The American Conservative

There is a widely read new essay at the neocon Jewish Ideas Daily denouncing Christopher Hitchens as an anti-Semite.  How sweet comeuppance can be, especially for these two parties that definitely deserve each other.  There is much worth noting, however, about how they got there.

It was inevitable, to be sure, that the largely modern Orthodox neoconservative core would clash with an erstwhile ally who expressed his agreement with Voltaire “that Judaism is not just one more religion, but in its way the root of religious evil.”  Yet what our author fails to grasp is that what he insists on calling anti-Semitism – a talismanic phrase that he may or may not have noticed gets diminishing returns – is merely Hitchens’ dogged consistency.  Hitchens joined the crusade against Islamofascism (how quickly we forget he coined that noxious term) because he was committed to armed progressivism while his leftist comrades had to oppose it because it was being articulated in a Texas drawl.  And to his credit, Hitchens is rare in his consistency among the atheist mandarins for being as unsparing to Judaism as to Christianity and Islam.

But of course all this is lost on one who writes shamelessly of “the existence of a Jewish nation in the land of Israel for centuries, its sovereignty ended only by genocide at the hands of Roman legions . . . . and various other significant and notably secular historical facts.”  The heart of the matter lies in the somewhat obscure figure of Israel Shahak, whom Hitchens reveres as a “great and serious man” and his antagonist insists was a “barking mad” Jewish anti-Semite.

The truth, of course, lies somewhere in the mean.  Shahak is best understood as the analog in Judaism to Salman Rushdie in Islam and V.S. Naipaul in Hinduism, to whom the simple historical accident of power relations in the American media denied the favors and honors given the latter two.  Some of his arguments are genuinely insightful – such as his tracing the Talmud to the totalitarian thought-patterns of Plato – but more often, like Rushdie and Naipaul, he can be just batty.  For example, he writes at some length about how humor is not, in fact, a traditional Jewish attribute – undoubtedly true, but what does it matter?

In the Jewish context, Shahak is best understood as the latter-day champion of the enlightenment extremism of the 19th century haskalah.  The latter could be viciously anti-religious, particularly toward the Hasidim, and this, rather than “anti-Semitism”, is the source of Shahak’s truly outlandish positions, such as his vituperative hatred of the great spiritualist and binationalist Martin Buber.  Yet another legacy of this is that Shahak was basically a libertarian, and condemned the PLO for being Marxist and therefore all too willing to become the enforcer for its Labor Zionist comrades.

It also happens that Shahak has something of a small supporting role in my forthcoming biography of Rabbi Elmer Berger – having been a close friend of Berger’s protege Norton Mezvinsky.  Though Berger was definitely a humanist through and through, I have no doubt that were he alive today he would be most at home with Rabbis for Human Rights and the Jewish Voice for Peace Rabbinical Council.  Nor do I doubt that Shahak would react to the rise of these groups with horror, to say nothing of half the kids in this milieu having gone to Jewish day school.

Shlomo Sand, who has made far the greater contribution to an enlightened Jewish future, had it exactly right about Shahak: “a tremendous moral force, but he didn’t know the material”.

What does all this tell us about Hitchens getting his comeuppance from the neocons, and vice versa?  It is true, as the essay blasting Hitchens states, that his veneration of Shahak is not news.  I myself noticed throughout the neocon salad days that Hitchens was capable of deftly playing his enduring consistency by simply repeating establishment platitudes about the two-state solution and the problems with Sharon whenever Israel/Palestine entered into his Iraq War boosterism.  Now that he has moved on to the greener pastures of being the jaded wise man of the establishment, he can milk the rhetoric he learned from Shahak now that bashing the Israeli right is fashionable among serious people.

And what of the further idiosyncracy that Hitchens’ praise for Israel Shahak could not be more at odds with the views of his erstwhile comrades around the Euston Manifesto?  To be sure, Hitchens has always been a phenomenon unto himself and very often a square peg among the Eustonites.  But this particular difference is made all the more striking when we consider that a very large percentage of the Eustonites are avowed atheists, or at least secularists.  And of course, a far larger, and greatly overlapping percentage are Jewish.

It was Will Herberg, leading disciple of Buber and friend of Russell Kirk and Robert Nisbet, who first likened Jewish nationalism as a new religion to the doctrine of Charles Maurras, the French fascist intellectual who advocated an avowedly atheist form of Catholic traditionalism.  To whatever degree that the attack on Hitchens may anticipate bigger controversies down the line for the neocons, it is so richly appropriate that what may tear the neocons apart is a clash of secular fundamentalisms.

I’ll begin by repeating how dubious I find the notion that the budget negotiations of the current lame-duck session of Congress have some historical or climactic significance.  That said, the drama of it all does reveal a disturbing turn on the liberal left.

In movement liberal circles, Bernie Sanders has become the hero of the hour for what now turns out to be his largely symbolic filibuster of the deal.  Some may be tempted to take the attitude of John Podhoretz – “when you give an old socialist Jew a microphone, you do something more dangerous than you know” – but this misses the point by a wide mark.  Not least so because Sanders has pointedly not identified himself as a socialist in at least a decade.

Sanders disappointed many on the right who saw considerable hope in his ultimately compromised backing for the Audit the Fed bill.  Still others on both the left and right have been no doubt disappointed in his decided lack of interest in taking a stand on foreign policy.  And all this and more has earned him the no-holds-barred fury of the Second Vermont Republic.

A particular grievance of the latter has been Sanders’ silence on Israel/Palestine, which I must say I too find puzzling.  On the one hand, to my knowledge Sanders has never once appeared at AIPAC, but on the other he has a safe enough seat that if he wanted to he could make a powerful stand as Jewish senator.  Alas, he will not fill the shoes of his great predecessor Ralph Flanders, who would blast on the Senate floor the Scientology-style multi-million dollar ponzi scheme masquerading as religion known as the United Jewish Appeal (see also my forthcoming book).

In any event, Bernie Sanders chose his priorities long ago, these being an often largely academic critique of the politics of class and inequality in America.  But there was a time when Sanders was more-or-less committed to breaking the two-party dictatorship in American politics, and thereby providing a genuine alternative to Democratic Party liberalism.  But his agenda and his presentation of it, finally culminating with his filibuster, have served the very enabling forces of the worst instincts of progressive Democrats.

I write this not out of any right-libertarian sour grapes that Bernie Sanders has not been our kind of leftist.  On the contrary, I write this as someone who cares about the millions of Americans whose unemployment benefits have been at stake in the recent tax debate, and can only be astonished that someone who by all appearances actually cares about the growing income inequality in America seems more interested in soaking the rich.

Sanders is thereby enabling a truly frightful phenomenon I see rearing its head in the liberal rhetoric on taxes: a bizarre left-mirror image of the Tea Parties, in which an improbable angry militancy on wonkish economic policy questions is the mask for much deeper and darker pathologies.  This, in short, is the progressive tragedy – that they have come to oppose a liberal President not for any of a long list of compelling reasons, but out of their own petty psychodramas.  In my own humble opinion, what I believe is at the bottom of this is the inability of the liberals even to admit to themselves that the first black President is not one of them.

So leave it to Pat, who knows a thing or two about how a President who pleases no one can yet be the voice of the silent majority, to put in a kind word for the adults in the room.

I was wondering yesterday whether there was anything worth saying about the appointment of a new editor at The New Republic, but when I attempted to plod through the self-important announcement exchange I was naturally put off to the proposition.  Then I discovered that Ron Radosh saw fit to mark the occasion with a long disquisition on the role of intellectuals in combating the Islamofascist conspiracy against our precious bodily fluids.

All the reasons I shouldn’t take any of this the least bit seriously are exactly the point.  For one as depressingly middlebrow as Ron Radosh, perhaps the saddest case in the entire history of American public intellectuals, to take to such high dudgeon is almost comical.  I still assume he wrote his recent book on Truman and the founding of Israel for the money, but the lengths to which this lifelong non-practicing Jew is going on this new kick are increasingly disturbing, adopting an apocalyptic view one part John Hagee and two parts James Burnham.

Which brings us to the real story here, which is how unoriginal and uninspired all this really is.  That it is just warmed-over neoconservatism of the early vintage is made clear by Radosh anchoring his remonstrations toward TNR in this bizarre essay even for the always-silly Walter Russell Mead, channeling nothing so much as the polemics against lack of manliness by Teddy Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge and assuring us that the answer is Tea Party economics.  Radosh takes it the extra mile by making an appeal along these lines directly to the new editor of TNR himself.

Radosh informs us that the new editor, Richard Just, was in fact an early architect and booster of the Euston Manifesto, the 2006 document calling for support of the Bush-Blair global democratic revolution expressly in the name of “democratic socialism”, but which read rather more like an Israeli attempt to refound the World Peace Council.  I guess TNR just can’t give up its liberal charade even if it wanted to, now that everyone has stopped believing it.  Jamie Kirchick, long known as Marty Peretz’s mini-me, I guess was out of the running for pulling off the most improbable feat of becoming a gay man embraced by Commentary.  Even such second-fiddle young Eustonites as Michael Weiss are now with the Weekly Standard.

I have argued previously that our impeccable “democrats of the left” around the Euston Manifesto and TNR are acting out pathologies strait out of The Paranoid Style in American Politics, and that these lead directly to the belief expressed most frankly by David Gelernter in “Americanism” as “the fourth great western religion” behind the entire anti-Muslim backlash gripping America.  It is plainly self-evident that this ideology – be it called Americanism, neoconservatism, democratic socialism, Shachtmanism, or any other name – is the militant world-redemptive creed whose pathologies its adherents project on to the Islamic faith.

TAC‘s publishing schedule, and the long moribundity of this blog, did not allow for a timely obituary for Tony Judt last August, so I shall pay him his due tribute here and now.  I had the privilege of meeting him twice, the first time being after his brilliant debate performance alongside John Mearsheimer at Cooper Union in the fall of 2006, at which he was delighted to hear that I looked forward to taking consortium courses from him at NYU through the New School.  Alas, it was not to be – I left graduate school, and he was now famously felled by Lou Gehrig’s Disease.

The very week of the Cooper Union debate, Judt had the lead essay in the London Review of Books which single-handedly confirmed his greatness, his brilliant polemic against the Eustonites “Bush’s Useful Idiots”:

For what distinguishes the worldview of Bush’s liberal supporters from that of his neo-conservative allies is that they don’t look on the ‘War on Terror’, or the war in Iraq, or the war in Lebanon and eventually Iran, as mere serial exercises in the re-establishment of American martial dominance. They see them as skirmishes in a new global confrontation: a Good Fight, reassuringly comparable to their grandparents’ war against Fascism and their Cold War liberal parents’ stance against international Communism. Once again, they assert, things are clear. The world is ideologically divided; and – as before – we must take our stand on the issue of the age. Long nostalgic for the comforting verities of a simpler time, today’s liberal intellectuals have at last discovered a sense of purpose: they are at war with ‘Islamo-fascism’.

When considering Radosh, and the myriad “ex”-Stalinists who have been the most militant Eustonites in Britain, the following passage brings it all home:

It is particularly ironic that the ‘Clinton generation’ of American liberal intellectuals take special pride in their ‘tough-mindedness’, in their success in casting aside the illusions and myths of the old left, for these same ‘tough’ new liberals reproduce some of that old left’s worst characteristics. They may see themselves as having migrated to the opposite shore; but they display precisely the same mixture of dogmatic faith and cultural provincialism, not to mention the exuberant enthusiasm for violent political transformation at other people’s expense, that marked their fellow-travelling predecessors across the Cold War ideological divide. The use value of such persons to ambitious, radical regimes is an old story. Indeed, intellectual camp followers of this kind were first identified by Lenin himself, who coined the term that still describes them best. Today, America’s liberal armchair warriors are the ‘useful idiots’ of the War on Terror.

The comparison to Orwell may seem overwrought, but I will stand my ground that it is appropriate, especially considering the horrific and unbearable claim to Orwell by the neocons.  For Tony Judt stood courageously alone in recognizing that it is neoconservatism, not Islam, that is the heir and successor to 20th century totalitarianism.  Like Orwell, he was tragically taken from us at the very moment of realizing his greatness and indispensability.  Yet if mediocrities like Radosh, Mead, and the hangers on at TNR are any indication, the second time around shall indeed prove to be farce.

We have, of course, seen countless sign posts of this just in the last year.  But now of course comes the news that the U.S. is giving up the ghost of the “peace process” by dropping its demand for a settlement freeze.  I will again repeat what I have always said, that Obama never seriously believed he could stop the settlements, that it was only a smokescreen to buy time as the world prepared for a universally acknowledged death of the two-state solution.

Which makes the pathos of those pleading to save it all the worse.  I was exposed to this once again when I went to hear Peter Beinart speak on Tuesday at the final session of the annual conference of Rabbis for Human Rights.  In the above link I recount what I can only describe as the Don Quixote quality to Beinart’s efforts to breathe new life into progressive Zionism, with a far more emotional appeal than the awkwardly calculated politics of J Street and before a far more radical audience.  This morning, Beinart has responded to the recent developments with an unstoppable righteous anger.

Obama and his Jewish allies such as J Street have been General Kornilov to Netanyahu’s Kerensky – the one force that can save the regime from its otherwise inevitable downfall only to be persecuted as traitorous, with Netanyahu and his American amen corner, like the Wilsonian Kerensky, drunk in equal measure on power and ideology.

Committed anti-Zionist though I am, what is happening to Israel has been an avoidable tragedy.  In my forthcoming book I recount one or two cases as early as the 50s where Israel squandered incredible opportunities to secure its future.  But the most recent history has been the most alarming, with some dreadful implications for America.

The downfall of the contemporary Israeli political class is that they are believers in the propaganda of the neocons whom they historically regarded as their useful idiots.  Ariel Sharon, I believe, was the last Israeli leader who knew better than to believe it, which is why at the time of his incapacitation he appeared to be moving swiftly toward a genuine two-state solution.

There are ominous parallels in the trajectory of the American right.  We are, to be sure, far past the day when the Republican establishment and its allies looked upon the neocons as little more than useful idiots, but they are not quite yet past the same point of no return as the Israelis.  Indeed, let us remember that we are more or less talking about the very same individuals in both cases.  We might well cast Sarah Palin – whose true believership in, and intimacy with, the neocons makes George W. Bush pale in comparison – in the role presently held by Netanyahu.

In short, the self-delusion that had doomed the Israelis will next befall the partisans of the American empire.

I have to say I’ve found all the talk of Obama’s “capitulation” on taxes to be rather silly.  And the right-wingers who are egging on those liberals foolish enough to think a tax-hike is a political winner are being pernicious.  Of course, the continuation of Bush-style tax cut-and-spend politics is contemptible, but who ever expected anything different?

But no comes the most ridiculous item of all from Dave Weigel, extolling Machinists Union leader Tom Buffenbarger as the prophet of Obama’s weakness.  Why this buffoon and not a serious critic from either left or right should be so honored who knows, except perhaps to dust-off media silliness of the 2008 vintage we are definitely all better off forgetting.

I had the privilege of watching the 2008 Democratic convention with a retired top leader of the AFL-CIO, and when after months of wanting to asked him what he made of Hillary’s bizarre attempt to revive hard-hatism, he simply replied with a perfect old man’s shrug of cynicism and lack of interest “I was just waiting for it to go away”.  May it be so of all media nonsense, hopefully within our days.

There seem to be a number of misconceptions about my blog on Gary Johnson.  I intended it to be mainly political analysis and not so much boosterism.  Anyone who knows me will know that pot-smoking school voucher boosterism is definitely not my bag, my enthusiasm stems mainly from the potential shake-up of the system Johnson would represent.

Jim Antle misrepresents the substance of my blog totally by saying I’m suggesting Johnson could win.  I make crystal clear what the obstacles would be in my already optimistic scenario.  As for his particulars, the recent vote in California notwithstanding, I find it difficult to believe that the pot issue can be effectively demagogued in this day and age, even in a Republican primary.  On immigration, Antle certainly has a point, but Johnson could easily triangulate on immigration as Antle suggests he could on abortion, taking a law-enforcement-first approach which is already a proven winner with the Republican gains among Hispanics in the midterm.

Larison’s argument about New Hampshire not being so fertile libertarian ground I think misses the point.  Again, I state clearly that my scenario is premised on Romney self-destructing, which cannot be ruled out when he has an ever-growing reputation for phoniness and has not been heard from in a while.  Lest we forget why he self-destructed when he already had a lot going for him in 2008, and one can not assume that the Mormon issue has suddenly disappeared either.  And again, I make it clear that Palin could be the one who self-destructs in which case Romney would probably cruise.

The bottom line about Gary Johnson is only that he is someone who can continue the broad-based appeal that made Ron Paul’s campaign so extraordinary, and potentially make major strides in mainstreaming this positive alternative for the future of the right.  It is for this reason that I suggest only that he could become a desperate choice of a large, but certainly not complete, segment of the Republican establishment.  And with things only getting worse from the war on Wikileaks to the TSA, that should be cause for hope enough.

Having gotten a first-hand report from a close friend about a meeting Gary Johnson held with a number of prominent Bay-Area libertarians last weekend, this seems like a good time to inject an optimistic counter to the pessimism engendered by Johnson’s Weekly Standard interview.

My source in San Francisco tells me Johnson was actually quite adamant about foreign policy and even Israel in particular.  As to the quote that seems to be an endorsement of humanitarian intervention, that sounds like rather a stretch.  To take the example of a counterfactual, if America had opened the doors unconditionally to European Jews fleeing Hitler, that would have had “a positive impact on the situation” while avoiding war.

I have to say I’ve actually gotten quite excited thinking about a Johnson candidacy and what its impact could be in the last couple of days.  To begin with, it could actually be a rather neat solution to the libertarian dilemma following the midterms.  If Dan is right that the Republicans may grant Ron Paul the Chair of the Subcommittee on Monetary Policy precisely because it will keep him from running for President, this is a perfect opening for the torch to be passed to Johnson and put forward a relatively mainstream Republican that Rand can get behind.

Add to this a decent handful of House Republican endorsements, and also the fact that its been quite a while since we’ve heard much from Mitt Romney, who, even if he runs, his obvious phoniness could prove too much to bear.  In such a scenario, Gary Johnson could become the desperate choice of the Republican establishment to stop Sarah Palin.  Of course, Palin could also implode, in which case the establishment would rally to Romney to crush Johnson, but let’s leave that aside for now.

It is therefore quite conceivable that Palin could win Iowa, Johnson New Hampshire, and the battle joined.  The first point that bears emphasis in this scenario is that in it, there can be no doubt that the vast majority of self-identified tea party supporters will be squarely for Palin, turning a great many assumptions upside-down.  Indeed, it would not be difficult for the media to spin Johnson as a “centrist” – Catoite on economics and culturally the anti-Palin to boot.  The neocons, of course, would go berserk in this scenario, which is just another reason to relish it.  The Kristol machine has become so invested in Sarah Palin, on top of all the damage to their conceit as self-styled “moderates” from the Bush years, that it will be very difficult for them to pivot back from the radical conceit they’ve adopted in the Tea Party charade.

It bears emphasis, however, that none of this is to suggest that for Gary Johnson to become the moderate or establishment choice would secure him the nomination, far from it in fact.  Larison has consistently argued that the Republican establishment will win in 2012 as it always does, but there are reasons to think that this coming election could prove to be the exception to the rule, analogous to the Democrats in 1972.  I have long been, and remain, agnostic about which will prove right, the point is only that there are multiple reasons for uncertainty.  If anything, the lack of a candidate with the resources of Romney, especially one with the “radical” baggage of Johnson, would likely redound to Palin.

Much less, therefore, will I try to forecast what an Obama-Johnson general election race would look like.  But the more important thing will surely be to build a future for principled conservatism.  In my despair over the apparent trajectory of Rand Paul and the Tea Parties over the past year, one point which continued to gnaw at me was why I was demanding the perfect from conservatives while being willing to accept the less-and-less reasonably good from the liberals.

More recently, David Cameron’s early start and agenda have seemed to me a fine example of the good as opposed to the perfect, but realizing this made me only despair further of any hope on this side of the pond.  With many personal and policy affinities between them already, Gary Johnson may prove to be the American Cameron.

MINT-AND-CORN COUNTRY, INDIANA — When cutting the deficit is a low enough priority that extending tax cuts for the wealthy is acceptable even as you have no interest in cutting imperialistic expenditures, what makes more sense than extending the tax cuts and renewing jobless benefits — plus, just in case we haven’t already removed enough sources of funds wherewith to pay off our brobdingnagian bills, a one-year reduction in Social Security taxes, because we clearly can afford this.

I’m not a grinch: It’s not as if I want those who struggle to find gainful unemployment in this prolonged recession to be without any source of income. I’m not a fan of supporting the Leviathan, either. That should be clear to all but the most dull-witted or willfully ignorant reader of my previous writings. Hell, I love the idea of paying less in payroll taxes! However, what I am is someone who thinks that disregarding the thirteen-point-eight-trillion-dollar elephant in the room is reckless and immoral.

Besides, if Fearless Leader is for it, ain’t I supposed to be against it?

Lisa: “Didn’t you wonder why you were getting checks for doing nothing?” Grampa: “I figured ‘cuz the Democrats were in power again.”

MINT-AND-CORN COUNTRY, INDIANA — “[The House Democrats’ proposal for extending the Bush tax cuts for “the middle class”, whoever exactly they are,] was simply intended to send a message to the Democratic base: Democrats are for the middle class and Republicans are for millionaires,” claims Daniel Clifton of Strategas Research Partners. True or not, it is, on the face, a pretty compelling picture. Only three Republicans in the House supported extending the tax cuts, sans an inclusion of those earning more than $200,000 and families with incomes greater than $250,000. Dr. Ron Paul crossed party lines, as did two Republicans with views generally sympathetic to his. They were right to do so — however meaningless this bill may prove to be in the light of “Slurpee summits”, White House-Republican negotiations, and this morning’s failure in the Senate (courtesy, again, of the GOP).

They were, indeed, right.

Paying taxes is a burden that we are compelled to endure purportedly for our own betterment. The trajectory of the policies of the American state more and more evinces the farce here, but the American of today, Tea Party antics notwithstanding, is rather more docile than his 1770s forebear, and long ago cast aside his pitchfork and torch in the name of comfort. He ain’t gonna start a-fussin’-’n’-a-feudin’ any time soon.

Nonetheless, one seldom desires to contribute more of his hard-earned (by our increasingly diminishing standards) wages to the gummint. Moreover, the folks with the greatest incomes (however morally repugnant the means whereby they maliciously machinate to mulct money be) have the most disposable income with which, supposedly, to stimulate “The Economy.” Finally, yes, I do worry that this could harm small businesses.

So why on earth should I applaud the House Democrats and those three wayward Republicans? Well, I’m glad that I asked.

Stimulating “The Economy” will take far more than the relatively trivial tactic of permitting the well-to-do to keep a bit more of their income. Moreover, the current administration has already made rather clear that it, like every government that assumes power in DC, has little use for small businesses — who lack the deep pockets necessary to adimpleate political war chests — except for photo ops and sloganeering. The little guy, the all-American economic engine, is out of luck in the end, whoever rules the roost.

What really matters, though, is that no one ought to be taken seriously when with one side of his mouth he professes his sincerest desire to cut “our” immorally prodigious national debt whilst out the other comes an uncompromising defense of tax cuts for all, consequences be damned. Pace the romanticization of the rugged individual, By-his-own-bootstraps Billy is the exception, rather than the rule, and wealth is a product of fortuitous circumstances and rent seeking and other system-gaming strategies as much as of elbow grease. One need not to embrace Marx to see that asking him with the most to contribute more in such a situation is judicious.

We spend too much money. President Bush spent awe-inspiringly, and his successor, with his messianic delusions, has followed suit nicely. The Republicans, whether out of principle or opportunism, have reacted with righteous hostility to Obamacare and the president’s multifarious other shenanigans, but simply calling for revisions (Repeal? Ha!) suffices not.

The simple fact is that cutting spending alone will not do the trick — particularly when entitlement programs and our bloated imperial budget are off-limits. The government needs income. In a perfect world, this nation-state would not be, nor would its fiscal imprudence. The world in which we live, however, is home to United States who spend as recklessly as Bart and Milhouse did when the wind brought Homer’s $20 bill to them — but with consequences wholly lacking hilarity. Few things dishearten me more than having to contribute to this morally bankrupt machine on the Potomac, but we are, for the present, stuck with these terms.

If the Republicans are serious about reining in the deficit, then the cut-spending-and-taxes approach needs to be shelved. Just the same, tax-and-spend surely is not the answer, and ought not to be shelved, but thrown into the rubbish bin. The truly fiscally conservative ethos right now demands that our elected officials maintain, if not increase, taxes and cut spending. This is unpleasant, but the repercussions if our ways are not mended will be felt by the Posterity for whom those disobedient men in Philadelphia ordained and established the now-trampled-upon Constitution.

Note: This was originally submitted, with a different title and with slight differences in the text, for publication in The Terrapin Times, the student-run right-of-centre student newspaper at the University of Maryland that the author previously edited.

In late 2006, an unknown Julian Assange posted two seemingly innocuous essays on his blog iq.org. The essays, “State and Terrorist Conspiracies” and “Conspiracy as Governance,” (PDF) appeared online around the same time Wikileaks first launched. The essays, which are nearly identical, advocate disrupting the tools authoritarian regimes use to collude or “conspire” in a manner that harms citizenries. Drastically hindering the ability to conspire, Assange argues, forces regimes to alter behavior by rendering the prior set of behavior untenable. What is one tactic Assange posits as an effective weapon for destroying a conspiracy? The leak.

Fast forward to 2010. Wikileaks uploads millions of classified documents and communications from governments and private companies to the Internet for the viewing pleasure of all. The numerous leaks make public the intimate details of war, diplomacy, governance, and business. Critics charge these actions recklessly endanger lives, but no organization, be it the Pentagon or third-party humanitarian groups, find evidence that any person has been put in harms way because of a release. In fact, the person most at risk of being harmed due to Wikileaks’ activities is Assange himself. The rising profile of his organization has catalyzed the ire of government officials and political talking heads. More than a few have called for Assange to be assassinated or thrown in prison.

Wikileaks appears to be the embodiment of what Assange describes in his 2006 essays. When Wikileaks acts it dominates the news cycle for days and even weeks at a time. But for all the scaremongering cries, enthusiastic endorsements, and tepid analysis, people are just now beginning to examine the logic of Wikileaks, its philosophical assumptions, and its effectiveness in achieving its goals.

For what purpose does Wikileaks exists and what end is it attempting to realize? A simple answer to this question is to free information. A cynic may answer the question with one word: anarchy. If one assumes that Assange’s essays are indeed the grounding for Wikileaks, the goal is to use leaks and technology to dismantle the interacting and interdependent factions of authoritarian conspiracy in hopes of creating strong resistance to authoritarian planning while fermenting the proper incentive for more humane government. But there are massive blind spots in Assange’s reasoning which renders Wikileaks a self-defeating project.

Assange uses of the Oxford English Dictionary definition of conspiracy: “make secret plans jointly to commit a harmful act; working together to bring about a particular result, typically to someone’s detriment.” And while he does not provide a similar working definition for authoritarian, it seems safe to assume the OED can again provide the working definition: “favoring or enforcing strict obedience to authority, especially that of the government, at the expense of personal freedom; showing a lack of concern for the wishes or opinions of others; domineering; dictatorial.” Authoritarian regimes, Assange notes, use “conspiratorial interactions among the political elite, not merely for preferment or favor within the regime, but as the primary planning methodology behind maintaining or strengthening authoritarian power.” (I only note these definitions to point out that Assange’s use of conspiracy differs from other conspiracy theorists, like the truthers.)

The claim is that once the inner workings or conspiratorial forces that support the regime is made public, resistance will be “induced” and strengthened and can thus negatively impact unjust authority’s power. Assange articulates,  “Since unjust systems, by their nature induce opponents, and in many places barely have the upper hand, mass leaking leaves them exquisitely vulnerable to those who seek to replace them with more open forms of governance.” Assange seem to think that authoritarian operations have a frustration limit and once reached, the powerful will crumble under the weight of their own ugliness and will be replaced by a more benevolent force that respects personal freedom. This assumption is wildly naïve and ignores a plethora of important factors.

The mythical resistance to authoritarian power is the biggest impediment to this argument. It is simplistic because it ignores an obvious question: Who is the victim of the authority’s oppression? Nothing prevents a regime from being relatively benign to its own citizens while garrisoning the rest of the planet in the name of national security. If the citizenry of an authoritarian regime is not the victim of the regimes oppressions and/or the citizenry views the actions of its government as legitimate, the chances of resistance forming inside that country are slim. Authoritarian regimes that face resistance abroad and support at home tend to confront resistance with stronger, and often less humane, force in hopes of pounding their foes into submission. Authority errs towards violence, both physical and otherwise, when challenged. And therefore, the success of a resistance, where it exists, depends in large part on its methodology of attack and its ability to endure intensified assaults from the authoritarian regime.

The trove of documents released by Wikileaks has given individuals around the world raw witness to how The State rite large speaks with forked tongue. Yet, as noted earlier, the leaks have been met with scorn from private citizens and government officials. Nationalism is a powerful motivator. And foreign entities that attempt to discredit the actions of a nation will undoubtedly be met with force and contempt—regardless of the moral worthiness or truthfulness of their claims. Even individuals who would seem genuinely sympathetic to transparent government and revelations of corruption lambaste the actions of Assange’s organization. Simply illuminating the truth that authoritarian governments collude and lie to the determent of individuals does not in of itself guarantee resistance in the places where resistance matters most.

Assange makes another important error through omission—he does not anticipate the type of selection pressure leaks might place on the state. It is natural for the state to want to protect what it views as private communications. When previous methods of protection fail and the ugliness of some forms of governance is shown, the state doesn’t become more transparent but rather it becomes more opaque—at least initially. Assuming none of the players making decisions change, the goals of the authoritarian conspiracy would remain in tact. Instead of being forced to alter its goals, like Assange would desire, the regime would simply alter its methods and make it even more difficult for future leaks to happen. Assange contends that this will lead to an internalization and over-reaction that will hinder the states’ ability to understand the environment it attempts to control. But much depends on the type of adjustments the state decides to make. If enough support exists (and judging from the current reaction to Wikileaks activity, it seems foolish to doubt the existence of such support), the state can attempt an outward adjustment that seeks to dissuade resistance through violence and imprisonment. Authoritarian conspiracies can be brazen. America already has a government that publicly asserts the authority kill its citizens without due process. Is it really that hard to conceive of the US or other governments finding ways to continue levels of communication while using “other means” to control the threat of leaks from a foreign organization?

The germination of a resistance is just the first part of how Assange expects to alter the behavior of authoritarian regimes. The second step concerns the methods the resistance will use to “halve” the “total conspiratorial power” of regimes until the regimes are rendered ineffective. This can be done through blinding the authorities by distorting the information they gather or by throttling and separating the links in the conspiracy. Critics of “cablegate” accuse Wikileaks of disrupting the United States ability to engage in diplomacy with countries whose populations are not friendly to America. Some Arab diplomats and leaders contend that “cablegate” will seriously hinder the types of conversations America and Arab states conduct, simply due to the fear that the correspondence might be leaked. The second prong of Assange’s attack on conspiracies, the separating, is near identical to the present actions of Wikileaks.

While the halving tactic is rather smart, it does fall prey to the same set of problems as Assange’s other argument. In reaction to an attempted halving, authority is more likely to peruse the resistance with less discriminate force that erodes civil liberties for all and increases collateral damage. The current configuration may become untenable, but it will likely be replaced by a more pernicious configuration. Assange is falling victim to the logic that damaging the system is enough to alter the behavior. But since the ideas and desires of the authority live on, Assange’s efforts merely result in a reconfiguration of the same evil he wants to destroy. All this is not to say that it is impossible to change regime behavior for the better, just that catalyzing a positive alteration in the behavior of authoritarian conspiracies is far more complicated than Assange lets on in his essays.

It is easy to see why libertarians and paleocons (and even the “hard left”) admire the actions of Wikileaks—the organization’s battle to free information that “targets lying, corrupt, murderous leadership” hits home with the anti-war/small government contingent of the “American Right.” In an interview with Forbes.com, Julian Assange talks about his fondness for American Libertarianism. Sadly, the transparency brought by Wikileaks is but a fleeting moment and the anti-war movement would do well not to settle for the simple gratification wrought by the temporary squirming and panic of the bastards who hold seats of power in Washington and around the world. It is nice to think Wikileaks will awaken the inherent desire for liberty that lays dormant in the minds of many. It is equally nice to think a revolution will come if the right information gets out. That revolution will not be televised … because that revolution will not happen. Too often have people kowtowed to authority in the name of security or partisanship or national exceptionalism. Too often have people simply not cared.

Glenn Greenwald, who has done a magnificent job explaining the moral repugnance of those calling for Assange’s arrest and death, echos the sentiments of Will Wilkison that Wikileaks might be the last best hope for government transparency. I find myself echoing Ross Douthat‘s retort, “If it’s the best we can hope for, then we’re in even more trouble than I thought.”