Read Glenn Greenwald's "Great American Hypocrites"

Glenn Greenwald's new book "Great American Hypocrites" very effectively argues a number of the kinds of things I have proposed in earlier posts to this blog. While he is primarily focused on the Republican Party's hypocrisy this underlines how those who claim to be "conservative" are not. Here is how he puts it on p. 237:

There has been a long line of decidedly unconservative actions by the Bush administration that have been almost uniformly cheered on by the right wing--from exploding discretionary domestic spending to record deficits, to an emergency convening of the federal government to intervene in one woman's end-of-life decisions, to attempts to federalize marriage and medical laws--all of which could not be any more alien to what has been meant by conservatism for the past forty years.

Greenwald is very effective in providing evidence of how Republican ideologues are, in their actions and lives, precisely the opposite of what they say they are. Read Greenwald's book and let us put a stop to the mammoth hypocrisy they have been getting away with for at least the last 28 years. As he puts it on p. 2:

those who playact as powerful Tough Guys and anti-terrorist Warriors and Crusaders for the Values Voters have lives filled with weakness, fear, unbridled hedonism, unearned privilege, sheltered insulation, and none of the "Traditional Masculine Virtues" they endlessly tout.

In his Chapter 1 he shows how that model of Republican Tough and Patriotic American, John Wayne, actually lived his life. In Chapter 2 he describes how the establishment media enables Republican hypocrites to get away with their hypocrisy. Chapter 3 deals with the more general tendency of Republican males to swagger around pretending to be tough guys in their "Tough Guise" while in fact being the opposite. Chapter 4 concerns Republican shamming of being morally superior examples of family values.

Chapter Five examines what has perhaps become the most transparent Republican myth of all: that it is the party of small government, limited federal power, and individual liberty.

In his final chapter Greenwald focuses upon John McCain's hypocrisies. This is an excellent book.

My Struggles to Understand the Appeal of 'Tough' Foreign Policy

In an earlier post I struggled mightily to understand the appeal of 'tough' foreign policy. I now think that this thinking makes so little sense to me because I can't empathize enough with the authoritarian personality. This notion of 'tough' punitive treatment of our opponents comes right out of the authoritarian's psychological playbook. See my previous posts involving Karen Stenner's The Authoritarian Dynamic. Search for these by using the Search tool in the upper left of my blog's homepage and type in Stenner.

Chuck Hagel's Views on Iraq

Senator Chuck Hagel Republican of Nebraska has written an excellent article for the Washington Post outlining his latest assessment of the Iraq war. Here are a few of his comments:

The time for more U.S. troops in Iraq has passed. We do not have more troops to send and, even if we did, they would not bring a resolution to Iraq. Militaries are built to fight and win wars, not bind together failing nations. We are once again learning a very hard lesson in foreign affairs: America cannot impose a democracy on any nation -- regardless of our noble purpose. We have misunderstood, misread, misplanned and mismanaged our honorable intentions in Iraq with an arrogant self-delusion reminiscent of Vietnam. Honorable intentions are not policies and plans. Iraq belongs to the 25 million Iraqis who live there. They will decide their fate and form of government.

While I wish Sen. Hagel was correct that: "We are once again learning a very hard lesson in foreign affairs: America cannot impose a democracy on any nation--regardless of our noble purpose." I truly doubt this because it will only be true if a coherent criticism of the authoritarian pseudo-conservative 'tough' foreign policy position can be systematically countered by an organized articulate opposition. This takes numbers of people, an articulated position and, most of all, guts. The fear-mongers of the right have the easiest sell and too often there are 'liberals' who join them in advocating a combative, militaristic, crusading foreign policy. Reasonable critics of the 'bully' theory of foreign policy must have the courage to stand for what they believe even in the face of being called names like 'soft' and 'appeasers'.

Clarification Regarding "The Authoritarian Dynamic"

In my Is There an Inborn Authoritarian Disposition? I wrote that Karen Stenner, author of The Authoritarian Dynamic, "doesn't really have much to say about the origins of authoritarianism, i.e., whether it is inborn temperament or not." Dr. Stenner has kindly corrected me on this stating:

I do in fact state explicitly and provide a good deal of empirical evidence (e.g., see Chapter 6!) that authoritarian predisposition is an "inborn temperament" (it is much like a personality disposition, and is in fact substantially related to lack of "openness to experience", one of the 'Big Five' personality factors). I argue and show that it is substantially genetically 'programmed', heritable, immutable. There are even studies of identical twins reared together or apart that provide pretty conclusive evidence on this point. So the predisposition sits there, latent, in a fair chunk of any country's population, and the key is that it can either remain quiescent and relatively innocuous, or else be activated and expressed openly in aggressive, racist and intolerant stances...

This is very interesting. Stenner presents data (see her pp. 91-2) supporting the interpretation that perhaps 59% of any national population could have an "authoritarian predisposition" while 39% could be predisposed to a libertarian stance. If I am reading this correctly it could give pseudo-conservative politicians an edge in working up the approximately 60% majority of authoritarians with their messages of fear and 'toughness'.