The Convergence
Lurking in this post is the interesting observation from Justin Logan about an odd convergence of beliefs between neocons and the far left about how to understand the history of American foreign policymaking. With the difference being, basically, that the neocon right takes what’s a critique in leftist hands and turns it into approbation.
I thought one of the weirdest recent expressions of this was a 2006 Robert Kagan New Republic article which made the case that Bush administration foreign policy was essentially continuous with the genocide of America’s native population and that this somehow constitutes a devastating rebuttal to Bush’s critics. If anything, it just sounds like an unhinged criticism of Bush. Or more to the point, it’s an example of a kind of moral rot inside the neo-imperialist camp where you see a positive embrace of the dark side of western history rather than an effort to identify and emphasize positive elements.
33 Responses to “The Convergence”
Register
RSSLogin
Topic Cloud
ArchivesBlog RollAbout Matt YglesiasContact Me
Donate
January 15th, 2009 at 3:24 pm
This is the sort of post where you’d do a lot of good if you felt it necessary to actually, you know, criticize the far left opinion rather than assuming it’s beyond the pale. Part of the reason the far right can wrest power in this country and the far left can’t is because decent liberal commissars like yourself dismiss anyone to your left out of hand, while you actually consider neocons and their ilk worthy of rebuttal. You inherently legitimize the latter when you do so, and it’s a major problem for someone with your policy preferences.
January 15th, 2009 at 3:27 pm
Reminds me of when Bill O’Reilly twice accused the U.S. Army of perpetrating the Malmedy Massacre. And his point was… to excuse war crimes committed in the present day. Ignorant and repugnant.
January 15th, 2009 at 3:29 pm
Who’s the guy with the pipe?
January 15th, 2009 at 3:33 pm
Yes, I think this explains a real oddity in a way I have never been able to do so concisely. It is truly strange to criticize the administration only to have counter examples from America’s dark side thrown up to counter the criticism. Those were the aspects of the American past that I thought we were all trying to get past.. and now it is like people are searching for them in order to say: “See, we’ve always done things like this.” I find that bizarre..
January 15th, 2009 at 3:38 pm
Pay attention to Freddie’s comments.
Incidentally, this is why a lot of people mentioned early on that the most fervent of the neo-Khans were still aiming to be revolutionaries at the intellectual vanguard who would lead Leninist revolutions; they just changed their sides and their goals.
January 15th, 2009 at 3:40 pm
2006 Robert Kagan New Republic article which made the case that Bush administration foreign policy was essentially continuous with the genocide of America’s native population and that this somehow constitutes a devastating rebuttal to Bush’s critics. If anything, it just sounds like an unhinged criticism of Bush.
How hard is it to understand? Killing non-christian and/or non-white = GOOD.
January 15th, 2009 at 4:15 pm
Freddie,
That is a very good observation, and one that of course shows the continuum between the “new liberals” such as Yglesias and the old liberal guard such as the NYT editors, who in the name of diversity will publish the most insane right-wing claptrap but nothing ever to the left of Krugman’s capitalism with a human face.
However,
As a “far leftist” allow me to point that this is quite understandable. The liberal center finds the far right morally offensive, but the far left attacks the very privilege liberals think they deserve on account of their dispassionate intelligence (but actually get for quite different reasons, and that of course does not mean they aren’t intelligent. Some of course are).
Now, is there a connection between the war in Iraq and the genocide of the Native Americans or the institution of slavery? Tomahawk missiles, Apache helicopters, ’sand n***rs’. Why do these names keep coming back? It’s absurd to describe causal relations, but it seems to me that the culture that cannot come to terms with its past cannot “bury it”. You can’t bury the genocide of native-Americans while you continue to repress their surviving descendants. You can’t “bury” slavery while incarceration of the slaves’ descendants is the most important race strategy in the U.S, today.
January 15th, 2009 at 4:27 pm
The central feature of most foreign policy discussion in the United States is that it is up to its neck in self-congratulatory euphemism. Anyone who offers a factual description of that the US policy actually does to the Palestinians, to many in Latin America, for drug companies etc, seems to be a whack-job of one sort or another by comparison.
January 15th, 2009 at 4:57 pm
ditto Freddie ditto.
People on the left have to stop being embarrassed at the simple fact that they’re, well, on the left. and we would all benefit by actually taking on conspiracy-mongers and crazies on the left and correcting their info where applicable, and ceding to their data and arguments (because at times they do have them) when applicable.
the “center” in the US is very, very far right in reality. we don’t live in reality, we live in the god damn USA. its as if peace and cooperation are the two terms the world should be most afraid of, according to liberal democrats, here in the US! why? the neo-con foreign policy has been crazy-talk for a decade running now, but we still see them every damn night on every damn infotainment program. every night, espousing ideas that were discredited years ago, in our time, in front of all of our eyes!
why does this happen? this never used to happen? you never saw Spiro Agnew being interviewed about whether he preferred Carter or Kennedy for the Dems in ‘80? or Nixon being allowed to keep talking about victory in Vietnam through the late 70’s. when and why did we stop keeping track of who was full of shit and who wasn’t?
January 15th, 2009 at 4:59 pm
“The central feature of most foreign policy discussion in the United States is that it is up to its neck in self-congratulatory euphemism.”
Yep. We’re the special, unique, shining vanguard of human liberty on a hill, or some such.
Kagan’s take on US history really is strikingly similar to leftist critiques of American power. Whereas, say, Noam Chomsky dispenses with the mythos of the “reluctant hegemon” in order to call the morality of American foreign policy into question, Kagan wants Americans to dispense with their squeamishness and accept that imperialism is as American as apple pie, in order to win their support for a whole lot more imperialism.
What’s striking to me is the way Kagan’s article highlights both the duplicity and the complicity of “mainstream” center-left and center-right American foreign policy circles during the Bush era. Liberal hawks and moderate Republicans leaned on an idealized, sanitized vision of America as a noble, reluctant warrior to place the Iraq War within our tradition of intervening when we must. Liberal critics of the war leaned on a similar vision to paint the Iraq War as an unprecedented break with our noble traditions that sullied our image.
Those of us who take a generally dim view of our country’s long, nearly unchecked 220-year history of radical expansionism, imperial ambitions, and failing to live up to our own high-minded rhetoric are, of course, crazy wild-eyed radicals who hate America, and therefore can’t be taken seriously. But evidently, Robert Kagan sees things pretty much our way… except he thinks it’s a good thing that our country fails to live up to our high-minded rhetoric.
So when are major newspapers going to conclude that he’s a crazy wild-eyed radical and stop lending him their soapbox?
January 15th, 2009 at 5:06 pm
If a poll asked
“Should the US have expanded Westward as it did in the 19th century, considering the fate of the Native
populations?”
95% of the public would answer yes.
January 15th, 2009 at 5:11 pm
One of the problems with trying to argue about American policy has always been its advocates’ lack of frankness about the actual goals. Imperialism without the word “imperialism, a master race without the words “master race”.
“A level playing field” and “moral clarity”, for example, are just coded expressions of “The Palestinians are always wrong and should be destroyed as a people”.
January 15th, 2009 at 5:17 pm
I think I get Freddie’s point, but in fairness, criticizing the far left can seem petty and churlish for a left-liberal, because the far left has no power in this country while the far right has considerable influence and authority that needs countering. Liberals are more inclined to challenge the powerful than to pick on the weak.
January 15th, 2009 at 5:40 pm
re: “Should the US have expanded Westward as it did in the 19th century, considering the fate of the Native
populations?”
But this really doesn’t get to the heart of the matter, does it? After all, MA, VA, NYC, PA, were all settled before the 19th Century and before there was a United States. This still presupposes there was some kind of virgin birth and that the 19th C. is where it went wrong. The reality is that it’s all been European expansion since 1500, and that implicates all of us in these colonial societies (US, Canada, Australia, NZ, Brazil, Colombia, Quebec, S. Africa, etc.).
I think the “far left” critique is weak inasmuch as it’s just as much of a cartoon as the rightwing mirror presented by Kagan, with little room for human frailty, agency, or contingency. It’s practitioners also don’t seem to recognize their own culpability if they believe what they say.
It’s for reasons like this that historians (with the exception of Sean freakin’ Wilentz, who is good but needs to control himself, as a colleague said) tend to shy away from these ideological battles. That said, it really is interesting the simplistic uses of history made by both left and right, with the former generally being less destructive than the latter, but still bad history.
January 15th, 2009 at 5:51 pm
The expulsion of the Cherokee from Georgia is an example of something that need not have happened. They were willing and able to live in America, but were not allowed to. It isn’t an all-or-nothing question.
January 15th, 2009 at 6:07 pm
Kagan is completely wrong though when he claims that Southern slaveholders were realist opponents of imperialism. Actually, they were the strongest promoters of the Mexican War and backed the “filibusters” who mounted private invasions of Central American states, all with the aim of getting more territory for slavery.
January 15th, 2009 at 6:10 pm
“The reality is that it’s all been European expansion since 1500.”
No, that is not the reality. The Ottoman Empire could still pose a serious military threat to European powers, as could China and many other non-Western powers. African kingdoms could keep Europeans on the coast, as to a substantial extent could native peoples in North and South America. The native people of North America engaged in trade with the Europeans, and for the most part European colonists in New England or Quebec depended on alliances with the native peoples to keep their colonies secure. So there is a big difference between the outright genocide of the post-1800 period, and the period of merely incipient European dominance between 1500-1800.
January 15th, 2009 at 6:39 pm
Both Kagan’s article and a lot of far left criticisms start with the concept that the United States has always believed something or stood for something, whether that something is liberalism, restlessness and aggression or “radical expansionism, imperial ambitions, and failing to live up to our own high-minded rhetoric ” as Lafolette argues. But countries aren’t alive, they can’t be aggressive or wishy washy or hypocritical or anything else. They are abstract concepts that don’t exist outside of our minds. I’m not trying to be pedantic, here, I don’t think this way of talking about “nations” is just shorthand, it really starts to cloud the discourse.
America stands for what people think it stands for, which means it stands for all sorts of things and those things are constantly in flux.
January 15th, 2009 at 7:40 pm
Freddie, I’m giving Matt the benefit of the doubt and assuming that his use of “unhinged” was ironic. If so he probably should have used scare quotes, but come on, this is Matt Yglesias we’re talking about.
January 15th, 2009 at 7:41 pm
Genocide of the Native Americans occurred because they happened to be in the way of a rapidly expanding country and economy, full of people who refused to live with them.
That winner/loser scenario is something that’s happened countless times over the years.
What Kagan is espousing is for a fully-grown, exhausted country to continue shoving and slaughtering for old times’ sake.
If that scenario has ever been recorded in history, it was recorded as an epitaph.
January 15th, 2009 at 8:05 pm
95% of the public would answer yes.
Most Chinese would rather have Taiwan back in the fold than get rid of their Commie overlords.
Nobody stranger than people.
January 15th, 2009 at 11:33 pm
Kaagan’s view is strikingly similar to that of Bismark and Kaiser Wilhelm’s.
March 1st, 2009 at 4:58 am
viagra
Great site. Good info
March 11th, 2009 at 4:11 am
Great site. Good info
March 12th, 2009 at 10:40 pm
It is the coolest site,keep so!
March 17th, 2009 at 2:19 am
Very interesting site. Hope it will always be alive!
tramadol
March 22nd, 2009 at 5:51 am
tramadol
Excellent site. It was pleasant to me.
March 23rd, 2009 at 4:18 am
viagra
I bookmarked this site. Thank you for good job!
March 24th, 2009 at 9:42 pm
I don’t normally comment on blogs.. But nice post! I just bookmarked your site
April 2nd, 2009 at 4:51 am
Excellent site. It was pleasant to me.
buy cheap viagra
April 9th, 2009 at 4:35 am
If you have to do it, you might as well do it right viagra
April 16th, 2009 at 10:11 pm
Could you help me. They say such nice things about people at their funerals that it makes me sad to realize that I’m going to miss mine by just a few days.
I am from Kuwait and too bad know English, please tell me right I wrote the following sentence: “Airline tickets with instant reservations for last minute airline tickets,airfare packages weekend getaways about our cheap last minute airline tickets.”
Thank you very much
. Vandyke.
April 19th, 2009 at 8:56 am
vzbIUD vbsnfautbknr, [url=http://mdqwszzshvsg.com/]mdqwszzshvsg[/url], [link=http://dzeombjgavtq.com/]dzeombjgavtq[/link], http://reeruxrnrppe.com/