By Matthew Continetti
Saturday, September 24, 2016
‘He has been a creature of light at a time when the world
has been darkening,” says David Ignatius.
Jesus? Try again. Ignatius is talking about President
Obama. About his “sterling assets,” his “idealism,” his “moral clarity,” his
“calm intellect,” his “personal and polyphonous” address to the United Nations
General Assembly, his “valedictory” speech in defense of the “liberal
international order at a time when it’s under severe stress around the world.”
For a stress-induced headache you take an aspirin. What’s
happening in the world today requires something much stronger. A farcical
ceasefire in Syria has Americans blowing up Assad loyalists and Russians
blowing up aid convoys. North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs horrify.
China is more assertive by the day. Iranian terrorist, cyber, missile, and
maritime threats are unimpeded.
“Obama will leave behind the right ideas for restoration
of an American-led order,” writes Ignatius, “but sadly, also, the inescapable
fact of its decline during his presidency.” I have read this sentence many
times in amazement. Ignatius notes the decline of the “American-led order” over
the last eight years while absolving the commander-in-chief of any
responsibility.
I didn’t listen to Obama’s speech in sadness. I listened
in dismay. Dismay at the blithe and aloof manner in which the president
described the current moment he helped create, disgust at the sanctimony and
elitism of a globalization “course correction” that is really just a doubling
down on current policy.
“Polyphonous”? Whatever you say, David. It was also
revolting.
“This is the paradox that defines our world today,” Obama
told the U.N. “A quarter century after the end of the Cold War, the world is by
many measures less violent and more prosperous than ever before, and yet our
societies are filled with uncertainty, and unease, and strife.”
We are indeed richer, fatter, and more peaceful. We have
more toys. So why is it that we are also anxious, polarized, dismayed? No
answer is offered. The paradox is not resolved. Instead we are admonished to
“press forward with a better model of cooperation and integration” rather than
“retreat into a world sharply divided, and ultimately in conflict, along
age-old lines of nation and tribe and race and religion.”
Why? “The principles of open markets and accountable
governance, of democracy and human rights and international law that we have
forged remain the firmest foundations for progress in this century.” But this
is a non sequitur. One second he’s saying a world constructed under liberal
democratic principles has also brought social disintegration and unhappiness, and
the next second he says the answer is — more liberal democracy.
Nor is the president’s “better model” of global
integration different from the status quo. He says economic policies intended
to lessen inequality will reduce tribalism despite pointing out earlier that
tribalism exists in the midst of peace and prosperity.
He wants his climate treaty to go into effect despite not
submitting it to the Senate for ratification. “We have to open our hearts and
do more to help refugees who are desperate for a home.” And “we can only
realize the promise of this institution’s founding — to replace the ravages of
war with cooperation — if powerful nations accept constraints.” Because
I am convinced that in the long
run, giving up some freedom of action — not giving up our ability to protect
ourselves or pursue our core interests, but binding ourselves to international
rules over the long term — enhances our security.
We’ll be safer if Ban Ki Moon has a greater say over our
lives.
I don’t buy it, I never have, and that is the point. None
of this is any different from what President Obama has been saying for eight
years. And during this time America’s global position has eroded, our friends
have been confused, our enemies emboldened, a Caliphate established, and ethnic,
racial, and economic tensions resurgent.
Not to worry. One more speech will do the trick.
I’d like to posit that there is no paradox. The material
prosperity and security of the West matters insofar as it has given our
political, business, and cultural elites a false picture of human needs,
motivations, and priorities.
What is driving the forces of “nation and tribe and race
and religion” is not economics but pride and shame. The indignity of abasement,
the thirst for recognition, the quest for dominance vis-à-vis other groups both
within and without the nation. These are parts of “our common humanity” that
the ideology of liberalism fails to recognize. That is its weakness.
China builds its forces after a “century of humiliation.”
Russia asserts itself after the “geopolitical catastrophe” of the Soviet
collapse. Islamic militancy, wrote Bernard Lewis decades ago, is part of a
“rising tide of rebellion against this Western paramountcy, and a desire to
reassert Muslim values and restore Muslim greatness.” The English, Germans,
French, Greeks repudiate the E.U. because they feel insulted by the hegemony of
Brussels.
It’s the same at home. Sexual minorities struggle for
equal treatment in both the public and private spheres. African-American
communities revolt over maltreatment by police forces. And a large number of
voters, many of them whites without college degrees, protest affronts to their
status, their thoughts, their concerns, their agendas, their hierarchy of
values.
These battles aren’t about how much you have. They are
about who rules over you. Will D.C. and Brussels make decisions or will Moscow
and Beijing? Will you have a say over which treaties your nation enters, which
refugees settle in your community, what can and cannot be said, which facts are
deemed important and which not?
President Obama’s speech at the U.N. was almost a parody
of liberal theory. It presented a homogenous world governed by rationally
administered universal principles, a vision of affluence and peace, of moral
imagination and compassion and hybrid identity. These are noble ideas. They
have motivated men for centuries. Yet so detached has the theory become from
the everyday reality of the people that it is ossified, hollow. It’s dogma. And
it is careening toward a fall.
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