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So Give Me the Scoop on this CPAC Thing
I’m guessing there’s no better group of people to ask. I want to know what really happened at CPAC. Remember, I wasn’t there. Missed the party. Wasted my weekend on the news about Boris Nemtsov being blown away on the streets of Moscow. No, of course I don’t know who killed him, but I’m not yet at that zen state where I look at that news and think, “Political assassination in Moscow, Kremlin critic lying dead just outside the Kremlin’s walls, who cares, how could that possibly affect the world.”
So after freaking out completely, I turn my attention back to the US to scan the news from the other superpower, the last, best chance of –well, “my country,” as I quaintly think of it. I read, variously, that CPAC is freaking out the Nation because it seemed “disturbingly sane,” and that 25.7 percent of the 3,000+ attendees–half of whom identified as between the ages of 18 and 25–think Rand Paul’s the man for the job.
If I were just casually skim
ming the news, didn’t know all that much about America, my takeaway would be that CPAC made itself look “disturbingly sane” to the Nation–and I’d be confused: Shouldn’t CPAC just look “disturbing” to the Nation? What does CPAC look like to our nation, as opposed to the Nation? What about the world–did CPAC just make our nation look sane, insane, or “disturbingly sane?” I hope people at CPAC were sane enough to be really freaked out by that news from Moscow–were they?
Ricochet is on the CPAC beat and it’s been there all weekend. Looks like we’ve got 21 podcasts from CPAC and lots of people who were there. Which one should I listen to if I want to know, “What really happened at CPAC?” I figure I have a better chance of figuring that out than figuring out who killed Nemtsov. I want reassurance that CPAC is sane, not “disturbingly sane to the Nation,” or “totally insane, full stop.” So I want to know if lots of people there were thinking, “Who killed Nemtsov,” and worrying about the things sane people worry about when that news clatters across the transom.
Or, maybe I could just focus on the really important part. The key metric. It sounds like there were a lot of Washington critics in Washington. All alive and accounted for, as I understand it. I myself find that undisturbing and entirely sane. Unlike that other superpower I could mention.
But yes, I’d find it weird if you told me, “No one there was at all concerned about Kremlin.” It’s one thing to look so sane it confuses the Nation, another thing to be insane, like the Nation. 
Basically, I don’t think Americans are insane. I reckon if you offer them Rand Paul, my fellow citizens will still be the Americans I know, so unless I’ve completely lost the plot, they’ll give you Jim Webb.
Frankly, he makes a lot more sense to me on national security. Or at least, he seems to be in basic contact with reality. So yes, given that awful choice, I’d vote Webb. My loyalty–and my duty–isn’t to the Republican Party. It’s to the United States of America. If I think the American conservative party has gone nuts, I’ll vote for the least-nuts Democrat. I reckon–I hope–that many Americans do share my view. But you’re there, I’m not. Do you?
Published in General
Fair enough. I would be happy to interview our candidates and to ask them some tough questions. I suspect that the best way to do it would be for me to say, “I will interview you in private, and keep what you say to me in confidence. All that will emerge is a grade. A, A-. B+, B-. That way they might feel more free to speak to me without fear that something they’re said would be misinterpreted.
@yeti do you know how to arrange something like this
I like the idea of candidates (from both parties) getting a score (between 1 and 100) on the Berlinski Scale.
To benchmark, Claire, what score would you give US Presidents from Reagan to the present?
I reckon that if I just offer the grade, someone will ask “Why?” And I won’t be able to say, “The only way they agreed to the interview was if I promised all the details would stay off the record.”
I have a very different way of assessing the past than I do the future. But basically, the biggest, most unambiguous and clearest foreign policy achievement since Reagan came to power–and this did not just happen under Reagan, but it started with him–was the liberation of central and Eastern Europe. It remains our biggest foreign policy achievement since then. I’d give Reagan a B+. (His biggest mistake was failing to see what was about to come surging out of the Sunni world, and yes, there were many signs of it then. But it just wasn’t on the West’s radar. Wasn’t on mine, either. Iran certainly was, but I made the same mistake as everyone–I looked at the Saudis as “unpleasant, but moderate in OPEC.”)
Drop a grade for every successive administration. My guess about the real “why” behind the downward trend would be that others made the same analytic mistake I did. (This is a guess, based on introspection, which shouldn’t be confused with research.) I thought, “We won the Cold War, and from now on are living in a unipolar world.” I suspect many others believed this, and thus figured they didn’t need to take this stuff quite so seriously anymore. Of course, I was dramatically and dangerously wrong about that. So much so that I suspect Chinese and Indian historians of the future will write puzzled doctoral dissertations about this period.
But no one has yet failed the class. There has not yet been a thermonuclear exchange. Thus far, everyone has received a passing grade.
I’ve read
Without You, There Is No Us: My Time with the Sons of North Korea’s Elite,
The Real North Korea: Life and Politics in the Failed Stalinist Utopia,
Dear Leader: Poet, Spy, Escapee- A Look Inside North Korea,
Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea,
Escape from Camp 14: One Man’s Remarkable Odessy from North Korea to Freedom in the West (and associated retractions).
The Orphan Master’s Son (fiction).
Nuclear Showdown: North Korea Takes on the World
and Rogue State: How a Nuclear North Korea Threatens America.
The Cleanest Race is not on that list because I read too many interviews in which he said deeply stupid things about fascism and communism. His central claim that the most orthodox post-Stalin Stalinist regime is not what it is is that it’s racist and militarist. If you read even children’s histories of Stalin, you’ll see how dumb that is.
It’s certainly true that a lot of the institutional structure is retained (as in most Stalinist states), and that the Zen Buddhism that underlay a lot of the Japanese monstrosities is also retained. It’s also true, though, that Kim Il Sung drunk deeply from the Stalinist cup, and that his revolution and his government were built according to Stalinist teaching. The legacy today, after a number of fairly radical shakeups in government, is generally more nominally colonial and more explicitly Stalinist.
It’s also true that the details of the cult of personality are very different. Stalin built on a Tsarist and Orthodox culture to become, essentially, a Tsar, whereas the Kims are, essentially, Shoguns. This means that the (literal) icons of the Kims are treated differently to the icons of Stalin. They are cleaned in explicitly Buddhist ways, for instance. When it comes to the economy, though, or the structure of government, or the organization of education, it’s Stalin that shines through.
Time and again, the book sounds like an apology for the left, like it’s chief aim is to persuade people that it’s conservatives who share commonalities with the Norks, not liberals. Obviously, neither side shares commonalities with them, although if you look at the fringe folks who do sympathize with the Kims, you’ll find them mostly on the left.
So he says that the Kims aren’t Stalinist because their ostensible doctrine of self-reliance, or, as Stalin put it, “Socialism in One State” (the key doctrinal element separating Stalinism from Leninism, the defining feature of Stalinism, that does not get mentioned in a book claiming that the Kims are not Stalinist), does not preclude them from being dependent on aid, so long as they are able to frame it as “tribute”. Obviously, as any fule kno, Stalin took exactly the same approach, both in theory and in practice.
I think studying Nork propaganda is fascinating, and you can learn a lot from it, but I couldn’t trust anything in Myers’ book and I figured the possibility of learning interesting things was not worth the risk of unconsciously learning falsehoods and the endless frustration of the stupid bigoted things he says.
Pardon my coming into the conversation uninvited, at least if you see sense in the following: You are mixing political philosophy or political science with politics every step of the way here. I recommend you do not. Your history is as much intellectual history as political history. That’s never going to work. You’re better off, I’d say just looking at the political history. So what does it mean to learn the Stalinist teaching? To believe what Stalin said or to do what he did? Only the latter is really politics. Stalin taught by example that tyranny works for the tyrant. His doctrines & propaganda do not make sense except as they serve tyranny. He brought a singularly modern power to a rule whose violence is typical of very old things. This appealed to a lot of innovators…
If you go for this kind of humor, you could call this the Bagehot type of description: A part of a regime is dignified, another efficient–how authority works…
Again, there is a difference between political science & political history. In terms of politics, the liberals have little in common with any tyrant–except in foreign of policy, but even that is to mostly the willingness of the liberal to be exploited, or his inability to prevent it or stop it. But in terms of political science, it is really a strong argument that tyranny is merely the effectual truth of the doctrine of equality.
The difference between Stalin & Lenin seems to me a matter of politics. They both seem to have been very much blind to politics & both seem to have been very adept at learning–then again, learning politics is easier when you’re a tyrant. They both seem to have misunderstood especially foreign policy, which is the test of astuteness, but both were able to live with their errors. The difference is, Lenin died. What would he have done differently than Stalin? What could Stalin have done differently? Bloody murder & terror, with & without calculation, was the only way for them, was it not? Lenin seems to have been the better at usurping power, Stalin the better at preventing further usurpation.
You have a standing invitation to any of my conversations, Titus.
I agree that they’re separate issues, but I believe they inform each other. I think Stalin took theory pretty seriously, and that quite a lot of debate within his administration revolved around theory, with much of that debate taking place in good faith. I think that Kim was educated in the USSR, and that it is not coincidence that both his actions and his ideology mirrored those of his teachers, with adjustments for culture.
I think that there are different kinds of tyranny (an assumption that underlies this whole debate); Stalin and Hitler were genuinely different from each other, although there are obviously commonalities, some of them unbelievably awful. Hirohito was more different from either than they were to each other.
Although the chief source of power in North Korea has been the oppression; the police state, total control over education and the media, and the informer network. The appealing ideology appears to me to be only the secondary source of authority.
I don’t think that many liberals in the US want the sort of equality that the Kims offer. Some communists, sure, but I think that that desire is somewhat definitionally not liberal.
I think that Socialism in One State was a significant philosophical change and that Stalin moved quite some distance from the concept of a permanent revolution. Kruschev’s objection was both to his philosophical and his political innovation and I believe it to have been sound.
Maybe Lenin would have altered his views in the same direction if he’d lived; that seems very hard to judge (both Stalin and Lenin regularly changed their views in unpredictable ways). It still seems legitimate to me to compare both how their ideas differed and how their political actions differed. It’s not necessary to deal with that, though, to find the claim that proclaiming self sufficiency and economic superiority to those you receive aid from is different to Stalin’s position is kind of dumb, whether approached as philosophy or politics.
Thanks, you are too kind. Tyrants not in power are far more inclined to theorize than those in power. Those in power are inclined to theorize because they are tyrants–illegitimate. Theory replaces legitimacy as it is usually understood–a passive or active consent of the governed.
In the case of the Soviet communists–or any others of that kind–you need to see that Stalin cannot have believed the doctrines all that much, because he won all the battles among the various factions in the USSR. That requires a cunning & an understanding of psychology that is not compatible with any form of Marxism. As for his socialism in one state: That is the speech of necessity, not of choice. World revolution was not a viable alternative. He never chose or could choose between the two. You may say he made a theory of necessity…
You might argue, Stalin’s understanding of politics was a means to an end–but the end was theoretical: Marxism in one form or another. Even if that were true, you would have to grant that the means overtook the ends pretty quickly. The man moved from any belief that he should install what Marx or Lenin or Stalin or any combination thereof believed to the strongly held belief that he should be the one doing the installing of whatever was going to be installed.
This transformation of the means into ends is required politically in all revolution: There is a pretense of progress, but war is always war: What Clausewitz calls friction & the fog of uncertainty–these things affect revolutionaries just as much as anyone else. Necessity, in short, proves progress wrong, & progressives, even victorious ones, are stuck with the fact that they do not know where they are going, because it is quickly proven that they cannot go where they believed they should–maybe no one can get there…
All tyranny is revolutionary, & open to theory; this has always been so. But modern theory has the use of modern science–much of its power, as well as some of the blindness it creates. All modern science is essentially progressive, it has no respect for history–History, after all, is paradoxically about what has not yet happened, not what has happened, which is what people usually think of as history. But of course tyrants do not have the scientist’s willingness to be proven wrong, replaced, or updated, nor are they as weak as scientists, who do not usually get a choice…
The fact of tyranny is greater than any differences in the class–I think that’s our opening assumption. The other thing that matters really is whether those tyrannized are willing to be tyrannized. There is such a thing, though free men would never believe it… One looks at different tyrants in their particular differences only for practical reasons: One really does need to know the devil one fights. But to think that the differences have a theoretical standing is somewhat misguided. If any tyranny were serious about its founding or ruling theory, there would never be the kind of political savvy one does, in fact, see. What tyrants know is that demonstration in politics & physics are different things. One’s will matters far more in the one case than in the other. A theoretician might be expected to give up if proven wrong, & yet no tyrant was ever proven wrong except by the sword…
Finally, Hirohito was no tyrant–he was a legitimate monarch. That kind, though it is unlikely, is also able to end up in a disastrous way, maybe bring about the end of the world for those whom he rules by consent rather than force.
First, great discussion. Hopefully I’m not the only one feeling embarrassed by my inadequate education and knowledge.
Second, where do you fellas possibly find the time to read enough to be so informed? James, I gather that listening to audio books at triple speed is your chief means, aside from a gentleman’s capacity for leisure that is. Titus, what’s your secret?
I wasn’t particularly aware of politics, history, or much of anything else during the 80’s or even into the 90’s when the cold war came to an end. Rush guided my awakening in the mid 90’s and it was almost entirely domestic and Clinton related.
Anyway, I’ve always had a vague impression that we dropped the ball when it came to Russia rebirthing itself from the USSR. Were we too hands-off? Could we have done more to help rebuild Russia into something approaching a western nation with western values, and to diminish the risk of a return to dictatorship? Did we do anything at all aside from sending David Hasselhoff to sell records and wear leather pants?
If there are no convenient or easily-summarized answers, can anyone recommend some reading which might educate me?
It’s been a while since I read it, but it beckons from the shelf. The core of what I’ve retained may seem hair-splitting, but I would say that the book portrays the psychology of the clique, rather than the methodology. It is aimed not so much at the how, but the why. In that limited context, if I racell correctly, I agree with Myers.
Having lived in Japan for some time (including a stint with no official American connection to my presence — spouse visa, out slogging with the sararimen), I do see the psychological argument as well-founded. I’m not criticizing here. Just pointing out that as different religions have their own heresies, different functions have their own dysfunctions.
Sure. They’re certainly culturally Asian, and specifically Zen Buddhist. You’re right to remind your neighbors of their shameful past and of the horrible ideology of their religion in its pre-lovebomb days (after Nagasaki, Japanese religion has become much less toxic). I just think that Myers’ hack piece was primarily intended to make false claims and was happy to shape its facts to do so.
If you’re interested in the historical cultural aspects of Nork ideology, Blaine Harden has a new book out that I’m excited to read about Kim Il Sung, and I should have included Aquariums of Pyonyang in the above list; both that and Nothing to Envy discuss the complicated relationship with Japanese cultural heritage. If you’re interested in the propaganda, Dear Leader’s account of the way that poetry and propaganda were constructed is probably the best part of the book, and Paul Fischer’s new book, which I will read after Harden’s, is an biography of an involuntary producer of North Korean Films. There’s a lot of compelling stuff out there on the subject, mostly more reliable than Myers.