You get these emails, not very often, but I got one today when I landed from Dubai in JFK (closely paraphrasing): “You disappoint me Tom. Your writing regarding the election seems to be going off-track. I visit your blog less and less. You’ll lose your readers if you keep this up.”
This guy seems really disappointed that I’m not a Republican and infers that if I wasn’t so “partisan” (meaning, not like him in supporting the GOP), then I’d put my country first—and vote for McCain! He actually said, put the country first.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t know whether to laugh or cry at something like that. It’s just so crude: vote like me or you’re a traitor to your country! I’m not saying our Founding Fathers would blanch at such language. Hell, they used it plenty themselves in early elections. I just find it goofy from a strategic perspective—immature.
First off, when you really write a blog—as in, it’s a diary of your thinking, then you don’t give a f—k about what your readers think. You write what you think and let people engage it or not, but you don’t write a diary of your thinking to meet somebody else’s expectations. That would just be pathetic, as well as intellectually dishonest. Then you’re just pushing product.
And if you think that’s a new concept or attitude from me, I bet Sean can find you about 20 posts, going back to the spring of 2004, that stated the same. I write this blog for me and me alone. That’s my philosophy of having a blog—perhaps growing increasingly old-fashioned as blogs evolve into more consciously corporate/public persona tools.
That’s why I don’t belong to some larger blogging group or entity, something I get offered all the time. It’s also why I keep my blog separate from Enterra. I don’t ask for money and I don’t want any, nor do I want an affiliation where I will inevitably find myself self-censoring to accommodate the whomever upstairs. I just find this sort of expression fun and relaxing. If it works for you, great. If not, move along.
So that pathetic sort of threat: “Write what I want or I won’t read it!” is downright goofy. I couldn’t give a rat’s ass about what other people want to read. This is a self-selecting universe—the ultimate freedom afforded by the web.
Is my blog the same as my column? No. There I work within the confines of small and medium-metro newspapers. They need a certain product, and I deliver.
Ditto for Esquire.
The books are different by a wide margin. There you write for time—stuff you want to feel proud reading years later. And when the subject is grand strategy, which is pretty much what I’ve always written about, then you have to write above the needs of any party, because the only successful grand strategy is one that can span administrations and parties.
I realize that there is a class of people who just read the blog. Fine by me. I don’t charge and I don’t track and I don’t care. Others read the blog plus the articles—same difference, because there others charge and track and care and if I don’t perform in a way they like, they take away the venue. Some readers go all the way through the books, with a big distinction between those who see only the first book as being right and the second book less so.
The reality there is that I wrote PNM with a lot of appreciation for the first Bush administration, with which I interacted a lot at medium-to-medium-high levels during my time at the War College and my two years in the Office of Secretary of Defense (big place, small job) following 9/11. In that function, I did feel a natural desire to argue more in defense of the administration than against it. I think that’s basically the way to go when you’re in government.
The second book, Blueprint, I wrote just after the War College fired me. I was a bit pissed at them at the time over that, but not that much. I knew it was a good and necessary move for me, and it’s amazed me how I’ve never really looked back with any regret (except I wished we hadn’t left Rhode Island, but that was more a family choice).
But I clearly wrote the second book in a more critical vein than PNM, which was essentially diagnostic and not prescriptive. I wrote BFA in a more prescriptive vein because I felt so many readers were incorrectly filling in the blanks on my diagnosis and coming up with all sorts of whacked-out prescriptions—like get a huge army and invade the entire Gap! I was also concerned about the assumed unilateralism and militarism of PNM, or the way certain advocates took it as an argument against multilateralism and non-kinetic approaches. Naturally, I felt that readers who read PNM in this way were simply not getting it or purposefully distorting it, but there was also the underlying reality that—even with 150k words—I left a lot of things unsaid that I felt were obvious but clearly were not to some readers. I simply needed to finish PNM in full, and BFA did that by running the diagnoses more clearly to ground in terms of prescriptions.
Now, when I publish PNM, I naturally become the darling of certain Republicans/conservatives who support Bush, even to the extent that I am lumped in with the neocons by many admirers and critics. But as Doug Feith made clear to me in our one F2F (Esquire interview), I should most definitely not consider myself a member of their ranks. On receiving such “news,” I was “crushed” in the same way as when the CIA crapped me out by way of my psych responses to testing (“You mean my personality doesn’t fit with your organization?”). I mean, you are who you are, and just getting confirmation of that is hardly an ego bruiser. It’s more just a signpost telling you where you need to go next.
So with PNM, a lot of assumptions were made about me and what I believed in. I could point out certain passages as counter-indicators, but some people (way too many, actually) read in a lot that isn’t there. That doesn’t bother me per se. I see it as part and parcel of the material—even its attractiveness.
Nonetheless, I clarified all that as much as possible in sequel, Blueprint. Since I wrote that while out of government and since my views on the Bush administration had become more critical in response to policies (or the lack of change in policies), I lost a bunch of readers who assumed I was one of their own and thus couldn’t stomach my perceived “change of heart.” But to me, good grand strategy consists of constant adjustment and adaptation to changing circumstances. It’s not some fixed thing, nor is it reflective of some fixed position on the ideological scale of GOP-v-Dems. I tend to be center-left on domestic policies and center-right on foreign policies, but I’m also a big sequentialist, meaning I see a time and place for all manner of appropriate shifts. To me, timing is everything if you want you get your way the majority of the time. To some, that makes me a flip-flopper. I consider that charge infantile, but most ideologues are infantile, and that’s not my problem—just an environmental factor.
So now we head into the third book, which to me is a logical evolution from PNM and BFA, but I guarantee you that certain past admirers will find it an unacceptable shift, putting me in the position of trading off certain readers and gaining new ones. Riskier than just giving the perceived faithful more of the same, but as soon as I feel that urge, the F-bombs start dropping. I have to be proud of the material. I can live with the reception. As soon as I catch myself optimizing the material for its ideological reception, I will quit making the effort. Naturally, plenty will—and have—judged me as having gone round that bend already, but since these people seem to be evenly split left and right, I’m not particularly worried. Pissing off plenty of people in a plentiful way is an occupational hazard.
But I definitely realize that as we may well see a shift from GOP to Dems in the White House (having seen the GOP win the vast majority of top-line races in my lifetime, I generally assume we’re going to lose until proven otherwise), there will be plenty of readers who—if they haven’t noticed I support Obama—would have assumed I’d go into some sort of opposition stance or exile myself (as politicos are wont to do). But since I never did that before when the GOP held the White House, such expectations (based on false assumptions of my political preferences) are misguided.
On the other hand, I’d hardly be crushed by McCain’s winning, any more than I was by Bush. To me, that’s simply the yin and yang of American politics (especially when it splits power between Congress and the White House, something I generally approve of), and since I don’t really work with appointees all that much (I tend to interact more with the persistent SESers [senior exec service] and career military), it’s not even worth worrying about one way or the other.
But I do expect that I will lose some readers for the sheer reason that Obama will win and these readers will feel I somehow “betray” my past thinking for enjoying that outcome. Conversely, the same happens on the opposite side if McCain wins and I’m so negative on the “league of democracies” idea (which I believe, quite frankly, will die stillborn in any McCain administration because democracies are damned difficult to boss around).
Either way, we’re headed for a new course. Again, such shifts don’t spook me or sadden me. I’ve done this since it was Bush the father, through both Clintons, and now almost through both Bushes (administration terms, that is). I expect to go through maybe a dozen more individual terms before I hang up my cleats for good, so getting too jacked up about one shift or another just seems pointless and immature, in part because I lack that zero-sum fear-threat reaction. Either way, for example, the Dems will control both houses of Congress, so we’re not talking a big shift from Bush II, which has been itself a self-correcting term WRT Bush I. The major difference will be how either McCain or Obama handles the emerging multipolar reality that I have long-labeled as “the New Core sets the new rules.” We can fight it or accommodate it, but what we won’t do is make that reality go away, because it’s based overwhelmingly in economics.
Sticking to such long-haul thinking (to include the reality of the Long War against radical extremism) means you will lose and gain adherents to your thinking all the time as events shift. And yes, there is a surfeit of immature/overly ideological people out there. For me, they come and go, providing some laughs and some serious irritation along the way (more sadness, really), but no agony.
Steve DeAngelis and Mark Warren are my best friends. Steve is a lot more GOP than I could ever be (we watched “Recount” on the flight back from Dubai and I could barely stomach how much Steve was digging it—my only consolation being Baker, whom I deeply admire, at the end of the movie stating the reality that he was a Dem until 40 and really only switched because his good bud, George H.W., mounted a senate campaign and asked for his help as a way of getting him off the gloom he was in over a recently deceased spouse), and Mark tends to be more Dem than I’m typically comfortable being. And yet all three of us can be quite conservative on some issues and pretty damn liberal on others, and while all three of us will slice any current issue a bit differently, what always amazes me is how much we can agree on, especially since both Steve and Mark were political operatives of great skill in previous lives. And that’s because we’re all three essentially problem-solvers, forced to go binary every time there’s an election but awfully flexible in between, meaning we like to make bad things go away and good things happen and we spend a lot of our careers working very diligently to those reasonably agreed-upon ends.
To me, at least, those instincts to improve the world around you have got nothing to do with this nonsense about putting country first, which I don’t believe in and never will. God will always come first, and then family, and then country. I would never trust a government that tried to upend that priority ranking, and I don’t believe America has ever been about putting country first, even when we’ve engaged in all-out—and all-in—world wars (like when both FDR and Ike go out of their way to keep our casualties low, contrasting with motherland-first Stalin and fatherland-first Hitler), and I love that aspect of America more than anything else. This place was created to enshrine individual liberty, asking of us all only that we come together as necessary to defend that liberty but never to pretend that this country outranks us as individuals, believers, or members of whatever tribe we choose to belong to. As a political scientist, I’ve seen plenty of examples in history where nation comes first, and what I see is a litany of disasters resulting—ideologues at the lead. That’s why I think we have the greatest political system in the world, despite its many irritating flaws. It is built around the individual pursuit of happiness—the most liberating and radical concept in human history.
So no, I won’t be reining in the blog, or censoring myself, or crying over spilt milk, much less lost readers. My motto here has always been, “F—k ’em if they can’t take a post!”
I expect, as always, to make as many mistakes here as are required to work my way toward what I consider to be essential truths. I don’t pretend any monopoly exists on these, just that my systematic approach to thinking about global futures is a useful tool—among many—to figure out where we as a nation and planet need to go.
So, by all means, read if you like, and complain within reason if you must, but if it ever stops working for you, please move along with my blessing.
But spare me your agony. It just falls on deaf ears.
Friday, September 12, 2008 at 3:14AM 
