The Nation's Pulse: Root-Cause Radicals
Puddington, Arch
['HE N A T I O N ' S PU LSI by Arch Puddington Root-Cause Radicals A crafty Washington think tank is up to new lefty tricks. W ~ hen last heard from, the Institute for Policy Studies...
...Likewise, America is urged to take a root-cause approach to the terrorist threat by understanding how our aid to Israel, Egypt, and Turkey feed the flames of Arab indignation...
...In its issues papers and publicity material, IPS speaks a language that is far different from the belligerent vocabulary of socialist revolution and eschews the anti-establishment diatribes of the Ruckus Society...
...IPS pursued its mission with the tenacity of the true believer and an organizational shrewdness that would have done Lenin proud...
...To be sure, some are properly skeptical of the viability" of the new New Left--the phrase "brain dead" has frequently been attached to the assorted anarchists and tree buggers who dominated the hijinks at the anti-trade festivals in Seattle and Washington, D.C...
...In the long run, IPS and its fellow thinkers pose a much more formidable threat than those who believe that breaking a window at Starbuck's is striking a blow against globalism...
...self-censorship on Moscow's world role...
...The American Spectator _9 July/August 2000 77...
...IPS sneers at Israel's "exaggerated security concerns" and speaks of the country's "ongoing violations of international law...
...Certain themes recur in these papers...
...To wit: Blame Israel First: Aside from the United States, no country--not China, nor Serbia, nor, of course Cuba-attracts as much IPS venom as does Israel...
...Although sustainable-development advocates claim to support growth, in practice they would limit economic expansion with regulation, in a kind of government by environmental impact statement...
...the neoliberal agenda" an official role in policy debate and conceding trade unions, environmentalists, and other cause groups "parity with financial and corporate interests in access to the policy planning process," not to mention "equal consideration for staff positions in the new regulatory institutions...
...Limits-to-growth has since undergone a makeover...
...W ~ hen last heard from, the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) was at the center of a coalition of liberal-left organizations that sought to undermine America's Cold War effort and, in the words of a famous New Left slogan, "make the world safe for revolution...
...New Internationalism: To the Old Left and even the old New Left, an identification with world revolution trumped identification with the national interest of the United States...
...IPS is now promoting a new internationalism-"UN-based, people oriented, and democratic;' in the words of an IPS paper...
...IPS boosts sustainable development throughout its literature, and no wonder...
...Green Wedge: During the 197o's the concept of"limits-to-growth" gained some currency on the left, until it was pointed out that an anti-growth policy would condemn the Third World to permanent have-not status...
...Boiled down to its essentials, sustainable development requires that all systems- economic, environmental, population, social-exist in a state of equilibrium, a condition that can be maintained only through a regime of state management...
...But these soothing words cannot conceal the institute's conviction that the U.S...
...IPS earned its mainstream reputation through its fluency in the vocabulary of Washington policy circles...
...Sustainable development is incompatible with the messiness and unpredictability of free markets...
...Landau was right, of course, in ways he never imagined...
...Undaunted, IPS urges the application of root-cause therapy on a wide range of issues...
...But here it is important to recall that the old New Left was regarded as frivolous and inarticulate, and yet managed to produce a core of politicized radicals whose imprint on American politics is still with us...
...Root-Cause Radicals: The phrase "root cause" lost favor because of its association with the discredited soft-on-crime attitude shared by many liberals in pre-Clinton days...
...It worked in tandem with dovish members of Congress to cripple the American intelligence capability, escorted gullible clergymen on tours of revolutionary Nicaragua, sponsored conferences where bogus Soviet "peace" delegates stated their case, created anti-defense spending alliances, and promoted the virtues of the Cuban Revolution...
...Challenged at a conference held shortly after Moscow's invasion of Mghanistan, Landau blurted out that Soviet armed power remained "the one insurance of [Third World] revolution...
...Thus IPS favors "democratizing" the trade debate by "conceding social justice advocates a participatory role in shaping the rules of economic integration and in the operation of the bodies that implement new rules...
...IPS boasts a budget of $1...
...According to IPS's world view, the U.S...
...Democracy Sf...
...But while socialism did not survive the collapse of the Soviet Union, IPS is still around, waiting for the right moment to re-ignite the struggle to refashion America's domestic arrangements and build a regime of international "fairness...
...According to IPS, this means granting "citizens who dissent from It plans to 'educate" likeminded Americans about the global economy...
...With the emergence of the anti-globalism movement and the apparent revival of the left, that moment may have arrived...
...It is a safe assumption that the anti-globalist forces similarly contain a nucleus of serious leftists who, given the proper schooling, can exert a long-term influence over the emerging debate on the international economy...
...stands as the single most powerful impediment to a left-defined world order or its intention to promote a global strategy to cut America down to size...
...Like the old internationalism, the new version treats the American national interest as an alien concept...
...Yet IPS is curiously ambivalent about the democratic idea...
...Some years back IPS promoted the idea of"economic democracy"lsocialism under another name...
...Ifa leftist resurgence does materialize, IPS will almost certainly be situated somewhere in the vanguard...
...IPS gained a shadowy reputation among anti-Communists, who fumed when the press described the organization as a "liberal" think tank, thus placing it on an ideological par with the Brookings Institution...
...the refined version is known as "sustainable development...
...Veteran IPS men like Marcus Raskin and Richard Barnet, the two Kennedy administration drop-outs who founded IPS 37 years ago, have been joined by a younger generation of radicals, whose credentials range from the struggle against American policy in Central America to the free trade wars, and who have written books with titles like Global Dreams: Imperial Corporations and the New World Order and Who Owns Paradise: Ecotourism and Sustainable Development...
...7 million and a staff of battle-hardened organizers and publicists, apparently none the worse for wear after the collapse of the Marxist revolutionary state...
...In other words, the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and World Trade Organization would be administered by people who oppose growth, mistrust "globalism," find the notion of profit obnoxious, resent the power of the United States, and are accountable to no one...
...It counsels Washington to take a more relaxed attitude toward radical Islam (an odd stance for an organization dedicated to sexual equality) while focusing instead on the root causes of anti-Americanism, namely our pro-Israel policies and our insidious pop culture...
...There being no existing alternative center of global power to the United States, IPS urges a strategy of ceding more and more authority to the United Nations and other institutions such as the new International Criminal Court...
...Constitution should hold sway only where it conforms to international law, and American influence in international financial institutions should not exceed that of any other country...
...While IPS objects to democracy promotion on the grounds that elections can exacerbate ethnic or religious differences in certain societies, its real problem has nothing to do with political theory and everything to do with its distaste for the American system...
...It complains that America defines democracy too narrowly by stressing elections and free markets...
...Democracy, No: IPS literature frequently makes reference to the importance of the expansion of democracy, both here and abroad, an interesting departure for an organization which once apologized for some of the world's most anti-democratic regimes...
...they reveal both the current state of IPS's ideology and provide important clues about the emerging strategy of a revived left...
...On the other hand, IPS takes a dim view of American government policies designed to promote democracy abroad...
...Nor has it wasted much energy trying to reform domestic arrangements in the United States...
...Another country on the IPS hate list is Turkey, an American ally whose democracy record, though flawed, is relatively impressive within the Middle East context...
...On one notable occasion, however, Saul Landau, an IPS fellow and inveterate Castro booster, violated the organization's ARCH PUDDINGTON is vice #resident for research at Freedom House and the author ofiBroadcasting Freedom: The Cold War Triumph of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty (University Press ofl Kentucky...
...If you want to know what IPS has to say about the CIA, American aid to Russia, or civil war in Colombia, simply go to its Website (www.ips-dc.org) and browse through the organization's In Focus issue 76 Ju/y/A ~ g u s t 2 o o o _9 The American Spectator papers series...
...It was particularly adept at forging alliances with more acceptable critics of Reaganite foreign policy...
...But economic democracy's appeal was limited to such redoubts as Santa Monica and Berkeley, and IPS quite intelligently decided that Central America held a greater potential for revolutionary change than the U.S...
...its representatives were thus careful to avoid words of praise for the Soviet Union...
...Even worse, IPS finds objectionable that democracy promotion is sometimes invoked to enhance the American national interest, too often is channeled to parties which conform to our definition of democracy, and is denied to dissident forces like the Zapatistas of Mexico's Chiapas state...
...While the men and women who staff IPS are radicals in the truest sense, the organization itself has prudently avoided identification with the sectarian parties of the American left...
...T he IPS view of the human condition is relentlessly grim, with the rich getting richer, the poor becoming even more impoverished, a few wealthy white men o~ning an ever-expanding share of the world's resources, and Third World countries condemned to a "race to the bottom" by a Dickensian international order whose rules are rigged by the United States...
...Instead, it employs the anodyne phrases of NGO-speak: "sustainable development," "inclusive dialogue," "democratization," "coordinated policies," "fairness...
...It condemns the entire anti-drug effort, urging as an alternative a "holistic" assault on such root causes as racism, poverty, and "social alienation...
...It favors democratization when it might have the effect of weakening American global influence, and opposes it when it might serve our national interest...
...It has already conducted teach-ins for anti-globalist activists and has plans for an ambitious project to "educate" like-minded Americans about the global economy...
Vol. 33 • July 2000 • No. 6
