20 Years of In Medias Res

Remember this image? Of course you do. Everyone does. Especially those of us who had already been blogging for years (in my case, five of them) by the time it appeared in February 2008.

Like millions of other American bloggers, I'd been reading blogs--though I don't recall if I called them that--for years (all through graduate school in the late 1990s, specifically) before the Iraq War tipped me over into actually publishing one myself. It's easy to reconstruct my blogging career, such as it is, partly in reference to the content of my writing way back then; I've done it before, and the details haven't changed, though obviously my assessment of it all has. Talk about being wrong! All those posts during my first month of blogging, in March of 2003--"liberal internationalism," "the Anglosphere," Blair, Bush, blah, blah, blah. There are intellectual elements to the way I was drawn into tentative but nonetheless undeniable support of America's utterly unwarranted and overwhelmingly ruinous invasion of Iraq that I can, and sometimes still do, reconstruct into a more theoretically nuanced and therefore defensible political posture towards nationality and sovereignty and all the rest, but that doesn't excuse being wrong about the question of the moment. And it wasn't the only time, for certain; over the past two decades of blogging, I've had to eat crow over stuff as momentous as same-sex marriage, stuff as unimportant as Deathly Hallows, and lots of stuff in between. But this is getting me into talking about content, which I didn't want to do. Rather, I feel like I should say something about why I'm still typing away, however rarely these days, on this here blog--yes, still using Blogger!--because maybe that will say something that I need to hear myself say about where I stand and where I'm going, looking forward towards the last third of my life.

That sounds terribly pretentious, I suppose (also not a new thing for me). But I'm 55, and I've been wondering on and off all summer what sort of aims and intentions should shape the remaining 15 or 20--or less, or more--intellectually and professionally productive years I have left. And just as the the medium is the message, I suppose to one degree or another, the platform is the person--or the publicly thinking and writing persona, at least.

When I started that first blog in March 2003, I was less than two years out of graduate school and still had aspirations to publish my dissertation as a book; I was going to the sort of political theorist who thought and wrote heavily about the sort of issues and ideas--identity, recognition, revelation, community, language, truth--that the German Romantic and Counter-Enlightenment traditions, and the particular sort of communitarianism which I saw deeply indebted to it, put front and center. Hence the name of my first blog: "Wäldchen vom Philosophenweg," a phrase of my own invention (though heavily indebted to Johann Gottfried Herder's Kritische Wälder) that basically meant something like "the twisted, wooded path through philosophy." Yes, it was terrible. And by the summer of 2004, I knew that. By then I also knew that the way I'd leaned hard into thinking about global politics in light of all the aforementioned issues and ideas was, while not worthless by any means, part and parcel to how I'd convinced myself of something that was very, very wrong. So I had this idea: I needed to back away from my heady, grad-school-inspired approach to framing what I saw as my own intellectual contributions to online discourse, and get more humble. (My inability to follow through on my plans to turn my dissertation into a book was pretty humbling too.) I spelled out some of this in my final post on that old blog, and then 20 years ago today, on August 13, 2004, I started this baby, In Medias Res, "in the midst of things," complete with a tagline stolen from a comment my dissertation advisor once made on one of my papers, with two posts: one, a reflection about my life at the time as a visiting assistant professor at Arkansas State University (a position I'd hold for one more year, before the most stressful year of my professional life, which ended with my surprising job offer here at Friends University), and two, a celebration of Melissa's and my 11th wedding anniversary (31st this year!). And, well, here I still am.

Over the past two decades I've thought dozens of times--as the position of blogging in the media ecosystems around us radically changed, as the technology our homes and my offices upgraded, and, I think most importantly, as smart phones undermined, sucked up, and/or re-wired nearly all of the discursive habits that had made the blogsophere a thing in the first place--of dumping IMR. Or revamping it through Wordpress, or moving it to Reclaim Hosting, or any number of other strategies. After moving here to Wichita, KS, and beginning teaching at Friends, and landing on the idea of taking my intellectual interests in community and turning that towards a consideration of the urban and rural divide, and of the politics and economy and physical environment of urban communities of a middling size--like Wichita--I continued to experiment. Once I launched a different blog, then later a substack (now called Wichita and the Mittelpolitan; you can read my justification for that effort here) to replace that second blog. I moved posts from In Medias Res over to the first one and then later to the second one, all in the hopes of eventually finding, through the architecture of how I was arranging and thereby thinking about my own engagements with both my scholarly interests as well as the constant flow of information all around me, some way to make my contributions more constructive (and maybe even write a book!). It hasn't happened yet, and now I wonder if it ever will. 

And would that be so bad? In the grand scheme things--especially since I, thankfully, landed at an institution that prioritizes teaching and different types of service, both to the school and to the community, over pure research (though of course we're supposed to be doing that as well)--maybe not. And yet, I haven't taken down the substack, have I? Nor this blog. So apparently I still have some sort of aspiration to keep my thinking and writing, if not truly organized and intentional, than it least occupying a space, and possessing a direction. I may not understand myself and my own limited grasping of the world as the hacking through of philosophical thickets any longer, but I do still believe, or at least aspire to believe, that in the midst of things, some constructive pattern can be drawn out. Ideally by me! But, maybe not? I'm not sure. Melissa always says that over the past 20 years on this blog, I've written hundreds of thousands of words; a large portion of that has been about family and local politics and pop music and philosophical tributes and movies and geek culture, true, but surely at least some of it could be shaped into some kind of genuine scholarly work, right? Sometimes I can see a way to do that; other times I can't. But as long as I think there might be some value to all these ruminations, whether or not that value manifests in the form of some goal I can aim to make the final third (more more) of my professional add up to, I figure it's a good thing I never got rid of In Medias Res and all that has spun off from it. Being thrown into the midst of things means finding some kind of stability in the midst of the flow; maybe this blog, whether I use it much or not, and however my thinking about that use has changed (and will likely continue to change) over time, has been mine. And given my unwillingness to pull the trigger after two decades, presumably will remain so until Blogger goes bankrupt (knock on wood!).

My primary guide--and sometimes primary goad--throughout all of this has been the wonderfully meandering musings of Alan Jacobs, a scholar I've never met in person, but whom I've read productively and sometimes engaged with for over 15 years. He not only planted the seed which inspired my original--more than a decade old!--vision of engaging with what I later named "mittelpolitan" places, but his whole, always evolving, always self-reflecting, presence on the internet--his main blog, his micro-blog, his Buy Me a Coffee community--continually inspires (as well as intimidates) me. I've never been, and likely never will be, either disciplined enough or productive enough--or just plain write quickly enough--to make habitual any of the practices which I see his own experimentation as pointing out options for, but I love imagining finding some version of them in my own online writing nonetheless. He recently commented:

[A] blog is an ideal venue for what I want to do, which is preservation and transmission...[even though] a blog is probably the least cool way to communicate with people. It doesn’t have old-school cred or state-of-the-art shine; it falls into a kind of uncanny valley. To be a blogger is sort of like being that Japanese guy who makes paintings with Excel. But that suits me.

Suits me too. (And, if you're one of the, I suppose, 14 occasional readers of this blog, maybe you as well!)

Thoughts on Elshtain

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]

Jean Bethke Elshtain, a profound and important political theorist and ethicist, died yesterday I was lucky enough to have met her perhaps a handful of times, being able to ask her a question or two about this or that work of hers, at various conferences and dinners over the years. I wish I could have known her better, and learned from her more, because far more than any of the other philosophers and theologians I've felt inspired to write encomiums to before, Elshtain's work mixed theory, politics, history, and faith together in a way which mattered to me deeply. Save perhaps Charles Taylor or G.A. Cohen or Fred Dallmayr, I can't think of another scholar whose intellectual work overlapped with my own professional life that mattered to me more.

The surprising part of that claim, as I acknowledged it to myself yesterday, is that its heart is not to be found in Elshtain's major works of scholarship. Her work on Jane Addams is an important addition to her many writings on democracy and civil society over the years; her book on Augustine was hugely influential to my thinking about Christian realism; and her earlier writings on women in the context of both war and public life, most crucially her twin essays "Antigone's Daughters" and "Antigone's Daughters Reconsidered," are essential texts in second-wave "difference feminism." All that I know (and I haven't even mentioned her final major work, Sovereignty: God, State, and Self, based on her Gifford Lectures, mainly because I haven't gotten around to reading it yet)...and yet, that's not the stuff which made her voice so vital to my own reflections. No, the Elshtain that mattered to me was the public intellectual of the mid-1990s, the author of numerous essays and reviews for First Things (which posted a fine, brief tribute to her yesterday) and The New Republic, and of a short, wonderful book (a revision of her Massey Lectures), Democracy on Trial, which I have used multiple times in my classes over the years. The voice Elshtain used in those comparatively short writings was a kind but trenchantly common-sensical one, the voice of someone of genuinely conservative cultural and religious sensibilities who was dealing honestly and straightforwardly with the manner in which social and economic changes--many of which she openly acknowledged to be positive--were obliging those in her camp to be clear and uncompromising on just what they wished to conserve, and why. For Elshtain, the what was, primarily, a well-marked out public space, one which separated the public from the private (a distinction which she saw grounded significantly in the real, bodily, natural characteristics and rhythms of men and women and children and family life), and which thereby opened up a space for open-minded (but never abstract or theory-driven) education and debate and compromise. The why of such a space was very simple: the possibility of genuine democracy, and the civic virtues which popular self-government make possible. Hence, Elshtain was a conservative defender of culture, community, manners, and tradition for the sake of good democratic government and civil society--which meant that those trends and ideas which she challenged, while often overlapping which those whom conservative Republicans throughout the Clinton years already regularly and gleefully attacked, were approached in a manner that made her words stand out. Certainly, at the very least, they stood out for me.

At the time, I considered Elshtain's arguments to be of a piece with those of various communitarian writers, both left and right: William Galston, Michael Sandel, Amitai Etzioni, and others. There's a good deal of truth in that association. Like Alan Wolfe or Mary Ann Glendon, she saw the language of rights as being "increasingly [expressed] in individualistic terms as their civic dimensions withered on the vine"; like Robert Putnam, she was very concerned with social capital, and wrote persuasively about how the "black and white, winner-take-all" model of juridical politics "preempts democratic contestation and a politics of respect and melioration"; and like Sheldon Wolin, she feared that the "new ideology of difference" represented a kind of "exclusionist sameness," one that would dissolve the more important category of "citizen," within which, by contrast, a "broad measure of similarity...support[s] a notion of membership that entails equality of rights, responsibilities, and treatment" (Democracy on Trial [1995], 14-15, 27, 74-75). To this day, I am comfortable describing Elshtain as part of that post-Reagan movement to dig deeper into and do more with the explosive transformation of American (and international) liberalism following the end of the Cold War, to add civic republicanism and participatory democracy--or, in other words, to add Alexis Tocqueville and Hannah Arendt--to American political discourse. In the years before 9/11--after which Elshtain's own political sympathies and her deep connection to the Augustianian/Niebuhrian tradition of realism led her (like many others, unfortunately) to mostly accept without much dispute Bush's War on Terror--her arguments stood as a powerful conservative complement to what might be seen as a broad work of vital communitarian renewal.

But now, in retrospect, I wonder if it might not be more accurate to describe her voice during those years as one that played a part--perhaps a small one, but perhaps not--in laying the groundwork for a different, more localist and more realistic, conservatism. The kind of conservatism I have in mind here was, of course, pretty much completely foreign to the Reagan years, and during the Bush years it took refuge in various libertarian, traditionalist, and/or paleoconservative corners....but which today, in our moment of technological and financial overreach and social and sexual transformation, it has found itself, I think, echoed (if not strongly affirmed) by certain mainstream voices in surprising ways. I go back to her review-essay "Suffer the Little Children," a harsh--but with a tragic, rather than a vindictive or mean tone--takedown of Hillary Clinton's It Takes a Village (and book which, I should note, I like and am willing to defend), published in The New Republic on March 4, 1996, and I see in it not just a sharp democratic and civic rejection of the cult of expertise, but an insistence on putting modernity's cultural costs to the family (particularly those costs which flow from educational attainments, economic diversification, and the general suburbanization and professionalization of American society) front and center:

I am no a family-above-all person. Some families are rotten and the children in those families should be spirited to safety as quickly as possible. But truly rotten families are, thank God, few and far between. More commonly we have good enough families or almost good enough ones. How high do we place the threshhold in assessing good and bad parenting? Whose business is it anyway? Here Clinton makes one of the more lamentable moves in her book. She is dead-on about the importance of being attuned to the needs of infants, feeding them, cuddling them, holding them, but in a discussion of the fact that there is not "substitute for regular, undivided attention from parents" we learn that the "biggest difference" that emerged from a study she cites and endorses, was "in the sheer amount of talking that occurred" in various households. It is no surprise that Clinton favors the chattering classes, but she proceeds to malign poor and working-class parents because they interact less with their children....

Like Clinton, I recoil when I hear a parent shout at a child. I, too, cringe when a parent is curt, abrupt and dismissive. But I recognize that this is not the same thing as neglect, not the same thing as abuse. Perhaps, as the late Christopher Lasch insisted, the working-class or lower-middle-class style aims to instill in children a tough, early recognition that life is not a bowl of cherries, not a world in which everyone is telling you how great you are; that their lives will be carried out in a world in which they tasks they are suited for, the jobs they do, the lives they live, and even the way they talk (or do not talk) will be scrutinized and found wanting by their "betters." I know that Clinton would argue, in response, that she means no invidious comparison. But the comparison is there and it is invidious. According to her book, the higher the income and education, the better the parenting, all other things being equal....Don't get me wrong. As a general rule, children shouldn't have to...[suffer]. And no group of children should be stuck in such a situation as a permanent condition. But life is hard, and its necessities bear down on people. In the light of such recognitions, it is best at times to restrain ourselves and not rush to intervene and fix everything and tell people struggling against enormous odds that they are doing a crummy job. Sometimes Clinton understands this, sometimes she doesn't ("Suffer the Little Children," 36, 38).

Harsh, as I said. But then Elshtain turns that same analysis on herself:

Those of us who have departed our villages and taken up residence in more complicated places should, in an unblinkered way, face the fact that we are not doing exactly what are parents and grandparents did. Some things were lost; something we gave up. This hit me with great force when, with my husband and children, I drove out of my grandmother's yard about twenty years ago. She was by then utterly bowed over--the years of stoop labor [Elshtain's family, as she explains in this essay, had come to northern Colorado in her grandparents' time as immigrant labor, working the beet fields] had taken their toll--but she came out to the car for a last goodbye, thrusting into my arms more homemade noodles, another loaf of rye bread, freshly gathered eggs, a new apron, another remarkable quilt. What would I had to my own grandchildren, I wondered, as they lingered in the yard with their own families? Will I give them offprints of articles? Copies of my latest books? I suppose I will. But I will not comfort myself with the notion that this is the same as rye bread and quilts. It isn't. I made a choice. That is sometimes called growing up ("Suffer the Little Children," 38).

Elshtain does not condemn herself for her choices, nor does she condemn (at least not whole-heartedly) the Baby Boomer mentality that she was born only a few years in advance of--on the contrary, as those who knew her and know her writings well can attest, she had no interest whatsoever in defending those whose conservatism would lead them to reject the progress which the social and economic choices of women like Jane Addams had pointed towards. Ever the Augustinian, she just wanted to insist that the conservative agenda she supported never reduce itself to a Panglossian best-of-both-worlds utopianism. Conserving certain things did not mean being able to graft those things without change on the present situation. Instead, her conservatism was of an Oakshottian sensibility. She wished to conserve the traditional family--just like she wanted to conserve the simple, direct, communal (and non technologically mediated) public space--because she thought those to be the best possible arenas for people to learn how to work out, and live with, the limitations and tragic compromises which attend all our lives. That's a powerful claim, one rooted in an (I think, at least) essentially incontestable, deeply Aristotelian, philosophical anthropology. We really are, I believe, creatures of community, beings whose language and whole ability to interpret and interact with the given world simply reveals how much our mutual belonging conditions us, intellectually and otherwise. Even if--as I strongly suspect would have been the case between Elshtain and I, if we'd somehow have been able to have a conversation about same-sex marriage or some similar topic--we would have come out on different sides of any given argument over what all that natural and social belonging obliges us recognize and what it obliges us to reject, we nonetheless would have shared enough fundamentals regarding our limits and our place as human beings to be able to productively talk about it. And, ultimately, keeping such democratic conversations going--conserving their basic moral and civic requirements, as it were--was, from all of what I read by her, her most important intellectual goal. That's the sort of conservatism that I want be a part of, and I am in Elshtain's debt for having helped me see, a little bit better, just what it entailed.

I would have liked it if Elshtain's communitarian and democratic sensibilities had directed her to think more about economic matters as opposed to cultural ones, and while I value her culturally-attuned engagements in foreign policy, I think ultimately she made the same mistake many others of us did: allowed her own theory (in her case, a putatively hard-headed "realism") to guide her thinking about the actual people and actual institutions conducting this actual war. But for now, I'm not thinking about where I believe she went wrong; I'm thinking about how often her arguments, even when they didn't persuade me, pointed me in the right direction. There won't be any more of that now from her, which is our loss. Jean Bethke Elshtain, requiescat in pace.

Godspeed, You Brilliant, Thought-Provoking Ass

Finally finished with finals, leaving me some breathing space to start getting caught up on some things that need to be said. And first up on the list comes the news this morning, that Christopher Hitchens has passed away, from pneumonia, contracted in the process of his twilight struggle against cancer. RIP, I say.

Why do I say that, about a man who I've never met and whose ideas I disagreed with more often than not? First, because wishing Hitchens's immortal soul Godspeed would piss him off, and he liked being pissed off. Second, because I'm a softy, in the way that Rod Dreher is a softy, who commented in a post of his, put up late last night, that he finds it "impossible not to like someone as, well, original and as gifted with the English language as Hitchens." (And gifted he was; there are many, many people who attempt to put on the mantle of George Orwell, and appropriate the attitude and emulate the skill demonstrated by the controlled fury and exacting brilliance of Orwell's prose: for Hitchens, unlike nearly everyone else, the comparison very nearly works.) But third, and most importantly, because in my disagreements with him, even more than my agreements, I came to understand something essential about conservatism, and about myself.

I read Hitchens's The Missionary Position, his ferocious screed against Mother Teresa, while I was working as a bookseller while still in graduate school. (He later repeated his basic thesis against Mother Teresa in Slate magazine, here.) After finishing the book, I realized something: I agreed with him. I agreed with his claim that Mother Teresa wasn't at all engaged in the humane act of healing the world which most of her admirers the world over imagined she was. Mother Teresa made Hitchens's angry, and he liked being angry, especially at anyone who believed in a God: she's just an illiberal authoritarian who cares more about building her little kingdom than solving any actual social problems!, his book screamed. (Or, as he summarized his complaint in Slate: "Mother Teresa was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction. And she was a friend to the worst of the rich, taking misappropriated money from the atrocious Duvalier family in Haiti, whose rule she praised in return, and from Charles Keating of the Lincoln Savings and Loan.") My response to his attack, both when I read it originally and anytime I thought about it afterward, remained the same: You're right Hitch: Mother Teresa was concerned more with authority and God's kingdom...because she was convinced that that was where love and salvation and grace are to be found, not in anything so fallen, so liberal, as "society." Or as I wrote back then, with the help of St. Augustine:

Did criminals and murderers and wicked men contribute money to Mother Teresa's cause, hoping to gain something from their proximity to her? Very likely. Should that have troubled Mother Teresa? Not at all. After all, as Augustine reminds us, outside the City of God (and not one of us is fully in it, not now, not until the rest of God takes us), we're all criminals anyway:"What are kingdoms but great robber bands? What are robber bands but small kingdoms?" (City of God, Bk. 4, Chp. 4) This is hardly a good way to interact with others in a political sense: we must seek out standards of justice, build communities that exclude and include, form principles of law, all so that the limited goods of this life can be shared, rather than made subject to raw power and wealth. This is solid Catholic doctrine, and solid Christian doctrine as well: "If you want peace, work for justice." And it's true. But it's only true right here, right now, and the final supreme good of the believing Christian is neither here nor now: it is the eternal peace which the rest of God promises. In the meantime, justice is, well, valuable--but, in a very fundamental sense, it is limited too. "What about justice, whose function is to render to each his due, thereby establishing in man a certain just order of nature, so that the soul is subordinated to God, and the flesh to the soul, and consequently the flesh and the soul to God? Does it not demonstrate in performing this function that it is still laboring at its task instead of resting in the completion of its goal?" (City of God, Bk. 19, Chp. 4) Justice, and all mortal concerns, are by definition incomplete. Holiness, by contrast, in wholeness. If one wholly adored God, then the moral complications of discerning between what some deserve and others do not, of working out compromises when faced with hard moral choices, of deciding between just and unjust wars, indeed of all the necessary vicissitudes of ordinary life, would not trouble you one bit--and, as Hitchens proved (to me at least), that describes Mother Teresa's lack of care for the "real world," or "the big picture," or "the long term" very, very well. In short, I think Hitchens helps us understand why Mother Teresa really was a saint--and why most of us don't want to be one.

This argument--both Hitchens's against Mother Teresa, and mine with Hitchens--simply underscores his similarity to Orwell, who was notoriously divided in his feelings on Gandhi, sniffing that "saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent." Hitchens always thought saints were guilty (like Gandhi too!), because saints are not of this (social, political, "real") world, and this is the only world which Hitchens every acknowledged. Whereas I, on the other hand, think any decent politics has to have at least some saintly involvement, at least sometimes, however convoluted or compromised the presence of that otherworldly (or higher-worldly) that saintlessly may be.

Hitchens unapologetic embrace of the "real world" also forced another realization of mine about conservatism, through the way he contributed to my own twisted odyssey over the war in Iraq. My support for it, as I've written a couple of times before, was almost wholly a creation of the theoretical framework which I embraced at the time (and still somewhat, to a limited degree and in a changed manner, hold to today): a kind of liberal (inter)nationalism, an emphasis upon the proper place for nations to exercise real world power in defense of culturally grounded expression of broadly liberal principles. Hitchens, who had been, up until the moment of the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and, particularly, the American-led invasions into Afghanistan and Iraq, an unpredictable but still fairly consistent man of the left and a critic of American imperialist power, all of a sudden became a vicious defender of almost all things Western against what he termed the "Islamofascist" threat. Hitchens--in retrospect simply bizarre--obsession with the righteousness of the Western liberal cause (and the power to Western liberal states to impose that cause upon whole populations that were presumably more concerned with feeding themselves than being on the right side of some political theory!) was one that, for some years, I had a strange admiration for. As I put it at a conference once:

What happened as some of us watched the World Trade Center come down on September 11th was the realization, for the first time in a very long time, that one could actually see a boundary, a limit: there really was this place called "America," and it had a culture and a way of life and a meaning, and there was something outside of it, something that wasn't a function of, or susceptible to, the abstract forces o globalization, but instead took the corporate Americanization of the world and shoved it all back into national, historically embedded terms. In other words, all of sudden we could see ourselves as a community, not just a site of media and market exchanges, and a community worth loving as well. And to the extent which the struggle with Islamic fascism and terrorism proceeded on those terms, terms which presumed (and, we fancifully imagined, even encouraged the growth of, despite Bush's refusal to ever talk about any real kind of sacrifice) a solidarity with and commitment to one's own....well, the neocons and liberal hawks ended up leading a number of us national communitarians and Christian socialists around by the nose.

What I didn't say at the time was that Hitchens was, perhaps, the most articulate and challenging (and, to be sure, the least balanced) exponent of this kind of theoretical attitude, but I didn't need to say it; almost immediately upon making my comments, one of the other discussants declared my thoughts a species of "Christopher Hitchens conservatism"--and he was absolutely correct. In a perverse way, the ideological hothouse that was the Western world in the early days of the Iraq War managed to turn leftists that like community, like me, or even just left-liberals who like the idea of punching illiberal God-worshipers in the nose, like Hitchens, into people on the right--into, in short, conservatives, even imperialists, of a fashion. I was wrong about that. Hitchens remained in denial about it, as far as I know up until the very end.

That's a sad ending for this little essay, and an even sadder ending to the brilliant (in the very literal sense of "brightness"--Hitchens obviously loved both being at the center of, and being a generator of, both light and heat) career of an enormously talented writer. I would hope that this judgment doesn't sum the whole atheistic, combative, pig-headed, awesomely informed and opinionated man up. (George Scialabba, a much more balanced but equally well-informed writer, has a wonderful summary of Hitchens's work here.) I'm afraid I can't agree with frequent the one blogosphere commenter, who wrote that, "[Hitchens] supported the war in Iraq. That, to me, disqualifies practically everything else." No, for better and/or for worse, this particular asshole contained multitudes. Part of what he was (and, to his great consternation, I will insist still is) spoke to me; part of that speaking isn't with me any longer, thank goodness, but part of it still is. Hitchens, who has nothing if not a constant partisan, would have liked that, I hope.

Anyway, requiescat in pace, Hitchens. You won't like being at rest, but God knows you probably really need some.

What Osama's Death Has Accomplished

Matt Yglesias and Ross Douthat, agreeing with each other. First, Ross:

[The years since 9/11 have] taught us...that whatever blunders we make (and we have made many), however many advantages we squander (and there has been much squandering), and whatever quagmires we find ourselves lured into, our civilization is not fundamentally threatened by the utopian fantasy politics embodied by groups like Al Qaeda, or the mix of thugs, fools and pseudointellectuals who rally around their banner. They can strike us, they can wound us, they can kill us. They can goad us into tactical errors and strategic blunders. But they are not, and never will be, an existential threat...We learned the lesson in every day that passed without an attack, in every year that turned, and in the way our eyes turned, gradually but permanently, from the skies and the sky-scrapers back to the ordinary things of life.

Next, Matt:

The threat to the physical security of Americans posed by terrorists needs to be put alongside the threat to physical security posed by “ordinary” criminals, by car accidents, etc. And the foreign policy significance of violent Islamists needs to be put alongside the foreign policy significance of China and India emerging as great powers on the global stage. Homeland security investments ought to meet a plausible cost-benefit test and not just take it for granted that anything done in the name of terrorism-prevention is worth doing. The primary mechanism through which terrorism works as a tactic is fear and panic, and in an ideal world the emotional catharsis we saw around the country last night should be a chance to put things on a more sustainable footing.

Yes and yes. Those of us who tumbled down the rabbit-hole of fear and gave in to the temptation of ideological grand-standing were wrong. This would be a wonderful time for the legacy of those wrong decisions to begin to be slowly put right.

And Now, Time for Scoring Some Cheap, Completely Unnecessary Political Points

I spent last night and this morning thinking about moral causality and historical significance; I think I can allow myself to be a little bit of a wise-ass now.

He Deserved It

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]

That's a terribly unChristian thing to say, I know. To speak in moral terms--to speak of "desert"--in matters of war is to invariably invest those actors which participate in war--in other words, to invest states like our own, to say nothing of terrorist cells and other organized bodies such as those Osama bin Laden lead and inspired--with a level of moral significance that is frankly idolatrous. Bin Laden, the enemy of the United States, the enemy of all that the United States stands for, is finally dead! Righteousness wins, evil loses! That's the sort of way of talking which opens up all sorts of abuses, which leads one into all sorts of disturbing equivalencies. There's plenty of room for moral judgment when one looks at the consequences of actions; there's no need to take up those consequences and turn them into game of winners and losers, of deserving and undeserving, of God's favorites and those whom God wouldn't mind being blown apart by an bomb. The moral plane of the universe is not somehow improved by the killing of a man. "Rejoice not when thine enemy falleth, and let not thine heart be glad when he is overthrown"--the author of Proverbs had it right.

I believe all that....but I still think he deserved it. He deserved it, because he lead and inspired actions whose consequences, in a very real and specific way, not only left nearly 3000 human beings dead, and which gave rise to an occasionally desperate and often mismanaged war which has killed many thousands more (both innocent and guilty), but which have also generated pathologies that have plagued and damaged American politics ever since. He was hardly solely responsible for these results, but neither could he ever escape the blame.

Are you frustrated by the loss of civil liberties which The Patriot Act represents? Blame Osama bin Laden.

Are you disturbed by the bureaucratic mentality which has decided, in the mad pursuit of absolute safety, to treat ordinary citizens as suspects to be manhandled and debased by the TSA every time they get on a plane flight? Blame Osama bin Laden.

Are you embarrassed by the vaguely racist and often paranoid accusations which have haunted our rhetoric and our relations with other states over the past 10 years? Blame Osama bin Laden.

Are you concerned about the expansive complications and enormous costs which the United States has piled up, not only in terms of the blood and treasure expanded (perhaps necessarily...but then again, perhaps not) in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also in terms of entanglements with numerous onetime foes, and disagreements with numerous onetime allies? Blame Osama bin Laden.

And are you troubled that the United States, a country founded on revolution and independence, has spent a decade sincerely playing around with the possibility of unapologetically embracing a new role as a "democratic empire," one committed to waging an endless "war on terror"? Well, again, blame Osama bin Laden.

I've not doubt that many millions of people will quite sincerely, and reasonably, see the news this night as pretty straightforward: this is a success, a triumph for soldiers that have suffered too much for much too long, and a richly deserved bit of payback for the horror of September 11th, 2001. I remember the horror of that day well, as do millions of others, and I can remember the slow realization about the challenge which Osama bin Laden's ideology posed to the American way of life which followed in the weeks and months afterwards. All of which was true.

But what I didn't realize until much later was that the pre-occupation we had with that threat was itself a perhaps even deeper threat to the American way of life...a way that, whatever else we all disagree upon, really shouldn't be a life conditioned by endless low-level wars, and the costly divides in American life they give rise to. We did that to ourselves, but Osama gave us the pretext for doing so, and for that, I suppose he deserved what he finally, finally, got. If only I could believe that a well-executed firefight could rid us of all the civic and international damage he has left in his wake.

Thoughts on Kosovo, Mill, and Walzer

Last week I was drawn into a couple of fascinating threads on Crooked Timber, both started by Chris Bertram and both focusing on the question of what, if anything, Kosovo's declaration of independence from Serbia means for the future of national-building and national separation (to say nothing of what it more immediately may mean for Russian and European politics--for a good summary of that, see Doug Muir's thoughts here). Chris started the discussion focusing on the matter of secession, and bringing up the work of Allen Buchanan as part of an argument suggesting that Kosovo's claim of independence could be (and thus presumably should be) justified--though not just another potentially troubling burst of arguably legitimate ethnic-based nationalism, but as the exercise of a "remedial right," given that "[t]he Kosovo Albanians...have both suffered injustice and have no good reason to believe that a just settlement is possible within Serbia." Soon though, both threads spread to discussions of self-determination--and therefore nationalism and democracy--in general. I wanted to put my comments on both threads into a somewhat coherent form, and so let me try to make a few broad points here:

1) Chris is rather hostile, to say the least, to the idea of "self-defining 'nations' complete with normalizing ideologies," preferring instead "multiethnic states if possible, separatism only if strictly necessary"; hence he doesn't want to read anything more into the Kosovo secession than he needs to. He has, of course, a very good point: ethnic separatism has in recent history been the cause of an enormous amount of violence and deprivation, and the ideological promise of "national self-determination" has encouraged more than a few racial/ethnic/tribal elites over the past century to use their influence over local economies and media to panic or stratify their fellows into narrow groupings over which they then somewhat plausibly claim rights of sovereignty. Arguably, that's the whole recent history of the former Yugoslavia in a nutshell. But in the end, it's too simple a story: it's just too easy a response to dismiss what is such a major element of the modern consciousness--our many often convoluted attempts to articulate and/or imagine a national identity (as I wrote long ago, the whole question of "'people-making,' or imagining, or articulating, depending on whether you prefer a more or less constructivist or essentialist approach to the question of peoplehood," is a complicated one to get a handle on)--as "petty bigotry." The truth is that the sort of ideals that many would like to see take the place of ethnic or tribal or racial self-identification and determination--things like neutral state-based "democracy" and "human rights"--are themselves parasitic upon, or at the very least historically developed from, recognitions that are much less abstract, much more tied (though admittedly in an often murky aesthetic/expressive way) to the everyday performed and seen and spoken raw material of our lives. Democracy requires a demos, and for a people to come to a collective self-understanding of itself as capable of self-government, it needs to have been able at some point to "bound" itself, to see itself as a body with the capacity for, much less the right to, sovereignty. How does it erect those boundaries? Obviously much of the time they've been erected from the outside by the brute force of invading empires and colonizing states; but those aren't the cases under consideration here--were considering how a people can come to the capacity of self-recognition internally, on their own. So, when it comes to matters of borders...well, race, tribal ties and ethnicity are obvious and very basic possibilities; other thinkers however (like J.G. Herder) point us towards religion and language as more expansive possibilities, ones which potentially open the way to a mixing of national apprehension with the sort of egalitarian perceptions most moderns would prefer to see. (Which, arguably, is the deepest explanation of how America's own "national idea" came to be.) Either way, however, if there doesn't come to be a ground upon which a people can properly determine itself to be such, then there isn't going to be a consciousness of rights or democracy which said people will be able to elaborate, act upon, and commit themselves to.

Obviously, this doesn't mean that we should fall back defeated by some historical imperative or logic of Enlightenment when, say, a group of Albanians start crowing about self-determination. The debate--both the theoretical and the practical, political one--about identity, community, and sovereignty, and the prudence of striving for such, is, as I said above, a complicated one within which you can find a great many different plausible arguments. In the comments, Chris chooses to contrast "citizenship" with ethnicity insofar as recognition and identity are concerned, and suggests that the American and (to a lesser degree) British and French national self-understandings do a fair-to-good job of prioritizing the former over the latter, in contrast to the German self-understanding, which doesn't. Here he's invoking the distinction between "civic" (or "cultural" or "liberal") and "ethnic" (or "illiberal") nationalism, the idea being that some forms of self-understanding or peoplehood are going to be premised upon open-minded notions of shared social and civic life and thus be nonexclusivist, whereas others won't be; they will focus upon nontransferable blood and soil ("blut und boden") matters that will always seek to exclude. There is a great deal of scholarship on this point, going both ways, far too much to synthesize here. All I can say to this is that, while surely the differences here are real and worth emphasizing, I fear that Chris and others who think like him are perhaps failing to appreciate what being acculturated, being socialized into a culture, and thus being able to recognize what it is and what it is not and be a part of it, fully involves: their ideas are not capturing the unspoken, performative, ritualistic, participatory, and/or expressive aspects to peoplehood. That doesn't mean I think all national identities must, by definition, be exclusive, or to apologize for those that are; it simply means that, to the extent one wants to encourage the formation of peoples that might see themselves collectively as sovereign and thus may possibly govern themselves democratically, one shouldn't draw too firm of a justificatory line between purely and hypothetically "civic" markers on the one hand, and locally embedded ones (historical, linguistic, religious, ethnic, whatever) on the other; there are important ways in which any of those might in fact contribute to the formation of a liberal and/or democratic state. (I'm drawing on a lot of different thinkers, but mostly Craig Calhoun, Ranjoo Seodu Herr, Eric Kaufmann, and Bernard Yack, in coming to these conclusions.)

2) Perhaps predictably, John Stuart Mill makes an appearance in the discussion. Mill made very clear his belief that the education of peoples for representative self-government had to involve their being in a position to receive such an education collectively, forming and sharing public opinions that are clearly their own and not someone else's; as he wrote in Considerations of Representative Government (chp. 16), "One hardly knows what any division of the human race should be free to do, if not to determine, with which of the various collective bodies of human beings they choose to associate themselves....Among a people without [this] fellow-feeling, especially if they read and speak different languages, the united public opinion, necessary for the working of representative government, cannot exist." This statement and others of his which defend the idea of mono-ethnic societies--which Chris suggests was one of the inevitabilities of the "disastrous doctrine of national self-determination"--is contrasted to the position of Lord Acton as detailed in an article by Pratap Bhanu Mehta that Chris praises, an article which suggests that Acton properly understood that it was "more important to secure liberal protections than link ethnicity to democracy"

Well, as should be clear from above, I would dispute that "link[ing] ethnicity to democracy" is all or even mostly what the doctrine of self-determination involves; yes, of course, that often takes place, but it isn't necessarily solely what takes place, and when it takes place it doesn't necessarily enlist a cultural understanding that is illiberal in all ways. But leaving that huge, complicated debate aside, my point here is actually a rather narrow one. I'm hardly a major defender of Mill; that his writings on self-determination were joined at the hip to a 19th-century condescension and/or racism regarding certain peoples is undeniable. He was, despite his modifications of doctrine throughout his life, a utilitarian until the end, and as he simply couldn't imagine the utility of being a member of an uncultivated community as opposed to a metropolitan one--Basques or Bretons or Scottish Highlanders, "sulk[ing] on [their] own rocks, the half-savage relic[s] of past times, revolving in [their] own little mental orbit, without participation or interest in the general movement of he world"--he didn't grant any real weight to the claims or attachments of such peoples. That being said, however, think about what his arguments may suggest about demands for independence coming from Kosovo. The context in which Mill was writing was one in which the Bretons and Scots had long since been formally absorbed by the French and British states; Mill, while having already granted the general principle of self-determination as an important element of democratic expression and development, wondered nonetheless why on earth these poor benighted Bretons and Scots complained. Far better, he thought, for them to accept the advantages offered them through governments which have already gone through and benefited from their own national articulations and struggles. Similarly, Kosovo is a region that has contested its incorporation within a post-Yugoslavian environment; in pushing for independence, it is challenging a larger, legitimated polity. I'm not defending Mill by any means, but still: if he was willing criticize the Bretons and Scots, then doesn't that mean he’s not quite the self-determination absolutist which Mehta’s comment makes him out to be? Doesn't that mean that, contra any supposedly stark distinction between himself and Acton, Mill as well was thinking--however condescendingly--about the realities of self-government, and where one is most likely to find the space for democratic development? I'm not enlisting Mill either for or against the Kosovars; just pointing out that Mehta's duality is, again, much to simple for historical and contemporary reality.

3) Finally, Michael Walzer came up on the thread, specifically his collection of essays What It Means To Be An American. Walzer's actually been on my mind a bit lately, thanks to some comments from Jacob Levy and Damon Linker (the latter having caught a recent speech of Walzer's at the University of Pennsylvania, and who referred me to a piece on Walzer's latest book from the NYRB that I'd missed). Walzer is an important thinker to bring up in this matter, because his bona fides span the debate: he's been a strong defender of the principle of sovereignty as both a potentially democratic expression of local/national identities and communities and as a tool for preventing exploitation, but is also deeply liberal in his commitment to egalitarianism and justice. The question at hand is, does he believe the latter necessitates a purely civil form of the former?

That Walzer is firm believer in the legitimacy and the enviableness of America's civic accomplishment: it is a good thing, he affirms, that America is not a "homeland," but rather a place defined as a people "only by virtue of having come together"; as he writes at greater length: "These abstract ideals [liberty, equality, and republicanism] made for a politics separated not only from religion but from culture itself or, better, from all the particular forms in which religious and national culture was, and is, expressed" ("What Does it Mean to Be an 'American'?" pgs. 24, 27, 30). But, he almost immediately goes on to note that he doesn't "want to claim that American politics was not qualified in important ways by British Protestantism," to say nothing of all the other religious and cultural movements that burrowed their way inside what describes as "this strange America"--strange because this most patriotic of nations actually doesn't appear to have what it takes for any real kind of nationalism (pgs. 31, 46, 47). And sometimes he will admit to some regrets on this point--regrets that take him back to a desire to construct truly sovereign democratic communities, which he acknowledges will require civic attachments and virtues that will require more than just a liberal public square:

Among a people like ourselves, a community of patriots would have to be sustained by politics alone. I don't know if such a community is possible. Judged by the theory and practice of the classical republics, its creation certainly seems unlikely: how can a common citizenship development if there is not other commonality--no ethnic solidarity, no established religion, no unified cultural tradition?...Given liberal society and culture, certain sorts of dedication may well lie beyond our reach. But that's not to say that we cannot, so to speak, enlarge the time and space within which we live as citizens. This is the working principle of democratic socialism: that politics can be opened up, rates of participation significantly increased, decision-making really shared, without a full-scale attack on private life and liberal values, without a religious revival or a cultural revolution. ("Civility and Civic Virtue," pgs. 98-99).

So yes, Walzer finds America's accomplishment unique and admirable...but he also sees it as needing to find something political--in a rather deep and redistributive sense--to supplement the sort of civic strength that its plurality prevents it from developing internally on its own. I would take this point, and deepen its historical force; I would argue that the history of populism and progressivism and egalitarianism in this country reflects at least in part the abiding influence of tight communities motivated by common bonds--whether they be poor white farmers from the Great Plains or exploited African-Americans from the South--extending their self-generated understandings of dignity and democracy to the wider world, strengthening the country along the way. Which is, perhaps, just a rather pretentious way of making the same point: that even we prudential liberals and social egalitarians have to make room for, perhaps even have to depend upon, the emergence of tight attachments--dare I say self-determining attachments--if we're going to see self-government and justice make any kind of headway.

This actually comes out fairly clearly in Jeremy Waldron's review of Walzer's thought that I mentioned above. He writes that "political community is the heart of Walzer's writing," and that he believes "communal integrity has a nonrelative claim upon us"; we morally and prudentially ought to, in short, allow all (or almost all) self-identifying communities the space to work out (and deepen, and thereby perhaps through an education in democracy extend) their own identities and claims. What others may see as a clear-cut issue of humanitarian justice (a state oppressing its ethnic minorities, a violence-prone secession movement gaining power), Walzer sees--at least in many cases--as more of the "traditional philosophical dislike for politics." Waldron adds:

Even in the absence of democracy, Walzer wants to hang on to the principle of self-determination. A political community "is self-determining even if its citizens struggle and fail to establish free institutions, but it has been deprived of self-determination if such institutions are established by an intrusive neighbor." The compromises that people make, the sacrifices they forgo, may trouble a philosopher who is obsessed with human rights. But "I don't believe," says Walzer, "that the opposition of philosophers is a sufficient ground for military invasion."

Walzer is a careful and complicated thinker, as anyone should be who dares to take on the thorny and often discomforting mess of cultural and civic issues that surround claims to self-determination, claims which are central to figuring out what to think about Kosovo (or for that matter, Iraq, or even the U.S., as it tries to take care of its own issues while allowing itself to be dragged into others' as well). If I've learned anything from the past five years of trying to apply my knowledge of political theory to world affairs, it is to not assume that I can really see to the ends of the particular rabbit holes I feel obliged to dive down, not the least reason for which the possible violence I may be doing to those who go down (or may be dragged down) the hole along with me. Self-determining nationalities may not be entirely theoretically justifiable, or even politically desirable, but they do, undeniably, play a part in making a people sovereign, capable of deciding where they want to go and which hole they want to go down. People who would warn the Albanians about the very legitimate risks facing them after having declared independence, or who argue about what Mill or Walzer or anyone else might say to them about such, need to keep that in mind.

The "Sovereignty Left"?

This post is, in some ways, a follow-up to my thoughts about my own and others' past support for the Iraq war, but mostly it's an elaboration of some themes I see being discussed throughout the long (and growing!) thread beneath Michael Bérubé's Crooked Timber post on the complicated arguments amongst liberals and leftists about their opposition to the war. In other words, it's my observations about the justifications and reasons employed by people who were, for the most part, smarter than me.

Bérubé's complaint is with those he refers to as the "Z/Counterpunch left," who continue to attack liberals like himself "and Michael Walzer and Todd Gitlin and Marc Cooper and David Corn (all of whom opposed war but favored UN inspections and/or no-fly zones and/or revised sanctions) as supporters of war in Iraq." Or if not outright supporters, than at least people who were supposedly squeamish enough in their taste for confrontational politics, or seduced enough by the universalist rhetoric of the liberal hawks, to not be willing to reject all American actions against Iraq. In the minds of folks like Alexander Cockburn, as Bérubé sees it, this animosity has deep roots, going back to the division between certain liberals and leftists over the appropriateness of NATO's intervention into the civil conflict in Kosovo, to say nothing of America's attack on the Taliban in Afghanistan. He sums up:

[I]f Alexander Cockburn is going to wonder whether I’ve had any dark nights in the past few years, I suppose I can wonder in return if he’s had any moments of regret for inveighing against people like me and Gitlin as insufficiently anti-imperialist and unacceptably willing to consider violations of Saddam’s sovereignty. Because although the Sovereignty Left has achieved a remarkable consistency in defending Milosevic and the Taliban from international interventions, they also did their part to make the antiwar movement in the US smaller and less effective than it might have been when it came to Iraq.

Bérubé's label for this group--the "Sovereignty Left"--is an interesting one. Many of the commenters that have shown up on the thread have denounced it as unfair; the primary concern of anti-intervention absolutists is repelling imperialism, they claim, not defending national borders. Still, it's a revealing enough label to prompt this thought from Timothy Burke:

[W]hen and how did one faction of the Western left come to regard sovereignty as the singular inviolate principle that left politics is called upon to defend, and by which people who are truly “left” may be separated from riff-raff moderates and popular frontists of various kinds? Seen against the long history of the left in the West, this strikes me as a very late and in many ways markedly odd development.

The question of "sovereignty" has weighed on Tim's mind for a long time. Years ago, he wrote a fine post on the topic that has stayed with me ever since:

When you defend sovereignty as the only moral principle in all the world, and say that all intrusions, forcible or otherwise, are wrong by their very nature, you ought at the same moment to deny yourself any and all judgments about the places and peoples you deem sovereign. If East is East and West is West, then the twain really must never meet, and humanity is sundered from itself, the globe inhabited by ten times ten thousand variants of the genus Homo. If you rise to sovereignty as the singular sacred principle, then human rights, civil liberties, democracy, and freedom are no more than local and parochial virtues.

And not even that. Because once sovereignty becomes an impermeable barrier to intervention, we have to ask, "Are nations the proper unit of sovereignty?" The answer is clearly no: peoples or “cultures”, in the ethnographic sense of the world, are what assert the most meaningful claims of sovereignty, of an inalienable right to difference. Meaning that from such a perspective imposing Roe vs. Wade as the law of the land on a town of Southern Baptists in Georgia is morally little different than invading Iraq with tanks: the difference is only in scale and method of imposition. The Constitution itself is then an imposition, as is any law which intrudes a larger political power onto the scene of some bounded, well-defined practice of everyday life in the name of enforcing a larger system of rights and obligations which the smaller community refuses....

A journey through that hall of mirrors always brings us back to interventionism. We are all interventionists now. We should be able to spare a gentle thought or three for late 19th and early 20th Century British imperialists as a result. The question of the 21st Century is not whether interventions should happen, but how they should happen. It is a question of method and result, not of yes or no....

If we are bringing democracy to the world, then let us bring democracy, and follow the best traditions and instincts of the United States. Intervention is a double-edged sword. If we act against sovereignties in the name of human rights, then we must be open to being acted against. If humanity as a whole rejects capital punishment as a fundamental violation of human rights, for example, then the United States has no business pursuing it--not if we want the right to intervene on behalf of human rights ourselves.

That is the crystalline moment where interventionism become immoral imperialism: when the pursuit of human emancipation is not a reciprocal obligation that binds the actor as well as the acted upon, when the honest pursuit of freedom everywhere curdles into cynical oppression.

When I first read that essay, the phrase "we are all interventionists now" rang forth as a terribly true description of the post-9/11 global reality. But I wonder how much I may have misunderstood Tim: he was clearly talking about the failure of both national actors (like the U.S.) and existing international actors (like the U.N.) to fail to appreciate the reciprocity which an ethical interventionary liberalism ought to demand, but nonetheless I read his essay as forwarding a prescription for interventionary liberalism as an unavoidable burden--seeing his comments through Michael Ignatieff lenses, as it were. I suppose that if I got him wrong, then that is all the Sovereignty Left requires: positive proof that failing to be an absolutist on matters of sovereignty results in blank-check writing to supporters of war, even fairly doubtful one's like myself. Tim, of course, shouldn't be blamed for my misreading of him, or rather for my ideological appropriation of his ideas. But nonetheless, I think, thanks to a few years of pondering over what liberalism and universalism and their opposites mean, I can give a slightly more charitable reading of what Bérubé's and Burke's opponents saw in statements like this, and what might yet be learned from such claims, however much they failed to grasp our real situation both in 2003 and today.

Cockburn and Co. obvious consider themselves leftists. Clearly, any position that is even remotely leftist is going to be unwilling to credit the historical construction of power and elites within state borders with normative authority; the willingness to dispute the claimed “naturalness” or “rightness” of capitalist/colonial hierarchies is pretty much fundamental of leftist critiques. And so, in that sense, to attribute to them an obsession with state sovereignty is either to accuse them of deep confusion, serious hypocrisy, or to have misunderstood their position. Surely leftists, from Marx's call to working men of all countries onward, have been internationalists, supporters of international agreements and movements that would limit the crimes that can be covered in the name of sovereign privacy.

However, state power doesn’t necessarily exhaust all the possible meanings of "sovereignty"; one might also be talking about populist/culturalist notions of power, in which case the defense of sovereignty is a way of defending the self-determination and democratic development of peoples. That is, one might argue that progress/the revolution/liberation has to happen solely through the organic efforts of the oppressed, and if that’s going to happen then some sort of space that is truly their own and not subject to intervention needs to be in principle defended. This is a way of thinking on the left that, far from being recent, has been with us for a while; it is a mix of Gramsci and realpolitik, and as subsequent comments Tim makes in the CT thread reveal, it has deep roots in the anticolonial leftism of the 80s and 90s and perhaps earlier.

How does this map on to the supposed internationalism of the left? That internationalism obviously underwent a crisis over the past decade, as leftists of numerous persuasions came to recognize that hegemonic power was no longer being exercised by states and governments but rather by corporations and media empires, both of which benefited enormously from--indeed, were the largest supporters of--free trade and open borders and liberated populations. In this new world, international law served the upwardly mobile (and thus incipiently liberal and Westernized) classes; international institutions, far from being a tool of the oppressed, became components of an interventionary world system.The resistance to globalism thus became paired with a kind of defensive, anticapitalist organicism, and sovereignty, all of sudden, made more than just anti-imperial sense: it because the very heart of certain quite narrow, quite pure, leftism.

Now frankly, I think this is a terribly flawed position. Admittedly, it is "conservative" in all sorts of ways I find interesting, but it also fails to provide any sort of grounding for what it aims to "conserve"--in this case, a localized space for "authentic" liberation--besides that which the status quo provides. In short, it fails the Rousseau test; it does not allow for, or even properly acknowledge, the tragic reality and history of interventions of all sorts in any sort of spatial or social or public construction; it takes what is there (Kosovo in the midst of war, Afghanistan under the Taliban, Iraq under Saddam, Zimbabwe under Mugabe) and calls it a will worth respecting. Which, of course, it often isn't...and just not from some elite universalist position (though obviously it is often that also, of course), but from the position of the people themselves. But I will give this to the “sovereignty left”: there’s a conceptual clarity to their anti-universalism, one which allows them (in the end wrongly, but not without some insight all the same) to see at least part of where liberal nationalists and communitarian social democrats from Christopher Hitchens to Michael Walzer and everyone in between got their thinking somewhat confused (though obviously some of the above were far more confused than others, myself included!). There’s a reason, I suppose, why Cockburn et al, get so inflamed at certain leftists: because they expect them, demand of them really, a willingness to denounce any kind of interventionary liberalism—that is, universalism—both root and branch. Their antiliberal leftism is both silly and self-defeating given the actual world we live in. Even a communitarian and anticosmopolitan like myself can and should recognize that there are good, prudent reasons to be liberal, and that means--at the very least!--recognizing the occasional justice of intervening on behalf of the liberation and security of individuals in the face of whatever remains of the Westphalian system. Still, that alone--that observation about sovereignty that I turned into a support for my own theoretical take on the Iraq War--is hardly sufficient to justify a pre-emptive war; and I have to say that I find it bracing, and even a little bit salutary, to have radical leftists-cum-paleoconservative anticapitalist cranks like Cockburn remind weak thinkers like myself of that fact, when necessary.

March 2003 and Me

About a week and a half ago, via Crooked Timber, I heard about the challenge: "If you are a blogger who was active in March 2003, link to that month’s archive and write an entry called 'What I was wrong about in March 2003.'" I was planning an anniversary post this weekend anyway, as today is the fourth anniversary of my entry into the blogosphere. And given that the overwhelming majority of my posts when I started blogging were about Iraq, and that tomorrow is the fourth anniversary of the beginning of the war...well, it made sense to respond.

Here are my posts from March 2003; I wrote 17 posts in 12 days, a rate that I'm certain I've never matched since. I wish I could say those posts were filled with informed and prescient commentary about Sunnis and Shi'ites and Baathists and so forth...but they weren't. The best I can say is that I knew my posts supportive of the war weren't constructed out of the latest empirical and predictive scholarship; my thinking about the Iraq war was admittedly driven by theory, as I put it in my very first post:

My assessment of the arguments both for and against an invasion [of Iraq have] never depended, at least not too much, on a solid understanding of the "facts": whether Saddam actually had WMDs, and if so which ones and how many, and what he intend[ed] to do with them or whether that could actually be known, and whether regardless of Saddam's intentions we could be certain that he could be prevented from ever making them available to terrorist organizations, and what his actual relationship with such organizations really is anyway, and for that matter what Bush's relationship with Saddam really is and what his intentions are, etc., etc., etc. I've never attempted to develop anything like any real expertise in these areas; while I'll read with interest reports on U.N. resolutions, the Iraqi opposition, neoconservative ideologues at the Pentagon, al-Qaeda, Bush the First's deals with Saudi Arabia and so forth, I lack confidence in my ability to work out all the contrasting military, strategic, political and conspiratorial claims.

So why have an opinion at all? Because, in the end, the language of the pro-war argument fits well with an intellectual and moral paradigm I find persuasive. It's a theory--usually called "liberal nationalism" by political theorists--which holds that the international order depends upon expressions of national conviction and power. If you're not a fan of the existing "international order" (and I am one, though with some big reservations), you could just as well replace that phrase with "human rights" or "the spread of democracy": either way, the idea is that the accomplishment of certain humane, liberal conditions depends upon national action....Translated to questions of international politics, this attitude suggests that the use of national power to accomplish liberal ends is not necessarily corrupting of those ends; on the contrary, it is possible that without real, specific, national engagements with the liberal project, those ends will never emerge.

In other words, to talk about the United States acting forcefully on behalf of liberal goals, even if such action takes place outside the procedures of the presently-existing international community, even if such action is pre-emptive and not premised upon any sort of immediate threat as has been traditionally recognized, shouldn't be dismissed as incoherent outright. The foundation of liberalism--for the oppressed people of Iraq, or anyone for that matter, anywhere--is the work of liberal nations, not an ungrounded ideology which exists to constrain such nations. Does this mean that asymmetrical--even hegemonic--relations between national actors is not, in itself, an obstacle to liberal ideals: that you could have a "liberal empire"? The answer, as best as I can see it, is "maybe so."

Yes, I was a "liberal hawk," though I disliked calling myself one. Nonetheless, my posts for the remainder of the month were filled with proof of my attitude: I talked about Tony Blair and the "Anglosphere" and Michael Ignatieff and neo-Wilsonianism and "liberal interventionism" and "democratic imperialism" and Islamic fundamentalism and all the rest. The need to create a "decent left" seemed obvious to me; I would have signed the Euston Manifesto in an instant.

What was I wrong about? To the extent that I developed specific predictions about the war (and I didn't develop many), they were almost wholly wrong. As for the war plan itself, it took me a while, but I finally was able to put into words how screwed up my acceptance of Bush's claiming of my preferred theoretical mantle had been here. That leaves the theory itself. Has Iraq disproved to my mind the very possibility of an interventionary (inter)national liberalism?

I always insisted that there was an important difference between the liberal nationalist/internationalist position and the neoconservative one, and despite the depressing track record of many liberal hawks, I still believe that to be the case. The latter group had a tendency to insert "liberalism" and "democracy" into all their supposed conservative calculations in the place of "culture," and thus arrived at descriptions and prescriptions for the development of nations and civilizations that were explicitly ideological. (And they continue to do so, waxing lyrical about the easy intersection of partisan politics and cosmic struggles over the centuries, as this Slate article makes clear.) Whereas the liberal hawks simply wanted to do the right, "liberal," thing, issues of sovereignty be damned--or at least, be trumped by human rights and so forth. By so arguing, the liberal hawks were ironically far more respectful of the cultural--and thus the "conservative"--roots of their subjects than the neoconservatives were: they at least did not delude themselves into thinking that their ideological preferences captured the movement of history through culture, but instead acknowledged that, if they were going to remake the Middle East, they were going to have to muscle their way into doing so. This was the tough, "realistic" aspect of liberal hawk thought that some of us found so appealing...perhaps especially those pseudo-conservative leftists like myself who are really more communitarian than liberal, and who were thus, as I wrote a while ago, delighted to discern in the liberal hawks' worldview a theory of international relations which allowed America, and the liberal nations of Western world, to be acknowledged--in direct contrast to the preferences of Islamic terrorists--as representing "a culture and a way of life...that wasn't a function of, or susceptible to, the abstract forces of globalization...not just a site of media and market exchanges [but] a community worth loving." The prospect of a nation intervening and fighting on behalf of liberal principles gave both "national" and "liberal" a meaning and a force that I desperately wanted them, and still want them, to have.

However, at the time, I couldn't really tell you where my theory ended and where ranting about the imperative of responding militarily to the Islamic fascist challenge to universal human rights began; my biggest intellectual error, complete aside from whatever might be conceptually wrong about all of the above, was that I didn't even really try. Because if I had tried--if I'd really done the work to flesh out my theoretical paradigm, to relate it to what was going on in Washington DC and in Iraq--then I might have realized that it was genuinely stupid to allow myself to believe that just because I could explain the value of seeing certain actions in a certain light, that therefore any such actions thus undertaken would conform to that light, as if my value set (even assuming anyone else held it, and in retrospect it's clear that even fewer people did than I thought) was the only one out there. No, the banal and obvious truth is that there were a million things--things revealed by all those "facts" I failed to pay adequate attention to--which were being valued or pursued or elided in and through the Iraq war, and even if it is the case that one ought not allow the inability account for every possible intention to prevent one from acting on theory and hope when the need is great enough, a better effort could have and should have been made by me and many others who supported this war to least account for some of what was or wasn't being prepared for. Forget prudence--amongst the theory-driven supporters of the war like myself, basic intellectual responsibility was what was needed here.

People like Michael Walzer, who did try to work things out in the light of a worldview very similar to the liberal hawks' and to my own, refused to support the war; they knew, as Peter Beinart has learned, that just because events may arise that allow one to describe the United States differently than the superficialities of our current world system usually allow, that doesn't mean the U.S. is, in fact, a "different country." Not that my blogging four years ago made any kind of difference, but still: I wish I'd learned it sooner too.