Fascinating post Paddy. I read the NYT's article reviewing Obama's performance as a Law School Senior Lecturer with interest. It seems to me he employed a Socratic line of questioning in his classes, allowing the students to think, and to challenge their own thinking as they informed themselves. Imagine a Cabinet meeting where Obama asks provocative questions or weaves a scenario for them to address to smoke out unintendeded consequences before a recommendation becomes policy. Like the Kerns Goodwin book, "Team of Rivals" I expect Obama to seat a Cabinet that has very different view points.I expect better and more pragmatic decisions from the Obama presidency. What do you think Paddy?

Brzezinski is not a neo-con. He thinks they're blockheads.

He's been yelling at Obama for the past several months about not getting "entangled" in Afghanistan like the Russians did, and he should know about that one.

Anyhow, I disagree with him on Afghanistan this time around, and so does Obama, and so do the troops and combat anthropologists on the ground.

(Love the concept of combat anthropologists).

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Obama may be the first president to not have a definition of where "The Wogs" start. Churchill famously said they start at Dover, Lou Dobbs thinks they start at El Paso, The Indians think they start at the Pakistani border, Rich Lowry thinks they start in Berlin, and the Bushies think they start at the White House gate.

Anyhow, this one's about domestic policy mostly. Kind of a different psychological difference in approaches.....

There was an earthquake a few years back and in NW Pakistan, villagers were surprised and delighted to see American helicopters and trucks delivering medical supplies, potable water, and food to remote dwellings isolated by rockslides etcetera.

A lot of good will was generated between aid providers and the very same guys that are currently shooting at our troops over there. As was pointed out upthread, these guys have beaten back and worn out invaders from the time of Alexander on......but doesn't anyone else see strategies here for peaceful interaction and bringing them into the world community so they can refocus on the important things in life like Big Macs and Gap Jeans?

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I've read Strauss, the PNAC Manifesto, The Prince, Sun Tzu, and as much Brzezinski as I need to. So has Obama. I've also been pretty diligent about reading Obama himself, and I really like what I'm seeing so far, especially that he continues to confound the Box Builders on the Left and Right.

It's at least possible that we might have a guy here who will be beholden to neither the Neo-Cons, the Paleo-Cons, the Passive Aggressors, or the Euroditherers. If that's the case, we could see foreign policy and world peace gains unlike anything since the end of WWII.

I'm able to imagine a president who will make decisions based on what's best for the world without needing to fudge policy to accommodate The Carlyle Group, United Fruit, Coca-Cola, Halliburton, and so on. One precondition for such a guy would be that he be minimally beholden to these interests upon assuming office.

This presidential candidate might tell you his intentions and some keyboard commando might write up the parts he finds especially fascinating and emblematic of the ballyhooed Change we keep hearing about.

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Whereas really smart guys like Clinton or really indifferent guys like Bush seem to cede whole swaths of their agendas to key advisers, I've seem zero evidence that Obama is similarly myopic. Quite the contrary. He seems to pick little bits of useful stuff from a broad range of advisers and synthesize something that goes beyond previous established thought in a particular discipline.

That's why I HOPE for positive CHANGE.

Why do you think that he ain't the guy?

Murph,

Aren't you cherry picking a bit here? Obama's foreign policy team also includes Susan Rice, Samantha Powers, and Tony Lake. Do you think any one of these can even be remotely characterized as a neo-con?

Brzezinski also opposed the initial aggression in Iraq and has consistently argued for getting out ASAP. In this respect his self-proclaimed "realism" allows him to be what he'd no doubt call "hard-headed" (meant in a good sense) about the speculations as to consequences for Iraqi civil conflict, as in "we can't afford to let that be our problem."

The folks Paul cites are all "liberal interventionists." Brzezinski probably argues against them.

Liberal interventionism might mean some good things in certain kinds of genocidal situations, but also can be a path to imperial adventurism. A great deal of the British and French conquest in late 19th and early 20th century Africa was made in the name of suppressing Muslim-run slave trades, and/or internal slavery producing plantation crops for export to Europe (palm oil for Palmolive and Pears Soaps, e.g.) that developed when slave exports to New World plantations were largely cut off. In point of fact, once the British and French were on the ground, their need for governance on the cheap led them to ally with local elites and to be very reluctant to intervene at all in local slavery & labor arrangements; even after formal abolition laws were passed, they were often not enforced.

The point is that "liberal interventionism" will often end up working in similar ways in the present.

Apparently Samantha Power married the "law and (behavioral) economics" maven Cass Sunstein on the Fourth of July this year.

On "behavioral economics," I think this term is pretty funny since mainstream marginal utility economics is nothing but an impoverished theory of human psychology and behavior anyway. What kind of economics isn't behavioral?

NYTimes economics blogger ("Freakonomics" column) Steven D. Levitt disagrees that "behavioral economics" is about incentives. He writes:

The main point of [Sunstein and Richard Thaler's behavioral economics advocacy book Nudge] is as follows: Since people don’t think very hard about the choices they make, it is a lot easier to trick them into doing what you want than to try to educate them or incentivize them to change their behavior. There are many ways to trick people, but one of the easiest is simply by giving thought to the way choices are arrayed to them, or what they [Sunstein and Thaler] call “choice architecture."

N.B. -- trick rather than incentivize.

Which seems to bring us back rather closer to the Straussian heritage of "the noble lie," Plato's Guardians (philosopher subset) performing shadow theater for the hoi polloi who are inherently unequipped to handle the light of Truth etc. In which light the seeming oxymoron of "libertarian paternalism" also takes on a rather Straussian cast -- if not simply a Platonic shadow in the cave itself, then perhaps one of the figures held up by the Guardians to cast the shadows.

The prospect of Cass Sunstein as Obama's putative first choice for the Supreme Court does not make me at all happy, despite some of his domestic views (see below), because of his positions on the constitutional crisis created by Bush's illegal usurpations and exercise of power, under spurious interpretations of the commander-in-chief's prerogatives that in essence purport to place the president above the law and the constitution.

Sunstein supports much if not all of this spurious doctrine. This is troubling in two respects. Whether on the court or not, Sunstein clearly has Barack Obama's ear. Comparison of his views on FISA with what Obama has said to justify reneging on his promise to support a filibuster of any telecom immunity bill strongly suggests that it was Sunstein who persuaded him to vote as he did.

So, even if Sunstein were not appointed to the Supreme Court, how else might he influence Obama away from his promises to reverse himself or support Congressional reversal of Bush's illegal executive power grabs?

If he were appointed to the Court, his views make it seem likely that he would join in with the conservative bloc in their perspectives on deference to the president as commander-in-chief and their exaltation of that military-imperial role. Rather than a help in resolving the constitutional crisis in favor of the actual constitution and restoration of the balance of powers, he appears likely to be a force to entrench Bush's erosion of democratic republican civil liberties and the apotheosis of the unconstitutional powers of executive securocrats.

This is a pity, because his views on domestic rights seem to be quite good. He advocates for the (legislative) enactment of Franklin Roosevelt's proposed "Second Bill of Rights" (in his 1944 inaugural address): A job with a living wage, freedom from unfair competition and monopolies, homeownership, medical care, education, recreation.

Much of this corresponds to what international human rights advocates call "third generation human rights," the first generation being the kind of republican civil liberties embodied in the Bill of Rights or the Declaration of the Rights of Man, and the second generation being those embodied in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights & places like the Geneva Conventions.

But his views on presidential power, the constitution and the subordination of civil liberties to national security claims and secrecy make him anathema to me as a potential Supreme Court justice, or federal judge on any level actually.

That in turn substantially weakens the main basis for my personal support for Barack Obama, which has been seeing a strong contrast between Obama and McCain in terms of their implications for the future of the courts. The prospect of a Sunstein appointment makes that contrast much murkier.

Now I am concerned that Obama may prove to be as much the Democratic ratifier of the Bush commander-in-chief powers coup as Bill Clinton proved to be of Reaganite domestic policy presumptions and reasoning.

Scams and Straussian manipulation acknowledged and Levitt's right on the money of course, but when we're dealing with a huge swath of the electorate that absolutely refuses to inform themselves, what should we do?

I know that for the past four decades, progressives have eschewed deception in favor of education. That, if anything, is the central focus of croups like ROP and the Bus Project. I salute them for their efforts and for the concrete results that they've gotten, but they're still only reaching a tiny fraction of the voters with the specific message of citizen involvement based on educated and informed choices.

For the rest, there's either Toby Keith and Sean Hannity or Behavioural Economics.

I'm sick of being the One Legged Man in the Ass Kicking Contest.

Ted has a very peculiar and mistaken view of history. "The financial centers of Europe and America" so "swooned" over the Soviet Union that they backed their governments in invading it, unsuccessfully, to side with the anti-Soviet Whites in the Russian Civil War that followed the revolution.

Leo Strauss was never a Trotskyist. His intellectual interlocutors included the independent leftist Hannah Arendt and the Nazi-murdered Communist intellectual & literary critic Walter Benjamin, as well as the right-wing authoritarian Carl Schmitt and the philosopher Martin Heidegger, who was an actual member of the Nazi party, with whom Strauss studied, though Strauss left Germany with the rise of Nazism and was for a long time at the New School for Social Research, founded by refugees from Nazism. He just can't be labeled easily in those kinds of political terms.

James Burnham was in the 1930s, broke with the main Trotskyist party, the Socialist Workers' Party, in 1940 over the Soviet invasion of Finland, then ceased to be a communist altogether and joined the OSS during World War II, being vigorously anti-communist from then on.

A considerable thread of neo-cons were connected with a faction that broke with the SWP at the same time and formed the Workers' Party around Max Schactman, which eventually entered into the Socialist Party of Norman Thomas. Some, like Irving Kristol, left relatively soon thereafter. Jeanne Kirkpatrick apparently had a short youthful affiliation in the mid 1940s. Others stayed in until the SP split over Vietnam, when many who became neo-cons formed Social Democrats, USA.

The Schactmanites formed part of what became known as "the third camp," rejecting both Washington and Moscow in international matters, and the orthodox Trotskyist position of critical support for the Soviet Union. They had an anti-Soviet position consistently and formed a key source for the Cold War AFL-CIO anti-communism, support for the Vietnam war etc., through people like Tom Kahn.

Most of the Schactmanites also worked inside the Democratic Party. Many worked for Hubert Humphrey and then for Henry Jackson for President in 1972, where they linked up with others like Elliott Abrams, who never had been in any sense a Trotskyist.

The Jackson campaign may be the single largest common denominator for the foreign policy neo-con first generation (much of the younger generation being their children), with migration of many to the Republicans beginning with sitting out the 1972 general or supporting Nixon over McGovern over Vietnam. The movement was accelerated as that grouping formed the core of "The Committee on the Present Danger" opposing Carter's foreign policy in the mid-late 1970s.

In any case, none of those people were in any meaningful sense Trotskyists after the Workers' Party went into the Socialist Party (which was not only anti-Stalinist, but anti-communist entirely) in 1958.