Racist Chips Off the Old Block?

I was indifferently pouring myself a bowl-full of corn chips the other day when from the bag emerged this:

How does this sort of thing happen? No, really. How does it happen? Do the workers save a burnt chip -- hereafter known as "Burnt Chip + Number" -- that was rejected by quality control and surreptitiously toss it into a passing bag just prior to the bag's sealing? Or does quality control simply miss one of these burnt fellows every once in a great while? Whether intentional or stochastic, the consequence is a race to the bottom of e-quality, this being an online query.

But the query could easily devolve into that putatively much-needed discourse, "A Conversation on Race." For example, which runner is faster: Achilles or Usain Bolt? Neither, as we learn from Zeno, for neither of the two can take the first infinitesimally small step.

No race, therefore, exists, and since there is thus no race, Burnt Chip 1 thereby needn't worry about possible racists!

It's a wonderful world . . .

Academia Rejects Diversity?

Arthur C. Brooks

NYT

Academia? Reject diversity? Surely not! Let's look:

[N]ew research . . . shows that academia has itself stopped short in both the understanding and practice of true diversity - the diversity of ideas - and that the problem is taking a toll on the quality and accuracy of scholarly work. This year, a team of scholars from six universities studying ideological diversity in the behavioral sciences published a paper in the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences that details a shocking level of political groupthink in academia. The authors show that for every politically conservative social psychologist in academia there are about 14 liberal social psychologists.

Why the imbalance? The researchers found evidence of discrimination and hostility within academia toward conservative researchers and their viewpoints. In one survey cited, 82 percent of social psychologists admitted they would be less likely to support hiring a conservative colleague than a liberal scholar with equivalent qualifications.

This has consequences well beyond fairness. It damages accuracy and quality. As the authors write, "Increased political diversity would improve social psychological science by reducing the impact of bias mechanisms such as confirmation bias, and by empowering dissenting minorities to improve the quality of the majority's thinking."

Who's telling us this? Arthur C. Brooks? The opinionated columnist who works for the American Enterprise Institute? Ah, a conservative. He's obviously biased, so ignore what he says, even if he is publishing this article, "Academia's Rejection of Diversity," in the New York Times (November 2, 2015).

Remember: Diversity in all but ideas! (Because ideas are dangerous.)

James Kurth on American Conservatism

James Kurth
Professor of Political Science Emeritus
and
Senior Research Scholar at Swarthmore College
Member, Board of Editors - Orbis

I regularly receive emails from the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI), with which my old 'paleoconservative' history professor at Berkeley, Walter A. McDougall, is associated, and a recent missive was penned by the man pictured above, James Kurth, one of the editors of the FPRI journal, Orbis, and a senior fellow at the FPRI's Center for the Study of America and the West.

The missive referred to is titled "The Crisis of American Conservatism: Inherent Contradictions and the End of the Road," which sounds like it would be self-consciously a swan song, and indeed it is, for it looks directly at the stark facts confronting American conservatism . . . though Kurth holds out hope that some reinvention of conservatism can be achieved and prove successful.

His article's main focus, however, is on the incompatible ideologies grouped together in America under the label "conservatism":

In recent decades, political analysts have found it useful to interpret American political movements by distinguishing between different policy dimensions or arenas. Thus, conservatives have been divided into (1) those who are most concerned about economic or fiscal issues, i.e., pro-business or "free-enterprise" conservatives; (2) those most concerned with religious or social issues, i.e., pro-church or "traditional-values" conservatives; and (3) those most concerned with national-security or defense issues, i.e., pro-military or "patriotic" conservatives.

As Kurth acknowledges, there's nothing new about this, but he proceeds to make some interesting points, noting -- for example -- that the free-enterprise ideology of Milton Friedman, which has dominated the Republican Party's pro-business conservatives is, in one sense, not conservative:

Although Friedman and his followers were always talking about the virtues of the free market and of conservatism in economic affairs, their approach was not truly a free-market or traditional-conservative one at all. Instead, they advocated a controlled market in matters of money, credit and finance, while advocating a free market with respect to almost everything else. And the market in money, credit, and finance was to be controlled by an oligopoly of the major banks, implemented through the Federal Reserve System (whose name made it sound like some kind of government agency, but whose reality made it more a cartel of profit-making banks).

This monetarist policy worked well enough for about thirty years, but it planted the seeds of its failure by deregulating banks and supporting the risky investments that resulted in the crash of 2007, which caused the current Great Recession. Kurth goes on to show the problems of Neo-Conservatism (i.e., the dominant patriotic conservatives), basically a military doctrine advocating American intervention abroad in troubled places such as the Middle East and the Islamic world generally. He also shows the weakness of the traditional values conservatives, primarily, that this collection of groups has no "big money" backing it, and that it is undermined by the pro-business conservatives in their support for cheap immigrant labor, but readers will need to see the article for details on this and other 'contradictions.'

I thus won't summarize everything, but I encourage readers -- regardless of political position -- to peruse the article for a rational, intelligent, authoritative analysis of the current state of American conservatism and how it reached this state.

Professor Walter A. McDougall's Burkean Conservatism

Professor Walter A. McDougall
Alloy-Ansin Professor of International Relations
University of Pennsylvania
Senior Fellow of the Foreign Policy Research Institute

I've not blogged on my old history professor Walter McDougall in a long while, partly because he's been so publicly quiet, so silent working on his next book that he only recently broke his silence to present a paper titled "Nightmares of an I.R. Professor" in which he relates the following anecdote:

[E]arly in 2012 a young specialist on the Middle East posted a blog about NATO air strikes in defense of the popular revolt in Libya against Muammar Qaddafi. The White House, eager to reassure Americans that the operation was not the prelude to another costly war and nation-building project in the Muslim world, called the President's posture "leading from behind." The blogger wondered whether this modest, multilateral, and limited-liability intervention might signal a full-fledged Obama Doctrine that repealed the proud, unilateral, and rhetorically limitless (George W.) Bush Doctrine. He then recalled a "fabulous book" titled Promised Land, Crusader State, which seemed newly relevant in the wake of the Iraqi and Afghan wars, and wondered "what would Walter McDougall think?"

That query was disconcerting since the "would" made it sound like McDougall was already dead.

That young blogger might not have known, but I knew McDougall wasn't dead, else I'd already have heard about his demise. I did wonder, however, what he thinks about the recent events in Libya, given that he's a Burkean conservative skeptical about intervening in the political affairs of foreign countries, which didn't make him popular with Neoconservatives even before 9/11:

My own new status as a pariah became painfully obvious in Spring 1999 when I addressed The Philadelphia Society on the subject "The Crusader State in the 21st Century." Joking that they asked me to speak about something I hoped would not exist in an era that had not yet begun, I used the occasion to draw spooky parallels between contemporary American interventionists and Medieval popes! Both could make geopolitical arguments on their behalf: the Crusades, after all, were a long-delayed counteroffensive against Arab jihads. But both promoted forms of "assertive multilateralism" on behalf of "regime change" in hopes of solidifying and sanctifying their home fronts while forcibly exporting their civilization. But pious intentions did not prevent the crusading knights from wreaking death, destruction, and havoc at ruinous cost, including collateral massacres of non-combatant Muslims, Jews, and Greek Orthodox Christians. Worse still, the Crusades became a self-perpetuating, transnational, political-economic system justified by "the revolutionary idea that Christendom had an intrinsic right to extend its sovereignty over all who did not recognize the rule of the Roman Church." With high irony I suggested the audience substitute America for Church and Democracy for Christianity to imagine how our modern crusaders could spawn perpetual war for perpetual peace -- like Oceania in George Orwell's 1984 -- and exhaust their own countries in the process. Much of the audience gave my talk a standing ovation, but an angry minority did not. Some were devout Catholics who took offense that I would liken Urban II to the sleazy Clinton! The rest appeared to be earnest young Straussians in whose neoconservative Weltanschauung my Burkean conservatism was heresy.

From these words, one might expect that McDougall will have opposed even leading from behind, and perhaps he did oppose it, though I do not know this for a fact. Also, since he says nothing of the recent events in Libya, including the murder of Ambassador Stevens, then I suspect that his recent talk took place before all of these unsettling developments. Perhaps he would say what he said after his reference to the "butcher's bill" the US has had to pay for its invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq:

By now you can guess "what McDougall would think."

McDougall is thinking, "I told you so!"

I imagine that's more or less what he's also thinking about Libya, even if we have been "leading from behind."

Irony of The Iron Lady?

The Iron Lady
Wikipedia

I finally went to see Meryl Streep play Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady. I had been wanting to see the film, but it had slipped off my radar screen due to my being occupied with various things recently, including the numerous duties associated with the semester's onset, and I only was reminded of it when my wife asked if I wanted to see it with her. I did.

Streep does her usual flawless best, of course, and the film brought back memories of those times because I lived through them myself, so I enjoyed the scenes, but I found the movie lacking. As I told Sun-Ae when we were leaving the cinema, unless one already knows the story of Thatcher's years in office, the movie will be incomprehensible. She agreed and said that one professor here in Korea -- an older female professor of political science, if I recall -- had made much the same criticism.

The story suffers the identical ailment as Thatcher herself, namely, a fragmented memory of her life. The irony -- unintended, I presume -- is that we viewers succumb to this same condition. Seeing this film can make one forget why Thatcher was great.

I got the film's main point, of course, that Thatcher's life was a Shakespearean tragedy after the manner of King Lear, with Thatcher ending her career incapable of listening to anyone else, and there's some truth to that view, but her larger career did not end with that political defeat at the hands of her fellow Conservatives. She not only stepped down from power with grace in her final speech to Parliament, she also gave a rousing speech at the first Conservative Party meeting after that and received a standing ovation from the rank-and-file members. Moreover, she regained her confidence quickly after her fall from power and went on to a post-political career giving political speeches, for which she was much sought after around the world throughout the nineties and into the new millenium, until a series of strokes in 2002 cut that short and led to her decline.

Every life ends in decline, unless prematurely shortened, but I can say that the movie, despite its limitations, managed to convey hints of her earlier greatness even in its depiction of her in failing health. There's a touching scene near the end where she's being examined by her doctor. He asks her how she feels -- perfectly normal for a doctor to inquire about -- and she goes on a rant about how everybody these days wants to know each other's feelings:

"Don't ask me what I'm feeling," she gripes, "ask me what I'm thinking!"

"What are you thinking?" the doctor asks.

Appearing initially at a loss, she nevertheless steels herself and manages to draw upon a memory apt for the moment, "I'm thinking about something my father used to tell me. 'Watch your thoughts, for they become words. Watch your words, for they become actions. Watch your actions, for they become habits. Watch your habits, for they become character. Watch your character, for it becomes your destiny!'"

There was irony in that, too, but intentional irony for the film in this case, and I suppose there's some truth to this irony, for Thatcher's strength of character proved to be her weakness as well: self-reliant, she came to rely on no one but herself and thus came to lose the support of her closest political associates. That was her political destiny

But as I've already pointed out, her life didn't end with that defeat, nor did her political influence.

Maggie Thatcher, Milk Snatcher!

Margaret Thatcher

Electoral Victory 1979

Peter Marlow / Magnum

Newsweek

I still recall that chant by her opponents, dating from 1971, I think, when Margaret Thatcher was appointed Secretary of State for Education and Science in the Heath administration and attempted to cut spending for nonacademic things, including the free milk program for elementary students. Of course, I was too young to be aware of Thatcher at the time, being merely an eighth grader in the isolated Ozarks, and I learned of Thatcher's 'milk-snatching' intentions only later, around 1979, when she became Britain's Prime Minister and I was old enough to have developed some political views and to take an interest in international politics. Having benefitted from free milk as a poor young elementary student, I instinctively disliked Thatcher's conservative politics and found my attention grabbed by the chant.

Now, much older, perhaps slightly wiser, and confronted by the Korean Left's insistence on 'free' lunches for all elementary school students in Seoul, I mutter, "Free lunches? There is no free lunch! Where will the money for these 'free' lunches come from?" As a taxpayer, I know, of course. From me . . . and everybody else, more or less. But in the long run, as society ages in a country whose birthrate is below replacement level, I raise the same question: "Where will all that money come from?" So, I look at Thatcher with different eyes . . .

Newsweek has a fascinating article by Amanda Foreman on this woman whom the Soviets called The Iron Lady: "The New Thatcher Era" (December 26, 2011 - January 2, 2012). Readers can go to the link to read the entire article on how Thatcher predicted the European Union's current problems, so I'll just note an anecdote by Meryl Streep, who plays Thatcher in a new film, for Streep happened to see Thatcher give a speech in 2001, one of the many speeches that she gave after leaving public office:

After she left office, Thatcher's chief occupation became giving speeches, lots and lots of speeches, for lots and lots of money. Streep happened to stumble on one such event while visiting her daughter at Northwestern University: "She delivered the lecture, which was smooth and very controlled. And then she started to take questions. She continued for over an hour and a half, gaining in animation and zeal as she went on. I thought, oh my God, she's absolutely formidable."

In retrospect, I think so, too. She was formidable, great, towering over the men of her era. I didn't appreciate her enough at the time, and I'm saddened to hear of her decline due to the blight of Alzheimers.

I even went out and bought her biography for my daughter, hoping to provide motivation . . .

Walter McDougall on "American Grand Strategy"

Walter A. McDougall

(University of Pennsylvania)

My old Berkeley professor Walter A. McDougall (though now at the University of Pennsylvania) has recently published an article -- "Can the United States Do Grand Strategy?" -- in The Telegram (No. 3, April 2010).

The paper originated as a question posed by a student in the spring of 2003, asking McDougall how long he expected the United States to remain dominant in the world. Off the cuff, he replied:

It all depends on whether the United States is as exceptional as we like to believe. If the United States follows the pattern of all previous powers, then demographic or technological trends, new foreign threats, strategic folly, overextension, domestic decadence, or sheer loss of will must hurl it into decline, perhaps within fifty years. If, however, our institutions, values, and national character really do amount to a new order for the ages, a potent mix enabling the United States to reinvent itself and force other nations to adapt to the challenges posed by us, then the republic may stay on its asymptotic trajectory.

That was his measured response, but he had second thoughts on the matter:

I stopped there [in my response], but as I walked to my office I recalled Arnold J. Toynbee's historical law to the effect that empires die by suicide, not murder.

With that gloomy note, McDougall open his reflection on whether or not America is capable of conducting any grand strategy, and he quickly turns to a similarly gloomy view, namely, that a grand strategy capable of keeping a nation from suicidal despair is simply impossible for a democracy:

Democracies, especially the wild and vast American one, do not do grand strategy, or else cannot do it very well or for very long: such was the famous judgment rendered by Tocqueville 170 years ago.

McDougall, however, does not entirely agree, and speaking as a historian of diplomatic relations, he argures:

[T]he historical record would seem to indicate, first, that the United States can and has embraced grand strategies (even during the eras once scorned as isolationist), second, that strategies based on realist premises have been mostly fruitful, and third, that strategies based on idealist premises have been mostly abortive.

In this view, McDougall situates himself between neoconservatives and paleo-conservatives:

Robert Kagan, the neoconservative heavyweight, does not agree [with my skepticism about idealism]. Indeed, he is devoting years to a two-volume history of U.S. foreign relations seemingly to debunk interpretations such as my own -- albeit without so much as a footnote to the scholarship he dismisses. Dangerous Nation, Kagan's first volume, covers the century down to 1898 during which neutrality, unilateralism, and reticence seemed to characterize U.S. foreign policy. On the contrary, Kagan labors to argue, the American people have believed ever since their nation's inception in their mission to liberate the whole human race, not just by example but exertion abroad. In short, George Washington was a neo-con. The sometimes explicit, but always implicit message of Kagan's books and columns is that the true and abiding U.S. grand strategy is to export democracy, free markets, and human rights in what amounts to universal regime-change. Now, there are prophecies of the Kingdom of Heaven on earth where swords are beat into plowshares and lions lie down with lambs. For a few years after the Cold War there were also Hegelian prophecies of an end to history thanks to the ideas that conquered the world. But grand strategy is not usually thought of as a faith-based initiative. Or does Kagan really believe the U.S. government knows how to pacify and develop Fallujah or Kandahar? If so, he ought to inspect how little billions of dollars in urban renewal have achieved over forty years in the United States' own inner cities. What is more, even if such Global Meliorism, with or without guns, were a viable option for terrorist sanctuaries under U.S. occupation, what strategic relevance can nation-building theory possibly have for such sources of geopolitical angst as Iran, China, and Russia?

Andrew Bacevich disagrees with my interpretation of the U.S. foreign policy traditions and grand strategies for the opposite reason than Kagan. While agreeing with us that American isolationism is a myth, Bacevich rejects both my emphasis on geopolitics and Kagan's emphasis on ideology in favor of an economic interpretation. Indeed, his paleo-conservative critique of what he calls the new U. S. militarism and empire revives the New Left revisionism of William Appleman Williams. That "Wisconsin" or "Open Door" school was not strictly Marxist, but it did advance a mono-causal economic theory for what Williams called the tragedy of U.S. diplomacy. The real motive for U.S. foreign policy during all eras of history was not security or liberty, but the capitalist appetite for new markets, resources, and customers, at home and increasingly abroad. So the American Dream was real, but therein lay tragedy because in order to meet the growing expectations of a growing population the United States was ineluctably drawn to imperialism that belied its liberationist rhetoric. Keenly aware of the consumerism and seductive advertising lurking behind this national tragedy, Bacevich blames the United States' grand strategic folly on the iron triangle of business, political, and military elites who alone benefit from the nation's peripatetic crusades. Indeed, the statistics he cites on U. S. debt and over-extension suggest a Ponzi scheme at the end of its tether. In sum, the United States has indeed pursued a grand strategy ever since 1776. But far from being ideological, benign, and destined to triumph, as Kagan suggests, it is material, malign, and destined to ruin.

McDougall doesn't agree with either extreme, but he seems rather more distant from Kagan, based on his own pessimism concerning idealist aims to reform the world:

I think it is because my training was that of an old-school European historian, which gave me an outside vantage point from which to view U.S. shibboleths more objectively than do U.S. historians. I suspect my training in European history also inclines me to think about foreign policy in terms of realism, balance of power, contingency, tragedy, irony, folly, unintended consequences, and systemic interactions -- all of which are foreign if not repugnant to U.S. citizens. Finally, I am a Vietnam veteran skeptical of nation- and state-building, winning hearts and minds, and making the world over in the United States' image.

To temper their enthusiasm for idealist schemes, suggests McDougall, America's national security agencies should keep posted on their walls the list of ten strategic blunders identified by the business strategist Richard Rumelt:

1. Failure to recognize or take seriously the fact that resources are scarce
2. Mistaking strategic goals for strategy
3. Failure to recognize or state the strategic problem
4. Choosing unattainable or poor strategic goals
5. Failure to define the challenge competitively
6. Making false presumptions about one's competence
7. Loss of focus due to too many stakeholders and bureaucratic processes to satisfy
8. Inaccurately determining one's areas of competitive advantage
9. Failure to realize that few people have the cognitive skills needed for strategy
10. Failure to understand the adversary

To which, McDougall adds an eleventh strategic blunder:

11. Failure to understand ourselves

Avoiding strategic blunders seems more important than formulating strategic aims, McDougall would seem to imply, and he ends his article on a poetic, if somber note implying much the same:

To cite a Samuel Huntington metaphor told me by Jim Kurth, the most a wise statesman can do is imagine his ship of state on an infinite sea, with no port behind and no destination ahead, his sole responsibility being to weather the storms certain to come, and keep the ship on an even keel so long as he has the bridge.

How long can such a ship sail on with no port even for repairs, and with maintainance forced to be done at sea . . .

Jonathan Dee: Little Green Footballs and the 'Missing Link'

Little Green Footballs

Blogger: Charles Johnson

Photo by Zach Johnsen

(Image from New York Times)

Jonathan Dee, writing in his recent article "Right-Wing Flame War!" (January 21, 2010) for The New York Times, has analyzed a cultural crackup that split rightwing blogs into warring camps two years ago. This rightwing kulturkampf was initiated by Charles Johnson when he accused a number of rightwing bloggers of fascistic tendencies because they were 'linked' with individuals whom Johnson considered fascists. There is some irony in this, for Johnson's own blog, Little Green Footballs, was often itself accused of post-9/11 fascism for what many considered its shrill nationalism, its contempt for Muslims, and its inflammatory language:

If the tone of Johnson's writing on the blog sometimes bordered, as his detractors claimed, on hate speech, that of his mostly anonymous commenters was reliably worse. A popular blog like L.G.F. functions as a kind of cloud-sourced id. It is not uncommon for a simple, 200-word post to accrue upward of a thousand written responses from readers. The question of how responsible he is, or should be, for these expressions of uncensored reader sentiment is one that Johnson, like many bloggers, has struggled with; but in the middle years of the last decade, whether for free-speech reasons or simply because he enjoyed being the popular focal point of such strong nationalist feeling, he did very little to rein it in. Muslims were described as "vermin." The posthumous nickname St. Pancake was coined for the young American pro-Palestinian activist Rachel Corrie, in reference to the Israeli bulldozer that killed her. Discussion of U.S. foreign-policy options included terms like "targeted genocide." As for Palestinians, "they don’t need statehood," offered one commenter; "they need sterilization." And on and on. A so-called stalker blog, called L.G.F. Watch, sprang up to document instances of what it considered hate speech on the part of Johnson and his followers. Vanity Fair's James Wolcott compared Johnson’s site to a "disorganized Nuremberg Rally."

I vividly recall those days at LGF because I used to read not just Johnson's blogposts but also many of the comments, and they were indeed inflammatory, but they got LGF a lot of attention and garnered the blog a huge number of links:

L.G.F. was, by 2007 or so, at the heart of a vast, amorphous grid of right-wing sites of every description, an interdependence that Johnson himself had become, in a way, too popular to control.

That sentence stumbles a bit. Dee means that Johnson could no longer control the linked interdependence because he had become so popular on the right. But despite the awkward sentence, Dee is on to something about Johnson's way of thinking:

That concept of the link, in all its permutations, is the key to what happened next, both to Johnson and because of him, and it says something enlightening not just about blogging but also about the nature and prospects of citizen journalism. Whatever you think of him, Johnson is a smart man, a gifted synthesizer of information gathered by other people. But just as for anyone in his position, there is an inevitable limit to what he can learn about places, people, political organizations, etc., without actually encountering them. Instead of causes and effects, motivations and consequences, observation and behavior, his means of intellectual synthesis is, instead, the link: the indiscriminate connection established via search engine.

. . .

He came of age, as a writer and as a public figure, in the culture of damnation by link, and he does not exempt himself from its logic.

. . .

[Johnson employs] a kind of six-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon approach to political rectitude, in which the existence of even a search-engine-generated connection between two people anywhere in the world implied a mutual back-scratching, an ideological partnership.

Johnson therefore decided that certain groups were fascist and anyone linked to those groups, even by a mere internet link, was tainted by fascism. But that would entail that Johnson himself was linked to fascism, for he was linked by internet to those whom he considered fascist. Dee argues that Johnson therefore decided "to conduct a kind of public self-purge of the alliances he acquired on the road to fame" as a radical means of 'de-linking' himself from them. It was also a way of 'de-linking' himself from his own rightwing persona, for despite some points of ideological contact, Johnson had really always been more of a libertarian than a rightwing conservative. He thus attacked many of his erstwhile rightwing allies in strongly personal terms. "It was unfair and simplistic and petulant, but it also seems to have achieved its goal," notes Dee, for "[v]ery few people on the right want to be linked with Charles Johnson anymore."

Johnson is obviously intelligent, at least in a techie sort of way, but but he doesn't seem especially well-read in history or political theory, nor does he seem capable of nuanced distinctions in this age of internet linkage, His preferred style of blogging about those whom he dislikes (or prefers to dislike), by posting highly emotive personal attacks, is a method that most serious-minded people would consider a sign of intellectual immaturity.

But those personal attacks did get him very effectively 'de-linked' from individuals with whom he no longer wants to be linked, including his own very public rightwing persona. Johnson himself has recently observed that "the best way to deal with defamatory statements on the Internet is to make sure your defense shows up in a Google search too." By that same internet logic, the best way to make your 'de-linkage' show up on Google searches is to make the break as publicly acrimonious as possible.

Everyone will then link to your 'de-linking'.