Posted on 01/04/2009 11:05:43 AM PST by Publius804
Sam Huntington Was Plainly Correct
If 2008 taught us anything, it was the danger of listening to people who tell us what we want to hear. Anybody with a lick of sense should have seen that we were living inside a bubble of Panglossian optimism that had little basis in observable fact. But as George Orwell quipped, "To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle."
Samuel P. Huntington, the eminent Harvard political scientist who died on Christmas Eve, was used to being derided for his ability to see what was in front of our collective nose and to describe it to people who didn't want to hear. In 1957, he rankled the academic establishment with his first book, The Soldier and the State, which argued that protecting our liberal political and social order required a professional military that held a far less idealistic view of human nature than many of us tender.
His thesis appalled academic elites of the day, who misread it as a defense of militarism. In fact, Huntington - all his life a New Deal Democrat - argued that liberals favor individualism because they take security for granted. Conservatives, including soldiers, understand that security is not in the natural order of things and that protecting our liberal order in a hostile world requires rejecting the standard liberal view of good, evil and human nature.
The Soldier and the State, despite its seeming paradoxical, ideologically inconvenient message, went on to become a realist classic - and Huntington's brilliant career was launched.
(Excerpt) Read more at realclearpolitics.com ...
“Defenders of liberalism had better be conservative about human nature - or else. “
As long as the author means modern liberalism, the problem is they cannot be conservatives about human nature. If they were, they would not be liberals.
All modern liberalism is rooted in a Rosseauian view of human nature that makes almost no sense. To be realistic about human nature would require liberals to change every view they hold dear.
Neoconservatives are a product of modern liberalism, and their belief that America can "convert to world to democracy" through an evangelical foreign policy of the Wilsonian variety is a pox on the contemporary conservative movement.
Kissinger and Schultz are what is needed, to say nothing of Metternich and Macchiavelli. Unfortunately, the Neo-Realism of folks like Mearshimer and Zakaria (who has been seduced by his own press) is rather wishy-washy.
National Review
November 6th, 2000
John Derbyshire
Head of the New Class
. . . the New Class—the intellectualized, tertiary-educated, meritocratic elites of the law, academia, the media, the great foundations and government bureaucracies.
The term “new class” was first used in this precise context by Daniel Patrick Moynihan in 1972, and got capital letters from Michael Novak later that same year. Some key essays on the phenomenon were gathered together in a 1979 book, The New Class? edited by the historian B. Bruce-Briggs. Anyone who seeks clarification of who the New Class are and where they come from could not do better than to track down a copy of that book (now, alas, long out of print).
The New Class has been engaged in its “long march through the institutions” for thirty years . . .
http://olimu.com/Journalism/Texts/Commentary/NewClass.htm
I went to college with Rod Dreher. I didn’t know him, but I remember his byline in the student newspaper.
Thanks so much for posting the link.
Despite being written over 8 years ago, there is no better description of the Obama campaign or of the elite reaction to Sarah Palin.
The New Class has deep differences of opinion with the common people and therefore cannot get elected without a certain amount of deceit. The American public is, for example, religious; the New Class is atheist. (As Peter Berger expressed it very elegantly: the people of the U.S.A. are as religious as those of India, but they are ruled over by an elite as irreligious as Swedes.) Thus New Class candidates for power must make a show of piety. At critical points in his various personal dramas, President Clinton has taken care to be seen coming out of church clutching a bible.
Huntington describes the pickle we're in. Derbyshire helps to point out why.
It is a good John Derbyshire column.
My thanks to Freeper Harrius Magnus for mentioning the column on another thread some time ago.
Kissinger and Schultz are what is needed, to say nothing of Metternich and Macchiavelli. Unfortunately, the Neo-Realism of folks like Mearshimer and Zakaria (who has been seduced by his own press) is rather wishy-washy.
Realists are not fooled by their press, but by their university models and assumptions. They make assumptions of human nature that don't work historically. Game theory work only when everyone plays the same game. (In theory, they plan for games like "grim trigger", but always assume that no rational person would play that game, forgetting that their assumption of rationality undermines any pretense of "realism".)
Interesting post and thread. BTTT.
“Neoconservatives are a product of modern liberalism, and their belief that America can “convert to world to democracy” through an evangelical foreign policy of the Wilsonian variety is a pox on the contemporary conservative movement.”
In general I agree with you. But as to the middle east now, remaking it is real politik because of the alternatives. The middle east as it exists now is unacceptable to me and to America. If left alone, it will cause nuclear or biological war, eventually. If left alone, American cities will be wiped out en masse. That alternative is not acceptable.
So my normal conservative reservations about invading and trying to build a real nation (not necessarily a democracy; but a functioning nation that does not threaten the US) out of a collection of barbarians (or, if necessary, occupying to prevent them from doing mischief to us) are set aside.
If we don’t try to accomplish that in the middle east, the alternatives are mass genocide (basically, razing the middle east with nuclear or biological weapons) or doing nothing (Obamaing) and eventually surrendering to nuclear and biological attacks from the folks we ignored because of conservative principles.
I’m not ready to accept either of those alternatives without first trying to force the middle east into the 21st century. Even if there’s only a 5% chance of succeeding (and Iraq suggests the odds are better, at least in some places), it defers our choice between Obamaing (doing nothing useful) and genocide until we know it is impossible to fix things short of genocide.
I am deeply opposed to nation building etc if the alternative is that something bad happens somewhere that does not affect me or my children very much. Wilsonian nation building is almost always a bad thing, unless it is the least worst alternative.
“Libertarians are also liberals. The assumptions are only that of a single civilizations, and exist only as long as there is enough moral capital to continue spending it without recreating it.”
I don’t think it’s fair to call them liberals. That’s a pretty nasty slur :). Libertarians get some things right. Liberals almost never get anything right.
You are correct, though, that, like liberals, libertarianism works only if a rather silly set of Rousseauian assumptions about human nature is correct.
Your point about accumulated Judaeo-Christian moral capital being spent by libertarians is a nice way to put the problem. Eventually, human nature left unchecked, produces something like Lord of the Flies or Triumph of the Will. Once you abandon a reason to have morals, and don’t renew it, that’s where you end up.
I beg to differ.
The term was coined by Milovan Điljas, writing about the power structure in communist bloc states in his work "The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System" in 1957, although the concept was described earlier by George Orwell in 1984 explicitly, and in Animal Farm ironically (all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others). Moynihan borrowed the idea and extended its application to the Federal government, but it was not original with him.
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