September 26, 2010
From the The Chronicle of Higher Education
What Are Books Good For?
Jonathan Barkat for The Chronicle Review
Enlarge Image Jonathan Barkat for The Chronicle Review
By William Germano
I've been wondering lately when books became the enemy. Scholars have always been people of the book, so it seems wrong that the faithful companion has been put on the defensive. Part of the problem is knowing what we mean exactly when we say "book." It's a slippery term for a format, a technology, a historical construct, and something else as well.
Maybe we need to redefine, or undefine, our terms. I'm struck by the fact that the designation "scholarly book," to name one relevant category, is in itself a back formation, like "acoustic guitar." Books began as works of great seriousness, mapping out the religious and legal dimensions of culture. In a sense, books were always scholarly. Who could produce them but serious people? Who had the linguistic training to decode them?
In the sense of having been around a long time, the book has a long story to tell, one that might be organized around four epochal events, at least in the West. In the beginning was the invention of writing and its appearance on various materials. The second was the development during the first years of the Christian era of the codex—the thing with pages and a cover—first as a supplement and eventually as a replacement for the older technology of the scroll. The third was what we think of as the Gutenberg moment, the European deployment of movable type, in the 15th century. And the fourth is, of course, the digital revolution in the middle of which we find ourselves today.
When we say "book," we hear the name of a physical object, even if we're thinking outside the codex. The codex bound text in a particular way, organizing words into pages, and as a result literally reframed ideas. The static text image on my desktop is the electronic cousin of late antiquity's reading invention. When my screen is still, or when I arrange text into two or four pages, like so much visual real estate, I am replicating a medieval codex, unbinding its beautifully illuminated pages. Yet reading digitally is also a scroll-like engagement—the fact that we "scroll down" connects us to a reading practice that dates back several millennia. One of the things that book historians study is the change in, and persistence of, reading technologies over time, and what those historians have demonstrated is that good technologies don't eradicate earlier good technologies. They overlap with them—or morph, so that the old and the new may persist alongside yet another development. Think Post-its, printed books, PC's, and iPads, all in the same office cubicle.
The book has a long history, but the concept of the "history of the book" is comparatively new. In the 1950s, two Frenchmen—Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin—brought out L'apparition du livre, or, in English, The Coming of the Book, a work of scholarship that became one of the signs marking the arrival of a new scholarly discipline. Book history's objective was analysis of the function of the book in European culture, and since the 1970s, it has continually expanded its scope, emerging as a trading zone among various disciplines, a rare scholarly arena where the work of librarians, archivists, and scholarly publishers can intersect with the work of traditional scholars and theorists, all members of what the economist Fritz Machlup termed the "knowledge industry."
In the long night of culture, we knowledge workers are restless sleepers. We need dreamers—in technology and science as well as the arts. Right now we are walking through two great dreams that are shaping the future of scholarship, even the very idea of scholarship and the role "the book" should play within it.
Related ContentFrom Book to Byte
Books Aren't Crucial, but Long-Form Texts Are
Great Dream No. 1 is universal access to knowledge. The cry to open the doors to information is heard everywhere. This dream means many things to many people, but for knowledge workers it means that scholarly books and journals can, and therefore should, be made available to all users. New technologies make that possible for the first time in human history, and as the argument goes, the existence of such possibilities obligates us to use them.
Great Dream No. 2 is the ideal of knowledge building as a self-correcting, collective exercise. Twenty years ago, nobody had Wikipedia, but when it arrived it took over the hearts and laptops of undergraduate students, and then of everyone else in the education business. Professional academic life would be poorer, or at least much slower, without it. The central premise of Wikipedia isn't speed but infinite self-correction, perpetually fine-tuning what we know. In our second dream, we expand our aggregated knowledge, quantitatively and qualitatively.
These two great dreams—the universal and the collective—should sound very familiar, since they are fundamentally the latest entries in Western culture's utopian tradition: Thomas More's Utopia, the Enlightenment's rational distribution of freedoms, Karl Marx's reorganization of labor. But their dark side—the troubling lump in the mattress—is the problem of books themselves, a problem always framed around the physical book and its limitations. The physical book takes up space, it may cost too much to buy and to make, it is heavy, only one person can read it at a time. Books deplete the greenery of our graying planet. Besides, the world and its technologies have replaced book reading with a quick dip into an electronic resource.
Against all that, there are classic arguments in favor of the book. Consider four.
The epistemological argument: Books are the material evidence of what we know. They are knowledge, and through them we discover what we know and who we are.
The cautionary or monitory argument: In their function as record-keepers, books transform history into the present and the present into history. Books cause us to remember and to prevent future generations from forgetting or misunderstanding us and the long collective story of particulars.
The technological argument: No predigital means of transmission has been as effective as the codex. Books don't need batteries. They're cheap in the scheme of things, and remarkably permanent. They travel well. The so-called invention of distance education, in the mid-20th century, was preceded at least 1,500 years earlier by books sent long distances from one early Christian community to another.
The autobiographical argument: Little else can demonstrate as clearly as a shelf of books (or possibly a refrigerator) who we are or imagine ourselves to be. This last argument has been given less respect than it might. Great and fancy libraries astound us, but it's the personal library where a scholar's serious work begins. Lose the personal library, and we become less than we are.
Those are four good arguments. But they don't make my case for books.
In 2009, Robert Darnton, formerly a professor of history at Princeton University and now director of the Harvard University Library, published a volume of more than three decades of essays, titled The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future (PublicAffairs). Perhaps more than any others, those essays have helped shape the current conversation about books and scholarship, their history and their future. In essence, The Case for Books has naturalized an argument that the Enlightenment's Republic of Letters—with its democratic vista lined with books available to all comers—may be reinvented in the 21st century. Darnton helps us see the connection between "a republic of learning" and a republic of electronic letters. His thoughtful case falls short—how could it not?—of proposing a solution to the competing interests of the market and the user. But we need visions, which by definition lack the fine print that makes the wonderful possible.
The Enlightenment's concerns with spreading light and learning are amply demonstrated in the Darntonian vision of a digital democracy. Both celebrate the luminosity of knowledge, shining forth through the written word. I'm struck, though, by the word "case" in the title of The Case for Books. In arguing his case for books, the author makes reference to cases of historical archives and to the various legal cases surrounding copyright protection.
But there are other relevant uses of the word "case." One would have been familiar to publishers for the 100 years before computers reinvented first printing and then publishing. When the term "case" entered the book trade, at the end of the 19th century, it described what we today might call a binder. The purchaser could use the case to store issues of a journal or other periodical publications. (Twentieth-century English publishers developed the habit of referring to their hardcover books as published in cased editions, as if the text were free-standing and the pages likely to wander off on their own.) Books had been bound in leather for centuries, but for 19th-century English printers engaged in mass production for a general audience, they were encased between what rare-book dealers and some publishers refer to as the top and bottom boards of a book. To the working publisher circa 1950, the case for books was not the Darntonian vision of the ultimate digital repository but a simple covering, a protective armature.
There are earlier uses of the word "case" as well. The Oxford English Dictionary cites an earlier case from an Elizabethan devotional tract that warned, "Every mans case is the skinne of a sinner." The pious writer meant that we are not only sinners, we also are containers stuffed with sin—sort of sin sausages. In Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare's Egyptian queen bids her servants leave Marc Antony's corpse at the Monument: "Come, away," she tells them. "This case of that huge spirit now is cold." Cleopatra's words confirm the distinction between the box that contains our life and the life within it.
Is the book the physical, printed text in its protective case, or is it the knowledge that the hidden text is always prepared to reveal? The answer, of course, is that the book is both. And because the book is and is not the form in which it is presented, it can do its work between boards of calf, or morocco, or Kivar, or from the booklike window of an iPad or a Nook.
So what are books good for? My best answer is that books produce knowledge by encasing it. Books take ideas and set them down, transforming them through the limitations of space into thinking usable by others. In 1959, C.P. Snow threw down the challenge of "two cultures," the scientific and the humanistic, pursuing their separate, unconnected lives within developed societies. In the new-media ecology of the 21st century, we may not have closed that gap, but the two cultures of the contemporary world are the culture of data and the culture of narrative. Narrative is rarely collective. It isn't infinitely expandable. Narrative has a shape and a temporality, and it ends, just as our lives do. Books tell stories. Scholarly books tell scholarly stories.
Storytelling is central to the work of the narrative-driven disciplines—the humanities and the nonquantitative social sciences—and it is central to the communicative pleasures of reading. Even argument is a form of narrative. Different kinds of books are, of course, good for different things. Some should be created only for download and occasional access, as in the case of most reference projects, which these days are born digital or at least given dual passports. But scholarly writing requires narrative fortitude, on the part of writer and reader. There is nothing wiki about the last set of Cambridge University Press monographs I purchased, and in each I encounter an individual speaking subject.
Each single-author book is immensely particular, a story told as only one storyteller could recount it. Scholarship is a collagist, building the next iteration of what we know book by book. Stories end, and that, I think, is a very good thing. A single authorial voice is a kind of performance, with an audience of one at a time, and no performance should outstay its welcome. Because a book must end, it must have a shape, the arc of thought that demonstrates not only the writer's command of her or his subject but also that writer's respect for the reader. A book is its own set of bookends.
Even if a book is published or disseminated in digital form, freed from its materiality, that shaping case of the codex is the ghost in the knowledge-machine. We are the case for books. Our bodies hold the capacity to generate thousands of ideas, perhaps even a couple of full-length monographs, and maybe a trade book or two. If we can get them right, books are luminous versions of our ideas, bound by narrative structure so that others can encounter those better, smarter versions of us on the page or screen. Books make the case for us, for the identity of the individual as an embodiment of thinking in the world. The heart of what even scholars do is the endless task of making that world visible again and again by telling stories, complicated, nuanced, subtle stories that reshape us daily so that new forms of knowledge can shine out.
William Germano is dean of the faculty of humanities and social sciences at Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. A longer version of this essay was presented as a talk at the annual meeting of the Association of American University Presses this summer.
Thursday, September 30, 2010
Wednesday, September 29, 2010
Willie Morris - North Toward Home
Is there anything better for the Southerner than a literate Southern man writing about his small-town Southern upbringing? Willie Morris came of age in the 1940's and 50's in Mississippi and went on to a stellar literary career. He grew up in Yazoo City, one of these towns up and down the Mississippi River like Tunica, Greenwood, and Vicksburg. I've started the book.
Robert Reich Says
Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future
By Robert B. Reich
Hardcover, 192 pages
Knopf
September 29, 2010
FROM NPR WEBSITE
Economist Robert Reich isn't surprised at the anemic economic recovery from the meltdown in 2008. His new book, Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future, argues that the economy isn't going to get moving again until we address a fundamental problem: the growing concentration of wealth and income among the richest Americans.
"I think that we have not fundamentally reformed Wall Street," he tells Fresh Air's Dave Davies. "We have not done what we needed to do. Derivatives are still relatively unregulated. There are big, big holes in that Wall Street financial reform act — holes big enough for Wall Street traders to drive their Ferraris through. We didn't bust up the big banks. ... We have not in any way helped the mortgage market. ... I think we're going to be left with a Wall Street that continues to grow more and more powerful and richer relative to the rest of the United States economy."
Reich says the last time income was so concentrated at the top was before the Great Depression, and he thinks that's no accident. Until the fruits of the economy are more broadly shared, he says, the middle class will lack the buying power to restart America's economic engine.
Robert Reich is currently the Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley.
"[The middle class] can't go deeper and deeper into debt. They can't work longer hours. They've exhausted all of their coping mechanisms," he says. "And people at the top are taking home so much that they are almost inevitably going to speculate in stocks or commodities or whatever the speculative vehicles are going to be. ... Unless we understand the relationship between the extraordinary concentration of income and wealth we have this in country and the failure of the economy to rebound, we are going to be destined for many, many years of high unemployment, anemic job recoveries and then periods of booms and busts that may even dwarf what we just had."
Reich is Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the Richard and Rhoda Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley. He served as labor secretary in the Clinton administration and is a co-founding editor of The American Prospect and a regular contributor to Marketplace.
By Robert B. Reich
Hardcover, 192 pages
Knopf
September 29, 2010
FROM NPR WEBSITE
Economist Robert Reich isn't surprised at the anemic economic recovery from the meltdown in 2008. His new book, Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future, argues that the economy isn't going to get moving again until we address a fundamental problem: the growing concentration of wealth and income among the richest Americans.
"I think that we have not fundamentally reformed Wall Street," he tells Fresh Air's Dave Davies. "We have not done what we needed to do. Derivatives are still relatively unregulated. There are big, big holes in that Wall Street financial reform act — holes big enough for Wall Street traders to drive their Ferraris through. We didn't bust up the big banks. ... We have not in any way helped the mortgage market. ... I think we're going to be left with a Wall Street that continues to grow more and more powerful and richer relative to the rest of the United States economy."
Reich says the last time income was so concentrated at the top was before the Great Depression, and he thinks that's no accident. Until the fruits of the economy are more broadly shared, he says, the middle class will lack the buying power to restart America's economic engine.
Robert Reich is currently the Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley.
"[The middle class] can't go deeper and deeper into debt. They can't work longer hours. They've exhausted all of their coping mechanisms," he says. "And people at the top are taking home so much that they are almost inevitably going to speculate in stocks or commodities or whatever the speculative vehicles are going to be. ... Unless we understand the relationship between the extraordinary concentration of income and wealth we have this in country and the failure of the economy to rebound, we are going to be destined for many, many years of high unemployment, anemic job recoveries and then periods of booms and busts that may even dwarf what we just had."
Reich is Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the Richard and Rhoda Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley. He served as labor secretary in the Clinton administration and is a co-founding editor of The American Prospect and a regular contributor to Marketplace.
Roger Kahn - The Era (4)
Just how good was Joe Dimaggio? This is the great unanswered baseball question for me. Of the all the athletes that I know, Dimaggio is one with the greatest mystique. The mystique of Joe D is so thick you can cut it with a knife.
My theory is that Dimaggio is overrated. He had the good fortune of playing in New York where the sportswriters of that city lauded him beyond all reason. The Great Dimaggio. It never ends. Hemingway mentions him in "The Old Man and the Sea." Paul Simon immortalizes him in "Mrs. Robinson." John Fogerty mentions him in his classic baseball song "Centerfield." Analysis has no chance against the Dimaggio mystique.
Roger Kahn asks, "How much of his reputation is image and hype?" Kahn doesn't directly answer the question, but he does point to the evidence for the hype.
In the end, the swooning over Dimaggio is something I will never understand. Great ballplayer, sure, but not the godlike figure he is made out to be.
My theory is that Dimaggio is overrated. He had the good fortune of playing in New York where the sportswriters of that city lauded him beyond all reason. The Great Dimaggio. It never ends. Hemingway mentions him in "The Old Man and the Sea." Paul Simon immortalizes him in "Mrs. Robinson." John Fogerty mentions him in his classic baseball song "Centerfield." Analysis has no chance against the Dimaggio mystique.
Roger Kahn asks, "How much of his reputation is image and hype?" Kahn doesn't directly answer the question, but he does point to the evidence for the hype.
In the end, the swooning over Dimaggio is something I will never understand. Great ballplayer, sure, but not the godlike figure he is made out to be.
Tuesday, September 28, 2010
Judge Breyer Instructs
Associate Supreme Court judge Stephen Breyer has written a marvelous new book countering the originalism of revanchists like Justice Scalia. I look forward to reading the book in the coming days. In the meantime, I wanted to preserve this review from The New Republic.
Pragmatism Strikes Back
Jeffrey Rosen
Justice Stephen BreyerMaking Our Democracy Work: A Judge's View
by Stephen Breyer
Knopf, 288 pp., $26.95
Justice Stephen Breyer’s new book arrives at a time when liberals are still hungry for a constitutional vision. In a series of polls conducted by Quinnipiac University between 2003 and 2008, 54 percent of the respondents believe that “the Supreme Court should consider changing times and current realities in applying the principles of the Constitution,” as opposed to 44 percent who believe that the Court “should only consider the original intentions of the authors of the Constitution.” And yet, unlike the defenders of “original understanding”, the supporters of “the living Constitution” have not been able to agree on a clear interpretive approach. Justice Breyer is the only sitting Supreme Court justice who has tried to outline, in a systematic way, an alternative to originalism.
In its scope and historical detail, Making Democracy Work advances Breyer’s vision beyond the broad details that he sketched in his previous book, Active Liberty, which argued that judges should interpret the Constitution in ways that promote democratic political participation rather than short-circuiting it. He sets out to answer a basic question about democratic legitimacy: how can judges earn the public’s confidence, so that Americans will follow even those opinions with which they disagree? And he offers two principles, drawn from history and experience. The first is that the Court should reject rigid originalism, instead viewing “the Constitution as containing unwavering values that must be applied flexibly to ever-changing circumstances”; and the second is that the Court, when interpreting the Constitution, should “take account of the role of other governmental institutions and the relationships among them.” Breyer is a staunch pragmatist, and he emphasizes that in building practical working relationships with the President and Congress, the Court should recognize that its decisions have real-world consequences, and take those consequences into account.
Breyer’s book begins by exploring four historical controversies in which the public accepted Supreme Court decisions that substantial numbers of people thought were wrong: Marbury v. Madison, in 1803, in which Chief Justice Marshall established the principle of judicial review and avoided a conflict with President Jefferson; Worcester v. Georgia, in 1832, in which Marshall protected the rights of the Cherokee Indians over the objections of President Jackson; Dred Scott v. Sandford, in 1857, in which Chief Justice Taney struck down the Missouri Compromise and mobilized opposition led by Abraham Lincoln; and Cooper v. Aaron, in 1958, in which the Court led by Chief Justice Earl Warren unanimously ordered Governor Orval Faubus to integrate the schools in Little Rock.
Breyer’s historical narratives are vivid and full of surprising details. He describes highly technical opinions—such as Justice Benjamin Curtis’s dissent in the Dred Scott case—in lively and accessible ways, and documents how extensively Lincoln relied on Curtis’s dissent. He also unearths relevant details about the political and legal context of the four cases, such as the misleading report that the military filed to justify the Japanese internment, and the Solicitor General’s refusal to cite the unreliable report explicitly. Although the four cases are different, Breyer says, they illustrate that the public has “developed a habit of following the Court’s constitutional interpretations, even those with which it strongly disagrees,” and that this habit has supported the Court’s increasingly confident assertion of “judicial supremacy”—namely, the principle that the justices are supreme over the president and Congress in the interpretation of the Constitution.
But do these historical examples really support a view of heroic judges fearlessly and successfully protecting unpopular minorities in the face of “strong” opposition from the political branches and the public? As Breyer notes, the principle of judicial supremacy that the Court asserted in Cooper—namely, that the president and Congress are obligated to follow the Court’s interpretation of the Constitution not only in a particular case but in all similar cases—went far beyond Marshall’s more modest claim in Marbury that all three branches of government are “bound by” the Constitution and entitled to interpret it on their own. Moreover, Breyer’s examples suggest that the Court is generally ineffective in sustaining constitutional interpretations that are intensely contested by the President and Congress: in the two cases where Presidents or national majorities strongly rejected the Court’s interpretation—the Cherokee Indians case and Dred Scott—the Court was ultimately unable to enforce its constitutional vision. It was only where the President and Congress supported, or at least tolerated, the Court’s decisions that the justices were able to prevail over opposition from a minority of the country.
More generally, Breyer does not discuss the extensive literature by political scientists and others suggesting that the real reason that the Court has generally maintained its legitimacy over time is that it rarely challenges public opinion in a sustained way, even in cases that the public does not follow closely. Breyer’s focus on the need for the Court to persuade the public to accept unpopular opinions may underestimate the degree to which the Court is highly constrained by public opinion; seldom issues opinions that are strongly unpopular with national majorities; and gets into trouble on the few occasions when it sticks its neck out too far.
In the latter half of his book, however, Breyer persuasively acknowledges the Court’s inability to act unilaterally by arguing that it should consider—and often defer to—the institutional views of the President and Congress in deciding cases. Here Breyer shows an appealing humility, which contrasts with the grandiosity of originalist judges who believe they have a unique ability to discern the one and true meaning of the Constitution, and to put the other branches in their place. This hermeneutical modesty, more than any other quality, is what the most successful justices, notably John Marshall, have deployed to shore up the Court’s fragile legitimacy—never picking fights with the other branches that they cannot win. As Marshall remarked, “I am not fond of butting against a wall in sport.”
Breyer’s institutional modesty suggests that he, far more than the conservative originalists, has inherited the mantle of judicial restraint from Brandeis and Holmes. But like all approaches, institutional modesty has its limitations. One criticism of Breyer’s moderation in interepretive ambition is that he can be, at times, too accommodating of the other branches, too willing to enmesh the Court in constitutional compromises that it would do better to avoid. In his discussion of Korematsu v. U.S., from 1944, the case that upheld the exclusion of Japanese Americans from their West Coast homes during World War Two, Breyer makes clear that he agrees with Justice Frank Murphy’s dissenting opinion. But in a surprising passage, Breyer goes on to suggest that the Court could have converged on a pragmatic compromise that would have upheld the internment of some Japanese Americans by crafting appropriate safeguards and procedures. The Court might “have found a workable way to hold the president constitutionally accountable,” he writes. “Perhaps it could have developed a sliding scale in respect to the length of detention and the intensity of its examination of the circumstances. Perhaps it could have insisted that the government increase screening efforts the longer an individual is held in detention. Perhaps it could have required the government to have had in place from the beginning a plan for future screening … As it was the Court majority understood the danger of excessive judicial interference in military affairs, but it did not satisfactorily address the problem of insufficient judicial involvement.”
But if the Court’s decision “hurt the interned Japanese by validating their interment,” as Breyer suggests, wouldn’t it have hurt itself by validating the interment of a smaller group of the detainees with judicially crafted safeguards? What sort of pragmatism is this? As it turned out, on the same day that it struck down Korematu’s exclusion, which had been endorsed by the President and Congress, the Court refused to endorse the continued detention of another American citizen, Mitsuye Endo, which Roosevelt and Congress had never endorsed. Wouldn’t the Court have dug itself in deeper by saying that Endo, or other Japanese Americans suspected of disloyalty, could, in fact, be detained as long as the government followed appropriate procedures?
Similar questions may be raised about Breyer’s positions in four related Guantanamo cases involving the President’s power to detain suspected enemy combatants in the war on terror. In the Hamdi case, in 2004, Breyer joined Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s plurality opinion holding that the Constitution permitted the Bush administration to classify an American citizen as an enemy combatant, despite the lack of Congressional authorization. But the opinion added that judges should create procedural safeguards, such as access to lawyers. The obvious objection to the Hamdi opinion was that it failed to respect Congressional prerogatives: why should judges allow President Bush to act unilaterally, inventing judicial oversight mechanisms to save him from his worst instincts, rather than forcing him to ask for Congressional support?
In the Hamdan case in 2006, the Court became less accommodating, insisting that Bush could not create military commissions without Congressional approval. Bush responded by asking Congress to approve his commissions, and Congress promptly obliged, passing the Military Commissions Act of 2006. But then, in the Boumediene case, Breyer joined Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion holding that Congress could not suspend the writ of habeas corpus in the absence of an emergency, and therefore the procedures Congress created were invalid. Once again, respect for the prerogatives of Congress might have led the Court to construe the Military Commissions Act narrowly: by holding that Congress hadn’t suspended habeas corpus, the Court could have avoided constitutional difficulties. As Breyer acknowledges, “one cannot characterize Boumediene as a case that followed Congressional directions or implemented Congress’s broader purposes.”
So Breyer’s pragmatic attempts to promote inter-branch cooperation in particular cases is sometimes open to question, and the same may be said of his various applications of what he calls the “proportionality principle,” which encourages judges to balance competing constitutional values in cases where they conflict. In interpreting the Second Amendment right to bear arms, for example, Breyer says that judges should balance a handgun ban’s “efficacy, in term of community safety, with the obstacles it imposes to self-defense.”
But you do not have to agree with all of Breyer’s specific conclusions to admire the transparency and the nuance of his judicial approach. This is constitutional interpretation for adults, an interpretive guide that recognizes that the Court has always depended on the other branches to enforce its constitutional vision, and that if the Court refuses to moderate and balance competing values in a candid way, the more polarized political branches are unlikely to step into the vacuum. Breyer is impressive in presenting an integrated theory not only of constitutional interpretation, but of legal interpretation in general, suggesting that judges can interpret Congressional statutes, administrative decisions, prior precedents, and questions involving federal and state relations in a way that promotes democratic deliberation. Pragmatism, as Breyer defends it, cannot be summarized on a bumper sticker or a poster, and therefore it will never have the political appeal of originalism, which misleadingly—but in politics, attractively—promises simple answers to hard questions. But it is the complex and careful Breyer who accurately describes how the Court has in fact maintained its legitimacy over time: by viewing itself as a partner of the president and Congress, not as some sort of Platonic guardian.
Most important, Breyer’s willingness to present his argument in terms that educated citizens can understand, in the hope of persuading all of us to participate actively in American democracy, exemplifies an idealism about what is possible in a democratic citizenry, and an optimism about it, that is as impressive as it is rare on the Supreme Court. Breyer’s book might be described as a work of democratic pedagogy, and a very admirable one. Unlike other justices, who have written memoirs emphasizing their upbringings or the personal difficulties they have overcome, Breyer is a teacher in the best sense, offering a tentative framework for evaluating the Constitution and encouraging citizens to debate with him about the details. More than his particular conclusions, it is the power of his intellectual example—his openness to opposing points of view and his recognition of the difficulty and necessity of trying to balance them—that makes his message urgently relevant in, and a kind of balm for, our polarized age.
Pragmatism Strikes Back
Jeffrey Rosen
Justice Stephen BreyerMaking Our Democracy Work: A Judge's View
by Stephen Breyer
Knopf, 288 pp., $26.95
Justice Stephen Breyer’s new book arrives at a time when liberals are still hungry for a constitutional vision. In a series of polls conducted by Quinnipiac University between 2003 and 2008, 54 percent of the respondents believe that “the Supreme Court should consider changing times and current realities in applying the principles of the Constitution,” as opposed to 44 percent who believe that the Court “should only consider the original intentions of the authors of the Constitution.” And yet, unlike the defenders of “original understanding”, the supporters of “the living Constitution” have not been able to agree on a clear interpretive approach. Justice Breyer is the only sitting Supreme Court justice who has tried to outline, in a systematic way, an alternative to originalism.
In its scope and historical detail, Making Democracy Work advances Breyer’s vision beyond the broad details that he sketched in his previous book, Active Liberty, which argued that judges should interpret the Constitution in ways that promote democratic political participation rather than short-circuiting it. He sets out to answer a basic question about democratic legitimacy: how can judges earn the public’s confidence, so that Americans will follow even those opinions with which they disagree? And he offers two principles, drawn from history and experience. The first is that the Court should reject rigid originalism, instead viewing “the Constitution as containing unwavering values that must be applied flexibly to ever-changing circumstances”; and the second is that the Court, when interpreting the Constitution, should “take account of the role of other governmental institutions and the relationships among them.” Breyer is a staunch pragmatist, and he emphasizes that in building practical working relationships with the President and Congress, the Court should recognize that its decisions have real-world consequences, and take those consequences into account.
Breyer’s book begins by exploring four historical controversies in which the public accepted Supreme Court decisions that substantial numbers of people thought were wrong: Marbury v. Madison, in 1803, in which Chief Justice Marshall established the principle of judicial review and avoided a conflict with President Jefferson; Worcester v. Georgia, in 1832, in which Marshall protected the rights of the Cherokee Indians over the objections of President Jackson; Dred Scott v. Sandford, in 1857, in which Chief Justice Taney struck down the Missouri Compromise and mobilized opposition led by Abraham Lincoln; and Cooper v. Aaron, in 1958, in which the Court led by Chief Justice Earl Warren unanimously ordered Governor Orval Faubus to integrate the schools in Little Rock.
Breyer’s historical narratives are vivid and full of surprising details. He describes highly technical opinions—such as Justice Benjamin Curtis’s dissent in the Dred Scott case—in lively and accessible ways, and documents how extensively Lincoln relied on Curtis’s dissent. He also unearths relevant details about the political and legal context of the four cases, such as the misleading report that the military filed to justify the Japanese internment, and the Solicitor General’s refusal to cite the unreliable report explicitly. Although the four cases are different, Breyer says, they illustrate that the public has “developed a habit of following the Court’s constitutional interpretations, even those with which it strongly disagrees,” and that this habit has supported the Court’s increasingly confident assertion of “judicial supremacy”—namely, the principle that the justices are supreme over the president and Congress in the interpretation of the Constitution.
But do these historical examples really support a view of heroic judges fearlessly and successfully protecting unpopular minorities in the face of “strong” opposition from the political branches and the public? As Breyer notes, the principle of judicial supremacy that the Court asserted in Cooper—namely, that the president and Congress are obligated to follow the Court’s interpretation of the Constitution not only in a particular case but in all similar cases—went far beyond Marshall’s more modest claim in Marbury that all three branches of government are “bound by” the Constitution and entitled to interpret it on their own. Moreover, Breyer’s examples suggest that the Court is generally ineffective in sustaining constitutional interpretations that are intensely contested by the President and Congress: in the two cases where Presidents or national majorities strongly rejected the Court’s interpretation—the Cherokee Indians case and Dred Scott—the Court was ultimately unable to enforce its constitutional vision. It was only where the President and Congress supported, or at least tolerated, the Court’s decisions that the justices were able to prevail over opposition from a minority of the country.
More generally, Breyer does not discuss the extensive literature by political scientists and others suggesting that the real reason that the Court has generally maintained its legitimacy over time is that it rarely challenges public opinion in a sustained way, even in cases that the public does not follow closely. Breyer’s focus on the need for the Court to persuade the public to accept unpopular opinions may underestimate the degree to which the Court is highly constrained by public opinion; seldom issues opinions that are strongly unpopular with national majorities; and gets into trouble on the few occasions when it sticks its neck out too far.
In the latter half of his book, however, Breyer persuasively acknowledges the Court’s inability to act unilaterally by arguing that it should consider—and often defer to—the institutional views of the President and Congress in deciding cases. Here Breyer shows an appealing humility, which contrasts with the grandiosity of originalist judges who believe they have a unique ability to discern the one and true meaning of the Constitution, and to put the other branches in their place. This hermeneutical modesty, more than any other quality, is what the most successful justices, notably John Marshall, have deployed to shore up the Court’s fragile legitimacy—never picking fights with the other branches that they cannot win. As Marshall remarked, “I am not fond of butting against a wall in sport.”
Breyer’s institutional modesty suggests that he, far more than the conservative originalists, has inherited the mantle of judicial restraint from Brandeis and Holmes. But like all approaches, institutional modesty has its limitations. One criticism of Breyer’s moderation in interepretive ambition is that he can be, at times, too accommodating of the other branches, too willing to enmesh the Court in constitutional compromises that it would do better to avoid. In his discussion of Korematsu v. U.S., from 1944, the case that upheld the exclusion of Japanese Americans from their West Coast homes during World War Two, Breyer makes clear that he agrees with Justice Frank Murphy’s dissenting opinion. But in a surprising passage, Breyer goes on to suggest that the Court could have converged on a pragmatic compromise that would have upheld the internment of some Japanese Americans by crafting appropriate safeguards and procedures. The Court might “have found a workable way to hold the president constitutionally accountable,” he writes. “Perhaps it could have developed a sliding scale in respect to the length of detention and the intensity of its examination of the circumstances. Perhaps it could have insisted that the government increase screening efforts the longer an individual is held in detention. Perhaps it could have required the government to have had in place from the beginning a plan for future screening … As it was the Court majority understood the danger of excessive judicial interference in military affairs, but it did not satisfactorily address the problem of insufficient judicial involvement.”
But if the Court’s decision “hurt the interned Japanese by validating their interment,” as Breyer suggests, wouldn’t it have hurt itself by validating the interment of a smaller group of the detainees with judicially crafted safeguards? What sort of pragmatism is this? As it turned out, on the same day that it struck down Korematu’s exclusion, which had been endorsed by the President and Congress, the Court refused to endorse the continued detention of another American citizen, Mitsuye Endo, which Roosevelt and Congress had never endorsed. Wouldn’t the Court have dug itself in deeper by saying that Endo, or other Japanese Americans suspected of disloyalty, could, in fact, be detained as long as the government followed appropriate procedures?
Similar questions may be raised about Breyer’s positions in four related Guantanamo cases involving the President’s power to detain suspected enemy combatants in the war on terror. In the Hamdi case, in 2004, Breyer joined Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s plurality opinion holding that the Constitution permitted the Bush administration to classify an American citizen as an enemy combatant, despite the lack of Congressional authorization. But the opinion added that judges should create procedural safeguards, such as access to lawyers. The obvious objection to the Hamdi opinion was that it failed to respect Congressional prerogatives: why should judges allow President Bush to act unilaterally, inventing judicial oversight mechanisms to save him from his worst instincts, rather than forcing him to ask for Congressional support?
In the Hamdan case in 2006, the Court became less accommodating, insisting that Bush could not create military commissions without Congressional approval. Bush responded by asking Congress to approve his commissions, and Congress promptly obliged, passing the Military Commissions Act of 2006. But then, in the Boumediene case, Breyer joined Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion holding that Congress could not suspend the writ of habeas corpus in the absence of an emergency, and therefore the procedures Congress created were invalid. Once again, respect for the prerogatives of Congress might have led the Court to construe the Military Commissions Act narrowly: by holding that Congress hadn’t suspended habeas corpus, the Court could have avoided constitutional difficulties. As Breyer acknowledges, “one cannot characterize Boumediene as a case that followed Congressional directions or implemented Congress’s broader purposes.”
So Breyer’s pragmatic attempts to promote inter-branch cooperation in particular cases is sometimes open to question, and the same may be said of his various applications of what he calls the “proportionality principle,” which encourages judges to balance competing constitutional values in cases where they conflict. In interpreting the Second Amendment right to bear arms, for example, Breyer says that judges should balance a handgun ban’s “efficacy, in term of community safety, with the obstacles it imposes to self-defense.”
But you do not have to agree with all of Breyer’s specific conclusions to admire the transparency and the nuance of his judicial approach. This is constitutional interpretation for adults, an interpretive guide that recognizes that the Court has always depended on the other branches to enforce its constitutional vision, and that if the Court refuses to moderate and balance competing values in a candid way, the more polarized political branches are unlikely to step into the vacuum. Breyer is impressive in presenting an integrated theory not only of constitutional interpretation, but of legal interpretation in general, suggesting that judges can interpret Congressional statutes, administrative decisions, prior precedents, and questions involving federal and state relations in a way that promotes democratic deliberation. Pragmatism, as Breyer defends it, cannot be summarized on a bumper sticker or a poster, and therefore it will never have the political appeal of originalism, which misleadingly—but in politics, attractively—promises simple answers to hard questions. But it is the complex and careful Breyer who accurately describes how the Court has in fact maintained its legitimacy over time: by viewing itself as a partner of the president and Congress, not as some sort of Platonic guardian.
Most important, Breyer’s willingness to present his argument in terms that educated citizens can understand, in the hope of persuading all of us to participate actively in American democracy, exemplifies an idealism about what is possible in a democratic citizenry, and an optimism about it, that is as impressive as it is rare on the Supreme Court. Breyer’s book might be described as a work of democratic pedagogy, and a very admirable one. Unlike other justices, who have written memoirs emphasizing their upbringings or the personal difficulties they have overcome, Breyer is a teacher in the best sense, offering a tentative framework for evaluating the Constitution and encouraging citizens to debate with him about the details. More than his particular conclusions, it is the power of his intellectual example—his openness to opposing points of view and his recognition of the difficulty and necessity of trying to balance them—that makes his message urgently relevant in, and a kind of balm for, our polarized age.
Saturday, September 25, 2010
Banana Republic?
Op-Ed Columnist
Downhill With the G.O.P.
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: September 23, 2010
Once upon a time, a Latin American political party promised to help motorists save money on gasoline. How? By building highways that ran only downhill.
I’ve always liked that story, but the truth is that the party received hardly any votes. And that means that the joke is really on us. For these days one of America’s two great political parties routinely makes equally nonsensical promises. Never mind the war on terror, the party’s main concern seems to be the war on arithmetic. And this party has a better than even chance of retaking at least one house of Congress this November.
Banana republic, here we come.
On Thursday, House Republicans released their “Pledge to America,” supposedly outlining their policy agenda. In essence, what they say is, “Deficits are a terrible thing. Let’s make them much bigger.” The document repeatedly condemns federal debt — 16 times, by my count. But the main substantive policy proposal is to make the Bush tax cuts permanent, which independent estimates say would add about $3.7 trillion to the debt over the next decade — about $700 billion more than the Obama administration’s tax proposals.
True, the document talks about the need to cut spending. But as far as I can see, there’s only one specific cut proposed — canceling the rest of the Troubled Asset Relief Program, which Republicans claim (implausibly) would save $16 billion. That’s less than half of 1 percent of the budget cost of those tax cuts. As for the rest, everything must be cut, in ways not specified — “except for common-sense exceptions for seniors, veterans, and our troops.” In other words, Social Security, Medicare and the defense budget are off-limits.
So what’s left? Howard Gleckman of the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center has done the math. As he points out, the only way to balance the budget by 2020, while simultaneously (a) making the Bush tax cuts permanent and (b) protecting all the programs Republicans say they won’t cut, is to completely abolish the rest of the federal government: “No more national parks, no more Small Business Administration loans, no more export subsidies, no more N.I.H. No more Medicaid (one-third of its budget pays for long-term care for our parents and others with disabilities). No more child health or child nutrition programs. No more highway construction. No more homeland security. Oh, and no more Congress.”
The “pledge,” then, is nonsense. But isn’t that true of all political platforms? The answer is, not to anything like the same extent. Many independent analysts believe that the Obama administration’s long-run budget projections are somewhat too optimistic — but, if so, it’s a matter of technical details. Neither President Obama nor any other leading Democrat, as far as I can recall, has ever claimed that up is down, that you can sharply reduce revenue, protect all the programs voters like, and still balance the budget.
And the G.O.P. itself used to make more sense than it does now. Ronald Reagan’s claim that cutting taxes would actually increase revenue was wishful thinking, but at least he had some kind of theory behind his proposals. When former President George W. Bush campaigned for big tax cuts in 2000, he claimed that these cuts were affordable given (unrealistic) projections of future budget surpluses. Now, however, Republicans aren’t even pretending that their numbers add up.
So how did we get to the point where one of our two major political parties isn’t even trying to make sense?
The answer isn’t a secret. The late Irving Kristol, one of the intellectual godfathers of modern conservatism, once wrote frankly about why he threw his support behind tax cuts that would worsen the budget deficit: his task, as he saw it, was to create a Republican majority, “so political effectiveness was the priority, not the accounting deficiencies of government.” In short, say whatever it takes to gain power. That’s a philosophy that now, more than ever, holds sway in the movement Kristol helped shape.
And what happens once the movement achieves the power it seeks? The answer, presumably, is that it turns to its real, not-so-secret agenda, which mainly involves privatizing and dismantling Medicare and Social Security.
Realistically, though, Republicans aren’t going to have the power to enact their true agenda any time soon — if ever. Remember, the Bush administration’s attack on Social Security was a fiasco, despite its large majority in Congress — and it actually increased Medicare spending.
So the clear and present danger isn’t that the G.O.P. will be able to achieve its long-run goals. It is, rather, that Republicans will gain just enough power to make the country ungovernable, unable to address its fiscal problems or anything else in a serious way. As I said, banana republic, here we come.
Downhill With the G.O.P.
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: September 23, 2010
Once upon a time, a Latin American political party promised to help motorists save money on gasoline. How? By building highways that ran only downhill.
I’ve always liked that story, but the truth is that the party received hardly any votes. And that means that the joke is really on us. For these days one of America’s two great political parties routinely makes equally nonsensical promises. Never mind the war on terror, the party’s main concern seems to be the war on arithmetic. And this party has a better than even chance of retaking at least one house of Congress this November.
Banana republic, here we come.
On Thursday, House Republicans released their “Pledge to America,” supposedly outlining their policy agenda. In essence, what they say is, “Deficits are a terrible thing. Let’s make them much bigger.” The document repeatedly condemns federal debt — 16 times, by my count. But the main substantive policy proposal is to make the Bush tax cuts permanent, which independent estimates say would add about $3.7 trillion to the debt over the next decade — about $700 billion more than the Obama administration’s tax proposals.
True, the document talks about the need to cut spending. But as far as I can see, there’s only one specific cut proposed — canceling the rest of the Troubled Asset Relief Program, which Republicans claim (implausibly) would save $16 billion. That’s less than half of 1 percent of the budget cost of those tax cuts. As for the rest, everything must be cut, in ways not specified — “except for common-sense exceptions for seniors, veterans, and our troops.” In other words, Social Security, Medicare and the defense budget are off-limits.
So what’s left? Howard Gleckman of the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center has done the math. As he points out, the only way to balance the budget by 2020, while simultaneously (a) making the Bush tax cuts permanent and (b) protecting all the programs Republicans say they won’t cut, is to completely abolish the rest of the federal government: “No more national parks, no more Small Business Administration loans, no more export subsidies, no more N.I.H. No more Medicaid (one-third of its budget pays for long-term care for our parents and others with disabilities). No more child health or child nutrition programs. No more highway construction. No more homeland security. Oh, and no more Congress.”
The “pledge,” then, is nonsense. But isn’t that true of all political platforms? The answer is, not to anything like the same extent. Many independent analysts believe that the Obama administration’s long-run budget projections are somewhat too optimistic — but, if so, it’s a matter of technical details. Neither President Obama nor any other leading Democrat, as far as I can recall, has ever claimed that up is down, that you can sharply reduce revenue, protect all the programs voters like, and still balance the budget.
And the G.O.P. itself used to make more sense than it does now. Ronald Reagan’s claim that cutting taxes would actually increase revenue was wishful thinking, but at least he had some kind of theory behind his proposals. When former President George W. Bush campaigned for big tax cuts in 2000, he claimed that these cuts were affordable given (unrealistic) projections of future budget surpluses. Now, however, Republicans aren’t even pretending that their numbers add up.
So how did we get to the point where one of our two major political parties isn’t even trying to make sense?
The answer isn’t a secret. The late Irving Kristol, one of the intellectual godfathers of modern conservatism, once wrote frankly about why he threw his support behind tax cuts that would worsen the budget deficit: his task, as he saw it, was to create a Republican majority, “so political effectiveness was the priority, not the accounting deficiencies of government.” In short, say whatever it takes to gain power. That’s a philosophy that now, more than ever, holds sway in the movement Kristol helped shape.
And what happens once the movement achieves the power it seeks? The answer, presumably, is that it turns to its real, not-so-secret agenda, which mainly involves privatizing and dismantling Medicare and Social Security.
Realistically, though, Republicans aren’t going to have the power to enact their true agenda any time soon — if ever. Remember, the Bush administration’s attack on Social Security was a fiasco, despite its large majority in Congress — and it actually increased Medicare spending.
So the clear and present danger isn’t that the G.O.P. will be able to achieve its long-run goals. It is, rather, that Republicans will gain just enough power to make the country ungovernable, unable to address its fiscal problems or anything else in a serious way. As I said, banana republic, here we come.
Friday, September 24, 2010
Roger Kahn - The Era (3)
Here is one of the key things I learned from this book. We all know that today's football and basketball players are bigger, strong, and better than the athletes of old. Baseball is one sport where this may not be the case. The baseball players from decades gone past may have been just as good as today's players. This may be unique to baseball. Roger Kahn explains why.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Aren't today's athletes faster, bigger, and stronger than their counterparts in the 1950's? Certainly that applies to football players, runners, and basketball players. But baseball is not a bigger-faster-stronger game. Given a certain minimum standard, major league baseball is timing, coordination, and hand-to-eye response. Jim Thorpe, the strongest, fastest athlete of his time, was a bust as a professional baseball player. For all his strength and speed, Thorpe could not hit major league curveballs.
-Roger Kahn, "The Era," p. 282-83.
Hence, baseball is an exception to the rule. The players of old might be just as good as today's players.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Aren't today's athletes faster, bigger, and stronger than their counterparts in the 1950's? Certainly that applies to football players, runners, and basketball players. But baseball is not a bigger-faster-stronger game. Given a certain minimum standard, major league baseball is timing, coordination, and hand-to-eye response. Jim Thorpe, the strongest, fastest athlete of his time, was a bust as a professional baseball player. For all his strength and speed, Thorpe could not hit major league curveballs.
-Roger Kahn, "The Era," p. 282-83.
Hence, baseball is an exception to the rule. The players of old might be just as good as today's players.
A Satiric Look at the Start of the New Health Care Act
Jonathan Chait
Freedom Officially Dead &c Democrats Decide On Political Suicide September 24, 2010 | 8:06 am 1 comment
The first set of regulations in the Affordable Care Act is now in effect. Big government has now capriciously taken away the right of average Americans to start an insurance company, sell other people insurance, and then arbitrarily cancel the policy when that person contracts a horrible illness:
For all plans - including individual and group policies as well as those sponsored by employers - insurers will no longer be permitted to:
l Deny coverage to children with preexisting conditions.
This will not necessarily prevent insurers from charging higher premiums in such cases. But it will mean they can no longer refuse to sell policies for children who are sick. They also cannot temporarily or permanently exclude coverage of medical bills arising from a child's preexisting condition. An important caveat: This rule does not apply to plans purchased before the legislation was adopted on March 23.
But Americans of all ages will be able to receive these protections after 2014.
l Put lifetime limits on benefits.
Another caveat: A plan can still put a lifetime dollar limit on spending for health services that the government does not deem essential.
l Cancel a policy retroactively without proving fraud.
This addresses a practice known as recission, by which insurers could cancel coverage just as a person got sick, on the grounds that they or their employer had provided inaccurate information when they originally applied for coverage. Now insurers will have to prove that the error was more than just an honest mistake. As with many of the other rules, this one applies to "plan years" or "policy years" that begin on or after Sept. 23.
We're living in the nightmare of an Ayn Rand novel.
Freedom Officially Dead &c Democrats Decide On Political Suicide September 24, 2010 | 8:06 am 1 comment
The first set of regulations in the Affordable Care Act is now in effect. Big government has now capriciously taken away the right of average Americans to start an insurance company, sell other people insurance, and then arbitrarily cancel the policy when that person contracts a horrible illness:
For all plans - including individual and group policies as well as those sponsored by employers - insurers will no longer be permitted to:
l Deny coverage to children with preexisting conditions.
This will not necessarily prevent insurers from charging higher premiums in such cases. But it will mean they can no longer refuse to sell policies for children who are sick. They also cannot temporarily or permanently exclude coverage of medical bills arising from a child's preexisting condition. An important caveat: This rule does not apply to plans purchased before the legislation was adopted on March 23.
But Americans of all ages will be able to receive these protections after 2014.
l Put lifetime limits on benefits.
Another caveat: A plan can still put a lifetime dollar limit on spending for health services that the government does not deem essential.
l Cancel a policy retroactively without proving fraud.
This addresses a practice known as recission, by which insurers could cancel coverage just as a person got sick, on the grounds that they or their employer had provided inaccurate information when they originally applied for coverage. Now insurers will have to prove that the error was more than just an honest mistake. As with many of the other rules, this one applies to "plan years" or "policy years" that begin on or after Sept. 23.
We're living in the nightmare of an Ayn Rand novel.
Roger Kahn - The Era (2)
Roger Kahn points out that at the start of The Era (1947-1957) that New York was THE place to be, the capital of the world, not just the media capital, the financial capital, whatever. New York City was these things, but it was much more. NYC was the destination for everyone who wanted to write or compose or dance, to make a fortune, find a lover, or to play baseball. Back then, the city was affordable and safe for human habitation. It was the closest thing we've seen to a cosmic town. I agree. Even during the 60's and 70's, my time, I could relate to this feeling that if not to live in NYC, you had to go there and see it, experience it, and come to terms with this fantastic place of destiny.
Thursday, September 23, 2010
Same OLD Republican Ideas
There is an old adage that there is nothing new under the sun. This is certainly true when it comes to Republican propaganda.
by Jonathan Chait
The Republican Party's new "Pledge To America" is not what you'd call a surprise. It's a reprise of every theme of Republican economic policy-making the party has followed for 20 years, since the conservative wing rejected George H.W. Bush's deficit reduction deal and seized control of the party. Since then, the Republican program has consisted of a combination of specific, detailed plans to increase the deficit alongside vague assertions of intent to reduce it.
The Pledge To America fulminates against debt, but it should be read as a plan to explode debt through the ceiling. It would make permanent all the Bush tax cuts, at a cost of trillions. It would add new business tax cuts on top of those. It would repeal the Affordable Care Act, at massive long-term fiscal cost. (Republicans are already planning to undermine many of the cost-saving features of the bill.)
On the opposite side of the scale, you have a handful of symbolic measures, like cutting Congress's budget. The big money "saving" measure is a cap on non-defense discretionary spending. This is a hoary tool for pretending you plan to make serious cuts when you do not. "Domestic discretionary spending" is a popular category to target because it is a collection of programs, not an individual program, like Social Security. But when the programs to be cut are given names, like "food safety inspectors" or "the Coast Guard," then the will to cut those programs inevitably (and, usually, correctly) disappears.
Republicans keep running on platforms consisting of specified measures to increase the deficit and unspecified pledges to reduce it. Inevitably, they fail to reduce it. Then the party faithful decide the problem was leaders who lacked true conviction, and so the new leaders promise to mend their ways. Then they do the same thing all over again.
by Jonathan Chait
The Republican Party's new "Pledge To America" is not what you'd call a surprise. It's a reprise of every theme of Republican economic policy-making the party has followed for 20 years, since the conservative wing rejected George H.W. Bush's deficit reduction deal and seized control of the party. Since then, the Republican program has consisted of a combination of specific, detailed plans to increase the deficit alongside vague assertions of intent to reduce it.
The Pledge To America fulminates against debt, but it should be read as a plan to explode debt through the ceiling. It would make permanent all the Bush tax cuts, at a cost of trillions. It would add new business tax cuts on top of those. It would repeal the Affordable Care Act, at massive long-term fiscal cost. (Republicans are already planning to undermine many of the cost-saving features of the bill.)
On the opposite side of the scale, you have a handful of symbolic measures, like cutting Congress's budget. The big money "saving" measure is a cap on non-defense discretionary spending. This is a hoary tool for pretending you plan to make serious cuts when you do not. "Domestic discretionary spending" is a popular category to target because it is a collection of programs, not an individual program, like Social Security. But when the programs to be cut are given names, like "food safety inspectors" or "the Coast Guard," then the will to cut those programs inevitably (and, usually, correctly) disappears.
Republicans keep running on platforms consisting of specified measures to increase the deficit and unspecified pledges to reduce it. Inevitably, they fail to reduce it. Then the party faithful decide the problem was leaders who lacked true conviction, and so the new leaders promise to mend their ways. Then they do the same thing all over again.
Wednesday, September 22, 2010
The Race Card
From Andrew Sullivan
22 Sep 2010 07:46 am
Patrick Buchanan plays it in an unexpected way, denigrating president Obama for failing to give black Americans preferential treatment:
[W]hile conservatives always get one of their own on every national ticket, and all of their own on the Supreme Court, African-Americans seem to settle for a few back-of-the-bus Cabinet seats. Say what you will about the right. But if their party took them for granted the way Democratic presidents take black constituents for granted in plum appointments, there’d be a whole lot of shakin’ going on.
Of course, if Obama ever did give blacks preferential treatment, Buchanan would be the first one to seize on the matter in the most demagogic way imaginable. And insofar as Democrats do take black constituents for granted, it is due in no small part to the fact that those constituents are powerfully averse to voting for the party of Pat Buchanan, who has replaced the outright racism of his early career with a new affinity, suddenly shared by so many on the right, for race-baiting.
22 Sep 2010 07:46 am
Patrick Buchanan plays it in an unexpected way, denigrating president Obama for failing to give black Americans preferential treatment:
[W]hile conservatives always get one of their own on every national ticket, and all of their own on the Supreme Court, African-Americans seem to settle for a few back-of-the-bus Cabinet seats. Say what you will about the right. But if their party took them for granted the way Democratic presidents take black constituents for granted in plum appointments, there’d be a whole lot of shakin’ going on.
Of course, if Obama ever did give blacks preferential treatment, Buchanan would be the first one to seize on the matter in the most demagogic way imaginable. And insofar as Democrats do take black constituents for granted, it is due in no small part to the fact that those constituents are powerfully averse to voting for the party of Pat Buchanan, who has replaced the outright racism of his early career with a new affinity, suddenly shared by so many on the right, for race-baiting.
A Farce & a Coward
from Andrew Sullivan
By the way I think Obama's absolutely right not to engage Palin directly. She is a farce and a coward and cannot be engaged by intelligent adults. Any treatment of her as a serious figure worth actually debating when she has yet to make a single argument on any substantive or complex policy question is futile and counter-productive. The president needs to create a better narrative as to why his policies are the best the country can do with right now - his most evident rhetorical and political failing right now - not give this farrago of Facebook fantasies the stature she craves.
By the way I think Obama's absolutely right not to engage Palin directly. She is a farce and a coward and cannot be engaged by intelligent adults. Any treatment of her as a serious figure worth actually debating when she has yet to make a single argument on any substantive or complex policy question is futile and counter-productive. The president needs to create a better narrative as to why his policies are the best the country can do with right now - his most evident rhetorical and political failing right now - not give this farrago of Facebook fantasies the stature she craves.
Tuesday, September 21, 2010
Get Tough, Mr. President!
Robert ReichFormer Secretary of Labor; Professor at Berkeley; Author, 'Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future'
Posted: September 21, 2010 11:51
Why There's an Enthusiasm Gap
On Monday at a "town hall" sponsored by CNBC in Washington, the president took questions about the economy. When a hedge-fund manager complained that Wall Street executives "feel like we've been whacked with a stick" by the administration, Obama said most of his critics think he's been too soft on the Street.
He noted he still hasn't been able to end the practice of taxing some hedge fund and private-equity earnings at the capital-gains rates rather than the higher income-tax rates. "The notion that somehow me saying maybe you should be taxed more like your secretary when you're pulling home a billion dollars...a year I don't think is me being extremist or anti-business."
Good as far as he went. But that's as far as he was willing to go. It was a golden opportunity for Obama to connect the dots -- to make the case that:
Super-rich financiers on Wall Street and top corporate executives have grown even richer than they were before the Great Recession, even though most Americans are getting poorer or losing their jobs and homes and savings, and more Americans are in poverty.
Yet the lobbyists for the financiers and top corporate executives, and their Republican allies have blocked or tried to block every effort of the administration to widen the circle of prosperity, including enacting a major jobs program, providing major relief for mortgage holders who are under water, helping working families afford college for their kids, making sure states and cities have enough money to pay our classroom teachers, and cutting taxes on average working people.
They almost scuttled the effort to make sure health care would be affordable to average Americans.
The super-rich say the nation can't afford any of this because of budget deficits. Yet at the same time their platoons of lobbyists are fighting off efforts to treat their income as taxable earnings rather than capital gains. So last year the 400 richest families in America, with an average income of300 million each, were taxed at an average rate of only 17 percent. That's the same tax rate paid by a family earning30,000.
And they're fighting off efforts to end the temporary Bush tax cuts. If they're successful, the richest 1 percent of Americans will get a windfall of36 billion next year. Millionaire families will avoid paying31 billion in taxes. Over ten years, they'd avoid paying700 billion.
And they're fighting off efforts to restore the estate tax, which only applies to the top 2 percent of Americans, and which has been in effect since Abraham Lincoln introduced it to help finance the Civil War. How do we afford national defense if the richest and most privileged Americans won't pay their fair share?
Wealth and power in this country are so distorted that the top 25 hedge-fund managers each earned an average of1 billion last year.1 billion would support 20,000 classroom teachers. Yet who contributes more to this country -- a hedge-fund manager or a teacher?
But he didn't.
Instead, he challenged tea-party activists to come up with specific spending cuts. "It's not enough just to say, 'Get control of spending.' I think it's important for you to say, you know, I'm willing to cut veterans' benefits, or I'm willing to cut Medicare or Social Security benefits, or I'm willing to see taxes go up."
Posted: September 21, 2010 11:51
Why There's an Enthusiasm Gap
On Monday at a "town hall" sponsored by CNBC in Washington, the president took questions about the economy. When a hedge-fund manager complained that Wall Street executives "feel like we've been whacked with a stick" by the administration, Obama said most of his critics think he's been too soft on the Street.
He noted he still hasn't been able to end the practice of taxing some hedge fund and private-equity earnings at the capital-gains rates rather than the higher income-tax rates. "The notion that somehow me saying maybe you should be taxed more like your secretary when you're pulling home a billion dollars...a year I don't think is me being extremist or anti-business."
Good as far as he went. But that's as far as he was willing to go. It was a golden opportunity for Obama to connect the dots -- to make the case that:
Super-rich financiers on Wall Street and top corporate executives have grown even richer than they were before the Great Recession, even though most Americans are getting poorer or losing their jobs and homes and savings, and more Americans are in poverty.
Yet the lobbyists for the financiers and top corporate executives, and their Republican allies have blocked or tried to block every effort of the administration to widen the circle of prosperity, including enacting a major jobs program, providing major relief for mortgage holders who are under water, helping working families afford college for their kids, making sure states and cities have enough money to pay our classroom teachers, and cutting taxes on average working people.
They almost scuttled the effort to make sure health care would be affordable to average Americans.
The super-rich say the nation can't afford any of this because of budget deficits. Yet at the same time their platoons of lobbyists are fighting off efforts to treat their income as taxable earnings rather than capital gains. So last year the 400 richest families in America, with an average income of300 million each, were taxed at an average rate of only 17 percent. That's the same tax rate paid by a family earning30,000.
And they're fighting off efforts to end the temporary Bush tax cuts. If they're successful, the richest 1 percent of Americans will get a windfall of36 billion next year. Millionaire families will avoid paying31 billion in taxes. Over ten years, they'd avoid paying700 billion.
And they're fighting off efforts to restore the estate tax, which only applies to the top 2 percent of Americans, and which has been in effect since Abraham Lincoln introduced it to help finance the Civil War. How do we afford national defense if the richest and most privileged Americans won't pay their fair share?
Wealth and power in this country are so distorted that the top 25 hedge-fund managers each earned an average of1 billion last year.1 billion would support 20,000 classroom teachers. Yet who contributes more to this country -- a hedge-fund manager or a teacher?
But he didn't.
Instead, he challenged tea-party activists to come up with specific spending cuts. "It's not enough just to say, 'Get control of spending.' I think it's important for you to say, you know, I'm willing to cut veterans' benefits, or I'm willing to cut Medicare or Social Security benefits, or I'm willing to see taxes go up."
Roger Kahn - The Era
I move on to another Roger Kahn book. Next to "The Boys of Summer," this is his best one.
For New Yorker Kahn, "the era" was baseball from 1947 to 1957 when the Giants and Dodgers were still in New York and New York City ruled major league baseball. This was the era of Jackie Robinson and the beginning of the careers of Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle. There was the arrival of Casey Stengel to manage the Yankees in 1949 when the pinstripes won the first of 5 straight World Series
It was the end of the career of Joe Dimaggio. More about Joltin' Joe in later posts.
The Dodgers finally won their first World Series against the Yankees in '55. Willie Mays made that famous catch in the Polo Grounds in 1954. For New Yorkers, this was the time of their lives.
For New Yorker Kahn, "the era" was baseball from 1947 to 1957 when the Giants and Dodgers were still in New York and New York City ruled major league baseball. This was the era of Jackie Robinson and the beginning of the careers of Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle. There was the arrival of Casey Stengel to manage the Yankees in 1949 when the pinstripes won the first of 5 straight World Series
It was the end of the career of Joe Dimaggio. More about Joltin' Joe in later posts.
The Dodgers finally won their first World Series against the Yankees in '55. Willie Mays made that famous catch in the Polo Grounds in 1954. For New Yorkers, this was the time of their lives.
Monday, September 20, 2010
Let's Get With It
President Obama needs to realize that with Republicans you are not dealing with reasonable people. Rip them to shreds!!!
The Liberal Mood In 18 Words
Jonathan Chait
The Liberal Mood In 18 Words
When Mascots AttackVia Ben Smith, this comment from a Democratic voter to President Obama perfectly encapsulates the liberal mood:
I'm exhausted. Exhausted of defending you, defending your administration, defending the mantle of change that I voted for.
This gets at what I've been writing about a lot, which is liberals' inability to sustain political enthusiasm, especially when their party holds power. Conservatives often find it natural to muster enthusiasm on behalf of a party in power. Liberals seem to do so only on behalf of an idealistic alternative, which inevitably falls short of their dreams.
The Liberal Mood In 18 Words
Jonathan Chait
The Liberal Mood In 18 Words
When Mascots AttackVia Ben Smith, this comment from a Democratic voter to President Obama perfectly encapsulates the liberal mood:
I'm exhausted. Exhausted of defending you, defending your administration, defending the mantle of change that I voted for.
This gets at what I've been writing about a lot, which is liberals' inability to sustain political enthusiasm, especially when their party holds power. Conservatives often find it natural to muster enthusiasm on behalf of a party in power. Liberals seem to do so only on behalf of an idealistic alternative, which inevitably falls short of their dreams.
Saturday, September 18, 2010
A Part of All That I Read is Mine to Keep
I like to think that everything I read stays with me somehow even when I don't remember most of it.
Essay
The Plot Escapes Me
By JAMES COLLINS
Published: September 17, 2010
Those were glorious days, the ones I spent reading “Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case,” by Allen Weinstein. It is a book that I, having long had an interest in domestic Communist intrigues, had been meaning to read for years — decades — and I vividly remember that moment a couple of summers ago when, on my way to visit friends in New Hampshire, I found a hardcover copy in good condition at a restaurant-cum-used-book-store.
For the next few days, all I wanted to do was read “Perjury.” I tried to be a good sport about kayaking and fishing and roasting wieners with the kids, but I was always desperate to get back to Alger and Whittaker. The house where I was staying had been built on the edge of a lake, and I distinctly remember looking up from the book and seeing the sun sparkle on the clear, rippling water, then returning to the polluted gloom of the Case.
I remember it all, but there’s just one thing: I remember nothing about the book’s actual contents.
Before reading “Perjury,” I had an elementary understanding of the Hiss affair and the personalities involved; further, I knew that Hiss claimed to have known Chambers as “George Crosley.” Today, a couple of years after reading “Perjury,” I have an elementary understanding of the Hiss affair and the personalities involved; further, I know that Hiss claimed to have known Chambers as “George Crosley.” I have forgotten everything else. What was the point?
I have just realized something terrible about myself: I don’t remember the books I read. I chose “Perjury” as an example at random, and its neighbors on my bookshelf, Michael Chabon’s “Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay” (on the right) and Anka Muhlstein’s “Taste for Freedom: The Life of Astolphe de Custine” (on the left), could have served just as well. These are books I loved, but as with “Perjury,” all I associate with them is an atmosphere and a stray image or two, like memories of trips I took as a child.
Nor do I think I am the only one with this problem. Certainly, there are those who can read a book once and retain everything that was in it, but anecdotal evidence suggests that is not the case with most people. Anecdotal evidence suggests that most people cannot recall the title or author or even the existence of a book they read a month ago, much less its contents.
So we in the forgetful majority must, I think, confront the following question: Why read books if we can’t remember what’s in them?
One answer is that we read for the aesthetic and literary pleasure we experience while reading. The pleasure — or intended pleasure — of novels is obvious, but it is no less true that we read nonfiction for the immediate satisfaction it provides. The acquisition of knowledge, while you are acquiring it, can be intensely engrossing and stimulating, and a well-constructed argument is a beautiful thing. But that kind of pleasure is transient. When we read a serious book, we want to learn something, we want it to change us, and it hardly seems possible for that to happen if its fugitive content passes through us like light through glass.
Now, with a terrible sense of foreboding, I slowly turn to look again at my bookshelf. There they all are, “Perjury” and “Kavalier & Clay” and those other books that I have read and of which I remember so little. And I have to ask myself, Would it have made no difference if I had never read any of them? Could I just as well have spent my time watching golf?
But this cannot be. Those books must have reshaped my brain in ways that affect how I think, and they must have left deposits of information with some sort of property — a kind of mental radiation — that continues to affect me even if I can’t detect it. Mustn’t they have?
To help answer this question I called Maryanne Wolf, a professor of child development at Tufts University and the author of “Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain.” I described my “Perjury” problem — I was interested in the subject and engrossed in the book for days, but now remember nothing about it — and asked her if reading it had ultimately had any effect on me.
“I totally believe that you are a different person for having read that book,” Wolf replied. “I say that as a neuroscientist and an old literature major.”
She went on to describe how reading creates pathways in the brain, strengthening different mental processes. Then she talked about content.
“There is a difference,” she said, “between immediate recall of facts and an ability to recall a gestalt of knowledge. We can’t retrieve the specifics, but to adapt a phrase of William James’s, there is a wraith of memory. The information you get from a book is stored in networks. We have an extraordinary capacity for storage, and much more is there than you realize. It is in some way working on you even though you aren’t thinking about it.”
Did this mean that it hadn’t been a waste of time to read all those books, even if I seemingly couldn’t remember what was in them?
“It’s there,” Wolf said. “You are the sum of it all.”
This was very encouraging, and it makes intuitive sense: we have been formed by an accretion of experiences, only a small number of which we can readily recall. You may remember the specifics of only a few conversations with your best friend, but you would never ask if talking to him or her was a waste of time. As for the arts, I can remember in detail only a tiny fraction of the music I have listened to, or the movies I have watched, or the paintings I have looked at, but it would be absurd to claim that experiencing those works had no influence on me. The same could be said of reading.
Still, reading is different from life, and writing is different from those other art forms. Indeed, reading’s great distinction may be that it is not an experience to be experienced only as an experience (otherwise, poets wouldn’t have to sweat so hard to make their poems a performance rather than discourse). A book, even a novel, contains information, in the strictest sense, and the most obvious purpose of reading a book is to acquire that information for oneself. And unlike a catch-and-release fisherman, when I acquire that information, I want to keep it. I enjoyed reading “Perjury” and am relieved and happy that I retain its gestalt, but I didn’t actually read it for pleasure or for its gestalt. I read it so that I would know, consciously, a lot about the Hiss case. Well, guess what? I don’t.
I suppose one solution would be to use the techniques recommended in study guides for retaining reading assignments. Do not recline! First review the table of contents and index. Read actively, underlining and making notations in the text. Review what you have read, making notes (three to five pages for every hundred pages of text).
Some good ideas, surely. But “Do not recline”? Impossible.
Essay
The Plot Escapes Me
By JAMES COLLINS
Published: September 17, 2010
Those were glorious days, the ones I spent reading “Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case,” by Allen Weinstein. It is a book that I, having long had an interest in domestic Communist intrigues, had been meaning to read for years — decades — and I vividly remember that moment a couple of summers ago when, on my way to visit friends in New Hampshire, I found a hardcover copy in good condition at a restaurant-cum-used-book-store.
For the next few days, all I wanted to do was read “Perjury.” I tried to be a good sport about kayaking and fishing and roasting wieners with the kids, but I was always desperate to get back to Alger and Whittaker. The house where I was staying had been built on the edge of a lake, and I distinctly remember looking up from the book and seeing the sun sparkle on the clear, rippling water, then returning to the polluted gloom of the Case.
I remember it all, but there’s just one thing: I remember nothing about the book’s actual contents.
Before reading “Perjury,” I had an elementary understanding of the Hiss affair and the personalities involved; further, I knew that Hiss claimed to have known Chambers as “George Crosley.” Today, a couple of years after reading “Perjury,” I have an elementary understanding of the Hiss affair and the personalities involved; further, I know that Hiss claimed to have known Chambers as “George Crosley.” I have forgotten everything else. What was the point?
I have just realized something terrible about myself: I don’t remember the books I read. I chose “Perjury” as an example at random, and its neighbors on my bookshelf, Michael Chabon’s “Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay” (on the right) and Anka Muhlstein’s “Taste for Freedom: The Life of Astolphe de Custine” (on the left), could have served just as well. These are books I loved, but as with “Perjury,” all I associate with them is an atmosphere and a stray image or two, like memories of trips I took as a child.
Nor do I think I am the only one with this problem. Certainly, there are those who can read a book once and retain everything that was in it, but anecdotal evidence suggests that is not the case with most people. Anecdotal evidence suggests that most people cannot recall the title or author or even the existence of a book they read a month ago, much less its contents.
So we in the forgetful majority must, I think, confront the following question: Why read books if we can’t remember what’s in them?
One answer is that we read for the aesthetic and literary pleasure we experience while reading. The pleasure — or intended pleasure — of novels is obvious, but it is no less true that we read nonfiction for the immediate satisfaction it provides. The acquisition of knowledge, while you are acquiring it, can be intensely engrossing and stimulating, and a well-constructed argument is a beautiful thing. But that kind of pleasure is transient. When we read a serious book, we want to learn something, we want it to change us, and it hardly seems possible for that to happen if its fugitive content passes through us like light through glass.
Now, with a terrible sense of foreboding, I slowly turn to look again at my bookshelf. There they all are, “Perjury” and “Kavalier & Clay” and those other books that I have read and of which I remember so little. And I have to ask myself, Would it have made no difference if I had never read any of them? Could I just as well have spent my time watching golf?
But this cannot be. Those books must have reshaped my brain in ways that affect how I think, and they must have left deposits of information with some sort of property — a kind of mental radiation — that continues to affect me even if I can’t detect it. Mustn’t they have?
To help answer this question I called Maryanne Wolf, a professor of child development at Tufts University and the author of “Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain.” I described my “Perjury” problem — I was interested in the subject and engrossed in the book for days, but now remember nothing about it — and asked her if reading it had ultimately had any effect on me.
“I totally believe that you are a different person for having read that book,” Wolf replied. “I say that as a neuroscientist and an old literature major.”
She went on to describe how reading creates pathways in the brain, strengthening different mental processes. Then she talked about content.
“There is a difference,” she said, “between immediate recall of facts and an ability to recall a gestalt of knowledge. We can’t retrieve the specifics, but to adapt a phrase of William James’s, there is a wraith of memory. The information you get from a book is stored in networks. We have an extraordinary capacity for storage, and much more is there than you realize. It is in some way working on you even though you aren’t thinking about it.”
Did this mean that it hadn’t been a waste of time to read all those books, even if I seemingly couldn’t remember what was in them?
“It’s there,” Wolf said. “You are the sum of it all.”
This was very encouraging, and it makes intuitive sense: we have been formed by an accretion of experiences, only a small number of which we can readily recall. You may remember the specifics of only a few conversations with your best friend, but you would never ask if talking to him or her was a waste of time. As for the arts, I can remember in detail only a tiny fraction of the music I have listened to, or the movies I have watched, or the paintings I have looked at, but it would be absurd to claim that experiencing those works had no influence on me. The same could be said of reading.
Still, reading is different from life, and writing is different from those other art forms. Indeed, reading’s great distinction may be that it is not an experience to be experienced only as an experience (otherwise, poets wouldn’t have to sweat so hard to make their poems a performance rather than discourse). A book, even a novel, contains information, in the strictest sense, and the most obvious purpose of reading a book is to acquire that information for oneself. And unlike a catch-and-release fisherman, when I acquire that information, I want to keep it. I enjoyed reading “Perjury” and am relieved and happy that I retain its gestalt, but I didn’t actually read it for pleasure or for its gestalt. I read it so that I would know, consciously, a lot about the Hiss case. Well, guess what? I don’t.
I suppose one solution would be to use the techniques recommended in study guides for retaining reading assignments. Do not recline! First review the table of contents and index. Read actively, underlining and making notations in the text. Review what you have read, making notes (three to five pages for every hundred pages of text).
Some good ideas, surely. But “Do not recline”? Impossible.
Roger Kahn - Beyond the Boys of Summer (4)
Roger Kahn did a story on Willie Mays in 1969 toward the end of his career.
Here is one thing Mays had to say.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * *
"I won't lie to you," Mays says. "It gets to be work. Somethimes when I get tired and with all that pressure, it gets to be work. I knew when I was sixteen years old, I never did want to work for a living." Again, the smile.
Roger Kahn, "Beyond the Boys of Summer," p. 119.
Here is one thing Mays had to say.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * *
"I won't lie to you," Mays says. "It gets to be work. Somethimes when I get tired and with all that pressure, it gets to be work. I knew when I was sixteen years old, I never did want to work for a living." Again, the smile.
Roger Kahn, "Beyond the Boys of Summer," p. 119.
Friday, September 17, 2010
The Hypocrisy of the Deficit Hawks
Where Have All the Deficit Hawks Gone?
By: Jon Walker Friday September 17, 2010 5:30 am
I noticed that earlier this year we were overwhelmed by a wave of anti-deficit grandstanding throughout the Democratic Party while the Catfood Commission was sending up trial balloons about cutting Social Security benefits, raising the retirement age (which is just a sleight-of-hand way of cutting benefits) or cutting the health care benefits for military service personnel.
Interestingly, since we have started the public debate about whether or not to extend Bush’s massive, deficit-ballooning tax cuts to millionaires, those same deficit hawks have been very quiet. That, or they have been very noisy about pushing to greatly increase the deficit by demanding Bush’s tax cut for millionaires be allowed to continue. Senators such as Ben Nelson (D-NE), Kent Conrad (D-ND), Evan Bayh (D-IN), and Joe Lieberman (I-CT), and 31 House Democrats have squawked about letting those tax cuts for the rich expire as Bush’s law had originally intended. Almost all of those 31 Representatives are self-proclaimed “fiscal conservatives” who pretend to be worried about the deficit even as they fight to greatly increase it.
When it comes to cutting benefits for poor and middle-class seniors, or cutting the pay of our military personnel while forcing our veterans to pay more of their own health care costs — much of which likely resulted from illness due to their service in two long wars — what we hear from Washington elites is the great need for “shared sacrifice” to bring down the deficit. Yet, when debating the idea of allowing taxes on millionaires (and here it might be good to remember that two-thirds of the members of Congress are themselves millionaires) to return to what they were under Bill Clinton, it is all “damn the deficit we can’t let the wealthy suffer during this economic downturn!”
It is just a reminder that in Washington talk about “reducing the deficit” is almost always nothing more than code for screwing over regular Americans and almost always completely divorced from any actual concern about the size of the federal debt. It is long past time that the media calls out these “deficit hawks” for the hypocrites they are and explain what their fake deficit grandstanding is really about.
By: Jon Walker Friday September 17, 2010 5:30 am
I noticed that earlier this year we were overwhelmed by a wave of anti-deficit grandstanding throughout the Democratic Party while the Catfood Commission was sending up trial balloons about cutting Social Security benefits, raising the retirement age (which is just a sleight-of-hand way of cutting benefits) or cutting the health care benefits for military service personnel.
Interestingly, since we have started the public debate about whether or not to extend Bush’s massive, deficit-ballooning tax cuts to millionaires, those same deficit hawks have been very quiet. That, or they have been very noisy about pushing to greatly increase the deficit by demanding Bush’s tax cut for millionaires be allowed to continue. Senators such as Ben Nelson (D-NE), Kent Conrad (D-ND), Evan Bayh (D-IN), and Joe Lieberman (I-CT), and 31 House Democrats have squawked about letting those tax cuts for the rich expire as Bush’s law had originally intended. Almost all of those 31 Representatives are self-proclaimed “fiscal conservatives” who pretend to be worried about the deficit even as they fight to greatly increase it.
When it comes to cutting benefits for poor and middle-class seniors, or cutting the pay of our military personnel while forcing our veterans to pay more of their own health care costs — much of which likely resulted from illness due to their service in two long wars — what we hear from Washington elites is the great need for “shared sacrifice” to bring down the deficit. Yet, when debating the idea of allowing taxes on millionaires (and here it might be good to remember that two-thirds of the members of Congress are themselves millionaires) to return to what they were under Bill Clinton, it is all “damn the deficit we can’t let the wealthy suffer during this economic downturn!”
It is just a reminder that in Washington talk about “reducing the deficit” is almost always nothing more than code for screwing over regular Americans and almost always completely divorced from any actual concern about the size of the federal debt. It is long past time that the media calls out these “deficit hawks” for the hypocrites they are and explain what their fake deficit grandstanding is really about.
Thursday, September 16, 2010
The New York Review of Books 9/30/10
The new issue has a review of Jonathan Franzen's new book "Freedom." This is the hot novel right now. Oprah has selected it. Maybe I'll read it anyway.
Paul Krugman coauthors an article on why the economic slump continues.
There are advertisments for upcoming Fall book releases.
This publication is necessary reading for me.
Paul Krugman coauthors an article on why the economic slump continues.
There are advertisments for upcoming Fall book releases.
This publication is necessary reading for me.
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
The New Will Bunch Book
The progressive journalist Will Brunch has a new book about the right wing crazies. I will be reading it soon.
Books of The Times
The Engine of Right-Wing Rage, Fueled by More Than Just Anger
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Published: September 13, 2010
Will Bunch
THE BACKLASH
Right-Wing Radicals, High-Def Hucksters, and Paranoid Politics in the Age of Obama
By Will Bunch
354 pages. Harper/HarperCollins. $25.99.
Related
‘The Backlash’ (September 13, 2010)
As Mr. Bunch sees it, there are three main reasons for the rise of the Tea Party:
1. “Genuine anger and panic by rank-and-file conservatives” who were deeply frustrated by the election of Barack Obama, and who “suddenly saw a world in which — thanks to a growing electoral base that did not think or look like them — their Reaganist conservative philosophy might be shut out of power for good.”
2. “The electronic media” — including the likes of Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and local talk radio imitators, as well as social networking forces like Facebook and Twitter — which have enabled “like-minded Obama naysayers” to come together “without actual journalists intervening to filter out untrue information like the canard about the president’s birth certificate.”
3. “The ever-circling capitalists — the policy pushers who saw a new grass-roots movement as a back-door way to revive the big-business agenda” that had thrived from the 1980s through the George W. Bush era, along with “the pure-profit hucksters” eager to cash in on voter anger.
Mr. Bunch seems to have spent a lot of energy looking into Reason No. 3: He writes at length about the marketing of items like gold coins, solar generators and seed bank kits to survivalist-minded, apocalypse-fearing consumers; and Glenn Beck’s sprawling TV-radio-book-merchandise empire. Other sections of “The Backlash” — a title that consciously or unconsciously recalls “Backlash,” Susan Faludi’s 1991 book about antifeminist reaction to the women’s movement — feature the author’s visits to events like the Knob Creek Machine Gun Shoot and the first national convention of Tea Party activists held in Nashville earlier this year.
Although Mr. Bunch — a senior writer at The Philadelphia Daily News and a senior fellow at the left-leaning research group Media Matters for America — tries hard in many of his interviews with various Tea Party-affiliated individuals to understand where they are coming from, he occasionally lapses into snarky put-downs that undercut the mostly reasoned tone of his book and his many persuasive observations. For instance, he writes of the numerous retirees and Glenn Beck fans at one event: “Not only did it turn out that the revolution was televised after all, but it also needed assistance out to its car.” By far the most compelling, if not terribly original, arguments in “The Backlash” concern the current media environment, which has amplified the loudest and most partisan voices, and helped spread fact-free theories about President Obama’s not being born in the United States or wanting to take away people’s guns. Mr. Bunch invokes Neil Postman — who argued in his seminal 1985 book, “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” that the entertainment values promoted by television are subverting public discourse — to explore the phenomenon of Mr. Beck and his shameless emotional appeals to his audience’s deepest fears about change and the threat of the Other (be it a black president, Mexican immigrants or East Coast liberals).
Mr. Bunch also builds upon the insights of Cass Sunstein (the author of prescient books like “Going to Extremes: How Like Minds Unite and Divide”) to look at how the echo chamber of partisan Web sites can ratify radical, even dangerous, views, and how group polarization, especially at a time of high employment and economic anxiety, fuels anger and irrational rumors about government conspiracies (like FEMA-run concentration camps and black helicopters). Echoing other reporters and commentators before him, Mr. Bunch uses the writings of Richard Hofstadter — most notably “Anti-Intellectualism in American Life” and “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” — to try to explicate the roots of populist rage that animate many Tea Party gatherings. And he goes on to suggest, not always convincingly, that psychological or personal reasons drive many Americans to seek “rebirth from the raw energy of the Tea Parties.”
As for the consequences of the so-called backlash movement, Mr. Bunch reviews well-known cases like the Republican Scott Brown’s ascension to Edward M. Kennedy’s Senate seat in liberal Massachusetts and the Tea Party favorite Marco Rubio’s capture of the Republican nomination in the Florida Senate race. But he argues that the “Tea Party’s true success in 2010 was not in electing their own people but moving incumbents” like Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, to the right.
Mr. Bunch adds that conservative insurgents have tilted the entire national conversation to the right, with Arizona’s crackdown on illegal immigration rocking “any hopes for a realistic federal immigration policy” and “Second Amendment paranoia” driving “lawmakers to take actions that would make it harder for authorities to keep tabs on guns and possibly increase the supply even further.”
For many decades, Mr. Bunch observes, “there were grown-ups involved in the conservative movement who tamped down the flames of extremism rather than fanning them.”
“Ironically,” he continues, “the main reason that the John Birch Society” — which went so far as to suggest that President Dwight D. Eisenhower was a Communist sympathizer — “failed to gain much traction in the early 1960s was because mainstream Republican politicians turned against them, even though the party was at low ebb in the Kennedy-Johnson years. Barry Goldwater, the leader of the so-called New Right movement who won the G.O.P. presidential nomination in 1964, did have considerable support from the Birchers, yet not only did he not embrace them but secretly authorized the intellectual leader of 1960s conservatism, William F. Buckley Jr., and his National Review to go after the organization, successfully marginalizing it and helping to keep its Richard Hofstadter-described paranoid style in the shadows, even as that decade grew more tumultuous.”
Today things are different. Republicans are reluctant to speak out against Mr. Limbaugh’s invective. Representative Michele Bachmann, Republican of Minnesota, has suggested that President Obama “may have anti-American views.” And Sharron Angle, a Republican Senate candidate from Nevada, has spoken of citizens arming themselves “against a tyrannical government.”
By “shifting the parameters on what is acceptable political speech in America,” Mr. Bunch says, right-wing insurgents have driven “distrust of government to its highest level in more than a generation” and mapped out “dangerous new territory for our national politics.”
Books of The Times
The Engine of Right-Wing Rage, Fueled by More Than Just Anger
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Published: September 13, 2010
Will Bunch
THE BACKLASH
Right-Wing Radicals, High-Def Hucksters, and Paranoid Politics in the Age of Obama
By Will Bunch
354 pages. Harper/HarperCollins. $25.99.
Related
‘The Backlash’ (September 13, 2010)
As Mr. Bunch sees it, there are three main reasons for the rise of the Tea Party:
1. “Genuine anger and panic by rank-and-file conservatives” who were deeply frustrated by the election of Barack Obama, and who “suddenly saw a world in which — thanks to a growing electoral base that did not think or look like them — their Reaganist conservative philosophy might be shut out of power for good.”
2. “The electronic media” — including the likes of Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and local talk radio imitators, as well as social networking forces like Facebook and Twitter — which have enabled “like-minded Obama naysayers” to come together “without actual journalists intervening to filter out untrue information like the canard about the president’s birth certificate.”
3. “The ever-circling capitalists — the policy pushers who saw a new grass-roots movement as a back-door way to revive the big-business agenda” that had thrived from the 1980s through the George W. Bush era, along with “the pure-profit hucksters” eager to cash in on voter anger.
Mr. Bunch seems to have spent a lot of energy looking into Reason No. 3: He writes at length about the marketing of items like gold coins, solar generators and seed bank kits to survivalist-minded, apocalypse-fearing consumers; and Glenn Beck’s sprawling TV-radio-book-merchandise empire. Other sections of “The Backlash” — a title that consciously or unconsciously recalls “Backlash,” Susan Faludi’s 1991 book about antifeminist reaction to the women’s movement — feature the author’s visits to events like the Knob Creek Machine Gun Shoot and the first national convention of Tea Party activists held in Nashville earlier this year.
Although Mr. Bunch — a senior writer at The Philadelphia Daily News and a senior fellow at the left-leaning research group Media Matters for America — tries hard in many of his interviews with various Tea Party-affiliated individuals to understand where they are coming from, he occasionally lapses into snarky put-downs that undercut the mostly reasoned tone of his book and his many persuasive observations. For instance, he writes of the numerous retirees and Glenn Beck fans at one event: “Not only did it turn out that the revolution was televised after all, but it also needed assistance out to its car.” By far the most compelling, if not terribly original, arguments in “The Backlash” concern the current media environment, which has amplified the loudest and most partisan voices, and helped spread fact-free theories about President Obama’s not being born in the United States or wanting to take away people’s guns. Mr. Bunch invokes Neil Postman — who argued in his seminal 1985 book, “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” that the entertainment values promoted by television are subverting public discourse — to explore the phenomenon of Mr. Beck and his shameless emotional appeals to his audience’s deepest fears about change and the threat of the Other (be it a black president, Mexican immigrants or East Coast liberals).
Mr. Bunch also builds upon the insights of Cass Sunstein (the author of prescient books like “Going to Extremes: How Like Minds Unite and Divide”) to look at how the echo chamber of partisan Web sites can ratify radical, even dangerous, views, and how group polarization, especially at a time of high employment and economic anxiety, fuels anger and irrational rumors about government conspiracies (like FEMA-run concentration camps and black helicopters). Echoing other reporters and commentators before him, Mr. Bunch uses the writings of Richard Hofstadter — most notably “Anti-Intellectualism in American Life” and “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” — to try to explicate the roots of populist rage that animate many Tea Party gatherings. And he goes on to suggest, not always convincingly, that psychological or personal reasons drive many Americans to seek “rebirth from the raw energy of the Tea Parties.”
As for the consequences of the so-called backlash movement, Mr. Bunch reviews well-known cases like the Republican Scott Brown’s ascension to Edward M. Kennedy’s Senate seat in liberal Massachusetts and the Tea Party favorite Marco Rubio’s capture of the Republican nomination in the Florida Senate race. But he argues that the “Tea Party’s true success in 2010 was not in electing their own people but moving incumbents” like Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, to the right.
Mr. Bunch adds that conservative insurgents have tilted the entire national conversation to the right, with Arizona’s crackdown on illegal immigration rocking “any hopes for a realistic federal immigration policy” and “Second Amendment paranoia” driving “lawmakers to take actions that would make it harder for authorities to keep tabs on guns and possibly increase the supply even further.”
For many decades, Mr. Bunch observes, “there were grown-ups involved in the conservative movement who tamped down the flames of extremism rather than fanning them.”
“Ironically,” he continues, “the main reason that the John Birch Society” — which went so far as to suggest that President Dwight D. Eisenhower was a Communist sympathizer — “failed to gain much traction in the early 1960s was because mainstream Republican politicians turned against them, even though the party was at low ebb in the Kennedy-Johnson years. Barry Goldwater, the leader of the so-called New Right movement who won the G.O.P. presidential nomination in 1964, did have considerable support from the Birchers, yet not only did he not embrace them but secretly authorized the intellectual leader of 1960s conservatism, William F. Buckley Jr., and his National Review to go after the organization, successfully marginalizing it and helping to keep its Richard Hofstadter-described paranoid style in the shadows, even as that decade grew more tumultuous.”
Today things are different. Republicans are reluctant to speak out against Mr. Limbaugh’s invective. Representative Michele Bachmann, Republican of Minnesota, has suggested that President Obama “may have anti-American views.” And Sharron Angle, a Republican Senate candidate from Nevada, has spoken of citizens arming themselves “against a tyrannical government.”
By “shifting the parameters on what is acceptable political speech in America,” Mr. Bunch says, right-wing insurgents have driven “distrust of government to its highest level in more than a generation” and mapped out “dangerous new territory for our national politics.”
Monday, September 13, 2010
It May Seem Strange
It may seem strange that I am reading baseball books in football season, but, after all, it is still baseball season even though I pay no attention to MLB other than check the standings every now and then.
I happened on to the Willie Mays book, and then moved on to Roger Kahn.
I have learned some things.
I know the case for Willie Mays being the best baseball player of all time.
From reading Roger Kahn, I've learned that sportwriting can be literate. It's hard to see that reading sports in the state of Alabama.
I've learned more about baseball in New York City in the 40's & 50's.
And I've learned that sports figures can be just as interesting as people in other professions.
I happened on to the Willie Mays book, and then moved on to Roger Kahn.
I have learned some things.
I know the case for Willie Mays being the best baseball player of all time.
From reading Roger Kahn, I've learned that sportwriting can be literate. It's hard to see that reading sports in the state of Alabama.
I've learned more about baseball in New York City in the 40's & 50's.
And I've learned that sports figures can be just as interesting as people in other professions.
Roger Kahn - Beyond the Boys of Summer (3)
One theory of great hitters is that great hitters (like Ted Williams & Stan Musial) walk a lot because 1) the good hitter waits for his pitch, and if he doesn't get it, he is content to walk and 2) after all, a walk is as good as a hit. Soon I will be reading the new biography of Henry Aaron. In the meantime, here is Roger Kahn's take on Aaron's different theory of hitting.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
But, in a team sense, Aaron's natural style brings its own rewards. With the tying run at second, Williams may walk on a pitch just below the knees. Aaron may choose to swing, and if he is on a good streak, it's a reasonable bet that the score will be tied. Over a year, it's probably a good team risk, but over the same year this tendency pulls Aaron's individual batting average down. To both Musial and Williams, walks are a measure of effectiveness. Aaron accepts them with bad grace. "I'd rather hit," he says.
Roger Kahn, "Beyond the boys of Summer," p. 97
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
But, in a team sense, Aaron's natural style brings its own rewards. With the tying run at second, Williams may walk on a pitch just below the knees. Aaron may choose to swing, and if he is on a good streak, it's a reasonable bet that the score will be tied. Over a year, it's probably a good team risk, but over the same year this tendency pulls Aaron's individual batting average down. To both Musial and Williams, walks are a measure of effectiveness. Aaron accepts them with bad grace. "I'd rather hit," he says.
Roger Kahn, "Beyond the boys of Summer," p. 97
Sunday, September 12, 2010
Roger Kahn - Beyond the Boys of Summer (2)
Willie conquered me. I had not come to praise him and sycophancy annoys me, but he brought to the game the outstanding collection of skills in our time and deepest enthusiasm to play I've seen. He was the ultimate combination of the professional full of talent and the amateur, a word that traces to the Latin "amator," lover, and suggests one who brings a passion to what he does."
-Roger Kahn, Beyond the Boys of Summer, p. 124, writing about Willie Mays
-Roger Kahn, Beyond the Boys of Summer, p. 124, writing about Willie Mays
From Frank Rich in the NY Times
As many have noted, the obvious political model for Obama this year is Franklin Roosevelt, who at his legendary 1936 Madison Square Garden rally declared that he welcomed the “hatred” of his enemies in the realms of “business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.” As the historian David Kennedy writes in his definitive book on the period, “Freedom from Fear,” Roosevelt “had little to lose by alienating the right,” including those in the corporate elite, with such invective; they already detested him as vehemently as the Business Roundtable crowd does Obama.
Though F.D.R. was predictably accused of “class warfare,” his antibusiness “radicalism,” was, in Kennedy’s words, “a carefully staged political performance, an attack not on the capitalist system itself but on a few high-profile capitalists.” Roosevelt was trying to co-opt the populist rage of his economically despondent era, some of it uncannily Tea Party-esque in its hysteria, before it threatened that system, let alone his presidency. Only the crazy right confused F.D.R. with communists for taking on capitalism’s greediest players, and since our crazy right has portrayed Obama as a communist, socialist and Nazi for months, he’s already paid that political price without gaining any of the benefits of bringing on this fight in earnest.
F.D.R. presided over a landslide in 1936. The best the Democrats can hope for in 2010 is smaller-than-expected losses. To achieve even that, Obama will have to give an F.D.R.-size performance — which he can do credibly and forcibly only if he really means it. So far, his administration’s seeming coziness with some of the same powerful interests now vilifying him has left middle-class voters, including Democrats suffering that enthusiasm gap, confused as to which side he is on. If ever there was a time for him to clear up the ambiguity, this is it.
Though F.D.R. was predictably accused of “class warfare,” his antibusiness “radicalism,” was, in Kennedy’s words, “a carefully staged political performance, an attack not on the capitalist system itself but on a few high-profile capitalists.” Roosevelt was trying to co-opt the populist rage of his economically despondent era, some of it uncannily Tea Party-esque in its hysteria, before it threatened that system, let alone his presidency. Only the crazy right confused F.D.R. with communists for taking on capitalism’s greediest players, and since our crazy right has portrayed Obama as a communist, socialist and Nazi for months, he’s already paid that political price without gaining any of the benefits of bringing on this fight in earnest.
F.D.R. presided over a landslide in 1936. The best the Democrats can hope for in 2010 is smaller-than-expected losses. To achieve even that, Obama will have to give an F.D.R.-size performance — which he can do credibly and forcibly only if he really means it. So far, his administration’s seeming coziness with some of the same powerful interests now vilifying him has left middle-class voters, including Democrats suffering that enthusiasm gap, confused as to which side he is on. If ever there was a time for him to clear up the ambiguity, this is it.
Saturday, September 11, 2010
Roger Kahn - Beyond the Boys of Summer
Roger Kahn is arguably the greatest sportswriter of my time: since the 50's. In 1972 he published the greatest baseball book of all-time called "The Boys of Summer" about the Brooklyn Dodgers of the 1950's. Kahn began his journalistic career as a young man in his early 20's cover Brooklyn's Dodgers. In this nostalgic book he tracked down those immortal players like Gil Hodges, Pee Wee Reese, and Duke Snider to find out what had happened to them since the 50's. The result is a treat for all baseball rememberers, even those like me who aren't old enough to remember the Dodgers before they moved to Los Angeles in 1958.
Even though I loved "The Boys of Summer," which I read in 1972 when it was first published, I did not realize how good of a writer Roger Kahn is until I read this compilation of some of his best writing. He says in the preface that he aspired to write literature. That is quite an ambition for a sportwriter. I say he succeeded.
This compilation features excepts from his many books, mostly about baseball, Kahn's true sports love, but the book culls mostly his magazine pieces, profiles of some of the era's greatest sports heroes.
His profile of Willie Mays fits in nicely with the Mays biography I read recently. There are snapshots of Mickey Mantle, Hank Aaron, and Joe Dimaggio. What's amazing is how Kahn gets into a few magazine pages an incisive portrait of his subject so that you really feel like you know the person after just a few pages. What a writing talent.
I'll have more to say.
Even though I loved "The Boys of Summer," which I read in 1972 when it was first published, I did not realize how good of a writer Roger Kahn is until I read this compilation of some of his best writing. He says in the preface that he aspired to write literature. That is quite an ambition for a sportwriter. I say he succeeded.
This compilation features excepts from his many books, mostly about baseball, Kahn's true sports love, but the book culls mostly his magazine pieces, profiles of some of the era's greatest sports heroes.
His profile of Willie Mays fits in nicely with the Mays biography I read recently. There are snapshots of Mickey Mantle, Hank Aaron, and Joe Dimaggio. What's amazing is how Kahn gets into a few magazine pages an incisive portrait of his subject so that you really feel like you know the person after just a few pages. What a writing talent.
I'll have more to say.
Wednesday, September 8, 2010
Timothy Egan - The Worst Hard Time (2)
I finish this history of the great Dust Bowl of the 30's. What I learned is that this disaster was man-made. Led by government policy and poor soil mainanence, wheat farmers streamed into the lower High Plains (mainly Oklahoma and Texas) and stripped millions of acres of grass, which the left the ground barren. Winds picked up the loose dirt and wrecked thousands of square miles in 1934-35. Many people fled, chronicled by Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, but many remained, and this book tells their story. It is a heartbreaking story of disaster and survival, endurance and heroism. The ultimate moral is this: don't mess with Mother Nature.
Monday, September 6, 2010
1938 in 2010
Op-Ed Columnist
1938 in 2010
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: September 5, 2010
Here’s the situation: The U.S. economy has been crippled by a financial crisis. The president’s policies have limited the damage, but they were too cautious, and unemployment remains disastrously high. More action is clearly needed. Yet the public has soured on government activism, and seems poised to deal Democrats a severe defeat in the midterm elections.
The president in question is Franklin Delano Roosevelt; the year is 1938. Within a few years, of course, the Great Depression was over. But it’s both instructive and discouraging to look at the state of America circa 1938 — instructive because the nature of the recovery that followed refutes the arguments dominating today’s public debate, discouraging because it’s hard to see anything like the miracle of the 1940s happening again.
Now, we weren’t supposed to find ourselves replaying the late 1930s. President Obama’s economists promised not to repeat the mistakes of 1937, when F.D.R. pulled back fiscal stimulus too soon. But by making his program too small and too short-lived, Mr. Obama did just that: the stimulus raised growth while it lasted, but it made only a small dent in unemployment — and now it’s fading out.
And just as some of us feared, the inadequacy of the administration’s initial economic plan has landed it — and the nation — in a political trap. More stimulus is desperately needed, but in the public’s eyes the failure of the initial program to deliver a convincing recovery has discredited government action to create jobs.
In short, welcome to 1938.
The story of 1937, of F.D.R.’s disastrous decision to heed those who said that it was time to slash the deficit, is well known. What’s less well known is the extent to which the public drew the wrong conclusions from the recession that followed: far from calling for a resumption of New Deal programs, voters lost faith in fiscal expansion.
Consider Gallup polling from March 1938. Asked whether government spending should be increased to fight the slump, 63 percent of those polled said no. Asked whether it would be better to increase spending or to cut business taxes, only 15 percent favored spending; 63 percent favored tax cuts. And the 1938 election was a disaster for the Democrats, who lost 70 seats in the House and seven in the Senate.
Then came the war.
From an economic point of view World War II was, above all, a burst of deficit-financed government spending, on a scale that would never have been approved otherwise. Over the course of the war the federal government borrowed an amount equal to roughly twice the value of G.D.P. in 1940 — the equivalent of roughly $30 trillion today.
Had anyone proposed spending even a fraction that much before the war, people would have said the same things they’re saying today. They would have warned about crushing debt and runaway inflation. They would also have said, rightly, that the Depression was in large part caused by excess debt — and then have declared that it was impossible to fix this problem by issuing even more debt.
But guess what? Deficit spending created an economic boom — and the boom laid the foundation for long-run prosperity. Overall debt in the economy — public plus private — actually fell as a percentage of G.D.P., thanks to economic growth and, yes, some inflation, which reduced the real value of outstanding debts. And after the war, thanks to the improved financial position of the private sector, the economy was able to thrive without continuing deficits.
The economic moral is clear: when the economy is deeply depressed, the usual rules don’t apply. Austerity is self-defeating: when everyone tries to pay down debt at the same time, the result is depression and deflation, and debt problems grow even worse. And conversely, it is possible — indeed, necessary — for the nation as a whole to spend its way out of debt: a temporary surge of deficit spending, on a sufficient scale, can cure problems brought on by past excesses.
But the story of 1938 also shows how hard it is to apply these insights. Even under F.D.R., there was never the political will to do what was needed to end the Great Depression; its eventual resolution came essentially by accident.
I had hoped that we would do better this time. But it turns out that politicians and economists alike have spent decades unlearning the lessons of the 1930s, and are determined to repeat all the old mistakes. And it’s slightly sickening to realize that the big winners in the midterm elections are likely to be the very people who first got us into this mess, then did everything in their power to block action to get us out.
But always remember: this slump can be cured. All it will take is a little bit of intellectual clarity, and a lot of political will. Here’s hoping we find those virtues in the not too distant future.
1938 in 2010
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: September 5, 2010
Here’s the situation: The U.S. economy has been crippled by a financial crisis. The president’s policies have limited the damage, but they were too cautious, and unemployment remains disastrously high. More action is clearly needed. Yet the public has soured on government activism, and seems poised to deal Democrats a severe defeat in the midterm elections.
The president in question is Franklin Delano Roosevelt; the year is 1938. Within a few years, of course, the Great Depression was over. But it’s both instructive and discouraging to look at the state of America circa 1938 — instructive because the nature of the recovery that followed refutes the arguments dominating today’s public debate, discouraging because it’s hard to see anything like the miracle of the 1940s happening again.
Now, we weren’t supposed to find ourselves replaying the late 1930s. President Obama’s economists promised not to repeat the mistakes of 1937, when F.D.R. pulled back fiscal stimulus too soon. But by making his program too small and too short-lived, Mr. Obama did just that: the stimulus raised growth while it lasted, but it made only a small dent in unemployment — and now it’s fading out.
And just as some of us feared, the inadequacy of the administration’s initial economic plan has landed it — and the nation — in a political trap. More stimulus is desperately needed, but in the public’s eyes the failure of the initial program to deliver a convincing recovery has discredited government action to create jobs.
In short, welcome to 1938.
The story of 1937, of F.D.R.’s disastrous decision to heed those who said that it was time to slash the deficit, is well known. What’s less well known is the extent to which the public drew the wrong conclusions from the recession that followed: far from calling for a resumption of New Deal programs, voters lost faith in fiscal expansion.
Consider Gallup polling from March 1938. Asked whether government spending should be increased to fight the slump, 63 percent of those polled said no. Asked whether it would be better to increase spending or to cut business taxes, only 15 percent favored spending; 63 percent favored tax cuts. And the 1938 election was a disaster for the Democrats, who lost 70 seats in the House and seven in the Senate.
Then came the war.
From an economic point of view World War II was, above all, a burst of deficit-financed government spending, on a scale that would never have been approved otherwise. Over the course of the war the federal government borrowed an amount equal to roughly twice the value of G.D.P. in 1940 — the equivalent of roughly $30 trillion today.
Had anyone proposed spending even a fraction that much before the war, people would have said the same things they’re saying today. They would have warned about crushing debt and runaway inflation. They would also have said, rightly, that the Depression was in large part caused by excess debt — and then have declared that it was impossible to fix this problem by issuing even more debt.
But guess what? Deficit spending created an economic boom — and the boom laid the foundation for long-run prosperity. Overall debt in the economy — public plus private — actually fell as a percentage of G.D.P., thanks to economic growth and, yes, some inflation, which reduced the real value of outstanding debts. And after the war, thanks to the improved financial position of the private sector, the economy was able to thrive without continuing deficits.
The economic moral is clear: when the economy is deeply depressed, the usual rules don’t apply. Austerity is self-defeating: when everyone tries to pay down debt at the same time, the result is depression and deflation, and debt problems grow even worse. And conversely, it is possible — indeed, necessary — for the nation as a whole to spend its way out of debt: a temporary surge of deficit spending, on a sufficient scale, can cure problems brought on by past excesses.
But the story of 1938 also shows how hard it is to apply these insights. Even under F.D.R., there was never the political will to do what was needed to end the Great Depression; its eventual resolution came essentially by accident.
I had hoped that we would do better this time. But it turns out that politicians and economists alike have spent decades unlearning the lessons of the 1930s, and are determined to repeat all the old mistakes. And it’s slightly sickening to realize that the big winners in the midterm elections are likely to be the very people who first got us into this mess, then did everything in their power to block action to get us out.
But always remember: this slump can be cured. All it will take is a little bit of intellectual clarity, and a lot of political will. Here’s hoping we find those virtues in the not too distant future.
Sunday, September 5, 2010
America's History of Fear
Kristof places the current anti-Muslim hysteria in historical context.
by Nicholas D. Kristof
Screeds against Catholics from the 19th century sounded just like the invective today against the Not-at-Ground-Zero Mosque. The starting point isn’t hatred but fear: an alarm among patriots that newcomers don’t share their values, don’t believe in democracy, and may harm innocent Americans.
Followers of these movements against Irish, Germans, Italians, Chinese and other immigrants were mostly decent, well-meaning people trying to protect their country. But they were manipulated by demagogues playing upon their fears — the 19th- and 20th-century equivalents of Glenn Beck.
Most Americans stayed on the sidelines during these spasms of bigotry, and only a small number of hoodlums killed or tormented Catholics, Mormons or others. But the assaults were possible because so many middle-of-the-road Americans were ambivalent.
Suspicion of outsiders, of people who behave or worship differently, may be an ingrained element of the human condition, a survival instinct from our cave-man days. But we should also recognize that historically this distrust has led us to burn witches, intern Japanese-Americans, and turn away Jewish refugees from the Holocaust.
Perhaps the closest parallel to today’s hysteria about Islam is the 19th-century fear spread by the Know Nothing movement about “the Catholic menace.” One book warned that Catholicism was “the primary source” of all of America’s misfortunes, and there were whispering campaigns that presidents including Martin Van Buren and William McKinley were secretly working with the pope. Does that sound familiar?
Critics warned that the pope was plotting to snatch the Mississippi Valley and secretly conspiring to overthrow American democracy. “Rome looks with wistful eye to domination of this broad land, a magnificent seat for a sovereign pontiff,” one writer cautioned.
Historically, unreal suspicions were sometimes rooted in genuine and significant differences. Many new Catholic immigrants lacked experience in democracy. Mormons were engaged in polygamy. And today some extremist Muslims do plot to blow up planes, and Islam has real problems to work out about the rights of women. The pattern has been for demagogues to take real abuses and exaggerate them, portraying, for example, the most venal wing of the Catholic Church as representative of all Catholicism — just as fundamentalist Wahabis today are caricatured as more representative of Islam than the incomparably more numerous moderate Muslims of Indonesia (who have elected a woman as president before Americans have).
In the 19th century, fears were stoked by books written by people who supposedly had “escaped” Catholicism. These books luridly recounted orgies between priests and nuns, girls kidnapped and held in secret dungeons, and networks of tunnels at convents to allow priests to rape nuns. One woman claiming to have been a priest’s sex slave wrote a “memoir” asserting that Catholics killed boys and ground them into sausage for sale.
These kinds of stories inflamed a mob of patriots in 1834 to attack an Ursuline convent outside Boston and burn it down.
Similar suspicions have targeted just about every other kind of immigrant. During World War I, rumors spread that German-Americans were poisoning food, and Theodore Roosevelt warned that “Germanized socialists” were “more mischievous than bubonic plague.”
Anti-Semitic screeds regularly warned that Jews were plotting to destroy the United States in one way or another. A 1940 survey found that 17 percent of Americans considered Jews to be a “menace to America.”
Chinese in America were denounced, persecuted and lynched, while the head of a United States government commission publicly urged in 1945 "the extermination of the Japanese in toto." Most shamefully, anti-Asian racism led to the internment of 110,000 Japanese-Americans during World War II.
All that is part of America’s heritage, and typically as each group has assimilated, it has participated in the torment of newer arrivals — as in Father Charles Coughlin’s ferociously anti-Semitic radio broadcasts in the 1930s. Today’s recrudescence is the lies about President Obama’s faith, and the fear-mongering about the proposed Islamic center.
But we have a more glorious tradition intertwined in American history as well, one of tolerance, amity and religious freedom. Each time, this has ultimately prevailed over the Know Nothing impulse.
Americans have called on moderates in Muslim countries to speak out against extremists, to stand up for the tolerance they say they believe in. We should all have the guts do the same at home.
by Nicholas D. Kristof
Screeds against Catholics from the 19th century sounded just like the invective today against the Not-at-Ground-Zero Mosque. The starting point isn’t hatred but fear: an alarm among patriots that newcomers don’t share their values, don’t believe in democracy, and may harm innocent Americans.
Followers of these movements against Irish, Germans, Italians, Chinese and other immigrants were mostly decent, well-meaning people trying to protect their country. But they were manipulated by demagogues playing upon their fears — the 19th- and 20th-century equivalents of Glenn Beck.
Most Americans stayed on the sidelines during these spasms of bigotry, and only a small number of hoodlums killed or tormented Catholics, Mormons or others. But the assaults were possible because so many middle-of-the-road Americans were ambivalent.
Suspicion of outsiders, of people who behave or worship differently, may be an ingrained element of the human condition, a survival instinct from our cave-man days. But we should also recognize that historically this distrust has led us to burn witches, intern Japanese-Americans, and turn away Jewish refugees from the Holocaust.
Perhaps the closest parallel to today’s hysteria about Islam is the 19th-century fear spread by the Know Nothing movement about “the Catholic menace.” One book warned that Catholicism was “the primary source” of all of America’s misfortunes, and there were whispering campaigns that presidents including Martin Van Buren and William McKinley were secretly working with the pope. Does that sound familiar?
Critics warned that the pope was plotting to snatch the Mississippi Valley and secretly conspiring to overthrow American democracy. “Rome looks with wistful eye to domination of this broad land, a magnificent seat for a sovereign pontiff,” one writer cautioned.
Historically, unreal suspicions were sometimes rooted in genuine and significant differences. Many new Catholic immigrants lacked experience in democracy. Mormons were engaged in polygamy. And today some extremist Muslims do plot to blow up planes, and Islam has real problems to work out about the rights of women. The pattern has been for demagogues to take real abuses and exaggerate them, portraying, for example, the most venal wing of the Catholic Church as representative of all Catholicism — just as fundamentalist Wahabis today are caricatured as more representative of Islam than the incomparably more numerous moderate Muslims of Indonesia (who have elected a woman as president before Americans have).
In the 19th century, fears were stoked by books written by people who supposedly had “escaped” Catholicism. These books luridly recounted orgies between priests and nuns, girls kidnapped and held in secret dungeons, and networks of tunnels at convents to allow priests to rape nuns. One woman claiming to have been a priest’s sex slave wrote a “memoir” asserting that Catholics killed boys and ground them into sausage for sale.
These kinds of stories inflamed a mob of patriots in 1834 to attack an Ursuline convent outside Boston and burn it down.
Similar suspicions have targeted just about every other kind of immigrant. During World War I, rumors spread that German-Americans were poisoning food, and Theodore Roosevelt warned that “Germanized socialists” were “more mischievous than bubonic plague.”
Anti-Semitic screeds regularly warned that Jews were plotting to destroy the United States in one way or another. A 1940 survey found that 17 percent of Americans considered Jews to be a “menace to America.”
Chinese in America were denounced, persecuted and lynched, while the head of a United States government commission publicly urged in 1945 "the extermination of the Japanese in toto." Most shamefully, anti-Asian racism led to the internment of 110,000 Japanese-Americans during World War II.
All that is part of America’s heritage, and typically as each group has assimilated, it has participated in the torment of newer arrivals — as in Father Charles Coughlin’s ferociously anti-Semitic radio broadcasts in the 1930s. Today’s recrudescence is the lies about President Obama’s faith, and the fear-mongering about the proposed Islamic center.
But we have a more glorious tradition intertwined in American history as well, one of tolerance, amity and religious freedom. Each time, this has ultimately prevailed over the Know Nothing impulse.
Americans have called on moderates in Muslim countries to speak out against extremists, to stand up for the tolerance they say they believe in. We should all have the guts do the same at home.
Thursday, September 2, 2010
The History of the Political Parties Since 1964
Here it is in a nutshell: the history of the Democratic and Republican Parties since 1964, how the South became Republican, and why the base of the Republican Party is the white South. It's all about race.
Thursday, Sep 2, 2010 07:01 ET
The GOP's new fake racial history
A Southern Republican with designs on challenging Barack Obama in 2012 offers a phony version of history
By Steve Kornacki
Haley BarbourAlmost 50 years ago, the Republican Party made a decision to embrace the backlash generated by civil rights among white Southerners.
Traditionally, they had been staunch Democrats, but they were also culturally conservative, and as Lyndon Johnson and the Democratic Party embraced civil rights once and for all, they were up for grabs. The Republican Party offered them a home, a steady, decades-long realignment ensued, and today conservative Southern whites comprise the heart of the GOP -- just as culturally liberal Northerners, who called the GOP home before civil rights, have migrated to the Democratic Party.
There's nothing new about this story. In fact, it's the story LBJ himself predicted when he signed the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and supposedly mused, "There goes the South for a generation."
But it's an inconvenient story for today's Republican Party, which still relies on cultural, racial and ethnic wedge issues to keep its base in line -- but which also needs to win over less conservative suburbanites across the country to compete in national elections. And it's a particularly inconvenient story for Haley Barbour, the 62-year-old Mississippi governor who aspires to run as the Republican nominee against the nation's first black president.
So Barbour has invented his own sanitized, suburb-friendly version of history -- an account that paints the South's shift to the GOP as the product of young, racially inclusive conservatives who had reasons completely separate and apart from racial politics for abandoning their forebears' partisan allegiances. In an interview with Human Events that was posted on Wednesday, Barbour insists that "the people who led the change of parties in the South ... was my generation. My generation who went to integrated schools. I went to integrated college -- never thought twice about it." Segregationists in the South, in his telling, were "old Democrats," but "by my time, people realized that was the past, it was indefensible, it wasn't gonna be that way anymore. So the people who really changed the South from Democrat to Republican was a different generation from those who fought integration."
This is utter nonsense.
For a century after the Civil War, the South was deeply and overwhelmingly Democratic, a consequence of the "humiliation" visited upon white Southerners by the Republican-initiated Reconstruction that followed the Civil War. The level of support enjoyed by Democratic candidates in the region is almost too astronomical to fathom now. In 1912, Woodrow Wilson took 42 percent of the vote nationally in a four-way presidential contest. But in South Carolina, he snared 95 percent. In Mississippi, 88 percent. While he was grabbing 60 percent nationally in 1936, Franklin Roosevelt scored 97 percent in Mississippi and nearly 99 percent in South Carolina. The region's congressional delegation was uniformly Democratic -- and, thanks to the South's one-party status, disproportionately influential, with lifelong incumbents taking advantage of the congressional seniority system to secure the most powerful committee gavels.
For decades, they comfortably coexisted in the national Democratic Party's other major source of support, the machine-folk of the urban North. But as civil rights became a national issue -- and as the Great Migration of Southern blacks to the cities of the North and West turned civil rights into a priority for Democrats outside the South -- the coalition began to splinter. When the party ratified a civil rights plank at its 1948 convention, Southern Democrats staged a walkout and lined up behind Strom Thurmond, South Carolina's governor and (like all Southern Democrats of the time) an arch-segregationist. Running under the Dixiecrat banner, Thurmond won four Deep South states that fall.
Throughout the '50s and early '60s, Southern Democrats sat in political limbo. Their national brethren were inching their way toward a full-on embrace of civil rights, but the GOP wasn't much of an alternative, not with Dwight Eisenhower endorsing integration and not with the party's Northern-dominated congressional ranks strongly backing civil rights legislation.
1964, though, is what changed everything. In signing the Civil Rights Act, LBJ cemented the Democrats as a civil rights party. And in nominating anti-civil rights Barry Goldwater for president (instead of pro-civil rights Nelson Rockefeller) the GOP cast its future fortunes with the white electorate of the South. LBJ trounced Goldwater nationally that fall, winning more than 60 percent of the popular vote. But in the South, voters flocked to the Republican nominee, with Goldwater carrying five states in the region. Mississippi, the same state that had given FDR 97 percent of its votes 28 years earlier, now gave Goldwater 87 percent. That fall, Thurmond, now a senator, renounced his Democratic affiliation once and for all and signed up for Goldwater's GOP. The realignment was well underway, and it had everything to do with race.
All of this, mind you, happened before Barbour -- who claims that his generation led the South's migration to the GOP for non-racial reasons -- was old enough to vote. And while it did take a few decades to solidify the South as a top-to-bottom GOP stronghold, you can draw a straight line from the GOP's embrace of Goldwater and his segregationist allies in '64 through Richard Nixon's Thurmond-aided Southern Strategy and Ronald Reagan's 1980 embrace of "states' rights" in Philadelphia, Miss., and to the present day, when Republican candidates routinely win 85 percent of the white vote in statewide elections in the Deep South.
Actually, Barbour's account of his own civil rights-era political coming of age, which he relates in a different part of the Human Events interview, tells the story of the South's partisan transformation very well. His father and grandfather, he notes, were both Democrats -- "Eastland Democrats," to be precise.
That would be James Eastland, an ardent segregationist senator who represented Mississippi from 1943 to 1978. Dubbed "the voice of the white South," Eastland declared that Brown v. Board of Education "destroyed" the Constitution and that segregation was the "correct, self-evident truth" and "the law of nature." When three civil rights workers in Mississippi disappeared in the Freedom Summer of '64 (they were murdered, it turned out), Eastland privately told LBJ that no one had really disappeared -- that it was all "a publicity stunt."
Eastland, like many Southern segregationists, remained in the Democratic Party even after civil rights. But he aligned himself with the Nixon administration -- there's that Southern Strategy again -- and regularly voted with the GOP.
Barbour, too, aligned himself with Nixon, signing up with the Republican's 1968 presidential campaign, when he was just 20 years old. In the Human Events interview, he casts this as a risky, against-the-grain decision, since there were so few Republicans in the South back then, but it really wasn't; remember, Mississippi had just given 87 percent of its votes to the Republican presidential candidate in '64.
And why did Barbour join the GOP? "I don't know what possessed me, other than my oldest brother came home from the Army a Goldwater Republican in 1965." In other words, his brother -- a member of Barbour's generation, the generation that supposedly didn't see race -- left the Democratic Party just as LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act, just as the Republicans nominated a civil rights opponent for president, and just as almost every white Mississippi voter crossed party lines to vote for that civil rights foe and brought young Haley along with him. But race had nothing to do with it!
In Barbour's revisionist history, old segregationist Democrats from the South stood in the way of integration in the '50s and '60s, but then a new, enlightened generation of post-racial conservatives came of age and transformed the region into a Republican bastion for ... some other reason.
In reality, the Republicans' domination of the South today is a direct result of the party's rejection of civil rights in '64 (and Nixon's Southern Strategy, which called for coded appeals and behind-the-scenes assistance to Southern bigots). The partisan disparities in Southern elections speak to an enduring racial divide: While Barack Obama won nearly 45 percent of the white vote nationally in 2008, he got just 11 percent in Mississippi and 10 percent in Alabama.
It's understandable why Barbour doesn’t like to talk about this -- and why most national Republicans would rather ignore it. The South is critical to them, and their support in that region comes almost exclusively from white voters. But to be a national party -- and to win the White House -- requires votes from educated suburbanites outside the South who have a strong distaste for racial politics. Thus, the party takes pains every four years to showcase as many black Republicans as it can at its national convention -- a message not so much to black voters but to white suburbanites who want reassurance that they're not voting for a Goldwater party.
This balancing act is especially critical to Barbour, who knows the suspicions he'll face from those suburban swing voters if he ends up challenging Obama in '12. If he can get them to believe his whitewashed version of history, it'll be a lot easier to win them over.
Thursday, Sep 2, 2010 07:01 ET
The GOP's new fake racial history
A Southern Republican with designs on challenging Barack Obama in 2012 offers a phony version of history
By Steve Kornacki
Haley BarbourAlmost 50 years ago, the Republican Party made a decision to embrace the backlash generated by civil rights among white Southerners.
Traditionally, they had been staunch Democrats, but they were also culturally conservative, and as Lyndon Johnson and the Democratic Party embraced civil rights once and for all, they were up for grabs. The Republican Party offered them a home, a steady, decades-long realignment ensued, and today conservative Southern whites comprise the heart of the GOP -- just as culturally liberal Northerners, who called the GOP home before civil rights, have migrated to the Democratic Party.
There's nothing new about this story. In fact, it's the story LBJ himself predicted when he signed the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and supposedly mused, "There goes the South for a generation."
But it's an inconvenient story for today's Republican Party, which still relies on cultural, racial and ethnic wedge issues to keep its base in line -- but which also needs to win over less conservative suburbanites across the country to compete in national elections. And it's a particularly inconvenient story for Haley Barbour, the 62-year-old Mississippi governor who aspires to run as the Republican nominee against the nation's first black president.
So Barbour has invented his own sanitized, suburb-friendly version of history -- an account that paints the South's shift to the GOP as the product of young, racially inclusive conservatives who had reasons completely separate and apart from racial politics for abandoning their forebears' partisan allegiances. In an interview with Human Events that was posted on Wednesday, Barbour insists that "the people who led the change of parties in the South ... was my generation. My generation who went to integrated schools. I went to integrated college -- never thought twice about it." Segregationists in the South, in his telling, were "old Democrats," but "by my time, people realized that was the past, it was indefensible, it wasn't gonna be that way anymore. So the people who really changed the South from Democrat to Republican was a different generation from those who fought integration."
This is utter nonsense.
For a century after the Civil War, the South was deeply and overwhelmingly Democratic, a consequence of the "humiliation" visited upon white Southerners by the Republican-initiated Reconstruction that followed the Civil War. The level of support enjoyed by Democratic candidates in the region is almost too astronomical to fathom now. In 1912, Woodrow Wilson took 42 percent of the vote nationally in a four-way presidential contest. But in South Carolina, he snared 95 percent. In Mississippi, 88 percent. While he was grabbing 60 percent nationally in 1936, Franklin Roosevelt scored 97 percent in Mississippi and nearly 99 percent in South Carolina. The region's congressional delegation was uniformly Democratic -- and, thanks to the South's one-party status, disproportionately influential, with lifelong incumbents taking advantage of the congressional seniority system to secure the most powerful committee gavels.
For decades, they comfortably coexisted in the national Democratic Party's other major source of support, the machine-folk of the urban North. But as civil rights became a national issue -- and as the Great Migration of Southern blacks to the cities of the North and West turned civil rights into a priority for Democrats outside the South -- the coalition began to splinter. When the party ratified a civil rights plank at its 1948 convention, Southern Democrats staged a walkout and lined up behind Strom Thurmond, South Carolina's governor and (like all Southern Democrats of the time) an arch-segregationist. Running under the Dixiecrat banner, Thurmond won four Deep South states that fall.
Throughout the '50s and early '60s, Southern Democrats sat in political limbo. Their national brethren were inching their way toward a full-on embrace of civil rights, but the GOP wasn't much of an alternative, not with Dwight Eisenhower endorsing integration and not with the party's Northern-dominated congressional ranks strongly backing civil rights legislation.
1964, though, is what changed everything. In signing the Civil Rights Act, LBJ cemented the Democrats as a civil rights party. And in nominating anti-civil rights Barry Goldwater for president (instead of pro-civil rights Nelson Rockefeller) the GOP cast its future fortunes with the white electorate of the South. LBJ trounced Goldwater nationally that fall, winning more than 60 percent of the popular vote. But in the South, voters flocked to the Republican nominee, with Goldwater carrying five states in the region. Mississippi, the same state that had given FDR 97 percent of its votes 28 years earlier, now gave Goldwater 87 percent. That fall, Thurmond, now a senator, renounced his Democratic affiliation once and for all and signed up for Goldwater's GOP. The realignment was well underway, and it had everything to do with race.
All of this, mind you, happened before Barbour -- who claims that his generation led the South's migration to the GOP for non-racial reasons -- was old enough to vote. And while it did take a few decades to solidify the South as a top-to-bottom GOP stronghold, you can draw a straight line from the GOP's embrace of Goldwater and his segregationist allies in '64 through Richard Nixon's Thurmond-aided Southern Strategy and Ronald Reagan's 1980 embrace of "states' rights" in Philadelphia, Miss., and to the present day, when Republican candidates routinely win 85 percent of the white vote in statewide elections in the Deep South.
Actually, Barbour's account of his own civil rights-era political coming of age, which he relates in a different part of the Human Events interview, tells the story of the South's partisan transformation very well. His father and grandfather, he notes, were both Democrats -- "Eastland Democrats," to be precise.
That would be James Eastland, an ardent segregationist senator who represented Mississippi from 1943 to 1978. Dubbed "the voice of the white South," Eastland declared that Brown v. Board of Education "destroyed" the Constitution and that segregation was the "correct, self-evident truth" and "the law of nature." When three civil rights workers in Mississippi disappeared in the Freedom Summer of '64 (they were murdered, it turned out), Eastland privately told LBJ that no one had really disappeared -- that it was all "a publicity stunt."
Eastland, like many Southern segregationists, remained in the Democratic Party even after civil rights. But he aligned himself with the Nixon administration -- there's that Southern Strategy again -- and regularly voted with the GOP.
Barbour, too, aligned himself with Nixon, signing up with the Republican's 1968 presidential campaign, when he was just 20 years old. In the Human Events interview, he casts this as a risky, against-the-grain decision, since there were so few Republicans in the South back then, but it really wasn't; remember, Mississippi had just given 87 percent of its votes to the Republican presidential candidate in '64.
And why did Barbour join the GOP? "I don't know what possessed me, other than my oldest brother came home from the Army a Goldwater Republican in 1965." In other words, his brother -- a member of Barbour's generation, the generation that supposedly didn't see race -- left the Democratic Party just as LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act, just as the Republicans nominated a civil rights opponent for president, and just as almost every white Mississippi voter crossed party lines to vote for that civil rights foe and brought young Haley along with him. But race had nothing to do with it!
In Barbour's revisionist history, old segregationist Democrats from the South stood in the way of integration in the '50s and '60s, but then a new, enlightened generation of post-racial conservatives came of age and transformed the region into a Republican bastion for ... some other reason.
In reality, the Republicans' domination of the South today is a direct result of the party's rejection of civil rights in '64 (and Nixon's Southern Strategy, which called for coded appeals and behind-the-scenes assistance to Southern bigots). The partisan disparities in Southern elections speak to an enduring racial divide: While Barack Obama won nearly 45 percent of the white vote nationally in 2008, he got just 11 percent in Mississippi and 10 percent in Alabama.
It's understandable why Barbour doesn’t like to talk about this -- and why most national Republicans would rather ignore it. The South is critical to them, and their support in that region comes almost exclusively from white voters. But to be a national party -- and to win the White House -- requires votes from educated suburbanites outside the South who have a strong distaste for racial politics. Thus, the party takes pains every four years to showcase as many black Republicans as it can at its national convention -- a message not so much to black voters but to white suburbanites who want reassurance that they're not voting for a Goldwater party.
This balancing act is especially critical to Barbour, who knows the suspicions he'll face from those suburban swing voters if he ends up challenging Obama in '12. If he can get them to believe his whitewashed version of history, it'll be a lot easier to win them over.
Lying Beck
We know for a fact that Palin, Beck, and the rest of the Republicans are huge, incorrigible, never ending liars. What amazes me is how they get away with it. They are never held accountable for their unending falsehoods.
Olbermann: Beck Caught Lying During Rally (VIDEO)
First Posted: 09- 2-10 08:47 AM | Updated: 09- 2-10 08:49 AM
Read More: Glenn Beck, Glenn Beck George Washington, Glenn Beck Lie, Glenn Beck Rally, Glenn Beck Restoring Honor, Keith Olbermann, Keith Olbermann Glenn Beck, Restoring Honor, Media News
Email Comments 667 Wednesday night on MSNBC, Keith Olbermann helped expose a lie Glenn Beck told during his "Restoring Honor" rally this weekend.
"He's a great moment from the Beck Rapture, total crapture," Olbermann said introducing a clip in which Beck claimed to have visited the National Archives and held George Washington's handwritten first inaugural address in his hands.
"Little could Father Cough-Glenn over here know, but there are actually people at the National Archives to call him on his lies," Olbermann said.
According to the National Archives, Beck did visit and was shown Washington's inaugural address, but did not hold it.
"Those kinds of treasures are only handled by specially trained Archival staff," a spokeswoman said.
Olbermann's MSNBC colleague Ed Schultz also reported on Beck's rally lie Wednesday night.
"If the Beckster really wants to restore honor to America, he should start with telling the truth," Schultz said.
Olbermann: Beck Caught Lying During Rally (VIDEO)
First Posted: 09- 2-10 08:47 AM | Updated: 09- 2-10 08:49 AM
Read More: Glenn Beck, Glenn Beck George Washington, Glenn Beck Lie, Glenn Beck Rally, Glenn Beck Restoring Honor, Keith Olbermann, Keith Olbermann Glenn Beck, Restoring Honor, Media News
Email Comments 667 Wednesday night on MSNBC, Keith Olbermann helped expose a lie Glenn Beck told during his "Restoring Honor" rally this weekend.
"He's a great moment from the Beck Rapture, total crapture," Olbermann said introducing a clip in which Beck claimed to have visited the National Archives and held George Washington's handwritten first inaugural address in his hands.
"Little could Father Cough-Glenn over here know, but there are actually people at the National Archives to call him on his lies," Olbermann said.
According to the National Archives, Beck did visit and was shown Washington's inaugural address, but did not hold it.
"Those kinds of treasures are only handled by specially trained Archival staff," a spokeswoman said.
Olbermann's MSNBC colleague Ed Schultz also reported on Beck's rally lie Wednesday night.
"If the Beckster really wants to restore honor to America, he should start with telling the truth," Schultz said.
Lying Palin
Vanity Fair's Sarah Palin Profiler: 'The Worst Stuff Isn't Even In There'
Huffington Post | Danny Shea First Posted: 09- 2-10 10:49 AM | Updated: 09- 2-10 10:49 AM
The author of the blistering Vanity Fair profile on Sarah Palin says he wanted to write a positive piece, but was shocked by what he learned as he researched his story.
"The worst stuff isn't even in there," Michael Joseph Gross said on "Morning Joe" Thursday. "I couldn't believe these stories either when I first heard them, and I started this story with a prejudice in her favor. I have a lot in common with this woman. I'm a small-town person, I'm a Christian, I think that a lot of her criticisms of the media actually have something to them. And I think she got a bum ride, but everybody close to her tells the same story."
In the profile, Gross paints Palin as an abusive, retaliatory figure with an extreme ability to lie.
"This is a person for whom there is no topic too small to lie about," he said. "She lies about everything."
Asked about Palin's political future, Gross said it depends on what the media lets her get away with.
"If we decide to let her keep lying and getting away with it, she's gonna still be around," he said. "But if we start returning to the standard that a politician has to talk with people, and a politician has to tell the truth, then she's outta here, because she can't stand up to that."
Gross added that he takes exception to criticisms that he wrote a "hit piece" against Palin.
"I started this with every good intention toward her," he said. "I was just shocked and appalled at every step at what I found. And I wrote this story sort of against my will. It wasn't what I wanted to write, it wasn't what I wanted to find. It was what was forced on me by the facts."
Huffington Post | Danny Shea First Posted: 09- 2-10 10:49 AM | Updated: 09- 2-10 10:49 AM
The author of the blistering Vanity Fair profile on Sarah Palin says he wanted to write a positive piece, but was shocked by what he learned as he researched his story.
"The worst stuff isn't even in there," Michael Joseph Gross said on "Morning Joe" Thursday. "I couldn't believe these stories either when I first heard them, and I started this story with a prejudice in her favor. I have a lot in common with this woman. I'm a small-town person, I'm a Christian, I think that a lot of her criticisms of the media actually have something to them. And I think she got a bum ride, but everybody close to her tells the same story."
In the profile, Gross paints Palin as an abusive, retaliatory figure with an extreme ability to lie.
"This is a person for whom there is no topic too small to lie about," he said. "She lies about everything."
Asked about Palin's political future, Gross said it depends on what the media lets her get away with.
"If we decide to let her keep lying and getting away with it, she's gonna still be around," he said. "But if we start returning to the standard that a politician has to talk with people, and a politician has to tell the truth, then she's outta here, because she can't stand up to that."
Gross added that he takes exception to criticisms that he wrote a "hit piece" against Palin.
"I started this with every good intention toward her," he said. "I was just shocked and appalled at every step at what I found. And I wrote this story sort of against my will. It wasn't what I wanted to write, it wasn't what I wanted to find. It was what was forced on me by the facts."
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
Timothy Egan - The Worst Hard Time
I am reading this illuminating book about the Dust Bowl of the 1930's: the story of those who survived. The dust storms that blew up in America's High Plains in the darkest years of the Great Depression were like nothing ever seen before or since in America. This environmental disaster had an enormous impact on thousands of people. John Steinbeck's GRAPES OF WRATH is about those who ran away from the dust storms. This book is about those who stayed behind & its consequences. It is compelling reading. The books is also a warning about messing with Mother Nature.
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