Builders, Defenders, etc
David Adesnik posts a long response to the debate surrounding the Michael Totten piece about the alleged lack of interest shown by liberals in both the outside world and the study of history. I’ve already had my say about the poor quality of this piece, but apparently it had little effect as it’s just been published in the Wall Street Journal’s Opinion Journal. David notes that
The most forceful response to Totten’s post is from Kieran Healy, who argues that Totten depends far too much on vague generalizations and circular logic. Kieran scores a few points, but in the end he just avoids what Totten has to say.
To which I can only reply that it’s because Totten “depends far too much on vague generalizations and circular logic” that it isn’t worth taking what he has to say about “Builders vs Defenders” or “Liberals don’t care about foreign countries” very seriously. The distinctions don’t work! It would be very easy to write a column that’s the mirror-image of Totten’s assertions and that would probably play very well to the same audience if this were a time of international calm and domestic crisis. Much of his piece could actually remain as it is—only a bit of reframing would be needed. It would go like this.
Conservatives are oriented to their own back yard. Their view is that if everyone took responsibility for their own problems then we wouldn’t need a nanny state or world government to solve them for us. In this sense Conservatives are Builders. “The first priority of builders is the immediate surrounding environment, starting with the home and moving outward from there. Next is the community, followed by the city, the region and the nation. The other side of the world is the lowest of all priorities.” Conservative builders have little interest in managing the problems of others. As Governor Bush said during the second Presidential debate, “I think what we need to do is convince people who live in the lands they live in to build the nations. Maybe I’m missing something here. I mean, we’re going to have kind of a nation-building corps from America? Absolutely not.”
By contrast, Liberals are far more likely to be interested in getting involved in other people’s business, at home or—especially—abroad. They have an agenda to advance and a political system (and state bureaucracy) to export and they are much more interested than conservatives in reforming or changing the political systems of other countries. They are Defenders, always looking out for the rights of the supposedly oppressed, even if those they protect don’t really want to be defended. Looking at international political interventionism from the ill-fated League of Nations to the United Nations to the Marshall Plan to the European Union, we see Liberal thinkers and politicians behind all of these grand schemes—schemes which are anathema to the Conservative way of thinking.
“This is a broad generalization and there are, of course, lots of exceptions…”
Fill in the rest yourself. We can co-author, and maybe get picked up by the WSJ in a couple of days.
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