“We live in a strange age in which the elections held in a country recently liberated from a monstrous and barbaric dictatorship were criticized because they resulted from an “imperialist intervention” by the “fascist US regime” – but terrorists attempting to destabilize that country and prevent popular elections through threats of violence are called “freedom fighters” and “Minutemen” by voices of the Left like last year’s international media darling, Michael Moore.
The Left used to claim to be on the side of democracy and the will of the people (as long as those people weren’t under Soviet domination), and against fascism and oppression. Now that the post 9/11 Right has taken up the cause of liberation (for admittedly self-interested and pragmatic reasons), the Left is suddenly on the side of “stability”, even as dictatorships around the world are being shaken to their foundations.”
The Left has become, at least psychologically, a vanguard movement. Millionaire Hollywood socialists, tenured radicals and activist lawyers from law schools steeped in histories of WASP white shoe privilege. What does George Soros or Cass Sunstein have in common with anybody trying to raise kids in a modest three-flat bungalow in Chicago or a double-wide in some Georgia hamlet ?
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Dan tdaxp:
February 15th, 2005 at 4:20 am
Mark,
Could you write more on George Soros? I remember reading his Open Society essays in the 1990s, being thrilled during George and Ukraine, and very hopeful when I hear about his work the rest of the Former Soviet Union.
Is George Soros is being tarnished by his American associates? Everywhere else he is so adept at creating cross-ideology alliances. His unfortunate choice of friends in American politics is a puzzle.
mark:
February 15th, 2005 at 3:54 pm
hi Dan,
George Soros…hmm…here goes
Soros is an international currency speculator of great skill. That skill earned him a great deal of unpopularity in semi-authoritarian countries that were trying to liberalize their markets yet still have the state manipulate them. Soros was their poster boy for the market puncturing that particular ” have your cake & eat it too” balloon. He also wrote checks to dissident organizations pushing the democracy envelope in those same regimes, further aggravating those rulers.
Soros made a great show of anti-Bush grandstanding and check-writing in the last election cycle and Bush is even more unpopular with most of those regimes than Soros is. There are far, far, more effective and quiet ways for a billionaire to influence the American political process with money. Soros went about spending in probably the least efficient and strategic and most noisily obnoxious way possible.
I’m pretty sure he knew that too and intended, in the long run, to achieve nothing substantively while looking like the Anti-Bush sugar Daddy. This was Soros trolling to rebuild his overseas image to take himself out of the antiglobo bullseye.
Bush’s policies – spreading markets and rule of law in the long run but creating market uncertainty in the short – are ultimately very helpful to guys like Soros so why try to get rid of him ?
The other explanation is that Soros is as politically naive as he is financially sophisticated and is an egomaniac to boot. I have trouble buying that one but it is possible.
J.:
February 15th, 2005 at 8:23 pm
I think you miss my point – I’m not as concerned about the cost of fabric (although you do, I think, underestimate the price differences of DLA’s ordering millions of fatigues a year and their point of view on economies of scale) as I am the mindset.
You say “Jointness is better expressed in such elements as communications equipment and military doctrines that cultivate interservice teamwork while letting each unit do what is designed to do well.” Well, here’s the thing – the services don’t like joint, they write joint doctrine to be all-encompassing of all four services’ unique views and practices instead of refining it from a top-down, slimmer joint aspect. Here it is, what, 20 years after Grenada and we still can’t get the four services to use one version of GCCS or use one standard logistics reporting format.
I merely meant that this uniform issue is indicative of the deeper feelings within the four services. I don’t fault Rumsfeld for not forcing them to go standard, just that Rumsfeld’s goal of going joint appears to be weakening as a result of this symptom.
Anonymous:
February 15th, 2005 at 8:25 pm
The name game…
It is confusing trying to get a grasp on the American political landscape since the names we use often mean the opposite of what the various factions are supporting.
There is nothing progessive about Progressives. They are rather stasists/statists, and quite regressive.
There isn’t much liberal about Liberals. They are welfare-statist, democratic socialists.
We have Democrats who opposed democracy in Iraq, try to undermine democratic decision-making by resorting to judicial fiat, and who despise the demos as being stupid and beneath them.
We have Conservatives who are promoting some of the most radical, audacious, forward-looking policies that are not conservative at all.
I consider myself a classical liberal, which is a completely inadequate term. Because it makes it seem as if I support some old set of ideas that belong in a museum. It certainly doesn’t capture Hayek’s Party of Life or Postrel’s Dynamism.
It is very difficult to make sense of our political reality and to find a place within it with all these up-side-down meanings to these terms.
phil
mark:
February 16th, 2005 at 4:28 am
Phil,
Can’t say I disagree.
” Liberal” I think was kept as a brand – calling yourself a Social-Democrat/Democratic-Socialist doesn’t sell very well in the US.
The Right has never been a unified party in the last half-century so much as separate but intertwining threads with a common set of political adversaries.