Ross Douthat on Palin's resignation

This excerpt from Ross Douthat’s latest NYT column may seem a bit bizarre at first:

Palin’s popularity has as much to do with class as it does with ideology. In this sense, she really is the perfect foil for Barack Obama. Our president represents the meritocratic ideal — that anyone, from any background, can grow up to attend Columbia and Harvard Law School and become a great American success story. But Sarah Palin represents the democratic ideal — that anyone can grow up to be a great success story without graduating from Columbia and Harvard.

First, we have meritocracy positioned opposite democracy. Funny, I had thought that democracy was the best route to meritocracy, that the two generally complimented each other—electing, and more importantly reelecting,* people based on performance. Yet somehow Douthat finds them opposed.

In order to do that, he has to gut the phrase “democratic ideal” of its core spirit, at least as we know it—election based on popularity, itself due to performance**—leaving only the barest of shells: election based on popularity, itself due to…“success,” which he leaves undefined. Oh, but the important thing is, he tells is, that she stands as a representative of the working class, Real American Values. Just keep that in mind, everybody.

So, election based on popularity, itself based on…ah…what? Just popularity via, in Palin’s case, cultural identification? Republican pollster Alex Castellanos, of the (in)famous “white hands” ad, does admit that “…with Republicans her support is not based on her record as governor of Alaska.”***

It’s not a meritocracy, then, I’ll give Douthat that. And it is indeed a form of democracy; in fact, Plato himself considered this form—rule based purely on immediate mass appeal, whether due to identification with a certain class, pacification through “bread and circuses,” or other means—to be the most accurate definition of the word. The philosopher also ranked it as the worst possible form of government for precisely this reason, behind even oligarchy, rule by merchants (his definition).

Douthat’s passage makes sense, then, if you assume he’s talking about “democratic ideals” as a Platonian. For some reason, I don’t think he would agree...but rather than accuse such an esteemed thinker of intellectual dishonesty or inconsistency, let’s go with this reading.

Our president represents the meritocratic ideal — that anyone, from any background, can grow up to attend Columbia and Harvard Law School and become a great American success story, rising by virtue of merit alone. But Sarah Palin represents the democratic ideal — that anyone can grow up to be a charismatic, shallow, power-hungry egomaniac† without graduating from Columbia and Harvard.

The man finally writes a column I can agree with! Good to be on the same side for once, Ross.

*Something that Palin, perhaps not coincidentally, has just taken off the table.
** Often correlated with some measure of intellect and open-mindedness.
***Full quote: “For independents and Democrats, [Palin's] already not their candidate, and with Republicans her support is not based on her record as governor of Alaska.”
†A universally human sort of success story--Ross was even careful enough to leave "American" out in the original piece

Is 'bombast' a necessity?

Caught an interesting NYT article on the economic and diplomatic inroads that China quietly made in Latin America during the Bush years. For those unfamiliar with the state of relations between that Administration and our southern neighbors, let's just say 'antarctic' wouldn't be far off. Indeed, Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, love him or hate him, probably owes a good part of his career to the seething contempt for Bush that characterizes the region.

One thing jumped out at me near the end.

Despite forging ties to Venezuela and extending loans to other nations that have chafed at Washington’s clout, Beijing has bolstered its presence without bombast, perhaps out of an awareness that its relationship with the United States is still of paramount importance. But this deference may not last.

“This is China playing the long game,” said Gregory Chin, a political scientist at York University in Toronto. “If this ultimately translates into political influence, then that is how the game is played.”

This seems to imply that the default or preferred state for a superpower, or any power at all, is 'bombast', the lack or absence of which is considered 'deference'. Notwithstanding that this strikes me as a false dichotomy, how is bombast anything more than a luxury, indulged at one's own risk? China is strengthening its hand in real terms, whether it trumpets this to the skies or not. Even if it were the biggest fish in the pond, I fail to see how this sort of bragging could do anything to advance its agenda. If anything, it would hurt their interests.

I'm curious; is this sort of thinking a product of the past 8 years--though they should have been enough to show anyone the folly of bombast in foreign relations--or is it simply a generally accepted principle? Were I to helm a superpower, I would do my utmost to keep everything as simple and low profile as possible; attracting attention and riling people up would only hinder my cause in the long run. Something to ponder, anyway.

That final paragraph reminds me a bit of why I'm such a fan of Machiavelli and Sun Tzu; I'll make a follow up post at some point to discuss those interests in greater detail.

The State of the Military: An Introduction

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience... We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

...Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

--President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Farewell Address, 1961



Eisenhower's worst fear, total dominance of government by the arms industry and its political backers, has not been realized. However, the military-industrial complex plagues us still.

While its unwarranted influence may not be responsible for the subversion of our domestic or international political goals, it has undoubtedly reinforced and disseminated its requirements across American society to the point of impeding our government’s ability to achieve its political and military goals.

With the beginning of the Korean War and the reformation of the U.S. armed services following their post-World War II drawdown, the US military elite began to see the need for a fully formed professional army, ready to serve at a moment’s notice. The years of a tiny peacetime military had ended, and the burgeoning Cold War and its accompanying arms race required massive military spending that inevitably encouraged an environment of waste and complicity at the Pentagon.

Even by Cold War standards, however, the past eight years have left an army once capable of flexible, worldwide response now hamstrung, eroded, and overstretched. Yet vastly expensive weapons programs designed to fight yesterday’s battles continue to plod along in the bowels of the Pentagon, sucking up valuable funding and resources. Meanwhile, the services of America's military faces dramatic tasks of a seriously different nature.

The Obama administration has found its power projection capability outside of Iraq and Afghanistan hampered, up to the point that its ability to conduct strategic diplomacy in general is seriously impeded. On top of this, President Obama has given himself perhaps the most difficult task of all: a complete overhaul the entire defense procurement process, the military-industrial complex itself.

The years preceding George W. Bush's presidency marked a period of simultaneous decreases in military spending and increases in the number of military operations abroad. While President Clinton is said to have been reluctant to deploy the U.S. military to intervene abroad, international events often forced U.S. intervention. In such cases he employed a flexible response, often involving the use of cruise missiles and the Marines.

This strategy, however, made for a poor match with available U.S. military forces, but the lessons of such conflicts never managed to penetrate the walls of the Pentagon. As such, development of weapons systems irrelevant to these conflicts and the tactics required to fight them continued.

We at the Internet Bullhorn plan to run a series of posts on these issues and how the Obama Administration might best address them. Each issue can be roughly divided into two parts: reorganizing military forces and procurement methods in order to craft a more efficient and effective fighting force, and the interplay between this process and the United States’ role on the international stage.

An Obama Military
The latest copy of Obama's budget plan for the Department of Defense provides for a 4 percent increase in funding. Among other things, this includes funds for a larger Army and Marine Corps, increased benefits for enlisted families, continuing operational costs for the two major theater operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, and plans intended to 'leverage allied support to help struggling states such as Pakistan, which are the keystones for regional stability.'

However, this 4 percent rise in defense spending also masks an overall reallocation of spending to focus on operational costs, as opposed to purchasing new weapons systems. This then implies budget cuts, at least for the Navy and Air Force.

Overall, the focus of defense spending under an Obama administration looks to be based on pragmatism and logistical practicality, stressing the tactical needs of counterinsurgency warfare insofar as they secure strategic goals. This may well exclude the need for major technological spending on programs like the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, freeing up money towards increasing troop levels, improving the integration of theater command, and ensuring all troops in current war zones are properly equipped.

On March 4th , President Obama officially opened the door to the axing of one or more of these high end weapons systems with a memorandum giving the Office of Management and Budget the ability to cancel any development program or contract it deems wasteful.

The Road Ahead
The United States can only afford a foreign policy that is backed with teeth, and if it cannot afford the armed forces that serve as those teeth, it must reexamine its foreign commitments. An inability to project power abroad stilts any administration's ability to respond to international events and threatens the international status of our Union.

Military power exists solely to produce political results, war being merely an extension of politics. A military unable to meet the requirements set by political necessity is no longer a fully capable armed force. Determining which programs are prime candidates for cutting, and which programs stand to ultimately ensure national security in proportion to cost will be the objective of this study.

States: America's SEZs?

Fascinating article in today's New York Times about Obama's openness to '"progressive federalism."' That is, where 'governors and activist state attorneys general...try to lead the way on environmental initiatives, consumer protection and other issues.' The article quotes Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis describing in 1932 how each state can '"serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country."'

Upon reading that quote, I immediately thought of China's Special Economic Zones (SEZs), which Deng Xiaoping established in the early 80s to experiment with market capitalism without committing the entire country to wide-ranging reforms with uncertain consequences.

There are, of course, important differences. Deng's de facto dictator status and the Chinese central government's total power enabled him to impose the SEZs wherever he deemed best, so for China the process was very much an experiment directed from the top. Once it proved successful, Deng expanded the reforms to include the entire country (though important differences still exist between the SEZs and the rest of the PRC).

Progressive federalism, on the other hand, is driven by democratically elected state governments impatient with the federal government's slow pace or badly applied regulations. It's not clear whether some of these initiatives, if successful, will be taken up by Washington and applied on a national level, though the fact that it will have taken a state to try them in the first place leads me to believe that Congressional passage would be difficult at best. Plus, if the state is large enough or if enough states adopt the same reform, it may become more profitable for affected companies to treat it as though it were a federal law rather than maintaining separate production lines for different states. I anticipate Republican complaints about large blue states like California setting the regulatory pace for the entire country, as it already seems to be doing.

Krauthammer: pettiness and insecurity

Charles Krauthammer splutters with indignant outrage at President Obama's 'apology' interview with the Dubai-based al-Arabiya cable network. (NOTE: outside of block quotes, I use single quotes to denote Krauthammer's words and double quotes for sayings or anything not from the column).

[Obama was] needlessly defensive and apologetic.

Is it "new" to acknowledge Muslim interests and show respect to the Muslim world? Obama doesn't just think so, he said so again to millions in his al-Arabiya interview, insisting on the need to "restore" the "same respect and partnership that America had with the Muslim world as recently as 20 or 30 years ago."

Astonishing. In these most recent 20 years -- the alleged winter of our disrespect of the Islamic world -- America did not just respect Muslims, it bled for them. It engaged in five military campaigns, every one of which involved -- and resulted in -- the liberation of a Muslim people: Bosnia, Kosovo, Kuwait, Afghanistan and Iraq.

Krauthammer continues in this vein, angrily maintaining that even in the face of repeated abuse from the 'Muslim world', such as the OPEC embargo and all kinds of 'cold-blooded' terrorism, the United States has done nothing but seek to alleviate the plight of Muslims around the world.

Perhaps the past eight years have made it hard for Krauthammer to remember, but what Obama is doing is called "diplomacy." Regardless of how one-sided our relationship with the 'Muslim world' may be, if indeed it is, it is their perception of us that really matters. And currently, we are seen as the firm, unyielding backbone of the hated, land-stealing, baby-killing Zionist menace. That description may be significantly at odds with reality--and the additional hatred brought on since March 2003 may be even more at odds with Krauthammer's reality--but if our goal is to engage with the Muslim Middle East, that is the view with which we must engage, at least to start out with. The goal being, of course, to change it.

Keep in mind, Obama has made no actual concessions nor promises to the 'Muslim world' or any individual majority-Muslim Middle Eastern country. But reading Krauthammer, you'd think he gave away the world:

If Barack Obama wants to say, as he said to al-Arabiya, I have Muslim roots, Muslim family members, have lived in a Muslim country -- implying a special affinity that uniquely positions him to establish good relations -- that's fine. But it is both false and deeply injurious to this country to draw a historical line dividing America under Obama from a benighted past when Islam was supposedly disrespected and demonized.

Again, it may be false, especially from Krauthammer's point of view, but it's the perception within the Muslim world that matters. More to the point, though, 'deeply injurious'? Really? How exactly does it hurt us as a nation for our president to apologize for perceived wrongs? For myself, I would add "especially when there is some substance to the complaints," but even if you take Krauthammer's view that we have done nothing but good, how exactly does it hurt us to simply apologize?

Hurt George W. Bush's legacy, perhaps, though by all accounts the former President needs no assistance there. But the United States 'as a country'? Again, even if this amounts to 'gratuitous disparagement of the country he is now privileged to lead', as Krauthammer continues, I fail to see how exactly that leaves us weaker as a nation.

On the contrary, owning up to one's own mistakes, real or perceived, and apologizing for same costs us nothing. In fact, I would argue that it makes us look more powerful. "Being the bigger man"--notice the word "bigger"?

Let's try a different tack. Ever see a Porsche commercial that loudly asserts their number one status? How about Johnny Walker--"Keep walking", what kind of an ad is that? Nothing in there about what makes their brand superior to that of other scotch.

Openly flaunting one's power and wealth creates the impression of insecurity and hidden weakness.* There's a reason that "nouveau riche" is considered an insult. A lesson certainly lost on the supremely patriotic and testy Bush Administration, and apparently on Charles Krauthammer, too. Or do is America really so fragile that a few apologies is enough to bring her down?






*In fact--and I can't find an exact quote at the moment--far better writers than I have observed a certain shabbiness associated with the truly wealthy, those with absolute security and a total lack of self-consciousness about their status. I have seen this mentioned more often in connection with the British rather than the American upper classes, which I assume is due to the greater length of British history allowing the upper classes to grow more accustomed to their greater means. (A quick Google search turns up this (search for "shabbiness") and this, just to provide a few examples). Of course, this also meant greater social stratification and less social mobility in general, as opposed to the rags-to-riches American Dream. Might these other characteristics also apply to countries as well as people? Perhaps, but, I would argue, not nearly as inevitably, and anyway that's another post.