Category Archives: Conservatism

Some IR Thoughts on the GOP Debate Marathon

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I guess if you speak a foreign language, you’re a traitor

Here were my first, domestic politics thoughts on the GOP debate-run, particularly the competitive, extreme position-taking forced onto the candidates by the audience reactions. But I thought the debates actually taught us very little directly on foreign policy (beyond bombast, or just watch the vid above you francophile, cheese-eating traitor to the heartland). Instead, most of my cues were indirect, such as audience reaction:

4. We (and the world) learned a lot from the audience behavior. I don’t think anyone anticipated this, but the GOP audience demographic (aging white evangelicals), plus its hoots and hollers (for torture, against the Palestinians, for executions, for war with Iran) communicated a lot of information in itself. It showed just how captured the GOP is now by a hard right Christianist ideology that comes off as more than just angry, but downright belligerent, if not scary. And for IR, this is important too. Foreigners will see this stuff and hardly believe that American hegemony is ‘benevolent’ or ‘benign.’ I’ve said this before, but this Tea Party radicalism is washing downstream to the rest of the world; a few years ago, my students here were asking me in amazement why Americans were comparing Obamacare to the Nazis, and I just ran out of lame excuses. Foreigners do pick up on this stuff, Fox News execs. You can’t talk like this and be a superpower at the same time. Foreigners do think we are fairly bonkers, and don’t even start with that ‘bound to lead’ schtick (more like unfit), when so many Americans muse that Obama might be the Antichrist or a Muslim non-citizen.

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Some Political Science Thoughts on the GOP Debate Marathon

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Here’s the last one is you haven’t seen it yet

 

So it looks like the GOP debating season is over. Wow. I don’t study American politics, but I can’t remember a marathon run of debates like that ever before. (Can anyone speak to that point, btw? This is something very new, right?) I think there will be much discussion in both parties about whether or not to run this sort of marathon schedule again in 4 years. Like most people I watched bits and pieces of them, and I concur that they should probably come with a drinking game like the State of the Union does. I zoned out a lot when it got (often) insider-y about who voted for which earmarks, but there were some good insights. On foreign policy, ironically the best insight is how little it interests Americans as measured by how how little it was discussed.

So here are some other political science-y thoughts after 6 months of these things:

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GOP SotU Response Better than SotU (2)

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Part one of my response to Obama’s 2012 State of the Union is here.

3. The foreign policy section was weaker and more militaristic than usual. The opening bit about the Iraq war making us ‘safer and more respected around the world’ was jaw-dropping. I guess this really is a campaign speech outreach to the right, because I can’t believe any of the president’s 2008 voters actually buy that line. Does anyone really believe that anymore, except for the right-wing think-tank set or something (ok, I’ll admit I did until a few years ago, but not now)? Wow. Didn’t people vote for Obama because of exactly the kind of Bushian American hubris that can read an unjustified, unprovoked, unilateral assault on another state (which would have provoked howls of rejection by Americans if done by any other country in the world) as a great American victory? Veterans too got a pander wishlist – even though even Michelle Bachmann (!) has come to realize that VA benefits will have to be included in any budget deal.

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GOP Response Better than SotU (1) – Wow

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Each year I try to write on the SotU (2010, 2011). I know they are preposterously scripted, usually forgettable, and almost meaningless as a guide for the upcoming policy season/budget debate. But the political scientist in me thinks that showing the whole panorama of democratic government in one room is hugely instructive for the both US citizenry and for foreigners interested in the US, as well as a great example of how democracies differ from oligarchies and dictatorships with their sycophantic, faux ‘legislatures.’ Let’s hope that somewhere some Chinese, or Burmese, or Syrians can see this and dream that one day they too can … play their own SotU drinking game.

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Foreign Policy of the GOP Debate (2): the Creepy Relish for Violence

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This is the second GOP national security debate, from November 22.

Part one of my thoughts on the foreign policy discussion in the Republican primary is here.

4. At least Gingrich, Romney, Santorum, and Huntsman know what they are talking about. If the primary was just about foreign policy, the race would narrow fast. Huntsman is obviously the only one talking as if he would run the country’s foreign policy as an institution in the real world, rather than a Rambo movie. I do wish he would get some traction. I’d love to give him a shot. Gingrich, while I do think he’s brilliant (I know, I know –  most people think he’s a charlatan), has morphed into a disturbing superhawk on Iran and the faux ‘due process’ of the drone war even though I think he knows better. (Full Disclosure: I worked for the GOP in Congress during Gingrich’s Speakership.) Romney sounds increasingly like what the Japanese, Indians, Koreans, and Australians want us to be – containers of China. I still think this should be their job first, if containment must happen, and Huntsman was right to warn him off. Santorum shocked me the most. His answer on Pakistanis loose nukes was downright intelligent, especially from the guy most famous for saying this. Hm. Not quite sure what to make of that…

5. Ron Paul is my new … gah, I can’t say it, please help … hero in the primary, at least on foreign policy professionalism. While his ‘let-em-die-without-healthcare’ creepiness, loathing for the Fed, and love of the gold standard (?!) terrifies me on domestic policy, his foreign policy answers were, to be perfectly honest, the most consonant with the rule of law, and the legal and moral constraints the president does and should face  – despite his isolationism which I don’t care for. He stuck to the Constitution and insisted that the Congress, not the prez, declare war. (Thank god someone still says that after Korea, Vietnam, Iraq 1, and Iraq 2). He rejected the legality of  hellfiring Awlaki (a US citizen). He defined waterboarding as torture (that is just how low the bar is now,  good god). And he argued against striking Iran, which would almost certainly chain-gang us into yet another horrible conflict in the ME. Throughout the debates, he has rejected empire, rejected GWoT legal games, spoken regularly of our growing inability to pay for all these wars, bases, and other exertions, and counseled legal and financial restraint in the face of the Republican adulation of the imperial presidency, which even Obama has expanded (sooo disappointing that). Here’s Sullivan on Paul’s foreign policy importance as well.

6. ‘I will consult with my generals’ is becoming the biggest dodge of tough questions in the race, and it gets used so often, that it’s making me wonder if GOP questions the supremacy of civilian authority. Why don’t we just nominate David Patraeus instead? Indeed, if you listen carefully to the debates, the attitude toward the military is almost sycophantic (note how the armed forces are used as a touchstone), which reinforces my growing suspicion that the GOP equates American greatness overseas with the use of force. Contrast that with the extreme niggardliness of the contenders on foreign aid (Perry’s zero-based budgeting). So we might occupy your country or fly drones over it, but we wouldn’t dare build you a functioning sanitation system. What a terrible signal to send the rest of the world!

The locution ‘our men and women in uniform’ has a become an applause line, a throw-away pander to the red-meat Tea Partiers, conveniently shoe-horned in to defend almost any possible position – waterboarding, killing Iranian scientists, intervening in Pakistan, whatever. Yes, we support the military, and yes, we should provide it with the resources needed when tasked with missions. But we are more than a nation of armies, indeed, we are/should be an open, relaxed democracy FIRST. I would much prefer that the the primary face of our global image be the Peace Corps than men with guns. What is it with the GOP and uniforms and firearms? Didn’t we learn anything from the insurgency in Iraq? I would much rather that foreigners think of America as a place of great artists, musicians, entrepreneurs, poets, etc. than the regular diet of militarization on tap with the GOP since 9/11. Did anyone else notice in the emailed-in question about opposing torture, that the questioner felt obliged to say he was a veteran in order to have the moral standing necessary to question GOP dogma? ‘Service guarantees citizenship!’

7. And there is yet another sycophancy – toward Israel. Again, the pandering was almost embarrassing. The candidates seemed to fall all over themselves to proclaim fealty to even the most maximal positions on Israel, the Palestinians, and Iran. Again, yes, we want Israel to survive and be prosperous and all that. But we are two different states; our interests don’t always align, and the current Israeli administration is surely the most irresponsible and needlessly aggressive in a long time. But here, Israel is the 51st tea partier state.

8. And then, worst of all, there is – there had to be I guess in this primary season of ideological purity – the bloodlust – the relish in the use of force and pain. This more than anything else has scared me. The cheering and clapping from the audience has goaded the candidates to ‘outhawk’ each other; in fact, that is probably too generous – ‘out-brutality’ each other is more accurate. Bachman has her nuclear war. Paul would let people die if no charities came forward to help with medical bills. Perry came off almost bloodthirsty on the Texas death penalty and yet again on waterboarding (“I’ll be for it until the day I die”). Does Perry, previously a somewhat normal guv, really want to be remembered this way? As the ‘guy who loves the death penalty and waterboarding’? (This is what I mean by the Tea Party audience members goading these guys into extremism; Perry is clearly being pushed by this race into rashly saying lunatic things about the Fed, Israel, wateboarding, etc.) But for Paul and Huntsman, the rest endorsed waterboarding and ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ too. On Israel, Iran, and Pakistan, the pressure to reach further and further to extremes is so obvious. Even Huntsman, desperate to look ‘tough’ on anything, said he send special forces into Pakistan to chase loose nukes, after even Santorum (!) said that was a bad idea.

There must be a limit. What would the GOP reject? Can the president use drone strikes inside the US? Should he use nuclear weapons in the GWoT? I think it would really help the rule of law if the moderators could tie down the candidates to some framework, but the audience won’t have it. Its too late. The Tea Party understands the GWoT in the Jack Bauer way – the rule of law is for lawyers and sissies; real men carry guns and inflict righteous pain even if its illegal. Terrifying.

Foreign Policy of the GOP Debates (1): We couldn’t care less @ Foreigners

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The ‘foreign policy’ debate

MEDIA UPDATE: On November 8, I published a brief write-up on the US-Korean alliance with the East Asia Forum. EAF is a good outlet for readers of this site. The piece was based on longer writings here on the blog earlier this fall. Comments are welcome.

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There have been lots of these GOP debates (here is the whole schedule), and the one above, from Nov 12, is the most relevant for readers of this site. Here is a decent write-up on that debate, and after months of them, there is enough said to provide something to say on the (otherwise scarcely discussed) foreign policy edge of the primary.

1. Any first foreign policy comment must be, paradoxically, that foreign policy isn’t really much of an issue. No one at the primary stage really cares about foreign policy, beyond Israel, which increasingly isn’t seen as foreign policy at all, at least by the GOP, and a general chest-thumping of American awesomeness. This is not news for Americans. US observers all know that domestic politics, especially the economy, pretty much determines elections. When you are a superpower you have the luxury to disdain and ignore foreigners. But foreigners don’t know this as well, and US allies especially often build-up (self-serving) images of themselves as ‘critical’ to the US, even though monolinguistic, untravelled Americans couldn’t care less about these countries (poor Georgia; the entirely ginned-up Korean belief that K-pop is a ‘wave’ in the US; a self-important German colleague once told me that America should never force Berlin to choose between Washington and Paris – oh please! like we care, dude!). Indeed, Hermann Cain’s rise and his staggering ignorance about the non-US world tells you that disinterest in the world – presumably because we are so exceptional and powerful that we don’t need to care – is almost welcomed by the Tea Partiers who hate IOs, illegal immigrants, and US bargaining with foreigners. Build the fence higher! And electrify it!

2. For all the hype about the US switching its focus to Asia, you wouldn’t know that from the debates. Do you really think that the average tea party white guy voter cares about SK or Japan? The Middle East was far more dominant. Iran, Pakistan, Israel, and the rest of the usual suspects were everywhere. I think I heard Gingrich mention NK once in this debate. The China stuff between Huntsman and Romney was flat. India wasn’t even mentioned, but waterboarding (of GWoT detainees) was a disturbingly hot topic. Again, this isn’t news to US observers who know how many Americans, especially Christians, take a fairly apocalyptic, clash-of-civilizations view of the GWoT. Bachmann even warned of a global nuclear war against Israel (god, she’s a terrifying flake). Elites may want an Asian turn in US focus (as I think would also be a good idea), but the ‘Christianist’ GOP electorate remains focused on the ME, and we should expect that to continue to dominate US time, even if we don’t want it to. Terrorism, oil, and Israel aren’t going anywhere.

Asians are bound to be disappointed, because of the deep-rooted belief (desire, actually), verging on desperation, that the US should pay attention more to them. (Read this and this – apparently India and Southeast Asia are ‘indispensible’ for the US. Oh, and so is Latin America. — Not! Americans just don’t care. Elites aren’t the voters. Build the fence higher!) What this tells you is that the Asia hype is a lot more hollow than Asians want to admit, because it requires US attention to be justified. So America is still the unipole whether you like it or not (natch), and the ‘new Asia’ schtick is more about Asian insecurity and desire for prestige, than it is about empirical shifts. (Yes, the shift is happening, but a lot slower than the ‘Asia is the future’ types I meet here all the time will admit.) I have argued before that Americans just don’t care than much about Asia, no matter how many Asians tell us we should. Israel or even ‘old Europe’ Ireland is a lot more recognizable to Americans than Shanghai or Bangalore. Further, so long as India, Japan, China, and the rest out here are all balancing each other and competing, the US doesn’t really need to get sucked into the maelstroms of the Korean peninsula or the South China Sea anyway. The Asian hype that the US should pay more attention out here is really an effort to get the US to help locals contain China, which bait we should not take, IMO.

3. Cain, Bachmann, and Perry are way out of their depth. By now everyone knows Cain’s ‘U beki beki stan stan’ remark and Bachmann’s off-the-wall assertion that the ‘ACLU runs the CIA.’ (Yes, the same Agency that runs the drone strikes that now kill US citizens.) But even Perry can’t seem to give good answers – that he ‘commands’ the national guard and has friends in the Defense Department are qualifications for the White House. That’s all he’s got after 3 months on the trail? What happened to Perry? He seemed so imposing back in August, and he has just crashed. He comes off more clueless and lost in the woods, after his pre-scripted reply sentences run out, than even Bush. It’s amazing how weak this field is (which is why Romney is running away with this thing, even though no one likes him).

Part two will go up in three days.

Transformers 3 (2): America the Bitter & Vengeful after a Decade of War

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“In the name of freedom, we will kill them all” – Yikes!!

Part one is here, where I noted the film’s extraordinarily brutality, including battlefield executions by its American-allied protagonists.

The obvious, if unwanted, parallel to such battlefield cruelty is all those conservatives who complained for years that America’s rules of engagement in the GWoT were too strict, or Limbaugh’s flippant defense of Abu Ghraib brutality as ‘hazing on the nightshift.’ Bay’s childish defense, I’m sure, is the throw-away fig-leaf that the Decepticons are ‘evil,’ so it’s ok to just blow them away, decapitate them when they’re defenseless, or draw-and-quarter them. But I can’t imagine such levels of brutality, including multiple executions (!), making their way into a mainstream blockbuster for tweens, produced by family-friendly Spielberg (!!) no less, before the GWoT. We’ve become a harsher people when liberal restraints on force give way to bloodlust.

To see Bay’s regression more clearly, note that first film had no executions-as-entertainment, the second ‘only’ had one (in the first China sequence), but there are four in this one. If this seems unfair, recall that this isn’t an R-rated horror movie, with different standards and genre tropes. Also, Bay has always reached for a certain national security credibility; he’s like the Hollywood version of Tom Clancy. He reverentially celebrates the US military. Bay gets uniquely deep access to actual US hardware from the Pentagon. Armageddon lionized NASA. Pearl Harbor told everyone that America is awesome. In this Transformers film, the Autobots even help derail Iran’s nuclear program. In same way that uber-popular, ultra-violent video game franchises like Modern Warfare obviously channel American attitudes about force, the military, and terrorism, so does Bay. So I don’t think it’s too much to notice how Bay turned Transformers from a toy-movie for tweens into Black Hawk Down meets Saw with robots.

I wrote a review of the Transformers 2, where I argued that Bay fetishizes (US) military hardware and glorifies the US military so much, that he is given unparalleled access to display US weaponry. His simplistic good vs. evil storylines and adultatory portrayal of the US military give his films an ‘establishment,’ rah-rah feel that vastly more interesting but subversive war-films like Apocalypse Now or Platoon could never have. The most sycophantic line of the film is when the ridiculously improbable new ‘Bay girl’ is legitimized before no less than the Director of National Intelligence, because ‘she comes from a good military family.’ There is so much elitism and militarism wrapped up in that statement, that it could have been written by Robert Heinlein.

This is entertainment for WR Mead’s Jacksonians, mixing American exceptionalism, self-righteous violent vengeance, and alpha male strut into the modern Republican party. Pandering to these reactionary sentiments is easy: America battles for good, deploys flashy, high-tech hardware, and, most importantly, wins. In the background are waving flags, boyishly shallow speeches about ‘freedom,’ and Pentagon guys barking dialogue like, ‘failure is not an option,’ or ‘roll out strike package dark star whiskey tango foxtrot…’ If you’re not in the military, you’re probably a wimp or a liberal. And if you can throw in a hot babe wandering around in a bikini or something, so much the better to capture the mix of sexual titillation and self-righteous, militaristic posturing that has made Fox News such success. Indeed, I’ve often thought that Fox News models itself on Bay’s flashy, militaristic, sexualized style.

Hollywood is far more nationalistic than American conservatives, wedded to the trope of ‘liberal Hollywood,’ will admit. And Bay is the leading edge of this. He is bombastic, reactionary, and jingoistic, and people love him for it. His films make ridiculous amounts of money, suggesting a far deeper reservoir for a conservative, pro-military Hollywood than the standard Republican interpretation of Hollywood admits. This is entertainment for men of course, but for the sort of anti-feminist, semi-authoritarian Tea Partier who thought W’s landing on the Abraham Lincoln was a milestone in America’s foreign policy history of ‘kicking a—,’ pines for Sarah Palin (a housewife hottie who wants to bomb foreigners and loves America), and doesn’t understand why the greatest country on earth is losing the GWoT and ceding place to China. As no less than Optimus Prime, the leader of the Autobots says in the clip above, ‘In the name of freedom…we will kill them all.’ That is pretty much all that’s left of the Bush Doctrine for the angry, frustrated, ‘I-don’t-give-a-damn-anymore-about-the-rules-of-engagement,’ tea-partier.

This is where the third Transformers film is revelatory. It is one of the most purposefully, gleefully cruel mainstream geopolitical films I can think of since the Rambo-80s. It displays better than any GWoT-era film the growing American acceptance of war cruelty resultant from ten years of frustrating, inconclusive combat. That normally tempered Spielberg produced the film too shows just how far the bar has fallen. Indeed, Spielberg should be embarrassed after producing morally-nuanced war-films like Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers. This is entertainment for an angry, confused, militarily exhausted electorate looking for decisive outcomes and now willing to tolerate cruelty to get them. When people say that 9/11 and the GWoT have made Americans a nastier, angrier, less pleasant people, this is exactly what they mean.

Transformers 3 (1): “We will Kill them all in the name of Freedom” – Yikes!

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“In the name of freedom, we will kill them all!”

– Optimus Prime (the protagonist in the clip above) updates the Bush Doctrine after a decade of war

 

 

 
Part 2 of this post is here.

I missed this over the summer, but the blu-ray just came out, and it’s a nasty, harsh, rah-rah militaristic mess. I won’t bother with the story. You already saw it and know how ridiculous it was. (Try here if you don’t.) I’ll only note that great actors like Malkovich, McDormand, Turturro, and Nemoy are complicit now in the militarization of American cinema, as is Buzz Aldrin (sooo embarrassing that was – wow). The Asian racism and gay jokes are a just as offensive (and painfully unfunny) as the black racism of the second one. And the new ‘Bay girl’ is even worse than Megan Fox, who at least had a grittiness. This one is just living plastic and skin-cream. Bay never misses a chance to promote emotionally debilitating lookism to young girls. (Even Bay’s female corpses must be hot. That must take a sexism award somewhere.)

No one captures the ups-and-downs for popular consumption of current American attitudes toward war as well as Michael Bay. Bay’s films obviously carry the moral weight and approval of the American Right. This is most clear when he guiltlessly references signature moments in US history like the collapse of the Trade Towers, the moon landing, or Challenger explosion. More leftish action directors like James Cameron or George Lucas would be relentlessly criticized were they to do that. Consider the Right’s response to Avatar and Star Wars III, compared to Transformers. But ‘America’s director,’ just like ‘America’s newsroom,’ can do this, because he is reliably nationalistic and pro-military. As Time put it, Bay has become the “CEO of Hollywood’s military-entertainment complex.”

As a result of Bay’s signature position as the filmic voice of the US populist-militarist right, no movies better capture the US emotional arc regarding the war on terror than his Transformers trilogy. As Americans have become more and more frustrated by an unwinnable war, more tolerant of brutality like torture, and less compromising, so has Bay. The films have become progressively more jingoistic, bitter, macho-sexist, and cruel. This is entertainment for the Tea-Party. In this most recent installment, there are even four battlefield-executions (!) in this Steven Spielberg (!) production based on a line of toys and aimed at young boys. But I guess that’s good stuff in the GOP primary these days.

The antagonists (the Decepticons) are nastier than usual, but the protagonists (the Autobots) are extraordinarily brutal for mainstream heroes, and Bay revels in it. The usual story about how the Decepticons are ‘evil’ is thrown in to provide a moral fig-leaf for the Autobots’ violence, but it’s a sham. Bay really wants to show us a vengeful bloodbath (the last hour), and here is where the Tea-Partier frustration and anger at the confusion over the GWoT’s course is most obvious. The film, like current the Tea Party-influenced GOP primary season, is filled with a deeply disturbing bloodlust for brutality. This is not a fun action film for the comfortable, amiable America of the 1990s (like Bay’s Armageddon). This is war carnage for a bitter America desensitized to vengeance and brutality after a decade of torture, confusion, wounded veterans, ‘ingratitude’ from Iraqis and Afghans at being ‘liberated,’ sky-rocketing costs, and global condemnation. T3 is wish-fulfillment for the people who hoo-rahed at OBL’s death: if only we could just go and kick the s— out of all them.

The Decepticons execute an Autobot made up to look like an old-man by shooting him in the back of the head. This came off so harsh, that a woman sitting next to me gasped and looked at her rather shocked boyfriend. When a Decepticon fighter crashes, the Autobots dismember the pilot alive to the jokingly-delivered line, ‘this is going to hurt.’ Holy c—! Sadism is hilarious? Kids are supposed to find that line humorous? At the end, Optimus Prime – remember, this is main good guy – kills one bad guy (Megatron), who had actually just assisted him, by hatcheting him unsuspectingly in the back of the head and them pulling out his entire brain stem, complete with arterial spray. Next the chief bad guy is dispatched after he is badly wounded and crawling on the ground begging for mercy. Nevertheless, Optimus Prime shot-guns him in the back at close range. Twice. And the camera lingers on his pained face as he’s being shot. Wow. WTH happened to Michael Bay (and Steven Spielberg)? Does Bay really expect us to endorse this kind of brutality as entertainment? Both antagonists are in morally compromised positions, yet the hero effectively executes them?! Are we supposed to cheer on the Autobots (allied with the US military in the film) when they brazenly disregard the rules of engagement (which makes liberal states’ use of force more trustworthy) and just execute people?

Cheering & Whistling for Executions: Republican Primary goes Talibanic

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Bloodlust on the Right

 

I try not to be too openly partisan on this website, but I worry a lot about the course of US conservatism, especially after 9/11 and because I am a registered Republican. And this was genuinely horrifying. Just watch. This is from the Republican primary debate on September 7 and should tell you why a vote for against the GOP is practically a moral requirement, at least until the Tea Party fury fades. Someone vote for Huntsman please…

The best piece I have seen on that debate is this. Also, from deep in the military-industrial complex comes this from a friend:

“After watching Wednesday’s GOP debate, I think Rick Perry will probably win the nomination. I think Mitt Romney is actually underrated as a general election candidate – he’s smart and he stays on message, he looks presidential, and I’m certain the Tea Party will give him wide latitude to moderate after the nomination if that’s what it takes to win the election. People say all the time that the Tea Party won’t support him – I disagree. They’re as hive-minded as the rest of the ‘conservative’ (i.e., radical reactionary) movement. They’ll line up behind any plausible candidate with an effective general election narrative regardless of past sins, if he or she demonstrates a present willingness to their bidding.

When it comes to the nomination, what Rick Perry says doesn’t matter as much as how he says it. I’ve never actually heard the guy talk before until the debate. I was expecting more rootin’, tootin’ Yosemite Sam unpredictability than Perry showed, and the left should be little nervous. The left’s ‘Bush-without-the-brains’ narrative for Perry isn’t going to hold. I think George Bush was slow and incurious and frequently kind of goofy, and he sounded like it when he talked. But the right loves decisive alpha males and Bush claimed to be one, even if as a manager he was weak, passive, and indecisive. But despite some stumbles (which will probably dissipate with experience) Perry doesn’t sound like a moron. I think he is a lot like Bush (I mean that in the worst possible way), but reading him from your gut, the guy projected decisive alpha-maleness without the moronic, verbal lost-in-the-woods dead ends and cliffhangers that afflicted Bush and made watching him speak such a nerve-wracking experience. (ed.: I love that last line.) And Rick Perry has none of Bush’s fundamental goofiness.

In the general election I think Perry’s attacks on Social Security as ponzi scheme will cost him but…maybe not. The line that those on or approaching SS have nothing to worry about may actually work. People our age really don’t believe SS will be there, and selfish, aging boomers will absolutely love the thought of pigging out on the remains of SS while it’s being eliminated for the rest of us. Tell the average narcissistic boomer that SS will be there for him, and screw the rest of us, and he’ll be perfectly satisfied with the arrangement. Younger voters probably won’t care or even bother to show up, and a lot of those who do see SS as a poor investment vehicle rather than as social insurance will welcome its “restructuring”. The proper Dem response should be, “Just wait – they’ll take it away from everybody the second they get the chance” and then let the GOP scramble to promise it won’t. But Dems are far too weak and inept to go on offense like that.

My prediction for the general: The analytical and fundamentally decent Obama is compelled to qualify and explain his thoughtfully crafted policy positions, vs. a Perry unrestrained by rational thought or character or policy ideas. In politics, any time you’re explaining anything you’ve already lost. Perry doesn’t explain himself, much like Bush, and both benefitted from this because it concealed the vacuity of their ideas.

Perry will lean forward, stay on offense, and lie without hesitation. Obama will stay on defense and complain about the lies and continue trying to prove how reasonable and decent he is, which swing voters don’t give two tosses about.

So I can see Perry pulling this off. Obama is superior and preferable in every way but the one that matters right now because of the nation’s current malaise – that gut feeling swing voters will have about who’s packing more testosterone. Dems never, ever learn that strut as important as policy to governing, and that policy has almost nothing to do with winning elections. There were hints in Obama’s jobs speech that he may shelve the tweedy jacket and start going on offense – which is great! – but that’s not naturally in his character.

With Perry, it is. There was a great shot of Perry grabbing Ron Paul by the arm and poking a finger in his face during one of the debate commercials. That’s the real Perry, and the GOP is in thrall to that kind of tough-guy strutting. Just look at the body language in those pictures! A lot of voters are going to love that.

BTW, I also thought the bloodlust on display with the applause over Perry’s 234 executions was repulsive and frightening, and his gosh-no response to the question about his discomfort over dishing out so much death (well deserved or not) could have been delivered just as easily by George Bush.”

For more GOP ‘cheering for death,’ came this from the second debate. What is with the bloolust?!

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NB: On a different point, East Asianists should not miss this from the ‘rising China’ debate.

Soldiers Shooting at Airplanes: Yet Another Reason to Decentralize Korea

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seoul-incheon-airport

I was just about to leave town for the summer when this incident occurred. In June, two Korean marines fired on a civilian airliner coming in to land at Incheon international airport (pictured above). Much of the commentary has focused on the heightened levels of tension because of last year’s incidents (the sinking of the Cheonan and the shelling of Yeonpyeong Island). And certainly, the ‘enhanced readiness’ and ‘proactive deterrence’ sought by the new minister of defense add (with obvious justification to be sure) to the tension. While clearly SK should defend itself, I was wary last year of the new guidelines because of precisely this possibility. Everyone is edgy, so incidents like this aren’t unexpected.

Yet no one has brought up the obvious fact that is hugely dangerous for civilian airliners to be regularly landing and taking off less than 50 miles from the demilitarized zone to begin with. I argued this point at some length last year. My concern was and remains that SK is far too centralized (a problem in itself) on a hugely vulnerable region right on the border with NK. 55% of the SK population lives within 50 miles of the DMZ, most obviously the massive northwestern agglomeration of people living in Seoul, its surrounding Kyeonggi province, plus the city of Incheon.

Note further that this problem is worsening, not improving. Seoul continues to grow, while Incheon, a new, hyper-modern ‘model’ city is exploding in size too. To boot, the new (and supercool and efficient) Incheon airport is now one of the busiest and largest in Asia. On the downside, Korea’s second city, Busan, which is already a paltry 3 million (Seoul is 20+ M), is shrinking. A friend who works in US Forces in Korea, and who interfaces regularly with the Korea military, tells me that the Korean military is increasing closing (naval) installations in the south (near Busan), because no one is willing live down here anymore. Just about all of my students tell me they want to move up to Seoul, the center of the universe.

So I will ask once again, why does the ROK government continue to worsen SK’s strategic position by permitting this wildly lop-sided regional development? You could say that this is simply the outcome of consumer choice – ie, SKs all want to live in Seoul. That is true, but the government could obviously do a lot to discourage that. Remember that this is SK – ground-zero for state-led capitalism, ‘administrative guidance,’ and all that. SKs are accustomed to the government ‘directing’ or “nudging” (in American/Obama era parlance) national life far more than westerners. SK efforts to incentive extra-Seoul demographic accumulation would hardly been seen as a government tyranny or something like that. And besides, the reason – security against NK – is very defensible. This wouldn’t be like uprooting a neighborhood to build a strip mall or something. This wouldn’t be District Six in Capetown.

If you lived next to North Korea (North Korea!), would you really want these sorts of demographic-regional patterns? Even if you drop all the other (very good) arguments about regional equity, sustainable living patterns, the informal discrimination against the rest of Korea doomed to the ‘provinces,’ etc, there is an obvious national safety argument to unwind Seoul-centricity. Yet this is never discussed, even after incidents like this shooting. I don’t get it…

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OTHER POST-SUMMER THOUGHTS

1. The S&P downgrade of US debt was both meaningful yet ludicrous. Meaningful in that it put a point on something everyone already knew anyway – the US political process is so gridlocked and its political culture so acrimonious, that it calls into question the ability of the USG to meet future obligations. But it was simultaneously inaccurate, because the very next day, the market rushed into US Treasuries as the safest global asset. Interest on the benchmark US debt issue – the 10-year Treasury bond – is near record lows, around 2.5%.

In fact, I find this astonishing. For a decade, budget hawks (me included) thought the US was borrowing far more than it could ever pay back to cover the Bush tax cuts, the GWoT, and Medicare Part D. I find the interpretation that the western welfare state is in crisis, to be persuasive. I never thought the US would be able to just borrow and borrow and borrow like this. It is astonishing just how willing foreigners are to buy American debt. For all the chaos, no other asset is even close to the reliability of the T-bill, so maybe Cheney was right – we can just borrow forever… (how terrifying) … which leads to me next thought:

2. It is probably time for another stimulus. Increasingly it looks like the economy never climbed out of the 2008 implosion. The fear of the double-dip looks pretty warranted, but it is more likely to be understood as the long tail of the Great Recession rather than as a separate event. And increasingly I think Krugman is right that we should use the continuing super-low interest rates on US debt to fund another stimulus. I find the GOP/WSJ argument that the first stimulus didn’t work to absolutely fatuous. No less than the IMF has found that the stimulus prevented US unemployment from reaching 15-20%. The standard Keynesian prescription is that when consumer spending contracts, followed by investment spending, government is the only collective or ‘public goods’ actor that can step in countercyclically. And I don’t see much evidence that this doesn’t apply here, just as it applied and worked pretty well 3 years ago.

It should painfully obvious after the stockmarket roller coaster of two weeks ago, that uncertainty is worse than usual; government focus would probably help, especially given the policy-process meltdown of the debt-ceiling fight. But the DOW numbers increasingly strike me as frothy and casino-like rather than genuinely indicative. CNBC can cash in on the drama of wild ups and downs, but I think Yglesias (following Krugman) is increasingly correct – the real issue is growth and unemployment. And I don’t see the correlation between debt reduction and (job) growth (much-touted in the GOP Iowa debate). Speaking of…

3. The GOP Iowa debate was terrifying. Among other ideas raised were: to return to the gold standard (Ron Paul), to criminalize abortion for rape-victims (Santorum), to never raise the debt ceiling (Bachmann), to cut the highest US tax rate to 25% (Cain), and that the EPA runs a “reign of terror” over US business (Huntsman). Wow. Really? Who let these people of out the asylum? Is the GOP really this conservative? Is this even conservatism anymore, because it increasingly looks to me like nihilism of a sort. Do Republican primary voters (FULL DISCLOSURE: me included) really believe it when Perry says God is calling him to run for prez? None of this tea-party reactionary delusion actually reflects the reality of modern, cosmopolitan democratic governance enmeshed in the global economy. As always, I can only think that this sort of stuff convinces the rest of the world that we are bonkers and unfit to lead to lead the international community. Don’t believe me? Try to figure out how you explain this to non-Americans. Why aren’t the GOP candidates talking about stuff like this, a far more realistic and worrisome scenario of American power? Only Huntsman even came close, so if he survives to the Ohio primary, I guess I’ll vote for him. If anything, I left the debate thinking of Thomas Frank’s book, which I read this summer: the surreality of the GOP primary speaks to extraordinary insularity of rural America and the almost purposive resentment of the modernity in contemporary US conservatism. Creepy…

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This and this are the best short-form articles you didn’t read this summer. And then of course, there’s this, by an expat busted for pot who turned his jail-term into local Korean celebrity – bizarre, but the article is dead-on.