CHINA AND DEMOCRACY

... and some hopeful developments in China, from Nicholas Kristof:

"In the aftermath of the great Sichuan earthquake, we’ve seen a hopeful glimpse of China’s future: a more open and self-confident nation, and maybe — just maybe — the birth of grass-roots politics here.

In traveling around China in the days after the quake, I was struck by how the public and the news media initially seized the initiative from the government. Ordinary Chinese are traveling to the quake zone to help move rubble, and tycoons, peasants and even children are reaching into their pockets to donate to the victims.

“I gave 500 yuan,” or about $72, a man told me in the western city of Urumqi. “Eighty percent of the people in my work unit made donations. Everybody wants to help.”

Private Chinese donations have already raised more than $500 million. That kind of bottom-up public spirit is a mark of citizens, not subjects."

GOOD NEWS FROM IRAQ

Read from this Washington Post selection about a signal event in the progress of Iraqi security:

"Iraqi soldiers moved unhindered through Baghdad's vast Sadr City district on Wednesday as Shiite militiamen who have long controlled the area faded from view and schools and businesses began to reopen after weeks of strife.

The Shiite-led government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is pursuing an increasingly successful effort to contain the militias of his Shiite rivals and to exercise authority over areas where Iraqi forces were once unwelcome. The strategy has won Maliki admiration from Sunni politicians and from U.S. and British officials, who credit him with exerting some of the political will necessary to achieve reconciliation."

"DEMOCRATIC RECESSION


Tom Friedman suggests today that

There are two important recessions going on in the world today. One has gotten enormous attention. It’s the economic recession in America. But it will eventually pass, and the world will not be much worse for the wear. The other has gotten no attention. It’s called “the democratic recession,” and if it isn’t reversed, it will change the world for a long time.

It is interesting to consider that Friedman's focus on globalization may, in fact, obscure the importance of observing trends in the growth of democracy. David Brooks' recent column (discussed here) suggests that technological change is more essential than globalization as a factor driving our economic evolution. Today's Friedman column, with its focus on the importance of oil in driving corruption, makes clear the importance of the economic structure of a society in influencing its political organization.

Friedman has, in the past, suggested that globalization is one of the principal meta-narratives of our time. I think that today's column gets much closer to specifying the actual issues that influence our lives and our future.

In short, technological change and democracy are much more significant factors in global development than is globalization. It is to our intellectual detriment that we misconstrue the relative primacy of these factors.

MORE ON CHINESE NATIONALISM

On the new generation of Chinese nationalists:

Hardly uneducated know-nothings, young nationalists tend to be middle-class urbanites. Far more than rural Chinese, who remain mired in poverty, these urbanites have benefited enormously from the country's three decades of economic growth. They also have begun traveling and working abroad. They can see that Shanghai and Beijing are catching up to Western cities, that Chinese multinationals can compete with the West, and they've lost their awe of Western power.

Many middle-aged Chinese intellectuals are astounded by the differences between them and their younger peers. Academics I know, members of the Tiananmen generation, are shocked by some students' disdain for foreigners and, often, disinterest in liberal concepts such as democratization. University students now tend to prefer business-oriented majors to liberal arts-oriented subjects such as political science. The young Chinese interviewed for a story last fall in Time magazine on the country's "Me Generation" barely discussed democracy or political change in their daily lives.

Read more.

CHINESE NATIONALISMS

From an op-ed in the Washington Post:

Frequently the past few months, I have been asked about the wisdom of using the Olympics as an opportunity to push China to improve its human rights record. Underlying these questions is a sense that international pressure may have played into the hands of the Chinese Communist Party by triggering nationalist emotions and rallying indignant Chinese people behind the regime.

This concern is understandable. It is critical, however, that people distinguish among the four types of nationalism in China today to determine how best to pressure the regime to make improvements.

TOM FRIEDMAN: BACK, WITH A VENGEANCE

An excerpt:

It is especially not trivial now, because millions of Americans are dying to be enlisted — enlisted to fix education, enlisted to research renewable energy, enlisted to repair our infrastructure, enlisted to help others. Look at the kids lining up to join Teach for America. They want our country to matter again. They want it to be about building wealth and dignity — big profits and big purposes. When we just do one, we are less than the sum of our parts. When we do both, said Shriver, “no one can touch us.”

Read more.

THE COGINITIVE AGE, NOT THE AGE OF GLOBALIZATION

Brilliant, yet again. Read David Brooks' explanation of why technological change should be seen as the major driving force behind changes in our economy.

CHINESE OLYMPICS

I think that I'm for a boycott.

Read what Jewish leaders have written on the subject.http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif

THE STATE OF EDUCATION IN THE US

Ruminations thereon . . .

Peace in Iraq

David Brooks broadens our understanding of this topic in today's New York Times. Here are the first several paragraphs:

The U.S. brought no shortage of misconceptions into Iraq, but surely the longest lasting has been what you might call: Founding Fatherism. This is the belief that peace will come to the country when the nation’s political elites gather at a convention hall and make a series of grand compromises involving power-sharing and a new constitution.

The Bush administration has been pushing the Iraqis to make this sort of grand compromise for years — to little effect. The Democrats happily declare that there has been no political progress in Iraq because this grand compromise is the only kind of political progress they can conceive of.

As Philip Carl Salzman argues in “Culture and Conflict in the Middle East” (brilliantly reviewed by Stanley Kurtz in The Weekly Standard), many Middle Eastern societies are tribal. The most salient structure is the local lineage group. National leaders do not make giant sacrifices on behalf of the nation because their higher loyalty is to the sect or clan. Order is achieved not by the top-down imposition of abstract law. Instead, order is achieved through fluid balance of power agreements between local groups.

In a society like this, political progress takes different forms. It’s not top down. It’s bottom up. And this is exactly the sort of progress we are seeing in Iraq. While the Green Zone politicians have taken advantage of the surge by trying to entrench their own power, things are happening at the grass-roots.

THE AUSTRALIAN PM

I hadn't been expecting to write about Australia. Still, I found this description of the new Prime Minister's foreign policy to be interesting. He seems to me to be on the right track for the decades ahead.

An excerpt:

It would be easy to ridicule [Prime Minister Rudd's foreign policy] ambition and it would be wrong. The European portion of Rudd's world tour takes him deep into the second leg of his now famous foreign policy tripod. The American part of the journey represented the first leg of the tripod: the US alliance.
Here Rudd made profoundly important commitments to the US alliance as central to Australian foreign policy, to a view of the US as "overwhelmingly a force for good" in the world, and displayed a warmth to Republican and Democratic leaders alike, which underlined the bipartisan quality of the alliance in both the US and Australia.

Now, in Europe, he displays the second leg of his policy tripod, his commitment to multilateralism and the institutions of global governance.

Next week, in China, we'll get the third leg: deep engagement with Asia.

IRAQ

I have to admit that the information coming out of Iraq, regarding the fighting with al-Sadr, has been ambiguous. We'll have to stay tuned.

I will note, on the plus side, however, that Sunnis had been waiting for some time for this al-Maliki to confront the Shiite militias.

A FEW CAMPAIGN-RELATED ARTICLES

Krauthammer writes an excellent piece called "The Fabulist vs. The Saint" that highlights Hillary's lies and Barack's "free pass" from the media.

Dick Morris highlights the low expectations of the electorate that Hillary Clinton has evinced. This is something that I've been thinking about for a while, expressed rather clearly here by Morris.

And finally, here's an older Hillary Clinton piece from the late Michael Kelley.

YAY!

I was happy to see specific ideas about expanding NATO in Foreign Affairs magazine. Frequent readers will recognize the resonance of this idea with my refrains about the collective challenges faced by the world's democracies.

A couple of quotes [emph. mine]:

#1

Clearly, NATO is changing. But is it changing enough? If the point of the alliance is no longer territorial defense but bringing together countries with similar values and interests to combat global problems, then NATO no longer needs to have an exclusively transatlantic character. Other democratic countries share NATO's values and many common interests -- including Australia, Brazil, Japan, India, New Zealand, South Africa, and South Korea -- and all of them can greatly contribute to NATO's efforts by providing additional military forces or logistical support to respond to global threats and needs. NATO operations in the Balkans and Afghanistan have benefited greatly from contributions made by non-NATO members. Australia, Japan, and South Korea have sent substantial numbers of troops to Iraq in support of efforts by NATO members to stabilize the country. Together with other non-NATO democracies, such as Brazil, India, and South Africa, they have also contributed significantly to peacekeeping operations around the globe.

#2

Creating a global NATO is not about saving the alliance from obsolescence. The issue is not whether NATO goes out of area or out of business. The issue is how the world's premier international military organization should adapt to the demands of the times in a way that advances the interests not just of the transatlantic community but of a global community of democracies dependent on global stability. Global threats cannot be tackled by a regional organization. NATO has worked well in the past because its founding treaty demands that members be committed both to the political and economic principles underpinning democracy and to the common security challenges faced by the alliance. It would be foolish not to welcome into the alliance other countries that can make the same commitments and help confront new global challenges.

SPIRIT & INTELLIGENCE

Back to Aristotle, whose profound insight below is colored, unfortunately but not surprisingly, by racialism and some degree of historical determinism:

The people of cold countries, generally, and particularly those of Europe, are full ofs spirit but deficient in skill in intelligence; and this is why they continue to remain comparitively free, but attain no political development and show no capacity for governing others. The peoples of Asia are endowed with skill and intelligence, but are deficient in spirit; and this is why they continue to be peoples of subjects and slaves. The Greek stock, intermediate in geographical position, unites the qualities of both sets of peoples. It possesses both spirit and intelligence, for which reason it continues to be free, to have the highest political development, and to be capable of governing every other people . . . (Politics, VII, 7: 1327b18ff)

It may be tough not to focus on the apparent ethnocentrism/racialism/racism in this selection. I think that there is a truth bubbling (at least) right near the surface. This truth involves the fact that strong cultures are undergirded by both intelligence and a strength of spirit. I think that Greece did embody that confluence for a period of time in the ancient world. Aristotle missed the fact that these qualities can grow or, alternatively, degrade, in a particular culture over the course of a period of time (I would even hold that the 'intelligence of a society can grow over time. I'm not referring to evolutionary biology here, but to the fact that the organization and values of a particular society can promote, or diminish, the degree to which intelligence; as opposed to say, ideology, fear, or anger; defines the actions of the society in question.).

The United States has, over the past century, been largely successful at combining intelligence (read here: an appreciation of the role of learning and science in developing a country's institutions) and a strength of spirit (read: innovativeness, an ability to confront societies that do not nurture individual growth Roger Cohen's recent op-ed piece highlights some of the ways in which China, specifically, and Asia, in general, is developing these qualities in a way that should give US citizens pause to consider how true we are being to our own best traits. Namely, are we valuing science enough? Are we concerned enough with innovation and the development of raw talent? Will the weaknesses of our secondary school system undermine our ability to be a world leader in the medium- or long-run?

A GOOD DAY IN IRAQ?

This is an important (short) article about the recent fighting Iraq, providing some long overdue context to the story.

Here's an excerpt:

Anyone who follows the news closely in Iraq knew this day would come. The British left a power vacuum behind in the south that the Baghdad government could not fill at the time, and Sadr and the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council’s Badr Brigades filled it instead. They have fought each other and some smaller Shi’ite groups for control of the streets ever since 2005, as Steven Vincent tried to warn people just before they murdered him in Basra. The Iraqi government had no choice but to challenge the militias for control of Basra and the surrounding areas, but they waited until the Iraqi Army had enough strength to succeed.

Did our media give anyone this context? No. They reported it as some kind of spontaneous eruption of rebellion without noting at all that a nation can hardly be considered sovereign while its own security forces cannot enter a large swath of its own territory. And in the usual defeatist tone, they reported that our mission in Iraq had failed without waiting to see what the outcome of the battle would be.

OBAMA'S FOREIGN POLICY

Here is the best article about Obama's foreign policy vision that I've read yet.


This quotation sums up the analysis:

Obama's foreign policy brain trust . . . envision[s] a doctrine that first ends the politics of fear and then moves beyond a hollow, sloganeering "democracy promotion" agenda in favor of "dignity promotion," to fix the conditions of misery that breed anti-Americanism and prevent liberty, justice, and prosperity from taking root. An inextricable part of that doctrine is a relentless and thorough destruction of al-Qaeda. Is this hawkish? Is this dovish? It's both and neither -- an overhaul not just of our foreign policy but of how we think about foreign policy. And it might just be the future of American global leadership.

I have two comments about the quotation:

1) I like the idea of "dignity promotion": I appreciate and support the desire to address "conditions" that "prevent liberty, justice, and prosperity from taking root." I agree that we have thought too litle about this in recent years and I would appreciate it if we come to see Obama 'put his money where his mouth is' and explicitly make the kinds of arguments that Kerrey, et. al, are somewhat more cautious in making, but which many Democrats apparently believe. I agree that the Democrats will not be come credible about foreign policy by being "lite Republicans."

2) I am not comfortable with the apparent dismissal of the idea of "democracy promotion." The US is not simply a charitable organization. It has fundamental interests at stake that are tied to the promotion of democracy. Is it possible that the focus on 'dignity' rather than 'democracy' implies a focus on basic needs and a relative neglect of the political and civil forms that stabilize free and prosperous societies?

As Aristotle writes in Politics (IV.4:1291a19ff):

If the mind is to be reckoned as a more essentially a part of a living being than the body, parts of a similar order must equally be reckoned as more essentially as parts of the city than those which serve its basic needs. By this we mean the military part, the part concerned in the legal organization of justice, and (we may also add) the part engaged in deliberation, which is a function that needs the gift of political understanding.

OBAMA'S SPEECH, Part II

Obama addresses the issue of race in his speech. He did not so clearly address the issue of Americanism. He should have done this because Wright's comments called into doubt Obama's feelings about America, much more so than they called into doubt his feelings about whites. Very few people doubt that Obama is a sympathetic and tolerant person, in general. What does he believe is America's role in the world, though? What defines Americanism? McCain has a view about this. Does Obama?

OBAMA'S SPEECH

I've watched the first third of Obama's speech and read about twenty articles about it. It's not easy to remember another speech that has generated so much disagreement while still inspiring general respect for the speaker. There seems to be great agreement that Obama, in giving the speech, took some risks uncharacteristic of American politicians.

It's not over for Obama, of course. A prediction: Discussion will come to a head over Obama's apparent equation of Ferraro's unfair(?) comments about the role of race in Obama's rise with Wright's apparent disdain for America. Here's the passage in question:

On one end of the spectrum, we've heard the implication that my candidacy is somehow an exercise in affirmative action, that it's based solely on the desire of wide-eyed liberals to purchase racial reconciliation on the cheap. On the other end, we've heard my former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, use incendiary language to express views that have the potential not only to widen the racial divide, but views that denigrate both the greatness and the goodness of our nation — that rightly offend white and black alike.

RACE AND THE ELECTIONS

Disclaimers:

• I am no big fan of Clinton's. I think that she often makes disingenuous and/or misleading arguments.
  
• I think that Obama has run a largely reputable campaign (In fact, one of the most reputable I can remember seeing.)

Still, I have been disturbed by the recent attacks on Geraldine Ferraro which have been instigated by the Obama campaign. A Wall Street Journal article today helps to sort through, rather well I think, the times when the Clinton campaign has used racially-loaded arguments and the times when they (and their surrogates) have been unfairly accused of this.