Keith Ablow is a Dolt (American Jihad edition)

Keith Ablow is a psychiatrist, thriller writer, and TV talking head, contributing to the “Fox News Medical A-Team” on psychiatric matters. Which is perfect, because he’s about as loony as a ward full of Napoleons.  Here’s his latest screed at the Fox News web site, an opinion piece on the Values page titled, cheerfully, “It’s time for an ‘American jihad‘”

Hey, Keith. That’s a pretty provocative headline. No doubt it’s a misinterpretation from a helpful editor at Fox.

Among the many definitions of jihad are a “war or struggle against unbelievers” and “a crusade for a principle or belief.” Given those definitions, I believe it’s time for an American jihad.

Right … because what always makes the world awesome is people like you, Keith, who decide that something that is both a crusade and a jihad must indeed be a fabulous thing.  I mean, we’ve been fighting against Islamist jihadists (usually presented without the assumed modifier) for decades — why would we want to linguistically model anything we do on their example?

An American jihad would reawaken in American citizens the certain knowledge that our Constitution is a sacred document that better defines and preserves the liberty and autonomy of human beings than the charter of any other nation on earth.

There is so much wrong in that sentence, Keith, it’s hard to know where to start.

If it takes a “jihad” to “reawaken” American patriotism (to grab a label at random), that patriotism isn’t worth very much.

And I have to disagree with you, Keith. The Constitution is not a “sacred document.” It was not handed down from heaven in a beam of light, or brought on stone tablets from a meeting with God. It was hammered out with debate, compromise, proposals, counter-proposals, drafts, re-drafts, and was such an imperfect document that it immediately required ten significant changes (and has required seventeen more  since then).  One of the most famous books about its creation is called A Miracle in Philadelphia, not because of loaves and fishes, but because it’s a miracle (in a very figurative sense) that anything successful came out of the contentiousness of the Constitutional Convention.

Keith, have you actually made a study of constitutional law around the world?  I’m just wondering on what basis you think that the US Constitution is so much spiffier than, say, Sweden’s, or Poland’s, or Japan’s.

Now, there is a lot of good stuff in the US Constitution. There’s some dubious stuff, too, like that old three-fifths rule.  But it’s been flexible enough that several changes that have been absolutely needful have been made — and, in one case, later unmade.  Which “form” of the Constitution is the sacred one, Keith?  The 1789 edition? Or what we have now? Was the Constitution more sacred with Prohibition, or less, and how did its repeal affect its sacredness? Did giving the franchise to 18-year-olds rectify a long wrong, or spoil it?

Calling the Constitution “sacred,” Keith, is, like the “jihad” language, theologically suspect.

The Constitution, along with the miracle of our nation’s founding and the providential history of America fighting and winning war after war against oppressive regimes, …

So the creation of the United States and its survival since then has been provided specifically and directly by God. Which of our nation’s actions does God get to take responsibility for? Which ones does he get to duck?

… proves our manifest destiny …

Ringing all the nostalgic chimes, Keith. Manifest to whom?

… not only to preserve our borders and safety and national character at home, …

Nothing particularly unique about a country thinking that about itself.

… but to spread around the world our love of individual freedom …

I love individual freedom, too, Keith. Of course, I suspect that what we think individuals ought to be free to do might differ from one another (though we should, of course, be free to differ on the matter).

… and insist on its reflection in every government.

Really. Insist. I would ask what right the US has to insist that another government change its form, whether or not its people agree, but the obvious answer is that you think the US has a divine right, a manifest destiny, a direct blessing from God to … well, to what?

An American jihad would embrace the correct belief that if every nation on earth were governed by freely elected leaders and by our Constitution, the world would be a far better place. And an American jihad would not only hope for this outcome, but work toward it.

I have little doubt that the people of, say, North Korea would be far better off with free elections and a constitution that protected basic civil rights. On the other hand, we’ve seen plenty of cases where simply slapping the documents and structure of a republic upon a populace doesn’t guarantee much of anything, as a review of post-colonial governments from Latin America to Africa can demonstrate.

Meanwhile, I suspect the people of the UK, France, and Germany might object to our insisting that they need to adopt our constitution.

We would begin at home, as every great world movement does. We would not only allow, but teach, Americans — including American children — to internalize and project their justifiable feelings of pride in our democracy as superior to all other forms of government.

So, Keith, are we talking about democracy in general? Or “our” democracy as in some particular version that is unique to the United States. Can you clue us on on what “our” democracy is about?

I am less enamored of democracy in and of itself, as in what a democracy does. A lynch mob is democratic. Elected officials can still be corrupt. The majority can vote for a dangerous leader.  A democracy is valuable in that it gives each individual (whose franchise is recognized, of course) a voice in government, and so buy-in to the society as a whole. That’s good. But while a democracy (a term that covers a variety of arrangements, including a constitutional republic like ours) is better, it is not perfect. Our pride — and our shame — should come from how we implement that democracy and what we do with it.

In grade schools we would teach the truth that the founding of our nation and its survival in the face of communism and fascism weren’t just good luck or good planning, but preordained by our commitment to the truth about the essential nature of man.

Would that be the 1789 Three-Fifths Rule truth about the essential nature of man?  The pre-Thirteenth Amendment slave era truth about the essential nature of man? What about the pre-Nineteenth Amendment truth about the essential nature of man (which is that only a man can vote, not a woman)?

I won’t argue that our basic belief in freedom vs authority (in most cases) was a cause in our fight in WWII and the Cold War (it’s much less clear that it was a cause in our fights against Spain or Mexico), and a good cause, but I would hesitate to say that it preordained our victory.

And we would embrace the certain knowledge that history will eventually spread our values all over the globe.

Which sort of renders the idea of an American Jihad moot, doesn’t it?

We would tie American aid to incremental changes not just in the attitudes, but in the fundamental structures, of countries. These changes would move those countries, slowly but inexorably, toward reflecting our Constitution in their own charters.

And this is okay because Our Constitution Is Sacred, so God says we can do whatever we want.

Remember when Jimmy Carter was ridiculed (from the Right) for trying to tie foreign policy and aid to human rights records? How is this any different (except through being human rights by proxy of a good constitution)?

Remember also that a lot of these countries already have constitutions that protect civil rights and call for elections and promote a representative democracy. What’s lacking is not the words, but the adherence to them.

We would unabashedly fund pro-democracy movements around the world, partly with government funding and partly with donations from American citizens.

We actually do tend to fund pro-democracy movements with government aid — though it’s often done covertly  because non-democratic governments tend to frown on other governments sending their dissidents money.

As to private donations — what’s stopping them right now? What pro-democracy movements overseas have you donated to, Keith?

Through these donations we would seek to double the budgets of the CIA and our Special Forces, …

Because the CIA has an awesome record in promoting democracy around the world.

And, Keith, have you actually considered what you want to use Special Forces for, and whether any of the US military agree that they need to be doubled in size?

… seek to fund an international mercenary force for good …

Because paying people to do good with guns is always a good time (and so in keeping with the spirit of our Constitution).

So I keep hearing this idea, Keith. What mercs are you considering hiring on? Do you really want to be funding and arming mercs who might then get a better offer from someone else? Should we encourage other countries to start hiring bands of mercenaries for their own purposes?

What does hiring mercs do, vs. using actual US troops? What’s the “truth of the essential nature of man” that using mercs reflects?

Why, if we are able to instill the patriotic yadda-yadda of the American Jihad in the hearts and minds of Americans, do we need to hire mercs?

… and provide our veterans unparalleled health care.

Well, we’ll certainly be saving veteran care funding in the future if we’re hiring mercs to do our dirty work.

I have no problem, by the way, with providing vets with unparalleled health care. Let’s get the GOP proposing it and funding it in Congress first, and we can go from there.

We would urge our leaders, after their service in the U.S. Senate and Congress, to seek dual citizenship in other nations, like France and Italy and Sweden and Argentina and Brazil and Germany, and work to influence those nations to adopt laws very much like our own. We might even fund our leaders’ campaigns for office in these other nations.

Now that’s an interesting idea. It would certainly be a more productive service than becoming consultants and lobbyists. Of course, if I were France, I might be a bit resentful about Americans coming over and trying to become citizens so that they could change our laws.  I suspect most Americans would feel the same way about a bunch of EU politicians emigrating to the US in order to influence our laws.

We would accept the fact that an American jihad could mean boots on the ground in many places in the world where human rights are being denigrated and horrors are unfolding.

Are those going to be American boots on the ground, or those convenient mercenary boots on the ground?

Now, I understand wanting to intervene when horrible things are happening. But there’s a reason we don’t intervene everywhere horrible things are happening right now. It’s expensive. It costs lots of lives. It’s often a conflict that simply “send in the Marines” doesn’t help.  Stocking up on mercenaries, in it for the money, is not going to help there, and sounds like a reliable formula for further human rights abuses / war crimes to boot.

Because wherever leaders and movements appear that seek to trample upon the human spirit, we have a God-given right to intervene — because we have been to the mountaintop of freedom, and we have seen the Promised Land spanning the globe.

No. Just … no.

American triumphalism that it is the shining city on the hill, the bastion of freedom and civilization and all that is good, has, as often as not, led to disaster and tragedy. The Spanish-American War is a great example — the US taking on the “white man’s burden” to free the poor brown folk of Cuba and the Philippines from the decadent oppression of Spain … leading to anything but democracy in both those locations (not to mention addition of territory in the form of Puerto Rico). Wars against Mexico, agri-business coups in Hawaii, and the results of our invasions of Iraq, all stand as counter-examples of this.

The ancient Greeks always spoke of hubris in their myths — overweening pride that led even the most noble and talented into disaster.  Assuming that we have a “God-given right” to intervene in others countries (especially when we have so many beams in our own eyes) is hubris of the highest order.

That doesn’t necessarily mean we should be isolationist and let the rest of the world go hang. But we need to be careful in assuming that sending in the Marines (or Special Forces, or CIA, or Our Mercenary Army) will resolve the conditions that lead the rise of tyrants, or that the overthrow of such individuals by armed force will solve all the problems of the place we’re invading.

An American jihad would never condone terrorist acts of violence against our adversaries or the targeting of people simply because their beliefs are different from ours. But for those who malignantly demonstrate their intentions to subjugate others, there would be no quarter.

It’s nice to think so. But examples of our intervening in other nations show that the best of public intentions often ends up with violence and intolerance and death where we wouldn’t expect it. Backing the Contras in Nicaragua and overthrowing the Allende regime in Chile are fine examples of ostensibly fighting for freedom and democracy turning into cruel bloodbaths that lead to even worst oppression.

One of the problems being that acting on the best of intentions is hard to sustain. There are so many temptations around conquest. Economic advantage, geopolitical advantage, any number of other factors contaminate even the most virtuous rationale for intervention in another country.

An American jihad would turn back and topple the terrible self-loathing in our citizens set in motion by President Obama, beginning with his “apology tour” — a psychological plague.

Sorry, Keith — I call bullshit. The inability to recognize America’s flaws (even while holding onto America’s strengths and virtues) serves nobody well, and drives off even potentially sympathetic people in other countries who might recognize what we have to share with them. Pride is, after all, one of the Seven Deadly Sins. Consistently badmouthing the United States is more emotion than fact as well — but it’s often a reaction to “Ugly Americans” who are not only unable to see or acknowledge their own past and present errors, but even see them as blessings and laudable acts.

Let me give you a Biblical example. Paul is out to share what he considers the message of God Almighty. But he’s also humble, constantly speaking about his own flaws, errors, problems. Sure, sometimes that comes across as a rhetorical trick, but honest or not it’s effective. If you don’t recognize what you’ve done wrong, you can’t win “hearts and minds” among others. American arrogance is the biggest turn-off to “selling” the American message.

The characterization of Obama’s early foreign policy contacts as an “apology tour” is a grotesque mischaracterization. But if Obama publicly admitted that the US has made mistakes in the past, that’s not a “psychological plague,” or a case of “terrible self-loathing,” but appropriate, even virtuous, humility — and did more to impress others about the US than all of the triumphalist chest-thumping you seem to indulge in, Keith.

As a psychiatrist, Keith, you should know that an inability to take responsibility for things you do is one of the marks of sociopathy.

It would make American pride not only acceptable, but celebrated, again. And, remember, American pride is nothing more than being proud to support truths that are self-evident, irreducible, elemental and inevitable.

If American pride were simply about our belief in and devotion to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” or in protecting and celebrating the rights of individuals, then, yes, that would be worth some pride. But American pride is often seen (and, in fact, often is) an arrogant assumption of infallibility and justification for any action we choose to take as a country.

And, as noted, even if such pride is, in part, justified, it’s also unseemly, and hardly makes others eager to embrace us and take what good things we have to teach them to heart.

An American jihad would make every tax dollar a tithing and the squandering of those dollars a sin.

Honestly, Keith, I don’t think framing questions of taxing and spending in religious terms is really all that helpful. Unless, perhaps, if we ask whether we are helping following the moral imperatives of feeding the hungry, caring for the seek, clothing the naked, comforting the imprisoned.  Was that the sort of thing you had in mind, Keith?

An American jihad would make every hour spent working in an American company — or founding one — an offering.

 

I’ll confess, Keith, framing Americanism as some sort of holy activity — turning work / management / labor into some sort of holy offering, taking foreign policies as dictates from God, considering our government as some sort of sacred structure — makes me intensely uncomfortable. Not only does it make it far too easy for us to conflate our national interests with divine ones, and fool ourselves into moving from thinking that God approves of our country’s principles to God justifies our country’s actions, whatever they may be.

Worse, it begins to produce a civil religion, where our focus starts being on America — a geography and society and human governmental construct — and on worship of it and its actions as a stand-in for God’s will, rather than on God per se.  No human institution is without flaw, in concept or action, but to spend a lot of time talking about divine favor and manifest destiny and sacred charters papers over such flaws — or, worse, leads to discussion of such flaws as being considered heresy. Setting up Caesar as the chosen of God, whether Caesar is a leader or a governmental system, never ends well.

An American jihad would make every teacher of American history not only a public servant, but a servant of the Truth.

As a history major and lover of the topic, I think that’s true even without an “American jihad.”  Truth should be the goal and service of any history teacher, or of any person.

We the People of the United States are good and we are right.

I think we People are pretty good — but I’m unconvinced that we’re better than the People of France, or the People of India, or the People of Australia.

And what do you mean, Keith, that we are “right”?  Right about what? Right when? Right compared to whom? We’ve done a lot of good things around the world, certainly, but we’ve also done some things that weren’t. Yeah, we beat the Fascists — and stuck innocent Japanese-Americans in prison camps, and smuggled out Nazi scientists to use in our missile program, and firebombed Dresden, and gave up Eastern Europe to Stalin. Yeah, we beat (or at least outlasted) the Commies (at least the European ones) — and brought folk like Pinochet to power, supporting dictatorships and those who “malignantly demonstrate their intentions to subjugate others” as “lesser evils” to the Soviet Union. Anyone who can say that America has been universally “right” is condoning tremendous evil, as much as anyone who can say that American has been universally “wrong” is ignoring tremendous good.

Treating America as the equivalent of right, as a proxy for God, is both blasphemous and foolhardy.

And we need the spirit of an American jihad to properly invite, intensify and focus our intentions to preserve, protect and defend our Constitution here at home, and to seek to spread its principles abroad.

See, Keith, I have no idea with taking the principles of the Constitution — of popular representation, of checks and balances between creators, enforcers, and judges of laws, of protection of individual expression, of due process, and more — and encouraging them globally. I think those are great values.

But I think there’s a difference between that and saying that we’re going to start strong-arming other countries — blackmailing with aid and enforcing with bands of mercs and CIA subversion and Special Forces strikes — into adopting our Constitution, because We’re Number One, and God Likes Us Best.

Worse, that ignores the possibility that we might learn something from others. The principles in the Constitution didn’t spring full-blown from the brows of the Founders, but came from great Enlightenment thinkers in England, France, and elsewhere. Just as they contributed to the thinking of our Founders, so too we might find something of value in the constitutions and societal principles of those countries today.

Yeah, I know, Keith, that’s awfully messy. It requires judgment calls, experimentation, debate and discussion, doubt and leaps of faith. It means acknowledging the possibility that we’re not always right or best. It’s a heck of a lot easier to pretend that God passed down the Constitution on stone tablets and that it’s the one, clear, true, unalterable (except for the Amendments, or at least some of them) truth and standard of governmental rectitude. It’s simpler and happier to think that God made us the bestest-best country in the whole world, and that we can do no wrong (except, maybe, when people we don’t like are in the White House) because we have God’s favor.

The alternative requires not thinking we’re better than everyone else about everything, that we have something to offer others, but that the reverse can be true, too.  It requires humility and openness and a willingness to learn from others. That’s a difficult sell for Americans, I know. But wouldn’t it be nice if we could, maybe, give it a try again?

[ Keith Ablow is not just a cheerleader for the American Constitution as the Greatest Thing Since the Decalogue, but also a guy who thinks Obama is letting Ebola into the country because he “has it in for us,” and wants us to “suffer along with less fortunate nations;” that Putin was able to annex the Crimea because Obama’s domestic policies “imperiled the notion of individual autonomy;” that Obama was re-elected because America has a “captive mentality” (but that Newt Gingrich would have been great because he’s been married three times); that the Unabomber was correct in seeing “technology and leftist political leaders” as a grave threat to the nation (but coal plants don’t cause asthma problems).  Thanks for playing, Keith! ]

 

(G+ Edition)