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It’s supposed to be the time of year for joy and merriment, but I’ve seen a few things lately that bother me about the immediate course of the country. Most of those concern foreign policy, that necessary evil Americans aren’t very good at, even with all the years of travel and media coverage. (I think the media coverage is part of the problem, but I digress…)

What I specifically have in mind are the drumbeats of war about Vladimir Putin and the Russians. I’ve heard endless bawling about how he is the new Adolf Hitler and the Russian Federation the new Nazi Germany and, if we don’t “do something” about him, he’ll go on and conquer the world.  I’m sure that some Boomers, whose lives were dominated by the Cold War but who were too late to the party to end it, feel a tingle up their legs at the whole idea of reviving the ethic of that era.

It’s a lot of rubbish.

Back in 2008 I wrote a piece entitled Why I Wouldn’t Obsess Over the Russians. In that piece I noted the following:

It’s fair to say that the current regime in Moscow is looking for yet another buffer, having lost not only the Warsaw Pact countries but also the other republics of the old Soviet Union. From a strategic standpoint the touchiest of those is the Ukraine. Invading Georgia is one sure way of sending a message to the Ukrainians not to welcome NATO with open arms, which the Russians would interpret as a stab into their heartland (and a look at the map would confirm this.) Wisdom for the Americans would dictate that we, while certainly securing a position in places like Poland (maybe, I’ll take that up later,) should not push too hard in places like Georgia or Ukraine. If we corner the Russians, they have no where else to come out but straight at us, and that’s not a pleasant thought for a country with a large arsenal of nuclear weapons–especially if some of them end up in Cuba.

But I also noted this:

…it’s hard to think of a nation which is more blessed than Russia with sheer territory and natural resources and yet never seems to take full advantage of it. Russia had a golden opportunity to shed its authoritarian past and adopt a working economy and state, yet squandered it in a fashion worthy of the Middle East, first in the “Mafia” years of Boris Yeltsin and then those of Vladimir Putin when the power of organised crime was centralised in the state. The main reason why the Soviet Union lost the cold war was that it never developed a viable economy to match its military arsenal, and both Russian and American history show that, if you want to be a sustaining world power, you have to have both.

Or put more humorously:

 In the early 1970’s, when the Brezhnev era seemed most full of promise, an elderly Frenchman travelled from Moscow to Khabarovsk on the Trans-Siberian railway.  After only a few hours at the eastern end of the line he boarded the train again for the long journey back to Moscow.  The Frenchman watched life through the windows of the train, commenting on what he saw to his wife and anyone else who would listen.  The sights, as he saw them a second time, seemed even more fascinating and puzzling; and as the train passed yet another straggling town he took off his spectacles and addressed the carriage.  ‘There are only two words in the English language to describe this country.  One is mesee and the other is sloppee.’ (Mark Frankland, The sixth continent: Russia and the making of Mikhail Gorbachov, p. 46)

Russia is, to use their own expression, a very specific country, one which people in the West (to say nothing of Americans) have always found mystifying. The simple fact of the matter is that most of what we are seeing Putin doing is basically defensive posturing wrapped up in Russian nationalism. Putin is playing from a weak hand and he knows it; his adventures are nibbling about the edges and not swallowing up vast territories.  I think that Angela Merkel understands this but whether her counterparts in Washington do is another matter.

Rather than being another Hitler, Putin is an outsized Mussolini.  Russia is no Germany, never has been. (Neither, for that matter, are we, which is one reason why we don’t have a Hitler in the White House, either).

What dealing with Russia will take is patience and flexibility, understanding our real national interests rather than our hippie or Cold War dreams. We don’t need to do something stupid or impulsive we will regret later. That advice also applies to the Middle East, where endless calls for “boots on the ground” defy the lessons of recent history or that everyone there has many natural enemies who can prove useful.

We are paying a foreign policy establishment well; it’s time we got something for our investment other than one fiasco after another. Otherwise we will prove once again what most snobs know: that you can be a real American and a foreign policy expert, but you can’t be both.

The Republican “wave” (what that means electorally depends upon whom you talk to) in the recent Congressional elections has highlighted their opponents’ weaknesses at the state level.  To a large extent there are two electorates: one at the mid-term and one at the Presidential year.

The one thing these two have in common, according to one Jonathan Gruber, is that they’re both stupid.  And that has much of the right in a tiswas.  Well, I hate to burst balloons, but the idea that the American people are stupid has been an article of faith among our ruling elites as long as I can remember.  I certainly was inculcated with that concept growing up.  The difference between then and now is that, with the Internet and viral videos, it’s a lot easier for this élite idea to be presented in the raw to the general population.  And using legislative and political artifices to get stuff done (good and bad) in Congress isn’t anything new either.  One would like to think that our elites, as smart as they claim to be, would use these tricks to pass something better than the expensive kludge known as Obamacare, but that too tells us that our “meritocracy” isn’t as advertised.

Getting back to the state level thing, the Democrats’ problems there go beyond the U.S. Congress; they extend to the governors’ mansions and state legislatures.  That’s a bad thing politically because your states and localities are the “farm club” for bigger things.  Today’s city councilman or woman (and the Republicans are getting better at that, too) is tomorrow’s U.S. Senator or more.  Even Barack Obama had to pass through the Illinois state senate on his way from organising the community to upending the nation.

The shallowness of that electoral “bench” shows up most vividly in the Democrats’ 2016 Presidential prospects.  To put it simply, they come down to Hillary Clinton.  No one else comes close.  And she isn’t an ideal candidate.  There’s always the baggage from Bill (although Obama has done a lot to lighten that load), the Benghazi fiasco, and IMHO the biggest unknown, her health.  For the party which claims to be the new American majority and the darling of the Millennials and the immigrants, to hang the 2016 Presidential  aspirations on her doesn’t speak well for the breadth of their leadership.  That’s an opportunity for the Republicans to take.

Or is it? What I think is happening is that aspiring Democrats are moving up in other ways.  They’re taking their places in NGO’s (which, as Julian Assange points out, are more often than not fronts for corporatist/political agendas and people), in the legal profession (where they can move up to the judicial bench), in the bureaucracy and finally in our pliant media.  There are two reasons for this.

The first is practical: moving up in this way is less risky (one doesn’t have to deal with the uncertainties and risks of our manic electoral system) and generally pays better.  The second goes back to the Progressive Era and is based on the idea that “professionals” are better at governing than elected “political hacks”.  That concept is well entrenched in our system; most of our career bureaucracy is based on that, and Congress has given the executive broad powers that put them far away from pesky elected officials.  (Which is why Obama’s use of executive power is possible; my only surprise is that he didn’t start using it sooner).  It also creates a natural army against shrinking the government.  There’s still a great deal of debate about whether the IRS was ordered from the top to put the stall on Tea Party groups, but one thing is certain: people like Lois Lerner didn’t need much encouragement.

And recent history, more than the Right would care to admit, vindicates this approach.  The Religious Right’s experience is instructive.  Their greatest mistake was to put too much confidence in making change through the electoral process and not recognising that their main opponent was an élite that didn’t have any use for them and whose minimisation was essential to their success.  The result was an expensive effort that has yielded little except for antagonising large parts of the population.  The only exception to that has been the pro-life movement, which was born in the wake of a major piece of élite fiat and whose legislative options have been limited, to say the least.

The idea that the electoral process isn’t central to political life strikes many as unAmerican.  But we live in a different country now; it’s time to get used to it and act accordingly.

In this wild election cycle, a Republican is about to break a record she wasn’t “supposed to”:

An upstate New York Republican is slated Tuesday to shatter the congressional record of former Brooklyn Democratic Rep. Elizabeth Holtzman as the youngest woman ever elected to Congress.

Elise Stefanik, 30, is favored to win in New York’s upstate 21st District and break history as the youngest female to win a seat in the House. Holtzman was sworn in at age 31 in 1973 at a time when women weren’t even allowed in the congressional gym.

“I’m just sorry it’s a not a Democrat,” Holtzman told The Post. “But hats off to her. We need more young women in Congress.”

We do, but then there’s the kicker:

“I think more important than gender, it’s what people stand for,” said Holtzman, a lawyer in Manhattan.

That’s true too.  But people like Stefanik, according to the current meme on the left, aren’t supposed to exist.  Neither are two other Republican women running this year: Mia Love and Joni Ernst.  But they do and have done well this election cycle.

Perhaps the lesson from all of this is that the best way to develop talent is through adversity and not entitlement.  That’s something that the Democrats should think about as they move to coronate another hippie dreamer with the goal of having the “first woman President”. The fact that the Turks and Pakistanis (to say nothing of the Canadians,  Brits and Israelis) beat us to having a woman as head of government should tell us that our whole gender construct is a disaster, and that nearly a half century of trying to “fix” it hasn’t achieved the desired objective.

But the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result, and that’s pretty much the norm in American politics these days.

In the middle of Julian Assange’s long diatribe on Google, we have this:

The received wisdom in advanced capitalist societies is that there still exists an organic “civil society sector” in which institutions form autonomously and come together to manifest the interests and will of citizens. The fable has it that the boundaries of this sector are respected by actors from government and the “private sector,” leaving a safe space for NGOs and nonprofits to advocate for things like human rights, free speech and accountable government.

This sounds like a great idea. But if it was ever true, it has not been for decades. Since at least the 1970s, authentic actors like unions and churches have folded under a sustained assault by free-market statism, transforming “civil society” into a buyer’s market for political factions and corporate interests looking to exert influence at arm’s length. The last forty years have seen a huge proliferation of think tanks and political NGOs whose purpose, beneath all the verbiage, is to execute political agendas by proxy.

Following the Hegelian idea, society is said to be divided into three parts: the public/political sphere, the private sphere, and the civic sphere.  The one thing that separates a democratic society from an undemocratic one is the existence of a healthy civic life and the absence of one in the latter.  Assange states, with a good deal of justification, that civic life as we have known it in the west is being crowded out by a corporatist system (and the mentality that goes with it) where our lives are sucked into complete domination by the “system”.  In such a system real dissent is a positive nuisance at best and a dangerously unaffordable luxury at worst.  The demise of a democratic society follows.

As a Christian, I found Assange’s mention of the church as a part of that bygone civic life interesting.  That, in part, explains the growing hostility being drummed from the top towards religion of any kind: when it’s organised, it’s a threat because it dilutes the monopoly of the system being put together.  And technological wonder organisations such as Google are simply being a part of that system.  I don’t think that the techies started out to be that way but have taken necessity and made it into a virtue.

There’s a lot of back and forth these days in Evangelical Christianity (and Roman Catholicism is having this tug of war, as evidenced during the recent synod on the family) about how much of the faith is going to have to be compromised to survive and thrive in the West.  Given the general hostility towards a practical civic life that’s out there (and, as Assange points out, the NGO’s are in large part fronts) I think it should be clear that compromise is a waste of time; it will only stall the inevitable.

What Christianity in the West needs to learn in a hurry is what our counterparts in China know all too well: how to operate the church without the civic society we have had for so long.

Thorston Pattberg at Asia Times Online thinks he’s found something novel:

There is a cult of Western evangelists and self-righteous crusaders who are determined to dislodge non-Western nations and usurp their governments.

Unfortunately, Western “experts” have hung around China for a long time.

In the years immediately after the start of the People’s Republic, same People’s Republic would bring in foreigners to help them in their economic and technical development.  Think the Soviet experts who came in until things froze between Moscow and Beijing; the Soviets pulled them from the country.  Others came to “help out” and get caught in upheavals such as the Cultural Revolution.

After Mao’s death the experts became people who were basically self-proclaimed know-it-alls and marketed themselves accordingly.  As I noted in my series on doing business in China in the early 1980’s:

One of the lessons we at Vulcan took from China is that “experts” seem to gravitate towards the country. We found these experts in the U.S., too. They’d appear at international trade events, going on at length about how to deal with this exotic Chinese culture and how different it was from ours, and how with their advice we would do business.

The problem with many of these people is that they’ve never “done the deal.” Many of them have never sold or leased anything to the Chinese or anyone else for that matter. We found that such advice not to be as helpful as it looked. However, the one thing that those of us who have done the deal must avoid is to represent our specific experience as the only way to do business in China, then or now. But there are some useful lessons that can be learned.

The experts that Pattberg is referring to, however, are those who have aimed their advice towards China itself.  Instead of marketing themselves to the West based on the “weirdness” of Chinese culture, they impose themselves on the Chinese based on Chinese “weirdness”.

And the Chinese don’t always think much of Western opinion even when it’s well meaning, as I found out in this comment on my piece about the death of the Chinese author Mao Dun:

I don’t understand why the interview surprised that journalist that much. For someone who really understands his literary theories and political ideology, one should not be surprised at all. I don’t think what he said there was a show or some effort by him to keep in power. It was what he truly believed, or at least that was what he envisioned after his life-time devotion to the revolutionary cause.

American journalists tend to look at things from their own angle. They have a self-defined notion of correctness or ultimate truth, and if people do not agree with that, then there is a problem. This is very sad. They do not try to understand the path of other people’s development, neither do they respect others’ ideals, or if they do, they bluntly ignore it. They describe everything they disagree as “undemocratic”, “insincere” or “fake.”

Disagreement is too common and it is good that people are open about it. But I think it is a disgrace of turn a disagreement into character bashing. This is what the journalist did here. But nonetheless, it was good information that he revealed.

That’s pretty much Pattberg’s thesis in a nutshell.

China is an old civilisation which has done things its way for a long time.  Although people are people, it has an inner logic that has to be understood to successfully deal with the Chinese. For Westerners to come in and lecture/impose stuff on the Chinese is neither helpful for the West nor the Chinese.  It sets up institutions in Chinese society that don’t work and blurs the Western understanding of the country.

It also puts a new twist on this “white privilege” meme that we hear so much of these days.  Most propagators of that meme would like us to think that such is a purely right-wing phenomenon.  But this is not the case, as the list of experts Pattberg reels off shows.  It’s one thing to mouth a multicultural agenda; it’s quite another to actually do it successfully.  In the case of China, we’re nowhere near that point, and I’m not holding my breath on that changing any time soon.