My long review essay on Paul Kennedy and the United Nations

Paul Kennedy’s book on the history and future of the United Nations, Parliament of Man, appeared in 2006. A Spanish translation appeared in late 2007, which I review in a (very) long essay (some 10,000 words, be warned) appearing in Spanish in the Revista de Libros (Madrid), November 2008 issue. The Revista, for which I serve as political science advising editor, I am proud to say, is one of the best book reviews going in any language, anywhere.

It is interesting, as a side note, to see how the title of Kennedy’s book has shifted between national markets. In the US edition, it is subtitled “the past, present, and future of the United Nations.” In the Spanish edition, it is merely the “history of the United Nations.” Whereas the British edition has it as “the United Nations and the Quest for World Government.”

My review runs across a wide range of issues, related both to Kennedy’s work and the project of global governance. My view of Kennedy is that he is a “platonist” as regards the UN; forever looking past the rather sordid reality of the present to dream of the glorious future of global governance that is, alas, always coming but never come. And, in a world that seems to be returning to stronger regional multipolarity, global governance looks less on offer, and the UN as, at best, a place for multilateral negotiation among sovereigns, more so. My view is that global governance always looks most possible when the US is at its hegemonic strongest to offer the guarantee of security that allows all the platonic dreamers to do their dreaming. History however is upon us once again.

It is available on SSRN in the English version that will appear in Spanish in the Revista in November; I will also post the Spanish version to SSRN once it is out. Some bits - this one observing that a Europe attuned to the spirit of Raymond Aron would look with alarm upon American leaders in a new administration bearing the gifts of ‘meek multilateralism’ and superpower humility:

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The truest description of the international security situation since 1990 is that it is a conjoined and parallel UN-US security system. It is best described as two parallel, interlinked security systems – a weak one, the UN collective security apparatus, and a strong one, the US security guarantee. Understood this way, the US is not merely a, or even the, dominant and most powerful actor. Rather, the US offers a genuinely alternative system of international peace and security. And the dominant actor’s willingness to extend a security guarantee to a sizable portion of the planet, explicitly and implicitly, alters the meaning, necessity, and quality of collective security at the UN itself. They are two different game-theory scenarios – a dominant actor within a UN collective security-defection international relations “game”; versus an actor that offers its own security package alongside that of the UN in a parallel collective security “game.” In a diplomatic system characterized (in game theory terms) by insincere public promises, easy defection, moral hazard, and free-riding, the fig leaf is assiduously maintained that the UN constitutes, or anyway offers, a collective security system. Whereas in fact, most leading players in Europe, Asia, and Latin America, and even the Middle East, are unwilling to test the strength of that system: insincere lip service to the UN system while actually relying on the United States.

A realist might say, in other words, that for all the extant elite complaining and populist anti-Americanism, a remarkable number of countries have counted the costs of adherence to the US security promise and found it rather better than their own, and better than the UN’s, and better than anything else on offer, as to both benefits and costs. After all, the US does not even particularly care when those under its security hegemony (which extends far beyond its allies or clients to provide, perversely, significant stability benefits even to America’s acknowledged enemies) heap abuse on it (justified or not) because, in the grand scheme of things, it understands (however inchoately and inconstantly) that the system incorporates (often heartfelt but, in the final policy result, insincere) public rejection and protest by the system’s beneficiaries. The US is not imperial in a way that would cause it much to care. Part of accepting US security hegemony by its beneficiaries includes their rational desire to displace security costs onto another party, even if that providing party thereby has equally rational reasons to look to its own interests first, since it so overwhelmingly pays the costs.

Acceptance also includes realistic appraisal of the alternatives: would Europe (let alone Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Indonesia, India, the Philippines, New Zealand, or Australia, or even Russia) prefer, for example, Chinese hegemony to the US? The crisis in Georgia has forced a little bit of discussion – less than the current newspaper headlines suggest, however – on the mission and role of Nato. On the one hand, Europe is in strategic disarray with the reassertion of regional Russian imperial will; the interests of those close to it are different from those far away and at some point even the United States will wonder, as a matter of budget and defense plans, what Nato is worth: how long does a hegemon support its free riders? Prudent, Aronian-thinkers in Europe will be wary, above all, of liberal internationalist Americans bearing gifts of multilateralism: an America that does not assert, rudely and brusquely, its own interests and views first through Nato and elsewhere, an America that sings sweet songs of multilateral interdependence is, surely, a superpower that has decided to simply go along with what everyone else does, which is another way of saying it has tired of supporting the free riders, which is another way of saying that it, too, says one thing but might do another, and what it might do is not show up when the big battalions are finally needed. Prudent Europeans fear and do not trust, above all, an America that does not put its own interests first and carry the rest along in train. Europe will soon enough face an Iranian nuclear weapon along with its massive dependence upon Russian natural gas, even as its military strength declines yearly – hourly – and in important respects it is today at least arguably more dependent on the American security guarantee, not less, than at any time since 1990.

Come to that, one does not hear a great clamor among Europeans for the collective security of the UN, in the form of calls for resolution of the Georgia crisis by action of the Security Council – for obvious reasons. And yet, if one gives up the idea of the Security Council as the seat of collective security governance and understands it as the talking shop of the great powers, then it performed as well as should be expected. Of course it resolved nothing – but the architecture of the Security Council in the UN Charter anticipates that in a conflict among great powers on the Council, of course it cannot resolve anything. But it did provide a talking shop in which it was as a matter of course assumed that active, relatively public discussions would take place there – and, moreover would take place not just between antagonists, but much more publicly with other great powers, and even with non-great powers represented in rotation at the Council. The Security Council performed well in the Georgia crisis, given what it is, not badly.

But if we are indeed moving toward a more multipolar world – at least in certain regions, the Russian ‘near abroad’ or the Chinese periphery – then the great power conflicts promise to become more acute, not less. As David Rieff has pointed out, multipolarity is by definition competitive, not coooperative. In such a world, the Security Council performs a vital, but perforce limited, function as multilateral talking shop for those conflicts – and its ability, as one hopes Ban Ki Moon and his advisors understand, to perform that function depends fundamentally on accepting its limitations. The rapturous fantasies of global governance that feature so prominently among liberal internationalists – Professor Kennedy and nearly all professors of international law, for example – are not just a quaint holdover in a multipolar world, they are today an affirmative danger, because they tempt institutions beyond their limits in time of crisis. The grand irony, for which Georgia perhaps serves as a harbinger, is that the most propitious time for dreaming of global governance was precisely when the US was at its maximum, largely unopposed strength, because it allowed much of the world, much of the democratic industrialized world, the luxury of imagining that its security was one thing, when it fact it was another.

There are people in the world who must rely on the UN collective security apparatus; and not to their benefit. Why? Because not even America’s peculiarly changeable combination of interest and ideals extends everywhere: Darfur and Congo, for example. An important reason why the dual system persists is that the US and the industrialized world that takes its stability from US hegemony together see the UN system as the least costly system for enforcing minimum order in the hopeless world of failed and failing states – places that they will not, and realistically cannot, police (pace Afghanistan). But all this is emphatically not the system as Kennedy describes it; he offers instead the classic collective action problem located at the UN itself, in no small part because it is built into his a priori moral vision of the rise of UN hegemony necessarily through US decline. Kennedy might profitably consider that the existing UN system is one that is publicly in perpetual crisis and yet somehow, because of the parallel US security guarantee, never truly forced to a crossroads. It seems more plausible to see the UN in collective security as actually stable, to the point of stasis and stagnation. Even episodic protestations of crisis are an integral part of the quotidian theatre of the UN cul-de-sac.

On nearly every measure – population, influence, military might – the Security Council’s five permanent members are completely unrepresentative of the world; Kennedy devotes much discussion to the issue, as one would expect if one thought the Security Council ought someday to be the principal organ of global security. After all, the Council is not even especially a collection of the great powers anymore. This issue was (foolishly) the dominant discussion in largely abortive UN reform negotiations that took place in 2004-5: how to alter the composition of the Security Council to make it more realistically a meeting ground of the great powers, and how to make it more representative of the world as an idealized institution of global governance. Kennedy candidly acknowledges that there is no solution to this issue; Kofi Annan, to his credit, urged the main players in UN reform to leave this question aside in favor of more urgent questions that could be resolved. The main antagonist was not the United States, whose place on the Council is beyond question and is thus in the rare position of being a relatively neutral “honest broker” on the issue. The disputes arose instead from the lesser and declining military powers, France and Britain, as against the clamors of Japan, India, Nigeria, Brazil, and even economically powerful but de-militarized Germany. Yet even if the existing “permanent five,” holding a veto, would accept any alteration, in real life Japan is checked by China, India by Pakistan, Brazil by its Latin American neighbors, Germany by the global recoil at a third EU permanent member and, alas, it is far from inconceivable that, in the next quarter century, Nigeria might fall into grave civil war.

Nonetheless, to a large extent Kennedy insists on telling the tale of the Security Council in the post-Cold War period as largely an ‘America versus the world’ story – a morality tale of heroic liberal internationalists checkmated by Republican Party intransigence. It is both tiresome and seriously misleading to devote so much of the text to minor and parochial issues of US politics in what is supposed to be a discussion of the world system. It is as though Kennedy, whose prose is otherwise lapidary, stunningly clear, and entirely free of academic jargon, suffers from a sort of political Tourette’s Syndrome that causes him suddenly and inexplicably to lapse into irrelevant criticism of the US for this or that. Of what conceivable importance, for example, is his Little Englander digression on the virtue of the BBC over US news programmes, or any of a dozen other indulgences?

The US, as Madeline Albright famously said, is the ‘indispensable party’, but what matters are not the little bits of internal US political wickedness that Kennedy cannot shake from his mind, but instead a much more basic fact that much of the industrialized world accepts the US role and depends upon it regardless of what is said. Kennedy fails to take account of a conjoined UN-US security system that prominently features diplomatic insincerity. He moreover assumes, as ever, a specific normative direction for “progress,” toward a genuinely UN system of collective security. Suppose, instead, that UN collective security is what everyone wants in theory but no one wants in practice? In any case, the rise of a new, multipolar world – not the decline of the United States as such, but instead, as Fareed Zakaria argues in a new book, The Post American World, the rise of new powers such as India and China, and the global risks posed by ‘resource extraction authoritarian states’ such as Russia, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, and Iran – offers the opportunity to see how much America’s allies and friends, and for that matter its enemies, actually want to give up the stability proffered by America’s security guarantee. That new world might offer much in the way of schadenfreude – it might not, however, be a thing of beauty.

Welcome to By Common Consent folks

By common consent readers - welcome - I saw from the site meter that I was getting some hits in relation to a post on Moroni and Mormon and LDS views on just war ethics. As I take it BCC is an unofficial Mormon site, greetings and delighted to see you. I’m a law professor in my day job, and among my academic areas are ethics of war and just war theory, which involves moral philosophy, theology, and history, more or less.

I am a long, long lapsed Mormon; served a mission in Peru in the 1970s, but haven’t been active since the early 1980s and am married to a Catholic and, although with no desire to become a Catholic, make Mass my/our religious practice, such as it is. Most of my immediate family -brothers and sisters - remain active Mormons and, unlike many ex-Mormon intellectuals, I have zero ill will toward the religion or its practitioners; quite the contrary.

Here, for what it’s worth, are a couple of links to things I’ve written about Mormons and Mormonism:

Weekly Standard, “Mormons, Muslims, and Multiculturalism,” Dec 24, 2007
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/014/484tthrj.asp

Times Literary Supplement, “The Magi of the Great Salt Lake,” March 24, 1995
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=935784

Los Angeles Times Book Review, “A Peculiar People,” November 1999
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=935778

For my general take on just war theory, in a single article,
New York Times Magazine, “Who Owns the Rules of War?” April 13, 2003
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=403800

The SSRN papers are all free downloads - just pick a location from which to download and get the pdf.

As far as Mormonism and just war theory goes - I’ve had a number of devout Mormon students in my just war seminar in recent years, both devout and very smart. They’ve spent a lot of time talking with me about it, and written fine papers on the subject. The thing I am most struck by is how much a theory of just war ethics - how worked out a theory of just war ethics a religion has - depends upon that religion’s role in society. If you are the Catholic or generally the Christian churches in Europe over a thousand years, well, you have a pretty extensive theory of just war ethics because you, or your religious confreres, are running the place - the rulers of states and societies. On the other hand, if you are the very early Church, your concerns about war are much more limited, to questions about individual participation - because you are not the state or running society.

Mormonism, so far as I can tell and drawing a lot on my students, has not really run state and society - leaving aside the Brigham Young theocracy in Utah - and instead long had a fractious relationship with the state and government, in which questions of fundamental loyalty for quite a long time were on the table. The ethical concerns of Mormon leaders have therefore tended to focus not on the grand questions of war and peace, and how one might, if at all, conduct war ethically, but instead about the obligation of individual loyalty to the state, the obligation to undertake civic duties including those of a soldier, and the question of moral responsibility, or not, in case of such individual participation. It is not an overall theory of ethics and war, in the large sense that traditional Catholic just war theory undertakes it - and is mostly a reflection, I believe, of the fact that Mormons have never really, so to speak, ‘run the joint’ the way that other Christians have done over centuries.

That seems to me a fair reflection of what Mormon leaders said about the ethics of war in the run-up to the Iraq war. As far as individual Mormons, and especially Mormon political leaders - Romney, Hatch - but also, in my personal experience as a laws of war lawyer with close ties to lawyers in the Department of Defense, much more Mormons serving as mid and high level officers with ethical and legal responsibilities for the ‘conduct of hostilities’ according to the ‘laws and customs of war’, as the lawyers like to say - things are a little different. I take that as a function of having civic obligations over and above religious one. But in my experience, these American Mormons tend to adopt the general tone of just war theory. Meaning, most Americans have absorbed a secularized version of just war theory, and so have most American Mormons serving in such capacities. It is the secular, human rights based theory of just war developed by Michael Walzer. I think that, more than any specifically Mormon version of war ethics, informs most American Mormons who have direct responsibilities for the conduct of war.

Labor Day thanks to the folks who gave us the weekend

Labor Day, USA. So, let’s take a moment to give thanks for all those who fought for labor rights over the past 150 years. Talkleft has a nice quick history of the holiday and a Rolling Stones rendition of Salt of the Earth from Youtube.

I was a card-carrying member of the Teamsters Union for a couple of years, when I worked for a couple of years (before starting college (finally) at UCLA) at the truck loading dock for Roadway Express in downtown Los Angeles. This was in the late 1970s to 1980 or 81, I don’t remember very well. I finally decided that maybe I needed to go to college; not long after I left that job, loading and unloading big trucks, every kind of freight imaginable, the facility was closed and moved out to the desert town of Victorville. It made sense - it had become far too difficult to get huge freight trucks in and out of downtown LA, and made better sense to shift the freight from big trucks to smaller ones for urban delivery.

More importantly, the container revolution was just taking off - I didn’t know it at the time - and it was going to render an awful lot of loading and unloading unnecessary. It was a period of horrible productivity in American manufacturing - Roadway Express and I were certainly part of the less-than-stellar productivity, as we collectively were entirely indifferent to damage of any kind. Quality control was a wholly alien notion. The supervisors apparently were evaluated strictly in terms of meeting schedules and gross weight moved; I recall when we once unloaded a whole huge truck of glass fluorescent light tubes - the supervisor had us throw the boxes to speed things along and when I reported that I could hear the glass breaking in every single one, he snarled, who the fuck cares, insurance will pay for it. But I didn’t care any more than he did.

I look back over the hundred year old sloganeering of the unions, and although I am as critical as the next center right Republican about union demands, and anyway think that labor unions don’t really suit the direction of capitalism for the new century, nonetheless I stand in awe and respect for what they achieved. I don’t think that, as the 19th century slogan went, ‘labor creates all wealth’. If that were so, humans would have been far richer over the last 10,000 years; technology and innovation create wealth and none of that really took off until the Industrial Revolution. And, for the same reason, the takeoff of the labor unions themselves.

But those slogans were never truly about economics - they were an assertion of the inherent dignity of labor. To the folks who brought us the weekend, labor safety, the eight hour workday, and so many other inherent dignities of life we today take for granted - thanks.

Jeanne of Arc

Jhesus-Maria, King of England, and you, Duke of Bedford, who style yourself regent of the Kingdom of France, you, Guillaume de la Poule, count of Suffort, Jean, sire of Talbot, and you, Thpmas, sire of Scales, who call yourselves lieutenants of the Duke of Bedord, acknowledge the summons of the King of Heaven. Render to the Maid here sent by God the King of Heaven, the keys of all the good towns which you have taken and violated in France. She is here come by God’s will to reclaim the blood royal. She is very ready to make peace, if you will acknowledge her to be right, provided that France you render, and pay for having held it. And you, archers, companions war, men -at-arms and others who are before the town of Orleans, go away into your country, by God. And if so be not done, expect news of the Maid who will come to see you shortly, to your very great injury. King of England, if you do not so, I am chief-of-war, and in whatever place I attain your people in France, I will make them quit it willy-nilly. And if they will not obey, I will have them all slain; for I am here sent by God, the KIng of Heaven, body for body, to drive you all out of France.

(Joan of Arc, Orleans, March 22, 1429.)

The New Class, Palin and Obama (Note to Peter Berkowitz)

Peter Berkowitz once asked me how I made the transition from a fairly radical (if mostly intellectually radical) leftism to a center-right position, rooted in the defense of American democratic sovereignty abroad and a modestly libertarian conservatism at home.

The answer is that sometime during the course of the 80s and 90s, I looked at the left, my friends and confreres in America, and concluded that we were promoting a ‘left authoritarianism’, under the conjoined banner of rights and therapy: which is to say, what certain people think is good for you, promulgated in the essentially unanswerable language of ‘rights talk’.

So the importance of conservatism (leaving aside the usual issues about rational economic policy and national security) is largely that I am anti-New Class. Anti-the elite left ‘helping professions’, who come armed with law and therapy - the power of the prosecutor to make you and your kids better people! The leftwing, feminist hysteria of the 1908s and 90s over child abuse has never ceased to rankle me, and might well count as the thing that drove me out of the left (note to Peter). Waco certainly had an effect. Ever since dropping out of the Mormon church many, many years ago, I’ve never had the faintest sympathy for social conservatism as a set of substantive positions - but I also could not abide the idea of a bunch of creepy social workers (bearing, once again, the therapeutic nostrums of the helping professions but armed with the legal authority of the prosecutor) telling my much more socially conservative Mormon sisters how to run their lives and the lives of their families.

There are many ironies and subtleties to New Class analysis. One is not so subtle, however - it is, in fact, central. The rewriting of New Class doctrine by American neoconservatives that took place during the 1980s and 90s was a huge intellectual mistake (as we at Telos noted at the time, not that anyone was listening). Irving Kristol’s book on American neoconservatism in the 1990s claimed that the New Class divide was between, on the one hand, the intellectuals, the professionals such as lawyers whose livelihoods consisted of navigating the divide (more precisely: holding monopoly access to the divide) between public and private, government professionals in the “helping professions,” media professionals, etc., and, on the other hand, business people.

That proposed division, putting professionals and government bureaucrats on one side, and business people on the other, was flat-out wrong. It was wrong for all the reasons that the late Christopher Lasch pointed out in his final works, particularly The Revolt of the Elites and, for that matter, David Brooks noted in another sort of way in his hilariously on-target Bobos in Paradise. Many business people, many whole categories of business people - people in finance, private equity, all sorts of businesses - are entirely New Class in their cultural and professional and social orientations.

The problem, however, is not with elites, or with the idea of elites, as such. I am not in the least bit ‘anti-elite’, anti-elite as such. I’m not a populist. I’m an intellectual and an elite and a believer in representative democracy. That a society, governed by representative democracy, needs elites is beyond issue. The question is, what kind, and what should their relationship be to those whom they govern?

Palin and Obama cast that issue pretty squarely on the table, and they put it on the table for the next generation in American politics, once the Bidens and McCains have passed from the historical stage. Obama is a classic New Class elitist, by education, outlook, everything. So is his wife. Their professional lives have consisted in - community organizing? please - the elite management of the poor and, of even greater importance today, management of, but also production of, communalist tensions through multiculturalism and identity politics. That’s what the New Class does; that’s what it exists to do. Along with, to be sure, extracting rents for managing social conflicts that it also has much interest in creating.

Palin represents not just another sort of America, but another sort of American elite. Not very elite, in her case, let’s be clear. She is not an intellectual, obviously: so what? It’s overrated, I can tell you. She doesn’t have an Ivy League education, or even a degree from one of the great public universities.

[Footnote: She is above all a cultural product of the Western United States; the land-grant universities and colleges where my father spent all his life. Idaho native and former Clinton domestic policy advisor Bruce Reed, a genuine Democratic centrist who seems, alas, unlikely to have a big place in the New Obama Order, has written the very best thing about why Democrats run a big risk in condescending to her. His article in Slate, ostensibly about Sarah Palin, is one of the most touching essays I’ve read in a long time, because it’s obvious that it is indirectly a love letter from Bruce to his own wife. Very, very cool.]

But Palin obviously is not Fred Flintstone, either - as though Fred Flintstone were chosen by lot from the masses to lead the masses; she has political skills and smarts and a view on large issues that affect many lives. Let’s face it, I don’t think any of my intellectual colleagues in academia or me, for that matter, could get elected governor of anywhere, or dogcatcher, or anything else. We don’t dream of being elected; we dream of being appointed, and when we dream of ‘appointed what?’, it is usually Czar or maybe Grand Inquisitor.

But unlike me or my confreres in the academy, Palin has an organic, extra-political connection to the people she proposes to govern, whether in Alaska or the United States as a whole. Everything about her says, I’m one of you. Not the whole citizen of the planet thing that Obama’s New Class persona uses as a way to elide the question of his relationship to America and Americans, except as Redeemer, but a representative of the people of whom she is indeed representative, but among whom she must be, in virtue of the office she seeks, also an unapologetic elite. The question for contemporary elites is no longer whether they have, but instead whether they believe they actually need, a rootedness in and among the people whose lives they intend so thoroughly to govern. This is the question that Lasch posed ironically in The Revolt of the Elites (playing on Ortega y Gasset’s Revolucion de las Masas). Lasch answered, ‘not any more’; in classic New Class fashion, they aver their expertise instead and say that it is enough.

But the answer, I should hope, is still surely ‘yes’. A representative democracy needs elites who are both elite and expert and even wise, but also rooted in the place and among the people they propose to lead. Palin’s “rootedness” is not at issue. The question for her, instead, is whether she has (lacking the ponderous, yet often pointless credentials of the contemporary elites) that which is genuinely necessary to lead and manage an enormous, modern political economy, as well as a polity out among enemies in a dangerous world. The common man does not. Fred Flintstone does not. Does she?

The modern Democratic party has wobbled, since Woodrow Wilson at least, between its intellectual pretensions and its working class roots, through Dewey, Stevenson, etc., etc.. But it has tipped over today, and not just into elite management, the ‘expert’ management of society that its progressive wing has always proffered, sometimes for good against populist sentiment, but frequently for bad, in all the ways that Jonah Goldberg notes in Liberal Fascism - as a justification for left-authoritarianism. Today, however, it has tipped beyond that into New Class ideology, the seemingly unassailable combination (which is to say, the intellectual cul-de-sac) of therapy-law managing people who are increasingly broken down into identity communities, and whose relationships are then run (we call it ‘community organizing’, among other things) from the top by New Class elites. That’s Barack and Michelle Obama, even if you leave aside all the creepy cultish stuff. The Democrats are the party of the New Class, for as far into the future as I can see today.

For the Republicans, however, the question is still (for the moment) an open one. What remains most open, in the future of politics and ideology for the party, is the way in which it comes to grips with the necessity of elites in a Republic, in a republican form of government, in a representative democracy. It has its New Class temptation, to be sure - its name is Mitt Romney. Conservative New Class analysis, however, because it has mistakenly exempted business people from the category, cannot see Romney for the managerial therapist that in reality he is. For that matter, it cannot see, either, that what passes as evangelical religion in the United States has long since made God into a cipher interpreted by the Twelve Step Program; the God of the evangelicals turns out to be ‘as interpreted’ not by his prophet, but by our therapist.

At the other end, however, without a theory and practice of elites, the temptation to disastrous and, let’s be clear, often evil populism always looms. Obviously this has always been true: this is largely why we have representative republican government, not direct participatory democracy. New and not worked out for Republicans (and conservatives more generally), however, is what this means today, in a world in which New Class experts - free floating not just in the United States but, in a globalized world - propose to run the planet while they float untethered, unrooted, deracinated, unattached, but always highly paid, in the jet stream. What is the theory of elites, what is the theory of popular participation and democratic legitimacy? How to describe the difference (a difference we currently recognize, if only in an intutitive, inchoate, and untheorized way) between the “leadership” of the republic and its citizenry, on the one hand, and the “management” of a mere “economy” and its mere consumers, on the other?

Working out this relationship in a way that can be defended intellectually, but is also accessible politically, is the current intellectual task of conservatism in America. Whether, of course, it knows it or not.

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All that said:

I am supposed to be finishing a book chapter on where American conservatism is, or should be, going. For the record, it is not done yet.

In some respects, this was always an odd assignment for me, since I am a johnny-come-lately to conservatism, and am not sure exactly how much applies to me ... social conservative, very far from it; national security conservative, yes, emphatically; libertarian conservative, yes, but not in that crazy Ayn Randian mad, mad way. I suppose that means I fit one classic, if otherwise empty, definition of a ‘neoconservative’ - someone who mostly favors Republicans, but only started doing so since the mid-1990s.

That, by way of autobiography with respect to suggesting ‘where American conservatism ought to be going intellectually. Because, when I think about what actually draws me to conservatism, it starts with a profound distaste for the elite intellectual class of which I am a part.

It is what drew me, for example, to the radical critical journal Telos, to Paul Piccone and Russell Berman: a deep suspicion of what it described as the New Class management-domination of the rest of America, through a therapeutic language that barely concealed an authoritarian agenda.

(It is an authoritarianism premised, as the eminent sociologist Zygmunt Bauman once wrote in a marvelous late 1980s essay in Telos, on the proposition that the “problem” of the poor, and a “problem” of social management since extended to include all the non-rich, anyone who might not share New Class social and political sentiments, is not one of class, at least not in the usual marxist sense, but instead that, in the sense of the market-therapeutic professionals who propose to manage them today, they exhibit the “poverty of flawed consumers”).

You can read New Class ideology pretty much straight up in Clinton’s It Takes a Village, as I pointed out in a review in the TLS in the mid-1990s. I wrote about some of this in a lengthy but - if you’ll forgive me - really quite good review essay of several books on the New Class and the new ‘market professionals’ and why lawyers were so professionally unhappy in the Columbia Law Review in 1996.

So I think.

On the other hand, no one to whom I have ever described this project - even as a book chapter - has ever agreed. They all think it is thin and doesn’t amount to anything other than a political slogan: “leadership.” I therefore call upon the spirits of Telos, including its gazillion ex-editors of every political stripe, and the guiding force of Paul Piccone, may his soul rest in peace, to help me better articulate this. Because I also think that the root intellectual sources for this lie not in American conservatism, but in the Telosian critiqe of the “wholly administered society” from back in the 1970s and 80s.

And yet no one, on the left or right, among my most respected friends, thinks there is much to this, and certainly not as an (“re” - let’s be clear) animating project for American conservatism.

This skepticism has inhibited, I admit, my intellectual confidence in my ideas and has slowed down my writing. But I must admit that the emergence of Obama and, today, Palin, frankly makes me think, once again, that I’m right.

Public trust societies and kinship societies

Huntington famously argues that a clash of civilizations is underway, and locates it as a clash of religious traditions, Christianity and Islam. But it seems to me more correct to think of a clash, less of two universalist religious traditions, than of two fundamental organizational principles, kinship societies and those limited number of societies that have managed to establish, however incompletely, social organization on the basis of public trust that goes beyond ties of kinship. Those ‘public trust’ societies in one sense define modernity, but some of the core conditions predate modernity by centuries - monogamy and out-marriage, to start with.

Monogamy is a necessary, although obviously far from sufficient, condition of a society that is both egalitarian and free: a society in which a group of males has no real access to sexual reproduction is not an egalitarian society, by definition, nor a free one, and that inequality in reproductive access is tied to every other form of economic inequality. And that is to speak only of the men. From this standpoint, the fact that Christianity, for reasons that appear to me, at least, historically and even theologically quite contingent, favored both monogamy and out-marriage over cousin marriage, however much honored only in the breach, sets it apart as a form of social organization.

Modernity in some sense starts with those preconditions. The development of a social ethos that accepts the idea that individuals have fiduciary duties in the abstract, that do not pertain solely to those who are members of extended family groups - even where those extended family groups are as much or more socially, rather than genetically, defined - is what gives rise to the public trust necessary to modern Western society and the modern democratic state: that the state, and its officials, will treat people neutrally, without regard to kinship or other pre-modern markers of identity. Without that trust, the result is the form of the state, but an animating principle quite at odds with it. It is the marker of the rule of law and, it increasingly seems to me, the real line of division between societies today.

What gets the cultural cycle of public trust going in society? I have no idea but certainly it appears to be a long term cultural fact, rather than a short term political creation. Samuel Pepys, for example, wrote his diary at what appeared to be the beginning of a long term shift in English political culture: a time in which offices were still heritable and for sale, but also at a time when officials - in vital public positions such as the Royal Navy - were also beginning to be held to account for corruption and fraud. By the Industrial Revolution, the culture of the civil service was taking hold, and with it an ideal of neutrality in dealing with alternating governments and with the public. The very notion of “honor” and to whom it was owed had shifted.

The idea of equality before the law, in matters related to integrity of person, is a very old one and found widely across cultures. The idea of equality in the distribution of the largesse of state favor, and that it is dishonorable for me as a publi official to favor me and mine over you and yours in the matter of state property and privilege, because it is a “public trust,” is a quite new one, and very limited in cultural scope. Yet it is the basis of legitimacy - even more the democracy - of the modern state worldwide. What we call a ‘failed state’, after all, is almost by definition that there is no concept of public trust, that it has been exhausted and depleted.

(Useful reading on this includes James Bowman, Honor; and Francis Fukuyama, Trust. Of course, if your view is that all societies are equally successful in their social and cultural arrangements, just different, but no one is better or worse, then none of this will make much sense.)

The Ghost of Freedom: A History of the Caucasus

The new issue of the Times Literary Supplement has a fascinating, troubling review by Donald Rayfield of a new book on the history of the Caucasus. I think I nominate it, and the book, for most timely of the year. The Ghost of Freedom, by Charles King (OUP 2008).

[Western] romanticizing underlies attitudes to the new states of the southern Caucasus, Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia, where a hard-headed desire to have a route for oil and gas that cannot be cut off by Putin and Medvedev is glossed as an aspiration to encourage European Union-standard human rights and democracy. The discussion of Georgia’s emergence from “failed state” status under a tired Edvard Shevardnadze, mired in corruption, like the account of Azerbaijan under its dynasty of ex-KGB Alievs, and of an Armenia run by violent nationalists and thinly disguised Soviet-style Communists, is more than competent. One would wish only for a little more cynicism: Mikeil Saakashvili may have the suave exterior of a Columbia University lawyer, but there are a lot of questions not posed, let alone answered here. The initial connivance of the Russians at the Rose Revolution, which got rid of the Ajarian warlord Aslan Abashidze as well as of Shevardnadze, two figures particularly hated by Putin, is unmentioned, and the mysterious sequence of murders and unexplained deaths of Saakashvili’s rivals and opponents needs to be discussed as proof of the continuity of a specifically Caucasian way of politics.

In a book dealing with “the ghost of freedom” one would expect a more thorough exploration of the Caucasus’s little Kosovos, where ethnic groups such as the Abkhaz and South Ossetians try to break away from a newly independent Georgia only to find themselves international pariahs, whose only refuge is a return to the Russian embrace. Here Putin’s salami tactics for reincorporating lost Soviet territory meet with no adequate or even intelligent response by the principal victims, for instance the Georgians, or from the European Union and United States who have already tied themselves into knots over the former Yugoslavia, and can only wring their hands as they see Russia, with the help of its heavily armed “peacekeepers”, turning Abkhazia back into its own private recreation zone. King ends with a vague hope that Europe’s “inexorable march” towards liberal values can proceed in the Caucasus, but not much of the evidence supports him. For over a thousand years the Georgians and Armenians have appealed to Europe for support as fellow Christians, as Europeans by culture, if not by geography, and after being strung along by Crusaders, by Louis XIV, by various Popes, by Presidents Wilson, Roosevelt and both Bushes, can still not believe that the answer they get will always be a perfunctory apology that deeper interests of state force the West to take sides with its major trading partners, not its cultural and spiritual brothers. Ghost of freedom, indeed. Given the present crisis, as Russia backs Ossetia’s separatists with bombs and shells, our politicians’ vacillations and our diplomats’ complacency may not be remedied in time, even if a group of experts were hurriedly assembled to follow up Charles King’s reconnaissance and produce and analyse in full the history of the Caucasus.

C.J. Chivers, NYT, offering a a page one opinion piece on Georgia

(Thanks Glenn, for the Instalanche, and welcome Instapunditeers.)

(Update: Dear Mr. Chivers. I’ve gone back and read some of your earlier reporting, which is excellent. So why don’t you ignore all the rude things I say below, and quit wasting your time writing the kinds of things that get the cross-x I give it below. Why, in the midst of the world potentially changing in a genuinely strategic and dangerous way, are you writing pointless opinion pieces, pieces which I or anyone else might agree or disagree with, while channeling - not Kremlin operatives, not Georgian generals but ... anonymous USG flunkies, likely from the State Department, with some or another ax to grind. This requires your genuine, hard-won, value-added Russia and Central Asian reporting skills? You have the skills to go gather new, actual facts, and you waste your time on this blather. I realize this is what the Times values, and this is how you get on the front page. But please be aware that there are some NYT readers - even paying subscriber readers - who would actually like to read brand new facts, gathered out in unlikely, difficult places. The test of a good, well-reported piece, Mr. Chivers, is that I wouldn’t be able to say anything about it: a painfully simple logical argument, not subject to the kind of logical questions I raise below, and facts that you have found out that no one yet knows. I don’t suppose it will wind up on the front page. But I would read it and I bet a lot of other people would too. Why don’t you do what you are specially in a position to do, and go out and research and report something in this moment of crisis? I mean something not obtained in the eternal circle-jerk between NYT reporters and USG officials eager to leak something. You can put all your brilliant analyses and opinions in the book later - I promise I’ll buy it. But in this moment of crisis, why not do some original reporting? Like you used to do? You used to be quite good at it, you know.)

The last time I had occasion to think about NYT’s Moscow bureau chief C.J. Chivers was by reason of his reporting on the latest UN conference on small arms controls. I put that post up at Opinio Juris, here. My basic point was that Chivers’ reporting was soft-ball at best, took whatever UN officials had to say at pretty much face value, and didn’t offer relevant qualifications to the narrative he and UN officials seemed together to accept. Dave Kopel, at Volokh Conspiracy, had more to say, here.

The NYT has a front page article by Chivers, a “news analysis” offering, In Georgia and Russia, a Perfect Brew for a Blowup, August 10, 2008. I haven’t posted this to OJ, because it’s frankly not worth it, but it is still an annoyance. Midway through the article, Chivers informs us that:

The risks were intensified by the fact that the United States did not merely encourage Georgia’s young democracy, it helped militarize the weak Georgian state.

In his wooing of Washington as he came to power, Mr. Saakashvili firmly embraced the missions of the United States in Afghanistan and Iraq. At first he had almost nothing practical to offer. Georgia’s military was small, poorly led, ill-equipped and weak.

But Mr. Saakashvili’s rise coincided neatly with a swelling American need for political support and foreign soldiers in Iraq. His offer of troops was matched with a Pentagon effort to overhaul Georgia’s forces from bottom to top.

At senior levels, the United States helped rewrite Georgian military doctrine and train its commanders and staff officers. At the squad level, American marines and soldiers trained Georgian soldiers in the fundamentals of battle.

Georgia, meanwhile, began re-equipping its forces with Israeli and American firearms, reconnaissance drones, communications and battlefield-management equipment, new convoys of vehicles and stockpiles of ammunition.

The public goal was to nudge Georgia toward NATO military standards. Privately, Georgian officials welcomed the martial coaching and buildup, and they made clear that they considered participation in Iraq as a sure way to prepare the Georgian military for “national reunification” — the local euphemism of choice for restoring Abkhazia and South Ossetia to Georgian control.

All of these policies collided late last week. One American official who covers Georgian affairs, speaking on the condition of anonymity while the United States formulates its next public response, said that everything had gone wrong.

Does Chivers really want to tell us that the United States “helped militarize the weak Georgian state”? What is the evidence for that? The fact that the US helped reequip the Georgian military and helped train it? Mr. Chivers, cf. militarize - it doesn’t mean training and weapons merely. It doesn’t mean what you seem to think it means. It means systematically remaking the state under military domination. Is that really what you mean? Really? Again, what is your evidence for this remarkably strident charge? Besides the supply of American equipment and training?

After all, US policy around the world has been training of military forces in democratic states so that their militaries would operate in a more professional and disciplined fashion - particularly in matters of human rights. As I noted in my OJ post, here, the Georgian military was in desperate need of such professionalization going back to the days that led to the current conflicts. It was, in my personal experience at Human Rights Watch in the early 1990s, a militia army, extremely abusive and undisciplined in pretty much every way. The US “helped militarize” the Georgian state by seeking to raise its military above those standards. Good God, the horror.

To precisely what in what the US taught do you take exception? You say that the United States “helped rewrite Georgian miilitary doctrine and train its commanders and staff officers. At the squad level, American marines and soldiers trained Georgian soldiers in the fundamentals of battle.” You say this with a certain hint of dark things. Wow. How horrible - the fundamentals of battle. Who would have thought?

So what are you suggesting? Come on, be straight about it. What exactly do you think that American training said or did that was objectionable? Are you, for example, suggesting that US forces trained Georgian forces in abuses, of the kind of Abu Ghraib? What? It’s not good enough to drop a dark suggestion that training in basic military skills is somehow wrong. You actually have to say what’s wrong with it. If your point is that this led Georgian political elites to assume that the US would back them in a fight with the Russians over South Ossetia or Abkhazia, fine, or that the US failed to disabuse them of that possibility in order to keep them in Iraq, fine too - but that’s a completely different argument from saying that Americans trained Georgians in perfectly respectable military skills that any army needs, including respect for the laws of war, and implying that there was something sinister about it. Those latter possibilities, while entirely possible and in my speculative estimation likely, require premises going beyond simply saying that the US trained the Georgians. I’m speculating; you’re telling me you’re not. But what you offer in way of evidence consists of the fact of training and equipment - consistent with any number of other policies and explanations - and some anonymous sourcing.

Christ, it’s not that hard. Tell us straight what you you think is wrong with US policy. Is it the content of training? Is it the the bare fact of training? Is it an implied deal of training for the US going along with a Georgian move to re-take the territories? These are not the same thing, but you conveniently treat them as though they are - and, in particular, without managing quite to say so, imply sinister things about the bare fact of training and its content, as a way of casting suspicion on US conduct, rather than Georgian interpretations of it. As for the US re-equipping the Georgian army, if that’s wrong, one obvious implication is that it would somehow be better if the Georgian republic were unable to defend itself against Moscow - maybe that’s true, maybe not, but surely you would admit that this is a rather Moscow-favorable interpretation of things, offered by a Moscow bureau chief, and that simple argumentative obligations, not offered as narrative, would require that you at least acknowledge the possibility and state why that is not the case. Might I trouble you to do that?

Look: what you’ve offered us is an argument, masquerading as a narrative news story. I’m very interested in arguments, especially on a policy topic as difficult and fraught with risks as this, and I don’t doubt that you have important things to say. But if you want to offer an argument, then, well, argue it. Make claims and then explain the evidence for your premises. You offer us a narrative story that is, let’s be honest, very Moscow-centric, backed by a couple of unnamed US government sources. The last one you cite, the one American “official who covers Georgian affairs,” sounds like possibly he or she has an agenda or two. Is that possible? Might you tell us about it? But the fundamental point is that if you actually set out to argue your case, it wouldn’t look anywhere near as convincing as the narrative you spin out, because you might have to consider weaknesses in your own position. It would be a lot harder to rely on anonymous sources. A decent editor would query the use of inflammatory and unwarranted language like “militarize.”

I’m fine with the NYT becoming an 80% opinion paper, heck, 95%, since that’s what it is already. But in that case, offer the opinion pieces as arguments. My fifteen year old daughter just finished an elementary logic class this summer - strikingly, one of the most important parts of the class was the discussion of why straw arguments were bad, and the obligations in argument of charity in presenting an opponent’s position and fidelity in offering it. The fundamental problem with the journalistic media style is that, offered in place of argument, presenting opposing views, alternative explanations, anything to the contrary, simply disappears. Doesn’t fit the narrative. For heaven’s sake, if you’re going to argue, then argue.

Mr. Chivers, I don’t doubt you have important things to say about the Russia-Georgia war. So why don’t you report the facts, unadorned, and if you want to argue your opinions, then do so in an plainly stated, argumentative way?

(ps. To finish out the apparent agendas, I suppose I should add that what Chivers means by “militarization” is that Georgia supported the US in Iraq and Afghanistan. As he says (bold added):

[T]he fact that the United States did not merely encourage Georgia’s young democracy, it helped militarize the weak Georgian state.

In his wooing of Washington as he came to power, Mr. Saakashvili firmly embraced the missions of the United States in Afghanistan and Iraq. At first he had almost nothing practical to offer. Georgia’s military was small, poorly led, ill-equipped and weak.

But Mr. Saakashvili’s rise coincided neatly with a swelling American need for political support and foreign soldiers in Iraq. His offer of troops was matched with a Pentagon effort to overhaul Georgia’s forces from bottom to top.

Is it a “fact” that the US “helped militarize the weak Georgian state”? This sounds like an opinion to me. It might be a reasonable one - I think what Chivers says next is almost certainly correct, that the Georgians perceived the situation as a quid pro quo, but that too falls into the category of opinion, even if informed opinion, at least on the evidence presented: it is not shown, instead it is used as a premise in the rest of the argument - assumed, in other words.

It is likewise quite another question whether the US, which has had a long term policy of assisting places like Georgia with training and equipment, for reasons that long predate Iraq or Afghanistan, also saw this as the quid pro quo. Chivers would have to establish that this would not have been US policy in any case. Not exactly what I associate with, um, facts. The implication, in any case, that Chivers wishes to draw from this is that the weak Georgian state was “militarized” by the fact of US military assistance - as though there were no independent reasons why the US would not have undertaken this - and the “proof” of this is ... Georgian military support for the US in Afghanistan and Iraq. Lovely.)

(pps. Remarkably, dear readers, I am one of the dwindling out-of-NYC home subscribers to the Times. I pay for it, I don’t just read it online. Even more remarkably, I am actually a NYT shareholder, oy vey - shares I bought a while back because, as a finance professor in my day job, I thought it would help if I owned a few shares of a company I frequently use as a class test case to give me a personal reason for keeping track of the company finances. Still, I didn’t imagine when I bought it that the stock price would fall this far ... For that matter, I’ve written for the Magazine a couple of times. I don’t have a strong opinion as to whether the content really has an effect on the financial decline of the Times; there are arguments both directions, in that the greater opinionizing , if it really is that and not simply more noticed opinionizing, might have the effect of reinforcing the core audience as a niche product. And the conditions of the industry are disastrous for reasons that reach beyond any single newspaper. But I do agree with Glenn Reynolds and others that the best financial strategy for newspapers, including the Times, is reporting of facts and not simply offering opinions. The web is filled with people with opinions who frankly write as well as any NYT writer. Any ass with a law degree can do what I did here, and simply closely read what was written; I did what an editor should have done. What we don’t have is independent access to facts. Pity that the Times seems to reached the point where “reporting” simply means calling a government source and saying, hi, you want to leak? For that matter, I suspect Chivers is probably a pretty decent factual reporter on the ground in the many places from which he has reported, possibly even an outstanding one, but you’d never know - the problem is that factual reporting is not especially valued by his employer, and does not seem to be the ticket to the front page. More’s the pity. Mr. Chivers, I apologize for being rather rude in this post. But at some point exasperation trumps - who was it, Dorothy Parker, who got it best: What fresh hell is this?)

How much reading will 2 or 3L law students do?

Rick Hills, over at Prawfsblawg, asks the question, how much reading will 2L or 3L law students do in a weekly seminar? Fifty pages a week too much?

Professor Hills teaches at NYU. I’m surprised that no one in the comments so far has remarked on what students outside the top 10 law schools do in their second and third years, at least if they are in sizable cities - viz., work as many hours as they can somewhere. It helps to be in DC, of course, but my students at American try to work at least half time, as permitted by the rules, and in many cases I am sure work far more than that. At paid jobs with law firms, if they can get them, or else at internships with government agencies. Their motivations are partly to reduce debt, but also because, at least in DC, clerkships with firms or internships with government agencies are hugely important ways of getting jobs.

This takes a large toll on class preparation. I put up with it in large part because I can see from years of watching that these positions matter in getting jobs. My students are not in law school as grad school - I wish they were, but they’re not. I don’t think they go out as well prepared academically for practice as they would if they put their focus on their classes - and I think students at schools, even in my same tier, where such positions are not available have an intellectual edge in important ways for the practice of law, because they focus more on class. But it is hard for me to fault my students and, in fact, I don’t.

Bright Lights, Big City

Huh. I remember that I have read a Jay McInerney novel, Model Behavior, from the late 1990s, and Bright Lights, Big City seems identical, as far as I can tell. I enjoyed Model Behavior in a guilty pleasures mode, mostly because it fit into a very particular genre of male fantasy novel that is the male equivalent of chick lit - the novel of manners in which the hero is some version of an intellectual or writer or anyway nothing very manly or hunky or rich or famous or powerful, but somehow gets the model or actress or some-such, of whom he is obviously completely unworthy. She leaves him but then, of course, comes back to him. Or they break up and get back together. The fantasy point is that she would be interested in the first place. In McInerney’s novels, the model seems to want to get married when in fact she would be looking to trade up. But you see what I mean about the equivalent of chick lit. I also find intriguing, as a fantasy point or maybe it’s just something from a now-gone era, that the New York young writer of fiction, short stories, novels, etc., seems like a figure of sexy up and coming power and consequence. Writers? Who are we kidding? Girls these days are not foolish enough to fall for boys who studied literature in college, rather than economics, unless said male is already known to be headed to Yale Law School. Other examples in this genre include the movie Notting Hill which, contrary to all wisdom, is not a chick flick at all but a male fantasy, and of course the very great, in its own sweetly wrong, wrong way, AA Gill, Starcrossed. I started into Bright Lights, Big City at the Stanford gym, on the cross-trainer, at 20% O2, which seems about right. But what is this thing for first person, present tense fiction?

ps. Okay, it all becomes clear, now that I have finished reading BLBC at the gym, and have launched into Less Than Zero. I didn’t do drugs, didn’t drink, didn’t have the money for either of those two things, and didn’t really know anyone who did all that cocaine in the 1980s. Less Than Zero is a bore, even as reading on an exercise machine; I can sort of imagine that it shocked people when it came out in the mid-1980s, but the complete absence of anything below the surface save for some dated psychoanalytic schlock that was dying even as this was being published is just ... dull. Someone at the bookstore commented to me in the checkout line that Ellis is a better writer than McInerney. Not as far as I can tell - at least McInerney tells a rather sweet romance, plus more of the lost-mother psychological schtick; Ellis is just dull. Not sure I’ll manage to finish Less Than Zero. I saw a $2.50 Dover edition of The Sorrows of Young Werther in the bookstore, too, maybe I’ll reread that. Same general trend, more content.

Francisco Goldman and novels of the 1980s

Taking a little break here from writing away on my US-UN relations manuscript. Took a stroll over to Stanford Bookstore, where I was suddenly seized by a desire to read a couple of novels that supposedly characterized the 1980s. So I bought Bright Lights, Big City and Less Than Zero.

I never read any of this stuff when it came out. I wasn’t interested - not sure I am now, but got curious because people I knew kept referring to the 1980s in terms of those novels, even though none of the references seemed to have any relation to my life during the period. I think I was the right age - I was 25 in 1980, when I finally got around to starting college at UCLA. I was a somewhat older student who didn’t have any money, had been working for a couple of years as a teamster on a loading dock in the grimy part of downtown LA until it closed in 1979 and moved out to Victorville, had spent a couple of years as a Mormon missionary who hadn’t really been sure about going to college at all ... reading the back covers, I don’t think Less Than Zero had much to do with my experience in LA. No mistake - I loved LA, lived in a gritty, dangerous part of Hollywood for a couple of years, then moved to Venice and Santa Monica when I started in at UCLA - I’ve always loved LA. But I never saw anything of the glamorous, moneyed, fast young LA set when I was young and lived there. Same in NYC a decade later, after law school and the beginning of my adult life on the East Coast.

One reason I thought about these novels was (a shining example of the Anderson coup-de-nonsequitur) thinking about the novels of the Guatemalan-American writer Francisco Goldman, an old friend who most recently published a nonfiction account of the murder - really, the investigation or non-investigation into the murder - of Archbishop Gerardi in Guatemala in the late 1990s, The Art of Political Murder, out September 1 in paperback. It’s a marvelous book, and it made me go back to Frank’s novels and (continuing the weird brain connection saga) think about what Frank said to me in the 1980s about novels and novelists.

He - Frank - said, I don’t want to be like Them. Meaning Jay McInerney or Bret Easton Ellis. Frank, a well regarded rising young writer in 1980s New York, was then working on his first novel, a sprawling marvelous thing called The Long Night of White Chickens, a combination Latin American fabulism combined with a New York Jewish coming of age story. Sound weird? Well, it works, read it. Also, quite apart from anything else, it’s the best riff on what the world of do-gooding, nongovernmental organizations working in bad places in the world is like, even twenty years later.

(Why is it, by the way, that no one has written a decent novel featuring an NGO worker? Besides this one, I mean, something dating from the 1990s and beyond? The ones that are out there are either filled to the brim with sugary, soupy romantic claptrap about the Heroic NGO worker, preferably a handsome French surgeon with MSF, sawing away at the leg bones of landmines victims in an improvised field hospital, Gaulois cig dangling from mouth, or else preternaturally but understatedly beautiful, marathon runner, disciplined bodies of the Good GIrls of the Left, triaging bags of rice and flour, or digging up the bodies of the disappeared, always Grimly Serious ... cf. Michael Ondaatje. How about, for example, a novel in which the MSF French surgeon accidentally, but hilariously, amputates the wrong leg?)

I was a young associate at Sullivan & Cromwell, and Frank used to call me up in the middle of the afternoon and read sections he was writing to me aloud as I stared out into the canyons of Wall Street and didn’t think about international tax law.

Well. Frank had a touch of envy in talking about the glitter writers of the period, Ellis and McInerney - who wouldn’t, fame, fortune, movie deals? But, he said, I want to write prose that is not about glitter, not a form of consumer shorthand. Also, he said, I’m not really interested in chronicling the lives of spoiled rich kids in New York. The Long Night of White Chickens certainly wasn’t that. But afterwards I noted a shift in his prose style. His subsequent novels shifted away, it has always seemed to me, from the exquisite formations of sentences that threatened, unless one was a very attentive reader, to overwhelm at the level of metaphorical detail, the actual narrative, to a simpler, less adorned style that emphasized the story.

It seemed to me right. Much plainer, quieter prose, much more story. It was a brave shift for a novelist looking to make a name, in an era in which glittering, high octane, sparkling surface prose seemed to count for a lot. But The Ordinary Seaman, in particular, simplifies a lot, while the historical The Divine Husband is a kind of combination of the two. And those are wonderful novels.

Frank has had recent tragedy in his life. He married a young woman I never had the privilege of meeting, Aura Estrada, a young Mexican writer studying at Hunter in New York; she died at age 30 in a tragic beach accident in Mexico a year ago. Frank is setting up a memorial writing fund in her name, the Aura Estrada Prize, and there is a fundraising dinner for it in New York in September 2008; Jean-Marie and I are on the dinner committee, but on account of my teaching schedule, Jean-Marie will be there but I won’t, alas. But I certainly wish it all the best in creating a scholarship in her name.

Ben Wittes Long War book discussion at Opinio Juris next week

I have said on repeated occasions that I regard Benjamin Wittes’s Law and the Long War as the most essential reading on Guantanamo and on the general question of what forward-looking counterterrorism policy should be for the United States, on matters of detention, interrogation, the role of Congress, and many other topics. Opinio Juris will be holding a discussion of the book next week, starting Monday, with a very impressive lineup of commentators: Glenn Sulmasey, Steve Vladeck, Geoff Corn, Bobby Chesney, maybe some others as well, and also Deborah Pearstein joining the regular OJ lineup. Check it out.

(And Marty Lederman too - Opinio Juris, only the finest in intellectual legal commentary!)

My TLS review of Philip Bobbitt's Terror and Consent, now out online

Philip Bobbitt’s book Terror and Consent is a marvelous book, and I hope it gets wide readership. It is long, but It repays careful study. My review in the Times Literary Supplement has just appeared online. Here is a little bit of it (and thanks to Larry Solum at Legal Theory Blog for the shoutout):

***
Philip Bobbitt’s Terror and Consent is a big book, enormous in concept and sweep, full of portent for transnational politics in the twenty-first century. Portentousness in a book can be a good thing, provided it delivers as promised, and this one delivers more intellectual punch on the fraught relationships between state and society, terrorism and terrorists, than any book I know. Not everyone feels this way; one indicator of the book’s intrinsic interest is the volatility of the reviews. The Economist was distinctly cool; Bobbitt’s grand ambition, it said, “is confusing, hard to digest, and perhaps wrong”. Niall Ferguson, on the other hand, recently called it the “most profound book on the subject of American foreign policy since the attacks of 9/11 – indeed, since the end of the cold war”.

A problem with much current analysis of this nature is that it thinks small. Today’s most serious efforts tend to avoid anything resembling a grand strategy for winning a long-term struggle against terrorists and terrorist organizations, and the states that sponsor and shield them. Favoured instead is the narrowing method of cost-benefit analysis and (adopting one version of it) an endorsement of defensive, immediate measures that are most obviously cost-effective. Talk of “victory” or “winning”, meanwhile, might resemble talk of “war” – but these days few dare call it war, at least if one wants to remain respectable among Western policy, academic and political elites. Governments shrink back, in fear of precisely the Muslim backlash their timidity invites. Terror and Consent, for its part, is heterodox on a long list of things. Bobbitt thinks that the struggle against terrorism is plainly a war, to be called a war and fought as a war, against religiously driven Islamist ideologues who seek to establish, he says, their vision of the caliphate. These figures operate in what he flatly calls “states of terror” that must be defeated. Nonetheless, changing conditions of twenty-first-century war, because of changing conditions of the twenty-first-century state, mean that war is not as it has long been.

Recent approaches to terrorism are driven not just by narrow cost-benefit analysis, but by a still narrower focus on something we might call “event-specific catastrophism”: preventing the next attack.

This is understandable for the Bush administration, considering what its officials see every day in secret threat assessments. The US Attorney General since late 2007, Michael Mukasey, has mused publicly about how constant and serious the threats against the US are; despite no successful homeland attacks since 9/11, he is “surprised by how surprised I am”. This may well be self-serving administration rhetoric, but much US policy is based less on “war” than on the last defensive perimeters: airport security, daily monitoring of cellphone traffic, internet analysis, watch lists, and many, many cement barriers. This is counterterrorism in a vital but stiflingly narrow sense. The cost-benefit analysis underlying such planning bears little resemblance to any strategic conceptual response to jihad that goes beyond preventing particular events of uncertain probability and magnitude.

Indeed, since 9/11, the Bush administration has undertaken only one genuinely strategic gambit – rolling the dice on Iraq and inviting al-Qaeda and other jihadists to make their stand there. But this is a post-hoc rationale: the Bush administration obviously undertook the Iraq war on a very different strategic basis.

The Bush administration’s numerous critics ridicule US counterterrorism policy in great measure within the same narrow framework that the administration has used. Sometimes the cost-benefit analysis would scarcely pass muster in an undergraduate economics class – the political scientist John Mueller, in his bestselling Overblown (2006), or the journalist James Fallows, each breezily announcing that the chances of getting killed in a terrorist attack are less than getting struck by lightning, or that 9/11 killed 3,000 people whereas 40,000 Americans die each year in automobile accidents and, ergo, well what? Cost-benefit comparison of opportunity costs makes sense only if comparing genuinely apposite opportunities. There have been some serious cost-benefit analyses offered in criticism of US policy. Cass R. Sunstein, for example, in his impressive, thoughtful Worst-Case Scenarios (2007), calmly demolished the so-called “One Percent Doctrine” – Vice-President Cheney’s assertion that even a 1 per cent chance of a catastrophic terrorist event requires a response as though it were a complete, 100 per cent certainty. Not even all the instruments of the national will (what President Bush committed to the fight against terrorism after 9/11) are unlimited. Choices still have to be made and priorities established and, as Sunstein observed, preventative actions bring risks of their own.

Nonetheless, even sophisticated analysis takes the prevention of particular events as the fundamental analytic objective. There is an important political reason for this. The American public has been gradually downgrading terrorism as a political priority, even while continuing to say that it supports serious measures against it. American elites, for their part, have been sliding to a dismissively contemptuous view that questions the whole idea of counterterrorism as a serious, large-scale necessity. The threat is downgraded, deploying cost-benefit-style arguments to call the administration’s counterterrorism programmes trumped up and exaggerated, and to suggest that the terrorist threat is quite capable of management without special military or even extraordinary intelligence measures.

Leaving aside the frequent starting assumption that the Bush administration has illegitimately grabbed executive power, and that this, rather than terrorism, is the primary thing against which to protect, the fundamental factual claim is that the probability of a successful attack has been seriously exaggerated. How to interpret, in other words, the fact that the US has not been hit on its territory since 9/11: as evidence of the effectiveness of the anti-terrorism efforts, or evidence that the threat was always more chimerical than real? Thus, in Barack Obama’s reckoning, Islamist terrorism is just one threat among so many: climate change and poverty, genocide and disease. The task is to learn to do as Western European countries do, and manage terror and terrorism, preferably within the existing confines of the criminal justice system. A certain amount of terrorism is normal, because a certain amount of criminality is normal. Of course, the strategic circumstances of Western Europe are different from the US (the threat to Britain, for example, lies mostly within, not without); and few in the US stop to consider that the European approach is as much a matter of necessity as strategic preference.

It might make sense to pursue policies that can at least command wide if shallow support. The kind of fundamental agreement that bound the Cold War’s “Vital Center” in the US over decades appears not to be forthcoming. Even so, few will oppose measures narrowly tailored, through recourse to cost-benefit analysis, towards preventing the next attack. But the difficulty with this policy minimalism, as Bobbitt has observed, is that event-specific cost-benefit analysis is “relentlessly tactical”. Even when not event-specific – even when it takes “Islamist terrorism” as a whole – it is by its very nature reactive. Cost-benefit analysis does not propose solutions; it evaluates proposed solutions offered by other processes. It is not a strategic form of thinking.

Terror and Consent, by contrast, offers strategic thinking on an unapologetically grand scale. It is synthetic across three large fields: history, law and strategic international politics. Bobbitt is able to combine academic and real-world experience – a Democrat by affiliation, he has served in senior positions in both law and intelligence in the Clinton and Bush senior administrations. His core insight is that transnational jihadist terrorism must be understood on the largest historical scale, and that requires understanding the shifting nature of the state and society in both the liberal democratic West and the rest of the world. For Bobbitt, jihadist transnational terrorism gets going by being able to exploit the interstices of the state system, not just on a geographical basis – the failed state of Afghanistan, for example – but on a historical basis, as the nature of the state moves from its incarnation in the twentieth century to something quite different in the twenty-first. Bobbitt’s main point is that al-Qaeda terrorism, and what might eventually replace and transform it, cannot be understood without reference to the state system and its evolution over a long period of time. This leads Terror and Consent into a long walk through the history of the state in the West ....

Joining Opinio Juris!

As of July 14, 2008, I have joined Opinio Juris group blog on international law. I am so delighted to join the finest of the international law blogs; I have been a fan since its beginning.

Opinio Juris has gone through a complete revamp - an upgraded, completely redesigned site and an exciting new partnership with Oxford University Press. Check it out. (If you currently have feeds, etc., check out the instructions on how to get up to speed on the new site.)

I don’t intend to abandon this blog, so you might want to keep it on your blogroll or your feed. I will use it to post stuff that doesn’t seem quite right for an international law blog, as well as advertisements (so to speak) for various writings of mine. I do intend to post stuff about music, for example, and probably some quick stuff about books unrelated to international law topics. I might also cross post some things, too.

My TLS review of Joost Hiltermann's account of poison gas use in Iraq

My review of Joost Hiltermann, A Poisonous Affair: America, Iraq, and the Gassing of Halabja (Oxford 2007), has just appeared today in the July 9, 2008 Times Literary Supplement, “America, Iraq, and Poison Gas.”

***
Despite their limitations, chemical weapons are eminently suited to another purpose – spreading terror among civilian populations. Iraq broke the moratorium early in the Iran–Iraq war that began in 1980, but chemical weapons gained their most notorious use as a weapon against civilians in the later 1980s, when Saddam Hussein turned them against his own Kurdish population in the infamous 1988 Anfal campaign. The veteran human rights campaigner Joost R. Hiltermann has written an indispensable book on the use of chemical weapons by the Saddam regime, and the reactions and responses of the international community, focusing on the largest and most lethal of the attacks in Kurdistan, the gassing of the town of Halabja on March 16, 1988. This is far more than simply the twenty-year-old history of yet another atrocity. The death sentence pronounced in September 2007 by an Iraqi court on one of the principal architects of the Anfal campaign, so-called Chemical Ali, is evidence of that. And the larger political repercussions of chemical weapons use by Saddam Hussein in the 1980s are still palpably with us today – as a monumentally mistaken ground for the US invasion in 2003, as an ongoing anxiety of governments fearful of terrorist use of chemicals, as a test of international law and its ability to make good on prohibitions on their use by states or other parties. And it is finally, as Hiltermann makes central to this book, a marker of the gap between American foreign policy realism and idealism, between the accommodation of dictators in conflict with other dictators, America in the 1980s between the regime of Saddam Hussein, on the one hand, and the Islamist regime of the Iranian mullahs, on the other – all in the midst of one of the most brutal, long-running and yet largely ignored, conventional state-to-state wars of the latter half of the twentieth century.

As a former senior staffer of Human Rights Watch, which did much of the early research, Hiltermann is well positioned to present the story of Halabja and the rest of the Anfal chemical campaign (Hiltermann is currently with the International Crisis Group). But his extraordinarily extensive interviews – with Iraqis following the US invasion, with Iranians, with US government staff current and past, with UN officials and many others – have produced a seamless record of what transpired, far beyond the research of the early 1990s. As someone who had a minor role in all this – I preceded Hiltermann as the director of the Human Rights Watch Arms Division and co-directed some of the early field research into chemical weapons attacks in Iraq in 1992 – I can say that this is the best-researched and documented account of events in 1988. And it brings to bear the best judgement available on vexed collateral questions – did the Iranians, for example, use gas weapons in the war? Perhaps future historians, with access to insider Iranian government files, will say something different; but Hiltermann’s conclusion, “not impossible, but unlikely”, is likely to remain the correct answer.

Several thousand people perished in the Halabja attack; the exact number, Hiltermann says, remains unknown. How they died, recounted through interviews with survivors, is unsparing and yet never sentimental or overwrought. It recalled to me my own interviews with survivors who watched their loved ones die from nerve toxin exposure, spasms resembling, one said, cockroaches doused with bug spray. But the larger question that Hiltermann seeks to answer is the response of the international community. His conclusion is that the world turned aside and ignored the particular crimes as well as the breach in international law and the dangerous precedent laid for the future.

Welcome PJM readers!

For those of you who might have come over here from my PJM piece on Boumediene this week, welcome! As you can see, I have not been blogging much here. In fact, I am migrating over to blog on international law topics at Opinio Juris starting around July. I will continue to maintain this blog for various things, like posting up links to articles of mine and some non-international law related posts, but mostly I will be over at Opinio Juris.

Feel free to leave any comments re the Boumediene piece here on this blog, or over at PJM.

Blogging on battlefield robots at Opinio Juris

I put up a post introducing the topic of battlefield robots over at Opinio Juris today. And Glenn Reynolds gave it an Instalanche - thanks Glenn!

Congratulations to all WCL graduates!

My congratulations to all the graduates of WCL - commencement was today, with Justice Breyer delivering the commencement address. My warmest congrats to all WCL grads, but especially to my students and their families, and to my two research assistants during this past year, Marc Patterson and Shaunna Bailey.

Guest-blogging at Opinio Juris this week

As I mentioned a few days ago, I am guest blogging this week at Opinio Juris. Hope you can join us there!

Elliptically joining the discussion of Peter Spiro's book at Opinio Juris

... by quoting Michael Ignatieff. Here at Opinio Juris. I will be guest-blogging at Opinio Juris for real next week.

Philip Glass, Songs and Poems for Solo Cello

(Update. I’ve now listened to the 7 songs a number of times. I’ve concluded that it is much less Bach, than the earlier, more primitive Domenico Gabrielli, of the Ricercars for solo cello, among the earliest of all known music composed specifically for cello. Gabrielli is simpler and less developed than Bach, but has a driving insistence all his own. I actually quite love Gabrielli, the Ricercars, the Canon for 2 cellos (which is arguably the earliest cello music), and also his two sonatas for cello and continuo, all of which I play - badly. The thing is, Glass’s cello songs are arpeggios repeated mostly, rather than counterpoint and, except for the wonderful song V, there is relatively little of the polyphony of the Bach solo suites. Indeed, not really even the polyphony that you find in the Gabrielli ricercars. In that respect, it has a more raw, primitive feel to it, like the Gabrielli ricercar number 1, which is almost like a continuo line for solo cello. Wendy Sutter, playing the Glass songs, gets a big bite on these repeated arpeggios with her bow. She is a player with enormous precision and control - you can feel that in her bow arm, completely - but there is also a sense, in her bowing of these chords, that she is, I don’t know, tearing off chunks of raw meat with that same bow. There is a huge, guttural power there. It is unusual to have the music focused so much on the lower range of the cello, but it is definitely ‘gutteral’. I’m not sure that is what she or Glass had in mind, but there you have it.)

Jean-Marie just gave me a gift out of the blue, something she had seen reviewed somewhere ... Philip Glass, Songs and Poems for Solo Cello, performed by Wendy Sutter.

It’s an absolute stunner, both the music and the performance. It is very close in feel to Bach solo cello suites. I will be listening to this a lot, especially late at night working with headphones on.

I have not normally been a huge Philip Glass fan - the repetition just got too boring, even if I was supposed to be achieving a higher plane or something. It seemed like perfect soundtrack music for the right kind of performance, but not something I really wanted to listen to.

No, that’s not quite right. I saw, many years ago at American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, a quite stunning Philip Glass opera, The Juniper Tree. That was rivetting. But it was also true that the force lay in the repetition, which would have quite bored me out of my mind if it had not been tied to the book being played out on stage.

This album is something very different. Quite remarkable. Wendy Sutter has a remarkable sound, precision and intensity. Utter and complete control. The sound of her bow conveys utter control.

Track V is particularly wonderful.

Guest-blogging at Opinio Juris May 19-25

The folks over at Opinio Juris have very kindly invited me to guest blog there during the week of May 19-25. It is one of the genuinely high quality law blogs, a great combination of voices, so I hope I will have something to add.

I am greatly tempted to join the discussion of Peter Spiro’s new, outstanding book - outstanding, splendid, and well worth your buying it despite my disagreements with it - that will take place on Opinio Juris next week. I might yet. However, I am looking to persuade an editor to let me review it as part of a larger review, and it probably doesn’t help things if I shoot my wad off on a blog before a review is published. So I will probably refrain.

What kinds of things cross my mind to blog about? My interests are a little different from most of the Opinio Juris folks - I have long standing interests in laws of war and international law and human rights law, of course, but my day job is actually as an international business and finance professor. Although even there, my interests run toward nonprofits, ngos, international philanthropy, and global civil society. Development finance, microfinance, international development paradigms. I have a long standing interest in terrorism and counterterrorism that long predates 9-11; one of my favorite, if unsung, roles is on the editorial board of the Journal of Terrorism and Political Violence, dating back to the 1980s. I have a very long standing interest in ethics of war, just war theory, and am currently looking at the ethics of war in the Second Inaugural Address, contrasting Lincoln’s views in the Address with Sherman, McClellan and ... well, there’s no easy way to put this, but I am interested in certain comparisons to Albert Camus, Rene Char, and Raymond Aron. There, I’ve said it. The idea and limitations of humanitarian neutrality. And of course ... robot soldiers!!

Also, I am very interested, for the first time in my career as an academic, in trying to understand the shape of the scholarship that makes up international law scholarship. I’ve never really paid attention to it. Now I am - and am increasingly finding that the most interesting connections draw one back to the larger questions of where legal scholarship is going in an age of reinvigorated legal realism as social science, rationalism and empiricism. The triumph of the Higher Utilitarianism in the legal academy - we are living the age of a kind of combined Cass Sunstein and Eric Posner. It must be a sign of age - although because I started into academic law in my mid-40s, I haven’t been doing this that long - that I’d get interested in the navel-gazing.

What else? Strategy and tactics in the US response to transnational jihadist terror - and the alternative approach that Cass Sunstein offers, in Worst Case Scenarios, of a narrow cost benefit analysis, or the other analysis from cost benefit analysis given by Eric Posner and Adrian Vermeule - very interesting Opinio Juris forum on this - but what interests me is the implications of cost benefit analysis. It is, as Philip Bobbitt has said (he says he doesn’t recall, and the reason is that it was an offhand remark while we were walking around my neighborhood as he smoked a cigar a couple of months ago), “relentlessly tactical.”

So there are a lot of things on my mind to blog about - how much they really have to do with international law, though, I have no idea. I fear that I am going to bore - or mystify - the Opinio Juris readership.

Anyway, hope you can join us at Opinio Juris, that week and every week!

Nicholas Eberstadt on 'Graying Europe' in the Revista de Libros (Madrid)

If you read Spanish, you should check out Nicholas Eberstadt’s new essay - part of a three part series - on demography in Europe. It is:

Nicholas Eberstadt and Hans Groth, El proximo desafio demografico de Europa: la rentabilidad de la salud, Revista de Libros (Madrid), No. 137, May 2008.

The Revista de Libros website is here (although NIck’s article is not available online). Nick is one of the world’s leading demographers, and holds a chair at American Enterprise Institute here in DC.

I regard the Revista as the finest Spanish language literary review - the equivalent of the New York Review of Books, the TLS, or the London Review of Books. It is such a pleasure to read, both for the prose in Spanish - but equally for the intellectual and cultural breadth. Of course, I have a certain bias. I started reading the Revista while on sabbatical in Spain four years ago, and got hooked. Eventually I found myself in contact with the review, was delighted to have a piece of mine from the TLS published there, and ... well, I am proud to say I am the coordinador de ciencia politica for the Revista - roughly the editorial advisor on political science.

All that said, I am late, late, late with a review of my own for the journal, a review of Paul Kennedy’s history of the United Nations, Parlamento de la humanidad.

Private equity equals 'proxy for the credit markets'?

This Financial Times comment, “Private equity boom was nothing more than a clumsy trick,” dates back to March 31, 2008, by Michael Gordon, but having finished teaching my private equity class ten days ago, and sitting and reading papers from the 70 or so students in that class, I am pretty much convinced that this is the case. (For those of you who occasionally look at this blog for law of war and public international law, etc., my day job is actually corporate finance and international business law professor.) Excerpt:

So now we know. The boom in private equity, which was promoted as the superior business model, based on patient capital, superior management and an alignment of interests, was nothing more than a trick of financial engineering – and a clumsy one at that. The magic of leverage works both ways, as we are discovering.

Henry Kravis of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts is asking his investors to be patient after a bout of negative returns and writedowns, echoing the cries of Alan Bond and other entrepreneurs of earlier credit cycles. Hamilton James, Blackstone’s president, said at the Super Returns private equity conference on February 26: “We’re a proxy for the credit markets.” David Rubenstein, co-founder of Carlyle Group, recently asked whether “modest return” was a more apt name for private equity. He thinks it’s funny. It’s not.

As investors are increasingly bruised by the recognition that reality has once again triumphed over hope, the private equity barons are having to confess that the benefits of superior management, alignment of interest and, of course, the superior reward structure counted for very little.

Many of the private equity deals look no different from Yell and other highly leveraged public companies. As Warren Buffett notes, when the tide is going out, we find out who has been swimming without their shorts.

Sometimes a simple observation can prove an important point. In November 2006 Citibank published a research report that highlighted how private equity returns could be achieved by just leveraging basic stock market indices. It is a seminal note. “How do they do that?” asked the report, and then went on to provide the answer.

By leveraging the basic stock market indices by three to one, Citibank pointed out, returns could exceed even the best historical private equity returns. Never mind that as they were spellchecking the final version of the note, leverage on that season’s deals was reaching four to one and even five or six to one.

As Citibank pointed out, the private equity barons would always emphasise alpha over beta – their ability to outperform a market rather than merely ride the market wave – but it showed clearly that leveraged beta was where the returns were being generated.

My view is a pretty traditional one of private equity: that it is one end of the oscillation between public markets (characterized by weak control, leading to agency problems and inefficiencies, but relatively cheap cost of capital) and private equity (characterized by strong control, alignment of agency interests, but relatively high managerial costs to achieve gains). Firms move back and forth between those two points, or are threatened implicitly, or the market is threatened implicitly, with movement via buyouts and resale back into public markets. Superior management pays off at one point in the cycle; cheap capital at another. A pretty traditional view.

But after the Fed shovels so much capital out the door, then the business model is transformed from that into simple leverage. As Gordon, quoting Citibank, says, leveraged beta triumphs over patient alpha when the money is easy. So, as Hamilton James says, private equity is just a “proxy for the credit markets.”

For this, you get gigantic fees and a big premium? So much rent-extraction from the conveyor belt moving money out of the Fed? Remind me again what super-duper skill set it takes to take money from Ben Bernanke?