Zakaria Forgets the Right

Faheed Zakaria has a lengthy, overblown, and insipid essay on what the United States has to do to solve it's foreign policy problems and regain it's standing in the world. The argument boils down to a single word--"confidence." Zakaria wants American to get over the paralyzing fearfulness that was engendered by 9-11 and regain the confidence to embody the values of openness, expansiveness, generosity, and tolerance once again. For Zakaria, it's not just George Bush or the Bush administration that's become rigid, fearful, and uncaring, it's American society as a whole.

Having spooked ourselves into believing that we have no option but to act fast, alone, unilaterally and pre-emptively, we have managed in six years to destroy decades of international good will, alienate allies, embolden enemies and yet solve few of the major international problems we face.

Matthew Yglesias writes that he agrees "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."

To the contrary, I thought Zakaria's essay was crap even where I agreed with it. The problem is that Zakaria tries to be politically neutral. Zakaria is especially disturbed by the fear-mongering of Rudy Giuliani and other Republican presidential candidates, but he is almost as critical of the Democrats for playing "I'm tough too." But why do the Democrats have to play tough? Zakaria doesn't either ask or answer that question.

Likewise, Zakaria is disgusted with the Bush administration's lone wolf approach to foreign policy and views the values of negotiation and compromise as crucial to American foreign policy success. However, Zacharia also shows Broderesque even-handedness in giving Bush credit for developing a version of a more sensible "containment" policy toward Iran. But what about that lone wolf approach, the sneering at negotiations, the loathing of any kind of compromise, the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive war, and the justifications of torture and secret prisons. Where did those elements in Bush administration policy come from? Zacharias neither asks nor answers these questions either. He seems to have little interest in how the United States got to a point where our primary political currency is fear and revulsion.

Of course, if Zacharia had asked these questions, he couldn't have been even-handed. He would have had to point an accusatory finger at the American right and the people who aid and abet the right-wing in the American media. Zacharia makes a lot of the fear-mongering of Rudy Giuliani, but fear-mongering has been the primary motif of Republican candidates going back to Richard Nixon's law and order campaign in 1968. The primary significance of Ronald Reagan was that he put a friendly, optimistic face on conservative fear-mongering about the Soviet Union, the civil rights movement, crime, feminism, and homosexuality.

Of course, it wasn't just Reagan. If the right-wing was promoting fear, the mainstream media was translating those fears from conservative political discourse into the common sense interpretation of the news. The media might have rejected Republican policy prescriptions on things like crime but they found the structuring of the news in terms of relentless litany of the horrors of urban crime, drugs, and pedophilia to be comfortable and profitable. Even specialized liberal media jumped on the right-wing bandwagon by translating the conservative world view into the language of liberal values on welfare, unions, NAFTA, the privatization of social security, and the debate over invading Iraq. With the rise of "neo-liberalism," the conservative world-view became the common sense of most of the American left as well as the right and Democratic politicians were reduced to advocating a "kinder and gentler" conservativism than their Republican opponents.

Without discussing the origins of the American fear-mongering, Zacharia's argument for a renewal of American confidence was just as empty as Julie Andrews singing "they'll have to agree that I have confidence in me" in The Sound of Music. If the United States is going to stop wallowing in fear after the Bush administration leaves office, we need to defeat the overly large right-wing in this country. Given the disastrous performance of the Bush administration, the opportunity to defeat the right lies at hand, but the left-wing blogosphere is the only part of American political discourse that specifically opposes the right. If mainstream journalists like Zacharias want the Democrats to stop being influenced by right-wing fear-mongering, the first thing they can do is cut themselves off from the right-wing. They can stop hiring personalities like William Kristol, stop taking the work of the lunatics at the American Enterprise Institute seriously, and start reporting seriously on the distortions in the right-wing media and blogosphere. The first step toward defeating the right-wing is to isolate the right within American society.

For Zacharia, that means acknowledging that the right-wing is the source of the fear-mongering that bothers him so much.