Category Archives: Political Philosophy

William Appleman Williams and the US foreign policy worldview

James Carden mentions William Appleman Williams’ “inside-outside” dynamic. The official, self-serving narrative for US government action is set by those within the government, and reinforced by the major US media outlets, who serve as official propagandists.

More on Williams here, with the US worldview described as such:

• A tendency to equate anti-colonialism with opposition to empire as such, thereby crediting the United States, a frequent opponent of formal empire, with a steadfastly anti-imperial outlook;
• An insistence that American values are universal values, leading to this corollary: “other peoples cannot really solve their problems and improve their lives unless they go about it in the same way as the United States”;
• A self-serving commitment to the principle of self-determination, informed by the conviction that “all peoples must ultimately self-determine themselves in the American Way if America itself is to be secure and prosperous”; or to put it another way, only when “historic American principles were honored by all” would world peace become possible;
• A penchant for externalizing evil, fostering an inclination to believe that trials and tribulations at home have their roots abroad; “domestic problems [therefore] became international problems” and U.S. foreign policy became the continuation of domestic politics by other means;
• A reflexive predilection for demonizing adversaries; opponents of the United States are not merely wrong or misguided; they are by definition “beyond the pale and almost, if not wholly, beyond redemption”;
• A belief that the American economy cannot function absent opportunities for external expansion and that the American political system cannot function absent prosperity: stagnation fostered internal unrest which threatened stability and raised “the specter of chaos”; economic expansion, therefore, “provided the sine qua non of domestic prosperity and social peace”;
• A steady, if unacknowledged, drift toward militarization, as policymakers “increasingly defined safety in terms of conquest—or at any rate domination”; yet as Williams emphasizes, “it was the civilians who defined the world in military terms, not the military who usurped civilian power”;
• An unshakable confidence in American Exceptionalism and American beneficence; in the end “a unique combination of economic power, intellectual and practical genius, and moral rigor” will enable the United States “to check the enemies of peace and progress—and build a better world—without erecting an empire in the process.”

The conditions for state expansion

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It is a mistake to analyze the actions of governments. Instead, the actions of the people who make up governments should be the focus of study. Their incentives, their ranges of possible actions, the benefits and costs of their actions, both perceived and real, and the belief systems which facilitate their actions are important.

Belief systems are necessary to maintain the momentum of governmental action. They do not operate within a system of economic profit and loss and therefore must rely on other motivations. These motivations must provide psychological cover for the violence, both threatened and real, that all government actions rest on. Otherwise disgusting acts can be explained and condoned when a (pretended) higher goal is in mind. Most, if not all, empires expanded on the foundation of some national philosophy or ethos which justified the subjugation of others, often for reasons that were explained to be for their own good. These other live both inside and outside of the empire.

Compare nations where no such ethos exists. The governments of these places are seen by their citizens as nothing but corrupt and as hindrances. They focus their depredations, usually at a low level, inwardly since there is no enthusiasm or energy for outward expansion.

Finally, observe the historical collapses of empires. They all coincide closely in time with the collapse of the national ethos.

Who acts within the government? We see a mix of those who are simply selling their labor and those who act as entrepreneurs. Both groups require different analysis than their counterparts in the private sector. The labor sold to the government cannot be valued as discounted marginal product since it is not purchased by those who produce and sell in a competitive market. The wages are paid with what could be considered stolen money. No one willingly parted with their money to buy these services.

The entrepreneurs also do not profit by filling a demand in a competitive market. Instead they act to sell policies, ideas, that can facilitate the goals of someone of higher rank than themselves in the government. These goals must further not only the goals of the higher ranking individual, but also the goals of one of many organizations within the government, sometimes at the expense of other organizations withing the government, but they must always comport with the general ideological and philosophical underpinnings of the government as a whole. This is the current they ride on and the cover they rely on for protection against the consequences of their actions.

This necessity of riding on the ideological current explains the group thinking and lack of questioning which seems so odd to thinking observers from the outside. One need not truly believe the ideology, but one must at least feign belief if one wants to advance from within. The beliefs of many of the policy entrepreneurs are fickle. They are as subject to change as a restaurateurs menu. One’s own beliefs as to the proper items on a menu or the proper governmental policy must be flexible enough to find an audience, a market.

But this flexibility is also the ever present precondition for the rapid collapse of empires. Any expansionary government must convince those who pay for the expansion, the taxpayers, that there is a greater philosophical meaning behind the expansion. When the facade of this philosophy falls away, and the expansion is seen as nothing more than a wealth transfer, those whose wealth has been transferred away withdraw their support. The entrepreneurs quickly jump ship or find new markets when the ideological momentum stops or changes course. Only the true believers are left to realize how few they truly were.

Maybe this explains the push for the US to be considered a “propositional nation”. Without a proposition, the US has little to hold it together. It has a decreasingly common culture from which to draw. There is no common religion. There are no real national founding myths. It is no wonder then that such a blank slate would have a proposition drawn up for it by its rulers and their intellectual enablers that is fluid enough to empower and enrich those rulers in almost any situation, all the while maintaining the pretense of goodness and morality and historical purpose which excuses them from apologizing to its many victims and keeps the taxpayers from raising too much of a complaint.

Maxim rex non potest peccare: sovereign immunity and the 9/11 JASTA Bill

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The king can do no wrong.

The US government’s latest excuse for Obama’s upcoming veto of JASTA is that it “threatens the troops”. They have also said that holding Saudi Arabians accountable for their roles in 9/11 would set a dangerous precedent. The US government might someday be held accountable for its actions! Well, isn’t this a good thing? A feature, not a bug? The American people would win by placing legal ramifications on the idiotic adventurism of the politicians and careerists who have done so much harm with their money.

And now the European Union has come out against the bill, no doubt afraid that they could be held accountable for their many misdeeds.

Saudi Arabia is now busy bribing (I mean lobbying) US politicians to keep this “sacrosanct” principle of international law in place.

What a great racket. The worst social climbers and careerists can join an organization that let’s them literally kill anyone with looted money and they can’t be held accountable.

The War Lobby, think tanks, and enriching special interests at the expense of American taxpayers

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There is not even the pretense of working for the good of the American people, or any other people other than the small group of politicians, bureaucrats, think tank “intellectuals”, and weapons makers who parasitize the country.

From Stephen Kinzer in the Boston Globe:

The US Committee on NATO was founded by a former Lockheed executive and pushed successfully to expand the NATO alliance onto Russia’s doorstep. That sharply increased tension in Europe, which produces a handsome profit for the arms industry. Another influential think tank, the Atlantic Council, is funded by Raytheon and Lockheed. It faithfully produces articles with headlines like “Why Peace is Impossible With Putin,” and urges the United States and European countries to “commit to greater defense spending” and confront “a revanchist Russia.”

Large, centralized bureaucratic democracies are susceptible to myopic, parasitic special interests.

The price of Empire

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What Empire brings, from Bill Kaufman:

It’s been a long time since a Republican or Democratic presidential nominee acknowledged the primacy of home over the empire. Today we have these rootless politicos babbling on about “the homeland” — a creepy totalitarian phrase that, pre-Bush, was never applied to our country and which we should ridicule at every opportunity before it is permanently implanted in our national vocabulary. As the manufacture of political opinions and the directing of the political parties has become centralized in imperial Washington, the old skepticism of a powerful central state and respect for out-of-the-way places, the provinces, has seemingly vanished.

Why is there such consensus among the Establishment on foreign policy?

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Justin Logan, paraphrasing his upcoming paper:

After demonstrating the lack of debate about grand strategy in Washington, we argue that the consensus strategy, primacy, serves the interests of U.S. political leaders, meaning there is little demand for arguments questioning it. Aspiring foreign policy hands would be poorly served professionally if they specialized in a product that their buyers–policymakers–did not want. Accordingly, think tankers and other members of the foreign policy community adopt what we call an “operational mindset”: scholars specialize in relative minutiae, giving support and the veneer of scholarly credibility to whatever foreign policy ideas the policymaker may have, without questioning the objectives themselves.

Rather than a “marketplace of ideas” in which policymakers peruse various policy shops for ideas, the role of the ideas people is mostly to lend scholarly credibility to, and possibly help implement, policymakers’ existing preferences. And policymakers’ existing preferences almost always equate to primacy, partly resulting from the normal bias toward activism among politicians, partly from ignorance, partly from social and other pressures, and partly from the fact that their own incentives point to an expansive grand strategy. In short, there are few restraints and many inducements facing policymakers when it comes to foreign policy.

Sovereign immunity is criminal insider immunity

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Governments are the only arbiters of the law within their own borders, where they have a monopoly on the use of force, and make deals with other governments so individual citizens of any country can’t sue governments for their actions. Individual citizens can be sued, corporations can be sued, but governments can’t be sued.

But governments don’t act, the individuals in the governments do, and they often don’t have their citizens’ interests in mind when they act. They act for the benefit of special interests. When average people are hurt because of the actions done for the benefit of the few, the few don’t want them to be able to receive compensation, and they certainly don’t want to be held accountable personally. Otherwise the prisons would be filled with presidents, politicians, bureaucrats, and lobbyists from all over the world.

From The Hill:

“The White House has come out against the legislation, because of what it claims would be dangerous precedent that could erode the legal system of sovereign immunity.

“If we open up the possibility that individuals and the United States can routinely start suing other governments, then we are also opening up the United States to being continually sued by individuals in other countries,” Obama said in an interview with CBS broadcast early Tuesday.”

Will Increasing Technology Necessarily Lead to Higher Stock Prices?

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This article by Gary North talks about the drag the administrative State puts on the lives and dealings of modern people. Administrative law, like the permanent security
State, is above and apart from the elected governments in many ways.

North also talks about the inevitable Great Default, where governments will be forced to capitulate on their promises to pay health and other entitlement programs in the future.

Technological innovation has brought massive gains in efficiency and productivity in the last several decades. These gains will likely increase at an increasing rate. The prospects for the future are laid out in a very long and influential article by Ray Kurzweil, who begins his essay like this:

“You will get $40 trillion just by reading this essay and understanding what it says. For complete details, see below. (It’s true that authors will do just about anything to keep your attention, but I’m serious about this statement. Until I return to a further explanation, however, do read the first sentence of this paragraph carefully.)”

If one does read much further, the $40 trillion comment is explained. Kurzweil says that exponential growth in technology, and hence efficiency, productivity, and wealth, imply that stock markets should triple, or rise $40 trillion in value.

Perhaps. But some other things could happen. Rapidly increasing technology is leading to greater connectivity between people, all of whom are buyers of some things and sellers of other things. It is becoming less necessary for large corporations to aggregate labor for the production of goods and services on one hand, and to distribute those goods and services, on the other hand. Technology will continue to allow more and more transactions to take place directly. Will many of the profits of these transactions accrue to sources not listed on stock exchanges? Will we see a re-localization of economies which will show the age of centralization and conglomeration to have been only a transitional state made necessary by a lack of technology?

How many corporations and their stock prices are boosted by the expectation of continued redirection of capital through governments? A Great Default would not only mean that health care spending (in total dollars) would go down, and with them the stock prices of the health care sector. The many corporations related to the war and surveillance State would be affected. Auto makers, energy companies, airplane makers, and many others receive huge government subsidies.

These two factors, greater connectivity which will remove the need for many corporate middlemen, and a general government default which will leave more money in people’s hands at the expense of connected corporations, lead me to imagine another world. This other world will see lower and less important stock markets, but greater total wealth in society as a whole.

Every non-coerced transaction leaves all parties better off. The future will see exponentially more transactions taking place in more efficient markets. Total wealth will rise exponentially. But stock prices might not.

And what of the administrative State? Will it be able to insinuate itself further into the dealings of our personally connected buyers and sellers? Exponential increases in connectivity would lead to exponentially more holes to possibly be filled by State administration. I don’t believe it would have the intelligence or the funding to be able to keep up. It could revert, due both to lack of funding and capability and to being out-competed by the private sector, to a night watchman role. Technology might lead to a re-distribution of wealth back to its producers.

How Right He Was

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http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/2015/12/peacenik-prophet-russell-kirk.html

“Kirk saw President Bush’s misuse of Reagan’s Cold War military apparatus as nothing but sheer betrayal of Reaganite, republican, and American principles. In private, Kirk joked that the American people should execute President Bush on the White House lawn. In public, Kirk railed against what he knew to be the beginning of American empire and never-ending war.”

War and Community

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Robert Nisbet in The Quest for Community describes the effects of war on a modern, impersonal society composed of disconnected people in search of meaning and purpose.

War brings modern, atomized societies into a temporary sense of community. Empty activities are filled with moral meaning. Everyday life, with its anonymous people repeating meaningless tasks in standardized offices, become part of a common moral crusade. Modern wars are consciously cast as moral endeavors by governments, undertaken for moral abstractions like democracy, freedom, and even women’s rights. The enemy is seen as the personification of evil. War brings a temporary sense of spiritual peace to lives otherwise devoid of moral purpose and disconnected from their fellow citizens. Even shopping for the most meaningless material objects, the symbols of the society which man has striven for and which has made his existence that of a cog in a machine for the production of those objects, takes on a moral significance.

War administration and production for the war effort find their ways into science and education. Psychiatrists forswear their oaths in order to bring evil doers to justice. University researchers turn their attention to making weapons, with the aid of healthy government grants, of course.

After the fighting drags on, and the moral fervor dissipates, the psychological weight of returning to anonymous lives without moral purpose seems heavier than it was before the moral crusade started. What is left is a strengthened government and bureaucratic apparatus devoid of morality, existing for its own sake, more entwined with the productive society, and always on the lookout for new moral crusades for moral cover.

As the war does not turn out as promised, citizens lose faith in their political leaders and turn to the military as the source of national strength and efficiency. If only the politicians had turned the military loose, instead of shackling them, everything would have been different.

Military leaders are increasingly seen as the best of the nation, endowed with almost super-human properties. Soldiers are applauded at airports, and sporting events become constant celebrations of war and the politicians’ tool for waging it, the military. Instead of being seen as at best dupes, and at worst careerists and adventurists with no compunction against killing strangers, soldiers are seen as sacrificing, selfless protectors against an encroaching and ugly world. Minding their business and working for good, they were the victims of sneak attacks by cowards who hate us for who we are, because we are good. The people, despite the lies of politicians and the setbacks in the war of good and evil, have found a new totem, the sacrificial, yet always pure, soldier. For the masses, psychologically there is no choice but dissent into total national self-doubt.

Nisbet ends chapter 2 with a quote for Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamozov, from the Grand Inquisitor:

“So long as man remains free he strives for nothing so incessantly and painfully as to find someone to worship. But man seeks to worship what is established beyond dispute, so that all men will agree at once to worship it. For these pitiful creatures are concerned not only to find what one or the other can worship, but find something that all will believe in and worship; what is essential is that all may be together in it. This craving for community of worship is the chief misery of every man individually and of all humanity from the beginning of time.”

Metaphysical yearning is hard to quench. Its pain is ameliorated with communal continuity and symbolism, both religious and social. The continuity assures man of his place in a never-ending cycle, and the symbolism, revered by all in a community, binds that community together. This was the traditional world. It has almost disappeared in the Western world, and has left in its place free-ranging people searching for their place in the modern industrial society, where productive efficiency is valued most highly and which leaves little room for the encumbrances of the old continuities and symbols.

New symbols must be found. Needing something to worship, and needing to know that all others also worship it because the need to live in a community is so strong, the symbols of the managerial State take the place of the old symbols. Those who dare to abstain from worship, or who remain agnostic to these new gods, are despised. Phrases such as “love it or leave it”, or calls for the killing of dissenters become more common. Man must worship something, and when man is cast in a small role in a materialist society where the old ways have been overthrown, and where the democratic lowest common denominator is exalted, the new objects of worship will reflect this.