In April of this year, Compact published The Poverty of Anti-Imperialism by Djene Rhys Bajalan. I read the essay with much interest and much agreement—above all, agreement on Bajalan’s most important practical conclusion, that “the core of [our] opposition to American empire” ought to be based on resisting “the military-industrial complex’s chokehold over American society.” Or, as I would put it, imperialism abroad becomes imperialism at home; the military-industrial complex is a particularly prominent part of our unconstitutional, anti-republican administrative state; if we are to slow or even reverse the corruption of our regime, we must deconstruct the MIC.
But I also found myself criticizing Bajalan for not sufficiently freeing himself from the moral basis for the American Empire’s humanitarian imperialism. His critical work was sound; his practical conclusion was very close to my own; but the best justification for reaching that conclusion was, to my mind, missing. So I wrote a response, A Richer Anti-Imperialism, for The American Conservative, in which I proposed John Quincy Adams as an eloquent source for an alternative foundation for foreign policy, one that would issue in a more just, less cruel, more restrained, less hubristic, more republican, less imperial, more nationalist, less globalist, more USA, less GAE approach to foreign affairs.
Bajalan was kind enough to read my critique and invite me on his podcast to discuss our two articles. Here’s our conversation:
As you will immediately learn from the podcast title (This Is Revolution) and the video’s intro (featuring lots of videos of murderous Commies—mostly looking rather chic, I must admit), Bajalan is a man of the left. I, to say the least, am not. Which made for an interesting discussion, in which both of us stated our conclusions about American imperialism, and articulated the distinct lines of reasoning, from rather different premises, that led us to such similar practical conclusions.
What do a socialist (of some kind) and a conservative (of some kind) have in common in their critiques of the American imperium? Tune in to find out.
All this is an example of an emerging foreign policy horseshoe, at least among those of us who teach, talk, and write for a living. Will it become effective in our policy? I hope so, but I make no predictions. That really wasn’t our focus in the discussion, and I have little to add on that topic now. But I will add a few follow-ups to the conversation.
Thanks, Djene, for your graciousness in hosting and leading our conversation. It’s refreshing to be able to sit down with someone with whom I frankly diverge on many vital questions, and work to articulate what we do and do not agree on—all in a spirit of collegial, cooperative inquiry. (Readers: if you’d like, you can find him on Twitter @djenebajalan.)
There are several points Bajalan made that I might have responded to (or at least registered my disagreement with) but did not, due to the flow of the conversation and the focus of our topic: namely, his characterization of the American Founding and his response to my reference to Tocqueville. Regarding Tocqueville: I did a poor job of introducing Tocqueville into the conversation, as I made it sound like his comments in Democracy in America were a criticism of a leftist concern for equality rather than a criticism of the democratic epoch’s love of equality. Oh, well.
Regarding the Founding: I’m not convinced either of its “radical” Enlightenment character or that it contained within itself the self-contradictions indicated by Bajalan. But “the character of the Founding” is a topic of many, many ongoing arguments and many, many volumes of scholarship. All I can add here is a simple, unsatisfactory “That’s debatable, and I disagree.”
In the course of the conversation, I referenced my TAC essay on Eisenhower’s Farewell Address at 60.
I wish I had also referenced Arta Moeini’s Compact essay America: The Last Ideological Empire, a very helpful piece of analysis that places our “hyper-ideological response to the Ukraine crisis” in the context of the decline of the non-liberal 20th century universalist ideologies and the resurgence of realist, civilizational, cultural thinking in the 21st century.
Finally: I much prefer the podcast’s outro (for its visuals and its audio) to the intro. But I won’t spoil it for you!
Bravo!
Well done, Pavlos! Glad to see that intelligent discussion matters more than ideology or fervor-