Liberty reins

"The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands."

Why?

A large part of the intellectual bankruptcy of the neocon project lies in that question, because it is not convincingly answered. Liberty in the United States has not been seriously threatened by states that do not have it in its history with the possible exception of Hitler's Germany, which the States was tempted to accommodate rather than fight. Japan, of course, would not even have needed to have a war with the United States, let alone threaten its liberty, had the States been willing to adjust its sphere of influence -- or at least contest it in a nonlethal way -- to areas that really were core for it, as Britain and Russia were willing to do in central Asia. (It's notable that Britain fought France hard for India but only jousted with Russia in central Asia.)

Bush's insistence that other people's way of organising themselves affects his nation recalls the reactionary Europeans of the early nineteenth century, convinced that revolution in one place could spark the destruction of their own regimes, by contagion, even if the revolutionaries in each place were pursuing narrow aims -- nationalism or local protests against repression.

There is a marked difference though. The Metternichs of the Congress system were not mouthing platitudes as part of laying the groundwork for expanding their empires -- they were concerned only with how they could keep their world intact in the face of the Enlightenment and the threats of the industrial age (which would together tear them down -- I am not quite convinced that Bobbitt's theory of the entwinement of the strategic and the political always holds true, because it so minimises other inputs that seem to me important, even if in a less easily measured way than the requirements of warmaking). They were keen to increase their empires, of course, and revolutions threatened to unravel them; but it was the threat at home that they feared most. All conservatives do, it almost goes without saying. They represent the status quo, the entrenchment of existing privilege. Change is threatening to conservatives because they generally have most to lose from it. (I should almost use a big C for conservative here, because of course I am thinking of them as a faction that represents certain interests rather than simply as the reactionary elements of society. My discussion here would seem to exclude such conservatives as rural folk, who also tend to dislike change. However, rural conservatives are not just reactionary because they lack education and contact with the flow of ideas that is so much a part of urban life but because they feel that if traditional power structures are modified, they will lose what they have. They have the belief that they are well served by their distant social superiors, who need them and nurture them (they are rather fondly romantic in their misjudgement of the landed, who have ruthlessly exploited them throughout human history), and that revolution, as all change, is a product of the cities, whose inhabitants, the bourgeoisie, bear them ill will. Anyone who has lived in the country will know the malice that bumpkins bear urbanites, often extended to the educated or those who seem to share urban values. It's natural that rural folk will not feel they have much to gain from socialism or welfare. Many people in the country live in communities that have lasted a long time focused inwards, communities that largely take care of their own. It might seem to the bumpkin that it is the urbanite who needs a welfare state because the latter has gambled on leaving the nurturing community to try to increase their personal wealth. The notion of genteel poverty was born in the country, and the country poor have never had half as much respect for those who try to become rich as they do for those that began that way.)

Bush is of course pretending to love democracy (an ironic stand from a man who is president because two elections were subverted for him and who not only evades accountability but seeks to undermine the pillars of his own nation's democracy -- by appointing the interested to posts that should be filled by men and women without interest and by attacking the judiciary, which is fundamental to American democracy because of its role doing exactly what Bush despises: the "activism" of forcefully preventing the abuse of power) because he and his faction covet the resources of countries that happen not to be democracies (and in the case of North Korea, because it is one of the few remaining Communist thorns in the American flesh). He would be horrified if they actually became democracies. If he were genuinely interested in it, one can note, he would presumably encourage the clerics in Iran, who have at least allowed some movement towards democracy and censure the theocracy in Saudi Arabia, which will not be becoming democratic this side of Armageddon, or the other antidemocrats in the Gulf, who would barely be able to support themselves without our guns and our trade. A couple of years of going without Bahrainian oil, for instance, would not hurt us much but would surely see the end of the family that owns that unfortunate island. Why is there no move, no suggestion of a move, to sanction nondemocratic regimes in the Middle East, if it truly is democracy we wish to see spread there? Bush could suggest to the Saudis that there must be a national assembly within six months or the Saudis face an end to the stream of guns and tanks that we supply them with. (Of course, Daddy wouldn't like it and neither would his colleagues in the Carlyle group or any of the other "defence" contractors who grease the wheels of American politics.) If that doesn't work, we don't buy their oil. What is often forgot in discussions of the Saudis is that, yes, we need their oil and would grind to a halt without it, but they need our dollars more. The threat would, I think, be enough.

But it will never be made and in any case liberty is more often an outcome of justice -- in both its narrow and broad senses (Iraqis would be a good deal more liberated were they safe and were there an equitable structure to share power) -- than it is of holding an election every now and then.

posted by Dr Zen @ 2:30 pm