A Grounded Foreign Policy Conversation
What message will Democrats deliver to their fellow Americans that builds on peoples’ growing convictions about the recklessness of the war? Whatever the specific content of the ‘message’, it needs to begin in Flint, Michigan or Sioux Falls or Biloxi Mississippi. More radically, let’s stop thinking ‘message’, and start thinking ‘conversation’.
If the American people are turning away from the bankrupt Bush foreign policy, they are doing so because they have sensibly concluded that it really does damage the day-to-day lives they are trying to live in their community – their families, their sense of their own personal security, their jobs. They have come to understand that money is being drained away from their health care and their retirement funds. They sense there is something corrupt and arrogant going on in Washington that undermines their own fundamental values as Americans.
Democrats need to find a new voice in foreign policy, one that captures these local realities. Too much of the rhetoric sounds flat footed or utopian. The elected politicians give speeches filled with long lists of things to do and not do; policy advisor types write long essays that soar far above our towns and cities, firmly planted in abstractions. Neither seems particularly rooted in the concerns of the great American middle living in Flint, Sioux Falls or Biloxi.
Democrats need to find a voice, a rhetoric, that resonates with the vision and voice of the vast majority of Americans, and helps guide that vision especially as voters are making their own difficult transitions from support of the war and the administration, to a clear rejection of both.
Instead, foreign policy analysts tend to construct our arguments deductively, starting with first principles of realism or neo-realism, liberalism or neo-liberalism, and then work ‘down’ to cases, usually stopping the essay long before it reaches anybody in Biloxi or Boston or Mattapan or Roxbury or Jersey City or Newark. Instead, Democrats need to start and sustain a national conversation with the broad swath of middle America that is turning against the way that American foreign and national security policy is being handled. A conversation implies listening as much as talking. Most people can tell the difference between talking down and listening; one comes off as arrogance, the other as empathy.
Here’s an exercise I find salutary. Start an essay or two with a paragraph reflecting on where the average middle American citizen finds herself today. What are her concerns? Her hopes for her children? Her worries about the war? Then construct a foreign policy argument from that starting point. Rather than starting with dueling disciplinary perspectives on global power, start with where the citizens say they are.
Read E. J. Dionne’s column in today’s Washington Post on the “Rising Radical Center”. Dionne makes a similar point in a different way, drawing on the latest polling data. But Democrats shouldn’t need a polling report to know which way the wind blows. Listening to people works fine too.
Excellent analysis. I would take the concept of "conversation" to the next step - actually doing it. I would suggest that Democrats unveil a strategy of a "Conversation with America". After the elections, win, lose or draw take the time off from the lame duck session of Congress and fan out across America.
To that end, both Senators and Representatives will cold call homes and set up meetings with individual families. There would be no bias in choosing Democratic families. Just one on one with Mom, Dad and the kids - no press invited. Congressmen and women would NOT just go to homes in their own territory but also get the perspectives from outside their territory. Before the next session of Congress starts, the results of this Conversation would be published. It's definitely a way to start giving Democrats their identity back.
October 24, 2006 11:01 AM | Reply | Permalink
Professor Wilson has here addressed a crucial point that actually is more important to America's allies (at least the democracies) than I think is usually recognized in Washington.
A problem, seen from abroad, with U.S. foreign policies is that they are so volatile and not really rooted in the public opinion of the nation. By founding policies on something closer to a national consensus, there is every reason to hope that they will be more trustworthy also seen from the perspective of the allies.
A consequence may also be that the public opinions of other countries are treated with more respect and less as receptors of PR-campaigns. America has for too long suffered from confusing the interests of foreign nations with the interests of their elites, as pointed out by Julia Sweig.
October 24, 2006 1:53 PM | Reply | Permalink
Very important point here. As much as executives claim foreign policy for themselves, a policy that found the center, rather than the political winners, would usually change slowly and somewhat predictably.
I can't think of any actions from history, such as policy choices, that were based on some theory and actually worked. All I can think of is the theories of state that led to disasters, from the Socratic elite Dictatorship of the Thirty, through Hitler and Communism.
Our Revolution was driven by necessity; it utilized theory but was not instigated by it. We can simply ask: What is necessary? This includes deciding what "necessary" means.
It seems easy to conclude that some action regarding Afghanistan was necessary; equally it is easy to conclude that necessity did not include Iraq.
October 24, 2006 6:18 PM | Reply | Permalink
One of the wisest statements ever made at TPMCafe. Thank you, Ernest.
The foreign policy conversation we need is not just about Iraq. It needs to start with "Okay, that was not a really smart response to 9/11. So what would be better?"
It's been 5 years now and those people who were honestly scared out of their wits on 9/11 have largely gotten over the actual "fear". We need the conversation now that we didn't have back then. The conversation that puts terrorism in it's proper place, way below our own confidence that we can prevail without compromising who we are, that we can prevail by embracing the heritage of our republic, that we can only prevail by trusting each other. But we don't just need that national conversation to win - more importantly we need that conversation to heal the wounds of 9/11, wounds that the Republican party has purposefully and cynically kept inflamed.
My greatest disappointment the last 5 years has not been this disastrous war, or the erosion of our freedoms and national character. The greatest disappointment has been that those of us who were not terrorized by 9/11 have failed to understand the genuine terror that was experience by tens of millions of our fellow citizens. We have failed to reach out to our brothers and sisters and neighbors with a conviction of hope. And having failed to do that, we've not heard their doubts about us that kept them at arms length.
We, as a people, have all failed the first round with Osama. We let the twerp get to us and between us. Until we have this conversation amongst ourselves, we can not begin the conversation with the Moslem world that we must have. The Moslem world is full of people just like us.
But you know what, Ernest? I don't believe we'll have this conversation. I think we'll continue to talk politics instead of reality. I think we'll continue to hide behind politics. It's the cowardly thing to do, and it's become as American as apple pie.
October 24, 2006 8:07 PM | Reply | Permalink
Oh, please. Who in his or her right mind would waste time having a conversation about foreign policy with a bunch of ninnies who wouldn't be able to find Wazirstan, South or North, on the map if their lives depended upon it.
And for that matter no one needs to ask them what their desires are: they want peace and prosperity. They're well aware -- at least those with any brains in their heads -- that they haven't the slightest idea of how to attain those desires and that no one of any importance is likely to take seriously such of the few generalized ideas they might, in a pinch, manage to come up with in one of Prof. Wilson's patronizingly solicitous focus groups.
The President's job is to design and execute foreign policy. The citizens' job is to decide, based on the results, whether or not they've chosen what they thought was a wise and judicious leader and let that conclusion guide their next opportunity to exercize the franchise.
October 25, 2006 12:52 AM | Reply | Permalink
Ellen - I would assume you include yourself in that group of "ninnies"? If not, do you think you are the only citizen who understands Pakistani political dynamics as well as GW Bush and Condi Rice?
October 25, 2006 7:58 AM | Reply | Permalink
Thanks for the comments.
There are always risks that the cogniscenti figure they dont need to talk to people beyond the Beltway and outside the think tanks and universities, (per Ellen's tart retort), but that runs counter to the democratic instinct.
It would be great if one of our Democratic politicians took up the call for a "New American Conversation" on foreign policy, and make it an opportunity for empathetic listening. They might actually learn something that polls can't teach them..
October 25, 2006 9:25 AM | Reply | Permalink
The FATA was known, in Kipling times, as the Northwest Frontier, home of the "wily Pathan", which was, given the source, a term of great respect.
--
Howard
*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*
October 25, 2006 9:38 AM | Reply | Permalink
Where is your sense for Democracy?
Maybe it's high time to start educating these ninnies so they get the ability to evaluate the proposed foreign policy designs of presidental candidates?
October 28, 2006 5:09 PM | Reply | Permalink
A year ago, I returned from half a year spent in Upstate New York. The people I socialized with were mostly in graduate school, so of course they were maybe not the best representatives for typically ordinary Americans. But one of my lasting impressions is that most people I learned to know have very diffuse ideas about what they thought to be considered as the National Interest(s) of America.
In fact, if I asked straight on, I was most likely to get a list of items such as Race Relations, Unemployment, and different federal governance matters.
Some people worried about matters as Climate Change and its likely effects, and over the likely difficulties to get the huge populations in Asia to lastingly accept a much lower standard of living than we wish for ourselves and our children. Very few (if any) shared my fear for repeated starvation catastrophs, possibly also on our latitudes, that also can lead to huge refugee movements and armed conflicts.
A somewhat similar issue is worries for what would occur if a large share of the American workforce became unemployed due to competition (again with Asia in the role as The Threat).
But also if people worried, debating alternative meassures and solutions were often not their cup of tea.
Then there were many references to America's role as Good Fairy, i.e. as protector of Israel, Taiwan, ...and Europe.
But these interests are of two very different kinds. The former are literally about the security and survival of the nation, the latter is about doing good things.
To my great surprise, people I met were relatively unconcerned about actual security issues and a lot more engaged in the issue of Right and Wrong, or in doing Good and Right, as in giving certain nations gifts (like security, health care, education or democracy) and penalties [Afghanistan, North Korea or Venezuela].
At home I've many years been engaged in the reception and guidance of guest students to my school. There are some obvious differences. Conversations easily gyrate towards National Interests of different countries, Islamists, African economic migrants, Russian revanchism, dying seas and forests, and what to do about these dangers.
American students are as a rule unreserved and happy to debate, but it seems to me as if the educational system in the U.S., with regard to this very matter, prepares the students badly.
October 28, 2006 6:44 PM | Reply | Permalink
Ah -- a true believer.
But if we intend to be a part of the conversation, the first thing to notice is that no matter from which political spectrum the foreign policy expert comes, he or she is speaking as a member of an imperial elite whose subject is the American imperium (hegemony) consisting of North America, Western Europe, Japan and ANZ together with its marches, Central Europe, South America, and SEAsia.
The running of empires has always and everywhere been the exclusive province of its elites. Now, it is the case that when an empire encounters pressure at its borders -- Communist China and the Soviet Union, then; the dar al-Islam, now -- these same elites may find it necessary to conscript the lower orders in the maintenance or advancement of those borders, and that necessity may give the folks at home some say in respect to the extent of the sacrifice they're willing to make on behalf of the elites' interests.
And to repeat myself, that's democracy's strength*. If the elites prove overwhelmingly incompetent and stupid, even the "ninnies" will finally have had enough and will kick the arrogant bastards out.
* There's little evidence that the meritocratic elites that democracies opt for are any wiser than the elites of former times; cf., GWB with Kaiser Wilhelm.
October 28, 2006 6:54 PM | Reply | Permalink
I thank you sincerely for your informative reply.
With all respect, I disagree with your view on democracy. I think we could have evolved somewhat from the mechanism of electing dictators that doesn't get re-elected if they fail to provide enough circus for the ninnies. And I dare say that some democracies have.
And yes, I'm a believer in the theory that nations acting in resonance being more resistant to external threats. National elites that disregard their nation's mood are likely to experience their nation's decline.
I also note that we have a different understanding of the term elite. Although the Bush family belongs to America's aristocracy, and hence may be understood as part of its elite, I see neither Prussian kings, or American presidents, nor aristocratic sons as representatives of meritocratic elites. Inherited status have as little with meritocracy to do as the qualities that make a winner in an American presidential election.
Bismarck belonged to the elite, or Kissinger; the Kaisers did not.
November 21, 2006 4:59 PM | Reply | Permalink