The Enlightened Despot

First they took the joy out of disliking the French. Now, it seems, Dick Cheney fans have made me into a leftist. Commenter Dan challenges me:

It would be interesting to hear you mention, if not discuss, your crazy right-wing views. Your common ground with lefty intellectuals, which you mention above, is much more apparent in many of your posts. Getting a sense of where you differ would help put things in perspective.

It’s true, much of what I feel the need to write about these days is more in tune with the left than the right, but I have been considered a right-wing extremist by most of the people around me for most of my life, and my views haven’t changed all that much. In the most abbreviated manner possible, here’s why I think I still deserve my conservative card:

• Many people all over the political spectrum think that it is absurd that someone can be old enough to die for his country, but not old enough to drink alchohol. I agree, but I think this understates the problem: an eighteen year-old is also old enough to chose whether or not to wear a seatbelt while driving with an AK-47 across his lap to the corner store to pick up a few crack rocks to pay the hookers at his favorite local casino.
• Some of the activities described above might be hazardous to the practitioner’s health. I don’t think this constitutes even a prima facie case for making them illegal. It is, however, a serious problem for nationalized healthcare, because creating a fiscal obligation for the government to care about how its citizens treat themselves is a very, very bad thing.
• As I’ve said before, the facts that we don’t have anything like a free market in healthcare, that there is no serious movement to create one, and that the current system is a fiscal disaster constitute sufficient reason to embrace a reform along the lines envisioned by Democrats. But that doesn’t change the fact that I deem the notion that the wealthy shouldn’t be able to pay for better healthcare than is available to the rest of the population to be thoroughly evil. I also think absolutely everyone stands to suffer from the (very popular) impulse to reduce profit margins for the pharmeceuticals industry.
• As delighted as I am by Barack Obama’s victory, I am constantly depressed by reminders that he wants Supreme Court justices “who [understand] justice is not just about some abstract legal theory, but about how laws affect Americans’ daily lives.” I’m not sure what justice is, but if it has to do with Americans’ daily lives, the SCOTUS shouldn’t have anything to do with it. The rule of law would be a much more serious force in the world if we had judges who had never met any Americans and didn’t know anything about their daily lives. Sadly, the fields of linguistics and artificial intelligence are not yet advanced enough to do away with these people altogether, but I wish they were.
• I recognize that if people took the Constitution seriously, there would be a lot of changes to the law of which I wouldn’t approve, and I have no problem with that. On the other hand, even on the issues over which I agree with the left, I wouldn’t really share their pain. Laws against abortion are a bad, bad thing, but thankfully I like federalism every bit as much as I like the Constitution - that is, as much as Republicans pretend to. If Constitutional law were a serious enterprise, Kansas would be allowed to ban abortions, which is too bad, but not all that much worse than the fact that Iran doesn’t allow them.
• It seems fairly clear to me that the recent spike in inequality in the US is in part due to legal and regulatory failings that benefit the wealthy, and that should be addressed. But inequality, in and of itself, doesn’t keep me up at night.
• I hate to see people slaughtered in Darfur or Rwanda as much as the next guy, but I’m not convinced that using military force for purely humanitarian reasons is ever such a hot idea.
• I don’t even know who Terry McAuliffe is running against, because I find his continued existing too depressing to think about for more than a few minutes at a time. Assuming it isn’t David Duke, I would vote for whomever it is if I were a Virginian.
• Worries about the environmental and labor policies of third world countries are nothing but window-dressing for protectionism to curry favor with labor unions. Sweat shops don’t say much for the moral compasses of the people who operate them, but on the whole, they are a good thing for the countries in which they operate, and for the people who get to work in them. That is, after all, how they recruit workers. Furthermore, pretending that farmers are so awesomely American that we should pay them for their trouble is not just stupid, it’s evil.
• I do not believe in a supreme being, but I suppose I must believe in hell, because I am absolutely certain that there is a special place in it reserved for the folks who have inflicted upon the owners of bars and restaurants in major American cities the requirement that they ban smoking and transfats

There’s more, but I hope this is sufficient. I don’t approve of torture and I don’t hate gay people or science. I realize those are all deep red sentiments these days, but I suspect it won’t be more than a decade or so before the Republicans once again strike me as the less loathesome party.

… is now trying to rehabilitate democracy-promotion from its Bush-era taint:

“Democracy fatigue” might be an understandable reaction to the Bush administration. Yet turning away from freedom as a touchstone of our national security policy–especially today–would be dangerous. The neocons in the Bush administration focused primarily on structural elements such as elections in their attempts to support democracy, including in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Gaza Strip. Instead, we ought to make the cultivation of constitutionalism–a vibrant, anti-authoritarian civic culture that acts as a sort of self-sustaining bulwark against instability–a primary goal of a post-Bush foreign policy.

…

In the years ahead, we’re going to need to work directly with peoples, rather than just leaders and institutions. We will need to view a successful liberal order in a country as a product of culture and values, not just political structures like elections. And we’ll have to accept that there are certain areas–such as the Gaza Strip, where the terrorist group Hamas won elections in 2006–where constitutionalism is a more important end than short-term “democratic” outcomes that perversely end up damaging freedom in the world.

Wouldn’t want to condemn the whole Idealist foreign policy program based on the strength of a single half-century of slip-ups. We’ll get the details sorted out one of these days.