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"The stream of Time, irresistible, ever moving, carries off and bears away all things that come to birth and plunges them into utter darkness, both deeds of no account and deeds which are mighty and worthy of commemoration. . .Nevertheless, the science of History is a great bulwark against the stream of Time; in a way it checks this irresistible flood, it holds in a tight grasp whatever it can seize floating on the surface and will not allow it to slip away into the depths of Oblivion. "
- Anna Comnena (1083-1153), The Alexiad
"I have taken all knowledge to be my province."
- Francis Bacon, 1592
Friday, May 9, 2003
Check It Out III
My British friend has some good observations on the state of affairs in Britain. Just keep scrollin' along.
Then there's this post at Innocents Abroad, which contains this very insightful line:
I’m all in favor of multipolarity if the poles are responsible political actors, but that doesn’t seem to be the case with the emerging Europe
Read it all.
Victor Davis Hanson has an idea whos time may have come. I've been thinking about a designated "Peacekeeping Unit" as well, as a means of keeping our fighting forces from being cannibalized for such duties. The only thing I worry about are the potential unintended consequences (more on that in a future post, perhaps).
(For awhile several years ago I thought Our European Allies could be the "peacekeeping unit" - we do the fighting, they keep the peace, which seemed to be more what they wanted anyhow. But though they pat themselves on the back for their peacekeeping efforts, it turns out that they refuse to do any where we aren't there to hold their hand - even in Macedonia, where they beat their chest this year about the EU taking over the mission, but it turned out they required the presence of a fair number of American support troops even then. Plus, in the places they stick their noses and are let loose on their own, well, it doesn't turn out well. Take the Ivory Coast - please. Or mid-90s Bosnia, dittoes).
And of course there's more in the VDH piece; this paragraph in particular:
As an outsider, the most notable impressions I have had since arriving are the surprising degree of self-criticism of the U.S. military and its willingness to welcome both internal and outside audit — and thus its abject contrast with two equally formidable institutions, the media and the universities, which really are shrinking and have indeed suffered "significant casualties" to their reputations. Again, it is far easier to be a liberal in the supposedly authoritarian military than to be a moderate or conservative on a college campus; students are more likely to be segregated by race in the lounges and cafeterias of "progressive" universities than they are in the mess halls of aircraft carriers.
How Can You Tell When Senatorial Republicans are Bluffing?
Whenever they start talking like they're going to become tough. Remember how these guys were going to make the opponents actually engage in a real filibuster? They were going to make 'em hold the floor, 24/7? After the break? Well, maybe a week later? Well, maybe. . .um, nevermind?
I'll believe this when and if we see it. We won't. The only story here is "Republican Senators Bluff. Dems Use It To Call Them Meanies. Republican Senators Cave Again."
But even that isn't a news story, for the same reason that "dog bites man" is not a news story.
To me it's the antics of the Republican Senators, not the Dems, that have become tiresome. They insure that they get the worst of both worlds, all the time: tarred with being meanies for talking about making poor old Sen. Byrd undertake a real filibuster, but failing to actually do it. They'll be tarred now for wanting to "mess with Senate tradition of unlimited debate" (don't look behind the curtain that this "tradition" hadn't been applied to nominees until the Dems escaladed things this year), but they'll cave without doing it. Once one gets (as the Republicans in the Senate have, and deserve) a reputation for bluffing frequently and giving in every time the bluff is called, one is easy to manipulate. And the Senate Republicans are the classic "Mark". They're nothing but the most august assemblage of chumps in the world, and they're gonna get rolled again.
I don't blame Senate Democrats for treating them like patsies, if the Senate Republicans are willing to act like patsies then you can't blame those who treat them as such.
The Frankfurt School coalesced in the mid twentieth century, largely in response to the discontent that many Marxist intellectuals felt toward orthodox Marxism, and to the growing realization that the much desiderated class war in the capitalist West was unlikely to occur. Benjamin, Adorno, Marcuse, Williams et. al., then began to speculate on how best to subvert the capitalist society they hated so much. Willy-nilly, they concluded that capitalism was far more vulnerable at the cultural than the economic level and that, therefore, the cultural norms of capitalist society should be attacked. The obliteration of capitalism's cultural infrastructure would bring down capitalism and make possible the construction of a Communist society in the West. . .
Whereas the anarcho-coms urge violence, terrorism, mass vandalism, civil disobedience, and syndicalist strikes to bring down the system, the cult-coms deploy the slightly subtler weapons of multiculturalism and political correctness to achieve identical aims. Where the anarcho-coms envisage a dramatic and cataclysmic revolution, the cult-coms seek to gradually mold the United States into an entity that all neo-coms could embrace, but that would resemble the United States in name only. . .
Moreover--and as David Alan Kors and Harvey Silverglate have pointed out--they believe that free speech reinforces hierarchies because elites have access to organs of communication while the disadvantaged do not. The elites use this advantage to cement their high status and to seal the pitiable fate of the less fortunate. The solution, therefore, is to gain control over society's cultural, educational and media spheres (a veritable fait accompli), and to use these redoubts as bases from which to regulate "hurtful" language and suppress the speech of the so-called elite class. Over time, the enfor ced usage of "benevolent" language and outlawry of "hate speech" will reconfigure white consciousness along progressive non-racist lines. . .
. . .In realized form, this means denigrating and covering up the accomplishments of Western civilization while usurping and inventing achievements for non-Western societies. It means focusing monomaniacally on atrocities committed by Westerners while sweeping non-Western abominations under the rug. It means claiming that the philosophical, scientific and literary heritage of ancient Greece was in fact stolen from "black" Egypt. It means pretending that slavery and wars of conquest are uniquely American, while eliding the successes of America's democratic government, its economy, its breakthroughs in science and industry, its struggl es on behalf of human rights, and the courage and decency of its soldiers. And, of course, it means asserting that the United States got just what it deserved on 9-11, and that any punitive American responses were unjust.
I can add to that, a bit. In the town where I work now (Durango, CO) there is a College (Fort Lewis College); they used to be "the Raiders" - now they're "the Skyhawks" (less "offensive" and more "inclusive").
Last fall before the elections in Germany I exchanged some mails and some posts with a dude who said he hoped Schroeder would win because it would show us (Americans), since if Schroeder won it would be because of his anti-war, anti-American political campaign.
My retort was that it would be the Germans who'd have to live with whoever they elected. And they are. Headline:
Gloom deepens as German industrial output falls
Boy, they're certainly showing us, eh? Here's another salvo:
Germany Facing Slide Into Recession
Wile E Coyote, Supra Genius.
America's economy may be "enjoying sluggish times, and not enjoying them very much", as the first Bush once said. But we're doing tons better than Germany. Or France.
And meanwhile, the 1st AD is finding more congenial digs. More to follow.
When I referred to them as the "Statist Department", I was unsatisfied myself. Something was lacking.
Well, Robert Crawford has improved upon it; "Stasist Department" is very apt. "Why, if we go into Iraq, it might destabilize the entire region! Arafat may fall, Syria's government may crumble and Syria might be compelled to pull their troops out of Lebanon! Why, even the Ayatollahs in Iran might end up tottering! We can't have that, we'd have to update our Country Briefs on the whole area! The predictable status quo is much more preferable."
"What?? Re-evaluate our relations with France and Germany? That sounds like work. Can't we just keep acting as if things are fine and go back to the foreign policy of the '90s - ignoring efforts by the French and pals to build the EU in opposition to us, and pretend it's not happening? Please?"
However, he illustrates a point I made in my comments on Cultural Marxists:
A case in point is a recent article in The Nation, a liberal magazine
When Liberals like Cohen include organs of the Left, like The Nation, in the same umbrella as themselves, they're the witting or unwitting instruments of the infiltration of their own political movement by people who are at best il-Liberal and quite often anti-Liberal.
Lets face it: until Liberals themselves stop lumping Leftists in with Liberals, it makes it much harder to take the (fairly frequent) complaints that conservatives are refusing to distinguish between mainstream Liberals and Leftist extremists seriously (I for one would never make the mistake Cohen makes, and refer to The Nation as "a liberal publication"). You all gotta do better in making the distinction yourselves.
The rest of Cohen's piece is pretty good (though where he muses that the source of the seething animosity towards the U.S. had its origins in the Great Depression, I disagree. Liberals were pro-American during the Great Depression, and even Leftists often were - the seething hatred spread with the New Left and the Cultural Marxists). I'm also not saying that Liberals themselves haven't often fallen into this brink (it's one of the things that comes from making associations with Leftists and finding it easy to swim in the same intellectual pool with the Leftists, something that, to repeat myself, is apparently an assumption of Cohen - failing to see a distinction between Liberals and Leftists, well it's one of the ways things slop over into the mainstream that otherwise would be kept on the margins where it belongs).
He hangs his article around Jeane Kirkpatrick's '84 Convention Speech, and properly identifies her as a former Democrat. Among some of the feedback I got on the "Cultural Marxism" series was some saying I'm making too much of a "few" extremists. Well, there's a reason why Scoop Jackson Democrats became Reagan Republicans, and that's because the "extremists" were made to feel more welcome in Liberal, Democratic circles than the Scoop Jackson type Democrats were. So they migrated. They're not alone (it would surprise some of my readers to learn that in '92 I did some volunteer work for the Jerry Brown campaign in the Wisconsin primary. I migrated).
Perhaps the most disheartening development of the war -- at home, anyway -- is the number of liberals who have allowed Bush-hatred to take the place of thinking. Speaking with otherwise perceptive people, I have seen the same intellectual tics come up time and time again: If Bush is for it, I'm against it. If Bush says it, it must be a lie. Their opposition to Bush has made liberals embrace principles -- such as the notion that the United States must never fight without U.N. approval except in self-defense -- to which the Clinton administration never adhered (see Operation Desert Fox in 1998, or the Kosovo campaign in 1999). And it has made them forget that there are governments in the world even more odious and untrustworthy than the Bush administration.
I'm somewhat familiar with this in daily life (as is my former-Democrat mother, who has had friends scream bile at her and engage in all sorts of conspiracy-theories regarding Bush).
It's not a figment of Chait's imagination, and it's not just a few extremists, and responding to this with an argumentum tu quoque will not solve the problem.
A UPI piece on the recently released McCarthy-hearing papers:
So the transcripts of the secret McCarthy hearings were released this week, after 50 years in cold storage, and less than 24 hours later we have the official pronouncement of The New York Times: "Historians who have reviewed the documents say they do not support McCarthy's theories that, in the 1950s, communist spies were operating at the highest levels of government."
First of all, what kind of speed reader can figure that out when there are 117 transcripts to go through?
Second, why does it say "historians say"? Why doesn't it say "New York Times reporters who have read the transcripts say"? The New York Times covered the hearings in 1953 and 1954. They've got all the information everyone else has. They can read. By putting the judgment on "historians" instead of journalists, they're shifting the verdict to a high priesthood of academics who presumably have arcane specialized knowledge but are more likely to be tied to whatever thesis anchored their last book.
Also, un-named historians; thus we can't evaluate who they were (was it Eric Hobsbawm, Eric Foner and the like? It makes a difference if the unidentified "historians" are themselves Marxists, but the reader is left in no position to evaluate - making the Times article more of a propaganda piece than a news report).
Third, the fact that McCarthy himself was such a buffoon doesn't mean that ALL efforts to root out communist sabotage were mean-spirited, or that everyone accused of being a party member was automatically NOT. I was shocked, for example, to find out that many of the blacklisted "Hollywood Ten" were actually communists. (You can't call them card-carrying communists, because Stalin had a policy that film-industry members should keep their membership secret.)
For years I'd received invitations to various Hollywood get-togethers where these guys were honored for being the victims of a groundless vendetta -- only to find out later they WERE commies.
They never stood up at the banquets and said, "Yes, I was a proud member of the Communist Party, and they persecuted me for that."
Instead the whole thing was portrayed as some kind of groundless libel in which they were accused of being communists but weren't.
(The reverse of that was the freeze-out of Elia Kazan, who had named names before the committee, and was forever persona non grata in Hollywood as a result. He thought communism was dangerous and a threat to the nation, and for saying, "Yes, that guy told me he belonged to the party," he's reviled to this day.)
Too true. And their is a Hollywood censorship effort that goes on to this day. Time to name names:
After all, Whittaker Chambers WAS a communist agent, and when he confessed, he fingered a dozen or so other agents.
Alger Hiss WAS a communist agent. And he was still part of the American delegation at the Yalta conference.
Julius Rosenberg was not only a communist agent, he was a controller of several other agents involved in the Manhattan Project.
Or how about the agents controlled by Robert Goldfus, who appeared to be a self-employed painter in Greenwich Village, but whose real name was actually Vilyam (Willie) Genrikhovich Fisher?
We know Goldfus ran at least four agents inside Los Alamos, including Ted Hall, the Harvard physicist, whose code name was MLAD, the Russian word for "young," since he had started spying when he was 19 years old.
Or let's go back to the 1930s, when we know that the top NKVD agent in the U.S. had at least three agents inside the State Department. One of them, we know, was Laurence Duggan, who supplied hundreds of documents to the Soviet Union and continued to spy into the post-war years.
How about Martha Dodd Stearn, code-name LIZA, the daughter of a former U.S. ambassador to Germany and the wife of millionaire Alfred Kaufman Stern (who was also, by the way, an agent)? Congressional candidate William E. Doss Jr., Treasury Department honcho Harry Dexter White. Someone in the Justice Department we've never identified but had the KGB code name MORIS.
The Hollywood producer Boris Morros, of "Laurel and Hardy" fame. Mary Wolf Price, the secretary to syndicated columnist Walter Lippmann. Lauchlin Currie, a presidential aide in the Roosevelt administration.
Duncan Chaplin Lee, code name KOCH, personal assistant to Gen. Wild Bill Donovan, head of the OSS during the war.
The list goes on, in both high AND low places. Legendary among spy buffs is Nathan Gregory Silvermaster, a communist agent who was almost invisible as a statistician in the Farm Security Administration. He was not just an agent but a controller of agents, but he was eventually betrayed by his courier, the sexy but flighty Elizabeth Bentley.
Look, Communism was the most bloody movement in the 20th Century. In all of human history. Minimizing the activities of those who acted on behalf of Stalinist regimes and smearing everyone who opposed these activities and tried to root them out as a "McCarthyite" is an affront to human decency - not an act of human decency.
Hey, I wouldn't throw my money away on the slots, either, and I think that State lotteries are a tax on people who are bad at math (plus, how come it's wonderful when the State does it, but it's a horrible "numbers racket" when the mob does it? Don't give me that "it's for the children!" stuff, either - and at least the mob usually offered better odds). I like Football and all, don't give a rats ass about the point spread (betting on games holds no attraction for me. Like Bill Parcells once said, "happiness is winning by one point"). I like card games (including Hearts, Spades, Poker, and the like), will bet chips, but haven't any interest in playing for money. But I sort of do look at this as an issue of how one spends one's entertainment dollars (and anything to excess is a vice, to me the question is more "was this to excess").
Then there's this discussion, which is really thought-provoking. I'm not going to excerpt it - worth reading in its entirety. Might make you look at things in a whole new light.
The AP story of course focuses on the police officer's activities. The Barre Montpelier Times-Argus has more details on what he photographed.
A passionate pacifist, he has been skewered publicly by critics who say he is pedaling his personal political views to the students in his class. Part of the proof, critics say, is in the photographs Mott took when he visited the high school April 9 while on duty, in uniform, and out of his jurisdiction.
Of course the first thing at issue here is whether a classroom in a public school is really a private sanctum and it isn't anyone's business what goes on there. What was is rather buried (and glossed-over and made to sound more benign than it was) in the AP story. It's also buried in the Times-Argus story (because our focus is supposed to remain on what the cop did, not on what's going on in our schools), but it's at least more complete:
Among the student projects that Mott said he photographed were a poster of the President Bush with duct tape over his mouth and a large papier-mâché combat boot with the American flag stuffed inside stepping on a doll. He said there also were pictures of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro and his former chief lieutenant, Ernesto “Che” Guevara, posted on the walls.
Now, of course what we're to do is keep our attention on what the cop did, how wrong it was (if it was wrong), and debate that. This way the issue of what sort of things are being taught in schools will be quietly ignored (but of course we care about education, right?). "When a teacher puts things on public display on 'his' classroom door and up on the wall, in a public school, does he have an expectation of privacy?" is what we're supposed to keep our attention fixed on. I'm going to leave that to others to discuss, though. Here we're going to look at the issue we're not supposed to look at. The school officials of course get into these sorts of claims:
“As a teacher he (Treece) does present all sides of an issue,” Anderson said.
They say an image is worth a thousand words.
Here's the classroom door. Remember, this isn't a university professor's office door we're talking about (I've seen stuff like that, it's practically de rigur) - this is the door to a high school classroom. (Oh, and the "Goddess Bless the World" sticker reminds me of this post by Steven Den Beste.
Of course, we must remember that this is not a complete view of the classroom. There's also the poster of Che and the papier-mâché combat boot with the American flag stuffed inside stomping on a doll (forever).
Why are schools faltering in basic education (even though more money is spent per pupil than at any time in the past)? Well, it's better if we don't pursue such questions too far, much less ask if it's because the time that might otherwise be spent productively is spent in this way instead.
Moving on to another topic, but one related to our series on Cultural Marxism and the Long March Through the Institutions, here's something interesting about LA Times' Robert Scheer, and his life-long condemnation of America and preference for Leftist dictatorships.
I've mentioned Hernando de Soto before, in connection to reconstructing Iraq. Here's a must-read interview of him on the subject.
I've also sort of, as a result of considering de Soto's thesis, decided to fret less about the destruction of existing records; not because keeping records is a bad thing, nor because there is some way to start "de novo" in property distribution in Iraq (or that it would be a good thing to do, if it were possible).
But a close reading of de Soto indicates that the thing to do is to go out, survey the people and their property, and make records in order to fold otherwise unrecorded property into the system of recognized, legally protected, property rights. In this, relying on the old records would be a hindrance rather than a help.
Senator George Allen (his father shown here) comes out in favor of shifting American military forces to bases in Eastern Europe - and out of Germany:
For nearly 60 years, the US has had military bases on the territory of Nato partners. Chief among these is Germany, where there are currently more than 80,000 American soldiers. Most of the US troops wounded in Iraq were evacuated to medical facilities in Germany, even though the country is more than 2,000 miles from Baghdad. The US also supported military deployments to Iraq from long-established US and Nato bases in Europe. But the US also set up temporary bases in other parts of Europe - in countries such as Rom- ania, Bulgaria and Hungary. These nations will soon be the newest members of Nato. Each has recent memories of life under a repressive regime and each was a stalwart and vocal member of the coalition against Iraq.
There are abundant options for US bases in this region. They include strategically located ports such as Constanza and dozens of other facilities that would provide versatility in responding to threats from the Middle East and central Asia. Many of these were built in the Soviet era but have been modified to achieve interoperability with Nato and to conform with Nato doctrine on military logistics.
There would be three advantages to moving US forces to such bases and facilities. First, they are closer to current military threats. Even before September 11, it was becoming clear that the newest threats to Nato countries come from the southern and eastern borders of Europe and from terrorist cells across the globe.
Second, these countries want US forces. In welcome contrast to recent sentiment in Germany and France, which for decades has refused to have US troops on its soil, countries such as Romania and Bulgaria have invited them in. Local opinion polls show that the hospitality of these governments reflects the will of their people. Third, it would be cost-effective. The newly free economies of Europe are embracing economic freedom with zeal but operations are less expensive there. A garrison near Bucharest would cost less than one near Bonn.
Now is the time for the US to re-evaluate its bases in Europe. It should do this not to punish any ally who did not agree with it, or simply to reward its newest allies, but to serve its own strategic interests. The new democracies of Europe offer the opportunity, strategic advantage and shared values that will help us to win the next conflict - or deter it altogether.
Despite being zealous advocates of closer European integration, the French are facing 220 open cases involving systematic violations of EU laws and are guilty of the most flagrant foot-dragging of any EU state when implanting new rules.
I'm not really the least bit surprised by this. The EU integration is meant to regulate the behavior of others and make them pliably submit to French direction. The French of course reserve for themselves freedom of action.
If one has a good idea for the world, one should start to put it in practice at home, right? The same applies to the idea of a "multipolar" world. If the French are so enthusiastic about it, all help should be given them to first build a multipolar EUrope.
But we already know, from unilateral French adventures in Africa if from nothing else, that they're as insincere on the "multipolarity" vs "unipolarity" thing as they are on everything else. They only invoke such charges as a weapon to use against others. As the vanguard of Collectivist Internationalism, of course they do not think that the standards they apply to others apply to them. These things are just tools to whip people and countries on the road to a more glorious future.
The Simpsons was all over this. From the episode "$pringfield (Or, How I
Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Legalized Gambling)":
Homer: You know, Marge, for the first time in our marriage I can finally
look down my nose at you. You have a gambling problem!
Marge: That's true. Will you forgive me?
Homer: Oh, sure. Remember when I got caught stealing all those watches
from Sears?
Marge: Hmm.
Homer: Well, that's nothing, because you have a gambling problem! And remember when I let that escaped lunatic in the house 'cause he was dressed like Santa Claus?
Plans to eliminate "unfair" tax competition in Europe by scrapping the national veto on tax will be proposed this month by Valery Giscard d'Estaing, the man drawing up a new EU treaty.
His plan, designed to stop some EU members poaching inward investment and savings by setting very low tax rates, has the backing of most member states, including France and Germany.
But of course the EU is intended to help its members resist "bullying" interference in the internal policies of its members. Or perhaps not - if it's France and Germany pushing everyone else into following their lead and adopting their fiscal policies, then it's ok.
One compromise being considered by Mr Giscard d'Estaing's team, designed to assuage British concerns, is to introduce the idea of a "super-qualified majority" to address certain tax issues. That would allow a big country like Britain to wield a blocking vote, but would prevent a small country - like Ireland - doing the same.
Proposals for a new two-tier European Commission, on which every European Union member state would have a seat, will be boosted on Monday by a new paper by the three Benelux countries.
Well, that sounds fine. Here's the kicker:
Under the Benelux countries' scheme, each member state would have its own commissioner, but only about half would have voting rights at any one time.
A second tier would guarantee all member states would be represented in the Brussels executive, but would play more of an advisory role.
The plan addresses concerns among many smaller member states that they will lose the right to have their own commissioner once the EU expands to 27 members, due in 2005.
See? No worries! Says right here you can have a commissioner. No problemo.
All EU countries are equal, but some are more equal than others.
The voting and non-voting will rotate; lets call it "rotating disenfranchisement". But do we really, really think that France and Germany will lack voting commissioners when big issues are dealt with? Or will it always turn out that countries that might disagree just happen to not have a voting commissioner at the time matters are voted on?
Then there are Steven Den Beste's musings on EU Parliament size. This reminds me that the Supreme Soviet was of some ungodly size, but it never suffered from gridlock. It always passed bills in a timely fashion, because it was a rubber stamp for decisions made elsewhere.
Nothing important is done by the EU Parliament; it's a moot Moot. The real decisions are all made by the bureaucracy (that drafts legislation that the Parliament then rubber stamps) or by the Politbure - er, EU Commissione. Which is why there's a lot more wrangling over the EU Commissione than the EU Parliament.
The EU Parliament is just a sop to the residual democratic sensibilities of the populations of EU member countries, who are soothed (supposedly) by going through the ritual of election, but (apparently) don't mind that elections have no influence on policy.
I'm not sure anyone can remember the last election for EU Parliament. Elections for minor powers like France, or fraudulent ones like the recent ones in Zimbabwe and Nigeria get more attention than EU Parliamentary selections because even those mean more.
Then there's the EUropean military cooperation project, a project in search of a military. Andrew Duff has a solution - give France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and Germany control over Britain's military. Problem solved:
The Maastricht Treaty said that the EU should gradually frame its own defence policy, leading in time to common defence. But progress has been slow. When real decisions about military integration have to be taken, the problem of what to do with America rudely intrudes. Indeed, for fifty years Franco-British disagreement about US relations has hampered the search for European autonomy in military matters.
Seen in that light, Tony Blair's decision to side with Washington in the teeth of opposition from Paris and Berlin is no more than the latest in a long line of regrettable and critical incidents that impair European unity.
A European Armaments and Strategic Research Agency will be set up for those who want to use it. Member states that fulfil higher criteria for military capabilities and have made more binding commitments to one another will be allowed to forge ahead.
It's widely known that France, Germany, Belgium, and Luxemburg are not devoting the resources necessary to "fulfil higher criteria for military capabilities". They've thus been searching about for some external means of acquiring that - someone else's military resources will do. Perhaps Russia's? Well, that's not really practical for a variety of reasons. How about gulling the Americans into a transfer of military technologies so that the EU can oppose hegemonism? We'll, as long as Bush is in the White House, it doesn't look like that's going to happen. Hey - Britain. Britain has pretty solid military capabilities, and Britain is an EU member. The Franco-German axis could "fulfil higher criteria for military capabilities" by seizing control of British military assets via passive-aggressive means:
Are fifty years of defence frustration about to be over? Tony Blair must now realize he is faced with yet another opportunity to miss in Europe.
Miss out on this golden opportunity? Why, perish the thought!
As a result of its diplomatic strategy and style, France is now the target of a new anti-French patriotism in the US. Germany's first serious attempt at diplomatic Gaullism has hardly given the country greater international influence. The creation of a Paris-Berlin-Moscow axis is not a viable strategy for balancing American power. And it could only prove divisive in a European Union of 25 members that does not include Russia.
Last week's defence summit between Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany and France showed how absurd the idea of a strong European defence policy is without Britain. And without a strong defence, Europe can never hope to influence and restrain the US.
It is clearer than ever that a stronger Europe will result only from a partnership between France and Britain, the EU's two credible military powers. . .
Depends on what one's purpose is. If it is to contain the enemy (the U.S.), then that's needed. If it's to cooperate with it's ally (the U.S.), as Britain did, then it really isn't a good idea to pair an ally of the U.S. (Britain) with an opponent (France) like this, until one changes its policies. But at least Moisi understands something Duff does not:
In reviving their special relationship, France and Germany have succeeded only in marginalising themselves and, ironically, in making Britain the pivotal power in the EU.
And at least Moisi is now putting the blame for "division" in EUrope in a place that normally isn't called to account:
The clear lesson for France is that there is no alternative to partnership with Britain if it wants to build Europe into a military and diplomatic power.
In the late 1980s, France had to accept German unification for the sake of Europe. Now, for Europe's sake, France must eschew systematic opposition to the US.
But Moisi keeps raising the specter of the American Boogeyman as something for a strong EUrope to tame. So this remains just an argument over tactics and means, not goals and ends.
There are always those who claim that society is bound to fall, and it's usually going to be sometime soon. . .
This is not a pre-ordained cycle or a superhuman force. . .
We are on the brink of the abyss. Don't be afraid to hear that. I'll say it again: we are on the brink of the abyss. . .Awareness is always the first step. And now that we know, what are we going to do about it? We are going to make damned sure we don't fall in, that's what we're going to do. . .
People build civilisations, not historical forces. People fight wars, not invisible gremlins. People sign peace treaties, make alliances, build buildings. . .raise families - they create things in places where there was never anything before. Why do we do this? Because we dream and envision things, because we believe in things - and the first thing to believe in is that our destiny belongs to us, and we are the only ones who can take it away from ourselves.
- "Norris", p.9, Survival Margin, By David Nilsen.
I've spoke of my pessimism in the below posts, and my lack of answers. But that shouldn't be confused with defeatism.
Marx made several errors, large and small. One of these was his belief that materiel factors create ideas. This is precisely backwards - ideas matter most; sure, they don't create the universe, but they allow understanding of it. And in human economics, the idea comes first (no wheel without the idea of the wheel, no prosperity within a free market society without the idea of free markets, etc). Ideas matter most.
His other most grave error was perhaps related, or at least interthreaded with that - the belief that human history (past and future) was the product of inevitable historical forces. This, too, is wrong. What will happen is what we make of it. In other words, we can thwart the march of "Bad Philosophy", internally as well as internally. The only question is if we will - will find the means and tools to do so.
In some ways, I think that the battle is more likely to succeed against the "Bad Philosophy" abroad. I sometimes wonder whether the flame of liberty will, ironically, be kept alight in undreamed of places even while it dims and flickers here. That in helping them we are helping ourselves in ways beyond what even the most optimistic among us usually think: that perhaps we might rely on future help from them just as we aid them now. I haven't written that till now because it sounds so outlandish - and it may well be. But who can say where or from whom the answer(s) to our quandary may come from?
We may solve these things ourselves or we may need help from abroad in doing so. I do think we have a better chance than, say, Continental Europe in succeeding on our own account, and I don't recommend relying on help from kind strangers (like Blanche DuBois). (Given the way the world really works and how exceptional the U.S. is in actually helping strangers in need rather than using weakness as an opening to screw them over, this would be a bad first method).
I do think Liberty is too robust to be snuffed out completely. But it might go dark for a bit in some of its homes and hearths. That in and of itself is a bad enough fate for the people who must live in the "dim time". It's also a matter of how bad things will get before things get better - I'm hope they won't have to get that bad at all. That we'll find the intellectual tools to cure the virus before the body succumbs, as it were.
Of course, the first option for us individually is to not fall into the trap of being intimidated by the Cultural Marxists (who are past masters at intellectual bullying and the use of passive-aggressive manipulation to shout down criticism of them. Never, never, never give in to it, in any form or guise, and that's a personal victory over the darkness), and "each one, teach one" the same.
I had a dream. A dream of darkness.
There was a roiling sea, a sea of. . .water? . . .hydrogen plasma? . . .protoplasm? A sea of something I could not name because I could see nothing. There was the infinite roaring of a boundless sea, as wide as all the directions of time, as deep as the questions of the heart, as mighty as the weight of eternity. There was its spray, sometimes a gentle mist, sometimes a stinging scourge, but again, there was nothing to see but blackness enfolded in darkness wrapped in sunless, moonless, starless night.
How long had this darkness existed? How wide was its domain? Did it exist within the banks of a larger infinity, or was this ocean the stuff of infinity itself, formless, indefinable, without origin or destiny? I don't know how long I pondered this question, but I was aware that the ocean's voice, rising, falling, rising, falling, chanted a tuneless canticle that pulled me along into sense of well-being that dulled my senses. The chant was rhythmic and reassuring, and I realised with a start of chagrin how simple my life really was. Live: eat, sleep, breathe; live: eat, sleep, breathe; live: eat, sleep, breathe; live: eat, sleep, breathe. And gradually I began to know how senseless was all this asking of questions, this chaos, this searching for something greater than. . .greater than what? What could be greater than live: eat, sleep, breathe?
The questions receded and I knew happiness, true happiness, the happiness of being at one with what I was, or was becoming, or had been - it was all the same.
Suddenly, blindingly to my dark-adjusted eyes, a streak of light ripped across the blackness, pure white, flame, liquid and solid all at once, and was gone an instant later. But where it had been, it left a tear in the continuous blackness, a tear that was not black, but which glowed and sparkled, opalescent, as it gradually faded.
But as it faded, I saw curtains of black enfold it, twist and spiral about it, blotting its gleaming into dull grayness, and rapidly into blackness, and soon it was as if there had never even been a bolt of light. After a time I began to doubt if I had seen the light at all; it had holy been an artifact of my wilful resistance to the chant of living - eat, sleep, breathe - it had only been a reminder of. . .of. . .nothing at all. But there had been something joyful about the light, something that reminded me of. . .of. . .questions I used to ask. . .
Sometimes I dreamed of the light, but after a time I only dreamed of a black wrapped in darkness, clothed in night, twisted with lightlessness, all of which concealed nothing, for there was nothing at all to conceal except eat, sleep, breathe, and that was not a secret - that was all there was to know.
When the light came again, I had almost forgotten what it reminded me of. It returned without form or design, random bolts, knives, swords of pure, punishing light, tearing, ripping, rending, shredding the blackness, leaving it hanging in tatters, revealing the opalescence I had once seen. But the blackness was quick to reassert itself, wrapping, covering, hiding the tears and the crepuscular gleamings. And where there had been sharp white lines against black, the swirling darkness softened and blurred these lines into gray, first light gray, but then deeper and deeper charcoal. But before the last of the gray was gone, while the sky was still a swirling miasma of once-bright suns smothered into the mist of darkness, the lights returned, ripping, tearing, releasing the weak threads of gray about to be choked into nothingness. And again the dark reasserted itself, but again the light returned.
Again and again I watched this cycle, but the light never completely faded, and returned more often, until a continuous dim light began to glow, and I could see that there was a vast area that existed above this ocean, an area that I remembered once from long before, and I remembered its name - sky. The sky existed as limitless as the sea, above it wherever it went, clawed and batted at by the sea, but unending just the same. And within this sky were shapes that I recognised, balls and globes alternately lit by the light and covered by the darkness. The darkness still attacked the light and its gleaming residue, but the new light, constantly reoccurring, kept opening up new glimmering rents until a sort of equilibrium resulted, a world of light and darkness, still mostly gray, but actively and violently fought over by the exuberant, unbowed, spontaneous swords of light and the implacable, tireless, swirling, mantiling cloaks of swords of light and the implacable, tireless, swirling, mantling cloaks of darkness.
And in the light of this new dawn, I remembered the questions that I had once had, and wondered why it had been so long since I had tried to find their answers.
Where once there had been nothing, only darkness, there was now a world, and where the gray, scuddling sky met the angry, black sea, there was a horizon, a line that was a destination, always before me, always beckoning, always partly lit by the light and partly concealed by the darkness. And I renewed my journey, knowing that I would I would never arrive, but knowing that I would grow ever closer, and that was every bit as good.
I had a dream. A dream of darkness.
- "M. Corralci", Aliens of the Rim, by "B." David Nilsen and Loren K. Wiseman
So does the blogosphere have a role in combating CM? My gut says yes but only insofar as it is able to gain exposure to the non-blogging public.
On the whole it seems that the forces of CM are more likely to get active and make noise and draw attention to themselves and make it seem that they are more influential than perhaps is the case.
They need to be shouted down, held up to ridicule, made to defend their position on the merits (if any), made public their position on the lunatic fringe. I'm a registered independent (a pox on all their houses) but frankly the pachyderms are doing such a fine job of 'playing well with others' that they are assisting in the excavation of the holes that the extremist donks want to bury them in. The silent majority needs to start getting noisy.
Bush/Rice in '04 - Rice/Powell(?) in '08, Stuff that in your craw, Jesse, Al, Ted and Hillary.
The blogosphere is good for cross-pollination of ideas; perhaps someone will come up with an effective way of combating these movements. It won't, IMO, be combated through persuading the public (who are already, when they hear of these things, opposed to them by large majorities; but Cultural Marxists and the institutions they infiltrate are impervious to the public will, they are deliberately insulated from popular accountability).
It's no accident, as they say, that even such things as NGOs that claim to be the voice of the people in, for example, the international community, really represent tiny constituencies of members/contributors, and pursue their aims regardless of what most people actually want (again, while claiming to speak for most people; irony of ironies, all is irony); most, even ones that push for institutions to be publically accountable and for institutional transparency, are lacking (or above) public accountability (usually on tautological grounds that amount to asserting that they are the public and are the expression of the popular demand for accountability and transparency) and suffer from a paucity of transparency when it comes to their own internal processes.
If one looks just at Republican administrations, even ones that recognise the importance of the battle of ideas (such as Reagan's vs. Communism, and that included battles with University Communists when he was Governor of California) and Bush II (to an extent, against Jihadist Islam), even they have no real "answer". Ridicule (the "horse laugh" which Steven Den Beste considers the best weapon against Political Correctness) seems to work (it causes the Cultural Marxists to be subdued in what they say publicly). But it has no real effect (as I put it in my post, they don't care about the popular will and indeed that just shows to them how benighted we all are, and how much in dire need of additional education and enlightenment we and our progeny are). Lets say they decide to implement a policy on a University that 70%+ of the public thinks is absurd. The reaction causes that policy to be withdrawn. Everything quiets down and we all think that the system worked. Six months (or less) later, the University administration produces, invariably, a newly-formulated policy document (probably carefully crafted to avoid whatever phrasing the critics highlighted), aimed at accomplishing the same goals.
This is why ~15 years ago when the whole "speech codes and multiculturalism" stuff became a fairly significant public issue, with people opposing speech codes and courts striking them down, many, many people figured "well, ok. They tried something absurd, but with good intentions, and the problem's been solved anyhow". But one looks at campuses (the example I keep returning to because it's the most obvious and easy to use one; it's not the only one. Many NGOs are the same, many government institutions are the same, many media organisations, dittoes, etc) today and it's as if none of that happened, really. Things may actually be worse (though it's harder to tell because their has been one change - they're more circumspect in how things are documented).
It's like we pushed into a pool of water. We made a lot of progress, but the water flowed around, and when we stopped pushing it just rebounded back into place. As I mentioned in my post, they're very resilient and persistent.
Most politicians don't really see the depth of the problem and if they do they try to avoid it because they don't know how to accomplish anything without being tarred as a McCarthyite, witch hunter, violator of academic freedom, etc (just think the reaction to Newt's speech on the State Department and how well that went over, and that wasn't even directly confronting this issue). I don't think Powell, for all his merits, would even perceive this problem. Rice might, she was, after all, at Stanford. But, again, would she know what to do about it.
In saying that, I'm not casting aspersions on her intellect (or on Powell's for that matter, nor implicitly on Bush's) - I'm not claiming to know how to handle this problem, either. I have no answers except to keep buggering on, keep accomplishing things in the real world (such as mentioned in my post "All or Nothing" pairing success in Iraq with the possibility of success at home) that will at least limit the number of people that are seduced by these movements (but I don't think can roll them back), and the like. But these people and those they continue to convince - well, they live in a intellectual world where they have an excuse to dismiss everything "real" by comparison with the "ideal" (which is no longer even described overtly, actually); for example, 12 years ago the same people were saying we fought the Gulf War for oil; the fact that we didn't seize Iraq's (or Kuwait's) oil then didn't affect in the least their making the same arguments this time, did it? The fact that none of their predictions came to pass in Afghanistan didn't stand in the way of their repeating similar ones this time around (and one can mention countless other examples) - indeed, they just went on to make criticisms of both, anyhow, inventing new ones where the old ones had failed, as if nothing happened to affect their view of anything (I also, btw, think that the "reappraisal" happening in parts of Europe will not really amount to any real introspection and rethinking, in the end. That's just an operational pause - tactical more than anything. No minds are changing. They just find it necessary to go quiet for an interim).
It may very well be that this is not something that can be overcome by political officials, through the use of state power.
Which isn't to say that who one supports electorally doesn't matter, and indeed having people win elections who embody Western, liberal democratic free-market values and will pursue policies in a way that is most likely to produce success in the real world and thus at least slow the rate at which the "meme" of Cultural Marxism (in all its varieties) spreads is important, if for no other reason than it gives us all time, in which people might come up with the intellectual tools (plural) that will prove effective in neutralising "Bad Philosophy".
A note here before proceeding: The title of John Allison's e-mail was "On Cultural Marxism (Transnational Progressivism?)", identifying or equating Cultural Marxism with Fonte's description of Transnational Progressivism. This is not wrong, but it is perhaps incomplete or misleading.
Transnational Progressivism is one of the progeny of Cultural Marxism, which predates it (Transnational Progressivism has several "intellectual grandparents", threads of a variety of Leftist thought, and Cultural Marxism is one of those grandparents or threads woven into its pattern). There are many iterations of the Left, all with common goals (at least in the negative sense of what they oppose), resulting from the fragmentation of Orthodox (or Classical) Marxism. Here's a fairly good, concise description of Marxist theory. At that same site is also a description and excellent analogy of the modern (post-modern) varieties of "Bad Philosophy" (at least the Western ones; nothing on Qtub et al on that particular page, though he has some thoughts on that topic here). (No, I'm not going to tell you what the analogy is because, A) I'm a cruel slot and B) I want you to read the piece. But I will have to say it comes from the movie Bram Stoker's Dracula). This Lee Harris article is also something to keep in mind as we proceed.
Cultural Marxism predates Transnational Progressivism, the later being heavily influenced (in my opinion) by its theories. It has its roots in Gramsci's realisation that Marx's "immiseration" theory was wrong. But in that realisation, Gramsci did not stop being a Marxist, but instead thought up a means to save the Communist project. The Cultural Marxists evolved this into a position that, in effect, turned Marx on his head: Capitalism was bad not because it would result in impoverishment of the masses (though it continues to result in their "economic exploitation", but instead produces a society with materiel wealth but spiritual impoverishment (aside: Marx actually would have hated this and dealt with it dismissively and derisively, as he did with anything metaphysical. But that's neither here nor there).
This is important as we move on to the next response, this one from M. Simon, who wrote via e-mail:
I just quote Marx back to them.
"Socialism will not prevail until capitalism stops producing profits."
I then say that this may take 100 years or more.
I then say that the best thing to do at this time is to advance capitalism as rapidly as possible by participation.
So far it has worked.
That counter-argument would work with many Orthodox (or Classical) Marxists, but is not likely to have much of an impact on Cultural Marxists for whom profit itself is a vice and the "materiel prosperity and spiritual impoverishment" caused by Capitalism is the problem.
Or, to put it this way, it's not likely to persuade those who think that having McDonalds in Iraq is something to dread and represents a great setback for the cause of humanity.
Likewise, one looks at prominent people who are, in my opinion, Cultural Marxists, and they're out there happily growing wealthy within the framework of free market democracy, but that has not (and will not) dissuade them from asserting and spreading "Bad Philosophy" (think Ben & Jerry, Oliver Stone, Jane Fonda, Bill Moyers, Michael Moore, and all the rest of them). Even people like Noam Chomsky are not exactly leading the life of third-world peasants; they have rather comfortable economic circumstances.
One of my patented asides: I mentioned Jane Fonda deliberately in the above parenthetical remark, because this is a case-study. I knew when I wrote it that by invoking her it might cause some people to roll their eyes "oh, the boogie man (er, woman) of the paranoid Right who can't get over her principled opposition to the Vietnam War. Fonda's a mainstream Liberal and Democrat". That sort of reaction is a frequent response by real Liberals who function as "Hosts" for this movement. But it isn't quite true. Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden (and, interestingly, LA Times editor Robert Scheer) were members of the radical New Left "Red Family" commune, and Hayden mused about founding a new Communist party until he decided to enter the Democratic Party for tactical reasons. This did not involve a change in ideas, but it was a means of gaining electoral power as part of the maskirovka of the "Long March Through the Institutions". Fonda's famous Workout exercise videos - an exercise in using the free market to profit (as M. Simon proposes), was used to fund Hayden's political efforts. This isn't speculation on my part - Fonda said this was the purpose, and it is widely known and admired on the far Left. True Liberals reacting as many do in defending the infiltration and usurpation of their institutions (the Democratic Party for one) by Leftists like Fonda, Hayden, and Sheer (a interesting trifecta there) is one of the most frustrating aspects of the "War on Bad Philosophy" and something that must be dealt with - by Liberals confronting this and re-asserting true Liberalism (which, this time I don't even necessarily mean "Classical Liberalism"; Harry Truman, JFK style Liberalism would be enough) distinct from Leftism, New or otherwise. This is really a necessary precondition for a healthy Democratic Party and for Liberal politics. See, I don't want a one-party state, even a Republican and Conservative one.
One thing to illustrate the degree of infiltration and the failure of most real (or mainstream) Liberals to distinguish between themselves and radical Leftists is a less well-known member of the same political-social circle as Hayden, Scheer, and Fonda was an apparently very fanatical radical named Michael Lerner, who went on to found Tikkun and went seamlessly (without break with the intellectual legacy of the "Red Family") to become a guru of the Clintons (in their "politics of meaning" period). But right now, so deep is this problem that people have essentially been excommunicated and declared "Conservative" who have simply opposed aspects of "Bad Philosophy" (Harold Bloom is an example - here's a man who votes Democrat or Socialist, never once has voted for any Republican, he said on C-SPAN's Book TV "In Depth" today, but his critiques of Universities has made people consider him "Conservative" none the less; it's an upside-down world where Harold Bloom is considered "Conservative" and Hayden, Sheer, and Lerner are accepted as "Liberals"; Given that Bloom says he prefers Socialists, I wouldn't even consider him "Liberal" per se - preferring Socialism means he's a man of the Left, but the fact that he opposes "Bad Philosophy" means he is treated by many as "objectively Conservative" when he's not. This, for those who are inclined to dismiss this as "making too much over a very few fringe characters", as is often done, says all that needs to be said about who controls the terms of debate at this point). In any case, back to our post, already in progress.
I have no doubt that M. Simon's method works in encouraging people to go out there and get their share of the wealth, but that is not really the same as changing their minds, persuading them to not be Marxists (of whatever stripe). It just makes patient Marxists (and Marxists of the Cultural type are nothing if not patient as it is; they keep a constant, seemingly impatient, rhetorical pressure on "the system", as they used to call it, but their methods are really of the "how do you boil a frog" sort). M. Simon also wrote:
End drug prohibition.
End the wars on sexual minorities (not including rapists, child molesters, etc.)
This deprives them of their main issues.
Not to seem dismissive, but this is focusing on small beer. I know that by writing that, it'll cause some to shift in their seats uncomfortably. I'm not saying "Sodomy laws are the way to go" (a free society shouldn't have such things, in my opinion), but when I read these suggestions, it reminded me of something Jerry Rubin once said, describing his movement, the movement we're discussing here:
"Satisfy our demands, and we've got twelve more. The more demands you satisfy, the more we got. . .We always put our demands forward in such an obnoxious manner that the power structure can never satisfy us and remain the power structure. Then, we scream, righteously angry, when our demands are not met.... Goals are irrelevant. The tactics, The actions are critical. If we had to decide beforehand what our goals would be, we'd be arguing about the future society for the next 1,000 years. Let's worry about that bridge when we come to it. The goal now is to blow up the bridge just behind us.
Note that he said this not as a critical description of the movement, but as a positive description - not what should be avoided, but what ought to be done. Note also the nihilistic character of it all, which is pretty common really (we'll destroy this civilisation regardless of whether or not we have something better to offer in its place. It'll take us a thousand years to come up with that, but no matter. Destroy now, pieces are for others to pick up a millennium hence).
The main problem with M. Simon's suggestion isn't the merits of it (doing what M. Simon suggests may be good on their own merits), but I hold that it won't make a whit of difference in the "War on Bad Philosophy", because if you look at the historical record, what Jerry Rubin talked about is exactly what happened.
Here's an analogy: what M. Simon is suggesting is akin to saying that we should have fought the Afghanistan war (as we did) in the most humane way possible, trying to minimise civilian casualties, insure that people didn't starve, and prevent an outflow of refugees, so as to deprive the anti-war movement of issues. We did all that (indeed, rather than creating refugees, we created the conditions that allowed refugees to return to their homes), and there was intrinsic merit in doing that. But when the Iraq debate came around, the anti-war protests were bigger and more vituperative, making the exact same charges and demands. Will the fact that we fought the Iraq war in a way that disproved all the apocalyptic predictions deprive them of the ammo the next time around?
No, because this misses the source of the problem, when it comes to the adherents of "Bad Philosophy". Now, it will cause some people who were genuinely concerned (and were used as foot soldiers to fill up the streets) with these things, but it will have absolutely no effect on "The Movement", which simply moved on to other charges, other accusations, and new demands.
I also would caution against accepting the rhetorical milieu of the Cultural Marxists. "War against sexual minorities"? Marcuse couldn't have put it any better, but is what is going on now really accurately described as a "war against sexual minorities"? I beg to differ - if anything, there is more tolerance than ever before of what used to be routinely described as "sexual deviancy". There is, to be sure, some debate on particular things, but the issue is usually how far to expand, rather than to try and contract and restrict, the range of liberty on these issues. The phrase "war against sexual minorities" actually, if unintentionally, is riven through with the premises of the Cultural Marxists of the Frankfurt School. It's also important to remember that for such people, liberal tolerance in the context of a free-market, democratic society is never enough, never substantive, is always really "oppressive" because the foundations of Western society built on those premises are objectively and fundamentally flawed and impossible to reform.
Thus one gets situations like that of the "Gay Debate" that Andrew Sullivan participated in several months ago (was it almost a year ago already?), which was televised on C-SPAN. The premise of some on the opposite side (who's names escape me at the moment) was that the way, and the only way, to advance the cause of homosexuals in America was by advancing the cause of Socialism (with the advent of Socialism, all these problems would be solved automatically, and none of them could "really" be solved in the absence of Socialism). This was the mainstream of the Gay Left, not it's fringe, talking.
Again, don't mistake me - some things (as with the Afghanistan and Iraq war analogies) should be done for their own intrinsic merits. But to believe that this will satisfy the goals of the Cultural Marxists, or even deprive them of issues, and has always proven to be fallacious.
Update: Jeff at Caerdroia has some thoughts on combating "Bad Philosophy", which essentially boil down to creating a "decent Left" (to steal a phrase from Michael Walzer), a new Leftist paradigm that will wash over the rot and cleanse away "Bad Philosophy". It's a good post, well worth reading. It reminds me of the old saw about "how do you make rabbit stew", though. Answer: first catch the rabbit.
I also think that the framework is somewhat, I'm not sure. He proposes what amounts to Classical Liberalism (limited state intervention, specifically defined), though wrapped around the invocation of justice and fairness - terms he associates with the Left.
But we've really been there, done that. The problem isn't that non-Leftists don't care about justice or fairness; it's more a matter of who's justice? By saying "been there, done that", what I mean is that this is exactly how Classical Liberalism was initially, but as Jacques Barzun termed it (in his book From Dawn to Decadence), underwent a "Great Switch" - the "reversal of liberalism into its opposite," focused precisely on invocations of justice and fairness, and then with the same Left critiques reasserting themselves (see also this review).
If Jeff is right that what is needed are new Leftist axioms [not another "New Left", Porphy groans. May be needed. Ok.], then they have to be really new, not just a rehashing of the old (or a projection of what some of us want), axioms and paradigms. (Yes, yes, yes, I know: there is nothing new under the sun, and all this has its origins in Plato et al somewhere. Still, there are some innovations).
So this would bring us full circle, but with a strong tendency to continue the circle right around without getting us out of the quandry.
To engage in a tautology of my own, if what are needed are new, intellectually healthy, axioms that appeal to the Left, we'll find it hard to speculate on what they might be until we see them (or come up with them), because, well, they'll be new. We don't know what they are yet.
(By the way, yes: not teaching or at any rate devaluing reasoning is a deliberate tactic, on the grounds that "reason" and "logic" are the problems with "white male opressors", and its related attribute - sound judgement, is the vice of "judgementalism", to be avoided at all costs except when done by Leftists practicing "critical theory").
