The only question I have about Robert Kagan’s latest Washington Post column is where was this column when the WaPo was hailing Mohamed bin Salman as a reformer?
Many Americans have an odd fascination with the idea of the reforming autocrat, the strongman who can “modernize†and lead his nation out of its backward and benighted past. This was the hope for Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, a hope now somewhat diminished by the hit he appears to have ordered against Post contributing columnist Jamal Khashoggi in Turkey.
Sympathetic Americans saw Mohammed, or MBS, as he is known, as a transformational figure seeking to reform Saudi Arabia’s one-commodity economy and to reconcile Islam and modernity. If doing so required more not less dictatorial control, if it entailed locking up not only fellow members of the royal family but also women’s rights activists, moderate religious figures and even young economists raising questions about the dubious figures contained in his “Vision 2030†program, then so be it. Only a “revolution from above†held any promise of reforming that traditionalist, hidebound society. You know — omelets, eggs.
He’s being overly kind and insufficiently specific. It wasn’t Americans broadly who exhibited an “odd fascination” with MBS. I don’t recall any dinner table conversations to the effect of “Boy, what a great reformer that MBS is!”
To the contrary tt was Mr. Kagan’s editors and those of the other major media outlets as well as his columnist peers. Why are they so attracted to dictators? I can only speculate. I can’t remember who made the observation but it’s apt. They don’t want to live under an authoritarian system but they do want to run one. The lesson here is that we are ill-served by our pundits.
Mr. Kagan, the first step on the road to recovery is acknowledging you have a problem. It’s clear that you and your peers have a problem. When does the acknowledgement come?
The broad liberal paradigm is for increased individual rights excepting the politic sphere, which ought to be run by the “natural aristocracy.”
“‘The public must be put in its place,’ Walter Lippmann wrote, so that we may ‘live free of the trampling and the roar of a bewildered herd,’ whose function is to be ‘interested spectators of action,’ not participants.”
That’s a view that goes right back to the 19th Century thinkers.