Commentary

The trouble with those anarchists is that they don’t know what they like; they only know what they do not like, which is everything; they are consumed by an impulse to destroy, destroy, destroy all existing social orders; and what will happen if they do succeed in destroying all existing social orders?  they will feel nothing but emptiness.

left-wingers (such as social democrats) believe morality does not need to be regulated, but economy should be regulated, because a capitalist businessman with no moral is a danger to society.

Right-wingers believe morality should be regulated, but economy doesn’t need to be regulated, because a capitalist businessman with a strong sense of morality will not harm society for his own personal gain, and even if he does get out of line, a population with sense of morality will not support him.

And then there are Libertarians (or classical liberals), who believe neither morality nor economy should be regulated, let God/nature/the invisible hand sort things out.

Historian Francis Fukuyama wrote in his book America at the Crossroads:

The roots of neoconservatism lie in a remarkable group of largely Jewish intellectuals who attended City College of New York (C.C.N.Y.) in the mid- to late 1930’s and early 1940’s, a group that included Irving Kristol, Daniel Bell, Irving Howe, Nathan Glazer and, a bit later, Daniel Patrick Moynihan. The story of this group has been told in a number of places, most notably in a documentary film by Joseph Dorman called "Arguing the World." The most important inheritance from the C.C.N.Y. group was an idealistic belief in social progress and the universality of rights, coupled with intense anti-Communism.

It is not an accident that many in the C.C.N.Y. group started out as Trotskyites. Leon Trotsky was, of course, himself a Communist, but his supporters came to understand better than most people the utter cynicism and brutality of the Stalinist regime. The anti-Communist left, in contrast to the traditional American right, sympathized with the social and economic aims of Communism, but in the course of the 1930’s and 1940’s came to realize that "real existing socialism" had become a monstrosity of unintended consequences that completely undermined the idealistic goals it espoused. While not all of the C.C.N.Y. thinkers became neoconservatives, the danger of good intentions carried to extremes was a theme that would underlie the life work of many members of this group.

If there was a single overarching theme to the domestic social policy critiques issued by those who wrote for the neoconservative journal The Public Interest, founded by Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer and Daniel Bell in 1965, it was the limits of social engineering. Writers like Glazer, Moynihan and, later, Glenn Loury argued that ambitious efforts to seek social justice often left societies worse off than before because they either required massive state intervention that disrupted pre-existing social relations (for example, forced busing) or else produced unanticipated consequences (like an increase in single-parent families as a result of welfare). A major theme running through James Q. Wilson’s extensive writings on crime was the idea that you could not lower crime rates by trying to solve deep underlying problems like poverty and racism; effective policies needed to focus on shorter-term measures that went after symptoms of social distress (like subway graffiti or panhandling) rather than root causes.

Leon Trotsky (born Lev Bronstein) appeared as a character under the name Emmanuel Goldstein in George Orwell’s novel 1984. 

Recently, some political commentators have called for the United States government to become more open; however there are some issues that must be raised.

One that immediately comes to mind is the issue of the economy.  It’s well-known that politicians lie about the reality of economic recession because the truth usually would just make the economy worse.  Some concluded that Franklin D. Roosevelt’s honesty caused the United States to sank even further into the Great Depression.

The reason that the United States federal reserve or any other central bank for that matter, is shrouded in secrecy is because if the federal reserve/central bank is to manage the economy, it must insulate itself from this economy, thus preventing its own intentions from feeding back into the market.

The most important issue is that of war.  A country with an open government is at a huge disadvantage when battling against a country with a closed government.  Nothing illustrate this point better than the Israel-Lebannon War of 2006, in which an open democracy like Israel was portryed by the media as incompetent, chaotic and stranggled by bureacracy; in contrast, Hezbolla, a closed theocratic government, by careful manipulation of the press, was portrayed by the media as efficient and organized.

A better title for Jeane Kirkpatrick’s latest and last book Making War To Keep Peace would be Threatening War To Keep Peace.  Of course, if your enemy doesn’t take your threat seriously, then you would be forced to go to war for real.  The effectiveness of a threat depends on how effectively you can convince your enemy of the seriousness of your threat; which is something the United States is struggling to achieve.

William Deresiewicz, a professor at Yale University, concedes that the modern professor is often a “careerist parvenu.” But if so, it is because he has no other choice; the old-boy network that once allocated teaching jobs among a small elite no longer exists. “[T]he old gentility rested on exclusion,” he explains, “and the new rat race is meritocracy in motion.” And he concedes that today’s professor is far more likely to sleep with his students than his pre-1960’s predecessors, but not with the freewheeling abandon that Hollywood imagines.

Deresiewicz is more interesting when he moves from the sociology of the professor to the sociology of the American public—and why Americans seem so hostile to academics. His proposed explanation is fascinating:

Americans’ traditional resentment of hierarchy and hostility toward intellect have intensified since World War II and particularly since the 1960s. Elites have been discredited, the notion of high culture dethroned, the means of communication decentralized. Public discourse has become more demotic; families, churches, and other institutions more democratic. The existence of academia, an institution predicated on intellectual hierarchy, irritates Americans’ insistence on equality, their feeling that intellect constitutes a contemptible kind of advantage. At the same time, as American society has become more meritocratic, its economy more technocratic, people want that advantage for themselves or their children. With the U.S. News rankings and the annual admissions frenzy, universities are playing an ever-more conspicuous role in creating the larger social hierarchy that no one acknowledges but everyone wants to climb. It’s no wonder that people resent the gatekeepers and enjoy seeing them symbolically humiliated.

via Contentions.