In his recent piece on Syria, Leon Wieselter of the left-of-Cneter New Republic writes that “Obama has exposed the timidity, the relinquishment of position, at the heart of the multilateralism fetish: when we cannot act with others, we will not act alone.”
Comparing the administration’s reaction to Syria to its reaction to the uprising last year in Libya, Wieseltier asks if the United States have a foreign policy:
Of course it does. It never doesn’t. But what is it, exactly? It cannot consist in the absurd peregrinations of Hillary Clinton’s plane. (According to the State Department’s website, where you can play “Where is the Secretary?,” the travel stats of the wandering icon as of this writing were these: Total Travel Time: 1,951 hours, or 81.3 days. Total Mileage: 897,951. Countries Visited: 110. Travel Days: 376.) Our foreign policy is doctrine-free, and maybe even concept-free. It seems to consist in a series of local and regional managerialisms, a lot of problem-solving in which not many problems are solved. It is thoroughly lacking in boldness and flair. I see mainly diffidence and drift.
Read the whole thing. “Even on the back burner,” the left-of-center pundit opines, “the world burns.”
Buzz off, Bitter Clingers! Obama’s got more important stuff to do than formulate a coherent foreign policy. Next up on the President’s busy schedule, an appearance with Whoopie Goldberg and “The Ladies” of The View. Priorities you racist reich wingers, priorities!
“Leon Wieselter of the left-of-Cneter New Republic writes … Read the whole thing.”
His Grief, and Ours
Paul Ryan’s … ideal of self-reliance.
Leon Wieseltier
This article appeared in the September 13, 2012 issue of the magazine
“It is no wonder that Ryan, and of course Romney, set out immediately to distort the president’s “you didn’t build that speech” in Roanoke, because in complicating the causes of economic achievement, and in giving a more correct picture of the conditions of entrepreneurial activity, Obama punctured the radical individualist mythology, the wild self-worship, at the heart of the conservative idea of capitalism. An honest reading of the speech shows that Romney and Ryan and their apologists are simply lying about it. ….
THE IDEAL of self-reliance in America has always been attended by a corollary of indifference to others, of nastiness. Even Emerson in his sublimity, or as a consequence of his sublimity, was not immune to this high strain of selfishness. … A direct line runs from this tantrum to John Galt’s proclamation in his ethical will (or rather his unethical will)”… Galt pseudo-prophetically thunders. “You have sacrificed wealth to need.”
Ryan, too, is moved more by wealth than by need. “They take more from society than they provide for themselves”: Who? The jobless? The aged? The sick? The desperately poor? Of course they take more, financially. They do not do so recreationally, or because they are nefarious wastrels cunningly exploiting a gullible government. They would rather be employed and young and healthy and secure. But have they, in their infirmities and their disadvantages, no legitimate claim on our conscience that justifies a sacrifice of wealth to need? Ryan’s philosophy represents the demonization of need and the diabolization of weakness. …
The problem for Ryan’s steely vision, of course, is that many people do need help, and they are usually not responsible for the circumstances that have driven them to seek help. … We may have extraordinary powers, as the fit and fiscal Ryan believes we do, but none of us—not even in private equity—are gods. We are all vulnerable. We are never sufficient unto ourselves. Who is more self-reliant, indeed, than a poor man, or a man without a job? Truly he has only himself on whom to rely. But a rich man has so many things done for him, because he pays for them to be done. Is that self-reliance, or is it expensive helplessness? And why is it not a stain of shame, or a “culture of dependency,” for a rich man, or his bank, to ask for help, and to be given it? …
““I swear—by my life and my love of it—that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.” That is how John Galt concludes his testament, which Paul Ryan demands that his staffers in Congress read. What a frail sense of self it is that feels so imperiled by the existence of others! This monadic ideal is not heroic, it is cowardly. It is also dangerous, because it honors only itself. In his Roadmap, the intellectual on the Republican ticket lectures that “the Founders saw [Adam] Smith not only as an economic thinker, but as a moral philosopher whose other great work was The Theory of Moral Sentiments.” … Has Ryan ever opened The Theory of Moral Sentiments? Has he ever read its very first sentence on its very first page? “How selfish soever man may be supposed,” Smith begins, “there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.” That is the least Galt-like, least Rand-like, least Ryan-like sentence ever written. And from there the conservatives’ deity launches into a profound analysis of “mutual sympathy.” So much for Ryan’s fiction of the isolato with a platinum card! If there is anything that Adam Smith stands for, it is the reconcilability of capitalism with fellow feeling, of market economics with social decency. But Ryan is a dismal student of Smith, because he likes his capitalism cruel.
Ryan is animated as much by a theory of government as by a theory of life; but his theory of government is erected in part on his theory of life. For government, limits; for the individual, no limits. A terrible fear of dependence has led him to a terrible exaggeration of independence. The self in Ryan’s self-reliance is a monster. I would not raise a child, let alone design a budget, on this stunted ideal. In a new book on child-rearing, I recently read this: “We tend to encourage self-reliance (a good trait), but resourcefulness is even better. Why? Because resourcefulness is the ability to both independently and optimally solve daily problems and to seek help from others when we can’t problem-solve independently.” It does not exactly sing, but it is exactly wise. We are not only a self-reliant nation, we are also a resourceful nation. But Paul Ryan’s plan for America would undo its magnificent inclination toward community, and leave us not only economically insolvent but also morally insolvent.”
thank you, Passing By, for showing just how devastating Wieseltier’s critique of Obama’s foreign policy is, given that it comes from a man with such a jaundiced view of one of the leading conservative voices in America.
“thank you”
An bhfuil Gaeilge agat?
Passing By: Isn’t it a violation of copyright to publish such a large portion of someone else’s words? This looks like more than fair use to me.