In discussion at WWWTW  that has followed my earlier post, my remarks about the “open society” were challenged.  Where I was talking about the ideology of post-war managerial liberal democracy, Eurocracy and Soros’ Open Society Institute–the sorts of things championed by those who consider themselves “Popperians”–to one of my colleagues at the group blog I seemed to be attributing their views, flaws and policies to the politics of Karl Popper.  This was not the case, and if anything the views and policies advanced by these people are virtually the exact opposite of Popper’s intelligent, humane rightish liberalism.  It is rather like the difference between Strauss and some of his more ridiculous disciples running around nowadays: they claim the master’s mantle and his name, but they may have no necessary relation to his view of things. 

Popper came out of the early 20th century Viennese context.  He was politically idiosyncratic, a scientist and philosopher of mathematics and science, an ex-communist turned social democrat turned anticommunist liberal, and a friend of Fredrich von Hayek.  His dabbling with communist politics, his experience of interwar Austrian politics and his flight from Austria on the eve of the Anschluss all shaped his attitude towards ideologies that invoked teleological, progressive histories that justified their crimes by referring to future utopias.  His Poverty of Historicism is worth reading, especially as an antidote to all of the prating West Coast Straussians do about historicism.  Not that they would understand this, but according to his definition they are the historicists and the enemies of his idea of the open society.  As a scientist, Popper was horrified by the inflexibility and certainty of ideologies, and he was similarly averse to all attempts at domestic social engineering projects that presumed to be able to handle human society as if it were a laboratory experiment.  Real scientific understanding always inculcates  genuine humility about what man is able to know, and Popper was a prime example of this willingness to admit the limits of human knowledge.  These experiences and ideas eventually led to his theorising about the opposition between the open society (tolerant, pluralistic, democratic) and its enemies, whence came his major work by that name. 

He located totalitarian impulses in Plato, Hegel and Marx.  One of his biographers, Malachi Hacohen, does a fairly good job showing that Popper’s understanding of all three was not always terribly accurate or sophisticated; he knew Marx best of all, because of his former politics, but Plato and Hegel he really rendered into caricatures.  Some of these caricatures of Hegel as bootlicking authoritarian lackey and the forerunner to modern totalitarian thought, have survived or been repeated by others, but these caricatures survive only because very few people have ever bothered to read Hegel’s political treatises.  Hegel’s vision of a liberal constitutional monarchy is very frightening, I suppose, if you don’t like that sort of thing.  Popper was one of many then and now to retroject the struggles of the mid-20th century into 5th century B.C. Greece and see Athens as the embodiment of Western values and Sparta as the embodiment of the totalitarian impulse.  The politics of all of the great Athens-based philosophers put a bit of a damper on Popper’s theory of Athens as democratic paradise, and the preference of more than a few of them for elements  of the Spartan regime was one of those complexities that the simple dualism of virtuous democracy and vicious dictatorship/authoritarian state was never going to handle very well.

If there is one thing in Popper’s original vision that remains intact among today’s defenders of the “open society,” it is his incredibly simple, dangerous confidence in democracy as a type of regime.  Unlike Kolnai, his Hungarian contemporary and also an exile from the world of the former Habsburg Empire, he never could develop much appreciation for monarchy, so far as I know.  Also unlike Kolnai, he did not become really conservative.  Kolnai converted  to Catholicism and finally settled in Quebec, both of which had to have had some effect on his outlook.  Kolnai offers a good corrective to some of Popper’s enthusiasms, though he is not free of some of the same biases.

The great trick of “open society” defenders is to make people believe that they actually live in an open, free society in which debate is wide-ranging and basically uncensored, where divergent ideas are tolerated and political diversity is encouraged.  The picture of Western societies as being such open societies is untrue to a significant degree, and today’s “open society” men would like to make it even more untrue in practice. 

This is the “open society” that preaches freedom of speech, but bans the Vlaams Blok (now reconstituted as the Vlaams Belang), puts Orianna Fallaci on trial, whips up the crowd into intense hatred of Pim Fortuyn, jails David Irving, and smears dissidents from the consensus line on fundamental economic, social and foreign policy questions.  These are the preachers of tolerance who work to root out every last vestige of Christian influence in public and most private institutions, implement speech codes on campus and classify what is often nothing more than political disagreement as “hate speech.”  The most impressive part of the scam is the commitment to democracy, which lasts only so long as the public backs one of the pre-approved parties that espouse all of the “correct” positions on any matter, but especially those pertaining to cultural identity and immigration.  Those that take a different line are systematically vilified, demonised and marginalised from the process.  Regardless of how many millions of voters a party may represent, its ideological conformity with the demands of the consensus is the key. 

The purpose of all this is clear: control.  The “open society” wants to create as much cultural and political homogeneity and uniformity as it can in every country, the better to eliminate nation-states and the cultures of the nations therein.  The stated goal may well be to eliminate discrimination, hatred, racism, and so forth, while the real goal is to break those institutions and bonds of social solidarity that might be used to mobilise against elites, whether they are national or transnational elites.  Consolidation of power and the elimination of rival sources of authority and rival objects of loyalty are also part of the project. 

The “open society” provides the ideological and cultural matrix for the pursuit of policies of “openness” with respect to trade and immigration, and these policies help to reinforce the ideology of the “open society.”  It is the intellectual (if that’s the right word for it) underpinning of globalisation, and consequently the enemy of conservatives everywhere.  The “open society” is the society as left-liberals around the world believe society should be, and necessarily conservatives are its enemies.  Also among its enemies are all those who would actually prefer a free society in which dissent is not muzzled, stifled, marginalised, punished or repressed.

Edwards continues to do reasonably well in the talk-show segment of the debate.  He gave an unusually smart (for Edwards) answer on Iran.  Biden gets really excited about intervening in Darfur.  Sane people should be very afraid of Biden.  Anyone who wants to boycott Beijing 2008 over Darfur wants to relive one of the most embarrassing moments of Jimmy Carter’s presidency.  Clinton actually had a good point bashing stupid hypothetical questions.  This was a much-needed statement.  I was waiting for Blitzer to ask something like, “If you had a time machine and could prevent the attack on Pearl Harbor with a magic wand, what would you do?”  Obama seems to actually be boring some of the audience members.  Kucinich got some applause on getting rid of NAFTA. 

Update: Edwards reverts to trial lawyer slime in his answer on top priorities.  Biden, Clinton and Obama give the obvious, right answer of ending the war.  Richardson blathers about education.  Kucinich wants peace–and getting rid of WTO and NAFTA–all in the first 100 days!

It occurs to me tonight: Richardson is now the Gilmore of the Democratic field.  He can’t stop talking about his resume.  I understand that this is his supposed strong suit, but he has to be able to finish a sentence without mentioning one of his past jobs.  He just said something about New Mexico and starting an “Apollo program” on energy consumption…please, make it stop. 

Obama continues to be halting and ill at ease.  Clinton must be having a great time–she has been laughing like a clown.  Edwards is taking as much time as he wants and he is dominating the debate.  For Democratic voters, he seems more and more like the obvious choice (not that I agree with this choice at all).  Gravel was the only one to support English as the official language of the U.S.  Kucinich (naturally) put in his two cents for full-on socialised medicine.  Dodd and Biden were also present, but seem to keep getting lost in the fray of Senators.

Regarding the recent Noonanian gnashing of teeth about Bush and others’ complaints about conservative complicity with the Bush debacle, Poulos, MPM, says:

Had Iraq gone much better or not gone at all, this conversation would not be happening. Conservatives fought properly when offered bad policy. They gave in when Congressional and Party operators concluded that election cash answered questions of political philosophy. Not until now — Election ’08 — had other choices been both compelling and viable. I think, then, that the question of conservative guilt distills down to the question of war guilt — for good, ill, or both.

I think James is somewhat right in his explanation of what has made the Bush repudiations and conservative guilt-tripping rather more common. Without the war pummeling Bush’s approval rating into the ground (and confidence-destroying episodes happening every few months in some important department of government), there would probably be fewer conservatives rocking the old boat.  On the other hand, had the Iraq war never happened, Bush would have drifted along aimlessly, probably would have been voted out in 2004 as a government-increasing squish just like his father and the relative conservative passivity in the face of bad domestic legislation would have gone down as a black mark against them.

As someone who v-voted for “B-Buchanan” in 2000, I can assure him and everyone else that it was not out of “spite”–I voted for the most well-known conservative candidate and, what’s more, one of the only prominent voices on the right who actively opposed the bombing of Yugoslavia when it was happening. 

I wonder if James thinks that conservatives actually “fought properly” and fought hard enough against NLCB or Medicare Part D or any other bad–by conservative lights–domestic policy.  There was some grumbling about NLCB, but that early issue lacked any memorable, “This bill will pass over my cold, dead political body” moments of resistance.  Ditto McCain-Feingold and the Medicare prescription drug bill (the latter of which was, I acknowledge, rammed down the House’s throat by DeLay, but which did not precipitate massive rebellions in the base).  The giving in part of the process seemed to me to happen rather quickly.

More broadly, lines have been drawn between those labeled “realists” and those labeled “neoconservatives.” Yet these terms mean little when even the most committed neoconservative recognizes that any successful policy must be grounded in reality and even the most hardened realist admits that much of the United States’ power and influence stems from its values and ideals. ~Mitt Romney

Via George Ajjan (who proceeds to demolish the claim made in this quote and refute much of the rest of Romney’s blather)

It helps when the “reality” in which the neocons are  grounded is also the one that actually exists here on this planet.

Our very own Aleppine Elephant, George Ajjan, has a great post on Obama’s Foreign Affairs article.  George begins:

When I was in 8th grade, I ran unsuccessfully for Student Council President in a field of 6 or 7 candidates. One of those candidates was an immigrant from India named Surinder Singh. He spoke with a very thick accent, wore a turban, and was generally unaccustomed to American pre-teen life. Thus, Surinder had some hard times at Franklin Avenue Middle School.

But to his credit, that didn’t stop him from standing as one of my competitors in the election of 1989. To this day I can remember elements of Surinder’s campaign speech. He began:

“My name is Surinder Singh. My goal is to make school a better place. We will have longer lunch and recess. We will have more rec nights and field trips. I will clean up the bathrooms!”

And on he went from there with a hilarious litany of pie-in-the-sky campaign promises.

I only bring this up because after reading Barack Obama’s 7-page foreign policy outline published in the most recent Foreign Affairs issue (a publication of the Council on Foreign Relations), Surinder’s ludicrous wish list was the first thing that sprang to mind.

George has put together a list of Obama’s grandiose promises and concluded:

If anyone had any doubts that Barack Obama is totally out of his league and thoroughly unqualified to be President of the United States, this ought to remove them.

At the Spectator blog, Clive Davis has a post with a YouTube video that sets the Brazilian national anthem to images of the country.  He says:

I love the sheer operatic jauntiness.

It does have a Pucciniesque operatic sound to it.  This makes it a rather jolly and pleasant anthem.  It is not, pace Sullivan, “kinda fascist.”

Jeff makes an important observation before he gives the citation from the always insightful Prof. Bacevich. Jeff writes:

That strategy of openness has been structured around the imperatives of economic growth and expansion, on the assumption that the construction of an integrated global order will ensure not only the economic preeminence of the United States, but her geopolitical preeminence.

It is interesting that Jeff should bring up this discussion of a “strategy of openness,” since Fareed Zakaria has come out this week with an affirmation of key elements of that strategy as the appropriate post-Bush strategy for the United States.  In other words, the policy establishment will continue business as usual, minus the glaring incompetence of management.  This has the feel, as all paeans to “open society” have, of whistling past the graveyard. 

Zakaria argues this point in a smart way: by making it appear as if the country is rushing into a period of “hunkering down” and turning away from the rest of the world, he can make the actual same-old, same-old policies he proposes (these can be summed up briefly as: immigration good, Iran bad, growth good), with which the overwhelming majority of presidential candidates agrees, seem bold, counterintuitive, fresh and, above all, very open.  In fact, these are fundamentally the same policies against which large parts of the country are in revolt.  Zakaria simply proposes to put them under new, more worldly, more “open” management. 

All this talk of openness has reminded me of the remark of a modern German politican (whose name escapes me) quoted by Malachi Hacohen in his interesting biography of Karl Popper, which said effectively, “We are all Popperians now.”  Hacohen was quoting this by way of showing the enduring legacy of Popper, whose idiosyncratic political ideas (a humane social democratic view that gradually developed into liberal anticommunist Cold War hawkishness) took form in his magnum opus against all totalitarian impulses, The Open Society And Its Enemies.  It occurs to me that this German politician had a point, to the extent that virtually every politician and pundit across the spectrum feels obliged to say nice things about the “open society” and the dreadful George Soros  often dresses up his brand of international meddling under the guise of his Open Society Institute.  Most of us may be Popperians, but it is important to begin asking why we should remain so when the “open society” (which is neither open, nor a society) has proven to be such a failure? 

Cross-posted at WWWTW

At Eating Words, there has been some discussion of the merits of the compliments contained in the Song of Songs.  While these may not be the most evocative poetic references in the English-speaking world today (or perhaps at any time), it is possible to find Near Eastern love poetry using these sorts of images for centuries after this.  Comparison of women’s attributes to pomegranates, cedars or cypresses, for instance, is fairly common in what little traditional Armenian poetry I have seen.  The most bizarre compliment, and one that I can’t quite understand, is when Sayat Nova compares his beloved’s hair to basil.  This doesn’t strike me as a complimentary thing to say, but perhaps I am not being imaginative enough.

I did see through Mr Blair when others didn’t, and for exactly the same reason that I see through Mr Cameron. That is, I am interested in politics as such, not as a branch of show business or of the gossip industry. ~Peter Hitchens

My view of the Republican presidential field this time around is much the same.  My low opinions of Romney, Giuliani and McCain, among others, come from considering what their policies would actually be rather than focusing on the dreadful question of “electability.”  In a sane world, the merits of a candidate’s policies and his “electability” would be closely related.  In any case, after two terms of Bush we should understand exactly what a campaign based on “leadership” and “electability” gets you: disastrous policies and actually fairly poor leadership.    

I did see through Mr. Bush the first time round and did recognise early on that he was obviously not conservative and his policies were generally going to be poor ones.  At the time, I assumed his worst policies would be his domestic policies, which would have been the case had he not overachieved in foreign policy incompetence as well.  Admittedly, I was sucked in by the deception or confusion of Bush on foreign policy and thought that “humble” foreign policy was a better bet than anything Gore might cook up.  A year after Kosovo, it was hard not to look at things this way.  On that, I should have known better, and I should certainly have known better than to buy even a little bit into whatever Condi Rice was selling at the time.  Even so, my 2000 Buchanan vote seems smarter and smarter every day.  Will a third party get my vote this time?  Almost certainly, unless GOP primary voters show some good sense and select Ron Paul.  You might think after the last eight years these voters would not be duped with the same old “leadership” and “electability” cons that got them into their present predicament, but you would be wrong.