Political Philosophy

Why the Democrats Raked It In

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On this Reason post [h/t Instapundit] about possible serious political warping of the “stimulus”spending, commenter nate made an interesting claim:

I work in a federal agency that had a good portion of stimulus cash and was part of the team that picked projects to get funds. We really didn’t look at unemployment in the area. Our main criterion was whether the project had been designed and engineered to a point that we could get construction going pretty quickly. Once we set out our list, we sent it up to OMB. They knocked some stuff out and changed it up some, but for the most part the final list looked like what we sent them. I doubt politics had too much to do with the selection of projects.

I actually think this is very likely. As much as I would gain emotional satisfaction from the idea that perfidious Democrats systematically channeled hundreds of billions of dollars to their cronies in old style big city machine corruption writ large…

… I just don’t think they’re that competent.

Instead, I think the asymmetry could largely result from the type of projects that nate and his colleagues were primed to fund. They didn’t fund projects because the projects fulfilled an important need. Neither did they fund projects that local areas could not afford and therefore had never started. Instead, they funded projects based solely on how far along the projects already were in their development.

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Faustian Ambition

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AnoukAnge’s post on ambition, which included a range of quotations on the subject, inspired me to think that I might be able to write an interesting essay on the topic of ambition in Goethe’s Faust. This post is a stab at such an essay. Although this may seem like a strange thing to spend time blogging about at the moment, given all the political news and events, I believe this topic is in fact highly relevant to current affairs.

The word “Faustian” is frequently used in books, articles, blog posts, etc on all sorts of topics. I think the image that most people have of Faust is of a man who sold his soul to the devil in exchange for dangerous knowledge: sort of a mad-scientist type. This may be true of earlier versions of the Faust legend, but I think it’s a misreading (or more likely a non-reading) of Goethe’s definitive version.

Faust, at the time when the devil first appears to him, has devoted his entire life to the pursuit of knowledge–in many different scholarly disciplines–and is totally frustrated and in despair about the whole thing. It is precisely the desire to do something other than to pursue abstract knowledge that leads him to engage in his fateful bargain with Mephistopheles.

If it’s not the pursuit of abstract knowledge, then what ambition drives Faust to sell his soul? C S Lewis suggests that his motivations are entirely practical: he wants “gold and guns and girls.” This is partly true, but is by no means the whole story.

Certainly, Faust does like girls. Very early in the play, he encounters a young woman who strikes his fancy:

FAUST: My fair young lady, may I make free
To offer you my arm and company?
GRETCHEN: I’m neither fair nor lady, pray
Can unescorted find my way
FAUST: God, what a lovely child! I swear
I’ve never seen the like of her
She is so dutiful and pure
Yet not without a pert allure
Her rosy lip, her cheek aglow
I never shall forget, I know
Her glance’s timid downward dart
Is graven deeply in my heart!
But how she was so short with me–
That was consummate ecstasy!

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Sleeping with the Enemy–Update

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My post of a couple of weeks ago, Sleeping with the Enemy, (which expanded on an old novel by Arthur Koestler) has drawn some extensive and thoughtful remarks from Shrinkwrapped…definitely worth reading.

Also, it is possible to discern a slight relationship between the woman called “Jihad Jane,” an American accused of terrorist activities, and Koestler’s protagonist Hydie Anderson. But as I noted in the post

today’s Hydies are unlikely to share the educational and religious depth of the woman Koestler imagined

To put it mildly, judging from appearances in this case. Looks like I called that one right!

The Machiavellians: Principle II

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The struggle for power
The struggle for power

The second principle outlined in James Burnham’s 1943 political science classic The Machiavellians is the fundamental truth about politics:

2. The primary subject-matter of political science is the struggle for social power in its diverse open and concealed forms.

(Contrary views hold that political thought deals with the general welfare, the common good, and other such entities that are from time to time invented by the theorists.)

To paraphrase Clausewitz:

[Politics] is nothing but a duel on a large scale. Countless duels go to make up [politics], but a picture of the whole can be formed by imagining a pair of wrestlers. Each tries…to compel the other to do his will; his immediate aim is to throw his opponent in order to make him incapable of further resistance.

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Stephens Looks at Chile

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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.