Why Americans Should Die for Ukraine

Politics as a struggle among narrative tribes

One dilemmas of being a small-l liberal is that our political views tend not to provide meaning. But what exactly does this even mean? I feel that this criticism of liberalism is correct, but nobody ever spells out the reasoning. Imagine two explanations for why housing is expensive.

Explanation 1: Well-meaning interventions at the state and local level have prevented enough housing from being built, driving up prices.

Explanation 2: Elites have let in too many illegal immigrants who compete with Americans and greedy corporate owners are jacking up prices.

Or consider these explanations for wokeness.

Explanation 1: Wokeness is the natural consequence of mission creep and mistaken legal doctrines that came out of civil rights law and corporations rationally responding to incentives.

Explanation 2: Wokeness is a Marxist plot by anti-humans who want to remove all traces of merit and excellence in order to destroy Western Civilization.

In each instance, Explanation 1 is much better at reflecting reality. But Explanation 2 is more popular, and likely to rile people up and motivate them to take action.

What separates meaningful explanations from those that are less meaningful? I think that it comes down to having an enemy. People don’t watch action movies about a lack of state capacity or misaligned incentives causing individuals to suffer. They want heroes and villains. Most religions are the same, with good and evil forces doing battle in the world, although more so in the Abrahamic faiths than Buddhism or Hinduism.

This is a problem for liberals. If you believe it’s simply true that so much of the world is governed by impersonal processes and the incentive structures created by norms and institutions, you don’t have a simplistic story with good guys and bad guys you can sell to people. We hear a lot about the “failures of liberalism” coming from writers who live in what are by far the safest, wealthiest, and most successful societies in the history of the world. Most of the unease they and their followers feel is clearly psychological, though that doesn’t make it any less real. Just as how democracy is the worst government except all others that have been tried, liberalism has proved to be by far the best possible ideology on which to base society. But it still feels like something important is missing.

Politics as Meaning Tribes

Right now, in American society, we can understand political life in terms of cooperation and conflict among tribes seeking meaning by focusing on one or more enemies. The following are some of the narratives with the most influence on our political life, although there are of course many more.

On the right, you have,

Anti-Wokeness: Crazy, mentally ill, or demonic intellectuals and other elites are trying to erase all standards to achieve an agenda based on equity.

Trump Cult: The Deep State is out to get Trump, the one man who has the courage, independence, and stature to fight them.

Nativism: Elites sold us out and allowed foreigners to come in and jobs to be shipped overseas, harming American identity and living standards.

Christian Nationalism: Elites who are anti-nation and anti-God, and Satan too, have subverted the true will of the American people or led them astray.

On the left, there is,

Wokeness: Racist white males and Western Civilization have held back women, gays, the third world, and people of color.

Socialism: The rich and big corporations are oppressing the poor.

The Resistance: Trump, in alliance with Republican enablers and foreign autocrats, are destroying America’s institutions.

Environmentalism: The rich and corporations, or maybe humans more generally, are destroying planet earth.

There are a few that don’t fit neatly into the box of either right or left.

Gribblism: “They” are screwing you over economically, making you unhealthy, sending you off to wars, and lowering your sperm count.

Populism: Really a combination of the Socialism and Nativism narratives, and can identify more with the left or right depending on which aspect is emphasized.

Many of these tribes overlap, and right and left are in a sense defined by coalitions among these narratives, though individuals will put more emphasis on one over the other. So most Trump cultists are also nativists. But conservatives who emphasize the Trump cult don’t care if he says something more moderate on immigration, while those who support him mostly because he dislikes foreigners do. Wokeness and socialism are of course very intimately linked and in some ways form a coherent worldview when combined.

The role of libertarianism in all this is interesting, and I think the meaning framework can help us understand something that has always been a mystery to me. More respectable libertarians are often weirded out by those who claim the same label but sometimes say nice things about slavery or Vladimir Putin, which seems inconsistent with having a worldview oriented around the importance of individual liberty. I suspect that this is because libertarianism in its purest form can’t win a large audience since it doesn’t offer an enemy. The crowd that used to be called paleo-libertarians or those who have bought into Trumpism have a narrative to tell in which the American global empire is the enemy, so all of its opponents throughout history, from the Confederacy to Nazis to contemporary foreign adversaries like Putin, are misunderstood or even heroic.

I think a saner libertarian without this need for an enemy looks at the course of history and understands that the US has been on net a force for liberty in the world. But acknowledging that doesn’t give you any obvious enemy to focus on today. In my view, when understanding why we don’t have a more libertarian society, much of the blame should be placed on public opinion and distortions explained by public choice theory, not globalist elites, who are if anything often more pro-freedom than the masses. But again, not giving people an enemy means you don’t give them meaning, so more agent-oriented versions of libertarianism are what build mass constituencies, that is to the extent that a mass constituency for libertarianism can be said to exist.

We can do some handwaving and come up with an evolutionary explanation for all this. Humans evolved to compete with other humans, not understand complex matters of geopolitics or how institutions function. As the world becomes more complex, our intuitions become worse at explaining it. And so on. I could write more, but you get the point.

Meaning Tribes as Inverse Realities

The problem is not only that practically all of the most popular narratives are wrong. The worst among them create an inverted reality. Socialism blames the rich for our problems, when they are the class that contributes most to improving living standards. Nativism appeals to low human capital because it creates arbitrary moral distinctions and rejects basic economic principles when it comes to immigration and trade. Populism thinks that the masses have some kind of deep wisdom, but they’re in fact very dumb. The Trump Cult is the funniest narrative tribe, providing endless entertainment due to the disparity between how supporters of the former president see him and what this man actually is.

The Resistance has one thing going for it, which is that it is based in truth. Trump did try to steal the last election, and he does in fact represent a unique threat to American democracy and institutions. It’s the inverse of the Trump Cult, and since the Trump Cult is an inverted reality, the Resistance becomes true. I tend not to attack Resistance types, because even if they get some things wrong and don’t always emphasize the most important issues, creating a meaning tribe based on something that is actually true makes you better than most alternatives. One can say the same about anti-wokes.

Political ideologies without a distinct enemy are rare, and disproportionately appeal to Elite Human Capital. In 2019, Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen published an article calling for a new science of the study of progress. In the years since, they’ve built a community of like-minded people around institutions that they are both affiliated with. Progress as a political ideal does not have as much mass appeal as Gribblism, Wokeness, the Trump Cult, etc. because it doesn’t provide an enemy, but it disproportionately attracts the highly intelligent and wealthy. We can say similar things about Rationalism and Effective Altruism.

This is not to say most EHC types always adopt one of these worldviews. More individuals who are Elite Human Capital become Wokes or Socialists than Rationalists. The need for an enemy is strong. To be Elite Human Capital is necessary but not sufficient to adopt a worldview that lacks a Great Satan.

The need for an enemy is so deeply intertwined with the identities of nations and societies that if you take enemies away you can never be sure what will be left. I’ve called for Israel to crush the Palestinians and the United States to support them in that effort. But sometimes I wonder whether a total victory would cause Israel to lose many of the qualities that make it worth defending in the first place. Maybe you need Gaza on your borders to create a technologically advanced society that nonetheless has a healthy birth rate. That said, it’s hard to for example calibrate your support for Israel to the point that the country survives and prospers but doesn’t totally defeat the enemy. So my view is we should give total support to Israel and then deal with whatever negative consequences of victory come later. Maybe it needs to expand into Syria after defeating the Palestinians to avoid decadence, as it’s not like the government there has any legitimacy or good reason to exist. One problem at a time.

The fact that societies are always reacting to an enemy explains why countries like Ukraine and Israel have a stronger sense of blood and soil nationalism than Americans, Canadians, or Western Europeans, and there’s nothing wrong with this. The same form of nationalism can be healthy under certain historical conditions but stupid and destructive under others.

Taking the Neoliberal Pill

So far we have a four part syllogism.

1. People need meaning to feel motivated, vital, and fulfilled.

2. “Meaning” simply means a narrative in which you have an enemy to hate and blame.

3. Most attempts to find an enemy/meaning lead to false worldviews, if not inverted realities.

4. People usually need to believe false and stupid things to feel motivated, vital, and fulfilled.

That’s not very optimistic. What can we do? One way out is to provide the masses with a narrative that is close enough to true to not be as destructive as the things that are completely wrong like Woke, Nativism, Trump Cult, etc. If the masses can’t find meaning in pro-freedom and pro-progress ideologies alone, we should at least give them a worldview that creates room for intelligent policy and structural reforms rather than being directly antagonistic to such efforts. As is often said, all models are false, but some approximate reality enough to be useful.

From that perspective, I believe that the best kind of meaning we can give people is a narrative that focuses on foreign dictators and malevolent non-state actors as the enemy. The story goes something like this. At the beginning, man had absolutely nothing. Nature created him no different than any other animal, in a state of constant struggle for existence. He invented myths about creation, his place in the world, and his ultimate destiny. Eventually came Western Civilization, science, and the founding of the United States. Over time, we learned what works and what doesn’t, with history settling on liberal democratic capitalism as the best way to organize society. Today, we are hindered from moving even further along by non-optimal institutions and instincts that perhaps once made sense from an evolutionary perspective but are self-destructive given modern conditions. There can be variations on this theme, with versions that are for example Christian or atheist, more left or right leaning, but the story of progress and overcoming the past is what is fundamental.

So far, this sounds just like basic Progress Studies or technofuturism. But we add the element of the enemy, in the form of third world dictators and terrorist leaders who stand in the way of humanity advancing even further. To different degrees, they represent parochial nationalism, theocracy, arbitrary and ultimately illegitimate rule, and, in the case of China, extreme safetyism. These are the same forces we are still battling at home, albeit usually in less extreme forms. The fight for progress has not always been a matter of gentle persuasion, with individuals simply being convinced of what works by observing the success of democratic capitalism and mending their ways. Humanity has made moral, intellectual, and material progress over the course of its history, and that has occasionally meant using violence to overthrow or resist tyrants.

There are people who think about geopolitics like this already, including most importantly many in the foreign policy establishment. The failures of the Bush administration have discredited this crowd among much of the wider public, and to the extent that they engage with other narrative tribes it is as part of the Resistance. What I’m arguing for is taking this narrative, learning from past mistakes, combining it with more cultural chauvinism, and placing it within a larger story of human progress.

Recently, there was a great deal of controversy over Tucker Carlson interviewing Darryl Cooper, an independent historian who has said a lot of things that sound pro-Nazi. By his own account, Cooper is trying to provide a wider perspective on our standard World War II mythology. Of course, any mythology is going to be an extreme simplification of reality. Cooper is not doing any original research or bringing to light historical facts that were previously unknown. Given this, we have to judge his work by the standard of the narrative he is selling when he seeks to deconstruct the conventional wisdom. The worldview Cooper is pushing isn’t exactly subtle. It’s basically white nationalism, which in his mind requires one to raise the status of Nazi Germany, and lower that of the communists and Western democracies, since the latter eventually gave us mass immigration, trans acceptance, and other supposed curses of modernity.

What Cooper is doing isn’t all that unusual, as historians are often in the business of shaping myths in order to create lessons for today. He’s just hiding the ball, since it’s hard to come out and say Nazis weren’t all that bad, instead arguing that it is other historians that are enlisting the past in the service of a contemporary political agenda. This is easy to do, since every history by necessity contains a selective presentation of facts, and one can always critique a historian for leaving certain events out or not emphasizing them enough.

If you’re a liberal, however, the American story is one to be proud of. In the course of less than a century and a half, the US fought a war to end slavery, defeated fascism abroad, and then brought down communism. By any reasonable standard, that’s a great record. Yes, there are facts that complicate this story. Libertarians sometimes say that for the cost of the Civil War, Lincoln could have simply tried to buy all of the slaves and set them free. We can debate questions like whether the Treaty of Versailles was too harsh, whether the Allies went too far in bombing civilians during World War II, and whether our leaders behaved too recklessly during the Cold War. Historians and more educated members of the public can and should discuss these topics. But at the level of mass understanding, the events of decades or even centuries get boiled down to one or two sentences. From that perspective, the current mythology of America as the force that has spent its history fighting and ultimately defeating evil collectivist ideologies and today continues to stand against the worst people in the world is at the same time practically useful and true enough for both stupid and intelligent people to believe in and make them proud of their country.

America should be a spiritual guide to the rest of the world, as it seeks to spread the liberal project abroad while perfecting it at home. This means allying with other liberal states, and providing moral, diplomatic, financial, economic, and military support to those who fight for their rights abroad. Such a project wouldn’t simply seek to overthrow every government in the world that doesn’t meet our standards of democracy. Liberalism rather than democracy is what should be emphasized, and that to a large extent includes economic freedom. This creates room in the rules based international order for polities like those of Singapore and the United Arab Emirates.

If Americans have to pick between hating the rich, straight white males, foreigners who are doing productive work, or tyrants like Putin, then the choice is easy. Putin at the very least is actually bad. And it’s true that he wants to control and influence his neighbors in ways that would make the world much worse. Ukrainians resisting his designs are behaving heroically, while those who sympathize with the position of the Russian government are wrong.

Now, as with historical analysis, there are all kinds of things you can say that can complicate this picture, and should be considered in any policy discussion. Ukraine means a lot more to Russia than the United States. Given that Ukraine doesn’t let its men leave and relies on conscription, one can question just how pure their cause actually is. I hope that American leaders take considerations like this into account. At the same time, they shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that for the US to identify with Ukraine over Russia reflects a fundamentally healthy instinct. It’s not an accident that Putin sympathizers in America tend to be extreme misanthropes who share a great deal of fake news and are really bad at processing information and understanding the world.

There’s a question of what American policy should be towards Ukraine, but also a separate but nonetheless distinct one of whether you want to live in the kind of country that sympathizes with Russia, Ukraine, or neither. The first question is difficult, while the second in my mind has a clear answer. We can say similar things about disputes between the two Koreas, China and Taiwan, and Israel and the Palestinians.

One idea that needs to be resisted is that American elites are particularly bad when judged by realistic standards. Americans enjoy a standard of living that is not only historically unprecedented but an outlier in terms of large developed countries. If you listen to right-wing populists, they will tell you that Americans are the most oppressed people in the history of the world. When a natural disaster hits, Trump and his supporters start talking about how nobody is out there to help regular Americans because all their money went to privileged groups like Ukrainians getting bombed and illegals cleaning toilets. This is part of the nativist inversion of reality, in which Americans become the victims of modernity and globalization rather than its greatest beneficiaries. Similarly, upon Alexei Navalny’s death, Trump compared his own supposed persecution to that of the recently deceased Russian activist, which might’ve been the most vile thing he has said.

Woke has the same problem, although it has the redeeming feature of only emphasizing the plight of racial minorities, thus just seeking to demoralize 40% or so of the American population rather than all of it. By focusing on actual victims of oppression abroad, Americans can learn that they don’t have it so bad and start trusting their elites again.

Once we see our true enemies as foreign autocrats and terrorists, we reduce the power of ideologies at home that engage in scapegoating or aim to restrict liberty. This vision argues that to be strong in the face of our enemies means we can’t afford indulgences such as DEI, immigration restrictions, or economic policies that prioritize equality over growth.

Sometimes I’ll see rightists declare they don’t want to go die for Ukraine. If only you should be so lucky! The people who say these things tend to see Honduran nannies as the greatest threat to civilization and have dreams like being a nation where people sit in factories making overpriced toasters. What a pathetic existence. Going abroad and dying for Ukraine would indicate physical courage, broad horizons, and a generosity of spirit. It would allow a regular person to play a part in one of the great struggles of our era. If you want something higher to believe in, it’s much better than most of the alternatives. Americans should be more familiar with the names and stories of Russian, Iranian, and Chinese dissidents, and find inspiration in their struggles. We should want a world where the subset of the population that needs to find meaning in a heroic cause channels its energies abroad, rather than swelling the ranks of demagogues at home.

Some Pitfalls to Avoid

Taking the neoliberal pill is not risk free. Anti-interventionists are constantly warning about the threat of nuclear war if the US takes an aggressive posture abroad. Luckily, I think that the Ukraine War has taught us that such fears are exaggerated. Russia was thinking about going nuclear earlier in the conflict, but apparently backed off when it learned doing so would sour relations even with friendly countries, particularly China. People citing “World War III” as a reason to pull back from Ukraine simply haven’t been paying attention. I think there’s been a tendency for anti-interventionists to exaggerate both the capabilities of US enemies abroad and their capacity for risk. I’ll acknowledge that the neoliberal pill probably raises the risk of nuclear war over a policy of isolationism, but the other costs of withdrawing from the world in terms of economic growth, global stability, and spiritual health are simply too high.

A smaller but still significant risk of taking the neoliberal pill is you get more misguided adventures like the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Indeed, there’s no way that elites could get us into another Iraq today. This at first glance appears to be a good thing, but it’s been at the cost of our culture becoming more neurotic, cynical, parochial, and fearful. Americans wouldn’t go off and die by the thousands in Iraq today because they don’t think anything is worth fighting for or believing in. Young people aren’t even leaving the house. I’d rather be a country that occasionally fights stupid wars than one that shuts itself off from the rest of the world and gives up on any idealistic vision of the future.

In the end, there’s been too much exaggerating of the costs of Iraq and Afghanistan. The US debt is $36 trillion. A recent estimate put the cost of the War on Terror across the entire period from 2001 to 2021 at $8 trillion. For some context, land use reform alone could add perhaps $1 trillion a year to American GDP.

My point isn't that the ways that Afghanistan and Iraq were fought didn’t inflict serious costs on the country. Rather, these weren’t the civilization destroying mistakes that many portray them as. The War on Terror is rightly understood as the kind of blunder you make when you’re too optimistic and sure of your civilizational health. But in some ways it’s the kind of mistake you want to make.

A new neoliberalism will not buy into the naive idealism of the Bush years. Not all countries are ready for democracy at all times. There is nothing wrong with questioning some people’s capacity for self-governance, at least at this point in their history. I actually believe that the original neocon vision was to install Chalabi as the dictator of Iraq. The problem was that Bush was convinced to go for a full remaking of Iraqi society, at which point everyone both on the right and left started to pretend that this was the plan all along. Regardless, it’s clear in retrospect that despite what leftists think, many of Bush’s mistakes resulted from him being not enough of a cultural chauvinist.

In 1979, Jeane Kirkpatrick, who would later be Reagan’s ambassador to the United Nations, wrote an essay titled “Dictatorships and Double Standards,” in which she argued that not all authoritarian regimes should be treated equally. American foreign policy should recognize Marxist states as inherently worse for the world than normal kinds of dictatorships and more threatening to American interests. The Kirkpatrick Doctrine became associated with the Reagan administration, but it’s actually been an implicit part of US foreign policy throughout the postwar era. It’s a credit to American elites that they constantly find themselves on the opposite side of the worst regimes in the world, including North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, and Iran. Standing up to them will occasionally require aligning with other dictatorships, which are tolerable as long as they show a basic respect for markets and human rights.

In retrospect, seeing what came afterward, I’ve become more forgiving of the cultural conditions that led to the War on Terror as it was fought. Americans wanting to democratize the Middle East seems innocent and quaint compared to our current political culture.

Some will argue that it was mistakes like Iraq and Afghanistan, and also NAFTA and other elite projects, that gave us all of our contemporary stupidity. This is a tenet of faith among populists, who always need to make the broad public look sane and reasonable. I just start from a place of fundamental disagreement regarding how much rationality you can expect from the masses. The rise of the internet and the fall of gatekeepers seem sufficient to explain the changes we’ve seen.

Stupidity doesn’t need a “root causes” explanation. People don’t follow influencers like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens or believe that the government is controlling the weather because elites lied to them. Such individuals are so disconnected from reality that even if elites were 100% perfect they wouldn’t have the mental tools to competently judge that fact.

If you want to go by objective results, American economic growth and technological innovation have been massive success stories. Any narrative that tries to use how living standards have changed to explain political anger simply isn’t credible. If Americans feel unfortunate relative to war refugees, it’s because we’ve in recent years had more demagogic leaders and the development of communications technology that allows the worst voices to dominate the conversation.

It doesn’t seem like this cynicism can be fought simply by reasoning people out of their delusions. There’s a reason conspiracy theories never involve elites secretly doing great things for the world. The need for an enemy among the public is primal, and liberalism struggles to provide them with one. Society has therefore fractured into tribes that have reverted to standard forms of demagoguery, focused on the perennial targets of the rich, the successful, and the foreign. The liberal project needs to try and reduce the level of cynicism and hate within society, while also channeling however much of these negative emotions remains towards more productive targets.