Let me preface this by saying that I am a great admirer of T.S. Eliot, who has to be considered one of the best, if not the best, poet writing in the English language in the 20th century. His writings on culture and Christianity have been important in my thinking about these matters, his inclusion in Kirk’s The Conservative Mind had an important role as well, and I would be lying if I didn’t acknowledge that his oft-quoted remark about there being no such thing as lost causes has had more influence on how I think than just about any other single aphorism. So I was a little surprised to read the report (via Alan Jacobs) that Eliot had, as an editor at Faber & Faber, rejected Orwell’s Animal Farm in 1944.

It was not that he rejected the novel that surprised me or concerned me so much as the reasons he reportedly gave. As Jacobs notes, the reasons are entirely political and seem to be dictated to an embarrassing degree by the British and American alliance with the Soviet Union. Personally, I have never been overwhelmed by the quality of Animal Farm, having first read it when I was in elementary school and perhaps not able to appreciate it fully thereafter, but if one had to turn it down I would think that describing it as an “anti-Russian novel” informed by a “Trotskyite” political view would be one of the last things one would ever say about it. It is not an anti-Russian novel, or to be precise one could only call it that if you accepted that being Russian and being a Soviet communist were necessarily the same thing, which is an idea that Solzhenitsyn would later ridicule with great vehemence. If I recall correctly, Russians have nothing to do with the story, and indeed I would hazard a guess that setting an anti-communist or more specifically anti-Soviet communist story in an entirely un-Soviet setting was intended to distinguish between the destructive ideology being critiqued and any particular nation. It is Trotskyite mainly in the sense that anyone on the left writing against Stalin’s butchery and evil would probably have been denounced as a Trotskyite by the Soviets.

Would Animal Farm have offended the Soviets? I assume that it would have to have been offensive to them and was offensive, but why should a publishing house in the West care about that? What a telling and sad statement about the power of wartime political correctness that even a mind such as Eliot’s, which obviously had zero sympathy for the system being attacked in the novel, could reach the conclusion that he was not convinced that “this is the thing that needs saying at the moment.” When would have been appropriate? When the Allies were no longer at war with Eastasia and were once again opposed to Eurasia? Ahem. Presumably, as in most historical films today, what was needed was a reliable, easily vilified Nazi pig dictatorship in which the chickens and cows were subjected as ‘racial’ inferiors.

John points to Alex Massie’s post on growing dissatisfaction with European economic policy on some parts of the American left:

The President has told everyone what to do, so why won’t our friends do as they’re told? Once upon a time – and not so long ago neither – Democrats thought it was important fro friends to speak candidly to friends and stand up for what they thought was right. Now? Not so much. Now friends must remember that their independent analysis of the economic troubles afflicting the globe counts for nothing and they should fall quietly into line and accept their marching orders from Washington.

As I say, how times change. We’ve swapped a military and foreign policy sense of imperial entitlement for an economic one. How refreshing!

What is also worth noting is not only the repetition of the tropes of imperial entitlement and unreasonable expectation of lockstep obedience, but the same accusatory rhetoric that Europeans are not sharing the load. If Europeans (particularly the “old” ones!) were free-riding, dictator-loving weaklings (or whatever) in 2002, they are now supposed to be free-riding, self-destructive neo-Hooverites if they are not on board with dubious Washington remedies. The assumption is always that we propose, and the Europeans dispose, and there can be no backtalk. This was a crazy attitude before the war, when we should have listened to the French and Germans when they warned us that no good would come from invading Iraq, and it is a crazy attitude now when we could probably stand to learn from the German wariness of taking on massive new amounts of debt and spurring wealth-destroying inflation.

One of the great ironies in all this is that it is the fiscal straitjacket of the EU itself that compels leading European states to be less reckless in their deficit spending, and it is the same Union structures that Washington has been only too glad to encourage. This is also the same Union whose expansion Washington has been more interested in than some of its current members. The Turks might take note that their banking system appears to be much less adversely affected by the crisis, and this might not have necessarily been the case had their government had its way in gaining entry into the Union and Turkey participated in the free-wheeling financial bonanza that ate Iceland. While badly underrated during boom times, retaining relatively more national sovereignty can have its advantages.

There is a related misunderstanding that continental economies are somehow not as badly affected by the recession and the financial crisis, which some may want to cite as proof that continental models are preferable to the “Anglo-Saxon” one and others use as an excuse to demand that Europe put up much more than they can possibly afford in new spending. That is, even if European governments were inclined to pursue Washington’s route of stimulus spending, many countries have banks that are just as overleveraged as ours and some that are even more so, which constrains the resouces these states can devote above and beyond their existing welfare outlays. While economic integration will tend to lead to similar political responses over time, there is a lot to be said for sovereign states tailoring their policies according to conditions in their countries and not simply reproducing the responses that may be more appropriate elsewhere. Part of me suspects that some of the administration’s supporters would like to see European governments get on board with additional spending to provide cover and create the impression of a near-universal consensus on how to respond to the recession, so that even if they are wrong in their proposals they can, like the previous administration about WMDs in Iraq, declare haughtily, “Hey, everybody thought this was true!”

No one chanting “Yes we can” was pushing for a change that would stick America’s middle-class taxpayers with additional trillions of new debt in order to fill up the coffers of some of the biggest and richest swindlers on Wall Street.

Where’s the change, in short, between Bush’s TARP-1 and Obama’s TARP-2? ~Ralph Reiland

Obviously, I agree that there are certain obvious points of continuity between the administrations on matters of foreign and financial policy, since I have been saying something of the kind about Obama’s policy views for more than a year. If I had a dollar for every time I saw someone make some stupid claim about Obama’s plans to slash the defense budget, sell out Israel or introduce socialism, I could pay for a considerable part of the omnibus budget bill. However, these points of continuity were obvious before the election, so I do get a little tired of pundits who write entire columns saying nothing more interesting than, “That’s not change–that’s more of the same!” as if this has never been discovered until now. On the day after the election, I wrote a summary of my assessment of Obama in a piece for Culture11:

If you have a high opinion of the Washington establishment and bipartisan consensus politics, Obama’s election should come as a relief. If you believe, as I do, that most of our policy failures stretching back beyond the last eight years are the product of a failed establishment and a bankrupt consensus, an Obama administration represents the perpetuation of a system that is fundamentally broken.

In fairness to Obama, he has never hidden his preference for accommodation and consensus, and those who understand Obama’s political career the best have already discovered this defining characteristic.

This was a distillation of arguments I had made for the entire campaign. Just about everything Obama has done since his inauguration bears this out. One of the more odd memes that has cropped up recently is the sudden recognition by a broad swathe of the media that Paul Krugman is an Obama critic–really, I hadn’t noticed! Krugman railed against Obama as a centrist (which, from Krugman’s perspective, is a mostly accurate description) since the early stages of the primaries, Krugman denounced the bailout plan the first time and has resumed denouncing it in its new incarnation, and yet for the Reilands of the world it is as if Obama’s relative centrism and establishmentarian instincts come as a revelation only recently imparted.

When I pointed out in one of my columns the absurdity and non-credibility of McCain’s attack on the “spread the wealth” phrase in light of his support for the bailout, I am fairly sure that there were not a lot of others on the right who perceived the sheer hypocrisy of it all. They had their lines down cold: Obama was the evil redistributionist, and McCain was resisting the onset of socialism, and that was all they needed to know, because the Plumber had told them so. The possibility that both were acquiescing in a bad policy designed to satisfy the interests of certain large financial institutions at the expense of the public seems to have been lost on quite a few people in the mainstream press. Of course, on this question not only did Obama not make a significant break with the Bush administration, but he and McCain were indistinguishable.

For that matter, based on surveys of public attitudes before the election, there was a significant minority of approximately 30% across all ideological and partisan affiliations that supported the creation of the TARP. So clearly there were quite a few Obama voters who were not bothered by his embrace of the bailout and his vote for the EESA, and perhaps there were more than a few “responsible” center-left “pragmatists” and Wall Street Democrats who saw Obama’s pro-bailout stance as a reason to vote for him. These are the people who welcomed the appointment of Geithner as brilliant. These people were pretty thoroughly wrong, but there were plenty of them–the sort who sneer at populists, whether left or right, and put their trust in technocrats.

There were also quite a few progressives who hated the bailout, but who nonetheless voted for Obama, so whatever they may have expected in the way of “change” they must have understood that rejecting the TARP was not going to be part of it. It is unlikely that these people would have supported McCain had he done the politically and substantively smart thing by opposing the bailout, but then McCain has almost never done the substantively smart thing so we were never going to find out. For that matter, there was significant support on the right for bailing out those whom Reiland dubs swindlers, and there were very few rising national Republican leaders who actively opposed the measure; no one in the Congressional leadership did so. The House backbenchers and a handful of GOP Senators who opposed the TARP were regularly demonized by “responsible” Republican pundits as know-nothings, nihilists and nitwits. Six months later, their opposition, like that of progressives in the House and Senate, appears even more correct than it did at the time.

Where was Reiland’s criticism of this plan at the time, or did he just happen to rediscover his outrage now that it is Obama who presides over and supports the awful policies that Bush, McCain and the GOP leadership all embraced just as readily?

The Bush-Obama approach to the crisis in the financial sector is to monetize existing debt and accumulate massive new debt that will likely also require monetization. The monetization threatens inflation, high interest rates, and depreciation of the U.S. dollar and loss of its reserve currency role. The accumulation of new public debt implies larger annual interest payments that could make future deficit reduction problematic. Clearly, the Obama administration needs to broaden its perception of the predicament to which financial deregulation and offshoring have brought the U.S. economy. ~Paul Craig Roberts

Naturally, then, our crack team of experts is busily combating non-existent deflation as most pundits warn against the menace of protectionism.

Via Clive Davis, a tutorial courtesy of The Onion:

Prague’s Franz Kafka International Named World’s Most Alienating Airport

If we focused on what is vital for our safety and independence, we could spend a lot less money. But if there is no limit to what we have to do to police and remake the world, there is also no limit to what we can spend. ~Steve Chapman

This is one of the key things to understand about the Long War: its very amorphous, unlimited and endless nature makes for an outstanding justification for ongoing and ever-increasing spending, which then creates more and more interests that have a stake in keeping the flow of funding constant. For one thing, a war of “no exits and no deadlines,” and one that theoretically encompasses the entire planet in one way or another, is a perfect justification for a set of government programs that can never be defunded. If our national security strategy were primarily concerned with national defense, rather than with power projection and hegemony, our objectives would be relatively few, limited and achievable, but that would create some ceiling on spending. The very open-ended and global nature of the Long War means that no “defense” budget is ever really large enough, because no budget no matter how large could be equal to the unlimited nature of the project. This may help explain why the Long War’s most ardent supporters are not embarrassed to claim that Pentagon budget increases are cuts. When measured against the absurd demands their war of “no exits and no deadlines” makes on the nation, mere 9% annual increases in outlays probably barely register.

One of the many things wrong with the financial bailout bill passed last September, George Will argues, is its unconstitutional nature: it vested the executive branch with powers reserved solely to Congress. For much the same reason that the line-item veto was ruled unconstitutional and why modern war resolutions ought to be considered unconstitutional (that will be the day), the legislative branch cannot delegate authority specifically granted to it by the Constitution to another branch. Arguably, separation of powers has been a dead letter in some respects for a very long time. The notion of checks and balances was a clever Federalist trick to make it seem as if their proposed usurpation and concentration of power successfully attempted at Philadelphia was actually a guard against usurpation and concentration of power. The Federalists were nothing if not good salesmen! Patrick Henry memorably and correctly observed the flaw of the “checks and balances” argument in favor of a more powerful central government during the ratification debates:

There will be no checks, no real balances, in this Government. What can avail your specious imaginary balances, your rope-dancing, chain-rattling, ridiculous ideal checks and contrivances.

The idea that members of the federal government would work to counterbalance and limit one another, rather than collaborate to enhance their collective power, sounded very nice, but it was always pretty far-fetched. That said, the impulse to resist concentrating additional power in any branch of the federal government is a welcome and long overdue one.

Congress has delegated its equally vital warmaking powers to the executive branch for decades, so I find it hard to imagine that any court is going to strike down the EESA. Indeed, if anyone were to file a suit contesting the constitutionality of the Act my guess is that the fig leaf of a Congressional vote would be treated as proof that EESA is consistent with separation of powers, just as war resolutions are used to provide some minimal cover for illegal wars. One of the reasons the Framers insisted that the power of the purse be held solely by the legislative was to prevent the executive from arbitrarily disbursing money, and so acquiring power for itself, unaccountably and without consent of the legislature.

As with war powers, Congress has preferred once again to hand over its proper role to the executive. It is not an accident that such a dreadful bill came out of a rushed process in which alarmist cries of doom panicked much of the public and most members of Congress into a stampede to give the executive whatever it wanted. Legislation passed in haste and fear tends to enhance arbitrary power, while patience and deliberation are necessary guards against it. This is why our system was designed to be slow-moving and filled with obstacles to action, which is a system that now seems utterly unsuited to the character of an impatient people.

William Brafford has an interesting post on the dangers of hubris (or, as he puts it, undue confidence and ignorance of the limits of one’s knowledge, which are all part of this flaw) and on how to understand ideology. Brafford is right that one of the attractions of ideology is that it seems to offer “a schema for predicting the consequences of events.” I would emphasize that ideology only seems to do this, because one of the key features of any ideology is its horrific powers of oversimplification and its impressively narrow perspective on historical events. That is, ideology will not reliably predict consequences of events, but it will condition the mind to force every event into the mold provided by the ideology. If a person approaches the world with an ideological frame of mind, whatever events dominate the historical memory of his fellow ideologues are perceived as constantly recurring again and again as part of a progressive narrative of successive triumphs, each one more important than the last. The simple framing, the certainty of victory and the quick and easy interchangeability of extremely different groups as different faces of the same enemy are all very useful for purposes of propaganda and the acquisition and exercise of power.

This is one reason why so many ideologues express great confidence that History will judge their endeavors to have been worthwhile and why they always avoid accountability for the consequences of their own policies and actions: their grasp of historical contingency is poor, and their knowledge of history is usually limited to a narrow range of approved opinions about major events. These were the people Popper derided as historicists in The Poverty of Historicism and elsewhere. It is therefore endlessly entertaining that some of the most obnoxious ideological snake-oil peddlers hurl the label historicist at anyone who questions their grand theories. When Popper’s historicists accuse their opponents of historicism, they are attacking respect for contingency and context, skepticism of moralizing, self-congratulatory narratives of national virtue, and hostility to grossly anachronistic celebrations of certain historical figures as precursors of enlightened modernity. Ideology thrives on ignoring contingency and context, and on embracing self-congratulatory narratives and rampant precursorism.

The ideology to which Bacevich refers in The Limits of Power has a certain appeal because it offers a flexible rationale for action, which is to say that it can provide rationalizations for just about any exercise of power, and in the case of national security ideology this is the exercise of executive power. This ideology is able to draw readily on a well-established tradition of justifying presidential power-grabs in emergency situations. It was only a matter of time before the emergency would be made permanent, so that the continual expansion of executive power would become more or less unquestionable and seemingly irreversible.

Support for the Long War requires support for a war of “no exits and no deadlines,” as Prof. Bacevich has described it. Support for a specific military mission in Afghanistan does not necessarily require one to endorse the concept of the Long War or the fundamentally flawed strategy behind it. The debate has been framed in such a way that most people seem to assume that endorsing the concept and strategy of the Long War is an essential part of what it means to support U.S. national security interests and even our current war effort in Afghanistan, which is just about as misguided as it gets.

One can, of course, support the campaign against Al Qaeda without the dangerous and unsustainable Long War framework, but it might require rethinking how to wage that campaign. As Bacevich said in his review of Accidental Guerrilla:

If counterinsurgency is useful chiefly for digging ourselves out of holes we shouldn’t be in, then why not simply avoid the holes? Why play al-Qaeda’s game? Why persist in waging the Long War when that war makes no sense?

When it comes to dealing with Islamism, containment rather than transformation should provide the cornerstone of U.S. (and Western) strategy. Ours is the far stronger hand. The jihadist project is entirely negative. Apart from offering an outlet for anger and resentment, Osama bin Laden and others of his ilk have nothing on offer. Time is our ally. With time, our adversary will wither and die—unless through our own folly we choose to destroy ourselves first.

There is a split in the country that is very much like the difference between supporters of rollback and containment during the Cold War, but unlike in the Cold War the advocates of containment seem to be a small minority. Even though containment was the wiser, superior policy during the Cold War, it has somehow lost its appeal. During the first two decades of the Cold War advocates of rollback considered it insufficiently “robust” (to use a word that ideological fantasists like to throw around a lot) and not nearly aggressive enough, and current partisans of the Long War concept seem intent on not making the “mistake” of opting for containment, which is to say that they are intent on embarking on fool’s errands.

The Long War is, as Bacevich says in The Limits of Power, “both self-defeating and irrational.” If we wish to secure our country and to get our economic and fiscal houses in order, one thing we have to do is start by scrapping the Long War concept and focusing on national security strategy that has limited, achievable objectives.