Monthly Archive for September, 2010

A commenter in my previous post has some harsh words for former president Jimmy Carter, in the wake of the latter’s recent statement that his “role as a former president is probably superior to that of other presidents”:

His post-Presidential career actually reveals precisely the same problems he faced with his Presidency–he’s all heat and no light. Sure, he sprints around the globe to meet with “history’s greatest monsters,” but what does he have to show for it? Nothing–no concessions, no real improvements in human rights, nobody won over to the cause of justice. Which is what America also has to show for his Presidency.

Carter’s reputation as a failed president—derided and ineffectual at home, weak on defense, politically inept—seems so culturally entrenched that it’s hard to envision the old Georgian peanut farmer ever being eligible for a favorable historical reconsideration from that mercurial final arbiter and last best hope of all maligned and controversial men: Posterity.

As I said, I’ve no interest in defending Carter’s post-presidential pastime of coddling authoritarians and terrorists the world over, often with the effect of undermining prevailing official U.S. foreign policy. Nor will I defend his tendentious string of inanities on the Jewish question. And I also won’t defend his administration’s infamous bureaucratic bungling or his born-again sanctimony or his impressive and enduring inability to tell friend from foe.

But I will offer one narrow defense from my interlocutor’s statement that Carter-as-president had nothing to show for the cause of human rights or international justice. The commenter does mention Camp David and SALT II as high points, and I agree. But there’s something else that should go in his plus ledger.

In essence, the argument is that Jimmy Carter was an underrated Cold Warrior. His committment to ramping up covert support to Soviet dissidents; his insistence on rescuing the language of human rights and democracy from the odious sepulchral fingers of Kissinger and Nixon; his willingness to attack the very legitimacy of the Soviet system on ideological and moral grounds—all ought to be much more celebrated than it is. My source for this reassessment is Robert Gates’ excellent memoir, From the Shadows.

In 1975 the Soviet Union made itself a signatory to the Helsinki Accords; implausibly binding itself to a then-overlooked provision in the agreement which guaranteed “free movement” of people and ideas. Thirty-five countries, including the U.S., also signed on. The effects of the Soviets committing themselves in principle to a basic tenet of universal human rights cannot be overstated. Here’s Robert Gates:

In retrospect, it is indeed apparent that [the Accords] provided the spark that kindled widespread resistance to communist authority and the organization of numerous independent groups throughout Eastern Europe and even in the Soviet Union determined to bring change. This spark of resistance would burst into flame in Poland only months later, and spread throughout the Soviet Empire within a short time.

The Soviets were thoroughly surprised and deeply alarmed by the scope and rapidity with which the new ferment of dissident activity spread following the ratification of Helsinki. Upon taking office, Jimmy Carter could have easily continued the Kissinger/Nixon legacy of pragmatic “realism”, which held that the U.S. should never question the Soviets’ internal policies; should take for granted Soviet claims to legitimacy and equality within the international system; and should never dream of elevating the prosaic issue of human rights to a central focus of bilateral relations.

Carter didn’t do that. Instead, as early as three months after his inauguration, Carter approved a plan initiated by Zbig Brzezinski which represented “an unprecedented White House effort to attack the internal legitimacy of the Soviet government.” The plan involved several proposals for covert propaganda actions inside the USSR as well as direct support to dissident writers and activists. The plan met with considerable bureaucratic opposition from both State and CIA; and though both were able to water down the most ambitious parts of Carter’s and Zbig’s proposals (like fomenting ethnic tension among disparate Soviet nationalities), the late ’70s saw a huge increase in the covert infiltration of dissident books and periodicals, as well as rhetorical and material support for the nascent human rights movement throughout the Soviet empire.

Carter also spearheaded a significant scaling up of the overt communication tools of the U.S. government: Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, and Voice of America. He called for the installation of new high-powered transmitters that would overcome the USSR jamming efforts. Of this legacy Robert Gates notes:

In short, through the public policies and pronouncements of the President, and significantly more aggressive use of the radios and of CIA’s clandestine distribution network in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, the Carter administration waged ideological war on the Soviets with a determination and intensity that was very different from its predecessors…. I believe that the propaganda and covert endeavors of the Carter administration produced their share of the tiny fissures in the Soviet structure that ultimately helped bring about its collapse.

Gates writes that through his human rights policies and his willingness to “challenge directly the legitimacy of the Soviet government in the eyes of its own people,” Carter did nothing less than change “the long-standing rules of the Cold War.”  Gates says that “Soviet leaders knew the implications for them of what Carter was doing, and hated him for it.”

While Carter’s human rights policies were derided at home as naive and counterproductive, in later years Soviet dissidents would be virtually unanimous in their praise of those policies and the importance to the democratic dissidents of the publicity those policies brought to their cause. Carter’s actions and policies gave encouragement to the nascent human rights groups that sprang up throughout Eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union [after Helsinki]. His approach marked a decisive and historic turning point in the U.S.-Soviet relationship.

This is not some grand reevaluation of the man’s entire legacy. And I know that “better than Nixon” isn’t exactly a high bar of accomplishment. But on this point he did the right thing at the right time. And breaking with long-standing U.S. Cold War policy while taking political hits for it domestically was a courageous thing to do.

Reagan readily capitalized on Carter’s hard effort at permanently expanding the rhetorical space within which the U.S. could operate during the Cold War. His emphasis on undermining the legitimacy of the Soviet regime presaged Reagan’s subsequent stark ideological differentiation with the Soviet Union and his own frequent use of overt moralism as a cudgel.

Carter is not often credited with bestowing upon Reagan a robust and ready infrastructure with which to subvert the forces of despotism and give hope to those languishing behind the curtain. In fact all subsequent presidents have inherited and embraced Carter’s profound committment to the war of ideas and ideals. (And the war of weapons too: Gates argues that Carter is unfairly maligned for weakness on defense, when in fact, with one exception (the B1) “Carter sustained virtually every major U.S. strategic modernization program,” as well as added a few new ones. He also led the way in strengthening NATO’s conventional and nuclear forces in Europe.)

Again, this isn’t to expiate all the man’s sins or to argue he was a great or even good president on net. But on this one point at least Carter indeed contributed to the store of justice in the world and did his small part in improving the welfare of millions.

This piece by Stephen Rose in the NYT argues that while in the short term the economy will eventually recover all the job losses caused by the recession, we have a larger problem ahead:

In the long term, however, we need to align our workforce with the changing needs of the economy. According to the Center on Education and the Workforce’s Help Wanted report, the fastest-growing job clusters are those found in the occupations that demand the highest levels of education: managerial and professional, education, health care professional and technical, and science, technical, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), and community service and arts occupations.

Together, these career paths will account for 31 percent of jobs in 2018. In the economy as a whole, 63 percent of all jobs will require some form of post-secondary education.

That 63% of all jobs will require post-secondary education would seem to be a serious problem in a country in which only about 28% of people have college degrees. And I’m not sure why Rose is so sanguine that the jobs lost in the recession will come roaring back in the next few years. He surely knows that the overwhelming majority of the job losses have come at the expense of people who have less than a college education:

Unless a whole bunch of those workers get college degrees by 2018, I don’t know how 72% of the workforce (those without a degree) will be expected to compete for 37% of the available jobs which require no degree. It seems that the realignment of our workforce is a rather more pressing issue than Rose makes it out to be. 

Yesterday Matt Yglesias wrote about this problem in the DC context:

We’re in the midst of a mayor’s campaign largely focused on the question of why the economic plight of low-skill workers living east of the Anacostia River is so severe. […]

[H]alf the problem with DC’s uneven economic development is that too many of the jobs are good jobs. The people in need of work can’t get jobs as lawyers or doctors or architects or lobbyists or what have you, and expansion of the DC “good jobs” sector mostly serves to merely draw new prosperous residents into the city.

As Matt notes, new prosperous residents bring with them some new demand for lower-skill service jobs. But not enough to make up the difference. The Stephen Rose piece ends:

While the American economy will continue to create jobs, the structure of the economy is continuing to shift in favor of workers with more than a high school diploma. It is increasingly important that young people and working adults are educationally prepared to succeed.

Rose has a new book out called Rebound, on the shape of the economic recovery to come, so I’ll assume that he has plenty of substantive ideas on how this will all piece together. But to say that it is "increasingly important" that workers are educationally prepared to succeed is a statement so free of content as to not even rise to the level of platitudinous.

There seems to be a terminal deterioration in the job prospects of less-skilled, less-educated workers. One thing we can do is try and make those workers more skilled and more educated. But the efficacy of worker retraining programs is highly suspect. The other thing we can do, as Yglesias notes in his post, is consider making sure that zoning and development policies in high unemployment areas are structured such that they expand job opportunities for lower-skilled  workers. Both of these options seem to have extremely limited practical potential, which means that we’re in for quite a disruptive "transition" whatever form it takes.

A more radical option was outlined by the former CEO of Intel, Andy Grove, in a recent essay for Bloomberg. Grove frets about the spectre of Chinese dominance and advocates using protectionist trade barriers and government subsidies to revive and grow the U.S. manufacturing and industrial base. Reihan Salam disagrees, and wrote a critical followup essay for Forbes:

The U.S. badly needs job and income growth. But it won’t come from the manufacturing sector. Rather, it will come from a wrenching series of labor market and entitlement and tax reforms designed to improve work incentives, most of which will prove far less popular than simply bashing China.

I don’t know if Reihan is right that insufficient work incentives is the main problem here, but his use of the word "wrenching" seems apt enough.

In his column today, David Brooks sees a parallel between today’s America and 20th century Britain, whose decline from imperial and economic world domination began with a society-wide shift in cultural values: "[T]he great-great-grandchildren of the empire builders withdrew from commerce, tried to rise above practical knowledge and had more genteel attitudes about how to live." Brooks sees a similar shift towards "gentility" in the U.S.: 

After decades of affluence, the U.S. has drifted away from the hardheaded practical mentality that built the nation’s wealth in the first place.

The shift is evident at all levels of society. First, the elites. America’s brightest minds have been abandoning industry and technical enterprise in favor of more prestigious but less productive fields like law, finance, consulting and nonprofit activism. […]

Up and down society, people are moving away from commercial, productive activities and toward pleasant, enlightened but less productive ones.

We can get distracted by short-term stimulus debates, but those are irrelevant by now. The real issues are whether the United States is content with gentility shift and whether there is anything that can be done about it in any case.

This mass movement of elites into more pleasant, genteel, but less productive fields and lifestyles was described with tremendous insight by Francis Fukuyama in The End of History and the Last Man. When people reference that book they often leave off the final clause, when in fact it’s as central to his thesis as his much-misinterpreted heralding of the "end of history."

In his masterwork Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche writes about the idea of the "last man." Nietzsche’s "last men" are those left standing as the end product of evolution; those who have developed and grown only by being pulled upon by the dictates of nature, rather than through their own striving and the "overcoming" of their atavistic animalism. At the end of history these last men reside in advanced liberal democracies in which material wealth is abundant and all their physical needs are provided for. They are mutually contented, and enjoy physical health and security. The last men of liberal democracies also provide universal individual recognition to one another, which precludes the need for any battles for prestige which characterizied earlier, bloodier eras of aristocratic and monarchical striving. Self-preservation is the supreme value.

Nietzsche thinks there is something irrevocably lost in this flight of man from striving. He writes contemptously of those who would choose a society of staid contentment over one in which struggle and sacrifice lead to true human greatness and nobility:

I say unto you: one must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star. I say unto you: you still have chaos in yourself.

Alas, the time is coming when man will no longer give birth to a star. Alas, the time of the most despicable man is coming, he that is no longer able to despise himself. Behold, I show you the last man."  […]

One still works, for work is a form of entertainment. But one is careful lest the entertainment be too harrowing. One no longer becomes poor or rich: both require too much exertion. Who still wants to rule? Who obey? Both require too much exertion.

No shepherd and one herd! Everybody wants the same, everybody is the same: whoever feels different goes voluntarily into a madhouse.

Liberal democracies preach egalitarianism (universal recognition) and tolerance (elimination of discord); two values that Nietzsche had precisely zero use for. He venerated the perpetuation of the ongoing struggle for recognition; a state of discord and inequality which alone could produce transcendent human achievement and artistic expression. He thought such a state only could  be achieved in an aristocratic order, one that guaranteed inequality and one in which men were beset by their own ambition for besting their peers and overlords. He detested the idea of a society of "last men" surrounded by abundance, fearful of death, and with nothing to struggle against:

You call yourself free? Your dominant thought I want to hear, and not that you have escaped from a yoke. Are you one of those who had the right to escape from a yoke? There are some who threw away their last value when they threw away their servitude.

Free from what? As if that mattered to Zarathustra! But your eyes should tell me brightly: free for what?

Many writers and thinkers, including Hegel, Toqueville, and Strauss, have shared Nietzsche’s concern of a liberal democratic order populated by hollow last men who are only concerned with their own material well-being and the preservation of their own lives and abundance. Yet, though David Brooks and Fukuyama join them in lamenting the spectre of the "pleasant gentility" of modern American life, rife with Nietzschean last men, no one of course wishes for a return to the days of aristocratic privilege or the right of kings or feudal lords. And it’s obviously not an either/or proposition. There is clearly plenty of cultural dynamism to be had in liberal democracies, notwithstanding the deep, structural economic woes spelled out in Brooks’ column. There is also plenty of opportunity for those who "still have chaos" in themselves and strive for excess individual recognition and prestige beyond that conferred to everyone at birth by the constitutional rights of citizenship. (Unfortunately for Brooks, it is precisely those professions which he derides as "pleasant but less productive"—business, finance—that provide ambitious people with the means of sublimating their ambition and striving for the recognition and prestige that is denied them in the larger "genteel" society around them.)

That’s why Fukuyama ultimately affirms and celebrates the triumph of liberal democracy as the best possible means of ordering human beings into governing units, despite its latent tendency to produce sated, contented, and healthy but empty-chested men. David Brooks’ "gentility shift" is probably here to stay, but there are still no worthy contenders to liberal democracy that so satisfy the constitutent parts of man: reason, desire, and the demand for recognition.