So I was away last week, up in the mountains, and I missed a lot of the late scrimmage over the usefulness or lack of same of the "foreign policy clerisy," whatever the hell that is when it's at home.
But since nobody seems to agree on just what the term means exactly, even those to whom it obviously applies using any sort of halfway reasonable Potter Stewart test, I guess I don't feel so left out just because I spent several days with the lake bass laughing at me over my weak angling skillz. Rob Farley suggests that what is really meant by the "foreign policy community" is the "military intervention community," which is helpful in narrowing down the concept, but I'm not sure really gets to the nut of the biscuit, as it were.
It seems to me that the specific group of assholes the "lefty bloggers" are pissed off at are those members of the permanently installed opining class who have Influential Idea-Man Status in the worlds of academia, media, and politics simultaneously -- if not necessarily in the form of a direct relationship in the form of paycheck-collection, at least in the sense that members of this class are thoroughly at home in each of these worlds (or at least important sections of them) and that their standing in each tends to reinforce and enhance their standing in the others.
The poster boy for this sort of professional miscegenation is of course noted horrible jackass Michael O'Hanlon, who is apparently every bit as firmly ensconced inside the Washington foreign policy establishment as his head is ensconced up his tuckus. Despite being clearly wrong and dishonest, O'Hanlon continues to be taken seriously. Why? Well, it's kind of a round-robin thing. From an academic perspective, his now-notorious co-written op-ed may be fact-challenged ideological crap, but it was published in the WaPo, so that's pretty prestigious. From a journalistic perspective, the piece is laughable -- a liberal war critic, my bright pasty ass -- but then, the man does have the ear of prominent politicians, so we'd better listen to him. From a political perspective, taking the advice of this buffoon would be suicidal, but, you know, he does hold the Ignatius Q. Wankypants Distinguished Chair at the Brookings Institutional Home for Incredibly Serious Thinker Dudes, so I guess you can't go wrong there....
You see the problem. If we've come to quite rightly deplore the collapse of the theoretical barrier between politics and journalism (Fox News!), we're also quite right to be annoyed by the collapse of the barrier between academia and the political & media fields. Matt Yglesias caused a lot of squawking when he touched this sore spot:
One is not supposed to question the motives of members of the foreign policy community.... insinuate that leading foreign policy analysts are driven in part by careerism and not just determined pursuit of the truth, and people get the vapors.
And the vapors emanated thusly:
many of the people at Brookings or CSIS or other top think-tanks are fully as noble, disinterested, serious-minded, and knowledgeable as the best people inside the system, and the notion that they’re not is just cheap cynicism. [Finally], the idea that there is some Chinese wall separating the professionals inside the system from those outside it is just silly: the higher ranks of the bureaucracies are filled with political appointees, many outside experts have extensive experience inside the system, and the good people in all places tend to know and respect each other.
Which rather spectacularly misses the point. The notion that think-tank employees are "disinterested" doesn't really make much sense when you consider what think-tanks actually are intended for in the first place -- to push for specific policy agendas. No doubt many of these employees are "noble." But they also have a strong incentive to not mess with the institutional line. And there's nothing wrong with that. Even political partisans, eek, can be right, you know.
These are fairly banal observations, or would be, anyway, were it not for the hysterical and faintly ludicrous counterclaims to "disinterest." Such claims actually point straight to the heart of the problem. There obviously are powerful incentives for members of the permanently installed think-tank opining class, and none of these is more powerful or tempting than the benefits of getting on teevee all the time to be celebrated as an expert. And if there is one thing that defines the TV expert's true expertise, it is the expertise of knowing what to say and how to say it so you keep getting invited back on the teevee. Knowledge of what you're actually talking about, not so much.
And it is this system of rewards for insiderism, of knowing how to play the game, that has produced the bad odor in which the "foreign policy clerisy" is now held. It's not just that O'Hanlon and Pollack and the like have faced no accountability moment, it's that they continue to be actively rewarded. It's systemic, institutionalized rot.
So, Shorter Thers: Hey, Democracy Arsenal kidz! Relax, us unhinged vitriolic lefty bloggers don't hate everyone in the Very Serious Foreign Policy Community!
We only hate the ones who are always on the teevee constantly talking absolute shit.
(And if you want to do something useful in the form of reconciliation, you need to yell at these people for talking absolute shit, because Civil Debate has kind of, um, not fucking worked.)