Christopher makes an important point. To anyone who’s tempted to believe that the Bush years were a complete departure from an otherwise unbroken American tradition of “moral leadership” I’d recommend–for starters–getting acquainted with Andrew Bacevich’s The Limits of Power, which I blogged about here. Then we can move on to the collected works of Reinhold Niebuhr.
Category: Messianic delusions
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Bacevich on “Democracy Now!”
Starts at about 33 minutes into this stream (thanks, Elliot!).
To the extent that I still think of myself as a conservative, it’s in the Bacevich-Reinhold Niebuhr mold. Bacevich gets at what I take to be the heart of this conservatism in the interview: it’s the recognition that world exists prior to us and doesn’t conform to our ideas or wishes. Ironically, conservatives used to lambaste progressives for allegedly wanting to remake the world according to some abstract, utopian scheme. But contemporary U.S. conservatism seems to have embraced a similarly magical worldview (or what Matthew Yglesias has called the “Green Lantern” theory of politics) where sheer willpower is sufficient to make the world the way we want it to be.
Not coincidentally, Bacevich has just written the introduction for a new edition of Niebuhr’s The Irony of American History. Of course, Niebuhr was in many ways a man of the left, which leaves open the possibility that a broadly “conservative” worldview–one that emphasizes human sinfulness and finitude, unintended consequences, and the need for limits–might lead to what we would consider progressive policy prescriptions, something which I think has a lot of truth in it.
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The menace of Rudy
Speaking of executive power-grabbing, The American Conservative has put out a special anti-Rudy issue. Glenn Greenwald writes about Rudy’s authoritarian tendencies, while Michael Desch looks at his ultra-hawkish foreign policy.
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Freedom by cluster bomb
Michael Gerson scolds critics of “President Bush’s democracy agenda” (he doesn’t mean Bush’s commitment to transparency and accountability here at home, by the way) and manages to write an entire column without mentioning the means supported by proponents of the “democracy agenda,” namely maiming and killing large numbers of people in foreign countries.
See here for a less snarky response to this kind of thinking.
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Holy immanentizing the eschaton, Batman!
Did Barack Obama really say this? – “I am confident we can create a Kingdom right here on Earth.”
Don’t go there, dude. (via Eunomia)
A Thinking Reed 