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[05.07.03] Revenge of the ParticularsMichael Totten deserves enormous credit for writing one of those pieces that gets right to the heart of how liberals differ from conservatives:
After September 11 I discovered an intellectual weakness on the left that I never noticed before. For some reason, perhaps for several reasons, liberals and leftists are bored by the outside world. Compared with conservative magazines, publications like The Nation and The American Prospect rarely feature articles about what happens in other countries. They'll do it occasionally, but almost always in the context of how it relates back to America. The Nation might report on the effects of Iraqi sanctions, but rarely does it publish anything about Iraq in its own context. If you want to learn about the history of the Ba’ath Party, Saddam’s human rights abuses, the fate of the Marsh Arabs, or Iraqi public opinion, you have to seek out magazines and journals of the center and the right.
Totten's ultimate explanation for this does smack a bit of liberal self-congratulation: liberals want to build for the future and are more practical-minded; conservatives like to study the past and revel in it. In this case, though, Totten doesn't mean to disparage conservatives. He acknowledges that the right's particularist knowledge about Iraq is exactly what we need right now.
There is one missing piece in Totten's analysis, and it's the continuing influence of Marxism. By Marxist, I don't mean mean the strict definition involving the petty tyrant clad in Mao suit or the protest organizer in his Che t-shirt jabbering into his Nokia. I am referring simply to economic determinists, or those who believe that who gets what in a society matters supremely, even moreso than the wealth and vitality of the society as a whole. Marxists, loosely defined, are those who like to find economic motives behind pretty much everything .
You can trace much of the liberal generalizing about foreign policy and the war back to these deterministic roots. (It's all about oiiiilll. And Halliburton.) If you buy into the Marxist take of imperialism, dependencia theory, or the writings of Immanuel Wallerstein, then the U.S. is always cast in the role of the colonial exploiter. There are no exceptions. When the leftist journals Totten singles out deign it necessary to write a foreign policy article or two, they usually do it applying this basic template. That's what makes them so trite and doctrinaire.
Classic conservatives have rejected this approach as radically misguided because they recognize that the human condition is too varied to submit to a single set of assumptions for governing our economic and social life. This tension is captured most enduringly by Michael Oakeshott. Where Marxism was utterly uninterested in local conditions, conservatives at the height of the Cold War did battle with it by emphasizing (and leveraging) the powerful pull of tribal allegiance that lay below the skin-deep Stalinist agitprop.
As some paleos have pointed out, and I will readily admit, this war was something of a departure for classic conservatism. It was justified on the grounds of liberal internationalism against the demands of regional specialists who worried about blood being spilled between Kurds and Sunnis, Turkmen and Kurds, and Sunni and Shi'ite, or almost any permutation of the above. The neocons would bring democracy to the Arab world, local conditions be damned.
There is a vital distinction to be made between the neocon and leftist generalizations and it is embedded in the substance of what each has advocated. Democracy, as advanced by the neocons, is an open-ended system that accomodates changes in regional conditions even if it's programmatically blind to what they are. Well-designed democracies, employing varying degrees of federalism, can establish safety valves against ethnic tension. Democracies simply provide a mechanism for local majorities to govern (whoever they are) and over the long term, smooth the hard edges of the body politic (whatever they are).
While democracies can be designed to adapt differently to these local changes, Marxism seeks to eviscerate them by imposing a superstructure of class and enforcing an equality of outcomes. Compared to democratization, this is an inordinately more demanding adjustment for traditional societies to make.
Just because neoconservatism has departed from classic conservatism in its strict devotion to historical particulars, that doesn't make it somehow wrong or inauthentic. The defeat of the Soviets in Afghanistan exemplified the triumph of local conditions over the inexorable "march of history," but the hands-off deference to Islamism that followed was entirely ill-suited for the changing situation on the ground. Local variety matters, but promoting a basic set of institutions (democracy, free markets, the rule of law) can make these local societies function better and it matters just as much.
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