Wow, Who Are the Smart Guys?
Bush's vision is a winner in Iraq, and America.
opinionjournal.com
BY ROBERT L. BARTLEY
Monday, April 14, 2003 12:01 a.m. EDT
Jubilant crowds in Baghdad show that President Bush and his team were spectacularly right and his critics spectacularly wrong. And this says something about who are the smart guys and who are the dullards in this society--or at least, what kind of mindset leads to good judgments.
"We will be greeted as liberators," Vice President Dick Cheney told Tim Russert, making himself the special target of the critics. He elaborated, "The read we get on the people of Iraq is there is no question but [that] they want to get rid of Saddam Hussein and they will welcome as liberators the United States when we come to do that."
He continued that only the special Republican Guard and Saddam's security organization would likely offer strong resistance: "I think the regular army will not. My guess is even significant elements of the Republican Guard are likely as well to want to avoid conflict with the U.S. forces, and are likely to step aside."
Put to the battlefield test, this is as precise a prediction of what has now happened as ever occurs in human affairs.
Mr. Cheney drew similar howls, remember, with his explanation of the administration's energy policy. He pointed out that while nuclear plants generate 20% of the nation's electricity, "the government has not granted a single new nuclear power permit in more than 20 years, and many existing plants are going to be shutting down. If we're serious about environmental protection, then we must seriously question the wisdom of backing away from what is, as a matter of record, a safe, clean, very plentiful energy source."
Even more inflammatory, he said, "conservation is an important part of the total effort. But to speak exclusively of conservation is to duck the tough issues. Conservation may be a sign of personal virtue, but it is not a sufficient basis all by itself for sound, comprehensive energy policy. We also have to produce more."
To many of us, no doubt including the vice president, these remarks seem unexceptionable common sense. Modest, even. Clearly, though, to others they seem outrageous. Sacrilegious, even. They're an affront to the received wisdom of "right-thinking" people.
It's no accident that Mr. Cheney's critics on the environment are also his critics on the war. Thomas Sowell has written two books pondering why the same people end up on the same side of issues that have no intrinsic connection. In "A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles," he writes that this is because they operate from two different "visions" of how the world works, indeed of human nature. In "The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy," he argues that the prevailing vision in the press, academy and politics has become so dogmatic that it has lost touch with reality.
Mr. Sowell labels the competing visions "constrained" and "unconstrained." The constrained vision argues that perfection is impossible, that social policy consists of structuring incentives for self-centered men, that life is a series of trade-offs. This vision is represented by the likes of Adam Smith, Edmund Burke and Alexander Hamilton (and of course, Dick Cheney and the Bush administration mindset).
The unconstrained version argues that man's imperfections are the result of bad institutions, that pure intentions matter more than actual effects, that rationality can solve problems once and for all. In the time of Smith and Burke, this tradition was epitomized by William Godwin, whose "Enquiry Concerning Political Justice" was popular in Great Britain until the public started to witness the excesses of the French Revolution.
For the path of the unconstrained vision ran through Rosseau, Voltaire and Thomas Paine (a defender of the French Revolution as well as a hero of the American one). Today's academy is in thrall of descendants of these French ideas. The academically popular "deconstructionism" promoted by Jacques Derrida argues that the conception of meaning or truth is another corrupting institution, merely expressing power relationships.
Students and journalists who have never heard of Derrida reflect his influence in preoccupation with issues of gender, class and race. As Mr. Sowell writes, the "vision of the anointed" has become impervious to evidence. Rather, it's "a badge of honor and a proclamation of identity: To affirm it is to be one of us and to oppose it is to be one of them."
This is relevant today because these two visions were put to a stark test on the streets of Baghdad. Those who followed the constrained version were proved right; those associated with the unconstrained version, Mr. Sowell's "anointed," proved foolish. This rare empirical test should be weighed in the competing claims offered on other issues--energy policy, the environment, racial quotas and, to come to the present crux, economic policy.
Seeking the social approval of the anointed, Maine Republican Olympia Snowe held out for an uneasy compromise on the budget resolution, effectively paring the president's tax cut by half. The real problem is not a few wayward Republicans but the Democrats, who voted almost in lockstep against even the compromise. It's time for the president to take the offensive, arguing that the public should trust him and not his critics on how to revive the economy. After all, the war's outcome makes patently clear that they were wrong and he and his administration were right on the last big issue.
Historic philosophers aside, after all, we find in everyday life that those who display good judgment in one arena tend to display it in another. And between the two great visions, perhaps the Iraqi campaign will change minds the way the French Revolution did in an earlier century. |
