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Winter 2001
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Comments of the President
By Robert J. Loewenberg
Politics and Policy
Zev Golan and Alvin
Rabushka, and our Koret Fellows, predicted five years ago that then first-term
MK Silvan Shalom was someone important for IASPS to work with - he was one of
those rare politicians who knows that policy, a thing that is intellectually
distinct from politics, is part of the more ultimate distinction between tyranny
and freedom.
I can tell you what
this means easily enough by an example from another set of predictions we made
before the peace process began officially in 1993.
Wrong
Approach
We did a study three years before Oslo called "Can Israel Survive a Palestinian
State?" (Our answer, incidentally, was and remains a resounding NO.) One of our
participants, who agreed with us, nonetheless said of the peace process
discussion at that time (on page 115 of our study): "Remember: in politics, to
be early is to be wrong....The existing policy [the peace process] will be
pursued for another year or two....Those in the opposition...have little choice
but to sit aside and watch....Obviously, even those in disagreement with [the
peace process] wish it to succeed."
Here is a perfect example of the wrong approach to the distinction between politics and policy (and tyranny and freedom). Too many people in our business take this approach. But it is clear that the writer's prediction was wrong and his advice to policy analysts was wrong. Most of all his "wish" that the peace process would "succeed" was the source of his errors. The peace process should not have succeeded. But exactly the failure to separate policy and politics or fearing to be out of step with the crowd ("to be wrong") is where the connection between freedom and tyranny hooks into the distinction between politics and policy. How?
The right policy view at that time is the one that saw the policy of the peace process for what it was: it was (and now is, for example in the acts of Israel's recent foreign minister Shlomo Ben Ami and, before him, in Mr. Peres about to be foreign minister again) a policy the success of which would have the effect of replacing the "existential" leadership of the Jews in Israel with a government of Jews that represented the Arabs. Moreover, and this now 11-year-old prediction is apparent today, these Jewish representatives, relying still upon aid and free money, would destroy the Jewish state, e.g., with a "democratic multinational state." Thus we said the result of Labor or Likud politics would be the same. (Consider Mr. Sharon's first act before his government took power was to send socialist "businessman" Zalman Shoval to America for $450 million, to pay for Israel's huge consumption deficit ($554 in January) in the face of Israel's present worse-than-usual economic crisis.)
The first and
ultimate lesson in policy is to predict what a policy will produce - not
irresponsible and loose words about how a bad policy might last "for another
year or two." Peace was not the aim of the peace process but the consequence of
aid-based socialism which had in turn made Israel's demographic decline
inevitable, this being what produced the peace process as yet another
instrument, a "gimmick" as we called it, for aid.
Voegelin
The great scholar of policy properly so-called, Eric Voegelin, explained what
our only business is in policy scholarship. "No one is obliged to take part in
the spiritual crisis of a society; on the contrary, everyone is obliged to avoid
this folly and live his life in order." And so the answer to the question that
is raised by our little introduction to Silvan Shalom or how do the distinctions
between policy and politics on one side and freedom and tyranny on the other
side hook into each other is this. Those who think that policy is supposed to be
based on the easy relativism of democracies so that the grounding distinction of
policy (between Is and Ought) is set aside in favor of not being wrong about the
facts wind up being wrong on the facts and wrong on what's true about what's
right.
Right
Approach
As for the great truth about right in the peace process policy - and Laborites
were, some of them, as right about this as Likudites, most of them - it was that
national existence is the main one of policy today even though, and especially
in Israel and among Jews, the opposite untruth dominates. The untruth is that
nations are an "option" and a bad one at that. MK Shalom was clear about the
necessity to preserve Israel from a withering peace process against national
existence itself. He saw this. But, and this is the most important thing because
the peace process blurred the real right and wrong of what was at stake, he
realized that national existence in Israel was threatened most of all by
socialism more than by its "cleanup crew," the Arabs.
Some of our
Fellows and MK Shalom may have been of different parties and perhaps of
different opinions about the peace process, too. But they saw in him that rare
devotion to policy and freedom that politicians, and of course policy analysts,
too, sacrifice to going with the crowd.
Think
Tanks
It was useful they did this, first for our program. Koret Fellow Sharona Erlich
and other Fellows helped the Institute to introduce in an open way the central
teaching of the think tank community in the U.S. and England in the late ‘50s.
The early think tanks, many of them free-market shops, were responding to the
political class - especially in the universities, bureaucracies and
communications, all of which have grown worse respecting the main point that
follows here. These institutions were then advising governments and others who
said that totalitarianism was the result of nation states and the balance of
power. These were only "options," they said, not the order of things. The crowd
then and now had taken up the New World Order crusade begun in 1917-1918 by
Wilson. Democracy, he said, little realizing perhaps he meant the end of freedom
and national existence, will make it possible for us (the political class) to
replace states and the balance of power with a single world state; what outgoing
U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbot just this January called an
inevitable and welcome "single global authority."
But think tank
founders said - What are communism and fascism if not "single world state"
programs? Or, as Sharona Erlich probably thought of it, what are the prospects
for freedom without markets? They may be "global" but they cannot also be truly
markets in the absence of differences among groups of people, the differences
that find their expression in "the largest human bodies" or nations.
