We’re all gonna die! Watch enough Fox News, listen to enough Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, or to what John McCain and Lindsey Graham are saying, or anyone on the right, and you know this is true. Ebola will kill us all – it’s far more contagious than the CDC is letting on. You can get it from sitting next to someone who knew someone who read about it, or who lived in Dallas, or who used to watch the old Dallas show, the one with Larry Hagman. He’s dead, isn’t he? Maybe you can get it from a random email message – those often carry viruses, as everyone knows – but it’s certainly going airborne (CNN) – unless it isn’t (scientists). Should we trust scientists? They’re the ones that say man-made global warming is screwing up the planet, badly, and we really ought to do something about that – we should stop burning so much oil and coal – but of the fifteen thousand or so peer-reviewed studies over the last decade or so at least three or four of those, the ones funded by the coal and oil industry, say that might not be so, maybe, so the jury is out. It could be that all the scientists in the world formed a giant secret conspiracy to destroy America, by taking away its sources of the power that keeps everything running. That might be what’s really going on, and it’s the same with Ebola:
In an interview with World Net Daily’s Paul Bremmer, conservative icon Phyllis Schlafly claimed that President Barack Obama is allowing people infected with Ebola to enter the United States in order to make the country more like Africa… The problem, Schlafly said, is that the president doesn’t believe in American exceptionalism.
“Obama doesn’t want America to believe that we’re exceptional. He wants us to be just like everybody else, and if Africa is suffering from Ebola, we ought to join the group and be suffering from it, too. That’s his attitude.”
Perhaps that’s what’s really going on. Obama won’t halt flights from Africa into the United States, or to be safe, close our airports to all international flights – someone from Africa could fly to London, then to Toronto or Tokyo, and then catch another plane to Dallas, or Cleveland. What about that? Obama wants us all to die. That explains why he’s having the CDC lie to us too. Obama is out to destroy the America we know and love – but then we will all die because God will turn is back on America, because we turn our back on Him. Years ago we made first-term abortions legal, saying women have a right to decide if that the best thing to do, and then Obamacare mandated that all qualifying health plans cover family planning, including birth control – which means women can get what Rush Limbaugh calls those “slut pills” – and now the Supreme Court has declined to review any of the recent lower-court decisions requiring states to recognize same-sex marriages in spite of any bans in place. The Supreme Court gave up – let gay folks marry each other – no one is going to die or anything. Let them have the right to do what everyone has the right to do – get married and settle down, for better or worse.
Most of the Republican Party gave up too. There’s no point in fighting this battle, not with more than half the country thinking gay marriage is no big deal, and thus thinking the Republican Party is full of jerks, but then there’s Mike Huckabee:
Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee said he would quit the Republican Party if it surrenders on gay marriage. In an interview, the possible Republican presidential candidate said he’s frustrated that party leaders are raising “the white flag of surrender” on the issue. …
“If the Republicans want to lose guys like me and a whole bunch of still God-fearing, Bible-believing people, go ahead,” he said. “And while you’re at it, go ahead and say abortion doesn’t matter, either – because at that point, you lose me. I’m gone. I’ll become an independent.”
God may smite us for our wickedness, and we’ll all die, but Mike will be safe – but even if Mike Huckabee, that mainstay on Fox News, with his own nightly show, is wrong, we’ll all be speaking Spanish. Everyone know those Mexican are pouring in, streaming across our southern border, taking our jobs and taking over. Obama refuses to build that flaming moat or declare war on Mexico, rolling the tanks into Juarez, and this is serious. It’s the perfect storm – the Islamic State collaborates with those drug cartels in Mexico to expand outside the drug trade, into human trafficking, and now terrorism, and at least ten ISIS fighters have been caught coming across the border in Texas, and all immigrant children are probably bringing Ebola across the border.
None of that seems to be true at all – no one caught any ISIS fighters coming across the border in Texas and as one sensible person put it – “The cartels are in the business to make money, and are not in the business of helping some wacko overseas Islamist group kill Americans, especially since those same wackos probably wouldn’t mind killing the drug dealers themselves.” There’s that, and Americans are their customers too. Don’t kill your customers. It’s bad for business. Even the big tobacco companies, after far too many wrongful-death suits, figured that out, eventually. Still people do extrapolate. Those ISIS folks are pretty nasty, and they could be poised to take over the world.
That has been discussed on Fox News:
Coming off of a takedown of President Barack Obama’s ISIS speech last week, Judge Jeanine Pirro opened her show Saturday night by slamming the president’s handling of ISIS and going as far as calling the Islamic extremist group America’s “single biggest threat in her 200-year history.”
The threat is even bigger than those America faced during World War I, World War II, and September 11th, Pirro clarified. She also predicted that ISIS will come to America, “if [they are] not already on American soil.”
We’re all gonna die:
“Everything I’ve been telling you for a month is accurate. You need to think September 11th, 2001. You need to remember what it felt like then. Don’t sit there and think that government has you covered. Hell, the White House itself and its perimeter were penetrated twice in the last 24 hours.”
Yeah, the Secret Service blew it, so one need only extrapolate:
“If our government were listening, our borders would be closed. If our government were listening, we’d be bombing ISIS nonstop. And if they were listening, our president would be following the advice of the military experts united on the issue of boots on the ground. But instead, our president thinks he knows more than the military experts, a disagreement highlighted this week and virtually unseen in American history. And if our government were listening, we would never have gotten out of Iraq the way we did.”
Yep, we’re all gonna die, and she doesn’t even mention ISIS’ secret powers. We spent eight years and billions of dollars building up and equipping and carefully training a new Iraqi army, from scratch, and when they faced a tiny group of ISIS fighters they threw down their arms and ran, except for those who turned in their weapons, and with the big stuff threw in the spare parts and user manuals, and then dug their own graves and lined up to be executed. How did ISIS do that? It must be magic. How do you fight that? We could send in two hundred thousand troops. We have cruise missiles and armed drones and fast planes that drop precision bombs. ISIS now has about thirty thousand fighters, mostly with small arms. We wouldn’t stand a chance. Do the extrapolation.
All of this is nonsense, of course, but such talk is in the air. Slate’s Fred Kaplan gets real:
The Syrian part of Obama’s anti-ISIS strategy was always a deferral. He seems not to have thought it through, perhaps because he didn’t think he’d have to. It would be hard, and take long, enough to “degrade and destroy” ISIS before he’d have to deal once more with Assad. He didn’t count on two factors. First, ISIS-in-Iraq and ISIS-in-Syria turn out to be inseparable; it’s hard to fight one without contending with the other. Second, America’s allies in the region – on whom Obama’s strategy depends – have interests that are at times at odds with American interests. This becomes a problem in coalition warfare. ISIS, in fact, gains much of its strength from the fact that the countries arrayed against it – which, together, could win in short order – can’t get their act together; they have too many conflicting interests tearing them apart.
Turkey’s ambivalence – even with ISIS controlling much their border with Syria – says it all, but Kaplan sees something more:
The international system, in which we all grew up, the system of the Cold War, has shattered, and nothing has taken its place. There are no real power centers. Nations, even small and medium-sized ones, are freer to pursue their own interests, which often collide with ours. Large nations have less leverage than they once did, and it’s harder to coerce or persuade other nations to put our interests above their own. Obama is in a tight position (and future presidents should take note, because they will be, too): He may have to succumb to mission creep – or slowly, carefully, creep away.
One thing leads to another. The international system, the system of the Cold War, did shatter. Nothing took its place, although we tried to replace it with a new American century. The struggle of our times, after Hitler and Tojo were gone, was the epic battle between consumer capitalism, with its assumption that only the individual matters and individual choice determines all good, and rigid communism, where the state determines what is good for everyone, generally, where the individual doesn’t matter a whole lot, as only the collective does. That’s what the Cold War was all about, and that would be an endless stalemate, forever.
It wasn’t. Communism collapsed. The Berlin Wall fell and then the Soviet Union just up and disappeared. The eternal struggle was over. That called for a reassessment, and Francis Fukuyama decided to write about “the end of history” in a 1989 essay that he turned into a book three years later – explaining the end of history as “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”
Everything was settled. The Cold War was over. Communism was dead – in fact, every other system of organizing human society for the greater good was dead too. The job now was to find a way to have everyone settle down and deal with the inevitable – everyone was going to be just like us. They might not like that but they’d eventually see the light, or we’d help them see the light – for their own good, because we’re nice guys and do have the only proven way to run things. That’s what was in the air. That was the premise of the whole neoconservative thing that eventually gave us eight years of war in Iraq and thirteen years of war in Afghanistan, after all the other reasons for those wars fell apart. We extrapolated. We could now see the inevitable sweep of history. Every nation would be a secular Jeffersonian democracy, with an economy based on consumer capitalism, where the individual is everything and the state does next to nothing at all.
Francis Fukuyama later decided to take it all back. History didn’t end – the players just changed – and Fukuyama admitted as much and went on to split with the crew who hadn’t figured that out. There would be no New American Century after all – sorry about that.
Don’t worry. He’s back. In the Literary Review, John Gray has a review of Francis Fukuyama’s latest book Political Order and Political Decay – all about what it takes to make democracy work, and Gray offers this:
Today, possibly somewhat chastened by events, he is no longer writing in such triumphalist terms. He recognizes that democracy is showing signs of decay, such as gridlock in Washington and the rise of extremist parties in Europe. Yet the prophet of the end of history has hardly changed his tune: though the tone is different, the message is essentially the same. A quarter of a century after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Fukuyama is as convinced as he was then that democracy is the only system of government that has a future. The West may not be as powerful as he once thought, but Western-style democracy remains the end point of modern development. …
For Fukuyama, as for many other modern thinkers, today and in the past, political development is an evolutionary process. What drives this process is never specified; if there is a social equivalent of the natural selection of genetic mutations, we learn no more about its workings from Fukuyama than we did from Karl Marx or Herbert Spencer, who produced similar speculations in the 19th century. It is never explained why political evolution should have any particular end state, nor why the process should involve the convergence of institutions. As it operates among species, evolution shows no such tendency. Drift and diversity, punctuated by extinction, are the normal state of affairs. Why should evolution in society – if there is such a thing – be any different?
The answer, of course, is that Fukuyama takes for granted that the end point of political development is the system of government he prefers. As he puts it here, the problem that most of the world faces is ‘getting to Denmark’ – where ‘Denmark’ means not the actual country but ‘an imagined society that is prosperous, democratic, secure, and well governed, and experiences low levels of corruption’. He sees many of the humanitarian and military interventions of Western governments as bungling attempts to promote this imaginary society: ‘The international community would like to turn Afghanistan, Somalia, Libya, and Haiti into idealized places like “Denmark,” but it doesn’t have the slightest idea of how to bring this about.’ Oddly, Fukuyama omits Iraq from his list of Western failures. The reason for all of these fiascos, however, is clear: ‘We don’t understand how Denmark itself came to be Denmark and therefore don’t comprehend the complexity and difficulty of political development.’
Sometimes extrapolation is impossible:
One of the merits of this ambitious and wide-ranging book is that it recognizes the daunting difficulties of creating an effective state – democracy’s most essential precondition. ‘Before a state can be constrained by either law or democracy’, Fukuyama writes, ‘it needs to exist. This means, in the first instance, the establishment of a centralized executive and a bureaucracy.’ Much of the book is a catalogue of the vicissitudes of state-building, and Fukuyama recounts in impressive detail the disparate results in countries such as Prussia, Italy and the United States. Part of the book is given over to examining semi-failed states, with an instructive chapter devoted to Nigeria. Here Fukuyama’s analysis is incisive: ‘Lack of democracy is not the core of the country’s problems.’ What Nigeria lacks is ‘a strong, modern, and capable state … The Nigerian state is weak not only in technical capacity and its ability to enforce laws impersonally and transparently. It is also weak in a moral sense: it has a deficit of legitimacy.’
George Bush listened to Dick Cheney and the neoconservatives, who listened to Fukuyama back in 1989, and decided that “spreading democracy” was the answer to everything. That was an extrapolation from the fall of communism and it was dead wrong:
In some ways Political Order and Political Decay may be Fukuyama’s most impressive work to date. The upshot of his argument is that functioning democracy is impossible wherever an effective modern state is lacking. Since fractured and failed states are embedded in many parts of the world, the unavoidable implication is that hundreds of millions or billions of people will live without democracy for the foreseeable future. It’s a conclusion that anyone who thinks realistically is bound to accept. It’s also a view that runs counter to nearly all currents of prevailing opinion.
Of course it does. Fukuyama is not Judge Jeanine Pirro on Fox News, and Andrew Sullivan is a fan:
His sanity continues with his opposition to the current intervention in Syria and Iraq to do again what we tried to do last time, i.e. to defeat a Sunni insurgency on behalf of a hapless and largely useless Shiite government in Baghdad. It’s such a mug’s game you have to have the judgment of the man who picked Sarah Palin as a vice-presidential nominee to endorse it.
Unlike so many in our political elites, Fukuyama has also had the wisdom to reassess the question of Jihadist terrorism after 9/11 and come to a different conclusion than the hysterics in the media and the political opportunists in Washington.
Sullivan then cites a new profile of Fukuyama in the New Statesman:
“There was a really serious question: is this the wave of something generally new and important in world history, or was this just a really lucky blow they got in?” Fortunately for his academic consistency, he concluded it was the latter. “These are really marginal people who survive in countries where you don’t have strong states . . . Their ability to take over and run a serious country that can master technology and stay at the forefront of great-power politics is almost zero,” he says now.
Sullivan:
As ISIS threatens Baghdad and the war-machine and neocons go into high gear demanding a full scale re-invasion, that’s worth keeping in mind.
And there’s this from the profile:
When I suggest that half-hearted interference is likely to prolong conflict in the region, he comes close to agreeing with me. The wars engulfing the Middle East are essentially a Sunni-Shia war, he says, that “could go on as long as the Thirty Years War in Europe”, which raged between 1618 and 1648. “Under those circumstances, I think it’s a little hard to figure out how American power is going to settle that conflict. I don’t think we’ve got the wisdom to actually see our way towards a political settlement.”
Does he believe that the rise of Isis might have been avoided if the US had intervened militarily earlier on in the Syrian conflict? It is possible, but unlikely, he concludes. “The one thing that both the Iraq and Afghan wars should have taught us is that, even with a very heavy input in boots on the ground, and nation-building, and the trillions of resources poured into these countries, our ability to bring about a specific political result like democracy, or even basic stability, is very limited.”
Sullivan:
This is fundamentally a reality-based conservative position. Do not let the fanatics on the right persuade you otherwise. The neo in neoconservatism stands for war – always war. It is close to an end in itself.
Back in February, Sullivan has said this of the Iraq war:
I saw that war as an almost text-book refutation of the logic behind US intervention in this century. The Iraqis were not the equivalent of Poles in 1989. They were deeply conflicted about US intervention and Western liberalism and came to despise the occupying power. The US was not the exemplar of liberal democracy that it was in the Cold War. It was a belligerent state, initiating Israel-style pre-emptive wars, and using torture as its primary intelligence-gathering weapon. Its military did not defeat an enemy without firing a shot, as with the end-game of the Soviet Union; it failed to defeat an enemy while unloading every piece of military “shock and awe” upon it. A paradigm was shattered for me – and shattered by plain reality. A realist is a neocon mugged by history.
There was another way to see the Cold War:
For me, the end of the Cold War was a blessed permission to return to “normal”. And “normal” meant a defense of national interests and no countervailing ideological crusade of the kind the Communist world demanded. In time, it seems to me that the basic and intuitive foreign policy for the US would return to what it had been before the global ideological warfare against totalitarianism from the 1940s to the 1980s. The US would become again an engaged ally, a protector of global peace, but would return to the blessed state of existing between two vast oceans and two friendly neighbors. The idea of global hegemony – so alien to the vision of the Founders – would not appeal for long, at least outside the Jacksonian South. As Islamist terror traumatized us on 9/11, however, I reverted almost reflexively to the Cold War mindset – as did large numbers of Americans. It was the rubric we understood; and defining Islamism as the new totalitarianism helped dispel what then appeared as the delusions of the 1990s, when peace and prosperity seemed to indicate an “end of history”, in Fukuyama’s grossly misunderstood and still brilliantly incisive essay.
From the perspective of 2014, however, the delusions seem to have been far more profound in the first decade of the 21st Century than in the last decade of the 20th. The conflation of Islamism with Communism was far too glib – not least because the former was clearly a reactionary response to modernity, while the latter claimed to be modernity’s logical future; and the latter commanded a vast military machine, while the former had a bunch of religious nutcases with box-cutters. And the attempt to use neo-colonial military force to fight Islamism was clearly doomed to produce yet more Islamists – as the Iraq and Afghanistan interventions proved definitively. More to the point, Americans now understand this in ways that many in the elite don’t.
And now they’ve forgotten that again. We’re all gonna die!
Of course we are. No one gets outta here alive. But there’s no point in making things worse, by making things up. The world isn’t coming to an end, or it always is, and never does. There’s not much you can extrapolate from that.