[Mb-civic] NYTimes.com Article: Not Just a Personality Clash, a Conflict of Visions

Tue Oct 12 11:27:54 PDT 2004

The article below from NYTimes.com 
has been sent to you by michael at intrafi.com.

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Not Just a Personality Clash, a Conflict of Visions

October 12, 2004
 By DAVID BROOKS 

On Sunday I went for a walk in the country, past some
extremely skittish cows, and gazed at a wide-open valley
without a single building in sight. Then I drove home to my
little patch of Blue America, with the traffic getting
progressively worse, and the population densities getting
higher. I was struck again by how powerfully the physical
landscape influences our view of politics and the world. 

We're used to this in the realm of domestic politics.
Politicians from the more sparsely populated South and West
are more likely, at least in the political and economic
realms, to champion the Goldwateresque virtues: freedom,
self-sufficiency, individualism. Politicians from the
cities are likely to champion the Ted Kennedyesque virtues:
social justice, tolerance, interdependence. 

Politicians from sparsely populated areas are more likely
to say they want government off people's backs so they can
run their own lives. Politicians from denser areas are more
likely to want government to play at least a refereeing
role, to keep people from bumping into one another too
abusively. 

Neither group lives up to its ideals with perfect
consistency, but this is what both groups say. 

I wonder whether this tension also explains the argument
we're now having about foreign affairs. 

In the current issue of The Weekly Standard, Adam Wolfson
argues that the foreign policy debate between George Bush
and John Kerry is really a conflict between two values:
freedom and internationalism. 

That's a clarifying insight. When Bush talks about the
world he hopes to create, he talks first about spreading
freedom. What he's really talking about is a decentralized
world. Individuals would be free to live as they chose, in
their own nations, carving out their own destinies. 

The optimism built into this vision is that free people
would be able to live in basic harmony. There would not
need to be any central authority governing their
interactions. Indeed, Bushian conservatives talk about
central global authorities like the U.N. the way they talk
about Washington - as places where venal elites gather to
serve their own interests. 

When Kerry talks about the world he hopes to create, he
talks first about alliances and multilateral cooperation.
He's really talking about a crowded world. People from
different nations would gather to work out differences and
manage problems. 

The optimism built into this vision is that nations will
sometimes be able to set aside their rivalries and narrow
self-interests and work cooperatively to thwart the sorts
of global threats posed by Saddam Hussein, or genocides
like the one in Sudan. Kerryesque liberals are concerned by
the possibility that some nations will go off and behave
individualistically or, as they say, unilaterally. 

Put this way, the argument we are having about
international relations is the same argument we are having
about domestic affairs, just on a larger scale. It's a
conflict between two value systems. One is based on a
presumption of a world in which individuals and nations
should be self-reliant and free to develop their own
capacities - forming voluntary associations when they want
- without being overly coerced by national or global
elites. The other is based on the presumption of a crowded
world, which emphasizes that no individual or nation can go
off and do as it pleases, but should work instead within
governing institutions that establish norms and provide
security. 

This formulation explains why Bush's foreign policy is not
an aberration of conservatism, as Pat Buchanan and the
other paleocons argue, but is actually its fruition. This
formulation also explains why, in The Times Magazine on
Sunday, Kerry compared terrorism to domestic organized
crime, gambling and prostitution. In his mind there should
exist an effective body of international law. It is a law
enforcement problem when some group violates that law. 

Seen in these terms, this election is not just a conflict
of two men, but is a comprehensive conflict of visions.
Both these visions have been bloodied of late. Still, they
do address the central issue confronting us: How do we
conceive of an international order in the post-9/11 world?
Bush, the conservative, conceives of a flexible, organic,
spontaneous order. Kerry, the liberal, conceives of a more
rationalist, planned and managed order. 

This debate could go on for a while since both sides
represent legitimate points of view, and since both sides
have concrete reasons to take the positions they do. 

E-mail: dabrooks at nytimes.com

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/12/opinion/12brooks.html?ex=1098605674&ei=1&en=6f85c1fb6164b7df

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