I would guess (I don’t have real evidence) that most Bush supporters of the sort you are talking about approach issues of terrorism and politics in general in a fashion that is cognitively much closer to yours and mine than your reference to utopia and millennialism implies. I.e., they accept that there are no perfect or permanent solutions to terrorism, that tradeoffs inevitable, that means should be reasonably tailored to achieve identifiable ends, etc. Addmittedly, within this cognitive framework, the people in question approach apply it much more crudely than you do (and than it should be applied) and also simply (and, I would agree wrongly) give too little weight to the legal apparatus of liberty (both for its own sake and as an instrumental tool for keeping your society from screwing up too badly) too much weight to the value of force and violence, etc. And, of course, there is the resistence to contrary evidence and wishful thinking; but one doesn’t have to be a millenial utopian to be afflicted with these tendencies.

Obviously, you are not contending that a majority of even extreme Bushies are millenial utopians who don’t think rationally about policies at all, and I am not suggesting that the tendencies you point to play no role at all in the mind set of a substantial fraction of American voters. However, the rhetoric I quoted and some other similar rhetoric in your post suggests that you are characterizing (a substantial fraction) of the other side as more different from “us” in underlying world view than they really are.

I had somewhat similar concerns about a post of yours I remember reading during the 2004 election campaign. (I’m going by memory so I am almost certainly distorting your post at least a bit and there is a small chance that my recollection is totally spurious.) As I remember it, you were responding to the limited effect on Republican voters of the already obvious (to some of us)incompetence of the administration’s planning and execution of the Iraq war. Referring to people you knew in your home town, you suggested that some people had a value system that places much less importance on competence than you and other members of the intelligensia/new economy/upper middle class did. You pointed out that, the alternative values these people favored, such as fortitude, acceptance of fate without bitterness, etc. were, in fact praiseworthy, even if they differed from the sort of competence needed to make good foreign policy. My personal reaction at the time (I didn’t submit a comment) was that while there was some accuracy to your characterization, it was highly overdrawn. I felt that most small-town, conservatively religious, echt red staters would agree that that valued fortitude etc. but would find it extremely condescending to be described as not valuing competence as much as you did. Moreover, I felt that these individuals could reasonably claim that they did value competence, with that word having much the same meaning you and I would give it. They simply placed more emphasis on having the correct general approach and gut feels as a component of competence than on educated technical expertise. Moreover, while this approach is, in your and my opinion, inadequate as an account of the competence needed to run the country, it is not off the wall. I was reminded of two examples: 1. Winston Churchill was arguably wrong on just about every technical issue he addressed in his life (e.g., gold standard in the 1920s, invading Normandy vs. fighting in Mediterranean in WWII) but his correct gut feel on a couple of key issues made him ultimately a more competent leader, even by purely technical standards, than his opponents. 2. In the mid-sixties a bunch of hippies (to simplify the description) arrived at a more competent Vietnam policy than McNamara, the Bundys, the Rostows, etc.

Just to be clear, both emotionally and intellectually I approach political issues very much as you do. But I fear that you are drawing a sharper, or, rather, philosophically deeper, distinction between us and some of our ppponents than is justified.

Jonah Goldberg anticipates you:

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MDNiN2VlNzIxNTg5ZDQyMjgzMDRjYzFiMzUwOGJlOGI=

First, though, I am uncertain that the “educated elite” as a whole are alienated (or being alienated) in the US society today, as you seem to suggest. Certainly the categories of liberal and progressive intellectual are thoroughly alienated, but there are plenty of educated elites who are generally satisfied with their current influence on and relation to the state (Yoo, Perle, Kristol, Wolfowitz, Reynolds, etc etc, the list is considerable). The arguments they put forth to support current policies like torture and aggressive war follow the rules of rational discourse rather well, even if they are ultimately (in my opinion) quite pernicious. At the same time, I think these arguments also succeed because they draw on deeply felt emotions like fear and distrust of the other, which I would imagine are not rational ideals. And with this observation I’m not trying to say that these thinkers are “failed rationalists”; rather, I’m hoping to question the premise that the educated elite is somehow less emotional or free of the irrational in comparison to the “mass public.” I also don’t mean to imply that this is a dynamic particular to conservative intellectual elites, as a cursory glance at the responses of educated readership on left blogs like talking points or unfogged should demonstrate. I would argue that the rational/irrational elite/mass binaries have always been misleading. Didn’t these distinctions emerge with the ascendancy of liberal intellectuals as a method for claiming specialized expertise and as justification of technocratic power? At the very least, if the distinction isn’t completely false, the categories work dialectically such that they can’t easily be separated.

This doubt of the mass/elite split was a subtext in my original comment. With this said, even if the foundational principles of the educated elite are ultimately false, I completely agree with Gary Jones if he argues that experts constitute a separate social class in modern society. The claim to specialized knowledge seems like a fundamental organizing principle of modern society. Experts/elites themselves certainly work to maintain their distinction from mass society, and I would even say that most contemporary mass culture also reifies the separation of the expert and mass, the rational and irrational (to reference pop culture, see the enigmatic Grissom on CSI, or House MD, etc).

At the same time, it seems to me important to separate expertise from reductive analogies to the educated liberal elite. I would love to hear your thoughts on the dynamics of expertise, but it seems to me that expertise is perfectly capable of supporting nonliberal and even utterly irrational ideals (look no further than the role of engineers in fascist regimes). Also, in the command of liberals, expertise can also support a dis-integreation from political society as well as a claim to power within it; to return to the Schorske case study, Freud is certainly making a claim to expertise, but his expertise has a counter political ingredient– for him politics is reduced to epiphenomenon of psychic forces.

Sorry if this response is a little inchoate, I’m still trying to work some of this stuff out.

My most recent efforts have involved the study of group problem solving in which teams of heuristically diverse experts perform better than the individual members in 99% of cases. There is still the rare instance of a lone expert hitting a home run, but they usually whiff.

I don’t think that better experts can be made some how. The ones we have are as good as they can be. It’s just that there is a limit. They only get so good, and that isn’t good enough to be of much use. Maybe we can hack them some day and give them a brain boost or something, but until then I suggest collective cognition by diverse teams – expert or not.

The streak of “kill everyone on the other side” (now, as I hear, the invasion of Iran is a popular refrain) exists on both fronts. So, believe it or not, does a deep-seated desire for civil liberties, universal fairness, and moderate reform. (The Iranian reform movement was not a myth, as anyone who actually knows Iranians understands.) It’s likely true that either civilization could destroy the other. But that doesn’t erase my concern that either civilization – and, because I love it, I’m particularly concerned about ours – could implode.

I raise that because I think it’s not universally agreed upon. As withywindle points out, we in America have built ourselves up from a past built on rather complicated (and in part unacceptable) practices. I think, however, that democracy was built from, or upon, this past – it was evolving, but wasn’t achieved until some of the worst of those past practices were rejected by fairly universal accord. Yet any reversal of course would be not a retrenchment but a regression. We’d lose the war – within ourselves.

I’ve been reading Richard Posner, and can’t understate how sharply my own sense of dread has been awakened by what I’ve found so far. Posner has always been labeled a pragmatist; and insofar as he’s willing to make his “first principles” economic ones, I suppose he is. But if cost/benefit analyses lead us to conclude that sometimes torture is best; that sometimes suspending civil liberties is acceptable; that any desire to stick to our principles is tantamount to a weak clinging to “pieties” (ok, that’s withywindle, but it accords well with Posner!) – well, as a liberal who’s often been accused of being a wishy-washy “relativist”, I have to say, I’m astounded. What is the foundation of our civilization if all these principles and practices are pieties, and their sacrifice acceptable when it’s expedient (or even worse, seemingly so)?

Anyway, my point is, Posner seems quite convinced that the pragmatic approach will demonstrate that torture and so on *will* work. In this view, I assume “work” means (a) we will find terrorists and unearth their dastardly plots; (b) future terrorists will be cowed by the fact that we’re known to be tough on suspected ones in our custody (“there will be no mercy”); (c) hearts and minds abroad will be convinced by our authority and power; and (d) our own citizens’ hearts and minds will be comforted by our strength, and will rest easy in the knowledge that we are protecting our own. Isn’t that more or less what pragmatism has to offer?

I’ll offer another take: (a) We may find potential terrorists, even though it appears that thus far we have not. (b) Future terrorists will be galvanized (and generated) by a sense that we lump a huge range of people into a category of suspects (see the “unclassified report” on the “cause celebre” aspect). (c) Tentative movements for reform, moderation, and Western style advancements will be quelled (when it’s clear they’re not even followed in the West). (d) And, perhaps most importantly, the hearts and minds of our own citizens will be hardened (see the upsurge in hate speech against American Muslims, whether “assimilated” or not), and popular opinion will turn ever more hawkish, more undemocratic, and more irrational.

Which leads me to presumptions of “stupidity” of people. I have to admit, that is usually my first response to what I see and read. Upon reflection, though (and mostly based on personal interactions – which may be anecdotal, but at least keep me from being foolishly reductive), I come to think that people are more confused, more ambivalent, more suspicious of authority (whether it’s “good” expertise or “bad” punditry), and more persuadable, in a way, than I’d like to allow. This is equally true of the many Muslims I know (not just American ones, but those I know from my years of living in Europe) as of us. I guess that brings me back to the “hearts and minds” thought, however stale that might seem, that I first raised. We are, most of us anyway, hanging in the balance…

As a general sweeping statement, I agree that civics and history need each other. But this does not apply to the classroom. There are a limited number of hours that are being expended by students at a time of crucial brain growth and the time must be used wisely. There is no value in spending it on anything that does not enable the student to live a successful life for himself and his family and to also take part in building a better world and creating a new America with a new history and a new course of civics, and the process renews.

So withywindle I look, probably unfairly, at your aside to me as typical of historians, that is to issue ponderous statements that sound good and wise but are of no practical value. For example, “Those who don’t learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them.” But historians don’t tell us the lessons of history and they often reject the concept altogether. For example, “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Forgetting of course, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Jimmy Carter, Dwight Eisenhower, Harry Truman, Franklin Roosevelt, and so on — forever and forever. So what good are historians and History? Not much.

“In fact the denigration of authority is not the only prejudice of the enlightenment. For, within the enlightenment, the very concept of authority becomes deformed. On the basis of its concept of reason and freedom, the concept of authority could be seen as diametrically opposed to reason and freedom: to be, in fact, blind obedience. This is the meaning that we know, from the usage of their critics, within modern dictatorships.

But this is not the essence of authority. It is true that it is primarily persons that have authority; but the authority of persons is based ultimately, not on the subjection and abdication of reason, but on recognition and knowledge—knowledge, namely, that the other is superior to oneself in judgment and insight and that for this reason his judgment takes precedence, i.e. that it has priority over one’s own. This is connected with the fact that authority cannot actually be bestowed, but is acquired and must be acquired, if someone is to lay claim to it. It rests on recognition and hence on an act of reason itself which, aware of its own limitations, accepts that others have better understanding. Authority in this sense, properly understood, has nothing to do with blind obedience to a command. Indeed, authority has nothing to do with obedience, but rather with knowledge”

Endie:

You did not answer directly the question about civil liberties in Britain since World War One. This matters, since it provides a very important precedent that a liberal democratic state and gather up an extraordinary amount of power over individual liberty during wartime-and then give up those powers at war’s end, instantly. Although I gather that the pub-closing laws did stay on the books until a year or so ago, so I grant some mission creep does occur.

British rights only marginally applied to the Irish during the IRA terror of the 1970s and 1980s; hence a certain number of cause celebres. And yet the policing of the Irish at large as a suspicious group had something to do with the prevention of Irish terror-and the spotty enforcement of the rights of Irishmen in Britain did not metastasize into dictatorship, and has gone away with the general disappearance of IRA terror.

As to ID papers: it is my understanding that virtually all liberal democracies, save the English-speaking ones, required its citizens to show ID, passports, etc., to the authorities upon demand; it may be unEnglish, but it is hardly outside the democratic tradition.

You present an argument of necessity: you are arguing that various measures (especially ID) are not just wrong in principle, but that they don’t work. This does, in crucial respects, undercut the argument from principle: what if they do work? More precisely, what if each of these several measures is not a magic bullet, but each make it more difficult for a terrorist act to be committed, severally deter opportunistic acts of terrorism, catch significant numbers of terrorists beforehand, reduce the number of terrorists entering the country? – what if some or all of the actions you find so objectionable were, in point of fact, necessary to catch these would-be airplane bombers this summer? What if they have already saved British (and other) lives? Why, then you could argue as a matter of principle for the same policy position—but it would be a rather messy, ambiguous, and Burkean situation.

Timothy:

As I said, I am aware of the temptations of Denethor, for which I take Boromir as a variant. I rather do think it is a war of civilizations coming up, and not one of my choosing. I am committing myself to the defense of the West against a civilizational jihad. I do think, empirically, the forces of religion will slowly but surely align all those messy little details you are so fond of into a terrible simplicity-but, as I said before, I support the President’s noble, perhaps foolish, attempt to avoid such simplicities for as long as possible, and not deliberately to provoke them. As for ethics-since my empirics differ quite strongly from yours, it is your position, which I take to tempt the destruction and the enslavement of the West-and actually to increase the odds of a nuclear war in the Middle East-which I find ethically dubious.

“In part they’re willing to do it because they understand the enemy in racial and “civilizational” terms, and never expect that these measures will be employed against themselves.”

Why? American history was built on the successful practice of white, liberal democracy and the enslavement, disenfranchisement, and genocide of non-whites. Most regimes, including democracies, have always had their torturable classes. (In England, always the Irish.) It’s actually been a pretty good bet that you can apply racial/ethnic/religious distinctions, and keep your democracy going. Against that history, mere ethnic profiling by the police (which isn’t even our official policy yet, more’s the pity) seems trivial, and an exercise in sustainability.

I am actually just as glad Sen. McCain exists, and his faction of Republicans, to engage in a mature debate with the administration, about the proper extent of wartime powers. I tend to disagree with him on the issues, but he plays a valuable role in preserving checks and balances and liberty. (And does, I think, rather put a spoke into the idea that popular authoritarianism is rampaging across the land.) In a pinch, though, I cannot trust any political faction that will not recognize the extent of the danger we face, and I will take the risk of losing liberty by action way over the certainty of losing liberty and life by inaction.

And part of the point of liberal democracy, and checks and balances, is that once the people have decided something, endorsed by all branches of the government, they are extraordinarily powerful. Liberal democracy, among other things, marshals the power of millions of citizens for wartime effort. Peacetime liberty is the prerequisite, and counterpart, of wartime power.

“Most of the examples of republics you cite got “murdered” by neighboring states, in classic territorial wars. That is not what this moment is, whatever it is. (Some of them were fairly dubious examples of “republics”, moreover: the Transvaal and OFS, for example.)” – but that is precisely what this moment is. The territorial impulse of Islam, short and long term, is precisely what is at issue. Transvaal and OFS weren’t democracies—but how were they not republics?

“But the things happening with torture and habeas and so on are quite separate issues from all of that, in many ways. They not only aren’t necessary, they’re foolhardy in the extreme.” – Again the argument from necessity—but what if waterboarding Khalil Mohammed was a necessity (as has been stated in a recent interview) that saved the life of many? Then your argument is only one of principle, and a rather different level of ethics.

“But more importantly, this view simply turns its back on progress. I really would like to think that we get wiser as time goes on, that we learn more of what to do and not do.” – and progress is only providence under another name, and I do not trust that sort of secularized providentialism. Contingency, prudence, study the lessons of Old Nick Machiavel.

Actually, I do agree with you in principle that it would be a terrible thing for the US, with its essential contributions to liberty and constitutional government, to cease to exist. (We do actually share many of the same fundamental principles and goals.) My disagreements are purely contingent, empirical, and political—I do not see the threat to our liberties from administration policy that you do, and I see a far more profound threat from our enemies. I do also see the strict parallel in logical argumentation—I want to fight against our enemies before its too late, you want to save our liberties before its too late, and in both fights, not all our fellow citizens see the compelling nature of the danger. Now, while it is doubtless of small comfort to you, I am perfectly prepared to abandon my current political coalition and join yours, when I think circumstances dictate that the time has come to prune these wartime powers government is acquiring over the individual.

“Reasoned discourse”—go back to your Montaigne, man! Put not your faith in reason.

“Which is part of why I don’t want to resort easily to the cry of the expert or elitist at this moment (as I think many radicals have): namely, that the people are stupid.”—Good! That, I think, is the Sarumanian temptation.

Hestal:

The American Way is embedded in History; civics and history need each other.

I am repeating what the Professors who administered the test said, and that is these students did not know very much about civics. They did not understand how our government works. To take the time to teach History rather than Civics, the American Way, is a mistake. Perhaps we can’t teach our children about the American Way because it is undefined. And lack of definition is the hallmark of Historians. They feel their duty is to unearth new sources, or new interpretations of old sources, and publish them in booktiques so that the ignorant masses can buy them to learn about History and decide what the American Way is.

I guess I am one of those people who believes in applying what we know. Historians don’t admit to knowing anything for sure, and they never apply it. What a huge, huge, ugly, shameful waste.