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Category Archives: Essays
April 16, 2012
ESSAY
Post Blue Jobs: Part Two
When people think about what will happen to jobs as the blue model continues to crumble, most have a picture in their heads of the type of change that is happening, and it is based on the experience of the last thirty years. Continue reading
April 14, 2012
ESSAY
The Ring, My Precious, The Ring!
For me, this is peak opera time in New York. Last Monday night I saw Verdi’s wonderful MacBeth, sandwiched between a Saturday performance of Rheingold and last night’s beautifully sung and acted Valkyrie. I’m halfway through the first cycle of the Met’s new production of the Ring, with Siegfried and Götterdämmerung still to come. Between the regular subscription and the Ring, it’s almost a total immersion in the greatest of spectacles and as always, my advice to those of you who don’t live close to New York is to find the nearest theater that offers opera HD simulcasts and go there immediately. Continue reading
April 12, 2012
ESSAY
As Blue Dies, What Happens To the Jobs? Part One
The blue social model was based on the political economy of the industrial age: an age of mass manufacturing employment in the US and other advanced countries. The shift from blue to post-blue, from industrial age to post-industrial age society, raises many questions that are at the core of our political debates even if they are not always spoken of in these terms.
The most consequential question facing the United States is rarely talked about directly. Instead we operate on the basis of seldom acknowledged or scrutinized intuitions and assumptions about the implications of the vast economic transition now under way.
The basic question behind the debate is the question of jobs. In the twentieth century, mass manufacturing replaced agriculture as the bread and butter occupation that supported the broad mass of the population. Continue reading
April 10, 2012
ESSAY
Ending The Poverty Blues
One of the most important claims that the friends of the blue social model make is that it addresses the needs of the poor and the weak better than any other existing social system. This is a serious point that blue critics sometimes don’t think enough about, but the claim is more questionable than blues admit — and more to the point, from where we are today, the basic methods of the old social model aren’t likely to make things much better. Continue reading
April 9, 2012
ESSAY
Iran: The Haggling Begins
They will be biting their fingernails in Israel as the focus in the Iranian nuclear controversy shifts to bargaining now that, apparently, Iran has agreed to another round of talks on its nuclear program.
On the one hand, Iran has a clear treaty right to develop and use nuclear technology for civilian energy purposes. On the other, it has failed to satisfy the IAEA that it is operating its nuclear program within the treaty’s conditions. The question is, what comes next? Continue reading
April 7, 2012
ESSAY
Obama Nails His Blue Colors to the Mast
The past few years have seen a number of blue-state Democratic governors—from California to New York to Vermont—driven by dire fiscal situations to attack the blue model. Yet this tide of reform washing over the Democratic Party at the state level still hasn’t gone national.
Up until recently, President Obama had been somewhat vague on this issue, but with campaign season beginning in earnest this is quickly changing. In a statement on Tuesday, Obama did more than blast the budget proposed by the House GOP, finally choosing a role as chief defender of big blue. The New York Times reports that Obama attacked the GOP budget as “an attempt to impose a radical vision on our country” and as “thinly veiled social Darwinism” due to its plan for lower taxes on high-earners and significant restructuring of government programs like Medicaid. Though Obama did not respond with a coherent proposal of his own, he did sketch broad outlines of his proposed response: higher taxes on the wealthy and increased spending on education, police, and other local services. Continue reading
April 4, 2012
ESSAY
A Crisis of Civilization
As I’ve been writing about the crisis of the blue social model, I’ve mostly focused on its consequences for North American and European societies. Canada, the US and the countries of western and central Europe are the places where the blue model has become most solidly entrenched and fully developed, and in the first instance the decline of that social model is registering most forcefully in their political and cultural lives.
That process has a long way to run; the creative destruction of the world of big blue is going to be causing social and economic crises for years and even decades to come. But we won’t grasp the immense importance and the urgency of what’s happening in the west until we fully take on board the importance of the decay of the blue model for global politics. Continue reading
April 1, 2012
ESSAY
First, Let’s Indenture All The Lawyers
Spring is here, which means that it’s acceptance letter season around many American kitchen tables this time of year. And because many graduate as well as undergrad schools send out acceptances around this time of year, both high school and college students will be checking the mail to see whether the school of their choice has sent fat or thin envelopes.
More than ever in these tough times, those letters will pose some hard choices in many families. To attend a more expensive liberal arts college or go for the scholarship at the bigger but less expensive state school? Does it really make sense to take out all of that debt for that graduate degree? Continue reading
March 31, 2012
ESSAY
Eagle Nests And Sheeple Stalls
In the last grand strategy class before spring break this semester, we came to Napoleon. It’s been a long journey from Sun Tzu back at the start of the semester, but Napoleon, himself an assiduous student of grand strategy who carried a copy of Sun Tzu with him on campaign, studied the careers of Hannibal and Scipio, and made practical and conscious use of the teachings of Machiavelli, is an important figure for young grand strategists to contemplate.
Dedicating time to Napoleon is one of the differences I’ve made to the grand strategy curriculum used at the mother of all grand strategy programs back at Yale. He strikes me as a pivotal figure in strategic history whose rise and fall have much to teach, and whose career and accomplishments remained the focus of strategic thought from Jomini and Clausewitz to Mahan and beyond. He also straddles the boundary between classical and renaissance strategists and the strategists of the modern world. Like Machiavelli, Napoleon’s intellectual toolkit came from the literary productions of ancients like Polybius, Plutarch and Livy, but unlike the great Florentine the political and ideological problems that engaged and ultimately overwhelmed Machiavelli are very much like those strategists must grapple with today. Continue reading
March 29, 2012
ESSAY
The Health Care Disaster and the Miseries of Blue
After oral arguments before the Supreme Court this week, the odds that the Court will strike the individual mandate rose sharply; Intrade markets after the hearings showed bettors thought there was a 62 percent chance that the mandate will fall.
I can’t tell you whether the law is unconstitutional; I can’t even tell you whether the Supreme Court will uphold it — or, if the mandate goes, what else might stay.
But the health care law’s troubles shed some further light on the crisis of American progressivism and the blue social model it has built. Those who believe in the blue model and want to extend it have lost their touch; the dream machines of the blue social engineers don’t sail serenely across the azure sky anymore. Think of the various carbon exchanges and environmental planetary schemes; think of high speed rail proposals like California’s $100 billion train to bankruptcy; think of Obamacare. These days the experts, “social entrepreneurs” and smart young blue twenty somethings fresh out of the Ivy League whomp up social programs with as much verve and dedication as their New Deal and Great Society predecessors, but the new Dreamliners don’t take off. At most they roll around the runway, emitting clouds of noxious smoke; wings fall off, windows pop out, turbines misfire and the tires go flat. Continue reading
March 27, 2012
ESSAY
History Repeats: In Europe, They Want Jewish Blood
When a self-proclaimed jihadist slaughters Jewish schoolchildren in France on account of events in the Middle East, the proper response is collective horror and serious societal soul-searching. Via Meadia highlighted one laudable example of this in the form of Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, and there have been many more in France. Unfortunately, there are those in France and elsewhere who do not see the Toulouse attack as an anti-Semitic hate crime to be forcefully condemned, but rather as an event to be “explained,” whitewashed or even celebrated.
March 26, 2012
ESSAY
Obama in Seoul: Busy Busy Busy
President Obama has just completed an important ritual of an American presidency: on this third visit to South Korea as president he has visited the demarcation line between North and South Korea, peering into the windswept, desolate north from behind bulletproof glass.
What some in the press hailed as a unique triumph of Obaman diplomacy—actually, yet another “food for nukes” deal in which North Korea makes modifications in its nuclear program and the US and friends make modifications in their sanctions and aid restrictions—is on the verge of the usual meltdown as North Korea makes noise about a satellite launch.
Continue reading
March 25, 2012
ESSAY
Palestinian PM: Don’t Use Us to Justify Your Anti-Semitism
Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad is one of the most interesting and even tragic figures in world politics.
Consider his statement made in response to the horrific shooting at a Jewish school in Toulouse, France, after its jihadist perpetrator claimed to have been acting in service of the Palestinian cause. Said Fayyad:
“It is time for these criminals to stop marketing their terrorist acts in the name of Palestine and to stop pretending to stand up for the rights of Palestinian children who only ask for a decent life. This terrorist crime is condemned in the strongest terms by the Palestinian people and their children. No Palestinian child can accept a crime that targets innocent people.”
To begin with, Fayyad’s refreshing moral clarity is much to be admired. For it is an ugly fact that violence against Jews today, whether in France or elsewhere, is too often justified or explained away as if not a legitimate then at least an understandable response to Israeli policies like the occupation. Continue reading
ESSAY
Top Saudi Cleric Issues Fatwa: Destroy Churches
In recent years the king of Saudi Arabia has won plaudits around the world for promoting interfaith dialogs. Those efforts recently received a dramatic setback when the top religious official in Saudi Arabia issued a fatwa earlier this month calling on the faithful to destroy all churches in the Arabian peninsula.
The ruling came in response to a request from a Kuwaiti legislator who wanted to know if under Islamic principles the government of Kuwait could ban church construction in the country. Citing what is said to be a deathbed request by the Prophet Mohammed as the basis for his ruling, the senior cleric in the Saudi religious hierarchy (Abdulaziz Al al-Sheikh) found that under Islamic principles, not only should all new church construction be banned, existing churches should be destroyed. Continue reading
March 23, 2012
ESSAY
Argentina: Where Failure Is A Choice, Not A Caprice
Longtime watchers of Argentina have seen this movie before: in the aftermath of a mighty economic crash, an Argentine government embraces an unorthodox set of economic polices. For a time, they work—partly because the crash was so huge that some kind of recovery was inevitable and partly because Argentina’s rich natural resource endowment (fertile soil, oil and natural gas) keeps producing year after year.
As the recovery gains momentum, Argentines start to claim that they have beaten the odds; their new unconventional program will work for the long term. Foreign investors (and a new one moves in every minute) forget that for generations foreign investors have been losing money in the periodic meltdowns and serial repudiations that mark Argentine financial history. Argentine assets are undervalued; growth looks good. And there is all that wheat, beef, wine, fruit, oil and gas. They plunge back in, and the cycle gets another kick forward. Continue reading
