MaxedOutMama
Tuesday, March 08, 2005
Surfing The Tsunami
Sigmund, Carl and Alfred drew my attention to this Spiegel column by Claus Christian Malzahn. It appeared February 23rd, and amazingly enough, some of the possibilities he discusses in the article are already occurring. In this article Malzahn appears to be pointing out that "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves...."
Malzahn compares Bush to Reagan, and Europe's reaction to Bush now to Europe's reaction to Reagan in the 1980's:
I have written before about cultural differences between Europeans and Americans. Some of the more relevant posts are here, here, here, and here. But my purpose in writing this post is to point out that we are suffering from the same problem of intellectual stagnation in this country, and I wonder if we have the strength to overcome it.
The Bush administration's strategy for countering world terrorism (explicitly stated since at least 2003 - see this round-up post at No Oil For Pacifists) has enjoyed some success because it relies not on controlling other populations but on letting other populations control themselves. In a sense, the Bush strategy is to tear down dams and let the water flow where it will. Europe feared a tsunami - the Bush administration just stands poised with their surfboards. It's impossible for me to believe that these dams can be rebuilt, because now the Arab world is gaining confidence in itself. Now they know they can have it. And they want it. They want what new Europe wanted and what Jefferson wanted. Why shouldn't they?
Coming back to the US, all it takes is a quick read of our major new magazines or the round-up at No Oil For Pacifists to see that we are fighting to emerge from the web of our own stereotyped thinking:
Certainly however, it is a decisive reaffirmation for the principles on which the American revolution was founded. It is Jeffersonian in scope. It is a decisive, ringing rebuke to the cultural, ethnic and religious bigots of the old orders, under whatever name they reign. It was Jefferson who wrote something about religious freedom in America being meant for the Mohammedan, the Hindoo and the Hebrew. The original American thesis did not see life in terms of ideological supremacy, whether secular or religious, but in terms of freedom to follow any path that did not require barring the paths of others. That American thesis feared neither conservativism or liberalism, but only expressions of thought which attempted to circumscribe possibility and impose an artificial order upon the inherent freedoms of human beings to shape their own lives.
In the aftermath of 9/11 we are confronting our own political stereotypes. The US must be innovative if it is to thrive and even to survive. The US must adapt to a new world of growing opportunity for a growing number of peoples. This is not fundamentally bad news, is it? Whatever the political parties may look like twenty years down the road, it will be the factions that are willing to permit change, growth and innovation that will eventually emerge as victors. There are strains in both major parties today that are essentially totalitarian in nature, and there are strains in both parties that are struggling to reassert the essential, original philosophy of optimism strengthened by a healthy cynicism based on a knowledge of human nature.
Germany's failures to recognize even the possibility of change as noted by Malzahn derive from the fundamentals of post-war Germany. Their vision of their body politic is essentially an economic one, in which prosperity is relatively fairly distributed among the population. The problem with that is that it breaks down when prosperity breaks down, and there is no fall-back position. If rights are seen in terms of a right to a good job, medical care without payment, six weeks of vacation a year, and free tuition at any university, then it is felt as an attack on individual political rights when society can't afford all of that for a time.
Economies are essentially unstable. So the German political system as it has evolved post-war hates change. It fears economic change because it forces social change, and it fears social change because it might force economic change. Whether any American wants to hear it or not, we are facing the same issues now, and we have obviously not decided how we will resolve them. Demographics are a relatively immutable force, and we will have to dramatically alter our domestic spending programs as a result. Anyone can read our newspapers and see a willful failure to confront the realities we face.
We ought to face them by retreating to our fall-back position and then moving forward from there. Our society owes our citizens defense of its freedoms and the uncircumscribed pursuit of opportunities. We don't have the right to tell a Jew or an Asian that she or he doesn't deserve a place at a top university because there are too many Jews or Asians there (both of which have occurred during our post-WWII period). We don't have the right to tell a Sikh that he can't walk around in our society wearing a turban because it looks weird. We don't have the right to tell a black person where to live, how to vote, to go to a segregated school, or to be content with a lower-paying job. We don't have the right to exclude an orthodox Jewish woman from an executive business position because she does not want to shake hands with a man. We don't have the right to tell people where they belong in our society. We don't. They determine what they want to do.
After defending people's rights to do what they wish, then we have the right as a society to create laws and a legal framework that try to promote opportunity and overcome handicaps. We have always done best as a society when we have distributed opportunity widely, and we have always stagnated and retreated when we have built walls inhibiting opportunity, whether those walls were based on color, ethnicity, class or other categories. We have several centuries of history behind us, and those centuries ought to have taught us that people create economic growth, and that more people participating freely in the economy and in national life promote economic freedom and a healthy national life. Every time we open doors we profit from it. This should be a common American understanding. That particular axiom has proved out over and over again.
However, we are entering a period in which it appears that the bottom socio-economic third of our society is losing big-time. This trend is being fed by international economic trends and our own short-sighted economic policies. We will have to forge a new consensus within the next decade as to how we will conduct our domestic economic affairs, and it will take major change. Do we have the courage to do it?
Malzahn compares Bush to Reagan, and Europe's reaction to Bush now to Europe's reaction to Reagan in the 1980's:
Quick quiz. He was re-elected as president of the United States despite being largely disliked in the world -- particularly in Europe. The Europeans considered him to be a war-mongerer and liked to accuse him of allowing his deep religious beliefs to become the motor behind his foreign policy. Easy right?and:
When Reagan stood before the Brandenburg Gate -- and the Berlin Wall -- and demanded that Gorbachev "tear down this Wall," he was lampooned the next day on the editorial pages. He is a dreamer, wrote commentators. Realpolitik looks different.Malzahn writes:
But despite all of the sugar coating the trans-Atlantic relationship has received in recent days, Germany's foreign policy depends on differentiating itself from the United States. And when Bush leaves Europe, the differences will remain. Indeed, Bush's idea of a Middle Eastern democracy imported at the tip of a bayonet is, for Schroeder's Social Democratic Party and his coalition partner the Green Party, the hysterical offspring off the American neo-cons. Even German conservatives find the idea that Arabic countries could transform themselves into enlightened democracies somewhat absurd.He continues:
Europeans today -- just like the Europeans of 1987 -- cannot imagine that the world might change. Maybe we don't want the world to change, because change can, of course, be dangerous. But in a country of immigrants like the United States, one actually pushes for change. In Mainz today, the stagnant Europeans came face to face with the dynamic Americans. We Europeans always want to have the world from yesterday, whereas the Americans strive for the world of tomorrow.Even in France there has been some discussion about the US success in integrating immigrants into our culture as opposed to the European experience. Malzahn's column is well worth a read or two. It is just as relevant for us as it is for the Germans, and the fact that he writes this way shows the strength of the European people, not their stupidity. There is a slow, growing movement that questions their default assumptions, but it is coming from the bottom or the middle, not from the top. This is a sign of a healthy culture, not a sick one. The sickness lies in the European fear of outside cultures, but with any luck within 15 years that perspective will have changed as well.
I have written before about cultural differences between Europeans and Americans. Some of the more relevant posts are here, here, here, and here. But my purpose in writing this post is to point out that we are suffering from the same problem of intellectual stagnation in this country, and I wonder if we have the strength to overcome it.
The Bush administration's strategy for countering world terrorism (explicitly stated since at least 2003 - see this round-up post at No Oil For Pacifists) has enjoyed some success because it relies not on controlling other populations but on letting other populations control themselves. In a sense, the Bush strategy is to tear down dams and let the water flow where it will. Europe feared a tsunami - the Bush administration just stands poised with their surfboards. It's impossible for me to believe that these dams can be rebuilt, because now the Arab world is gaining confidence in itself. Now they know they can have it. And they want it. They want what new Europe wanted and what Jefferson wanted. Why shouldn't they?
Coming back to the US, all it takes is a quick read of our major new magazines or the round-up at No Oil For Pacifists to see that we are fighting to emerge from the web of our own stereotyped thinking:
Bush's capacity to imagine a different Middle East may actually be related to his relative ignorance of the region, Zakaria writes. Had the president traveled to the Middle East more and seen its many dysfunctions, he might have been disheartened. Freed from looking at the day-to-day realities, Bush maintained a vision of what the region could look like. . . .Uh-huh. So stupid he's accidentally successful, eh? A likely story, and once again we are ignoring Rice's obvious influence. Bush is not so dumb that he surrounds himself with stupid advisors. The difference between Bush and his Candide-style opponents (the world we have is the best of all possible worlds, don't disrupt it) is that Bush believes in people and their drive to innovate and create, whereas his opponents did not. So is this a victory for conservative or liberal thinking? I think it is a victory for both.
Certainly however, it is a decisive reaffirmation for the principles on which the American revolution was founded. It is Jeffersonian in scope. It is a decisive, ringing rebuke to the cultural, ethnic and religious bigots of the old orders, under whatever name they reign. It was Jefferson who wrote something about religious freedom in America being meant for the Mohammedan, the Hindoo and the Hebrew. The original American thesis did not see life in terms of ideological supremacy, whether secular or religious, but in terms of freedom to follow any path that did not require barring the paths of others. That American thesis feared neither conservativism or liberalism, but only expressions of thought which attempted to circumscribe possibility and impose an artificial order upon the inherent freedoms of human beings to shape their own lives.
In the aftermath of 9/11 we are confronting our own political stereotypes. The US must be innovative if it is to thrive and even to survive. The US must adapt to a new world of growing opportunity for a growing number of peoples. This is not fundamentally bad news, is it? Whatever the political parties may look like twenty years down the road, it will be the factions that are willing to permit change, growth and innovation that will eventually emerge as victors. There are strains in both major parties today that are essentially totalitarian in nature, and there are strains in both parties that are struggling to reassert the essential, original philosophy of optimism strengthened by a healthy cynicism based on a knowledge of human nature.
Germany's failures to recognize even the possibility of change as noted by Malzahn derive from the fundamentals of post-war Germany. Their vision of their body politic is essentially an economic one, in which prosperity is relatively fairly distributed among the population. The problem with that is that it breaks down when prosperity breaks down, and there is no fall-back position. If rights are seen in terms of a right to a good job, medical care without payment, six weeks of vacation a year, and free tuition at any university, then it is felt as an attack on individual political rights when society can't afford all of that for a time.
Economies are essentially unstable. So the German political system as it has evolved post-war hates change. It fears economic change because it forces social change, and it fears social change because it might force economic change. Whether any American wants to hear it or not, we are facing the same issues now, and we have obviously not decided how we will resolve them. Demographics are a relatively immutable force, and we will have to dramatically alter our domestic spending programs as a result. Anyone can read our newspapers and see a willful failure to confront the realities we face.
We ought to face them by retreating to our fall-back position and then moving forward from there. Our society owes our citizens defense of its freedoms and the uncircumscribed pursuit of opportunities. We don't have the right to tell a Jew or an Asian that she or he doesn't deserve a place at a top university because there are too many Jews or Asians there (both of which have occurred during our post-WWII period). We don't have the right to tell a Sikh that he can't walk around in our society wearing a turban because it looks weird. We don't have the right to tell a black person where to live, how to vote, to go to a segregated school, or to be content with a lower-paying job. We don't have the right to exclude an orthodox Jewish woman from an executive business position because she does not want to shake hands with a man. We don't have the right to tell people where they belong in our society. We don't. They determine what they want to do.
After defending people's rights to do what they wish, then we have the right as a society to create laws and a legal framework that try to promote opportunity and overcome handicaps. We have always done best as a society when we have distributed opportunity widely, and we have always stagnated and retreated when we have built walls inhibiting opportunity, whether those walls were based on color, ethnicity, class or other categories. We have several centuries of history behind us, and those centuries ought to have taught us that people create economic growth, and that more people participating freely in the economy and in national life promote economic freedom and a healthy national life. Every time we open doors we profit from it. This should be a common American understanding. That particular axiom has proved out over and over again.
However, we are entering a period in which it appears that the bottom socio-economic third of our society is losing big-time. This trend is being fed by international economic trends and our own short-sighted economic policies. We will have to forge a new consensus within the next decade as to how we will conduct our domestic economic affairs, and it will take major change. Do we have the courage to do it?
Comments:
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Bush's foreign policy innovation is both original and outstanding--spreading democracy abroad is America's most effective defense against global terrorism.
BTW, NRO's Rich Lowry summarizes the left's current confusion: "If the world that Democrats have been living in lately were made into a reality disaster show, it would be called 'When Good News Strikes.'"
BTW, NRO's Rich Lowry summarizes the left's current confusion: "If the world that Democrats have been living in lately were made into a reality disaster show, it would be called 'When Good News Strikes.'"
Carl, the Rich Lowry quote is hilarious. Of course it is not all Democrats that feel that way.
You are right about Bush's policy - it is America turning its best face to the world. I have never seen anything so effective in my lifetime.
It is a terrible pill for some to swallow though. Some on the left have made themselves into caricatures of extremist thinking.
You are right about Bush's policy - it is America turning its best face to the world. I have never seen anything so effective in my lifetime.
It is a terrible pill for some to swallow though. Some on the left have made themselves into caricatures of extremist thinking.
Ah, Lancelot, at the present time I agree with your characterization of the two nations. But if you forecast into the future 10 years, unless we start making some fundamental changes now we will be looking at labor force participation rates similar to Germany's. I wrote a later post trying to give people a feel for what that really means. A cursory glance at the SS debate in the MSM demonstrates how far from contemplating reality we really are. Germany got themselves into an economic trap that has profound political implications. I would not like to see us do the same.
I read your article, it is excellent, although your tax rates in the example are way off. I have been working on an immigration post and I am now rewriting it to refer to your article. Kender, for instance, made a post noting exactly the phenomenon you describe regarding Mexico. Yours is a very original thinking that would help to solve several problems at once.
GA's economy is quite dynamic and we have a low unemployment rate. Of course this too may change 10 years down the line.
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I read your article, it is excellent, although your tax rates in the example are way off. I have been working on an immigration post and I am now rewriting it to refer to your article. Kender, for instance, made a post noting exactly the phenomenon you describe regarding Mexico. Yours is a very original thinking that would help to solve several problems at once.
GA's economy is quite dynamic and we have a low unemployment rate. Of course this too may change 10 years down the line.
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