Saturday, August 21, 2004

Posted here Saturday, August 21, 2004 at 8:37:58 PM       Two tough articles, one from the progressive and on from the neocon side. Both are serious attempts to name the reality. The emotional and value base is nearly orthogonal, missing each other. But the struggle to understand them, and what you think, and why, is really worth the hard work. My own copies are now about one third my notes, and I've just started to fully understand the nature of the beasts.  Agre's is a brilliant analysis of conservative posturing, and Podhoretz's is as solid attempt to lay out the view that the US is the pinnacle of civilization (city on the hill) and we need to defined it with everything. That he treats Bush a the personification of American wit and will is of course in my mind, ludicrous. but Dealing with all the history and logic is not easy.   Pasted from <http://polaris.gseis.ucla.edu/pagre/conservatism.html> What Is Conservatism and What Is Wrong with It? Philip E. Agre August 2004   Liberals in the United States have been losing political debates to conservatives for a quarter century. In order to start winning again, liberals must answer two simple questions: what is conservatism, and what is wrong with it? As it happens, the answers to these questions are also simple: Q: What is conservatism? A: Conservatism is the domination of society by an aristocracy. Q: What is wrong with conservatism? A: Conservatism is incompatible with democracy, prosperity, and civilization in general. It is a destructive system of inequality and prejudice that is founded on deception and has no place in the modern world.   These ideas are not new. Indeed they were common sense until recently. Nowadays, though, most of the people who call themselves "conservatives" have little notion of what conservatism even is. They have been deceived by one of the great public relations campaigns of human history. Only by analyzing this deception will it become possible to revive democracy in the United States.   //1 The Main Arguments of Conservatism From the pharaohs of ancient Egypt to the self-regarding thugs of ancient Rome to the glorified warlords of medieval and absolutist Europe, in nearly every urbanized society throughout human history, there have been people who have tried to constitute themselves as an aristocracy. These people and their allies are the conservatives.   One weakness in his argument is that he says things about right authoritarians that also applies to left authoritarians. The article is an powerful analysis of self serving elites at the cost of others. True conservatives, one might think, work for the good of the whole society. but that there are such people might be an illusion. The alternative is a forthright and demanding democratic ethos.   This comp[ares with a very thorough article on why winning in Iraq is important part of a world war 4 (3 was the cold war). I hate the tone and logic of this piece, but it has important history, and force s one to think. It is a hard exercise, very worth while. the two together, rubbed together so to speak, will heat your mind - a hard workout.     Pasted from <http://www.commentarymagazine.com/podhoretz.htm>           Commentary September 2004 World War IV: How It Started, What It Means, and Why We Have to Win Norman Podhoretz     This past spring, when it seemed that everything that could go wrong in Iraq was going wrong, a plague of amnesia began sweeping through the country. Caught up in the particulars with which we were being assaulted 24 hours a day, we seemed to have lost sight of the context in which such details could be measured and understood and related to one another. Small things became large, large things became invisible, and hysteria filled the air.   Since then, of course, and especially after the hand over of authority on June 30 to an interim Iraqi government, matters have become more complicated. But the relentless pressure of events, and the continuing onslaught both of details and of their often tendentious or partisan interpretation, have hardly let up at all. It is for this reason that, in what follows, I have tried to step back from the daily barrage and to piece together the story of what this nation has been fighting to accomplish since September 11, 2001. ..   Telling the story properly has required more than a straight narrative leading from 9/11 to the time of writing. For one thing, I have had to interrupt the narrative repeatedly in order to confront and clear away the many misconceptions, distortions, and outright falsifications that have been perpetrated. In addition, I have had to broaden the perspective so as to make it possible to see why the great struggle into which the United States was plunged by 9/11 can only be understood if we think of it as World War IV.   My hope is that telling the story from this perspective and in these ways will demonstrate that the road we have taken since 9/11 is the only safe course for us to follow. As we proceed along this course, questions will inevitably arise as to whether this or that move was necessary or right; and such questions will breed hesitations and even demands that we withdraw from the field. Some of this happened even in World War II, perhaps the most popular war the United States has ever fought, and much more of it in World War III (that is, the cold war); and now it is happening again, notably with respect to Iraq.   He fails, in my view, to pay attention to culture, and to the complexity of events within the US and the market world, and fails to give weight to the obvious: that American democracy is not the only meaning of democracy, and that the destruction wrought by too aggressive an economy is devastating - as devastating as terrorism itself. He fails at empathy.   ********