David Adesnik offers (note: permalinks broken, scroll down to Sunday May 11, “The Left vs. Itself” ) a history of U.S. foreign policy, and an outline of what he believes a liberal, Democratic, and effective foreign policy might look like.

First I have to publicly go on record that this is an exciting time for me; I’ve felt isolated from much of the Democratic party and what passes for liberalism for some time, and am constitutionally incapable of moving to the other side of the aisle. But now, I feel that there is some ferment in the Left both here in the U.S. and in the U.K., and that we’re starting a process that could well result in an effective, moral, and progressive vision of the country and the world. I’m happy as all get-out to be one of the smaller yeast organisms and a part of that fermentation process. We’ll taste the beer in a year or two and see if it’s fit to drink.

But I think that David is waaay off the mark in at least three areas, and want to offer some off-the-cuff collegial corrections.

First, in case, you haven’t, go read his post.

OK?? Click through to see some quick thoughts on what he’s written and some directions I think the Dems ought to be taking.

[Update: I respond to his rebuttal below…]He neatly collapses the history of recent American foreign policy into a blog post, and talks about the varying positions of the Democratic and Republican wings of our politics. But in doing so, he misses or mis-states a few things.

First, he characterizes Bush as a Wilsonian (in the Mead sense). Uh, sorry?? Wilsonians are typically defined as attempting to enmesh nations in a framework of democracy and the rule of law. Bush?? I’d have to make him as a Jacksonian/Hamiltonian in the Mead framework.

Overall, I think that David is right in characterizing most of the recent Republican administrations as Hamiltonian in promoting “a realist approach to foreign policy that considered no dictator unworthy of an American alliance provided that his brutality was matched by his anti-Communism”.

Carter was Wilsonian/Jacksonian, as was Clinton.

Adesnik argues in favor of the Wilsonian notion that “democracies do not make war”, with this comment:

As any compelling liberal foreign policy must be, Wilson’s was founded on the idea of protecting individual rights. Having witnessed the horrors of the Great War, Wilson belived that such tragedies could be avoided if governments would only listen to the voice of their citizens.

Anticipating the democratic peace theorists of today, Wilson believed that no democratic government would commit acts of agression against any other. Thus he insisted that the German Empire be replaced by a German republic.

Yet Wilson also recognized that most governments at the time were not democratic and would not become so. Thus, he sought to project democracy onto the international stage by creating the League of Nations. Its purpose was to create a forum for “world opinion”, which Wilson believed would be an unfailing opponent of war. While this approach has considerable merit, critics point out that the people of the German Reich overwhelmingly supported war when it was declared in 1914, as did the citizens of most other nations.

You’d have to add me to the list of those critics, because I’ll point out that democracies can and often are bellicose (not as often as tyrannies which often rely on demonizing the ‘other’ and the rigid apparat of the wartime state).

Democracy alone…whether within states, or among them…is itself not a strong defense against war, as commentators from Thucidydes forward have shown us.

Neither is the rule of law alone enough. As the U.N. and the E.U. (and to an extent, the U.S.) show us, writing laws itself does not solve problems, it does not prevent injustice, it does not build stable or progressive societies. It does build complicated legal-regulatory structures which ignore inconvenient realities and find ways within the law to ignore (or perpetuate) injustice.

So when Adesnik comes out as a Wilsonian,

As you might have guessed by now, I believe that the foundation of a liberal vision for American foreign policy must entail a return to the Wilsonian vision that animated American liberalism from the First World War until the tragedy of Vietnam. Perhaps the greatest flaw of such a foreign policy is that it does not provide Democratic candiates with a credible means of differentiating their views from that of the current administration.

I think that he’s missing the boat in three ways.

The current Administration isn’t Wilsonian.

The most successful Democratic foreign policies – FDR, Truman, and JFK – weren’t either.

We have a surfeit of international institutions, laws, and regulations. They aren’t working. The public – here and abroad – sees this. Democratic candidates who tie their foreign policy to a new round of international institution-building may as well go home now and save themselves and their donors dollars and heartache. It won’t work and it won’t sell.

So what do we do?

Well, I’ll suggest a few things.

First, and foremost we have to sell America. Adesnik is absolutely right when he points to the Vietnam War as the turning point in U.S. foreign policy, but it wasn’t just because we ‘lost he war’. It was because for the first time, a number of Americans and people abroad were united in the vision that America was wrong, and bad, and even evil.

Our foreign policy has to be based, not just in our mechanistic view of ‘doing what’s good for America’, as one nation among many, but on the notion that we (along with many others) have something to offer the world. And what we have to offer the world – the reason why so many want to come here – is not only our prosperity, but our freedom, our belief in and respect for the individual, and most of all our belief in justice – that everyone is equal before the law, that everyone gets an opportunity, and that if we get it wrong once, we’ll work and change and eventually get it right.

It is our belief in the dignity of every American.

Now those values are under attack within America, too. Not just in our imaginations, but in our policies, laws, and institutions. We need to fight on two fronts – to restore the power of those beliefs here – and to expose them to the world as what we have to contribute.

We need to make it clear that violence will be met with violence. Because we aren’t ashamed to be Americans, we need not be ashamed of defending ourselves nor of taking threats to ourselves or others seriously. Out of a mixture of guilt and passivity, we’ve tolerated extremism and saber rattling and watched it turn into saber waving.

Democrats love their country as much as Republicans do, and shouldn’t have a problem with “kill an American and you’re toast”.

But this (standing up to violence) is a cornerstone of Bush’s policy, and taking that stand alone won’t do much for the Democrats.

First, a successful challenge to Bush’s foreign policy will rest on highlighting the close connections between Bush’s ‘Engine Charlie’ Wilson (““What’s good for General Motors is good for the rest of America.”) view of the U.S. and the world and his policies.

Second, we have to show fairness above all. The Kyoto treaty was probably a bad treaty, but driving CAFÉ and a gas tax – or even a commitment to a future gas tax – would go a long way to show the world that we’re not liberating Iraq to make commuting in a Hummer affordable.

Third, we need to focus on foreign intervention and aid that empowers from the bottom up, rather than the top down. The Soviet-style of building immense projects and the institutions to support them has to be inverted toward something more like this:

The ramshackle facade of Christopher Wilson’s two-room home in the gritty Southside neighborhood of Kingston, Jamaica, doesn’t raise great expectations. But through the rickety wooden gate and beyond the drainage ditch lies a new, freshly plastered extension to his house and woodworking shop.

Wilson, 36, who has a wife and two young children, brings in $800 a month making cabinets, tables and chairs for a furniture store and for neighbors. His business got a big kick six months ago when he bought a used drill press and lathe for $650. It doubled his productivity, which in turn allowed him to purchase the materials for the extension and hire a mason.

Wilson bought the tools, at a 20% discount from their secondhand value, from a nonprofit called Tools for Development. Started 15 years ago by Roy Megarry, 65, the former publisher of Canada’s prestigious Globe & Mail newspaper, Tools for Development has a simple but powerful premise: Make secondhand equipment available to poor entrepreneurs at an affordable price. There are no handouts. The entrepreneur pays for the tools either up front or on credit, with interest rates slightly lower than banks charge.

Foreign aid is only one component of foreign policy, but part of what we need to do is pitch our policies downward, at the people affected, and sell them on the value and power of American friendship.

It will be hard to do…selling American ideals and friendship retail, one-by-one. But it is vitally necessary.

We ought to work with our friends and allies to do this, but while we figure out how to do this together, we ought to be doing it on our own.

If that makes me a Jacksonian, so be it.

Addendum in response to Adesnik’s rebuttal:

David Adesnik takes me to task on my interpretation of the Wilsonian and Jacksonian threads in American foreign policy.

I’m irritated – at myself.

I should have made my points more clearly. Haste is an explanation, not an excuse. So first off, let me move away from formally mapping him against Mead. I read the book when it came out, and it’s still in the Giant Stack Of Boxes in the garage. Another explanation, not an excuse; I’ll go dig it out and we’ll talk about what Mead meant later.

Let me try and explain in some greater detail what I meant.

Adesnik points out the post-Boshevik invasion of Russia as an example that Wilson was no dove. I never meant to suggest that he was.

What distinguishes the Wilsonian view, in my opinion, is the belief that formal international institutions and a body of international law – rules between nations, as it were – was the route to peace and international stability. When those institutions permit, violence is certainly acceptable.

Jacksonians, on the other hand, rely on the direct relationships between people and subnational institutions (along with violence).

I’m arguing that the core defect in his proposal is the overreliance on international law and institutions which directly bind states – institutions and laws which today have virtually no legitimacy worldwide, and less here in the U.S.

My counterproposal is that we work to build and nourish good subnational institutions and attack (sometimes literally) bad ones. To me that is a Jacksonian position; I’ll stand abashed if I’ve misinterpreted Mead, but will work to expand and defend my argument.

In this morning’s L.A. Times (intrusive registration required, use ‘LAExaminer’/’LAExaminer’), a fascinating column by Joel Kotkin and Karen Speicher on a growing crisis within mainstream American religion:

The war in Iraq exposed many continuing fissures in U.S. society, but none more evident than the divide between the clerical establishment and the laity. The gap presages more fragmentation in the structures of religious faith in this historically devout global power.
…
Virtually the entire leadership of every mainstream Christian faith – from the Roman Catholic Church, the Episcopal Church, the United Church of Christ and the National Baptist Convention to the United Methodists, as well as the National Council of Churches – adamantly opposed the war against Iraq from the outset. Like many on the secular left, religious leaders denounced the conflict as one of U.S. aggression and needless destruction, and likely to evolve into a long, bloody conflict.

In contrast, the people in the pews, for the most part, were among the strongest backers of President Bush’s goal of ousting Saddam Hussein. According to a prewar poll conducted by the Pew Research Center and Forum on Religion and Public Life, more than 60% of mainline Protestants and Catholics favored attacking Iraq; greater than 75% of evangelical Protestants supported a military effort.
…
What is most disturbing for the future of mainstream religion in America, Roof suggests, is the lack of a middle ground between evangelical fundamentalism and the increasingly out-of-touch clerical elite more united with one another’s common vision than with their parishioners’.

Particularly note the last quote, look around at pretty much any national institution, and check your gut to see how closely it applies.

Here at Winds of Change, the comments section to this post has some interesting discussion that further expands on this.

OK, so I’ve posited a 2 x 2 matrix to define the kind of political divisions I’m trying to talk about.

Let start with the more complicated axis and see if I can knock that out before the pizza we’re making is ready (Friday is always Pizza and Movie night at Casa de Armed Liberal).

I’ll use three words to try and describe one end of the axis:

– Open
– Unfinished
– Fine-grained

On the other, we have

– Closed
– Complete
– Large-scale

Let me give some concrete examples – literally.

Why is Paris a more interesting city than Irvine? Why is it that when we see pictures of the Champs or of Rue l’Odeon we’re more interested than when we see pictures of Fashion Island Way?

In another example, what is the difference between the styles of fighting of the U.S. Army that invaded Iraq with minimal losses and the Soviet Army that took incredible losses invading Grozny?

One succeeds (on specific terms) and one doesn’t.

Because one is ‘unfinished’, it is fine-grained, and deliberately open in design and planning, and the other is the result of a massive single vision. On one hand you have the coherent but slightly different visions and plans created and executed by people close to the scene, and on the other the broad-brush implementation of the huge plans made by distant visionaries.

One is, in a word that ought to resonate to this audience, open-source.

The other isn’t.

Visionaries don’t usually have open-source dreams. Their dreams are entire, whole, of a cloth. And like Lenin, they are often willing to build mountains of corpses to construct them.

Other people are the material of these dreams, not participants in them.

I was an immense fan of the architect Le Corbusier until I actually walked through one of his buildings, a convent in France. And I thought it was horrible. Because it was ‘finished’.

There are two great books: “How Buildings Learn”, by Stewart Brand, and “Building the Unfinished” by Lars Lerup. Both of them talk about how neighborhoods and buildings are changed by those who live in them and use them, and how good neighborhoods…ones that we find attractive and liveable…are those that have been adapted by those who use them.

So what I’m trying to talk about is an axis between a Romantic ideal…a single grand vision, an orgasmic leap from self to world via will…and a pragmatic, Classical ideal which talks about complex, evolving systems.

Berlin talked about “the Hedgehog and the Fox”…the fox, who knows many things, and the hedgehog, who knows one great thing. He was talking about intellectual history, not political history. But we can talk about political systems in the same way…

The other day I said:

I begin to get a new way of parsing contemporary politics, and an explanation of why the conservatives in power now are really liberals in disguise.

I expected a bigger response to this, but figure I may as well just jump into what I see as a new taxonomy of current American politics.

I’ll start by setting out four of the corners:

– Romantic Liberals
– Classical Liberals
– Classical Conservatives
– Romantic Conservatives…

I’ll try and explain what these are one by one, but I figure I’ll have some fun with y’all and start with the one guaranteed to make folk’s eyes bug out.

Romantic Conservatives – and why it is that the GOP today is really not conservative. Today, the GOP is pretty squarely in this camp. Why do I call them Romantic?

Because they are in thrall to an ideology almost as fantasy-driven as Al-Quieda’s. It projects a fantasy of an economic America of limited government and yeomen entrepreneurs running small businesses, and a social America that looks like the television shows of the 1950’s. Neither one reflects any kind of real American history any more than Qutb’s fantasy connects to real Middle Eastern history – instead they are references to a series of Chamber of Commerce pamphlets and old situation comedies.

And the concrete policies they choose completely undermine the fantasy – another characteristic of Romantic politics. The centerpieces of Bush’s economic policy, if you look at them carefully, don’t benefit small business, professionals, or small entrepreneurs. The impact of these incentives is as targeted as a JDAM, and it is on the large corporations who make up the GOP’s core constituency.

It assumes that the best way to promote small business is to … give tax breaks and shift policies in favor of big businesses and big investors, thereby accelerating the concentration of economic power – which means shuttering the small businesses as they go under. It assures us that the best way to preserve our way of life is to … deprive us of the liberties and the equality before law that are central to it. In essence, GOP policies are aimed at using the power of the State to reward those who they think should be rewarded and enforce their ideals of human behavior…one of the basic definitions of liberalism, no?

Note that a different set of large corporations and institutions make up the Democrat’s core constituencies, and their policies are similarly targeted in denial of their stated ideology. We’ll get to them later.

Joe weighs in with a commentary below on Michael Totten’s column on liberalism, which has prompted a lot of discussion around the blogs.

Well, as the designated liberal here, I’d better weigh in, or I’ll lose all my street cred.

[JK: A.L. has added an excellent update to the earlier verison of this post! The last line is a bit of a stunner, but I won’t spoil the surprise…]While I think a lot of Michael, and see some things in his post that can lead us some places, I have to agree with Kieran Healey that what we have is some observations in search of an argument. Now that is a charge that I’m all too aware of, given that many of my own posts tend to do the same things.

But in the background, I’ve been struggling toward an argument on liberalism that will both account for what I (and many others) see as the problems with it, and what I believe is essential about it.

And while I think Michael missed the 10-ring, I think he got his shot onto the target, and I want to look at what he did and see if I can set out the beginning of an argument that builds on what he suggested.

He said:

Liberals are builders and conservatives are defenders. Liberals want to build a good and just society. Conservatives defend what is already built and established.

Close, but not quite.

I’ve been talking for a long time about Romanticism, and about the roots in Romantic thought of much of modern radicalism and even terrorism.

Romanticism, to try and boil a definition down to a sentence, stands on two legs: an unwillingness to be shaped by the world around us, and a desire to remake to world to fit our image of it.

At its most extreme, it leads to the kind of suicidal megalomania that we saw on 9/11.

But it also attaches us to ideals, and makes us willing to fight for them, even when inertia suggests that we would be better off tending our gardens.

When Totten points out that his liberal acquaintances don’t know much about history or about current affairs, I’ll suggest that it is because much of modern liberalism has become an exploration of the internal landscape of our ideas, without the connection to an external world.

In opposition to Romanticism, I’ll suggest that we have Classicism, which I’ll define for this purpose as “knowing one’s place”. Part of that is an inherent willingness to accept authority, and another part has to do with a willingness to accept the concrete reality of place…to accept facts as they are.

Pirsig talked about this in slightly different terms in ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance’. He actually goes deeper into it in ‘The Cruising Blues’.

Liberalism…classical Liberalism and again contemporary liberalism as I’m trying to redefine it…was a masterstroke because it found a path between the two movements above, which have defined the poles of social thought for as long as people have been writing about it. It simultaneously created a ‘place’ where people stood, and made that place one that they could control.

I’ve got to get back to work, but I’ll toss this out as a starting point for discussion.

Update:

Here are two good quotes from Robert Pirsig’s article ‘The Cruising Blues and Their Cure’, from Esquire.

An alternative – and better – definition of reality can be found by naming some of its components …air…sunlight…wind…water…the motion of waves…the patterns of clouds before a coming storm. These elements, unlike twentieth-century office routines, have been here since before life appeared on this planet and they will continue long after office routines are gone. They are understood by everyone, not just a small segment of a highly advanced society. When considered on purely logical grounds, they are more real than the extremely transitory life-styles of the modern civilization the depressed ones want to return to.

If this is so, then it follows that those who see sailing as an escape from reality have got their understanding of both sailing and reality completely backwards. Sailing is not an escape but a return to and a confrontation of a reality from which modern civilization is itself an escape. For centuries, man suffered from the reality of an earth that was too dark or too hot or too cold for his comfort, and to escape this he invented complex systems of lighting, heating and air conditioning. Sailing rejects these and returns to the old realities of dark and heat and cold. Modern civilization has found radio, TV, movies, nightclubs and a huge variety of mechanized entertainment to titillate our senses and help us escape from the apparent boredom of the earth and the sun and wind and stars. Sailing returns to these ancient realities.

In the terms I discuss above, sailing is not Romantic, it is Classical. It is about accepting concrete reality, not willing a new one into being.

We call sailing romantic, because it is an escape from what we in the industrialized West see as our ‘reality’, which is one of offices, bureaucracy, and the other manifestations of civilization. But like many of the disciplines I have enjoyed in my life, rockclimbing, sailing, and racing motorcycles, it relies above all on a clear-eyed acceptance of what is real.

That acceptance is not without moral qualities. Pirsig discusses virtue:

Now, however, with a boat of my own and some time at sea, I begin to see the learning of virtue another way. It has something to do with the way the sea and sun and wind and sky go on and on day after day, week after week, and the boat and you have to go on with it. You must take the helm and change the sails and take sights of the stars and work out their reductions and sleep and cook and eat and repair things as they break and do most of these things in stormy weather as well as fair, depressed as well as elated, because there’s no choice. You get used to it; it becomes habit-forming and produces a certain change in values. Old gear that has been through a storm or two without failure becomes more precious than it was when you bought it because you know you can trust it. The same becomes true of fellow crewmen and ultimately becomes true of things about yourself. Good first appearances count for less than they ever did, and real virtue – which comes from an ability to separate what merely looks good from what lasts and the acquisition of those characteristics in one’s self – is strengthened.

And to me, these virtues…getting up and going on, steadfastness…are the root of real virtue.

When Totten talks about “Building” and “Preserving”, I want to shift the focus to “Imagining” and “Accepting”. Now this construction is overly simple and in some ways clearly untrue (liberals have some grounding in reality and conservatives have imagination); but I think that it can serve as an organizing metaphor to understand what I’m getting at. Liberals center their values around imagining, and they want to fashion social worlds that enable them to manifest their imaginings, to materialize the moral good that they can envision. Conservatives center their around accepting, and they want to fashion social worlds that are stable.

Without liberal imagination, we would still be in thrall (literally!!) to kings. Without conservative acceptance of reality we would be – like the B’aath regieme, like Pol Pot – whipping our people to implement the fevered imaginations of our leaders, and struggling with leaders who must have more and more power in order to be able to will their imaginings into reality.

What works is a tension between the two things; a tension within each of us as people, within our politics as a society.

Looking at this, I begin to get a new way of parsing contemporary politics, and an explanation of why the conservatives in power now are really liberals in disguise.

I’ll divert the focus from the international scene for a moment and talk about domestic politics, and an unintended consequence of the information revolution – paralyzed legislative bodies, unable to come to grips with the real issues facing the various states and the nation and exempt from punishment by the electorate. That’s right, unless you are meaningfully accused of murder (Gary Condit), incumbency is essentially considered a property right these days.

There are a number of reasons, and I’ll focus here on one…reapportionment.

Reapportionment is the process whereby districts are drawn for legislators, and what has happened is that old-fashioned gut instinct has been replaced with a level of sophistication and exactitude made possible by computer’s ability to crunch statistics, and by the excellent and readily available sets of statistics on voting behavior by precinct and demographic changes down to the city block level.

This allows sophisticated operatives (and we had among the first here in Los Angeles in the Berman brothers) to design legislative districts with an impossibly high level of assurance on how those districts will vote.

And this means that each vote counts for substantially less, because the contest was pre-selected when the politicians selected their voters, instead of the other way around.

This is going on worldwide right now, as U.S.-style election consultants and electoral techniques spread. A quick Google shows articles from Ireland, Italy, and Greece, as well as the U.K.

Here in California, (thanks to a permalink-less Mickey Kaus – just scroll down to Sunday, May 4 – hey, Mickey, we went high school together!!) California Congressman Devin Nunes is proposing an anti-gerrymandering initiative. Where do I sign up?? I’ll dig in and share the word. You can’t email his office because of the stupid ‘contact your representative online’ system in place, but you can fax him at (559) 733-3865. Other states should follow.
I’ve blogged about this over at Armed Liberal (here and here) and want to bring three great articles up here.

First, in the normally somnolent L.A. Times, in an article titled In California, Politicians Choose–and Voters Lose:

What if the World Series had been played during spring training, the commissioner of baseball having picked the competing teams? Baseball fans would be outraged. Yet something similar has happened to California elections. In the vast majority of legislative and congressional districts, we have no general election contests this fall because the races were decided in the spring primaries. The political stadium is dark.

How many competitive races for the House of Representatives are there in the Southland? None. How many competitive races for the state Senate? None. How many for the Assembly? Two–at most.
…

That’s what a politician likes–the fewer voters, the better, and especially if they are the most partisan ones. Candidates beat their breasts about what hard-core partisans they are, and the tiny number of people who go to the polls respond by electing the most hard-core partisans in both parties.

The result is a largely dysfunctional Legislature. Members chosen in a closed primary, with a minimum of voters participating, come to Sacramento intent on representing the narrow partisan positions that got them there.

Is it any wonder they cannot negotiate a state budget? Passing the budget–it was two months late this year–is the most important and most difficult thing a legislator does because it requires compromise and negotiation. The current system encourages exactly the opposite.

One Republican who might have broken the budget impasse this summer privately told friends, “Look, I can’t afford to cross my primary voters; they demand that I hang tough.” The sentiment was the same on the Democratic side. A look at the shadow Legislature elected in March shows future members will be even more ideologically rigid.

Californians might remember this when they cast their meaningless votes in November for their preordained members of the Legislature–if they bother to vote at all.

And why should we?? I live in a district – CA 36 – which was just ‘adjusted’ to assure a Democratic plurality. In the Democratic primary, my congresswoman, Jane Harman, originally took the seat (after stepping down for a laughable run for Governor) by simply showing up and explaining to the list of local Democratic candidates that she wanted it, and that the national party would support her, so thank you all very much for running.

Dan Polsby had a great interview (tip of the hat to Team Volokh), in which he explains that

he 2002 elections for Congressional Representatives will be the first conducted under the new districts drawn following the 2002 Census. Although important issues are at stake in November, most of the districts’ borders have been gerrymandered so skillfully that the typical race’s outcome is predetermined. Time Magazine estimates that 394 House seats are “safe,” 29 are “almost safe,” and eleven are “toss-ups.” That’s eleven toss-ups out of 435 separate elections.
In contrast, 8 of 34 Senate seats are said to be toss-ups. The Senate is more than ten times more competitive than the House, in large part because Senate races are fought over entire states, which can’t be gerrymandered. With districts, however, by carefully redrawing boundaries, parties can ensure that that most of their incumbents enjoy a comfortable majority.

This is the opposite of what the Framers of the Constitution intended for the House of Representatives. They wanted the House to represent the views of the public by allowing voters to make wholesale changes in their Representatives every two years. The Senate, in contrast, with its staggered six-year terms, was supposed to provide a brake on popular passions.

As some objective evidence, take a look at Nathan Newman, who has a great analysis of increasing deadlock and partisanship in Congress (with a really cool animated .gif); he has some traditional historical explanations, but I suggested that the incumbent-centric gerrymandering above is a huge part of the problem.

This is a bad, bad, thing people…one of the worst U.S. exports, and something we should work hard to stamp out here and abroad. It is one of the main pillars of the SkyBox (what I call the barriers to entry in politics), and has damaged the U.S. badly.

I saved this for Saturday, in keeping with Joe’s “good news” policy.

In the L.A. Times this week, there was a front-page story of a man’s fall and his first steps toward redemption. I’m a sucker for those stories, most of all because I believe in redemption (I once argued for hours with a friend that Pulp Fiction was most of all a moral film, because it was the story of Jules’ – Samuel Jackson’s character – redemption).

And I was a deeper sucker for this story, because I sort of know the man involved, and because of the impact he indirectly had on my life.

The 53-year-old diabetic with a weakened heart, a white, unkempt beard and several missing front teeth awakens in his $35-a-day room the size of a jail cell, cradling his electric guitar. He gets dressed and shambles a couple hundred feet down the street to a seedy BART plaza in the Mission district. He sits on a battery-powered amplifier, plugs in the guitar, puts a cardboard donation box on the ground and begins to play and sing.
…
The notes are fuzzy and occasionally halting, but the technique is unmistakably sophisticated: chords and melody played simultaneously, the way Chet Atkins might have done. An old gravelly blues voice, perfectly cracked, effortlessly in tune, pours from the slumped singer. The truthfulness of the voice commands you to listen, but it also commands you to wonder: Who is this? What is a guy with these chops doing here?

Continued…

His name … his stage name for 23 years … is Carlos Guitarlos. Two decades ago, he was a member of a famously mercurial Los Angeles bar band, Top Jimmy and the Rhythm Pigs. The band, a collection of big, obstinate, blues-loving men who played and partied fiercely and disdained rehearsals, was at the epicenter of Los Angeles’ club scene during a brief era when the roots-rock and punk-music movements collided, forging groups like the Blasters, Los Lobos, X and Fear. These bands were fraternities of elemental musicians, contemptuous of stardom, seeming to long only for one transcendent moment on stage.

By the late 1980s, that fervor was largely gone, along with the Rhythm Pigs. Guitarlos became another obscure name in the long list of musicians felled by drugs and booze, desperately following his ex-wife and infant daughter to San Francisco, living by playing on the streets and sometimes sleeping on them, losing himself in cocaine.

Which is where most of these stories end. Every once in a while, though, one of the fallen will rise and, as former Blasters guitarist and songwriter Dave Alvin puts it, “bear the symbolic cross for the others.” And so it has come to pass that in this transit plaza, where commuters and drug dealers swirl in separate circles, paying little attention to him, Carlos Guitarlos is on the verge of resurrection, of making that new start.

While I was raised in Los Angeles, I moved away early, and never meant to come back. My Parisian then-wife and I were transferred here by our employers, and we were unhappy about it, and by extension with each other.

We started going out; to plays, concerts, and little clubs, and in one little club (Club 88 on Pico) one night we saw three bands: Top Jimmy (with Carlos Guitarlos), Los Lobos, and then in an unbilled after-hours set, The Blasters. It was sweaty, beer-drenched, ear-ringing rock and roll perfection. I’ve seen a lot of amazing concerts…Nine Inch Nails in a small club on Sunset, Jesus and Mary Chain at the Whiskey…that I was lucky to experience, but there was something Platonic about this one.

And driving home, two things happened. First, Wife #1 and I realized that we’d fallen in love with Los Angeles, and in turn reconnected with each other…which meant that we would go on to have Biggest Guy and Middle Guy, two of the three best things in my life…and I realized that above all I was in love with America, because unlike NIN or other bands, whose music cuts across cultures and unites a worldwide “youth culture”, bands like Top Jimmy, Los Lobos, the Blasters, and X…the Los Angeles ‘roots rock’ bands of the 80’s were specifically from and about America. And listening to them you couldn’t help but to connect with the music of America’s past, and with the people who listened to that music. Not people in symphony halls, or intellectuals listening to avant-guarde compositions in salons, but the average people who listened to AM radios as they worked and played and drove.

My affection for place and love of country gelled in some part because of that rock and roll show; and I’m damn grateful for that.

Carlos Guitarlos’ self-published new CD will be at Tower Records, and I think I’ll go by and pick one up today. You may want to do the same, if you can talk your local music store into finding it for you.

Who knows where it might lead…for him, or for you.

Over at Porphyrogenitus, Porphy (we’re e-mail friends, so I can call him that) has a long and link-filled post on the roots of what he sees as the modern kulturkampf. While I don’t quite agree with the place (on the right wing) where he stands to make this point, I think he lays out a fairly good description of the array of intellectual parents responsible for “Bad Philosophy”, and of some of the sociology that underpins its promulgation.

Intellectual life doesn’t take place in a vacuum; to borrow from Newton, intellectuals all stand on each other’s shoulders. People being human and fallible, they are picky both of whom them allow to stand on their own shoulders, and of whose shoulders they stand upon.

Readers of Thomas Kuhn’s book “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” will see this as a familiar process, in which socially accepted constructs – “paradigms” mature, evolve, and occasionally collapse, through an essentially social process.

The social process Porphy focuses on is the process whereby academic ideas become “normal” and accepted, and the ways in which their holders defend themselves against new and different ideas. He looks intently at issues of language, and so I’ll go back to a great article by Stephen Hicks on “Free Speech and Postmodernism” (I was pointed there by Arthur Silber via Instapundit). In the article, Hicks says:

What we have then are two positions about the nature of speech. The postmodernists say: Speech is a weapon in the conflict between groups that are unequal. And that is diametrically opposed to the liberal view of speech, which says: Speech is a tool of cognition and communication for individuals who are free.
If we adopt the first statement, then the solution is going to be some form of enforced altruism, under which we redistribute speech in order to protect the harmed, weaker groups. If the stronger, white males have speech tools they can use to the detriment of the other groups, then don’t let them use those speech tools. Generate a list of denigrating words that harm members of the other groups and prohibit members of the powerful groups from using them. Don’t let them use the words that reinforce their own racism and sexism, and don’t let them use words that make members of other groups feel threatened. Eliminating those speech advantages will reconstruct our social reality—which is the same goal as affirmative action.

A striking consequence of this analysis is that the toleration of “anything goes” in speech becomes censorship. The postmodern argument implies that if anything goes, then that gives permission to the dominant groups to keep on saying the things that keep the subordinate groups in their place. Liberalism thus means helping to silence the subordinate groups and letting only the dominant groups have effective speech. Postmodern speech codes, therefore, are not censorship but a form of liberation – they liberate the subordinated groups from the punishing and silencing effects of the powerful groups’ speech, and they provide an atmosphere in which the previously subordinated groups can express themselves. Speech codes equalize the playing field.

I still find Objectivism kind of silly, but think this is one of the most incisive descriptions of the “speech and tolerance” issue that I’ve ever read, and believe that resolving this key issue…the place and power of speech and freedom of thought…is going to be the key battle in the War on Bad Philosophy.

Note that simply defeating the post-modern model isn’t an accurate reflection of my own views on where we should go. These are complicated, and as of now, still ill-thought through. Paradigms change for a reason, Kuhn suggests, and the insular paradigms of the ‘modern’ 1950’s changed because they couldn’t readily absorb racial or sexual equality as well as a host of other changes which were brought by the 60’s and 70’s and which I see as of value.

(note that I posted earlier on the Hicks article at Armed Liberal)

Thinking about the question of Israeli WMD, I keep circling around two core questions –

“Is it OK for Israel to have them?”

and if it is OK, as my knee-jerk reaction so far has suggested,

“Why is it OK for Israel to have them, and not the Arab states?”

Commenter poikilotherm suggests a framework for the question:

1. “What are the “rights” of nations, how do we decide what our rights are vs anothers rights, how do we mediate disputes, how are these rights limited by othernations, and is a WMD unique enough to deserve particular concern?” That’s as opposed to

2. “On balance, is it better for Israel to have the bomb than no?”

The first one is a doctoral dissertation (or a post on Oxblog…), the second is one I think I can roll around and make something of in a quickly-written blog post.

I’ll expand the question to include the issue of Arab WMD, and reframe it as

“On balance is it better for Israel to have the bomb or not, and if they do, is it better for them to have the bomb alone or not?”
I’m going to focus on the Bomb, as opposed to biological or chemical agents. The reality is that Israel has the technical capability to make pretty much anything in either group, but short of Aziz’s ‘germs that target Arabs’ weapon, I don’t see how any of them help the Israelis given their style of warfare.

I’ll also point out that given the interpenetration of Israeli civilian and military life, and the broad training necessary down to the field soldier level to effectively make use of those kind (bio and chem) weapons, it would be difficult (certainly not impossible) for Israel to deploy them in secret.

I’m also going to ignore the historic/moral issues – i.e. that Israel isn’t entitled to WMD because it is an illegitimate colonial state, or that it is entitled to WMD because it is an outpost of G-d, and Jews have some special right to weapons because of the Holocaust.

Both are interesting barroom discussions, but to me have little to do with the issue at hand.

I believe that Israeli possession of WMD has been a good thing, because I believe that it has most likely restrained Israel’s enemies but has restrained Israel as well. I think that this dynamic is about to change, and that this change will have some pretty serious consequences.

Let me explain.

The current reality (over the last 25 years) is that Israel is surrounded by states which would, if they could, invade and occupy it. Whether this would end with the destruction of the Israeli political state, or with the death of the Israeli people is immaterial; I’ll stipulate that Israel has a right to survive as a state (take that as an axiom).

There are two more key assumptions, both of which are, I believe strongly defendable:

1) That Israel is not territorially ambitious, which feeds
2) That Israel is not interested in destroying the nations surrounding it except as a part of destroying their capability to attack Israel (i.e. Israel is happy to coexist)

Both of these are debatable, but I’ll suggest that in the context of this issue, if Israel intended to use its WMD to conquer territory or destroy Arab countries, they’ve had roughly twenty-five years to do so, and haven’t.

Those states have available to them both their conventional armies, which are not insignificant (although the whole “why are the Arab Armies ineffective” thing is worth a discussion), and they have the Palestinian people, who the Arab states maintain as proxies against Israel. The entire Palestinian population is not a threat to Israel, but a significant enough number of them are that they are an effective force.

The armies can’t win, so they don’t attack, but they are relatively restrained in the kinds of tools and support they offer the Palestinian population. Why is that?

I’ll suggest that one of the restraints is the threat that Israel would, if seriously under siege, use nukes. There are a variety of things they could so with them, and there are people who know lots more than I do about but I’ll suggest three:

1. destroy the oil fields – this is a threat both to the Arab countries which would go broke and to the West
2. destroy the Arab armies in place – which would lead to loss of control by the leadership of the Arab countries so targeted

note that these two would have ‘relatively’ low casualty rates, as the much of the population isn’t near the oil fields or military bases (which tend to be Israel-facing)

3. destroy the Arab societies by destroying their population centers

I have read theories that they would destroy Mecca and Medina, but have to believe that they wouldn’t do that since it would enrage all Muslims to the point of attacking.

The people who run the Arab governments aren’t stupid, they understand the threat, and in turn have to modulate the level of threat they present to Israel. Supporting Arafat and Hamas with small arms is one thing; with tanks and major weapons systems is another.

So I’ll suggest that the threat of the Israeli bomb has moderated the behavior of Israel’s enemies, and that’s a good thing.

I’ll suggest that it has also moderated the behavior of Israel.

Here I’m stepping further out past what I know anything about to what makes sense to me.

I have done business with a fair number of Israelis (Persians and Saudis too; no Palestinians unfortunately), and being the Nosy Parker that I am, tend to ask them questions about Israel and Israeli politics and the Middle East.

And I notice that my memory of talks in the 70’s was of the perceived imminent threat to Israel’s existence – which was the justification for massive, hair-trigger responses to any threats. I don’t notice that as strongly now.

Whether this is because of the Israeli military record (which is pretty damn good) or because they know they live under the nuclear umbrella is a good question. I’ll suggest that the latter has to have some effect.

And to the extent that it causes the Israeli decision makers to adopt a more – relaxed – posture that’s a damn good thing. If it lessens the sense of threat faced by the Israelis, that’s good – not for ‘touchy-feely’ reasons, but because it makes the Israelis less likely to respond massively and suddenly to perceived threats. Their DEFCON is lower, and is harder to elevate.

So I believe that the Israeli WMD have contributed to stability in the region, which translates into fewer deaths, which I take as a good thing.

Now I’ll editorialize for a minute, and make a point that deserves it’s own post, and will probably get one later.

Pluralistic, capitalist states are expansionist in subtle and powerful ways. These have more to do with culture and trade than conquest.

Totalitarian states also tend to be expansionist, but the form of expansion for them tends to be military.

This means that I’m inherently more trusting of pluralist capitalist states than I am of totalitarian ones.

In the case of the totalitarian Arab states this innate tendency is amplified by the ideological basis of Islamist thought, about which more later.

This tends to make me inherently distrustful of totalitarian Islamist states with WMD. His deserves amplification and support, and I’ll step up and do so.

But my final point is that Israel and to a lesser extent the U.S. are working against the clock. There will be an Islamist nuke sometime in the intermediate future. Whether it is built, bought, or stolen is immaterial.

The issue is whether we can lower the take the momentum out of the Islamist movement before then.

One way will be to try and push a resolution of the Palestinian question – a resolution that leaves the Palestinians with a viable state. The leadership will have to change for that to happen (we may seeing that now). Let’s hope.

A delay in bloggage has occurred.

I wrote something on WMD in the Middle East, and on re-reading, it seemed really trite, so I’ve shelved it while I read these two books:

The Israel-Arab Reader: A Documentary History of the Middle East Conflict ed. by Barry Rubin and Walter Laqueur, and Terror and Liberalism by Paul Berman.

I finished the Berman book, which is interesting but relatively shallow. He has some insight into Qutb, but little into the Western roots of modern terrorism, and he never paints a convincing contrast between Islamism, which the book spends most of its time describing in somewhat breathless tones, and liberalism.

I’m working my way through the Rubin book, which is an interesting collection of original documents. I’ll finish it tonight and have something for tomorrow.

But this seems like an interesting opportunity to start asking about a reading list. In comments, what books are people finding indispensible in understanding either the Middle East or the broader Islam v. Islamist issues we discuss here…