Thanks for the link. I hope you don't mind me writing my reactions to it. I know that, as you said, you don't endorse the author of the piece, but you found his analysis of Horowitz sound. So I'll preface with an acknowledgement of that.
The piece itself:
Horowitz is slippery and disingenuous, but Chomsky merely fast and loose with his sources?
I remember going to a couple Chomsky speeches (once when I was in high school and once when I was in college. Both times I went to a Chomsky speech at the UW), Chomksy always tells his audience not to trust him, to go look up X himself (usually a NYT article) that will, he assures us, prove his point. Usually the problem is that this is a sleight-of-hand and more of a diversionary tactic (because information that REFUTES Chomsky's claims are available elsewhere). Often, though, Chomsky is simply lying and/or using sources that have themselves fabricated information or used data that proved to be false (and have been subsequently corrected), but Chomsky relies upon the falsehood long after he should be reasonably expected to know that the information is wrong, and asks his audience (readers, whatever) to rely upon it as well.
He's the slippery, disingenous liar.
Chomsky isn't "intellectually inconsistent" - he's intellectually deceptive and disingenuous (to use that word again): when something ceases to be useful, he pretends he never believed what he said he believed (I remember in the Chomsky documentary movie, which I watched twice, he makes it sound like he was always against the Khmer Rouge, he was just upset that the East Timor situation wasn't getting as much attention, because of the "propaganda model". That's actually Chomsky practicing a propaganda model - because it's slippery and untrue).
This article is also more than a bit slippery, in that it on the one hand attacks Horowitz for not answering Chomsky in any fully developed way, but then seems to think it's somehow an argument or an excuse that a pamphlet by Chomsky shouldn't be taken as representative of Chomsky's views - but a two-part web-column no longer than a pamphlet is a failure because it doesn't answer book-length diatribes by Chomsky (the pamphlet was a concise expression of Chomsky's points and thus provided pithy quotes that a short work, such as a web article, needed). On the one hand we should cut Chomsky some slack because, well, a pamphlet is not where one can find fully developed articles, but on the other hand we should condemn Horowitz because a pamphlet-length rebuttal should have included fully developed counter-arguments (to the extent to which Chomsky makes arguments that are to be taken seriously and rebutted, rather than quoting the remarks a obscure PR flack made in the '20s, for example, and trying to convince people that's what the entire American establishment "really" thinks on issues of consent, they are covered elsewhere in book-length tomes).
As for the 2nd half of the article where the author attacks Neoconservatives generally and Horowitz specifically, he's engaging in no small part in the very practice he asserted Horowitz was to be faulted for: he sets up a sort of straw man. Rather than refuting specific points, he simply characterizes them (something the author assures us is a sin when he represents Horowitz as doing that). At least he gets his Acton right (most people leave out "tends". It's a pet peeve of mine).
If one asked Horowitz about his views of government power and the possibility of its abuse by those who hold it, one would get a quite different response from the characterization that the author makes of Horowitz' views. Similar with other NeoCons - if one has read, for example, Jonah Goldberg's columns, one will notice a very strong thread and theme in many of them about the need for limits on government, government power, intermediary institutions, the private sphere, and the vitality of people refusing to go along with whatever the government says. But because these (and other) NeoCons don't carry that over to reaching the same conclusion regarding the current war as Kevin Carson does, Carson prefers to mischaracterize their position on power rather than engage their arguments on matters of war, total or otherwise, or the historical actions of America (the same figures who the author cites, correctly, as leery of abuse of power, also sent ships and marines to Tripoli, and were not as adverse to "imperial" expansion as the author and other Buchananites tend to imply. America wasn't born out of 1789 as large as it is today, like Athena out of Zeus' head, fully grown; the author mentions 1914 as a dividing line but most of America's imperial expansion took place before then).
Similarly, to digress, I love Jerry Pournelle and I think it's probably fair of me to be presumptuous and assume that you're familiar with his "Republic and Empire" writings (which are very good by and large and I have been influenced by them), but the sort of spectre he (among others) raise, that an interventionist policy abroad *inevitably* brings loss of liberty at home just doesn't always apply (this is not in and of itself an argument for Empire or interventionism) - one can look at Britain at the dawn of its Imperial era, compared to Britain in the middle of it, and Britain towards the end of it. At each stage, the British people were more free, had more democracy (not less) and more liberty (not less) than they did in the earlier stage. Likewise, the people in British colonies became progressively freer, from the point of view of liberty. Places that Britain colonized for a longer time (like India, for example) have deeper attachment to (if not complete attachment to) concepts like the rule of law, federalism, and electoral democracy than places where British thought didn't have a chance to sink as deep (there one gets Mughabe, selected by people who haven't formed an adequate understanding of the whole Anglo-Saxon political philosophical tradition). Likewise, these places didn't have any of these things even in theoretical form before their colonial experience. Again, I don't make this as some sort of argument that colonial imperialism and empire is the way to go (that I would have to make elsewhere, in a more extensive argument, if I were to try to make it), just that the theory that it is always and everywhere destructive of liberty is not proven by history. Same with America's expansion (we had a more aristocratic system at the start, where only landed gentleman farmers, males, preferably white, were presumed to be thoughtful enough and with enough of a stake - in the form of property - to be granted the vote; letting non-propertied people vote was a potential threat, they believed, because the landless may try to expropriate the landed. Oops, they did turn out to be right on that score, at least, as we're experiencing after a fashion. But liberty and rights were extended, simultaneous with our expansion and growth).
Non Straussians have argued, rather compellingly, that the post Civil War amendments extended the protections of the Bill of Rights to include the States, not just the Federal government (and, well, if we want those rights protected and government power limited, we darn well want them protected at all levels of government, don't we? Don't get me wrong - I think one of the worst things to come out of the '60s was the total collapse, effectively, of the concept of States Rights and its de-legitimization. We have to be fair, though, and admit that it got discredited not only because there were interested supporters of centralizers who did their worst to work for that, but because those who made the most of states rights arguments misused them in the name of a cause that was disreputable); states rights, one can argue, received a heavy blow in the Civil War but they did persist afterwards; they got their coup-de-grace in the New Deal and (especially) the Civil Rights and Great Society. Straussians do have a certain point, if not an adequate one, in that the cultural milieu is important - these changes didn't come because there were amendments, but because cultural attitudes were shifted. One can argue why and how and the extent to which this was a good or bad or mixed thing, but it was.
The author also sets up a straw man on the Straussian attitude toward liberty (Horowitz, btw, is not to my knowledge much influenced by Strauss); I do not think it's fair that they believe liberty (or "Liberty") somehow excludes the right to be left alone in one's choices and private lives. Indeed, many NeoCons are among the most forceful in rejecting the precepts of the French Revolution's "Liberty, Egality, Fraternity" mindset and contrasting it with the legacy of the American Revolution, and preferring the very different conceptions of the latter view and fearing and calling for resistance to the spread of the concepts associated with the former, French-derived, interpretations.
I'd like to see where Carson gets from Horowitz the assertion that Horowitz would have stood against Burke. Or is this just a characterization rather than an analysis of Horowitz's views? I notice that even though Horowitz was able to actually quote Chomsky, Carson has NO QUOTES WHATSOEVER of Horowitz in this article to support his characterizations of Horowitz' position. Maybe they're to be found in other articles Carson has written, but since Carson doesn't cut Horowitz that kind of slack when it comes to his analysis of the "Sick Mind" articles, it is fair to not cut Carson that kind of slack, either.
Carson makes a big point over how, in the past, in the French situation (I didn't think we were conserving the French revolution and the Estates General, I thought we were conserving the American experience? For some of the reasons Burke made when he came out against the French revolution in contrast to his support for the American revolution. But I digress, I suppose), those that the NeoCons consider on "the Right" sat on "the left". But anyone who has paid any attention to the world around them knows that in the time since then, things have shifted rather considerably (or, to paraphrase Burke, "institutions lacking the means of change lack the means of their preservation"). I won't make too much of this point, but it's a simple fact that many many people have found themselves on the Right because they no longer felt welcome on the left. I guess that makes Reagan, for example, a NeoCon, but what interests conservatives have in looking down on people who weren't "Right from the Beginning" as somehow disreputable for it has always been lost on me. The fictionalization of the Left where every tiny band feels they have to have their own separate Socialist Party because others aren't pure enough for them or for whatever other reason is not something I want to emulate. But I digress again.
Carson assails Horowitz for, in Carson's view, failing to take into account all of Chomsky's writings and their full development, but Carson feels free to ignore the range of Horowitz in his next claim, where he asserts that Horowitz has ignored the anti-statist Left. This is simply not the case; Horowitz has had exchanges with, for example, the Parecon anarchists (an exchange I didn't think Horowitz handled adequately, myself, but it did occur and Horowitz has not ignored the existence of such folks).
Fact is, truth to be told, I think too much is made of the "anti-statism" of the anti-statist Left. Marxism and anti-statism aren't really compatible (for reasons that were delved into by, among others, Hayek and von Mises. Or perhaps these are untrustworthy NeoCons because they had started as Left-Socialists and only converted to Conservatism later themselves), in multiple book length analysis of Socialism. Councils by any other name still stink, because communalization ultimately leads to certain conclusions (I once had some lively discussions with a anarchist/Parecon type, and probed deeper into how he envisioned things would work, etc. One started with work councils, then he worked up to councils to coordinate among the various individual councils so that each would get the goods they needed, then another council on top of that to plan things more and insure that in the aggregate the environment wasn't being degraded because of a lack of coordination and planning, etc. He eventually essentially rebuilt the Soviet Union's political model in every particular from the ground up, after having started from a position of anti-statism participatory economics).
Ultimately, some of what Carson says about Horowitz may have some merit
(Horowitz himself has said that yes, he's an inflammatory polemicist – and given his reason for why he adopts the tone he does. Carson doesn't deal with Horowitz' reason. That reason may not be convincing, but Carson simply doesn't engage it AT ALL). The lumping together of all NeoCons, btw, in an article that slams people for refusing to acknowledge subtlety of philosophical range and difference among ideological subsets is telling (for example, while *some* NeoCons embrace the "end of ideology" and "vital center" blather, at least as many have vociferously argued against those who hold such beliefs. Carson has no room, apparently, for considering that possibility). We all, I suppose, have our ideological boogiemen. Carson seems more upset that some conservatives ("NeoCons") don't share his boogiemen than that their shouldn't be such lumping together at all. He's all to willing, obviously, to engage in that very thing in a polemic against his demons.
I have come to believe that all do that to some extent. I know that most on the Left do that to most Conservatives (though there are a few exceptions), lumping them all in together. I know I do that (though as part of a practice of illustrating it - I notice that many liberals who don't mind when the likes of Carvile or "MoDo" do that to the right get all offended when it happens to them).
The piece itself:
Horowitz is slippery and disingenuous, but Chomsky merely fast and loose with his sources?
I remember going to a couple Chomsky speeches (once when I was in high school and once when I was in college. Both times I went to a Chomsky speech at the UW), Chomksy always tells his audience not to trust him, to go look up X himself (usually a NYT article) that will, he assures us, prove his point. Usually the problem is that this is a sleight-of-hand and more of a diversionary tactic (because information that REFUTES Chomsky's claims are available elsewhere). Often, though, Chomsky is simply lying and/or using sources that have themselves fabricated information or used data that proved to be false (and have been subsequently corrected), but Chomsky relies upon the falsehood long after he should be reasonably expected to know that the information is wrong, and asks his audience (readers, whatever) to rely upon it as well.
He's the slippery, disingenous liar.
Chomsky isn't "intellectually inconsistent" - he's intellectually deceptive and disingenuous (to use that word again): when something ceases to be useful, he pretends he never believed what he said he believed (I remember in the Chomsky documentary movie, which I watched twice, he makes it sound like he was always against the Khmer Rouge, he was just upset that the East Timor situation wasn't getting as much attention, because of the "propaganda model". That's actually Chomsky practicing a propaganda model - because it's slippery and untrue).
This article is also more than a bit slippery, in that it on the one hand attacks Horowitz for not answering Chomsky in any fully developed way, but then seems to think it's somehow an argument or an excuse that a pamphlet by Chomsky shouldn't be taken as representative of Chomsky's views - but a two-part web-column no longer than a pamphlet is a failure because it doesn't answer book-length diatribes by Chomsky (the pamphlet was a concise expression of Chomsky's points and thus provided pithy quotes that a short work, such as a web article, needed). On the one hand we should cut Chomsky some slack because, well, a pamphlet is not where one can find fully developed articles, but on the other hand we should condemn Horowitz because a pamphlet-length rebuttal should have included fully developed counter-arguments (to the extent to which Chomsky makes arguments that are to be taken seriously and rebutted, rather than quoting the remarks a obscure PR flack made in the '20s, for example, and trying to convince people that's what the entire American establishment "really" thinks on issues of consent, they are covered elsewhere in book-length tomes).
As for the 2nd half of the article where the author attacks Neoconservatives generally and Horowitz specifically, he's engaging in no small part in the very practice he asserted Horowitz was to be faulted for: he sets up a sort of straw man. Rather than refuting specific points, he simply characterizes them (something the author assures us is a sin when he represents Horowitz as doing that). At least he gets his Acton right (most people leave out "tends". It's a pet peeve of mine).
If one asked Horowitz about his views of government power and the possibility of its abuse by those who hold it, one would get a quite different response from the characterization that the author makes of Horowitz' views. Similar with other NeoCons - if one has read, for example, Jonah Goldberg's columns, one will notice a very strong thread and theme in many of them about the need for limits on government, government power, intermediary institutions, the private sphere, and the vitality of people refusing to go along with whatever the government says. But because these (and other) NeoCons don't carry that over to reaching the same conclusion regarding the current war as Kevin Carson does, Carson prefers to mischaracterize their position on power rather than engage their arguments on matters of war, total or otherwise, or the historical actions of America (the same figures who the author cites, correctly, as leery of abuse of power, also sent ships and marines to Tripoli, and were not as adverse to "imperial" expansion as the author and other Buchananites tend to imply. America wasn't born out of 1789 as large as it is today, like Athena out of Zeus' head, fully grown; the author mentions 1914 as a dividing line but most of America's imperial expansion took place before then).
Similarly, to digress, I love Jerry Pournelle and I think it's probably fair of me to be presumptuous and assume that you're familiar with his "Republic and Empire" writings (which are very good by and large and I have been influenced by them), but the sort of spectre he (among others) raise, that an interventionist policy abroad *inevitably* brings loss of liberty at home just doesn't always apply (this is not in and of itself an argument for Empire or interventionism) - one can look at Britain at the dawn of its Imperial era, compared to Britain in the middle of it, and Britain towards the end of it. At each stage, the British people were more free, had more democracy (not less) and more liberty (not less) than they did in the earlier stage. Likewise, the people in British colonies became progressively freer, from the point of view of liberty. Places that Britain colonized for a longer time (like India, for example) have deeper attachment to (if not complete attachment to) concepts like the rule of law, federalism, and electoral democracy than places where British thought didn't have a chance to sink as deep (there one gets Mughabe, selected by people who haven't formed an adequate understanding of the whole Anglo-Saxon political philosophical tradition). Likewise, these places didn't have any of these things even in theoretical form before their colonial experience. Again, I don't make this as some sort of argument that colonial imperialism and empire is the way to go (that I would have to make elsewhere, in a more extensive argument, if I were to try to make it), just that the theory that it is always and everywhere destructive of liberty is not proven by history. Same with America's expansion (we had a more aristocratic system at the start, where only landed gentleman farmers, males, preferably white, were presumed to be thoughtful enough and with enough of a stake - in the form of property - to be granted the vote; letting non-propertied people vote was a potential threat, they believed, because the landless may try to expropriate the landed. Oops, they did turn out to be right on that score, at least, as we're experiencing after a fashion. But liberty and rights were extended, simultaneous with our expansion and growth).
Non Straussians have argued, rather compellingly, that the post Civil War amendments extended the protections of the Bill of Rights to include the States, not just the Federal government (and, well, if we want those rights protected and government power limited, we darn well want them protected at all levels of government, don't we? Don't get me wrong - I think one of the worst things to come out of the '60s was the total collapse, effectively, of the concept of States Rights and its de-legitimization. We have to be fair, though, and admit that it got discredited not only because there were interested supporters of centralizers who did their worst to work for that, but because those who made the most of states rights arguments misused them in the name of a cause that was disreputable); states rights, one can argue, received a heavy blow in the Civil War but they did persist afterwards; they got their coup-de-grace in the New Deal and (especially) the Civil Rights and Great Society. Straussians do have a certain point, if not an adequate one, in that the cultural milieu is important - these changes didn't come because there were amendments, but because cultural attitudes were shifted. One can argue why and how and the extent to which this was a good or bad or mixed thing, but it was.
The author also sets up a straw man on the Straussian attitude toward liberty (Horowitz, btw, is not to my knowledge much influenced by Strauss); I do not think it's fair that they believe liberty (or "Liberty") somehow excludes the right to be left alone in one's choices and private lives. Indeed, many NeoCons are among the most forceful in rejecting the precepts of the French Revolution's "Liberty, Egality, Fraternity" mindset and contrasting it with the legacy of the American Revolution, and preferring the very different conceptions of the latter view and fearing and calling for resistance to the spread of the concepts associated with the former, French-derived, interpretations.
I'd like to see where Carson gets from Horowitz the assertion that Horowitz would have stood against Burke. Or is this just a characterization rather than an analysis of Horowitz's views? I notice that even though Horowitz was able to actually quote Chomsky, Carson has NO QUOTES WHATSOEVER of Horowitz in this article to support his characterizations of Horowitz' position. Maybe they're to be found in other articles Carson has written, but since Carson doesn't cut Horowitz that kind of slack when it comes to his analysis of the "Sick Mind" articles, it is fair to not cut Carson that kind of slack, either.
Carson makes a big point over how, in the past, in the French situation (I didn't think we were conserving the French revolution and the Estates General, I thought we were conserving the American experience? For some of the reasons Burke made when he came out against the French revolution in contrast to his support for the American revolution. But I digress, I suppose), those that the NeoCons consider on "the Right" sat on "the left". But anyone who has paid any attention to the world around them knows that in the time since then, things have shifted rather considerably (or, to paraphrase Burke, "institutions lacking the means of change lack the means of their preservation"). I won't make too much of this point, but it's a simple fact that many many people have found themselves on the Right because they no longer felt welcome on the left. I guess that makes Reagan, for example, a NeoCon, but what interests conservatives have in looking down on people who weren't "Right from the Beginning" as somehow disreputable for it has always been lost on me. The fictionalization of the Left where every tiny band feels they have to have their own separate Socialist Party because others aren't pure enough for them or for whatever other reason is not something I want to emulate. But I digress again.
Carson assails Horowitz for, in Carson's view, failing to take into account all of Chomsky's writings and their full development, but Carson feels free to ignore the range of Horowitz in his next claim, where he asserts that Horowitz has ignored the anti-statist Left. This is simply not the case; Horowitz has had exchanges with, for example, the Parecon anarchists (an exchange I didn't think Horowitz handled adequately, myself, but it did occur and Horowitz has not ignored the existence of such folks).
Fact is, truth to be told, I think too much is made of the "anti-statism" of the anti-statist Left. Marxism and anti-statism aren't really compatible (for reasons that were delved into by, among others, Hayek and von Mises. Or perhaps these are untrustworthy NeoCons because they had started as Left-Socialists and only converted to Conservatism later themselves), in multiple book length analysis of Socialism. Councils by any other name still stink, because communalization ultimately leads to certain conclusions (I once had some lively discussions with a anarchist/Parecon type, and probed deeper into how he envisioned things would work, etc. One started with work councils, then he worked up to councils to coordinate among the various individual councils so that each would get the goods they needed, then another council on top of that to plan things more and insure that in the aggregate the environment wasn't being degraded because of a lack of coordination and planning, etc. He eventually essentially rebuilt the Soviet Union's political model in every particular from the ground up, after having started from a position of anti-statism participatory economics).
Ultimately, some of what Carson says about Horowitz may have some merit
(Horowitz himself has said that yes, he's an inflammatory polemicist – and given his reason for why he adopts the tone he does. Carson doesn't deal with Horowitz' reason. That reason may not be convincing, but Carson simply doesn't engage it AT ALL). The lumping together of all NeoCons, btw, in an article that slams people for refusing to acknowledge subtlety of philosophical range and difference among ideological subsets is telling (for example, while *some* NeoCons embrace the "end of ideology" and "vital center" blather, at least as many have vociferously argued against those who hold such beliefs. Carson has no room, apparently, for considering that possibility). We all, I suppose, have our ideological boogiemen. Carson seems more upset that some conservatives ("NeoCons") don't share his boogiemen than that their shouldn't be such lumping together at all. He's all to willing, obviously, to engage in that very thing in a polemic against his demons.
I have come to believe that all do that to some extent. I know that most on the Left do that to most Conservatives (though there are a few exceptions), lumping them all in together. I know I do that (though as part of a practice of illustrating it - I notice that many liberals who don't mind when the likes of Carvile or "MoDo" do that to the right get all offended when it happens to them).
posted by Porphyrogenitus at
9:32 AM
