McCain's Bum Slogan

I see thru Daniel that McCain’s new slogan is not, contrary to my advice, “Solvency, Citizenship, Subsidiarity.” It is, instead, “Reform, Prosperity, Peace.” I guess Prosperity is supposed to cover Solvency, Reform is supposed to encompass Subsidiarity, and — ah, but instead of Citizenship it’s Peace, a position sure to win over droves of libertarian voters. There are many ways of making fun of McCain’s slogan, but if I wanted to say something nice about it, I might say this:

Peace comes in a distant third, right? Yet on the other hand, it seems clear that the US is in far stronger need of reform and prosperity than of peace — considering that without the former two our ability to carry on with the wars we’re fighting now diminishes alarmingly. There are those who savor a supposedly long-coming Collapse of Empire, but I ain’t one of them: first because the American behemoth bestriding the globe is not an empire properly speaking; second because a Collapse would be really awful instead of the spur to localism and homespun virtue that it’s sometimes hinted at as being.

This should be considered, incidentally, as a gesture toward the ongoing discussion about whether Matt Yglesias’ internationalism is coherent. I am way too jetlagged to proceed with what hopefully will be a well-thought-out argument tomorrow morning, but I do want to take the opportunity now to emphasize that I left “Peace” out of my recommended slogan for McCain because War is not really the issue this go around. Nor is Empire. Rather it is this war and this hegemony, and the gap between liberal internationalism and neoconservatism that Ross describes is in large part measured by the distance between war-and-hegemony as such and Bush’s war-and-hegemony.

And I persist in my claim that war-and-hegemony as such can be carried out more or less on the cheap, especially along the sort of lines Matt might prefer. Further, I think this is certainly not the best but by the same token by far not the worst outcome for American foreign policy in the short term. Short term, I say, because a rash and hasty unspooling of our hegemonic commitments abroad would do the US and the rest of the world a considerable disservice. (I know I need to say more about this.) Yet, I’ve also argued for a while now that America does empire — or empire-like hegemony — poorly by nature. And the security welfare program currently enjoyed by Japan and Europe is also a positive harm to US interests, not to mention those of what we sometimes call (Western) Civilization. Sadly, hawks tend to think the opposite. A real hawk on actual defense (as opposed to war) would want to strategically untangle the US from its network of quasi-imperial commitments around the globe — though not for the purpose of recovering some halcyon isolation. The idea that it’s an all or nothing game, full isolation or full engagement, may be something of a straw man. But it’s also a caricature reinforced by the common conversation.

And I have to say that McCain’s gesture toward Peace does little to clarify the lines of agreement and disagreement that delineate reality from caricature. Perhaps most bizarrely, to recapitulate, I bet that this is because what Americans want isn’t peace per se but low-cost war. Which brings me back to what I hope to keep saying about Ross’s post sooner rather than later.