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Which Wise Man of Conservatism is Correct?
I have been struck this week by the divergent opinions of two wise men of conservatism, George Will and Victor Davis Hanson. Will thinks Americans are too mired in pessimism:
The world might currently seem unusually disorderly, but it can be so without being unusually dangerous. If we measure danger by the risk of violence, the world is unusually safe. For this and other reasons, Americans should curb their pessimism.
He points out that terrorist groups in the past have been more lethal, and, though ISIS is nasty, he agrees with President Obama that it poses no existential threat to the US or the West in general. Even its beheadings and other atrocities echo those found in public executions in Shakespeare’s London. With time, this kind of barbarism recedes as cultures mature. Russia, as a nuclear state, is a more worrisome problem, but its ramshackle economy makes sanctions likely to be effective. So we should not be so worried about the state of the world.
Worldwide, violence has been receding, unevenly but strikingly, for centuries. Steven Pinker, a Harvard psychologist, ascribes the steep decline in violence to numerous factors — governments supplanting anarchy; trade supplanting plunder; rejection of “cruel and unusual” punishments; the decline of interstate war since 1945; the collapse of Communism; the pacifying effect of prosperity and its pursuit; cosmopolitanism, meaning the decline of hostile parochialisms due to literacy, travel, education, popular culture, and mass media.
Additionally, Will suggests that some worrisome situations might have an upside. Greece’s financial troubles might serve to highlight the follies of the European Union and the euro. Foreign policy failures, particularly in Libya, might serve to highlight how unsuitable Hillary Clinton is for the presidency, though it unfortunately also shows how unforced errors in foreign policy are the result of panic. That being the case, Will urges us to buck up and take a more reasonable view of the current state of the world.
Victor Davis Hanson agrees with Will that panic causes problems, but he parts ways when it comes to the state of the world. He compares contemporary conditions to those of the 1930s:
The panic from the ongoing and worldwide Depression in the 1930s had empowered extremist movements the world over. Like-minded, violent dictators of otherwise quite different Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Imperial Japan, and the Communist Soviet Union all wanted to attack their neighbors.
Hanson argues that had the West been willing to band together to deter Hitler, they could have avoided World War II, but instead Europeans appeased him, the US turned isolationist, Japan and Italy joined Hitler, and anti-Semitism became rampant. Hanson asks if all this doesn’t sound depressingly familiar.
He goes on to catalogue the similarities between that time and our own. Europe is still reeling from the 2008 financial meltdown. The situation is exacerbated by the ill-conceived euro and unwise European immigration policies in recent years. Anti-Semitism is again rampant. The US has turned inward as a result of the Iraq and Afghan wars and an unwillingness on the part of the left to be honest about the nature of the enemy. Hanson argues that
The 1930s should have demonstrated to us that old-time American isolationism and the same old European appeasement will not prevent but only guarantee a war. And the 1930s should have reminded us that Jews are usually among the first — but not the last — to be targeted by terrorists, thugs, and autocrats.
Which of these wise men is on the right track? Can they both be right in some sense? In a way, yes. Both compare the current moment to the past using different signposts. Looking at the bigger comparative picture in terms of levels of violence, Will concludes that things aren’t so bad. VDH compares current trajectories to a particular historical period and suggests that the United States should have learned from history in formulating current policy. Which argument seems more cogent to you?
The comparison is perhaps not quite fair to Will. I don’t think he favors isolationism nor Obama’s policies in general, and panic is not usually the best spur to sensible action. Still, I’m inclined to agree with VDH. Now is not a time to downplay the perilous state of our nation and the world. Policies of appeasement and winking at virulent anti-Semitism lead to very bad places. These things do not heal themselves. The left, with its ironically rosy view of humanity, can’t quite get its collective mind around these realities. After all, if we could just provide jobs for everyone in the world there would be no problems. So, while I agree with Will that panic is not the best response to anything, I still think we have a paradigm from the past that could guide our actions at the current juncture. We should use it.
Published in General
The failure to understand this is one of the most frustrating things about the anti-war Left. Actually, ever the more moderate wing of the Democratic Party (e.g. Hillary Clinton) failed miserably to stand up to the anti-war Left and abandoned the mission in Iraq.
I remember driving in my care during the 2012 debate between Biden and Ryan, and Ryan was arguing that the administration’s myopic desire to “end the war in Iraq” was leading it to a wholesale failure to provide for the security of the fledgling semi-representative Iraqi republic, particularly by failing to get a status of forces agreement. Biden promised that the administration would get a status of forces agreement. I remember thinking “liar” — and I was right. (Not that it takes great wisdom to figure out when Joe Biden is lying.)
It would be nice if the MSM pointed out that the rise of ISIS, and all of the ensuing chaos and brutality, is the natural result of the Obama administration’s short-sighted, foolish policy in Iraq.
Seconded.
I’m sure he’d respond that he never wanted us to get into Iraq and — while I have some sympathy with that position, despite favoring the invasion — we had already done so before he decided to run for president. He campaigned heavily on getting us out of Iraq and then this happened.* It galls me that he gets away with pretending he had no part in it.
* I’m not sold on the notion that we had “won” in Iraq prior to 2009. Surely, the Surge had made some tremendous gains, but we’d seen Iraq cycle from stability to chaos a few times before then.
Where I agree with Victor Davis Hanson and share his pessimism is that there has been a lot of wealth accumulation and concentration globally in the last twenty years. It looks great on paper, but the effect is to enable individuals and governments to fund their evil plans.
The old guns-versus-butter problem.
You add into that problem the large number of kids not connected to family life–450,000 children in foster care in the United States alone, just for starters. There were, as of three years ago, before we brought in several thousand high school-aged kids from Central America these past two years–6,000 high school-aged, family-less, homeless kids in Massachusetts alone. Multiply that across the country and then the whole world.
So there’s a lot of money floating around, and a lot of directionless young people.
It’s a recipe for war.
One thing that could also factor into worldwide instability in years to come is the Chinese gender imbalance. All those men who cannot get wives will need somewhere to spend their energy. We’ll have to keep an eye on that.
Yes.
Whew.
I was watching an admittedly liberal MSM interview about terrorism on my Yahoo! home page news feed this week, and this terrorism expert in Washington, D.C., said they are estimating somewhere around 15,000 U.S. young people have longings to join ISIS. They are connecting over the Internet.
No surprise.
These are young people who are without family or faith. They want to belong. They want to feel needed and like they are part of a group. They want friends, basically. They have stirred-up emotions that have to go somewhere.
The breakdown of church, family life, and local communities and neighborhoods is going to come back and bite us.
F that! We need him! The second he steps down it’ll mean the Second Coming Of Trudeau. That is what I call an existential threat!
There will always be Patty Hearsts.
The biggest difference between you and I on this issue would seem to be that you attribute only factors immediately in play at the time of collapse, where as I say Rome sat on the verge of collapse for centuries, and the causal events predate the actual collapse by centuries.
I would describe Roman cultural decline as decadence, not debauchery. Orgies didn’t cause Rome’s downfall, but their culture became increasingly soft as it became more prosperous.
What I said was that this was the moment where Rome was ultimately doomed, not its peak of power. I don’t think this is a greatly disputable claim. Marius shifted the loyalties of the legions to their general as opposed to the nation. Combined with the senate allowing him consecutive terms as consul, an action that was forbidden expressly because it was feared it would lead eventually to one man accumulating too much power, and the recipe for all future civil wars was laid.
Marius discarding so many Roman traditions leads directly to the overthrow of the Republic by Caesar a mere 50 years later. I’m not sure how anyone can read the histories of the centuries that followed without seeing this moment as the cause of the power struggles that plagued Rome for the rest of its days.
Low quality emperors is the inevitable byproduct of having emperors. Marcus Aurelius was a competent enough leader, but not enough to see the flaws in appointing his useless son emperor. Attempts to establish dynasties are inevitable when one man wields supreme power, and some of those heirs will be utterly incompetent.
I don’t know that this is true. If we judge scale the size of the enemy forces (not my preference, but we have to start somewhere) then it was no bigger than the wars fought at the time of Marius against various barbarian tribes. Arausio had something like 200,000 soldiers on the other side of the battle. Hannibal and Pyrrhus both had smaller armies, but both were of a substantially higher quality than what Rome fought in its later days.
Persian court intrigue predates Roman court intrigue. By quite a bit. Herodotus is full of it. A significant part of my point is that the Persian tradition of all powerful kings who ruled by their whims and engaged in all manner of court intrigue was foreign to the Romans, and an anathema to their culture, stemming from their origins in overthrowing a king. I’m arguing precisely that their culture became more like the Persians, and in turn, became less stable.
I suppose we now have to run through the imperial period as you tell me that Rome was doing okay, while I tell you that Rome was in bad shape.
By September of 1940 Germany had already given up on invading Britain (Operation Sea Lion) long before it invaded Russia. So, my point stands, namely, that even a sea invasion over a short distance against a fairly weak enemy is so difficult that the Germans, not at the time really at war with anyone else by this time (France having been defeated by June 1940), could not pull it off. They actually came to believe that Russia would be easier.
When we finally launched that same British invasion in reverse, on D-Day 1944, it was touch and go. We could have lost it all that day. Bad weather, or more competent commanders on the German side (instead of Hitler), and the invasion could have failed. It must be a really hard thing to do.
I doubt that 20 years of peace on the continent would have allowed them to threaten an enemy with (by the time their invasion would be launched) the world’s biggest navy and most sophisticated air force, across 3,600 miles of ocean, then to hit the beaches on our east coast, defended by an army of 30 million men. I don’t think they would do it. I don’t think we had to worry about it.
If we had actually worried much about a German attack on our homeland in 1941 (or later) we would not have allowed the Russians to take the full brunt of the European war from 1941 till 1944. According to your view, if the Germans had prevailed in the Eastern Front, we would have been under existential threat. But we did precious little to take the pressure off them. I interpret that to mean that we did not see a German victory in Russia as something so catastrophic that it must be prevented at all costs, since we didn’t seem willing to pay much of a cost at all.
Oh, yeah, but at least this fop of yours can box… That’ll make up for his bringing back the good ol’ days of the 70’s, when no civilized country could do anything right-
Frank- I have a couple unrelated points to make an response:
1) “assassinated” was supposed to have been Sassanid. I’m dictating these posts into my phone and the transliteration is not always precise. I should have more thoroughly checked it before I posted. I was not making a reference to political intrigue political intrigue in the Persian court. I was referring to the rise of a new and aggressive state on the border of the eastern Roman Empire.
2) I agree with you that the unprecedented actions of Marius were the point at which the Republic became unlikely to be sustained, but we are not discussing the fall of the Roman Republic. We are discussing the fall of Roman power. The fact that Roman power continued to wax for at least three centuries after the death of Marius and two centuries after the death of the republic suggests that Roman power was not dependent upon republican virtue.
3) I’m not sure what you are basing the qualitative assessment of Germanic armies relative to the Army is possessed by Hannibal or Pyrrus. It would seem to me that the best criterion would be their performance relative to Roman armies. The Roman armies which faced at least the early stages of Germanic invasions and which how old the frontier against Persia where professional, well-trained, long service heavy infantry. In contrast, the Roman armies which had such difficulty defeating Hannibal and Pyrrus were made made up of citizen levies, lacking professional training and largely without the heavy armor which would come to characterize the later Roman legions which so outclassed most competitors. In any case, even if the Germanic horns were man for man less threatening than Hannibal’s hodgepodge of mercenaries and Iberian tribesmen (a proposition for which I see no conclusive evidence) as you pointed out, there were a lot more of them and quantity has a quality all its own.
4) Just one more (repetitive) note on Marius. I seriously dispute the notion that Roman power was doomed from the point of Marius’s departure from the established constitution. There are simply too many centuries of intervening proximate causation which that argument does not address. It is roughly analogous to making the claim that the British Empire was doomed because of Cromwell or that America was doomed to suffocating debt because Hamilton got his way on the national bank.
Frank- “The biggest difference between you and I on this issue would seem to be that you attribute only factors immediately in play at the time of collapse, where as I say Rome sat on the verge of collapse for centuries, and the causal events predate the actual collapse by centuries.”
I don’t think it’s quite accurate to say that I limit my analysis only to factors immediately at play at the time of collapse, which I would in any casedistinguish from the point at which decline began by at least another century. It’s that I do not place much weight on events which took place centuries farther in time from the commencement of the Roman Empire’s decline than the entire lifespan of most empires.
Man- “By September of 1940 Germany had already given up on invading Britain (Operation Sea Lion) long before it invaded Russia.”
I think we are operating over very different ideas of what the relevant timeframe is. I recognize that I am engaging in counterfactual history, but the fact that Germany decided with in a matter of months of the conclusion of the conquest of France that its resources should be used on the invasion of Russia rather than the invasion of Britain doesn’t seem terribly relevant to the point that I am making about what a Germany which either refrained from attacking Russia or was successful in its invasion (a real possibility) would be able to do after several years of unchallenged consolidation of its European conquest.
I agree with you that both of us are engaging in counterfactual history to a degree. But the real history indicates that US leaders did not view the German threat as existential. They didn’t act as if they did.
It wasn’t simply a decision by the Germans that their”resources should be used on the invasion of Russia rather than the invasion of Britain.” Rather, it was a decision that an invasion of Britain, which if successful would have perhaps been the final nail in the coffin of European resistance, was too problematic to succeed.
Remember the American reluctance to invade Japan? We expected millions of casualties on both sides. We used that reluctance as justification to drop atomic bombs on them. This invasion would have taken place after years of degrading Japanese defenses, not years of them building them up, as we would have done to counter a possible German invasion. The Japanese were so spent that they had resorted to kamikaze and kaiten attacks. How many casualties would the Germans have had to consider if they attacked the US homeland from 3,600 miles away? Many millions? Would they have dared? If not, did we have to care (in the existential meaning) that they were in control of the entire European continent?
Frank: “Low quality emperors is the inevitable byproduct of having emperors. Marcus Aurelius was a competent enough leader, but not enough to see the flaws in appointing his useless son emperor. Attempts to establish dynasties are inevitable when one man wields supreme power, and some of those heirs will be utterly incompetent.”
My point about the poor quality of emperors who succeeded due to heredity was not quite as broad as I think you took it to be. I am not arguing that the high level of political instability to which I refer is simply the product of rule based on heredity inevitably being something of a crapshoot when it comes to quality of rulers.
All dynastic monarchies are susceptible to the risk of unqualified rulers, as you correctly point out. However, despite its tendency to produce rulers of widely differing quality, hereditary monarchy has generally been one of the more stable forms of government throughout history. This is because the principle of legitimacy in established hereditary monarchy’s is very strongly tied to heredity. As a result, even when the biological lottery results in a ruler who is less than competent, the ambition of more qualified potential rivals who lack a credible dynastic claim is often overcome by respect for the descent based legitimacy of the incumbent. This was not the case in the Roman system.
Because there was no strong principle of legitimacy being based upon heredity a Roman emperor’s right to rule was largely a function of his competence. This principle worked well when emperors appointed successors who were not their own sons, as ability was a chief criterion for selection. The problem with Marcus Aurelius’s appointment of Commodus as his successor was not that he was attempting to move from a merit-based to a hereditary monarchy. It was that Commodus was unfortunately a particularly bad emperor. Had Aurelius been succeeded by a few generations of hereditary emperors who were of at least average quality, it seems likely that the hereditary principle of legitimacy would have become established firmly enough to survive the occasional incompetent. I’m aware that my argument seems to rest heavily on the luck, but I actually think luck plays a very important part in the course of history.