World

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Neoconservative Christians and the crisis in Iraq

Artur Rosman asks hawkish Catholics to take stock of the devastation in Iraq:

There were actually major centers of Christianity in both North Africa and the Middle East–regions presently exclusively associated with Islam. These regions were eventually decimated by the rise of Islam and its clashes with the West and Byzantium. What we are seeing today is not the beginning of the end for this region’s Christianity. It’s more like the end of the end. …

What’s become apparent is how much the presumption for force ultimately failed to take a very complex situation into consideration.

As I remember it, sometime in 2003 or 2004 both Paul Griffiths and Stanley Hauerwas (author of War and the American Difference: Reflections on Violence and National Identity) ultimately gave up their associations with First Things, because their presumption against war, in line with John Paul II, was marginalized by the journal.

The Christians of the Middle East are now paying the price.

But they’re not the only ones paying the price, because Neo-Conservatism also has a monopoly upon the anti-abortion position, which continues to lose its luster as it is associated exclusively with that political group.

He’s broached a difficult subject for some people, and while I can’t speak to First Things (though I am a reader and enjoyer of it), as another concerned critic of the empire, given recent events, I feel compelled to add similar thoughts.

Recently, I had written a longer piece on the sordid behavior of the Episcopal Church, now the clerical wing of the Democratic Party, with the head of the National Episcopal Health Ministries promising to help implement Obamacare and getting a fellowship at the Center for American Progress, controversial gay bishop Gene Robinson getting a Daily Beast column and the requisite CAP fellowship as well, and our nation’s chief law enforcement officer, an Episcopalian, takes up pet progressive legal crusades while property across the country is confiscated by judicial fiat and turned over to ailing, left-wing rump congregations.

For mostly personal reasons, I decided to pull it — my family attends one of the breakaway Anglican parishes whose appeal was denied by the Supreme Court in March. Rather more sensitively, the piece also raised the fact that a number of the key participants in the Anglican realignment, (which I support entirely for reasons above) were involved in the neoconservative project or publicly supported the second Iraq invasion. Mort Kondracke, Ken Starr, and Fred Barnes, for example, who were in a Bible study with the rector of the Falls Church and the former chaplain of the Redskins. The latter, Jerry Leachman (whom Brit Hume has named a mentor), is married to Holly Leachman, named by Hillary Clinton in one of her books as a sort of liaison to the Fellowship, the civil religion pseudo-ministry that puts on the National Prayer Breakfast.

One could go on. The American Anglican Council, which filed the complaint against the presiding bishop just after the Supreme Court’s decision, has close ties to the neoconservative Institute on Religion and Democracy, which grew out of the Scoop Jackson wing of the Democratic Party, in part to be a counterweight to the thoroughly leftist World Council of Churches. One of its founders was a Schachtmanite. The AAC’s president sits on the IRD’s board, along with Barnes, a longtime member of the Falls Church who left in 2009 for one of its plants, and wrote a Wall Street Journal column about it. The IRD’s former president Diane Knippers was a parishioner at Truro, another breakaway Virginia church, until her death from cancer in 2005. In the mid-2000s, the IRD was telling Christians to shut up about the war in Iraq.

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Ibrahim

Filling in the incentive void of democracy

It’s clear that democratization is not the panacea for the problems of developing countries. Elected leaders even lack some of the incentives for good leadership that unelected leaders have, since their terms are limited and their rule is a short saga in the history books. Problems that demand solutions that exceed the term of the elected executive can easily be ignored. Sudanese-born telecommunications billionaire Mo Ibrahim seems to have have a solution to this: his own Mo Ibrahim Prize for Achievement in African Leadership. An African himself, it is easy to see that Ibrahim wants to to see his continent prosper. For maximum impact, he has made a monetary surgical strike: paying the leaders themselves to actually care about their country’s prosperity and future. A generous sum, $5 million US plus a $200,000 US yearly payment, is awarded to leaders of African nations who have recently left office, and who:

  • Have developed their countries, lifted people out of poverty and paved the way for sustainable and equitable prosperity
  • Are exceptional role models for the continent
  • Ensure that Africa continues to benefit from the experience and expertise of exceptional leaders when they leave national office, by enabling them to continue in other public roles on the continent

All of these criteria are apparently geared towards incentivizing leadership that is focused on the good to come after the statesman leaves office. Kicking the can down the road, which is de rigeur for elected officials, is no longer possible with the independent oversight of the Ibrahim Foundation. Politicians normally serve the interests of their parties or themselves. In poor countries governments are at their most predatory, being, as Mark Lutter pointed out, the major culprit behind third world squalor. Spinning, rhetoric, and political grandstanding, which work on the voting public, presumably do not work for the award committee of the Ibrahim Foundation, which is entrusted with handling millions upon millions of dollars.

What exactly is the subtext of this award? It is that political systems, on their own, are not built to act in the interest of the nations that they control. The much vaunted democratic political system has not brought African nations to the promised land. So why does the Foundation require that leaders who receive the award to be democratically elected? To the naive, this might be seen as an encouragement of democratic leadership, which is certainly a better alternative to dictatorship. I would guess that Ibrahim also wants to in fact fix democracy and all its misplaced incentives, having the requirement of a democratic election in order pinpoint these problems, and using his wealth to tip the scales from favoring government to favoring society.

Source

On middle classes and vote disposal

The situation in Thailand is now reverted to what is essentially a standard practice since the establishment of a constitutional monarchy in 1932: Absolutist military rule with backing from King Bhumibol Adulyadej, because direct absolute monarchy is so unmodern. The country did not have a stable democratic government for about 60 years until approximately 1992, after the tenth coup since 1932 forced civilian elections without military meddling. That lasted only 14 years, before another coup forced the one Prime Minister to complete his term, Thaksin Shinawatra, out of office and out of the country.  Since then, there has been either military rule or military-backed rule, with some attempts at neither in between.

What is interesting is that, for all the factionalism in Thai politics that is built on either complete support or less-than-complete support of the sclerotic Royal Family, the main factor in this situation is a middle class that is either indifferent or actively antagonistic to the principles of democracy. This much is particularly clear with the leading supporters of the coup, a People’s Democratic Reform Committee made of middle-class figures in Bangkok and the southern provinces, calling for an unelected “people’s council” (whatever that means) to reform the Thai government.

Uri Friedman argues that such coups happen because the middle class seeks stability:

In both Egypt and Thailand, the protest movements that prompted military intervention enjoyed support from middle- and upper-class citizens. These aren’t isolated cases. Joshua Kurlantzick, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, has argued that around the world, a growing middle class “is choosing stability over all else,” and embracing “the military as a bulwark against popular democracy.”

However, to say stability is the primary interest lacks a lot of nuance. In both cases, but particularly Thailand’s, the governments that were toppled won significant majorities or at least a majority coalition in (mostly) fair elections, and were at least initially stable.  Seeking stability by agitating and overthrowing a government that has done little to destabilize the country sounds, well, counter-intuitive.

The greater interest of the middle class, in Thailand and in similar countries, is not so much stability but a belief of wanting their side to be the rulers at all costs, even if it means throwing away their votes (which they literally did in 2006, instigating the coup that got rid of Thaksin). The middle class in Bangkok and the south has long been supporters of the Democrat Party, whose electoral strategies seem to follow a pattern of simply placating to those voters, and hoping that the multiparty nature of Thailand will play to their favor. Consequently, even in elections where they have earned the most votes, they have never earned more than a quarter of the electorate, and a third of the legislature.

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Kill enough people and become a governor

I found a new favorite blog. It is dedicated to popularizing North, Wallis, and Weingast’s (hereafter NWW) framework of violence and social orders. The argument is that the natural type of government is vicious and predatory. It is what we see in the third world today. Modern liberal governments only really emerged in the 18th century and are still largely restricted to Europe.

A main contribution of NWW is changing the frame of reference for government action. Good governance is not the norm, but the exception. In much of the world, local tyrants are rewarded with power, rather than punished. This post details David Yau Yau, who, having lost an election, decided the best way to keep his rents was to start low-scale warfare:

On again off again since 2010, he’s led one of the most vicious, mindlessly murderous little tribal guerrilla wars you’ve never heard of for control of his home region in Jonglei State’s Pibor County, just near Ethiopia.

For his troubles, he was appointed governor of the area he terrorized. While this offends basic notions of justice, it is probably better than the alternative. Theft by governments is far less socially damaging than raiding villages and murdering their inhabitants.