Solid as Iraq

“When pride comes, then comes disgrace, but with humility comes wisdom.”
– Proverbs 11:2

In politics, disgrace does not follow pride and there are no such things as humility or wisdom. Partly this is because politics attracts the type of people who “think that it is not the system which we need fear, but the danger that it might be run by bad men,” as Friedrich Hayek wrote in The Road to Serfdom. The belief that there is nothing wrong with a bloated, oppressive, administrative bureaucracy actively engaged in managing the economy should be woefully outdated and subject to mockery. Alas, this idea retains decent heft in America and the broader West. Worse is the belief among federal bureaucrats that they are called to do important work on behalf of “society.” Worse still is they believe they are “public servants” arbitrating what’s fair and proper in civic life. But the absolute worst aspect of it all is how proud they are to play petty authoritarian. Whether it’s an IRS middle manager, an EPA busybody or an EEOC scold, American life is now regulated to the point of oppression by a class of elite social justice warriors who are all too happy for the opportunity. This is the subject of Charles Murray’s new book, By the People, which calls for a form of conservative civil disobedience by way of noncompliance with the regulatory state. But the left is exceedingly proud of their regulatory state – they did build that, and over a long period and a “long march.” They are never going to part with it willingly or lightly; their identity depends on its preservation.

If only this was confined to the left. The reality though is that the faction of conservatives who base their identity more or less on American global power are similarly in thrall to pride. The spectacle that was Jeb Bush fumbling soft ball questions on the Iraq War last week was both instructive and foreboding. We got crystal clear confirmation that Jeb is surrounded by the same elite cadre of foreign policy hawks as was his brother George. We got warning that proponents of the war had undergone a level of soul-searching akin to that of Sauron after his first defeat. I would bet everything I own that without the advice of his team, Jeb would have answered Megyn Kelly’s “knowing what we know now” Iraq hypothetical with an unequivocal “no.” But Jeb is not without that advice, because that advice comes from a donor class and an establishment GOP mostly wedded to the idea that the Iraq War was basically the right call.

Hovering in the ether ever since the Democrats’ 2006 midterm romp is an obvious political truth, one which precious few on the right want to accept. The truth is this: the war in Iraq was devastating to conservatism and the Republican party. This devastation had layers. The first layer was the practical impact on the party, which suffered from both honest and dishonest partisan attacks by the Democrats and therefore limped into the post-Bush era discredited and with all the confidence and swagger of a beaten dog. The second layer has to do with how principled conservatism itself was discarded by the Bush administration. Despite pursuing a brave and fortuitous tax cut agenda, George W. Bush governed as a progressive Republican, aka a “compassionate conservative.” Federal spending skyrocketed, add-ons to entitlements were enthusiastically adopted and that once proud disciple of the Reagan-Laffer school of fiscal conservatism, Dick Cheney, opined that “deficits don’t matter.” That champions of the Bush legacy and adherents to the neoconservative worldview are one and the same today is not surprising. What is surprising is they lack any self-awareness or humility and instead prefer to look at their foreign policy record and bask in pride.

There was very little reason for conservatives to rally around Bush in 2004 beyond pride in the tribe. Compassionate conservatism was a disaster that ushered in Medicare D and No Child Left Behind. The “ownership society” Bush wished to cultivate was corrupted by the Fed and congressional loan edicts to mortgage lenders, setting the scene for the 2008 crash. The only reason Bush won in 2004 was because the war led Republican voters to dutifully vote to keep their tribe in power for fear of what the other would do. Now eleven years on, the other tribe is gearing up to rally around someone they don’t particularly like but to whom they owe loyalty and deference because again, pride and tribe, and again, those other bastards would be worse.

Because ultimately, depressingly, inevitably…. we’re all tribal animals and it will always be so, to a degree. What is the point though of living in a tribal democracy, where the mob reigns? Despite the fact that it is the natural condition of democracies to have competing tribes looking to get to 51% so that they may force their preferences and mandates on the other 49%, the American model is supposed to be something quite different. We are a republic because the founding generation looked askance at democracy. Pure, majoritarian democracy is indistinguishable from mob rule, whereas a republic would be healthier than a democracy because a combination of representative democracy with an ingrained respect for natural rights and common law would cement the centuries long social transition from “status to contract,” meaning a society where prospects and opportunities are contingent on an individual’s freedom to enter into contract instead of on social status or class. Democracy only works if certain first principles and inalienable rights are enshrined forever into the nation’s DNA so that no transient majority can ever deny those natural rights which inform the Declaration of Independence.

The parallel rise of the Tea Party along with a rowdy libertarian-minded youth are about far more than tribalism. They are about first principles and the attempt to revive them in the public conscience. The movements are essentially inchoate, schizophrenic attempts by frustrated conservatives and libertarians to reclaim the agenda from the big spending, saber-rattling, deep pocketed GOP elites who not only wish to see their influence preserved, but who insist in all their pride that their righteous motives yielded righteous gains, and anyway, who are you to suggest otherwise, some kind of isolationist?  This is the takeaway from l’affaire Jeb Bush: the GOP foreign policy establishment is simply too proud to admit they committed a fatal error, politically, strategically, morally. “Most of the Republican presidential candidates would have invaded Iraq. Despite protestations to the contrary, few of them have truly learned the lessons of the war,” says James Antle at The Week. There is nothing in the founding and nothing in conservatism that says nation building abroad  or preemptive war is desirable, and yet “even today, the true conventional wisdom in the GOP seems to be that the only mistakes that were made in Iraq were invading with too few troops and withdrawing too soon.”

When the party which is supposed to stand for limited constitutional government that maximizes individual freedom eventually abandons its fixation with mimicking the domestic progressive project on the global stage and returns to its notional commitment to free markets and federalism, then that will be party worthy of my pride. Until then, all the elites in both parties should take a moment to consider why exactly growing government and expanding arbitrary power (whether with OSHA or the DHS) at the expense of ordinary taxpayers is anything to be proud of.

Or maybe the GOP is actually G.O.B.?

Iraq? Solid as a rock!

 

Arm the Syrian Rebels?

The level of John McCain and Lindsey Graham agitation over any given foreign policy issue should have an inverse correlation with the general public’s perception of what amounts to a good idea.

In the case of arming the “vetted” Syrian rebels, each successive shrieking bleat for more urgency in the matter of placing sophisticated weaponry in the hands of “moderate Islamist” militants should cause a respective dose of pump the breaks among public opinion.  The Free Syrian Army, whose virtues McCain, Graham, Jen Rubin, Bill Kristol and the rest of the neocon amen chorus never tire of extolling, is in fact a Muslim Brotherhood operation. But you wouldn’t know that from the way the political class talk about them. In the eyes of the always-already interventionists, there is always a ready force of Jeffersonian freedom fighters just waiting to be aided by the benevolent American liberators. The reality is more like having a disparate arrangement of angry Sunnis who tilt closer to the jihad than to pluralism or liberty. And they are likelier to view US assistance as reckless and clumsy machinations from the world’s most visible hand. And just as unwelcome meddling by the state corrupts the market, so does muddled policy in a sectarian conflict elicit only resentment and treachery among those we are ostensibly helping.

We cannot possibly know who the “good guys” are in Syria. Some rebel factions are only interested in toppling Assad, while others are committed to fight ISIS. Many are just waiting to see how things shake out and then will fall in with the whoever the victors are. The so-called moderates that inhabit the Free Syrian Army are just as fond of beheadings as ISIS. They possibly sold Steven Sotloff to ISIS, who ultimately decapitated him. Now there are signs they have signed a cease-fire with ISIS so they can concentrate on battling Assad, though they of course deny that. (Not much prospect of getting free US-made RPGs and MANPADS if a pact with ISIS leaks). The clear takeaway is that Syria is riddled with chaos that cannot be easily navigated or solved. The sectarian conflict within Islam has been going on for close to 1500 years, yet our genius foreign policy mandarins in Washington think they can waltz in and fix everything, yet again. We’re only three years into the fallout from the Tunisia and Cairo affairs igniting the Arab Spring, an event that has seen secular autocrats deposed in favor of a toxic vacuum from which only chaos and jihad could ever have sprung. But the neocons can’t bring themselves to admit that there is no amount of top men capable of turning that region of the world into a peaceful democratic redoubt.

Lately I’ve been especially bothered by the conservative hawk tendency to mirror perfectly the follies of progressivism. It’s the fatal conceit applied to foreign policy. Neocons believe they are the only ones equipped to address the problem of radical Islam. Dan Henninger (who I otherwise like in matters not related to foreign policy) went so far as to assert that the world is too dangerous to allow the Democratic Party to be in charge. I would agree wholeheartedly if the brief against allowing progressive reign was to do with their economic agenda; but I can’t rightly get behind a platform that thinks its stewardship of foreign policy under George W. Bush is the beacon from which all future American foreign policy must shine. No thanks. That is not to say the progressives have a better vision or policy regarding America’s place in the world; they absolutely do not. The point is that on matters of state in regions rife with sectarian hatred living under a religion yet to undergo its much awaited Reformation, there simply aren’t any easy answers, if there are answers at all. The worst thing a democratic republic of free people can do is sanction their government’s insistence that they know – this time – they know exactly how to solve impossible problems.

Is that isolationist? Of course not. For starters, isolationism implies a reluctance to trade with the world as well as an ignorant suspicion of global markets and free movement of capital around the planet. Neither is it a call for doing nothing. By all means, work with allies, build a coalition, get consent and authorization from Congress and then hit ISIS where they can be hit from the sky. The special ops ground forces will undoubtedly be asked yet again to perform heroic acts while undermanned, but that is the unfortunate yield from last decade’s wars of occupation and incompetence: a thorough “No Mas!” from the citizenry back home regarding the insertion of whole new brigades into Iraq. And in Syria, the situation is far more confusing, dangerous, and not worth our investment, especially if infantrymen are going to be asked to clear corners and go door-to-door in urba warfare as they did in Fallujah, as they would no doubt have to in Aleppo and Raqaa. It can’t be done, at least not as efficiently and smoothly as the hawks so offensively suggest.

The sardonic hilarity that one can glean from this whole episode is this: due to unbridled hubris on the part of Dick Cheney and the neocons, we have spent eleven years poking our big stick in the world’s biggest pile of fire ants, and arguing over the welts on our ankles as we stand idly in the ant hill, clumsily and futilely swinging the stick where and when it suits us. But we continue to be bit. And is there a more stark manifestation of this parable than in our Air Force now having to launch airstrikes against our own vehicles and weaponry, stolen by ISIS from the Iraqi Army that we spent a decade equipping and training?

Let’s not arm the Syrian rebels, because we’re just as likely to have to face our own weaponry at some point in the future.

On Delusion

In examining progressivism today, it is impossible not to marvel at a fascinating phenomenon: the pronounced delusion of the collective leftwing media. This is not a phenomenon isolated to the left. Neoconservatives and mainstream Republicans were similarly delusional about the reality of their political fortunes amid the drawn-out Iraq war quasi-quagmire. Resorting to cheap nationalism and cynical “with us or against us” rhetoric by the time the “Mission Accomplished” banner had faded from memory, the Bush administration demonstrated an unseemly instinct to wield “patriotism” as a cudgel against anyone not displaying the requisite enthusiasm for foreign nation-building.Substitute “Iraq” with “Obamacare” and you see the same delusions infecting the progressives as happened to the neocons almost a decade ago. While substantively different (obvi), Iraq and Obamacare are similar political issues because they are both immense crosses to bear for the party who brought them forth. Each stands today as a symbol of political overreach and as a bleating warning to its respective partisans of which road not to hoe. And today’s Democrats are following gloriously in the deluded footsteps of yesterday’s Republicans by studiously emulating the latter’s stubborn denial about what the Iraq war was doing to its credibility and pretending that Obamacare is not likewise shepherding their party into a single-issue ditch.

The left is essentially undergoing a psychological pep rally and its most committed media denizens are trying to convince themselves that Obamacare is fine. This is no small feat, as progressives from the New Republic to the Daily Kos are wringing their hands over the potential political cataclysm that awaits them in November. Debacle, thy name is Obamacare. Still, there are already signs that some of the loudest progressive cheerleaders are turning the page and moving on. Breathless reporting of “nothing to see here” has predictably flowed from Ezra Klein, Alec MacGillis, Kevin Drum, Michael Tomasky and, of course, the cadre of statist enthusiasts at MSNBC. I share Jonah Goldberg’s delight in discovering the word fremdschämen, which describes the feeling one gets from watching people embarrass themselves while oblivious to the fact that they are embarrassing.

Delusional people acting delusionally are usually going to be embarrassing, and by the very act of deluding themselves into believing an alternate reality, they lose all capacity for self-awareness or psychoanalysis. I defy any sane person to eschew fremdschämen when listening to someone like Debbie Wasserman Schultz say something like this. It is easy to assume that much of the inanities spewing from the mouths of the delusional do not in fact reflect a confused mind but rather an intentionally malicious and deceptive one. But that underestimates the powerful effect of collective delusion. With so much at stake in a country divided into separate factions over a fundamental disagreement about the nature of the liberal society, it does not require a genius to understand the urgency of partisan politics (particularly in a de facto two-party system such as ours). However, it should be equally obvious that institutional parties might succumb to self-deception on occasions when their political mission loses its mandate with the voters. Nothing sparks a bout of collective delusion like a threat to power. Like Republicans in 2006 seeing the writing on the wall but refusing to read it, the Democrats today know that Obamacare is crippling their hold on power, they just refuse to admit it.

Political inertia is a powerful thing; stagnation lingers longer than it should because things at rest tend to stay at rest. Once motion of the sort that Obamacare is creating gets started, there is little to slow it down, let alone stop it. Things in motion tend to stay in motion. The pandora’s box that Democrats were too cocky and hubristic to care that they were opening has unleashed a powerful torrent of voter animosity and hostility directed at President Obama and the Democrats. Lying tends to arouse passions in people, who knew? Mass delusion is the inevitable byproduct of a party’s massive screw-up. Whether it’s the launching of a silly hegemonic foreign adventure or the arrogant attempt to remake 17% of the national economy by placing government at the center of healthcare, colossal errors that point to guaranteed defeat cause people in both parties to behave like children and to deny the obvious consequences looming in a cold November not too far on the horizon.

Here’s to the next apocalyptic mistake resulting in mass confession and apology, rather than denial and delusion.