Sometimes a news story has a way of bringing you back down to earth. This timely poll helps us political junkies keep our perspective: “Two-thirds of voters — including two-thirds of Democrats — were unable to name any of the Democratic candidates for president.” (Via Drudge.)
Hillary?
First there was this, saying, “hey, she‘s getting in”. Then she denied it. Then we saw stuff like this saying she is being urged by the Donk leadership to run. Or this talking about the fact that she is raising buckets of money. Mark Steyn lays out the reasons she ought to run. The key paragraph:
The way to look at it is like this: What does she have to gain by waiting four years? If Bush wins a second term, the Clinton aura will be very faded by 2008. And, if by some weird chance Bush loses to a Howard Dean, she’s going to have to hang around till 2012. Logic dictates that, if Hillary wants to be president, it’s this year or none. In her reflexive attacks on Bush over the war and the blackout and everything else, she already sounds like a candidate. The press will lapse into its familiar poodle mode (”Do you think you’ve been attacked so harshly because our society still has difficulty accepting a strong, intelligent woman?” etc.). And, more to the point, when the party’s busting to hand you the nomination, you only get one opportunity to refuse.
You got that right. Especially the line about the party wanting her to do it. My bellwether is my Democrat wife. She wants Bill back, but she’ll gladly take Hillary. Hillary would get the nomination in a walk. Bill struck in ‘92 when it was supposedly impossible. That’s the Clinton way, brass balls. If Hillary changed her mind after all her vociferous denials? That would be no less than we’ve come to expect from the Clintons, either: say one thing, do another, i.e. lie. Just like the good old days. Watch, she’s going to “listen to America” the way she did to New York, and she is going to hear America calling her to the presidency.
Nothing has happened yet to make me waver (much) in my prediction made last December that Hillary will run, get the nomination, and that Wesley Clark will be her running mate.
(Unfortunately, with Labor Day upon us, my prediction that the Donnas would be huge this Summer is already disproven. My wife suggests that we may be so out of it that they were and we didn’t notice. Naaaah.)
Ten Tips for Governing an Empire, and a Heckler in the Back …
I will at some point put up in detail why I don’t think that what America is in the process of building or becoming is an empire.
But, whatever you call it, Robert Kaplan’s essay, “Supremacy by Stealth” on the subject is insightful. (It came out in July but has not been on the Net very long, so maybe it is not ancient news to all our readers.) This passage sounds typical of much that one finds on the conservative/libertarian side of the blogsphere:
The purpose of power is not power itself; it is the fundamentally liberal purpose of sustaining the key characteristics of an orderly world. Those characteristics include basic political stability; the idea of liberty, pragmatically conceived; respect for property; economic freedom; and representative government, culturally understood. At this moment in time it is American power, and American power only, that can serve as an organizing principle for the worldwide expansion of a liberal civil society.
This, less so:
Two or three decades hence conditions may be propitious for the emergence of a new international system—one with many influential actors in a regime of organically evolving interdependence. But until that time arrives, it is largely the task of the United States to maintain a modicum of order and stability. We are an ephemeral imperial power, and if we are smart, we will recognize that basic fact.
Near the end he re-emphasizes this point:
In many ways the few decades immediately ahead will be the trickiest ones that our policymakers have ever faced: they are charged with the job of running an empire that looks forward to its own obsolescence.
Kaplan also notes that liberal empires undermine their own power:
Precisely because they foment dynamic change, liberal empires—like those of Venice, Great Britain, and the United States—create the conditions for their own demise. Thus they must be especially devious. The very spread of the democracy for which we struggle weakens our grip on many heretofore docile governments: behold the stubborn refusal by Turkey and Mexico to go along with U.S. policy on Iraq. Consequently, if we are to get our way, and at the same time to promote our democratic principles, we will have to operate nimbly, in the shadows and behind closed doors, using means far less obvious than the august array of power displayed in the air and ground war against Iraq.
Problem here is that acting deviously is even more antithetical to democratic practices. So, you can’t do what Kaplan says you need to do to keep a real empire going, if you have to answer to a democratic electorate back home. But, putting that insurmountable issue aside, Kaplan provides a comprehensive “users manual” for US global power.
Oh yeah, in case you were wondering, the ten “Rules for Managing the World” are:
1. Produce More Joppolos
2. Stay on the Move
3. Emulate Second-Century Rome
4. Use the Military to Promote Democracy
5. Be Light and Lethal
6. Bring Back the Old Rules
7. Remember the Philippines
8. The Mission is Everything
9. Fight on Every Front
10. Speak Victorian, Think Pagan
And if that still leaves you scratching your head, you are going to have to read the whole thing.
Kaplan has been all over the place and seen a lot and talked to everybody. He focuses on the mechanics rather than the ethics of global governance by the USA. I don’t think he’s always right, but he is never wrong for light or trivial reasons.
Kaplan’s interview regarding the article is also good and adds further interesting details.
As noted above, the great defect in Kaplan’s vision is that democracies don’t like devious, hard-nosed world empires enforced by small cadres of tough, professional legionaries and operatives. Democracies don’t like to run such empires, and they don’t like it when other people do. The public gets suspicious, or sentimental, or has moral qualms or worries about its civil liberties, etc.
War Nerd,provides a good counterpoint to Kaplan on Joe Sixpack’s willingness to bear the burdens of empire, or hegemony, or whatever it is. As usual, he minces no words: “You Pussies!” To paraphrase: First you are baying for blood, now you are whimpering about losing a soldier a day, make up your minds, if you want an empire, face what it takes to have an empire. But no synopsis can do him justice. Don’t let the sarcastic or nihilistic or jeering tone fool you. War Nerd always raises real issues.
They don’t like Jews? They don’t like Catholics, either.
It just depends on who the “they” is. There’s always somebody. Sometimes it’s the same people, even. (Lex will add here, as an aside, that it gave brought genuine joy to his Roman Catholic heart to see that David Warren has swum the Tiber.)
Our long-time readers are well aware that we Chicago Boyz celebrate diversity, amongst ourselves, comprising as we do a delightful array of strongly held religious and philosophical perspectives. And we get along fine. Civility, so sadly lacking in our world, is in surplus on this blog. (And of course we expect it and usually get it from our most of our esteemed visitors.)
Believing that the Vatican is secretly manipulating all kinds of things, that it secretly pulls the strings behind major world events, is an old and disreputable (to say nothing of demonstrably false) form of anti-Catholic conspiracy theorizing. It is deeply-rooted in this country in the frontier Protestantism which preceded and to a large degree still permeates Jacksonian America. You can still see it on cable TV from time to time — clean-cut people from the Heartland who know darn well that the Pope is the Antichrist and secretly behind this or that. Ho hum. Same old thing. Click to the figure skating trials.
The British still have a deep streak of this kind of thing. In fact, we got it from them. One friend, an American expat and lapsed Catholic, was struck by the chants on “No Popery” on Guy Fawkes day. How un-PC. Other than that annual outburst, these sentiments seems to only be vocalized out on the right-wing fringe even in England. So I was a little surprised when the Spectator, which I like very much, recently published an extraordinary article entitled “Render unto the Pope” which shows what I suppose is the cutting edge of British anti-Catholic “thinking“. The author is a person named Hilton, whom we are assured by the Spectator is “an approved candidate for the Conservative party.” Wow. I guess the Catholic vote is not up for grabs in the UK. A friend whom I’ll call Francophile Pundit (“FP”) sent me the link, and I responded pretty much as follows:
No Elvis, Beatles or the Rolling Stones in 1977
Punk’s not dead. Or maybe it is. Anyway, for those of you who were or still are devotees of first-wave British punk rock, this is a really great site. I’ve only looked at maybe 15% of it, and it is loaded with good facts and pictures. The “punk store” has some absolutely jaw-dropping material, live shows by the Jam, live Buzzcocks, rarities by Patti Smith. It looks I’ll be spitting out a hefty British Pound denominated international money order pretty soon. And one neat thing — the front page has a picture of Jeff Connally, better known as Monoman, of DMZ and the Lyres. An odd selection for a mostly Brit-punk site, but what the Hell, its a cool photo.
Another cool site is this collection of “New Wave Photos by Philippe Carly”. Philippe shot photos of a phenomenal number of bands, in the 1977-78 period, basically all the punk acts of that era who came through Belgium — the big names like the Clash, Jam, Ramones, Devo (in the yellow jumpsuits) as well as half-forgotten names from the dim past like SpizzEnergi, the Au Pairs, the Mo-Dettes (I had all their singles — where are they now?). A labor of love. Check it out.