Posted by Aaron

I will freely admit that I had a grand-mal conniption upon hearing that William Kristol would be joining the New York Times op-ed page.  The deluge of reader responses, however, left me with an all-too-familiar sense of embarrassment at the kind of passions that can overtake the less thoughtful self-described liberals from time to time.  One reader helpfully opined: “That rotten, traiterous [sic] piece of filth should be hung by the ankles from a lamp post and beaten by the mob rather than gaining a pulpit at ANY self-respecting news organization.”  Does anyone think our cause is being served by behaving like the idiot mob in Monty Python and the Holy Grail?  String up the Republicans because they’re evil, and, er, they’re made of wood!

Still, the inquiring mind has to view the Times’s justifications for their bizarre move with a good dose of skepticism.  One might ask: first, does a “left”-leaning staff of columnists really need to be “balanced” by a neoconservative ideologue like Kristol?  Second, what does he add to the discourse?  Finally, how will the assumptions of the Times’s readership be challenged by his columns?

The answer to the first question is a qualified no.  What we need is debate, not more formalized opposition.  There have been a number of liberal orthodoxies in the last half-century or so that dearly deserved to be deconstructed— in particular, those that tend toward the utopian in their conception either of human nature or the power of good intentions.  But the disappointing thing is that the worst of them has actually been appropriated by neoconservatives.  I’m speaking, of course, about neo-liberal foreign policy (more on that to follow).

Second: what does he add to the discourse?  Vigorously raising my hand to answer: nothing valuable.  Kristol, like many other hidebound ideologues, is either intellectually or temperamentally incapable of disputing policy or partisan rhetoric on the merits.  Everything is about image, personality, and prejudice.  It is not that he merely disagrees with Democrats; it is that he constantly implies that all progressives—indeed, all who question neoconservative ideology—are naïve, feckless, stupid, and morally corrupt.  Imagine a kid sitting in a classroom, watching another kid botch a geometry proof on the blackboard.  He raises his hand and says the answer is wrong.  The teacher, not disagreeing, asks him to explain.  And he replies, Well, never mind that, the important thing is that Suzie got it wrong because she’s on free lunch and her mom’s a whore.  There might be an argument to be made, but it’s lost in the smugness and the namecalling and the I-told-you-so intoning.

Third: will he actually force us to challenge our assumptions?  Well, of course not (see above “your mother is a whore” argument).  Commentators like Kristol don’t just lie; they mangle the terms of discourse so badly that it is difficult to confront them with rational arguments.  How do you convince someone that “winning”—something you can do with a basketball game or a level of Halo—is not a concept that has any particular meaning in the realms of war and peace?  How do you debate with someone whose metrics of “progress” change as swiftly and seamlessly as the rules of Calvinball?

Take today’s column about Iraq, for example.  Kristol writes, “It’s apparently impermissible for leading Democrats to acknowledge — let alone celebrate — progress in Iraq.”  There’s something demented about this kind of triumphalism.  One could attempt to build a case for a continued military presence in Iraq based on certain developments that have accompanied the surge (though I think one would lose that argument on the merits); but it is absurd to expect anyone to throw a parade for the limited forms of “progress” that have taken place in Iraq over the last year, just as it is irrational, cruel, and dumb to wave a banner of success over an enterprise that has cost hundreds of thousands of lives, inflamed anti-American rhetoric throughout the globe, cost hundreds of billions of dollars (tens of billions of which remain unaccounted for), and produced no indications of long-term stability for the nation of Iraq or for the Middle East at large.  But, no matter. “December 2007 saw the second-lowest number of U.S. troops killed in action since March 2003.”  Witness the power of right-wing anecdotal fact-gathering in action.  (Naturally he neglects to mention that it was the deadliest year overall since 2003.)

Seemingly, nothing is more important to guys like Kristol than “winning.”  Ultimately, this trumps any supposed good our various military adventures have been supposed to accomplish, any demonstrable improvement in the day to day lives of citizens of other countries (or our own), and any philosophical or moral objection to the arbitrary use of force.  When Kristol talks about spreading freedom, he is actually joining a long parade of (sometimes) well-meaning thinkers who thought that this same seldom-examined “freedom” would be just the thing for the peoples of the Philippines or Indochina or most of this hemisphere south of the Rio Grande.  What seems to be meant by “freedom” in this context, aside from photogenic purple index fingers, is the imposition of American will upon nations that are regarded as democratically (and, implicitly, culturally and/or racially) inferior.  American exceptionalism is the only argument that such ideologues ultimately have to offer, and it is, to my mind, this very belief that is ruining any chance we have to represent some sort of positive force on the global stage.

Now, clearly, I dislike William Kristol.  I hate his smugness, his posturing, his bullying, and his astonishing propensity for double-think.  He bothers me so much that I find myself breaking my own rules about name-calling and so forth.  But if he were a smarmy bastard who happened to introduce powerful rational arguments, who instigated debates among myself and my pinko friends, who introduced alternative strategies toward accomplishing things that we all care about— trying to establish a just, prosperous society; providing powerful opportunities and legal protections for all; maintaining, developing and improving a sustainable infrastructure—then I would welcome his inclusion in the Times op-ed page.  (My kingdom for a Coke Stevenson conservative…)  But the reality is that we can’t talk to guys like him because he’s not interested in communicating, and he’s not interested in making things better—because those things might get in the way of “winning.”