Neo Wrong
On the occasion of Mr. Wolfowitz's second retirement Second Chance at Career Goes Sour for Wolfowitz - New York Times. I thought of the post I wrote back in April:
Allan Bloomsday. I thought then that for all the pompous attacks the right launched on the American education system over the past few decades the foreign policy they produced did not seem to have escaped the pitfalls of ignorance. I'm not sure I can say with any clarity, what I sidestepped in the previous post; what exactly is wrong with the blinkered neo-conservtive world view and education. I wouldn't get far trying to sift Ph.D.s from better schools through the filter of my own broken education. Some say Wolfowitz's problem is the University of Chicago and Leo Strauss's corner of the Political Science school that existed there. I've read through a history of political science that Strauss edited and have a notion of how he and his cohort view things. I don't understand it enough and I am aware this point has been argued enough already. There is something in this view that is adversarial. A state is a protagonist and there is an antagonist. If Straussian political philosophy were a movie the tag line would be: "there's always someone". This is the enemy. The enemy mine. I'll tell you there is in the end only us, we are who we are most afraid of. On those who are not us, the others, we arrange this.
Recently I've read, from different sources that Albert Wohlstetter was a more immediate influence on Wolfowitz's thinking than Strauss [ Albert J Wohlstetter (worldcat), and a-wohlstetter - Google Scholar]. Wohlstetter was a prominent national security writer and academic in the cold war error (sorry I meant 'era'). He spent the 1970's arguing that the US was not involved in any Arms Race with the Soviets certainly not one based on systematic overestimation of Soviet capability matched with aggressive overspending on our part. His book "Swords from plowshares" reflected his view that all nuclear power development trended towards nuclear weapon acquisition. Well there's nothing like tradition and the power of example. Wohlstetter's background seems to have been in mathematics and in the world of social science policy took the form of something he called opposed system design. For a truly fascinating glimpse into his world take a look at his Vietnam paper written for the Rand corp. in 1968
On Vietnam and Bureaucracy.
Another of the neo-conservative pillars is Harvey Mansfield (there are two, it is Jr. considered here
Search results for 'Harvey Claflin Mansfield '). A few weeks ago he wrote an editorial in the Wall Street Journal
WSJ | Harvey Mansfield - The Case for the Strong Executive explicitly throwing aside the rule of law. The sub head for that piece: Under some circumstances, the rule of law must yield to the need for energy. A few paragraphs further in he states: Now the rule of law has two defects, each of which suggests the need for one-man rule... I don't follow the WSJ editorial page. I came across this via Tutor in the Wealth Bondage web log
Ordered Liberty where he pointed to the original piece and a somewhat incredulous Glenn Greenwald piece in Salon commenting on it
Glenn Greenwald - Salon. The take-home kernel of that editorial simply is that these people consider that Rule of Law is for weaklings. The Washington Post caught up with Mr. Mansfield a few weeks later when he showed up to give the Jefferson lecture for the National Endowment of the Humanities
A Strauss Primer, With Glossy Mansfield Finish - washingtonpost.com. Here he laid into his favorite theme Thumos which apparently is an ancient Greek term which means 'being an asshole'. It also reveals his mode of operating which is to make provocative statements then fill in behind them until they seem reasonable. Except they don't he seems embarrassingly unaware of the depth of his mistakes, his fall. He didn't get much past the writer, Philip Kennicott, either who said: His speech was essentially a paean to a Homeric world-view, a fantasy of great men striving for great things, adding their names to the roll call of history. In both of these individuals we see much made of the logic they suppose of their arguments that, in fact, depend a great deal on loaded terms and ridicule. Essentially operating on an emotional level. I have a glimmer of an impression that in their early education an intoxication of myth structures overtook them, a framework which redraws and arranges all later knowledge learning, and experience.
Their notions of history seem less than fully rigorous. If nothing else history for them is comprehensible. It is narratival (yeah I'm just making up words now) that is; it tells a story that has a beginning middle and end. That can be told within a frame of focus and has a purpose, of some kind, in the telling. Implicitly at least. For them history is dramatic, romantic individualized. Their idea of it is wrapped up in the notion of the critical act, the great man, the decisive moment. In other words neo-conservatives are all a bunch of Drama Queens.
All this invests their notions of society. Which for them is hierarchical, affect-able, responds to agency, and orderable. Discussion of it always has properly a moralistic tone, because always some one is responsible; however, never them
Operation Freedom From Iraqis - New York Times. It brings out the meaninglessness of the masses, their lives, loves, desires, actions. All those for whom the leaders of men claim they act to free. Only the leaders decide, only the leaders matter. You are either named by history which catalogs your wealth or you are back drop. When things do not go according to plan, only confusion is next
The Neocon Paradox - New York Times. I stopped to think of the personnel in question from this administration. Between this Sidney Blumenthal piece in salon
Salon.com | Wolfowitz's tomb and some really old Washingtonians I've looked through recently I've seen three different iterations of what the Bush administration might have looked like as it was forming. How did these actors each with their cheering sections and sponsors arrive at their particular offices and how much of what occurred in the last six years depended on that? Blumenthal is one of the writers which looked to Wolfowitz's relationship with Wohlstetter to illuminate the particular cast of his thought. I still see in the myriad of operators in the positions of power of this administration - neo-conservatives and the rest, as a mix of neo wilsonian idealists cold war shadow-boxers and crypto-realists. Whose realism is material, acquisitive and subjugating. What joined them all were the schemes they all brought with them. As well as holding a view of war as a device that clarifies and simplifies, produces order. Nearer to reality; however wars start, they do not end until their ability to keep producing disorder is exhausted. Human affairs are dispersed economically and institutionally determined, they do not assemble towards anything explicitly monolithic or comprehensible. There is no story to history. Not in a sense that can be theatrically purposed, that is illusionary. There are stories within history, but none of them are, or can be the whole story. What story there is is the story of small practical everyday problems encountered and overcome by invention. Invention is carried on by institution and is carried forward until it is no longer able to serve as solution. That neo-conservatives and their ideology are an answer to a question history poses is a thing that that does not exist outside of their begging.
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