Publish or perish

Yesterday I submitted the piece below to The Age newspaper - a good Melbourne based broadsheet.

Katrina red herring, soft on neo-con sacred cows

Michael Gawenda, (Opinion, 06/03), is, as usual, trying a bit too hard to render Bush sympathetic and his ideology benign. Gawenda ridicules the notion of the US as the unstoppable hegemon, by pointing to the Katrina response debacle, but this is a red herring. It has never been argued by Bush detractors that the malfeasances of the Bush Administration, at an international level, are a product of supreme competence at a domestic level. Indeed, it's illogical to suppose the two must be related. America's capacity to act as a superpower abroad certainly doesn't hinge on good governance at home.

Moreover, there's a strong case to be made that the success of the modern conservative movement, of which Bush is a part, is tied to selling scepticism about government anyway, which would explain why universal health care, and many other public goods, remain off the political radar despite a solid majority wanting them.

Gawenda concludes with some contrived wistfulness about the prospects of the political pendulum swinging back toward isolationism, but he refuses to actually put the blame for the failed neo-conservative project where it belongs. The American public isn't now, and nor was it ever, faced with a binary choice between Pat Buchanan style traditionalist conservative isolationism, or the hopelessly corrupt neo-conservative Pax-Americana. Whilst ever journalists like Gawenda keep going soft on the real culprits and treating American exceptionalism and unilateral preventative war as benign, sacred cows, such false dilemmas are doomed to wreak the havoc they will.

My response was perhaps a little aggravated, given that Gawenda's original piece on the 6/3 wasn't really that offensive. If it was a once off, I would not have bothered. But it's not a once off for Gawenda, it's part of a pattern of him apologising for Bush, and Bush voters, and I finally got fed up with this softly-softly equivocation. It's bad enough that The Age has Tony Parkinson reading from the neo-con script, but when Gawenda, who usually occupies the middle ground, starts doing little but repeating RNC talking points, it got my goat.

The Age in its infinite corrective wisdom, decided to publish my letter in an abridged form. You can see it here for today. Amusingly they added a grammatical error - by changing hegemon (the actor) to hegemony (the force).

As for what bits they deleted, it was mostly good editing - they got rid of unnecessary attack words, which didn't really add anything to the letter. The only bit I was kind of disappointed in was the last comment about American exceptionalism, (meaning the way the United States tries to rely on norms to constrain others, whilst rejecting those same norms when it comes to itself), and preventative war, (the notion that war can be made under the rubric of self-defence without a real proximate threat). Both these notions are hopelessly confused and a big reason for why even the few vaguely honest neo-conservatives, like Fukuyama, will never be able to rescue even an ember of intellectual respectability from the project he has now rejected.

Gawenda is not the only journalist guilty of prevaricating about these fundamental issues, but he's certainly someone who's capable of better than playing apologist, and miscasting the blame for future American isolationism, by implication, on to nameless negative cheerleaders on the sidelines.