Re: What is your counsel?

Description: Open discussion is critical, says Walt.

Question: Collectively, what should we be doing?

Transcript: You know just to beat a dead horse now, I do think open discussion is really critical; and encouraging lots of different voices to be out there.  I find now in the United States, for example, the debate on foreign policy is quite a narrow debate.  Lots of agreement among the most visible members of the sort of foreign policy establishment; and people who are outside of that consensus very much marginalized in public discussion.  But that’s just in foreign policy.  So I like open discussion. The second thing that we have to remind ourselves is a country, that knowledge turns out to be a good thing; that we ought to be basing our policy decisions to the extent that we can on robust analysis; on the best available expertise; on . . . on facts.  You know people call “reality-based analysis”.  It’s troublesome when you read about a president who says, you know, he likes to go on his gut instincts.  Nobody’s gut instincts are that good, and one of the things that has allowed us to get to where we are today as a country, but I think also more broadly in the world, has been to prize knowledge; to prize research; to place a lot of social resources in that place and encourage people to pursue ideas as much as they can.  And it’s, I think, very short-sighted for any society when they start short changing its intellectual community.  Or when it starts ruling certain ideas out of court and saying, “No, you can’t work on that.  You shouldn’t write that.  You shouldn’t say that.”  That’s what strangles human creativity, and we’re gonna need some creative solutions to address the various problems we already talked about.  Again we get that by valuing intellectuals of all kinds – natural scientists, philosophers, artists, etc. – but also giving them lots of freedom to explore ideas.  Let me just add one other caveat to that.  I do occasionally worry about the academic world, or at least parts of the academic world being really mired in what some friends of mine and I tend to call the “cult of irrelevance” – this idea of wanting to work on topics that are of great interest to you, and three of your friends, and two people at another university.  And I think this is an abdication of our responsibility as intellectuals.  We should be grappling with really big questions as much as we can, and questions that are of great importance.  That’s why society allows us to have these very privileged positions as intellectuals, or college professors or whatever.  And the way we should be paying society back is by using that to try and make the human condition better.  Now we’re not all going to agree, but that’s okay because we’re more likely to collectively reach a wise position if we all think hard and then argue about it, and do so in public whenever possible. 

Question: How do we reign in special interest groups?

Transcript: You could certainly diminish the impact of all special interest groups if you could have a really radical campaign finance reform in the United States.  It wouldn’t end interest group politics; but it would take some of the fuel out of it.  And that, I don’t think, is gonna happen in my lifetime; because of course that would get resisted by all special interest groups, not any particular one.  I think because there’s nothing wrong with any group of Americans organizing to shape American foreign policy in ways that they think are good for the country; I don’t favor putting any of the restrictions or limits saying that, “You guys can’t organize.  You can’t come up on Capitol Hill anymore and talk to congressmen.”  I think anything like that would be very anti-American, very anti-democratic.  What I hope happens, and what I hope our book helps encourage, is that some of the organizations in the sort of broad coalition, which doesn’t agree on everything, by the way . . . that some of the more moderate groups, some of the more progressive groups become more influential, gain more supporters.  And similarly, some of the more powerful groups now that tend to be more hard-lined begin to rethink their positions.  I would have no objection to their being a very powerful, pro-Israel community in the United States if I thought the policies they were pushing for were better for us and better for Israel as well.  So I have no problem with their being a lobby.  I just wish it were pushing for policies that were smarter.

Recorded on: 10/8/07