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DO HISTORIANS UNDERSTAND THE CONSERVATIVE MOVEMENT?

Cliopatria has had a symposium on an article “Bush’s Ancestors“by Princeton historian and sometimes liberal partisan Sean Wilentz. In the article, Wilentz draws a comparison and traces the origin of modern American conservatism to The Whig Party that rose up in the antebellum period to challenge the Democratic Party of Andrew Jackson. The Wilentz article is worth reading even though I think that in numerous instances the author is being rather facile by ignoring some logical historical connections that might be more flattering to George W. Bush and the G.O.P. than the comparison with the Whigs who died an ignoble death equivocating on slavery.

The Cliopatriarchs Ralph Luker, Jonathan Dresner, K.C. Johnson, Caleb McDaniel, Wilson J. Moses and Greg Robinson give an excellent demonstration of how to properly critique a historical argument, probing for weaknesses in reasoning and offering countervailing evidence to the thesis (Moses is the least effective at addressing Wilentz but his argument is nonetheless entertaining in a weirdly provocative way – every symposium needs somebody to be a bombthrower or at a minimum, get outside everyone’s comfort zone).The symposium should be printed and passed around as mandatory reading in seminars for first year graduate students.

Collectively, they offered many cogent criticisms that I myself would make of ” Bush’s Ancestors” including:

• “To begin with, as Eric Foner noted in his review of The Rise of American Democracy, Wilentz is remarkably unsympathetic to Andrew Jackson’s rival, John Quincy Adams. Here, in “Bush’s Ancestors,” Adams gets no credit as a major figure in the Whig Party. The article might actually have been strengthened had Wilentz given Adams some space” – Ralph Luker

• “I’m frankly surprised that Wilentz doesn’t go back at least into the revolutionary period, though perhaps the founders were too deistic and humanistic for their anti-oppressive zeal to fit the conservative mold but their successful revolution clearly set the tone for the movements he tracks forward. ” – Jonathan Dresner

• “There seem to me, however, three significant differences between the two parties. First, as Wilentz notes, the Whigs originated in opposition to what they perceived as the excessive executive authority of Andrew Jackson, and they maintained this vision of a weak presidency for most of their party’s history….And regardless of the merit of his policies, George W. Bush has been a stunningly powerful president—going five years without having to veto one bill, dramatically expanding executive authority after 9/11, and seeming to defy the Supreme Court with his handling of the Guantanamo prisoners issue.” – K.C. Johnson

Where the Cliopatriarchs critiquing Wilentz are weakest – as is Wilentz – is in understanding or explaining the several economic philosophies of conservatism which seem to all get lumped together under the vague label of ” pro-business”. This is a lacuna that seems to affect the historical profession as a whole which collectively believes that modern economics began with John Maynard Keynes The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money and ends with Paul Krugman’s column. Any opposing view of economics from the Right is a priori dismissed outright as scribbling on a cocktail napkin – despite von Mises, von Hayek, Milton Friedman, a boatload of Nobel prize winners at the University of Chicago and a supply-sider Nobel laureate who inspired the Euro.

The intellectual resistance among most historians to giving serious consideration to conservative economic arguments borders on being an article of faith; and as a result they miss an important part of the conservative movement. American conservatism is deeply split on economics and the libertarian, free-market wing provided an ideology that helped fuel Ronald Reagan’s march to the White House. Big Business by contrast opposed Reagan in the primaries and lined up behind George H.W. Bush in 1988 and George W. Bush in 2000. Supply-Side economics are what drove Reagan’s across the board tax cuts, budget cuts, degregulation policy and tax reform, not the complacent rent-seeking of the Business Roundtable.

Big Business does not like across the board tax cuts, tax simplification or pro-entrepreneurial deregulatory policies. Big business likes tax loopholes, credits, subsidies, no-bid contracts, interest-free government loans, waivers and high artificial barriers to market entry – things that George W. Bush has given them in spades. That wing of the G.O.P. is Richard Nixon’s and Bob Dole’s wing, not Jack Kemp’s or Ronald Reagan’s and they are in the driver’s seat these days but constitute few of the rank and file ” movement” conservatives.

A second criticism I have- and it’s a surprising one given the past four years – is that the once, allegedly all-powerful, Neocons are missing in action in both the Wilentz article and in the symposium. Of the group, McDaniel comes closest to addressing that strand of conservatism, albeit indirectly. The Bush administration Neoconservatives fit very poorly into Wilentz’s Whig model, if at all ( I think McDaniel’s allusions and his references to the fire-eating, Southern filibusteros demonstrated how poorly).

Conservatism really isn’t a riddle, wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma – though in the Ivy League it might as well be.

FUKUYAMA’S REASSESSMENT OF THE BUSH DOCTRINE

The End of History for Preemption ? Francis Fukuyama writes in ” The Bush Doctrine, before and After” the following:

“Under the right circumstances, it is impossible to make a normative case against preventive war: if suicide terrorists with WMD are clearly planning an attack on the US on the territory of another country, it is hard to argue that America does not have the right to take matters into its own hands rather than wait for United Nations Security Council permission to act. Even the UN’s High Level Panel on reform admitted as much. The problem is that, in the real world, such conditions almost never exist. We seldom have good information about our enemies’ capabilities or reliable ways to predict their future behaviour. Failure to find Iraqi WMD exposed the limits of US intelligence capabilities. The Bush administration merged the terrorism/WMD problem with the rogue state/proliferation problem in a way that skewed the risk-reward calculation toward preventive war. The Iraq war showed that traditional prudential strictures against preventive war ( Bismarck once called preventive war “committing suicide for fear of death”) remain valid even in an age of suicide terrorism.

There are several reasons for this. A hegemon has to be perceived not just as benevolent but competent. With the administration’s failure to find Iraqi WMD and its bungling of the Iraq reconstruction process, Washington ‘s credibility plummeted. The Bush doctrine’s preventive war doctrine was, moreover, based on implicit assertion of US exceptionalism. Given that the US would almost certainly criticise a similar anti-terrorist policy proclaimed by Russia , China or India , its assertion of this right rested on the premise that America is somehow more disinterested than other nations. Americans may believe in their own good intentions but international legitimacy emerges only if others do as well. Long before the Iraq war, Americans failed to perceive deep currents of anti-Americanism building up.”

The U.S., it must be said, was first decried as a ” hyperpower” in 1994 when it was being criticized abroad for too little unilateralism, not 2004 when it was widely ( and erroneously) criticized for too much. Fukuyama concludes:

“The best way to assess the durability of the Bush doctrine is to ask how likely it is to be applied again in the future – that is, how ready is the US to again intervene unilaterally to topple a rogue state proliferator and engage in another nation-building exercise? The answer comes from the Bush administration itself, which has already backed away from military confrontations with both North Korea and Iran in favour of multilateral approaches, despite much clearer evidence of nuclear programmes in those countries. This suggests the doctrine has not survived into Mr Bush’s second term, much less become a permanent component of US strategy against global terrorism”

The United States is inevitably going to be involved in future ” nation-building” enterprises simply because the Gap is going to continue produce horrors that will reach a threshold that connected, democratic, vocal populations in the Core will find impossible to ignore once the suffering is of a sufficient magnitude. Or when some ongoing atrocity neatly coincide with state interests. Nor will a future president shrink from a better safe than sorry military intervention approach in a situation where loose nukes and irrational hostile actor are involved.

No, what will happen is like with Munich, Pearl Harbor and Vietnam, 9/11 and Iraq will become analogies that get weighed against one another in a future crisis as statesmen struggle with questions of war and peace.

THE BALLOT AMIDST THE BULLETS: THE VOTE IN IRAQ

The intrepid Bruce Kesler has a stinging analysis of the Iraqi referendum in light of the predictions and the political axes ground by those making them. His piece is entitled, “ Not a Sunni Day For The Left” and is posted at AEI Online. Some excerpts:

“ Today, it?s the Americans who are unleashing revolutionary ideas, most recently in the Middle East. But the French, as is their wont, demure. And why not? Aside from the danger that democratically-elected governments would expose the role of Chirac’s advisors in profiteering from the UN oil-for-bribes program, a liberated Middle East would upset France?s cozy power and commercial relationships with other corrupt Arab states. Democracy is too potent a force to be fooled with by mere un-French mortals from Texas.

…Did the invasion of Iraq precipitate these changes? I think the hawks considerably overstate their case, but at the same time they do have a case. Even if Iraq is a mess, it might all be worthwhile if it eventually produces progress toward a more open, more liberal Middle East. At the very least, it’s an argument that needs to be engaged.

…Even the New York Times’s defeatist in Baghdad, Dexter Filkins, was forced to recognize the significance of last Saturday’s turnout in Iraq?s constitutional referendum, which was heavier than last January’s turnout and higher than most U.S. elections. It represents the first evidence that Iraqi?s Sunni Moslems, whose community forms the heart of the guerrilla insurgency, have decided to join the budding Iraqi political process. Another New York Times report tells us that, for the first time, Syria’s Opposition Unites Behind a Call for Democratic Changes “

Interestingly enough, Bruce’s thesis is being echoed, some irony here, in Le Figaro ( Hat tip Marc Schulman):

“It’s hard for the anti-Bushites to swallow: the Iraqis accept the democracy offered by the United States. Saturday, 61% of eligible Iraqis took part in the referendum on the Constitution. On January 30, they had mobilized in similar fashion, in spite of the threats, to elect their deputies. Whereas the popular wisdom sees in George W. Bush the expression of a “totalitarian spirit,” history is correcting this caricature. It is a change in perception that is not to France’s advantage. By confronting the intimidation of the Islamists who forbid these electoral consultations, Iraqi society expressed its refusal to be subject to their wishes. Will Iraqis build the Muslim democracy hoped for by American neoconservatives, and that the media chorus judges unattainable? “

My commentary today consists of two points:

First, that while the Bush administration’s lack of competent Arabic fluent USG personnel are hampering our efforts in Iraq, the critics in theMSM is not any more in touch with the average Iraqi. If they were, the turnout and result would have been less surprising. Perhaps part of the problem is that Westerners are talking primarily to the minority of Iraqis who are English fluent.

Secondly, while the referendum was very important that importance is longitudinal in terms of establishing democratic norms. Recall the civil war in El Salvador; the election in 1984 was a milestone for El Salvadorans, carried out in the face of Communist guerilla violence but the war itself stetched on into the first Bush administration. And that civil war was less complex and the FMLN rebels were more dependent on outside aid and more disciplined ( in terms of reporting to a command hierarchy) than Iraq’s insurgency and foreign terrorists. Elections do not suffice to quell wars but they make the battlespace more inhospitable for the side that is fighting against the concept of free elections.

The war in Iraq is going to grind on for years at various levels of violence. Iraq’s referendum did not stop the insurgency, it cannot by itself, but in habituating millions of Iraqis to democratic expectations of governance, it was an irreplaceable event. Iraqis now know the difference between a sham election run by Sadaam’s Baathist goons and a real democracy; and the concept of ” consent of the governed”, so intolerable to Zarqawi’s Islamists and Baathist die-hards alike, has been legitimized, once again, by precedent.

These are effects that can be suppressed for a time but never erased.

RUSSIA UNRAVELLING: TRANSCAUCASIA’S UNPOPULAR BUT ADVANCING ISLAMISM

If you are interested in Russian and Eurasian affairs you can do no better than to check out Peter Lavelle’s Untimely Thoughts and in particular, his weekly round-up of expert opinion. Along with Nathan’s Registan, Untimely Thoughts is your “must-read” blog.

This week, Peter’s experts discuss the disintegrating situation in Southern Russia and Transcaucasia. A worst-case scenario view from one of them, Gordon Hahn:

“Moreover, there are four general and rather profound implications of Russia’s emerging revolutionary jihadist network for U.S. national and international security that policy-makers ought to be considering:

(4) a rising tide of Islamist terrorism and the government’s failure to hold onto large areas of Russian territory likely would promote serious instability in Moscow. A regime that “appeased” or lost out to Islamist separatist revolts and terrorism would be more vulnerable to neo-Communist, hardline nationalist forces or be inclined to continue re-centralizing power and rolling back democracy to such an extent that it transforms itself into a dictatorship. Any of these outcomes is likely to produce a powerful government opposed to U.S. policies and interests, perhaps in alliance with a revived nationalist China or other rogue states. This would be catastrophic for security, given the burdens of an on-going war against terrorism (Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere), the danger of crisis and conflict with Iran and North Korea, and other national and international problems.”

Fears exist that Chechen rebels have acquired nuclear warheads and/or weapons grade material or are actively seeking to do so. Given their willingness to strike all the local headquarters of Russian security agencies in coordinated head-on attacks, this fear is justified. In the eyes of Shamil Basayev, how many of his men’s lives are ” worth ” a one megaton warhead ?

The odd aspect to this war, as some other experts rightly point out, is the utter alien nature of terrorist Islamism to the Chechens who historically practice a localized brand of loose Islamic faith with social mores dominated by the code of Adat, not the Sharia. Indeed there is considerable evidence that the ultra-violent Shamil Basayev, the ex-communist, ex-nationalist turned Islamist, may exhibit piety more for the financial support of wealthy Gulf extremists than anything else. There is also no evidence that the Chechens, while loathing Putin, evince any desire to give up their clan-based culture for some kind of artificially constructed neo-Taliban puritanism.

Were it not for the inept and brutal policies of the Russians themselves, Basayev’s men would probably meet up with a much more hostile climate in the mountain villages.

PERHAPS THE U.S. SHOULD LET THE BRITS DO ALL THE TALKING

“I believe that this is precisely because we have developed a highly successful model of integration which enables people of all backgrounds and faiths to prosper and live together within the safeguard of common values. Our society is itself an affront, and a reproach, to the ideologues who believe that only their way of living life is the right one.

However, there can be no negotiation about the re-creation of the Caliphate; there can be no negotiation about the imposition of Sharia law; there can be no negotiation about the suppression of equality between the sexes; there can be no negotiation about the ending of free speech. These values are fundamental to our civilization and are simply not up for negotiation.”

– The Rt. Hon. Charles Clarke, M.P. Home Secretary of the United Kingdom

The power of moral and intellectual clarity combined with actual mastery of the English language, you can read the whole thing here.

Now many of our top officials are just as smart and sometimes better educated than their British counterparts, so why do our officials come off sounding more like the president of the Akron, Ohio All-City Bowling League ?