Conservative Progression
by digby
One of my favorite hawkish pundit rationalizations of the last year or so, since it has become evident even to them that Iraq is a cock-up of epic proportions, is that even if it looks bad right now, it could improve in the next 30 years or so in which case everything will turn out all right in the end and everybody will be happy. Indeed, if you look at it in the long sweep of history, even if Iraq devolves into outright civil war, the US did the right thing by “laying the foundations for peace.” (David Ignatius rather famously set that forth in this op-ed.)
However, I’ve never seen this so interestingly explained as is has been today by David Brooks:
In 1848 a democratic revolution swept across Europe, and then promptly collapsed. Thousands of protesters were killed in the streets. Authoritarian regimes were re-established. Some called 1848 “the turning point when Europe failed to turn.”
And yet that wasn’t true. Anti-democratic regimes did regain power, but within decades they had enacted most of the reforms the revolutionaries of 1848 had asked for. Constitutions were written. Suffrage was expanded. Welfare systems were created.
Conservative authoritarians enacted these reforms reluctantly, and with cynical motivations. But they knew they had to keep up with the times to retain their grip on power and to forestall more radical change. Democracy didn’t move forward in a burst of glory, but in a long slog of gradual concessions made by reluctant conservative reformers.
I wonder if, when we look back at the world of today from some future vantage point, we will see an echo of that pattern.
(Interesting that he calls the the reluctant acquiesers conservative authoritarians. Without irony, too.) But his point is that progress always happens so just because conservative authoritarians stand in its way doesn’t mean anyone should get their panties in a bunch. They’ll get it together eventually.
Brooks takes his look into the future:
We’ll see a burst of democratic change that swept the world between 1980 and 2005. Authoritarian regimes collapsed, sometimes under their own weight (the Soviet Union), sometimes amid outside pressure (the Philippines) and sometimes by force (Iraq). In places where the fabric of society was thick, nations maintained their equilibrium and democratic dreams were realized. But in nations where totalitarianism had been strongest, and civil society most brutally pulverized, liberation begat chaos.
In these places, the old political order was the only source of social authority, and once that was removed everything was permissible. The worst people in the nation were given free rein to prey upon the best. In Iraq, that meant brutal violence, rampant crime and a sectarian power struggle that produced unimaginable horror.
In Russia, the chaos produced a culture of plunder and gangsterism that rewarded the dishonest. A large share of the population was set free to drink themselves to death, with the average lifespan of the Russian man declining by seven years.
Moreover, the Western liberators were complicit in and discredited by the chaos. In Russia, the West sent in economists and technocrats. Coming from places that had always been stable, they took for granted the moral foundations that undergird stability. They didn’t see that Russia lacked these foundations, and that any institutions they built on top would simply be perverted.
In Iraq, the American liberators didn’t understand what would happen if brutalized Iraqis were left in a state of nature, and didn’t or couldn’t impose a humane order.
Yes those brutalized regimes just couldn’t get it together and nobody could really help them. It was sad. But fear not. Everything turns out ok in the end with the help of some good old fashioned conservative authoritarianism:
So if the first stage of the democratic era in these places was liberation and the second stage was chaos, the third stage was conservative restoration. Unlike the Western democrats, the conservatives — Putin in Russia, the theocrats and strongmen who came to dominate Iraq [can you believe it? — d] — did understand the desire for order. They understood the people’s desire to live in an environment in which it was possible to lead a dignified life. They shared the feeling of national shame that had come amid the chaos and the longing to restore national prestige. In short, they had a deeper understanding of human nature than the technocrats who came to modernize them.
These conservatives did have their shortcomings:
The autocrats created nations that were not totalitarian but not free. On the one hand they sought to stifle liberty in order to secure their grip on power. Democracy activists were arrested and TV stations suborned. On the other hand, as in 1848, the democratic forces did not go away. The people, especially the growing middle classes, longed for freedom. New technologies threatened centralized power.
You see, if everybody just has a little patience, waits a few decades maybe, a century in some cases, it will all turn out just fine. The key is that progress just “happens” sort of inevitably (certainly without the hard work of those icky “progressives” who keep plugging away for decades for equality and freedom.)The conservative authoritarians will eventually give way because otherwise they have to govern with terror which is “unstable.” (Thank goodness for small favors.)
(One wonders about his little fantasy about democracy activists arrested and TV stations being suborned. Seeing as he writes for the NY Times, you’d think he’d see a little foreshadowing in his own backyard, but I don’t think he does…)
If this pattern is true, and future historians do look back on our period this way, then a crucial task for U.S. foreign policy in the years ahead will be to cajole semi-autocratic regimes — in places ranging from Russia to the Middle East and even China — into making gradual democratic reforms. At the moment we do this badly, alternating between bold speeches that call for revolution and craven diplomatic gestures that suggest capitulation.
Who is this “we” you ask?
Why not here? This is the most powerful question in the world today: Why not here? People in Eastern Europe looked at people in Western Europe and asked, Why not here? People in Ukraine looked at people in Georgia and asked, Why not here? People around the Arab world look at voters in Iraq and ask, Why not here?
Thomas Kuhn famously argued that science advances not gradually but in jolts, through a series of raw and jagged paradigm shifts. Somebody sees a problem differently, and suddenly everybody’s vantage point changes.
”Why not here?” is a Kuhnian question, and as you open the newspaper these days, you see it flitting around the world like a thought contagion. Wherever it is asked, people seem to feel that the rules have changed. New possibilities have opened up.
The question is being asked now in Lebanon. Walid Jumblatt made his much circulated observation to David Ignatius of The Washington Post: ”It’s strange for me to say it, but this process of change has started because of the American invasion of Iraq. I was cynical about Iraq. But when I saw the Iraqi people voting three weeks ago, eight million of them, it was the start of a new Arab world.”
So now we have mass demonstrations on the streets of Beirut. A tent city is rising up near the crater where Rafik Hariri was killed, and the inhabitants are refusing to leave until Syria withdraws. The crowds grow in the evenings; bathroom facilities are provided by a nearby Dunkin’ Donuts and a Virgin Megastore.
The head of the Syrian Press Syndicate told The Times on Thursday: ”There’s a new world out there and a new reality. You can no longer have business as usual.”
[…]
Why not here?…this is clearly the question the United States is destined to provoke. For the final thing that we’ve learned from the papers this week is how thoroughly the Bush agenda is dominating the globe. When Bush meets with Putin, democratization is the center of discussion. When politicians gather in Ramallah, democratization is a central theme. When there’s an atrocity in Beirut, the possibility of freedom leaps to people’s minds.
Not all weeks will be as happy as this one. Despite the suicide bombings in Israel and Iraq, the thought contagion is spreading. Why not here?
That was none other than David Brooks in February of 2005.
Can someone remind me again why i am supposed to take these people seriously? This is some kind of bi-polar reality in which they “believe” certain things one day and then as soon as they are no longer able to hold the facts at bay, simply shift to a completely different stance without so much as a backward glance at their own mistaken judgment. (Josh Marshall documented a similar shape shift from Robert Kaplan earlier this week.) I guess being a hawkish pundit means never having to say you’re sorry.
Liberals have plenty of internal disagreements. The punditocrisy can talk of little else. But at least these internal disagreements don’t usually happen inside each individual liberal’s head.
How a country like the US can support freedom and democracy, and what tools should be used, is a valid question. There has always been the problem of a mighty superpower seeming to throw its weight around having the effect of creating a certain human resistence to its influence. Nobody has an easy answer to that question, but most liberals believe that the best, if not perfect, hope lies in international law and institutions.
But, honestly, anybody who thought that it was a good idea to illegally (and virtually unilaterally) invade and occupy a middle eastern nation that had not attacked anyone, in the name of freedom and democracy was nuts. (To compound the error by thinking that you could use torture and humiliation in the process and still somehow be seen as a valiant liberator is simply mind-boggling.) If there is ever a case in human events in which you cannot adopt an “ends justify the means” philosophy it’s in the realm of spreading liberal values. The minute you do it, you have defeated yourself.
This was not a difficult thing to understand for those who actually believe in liberal values. It seems, however, to still elude those who for the last decade, at least, have been swinging wildly from one position to the other without even pausing for breath. David Brooks has managed to go from starry-eyed neocon optimist to dreary, cold hearted realist in less than 18 months. I shudder to think where he and his friends might land by 2008.
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