Who are the debtors?

PRE-POSTSCRIPT: Drowning in the firehose of commentary about the crisis and "bailout," I can only recommend my favorites, Instapundit (Glenn Reynolds) and Megan McArdle's joint. Reynolds' entries are terse but frequent; McArdle's less frequent and sometimes a bit long-winded (like I'm one to talk). Both have good links to other places. Megan has a funny screed against bad metaphors for the crisis here. Glenn correctly nudges people to use "rescue" instead of "bailout."*

An idea definitely worth supporting is replacing Pelosi and Reid as House Speaker and Senate leader, respectively. Both have been embarrassments to their party and country. Bush's popularity oscillates between 30 and 40%. This Congress' ratings have never been higher than low 20s and have sunk, at times, into single digits. With good reason, it's the most unpopular Congress since World War Two. Assuming the Democrats maintain control of the House (which they probably will, with a smaller majority), the best choice is Clintonista Rahm Emanuel. Politics makes strange bedfellows: weird as I feel typing these words, everyone's disgusted with Reid-elosi, and the Dems desperately need a counter to the cultish children's crusade that is their presidential campaign.

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The credit market and housing debt crisis continues to gyrate. Strangely, it seems to have boosted the prospects of the party that bears much of the blame for it. Remember: government is now involved in backing about 40% of home mortgages.

While I would have voted for the bailout bill if no alternative were available, I completely understand the motives of the House members who voted against. They got an earful from their constituents and only weak pressure from the House leadership. It's essential to decouple the credit-liquidity crunch from the longer-term asset-decline problem. It's too early to seriously discuss responding to the latter. The former needs a response now.

Finance/economics blogger Fabius Maximus (F.M. from this point) recently published a fascinating and frightening look at American debt trends since World War Two. While his views are always loaded with doom and gloom, this argument is worth a look; he's backed it up with hard numbers ultimately based on what the Federal Reserve tracks. F.M.'s debt ratio charts show various categories of debt from 1952 until now, as a fraction of GDP. (The GDP is gross domestic product, the annual output of the American economy, the world's largest, at a little more than a quarter of the global total). I'll admit: my jaw dropped too.

Such high debt ratios are the deep fact now spooking credit markets and foreign investors, deeper than the immediate credit crisis or falling housing prices. No society can get into as much debt as we're in and not create a huge crisis of confidence among lenders. With no sign that the debt accumulation will stop, they've cut back their lending, even to the creditworthy. We've been lucky that this debt is denominated in our own currency, allowing the Fed to massage the money supply and keep credit crises at bay in the past. But, still, there is a limit. Evidently, we've reached it.

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From these charts, both the numbers and their trends, we can draw some conclusions at some variance with received wisdom.

Government itself, far from being the main debt culprit, is the least. Its ratio reached an absolute peak in 1945 and has not approached it since.

A large federal debt does seem to be a permanent feature of modern America. The period of the 1960s and 1970s, when the federal debt ratio dropped, is misleading in one respect. In that era, government policy was to print money rather than borrow it. The tendency to borrow, established in the 1930s and 40s, returned in the 80s. OTOH, the effect of peace dividends is real: the drop of the federal debt ratio after World War Two and in the late 80s and early 90s reflects the end of one very large and another, less intensive, conflict. Both the 1950s and the 90s were periods of falling federal debt ratios, because the pressure to increase government spending had eased off. The period after 2000 was marked by a smaller, but still significant, surge in federal debt, mostly a result of the Republicans' new eagerness for big government.**

Business enterprises, both financial (banking and insurance, essentially) and non-financial, have developed a large leveraging habit, borrowing in good times -- during economic expansions -- and paying down in bad -- during and just after recessions. They learned to start doing this in the Great Inflation of the 1970s, because inflation makes debt attractive.

But the habit persisted long after high inflation ended in the 80s. The rationale for business debt is simple: borrow now, found or expand a business, and future profits will more than take care of it. While this "leveraging" generally works, it doesn't work consistently enough to prevent major debt crises from hitting poorly performing corporations at every recessionary downturn. It's a risky strategy with extravagant real payoffs, but frequent casualties as well.

Finally, Americans as consumers, individuals and households, have by far the biggest taste for debt -- an extraordinary taste for it, in fact -- much more than corporations and government.

The largest component of this debt consists of mortgages. But it also consists of credit cards, student and home equity loans, and all the rest. Almost 40% of this debt ratio's increase occurred just in the last 15 years or so.

Powerful institutional and social habits reinforce the preference for personal and household debt. Many of our institutions, both public and private, make debt look and feel very attractive. While bankruptcy was made more punitive a few years ago, lending standards have continued to drop (at least, until a few weeks ago). Inevitably, there will soon be a lot of people in a lot of financial pain and legal trouble. It was fine to make bankruptcy more punitive -- but only if borrowing itself had been made more difficult as well.

F.M.'s charts make me wonder something else. Rather than take on too much debt themselves, government (in relation to housing and higher education) and banks (in relation to credit cards, mortgages, and home equity loans) have instead encouraged ordinary people to take on debt, a lot of it. Preaching prudence and probity, but also enticing us with borrowing and spending, often ready to "juice" the economy with cheap credit, these are institutions at war with themselves, sending very mixed messages.
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* More accurately, Part I (credit crunch) is a "rescue"; Part II (falling house prices) is a "distressed asset collection and fire sale."

But, ah!, a cynical Ann Althouse smirks in the background :)

** An important feature F.M.'s charts is that his current federal debt totals about $6 trillion, not the $9 trillion you usually hear.

The reason is that he doesn't count $3 trillion in past Social Security and Medicare debt, which (as he rightly points out) merely consists of IOUs written by government to itself. It is not part of the federal debt held by bondholders. In any case, present entitlement costs are at this time paid for by present tax revenue. That will start to change in the next decade, however.

The New Deal reconsidered: The war years

Dedicated to the memory of my parents

To organize a society for a cause means facing everyone in one direction, toward an external goal, and what better goal than crushing an enemy? If there is no foreign one, then, as FDR discovered, domestic ones have to be invented. After his 1936 landslide victory, FDR began to do just that, ultimately overreaching with his 1937 Supreme Court-packing scheme. This crisis proved the beginning of the end for the New Deal. And 1938 saw a recession, wiping out the partial recovery that had taken hold in 1935-36, and large losses in Congress for the New Dealers, who were replaced by Republicans and conservative Democrats. The court crisis set off a wave of disillusionment, as more and more voters realized how limited the New Deal's accomplishments were. Voters recoiled in horror at the blatant violation of separation of powers inherent in FDR's attempt to manufacture a Supreme Court that would rubberstamp what he wanted. America would not become a dictatorship.

And then international crisis came. The 1930s was the most isolationist decade in American history (check out Little Orphan Annie and Daddy Warbucks). For much of the decade, FDR not only went along with it, he helped to destroy the world trading system by leaving the gold standard. Central planning is a lot easier with a closed economy, after all. With the New Deal on the way out, however, Roosevelt, like many presidents frustrated with domestic stalemate, turned to foreign affairs. The Spanish Civil War (1936-39) gave a preview of coming attractions, so to speak, not only with fascist Italy and Germany supporting Franco, but the Soviets trying to control the anti-fascist opposition for their own purposes. Roosevelt's distant cousin, Winston Churchill, then on the outs of British politics, was already sounding the warning about Germany. By 1940, the war was underway, and American shipping was being attacked by German submarines in the Atlantic.

But there was nothing close to approaching consensus about whether the US should enter or even support the Allies. Bad memories of Wilson and the "war to end all wars" twenty years earlier were still fresh. The largest peace movement in American history, America First, was formed in 1939 to head off American intervention. These isolationists were a motley collection: opponents of the New Deal and FDR mixed with labor, church, and pacifist leaders. Even with the New Deal gone, modern "total" war would mean a large and possibly permanent increase in federal and presidential power. In the Middle West, Republicans of German and Scandinavian extraction looked favorably upon the Third Reich. Democrats of Irish background (like Kennedy père) looked unfavorably upon Britain. At the fringe were a small but vocal (if embarrassing) group of Nazi fellow-travelers. With the Soviet Union an ally of Germany after August 1939 and the fall of France in June 1940, the anti-German cause looked lost anyway. Only after Britain refused to fold in the summer and fall of 1940, did American public opinion begin to change. Even so, while most Americans in 1941 hoped for an Allied victory, until Pearl Harbor, most were still unwilling to intervene directly. Only the attack on Pearl Harbor banished, at least for a while, the antiwar and anti-FDR voices.

Popular historian Thomas Fleming's witty, readable, and controversial The New Dealers' War: FDR and the War Within World War II details the suspension of normal politics "for the duration" and how FDR and his administration kept grumbling and discontent at bay. The result was remarkable: the US reached a level of consensus on international affairs in those years that, while attacked from various directions afterward, did not fully dissipate until the 1990s. This in spite of serious deception (hiding how ill FDR was in the 1944 election) and strong illusions in some quarters about Stalin's designs on postwar Europe.

The full disillusionment with the New Deal never had time to sink in before America began to turn its attention in 1940 to war. The economic build-up finally did what the New Deal never could, namely, end the Depression. In less than two years, the US economy went from idle capacity and high unemployment to shortages. International crisis - preparing for war, then hot war, the start of the Cold War - delayed the reaction against the New Dealers until the 1950s, in fact. Invented domestic bogeymen were not necessary; for a while at least, there were real ones, on the outside.*

Moral inequivalencies. In spite of the similarities of the different collectivist tendencies, comparison is not equation. In the 1930s, the United States had no concentration camps, no liquidation of political or class enemies, no genocides, no destruction of the Constitution. It did experience under FDR an astonishing transformation of presidential power: compared to the handful of 19th century executive orders, and the hundreds of Wilson, we got thousands in the 1930s and 40s. Congress alienated an entire chunk of its law-making power to executive agencies. Ordinary freedoms were partly suspended "for the duration," and a hundred thousand Japanese-Americans were put into temporary camps. But the political system mostly remained in place, limiting presidential reach. Towards the end of the war, as the nature of the fascist enemy become clear to Americans, an even sharper disillusionment with the all-powerful state set in. Whatever problems a free society suffered from, the modern omni-state had turned out to be the most lethal weapon ever created. Deeper awareness a few years later of the Stalinist system reinforced the lesson. This was era when everyone started reading Orwell's Animal Farm and Hayek's Road to Serfdom, both published in Britain in the war's last years.

Follow the yellow brick road. For FDR's subsequent reputation, the war years made all the difference. The New Deal ended on an ambiguous and largely negative note. It had, in all probability, prolonged the Depression and certainly not ended it. But if FDR is counted among the greatest presidents, it is because of his skillful leading of Americans into the largest conflict in history, one that it was not initially obvious could be won.

When we compare successful war presidents (FDR, Lincoln, Washington, as well as other democratic leaders like Churchill and De Gaulle) to less successful ones (McKinley, Wilson, Bush), the obvious thing that leaps out is the degree to which the political ground was properly prepared before the conflict was engaged. Pearl Harbor, like the attack on Fort Sumter and the battles at Concord and Lexington, was the culmination of a process, not its beginning. The other key to successful war leadership is that, however indispensable they might seem at the start, great democratic leaders, by evoking popular initiative and enthusiasm, make themselves superfluous in the end. Churchill and Roosevelt were indispensable at the outset. Yet the war ended successfully without them, one dead, they other turned out of office by voters. This is far removed from a cult figure like Hitler, whose suicide just a few weeks after FDR's death, marked the end of his entire regime and movement.

Two years before Americans went to war in 1941, they sat in theaters and watched the film version of The Wizard of Oz. In the story that everyone knows, Dorothy and her friends set off to receive prized human virtues from the mysterious and powerful Wizard, who turns out, after his booming, amplified voice is turned off, to be less than imposing. From him, they receive the courage, love, and intelligence they seek, but come to realize that they actually had them all along. After all, they defeated the Wicked Witch of the West and done other marvels without the Wizard's gifts. After the Wicked Witch, even Hitler would seem like a piece of cake.
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* Several hundred Soviet agents working in Washington in the late 1930s and during the war have been firmly identified from Soviet records available to historians after the Cold War ended. However, the defection of two of them (Elizabeth Bentley and Whittaker Chambers) in 1945 caused the Soviets to shut down their espionage operations. By 1948, there was nothing left of it. Leading liberal lights, however, such as Eleanor Roosevelt and President Truman, could not bring themselves to admit that such things had been going on and that establishment figures such as Alger Hiss, of good family and reputation, were involved in it.

Their lack of honesty on this issue made liberals politically vulnerable. If the Korean War had not broken out, the resulting attacks, by McCarthy and others, probably would have remained on the fringe. But American soldiers dying in a country supposedly already secure made it an irresistible issue.

The New Deal reconsidered: Liberal fascism

PRE-POSTSCRIPT: Here's a podcast interview with Jonah Goldberg.
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Up there on Amazon's best-seller lists for months now has been Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning. The book has brought back a debate that should be at the forefront of our politics, but rarely is. One of Goldberg's goals is to lay to rest a mythology that has been central to the American left and more mainstream liberals since the 1930s, that Anglo-American conservatism is somehow "fascist"; and more generally the misuse of fascism to describe the free-market and individualist right. It's only become "right" because the left foisted this mythology on us all those decades ago, that leftism and fascism are mutually exclusive and exhaustive poles of politics. Having the slightest familiarity with modern political history, especially from a European perspective, no one educated person could have fallen for this. But in our age of media-induced amnesia, it's helpful to now and then wake up and read some real history for once. It's history that's not hidden, just forgotten, sometimes deliberately so. Readers of Hayek's 1944 classic, The Road to Serfdom, will recognize the essentials.

Most of what is called "conservative" in the English-speaking world in the last 80 years is really a blend of what 19th- or 18th-century educated people would have correctly called "liberal" (meaning limited government and individualist) and "conservative" (meaning traditionalist). The two are still in tension (we think of "conservative" versus "libertarian," for example), but they were also in tension then. In the generation before the First World War, a new force, not answering to either label, arose in opposition to the older limited-government liberal ideal. It went under various names: "reform" liberalism, the "new" liberalism (as opposed to the "old"), "progressivism." Influenced by Marxist and socialist doctrines, they came to dominate American politics in the teens and then again during the Great Depression and the New Deal. It's the basis today of what is conventionally and very misleadingly called "liberalism" in the US and more correctly called "social democracy" or "welfare liberalism" in the rest of the world. We're all familiar from our history classes what this meant: in democratic societies, a much larger and more powerful government; far more overt political involvement in social and economic decisions; the state (to an extent) taking over once-private or familial functions (education, old age and sickness insurance), and so on. The political values associated with classical liberalism largely remained, but its economic and social values were transformed into a form of democratic statism.

But in countries with weaker or non-existent democratic traditions, while it meant all those things, it also meant something else: a comprehensive alternative to liberal democracy altogether. In reconstituted empires like the Russian and Chinese, it was the fantastic and deadly fake, coercive utopia of communism. In countries with old cultural identities but recent and weak political unification (Italy, Germany, Japan), the new collectivism and statism were merged with a post-nationalist imperial chauvinism, eventually christened "fascism" by Mussolini. He named his idea and movement after the Roman fasces, the bundled sticks that represented the supersession of individuals going about their business by a concentrated unity of purpose embodied in the person of the dictator. Hitler and Nazism then did it all better by adding a mystical romantic racism and a Teutonic thoroughness the Italian model lacked.

The non-democratic forms of 20th-century collectivism, rather than being opposites, are best viewed as rival siblings. They were born at around the same time and answered similar needs. The career of Mussolini illustrates their entangled origins: born to radical parents (who named him Benito after the Mexican revolutionary Benito Juarez), drifting through Marxism (too German-pedantic) and anarchism (fit the Latin temperament better), then to the realization that he could really make a big splash if he fused the two rivals, chauvinistic nationalism and socialism. The epiphany came to him, as it did to many, during the first modern "total" war. World War One demonstrated the apparent practicality of nationalized economies, centralized control, and total unity, with the hope that they could be carried over permanently into peacetime.

There were parallels in various countries and between democratic and non-democratic forms. Progressivist Woodrow Wilson viewed the limited government paradigm of the American founders as obsolete, to be replaced by an organic system, with the President as the "head" of the body politic. His younger colleague, Franklin Roosevelt, later succeeded where Wilson failed. H. G. Wells coined the term "liberal fascism" in a 1931 speech in which he called for a synthesis of the older "liberal" (what we now misleadingly call "conservative") political values with state manipulation and control of society and economy. Wells wasn't thinking of Soviet Russia, but of Fascist Italy, where Mussolini had done more than make the trains run on time. Wells had seen this apparent "wave of the future," and it seemed to work. After 1918 and especially after the onset of the Great Depression, liberal democracy, free societies, and free economies seemed passé. All of this was of course deliberately forgotten after 1945. From then on, "liberalism" and "fascism" were supposed to be opposites.*

But Goldberg arrives to tell us otherwise, exhumes this repressed history, and updates it with the distinctive excesses of the 1960s New Left, its eroticized cult of violence and worship of exotic foreign dictators, both reminiscent of fascism and its 30s fellow-travellers in democratic countries. In certain ways, Goldberg exaggerates: the tragedy of American liberalism since Wilson is not that it is fascism (it isn't), but that it tries to combine what cannot be: unlimited government in the service of liberal goals. It has led modern liberals to one predictable disaster after another.
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* We also can't ignore the effect of the Popular Front period (1936-39), when Stalin and Soviet-oriented zombies worldwide tried to manipulate the democratic left and liberal middle-class parties with a common program in opposition to fascism. The real controlling factor was Soviet policy towards Germany, which zigzagged from neutrality, to hostility, to friendship, all in a few years. In Europe, the PF program made at least superficial sense. In the US, there wasn't much to oppose really - except, strangely, the New Deal itself, which had multiple features in direct and conscious imitation of Mussolini's system. The emotionalistic use of "fascist" as an empty epithet to label anyone not with this program started in the Popular Front era, then reappeared in the 60s.

The Hitler-Stalin pact of August 1939 brought the Popular Front to an end, although the crude manipulation of gullible non-communists to serve Soviet foreign policy goals was already evident before then. And the illusions of the Popular Front survived long after the Popular Front itself.

William F. Buckley, Jr.: An appreciation

Where to start? A giant of the postwar world, one of the founders of modern conservatism, and a leading light who remade American politics, died just over a month ago. Many tributes have appeared, and his positive influence is everywhere you look.

When World War Two ended, American conservatism seemed to be finished. Although opposition to the increasingly statist bent of liberalism came from many and often conflicting points of view (individualism, religion, nativism, etc.), the two large forms of opposition were isolationism (opposition to American entry into the war - although that was not in any way purely a cause of the Right) and hostility to the dramatic expansion and pretensions of the federal government. Both oppositions appeared discredited, although disillusionment with the New Deal and federal intervention in general was widespread by the time of the 1940 election. And a significant part of the Republican party - its East Coast, Anglophile wing, led by Wendell Wilkie - did support intervention, in fact preventing foreign policy from becoming a major partisan issue in the 1940 and 1944 elections and marginalizing isolationism to a great degree. Nonetheless, while much of the New Deal had been repudiated after the 1938 midterm elections, everyone in 1940 knew what the great question was: to intervene or not, how fast and how deep. Of course, the Germans' undeclared submarine war of 1940-41 and the attack on Pearl Harbor at the end of 1941 rendered that debate moot. The US did intervene in World War Two, on the Allied side, and few regretted it afterwards, in spite of the immense cost and the dubiousness of having the Soviet Union as an ally.

Other factors were at work in the fragmented state of the American right in 1945. It had some of the same components familiar today. There were conservatives, people who deferred to tradition because it was tradition. The fact that the American political tradition was largely a liberal one (with one major exception) created something of a paradox.* That tradition was one of limited government, one overturned by the socialist-tinged "new" or "reform" liberalism of the Progressive and New Deal eras. (The change was large enough that it is questionable whether the adjective "liberal" should be used at all.) Classical liberals (later called libertarians) never bought into tradition-for-tradition's-sake and based their views on straightforward, historically informed ideas (abundantly confirmed by recent experience in the world wars and totalitarian dictatorships) about the negative effect on human liberty and prosperity by too-large and too-powerful a government. Some went further and re-developed the familiar 18th-century theories of natural rights and consensual government in terms understandable to a 20th century audience. To that they added a more modern and deeper appreciation of the limits of social knowledge and the impossibility of social planning.

A striking fact astute readers might notice is that I make no mention of the "religious right" in this potted history. That's because, after the liberal-fundamentalist battles of the late 19th and early 20s centuries, the fundamentalists retreated to their own, anti-political, subculture. To the extend that they were political, they largely voted Democratic, because they were largely southern or urban-ethnic Catholic - and in those days, virtually all white southern and Catholic voters voted Democratic. The "religious right" as we now know it, an alliance between conservative Catholics and conservative Protestants, was 30+ years in the future at the end of the war. In 1945, a few feeble attempts at ecumenism apart, the relation between Protestants and Catholics was one of mutual suspicion, laced with ignorance and prejudice - although the war itself had had a strong positive impact on this state of affairs. The full scope of this impact is in large part the complete transformation of religious and ethnic identity in America in the postwar era. This transformation made black civil rights easier to swallow (for whites), gave rise to a new level of interreligious understanding, and made Buckley's type of "big tent" conservatism possible. All of these were out of reach and almost unthinkable before 1945. In his relationship with American Jews, Buckley's approach was even more radical, given the level of anti-Jewish prejudice still prevalent in 1945. By the late 1950s, his nascent movement and its allies counted a significant number of Jewish thinkers, many of them refugees from Europe and carrying first-hand experience of life under the totalitarian dictatorships. Well before the Republican party, under Nixon, fully embraced support of Israel, Buckley adopted such support as a matter of course, because he understood the basic issues at stake. When the Soviet Jewry movement started in the mid-1960s, Buckley and his followers were among its early non-Jewish allies and supporters.

Buckley was a wealthy liberal Catholic, a man from a social background (including a father who was an American ambassador) that, on the surface, seemed conventionally WASP. It was his quirky Catholicism that initially made the difference. It made him have to think - really think - about political issues in a deeper way than most people have to, people who take their political views without much thought from their parents, teachers, and peers. This led him initially to oppose modern American liberalism from a traditionalist point of view, but also made him open to libertarian approaches. From these experiences, he formed a clear conception of how to rebuild the American right around a few simple and broadly appealing stands that any rational person could assent to, without regard to ethnic or religious background: opposition to the growth of government at home and opposition to the dominant form of collectivist tyranny abroad, communism. Buckley and his allies founded National Review, still the flagship of American conservatism, and began a campaign that stretched from the early 1950s to the late 70s to absorb all opposition to modern liberalism in this way. By doing this, Buckley sidestepped the leftover isolationist-interventionist debate and ended the American right's parochialism. By the late 1950s, all sorts of people, many Protestant, but a large minority of Catholics, and a surprising number of Jewish thinkers had been pulled into Buckley's movement, so much so that by the 1960s, the movement had become a broad political tendency in its own right and no longer a "movement." Buckley concentrated on the crucial common ground, dispensed with the provinciality and ethnocentrism of the prewar right, and even proved ecumenical enough to accept individualist and libertarian followers. (They often rejected him anyway, but that was their doing, not Buckley's.) Buckley even flirted with libertarianism himself, in his 1965 run for Mayor of New York and his famous, offshore 1960s pot parties on his yacht.

The era of Buckley's and conservatism's success was the late 70s and 1980s. In the 1960s, American liberals had obtained a blank check, under Kennedy and Johnson, and led themselves and the country, both domestically and internationally, into a gratuitous mess: instead of triumphing, liberalism went haywire and, after 1965, began a free-fall from which it has never recovered. The fact that the president who brought the Kennedy-Johnson tendencies to their logical conclusion - Richard Nixon - was a Republican seemed at first to set back the conservative cause. But Nixon was not a conservative. He was nominated in 1968 in part because he wasn't Goldwater and couldn't be tarred as a "crazy radical." The Watergate crisis (and the war that led to that crisis) were largely, and correctly, perceived as failures of the new, expensive, obtrusive, and frequently dysfunctional expanded government introduced by liberals. Nixon went along with it ("we are all Keynesians now," he famous said in 1972) and did big government a few times better - wage and price controls, entitlements and affirmative action as we now know them, and so on. His fall opened up a singular opportunity for conservatives, one taken by Reagan. The rest is history: a halt in the growth of domestic spending in the 1980s and 1990s, the successful and peaceful end of the Cold War, the end of "stagflation" and a generation-long success of low-inflation economic expansion and moderating the growth of the federal government. It was a stunning achievement, especially for a political movement - conservatism - that never gained majority acceptance. Buckley's approach saw to it that what we now call "identity politics" would not wreck his coalition and that, even when not having a strong influence over the Presidency, conservative ideas and policies shaped by those ideas would have their continued impact. Certainly, the rise of Clinton in 1992 was a direct response - "neoliberalism" - to the prior failure of liberalism and the success of conservatism. Clinton went on, chastened by the 1994 mid-term elections, to become the most conservative Democrat since - well, Grover Cleveland.

Buckley, like his movement, spent more recent years in ill-health. Certainly, the decline of conservatism after 1994 troubled him. Even more troubling was the return of "Nixonism," in the form of Bush Jr. and Karl Rove. This tendency started at the end of the 90s with a grand throwing-up-of-the-hands by conservatives, a giving-up on ever implementing a conservative program. Being the majority party in Congress put them into the position of actually having to decide whether to go ahead with serious reform, and they couldn't do it. (Many thought conservative reform politically impossible.) Another disturbing trend was the return of authoritarian, big-government populism, as signaled by Perot in 1992 and 1996, with its powerful tendency to split the right-leaning vote. (Indeed, Perot made Clinton's election and re-election possible.) To capture these voters for the Republican party meant dropping much, if not all, of conservatism as Buckley and others had defined it. The prize was permanently incorporating white southern and Catholic voters into the Republican coalition. The price: alienating everyone else - and proving multiple times over that big government fails for an inherent reason, not just when it's done by liberals. It also led, on an intellectual level, to nasty disputes between conservatives and libertarians on one side and neoconservatives on the other, those disaffected liberals who dropped out of the Democratic party in the 1970s and 80s. The opposition of many conservatives and libertarians to the Iraq war sharpened the nastiness.

Buckely's synthesis of traditionalism and "classical" liberalism (to use the L-word in its original and best sense) seemed unstable and incoherent to many. But it has proved enduring, like his very Catholic mix of faith and philosophical reason. It is both seriously intellectual, answering to that part of us that is consciously rational, and attractive because it recognizes the limits of individual reason. It combines with a classical liberal understanding of government a solid understanding of the limits of politics. Conservatives view society as more important than government, culture as more important than politics, and custom as more important than law. Buckley made his own contribution to culture as a prolific author and as host of public television's Firing Line for more than 30 years.**

He will be missed.
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* That exception was the semi-medieval views that had taken hold in the antebellum South regarding slavery, which then influenced the dominant American thinking about race from the end of Reconstruction, in the 1870s, until the 1950s.

** When Binah was a youngster, he was confused by Buckley's sometimes notoriously Latin-inflected discussions on Firing Line, reflecting Buckley's high-level Catholic education. Latin came later to Binah and, with it, some understanding of what Buckley was talking about. Buckley himself adopted a less erudite and more straightforward style in later years.

Afghanistan, bin Laden, and all that

A mindworm has returned, one familiar from 2001 and 2002. Inspired by the book and recent movie, Charlie Wilson's War, and Pakistan's troubles, the worm says something like this: in the 80s, "the US supported bin Laden," or "bin Laden supported the US," or the 1980s anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan is somehow responsible for al Qa'eda. None of this is true. Those events and forces do have significance today, most of it not foreseen back then. But the Afghan anti-Soviet war (1978-1989) helped to delay the rise of al Qa'eda and Sunni radicalism directed at the US, rather than accelerate it. And Sunni radicalism needed certain prerequisites - the end of the Iran-Iraq war (1988), the end of the Cold War (1990), American troops stationed in the heart of the Muslim world (Arabia, 1990-2003), the rise of Arabic satellite television (after 1994) - that didn't start falling into place until the end of the 80s.

Few people in the Western world in the 1960s and 70s foresaw the rise of radical Islam. Superficially, at least, the Middle East was dominated by ideologies familiar in a Western context: nationalism, and various types of socialism. Not understanding that the Middle East is really a distinct civilization with a history very different from the West or Asia, most pundits and experts projected the future as more of the same. Most people unthinkingly believed in an automatic secularization, modernization, and so on. The Middle East was mentally lumped into an artificial construct, the "Third World," made up of non-white peoples either patronized as "noble savages" or feared as simply "savages."

The Islamic revival of the late 1970s came as a shock to the West, the communist bloc, and Westernized elites in the Middle East. Several events marked turning points and milestones in the return of political Islam. The failure of modernization and the Arab defeats in 1967 and 1973 helped to discredit secular regimes. At the same time, Saudi Arabia's successful orchestrating of the 1973-74 oil embargo - taking the industrialized world's economy hostage, in effect - marked a power shift away from secular governments like Egypt's and Syria's, once the centers of the Arab world. The Saudis already enjoyed a unique prestige from their position as keepers of the Muslim holy cities (Mecca and Medina) and as the strictest Muslims. There and elsewhere in the Middle East, Muslim radicals began to argue that Islamic purism was an authentic identity Muslims should return to and reject alien imports like nationalism, secularism, and socialism. The 1977 and 1979 hostage crises, one in Washington DC, the other in Mecca, were both carried out by Sunni radicals enraged by the gap between the Saudi regime's purist rhetoric and its modernizing, semi-cosmopolitan, and often corrupt reality. These marked the first of what would, later in the 1990s, become a familiar stream of events. At the same time, a double opposition to the Shah's regime of autocratic modernization in Shi'ite Iran put the region's secular autocrats on notice. Most Western observers expected the liberal, secular opposition to win and were stunned when the 1979 Iranian revolution turned Islamic.

In those days, everyone in the West viewed the Cold War as far more important and failed to take Islamic radicalism seriously. The war between North and South Vietnam had just ended (in 1975) with a communist victory. Only in the Iranian case was Islamic revolutionary politics viewed as genuine and threatening: by the US, because of the Iranian hostage crisis (1979-81),* and by the conservative Gulf monarchies, who rule over significant Shi'ite populations and live next door to Iran. In fact, the Gulf governments were thrown into a panic, one that led them in 1980 to prod Iraq into launching the Iran-Iraq war.** Few could see how Muslims from the ultra-conservative Gulf states would experience a growing and intolerable tension between the supposed purity of Islam in Arabia (its home) and the reality of the Gulf kingdoms, then being showered in oil wealth.

The 1978 communist coup in and December 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan brought this budding Sunni radicalism to a stop, or rather temporarily transformed and redirected it. Suddenly the region was under a genuine threat, not from the US, but from the Soviets. After the 1978 coup, the US began to support Afghan groups directly. The most important was the Northern Alliance of Ahmad Shah Massoud, an ethnic Tajik and not a member of Afghanistan's Pashtun majority. The US continued to support Massoud, but later in the 80s, found itself shut out of the more important channels for helping the Afghans, controlled by Pakistan and its military intelligence service (the ISI). (This is the part where Charlie Wilson came in.) The US, which has always had a rocky relationship with Pakistan, upgraded its ties and kept them there until 1990, when they were downgraded again, because of Pakistan's nuclear program.

Here truly a devil's bargain was made, but it has nothing to do with the Afghans. (No Afghan has been involved in terrorist attacks on the US.) The problem is Pakistan and the later involvement of Saudi religious institutions in Pakistan and Afghanistan, which began after the anti-Soviet war was over, in the 1990s. After the Soviet withdrawal in 1988-89, the US made a terrible (if familiar) mistake of just walking away from Afghanistan. It entered into a vicious, three-way civil war pitting against each other the remains of the pro-Soviet regime, Massoud's forces and allies, and radical Islamic groups sponsored by Pakistan. From the Saudi seeds and Pakistan's continued attempts to take over Afghanistan sprang the Taliban, whose core were madrassa (religious school) students determined to turn Afghanistan into an Islamic utopia.† After coalescing in 1994 and obtaining widespread popular support for bringing the civil war to an end, the Taliban (with massive Pakistani aid) took over most of the country by 1996. Popular support evaporated, once Afghans got to see the Islamic utopia close up (as in The Kite Runner), but by that point, popular Afghan sentiment meant little. Poor and isolated, Afghanistan had been unwillingly and unwittingly turned into a "jihad theme park," with Islamic radicals implementing the vision they could not in their home countries.

As for the rest of the myth, it's almost all fabricated, largely in retrospect by al Qa'eda, its supporters, and credulous Western journalists. The "Afghan Arabs" who supposedly fought against the Soviets actually did no fighting, confining their support of the Afghans to monetary donations. The religious motives for Sunni radicalism are rooted in Arabia, the home of Islam, and fundamentally result from the large contradiction between its dominant Wahhabi (Salafi) type of Islam and the materially modern life made possible by all that oil wealth. Pakistan, an artificial country lacking a national identity, finds promoting Islamic radicalism an almost irresistible temptation. It's a practical good as well, since it helps the ISI run an insurgency next door in the Indian province of Kashmir (claimed by Pakistan) and promote Pakistani control of Afghanistan, its geographic "rear," through the dominant Pashtuns who live on both sides of the Pakistani-Afghani border. To come full circle, when the US invaded Afghanistan in late 2001, its local allies were made up of - you guessed it - the same Northern Alliance we started supporting in 1978, but then abandoned in 1989. Massoud had visited the US in the summer of 2001 to warn Americans about the Taliban and its al Qa'eda allies. After his return to Afghanistan, he was assassinated, two days before the 9/11 attacks, by an al Qa'eda suicide bomber posing as a journalist. The Taliban and al Qa'eda guessed correctly that their upcoming attacks on the US would lead to a US invasion. Killing Massoud, in advance, deprived the US of an important local ally, one we had supported in the past.

The radical Islamic project remains today, among Sunnis, a violent cult inspired and funded by Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states and largely hosted by Pakistan. That these are supposedly American "allies" just adds what history will view as a cruel twist. From this perspective, the wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq are, not diversions, but sideshows, chasing around and killing or capturing terrorists whose beliefs and activities are the result of the policies and religious proclivities of countries we dare not touch. A year-and-a-half after invading Afghanistan to overthrow a government made possible and supported by Pakistan, we failed to logically take the struggle home to the countries that hatched the crisis and instead invaded Iraq.

There are some important lessons here, but they have little do with lachrymose theories of "blowback" and other "radical" claptrap.†† The most important is the damaging American habit of walking away from a foreign involvement after a period of intense engagement, abandoning hard-won friends in the process. The US has always had, and probably will always have, a strong isolationist streak, reinforced by our attention-challenged media and short election cycles. But foreign policy is not about one-night stands and can't be built on dubious "allies" and so-called "friends." And the other lessons are familiar to readers of this blog: the sinister roles played by Saudi Arabia and Pakistan in the rise of radical Sunni Islam and our strange relationship with Saudi Arabia. Even an enormity like the 9/11 attacks was not enough to shake that relationship, in the end. Our descendants will stare at this fact in wonder.

POSTSCRIPT: There's another angle to Afghanistan, besides the fact that its security problems are all baked next door in Pakistan. We've heard over and over in the last few years how much the US needs to be multilateral and follow the NATO model of Yugoslavia and Afghanistan, and not the Iraq model of largely unilateral action. But there's trouble on the horizon for NATO. It's an organization that was founded to cope with the Cold War, which it did, with great success. But in the 1990s, it was pressed into service in new ways not part of its original mandate and which are now proving more difficult, costly, and unpopular than originally anticipated. Afghanistan and Yugoslavia, supposedly models of multilateralism, may instead prove its graveyard. US military action in the future will probably look a lot more like Iraq than people think.

Another important development that our wonderfully unbiased and objective news media are all over - right?
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* Notice how often the word "hostage" comes up in this posting.

** Here's a place to lay to rest another myth, that the US supported Iraq and Saddam Hussein in the Iran-Iraq war. While the US did quietly grant security guarantees to the Gulf kingdoms, it was officially neutral in the conflict ("it's too bad both sides can't lose," was Kissinger's famous quip). It was the Gulf kingdoms themselves that directly supported Iraq with money. Using that and his own oil money, Saddam bought weapons mainly from the Soviets and, to a smaller extent, from France. (The French had their own reasons to back Iraq against the Iranian revolutionary mullahs.) Iraq didn't fight Iran with American weapons, but with Soviet ones: AK-47s, not M-16s; T-55s and T-62s, not M1s; MiGs, not F-16s. But the price of oil collapsed in the later 1980s, and Saddam's income dried up. Unable to pay off his loans from the Gulf states, he invaded one of them and threatened to invade the others.

† In Farsi (Persian) and related languages, taliban just means "students."

†† As for "blowback," the ultimate in tragic backfiring is the death of Benazir Bhutto. It was during her terms as Pakistani prime minister (1988-90 and 1993-96) that the ISI turned into a dedicated machine for promoting radical Islamic groups in Afghanistan and in Pakistan itself. And of course, it is just those groups who were responsible for her assassination.

Again, these developments started after the end of the anti-Soviet war. Only once Pakistan was no longer an object of superpower interest did it unabashedly and recklessly go full-time into the Islamo-radicalism business, picking up the thread dropped in 1980.

Good czar, bad czar

Something very bad has happened in Russia in the last eight years: the rise of Vladimir Putin and the new Russian mafia state. Contrary to myths still repeated in the West, this period has not seen Russia become more stable or a nicer place: on the contrary. The Russian state has prospered, because it's seized control of Russia's oil and gas wealth. It's now become another petro-dictatorship. The decline of Russian society, arrested in the 90s, is accelerating.

But there's also a whole army of bagmen (consultants, lobbyists, etc.) out there who've clouded the issue both here and especially in Europe. The West lacks the clarity on the issue that it had during the Cold War, even though Russia is causing problems in Iran and is about to in Kosovo. This is not the 90s "holiday from history" any more. And there's no good czar - Yeltsin - to deal with.

Bad - bad - czar - bad - bad.

The end of Europe? IV

Utopias appear to be more easily realized than anyone had previously believed. And we find ourselves today before an otherwise harrowing question: How to evade their definitive realization? ... Utopias are realizable. History is marching towards utopias. Perhaps a new century is beginning, a century in which intellectuals and the educated class will dream of the means of escaping utopia and returning to a non-utopian society, less "perfect," and more free.

- Nikolai Berdyaev (1923)

Surveying the future of Europe one last time, we also need to keep in mind that, for all their importance, deep philosophical, spiritual, and existential questions rarely furrow the brows and agitate the minds of most people. (Good thing, too.) Most of their decisions, most of the time, are shaped by straightforward political realities and economic incentives. Europe's welfare states were not born from a vision of continuing progress, but from the socialist vision of heavenly stasis and permanent leisure. More importantly, they were born from the social upheavals and civilizational emergencies of the century-and-a-half ending in 1945. But history never stops: even if you're not interested in it, history is very interested in you. Europe's welfare states embody long-outdated responses to civilizational crisis. They have made it difficult for productive people, between the ages of studenthood and retirement, to sustain themselves economically, much less expand and improve their economic activity, and to raise families. While providing lavishly for the young, old, and sick (they're receiving free benefits no one ever got before - and no one ever will again), welfare state systems of subsidy and taxation penalize responsible adult behavior to an unprecedented degree - often seeing the only way to cushion the burden of high unemployment and low growth in pulling even productive, educated people in their working prime into the welfare state net. This is immoral, crazy, and won't last even another generation: it makes permanent adolescence universal, but drains away all of its benefits. While immediate success is rewarded, continued failure is subsidized, even glorified. Instead of marking an intermediate destination on the way to better things, the prolonged adolescence of welfare state culture is a cul-de-sac, a deadend.* The pervasive underlying principle is the powerful tendency to treat adults of sound mind and body as children, no matter their age - as the prophetic thinkers of the nineteenth century foresaw.

The evidence for such simple reasoning is straightforward: when Europeans emigrate - mainly to the US, but elsewhere too - they respond to lower taxes and less stifling economic conditions by working harder, saving more, and having more children. We can muse, as do Bawer, Weigel, and Berlinski, on hard questions of national identity, Europe's catastrophic modern century, or its spiritual deadness - but let's not lose sight of the obvious. The books of Steyn and Laqueur, in particular, are buckets of common-sense cold water poured on what might otherwise become woozy and interminable Weltschmerz (world-weariness).

All of these authors ask what are the possible and likely futures for Europe. Steyn and Weigel attempt some systematic answers, as does Laqueur, in a more jumbled fashion. None is sanguine. All foresee large parts of urban central and western Europe ceasing to be European in any meaningful way. Some parts will become Islamic, although it's a mistake to view these immigrant communities as monolithic. All of them point to the fact that the big changes have only just started. The biggest will happen in the next couple decades, and Europe is likely to be unrecognizable afterwards. Tourists receive a seriously distorted view by getting such a surfeit of Europe's past - while the ex-pat set (students, temporary and visiting workers) see only the slowly shrinking island of the pampered welfare state lifestyle that is already unaffordable.

The future of the American relationship with Europe. In keeping with our starting principles, this is another subject that requires steady concentration on long-term fundamentals, ignoring immediate episodes of European anti-Americanism, like the most recent one that started in the late 90s and now dissipating.

Until 1917, the US did not interest itself directly in European affairs. European countries were major world powers in their own right, while the US was a new and largely untested power. Almost all of its energy was focused inwards on economic development and political integration. Back then, if they thought about foreign countries at all, many Americans often viewed Latin America and Asia as more important. They were wrong back then - Europe remained a center, if not the center, of the twentieth century's great conflicts. But those Americans then, and their misnamed isolationist cousins of the 1930s, saw a deeper truth. Europe was destroying itself, and the future - for the US - had to be more about Latin America and Asia. That was already evident by the 1980s, but it became central after the Cold War. American intervention in Europe - in four distinct episodes (1917-1919, 1940-1945, 1945-1990, and 1995-1999) - has been founded on the perception that Europe was both important and, at the same time, in so much trouble, that it couldn't straighten itself out.

As Steyn and Laqueur point out - in very different tones - both the US and Europe have, since the late 90s, been focusing on a meaningless rivalry between them, while the heated public rhetoric has ignored the real issues. America's main economic competitors are Asian. Its major, everyday pressing social problem is illegal immigration from Latin America. Its major political problems are internal. Europe's major economic competitors are Asian. Its largest strategic problems are with Russia and the Islamic world. Its major social problems are internal (demographics, welfare state) and externally to the east and south. Europe is in a weaker position to deal with its problems than we are to deal with our problems. For the foreseeable future, Europe will need us more than we need them - just as it has been since 1945. The real change is not Europe's objective condition - in trouble and needing outside help - but in American perceptions of whether it's worthwhile to help Europe. While Europe still needs outside help, Europe is no longer as important as it once was. This fact will be the source of a considerable friction in the years to come. Many Americans don't understand it, especially liberals, who have spent the last 90+ years selling the centrality of Europe as a core principle of US foreign policy. This view will be harder and harder to defend in the coming decades and is another sign of modern liberalism's decline. Certainly, nothing has brought out American liberalism's backward-looking nature the way its colonial-inferiority complex vis-à-vis Europe has. Bawer's book exhibits a strong, lingering whiff of this thinking, although Bawer has spent most of the last decade apparently arguing himself out of his once-firm liberal views on this and other topics. It's even more bizarre given the fact that, until recently, the US was much more firmly committed to liberal political values than was Europe - Europe's continent-wide conversion to these is recent and untested, no matter what the Eurocrats say.**

As we look further and further out beyond the current generation, we must admit that all bets are off. Demographers cannot predict accurately much beyond two generations. It is clear that Europe's native populations will shrink dramatically during that time. In particular, Europe's southern tier and eastern ex-Communist bloc of countries have reached low birth rates that no society, outside of wars and plagues, has ever recovered from. But what comes after is less clear. Right now, the immigrant communities filling in Europe's hollowing-out demographics form compact societies-within-societies, especially the Islamic ones. (This is also true of the Africans, but much less true of Hindus and Sikhs in Britain, whose success is more "American" in nature.) These compact mini-societies might become sovereignties in all but name, just as the western Roman empire fragmented in its last few decades. Or something else entirely might happen - the modern world is not the ancient. These immigrant communities might open up and become far more culturally integrated into their host societies than they are now. Then expect to see a significant decline in traditional religious identities and automatic political solidarity. Although they will remain different for a long time to come, in this scenario, they might become more like the "hyphenated Americans" of 50-100 years ago - on their way to cultural assimilation into Europe, while changing Europe at the same time. This American-style "happy ending" is possible, although I would say now, not terribly likely.

Only time will tell and, as it it always has, holds surprises in store.
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* The American version is familiar - from the birth of the teenager in the 1940s, captured perfectly in Lolita (the movie, not the novel), to the "death of the grown-up" in Diana West's new book, reviewed here by John O'Sullivan.

** Or perhaps, in their nervous political correctness, they know in their bones better than they know in their heads.

Empires and nations

The earlier postings on Armenians, Jews, Turks, and Israelis (and Kurds!) cut a small way into the Big Issue of empires versus nations. A century ago, much of the world's population lived in multiethnic, multireligious empires, ones rules by a dominant group defined by ethnicity and often religion, with other ethnic and religious groups subordinated in political power and civil rights. Some countries (like the United States and France) were already republics, while others, like Great Britain, had mixed republican-imperial features, a combination of aristocracy and popular representation. But the imposing, centuries-old structures of the pre-1914 era were empires like the Austro-Hungarian (dominated by Austrian Germans and Hungarians and which ruled over Christians, Jews, and even some Muslims), the Russian (which ruled over many non-Russian Christians, as well as Jews and Muslims), the Ottoman (which ruled over non-Turks and non-Muslims), and the Chinese (ethnically mostly Han Chinese, but with a mix of languages). Once empire and theocracy were the way of the world. But they have had their day.

The last century has seen a dramatic growth in the number of nation-states and the dismantling of empires, in three major waves: after World War One, after World War Two, and after the Cold War. Clearly, if we want to understand the modern world, we need to, not just note the fact, but understand the why. Let's step back and take in the basic forces at work here.

The most fundamental is the incompatibility of empire and modernity - they're as incompatible as tribalism and modernity, or modernity and theocracy. National self-rule is essential in the modern world and, indeed, one of the pre-conditions of "being modern." The political unit of a nation-state, republic, or representative democracy is a citizen, who has equal, or nearly equal, rights with other citizens. Citizens participate in society (in political life, but not just political life), a sine qua non of constituting a modern society. Political and social units are integrated to an historically unprecedented degree. Empires, with their aristocracies and monarchies, were a whole world apart. Their political basis was narrow. Their political units were radically heterogeneous and unequal: ruling castes, and conquered ruled with varying levels of granted toleration. Outside their narrow political bases, empires often had ignorant and backwards - and in all cases, helpless - populations. These were subjects, not citizens. This type of political structure is compatible with theocracy as well, although it isn't a requirement.

From the fall of the western Roman empire in the late 400s, it took 1200 years for nations-states to be accepted in principle as the organized basis of political life and, even then, only in western Europe. It took another 300 years to sort out which nations would have states, a not-entirely settled issue even now. This question lies at the root of the great partition wars of the last century, the largest being India, but also encompassing Palestine, Cyprus, and Ireland, for example.

At the highest level, this is the evolution at work in the Middle East and Africa, which the nation-state principle and practice are still not fully accepted or even understood. Outside the West, the rise of radical Islam is the main force today in conflict with nationalism. Within the West, there is increasing confusion - especially in Europe, and especially among European elites - about the necessity of nationalism, instead of empire. (The EU is, in some ways, an empire-by-stealth, what happens when nations given up their sovereignty to non-representative supernational institutions lacking democratic legitimacy.) And Europe might very well be faced with theocratic demands in another generation. Already, parts of certain European cities have seen the abandonment of state sovereignty to Islamic-tribal custom, the first such development since the end of the Middle Ages.

Europeans and some Americans might be surprised to hear this. A central postmodern myth, upon which the EU is built, is that World War Two discredited nationalism. The problem is that for the countries responsible for World War Two (primarily Germany, as well as the Soviet Union to a smaller extent) were not fighting for nationalism, but for supernational ideals, like racism. (Nothing will destroy a nation-state faster than racial ideologies - the two are incompatible.) In any case, Europe's great nationalist moment was not 1939, but 1914. Even then, the First World War was a result of the implosion of the empires of central-eastern Europe, not something about the nation-states of western Europe. These empires had started economic and social modernization before they were politically modern, which in turn created impossible contradictions that then did them in. Their final manifestations were the supernational or "pan" ideologies, like pan-Turkism, Aryanism, and other racist movements.

To be part of the modern world means, among other things, living in a nation-state. That excludes much of the social and political practice that dominated human existence for most of recorded history and all of prehistory. For those of us living on the other side of this divide, the historical reality is often forgotten. When we encounter conflicts across this divide, we look around at how we live, but don't see; hear, but don't listen.

Neoconservatives, realists, and unipolarity

An earlier posting mentioned three reasons for the decline of realism as a master foreign policy paradigm; I want to expand on one of them: the reality of unipolarity since 1991. This reality underlies much of our discomfort about America being an "empire." (Actually, it isn't one, but that doesn't get to the core of our discomfort.) This strange situation - one superpower with weak allies and potential enemies that threaten us with, not conquest, but collapse - embodies an apparent paradox: America is relatively strong, but absolutely weak. This condition of unipolarity is at the root of our increasingly haywire foreign policy situation since the Persian Gulf war.

To bring this into focus, consider US military spending and force size after the end of the Cold War. Netting out homeland security, military spending is at its lowest level - relative to national income and the federal budget - since 1940. (It's about 3% of GDP and about one-seventh of the federal budget. Five-sevenths is entitlements; the other one-seventh is everything else. That situation will become even more lopsided in the coming years.) Similarly the relative size of the US military is at its smallest since before Pearl Harbor. Should it be increased? Yes, of course, especially if manpower-intensive interventions remain the norm that they have been since 1991. It's a no-brainer. We had an all-volunteer force twice its current size 20 years ago.

OTOH, US military spending relative to its peers and rivals is far more than the rest of the world put together. Rich countries no longer spend on military force, because they rely on us. Poorer countries, like China, do spend and arm, but have a far less expensive cost structure.

Normally, relative strength is all we'd need consider; military power is counted as force relative to an adversary. But there are no obvious peer-enemies any more. There are instead a lot of potential manpower-intensive situations: stateless terrorists; humanitarian interventions; nation-building; small possible smaller- and poorer-state adversaries (Iran, North Korea). Counting military strength relative to other advanced nation-states no longer makes sense.

Different foreign policy schools have their reactions to unipolarity: is it an incomprehensible accident (realism), an embarrassment (liberal internationlism) - or destiny (neoconservatism)? Without speculating on any "deep meaning" or "goal" to history, unipolarity is not an accident. ("Accident" means "we can't explain it.") Often it seems like an uncomfortable embarrassment, which is what liberals felt in the 1990s - America as "the indispensible nation," as Madeleine Albright put it, but bothered by this nagging feeling that America shouldn't be an "empire". Maybe it's historical destiny, but whatever its ultimate reason, the nature of unipolarity has been misconstrued. It's not due to America being overwhelmingly powerful. The US is a large, wealthy, and powerful country - but it's not omnipotent. Unipolarity is due to all of its natural peers and rivals being so weak. This is what the neocons don't get. The other schools don't get it either, but they don't have as much invested in unipolarity, so it's not as crucial for them.

This misconstrual of unipolarity is an important fallacy in the canon of neoconservative fallacies. Others include: trying to achieve liberal ends by unilateral means; trying to achieve non-military ends by military means; America as the "universal nation"; attempts to rewrite American history and wrongly identify past figures as neocons avant la parole. More about the origins, nature, and fate of neoconservatism anon.

But unipolarity isn't just an intellectual problem. It's a political-military condition that calls for change. The US needs a larger military; it also needs allies that contribute more (and I don't mean just, or even mainly, Europe). Such allies also need to be more involved politically. Only then can we move away from relative strength and absolute weakness.

The rise and fall of patriotic internationalism

What was patriotic internationalism? A precious but ultimately unstable amalgam of patriotism and liberal internationalism that defined popular support for American foreign policy from about 1940 to about 1990. There is still a large residual of it even now in American life. But the liberals who once were the exemplars and promoters of patriotic internationalism are today largely defined by nostalgia, if not paranoia and hysteria -- now that modern liberalism is dead and liberals are a beleaguered minority.

Patriotic internationalism is the recognition of the unique legitmacy of national self-rule, combined with the realization that no nation can go it alone. Historically, it was defined by World War II and the Cold War and had its roots in the failure to create a robust international order in the interwar years. Such an international order was successfully created after 1945. It was flawed in certain ways, but it worked, at least as far as the "old Core" (Japan, North America, Western Europe) went. The attempts since 1980 to extend it were only partly successful: it was most successful in Asia and eastern Europe, less so in Latin America, mostly a failure in Africa, and a total failure in the Middle East. A key problem in the last two areas is the lack of robust, sovereign nation-states. In one case, the weakness is due to tribalism; in the other, due to a volatile mix of tribalism and religion. In those areas, no one tried very hard either.

Since the end of the Cold War, although it makes many Americans unhappy, America has drifted into a new moralistic nationalism that oscillates between isolationism and unilateralism (confused with religion or imperialism by some people who should know better -- it's neither). Europe has drifted into a covertly imperial project of sacrificing national sovereignty to an illegitimate supernational entity, the European Union. The EU is not a truly international treaty organization (like NATO). It's an attempt at laws imposed from "above" (super) nations, not "in between" (inter) nations. (See here for more about illegitimate forms of "super"-national law -- and the parallel need for constitutional self-policing of foreign policy. This point is somewhat dated by now-acknowledged dead-end of EU governance and the Supreme Court's Hamdan decision [PDF] and consequent Congressional action in response.)

There is a real need to clear the air of the confusion and obfuscation surrounding nationalism. Nationalism is the opposite of imperialism. Nationalism is not fascism; fascism was an exceptionally violent and illiberal form of imperialism. Here's a further clue: the opponents of fascism were nationalists: Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin (when faced with German invasion), De Gaulle, Adenauer, and various anti-fascist resistance movements. The fascists, like Hitler, Mussolini, Tojo, were not. The nationalist character of the European anti-fascist movements gave a unique panache to colonial independence movements. European countries had resisted fascism in the name of nationalism; so too they had to recognize the legitimacy of national aspirations of the colonial peoples they ruled.

The collapse of America's uniquely blended traditions of patriotism and internationalism, in both liberal-internationalist and conservative-realist forms, is spreading across the political spectrum. For an example of the retarded regression of the Democrats, read Sebastian Mallaby at the Washington Post. See Clay Risen at the New Republic (requires subscription) for the gyrations of Republicans no longer committed to free markets, but shameless and destructive protectionism. Since the end of the Cold War and the first Persian Gulf war, the American news media has also cut back drastically on what it invests into foreign coverage.

Everywhere, not just in the United States, political elites are abandoning the common good in favor of pandering to narrow, parochial interests. The parallel politics is a provincial narcissism, tending towards conspiracy theories, with the local and the obscure blown up into cosmic significance.

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Others have noticed. Mark Lilla just published an interesting but flawed essay in TNR on this subject (requires subscription). According to Lilla, America was sleepwalking through the 80s, woke up in 1989, then went to sleep after September 2001. Lilla deploys this analysis in support of a false evaluation of Clinton's presidency. The phenomenon Lilla is pointing to is real, but he seriously misunderstands it.

After a very troubled decade in the 1970s (a decade that, in some ways, never ended in Europe), America slowly came back to its senses in the 80s, reaching a state of full awakeness between 1989 and 1991, after which it went into a deep sleep of indifference to the outside world. Clinton's 1992 election slogan ("It's the economy, stupid!") and Perot's hostility to free trade reflected a larger swing against foreign involvements, represented by the sudden intense hostility of both elites and the larger public to Bush Sr. Clinton's second term did feature a significant return to foreign policy concerns, but only in a half-blind, groping fashion and with neither party showing more than tepid support or interest. America's descent into political triviality continued, climaxing with the Lewinsky scandal. The next period, from 1998 to 2001, might be called the period of troubled sleep; the first signs of opposition to globalization and the America-dominated unipolar world appeared following the 1997-98 global financial crisis. Americans barely noticed, since their economy continued to suck in the world's savings, buy the world's surplus output, and import the world's ambitious poor as immigrants. After the 9/11 attacks, America came back fully awake. The awakeness lasted somewhat longer than a year. What put us back to sleep were the 2002 mid-term elections and the second Iraq war. Since late 2003, American politics has turned back towards self-referential triviality, powerfully reinforced by the electronic media. The Iraq war and the controversy surrounding it are mired in this self-referentiality. The real quagmire is at home.

The new force that fills the vacuum left by the decline of liberalism and the marginalization of conservatism is moralistic nationalism. It naturally tends toward isolationism, but when foreign intervention is necessary, it swings towards unilateralism. It distains both liberal internationalism and conservative realism. Domestically, its natural tendency is towards hyperactivist big government, not traditional conservatism - less Reagan, more Nixon. But its style is echt-Baby Boom: pop culture, not bookish or intellectual; less substance, more posturing and attitudinizing; less Friedrich Hayek, more Ann Coulter.

The real problem here may be the Baby Boomer generation itself, which is nothing if not narcissistic -- it's a defining generational trait. (I emphatically include Bush Jr. in this characterization.) To the narcissist - if he pays any attention to the world at all - everything in the world is about him, especially everything negative.

POSTSCRIPT: If you want to read what's wrong with foreign elites, with their insistent and myopic recycling of anti-American mythology - fully awake before September 2001, contrary to the revisionist history now peddled by Bush critics - see here for a reminder from Anne Applebaum.