The leaking of 92,000 top secret documents by the shadowy WikiLeaks this weekend has the commentariat working overtime. I’ll leave the speculation over the significance of the actual leaked material to more seasoned oracles than me (see, for example, Joe Klein: “Is it Obama’s Tet or his Pentagon Papers?”) and instead kick around some thoughts I had today about the significance of the WikiLeaks organization itself.

One of the first things I read yesterday morning on the leak were the musings of Jay Rosen over at the NYU Journalism Institute. They’re insightful and provocative, and you should give them a once-over if you have the time. Two of his points are especially worth pondering.

First, WikiLeaks may be the first supranational media organization:

Appealing to national traditions of fair play in the conduct of news reporting misunderstands what Wikileaks is about: the release of information without regard for national interest. In media history up to now, the press is free to report on what the powerful wish to keep secret because the laws of a given nation protect it. But Wikileaks is able to report on what the powerful wish to keep secret because the logic of the Internet permits it. This is new. Just as the Internet has no terrestrial address or central office, neither does Wikileaks.

As I remarked the other day, technological change has this nasty habit of outrunning a society’s means of coping with it. Often times, technological innovators themselves aren’t fully aware of the full consequences of what they’re doing. Such is likely the case of Julian Assange, the anarchist hacker behind WikiLeaks.

Assange’s anarchist bona fides shouldn’t be in doubt—even a cursory read of his profile in The New Yorker provides all the evidence you need. A flamboyantly dressed, if absent-minded, manifesto author who seems baffled at times that few others in the world share his radical agenda, Assange comes off as half comic book superhero and half a twenty-first century version of the kind of person skulking around Conrad’s Secret Agent. But as distasteful as his politics might be (“…WikiLeaks might get ‘blood on our hands’” he quips at one point), they’re irrelevant to the more interesting question at hand.

For this troubled superhero-of-sorts seems to have devised a system of electronic publishing which relies on a network of servers that span several international jurisdictions with robust privacy laws. As an illustrative example, one of these countries, Sweden, is home to a thriving “Pirate Party” devoted to, among other things, the radical reform of copyright law and the abolition of patents. The Swedish Pirates currently have two members representing Sweden in the European Parliament, and may well win several seats in the Swedish parliament in elections this September. The United States and the EU have had a very difficult time shutting down a software, music and movie piracy site based in Sweden alone. Shutting down a more decentralized site like WikiLeaks would prove exponentially more difficult.

While this may be music to the ears of a certain libertarian subset, it’s a nightmare for governments to deal with. As Jay Rosen notes, it’s true that the possibility of leaking has always been a crucial component ensuring the existence of a vibrant free press. However, the WikiLeaks phenomenon, with its built-in anonymity and unstoppable distribution model, starts to alter the basic calculus of a would-be leaker. If the leaker is a whistleblower with a troubled conscience, the increased protection afforded to him by the anonymity is probably all to the good. If the leaker is an advantage-seeking schemer looking to take revenge on a bureaucratic rival, the reduction of potential downside is more troubling.

One way that governments may seek to cope with this new challenge would be to clamp down even harder on the things they want to keep secret. Wired’s Danger Room cites an anonymous officer as worrying that these most recent leaks will have caused “very severe, if not irreparable damage, to the manner of intelligence sharing between our NATO allies and ourselves.” Further down the line one could even imagine the national security state seeking to further erode our basic rights to privacy as a means of re-increasing the costs to potential leakers. But government retrenchment, though possible, is not the smartest way forward.

This brings me back to the second Jay Rosen point. Citing the lack of any sort of measurable reaction to the Washington Post‘s Pulitzer-seeking exposé of the bloated intelligence bureaucracy, Rosen worries that there in fact won’t be a public outcry to this latest WikiLeaks dump:

The mental model on which most investigative journalism is based states that explosive revelations lead to public outcry; elites get the message and reform the system. But what if elites believe that reform is impossible because the problems are too big, the sacrifices too great, the public too distractible? What if cognitive dissonance has been insufficiently accounted for in our theories of how great journalism works… and often fails to work?

Rosen is despairing of the same reality as the frustrated Assange—indeed, the same reality that so dispirited Daniel Ellsberg: the people tend to give the government the benefit of the doubt far more than any activist suspects. Though some argue that the leaking of the Pentagon Papers helped end the Vietnam War, it’s easy to forget that it certainly wasn’t due to an immediate outcry from an outraged populace. If the Pentagon Papers were a “teachable moment”, it’s that any democratically elected government has more to fear from a cover-up than from an electorate it has leveled with.

It’s true that the Pentagon Papers were qualitatively different from the WikiLeaks dump. They were merely an historical analysis and not raw intelligence and field reports from a hot war, the irresponsible leaking of which could endanger soldiers’ lives. Unfortunately for governments, however, a technological cat has been let out of the bag. Even if Assange himself is captured, his network will live on. And even if the network were somehow successfully physically disrupted, someone else would reconstitute it in short order. You just can’t make the Internet forget something it’s learned.

The smart way forward, therefore—and it’s far from perfect—would be for our government to take a long hard look at its current system of classification and do some much-needed simplification and pruning. Surely there’s plenty of classified stuff out there that, while it might seem like a good idea to keep from the public, probably just isn’t worth the effort. A good example would be the much ballyhooed previous WikiLeaks release of the footage of Apache pilots engaging with and killing unidentified Iraqis on the street. Whatever the justification was for hiding that away, it probably was counterproductive: most people immediately understood the dangers and pressure that those young soldiers operate under, and that even if the pilots’ snap judgment was off, their behavior was both legal and justifiable. That would presumably leave the government with a more manageable subset of really truly top secret stuff which needs to be kept under stricter lock and key.

Again, it’s not a silver bullet. The very existence of WikiLeaks changes the contours of the landscape in ways that neither its founder, nor state governments, nor technologist pundits can fully predict. What’s probably safe to say is that, as is usually the case with such game-changers, business-as-usual is no longer a viable option.

Walter’s “Literary Saturday” series of posts is one of my favorite parts of this blog. As a product of the American public school system, where our primary texts were in fact textbooks, I feel like I’ve been catching up to where I “ought” to be, reading-wise, for years now. These Saturday posts never fail to sharpen my anxiety about being behind while at the same time providing useful suggestions for a way forward. It’s an excellent didactic method!

But even bracketing off personal anxiety, trying to do one of these posts is a daunting task. The breadth of knowledge on regular display here is conservatively best described as encyclopedic. What can I bring to such an opulent table? Walter tends to focus on the classics of history and philosophy, arguing that we cannot possibly understand the present without properly understanding the Western tradition. I suppose I’d like to try something narrower while still keeping with the general spirit of the project.

I’ve been re-reading Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita all this week. I haven’t touched the book in over 12 years, during which my memory of it has more or less been completely subsumed by the experience of having watched Stanley Kubrick’s remarkable film version several times. What didn’t quite make it over in the transition from novel to big screen is that which Nabokov is perhaps most trying to achieve in his art—namely a sense that the narrator gives us an unreliable picture of reality. Lolita‘s Humbert is next to impossible to pin down as he veers from defiance to regret to shame over his pedophile instincts, weaving a web of allusions so dense that you begin to wonder if he’s not making up parts of his story for more sinister reasons. (Incidentally, if you plan on taking up Lolita, I very much recommend the annotated version. The notes are very unobtrusively presented, so you can use them as much or as little as you choose.)

The idea of the unreliable narrator is far from unique to Nabokov—it’s arguably been one of the key obsessions of modernist novelists since at least James Joyce. Indeed, the idea that our access to truth and reality is at best indirect has a lengthy pedigree in Western philosophy. And from the earliest times, historians from Thucydides onwards were very conscious that they were, through sound judgment, experience and research, nevertheless telling us stories about how things came to pass.

Yet perhaps as a reaction to the excesses of radical postmodernism, which saw in everything attempts to subjugate and marginalize “the other” and thus set about relativizing and contextualizing every field that it touched, it’s become unfashionable to dwell on these kinds of questions. In the rush to re-canonize the canon of “old dead white males,” a particularly crude attitude to the truth and reality has snuck in through the back door—that the truth plainly exists and that we can all have easy access to it.

I hope I’m not sounding too highfalutin, or indeed too postmodernist. It’s just that these ideas always buzz around in the back of my head whenever a debate arises over the biases of the American mainstream media. I’m not 100% clear on the history of this useless debate, but I believe these biases were first “discovered” by conservatives around the dawn of the popular Internet in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Similar “discoveries” were soon enough made by the other side, and rhetorical battle was joined. This has escalated to the point where we now have an increasingly unhealthy amount of energy being expended by politicians, journalists, and bloggers on what amounts to a baroque game of gotcha.

It needn’t be this way. It’s particular to America that we obsess over the impartiality of our press. Or, to put it another way, it’s particular to America’s press that it takes such pride in claiming to be completely impartial. Either way, it’s not how things work elsewhere in the world. Where there is a free press, you’ll often find different papers catering to different kinds of audiences. Let’s call it an ideological press. In England, The Guardian leans left and The Telegraph leans right. In Germany, Die Welt leans right and Süddeutsche Zeitung leans left. Each country has different restrictive legal frameworks to prevent outright slander and defamation, and the papers strive to write stories they won’t be forced to retract. But apart from that, the papers’ ideological slant is explicit and acknowledged, and it shapes their coverage.

Our ongoing debates over news coverage bias aren’t merely a waste of time, however. There’s something to the moralizing tone and indignant righteousness evident on both sides that feels like it may be worse for the Republic than whatever ill effect a merely ideological press might have. It’s been particularly apparent in the flare-ups all last week over the liberal JournoList listserv. Even if one rejects the breathless insinuations coming from conservatives that the members of JournoList were actually colluding and message-coordinating rather than venting and kibbitzing, there’s something disheartening about the tone of the discussions going on behind closed doors. This is not ideology at work, but rank short-sighted politics—the stirrings of a partisan press.

I only single out the Left here because it was in the news last week. It’s very much a “pox on both their houses” sort of situation. As Andrew Sullivan noted the other day, it’s not that journalists can’t have political sympathies and opinions, but that their attitude towards those in power should be fundamentally one of skepticism. They should never feel they’re part of a team. The clubby nature of Washington DC undermines this skepticism, and the vicious churn in the industry as the old guard publications struggle to retain relevance in a sea of nimble Internet-only startups has caused people to lose their bearings. We’re sure to suffer through scores more inane and spiteful news cycles (like the one kicked off by Andrew Breitbart last week) as this new system organizes itself.

For my part, I’m generally optimistic for the long run. It seems to me that the rise of a partisan press is but a passing phenomenon. It’s not that websites like Breitbart’s will die out, ceasing to cater to the lizard brain of the partisan political junkie. It’s that new organizations will hopefully continue to emerge, merging serious accountable journalism with a lack of shame over ideological slant. At the end of the process, the only casualty will be the old delusion of objectivity. And we, as both consumers and citizens, will be better served by a news industry that will devote less energies to censoring itself and more of its time holding those in power accountable, regardless of party affiliation.

Greetings readers and Fans of Mead. My name is Damir Marusic, and I’ll be one of the people contributing to this wonderful blog in Walter’s absence (or better put, reduced presence) during the next two weeks. Working at The American Interest pays my bills, but it’s safe to say that I’d be an avid reader of this blog even if I wasn’t associated with the magazine. Thus it’s a real honor and privilege to have been asked to contribute what I can.

I was born in Zadar, a Croatian town on the Adriatic coast, and though my entire education—from first grade through graduate school—has been in the United States, my entire family still still lives in Croatia. If I can claim some specific expertise, it’s got mostly to do with that broader region. The Balkan Wars of the 1990′s prefigure many of the conflicts we (the West, broadly speaking) have participated in during the 2000′s. They provided a template for how we might act militarily outside of the full legitimation of the UN. They were nasty, medium-intensity wars between groups of people we never fully understood, fighting for reasons we still cannot fully fathom. And in the case of Bosnia and Kosovo, they provided an early glimpse into the intractable problems of state-building which continue to bedevil us to this very day in Iraq and Afghanistan. In short, though I’m passionate about international relations, I’m also quite skeptical of most of what we’ve gotten up to in the past decade.

I’m also an avid technologist, and like Walter, I’m generally optimistic about what the increasing acceleration in change ultimately means for our society. This acceleration is certainly not without its social disruptions, and we must remain vigilant that the things we hold dear as a society are not trampled underfoot in the stampede towards the next great thing. For example, the increase in the complexity of our world that naturally accompanies technological change presents special challenges for democracies—especially ones like ours in the United States which are subject to sporadic irruption of populist sentiment. How can we balance the imperative of keeping people engaged with the reality that many of the problems we face are so complex that they even confound experts? How do we cope if it turns out that Bryan Caplan’s The Myth of the Rational Voter thesis is correct? These questions are not simple ones, and the implications are not pretty. But on balance, I continue to believe that the promise of technology outweighs the costs of the inevitable accompanying churn. Anyway, change is inevitable; it’s just a question of being smart about it.

But enough about me in these broad strokes. I’m very much looking forward to writing regularly, and I hope I can offer you some posts worth commenting on. Let’s get down to business!

During the next two weeks I’ll be visiting Pakistan at the invitation of the US Embassy there.  I won’t be there to toe the government line; from time to time US diplomats abroad call on people from many different points of view and walks of life to give overseas audiences a chance to encounter Americans first hand.

On these trips, US diplomats try to ensure that a variety of audiences get a chance to meet with you and share their concerns.  This time I’ll be meeting with everyone from senior members of the Pakistani diplomatic corps to civil society groups and secondary school students.  I’ll be interviewed on TV and for newspaper articles; I will post links to the English language coverage so Via Meadia readers can see how things are going.  Many Pakistanis speak and write fluent English; I’ll be posting links to some of the English language publications I run across so readers here can follow the Pakistani media on their own. One of the great benefits of the internet is that news sites from all over the world are instantly available; access to publications like The Dawn, The Nation and The News can help Americans get a sense of what people are thinking and doing over there.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates, left, talks with Pakistani President Asif ali Zardari in Islamabad, Pakistan (CREDIT: DOD).

This works both ways.  Pakistanis read American papers and sometimes they don’t like what they see.  A recent example is the “Burn a Koran Day” being sponsored by a profoundly misguided church in Gainsville, Florida.  As this story from the Orlando Sentinel notes, the church members plan to burn a copy of the Islamic Holy Book outside their church on September 11 this year, and encourage others to go and do likewise.  The Pakistani media has picked up on this story, including the Urdu language press, and people are understandably upset.  For many Pakistanis, this is confirmation that Christianity is a dangerous movement of religious radicals who will use any weapon at hand to destroy Islam.  They will point to US military attacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan itself, and highlight statements by US military officials and others that give a religious cast to America’s war efforts.  They will point to statements by religious figures like Franklin Graham and Benedict XVI to paint a picture of Christianity on the offensive against Islam around the world.

Part of what I will try to do is put statements and actions like these into context for Pakistani audiences.  Just as the wild eyed violent statements from various misguided extremists in some parts of the Islamic world don’t reflect the views of the majority of pious Muslims, so certain statements and actions by self-appointed spokespersons for Christianity do not reflect the core of what most Christians understand their faith to be about.  Fanatics who want to bring about a ‘clash of civilizations’ or start a new age of religious warfare are the enemies of peaceful Muslims and Christians all over the world and in Pakistan and other predominantly Islamic countries I’ve visited I have always been struck at how many people agree.  There is and there should be no clash of civilizations between Islam and the west; there is a clash between civilization and barbarism, and in this fight mainstream Islam and the mainstream west are on the same side.

In my public lectures and seminars I will try to help Pakistanis see how American history, culture and our global interests affect our policy towards Pakistan.  Americans sometimes are unaware how rapid changes in our foreign policy unsettle our partners overseas.  During the late Cold War, we worked closely with Pakistan to defeat the Soviets in Afghanistan.  Once the Soviets left, we moved on.  More recently, US policy has seemed to shift wildly between the Clinton administration, the Bush administration pre-9/11 and again after it, and now again under President Obama.  The combination of great power and unpredictability is not something people overseas welcome; countries like Poland and the Czech Republic who worked very hard to stay on good terms with the Bush administration can feel left out in the cold when the winds in Washington change.  For Pakistanis, the uncertainty about America’s future intentions can run very deep.  Are we getting ready to stay the course in Afghanistan?  To cut our losses and run?  To accept an informal partition of the country?  Is the United States getting ready for a confrontation with Iran — or to accept iranian nuclear weapons?  More broadly, Pakistanis watch the changing relationships between the United States, India and China with concern.  If the US continues to deepen its relationship with India, where does that leave Pakistan?  What can Pakistan do to make sure its interests are respected as US-Indian relations evolve?

These and other questions are hugely important for Pakistan; I’m looking forward to a series of stimulating sessions with thoughtful people and I hope to help them gain a better sense of how Americans approach these issues, even as I learn more about Pakistani perceptions and concerns.  Pakistan has a vibrant intellectual life and some very talented scholars — including some very sophisticated students of American history and culture.  I look forward to reconnecting.

While I’ll continue to post from time to time, the schedule is heavy enough that I don’t expect to keep to my usual pace.  To keep things interesting here at the site, I have invited some friends and associates to post from time to time while I’m gone.  Some of these folks are experienced writers; others are relative newcomers.  We will post bios of the guests as their posts appear.  Enjoy.

When I get back from Pakistan, I’m leaving almost immediately for some quality family time.  Weather permitting, we will be at an undisclosed location improving the scuba skills we developed last winter in Belize.  Once again I hope to do a little light posting from my tropical hideaway, but the guest posters will bear the brunt of the blog duties that week.

Expect me back at the stately Mead manor in glamorous Queens in the second half of August.

I was waiting to name my blog until the White House came up with a new name for the Conflict Formerly Known As The Global War On Terror (COFKATGWOT); I’ve pretty much given up on that now.  We are fighting an anonymous war with unspecified goals against Those Who Cannot Be Named and that’s the way it will stay for a while.

But just because our civilian leadership cannot settle on a name for the high stakes conflict now being fought on six continents plus cyberspace by the largest and most powerful military and intelligence forces in the history of the world  against an unspecified constellation of people and organizations seeking to destroy American power and western civilization for reasons that cannot be described in polite company is no reason for me to have an anonymous blog.

So: welcome to Via Meadia.

The name expresses four things about what I’m trying to do here.

First, it alludes to a famous Latin phrase ‘via media’ or ‘middle way’.  The via media is a search for the path between two extremes.  The via media is the sweet spot, the golden mean.  It is Baby Bear’s porridge, neither too hot nor too cold.  Traditionally many moralists have thought that the golden mean was the path of virtue.  If you are too bold, you are rash.  Not bold enough, and you are a coward.  Hit the sweet spot and walk the middle way, and you are courageous.  If you are too slack and too generous with your kids, you will spoil them.  If you are too harsh and too much of a perfectionist, you will ruin them another way.  Find the middle path and you will be a firm and loving parent who keeps the affection of your children while helping them form the habits and develop the skills that will enable them to lead rich and rewarding lives.

The middle way isn’t an insipid compromise, a repudiation of excitement and creativity in the name of predictable dullness.  It is not about settling for mediocrity.  The goal, rarely reached but sometimes approached pretty near, is to have it all, to combine the virtues of the extremes while offsetting their vices, rather than replacing the fire and drama of the extremes with a muddy caution.

In politics as well as in morals, I like that approach.  There are values in the extremes and in certain unusual situations you may have to go there, but the extremes by themselves are usually insufficient.  In Special Providence I found myself sympathizing with all four schools of American foreign policy — yet feeling that none of them on its own would quite do.  I respond positively to much of what liberals believe — but I don’t think we can deepen and preserve our liberal way of life without a healthy infusion of conservative policies and ideas.  I’m often the most liberal person in a conservative room — and the most conservative person in a liberal one.  Well, as Martin Luther might have said in my shoes: here I dither, I can do no other.

Second, the phrase ‘via media’ has often been used by Anglicans to describe their attempt to find a road between Catholic and Protestant forms of Christianity.  I’m not sure how successful we’ve been over the centuries, but since I think the attempt is worth making, I’m happy to have a blog name that expresses that.  Back when I was innocently blowing up cherry bombs in Episcopalian summer camp, our counselors (some of whom must have been seminarians), taught us the Anglican fight song, sung to the tune of “God Bless America”.  To wit:

I am an Anglican, I’m C of E, [Church of England]
I’m neither High Church nor Low Church
But I’m Protestant and Catholic and Free.
Not a Luthie, nor a Presbie
Nor a Baptist, white with foam:
I am an Anglican, just one step from Rome,
I am an Anglican, via media, boom! boom!

Third, the title Via Meadia could be translated as “Mead Way” or “Mead Street.”  In a way that books and journal articles don’t, posting on Via Meadia gives me the chance to  address all the subjects that interest and concern me.  Over time the blog may end up expressing and conveying both the way my mind works and the world view that is implicit behind many of the more polished things that I publish elsewhere.  Via Meadia is the street that wanders through my mental neighborhood and over time the posts may add up to a far more comprehensive form of communication than other forms of writing.

Finally, from my point of view, Via Meadia also means “my way.”  Our literary culture today is dominated to a historically unusual degree by editors.  Many of them do a very good job and I’m personally indebted to the great editors I’ve worked with at TAI and other places.  More than once a thoughtful editor has prevented me from making an ass of myself in print.  (‘Not often enough,’ I hear some of you saying.)  But when I post here, the words go directly to the reader.  When I post, as Frank Sinatra would put it, I do it my way.

If you don’t like it you are of course free to move on; fortunately many of you out there seem to like at least some of what you read here.  We will soon be celebrating our first million hits.  And for those of you who liked the site when the blog was anonymous, stick around.  At this point, I still feel like John Paul Jones — “I have not yet begun to post.”

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? asked the Roman satirist Juvenal: Who will watch the guards?  In our society, we have another question to ask:  Who will reform the reformers?

As the country sweltered under the hottest three months since record keeping began, as the gushing oil spill in the Gulf riveted the country’s attention on the environment as never before, and as the largest Democratic majority in a generation — fresh from historic victories over health care and financial reform — turned to the rest of its legislative agenda, the Green Dream languished in what Politico called a “near death” condition on Capitol Hill.  Liberal Washington Post writer Ezra Klein goes farther; cap and trade, he says, is “dead”.  As Klein puts it, “If cap-and-trade is so unpopular that its primary legislative advocates can’t mention it, then it’s dead.”

Klein is almost certainly right; the good ship Greenpeace is sinking.  Skittish Democratic politicians are still casting about desperately for some way to pull together a climate bill that will keep the green lobby happy but won’t look to the voters like a grotesque and counterproductive act of social engineering fatally flawed by multibillion give-aways to well connected lobbyists. But increasingly politicians cannot speak the words “carbon cap” out loud.

It reminds me of the halcyon days of my childhood.

Back in the gloriously unregulated 1950s, when your average red blooded American kid could still buy cherry bombs and M-80s without a bunch of nanny-state do-gooders getting their knickers in a twist, and my favorite toy was a home lead smelter for making toy soldiers, the kids in my family used to play Blind Man’s Bluff in the rec room down in the basement.  The person who was ‘it’ put a pillowcase over their head and tried to catch the other kids; the only rule was that the kids trying not to be caught couldn’t touch the floor.  You had to jump on the furniture — from chair to chest to couch and, if you were good, to the magazine stand.

Harry Reid speaking about climate change (Credit: Center for a American Progress).

It was an excellent game; unfortunately the combination of giggles and loud bangs and crashes as we bumped into each other and knocked over the various lamps and vases that somehow kept getting in the way soon attracted my mother’s attention.  She’d open the door to the basement, peer down into the noisy darkness and shout “What are you kids doing down there?”

“We’re just playing Blind Man’s Bluff,” we said with that innocent little voice kids use.

“Well stop it,” she said, unsympathetically.

That was the end of our fun for a while, until my brother Chris had a brilliant idea: we’d change the name of the game.  We wouldn’t play Blind Man’s Bluff anymore; we’d just play Pillowcase Risk.  We tried to keep the noise down for a while, but that didn’t last.  Soon the basement was as noisy as ever, and once more my mother came to the door.

“Are you kids playing Blind Man’s Bluff?”

“Oh, no, Mommy,” we said in tones absolutely oozing with sincerity.

“Well keep it quiet down there.”

This worked for a while, but my mother is a cynical and suspicious person.  After a couple more trips to the door to stop the riots downstairs, she shouted “If you aren’t playing Blind Man’s Bluff, what are you doing down there?”

“We’re just playing Pillowcase Risk.”

“I don’t care what you call it,” she said.  “You aren’t making that kind of racket in my house.”

This is pretty much what is going on in the Congress.  “What are you kids doing down there,” ask the voters, who’ve noticed some banging and crashing in the basement.  “Are you kids writing a Carbon Tax?”

The greens check quickly with the focus groups and pollsters before shouting back up, “No, Mommy, of course not.  We aren’t playing Carbon Tax.  We’re playing Cap and Trade.”

That scam worked for a while, but as Politico tells us, ‘cap and trade’ is now as toxic as ‘carbon tax’, and the greens are trying to come up with a new name.  Asked if the Democrats were working on a carbon “cap,” Majority Leader Harry Reid brushed the charge aside.  “Those words are not in my vocabulary. We’re going to work on pollution.”

What the greens don’t seem to get is this: you can’t make fundamental changes in American energy policy by stealth legislation.  It’s not a matter of focus groups and labels.  Energy policy is an important issue to most Americans, and for most of them, the kind of energy policy they want is one that makes American energy supplies abundant, secure and cheap.  Greens generally think that the key to good energy policy is to raise prices (directly through a carbon tax, indirectly through ‘cap and trade’ and other arcane ideas); public opinion just doesn’t buy it.  Maybe it should, but it doesn’t.

This is a problem you can’t fix by changing the title of your bill — or the name of your game.  People see through these stupid tricks — especially when the Republicans and the anti-greens can raise tens of millions of dollars to drive the message home between now and November.  You can call it the “Happy Clappy Coal Promotion Act” if you want to, but if your goal is to change people’s behavior by artificially raising the price they pay for energy, they are going to figure you out — and they are going to fight you.  If you pass it anyway, they are going to smack you down hard at the next election and put some people in the Congress who know what the folks want back home.

Playing Pillowcase Risk with the climate bill wasn’t going to get the bill through Congress.  It’s hard to believe there was anybody lame enough to think that dodge that could work — though one should never underestimate the credulity and incompetence of the leadership of the environmentalist movement.  But playing silly name games could and did accomplish something: it could demonstrate just how stupid the greens think voters are and how easily fooled greens think the ignorant peasants clinging to their guns and their God out there can be.  This cheap and stupid maneuver will deepen the impression among some Americans that many green leaders are disingenuous shills who will say and do anything to serve their ideological agenda.  Voters watching these shenanigans can be forgiven for agreeing with Roscoe Conkling‘s observation that “When Dr. [Samuel] Johnson defined patriotism as the last refuge of a scoundrel, he was unconscious of the then undeveloped capabilities and uses of the word ‘reform’.”

One would think a movement trying to persuade public opinion that climategate and glaciergate were trivial slips that in no way reflected the scientific and ethical standards of the green community would avoid getting entangled in stupid scams like this — but one would be wrong.

The perception among some voters that green leaders are hysterical weasels is inexpressibly damaging to the environmentalist cause.  Green hopes of success ultimately hinge on their ability to persuade the public to trust the environmental movement as the source of the most sober, accurate and trustworthy information around.  You can’t have it both ways: you can’t be part of the wild eyed chorus hyping the science and at the same time be the sober voice of reason adjudicating the controversy.  You can’t be the Last Honest Man fighting the Minions of Big Oil while trying to bamboozle the public with cheap confidence tricks.

This is a dumb strategy, but the people who have come up with it, and who persist in it after a year of epochal political collapse and historic levels of fiasco and humiliation continue to believe with a serenity I can admire if I can’t quite respect that they are smarter, more virtuous and altogether more worthy than the rest of the world — and that they and they alone know how the world must be run.

The strategic incompetence exhibited by the climate movement and its congressional allies is something that students everywhere need to study — and especially those who hope someday to help build a better world or fight for social change.  This is how you fail, kids:  Advance half baked policy ideas by hyping the science to create a global panic; when that fails, fall back on shady little dodges that don’t fool anybody — all the while telling anybody and everybody that you are the smartest, most virtuous person in the room.

This is more than a green problem.  The green fiasco illustrates a syndrome that pervades the ‘activist’ communities on both the left and the right.  Often funded by direct mail and foundation grants, these social movements are accountable to the extremes and the purists.  The various organizations on a big issue like climate change have their own constituencies and are often rivals for fundraising.  Such movements often become strong, with big war chests and a significant amount of public support.  But they also tend to be poorly led, poorly managed, and incapable of working effectively for positive change.

This is not new.  In earlier posts I’ve compared the green failures of our time to earlier failures by the Prohibitionists, the peace campaigners of the 1920s and 1930s, and the anti-nuclear activists of more recent years.  “Civil society” campaigners like to blame other forces in our society for the problems we see: corporations, lobbyists, venal politicians, ignorant and prejudiced voters.  The sad fact is that most civil society groups and NGOs just don’t work very well.  There are honorable exceptions, but civil society often looks like a vast wasteland of squandered resources, poor strategy, uncoordinated efforts and bad management.

To meet the challenges of the 21st century, likely to be the most challenging and difficult period in human history thus far, we are going to have to raise our game.  Civil society (especially but not only the environmental movement) has a necessary and vital role to play, but on the whole at the moment it is just not up to its job.

Civil society as it now exists and is organized is profoundly dysfunctional.  That needs to change.  One of the many jobs on the plate of the rising generations will be the need to rethink and restructure the whole concept of civil society and the NGO.  There is much work to do.  It may be that the Green Gethsemane now unfolding around us will be one of the experiences that stimulates and invigorates new thinking about how civil society movements can work more effectively and intelligently for change.

I hope so.  The environment matters; sustaining the diversity and vitality of the beautiful world in which we are privileged to live is one of the two or three most vital challenges before the human race.  The greens have been wrong about many things, but about this they are undeniably and courageously right.

In spite of what some conspiracy-minded critics on the right think, mainstream journalists like Time’s Joe Klein do not often agree with Fidel Castro.  That both Klein and Castro think the chances of war between the United States and Iran have increased recently is worth noting.  I happen to think they are right.

The problem is not, as Castro would argue, that the United States under President Obama is bellicose and imperialist.  President Obama genuinely does not want war with Iran and would make any reasonable concession (and even a few unreasonable ones) to keep the peace.  And while what I hear matches Klein’s observation that the US military is more confident than it was a year or two ago about its ability to succeed against Iran (“The Iranians aren’t ten feet tall,” is what one soldier told me), the military isn’t exactly pulling on the leash.

Nevertheless, there is a significantly greater chance that President Obama will lead the United States into a war with Iran than many observers think — and that chance is growing rather than shrinking as the confrontation wears on.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad addresses the general debate of the sixty-fourth session of the General Assembly (UN).

The failure to grasp the real possibility that Obama may confront the mullahs reflects the difficulty that many foreign policy experts have in understanding the way that President Obama’s world view differs from a conventional realist perspective.

Most analysts are looking at the US-Iranian confrontation from the standpoint of realpolitik.  Issues like the regional balance of power, US relations with key regional allies like Israel and Saudi Arabia, and economic factors (the price of oil) are being taken into account.  Those are important issues, and they are the kind of issues that under the right circumstances might have led other US presidents (like George H. W. Bush) towards confrontation with Iran.

But those are not the issues that move President Obama.  Under extreme conditions this president might respond to a realist threat to vital American interests with force, but the core of his global agenda isn’t about the balance of power or the Straits of Hormuz. Threats of that kind call forth Obama’s patience and summon him to diplomacy rather than war.

The conventional wisdom that Obama will end up learning to live with an Iranian bomb rather than risking a military confrontation to stop it rests on the perception, accurate as far as it goes, that the strictly realist case for confronting Iran is unlikely to move this president.  (Additionally, his perceived lack of love for the Jewish state means that the ‘solidarity with Israel’ argument might, some feel, carry  little conviction in the Oval Office.)

This relative indifference to realist concerns does not make President Obama indifferent to global affairs.  Far from it.  As laid out in the 2010 National Security Strategy and as President Obama has made clear on many occasions, the United States has a president with a vision for the kind of world he wants to build, and as he made plain in his Oslo Nobel speech, there are things for which he is willing to fight.  As columnist Phillip Stevens writes in that excellent newspaper the Financial Times, Strobe Talbott recently gave a speech in the UK that described President Obama’s Wilsonian vision very well.  As Talbott says, “it is hard to imagine an American president more committed … to the need for effective global governance.”  This is a theme I’ve written about myself in Foreign Policy.

To understand the way this President’s relations with Iran are likely to unfold, we have to look at the impact of Iranian policy on the issues that matter most deeply to President Obama. In my view, Iran and this President are headed toward a confrontation in which President Obama will either have to give up all hope on the issues he cares most about, or risk the use of force to stop Iran.

Ideas and ideals move this president more than the regional balance of power or the price of crude.  In many ways a classic example of the Wilsonian school of American foreign policy, President Obama believes that American security can best be safeguarded by the construction of a liberal and orderly world.

The present international system, often (though to my mind somewhat crudely) identified with the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, starts from the idea that each government is completely sovereign to police and rule its people as it thinks best, and to defend itself and advance its power and interests internationally in whatever ways seem good to it. Wilsonians hate Westphalia, which seems to make governments independent of both moral and legal restraints.  The essence of the Wilsonian project is to turn the system of Westphalian, sovereign states into a society of states under the rule of some basic laws and principles governing how they behave internationally and at home.

Think of the European Union blown up to a global scale; in the Global Union nations would have their own governments and their own laws, but an increasingly dense framework of commonly agreed-upon laws and norms, and an increasingly complex and effective web of global institutions would supplement and in many cases replace the authority of national governments.

President Obama is not a naif: he does not plan to build the GU tomorrow.  He knows that the construction of this order, if it happens at all, will likely take place over many years and through many small steps rather than a handful of big ones.  He is not dogmatic about the final form it will take; perhaps it will be a looser global association without the kind of political and legal identity of the EU.

President Obama discusses Iran with Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy (White House).

President Obama doesn’t think that creating the GU is going to be accomplished under his leadership, nor is he, I think, entirely certain that the world can ultimately reach even a modest version of this goal.  But he does believe that there is no other way to make the United States (and the other nations of the earth) secure, and he believes that the core strategic challenge facing American foreign policy is to gradually move the world in the direction of a post-Westphalian peace.

What does this have to do with the potential for a deadly clash between the ambitions of the Iranian mullahs and the ambitions of the American president?

Everything.

The consequences of the Iranian nuclear drive for the President’s Wilsonian project are deadly; the Iranian nuclear program can fairly be called an existential threat to the Wilsonian ideal.  In particular a nuclear Iran will kill the two dreams at the heart of President Obama’s foreign policy and indeed of his view of the world: the dream that the genie of nuclear weapons can be forced back into the bottle and the dream that the nations of the world can build a post-Westphalian international order in which the world’s governments are bound by deepening networks of laws.

There are a lot of people in the foreign policy world who consider both of President Obama’s dreams to be hopelessly naive.  The idea that the world’s nuclear powers would ever agree to give up these expensive and powerful weapons strikes many realists as laughable.  There is a realist case (which I personally buy) for the President of the United States to advocate the abolition of nuclear weapons; the United States, with its overwhelming superiority in conventional weapons, would be safer and more powerful in a world without the big bomb.  Conceivably, the UK could go along as that county might welcome a chance to save money while looking idealistic.  Russia, China, India, Pakistan, Israel, North Korea and France won’t buy.  Those countries have good reasons for their nuclear arsenals and they won’t give them up.

The dream that the great powers of the world will ever form a kind of universal European Union also strikes many observers of world politics as naive.

The cynics may be right (and in fact I fear they are) but that isn’t the point just now.  Henry Kissinger may not believe in the creation of a post-Westphalian order, but President Obama does — at least he believes that without these noble hopes as guiding lights we will lose our way amidst the countless pitfalls of the world’s long night.  And he believes this deeply enough to continue to do his best to set American foreign policy in the service of these two transcendent goals. The President of the United States is a serious and strong-willed man; these values are the rocks on which he stands.

The problem is that Iran’s success means the complete, utter and historic destruction of everything President Obama wants to build.

Make no mistake about it.  If Iran gets nuclear weapons on his watch, the dream of non-proliferation comes to an end and Barack Obama will go down in history as the president who lost the fight to stop nukes.

It won’t just be Iran: if Iran defies western pressure to get nukes, every self-respecting country in the Middle East will want and need nukes.  Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt and even some of the smaller fry will have to make their moves.  They won’t all get the bomb but enough of them will.  This will have a disastrous impact on America’s ability to carry out one of its principle global tasks and ensure the steady and uninterrupted flow of oil to the great industrial and commercial centers of the world — but that isn’t all.  The decisive failure of the nonproliferation agenda in the Middle East undermine nonproliferation everywhere, not only because the Bomb will become even more of a coveted symbol of first class international status than it already is, but because with all those proliferating states buying and selling the technology, it will be harder to stop countries from moving ahead.  The global black market in nuclear tech will spread like kudzu; there will be so many sources and so many destinations that the traffic will be harder than ever to stop.

At the same time, nobody will pay attention to UN sanctions and other huffings and puffings of an equally vain kind.  The birds will have figured out that the scarecrow can’t move; they will perch on its broomstick and poop on its head. 

It gets worse.  The collapse of nonproliferation will mark the definitive death of the post-World War Two legal regime, just as the League of Nation’s failure to protect Ethiopia from Italy brought an end to the interwar fling with a law-based world.

If solemn treaties, sacred oaths and decades of patient diplomatic effort can’t stop the spread of nuclear weapons, what can international law really accomplish?  What is the Security Council except an exalted talking shop if it can’t summon the unity and the resolve to act effectively in the face of a naked challenge to one of the foundations of international order?  If global institutions can’t solve this problem, how can such weak and unpredictable organizations be trusted with any urgent and vital problem?  If the treaty on non-proliferation is essentially a dead letter, what treaties still command respect? If countries only obey treaties as long as they want to, and the international system can take no effective action against those who break its most important laws, what becomes of the Wilsonian dream?  

If Iran gets the bomb, the world will change in ways that are deeply destructive of everything President Obama cares about.  A world in which nuclear weapons are widespread isn’t just a world in which the collapse of the non-proliferation movement has brought discredit on the concept of international law and binding treaties on security issues.  It won’t just be a world in which the bad guys have learned that the good guys will blink if you stand up to them.  It won’t just be a world in which emboldened Iranian adventurism will work more rashly and unscrupulously than ever to destroy our alliances and friends in the Middle East.

That brave new world that appears when Iran gets its nukes is an ultra-Westphalian world, a world of sovereign nation states forever emancipated from the dream of true international law.  Nuclear weapons give every state — and every dictator — the ability to veto troublesome interventions in their affairs by treaty-citing busybodies and international lawyers waving documents and babbling about binding accords.  If you have your finger on the button, nobody can make you do anything you truly don’t want to do: this is state sovereignty on steroids, and it is the what Barack Obama will leave as a legacy if he doesn’t stop Iran’s nuclear march. 

President Obama is probably hoping that luck or fate will spare him the horrible fate of presiding over the death of his dearest ideals and of being the American president who destroyed the credibility of the international system and let the nuclear genie loose in the most dangerous part of the world.  Maybe sanctions will work; maybe the Iranians will change their minds.  Maybe new technical problems will crop up and slow the Iranians down enough so that he can pass the problem on to his successor — as, indeed, his predecessors handed it down to him.

I hope he is spared this choice, as indeed I hope we are all spared it. And after George W. Bush’s failures on Iraq’s WMDs, we need to be extra careful that we don’t let our policies get too far ahead of the facts.

But those who think that President Obama’s interest in basing his foreign policy on values make it unlikely that he would go to war haven’t been paying attention.  For Iran to get nukes it will have to destroy the world Obama wants to build.

Will he, can he allow that to happen?

There’s a possibility that he will flinch — or, to put it another way, that his Jeffersonian instincts for restraint will triumph over his Wilsonian ambition to build a better world.  But Iran is not just on a collision course with America’s core interests from a realist perspective.  It is trying to destroy the world that American idealists want to build.  That makes a conflict hard to avoid.

As the reports from Dutch and British watchdog panels came in last week, greens hailed what they see as a vindication of the East Anglia Climate Research Unit and the partial rehabilitation of the IPCC, but they are wrong.  As usual, the greens (and many of their critics) are missing the point.

The Big Green Lie is falling apart.  And it’s not about Climategate and Glaciergate.  It’s not about the science.  It’s not even about public confidence in the integrity of the green movement — although this confidence is unlikely to regain the levels of 2009.  Humpty Dumpty has fallen from the walls, and all the establishment commissions and investigations in Europe cannot glue him together again.

The core green problem is about the credibility of its policy proposals and the viability of the political strategy the big green groups pushed to enact them.  Climategate and Glaciergate did not cause the collapse of the green agenda in Copenhagen and they are not responsible for the global decline in green political fortunes since then.  Both the greens and their opponents need to understand that the reason that the Great Global Green Dream is melting lies in the sad truth that whatever the scientific facts of the matter, the global green movement is so blind and inept when it comes to policy and process that it has deeply damaged the causes it cares most about.

(Credit: UN Climate Talks)

Not since the incident at Chappaquiddick derailed the Ted Kennedy for President boomlet of 1969 has a political movement imploded so fast and so messily as the green crusade to stop global warming.   Just last November, the world’s leaders were elbowing each other aside to get in front of the cameras at what was billed as the Copenhagen Summit to Save the Planet.  These days, nothing in the world is deader than the drive for a UN climate treaty — and polls around the world show voters less worried about climate change than about a host of other issues.

Here in the US, Al Gore has unaccountably disappeared from the leadership of the climate change movement; John Kerry has taken over the leadership of America’s greens. Kerry is fighting to get some kind of energy bill through the Senate despite fierce political headwinds, but it is already clear that the only way to get a bill through the Senate is to bait it with so many favors for so many special interests that its environmental impact will be, at best, small while its pork factor will be huge.  Even that may not suffice; the last time I checked the smart money, Intrade thought there was a one in four chance that a cap and trade bill will get through Congress by December of this year.  With Congress expected to be significantly more conservative after the midterm election, chances of significant climate legislation during President Obama’s first term range from slim to none.

The global process is in an even deeper hole.  The greens, it is increasingly clear, bet the ranch on the Copenhagen process.  That horrible meltdown, perhaps the biggest and most chaotic public embarrassment in the history of multilateral summits, turned climate change from global poster boy to global pariah.  The green activists who advised their bosses to go to that summit and make large public commitments about global warming are in the doghouse now.  Success is sometimes the most cruel and definitive form of failure: the Copenhagen Summit was exactly that kind of success for the climate change movement.  They got all the world leaders together, got every television camera on the planet to focus in — and let everybody see just how confused and utopian their plans really were.

As the greens struggle to figure out how a cause so righteous, so necessary has gone so far off course, the Kool-Aide drinkers among them have frenetically concocted and endlessly repeated a narrative that casts all blame on the vileness and the stupidity of their opponents.  Those awful climate deniers and their nefarious Big Oil paymasters are the vicious super villains who stopped this glorious social movement dead in its tracks.  Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly and other evil quacks manufactured the appearance of scandal — the East Anglia emails, the ‘glaciergate’ charge and so forth.  Aided by a clueless media, and pushed by evil carbon emitters, these non-stories took on a macabre life of their own.

But now, natter the cluelessly chirpy greens, all that is over.  Limbaugh’s Big Lie has been conclusively disproved!  The independent panels have reviewed the evidence in a dispassionate and thorough way, and both climate science and climate scientists have been cleared.

So presumably we will all be going back to Copenhagen soon, this time ready to sign up for that treaty?

Well, no.  For one thing, the ‘vindication’ is less sweeping and thorough than the green cheerleaders acknowledge.  As climate skeptic Pat Michaels argues in the Wall Street Journal, some of the investigators had significant links to the targets of the investigation and many of the most important questions were not addressed.   A suspicious and skeptical public will not be convinced without a significantly more transparent process; the story isn’t over yet. Not until commissions that include prominent climate skeptics and genuinely independent figures ask all the relevant questions will this story die down.

Worse, even the very partial and incomplete results now emerging are in some ways a damaging indictment of the impartiality and trustworthiness of some climate scientists and environmental leaders.  The greens were found innocent of inventing the science, but guilty of systematically hyping their case.  The serious media are distancing themselves from the green leadership at this point more than nuzzling back into their arms.  The New York Times report on the Dutch and British reports investigating the East Anglia CRU and the IPCC was widely hailed by infatuated green outlets as evidence that the whole scandal was a fraud; the actual Times story is considerably more cautious (and the text is more cautious than the headline).  Andrew Revkin, whose coverage on his Times Dot Earth blog has often been considerably sharper and more far-sighted than what appears in the Grey Lady’s printed pages and has made him no friends among the environmentalist hard core, is making some very solid points.

The influential Economist, which has long been one of the most respected establishment voices urging fast action on climate change, is now voicing important qualifications and doubts about the green case.  Perhaps even more than the Times, the Economist takes a sober view of recent events, noting that there is a pattern of exaggeration and hype in the IPCC documents reflecting some serious management and culture problems — and suggesting that Rajendra Pachauri is not the man to set things right.  More, the Economist is putting out some extraordinary journalism on the complexity of the climate change problem and the difficulties that result when one tries to leap from science to policy.  What the Economist is reporting is that excitable greens have oversold a wide variety of worst case scenarios — and underestimated the complex nature of the relationship between climate change and world politics.

In sum, the mainstream press seems to be swinging around toward the views expressed on this blog: that the scandals may not discredit or even really affect the underlying scientific arguments about climate change but they do cast doubt on the perspicacity of the movement’s leadership — and that a fundamental rethink is called for.

Greens who feared and climate skeptics who hoped that the rash of investigations following Climategate and Glaciergate and all the other problems would reveal some gaping obvious flaws in the science of climate change were watching the wrong thing.  The Big Green Lie (or Delusion, to be charitable) isn’t so much that climate change is happening and that it is very likely caused or at least exacerbated by human activity.  The Big Lie is that the green movement is a source of coherent or responsible counsel about what to do.

The greens claim to be diagnosticians and therapists: that they can both name the disease and heal it.  They are wrong.  The attitudes and political vision of a group of NGO pressure groups may work when it comes to harassing Japanese whale ships in the Antarctic; this vision and these people come up short when set against the challenge of moderating the impact of human industrial activity on the earth’s climate system.  Many leaders of today’s environmental movement are like the anti-alcohol activists before Prohibition who convinced Americans that the problem of alcohol abuse was real, destructive, and likely to get worse unless addressed.  These farsighted activists were absolutely correct: with the introduction of the motorcar alcohol was more destructive than ever; with more than 500,000 alcohol related highway deaths between 1982 and 2008, more Americans have been killed on our roads as a result of drunk driving since 1915 than have died in our wars.

The problem is that the remedy proposed, Prohibition, not only failed to solve the problem — it made the problem of alcohol abuse worse, and it also reduced respect for the law and led to the rise of organized crime in the United States on an unprecedented scale.

The Prohibitionists were brilliantly, scientifically correct about the problem: they were foolishly and destructively blind about how to deal with it.

The green movement’s strategic failure is also reminiscent of the Peace Movement of the 1920s.  Chuckleheaded do-gooders correctly recognized the problem of war.  In the conditions of the twentieth century, great power wars like World War One were radically unacceptable.  Unless war could be stopped, scores of millions might brutally die.  Whole nations would be devastated; millions of children would starve.  Given the rise of aircraft, great cultural monuments would be destroyed as the world’s greatest cities were razed to the ground.  New and more terrible weapons would be developed under wartime conditions, weapons that potentially could lead to the destruction of all human civilization or even of life on earth.

Again, the Peace Movement of the 1920s was completely right about this — we know to our sorrow today just how right they were.  Yet the strategies they proposed — a treaty to ‘outlaw war’ in the 1920s, and appeasement of dictators and revisionist powers in the 193os — were utter disasters and made World War Two inevitable.  The Nuclear Freeze movement in the 1980s repeated the mistake: confusing the identification of a problem (nuclear weapons) with a workable policy solution (a unilateral western freeze on nuclear weapons deployment that would have given the Soviets superiority in Europe).  There are fewer nuclear weapons today than would have existed had the Nuclear Freeze people had their way; there almost certainly would have been fewer wars and fewer war deaths if the policy recommendations of the pre-World War Two peace movements had been greeted with the obloquy and contempt they deserved.

You can diagnose a disease but have no clue how to treat it.  You can be an excellent climate scientist and a wretched social engineer. You can want to do good and end up furthering exactly the evils you most deplore.

That is where most of the organized green groups stand today.

The real and lasting damage that the green movement sustained in the last eight months has been the revelation that it is strategically and politically incompetent.  It adopted a foolish grand strategy (a global treaty by unanimous consent) and attempted to stampede the world to agreement by hyping the science and whooping the treaty through.  That was never going to work; the green movement today is living with the bitter consequences of its strategic blindness.

The problem is real; therefore my solution is right: that is the faulty logic behind the Green Lie, and it is exactly the tired old lie of the Prohibitionists and the peace quacks.  Alcohol abuse, war, nuclear weapons and excessive emission of greenhouse gasses are all bad.  Those facts, however, do not make Prohibition, the Kellog-Briand Pact, the nuclear freeze or the Big Green treaty movement smart, effective or good.

History is brutal and unforgiving; good intentions are no excuse.  The nobler the cause, the worse the betrayal.  Precisely because a growing body of science points to the existence of some serious concerns about climate, we must think carefully and clearly.  Malthusian panic attacks alternating with utopian dreams of universal accords, anti-growth politics and anti-capitalist resentments dressed up as environmentalism aren’t going to help us.

“Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?”  Sir Toby Belch asked the Puritanical steward Malvolio in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night.  Human nature is not going to change because hair-shirted environmentalists think we should become more ascetic.  The world economy must and will grow; world living standards can and must continue to rise. Grandiose global treaties to regulate economic activity and limit growth will never work any more than airy global treaties will get rid of war.  Complex cap and trade systems are going to be distorted by lobbyists and gamed by lawyers — just as the biofuels program turned into just another special interest farm subsidy.  Americans didn’t stop drinking because the bluenosed progressive reformers of the day thought it would help.  They, and other people as well, aren’t going to give up their lifestyles just because there is a climate problem.

This doesn’t mean that nothing can or should be done.  Nudging the US economy toward less energy intensive activity while cutting the costs of hiring people is a sensible way to promote the kind of high tech, complex service economy that will serve us best down the road with or without global warming; I personally think the substitution of a carbon tax for payroll taxes would be sound public policy even if global warming turned out to be a total fraud.

I note that the Indian government, as allergic as ever to the Copenhagen approach, is attempting to end that country’s wasteful and destructive policy of subsidizing energy use by keeping fuel costs artificially low.  This is happening for economic, not environmental reasons: the Indian government simply cannot afford the cost of these subsidies, and it is prepared to face strikes and protests to see the reforms through.  This single reform if carried through and sustained, is likely to do more for the environment than the complex, expensive, time consuming and largely ineffectual Kyoto Protocol.  Ending fuel subsidies was not a green idea; it was a growth idea.  It was not a global policy; it was an Indian policy.  The ideas that get us out of this mess will be ideas that work for specific countries and that make the economy work better, produce more wealth and use energy and raw materials more efficiently.

Alcohol abuse was a real problem in 1918, but the Prohibitionist belief that there was One Big Legislative Answer only made things worse.  Over the years, we’ve made progress on reducing the effect of alcohol abuse on our society in various ways.  Organizations like AA have helped millions stop drinking while leaving those who can drink responsibly to do so in peace.  Strict enforcement of drunk driving laws has dramatically reduced highway deaths due to drink.  Many of the most important advances had nothing to do with direct assaults on the alcohol problem.  Increased economic competition ended the days of the three martini lunch.  Attacks on discrimination against women have given women and children more economic choices when Daddy spends all his money at the corner saloon; enforcement of laws against domestic violence has helped curb the vicious spouse and child abuse that was once part of John Barleycorn’s toll on our society.  We are not all the way there yet, and as long as human nature is what it is we may never get there, but once we had the good sense to ignore Carry Nation and the crazy Prohibitionist cranks, we were able to make significant and sustained progress dealing with the problem.

Carry Nation, hatchet in hand.

Something like this is going to have to happen on the climate front.  Relatively small steps, or larger steps often undertaken for reasons that have little directly to do with climate, will have to see us through.  Until more greens understand that, and until the green movement as a whole disabuses itself of the dangerous fantasy that the way to solve our environmental problems is to embrace Malthusian fantasies, utopian treaties and grandiose laws, the green movement will continue to be a drag on human progress — even as the computer models get better and the temperature goes up.

At best, the green movement might be compared to an alarm clock: jangling shrilly to wake up the world.  That is fair enough; they have turned our attention to a problem that needs to be carefully examined and dealt with.  But the first thing you do when you wake up is to turn the alarm clock off; otherwise that shrill beeping noise will distract you from the problems of the day.

The alarm clock will never understand this; making shrill and irrational noise is what alarm clocks do and is all they understand.  But sensible and thoughtful people who want humanity to live fuller, richer lives in a cleaner and more sustainable world need to get past the naive and crude policy ideas that currently dominate green thinking and start giving these questions the serious attention and careful thought they deserve.

The disintegration of the world’s third largest Christian ecclesiastical community marches on.  (The Roman Catholics with more than a billion members and the 300 million member Greek Orthodox communions are the two largest; the Pentecostal and charismatic movement worldwide is larger than the Greek Orthodox community but is not organized into a single group of churches.)  This week, the center of attention has moved from the dismal flailing of the American Episcopal church to the equally disheartening infighting in Britain, and the issue has moved from ordaining gay bishops to the question of how to handle the Angl0-Catholic minority in the Church of England who object to the ordination of women as bishops.

The Church of England has been edging toward the ordination of women bishops for some time; a minority bitterly opposes this step, believing (like the Vatican and the Eastern Orthodox churches) that only men can serve in the ‘holy orders’ of the church.  The Archbishop of Canterbury had introduced a resolution at the General Synod or convention of the Church of England that would allow parishes and priests who objected to the ordination of women bishops to remain under male supervision.  It was hoped that this opt-out would allow dissenters to remain in the Church of England rather than going to Rome; the news this week is that the resolution was defeated.  Leaders of Britain’s Anglo-Catholic minority (Anglo-Catholics are Anglicans who believe that there are or should be virtually no theological differences between Anglican and Roman Catholic teaching) are now threatening to secede.

This is a very Anglican dispute.  Historically, the Anglican Communion has claimed to be a “via media” or middle way between Protestantism and Catholicism.  This tends to infuriate both Protestants and Catholics who find Anglicans unbearably self-righteous and smug; there is much quiet gloating in various Christian circles as the Anglicans tear themselves apart.  Nevertheless, Anglicans have seen the peculiar course of the English Reformation as leading to a church that was both Catholic and Reformed, holding fast to the core truths of the Christian faith and respecting tradition while ridding itself of the abuses and errors that Protestants associate with the Church of Rome.  Given this position, it is not surprising that ever since England broke from Rome under Henry VIII the Anglican Church has witnessed bitter theological controversies between its more Protestant leaning and more Catholic leaning members.

The differences sharpened in the nineteenth century.  The Oxford Movement saw men like John Henry Newman, John Keble and Edward Pusey develop a fully articulated Anglo-Catholic theological position while reviving Catholic liturgical practices (“bells and smells”) and ultimately establishing Anglican monastic orders.  At the same time, the evangelical revivals that swept Victorian Britain greatly strengthened the Low Church or Protestant party, and a third force also emerged, the “Broad Church” movement that thought both High Church Anglo-Catholics and Low Church evangelicals were entirely too conservative in their approach to Christian doctrine and that it was perhaps more important to get along than to tear the church asunder over small points of (irrelevant and perhaps dubious) doctrine.

Because the Church of England is a state church (its bishops are appointed by the Queen on the advice of the Prime Minister, Parliament ultimately has the right to determine what Prayer Book it uses, the bishops sit in the House of Lords, the Queen and her family and heirs cannot leave the Church of England or marry Roman Catholics without losing their right to the throne), many of its doctrinal disputes have ended up in court or have been decided by government action.  In the past, decisions like the establishment of a joint Angl0-Prussian missionary bishopric in Jerusalem and the Privy Council’s decision in the Gorham case deeply disturbed Anglo-Catholics by appearing to give a decisively Protestant cast to the Anglican faith.  Over the years, a significant number of Angl0-Catholics including at least two future cardinals (John Henry Newman and Henry Manning) have left the Church of England for Rome over issues like this, but most have stayed.

The fight over women bishops is in many respects a typical Anglican squabble between the Catholic and Protestant trends in the church.  For Anglo-Catholics, the issue is clear and it is vital.  The sacred orders (bishops, priests, deacons) are the common property of all the churches — Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and Anglican.  The Anglican church acting alone has no right to change 2000 years of church teaching and practice — and in any case, many Anglo-Catholics agree with Benedict XVI that the exclusion of women from the priesthood is a matter of divine law rather than human tradition.  (The Roman Catholics and most Eastern Orthodox do not believe that Anglican orders are valid and insist that Anglican ‘priests’ joining these churches must be re-ordained.)

What the Archbishop of Canterbury proposed was a classic Anglican fudge.  The ordination of women as bishops would go ahead in Britain, but parishes and priests whose consciences were offended could deal with male bishops instead.  Unfortunately (in my view) this approach has been defeated by those who argue that the core question is one of the rights and dignity of women.  Women bishops should not be ‘less-than’ their male counterparts, they argue.  For centuries the church has wrongfully denied women their proper place in ecclesiastical affairs.  Will justice even now not be done?

I take the point, but ultimately this seems Puritan rather than Anglican to me.  A church that attempts to straddle the Catholic/Protestant divide and also seeks to maintain a global fellowship without an authority structure comparable to the Vatican and the Pope needs to be unusually tolerant, even on matters which some consider matters of principle.  Without a tender regard for the sensibilities of minorities, the Communion is unlikely to hold together.  Quiet little exceptions and pragmatic fixes that cannot withstand the glare of strict logic are a necessary part of Anglican life.

On the strict merits of the question, I am with the women.  I think that Pope Leo XIII was completely correct from a Roman Catholic point of view when he declared all Anglican ordinations “absolutely null and utterly void” back in 1896.  Anglican orders and Roman Catholic orders reflect different ideas of priesthood, and although many thoughtful and conscientious Anglicans think otherwise, I think they are wrong.  The ordination of women as bishops makes perfect sense in an Anglican context, however wrongheaded it may appear to the Pope.

Nevertheless it seems to me that the Anglican thing to do here is exactly what the Archbishop of Canterbury proposed: graciously to accommodate the real spiritual concerns of a minority party in a theologically diverse Christian communion.  That he has been vilified by militant liberals only increases my respect for this remarkable prelate, bravely struggling to fulfill his responsibilities in one of the church’s most difficult hours.

On the question of whether a special provision to salve tender consciences reduces the standing of women bishops, I think that what applies in a secular context does not fit the life of the church.  Women MPs should be equal to their male counterparts in every respect and would be rightfully angry if anyone suggested that they operate under a different set of rules than the men.  But the Christian church lives by different standards.  I do not think any bishop, male or female, loses authority or stature by an act of forbearance and Christian charity.  Insisting on prerogatives and points of prestige that damage the church, on the other hand, violates the core spirit of the faith.

The history of Anglicanism is a history of schism.  Most of the tens of thousands of denominations in the United States today ultimately descend from groups who broke away from the Church of England over one issue or another since the time of James I.  Those who broke away did so on the basis of deeply felt principles that were, they believed, too vital to compromise.  That is fair enough.  The ideal of a community of Christians who remain together despite serious differences of opinion on important theological issues is not the only ideal, and I can honor those who have chosen to break up the communion over issues of principle even as I struggle to keep the old flame alive.

But the Anglican ideal of forbearance and compromise also has a place.  It’s not always enough to be theologically correct; one must also sometimes be Christian.  The Anglican Communion is in trouble today because too many of its members are giving their inner Puritans free reign.  Where liberals are in the majority, as in the US and to a lesser extent the UK, they are imposing their vision and values in ways that are forcing conservatives toward the exits.  Where conservatives have the upper hand, as in some of the African and South American provinces, the conservative majorities are also suffering from an excess of zeal.  Liberals and conservatives both need to cool down, to remind themselves that to be Anglican is to acknowledge that the church is inevitably a mixed bag: it is more Noah’s ark with a lot of different species awkwardly trying to keep out of each others’ hair than a can of sardines where everyone looks alike and faces the same way.

I think that’s the way God wants it to be, and that is why I am keeping the faith even as I watch so many of our supposed leaders doing everything they can to rip the church to shreds — motivated, as they say, by nothing but the highest regard for justice and right.

As regular readers of this space know, I was in London last week and took the opportunity to visit some of the sites associated with some of the important thinkers and writers who shaped the modern world.  I visited the tomb of one of the Founding Fathers of the Blogosphere,  Joseph Addison, in Poet’s Corner at Westminster Abbey.  While there I also paid stopped at the tombs of Sir Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin before going out to Greenwich Observatory to see John Harrison’s H-4 clock that made it possible for navigators to determine their global position and so facilitated the vast expansion of trade and communication that defined the last 200 years.  I visited the houses of two more great bloggers — Benjamin Franklin and Samuel Johnson — and paid my respects to St. Sir Thomas More, Leigh Hunt, George Elliot, Henry James and Thomas Carlyle in Chelsea.

This was not even scratching the surface of literary and intellectual London — no visit to the Reading Room or to Marx’s tomb, no stroll through Bloomsbury (though I did see Virginia Woolf’s entry in the guest book at the Carlyle House), no visit to the Dickens Museum, the new Globe or to countless other places associated with the great people and great minds who placed this city on a level with Athens, Jerusalem and Rome in the annals of western and indeed world civilization.  But it was enough to challenge and sharpen my thinking about what blogging is about, what intellectuals should be up to, and what we are trying to do at The American Interest Online.

Joseph Addison, ur-blogger.

If you go back far enough, all the intellectuals were in the Church.  It’s been frequently noted that during long stretches of the Middle Ages, the nobility and the fighting men thought literacy beneath them — and nobody bothered teaching anything to the common people.  If you were literate, you must be in the church — this belief was so firmly fixed that it was part of the law.  From 1351 on, if you could read (or recite Psalm 51, the Scripture passage usually used for the test), you could plead ‘benefit of clergy’ and either have your case transferred into the (dilatory and merciful) ecclesiastical courts or get off entirely.  The English practice crossed the ocean with the early colonists; Wikipedia asserts that in South Carolina defendants were still pleading benefit of clergy on the eve of the Civil War.

(I would hate to think that it was because literacy was so rare in my native state that this practice survived its elimination in federal courts by sixty years.  One hopes it was South Carolina’s deep reverence for learning that kept this medieval survival alive even after the British got rid of it.)

In any case, during much of western history, the universities were part of the Church and the high offices of state were filled by the clerics who, alone, had the learning to manage the business of government.  The rest of the learned were mostly found in monasteries, partly because before printing became widespread there were so few collections of books in private hands.

What we might now consider free range intellectuals, people like Macchiavelli and Thomas More who made intellectual careers outside the Church, start to pop up in significant numbers with the invention of printing.  The closure of the monasteries in Protestant countries sent scholars and thinkers out to make a living in the wide and bitter world.  Men like Roger Ascham, Elizabeth I’s famous tutor, in earlier eras probably would have found a niche somewhere inside the ecclesiastical establishment; although thanks to his famous pupil Ascham ended up with a nice clerical living, he never took holy orders.  In England, the break comes in the reign of Henry VIII; when Cardinal Wolsey fell, he was replaced by the layman Thomas More; from that time forward the government of England has largely kept the clergy to the side.

As Thomas Macaulay observed from his comfortable and well upholstered perch in the nineteenth century, the eighteenth century saw a revolution in the social and economic position of intellectuals.  At the beginning of that century, there were four ways to earn a gentleman’s living as a thinker or writer: a university fellowship, a clerical ‘living’, a comfortable government place (whether active like Lord Chancellor or honorary like Poet Laureate), or a private post (tutor or librarian in a great noble house).  Men like Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Sir Isaac Newton navigated this system fairly well; the unattached writers of Fleet Street floundered on the outskirts of destitution, living from hand to mouth and frequently in peril of arrest for outstanding debts.

Samuel Johnson lived through this transition, desperately working to keep body and soul together for many years, angling for and failing to get the patronage of Lord Chesterfield, and at times he was literally homeless.  Arrested for debt in 1756 he did not become truly secure until George III gave him an annual pension worth about $50,000 in today’s money.  Nevertheless, Johnson carved out an independent career as a free lance poet, essayist (like Addison he wrote a blog-like series of essays known as The Rambler) and lexicographer.  From Johnson’s heyday through the middle of the twentieth century, a galaxy of writers and critics were able to support themselves from the commercial proceeds of their work — though not a few endured financial setbacks and uncertainty as harrowing as Johnson’s early life.

A handful of ‘wits’ in London got the ball rolling, and the more I look at their work the more I see the similarities between what they did and what bloggers now do.  Writers like Jonathan Swift, Daniel Defoe, Richard Steele and Joseph Addison (occasionally joined by people like Alexander Pope) started writing informal essays and observations about politics, society, the theater, fashion and anything else that caught their fancy.  These essays were handed to the printers and distributed by post and sold to subscribers.  The Tatler, one of the first of these publications, even had a precursor of the comments section; if you paid a little extra you got an additional page on which you could post observations and gossip of your own before mailing the issue on to a friend.

These paleoblogs took the country by storm; they also made money for their authors.  For the first time, English writers could make money based on the popularity of their work with the general public.  As a mass audience developed for contemporary literature and criticism, more and more writers would be able to follow this path, supporting their study and their work by the contributions of their readers.  The rise of the intelligent lay public and its ability to support independent writers and analysts was one of the most important developments in the history of the modern world and in the growth of democracy.  Writers no longer had to please exalted patrons in church or state; with a lively style, keen sight and an instinct for what the public wanted to know, writers and thinkers could make their own way in the world.

It was never particularly easy; nor should it be.  But the eighteenth and nineteenth century saw more and more thinkers and writers finding ways to support their work by engaging with the public.  The proliferation of magazines and book publishers, the gradual move to provide writers better copyright protection, and, when the railroads made travel easier, the rise of the lecture circuit enabled people like Frederick Douglass to enter public debate in new ways.

I’m not going to attempt an economic history of the intellectual in a blog post, but the twentieth century seems to have reversed the trend of the previous two hundred years.  Increasingly as the twentieth century moved on, intellectuals and writers were forced back into the pre-modern pattern.  Poets, novelists, essayists, critics, historians: it became increasingly difficult to sustain any of these vocations outside the universities and the think tanks and university and think tank presidents took over the old task of shaking down the wealthy to subsidize the learned through patronage of various kinds.

There was another way in which the writer was increasingly yoked — not always happily — to institutions.  During the twentieth century, magazine and book publishing inexorably became more businesslike.  To print and distribute a book or a magazine was so expensive that with a handful of noble exceptions only large and well financed companies could succeed.  This gave tremendous power to editors; the editor’s ability to figure out what would sell was the vital spark that kept book and magazine publishers going.  At the limit, writers for magazines like the old Time, Life, Newsweek — and in the Economist today — wrote anonymous copy that was heavily edited into a homogeneous house style.  But even in publications and publishing houses where individual voices were prized, writers were dependent on editors for the opportunity to put their work before the public.

This is not the way it was when Addison and Steele were writing the Spectator.  The writers produced the paper: they decided what went into it, how long each article should be, when it would appear and what it should look like.

Today’s blogger has the same freedom that the progenitors did.  Anybody with a computer and an internet connection can set up a blog; you don’t need the mighty machinery of a powerful media company to get your message out to the world.  Figuring out how to get and keep an audience is as hard as it ever was, and converting public interest into a reliable revenue stream remains dicey.  Nevertheless, it is easier and cheaper to put ideas in front of the public than it has ever been.

What remains to be seen is whether the new media will reverse the decline of the free range intellectual, allowing more creators, writers and thinkers to earn their living from the public, rather than seeking the patronage of institutions.  I hope so; as I wrote in The Last Post, the institutions that support intellectual work in this country are in trouble, and I suspect that the financial bind affecting all levels of government will soon result in some very painful university cutbacks while the great journalistic meltdown will only get worse.

But I also think something vital is lost when a society’s artists and thinkers live on the bounty of established institutions and must negotiate the complicated political and ideological dances such institutions require in order to live.  The quirky, cranky critic who doesn’t really care what anybody thinks is often wrong, but sometimes these people at their rudest and crankiest are pointing to vital truths that the complacent and timeserving cultural bureaucrats and custodians of conventional wisdom cannot see or will not speak.  In revolutionary times like ours we need to hear from the thinkers who won’t be politically house trained, who speak the ugly truths that no decent person would utter, are atrociously rude to the donors and make no secret of their belief that the dean is a hack.

To visit London and poke among the tombs and shrines of long dead writers is to be reminded that the intellectual professions don’t stand above history, judging from on high.  We are shaped by the times we live in, the way we earn our livings, the technology that allows us to reach the public as well as by the changing fashions in ideas.  The economic and social turbulence that is reshaping American life is not going to pass intellectuals by.  Every profession and every trade in America is being transformed; the literary and intellectual professions are going to change in ways we can scarcely imagine.

Here at The American Interest we are going to have to do more than host interesting pieces by insightful people; like everyone else in the business we are going to have to rethink the way that authors and publishers collaborate in this changing world and find new ways of connecting with the public.  We will be writing about the many faceted and accelerating changes that are remaking the world of the American thinker, but we will also be trying to be a part of those changes and to follow as best we can in the footsteps of those earlier generations who repeatedly reinvented and reformed the relationship of thinkers and writers to society even as they wrote books that we still read with astonishment and delight after hundreds of years.

In recent posts I’ve been hinting at new developments at The American Interest Online; I’m happy to share the first of these with you today.

Peter Berger, a renowned sociologist, widely considered the world’s leading scholar on the role of religion in the contemporary world and one of the great socially engaged intellectuals of our time, is launching a blog on our site.  It will be called “Religion and Other Curiosities;” Peter will write about developments in the world of religion as only he can, but warns us that he intends to range as far abroad as his curiosity drives him.  A true Weberian, Peter doesn’t like being limited by a narrow specialization.  Peter’s first post appears today; at this point he plans to post twice a week, though this may change.  I first came across Peter’s work as an undergraduate taking introductory sociology; even then he was seen as a towering figure in the field, one of a handful of thinkers who were keeping alive the tradition of deep social reflection across a wide range of issues.  Since then, his reputation has only grown.

Peter was once known chiefly for his work on the ‘social construction of reality;’ these days he is also and increasingly known for his groundbreaking reconsideration of the role of religion in modern society.  Thirty years ago, when I was in college and the world was young, virtually all thoughtful observers believed that religion was doomed to fade away with the approach of ‘modernity’.  The European experience in which secularization seemed to go hand in hand with modernization was the normal course of human development; religion was a byproduct of human ignorance and powerlessness and as the sun of enlightenment arose, the shadows of religion would fade away.

Peter began his career as a firm believer in what was then the established scholarly consensus; over the years, however, he could not help but notice that in many developing countries as in the United States, religion was not fading away.  Indeed, it many countries it was precisely among modernizing elites that new religious movements were gaining ground.  Peter was also one of the first important thinkers to take the global Pentecostal movement seriously and has argued that the rise of Pentecostalism in many developing countries offers new hope for economic and social progress.

Frank Fukuyama, the chairman of the editorial board of The American Interest, suggested to Peter recently that he consider blogging on our site, and since then Peter and I have had several conversations and email exchanges about it.  Peter sees blogging very much as I do: as an opportunity to engage more directly and informally with an audience on a wide range of topics.  It is an elastic medium that allows for anything from the equivalent of a formal lecture to a fireside chat.  It was made for Peter: someone with a vast stock of learning and experience, a universal curiosity, and an engaging personal style.

This is big news for The American Interest Online, but it is much more than that.  It represents a significant step in American letters.  One of the great public intellectuals and thinkers of our time is going to try his hand at an exciting new way of reaching the public.  Over time I hope The American Interest Online can build a community of established and emerging voices and host a range of blogs that cover many different subjects from different points of view.  For half a century, Peter Berger has been one of the most vital and engaging scholars and intellectuals in the world; it is with immense happiness and pride that I welcome him as a colleague on our site.

But don’t just read Mead on Berger; read Berger on the world and follow this link to Peter’s first post.

Welcome to my last post; it’s been a great run.

This is not the last post I will make on the blog; it’s the last post I have written as a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.  There are still a few loose ends to tie up, a few things to pack in the office, but we’ve had the goodbye party and the last staff meeting and the last paycheck is about to be cut. It’s been a great thirteen-year run, and I have a lot of good friends and colleagues still at the Council.  I’m not going to miss them because I’ll stay in touch — reading their books, op-eds and blog posts, and as a member attending the events and the roundtables they organize. Participating in the life and work of this organization for more than a decade gave me a window into how the US foreign policy community works and thinks, and that perspective will inform and enrich my work going forward.

That said, though, it’s time to move on.  The shift in my career focus from think tanks to the university and journalism is being driven by my growing sense that the greatest problems in American foreign policy and more generally in our political life do not flow from an absence of policy proposals and the other products that a good think tank makes.  We do not, in my opinion, suffer from a lack of ingenious plans for fixing Bosnia, preventing conflict in the African Great Lakes region, or for redesigning the international financial system.  At the levels at which think tank fellows characteristically work and think, we are pretty well covered. There are more task force reports, issue studies and position papers being produced than can be put to use – and many of them (especially the ones prepared by my CFR colleagues) are often very good.  

But if the country has never been so rich in policy institutes and policy scholars producing policy positions and policy papers, we don’t seem to be doing so well when it comes to adopting and sticking to good policies.  Our capacity for sensible public discussions about our alternatives, and our ability to produce and elect leaders who understand the world we live in also look weak.  This isn’t just a criticism of the Obama administration; the Bush and the Clinton administrations were both better at rhetoric than at policy.  Increasingly I’m drawn to the conclusion that the weak links in the American foreign (and domestic) policy processes reflect weaknesses in the way we train and prepare people for this kind of work and more generally in the relationship of intellectuals to American society overall.

As someone who has worked and hopes to keep working in the three major groups of institutions where American intellectuals are most active (the academy, ‘serious’ journalism and publishing, and policy institutes or think tanks), I find that the relations among these institutions and between all of them and the educated lay public are shifting in complex and not always helpful ways.  The problems we face cannot simply be addressed by writing more and better policy papers in think tanks; we need to prepare for big changes in the institutions where intellectuals work, in the way that intellectuals understand their role in society, and in the way that intellectuals are formed.

The rise of the think tank world (the Council on Foreign Relations alone has gone from about maybe one dozen senior fellows when I joined to several times that today) partly reflects a crisis in the universities.  A generation ago, university professors were the country’s repository of talent for most policy matters, foreign and domestic.  Henry Kissinger was teaching at Harvard before he joined the Nixon Administration.  Partly as a result of the Vietnam War, which created an entire generation of academics who believed that to serve the American government was to betray the purity of the scholarly calling, and partly as the result of academic pressures for ever narrower specialization and ever more emphasis on theoretical constructs, the universities have become less and less relevant to the policy process.  (Law schools and economics departments are the principal exceptions to the rule.)  Great scholars with global reputations like Joe Nye at Harvard can still move between the academy and government, but each generation is finding that harder to do.

The rise of think tanks reflects many forces, including the interest of ideological or economic special interests to collect and promote ‘stables’ of thinkers who will reliably produce work that reflects a given worldview.  But the reason think tanks have become so valuable in the government and policy world is because a gap grew up that needed to be filled.  The academy has abdicated its former role of providing comfortable resting places for out of power (or preparing for power) policy thinkers.  The political studies and international relations departments of many leading universities are becoming places for introspective, sometimes navel-gazing study aimed chiefly at clarifying and reflecting on the terms of debate and the scholarly discourse; the think tanks have emerged to host extroverted study aimed primarily at changing the external world.  This is not, I think, a particularly elegant, cost-effective or intellectually fruitful way of organizing American intellectual life or of teaching young people, but there it is.

The third leg of the tripod of American intellectual life is the world of serious generalist intellectual comment.  In the past the combination of serious book publishing and magazines (back when The Atlantic was one of many general circulation magazines attempting to deal seriously with ideas, culture and politics) could support independent intellectuals who were not affiliated with universities or think tanks.  The economic base of those thinkers has been declining for generations.  After World War Two, most of the intellectuals were forced to take on university positions to earn a living.  As the universities became less hospitable to the generalists, and as it became progressively more difficult for serious writers to live on book royalties, some fled into the world of think tanks; others responded by writing for glossy magazines — where possible without dumbing down the content too much.  The continuing decline of magazines and serious newspapers, the travails of book publishing and, so far, the failure of internet journalism to produce much revenue further complicates the task of those who want to make a living by writing intelligently about important issues for the public at large.

Each of these three legs of the tripod of American intellectual life has its problems; there are also problems that affect the tripod as a whole.  First, there is a widening gap between intellectual and ‘expert’ opinion and American society as a whole.  Americans have always been skeptical, iconoclastic and lacking in deference to intellectual and social authorities; in some ways that populist irreverence and revolt is now stronger than ever.  Our universities are producing more theories than ever; our think tanks are producing more complex policy papers than ever; our thinkers and journalists are producing more commentary than ever: but the people aren’t buying.

This is partly a question of ideology (American intellectuals and professionals have a set of class interests that are not identical to that of other groups in society and few American professionals reflect deeply on the ways that warps their judgment); it is also a question of the second major failing in our intellectual system: preparation.  We are doing a lousy job of equipping people with the social and verbal ability to communicate effectively between different specialist audiences (environmentalists and political scientists, for example) or between specialists and academics as a whole and the educated lay public.  Being able to write clear and compelling books and articles for the educated lay public about important topics and complex ideas isn’t just a way for intellectuals to sell more books.  This skill is vital to the health of a democratic society; without a healthy discussion of important ideas it’s going to be hard to get broad public support for difficult but important policy choices.  In any case, the people need to be involved in the discussion and in the United States today our universities have largely abdicated what ought to be part of their core mission.  These skills aren’t valued; they aren’t even taught.  In the late Middle Ages many monkish scholars pursued ever finer theological distinctions and arguments as the church rotted away in gross corruption and society moved beyond the ideas and institutions that had once served it well.  Something like that seems to be happening today in the United States; it’s not a good trend.

The third problem is, I think, related to the first two. As a society, we seem to be good at producing technicians and bad at cultivating and nurturing people with vision.  There are conspicuous and outstanding exceptions to this generalization (people like my TAI colleague Frank Fukuyama or in a different way my old CFR boss Les Gelb), but on the whole both our think tank technicians and our academic theoreticians are weakest when it comes to what George H. W. Bush famously called ‘the vision thing’.  This has a lot to do with the way our emphasis on technical and specialist education produces policy people with surprisingly little understanding of either history or the great cultural forces like religion that shape the way people encounter and respond to the world.

One result is that many Americans come out of the higher educational system with a combination of detailed knowledge about a specific subject area and quite naive and simplistic ideological views.  Simplistic ideas about ‘nation building’, the relationship of development and democracy, the nature of democracy and both the nature and direction of the historical process itself are widespread among American policymakers and even more prevalent among the bureaucrats and experts who staff large government institutions.  Quite responsible people sometimes have shockingly crude ideas about the relationship of power to ideals in history, the nature of a liberal international order, and the relationship of culture and history to contemporary politics not only in the United States but around the world.

Like the urban planners of past generations who devastated whole cities by building vast projects that ignored the human factor, many of the people who think about policy in this country are in the grip of great theoretical abstractions and are poorly prepared to manage the inevitable problems when the grand concept meets the friction and resistance of history and human reality.  The ambitious globalism of the Clinton administration, the Bush administration’s dash for democracy and the Obama administration’s liberal internationalism are very different approaches intellectually speaking, but they share a common abstraction from the real world.  These ideological abstractions miss the details and the fine points like the way a South Park cartoon sketch misses the detailed verisimilitude of a Vermeer.

The individuals who try to apply these caricatured ideals to history aren’t stupid; they are often extremely intelligent.  But the educational system that created them and the intellectual life and discourse that has surrounded them have failed to prepare them for their tasks.  We are failing to provide what in an earlier post I called the που στω, or ‘standing place’ (as in “Give me a lever and a place on which I can stand, and I will move the world”): a vision of culture and history that enables someone to see far, reflect broadly, think deeply and communicate clearly about the major issues of the day.

We are also failing to provide that standing place in another sense: a way for people called to make a living as they develop the vision and skills that can ultimately enable them to emerge as great thinkers or leaders.  The universities and the think tanks increasingly reward specialists rather than holistic thinkers; the media environment rewards predictable controversialists — provocateurs of the right and left.  This will be ruinous if it continues.  

History, culture, religion: we have produced a caste of policymakers and intellectuals who for the most part are color blind or nearly so when it comes to these topics.  There are many exceptions of course, including many of my old Council colleagues, but taken as a group, we have a policy elite that too frequently can neither understand nor plan for nor communicate effectively with the broader public in this country and abroad.

If democracy is going to flourish in this turbulent new century, we need to equip, prepare and support a new kind of socially engaged intellectual (or an old kind of intellectual made new). I hope that my work at Bard and at The American Interest Online is going to contribute in some small way to addressing this problem.  The health and strength of American society is essential, not only for our own continued freedom and prosperity, but to ensure that we can make our necessary contribution to the peace, development and well being of the world.

It’s easy to complain; hard to do.  At Bard and The American Interest Online I’m going to try to do something useful about these problems.  You, the readers of The American Interest Online, have ringside seats to watch the show.  Judging from the comments I’ve received to date, you won’t be shy about sharing your opinions about how well, or how poorly, I succeed.

London is an odd place for an American to spend the Fourth of July, but the way the schedule worked out this summer, this happened to be the best time for me to make a quick trip.  I’ve been putting some ideas together about Anglo-American relations, the decline and fall of great powers and the influence of religion, culture and intellectuals on foreign policy and political institutions.  Those of you who stick with this blog will be reading about them going forward.

But for an American in London on the Fourth of July it’s hard to avoid reflecting on the break.  History has a way of jumping out at you here; walking out of St. Paul’s after evensong today I passed under the baleful gaze of a heroic statue of Lord Cornwallis.  But aside from the odd discordant note, the evidence of the special relationship between the United States and Britain is thick on the ground on what was an extraordinary and glorious Fourth here today — sunny and slightly cool, with fresh breezes gusting along the river and through the parks.

Poets’ Corner, in Westminster Abbey.

It’s amazing how deep the connections run.  Westminster Abbey’s Poet’s Corner, where British writers are buried or commemorated on plaques near the tomb of Geoffrey Chaucer, honors a startlingly large number of American writers.  Not only does the National Portrait Gallery have a portrait of Washington, but Benjamin West and John Singer Sargent are strongly represented among the paintings there.

More than three thousand bodies lie buried in Westminster Abbey, including Elizabeth I and Henry V; the one grave over which nobody is allowed to walk, and which even royal coronation processions must swerve to avoid, is the tomb of an unknown soldier from World War One.  Carefully displayed nearby is the Congressional Medal of Honor awarded by the United States to the unknown hero.  (America’s unknown soldier was awarded the Victoria Cross in return; no decorations by any of Britain’s other wartime allies are on display.)

Outside of the Abbey, a brooding statue of Abraham Lincoln overlooks a “Peace Village” where a scattering of Afghan and Iraq war protesters huddle under banners proclaiming that capitalism isn’t working and that British and American soldiers are committing war crimes.  Around the corner is the Churchill Museum in the bunker where the British high command and War Cabinet met during the Blitz; the museum highlights Churchill’s lifelong connection with the country in which his mother was born.  The highest tech equipment in the British government’s wartime nerve center were the secure telephone lines permitting the British to confer in real time with their American counterparts in the States.  The world’s first ‘hot line’ was there, specifically so Churchill could get through to FDR.

A short walk from the Churchill Museum is the modest townhouse on Craven Street where Benjamin Franklin lived from 1757 to 1775.  Nobody believed in the special relationship more than Franklin; he was proud of his status as an Englishman, visited the town from which his father had emigrated to the colonies, considered repurchasing the old family estate, and in many ways seemed happier in London than in Philadelphia.  He got to know Joseph Priestly the chemist and Unitarian theologian, formed a friendship with Adam Smith, and generally became a valued member of the enlightened and scientific elite in the leading city of the most advanced empire of its day.  At least at the beginning, he was a patriotic and loyal English subject who only hoped to strengthen the British Empire.  By the end of his tenure he was convinced that parting was inevitable; he would break off all relations with his own son when the younger man remained loyal to King George.

Part of what drove Franklin away was politics.  He was always closer to the Whigs — and especially to William Pitt the elder, architect of Britain’s stunning victories over France in the Seven Years War and a constant friend to the American colonies.  George III favored the Tories and wanted to turn the loose British Empire into a much tighter and more centralized state.  The British Whigs didn’t like what that did at home or abroad: they argued that the Crown was regaining too much power from Parliament and were sympathetic to American arguments that the King was usurping the rights of the colonial assemblies.

This difference remains, I think, an important factor in Anglo-American relations today.  The British see their history after the Glorious Revolution of 1688 as the successful construction of a strong central government that made the country respected abroad and prosperous at home.  In the 19th century, the middle classes wrested control of this strong state from the aristocracy, squeezed much of the corruption out of it and began to use it for purposes of social uplift.  With the emergence of the Labor Party the workers got their share as well; while there are some people in the UK who sympathize with the idea of small government (and while the British are less statist than, for example, the French), on the whole the center of gravity in British politics favors a significant social role for a strong state.

The British are less religious these days than Americans are (although both the Anglican and the Catholic churches I saw this Sunday had quite large congregations), but the persistence of an established church has something to do with this feeling that the state is and should be an important moral agent in the life of the nation.  The church, supporting and supported by the state, projects values into society and all good people are expected to rally around.  (A Puritan version of this vision made it over into the New England states; the desire of many American liberals to use government to reshape society ultimately traces back to this English sense of the union of throne and altar.)  In America, there were always too many sectarians who saw these attempts to unify the moral and the political as a form of tyranny, and in the US the ‘great and the good’ have had a harder time imposing a unified moral vision on society as a whole.

There are other ways in which the British are more comfortable with centralization than Americans are.  We have no city like London: it is Britain’s New York, Washington and Los Angeles rolled up into one.  The American founders debated keeping the capital in Philadelphia or New York, but decided to place it out in the boondocks.  (In the same way many American states deliberately chose to establish their political capitals in smaller towns.)  We don’t want too much power flowing to a single city and we don’t want the members of the elite to get too clubby and know each other too well; the rest of the country is suspicious of anyone who works on Wall Street or inside the Beltway.  We don’t think America would be a better place if Wall Street and Pennsylvania Avenue got closer together.

America is too big, too diverse and too disputatious to settle down with one social model and one big establishment the way Britain has.  This has its costs; ever since Franklin’s time Americans have looked with envy on British governance that often seems more effective, organized and, since the middle classes nudged the aristocrats out, more honest and competent than our own raggedy system.  But although over time we have built a stronger and more effective central government, somehow we never quite go all the way.  Thomas Jefferson and his allies ultimately defeated Alexander Hamilton’s effort to model our financial and political systems on Britain’s.  Daniel Webster, Nicholas Biddle and Henry Clay were beaten by Andrew Jackson and James K. Polk.

In that sense, the forces that drove the American Revolution are still coursing through our politics now.  While a significant number of Americans (usually relatively affluent and well educated) want a transformational government acting in the service of a coherent moral vision, larger numbers of Americans start getting nervous when they see too much movement in that direction.

The Tea Party movement’s choice of revolutionary imagery makes a lot of sense from this perspective.  Tea Partiers see themselves as resisting liberal efforts to centralize power and impose a single moral vision on the United States — very much in the tradition of those who threw the tea into Boston Harbor.  As always, an upsurge in American populism brings out the fruit bats and the conspiracy nuts — during the Revolution there were people who identified George III as the Antichrist.  The Anti-Masons and the Know Nothings surged until the rise of the Republican Party refocused these energies in a more positive and effective way.  There was much more anti-Semitism, racism and all around crackpot thinking among American Populists than progressive historians generally like to remember.

It is much too soon to predict how the Tea Party movement will develop.  The metamorphosis from decentralized protests to a political force that can govern can be tough, and leadership makes a big difference.  But it’s interesting to note that Benjamin Franklin, welcomed into the British establishment and living the (fairly) high life on Craven Street, knew America well enough to know that the London program of centralization wasn’t going to work.  No American had better reason to know Britain’s power and fear the determination of its rulers, but Franklin signed the Declaration of Independence and went to Paris to negotiate a treaty of alliance with Britain’s oldest and most hated foe.

Benjamin Franklin’s old house on Craven Street has only recently been restored and opened to the public.  The folks running it could use your support.  Any American who wants to understand our politics and culture needs to understand Britain and the complex relationship between two similar countries on such different paths.  Benjamin Franklin was one of the first to live the tension between the two cultures and the two ways of life; visiting Number 36 Craven Street will give you new food for thought.

[Photo from Victorian Web]

I am spending about a week in London and it has been harder than usual to find time to post.  That will change shortly; I look forward to getting back on track with the blog.  London is a city of bloggers: Pepys, Addison, Steele, Johnson — and it’s hard not to be inspired here.

The verdict on the G-20 meeting is in.  It wasn’t delivered by the spinmeisters of the global leaders hailing their bosses’ groundbreaking accomplishments.  It wasn’t delivered by the clueless journalists gravely assessing whether the summit was a win for Merkel’s message of austerity or Obama’s message of spending.  The verdict was delivered by the world’s financial markets and it can best be summed up by the Edvard Munch painting:  “The Scream.”

At first glance, the G-20 looked harmless.  As predicted, it cost much and accomplished nothing.  No decisions were taken, no minds were changed.  Politicians had their pictures taken; the press hailed mushy communiques as breakthroughs and delusional protesters played silly ‘revolutionary’ games.

That would be fine under normal circumstances; wasting taxpayer money on pointless pageantry is one of the least harmful things the world’s political leaders ever do.

But this is actually one of those times when the world needs leadership.  The European financial crisis, like a metastasizing cancer, is infecting new targets.  It is no longer a question of sovereign debt in a handful of fringe countries.  We are now looking at real threats to the financial architecture of the EU’s richest and most powerful members.

Obama and Sarkozy in Canada at the G8 meeting, before attending the recent G20 summit (White House).

With the adoption of the euro, southern European countries (and a few northern ones like Ireland) enjoyed a cheap credit bonanza.  Historically, interest rates in countries like Italy, Spain and Greece reflected the belief by investors that those countries would constantly depreciate their currencies in response to high deficits and the inflationary bias of their policy makers.  When those countries entered the euro, interest rates fell to near-German levels as currency and inflation risk disappeared overnight.  Those low interest rates inflated two bubbles.  In the public sector, countries with low borrowing costs started handing out cash to government workers and other well connected interest groups, pumping up economic demand overall and increasing the national debt.  In the private sector, countries like Spain saw huge real estate bubbles develop as home buyers rushed to take advantage of cheap mortgages — and developers enjoyed cheap financing as well.

Central banks are supposed to be the chaperons at parties like this, locking up the liquor cabinet when the guests start getting too happy, but the European Central Bank wasn’t paying attention.  That wasn’t a mistake; it was on purpose.  The ECB is supposed to think about the European economy as a whole, so it was watching economic conditions in the biggest economies like Germany and France.  The ECB sat in the living room, watching Mom and Dad stay sober even while the kids were whooping it up in the basement.  Mom and Dad were pretty well behaved so the bankers left the punch bowl alone — but things got a little out of hand down below and now the whole house is on fire.

As the Europeans scramble to deal with the problem, they’ve tried three things.  First, they tried to build a firewall to stop the crisis from spreading, opening up the liquidity pumps at the central bank and putting together a fund to stabilize Greece’s short term financial situation and reassure investors worried about Spain and Italy.  Second, they canceled the kids’ credit cards — Spain and Greece have both passed strict austerity programs to bring their deficits down over the next few years.  Third, they have started one of those complex, multi-stage European talking processes aimed at economic reforms to make labor markets more flexible plus the creation of new fiscal rules and procedures to provide the kind of unified economic governance that Europe needs to operate a single currency zone.

The trouble is that none of these steps seems to be working very well.  More and more investors believe that Greece will never be able to repay its debts and that sooner or later it will have to go through the international equivalence of bankruptcy proceedings.  This also means that the Greek banking system, which holds many Greek government bonds, is probably also insolvent.  If it isn’t already, it certainly will be by the time the Greek economy goes through a massive contraction as the government austerity bites — and the Greek government then declares that it cannot pay its debts in full.

This isn’t just a Greek problem.  German and French banks don’t just own a lot of Greek government debt; they have complicated relationships with the Greek banks and private sector as well.  Much of this debt may turn out to be worthless, and perhaps almost all of it is going to have to be written down.  Throwing in the problems of the Spanish banking system (and Spain’s credit problems result more from the housing bubble than from the public sector deficits), makes the problem worse.  It’s possible that some of the major European banks (especially the badly managed, politically connected Landesbanks in Germany) are also insolvent.  Reflecting these concerns, lending between banks in Europe has seized up; if the ECB stopped providing loans to banks unable to finance themselves elsewhere, a full blown financial crisis would take the European economies down overnight.

Meanwhile the political signals are flashing red.  A recent poll in Germany showed that 51 percent of Germans want to ditch the euro and go back to the deutsche mark.  It is very hard to see Germany paying billions and billions more euros on into the indefinite future to keep an unpopular currency alive.  Meanwhile Germany and France, the two countries on whose close and strategic cooperation the entire EU system depends, have opposite views about how the current crisis should be addressed.  The French think the Germans should pay through the nose to keep the euro going while increasing the German government deficit to bolster the European economy.  The Germans think the French should shut up.

Both sides have a point.  The French are right that Germany has benefited hugely from the euro.  Those Greeks, Spaniards and Italians who were wildly overspending were spending a lot of their money on German goods.  Under the old system, the franc, peseta, lira and drachma kept losing value against the deutsche mark; that limited Germany’s ability to sell products in the EU market.  From this point of view, the cost of bailing out the weak euro economies is the cost of keeping Germany’s export markets in good shape — and, at the same time, the bailouts of weak European governments and banking systems are chiefly bailing out Germany’s own banks.

On the other hand, from a German point of view it now seems clear that no matter what rules are agreed, the Mediterranean countries won’t keep them.  The Greeks systematically lied and cheated their way into the euro and continued to lie and cheat and steal until the books could no longer be cooked.  “Fool me once, shame on you” say German taxpayers.  “Fool me twice, shame on me.”  A monetary union doesn’t just need rules of the road; it needs some basic consensus about values and methods.  Lacking these, the euro area must sooner or later break down, many Germans feel.  Why not let it break down before spending billions and billions in a doomed effort to save it?  German politicians cannot avoid dealing with this popular feeling; this is a pocketbook question of vital interest to everyone in the country.  The loss of export markets in Greece and even Spain is a small matter compared to the value of your money in the bank.

In my lifetime the Europeans have solved or at least fudged many intractable problems.  Given the enormous stakes and the tremendous talent of European financiers and banking authorities, I would not advise underestimating the chances that they will figure out some ingenious way to manage the current crisis.  But they have been trying and failing to manage their euro crisis since last December and in many respects things have only gotten worse.

If this were just Europe’s problem, the rest of the world could commiserate or gloat depending on its state of mind.  But economically speaking, we live in adjoining row houses.  The fire in Europe’s basement will burn us all out of house and home if it isn’t put out.  Without a healthy European economy it is hard to see the world returning to an era of stable growth anytime soon.  President Obama’s plan to double US exports has always been a long shot and one suspects that the White House now wishes that a target this ambitious and this public had never been set.  A prolonged slowdown in Europe puts that goal totally out of reach and could even derail the US economic recovery — if the latest fall in consumer confidence doesn’t accomplish that on its own.  A full blown European banking crisis would almost certainly plunge us back into the deepest depths of recession.

China must also worry about Europe.  The EU is the largest consumer market in the world, and Chinese exports to the EU are now larger than its exports to the US.  Slow growth or recession in Europe will create more problems for a Chinese leadership already struggling to cope with labor unrest and housing bubbles.  Throw in the effects of a European crisis on Japan and the rest of Asia, and it is clear that the world’s economic leaders have plenty to think about — and they need to act fast.

Acting fast was exactly what the world’s leaders did not do in Toronto.  The stately, pointless procession of photo ops and staged conversations sent out a strong signal that the world’s leaders take after the old Mad magazine mascot Alfred E. Newman: “What, Me Worry?” was the motto du jour in Toronto.

Pointless posturing is all very well in normal times.  But these times aren’t normal and the world’s leaders don’t seem to have grasped that.  This was the message from Toronto and it is hard to think of anything more alarming.