Bret Stephens compares Haiti and Chile, corruption and transparency. How often we forget that corruption and a state economy kills. And in times like these, we see that the rebar metric measures lives saved.
Political Philosophy
The Machiavellians: Principle I
The Machiavellians, written by James Burnham in 1943, is the greatest work of political “science” you’ve never heard of.
Burnham was a prominent Trotskyite during the 1930s. However, he had a Road to Damascus moment in the wake of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the Soviet invasion of Finland. It was during during the period between his previous life as an American Communist/Socialist Party apparatchik and his later career as a prominent conservative intellectual (he was one of the original founders of National Review) that Burnham wrote his two most important books, The Managerial Revolution
Sleeping with the Enemy
The Age of Longing
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Why has the western world shown such loss of will in defending itself from radical Islamic terrorism? Why, indeed, do substantial numbers of people–particularly those who view themselves as intellectuals–endlessly make excuses for dictatorships and terrorist movements whose values are completely at odds with their own stated values–and even romanticize these goons? I think some clues can be found in a forgotten novel by Arthur Koestler.
The Age of Longing (published in 1950) is set in Paris, “sometime in the 1950s,” in a world in which France–indeed all of western Europe–is facing the very real possibility of a Soviet invasion. Hydie Anderson, the protagonist, is a young American woman living in Paris with her father, a military attache. Hydie was a devout Catholic during her teens, but has lost her faith. She was briefly married, and has had several relationships with men, but in none of them has she found either physical or emotional satisfaction…she describes her life with a phrase from T S Eliot: “frigid purgatorial fires,” and she longs for a sense of connection:
Hydie sipped at her glass. Here was another man living in his own portable glass cage. Most people she knew did. Each one inside a kind of invisible telephone box. They did not talk to you directly but through a wire. Their voices came through distorted and mostly they talked to the wrong number, even when they lay in bed with you. And yet her craving to smash the glass between the cages had come back again. If cafes were the home of those who had lost their country, bed was the sanctuary of those who had lost their faith.
The Rorschach Test for Evil
[I did a post on this thread over at Reason and it went long so I decided to turn it into post here. I apologize for the sloppiness. I am pressed for time.]
We have a modern ritual in which we try to see which political ideology is reflected in the murderous actions of people like Amy Bishop and Joseph Andrew Stack. This is especially true in the case of Stack who left a suicide blog post.
The key to understanding this guy (and others like him) is to grasp the staggering depth of his narcissism and self-absorption.
People who carry out these types of crimes have an incredibly invariant profile. It’s always the same in every single one of these crimes.
(1) They have a seriously inflated sense of their own competence. They believe they are in the top 1% of their chosen field when they are usually merely average or sub par. Since they believe they deserve the top rewards but only get the average rewards, they constantly believe themselves cheated out of money, jobs and status.
Get Out Your Godwin’s Law-O-Meter
I originally posted this at zenpundit.com but then I remembered that at Chicago Boyz there are likely many readers and bloggers who are fans of Jonah Goldberg and might enjoy reading him squaring off against leftist academic critics:
HNN is running a symposium on Jonah Goldberg’s recent book, Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning
While I know a great deal about the historical period in question, I have not read Goldberg’s book, so I am not going to comment on his core proposition except to say that IMHO, I tend to find arguments that the intellectual roots of Fascism and Nazism are located exclusively on one side of the political spectrum are flatly and demonstrably wrong. Goldberg’s polemical thesis though, yields a hysterical reaction because he is jubilantly shredding the hoary (and false) assertion of the academic Left, going back to the pre-Popular Front Communist Party line of the 1930s, that Fascism is a form of radicalized conservatism and a secret pawn of big-business capitalism.