"When philosophy paints its gray on gray, then has a form of life grown old, and with gray on gray it cannot be rejuvenated, but only known; the Owl of Minerva first takes flight with twilight closing in." - G.W.F. Hegel, "Preface," Philosophy of Right
Andrew Bacevich can safely be called a fundamental critic of American politics and foreign policy. He’s also a historian and currently the head of the Quincy Institute, which promotes a realist and peace-oriented US foreign policy. His latest book, The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory (2020) continues the tradition of sharp and critical analysis he is known for providing.
The Age of Illusions is an attempt to articulate a coherent metanarrative for US politics and foreign policy since 1989. Such metanarratives are very difficult to construct in a meaningful and substantive way. But Bacevich succeeds in articulating one that provides a useful point of reference to think about how well major events like wars and Presidential elections may or may not conform to it. In brief, he argues that the kind of free-market economic neoliberalism combined with a very interventionist foreign policy and a sometimes dubious vulgar-materialist/libertarian cultural ethos have worked out badly for most Americans and that current American politics is a symptomatic manifestation of that failure.
Bacevich is very impressed with Reinhold Niebuhr’s brand of Christian foreign policy realism. He even brought out a new edition of Niebuhr’s 1952 The Irony of American History. Bacevich does not appear to be particularly fond of Hegelian thought. He criticizes Francis Fukuyama’s (in)famous End of History notion, which was at least a Hegel-tinted concept. But for a Niebuhrian like Bacevich, indulging in the kind of Enlightenment faith in progress in which Hegel shared would always something to be regarded with caution. Fukuyama in his famous essay took the (approaching) end of the Cold War as the “triumph of the West, of the Western idea” and “an unabashed victory of economic and political liberalism.” (The End of History? The National Interest Summer 1989)
For someone with an Augustinian regard for fallen human nature, Fukuyama’s vision sounds like a serious case of hubris, which another major strand of Western thought regards as inevitably producing future falls. Heraclitus is quoted as saying that hubris needs putting out even more than a house on fire. (The sourcing of Heraclitus quotes is always a bit dicey, but it’s a notion credited to him.) Bacevich finds the value of Fukuyama’s essay in that it “belongs in the category of writings that capture something essential about the moment in which they appear, while simultaneously shaping expectations about what lies ahead.”
Bacevich’s narrative of the post-1989 world and particularly the US role in it is a story of hubris yielding its tragic and fiery results. And while he may be wary of Hegelianism, he has a strong appreciation for contradictions as a normal part of history and politics.
From Boone City to the Emerald City
He employs two literary/cinematic cities as major metaphors for two American eras: Boone City from the film The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) for the Cold War, which in his narrative basically refers to 1945-89 ; and, the Emerald City of The Wizard of Oz for the 1989-2016 period.
“In the Middle America represented by Boone City, freedom isn't gaudy. It does not put on airs or bridle against received norms. Freedom imparts direction and confers purpose,” he writes. It was a vision that emphasized a classic form of negative liberty. “’Freedom from’ takes precedence over ‘freedom to.’ Almost of necessity, access to this unpretentious Eden is therefore limited, with women allowed only auxiliary membership and people of color all but excluded.” An optimistic version of freedom for white men, in other words, with extreme inequality for women and especially for African-Americans, the largest minority in the world of “Boone City”.
Bacevich is mostly focused on the foreign policy of the two eras. He reviews the establishment of the Cold War foreign policy that largely remained focused on the idea of “containment” of the Soviet Union, although a more militarized and ideological version of it than envisioned by its originator, George Kennan. As Bacevich observes, “Kennan himself, appalled by the nuclear arms race and U.S. interventionism in places like Vietnam, was to disavow his own handiwork.” We might add that before his passing in 2005, Kennan was also calling attention to the enormity of the environmental problems the world was (and still is!) facing.
The bulk of the book is devoted to the rise, flourishing, and failure of the subsequent post-Cold War paradigm, the “Emerald City”. The new concept that emerged from “1989” he frames this way, “The United States was exiting a very dark and dangerous forest. The way ahead glittered and gleamed. And the road leading to a global Emerald City appeared smooth, well paved, and clearly marked.”
He identifies four key markers for the Emerald City era as: globalization, more particularly the neoliberal, free-market, Washington Consensus, corporate-deregulation-“trade”-treaty version celebrated in caricatured fashion by Thomas Friedman; the global dominance of the US in which America would defend its position of the overwhelmingly dominant hyperpower of the world against the rise of any possible “peer competitor”, as the foreign policy jargon described it, a condition Bacevich also describes as militarized global leadership by the US; a significant expansion of personal, private freedom in which “freedom, empowerment, and choice became all but interchangeable terms”; and, a continuing expansion and exaltation of Presidential power in which If anything, “the presidency became yet bigger and grander, overshadowing every other aspect of American politics.”
Part 1: From Boone City to the Emerald City
Part 2: The Emerald City Presidencies
Part 3: Bacevich’s political perspective
Part 4: The way forward – and what to do about the “deplorables”
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