BrinkLindsey.com – The Age of Abundance

This eerie video clip of a 1994 interview with Dick Cheney has been making the rounds in recent days:

In it, Cheney defends the Bush 41 administration’s decision not to proceed to Baghdad after expelling the Iraqi army from Kuwait. His description of the downsides of occupation now sounds downright prophetic.

Seeing this clip reminded me of a personal experience along similar lines. Back in 1998, when I was running Cato’s then-new Center for Trade Policy Studies, we held a conference on unilateral economic sanctions called “Collateral Damage: The Economic Cost of U.S. Foreign Policy.” And our luncheon speaker at that event was none other than Halliburton CEO Dick Cheney.

Looking back at the transcript of his talk, you can see that it’s not just Cheney’s views of the wisdom of occupying Iraq that have undergone an amazing transformation. So has his attitude about engaging versus confronting Iran:

[O]ur sanctions policy oftentimes generates unanticipated consequences. It puts us in a position where a part of our government is pursuing objectives that are at odds with other objectives that the United States has with respect to a particular region.

An example that comes immediately to mind has to do with efforts to develop the resources of the former Soviet Union in the Caspian Sea area. It is a region rich in oil and gas. Unfortunately, Iran is sitting right in the middle of the area and the United States has declared unilateral economic sanctions against that country. As a result, American firms are prohibited from dealing with Iran and find themselves cut out of the action, both in terms of opportunities that develop with respect to Iran itself, and also with respect to our ability to gain access to Caspian resources. Iran is not punished by this decision. There are numerous oil and gas development companies from other countries that are now aggressively pursuing opportunities to develop those resources. That development will proceed, but it will happen without American participation. The most striking result of the government’s use of unilateral sanctions in the region is that only American companies are prohibited from operating there.

Another good example of how our sanctions policy oftentimes gets in the way of our other interests occurred in the fall of 1997 when Saddam Hussein was resisting U.N. weapons inspections. I happened to be in the Gulf region during that period of time. Administration officials in the area were trying to get Arab members of the coalition that executed operation Desert Shield/Desert Storm in 1991 to allow U.S. military forces to be based on their territory. They wanted that capability in the event it was necessary to take military action against Iraq in order to get them to honor the UN resolutions. Our friends in the region cited a number of reasons for not complying with our request. They were concerned with the fragile nature of the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians, which was stalled. But they also had fundamental concerns about our policy toward Iran. We had been trying to force the governments in the region to adhere to an anti-Iranian policy, and our views raised questions in their mind about the wisdom of U.S. leadership. They cited it as an example of something they thought was unwise, and that they should not do.

So, what effect does this have on our standing in the region? I take note of the fact that all of the Arab countries we approached, with the single exception of Kuwait, rejected our request to base forces on their soil in the event military action was required against Iraq. As if that weren’t enough, most of them boycotted the economic conference that the United States supported in connection with the peace process that was hosted in Qatar during that period of time. Then, having rejected participation in that conference, they all went to Tehran and attended the Islamic summit hosted by the Iranians. The nation that’s isolated in terms of our sanctions policy in that part of the globe is not Iran. It is the United States. And the fact that we have tried to pressure governments in the region to adopt a sanctions policy that they clearly are not interested in pursuing has raised doubts in the minds of many of our friends about the overall wisdom and judgment of U.S. policy in the area.

Note again that Cheney gave these remarks in 1998 – when Iran’s nuclear ambitions were already well known, and two years after the Khobar Towers bombing in which Iran was believed to be complicit.

9/11 may not have changed everything, but it sure changed Dick Cheney.

Writing on NRO’s “Phi Beta Cons” blog, Carol Iannone takes exception to my recent NR piece “A Farewell to Culture Wars” and a follow-up article in NRO. In particular, she states:

Lindsey made some remarks in his part of the exchange, that the Right should be embarrassed about previous racism, sexism, and prudery….  In the National Review I read as a teenager, edited by William Buckley, I don’t recall any of that.  I recall its being sound, elegant, rational, cultured, with high intellectual standards. Lindsey should be prevailed upon to give specific examples of what he means by the sins of the Right in these areas.

OK, Carol, I’m happy to oblige. Let’s start with racism — specifically, support for the institutionalized suppression of blacks’ civil and political rights before 1964. Here’s an excerpt from a National Review editorial back in August 1957, exactly 50 years ago:

The central question that emerges–and it is not a parliamentary question or a question that is answered by meerely consulting a catalog of the rights of American citizens, born Equal–is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes–the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced ace. It is not easy, and it is unpleasant, to adduce statistics evidencing the median cultural superiority of White over Negro: but it is fact that obtrudes, one that cannot be hidden by ever-so-busy egalitarians and anthropologists. The question, as far as the White community is concerned, is whether the claims of civilization supersede those of universal suffrage. The British believe they do, and acted accordingly, in Kenya, where the choice was dramatically one between civilization and barbarism, and elsewhere; the South, where the conflict is byno means dramatic, as in Kenya, nevertheless perceives important qualitative differences between its culture and the Negroes’, and intends to assert its own.

And here’s more along similar lines, from a March 1960 National Review editorial:

In the Deep South the Negroes are retarded. Any effort to ignore the fact is sentimentalism or demagoguery. In the Deep South the essential relationship is organic, and the attempt to hand over to the Negro the raw political power with which to alter it is hardly a solution.

Now, on to sexism. Back in the late ’50s, when conservatives were still defending the “traditional values” of Southern race relations, pretty much everybody was still defending traditional sex roles. For example, in my book I quote from a December 1956 Life magazine article that decries what it calls the “suburban syndrome,” in which “the wife, having worked before marriage or at least having been educated and socially conditioned toward the idea that work (preferably some kind of intellectual work in an office, among men) carries prestige” become depressed as a result of being “just a housewife.”

Liberals, however, were much quicker to accept a broader role for women outside the home than people on the right. Here, 30 years after that Life article, is George Gilder in his 1986 book Men and Marriage (an updating of his 1973 book Sexual Suicide):

In successful civilized societies, man counterbalances female sexual superiority [i.e., women's ability to give birth] by playing a crucial role as provider and achiever. Money replaces muscle.

If society devalues this role by pressing women to provide for themselves, prove their “independence,” and compete with men for money and status, there is only one way equality between the sexes can be maintained: Women must be reduced to sexual parity. They must relinquish their sexual superiority, psychologically disconnect their wombs, and adopt the short-circuited copulatory sexuality of males.

I trust Carol does not believe she has psychologically disconnected her womb by competing with male bloggers.

Finally, on to prudery. Combing through National Review’s digital archives, I found this gem from John Lukacs back in August 1970:

There are reasons to believe that by 1970 many people in the Western world behaved in bed differently than had their ancestors. For one thing, people in 1870 made love without saying much at all. By 1970 they were talking to each other, before and sometimes even during the sexual act — surely a sign that the intense awesomeness of it was no longer the same…. For another thing, women and wives were now told and taught that they were to reach the same peaks of sexual satisfaction that were previously supposed to have been the monopoly of their men and husbands. This was another imbecile outcome of primitive propaganda parading in the disguise of sophistication. It caused a lot of trouble, as women were told to forget that their satisfaction is of a different, though by no means less deep, nature than that of men….

I could go on, but you get the idea. I don’t suppose many conservatives today would share Lukacs’ dim view of female orgasms and sexual communication between spouses.

The point here isn’t to bash conservatives for benighted views from decades ago that most people on the contemporary right don’t hold. The point, rather, is that conservatives today should reflect on the fact that their predecessors did sometimes say embarrassing or even shameful things in the name of defending “traditional values.” Such reflection should lead to the conclusion that indiscriminate defense of traditional values isn’t proper conservatism at all. It’s reactionary populism.

Conservatives should therefore recognize that lapsing into reactionary cultural populism is a characteristic vice of the right, and they should be on their guard against it. These days, unfortunately, the right’s guard is down — as evidenced by the recent hysteria over gay marriage and Mexican immigration, as well as the sorry spectacle of the GOP presidential candidates’ tripping over each other to endorse torture, “doubling” Guantanomo, and other jingoistic excess.

I recently had a nice discussion about my new book with Michael Duffy of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s “Counterpoint” radio program. You can go here to download the audio or read the transcript.

In my book and elsewhere (see, for example, here and here), I’ve argued that American society has shifted in a decidedly libertarian direction — i.e., left on culture and right on economics — over the past generation, and that American political culture reflects this shift. Regarding economics at least, Ezra seems to agree:

America’s political consensus is almost absurdly to the right. But because people still need to run to the left of each other, the rhetoric on offer frequently sounds like the rhetoric of the left, even as its actual prescriptions are decidedly within the mainstream of our fairly conservative consensus on economics. And vice versa in other countries, where rhetoric of the right can refer to almost comically leftist policies. where the center is much further left — and in other countries, the precise opposite happens.

Ezra makes this point in an effort to counter charges that John Edwards is a dangerous left-wing populist. Fair enough — I agree that Edwards’ policy views would fall on the right side of the center line in many European countries. But since he’s running for office in the United States, I don’t see how that matters much.

Rather, I think Ezra’s point means we shouldn’t make too much of the current popularity of left-wing populist rhetoric. After all the globalization and “new economy” hype of the ’90s, we were bound to experience a swing in the political and rhetorical pendulum; meanwhile, the Bush administration and its failures have given the leftward swing additional momentum.

But when we get past rhetoric and electioneering and move to actual policymaking, we’re still in a very libertarian political culture by world standards. So progressives who imagine we’re on the verge of a big lurch toward social democracy are setting themselves up for a major disappointment.

In her Wall Street Journal column today, Kimberly Strassel reports on opposition within the congressional Democratic ranks to various “soak the rich” tax hikes. Here’s an excerpt:

Class warrior Sander Levin from Michigan introduced House legislation levying higher taxes on hedge fund and private equity managers’ earnings back in June. It took until the end of July for Senate Democrats to start publicly trouncing the idea. Washington’s Maria Cantwell worried the tax would hurt returns for her state’s public pension fund, which makes a pretty penny off the back of private equity funds. Others fretted it would drive their private equity companies offshore. As for the almighty Chuck Schumer, patron senator of Wall Street, he declared his opposition to any tax that wasn’t also levied on non-finance industries. And since Mr. Schumer is the one doling out money for next year’s Senate re-election races, that may well be the end of that tax idea….

Madame Speaker, meanwhile, spent what was by all accounts an unfriendly hour last week trying to coax Democrats from oil-patch states to sign on to her oil-company tax hike. As of yesterday, she hadn’t had much luck; Texas’s Gene Green and about two dozen other oil-state dissidents were holding firm against the $16 billion tax package leveled directly at their home-state economies. It was unclear whether Ms. Pelosi could even risk bringing her vaunted energy legislation for a vote before August recess. Chief tax writer Charlie Rangel has faced so much in-party blowback to his idea of heavily taxing “the rich” in order to finance an alternative minimum tax fix, he has yet to introduce legislation.

It’s too early to know how any of this will turn out, but these little flareups of tax resistance illustrate the political constraints that serve so often to keep economic populism in check.

Economic populism — bash the rich, bash corporations, and bash foreigners — cashes in on economic anxiety, and consequently it usually resonates with a goodly chunk of the electorate. For a variety of reasons, it’s resonating especially well these days.

But here’s the catch: populism works much better as diagnosis than prescription. Rail against obscenely paid CEOs and hedge fund managers, greedy oil and pharmaceutical companies, and dastardly job-stealing Chinese imports, and you’re sure to convince certain constituencies that you’ve correctly identified the problem. No suprise there — people are feeling pain or feeling worried, and you’re offering up a primal scream on their behalf.

But now comes the hard part. Now that you’ve tapped into economic anxiety for political gain, what are you going to do to alleviate it?  If your answer is tax increases or protectionist policies or other measures that throw sand in the economic gears, good luck — because those proposals, if enacted, will end up increasing the number of people suffering from economic anxiety.

Because of this dynamic, the politically optimal solution is often some version of bait and switch: stir up political support with market-bashing demagoguery, then avoid a huge backlash by sticking to small-bore or symbolic policy changes. Consequently, populism’s bark usually ends up being much worse than its bite.

The great outsourcing scare of 2004 was a case in point. It was a political season, and the “jobless recovery” made playing to employment anxieties a political winner. John Kerry dutifully cashed in with a populist diagnosis of “Benedict Arnold CEOs”; his prescription, though, was penny-ante tinkering with the tax code. Yawn…. Before too long, job creation recovered, the election season ended, and concern over outsourcing was relegated to the back burner.

I’m not saying we should be complacent in the face of market-hostile political sentiment. Rather, I’m saying that supporters of pro-growth policies shouldn’t get demoralized by the current wave of economic populism. Yes, we’re forced to play defense for the time being, but being temporarily on the defensive and actually losing are two different things.