In the first place, as I blogged yesterday, the Zionist agenda in the Middle East has generally been pretty popular with American gentiles.  In some ways, the religious nationalism agenda supported by Likud is more popular with American gentiles than with American Jews; most American Jews side more with the Israeli left than with the right.

The power of Likud-supporting American Jews both in the Jewish community and in American politics generally has much less to do with the success of Likud’s ideology among American Jews than it does with the broad, pre-existing alignment between the ideas of the Israel lobby and general American public opinion.

Take AIPAC.  From where I sit, AIPAC isn’t powerful because of the Jewish votes it can sway.  Most Jews have views on Israel that are closer to the J-Street lobby vision than to the AIPAC line, and if a vote among America’s Jews decided our Israel policy the policy would be significantly to the left of where it is now.  It’s not even because of the money; ‘pro-Israel’ PAC money is a drop in the vast and ever-expanding river of American campaign funding.

A group like AIPAC enjoys power and recognition not because it controls or even represents the votes of Jews.  AIPAC’s power rests on gentile ideas and support; if a politician gets loudly and publicly labeled anti-Israel by AIPAC and its allies that politician will get hammered in the next election because so many American gentiles want their politicians to support the Jewish state.  AIPAC works like the NRA; it is the publicly accepted voice on an issue about which the public has strong views. 

Politicians don’t fear the loss of National Rifle Association PAC money nearly as much as they fear the loss of millions of pro-gun votes at the next election.  This, I think is why AIPAC is so powerful.  To be convincingly labeled an anti-Israel politician is the kiss of death almost everywhere in the United States — just as to be anti-gun is the kiss of death.  American gentiles consider AIPAC and those affiliated with and endorsed by it to be reliable guardians of pro-Israel policy; politicians don’t want to cross a force with this kind of hold on the public.

AIPAC has the power that it does because it has been in effect deputized by American pro-Israel gentiles to guard the frontiers of our Israel policy.  Like the NRA and like the fabled Tobacco lobby of old, it is strong because the public accepts it as the watchdog on an issue it cares about.  Lose that bond with the public, as the Tobacco lobby finally did, and the clout bleeds away — even if the lobby has all the money, all the organizers and all the connections that it previously had.

The Israel lobby is not simply the passive instrument of the dominant gentile view.  It can and does use (and perhaps sometimes abuse) its position of trust to push policy farther than its real mandate.  It can and does work to extract as many advantages as it can, to milk the cow for all it is worth.  But it can only go so far, and if over time it were to develop a reputation among the public at large as an unreliable deputy, its influence and therefore its power would decline.

There are clear limits to what the lobby can do.  When groups like AIPAC ask for things that American gentiles don’t want to give  — like banning all arms sales to Arabs or freeing Jonathan Pollard — they have to fight much harder and they very often fail.  Politicians and policy-makers have no trouble defying the lobby when its agenda deviates too far from what gentiles are prepared to accept.

This is exactly the situation that politically active Jews faced all during the twentieth century.  Zionism was usually popular with gentiles; requests for special immigration privileges for Jews were not.  The key to success for American Jews has not been to pile up the money and the promises of Jewish voting support at the polls.  The way to succeed is to develop an agenda which commands widespread non-Jewish support.

This role as mobilizing agents, as a group that takes public support and converts it into political and policy power, has historically boosted the power of Zionist Jews within the American Jewish community, helping for example the Russian Jews build their own institutions and power base in opposition to the mostly German, mostly anti-Zionist Jewish establishment during the first half of the twentieth century.  This still works today.  AIPAC has clout in Washington because of its role as an agent of gentile political sentiment, and that role in turn boosts AIPAC’s clout among American Jews.

That role also makes membership in AIPAC and similar groups an attractive option for American Jews who might not have strong views either way on US policy toward Israel.  It is a well-connected group of people with more access to the power structure than a group organized around Jewish causes of no interest to gentiles or with an agenda that gentiles don’t like.  (A lobby to ban US arms sales to Saudi Arabia or to ban oil imports from and trade with countries who boycott Israel would not get very far.)

The lobby’s intermediary role actually makes AIPAC’s leadership much more powerful among Jews than it would otherwise be. Staying on good terms with a group this powerful makes sense.  From this point of view, AIPAC and similar groups look less like a way that Jews exert power over gentiles in American life than a way that gentiles support American Jewish leaders whose purposes and vision they trust, in turn empowering those leaders within the Jewish community.

This is a very old pattern that goes back to the dawn of the modern Zionist movement.  Ever since the chaplain at the British embassy in Vienna (a Christian Zionist who wrote on the subject before Herzl did) introduced Herzl to the Prince of Baden, and the Prince introduced Herzl to Kaiser Wilhelm II (the two men are depicted in the famous, and famously photo-shopped picture above, taken during the Kaiser’s 1898 visit to Palestine), the ability of Zionist Jews to enlist high profile and effective support from gentiles has been instrumental in propelling Zionists to political power among Jews.

Many Jews wrote pamphlets about the Jewish Question in the late nineteenth century.  Herzl’s pamphlet led to a meeting with Kaiser Wilhelm II and led Kaiser Wilhelm to bring up the question of a Jewish national home with the Turkish Sultan, at the time the ruler of Palestine.  Nothing came of the conference between the Kaiser and the Sultan, but Herzl and his ideas had been catapulted into the world of high politics.

Time after time in the twentieth century, the ability of Zionist Jews to mobilize the support of gentile sympathizers increased their power and their credibility in the world of Jewish politics.  Without this ’secret weapon’ of gentile support, the Zionist movement could never have delivered on its promises or consolidated its political hegemony among Jews.  The Israel lobby in the United States today is working that ancient seam where Jewish and gentile hopes and views meet but now, as always, it is gentile politics and gentile will that establishes the context and sets the bounds within which the Israel lobby can work.

Now it’s true that American opposition to Zionism has a long and distinguished pedigree.  In the 19th century, American missionaries built a network of colleges and hospitals across what was then the Ottoman Empire and what today we call the Middle East.  The missionaries and their students helped develop modern secular Arab nationalism. The idea was that if Arabs stopped thinking of themselves as Muslims and Christians, but developed a communal inter-religious identity, this would allow Christian Arabs to play a larger role in political life and, the missionaries hoped, one day open the doors to present the gospel to the Muslims.  Many of the great leaders of Arab secular nationalism, including the (French-educated) Michel Aflaq, founder of the Ba’ath Party that once ruled Iraq and still rules Syria and whose beautiful tomb in Baghdad (at right) was built by Saddam Hussein, were Arabs of Christian origin.

For these missionaries, the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine looked like a disaster.  It radicalized and fragmented Arab politics and introduced the motifs of religious struggle that to this day divide, for example, the Palestinians between religious parties like Hamas and secular ones like Fatah.  Zionism was especially polarizing in modern Syria, Lebanon and Palestine — where some of the highest concentrations of Arab Christians were.  Moreover, the American missionaries in the Arab world identified with the Arab struggles for independence first from the Ottomans, and later from the British and the French.  They generally had a great deal of respect for Arab culture and looked to establish a close relationship between the United States and the rising Arab peoples.  The missionaries and their successors believed that the smart choice for the United States in the Middle East was to make friends with the Arabs; American support for the Jews was a foreign policy disaster that ran clearly counter to our obvious national interest.

Today when we think of missionaries we tend to think of evangelicals from what we East Coast types call the boondocks when nobody is looking, and the heartland when we are running for office, especially in the Iowa caucuses.  One hundred years ago, that wasn’t true.  Missionaries for the mainline denominations — which were the ones who predominated in the Ottoman Empire and who controlled the great missionary institutions of the day — were often extremely well connected and were sometimes well heeled members of the establishment.  Prominent business and political leaders sat on the boards of missionary colleges and missionary kids regularly returned for college at places like Yale before heading into careers in government service — and especially into the State Department.  (Missionary kids understood foreign languages and culture; they played a huge role in the expansion of America’s international presence during and after World War Two.)

The missionaries were more like the development establishment and the Ford Foundation of today than like Campus Crusade for Christ, and the young people (more than half of them women by some counts) who went into missionary service were more like Peace Corps and development workers.  They were, in other words, very much like the people in America today who are least likely to sympathize with Israel in the Middle East: well connected, well educated intellectuals and professionals from a high WASP and usually New England, background.  They generally had a wider knowledge about foreign affairs than most other Americans, and were interested in and concerned about development, democratization and women’s rights.  Their connection to Christianity was closer than that of their descendants; they believed that the promotion of social equality, economic development, rights for women and transparency in government were all intrinsically connected to the promotion of Christianity, but the missionaries and their allies were liberal upper-middle-class professionals from the mainline denominations and their descendants and heirs are very much with us now — and they still tend not to like Israel very much.

Then, as now, they thought Zionism was basically a bad idea (though once the state of Israel was a fait accompli they didn’t support its destruction), that it was bad for American foreign policy, and that the United States ought to stay as far away from it as possible.  Then, as now, they were largely clueless about why the Zionist cause was so persistently popular in Congress; then, as now, they blamed it on the Jews.  At that time, unlike today, these sentiments were often expressed in overtly and even virulently anti-Semitic language.

Although American anti-Zionists have never quite been able to figure it out, the typical pattern in the politics of American policy toward Israel dates back into the 19th century.  Public opinion is generally strongly pro-Zionist and Congress reflects that sentiment.  The diplomatic and academic establishment is much more cautious, with attitudes ranging from coolly skeptical to bitterly opposed.  Presidents occupy the middle ground, looking to harmonize the public’s support with the establishment’s unhappiness and they tilt one way or another depending on their assessment of the domestic and international politics of the day.

This, I think, is the heart of the matter:  American Jews didn’t drag reluctant American gentiles into the Middle East; it’s much more accurate to say that American gentiles pushed reluctant American Jews into the Zionist movement.  If American Jews had the power to shape American policy towards the Jews through the twentieth century, most likely there would be no state of Israel today.  This is an inconvenient truth.  Zionist myths about the Jewish past and gentile myths about American innocence are both challenged by this history.

American Jewish leaders in the old days were largely anti-Zionist for both ideological and pragmatic reasons.  Ideologically they mostly accepted the view that Judaism was a religion not a nation.  There were American Jews and French Jews and Russian Jews just like there were Swedish Lutherans and German Lutherans and American Lutherans.  Pragmatically, they thought that helping the tiny Jewish community in Palestine to grow was a distraction from the much more important job of helping millions of Jews in the war-devastated parts of Europe and the Middle East survive, and defending their rights in the chaos and anti-Semitism that marked the aftermath of the war.  (Some were also anti-Zionist because Zionism was strongest among Russian Jews.  Assimilated German-American Jews had little in common with these strange new ‘eastern’ Jews.)

If Jews had been running America back then, our foreign policy before and after World War One would have first stressed strong and effective support for Jews in central and eastern Europe.  We would have stayed involved in Europe after the war and worked with Britain and France to make sure that countries like Poland treated their large Jewish minorities fairly.  But Jews weren’t in charge.  Gentiles didn’t want to do that, and it didn’t happen.  We wrote nasty notes and pursed our lips in disapproval, but that was about it, and there was virtually no support for a more aggressive human rights policy at the time.

The second priority of American Jews earlier in the century was to permit greater Jewish immigration to the United States, especially as the Nazi persecution intensified.  Once again, the answer was clear, unambiguous and united: No.

America made the decision with wide public support after World War One that immigration to the United States could not be the solution to the world’s humanitarian problems.  Not for Jews, not for Christian Armenians and Greeks, not for refugees from the massacres of Christian minorities in the post-World War One Middle East, not for Italians, Czechs or Poles.  The door was closed; America was full.  In 1924 a narrow quota system was imposed which dramatically cut the overall number of immigrants and slashed immigration from countries where Jews lived even more.  Well placed and wealthy Jews lobbied to keep immigration open, and when that failed they lobbied for special emergency quotas to help Jews trying to flee the worsening conditions in Germany and elsewhere.  No dice and no deal: no ’special treatment’ for the Jews.  (This wasn’t just anti-Semitism, though anti-Semitism played a role.  Politicians didn’t see how they could let Jews in without angering other American ethnic groups whose immigration quotas were small.  Operating an immigration system that essentially discriminated in favor of Jews was something the American political system could not handle.)

The third and last possibility, something that many American Jewish leaders could only bring themselves to endorse, reluctantly, after World War Two had already broken out, was to ask for American support for Jewish immigration to Palestine and for Jewish political aspirations there.  Here, American Jews were basically pushing on an open door.  Public opinion always favored this option; after World War One, the Balfour Declaration was endorsed in both houses of Congress by unanimous votes (in the same 67th Congress that issued emergency immigration quotas).

A conspiratorial-minded and paranoid Jew could come up with a description of the modern Zionist movement as a gentile plot against the Jews: to push them all into a narrow, inhospitable strip of desert land entirely surrounded by people who hate them.  This in fact is one reason so many American Jewish leaders opposed the Zionist movement in the early years.  They saw it as a kind of “Jewish Liberia”; just as whites once hoped to recolonize African-Americans in Africa they might want to send the Jews ‘back’ to their ‘home.’

From a Jewish point of view, it was Zion or bust.  Given gentile attitudes in the United States, Zionism was the only possible program to help world Jews that the United States was actually willing to support.  This stark and unavoidable fact is what slowly turned many American Jews toward the Zionist movement.  If the United States had organized a strong and effective western coalition to defend Jews across Europe after 1919 or alternatively had simply permitted free Jewish immigration to this country after 1923, Jewish history might have taken a very different course.

You may be proud of this history, you may think it was all a ghastly mistake, or you may shake your head over the mysterious and twisting turns that history makes.  It doesn’t much matter; when Americans look at the Jewish state today, we need to recognize that if there was a paternity suit in this case, the DNA test would nail us.  Like it or not, that’s our baby over there.  Jews built the state of Israel, but Israel exists today because it was an American as well as a Jewish dream to build it.

Without an understanding of this history, I think it’s impossible to think clearly either about the realities of the Middle East or about the politics of Israel policy in the United States today.  The missionaries never got this; their heirs still get it wrong.

[This post reflects some work I've done on a book about gentile co-responsibility for Israel; I'm publishing these thoughts in part as a kind of open study group.  Feel free to comment -- not that you need any encouragement!  The responses will help me test my assumptions, see where the argument -- which looks solid to me -- might need more work, and come out at the end with a better, stronger book.  Who knows: you might even persuade me that I'm wrong.]

I don’t think Revkin quite gets all the dimensions of the policy failure that the climate change movement has made, but in calling the proposed global system a “Rube Goldberg” like device he’s certainly on the right track.

Anyway, read the whole thing.  If the climate change movement listens to Revkin, we will be well on the road to a more sensible and constructive debate on this issue.

I was a little mystified by what these young people were doing until my research associate Sam (formerly team intern here at Mead GHQ, but now ensconced in a comfier chair and with an actual salary) told me that this so-called ‘rap music’ is quite popular with the younger set.

This video is a rap parody (of Jay-Z, says Sam), channeling the energy and sentiment of my post “The Holy Crap Must Go,” only this time in the direction of the Catholic Church of 500 years ago. The video was created by and features students and faculty from my alma mater, and you can read the lyrics and see where they exercised poetic license at their website.

Enjoy the MTV treatment of Martin Luther…

]]> http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2010/03/09/holy-crap-rap/feed/ 2 http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2010/03/09/the-night-yasser-arafat-kissed-me/ http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2010/03/09/the-night-yasser-arafat-kissed-me/#comments Tue, 09 Mar 2010 11:56:56 +0000 Walter Russell Mead http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/?p=3216 The stars were sparking over Gaza on the unforgettable night when Yasser Arafat kissed me — gently, tenderly, sincerely.  I’ve rarely felt more relaxed or more comfortable with a world leader; he was kneading my shoulders and massaging my back at the time.  As the tension of a hard day drained out of me, I looked wonderingly at our reflections in the window as he closed his sensitive and expressive eyes and bent down to kiss me on the crown of my head.

It had been a hard day; a long business lunch at a fish restaurant overlooking the Mediterranean, a quick dip in the water, and one meeting after another.  In the afternoon I spent some time with Madame Arafat; she converted to Islam before marrying the leader of the Palestinian national movement, but had a beautiful, autographed biography of John Paul II on her coffee table.  She was very excited; to help with the Palestinian struggle she had planned a benefit in Paris to help Palestinian hospitals and we passed an agreeable hour as she told me of her plans.

I bring up this tranquil, tender moment when two busy lives intersected because I’m about to do something that usually makes for trouble: while continuing to blog on a range of subjects over the next week to ten days I’ll put up some more posts on the reasons why the United States supports Israel as much as we do.  I’ve touched on this subject before; my post on the “Israel Lobby Syndrome,” or ILS, that strikes some of our foreign policy specialists from time to time was not universally popular — anymore than Chairman Arafat was.  You can look at the comments page or check here and here to see some interesting responses.

Now some of the trouble I brought on myself; ‘realist’ is a word that so many people use in so many senses that I should have understood that its use in this context would only confuse matters.  I suppose I had in mind the misguided book written by two prominent ‘realist’ scholars that appeared a couple of years ago on this subject.  (Here is a link to the review of the book I wrote at the time in Foreign Affairs.)  It’s also true that some of the people whose bad advice led President Obama into the biggest and most costly foreign policy blunder of his administration so far are often called ‘realists.’  For those with short memories, these are the people who seem to have persuaded the President to issue a public demand that Israel freeze all settlement activity.  This was based on a completely unrealistic understanding of America’s leverage over Israel.  Israel rejected the President’s demand out of hand, and the rejection set President Obama’s hopes for progress toward peace in the region back by at least a year. This was bad for him, bad for the United States, bad for Israel and bad for the Palestinians.

I often hear self-described realists urging us to do completely unrealistic things when it comes to Israel, and the earlier post reflected that.  I remain genuinely puzzled why people who in other contexts have quite interesting things to say manage to trip up in such foolish and self-defeating ways when the I-word comes up, but you can’t tar all realists with that brush, and to anybody out there who felt unfairly besmirched by the association — I’m sorry.

Blogging on US-Israel relations is a political nightmare; there is so much mistrust, wounded righteousness and ill feeling on all sides that it’s hard to strike the right tone and make your points clearly enough to avoid being misunderstood.  The core points I want to make aren’t about whether American foreign policy toward Israel is a good thing or not, but this debate is so politicized that if you criticize the thesis that American policy toward Israel represents the power of American Jews people assume that you are part of the lobby. In fact, arguably the people who suffer the most from mistaking the political basis of America’s policy in the Middle East are those who want to change it.  Those who don’t understand the American politics of this issue are never going to come up with effective strategies for change.

Frankly, those who think they can make substantive changes in American policy toward Israel by attacking the Jews and the Israel lobby remind of some bulls I once saw at the bull fights in Madrid.  Bull after bull went for the red cape, not the matador.  Bull after bull went down in the dust as the crowds cheered and threw flowers.  That is pretty much what has happened to those who want to distance the US from Israel; they go for the highly visible and attractive target of the Israel lobby, and time after time they go down. I don’t think this is smart, but don’t let me stop anybody’s fun.

I’ll get into the reasons why I think the Israel lobby is more matador’s cape than matador going forward, but there’s one difficult subject that needs to be addressed up front, and that issue is anti-Semitism.  This form of prejudice is as deeply embedded in western Christian history as racism is in American culture.  As a native South Carolinian born back in the days of legally-enforced racial segregation, I have learned a lot about the subtle qualities and stubborn persistence of racist images and ideas that you take in unconsciously from the culture that shapes you.We’ve come a long way in fighting both types of prejudice, but you’d have to be naive and ignorant to think they have just vanished away.  I am always nervous around people who stridently insist that racism has disappeared in mainstream American life and only lingers on in weirdo subcultures; I feel the same way about people who say that anti-Semitism is no longer a significant feature of western culture.  I am especially leery when people who loudly and implausibly assert that anti-Semitism isn’t a problem anymore make harsh and unbalanced criticisms about the world’s only Jewish state.

I’m not trying to grade the incommensurable suffering of people around the world, but if we compare the attention and care that the international community has extended to the Palestinians with our attention and support for other victims in other places, a disturbing pattern emerges. Whatever the wrongs of Israel’s occupation policy — and I agree that there are some — the Palestinians, especially in the West Bank but even in Gaza, live much better than many people in the world whose suffering attracts far less world attention — and whose oppressors get far less criticism.  I would much rather be a Palestinian, even in Gaza, than a member of a minority tribe in the hills of Myanmar, or almost anyone in the Eastern Congo or Darfur.  Millions of children in Pakistan and Indonesia have less food security, less educational opportunity and less access to health services than Palestinians who benefit from UN services (to which the United States is historically the largest single contributor) that poor people in other countries can only dream of.

The disproportionate reactions to Israel’s treatment of Palestinians constitutes a genuine scandal and pretty much proves that anti-Semitism did not die when Hitler shot himself underneath Berlin.  Russia treats its Chechens much worse than Israel treats its Arabs yet there are plenty of self righteous German leftists who want to disinvest from Israel but favor closer relations with Putin’s Russia.  These people will hotly deny that they are anti-Semites and get all huffy and moralistic; I am not sure that the rest of us should take them at their word.  The pious people in Turkey who have gotten so angry recently about Israeli actions in Gaza haven’t perhaps thought as deeply as they could have about Turkey’s record with the Armenians, Greeks and the Kurds.  Although life is far from perfect for Arabs in Israel, Muslim and Christian Arabs generally have more freedom, dignity and equality in Israel than Christian Arabs, Jews and non-Arab ethnic groups enjoy in many Arab countries.

I’m not trying to say that anti-Semitism is the only reason why people react with disproportionate outrage to Israeli wrongdoings.  This dispute has lasted so long and events like the last war in Gaza are covered so much more thoroughly on television than other violent episodes, and the Israelis are so much more open about allowing the world press to see what is going on that Israeli actions and their consequences are well publicized.  And for people in Europe, Israel is close at hand and seems in many ways part of the same cultural space; events there somehow seem more real than bigger problems farther way.  It is also true that some ’causes’ somehow get to be more chic and interesting than others; the Palestinian cause is ‘in’ in a way that, say, the cause of Iranian Baluchistan or of Christian tribal people in northeastern India is not.  And of course for the Palestinians and their allies, mobilizing public anger against Israel is an important tactic in the long-running dispute.

But even after making all the possible and necessary allowances, there is something disturbing about the widespread excessive fixation on Jewish shortcomings.  Almost the whole world is barking obsessively and furiously at the Jews while ignoring equal or worse problems on every side. At worst and far too frequently, this is anti-Semitism in full career: virulent, murderous, irrational, vile.  It must be opposed, and it must be called to account.

I have no doubt that most of the official criticism that Israel receives from the European Union (to take one example) is hypocritical hogwash.  If any democratic European country faced the same kinds of threats that Israel did — hostility from the region, a constant threat of suicide bombers, persistent legal and political efforts to delegitimize the state, periodic uprisings among ethnic minorities, and rocket attacks from areas just over its frontier — those tut-tutting moralists would show another side of their character and act at least as ruthlessly as Israel sometimes does.  (And sometimes, as in Israel’s case, their anger and fear would lead them to do things that were unwise and self-defeating.  No democracy under the threats and pressures that Israel has faced throughout its existence could avoid excesses and even crimes.)

Now to give them their credit, I believe that many of the individuals who denounce Israel’s policies would also denounce the tough policies that their own governments would adopt in similar circumstances.  After all, many Israeli intellectuals and others denounce some of Israel’s policies. However, stridently emotional critics of Israel’s policies who spend more time and more energy on Israel than they do on other, more serious human rights abuses around the world and who come from countries with long histories of deeply rooted anti-Semitism (which is virtually every country in Europe) should take a good hard look at that righteous rage.  Yes it feels good to let that anger run free.  But remember please that Satan likes to appear as an angel of light.  Mistaking hatred and resentment for a disinterested love of justice is one of the most common and most destructive mistakes human beings can make.

Furthermore, while I am reluctant to call out individuals, I believe that unconscious but real anti-Semitism informs many contemporary attitudes toward the Jewish state.  I’ve run across a surprisingly large number of people who believe that Israel’s right to exist is conditional: that Israel has to earn and keep re-earning its legitimacy by behaving better than other countries.  I have also been told many times that the Jews are not a “real” people.

These views are anti-Semitic, pure and simple.  The Jews are a real people, a nation, and they have the same right to self determination that other nations have.  The Jewish state is the expression of their natural right to self-determination and whether that state behaves well or badly, wisely or foolishly, it has the same right to exist as Finland, the United States or Egypt.  To deny the right of the Jews to a state is to deny them a basic human right on account of their nationality; I’m sorry, but this is anti-Semitic behavior. If you work very hard, and are very clever and exceptionally careful in your moral and political judgments, it is technically possible for a gentile to be an anti-Zionist without being an anti-Semite, but this state of mind is not as easy to achieve as many people think.  Many and perhaps most of those who insist so self-righteously on this precious distinction haven’t worked nearly hard enough to earn it.

Opposing particular Israeli policies, of course, is very different from opposing the right of the Jewish people to have a state.  Opposition to a given Israeli policy or even set of policies may be a sign of a passionate attachment to the Jewish people and their right to have and protect a state.  An article in the current American Interest by former US Ambassador to Israel David Kurtzer offers a pretty devastating critique of Israel’s settlement policy as it has been carried out. In the same way, it’s not anti-Semitic to argue that the United States should change its policy toward Israel.

Finally, the belief that only Israeli recalcitrance prevents the outbreak of peace in the Middle East strikes me as delusional.  We all want this horrible, draining and destabilizing conflict to end, but there is very little prospect for a settlement between the Israelis and the Palestinians anytime soon.  The two sides share responsibility for this situation and to some degree both sides are trapped by a logic for which neither side is fully to blame.  Certainly the desire of some ultra-Zionists to continue building settlements in the West Bank is a factor, as is the much more widespread Israeli determination to hang on to every inch of East Jerusalem that they can.  On the Palestinian side, however, the obstacles are equally deep and to make matters worse, with outside powers like Syria and Iran meddling constantly in Palestinian politics for reasons of their own.  Weak leadership, fragile institutions and a lack of a sufficiently strong consensus among Palestinians worldwide to accept partition as the final outcome to the long struggle would continue to obstruct a peace settlement even if all the Israeli obstacles were to disappear.  And if the Palestinians and Israelis reach an agreement, other countries in the Middle East are likely to continue to stir the embers of hatred for generations to come.  Even if there is a formal settlement, we are likely to see decades of continuing violence and retaliation.  Some Palestinians (and some Israelis) will reject the peaceful solution and the compromise of partition; outside powers and the Palestinian diaspora are likely to fund groups committed to armed struggle.  Bombs will go off; rockets will fire; Israel will at times retaliate.  The legacy of the struggle is too deep, too bitter to fade away all at once.

Managing unhappiness rather than building utopia is what we Americans are likely to be doing in the Middle East for the foreseeable future.  We will be trying first to reduce the ability of Palestinian-Israeli confrontations and violence to disturb our other regional interests.  Second we will be working to improve the conditions of daily life for both groups, and especially for Palestinians who need the help more.  Finally, we will be doing our poor best to develop the network of ideas, institutions and policies that can bring Israelis and Palestinians together to settle the most contentious of the issues that divide them.

Back on that scented evening during the Clinton administration as the breakers crashed on the beach and Chairman Arafat bent down to give me his kiss, I was more optimistic about the prospects of Middle East peace than ever before.  It’s all been downhill from that moment; Presidents Clinton, Bush and Obama all brought big hopes to the region.  Let’s hope Obama’s luck changes, but for now there doesn’t seem to be much sign of it.  The Iranians and the Syrians seem to be blowing off his overtures of friendship; the Saudis are confessing their disappointment to Maureen Dowd.

Given all that, I’m not going to spend precious blogging time writing new peace plans for two sides who don’t want my help.  But over the next week as I go forward with this subject I’ll try at least to make clear to Americans and others just why the United States has been and remains so supportive of the Jewish state.  In part, however, the answer is this: western anti-Semitism, while still a force in American life, is for a variety of reasons weaker in the contemporary United States than it is in other parts of the Christian and post-Christian west.

The “New World Order” is an American-led, European- and Japanese-influenced attempt to build a single worldwide network of institutions and laws that would govern most aspects of the emerging international system.  From the World Trade Organization to the International Criminal Court, the thickening network of institutions and agreements would shape politics, investment, trade and energy use around the world.  The movement to monitor and regulate the world’s energy use would have been the capstone of this effort.  Energy is the lifeblood of the modern economy; establishing an international authority with the ability essentially to allocate energy use among the world’s countries would be an extraordinary historical development.

In American foreign policy, the effort to build a new world order reflected the ambitions of a globalist coalition including both the Hamiltonian and Wilsonian foreign policy schools.  Modern Hamiltonians want the United States to build a world order that promotes the interests of American business and anchors the security interests of the United States in a global network of alliances.  Wilsonians want this Hamiltonian world order to reflect American ideals; Hamiltonians get excited about the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund, but Wilsonians focus on international law, arms control and human rights.

For both Wilsonian and Hamiltonian globalists, the end of the Cold War was an opportunity to build the kind of international system they have wanted for a very long time.  During the first Bush administration and the Clinton years, this vision dominated American foreign policy.  George W. Bush was never much of a globalist; after 9/11 he set the globalist agenda aside to fight the War on Terror.  That put him at odds with most of the foreign policy establishment which continued to see the creation of the ‘New World Order’ as the most important strategic challenge facing the United States.  For globalists, it was vital to avoid polarizing world politics or alienating potential partners while the work of building the foundations of the world order went on.  By elevating the ’strategic threat’ of international terror over the ’strategic opportunity’ of building the New World Order, Bush in their view fundamentally misunderstood American interests.

Partly as a result of Bush’s failure to generate a politically sustainable base of support at home or abroad for his war policy, most of the foreign policy establishment is solidly united behind either the Hamiltonian or the Wilsonian vision of the globalist project and the Obama administration came into office determined to reinvigorate the quest for the New World Order.

There is, however, a yawning gap between what the American foreign policy establishment mostly wants and what the world can or will do.  It isn’t just climate change.  The Doha Round of trade talks at the World Trade Organization shows no sign of coming to a conclusion.  The difficulties that the United States has encountered in trying to get Security Council support for tough sanctions against Iran suggest a continued decline in the effectiveness of the United Nations.

For better or worse, I’m beginning to think that the whole sweeping and daring new world order project may have reached its limits.  It’s not simply that the complex and intrusive nature of any effective international climate change agreement makes it virtually impossible to negotiate a binding international treaty (much less get that treaty through the US Senate); it’s that the global economy is becoming too dynamic and complex, and world history is moving too quickly for the architects of the international system.

The New World Order is an artifact of the 1980s and it looks back rather than ahead.  It was built for the Trilateral world, at a time when the business and political elites of the United States, western Europe and Japan pretty much spoke for the effective political world.  There were many differences among these powers and their interests, but on the whole the idea of an international system that reflected their core ideas and served their interests made a certain amount of sense.  The core vision behind the New World Order was a shared conviction that the world was changing, and that Japan, Europe and the United States were in a long-term process of decline.  The hope was that by establishing a set of ground rules for the international system, the values and interests of the Trilateral powers could be ‘grandfathered’ into international life.  The rising powers would buy into the system and the interests of the old powers would be protected even as power shifted.

That was the plan; it’s beginning to look as if it has failed.  Japan and Europe are fading too quickly, and the new powers are rising too fast.  The Trilateral coalition can no longer shape the world and the United States — as we saw in Copenhagen — has to reorient its policy away from the old powers and towards the new ones.

The trouble is that the new players have very different interests and priorities than the old ones.  The BRIC powers aren’t nearly as invested in the institutional models of the New World Order as Europe and Japan are.  No longer tied to Washington or anybody else by a perceived security threat, and conscious of their growing economic and political clout, the BRICs and other countries around the world are rapidly losing their respect for a system of global governance that does not serve their perceived interests.

Beyond this, the increased small ‘d’ democratization of the world makes public opinion and cultural and religious politics more important around the world.  This makes it harder for elites anywhere to sell international institutions and agreements seen as imposing alien values or interests on domestic society.  The populist rebellion against the climate change movement in the United States has its parallels overseas.  The Chinese and Indian governments have very different political systems, but both governments must deal with a much more aggressive and demanding public opinion than they have faced in the past.

As we’ve seen both with the Doha Round and the climate change talks, international agreements are becoming simultaneously harder to negotiate among countries and harder to sell in domestic politics.  The global issues are becoming more complex and the agreements are becoming more intrusive, but national political systems are less and less open to the growing demands of international institutions and agreements.  Developing international agreements on complex topics that intimately affect domestic politics in countries with so many different interests and such different cultural histories is going to keep on getting harder.  It may well be that the progress toward a more ‘institutionalized’ world at the global level has come to a juddering halt.

This is going to cause problems.  The Trilateral vision may be out of date, but the problems it sought to address are real.  More and more of the world’s problems will require international coordination and action, but that international cooperation is going to be harder to get.  We have an increasingly volatile economic system and the effect of human activity on the global commons, the air and the sea in particular, continues to grow.  Living with these problems won’t be easy, but we are unlikely to be able to solve them all.

Meanwhile international life is going to start looking more tumultuous: less like a larger version of post-historical Europe and more like the great power politics of old.  Severe crises and threats of great power war cannot be excluded from this new world disorder.  The legitimacy and effectiveness of institutions like the UN is likely to decline; world politics will revolve less around institution-building and law and more about finding ad-hoc solutions for specific issues.  American diplomacy will need more Kissingerian students of power politics and fewer lawyers.  Rather than trying to build an enduring global framework that will last until the end of time, we will have to think much more about navigating through stormy seas. 

The American foreign policy establishment, essentially bureaucratic and legalistic in its approach, will have a hard time adjusting to a world in which bureaucratic thinking and proper procedure matters less and less. Like an army of peacetime, desk generals suddenly confronted with a war, our technocratic and bureaucratic foreign policy thinkers are going to face a whole new set of challenges.  Most of the desk generals fail when they get to the front, and battles are lost until the winnowing process brings forward the unconventional figures like a Grant or a de Gaulle who lack the talents needed to succeed in a somnolent peacetime bureaucracy — but know how to win wars.  Expect something like this in American foreign policy; a lot of the talents and ideas that worked in the Trilateral world won’t work as well now.

The globalist establishment hoped and believed that President Obama’s inauguration would get the New World Order back on track.  Everything that has happened since then suggests that this hope was misplaced.

If that’s right, and the New World Order project has gone irretrievably off the rails, the United States is going to need a new vision of its role in the world.  This will not be easy to develop.  The New World Order project embodied a coherent and thoughtful vision for achieving what many foreign policy experts believe are the country’s true and enduring strategic goals.  Further, it grew out of an American response to perceptions of its decline back in the 1970s and 1980s.  The idea was that instead of relying on American leadership, the Free World would promote a joint project in which its three principal power centers (the US, Europe, Japan) would coordinate their policies.  What has to happen now is a new and much more searching rethink of American interests and strategies for our post-Trilateral world.  Developing that vision and building support among a skeptical public for it will not be easy, but that, apparently, must now be the primary task in American foreign policy.

We are living in revolutionary not evolutionary times.  I’m not sure that either our foreign policy elite or the broader public is ready for the kind of wrenching changes that a new vision of America’s role in the world might entail, but ready or not, they are coming our way.

( Photo:  Carl Fredrik Reuterswärd’s sculpture Non violence, in the Visitor’s Plaza at the United Nations Headquarters in New York City.)

A strong belief in common sense was a necessary piece of mental equipment for the Americans who set out to build a new kind of government and society on the fringes of the known world.  The history of Europe was a history of institutions, of top down control over the anarchic actions of ordinary people.  An established church, linked to the state and possessing coercive powers to force conformity if not quite belief, ensured that everyone was taught proper doctrine and morals.  A strong state, anchored in the powers of society’s wealthiest members in every rural district and town, ensured that the unpropertied rabble kept its proper place.

That wouldn’t work in the United States; society was somehow going to have to run itself.  The colonial governments and, outside New England, the churches had always been weak.  Without widespread primogeniture and entail, estates tended to be divided equally among children, rendering the growth of a powerful aristocratic interest largely impossible.  The abundance of land weakened the dependence of the poor on the rich; labor was in perpetually short supply and those who felt mistreated and oppressed could always light out for the wilderness.  The Revolution had further weakened both church and state, and with the end of British attempts to restrict westward migration, the vast lands across the Appalachian mountains beckoned more invitingly than ever.

In the United States, there was really no choice: if American society was going to hold together at all, it was going to have to organize itself on a new basis.  When the Declaration of Independence said that governments depended on the consent of the governed, this wasn’t just a piece of rhetoric or a pious hope.  In the thirteen colonies, government simply could not work without that consent.

This is where the idea of common sense comes in.  British social thought in the 18th century had focused increasingly on the idea that all human beings had the ability to understand basic natural, political and moral truths.  This ‘common sense’, a set of abilities and ideas that rich and poor, educated and uneducated shared, could provide the basis for a new kind of political organization.  The average person could be trusted, most of the time, to know and to do the right thing — and the votes of the average common man could sustain a stable government that would protect the property and interests even of the rich.

In politics, this led people towards faith in Jeffersonian and Jacksonian democracy.  The honest common sense of the average person, not the special wisdom of the social and professional elites, was the safest guide for the commonwealth.  American institutions were built low to the ground, intended to be open to popular pressures so that the common sense of the people at large would shape the laws and policies of the country as far as this could be arranged.

This idea remains today the bedrock conviction of American democracy, and as always there’s a certain tension between the idea that commonsense reasoning by ‘common’ people can resolve everything, and the reality that many complex and important problems cannot be comprehended without serious study and reflection.

American religion has been as deeply shaped by the concept of common sense as American politics. Historically, European Christianity was a kind of mirror image of European states.  The people needed to be guided and governed; a complex hierarchy developed to maintain the orthodoxy and regulate the behavior of society at large.  This wasn’t an option in the New World; religion like government was going to have to learn to base itself on the consent and support of the people.

Without the structure and the financial resources of an established church, religion had to compete in the marketplace of public opinion.  Influence in American religion flowed to denominations and preachers who could craft messages with broad appeal.  In America you didn’t need to have a degree from a famous seminary to be a famous and successful preacher; you didn’t need the approval of the hierarchy of bishops or denominational elders.  You just needed to have a lot of people come to your church.

This unstructured, competitive environment made religious preaching in America dynamic and ‘results-oriented’ and kept the churches close to the values and aspirations of the population at large.  At the same time, because the social elite could not control the expression of popular religion, religious organizations became the places where the poor, the marginal and the immigrant communities could establish a space they controlled.  The people on the frontiers had churches that escaped the control of the coastal elites.  Churches were among the first institutions that African-Americans, slave and free, established and controlled.

Within a very short period of time American religion had developed a denominational and theological diversity without precedent.  But virtually all the new denominations agreed on the importance of common sense in religion: an untrained layperson, reading the Bible carefully and prayerfully, could understand true religion.  Just as human beings were made in such a way that they could form accurate ideas about nature and politics, the great and simple truths about God could be understood by ordinary people without special training.  The pioneer woman in the Appalachian hills could read her Bible by the light of her fireside, reflect prayerfully on what she read, and determine for herself what was true and what was not. No theologian, no bishop, no man had the right to make her believe something that her own common sense told her was evident and plain.  No white person had the authority or the right to tell an illiterate slave what the words of the Bible meant.  Every human being had the ability and the right to follow his or her own conscience towards God.

American religion rejoiced in its populism, in its freedom from the genteel limits that elites wanted to impose. American camp meetings were festivals of popular music, emotional preaching and populist ideas.  Scholars like Gordon Wood,  Mark Noll and Nathan Hatch have written brilliantly about the American synthesis of democracy, Protestantism and capitalism in the formative years of the American republic.  It’s clearly true that this uniquely American twist on north European Protestantism remains one of the most influential forces in our culture and politics today and we probably owe the continuing vitality of religion in American life in large part to the intersection of democratic ideology, market competition among religious denominations and the democratic theological perspectives that common sense reasoning opened up.

Nevertheless, this is Lent, and it’s a good time to reflect on what’s wrong with American religion rather than bask comfortably in the reflection that religion remains a more powerful force here than in other developed countries.  In fact the tradition of common sense theological interpretation of the Bible is a little trickier than it looks, and some of the enduring weaknesses in both liberal and conservative American Christianity can be traced back to it.

Historically, Christian theological reflection has been seen as coming from the interplay of three sources: the written word of God, the tradition of the faithful, and the exercise of reason.  Different Christian groups place different degrees of weight on the different legs of the stool.  Catholics give tradition, as embodied in the authoritative teachings of the magisterium, a definitive place, but the magisterium itself incorporates both scripture and reason in the process of theological study that leads the church to authoritative conclusions.  Protestants sought to replace tradition with scripture as the most important source of theology; over time with the development of distinctively Protestant traditions of theological scholarship and the accumulation of authoritative creeds and writings by important figures in church history, both reason and tradition reasserted themselves.

The American common sense approach sought to reduce the traditionally three legged theological stool to only two legs.  There was to be no more room for tradition. To the American mind tradition was suspect.  This is what kings and popes pointed to in order to justify their claims to special authority.  To become free, we had to throw tradition overboard: the independent American would bring common sense to the reading of scripture and so come to a knowledge of the truth without any help from kings and priests, thank you very much.  We’ve seen that this has been a liberating and creative force in the history of American religion; it’s important to realize also that it overlooks some inconvenient truths.

In particular, ‘common sense’ is not the pure exercise of disembodied reason.  Common sense is not just about logic; it is also about a set of cultural ideas that shape our ideas of what is true.  In 1800 almost no American Protestants, for example, read the Bible as allowing women to play a major role in the public worship of the church.  Now virtually all of them do.  The Bible hasn’t changed in the last 200 years; neither have the principles of logic.  What has changed is our culture’s vision of the social roles that women can appropriately play.

There are other examples of changing cultural values changing American theology.  In the 19th century most American Protestants had a broadly optimistic view of human progress and they thought that the spread of the Protestant and democratic principles of American life through the world were part of God’s plan to redeem the world and bring about the restoration of His kingdom on earth.  Conservative American Christians like Jonathan Edwards had post-millennial eschatologies; they believed that by God’s grace humanity would achieve one thousand years of peace before the second coming of Christ to judge the living and the dead.  From the Civil War forward, and even more into the twentieth century as the global scene became more threatening and as the family farm (where most Americans had once made their living) became an endangered species, many American Protestants became less sanguine about the world’s prospects — and more pessimistic eschatological views gained ground.  The text in the Biblical books of Daniel, Ezekiel and Revelations did not change between the time of Jonathan Edwards and today — but the ‘obvious’, ‘common sense’ interpretations of these texts changed 180 degrees in the American church.

Slavery was not only the most contentious issue in the history of American politics; it was the most contentious theological issue as well, causing many of the leading Protestant denominations to split in the nineteenth century.  Southern whites who grew up in a slave society, read the Bible by the light of common sense, and common sense told them that the Bible nowhere prohibited slavery.  On the contrary: the great biblical patriarchs were slave owners.  The laws of Moses regulated slavery; Jesus spoke not one word against it, and St. Paul returned a fugitive slave to his master.  Nothing seemed more clear to many serious American Christians than that the Bible sanctioned slavery.

Many Northerners and African-Americans took their common sense to the Bible and came away with a very different read.  Whatever may have been true in the long-gone days of the patriarchs, slavery as it existed in 19th century America was clearly a great moral and social evil.  God is by definition is morally good; the Bible could obviously not be interpreted to give divine sanction to the greatest evil of the day.  Simple common sense demanded that we interpret the Bible in a way that condemned the evil of slavery.

Common sense has to be understood as including various social, cultural and political ideas that are so widespread that they are largely unquestioned in a given society.  That is, the idea of common sense is not an escape from the force of tradition.  The ‘common sense’ of any community contains tradition as well as reason — but because common sense presents itself as pure reasonableness, Americans have often failed to understand the large and continuing role that tradition continues to play in American politics and American theology.  Worse, because we fail to acknowledge and recognize the role of tradition in our thought, our theology is often simply the reflection of our general ideas about how the world works.

You don’t have to look far to see this tendency in the American church today.  Both conservative and liberal American Christians often produce theological world views that simply reflect their secular ideas.  Rick Warren often says that the church shouldn’t try to be the left wing or the right wing; it should aim to be the whole bird.  That’s a commendable aspiration; to achieve it, American Christianity in both its blue and red state varieties is going to have to grapple with the unacknowledged role of custom and tradition in its theological life.

Common sense theology helped the American church adjust to life in a democratic, non-hierarchical society and it continues to give strength to important elements in American religious culture.  But I think we need that third leg of the stool.  We should recognize that the concepts that we bring to the study of Scripture don’t drop fully formed from the sky; they represent the cultural and political history of our society.  As such, they have value and should not be cast lightly away — and as such, they need to enter into judgment with reason and scripture. Acknowledging the role that tradition plays in our ongoing theological reflection won’t empower tradition and subject us to the dead hand of the past.  It will liberate us from the unconsidered power of our cultural and political traditions.

At the end of the day, we will still be a common sense people using common sense ideas in politics and religion.  On the whole, that’s a good thing.  Our society is going to rest on the consent of the governed and our churches (and other houses of worship) will have to persuade people to walk through the door rather than compelling them to come in.  But maybe we can be a little smarter about common sense and think a little more critically about how sometimes the most ‘obvious’ ideas are the ones that need to be criticized in the light of both human reason and the word of God.

The Manifesto is wrong, of course, but then almost everything is.  However, most of what is written is pointless and dull.  The Manifesto is anything but, and like all truly great books it is interesting and illuminating even when–or, especially when–it goes off the rails.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels dashed it off in the second half of 1847 and published it early in 1848 as revolutionary fervor was sweeping Europe.  As the first copies of The Manifesto began to circulate, King Louis-Phillipe of France felt his throne begin to shake; by the end of February he had abdicated and fled to Britain.  The next month, revolutions broke out in one small German state after the other (Germany would not be unified until 1871).  The revolutionary excitement spread into the Austrian Empire; for a few months it looked as if every king and emperor on the European mainland would be packing his bags.  Even the Pope, who at that time still ruled much of central Italy, was forced to flee Rome as the Romans proclaimed a Republic after 1900 years of imperial and papal rule.

But Marx and Engels weren’t interested in anything as trivial as making propaganda for a European revolution.  They believed that they had found the key to all history, the magic decoder ring that made sense out of everything: philosophy, religion, the rise and fall of empires, culture, art.  To this day there are millions of people all over the world who think they were right — and there are hundreds of millions more whose worldview has been shaped at least in part by this explosive little book.

I am one of them myself, though I don’t think many ‘big M’ Marxists would salute me as a comrade.

If you haven’t read the Manifesto, you should — and if you haven’t read it in a while, you should pick it up again.  The Communist Manifesto, with all its shortcomings, is on that short list of books that every educated person should keep coming back to over a lifetime of reading and thought.  Over the decades you can measure your own intellectual growth by the different ways that you read this book.

I could write a book about this book; maybe someday I will.  Actually, I could write two books on the Manifesto:  What Marx and Engels Got Right, and What Marx and Engels Got Wrong.

But for now I just want to highlight one of their breakthrough insights that is extremely useful today — and, as some of this blog’s longtime readers have surely figured out, it’s an insight that heavily influences my approach to history and ideas.  As usual, Marx and Engels pushed it a bit too far, but their core insight– that the way we are related to the economy helps shape our ideas, our sense of right and wrong and our sense of our relationship to broader trends in history–is something I think about almost every day.  I think about it when I try to understand how other people see the world, and I think about it when I’m trying to correct for my own biases and blind spots — asking myself what I’ve missed or where I’ve been unfair.

Marx and Engels weren’t the first people to have this insight, but they integrated it with an approach to the relationship of ideas and history that allowed them to criticize social thought from a new point of view.  They argued that the dominant social groups in each historical era developed a worldview that justified their pretensions to power and privilege, making their particular system the culmination of the historical process or, as The American Interest’s Frank Fukuyama taught Americans to say, the end of history.  Interest groups and power elites don’t just develop ideas and ideologies that favor their interests.  They develop worldviews that are unconscious as well as conscious, that are the foundation of cultures and ideals.  In the feudal age, the nobility and its hired hands synthesized Christianity, Germanic folk customs and classical Greco-Roman ideas into an all-encompassing world vision that stares out at us from a hundred thousand paintings, that colors the poetry of Europe for hundreds of years, and that lives on today in various forms.

In the Manifesto Marx and Engels write about the different forms of ’socialist’ ideology that were around in 1848 and tie each of these back to specific social groups.  They write about ‘feudal socialism’, the anti-capitalist writings of traditionalists who denounced capitalism for ripping up the old ‘harmonious’ social contract of the Middle Ages.  They write about various forms of ‘bourgeois’ and ‘petty bourgeois’ socialism as well: utopian ideas about a better future that aren’t grounded in any realistic view of political forces or the deep conflicts in human society.

One can only imagine how they would rip into the pompous, self-deceptive ideas and theories with which our elites surround and comfort themselves today.  The Asian Industrial Revolution, that enormous upheaval destroying the past social organizations and customs from China through India and Pakistan today, in reality is an affair of grinding poverty, immense human suffering and displacement, exploitation as naked and hideous as anything the London poor faced in the days of Charles Dickens, and vast contrasts between the lives of the working poor and the new rich.  Yet in the view of what Marx might well call the ‘Davoisie’, the new international bourgeoisie of our times, all that ugliness and suffering disappears.  It’s expected somehow that those struggling masses will go on ‘peacefully’ suffering and working without disturbing the peaceful stability of the comfortable and the rich.

Marx and Engels would mock and fillet the ideologies we have built around the word ‘development’ and they would demolish the inane models of development that our economists have been producing (and imposing on poor countries) since World War Two.  Their bitter comments on the recent Wall Street bailouts contrasted with the programs of austerity forced on people around the world who had nothing to do with the financial crisis would leap off the page and grab the reader by the lapels.

Contemporary western leftists would rub their hands in joy as Marx and Engels ripped into the smug ideologies of the Davoisie and its closest allies; they would begin to squirm, though, as the two founders of the modern Communist movement turned their attention to the labor movements, Hollywood progressives and radical intellectuals of the advanced countries. The spectacle of trade union leaders in rich countries fighting free trade, and especially of the alliances they’ve made with wealthy agricultural interests in the EU and the United States would fill Marx and Engels with rage and scorn.  Seeking to preserve the high living standards of a handful of privileged workers and civil servants (one of Marx and Engels’ least favorite groups of people), they try to obstruct the growth of productive forces in developing countries that, for all the misery and horror connected with that process, represents the one hope of a human life for billions of people and their children across the planet — and they call themselves ‘progressive’.

I don’t think the various strains of academic radicalism rooted in the New Left of the 1960s would much enjoy a new edition of the Manifesto, either.  Marx and Engels were unreconstructed Old Lefties who saw progressive ideology as being rooted in and concerned with the interests of the masses of the working poor.  The New Left emphasis on identity, ethnicity and self-expression would fill them with contempt.  The academic New Left would, I am pretty certain, appear to Marx and Engels as a new form of vile and self-indulgent petty bourgeois ideology that elevates the historical despair of a class at the end of its tether into a worldview.  That ideology, rampant in the academy today, is what we sometimes call postmodernism.  It’s the belief that the ‘grand narratives’ of history have collapsed, including the Marxist enlightenment of proletarian revolt and the broader Enlightenment narrative of progress.  Instead of a grand social march forward into a better world, society as a whole seems stagnant.  Liberation is no longer a project for society at large; it is something that small groups — cultural, ethnic, sexual minorities — achieve on their own.  It is a kind of dystopian version of Frank Fukuyama’s end of history: things can’t get much better, and they aren’t very good.

Marx and Engels would, I think, excoriate this ideology of ‘tenured radicals’ and foundation staff as the attempt of petty bourgeois intellectuals to console themselves for their own political irrelevance — and to take their own ironic fate as ineffective and marginal critics in a society still dominated by the demands of a capitalist order as the inevitable fate for all mankind.  The ’struggle’ to get another tenure-track position for an ethnic studies program, or to defeat a rival faction’s candidate for an academic post can be seen, sort of, as the contemporary version of the inspiring political struggles of old.  One is at the barricades, even if all one ever actually does is publish technical articles in obscure journals.  The continuing breakdown of academic disciplines into ever smaller and (at least in some cases) ever less relevant subspecialties reflects the wider breakdown of the social progress into the struggles of various smaller and more specialized minorities to define their identities and carve out some living space.  From an old-fashioned Marxist point of view (and perhaps not only from that perspective) this looks indescribably petty and vain, especially when measured against the enormous scale of the upheavals and social explosions reshaping today’s world.

Now as usual, they would be too brutal and too sweeping in their condemnations.  There are people in the western labor movements who think hard and long about how to connect the interests of working people in the rich world with those in developing countries.  There are plenty of thoughtful and skilled academics out there who do important work and do it well — and postmodernism has more to say for itself than they might allow.  But Marx and Engels would be right to contrast the sense of exhaustion, the tininess of the political vision and ambition of so many contemporary academics with the thundering changes and the billions of working people around the world desperately struggling to get a foothold in the modern economy.  In a world like ours, with billions of poor people and a few hundred million affluent ones, and with technological changes remaking the very nature of industry at a rate the bourgeois entrepreneurs of 1848 could not have imagined, Marx and Engels would not have thought that grand narratives had collapsed.  They would have seen titanic forces taking shape over the horizons and they would have predicted (a little too confidently) an age of revolutionary upheavals as sweeping and perhaps as violent as anything history had ever seen. I suspect they would have predicted that the big ideas of the future would come from out there rather than in here; that it would be people shaped by the struggles in rapidly developing countries who would generate the concepts and inspire the movements who would shape the intellectual as well as the political history of the twenty first century.

I may be missing the point completely; I’m sure that there are readers out there who could ‘unmask my ideology’ and Marxists used to say and show how my own take on the Manifesto reflects my own miserable economic interests and background.  Certainly I’m not going to embrace any wild-eyed ideologies that would let the unwashed hordes past the gates of the stately Mead manor in glamorous Queens!  And I’m careful to keep my copy of their collected works where the more excitable members of the grounds staff won’t see it lying around.

Anyway, on my first trip to Brussels something like twenty years ago an American journalist based in the city took me on a walking tour of the city and we passed the Grande Place, the magnificent square in the heart of the old city.  At one corner of the square he pointed out an upscale restaurant.  In 1848 that restaurant had been a seedy tavern where Marx and Engels would meet to go over the drafts of the Manifesto, he said.  By 1990 it was filled with well-heeled tourists, and expense-account bureaucrats and lobbyists working the ins and outs of the European Union.  Across the square was a Godiva chocolate shop. during World War II the SS had used it as a recruiting center to get the more ‘Aryan’ Dutch-speaking Belgians to join up.  It’s the end of history, EU style; I’d love to know what Marx and Engels would think of it.  I think they would regard the social peace in the west since World War II as a rare and short lived interval of relative calm in the midst of a still-accelerating revolutionary process in world history — more eye of the hurricane than end of history.

Read The Communist Manifesto.  It will remind you that history is real, that it matters, and that you must strive to see the world on its own terms, rather than passively accepting the comfortable ideas and perceptions that society encourages you to take for granted.  It may even prepare you for the future by giving you a glimpse into the storms ahead.

Next week on Literary Saturday: the wit and wisdom of Joseph Stalin.   (Just kidding.)

Update: Of course, the reality of the USSR didn’t quite work out as  Marx and Engels hoped.  While checking out Eamonn Fitzgerald’s Rainy Day blog, I ran across this amazing Brezhnev era piece of  Soviet entertainment.  Whatever ultimately happened in the Cold War,  Socialism was at least as advanced as capitalism when it comes to the  production of vacuous entertainment.  Highly recommended!

As Joe Conason notes over at Slate.com, in a spirited though ultimately unconvincing defense of Rangel, the Harlem congressman is being hounded from high office by, primarily, The New York Times.  The same thing is true of Governor Paterson; the Times has consistently led in the publication of stories which have undermined his credibility, ruined his public character and now exposed him to criminal prosecution.

Unlike Conason, I’m not mad at the Times for uncovering these facts.  I’m hoping this signals a new era at the Times of an intense concentration on the murky world of New York City and state politics.  There is no other newspaper in this state which has the resources and the reputation to take on the entrenched cultures of corruption and incompetence which are destroying the city and state and blighting millions of lives both upstate and down.  You go, Grey Lady!

But there’s no doubt that the sudden attention paid to the sins of high-profile black officials is not going down well with everyone.  Most New Yorkers think that you can’t throw a rock in our unspeakable legislature without hitting a crook; where are the corrupt white (and Latino and Asian-American) criminals doing the perp walk on the Grey Lady’s front page?  I hope they’ll come; one way for the Times to rebuild its reputation and credibility — and incidentally perform a signal service to the city and state — is to own the story of corruption here and to undertake a major effort to clean this mess up.

Conason (one of the most consistently readable columnists in the business even when, like now, he’s wrong) seems to think that another strategy is possible: Democrats should circle the wagons around their vulnerable leaders, just as the GOP did for, say, Tom DeLay.

There are two reasons he’s wrong.  First, this didn’t work out that well for the GOP and it won’t work any better for the Dems.  Fighting to save Congressman Rangel would give every GOP candidate in the country something like a five percent boost in the polls.  Or does Conason think voters won’t notice if the Democrats stand by their ethically-challenged comrades in arms?

The second reason this won’t work is that the cause of ‘good government’ isn’t just a slogan for a significant chunk of the Democratic base.  The ‘goo-goos‘ really believe in government and they really believe that for the state to work well it must be led by the pure in heart.  It’s easy for hardened New York journalists like Conason (and, I suppose, Mead) to sneer at the delicate sensibilities of Boston blue noses and genteel civic reformers, but take the upper middle class neo-Puritan goody-goodies out of the mix and there isn’t all that much left of the Democratic Party.

These folks, spiritually if not biologically descended from the original New England Puritans, really believe that the state is here to make virtue reign among men.  In the nineteenth century they were the ‘Conscience Whigs’ who opposed Sabbath delivery of the mails, the relocation of the Cherokee Indians and slavery.  Later they supported female suffrage, Prohibition and disarmament.  Today they are against torture, tobacco and trans fats.

These are the cats, Joe, who really believe that the state is here to make us Do Right.  These are the university professors and academic bureaucrats who believe in suppressing free speech in the name of polite discourse — just as they did 100 years ago when dirty books were banned in Boston.  These are the folks who want to write long ‘codes of conduct’ to regulate sexual encounters among undergraduates in the name of feminism — which again is pretty much what they were doing when Victoria was queen.  These folks want a strong national government because they deeply, truly and instinctively believe that true freedom means doing right, and that a government that makes people behave right makes them more free.

But here’s the catch: government has to be pure before it can make us pure.  You can’t have crooks and thieves and urban political machines imposing their wretched notions of patronage and compromise on that great engine of moral uplift, the federal government.  You can’t have lobbyists making laws if the purpose of the laws is to make us all pure — so you can’t have congressmen who are in hock to them or who take their favors.  Like Caesar’s wife, the federal government must be above suspicion.

Ideally, it sometimes seems as if the goo-goos would like to take the politics out of government and replace the messy give and take favor-swapping of conventional politics with the pure and glorious work of administration.  They would like the United States to have the City Manager form of government and replace the political hacks with degreed and credentialed experts in all the requisite fields.

It’s an old and honorable part of the American political tradition and without these earnest reformers we’d sink even deeper in the swamp than we already are — but like all the rest of the crazed ideological pressure groups and narrow interests that make up our body politic they’d ruin the country if they ever got full control.

But you can’t ask a goo-goo to stop being a goo-goo anymore than you can stop Charlie Rangel from liking the high life.

The fight between the reformers and the pols is likely to be a destructive one for the Democrats, and the racial dimension will only make things worse.  New York Democratic politics have been roiled for years by the struggles of different racial groups for high profile posts and the spoils of office.  In the last two weeks three high profile African-American Democrats have been rejected by the party: David Paterson, Charles Rangel and Harold Ford.  All three had their flaws, but then so do many of the white politicians who enjoy the privileges of power undisturbed in this great country of ours.  President Obama, the only national figure who effectively bridges this growing divide in the Democratic coalition, will probably have to keep intervening to hold the New York party together, but the defenestration of Rangel, the looming replacement of David Paterson by über white-boy candidate Andrew Cuomo and the rejection of Harold Ford in favor of the weak Kirsten Gillibrand will not soon be forgotten.

There have been two eras of close cooperation between blacks and goo-goos in American history.  The first started with the abolitionist movement and culminated in Reconstruction in a joint effort to establish black rights in the South.  That alliance broke up, in part because of goo-goo disgust at the real and perceived corruption of the Reconstruction governments in the south.  The second era took shape in the 1930s and reached its apogee during the civil rights movement.  It’s still too soon to tell, but we could be looking at a second break-up now.  While blacks continued to vote Republican after 1876 (where they were still allowed to vote), black politicians mostly gave up on the goo-goos when Reconstruction died and the so-called ‘rotten boroughs’ of the southern delegations to Republican conventions often voted with cynical pragmatism for machine pols rather than reformers.

These days there is a new factor: the rise of a new generation of well educated, well connected African American politicians (like President Obama or Newark’s Mayor Cory Booker) whose base transcends race.  The contest for the loyalty of poor and lower-middle class African-Americans between the crusty old pols and the shiny new reformers is going to be one of the great epic stories that make American politics so interesting.  But whatever comes out of all this, the struggles between goo-goos and  hacks are likely to test the unity and strength of the Democratic coalition for some years to come.

Let’s be clear on this: Hillary Clinton is one of our strongest secretaries of state in a long time, generally executing her difficult responsibilities in a way that does credit to her and to the country she represents.  But by (apparently) calling for talks between Britain and Argentina on the future of the disputed Falkland Islands (the Argentines call them the Malvinas), and offering her good offices to bring the two countries together, Secretary Clinton made a misstep.  It not only offends and even outrages public opinion in our closest ally; it encourages and enables exactly the kind of foolish political grandstanding in Argentina that helps keep that country frustrated and poor despite its extraordinary natural resources, its talented population and a culture and way of life that ensures that everyone who visits the country falls in love with it.

For those who don’t devote their leisure hours to the study of obscure territorial disputes in the remotest corners of the earth, the Falkland Islands (or, for the Argentines, the Malvinas), are a rough and rugged group of close to 800 mostly tiny and uninhabited islands in the wild South Atlantic wastes off the Patagonian coastlands near the southern tip of South America.  Seized from a weak and distracted Argentina by good old fashioned naked British imperialism in 1833 (an event described by Charles Darwin in The Voyage of the Beagle), the islands were settled by misguided Welsh and Scottish immigrants over the decades and about 3,100 of their descendants live there today.

The Argentines, who have a national fondness for lost causes and old territorial claims, never accepted the British occupation of the islands. In 1982 their thuggish and vicious military dictators attacked; after a brief but bloody war, Britain defeated the poorly equipped and disastrously led Argentines.  The military government had hoped that popular enthusiasm for the war would cause the Argentines to overlook its record of torture, murder, incompetence and corruption.  That seemed to work at the beginning, but as Argentina’s defeat became steadily more apparent, public opinion turned against the generals, and the dictatorship fell to be replaced by a disappointing run of bad civilian presidents lasting to the present.

The British position, which is both clear and right, is that regardless of whatever happened in 1833, no changes can be made to the status of the islands without the consent of the people who live there.  Argentina has renounced the use of force to settle the dispute, but maintains its claim to the islands — and raising the claim remains an attractive way for floundering Argentine politicians to whip up public support even as they continue to lead the country in unsustainable and destructive directions.  Argentina wants “negotiations” with Britain over the issue of sovereignty; Britain has maintained that there is nothing to negotiate.  The United States has historically been publicly neutral but really pro-British; that pretty much remains our stand today. 

Lately Argentina’s president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, has been experiencing a political condition that is unfortunately a common one in Argentine history.  After years of buying popularity with unsound economic policies and government giveaways, she’s losing her support as it becomes harder to pay for new programs.  She’s already taken over the country’s private pension industry to get more cash for government programs; more recently the head of the Central Bank quit rather than follow her orders to use the Central Bank’s reserves for short term purposes.  She found somebody new for the job, but the increasingly obvious disarray of her economic policies has undermined her popularity.  Her political allies have just lost control of the country’s Senate.  Meanwhile, the government has launched an attack on the country’s largest media company.  The government says this is for virtuous antitrust purposes, but not many people believe it.

Thank God for the Malvinas, then.  President Kirchner has been doing everything she can to focus Argentine attention on the issue.  The UN, the new association of Latin American countries that excludes the US and Canada: everywhere she can she’s trying to generate news coverage of her campaign.

To be fair to President Kirchner, something new is taking place on the islands.  Geologists have long believed there is oil under the seas around the islands; the British government has given drillers the go-ahead to start looking.  If oil is found, it’s going to be harder than ever to convince the 3,100 islanders that what they need to do is pay taxes to incompetent and corrupt Argentine politicians. To some degree, President Kirchner needed to raise the issue just to get Argentina on record stating its views; to be silent would essentially abandon Argentina’s claim to sovereignty and that is something no Argentine politician can do.

This is the quagmire into which Secretary Clinton inadvertently stepped.  Technically, her remarks were nothing new; the United States has long been willing to mediate in a dispute between two friends — if asked by both sides.  But the qualification somehow got downplayed.  The impression this created is that the United States is siding against our closest ally and with a floundering, unpopular Argentine president who has a poor and even anti-American track record in many ways.  It is a pointless piece of pandering; the United States will get nothing concrete from Argentina in exchange for this step and it does nothing to build a foundation for future US-Argentine relations.  Worse, it contributes to a dangerous trend abroad as well as at home.  People are starting to think that if you are tough and brutal to this administration — whether you are an ayatollah in Iran or a Republican in the US Senate — you will be civilly and decently treated, but that if you are its friend you will go under the bus.

It’s a small mess in the great scheme of things, but it’s a real one.  Secretary Clinton will need to mend fences with the Brits.  Substantively, a very level headed article in the Guardian points out that in fact US policy has not changed; the Guardian however is a pro-government newspaper trying to make embattled Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown look strong and globally relevant for his impending, uphill election battle.  Tory newspapers have been reveling in the government’s embarrassment, highlighting US neglect of a government they hope to defeat.  Secretary Clinton has enough real issues on her plate without distractions like this.

None of this counts as “smart diplomacy.”  The Patagonian Pander was never going to work; as the Guardian correctly pointed out, there is no way that the United States will really shift its position on this issue — and especially now, when Britain’s help in Afghanistan matters so much to us.  The  Argentines, while milking Clinton’s statement for all the political and propaganda they can, know this as well as anyone else.  They will not be fooled and are perhaps a little insulted that we tried to beguile them with such a cheap trick.  President Kirchner’s increasingly powerful political opponents will not thank us for giving her a propaganda coup at this critical time, nor will President Kirchner provide any real help to the United States or Secretary Clinton in return.  Outside Argentina, the message will also reverberate: America is rattled and on the run, hunting for friends in all the wrong places.

Secretary Clinton’s Latin American trip was not a success.  The Patagonian Pander was followed by the much more important Rio Rebuff, as Brazil’s President Lula refused to back Secretary Clinton’s request for help on Iranian sanctions at the Security Council.  These were not isolated snafus.  From Tijuana to Tierra del Fuego, our Latin America policy is breaking down.  The Secretary of State now needs to find out what has gone wrong and ask some tough questions of the advisers who got her into this mess.