Leon Wieseltier: Washington Diarist: Common Grounded
[Leon Wieseltier is the literary editor of The New Republic.]
The notion of a world society is nothing new to Americans. It dominated the rhetoric of World War II, of the founding of the United Nations, of much of the cold war. It is now a received idea, and its impress may be measured by the success with which advocates have found audiences for issues defined in international terms: the world environmental problem; the world population problem; the world food problem." Those words, platitudes now, were written presciently in 1975, and continued: "Much of this internationalist rhetoric is based on things real enough. There is a world ecology; there is a world economy; and some measures important to individual countries can only be obtained through international accord. Thus the concept of interdependence has become perhaps the main element of the new consciousness of a world society." Daniel Patrick Moynihan made those observations long before the rage for globalization and the shrinking world. He wished to call into question the prestige of international consensus. What mattered for him, heretically, was the substance of that consensus. After all, history is littered with unanimous falsehoods, and with their results. Moynihan transposed the classical anxiety about the tyranny of the majority to the realm of international affairs, and contended that there will be circumstances when American ideas and American interests require of us a strategic concept that he called "the United States in opposition." I cannot imagine a strategic concept more contrary to the thinking of Barack Obama, who regards "the United States in opposition" as the problem that he was anointed to solve.
Since conservatives are once again enjoying that old cataclysmic feeling, it is important to point out that the minoritarian dignity espoused by Moynihan is not to be confused with the contemptuous diffidence practiced by Bush and Cheney. They believe that a wilderness makes a prophet. But there is a world ecology; there is a world economy; and some measures important to individual countries can only be obtained through international accord. The hour of conservative self-examination has passed. The right is now securely swaddled in its certainty that there are no lessons it need learn from the Republican defeat or the Democratic victory. But Bush is not around anymore, even if his mess still is. And if, for Bush, American isolation in the world was an honor, American isolation in the world is, for Obama, a disgrace; and this, too, is not acceptable. Obama’s exquisite internationalism is also a kind of conformism. Everybody regards their world as the world: the United States under Bush was not wanting in allies, and Obama, too, has his preferred company for America. People admire Obama, at home and abroad, because his America is like their America; which is to say, they admire Obama because they admire themselves. The beautiful souls gave him a Nobel Prize for being a beautiful soul. We will soon discover that the popularity of an American president is a fact of minor strategic consequence. Anti-Americanism around the world is deep and tough and various. Most of it will not be dispelled by a black face and a Muslim name and a progressive smile. Multiculturalism is not a foreign policy. And enmity is the regular fate of states, and of superpowers, and of democracies...
Read entire article at The New Republic
The notion of a world society is nothing new to Americans. It dominated the rhetoric of World War II, of the founding of the United Nations, of much of the cold war. It is now a received idea, and its impress may be measured by the success with which advocates have found audiences for issues defined in international terms: the world environmental problem; the world population problem; the world food problem." Those words, platitudes now, were written presciently in 1975, and continued: "Much of this internationalist rhetoric is based on things real enough. There is a world ecology; there is a world economy; and some measures important to individual countries can only be obtained through international accord. Thus the concept of interdependence has become perhaps the main element of the new consciousness of a world society." Daniel Patrick Moynihan made those observations long before the rage for globalization and the shrinking world. He wished to call into question the prestige of international consensus. What mattered for him, heretically, was the substance of that consensus. After all, history is littered with unanimous falsehoods, and with their results. Moynihan transposed the classical anxiety about the tyranny of the majority to the realm of international affairs, and contended that there will be circumstances when American ideas and American interests require of us a strategic concept that he called "the United States in opposition." I cannot imagine a strategic concept more contrary to the thinking of Barack Obama, who regards "the United States in opposition" as the problem that he was anointed to solve.
Since conservatives are once again enjoying that old cataclysmic feeling, it is important to point out that the minoritarian dignity espoused by Moynihan is not to be confused with the contemptuous diffidence practiced by Bush and Cheney. They believe that a wilderness makes a prophet. But there is a world ecology; there is a world economy; and some measures important to individual countries can only be obtained through international accord. The hour of conservative self-examination has passed. The right is now securely swaddled in its certainty that there are no lessons it need learn from the Republican defeat or the Democratic victory. But Bush is not around anymore, even if his mess still is. And if, for Bush, American isolation in the world was an honor, American isolation in the world is, for Obama, a disgrace; and this, too, is not acceptable. Obama’s exquisite internationalism is also a kind of conformism. Everybody regards their world as the world: the United States under Bush was not wanting in allies, and Obama, too, has his preferred company for America. People admire Obama, at home and abroad, because his America is like their America; which is to say, they admire Obama because they admire themselves. The beautiful souls gave him a Nobel Prize for being a beautiful soul. We will soon discover that the popularity of an American president is a fact of minor strategic consequence. Anti-Americanism around the world is deep and tough and various. Most of it will not be dispelled by a black face and a Muslim name and a progressive smile. Multiculturalism is not a foreign policy. And enmity is the regular fate of states, and of superpowers, and of democracies...