Going into its third week, the Trump administration’s flood of shoot-first-ask (or don’t)-questions-later orders continues to set the pace and tone of political discourse. That tone, of all-out bipolar political warfare, also continues our “bipartisan” conflation of policy content with institutional structures.
The dismantling of AID forms Exhibit A. A primary objection to Elon Musk’s moves to eliminate the agency cites the benefits of foreign aid. But providing foreign aid and maintaining AID are not identical matters. True, AID is the current administrator of its programs and current moves will disrupt them all, at great cost to recipients and in some cases to US policy goals. But there are two issues here.
On the one hand, we need to determine whether we want to offer foreign aid, and, importantly, to what ends. No one has even broached, for decades, how much we want to give foreign assistance for humanitarian relief abroad, development assistance for other societies, geopolitical carrots to defuse tensions or cement friendships, campaigns to promote virtues from democracy to freedom of religion, defenses to keep diseases from spreading to our shores, or anything else. Beyond the simplistic politicized hollering match over providing aid at all, we have not addressed those choices.
And on the other hand, there is the question of who is to administer any aid we determine it our interest to offer. People who work at AID, or benefit from it, often see the two as a single matter, and in terms of any given program or grant, the demise of AID may also mean the demise of their program or interest. But for the nation, the questions are separate. AID itself, cited by Secretary of State Rubio as a “non-responsive” agency, has been decried by left and right alike, at different times. Policy and foreign relations workers, your blogger included, have chafed at the agency’s inflexible processes, distortions of ideas put to them for consideration, and slanting of policy deliberation to promote favored contractors.
The agency also fits, too neatly, into an old image of “defense, diplomacy and development” as three co-equal “legs of a stool” that constitutes US foreign policy. Those “three Ds” reflect only a particular assumption of ‘how US foreign policy works,’ and beg the question of new political leaderships’ potential interest – now real – in changing that process. Development assistance, we may decide if we ever engage such questions, now should give way to “carrots” to enhance our diplomacy. As one example. Active choice on such lines has been precluded by ongoing habits of AID practice, not policy deliberation.
Conversely, the move to eliminate AID also conflates those same issues, and could destroy a tool of foreign policy, setting a diplomatic tone that risks our geopolitical position, and dismantling measures that might keep, say, ebola contained on other continents. The initiative also has started far down an action path without ascertaining its legality. Yes, major and needed changes sometimes call for shooting first and checking later, but clear objectives and constitutional government matter. Opposition on those grounds, though likely tied to partisan goals, is legitimate outside of the partisan content.
The spirit of conflation of interests extends to almost everything, as a result of our polarization. A social media post (no link– privacy matters today) equates opposition to “DEI” with opposition to diversity, equity and inclusion. But there is a practice of “DEI” that is distinct from those values, and it is entirely possible to favor all three and still oppose “DEI.” Conflating them then enables people who oppose diversity, or equity, or the inclusions that the advocates favor, to denounce them all together. Far better, it would seem, to enforce against unfair discrimination based on inherited characteristics than to impose outcomes in hiring or spending or regulation based precisely on those same inherited characteristics. Focus on the values in themselves, and let the acronym go, on all sides.
The same applies on many other issues. Imposing tariffs as punishment for fentanyl – or opposing them as inflationary, in neither case considers the effects on foreign relations, on actual employment, or any other matter. Or, in the prior administration, blocking the Nippon Steel acquisition of US Steel on contrived national security grounds to obtain some political goal. As Peggy Noonan puts it, “in our politics now we consistently go too far and ask too much … It manifests in a kind of ideological maximalism. You must get everything you want and grant your foe nothing. “
At bottom, this attitude of our bipolar politics shows practitioners focused on their partisan duopoly more than on the country. They have carved out opposing doctrines that they paint as fundamental, expropriating buzz words of “freedom,” “corruption,” “democracy,” and thus depriving those terms of independent meaning. Our only recourse is, each of us, to start seeing the pols as children squabbling in their own sandbox. The actual fundamentals, the standard for our true values, still come from the same font for all of us. The nation conceived itself in the truths of individual rights and government that exists to secure them. It is an abstract creed, so does admit of the various interpretations of its terms, and various means to nurture us in its ends. The politicians play that, subordinate, game. It is up to us to maintain our larger comity, and keep them in that context.
Common Conviction 