I’ve been in a powerfully good mood, which makes me a little uncomfortable as my good is running counter to the business cycle. So the following is an effort to construct a somewhat darker but still plausible scenario.
I miss the old TAS crowd. Come visit me at The Agenda!
This is pretty shameless. I’ll make up for it by writing some terrible microfiction.
I’ve just changed my “political views” on my Facebook profile from “Estonian Reform Party” to “Realservative.” I continue to dearly love the Estonian Reform Party, one of my ten favorites in the North Atlantic community. (I’m also pretty fond of the Piratpartei.) But I’d like to explain “Realservatism” and what it is really about.
(1) Being really, really, really real. This is a bedrock, inviolable principle of Realservatism.
(2) Keeping it really real. Why be real in the first place if you drift away from realness over time? There’s no sense in it.
(3) Being realer than an onion peel. It is useful to have external metrics for one’s overall realness level. I find that an onion peel — already quite real — is a solid one. If you’re realer than an onion peel, you’re doing something right.
(4) Realism. Let’s appreciate the limits of what we can do and what we can know definitively. There are lots of unknown unknowns — another way of putting this is that Knightian uncertainty is important to keep in mind. I had an exchange with a reader recently — he wanted conclusive evidence that I was right to favor decentralized to centralized solutions to problems, which I found odd. Here’s what I wrote:
Anyone who tells you that there is conclusive evidence in the terrain of public policy is not a serious person. Can I point to any conclusive evidence? Absolutely not. Again, there is no conclusive evidence in the realm of public policy because it is not an experimental science. My bias in favor of state solutions and county solutions and town solutions, etc., is a bias in favor of decentralized discovery processes that allow for cheap failure and fast failure. I am under no illusion that free markets always lead to “good” outcomes (good for whom?). Rather, I simply think that small-scale and private failures are easier to wrap up, particularly if you have a decent, transparent regulatory architecture.
In his reply, he suggested that I was suggesting that it is only faith that drives my policy views and not reason, which I found a bit off. I then wrote:
I believe in using the common-law process of gathering a broad body of evidence, expert testimony and precedent. This does involve using reasont. But I don’t believe that there are any ways to settle these disputes in any definitive way. That’s life.
This view reflects the influence of thinkers like Hayek, Keynes, Knight, and, among more contemporary thinkers, Amar Bhide, Edmund Phelps, and, very importantly, our own Jim Manzi and Tim Lee, among others. Maybe that’s wrongheaded of me. It does, however, strike me as really, really real.
My friend Matt Continetti — one of the smartest journalists I know — has written a smart and thoughtful comment for the Wall Street Journal on the long, difficult road ahead for Sarah Palin if she intends to become a serious presidential contender. Though I don’t agree with Matt in every detail, his basic argument, as I understand it, is:
(1) Palin is polarizing and voters consider her underqualified for national office.
(2) She needs to reintroduce herself to the public as a market-friendly populist who reaches out to the center from a solid conservative base.
(3) High unfavorable ratings aren’t insurmountable. She hasn’t reached truly toxic territory yet.
(4) Effective performances in interviews and debates will go a long way towards correcting her perceived deficiencies.
(5) Palin needs to return to the broad position she embraced in her 2006 gubernatorial campaign, which Matt compares to Bob McDonnell’s 2009 approach.
This is where I disagree with Matt — Palin’s 2006 campaign was a highly idiosyncratic insurgent effort founded in no small part on her support for measures that can’t be described as conservative by the standards of the lower 48. And her central accomplishment in office was to pass a windfall profits tax on oil companies.
(6) But again, Matt offers straightforwardly constructive advice: “But she also might spend less time discussing campaign intrigue and Alaska trivia, and more time outlining how to spur job creation through tax reform,” and, he goes on to suggest, emphasize the downsides of the Democratic agenda.
Matt never suggests that Palin will necessarily take these steps. Rather, he is suggesting that she ought to do so if she intends to win. He has aligned himself with reformers like Mitch Daniels who argue that conservative candidates need to present workable, effective solutions to the various problems facing middle class and working class voters in non-ideological, non-polarizing language. Yet the fact that Matt isn’t unremittingly hostile to Palin is reason enough for many readers to reflexively dismiss his arguments.
I find this pretty depressing, albeit pretty predictable. What’s worse is that this contributes to a tit-for-tat culture that is the enemy of thoughtful, reasoned discussion.
(1) Last night, a friend and I were kvetching about (500) Days of Summer, a movie we were both expecting to be a witty and possibly even profound generational statement. Instead, I found it noteworthily terrible, though in fairness I should have dialed back my expectations. Actually, let me emphasize this point: the movie is definitely entertaining in stretches. It’s nice to see cultural touchstones associated with your cohort immortalized in celluloid. The leads are winning. Now I will unleash my lacerating tirade.
Scott Tobias, who is forced to endure lots of schlocky comedies as a movie critic for The A.V. Club, says it well:
It goes down smoothly, thanks in large part to Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s grounded lead performance and Marc Webb’s slick direction, but it seems like every other scene coughs up a dispiriting cliché.
While puzzling over the movie’s failures, I was thinking about Summer, the “sunny but obscure object of desire.” Obscure is important: the movie, like The Virgin Suicides, isn’t about the women — it’s about the delusions of the men. Was that the problem? I really The Virgin Suicides: my sense is that the creepiness is the point. So that can’t be it. Indeed, my friend noted that there’s another movie that tried to accomplish many of the same things, and it involved a similarly “sunny but obscure” female lead: Annie Hall.
When she mentioned Annie Hall, I slapped my forehead: that was it. Annie Hall was a movie about a problematic and probably doomed relationship; but it was also a movie about ideas, one that was very much in the stream of its time, ranging from the McLuhan references to the looping back and forth through a comically scarring romantic history. The movie thus had some grit. It gave you a sense of the circumstances that led Alvy to Annie, and, to a lesser extent, Annie to Alvy. Also, Annie had an ambition, which made her more substantial without making her any less inaccessible/baffling. Annie Hall is a damn good movie. I think our generation deserves an equally excellent generational statement.
Actually, another friend made a salient observation that might explain why the women I’ve discussed the movie with haven’t liked it:
What it is, really, is the first successful depiction of something that every sensitive male now goes through — the quasi-but-not-really-relationship with the woman who’s 1) love-shy and 2) doesn’t understand why a man has to get so damn attached to her in the course of an experimental quasi-relationship.
I can’t imagine any attractive woman actually liking it, though. Because I’m pretty sure they’ve all pulled this at least once.
That’s not a crazy assessment. (I’ll object, gently, to the “pulled this” line, as I think the male protagonist “pulled this” on himself, but that’s secondary. The movie is a damning indictment of a blustery, self-pitying version of being sensitive, which isn’t to say one shouldn’t sympathize in small doses.) Yet D’s criticisms still stand.
Writer-director Marc Webb was born in 1975, so he has the good fortune of having avoided — narrowly — one of the most harrowing pitfalls of quasi-romance in our time: excessive presentness. In Annie Hall, Annie and Alvy separate for a long stretch. Though Alvy continues to harbor pretty powerful feelings for Annie, he’s not confronted by her ghostly electronic presence at every turn. That kind of distance is valuable, time heals, etc. It’s a truism that this kind of social distance has been obliterated in the age of social graph gluttony. Someone born in 1985 or 1995 will eventually make a film — or some kind of immersive multimedia project specially designed for Purple-Ray-enabled Ultra-Def Smellovisions — that will get this right.
(2) Humpday was excellent. I was going to write something more substantial, but why bother? I’ll say this: it’s an astute portrait of alpha males (sorry, Wolf Guy) gone to seed and the peculiarities of male friendship. The main characters are both imbeciles, but they’re likable imbeciles. And they are believable imbeciles. Excellent performances. It’s funny as heck. Well worth your time.
Hey guys — my period of travel-induced delinquency at The Agenda has ended. Please come!
Unfortunately for you, I will still write lengthy posts at The American Scene on the meaning of life. I’ve been feeling pretty excited about life lately. I had an excellent and long trip, and, having returned, I’ve been listening to a lot of old favorites, particularly David Bowie’s Let’s Dance. Also, I just discovered that eMusic has an enormous new catalogue of albums; frustratingly, I went ahead and purchased a number of them via other more expensive means, but it’s terrific news regardless. Listening this morning to what had been long-lost mid- to late-1990s hip-hop records. There’s something about serial consumption: from 4th grade to 10th grade, I visited my favorite comic book store every weekend to stock up. And from then on, I followed record labels, particularly long-deceased Rawkus. Naturally, I’m pretty pleased by the critical claim for The Ecstatic, which is richly deserved.
I think I need a blog that will collate different things that I write. Perhaps I’d call it “reihansalam.com,” or “reihansalam.net.” But to what end? I guess to keep track of stuff. It sounds like a lot of work honestly. I’d love to just knock off Wilson Miner’s really impressive, cleanly-designed personal site. I also love Diana Lind’s Index on Diana Lind, though that’s a complex semantic concept and she’s a little cranky about intellectual property theft. (Whereas I paid my way through gun-fighting school by manufacturing fake Chloe handbags out of kitten hide and my own spittle. That’s not true. I’d never hurt a kitten.)
Songs that sound exactly like songs I’d want to make: Mos Def’s “Auditorium,” which has a neat harmonium-infused beat that smacks of 1950-60s Indian popular music. Quite nice. Also: Prince’s “I Would Die 4 You” and Supersystem’s “Eagles Fleeing Eyries.” My inability to carry a tune is a real source of sadness for me. Another thing: I’d want to make songs with lots of handclaps. When I fantasize about performing for an audience — this doesn’t happen daily, but it happens more than weekly — I picture myself making a lot of herky-jerky neck and shoulder movements and engaging in lots of friendly wry banter between songs. Oddly enough, I think I’d prefer being a “Hype Man,” complete with an enormous clock. The downside, of course, is that it is hard to take a man wearing a clock or a top hat or a fake mustache or moon boots seriously, let alone all four at once.
… is that of the inimitable Steve Teles.
For what it’s worth, however, my take is that this little micro-dispute in Cambridge was fundamentally a conflict about “honor.” This whole thing would have been a big nothing if either man were willing to swallow his pride. The cop could have defused it by letting Gates call him a racist and have it roll off his back. He couldn’t because, I think, he has a self-conception as precisely not a racist cop (given that he does racial profiling seminars). To back down would have been to accept what Gates was accusing him of—to be dishonored. Gates couldn’t back down and say “yes, officer, whatever you ask, officer” because he believed he was being treated in a way that was inappropriate to his status as a Harvard professor and because he thought he was being hassled because he was black. To back down would have been untrue to his idea of himself—as a race man and a part of America’s elite. Again, he would have accepted being dishonored. So they both stood their ground, and the guy with the gun won.
And so Gates retaliates in the media, and with the president—where HE was, in effect, holding the gun. Now the Cambridge cops think that they are being dishonored, because they believe that they run a comparatively professional police force that tries to treat black and white citizens fairly (“we’re not like LA!”), especially compared to what was the case in the past. To accept what Gates and the president said would have been to swallow being dishonored—to accept that what they believed about themselves was not the case. So they opened up on the president and Gates in this press conference.
The question is, is there any way for everyone involved here to retain their honor?
In Teles’s view, Obama “messed up” by not, in classic Obama fashion, attempting to explain both sides to each other.
There is another sensible take, actually — from an NYPD officer and philosophy grad student Brandon del Pozo.
Drake Bennett of the Boston Globe has just published an group profile of emerging conservative thinkers for the Ideas section, and he covers yours truly alongside Luigi Zingales, Brad Wilcox, and Megan McArdle. I’ve know and admired Megan for some time now, and not just because she’s engaged to Peter, and I’m a huge fan of Zingales and Wilcox. Suffice it to say, I’m very flattered to be in such company.
Rather amusingly, Bennett noted the following from our interview.
According to those who have worked with him, Salam blends conservative political belief with a voracious embrace of contemporary pop culture in all its forms – in conversation, before the references to Russell Kirk and John Kenneth Galbraith’s “The Predator State,” he opens with a semi-profane line from the hip-hop artist Ludacris.
These days, a Ludacris reference marks you as an old fogey. To provide context, the conversation went something like this —
[REIHAN] Oh yeah, I always pick up calls from strange area codes, as I have ‘hoes’ in many area codes. And by ‘hoes,’ I mean ‘friendly acquaintances.’
Or something like that. Rest assured, I don’t refer to people as hoes as a matter of course.
I’m in Berlin and very, very excited to be here.
Sarah Palin’s makes perfect sense to me. Though I wouldn’t exactly be surprised if she turned blue, sprouted several additional arms, and decided to become America’s chief advocate of a forceful Hindutva politics, I tend to think she really wants to leave politics behind and perhaps became the evangelical Oprah. One wonders if she’d do well as a radio talk-show host, a difficult and demanding job but one that requires her ease and natural charm.
The Purdum piece suggests that she moved very quickly through the ranks, and that she has a highly aggressive style — hence the “Barracuda” nickname. Think about how totally knackered you’d be after a decade of climbing over the dead bodies of all those who dared stand in your way. Having seen her political ambitions go terribly awry, with a collapsing approval rating and a long string of serious missteps — embarrassing reversals, an insidery-style that’s become a liability — who wouldn’t want to pull the plug and press reset?
My thinking about quitting is related closely to my thinking about sunk cost and the value of good bankruptcy laws, a favorite theme of Megan McArdle. No one wants to be a quitter. But sometimes you should quit! For example, you’re watching a terrible movie. Say you’re watching Tadpole, a movie so horrible that it makes me want to claw out not only my eyes but the eyes of the creators of the movie itself, just to teach them a lesson. Do you endure the whole thing? I did, and I’ve regretted it ever since.
Sarah Palin had a sense of how this movie was going to an end. Was this unfair to the people who put her in office? Actually, I’m pretty sure a lot of them are relieved. She’s presumably developed broader interests. Her thin-skinnedness doesn’t lend itself well to intense national scrutiny, particularly since she comes from a small-town political culture where cutting corners happens all the time. It turns out that she was, for purposes of personal happiness and fulfillment, in the wrong line of work.
I sincerely think she’d make an excellent television personality. I found her statement affecting. But yes, I can’t imagine she’d be a great president or senator, and those were the logical next steps in this career trajectory.
She could “hunker down” and “get down to business” for the balance of her term — but she’s lost interest! That happens! And to soldier on can be pretty unendurable.
We’re talking about human beings, man.
I’ll be writing a fair bit about this Death of Macho notion, but I wanted to highlight a smart comment I found via Feministing by jason_said:
On the one hand, given the international scope of the statistics and trends he compiles, Salam is highlighting a real problem that has distinctive gender dynamics. Not least to protect the immigrants, Jews, Muslims, and other minorities as well as the women vulnerable to unstable, unemployed young men’s violence and harassment and sometime-fascist politics, we should be thinking about their experience and how to respond creatively. (That isn’t to deny that some women contribute to such oppression, of course—and their experience should be studied as well.) Such a commitment does not have to entail opposition to women’s advancement or any denial whatsoever of the discrimination, hostility, and inequality women continue to face. In fact, just as denying the gender-oriented problems of women in favor of a facile universalism conceals institutionalized sexist patterns, so too envisioning gender equality requires examining the psychology and sociology of male sexism.
On the other hand, I agree with Fortini’s piece that Salam is guilty of some essentialism here.
That’s very fair. It’s definitely written in broad strokes; my hope was that I was nevertheless drawing attention to an important phenomenon, recognizing that I’d necessarily miss a lot of subtleties.
And as Martin recognizes, focus on gender-specific problems can serve to obscure the ways women’s advancement can often benefit men and vice versa—the reality of interdependence that sounds less provocative than narratives of gender conflict.
This is clearly true. Yet I suppose I’m very interested in this idea of conflict between societies that embrace the feminist revolution and those that don’t, which tend to be societies with abnormal sex ratios. That is, the essential conflict won’t be over ideology or supposed “civilizations”; rather, it will be over how different societies react to modernity.
Finally, it should be said that nowhere does Salam come close to claiming that sexism has ended. Indeed, he speculates that to some degree, it will be an obstacle to equality and economic growth for the whole of the twenty-first century. Indeed, one has to hope he is being too pessimistic here.
This is absolutely right. I basically think that societies that continue to discriminate against women are doomed to violence, ignorance, poverty, and disease. If given the chance to write a book about this theme of global conflict driven by the presence or absence of women’s equality (I’d like to!), a hefty section would focus on the development data: female literacy is the key indicator.
Some people are claiming — rather strangely — that I think sexism is over. That’s flatly absurd. It is real and it is pervasive. But like Robert Max Jackson, author of the brilliant Destined for Equality, I think that competitive markets guarantee the rise of women to leadership roles.
The search for profits, votes, organizational rationality, and stability all favored a gender-neutral approach that improved women’s status. The inherent gender impartiality of organizational interests won out over the prejudiced preferences of the men who ran them.
Others seem to suggest that I don’t think violence against women is a serious problem, which strikes me as baffling. A longer version of the piece spent considerable time on how domestic violence predicts internal instability and external aggression, but my editors concluded, not unreasonably, that this research, much of its conducted by BYU political scientist Valerie Hudson, wasn’t directly salient to the thesis.
But I think there’s a too-appealing narrative here: right-wing mini-pundit claims that sexism is dead and that men are the new victims. The fact that I don’t believe that sexism is dead — I think it’s alive and well, but that it is actually an increasingly economically destructive force and that the least sexist societies are the ones that will flourish — or that men are the new victims — I tried to argue that men continue to be powerfully advantaged by state economic policies in most of the world, though this is tentatively and encouragingly changing in a few advanced market democracies — is basically immaterial.
You can’t win ‘em all.
The title of this post promises a lot — suffice it to say, the following won’t solve all of your problems, but it might offer a new and constructive way to think about some of them: the Cosmic Timekeeper theory. I’ve included this sketch because I tried to make this woman look world-weary and wise.
Will be back home tomorrow AM, at which point I hope to have lots of US domestic policy to talk about at The Agenda, which I’ve neglected this week due to connectivity and travel out-of-itness. Not a good way to build an audience. I’ll do better, comrades.
But for now I’m still fixated on South African puzzles. I’ve followed South African affairs for many years now, yet this is my first trip here, though hopefully not my last. This morning I had the pleasure of meeting a brilliant young political thinker and strategist based in Johannesburg, a friend of a friend. I’d characterize his views as left-libertarian, and though he identifies with the ANC political consensus — he sees a split between the SACP-COSATU hard left and a meliorist mainstream that marries social democratic commitments with a neoliberal approach to the macroeconomic environment — he’s very interested in cultivating alternative political voices in the country, for obvious reasons. Between meeting various worthies under the auspices of this Brand South Africa trip, I’ve been reading the kind of books I normally avoid: doorstop political histories, including the very well-regarded Gevisser biography of Thabo Mbeki, now available in abridged and updated form; and R.W. Johnson’s history of post-apartheid SA, which has added poignancy as I understand Johnson has just narrowly avoided death. Johnson’s perspective is jaundiced at best, and some would call it apocalyptic. I find it a useful corrective, if difficult to square with my impressions and those of Alec Russell, who wrote the more breezy, journalistic account of the Mandela-to-Zuma era that I read on the way here.
Why does South Africa matter? Its Gini coefficient is essentially identical to that of Brazil, so it’s certainly not unique in the challenges it faces. Yet it also reproduces some of the tensions and anxieties of a post-conflict society like Iraq, which I think of as akin to a sprawling inner-city on a national scale devastated by poverty and violent oppression. The Shia majority was so under heel for so long that it bears the marks of serious psychological damage. The same is arguably true of South Africa’s majority. One often hears that whereas Zimbabwean migrants are highly educated and possessed of a cultural self-confidence that I as an American take for granted, there was an intense internalization of the logic of apartheid, of racial inferiority. Unraveling this is a slow process, as the older generation has imbued the post-apartheid generation with this residue of cultural self-doubt. I’m a little wary of this kind of analysis, but it rings true.
Crudely, I guess I think South Africa matters because it strikes me as a microcosm of the world. The awkward co-existence of First and Third World ways of life in a single state is very vivid and immediate here, but of course it exists throughout most of the world. The middle-income countries — the Brazils, the Mexicos, the Egypts, the South Africas — are the future. Everything depends on their getting it right.
Wait a second. Toto’s “Africa” is playing in the lobby right now. This is my favorite song. In light of the setting, this seems like a cannily ironic gesture. My mind is blown.
One community that has flourished in post-apartheid is the Asian minority, which has benefited from its relative privilege, the robustness of Asian civil society institutions, and also the fact that Asians are beneficiaries of racial preferences. Firms that hire Asians are given credit for hiring the underrepresented, a priority under the program of Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment, yet Asians are arguably overrepresented in many sectors. This will be a tough policy to unravel, not least because Asians were, like members of the Jewish minority, overrepresented in the leadership of the ANC in exile, quite in contrast to the so-called Coloured minority, an incredibly diverse group — some descended from enslaved Malays, some from the Khoisan, virtually all with some degree of European ancestry — that was an artifact of the apartheid state’s peculiar ethnographic logic, yet that has a very vital (and arguably problematic) sense of political identity.
As you can probably tell, I don’t have very systematic thoughts at the moment. The more I learn, the more I have to revise what had been settled views. This isn’t to say that my original assessments have been overturned — in broad outline, I basically believe the same things about the country and its prospects (fairly bright, R.W. Johnson’s brilliant polemics notwithstanding). It’s more in the fine-grained detail.
I haven’t spend much time in middle-income countries. I think it agrees with me. There’s something about the crazy energy of this phase of development, the self-fashioning, the reinvention of nationhood, etc. All gross generalizations, of course.
Also re: South Africa, I wrote a flawed column on what Iran might learn from the South African experience. I have to say, I wish I had more time to reflect on the relevant issues. It was a product of some very lengthy conversations. Those of you who find my neocon commitments distasteful might find it interesting.
I feel really lucky to get to think out loud. Thanks for indulging me, TAS readers.
In other news, I’m waiting in a hotel lobby for transport to the airport, which will arrive in an hour. I can thus catch up on vitally important 7 AM email from Amazon.com, including this recommendation for Earth 2012: Time of the Awakening Soul by Aurora Juliana Ariel PhD.
Aurora Juliana Ariel PhD’s latest release in the Award Winning Earth 2012 Series… The Earth 2012 Saga continues with a Journey into the Miraculous as millions of Awakening Souls alter the course of Earth’s Destiny. Weaving a prophetic vision of an Illumined Future, stories of extraordinary encounters, divine visitations, angelic intervention, healing by dolphins and more, reveal the extraordinary time we are in. While dire potentials loom on our horizon and many people are in the throes of darkness and despair, Dr. Ariel believes there is an unseen hand assisting us to move into an enlightened future. She unveils the new emerging culture largely responsible for this change and breaks the secret code to their mysterious origin. Who are these 21st Century Visionaries? Why have they embodied on earth at this historic time? Take the test to find out if you are one of them. Learn how you can fulfill your highest destiny potential, and play your unique role in the coming times.
Amazon.com has me pegged.
The highlight of the latest Douthat column is definitely the creative matchmaking at the end.
Maybe this reversal could start with some creative matchmaking across lines of class and politics. The dutiful, somewhat-boring husbands from Sandra Tsing Loh’s Los Angeles, for instance, sound like ideal soulmates for Kate Gosselin, the soon-to-be-single mother of eight.
And as for Cristina Nehring, who can’t live without being “derailed by love, hospitalized by love, flung around five continents, shaken, overjoyed, inspired and unsettled by love” — well, maybe someone should introduce her to Mark Sanford.
One small wrinkle: I wouldn’t wish Kate Gosselin on my worst enemy. After watching Jon and Kate for the first time in a hotel room about a year ago, I was totally absorbed. Though not a regular viewing, I’ve caught a marathon or two and, like millions of Americans, was taken in by the charming spectacle of the Gosselin Quapas, who seemed very sweet and well-behaved. I also delved into the Wikipedia entry and voluminous web commentary on the family, which was particularly preoccupied, long before rumors of marital infidelity, with the decidedly problematic relationship between Jon and Kate.
I was not inclined to see Kate as the villain, not least because Jon comes across as passive and, well, mildly punkish. But Kate … Kate is a character. She’s a little difficult. To be sure, raising an army of children is taxing, and my sense is that she bore more of the burden. Under those circumstances, I sense that I’d be a little quick to anger. Much of the anti- commentary focused on the ethics of capitalizing on the children — Jon and Kate have become quite rich by virtue of the television program and speaking fees on the evangelical circuit, fees that I have to assume will dry up in light of marital distress.
But yes, not sure how the dutiful dads of Santa Monica would take to Kate.
One neat thing about the column, which I liked very much, is that it weaves together quite a few separate strands. I hope this column will prompt a robust discussion on Journolist concerning the dark Phalangist plot to overthrow liberal democracy.
My fear, incidentally, is that the Gosselin children will evolve into a miniature militia that will roam America’s rural roads in search of plunder.
Another thought, slightly serious: Ross suggests, in a spirit of fun, that Kate find another husband. Yet as Andrew Cherlin argues in his excellent book The Marriage-Go-Round, one wonders if a quick remarriage is wise.
He writes that Americans have come to embrace two contradictory models of personal and family life: marriage, a formal commitment to share one’s life with another; and individualism, which emphasizes personal growth and development. The former promotes a lasting relationship; the latter encourages one to move on.
To some extent, the important thing is relationship stability rather than having, say, a male presence in the household. A quick remarriage might, alas, result in a quick divorce, thus introducing the children to a rotating series of adults who play an ambiguous role. The same applies, by the way, to Jon.
Deep thoughts.
It’s 4 AM here in Cape Town, and it’s raining like hell. I have to gather my scattered belongings for the flight to Johannesburg. Thus far the Brand South Africa journey has been rewarding, if unconventional. We’ve met a number of government officials, and I had the great pleasure of attending a press conference held by the Ministry of Public Enterprises, easily the highlight of my time so far. The political culture here is fascinating — and surprising. The effort to reconcile deep inequalities has been, to this imperfect and casual observer, insanely successful, considering the obstacles. Dani Rodrik has written a fair about South Africa’s growth trajectory, and why the country’s macroeconomic rigor hasn’t been rewarded with more FDI and economic growth. But it’s worth noting that the post-apartheid government has thoroughly kicked the ass of the apartheid government in this regard, and a real economic takeoff is easy to imagine, provided the crime problem is addressed very aggressively.
Re: the trip: it has reinforced lots of invidious stereotypes. There is a hilarious degree of clustering, with cliques forming more or less on national lines. Brassy American women sticking together, etc. As a jingoistic American, I’m a little sad to report that the Americans tend toward an un-Reihan showy earnestness, but that’s life. I find the Indians particularly awesome: two in particular are really witty and subversive and self-effacing. This raises interesting questions: am I more of a Diaspora personality than I realized. My mother says yes. One of the Chinese journalists has the most fascinating — and convincing — political worldviews I’ve encountered. I was heavily influenced by Prasenjit Duara’s critique of the nation-state, and this guy seems to have come up with it on his own. His whole thing is about how China is essentially France in the 18th century, in the midst of a centralizing project bent on obliterating regional and ethnolinguistic distinctions. Really, really interesting.
So now I must scramble. Keep it real, comrades.
Matt Frost and Freddie de Boer and Daniel Larison disagree pretty strongly with a Daily Beast column I wrote last night on Obama and Iran.
Matt makes the excellent point that many of those who are cheering on the (dwindling number of) protesters are projecting their hopes onto a movement they — I should say we — don’t fully understand. And as President Obama said in his press briefing, he has a special obligation to speak on behalf of the United States, not his own moral outrage.
Yet I do think that the president, by virtue of his political prowess and Iran’s vulnerability and the relative goodwill he enjoys in Europe, has an opportunity to put a a great deal pressure on Iran. Because I haven’t fully resigned myself to a nuclear-armed Iran, I think now is the time to apply this pressure.
The political turmoil in the country has deep roots: it derives to a great extent from the pain caused by an unbalanced state-dominated economy that directs scarce resources to the security services rather than to social needs. (This will sound familiar to left-of-center readers in particular.) I’m struck by the parallel with apartheid-era South Africa, which suffered from an abysmally low economic growth rate during its last decade, which was defined by paranoia and military adventurism on the part of the ruling clique.
Larison and I disagree at a fairly basic level about the normative dimension of foreign policy. To some degree, I think this guarantees that we’ll talk past each other. But as always, Larison makes very strong arguments that I need to take seriously.
On “Chicken Kiev,” he’s absolutely right that the nationalist aspirations of post-communist Europe were far from unproblematic. That’s putting it lightly. It’s also true that the bloody unraveling of the Balkans had a number of complicated causes, and that mixed signals sent by the Bush and Clinton administrations contributed to the disaster. On the basic point, Larison and I simply disagree: I think that the independence of the republics, including Ukraine and the Baltic states and, Larison’s favorite, Georgia, was a good thing, in part because I can imagine very grim counterfactuals. But of course I also think the Russian Federation would have been better off had Chechnya been allowed to go its own way. Larison has a very deep understanding of post-communist Europe, whereas my knowledge derives almost entirely from secondary sources and a seminar on Ukrainian history I took a decade ago. So I won’t blame you if he take his word over mine!
Larison also notes the calm and judicious tone of Bush’s speech, which bears a family resemblance to Obama’s early statements on Iran and Bush’s later reaction to the Tiananmen Square uprising. I’ll note only that time and context matter, and that the speech was a calibrated intervention designed to dampen nationalist enthusiasms. That’s not really in dispute.
In another post, Larison suggests that my admittedly crude model of Khamenei’s decision-making process doesn’t make sense.
One may or may not approve of the business being done, but the idea that the authoritarian government is the one that cannot by its very nature do business with Washington is just completely wrong.
That’s actually not my view at all, though of course Larison is responding to a brief sketch, so I can hardly blame him. There are many authoritarian governments that we can “do business with”; we do it all the time, after all. And some authoritarian governments are better than others. Larison is right to suggest that Mousavi represents a particularly potent threat to Khamenei, and that the axis of internal threat is different from the axis of external threat. That Khamenei wants to neutralize the threat posed by Mousavi doesn’t mean that he can’t do business with an agreeable US by necessity.
I suppose I was offering a psychological theory. I tend to think that a weak authoritarian government, one that feels threatened by internal rivals, is more likely to go to the negotiating table. Why? Because cutting a deal with your most potent external threat gives you breathing room to consolidate your power. Why would we want to play along, particularly if there’s a non-trivial chance that the regime might collapse? Say we cut a deal with South Africa National Party that gave them just enough room to liquidate key ANC cadres — but not enough to prevent a bloody revolution, one that would create an indigenous-majority government that would be implacably hostile to the West?
Khamenei’s crackdown suggests that he thought he was sufficiently strong to put down an internal threat. So yes, he’ll negotiate with the US. And then he’ll do exactly as he pleases. This is something I’ve heard for years from people who know far more about Iran than I do, most of whom believe that we should negotiate nevertheless to gain the moral high ground. I suppose I don’t see the point in gaining the moral high ground if it still means that Iran has a nuclear arsenal, one that will set off a destabilizing arms race in the region.
Larison also writes about the complex clerical rivalries that define Iran’s internal politics. I’ll happily concede that I used “pragmatic” clumsily: the problem isn’t so much that Khamenei and co. aren’t “pragmatic”; it’s that they aren’t very sensible. I absolutely agree with him re: their cynical use of religious rhetoric.
And that’s just the thing: I agree with Larison that the Iranian regime values survival above all else, and I even agree that a policy of not interfering with Iran’s internal affairs makes a nuclear deal (faintly) possible. I happen to think that there is a better achievable outcome, a la post-1994 South Africa.
Freddie writes a characteristically Freddie-ish post: incisive and astute and delightfully-written. Basically, Freddie has me pegged. I am a fairly conventional neocon, though more in the vein of Jeff Gedmin than that of my more combative friend Mike Goldfarb. Though I don’t think of myself as invasion-happy or trigger-happy, I still think that the decision to invade Iraq made a good deal of sense given what we knew at the time. I also think that we have a special obligation to the people of Afghanistan to help them build a decent, viable state. Re: Iran, I’d rather be on the side of the Mandelas than the Verwoerds.
I saw a man on CNN the other night (his name escapes me) who pronounced that there was no difference between those revolting and the government that they are revolting against, because both want nuclear weapons. Which, you know, is a handy and perfect example of how most of America’s intelligence and foreign policy communities see the world around us.
I’ll just point out that I disagree with the man on CNN. Nukes in the hands of Manmohan Singh worry me a lot less than nukes in the hands of, say, Subhas Chandra Bose.* [A reader was very exercised by my typo. I apologize for nothing.]
I’ll also note that I feel very privileged to be referred to as a rather vanilla Bill Kristol, though I’d much prefer to be known as the chocolate Bill Kristol, or perhaps the butter pecan Bill Kristol.
I foolishly failed to bring my international power adapter to South Africa, breezily expecting that I’d find one at my hotel. A marketing arm of the South African government has brought over to get a sense of how the country is preparing for next year’s World Cup, and my understanding is that I’ll also get to attend a Confederation Cup game or two. I’ll have a better understanding of what’s going on tomorrow. I hope I will, at least. My plan is to file a column tomorrow. I’m a few hours ahead for once in my life, which is nice. One wonders if I can make this time zone business work for me on a longer term basis.
Initial thoughts: the plane from Dulles to Dakar to Johannesburg was full of an improbable mish-mash of people, ranging from the quiet intensity of the enormously large gun-loving Afrikaner man to the voluble and demanding bald American business guy to the urbane middle-aged African American woman who is obsessed with the Die Hard movies who was seated next to the genteel African student who was interested in my book on the history of post-apartheid South Africa. Or rather Alec Russell’s book on the subject. I didn’t write it. I didn’t even buy it — I borrowed it from Christian Brose of Foreign Policy, who is a generous soul. I prefer counterprogramming in my reading, e.g., rather than read a book about Zuma on a flight to South Africa, I’d normally want to read a book about Suharto. I did read large sections of the forthcoming Isabel Sawhill + Ron Haskins book on building an opportunity society on the flight from Johannesburg to Cape Town, which will be fodder for future Agenda posts. But boy, I plowed throuh the Russell book. This was definitely the work of a veteran foreign correspondent: newsily engaging and well-informed, if far from comprehensive. It gave me some useful context, though I’m really interested in mundane stuff, like the drawing of provincial boundaries, the renaming of provinces, developments in local government, finer-grained accounts of the economic transition, language policy, etc. One hopes I’ll pick up a bit while I’m here. Still, worth reading.
Best part of the trip so far: Abdul Karim, who drove me to the hotel from the airport, is a brilliant dude. Born in 1978, he arrived in South Africa in 1994 as a student. He’s now a first-year political science undergrad, and he’s a totally incisive observer of the political scene in Kenya and South Africa and the wider world. Definitely a dazzling conversationalist. He’s going places. We had a frank conversation about perceptions of South Asians among other things.
Of course, the trip has lasted for just a couple of hours, not counting the endless flight. So we’ll see what happens next. Assuming I’m properly wired, I intend to keep you posted.
