There Are No Lost Causes

By Kevin D. Williamson

Monday, December 23, 2024

 

Syria. Bangladesh. Poland. South African democracy. The Ukrainian defense forces. The Greek economy. If there is a lesson to be learned from the events of 2024, it is this: There are no lost causes.

 

After 50 years of brutal tyranny under the Assads—first Hafez al-Assad, then Bashar—the Syrian people won for themselves a chance at a different and better kind of future, with a remarkable 11-day campaign that saw the old regime, which had seemed to be one of the fixed facts of Levantine life, melt away. Bashar al-Assad is now in exile in Russia. (Where else?) There is good reason to be cautious when it comes to the emerging Syrian leadership, given the jihadist roots of so great a share of the anti-Assad forces. But, as Josh Rogin of the Washington Post argued (with perhaps a slight excess of emotion) during his lively interview with Jamie Weinstein on The Dispatch Podcast, Syria’s future is, as of this moment, unwritten. The West can choose to be engaged in Syria with an eye toward guiding its new leaders in the right direction—and, happily, what’s best for the people of Syria aligns with Western interests and particularly with U.S. interests—or our leaders could take the J.D. Vance approach and pretend that Washington has no interests beyond the price of eggs at Jungle Jim’s. Which is to say, Washington could assume that Syria is a lost cause and thereby create a self-fulfilling prophecy.

 

Syria—which has about the same population as Florida but less than 1 percent of the Sunshine State’s economic output—has nowhere to go but up. It is worth keeping in mind that whatever else they were—murderers, torturers, tyrants—the Assads were socialists. Socialism was the ruling ideology of Syria until quite recently; Hafez al-Assad de-emphasized pan-Arab nationalism and emphasized more orthodox Marxist-Leninist measures; Syria was very much a Soviet satellite for many years. These socialist policies produced the same results socialist policies always produce—misery and stagnation—and Bashar al-Assad made a clumsy attempt at being the Baathist answer to Deng Xiaoping, notionally liberalizing some Syrian economic arrangements and inviting foreign investment. 

 

But Syria, after decades of profoundly corrupt and incompetent rule under a socialist personality cult, did not have the basic public goods (e.g., the rule of law) that would have allowed a free market to function. Unlike the case of China, where the people accepted political serfdom in exchange for material standard-of-living improvements, in Syria the people got the serfdom but not the relative prosperity. (We should not inflate the economic success of China, which still has a per-capita GDP lower than that of Mexico.) Syria also had intractable structural political problems: Brutal dictatorships are bad enough on their own, but brutal dictatorships led by minority groups—the Assads are Alawites, who compose about 10 percent of Syria’s overwhelmingly Sunni population—are typically unstable and often are in practice even more vicious and repressive as a result of their tenuous minority position.

 

As every bully, boor, and New York City subway maniac knows, one person or a small group of people can dominate and cow a much larger group of people simply by being willing to ignore rules and social conventions. Figures such as Assad use terror, torture, outrageous cruelty, and theatrical acts of repression as a substitute for the one thing they and their regimes lack: genuine strength. And it is remarkable how far cruelty can carry a political figure or a political movement that has few if any other virtues.

 

(Twice!)

 

But these regimes are almost always brittle, and autocrats typically end up all facing the same problem: While the ruling junta may have all the guns and the money, they never have the numbers. Assad’s 170,000 or so troops were never going to be enough to control 23 million Syrians if those Syrians should have decided not to submit. It is like Mohandas Gandhi supposedly said to the British authorities: There is no way for 100,000 Englishmen to control 350 million Indians if the Indians refuse to cooperate, even if a brute such as Reginald Dyer massacres unarmed protesters.

 

A junta can be brutal, but it can never be brutal enough to achieve its goals. That is not how the world works. Brutality is not the tool for the job when it comes to building a prosperous, powerful, stable society. People may not be naturally courageous in the main, but they’ll fight when they don’t have any other choice or if things just get bad enough. 

 

The fall of the Assad regime was an unintended consequence of two ill-considered military misadventures, neither of which originated in Damascus: One was the attack on Israel by Iran’s proxies in Gaza and Lebanon, and the other was Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Both Moscow and Tehran woefully miscalculated the desire of their respective targets to live and to continue on as nations. (So did U.S. intelligence.) Putin’s program is no less genocidal than that of the ayatollahs and the other jihadists: If Putin is allowed to have his way, there will be no such thing as Ukraine or Ukrainians. And so the Israelis and the Ukrainians fight—and have fought so hard that Iran and Russia were severely diminished in their joint capacity and willingness to support Assad. In that sense, the Syrians and the Israelis and the Ukrainians are all fighting the same fight against the same enemy. 

 

The people of Bangladesh, too. Sheikh Hasina’s government grew more oppressive and autocratic by the day until the July massacre. Sheikh Hasina is now living in exile in Delhi. 

 

How fortunate, by comparison, are the people of Poland! All they had to do to begin to end the creeping Orbánification of their country under nationalist-populist misgovernance was to elect the relatively liberal Donald Tusk, who has worked to make up ground Poland had been losing on democracy and the rule of law. There is much to criticize about Tusk—and the liberators of Syria, and the defenders of Ukraine, and the student-led revolutionists of Bangladesh, etc.—but Poland has been at least partly reoriented in the right direction, which is about all you can ask of mere democracy. As a child of the Cold War, I am accustomed to seeing Poland as a symbol of hope—as a witness to hope, as my friend George Weigel called his biography of the most significant Pole since Copernicus.

 

There are people who feel very much the same way about South Africa, where Nelson Mandela’s ANC squandered its moral legacy and, finally, found itself tossed out of power after three decades ruling the country. Throwing out one bad clique is no guarantee of success—and the country’s challenges are daunting—but prosperity is not generally associated with corrupt, effectively single-party states.

 

At their respective nadirs, I would not have held out much hope for the Greek economy (which still isn’t exactly Texas but has responded to better governance) or Syria or Bangladesh. I had a bit more hope for Poland, in part because I am of the opinion (a minority among conservatives, I think) that the European Union is a good project providing real benefits for its member states, both economic and political. The brief time I spent with the Ukrainians convinced me that they will not stop fighting—something that the Russians have been slowly figuring out even as Gen. Igor Kirillov learned his lesson abruptly.

 

There are no lost causes. 

 

But:

 

Polio. Inflation. A looming trade war.

 

There are no gained causes, either. 

 

And Furthermore … 

 

That T.S. Eliot line about lost causes and gained causes—which you will hear and see quoted around here often—came in the context of an essay about F.H. Bradley (does the name mean anything to anyone anymore?) and (secondarily) Matthew Arnold. In situ:

 

It is not to say that Arnold’s work was vain if we say that it is to be done again; for we must know in advance, if we are prepared for that conflict, that the combat may have truces but never a peace. If we take the widest and wisest view of a Cause, there is no such thing as a Lost Cause because there is no such thing as a Gained Cause. We fight for lost causes because we know that our defeat and dismay may be the preface to our successors’ victory, though that victory itself will be temporary; we fight rather to keep something alive than in the expectation that anything will triumph.

 

If Bradley’s philosophy is today a little out of fashion, we must remark that what has superseded it, what is now in favour, is, for the most part, crude and raw and provincial (though infinitely more technical and scientific) and must perish in its turn. Arnold turned from mid-century Radicalism with the reflection ‘A new power has suddenly appeared.’ There is always a new power; but the new power destined to supersede the philosophy which has superseded Bradley will probably be something at the same time older, more patient, more supple and more wise.

 

Eliot writes about Bradley’s work “in the ’seventies and ‘eighties,” and I had to stop for a second to remind myself that he means the 1870s and 1880s.

 

Words About Words

 

A reader sends in a sample from the sports pages of the Washington Post:

 

Entering Sunday, the Celtics had a league-high four players—Tatum, Brown, Pritchard and White—who averaged at least 15 points, three assists and no more than three turnovers, per Basketball Reference. That doesn’t even include former all-stars Porzingis and Jrue Holiday. The Wizards had no players who met that criteria, but there’s potential for such a roster to develop.

 

There are a couple of interesting language things in there. One is the issue my correspondent notes: Criteria is plural, so that criteria is wrong—you want that criterion or those criteria, depending on the number of criteria at work. Words borrowed from Greek sometimes bring some tricky singular/plural issues with them from those sunny shores: criterion/criteria, parenthesis/parentheses, etc. Some escapees from Philistia insist that we should just treat those foreign words as though they were more common English words, but you can’t really do that with criteria and use criterion/criterions, because criteria is so much more common than criterion. And who wants to write about parenthesises? 

 

The other issue is: Why is the basketball team the SELL-tics while the languages and tribes are KEL-tic?

 

You can begin to answer the question by noting that no Roman had ever heard of a guy called SEE-zur. In classical Latin, C- at the beginning of a word is pronounced like the K- in English, “hard.” In classical Latin, the imperial name was pronounced more like the modern cognate kaiser than the modern English pronunciation of Caesar, with the S-sounding “soft” C-.

 

That soft C, however, is all over the place in Latin imports: century, centurion, etc. But the rise of the soft-S pronunciations didn’t happen in English—it happened in later Latin, so that by the time the French were borrowing the Latin word to create Celte, they were pronouncing it (as Merriam-Webster reports) like the C- in Cézanne. So the people in Boston (and in Glasgow) are using an older English pronunciation with SELL-tics, not a later corruption. The hard-C pronunciation of KEL-tic was dreamt up by 18^th-century pedants (my people!) who thought the word’s pronunciation should more closely resemble its classical Latin ancestor rather than its medieval Latin and French ancestors. Back to the OG version, as it were. 

 

We could solve this pretty easily by just using Latin like educated Europeans used to do—or we could make like those educated Romans those educated Europeans thought so highly of and use Greek. 

 

Economics for English Majors

 

At this point in the fiscal-crisis news cycle, you’ll hear me, and people like me, bitching about something called “regular order.” 

 

What? 

 

You wouldn’t know it to watch Congress in action, but our federal government has a pretty orderly process for spending money—on paper. It’s kind of a two-tier thing: There’s authorization, which establishes (or continues or modifies) agencies or programs; once spending is authorized, the spending authority continues as long as the authorization is in force, whether that is for a year or a period of several years or open-ended. But just because an agency is authorized to spend money doesn’t mean that it has money to spend. Congress has to appropriate that money. And Congress doesn’t have to appropriate the full amount authorized. 

 

Appropriations, which is the nitty-gritty business of putting money into agency coffers where it may be spent, theoretically happens in 12 parts, with 12 subcommittees writing appropriations bills and these then going to the House and Senate appropriations committees. The subcommittees are for the most part relatively capacious slop buckets: Agriculture, Rural Development, and Food and Drug Administration; Energy and Water Development and Related Agencies; Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies; Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, and Related Agencies; etc. Some are more focused, such as Defense—not to be confused with Homeland Security or Military Construction, Veterans’ Affairs, and Related Agencies. 

 

When things are working the way they are supposed to, the appropriations subcommittees spend a lot of time listening to testimony and holding hearings about this or that program and its financial needs, with members of each party negotiating with their own fellow partisans and with those of the other party, doing all the usual horse-trading and favor-swapping and such that constitutes ordinary politics. It is a long, complicated, exasperating, labor-intensive process that, for the average congressional specimen, is not nearly as much fun as getting a hit on Fox News or MSNBC. And so we end up with what Jonah Goldberg calls our “Parliament of Pundits,” where relatively little work is done in the way of the ordinary business of politics (much less the ordinary business of governing!) and, while our lawmakers and bureaucrats angle for television time and hone their own-the-opposition social-media strategies, the actual fiscal process lapses into chaos. Holding off that chaos is what such stop-gap measures as “continuing resolutions” and “omnibus appropriations” and such are all about.

 

It matters how much money Washington spends. It also matters—a great deal!—what it spends that money on. And here I do not mean big broad vague categorical buckets such as “defense” or “education” or whatever, but actual programs. There is some education spending that is excellent and worthwhile and worth expanding, and some education spending that ought to be eliminated entirely, the programs ended, the records burned, the bureaucratic fields sown with salt by libertarian centurions under the command of Nick Gillespie (if only because I think he is likely to own a toga in addition to his 41 black leather jackets). (Rough estimate.) Talking about “how much we spend on education” doesn’t get to the important details.

 

You know what probably could get into those details? Congressional subcommittees doing their g—mned jobs.

 

“Getting spending under control” is only in part about debt and deficits—as important as those factors are. It also is about making sure that the money we do spend, we spend on things that are useful and productive. And that is why it is important to understand that continuing resolutions and budget ad-hocracy isn’t just about avoiding the hard work of intelligent appropriations and oversight—it is about avoiding accountability. If you lump everything together into one big mess and then pass it at the last minute under the shadow of a budget crisis, then you can pretend that you have an excuse for not watching where the money is actually going. And then you can go back to your career as a half-assed cable-news pundit who also happens to serve in Congress.

 

In Conclusion 

 

My triplets have my wife’s eyes and her taste in music, so they’ve been bouncing along to “Mr. Sandman” by the Chordettes for the past week or so. I don’t know quite how that happened or where that song entered the rotation—Mrs. W. loves Christmas music, so that’s always on this time of year, and my 2-year-old asks her to play “Jingle Bell Rock” about 40 times a day. But when he’s hanging out with Papa in the evenings, he asks for—of all things—“John the Revelator,” which he likes me to sing for him while he’s having his bath. 

 

I am not Son House, but I do take requests at bathtime, and the little man is pleased enough with my renditions. The thing is: I have no idea how he first heard that song. I suppose I must have sung it for him at some point or played a recording. (My usual lullaby for the triplets is “Bankrobber” by the Clash.) 

 

One of the sobering things about having little kids is that, from time to time, you are reminded that you are constantly setting an example and putting things into their heads irrespective of whether you meant to. My 2-year-old son cries for reasons I don’t understand and sometimes stamps his feet like a cartoon toddler when he isn’t getting something he wants, but he also walks guests to the door and tells them “goodnight,” and says “please” and “thank you” and makes observations that I wouldn’t think a 2-year-old would make, and he says that combing his hair makes him “debonair,” which is important to him, and sometimes kisses one of his little brothers on the head if he’s crying, to make him feel better. 

 

A lot of what’s in these babies’ heads I put there, and a lot of what I put there I put there without really doing it on purpose—it’s just how life goes from day to day. And that is equal parts sweet and terrifying.