A Useful Idiot

Jonah Goldberg once again indulges his obsession with Thomas Friedman (an obsession that he openly admits). His fascination is based on Friedman's too-good-to-be-true perfection as a specimen of the "useful idiot" - a totalitarian sympathizer in a free western nation. It's amazing that such a view can exist in the modern world, but there Friedman stands, proud as a peacock and as convinced as ever of his own enlightenment.

I have included a lengthy passage from Goldberg's article below. While reading this, I was constantly reminded of Thomas Sowell's great works: A Conflict of Visions and The Vision of the Anointed. Friedman is the ideal poster-child for Sowell's "anointed," don't you think?

As you read it, keep in mind: Friedman isn't some lefty Glenn Beck - a populist iconoclast prone to hyperbole. No, no. He's supposed to be one of the Left's elite intellectuals - a man of practical ideas, and apparently a man with the ear of the President. That is a terrifying thought.

*****
Friedman Aflame
The Times columnist’s mind melts fact and reason into nonsense

JONAH GOLDBERG

...Friedman is of late very frustrated with America for its failure to do what he says it must. Last September, in one of many columns lamenting that China does things better than we do, he wrote: “Watching both the health care and climate/energy debates in Congress, it is hard not to draw the following conclusion: There is only one thing worse than one-party autocracy, and that is one-party democracy, which is what we have in America today.” He continues: “One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks, but when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages.”

Just to clarify, according to Friedman, America is a one-party democracy not because the Democrats control the White House, the House, and the Senate. No, no. The U.S. suffers under the yoke of one-party democracy because the Republicans refuse to be steamrolled by the Democrats. “Our one-party democracy is worse” than China’s one-party autocracy, he explains:

The fact is, on both the energy/climate legislation and health care legislation, only the Democrats are really playing. With a few notable exceptions, the Republican Party is standing, arms folded and saying “no.” Many of them just want President Obama to fail. Such a waste. Mr. Obama is not a socialist; he’s a centrist. But if he’s forced to depend entirely on his own party to pass legislation, he will be whipsawed by its different factions.

So what are the advantages of China’s “enlightened” one-party autocracy? To borrow a phrase from Elvis, the autocrats take care of business, in a flash. In a chapter of The World Is Flat titled “China for a Day (But Not for Two)” Friedman rhapsodizes about the glories of China’s statism. And in 2005 he began a column with this avowedly tongue-in-cheek prayer:

Dear God in Heaven: Forgive me my sins, for I have been to China and I have had bad thoughts. Forgive me, Heavenly Father, for I have cast an envious eye on the authoritarian Chinese political system, where leaders can, and do, just order that problems be solved. . . . I cannot help but feel a tinge of jealousy at China’s ability to be serious about its problems and actually do things that are tough and require taking things away from people. Dear Lord, please accept my expression of remorse for harboring such feelings. Amen.

Among the myriad problems with this cutesy-wutesy-ootseyness is the simple fact that Friedman should actually be offering a sincere prayer for forgiveness of his Durantyesque sycophancy in behalf of a totalitarian regime with the blood of 65 million people on its hands. If he’d written a chapter called “Nazis for a Day,” this point would be more obvious to more people. But instead of contrition we get scores more columns gushing about how great China is for being able to get all of the policies right.

...His panic that America can’t get important things done while the mandarins of Red China fiat utopia intensifies as Obama’s New Progressive Era retreats into a sad and strange historical parenthesis.

One doesn’t have to read Dostoevsky to know this sort of thing is hardly new — the envy for authoritarian regimes that can force the wheel of history in the right direction; the contempt for the messiness of democracy; the conviction that all good things go together and that certain enlightened and visionary revolution­aries can apply their intellects to any problem, can pick the lock of History and start over at Year Zero. This all-consuming passion for a unified theory of everything and the indomitable conviction that you are right has consumed many a brilliant mind.

Friedman doesn’t want America to become a totalitarian country — at least not for more than 24 hours. Whenever he goes too far in that rhetorical direction he pulls back a few paragraphs later, but his to-be-sures about how America is still better become less convincing every time, more pro-forma and cutesy. He is possessed by his own prophecy, consumed by his clairvoyance about the One Right Way. Half-measures succumb to the mental furnace; the case for democratic deliberation cannot withstand the heat. Everything fuels the fire in Tom’s mind.