Of Ideologues And Realists
It shouldn’t surprise me, but Jonah Goldberg is mixing up conceptual categories and mashing together foreign policy positions that don’t necessarily have anything to do with each other in this column. In other words, it’s another typical Goldberg production. Consider this jumble:
Or take a look at Cuba. There’s a fresh effort under way, particularly from the left wing of the Democratic party, to lift the U.S. embargo against Cuba. Just this week, members of the Congressional Black Caucus junketed to Cuba to celebrate the heroism of Fidel Castro.
The arguments in favor of lifting the embargo are routinely swaddled in talk of realism. The Cold War is over; it’s time to throw away anti-Communist anachronisms. The only way to change Cuba for the better is to “engage it” with trade and tourism and exchange programs. The funny thing is, if you made the exact same arguments about South Africa in the 1980s, many of the same people would call you not merely an ideologue but a racist for not supporting sanctions. Indeed, today the anti-Israeli sanctions movement is infested with people who claim we must lift the embargo on Cuba.
This is a mess, which isn’t helped by the vague generalizations. It is strange that Goldberg chooses to cites a policy that is roundly condemned as a failure in his indictment of realism. The embargo of Cuba is obviously an anachronism and a complete failure on its own terms, and ending it and restoring normal relations with Cuba are long overdue. Normalization of relations with communist Vietnam occurred fourteen years ago, and obviously normalization with China took place thirty-seven years ago, and it is pretty much indisputable that this engagement and the subsequent commercial relationship established with both countries have been beneficial to those countries (or at least to portions of the population of those countries who would otherwise not have benefited). While critics of large trade deficits might be skeptical about how much all of this has benefited the United States, as far as I know there are virtually no proponents of a status quo Cuba policy who worry about such things.
Some liberals would be more inclined to push for international sanctions on Israel in imitation of the sanctions imposed on South Africa, but realists have little interest in imposing sanctions on allied states at any time, and you would be hard-pressed to find evidence that there were any realists who argued for this course of action against the Nationalist government in the ’80s. It was one of the more controversial and ultimately correct decisions of Thatcher’s government to continue to engage Pretoria while many other states were joining in the sanctions regime, and if ending apartheid rather than engaging in moral self-congratulation was the goal Thatcher’s method was more effective in changing policy.
One thing that at least some realists on the right have argued for a while is that sanctions are ineffective and counterproductive, especially if the goal is to undermine another government, and tend to punish those, namely the civilian population, whom we presumably least warn to harm. The unsentimental, “amoral” realist has a better chance of implementing a more just policy than the so-called idealists, because he is interested in both the right means and ends, and he is not satisfied with moral cant and making oneself feel better by engaging in a lot of bluster and misguided actions that backfire. Indeed, even though many realists are critical of current Israeli policy and U.S. enabling thereof, you would need to search quite extensively to find a realist who supports sanctioning Israel or organizing boycotts against it or doing anything of the kind. Such boycotts and sanctions would be exactly the sort of petty moralizing and sentimental do-goodery that blinds people to real solutions and ensures that the target of the sanctions becomes even more steadfast in its resolve to resist.
The way to tell an ideologue from a realist, and the reason realists are not simply ideologues posing as something else, is that the ideologue will persist in a course of action long after it has failed and long after everyone knows it has failed because he thinks that his “values” demand it. Instead of “let justice be done, though the heavens fall,” the ideologue says, “I am right, and the world can go to hell if it doesn’t agree.” The ideologue is terrified of having to make adjustments and adapt to the world as it really is, because these adjustments reveal to the ideologue just how far removed from that reality he has become. The ideologue keeps redefining the justification for the policy, he keeps rewriting history to suit his own purposes, and he never accepts responsibility for the failure of his ideas, because he believes they have never been faithfully followed. For the realist, cutting one’s losses and reassessing the merits of a policy are always supposed to be possibilities, but for the ideologue the former is equivalent to surrender and the latter is inconceivable. In his greatest confusion of all, Goldberg manages to mix up realists with their opposites.
“The way to tell an ideologue from a realist, and the reason realists are not simply ideologues posing as something else, [...] For the realist, cutting one’s losses and reassessing the merits of a policy are always supposed to be possibilities, but for the ideologue the former is equivalent to surrender and the latter is inconceivable. In his greatest confusion of all, Goldberg manages to mix up realists with their opposites.”
so realists cannot be ideologues? ideology can never enter into realist decisionmaking? if so, what is the realist definition of justice? (ie, “The unsentimental, “amoral†realist has a better chance of implementing a more just policy than the so-called idealists”)
Or perhaps one way to look at this is to suggest that the ideology needs to be at least one step up – or “meta” if you prefer. One presumes that the goal of our engagement with Cuba must be to advocate for human rights and to promote the freedom of the Cuban people. I presume that this is what Goldberg would suggest are the goals for us vis-a-vis Cuba. His problem is perhaps that he has neglected to see that there is a success component to virtue. The person who succeeds at virtue is in fact more virtuous that the one who desires virtue but fails to attain it. Or at least this seems to me to be the case. So a policy that helps the people of Cuba, rather than maintains the staus quo, would seem to me to be the better policy choice. Or am I missing something here?
I’m not sure a realist thinks it’s important to have a working definition of justice. When one government tries to change the behavior of (or destroy) another government using blunt instruments like sanctions or military force, or indirect methods like persuasion, appeals to ethics and morality, etc., the results are difficult if not impossible to predict. Sometimes nothing happens, sometimes things change in totally unpredictable and unpleasant ways. So it might help to pay much more attention to the justice of the means employed (which you have control over) than the justice of the ends being pursued (which are beyond anybody’s control).
There are good examples of this in the recent history of the United States–the embargo of Cuba (adding to the poverty of the Cuban people without accomplishing the stated goal of getting rid of the Castro regime); the Vietnam War (killing hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese and Cambodian civilians in a war that ended with Vietnam unified under Communist control and Cambodia in the hands of genocidal Communist maniacs), etc. In both of those cases, and many others, one can define just behavior very broadly (and, I hope, non-controversially) as “don’t kill people, impoverish people, and not destroying their societies and cultures” and say that the just decision on the part of the United States would have been to do nothing at all.
Sorry to double post, but…
First of all, sorry for the grammatical train-wreck at the end of that last post.
Second of all, it occurs to me that a realist might be less interested in a “just” foreign policy and more interested in an ethical foreign policy. I think borrowing “first, do no harm” from medical ethics might be a good place to start, though obviously that’s a harder principle to apply in foreign policy than it is in medicine.
Do you even think the goals behind the South Africa & Israel divestment movements were laudable? National liberation movements in Africa aren’t looking so good around now.
Goldberg and his family have made a cottage industry out of conservatism. Essentially he’s no different than Limbaugh or any of the other conservative “entrepreneurs” although he’s more clever than many. Hence the ability to turn out non sequitur laden pieces of high flown casuistry. He’s giving his readers what they’ve paid for, it doesn’t have to make sense.
It’s really not worth the time anymore to refute JG on this stuff but,as I said on my blog, I truly believe that every time I mock him someone’s term in purgatory is shortened. so here goes:
First off, notice the way he conflates Realists, liberals, general bigots and anti-semites. It’s actually a bit ugly – as in his phrase:
“A true realist would say: “How does it affect us if the Yemenis behead a gay guy every now and then?â€
Now, we might very well encounter that sentiment and those very words from Goldberg’s fellow travelers over at Free Republic, but even the most immoderate comments I’ve ever seen here fall well short of that.
More, notice that this whole “article” isn’t really aimed at libs or even independents…..most of whom wrote Goldberg’s stuff off as a joke quite a few years ago. This is a shot at sane Republican types who no longer wish to pursue insane policies. it is a blatant attempt to marginalize those righties who would like to find a better way of asserting their values. The word “fiefdom” comes to mind. I laid off of the Robert McCain thread the other day, because it’s not really my fight, but it reminded me of the LeCarre phrase, “My God, Toby, what a dog’s life they’ve led you”.
Yes, it’s a bit ugly, even Orwellian in a small, silly way. Fortunately, history appears to have moved on and I feel complete confidence that our stupid, shortsighted and non-productive Cuba policy will be ameliorated and, soon, eliminated. So, as I began saying, it’s really not worth contesting Goldberg on this stuff – we can let the Cuban -American community do that.
Oh….lest I forget…as someone who apologizes neither for double posting or for bad grammar…Happy Easter to all! And may God’s grace surprise you in the clinches.
“This is a shot at sane Republican types who no longer wish to pursue insane policies. it is a blatant attempt to marginalize those righties who would like to find a better way of asserting their values.”
….Have to agree. This is about a little internecine war going on in the conservative movement. Trying to keep what’s left of the soft right from jumping ship.
About Goldberg, I think you have to give the devil his due. I wasn’t a huge fan of _Liberal Fascism_, but whatever started that snark fit “groundbreaking work on a project never done in this depth ever before” actually turned out to be true. And imo, you would acknowledge this yourself but for the dominance of mindless factionalism among paleos.
But it wasn’t groundbreaking work, and it had been done in that depth before. I didn’t join in with much of the mocking of his book. I did occasionally laugh at the ever-changing subtitle, because I thought some of the subtitles were silly. Not that it will matter to you, even though you and I both know this to be true, but I made some mild defenses of the book when it was being mocked before publication, and I maintained that it was going to be a popularizing account of ideas that had already been covered extensively before now.
As I said at the time, and said many times since, Goldberg wrote a popularizing work bringing a lot of ideas that have been common in fascism scholarship for decades to a new audience. He revived and restated many of the things Kuehnelt-Leddihn said decades ago, which is interesting enough but not groundbreaking. That’s fine. In the process, he also said a lot of stupid things, referring, as I recall, to Woodrow Wilson as the first fascist dictator and called the French revolutionaries fascists. That is the part of the thesis that doesn’t hold up, and that is the part, such as it is, that is supposed to be original and trailblazing. I don’t have much interest in that part of the book, because I don’t it is true and it is an example of his tendency to mix up ideas that should be kept distinct.
I believe he also called Buchanan a right-wing progressive, which suggests that he didn’t have a very good grasp on what Buchanan thought or what progressive meant or means today. All of the flaws in the book are flaws that crop up again and again in his arguments. This is the same guy who argued that Maistre was the sort of person who would have believed in “white logic” because he rejected the idea of an abstract universal Man. He makes these bizarre, indefensible leaps that I assume even people who sympathize with him cannot seriously follow. If I weren’t the one making these criticisms, you probably wouldn’t bother to defend him, but, of course, I am the mindlessly factional one. Okay, whatever. I have always been willing to acknowledge that the book had some merit for what it was, but it was never what its boosters or Goldberg claimed that it was. The sort of hyperbolic overselling of the book inevitably brought a backlash.
Up to a point, Goldberg’s arguments are unremarkable but not necessarily always terrible, but then he frequently tries to push too far and ends up saying absurd things. This latest article is a good example of this. He wanted to make an argument that foreign policy should be informed by “values” and, I suppose, that wanting to sanction/boycott Israel is not compatible with lifting the Cuba embargo. There is an inconsistency in supporting both positions–he’s right about that much. There is an argument he could have made that would have made his point, and maybe even made it well, but post-Freeman there is this new meme out there that realists are the “real ideologues” and “fanatics” and are therefore even more dangerous, so he is trying to keep that meme going.
Had he made this a critique of a hyper-moralizing strain in the Israel boycott movement, rather than some bizarre broadside against realists, who have nothing to do with this movement, the article would have made sense and would not have occasioned criticism, at least not from me. For the record, I think boycott movements and sanctions are the sort of silly moral preening that does not advance the cause the boycott organizers or sanctions-imposing governments want to advance, and it tends to make the target redouble whatever behavior the critics want to change. Realists are among the first to see through the futility of such movements and sanctions regimes, while their “idealistic” counterparts are among the last to admit this. In trying to link realists in general to the activities of the Congressional Black Caucus (!), he tried to make a link that simply can’t be supported. It seems to me that this is clear enough, and I assume you can’t defend what he’s trying to do here, which is why you brought up his book out of the blue.
If you want to persist in defending him against criticisms I didn’t make, I can dredge up the posts where I said some of these things before, but then that would tend to undermine the pleasant fiction you have constructed in which paleos are the unreasonable, factional ones.
“Not that it will matter to you, even though you and I both know this to be true, but I made some mild defenses of the book when it was being mocked before publication, and I maintained that it was going to be a popularizing account of ideas that had already been covered extensively before now.”
I’ll prob comment again later, but let me just mention here that I did _not_ know that, and I should give you credit to the extent that’s true. (I thought you were whole-hog on top of the pile-on.)
Goldberg exists in some shadowy world of names & forms where every argument has two sides and can be spun endlessly like a coin. Shadowy figures emerge out of the ether to promote phantom ideologies or debate scratches of policy that exist outside of space and time; like a room full of devil’s advocates with Turretes. To make it work, his whole universe is founded in a kind of “conventional wisdom” where we all know his main point is right and, really, why do we have to get in to the specifics anyway – it’s almost cocktail hour? In this column, one could just as easily reverse the argument with examples from South Africa (as you mentioned) or more recently with Iraq.
Goldberg gets a lot of derision from the left – his role at the corner is essentially one of hung-over class clown, and his articles read like the opening remarks of a high-school debate – but I feel like his style is the mathematical equivalent of taking an argument and dividing it by zero.
I don’t know why anyone takes this guy seriously. It’s like taking O’Reilly seriously. What these people have is a career not a belief system. The title of his book was a complete oxymoron. If Jonah had been dealing with any real fascists he’d be wearing striped pajamas and living in a barbed wire enclosure. When the real fascists passed their enabling act in Germany the only ones in the Reichstag to stand up against it were the Social Democrats (the communists who are as bad as the fascists had been kicked out of the legislature) despite the howling mobs of fascists inside and outside. All the conservative/catholic parties with whom one assumes Goldberg identifies voted in favor. I guess what I’m saying is this puerile application of the term fascist to liberals devalues the true noxiousness of real fascism which along with communism is one of the most vile political doctrines ever to exist on the earth. A doctrine furthermore that was responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of people. How anyone other than to give himself a shock title for a bookstand can equate this with the doings of Nancy Pelosi, John Kerry or Bill Clinton simply doesn’t pass the sanity test. Goldberg is working a seam in mining parlance. It’s a narrow seam but ample to pay his grocery bills. The fact that in the process he makes political jello of a group of thuggish gangsters who destroyed millions including particularly his own people doesn’t bother him at all. For me it just emphasises that his only motivations are those of money and gigs on Fox News.
I assumed that you had been reading the blog since that time and had seen the relevant entries.
To offer a brief summary of what I have said about the book, here are some links:
http://larison.org/2007/03/22/groundbreaking-goldberg-probably-not/
http://www.amconmag.com/larison/2007/11/27/taking-the-challenge/
Another partial defense combined with some extensive criticism of one of the many subtitles:
http://www.amconmag.com/larison/2007/06/27/the-absolute-organic/
A bit off topic, but with regards to the bridging of dueling ideologies. There seems to be a trend in anarchist thought to rename the movement “libertarian socialism” in an attempt to popularize it in academia. Personally, I think this is a better label for what anarchism attempts to achieve. And it’s interesting to look at recent politics through this lens: the Code Pink protesters of the previous administration are being replaced with the Tea Party movement today, and while they would fiercely object to it, I feel that “libertarian socialism” quite accurately and mutually describes their position.
With Obama is essentially putting a moderate face on the foreign policies of Bush while propping up the upper class economically, how do you feel about the potential a “libertarian socialist” movement has for uniting the base of each party and forming a new opposition in the vaccum that the GOP will likely leave? That is, a party which is fierce in its promotion of civil liberties while simultaneously encouraging institutions that promote collectivism.
I was thinking in particular of this:
“It is a very serious, thoughtful, argument that has never been made in such detail or with such care.”
I am not a huge fan of the book as a whole, but imo he did do just that: to wit, document the influences and similarities of fascism on the Left, _in America_ , where no one else had (it’s the latter part that distinguishes him from Kuehnelt-Leddihn). If anyone else has any claim to priority, I wouldn’t know who. From here, snarking over the subtitle seems kinda cheap, and motivated by factionalism.
The weakness of the book imo, is precisely that he doesn’t overstate his case and ends up letting all the various associations sit there as a hodgepodge.
“If I weren’t the one making these criticisms, you probably wouldn’t bother to defend him, but, of course, I am the mindlessly factional one.”
Actually you’ve got company on this one. For some reason he’s a convenient two-minute hate target for a lot of people. Eg, the people on balloon-juice have convinced themselves he’s some kind of drooling idiot (NB: I haven’t checked this out recently,) I for one have no doubt that if they handed out the GRE or something, Jonah would beat at least 90% of the contributors/commenters there, prob more like 98-99%.
About factionalism, that’s just a huge energy suck that’s the Achilles heel of the paleocon movement. I guess it’s why I’m a paleocon-symp instead of a paleocon.
Oh, I missed this before. I love how this,
“It’s really not worth the time anymore to refute JG on this stuff but,as I said on my blog, I truly believe that every time I mock him someone’s term in purgatory is shortened.”
is in the same post as this:
“More, notice that this whole “article†isn’t really aimed at libs or even independents…..most of whom wrote Goldberg’s stuff off as a joke quite a few years ago. This is a shot at sane Republican types who no longer wish to pursue insane policies. it is a blatant attempt to marginalize those righties who would like to find a better way of asserting their values.”
I don’t read it that way at all. That piece had a simple, fairly narrow point: that “realism” in foreign policy is substanially a means of backdooring the realist’s moral preferences into policy without acknowledgment or debate. FWIW, it’s a point I strongly agree with. People who make a big deal over that are largely venting unrelated antagonism, as jetan more or less acknowledges above.
Regarding the book, one last point. It is in his attempt to adapt the argument to the American context that the book really falls apart, so drawing attention to this part of the book doesn’t help its cause.
“That piece had a simple, fairly narrow point: that “realism†in foreign policy is substanially a means of backdooring the realist’s moral preferences into policy without acknowledgment or debate.”
If that was his point, and not a bad way of framing his real concerns, then he’s just badly wrong and I find even less of value in it than I did before. Most realists are simply not interested in the sort of moralizing-as-policy in question. Framing arguments in terms of state interests is one way to avoid needless chatter about “values.” Realists don’t want to bring moral preferences into the discussion if they can help it. If they wanted them as part of the conversation, they would bring them into the conversation. They have no need to “backdoor” them.
This moralizing chatter gets in the way of finding shared interests with states with which we share few or no “values,” and hampers the conduct of foreign policy. In my earlier comment, I was trying to emphasize some of the potentially more interesting parts of the article, but it is exactly this “backdooring” part of the argument that has no support. It’s not even supported by the things he cites in the article. His riposte against realist criticism of the Cuba embargo is to bring up Israel boycotts and to lump realists together with people on the left who also happen to oppose the Cuba embargo. It’s as if I mentioned his support for the Iraq war and then simply assumed because of that support that he wanted, a la Newt Gingrich, to launch strikes against North Korea, when I have no evidence for the latter at all.
It wouldn’t be as big of a stretch, because he and Gingrich are that far removed from each other in their policy views generally, unlike realists and liberals, but it would still be an unsupported stretch that would require me to ignore distinctions and make assertions without proof. He makes a basic error in assuming that liberals and realists share a criticism of the Cuba embargo and therefore must be on the same page on boycotting Israel. He wants to bash realists for what the CBC was doing in Cuba, but by and large the CBC is not made up of what most people mean by foreign policy realists.
I had to register just to compliment you, Mr. Larison, for your critique of Jonah Goldberg. He’s frustratingly symbolic of modern conservatism is that he’s intellectually lazy and simply WILL NOT be bothered to put in the time and energy to analyze anything and then express an opinion in a clear and careful way. If Goldberg can’t frame a thought in what he imagines are “clever” and “irreverent” terms, he doesn’t want to think it. His greatest fear isn’t being wrong, it’s being thought of as “stodgy”.
Mike
About Goldberg’s book, I guess we just disagree. When you say that LF falls apart talking about fascism in the American context, have you written anything in particular about that?
Also, two points about realism. First, realism lacks an “inertial frame of reference” to borrow a phrase from the physicists. We don’t evaluate every foreign policy in realist terms. As a practical matter, “realism” is a club that others, often liberal moralists, use to backdoor their particular preferences. Whereas actual realists are buffeted around to and fro. Viewed in isolation, the realist case for ending the Cuba embargo is at the very least plausible. But of course such things are not viewed in isolation, that’s the point. Maybe Jonah should have stated this explicitly, but it seems pretty clear to me in context.
Second, realism is problematic in its own terms, especially when viewed as an end instead of a means (and JG actually does state this explicitly). He doesn’t even mention the Seventies-era debates over Communism, which is where that sort of realism was profoundly discredited (which is probably why realists are buffeted around to and fro now).
The funny thing is, if you made the exact same arguments about South Africa in the 1980s, many of the same people would call you not merely an ideologue but a racist for not supporting sanctions. Indeed, today the anti-Israeli sanctions movement is infested with people who claim we must lift the embargo on Cuba.
I wonder what Goldberg would say about people like me, who opposed the sanctions on South Africa in the 80s, who oppose the current embargo on Cuba, and who impose the proposal to impose sanctions on Israel.