Daily Archives: July 29, 2022

A look back on what internal Liberal polling appeared to be saying ahead of the May election, and the related matter of the Katherine Deves controversy.

Last week I took a big picture look at how the main public pollsters performed in their immediate pre-election polling. Today I offer a necessarily incomplete account of the only partly knowable subject of internal party polling specifically that of the Liberal Party, and how it played out against the backdrop of bitter conflict over its strategy of the campaign of pursuing culturally conservative constituencies at a time when those under threat from the teal independents needed every socially liberal vote they could get.

Much of this story relates to the controversy surrounding Warringah candidate Katherine Deves, which Scott Morrison appeared to consider the key to unlocking enough Labor-held seats in the outer suburbs and regions to balance defeats in inner metropolitan seats, at least to the extent of allowing him to hold on to power in a minority government. The notion that this strategy might have been hitting its mark was not the exclusive preserve of Liberal Party optimists. Shortly after the controversy first emerged early in the campaign, Phillip Coorey of the Financial Review wrote that in the suburbs, the regions and the religious communities, the government and Labor believes the Deves issue is going gangbusters in Scott Morrisons favour, messy as it may be. A week later, Chris Uhlmann cited a Labor strategist in the Age/Herald who believed the issue was playing 90/10 in Deves favour in the suburbs and the regions. Cameron Milner, a former Queensland Labor state secretary now all too comfortable in a new perch on The Australians op-ed page, described the Liberals exploitation of the controversy as brilliant foghorn politics that would yield a bumper crop of Hanson and Palmer preferences.

When Deves recanted her initial apology for her comments a fortnight out from the election, Niki Savva in the Age/Herald cited a Liberal source saying this had been set up deliberately to resuscitate the issue. Complicating the notion of a divide between what Uhlmann called the inner-city bubble and mainstream opinion further afield, Lanai Scarr of The West Australian that some were even tipping Deves could pull off her own miracle win and insulate other conservative electorates nationally in the process, potentially saving the Liberals in such difficult contests as the Perth seat of Swan.

Needless to say, none of this looks terribly prescient now that the elections unknowns are known. The possibility that the Liberals were acting on faulty intelligence is intriguingly raised by a report from Peter van Onselen on Ten News four days out from the election, which related that Liberal polling had Katherine Deves trailing Zali Steggall by only 53-47 quite a lot closer than Steggalls eventual winning margin of 61-39. Lest it be thought that this was some kind of Liberal Party psyop, it formed part of a batch of polling that was otherwise disastrous for the Liberals, with two-party preferred scores inclusive of an uncommitted component showing them trailing 50-43 in Bennelong and 50-41 in Parramatta (worse than their actual losing margins) and 49-48 in Reid (better), with particularly large deficits among women.

This happened to be the second batch of Liberal seat polling that van Onselen had been able to report late in the campaign, the first of which emerged as a bone of contention post-election in the partys deepening culture war over the teal independent seats and whether they should be cut loose in favour of a more populist approach that took its cues from Donald Trump. This batch of polling had the Liberal primary vote at 43% in Kooyong, 37% in Goldstein and 44% in Higgins, which bore up quite well against respective final results of 42.7%, 40.4% and 40.7%. Shortly after the election, Sharri Markson of The Australian recorded the following reaction to the leak inside the Liberal camp:

Senior Liberal figures scratched their heads, wondering where it had originated. The precise numbers did not reflect what was emanating from the partys official poster, Crosby Textor. An internal probe discovered that Bragg had submitted expenses to the NSW Liberal division of about $35,000 to $40,000 to conduct his own alternative polling in many NSW seats. There is no suggestion that Bragg leaked the polling to van Onselen, which he denies. It was not in his interest to depress the prospects of candidates he was fighting hard to help win. Its not even clear whether the polling Bragg commissioned was the same polling broadcast on Ten. However, Morrisons team believed it was.

Bragg had circulated the polling he commissioned to many Liberals an action one source described as sloppy and the suggestion is a recipient subsequently leaked it to the media. Questioned about the research for this article, Bragg admits he commissioned alternate polling and is scathing about the way Liberal headquarters and Crosby Textor treat Liberal candidates, who he says are kept in the dark about how they are faring.

The Liberal Party and Crosby Textor treat the candidates like absolute shit and dont give them the information they need, Bragg says. The candidates, who are often members of parliament, all they are given is a phone briefing and if theyre lucky they might get a piece of paper. Crosby Textor omit key things like the favourability of the leader because theyre worried that will leak to the media. If you know the party leader is massively unpopular youll differentiate so you can hang onto the seat. But if youre not told that how are you supposed to know? Its conflicts galore.

Echoes of Braggs criticism were to be heard outside the tent from Kos Samaras, who as one of the principals of the Redbridge Group had provided polling and strategic advice to Climate 200 (with which, as per the disclosure notice at the bottom of this sites sidebar, I was involved myself):

Why did the teals win? Many reasons. But at the centre of the campaign was an absolute commitment to the data. There were no games with what the internal polling said. There were no favourites shown, whereby resources are sent into a seat, even though the polling painted a different picture (The Liberals) poured resouces into one seat, Kooyong, at the expense of others, even though their data was indeed showing a grim picture. That picture of course was never told, as the constant backgrounding into the media was akin to a story-telling session, skunk drunk, at a pub. The Liberal decision-making was riddled with bias and subjectivity, fuelled by an internal factional structure that made it impossible for data to be utilised correctly.

If early indications are anything to go by, the tension between the Liberal Partys determination to tack to the right on cultural issues and electoral imperatives to win the favour of more liberally minded voters could be set to play out again at the Victorian state election in November. Stay tuned.

William Bowe is a Perth-based election analyst and occasional teacher of political science. His blog, The Poll Bludger, has existed in one form or another since 2004, and is one of the most heavily trafficked websites on Australian politics.View all posts by William Bowe

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Liberal with the truth The Poll Bludger - The Poll Bludger

In 2010, I knelt beside a family member as they cradled my laptop in their hands.

Wed just spent 17 agonizing minutes watching the WikiLeaks Collateral Murder video, which contained footage of the 2007 Baghdad airstrike during which US troops killed at least a dozen civilians, including two Reuters journalists, jeering as they opened fire.

Tears welled in the corner of their eyes. The horror of watching US armed forces fire upon innocent people, laughing even as they injured children in the process, struck hard.

For many, the Collateral Murder Video was a wake-up call. For others, like the person sitting next to me, it did the opposite.

Its not real, they said.

The words hit me like a slap.

It cant be real. I just I dont believe it.

Id brought up the video in a last-ditch effort to repair yet another relationship fractured by political differences. Instead of building a bridge, however, it highlighted the widening divide between my past and present.

I grew up in rural Indiana in a predominantly white, conservative bubble. I went to church three times a week and led prayer groups around my public school flagpole. I was desperately proud of my country, cheered when George W Bush won the 2000 election after voting for him in the middle school mock election, and viciously argued in his defense four years later when a classmate dared to criticize a sitting president.

In a high school bracketed with cows and cornfields, I found belonging in my beliefs. This is what I knew what my parents knew, what my friends knew, what my church knew and nothing could convince me otherwise.

It took attending a private Christian university less than an hour away to change everything. As a freshman, I eagerly signed the schools community life agreement, pledging to abstain from all vices (sex, gambling, alcohol) until after graduation. I agreed to a campus-wide ban on R-rated movies and non-choreographed dancing. I attended mandatory chapel twice a week, went to a local church on Sundays and, instead of chafing in the sheltered environment, I thrived.

Everything shouldve stayed the same, and for countless students it did. But after my first year, while my fellow students kept on finding answers, I started to find questions.

I had a British academic adviser who taught outside of the American perspective, and whose classes challenged the gleaming American idealism I held so dear. I learned about how the US carpet-bombed Cambodia during the Vietnam war, dropping over 2.7m tons of bombs on the country over an eight-year period, and was shocked to learn this paled in comparison to the combined 2m tons of bombs the Allies dropped during the second world war, even when factoring in the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Next, I learned about the My Lai massacre, in which US soldiers raped, tortured and killed hundreds of innocent Vietnamese people while several orders to stop the killings were systematically ignored.

The more I learned, the more I realized that my Christian beliefs didnt line up with the so-called Christian nation in which I was raised. The Bible told me to care for the sick, hungry and poor, while my fellow Republicans raged against universal healthcare, food stamps, and argued poverty was the result of laziness. As the veil slipped away, I realized American exceptionalism wasnt some God-given duty to protect democracy around the world, but a delusion sold to the American people which fueled our military-industrial complex. And we were falling for it hook, line and sinker.

The more I tried to share what Id learned with my friends and family, the more they wrote me off as a lost cause. My parents joked that I had turned liberal, and couldnt wait for me to leave my conservative Christian college so things could go back to normal.

In person, the conversations I tried to have about religion and politics were stilted and brief. Online, they were vicious. Social media was particularly brutal, and the older members of my church were among the most bloodthirsty. No matter how delicately I tried to broach a conversation, share sources or ask questions our conversation ended in a bloodbath. Once the personal attacks started led by friends, church members and even the occasional family member I gave up.

After finishing my degree and moving to the UK to pursue a masters degree in history, I realized I couldnt keep the US on the pedestal Id placed it. Life in England solidified my changing perspectives. Not only were the people wildly different than the ones Id grown up with my friend group included both socialists and blue bloods running in the same circles even the Christians I met surprised me. Gone were the puritanical attitudes obsessed with the battle between sin and virtue, and in its place were some of the most welcoming and warm-hearted people Id ever met.

Returning to the US in late 2012 was a culture shock. I moved back in with my parents while applying for jobs only to realize that my idyllic home town didnt feel quite as safe as before. The open-mindedness Id encountered at university was replaced with vicious political discourse, where even a kind neighbor warned me to be the good kind of journalist, leaving me to realize that if I wasnt careful Id be labeled as the enemy.

It didnt matter that I grew up in the same zip code, attended the same schools, went to the same churches. A simple difference in opinion was enough to place a target on my back, and I knew I needed to get out. I took a job in marketing that moved me out of state and headed to Nashville, finding a tiny liberal pocket in the Bible belt, where I met countless others who shared a similar experience.

One woman, Marie*, reached out to me after reading a lengthy conversation I had with another Republican on Facebook. A pastors wife in a moderately sized congregation in a conservative state and a lifelong Republican, she felt shocked by the growing support for Donald Trump.

I feel like Trump is using Evangelical Christians, she wrote in her initial message. [But] I dont understand how a human can think these things are ok.

We reconnected recently, and she told me how she watched in shock as more and more people around her began to follow Trump with what she described as cultish fervor, with some going so far as to believe that only Republicans could be considered Christians. While she and her husband refused to express overtly political opinions from the pulpit, she described the anger she saw in some people as proof that something wasnt right.

With family, it was a whole lot harder cause we were all raised strongly Republican, she explained. So for any of us to break away from not totally agreeing 100% with a candidate, it was like I had gone to the other side.

In the end, she found herself asking many of the same questions I had, especially as she watched those closest to her, including her siblings and daughter, begin to espouse radically different ideas. It was heartbreaking to watch, she told me, and while she tried to remain optimistic, she said it felt as if the whole world was changing around her, and nothing made sense.

I was like, Where are these crazy comments coming from? This is not foundational, this is not Christian, she said. Why are people following Trump so blindly? What am I missing?

For casual observers like Marie and myself, it can be mind-boggling to watch someone disregard what you perceive as concrete evidence. Unfortunately, logic has little to do with it.

Most people assume that deeply held beliefs are held because they are logical, and that is often the assumptive flaw. Deeply held beliefs are often held for other reasons entirely, explains psychologist Julie Gurner. Things like strong emotional attachments, social or personal reasons, and group membership make people particularly resilient to changing beliefs.

A lot of this boils down to cognitive biases, the subconscious tendencies in human thinking and reasoning that influence our judgment, decision-making and even our behavior. Confirmation bias, for instance, is one of the heaviest hitters: our brains tend to seek information that supports our existing beliefs and ignore information that challenges them.

The internet made this phenomenon worse, something I watched first-hand as my friends and family members began using Facebook as a source of news. I tried serving as a friendly factchecker at first, happy to put my history degrees to work. Most people ignored me; the burden of proof seemed to disappear. If something got enough likes and sounded correct, it was all-too-easy to hit share.

Kristina Lerman, principal scientist at the University of Southern Californias Information Sciences Institute, says her research has identified what she calls a majority illusion which is what happens when social media distorts our observations of what people believe until we start to overestimate the popularity of information. In some conditions, this can even lead people to believe things are far more believed and accepted than they actually are.

This is what happened with my friends and family. I didnt own a television before last year, so I never watched mainstream or cable news networks, while my parents tuned into Fox News. As a millennial, I lived by the warning drilled into us from a young age dont believe everything you read online and grew frustrated when others seemed to ignore that same advice. I tried my best to receive most of my news from following local and international journalists on Twitter, but even that was tinted with bias. The more my social network grew and the more active it became the easier it was to get trapped in an echo chamber.

Its something Im still wary of, especially given the ever-increasing political divide. Misinformation rages on, and I dont want to fall into the same trap that Ive seen claim so many others.

I dont go to church any more, but I still lead every conversation with a conservative Christian with, I grew up in the church. Its a trick Ive learned over the years that reminds people that were not so very different while making it easier for the dialogue to progress from there. Ive slowly rebuilt my relationship with my parents although Im admittedly terrified of them reading this article and Im working up the courage to reach out to my brother after a particularly brutal argument about politics on Facebook disintegrated our relationship years ago.

I havent given up on nudging all of them back toward the centrist beliefs they used to hold. We still talk about politics from time to time, and I try to start every conversation with empathy. Instead of railing against the things that I think theyre doing or saying or believing, I take a deep breath and think about why.

Why do they hold this position? Why do they feel this way? Why are my beliefs different?

I remind myself that beliefs are heavily influenced by emotions, not just facts, and I try to connect the dots.

My relationship with my family is still rocky, but thanks to time and therapy its one Ive come to terms with. Ive learned to surround myself with my chosen family, people who share my beliefs while challenging me to stretch beyond my limits and grow, and this has made it easier for me to connect with my friends and relatives back home on my terms.

We might not have the same relationship we had before, and that relationship might not look the way either of us wish it did, but thats OK. Either way, I feel better knowing that Im still trying.

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The heartbreak of becoming a liberal in a conservative family - The Guardian

During a very interesting conversation I took part in at the recent Times Higher Education Forum on the Liberal Arts in Asia, Leonard K. Cheng, the president of Lingnan University Hong Kong, made the striking argument that liberal arts education must go beyond its traditional rootedness in Western liberal democracy. Non-Western models, particularly when relevant to local contexts, must blaze new trails, he suggested.

Lingnan University has taken a liberal arts approach since the 1990s, and, according to Godwins Global Liberal Education Inventory, Asia accounts for 37 per cent of liberal education initiatives outside the US, of which three-quarters are in China, India and Japan. Yuanpei College at Peking University, launched in 2001, is another example, as is Taiwans Tunghai University. But Chengs examples were Effat University in the United Arab Emirates, which models its vision on Arabic principles of reading and writing, and Soka University, which, although located in California, draws its inspiration from Japanese Buddhism.

Indeed, while for most people, the phrase liberal arts education invokes an American model, it is arguable that liberal arts long predates the establishment of the US. A 2016 article by Boston Colleges Kara Godwin and Philip Altbach cites three examples. One is Chinas Confucian tradition, which sought broad education in the making of a whole person. Another is the ancient Nalanda University, which used both Hindu and Buddhist traditions to nurture self-realisation in India. And a third is Al-Azhar University in Cairo, the oldest continuously operating university in the world, which drew not only on Islamic theology and sharia law, but philosophy, mathematics, astronomy and, from the 1870s , natural sciences, on the grounds that an educated individual needed a comprehensive range of knowledge.

China was also a modern pioneer. In the late 1990s, its government turned away from its specialised, Soviet-style system, particularly devoted to professional training in engineering and medicine, towards cultural quality education, or whole-person development. A large number of specialised colleges were developed into comprehensive universities with broad programmes incorporating previously ignored soft disciplines.

In response to Chengs argument about the need for non-Western sources of liberal education, however, I could not help but ask him about the dangers of ethnic chauvinism. My question arose out of my own experience of consulting on the liberal arts with the committee of Indias new National Education Policy, which also articulates a strategic vision to transform colleges of specialised training into multidisciplinary universities.

The policy, unveiled in 2020, is a vast and ambitious mixture of various sometimes contradictory aspirations. But as someone who primarily focuses on the liberal arts, it was startling to see the policy imagine an American model of multidisciplinary liberal education through what is unmistakably a rhetoric of Hindu nationalism.

Ancient Indian literary works, the policy states, such as Banabhattas Kadambari described a good education as knowledge of the 64 Kalaas or arts; and among these 64 arts were not only subjects, such as singing and painting, but also scientific fields, such as chemistry and mathematics, vocational fields, such as carpentry and clothes-making, professional fields, such as medicine and engineering, as well as soft skills such as communication, discussion, and debate. But the policys repeated invocation of ancient India cannot but be a refusal to acknowledge the countrys medieval period of Muslim rule, from around the end of the first millennium to the advent of British rule in the 18thcentury, which included periods of great prosperity, development and relative communal harmony.

One might say that the narrative of majority religion is primarily a rhetorical gloss on what is essentially modern, interdisciplinary liberal arts education. But the omission from the narrative of educational practices rooted in other cultural traditions not just Islam and Christianity, but also tribal and indigenous practices remains glaring to anyone who imagines India not as a Hindu nation but as one made by multiple traditions.

It may be hard to admit it, but the openness and flexibility of liberal arts practices get rather easily limited by various forms of parochialism and provincialism. I have experienced this, too, through my years of studying and teaching in the US, where the cultural canon at the heart of liberal arts curricula has petrified over the decades through the severe constrictions of white parochialism. And even while calls to decolonise the curriculum familiar to scholars of colonial and minority cultures since the 1960s become ever louder, ethnic and nationalistic chauvinism remains undefeated.

As shown by Asias pre-modern centres of religious education, such as Nalanda and Al-Azhar, the values we associate with a liberal arts education freedom, tolerance, plurality, openness are not exclusively rooted in Western liberal democracies or the European Enlightenment. And there is no doubt that institutions of liberal arts education must draw from models beyond the easily available American one. But as higher education policy in contemporary India makes equally clear, it is undeniable that the political ideology of governments will determine the manner in which local or indigenous models of liberal arts will be adopted.

In the end, what matters more than history is historiography: our documentation and presentation of history. And, whether we like it or not, educational policy will always try to foreground certain political and ideological interests.

Saikat Majumdar is professor of English and creative writing at Ashoka University. He thanks Harshita Tripathi for research assistance.

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Indigenous models of liberal arts should beware of ethnic chauvinism - Times Higher Education

Dont get it twisted, in terms of the progressive silence on the new Cold War. For nearly a century, commentators have closely associated liberalism with progressivism. For instance, in a 1931 piece in The New Republic, Edmund Wilson identifies the latter as that which which has generally become known as liberalism to contemporaries. Liberal philosophy also contains what its supporters would consider a benevolent nationalism, that is, a system to both export self-determination to indigenous peoples and produce abundance at home. This abundance would be spread out benignly enough, thanks to an American spirit strong enough to compel Capitalism to restrain itself. Of necessity, then, the liberal makes the moral assumption of an underlying harmony of interests, in which, in the phrase of C. Wright Mills, greed and ruthlessness are reconciled with justice and progress.

On the other hand, journalist Gerard Colby-Zilgalso identifying progressivism with corporate liberalismdefines the first as an instrument of conservatism, in the sense that it is the rationalization of the old order to meet the needs of the new monopolistic order. This radical view presupposes a psychological derivation of the idea of progress in terms of political ideology, as in Karl Polanyi: Hopethe vision of perfectibilitywas distilled out of the nightmare of population and wage laws, and was embodied in a concept of progress so inspiring that it appeared to justify the vast and painful dislocations to come. This interpretation locates a cynicism at the heart of the modern liberal project, a dark twin to its much-vaunted idealism, and would therefore read the original progressive rhetoric for empire as textbook delusions of grandeur. These delusions would be leveraged to crush indigenous initiatives toward self-sufficiency around the world while hiding behind platitudes of support for the self-determination of all peoples.

Consider that the archetypal elements of American Third World thuggery emerge fully formedlike Athena from the head of Zeusin the period 1898-1901, between the dust-up to the Spanish-American War and the defeat of the Filipino insurrection:

* The inevitably debunked pretext for a declaration of war

* American dismissal of natives capacity for self-governance

* Hints of treason against dissenters over American war dead

* The rhetoric of disinterested dedication to the regeneration of humanity

This last is suddenly flipped into barbaric atrocities once met with native resistance, which presumably does not feel the need to be regenerated. Thus, resonating across a whole century is the U.S. Senate Investigating Committee on the Philippiness conclusion on Aug 29, 1902 that the destruction of Filipino life during the war has been so frightful that it cannot be explained as the result of ordinary civilized warfare. Let us find other explanations, then.

The unexamined gargoyles that lay between what Henry Cabot Lodge called the world-redeeming work of our imperial race and his anticipation of a vast future trade and wealth and power through Chinas illimitable markets, lead us off the psychological grid, and here, rusticating, lurk those primordial American delusions of grandeur. Sen. Albert Beveridge, in an iconic speech on the Senate floor in 1900, reveals the basis for the expansionists rhetoric of historical mission:

It is racial. God has not been preparing the English-speaking and Teutonic peoples for a thousand years for nothing but vain and idle self-contemplation. He has made us the master organizers of the world to establish system where chaos reigns. He has given us the spirit of progress to overwhelm the forces of reaction. He has made us adepts at government that we may administer government among savage peoples. He has marked the American people as His chosen nation to finally lead in the regeneration of the world. This is the divine mission of America.

The delusions of grandeur at the root of the progressive campaign for an overseas empire presume an unquestioned morality of war which, of necessity, refuses to acknowledge a legitimate basis for dissent; a built-in, hermetically-sealed intolerance prefiguring the paranoia that would drive the moral repugnance of both the war hysteria and the Red Scare a generation later, and the Cold War beyond. In his speech, Beveridge draws the association, with subtle misdirection, between dissent and treason: The Filipinos do not understand free speech, he begins, explaining that when the anti- expansionist critique was revealed to the natives, their takeaway was that our President is in the minority or he would not permit what appears to them such treasonable [emphasis added] criticism.

The presumptionand, eventually, the paranoiaof a conspiracy lurking behind dissent, sinister and beholden to alien interests, is mere psychological projection. What is it that supporters of the wars of empire cant bear to hear? At the heart of the civilizing mission lies the necessity for the dispossession of others, a job made easier through the psychological mechanism of dehumanization. A grotesque distortion of the humanity of others. Those seeking to unmask the hypocrisy behind the platitudes mustanother necessitybe simply unhung traitors, as TR referred to the anti-imperialists of his day.

The disproportionate revenge meted out against Filipinos in the Balangiga Massacre of 1901, in which Gen. Jacoby Smith declared that he would accept no prisoners, like the gay moral imbecility of indiscriminate napalming of Koreans later documented by I.F. Stone, and, most famously, the atrocities at My Lai, for which, as Noam Chomsky reports, charges were dismissed on the grounds that this was merely a normal operation in which a village was destroyed and its population murderedthese supposedly rogue, yet persistent, atrocities suggest an inscrutable linkage between hypocrisy and slaughter.

Even before the outbreak of the First World War, the Nationalist Progressives at the New Republic viewed war as a regenerative crusade, and put indecisiveness or pacifism down to an abject moral failure, writes Randolph Bourne. Historian Jackson Lears observes that they considered the conflagration to be a great lab for social engineering; the ultimate marriage of management and morality. As he concludes, War permitted the realization of the management dream: an administrative state that would supervise and cooperate with Big Business.

Since World War I, modern liberals have displayed a natural ability to transpose universal moral ideals onto arguments that align unquestioningly with the war aims of the American empire. In 1917 Bourne remarks that these youngish war liberals acquiesced so naturally that it seemed as if the war and these men had been waiting for each other. In fact, they carried themselves with conspicuous unease when outside the patina of powerEdmund Wilson remarks that in the extreme illiberalism of the 1920s liberals felt increasingly conscious that no one was paying any attention to them.

Bourne was the first critic to note the moral squishiness of modern liberals. He perceived in real time the well-appointed critical abilities of liberals like Herbert Croly at TNR and eminent philosopher John Dewey vaporize in the face of the rising War Hysteria. Bournes disenchantment with the eminent liberals of his day crystallized into radical misgivings about the warp-speed mobilization of the American war machine not least because he was documenting the freshly-sprouted tentacles of the modern surveillance state.

A generation later TNR exhibited no hesitation whatever in differentiating between the airborne terror of the Allies and the Germans, its editors glibly announcing that the robot bomb [used by the Nazis to terrorize Britain] is far more savage than our saturation bombing of German cities. And according to historian Richard Pells, in The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age, already by World War II the liberals at TNR were prepared to inflate even the most questionable operator [like Chiang Kai-shek] into a visionary leader as long as he attached himself to the Allies.

Subsequent wars, like those in Korea and Vietnam, contained important motifs directly related to the ambiguity between Americas moral conceits and her actual material ambitions. The liberal establishment was instrumental in developing, shaping, presenting and defending these war policies and somehow their cynicism and ambiguity managed to go over for a few generations as cold-blooded expertise.

The maintenance of tension was a prime objective of Trumans foreign policy, writes I.F. Stone, in The Hidden History of the Korean War. The peace talks were regarded by these leaders as a kind of diabolic plot against rearmament. The Establishment dreaded the consequences that peace would have on the economy, namely shutting off its inflationary narcotic. Essentially Truman wished to perpetuate a climate of fear in order to maintain rearmament and thus full employment by a pose of brinksmanship that would nevertheless try, as Stone describes it, to halt at measures short of [nuclear] war.

Stone reveals another aspect of the presidents indecision: Just as Truman opposed war but wasnt quite sure he wanted peace, so while crusading for democracy he wasnt quite sure he wanted to take the risk of permitting free elections if peace came. The palpable fear that the communists would win the elections led Truman to support the program of a man he ought to have despised, Syngman Rhee. This plan was based upon a naked gerrymandering that would have allowed the Southern regime to supervise the election, bringing the North under its jurisdiction. Subsequently, U.S. unwillingness to tolerate free elections would become widely recognized, infamously in Vietnam and literally all across Latin America.

When OnContact host Chris Hedges interviewed Professor of International Law Richard Falk regarding his experience with the power elite in the early days of the Vietnam War, Falk recalls that since it was important to the liberal sensibility of the day to reconcile foreign policy with international law, it became necessary for policymakers to stretch and manipulate its interpretation rather than to acknowledge that their geopolitical strategies transcended law. Dr. Falk goes on to comment that it was customary among his liberal Ivy League colleagues to sell their souls to centers of power, and he emphasizes their inability to resist being useful in these circles by remarking that they were waiting for the phone to ring.

***

In 1957, I.F. Stone castigated American liberals for having abdicated their responsibility in dealing with military spending. A report by liberals in response to Eisenhowers proposed budget had treated the Pentagon as a sacred cow and produced statistics arguing that real military spending as a percentage of total national production had fallen by 31 percent. The report concluded by asking, wink-wink, whether we are risking our lives by these slashes. Stone concludes: It is a melancholy day for American liberalism when its leading spokesmen act as a sounding board for the military budget makers. Yet there they were. Today, we recognize the penchant of liberals to give more to presidents for defense budgets than they actually request as a ritual de lo habitual.

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Liberalism and the Morality of War - CounterPunch.org - CounterPunch