Liberals and Conservatives
Here’s an interesting article by Michael Totten on liberals and conservatives, and their attitudes about the world.
The most provocative observation is that liberal intellectuals are in a way less interested in the world than conservative intellectuals are:
For some reason, perhaps for several reasons, liberals and leftists are bored by the outside world. Compared with conservative magazines, publications like The Nation and The American Prospect rarely feature articles about what happens in other countries. They’ll do it occasionally, but almost always in the context of how it relates back to America. The Nation might report on the effects of Iraqi sanctions, but rarely does it publish anything about Iraq in its own context. If you want to learn about the history of the Ba�ath Party, Saddam�s human rights abuses, the fate of the Marsh Arabs, or Iraqi public opinion, you have to seek out magazines and journals of the center and the right.
The reason, he argues, is that liberals are “builders” and conservatives are “defenders”:
Liberals want to build a good and just society. Conservatives defend what is already built and established. This is what the left and the right are for.
Builders want to start with the local environment — think globally, act locally — and work from there; defenders look for external threats when there are no obvious problems at home.
A corollary about the “Bush is a Nazi” slogan thrown around by the far left is that the left: while the left may understand Bush, they truly, deeply misunderstand the Nazis. This perhaps is from an ahistorical understanding of the world. A similar corollary about the far right branding everyone as a Communist traitor: the right may understand Communism better than the left, but, focusing on threats, sees threats everywhere.
One thing Totten doesn’t bring up is how a lot of left-wing discource on foreign policy is colored by Leninist theories on imperialism. How else do we explain the arguments that all Bush wants is to seize the oil? The problem with all-explaining theories about how the world works is that you stop looking for explanations, even though these theories don’t work, and were disproven decades ago.
I like to think of myself as a liberal with a fairly wide reading of international affairs. I’ve studied military history for years, and have been slowly catching up on an understanding of the Middle East, especially since 9/11 (Years ago, I picked up Bernard Lewis’s Muslim Discovery of Europe out of curiousity). I was appalled by the far left’s complacence in the face of Al Qaeda, and I was disappointed by the sense that the left’s refusal to acknowledge that war was a valid policy choice with regard to Iraq. I want to see more compelling policy arguments become the main voice of the left, because we desperately need it.
I wonder a bit about the neo-con hawks in the various Republican administrations over the past two decades. They don’t quite fit into the Michael Totten’s dichotomy: they’re the intellectual heirs of the anti-Communist liberals of Truman and JFK, and fled the Democratic Party after the McGovernites took charge. They are liberals: their goal is the transformation of states into liberal capitalist democracies, classic “builders” in Totten’s taxonomy. In foreign policy terms at least, they’ve found the conservatives to be more intellectually with it than the left. Is this how it goes?