The soon-to-be White House chief strategist laid out a global vision in a rare 2014 talk, one where he said racism in the far right gets “washed out” and called Vladimir Putin a kleptocrat. BuzzFeed News publishes the complete transcript for the first time.
The smug style in American liberalism
There is a smug style in American liberalism. It has been growing these past decades. It is a way of conducting politics, predicated on the belief that American life is not divided by moral difference or policy divergence — not really — but by the failure of half the country to know what’s good for them.
James Fallows Critique of The Economist
James Fallows, in his deliciously scathing 1991 look at The Economist, suggested that the magazine’s intentionally anonymous bylines “conceal[ ] the extreme youth of much of the staff,” quoting Michael Lewis’ observation that “if American readers got a look at the pimply complexions of their economic gurus, they would cancel their subscriptions in droves.”
Why historians would make bad policy advisers
Although few today would endorse Thucydides’ view that the Peloponnesian War was the greatest event in human history, the idea that his account has lasting relevance and importance beyond the war is widely accepted. This explains why he is one of the most cited classical authors, evoked in media discussions of topics as varied as the Brexit vote, the Greek economic crisis, the Russian annexation of Crimea and, most persistently in recent years, the tensions between the United States and China, in the form of the so-called ‘Thucydides Trap’
.. But widespread acceptance of Thucydides’ authority disguises the fact that his approach to the past, and to the lessons that can be drawn from it, can be understood in very different ways, with radically different implications for modern history.
.. It’s time for them to start listening to historians as well as to economists – and for historians to develop a new discipline of applied history
.. The problem for any would-be applied historian lies in converting this necessary corrective of over-confident social-scientific assertions or politicians’ simplistic assumptions – the historian’s reflex ‘actually, it’s rather more complicated than that’ – into anything resembling the sort of practical policy advice that politicians or civil servants will ever take seriously.
.. faced constant demands for definitive statements about ‘the German character’ and whether ‘Germans’ could be trusted. Nuance and ambiguity are clearly regarded as an impediment to decision-making but they are the stock-in trade of the historian.
.. Their case for putting historians at the heart of government opens with recent examples of historical ignorance and naïve assumptions, about Islam, Iraq and Russia, which led to unnecessary mistakes; better knowledge of history would have revealed the complexity of those situations and, presumably, encouraged greater caution.
.. historical analogies are easy to get wrong
.. Some events are more familiar than others and come pre-loaded with meaning, which is why Nazi analogies are so popular and so invariably unhelpful.
.. His narrative is driven not by abstract and inhuman laws but by the deliberations and decisions of people, and so by the power of rhetoric, the rhetoric of power, and human susceptibility to emotion and self-delusion. Far from endorsing a search for simplistic historical analogies as a basis for policy recommendations, Thucydides would most likely regard this habit as further evidence of our limited capabilities for self-knowledge, deliberation and anticipation – another facet of the ‘human thing’ that leads us to make similar mistakes again and again.