Kagan: Knowledge Is Elitist
Robert Kagan says it’s elitist to expect a President of the United States to be knowledgeable about national security issues:
Robert Kagan, a foreign policy advisor to McCain, derided criticisms of Palin as elitist.
“I don’t take this elite foreign policy view that only this anointed class knows everything about the world,” he said. “I’m not generally impressed that they are better judges of American foreign policy experience than those who have Palin’s experience.”
Based on the structure of the situation, it’s plausible that Kagan is just being opportunistically dishonest here and trying to say something useful to the Republican ticket. But based on having read Kagan’s work over the years, I think that’s wrong and he’s absolutely being honest. Kagan, like most neoconservatives, thinks that in-depth knowledge of foreign countries and the politics and culture of foreign societies isn’t helpful in thinking about foreign policy questions. Similarly, they believe that in-depth knowledge of theoretical and empirical work in the field of international relations isn’t helpful. Indeed, they think that this kind of in-depth knowledge is actually harmful. They prefer the judgment of people who have little knowledge of the outside world but do possess a degree of gut-level nationalism.
Since most Americans do possess a degree of gut-level nationalism and don’t possess much understanding of the world beyond our borders, it’s difficult politically to mount an argument against Kagan-style celebration of ignorance. But at the same time, the fact that a substantial swathe of the conservative policy elite thinks this way explains an enormous amount about why things have gone wrong in our foreign policy.
52 Responses to “Kagan: Knowledge Is Elitist”
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September 11th, 2008 at 10:08 am
This is horrific. The idiots win! They are the devil.
September 11th, 2008 at 10:11 am
Heck, take the cretin Kagan’s intellectually dishonest position its logical conclusion. Why do we need his kind of elitist foreign policy advisor? Heck, why do we even need a President since it’s obvious the average Joe Sixpack is much better informed of foreign policy issues than his type with their fancy schmancy schools and degrees. Doesn’t the last eight years prove that point?
September 11th, 2008 at 10:11 am
I can’t claim to have broadly read the works of neocon “intellectuals,” but I can say this much: Bernard Lewis and Francis Fukuyama certainly feel no deep need to “understand” a topic before writing about it.
September 11th, 2008 at 10:18 am
For a neocon, foreign policy is about having the willpower to impose our view of reality on the world. Knowledge of the world is, of course, completely irrelvant to such an undertaking–the whole point is to force the world to deal with us on our terms, not theirs.
September 11th, 2008 at 10:18 am
“I don’t take this elite foreign policy view that only this anointed class knows everything about the world,”
Kagan pretty much encapsulates the DC think-tank and pundit mindset pretty well here. All you need is a nice pressed shirt and a tie, and you can present yourself as someone who has opinions and judgment worth listening to. And if someone points out that you have no idea what you’re talking about, you can just rail against the “elitist” mindset of those who value actual expertise and experience in the field on which you are commenting.
I wonder if he’d be willing to substitute “foreign policy view” with “health care view” and “everything about the world” with “everything about the practice of medicine” when it comes to choosing a surgeon.
September 11th, 2008 at 10:21 am
I wonder if he’d be willing to substitute “foreign policy view” with “health care view” and “everything about the world” with “everything about the practice of medicine” when it comes to choosing a surgeon.
Tyro, that would depend on whether he’s chosing a surgeon for himself–or for you . . .
September 11th, 2008 at 10:24 am
Considering mcccain doesn’t know how many homes he owns, his wife was wearing 300,000 dresses at the convention, our president is a frat boy and no one in the republican party knows what a community organizer does, I’d say the republicans are the party of elitists.
And I think we democrats need to press that point home.
September 11th, 2008 at 10:24 am
Kagan, like most neoconservatives, thinks that in-depth knowledge of foreign countries and the politics and culture of foreign societies isn’t helpful in thinking about foreign policy questions. Similarly, they believe that in-depth knowledge of theoretical and empirical work in the field of international relations isn’t helpful. Indeed, they think that this kind of in-depth knowledge is actually harmful. They prefer the judgment of people who have little knowledge of the outside world but do possess a degree of gut-level nationalism.
I don’t think that is quite correct. They think foreign policy knowledge of a certain kind is useful, but only for themselves. What they don’t want is presidents, secretaries of state and secretaries of defense to have this kind of knowledge, because that makes them less manipulable by neoconservative viziers.
From Kagan’s point of view, Sarah Palin would be the ideal neocon president, because she would be compelled to rely on advisers for almost everything, and she is ideologically disposed to think guys like Kagan would be awesome advisers. In other words, if Palin is a knowledge-poor ideological vessel, Kagan and his friends get to be president.
September 11th, 2008 at 10:26 am
how convenient! that’s one’s a knee slapper!
September 11th, 2008 at 10:32 am
He just wants them to be stupid and therefor more likely to fall for his crap.
I don’t expect them to be specialists but I expect them to know more than just the headlines from their hometown newspaper and CNN.
September 11th, 2008 at 10:33 am
Shorter Kagan: I like ignorant morons because they’re easier for me to manipulate.
September 11th, 2008 at 10:35 am
1) I also liked Max Boot’s comment in the same story:
““I don’t know what her foreign policy views are. I’m not sure how important that is,” Boot continued. “No one thinks that a McCain administration would be guided by the foreign policy of a vice president. The office of the vice president is not set up to be a second national security adviser or secretary of state. ”
2) You would think that Boot would have the foresight to realize that President Palin is a real possibility, given that McCain is 72 years old.
September 11th, 2008 at 10:43 am
“The office of the vice president is not set up to be a second national security adviser or secretary of state. ”
You coulda fooled me with this current VP’s wide ranging powers and virtual carte blanche to do as he pleases.
September 11th, 2008 at 10:44 am
You would also think that Max Boot has been conscious the last 8 years when a VP did run a separate foreign policy shop out of the VP office.
September 11th, 2008 at 10:45 am
Damn, Pan types faster than me.
September 11th, 2008 at 10:45 am
Palin will obviously do whatever the neocons tell her once she is in office and we will end up with the same kind of disasters that the neocons wrought under Bush until she learns enough to kick them to the curb as Bush had to do. By then it will be too late. But clearly the deal with the devil has been made.
The neocons are famous for disdaining anyone who knows anything about foreign policy anyway. That is why the State Department and all of the “Arabists” were sidelined when it came to the Iraq war.
So Kagan is definitely telling the truth. You know that Robert Gates will be the first one to go…
September 11th, 2008 at 10:46 am
What Halberstam might have termed “The Least and the Dumbest”.
September 11th, 2008 at 10:51 am
Damm. ET beat me to it.
September 11th, 2008 at 10:52 am
There is a direct connection between this kind of don’t need to know any specifics attitude and the “Gee whiz I’m saved, no need to do the hard work of living a moral life” religiosity of Palin. Real Christianity involves difficult work in scriptural studies and theology (yes, theology is a serious intellectual business), and serious work about how one lives one’s life The Palins of this think they can get by with just a gut feeling that they’re special. Not to cite mainstream Protestantism or Catholicism or the Orthodox traditions, but the Billy Grahams and even Rick Warrens of this world know that’s not true.
September 11th, 2008 at 10:55 am
I wonder if he’d be willing to substitute “foreign policy view” with “health care view” and “everything about the world” with “everything about the practice of medicine” when it comes to choosing a surgeon.
Probably not a surgeon, but I’m pretty sure he’d demand major antibiotics for a virus even though they’d be both ineffective and cause longer-term resistance problems, just like lots of other self-absorbed and underinformed people in this country do. It’s the pathological narcissism of the US– mostly expressed by wanting everything from entertainment to politics to most professions to both validate and elevate our weaknesses rather than our strengths– that’s going to be the end of us. The spending and militarism are merely symptoms of the larger disorder.
September 11th, 2008 at 10:56 am
I think it can be framed:
If you own a small business, do you hire an accountant who’s spent time learning the tax code, or do you go with the guy who fills out the forms based on what his gut tells him about the tax code?
For your kid’s math teacher, do you want someone who studied math and knows more about it than you do, or do you want someone who teaches his gut feelings about how to do trigonometry?
To rewire your house, do you want someone who’s done it several times before, or someone who is just a regular nonelitist guy with no special “knowledge” about grounding?
Someone touting up our folksy presidents observed that people want someone who is qualified–went to those top schools, for example–but can play a downhome folksy soul. Giving out an “I’m better than you” vibe is death for politics. But the accountant and teacher and electrician above have to simultaneously not look down on their would-be customer while conveying that you’re in good hands because he or she DOES know a lot more about the topic in hand than you do–this can be done.
September 11th, 2008 at 11:02 am
Kagan is one of those neo-cons who believes that the all powerful United States could create its own reality – facts on the ground – overseas. Certainly the last 7 years should have disabused him of this view – we don’t have the resources to do this and we have squandered whatever “soft power” we have to bring most of the globe on board with us (being a huge debtor, having torn up the ABM treaty and sought to stoke up the cold war on the assumption that Russia is too weak to respond, having ineptly fought some wars and having shown no discipline with regard to dependence on cabron based fuels).
This post does illuminate the basic Republican view that foreign policy would work best if there were no foreigners. In the early 1980s it was amazing to see Senator Jesse Helms excoriate US foreign service officers becuase they had chosen career paths that involved dealing with foreigners.
September 11th, 2008 at 12:28 pm
Remember that according to Kagan, it is OK to operate by different rule sets if your intentions are good.
Here is an Example.
Others: Insist that others be truthful
Your side: Take advantage of the rules of the Jungle.
Thus it no longer matters what one thinks about the outside world this week, while a couple weeks ago it was very, very, very important. Such inconsistencies do not matter because your intentions are good.
September 11th, 2008 at 12:39 pm
Neocons are so weird that they now argue for Pol Pot/Stalin ideology. They, too, thought that elites are evil and peasants, or uneducated people are the salt of the earth. Turned out really well for bot of those countries.
September 11th, 2008 at 12:59 pm
Gene O’Grady,
Scriptural studies is a good thing, of course, but I would hesitate to say that it’s essential to being a good Christian. An illiterate peasant in Haiti is fully able, in his own way and in his own measure, to love his neighbors and to love God, which are the basic elements of a Christian life. Jesus died for all of us, the intellectuals as much as the illiterates.
I’m Anglo-Catholic so have no personal brief for Palin’s brand of evangelicalism, but I thought I would make that clear.
September 11th, 2008 at 1:18 pm
Kagan clearly just want to make sure that Stephen Colbert has plenty of material. (Quoth’s Stephen’s first episode: there are more nerves in our guts than in our brains, and we know that because we can feel it in our gut.)
September 11th, 2008 at 2:53 pm
Am I the only one here who thinks that Kagan has a point (other than the Palin part)? All sorts of people who know way more than me about the Middle East (Wolfowitz, George Packer, Ken Pollack, etc) advocated for the war in Iraq.
After the last 10 years, “I don’t take this elite foreign policy view that only this anointed class knows everything about the world,” either.
September 11th, 2008 at 3:59 pm
I think half the problem is that neocons have this belief that foreigners are exactly like Americans (they just speak foreign) and therefore given the same circumstances and same stimuli, will react exactly like Americans. And then they get outraged (and surprised) when countries–pursuing their own national interests–react differently.
September 11th, 2008 at 4:16 pm
The office of the vice president is not set up to be a second national security adviser or secretary of state.
Except when it is (see: 2001–).
September 11th, 2008 at 4:18 pm
Kagan is basically saying: “The dumber the politician in power the better it is for eggheads like me to advise and control them with self-serving disinformation that serves my true masters.”
September 11th, 2008 at 4:26 pm
Dean P:
I think it’s worse than that. Neocons seem to think that foreigners should not only react like Americans, they should all be on board American foreign policy, even when it directly conflicts with their own national interests. In other words, foreigners should subordinate their national interests to ours, just because we said so. And then they are totally mystified when foreigners have the temerity to stick up for themselves, rather than kowtowing to a neocon version of reality that they regard as being bad for them.
The real problem is that the neocons are tapped into the way that most Americans feel about the world. They also cannot understand why on earth anyone could every possibly disagree with us about anything. How could they possibly be opposed to us occupying their country with our army? After all, we are doing it with the best of intentions. These same people forget that when the colonies began to regard their own countrymen (i.e., the English) as an occupying force, they began a guerilla war (which, by the way, under the prevailing gentlemanly rules of war, the English regarded as nothing less than terrorism). They also forget that the Southern states were not at all happy with Reconstruction and being occupied by the Union army. However, Iraqis, etc., are just supposed to be happy being occupied because we say so.
September 11th, 2008 at 4:32 pm
Imagine Robert Kagan adopting the following position the next time he asks his accountant to prepare his tax filing: “I don’t take this elite CPA view that only this annointed class knows everything about taxes.”
Imagine Kagan’s child facing life saving surgery, with Kagan feigning: “I don’t take this elite surgeons view that only this annointed class knows everything about my child’s surgical procedure.”
If Kagan believes as he says, “I’m not generally impressed that they are better judges of American foreign policy experience than those who have Palin’s experience,” then why doesn’t he step aside and seek employment in the retail sector…Sarah Palin can cover for him.
September 11th, 2008 at 5:20 pm
Good God. These folks have gone into full-blown satires of themselves. It’s almost beyond parody. I’d expect to see comments like that on a “Saturday Night Live” sketch making fun of GOP figures, not the actual “strategists.” Are we soon going to see a McCain/Palin campaign book released, “In Praise of Ignorance” or some such insanity? How much sillier is that than what’s been revealed in this article?
September 11th, 2008 at 5:36 pm
As per Hans Magnus Eizenberger, Nationalism is a kind of Autism.
September 11th, 2008 at 5:40 pm
“Idiocracy” is the 21st century parallel to “1984″.
September 11th, 2008 at 5:49 pm
I think you’re missing the essence of Kagan’s argument, silly as it is.
I’ve spent a lot of years thinking about foreign policy and international relations theory since I first went to graduate school in 1991, and a lot of years — with a 14-month break for service in Iraq — reading neoconservative writings on foreign policy, and the problem is not they disregard or devalue knowledge but that they disregard and devalue the knowledge held by so-called “Subject Matter Experts.”
Take the Kagans. To them, a thorough grounding in classics, and the ability to quote Herodotus to presidents who can’t spell “Herodotus,” trumps actually knowing things about, say, the Arabs.
This dates back to the first neocon generation (Kristol pere, et al.) in the early- to mid-1970s and their rejection of Nixon-Kissinger detente which had been led, in their estimation, by pointy-headed academics who’d become too enamored in the intellectual sense with the Soviet Union. They couldn’t see the “real” Commie conspiracy forest for the trees, in other words.
Thus they concocted “Team B” with Daniel Pipes, and the 1976 iteration of the “Committee on the Present Danger,” both of which took a hysterical — and, as it happens, completely asinine — view of a Soviet military machine vastly outpacing the U.S. in terms of capabilities. The problem, they said, was the CIA with its “experts.”
Of course, we heard echoes of that in 1980, with the so-called “Committee of Santa Fe,” which promoted the anti-communist excesses of the Reagan administration in Central America. Again, subject matter experts had “gone native” and refused to see the “truth” of the Red Menace in the hemisphere. So you get support for ARENA in El Salvador, the invasion of Grenada, and Iran-Contra.
The second-generation neocons — Kristol the Younger, Boot, the Kagans, etc. — are simply trading in that same anti-expertise nonsense. They want smart people, elites, to dictate foreign policy, make no mistake about it. They want smart people like Max Boot to dictate policy because they can make facile, but very nifty, analogies to past glories of the Anglo-American-Greco-Roman imperial tradition.
They just don’t want elites with knowledge to influence policy.
Because when you know things, it has the way of mucking up perfectly delightful theories about democratic dominoes in the Middle East….
September 11th, 2008 at 6:02 pm
Kagen just wants to be the most knowledgeable guy in the room, and figures the best way to do that is to fill the room with ignorance. Thus his appreciation of Bush, McCain, Palin et.al.
September 11th, 2008 at 8:58 pm
Kagan’s comments are indicative of what’s gone wrong the last 7 years and that is relying on “old friendships” and large “campaign donors” to fill your Cabinet-level positions instead of relying on established professionals in the field and time-tested expertise. But then again, Kagan’s not old enough to remember or have been taught time-tested modalities. As though America didn’t have a clue how to run a country until the present cabal of neo-con intelligentsia came on the scene. Perhaps it’s not too late to think in terms of what’s principle-centered rather than which Party will rule this presidential cycle?
September 12th, 2008 at 2:39 am
“I don’t take this elite foreign policy view that only this anointed class knows everything about the world.”
Strangely enough, I don’t either. I believe any citizen that cares to can educate themselves on issues of foreign policy. More than that — I believe that every citizen has at least some vested interest to educate themselves, so they can vote responsibly.
That problem is, Sarah Palin has never cared to. Even after it became her job, given that she is a governor of a state that adjoins a foreign country (as the Republican faithful keep reminding us).
So… great assessment on how poorly she’s done her job, Bob, and how slow she’s been on the uptake.
September 12th, 2008 at 1:06 pm
When Mr. Kagan needs a doctor, I hope that he doesn’t get one of those elitist ones- you know the ones, with all the knowledge about their field. I hope that he gets one that acts on gut-level feelings about Mr. Kagan’s distress. All that pesky knowledge just gets in the way.
September 12th, 2008 at 3:11 pm
It is just possible that people like Robert Kagan would like the rest of us to be ignorant of foreign policy so that the neo-cons can do what their elitist ideologues think ought to be done, and go on conning us all like they have for the past eight years. Ignorance for us, is bliss for them. Speaking of elitist, this group has even put forward the rationale that it is OK to tell fibs, lies and Big Ones to people since we are not ready to hear the truth. It is disingenuous at best to mouth this slogan. I imagine they would like nothing more than to have another uncurious puppet-like president resident in the Big House.
September 12th, 2008 at 5:33 pm
Any society that has come to value ignorance over knowledge is doomed! I suppose it is just another symptom of America’s continuing decline…
By the way, who said elitism was a bad thing anyway?
Strange culture here in the states!
R. Nemo
September 14th, 2008 at 12:28 am
This country’s resentment and distrust of intellectuals is destroying us. The conservatives take advantage of this weakness. Hamilton, Jefferson, Adams, and Madison were not men that the common people could relate to, they were men to be admired. The rose to levels that reflected their exceptional qualities, not their averageness.
September 14th, 2008 at 12:30 am
This country’s resentment and distrust of intellectuals is destroying us. The conservatives take advantage of this weakness. Hamilton, Jefferson, Adams, and Madison were not men that the common people could relate to, they were men to be admired. They rose to levels that reflected their exceptional qualities, not their averageness.
September 15th, 2008 at 10:20 am
NEOCONS ARE EVIL BASTIDS
America is a special country and culture. Multinational in our own right. Any moron neocon who thinks America can impose our culture is dumb-as-a-doorknob. (witness W) God help us if McMoron wins.
December 10th, 2008 at 4:47 am
Elena Kagan, 48, dean, Harvard Law School. During her five-year tenure at Obama’s law school alma mater, Kagan has won over conservatives with her personal skills and efforts to diversify the faculty politically. The
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