I am struck by the juxtaposition of two news items. First, it is being reported that Bob Gates is proposing $100 billion in defense cuts over the next five years, including the cancellation of the Marines’ Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle. Second it is being reported that China’s military modernization program is moving ahead faster than expected. In recent days, China has unveiled a new stealth fighter, the J-20, and a new ballistic missile that has been dubbed a “carrier killer” because it is designed to target U.S. aircraft carriers. China is also reportedly building its own aircraft carriers and taking other actions to beef up its arsenal.
Granted, China has a long way to go before it approaches parity with the U.S. — but then again, it doesn’t need parity. Much of our military spending goes to enable operations thousands of miles from home. China, by contrast, seems to lack global ambitions, at least for the moment. It is concerned with dominating its region. And that does not require that it match U.S. military capacity across the board. All it has to do is raise the cost to the U.S. of taking action to keep in check Chinese expansionism, whereas the U.S. must worry not only about the threat from China but also about North Korea, Iran, al-Qaeda, Somalia, Yemen, and myriad other concerns.
The cuts proposed by Secretary Gates do not seriously threaten America’s military position in the world. Heck, I’ve expressed my own skepticism about the utility of the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle. I am also not that alarmed about the cancellation of the F-22 or the pushing back of the Marine Corps’s vertical-takeoff version of the F-35; I think the Marine version of the F-35 could be canceled altogether, because the vertical takeoff and landing capability of the Harrier jump jet has so seldom been utilized in combat.
But I am concerned about talk of delaying or downsizing the overall F-35 program at a time when China and Russia are both fielding their own stealth fighters. More than that, I am worried that Gates’s cuts may be only the beginning of a drawdown that is happening even as we are still fighting a major war in Afghanistan. Already proposals are circulating — see, for instance, this Foreign Affairs article — for massive cutbacks, including the loss of hundreds of thousands of service personnel, that would eviscerate American power-projection capabilities. Alas, many in Congress, even some Republicans, appear to be open to deeper defense cuts.
I am all for addressing our runaway federal spending — but we won’t balance the budget on the back of the Defense Department. Not when defense spending is less than 20 percent of the budget and less than 5 percent of GDP. Getting our fiscal house in order requires cutting entitlement spending. Downsizing the military, by contrast, will contribute to future insecurity and turn out to be the most costly option in the long run. That is a lesson we should have learned in the past, many times over (as I argued in this op-ed).
“We live in an age in which pragmatism is hot and ideology is not.”
Oh, you mean inside the beltway of American politics … otherwise this statement is just ludicrous in the light of recent events, the Bombay massacres, for example.
Let’s not confuse ideals with ideology.
Many of our greatest conviction politicians have been non-ideological pragmatists: Adams, Alexander Hamilton, Lincoln, TR, Wilson, FDR and Ike both, JFK, Chief Justices Warren and Roberts both.
Neither George Marshall nor George Shultz was ideological; both were idealistic.
(Even Reagan was not nearly as ideological as we liberals like to make him out to be.)
“But for some of us, it is still conviction politicians who create the great appeal and great drama of American politics.”
It’s why Harry Truman is now considered a great president and why George W. Bush will be considered one: they had strong convictions, carried them forward and did not buckle in the face of overwhelming disapproval — all at the cost of their “legacy”, something modern Democrats are obsessed with (because, in the end, it’s all about THEM!).
It was all about Bill; It’s all about “Hillary”; It’s all about Barack. This is who Democrats are. It’s in their DNA. It’s why Obama is likely to fail and George W. succeeded. Liberals don’t like to do the heavy lifting: it requires not “being liked” which trumps “being right” to them. Again, in their DNA.
Seth Swirsky Says:
“It’s why Harry Truman is now considered a great president and why George W. Bush will be considered one: they had strong convictions, carried them forward and did not buckle in the face of overwhelming disapproval”
Truman buckled in the face of a war with China over Korea. W buckled in the face of Iran, North Korea & Bin Laden. W was full of conviction in attacking a country that folded immediately.
The following excerpt from Presidential Profiles: The Carter Years by Burton I. Kaufman carries some favor of Obama today -
Yet Carter was more frenetic than forthcoming,
and his campaign was more one of style
than of substance. As one political commentator
observed, Carter had “given heart, mind,
soul and smile to winning the presidency.”
But he never made clear for what ends and
to what purpose. Indeed, the new president’s
entire campaign for office had been dogged
with charges that he was “fuzzy” on the issues,
and few voters knew exactly what to expect
from a Carter administration except that the
new president would never lie to them, that
he would run an open administration, that his
foreign policy would reflect his commitment
to human rights, that he would reform and cut
the size of government, that he would make it
more responsive to the people, that he would
President Carter in the oval office, 1977 (Jimmy
Carter Library)
Introduction v
seek tax reform, and that he would take measures
to cut the nation’s high rate of unemployment
(running at a little more than 7 percent in
the summer of 1976).
On specifics of these programs or how he
would go about implementing them (for example,
how he promised to pay for the cost of
a national health insurance program or what
federal agencies he proposed to eliminate),
Carter remained silent. Because he also chose
to make the central issue of his campaign the
need for a spiritual reawakening on the part of
the American people, his campaign speeches
dealt far more with questions of national values
than with specific programs and policies.
Because Carter was unusually abstruse,
political commentators who, at the beginning
of Carter’s run for the presidency, used to ask
“Jimmy Who?” increasingly asked, “Jimmy
What?” Indeed, the only humor in an otherwise
humorless campaign had to do with the candidate’s
“fuzziness.” One story that circulated
in Washington had young Jimmy responding
when asked by his father whether he had
chopped down the family’s peach tree, “Well,
perhaps.” The historian C. Van Woodward
delighted at “Carter’s remarkable propensity
… for fusing contradictions and reconciling
opposites,” remarking that the result was an
“unusual assortment of unified ambiguities and
ambiguous unities.”
Not that I want to make comparisons with Carter and Obama. Oh, no.
One of the things that most struck me on first reading Hayek was precisely this point. The pragmatist–not having the conviction that the free market will almost always correct itstelf–is always inclined to action (don’t just stand there, do something!), which in the case of a president means governmental action. In the economic sphere, that translates into interference in the market, which is more likely to make things worse rather than better.
Dr. T Says:
December 2nd, 2008 at 12:36 PM
One of the things that most struck me on first reading Hayek was precisely this point. The pragmatist–not having the conviction that the free market will almost always correct itstelf–—
Two problems: “almost always” is kinda vague/and the time frame for “correction” may be long term/people need to eat,have shelter every day. If the time frame for a correction is months/years, you have to intervene as with food stamps,aid to dependent children,medicaid,all of which are interventions which Hayek might insist stretchs out the disturbance. What is more interesting is Hayek’s theories on the non-governmental causes of free market disturbances.
Again with the binary. The American people don’t pick ideologies during elections so much as they course correct to keep the country off the shoulder of the road.
Obama clearly has an ideology. He is a progressive, but he believes that the country needs less partisanship and more pragmatism. (Translation: He knows conservatives are screwups, he just doesn’t say so.) It is a matter of degree, not an either/or choice. You will see his ideology come to the fore on issues like helping those less fortunate, expanding diplomacy, imposing safety and environmental regulations, and making the tax system more progressive. So don’t lament the end of ideology! It’s premature.
Help the less fortunate: governmental assistance, not a path to independence.
Expand diplomacy: retreat from the war on terror, allow Iran a nuke, fail in Afghanistan, leave the Iraqis to the depredations of Syria and Iran.
Impose safety & environmental regulations: during the Bush years, the environment (especially air and water) have gotten considerably cleaner due to market-based incentives for companies to clean up, not because the Sierra Club can sue and sue and sue. Regulations don’t clean the air or make one safe, they put fines in place when there is a failure to do so. Is Obama going to change this success story of the Bush years?
Progressive taxes: more people on welfare, receiving government handouts, and less money available to companies and enterpreneurs to hire workers, innovate, or expand business? How does this improve the economy or the lives of those granted government largess at the expense of other citizens?
Enjoy the hope/change rush before reality intrudes and the changes produce undesirable outcomes.
“When pragmatism–an approach to politics that is characterized by centrist, moderate, deal-cutting instincts rather than a commitment to core political principles–becomes a defining political identity, it often leads to ad hoc policies. Decisions are made discretely, in an unrelated fashion, and are not put within a larger philosophical framework. ”
You seem to be conflating a philosophical framework with a strategic framework. These are two different things that have very different relationships with the notion of pragmatism. Take the issue of economic policy. Conservative ideologues believe that lower and flatter taxes are the key to economic growth. This is an economic philosophy. Pragmastists, however, would operate under the rubric of promoting sustainable economic growth, which is a strategy. This may include a combination of tax cuts, targeted public investment, and lower deficits or surpluses during expansionary periods (which may actually warrant tax increases). If the decision-makers involved understand the complexities of and are actively working toward the end-goal of sustainable growth, specific tactics will be at the service of the strategic framework and will not be “ad hoc” or “discrete” as the author suggests.
Mr. Wehner says that “it is still conviction politicians who create the…great drama of American politics.” This is probably quite true, and exactly why I’m delighted not to have one in the White House. Give me calm, competent government any day of the week; if I want drama, I’ll catch a movie.
Always have to chuckle at the rightwing references to Reagan as the almighty conservative ideologue, when Reagan was actually a pragmatist who raised taxes three times, supported amnesty, and cut-and-ran in Beiruit when things got crazy.
The last eight years are a perfect example of what can happen when ideologues try to govern instead of just doing what they are best at, cheapshot commentary from the fringes.
“Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Reagan–believed in a fighting faith.”
You haven’t read history correctly if you believe either of these three leaders wasn’t governed, at least in part, by pragmatism. Let’s just look at Reagan. Yes, he swept into office with an army of Friedmanites wearing Adam Smith ties, but one certainly couldn’t say he was a die-hard supply-sider to the end. In fact, after cutting taxes in the early 80s, he ushered in the largest tax increases since WWII during the mid-80s. It’s not that he stopped believing in lower taxes. He was simply forced to recognize that higher social security and defense outlays were leading to unsustainable deficits. In effect, he was forced to turn his back on supply-side philosophy in an effort to promote the worthwhile strategy of fiscal discipline. His positions on defense were also solidly pragramatic. The Cold War theologians of the previous generation held to a philosophy that the Soviet Union was an evil empire and had to be stopped at all costs. The problem with this philosophy was that it allowed for a narrow and undesirable set of end-game tactics. Reagan, however, put philosophy on the back-burner and instead committed himself to a strategy of ending the cold war peacefully. Ostensibly, this involved some rather hawkish tactics, such as ramping up military spending. It also involved full-scale negotiations at the highest level. These tactics had the effect of dismantling Soviet economic structure from within, while simultaneously opening Russia to outside influence.
Give Obama time. He will take the country far to the left. In his book he said the trick is to move at a pace that does not shock his opponents into action.
Does anyone get the impression far right conservatives have nothing to say. After calling him a socialist, communist, terrorist, marxist, naif, community organizer etc etc Obama has stepped up to the plate and in another flawless performance chosen a knock out team of competent left leaning Dems and Republicans to run his administration. Make no mistake about it they are going to shift the country to the left but they will do it competently. Faced with his big hitter team, the usual cool rhetoric to roll them out and gradually fill the vacuum left by a president who has clearly checked out, Wehner is now mounting an attack on pragmatism. I see Obama has approvals in the mid seventies and without anyone flying planes into any buildings. It’s a reflection of the desperate desire the country has for a return to competent government to get us out of this mess.
One needs to be mindful of what Obama himself has said in response to the criticism of his conventional choice of experienced, pragmatic Washington Insiders. To paraphrase: “They ask, where is the change? The answer, the change comes from ME, not from the people who are going to work for me.”
He chooses pragmatists because pragmatists will not have their own ideas which may collide with his own, and they will not second guess his ideological purity. They are primarily interested in their own fame, not in accomplishing any specific set of policy goals. They are the perfect picks for a progressive ideologue who is also worldly wise. They will do their best to work to bring about his vision, always with an eye to what can be actually be accomplished. And they will be loyal, because they have attached their most prized possession to this enterprise: their own names.
You still don’t get it. You really don’t. This article had promise in the idea that pragmaticism is okay but sometimes one has to take a stand for example like on slavery. Obama has principles but the day the day running of the country do not require hard core ideology. Bush and his administration let ideology blind them and left the middle or pragmatic view wide open. Obama will appoint centrists and assert his liberalism or fairness on certain issues – namely climate change, abortion, tax policy, a foreign policy that doesn’t make us look constantly like hipocrites. The solutions to the probelms in this country are pragmatic ones. But those who a blinded by ideology can’t understand this.
Pragmatists fit solutions to problems. Ideologues define problems to fit solutions. The ideologue in many cases has to define problems in a way that that does not fit with the truth. That does not matter since it is the solution that counts.
This is why the intelligence on Iraq had to be misinterpreted since the purpose was to find a reason to invade Iraq. Trickle down economics is a solution to the problem of how to advance the wealth of the highest earners.
Reagan had the courage of his _ideas_. Martin Anderson had Reagan reading Hayek and Friedman on inflation in the years immediately before his Presidency — and Reagan was turning those writings of into popular rhetoric in his radio broadcasts and newspaper columns.
Note well that the “rocket scientists” at the Council of Economic Advisers — Krugman and Summers — didn’t think it would work, predicting much higher inflation than Reagan and Volcker achieved. Of course, Krugman and Summers had never read Hayek. Reagan had.
“Ronald Reagan pursued a tight monetary policy and provided unyielding support for Paul Volcker, then head of the Federal Reserve, despite a nasty recession which saw the unemployment rate exceed 10 percent, Reagan’s approval rating stuck in the mid-30s, and substantial mid-term election losses in 1982. But these policies were vital to wringing inflation out of the system, and they began what was then the longest peacetime economic expansion in our history. A politician less committed to a set of economic principles would have given up in the face of the ferocious criticism President Reagan received.”
As Hayek points out, at the base of modern “liberalism” is a necessary rejection of principle and and embrace of constant “pragmatism” of the moment in defiance of established rules.
See Hayek’s lecture “Expedience or Principle”:
http://oll.libertyfund.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=499&Itemid=280
“President-elect Obama’s apparent pragmatism is certainly preferable to liberalism”
I think the Reagan-Volcker analogy is actually really wrong. Volcker was a Carter appointee that was still fundamentally Keynesian. Portraying allegience to him as anything but pragmatic is ridiculous.
There is the myth of Reagan, then there is the actual Reagan. The more we get removed from the 80′s the more delusional conservatives get about Reagan. Give up the ghost.
If ideology is no longer popular, then I challenge you to tell me how our incoming illuminati liberal leader who stated he was going “spread the wealth” and “immediately end the war” and “initiate universal health care” got elected.
Bravo. Well written.
I personally feel that we have not had a genuine leader at the helm of this nation since George H. W. Bush lost to Bill Clinton. Clinton was a morally inept egomaniac who governed by the poll result, fought wars (or didn’t) by the poll result, etc. We had eight years of this fellow capped off in my opinion by the world-altering gift of bestowing Most Favored Nation Trading Status to China, a communist nation that uses human life as grist for the money mill.
Next, we had George W. Bush. A likeable fellow who, as a political stunt, gave away a trillion dollar surplus just before the EXTREMELY lousy circumstances of September 11th and all that followed. I do not begrudge him the invasion of Iraq as much as I begrudge him giving that surplus away; if you were in the President’s chair post September 11th, you’d have had to make some nasty decisions too in this environment, I assure you. It was the “free money” nonsense that politicians espouse these days that really ticks me off about him (then AND now). Eight years of this, come and gone.
We had a chance to break free of this with John McCain, a crotchety old fellow who said what he meant and meant what he said. He would have been a great leader. He told the truth, and made a habit of it, a rarity in today’s political arena. Instead, we opted for the Pretty One who made a habit of lying to us (NAFTA revision, Not taking private financing, swearing he’ll pull right out of Iraq and then rehiring Secretary Gates, etc). This man gave the Secretary of State position, one of the most important positions in the entire WORLD mind you, to Hillary Rodham Clinton. He gave this position to her, the position of Secretary of State, as a POLITICAL move. This is pragmatism? This is INSANE!!!!
We’re really turning out to be a boat full of absolute idiots. Really.
Hayek on principles, expediency, ideology and experimentation (sourced just above). In the current age of FDR and Keynes worship, all of this is every the more worth reading:
“From the insight that the benefits of civilization rest on the use of more knowledge than can be used in any deliberately concerted effort, it follows that it is not in our power to build a desirable society by simply putting together the particular elements that by themselves appear desirable. Though probably all beneficial improvements must be piecemeal, if the separate steps are not guided by a body of coherent principles, the outcome is likely to be a suppression of individual freedom.
The reason for this is very simple though not generally understood. Since the value of freedom rests on the opportunities it provides for unforeseen and unpredictable actions, we will rarely know what we lose through a particular restriction of freedom. Any such restriction, any coercion other than the enforcement of general rules, will aim at the achievement of some foreseeable particular result, but what is prevented by it will usually not be known. The indirect effects of any interference with the market order will be near and clearly visible in most cases, while the more indirect and remote effects will mostly be unknown and will therefore be disregarded. We shall never be aware of all the costs of achieving particular results by such interference.
And so, when we decide each issue solely on what appears to be its individual merits, we always overestimate the advantages of central direction. Our choice will regularly appear to be one between a certain known and tangible gain and the mere probability of the prevention of some unknown beneficial action by unknown persons. If the choice between freedom and coercion is thus treated as a matter of expediency, freedom is bound to be sacrificed in almost every instance. As in the particular instance we hardly ever know what would be the consequences of allowing people to make their own choice, to make the decision in each instance depending only on the foreseeable particular results must lead to the progressive destruction of freedom. There are probably few restrictions on freedom which could not be justified on the ground that we do not know the particular loss it will cause.
That freedom can be preserved only if it is treated as a supreme principle which must not be sacrificed for particular advantages was fully understood by the leading liberal thinkers of the nineteenth century, one of whom (B. Constant) described liberalism as “the system of principles.” Such also is the burden of the warnings concerning “What is Seen and What is Not Seen in Political Economy” (F. Bastiat) and of the “pragmatism that contrary to intentions of its representatives inexorably leads to socialism” (C. Menger).
All these warnings were, however, thrown to the wind, and the progressive discarding of principles and the increasing determination during the last hundred years to proceed pragmatically is one of the most important innovations in social and economic policy. That we should foreswear all principles of “isms” in order to achieve greater mastery over our fate is even now proclaimed as the new wisdom of our age. Applying to each task the “social techniques” most appropriate to its solution, unfettered by any dogmatic belief, seems to some the only manner of proceeding worthy of a rational and scientific age. “Ideologies,” i.e., sets of principles, have become generally as unpopular as they have always been with aspiring dictators such as Napoleon or Karl Marx, the two men who gave the word its modern derogatory meaning.
If I am not mistaken this fashionable contempt for “ideology,” or for all general principles or “isms,” is a characteristic attitude of the disillusioned socialists who, because they have been forced by the inherent contradictions of their own ideology to discard it, have concluded that all ideologies must be erroneous and that in order to be rational one must do without one. But to be guided only, as they imagine it to be possible, by explicit particular purposes which one consciously accepts, and to reject all general values whose conduciveness to particular desirable results cannot be demonstrated (or to be guided only by what Max Weber called “purposive rationality”) is an impossibility. Though admittedly, ideology is something which cannot be “proved” (or demonstrated to be true), it may well be something whose widespread acceptance is the indispensible condition for most of the particular things we strive for.
Those self-styled modern “realists” have only contempt for the old-fashioned reminder that if one starts unsystematically to interfere with the spontaneous order of the market there is no practicable halting point, and that it is therefore necessary to choose between alternative systems. They are pleased to think that by proceeding experimentally and therefore “scientifically” they will succeed in fitting together in piecemeal fashion a desirable order by choosing for each particular desired result what science shows them to be the most appropriate means of achieving it.”