You can't reason with extremists, you can only understand them and act on that understanding. We've created a situation in which there are quite a few people at home and abroad who distrust everything we say, and our illusions hurt us more as time goes on. In a sense I'm agreeing with the author of Imperial Hubris, but he offers us a choice, and I've already made it. I'd rather get blown up than live in a fortress, and I accept the risk that freedom necessitates. Muller and others should be making that defense of our liberties but he won't; he's too committed to the assumption that we already represent such notions of justice to the rest of the world. I'd argue, along with many others- none of whom will ever appear on Eugene Volokh's webpage- that we don't represent justice, and never have except at times to that changeling we call ourselves. We are a democracy of sorts at home and an empire abroad. Many people argue now that we need to be an empire at home as well. The logical response is to say that we need to be less of an empire in all places, but neither Eric Muller nor John Kerry will make that argument.
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Not all liberals are the same, however, there's a difference between blindness and occluded vision. Brad DeLong, who doesn't see too well himself, nonetheless offers the teenage philosopher a pair of glasses. I hope they do some good.
Matthew Yglesias is puzzled, and says something odd:TAPPED: August 2004 Archives: At the appropriate level of abstraction, the neocons couldn't be more right about this stuff, but when it comes to actually getting it done their policies have been a miserable failure.Yglesias believes that the words the neoconservatives spout are right "at the appropriate level of abstraction" because he is not yet old enough to have recognized that when neoconservatives use words, they do not mean what Yglesias thinks they mean.
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