Wednesday, September 21, 2005
Three Books
The bus trip from DC to New York and back allowed me to get to a few books I’ve been meaning to read for some time: Claes Ryn’s America the Virtuous, John Lukacs’ Democracy and Populism, and Natan Sharansky’s The Case for Democracy. They are all, more or less, written about the same subject – democratization. The former two are leerier about the forceful spread of democracy, the latter – well, the title says it all. Though more ideologically sympathetic to Ryn and Lukacs, I found myself somewhat more persuaded by Sharansky.
All right, confession right up front. Dr. Ryn is a professor of mine, and as such I will be careful where I tread. For the most part I agreed with the outline of his book, but felt the case overstated. His thesis is that a neo-Jacobin cabal has worked to steer American foreign policy in a direction that arrogantly seeks to impose its will on other nations in order to impose democracy. One could perhaps substitute neo-conservative for neo-Jacobin, though the neo-Jacobin grouping is much more extensive. He traces this movement to Strauss, whom Ryn portrays as an a-historical philosopher whose “conservatism” was anything but. (Also see this post) The Straussians have taken their mentor’s ideas in an even more radical direction, and are much in the mold of the late 18th century French Jacobins. They seek to impose their values – deemed as superior and idyllic – on the rest of the world in an effort to create a sort of utopian world.
I do share Dr. Ryn’s discomfort with much of the neo-conservative agenda. There is a certain naïveté in putting so much stock in the democratic push. And there is an arrogance underlying much of this ideology. But I think the case is overstated. I am not certain that the neoconservatives are as a-historical as Ryn portrays them to be (and of course he might argue that neo-Jacobins and neocons are not one in the same). Much is made of Alan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, but I don’t know that Bloom really speaks to this issue. But we’ll dig deeper in just a moment.
Lukacs seems cut from the same mold. Frankly Lukacs is skeptical of everything. Democracy and Populism at time appears an effort to refute every commonly held notion developed over the past century or so. An example of his contrarianism:
“And the Constitution collapsed in 1861, unable as it was to prevent the breakup of the country and the Civil War. That, not slavery, was what brought the Civil War about: Lincoln’s decision to preserve the authority of the American Union.”
This is a particularly irksome argument. Why exactly did the Constitution collapse if not because of the crisis of American slavery? It’s true that Lincoln’s primary motivation at the outset of the war was indeed to preserve the American union, but the union was in peril precisely because southerners decided that their precious slaveholding interests were threatened by the Republican Party led by Abraham Lincoln.
Anyway, this is just one of many contrarian claims made in the course of a breezy couple of hundred pages. To say that I was disappointed with the book would be a severe understatement.
Sharansky’s book is part biography and part plea. He believes that the spread of democracy will help stabilize the world. Much of the second part of the book focuses particularly on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and Sharansky maintains that the corrupt and un-democratic Palestinian leadership has so neutered the Palestinian people that, if only they were given greater freedom and more democratic opportunity they would focus their energies inward, and peace could develop between the Jewish and Muslim people.
I think Sharansky is ultimately right about Palestinian leadership. Arafat was a murderous thug who got rich off the backs of the people he was pretending to look out for. No doubt the anger and rage that boils within the heart of much of the Palestinian population would subside if they felt like they had more control of their own destiny. But I do not share all of Sharansky’s optimism. There is something much deeper at work, and democracy will not cure centuries of hatred. It would be a welcome step – but so much more needs to be done to change hearts and minds, and a full-fledged democratic regime would not be enough.
That said, I think Sharansky’s outlook is still much more realistic. I do think that democracy is a meaningless term, and any society that is authoritarian in mindset will not be anything like a liberal democracy. But that does not mean that all efforts at democratization are futile. I believe that we have fueled resentment in supporting non-democratic regimes in the past, and the yearning for freedom is a universal trait that should be nurtured – but carefully and cautiously.
We may have erred in rushing to hold elections in Iraq before we had developed sufficiently liberal institutions. The ballot box does not a true democracy make. But, handing the reigns of power to the people can be a start in that process.
Many people like to quote John Quincy Adams. “But she [the United States] goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.” But I think that it is many Middle-Easterners who go abroad seeking to destroy monsters as a means of compensating for their domestic unhappiness. Left powerless by despotic states, these young fanatics have taken their rage and transformed it into a mentality to seeks to punish others abroad for their own misfortune. If they are provided an opportunity to look inward for a change then perhaps that can be a means through which to temper their destructive energy. Perhaps not.
The singular point that Sharansky makes that I most certainly approve is that the yearning for freedom and democracy ARE NOT relegated solely to western civilization. There is a universal craving for these ideals, and all humans are capable of self-government. It is in this regard that their can be a synthesis of sorts between Burke’s historicism (praised by Dr. Ryn and yours truly) and Straussian universality. Heck, Dr. Ryn points to it himself in his criticism of Strauss.
One can hold, as do Burkeans, that no civilization is perfect. No society has achieved utopia because utopia cannot be achieved. After all, utopia means “no place.” But that does not mean that there are not societies that are in fact better than others. It is not wrong to call the regimes of Kim Jong Il, or Saddam Hussein, or the Iranian mullahs “evil.” If we cannot look upon the depredations of these inhumane dictators with appropriate disgust, then we truly have lost our moral compass. While it is no doubt true that there is much wrong with American civilization – high divorce rates, abortion, drug abuse, etc. – must we really pretend that we are in any way on the same plane as a nation as North Korea or Saudi Arabia? Must we maintain the fiction that the Egyptian polity is just as good as our own? This is absurd. We can certainly compare and contrast and conclude that one is better than the other. Common sense is all we need to make this determination. As long as common sense does not breed the arrogant assumption that our way is the only way, and must be copied exactly everywhere else, then that common sense is all well and good. And Sharansky does not argue that there is a singular model for the good, nor do I think most neocons make this argument. Many who strive to build democratic institutions in the Middle East recognize regional particularities. I think they recognize that we cannot merely transport the American constitution overseas and expect it to work. Nations must develop their own plans of government, and we must learn to expect disappointment with some of their plans.
Ultimately, we can make two different and yet equally fatal mistakes, and they are represented by these three books. We can either set our sights too high, or set our sights too low. Both of these options are deficient. We cannot expect to remake the world, but nor can we bury our heads and ignore the universal human desire for freedom. We can encourage democratic growth without stepping on everyone’s toes.
Iraq is the perfect case study. Both sides seem lost in the clouds. Iraq will not become a perfectly functioning liberal democracy – after all, we barely are ourselves. But the gloom and doom forecasts are equally, if not more inapt. It seems that we fail to appreciate the middle ground. Iraq will likely become a nation that is neither sufficiently liberal nor significantly authoritarian. Our expectation that it will be one or the other are rooted in black and white worldview that is inappropriate for this particular case.
Conservatism is an outlook that is pessimistic about human nature yet optimistic about its potential. It would behoove us to adopt a better mixture of realistic pessimism and grounded optimism. Golden mean anyone?
All right, confession right up front. Dr. Ryn is a professor of mine, and as such I will be careful where I tread. For the most part I agreed with the outline of his book, but felt the case overstated. His thesis is that a neo-Jacobin cabal has worked to steer American foreign policy in a direction that arrogantly seeks to impose its will on other nations in order to impose democracy. One could perhaps substitute neo-conservative for neo-Jacobin, though the neo-Jacobin grouping is much more extensive. He traces this movement to Strauss, whom Ryn portrays as an a-historical philosopher whose “conservatism” was anything but. (Also see this post) The Straussians have taken their mentor’s ideas in an even more radical direction, and are much in the mold of the late 18th century French Jacobins. They seek to impose their values – deemed as superior and idyllic – on the rest of the world in an effort to create a sort of utopian world.
I do share Dr. Ryn’s discomfort with much of the neo-conservative agenda. There is a certain naïveté in putting so much stock in the democratic push. And there is an arrogance underlying much of this ideology. But I think the case is overstated. I am not certain that the neoconservatives are as a-historical as Ryn portrays them to be (and of course he might argue that neo-Jacobins and neocons are not one in the same). Much is made of Alan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, but I don’t know that Bloom really speaks to this issue. But we’ll dig deeper in just a moment.
Lukacs seems cut from the same mold. Frankly Lukacs is skeptical of everything. Democracy and Populism at time appears an effort to refute every commonly held notion developed over the past century or so. An example of his contrarianism:
“And the Constitution collapsed in 1861, unable as it was to prevent the breakup of the country and the Civil War. That, not slavery, was what brought the Civil War about: Lincoln’s decision to preserve the authority of the American Union.”
This is a particularly irksome argument. Why exactly did the Constitution collapse if not because of the crisis of American slavery? It’s true that Lincoln’s primary motivation at the outset of the war was indeed to preserve the American union, but the union was in peril precisely because southerners decided that their precious slaveholding interests were threatened by the Republican Party led by Abraham Lincoln.
Anyway, this is just one of many contrarian claims made in the course of a breezy couple of hundred pages. To say that I was disappointed with the book would be a severe understatement.
Sharansky’s book is part biography and part plea. He believes that the spread of democracy will help stabilize the world. Much of the second part of the book focuses particularly on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and Sharansky maintains that the corrupt and un-democratic Palestinian leadership has so neutered the Palestinian people that, if only they were given greater freedom and more democratic opportunity they would focus their energies inward, and peace could develop between the Jewish and Muslim people.
I think Sharansky is ultimately right about Palestinian leadership. Arafat was a murderous thug who got rich off the backs of the people he was pretending to look out for. No doubt the anger and rage that boils within the heart of much of the Palestinian population would subside if they felt like they had more control of their own destiny. But I do not share all of Sharansky’s optimism. There is something much deeper at work, and democracy will not cure centuries of hatred. It would be a welcome step – but so much more needs to be done to change hearts and minds, and a full-fledged democratic regime would not be enough.
That said, I think Sharansky’s outlook is still much more realistic. I do think that democracy is a meaningless term, and any society that is authoritarian in mindset will not be anything like a liberal democracy. But that does not mean that all efforts at democratization are futile. I believe that we have fueled resentment in supporting non-democratic regimes in the past, and the yearning for freedom is a universal trait that should be nurtured – but carefully and cautiously.
We may have erred in rushing to hold elections in Iraq before we had developed sufficiently liberal institutions. The ballot box does not a true democracy make. But, handing the reigns of power to the people can be a start in that process.
Many people like to quote John Quincy Adams. “But she [the United States] goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.” But I think that it is many Middle-Easterners who go abroad seeking to destroy monsters as a means of compensating for their domestic unhappiness. Left powerless by despotic states, these young fanatics have taken their rage and transformed it into a mentality to seeks to punish others abroad for their own misfortune. If they are provided an opportunity to look inward for a change then perhaps that can be a means through which to temper their destructive energy. Perhaps not.
The singular point that Sharansky makes that I most certainly approve is that the yearning for freedom and democracy ARE NOT relegated solely to western civilization. There is a universal craving for these ideals, and all humans are capable of self-government. It is in this regard that their can be a synthesis of sorts between Burke’s historicism (praised by Dr. Ryn and yours truly) and Straussian universality. Heck, Dr. Ryn points to it himself in his criticism of Strauss.
One can hold, as do Burkeans, that no civilization is perfect. No society has achieved utopia because utopia cannot be achieved. After all, utopia means “no place.” But that does not mean that there are not societies that are in fact better than others. It is not wrong to call the regimes of Kim Jong Il, or Saddam Hussein, or the Iranian mullahs “evil.” If we cannot look upon the depredations of these inhumane dictators with appropriate disgust, then we truly have lost our moral compass. While it is no doubt true that there is much wrong with American civilization – high divorce rates, abortion, drug abuse, etc. – must we really pretend that we are in any way on the same plane as a nation as North Korea or Saudi Arabia? Must we maintain the fiction that the Egyptian polity is just as good as our own? This is absurd. We can certainly compare and contrast and conclude that one is better than the other. Common sense is all we need to make this determination. As long as common sense does not breed the arrogant assumption that our way is the only way, and must be copied exactly everywhere else, then that common sense is all well and good. And Sharansky does not argue that there is a singular model for the good, nor do I think most neocons make this argument. Many who strive to build democratic institutions in the Middle East recognize regional particularities. I think they recognize that we cannot merely transport the American constitution overseas and expect it to work. Nations must develop their own plans of government, and we must learn to expect disappointment with some of their plans.
Ultimately, we can make two different and yet equally fatal mistakes, and they are represented by these three books. We can either set our sights too high, or set our sights too low. Both of these options are deficient. We cannot expect to remake the world, but nor can we bury our heads and ignore the universal human desire for freedom. We can encourage democratic growth without stepping on everyone’s toes.
Iraq is the perfect case study. Both sides seem lost in the clouds. Iraq will not become a perfectly functioning liberal democracy – after all, we barely are ourselves. But the gloom and doom forecasts are equally, if not more inapt. It seems that we fail to appreciate the middle ground. Iraq will likely become a nation that is neither sufficiently liberal nor significantly authoritarian. Our expectation that it will be one or the other are rooted in black and white worldview that is inappropriate for this particular case.
Conservatism is an outlook that is pessimistic about human nature yet optimistic about its potential. It would behoove us to adopt a better mixture of realistic pessimism and grounded optimism. Golden mean anyone?
# posted by Paul Zummo : 11:17 PM
