A New Direction?

I no longer follow electoral politics as closely as I once did, but one question that continues to interest me is how the Democrats might redefine themselves or sharpen their message. If Nancy Pelosi's "New Direction for America" is any clue, then they still have some work to do. Rather than offering a bland smorgasboard of policy positions, I think they'd be much better served by going after the alternative energy issue full bore. Reducing "dependence on foreign oil" is nice, but reducing dependence on oil PERIOD is not only a saner policy, but one more likely than ever to grab the electorate's attention and revive the can-do spirit that used to characterize our national endeavors. America's future energy is a moral, domestic, national security, and foreign policy issue all wrapped in one, and the sooner our leaders realize it the better. If conservatives won't take a bold lead on this issue, as they ought to, then someone will have to. Nature abhors a vacuum.

Armageddon

I finally finished reading Max Hastings' Armageddon about the battle for Germany in WWII. As always, reading about that horrific conflict gives one some much needed perspective about the current state of affairs in the world. The numbers of soldiers and civilians killed in Germany alone in just the first few months of 1945 is, quite literally, beyond our comprehension today. We are accustomed to thinking of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki as the ultimate horror of that war, but in fact those two cities--indeed, the entirety of Japan--suffered far less than did Germany, both in terms of civilian deaths and destruction of infrastructure. It's strange to admit, but--had it been possible--it would have been far more compassionate to drop atomic bombs on Germany than to subject them to the horrors of the Allied aerial campaigns and the subsequent Russian occupation.

It's even stranger to admit, considering the popular perception of WWII in the U.S., that no matter how noble our cause in that war, its termination did not in fact mark the triumph of democracy over tyranny, but merely the replacement of one tyranny for another in the entire eastern half of Europe. Without the millions of Russian lives that Stalin eagerly sacrificed on the Eastern front, the Western Allies alone could never have defeated Nazi Germany.

At any rate, I recommend this book to anyone in good need of a healthy dose of historical perspective.

Secretary Zakaria?

Speaking of which, I guess I'm not the first person to have thought of this.

Democracy vs. Stability

Fareed Zakaria, as usual, makes a damn good point about democracy in his latest column. I wish someone would make this guy Secretary of State.

Kurdish Independence

The Christian Science Monitor has a new article about the aspirations of Kurdish independence. That the Kurds have long wanted a nation of their own is no secret; that they deserve one of their own is rarely in dispute, at least in the West. When the Western powers drew up the borders of the modern Middle East after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, Churchill was one of those who argued for a sovereign Kurdish state. T.E. Lawrence was another.

When the U.S. created the no fly zone above their territory after the first Gulf War, we emboldened their aspirations for independence; now, for the first time, a Western power was affording them a degree of protection from their persecutors. When we demolished Saddam Hussein's regime in 2003, we emboldened them even further by removing one of the major obstacles to their aspirations.

I have been called a cynic, a pessimist and a defeatist because I have said since 2002, when the Bush administration began making the case for an invasion of Iraq, that removing Hussein would make a Kurdish state inevitable. In contrast to my "pessimism" is the shockingly naive "idealism" of the Bush administration, which believes a nation as ethnically and religiously diverse as Iraq can raise a unified democracy from the ashes of a totalitarian state. Apparently the lesson of Tito's Yugslavia was quickly forgotten by anyone of consequence is the president's inner circle.

The Kurds have long shown all of the qualities that we dream about when we imagine a future Middle East; they are mostly secular, pro-Western and enterprising capitalists. When they eventually do demand a sovereign nation of their own, there will be many formidable obstacles in their path.

I hope our nation is not one of them.

Women in Congress

Sunday's edition of "Foreign Exchange with Fareed Zakaria" had, as usual, some fascinating facts between segments. One of them was called "Women in Congress/Parliament," and it showed the following statistics:

Saudi Arabia: O%

Iran: 4%

Pakistan: 21%

Iraq: 31%

And the United States? A humbling 15%.

There you have it. There are actually Moslem nations with more women in their national legislature than in the good old USA. What would have been even more fascinating is if Foreign Exchange had first quizzed a random sampling of Americans to match up the percentages with the nations. I'm willing to bet that a vast majority would haved guessed we had the 31%.

I say this not to bash on my own country, but to point out what should be obvious to a nation whose majority of citizens call themselves Christians: that humility is one of the greatest virtues, and we as a nation ought to be more humble, particularly in our opinion of ourselves as Americans. Patriotism can often cross a fine line into idolatry, and it has become fashionable for some politicians and commentators to gleefully rail against those who seem to believe "America is a fundamentally bad nation." Never mind that these same critics often describe America as a modern day Sodom; the point is that any sane, sober and reflective American knows our nation has many shortcomings. We can and should talk about them, and even better, do something about them.

We rant about the need for democracy and opportunity in areas of the world like the Middle East, and yet our own democracy is in many ways less democratic than our parliamentary cousins across the ocean. Do we have runoffs for the presidency? Do we have proportional representation? Do we have more women in Congress than the Pakistanis do in their parliament? Do we have a healthy multi-party system where a party formed only two months ago can win a national election?

The answer to all of these questions is no. Maybe instead of criticizing the speck of dust in our brother's eye, we ought to remove the plank from our own.

Those Who Forget History...

This morning, while reading about the history of the Phillippines over a cup of coffee, a particular passage struck me. Describing America's drift toward war with Spain, the author wrote, "Republican party imperialists passionately denounced Spain, and the Democrats followed, fearful of forfeiting a potentially popular issue." The emphasis is mine.

How sadly predictable. More than a hundred years later, our political parties and our foreign policy are much the same as they were at the dawn of the twentieth century (a century, by no cooincidence, that was the bloodiest in recorded history). One party (usually the GOP) gets fired up with patriotic zeal and warlust, while the other (usually the Democrats) lacks the moral and political courage to take a stand against it, until the war is well under way and the public is showing signs of unhappiness. How anyone on either side of this political divide can today stand up and defend their position as "bold" or "visionary" or "right" is ridiculous. They merely prove George Santayana's point that "Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it."

So what to do? Probably nothing; if there is any uniquely human quality, it is repeating one's own mistakes. Collectively, humans seem to have very little interest in studying history and profiting from its lessons, much less in examining their own individual faults and correcting them.

But for those of us who need to cling to some sliver of hope, is it too much to ask that supposedly "Christian" Republicans spend a little more time reading the Sermon on the Mount than listening to right-wing radio? Is it too much to ask that Democrats grow some spine and figure out what the hell their foreign policy is? For that matter, is it too much to ask that we break the morally and intellectually bankrupt stranglehold these two decrepit parties have on our nation? More than a century after the Spanish-American War, all they offer us is the same choice they did then: war, or bemoaning a war already well under way.

When Ariel Sharon got sick of the foreign policy deadlock between the two leading parties in Israel, he started a new party. And they won. And we have the temerity to consider ourselves the paragon of democracy? A nation that can only accomodate two parties--two parties with a proven record of unevolving and unimaginative policies--even after two centuries?

John Adams Reconsidered

Today I finished reading David McCullough's John Adams, which chronicles our second president's childhood in Braintree (later Quincy) Massachusetts, his notable career as a lawyer, his pivotal role in the American Revolution, his ambassadorial service to France and Great Britain, his two terms as a loyal vice-president to George Washington, his rather thankless term as president, and finally the long twilight of his years which is most famous for the remarkable correspondence he and Thomas Jefferson struck up after many years of estrangement.

Adams had an unenviable role in history, his presidency sandwiched between George Washington's and Thomas Jefferson's and plagued not only be an undeclared war with France, but by what was probably the most disloyal and scheming cabinet ever to afflict any president. Adams is most remembered for the deservedly unpopular Alien and Sedition Acts, which he signed into law. He is less known for his remarkable leadership in the American Revolution, his herculean efforts to keep America from a full-blown war with France (an unenviable balancing act that made him unpopular with the warmongering Federalists and the obsequiesly pro-French Republicans), his creation of the American Navy, and his appointment of John Marshall as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.

What most impresses one about John Adams, though, is the remarkable correspondence he kept up with everyone in his life, particularly his wife Abigail and his once-and-future friend Thomas Jefferson. In these letters one sees a very kind, brilliant and compassionate man whose simple Puritan values--from which he never deviated, aside from the sin of pride, to which he often confessed freely--set him apart from the scheming, partisan politics that were born during his presidency. For all his natural genius and accomplishments, one cannot help but feel a little less admiration for Thomas Jefferson in contrast. As close as the two men and their families were during their service in Europe, Jefferson would later resort to some of the most deplorable and underhanded means of discrediting his former friend, while Adams refused to speak ill of Jefferson in anything but private correspondence with friends and family. Perhaps the most baffling development of all was the Republicans' portrayal of John Adams as an aristocratic, pro-British Monarchist, when in fact he lived frugally and humbly all his life and never was either pro-British or a Monarchist. Thomas Jefferson, on the other hand, while portrayed as a "man of the people" by his supporters, lived as an aristocrat his whole life, supported by more than a hundred slaves and accumulating massive debts through his extravagant lifestyle.

And yet, the warm friendship that Adams and Jefferson restored in their years of retirement makes the closing chapters of the book some of the most touching and inspiring to read. That these two men died on the same day, that this day was the Fourth of July, and that it was the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration no less, has to be one most awe-inspiring "cooincidences" in the annals of history.

The Myth of Isolationism

[This is a slightly longer version of a post I made at Patrick Barkman's blog, The Local Crank.]

From the president's repeated references to isolationists and isolationism in his State of the Union address Tuesday, you might suppose there is a massive movement afoot to literally cut ourselves off from the rest of the world politically, militarily and economically and declare ourselves a "hermit state." The fact of the matter is, nothing could be farther from the truth. There is not a single elected official in our government, nor any group of Americans worth mentioning, advocating anything like isolationism.

Like Shangri La, American isolationism is a myth; our nation has never been, at any time in its history, an isolationist power. From our very founding we have always been actively engaged with the rest of the world, and not just commercially. As early as 1804 the U.S. landed marines in North Africa and William Eaton marched them across the desert---with Arab, Greek and Berber allies no less---to attack the Barbary pirates at the city of Derna. Before the 1930's, "isolation" was only mentioned as a fact of American geography and never in connection with any foreign policy. But in the Spanish-American War, a "policy of isolation" was attributed by the war's proponents to anyone who disagreed with the war and the subsequent assimilation of foreign peoples like the Filipinos. It was also used to label those who advocated neutrality in the 1930's, as the clouds of war in Asia and Europe continued to gather. As Walter McDougall aptly describes in Promised Land, Crusader State, "our vaunted tradition of 'isolationism' is no tradition at all, but a dirty word that interventionists, especially since Pearl Harbor, hurl at anyone who questions their policies."

McDougall argues instead that the true tradition of American foreign policy "isolationism" misleadingly refers to is Unilateralism, a policy "which never meant that the United States should, or for that matter could, sequester itself or pursue an ostrich-like policy toward all foreign countries. It simply meant, as Hamilton and Jefferson both underscored, that the self-evident course for the United States was to avoid permanent, entangling alliances and to remain neutral in Europe's wars except when our Liberty--the first hallowed tradition [of American foreign policy]--was at risk."

McDougall believes there is an "Old Testament" of American foreign policy consisting of four traditions--Liberty, Unilateralism, The American System and Expansionism--and a "New Testament" consisting of Progressive Imperialism, Wilsonianism, Containment and Global Meliorism. By his definitions President Bush could best be described as a Global Meliorist in that he believes America has a divinely ordained mission to "change the world for the better," though there are certainly elements of the other traditions in his foreign policy as well.

And now, unfortunately, his administration has revived that old dirty word "isolationist" as a way to marginalize anyone who questions their interventionist policies, and particularly the war in Iraq.

There is one major problem with this logic that supporters and opponents of the war alike should recognize and candidly acknowledge: most of the war's critics supported the invasion of Afghanistan to capture Bin Laden and destroy the Al Qaeda network there. That they didn't support the invasion of Iraq doesn't mean they suddenly became "isolationists" between 2001 and 2002; it simply makes them opponents of the invasion of Iraq. A casual survey of even just our own history demonstrates that not every military intervention is equally wise or justified. Any time war is an option, it must be debated on its particular merits and not in a sweeping black-and-white generalization that inaccurately dismisses all opponents as isolationists. In the case of Iraq, there were very legitimate reasons to believe it was unwise, at a time when our invasion of Afghanistan had not yet achieved its full objectives, to divide our resources and attack a nation that had no connection to 9/11 and did not--even by the administration's admisson--pose an immediate threat to the U.S. To raise these points is not to advocate a fictitious doctrine like isolationism, but to properly place Iraq in a very different category of threat than Afghanistan.

The president has a valid point when he says that "second guessing is not a policy." The debate over the wisdom of invading Iraq is now a subject of purely academic debate; Congress, as it has increasingly done in the last 50 years, temporized and gave the president an "authorization of force" without an outright declaration of war, and those who voted for it have little to no credibility in revisiting that academic debate now, as American servicemembers continue to die every day in pursuit of a stable and democratic Iraq. The proper debate now should be on how we can bring those servicemembers home in a way that does not immorally abandon the people of Iraq to decades of chaos and violence.

In my humble opinion, the president is doing a grave disservice to a nation that already has such difficulty separating fact from fiction by portraying "isolationism" as the only alternative to his policies. Let's stick to the facts and put aside these fairy tales.

The Baneful Effects of Party Spirit

You'll notice one of the links I've posted is to Washington's Farewell Address, which to my mind is one of the wisest political documents in American history. Among other things--such as his famous declaration of religion and morality as the "indispensable supports" of popular government and his exhortation to cultivate "peace and harmony" with all nations--our retiring first president warned his fellow countrymen about the "baneful effects" of party spirit, which "serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms; kindles the animosity of one part against another; foments occasionally riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which finds a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passion. Thus the policy and the will of one country are subjected to the policy and will of another."

It is easy enough to see how prophetic Washington's words were, both in his time and in our own. And yet Washington was no naive fool; he himself admitted that party spirit has "its root in the strongest passions of the human mind. It exists under different shapes in all governments, more or less stifled, controlled, or repressed" and "within certain limits" political parties do provide "useful checks upon the administration of the government, and serve to keep alive the spirit of liberty."

My own opinion about political parties--formed reluctantly after years of cynicism and reflection--is that they are a necessarily evil, that for reasons of basic human frailty democratic nations cannot conceivably conduct their public affairs without them. But, knowing that we are doomed to live with them, I believe our country would be much better served by the healthy competition of multiple parties than it is by the stagnant monopoly (or is it duopoly?) of our two-party system. The predictable response to this idea is that "we would just end up like Italy" with a crazy circus of third parties constantly winning and losing power. I disagree. I think Italy's parliament reflects the boisterous nature of a Mediterranean society descended from feuding city-states, while in Northern Europe and particularly in England, from whom we derived our political system, one seldom sees more than a few parties in office at any given time. But even three parties are often a vast improvement over two, as one of the two dominant parties must inevitably seek to build a coalition with the third, usually by making concessions to one of the third party's key issues. If Greens and Libertarians were elected to the U.S. Congress, one could easily imagine occasional partnerships between the Democrats and the Greens on one hand, and the Republicans and the Libertarians on the other, with the result that at least some Green and Libertarian ideas would get passed into law. If nothing else the Republicans might start paying more than mere lip service to the idea of "minimal government" if the Libertarian Party had a visible presence in Congress. As it stands now, voters who favor 1) smaller government, 2) balanced budgets and 3) a better form of taxation (be it a flat income tax or a consumption tax of some kind) have no choice at all other than two parties that will never deliver all three, or even just two of the three. And that's a real pity.

To compound this problem, Democrats and Republicans in all 50 states have erected many insurmountable legal and financial barriers that keep third party candidates from ever having a reasonable chance of being elected. Martin Gross catalogues some of these barriers in The Political Racket.

One might fairly ask me at this point, "Wouldn't electing more parties to office just make party spirit worse by simply multiplying it?" It might, but in fact it usually seems to have the opposite effect. The reason, again, is that the parties have to play nicer when building coalitions. It is the smug arrogance of uncontested power that seems to fuel party spirit more than anything, as we see in full display in our two-party government. I believe that healthy competition from third parties would shake the Democrats and Republicans out of their complacency and force them to improve, just as healthy competition in the free market often forces competitors to improve their products.

Imagine if Coke and Pepsi had a complete stranglehold on the market for soda, making it next to impossible for competitor brands to be distributed and sold. One can imagine how much nastier the advertising would be between the two companies as they constantly sought to achieve and maintain market dominance. But break up their monopoly and let Dr. Pepper into the market, and lo and behold they have a popular new rival. Faced with a refreshing new alternative, consumers would be much less interested in hearing the tired old Coke-Pepsi attacks, and those two companies would need to find new ways to market their product, usually by improving it.

Perhaps it's a deluded fantasy to think that a multi-party system would achieve the same results, but I don't think so. And it couldn't possibly be worse than the status quo. I've said it before and I'll likely say it again, but in a society like ours that always preaches free speech, choice and competition, it's nothing less than shocking that we tolerate such a stifling, stagnant and increasingly corrupt two-party system.

Democracy in America

I thought about posting a Top 10 list of the books that have most influenced my political philosophy, but Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America towers so far above the rest that it frankly deserves a post all of its own. I've also included a link to an online version of the book for those who have never read it. I actually prefer the J.P. Mayer translation to the one online, but the differences are mainly ones of prose and not of substance.

The nice thing about reading Tocqueville is that you don't have to feel constrained to reading the book from cover to cover. The chapter titles are all so specific, and sometimes completely unrelated, that you can freely skip around and read the ones that catch your interest as independent essays unto themselves. One of my favorites is a chapter near the very end of Volume II entitled "What Sort of Despotism Democratic Nations have to Fear."

Tocqueville's perceptive insights about American society and democracy are if anything more important today than they were in the early nineteenth century, and many contemporary authors continue to explore the relevance of his insights today. A good companion piece to Democracy in America is Habits of the Heart, co-written in the 1980's by the sociologist Robert Bellah. Among other things Bellah and his colleagues wrote very eloquently and movingly about the rise of individualism and the decline of republican ideals so much in need today.

The Lyceum is open for business.

The original Lyceum, as some of you may know, was a gymnasium in ancient Athens that served as a place of military exercises and later as a school of philosophy under Aristotle beginning in 335 B.C. Because of my own military background and my interest in philosophy and political science it seemed like the perfect name for this blog, which I created mainly as a forum for amicable discussion with friends who share these interests. In the days and weeks ahead I will occasionally post my thoughts, and I encourage you to read and comment on them. A few words before you do:

1 - I am not terribly interested in partisan politics, though I may occasionally comment on them. I am much more interested in philosophy and political theory, particularly the "first principles" of Western philosophy (from ancient Greece through the Enlightenment) that led to the birth of our nation. I am a republican, not a Republican, a difference I hope to explain in greater detail in future posts.

2 - I prefer discussion to debate, and dialogue to diatribes.

3 - I have many other responsibilities and hobbies that compete for my time, so I may be slow in responding to posts. Bear with me.

Thank you for visiting my Lyceum, and I look forward to hearing from you!