The American Conservative, in fine form today

There are times when I wonder if I should be worried that I am linking to so many stories on The American Conservative, but I can’t really help myself when the writing is this good and the arguments this right-headed (no pun intended). Daniel Larison is busy doing his noble work, to wit: the American equivalent of calmly and logically deflating wumao netizen conspiracy theorists, the conspiracy theorist du jour being Dr William Martel of Tufts University. Dr Larison’s arguments, of course, are fairly commonsensical for those of us who have studied both Russia and China - world powers which have their own economic and national security interests which do not always overlap. (Indeed, for all of our complaints about Chinese and Russian industrial espionage against the United States, they do not seem too averse to doing it to each other, particularly where military tech is concerned.) North Korea, Cuba and Iran are ludicrous additions to this supposed ‘axis’, as the only reason these nations do so much business with Russia and China is because, on account of sanctions, there is literally nowhere else to go. This is not an indictment of our economic policies toward them (well, maybe in Cuba’s and Iran’s cases it could be), but merely a statement of fact. The Chinese attitude toward North Korea nowadays is a notably ambivalent one, as many keen China-watchers have pointed out already. Likewise, these nations are not the sole bastions of ideological authoritarianism in the world: notable for their absence from Martel’s list are nations like Turkmenistan, Georgia, Albania (or its outpost of fundamentalist thugs in Kosovo), Azerbaijan, Saudi Arabia and practically all of the Gulf states. These nations are all amply authoritarian, yet are for all practical purposes aligned with the geopolitical agendas of many countries in what Dr Martel considers ‘the West’ (though this concept is also deconstructed adeptly by Dr Larison).

On a purely empirical basis, then, the ‘Authoritarian Axis’ model fails. Dr Larison does an excellent job of demonstrating this much. Going a bit further, though, one can readily see the appeal that the ‘Authoritarian Axis’ model would have for anyone seeking to create a normative space for a neoconservative policy agenda. Though Martel distances his model explicitly from the Bush-era ‘Axis of Evil’, it is noteworthy that he is actually broadening this category and turning it into an ideological one rather than one based on supposed threats to national security. Because it is now (rightly) rather passé to declare that the United States is under the immanent threat of attack (whether of the ‘smoking gun’ or the ‘ticking time-bomb’ varieties) from any of these countries, the neocons will be forced to adopt the language of existential threat, precisely as Dr Martel is doing here.

Another excellent article by author and former Congressional staffer Mike Lofgren on TAC concerns the way in which traditionalist conservatives ought to be questioning creeds such as vulgar Calvinism and Social Darwinism, and how they ought not to fear revolt from below but rather revolt from above, from an elite which are (to quote the Chinese pun) 和尚打傘--無發無天 ‘monks bearing umbrellas--without hair [law] and without Heaven’. This is an age where the working classes, having been denied it by a global order where capital is free to float about wherever its owners choose, desire stability most of all (for themselves, for their families and for their communities), and where the people who desire economic stability least are the ones in positions of power. As Mr Lofgren very aptly puts it:

If a morally acceptable American conservatism is ever to extricate itself from a pseudo-scientific inverted Marxist economic theory, it must grasp that order, tradition, and stability are not coterminous with an uncritical worship of the Almighty Dollar, nor with obeisance to the demands of the wealthy.

Great stuff. There is a lot of material on The American Conservative which can appeal to us lefties these days. Perhaps we should always have been taking this sort of thing seriously.