U S vs Them or Open Society and Its Enemies Volume 1

U. S. vs. Them: How a Half-Century of Conservatism Has Undermined America's Security

Author: J Peter Scoblic

How American foreign policy has been formed by conservative ideals that pose a catastrophic threat to our future

In U.S. Versus Them, J. Peter Scoblic argues that the Bush administration's belief in "moral clarity"—its insistence that our foreign policy be based on a fight to the death between America and the forces of evil—has put us at grave risk. Although this worldview may have appealed to many voters in the 2004 election, it has in fact exacerbated the greatest threat to our country: nuclear terrorism. U.S. Versus Them reveals that the seeds of current foreign policy were planted fifty years ago, at the beginning of the Cold War, when conservatism was just beginning to take root, defining itself in opposition to Soviet communism. Scoblic shows how conservative ideology itself—from its development by William F. Buckley, Jr., through its implementation by Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan to its culmination in the current administration—has endangered Americans and will continue to do so long after this president has left the Oval Office.

As James Mann does in Rise of the Vulcans, Scoblic does more than simply describe or deride Bush's foreign policy; he explains it, showing how and why the president has failed the greatest challenges to American security in the post-9/11 world—indeed, why he was destined to make those mistakes from the moment he took office. U.S. Versus Them is an intellectual history that also answers the question: How can we defend ourselves while restoring America's place in the world?

Robert Wright

J. Peter Scoblic is one of the freshest voices on U.S. foreign policy, and he's addressing a subject of existential importance. His distinctive take on the origins of George Bush's arms control policies—and why they've produced catastrophic results—belongs on the reading list of anyone trying to understand why a zero-sum approach to the world won't work in the twenty-first century. (Robert Wright, author of Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny)

James Mann

In U.S. Vs. Them, Peter Scoblic challenges the assumptions and policies of the Bush administration on nuclear strategy. The book describes the contrasting views of conservatives and liberals on arms control as they have evolved over the past several decades. To understand today's news stories about North Korea and Iran, one must understand the policy battles and the history that Scoblic lays out in this book. (James Mann, author of Rise of the Vulcans: A History of Bush's War Cabinet and The China Fantasy)

Sean Wilentz

J. Peter Scoblic's new book superbly dispels nostalgia in favor of history. Since 1989, pernicious myths have abounded about how cranky, right-wing ideas on foreign policy and nuclear supremacy won the Cold War. In fact, those ideas came all too close to destroying the world—which makes their comeback in recent years extremely alarming. Scoblic's unpolemical, deeply informed account offers urgent warnings about the present as well as a reasoned and persuasive rendering of the past. (Sean Wilentz, author of The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln)

Kai Bird

J. Peter Scoblic's rollicking indictment of how conservatives have undermined America's security since the dawn of the nuclear era is intellectual history at its best. Scoblic shows us that a ship of fools is afloat, still navigating us all toward catastrophe. It is a shocking and even sordid tale told with calm logic and clear prose. Every informed citizen should pick up this book—but the next president should not occupy the Oval Office without first reading U.S. Vs. Them. (Kai Bird, coauthor with Martin J. Sherwin of the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer )

Richard Rhodes

In this highly original study, part history, part current analysis, J. Peter Scoblic reveals the deep fear disguised as uncompromising idealism that has propelled the American conservative movement to promote its disastrous foreign policies. Us Vs. Them is a clear, succinct guidebook to the troubled first decade of the twenty-first century. (Richard Rhodes, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb and author of Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Atomic Arms Race)

Strobe Talbott

A penetrating and provocative critique of a worldview that has brought the United States a world of trouble. (Strobe Talbott, former deputy secretary of state, and author of The Great Experiment: The Story of Ancient Empires, Modern States, and the Quest for a Global Nation)

The Washington Post - Fred Kaplan

The shelves are already bulging with books about George W. Bush's disastrous foreign policy—where it went wrong, how to steer things right. Yet space should be made for J. Peter Scoblic's U.S. vs. Them, if only because it points out that there's nothing "neo" about the neoconservatives.

The New York Times - Nicholas Confessore

In U.S. vs. Them, Scoblic, the executive editor of The New Republic, argues persuasively that neoconservatism isn't the problem—plain old conservatism is. For Scoblic, the Bush administration's habits of foreign affairs—its distrust of international institutions, its conviction that "good" and "evil" nations cannot coexist in the world—are part of an inglorious tradition of bad ideas that dates to the years of the cold war, when Barry Goldwater lobbied against building a Moscow-Washington hot line.

Publishers Weekly

This cogent first book from the executive editor of the New Republic forcefully argues that 50 years of American conservatism have undermined U.S. security and pushed the world to the brink of nuclear disaster. Scoblic charts the course of American conservatism, from its development by William F. Buckley Jr. through the disastrous Cold War to Bush's failure to safeguard the United States after 9/11: in stark, often frightening detail, Scoblic examines how Bush embraced "regime change" as a means of fighting "evil" and neglected to secure nuclear materials in the former Soviet Union, failed to prevent North Korea from reprocessing plutonium, rebuffed requests for negotiations from an Iranian regime that was, in 2003, willing to comply with the International Atomic Energy Agency, repeatedly ignored U.S. intelligence and pursued the war in Iraq. Scoblic illustrates how and why conservatism shaped the current administration and explains how it guided Bush's "good vs. evil" morality. This is an important book, well researched and well reasoned in its assessment of conservatism and mandatory reading for anyone concerned with America's security and future. (May)

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Kirkus Reviews

A learned and lively political harangue insists that America's recent foreign-policy failures are the result of conservative principles. New Republic executive editor Scoblic begins in the 1940s when conservatism seemed a spent force, devastated by the Depression, isolationism and FDR's charisma. In the book's most stimulating pages, the author describes the ideology's rebirth in the '50s, sparked by a few academics and one brilliant journalist: William F. Buckley Jr. In the National Review, Buckley laid out the modern conservative creed: Free enterprise is good, government is bad, communists are evil. Morality, not politics, must guide our leaders, Buckley averred. One does not negotiate with evil; treaties and even cultural exchanges with the Soviet Union were shameful. This philosophy thrived, but not at the highest levels. Republican presidents Eisenhower, Nixon and Ford were not modern conservatives; they believed preventing nuclear war was more important than overthrowing the Soviet Union. (Buckley and colleagues disagreed.) President Reagan seemed ideal, vilifying communism and beefing up U.S. forces. However, halfway through his term he reversed his policy and launched negotiations that dramatically improved U.S.-Soviet relations. Scoblic reminds readers that Reagan left office under a torrent of conservative denunciation. In the second half, the author characterizes President George W. Bush as the apotheosis of modern conservatism to whom 9/11 appeared as a godsend, providing an evil enemy to replace the defunct Soviet Union. But the Bush administration has been distracted from fighting terrorism, the author argues, by its eagerness to smite rogue states like Iraq as ademonstration of American righteousness. Since modern conservatives have no objection to using nuclear weapons to fight evil, the current administration has dropped efforts to prevent their spread (except to evil nations), thereby making the world more dangerous than at any time during the Cold War. Readers must plow through a torrent of government position papers, speeches, editorials and intelligence reports, but many will find Scoblic's acerbic analysis worth the slog. A well-delineated albeit depressing portrait of America's present guiding political philosophy.

Table of Contents:

Pt. 1 Ideas 1

Ch. 1 Worldview 3

Ch. 2 Candidates 37

Ch. 3 Movement 72

Ch. 4 President 112

Pt. 2 Consequences 155

Ch. 5 Hibernation 157

Ch. 6 Apotheosis 192

Ch. 7 Catastrophe 232

Ch. 8 Future 263

Acknowledgments 291

Notes 295

Index 337

Book about: Simply Color Therapy or Womans Qigong Guide

Open Society and Its Enemies, Volume 1: The Spell of Plato

Author: Karl Raimund Popper

Popper was born in 1902 to a Viennese family of Jewish origin. He taught in Austria until 1937, when he emigrated to New Zealand in anticipation of the Nazi annexation of Austria the following year, and he settled in England in 1949. Before the annexation, Popper had written mainly about the philosophy of science, but from 1938 until the end of the Second World War he focused his energies on political philosophy, seeking to diagnose the intellectual origins of German and Soviet totalitarianism. The Open Society and Its Enemies was the result.

In the book, Popper condemned Plato, Marx, and Hegel as "holists" and "historicists"--a holist, according to Popper, believes that individuals are formed entirely by their social groups; historicists believe that social groups evolve according to internal principles that it is the intellectual's task to uncover. Popper, by contrast, held that social affairs are unpredictable, and argued vehemently against social engineering. He also sought to shift the focus of political philosophy away from questions about who ought to rule toward questions about how to minimize the damage done by the powerful. The book was an immediate sensation, and--though it has long been criticized for its portrayals of Plato, Marx, and Hegel--it has remained a landmark on the left and right alike for its defense of freedom and the spirit of critical inquiry.