David Brooks’ most recent column is an extravagant intellectual tour de force, springing off an essay written by Lewis Mumford for the New Republic back in 1940, chastising his fellow “pragmatic” liberals for failing to understand the menace of totalitarianism. Brooks presents Mumford’s argument as follows:
Mumford’s nominal subject was his fellow liberals’ tendency, in 1940, to hang back in the central conflict of the age, the fight against totalitarianism. “Liberalism has been on the side of passivism in the face of danger,” he wrote. “Liberalism has been on the side of ‘isolation’ when confronted with the imminent threat of a worldwide upsurge in barbarism.” Liberals, he continued, “no longer dare to act.”
Unsurprisingly, and most conveniently, Brooks finds endless parallels to the present day:
[A]s Mumford goes along, he penetrates deeper into the pragmatist mind-set itself, the mind-set of people who try to govern without philosophic or literary depth. And, in this way, his essay is perceptive about the mind-set that is dominant in political circles today. Washington is now awash in big data analysts, policy wonks and social scientists. Today’s foreign policy debate is conducted along realist lines, by both liberals and conservatives.
OK, where to begin? First off, Mumford himself was more than a bit of a hypocrite. The great antagonist of Adolf Hitler was Franklin Roosevelt, the Prince of the Pragmatists.1 The “isolationists” that Mumford criticized were in fact the “progressive” readers of the New Republic, overwhelmingly Marxist and in fact pro-Stalinist, which was why they were isolationist. It was the Nazi-Soviet Pact, not pragmatic lethargy, that made Mumford’s ideological foes isolationist.2
Brooks’ updating of Mumford’s argument is even more meretricious than the original. The notion that “[t]oday’s foreign policy debate is conducted along realist lines” is beyond absurd. If one took Brooks’ argument seriously, one could only assume that he wants the U.S. to deliver a 500,000 man army to the Middle East tomorrow, though if one asked him, I’m sure he would have plenty of ideas about what the president should have done last year, but as for today, well, you know, the president could do “more”—said “more” to be left delightfully unspecified until a later date.
Brooks compounds his folly with this foray into psychological/diplomatic exegesis:
Pragmatists often fail because they try to apply economic remedies to noneconomic actors. Those who threaten civilization — Stalin then, Putin and ISIS now — are driven by moral zealotry and animal imperatives. Economic sanctions won’t work. “One might as well offer the carcass of a dead deer in a butcher store to a hunter who seeks the animal as prey. …”
First of all, it is “interesting” that Brooks silently removes Adolf Hitler from the discussion, who, of course, was the main subject of Munford’s essay. Hitler threatened civilization—the western portion of it, at least—far more directly than Stalin, because, unlike Stalin, he believed that he could only achieve his policy goals through war. Stalin, though equally ruthless, was far less aggressive. Despite the fraudulent claims of right-wing propagandists like Whittaker Chambers, Stalin had no interest in fighting World War III, which he felt would be waged, in true capitalist fashion, by the U.S. and the British Empire, fighting over markets.
To pretend that Vladimir Putin, or ISIS, is any way comparable to the menace comprised by either Nazi Germany or the worldwide allure of revolutionary socialism is utterly shameless on Brooks’ part. Putin’s nationalism has, of course, absolutely no appeal outside of Russia itself. As for ISIS, it is a gang largely in search of oil revenue. Neither poses any threat to the United States, and it is nonsense to claim that they do. But, to our great and continuing misfortune, it is Brooks’ hysteria, and not any “realist” thinking, that holds sway, both within the Beltway and without. I fear it’s going to be a long time before reality gets a hearing in DC, not with hysterics like Brooks stoking the fires of unreason.
-
Richard Hofsteader, writing in the 1960s, said that every major American political figure was essentially Jeffersonian in philosphy, with the single exception of FDR, who had no philosophy at all. Roosevelt’s “philosophy” was simply a vast grab-bag of glib ad-hockery, designed to justify whatever it was he was trying to do at the time, unrelated to anything he had said in the past or would say in the future. ↩︎
-
The vast bulk of the “real isolationists” in the U.S. at the time were German-Americans, who were not interested in going to war with Germany a second time. ↩︎
