O.K. It's always a little intimidating getting into a tangle with Suzanne, not only because she knows volumes more than I do about anything and everything relating to international affairs, but also because she can write volumes more, and so my feeble response here will probably be crushed by an avalanche of devastating prose.
It's also a scorching hot day here in Richmond, where the heat waves off the sidewalks were visible at 9:00 a.m., and the elms were wilting. So the heat is on.
That said.
Here's my beef with Suzanne's last post, which responds to my previous one laying out six principles for a reinvigorated national security left.
Suzanne's points are all typically well-considered and thoughtful and nuanced.
But I think that in the case of thinking about the left and national security together, nuance is actually the last thing we need. We need to start with bold propositions and strong passions, and work our way down to the details, not vice versa.
Here's what I mean. The social scientists and rat-choice theorists have always talked a great deal about intensity of preferences as the independent variable driving the market. If my preferences are stronger -- if I want the widget 10 times more than you do -- I will put 10 times more effort into getting it, and I get to drive the market.
It concerns me that too many progressives lack intense affirmative preferences on national security generally. We're very good on negative preferences (like the Deaniacs' anger about the manner in which President Bush prosecuted the war in Iraq). But in an era where conviction has become the sine qua non of successful national politics, we doom ourselves to irrelevance by lacking emotional roots on the positive principles that could drive American foreign policy generationally.
My pet theory about 9/11 and the politics that followed is that that 9/11 was an emotional wound for the country, a gash in our collective psyche. Ever since, we have been looking for leaders with an emotional resonance, an affirmative provenance, large enough to fill the wound.
For all of his faults, George W. Bush and the team around him appeared to feel as deeply as my friends who were working on Wall Street when the Twin Towers were hit the wound of 9/11. His emotional response seemed proportionate to the injury, which helps explains why Americans have trusted his GWOT (rather than his GWOE), despite his mistakes.
Kerry was hammered for being a flip-flopper, but I think the real issue was not his sincerity (whether he believed) but his conviction (how much he believed) on matters of national security. I remember thinking during the debates that the only issue that truly seemed to come straight from his soul was his passion, ironically enough, about the perils of certainty. This is what he said in the September 30 debate:
"But this issue of certainty. It's one thing to be certain, but you can be certain and be wrong.
"It's another to be certain and be right, or to be certain and be moving in the right direction, or be certain about a principle and then learn new facts and take those new facts and put them to use in order to change and get your policy right.
"What I worry about with the president is that he's not acknowledging what's on the ground, he's not acknowledging the realities of North Korea, he's not acknowledging the truth of the science of stem-cell research or of global warming and other issues.
"And certainty sometimes can get you in trouble."
This hurts us in comparison with conservatives. Just look at the figures on the right who are defined by their conviction: Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, George Will, Pat Buchanan, John McCain, and, of course, George W. Bush and his hero, Ronald Reagan.
Now look at the left. What was most discomfiting about the Democratic response to President Bush's State of the Union was not the thoughtfulness or facts of Senator Reid and Congresswoman Pelosi -- these were fine. It was the relative colorlessness of their passion -- especially on national security.
This helps explain why Joe Biden is so head-and-shoulders above the field (and Hillary Clinton, not coincidentally the Senator from New York, a close second).
I think all of this may go back at least in part to the academy. Many of the left's political leaders have been schooled in an academy dominated by postmodern irony and the fetishes of deconstruction. Many have been so thoroughly inculcated with radical skepticism of any deep claims that we've kind of husked over our more profound sentiments about America.
That husk can be easily peeled away (just see the debate about Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo and our anguish about America's hard-earned moral reputation being tarnished). But as a general matter we default to a highly tempered, balanced equipoise -- to thoughtfulness, not as a key to unlock action, but as an end in itself.
So, I ask whether we have what it takes. What we learned in the 2004 election -- to our shock and chagrin -- was we won't win over the country just with better policies and positions, with superior statistics and by the President's self-delusion and self-destruction, and with more charismatic or experienced candidates.
We will win it because the public trusts our conviction.
So, given all of this: in response to Suzanne, and many of the responses I got to my original post, I throw back the following questions on my first three principles:
1) American exceptionalism: Do we really believe that America is unique, historically graced, and responsible for the world's greatest ideas? (When Suzanne writes, "We recognize that by claiming exceptionalism, we risk undercutting values and norms whose broad acceptance would advance U.S. national interests," I fear this is an exception that swallows the rule.)
2) The use of force: Are we truly comfortable with the fundamental proposition that great ideas are worth dying for, and that great injustices are worth suffering and pain to rebuke? (I think Suzanne's nuances here probably improve on my post -- she writes, "We are hard-headed about what force can and cannot accomplish, and we're committed to ensuring that force is used wisely in combination with other forms of power." -- but I still am concerned about what "wise use" ultimately means.)
3) American hegemony: Do we truly believe that America is great and good enough to be in a single leadership position over the world? Especially when China -- which would surely manage the world in a much different (and worse) fashion than us, looms? (Suzanne writes, "But we don't think even a hegemon (even one that has "earned" its status) can rule by fiat." But I believe this drains the concept of hegemony of its core value. In many cases, the ability and threat of fiat is what starts and pulls along cooperation, right?)
We've got to have conviction on these three ideas. The exceptions can't swallow the rules. Then we can get down to details and nuances, and to specifics on hard cases.
But we need to work on the big ideas first.