Yesterday, I posted some thoughts by Belmont Club on the nature of the war before us, and sparked a lively exchange in the Comments section. Today I segue over to Laughingwolf's series on the same subject. He, too, sees 2 wars facing us - but they are not the same 2. Rather, his second front is a conflict between the old rules and conventions of international diplomacy and the new. Along the way, he makes some useful points about the potential pitfalls and dangers ahead:
"The easy choice is to give up freedom, to go for an imperial leader and deal strictly by force of arms. Pax Americana. The opposite choice, and equally damning, is to give up freedom, and go for a socialist response that would maintain the illusion of power and control by the Old Powers, while adding a new and unchecked element in the form of Islamic fundamentalism. A third option exists, however, that threads the shoals and offers the chance of something truly new.
We take a page from the communists and socialists and export revolution. Not just any revolution, but The Revolution...."
There's much to be said for this idea, though one hopes that its adherents have learned appropriate lessons from the Marxists' tactical and doctrinal mistakes. We should be able to extract a few from Ken Wilber's work, though this link is kind of a heavy-isotope presentation.
We could start by getting the gender right:
Viva La Revolución
Sorry
Well, I take Wilber with a huge grain of deflating salt (and I say that as someone who frequented Esalen in the 80s, where folks did it better and more experientially than he does IMO).
But that caveat aside, I think Blake and Joe have this right. The US experiment in representative government by laws based on common law, by elected officials who are guided by the Consititution and legal precedent but who also apply judgement and ethics - that experiment is very foreign to many in the world.
Take France, for example.
Please. (badda-bing!)
Okay, cheap snarky shot, but to the point. One of the factors that makes our system work is that it is based on multiple legs: the Consitution, the common law, the explicit legal code as developed over time. The idea of "balance of powers" goes way beyond the explicit roles of 3 branches of government.
It is that core idea and the values it rests on that challenge the Old Powers so seriously. As both the difficulties and the possibilities in Iraq illustrate.
Wolf reads like a really bad version of Irving Kristol.
Yuck, Joe.
BTW: Kind of ironic that a site that runs nice little Saturday bits like "Sufi Wisdom" links so prominently to LGF.
The war of ideas within the West is a conflict between the classical liberal worldview and the socialist worldview.
In Hayek’s essay “Why I am not a conservative” he draws distinctions among socialism, classical liberalism and conservatism, but states that in America conservatives generally tend to be classical liberals because our founding constitution, institutions and ideals are classically liberal. And while American conservatives played an important role in promoting CL ideas against the rising tide of socialism in the second half of the 20th century, classical liberalism is NOT a conservative ideology. It is the most radical, dynamic, forward-looking, creative ideology the world has ever seen. Its ideals of individual liberty, universal human rights, limited gov’t, rule of law, etc. undermined the ancien regime and every form of despotism the human mind has conceived. Its ideals provided the foundation for the abolition of slavery, securing the rights of women, and the successful fight to eliminate institutionalized racism.
Classical liberalism is a large worldview that has room enough for many differing points of view. If we look back in American history we can see different manifestations of CL views: Federalists and Anti-Federalists were classical liberals; Federalists, Democratic-Republicans (later Democrats), Whigs and Republicans were all operating within the CL worldview (not always perfectly of course). Today, I would say that the CL worldview includes, conservatives, libertarians, huge numbers of independents, and moderate, centrist, conservative Democrats.
As I see it, the main battleground in the US between the CL worldview and the socialist worldview is within the Democratic Party, with the two sides being Liberal Democrats (moderate, centrist, conservative, DLC Dems) and Social Democrats. Howard Dean in appealing to Social Democrats tried to paint Joe Lieberman (a Liberal Dem) as “Republican Lite” or “Bush Lite”. This is one of the strategies of Social Dems: to try to make Liberal Dems think that CL ideals are conservative with the result that they will abandon those ideals and join the Social Dem side; or for those who won’t abandon the CL ideals, to make them feel as if the Dem Party has no room for CL ideals and thus forcing them out of the party. While they haven’t won yet, I think the Social Dems are winning. One example is the large number of Liberal Dems who have soured on the Dem Party after 9/11.
It is essential that Liberal Dems clearly define their ideals as being within the classical liberal worldview and make a clear distinction between their ideals and the socialism of the Social Dems. This is a long term, philosophical project. Liberal Dems need to reach out to the many independents who might be inclined to support the Dem Party, but who can’t bring themselves to align with the socialist agenda of the Social Dems and thus try to shift the voter base away from the Social Dems. I fear that a Kerry win in Nov. would embolden and empower the Social Dems and alienate even more Liberal Dems and independents.
Socialism has failed in all of its forms, resulting in the immiseration, oppression and murder of over a billion human beings. Its latest manifestation as “transnational progressivism” or “democratic socialism” will inevitably fail. It is essential that we defeat socialism in the realm of ideas before it undermines the unprecedented achievements of classical liberalism.
This is the true intellectual war going on. The left understands this strategy, though for the most part they refuse to acknowledge it for tactical reasons. If you must start every conversation with a recap of your grand strategy, you have precious little time to get to the detail you wanted to address in the first place. This is irritating.
Ultimately the far left in particular reacts viciously against this policy, and for a simple reason. They find the west (especially America) so fundamentally flawed, racist, sexist, wage slaving, environment wrecking, election stealing, coorperate driven, god help us religious, that the idea of exporting our values is madness. In a sense, they have become victims of their own rhetoric. As the actual differences in philosophy between left and right have shrunk, battles have ironically escalated in heat due to there being less and less ground available to cede. This is how we get Nazi allusions tied to tax cuts. The scary consequence of this has become, the Gore Vidal, Noam Chomski style intellectual elite have managed to convince the left that export of our current flavor or Capitalist Democratic Republicanism is akin to spreading National Socialism. Hence, the venom with which this strategy is savaged. This tends to trickle down to the ANSWER type footsoldiers and their marcher brethren in a much diluted form, hence we get the incoherance of a movement theoretically progressive, but in practice defending the most reactionary regimes on earth. At the end of the day, the left is terrified that market driven democracy is actually spreading instead of wilting as their theories predict.
VodkaPundit: "Live Free or Die" isn't a slogan, it's an ultimatum.
Regards,
Ric Locke
:-)