American Purpose

Miss Europe, Kent Monkman, 2016 Will Olaf Scholz “sort it,” as the campaign slogan of Germany’s Social Democratic Party (SPD) has promised ahead of September’s parliamentary election? Despite the campaign hype, in reality, few observers expect the emerging center-left coalition to give a dramatic new vigor to Europe’s integration project, and for good reasons. One often-overlooked factor is the intellectual fatigue of Germany’s—and indeed of Europe’s—progressive circles.

Journalist and novelist George Packer begins his latest book, Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal, with a joke. “I am an American. No, I don’t want pity.” This humble, witty self-deprecation doesn’t come naturally to a country that habitually claims it is the greatest in the history of the world.

One of the foolish arguments surrounding climate change has been over the relative priorities of mitigation versus adaptation. Mitigation revolves around reducing the amount of CO2 and other heat-trapping gases emitted into the atmosphere, while adaptation means dealing with the effects of climate change like building higher levees or moving cities to higher ground.

During a visit to the ruins of the city of Gauda, Suchitra Vijayan ran across a honeymooning couple from Gujarat. “I salute our armed forces!” shouted the husband while his bride filmed him.

Copper engraving from a Dutch Bible map of biblical times, Daniel Stoopendaal, c. 1714 The tragedy and humiliation of the withdrawal from Afghanistan have solidified the bipartisan consensus that, beyond immediate revenge on al-Qaeda and killing Osama bin Laden, America’s post-9/11 strategy for the Greater Middle East has been an unmitigated disaster.

At the moment, the merits and deficits—and, implicitly, the fate—of liberalism are much debated at the moment. From the right, religious figures like Catholic integralist Adrian Vermeule and Orthodox gadfly Rod Dreher argue that liberalism’s studied neutrality toward the ends, or purposes, of life has led to a collapse of even the idea of the Good, with disastrous consequences to public (and, indeed, private) life.

Cambodian students taking an entrance exam for the Don Bosco Technical School of Sihanoukville, 2008 How should a society allocate its most important, lucrative, and prestigious positions? In most places, for most of history, the question had a simple answer: by heredity. Monarchs and aristocrats held almost all the society’s power and wealth and passed their positions on to their offspring. Over the last two hundred years a different system came to supplant hereditary privilege.

There have been many abstract discussions about the need for global governance, but they tend to founder when confronted with the real-world political conditions that countries today face. This is no more so than in the case of climate change. Climate change is the most wicked of wicked problems because of the nature of the incentives facing countries trying to deal with it.

Wild Garden, Nikos Hadjikyriakos-Ghikas, 1959 by Donald J. Devine (Encounter Books, 384 pp., $24) Conservative and classical liberal commentators, notably Jonah Goldberg in his book Suicide of the West, have taken advantage of a well-known comparison between Anglo-American constitutionalism and English gardens.

President Barack Obama with Anthony Bourdain at Bún cha Huong Lien Restaurant in Hanoi, Vietnam, May 23, 2016. Anthony Bourdain was a hero—an Everyman (at least an upper-middle class Everyman) made good. He was a heroin addict cleaned up, a best-selling author, a celebrity chef (he hated the term), and an accidental yet quite brilliant journalist (he didn’t like that one, either).