One under-appreciated but useful aspect of Egypt's revolution is that it is a direct repudiation of both the realists AND the neoconservatives. The realists never thought that anything like this could ever happen. Sure, they're preaching "military coup" now, and the military has a big role to play in the short-term, but there's really nothing in realist doctrine and theory that acceptably explains all this, and not a realist in the world that had predicted it.
It's even worse for the neocons, though. Their argument was that only violent, foreign-backed uprisings and takeovers could bring any freedom to the middle east. That was the whole point of the Iraq adventure, of their coddling of Iranian terrorists, of their advocacy of sanctions against states that they didn't like, and of their attitude towards the Middle East in general. They were completely wrong. It was non-violent, it was Arab-led, and it had NOTHING to do with outside pressure. (Far from being a target of sanctions, Egypt was a favored client of the West. )
In fact, if anything, it was more about outside support than about outside pressure; while this wasn't a "twitter revolution" or anything like that, there's no doubt that the people of Egypt drew strength and hope from the outpouring of support that they received around the world. If we as outsiders want people to "throw off their chains", we shouldn't try to force them into it, we should encourage them. Make it positive, not negative.
(The lessons for handling the Israel-Palestinian conflict are left as an exercise for the reader.)
If there's any theory in IR or political science that holds sway here, it's good ol' fashioned liberalism, the kind that realists since Morganthau have always sneered at as "idealism". The Tunisian and Egyptian people wanted to be free of their dictators, and used their passion and determination to do it. That is the finest example of liberal doctrine and liberal tradition as we've ever seen, in countries that were thought to be so thoroughly illiberal as to be unrecognizable.
This isn't just a new day for Egypt. It's a new day for how we understand the world and our place within it.
Showing posts with label Liberalism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Liberalism. Show all posts
Friday, February 11, 2011
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
It's About Linking and Money
I don't have as much time or ability to comment on The Blindspot, by Freddie deBoer, as I would like. I've already praised it; it doesn't need more, and I'll have to limit my comments to two short points.
First, the comments saying "Klein has beliefs! Yglesias has beliefs! They just focus on the policies that are possible!" are a bit wrongheaded. Those things are undoubtedly true. Where the problem lies is that neoliberals like Klein and Yglesias only really pay attention to arguments coming from the center-left and the right. They don't link to anybody who's really to their left, they don't discuss anybody to their left, and therefore they don't acknowledge the existence of anybody to their left. This has been a constant problem online that has everything to do with the sheer multitude of voices. You can't read it all, and you can't even read most of it; so it becomes too easy to focus on a few quick, convenient sources.
That isn't even necessarily a problem. If those sources are doing a good job of being curators of opinion—which is the ultimate role of the vast majority of political bloggers—then they'll be exposed to a variety of opinions simply because of the nature of the network. The problem comes when all the big voices are all paying attention to the same voices, and rarely (if ever) venture outside of that reservation to see what everybody else is saying. This is not a recent phenomenon. In fact, it's the oldest problem with blogging, and has only been exacerbated by the rise of social networking tools as blogging substitutes. Echo chambers are a constant menace.
Secondly, you can't understand this issue without having also read The Rise of the New Global Elite. Money is speech. The Supreme Court ruled it so, it has reaffirmed it over and over again, and it's almost certainly going to keep doing so. In a country—and on a planet—hurtling headlong towards a plutonomy where the vast majority of wealth and income are in the hands of an ever-shrinking minority of the ultra-wealthy, that is naturally going to mean that speech is in the hands of that tiny minority as well.
deBoer hits on this when he talks about market fundamentalist libertarians and their outsized influence, but it isn't the thrust of the article and I think that misses the point. People who sell their ability to write and speak as their stock in trade—people like Klein and Yglesias, to get back to them—are almost inevitably going to have to sell that ability to the beneficiaries of the plutonomy because there's nobody else to sell it to. Speech is money, and we all know who has the money.
That sharply curtails their flexibility. Sure, they can advocate for progressive social policy and maybe even slightly progressive economic and taxation policy. But an out-and-out assault on the economic foundations of America? Hell no. Even acknowledging that such a thing is advocated could dry up the money spigots, and get you replaced by people whose morals, ethics, or lack of such more perfectly serve the interests of the guy who's ponying up the dough. Sure, deBoers points out the outsized influence of outlets like Reason has to do with the money behind them, but he never brings up the fact that the money behind them is in the hands of self-interested, self-serving billionaires.
This isn't "libertarians" buying speech; this is the plutonomy perpetuating its interests by showering convenient people with money. And, yes, that is harmful to the American public discourse. But since the American members of that "global elite" demonstrated that they couldn't give a rat's ass about their fellow Americans at gunpoint, I doubt that matters much to them. Money is speech no matter where you're from.
deBoer did a follow-up entry that said he was being deliberately provocative. Fine. That's the OTHER, non-curatorial job of the blogger. But there's one thing that I did want to actually quote and response to.
For many people, that's an improvement. But sometimes you need something beefier, and I still believe that Freddie deBoer's work demonstrates just how important it is.
First, the comments saying "Klein has beliefs! Yglesias has beliefs! They just focus on the policies that are possible!" are a bit wrongheaded. Those things are undoubtedly true. Where the problem lies is that neoliberals like Klein and Yglesias only really pay attention to arguments coming from the center-left and the right. They don't link to anybody who's really to their left, they don't discuss anybody to their left, and therefore they don't acknowledge the existence of anybody to their left. This has been a constant problem online that has everything to do with the sheer multitude of voices. You can't read it all, and you can't even read most of it; so it becomes too easy to focus on a few quick, convenient sources.
That isn't even necessarily a problem. If those sources are doing a good job of being curators of opinion—which is the ultimate role of the vast majority of political bloggers—then they'll be exposed to a variety of opinions simply because of the nature of the network. The problem comes when all the big voices are all paying attention to the same voices, and rarely (if ever) venture outside of that reservation to see what everybody else is saying. This is not a recent phenomenon. In fact, it's the oldest problem with blogging, and has only been exacerbated by the rise of social networking tools as blogging substitutes. Echo chambers are a constant menace.
Secondly, you can't understand this issue without having also read The Rise of the New Global Elite. Money is speech. The Supreme Court ruled it so, it has reaffirmed it over and over again, and it's almost certainly going to keep doing so. In a country—and on a planet—hurtling headlong towards a plutonomy where the vast majority of wealth and income are in the hands of an ever-shrinking minority of the ultra-wealthy, that is naturally going to mean that speech is in the hands of that tiny minority as well.
deBoer hits on this when he talks about market fundamentalist libertarians and their outsized influence, but it isn't the thrust of the article and I think that misses the point. People who sell their ability to write and speak as their stock in trade—people like Klein and Yglesias, to get back to them—are almost inevitably going to have to sell that ability to the beneficiaries of the plutonomy because there's nobody else to sell it to. Speech is money, and we all know who has the money.
That sharply curtails their flexibility. Sure, they can advocate for progressive social policy and maybe even slightly progressive economic and taxation policy. But an out-and-out assault on the economic foundations of America? Hell no. Even acknowledging that such a thing is advocated could dry up the money spigots, and get you replaced by people whose morals, ethics, or lack of such more perfectly serve the interests of the guy who's ponying up the dough. Sure, deBoers points out the outsized influence of outlets like Reason has to do with the money behind them, but he never brings up the fact that the money behind them is in the hands of self-interested, self-serving billionaires.
This isn't "libertarians" buying speech; this is the plutonomy perpetuating its interests by showering convenient people with money. And, yes, that is harmful to the American public discourse. But since the American members of that "global elite" demonstrated that they couldn't give a rat's ass about their fellow Americans at gunpoint, I doubt that matters much to them. Money is speech no matter where you're from.
deBoer did a follow-up entry that said he was being deliberately provocative. Fine. That's the OTHER, non-curatorial job of the blogger. But there's one thing that I did want to actually quote and response to.
I am sorry, though, for the Twitter ugliness. To put it succinctly, some conservatives were taking gratuitous swipes at the post on public Twitter feeds. I responded in an update to the post. Some people felt, for some odd reason, that this was out of bounds. But, look-- people were talking trash on public Twitter feeds. So I talked back. If you don't protect your tweets, they're public. Twitter is a public forum. It's not passing notes in biology class. I understand why people get bent out of shape about this, and it's why I fucking hate Twitter: it turns everybody cliquey. It's public, but gated through the following system, and it encourages a situation where people look to their in group to back them up in a kind of weird public/private fusion.I wholeheartedly agree. Twittering is a form of blogging. It's public. You can dial up anybody's Twitter page and read the lot of it. The fact that's short-form blogging doesn't change that. That's one of the reasons I get a bit annoyed with all that "death of blogging" nonsense. Blogging never went away. It's just that, for many, it got shorter and faster.
For many people, that's an improvement. But sometimes you need something beefier, and I still believe that Freddie deBoer's work demonstrates just how important it is.
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
The Blindspot
This piece by Freddie deBoer on the milquetoast, capitulation-happy people who dominate the "left" in blogging today, and how its membership excludes opinions that are actually leftist, isn't just good. It isn't just great. It's ASTONISHING. Even if you disagree with it, it's one of the best pieces of long-form personal essay-writing I've read this year. It's a rich, meaty smack in the face to those who argue that "blogging is dead" by reminding people what the hell it was always about.
I may have more to say later. But I'll tell you two things: Freddie is going on the blogroll RIGHT NOW, and I don't have the faintest clue what the hell happened to Matthew Yglesias, either.
I may have more to say later. But I'll tell you two things: Freddie is going on the blogroll RIGHT NOW, and I don't have the faintest clue what the hell happened to Matthew Yglesias, either.
Monday, November 08, 2010
One Of the Big Differences Between Liberals and Conservatives
When liberals win big, as in 2006 and 2008, you never hear people say that it's a triumph for liberalism.
When conservatives win big, as they did this year, you CONSTANTLY hear people say that it's a triumph for conservatism.
If it were just the media, then that'd be annoying but understandable. They take their cues from Fox, and Fox is a propaganda arm of the conservative movement. What's bizarre is that liberals never claim victory either. They are, as we see over and over again with that "progressive" bullshit, totally afraid to claim victory for their ideology. Hell, they're unwilling to even DISCUSS their ideology. They'll talk about the economy, they'll talk about warfare, they'll talk endlessly about political missteps and tactics and strategies and all that horse-race crap that only the media actually cares about. But you never hear them say "this shows that the American public is actually pretty liberal; it's just had the word demonized by agitprop from the well-heeled-and-amoral."
Meanwhile, every two-bit conservative from Canada to Mexico is crowing about how the 2010 results are a victory for conservatism. People like Mike Pence babble on and on about how the results are "a victory for conservative values". They're shouting their ideology from the rooftops.
The results aren't any sort of victory for conservatism, of course. How could they be? It's been a grand total of two years since Obama swept the nation. People's beliefs don't change that fast. No, they're a reaction to an unbelievably shitty job market, combined with the regression from the Democratic wave of 2008 and a metric tonne of Citizens United-spawned attacks ads. Americans are no more "conservative" in values than they were two years ago, and every time you actually poll them about their REAL beliefs, they end up coming across as fairly liberal. Hell, most want to repeal Obama's health care legislation because they want to add a public option. That ain't "conservative".
And what'd be nice if a liberal was actually out there saying that. If one of these talking heads said "most Americans are liberal, but don't realize it, because they've been told all their lives that liberals eat babies for breakfast". I know it's not popular and, perhaps, not politically savvy to tell the American people that they're being bamboozled by agents and apologists of that 1% of the population that's walking away with a full quarter of America's income. Such talk always seems to raise the spectre of the Cold War Commies in the American mind. Class inequality was the cause of The Enemy.
Nonetheless, it's true. And wouldn't it be nice if liberals calmly, forthrightly, and unapologetically spoke the truth for once?
When conservatives win big, as they did this year, you CONSTANTLY hear people say that it's a triumph for conservatism.
If it were just the media, then that'd be annoying but understandable. They take their cues from Fox, and Fox is a propaganda arm of the conservative movement. What's bizarre is that liberals never claim victory either. They are, as we see over and over again with that "progressive" bullshit, totally afraid to claim victory for their ideology. Hell, they're unwilling to even DISCUSS their ideology. They'll talk about the economy, they'll talk about warfare, they'll talk endlessly about political missteps and tactics and strategies and all that horse-race crap that only the media actually cares about. But you never hear them say "this shows that the American public is actually pretty liberal; it's just had the word demonized by agitprop from the well-heeled-and-amoral."
Meanwhile, every two-bit conservative from Canada to Mexico is crowing about how the 2010 results are a victory for conservatism. People like Mike Pence babble on and on about how the results are "a victory for conservative values". They're shouting their ideology from the rooftops.
The results aren't any sort of victory for conservatism, of course. How could they be? It's been a grand total of two years since Obama swept the nation. People's beliefs don't change that fast. No, they're a reaction to an unbelievably shitty job market, combined with the regression from the Democratic wave of 2008 and a metric tonne of Citizens United-spawned attacks ads. Americans are no more "conservative" in values than they were two years ago, and every time you actually poll them about their REAL beliefs, they end up coming across as fairly liberal. Hell, most want to repeal Obama's health care legislation because they want to add a public option. That ain't "conservative".
And what'd be nice if a liberal was actually out there saying that. If one of these talking heads said "most Americans are liberal, but don't realize it, because they've been told all their lives that liberals eat babies for breakfast". I know it's not popular and, perhaps, not politically savvy to tell the American people that they're being bamboozled by agents and apologists of that 1% of the population that's walking away with a full quarter of America's income. Such talk always seems to raise the spectre of the Cold War Commies in the American mind. Class inequality was the cause of The Enemy.
Nonetheless, it's true. And wouldn't it be nice if liberals calmly, forthrightly, and unapologetically spoke the truth for once?
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