How to fix Iraq: meditations on the meaning of "party"

I did not intend on writing again so soon, but I've been seized with a burst of inspiration. I figure that, given the fact of my departure to New York tomorrow, it's best to leave a last will and testament for after I'm stricken down a third time by another undue speeding ticket. Speaking of which, the first trial is in five days. If I'm found guilty then we can at least be assured of a very turbulent 2022. History hasn't ended, folks. 

In any event, my attention has once again been pulled back to Iraq, after reading this rather short but clarifying piece. I am not one to hold any policy analyst from the American Enterprise Institute in great regard, but the thesis of Mr. Rubin's article was compelling in its recognition (perhaps unconscious) of the root of the Arab political dysfunction in the early 21st century. He warns of a return to the streets of the Iraqi public after the protest movement of late 2019 toppled Prime Minister Mahdi and the citizenry's disdain for the network of carefully balanced interests that constitute Iraq's ruling political clique today. He sees in Mustafa al-Kadhimi's present inability to rein in the proliferating venal offices of the civil service, his intimidation by the Popular Mobilization Force's state-paramilitary machinery, the Sadrist bloc's rise to power, and Iraq's dependence on its oil-sector as a toxic brew of conditions which, given a small spark, will combust into an anti-political explosion. In an earlier article, written just as the United States was prepared to dissolve its Provisional Authority, he points to the origins of Iraq's kleptocratic clique as rooted in the invading Coalition's failure to establish a truly representative electoral system. Foolishly, the PA chose to construct a new electoral system for Iraq based on party-slates and not single member constituencies. As such, key minority demographics, such as the Shiite Turkmen of Tal Afar and the party-skeptical Christians, were left to choose between no representation at all or voting with parties that had little regard for their interests (which is functionally the same thing anyway). Aspiring politicians were left to compete for the patronage of party functionaries who held control of the slates, the consequence of course being that, as Iraq descended further into a sectarian-tinged insurgency and political polarization, political candidates were forced to traffic in ever more inflammatory and identity-oriented language. This electoral system was reformed to a district-based electoral method after the 2019 protests, closer to what we have in the United States, but factional interests had entrenched themselves so deeply in the system that what we are still left with today is an Iraq whose unwieldy politics is suspended on a teetering seesaw. Large party blocs vie for power, struggle over the office of prime minister, sometimes attempt to kill each other in the streets (Kadhimi was nearly assassinated in a drone strike on November 7th, undoubtedly the work of the Fatah bloc), and all the while the state itself continues to expand its bureaucracy without a corresponding improvement in public services. 

All of this smacks very much not simply of dysfunction but also corruption, as well as that other d-word which sends chills down the spines of all those who fancy themselves enlightened and rational: "degeneracy". It is a political vocabulary not merely restricted to the dissident corners of the new right, but which is rooted in a long history of public discourse, thought and imagery. It is no coincidence that Mr. Rubin invokes Lebanon's long history of communal violence when discussing Iraq. The problem is fundamentally the same in both countries. The problem is one that has vexed man since the late 18th century - the problem of party. 

I have been accused in the past, when this issue has come up, of importing "western notions" into a region that is unsuitable for them. Particularly when suggesting that a transition to a partyless system, or the elevation of a trans-partisan "mono-party", would be adaptable to the particular circumstances of a country like Lebanon. To that I would simply point out that the very notion of a legitimate political opposition, and the norms that have allowed any political party anywhere in the world to flourish, first took root in the west. If anything, I am suggesting that a reversion back to what was once the standard for most of the Middle East's history would do much more to heal their strife than the current attempt to build a pluralist system out of fundamentally irreconcilable interests. The problem, of course, is that those interests are not interested in true representation at all. They have lost sight of their intended purpose and function, they have themselves created one of the starkest mass-elite divides in the world, with predictable results. 

The notion of a political party was just as alien to the Anglo-American world of the 18th century as the Middle East of the 18th century. It was not at all clear in the newly formed United States then, as it is not clear for the Middle East now, that any type of political opposition should be legitimated. George Washington, that emblem of freedom and democracy, is on record asserting that "meetings in opposition to the constituted authorities" are improper and dangerous. Political clubs, parties, and all organized extra-constitutional structures were deemed a threat to republicanism itself. The institutions provided for by the Union's constitution were considered sufficient to deal with social and political discord, without the need to find recourse in parties. This was an attitude inherited from the British experience, where the wars of religion in the 17th century, with their extreme violence, scheming, and frequent attempts at usurpation, had left bitter memories of factional politics for all involved. Parties, simply put, were no better than factions of enterprising men who did not have the public good at heart and sought only to benefit themselves. For anyone observing Iraq or Lebanon (or Israel, Turkey, Italy, perhaps the entire world), this cannot be an unfamiliar sentiment. 

Of course, the American revolutionaries perceived degeneracy of a much different sort infecting Britain's parliamentary system, whose membership remained largely unaligned even as the British electorate and suffrage expanded. Pocket boroughs, shifting factions, hereditary dominance, as well as purchase and arrangement in parliament all contributed to the widespread view at the time that the sun was declining on Britain and its system, that everything worthy of being learned from it had already crossed the Atlantic and would be preserved in the New World, away from the corrupting tendencies of the Old. It would escape the terminal decline that appeared to be sinking Britain by embracing a republican form of government which would imbue virtue through its representative constitutional framework. And it would do all of this without the fractious influence of party which had torn apart the Anglo world. 

The first-party system, when it did emerge, did not come into being as an established and settled norm. The Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans looked askance at each other and attempted to absorb the other into their respective coalitions - in the hopes that doing so would eliminate party politics once and for all. This did in fact succeed, after the War of 1812 appeared to confirm the triumph of American virtue over British degeneracy, and the Federalists promptly collapsed. The Era of Good Feelings, as it is now known, was a period of unchallenged dominance for the Democratic-Republican party. The last uncontested presidential election was won in 1820 by the, not coincidentally, last of the Virginian dynasty of presidents: James Monroe. After appearing to clear the field of all opposition and securing nonpartisan rule, he had this to say about the future of the American experiment:

"Surely our government may go on and prosper without the existence of parties. I have always considered their existence as the curse of the country, of which we had sufficient proof, more especially, in the late war...We have no distinct orders. No allurement has been offered to the federalists to calm them down into a state of tranquility. None of them have been appointed to high office, and very few to the lowest...Parties have now cooled down, or rather have disappeared from this great theatre, and we are about to make the experiment whether there is sufficient virtue in the people to support our free republican system of governance."  

Simply put: a free system of governance does not depend on the existence of political parties for its survival. Political opposition is not a necessary condition for the proper and judicious functioning of representative government. Instead, it is civic participation, oriented to the commonweal in opposition to private interest, that secures the foundation of liberty. 

So there you have it. Iraq is not an insuperable problem. Mr. Rubin is probably quite right in supposing that the Iraqi people will again attempt to put pressure on their politicians. The 2021 electoral success and composition of the Sadrist bloc is one indication of the shape of things to come. Much like the Five Star Movement's populist alliance with Lega Nord after the 2018 Italian elections, Sadr's movement has shown itself ideologically flexible enough to align itself with parties that would appear anathema to its value system under any traditional analysis. In 2018, the alliance of its religious populist-nationalism with the Iraqi Communist Party's Marxism proved successful. It has allied itself with smaller catch-all parties that utilize the technocratic language of "reform" and "progress". The people's attachment to interest group politics has weakened as the elite-mass divide has grown stronger. Growing numbers of Sunnis, for instance, no longer see the Iraqi Islamic Party as representing their interests. And why should they? Their lives have not changed. It has only gotten worse. If Muqtada al-Sadr has his way, it is inevitable that his party will transform into the kind of techno-populist party that is emerging across the world. A populist and independent Iraq with a single mono-party, free of foreign influence, ruled by the Shiite Islamist equivalent of Lord Bolingbroke's patriot-king, answerable to the people, committed to reining in all faction and slashing the perverse incentive structure of the bureaucracy, will go far in halting the country's degeneration into perpetual internecine bloodshed.

If all of this sounds ridiculous, I invite the reader to consider the past 18 years of Iraqi history and to consider whether that is an acceptable price to pay for an electoral instantiation of pluralism that is, if nothing else, the true western artifice.

Frisson and bloom

There are some lines that, after all this time, still ring in my head. Whenever I sit down to write one of these monologues, the thoughts I've amassed in my mind dissipate into nothing. Whatever cognitive artillery I was able to bring to the dialectic before has been spent on staving off a complete collapse in academic credibility, and now that it is over I am left with nothing but a hollow cavern in my head. I am merely typing now in the hope, however vain, that I can begin to reconstruct some semblance of a worldview not squelched by an obstreperous mind. 

In that vein, it would only be appropriate, given the season and approaching holidays, to relate the story of the Christmas reckoning as it is told in Penelope Fitzgerald's The Blue Flower. It's an understated and beautiful novel, fictionalizing the short life of Friedrich von Hardenburg, or as the world now knows him, Novalis. A romantic philosopher-poet (that strange admixture which in all honesty should be mutually exclusionary, given the hegemonic influence that classical poetry and philosophy held over 18th-century Germany and the ancient disciplinary divides such a transmission ought to have transplanted) bewitched by a singular and passionate moment of ardor at the sight of twelve year old Sophie von Kühn. It is a love that appears to all interested parties to be intensely irrational and unsuitable. The Hardenburgs were a family that aspired to the noble pretenses common of the aristocracy, their patriarch a rigid man of faith who expected his son to follow him in managing the hereditary salt mines and who found his poetic mind deeply alienating. At their residence in the hometown of Weissenfels an old custom still holds sway, even in the midst of revolutionary upheaval in France and a loosening of old mores elsewhere. It is the Christmas reckoning - an annual penitentiary rite in which the children of the family confess their sins, omitted or otherwise. It is a deeply puritan ritual, a moral self-assessment which could only stem from a mind given to apocalyptic anxieties about the human character. It is 1794 and Christmas Eve when the Freiherr returns home and the children await his entry with anxious anticipation. Friedrich expects that he will be compelled to confess his budding courtship. But instead of consummating the ritual, as he is wont to do, the Freiherr slumps into his seat and makes a confession of his own: 

"You expect me to consider your conduct for the past year, both the progress you have made and your backsliding. You expect me to question you about anything that has been concealed from me. You expect - indeed it would be your duty - to answer me truthfully. You expect these things, but you are mistaken. On this Christmas Eve, the Christmas Eve of the year 1794, I shall want no confessions, I shall make no interrogations. What is the reason for this? Well, in reality, while at Artern I received a letter from a very old friend, the former Prediger of the Brethren at Neudietendorf. It was a Christmas letter, reminding me that I was fifty-six years of age and could not, in the nature of things, expect more than another few years on this Earth. The Prediger instructed me for once not to reprove, but to remember only that this is a day of unspeakable joy, on which all men and women should be no more, and no less, than children. And therefore...I myself have become, during this sacred time, wholly a child." 

This is a novel given itself over to the concerns of the Romanticist sensibility, indeed, attempts to make sense of its beguiling premise through a destruction of the boundaries that separate subject from object, waking from dreaming, wisdom and stupidity, life and death. The revolutionary sentiments of the period crop up frequently. One of the youngest Hardenburgs, known as The Bernhard, speaks flippantly of the seismic shifts occurring in world and thought, of republics without property and death as nothing more than a condition. There is a feverish expectation that runs through the eager Hardenburgs, Friedrich chief among them, that the events in Paris herald the return to a new "golden age". But these divisions and conflicts obscure deeper generational movements of the sort that they themselves begin to feel as they age. Late in the novel, as some members of the family reminisce at the break of dawn in an old family estate, one of the Hardenburg brothers confesses a deep desire: "I should prefer us all to be children...then we should have a kingdom of our own." It is telling that it is The Bernhard who punctures his lofty phantasms, "That has not been my experience," he says dourly. Just as it should come as no surprise that it is only The Bernhard's whose pleasure at the Freiherr's shaken disposition is made known to us and who breaks out into song at the sight: "He is born, let us love him." 

One fault-line not named but which runs an electric course through the book is that between the old and the young. It is the last, and perhaps hardest, boundary that the subjectivist or romanticist has left to break. Novalis is only dimly aware of this. Perhaps he sees it when wandering through a misty graveyard and notes a man standing before a headstone, a man he can see is very much alive but whom he also significantly understands as dead. Or perhaps he glimpses it when he sees Sophie for the first time and finds that "a quarter of an hour decided him". Or perhaps it never happens. Novalis died young, after all. He was not even thirty when tuberculosis smothered him. Sophie was half his age when she passed under the strain of chronic illness and multiple surgeries.

But surely there is something to be learned from the reckoning on Christmas Eve. Something quite anathema to those other thoughts I've had ringing in my head. At a dinner party I was made to attend only recently, where we discussed Fukuyama's End of History over champagne like repulsive elitists, a colleague expressed her gratitude that we were all there, learning to make the world "a less scary place". And the entire time she was speaking I could think only of how much a scarier place I would like to make of the world. The feverish apocalypse breaks in the Freiherr's mind, if only for a moment. It has yet to break from mine. And yet he has become what I wish to make of the world. Novalis quizzes those in his circle about the start of an unfinished story he has written about the eponymous blue flower, desperate to discern some meaning in his own symbolism and yet finds none. Perhaps it is a distant object of yearning like Gatsby's green light or fixed with meaning like the Little Prince's rose. Perhaps it is all of them, rose, flower, light. Novalis could hardly understand Sophie, could not "hear her question". That desire to reach something unreachable, to approach the infinite, propels him to elevate her into Wisdom and Philosophy. But what good is philosophy? Novalis's brother Erasmus reacts with surprise and dismay to discover the mature blossoming of a philosophical disposition in both himself and a worldly family friend, Karoline Just, and to discover that they are both twenty two years young. Time wasted is time that will hold us to account, in the end. 

These raise troubling questions, questions about what it really means to have "matured", about whether and when anyone really grows old and how such a thing might happen. Erasmus looks at Sophie and sees "a greedy infant", but Friedrich sees a gateway to another world. These are questions I cannot answer yet, but it would only be right, a kind of roundabout justice, if the ends I desire precipitate a reprieve from the repression I'd like to see imposed. But I would first hope that I can see the joy in this coming holiday. If the "golden age" is in fact a world without reprove, if to truly be a child again is to establish a kingdom without judgment and penance, then I should like to see that with my own eyes, to see it in myself most of all through the reflection of mirrors and persons and time. I have a sneaking sensation that, just as an early death snatched the blue flower from Friedrich von Hardenburg's tentative grasp, I will live only long enough to see that born again dream slip away.

Getting real about realism

I realized, looking back, that I was not as clear as I should have been in my last post. Sometimes I get lost in digressions and musings, which isn't always a bad thing, but having finally finished the 586 page Hobbes translation of The Peloponnesian War, I figured I would take the occasion to provide a concise summation on what I've taken away from it, insofar as the field of IR is concerned. The full thesis I was trying to convey may not have been as clear to me then as it is now, now that I have seen what becomes of the fateful conflict between Athens and Sparta. 

In sum, the father of classical realism has triggered within me a clean break from the realist persuasion in international relations. The reasons for this can be boiled down to a single proposition:

P1: Realism as a description and realism as a prescription are at odds 

For some reason, what has become painfully obvious is not so to the vast majority of scholars who have taken themselves to have learned something from Thucydides. What later commentators have referred to as the "Athenian thesis" - the thesis that, in essence, might truly does make right and the Athenians deserved their imperial dominion because of their strength - is in tension with the notion that Thucydides himself, who looked upon the imperial demos with a wary eye and who found much to fault in the conduct of the Athenians, was a consummate realist championing fealty to power over that of values and law. When one makes the normative judgement that might is right, you are in fact entering the world of values. Realism becomes another dreampolitik. 

So there is a grave mistake occurring, when those who see Thucydides' mere acknowledgement of the fact that power asymmetries are apt to cause conflict also see in this description a suggestion that power ought to be maximized in the international arena. It is the classic confusion of ought for is. Thucydides himself makes it clear in the dramatic structure of the historical narrative that the quest for power is more likely to prove the undoing of the state than enhance it. The Sicilian disaster follows the conquest of Melos. The plague follows Pericles' oration. Athens forgets fortune, but gambles anyway and comes away the loser. Realism as a prescription seems obviously wrong. If anything, The History of the Peloponnesian War is a cautionary tale. Quite apart from suggesting we must be guided by the facts of power, the book appears to warn us away from it. Bound up in tyche - or all of the future possibilities in play at some particular present moment and in some particular entity - power is unstable and inevitably dissolves, just like realism, into the opposite of its intention. The moral justification for this course of action is wholly distinct from the mere acknowledgement that power imbalances drive the behavior of individuals and states. The decision to raise it to an ideal can never be realist. Most scholars can agree on the description, while also advocating restraint despite in reality following the Athenians in calling for the exertion of power in areas outside of the immediate national interest. Following the Athenians, who simply ceased to be realist the moment they embarked upon the imperial project. 

One may go down the list of supposedly "realist" foreign policy practitioners and find the same tension at work. Kennan's "containment", Mearsheimer's "offensive realism", Walt's "offshore balancing", all of who called for restraint at one time or another in the name of realism, and all of whom offered prescriptions that ran against that very ethos, in the name of realism. 

What, then, is realism? It would seem to me that the term, if it is to accurately reflect any reality that matches the connotations associated with the word, cannot capture the suggestion that power is the fundamental variable that drives interactions between states while also encompassing the litany of policy prescriptions that call for an activist approach abroad, and which also nebulously defines "national security interests" in terms of checking hegemons, whether regional or otherwise, or rogue states that may one day pose a threat, in addition to suggesting that it is the foreign policy philosophy of "restraint". To suggest otherwise is to make realism indistinguishable from liberalism.

The problem with political realism

It's summer and I feel like garbage. I feel like I should be doing more than what I'm doing, which is nothing. I guess that's a contradiction. I can't do what I do-not. I have really learned nothing, both in life and in my reading. Art and life are supposed to be one and I suppose they are. They've both taught me nothing. 

So now I'm sitting here and the sun has just gone down in the sleepy little seaside hamlet. I came down from Maryland, where I've been living for the past nine months, because the incessant harassment on the part of my parents was getting to be too much, and to delay the inevitable any longer would have been a serious display of impropriety. So instead of sitting in my room in Maryland doing nothing, I got to sit on Long Island and deal with my moody prick of a father for a week. He's as cantankerous as ever (perhaps more-so) and my childhood home is in ruins. I used to revere the island because I thought I could see the beauty in its banality. I could appreciate a window pane or a patch of grass or a view atop a hill, but now the world has shrunk and it all feels alien. The memories have lost their grip and the sentiments have dulled. The only place where it's really strong is right here where I am now. It's sad. What's sadder is that I was sitting here typing out this very same subject matter one year ago. I thought things had changed. They didn't. They never do. Maybe they never will.

One thing that hasn't changed is my reading habits. I've finally gotten the opportunity to read Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War. It was a long time coming. It is, after all, the foundational text in my professional discipline. International relations scholars pore through its pages in search of its universal and immemorial wisdom so that they may apply the lessons of the past to the present day. The problem, as it so often is, is that they appear to be all wrong about what it really means.

I have been sympathetic to the so-called "realist" school of thought in international relations for as long as I can remember. The dominant school of foreign policy in the United States, we are told, is a liberal idealism that seeks to export its ideology globally. It promotes democracy abroad in places that are anathema to it. It demands of other states an adherence to juridical equality, human rights, and individual liberties. It funnels billions in foreign aid to states across the world in a bid to enhance influence and also in a genuine effort to do good. The attempt to sustain a "rules-based international order" since around 1947 has been the practical consequence of this school's influence over the political class and its foreign policy apparatus. Attempts to alter the sway of liberalism over foreign policy has often gotten bogged down in what some have called "the Blob" - the network of national security officials, journalists, and civil servants with a sincere belief and interest in the power of this idea. 

This is contrasted with realism, which calls for the antithesis to all of this. There are a variety of flavors one may pick and choose from, just as one may pick from the litter of liberalisms, but they all boil down to a few general characteristics. They call for restraint in our dealings with the world, an emphasis on power as the fundamental variable that drives interaction between states at the expense of ideological affinity or universalist crusading, and a reorientation of grand strategy around the national interest. Insecurity and fear in an anarchic international system fuel conflict. Realpolitik and pragmatism is the order of the day, not dreams of world harmony and universal democracy. 

This is all thought that to have received its earliest formulation in Thucydides' tract on the war between Sparta and Athens. The fundamental conflict that drives the narrative (and it is, indeed, more than just a summary of facts) is the conflict between realism and liberalism. Realism emerges as a submission to "necessity", a drive to achieve and expand the Athenian dominion. Liberalism manifests as a commitment to "law", dialogue, and justice. The irony of course is that the Athenian democracy often finds itself defending its actions by appealing to the natural necessity of the former, while the oligarchic Spartans couch their actions in terms of a defense of "liberty".

Something doesn't add up. Today's "restrainers", "offshore balancers" and "offensive realists" propose a course of action that would sidestep the blunders they see enervating American power in Iraq, Syria, Ukraine, and Afghanistan. And yet realist theory often makes diagnoses that conflict with the prescriptions of the supposed realists. Consider John Mearsheimer's realism, which calls for regional hegemons to eliminate potential rivals before they become the dominant powers in their own regional neighborhood. Consider Thucydides himself, who recounts in the famed Melian dialogue the negotiations between Athens and the besieged isle of Melos. In a passage that bears repeating, the Melian council counters Athenian arguments for surrender with their own: 

Mel: "But we know that in matter of war the event is sometimes otherwise than according to the difference of number in sides; and that if we yield presently, all our hope is lost; whereas if we hold out, we have yet a hope to keep ourselves up." 

Athens: "Hope, the comfort of danger, when such use it as have to spare, though it hurt them, yet it destroys them not. But to such as set their rest upon it (for it is a thing by nature prodigal), it at once by failing maketh itself known; and known, leaveth no place for future caution, which let not be your own case, you that are but weak and have no more but this one stake. Nor be like you unto many men, who, though they may presently save themselves by human means, will yet, when upon pressure of the enemy their most apparent hopes fail them, betake themselves to blind ones, as divination, oracles, and other such things which with hope destroy men." 

Mel: "We think it, you well know, a hard matter for us to combat your power and fortune, unless we might do it on equal terms. Nevertheless, we believe that, for fortune, we shall be nothing inferior, as having the gods on our side, because we stand innocent against men unjust; and for power, what is wanting will be supplied by our league with the Lacedaemonians, who are of necessity obliged, if for no other cause, yet for consanguinity's sake, and for their own honour, to defend us. So that we are confident, not altogether so much without reason as you think." 

The Athenians, by demanding the Melians submit to an outcome they would anyway impose on them by force, have forgotten the lesson of their own rise. When the Persian host marched into Greece, the city-states were small, squabbling polities with vastly inferior numbers. But as Pericles reminds the Athenians later on, it was their wisdom that mastered fortune and their courage that met the tests of Marathon, Salamis, and Plataea. Their victory was not ordained, it was not a consequence of law or natural necessity, it was hope, the comfort of danger, that destroyed them not. It did not fail, but made itself known all the same. Herein lies realism's positive and normative problem. A realist security policy bears more than a passing resemblance to a liberal one. Whether the motive is power or justice, both of these supposed rivals counsel assertive action in far-flung places. It transforms circumscribed suppositions about the nature of things, about man's innate drive for security and the anarchy he is forever presented with, into a reification of nature and sweeping presumptions about what actions these presumptions entail. It turns an "is" into an "ought", when no such thing is necessary. It turns these assumptions into a guide to conduct. Power is not the fundamental variable in Thucydides' world, and perhaps our own, instead it is fortune.  

Any realism that demands competition with great powers abroad has failed. It is a wonder that realist scholars have failed to note the contrary strategies offered by the Athenians at Melos and Nicias at the Athenian assembly immediately afterwards. In his debate with Alcibiades over the wisdom of the Sicilian expedition, Nicias does in fact counsel something approaching restraint. To expend wealth and resources on the domestic polity, to shore up control over their own neighborhood and confederacy, to gamble not with fortune. It is that same hope of the Melians turned inward and deployed to cautionary effect. The Athenians, of course, do not heed this warning and finally overstep, thanks largely to the machinations of Alcibiades himself (a topic which demands an entirely different post by itself). "Medism", as it turns out, denotes more than the suspicions the commons held towards great men. It was in fact a soul sickness infecting the heart of Athenian democracy. What was once Persia's to lose became Athens', and both lost it. The boundless aggression that the Melians warned the Athenians about, and which the Athenians dismissed, became the siren call of Alcibiades at the assembly. The realism of Nicias, in contrast to the supposed realism of the Alcibiadian spirit, begins to look more prudent, and more like isolationism. 

We spend far too much time detailing what states must do to attain power, instead of what they must do to lose it. And if the Melians are to be believed, we may find that it has very little to do with power (dis)equilibriums at all. The realist project must be tossed if it is to surrender belief and faith to the altar of their alleged necessities. For the experience of those who promulgate such doctrines would appear to contradict them. Democratic Athens, National Socialist Germany, and Napoleonic France all ceased to be realist states the moment they attempted to reorder the structure of the international system. But what to turn to? Liberalism won't do. We seek to avoid the blunders that both produce. The rule of law, particularly in its international guise, will have to be dissolved. In its place will be a Niciadian attitude aligned with what realism ought to be. A philosophy and strategy that reconciles the salience of power with its transience. In short, a foreign policy of limits.

Fading sun

A lot has happened (and not happened). I want to start this back up again. The great theological epiphany I was looking for finally occurred (albeit not exactly in the way I thought it would). Maybe I'll elaborate on that later. I'm facing a bit of a time crunch with the end of the semester however, so this review of Shutting Out the Sun by Michael Zielenziger, which I had originally posted on Goodreads, will have to do for now. It is quite relevant to some of what I've had to say before:

Published a year before the bursting of a bubble that, ironically, plunged the western world into a nearly identical economic crisis, Michael Zielenziger presented an incisive yet blinkered account of Japan's 21st-century failings; its economic stagnation, its crisis of confidence, and the deep scars left on the psyche of a generation of hopeless young men.

Some 15 years later, after two decades of withering political economy and the startling rise of western-style hikikomori, it is hard to fault the author for some of his mistaken presumptions: that this was a uniquely Japanese crisis born of uniquely Japanese pathologies rooted in its history and culture, that Japan needed to simply embrace the dynamism of a competitive and globalized economy in order to recover, and that its regimented society must embrace liberal pluralism in order to develop a true alternative to the heavy hand of the state.

The structure of the book mirrors that of a bewildered youth leaving his room and exploring the world, beginning with a microscopic examination of individual families laboring under the stress of hikikomori offspring, before gradually expanding its focus outward to examine the social and corporate world and eventually the international relations between Japan and the rest of the world. Through it all, the heart of this journalism-turned-book is oriented around its humanistic concern for the young men the author sought out to understand modern Japan. We learn about the plight of young men with seemingly little motivation and direction, who lash out at their parents, who take solitary walks through Tokyo's sprawling neighborhoods at night, who hole themselves up in their rooms and find recourse in fantasy worlds, anime, and manga. Sound familiar?

The theory of the case is that the Japan of the early 21st century is ruled by a soft managerial despotism that stifles creative expression and individuality even as it ostensibly guarantees the freedoms of its citizens. Its 20th-century traumas having not been adequately grappled with, its booming economy collapsed under the rapid deflation of an asset bubble, and its mores remain unchanged after co-opting western techniques of modernization without their complementary value systems, Japan has become a "hikikomori nation" incapable of contending with the challenges of modernity and unwilling to take the hard steps necessary to understand itself. Its national conglomerates, dense bureaucracy, and parasitical "press clubs" operate under a revolving door of patronage networks in which responsibility is widely disseminated and all are left unaccountable, even as rigid social mores meticulously pick out and remove dissenters from the nation's midst. The result is a hollow civil society, authoritarian culture, no effective mediator between individual and state, and near-total absence of social capital in Japanese society.

There is little doubt that much of the description is true. Anyone who pierces the thin veil with which Japan shrouds itself will see just what the author sees: the replacement of traditional Japanese aesthetic for dreary modernism, its single-minded devotion to education at the expense of all else, its stifling mechanisms of socialization, and the deep repression that sometimes explodes into shocking displays of violence. It is a far cry from the utopian image projected onto its western japanophiles by the cultural exports they readily consume. But time has demonstrated that the author's prescription - a sudden and dramatic individualistic revolution -misses the mark, and may well do much to land us in the same place.

The value judgments that inform his critique inform his solution, which automatically lends suspicion to the value of that critique. One need only look at the present state of the US and Europe, where young men retreat from society, take comfort in cartoons and video games, and in the worst instances engage in mass shooting sprees. Its people now die the same deaths of despair that the author laments as peculiarly Japanese. The same transformations in social mores that the author champions as a triumph of western flexibility in opposition to Japanese dogmatism now preclude a growing share of young people from sex and marriage. Inability to reckon with the tradeoffs of privatization and "shareholder" capitalism deindustrialized large swaths of developed nations and precipitated the rehabilitation of industrial policy in policy-making circles, precisely the kind of thinking the author identifies as responsible for Japan's economic stagnation.

Zielenziger dedicated a few paragraphs towards the end to the notion that the two extremes of the pendulum, extreme individualism and extreme collectivism, may both produce social dysfunction. Compared to his repetitive paeans for the protestant work ethic, he does not dwell on it nearly long enough. Nor does he take this essential insight to its logical conclusion: that a planned society and an unplanned society will, in the long run, produce the same kinds of systemic dysfunction. Creating thick networks of social trust will be as challenging in the United States's atomized society as it will be in a Japan dominated by its inflexible "Iron Triangle". The author gestures at this but does not follow through. Still, the insights here are valuable, and the dearth of hikikomori studies makes this a valuable source of information and an intriguing starting point for those who perceive that our similar conditions are more than mere passing resemblances. Japan's issues differ from ours only in the temporal realm. Their state of decay is not different, merely slightly advanced, and perhaps intertwined. 

Addendum: I will have more to say on this, if only because it has sprinkled some breadcrumbs which I suspect will lead me down a rather steep rabbit hole. Zielenziger hypothesizes that it was the progressive embrace of western values, particularly its Protestantism by reformers like Yu kil-chun who in turn inherited ideas passed down to them during their travels by a certain Yankee intelligentsia then under the sway of Spencerism, which led Korea down the path to modernization and the embrace of a more open foreign policy before its subsumption into the Japanese empire. The curious connection between Darwinism and "progressive" notions has been noticed before, and it is a line of inquiry which will yield much to whomever chooses to tug on the strand.