“On what issue or issues (if any!) have you changed your mind in the last 10 years- and why?” Their responses follow.
IT’S NEVER EASY to acknowledge changing your mind on an issue of importance. Sure, we all like to take refuge in John Maynard Keynes’s acid response to a sneering critique of his inconsistency and remark: “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, Sir?” But in truth we’d like to think that our insight into human events is broad enough not to be undone by the arrival of inconvenient new facts.
So it is with some discomfort that I must acknowledge that I’ve changed my mind perhaps more than most in my lifetime. Yet my Damascene journey was largely complete by the time THE WEEKLY STANDARD came along in 1995.
Twenty-plus years ago, I was a fairly predictable tribune of the British left; a social democrat, I called myself, a believer in the mixed economy at home and a global balance of power and even of ideology abroad. It was the 10 years prior to 1995 that changed my mind.
I visited both the United States and the Soviet Union for the first time in the space of a single year in the mid-1980s, and any temptations toward political or cultural relativism were instantly swept away by the experience. When the Cold War ended in 1989, so did the last vestiges of doubt I’d harbored about the moral and political superiority of American-led freedom. When U.S. forces evicted Saddam Hussein from Kuwait in 1991, my post-Vietnam diffidence about the exercise of force also disappeared, and I became a firm believer in the liberating power of American arms (and wished that it had been demonstrated all the way to Baghdad). While my economist friends predicted the steady attrition of the U.S. advantage in the post-Cold War period, I became a (slightly late) convert to the virtues of the Reagan-Thatcher ideological revolution and was steadily convinced that the United States and Britain were laying the foundations for the triumph of Anglo-Saxon free market economics.
So was I (intellectually) fully formed by the time THE WEEKLY STANDARD arrived in 1995?
No. On one big question I consider myself a sadder but wiser man this last decade.
Like Francis Fukuyama, I thought history had ended back then, that we were on a more or less preordained glide path to ever widening political and economic freedom, that the self-evident triumph of our free model was so overwhelming that the big challenges of the future would simply be the costs of managing the transition.
I know better now. I know that freedom is as vulnerable as it is precious. That there is nothing inevitable about its advance. That it must be defended at home and abroad with constant vigilance, vigor, and, if necessary, with force.
But in these 10 years I’ve come to see better than ever, too, that this nation and its people, ably assisted by my own, will prove equal to the task.
Gerard Baker, U.S. editor of the Times of London, is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
