Washington has made itself necessary, Mencius Moldbug notes, by making others dependent:
Not just to Americans, but to the entire world. Why does Washington want to help the survivors of Cyclone Nargis? Because helping is what it does. It dispenses love to all. Its mission is quite simply to do good, on a planetary basis. And why does the government of Burma want to stop it? Why turn down free help, including plenty of free stuff, and possibly even some free money?Because dependency is another name for power. The relationship between dependent and provider is the relationship between client and patron. Which is the relationship between parent and child. Which also happens to be the relationship between master and slave.
[...]
So comparing the social paternalism of Washington to the classical relationship between master and slave is not at all farfetched, or even particularly pejorative. And if it is pejorative, it is because the 20th-century imitation often seems to resemble less a functional paternal bond than a dysfunctional one: less parent-child than parent-teenager. With many of Washington’s clients, foreign and domestic, there is plenty of subsistence and even protection, but precious little loyalty, service, discipline or responsibility.We are now in a position to understand the relationship between Washington and Rangoon. Rangoon (I refuse to call it “Yangon” — the idea that a government can change the name of a city or a country is a distinctly 20th-century one) refuses to accept the assistance of the “international community” because it does not want to become a client.
You’ll find that any sentence can be improved by replacing the phrase “international community” with “State Department.” State does not impose many obligations on its clients, but one of them is that you can’t be a military government — at least not unless you’re a left-wing military government with friends at Harvard. The roots of the present Burmese regime are basically national-socialist: ie, no friends at Harvard. Burma cannot go directly from being an enemy to being a rebellious teenager. It would have to go through the helpless-child stage first. And that means the end of the generals.
[...]
What, specifically, will happen if Burma admits an army of aid workers? What will happen is that they’ll make friends in Burma. Their friends will not be the people in power — not quite. But they will probably be close to it. Thus the ties between the “international community” and all kinds of alternatives to the generals will be strengthened. Since the latter’s position is already precarious at best, much better if a few of the victims have to eat mud for a month or two. They will fend for themselves in the end. People do.
And why is Washington playing this game?
Just because it does. In that golden city are armies of desks, each occupied by a dedicated public servant whom the Cathedral [the university system] has certified to practice public policy, whose job it is to care about Burma. And he or she does. That’s what Washington does. As George H. W. Bush put it, “Message: I care.”When our patron’s suffering clients are actually American citizens, this pattern — as Nock predicted, correctly — generates votes. Before the New Deal, vote-buying in America was generally local and informal. Retail, you might say. After 1933, it was wholesale.
But however much of a client it becomes (I really can’t imagine the generals can hold out that much longer), Burma will never export electoral votes. Statehood is unimaginable. So why does Washington continue to molest the generals, in pursuit of the love and fealty of the Burmese people? Just because it does. There is adaptive value in “applied Christianity.” That adaptive value derives from its domestic application. There is little or no adaptive value in restricting the principle to domestic clients, and it involves a level of conscious cynicism which is not compatible with the reality of progressivism. So the restriction does not evolve.
Thus the neo-Quakerism which supplies the ethical core of progressivism, and is evangelized with increasingly relentless zeal by the Cathedral’s robeless monks, is completely compatible with the acquisition and maintenance of political power. Not only does the design work — I find it hard to imagine how it could work any better. Which does not mean that “applied Christianity” is evil, that the Burmese generals are good, or that their suffering subjects would not be better off under Washington’s friendly umbrella.