THE FORMS ARE THERE, BUT THERE IS NO SUBSTANCE.

I'm continuing a theme I raised two days ago, this time motivated by the reaction of the Front Row Kids to Our President's behavior at his two most recent summits.  Yes, there's the low hanging fruit: the same people who last summer feared nuclear war are now aggravated that a juche-preaching dictator is claiming legitimacy on the international scene, and it's the same sort of volte-face by which the same people who were shocked, appalled, dismayed, what have you, that a candidate for the presidency might suggest the election could be stolen with no shame switched to straining at gnats to demonstrate that the election could have been stolen by Macedonian data-farmers or Russian Twitter accounts, and we're seeing the same thing with respect to kids being detained at the southern border.

Sure, it’s extremely hypocritical. But more importantly, when a Democrat is someday reelected, those defending Obama’s immigration policies today will need to speak out with the same fervor against that president as they do now against Trump. Will they do so? Or will they again decide that there are certain circumstances under which they can live with other people’s suffering?

That's too easy, and we have lots of forums in which tu quoque appears to be the rhetorical trump card, so to speak, rather than the logical fallacy, and a weak one at that, that it is.

Rather, I want to dig deeper into what I perceive is going on, which is,

The elite keep getting the basics wrong.

I suspect, to continue the argument of that previous post, that there were other practicing Catholics, probably including other monks, who had questions about the sale of indulgences, and saw the papacy as a rigged and corrupt system, before Martin Luther and the 95 theses.  Consider, though, the position of the parishioners who read the theses, and went along with the arguments: they did not know that they were living through a world-historical moment that we would later understand as the Protestant Reformation.

Likewise, we don't know now whether we are living in a similarly world-historical moment, or whether the fracturing of the Established Order is an aberration, to be contained and corrected.

As you’ve probably noticed, the heady optimism of the 1990s has given way to a growing sense of pessimism — even alarm — about the existing liberal order. The New York Times’s Roger Cohen, a thoughtful and committed liberal, believes that “the forces of disintegration are on the march” and “the foundations of the postwar world … are trembling.” An April white paper from the World Economic Forum cautions that the liberal world order “is being challenged by a variety of forces — by powerful authoritarian governments and anti-liberal fundamentalist movements.” And in New York magazine, Andrew Sullivan warns that the United States itself may be imperiled because it has become “too democratic.”

Stephen Walt wrote that passage after the British vote, but before the 2016 presidential vote, and he continued with introspection. Whether any among the Pope's inner circle, five centuries ago, suggested that perhaps that German monk raised valid points about business as usual I don't know.

The first problem was that liberalism’s defenders oversold the product. We were told that if dictators kept falling and more states held free elections, defended free speech, implemented the rule of law, and adopted competitive markets, and joined the EU and/or NATO, then a vast “zone of peace” would be created, prosperity would spread, and any lingering political disagreements would be easily addressed within the framework of a liberal order.

When matters didn’t go quite so smoothly, and when some groups in these liberal societies were in fact harmed by these developments, a degree of backlash was inevitable. It didn’t help that elites in many liberal countries made some critical blunders, including the creation of the euro, the invasion of Iraq, the misguided attempt to nation-build in Afghanistan, and the 2008 financial crisis. These and other mistakes helped undermine the legitimacy of the post-Cold War order, open the door to illiberal forces, and left some segments of society vulnerable to nativist appeals.

Yes, that's couched in language the Front Row Kids would understand, and it's not going to get the Front Row Kids thinking they've messed up, badly. And yet, the warning signs are there.

Liberals also forgot that successful liberal societies require more than the formal institutions of democracy. They also depend on a broad and deep commitment to the underlying values of a liberal society, most notably tolerance. As events in Iraq, Afghanistan, and several other places demonstrate, however, writing a constitution, forming political parties, and holding “free and fair” elections won’t produce a genuinely liberal order unless individuals and groups in society also embrace the key liberal norms as well. This sort of cultural and normative commitment cannot be developed overnight or injected from outside, and certainly not with drones, special forces, and other instruments of violence. It is also abundantly clear that post-Cold War liberals underestimated the role of nationalism and other forms of local identity, including sectarianism, ethnicity, tribal bonds, and the like. They assumed that such atavistic attachments would gradually die out, be confined to apolitical, cultural expressions, or be adroitly balanced and managed within well-designed democratic institutions.

But it turns out that many people in many places care more about national identities, historic enmities, territorial symbols, and traditional cultural values than they care about “freedom” as liberals define it. And if the Brexit vote tells us anything, it’s that some (mostly older) voters are more easily swayed by such appeals than by considerations of pure economic rationality (at least until they feel the consequences). We may think our liberal values are universally valid, but sometimes other values will trump them (no pun intended). Such traditional sentiments will loom especially large when social change is rapid and unpredictable, and especially when once-homogeneous societies are forced to incorporate and assimilate people whose backgrounds are different and have to do so within a short span of time.

It's always encouraging to see policy intellectuals recognizing the hazards of designing institutions, let alone imposing them on other people.  And yet, Mr Walt concludes with the hope that Business as Usual will be restored.

That, too, has been in plain sight.  Consider this clip from Meet the Press, in which candidate Donald Trump's greatest sin might have been "mocking the process."  Yes, and he's continued to mock the process, to the great dismay of the Front Row Kids, and, apparently, to the continued delight of his voters.

Maybe that mockery is all that's available, until the Front Row Kids go away.  Here's Chris Hedges, picked up by Common Dreams, last year.  "The kleptocrats, whatever their differences, are united by one overriding fear. They fear large numbers of people will become wise to their kleptocracy and revolt. They fear the mob. They fear revolution, the only mechanism left that can rid us of these parasites."  He says he wants a revolution, but perhaps the opening stages of a world-historical event don't have Trotsky leading the militia into the Winter Palace.

Or perhaps the Front Row Kids are wising up.  Here's Daniel Drezner.

Adam Elkus is a smart guy I follow on Twitter; maybe you should, too! But in response to much gnashing of teeth in the past week over this question, he tweeted the following: “If the Rules-Based Liberal Order can be blown up by one man within a 4-year time span then people can’t still unironically talk about institutions and the binding power of norms.”

If Elkus is correct, then it’s a pretty damaging blow to liberal institutionalists. It would turn out that all of the trappings of the postwar global order rested not on rules or norms, but on raw American power. Is he correct?

I don’t think so. For one thing, it is not as if Trump was the first shock to the system. The liberal international order has committed a lot of own goals over the past decade. This begins with the 2008 financial crisis. It persists into the rise of the austerity movement.

That noted, perhaps in Patrick Porter's Nostalgia and Liberal Order we have, if not the 95 theses, at least there's recognition that perhaps, once the War is won and the European countries rediscover civil society and the Soviet Union self-liquidates, that institutional arrangement has served its purpose, and keeping it around for its own sake is foolish.  "Winners win, and losers complain. As one of my college professors liked to say, the dogs may bark, but the caravan rolls on."  That's not to say the dogs are silent.  Point.  Trump to the International Community: Drop Dead.  Counterpoint.  It's stupid to say Trump is shredding Western democratic order.  Divine Passive.  In Trump, some see the end of the world order.

It's too soon to tell whether the tributes to the International Community are recognition of institutional arrangements that confer evolutionary advantage, or if they are expressing a belief in United Nations, and in the sale of carbon offsets for the remission of sins, and all the other traditional sacraments.  J. J. McCullough in National Review notes,

The perspective of the American Right on matters of international law, institutions of global governance, supra-constitutional treaties, and the justifiable use of armed force, among other things, will always differ noticeably from that of the majority of European leaders, rooted, as it is, in uniquely American traditions. Any era of Republican control of U.S. foreign policy thus seems destined to herald some degree of ideological disharmony within the broader western alliance, and a western alliance worth anything will surely learn to incorporate this consistency of American democracy into its strategic planning.

Unless, that is, the point was never about integrating the United States as it actually exists into a position of leadership and deference, but rather merely tolerating American leaders to the degree they do not contest the settled consensus of the rest, propose disruptive ideas, or exert any independent prerogative without unanimous assent.

Put in historical terms, the Front Row Kids are, from a weaker position than the Pope, demanding that the Trump administration recant or be excommunicated.  These days, burning the papal bull takes the more pungent form of "We're America, B****!"  Perhaps, here he stands, he can do no other.  Perhaps the Front Row Kids will have the final say.  Or perhaps the Front Row Kids are done.  And the definitive chronicle of current events might be available in twenty years, or in two hundred.