After reading the synopsis, I read Fareed Zakaria’s book, The Post-American World.  It’s good, but it’s typical of a certain modern type of book that read like forced expansions of the original magazine article.  He goes into more depth, but not that much more; the major chapters are on China, India, America, and America.  I wish he’d gone into more depth on South Africa, Brazil, and other rising powers.

He’s obviously well connected, but this isn’t always a virtue, especially when it comes to history.  It’s nice that he can get an interview with Lee Kwan Yew, but sometimes the argument seems to be based on a few brisk interviews and visits to burgeoning cities rather than on broader academic research.  (This can be felt especially in his discussion of Chinese and Indian mentality.  It sounds reasonable enough, but no nation can really be reduced to its mentality.  E.g. is Japan an isolated despotism as in 1830, a rising power as in 1910, a grandiose empire as in 1940, or a pacifist economic powerhouse as in 1980?  Even if all of these could be related to some theory of the Japanese soul, they can hardly predict what Japan will be in 2050.)

Still, he has a good story to tell.  He makes a good case that the rise of China and India means a lot for the world, and is essentially a Good Thing for most everyone.  Neither power is likely to repeat the trouble caused by (say) the rise of Germany or Japan– so long as the US doesn’t act like an imperial hegemon.  Our own economic power isn’t going to go away anytime soon.  He makes some illuminating comparisons with imperial Britain, which enjoyed a long period of political dominance (say 1815 to 1945) but only a short period of economic dominance (from about 1845, when its industrial output surpassed France’s, to the 1880s, when it was surpassed by the US).  The US has been much spottier as a political leader, only rarely finding a good balance between isolation and arrogance.  In some ways we do best when we shut up and let our values (democracy and economic opportunity) do their magic.

Zakaria has a strange relationship to the Bush administration and the Republicans in general.  Most of what he has to say is highly critical, but he bows in their direction a few times, as if they’re, you know, just a little misinformed and could be set straight by some pointed reminders.  He was also a supporter of the Iraq war.  The book was written before the election, but more recent columns show that he’s hugely relieved that we now have a president who acts much more in accordance with his views.

Perhaps because of his own experience as an immigrant who’s made good, he’s essentially an optimist– a rare thing these days.  He’s excited by the huge reduction in the world’s poverty, by the vibrancy of newly energized economies, by the fact that the prevailing models are essentially variations of Anglo-American liberal capitalism.  He mentions the many ways we could fall off the rails (global warming, Taiwan, nuclear weapons), but his mind just doesn’t dwell on them.

I tend to be an optimist too; I think we can solve our problems if we want to.  But that’s a huge if.  The next century could look like the 19th– a time of generally rising prosperity and globalism– or like the 20th, when that global order collapsed into war and brutality.  Zakaria himself points out that perhaps the US’s worst failing is our political quagmire.  Britain seemed to do OK whether Liberals or Conservatives were in charge.  We have to fear the disasters that another Republican interlude could bring.

What do you take of this hoopla over the Iranian nuclear program? More specifically, what do you make of the opinions that Iran is secretly, or intending to, enrich weapons-grade uranium has any merit, or is a response to some US insecurity? (Notwithstanding the Bush administration’s attempt to garner a free pass to make a “pre-emptive” strike against Iran with nuclear weapons.)

—Nikolai

After Iraq, any such speculation needs a huge damn disclaimer: EXPERT OPINION MAY BE TALKING OUT OF ITS ASS.  Hussein was just as cagey as the Iranians about international inspections, well past the point where he was obviously undermining his own survival— all to protect, in fact, nothing.  It seems irrational, but not so much if we consider that a) he couldn’t be seen as weak domestically, as would happen if he showed that his nuclear threat was nonexistent; and b) dictators and enemies of the US hate the idea of UN inspectors running all over their territory.

So, if the experts don’t know for sure, I sure don’t, sitting here in my living room.

Of course, where there’s smoke, there is sometimes fire— North Korea, Pakistan, and India, despite years of denial, really were developing nukes.  In some ways the question is why the Iranians haven’t got them yet— are they having trouble with the differential equations or something?

What do we do about it?  There’s an old philosophical maxim that no argument can turn an is into a should.  We might add, no amount of punditry can turn a should into a will.  Take this article by Lee Smith at Slate, for instance, which warns that nothing less than American hegemony over Arabian oil is at stake.  Fine, Lee, what should we do?  He warns against leaving it to Israel on the grounds that “there are some things that need to be done by the alpha dog”, but he neglects to say what those things are.

Few things are more pathetic that bellicosity without follow-through.  The Right always wants us to be a badass, but the days are over when this could be done by landing a couple thousand Marines.  Maybe negotiation will work; it’s worth a try.  Let’s be honest: the alternative is going to war with Iran.  Is the country ready to do that?  (Quick factoid: Iran is double the population and four times the size of Iraq.  Do we have the few hundred thousand troops on hand that would be needed?  Since we’re still far from having stable allies in Iraq and Afghanistan, what makes us think we’d have one in Iran?)

If we’re not going to go to war, there’s precious little deterrence gained by threatening to do it.  It’s not like the Iranians can’t figure this out.

What about letting Israel do it?  It’s mounted such attacks before, on Iraq and Syria, with astonishing impunity.  The Iranians know this too, and it probably has more deterrence effect than the disapproval of the West.  But it’s a huge gamble as it could easily set off a larger war.  Iran’s obvious counter-move would be to attack not Israel but us, in Iraq.

Could we deal with Iran having the bomb?  Probably.  Nukes are better defensive than offensive weapons— actually using them means that someone will use them back at you, and the Iranians don’t want to lose Tehran, or Qom, or their oil fields.  Especially after the Iraq war, nukes add security to rogue states.   No one is more convinced by Kim Jong-il’s rhetoric than before he had them, but he’s that much more safe from invasion.

The irony here is that inside Iran, much more than inside Iraq, there’s an ally waiting to be born.  The Iranians have had a generation to get thoroughly tired of Islamic fundamentalism, and many have bravely taken to the streets to defy it.  It’s hard to say how we could encourage this domestic opposition; but I think it’s clear that trying to be a badass is the best way to strengthen the regime.  We might have learned that from our own experience after 9/11, or from our asinine Cuba policy: nothing helps authoritarians more against their internal enemies than an external threat.

Very interesting article by Frank Schaeffer on how the Religious Right went off the rails:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/frank-schaeffer/glenn-beck-and-the-912-ma_b_284387.html

Schaeffer is the son of Francis Schaeffer, an Evangelical thinker– I’ve read some of his books and didn’t think of him as very extreme.  But Schaeffer père evidently believed in separating from the world, and his followers turned into a cocoon for preparing a frighteningly anti-rational, anti-democratic mass of zealots:

To protect your children from Satan — in other words mainstream, open patriotic and pluralistic America — you either kept them at home where mom and dad could teach the children right from wrong or send them to a cloistered private evangelical/fundamentalist school. At home or in school you used curriculum prepared by the likes of James–beat-your-child-and-dare-to-discipline-Dobson, RJ-slavery-was-a-good-thing-Rushdoony, or many and other right-wing anti-American activists. That curriculum presented “secular America” as downright evil. Hating the USA became next to godliness.

Schaeffer warns that it’s a big mistake to think that these people are done because the GOP lost the last election.  The loss energized the radicals, and they don’t accept it anyway.  They’re not playing by the rules any more.

Nice article by Rick Perlstein on the long history of right-wing craziness in America:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/14/AR2009081401495_pf.html

It doesn’t make it any more acceptable, but sometimes the long-term view helps.

An excellent article which not only details the frightening insanity the Republicans have fallen into, but starts to address what to do about it:

http://www.southernstudies.org/2009/08/post-66.html

A lot of the ruckus is political theater, but the Republicans have been stirring up the crazies for years, and some of them are going to get violent– just as they did in the ’90s.

While we’re at it, here’s what the craziness looks like to a British observer.  Both links via Agto.

I’m going to have to revise my “The Last Century: Huh?” essay some time, because I can now much more easily answer the question I was struggling with: what happened to liberalism?  The answer is, the sixties happened.

That’s a generation ago now, so let me refresh your memory:

• We were trapped in a hopeless war (and with a draft, it affected all young men)
• Blacks were demanding change, bordering on revolution
• The crime rate was tripling
• Young people were rebelling: rock and roll, long hair, sex and nudity, drug use
• Authority was being questioned, at every level from insolence to pranks to a sprinkling of outfight terrorism

It was easy to feel that things were out of control.  And if you were on the right, there were even more reasons for alarm: loosened immigration, ballooning government, civil rights enforcement (i.e. “coddling of criminals”), feminism, the legalization of abortion, the decline of traditional Christianity.

Liberalism didn’t produce all this; some of it was inevitable; some of it (e.g. the black power movement) started out calm but radicalized in the face of reactionary opposition; some of it came from voices much farther to the left.  But if you were upset about these things, the nuances didn’t matter.

Much of modern Republican history and policy makes sense if you realize that, for the right, it’s still 1968.  They don’t really see Clinton or Obama; they see Abbie Hoffman and Malcolm X.  (And to a large extent they took their inflammatory rhetoric and even their threats of violence from the ’60s left.)

Somewhat ironically, politics in the ’60s didn’t look like this.  The major parties were both run by staid old fogies who’d been formed in WWII and got along well enough together.  Lyndon Johnson was no rabble-rouser; Nixon governed largely as a liberal.  He did start to develop the “southern strategy”, which peeled off white Southerners from the New Deal coalition, but that didn’t bear fruit till 1980.

The thing is, it’s 2009.  Most of the excesses of the ’60s are long gone– Democrats have moved to the right, and the far left is so inconsequential it’s not even worth mocking.  Other bits have become mainstream: megachurches play rock ‘n roll; reactionaries are happy to vote for a woman (and her kid’s having a baby out of wedlock is somehow no longer deplorable but bravely pro-life).  Race relations are far from great, but segregation isn’t coming back and there are just too many nonwhites to make racism a winning strategy.  The rising generation doesn’t have a problem with gay rights.

Unfortunately, the mainstream of the Republican Party hasn’t got the memo.  Palin, Gingrich, Limbaugh, the birthers, the town meeting disrupters– they’re standing up to 1968 with 1968 tactics, more furiously than ever. 

It’s a pity, because a democratic country needs a responsible opposition… something like the actual 1960s Republicans, in fact.  We’re facing some important issues: a near-depression, two major industries failed, health care reform, global warming, Islamist fascism, and more.  It’d be helpful to have an opposition that could keep Democrats honest, and not ruin the country if they happened to win an election.  Instead we have people in tinfoil hats, making up issues out of whole cloth and spreading confusion and lies. 

There is a more realistic sector of the Republicans, as well as a fraction of the Democrats, which isn’t trapped in 1968.  Unfortunately they’re trapped in 2007 instead.  It’s understandable that last year’s financial collapse, and the not-unrelated GOP electoral collapse, haven’t sunk in yet.  People don’t quickly abandon their hobbyhorses, and often people’s response to a crisis is to reinforce their worldview, not question it.  But the triple whammy of financial collapse, health care costs, and global warming is a death blow to the reflexive trust in The Market and hatred of government.  As Krugman put it, what’s saved us from a second Great Depression is big government.

It’s by no means tinfoil-hat craziness to worry about the deficit.  It’s a little suspicious since all the big thinkers of the GOP from Alan Greenspan to Dick Cheney fully endorsed Bush’s tax cuts and thus enormous deficits: it’s not intellectually coherent to object only to Democratic spending.  But the larger problem is that right now, the last thing we need is a stingy government.  “Make sure the economy fails even more” is not rational or constructive opposition.

A two-party system normally works to moderate both parties.  This broke down as the Republicans found a way to end long-term Democratic domination of Congress seemingly by breaking the old rules– moving away from the center rather than toward it.  They were so proud of their success, too, filling bookstores with their scurrilous books about liberals and their permanent majority. 

It’s hard to imagine today’s GOP adapting.  There are rational voices– Meghan McCain comes to mind– but the hotheads are still in control and see no point in cooling down.  It’ll probably take a few more election losses before things change.

First, read the story of Edith.  (Via Agto.)

Second, keep up with your Krugman– both columns and blog.  Some key facts about health care:

• If you have employer-provided health care and are happy with it, thank the government– both for the tax break, and for requiring that employers who get that break offer insurance to all employees, and can’t screen out pre-existing conditions.
• We already have a more-than-half-nationalized health care system: governments pay 47% of health care expenditures, private insurers 35%. 
• Medicare costs rise slower than those of private companies (since 1970, 8.8% vs. 9.9%).
• Whatever the free market is good for, it’s not health care.  Health doesn’t work like buying bread or computers– it’s a huge unpredictable expense, and the decisions involved are beyond consumers.  We need insurance to handle this sort of problem.  But if you let the market handle it, insurers will work hard to pay as little as possible.  This is socially destructive, adds to the health bill, and is eliminated in government programs.
• The system of getting insurance through employers is slowly crumbling.  The percentage of employers who offer insurance is declining, and for some industries it’s a global competitive disadvantage.

(I assume you already know that US health care costs are far higher than most other industrialized countries while our actual health care is worse, and that Britain or Canada is not the only option out there.)

Insurers are scared to death of the “public option”, not because it’s “socialism”, but because it would reveal how much better the government could do at insuring people.  (If they thought they could do better, it wouldn’t worry them.)  Thus you see strange things like demands that the government not be able to negotiate price breaks… often you hear this from the same people who claim to be concerned about runaway health care costs or the deficit.

Very telling chart from the New York Times, showing divorce rates, teenage birthrates, and subscriptions to porn sites, sorted into red and blue states:

Divorce, teen births, porn by red/blue states

Notice a pattern?  Red states cluster at the top, blue at the bottom.  To put it simply, conservative moralism doesn’t produce morality… quite the opposite.

Though I have my doubts about the last column… who subscribes to porn sites?  Listen, you red staters, I’ll tell you a secret… you don’t have to pay for it. 

I’ve been rereading the Appendix to 1984. The Party planned to ditch English and have all its members speaking Newspeak only by 2050. (It’s not certain what they planned for the Proles; O’Brien thought they were ineducable, in which case they would still be using Oldspeak.) But Newspeak was designed to have no redundancy in its lexicon and also to be spoken in a rapid, monotonous voice, with no variation of stress or tone (duckspeak) which would make it very hard to follow even in a moderately noisy environment. Do you think a language like that is viable?

—Mornche Geddick

Your question was an opportunity to reread Orwell’s description of Newspeak.  I think it’s a brilliant satire of totalitarian and authoritarian modes of thought; it should be read along with his less fantastical but equally perceptive “Politics and the English Language”.

The main sources or targets seem to be these:

• An aesthete’s aggrieved reaction to the regularities of artificial languages like Esperanto.  Though this is slightly provincial— what’s wrong with agglutinative languages?— it fits in very well with the Party’s blunt destruction of everything from the past.
• The careless meaninglessness and deceitfulness of political jargon.
• The Soviet fashion for syllabic abbreviations, e.g. Sovnarkom for “council of people’s commisioners”.

But that’s not your question.  Would it work?  As a written language, purposely impoverished in meaning and cut off from the past, I don’t see why not.  There are clear examples of the latter: Atatürk’s adoption of the Roman alphabet cut off Turks from centuries of literature; the adoption of báihuà (the Mandarin vernacular) over wényán (the classical literary language), plus the script reform, did the same for China.  To be sure scholars in both cases could continue to learn and study past works, but it was a new barrier.

Could the Party keep the new language immaculate of heretical meanings?  Only by retaining absolute power, which of course is a political not a linguistic question.

Newspeak depends on what’s normally called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis; it was intnded to make all other modes of thought but Ingsoc impossible.  But if the political side wasn’t there, I doubt that the linguistic side would hold up.  Suppose the totalitarian state simply collapses, as in V for Vendetta: would the absence of metaphorical uses of “free” continue?  I doubt it; people would simply invent new words or senses.  Writing in 1948, with all the European empires intact, Orwell might suppose that uneducated peoples (denied access to sophisticated liberal thought) could never rebel; I think it’s clear by now that this was wrong— despite his own hatred for imperialism, Orwell grossly underestimated the capacities of non-Europeans.

As for the monotonous delivery “without involving the higher brain centres at all”, I think this should be taken as a parody of political speeches, especially the propagandists for extremists, mouthing out verbiage with no concern for careful thought, beauty, or internal contradiction.  In the world of 1984, it wasn’t a bug but a feature if torrents of Newspeak were hard to follow; the aim was the suppression of thought and progress.

An excellent piece on Winston Churchill didn’t torture Nazis:

in Slate

Just to balance that, here’s an uncharacteristically stupid story by Jacob Weisberg claiming that the whole country is responsible for Bush’s torture.  The proof of 300 million people’s guilt?  Three pundits defended torture!  Not a word on what Jake wanted us to do instead, or even whether his charges include himself.