Faux Nation-States Breed Violence — See Syria and Iraq. By Andrew Doran.

Faux Nation-States Breed Violence — See Syria and Iraq. By Andrew Doran. National Review Online, March 24, 2016.

Doran:

Several years ago I heard the story of a freshman chemistry course at an elite American college. The professor informed the class that the electron model that they were about to learn was known to be incorrect. Chemists had not yet ascertained the correct model, so the students would learn the wrong model for now. In any case, teaching the wrong model would not get anyone killed.

It is hard to imagine political-science professors conveying a similar sentiment about certain applications of the nation-state paradigm: “We are about to learn a failed model, one that we know does not work where the requisite social, cultural, and political elements are missing. But we don’t yet have a model that works for those situations.” Perhaps chemistry professors are more candid about what they do and do not know. Yet Western professors and policymakers cling to the nation-state model today, even where it has proved untenable.

In February, the Atlantic Council launched the Task Force on the Future of Iraq at Georgetown University with a panel discussion led by former ambassadors Ryan Crocker and James Jeffrey and Lieutenant General Michael Barbero. The panel defended the borders created by the Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916, imposed following World War I. The Kurdish representative to the U.S., Bayan Abdul Rahman, pointed out that the current borders had been preserved at a terrible cost: “There has been genocide, chemical bombardment, war, bloodshed repeatedly. And we’re seeing it today in Iraq yet again. So I think we should stop thinking like 19th-century men” such as Messrs. Sykes and Picot. The Kurds — the largest group of people on the planet who share a common language, heritage, and culture but have no a country — and millions of others remain hostage to a cynical, artificial Western political construct.

Later in February, retired general Michael Hayden, former director of the CIA and the NSA, candidly acknowledged what should have been apparent for some time: Sykes-Picot and the concocted states it formed the Middle East have failed. “Iraq no longer exists,” Hayden said. “Syria no longer exists. They aren’t coming back. Lebanon is teetering and Libya is long gone.”

The two positions are, of course, mutually exclusive: Either Iraq and Syria are authentic states that merit continued recognition and sustainment or they are contrivances that have come apart, and attempts to hold them together will only lead to protracted violence. The claim against Sykes-Picot and faux nation-states is quite simple: States marked by a diversity of ethnicities, languages, heritages, religions, and cultures but lacking a developed concept of the common good can maintain their unity only through coercion; when that coercion is no longer present, parochial, sectarian interests will prevail and the state will break apart. Put another way: Pluralistic democracy cannot be sustained without a highly evolved public concept of common interest and the common good — or without force.

In the aftermath of World War I, several nation-states were recognized; others were more or less artificially created, carved out of disintegrating empires. Those with a common language, heritage, and culture, such as Poland, have been generally stable. The states with boundaries arbitrarily carved out of empires, such as Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Iraq, and Syria, have not proved durable.

By the early 1990s, Yugoslavia had come apart in all but name. The secular Communist state was sustained, despite its ethnic, religious, and cultural differences, through the brute force of Marshall Tito’s regime. With the Cold War over and Tito gone, Yugoslavia could not hold together; sectarian interests prevailed. Iraq and Syria, states carved out of the Ottoman Empire, passed through various phases of instability but were held together by ruthless Baathist dictatorships. These states could not survive without coerced unity. Iraq and Syria, following the Yugoslav pattern, descended into sectarian violence. Of the states created after World War I, only Czechoslovakia had the good fortune to dissolve along natural ethnic and cultural boundaries without bloodshed.

Ten years ago, then-senator Joseph Biden and Leslie Gelb proposed a plan for a federated, decentralized Iraq. The Biden-Gelb model borrowed heavily from the 1995 Dayton Peace Accords. We are left to wonder how many lives might have been saved, and whether ISIS would exist at all, had leaders listened. Sunni tribal leaders, however primitive their capacity to rule, no doubt would have preferred self-government to a Tehran-dominated regime in Baghdad. It is difficult to conceive of ISIS’s rise in a Sunni zone drawn out of the present Iraq: Indeed, Sunni tribal leaders had already substantially reduced al-Qaeda in Iraq, the forerunner of ISIS, during the 2007 surge. The Shia zone would still have been dominated by Iran, but its diminished geography would necessarily have meant diminished significance, and would have obviated much of the anti-Shia animus that fueled ISIS. And the Kurds could have devoted their energy to economic development rather than battling the Islamic State.

Western policymakers failed first by imposing Sykes-Picot on the Middle East. They failed next by not correcting that error, as they could have done by following something like the Biden-Gelb proposal. This failure was accentuated by the naïve belief (especially in America) that democracy would be a panacea for the region. Some American leaders and policymakers believed that persistent sectarian strife could be reduced simply through the introduction of elections. But Anglo-American democratic governance is, of course, much more than elections. Even in more authentic Mideast nation-states, such as Egypt, democracy has proved fragile — especially democracy of the narrow, procedural variety. Even the more robust pluralistic democracies of Western Europe suddenly appear tenuous with the recent resurgence of ethno-nationalist movements.

A common heritage and culture are necessary to the viability of a nation, but for a democratic state to survive, there must be a strong sense of the common good.  American naïveté, while costly, is understandable: It is the projection of American exceptionalism onto the Middle East.

In pluralistic democratic societies such as America, the sociocultural and political order is maintained through the notion of the common good. Americans rarely use the term “common good,” but the concept informs nearly every debate in the public square, even amid the recent culture wars. Like social-contract theory, it is rarely mentioned explicitly but is a powerful organizing concept. However, it is highly unusual for nations with diversity of ethnicity, heritage, and culture to transcend those markers of identity and embrace the common good.

In the Middle East, the promise of democracy has failed to forge a sufficient sense of commonality in given populations or to overcome the more visceral division of sectarian and tribal affiliation. So the faux nation-states of Iraq and Syria have gone the way of Yugoslavia, descending into horrific sectarian violence. In the former Yugoslavia, borders have been redrawn along ethno-religious lines; cohesive, largely sovereign proto-nations have emerged; most important, conflict has subsided. The epicenter of that conflict, Bosnia-Herzegovina, has staved off violence for two decades through a decentralized, federated model — precisely the model called for by the Biden-Gelb proposal. This was possible only when the international community reached consensus on what should have long been obvious: that the state created no longer existed.

If a prominent public figure were to call for the restoration of Yugoslavia today, it would be an act of professional suicide. Yet to claim that Iraq and Syria must be sustained — for the sake of the “cartography of governance” or some such — is regarded as somehow palatable, even though Iraq and Syria, like Yugoslavia, have witnessed hundreds of thousands of deaths from violence: testament to the exacting cost of a failed model. If America is to achieve a meaningful foreign policy in the Middle East, its experts must learn to acknowledge, like the humble chemistry professor, when the model they are trying to apply is wrong.

Debate Between Ronald Reagan and Robert Kennedy on Vietnam, 1967.

Town meeting of the world. Reagan & Kennedy, 1967. Video. Memoryretro, Dec 20, 2014. YouTube.

America May Never Have Another New Deal. By Jefferson Cowie.

Franklin D. Roosevelt signs the Gold Reserve Act, January 30, 1934. Wikimedia Commons.

America May Never Have Another New Deal. By Jefferson Cowie. The New Republic, March 15, 2016.

Cowie:

Why FDR’s massive reforms probably won’t be repeated.

Spilled across the pages of journals of opinion are demands for a new New Deal, a global New Deal, a New and improved Deal, to reNew the Deal, and even New Deal 2.0. The excitement following Barack Obama’s first election, just after the nation slipped into the abyss of a massive financial crisis, generated further New Deal analogies. Otherwise sober commentators began speaking of “Franklin Delano Obama.” Meanwhile, among union watchers, minor twists of the labor movement seem to generate unrestrained proclamations of the second coming of the union movement that swept across the nation during the Great Depression. Even before the coming of the financial crisis of 2007–2008, the New Deal has been metaphor, analogy, political principle, and guiding light for all that must be returned to the progressive side of American politics.

Then, inevitably, comes the shock: the new Gilded Age seems to have a lot more traction in American political culture than did the hope of a new New Deal. The return of nineteenth-century-style plutocracy, crony capitalism, and shocking levels of inequality—disparities that continued even after the excitement of Obama’s presidency—suggest a conscious, confident, and powerful ruling class that has largely separated itself from the concerns of the nation’s working people.

The New Deal and the postwar order it sustained once gave the illusion of permanence—for many, the inevitable domestication of capitalism. Marbled throughout its very creation, however, were a series of social and political fissures that help to explain its ultimate fall in the 1970s and beyond. Beneath the surface of the “fragile juggernaut” of America’s social democratic moment were a series of exceptions to U.S. history that are difficult to imagine being repeated: the massive but temporary transformation of the role of the state; the Faustian exclusion of African American occupations that kept the white South in the Democratic Party; the one-time leap forward in power of organized labor; the single period in American history in which immigration (and thus the politics of division) were closed off; and the temporary eclipse of the politics of culture and religion. Wrapping around all of these issues were the complex ideologies of a Jeffersonian individualism, which were muted but never resolved even as the New Dealers waded cautiously into collective waters.

Today’s politics are a regression to the norm. The fractious polity has chosen deeply rooted quarrels over individual rights, ethnic and racial hostility, immigrant versus native, and crusades over moralism and piety in lieu of a politics of collective economic security.

The Obama administration ultimately offered precious little in terms of the politics of material security. Part of that was President Obama’s unwillingness to make a bold, decisive break from previous decades and make the case to the American people that the state could help build economic security and opportunity for all. The first two years of the Obama administration was a lost opportunity for the American reform tradition—not just on policy grounds but in making the argument that government had a role in helping regular people. Seemingly insecure in his position, the new president appointed economic insiders, many of whom had played a role in creating the crisis, while shying away from larger stimulus packages or initiatives that would halt the decades-long growth in inequality and wage stagnation. Banking, finance, and important industries like auto were saved. Meanwhile, working people continued to inhabit the exact same economy they had in the decades leading up to the crisis.

While Obama might have made more of his moment, I do not believe he could come close to delivering the “next” New Deal. The remarkable differences between the politics of the crisis of 2008 and that of 1929 were too vast. When FDR was inaugurated in March of 1933, the Depression was already three and one-half years old. The mood of the country was a peculiar combination of resignation and depression, anger and calls to action. Focusing his 1932 campaign against incumbent Herbert Hoover’s inept handling of the crisis—ultimately refusing to even meet with Hoover to discuss plans during the four months before he took office—FDR gathered around him a coalition that demanded change. One-quarter of the population was out of work, and there was no unemployment insurance, no social security, no deposit insurance, and what state and private charities existed had either collapsed or were teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. For three winters, the nation suffered untold misery, and major industrial cities had populations on the edge of starvation. Homelessness was rampant.

While horrific, the Great Recession of 2008 fell short of the full devastation of the Great Depression. Both the sense of panic and the unemployment rate were only a fraction of what they were in the 1930s. Although Obama entered office not long after the crash, he inherited a bailout engineered by the previous administration, a trillion-dollar deficit, and a set of unpopular wars that proved to be the economic and political opposite of the stimulus of World War II. Because of Obama’s almost militant commitment to economic centrism and his unwillingness to confront the political power of Wall Street, he immediately elected to continue the policies (and even many of the players) from the previous administration. That clouded the contrast with the Republican he succeeded—a dramatic contrast that FDR had used to superb effect. As compared to the era when government hardly existed in the daily lives of regular people, a safety net, under attack since 1981, still did exist in 2008: Social Security, unemployment insurance, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Medicare, and Medicaid all helped cushion the blows of the financial crisis. Yet there was also tremendous political activity, built up since the 1970s, to roll back existing government activity that did not simply serve business’s interests. The Solid South that FDR needed for his legislative successes had turned largely Republican—and militantly so. The “modern” Republicanism of the postwar era, which had made its peace with the New Deal, had already become a distant memory.

All of this is not to say that Obama’s presidency, especially his first two years, was a failure. It was not; it just was not a new New Deal. The failure rests more squarely in analysts’ insistence in using the Depression Era analogy where it was not helpful. He did help dig the country out of the worst economic disaster in eighty years, pulled the United States back from a disastrous foreign policy, and renewed federal effectiveness in health and safety, immigration, and the environment.

The fundamental difference between the two eras was the place of the forgotten man and woman. FDR took office explaining that the “money changers had fled the temple” and that “the measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit.” The unspoken mantra of the Obama administration, in contrast, was “Save Wall Street first,” a symptom of, not a solution to, what political scientists Hacker and Pierson rightly call “the winner take all society.” In the politics of the recovery after 2008, FDR’s forgotten man remained trapped in the dustbin of history. In the politics of rage, however, he was the folk hero to conservative pundits and talk news shows that constructed a pot-boiling industry exploiting the mythology of the hijacking of the nation by various others—be they cultural elites, secular humanists, immigrants, or blacks. As conservative Fox News commentator Glenn Beck co-opted the discourse of the 1930s, “What happened to the country that loved the underdog and stood up for the little guy? What happened to the for- gotten man? The forgotten man is you.”

Caught up in the whirlwind of our present, we overestimate how radically new the rate of change is in the global-digital age. The sense of standing at the abyss of a new world feels unprecedented. Yet when Henry Adams made his prayer to the electric dynamo in 1900, he said that the pace of technological change was so great that if left “his historical neck broken by the sudden irruption of forces totally new.” In the creation of electric power, he saw the emergence of a religious faith in the rational, sterile, and technological future, which he regarded as “the break of continuity,” an “abysmal fracture” in everything he understood and trusted. Many would say the same about our own time. This is not to say that history has started over or is the same, but that our challenges are not unprecedented. The arguments made here do not mean that politics is the same as it was generations ago, only that the same issues that are deeply ingrained in American history and culture remain challenges for the past and the future.

Too often, political changes are seen as simple vacillating “cycles” of partisan history. While this might have some explanatory power when it comes to changes in what party is in charge, it fails to explain the underlying currents, coalitions, fractures, and agendas that run for longer periods. What replaces this generation of conservative, individualistic, “free-market” ideology, however, will not be some simple cycle back to a New Deal revival but will most likely be a much more chastened or radically different form of change that takes its cues from well outside of the New Deal paradigm.

To reframe the New Deal order as a great exception, I must emphasize, is not to take a jaundiced view of American history, but rather urges a more thorough and realistic understanding of our recent past in the hope that it can provide a more stable intellectual foundation for discussions of present and future politics. I recognize the contested nature of American politics and social life that have informed a wide variety of dissenting movements that reshape our politics and discourse, but I also understand that the most powerful aspects of American political culture have often proved resistant to these protests. My aim is also not to diminish the vision or values of those dissenters, but rather to resituate and rethink the New Deal Era in the broader terrain of U.S. history. Our founding mythos of individualism has structured our collective life, created much of value, and become so intimately intertwined with the very essence of the nation itself that its limitations become most difficult to perceive and discuss. If this argument is correct, then conservative victories are more understand- able and progressive victories all the more precious.

Despite the New Deal’s many flaws and fissures, the programs of the 1930s represent the best of what the United States can be as a nation—caring, sharing, secure, and occasionally visionary. Few issues seem more important today than the need to bring the concerns of working people out of the shadows and into the political and economic light.

But bad history makes for weak political strategy. While it is useful and hopeful to imagine that the United States can take the issue of collective economic rights as seriously as it did in the 1930s and 1940s, our present politics ought not be misled by freewheeling historical analogies based on an extraordinarily unique period in American history.

Excepted from The Great Exception: The New Deal and the Limits of American Politics by Jefferson Cowie. Copyright © 2015 by Princeton University Press.

How the Tribal Warfare of Our Ancestors Explains the Islamic State. By Luke Glowacki.

An ISIS fighter celebrates the conquest of Mosul, Iraq, June 23, 2014. REUTERS/Stringer.

How the tribal warfare of our ancestors explains the Islamic State. By Luke Glowacki. Washington Post, March 24, 2016.

Intergroup Aggression in Chimpanzees and War in Nomadic Hunter-Gatherers: Evaluating the Chimpanzee Model. By Richard W. Wrangham and Luke Glowacki. Human Nature, Vol. 23, No. 1 (March 2012).

The Role of Rewards in Motivating Participation in Simple Warfare. By Luke Glowacki and Richard W. Wrangham. Human Nature, Vol. 24, No. 4 (December 2013).

Warfare and reproductive success in a tribal population. By Luke Glowacki and Richard Wrangham. PNAS, Vol. 112, No. 2 (January 13, 2015).


Glowacki:

Luke Glowacki is a postdoctoral fellow in human evolutionary biology at Harvard University.

From Brussels to Paris to San Bernardino to Syria, the world appears to be erupting in violence. In this war, the targets can be anyone and anywhere. While attackers take inspiration from Islamic State leadership, in many cases they seem to act on their own initiative. In Syria, the Islamic State carefully stages theatrical acts of barbarity to create terror and awe around the world. Is this a new kind of war?

Only through the short view of modern history does this type of war look new. Public displays of brutality have long been used to terrorize and subdue populations around the globe. The theatrics of the Islamic State pale in comparison to those seen in Europe just a few centuries ago. Burning alive, drawing and quartering, drowning, garroting, disemboweling or breaking on the wheel were all common methods of dispatching criminals, enemies and those who ended up on the wrong side of a theological debate.

Even in the United States, executions were historically public affairs. At one of the last public executions in the United States, in 1936, at least 20,000 people turned up to watch. The city of Owensboro, Ky., built a gallows 25 feet tall. Bars were packed while “merrymakers rollicked all night” and many homes had “hanging parties.” The New York Times reported that when the body fell, “souvenir hunters rushed forward . . . and tore the black hood . . . off his head before he had been pronounced dead.”

Where does this capacity for horrific violence come from? My colleagues and I have been studying the origins of war through systematic analysis of chimpanzees, hunter-gatherers and modern conflicts. We have learned that lethal violence against out-groups is found, in one form or another, at all scales of society, including among our closest relatives, the chimpanzees.

In a pattern that disturbingly resembles human warfare, chimpanzees across East Africa regularly kill members of neighboring groups, including infants and females. Sometimes these attacks cause the extermination of entire communities, a phenomenon akin to genocide in human society. When this happens, the successful group takes over the territory of the defeated group, gaining access to valuable resources.

What about the traditional human societies, such as hunter-gatherers, that best represent our prehistoric past? Using ethnographic and historical documents, my Harvard colleague Richard Wrangham and I found that for most of human history, societies generally carried on some form of war with neighboring groups, even when the people spoke the same language and looked like them. Although there are well-documented cases of hunter-gatherers living peacefully with their neighbors, these are the exception rather than the rule. Such groups usually gave up violence after coming into contact with more powerful neighbors.

Like the terrorist attacks of today, these conflicts generally targeted members of a perceived enemy group, commonly including women and children. The bodies of victims were frequently mutilated with a creativity that the Islamic State would find astonishing. Entire populations and ethnic groups were wiped out. This type of violence stretches deep into our prehistory. Evidence of the first prehistoric massacre dates to more than 13,000 years ago, well before the invention of agriculture.

What explains how people can commit such violent acts? One answer lies in our psychology. Humans are hard-wired to adopt their communities’ norms, and these norms can include rules for how to treat others — including whether to tolerate differences or attack outsiders. When norms provide status, material rewards or membership in a privileged group, they become even more potent.

Cultures are able to hijack this psychology for violent ends by providing status, promises of an afterlife and a sense of meaning. People belonging to communities that advocate violence will adopt norms of violence, whether those communities are tribal societies, neighbors and family, or Facebook friends. Cross-cultural research I’ve conducted shows that the most important predictor of warfare in a society is a cultural system that awards warriors with social benefits.

In East Africa, where groups battle each other for livestock, access to grazing lands and water, conflicts are fought with modern weapons such as AK-47s but occur along tribal borders and resemble the dynamics of ancestral warfare in important ways. Access to resources such as livestock and water can be critical for a group’s survival, and so these cultures award status and livestock to successful warriors. Such warriors are able to marry more wives and have more children than other men. Half a world away, in the Venezuelan Amazon, researchers found that warriors also ended up better off than non-warriors. Over the time scales at which humans and cultures evolve, benefits such as these may have had profound significance in the development of human behavior.

Such incentives help explain how people can be lured into supporting the Islamic State. The group promises its recruits prestige, a sense of community and the possibility of glory — the same types of incentives that cultures across the globe have historically used to motivate youth to take up arms.

The difference between tribal societies and the modern world is that now social media makes it possible for isolated individuals to adopt the values of a movement halfway around the world. A Detroit teenager can be more connected to his Twitter followers in the Levant than to his peers at school. If his peers overseas advocate violent jihad, it is not surprising if he eventually considers it, especially if it comes with promises of fame and glory.

There is nothing historically unique about the type of war the Islamic State is waging, but the diffuseness of contemporary social networks presents a new challenge. What is clear is that countering the Islamic State will require creating cultural values that can compete with the community, glory and meaning the Islamic State offers its recruits. Can we engineer an alternative that makes supporting democratic values and tolerance of others as alluring?

What Europe Needs to Do to Stop the Next Brussels. By Ralph Peters.

What Europe needs to do to stop the next Brussels. By Ralph Peters. New York Post, March 23, 2016.

Peters:

What used to be bitter slums are now militant colonies.

The Muslim guts of European cities, from Brussels to Marseilles, and the high-rise banlieues of Paris (designed by the left as earthly paradises) or the grubby Stadtteile of Cologne or Hamburg, are no longer way-stations for readjusting immigrants. They’re imperial holdings of a bloodthirsty caliphate, poisoned with the spirit of jihad.

And the Islamist fanatics who rule from the shadows intend to slaughter the trusting aborigines, whose tribal chiefs are enchanted by the trinkets of political correctness — as we were reminded, again, Tuesday when terrorists killed 31 and injured hundreds in a double-barrel attack in Brussels.

Will Islam really conquer Europe? Of course not. But reality leaves Islamist terrorists unconvinced and unmoved.

And they’ve already disrupted societies, upended politics and seized strategic ground at Europe’s heart: The Brussels attacks were symbolically perfect, striking not only a national capital, but the headquarters of the European Union and NATO.

Consider Belgium. The police and intelligence organizations (mindlessly divided between Flemish- and French-speakers) couldn’t crack the local Muslim community. Contributing scores of jihadis to ISIS in Syria and Iraq, Molenbeek and neighboring slums also protected the terrorists in their midst.

Some locals must have known. Many more must have suspected. But none warned the authorities that hundreds of their “fellow Belgians” faced impending attacks.

The roots of radicalism had gone so deep that support for the fanatics trumped even the desire for self-protection. Of course, the locals saw that, in the wake of multiple terror attacks and arrests, they’d face suspicion, scrutiny and an end to the craven tolerance of their crimes.

But nobody talked. Nobody will.

Nonetheless, “humanitarian” groups will continue to defend the “rights” to government financial, medical and housing support for those who send their sons on jihad and beat their daughters to death.

Which brings us to the question: What can Europeans do? If they somehow summon the strength of will? Before the situation worsens monstrously?

Apart from the obvious measure of restricting migration that seeks only to feed at the public trough, there are three steps Europeans could (but likely won’t) take:

First, work on the families. In the Islamic cultures of the Middle East and North Africa, the family is the fortress. European states need laws that permanently deny all further state assistance, including subsidized housing, to the extended families of terrorists and their abettors.

Collective punishment? Islamist terror is a collective crime. As the residents of Molenbeek just reminded us. You have to do what works. And we need to remember the elementary truth that receiving countries owe immigrants nothing beyond their physical safety. We’re not in their debt, they’re in ours.

Second, not only resident status, but citizenship must be revoked from anyone affiliated with terror — including birthright citizenship. We must stop letting left-wing activists creatively interpret international law to protect monsters bent on massacre. The first human right is for law-abiding citizens to be able to live in peace, free of bodily harm.

Third — and toughest — the Europeans need to find ways to break up the Islamist colonies that even the police prefer to avoid. Just as European colonialists brought smallpox to the natives of the Americas, the jihadi colonists bring their plague of fanaticism.

Even in our own country, where a different class of Muslim immigrant — largely educated, ambitious and law-abiding — means we don’t face the crisis Europe does, the toughest problems we do face come when Muslims from underdeveloped states are allowed to immigrate in mass and concentrate in one area.

That lets them cling to their old culture and language, instead of learning English and digesting our social values. Note the way we’ve mishandled Somalis, who, in turn, have disproportionately slipped off to jihad.

American Muslims are yet another of our nation’s success stories (though we need to confront the bad actors abusing our tolerance). We get genuine immigrants seeking their American dream. Europe gets fanatical colonizers.

Don’t think there’s a difference? Check out Brussels.

Can the American Right Renounce Utopianism? By Michael Lind.

Can the American Right Renounce Utopianism? By Michael Lind. The National Interest, March 25, 2016.

Lind:

Can the American right free itself from the utopianism of the post-Reagan era?

The question would have seemed strange to mid-century American conservative thinkers like Peter Viereck, Russell Kirk and Robert Nisbet. In their view, conservatism was anti-utopian by definition. In different ways, they identified “conservatism” with a suspicion of radical schemes to revolutionize America and the world.

But today’s orthodox conservatism consists almost entirely of radical utopian schemes to revolutionize America and the world. So-called “movement conservatism” or “fusionism” in its present form is, in fact, an alliance of three distinct utopian movements in economics, domestic policy and foreign policy. All three crusades are doomed to fail in the real world.

Economic Utopianism

Right-wing utopianism in economics takes the form of schemes to repeal almost all of the major social legislation enacted since Franklin D. Roosevelt was sworn in 83 years ago, back in 1933. Social Security and Medicare will be altered beyond recognition, and replaced by a radically different system of private savings accounts and medical care vouchers, along the lines proposed by the economist Milton Friedman in his book Capitalism and Freedom, published 54 years ago in 1962.

Friedman always insisted that he was not a conservative but a classical liberal or libertarian. Other libertarian economists like Friedrich von Hayek also refused to be described as conservatives.

For their part, mid-century American conservatives rejected libertarianism, on the grounds that free-market utopianism is as undesirable as any other utopianism. Peter Viereck defended the New Deal programs and labor unions as conservative reforms and institutions that had averted more radical socialist or fascist movements in the United States. In his essay, “Libertarians: the Chirping Sectaries,” Russell Kirk wrote:

Conservatives have no intention of compromising with socialists; but even such an alliance, ridiculous though it would be, is more nearly conceivable than the coalition of conservatives and libertarians. The socialists at least declare the existence of some sort of moral order; the libertarians are quite bottomless.

Those words were published in fall 1981. Thirty-five years later in 2016, the distinction between conservatives and libertarians in economic policy has completely collapsed. There is no conservative economic program at all in the United States today. What is called the “conservative” economic program—privatize Social Security, voucherize Medicare, lower or abolish the minimum wage, cut taxes on the rich, and free trade—is merely the radical libertarian economic program, under a different label.

The conservative economic program doesn’t aim to conserve anything. It seeks to blow up almost all existing U.S. economic policies, whether in the realms of social insurance, regulation or taxation, and replace them with far-fetched and mostly untried voucher and privatization schemes dreamed up by libertarian ideologues. The socialist Bernie Sanders at most wants to add a few public programs to the existing American mixture of private, public and nonprofit provision of goods and services. The libertarian right wants to burn American domestic policy to the ground and start over.

Whether pushed by nominal conservatives at AEI and National Review, or by honest libertarian radicals at the Cato Institute and Reason magazine, the libertarian program is utopian. Not that all of its policy proposals are bad—libertarians sometimes have intelligent things to say in particular areas, like transportation or energy. It is the worldview that is crazy.

The premise that humanity is moving rapidly toward a perpetually peaceful, post-national civilization with a rule-governed global market in which there will be unrestricted movement of individuals as well as goods and money across borders is as much a lunatic fantasy today as it was in the 1840s in the era of Cobden and Bright. Human beings are and always will be nonrational, nepotistic social animals, not utility-maximizing economic individualists. And there will be cycles of geopolitical conflict as long as no world empire monopolizes global power.

Russell Kirk was right back in 1981: “genuine libertarians are mad—metaphysically mad.”

Foreign Policy Utopianism

Mainstream conservative foreign policy is just as “metaphysically mad” as the libertarian economic utopianism of the orthodox American right. If the word “conservative” means anything at all, it refers in foreign policy to cautious, anti-utopian Realpolitik, the kind symbolized by statesmen like Disraeli and Bismarck and Eisenhower and Nixon.

But thanks to George W. Bush and the neoconservative advisers who eclipsed Republican realists like Colin Powell and Brent Scowcroft, American “conservatism” came to be identified with the utterly unconservative project of unprovoked wars to topple autocrats in the hope of spreading a global democratic revolution. This radical utopian project, which has backfired and spread chaos exploited by jihadists from Iraq to Syria and Libya, is sometimes called “Wilsonian.” In fact Woodrow Wilson was cautious by comparison with the neocons, as were Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman. Neoconservative democratic revolutionary crusading owes more to the revolutionary mentality of anticommunist socialists in the neoconservative movement and their allies among European social democrats than to the more pragmatic policies of FDR or Eisenhower.

The second inaugural address of George W. Bush in 2005 was breathtaking in its utopian radicalism:

So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world. . .

. . . Today, America speaks anew to the peoples of the world:

All who live in tyranny and hopelessness can know: the United States will not ignore your oppression, or excuse your oppressors. When you stand for your liberty, we will stand with you.

Democratic reformers facing repression, prison, or exile can know: America sees you for who you are: the future leaders of your free county.”

This was essentially a declaration of war by the United States on all nondemocratic regimes, including those of allies like Saudi Arabia and Qatar and rivals like China. The American electorate showed what it thought of neoconservative utopianism and disastrous wars of “regime change” by electing a Democratic Congress in 2006 and a Democratic president twice, in 2008 and 2012.

Moral Utopianism

In addition to committing itself to free-market utopianism in economic policy, and the utopian project of promoting universal democracy by the invasion or subversion of other countries, the mainstream right is dedicated, at least rhetorically, to another utopian project: repealing the sexual revolution.

Until Donald Trump recently challenged the rules of conservative campaigning by offering qualified support for Planned Parenthood, American conservative politicians were expected to adopt the views on sexual and gender issues of the most extreme elements of the mostly-Protestant religious right. Mainstream conservatives promise to outlaw abortion and reverse the recent legalization of gay marriage and gay rights. Some social conservatives want to extend the counter-revolution to battle the use of contraceptives.

In the inaugural issue of National Review in 1955, William F. Buckley Jr. declared that conservatives wanted to “stand athwart history, yelling Stop,” rather, it must be supposed, as Joshua made the sun stand still in Joshua 10:12-13. The religious right has been more ambitious, wanting to stand athwart history and yell until it goes backward, as the sun went backward in Isaiah 38:7-8 and 2 Kings 20:8-11.

Strictly speaking, the religious right’s agenda has been counter-revolutionary, seeking to restore the sexual norms that prevailed as recently in the 1950s, when abortion was illegal, homosexuals were persecuted as criminals or lobotomized as lunatics, and premarital sex and divorce were scandalous. But a counter-revolutionary movement that has no prospect of success becomes just another kind of utopianism. If the libertarian right and the neocons are “metaphysically mad,” the religious right has been theologically mad.

Politics is the art of the possible. It follows that utopianism is unpolitical, even antipolitical. When combined with violence, utopianism produces horrors like the guillotine, the Nazi death camps, the gulag and the killing fields of Cambodia. When it is insincere, like late communism in the last days of the Soviet Union or in contemporary China, utopianism is far less deadly and revolutionary rhetoric tends merely to serve to divert attention from pervasive, low-level corruption.

The utopianism of the contemporary American right is of the latter kind, and the outsiders rebelling against the insiders in the GOP know it. Few if any elected Republicans or conservative pundits actually believe that there will be a borderless global market or the end of tyranny in the world or a return to the sexual norms of 1950s America in their lifetimes, if ever. These promises of revolution or counter-revolution are by now just stale ritual formulas deployed in elections, like talk about “the revolutionary camp” against “the imperialists” in the Brezhnev-era Soviet Union. Meanwhile, away from the talking heads on TV and the op-eds and the blogs and the magazines, the actual, mostly-transactional business of conservative politics goes on between lobbyists and legislators and staffers, many of whom will become lobbyists. Millenarian rhetoric is a cover for transactional kleptocracy.

One interpretation of the support for Republican outsiders like Trump and Cruz over establishment candidates like Jeb Bush holds that it is the GOP masses who are the unworldly utopians. This interpretation tends to be popular among progressives. Conservative leaders, it is sometimes suggested, promised conservative voters what they wanted, and the voters are punishing them for failure to deliver utopia on demand.

I don’t buy it, mainly because there is no evidence that in the post-Reagan era there has ever any popular demand for the three utopian projects of libertarian economic policy, neoconservative foreign policy or “theoconservative” moral restoration. The first two were elite projects, at odds with the popularity of Social Security and Medicare among working-class Republican voters—and at odds as well with the unpopularity of neocon wars of regime change and nation-building, in countries which are not immediate threats to the United States. The “moral majority” was always a moral minority, even among white working-class Republicans. The success of Trump in winning the support of many evangelical voters shows that even those voters care about issues other than sex and school prayer.

If anything, the Republican masses are more conservative, in the traditional sense, than the so-called conservative intellectuals. They want the federal government to enforce existing immigration laws and to retaliate against the attempts of state-capitalist mercantilist regimes like China to gain unfair market share in the United States and the world. These policies have costs, but as long as Americans are willing to pay the costs it is quite possible to deter illegal immigration and retaliate against cheating in international trade.

Most illegal economic migration is demand-driven, not supply-driven. Slap a few high-profile employers of illegal immigrant labor with fines or jail sentences, and the flow will dry up with employer demand, even without a sea-to-sea border fence or wall.

Likewise, imposing penalties on foreign mercantilism and/or enacting local content requirements mandating a degree of in-market production in the United States or North America technically is quite easy to do. One can argue that the costs, in the form of higher import prices or foreign counter-retaliation, exceed the benefits, but the policy is hardly utopian. A few trade treaties might have to be torn up, but what is the point of treaties that already have been rendered dead letters by foreign cheating?

My purpose is not to defend Trump voters, much less Trump himself, but to point out the absurdities of establishment conservatism. Many establishment conservatives claim that enforcing immigration laws or protecting American manufacturing are crazy, utopian pipe-dreams. And yet many of these same conservatives are committed, at least in public, to the far more utopian orthodox conservative agenda of a borderless global market and ending tyranny by American force or suasion in every country in the world. These conservatives can be compared to Soviet hacks in the 1970s or 1980s who insist that modest market reforms at home were too difficult even to attempt; best to stick to the party line of the global overthrow of capitalism, comrades!

The American right already has a non-utopian voter base whose voters are evidently uninterested in the revolutionary projects of global free trade and wars for democracy, and far less religious than their parents and grandparents. This means reconciling Republican voters with Republican policies is simply a matter of changing the policies to what the voters want.

It’s simple, really. The conservative movement merely needs to jettison its three utopian projects of libertarian economics, global democratic revolution and the reversal of the sexual revolution. Once this operation takes place, plenty of differences will remain to distinguish the American right from the American left and center, even if conservatives end their war on Social Security and switch from foreign nation-building to nation-building at home.

To be sure, a post-utopian American Right might disappoint and drive away some conservative thinkers and activists who actually believe in one or more of the three utopian crusades. But if I am correct, and most movement conservative operatives are really just paying lip service to these policies, I would expect them to adapt quickly to a new, post-utopian American conservative movement. All they need to do is drop the pretense of believing in utopian fantasies that hardly anyone believes in anyway.

Farewell, Grand Old Party. By Joel Kotkin.

Farewell, Grand Old Party. By Joel Kotkin. Orange County Register, March 22, 2016.

Kotkin:

The increased likelihood of Donald Trump as the GOP presidential nominee, as evidenced by his win in Florida and other states last week, spells the end of the Republican Party as we have known it. Successful political parties unite interests under a broadly shared policy agenda. The Clinton Democrats may seem ethically challenged, condescending and bordering on dictatorial, but they share basic positions on many core issues and a unifying belief in federal power as the favored instrument for change.

In contrast, the Republican Party consists of interest groups that so broadly dislike each other that they share little common ground.

GOP libertarians want more social freedoms; social conservatives want less. Neocons hunger for war, while most other Republicans, both libertarian and constitutionalist conservatives, reject Bushian interventionism. The rising populist wave now inundating the party and driving the Trump juggernaut both detests, and is detested by, the party’s media, corporate and intellectual establishment.

Some “movement” conservatives are returning the favor, essentially blaming the white working class for their own failures. Among some on the right, it appears, capitalism and the law of the jungle are always noble, and those who fail to make the grade clearly are not. No surprise, then, that the new generation of voters seems more ready for socialism than for laissez faire.

Against weak and squabbling opposition, Trump has employed his crude persona, and equally crude politics, to dominate the primaries to date. But in the process he has broken not only the party structure, but also its spirit. Indeed, some of the party’s most promising emerging leaders, such as Nebraska U.S. Sen. Ben Sasse, have made it clear they cannot support a candidate who seems to have little respect for the Constitution, or any other cherished principle.

In contrast, the Democrats, for all their manifest divisions, remain united by a desire to reward and parcel out goodies to their various constituencies. Hillary Clinton, as the troublesome Bernie Sanders fades, will gather a Mafia-like commission of Democratic “families” – feminists, greens, urban land speculators, public unions, gays, tech oligarchs and Wall Street moguls. Given the self-interest that binds them, few Democrats will reject her, despite her huge ethical lapses and appearance of congenital lying.

Finding fault

Who’s to blame for the destruction of the GOP? Some may argue the Tea Party faction and evangelicals behind Ted Cruz siphoned off too many conservative voters, who might have backed a more acceptable candidate. But many social conservatives have flocked to Trump, blunting the Bible-thumping brand that drove the Texan’s strategy.

The other icon of the Right, the Tea Party, also appears increasingly in decline. One Gallup poll shows the Tea Party with less than 20 percent support among voters. Simply put, these forces are too weak, and disunited, to defeat Trump.

Those most responsible for the party’s decline, however, are those with the most to lose: the Wall Street-corporate wing of the party. These affluent Republicans placed their bets initially on Jeb Bush, clear proof of their cluelessness about the grass roots – or much else about contemporary politics. They used to attract working- and middle-class voters by appealing somewhat cynically to patriotism and conservative social mores, which also did not threaten their property and place in the economic hierarchy. Now these voters no longer accept “trickle down” economics or the espousal of free trade and open borders widely embraced by the establishments of both parties.

The fecklessness of the party leadership has been evident in the positions taken by corporate Republicans. Reduce capital-gains taxes to zero? Are you kidding, Marco? New trade pacts may thrill those at the country club, but not in towns where industries have fled to Mexico or China.

And then there’s immigration. Simply put, most Americans – upward of three-fifths, according to one recent poll – consider immigration a “threat to the country.” The idea of expanding H-1B visas for skilled foreign workers, as suggested by mainstream GOP leaders, is a classic case of stupidity: supporting an electorally toxic position that really only benefits people – notably tech oligarchs – who also largely bankroll the other party.

Increasingly, the grandees are clueless how to appeal to a party rank-and-file that is no longer theirs. Far from being a country club party, roughly 53 percent of Republicans, according to Pew, come from households with incomes under $75,000. These are precisely the people who feel corporate America and the party economic gospel no longer work to their benefit.

These voters will be key to Trump’s strategy in November. He hopes many middle- and working-class Democrats will defect to his cause. Upward of 20 percent of Democrats, according to some surveys, are ready to bolt to embrace The Donald.

This could prove critical in many states, particularly in the upper Midwest. A study just published by Working America, a political-action auxiliary of the AFL-CIO, interviewed some 1,600 white working-class voters in the suburbs of Cleveland and Pittsburgh during December and January. It found strong support for Trump, even among self-identified Democrats.

Although some respondents might be motivated by racial concerns, they were most impressed with Trump’s “attitude,” the blunt and forthright way he talks. Among issues, “immigration” placed third, far behind the No. 1 concern: “good jobs / the economy.”

Rather than a Republican revival, Trump’s candidacy represents an anti-party insurgency. Nate Silver suggests that Trump’s candidacy has more in common with that of Ross Perot in 1992 than that of a typical mainstream Republican. Perot also ran a somewhat nationalistic campaign openly hostile to the parties’ dominant establishments.

In November, there may not be enough white middle- and working-class votes to put Trump over the top, but the GOP “mercenaries” don’t appear capable of stopping his hostile takeover of their party. In fact, the attacks by Mitt Romney and others have handed Trump exactly what he thrives on – a photo op to stand up to powerful “losers,” “idiots” and “morons.”

After the disaster

The election of Trump would elevate an unscrupulous, amoral and patently ignorant bully to the White House. This result seems unlikely as the corporate GOP either opts out of the election, or even rallies to Hillary Clinton. Trump’s campaign may bring some more independents and Democrats to the Republican cause, but he has alienated too many people – women, Hispanics, educated voters – to win a 50-state election.

Trump’s defeat will leave the Republican Party in shambles. Even party Chairman Reince Priebus admits another presidential defeat could undermine the party’s viability. “We don’t exist as a national party if we don’t win in 2016,” Priebus suggests. “You can’t compete 16 years out of the White House, it’s just not possible.”

Of course, the GOP in 2017 still will control the House of Representatives and more statehouses than its rivals. But it may lose the Senate in November, leaving Clinton a clear path to dominate the Supreme Court. This will strip away the only barrier to ever more intrusive rule by decree. Clinton has already made it clear that, unlike her husband, she is ready to circumvent Congress if it dares decline her initiatives.

In this way, the rest of the country will increasingly resemble what we already have in California – a central governing bureaucracy that feels little constrained about expanding its power over every local planning and zoning decision. The federal republic will become increasingly nationalized, dispensing largely with the constitutional division of power.

Centralism, as known well in California, comes naturally to a one-party state. Businesses, particularly large ones, faced with uncontested political power, will fall in line. How many times have I heard California business people, even supposedly powerful ones, tell me they are frustrated with Gov. Jerry Brown’s increasingly draconian rule but sheepishly add that they are too afraid to say anything.

Looking ahead, the only hope lies in a mounting reaction, perhaps manifesting in a new party, to over-reach. As Clinton works to serve her “families,” like public employees, crony capitalists and the academia/media PC police, she could ignite a rebellion not only among the Trump constituency but also many more moderate, suburban voters who find Trump too crude, divisive and unpredictable.

This new movement should be built around the idea that, in the information age, power can, and should, devolve to localities as much as possible. Even Californians prefer local, as opposed to centralized, control. This could spark a widespread populist rebellion which, in 2020, could finally tame the federal Leviathan and allow American politics to return to something the founders may have envisioned.