Thanks very much for the compliments. All that verbosity is what you get with a DSL connection, a lot of caffeine and unpleasantly warm evenings in an non-air-conditioned apartment. Let's just hope one or two thousand of those words are worth reading, or else I have wasted a lot of time!

I am puzzled as to why you refer to Dr. Fukuyama's piece as composed of 'bluster' as it lacks the sensible properties of the blowhard's art. I also cannot figure why that bit of commentary would be a point of departure for a discussion of 'ideology'. Much of it is taken up with a discussion of the 'resource curse' thesis, a commonplace of discussion in economic geography not strongly associated with any particular ideological bent.

There are quite a number of problems with Daniel Larison's thinking which render it less than magnificent. Consider...



---It is irrelevant whether these ideologies actually ever “provide the goods” or are even capable of providing them: what matters is that the ideology appears to be true, appears to make sense and, in this day and age, appears to represent an alternative to American and Western models, be they “neo-liberal,” “neoconservative,” “liberal democratic” or what-have-you. ----

If I understand him correctly, he is saying that popular enthusiasms are wholly insensitive to observable reality, a less than cogent assertion.


---Ideology is not so much a way of seeing the world as it is a set of blinders designed to keep you going in the ‘right’ direction, even when you would normally bolt and run the other way from horror at the sight of the place your faceless rider, Ideology, is taking you. ---

What he is describing is not a function of ideas arrayed in a system of thought (an ideology) but of ideologies that are involuted. Not all are.



---The capacity for self-deception under the influence of ideology is tremendous. (see, for example, Republican believers in Iraqi WMDs if you doubt the relevance of this discourse on ideology to the contemporary scene).---

I doubt they fancy themselves omniscient.




---The age of triumphant liberal democracy has seen progressive losses of freedom and real popular control over government in the last 100 years in the very centers of the “liberal democratic” world, but the conviction that something called liberal democracy, which the current system calls itself, is the political equivalent of deliverance and the best form of government going is as strong as ever.---

Is suggesting that local control of political life will be restored by military boards or party machines?


---Thus you will hear people object that the problem with the managerial state today is not too much democracy but too little, and work on the assumption that more democratic “engagement” and participation would fix many of the problems of a managerial state that was itself a product of the centralising impulses and social policies of mass democracy.---


I do not think I am in the grip of ideology in asking why he locates the source of centralizing impulses in ‘mass democracy’ rather than (say) in the capacity of the center to exercise power brought about by declines in the cost of transportation and communication. How many military or party regimes are more decentralized than the United States or Canada?


---The point here is not only the Moscian claim that structure and hierarchy are unavoidable and elites inevitable in any system of political power, which makes the “more democracy” mantra fairly futile in our specific case, but that an ideology structures our responses to its own inadequacies in ways that end up reinforcing our belief in it. It is a codependent relationship that we seem almost incapable of being able to end without some serious shock to the system to break us loose.---

Does he mean that elite behavior is unaffected by its matrix (voters, officers, or courtesans, it’s all one), and if I argue otherwise, I am in need of psychiatric care?


---...there are strong, empirical arguments that can be made to demonstrate that Chavismo really is a ludicrous grab-bag of failed ideas, but this has nothing to do with whether or not Chavismo will continue in Venezuela or spread elsewhere.---

Nothing whatsoever?


---It absolutely does not verify Fukuyama’s fantasy about the ‘direction’ of History (which does not actually have a discernible, necessary direction) or his notion that History is against anyone. ---

Dr. Fukuyama may hold to fantasies of one sort or another, but these are not displayed in the commentary which you reference, which is a light survey of sundry developments in Latin American political economy. See his last sentence.

Is it really Mr. Larison's intention to state that history has no discernable direction (an implication of which would be that industrialization was an illusion of historiography)?


---Here is an important lesson of real history: the actual absurdity of an idea is no guard against its adoption...---

Are we to take it that it was he who coined the term ‘demagogue’?


---there is nothing more counterintuitive and easily disprovable than the notion that men are by nature political equals…Equality of this sort is a myth, but just try to demystify it and you will be met with outrage and disgust, because this myth is fundamental to the broader liberal ideology to which so many Westerners and others belong today. Even though this basic tenet of the ideology is contrary to the way things actually are, this does not present a flaw in the ideology but a problem in the world that the ideology exists to “fix,” and thus we are always on the move combating inequality of every form (this is usually associated with calls for “more democracy”).---

Many years ago, the political theorist Gottfried Dietze offered an anecdote about a conversation he had with a bus driver on a Baltimore-Washington route. He asked the driver if the bus made stops on the way to Washington. The driver replied that he would stop at traffic lights. He is thinking like that bus driver. The statement that “all men are created equal” is not a statement that political influence is necessarily evenly distributed in the collectivity, but a statement in counterpoint to the notion that all men are created to be either clerics, nobles, burgesses, or peasants.


---Chavismo is the same way. There is no guarantee that any number of failures and poor policies under Chavez will shake the faith of his supporters in their revolution or persuade them that “liberal democracy” or neoliberalism is the correct alternative, because these beliefs will not be constrained or overthrown by the negative consequences of putting them into action (which is why, gentle reader, there are still true-blue Marxists and always will be in spite of the fact that Marxism in practise always failed even by its own measures), and in the end it is the beliefs and ideas of men that drive human action and thus all of human history.---

Soviet Communism remained an animating ideology of a particular political economy for about 70 years; the purveyors of Peronism retained an indifference to the actual operations of economic systems for 49 years (during only 15 years of which they actually governed); Getulio Vargas and his votaries retained power for 30-odd years; Mussolini lasted 21 years; Gamal Abdel Nasser’s successors began dismantling his handywork after a similar span of time; and the spawn of Joseph P. Kennedy have for 38 years been scarcely able to win an election outside of the ambit of the Boston media. If Col. Chavez has constructed a demagogue’s perpetual motion machine, he is talented indeed.