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Reflecting on Fukuyama's neocon defection

This book review by Paul Berman, raises some issues that I'm wanting to stew over some more. I'm still not sure what I think yet, but this feels like the most rational and pointed look at the ironies and contradictions that make the neoconservative philosophy so peculiar, and notable in its very peculiarities.

I just wanted to pull out the bits here that help me remember certain ideas, so I can think about them some more.

Link: 'America at the Crossroads,' by Francis Fukuyama - The New York Times Book Review - New York Times.

March 26, 2006

'America at the Crossroads,' by Francis Fukuyama

Neo No More

Review by PAUL BERMAN

In February 2004, Francis Fukuyama attended a neoconservative think-tank dinner in Washington and listened aghast as the featured speaker, the columnist Charles Krauthammer, attributed "a virtually unqualified success" to America's efforts in Iraq, and the audience enthusiastically applauded. Fukuyama was aghast partly for the obvious reason, but partly for another reason, too, which, as he explains in the opening pages of his new book, "America at the Crossroads," was entirely personal. In years gone by, Fukuyama would have felt cozily at home among those applauding neoconservatives. He and Krauthammer used to share many a political instinct. It was Krauthammer who wrote the ecstatic topmost blurb ("bold, lucid, scandalously brilliant") for the back jacket of Fukuyama's masterpiece from 1992, "The End of History and the Last Man."

But that was then.

Today Fukuyama has decided to resign from the neoconservative movement — though for reasons that, as he expounds them, may seem a tad ambiguous. In his estimation, neoconservative principles in their pristine version remain valid even now. But his ex-fellow-thinkers have lately given those old ideas a regrettable twist, and dreadful errors have followed. Under these circumstances, Fukuyama figures he has no alternative but to go away and publish his complaint.

[...]

His resignation seems to me, in any case, a fairly notable event, as these things go, and that is because, among the neoconservative intellectuals, Fukuyama has surely been the most imaginative, the most playful in his thinking and the most ambitious. Then again, something about his departure may express a larger mood among the political intellectuals just now, not only on the right.

[...]

Fukuyama offers a thumbnail sketch of neoconservatism and its origins, back to the anti-Communist left at City College in the 1930's and 40's and to the conservative philosophers (Leo Strauss, Allan Bloom, Albert Wohlstetter) at the University of Chicago in later years. From these disparate origins, the neoconservatives eventually generated "a set of coherent principles," which, taken together, ended up defining their impulse in foreign affairs during the last quarter-century. They upheld a belief that democratic states are by nature friendly and unthreatening, and therefore America ought to go around the world promoting democracy and human rights wherever possible. They believed that American power can serve moral purposes. They doubted the usefulness of international law and institutions. And they were skeptical about what is called "social engineering" — about big government and its ability to generate positive social changes.

Such is Fukuyama's summary. It seems to me too kind. For how did the neoconservatives propose to reconcile their ambitious desire to combat despotism around the world with their cautious aversion to social engineering? Fukuyama notes that during the 1990's the neoconservatives veered in militarist directions, which strikes him as a mistake. A less sympathetic observer might recall that neoconservative foreign policy thinking has all along indulged a romance of the ruthless — an expectation that small numbers of people might be able to play a decisive role in world events, if only their ferocity could be unleashed. It was a romance of the ruthless that led some of the early generation of neoconservatives in the 1970's to champion the grisliest of anti-Communist guerrillas in Angola; and, during the next decade, led the neoconservatives to champion some not very attractive anti-Communist guerrillas in Central America, too; and led the Reagan administration's neoconservatives into the swamps of the Iran-contra scandal in order to go on championing their guerrillas. Doesn't this same impulse shed a light on the baffling question of how the Bush administration of our own time could have managed to yoke together a stirring democratic oratory with a series of grotesque scandals involving American torture — this very weird and self-defeating combination of idealism and brass knuckles? But Fukuyama must not agree.

The criticisms he does propose are pretty scathing. In 2002, Fukuyama came to the conclusion that invading Iraq was going to be a gamble with unacceptably long odds. Then he watched with dismay as the administration adopted one strange policy after another that was bound to make the odds still longer. The White House decided to ignore any useful lessons the Clinton administration might have learned in Bosnia and Kosovo, on the grounds that whatever Bill Clinton did — for example, conduct a successful intervention — George W. Bush wanted to do the opposite. There was the diplomatic folly of announcing an intention to dominate the globe, and so forth — all of which leads Fukuyama, scratching his head, to propose a psychological explanation.

The neoconservatives, he suggests, are people who, having witnessed the collapse of Communism long ago, ought to look back on those gigantic events as a one-in-a-zillion lucky break, like winning the lottery. Instead, the neoconservatives, victims of their own success, came to believe that Communism's implosion reflected the deepest laws of history, which were operating in their own and America's favor — a formula for hubris. This is a shrewd observation, and might seem peculiar only because Fukuyama's own "End of History" articulated the world's most eloquent argument for detecting within the collapse of Communism the deepest laws of history. He insists in his new book that "The End of History" ought never to have led anyone to adopt such a view, but this makes me think only that Fukuyama is an utterly unreliable interpreter of his own writings.

[...]

He proposes a post-Bush foreign policy, which he styles "realistic Wilsonianism" — his new motto in place of neoconservatism. He worries that because of Bush's blunders, Americans on the right and the left are going to retreat into a Kissinger-style reluctance to promote democratic values in other parts of the world. Fukuyama does want to promote democratic values — "what is in the end a revolutionary American foreign policy agenda" — though he would like to be cautious about it, and even multilateral about it. The United Nations seems to him largely unsalvageable, given the role of nondemocratic countries there. But he thinks that a variety of other institutions, consisting strictly of democracies, might be able to establish and sometimes even enforce a new and superior version of international legitimacy. He wants to encourage economic development in poor countries, too — if only a method can be found that avoids the dreadful phrase "social engineering."

[this is perhaps the most frightening observation I've seen, but I'm happy to see SOMEONE from the neocon camp at least acknowledging that the majority of the "non-nation-building" nation-building rhetoric out of the Bush administration appears to be lifted directly from the Woodrow Wilson playbook, with any notion of a "League of Nations" surgically removed and replaced with U.S. despotic dominance, the U.S. as the single superpower to assume sovereignty over all as a self-appointed United Nations of One.

What I find so frightening in Fukayama's view here, and in the views of others who hold these ideas as well, distinctly neocon ideas since they bear little resemblance to the ideas usually attributed to traditional conservatism, is that the "promotion of democracy" as some kind of saving grace is purely rhetorical and bears no resemblance to what is actually happening.

I believe the word "democracy" is being corrupted, used as a code word for "governments that are easy to manipulate using massive influxes of capital to interfere, influence, and buy elections for our hand-picked and corruptible puppets." In other words, the opposite of true democracy (although one could argue it has become the way "democracy" is currently being practiced in the U.S.)

Sure, the U.S. could put a chosen dictator or despot in place, as colonial powers have traditionally done, or perhaps use the methods of control previously employed by the Soviet empire, OR it could simply use capital and corruption to turn the word "democracy" into a pale shadow of it's true meaning, and simply use it as rhetorical cover for things we might call "democracy" that are really unregulated monopolies by non-local corporations seeking to find the best way to siphon as much wealth out of a nation as possible, as quickly as possible.]

[...]

I worry that Fukuyama's preferred language may shrink our predicament into something smaller than it ever was. He pictures the present struggle as a "counterinsurgency" campaign — a struggle in which, before the Iraq war, "no more than a few thousand people around the world" threatened the United States. I suppose he has in mind an elite among the 10,000 to 20,000 people who are said to have trained at bin Laden's Afghan camps, plus other people who may never have gotten out of the immigrant districts of Western Europe. But the slaughters contemplated by this elite have always outrivaled anything contemplated by more conventional insurgencies — as Fukuyama does recognize in some passages. And there is the pesky problem that, as we have learned, the elite few thousand appear to have the ability endlessly to renew themselves. HERE is where a rhetoric pointing to something larger than a typical counterinsurgency campaign may have a virtue, after all. A more grandiose rhetoric draws our attention, at least, to the danger of gigantic massacres. And a more grandiose rhetoric might lead us to think about ideological questions. Why are so many people eager to join the jihadi elite? They are eager for ideological reasons, exactly as in the case of fascists and other totalitarians of the past. These people will be defeated only when their ideologies begin to seem exhausted, which means that any struggle against them has to be, above all, a battle of ideas — a campaign to persuade entire mass movements around the world to abandon their present doctrines in favor of more liberal ones.

[that would entail actually being true advocates for liberal democratic ideas, rather than using them as a smokescreen for more fascist strong-arm tactics and overt manipulation.]

[...]

In "America at the Crossroads," Fukuyama describes the Hegelianism of "The End of History" as a version of "modernization" theory, bringing his optimistic vision of progress into the world of modern social science. But the problem with modernization theory was always a tendency to concentrate most of its attention on the steadily progressing phases of history, as determined by the predictable workings of sociology or economics or psychology — and to relegate the free play of unpredictable ideas and ideologies to the margins of world events.

And yet, what dominated the 20th century, what drowned the century in oceans of blood, was precisely the free play of ideas and ideologies, which could never be relegated entirely to the workings of sociology, economics, psychology or any of the other categories of social science.  [...]  Fukuyama is always worth reading, and his new book contains ideas that I hope the non-neoconservatives of America will adopt. But neither his old arguments nor his new ones offer much insight into this, the most important problem of all — the problem of murderous ideologies and how to combat them.

Here's my deal: somewhere along the way I stopped worrying so much about the problem of murderous ideologies and how to combat them and instead started worrying more about those who pretend to ideologies, some potentially murderous, as crass cover for intentions that are far more devious.

Say what you like about Osama bin Laden, but the guy is apparently incorruptible and a true believer in his cause, however odious many of its basic principles may be to me.

So bin Laden has a murderous ideology, a cultural construct based in an interpretation of a venerable ancient religion. This is the lens through which he sees the world, and however I may not like it, it is reliable and consistent.

Many venerable ancient religions can be turned into murderous ideologies, perhaps ANY venerable and ancient religion, what with Pluto in Sagittarius. (I just had to throw that in... hey, you know Pluto will be moving out of Sag soon. Something to look forward to. When Pluto was in Scorpio, sex=death, and when Pluto moved into Sag, ideological purity=death. What do you suppose will happen when Pluto hits Capricorn, coming on the heels of these wars for ideology? Ambition=death. The will to power=death. So many people try to psych Pluto out, but Pluto has its own way of doing things, you know?)

But back to more rational thinking... It seems to me that it is easier to fight an ideologue than to fight a Machiavellian sophist. I dunno, maybe it's just me. One enemy seems a lot easier to understand and pin down than the other.

And once Pluto moves into Capricorn, we will just be aswim in Machiavellian sophists, as if we aren't gearing up for their ascendancy already.

So Berman may be more worried about how to characterize and combat an enemy that has an ideological beef with us, a clash of world views, and a desire to make one world view dominant over the other. So long as this fight is characterized by "my god is better than your god" thinking, a distinctly patriarchal view of religion that requires dominance just as surely as a dog pack requires an alpha, wars can only result. These are the wars of the "true believers," patriarchal true believers who make the fight an extension of rival high school football games with considerably more dick-waving, er, waving of big sticks. Even if the warfare is ultimately asymmetrical, broadswords vs. daggers or what have you.

Many cultures have allowed multiple religions, often matriarchal religions, to peacefully co-exist without a need for one to dominate or wipe out the others, without the culture of literalism, the book and the law, that demands the ascendancy one metaphysical interpretation of spirituality and one interpretation only.

In other words, this isn't high noon. The two patriarchal religions that are squaring off seem to think so, however, and they're saying, "This here globe isn't big enough for the two of us."

Both of them are of a piece, claiming allegiance to the same war-like Jehovah alpha god, nearly identical ascendant male deities, only with somewhat different commands and opposing claims of who exactly are the "chosen people."

I know one side is supposed to have white hats and the other side is supposed to have black hats, but they just look alike to me, with differences of degree in their oppression of women, the shrillness in which they impose their belief systems, and the manner in which they execute their will to power, to have power over others, and which commodities of power they prefer to use. Power and dominance are the coins in both of their realms. Ideology is merely the fuel that feeds it.

And me, I'm anticipating Pluto in Capricorn. I figure, ultimately, once Pluto moves, true believers will be corrupted by that power, by ambition. I'm not picking on Capricorn. Some of my best friends have their SUNS in Capricorn. But this is PLUTO in Capricorn, and power corrupts.

I think a day will come when we will wistfully long for true believers, as we face unending death, suffering, and wars over far less, over this person or that group's mere ambition and crass willingness to reach and grasp with Machiavellian slipperiness.

Anima

A place where women rule

This is so exciting to learn about!

Link: A place where women rule - washingtonpost.com Highlights - MSNBC.com.

A place where women rule

All-female Kenyan village points to burgeoning feminism in Africa

By Emily Wax
Photo by Emily Wax / The Washington Post

Kenyan female leader Rebecca Lolosoli is trying to help gain rights for her all-female village.

Updated: 1:29 a.m. ET July 9, 2005

UMOJA, Kenya - Seated cross-legged on tan sisal mats in the shade, Rebecca Lolosoli, matriarch of a village for women only, took the hand of a frightened, 13-year-old girl. The child was expected to wed a man nearly three times her age, and Lolosoli told her she didn't have to.

The man was Lolosoli's brother, but that didn't matter. This is a patch of Africa where women rule.

"You are a small girl. He is an old man," said Lolosoli, who gives haven to young girls running from forced marriages. "Women don't have to put up with this nonsense anymore."

Ten years ago, a group of women established the village of Umjoa, which means unity in Swahili, on an unwanted field of dry grasslands. The women said they had been raped and, as a result, abandoned by their husbands, who claimed they had shamed their community.

Stung by the treatment, Lolosoli, a charismatic and self-assured woman with a crown of puffy dark hair, decided no men would be allowed to live in their circular village of mud- and-dung huts.

In an act of spite, the men of her tribe started their own village across the way, often monitoring activities in Umjoa and spying on their female counterparts.

Role reversal

What started as a group of homeless women looking for a place of their own became a successful and happy village. About three dozen women live here, and run a cultural center and camping site for tourists visiting the adjacent Samburu National Reserve. Umjoa has flourished, eventually attracting so many women seeking help that they even hired men to haul firewood, traditionally women's work.

The men in the rival village also attempted to build a tourist and cultural center, but were not very successful.

But the women felt empowered with the revenue from the camping site and their cultural center, where they sell crafts. They were able to send their children to school for the first time, eat well and reject male demands for their daughters' circumcision and marriage.

[...]

Feminism spreads across continent

In a mix of African women's gumption and the trickling in of influences from the outside world, a version of feminism has grown progressively alongside extreme levels of sexual violence, the battle against HIV-AIDS, and the aftermath of African wars, all of which have changed the role of women in surprising ways.

A package of new laws has been presented to Kenya's parliament, intended to give women unprecedented rights to refuse marriage proposals, fight sexual harassment in the workplace, reject genital mutilation and to prosecute rape, an act so frequent that Kenyan leaders call it the nation's biggest human rights issue. The most severe penalty, known as the "chemical castration bill," would castrate repeatedly convicted rapists and send them to prison for life.

[...]

When she came back to Kenya, armed with ideas and empowerment training workbooks, she stood her ground even when some of the men filed a court case against her, seeking to shut down the village.

"I would just ignore the men when they threw stones at me and ask, 'Are you okay, are your children okay, are your cows okay,' " she said. Her tactic and calm reaction was disarming, she recalled. "After everything, they weren't going to stop us."

Lolosoli is still battling her brother over his attempt to marry the 13-year-old.

But lately, the residents of the men's village have been admitting defeat. They are no longer trying to attract tourists. Some have moved elsewhere. Others have had trouble getting married, because some women in the area are taking Lolosoli's example to heart.

[...]

Coffenut

Georgia election-fixing?

Or is it just "Return of the Southern Racists"?

Either way, it's getting awfully hard to get a driver's license in Georgia, especially if you live in Atlanta, or in poor rural counties (translation, black, poor, elderly).

Link: Creative Loafing Atlanta | NEWS & VIEWS | CITY TO GET LICENSE CENTER .

NEWS & VIEWS | HUMBUG SQUARE 06.29.05

City to get license center

But black officials ask feds to reject voter ID law

BY DOUG MONROE

The nice policeman who gave me a ticket on North Highland Avenue for my expired tag the other day happened to ask if my driver’s license address was current.

“Oh, I just moved, officer,” I said, failing to mention that I’d “just moved” in February.

“Under Georgia law, you have 60 days to get a new license,” he said. He gave me a ticket for the tag, hopped on his motorcycle and returned to the corner of Ponce de Leon and North Highland, where cops are operating some sort of minor-violation trap these days. You can’t get past San Francisco Coffee before they’re on your ass with blue lights.

I mailed in my ad valorem taxes, with $27.43 in late penalties, and got a new tag sticker in the mail a week later. I also went to the Department of Motor Vehicle Safety’s website to change the address on my license. After you change the address online, they confirm your new address with the post office and then send the new license in the mail with your old picture. It’s like the picture of Dorian Gray: You never age.

The process was painless. But before I discovered I could handle it online, I looked at the DMVS website to see which of my trusty old driver’s license sites was handiest.

I used to go to the Kroger on Ponce. But the driver’s license operations at four metro Kroger stores were closed several years ago by mutual agreement. So, what about the license office on Memorial Drive, just a few blocks west of the Capitol? No. Closed.

The office on Moreland Avenue? Closed.

I scrolled down the list of driver’s license offices and was shocked to find that there’s not a single one left in the city of Atlanta. It seems impossible that the largest city in the state wouldn’t have a damn driver’s license office.

Then, I remembered we have a new law in Georgia that requires a photo ID to vote. And if you make it hard for some people — say, old or poor people who don’t have cars — to get to a driver’s license office, you can radically cut down on, say, Democratic voters.

I called Susan Sports, the public information officer for DMVS, who said last week the department had to close the physically deteriorating offices on Memorial Drive and Moreland Avenue, and hadn’t found a suitable place to put a new full-service testing center in the city. She pointed out that there are centers outside the city in Forest Park, Lithonia, Norcross, Sandy Springs and south DeKalb. She noted that the facility at South DeKalb Mall is accessible by MARTA.

After I talked with Sports, I called Dan McLagan, Gov. Sonny Perdue’s spokesman, who said he wasn’t aware that Atlanta didn’t have a driver’s license office and that he would call DMVS to check into it. Voila! By Tuesday, Sports was back on the phone saying the department had found a location for a convenient new driver’s license center in downtown Atlanta near Turner Field. The facility will be built on a fast track on a vacant lot at Fulton Street and Capitol Avenue, just off I-20, she said. Perdue is expected to talk to the media about it Friday. [emphasis mine]

The new license center in Atlanta may mute criticism from legislators such as state Sen. Kasim Reed, D-Atlanta, who has said the lack of such a facility would reduce urban votes. But it won’t dampen concerns that the elderly, the poor and other non-drivers, especially in rural areas, are being disenfranchised.

[...]

DMVS now mails renewal notices to drivers who can handle the transaction online or by phone or mail. Over the past three years, more than 1.3 million drivers have renewed without going into the office.

Yet people still have to go into an office every other renewal or to get a first license or state ID. Anyone 64 or older has to go in for an eye test. As part of the restructuring, DMVS closed a number of offices statewide in favor of adding full-service centers. The department used to have 40 full-service centers and 26 renew-only sites. Now, it has 53 full-service sites, three part-time sites and no renew-only sites for 159 counties in the largest state east of the Mississippi.

It’s rather convenient for Perdue that the license-office closings came while the state is implementing a new Republican-driven law reducing the acceptable forms of ID for voters from 17 to five. State Rep. Tyrone Brooks, D-Atlanta, argues that the bill was intended to keep poor, elderly people in rural areas from voting.

Now I'm just wondering about these internet-mail-in driver's license renewals. How do you suppose this sits with the Department of Homeland Security? Say you find a wallet with a driver's license, so you decide to "renew" it so you can use it for your new fake I.D. Suppose you turn out to be a terrorist. Which is more important? Disenfranchising potentially Democratic voters or stopping terrorism?

“It’s crazy,” says Brooks. “This is a real slick, under-the-radar movement being conducted by the National Republican Party wherever the Republicans control the general assembly and the governor’s office. It will impact the elderly, minorities, students. It is really designed to suppress the vote that would go to Democratic candidates.

“Karl Rove, Ralph Reed and those boys are sitting around developing schemes to enhance the Republican turnout and give Republicans a boost at the same time they’re undercutting the strength of Democrats.”

The governor’s office insists that closing driver’s license offices had nothing to do with the voter ID bill.

[...]

The law “will seriously impair the ability of many, many citizens in this state to vote, particularly the elderly who don’t have the ID and live in the 100 Georgia counties [without driver’s license centers] and cannot go to an office and get one of these types of ID,” says Georgia Secretary of State Cathy Cox, who’s seeking the Democratic nomination for governor next year.

“This will make Georgia the most restrictive in the nation in terms of ID requirement for no apparent reason,” Cox said. “In the almost 10 years I have been working in the Secretary of State’s Office, we have had not one single complaint of a voter trying to impersonate some other voter. The notion that this is designed to stamp out rampant fraud is ridiculous. For rural voters, this will work as a tremendous hardship.”

[...]

The Georgia Association of Black Elected Officials adopted a resolution last weekend urging the U.S. Justice Department to reject the voter ID law. The department must review it because Georgia is still under the 1965 Voting Rights Act. If the Bush Justice Department doesn’t reject the law, the next step for opponents would be to take the case to court.

[...]

Anima

The intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy

Link: Video stream on Why the Downing Street Memo Matters.

Is the Fix in? Hijacking Catastrophe video

The video clip is adapted from the critically-aclaimed documentary "Hijacking Catastrophe"--the powerful and newly-urgent film that zeroes in on the very conditions that produced the Downing Street Memo and the Bush administration's drive to "fix" pre-war intelligence.

Check out the video clip at the link above!

Thanks for the lead, Tweeze.

Anima

Eisenhower on Social Security

"Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are .... a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid."

  Dwight D. Eisenhower, November 8, 1954

found by alwayslooking

Kent State Anniversary

On May 4th, 1970 - 35 years ago today - National Guardsmen opened fire on a crowd of unarmed students at Kent State University. Four students were killed and nine others wounded. We commemorate the 35th anniversary by airing an excerpt of the documentary, "Kent State: The Day the War Came Home" that includes interview with students and National Guardsmen who were there.

Listen/Watch/Read
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/05/04/1342257

Apidistra Flying