What Master Narrative?

One more reason why Frank Rich is sort of tripping (see below) is captured by Jonathan Chait with haikulike levels of parsimony:

The McCain campaign’s line of the day is that Barack Obama “wants to take us back to the bad old days of going after terrorists with prosecutors rather than predators.” But Obama did propose going after terrorists, which prompted McCain to accuse him of having “once suggested bombing our ally, Pakistan.”

So is going after terrorists with predators a good idea, or the reckless fantasy of a foreign policy naif?

Both, depending, of course. Actually this is the correct answer; trouble is that no one really has yet been able to articulate a totally convincing statement of when and why it depends. And one of the main reasons why that’s so is that America itself lacks one of them ‘master narratives’ when it comes to foreign policy post-Cold War. There are some interesting competing plotlines that we’ve seen launched and touted, but we can’t tell ourselves a convincing story about why we do and don’t do what we do and don’t do. This is kind of okay insofar as the quest for a master — that is, unifying — narrative makes us extra-susceptible to the modern-democratic desire for a Dummies guide to everything. Improvisational prudence is good, lest we forget. Trouble is, we aren’t willing to embrace that good as a guiding light either.

The result is a huge pile of unanswered questions about how America’s role in the world cashes out in practice (as aside from in rhetoric or aspiration). And neither Obama nor McCain can answer them, because these questions need to be answered at the level of our culture or our civilization instead of at the level of a single fleeting leader. Certainly this isn’t an appeal to rudderlessness among Commanders-in-Chief; it is a suggestion that no President, and certainly not Obama or McCain at this time in our lives, can settle the question of what narrative or narratives will guide our foreign policy in a coherent and at least somewhat durable way.

For that reason Daniel claims that that story arc for Election ’08 will be a clobberfest over ‘character’:

his election was going to be one of the nastier ones in recent memory because both candidacies are founded on appeals to biography and character, which means that character assassination will be the order of the day […] framed in terms of experience, national security and Americanism, which is to say that it will be pretty much a standard-issue critique of “weak” and “naive” Democrats who are supposedly not zealous enough in their Americanism.

So the question of the master narrative comes in the back door. Prepare yourself for Democrats to continue to reframe ‘Americanism’ as social democracy, and for culturally conservative Dems to creep out of the woodwork to bolster this long-lost vibe. The question is to what extent the character of the President can be parsed out from Americanism. The answer seems to be not much. But both McCain’s and Obama’s foreign policy narratives are contradictory and incoherent. Not all of this can be blamed on us living in contradictory and incoherent times. Arguing about ‘toughness’, McCain-style, can, and already has, degenerated into the Ionesco routine that Chait describes. But so can arguing about ‘principle’, Obama-style.

Such a stalemate opens the door for a referendum on character as filtered through the domestic lens, which is exactly what’s happening now: the old latte-liberal gambit is alive and well, as is the crusty maverick Arizonan trope. Perhaps toughness and principle on the international stage both take a backseat! And notice how our domestic folk visions of Mr. President have been accumulating new valences too — ones that reflect pretty poorly on McCain and pretty well on Obama. Amazingly, the ‘family values’ valence applies here too. I hope to say more about this soon.