I agree with almost every word of Fareed Zakaria's latest essay on what the country needs to do, post-Bush, in terms of restoring America's position in the world.
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What He Said
03 Jun 2007 02:43 am
Comments (32)
When someone says, "Socrates says this..." is that synonymous with what plato says. or is there a way of finding out what each said/believed distinctly?
serious question for you philosophy geeks out there.
Quite a wide-ranging essay by Fareed -- like a State of the Union, almost. Of course he glossed over the immigration issue. Yes, it's great that so many immigrants want to come to America and that we take so many in, but as Charles Krauthammer wrote recently:
As the most attractive land for would-be immigrants, America has the equivalent of the first 100 picks in the NBA draft. Yet through lax border control and sheer inertia, it allows those slots to be filled by (with apologies to Bill Buckley) the first 100 names in the San Salvador phone book.
This was boiler-plate right-wing establishment Democrat with one exception:
"A nuclear-armed Iran—and we are still far from that point—will not bring about the end of the world as long as we keep it tightly contained."
FZ is putting his toe in the water for better Iran-with-nukes than war. Good for him.
including the part about keeping 50k GIs in iraq?
"In any event, it is time to stop bashing George W. Bush."
No it isn't. FZ seems to assuming that there will be no new disasters in the next 20 months.
"I agree with almost every word of Fareed Zakaria's latest essay . . ."
Which words do you not agree with?
I'm with John Emerson -- the "it is time to stop bashing George W. Bush" bit stands out as both egregiously wrong-headed and impossible to agree with.
Note the use of the word "bashing" -- Republicans and their apologists have since the beginning of this Administration tried to preempt criticism of Bush by making the act itself seem strange or unpatriotic.
"I agree with almost every word of Fareed Zakaria's latest essay . . ."
Matt, wake up! There is plenty of objectionable crap in there!
First, the "pox on both your houses" stance that permeates all High-Minded Punditry. Second, the notion that Bush has "reversed" himself on a range of issues like global warming and Iraq is simply laughable. Third, the notion that Democrats are terrified of China's poor (uh, no: we're terrified of the plutocrats who are exploiting China's poor and decimating America's working class).
And that's just in the first half of the damn thing.
Right. There's this belief that objectivity means "x amount of complaints about both parties" when it merely means transparency.
Here, throwing in the "bashing" point and the criticism of Democrats on free trade seemed weird without backing it up.
thehova, I'm by no means an expert on the subject, but this article seems interesting. Somewhere in one of my ancient philosophy courses I read an article that claimed that we only know of two theses that Socrates held, one of which was that no one ever willingly does evil (I forget the other), but that view is disputed like just about everything else in philosophy.
Of course there's something self-undermining about saying "Socrates think people who live by the opinions of others are mentally ill." Like the cartoon one of my colleagues has up, "As Nietzsche says, idiots love to quote philosophers."
[It might not be Nietzsche.]
Thehova,
As there are no extant writings about Socrates, we only have the dialogues/accounts of Plato and Xenophon, which claim to quote Socrates extensively, and offhand remarks from later sources referring to Socrates.
However, since their accounts disagree so extensively, either Plato, Xenophon, or both clearly uses Socrates largely as a literary device.
Some people -- the Straussians being an example, Nietzsche a more chaotic one -- seem to think they can determine to some small extent what part of the philosophy (or "philosophies," if you prefer) of these two writers originates with Socrates, but there's no reliable way of knowing what the old man really said.
It's also hard to know what Plato "really said/believed," since except for a few (disputed) letters, all his surviving writing is in dialogue form, and Socrates is clearly not a mouthpiece for speaking directly to the reader -- he contradicts himself all the time. I'm not familiar enough with Xenophon to say what the case is for him, but he at least has other extensive writings, and his writings about Socrates are often more in a "socrates said [x]" style than a true dialogue.
I also agree with everything he says (except for the part about it being time to stop bashing Bush). The problem is in what he doesn't say. Namely, erosion of American democracy and rights have diminished our world image and threatened our nation's cohesion. This is, in my opinion, an even greater threat than protectionism, nativism, or Iraq. Optimism is good, but failing to confront the erosion of our basic freedoms will not be a healthy strategy.
I always talked Fareed with a grain of salt. Didn't he think the invasion of Iraq was a swell idea?
thanks for the replies. that cleared everything up for me.
"I'm with John Emerson -- the "it is time to stop bashing George W. Bush" bit stands out as both egregiously wrong-headed and impossible to agree with."
It's funny because I literally just read Zakaria's piece (without having noted Matt's post about it beforehand), and found myself extemely irritated by it.
#1) The "We Have to Move On and Forget About Bush" mantra has already become the conventional wisdom of the Washington elite consensus. It may be the case that the person who wins the presidency next year projects a certain kind of confidence about America and the future, and that excess focus among base Democrats to the present occupatant of the White House may help hand the presidency to Giuliani, but you can be sure that the likes of Zakaria and most of the rest of the MSM will kiss St. Rudy's ass as long as he governs as a "rational" centrist (even if he would prefer lib Hitler Hillary to be president). And the elite media's preoccupation with Moving On represents the worst manifestation of golden parachute syndrome (at least CEOs can only loot and burn companies; this administration has looted and burned a country). There are some in Bush administration who deserve to be impeached. There are some who deserve to be in prison.
#2) Zakaria has the superficial understanding of America of someone who arrived here in early adulthood and has spent his entire adult life mixing with the Washington cocktail set, reading national political magazines, and watching cable news. He remembers an America At Risk And In Trouble in 1982 whose confidence and self-esteem was restored by Reagan-Christ (I'm waiting for one of those Lenin-esque statues of Reagan across the street from the White House to be erected). What I remember about 1982 is living in a quiet safe neighborhood where nearly everyone's parents were still married and virtually no one's mother had to work because it was still perfectly possible for a great many people to have a comfortable life on a single household income. I remember the dark, lovely fall sky at soccer pratice that looked like one of those Magritte paintings, and the cold, comforting breeze. America isn't to me an "idea" as elites like Zakaria so often put it; it is a place. And it is a place of memory. In any number of ways I remember it as a better place.
#3) Zakaria says: "For the Democrats, the new bogeymen are the poorest workers in the world—in China and India." Really? I don't know anyone who thinks that. But I know a lot of people who have seen their standards of living stagnate or decline over the last quarter century. I know people who spent thousands - in some cases tens of thousands - of dollars on advanced degrees in computer science and other skills (they were told just a decade ago were the path to secure employment) who have lost good jobs to offshoring, and have had to take lower wage jobs in another profession, or lower wage jobs in their own profession. It isn't about workers abroad. It's about companies at home.
There is also Aristophanes' account of Socrates.
I'm not sure how you can not like Zakaroa's article. He's basically saying that Cheney, Giuliani, and Romney have a basically fearful view of the world and that Dems should stop aping it.
Zakaria needs to sit the fuck down and shut the fuck up.
look, the FZ article isn't perfect. compared to the truth-telling you read on a properly informed blog, there's a lot less truth-telling and a lot more rhetorical butt-covering.
Still--i think you people are focusing too much on the rhetoric, not enough on the substance.
Sure, it is sad that an MSM editorial still has to say "notice that I am not bashing Bush!!!"
But it's good news that an MSM editorial can now say, in substance, "everything Bush did was a colossal screw-up, and the only way forward is to repudiate the entire six-year catastrophe."
He basically says this: that the entire administration has been a dead loss. That the only Bush legacy will be a huge step backwards.
i know, i know--old news to blog readers. but a hell of a lot more people read newsweek than read Matt Yglesias.
so as an index of how far the conversation has evolved in 'polite society', i think it is relatively good news.
and of course it is our job to push it further, so you may now return to outrage at its faults.
The most important foreign policy issue confronting the US, and everybody else too, is global warming, and FZ had nothing to say about that except bs about about faces.
Of course, the words he did print were banal tripe, but that's what makes the big bucks.
Fareed Zakaria, despite his miscalculation in supporting the war in Iraq, is still one of the best and most insightful mainstream foreign policy commentators today. I agree with Yglesias that his essay today is very good.
I also feel like some of the posters here have missed the intent of the piece. Zakaria is not at all a "pox on all houses" type of person. That's simply an incorrect characterization. And he's been constantly bashing the Bush Administration ever since 2003. But he's saying now is that everything that should be said about Bush has been said. It's time for the country to move beyond the Bush era and think about what we should do after it's over. I absolutely agree with him. The country has sensed it too. That's why the 2008 presidential race has begun so early.
Do I think the president and vice president should be impeached for gross incompetence? I do. But, honestly, it's not important to me. I feel like we as a country have higher priorities. Let's talk seriously and clearly about the role of America in 2009 and beyond. That means recognizing the mistakes of America during the Bush years, but not just recognizing those mistakes.
I remember the dark, lovely fall sky at soccer pratice that looked like one of those Magritte paintings, and the cold, comforting breeze. America isn't to me an "idea" as elites like Zakaria so often put it; it is a place. And it is a place of memory. In any number of ways I remember it as a better place."That's a wonderful personal ancedote, from a time before I was born. But is it more or less valid than Zakaria's own ancedote? The facts, I think, are on Zakaria's side. 10.8% unemployment is pretty bad.
Second, the notion that Bush has "reversed" himself on a range of issues like global warming and Iraq is simply laughable.I do think this is laughable as well. But let's not focus on one throwaway sentence and not see that the overall essay itself is well argued and well done.
I think Zakaria's wrong about the increase of 187 billion dollars in the Department of War's budget. I don't think he is including the supplementals for the war in Iraq. That's a bizarre and bad habit, and a victory for the structural lying that is a Bush administration specialty - like announcing the decline of civilian casualties during the surge and casually excluding from the numbers the car bomb and suicide bomb victims. Your standard liar simply makes false statement - it is your real pathological liar, the most dangerous of liars, who creates false metrics.
The thing to like about other countries is that they don't necessarily have these chino clad middlebrow hacks as the leading political writers for national magazines. In the best (as in most interesting) cases they have poets and philosophers writing about politics, and doing it with a flair and sense of irony (and humor) that one is unlikely to find in a column by Thomas L Friedman or this Zakaria guy. Is it too much to ask for Time to replace Joe Klein with one of our best and funniest novelists?
When it comes to "restoring America's position in the world" there are certain fundamentals which probably defy any political solution.
The fact is that our manufacturing position has been devastated while our financial system, with deficits of all sorts, is shaky. The United States lacks the substance to be what it once was.
The guerrilla forces unleashed by Iraq are not going to stop. This does not mean that they are "going to follow us home." Rather, it means that in the Nigerian delta, in Columbia, and elsewhere people are going to assert their own rules rather than follow ours. And to some extent - perhaps quite a lot - we will have to dance to their tune rather than they to ours.
So the post-Bush United States might be able to restore itself in the same sense that the post-Blair England could restore itself. But let us remember that the sun has long since set on the British Empire and that England now is a frumpy little country at the edge of a frumpy, declining continent. A country which Scotland and Wales are increasingly distancing themselves from. Something like that is heading our way, is probably the best we can hope for, and - given Bush - arguably more than we deserve.
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Comments closed June 17, 2007.
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Heads in the Sand
Apparently, Socrates think people who live by the opinions of others are mentally ill.
Posted by Jewbacca | June 3, 2007 2:51 AM