization is supremely complex, and demands incalculably subtle powers.
Ill-fitted to direct it is this average man who has learned to use much of
the machinery of civilization, but who is characterized by root-ignorance of
the very principles of that civilization.
The command over the public life exercised
today by the intellectually vulgar is perhaps the factor of the present
situation which is most novel, least assimilable to anything in the past. At
least in European history up to the present, the vulgar had never believed
itself to have "ideas" on things. It had beliefs, traditions, experiences,
proverbs, mental habits, but it never imagine itself in possession of
theoretical opinions on what things are or ought to be. To-day, on the other
hand, the average man has the most mathematical "ideas" on all that happens
or ought to happen in the universe. Hence he has lost the use of his
hearing. Why should he listen if he has within him all that is necessary?
There is no reason now for listening, but rather for judging, pronouncing,
deciding. There is no question concerning public life, in which he does not
intervene, blind and deaf as he is, imposing his "opinions."
I have cut this short: more from Ortega at the
reference, and this is a small sample of his book, which many of you may
want to buy.
The Revolt of the Masses is very much worth reading.
You may also find Chris Brand's exposition on Ortega of interest:
http://www.thesprout.net/010/graft/graft22.htm
Accused of advocating aristocracy, Ortega said that he was much worse
than that: “Human society is always, whether it will or no, aristocratic by
its very essence, to the extreme that it is a society in the measure that it
is aristocratic, and ceases to be such when it ceases to be aristocratic.”
An aristocrat, Ortega says, is one who makes demands of himself; who is
not satisfied with how he finds himself, and seeks constant education and
improvement. This in contrast to the mass man who is quite happy as he is.
Fred uses his own idioms to say much the same things that Ortega
concluded. It is politically
incorrect even to think about stuff like this.
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