Guest Post: Pundita: Missing Something?
None of the above is meant as a criticism of the countries I’ve mentioned or their people, and one would be hard-pressed to find nicer peoples than the majority of Swedes or Norwegians — and Canadians for that matter, who also live under a constitutional monarchy. I see no harm in people upholding traditions that provide them with a sense of order and give them continuity with their past, which is why I cheered on the royal pomp associated with the marriage of William and Kate. If it helped Britons get clearer on their values I was all for that.
The harm comes when Americans are so unclear on their own values, their own past and traditions, they can’t engage closely with the rest of the world without becoming terribly confused. One consequence is that the more the U.S. government has tried to mesh with the “international community,” the lower America’s standing in the world has fallen.
Americans can’t turn the situation around without first acknowledging that the international community is in large measure of bunch of royalists. Arriving at this realization doesn’t mean Americans should eschew friendly relations with people in such societies or that official Washington should spurn engaging with the governments on issues of mutual interest. It does mean that Americans are asking for ever greater trouble by lumping “democratic” monarchies” with American democracy.
Over at ZenPundit, Mark Safranski has again expressed concern about what he calls an emerging American oligarchy, an elite that’s manipulating the rest of the American populace to accept its rule. Meanwhile, Fareed Zakaria is seriously proposing that America replace its president with a prime minister and Congress with a parliament — with an upper house, I suppose, to be stuffed with Mark’s oligarchs, duly elected of course, so that Americans will stop the troublesome habit of vehemently disagreeing with one another.
Now just see how one thing leads to another. First you’re snuggling with liberal monarchies, then authoritarian ones, then one day you’re asking, ‘Why is there no USA anymore? Why is there only the international community?’
Missing something?
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onparkstreet:
August 28th, 2011 at 12:39 pm
Pundita guest posting on zenpundit! And Charles and J. Scott posting as regulars, too.This is one of my favorite spots on the ENTIRE internets.
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Another interent fave of mine, Carl Prine, gently (er, his version of gently, which is to say, not at all gentle) chides GEN. Dempsey for his reading list in a recent post. Where is the Constitution in that list he argues? Where, indeed?
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I keep having the feeling that large portions of our history are completely unknown to members of this supposed elite (seriously, as a onetime inhabitant of that Boston and Palo Alto medical world axis-of-brilliance, what am I to say? Outside of their fields – which they master brilliantly – some of those elite don’t know much. Make fun of populists and anti-War protestors (right) and tea-partiers (left) for being dumb all you want, but I’m telling you, as a sort of factotum in that world, I listened in on my betters – a lot. What they know is a massaged and distorted narrative of Western guilt mixed in with noblesse oblige. They have high SAT scores. The underpay their TAS, secretaries, admin assistants, and assistants profs, all as they cry over the poor in post-colonial fiction and attend expensive fundraisers down Copley Square. You know?
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Now, where was I? Oh, yeah….
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In short, the oligarchs are weird. Seriously odd people. Maladjusted, even. I don’t agree with the previous zen post in which the Fabius Maximus blog is excerpted and which posits that we are well-governed. Well governed in what sense? Comparatively to Western Europe and Japan? Um, okay.
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In creating a two-tier society while painting stolid traditional middle-class values as an evil, the fools are quite good and divide-and-concur and game the class evolutionary scale toward their dullard children, so maybe Fabius Maximus is correct.
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I seriously don’t know where I am going with this.
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But I adore Pundita’s blogging.
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– Madhu
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Pssst….here’s a little secret for you all. You know how their are think tanky CNAster types (like CNAS, but you know what I mean) for foreign policy? They are their for medicine, too, and Obamacare is their baby. But you have to know some of the players from the inside to understand what that means.
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Now, where was I? Oh yeah….
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Hey, we’ve done some things to be truly and well ashamed of and there ought be no hiding it. But when it is not balanced out with a realistic history – the world as it is – it becomes much easier to lie to yourself and to manipulate others.
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Pundita’s tart (a word zen once used for her marvelous blogging – such a fangirl of her blogging that it’s embarrassing) commentary on how the Pakistani military
onparkstreet:
August 28th, 2011 at 12:41 pm
What internet devil always make me hit submit without preview? Internet devil, I don’t like you.
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– Madhu
onparkstreet:
August 28th, 2011 at 12:52 pm
"….and the U.S. military has been repeatedly outwitted by Pakistani military officers who got tactical training in the U.S." – Pundita, on a previous post.
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I’m too depressed about the ability for certain elites to game our elites to comment further on this point or on the Bruce Reidel post.
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I was going to write a novel about it in the comments section, but I just can’t go on with this topic at the moment.
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You know what the strangest part of reading milblogs is for a silly little ole’ civilian gal like me (yes, I am purposely being affected and annoying)? The sheer "we are men and women who read Clausewitz" arrogance of it all. I wasn’t too wrong with my crack about "how many Clausewitz-es fit on the head of a pin," now was I?
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COIN, FID, another article on Vietnam, yada yada yada….
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But study yourselves, dear Foreign Policy elite – civ and mil, your own curious history with a particular client state, the strange tendency for American military men of a certain type to romanticize the ole’ Pakistani "frontier," the tendency some in the CIA and State to cover for that client state, the sheer arrogance and oddness of a people who will do anything but study the exact, specific, history and nature of a part of the world meant for conquering? Or ass-kicking? Or saving?
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Just too hard, apparently.
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This topic depresses me. It’s the arrogance that gets me. And I’m arrogant as heck, too, so can you imagine the levels of arrogance out there? What’s that about, FP and milblog types?
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– Madhu
onparkstreet:
August 28th, 2011 at 12:58 pm
Not all of you people, obviously.
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Story from my youth: my mom always used to say that if you sent an American kid (of Indian parents) back to India, his or her Indian cousins would eat that kid alive in any hard negotiation, in an kind of enterprise involving money.
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It was my Indian mom saying this, so don’t go calling her racist or anything. She’d get the better of you, too, in any negotiation. A bunch of nice Pakistan ladies who are anti-General should have been in on all those various strategic reviews. They’d have done better in that environment.
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Again, too depressed on this topic to go on. We will recreate this same dynamic in all those Arab Spring countries. You just wait and see. The sad thing is that it is the people in those ME countries that we would like to help that we will likely crush with our DC bureaucrats inerring ability to go with the wrong guy….
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– Madhu
seydlitz89:
August 28th, 2011 at 1:35 pm
Interesting take on the realationship between society/culture and government/state. So the society can be monarchical and the state something else, as in republics like France or Portugal. That is the society/culture precedes the state . . . whereas with America the state preceded the society.
What exactly is "American democracy"? An apparatus for selecting leaders chosen by the elite, or a shared set of political values? How do US political institutions promote these democratic values or do they do the opposite?
zen:
August 28th, 2011 at 4:20 pm
First, thanks are in order.
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Thank you to Miss Pundita for agreeing to cross post here!
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Secondly, thank you to Charles for organizing this!
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Third, thank you to Doc Madhu for the compliment and enthusiastic response!
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Regarding "the Oligarchy"(TM) America always has had an elite, or wealthy ppl that’s not new. What is different to my mind is that formerly, with the Eastern Establishment pre-1974, there was a sense of stewardship, self-restraint, ethics and mutual identification with the nation as a whole with the old elite. When they were self-dealing, say John Foster Dulles pushing diplomacy that helped United Fruit, clients of Sullivan & Cromwell or LBJ handing out contracts to dredge South Vietnamese harbors to Brown & Root, they were at least feathering their nests in sync with pursuing American interests.
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The current crowd that I term "the Oligarchy" is an emergent fusion of financial sector masters of the universe with the political class of both parties and their close clientela based on alumni ties to a set of about 15 universities which shares a belief in technocracy, political correctness, regulatory capture to benefit the financial sector at the expense of everyone else and an education that was critical or disdainful of US history, democracy, constitutional liberties and restraints, due process, the rule of law ( it’s just a form of power etc.).
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The oligarchy – mostly JDs and MBAs – are very poorly educated in history because what they have been given in our fine universities, which abandoned the systematic teaching of the western canon to undergraduates in the 1960’s, has been a highly selective and ideological hodgepodge from 70’s & 80’s grievance activists masquerading as scholars. The oligarchy are not "marxists" or "leftists" but their sense of identification or primary loyalty to the US is weak and self-aggrandizement is great. The educational damage was not the looney left indoctrination, which did not stick beyond vague social guilt, but the loss of the substance that should have been there in the place of the ideological rot and the lack of a common ethical code. Unlike simple individual self-preservation, the oligarchy seem to have a visceral dislike of seeing ppl like themselves, in this insular social group, being held accountable like ordinary mortals. Even when it is no skin off of their nose or is affecting noiminal political opponents. For example:
http://networkedblogs.com/m4NHj
It is what the marxists used to call "class consciousness". They will feather their nests at the expense of American interests and not give a rusty damn. Perhaps that explains the strange affinity for the governments of Pakistan and Mexico and contempt for the rest of us.
This trend is dangerous – this crowd is not particularly competent at anything except behaving with unseemly, almost self-destructive, avarice and networking for power. As Tom Barnett likes to say, the smartest and nicest ppl are not the ones who went into politics in the past 30 + years and largely, he’s right. I’d feel more kindly and care less about their personal corruption if they were delivering a 6 % real GDP growth rate and not trying to spy on and control the behavior and life options of the public at large. It took two centuries to build America into a superpower and they are going to undo it in one generation of inept statecraft and unabashed, maniacal looting.
Larry Dunbar:
August 28th, 2011 at 6:55 pm
Just when I think it can’t get any better!
Charles Cameron:
August 28th, 2011 at 7:29 pm
I’ve been gaining some interesting insights about the (tectonic) differences between the US (where I live) and UK (where I’m from) lately, reading Pundita on monarchism (here and in her piece on the royal wedding), and Lexington Green on "bottom-up, inductive, spontaneous self-organization" as the essence of America.
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I am pretty sure that ritual and ceremonial have a lot to do with these differences, and will be writing on the reasons why ritual so powerfully engages the human spirit in upcoming posts — but for now, I’d like like to invite Pundita to tell us a little more from her own perspective about monarchy and its ritual aspects.
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Perhaps I might add that my own recent thinking along these lines was triggered by the media attention surrounding the recent requiem and other obsequies for Otto von Habsburg — another occasion marked by the interweaving of religious, state and military pomp and ceremony.
Larry Dunbar:
August 28th, 2011 at 8:15 pm
Perhaps we should bring to the conversation (a conversation I tried to get you to start many months (years?) ago) that a king is not necessarily a tyrant. A tyrant is non-generational by nature (a tyrant is not into Generational Warfare, but a king maybe). The advantage is in the targeting (3GW). A king, as those in ancient Greece, fought a Generational Warfare (targeted) that had a component of time and not just distance. But then perhaps we should not. Perhaps it would seem to P.C, as those of the committee would agree. As you are of the committee.