Category Archives: Domestic Politics

Lessons from Iran

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Prediction in social science is d— difficult, but it is awfully easy to retrodict. Charles Kurzman makes the important point that when the outcome is clear in Iran in a few weeks or months, lots of ‘experts’ will say it was ‘inevitable.’ Excellent point against social science hubris. So, I will hazard my guess now, in advance:

1. These color revolutions, and their model, the Velvet Revolution, always seem to take us by surprise. Suddenly, previously apathetic populations explode and and waves of protestors hit the street. No one seems to be able to explain why quiescence so quickly collapses. This is terribly humiliating to the social sciences, because we strive to build theories that explain social action. Yet we seem to get it wrong time and again – particularly in identifying the social breakpoints which push populations from apathy into activism. The CIA has been criticized for years for wildly overestimating Soviet power in the 80s and having not even an inkling of the coming collapse. Even Paul Kennedy, one of the finest historians working today, assumed the USSR would survive into the 21st C. (And good prediction is why Nouriel Roubini is such a rock-star today.) We just don’t know nearly enough about the intersection of politics, psychology, and social mobilization. Nonetheless, the lesson I draw is that political apathy is ticking time-bomb. If you endlessly repress (and bore) your population, there will be a backlash. China and even, or perhaps especially, NK beware.

2. Stagnation and low growth seem to be a driver of these revolutions as much as freedom. Freedom is great, but so are mundane things like being able to travel or getting a cool, future-oriented job. Eastern Europeans didn’t just want liberalism, they wanted globalization – the fun hip, exciting lifestyle they saw filtering in on bootleg VHS or western TV shows. Who wants to work for some bland, grey, state-owned enterprise making soviet-model toasters? People would rather work for Yahoo or Intel and be connected the world and the future. That the China seems to be able to deliver this, where the Islamic Republic could not, is my guess why China seems more stable.

3. Autocracies are frequently terrible economic managers. East Asian states seem to be an exception to this, but even they have high levels of corruption and can become unexpectedly brittle (Indonesia during the Asian financial crisis). Ideologues who demand national, religious, or other principled ‘purity’ frequently must do so at the expense of cool, fun, modern global lifestyles. Who wants to be cut-off from the fun world of globalization, video games, HDTV, Starbucks, etc? Maybe the Amish or Haredim, but the vast majority of people hardly want to be constricted this way, or at the very least, they want to choose to be or not be so restricted. To the Amish’ credit, they at least allow their children a choice to stay or go. In these color revolutions, economic stagnation is usually combined with closed politics.

4. Foreign influence can energize these revolts, but not seriously participate. I think there was a W effect and an Obama effect that helped spur these movements. Both presidents spoke meaningfully about democracy (2005 & 2009), and both were followed by outburst of popular enthusiasm. That is a good correlation. Further outside attention can put the regime in the spotlight and so raise the costs a Tiananmen-style repression. But this hardly means it won’t happen. The best we can do is continue to talk about it in the press and keep attention on it. This will give the regime pause. But openly intervening is hard (these places are far way; what exactly would we do?). So part of the blame for the recent Iranian crackdown is the ADD-level attention span of cable news. Michael Jackson saved the mullahs. That’s globalization for ya’.

5. Islamic governance is not inevitable in the Middle East. The ME will always be the home of Islam. But Islamic politics is not the only way. Muslims clearly like more open politics, even if they do then vote for Islamists. Yes, Hamas got elected, and Turkey’s Islamists are reasonably successful. But then these parties must govern. Inevitably, they make mistakes, and in so far as they close politics to criticism, those mistakes will remain unaddressed, pile up, and exacerbate. When they screw up, there will be pressure from below for change. That Muslims vote for Islamist parties does not mean they want to never vote again, or live in an Islamist tyranny. The Iranian clerics confused the two. They saw the mundane rejection of the Shah as an apocalyptic endorsement for Islamic theocracy. So did Hamas. So to will the Islamist in Egypt if they ever tip Mubrarak. The trick is retain democracy while allowing Islamists to run. This is challenging. The US allows anti-systemic parties like nazis and communists to run. Germany, given it history of voting in the Nazis who then prohibited voting ever again, does not. Whether or not to allow parties who want to destroy democracies to run in deomcratic elections is tough question.

Tiananmen +20: Tank Man will be a National Hero One day

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The Tiananmen Square Massacre was 20 years ago this week. It hardly needs repeating but this is one of the great moments in the long battle for human freedom against tyranny. One can only hope that the Tank Man below wasn’t (as probably happened) tortured or beaten to death.

Tank Man

What can we learn from the survival of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) ?

1. I think just about everyone is surprised the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and PRC are still around. Given how rapidly other communist tyrannies were collapsing, just about everybody thought China should be next to go. Why it didn’t happen:

a. Learning: The CCP watched the USSR and decided not risk the same opening. This is theoretically important, because it suggests how directed human action can up-end foggy notions of the ‘zeitgeist.’ Everybody thought the times were against the CCP,  it was ripe to fall, the historical pressures were enormous, the democratic dominoes were falling. And that was all correct. But the party still held out anyway. This is a salutary warning against seeing history as Hegelian History, with large tectonic philosophical shifts pushing states and leaders this way or that. The contrast here is striking. The CCP set its face against the wind, held tough, and now is considered a model for a new, globalization-savvy autocracy.

b. Culture: For all the sound and fury of communism since Mao, the real ‘ideology’ of the Chinese masses is traditional confucian agrarian conservatism. And it is not democratic. It deeply stresses social harmony and one-ness (recall the 2008 Olympics), unlike democracy and pluralism, which admit and try to manage conflict. It is the subculture of Asian, social harmony-demanding confucianism that is the real block on democratization out here. It is arguably the single biggest problem for democracy in Korea. In the North, the Kim monarchy regularly manipulates deeply rooted Korean symbols, where the Southern democracy has struggled with a foreign philosophical implant lacking local historical and cultural resonance. This argument holds for most of the confucian Asian space, including China. In 1989, the CCP monopolized political discourse, positioning itself as a defender, not of the shallow communist artifice just a few decades old, but long traditionalist confucian Chinese culture. By contrast, the students were promoting alien foreign concepts in a country where xenophobia has been a regime ideology for centuries.

A great irony of communist systems is how traditionalist-nationalist rather than communist they actually are. Without the communist ideology, most of them might have been considered semi-fascist, like the clerical fascism of Latin America. NK is arguably as much a fascist as stalinist state, with its hereditary kingship, focus on blood and soil (Korean uniqueness and unification), its plumbing of Korean history (rather than Marxist ideology) to justify the party’s rule. In China, communism is highly xenophobic, with foreign powers playing a critical, regime-justifying role (Japan, the US, the USSR). And nationalism has exploded since the ‘patriotic education campaign’ began in 1991. In the USSR, when Stalin was in real trouble in WWII, he mobilized Russian nationalism for the ‘Great Patriotic War.’ In Vietnam, the communists were as nationalist as they were socialist. In other words, communist ideology frequently overlays the real values rooted in the society – generally traditionalist and nationalist. These values at the bottom cannot be rooted out quickly, and indeed frequently popular nationalism replaced elitist abstract communism as the real ideology of communist regimes.

This is important in China, because the Confucian peasant subculture was as much a block on the turn toward democracy as the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). Eastern Europeans knew what democracy and the West was. They had had some exposure in the centuries before 1989, and they knew they wanted to rejoin European modernity. They wanted Starbucks and McDonald’s as much as democracy. In China, that was not the case. The student elites certainly wanted democracy and liberalization, but there was little popular sympathy and interest across the wide agrarian peasantry. Who knew want democracy or liberalism meant in the thousands of villages which most Chinese peasants have never left? This is why the CCP brought in rural PLA units to crush the protestors.

In the short, most of the Chinese population had and are living a traditional Confucian peasant lifestyle, the rhythms of which only change slowly. The CCP might try wild, extreme social experimentation on this hapless population, but unless such pressure is directed for long, long years, it was bound to fail. For all the awfulness of the Great Leap Forward or the Cultural Revolution, the basic cultural tropes – confucian, agrarian, traditional – changed little. Such radical shifts in attitudes take far longer, no matter how murderous the Marxist regime; Cambodia survived even the Khmer Rouge. This was and is the subculture, the real culture, below the artifices of ideology. And this subculture provided no democratic resources to the students – no myths, no past experiments, no heroes, etc. Instead, the popular culture favored/had accepted for centuries a confucian, traditionalist-nationalist blend of closed rule. And that is pretty much what the CCP is today.

2. The late 80s was a heady time of ‘democracy domino effect.’ This is ironic, insofar as the domino effect of the Cold War was to be a communist one. The idea of a democratic domino effect has not been researched much, although democratic expansion around the globe does seem to come in waves.

3. The endurance and success of the CCP continues to fire the argument that democracy and development are trade-offs. So long as Indian growth lags behind China’s, the ‘late developer’ argument that developing states cannot afford democracy will live on: democracy, with all its transaction costs, logrolling, side payments, distracting social and partisan conflicts, etc., is too expensive when growth is the real priority. Basically this is Berthold Brecht’s argument that bread is more important than freedom. I used to reject the idea that democracy is an opportunity cost of development, because it feels so illiberal. But of course, if it accurately reflects development patterns, i.e., if it is empirically accurate, then my moral discomfort is irrelevant. My suspicion is growing that the CCP and others like Lee Kwan Yoo or Park Chun-hee who make the same argument are (sadly) correct.

I am quite surprised (and disappointed) at how stable China seems to be. Like most Liberals, I like to hope that all good things go together. So for years after Tiananmen, I agreed with all those liberal progressive prognosticators (T Friedman, B Clinton, the Economist), that eventually China would open up, that all this market exposure would spur liberalization and then democracy. That just does not seem to be the case, at least in the medium term. How sad…

4. Prediction: For all the pessimism of this post, I will guess that China will still encounter a democratic transition in the long-term (before 2050). I still think democracies’ have major economic advantages over autocracies (more transparency, better rule of law, free journalism that will point out failure, less corruption). If the implicit deal between the CCP and the Chinese is high growth in exchange for political quiescence, then if growth slows, the CCP is in trouble. And autocracy’s economic inefficiencies do place a ceiling on growth. Like Indonesia and SK, I still suspect the Chinese economy will hit a plateau beyond which it cannot rise without political reform. And I do metaphysically agree with George W Bush that people want to be free, make their own choices, and have a say in their government. One day, the Tank Man will be a national hero.

What President Roh’s Death Tell Us about South Korea

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It is hard to not be astonished at the sheer scale of the South Korean grief over the death of former president Roh Moo-Hyun. TV networks estimated some 5 million people paid their respects publicly – at his home, in Busan, or in Seoul – in the last week. That is over 10% of the population. The western press response has been confusion and lack of coverage; westerners don’t really know quite what to make of it. Our chief executives pass away all the time, and even though it was a suicide, I can’t imagine anything like this social outburst happening in the West. Yet it was the top new here all last week, despite another NK nuclear blast. It was on the news all day long, and the country basically shut down on Friday for the funeral.

Something important has been unleashed, but even Koreans don’t really know, as the opposition is already trying to ride the wave as a political tool. So here are a few preliminary thoughts:

1. The FT fingered the most important insights. The connections between business and government at the top in SK are a textbook example of the problems new or transitional democracies confront in managing the economy, especially a growing one. One president after another in Korea has been investigated, usually with good cause. That Roh lamentably killed himself does not invalidate the possibility that he was corrupted by the kickbacks common in the revolving door between Korea’s political and economic elites. Business-family oligarchs corrupting politics is common practice in Asia. Growth plus elitist politics quickly breeds an informal corporatist system whereby ‘national champions’ – selected not for their prowess but their crony connections – receive subsidies and other preferential access to the budget in exchange for all sorts of election support and other sleaze. They become ‘too big to fail’ – with all the terrible inefficiencies that come with such a privileged status – and their success is easily frequently identified with that of the country. What is good for Samsung is good for Korea is still a common mindset, and this gives all sorts of leeway to the chaebol to escape market punishment by dumping costs on taxpayers. The IMF crisis helped reduce concentrated corporate power in Korea, but Koreans usually bristle when I say the crisis was good for their political economy in the medium- and long-term.

2. SK however should be congratulated for the diligence with which it investigates this corruption. Common practice of course is to sweep this stuff under the rug and pass of the costs to taxpayers. Weakly organized interests distant from power – ie, the voters – usually suffer while ensconced, politically influential interests set the national budget or business regulations. Think of Indonesia under Suharto, or China or Russia today. The IMF crisis revealed to Koreans the price of corrupt oligarchic corporatism, and these investigations, as nasty and political as they may become, at least suggest Koreans want accountability and take it seriously. This is another step in Korea’s democratization, and a necessary one. It is an awful irony on top of an awful irony that Roh stood for such accountability, then came under the light himself, and now might still be alive if the government was not so diligent in pursuing corruption.

3. The size of the outpouring of grief is the bigger story than Roh’s death itself. As I watched millions of Koreans publicly crying, even shrieking, I was increasingly reminded of the outpouring over Princess Diana. The grief process itself was a bigger story than the death. In the case of Diana, I must say it was embarrassing at first, but then increasingly disturbing. Her death was tragic of course, but a relic of a corrupt monarchy who enjoyed an unearned lifestyle of skiing and affairs enjoyed a mawkish sentimentality that suggested a shallow, celebrity-obsessed culture. There was a History Channel special top 100 people of the millennium two years later. Viewers could vote for candidates, and Diana beat out Stalin.

In Roh’s case the grief says two things. First, Koreans know how corrupt their politics is and don’t like it. That is a huge plus. That insures ongoing democratization – of great importance here in East Asia especially. The explosion of grief suggest there is a strong grassroots desire for better, cleaner governance. Koreans want their democracy to be vibrant; NK and China will take note, and that is good. By contrast, the grief over Diana was disturbing, because it suggested an unhealthy celebrity obsession, especially over royalty in a democracy.

Second, Koreans genuinely want their politics to be more open to popular participation and social mobility. Roh represented both of these trends, whereas President Lee seems to be drifting the other way. SK has a political culture dominated by a local version of French enarques. Pareto’s circulating elites are the Korean revolving door between business and politics – particularly the weak independence of Korea’s parties from the state. Roh had none of the usual enarque-style connections in the political class, and his education and career suggested that regular Koreans could aspire to the presidency. My students always giggle about Governor Schwarzenegger, and I have mixed feelings myself on his career track to such high office. But people like him or Jesse Ventura show how open the US political system is, and how social mobility is real in the US. The grief over Roh suggests Koreans want this too.

4. Finally, the outpouring reflects a feudalist, pre-modern tendency to see leaders as ‘fathers of the nation’ – an expression I have heard a few times about Roh this past week. This will fade as Korea has more and more presidents over time. Time – specifically more presidents over more time – will make the president’s office more institutional and less personalized. This too will be healthy, as the last thing Asia and developing states generally need is such ‘national fathers.’ That mindset gives you the identification of the body politic with one man – so obvious in NK, Suharto’s Indonesia, or China under Mao.

The Deficit Matters After All…

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Sometimes the dark or quirky side of me misses the Bush administration. Who can forget those ‘great’ Rumsfeld press conferences where he would attack the media (‘back off,’ ‘freedom is messy’)? Or Bush for his mind-blowing sillinesses (‘heckuva job,’ the ‘moo-lahs’ of Iran) and catastrophic English. Or Cheney (‘no doubt Iraq has nuclear weapons, ‘ deficits don’t matter’)? The political scientist in me can’t help, a little bit, but miss the sheer fun provoked by the endless stream of foolishness from the bad old days. R Gates is vastly superior SecDef, but for sheer entertainment value, you could always count on Rumsfeld to say something ridiculous on TV or Capital Hill and to provoke you. My top three ballonhead moments for W are:

1. When he ran in 2000, he was asked to name his favorite political philosopher and he said Jesus. For a nanosecond, the academic in me thought of Thomas Pangle. The moderate centrist citizen in me gaped in astonishment. To this day I remember that that line sealed my decision to vote for Gore.

2. In 2004 (I think), W was asked in a press conference what mistakes he had made. He said nothing for 15 seconds, before ducking the question. I remember exactly where I was when that happened, it stunned me so much.

3. In one of the State of the Union addresses, Bush said we could balance the budget without raising taxes. I was playing a SotU drinking game with a friend. I think I just about fell off the sofa laughing when I heard that one, and then again when I had to drill my whole cocktail in payment.

So now that reality has returned a little under the great O, another fine Bush era fantasy has just proven to be the illusion serious people always knew it was. It turns out the deficit does matter. How nice to learn once again what my freshmen learn in basic IR when we cover IPE and American power.

When W became POTUS, the deficit was under $6T. When he left, it was over $9T. Even while the economy was growing, we couldn’t balance the budget – which is a basic requirement if you want to borrow during the hard times (Clinton did this in his second term). Now the not-so-great-after-all O will give us trillion dollar plus deficits every year! Gah! I tell my Asian students this (gasp!) and then remind them who we expect to buy all those T-bills (GASP!). If Obama thinks they will just buy, buy, buy, he’s wrong. They may be great savers out here, but they’re not stupid.

Just in case you needed another W-era failure to reinforce your scope of what Obama has to fix, this is probably W’s worst pedestrian, everyday failure. It does not have the media glare and awful human toll of Katrina or Iraq, but this will effect the average American much more than those ‘highlights.’ And it is worse, because so few people understand it. You can see the awfulness of Iraq or Guantanamo on TV or when you travel and meet foreigners who loathe W and you have to tell them you come from Canada. But the deficit and the staggering debt have the kind of micro-effects only someone trained in economics can see in detail. This is not an argument for social science intellectual superiority; I mean only that it takes weeks of classtime for me to explain budgeting to my undergraduates, whereas they could grasp the Iraq mess pretty easily. The budget trainwreck is a complex topic. It is a failure that is easy to hide, dissemble about, or just ignore, as Cheney’s locution makes clear. But in myriad little ways, we must pay for this everyday. It sucks money from the budget to pay for interest on the debt (so we can keep a AAA credit rating in order to borrow MORE); it threatens higher interest rates and inflation should we lose the ability to finance it; it weakens US superpowerdom by placing vast dollar reserves in the hands of foreigners, especially China, who may not share our values. Consider, if China and Taiwan get in a shooting war, how hard it will be for the US to help Taiwan if China threatens to dump all its dollars abruptly.

So at least these people are out of government and some measure of sanity has returned. At least the Republicans can now be the voice of fiscal sanity in opposition they failed to be when in power. The irony is rich – an inverse of the ‘only Nixon can go to China’ notion. Only Clinton would try to balance the budget, because Dems are open and sensitive to the charge they tax and spend. The GOP under W went wild with the fiscus, because the usual voices for spending restraint (the Wall Street Journal, e.g.) were quiet.

Perhaps the larger problem though is we the taxpayers. It increasingly seems like the dominant problem is that Americans want government, but don’t want to pay for it. And ‘deficits don’t matter’ fits perfectly with such an attitude.

Guantanamo Recidivism

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The Pentagon seems ready to assert that 1 in 7 Guantanamo inmates return to terrorism. It seems likely that this will encourage the recent backtracking on Guantanamo’s closure. Once again, we will hear about how the inmates are hardened killers who hate America, threaten it, do not deserve due process, deserve to rot in a hole, etc. Clearly some of them do. But it must also be admitted that 1 in 7 is not such a bad recidivism rate. 14.28% is actually not that exceptional; compared to US rates it even seems low. It is also not clear just what kind of terrorism they return to.

The knee-jerk response is to say that even 1 in 7 is unacceptable, so W was right that we should just ‘lock ‘em up.’ This is an overreaction I think. There is a political choice here to be made, unless we adopt Cheney’s 1% doctrine that even 1 in 100 is too much. But by this logic, just about anyone we pick up in the GWoT should wind up in a hole, because who knows what he might do if we let him out.

But think more politically about it. 1 in 7 is bad, but it could be a lot worse. 1 in 7 is a ‘reasonable’ or ‘manageable’ number unless we assert that the goal of the GWoT is to kill every terrorist on the planet. This is impossible and would require such extreme means that it would create more problems that it would solve. As we learned in Iraq, we cannot kill (or imprison, torture, etc.) our way to victory. We don’t want the cure to kill the patient. And clearly, the side costs of Guantanamo have been enormous – the reduction of trust in the US, prestige loss, the temptation to torture, hedging by traditional allies, etc. The reasons to close Guantanamo are obvious. Idealistically, it violates core American beliefs of due process, civil liberties, human treatment of prisoners, etc. Realistically, Guantanamo’s damage to America’s reputation and its use in inspiring moderate Moslems that extremists are right about the US, almost certainly outweighs its value. In short, if we learn good intel at Guantanamo, but inspire new terrorists and betray our values in doing so, is it worth it? Is it worth 1 in 7?

Probably not. The answer to 1 in 7 is not the 1% doctrine. Instead it suggests what the lawyers and centrists have sought all along – some kind of investigative and legal process for these people. It is amazing that almost 8 years after 9/11, there is still no proper legal framework for detainees. In the place of ‘lock ‘em all up,’ we need a method to investigate, rules of evidence & appeal, punishment guidelines, special courts if necessary, etc. This process may be different for terrorist suspects and illegal combatants, but the framework must be open for public debate, authorized by congressional statute, constitutional consonant (i.e., acceptable to the Supreme Court), and with proper oversight mechanisms. Problems like this will continue arise as the GWoT rolls on, and the executive branch ad hocery of the last 8 years is both legally confused and insufficient for the burden of people to be processed.

In short, we need to create a legal framework that will allow us to investigate, and if warranted, prosecute and punish these people. This is what we normally do with other lawbreakers. Let’s adapt it to these new circumstances. Clearly some of these people are threats, but also 6 in 7 are not. That is a pretty sizeable number. Instead of absolutist positions like the 1% doctrine, we need a more nuanced, professional and sustainable approach that tries to discriminate the redeemable from the truly awful. This is what courts and investigations do everyday. The requirement to do that here is no different, even if the method will be. And we must be prepared for some recidivism nonetheless. This is the price we pay for being a liberal democracy. We can do as much as we can, within limits, to reduce our exposure, but the 1% doctrine betrays the very openness, generosity, and liberality of our society that we are trying to protect.

RINOs (Republicans in Name Only) vs Rush, Beck, & Fox News

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Before I blogged here, I and a friend tried a blog at blogspot on moderate Republicans under W. Here is the ‘manifesto’ (Sept. 2005), which I think bears repeating now, as Glenn Beck and Rush are taking the Right over the edge and driving away moderates like Arlen Specter.

“The national Republican Party today is slipping away from principles that once appealed to moderate and independent voters. We are concerned that the GOP has aligned itself closely to interest groups as powerful as those we dislike in the Democratic party. We recognize the legitimacy of interest articulation, but sharply conservative interests – from social and religious conservatives, as well as corporations – have seriously reduced the room necessary for moderates to comfortably co-exist. We do not believe that the GOP’s interests in becoming a permanent majority party are suited by the ideological narrowness of today’s leadership and strategy. While we do not blame President Bush entirely for this, he is the foremost example. His “instinctual” leadership style has empowered anti-modern and nepotistic elements in the GOP. We are concerned that short-term electoral interests have driven him to adopt highly contentious, unnecessarily conservative positions. Neither the religious right nor big business are fully consonant with the general will. In a two-party system, big tent parties are inevitable. For conservative activists who view us as “squishy” or “RINOs,” our response is that pluralism too is an American value.
We are, broadly speaking, classical liberals – or perhaps just Midwest moderates. For many years, a proper skepticism toward government and a preference for individual self-determination formed the principled core of the Republican Party. We were comfortable moderate Republicans for several decades. But today’s national GOP, with its untenable opposition to such clear requirements of good governance as accountability, empirical science, and balanced budgets, has left us profoundly alienated. Both of us felt compelled to vote for John Kerry in 2004.
We are deeply concerned that the Bush administration seems to have forgone a genuine trust in markets and individuals to embrace “big government conservatism.” We support necessary government capacity to rectify market failure and provide modern, humane safety nets, but not to reward market winners at the expense of challengers, nor to empower political cronies close to office holders, nor to shower programs on preferred electoral constituencies. We support individual freedom to make private sexual and cultural choices, and a balanced constitutionalism against the Bush administration’s breathtakingly expansive view of executive power.
These are hardly radical ideas. We do not believe the majority of Americans, or even Bush voters, share the social-conservative notion that the state should punish “immorality,” nor lobbyists’ view of public budgets as a windfall to be exploited. There is a modern, neoliberal/centrist way similar to the Free Democrats of Germany or the reformed Labor Party of Tony Blair. Such neoliberals and moderate conservatives exist here too – John McCain, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Christie Todd Whitman, George Voinovich spring to mind. We do not believe they share the divisive social conservatism, regressive fiscal propensities, and general opacity of the Bush imperial presidency.
So we invite all of you centrist and alienated Republicans to post here and engage in our debate. If you think we are Democrats, we are not. As bloggers, we feel close to grounded, moderate conservatives like Andrew Sullivan or The Economist. We generally trust the use of American power in the world. We support legal universalism against the multicultural opt-outs so dear to left. We admire the efficiency of the market and trade. But these sympathies are consonant with modernity. Increasingly the national GOP rejects the Enlightenment. We call it back.”

Start Investigating the Bush People for Torture

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The debate is beginning on investigating the Bush administration for torture. It seems to me that this is a no-brainer, and I am amazed at the hysterical conservative reaction that this will embolden the terrorists or divide the country. Perhaps the worst GOP cliche is that we will be ‘looking backward when we need to look to the future.’ Gimme a break. Accountability, which includes investigation where suspicion merits, is pretty basic in a democracy.

If the law was broken, there needs to be an investigation and possible prosecution. That is legally required. But of course, the politics of it are far more determinative of whether an investigation will happen.

1. If the Bush people have done nothing wrong, then they have nothing to fear. As Al Haig said to Nixon, an investigation can only prove that Dean is wrong, correct? (Ooops!) Indeed, an investigation will give the Bushies a chance to end this thing once and for all and defend their actions openly. Ex-DCI Hayden has already begun this by saying that torture did save US lives. We need to have this debate, in order to set the historical record straight and to decide if our values will permit torture if/when its efficacious.

2. Transparency and oversight are important. The country is far better off for things like the Watergate investigation or the Church committee. Investigating possible abuses of power so as to avoid them in the future is a fundamental difference between open and closed societies. It is also a major part of the balance of power. Congressional investigations of possible executive malfeasance are an important oversight tool. Having these debates out in public is good for the republic. It keeps government honest and insures the citizenry is informed of what occurs in their name, and hopefully encourages them to participate more. It is a healthy exercise that we do this when called for. It keeps us vigilant over our politics.

3. Walt makes the obvious and excellent point that the US has pushed for investigations and indictments of war criminals in places like the Balkans, Iraq, and Africa. If we brush this under the carpet, it will be far more difficult for the US to advocate for war crimes prosecutions in the future. The hypocrisy is so rank and obvious. To not investigate will damage the soft power and US reputation that Obama wants so much to restore and utilize.

The Imminent Death of ‘Democratic Realism’

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Obama’s bow to the Saudi king may go down as one of those moments when Americans, or at least its foreign policy elite, realized the dead-end of the new realism of the post-Bush Democratic Party. Obama was probably just trying to be polite, and bowing is a common, albeit declining, practice in much of Eurasia. It is pretty uncommon to Americans, so it is easier to overread its significance. (Its so ingrained in Koreans, eg, that I have seen people bow instinctively after a phone conversation.)

But it is also true that it is a not a democratic or egalitarian practice. It is rooted in aristocracies like those of Prussia, France or Britain. It does signify some deference, and those lower on the food chain are supposed to bow more deeply than those higher up. (You learn the intricate gradations of bowing in Asian cultures.) And Obama’s bow was awfully deep (about 90 degrees). Honestly, he probably should not have done it.

It looks pretty awkward for the leader of the world’s most successful democracy to bow to one the world’s most reactionary monarchs. And this mini-flap is part of the larger debate stirred up by Obama’s outreach to some of the nastier regimes on the planet – including Iran and Russia. Not only the American nationalist right, but most Americans will eventually sour on it.

The reason is that realism is not the instinct of Americans when it comes to foreign policy. Most Americans like think that US foreign policy is doing good in the world, and we recite our history to ourselves in that manner. I see it in my undergrads all the time. They love movies like Black Hawk Down or Band of Brothers (Americans dying to do the right thing for others), or just go watch the History Hitler Channel’s constant celebration of WWII, the ‘good war.’ In US foreign policy mythology, Eurasians are gutless, insipid dealmakers (EU countries trading with Iran and yakking at the UNSC) or progenitors of world-breaking fanaticisms (fascism, communism, Islamic fundamentalism) the US has to stop. The US is the city on the hill needlessly dragged in by Pearl Harbor or 9/11 to clean up Eurasia’s inability to leave in peace with itself. (For the long explanation of all this, try William Russell Mead’s Special Providence; the title alone tells you enough.)

Nor is realism really the position of the Democratic Party or Obama in their hearts. Obama is too much the social liberal – a supporter, eg, of gay and abortion rights – at home to really believe that the US should ‘respect’ dictatorships, theocracies and other closed states. Nor is realism the traditional foreign policy stance of the Democratic party. Since Americas ‘rise to globalism,’ the Democrats have traditionally argued that the US should promote human rights, expand aid, avoid alliances with nasties, limit the use and scope of force, etc. One of the great, and underappreciated moments, in the Democrats’ foreign policy history is C Vance’s principled resignation.

It is the GOP that is supposed to be the heartless defender of US interests, cold pragmatists, willing to expend ‘blood for oil,’ and all that. But actually, the GOP has never been so thoroughly realist either. Nixon and Bush 1 were the most ‘realist’ GOP presidents, but Reagan, the great GOP folk hero, was decidedly not. Reagan thought nuclear weapons, MAD, and the Cold War were a moral bane on mankind. He was as crusading as W on the promotion of US values abroad. And W of course argued that democracy promotion should be the whole point of US foreign policy.

My guess is that the newfound realism of the Democrats is simply a reaction to W, whom the left loathed. N Pelosi represents the city with the largest population of homosexuals in the country. She can’t honestly believe that Iran, whose president said there are no homosexuals in his country, is just another country we can deal with. At some point, she, Obama, HRC, and the others will turn from NK, Russia, Iran, etc. in disgust. They won’t be as obnoxious about it as W was, but I predict we will be nagging the Chinese about human rights again soon, re-containing Iran, squabbling with Russia and NK, etc. This trend will only accelerate as it becomes clear that pragmatic engagement doesn’t work much anyway: http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSTRE53B0Y020090412 and http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/nation/2009/04/116_43165.html.

He’s a Black President and No One Really Cares … So Stop Bringing It Up

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Eugene Robinson finally got one right about race in the US. Usually he (and Bob Herbert at the NYT and Tavis Smiley) represent the worst unreconstructed, temperature-raising, black vs white, ‘civil rights’ commentary. So he deserves recognition, even if he did take the time to remind us that Obama is black, even while telling us no one is thinking about it (he clearly is). Kinda snarky there, but understandable given what a breakthrough Obama was.

The notion that somehow Obama’s great relevance is his race is astonishingly irrelevant, parochial, and incorrect. If the liberal commentariat and black political/academic elite absorb this, then hopefully the notion of a ‘black America’ as a Quebec-like societe distincte will slowly disappear. It is divisive, unhelpful, and empirically inaccurate anyway; Obama’s own election demonstrates this, as does the wide popularity among non-black Americans of black socio-cultural contribution – Oprah, jazz, rap, Michael Jordan, C Powell on the lecture circuit, the brief and rather quixotic ‘Condy for president’ wave, whatever. This is Obama’s own vision (‘no white America, no black America’) – as well as ML King’s of course – and the promise of the US melting pot. The alternative is that hideous and divisive multiculturalist metaphor – that the US should be a ‘tossed salad’ of clumped ethnic groups simply living in proximity. This strikes me as risky (Canada, Yugoslavia) and inaccurate – with the exception of Native Americans and the Amish, I don’t think most minorities in the US are so removed or culturally alienated that they merit the classification francophones demand in Canada. Do we really want to give up on integrative Americanization in favor of  self-segregated suburbs and gated-communities?

Irrelevant, because in the midst of 2 wars and the worst economic crisis since the Depression, who really cares? Parochial, because he is president of the whole country, and a simple black-white bifurcation no longer corresponds to its ethnic reality anyway. To say he is one of ‘us’ against them is narrow, racist, and needlessly perpetuates US racial divisions. Finally, it’s incorrect, because – if you must read race into his presidency – his mixed race background is the real story, not his ‘blackness.’ His family is a great story of the integration and tolerance the US seeks to achieve.

And in point of fact, the great man has not governed in any recognizably ‘black’ manner. IR feminists used to hope that women in power might in some way be more peaceful or multilateral, than their male counterparts. Yet women as different in background as M Thatcher, G Meir and I Gandhi were just as ‘realist,’ nationalist, and prickly as any other male foreign policy figure (too bad…sigh). And Obama too has shown that black American presidents will go the same way. Abroad, he has increased Predator strikes in Afghanistan and has raised US troop levels there. He is holding the line on NK (sort of), and Ipredict he will soon be confronting Russia and Iran in the place of the vaunted but empty ‘reset.’ (They’re simply too illiberal and nasty for a liberal like Obama to stomach for long.) At home, his governing style is marked by gifted oratory and outreach, but this veils a clearly partisan agenda. He has not talked up or openly identified ‘black issues’ for special treatment, and his staff is packed with white technocrats. All these choices are his right – he won. But it shows that he hardly self-indentifies as a ‘black politician’ in the sense of classic ‘civil rights’ figures like Jesse Jackson, Marion Barry, or George Forbes. He is clearly a racial bridge-builder, but he seems to do this naturally, not as a stratagem for power or moral recognition on cable TV. (In this he is similar to former Cleveland mayor Michael White.)

So stop telling us he is black, start judging him by his record, and even better, start admitting that its not going so well.

Give Hillary a Break Already on ‘Fashion’ – Who Really Cares?!

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In an otherwise intelligent article on Turko-US relations, Yigal Schleifer makes the following wholly unnecessary remark: “Clinton appeared on a popular television chat show, Haydi Gel Bizimle Ol (Come and Join Us), similar to the popular American talk show The View. On the program, Clinton opened up to the four hosts about her family life and her challenged sense of fashion.”

Wth? Why? What is the possible value to the article of this remark? I can’t possibly understand why anyone really gives a d— about HRC’s clothes. If I were a woman, this is exactly the kind of pointless aside that would drive me up the wall and tell me there is still sexism in the world. For something like 20 years, Hillary’s clothes and hairstyles have been an on-again, off-again topic of conversation. What is the possible relevance of any of that to anything meaningful at all in her political interests? It’s so thoroughly pointless and vapid, and, given it endless repetition, vaguely chauvinistic.

I will admit that I know little about ‘fashion’ (‘nice clothes’ to me means Brooks Brothers),  but its not as if HRC dresses in t-shirts or jeans or otherwise unprofessionally. So give her break, because, really, why do you care so much? Aren’t your concerns about politics deeper than women politicians’ color schemes? (If you think I am exaggerating, read Maureen Dowd’s fawningly sycophantic coverage of Michelle Obama, especially here.)

This reminds me of an oft-repeated and similarly pointless pseudo-criticism of Al Gore in 2000. He was supposedly a poor candidate because he was too wonky and dorky, and he looked stiff when he gave Tipper ‘the kiss.’ GAH!! Who really cares? Must we be so embarrassingly insipid? Who cares what the E! Network or whatever thinks of Gore’s kissing ability? Don’t we want politicians who are a little nerdy and overread and don’t worry excessively about matching their jewelry or something ? I’ll take Hillary over Mrs. Sarkozy’s fluff, or Gore over the incurious W any day.

And for good measure, when HRC came to SK last month, she gave a good talk to a women’s college in Seoul. She said good stuff to young women about empowerment and advancement in a male-dominated society. And to its credit, no one in the SK media mentioned her clothes, style, etc. By contrast, I can only imagine HRC rightfully grinding her teeth on the Turkish View as some product of plastic surgey half her age asked her why she wore those shoes at that dinner in the 1990s. Awful…