HPR Online

New Online Only Articles

Jonathan Yip — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 19:50:00 +0000

We have a new batch of web exclusive articles from the HPR: a review of books from Cass Sunstein and Tyler Cowen, a search for our generation's protest music, a new perspective on European conservatives and the financial crisis, and a historical look at presidents and peace prizes. Take a look!

Conservative Revolutionaries

ga=giuliogalliani — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 19:44:00 +0000

How the European right wing have become unlikely innovators in the worldwide financial crisis

The economic crisis the world is currently experiencing has been the worst since the Great Depression. In such a period, nothing could be easier than pointing out market failures and the inefficiencies of deregulated capitalism. Indeed, it should be the perfect setting for an increase in state control, welfare, and redistributionist policies. In the United States, this took the form of the election of a liberal president. But in Europe, the equivalents of American liberals-that is, Socialists and Social Democrats-are losing ground everywhere.

Why is this happening? While the right is trying to find new strategies and new ideas to tackle the new problems presented by the crisis, socialist and social democratic parties grow more and more attached to their traditional core values. Not only has this kind of left-wing conservatism accounted for the decline of socialist parties in Europe to date, it is likely to cause them to lose even more ground in the future. Indeed, given their philosophical foundation in the vein of Hegel and by Marx, perhaps the socialist parties of today are simply no longer fulfilling the role for which they were born.

A quick look at all major left parties in the most influential countries of the European Union proves the strength of this trend. In France, the country with the strongest tradition of state influence in public life, the Socialist Party is at its historical ebb. In Germany, the Social Democratic Party experienced more than a ten percent reduction in vote share in the last election, while all other parties gained ground at its expense. The UK's relatively benign Labour Party was surpassed for the first time in history by the Liberal Democrats in the 2008 local elections, compounding the broad defeat it suffered against Tories in the London mayoral election. And notwithstanding the scandals of its leader, Italian right-wing party The People of Freedom has won a parliamentary majority whose size is unusual in Italian republican history, while the left-wing Democratic Party endured a change in leadership after several regional defeats.

To understand why this decline occurred, we must consider the case of left parties that do not identify as socialist as well as that of right-wing parties. In both cases, promotion of change and of new ideas unchained to old ideological diktats lead to a positive response in their elections, whereas the traditionalism of socialist parties proved itself to be a detriment. In contrast to the socialist parties, which in the last elections of the European Parliament lost nine percentage points in share of the vote, ranking last in performance, the Greens had the best performance with over 25% gain in seats. Green parties are relatively new compared to socialist parties-and their support of environmentalism, nonviolence, grass-root democracy, and social responsibility reflect ideas that started only in the '80s as a response to the problems that the increasing industrialization and globalization of the present world.

As for right-wing parties, what unites all cases at a national level is the quite surprising shift they have made towards advocating very different from what was previously considered "conservative." Recently, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France even claimed, "Laissez-faire capitalism is finished"-a line one might expect from a socialist leader during a time where the deregulated market economy is showing its weaknesses, but Sarkozy heads one of the biggest right-wing parties in Europe. In Italy, new economic policies are more in line with Sarkozy's philosophy than the ruling party's official conservative credo. The government's new self-proclaimed mission is to help those citizens worst affected by the financial crisis-and thus, as Minister of the Economy Giulio Tremonti put it, it is willing to be called left-winged "if being left-winged means being next to the poor people who suffer the crisis."

Why is the ideological answer of the left-which was, after all, "right all along"-insufficient? As Michele Salvati, the ideological co-founder of the Italian Democratic Party, argues, "The left has adapted to the economic system created by the right and by capitalism and lost its old specificity of being against this whole system." Thus, it is intrinsically difficult-though not impossible-for left parties to present a sufficiently strong ideological alternative to right wing parties on economical issues. Since "the left has been ‘capitalized', homogenizing to the market system in force," And when a crisis like the current one comes along, such adaptation that previously permitted left-wing parties to survive now restricts them to a turf on which they are at inherent disadvantage. The only way to survive as viable political players, then, is to continue to innovate upon capitalism and present alternatives to the failing status quo-which, this time around, the Socialist left has not done.

Given this passive adaptation of the left to the economic model shaped by free-market capitalism, it becomes clear that both the rise of the Greens at an European level and the successes of the right at a national level are due to the fact that they presented a new approach to the problems brought up by the crisis, promoting a change in their parties that led to a positive response in the electorate. In fact, Salvati admits that "the right has now the same credibility going against laissez-faire capitalism than the left has," so when Socialist and Social-Democratic parties tried to face this period of instability sticking even more to their traditional core values, ideas and policies, the outcome couldn't be but negative. Because their rhetoric remained focused upon the past and on the implications of the failure of capitalism rather than proactive prescriptions to fix it, the Socialists thus sabotaged their chance at political advantage.

And in a deeper sense, socialist parties that lost their progressive, innovative edge were also deprived of their original revolutionary mantle, so critical to their utility since their birth. The term "left" was coined during the French revolution to describe those who sat in the left part of the Parliament, who advocated a republic instead of monarchy, secularization in the Enlightenment's philosophical tradition, and a general resettling of class benefits and of wealth distribution. That single word, Left, represented the advocates of change against the status-quo: the aristocracy and the high hierarchies of the church. Within that tradition, socialism was deeply influenced by G.W. Hegel and Karl Marx, who saw history progressing through conflicts between Thesis-a status quo-and its Antithesis-or opposition. Through revolution, progress; from its very birth, Socialism very birth has been inseparably connected to the fact that the ideology of the Left should be an agent of change, of challenge and of new ideas against previous ones.

Given the role of socialist ideology in the past, it is particularly tragic that the Socialist parties of today have lost this role and acquired one which is its direct opposite: defending their past vision of the world without changing it through new ideas. As it is, right-wing parties are instead acting as the real promoters of change towards a new together with the new forces rising in the left. Unless Socialist parties strive to create a new a competing brand of ideas and reassert their true revolutionary, they will remain stuck on the wrong side of history-that of a narrow and conservative vision of politics.

After Woodstock

ga=cassandrathomson — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 19:43:00 +0000

Protest music for a new generation

The anniversary of Woodstock has come and gone, and with it scores of revitalized folk records and overused tie-dye designs. Many years have passed since the anti-Vietnam movement flooded the streets of America, and time has brought international conflict, economic downturns, and changes in the ideology of our political leaders. The question left in the wake of this anniversary is one that has gone relatively unnoticed in the post-Woodstock generation - where has all the protest music gone?

The radio, record stores, and even all-encompassing iTunes are missing the throngs of political protest music that used to hold such revolutionary impact. Of course, the fringe music still exists: loyal Kimya Dawson fans can still find anti-Iraq war messages in many of her songs, including "Loose Lips." And artists outside the mainstream, like Saul Williams or Le Tigre among countless others, can be relied upon for controversy to appeal to a narrow base of fans. Yet mainstream, far-reaching artists are noticeably quiet on political issues. This strange silence of political music cannot be attributed to a lack of subject matter; political controversy is still vibrant in the military, economic, and social arenas. What has happened to protest music? Does it only exist in the shadows, cowering away from most big-name records? Or has it changed forms completely, and will it ever come back? Though musical expression of politics post-1980s may seem to have decreased, the tradition of politics in music continues to flourish, albeit not in the same manner.

Where has all the music gone?

Of course, this is not to say that political music has completely disappeared. Examples of political protest music have been well advertised, whether in support of politicians, against political leaders, or discussing ideological standpoints of artists. Further, though most music takes a liberal stand, songs with a conservative twinge exist as well. George W. Bush's presidency was a catalyst for not only protest songs denouncing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (like the Beastie Boys' "In a World Gone Wrong") but also political music expressing patriotism and support (like Toby Keith's "Proud to be an American"). The presidential election of 2008 led to a flourishing of pro-Obama songs, including the Black Eyed Peas artist Will.i.am's "Yes We Can," which uses the Obama campaign slogan to stress his call for change. Yet few would argue that the activist tradition of John Lennon, Sting, and Jimi Hendrix lives: rarely are songs released into the mainstream today explicitly political; those that are receive high press coverage solely because they are so unusual.

Political art or political artists?

Indeed, the main contribution of the music industry to politics today is not through songs, but rather through the direct positions of recording artists. Musicians now leave their political beliefs out of the recording studio, and instead project them on stage. During Coldplay's recent concert tour, for example, lead vocalist Chris Martin made digs at Fox news anchor Bill O'Reilly in between belting nonpolitical hits like "Violet Hill" and "Viva la Vida." How things have changed: in the 1984 presidential election, Bruce Springsteen and his band explicitly refused to endorse Ronald Reagan's campaign, though their song "Born in the U.S.A." caused quite a pro-conservative fervor. The band had previously avoided explicit partisan stances or making their views public, but after contributing to a New York Times article in 2004, they became active supporters of John Kerry and Barack Obama. Countless other examples exist - the Dixie Chicks and Green Day, among others - who have lent their fame and time to support their political opinions rather than writing songs to incite political interest.

Dynamic Forms and Creators

What encouraged this shift of musician interests? It could be the shift of political expression towards other forms of media. The influence of the Internet has expanded enormously since the 1980s, and the impact of communication media cannot be ignored. With the prolific number of political blogs existing today, as well as websites dedicated to political awareness, political music is another aspect of the general frenzy for communicating individual political opinions. But artists today may find political expression too risky for their careers.
This may be why the number of amateur political artists continues to grow as mainstream musicians tone down their activism: almost 60,000 results for individual songs pertaining to politics can be found on YouTube alone, and this does not include scores of independent artists broadcasting from other sites. As it becomes easier for amateurs to communicate their ideas on an expansive level, so has the need for political music from mainstream artists diminished. Further, the independent amateur artists can proclaim partisan ideas with much less risk than mainstream artists: most do not have music as their sole source of livelihood, and thus are freer to express political opinions without fear of the consequences.
A Different Kind of Attitude

Nor can one ignore the shift in the tone of political music: parody, whether earnest or tongue-in-cheek, has evolved to become a form of protest outside of the proverbial music box. During the 2008 election, voters were barraged with political music videos of a political nature. Obama Girl's "I Got a Crush on Obama," with over fifteen million views on YouTube, and McCain Girl's "The Incredible McCain Girl" (three million views) exemplified some of the attempts to use humor and music for drawing support. Others, like "Whatever I Like" by Alphacat, parodied catchy songs in popular culture-and built entire reputations on playful Obama imitations.

But technology has affected protest music in more than just its distribution-the tools of creating music itself have changed. In"Two Minutes Fifty Seconds Silence for the USA," Matt Rogalsky used "a distillation of George W. Bush's address to the world on March 17, 2003, in which he gave Saddam Hussein forty eight hours to get out of town." Rogalsky used software to "remove [Bush's] voice from the thirteen-plus minute speech," leaving only thumping sounds to represent "the reverberations of Bush's voice inside the White House." Many have interpreted them to be the "drums of war" and thus have used the song as a symbol of protesting Bush and his connection to the Iraq War, but the ambiguous nature of the song makes assigning it to one narrow attitude impossible. With so many differing forms of musical communication for protest, there is no standard political song that rises above the rest to define the group; differing in genres, subjects, and forms of communication, there is no way to collectively define political protest music as collectively as in the past.

It's Not Protest, it's Social Commentary

Instead, the seeming lack of political music may be a problem of perception, and the definition must be rewritten to include more than the usual partisan or war topics. Perhaps today's political music should be considered to include artists like Jay Brannan, whose song "Housewife" considers the perspective of a gay man who wants to fit into the "wife" role and questions how others criticize this desire. Maybe we need to include Ani diFranco, who speaks of gay rights, feminism, and other women's issues, while John Rich protests the conditions confronting the working class under the impact of the economic crisis with his "Shuttin' Detroit Down." By moving away from the traditional subjects of political protest, artists of today are still commenting on the political climate, yet in a way more responsive to the social needs of a new generation.

It's All on You, Really

Music is a source of free expression, of individual emotion and declaration. But the transition of music from the individual artist to the populace involves communicating a greater sense, or emotion, that strikes a chord in both parties. The music that reaches, impacts, and resounds with the masses is what reflects the emotions held by the people at that time; this has been true through all ages of musical communication. Thus, it is fundamentally the fans, not the artists, which decide what music will be produced and will represent the greater society.

Artists with political music respond to the desires of the fans, whether that is stating the partisan opinions held by a group, or by reflecting the emotions experienced in a time of changing political culture. The fans effectively shape the artist and overall political music climate by deciding which songs to listen to, to highlight, which to pass on to their friends and family. In this new age, where political music is less frequent, appearing in interludes and from a variety of sources, perhaps the needs of the people are changing; perhaps the rise of societal commentary in addition to traditional political protest music is a reflection of the increasing desire for multi-issue based thinking, or of the increased diversity in thought and culture.

As Sanford Kwinter, renowned American architectural writer and theorist, said in an interview with Johan Bettum, it is important to look also at "the convergence of communications with the automation power of computing." "While we take these developments largely for granted today," he claims, "they remain the most powerful engine driving the transformation of contemporary social and economic life." Music may be a reflection of this idea. With a greater ability to communicate comes a greater need to represent a more diverse array of ideas, beliefs, and emotions. There is no standard anthem of musical protest today because there cannot be one. Though there are many songs that arise in popularity because they are evocative, powerful, and musically sophisticated, artists today cannot so easily articulate the needs of the people so universally.

Looking to the Future

Though it seems to have retreated to the shadows, protest music is still alive and well -- just not in the traditional sense. It flourishes through the expressions of social commentators like U2 and Belle & Sebastian, but finds outlets in the off-stage voices of artists as well. These songs can be ambiguous, accompanied by video, or in parody form, and yet still be political; there is no longer a clear definition as to political protest music, nor is there a single source of media for its expression. Whether or not the political declarations of artists are beneficial to society, the relevance of political music itself will not decrease. By encapsulating the emotions of societal commentary and partisan opinion, music is a form of artistic connection whose ability to translate reason into emotion cannot be replaced by any other means. Even without tie-dye shirts.

E Pluribus Pluribus

Max Novendstern — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 19:41:00 +0000

Public discourse in the age of the Internet

Republic.com 2.0
by Cass Sunstein
Princeton University Press, September 2009, $24.95, 272 pp.

Create Your Own Economy
by Tyler Cowen
Dutton Adult, July 2009, $25.95, 272 pp.

Cass Sunstein begins Republic.com 2.0 by asking his readers to imagine a world where their control over the media they consume is total."It is some time in the future," he writes. "Technology has greatly increased people's ability to ‘filter' what they want to read, see, and hear." His vision continues:

You are able to design your own newspapers and magazines. You can choose your own programming, with movies, game shows, sports, shopping and news of your choice... You need not come across topics and views that you have not sought out. Without any difficulty, you are able to see exactly what you want to see, no more and no less...

Of course, this world is already approximated today by the Internet. From the consumer's perspective, the Internet represents the fullest triumph yet of free, individual choice in the marketplace of ideas -- never before, we are so often reminded, have the barriers to getting information been so low, and the choices about where to get it so many. Sunstein's unsettling proposition in Republic.com 2.0 is that this choice might not necessarily be a good thing.

Consider the fact that every choice requires negation -- that every time you say "yes" to one option you are reflexively saying "no" to all the others; that the more choices we have the more stuff we end up having to reject. On the Internet, this is brought to its logical extreme: every time you choose to read one article, you are saying "no," implicitly, to the hundreds of thousands of others available only one click away. Choosing one site -- one blog, one review, one photo -- you reject the vast majority of human knowledge ever produced. It's a heady proposition, to be sure, and it seems to suggest that making choices well about what information we consume is one of our highest responsibilities as individuals. In an infinite marketplace, the individual is solely responsible for his own salvation. And in the infinite library of the Internet, the question of ignorance is not whether the information exists -- it does -- but whether we'll choose to access it. To Cass Sunstein, this is unsettling. Sunstein is a constitutional law professor who believes that individuals have obligations to their communities, and who also believes than a citizenry exposed to the right information is essential to the survival of a republic. To him, the very fact of having these choices about what information we consume means that we cannot, in fact, be prepared to make them well.

Sunstein makes two major arguments in his book. The first argument is a constitutional one: he claims that a republic needs a citizenry that is first, "exposed to materials that they would not have chosen in advance," and, second, "share a range of common experiences." This is the case, he argues, because a self-governing republic requires a citizenry committed to the process of deliberating on issues of public concern. Without their being exposed to a diverse amount of information, and without having a common basis on which to discourse, the very idea of a "sovereign people" begins to break down. Beyond its ability to satisfy our individual interests, Sunstein says, information exists as the glue that holds our republic together. Sunstein's key contention, then, is that free expression in a republic requires not just freedom but also responsibility -- that each citizen not only can but must access diverse information and deliberate on it critically and respectfully. The very act of flipping through a newspaper, then, is an exercise in civic virtue.

Sunstein's second argument is, in effect, that the Internet is undermining all of this. Because it allows us to filter out materials that we do not want to be exposed to, Sunstein argues, the web creates what he calls "personal information cocoons." As our ability to choose becomes greater, the number and precision of these personal information cocoons proliferates, until each person can live in his own little informational world customized to mirror all his prejudices. In this state, of course, people can't find common ground; they don't operate with the same facts. By avoiding material that unsettles their worldviews, they become radicalized and intolerant.

The problem with choice, for Sunstein, is that it runs contrary to our positive responsibilities as citizens in a republic. Choice isolates us. It dislocates us from the collective. And the problem with the Internet, for Sunstein, is that it is the ultimate choice machine. It's paradoxical, to be sure: the very diversity of information available leads directly to our insularity; its abundance leads to our ignorance. It's our freedom to choose that undermines systematically our freedom to self-govern.

Sunstein's argument is insightful, but only half-right. The fragmentation of our culture is a vitally important concern, and it's unequivocally real. Sociologists show that American community has been in decline for over fifty years. People are less connected to their fellow citizens; they are less likely to feel trust or affection toward their elected officials; and they are less likely to join organization and more likely to -- as famously put by sociologist Robert Putnam -- "bowl alone." Yet one wonders, can a trend that has been proceeding for nearly fifty years have anything to do with the Internet?

Consider this summer's healthcare debates. Few things in recent cultural memory have epitomized as clearly what it means to be "uncivic" in a self-governing republic. Numerous much-touted town hall meetings approached open violence. And rallies were filled with apoplectic, openly-racist sloganeering. It's easy to see in these events exactly the sort of fragmentation that Sunstein warns about: our culture fracturing into information cocoons, where lies like "death panels" gain wide currency; a citizenry that can't enter into a space of public discourse without, quite literally, bringing its guns; the impossibility of legislating in these conditions of self-government. All this was brought to bear as Sunstein predicted. Yet the Internet seems not to have been the cause at all. The causes of a radicalized right wing are many. They are sociological: questions of ethnicity, income, and religion all come into play. And there's a case to be made that there are relevant wider cultural phenomena as well: a general drift, pervasive in all aspects of American society, away from priority of community and civic virtue generally.

Yet whatever the causes of the splenetic right wing, the Internet is not among them. To paraphrase a review of the first addition of Sunstein's book: you could un-invent the Internet and you'd still have each and every picketer on the national mall with a swastika painted onto President Obama's forehead. If the Internet's to be blamed at all, then, it's for reflecting cultural predispositions, not creating them. The question we have to ask ourselves is not where the Internet went wrong -- but where did we?

Depending on your point of view, maybe even that judgment is premature. While Sunstein fears for the break down of the collective, there are some who openly embrace it. Fragmentation, they say, is another word for individualization, and individualism is the essence of freedom. In Create Your Own Economy, libertarian economist Tyler Cowen proceeds from just this perspective, and ends with conclusions stunning in their contrast to Sunstein's. Cowen hails the Internet on the exactly the grounds that Sunstein fears it: the power that it gives the individual to construct his own informational world. "The notion of ‘ordering information' may sound a little dry," Cowen writes, "but it is a joy in our everyday lives."

We are entering a world where the collection and ordering of information has reached baroque, extravagant extremes, and this is (mostly) good thing. It is a path toward many of the best rewards in life and a path toward creating our own economy and taking control of your own education and entertainment.

The "path to prosperity in a disordered world," as the subtitle of the book reads, is nothing less, Cowen says, than learning to actively create our own consciousness through the Internet. "At its core it is all about you," he writes. "Now, more than ever, you can assemble and manipulate bits of information from the outside world and relate them back to your personal concerns." Cowen takes this notion alarmingly far. About a third of the book is dedicated to reconceiving "autism" as a virtue in a world that demands consciousness-creating: "In essence we are using tools and capital goods-computers and the web-to replicate or mimic some of the information-absorbing, information-processing, and mental-ordering abilities of autistics." At another point, he tells the individual to step into Robert Nozick's "Experience Machine," saying that our problems are not an over-willingness to delude ourselves but an under-willingness. "Isn't our general tendency to clutch at the thought of reality just one more instance of the illusion that we are always in control? I say let's put down our polemic against living in our heads and let's put down our bias against interiority."

If we want to understand our own cultural fragmentation then we might be served well by reflecting not only on these arguments, but on the assumptions that underpin them. Cowen not only speaks about the positive effects of fragmentation; he also, in his way, symbolizes their cause. His entire argument depends on his readers accepting that individualism is the highest goal of freedom, and that the problem with our society is that we're not willing enough to work only for ourselves as we assemble the information around us. This idea, of course, is nothing new. Since at least the 19th century in America -- which witnessed the advent of the "Darwinian" rationale for industrial competition and the expansion of the frontier out west -- the myth of the self-creating individual has been a mainstay in our cultural discourse. And by all accounts, this myth has only gained in stature in the wake of the Reagan-Goldwater conservative movement. Cowen's argument is novel, then, because he applies the ideas of consumer sovereignty to the Internet space. His ideal of an "autistic mental type," who weaves stories for himself from the tidbits he glean from the blogs in his RSS reader, and of whom nothing is asked other than to "create his own economy" -- this is the cowboy individualist of the technological world. Cowen's book thus serves as a double indicator for the fragmentation of our culture: not only does he explain the fragmentation potentials of the Internet, he applauds them. Not only does his book tell us about the effects of the Internet on the fragmentation of our culture, but it also serves to symbolize the intellectual movement that seeks to sustain and legitimize that fragmentation.

Both of these books, then, are tracts of unlikely cultural warfare. The rift between them is between two notions of freedom and citizenship. Yet if both books are, in effect, cultural polemics, then neither of admits it. And thus both miss the point: this is not about the Internet. The question of what it means to be a free citizen in a republic cannot be contained in an analysis of a tool, no matter how powerful or catalyzing. The Internet, after all, is only a framework for gathering existing cultural assumptions and social values. Whether choices exist is not nearly as important as both Sunstein and Cowen believe; the real question is how as citizens we make these choices, what we feel our responsibilities are, and what we feel entitled to. In short: unless we as a culture re-adopt a vocabulary of civic virtuousness -- and can ask of ourselves to think less like consumers and more like citizens -- than it doesn't matter one bit whether it's from the Internet or the newspaper that we're getting out news.

In 1996, Jonathan Franzen published an essay in Harper's Magazine that captured this feeling of anomie: "Human existence," he wrote, "is defined by an Ache: the Ache of our not being, each of us, the center of the universe." Market capitalism, he argued, has thus been successful precisely because it compounded the delusion that we are, each of us, at the center of the universe. The problem with the Internet is that it takes this delusion one step forward. In his essay, Franzen wrote that the traditional role of reading was to help us overcome the limitations of ourselves: it forces us to experience other's thoughts; to enter into dialogue with another's consciousness; to deliberate on issues of public importance. The essence of reading, in some sense, is that we don't have a choice about the thoughts to which we are exposed, or about the nature of the cultural dialogue we enter. To the extent that the Internet places individual choice at the center of its paradigm, it undermines the traditional role that information plays in teaching us to think beyond ourselves. It reinforces the delusion that our own individual choice and our own immediate gratification are the central matters of a well-lived life.

Yet to say that the Internet created this delusion is disingenuous and wrong. The problem is deeper. The problem of the Internet, in fact, is that it is just one more tax -- like the car over the bus; like the suburb over the city; like the iPod over the concert hall -- on our abilities as citizens to relate to one another in a self-governing community. To blame the Internet alone is beside the point. It's like blaming the mirror for its reflection of ourselves.

Ghosts of Peace Prizes Past

ga=peterbacon — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 19:40:00 +0000

Obama would do well to learn from the post-Oslo experiences of two other Presidents

The Nobel Prize Committee's recent decision to award the Nobel Peace Prize to President Obama touched off a firestorm across the world. Reactions have ranged from rancor from much from the right wing for the supposed lack of justification, to delight from the American left and international supporters, to widespread confusion and amusement from those who simply didn't see it coming-including the President himself. In the debate between these camps, the Nobel precedents of two other Presidents have gained new significance. Too often, however, the press simply touches on how Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson "achieved" something to get their Prizes, without evaluation of what exactly Rough Riding Teddy and the dour academic Wilson did.

Teddy Roosevelt, one of the few Nobel Prize winners who can lay claim to having led a cavalry charge in a colonial war, won his peace prize for mediating a dispute between two other colonial powers. Between 1904 and 1905, he oversaw the writing of the Treaty of Portsmouth, a series of diplomatic discussions held in the New Hampshire seaside town. The Japanese had, during this time, done the unthinkable: a supposedly "inferior" Asian country had defeated-indeed, embarrassed-a white power. After their surprise attack on the Russians at Port Arthur and their wholesale annihilation of the Russian Baltic Fleet, which had sailed halfway around the world to meet them, the Japanese had pushed the Russians to the brink of collapse.

Teddy Roosevelt had originally cheered the Japanese victories: despite the racialist ideology of upper class America, the United States and the United Kingdom had cultivated closer ties with the Japanese Empire for much of the late 19th century. Specifically, the United States had hoped that Japanese expansion into Manchuria, the sight of the Russo-Japanese War, could counterbalance Russian designs on carving up the decaying Qing Empire. So Roosevelt watched silently with glee as Moscow's plans fell to ruin.
But by the beginning of the talks at Portsmouth, both the Japanese and Russians desperately wanted peace. The latter in particular had already faced military collapse and did not want more embarrassment against a non-white people, especially with a growing discontent in the Russian state that would eventually manifest itself in the December Revolution of 1905. But even the Japanese were having massive budgetary problems and did not want the war to drain the state's treasuries. Afraid that conflict would spill over into the rest of China and devastate the region, Roosevelt had his own reasons for supporting peace. His job in Portsmouth was therefore easy: to negotiate a peace between nations who had every reason to desire it. Winning his 1906 Nobel Peace Prize was, therefore, comparatively easy.

Woodrow Wilson's Nobel Peace Prize, in contrast, was won under considerable duress. The old, dour son of a preacher man from Virginia was perhaps one of America's most intelligent and idealistic Presidents. Woodrow Wilson's progressive internationalism led him to support American entry into World War I in order to "make the world safe for democracy," as he termed it to Congress. His "Fourteen Points," a series of idealistic foreign policy paradigms built around new liberal principles of foreign policy, including the creation of a new international body to arbitrate all disputes, the League of Nations, helped prompt the German Empire to begin its surrender in 1918. Eventually, America's participation in the Great War led him to help negotiate the Treaty of Versailles with the major Allied powers at its close. Wilson hoped to temper the demands of France and the United Kingdom, and with what seemed to be the full force of international public opinion behind him, he proposed a new world order based on international arbitration and egalitarianism in diplomacy. Like the Congress of Vienna a century before, Wilson hoped that this new world order would ensure stability and peace, making the Great War truly "the war to end all wars."

The trouble was, as it has been for President Obama in the past few weeks, American public opinion had turned significantly against the President and his internationalist efforts. Just as Obama's Nobel Prize brought him scorn instead of accolades, Wilson's win in 1919 came during a time of divisive political debate in America. The 1918 midterm elections had brought a significant number of Republican congressmen to the House and Senate who opposed Wilson's foreign policy goals. Led by Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, the Senate Republicans pilloried his treaty, objecting to supposed breaches of American sovereignty that it would entail. The disagreement between the Republicans and the obstinate idealist Wilson, who refused to compromise on any part of the Treaty, led its failure in Congress.

Obama could do well to learn from both his predecessors. Critically, the American people are perfectly fine with foreign policy that coheres with American objectives: no one in the United States objected to Roosevelt's Peace Prize. But Obama should also learn that a multilateralist agenda can lead to a political nightmare if not handled carefully. Obama's "post-partisan" politics, seemingly neglected throughout the beginning of his administration as the Democrats eschewed Republican input on major domestic policies, should not extend to the international front lest the Republicans launch a similar assault on him there-as they already seem to be prepared to do.

Ultimately, though, the President does not have much to worry about yet: unlike Wilson's, his Peace Prize wasn't awarded for committing wholeheartedly to multilateralist goals, but for taking tentative steps toward goals largely in line with U.S. interests-nuclear arms reduction, Middle Eastern peace, and dialogue with ‘rogue' nations. Still, he should be wary: if he goes too far, he could end up like another Ivy League academic, diplomat, and Democrat, who not quite a century ago gambled his reputation on his idealism and lost. A medal from a Norwegian committee could be but paltry compensation.

This is basically another Munich situation right here.

Alex Copulsky — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 13:41:00 +0000

Iran has backed down from a nuclear deal that would have significantly eased American tension with them. The deal was to send Iranian low-enriched uranium abroad to be enriched up to reactor-grade. While this first seems odd, the crucial point is that currently their uranium is in the form of uranium hexaflouride, a gas that can be endlessly enriched up to bomb-level purity. The uranium enriched abroad would be returned in the form of metal fuel rods, and impractically difficult for the Iranians to turn into bomb-grade material. Darn...it sounded like a good idea.

It seems as though there's little that can practically done to stop the Iranians from getting the Bomb if they want it badly enough. But for them to agree and then back out of this deal makes no sense, unless they just needed two weeks to put together a weapon. Which isn't the case, obviously, it seems like a stall for time that didn't put them in a stronger negotiating position and needlessly antagonized the Americans. So that was kind of bizarre. Bizarre or not, however, the Iranians are still rational and there seems to be no actual reason that Iranians with the Bomb couldn't be deterred just like the Soviets. Their principal adversary is a regional power with nuclear submarines and in all probability more nuclear weapons than China.

Given all that, I'm pretty sure the actual aggressor in the U.S.-Iran relationship is not the Iranians. They clearly don't like us, sure. But in Iran, I'm fairly sure that political discourse does not revolve around near-daily discussion of how and when to best attack the U.S. If I were the Iranian government, I'd damn well want a bomb, if only because it seems like America is willing to invade anywhere that looks as them funny, if they don't have nukes. And give actual nuclear states a wide berth.

What's in a Peace Prize

Alexander Sherbany — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 04:00:00 +0000

The prizefare theory, as enunciated by David Frum, says pacifist manipulation:

That Nobel was not a gesture of Obama-worship by left-leaning Norwegians. It was the very opposite: It was a pre-emptive strike against Obama, an attempt to neutralize him. How can a Peace Nobelist strike Iranian nuclear plants? Or wage a protracted war in Afghanistan? Or tell the Palestinians, “Sorry, that’s the best offer, take it or leave it”? The hope of course is that he cannot.

RealClearWorld's Kevin Sullivan dissents :

While that may have been the committee's intention, I don't know that their track record validates such a strategy. To my recollection, the 1906 award didn't alter President Roosevelt's strong-arm policy toward Nicaragua regarding the Panama Canal. Same goes for President Wilson.

Did the Nobel Prize change Kissinger? Not really. How about that champion of peace, Yasser Arafat? Enough said.

Really? A Kissinger or an Arafat may be immune to the Nobel's charms, but it's hard to imagine a committed liberal internationalist like Obama not feeling some obligation to "earn" the prize that he claimed he didn't deserve in his acceptance speech.

Update: Conservatives still grinning about it at the end of the day.

As funny as all the goofs today are, I feel some sympathy for him insofar as he didn’t campaign for this the way he did for the Olympics...The Nobel is more like a flaming bag of sh*t left on his doorstep: He didn’t ask for it but now he has to deal with it, and no matter what he does he ends up a bit soiled.

Yep, there is no way this could have helped him.

Except, of course, if he'd rejected it.

Barack Obama Wins Nobel Peace Prize

Alex Copulsky — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 12:18:00 +0000

I wasn't aware they graded on effort.

Strategy and Lord of the Rings

Alex Copulsky — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 19:50:00 +0000

It's a rainy afternoon, and so I'm watching The Two Towers, the second film in the Lord of the Rings series (Ed: I hated the books and didn't even finish, but those movies are great). Tolkien's politics are not my own, not so much because of their noxiousness as simply their anachronism. Regardless, the novels are rich in pretty interesting political implications, such as a close look at the difficulty of coalition-building among even well-intentioned partners. However, what really got me thinking was the battle of Helm's Deep, a supposedly impregnable fortress which is brought down by the placing of a bomb in a culvert, the sole weak point in the wall. The point is that the fortress was really quite well-built for the mission of "resisting swarms of armed orcs" but less well-built for the mission of "resisting explosions".

This is what I'm thinking about in the repeated trope that the U.S. needs to rebuild its military towards being able to win "small wars" like the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. This does make a certain amount of sense; a defeat-the-Soviets-in-the-Fulda-Gap military will be ill-suited towards a secure-the-Hindu-Kush mission. What worries me about an expensive makeover of the U.S. military is that it is premised on one of two assumptions: either Iraq and Afghanistan will last arbitrarily long, or that we will be invading and occupying enough other small Third World nations that we need to be prepared. Both of these are pretty troublesome assumptions.

In 1870, the French had an excellent army. Honed by years of fighting in Algeria, it was a highly professional and experienced counterinsurgency force much like what the U.S. army is envisioning. And when the shooting started on the Prussian frontier, they were absolutely destroyed. The point being that missions you're not prepared for are the devastating ones. It should require a fairly high expectation of future utility in order to totally rebuild the military for such a specialized role...right?

Georgian Reflections

Alex Copulsky — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 14:47:00 +0000

The EU has faulted both sides in the 2008 Russia-Georgia conflict for violations of international law. Russia, unsurprisingly, broke international law by its invasion of Georgia and its attacks on Georgian civilian infrastructure. Though if that's against international law, color me confused as to nations are supposed to fight wars and if any of them have ever done so. The real meat of the report is not, however, what Russia did wrong but the simple fact that was clear a while ago to anyone paying attention: Georgia started the war by its bombardment of Russian forces. Maybe John McCain feels a little silly for proclaiming that, "Today, we are all Georgians"...though probably not. The point here is not that Georgians are "to blame" for the war (although they are), but that the worst instincts of both American political parties were pushing America towards a conflict with Russia over something really, really stupid. And who says there's no such thing as bipartisanship?

Call it a more generalized corollary of the "Foreigners are weird" dictum: Foreigner's security strategies don't necessarily match up with our own. America sees NATO as a stabilizing force, and so is seeking to spread it eastwards. Russia sees NATO expansion as an attempt to intimidate Russia, and so is trying to dissuade the West. Georgia is threatened by Russian backing of internal insurgencies, and so sees American backing not as a failsafe, but a free hand to do whatever they feel like in Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Quelling secessionism is certainly Georgia's prerogative, just like the U.S. did in the Civil War, but I fail to see the compelling interest America has in the incorporation of Abkhazia into the Georgian commonwealth. Georgia was on the road to NATO membership, and the main reason the Georgian war was a localized tragedy rather than something much worse is that they hadn't made it yet.

Hopefully this report will convince American politicians that it's not a good idea to extend unconditional security guarantees to states that will not behave responsibly if they receive them. Of course it won't, any more than Matsu and Quemoy taught the same lesson to America 50 years ago. Here's hoping we go another 50 years without anything terrible happening because of it.