The Worldly Appeal of Jon Huntsman, Jr.

The announcement of Jon Huntsman, Jr. that he will resign his post as U.S. Ambassador to China should by no means be taken lightly. After all, if Huntsman does indeed throw his hat in the ring for the 2012 Republican nomination – as is widely expected – he will be the only candidate in the race with any formidable experience in foreign policy and national security, let alone enough to go toe-to-toe with President Obama in the general election. Any way that you look at it, Huntsman’s résumé stands out head and shoulders above all of his GOP rivals.

If Republican primary voters and caucus-goers were to pledge their delegates on the same basis of experience and competency that most job-seekers are evaluated, this contest should be a no-brainer. So far there are already six current and former Governors expected to declare their candidacies in the Republican race; Mitt Romney, Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee, Tim Pawlenty, Haley Barbour, Mitch Daniels. So if Huntsman joins the pack then the 2012 debates could perhaps stand out to the delight of conservative policy wonks across the country as a great comparison of policies among seven different Republican administrations. Likely a number of these Republican Governors might cancel each other out fighting for the same constituencies (e.g. Huckabee and Barbour), and the candidate who can best demonstrate something unique about their breadth of experience and ability should set him or herself apart from the rest.

In a primary race so far dominated by Governors, foreign policy gravitas seems to be the one thing that every single candidate lacks – except of course Huntsman. This is a very big deal, especially for the Republicans which have branded themselves post-1945 as the party of the Cold War and the War on Terrorism. Historically, the GOP has been particularly inclined to nominate the candidate with the strongest claim to the national security establishment (e.g. Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, George H.W. Bush) or decorated veterans of foreign wars who translated their personal heroics into Senate leadership on military and foreign policy (Barry Goldwater, Bob Dole, John McCain). Even Gerald Ford served in the Navy in the Pacific Theater and served in the House and as Vice President as a dedicated internationalist. Reagan… well, at least he made war films for the USO…

For comparison, let’s take a look at Jon Huntsman, Jr.’s C.V.:

U.S. Ambassador to China
Governor of Utah
CEO, Huntsman Family Holdings Co.
Deputy U.S. Trade Representative
President, Huntsman Cancer Foundation
U.S. Ambassador to Singapore
Deputy Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Asia
White House Staff Assistant

Education: B.A. University of Pennsylvania

Skills: Fluent in Mandarin Chinese

In 2008, such a career profile might have made Huntsman an ideal candidate for Ambassador to the United Nations or Secretary of State in the McCain administration that might have been… Though in 2012, this swarthy record of accomplishment makes him the unparalleled leader of the GOP presidential aspirants in terms of doing anything at all outside of the confines of their home state.

Even George W. Bush's stint in the Texas Air National Guard dwarfs the military experience that can be claimed by every last declared or likely candidate for the Republican nomination in 2012. Only Mitt Romney among them has had any experience having worked and lived overseas having spent 30 months as a Mormon missionary to France - and Huntsman can match that with his Mormon mission to Taiwan, let alone his Ambassadorships to the People's Repubic of China and Singapore.

Indeed, some of the secondi-tier candidates from Congress, i.e. Newt Gingrich, John Thune, Rick Santorum, Ron Paul have taken the occasional vote on matters of war and peace. However, they remain certainly lacking in the kind of stature enjoyed by the likes of Goldwater, Dole or McCain when they ran for president. Writing the occasional Op-Ed on foreign policy to the Washington Post, on the American Enterprise Institute blog or on your Twitter account - or rather, ghost-written in your name - does not constitute foreign policy experience. Thusfar, in addition to Huntsman only current Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels has had any experience at all working in the executive branch – and let’s be honest, few except for professional politicos even know what the acronym OMB stands for let alone what Daniels did as its Director during the Bush administration.

Of course, lack of prior foreign policy experience does not preclude the possibility of a victorious presidential campaign or even a relatively-successful presidency on matters of foreign policy (Carter, Reagan, Clinton, Bush II); though it certainly helps in the effort to establish credibility in the minds of voters. Jon Huntsman, Jr.’s unique background as both a popular Governor as well as an accomplished diplomat and trade representative undoubtedly puts him at the top of my list for the GOP presidential nomination; if I were a Republican genuinely interested in demonstrating that my party is credible to lead America before the world, I would be doing everything I could to ensure a Jon Huntsman-Condoleeza Rice ticket in 2012.

To reinforce my point, let’s look at the highlights of the foreign policy backgrounds of the rest of the Republican presidential aspirants in 2012:

Mitt Romney – served as a Mormon missionary in France for 30 months, organized the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, wrote an Op-Ed piece in The Washington Post lambasting the bipartisanly-supported New START Treaty.

Sarah Palin – Governor of a state that shares a border with Canada; can see Russia from her house. As the GOP candidate for Vice President in 2008 Palin called for U.S. military intervention in Georgia against Russia, did not know what the Bush Doctrine was, demonstrated complete and utter ignorance on the most rudimentary basics of foreign affairs.

Tim Pawlenty – Governor of another state that shares a border with Canada; in 2004 the President of Mexico met with Pawlenty to announce the opening of a Mexican consulate in St. Paul so that Mexican citizens would not have to travel all the way to Chicago to process passport and visa applications.

Mike Huckabee – None whatsoever, though caused a stir as a GOP candidate in 2008 when he published a blatantly ghost-written article in Foreign Affairs magazine accusing the Bush administration of having an “arrogant bunker mentality”.

Haley Barbour – None whatsoever.

Mitch Daniels – As the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, Daniels served as the Bush administration’s point man to discredit then-Assistant to the President on Economic Policy Lawrence Lindsey estimate that Operation Iraqi Freedom would cost between $100 and $200 billion – Daniels toured the talk show circuit, stating that the war would in fact cost between $50 and $60 billion.

John Thune – Jonah Goldberg of Politico writes, “In many respects, Thune is the GOP version of John Kerry: a candidate with very presidential hair who seems 'electable' despite not having done much of anything." As a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Thune’s record has consisted of little more notable than voting to support the Bush administration’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and lobbying against the closure of Ellsworth Air Force Base – once a significant economic engine in South Dakota.

Newt Gingrich – As Speaker of the House from 1995-1998, Gingrich stymied the Clinton administration’s foreign policy by opposing the Clinton administration’s military inventions in Bosnia, Kosovo, Sudan and Afghanistan, ran Congressional resistance to the Oslo peace process and blocked funding for the United Nations. In recent years, Newt’s grandest foray into foreign affairs has largely consisted of his railing against the proposed “Ground Zero mosque” – in one notable instance comparing the establishment of an Islamic cultural center to Nazis demonstrating next to the Holocaust Museum.

Rudy Giuliani – As Mayor of New York City Giulani responded to the initial 1993 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center by establishing an emergency command center in its basement, later presided over the worst terrorist attack in the history of the United States, once expelled Yasser Arafat from a concert at Lincoln Center.

Rick Santorum – As a Senator from Pennsylvania Santorum voted for an end to the arms embargo and for the Clinton administration’s use of force in Bosnia, against the use of force in Kosovo, for the Bush administration’s use of force in Iraq and voted against a timetable for withdrawal. Santorum sponsored the Iran Freedom and Support Act which appropriated $10 million for regime change in Iran, and he was also one of only two Senators to vote against the confirmation of Robert Gates as Secretary of Defense.

Underdevelopment is a Universal Shame

As long as I’ve been alive to remember, not a whole lot has ever happened in my hometown of Vista, New York. Back when I was ten years old there was a big to-do when an Associated supermarket sprang up in our sole strip mall, but they shut their doors just a few years after it opened because our town’s demand for groceries was too small to keep a full-size supermarket in business. There was an Italian restaurant along a little pond behind the strip mall which couldn’t lure enough customers as it couldn’t be seen from the road, so it closed and a new manager set up a new Italian restaurant – which quickly went out of business, and that was replaced by a third Italian restaurant – which also went out of business. For a couple of years Vista boasted a carpet store – which just as soon as it opened up went out of business, and of all things a used sporting goods store – which lasted maybe six months before it too went bankrupt. The only real economic development that I can think of over my 22 years of knowing Vista is when the shopping center sprouted a shop for beers by the caseload and keg and a merchant of wines and hard liquors – to my understanding these businesses are thriving.



Vista is such a peripheral enclave of Westchester County in that we are too small to justify our own infrastructure – we have no train station, no library, not even a post office of our own, and still we are too far from the larger suburbs of Mt. Kisco, Bedford Hills or Katonah to make use of theirs. Until the Katonah-Lewisboro School District was carved out in the 1950s, Vista residents went to school in Connecticut. You see, Vista is so far from the larger suburbs of New York that for many practical purposes Vista residents had to leech off of the state next door. By the time cell phones became widely used in the late 1990s and 2000s, Verizon and Nextel built cell towers in all of the New York suburbs and all of the Connecticut suburbs, but Vista was so far between both that it couldn’t get reception from either. Vista is so distant and relatively isolated that if its residents wanted to be able to use cell phones anywhere within the 533 neighborhood code, the hamlet would have to built a cell tower of its own.

The lack of cell phone coverage in my bucolic hometown is quite a serious matter. All of the landline phones in my parents’ house are wireless, so when the power went out we had no functioning phone at all – though we would if our cell phones could find a signal. When an ice storm this past month turned our vital artery Rt. 123 into miles of bumper-to-bumper traffic, none of the commuters trapped in their cars could communicate with the outside world to tell them to avoid the road. Once when I was 16 years old I was pulling out of a parking lot and another driver raced around a blind corner and crashed into my side and my car spun out in a 720 degree turn until it plowed into a snow bank – though we both had cell phones, neither I nor the other driver could call out for help and we had to wait for someone to physically drive to the Fire Department to call in a police officer from their two-way radio. Especially for emergency situations, public safety in Vista is endangered by the lack of reliable communication infrastructure which exists just about everywhere else in the populated territory of the United States.

For more than a decade there has been considerable demand, and multiple plans have been orchestrated to put up a cell tower on the property of a church along the only considerable road in town. For years each plan has floundered, because town meetings on the subject were dominated by a coalition of overprotective soccer moms who were terrified by the fear that the radio waves emitted from a cell tower might stimulate cancerous growths in the healthy tissues of their children. Of course, medical researchers have yet to conduct any study linking cell towers and cancer; if anything¸ contemporary understanding of oncology suggests no reason for such a link to exist. Even the American Cancer Association espouses that since cell phone radio waves are of such low energy levels, the wavelengths of radio waves are so long, and the magnitude of exposure to radio waves emitted by cell towers is so insignificant compared to microwaves, televisions, radio sets and cell phones themselves that “cell phone antennas and towers are unlikely to cause cancer.”

Though the mantle of science and reason hasn’t stopped the Sheila Broflovsky’s of Vista from holding up progress. Even though the medical fallacy is gaining less traction, the voices of reaction now put up claims that a cell tower conflicts with “the wooded landscape and the rural character of the town”; in so many words, we can’t have modern technology which is all but necessary to do business and simply function in the world nowadays because some people are under the delusion that their suburb of the New York metropolitan area is in fact a clearing of log cabins in the Adirondacks.

The Town Hall debate was often re-enacted at our dinner table between my father (a psychiatrist) and mother (a real estate agent):

“I am licensed medical professional, and I can tell you that a cell tower is not going to give anyone cancer unless they were to lay down with their head directly next to the transmitter for 20 years! If people in this town are seriously worried about the level of radio waves emitted from a cell phone tower, then they shouldn’t put a cell phone next to their head, they shouldn’t stand next to their microwave oven, they shouldn’t ever listen to the radio in their car!”

“That doesn’t matter! The people of this town don’t want it!”

“Yes they do! Everyone in Vista has a cell phone, but they have to drive 30 minutes to the next town over to be able to make a call!”

“Well maybe we want a cell tower, but Not in My Back Yard! It’s going to be ugly and drive down home values!”

“Isn’t your business booming in all of the other towns? Maybe people value being able to actually talk to one another?”

“Some people just don’t want it, and everybody’s entitled to their own opinion. It’s a free country, isn’t it?”

“You know, one of my patients suffers from panic attacks every time she sees an Asian man in a pickup truck - maybe society should accomodate her phobia with a town ordinance prohibiting Asian men from driving pickups?"

When I’m sitting in my little Minianka village in the Malian bush and my parents call my Nokia cell phone via Skype, I find it hard to believe that the villagers of Vista are still debating about this. I find it even harder to believe that educated Americans in the year 2010 can be so terrified of technology that they don’t quite understand, and that their unfound fears are strong enough of a political force to prevent such unarguably necessary development. And I find it absolutely humiliating that I live in a village of mud huts and millet stalks with no electricity, no running water, no trash collection and no dirt trail worthy of the word “road” – but I have 5 bars of cell coverage 24 hours a day 7 days a week, and my parents in Vista, New York can’t even receive my text messages because my hometown has been for so many years too pigheaded to put up a cell tower.



My Minianka tribesmen neighbors are afraid of lots of things - they believe in witches and wizards and black magic, they are scared of frogs, goblins and demons I which supposedly wander the fields at night. But unlike the villagers of Vista, they aren't scared of cell phone towers. The people here are proud of their cell phone tower which dominates the skyline of one-story huts - to them it symbolizes progress and modernity, it demonstrates that their otherwise backwater village matters enough to have a place on the map.

The chief of my village is an old illiterate, toothless man named Abdoulaye Sogoba. He doesn't have a phone himself, but he still understands the value the service has for the rest of his neighbors and their market. In conversation, Abdoulaye let me understand how important is the cell tower of Sanadougou.

"Nowadays, phones are necessary to do business! No one can do any serious business without one!"

"But what about back in the days before Sanadougou had a tower built? Aren't you sad about the traditional way of life that is now lost?"

"Nothing has been lost! This change is only good for us! The time of not being able to speak with other villages is a thing of the past, it is time to move on."

"What about all of those other little villages that don't have cell towers? What do you think about them?"

"I feel pity for any village without a cell tower. Without a cell tower, the people cannot experience any development."

Development with a Healthy Dose of Conservatism

I would probably sound like too much of a cliché of myself if I were to tell you that this guy who spent his days until recently stomping his sandal-clad feet around campus, spouting incendiary rhetoric about Democracy and Socialism and rousing the masses to the barricades, has spent a year in the Peace Corps and has since been so violently mugged by the cruel realities of human nature that he has transformed into a Conservative.

So I’m not going to tell you that. It is very difficult for those of us who have come of age during the intellectual leadership of George W. Bush, Tom DeLay and Sarah Palin to respect Conservatism with a capitol “C” as a coherent ideology. To me and so many members of my generation, the history of the past decade has utterly discredited the movement which seeks to build a double-layered fence across the Mexican border, to amend the Constitution to ban same-sex marriage, to defend "real Americans" and Western civilization itself from illegal immigrants, homosexuals, atheists, French people and the United Nations. Especially in the midst of this prolonged recession, with their hostility to any sort of government intervention in anything to do with the economy asides from more tax cuts and more bailouts to the banks, the dogmatic amalgam of supply-side economics and right-wing Christian fundamentalism that is the American Conservative Movement is rapidly atrophying into an obscure cabal as completely divorced from matters of this world as is the Church of Scientology or Zoroastrianism.

But nevertheless, I must sheepishly admit that my after one year in the Peace Corps, my experience so far has made me substantially tempered my faith in our power to “remake the world anew”. Living in a real-life African village and seeing first-hand the innumerable failures of past governments and foreign NGOs to revolutionize Malian society, I have unintentionally come to terms with the fact that one can only do so much. If after two years I can walk from my house to the center of town without having to tiptoe around puddles of human waste, I will consider my service a roaring success. Not only have I come to appreciate the values of prudence and restraint, but experience has taught me that private property, capitalism and individual responsibility are remarkably more effective in achieving long-lasting institutional change than any socialist principles of collective ownership. It would be fair to say that I have become significantly more conservative with a lower-case “c”; as defined by Merriam-Webster:

“con•serv’a•tive, adj. 1. skeptical of change. 2. avoiding excesses. 3. of or relating to a political philosophy based on tradition and social stability, stressing established institutions, and preferring gradual development to abrupt change.”

To be a Peace Corps Volunteer in Mali is in many ways like being bashed over the head with a hardbound copy of Atlas Shrugged all day, every day after day after day. Part of it is for the first time in my life having my own house and plot of land which I can call my own, and being completely and utterly responsible for its upkeep (technically I don’t own the property, but we’ll get to that in a minute). Part of it is the realization which comes with biking way out into the bush where its just me, sand, trees and scrub as far as the eye can see and realizing that if I were to fall and crack my head open on a rock, no one is ever coming to get me. Technically there is the Peace Corps Medical Unit in Bamako – but that’s two provinces and 400 kilometers away. If I get a nasty cut, if my latrine is dirty, if my house is full of termites, no one else is going to do anything about it out of the generosity of their heart – I have no choice but to be completely responsible for maintaining my own health, my home and garden. In this neck of the world, it’s really every man for himself.

By no means can my sharp veer towards rugged individualism be attributed to my having adopted the values of my host culture. The Bambara society amongst which I currently reside is tremendously more communalistic than anything I have known in America – even the semester I lived in the Vegan cooperative house. Here in the village of Sanadougou, every man and every woman share almost every daily activity with their family; they plow their fields together, they plant their seeds together, they reap their harvest together and then the women cook it together, it is unthinkable that anyone would ever eat a single meal alone. Though the dugutigi assigns each plot to certain families as determined by their historical usage, the fields are officially held amongst the whole village. There are even a handful of fields which are explicitly shared, and every couple of weeks during rainy season a man marches through the streets beating a drum to hail all the men to till the commons. There is a significant degree of familial autonomy – the head of each household has their own indivisible property and is responsible for feeding his own progeny, but no Bambara man would ever his relatives go hungry while stores remain in his own granary. And since 90 percent of all the families in this town share the last name Sogoba, the traditional family safety net for all intents and purposes extends throughout this entire society.

That is not to say that Bambara society is a Socialist Utopia for the whole world to emulate. The sharing of food is a practice born out of evolutionary necessity in this culture where death by malnutrition if not outright starvation is fairly ordinary. If Boubacar sees that Amadou’s millet granary has gone empty, he is probably going to invite his neighbor to na duminike until the next harvest – not just because Boubacar is such a nice guy, but because he would like Amadou to reciprocate the next time that he suffers the same fate. If there were a few more months of precipitation, if agricultural production was more efficient and food were not so scarce to begin with, food-sharing might not be such an indispensable bedrock of Bambara culture.

There is a fair argument to be made that Mali is so poor, that the output of its primarily agrarian economy is so diminutive precisely because of the traditional practices of communal land ownership. There’s plenty of land, and there’s certainly no shortage of labor – but there is not enough capital to spur significant economic growth. Almost all planting and harvesting is conducted with simple manual plows, hoes and scythes made out of wood and iron; no matter how hard and how long a family works with such limited tools, it will always remain a challenge to eke out a subsistence diet – let alone see enough windfall profits to invest in new physical capital and expand agricultural output. In the history of American and European economic development, farmers were able to escape this poverty trap by using their real estate deeds as collateral to take out loans and invest in tractors, irrigation pumps and other machine tools which expanded yields many times over. But such innovation will forever remain elusive to Bambara farmers who have only the dugutigi’s word to their parcels of the communal fields, who technically have no landed property to their name, and will continue to be shut out from the credit which they need for investment and growth.

During the heady days after independence in 1960, the nationalist revolutionary President Modibo Keíta tried to take Mali’s communalistic ethos even further and institute a People’s Republic modeled after the Soviet Union and China. Keíta aimed to establish Malian Communism on the organic village level; every man was ordered to harvest a pre-assigned quota of millet which was to be stored in village-wide granaries – which were in turn distributed back to central granaries in the capitol city of Bamako, and then redistributed back to each village and to each individual in order to ensure a perfectly egalitarian division of wealth. It goes without saying that the government kept the lion’s share of each harvest for in Bamako for its own purposes, Communism eviscerated the private incentive for industry, millet production plummeted and famine was the order of the day. Since it was widely accepted that the only way for many individual subsistence farmers to survive Malian Communism was to shirk their national obligations and fend for themselves, the People’s Republic soon became a parody of itself. By 1968 it was clear to all that the centrally-planned economy was so mismanaged and public opinion had so turned against the Communist regime that Modibo Keíta was overthrown in a coup d’état led by General Moussa Traoré – who would dismantle the state-run agricultural economy and institute one of the World Bank’s first structural adjustment programs.

And yet the most jarring aspect of Malian culture to my Western bourgeois sensibilities is not this country’s land ownership practices or its short-lived membership in the Communist bloc, but something which I encounter at least every day I take public transport or walk down city streets. Here – as in all of Muslim West Africa – there exists a class of religious beggar-children known as "garabouts". Picture a 12-year-old boy, barefoot and gaunt, rushing to shove a plastic bucket in your face while mumbling some fusion of Bambara and Arabic “prayer”: Allah ka dumini di n ma/Allah ka I deme ka n kongo dogoya... There are blind men and widows begging for coins in every country without a welfare safety net. But the garabouts are different in that they are fully capable, able-bodied boys who should be in school learning how to be a productive member of society, or rather, in the fields with their fathers learning how to farm. Ostensibly, these garabouts are instead begging on the street in order to learn humility and submissiveness to their Lord as a part of their “Islamic education”.

I often find myself duly offended by these garabouts – and not just the ones who yank on my arm and scream Tubabu! Donne-moi un cadeau! It has less to do with religion than it has to do with child labor, slavery and exploitation. These pre-pubescents are not begging for money because they have chosen a life of poverty in order to be closer to Allah – they are begging because their “Quranic teacher” commands them to bring in a certain amount of cash each day with the threat of a stiff beating if they fail to deliver. The garabouts are assigned this Dickensian fate by their parents, some of whom sincerely believe the marabout who comes to their village and promises to teach their boys the way to enter Paradise. But a good portion of all garabouts are praying for coins because dad did the math and realized that this year’s harvest was too paltry to feed the mouths of his 17 children, and so he decided the time is right to send his sons to the closest city’s Quranic teacher. And thus a not-so-insignificant number of Malians use the institution of the garabout as a fig-leaf for their own lack of responsibility as parents, and to pass the buck for feeding their children onto society as a large – all under the respectable and even admirable pretense of “Islamic education”.

A problem of scarcity occurs not just when these garabouts are on the streets praying for subsistence farmers to part with the fruits of their labor – eventually, these beggar children grow up to be adults with wives and children of their own. And a lot of them seem to have taken home some valuable lessons from their “Islamic education”; namely, you don’t have to work to eat, you can just count on other people, and in the end Allah will figure it all out. Talking to so many farmers in my Malian village who spend eight months every year sitting, drinking tea and complaining about how poor they are, these guys know very well that they can plant a vegetable garden, but don’t bother because of such deep-seated fatalism and renunciation of control over their own destiny that has crippled their sense of personal initiative. “If Allah wants me to be poor, then that is his command.” “If Allah wants me to find money, then Allah will provide.”

The sense of fatalism and helplessness perpetuated in this society is downright jarring. There was one Peace Corps Volunteer who recently watched as her host father more or less let his daughter die of what was probably simple pneumonia. As the Volunteer noticed that this 5-year-old girl was having trouble breathing and her wheezing was becoming worse and worse, she suggested that the man give his daughter some medicine. “No, there is no medicine for this illness.” The Volunteer insisted that there was, and offered to pay for it. “No, Allah will heal her.” A few days later the girl was dead, drowned in her own mucous. The father concluded: “She is gone. Allah has taken her.”

What it all comes down to is that a good share of people in Mali are poor – not just because the government doesn’t provide enough social services or because they are being oppressed by Global Capitalism – but because they and/or their parents have made some really irresponsible decisions. In the past I have written about how overwhelmed I became after seeing my neighbors’ gaunt kids with their black rotten teeth and their bellies protruding with protein deficiency and realizing they looked so sickly that they probably wouldn’t make it through the year. I was so beset that at one point I considered buying a sack of beans and condensed milk and giving it to their poor parents. But my attitude changed after I saw that these kids’ dad had a brand new Yamaha motorcycle. And you can only imagine the sound system at the party a month later when this guy married his second wife. And they’re almost certainly going to have many, many more offspring. As callous as it sounds, for me to intervene and provide these children with protein and calcium would only further enable their father to blow his money on toys and parties.

The bleeding liberal in the left ventricle of my heart is inclined to giving money, write a check as a knee-jerk reaction. This attitude is nothing new; to my recollection, there was this Judean rabbi back in the day who healed the sick and gave eyesight to the blind, who gave a big sermon about giving alms to the poor, clothing the naked and feeding the hungry, and how this moral obligation of selflessness is so absolute that it is easier for a camel to go through a needle’s eye than for a rich man to enter Heaven and so anyone with surplus wealth must give it all to charity. Judging by the African development scene today, apparently a lot of people still believe that this is an effective means of conducting economic development.

It is difficult to drive down any major road in Mali for any considerable distance without passing by a school built by Christian NGO X, a water pump built by Muslim NGO Y, or a clinic built by International Relief Organization Z – the road itself was probably financed by the Belgian Embassy. When missionaries and secular-minded do-gooders parachute in for Spring Break, distribute medicine and shoes and soccer balls and candy, take the mandatory photo-op of themselves hugging skinny black children, and within a week or two hop on the next plane home, they can then brag about their superior worldliness to the Save the World Club and put another chit on their résumé to help with grad school applications. Due to the sense of satisfaction derived from building schools and handing out goodies to poor malnourished Africans, there is no shortage of humanitarian relief programs on the ground here.

There is a shortage, however, in any sort of humanitarian relief programs that do anything more than perpetuating the sense of helplessness and instilling a mindset of inferiority among the Malian people. Imagine how a typical Bambara millet farmer might feel when he has been breaking his back in the fields for months just trying to eke out enough grain to feed his family for the coming year – maybe if this year’s harvest was particularly bountiful he can buy them all a new pair of cheap plastic sandals – and he sees a bunch of white people drive up in an SUV, distribute brand-new Nike high-tops to all the kids in the village, and leave. He’s probably going to think “Hamd’allah! And to think that I was almost going to buy my kids shoes! How foolish of me! Now I can blow that money on tea and sugar!”

And a few years down the line when that Bambara millet farmer sees that his kids’ Nike high-tops have all fallen apart and they’re walking around in the mud barefoot again, do you think he’s going to buy his kids new pairs of shoes? “Of course not! I can just wait for the next SUV full of white people to come!” No one in this village is ever going to by their children shoes again.

The fact is that African subsistence farmers might be poor – but they sure aren’t stupid. They are rational beings who respond to economic incentives just as much as anyone in the developed West; rather, since they have so little, and the simple act of receiving a free pair of shoes is so relatively generous, they respond to these incentives much more dramatically than the bureaucrat sitting in an air-conditioned office on the Upper East Side might ever imagine. Oftentimes these perfectly benign donations can lead to the most sinister repercussions.

This is not a phenomenon unique to Western donors. There is a village by the name of Yelemani located way up in the desert near the Mauritanian border; the economics of this village are drastically different from that of most communities in Mali, because a few years back a number of local men went off to France to find jobs and by some stroke of luck they succeeded. The men of Yelemani all live together in a one-room apartment and they are doing menial labor and custodial work that no Frenchmen would ever want, but compared to the mud hovels and hand-to-mouth existence they knew before the blue collar life in Europe seems to good to be true. They can afford to eat meat and drink Coca-Colas and watch TV every day, and what’s more, they are making such a surplus that each year they can send a big wad of cash back to their families in Yelemani.

During the first few years that these Yelemani families were receiving remittances, the problem was not that their expatriate sons were insufficiently generous; in fact, it was that they were too generous. When their subsistence farming fathers who made monetary incomes of less than $400 a year went to the bank and received checks worth ten times what they could ever make cultivating millet and peanuts, they had so much money that they didn’t know what to do with it. So they splurged on motorcycles, TV sets, cell phones, iPods, and fancy new clothes for themselves and for their wives. Yelemanikaw felt so rich that they didn’t even bother going to the fields during rainy season. Of course, they burned through their fortunes quicker than you can say “MC Hammer”. By the time they realized this, their granaries were empty and it would be months until they could even start planting again. And their children, the little brothers and sisters of the men of Yelemani who had made it, they ended up far worse off than the children of those who were not receiving remittances – while the latter were merely malnourished, the intended beneficiaries of such a liberal cash infusion were literally starving to death.

The best/worst example of this half-baked liberalism is a building which I see almost every day, Le Jardin d’Enfants (kindergarten) built by a perfectly well-intentioned Christian NGO named WorldVision. In addition to two classrooms for three- and four-year-olds, they also built two latrines, a well and a playground complete with three swing sets and a merry-go-round. The benefit of this Jardin d’Enfants to the education of Sanadougou’s youth, acclimating these children to sitting in a structured environment classroom environment is beyond doubt. However, their inept attempts at construction and ensuring simple maintenance practically negate any social benefits which might accrue from the existence of a Jardin d’Enfants in the first place.

To begin, WorldVision told Sanadougoukaw quite explicitly that after a given period of time they would be gone and the people of this village would be wholly responsible for conducting and financing any maintenance themselves. Within a year, the hinges on the metal doors to each of the latrines and also the large double-doors to the entrance rusted to the point that they could hardly open. This problem could have easily been fixed if someone in town had been willing to pitch in some simple axel grease – but that costs money, and few people feel like donating above and beyond their taxes to pay for public education. So they just took all of the rusted doors off the hinges entirely.


The latrines happen to be placed in an end of the schoolyard where the kids like to play. Without doors to these latrines, any child who wants to urinate or defecate there during the school day has to do so in plain sight of his or her classmates.


WorldVision also failed to build a storm drain in the walls enclosing the schoolyard. We’re not talking about anything complicated here; all they had to do was put a little piece of plastic piping into the wall at the lowest point where rainwater flows - like in every single family's concession in Mali. This slight omission was a humongous mistake, because without a storm drain the torrential rainy season downpours would flood the schoolyard and turned it into a giant pen of mud. So a teacher at Le Jardin d’Enfants had to take a pickax and pound a makeshift storm drain into the wall. Of course, he overcompensated and knocked out a whole much too big to only let out water runoff. Now even when one teacher might be watching the front gate, the children can easily crawl out the storm drain.


Controlling the children’s free movement in and out of Le Jardin d’Enfants’ schoolyard is so very important for reasons of public health, because now that the kids are too scared to pull down their pants in the latrines without doors, they either scurry out the front gate or crawl through the storm drain and urinate and defecate behind the perimeter wall. When school is in session, this area is covered with the children’s feces.


As for the playground, since no one could lock the proper entrance with its doors off the hinges, adults were able to enter and exit at their own leisure and cut the chains which once composed the swing sets. And they lifted the merry-go-round off its rotor and sold it as scrap metal.



No one has ever asked me to help them buy a new playground. The people of Sanadougou never asked for a playground in the first place – kids here are content to play with sticks and rocks. The idea that children need thousands of dollars worth of playground equipment which then needs to be shipped from France for at least another thousand dollars certainly never originated in the mind of a Malian who provides for his family's livelihood with simple hoes, picks and plows which cost no more than a few dollars.

Every day when I walk out my garden in Sanadougou, I am greeted by the enormous 2,000 square meter dongeyuro - “dance hall” – which was also built by WorldVision. I can only surmise that they had a conversation with a couple of teenagers who complained that there was not a lot to do here on weekends – et le voila, local demand! So WorldVision shelled out about $20,000 and bought enough cement and rebar to build sustainable, sanitary latrines and conduct top-well repairs for perhaps 40 or 50 families, and instead the hired masons from out of town to build a dongeyuro. Over the course of the year that I have lived here, there has been exactly one single event held there. I really don’t know where to begin on this monstrosity of a cadeau...

One would like to think that maybe giving out presents could serve some societal benefit if they came with strings attached. I am told that WorldVision wanted to do something about female genital mutilation, so they organized a meeting with the bolokomuso – the lady who makes an income on the side as this village’s go-to gal for circumcising little girls’ clitorises with a shard of glass and thus rendering them “marriageable”. WorldVision asked the bolokomuso, “What tools do you want us to give you so that you can have a new source of revenue? If you promise to stop this horrid practice, we’ll give them to you.” She wanted a donkey cart, two donkeys and a big wad of cash. WorldVision gave them all to her. And do you think she stopped bringing girls out to the fields and hacking away at their vaginas? Of course not – it’s the only job she’s ever had.

Other development agents are more liberal than I. In the town of Tominian, an NGO – let’s call them Basketball Court-Builders without Borders – swooped in and realized that this town was severely lacking in its basketball-playing infrastructure. Everyone knows that black people love basketball! So they gave the people of Tominian – whose wells all go dry for a good quarter of each year – what they most certainly needed more than anything else: a basketball court. Within a few years, the blacktop weathered under the extreme elements into a hardly-recognizable remnant of itself. In time the rim and the backboard were unscrewed and sold as scrap.

By then, another NGO rolled into town and realized that the public basketball court was in shambles. Instead of conducting repairs, they decided to start from scratch and build a brand-new basketball court next to the vestiges of the old one. And it was only a matter of time until it too decayed and the men of Tominian – it was probably the same ones as before – unscrewed this new basketball rim and backboard to sell as scrap.

When the new Peace Corps Volunteer rolled into town and started looking for projects to organize, you can probably guess what the young men asked him, “Hey, can you help us build a new basketball court?”

I suppose that the most cursory rule of sustainable development which one can surmise from these anecdotes is that 1) Giving people toys is not development. Even without foreign NGO and development agency intervention, people in Mali are perfectly capable of entertaining themselves. It is already somewhat obscene to see how men who live in mud huts – who cannot provide their families with adequate water, food or medicine, whose children might wear the barest of rags on their backs if anything at all – can somehow manage to scrounge enough money to treat themselves to iPhones and televisions. Philanthropic-minded Westerners swooping into Africa and building playgrounds, soccer fields, basketball courts and dance halls only makes things worse by teaching people that they can get something for nothing, that white people are bottomless sources of money, and that if Tubabs are spending all their cash on big, expensive toys then we should just continue to do more of the same.

2) No one should ever be in the business of simply giving people money – with or without strings attached. Money is perfectly fungible, and even if an NGO distributes cash to be spent on basic necessities, it is just as much if not more likely to be blown on tea, sugar, cigarettes or an iPhone (and thus violating Rule #1). This might sound quite paternalistic – it is – but for all their shortcomings professionally-run charities tend to be much better at spending their money in a constructive manner than individuals who have no sense of budgeting or even the basics of a monetary economy. If you are for some reason adamant about giving directly to a particular individual, it is best to give in the form of an in-kind transfer such as tuition at a private school or credit at a cereal bank; i.e. something which cannot be traded for booze and cigarettes.

Malians and Africans in general need to spend less of their own money on toys and luxuries and spend more on basic necessities like nutritious food, mosquito nets and medicine. Though except in the direst of humanitarian crises - e.g. catastrophic droughts or refugee situations - 3. No one should be in the business of giving to people what they can provide for themselves. Once this precedent has been set, it is nearly impossible to undo. Direct handouts of basic goods completely distort incentives to such a degree that they undermine the natural market forces which need to play out on their own if there are ever to be functioning economies of these necessary commodities. What development agencies and NGOs need to be doing is not giving away the basic necessities of life, but establishing the durable infrastructure needed for Africans to be able to provide these things without any foreign assistance.

Since handing out free rice and mosquito nets distorts markets, you might think that the durable infrastructure which I describe as “sustainable” must be composed of permanent edifices made out of concrete which will last for decades. To a degree, yes, the work of an NGO which parachutes into Africa and builds a schoolhouse will probably benefit the people of Africa longer than a care package of calcium supplements. But even then such development must be taken with a grain of salt. With the erratic climate which shifts between scorching heat and dryness to torrential downpours, termite colonies so ferocious that they will eat through any organic material, unemployed youth ready to steal any materials that can be removed and sold at market, and of course the mobs of children who tend to manhandle the most important tools of public infrastructure as their playthings, here in Mali things really need to be made out of steel and concrete if they are ever going to last more than a few years. And even then, they would require constantly vigilant maintenance and upkeep.

Moreover, once the schoolhouse has been built, who is going to hold classes there? How is a village of 200 subsistence farmers supposed to pay for teacher? Who is going to pay for chalk and paper and pencils? And after a few years when the schoolhouse itself starts to wear and tear – even steel and concrete degrade over time – who is going to conduct the maintenance and repairs? Unless the schoolhouse-building NGO can adequately answer these questions, and if the answer to all of the above is not “the villagers themselves”, then that wonderful school they just built is going to remain empty, unused, and it will eventually be dismantled and sold for scrap or disintegrate into rubble on its own terms. Unless the local population is willing and able to manage this school themselves, it might as well have never been built.

So a year into my Peace Corps service, what do I think is the single best thing that foreigners can do to implement sustainable development in struggling countries like Mali? Waking up in the morning at the call to prayer and spending the rest of the day hoeing dirt and pulling weeds in my garden like every farmer in my village. Sanadougou has been downright spoiled by NGOs who pull up in SUVs, build schools, hand out cadeaux and leave. If I do anything in my two years here, I have made it my personal mission to fight tooth and nail that Tubabs are just a bunch of playboys so rich that we never work, that the only thing we should do is buy more presents. I see to it that when my neighbors walk by and see this hairy Tubab, 9 times out of 10 they see me caked in mud, toiling with a pick in hand.

If entanglement in foreign quagmires is inherently suspect, the most effective development work that Peace Corps Volunteers like me can possibly do is to simply do what the Malians are doing, just tweak their methods a little bit and demonstrate that there might be a new way of doing things a little bit better. Me tending my own banana trees doesn’t directly put any more bananas into the mouths of potassium-deprived children, but by doing so I have introduced this society to the wonders of Nafosoro pumps, drip irrigation and mulching. If I tend the banana trees so well that my Malian neighbors can see that I am producing more and better fruit, if my neighbors are so impressed that they take to these methods in their own garden, then insh’allah next season Sanadougou’s banana farmers might just see that their own banana trees produce greater yields. To date no one has yet to emulate my conservationist irrigation technologies, but I have seen that a couple of my friends have already adopted my compost rotation and urine fertilizer practices. And thus in a perfectly Jeffersonian fashion, the private gardens of Xanadu serve as a shining patch of sustainable water/waste management upon a hill.

And every once in a while when my orange or lemon trees bear fruit, after I have enjoyed consuming the fruits of my labor and composted the peels, there are some remnants which are even more useful still: the seeds. Though I am loath to give away cadeaux, I can see no possible harm in handing out seeds because they come into my possession for free, they can’t really be traded for anything else; in fact seeds have pretty much no economic value at all unless someone invests the time and energy into planting, irrigating and fertilizing them. The seeds borne by my orange and lemon trees are purely positive externalities of my own selfish labor.

I acknowledge that tilling my garden and occasionally handing out seeds might not live up to the incendiary rhetoric of which I am so fond. You might be thinking “Damn, Zac – you have just become the bourgeois reactionary which you used to despise.” Not quite – I never was too keen on smashing the capitalist superstructure to begin with, I've always been critical of left-wing extremism and making pains to accomodate with rational, lower-case "c" conservatism. I still have those same dreams of remaking the world anew, just now I have let go of my more socialist sentimentalisms and want to achieve those same ends employing the power of human nature, market principles and that all-American philosophy of pragmatism.

Sometimes sustainable development can only be achieved by narrow protection of private property. For instance, there is a solar pump-fed robinet used almost exclusively by myself, the two houses of doctors and teachers who live in its immediate vicinity – though occasionally a mob of kids will walk by and stop for a drink. And over time a group of kids manhandled the robinet so badly that they broke the handles right off the faucet heads – all three of them. The doctors, teachers and I pitched in to buy brand new faucet heads. And within a month kids somehow managed to destroy the new faucet heads as well. We could have bought a third, a fourth, a fifth faucet head and provided the kids with potable drinking water and expensive steel toys indefinitely. But instead we decided to cut our losses and buy just a third faucet head – one with locks on the handles which can only be opened by either myself, a doctor or a teacher.


It’s a pity that this privatization scheme must deprive a substantial chunk of the population from using this water source at their leisure – but then again, having a limited scheme in which only 3 key-holders can access the robinet derives a greater good to a greater number of people than the communal scheme under which no one could use it at all.

And every once in a while someone like Etienne Dembele rides their motorcycle up to my concession gate and asks if I know where he can find a man named “Madu Sogoba”. Dembele rode all the way from the neighboring village of N’tonto, 12 km away. He is one of those rare birds who was distraught by the fact that if children in his village wanted to continue their studies past elementary school, they had to walk those 12 km all the way to Sanadougou Secondaire Cycle. He organized the families of his village to try to petition the Communal government, the Cercle government, the Regional and even the National government to build a Secondaire Cycle in N’tonto - to no avail. So Etienne Dembele organized the families of N’tonto to pitch in and build the school themselves. And they did. I was taken aback by his story of Malian gumption.

“So what do you need me for?” I asked.

“We built the school, but we haven’t any nyegens. The children have no choice but to relieve themselves in the bushes. This is intolerable! We must change!”

“Monsieur Dembele, I think you’re the kind of guy with whom I can do business…”

… to be continued!!!

Human Sanitation with Feline Inspiration

So I woke up one morning and let my kitten out to pee and set up my solar panel to bask in the rising Sun. Usually I start my days walking down the street greeting everyone in my village and try to get them excited about treating their wells and drinking water. But today I just felt like venting to my kitten.

“James Brown, what’s the point of it all? The people of Sanadougou tell the Peace Corps that they want me to help them with water sanitation, I spend all day teaching people about water-borne disease prevention and they don’t do a damn thing I tell them! Every day I tell people they should drink pump water instead of well water and how they should filter their drinking water with cloth and treat it with bleach and yet they continue to drink worm-infested well water because they say that it tastes better than pump water!!! And I know that they’re not doing anything differently because at night I can smell all the gaseous sulfur from the aggregate diarrhea of everyone in this village! Why do I do this?!?! Why am I here?!?! Why?!?! Why?!?! Why?!?!

James Brown replied, “Get a grip on yo self Madu! You gotta understand! The Bambara people have been living like this for thousands of years! Almost nuthin changes! You been here six months, and you frustrated cuz you ain’t changed nuthin yet? Take a chill pill!!! You gotta learn patience!!!

“You got a point there James. But I don’t understand how people who tell me every day how sick they are and how poor they are can be so resistant to change. It’s just absurd.”

“Put yourself in their position! You’re a Bambara peanut farmer, dig? And some white dude from the suburbs waltzes into your village and tells you you’re doing everything wrong! This honky tells you that diseases come from tiny animals that you’ve never seen! Then he starts tellin’ you that wizards ain’t real! You’d think that punk be talkin' Jive! You'd say ‘screw you, honky!’ You wouldn’t do a damn thing different!”

“But what am I supposed to do? Stop trying to teach people about giardia and amoebas?”

Al – my solar panel – chimed in. “No, Zachary, I would advise that you continue on your current course of action despite its lack of easily measurable achievement. For example, the other day Moustapha told you that he treated his well with liquid bleach like you told him to. I would consider that a success unto itself.”

“C’mon, Al, Moustapha is just one person! There are like 4,427 other people in this village! At this rate they’ll all be treating their drinking water in the year 6224!”

“I would not be so pessimistic, Zachary. When I presided over the first Senate hearings on global warming in 1988 I was received with such skepticism that I was practically laughed out of the committee chamber, for at the time this phenomenon was understood almost exclusively within the academic community. In my 1993 environmental treatise Earth in the Balance I explained the climatological science in relative layman’s terms, and my message reached a substantially larger audience. But it was not until 2006 when I produced and narrated the Oscar-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth that public opinion was so roused in favor of a national campaign to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and only now in the year 2009 does it look like public opinion has shifted to such a degree that the cap-and-trade program which I have advocated has a chance of passing both houses of Congress.”

“Al, you lost me. What does global warming have to do with diarrhea?”

“Actually, the two phenomena are not mutually exclusive, for methane actually constitutes one of the most significant biogenic greenhouse gases – and the amount of methane released by the human digestive system actually spikes due to cases of giardiasis and amoebic dysentery. If we could provide potable water supplies to the population of roughly 2 billion persons currently lacking, then that could make a consequential reduction in the annual tonnage of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. However, the point of my analogy between my campaign for sensible climate policy and your campaign for improved water sanitation practices is that you should look into trying new forms of media to broadcast your message to a wider audience. For example, I used cinema and the Internet...”

“No, Al, this has nothing to do with the Internet. The people in my village ooh and ah when I show them how the velcro on my sandals works. Three people in the Mayor’s Office know how to type birth certificates on a typewriter. Just forget about the Internet! If I am going to teach people anything about water sanitation and for them to actually do it themselves it has to be simple enough for a toothless, illiterate peanut farmer to understand. It has to be so simple and so obvious that they can see it for themselves with their own eyes. If it entails concepts that I learned in 9th grade Biology class then it is too complicated.”

“’Scuse me, fellas! I gotta take a pee!”

“You’re excused, James.”

James Brown proceeded to dig a little hole in the sand with his front paws, urinated, and then moved forward and with his back paws pawed sand back on top of his pee hole.

“James, what did you just do?”

“Nuthin! I just got to pee! And when I got to pee I got to dig a hole!”

“I know you dug a hole, but why?”

“I don’t know! I… I… I just got to pee! Every time I got to pee I got to dig a hole! That’s just the way it is!”

Al lectured, “The common house cat covers up its own liquid and solid waste because of its instincts as a carnivorous animal. The scent of feline urine is particularly strong due to its high concentration of urea relative to water and is used among the wild cat population to mark one’s territory; however, potential prey have over millions of generations learned to avoid areas marked by the scent of cat urine. Over time, cats began to realize this as wekk and hence they have likewise developed the instinctive behavior to bury their waste so as to hide the scent.”

“THAT’S IT!!! We need to build a network of rudimentary septic tanks!!! James Brown, you’re the most ingenious talking cat ever!!!”

“Damn straight! They don’t call me the Kitty Cat of Soul for Nuthin!”

So I emulated the ingenious water sanitation infrastructure designed by my kitten and began to build a soak pit. I went out in the back of my nyegen where the wastewater flows out into the garden and plotted out a hole. A soak pit should have a minimum of 1.7 m2 of volume for each person who uses it on an average day, and since I am the only person who lives in the mud mansion of Xanadu that meant that I had to dig a hole roughly 1.2 meters long, 1.2 meters wide, and 1 meter deep. Easy, right?


No. In the midst of dry season – six months since the last rainfall – the dirt is as hard as a rock. Before digging anything I had to take a pickax and smash the ground apart. But even a pickax alone did not do the trick – after smashing the ground for an hour, I would have maybe a couple centimeters of debris to excavate. It was a little easier if I dumped a bucket of water on it at night and came to smash the moistened dirt in the morning, but the water would only moisten about 5 cm below the surface each time. Eventually I was able to sit in my pit and use the ax head to chisel the walls flat. Never was I able to produce enough debris to fill a single shovel – I could only dig this pit with a small garden spade.

The most fascinating aspect of me digging a hole was… that it was so goddamn fascinating. Rumor quickly spread around the village; “Did you hear that Madu is digging a hole?” “Praise be unto Allah! This is the first time since he’s gotten off his fat bobaraba since he got here!” And unless you have been the only white guy living in an African village you’d never believe it, but pretty soon there was a crowd of people gathering around to watch me. Only to a people who enjoy watching shitty Brazilian soap operas dubbed into another Western language they don’t understand could this actually be entertaining. “Holy Goat Meat! Madu is digging a hole! I’ve never seen anything like it!” This actually made my work go significantly slower because every 15 minutes I had to stop and explain what I was doing “Well you see, I’m digging a hole…”

What was actually kind of encouraging is another phenomenon kind of like Tom Sawyer whitewashing Aunt Polly’s fence – if you start a project out in public, other people want to finish it for you. Ten year old kids would point out that in comparison to their fathers’ thick, calloused hands hardened after decades of hard labor in the fields, my hands have the soft and delicate skin of an American who has worked in offices clicking buttons all of his life. “You can’t dig a hole!” “You should sit and rest!” and they would try to take the pickax from my hands and do it for me. After having my manhood called into question by ten year olds, I had to lock my gate so they could only watch from outside.

After two weeks of picking and chiseling downward I eventually I dug my 1.7 m2.

And me digging this hole seems to have done its job. Pretty soon everyone knew that I had a hole in back of my nyegen. Word eventually got around to the dugutigi, so he and his crew of old men came to inspect my hole. They thought that it was so awesome that they wanted one in back of every last nyegen in the village, and I was summoned to the gwa of the elders.

(dum dum DUUUUUUM!!!! To be continued!!!!!!)

Overreach and Internal Discord: The Future of the G.O.P.

(November 2004)

In the eyes of the Republican Party, the American electorate has given them an unqualified mandate to lead the country on a sharp rightward turn. After all, they emerged from what was deemed the most important election in years with a wider lead in both houses of Congress, a slight majority of statehouses, and a president who even won the popular vote. In the words of the first commander-in-chief with an M.B.A., “I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it”.

What that means is, from now until Bush’s last days as a lame-duck president, do not expect any policy changes lacking the right wing’s blessing – take House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert’s derailing of the 9/11 Commission’s intelligence reforms as Exhibit A. Since the 2004 election validated Karl Rove’s tend-the-base strategy, the captains of industry and evangelical groups expect payback for all their work towards their candidate’s re-election. And they are expecting more than just leftover scraps from the 2000 platform.

“Now comes the revolution”, blogger Richard Viguerie declares, “If you don’t implement a conservative agenda now, when do you?” And by conservative agenda, he and his comrades are not just talking about plugging a hole in progressives’ ambitions for the 21st century. Leaders in the GOP are talking about rolling back the progressive edifices of the 20th century. Income taxes – flattened. Social Security – privatized. In his victory speech, President Bush outlined his very own “vision thing”: an “Ownership Society” in which law-of-the-jungle free market economics is used to solve just about every problem ranging from health care to public education.

My impression is that the Republican Party is lapsing into a state of intoxication, and their drugs of choice are pride and ideology. According to exit polls, the reasons voters offered for giving President Bush another term were that they admired his overt religiosity, traditional values, and dogged rhetoric about fighting terrorism. When it comes to bread-and-butter economic issues, the Republican leadership simply does not have a mandate to carry out the sweeping changes that they promise; in fact, the positions voters preferred on taxes, health care, and Social Security belonged to John Kerry. Just as how Mr. Bush refused to answer reporters’ follow-up questions by invoking “the will of the people” during his post-victory press conference, the GOP is grotesquely misinterpreting whatever mandate to lead that it has earned. It is as though the people have given the Republicans their car keys in order to drive them home safely, but our designated drivers are taking it as an OK to drive to their favorite bar across town. And if those at the wheel are actually going to party as hard as they say they will, at the end of this ride we are going to find ourselves in a ditch.

Unsurprisingly, this agenda is not so palatable among the rank and file. Though the party marched in lockstep through the last election cycle, the Republican-on-Republican literary combat has already begun with Pat Buchanan’s latest book, Where the Right Went Wrong: How Neoconservatives Subverted the Reagan Revolution and Hijacked the Bush Presidency. The charge is that there is an ever-widening gulf between the party’s nascent big government, interventionist wing and the true inheritors of the conservative philosophy. True fiscal conservatives like Senator John McCain loathe the status quo of deficit spending, exploding national debt, and public policy tailored to special corporate interests. True legal conservatives like Senator Arlen Specter do not want domineering judges who remake the law in line with their own political whims. True rugged individualists, like the Cato Institute and the Alaska state legislature, are horrified by the Justice Department’s wanton disregard for civil liberties. But Republican politicians who dare to stray from the official line, such as Senator Specter, are tagged “RINO”s (Republican In Name Only) threatened with having their party’s nomination and committee chairmanships pulled out from under them.

Let us not overlook the overlook the ten-thousand-pound pink elephant which is spawning friction among the caucus: Iraq. If there has ever been an example of neo-conservative overreach, this it, for American troops are dying not to eliminate an explicit threat to national security, but to promote democracy in Fallujah. Republican Congressmen like Doug Bereuter of Nebraska and Ron Paul of Texas are joining the steady drip of dependable party men who can no longer support the war, and rightly so, for it clashes with the principles for which they have dedicated their entire careers.

So what can we anticipate from the Republican Party over the next four years? Barring a Democratic upheaval in the midterm elections, they should be able to achieve pretty much everything they want with ease, but this could very well be more of a curse than a blessing. As Tom DeLay wanted to have the Contract with America broken so that he could remain House Majority Leader while under indictment for criminal charges, his colleagues effortlessly exercised their wherewithal to see it done. That this is what the GOP is spending its “political capital” on, however, cannot possibly benefit the party’s standing in the long run, and conscientious Republicans who abide by their core values of prudence, restraint and personal responsibility are furious. By the time the next presidential primary season rolls around, expect the disciples of Edmund Burke to revolt against the charlatans who have sullied their proud tradition. And if their infighting gets ugly enough, it might just rip apart the Republican coalition.