Reihan has an interesting post responding to two of mine, and he had some very kind words for the Dark Lord of Paleoconservatism (as I have been dubbed).  For my part, I enjoy Reihan’s charmingly eccentric, often idiosyncratic version of meliorism, and his criticisms here are unlikely to provoke much of my usual rhetorical ruthlessness.  Reihan allows that “[m]ost “And-ism” really is shallow,” so in this respect we don’t disagree at all.  I would say more and say that most And-ism is shallow because it is usually a gimmick or a blind groping towards some amorphous change.  Between most “And-ism” and “Me-tooism” there is often a thin, almost invisible line. 

Reihan speaks of “defying false choices,” and I am all for this kind of defiance.  But there is also virtue in defying false pairings.  Take the pairing of the label “green” with the carbon tax or the label “free market” with state capitalism.  There is frequently a pressure in debates to define your position in terms of the conventional policies frequently associated with that position.  Thus to show that you are serious about conservation you have to make certain alarmed statements about the dangers of climate change and you must also demonstrate your concern about these dangers by arguing for a carbon tax of one kind or another, whether or not climate change really is likely to usher in catastrophic events and whether or not a carbon tax (or Kyoto or what-have-you) is actually a prudent and workable policy.

There is a sense in which paleoconservatives have been offering an “and” conservatism in certain respects all along, but in an entirely different sense than the “And-ism” we have been discussing.  Paleos are and have been advocating the best in the traditions of the Christian West and, at bottom, a humane, traditional conservatism of place, prescription and piety.  In this sense, we are following the path of the Agrarians and the New Conservatives, among the more recent figures, who sought a holistic (not partial!) vision of order, the common good and the good life, and so we are looking to the example of what you might call the original “and” conservatives.  The idea that there was some contradiction in defending the rights of property and tending to the landscape would have struck many of these men as absurd.  To their mind, a decent respect for the land went hand in hand with owning property, because to them property still possessed the sense of having something to do with owning land.  The farther removed we become from that connection, thanks to the preferred arrangements of the moneyed interest, the more one-sided and fragmented every appeal to either property or conservation becomes, so that we are often left with And-ists desperately grasping at some earlier sense of what conservation required and usually ending up by accepting the most dreadfully conventional views of state environmentalism.   

However, if these traditional conservatives were and are early “and” men, they were and are even more fierce “or” men in that they insisted, for example, that you should not concentrate wealth in massive enterprises, gear everything towards efficiency and place the “protection” of both property and the land more and more in the hands of a state that would have great incentives to subvert those protections and to “develop” the land (very often in recent decades by making that land unusable for anything but parking or shopping) according to the goals of the moneyed interest.  To defend a wider array of goods necessarily means taking on that many more adversaries, which surprisingly is not the recommended way to win elections.  And-ists run the risk of making more adversaries, but very often they advance their And-ism with the most milquetoast, drippy, neutral language aimed at maximising superficial voting support and avoiding those policies that tend to create resistance.  Even the And-ists at ConservativeHome are unhappy with Cameron because he has taken this inevitable step away from emphasising “both…and” to just talking about the new and trendy things that will supposedly make the Tories likeable and electable again. 

My impression of virtually all “And-ism” as represented by the folks at ConservativeHome, for instance, is that its adherents revel a little too much in being contrarian when it will make them appear “new” or “interesting” or “innovative,” but are not as interested in challenging deep-set structural problems.  It doesn’t help that a lot of “And-ism” appears on the scene with the explicit purpose of rehabilitating the fortunes of some virtually moribund political party, which tends to mean that “And-ism,” like its distant cousin, fusionism, will shift and transform according to the needs of the party and not necessarily according to the goods of the commonwealth.  The Cameroons are a great example of this: they are “and” conservatives when it means that they can add on something trendy or popular to their agenda (e.g., Tory support for the disastrously bad, but theoretically very popular Kyoto accords), but they long ago in practice gave up on insisting on the “or” elements of conservatism when it has come to challenging expansive government.  In practice, “And-ism” of the kind advanced at ConservativeHome and, to some degree, in the counsels of the Cameron shadow government is just another way of saying, “Let’s take the easy way out.”  As I have seen it being practiced in politics, I think it is, in the end, an abdication of leadership posing as bold, exciting and transformative leadership.  This leads us, quite naturally, to Barack Obama, who purportedly offers us a kind of “And” progressivism.

Reihan is right that all large-scale problems are defined by complexity and numerous interrelated factors.  They cannot be addressed effectively by attacking from one and only one side.  Arguably, this is even more true in foreign affairs than elsewhere, where the complexity is potentially greater and the number of factors has vastly increased.  Responding to my critique of Obama’s big foreign policy speech, Reihan also grants that “Naxalite rebels don’t menace Peoria.”  But not even Obama would have said anything quite so easily ridiculed (though he might talk about the “quiet violence” of caste stereotypes in Bollywood movies).  The underlying assumption that made Obama claim our security “is inextricably linked to the security of all people” is that, eventually, unless “we” Americans do something about it the Naxalite rebellion will cause a chain reaction of events that will result in the destruction of Miami (or whichever city) or something equally undesirable.  (For the sake of clarity, I should note here that I was the one to first start talking about Naxalites in this discussion–one will look in Obama’s speech in vain for a reference to them.)  It is domino theory on stimulants: as Orissa goes, so goes the free world!  You could use any foreign crisis, real or imagined, in place of the Naxalites, and you would get the same unreasonable alarmism.  It is as if pop chaos theory met Cold War paranoia and had a brief tryst in the supply closet at an establishment foreign policy think tank, resulting in the birth of modern interventionism.  Strangely, though, instead of regarding this kind of thinking as the conspiracy theorising of bureaucrats and academics, a lot of people take it as sober and far-seeing analysis.  It is because of this kind of thinking that we are always being called to “do something” here or there–not necessarily because of the crisis itself, which might actually be relatively limited, but because of its potential impact “on the region.”  In Obama’s vision of the world, if a chicken on the other side of the planet sneezes, Americans might die.  Whatever else you want to say about interconnectedness, I think we can all agree that this is simply nuts. 

It may be that America at present is too bound up in the “global supply chain” to extricate itself from many of the places where someone in government thinks we have some interest, which certainly imposes constraints on what can be done right now, but it seems to be a mistake to accept that this dependency is either necessary or unchangeable.  My foreign policy views are based at least in part on the assumption that such dependency in the form that it now takes is neither necessary nor unchangeable and that this dependency is positively harmful to the United States.  From my perspective, someone who wants to enmesh us ever deeper into a global network, as Obama clearly does, does not really offer any greater appreciation for the complexity of that network, nor does he inspire confidence that he has any clear understanding of what the American interest is or ought to be.  He has, like so many progressives, fetishised cooperation and interdependence, as if to mirror the extent to which many Republicans have fetishised a sort of “splendid isolation” that isolates us from nothing harmful but rather leaves us stranded in hostile territory.