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Politics Huntington’s Liberal Heirs “The Clash of Civilizations” prefigures the liberal internationalist war of freedom and autocracy. Credit: ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/AFP via Getty Images Few contemporary geopolitical theories have proven as influential beyond their immediate context as Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations thesis. Focused on the cultural and religious fault lines that Huntington believed would set the stage for a new round of intractable conflicts following the Soviet collapse, the Clash of Civilizations was a sobering rejoinder to globalization at a time when many in the West were beginning to dream of an international community united around shared norms and values. Huntington’s approach of grouping countries into discrete blocs—bound not by something as variable as interests but by a shared underlying cultural essence—that are inevitably hostile to one another was pilloried for decades as an illiberal reading of international politics. A generation of liberal-minded scholars and experts decried Huntington for advancing a framework that treats inter-state conflict as pre-determined. Huntington’s approach, they claimed, is not just reductionist and ahistorical, but dangerous for its capacity to become a self-fulfilling prophecy if adopted by leaders as a lens for interpreting the world.  It is one of the great tragedies of post–Cold War politics that many of these same voices have gone on to advance their own narrative of international politics as an existential confrontation between hostile blocs—one that, ironically, is less nuanced and more prescriptive of conflict than even the most uncharitable readings of Huntington. In this liberal internationalist adaptation of Huntington, the clash is not of civilizations as such but between Western-style liberal democracy and its many enemies. This rival bloc has gone by many names: the former NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen referred to it as the “autocratic camp,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell termed it a new “axis of evil,” and NATO Chief Jens Stoltenberg called it an “alliance of authoritarian powers.” Whatever terminology one employs, the concept is the same: The West is locked in an existential, values-driven struggle with much of the rest of the world. Meaningful compromise is thus impossible because this global struggle is shaped not by situational interests but by implacable ideological differences. The latest scheme along these lines comes from Jonathan Rauch in the Atlantic. “Liberal-minded, Western-oriented countries,” Rauch argues, are confronted with an “axis of resistance” led by the “authoritarian dyad of Russia and Iran.” Rauch, citing Frederick Kagan, adds the nuance that this bloc, which also includes China and non-state actors like the Houthi rebels in Yemen, is united not around a common set of beliefs but in their shared opposition to the West. This is an important caveat which, under different circumstances, could have set the stage for an analytically stronger framework, but Rauch dilutes and renders it meaningless by quickly returning to the overarching premise that this axis of resistance is driven by the goal of “rolling back liberal democracy.”  This framework invites no shortage of technical objections. If Rauch’s “liberal alliance” has to be stretched to include the bastion of democracy and human rights that is Saudi Arabia, it raises questions as to the soundness of the author’s core concept. One can frame such relationships as a geopolitical necessity, but Rauch robs himself of the ability to make arguments based on realpolitik by taking the position that the international system is shaped by clashing ideologies, not hard power concerns.  In a similar vein, Rauch’s portrait of Vladimir Putin as a committed enemy of the West elides the more accurate and complex story of a post-Soviet Russia that initially saw itself as a Western, European power and sought to integrate into Western institutions. It was driven to an anti-Western posture for reasons that had nothing to do with an aversion to liberalism and democracy but were instead rooted in evolving Russian threat perceptions of NATO and the West. But to dwell on these lower-order problems is to miss the larger conceit of frameworks premised on a grand ideological confrontation between the West and its enemies. Bizarrely, the same elite sensibility that rightfully ridiculed George Bush’s assertion that our adversaries “hate our freedoms” has embraced a foreign policy outlook steeped in the equally absurd idée fixe that Russia, China, and others hate the West for its democratic values. This way of thinking imposes an analytical filter that makes it impossible to assess our great power competitors’ goals and intentions. It is teleological and anti-empirical in its insistence that American policy must stem from the conviction that our adversaries aren’t simply driven by different security interests but seek to destroy our very way of life.  Worse still, this approach enables a particularly destructive kind of policy fatalism. To proceed from the notion that the Russia-China partnership—and, indeed, all instances of international collaboration against the West—are ideologically pre-determined isn’t just wrong on the basis of the facts but lulls policymakers into a dangerous complacence.  The current state of affairs between the U.S.-led West and much of the non-Western world is, in fact, the natural byproduct of a policy approach that enforces values over concrete interests and insists on putting U.S. credibility on the line in far-flung reaches of the world where no critical interests are at stake. Having driven America’s adversaries together by the sum of its actions and rhetoric, the neoconservative–liberal internationalist consensus that has steered US policy for the past three decades now seeks to absolve itself with the ad hoc excuse that the emergence of an anti-Western bloc was always inevitable. Their storied record of gross foreign policy mismanagement suggests otherwise.  The post–Cold War West’s most powerful civilizational advantage, apropos of Huntington, is not in wealth or military might but in the universal appeal of its organizations and institutions. Weaponizing the dollar’s status as a global reserve currency, walling off access to Western-led commercial systems, and gatekeeping participation in multilateral platforms in response to foreign transgressions, whether real or perceived, facilitates the division of the world into competing blocs in ways that undermine the West economically and geopolitically. Even a country as dominant and virtually unchallenged as the US was in the 1990’s can only run up the geopolitical tab so much and for so long before its peer competitors start aggressively balancing against it. None of this is, or has to be, a fait accompli—these are choices made by Western leaders. Convincing ourselves that this division is immutable and legitimizing it in metaphysical terms as a battle between liberal democracy and its discontents is, at best, a recipe for continued American decline. At worst, it is laying the ideological groundwork for the U.S. to drift into ruinous wars in Europe, the Middle East, or elsewhere.  The point is not that there is or ever can be a perfect harmony of interests between the US and its great power peers. Nor is it, if one was to take the logic behind the clash of values argument to its other extreme, that Washington is to blame for all global conflict and instability.  The bottom line, rather, is that U.S. policy must employ a better analytical lens than the democracy vs. autocracy thesis and other such reductionist, manichean tales for engaging partners and adversaries alike.  America still enjoys tremendous latent advantages. If coupled with a more sound assessment of threats and interests, they can be leveraged to reverse the damage done by decades of ill-conceived schemes to extend a vision of primacy that has failed the American people at home and abroad. There is every opportunity to right this ship if, as is long overdue, U.S. leaders finally abandon the search of monsters to destroy and repair instead to a pragmatic, restrained foreign policy that is moored in concrete national interests.  The post Huntington’s Liberal Heirs appeared first on The American Conservative.

Politics Chevron Deference Defers to Metcalfe’s Law The Supreme Court just made America smarter and richer. These days, news about Donald Trump and Joe Biden stomps all over everything, and yet big events are happening elsewhere, and with the added infusion of innovation, they are likely to reverberate far beyond the next presidential term.  Case in point: Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, in which the Supreme Court, by a 6-3 margin, reversed a 1984 decision, the so-called “Chevron deference.”  Under Chevron deference, courts were instructed to acquiesce to regulatory agencies’ interpretations of Congressional intent. In practice, this meant allowing bureaucrats—most notably, the green activists at the Environmental Protection Agency—to freelance their own interpretations of statute.  For instance, when Congress wrote the Clean Air Act in 1970, it didn’t mention carbon dioxide as a “pollutant,” and yet the EPA, relying on its expertise (with help from the Sierra Club, et al.) chose to regulate it anyway. Why? Because that’s what empire-building zealots do.  This egregious overreach was screeched to a halt by the Supreme Court in 2022, in a decision anticipating Loper Bright.  As for the molecule in question, we can add that Congress, the proper source of federal law, has never regulated, and likely will never regulate, CO2 the way that it regulates, say, lead or arsenic. Oxygen is well known for its salubrious impact on life, and carbon is the fourth most abundant element in the universe—it’s central to any and every organic compound. Carbon should be treated as a resource to be converted, not as a toxin to be shunned.  So if the EPA’s “experts” think CO2 is a pollutant, then the rest of us need a second opinion. Happily, that’s exactly what the Supreme Court has now guaranteed—the right to a fair hearing, not an Al Gore Star Chamber.  Interestingly, when Chevron deference emerged four decades ago, it seemed to be only a small point of procedure. Yet with the mutagenic help of the bureaucracy, the NGO-cracy, and the media-cracy, Chevron grew like a tumor. According to one study, “Chevron had been cited in over 18,000 federal court decisions and had been invoked to uphold at least hundreds of agency actions. No doubt, behind the scenes, Chevron has influenced agencies’ approaches to countless other decisions.”  Of course, this much power in the hands of Deep State Cthulhus—interspersed, of course, with the depredations of myriad Lois Lerners and DEI-niks—caused a backlash, culminating in Loper Bright. In the summarizing words of the Federalist, “The high court’s decision marks a major victory for the conservative legal movement, which has spent four decades seeking to dismantle the unchecked power awarded to unelected bureaucrats.” Of course, the unelected bureaucrats, and their now-checked power, still have their fans. Such as Laurence Tribe, the former Harvard Law professor-turned-prolific-X-man, who tweeted, “The ones I feel sorry for are my administrative law colleagues who built their courses and careers around the intricacies of Chevron deference.” Dear reader, it’s your choice: This is either the greatest self-own in history, or else Tribe has a very, very, droll sense of humor. Cry, the Beloved Bureaucracy!  Yet if we look up from the cubicles, we can see the larger impact of Loper Bright. Axios prophesied some likely effects: The “winners” are tech, including Big Tech, while the “losers” are “the activists and organizations that support stricter tech regulation.”  Sigh. We’ll just have to get used to more innovation. More is surely coming, even as American tech is already a Schumpeterian juggernaut; relative to the world, the U.S. is gaining. Prominent analyst Mary Meeker reported recently that American AI boasts more than triple the investment of our next nine rivals (including China) combined. This riot of innovation will continue, as well, in cryptocurrency. While some view the whole crypto thing as a scam, others see it as the, uh, building block(chain)s of a new economic and political order. But only if the pesky bureaucrats can be shooed away.  In fact, the cryptopians have been turning against Biden. The particular object of crypto ire is the 46th president’s pick to chair the Securities and Exchange Commission, Gary Gensler; his auto-actualized activism blossomed in the Chevron era.  So now the crypto keepers are supporting Trump, who pledges to “get out of the way of innovation.” Meanwhile, another Republican, House Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-MN), cheered Loper Bright with vehemence, and then some: “The Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Chevron deference kneecaps the regulatory abuses of Gary Gensler and every other unchecked, unelected bureaucrat who legislates-by-rulemaking.” Is crypto, or AI, or any of this tech, risky? Maybe even downright dangerous? Plenty of people think so, and in a properly balanced, post-Chevron environment, they have plenty of recourse: They can petition any of the three constitutional branches of the federal government—congressional, executive, judicial—demanding action.  But what folks can not do anymore is seek audacious action from the constitutionally fuzzy fourth branch of government: EPA, SEC, indeed, probably every regulatory agency—some 270 in all. Already, observers are totting up the likely impact of Loper Bright on transgenderism, net neutrality, and medical devices—to name just three of three zillion impacts.  Still, amid the regulatory revamp, it’s important to keep in mind that nothing in Loper Bright stops Congress from taking any action it might wish; the decision is a check on un-elected officials, not electeds.  To be sure, the day may come when conservatives don’t trust Congress to protect their rights. After all, if Washington, D.C. is powerful, then there’s always the risk that someone will seize the reins of that centralized power and go galloping off in the wrong direction.  We can add that it’s fair for liberals to hold the same fear. If the right doesn’t trust Democratic one-size-fits-all answers, the left doesn’t have to trust Republican one-size-fits-all answers. We the people, all 340+ million of us, are simply too diverse, in all possible ways, to fit on the same Procrustean bed.  Justice Neil Gorsuch made this point nicely in his concurrence with Loper Bright: “Chevron deference requires courts to ‘place a finger on the scales of justice in favor of the most powerful of litigants, the federal government,’” he wrote. He continued, “Chevron deference guarantees ‘systematic bias’ in favor of whichever political party currently holds the levers of executive power.” That’s not what any liberty-lover should want: the dominant central state leveraging the law to become more domineering.  Fortunately, there’s an answer to this dilemma: distributed power, aka federalism, aka states’ rights. It’s all in the Constitution, as well as in such important ancillary documents as The Federalist Papers.  For instance, in Federalist 45, James Madison wrote,  The powers delegated by the proposed constitution to the federal government, are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the state governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negociation, and foreign commerce; with which last the power of taxation will for the most part be connected. The powers reserved to the several states will extend to all the objects, which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties and properties of the people; and the internal order, improvement and prosperity of the state. Madison saw the states as the compartmentalized bulwark against overweening federal power; to underscore that point, he later wrote the proto-Calhounian Virginia Resolutions.  Some will argue, of course, that the Constitution is antiquated and thus ill-suited to address national and global problems. After all, Madison & Co. were unaware of pretty much anything that we would today call “tech.” Yet since the even lower-tech time of Aristotle—the Stagirite being much studied by the Founders—true political wisdom has changed little.  Moreover, in a wondrous bit of serendipity, the timeless wisdom of the Constitution harmonically converges with the newfangled laws of Silicon Valley. Specifically, Metcalfe’s Law, which states, per Techopedia,  A network’s impact is proportional to the square of the number of nodes in the network. The focus is on the number of possible connections among the nodes. For example, if a network has 10 nodes (i.e., computers, servers and/or connecting users), its proportional value is 100 (10 x 10). It’s the same basic point as brain cells: The more you have, the smarter you are. But one needn’t be a technologist or a biologist to see the same logic everywhere: The more traffic at a crossroads, or a port—or at a lemonade stand—the more value.  So let’s apply Metcalfe’s Law to Loper Bright and federalism. Absent the lowest common denominating wet blanket of the federal bureaucracy, the states will be free to experiment. In Metcalfean terms, that’s potentially 50 state nodes of experimentation, as opposed to one federal node. And to apply Metcalfe’s math, that’s 50 times 50, so a value of 2,500. Meanwhile for the federal government, it’s one times one, which is…one.  Now it can immediately be objected that the comparison of nodes to states is, well, apples to pixels. After all, the states, being established systems, are not so elastically responsive to new data as a neural network.  Fair enough. Without a doubt, some states will be just as stand-pat and sluggish as the feds, but over time, more states will try new things. And we can no more anticipate where that process will end up than we could have anticipated previous twists and turns of history and technology.  Indeed, if Trump wins in November, blue states will be blazing trails of anti-Washington assertion. And if Biden (or some other Democrat) wins, the red states will be going rogue. If the center cannot hold, that’s good news for the edges—and it’s the edge lords who try new things.  Yes, bring on these Brandeisian laboratories of democracy—because, at the same time, they can be laboratories of prosperity.  Here’s prominent tech investor Balaji Srinivasan: “Technology is about to accelerate. Because Chevron deference is over. And regulators can’t just make up laws anymore. So, countless new startups just became feasible.”  Crypto investor Marty Bent added, “Thanks to the Chevron deference ruling from the Supreme Court, the economy has removed an anchor that has been holding it back for more than a generation. The balance of power, as the founders designed it, has been shifted back in the right direction.”  Are these tech bulls right or wrong? We’ll find out. Because even if the Democrats hold the presidency and appoint the sort of SCOTUS justices who would try to restore the Chevron Deference, many states, tech tycoons, and ordinary folks are certain to #resist.  Forty years ago, Chevron Deference crept in on little cat feet, only to grow into a raging lion. But now that it’s been caged, those wishing not to be eaten are on guard. And, per Metcalfe, the guards will be empowered by new networks of nodes.  A watchful citizenry, undeferential to faux expertise, is a proven defense against arrogant encroachment. Chevronism has been repealed. In the future, states willing, any attempted return can be repelled. The post Chevron Deference Defers to Metcalfe’s Law appeared first on The American Conservative.

Foreign Affairs Will Starmer End British Political Life as We Know It? While the right undergoes a period of necessary purges, Labour aims to enshrine Blairism. It is easy to feel schadenfreude in the wake of the Conservative defeat in the British general elections. That it is easy, to be clear, does not mean that it is wrong. The Conservatives deserved to lose—and a lot of the Conservative MPs deserved to lose their seats. As I wrote in these pages, they accomplished little while doing a lot of harm. That Keir Starmer’s Labour Party has not actually improved Labour’s vote share since 2019—when the party suffered a historic defeat under Jeremy Corbyn—demonstrates that its success had more to do with Conservative weakness than with its strength. There has been no rush of enthusiasm for Keir Starmer. There has just been the vague, and eminently understandable, sense that anyone is preferable to the idiots in power. Still, a win is a win. What will the Labour Party be like in government? Contra Jordan Peterson, I do not think that Keir Starmer is going to turn Britain into the next Venezuela. Starmer is not the second coming of Hugo Chávez; if nothing else, he does not have the same charisma. (Could you imagine hordes of British people returning him to power if he were removed? The question answers itself.) But “not being an actual communist” is not a high bar to clear. The government of Tony Blair seems likely to be uninspiring at best and destructive at worst. Britain faces tremendous structural problems when it comes to bureaucracy, infrastructure, and demographics. Starmer’s government—like, in fairness, the Conservative government—is pathetically ill-suited to solving them. Part of this is not entirely their fault. Labour’s majority, as Sebastian Milbank writes, is like a butter mountain—hard but not firm. Will it take decisions that could incur short-term local unpopularity, like backing development in the face of protests or allowing unsuccessful universities to fail? It seems implausible. Some of it very much is their fault. Labour’s manifesto is full of policies which combine progressive dogma with technocratic naivete. Their uncritical support for a “green transition,” for example, radically understates its expense and difficulty. Their idea for a “Race Equality Act,” as Fred de Fossard writes, “is expected to mandate diversity-related hiring, reporting, and pay requirements, [which] will end meritocracy in the workplace, and will create a divisive, legalistic working environment.” Starmer’s government seems liable to seek not radical politics but radical depoliticisation—the outsourcing of decisions to unaccountable authorities. His closeness to Sue Grey, the civil servant who led the report into “Partygate,” the scandal that brought down the government of Boris Johnson, seems illustrative here. So, economic policy will depend more on the Office for Budget Responsibility. Immigration policy will depend more on the Migration Advisory Committee. Ofcom—the Office of Communications—will be strengthened to take on dissenting media platforms. Unrepresentative “citizens’ assemblies” will provide a sheen of direct democracy. As J. Sorel of the Daily Sceptic has written, Starmerism is the declaration that the society created by Tony Blair, challenged after 2016, must stand forever. It is the project of a radicalised British establishment that has, in the face of these challenges, despaired of electoral politics altogether and wants to replace it with an explicit codification of the status quo. For Starmerites, the triumph of the Leave campaign in the Brexit referendum was a day of infamy to rival the Night of the Long Knives. Nothing similar must be allowed to happen again. On foreign policy, it would be hard to push a rolling paper between Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer when it comes to Ukraine. Their support, as Starmer has already said, is “unwavering.” Labour will seek to build stronger connections with the EU—even if, ironically, major EU states like France and Germany are drifting to the nationalist right. Starmer and his team must be saying silent prayers that Joe Biden will somehow be reelected. God only knows what Donald Trump would say about the Prime Minister. “Keir Starmer? He used to be a lawyer. I don’t trust lawyers. But he seems like a great guy and he likes me very much—” David Lammy, the new British Foreign Secretary, has attempted to summarize his ideas beneath the term “progressive realism.” His recent essay for Foreign Affairs was a hodgepodge of clichés. On the one hand, it emphasized the need for “a long term, generational response” to Putin’s Russia, and declared that “the United Kingdom must continue supporting Ukraine,” while on the other it contained a lot more about renewable energy than the restoration of the British Armed Forces. We must do nice things, Lammy appears saying, without doing difficult things.  “Once Ukraine has prevailed,” Lammy declared, “The United Kingdom should play a leading role in securing Ukraine’s place in NATO.” Needless to say, no detail was offered on how—and, indeed, whether—Ukraine can prevail. The right-wing opposition, which already contains Tory wets, the Tory right, and the insurgent nationalist upstarts of Reform, has a lot of internal feuding ahead. There is no point in lamenting this. Such disparate elements cannot be harmonized. In this author’s opinion, the Conservatives, who enjoyed a handsome triumph in 2019 on a lusty populist platform and then hurtled towards a miserable loss in 2024 after years of unprecedented immigration and infrastructural sclerosis, will not be cured by a dose of liberal managerialism. But we have a lot of time to make those arguments over the coming months. A key point is that any opposition worth its name must also focus on Labour. The electorate will not be impressed by in-fighting, necessary as it is, which will alienate the right from our key concern—events. As Keir Starmer and his colleagues attempt to bake stale Blairism deep into British life, its dishonest nature and unproductive results must be emphasized. By 2029, it may be hard to undo a lot of damage. By 2034, it may be impossible. The post Will Starmer End British Political Life as We Know It? appeared first on The American Conservative.

From auditions gone wrong to a spin-off that never was, here’s what you missed on ‘Glee.’

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