Category Archives: Americana

The Value of IR to the Citizen

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Steve Saideman recently blogged about how he conceived of his teaching mission, when teaching undergraduates: adding to an informed citizenry. This is is a noble endeavor.

It is precisely the need to be a better informed citizen that sent me on a now an 8 year journey towards a change of career, all inspired by Charles Hill’s excerpt from Grand Strategies: Literature, Statecraft, and World Order in the Review Section of the Wall Street Journal.

After reading that article, I realized I was too ignorant to be an effective citizen of the republic in matters of war and peace and trade. And after learning he taught in the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy at Yale, a non-degree program for training diplomats and would-be heads of state, a quick Google search yielded the syllabus for the program and I began to read.

The intellectual joy in studying the grand themes of the literature in IR had me thinking about a career change, which meant collecting a credential. Thus, I landed at Troy University for a masters degree and now University of Leicester for a PhD. My research interest, peacekeeping and civil war, came out of two courses at Troy. One on international organizations, a requirement, and one on Sub Saharan Africa.

I whole-heartedly agree with the value of undergraduate education in international relations, I wish I had been forced to take IR as part of breadth requirements as an undergraduate. UCSB at the time required a US government course in Political Science, but nothing dealing with relations among states.

Digression: If I had one criticism of the Brady-Johnson Program, it is that the syllabus I read from was too heavy on the diplomatic history approach and too light on theories. What I found most useful at Troy were the introductory course and the required ‘theory and ideology’ course, which prepared us for the exit exam. Those two courses gave me a large toolbox with which to conceptualize a given issue. (International political economy was less useful, mainly because I already had a background in micro and macro economics, accounting, finance, trade, supply chain management, and banking from an MBA. Although, I did appreciate the way the professor stressed the contradictions built into canonical developmental economics and the consequences for individual liberty in the standard policy prescriptions–i.e., Easterly’s critique.)

Diplomatic history is useful for context, but in the hands of policy maker–exactly whom they are training–it can lead to dangerous facile analogies. This is not to say that a policy maker needs Theory with a capital T, which is mostly useless academic abstraction, but an understanding of the claims of realism, liberalism, constructivism–although that ‘magic idea wand’ (Snyder 2002) can be rather dangerous in the hands of policy maker–will provide ways of conceptualizing issues.

Digression 2: The Brady-Johnson Program syllabus did include a book that became one of the most influential on my own thought: Walter Russell Mead’s Special Providence, which included a really helpful typology for understanding American foreign policy.

The Class Taboo on the Right

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Mingling in conservative circles I’ve noticed that some conservatives have an aversion to any references to class, as if class is the ideological equivalent of Voldemort, the concept which should not be named.  Class is a taboo.

Of course the conservative movement in America was vehemently anti-Communist.  In fact, it was the glue that held the libertarians in coalition with conservatives under the stewardship of William F. Buckley, Jr.

All of Marxism is predicated on class and class conflict.  It is reasonable to assume that the class taboo among conservatives is that they don’t want to validate a single element of Marxism.

This is taboo is really irrational.  Class does not have to be ontologically real, as it is in Marxism, to be useful.  Typologies, for example, are descriptive generalizations that involve set membership.  Based on some criterion, an observation may be placed in or out of a set.  Then based on those sets, you can make causal claims backed up by associations between set membership and an outcome.  It is fundamental to making generalizable claims about social phenomena.  

The conservative movement wasn’t always averse to using class as a concept.  For example, James Burnham, who would become an editor for National Review magazine, the house organ of movement conservatism, made much of the concept of the managerial classes in industry and government.  Neoliberal economists work with models using class, such as income quintiles, all the time.

Conservatives rightly shun bankrupt Marxist concepts like the labor theory of value and Marx’s teleological class conflict, but it is silly to shun the use of class typologically.

Reflections on the Cubs

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The Chicago cubs, after 108 years of futility, won the World Series. As a San Francisco Giants fan since birth, I had no rooting interest in either team. I had considered backing the Cubs, since I consider the designated hitter in the American League an abomination. Every player should be required to play on both offense and defense as a matter of fairness. Plus, Madison Bumgarner, in the tradition of Giants starting pitchers who could hit, like Rick Reuschel and Don “Caveman” Robinson, put on a commercial this year for allowing pitchers to hit. (We’ll leave aside the other Giants tradition of pitchers hopeless at the plate—e.g., Atlee Hammaker.)

I also flirted with the idea that I should root for the Indians, since the great Giant second baseman and now broadcaster Duane Kuiper was an Indian. But it was National Review’s Jonah Goldberg who solidified my choice in rooting for the Indians.  He wrote:

I want the Cubs to lose… for the same reason I wanted the Red Sox to lose in 2004: I like curses. No I don’t mean in the sense of giving someone the evil eye so that they give birth to a duck or anything like that. I like curses because they are romantic, in the anti-Enlightenment sense. They defy the machine thinking of the Scientific Revolution.

…

[I]f the Curse of the Billy Goat is lifted, a game more attached to superstition than any other I can think of will be somewhat diminished.

Giants fans will recall Aubrey Huff’s “rally thong” as a prime example of baseball’s enduring and endearing superstitions. Therefore the “conservative” position is to root against the Cubs.

Jonah continues:

As a Chestertonian at heart, I like and respect old things. I like it when stuff beats the law of averages for reasons we cannot fathom. The Hayekian in me thinks old things that last often do so for good reasons we just don’t know—and sometimes can’t know.

Unfortunately, we live in an age where we take the razor of reason to every little thing and strain to know the whys of it, as if knowing the why will empower the how.

Jonah is on the right track but fails in the detail. The scientific method can answer the what and the how of a phenomenon, but not the why. I’ll paraphrase Leszek Kolakowski on the enduring nature of myth. Positivism, which is the philosophical ground of the scientific method, is incapable of addressing questions of teleology and providence, hence the necessity of myth to provide meaning to unconditioned experience.

The victory of the Cubs is unfortunately yet another very slight step in the demythologization of society’s institutions. Let us feel happy for the long-suffering Cubs fans, but also lament the diminishment of baseball.

 

Trump Presidency the end of the UN?

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It is hard to know if Richard Gowan’s column over at World Politics Review is clickbait  a la Vox or Gowan is serious about Trump being the end of the United Nations if he is elected president.

It is clear that under a President Trump, the U.S. would be changing its relationship with the U.N. and other multilateral institutions. President Trump has promised to deemphasize international engagement. His foreign policy positions are best described as conservative non-interventionism. Animating this non-interventionism are the beliefs that United States interests are not served by multilateral regimes and institutions, they are a threat to the republic, and sovereignty is an absolute good. In some ways Trump’s position is a return to Herbert Hoover’s criticism of the Roosevelt administration: the American republic is fragile and being undermined from within and without.

Gowan gets hysterical about the damage to international institutions Trumps promise of withdrawing from the Paris Agreement is:

This is in part because Trump has repeatedly signaled that he will give the institution short shrift if he takes office. He has already promised to “cancel” the Obama administration’s biggest multilateral achievement: The Paris climate change treaty.

While this might not be quite as simple as Trump claims, many countries could rethink their environmental commitments if they believe that the U.S. will renege on the deal. Unilaterally reversing years of negotiations would also inject a huge dose of distrust into U.N. diplomacy. If Washington trashes such a crucial treaty, it is hard to see why other governments should sign up to any major bargains in future.

First of all, the Paris Agreement does almost nothing over current law and treaties. If that is the Obama administration’s biggest multilateral achievement, the administration sure hasn’t achieved much in eight years when compared to the Clinton administration. The Paris Agreement merely reaffirmed existing articles of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). For this reason, it was deemed an executive agreement and not a treaty under constitutional law requiring ratification. The Paris Agreement is “Green Theater” nothing more. The “crucial treaty,” is the original Framework ratified in 1992. The UNFCCC does provide a mechanism for withdrawal in Article 25. Would U.S. withdrawal from the UNFCCC pose an existential threat to the U.N.? It is unlikely. Since the United States never acceded to the Kyoto Protocol with binding emissions limits, the UNFCCC poses little threat to the U.S. economy.

The only thing that could break the United Nations is a concerted effort to create a parallel IGO with greater legitimacy with respect to liberal democratic norms. One such proposal has circulated on the Right for years: a concert or league of liberal democracies, or possibly an even more narrow concert of the Anglosphere. However, given the non-interventionism of Trump, such an IGO would never be considered. No, the likely outcome of a Trump presidency is withholding U.N dues, as previous Republican administrations had due to U.N. support for contraception, as a sign of defiance. It would make good theater, but once a Democrat came into office, the arrears would be repaid. Trump does not pose an existential threat to the United Nations.

What will suffer is the already creaky liberal international order that had been constructed after the Second World War. The relative power the United States has declined, and the American public is weary of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. These two things are contributing to a breakdown in the liberal international order. Dissatisfied revisionist powers—for example, North Korea, China, Iran, and Russia—are testing the limits of that order and even creating alternatives to that order. The United States appears poised to abandon maintenance of the liberal international order. In some ways, this is a return to type, where prior to WWII, the United States was content to enforce the Monroe Doctrine against European encroachment in the Western Hemisphere, but leave Europe to itself. Europe is no longer the bottle of scorpions it once was; the Middle East is that bottle of scorpions, but with the U.S. close to becoming energy independent thanks to technology and the post-industrial economy, the U.S. will likely pivot to its own period of “splendid isolation.”

Federalist 10 and the UBI

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Universal Basic Income (UBI) has gained traction as an idea among the reformicon/technocratic Right in the United States. For example, Charles Murray recently wrote a lengthy piece on the cover of the Review section of the Wall Street Journal on the subject. The concept of the UBI as a replacement for the welfare state on the Right has been mainly on the libertarian wing, where the UBI promotes poverty reduction without restricting liberty as much as the typical welfare state alternatives of conditional grants. The reason for the Right’s new found love of UBI is the risk that automation poses to the social fabric of society. When 47% of today’s jobs are subject to automation over the next 20 years, issues of morality and equity are presented front and center.

With half the nation not only unemployed, but unemployable, what does it do to an American polity that has the poster child for Weber’s Protestant Ethic? What Murray does no appreciate in his article is the risk to the constitutional order that a UBI poses. The dangers of faction, something Madison warned about and sold the Constitution as a solution for in Federalist 10, will be acute.

Madison described two dangers of faction: (1) tyranny of the minority (mainly a propertied ruling class) and (2) tyranny of a majority (mob rule). The new constitution was meant to tame faction through the mechanisms of divided and limited government, an independent judiciary, and representative and deliberative democracy.

Madison’s primary concern were with violent factions composed of land owners and the unpropertied, creditors and debtors, and geographic diversity (large versus small states and North vs. South). UBI carries tremendous risks for abuse through the democratic process. First, while the numbers proposed by Murray (an annual basic income of $30,000 with elimination of UBI at $40,000 of private income) will likely erode the likelihood of entering the workforce for those who could be employable, who is to say that the “dolists” who live off the UBI will not become the new unpropertied faction that will seek to exert their political influence to increase that dole to a more generous amount over time. Electoral politics is built around campaign promises and log rolling. It is unlikely the current institutions could restrain electoral majorities in the quest for “soaking the rich.”

Any UBI introduction will likely have to be via Constitutional amendment with anti-democratic protections installed to make it work. Otherwise, faction could tear the republic apart. It may also have to change the way the government funds itself. The repeal of an income tax and a substitution of a tax on capital may need to be implemented—i.e., tax the owners of the robots rather than the workers. The challenge there, is that it is essentially a tax on productivity gains, which will limit the increase in prosperity over time. Technology has not made republicanism obsolete, but it does pose challenges for the 21st century.

Loaning a Loan Word

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There is an all-purpose word for chaos, mess, tumult, or commotion in modern Hebrew: balagan. It passed into my everyday vocabulary when I lived in Israel. For example, my wife and I use it to describe the state of the household after the grandparents have visited and spun up the kids. The word just rolls off the tongue: ba-la-gan. I have caught myself using the word even with people who don’t speak Hebrew, much to their confusion.

Today, I was surprised to see it used in the headline of an AP story in Yahoo! News.  The story is about how the Israeli security establishment views the latest developments in the Syrian Civil War.  Does the use of the word in a headline portend  the passing of the word into English as a loan word?

The word itself is not originally Hebrew.  This article from Haaretz describes the travels of this wonderful word.   It passed into modern Hebrew via Russian to describe the temporary dwellings used by traveling puppet shows. The word’s origin is actually in Persian, meaning a yurt. Passing into English would make it a loan of a loan of a loan word. The word will have changed hands more times than a sub-prime mortgage in 2007.

Some Thoughts on the Trumpkins

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Are Donald Trump and his supporters (hereafter: Trumpkins) conservative?

Roger Kimball, a man I greatly respect for his fervent defense of traditional aesthetic values, certainly doesn’t think so, however, there is a case to be made that the Trumpkins, who describe themselves as conservative, are correct in that description.

There are three main ways that conservatism has been defined: (1) a defense of the European feudal order that is historically irrelevant today, which is the position held by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.; (2) an autonomous system of values; or (3) the a situationally defined ideology that is asserted against another ideological movement that seeks to undermine the established institutional order.

Modern American conservatives have never accepted the first definition and it is mainly used as a rhetorical tool by proponents of ideologies that are opposed by those claiming to be conservative; it is a class-based definition which appeals to those whose worldview interprets political reality in terms of class. The second definition is what a conservative like Roger Kimball would assert. It is  a certain Whiggish set of values held in common with Edmund Burke, the founder of conservatism. The final definition though is probably most relevant to the Trumpkins.

Samuel Huntington (1957) asserted that conservatism is in fact number 3. He extracts a core set of principles from Burke’s writings that defines conservatism:

  1. Man is basically a religious animal, and religion is the foundation of civil society. A divine sanction infuses the legitimate, existing, social order.
  2. Society is the natural, organic product of slow historical growth. Existing institutions embody the wisdom of previous generations. Right is a function of time.
  3. Man is a creature of instinct and emotion as well as reason. Prudence, prejudice, experience, and habit are better guides than reason, logic, abstractions, and metaphysics. Truth exists not in universal propositions but in concrete experiences.
  4. The community is superior to the individual. The rights of men derive from their duties. Evil is rooted in human nature, not in any particular social institutions.
  5. Except in an ultimate moral sense, men are unequal. Social organization is complex and always includes a variety of classes, orders, and groups. Differentiation, hierarchy, and leadership are the inevitable characteristics of any civil society.
  6. A presumption exists “in favour of any settled scheme of government against any untried project…” Man’s hopes are high, but his vision is short. Efforts to remedy existing evils usually result in even greater ones.

In short, conservatism “stands athwart history, yelling Stop” (to use William F. Buckley’s phrase).  As the society slowly changes over time (see #2), however, a new institutional norm develops to be defended when threated by radical change.

The Trumpkins consider themselves conservative in that third sense. That they want to conserve the existing Great Society programs, which were deeply un-conservative when created, does not make them un-conservative. Those institutions have become part of the accepted social fabric of society and worth preserving. Trumpkins are deeply distrustful of technocratic government, whether Republican or Democrat.

When it comes to issues, the best way to understand the Trumpkins is using Walter Russell Mead’s four main traditions in Special Providence: Jeffersonian, Hamiltonian, Jacksonian, and Wilsonian. The Trumpkins are asserting Jeffersonian (agrarian populism and non-interventionism) and Jacksonian (communitarian, yet egalitarian, and honor-bound) principles against Hamiltonian (pro-business and free trade) and Wilsonian (technocratic and interventionist) principles.

Typical Republican Party themes fail to resonate with the Trumpkins, since they, as a group, have become threatened by them. Flattening the income tax structure fails to resonate because it is insufficiently egalitarian. The claimed benefits of free trade and mass immigration fail to resonate because they suppress wages and the covenantal nature of the republic is threatened by foreign influence. Foreign wars of choice divert resources better spent at home, unless the United States is directly attacked, which challenges the Trumpkins’ honor. Trump is giving voice to a class of conservative that has been one of the three legs propping up the Republican Party and may be poised to either capture the party or split it irrevocably.

Anti-communism was the glue that held the Republican Party together in the twentieth century. That glue disappeared in October 1989.  Will the Republican Party go the way of its predecessor the Whig Party and fracture over irreconcilable differences?  Back then, it was slavery.  Will free trade and immigration be the proximate cause of a new fracture?

Bumper Stickers and The Gun Toting Hippie

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Jay Nordlinger posted an Impromptus today on the subject of bumper stickers and singled out a pickup truck that he came across with a seemingly odd collection of bumperstickers, being all over the map on the left-right spectrum.  He was having trouble with taxonomy.
This vehicle’s owner fits into a category I’ve called Gun Toting Hippie.  It is a particular species you find in pockets in Texas and the mountain states mainly, but can be found in isolated villages around the U.S. such as Bolinas, California, which received a substantial influx of Scots-Irish and was a smuggling town during Prohibition.
This species values radical individualism, rejecting the typical hippie communitarianism.  The radical individualism primarily manifests itself in an aversion to taxation, a valorization of gun rights, and corporate culture and bureaucracy are anathematized.  The military-industrial complex is sinister and a threat to individual liberty, as are treaties and multinational institutions, therefore isolation is the preferred foreign policy.  Conservation is an important goal, which aligns the Gun Toting Hippie with the radical left and environmental movements; except when those movements put agrarian pursuits in the crosshairs, because the Gun Toting Hippie is a Jeffersonian agrarian.  (The BLM is a sinister agency.)  In general the military should be small and based on a the principles of a democratic militia like Athens had as opposed to the professionalized military of Sparta (let’s leave aside that Athens was also imperial).
The ideology of the Gun Toting Hippie is very American, but a unique admixture not found in other cultures.  It is a strong brew of Jeffersonianism and Jacksonianism animated by the passions of Scots-Irish recalcitrance.  This ideological diversity is what makes America great.