Was Dark Helmet right about good and evil?

Americans are perpetually caught between their two selves. One is a happy-go-lucky bon vivant whose motto is, "Why worry?" This American is a ceaseless optimist. He's the reason stock markets continue to soar in expectation of more and more good bon temps ahead even when there are good reasons to worry. He's used to things working out for him, and he doesn't see any reason why that shouldn't continue. Even problems like global warming don't bother this guy. He figures scientists always figure problems out, and they'll eventually lick this one, too. 

The other American is an alarmist, willing to see even the smallest change from the world he's used to as the first step in a slippery slope to Armageddon. Especially if it's something he sees as cooked up by the other political camp from his own. News media, with its bad news bias, tends to feed this side of the American split personality. 

One side of the American personality wants to chug a beer and grill hot dogs on his lawn even while a nuclear missile is clearly raining down; the other wants to build a bunker and stockpile guns and ammunition when someone mentions changing rules about public bathrooms. 

Both sides reside in most Americans, and both have been evident in the past few weeks as we've watched events unfold in Ukraine. The optimistic American thinks that Putin has overplayed his hand, that all he's done is hurt Russia, reinvigorate a once-flaccid NATO, and even make America stronger. It's an incredibly sanguine way of looking at events when Ukraine's oil fields are being blown up, its dams destroyed, and civilians dying in a conflict that utterly flouts every norm we've come to expect. 

On the other hand, there's also been a lot of hand-wringing that this is the moment the whole liberal world order comes crashing down. It is proof that a particular view of the world has failed, and that we are now in an era of stark, power-based politics in which the loser will cease to exist. 

President Biden has mostly sided with the former version of events. That's probably the right thing for a commander-in-chief to do. Nobody wants a leader who will tell us we're all about to die in times of crisis. Even if Biden really, secretly feels like this is the beginning of the end, he ought to be telling us that everything is going to be alright. There's also a politically self-serving reason to frame the invasion in this way. While former President Trump is out saying...whatever it is he's saying about all of this...Biden needs to make it look like his policies have been good for American interests. So optimism is his best bet. 

I don't claim to know how this will end. It's certainly one of the most alarming events I have witnessed in my lifetime. I'm frustrated by how impotent my own country seems, how the fact that Russia has nuclear weapons is making us react very differently to this kind of naked aggression than we did in 1990 to an invasion of another country. The lesson to me seems to be that every country should have nuclear weapons or risk being invaded. 

But setting aside the specifics of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the more important general point is that US policy choices of the last 25 years do not seem to have helped promote a US world view. They do not seem to have increased the level of democracy in the world, nor helped secure peace. We have not turned from a Cold War world to a new world in which humanity, freed from focusing on war, solves the perennial evils that have plagued us as long as we've been a species. Geopolitics haven't improved anymore than anything else in the world has in my lifetime. 

I can't claim to be an expert on many things, but I am an expert on the Korean Peninsula. Would anyone say that the Korean Peninsula is in a better, safer place now than it was in 1994 when Kim Il Sung died? A series of US presidents have employed differing rhetoric, but basically the same, underlying policy: seek to isolate North Korea diplomatically and economically, then use the strength that isolation gives us to force them into concessions on nuclear issues. That plan can only be described as a spectacular failure. It has caused suffering for the already-suffering people of North Korea, and it has not, in return, brought them one step closer to freedom. 

I honestly believe that, in a choice between a flawed democracy like ours and a flawed enlightened dictatorship like Russia's or even a halfway decent enlightened dictatorship like China's, the United States is easily the best choice. It's the one that provides for the greatest level of human happiness. (Perhaps, in some ways, because human happiness isn't logical and neither is democracy.) So let's, for a moment, accept a very simplistic, George W. Bush "axis of evil" view of the world, and call us "good." 

Why has good been so bad at making the world a better place? Is it because, as Dark Helmet put it in Spaceballs, good is dumb?

The most unsettling thing in my life

I've been through four events in my life that have shaken my faith that I understood the world. The first was 9/11, the second was the election of Donald Trump, the third was the outbreak of COVID-19, and now the Russian invasion of Ukraine is the fourth. All of these events have undermined the self-certainty of my inner optimistic American. All have made me question whether a good life in a time of peace and plenty was really my birthright as an American of my era. 

None, though, have probably shaken me as much as an article by an American philosopher a friend sent me over a year ago. The philosopher is Adrian Vermeule, and the article is about skepticism in the effectiveness of free markets. That doesn't sound frightening, I know, but the article is about more than just economic markets. It's about how the entire liberal world order has been built on a faith in free markets of various types, including the economic ones, but also the much bigger "marketplace of ideas." 

Vermeule argues, very effectively from my point of view, that the marketplace of ideas does not seem to lead to the best possible idea very often. This is because idea marketplaces suffer from the same weaknesses economic ones do: they are never really as free as we'd like them to be, and they require all kinds of intervention to work as intended. Markets as described by liberal apologists are always ideal markets, Vermeule posits, and no market is ever anything like ideal. 

Perhaps his most damning argument is when he draws on the idea of free competition in courts. We believe not in a judge trying to be impartial and come to the best decision, but in lawyers slugging it out in an anything-goes-if-it's-for-the-good-of-their-client competition. A defense lawyer doesn't care if her client is guilty. She cares what the prosecution can prove. She doesn't care if the sentence for her client is best for society. That's up to society to argue for, in the form of the attorney for the state. 

Some people really believe this is the best system, but it's hard to call our system of justice highly fair or equitable or, well, just. Rich people get better lawyers with more resources, and that helps them get better outcomes. 

What reading Vermeule made me think about wasn't so much that our system of justice is unfair, but that we have extrapolated the system of everyone advocating with maximum effort for their own position to nearly everything in the rest of society. Our political system is an extension of our justice system. Nobody is capable of giving an inch of their own personal interests for the good of majority. That's not our job. It's society's job to make us give an inch. It's why every interview is so partisan. We no longer expect our politicians to demonstrate broad-mindedness. We want them to "fight for us."

It's evident now in the middle of the kind of foreign crisis that ought to make our country come together. Even Republicans who are supporting the effort to put pressure on Putin are still using the opportunity to point out that Biden is terrible at everything. Either sanctions aren't hard enough or Putin is only there because Biden isn't a macho man like Trump was. Then there's the whole insane faction that thinks whatever it is Tucker Carlson or Marjorie Taylor Greene believe. 

This isn't new. Almost as soon as World War II ended, the consensus in Washington broke down. James Brady explains in The Coldest War how Korea became an opportunity for Republicans to hit Democrats for being weak, a strategy it hasn't let up on since. David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest examines how Democrats were so sensitive to appearing weak they violated their own sense of what was right to carry out war in Vietnam. Our own fractiousness, a product of our free market system of ideas, has led us to carry out bad foreign policy decisions in order to satisfy domestic political demands. It's why we came in with such half-hearted sanctions. Biden can't open himself up to more criticism if gas prices go much higher. 

If our system really is good, shouldn't that give it an advantage in world competition? Shouldn't leaders in the rest of the world be able to see that our way of life is, if not the best, at least the least bad, and want to make theirs more like it? But the last 25 years have been the story of the West, led by the United States, making decisions that have tended to make our way of life less prevalent rather than more. Depending on your political perspective, there are reasons to think that democracy is even under assault within the United States, let alone abroad. 

There are really only two choices here. First is that we are mistaken and our way of life really isn't the "good" one. The other is that we are good, but good is dumb. 

I think it's the second, but as for recommendations for how to make good smarten up, that's a little difficult. As much as I agree with Vermeule's diagnosis of the maladies of liberal democracy, I don't believe I can get on board as much with his recommended cures. As one Catholic friend of mine put it, "Vermeule would be fine with a dictator as long as the dictator was Catholic." I don't think the solution is to try to force some kind of idealistic consensus to once-more-prevalent ideals that many (including me) now find themselves not only unwilling but unable to believe. 

America has gotten far by figuring it out as we go along. We didn't need some hard set of idealistic principles. We're pragmatic. We're rough-and-ready. Or at least that's sort of how events have transpired to make us see ourselves. But perhaps we really do need some core set of principles we can mostly all agree on. Perhaps we do need some shared sense of identity. These are oft-quoted conservative principles, and I agree with them, although I disagree with almost every actual principle conservatives float as one we should all agree on. But it does seem that for good to survive, good is going to have to be able to at least understand what it is that makes it good. 

To do this, we need the input of both our pessimistic and our optimistic halves. We need the buzz-kill to come ruin the party for us by reminding us of the peril we are in while questions of who we are remain unanswered. We also need the optimist who believes, maybe against reason, that it can be done. As the better writer in my family, tired of hearing the military maxim that "hope is not a strategy" put it, hope is not only a strategy, it is, in fact, the only strategy.