A couple of months ago, I was struck by a notice in the Wall Street Journal that fourteen leaders of industrialized countries signed The Berlin Conference communiqué titled “Progressive Governance in the 21st Century”. Among other center-left aphorisms, it states that globalization “should not just be allowed to happen” and that there should be a “return to politics” ahead of economics. They’re dreaming. In 1991, former Citibank Chairman Walter Wriston wrote in his Twilight of Sovereignty that the days when nation-states can control economic events are numbered and that technology has produced a new “gold” standard in the form of 200,000 computers run by money managers who never sleep and who “vote” on public policy and discount its implications often before the policy pronouncements by political leaders. And this was before the explosion of the Internet! It is axiomatic that capital goes where it is wanted and stays where it is well treated. Because of this fact, I’ll go one step further: wholesale privatization of the delivery of government services will be inevitable. Former Indianapolis Mayor Stephen Goldsmith, a key domestic policy advisor to George W. Bush, prefers the term marketization to privatization, but the principle is the same. The global competition for capital will force governments at all levels to subject themselves to the disciplines of delivering competitive goods, because capital is hyper-sensitive to public policies – taxes, mandates, expenditures, or regulations – that are onerous to capital formation. It will further force governments to seek out best practices on a global, not just local or national basis. They will have no choice in this move to market driven reforms. Sure, there is and will be continuing protectionist reaction, but it will ultimately fall to the requirements of the information revolution. Jobs follow investment. The old politics of the industrial age can be obstructive if it attempts to control the variables, but cannot win in the long term. The question is, which political leaders will be able to properly articulate the risks and costs vs. benefits involved in this newer form of Joseph Schumpeter’s “creative destruction”?

We must be accommodative to this phenomenon and allow the experimentation of new initiatives at the local and state level and practice the principal of subsidiarity that our Founders envisioned. And we need much less “us” vs. “them” advocacy. Business opinion leadership is key, but it must be the kind of leadership that avoids public policy considerations that are based entirely on the outdated mercantilist calculus of who wins and who loses. Marketization is not an unalloyed positive, and, as Lori Taylor of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas points out in a recent study, outside of public education, the jury is still out on the social benefits of public sector competition. But the competitive pressure of global capital mobility makes the outcome a matter of time. I’ll have more to say on some of the cultural ramifications in future issues.

“Truth is something outside yourself, something to be discovered, and not something you can make up as you go along.”—George Orwell, 1944.“There are no facts.”—Michael Foucault, 1968

The two quotes above illustrate both the wide divergence of views of truth that have come to prevail and the drift in the conception of truth from the respect for objective truth that undergirded everything from religion to science to the postmodern view that there is no truth other than claims made by the powerful to justify their power. The American Enterprise magazine devoted an entire issue in 1999 to the examination of the destruction of truth in Western society and the impact on our culture, politics, and governance. It is not a pretty picture. You know the recent history of the celebrated fabrications, such as the Tawana Brawley “rape”, the Rigoberta Menchu book on Guatemala, the falsified journalism of The Boston Globe’s Mike Barnicle and The New Republic’s Stephen Glass, not to mention the stream of dissembling and prevarication from the Clinton White House. The amazing and disheartening thing about these cases, and many others, is the absence of outrage and the fact that in many instances, the person who exposed the lie bore the brunt of the criticism. As Christopher Hitchens has noted, “there is a tendency in our postmodern discourse to inquire first about whose truth and which power stands to gain, and only then to take an interest in things like verification. Lying and perjury and neat evasions and sordid double talk are not just excused but praised and justified by many elites.” In the culture wars of the past thirty years, truth has been a casualty, not only particular truths, but allegiance to the very ideal of truth as an indispensable component of a just and moral life. Noted philosopher Richard Rorty approvingly describes American pragmatism as our “refusal to believe in the existence of truth in the sense of something with authority over human beings.” How did we get here?

Recently, I read Time for Truth, by Os Guinness, a senior fellow at the Trinity Forum. He targets the casual acceptance by much of contemporary American society of the idea that it is legitimate to create an entirely fictional self-image and pass it off as the truth. He blames philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche for setting in motion “perspectivism” (there are many kinds of truth, therefore there is no truth) as a wholesale assault on truth. And, as postmodernists argue, if there is no truth, then nothing is left but a struggle for power. It doesn’t take long to figure out that most of the past century’s brutalities were perpetrated by regimes that believed this. Guinness further identifies “a profound crisis of cultural authority in the West, of beliefs, traditions, and ideals.”

Unfortunately, much of this crisis has been aided and abetted by our elite institutions of higher education, particularly in the humanities, where truth is not always explored or celebrated, but is criticized or “deconstructed”. Fortunately, however, although too many Americans find it necessary to debate whether or not character and fidelity to truth in our political leaders really matters, pure moral relativism and disregard for truth has not yet spread widely and deeply. Let us hope it doesn’t spread much further, for without respect for objective truth in our institutions and opinion leadership, it will be impossible to sustain justice or freedom.

Various commentators have written about the growing influence that Corporate America has assumed over U. S. foreign policy, particularly trade policy, in the Clinton Administration. It has been noted that foreign policy formulation under Clinton has been as much dictated by the Commerce Department as by the State Department. A good question, recently posed by John Mann of the Los Angeles Times, is, what sort of values will be promoted by a corporate-driven foreign policy? An even more relevant and timely question is, what values will drive the foreign policy formulations of the administration that will take office next January? Marc Thiessen, who serves on the majority staff of the U. S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, has written an interesting piece contrasting the competing foreign policy visions of the Presidential candidates. Al Gore would like voters to believe that the choice is between Democratic defenders of “internationalism” and the Republican “isolationists”. Not so, says Thiessen. George W. Bush’s vision is old-fashioned American exceptionalism and the choice is really which kind of internationalism we will have, the global multilateralism of Clinton/Gore or Bush’s internationalism, based on the principled projection of American power and freedom of unilateral action within well-defined strategic alliances that promote vital U. S. interests and spread American values. No less an authority than Lady Margaret Thatcher would certainly favor the latter. In fact, she has said that “America’s duty is to lead. The other Western countries’ duty is to support its leadership…….under American leadership, the West will remain the dominant global influence; if we do not, the opportunity for rogue states and new tyrannical powers to exploit our divisions will increase, and so will the danger to all.”The multilateralists do not regard America as a unique nation with a unique role in the world. As deputy secretary of state Strobe Talbott has written, “all countries are basically social arrangements…….within the next 100 years, nationhood as we know it will be obsolete. All states will recognize a single global authority.” Multilateralists even now look to authorization from the United Nations as the sole source of legitimacy for the use of force in the world. To them, treaties and international organizations are ends in themselves, not means. The exceptionalists view these instruments as means and the United Nations as “helpful” to a U. S.-led Western alliance. The differences here are real and the policy implications will have significant consequences for the world in the 21st century.

“The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.”—Daniel Patrick Moynihan