On reading books on a computer screen:
“If physical discomfort discourages the reading of texts sequentially, from start to finish, computers make it spectacularly easy to move through texts in other ways – in particular, by searching for particular pieces of information. Reading in this strategic, targeted manner can feel empowering. Instead of surrendering to the organizing logic of the book you are reading, you can approach it with your own questions and glean precisely what you want from it. You are the master, not some dead author. And this is precisely where the danger lie, because when you are reading you should
not be the master. Information is not knowledge; searching is not reading; and surrender to the organizing logic of a book is, after all, the way one learns.”
-Philosopher David Bell
Saturday, October 30, 2010
Prophecy from Krugman
"Divided We Fall"
The New York Times
Paul Krugman
Barring a huge upset, Republicans will take control of at least one house of Congress next week. How worried should we be by that prospect?
Not very, say some pundits. After all, the last time Republicans controlled Congress while a Democrat lived in the White House was the period from the beginning of 1995 to the end of 2000. And people remember that era as a good time, a time of rapid job creation and responsible budgets. Can we hope for a similar experience now?
No, we can’t. This is going to be terrible. In fact, future historians will probably look back at the 2010 election as a catastrophe for America, one that condemned the nation to years of political chaos and economic weakness.
Start with the politics.
In the late-1990s, Republicans and Democrats were able to work together on some issues. President Obama seems to believe that the same thing can happen again today. In a recent interview with National Journal, he sounded a conciliatory note, saying that Democrats need to have an “appropriate sense of humility,” and that he would “spend more time building consensus.” Good luck with that.
After all, that era of partial cooperation in the 1990s came only after Republicans had tried all-out confrontation, actually shutting down the federal government in an effort to force President Bill Clinton to give in to their demands for big cuts in Medicare.
Now, the government shutdown ended up hurting Republicans politically, and some observers seem to assume that memories of that experience will deter the G.O.P. from being too confrontational this time around. But the lesson current Republicans seem to have drawn from 1995 isn’t that they were too confrontational, it’s that they weren’t confrontational enough.
Another recent interview by National Journal, this one with Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, has received a lot of attention thanks to a headline-grabbing quote: “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”
If you read the full interview, what Mr. McConnell was saying was that, in 1995, Republicans erred by focusing too much on their policy agenda and not enough on destroying the president: “We suffered from some degree of hubris and acted as if the president was irrelevant and we would roll over him. By the summer of 1995, he was already on the way to being re-elected, and we were hanging on for our lives.” So this time around, he implied, they’ll stay focused on bringing down Mr. Obama.
True, Mr. McConnell did say that he might be willing to work with Mr. Obama in certain circumstances — namely, if he’s willing to do a “Clintonian back flip,” taking positions that would find more support among Republicans than in his own party. Of course, this would actually hurt Mr. Obama’s chances of re-election — but that’s the point.
We might add that should any Republicans in Congress find themselves considering the possibility of acting in a statesmanlike, bipartisan manner, they’ll surely reconsider after looking over their shoulder at the Tea Party-types, who will jump on them if they show any signs of being reasonable. The role of the Tea Party is one reason smart observers expect another government shutdown, probably as early as next spring.
Beyond the politics, the crucial difference between the 1990s and now is the state of the economy.
When Republicans took control of Congress in 1994, the U.S. economy had strong fundamentals. Household debt was much lower than it is today. Business investment was surging, in large part thanks to the new opportunities created by information technology — opportunities that were much broader than the follies of the dot-com bubble.
In this favorable environment, economic management was mainly a matter of putting the brakes on the boom, so as to keep the economy from overheating and head off potential inflation. And this was a job the Federal Reserve could do on its own by raising interest rates, without any help from Congress.
Today’s situation is completely different. The economy, weighed down by the debt that households ran up during the Bush-era bubble, is in dire straits; deflation, not inflation, is the clear and present danger. And it’s not at all clear that the Fed has the tools to head off this danger. Right now we very much need active policies on the part of the federal government to get us out of our economic trap.
But we won’t get those policies if Republicans control the House. In fact, if they get their way, we’ll get the worst of both worlds: They’ll refuse to do anything to boost the economy now, claiming to be worried about the deficit, while simultaneously increasing long-run deficits with irresponsible tax cuts — cuts they have already announced won’t have to be offset with spending cuts.
So if the elections go as expected next week, here’s my advice: Be afraid. Be very afraid.
The New York Times
Paul Krugman
Barring a huge upset, Republicans will take control of at least one house of Congress next week. How worried should we be by that prospect?
Not very, say some pundits. After all, the last time Republicans controlled Congress while a Democrat lived in the White House was the period from the beginning of 1995 to the end of 2000. And people remember that era as a good time, a time of rapid job creation and responsible budgets. Can we hope for a similar experience now?
No, we can’t. This is going to be terrible. In fact, future historians will probably look back at the 2010 election as a catastrophe for America, one that condemned the nation to years of political chaos and economic weakness.
Start with the politics.
In the late-1990s, Republicans and Democrats were able to work together on some issues. President Obama seems to believe that the same thing can happen again today. In a recent interview with National Journal, he sounded a conciliatory note, saying that Democrats need to have an “appropriate sense of humility,” and that he would “spend more time building consensus.” Good luck with that.
After all, that era of partial cooperation in the 1990s came only after Republicans had tried all-out confrontation, actually shutting down the federal government in an effort to force President Bill Clinton to give in to their demands for big cuts in Medicare.
Now, the government shutdown ended up hurting Republicans politically, and some observers seem to assume that memories of that experience will deter the G.O.P. from being too confrontational this time around. But the lesson current Republicans seem to have drawn from 1995 isn’t that they were too confrontational, it’s that they weren’t confrontational enough.
Another recent interview by National Journal, this one with Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, has received a lot of attention thanks to a headline-grabbing quote: “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”
If you read the full interview, what Mr. McConnell was saying was that, in 1995, Republicans erred by focusing too much on their policy agenda and not enough on destroying the president: “We suffered from some degree of hubris and acted as if the president was irrelevant and we would roll over him. By the summer of 1995, he was already on the way to being re-elected, and we were hanging on for our lives.” So this time around, he implied, they’ll stay focused on bringing down Mr. Obama.
True, Mr. McConnell did say that he might be willing to work with Mr. Obama in certain circumstances — namely, if he’s willing to do a “Clintonian back flip,” taking positions that would find more support among Republicans than in his own party. Of course, this would actually hurt Mr. Obama’s chances of re-election — but that’s the point.
We might add that should any Republicans in Congress find themselves considering the possibility of acting in a statesmanlike, bipartisan manner, they’ll surely reconsider after looking over their shoulder at the Tea Party-types, who will jump on them if they show any signs of being reasonable. The role of the Tea Party is one reason smart observers expect another government shutdown, probably as early as next spring.
Beyond the politics, the crucial difference between the 1990s and now is the state of the economy.
When Republicans took control of Congress in 1994, the U.S. economy had strong fundamentals. Household debt was much lower than it is today. Business investment was surging, in large part thanks to the new opportunities created by information technology — opportunities that were much broader than the follies of the dot-com bubble.
In this favorable environment, economic management was mainly a matter of putting the brakes on the boom, so as to keep the economy from overheating and head off potential inflation. And this was a job the Federal Reserve could do on its own by raising interest rates, without any help from Congress.
Today’s situation is completely different. The economy, weighed down by the debt that households ran up during the Bush-era bubble, is in dire straits; deflation, not inflation, is the clear and present danger. And it’s not at all clear that the Fed has the tools to head off this danger. Right now we very much need active policies on the part of the federal government to get us out of our economic trap.
But we won’t get those policies if Republicans control the House. In fact, if they get their way, we’ll get the worst of both worlds: They’ll refuse to do anything to boost the economy now, claiming to be worried about the deficit, while simultaneously increasing long-run deficits with irresponsible tax cuts — cuts they have already announced won’t have to be offset with spending cuts.
So if the elections go as expected next week, here’s my advice: Be afraid. Be very afraid.
Friday, October 29, 2010
The State of Conservatism
The State of Conservatism
By CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL
Published: October 21, 2010 Within the space of a week last summer, one judge in Arizona, ruling in a suit brought by the Obama administration, blocked a provision in a new state law permitting police officers to check the status of suspected illegal immigrants, while another blocked the implementation of a California referendum banning gay marriage. The two decisions imposed liberal policies that public opinion opposed. These things happen, of course. Congress had acted contrary to measurable public opinion when it passed health care reform in March. What made the two judicial rulings different was that both seemed to challenge the principle that it is the people who have the last word on how they are governed.
American conservatives, most notably the activists who support various Tea Party groups, have a great variety of anxieties and grievances just now. But what unites them all, at least rhetorically, is the sense that something has gone wrong constitutionally, shutting them out of decisions that rightfully belong to them as citizens. This is why many talk about “taking our country back.”
If polls are to be believed, conservatives should have no difficulty taking the country back or doing whatever else they want with it. Gallup now counts 54 percent of likely voters as self-described conservatives and only 18 per cent as liberals. More than half of Americans (55 per cent) say they have grown more conservative in the past year, according to the pollsters Scott Rasmussen and Doug Schoen in their new book, MAD AS HELL: How the Tea Party Movement Is Fundamentally Remaking Our Two-Party System (Harper/HarperCollins, $27.99).
America’s self-described conservatives, however, have a problem: They lack a party. While the Tea Party may look like a stalking horse for Republicans, the two have been a bad fit. Insurgents have cut a swath through Republicans’ well-laid election plans. They helped oust Florida’s party chairman. They toppled the favored candidates of the party establishment in Alaska, Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Kentucky, New York, South Carolina, Utah and elsewhere.
More than 70 percent of Republicans embrace the Tea Party, but the feeling is not reciprocated. If conservatives could vote for the Tea Party as a party, they would prefer it to the Republicans, according to Rasmussen. (Lately, Rasmussen’s polling, more than others’, has favored Republicans. Not coincidentally, perhaps, it has picked up certain recent shifts earlier and more reliably — like the surge that won the Republican Scott Brown the late Ted Kennedy’s Massachusetts Senate seat in January.) Much of the Tea Party is made up of conservative-leaning independents. The journalist Jonathan Rauch has called these people “debranded Republicans,” and they are debranded for a reason — 55 percent of them oppose the Republican leadership. While Republicans are likely to reap all the benefit of Tea Party enthusiasm in November’s elections, this is a marriage of convenience. The influential conservative blogger Erick Erickson of RedState.com, insists that one of his top goals is denying the Republican establishment credit for any electoral successes.
Hence the Republicans’ problem. After November, the party will need to reform in a conservative direction, in line with its base’s wishes, and without a clear idea of whether the broader public will be well disposed to such reform.
How Republicans wound up in this situation requires one to state the obvious. Well before George W. Bush presided over the collapse of the global financial system, a reasonable-sounding case was being mustered that he was the worst president in history. Foreign policy was the grounds on which voters repudiated him and his party, starting in 2006, and President Obama’s drawdown of forces in Iraq may be the most popular thing he has done. But foreign policy is unlikely to drive voters’ long-term assessment of the parties. The Iraq misadventure was justified with the same spreading-democracy rhetoric that Bill Clinton, Madeleine Albright and other Democrats used to justify interventions in Haiti and the Balkans in the 1990s. President Obama’s difficulties in resolving Afghanistan and closing Guantánamo show that Bush’s options were narrower than they appeared at the time.
Republicans’ future electoral fortunes will depend on domestic policy and specifically on whether they can reconnect with “small-c” conservatism — the conservatism whose mottoes are “Neither a borrower nor a lender be” and “Mind your own business,” and the opposite of which is not liberalism but utopianism. The Bush administration was a time of “big-C” Conservatism, ideological conservatism, which the party pursued with mixed results. As far as social issues were concerned, this ideology riveted a vast bloc of religious conservatives to the party, and continues to be an electoral asset (although that bloc, by some measures, is shrinking). Had gay marriage not been on several state ballots in 2004, John Kerry might now be sitting in the White House.
Ideological conservatism also meant “supply-side economics” — a misnomer for the doctrine that all tax cuts eventually pay for themselves through economic growth. The problem is, they don’t. So supply-side wound up being a form of permanent Keynesian stimulus — a bad idea during the overheated years before 2008. Huge tax cuts, from which the highest earners drew the biggest benefits, helped knock the budget out of balance and misallocated trillions of dollars. To a dispiriting degree, tax cuts remain the Republican answer to every economic question. Eric Cantor, potentially the House majority leader, told The Wall Street Journal that if Democrats went home without renewing various Bush-era tax cuts (which they did), “I promise you, H.R. 1 will be to retroactively restore the lower rates.”
Until recently, supply side was political gravy for Republicans. It confirmed the rule that in American politics the party most plausibly offering something for nothing wins. In the 1980s, the New York congressman Jack Kemp was the archetype of an ambitious, magnanimous, “sunny” kind of Republican who let you keep more of your taxes while building more housing for the poor. Democrats who questioned the affordability of these policies sounded like killjoys. In a time of scarcity like our own, calculations change. Today your tax cut means shuttering someone else’s AIDS clinic. Your welfare check comes off of someone else’s dinner table.
Deficits in the Obama era are a multiple of the Bush ones, and the product of a more consciously pursued Keynesianism. But that does not absolve Republicans of the need to find a path to balancing the budget. With some exceptions — like Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, a Kemp protégé who has laid out a “Road Map” for reforming (i.e., cutting) Social Security in coming generations — Republicans have not adjusted to zero-sum economics. There is certainly no credible path to budget balance in the “Pledge to America” released in late September.
Yet the case against supply-side economics can never be airtight or decisive, and Republican tax promises will probably help the party this year. That is because taxes are not just an economic benchmark, but a political one. The public should not expect more in services than it pays in taxes. But the government should not expect more in taxes than it offers in representation. And the number of Americans who feel poorly represented has risen alarmingly during the Obama administration.
Americans’ feelings toward the president are complex. On the one hand, there is little of the ad hominem contempt that was in evidence during the Clinton and Bush administrations. There are no campaign spots showing a Congressional candidate’s face morphing into Obama’s. But the president’s ideology, fairly or not, has provoked something approaching panic. Not many Americans agree that Obama is a closet totalitarian, as the Fox News host Glenn Beck has claimed. But they have serious misgivings of a milder kind.
In retrospect it looks inevitable that Republicans would have been punished by voters in 2008; but until Lehman Brothers collapsed in mid-September of that year, it was far from certain they would be, despite strong Democratic gains in the 2006 elections. Independent and Republican voters wanted an assurance that Senator Obama would not simply hand over power to the Democratic Party. He consistently provided it. The centerpiece of his campaign was a promise of post-partisanship. He introduced himself as a Senate candidate in 2004 at the Boston convention, deriding as false the tendency of pundits to “slice and dice our country into red states and blue states” — a bracingly subversive thing to do at a partisan convention. He praised Ronald Reagan.
And in 2008 he got more than 52 percent of the vote, a higher percentage than many political consultants thought possible for a Democrat. That means he came into office unusually dependent on the good will of independents and Republicans. And yet, once in power, the president set to work enacting the agenda of the same Congressional Democrats he had implied he would keep at arm’s length. No president in living memory has compiled a slenderer record of bipartisanship.
It is often said in the president’s defense that Republican obstructionism left him no choice. Today, this is true — and it has put an end, for now, to the productive part of his presidency. But it was not true at the time of the stimulus in early 2009, when the president’s poll numbers were so stratospherically high that it appeared risky to oppose him on anything. Republicans certainly cannot be blamed for the way Democrats passed their health care bill. Whether or not the deal-making and parliamentary maneuvering required to secure passage was unprecedented, it was unprecedented in the era of C-Span and blogs, and many voters found it corrupt. The president’s legislative program has been bought at a huge price in public discontent. The expression “picking up nickels in front of a steamroller” has been used to describe a lot of the gambles taken by A.I.G. and other companies on the eve of the financial crisis. It describes the president’s agenda equally well.
It is vital to understand where this steamroller is coming from. According to Gallup, support for Obama has fallen only slightly among Democrats, from 90 percent to 81 percent, and only slightly among Republicans, from 20 percent to 12 percent. It is independents who have abandoned him: 56 percent approved of him when he came into office, versus 38 percent now. The reason the country is getting more conservative is not that conservatives are getting louder. It is that people in the dead center of the electorate are turning into conservatives at an astonishing rate.
The frustration and disappointment of these voters is probably directed as much at themselves as at their president. There were two ways to judge Obama the candidate — by what he said or by the company he kept. The cable-TV loudmouths who dismissed Obama right off the bat were unfair in certain particulars. But, on the question of whether Obama, if elected, would be more liberal or more conservative than his campaign rhetoric indicated, they arrived at a more accurate assessment than those of us who pored over his speeches, parsed his interviews and read his first book.
Some wish the president had governed more to the left, insisting on a public option in the health care bill and pushing for a larger stimulus. But those people make up only a small fraction even of the 18 percent of voters who call themselves liberal. In a time of growing populism and distrust, Republicans enjoy the advantage of running against the party of the elite. This seems to be a controversial proposition, but it should not be. It is not the same as saying that Democrats are the party of elitism. One can define elitism as, say, resistance to progressive taxation, and make a case that Republicans better merit that description. But, broadly speaking, the Democratic Party is the party to which elites belong. It is the party of Harvard (and most of the Ivy League), of Microsoft and Apple (and most of Silicon Valley), of Hollywood and Manhattan (and most of the media) and, although there is some evidence that numbers are evening out in this election cycle, of Goldman Sachs (and most of the investment banking profession). That the billionaire David Koch’s Americans for Prosperity Foundation supports the Tea Party has recently been much in the news. But the Democrats have the support of more, and more active, billionaires. Of the 20 richest ZIP codes in America, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, 19 gave the bulk of their money to Democrats in the last election, in most cases the vast bulk — 86 percent in 10024 on the Upper West Side. Meanwhile, only 22 percent of non-high-school educated white males are happy with the direction the country is going in. The Democrats’ overlap with elites leaves each party with a distinctive liability. The Democrats appear sincerely deluded about whom they actually represent. Democrats — who would have no trouble discerning elite solidarity in the datum that, say, in the 1930s the upper ranks of Britain’s media, church, business and political institutions were dominated by Tories — somehow think their own predominance in similar precincts is . . . what? Coincidence? Irony?
Republicans, meanwhile, do not recognize the liability that their repudiation by elites represents in an age of expertise and specialization — even in the eyes of the non-elite center of the country. Like a European workingman’s party at the turn of the last century, the Republican Party today inspires doubts that it has the expertise required to run a large government bureaucracy. Whatever one thinks of Obama’s economic team, and Bill Clinton’s before it, the Bush White House was never capable, in eight years, of assembling a similarly accomplished one. Nor is there much evidence that Republicans were ever able to conceptualize the serious problems with the nation’s medical system, let alone undertake to reform it on their own terms. “Democrats and Republicans agree that our health care system is broken in fundamental ways,” Eric Cantor notes in YOUNG GUNS: A New Generation of Conservative Leaders (Threshold, $15), a campaign book he has written with Paul Ryan and Representative Kevin McCarthy of California. Well, great. But for years now, Republicans discussing the availability and cost of health care have been like a kid who, when asked why he hasn’t cleaned up his room, replies, “I was just about to!”
It is in the context of class that Sarah Palin’s two-year career on the American political scene is so significant. She “almost seemed to set off a certain trip wire within the political class regarding access to power,” as Rasmussen and Schoen put it. But it is not an ideological trip wire. The Alaska governorship that catapulted Palin onto the national scene requires dealing with oil executives and divvying up the money from their lease payments. It is a job for a pragmatist, not a preacher. Palin has sometimes opposed big government and sometimes favored it, as became clear when journalists discovered that, contrary to Palin’s claims, she had been slow to oppose the wasteful Alaskan “Bridge to Nowhere,” which became a symbol of federal pork.
The controversies over Palin are about class (and markers of class, like religiosity), not ideology. She endorsed several underdog insurgent candidates who wound up winning Republican primaries in the spring and summer. How did she do that, when few observers — no matter how well informed, no matter how close to the Republican base — had given them a chance? Either Palin is a political idiot savant of such gifts that those who have questioned her intelligence should revise their opinion or, more likely, she is hearing signals from the median American that are inaudible to the governing classes — like those frequencies that teenagers can hear but adults can’t.
This talent alone does not make Palin a viable national leader. But until Republican politicians learn to understand the party’s new base, Palin will be their indispensable dragoman. After November’s election, the party will either reform or it will disappoint its most ardent backers. If it reforms, it is unlikely to be in a direction Palin disapproves of.
In The Ruling Class: How They Corrupted America and What We Can Do About It (American Spectator/Beaufort, paper, $12.95), Angelo M. Codevilla, an emeritus professor of international relations at Boston University who formerly was on the staff of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, gives a very interesting, conservative account of class politics. Codevilla sees the country as divided into “the Ruling Class” and “the Country Class,” who “have less in common culturally, dislike each other more and embody ways of life more different from one another than did the 19th century’s Northerners and Southerners.” Codevilla’s terms are often frustratingly vague. The Ruling Class, in his definition, includes top Democrats as well as Bush Republicans, despite their many differences; the Country Class seems sometimes to mean the passive remainder of the country, and sometimes the vanguard of ideological insurgents.
And yet Codevilla captures the texture of today’s conservative grievances with admirable boldness and convincing exactitude. Slights are harder to tolerate than exactions, he finds: “Day after day, the Ruling Class’s imputations — racist, stupid, prone to violence, incapable of running things — hit like artillery cover for the advance of legislation and regulation to restrict and delegitimize.” This is a polemic, and people wholly out of sympathy with conservatism will dislike it. But Codevilla makes what we might call the Tea Party case more soberly, bluntly and constructively than anyone else has done.
Codevilla takes seriously the constitutional preoccupations of today’s conservative protesters and their professed desire for enhanced self-rule. He sees that the temptation merely to form “an alternative Ruling Class” in the mirror image of the last one would be self-defeating. Americans must instead reacquire the sinews of self-government, he thinks. Self-government is difficult and time-consuming. If it weren’t, everyone would have it. The “light” social democratic rule that has prevailed for the past 80 years has taken a lot of the burdens of self-government off the shoulders of citizens. They were probably glad to be rid of them. Now, apparently, they are changing their minds.
Codevilla has no illusions about their prospects for success. Americans are not in the position to roll back their politics to before the time when Franklin D. Roosevelt or Woodrow Wilson or whoever-you-like ran roughshod over the Yankee yeomanry. Town, county and state governments no longer have much independent political identity. They are mere “conduits for federal mandates,” as Codevilla puts it. He notes that the 132 million Americans who inhabited the country in 1940 could vote on 117,000 school boards, while today a nation of 310 million votes in only 15,000 school districts. Self-rule depends on constitutional prerogatives that have long been revoked, institutions that have long been abandoned and habits of mind that were unlearned long ago. (Not to mention giving up Social Security and Medicare benefits that have already been paid for.) “Does the Country Class really want to govern itself,” Codevilla asks, “or is it just whining for milder taskmasters?”
We will find out soon enough. With a victory in November, Republicans could claim a mandate to repeal the Obama health care law and roll back a good deal of recent stimulus-related spending, neither of which they’ve made any pretense of tolerating. But achieving the larger goal — a citizenry sufficiently able to govern itself to be left alone by Washington — will require more. The Republican Party’s leaders will need to sit down respectfully with the people who brought them to power and figure out what they agree on. If Republicans make the error that Democrats did under President Obama, mistaking a protest vote for a wide mandate, the public will turn on them just as quickly.
Christopher Caldwell, a senior editor at The Weekly Standard, is the author of “Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West.”
By CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL
Published: October 21, 2010 Within the space of a week last summer, one judge in Arizona, ruling in a suit brought by the Obama administration, blocked a provision in a new state law permitting police officers to check the status of suspected illegal immigrants, while another blocked the implementation of a California referendum banning gay marriage. The two decisions imposed liberal policies that public opinion opposed. These things happen, of course. Congress had acted contrary to measurable public opinion when it passed health care reform in March. What made the two judicial rulings different was that both seemed to challenge the principle that it is the people who have the last word on how they are governed.
American conservatives, most notably the activists who support various Tea Party groups, have a great variety of anxieties and grievances just now. But what unites them all, at least rhetorically, is the sense that something has gone wrong constitutionally, shutting them out of decisions that rightfully belong to them as citizens. This is why many talk about “taking our country back.”
If polls are to be believed, conservatives should have no difficulty taking the country back or doing whatever else they want with it. Gallup now counts 54 percent of likely voters as self-described conservatives and only 18 per cent as liberals. More than half of Americans (55 per cent) say they have grown more conservative in the past year, according to the pollsters Scott Rasmussen and Doug Schoen in their new book, MAD AS HELL: How the Tea Party Movement Is Fundamentally Remaking Our Two-Party System (Harper/HarperCollins, $27.99).
America’s self-described conservatives, however, have a problem: They lack a party. While the Tea Party may look like a stalking horse for Republicans, the two have been a bad fit. Insurgents have cut a swath through Republicans’ well-laid election plans. They helped oust Florida’s party chairman. They toppled the favored candidates of the party establishment in Alaska, Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Kentucky, New York, South Carolina, Utah and elsewhere.
More than 70 percent of Republicans embrace the Tea Party, but the feeling is not reciprocated. If conservatives could vote for the Tea Party as a party, they would prefer it to the Republicans, according to Rasmussen. (Lately, Rasmussen’s polling, more than others’, has favored Republicans. Not coincidentally, perhaps, it has picked up certain recent shifts earlier and more reliably — like the surge that won the Republican Scott Brown the late Ted Kennedy’s Massachusetts Senate seat in January.) Much of the Tea Party is made up of conservative-leaning independents. The journalist Jonathan Rauch has called these people “debranded Republicans,” and they are debranded for a reason — 55 percent of them oppose the Republican leadership. While Republicans are likely to reap all the benefit of Tea Party enthusiasm in November’s elections, this is a marriage of convenience. The influential conservative blogger Erick Erickson of RedState.com, insists that one of his top goals is denying the Republican establishment credit for any electoral successes.
Hence the Republicans’ problem. After November, the party will need to reform in a conservative direction, in line with its base’s wishes, and without a clear idea of whether the broader public will be well disposed to such reform.
How Republicans wound up in this situation requires one to state the obvious. Well before George W. Bush presided over the collapse of the global financial system, a reasonable-sounding case was being mustered that he was the worst president in history. Foreign policy was the grounds on which voters repudiated him and his party, starting in 2006, and President Obama’s drawdown of forces in Iraq may be the most popular thing he has done. But foreign policy is unlikely to drive voters’ long-term assessment of the parties. The Iraq misadventure was justified with the same spreading-democracy rhetoric that Bill Clinton, Madeleine Albright and other Democrats used to justify interventions in Haiti and the Balkans in the 1990s. President Obama’s difficulties in resolving Afghanistan and closing Guantánamo show that Bush’s options were narrower than they appeared at the time.
Republicans’ future electoral fortunes will depend on domestic policy and specifically on whether they can reconnect with “small-c” conservatism — the conservatism whose mottoes are “Neither a borrower nor a lender be” and “Mind your own business,” and the opposite of which is not liberalism but utopianism. The Bush administration was a time of “big-C” Conservatism, ideological conservatism, which the party pursued with mixed results. As far as social issues were concerned, this ideology riveted a vast bloc of religious conservatives to the party, and continues to be an electoral asset (although that bloc, by some measures, is shrinking). Had gay marriage not been on several state ballots in 2004, John Kerry might now be sitting in the White House.
Ideological conservatism also meant “supply-side economics” — a misnomer for the doctrine that all tax cuts eventually pay for themselves through economic growth. The problem is, they don’t. So supply-side wound up being a form of permanent Keynesian stimulus — a bad idea during the overheated years before 2008. Huge tax cuts, from which the highest earners drew the biggest benefits, helped knock the budget out of balance and misallocated trillions of dollars. To a dispiriting degree, tax cuts remain the Republican answer to every economic question. Eric Cantor, potentially the House majority leader, told The Wall Street Journal that if Democrats went home without renewing various Bush-era tax cuts (which they did), “I promise you, H.R. 1 will be to retroactively restore the lower rates.”
Until recently, supply side was political gravy for Republicans. It confirmed the rule that in American politics the party most plausibly offering something for nothing wins. In the 1980s, the New York congressman Jack Kemp was the archetype of an ambitious, magnanimous, “sunny” kind of Republican who let you keep more of your taxes while building more housing for the poor. Democrats who questioned the affordability of these policies sounded like killjoys. In a time of scarcity like our own, calculations change. Today your tax cut means shuttering someone else’s AIDS clinic. Your welfare check comes off of someone else’s dinner table.
Deficits in the Obama era are a multiple of the Bush ones, and the product of a more consciously pursued Keynesianism. But that does not absolve Republicans of the need to find a path to balancing the budget. With some exceptions — like Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, a Kemp protégé who has laid out a “Road Map” for reforming (i.e., cutting) Social Security in coming generations — Republicans have not adjusted to zero-sum economics. There is certainly no credible path to budget balance in the “Pledge to America” released in late September.
Yet the case against supply-side economics can never be airtight or decisive, and Republican tax promises will probably help the party this year. That is because taxes are not just an economic benchmark, but a political one. The public should not expect more in services than it pays in taxes. But the government should not expect more in taxes than it offers in representation. And the number of Americans who feel poorly represented has risen alarmingly during the Obama administration.
Americans’ feelings toward the president are complex. On the one hand, there is little of the ad hominem contempt that was in evidence during the Clinton and Bush administrations. There are no campaign spots showing a Congressional candidate’s face morphing into Obama’s. But the president’s ideology, fairly or not, has provoked something approaching panic. Not many Americans agree that Obama is a closet totalitarian, as the Fox News host Glenn Beck has claimed. But they have serious misgivings of a milder kind.
In retrospect it looks inevitable that Republicans would have been punished by voters in 2008; but until Lehman Brothers collapsed in mid-September of that year, it was far from certain they would be, despite strong Democratic gains in the 2006 elections. Independent and Republican voters wanted an assurance that Senator Obama would not simply hand over power to the Democratic Party. He consistently provided it. The centerpiece of his campaign was a promise of post-partisanship. He introduced himself as a Senate candidate in 2004 at the Boston convention, deriding as false the tendency of pundits to “slice and dice our country into red states and blue states” — a bracingly subversive thing to do at a partisan convention. He praised Ronald Reagan.
And in 2008 he got more than 52 percent of the vote, a higher percentage than many political consultants thought possible for a Democrat. That means he came into office unusually dependent on the good will of independents and Republicans. And yet, once in power, the president set to work enacting the agenda of the same Congressional Democrats he had implied he would keep at arm’s length. No president in living memory has compiled a slenderer record of bipartisanship.
It is often said in the president’s defense that Republican obstructionism left him no choice. Today, this is true — and it has put an end, for now, to the productive part of his presidency. But it was not true at the time of the stimulus in early 2009, when the president’s poll numbers were so stratospherically high that it appeared risky to oppose him on anything. Republicans certainly cannot be blamed for the way Democrats passed their health care bill. Whether or not the deal-making and parliamentary maneuvering required to secure passage was unprecedented, it was unprecedented in the era of C-Span and blogs, and many voters found it corrupt. The president’s legislative program has been bought at a huge price in public discontent. The expression “picking up nickels in front of a steamroller” has been used to describe a lot of the gambles taken by A.I.G. and other companies on the eve of the financial crisis. It describes the president’s agenda equally well.
It is vital to understand where this steamroller is coming from. According to Gallup, support for Obama has fallen only slightly among Democrats, from 90 percent to 81 percent, and only slightly among Republicans, from 20 percent to 12 percent. It is independents who have abandoned him: 56 percent approved of him when he came into office, versus 38 percent now. The reason the country is getting more conservative is not that conservatives are getting louder. It is that people in the dead center of the electorate are turning into conservatives at an astonishing rate.
The frustration and disappointment of these voters is probably directed as much at themselves as at their president. There were two ways to judge Obama the candidate — by what he said or by the company he kept. The cable-TV loudmouths who dismissed Obama right off the bat were unfair in certain particulars. But, on the question of whether Obama, if elected, would be more liberal or more conservative than his campaign rhetoric indicated, they arrived at a more accurate assessment than those of us who pored over his speeches, parsed his interviews and read his first book.
Some wish the president had governed more to the left, insisting on a public option in the health care bill and pushing for a larger stimulus. But those people make up only a small fraction even of the 18 percent of voters who call themselves liberal. In a time of growing populism and distrust, Republicans enjoy the advantage of running against the party of the elite. This seems to be a controversial proposition, but it should not be. It is not the same as saying that Democrats are the party of elitism. One can define elitism as, say, resistance to progressive taxation, and make a case that Republicans better merit that description. But, broadly speaking, the Democratic Party is the party to which elites belong. It is the party of Harvard (and most of the Ivy League), of Microsoft and Apple (and most of Silicon Valley), of Hollywood and Manhattan (and most of the media) and, although there is some evidence that numbers are evening out in this election cycle, of Goldman Sachs (and most of the investment banking profession). That the billionaire David Koch’s Americans for Prosperity Foundation supports the Tea Party has recently been much in the news. But the Democrats have the support of more, and more active, billionaires. Of the 20 richest ZIP codes in America, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, 19 gave the bulk of their money to Democrats in the last election, in most cases the vast bulk — 86 percent in 10024 on the Upper West Side. Meanwhile, only 22 percent of non-high-school educated white males are happy with the direction the country is going in. The Democrats’ overlap with elites leaves each party with a distinctive liability. The Democrats appear sincerely deluded about whom they actually represent. Democrats — who would have no trouble discerning elite solidarity in the datum that, say, in the 1930s the upper ranks of Britain’s media, church, business and political institutions were dominated by Tories — somehow think their own predominance in similar precincts is . . . what? Coincidence? Irony?
Republicans, meanwhile, do not recognize the liability that their repudiation by elites represents in an age of expertise and specialization — even in the eyes of the non-elite center of the country. Like a European workingman’s party at the turn of the last century, the Republican Party today inspires doubts that it has the expertise required to run a large government bureaucracy. Whatever one thinks of Obama’s economic team, and Bill Clinton’s before it, the Bush White House was never capable, in eight years, of assembling a similarly accomplished one. Nor is there much evidence that Republicans were ever able to conceptualize the serious problems with the nation’s medical system, let alone undertake to reform it on their own terms. “Democrats and Republicans agree that our health care system is broken in fundamental ways,” Eric Cantor notes in YOUNG GUNS: A New Generation of Conservative Leaders (Threshold, $15), a campaign book he has written with Paul Ryan and Representative Kevin McCarthy of California. Well, great. But for years now, Republicans discussing the availability and cost of health care have been like a kid who, when asked why he hasn’t cleaned up his room, replies, “I was just about to!”
It is in the context of class that Sarah Palin’s two-year career on the American political scene is so significant. She “almost seemed to set off a certain trip wire within the political class regarding access to power,” as Rasmussen and Schoen put it. But it is not an ideological trip wire. The Alaska governorship that catapulted Palin onto the national scene requires dealing with oil executives and divvying up the money from their lease payments. It is a job for a pragmatist, not a preacher. Palin has sometimes opposed big government and sometimes favored it, as became clear when journalists discovered that, contrary to Palin’s claims, she had been slow to oppose the wasteful Alaskan “Bridge to Nowhere,” which became a symbol of federal pork.
The controversies over Palin are about class (and markers of class, like religiosity), not ideology. She endorsed several underdog insurgent candidates who wound up winning Republican primaries in the spring and summer. How did she do that, when few observers — no matter how well informed, no matter how close to the Republican base — had given them a chance? Either Palin is a political idiot savant of such gifts that those who have questioned her intelligence should revise their opinion or, more likely, she is hearing signals from the median American that are inaudible to the governing classes — like those frequencies that teenagers can hear but adults can’t.
This talent alone does not make Palin a viable national leader. But until Republican politicians learn to understand the party’s new base, Palin will be their indispensable dragoman. After November’s election, the party will either reform or it will disappoint its most ardent backers. If it reforms, it is unlikely to be in a direction Palin disapproves of.
In The Ruling Class: How They Corrupted America and What We Can Do About It (American Spectator/Beaufort, paper, $12.95), Angelo M. Codevilla, an emeritus professor of international relations at Boston University who formerly was on the staff of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, gives a very interesting, conservative account of class politics. Codevilla sees the country as divided into “the Ruling Class” and “the Country Class,” who “have less in common culturally, dislike each other more and embody ways of life more different from one another than did the 19th century’s Northerners and Southerners.” Codevilla’s terms are often frustratingly vague. The Ruling Class, in his definition, includes top Democrats as well as Bush Republicans, despite their many differences; the Country Class seems sometimes to mean the passive remainder of the country, and sometimes the vanguard of ideological insurgents.
And yet Codevilla captures the texture of today’s conservative grievances with admirable boldness and convincing exactitude. Slights are harder to tolerate than exactions, he finds: “Day after day, the Ruling Class’s imputations — racist, stupid, prone to violence, incapable of running things — hit like artillery cover for the advance of legislation and regulation to restrict and delegitimize.” This is a polemic, and people wholly out of sympathy with conservatism will dislike it. But Codevilla makes what we might call the Tea Party case more soberly, bluntly and constructively than anyone else has done.
Codevilla takes seriously the constitutional preoccupations of today’s conservative protesters and their professed desire for enhanced self-rule. He sees that the temptation merely to form “an alternative Ruling Class” in the mirror image of the last one would be self-defeating. Americans must instead reacquire the sinews of self-government, he thinks. Self-government is difficult and time-consuming. If it weren’t, everyone would have it. The “light” social democratic rule that has prevailed for the past 80 years has taken a lot of the burdens of self-government off the shoulders of citizens. They were probably glad to be rid of them. Now, apparently, they are changing their minds.
Codevilla has no illusions about their prospects for success. Americans are not in the position to roll back their politics to before the time when Franklin D. Roosevelt or Woodrow Wilson or whoever-you-like ran roughshod over the Yankee yeomanry. Town, county and state governments no longer have much independent political identity. They are mere “conduits for federal mandates,” as Codevilla puts it. He notes that the 132 million Americans who inhabited the country in 1940 could vote on 117,000 school boards, while today a nation of 310 million votes in only 15,000 school districts. Self-rule depends on constitutional prerogatives that have long been revoked, institutions that have long been abandoned and habits of mind that were unlearned long ago. (Not to mention giving up Social Security and Medicare benefits that have already been paid for.) “Does the Country Class really want to govern itself,” Codevilla asks, “or is it just whining for milder taskmasters?”
We will find out soon enough. With a victory in November, Republicans could claim a mandate to repeal the Obama health care law and roll back a good deal of recent stimulus-related spending, neither of which they’ve made any pretense of tolerating. But achieving the larger goal — a citizenry sufficiently able to govern itself to be left alone by Washington — will require more. The Republican Party’s leaders will need to sit down respectfully with the people who brought them to power and figure out what they agree on. If Republicans make the error that Democrats did under President Obama, mistaking a protest vote for a wide mandate, the public will turn on them just as quickly.
Christopher Caldwell, a senior editor at The Weekly Standard, is the author of “Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West.”
The State of Liberalism
NYTimes.com
The State of Liberalism
By JONATHAN ALTER
Published: October 21, 2010
It’s a sign of how poorly liberals market themselves and their ideas that the word “liberal” is still in disrepute despite the election of the most genuinely liberal president that the political culture of this country will probably allow. “Progressive” is now the self-description of choice for liberals, though it’s musty and evasive. The basic equation remains: virtually all Republican politicians call themselves conservative; few Democratic politicians call themselves liberal. Even retired Classic Coke liberals like Walter F. Mondale are skittish about their creed. “I never signed up for any ideology,” he writes in his memoirs.
That would be fine (people are sick of labels) if clarity weren’t such an obvious political advantage. Simple ideology routinely trounces nuanced pragmatism, just as emotion so often beats reason and the varsity fullback will most likely deck the captain of the debate team in a fistfight. For four decades, conservatives have used the word “liberal” as an epithet, while liberals have used “conservative” defensively (“I’m a little conservative on . . .”). And Fox fans range out of factual bounds (“death panels”) more than their NPR-listening counterparts in the liberal “reality-based community” (a term attributed to a Bush White House aide by the author Ron Suskind).
Liberals are also at a disadvantage because politics, at its essence, is about self-interest, an idea that at first glance seems more closely aligned with conservatism. To make their more complex case, liberals must convince a nation of individualists that enlightened self-interest requires mutual interest, and that the liberal project is better constructed for the demands of an increasingly interdependent world.
That challenge is made even harder because of a tactical split within liberalism itself. Think of it as a distinction between “action liberals” and “movement liberals.” Action liberals are policy-oriented pragmatists who use their heads to get something important done, even if their arid deal-making and Big Money connections often turn off the base. Movement liberals can sometimes specialize in logical arguments (e.g., Garry Wills), but they are more often dreamy idealists whose hearts and moral imagination can power the deepest social change (notably the women’s movement and the civil rights movement). They frequently overindulge in fine whines, appear naïve about political realities and prefer emotionally satisfying gestures to incremental but significant change. Many Democrats are an uneasy combination of realpolitik and “gesture politics,” which makes for a complicated approach toward governing.
As Senator Al Franken says of the Republicans: “Their bumper sticker . . . it’s one word: ‘No.’ . . . Our bumper sticker has — it’s just way too many words. And it says, ‘Continued on next bumper sticker.’ ”
Action liberalism has its modern roots in empiricism and the scientific method. Adam Smith was the original liberal. While “The Wealth of Nations” (1776) has long been the bible of laissez-faire conservatism, Smith’s first book, “The Theory of Moral Sentiments” (1759), pioneered liberal ideas of social and moral interdependence. By today’s standards, Abraham Lincoln’s support for large-scale government spending on infrastructure and appeals to “the better angels of our nature” would qualify him as a liberal. In the 20th century, progressives cleaned up and expanded government, trust-busted on behalf of what came to be known as “the public interest,” and experimented with different practical and heavily compromised ways of addressing the Great Depression.
The quintessential example of the pragmatic core of liberalism came in 1943, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt announced that “Dr. New Deal” had become “Dr. Win the War.” Roosevelt believed that the ends of liberalism — advancing democracy, expanding participation, protecting the environment and consumers (first promoted by a progressive Republican, Theodore Roosevelt), securing the vulnerable — were fixed, but that the timing and means of achieving them were highly negotiable, a distinction that often eludes modern liberals.
Whatever F.D.R.’s advantages over President Obama in communicating with the public, they share an unsentimental emphasis on what’s possible and what works. Both men, for instance, rejected the urgent pleas of some liberals to nationalize the banks and tacked toward their goals rather than standing ostentatiously on principle. Roosevelt was criticized by New Deal liberals in 1935 for allowing Congress to water down the Social Security bill before passage. Sound familiar?
Many movement liberals consider such concessions to be a sellout, just as they thought President Bill Clinton sold out by signing welfare reform in 1996. It’s important to criticize parts of Obama’s performance where merited — he didn’t use his leverage over banks when he had it — but some liberal writers have gone further, savaging his motives and integrity. Roger D. Hodge’s book is called THE MENDACITY OF HOPE: Barack Obama and the Betrayal of American Liberalism (Harper/HarperCollins, $25.99), as if Obama’s corporate fund-raising and failure to live up to the unrealistic expectations of purist liberals made him and his team puppets and liars. Hodge says the fact that Obama is “in most respects better” than George W. Bush or Sarah Palin is “completely beside the point.” Really? Since when did the tenets of liberalism demand that politics no longer be viewed as the art of the possible?
Hodge, formerly the editor of Harper’s Magazine, makes valid arguments about the failure of Democrats to undertake the essential liberal function of checking the excesses of capitalism. But the political scientists Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson are closer to the mark in their important new book, WINNER-TAKE-ALL POLITICS: How Washington Made the Rich Richer — and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class (Simon & Schuster, $27). Without rationalizing specific policy choices, they describe the “paradox” Obama confronted on taking office when the country faced a genuine risk of another depression: “how to heal a fragile economy without simply reasserting the dominance of the forces that had brought that economy to the brink of ruin.” It’s the healing part — preventing another depression — that voters often forget in their understandable rage over bailouts, almost all of which, by the way, have already been paid back.
In making the broader case that the rich have essentially bought the country, Hacker and Pierson zero in on two killer statistics. Over the last three decades, the top 1 percent of the country has received 36 percent of all the gains in household incomes; 1 percent got more than a third of the upside. And the top one-tenth of 1 percent acquired much more of the nation’s increased wealth during those years than the bottom 60 percent did. That’s roughly 300,000 super-rich people with a bigger slice of the pie than 180 million Americans. The collapse of the American middle class and the huge transfer of wealth to the already wealthy is the biggest domestic story of our time and a proper focus of liberal energy.
Arianna Huffington wasn’t exaggerating when she entitled her latest book THIRD WORLD AMERICA: How Our Politicians Are Abandoning the Middle Class and Betraying the American Dream (Crown, $23.99). Poverty in the United States isn’t as bad as in the third world, but the disparity between rich and poor is far beyond that of other highly developed nations. While Huffington’s muscular tone fits the mood of today’s liberals, she insists on pivoting to the positive. After excoriating politicians, she cites innovative nonprofits that can help liberals feel less helpless.
The good news reported by Hacker and Pierson is that American wealth disparities — almost exactly as wide as in 1928 — are not the residue of globalization or technology or anything else beyond our control. There’s nothing inevitable about them. They’re the result of politics and policies, which tilted toward the rich beginning in the 1970s and can, with enough effort, be tilted back over time (emphasis added for impatient liberals). The primary authors of the shocking transfer of wealth are Republicans, whose claims to be operating from principle now lie in tatters. It doesn’t take feats of scholarship to prove that simultaneously supporting balanced budgets, status quo entitlement and defense spending, and huge tax cuts for the wealthy (the Republicans’ new plan) is mathematically impossible and intellectually bankrupt.
But of course Democrats, caught up for years in the wonders of the market, are complicit in the winner-take-all ethos. President Clinton and his Treasury secretary Robert E. Rubin played to the bond market, and many of their protégés later came to dominate the Obama administration. Hacker and Pierson call Rahm Emanuel types “Mark Hanna Democrats,” a reference to William McKinley’s campaign manager, who said: “There are two things that are important in politics. The first is money, and I can’t remember what the second one is.” Action liberals can explain that they opposed the ruinous 2001 Bush tax cuts and that their prodigious fund-raising is necessary to stay competitive, but large segments of their base are no longer buying it. They want a more bare-knuckle attack on Wall Street than Obama has so far offered.
Liberals are also at a disadvantage because politics, at its essence, is about self-interest, an idea that at first glance seems more closely aligned with conservatism. To make their more complex case, liberals must convince a nation of individualists that enlightened self-interest requires mutual interest, and that the liberal project is better constructed for the demands of an increasingly interdependent world.
That challenge is made even harder because of a tactical split within liberalism itself. Think of it as a distinction between “action liberals” and “movement liberals.” Action liberals are policy-oriented pragmatists who use their heads to get something important done, even if their arid deal-making and Big Money connections often turn off the base. Movement liberals can sometimes specialize in logical arguments (e.g., Garry Wills), but they are more often dreamy idealists whose hearts and moral imagination can power the deepest social change (notably the women’s movement and the civil rights movement). They frequently overindulge in fine whines, appear naïve about political realities and prefer emotionally satisfying gestures to incremental but significant change. Many Democrats are an uneasy combination of realpolitik and “gesture politics,” which makes for a complicated approach toward governing.
Action liberalism has its modern roots in empiricism and the scientific method. Adam Smith was the original liberal. While “The Wealth of Nations” (1776) has long been the bible of laissez-faire conservatism, Smith’s first book, “The Theory of Moral Sentiments” (1759), pioneered liberal ideas of social and moral interdependence. By today’s standards, Abraham Lincoln’s support for large-scale government spending on infrastructure and appeals to “the better angels of our nature” would qualify him as a liberal. In the 20th century, progressives cleaned up and expanded government, trust-busted on behalf of what came to be known as “the public interest,” and experimented with different practical and heavily compromised ways of addressing the Great Depression.
The quintessential example of the pragmatic core of liberalism came in 1943, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt announced that “Dr. New Deal” had become “Dr. Win the War.” Roosevelt believed that the ends of liberalism — advancing democracy, expanding participation, protecting the environment and consumers (first promoted by a progressive Republican, Theodore Roosevelt), securing the vulnerable — were fixed, but that the timing and means of achieving them were highly negotiable, a distinction that often eludes modern liberals.
Whatever F.D.R.’s advantages over President Obama in communicating with the public, they share an unsentimental emphasis on what’s possible and what works. Both men, for instance, rejected the urgent pleas of some liberals to nationalize the banks and tacked toward their goals rather than standing ostentatiously on principle. Roosevelt was criticized by New Deal liberals in 1935 for allowing Congress to water down the Social Security bill before passage. Sound familiar?
But now the president is getting hit from both sides. In FORTUNES OF CHANGE: The Rise of the Liberal Rich and the Remaking of America (Wiley, $25.95), David Callahan points out that Obama raised more than John McCain in 8 of the 10 wealthiest ZIP codes in the United States. Callahan, the author of “The Cheating Culture,” notes that Hollywood money proves that rich donors don’t always push the parties to the right. It can also push the Democrats left on issues like the environment and gay rights. And yet in the months since he finished his book, many wealthy Obama supporters have grown disenchanted with what they see as the president’s “anti-business” language (he attacked “fat-cat bankers”). This was inevitable. “A benign plutocracy is still a plutocracy,” Callahan concludes. He quotes Louis Brandeis: “We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” That’s as relevant today to liberal thinking as it was when Brandeis said it, decades ago.
On social issues, liberals have mostly won, with the public backing them on abortion, gay rights and other live-and-let-live ideas. That doesn’t necessarily make liberals more libertine (in fact, divorce rates are higher in red states than in blue). But it floats them closer to history’s tide. The great hope for the future of liberalism lies in the changing demographics of the country. With younger voters and Hispanics moving sharply into the Democratic column, Republicans are in danger of being marginalized as an old, white, regional party. The Tea Party energy might be seen in retrospect as the last gasp of the “Ozzie and Harriet” order, with Obama as the scary face of a different-looking America. (Why else did Tea Partiers not seem to care over the last decade about President Bush’s profligate spending?) For now, of course, it’s conservatives who have the mojo, and not just because the economy is so bad. Despite historic advances in 2008, liberals remain better at complaining than organizing, which is a big reason they may take a shellacking in November.
A couple of new books recall the story about the civil rights and labor leader A. Philip Randolph, who was visiting F.D.R. to push for a policy. “Make me do it,” the president is said to have replied. Roosevelt meant that his visitors should go out and organize and demonstrate, not just expect him to wave a magic wand. Liberals have a tendency to think that when the “right” person wins, order has been restored. The idea of permanent trench warfare between liberals and conservatives is an abstraction to them rather than a call to arms. One reason health care reform stalled in the summer of 2009 was that Tea Party forces turned up en masse at town meetings in swing districts while liberals stayed home, convinced that after electing Obama they were free to go on Miller Time.
The enactment of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 was a bad experience for certain movement liberals. If conservatives were mindless in describing as “socialism” what was essentially a plan pioneered by Bob Dole, Howard Baker and Mitt Romney, liberals seemed strangely incapable of taking yes for an answer after more than 70 years of trying to expand coverage. They were right about the value of a public option, but wrong to attack Obama for not obtaining it when the votes were never there in the Senate. Many Democrats were ignorant of all the good things in the legislation (partly the fault of White House mistakes in framing the message) and politically suicidal in echoing Howard Dean’s infamous cry of “Kill the bill!” By the end of the process, voters were revolted by the notorious “Cornhusker kickback” and other smelly deals. If making laws is akin to making sausage (you don’t really want to know what goes into it), the stench from Capitol Hill spoiled everyone’s appetite for the liberal meal.
But somewhere Ted Kennedy is smiling. To the list of revealing Kennedy books, add Burton Hersh’s EDWARD KENNEDY: An Intimate Biography (Counterpoint, $32). Hersh, a Harvard classmate of the future senator, ignores much of his Senate career but makes good use of sources going back six decades to paint a personal portrait. While Hersh’s uncontrolled freight-train prose is loaded with often extraneous details, he nonetheless brings many of the old stories alive again. Kennedy was both the heart and the tactical brains of late-20th-century liberalism, which won many small victories even as it fell out of fashion. Had he been vital in 2009 and able to work his charm across the aisle, senators in both parties agree, the health care debate would have been healthier.
In GETTING IT DONE: How Obama and Congress Finally Broke the Stalemate to Make Way for Health Care Reform (Thomas Dunne/St. Martin’s, $25.99), Tom Daschle, the former Senate majority leader, strips the color from that story in order to maintain his Washington relationships. But Daschle, forced by a tax problem to step down as Obama’s health care czar, has written, with David Nather, an exceptionally clear account of an exceptionally tangled piece of recent history. He’s especially good on why the credibility of Democrats depends on how skillfully they implement the bill over the next 10 years. Left unsaid is that Democrats in 2012 will face not just hostile Republicans favoring repeal but also cost controls on Medicare that will encourage conservatives to resume their pandering to the elderly, an approach long taken by liberals to retain power. Beyond the specifics of the bill, Daschle is obviously right that “health care has become a symbol of the deep divide in Americans’ feelings about the role government should play.”
In his Inaugural Address, Obama tried to define his view of that role when he said, “The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works.” This is a sensible definition of modern liberalism but also a bloodless and incomplete one, evoking Michael Dukakis’s claim that the 1988 presidential election was about “competence, not ideology.” That definitional dispute had first flared four years earlier, when Gary Hart mounted a stiff challenge to Walter Mondale for the Democratic nomination. Both have new books out.
Hart’s eccentric contribution, THE THUNDER AND THE SUNSHINE: Four Seasons in a Burnished Life (Fulcrum, $25), will remind readers why he and the presidency would have been an awkward fit. His bitterness over the sex scandal that ended his political career in 1987 hasn’t fully ebbed. As always, he tries to aim higher: Condoleezza Rice is in the index, but Donna Rice isn’t.
The book contains a sustained and ponderous “Odyssey” metaphor, with one chapter opening, “As he rises from his stony perch above the harbor, Ulysses tells his mariners that he is prepared to sail beyond the sunset.” Hart began his career as a 1960s movement liberal, a seeker and intellectual (he received a doctorate from Oxford in 2001, at the age of 64) with Homeric aspirations. He ruminates well about some of the essential differences between the American political creeds. Conservatives, by nature more skeptical, “accept that life is just one damn thing after another, that we are on our own, and it is up to us to make the most of it. But for those with a sense of commonwealth and common good, the shattering of dreams and hopes is always viewed more tragically.”
True enough, but it raises the question of why attaching emotion to politics makes conservatives stronger but often weakens liberals. In the years since Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, something soft has wormed its way into the heart of liberalism, a diffidence about the cut-and-thrust of politics. Carville-style fisticuffs are satisfying, but have not yet made it a fighting faith again.
Mondale’s memoir, THE GOOD FIGHT: A Life in Liberal Politics (Scribner, $28), written with David Hage, is, not surprisingly, more conventional than Hart’s, but he comes to terms more squarely with the limits of liberalism. Looking back at his early days in the Senate in 1965, at the peak of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society — what he calls the “high tide” of liberalism — Mondale says: “A lot of it was wonderful, overdue and much needed. But we also overstated what was possible.” He recalls the years in the wilderness, when “I wanted to talk about poverty and opportunity, but people wondered why I wanted to give away things for free.” Even in feeling vindicated by Obama’s election, he admits that “liberalism is still on trial.”
Especially when it comes to education. It’s encouraging that even a paleoliberal like Mondale now believes that “we should weed out teachers who are unsuited to the profession” and that teachers’ union rules “must have flexibility.” There’s a great struggle under way today within the Democratic Party between Obama and the reformers on one side and, on the other, hidebound adult interest groups (especially the National Education Association) that have until recently dominated the party. If liberalism is about practical problem solving, then establishing the high standards and accountability necessary to rescue a generation of poor minority youths and train the American work force of the future must move to the top of the progressive agenda. Education reform is emerging as the first important social movement of the 21st century, a perfect cause for a new generation of idealists.
Where education might offer grounds for cooperation with conservatives, foreign policy almost certainly will not. After a long period of favoring interventionism to fight fascism and Communism, liberals have been doves since Vietnam, even in a post-9/11 world. If Democrats retain control of the House, they will pressure Obama hard next year to begin withdrawing from Afghanistan as promised. Chalmers Johnson, a noted scholar of Japan, has in recent years made a point of explaining how the Afghan freedom fighters the C.I.A. supported in the 1980s, when they were fighting the Soviet Union, are now the Taliban and Qaeda forces trying to kill Americans. In DISMANTLING THE EMPIRE: America’s Last Best Hope (Metropolitan/Holt, $25), he argues for a complete reordering of the national security state to save not just lives but treasure. While Obama won’t go as far as Johnson urges, a big tussle between the White House and the Pentagon is likely next year, when we’ll learn if neoconservatives can once again convince the country that liberals are “unpatriotic.”
The answer to that question — and to the immediate fate of liberal ideas — depends largely on the performance of one man, the president. Jeffrey C. Alexander’s intriguing argument in THE PERFORMANCE OF POLITICS: Obama’s Victory and the Democratic Struggle for Power (Oxford University, $29.95), a meticulous review of the 2008 campaign, is that his fellow sociologists have overemphasized impersonal social forces at the expense of the theater of public life — the way politicians perform “symbolically.” It’s a prosaic call for a more poetic (or at least aesthetic) understanding of politics. Ideology must connect viscerally, or it doesn’t connect at all. Liberalism, like any idea or product, can succeed only if it sells.
Jonathan Alter, a columnist for Newsweek and an analyst for MSNBC, is the author of “The Defining Moment: FDR’s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope” and, most recently, “The Promise: President Obama, Year One.”
The State of Liberalism
By JONATHAN ALTER
Published: October 21, 2010
It’s a sign of how poorly liberals market themselves and their ideas that the word “liberal” is still in disrepute despite the election of the most genuinely liberal president that the political culture of this country will probably allow. “Progressive” is now the self-description of choice for liberals, though it’s musty and evasive. The basic equation remains: virtually all Republican politicians call themselves conservative; few Democratic politicians call themselves liberal. Even retired Classic Coke liberals like Walter F. Mondale are skittish about their creed. “I never signed up for any ideology,” he writes in his memoirs.
That would be fine (people are sick of labels) if clarity weren’t such an obvious political advantage. Simple ideology routinely trounces nuanced pragmatism, just as emotion so often beats reason and the varsity fullback will most likely deck the captain of the debate team in a fistfight. For four decades, conservatives have used the word “liberal” as an epithet, while liberals have used “conservative” defensively (“I’m a little conservative on . . .”). And Fox fans range out of factual bounds (“death panels”) more than their NPR-listening counterparts in the liberal “reality-based community” (a term attributed to a Bush White House aide by the author Ron Suskind).
Liberals are also at a disadvantage because politics, at its essence, is about self-interest, an idea that at first glance seems more closely aligned with conservatism. To make their more complex case, liberals must convince a nation of individualists that enlightened self-interest requires mutual interest, and that the liberal project is better constructed for the demands of an increasingly interdependent world.
That challenge is made even harder because of a tactical split within liberalism itself. Think of it as a distinction between “action liberals” and “movement liberals.” Action liberals are policy-oriented pragmatists who use their heads to get something important done, even if their arid deal-making and Big Money connections often turn off the base. Movement liberals can sometimes specialize in logical arguments (e.g., Garry Wills), but they are more often dreamy idealists whose hearts and moral imagination can power the deepest social change (notably the women’s movement and the civil rights movement). They frequently overindulge in fine whines, appear naïve about political realities and prefer emotionally satisfying gestures to incremental but significant change. Many Democrats are an uneasy combination of realpolitik and “gesture politics,” which makes for a complicated approach toward governing.
As Senator Al Franken says of the Republicans: “Their bumper sticker . . . it’s one word: ‘No.’ . . . Our bumper sticker has — it’s just way too many words. And it says, ‘Continued on next bumper sticker.’ ”
Action liberalism has its modern roots in empiricism and the scientific method. Adam Smith was the original liberal. While “The Wealth of Nations” (1776) has long been the bible of laissez-faire conservatism, Smith’s first book, “The Theory of Moral Sentiments” (1759), pioneered liberal ideas of social and moral interdependence. By today’s standards, Abraham Lincoln’s support for large-scale government spending on infrastructure and appeals to “the better angels of our nature” would qualify him as a liberal. In the 20th century, progressives cleaned up and expanded government, trust-busted on behalf of what came to be known as “the public interest,” and experimented with different practical and heavily compromised ways of addressing the Great Depression.
The quintessential example of the pragmatic core of liberalism came in 1943, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt announced that “Dr. New Deal” had become “Dr. Win the War.” Roosevelt believed that the ends of liberalism — advancing democracy, expanding participation, protecting the environment and consumers (first promoted by a progressive Republican, Theodore Roosevelt), securing the vulnerable — were fixed, but that the timing and means of achieving them were highly negotiable, a distinction that often eludes modern liberals.
Whatever F.D.R.’s advantages over President Obama in communicating with the public, they share an unsentimental emphasis on what’s possible and what works. Both men, for instance, rejected the urgent pleas of some liberals to nationalize the banks and tacked toward their goals rather than standing ostentatiously on principle. Roosevelt was criticized by New Deal liberals in 1935 for allowing Congress to water down the Social Security bill before passage. Sound familiar?
Many movement liberals consider such concessions to be a sellout, just as they thought President Bill Clinton sold out by signing welfare reform in 1996. It’s important to criticize parts of Obama’s performance where merited — he didn’t use his leverage over banks when he had it — but some liberal writers have gone further, savaging his motives and integrity. Roger D. Hodge’s book is called THE MENDACITY OF HOPE: Barack Obama and the Betrayal of American Liberalism (Harper/HarperCollins, $25.99), as if Obama’s corporate fund-raising and failure to live up to the unrealistic expectations of purist liberals made him and his team puppets and liars. Hodge says the fact that Obama is “in most respects better” than George W. Bush or Sarah Palin is “completely beside the point.” Really? Since when did the tenets of liberalism demand that politics no longer be viewed as the art of the possible?
Hodge, formerly the editor of Harper’s Magazine, makes valid arguments about the failure of Democrats to undertake the essential liberal function of checking the excesses of capitalism. But the political scientists Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson are closer to the mark in their important new book, WINNER-TAKE-ALL POLITICS: How Washington Made the Rich Richer — and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class (Simon & Schuster, $27). Without rationalizing specific policy choices, they describe the “paradox” Obama confronted on taking office when the country faced a genuine risk of another depression: “how to heal a fragile economy without simply reasserting the dominance of the forces that had brought that economy to the brink of ruin.” It’s the healing part — preventing another depression — that voters often forget in their understandable rage over bailouts, almost all of which, by the way, have already been paid back.
In making the broader case that the rich have essentially bought the country, Hacker and Pierson zero in on two killer statistics. Over the last three decades, the top 1 percent of the country has received 36 percent of all the gains in household incomes; 1 percent got more than a third of the upside. And the top one-tenth of 1 percent acquired much more of the nation’s increased wealth during those years than the bottom 60 percent did. That’s roughly 300,000 super-rich people with a bigger slice of the pie than 180 million Americans. The collapse of the American middle class and the huge transfer of wealth to the already wealthy is the biggest domestic story of our time and a proper focus of liberal energy.
Arianna Huffington wasn’t exaggerating when she entitled her latest book THIRD WORLD AMERICA: How Our Politicians Are Abandoning the Middle Class and Betraying the American Dream (Crown, $23.99). Poverty in the United States isn’t as bad as in the third world, but the disparity between rich and poor is far beyond that of other highly developed nations. While Huffington’s muscular tone fits the mood of today’s liberals, she insists on pivoting to the positive. After excoriating politicians, she cites innovative nonprofits that can help liberals feel less helpless.
The good news reported by Hacker and Pierson is that American wealth disparities — almost exactly as wide as in 1928 — are not the residue of globalization or technology or anything else beyond our control. There’s nothing inevitable about them. They’re the result of politics and policies, which tilted toward the rich beginning in the 1970s and can, with enough effort, be tilted back over time (emphasis added for impatient liberals). The primary authors of the shocking transfer of wealth are Republicans, whose claims to be operating from principle now lie in tatters. It doesn’t take feats of scholarship to prove that simultaneously supporting balanced budgets, status quo entitlement and defense spending, and huge tax cuts for the wealthy (the Republicans’ new plan) is mathematically impossible and intellectually bankrupt.
But of course Democrats, caught up for years in the wonders of the market, are complicit in the winner-take-all ethos. President Clinton and his Treasury secretary Robert E. Rubin played to the bond market, and many of their protégés later came to dominate the Obama administration. Hacker and Pierson call Rahm Emanuel types “Mark Hanna Democrats,” a reference to William McKinley’s campaign manager, who said: “There are two things that are important in politics. The first is money, and I can’t remember what the second one is.” Action liberals can explain that they opposed the ruinous 2001 Bush tax cuts and that their prodigious fund-raising is necessary to stay competitive, but large segments of their base are no longer buying it. They want a more bare-knuckle attack on Wall Street than Obama has so far offered.
Liberals are also at a disadvantage because politics, at its essence, is about self-interest, an idea that at first glance seems more closely aligned with conservatism. To make their more complex case, liberals must convince a nation of individualists that enlightened self-interest requires mutual interest, and that the liberal project is better constructed for the demands of an increasingly interdependent world.
That challenge is made even harder because of a tactical split within liberalism itself. Think of it as a distinction between “action liberals” and “movement liberals.” Action liberals are policy-oriented pragmatists who use their heads to get something important done, even if their arid deal-making and Big Money connections often turn off the base. Movement liberals can sometimes specialize in logical arguments (e.g., Garry Wills), but they are more often dreamy idealists whose hearts and moral imagination can power the deepest social change (notably the women’s movement and the civil rights movement). They frequently overindulge in fine whines, appear naïve about political realities and prefer emotionally satisfying gestures to incremental but significant change. Many Democrats are an uneasy combination of realpolitik and “gesture politics,” which makes for a complicated approach toward governing.
Action liberalism has its modern roots in empiricism and the scientific method. Adam Smith was the original liberal. While “The Wealth of Nations” (1776) has long been the bible of laissez-faire conservatism, Smith’s first book, “The Theory of Moral Sentiments” (1759), pioneered liberal ideas of social and moral interdependence. By today’s standards, Abraham Lincoln’s support for large-scale government spending on infrastructure and appeals to “the better angels of our nature” would qualify him as a liberal. In the 20th century, progressives cleaned up and expanded government, trust-busted on behalf of what came to be known as “the public interest,” and experimented with different practical and heavily compromised ways of addressing the Great Depression.
The quintessential example of the pragmatic core of liberalism came in 1943, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt announced that “Dr. New Deal” had become “Dr. Win the War.” Roosevelt believed that the ends of liberalism — advancing democracy, expanding participation, protecting the environment and consumers (first promoted by a progressive Republican, Theodore Roosevelt), securing the vulnerable — were fixed, but that the timing and means of achieving them were highly negotiable, a distinction that often eludes modern liberals.
Whatever F.D.R.’s advantages over President Obama in communicating with the public, they share an unsentimental emphasis on what’s possible and what works. Both men, for instance, rejected the urgent pleas of some liberals to nationalize the banks and tacked toward their goals rather than standing ostentatiously on principle. Roosevelt was criticized by New Deal liberals in 1935 for allowing Congress to water down the Social Security bill before passage. Sound familiar?
But now the president is getting hit from both sides. In FORTUNES OF CHANGE: The Rise of the Liberal Rich and the Remaking of America (Wiley, $25.95), David Callahan points out that Obama raised more than John McCain in 8 of the 10 wealthiest ZIP codes in the United States. Callahan, the author of “The Cheating Culture,” notes that Hollywood money proves that rich donors don’t always push the parties to the right. It can also push the Democrats left on issues like the environment and gay rights. And yet in the months since he finished his book, many wealthy Obama supporters have grown disenchanted with what they see as the president’s “anti-business” language (he attacked “fat-cat bankers”). This was inevitable. “A benign plutocracy is still a plutocracy,” Callahan concludes. He quotes Louis Brandeis: “We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” That’s as relevant today to liberal thinking as it was when Brandeis said it, decades ago.
On social issues, liberals have mostly won, with the public backing them on abortion, gay rights and other live-and-let-live ideas. That doesn’t necessarily make liberals more libertine (in fact, divorce rates are higher in red states than in blue). But it floats them closer to history’s tide. The great hope for the future of liberalism lies in the changing demographics of the country. With younger voters and Hispanics moving sharply into the Democratic column, Republicans are in danger of being marginalized as an old, white, regional party. The Tea Party energy might be seen in retrospect as the last gasp of the “Ozzie and Harriet” order, with Obama as the scary face of a different-looking America. (Why else did Tea Partiers not seem to care over the last decade about President Bush’s profligate spending?) For now, of course, it’s conservatives who have the mojo, and not just because the economy is so bad. Despite historic advances in 2008, liberals remain better at complaining than organizing, which is a big reason they may take a shellacking in November.
A couple of new books recall the story about the civil rights and labor leader A. Philip Randolph, who was visiting F.D.R. to push for a policy. “Make me do it,” the president is said to have replied. Roosevelt meant that his visitors should go out and organize and demonstrate, not just expect him to wave a magic wand. Liberals have a tendency to think that when the “right” person wins, order has been restored. The idea of permanent trench warfare between liberals and conservatives is an abstraction to them rather than a call to arms. One reason health care reform stalled in the summer of 2009 was that Tea Party forces turned up en masse at town meetings in swing districts while liberals stayed home, convinced that after electing Obama they were free to go on Miller Time.
The enactment of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 was a bad experience for certain movement liberals. If conservatives were mindless in describing as “socialism” what was essentially a plan pioneered by Bob Dole, Howard Baker and Mitt Romney, liberals seemed strangely incapable of taking yes for an answer after more than 70 years of trying to expand coverage. They were right about the value of a public option, but wrong to attack Obama for not obtaining it when the votes were never there in the Senate. Many Democrats were ignorant of all the good things in the legislation (partly the fault of White House mistakes in framing the message) and politically suicidal in echoing Howard Dean’s infamous cry of “Kill the bill!” By the end of the process, voters were revolted by the notorious “Cornhusker kickback” and other smelly deals. If making laws is akin to making sausage (you don’t really want to know what goes into it), the stench from Capitol Hill spoiled everyone’s appetite for the liberal meal.
But somewhere Ted Kennedy is smiling. To the list of revealing Kennedy books, add Burton Hersh’s EDWARD KENNEDY: An Intimate Biography (Counterpoint, $32). Hersh, a Harvard classmate of the future senator, ignores much of his Senate career but makes good use of sources going back six decades to paint a personal portrait. While Hersh’s uncontrolled freight-train prose is loaded with often extraneous details, he nonetheless brings many of the old stories alive again. Kennedy was both the heart and the tactical brains of late-20th-century liberalism, which won many small victories even as it fell out of fashion. Had he been vital in 2009 and able to work his charm across the aisle, senators in both parties agree, the health care debate would have been healthier.
In GETTING IT DONE: How Obama and Congress Finally Broke the Stalemate to Make Way for Health Care Reform (Thomas Dunne/St. Martin’s, $25.99), Tom Daschle, the former Senate majority leader, strips the color from that story in order to maintain his Washington relationships. But Daschle, forced by a tax problem to step down as Obama’s health care czar, has written, with David Nather, an exceptionally clear account of an exceptionally tangled piece of recent history. He’s especially good on why the credibility of Democrats depends on how skillfully they implement the bill over the next 10 years. Left unsaid is that Democrats in 2012 will face not just hostile Republicans favoring repeal but also cost controls on Medicare that will encourage conservatives to resume their pandering to the elderly, an approach long taken by liberals to retain power. Beyond the specifics of the bill, Daschle is obviously right that “health care has become a symbol of the deep divide in Americans’ feelings about the role government should play.”
In his Inaugural Address, Obama tried to define his view of that role when he said, “The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works.” This is a sensible definition of modern liberalism but also a bloodless and incomplete one, evoking Michael Dukakis’s claim that the 1988 presidential election was about “competence, not ideology.” That definitional dispute had first flared four years earlier, when Gary Hart mounted a stiff challenge to Walter Mondale for the Democratic nomination. Both have new books out.
Hart’s eccentric contribution, THE THUNDER AND THE SUNSHINE: Four Seasons in a Burnished Life (Fulcrum, $25), will remind readers why he and the presidency would have been an awkward fit. His bitterness over the sex scandal that ended his political career in 1987 hasn’t fully ebbed. As always, he tries to aim higher: Condoleezza Rice is in the index, but Donna Rice isn’t.
The book contains a sustained and ponderous “Odyssey” metaphor, with one chapter opening, “As he rises from his stony perch above the harbor, Ulysses tells his mariners that he is prepared to sail beyond the sunset.” Hart began his career as a 1960s movement liberal, a seeker and intellectual (he received a doctorate from Oxford in 2001, at the age of 64) with Homeric aspirations. He ruminates well about some of the essential differences between the American political creeds. Conservatives, by nature more skeptical, “accept that life is just one damn thing after another, that we are on our own, and it is up to us to make the most of it. But for those with a sense of commonwealth and common good, the shattering of dreams and hopes is always viewed more tragically.”
True enough, but it raises the question of why attaching emotion to politics makes conservatives stronger but often weakens liberals. In the years since Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, something soft has wormed its way into the heart of liberalism, a diffidence about the cut-and-thrust of politics. Carville-style fisticuffs are satisfying, but have not yet made it a fighting faith again.
Mondale’s memoir, THE GOOD FIGHT: A Life in Liberal Politics (Scribner, $28), written with David Hage, is, not surprisingly, more conventional than Hart’s, but he comes to terms more squarely with the limits of liberalism. Looking back at his early days in the Senate in 1965, at the peak of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society — what he calls the “high tide” of liberalism — Mondale says: “A lot of it was wonderful, overdue and much needed. But we also overstated what was possible.” He recalls the years in the wilderness, when “I wanted to talk about poverty and opportunity, but people wondered why I wanted to give away things for free.” Even in feeling vindicated by Obama’s election, he admits that “liberalism is still on trial.”
Especially when it comes to education. It’s encouraging that even a paleoliberal like Mondale now believes that “we should weed out teachers who are unsuited to the profession” and that teachers’ union rules “must have flexibility.” There’s a great struggle under way today within the Democratic Party between Obama and the reformers on one side and, on the other, hidebound adult interest groups (especially the National Education Association) that have until recently dominated the party. If liberalism is about practical problem solving, then establishing the high standards and accountability necessary to rescue a generation of poor minority youths and train the American work force of the future must move to the top of the progressive agenda. Education reform is emerging as the first important social movement of the 21st century, a perfect cause for a new generation of idealists.
Where education might offer grounds for cooperation with conservatives, foreign policy almost certainly will not. After a long period of favoring interventionism to fight fascism and Communism, liberals have been doves since Vietnam, even in a post-9/11 world. If Democrats retain control of the House, they will pressure Obama hard next year to begin withdrawing from Afghanistan as promised. Chalmers Johnson, a noted scholar of Japan, has in recent years made a point of explaining how the Afghan freedom fighters the C.I.A. supported in the 1980s, when they were fighting the Soviet Union, are now the Taliban and Qaeda forces trying to kill Americans. In DISMANTLING THE EMPIRE: America’s Last Best Hope (Metropolitan/Holt, $25), he argues for a complete reordering of the national security state to save not just lives but treasure. While Obama won’t go as far as Johnson urges, a big tussle between the White House and the Pentagon is likely next year, when we’ll learn if neoconservatives can once again convince the country that liberals are “unpatriotic.”
The answer to that question — and to the immediate fate of liberal ideas — depends largely on the performance of one man, the president. Jeffrey C. Alexander’s intriguing argument in THE PERFORMANCE OF POLITICS: Obama’s Victory and the Democratic Struggle for Power (Oxford University, $29.95), a meticulous review of the 2008 campaign, is that his fellow sociologists have overemphasized impersonal social forces at the expense of the theater of public life — the way politicians perform “symbolically.” It’s a prosaic call for a more poetic (or at least aesthetic) understanding of politics. Ideology must connect viscerally, or it doesn’t connect at all. Liberalism, like any idea or product, can succeed only if it sells.
Jonathan Alter, a columnist for Newsweek and an analyst for MSNBC, is the author of “The Defining Moment: FDR’s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope” and, most recently, “The Promise: President Obama, Year One.”
Thursday, October 28, 2010
A New Obama Biography
In Writings of Obama, a Philosophy Is Unearthed
By PATRICIA COHEN
Published: October 27, 2010
The New York Times
James T. Kloppenberg
When the Harvard historian James T. Kloppenberg decided to write about the influences that shaped President Obama’s view of the world, he interviewed the president’s former professors and classmates, combed through his books, essays, and speeches, and even read every article published during the three years Mr. Obama was involved with the Harvard Law Review (“a superb cure for insomnia,” Mr. Kloppenberg said). What he did not do was speak to President Obama.
“He would have had to deny every word,” Mr. Kloppenberg said with a smile. The reason, he explained, is his conclusion that President Obama is a true intellectual — a word that is frequently considered an epithet among populists with a robust suspicion of Ivy League elites.
In New York City last week to give a standing-room-only lecture about his forthcoming intellectual biography, “Reading Obama: Dreams, Hopes, and the American Political Tradition,” Mr. Kloppenberg explained that he sees Mr. Obama as a kind of philosopher president, a rare breed that can be found only a handful of times in American history.
“There’s John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and John Quincy Adams, then Abraham Lincoln and in the 20th century just Woodrow Wilson,” he said.
To Mr. Kloppenberg the philosophy that has guided President Obama most consistently is pragmatism, a uniquely American system of thought developed at the end of the 19th century by William James, John Dewey and Charles Sanders Peirce. It is a philosophy that grew up after Darwin published his theory of evolution and the Civil War reached its bloody end. More and more people were coming to believe that chance rather than providence guided human affairs, and that dogged certainty led to violence.
Pragmatism maintains that people are constantly devising and updating ideas to navigate the world in which they live; it embraces open-minded experimentation and continuing debate. “It is a philosophy for skeptics, not true believers,” Mr. Kloppenberg said.
Those who heard Mr. Kloppenberg present his argument at a conference on intellectual history at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center responded with prolonged applause. “The way he traced Obama’s intellectual influences was fascinating for us, given that Obama’s academic background seems so similar to ours,” said Andrew Hartman, a historian at Illinois State University who helped organize the conference.
Mr. Kloppenberg’s interest in the education of Barack Obama began from a distance. He spent 2008, the election year, at the University of Cambridge in England and found himself in lecture halls and at dinner tables trying to explain who this man was.
Race, temperament and family history are all crucial to understanding the White House’s current occupant, but Mr. Kloppenberg said he chose to focus on one slice of the president’s makeup: his ideas.
In the professor’s analysis the president’s worldview is the product of the country’s long history of extending democracy to disenfranchised groups, as well as the specific ideological upheavals that struck campuses in the 1980s and 1990s. He mentions, for example, that Mr. Obama was at Harvard during “the greatest intellectual ferment in law schools in the 20th century,” when competing theories about race, feminism, realism and constitutional original intent were all battling for ground.
Mr. Obama was ultimately drawn to a cluster of ideas known as civic republicanism or deliberative democracy, Mr. Kloppenberg argues in the book, which Princeton University Press will publish on Sunday. In this view the founding fathers cared as much about continuing a discussion over how to advance the common good as they did about ensuring freedom.
Taking his cue from Madison, Mr. Obama writes in his 2006 book “The Audacity of Hope” that the constitutional framework is “designed to force us into a conversation,” that it offers “a way by which we argue about our future.” This notion of a living document is directly at odds with the conception of Justice Antonin Scalia of the Supreme Court, who has spoken of “the good, old dead Constitution.”
Mr. Kloppenberg compiled a long list of people who he said helped shape Mr. Obama’s thinking and writing, including Weber and Nietzsche, Thoreau and Emerson, Langston Hughes and Ralph Ellison. Contemporary scholars like the historian Gordon Wood, the philosophers John Rawls and Hilary Putnam, the anthropologist Clifford Geertz and the legal theorists Martha Minow and Cass Sunstein (who is now working at the White House) also have a place.
Despite the detailed examination, Mr. Kloppenberg concedes that President Obama remains something of a mystery.
“To critics on the left he seems a tragic failure, a man with so much potential who has not fulfilled the promise of change that partisans predicted for his presidency,” he said. “To the right he is a frightening success, a man who has transformed the federal government and ruined the economy.”
He finds both assessments flawed. Conservatives who argue that Mr. Obama is a socialist or an anti-colonialist (as Dinesh D’Souza does in his book “The Roots of Obama’s Rage”) are far off the mark, he said.
“Adams and Jefferson were the only anti-colonialists whom Obama has been affected by,” he told the audience in New York. “He has a profound love of America.”
And his opposition to inequality stems from Puritan preachers and the social gospel rather than socialism.
As for liberal critics, Mr. Kloppenberg took pains to differentiate the president’s philosophical pragmatism, which assumes that change emerges over decades, from the kind of “vulgar pragmatism” practiced by politicians looking only for expedient compromise. (He gave former President Bill Clinton’s strategy of “triangulation” as an example.)
Not all of the disappointed liberals who attended the lecture in New York were convinced that that distinction can be made so easily. T. J. Jackson Lears, a historian at Rutgers University, wrote in an e-mail that by “showing that Obama comes out of a tradition of philosophical pragmatism, he actually provided a basis for criticizing Obama’s slide into vulgar pragmatism.”
And despite Mr. Kloppenberg’s focus on the president’s intellectual evolution, most listeners wanted to talk about his political record.
“There seemed to be skepticism regarding whether Obama’s intellectual background actually translated into policies that the mostly left-leaning audience could get behind,” Mr. Hartman said. “Several audience members, myself included, probably view Obama the president as a centrist like Clinton rather than a progressive intellectual as painted by Kloppenberg.”
By PATRICIA COHEN
Published: October 27, 2010
The New York Times
James T. Kloppenberg
When the Harvard historian James T. Kloppenberg decided to write about the influences that shaped President Obama’s view of the world, he interviewed the president’s former professors and classmates, combed through his books, essays, and speeches, and even read every article published during the three years Mr. Obama was involved with the Harvard Law Review (“a superb cure for insomnia,” Mr. Kloppenberg said). What he did not do was speak to President Obama.
“He would have had to deny every word,” Mr. Kloppenberg said with a smile. The reason, he explained, is his conclusion that President Obama is a true intellectual — a word that is frequently considered an epithet among populists with a robust suspicion of Ivy League elites.
In New York City last week to give a standing-room-only lecture about his forthcoming intellectual biography, “Reading Obama: Dreams, Hopes, and the American Political Tradition,” Mr. Kloppenberg explained that he sees Mr. Obama as a kind of philosopher president, a rare breed that can be found only a handful of times in American history.
“There’s John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and John Quincy Adams, then Abraham Lincoln and in the 20th century just Woodrow Wilson,” he said.
To Mr. Kloppenberg the philosophy that has guided President Obama most consistently is pragmatism, a uniquely American system of thought developed at the end of the 19th century by William James, John Dewey and Charles Sanders Peirce. It is a philosophy that grew up after Darwin published his theory of evolution and the Civil War reached its bloody end. More and more people were coming to believe that chance rather than providence guided human affairs, and that dogged certainty led to violence.
Pragmatism maintains that people are constantly devising and updating ideas to navigate the world in which they live; it embraces open-minded experimentation and continuing debate. “It is a philosophy for skeptics, not true believers,” Mr. Kloppenberg said.
Those who heard Mr. Kloppenberg present his argument at a conference on intellectual history at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center responded with prolonged applause. “The way he traced Obama’s intellectual influences was fascinating for us, given that Obama’s academic background seems so similar to ours,” said Andrew Hartman, a historian at Illinois State University who helped organize the conference.
Mr. Kloppenberg’s interest in the education of Barack Obama began from a distance. He spent 2008, the election year, at the University of Cambridge in England and found himself in lecture halls and at dinner tables trying to explain who this man was.
Race, temperament and family history are all crucial to understanding the White House’s current occupant, but Mr. Kloppenberg said he chose to focus on one slice of the president’s makeup: his ideas.
In the professor’s analysis the president’s worldview is the product of the country’s long history of extending democracy to disenfranchised groups, as well as the specific ideological upheavals that struck campuses in the 1980s and 1990s. He mentions, for example, that Mr. Obama was at Harvard during “the greatest intellectual ferment in law schools in the 20th century,” when competing theories about race, feminism, realism and constitutional original intent were all battling for ground.
Mr. Obama was ultimately drawn to a cluster of ideas known as civic republicanism or deliberative democracy, Mr. Kloppenberg argues in the book, which Princeton University Press will publish on Sunday. In this view the founding fathers cared as much about continuing a discussion over how to advance the common good as they did about ensuring freedom.
Taking his cue from Madison, Mr. Obama writes in his 2006 book “The Audacity of Hope” that the constitutional framework is “designed to force us into a conversation,” that it offers “a way by which we argue about our future.” This notion of a living document is directly at odds with the conception of Justice Antonin Scalia of the Supreme Court, who has spoken of “the good, old dead Constitution.”
Mr. Kloppenberg compiled a long list of people who he said helped shape Mr. Obama’s thinking and writing, including Weber and Nietzsche, Thoreau and Emerson, Langston Hughes and Ralph Ellison. Contemporary scholars like the historian Gordon Wood, the philosophers John Rawls and Hilary Putnam, the anthropologist Clifford Geertz and the legal theorists Martha Minow and Cass Sunstein (who is now working at the White House) also have a place.
Despite the detailed examination, Mr. Kloppenberg concedes that President Obama remains something of a mystery.
“To critics on the left he seems a tragic failure, a man with so much potential who has not fulfilled the promise of change that partisans predicted for his presidency,” he said. “To the right he is a frightening success, a man who has transformed the federal government and ruined the economy.”
He finds both assessments flawed. Conservatives who argue that Mr. Obama is a socialist or an anti-colonialist (as Dinesh D’Souza does in his book “The Roots of Obama’s Rage”) are far off the mark, he said.
“Adams and Jefferson were the only anti-colonialists whom Obama has been affected by,” he told the audience in New York. “He has a profound love of America.”
And his opposition to inequality stems from Puritan preachers and the social gospel rather than socialism.
As for liberal critics, Mr. Kloppenberg took pains to differentiate the president’s philosophical pragmatism, which assumes that change emerges over decades, from the kind of “vulgar pragmatism” practiced by politicians looking only for expedient compromise. (He gave former President Bill Clinton’s strategy of “triangulation” as an example.)
Not all of the disappointed liberals who attended the lecture in New York were convinced that that distinction can be made so easily. T. J. Jackson Lears, a historian at Rutgers University, wrote in an e-mail that by “showing that Obama comes out of a tradition of philosophical pragmatism, he actually provided a basis for criticizing Obama’s slide into vulgar pragmatism.”
And despite Mr. Kloppenberg’s focus on the president’s intellectual evolution, most listeners wanted to talk about his political record.
“There seemed to be skepticism regarding whether Obama’s intellectual background actually translated into policies that the mostly left-leaning audience could get behind,” Mr. Hartman said. “Several audience members, myself included, probably view Obama the president as a centrist like Clinton rather than a progressive intellectual as painted by Kloppenberg.”
Quoting Emerson
"Within, I do not find wrinkles and used heart, but unspent youth."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1864 at age 61
-Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1864 at age 61
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
Is the Tea Party Rascist?
Of course it is.
Stephen Colbert To Garry Wills: Is Tea Party Racist?
First Posted: 10-27-10 11:48 AM | Updated: 10-27-10 11:48 AM
When Stephen Colbert asked author Garry Wills if "the Tea Party is essentially a racist endeavor?" last night, Wills replied, "Well, of course."
Wills, historian and author of the Pulitzer-Prize winning book "Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America," focuses his fiery new memoir on the observations he has made of various interesting world leaders, politicians and other characters. The book is called "Outside Looking In."
"Why 'outside looking in'? Why not inside, messing stuff up?" Colbert asked. "That's what the real actors of history do. You're a historian, but don't you want to be an agent of history?"
"No, I don't," Wills calmly replied.
"Why not?" Colbert said. "You're afraid someone will write a book about you?"
"Jim Fallows once asked me why I didn't join the Jimmy Carter campaign as he did. And I said, 'I'm an entomologist, which doesn't mean I have to become a bug."
"I like that," Colbert said. "I like that a lot."
Noting that Wills studied under the historian William F. Buckley, Colbert asked what "Buckley would make of the Tea Party?"
"He had a word he liked to use for people like that: Vulgarians," Wills said.
Colbert asked Wills to explain, noting that "they just want lower taxes, smaller government to preserve the constitution."
"They didn't say that, you notice, when George Bush was [in office] and all the same grievances were there," Wills said.
"But things changed when Bush left office," Colbert began to defend the Tea Party.
"They certainly did: we had a black President," Wills said. "That made all the difference."
"That is saying that the Tea Party is essentially a racist endeavor," Colbert said.
"Well, of course."
"Not of course," Colbert said surprised. "There are several people who are black who have been to tea parties."
Stephen Colbert To Garry Wills: Is Tea Party Racist?
First Posted: 10-27-10 11:48 AM | Updated: 10-27-10 11:48 AM
When Stephen Colbert asked author Garry Wills if "the Tea Party is essentially a racist endeavor?" last night, Wills replied, "Well, of course."
Wills, historian and author of the Pulitzer-Prize winning book "Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America," focuses his fiery new memoir on the observations he has made of various interesting world leaders, politicians and other characters. The book is called "Outside Looking In."
"Why 'outside looking in'? Why not inside, messing stuff up?" Colbert asked. "That's what the real actors of history do. You're a historian, but don't you want to be an agent of history?"
"No, I don't," Wills calmly replied.
"Why not?" Colbert said. "You're afraid someone will write a book about you?"
"Jim Fallows once asked me why I didn't join the Jimmy Carter campaign as he did. And I said, 'I'm an entomologist, which doesn't mean I have to become a bug."
"I like that," Colbert said. "I like that a lot."
Noting that Wills studied under the historian William F. Buckley, Colbert asked what "Buckley would make of the Tea Party?"
"He had a word he liked to use for people like that: Vulgarians," Wills said.
Colbert asked Wills to explain, noting that "they just want lower taxes, smaller government to preserve the constitution."
"They didn't say that, you notice, when George Bush was [in office] and all the same grievances were there," Wills said.
"But things changed when Bush left office," Colbert began to defend the Tea Party.
"They certainly did: we had a black President," Wills said. "That made all the difference."
"That is saying that the Tea Party is essentially a racist endeavor," Colbert said.
"Well, of course."
"Not of course," Colbert said surprised. "There are several people who are black who have been to tea parties."
What I'm Reading
I'm reading "Madame Bovary," the great French novel by Gustave Flaubert. After this, by the end of the year, I am going to back to Twain and read volume 1 of his new autobiography as well as "Pudd'nhead Wilson."
Sunday, October 24, 2010
Larry L. King - In Search of Willie Morris
This is the only biography of Willie Morris of which I am aware. Larry L. King, a writer himself, writes from the first person perspective of having known and interacted with Willie Morris over a period of years.
I like Willie Morris because here is a small-town Southerner who made good in the literary world---author, well-known in the big literary world, editor of Harpers in the 60's back when magazine publishing was prominent, writer in residence at Ole Miss, lover of sports and animals.
His idea of a good time was to visit the gravesite of Faulkner and talk literature. His idea of a good time was to go to Ole Miss football games. His idea of a good time was to stay up to all hours of the night, and his idea of a good time was to spend time with his animals.
Willie Morris comes across as a man truly larger than life, full of life, a man of shortcomings to be sure, but seemingly beloved by so many.
He was friends with William Styron, David Halberstam, and Gay Talese---you know, people like that, some of my great literary heroes.
I wish I had known Willie. Could have spent time with him. Had fun with him. He must been a hoot.
I like Willie Morris because here is a small-town Southerner who made good in the literary world---author, well-known in the big literary world, editor of Harpers in the 60's back when magazine publishing was prominent, writer in residence at Ole Miss, lover of sports and animals.
His idea of a good time was to visit the gravesite of Faulkner and talk literature. His idea of a good time was to go to Ole Miss football games. His idea of a good time was to stay up to all hours of the night, and his idea of a good time was to spend time with his animals.
Willie Morris comes across as a man truly larger than life, full of life, a man of shortcomings to be sure, but seemingly beloved by so many.
He was friends with William Styron, David Halberstam, and Gay Talese---you know, people like that, some of my great literary heroes.
I wish I had known Willie. Could have spent time with him. Had fun with him. He must been a hoot.
Saturday, October 23, 2010
Regarding Madame Bovary
The READ: Why Is Emma Bovary So Maligned and Misunderstood?
Ruth Franklin
Senior Editor
Family Values The Women The READ: Why Is Emma Bovary So Maligned and Misunderstood? October 20, 2010 | 12:00 am 3 comments |MorePrint
More From this Author
From THE BOOK: Can Novels Still Capture the Rich?
From THE BOOK: Alice Munro’s Fatal Weakness? Men.
The Linguistic Charms (and Anti-Charms) of ‘Jersey Shore’ Emma Bovary is one of the most abused heroines of the modern novel. It’s not enough for her to lose her mind in love for an unworthy man; to squander her fortune and suffer the terror of mounting debt; and, finally, to die in a prolonged, painful suicide by arsenic. No, she must also be cruelly misunderstood by Kathryn Harrison in a weird piece in The New York Times Book Review that has generated a steady seething of online dissent. Harrison and the Book Review have been jointly taken to task for the piece’s failure adequately to assess the novel’s boutique new translation by Lydia Davis. But equally hard to understand is Harrison’s pitiless condemnation of its protagonist.
Harrison’s review has been seen as a missed opportunity for the Times: an exercise in ego-stroking rather than a genuine intellectual contribution. I couldn’t agree more: It’s ludicrous for Harrison to make blurb-worthy statements about the quality of Davis’s work without offering any textual evidence to back them up. She writes that Flaubert “would have to agree his masterwork has been given the English translation it deserves,” but says nothing about the implied inadequacies of the previous versions (such as the popular Penguin Classics edition done by Geoffrey Wall). Nor does she offer a single bon mot as evidence of Davis’s inspired choices. Instead, we get a rehash of the usual praise of Flaubert as a brilliant stylist, his ability “to, godlike, summon life from words on a page.”
But why would this god of literature waste his time on the character that Harrison describes? “Readers cannot like Emma Bovary,” she confidently tells us, “and yet they follow her with the kind of attention reserved for car wrecks….
How can a covetous, small-minded woman, incapable of love and (as she feels no true connection to anyone) terminally bored by her life, fascinate us as she succumbs to one venal impulse after the next? … Fatally self-absorbed, insensible to the suffering of others, Emma can’t see beyond the romantic stereotypes she serves, eternally looking for what she expects will be happiness…. Emma doesn’t have character flaws so much as she lacks character itself. She’s a vacuum, albeit a sensitive and sensual one, sucking up every ready-made conceit.
Emma Bovary, “incapable of love”? This is truly a bizarre interpretation of perhaps the most famous adulteress in Western fiction. Of course, one of the novel’s primary currents is its stern anti-romanticism: Flaubert takes Emma to task for her fatal infatuation with love above all else, garnered primarily from her reading of cheap novels. But, if Emma is something of a vacuum for pre-fabricated clichés, she does not exist in one. Her condition, Flaubert makes clear, is hardly unique: She represents bourgeois French nineteenth-century society, in all its small-mindedness and materialism. As Davis writes in her introduction, Flaubert was “holding up a mirror to the middle- and lower-middle-class world of his day, with all its little habits, fashions, fads.”
In a letter to Louise Colet, his lover and confidante, Flaubert did indeed write that his goal was to “write a novel about shallow, unsympathetic people in a dreary setting, some of whom make bad choices and come to a horrific end.” And yet, despite his frustration with Emma and her decisions, despite his pitiless portrayal of her limited conversation and imagination, he is hardly unsympathetic to her. As he also wrote to Colet, “Irony takes nothing away from pathos.” If Emma Bovary were truly just a shallow woman who comes to a bad end, she could never have become the subject of what is arguably the greatest French novel of the nineteenth century, the novel that set the course for realism forever after.
Could it be that Davis’s noticeably cool new Bovary led Harrison to her strange conclusions? Davis has said that she felt no special affinity for the novel; rather, Viking approached her with the idea for a new translation. The author of minimalist short stories, Davis would seem an unlikely match for Flaubert, with his love of metaphor and obsession with detail. In comparison to previous versions, her Bovary is decidedly stripped down—to the extent that she occasionally dampens some of the novel’s humor and irony.
Take one particularly wonderful line that shows just how dull-witted Emma’s husband is. In Davis’s version, it reads: “Charles’s conversation was as flat as a sidewalk, and everyone’s ideas walked along it in their ordinary clothes, without inspiring emotion, or laughter, or reverie.” As flat as a sidewalk … walked along it … ordinary clothes: the language is plain and uninspired. It’s even a bit plainer than the original: La conversation de Charles était plate comme un trottoir de rue, et les idées de tout le monde y défilaient dans leur costume ordinaire, sans exciter d’émotion, de rire ou de rêverie. In Flaubert’s sentence, the ideas do not simply “walk”; a better rendering for défilaient might be “paraded.” Davis’s version loses something by flattening out the ironic image of commonplace ideas flamboyantly on parade.
Elsewhere, however, Davis captures with precision the sensitivity of the novel’s language, in which Flaubert subtly expresses his sympathy for Emma’s plight. He repeatedly uses images of drowning or suffocation, for instance, to demonstrate the desperateness of her situation. When Rodolphe, one of her lovers, first meets Emma, he thinks: “Poor little woman! That one’s gasping for love like a carp for water on a kitchen table.” This isn’t a beautiful image, but it is faithful to the original (Ça bâille après l’amour, comme une carpe après l’eau sur une table de cuisine), which depicts Emma as quite literally dying for love. Later, at the dénouement of their affair, Emma is again shown to be in mortal danger:
He no longer spoke those sweet words to her that had once made her weep, nor did he offer her those fervent caresses that had once driven her wild; so that their great love, in which she lived immersed, seemed to be seeping away under her, like the waters of a river being absorbed into its own bed, and she could see the mud.
Again like a fish in water, Emma lives steeped in her love, and the undulating motion of the sentence, which mimics the movement of the water “seeping away,” reinforces her terror at the ugliness of its dwindling (“she could see the mud”).
In the end, Davis’s version—which is faithful to a fault, even to the extent of preserving awkwardnesses and infelicities that other translators have silently smoothed out—ultimately demonstrates her own empathy with Emma. When she takes one of her few liberties, it happens to be in rendering one of the novel’s most famous lines—and she does so in a way that works to emphasize its universal qualities. When the passage begins, we are again watching Rodolphe, though this time the novel itself gently expresses a judgment on his deficiencies. First, we are privy to his reflections on Emma and the many women of his past acquaintance. “He could not perceive—this man of such broad experience—the difference in feelings that might underlie similarities of expression,” the novel tells us. “Because licentious or venal lips had murmured the same words to him, he had little faith in their truthfulness ….” (It is clear from these lines that Flaubert is hardly judging Emma as “licentious” or “venal”; in contrast to Rodolphe’s past mistresses, her love is truthful.) The passage continues:
… one had to discount, he thought, exaggerated speeches that concealed mediocre affections; as if the fullness of the soul did not sometimes overflow in the emptiest of metaphors, since none of us can ever express the exact measure of our needs, or our ideas, or our sorrows, and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when we long to move the stars to pity.
Note the subtle shift in perspective in this sentence: from Rodolphe’s warning to the narrative’s immediate contradiction of it. Well familiar with the hazards of beautiful talk, Rodolphe no longer believes it can convey true emotion. But the novel itself takes the opportunity to remind us of the inadequacy of all human speech: “none of us can ever express the exact measure of our needs, or our ideas, or our sorrows….” The original is in the third person: “puisque personne, jamais, ne peut donner l’exacte mesure de ses besoins, ni de ses conceptions, ni de ses douleurs”—“since no one can ever give the exact measure of his needs.” By using the first person plural instead—“our needs … our sorrows”—Davis generalizes it to apply to all humanity, as Flaubert surely intended.
This vision of the limits of language is particularly plaintive coming from a novelist known to sit at his desk for twelve hours at a stretch, mercilessly editing his work till it met his own exact specifications. As Flaubert famously said, “Madame Bovary, c’est moi”: If Emma’s metaphors are empty in comparison with the fullness of her soul, which of us could do better?
Ruth Franklin is a senior editor at The New Republic.
Ruth Franklin
Senior Editor
Family Values The Women The READ: Why Is Emma Bovary So Maligned and Misunderstood? October 20, 2010 | 12:00 am 3 comments |MorePrint
More From this Author
From THE BOOK: Can Novels Still Capture the Rich?
From THE BOOK: Alice Munro’s Fatal Weakness? Men.
The Linguistic Charms (and Anti-Charms) of ‘Jersey Shore’ Emma Bovary is one of the most abused heroines of the modern novel. It’s not enough for her to lose her mind in love for an unworthy man; to squander her fortune and suffer the terror of mounting debt; and, finally, to die in a prolonged, painful suicide by arsenic. No, she must also be cruelly misunderstood by Kathryn Harrison in a weird piece in The New York Times Book Review that has generated a steady seething of online dissent. Harrison and the Book Review have been jointly taken to task for the piece’s failure adequately to assess the novel’s boutique new translation by Lydia Davis. But equally hard to understand is Harrison’s pitiless condemnation of its protagonist.
Harrison’s review has been seen as a missed opportunity for the Times: an exercise in ego-stroking rather than a genuine intellectual contribution. I couldn’t agree more: It’s ludicrous for Harrison to make blurb-worthy statements about the quality of Davis’s work without offering any textual evidence to back them up. She writes that Flaubert “would have to agree his masterwork has been given the English translation it deserves,” but says nothing about the implied inadequacies of the previous versions (such as the popular Penguin Classics edition done by Geoffrey Wall). Nor does she offer a single bon mot as evidence of Davis’s inspired choices. Instead, we get a rehash of the usual praise of Flaubert as a brilliant stylist, his ability “to, godlike, summon life from words on a page.”
But why would this god of literature waste his time on the character that Harrison describes? “Readers cannot like Emma Bovary,” she confidently tells us, “and yet they follow her with the kind of attention reserved for car wrecks….
How can a covetous, small-minded woman, incapable of love and (as she feels no true connection to anyone) terminally bored by her life, fascinate us as she succumbs to one venal impulse after the next? … Fatally self-absorbed, insensible to the suffering of others, Emma can’t see beyond the romantic stereotypes she serves, eternally looking for what she expects will be happiness…. Emma doesn’t have character flaws so much as she lacks character itself. She’s a vacuum, albeit a sensitive and sensual one, sucking up every ready-made conceit.
Emma Bovary, “incapable of love”? This is truly a bizarre interpretation of perhaps the most famous adulteress in Western fiction. Of course, one of the novel’s primary currents is its stern anti-romanticism: Flaubert takes Emma to task for her fatal infatuation with love above all else, garnered primarily from her reading of cheap novels. But, if Emma is something of a vacuum for pre-fabricated clichés, she does not exist in one. Her condition, Flaubert makes clear, is hardly unique: She represents bourgeois French nineteenth-century society, in all its small-mindedness and materialism. As Davis writes in her introduction, Flaubert was “holding up a mirror to the middle- and lower-middle-class world of his day, with all its little habits, fashions, fads.”
In a letter to Louise Colet, his lover and confidante, Flaubert did indeed write that his goal was to “write a novel about shallow, unsympathetic people in a dreary setting, some of whom make bad choices and come to a horrific end.” And yet, despite his frustration with Emma and her decisions, despite his pitiless portrayal of her limited conversation and imagination, he is hardly unsympathetic to her. As he also wrote to Colet, “Irony takes nothing away from pathos.” If Emma Bovary were truly just a shallow woman who comes to a bad end, she could never have become the subject of what is arguably the greatest French novel of the nineteenth century, the novel that set the course for realism forever after.
Could it be that Davis’s noticeably cool new Bovary led Harrison to her strange conclusions? Davis has said that she felt no special affinity for the novel; rather, Viking approached her with the idea for a new translation. The author of minimalist short stories, Davis would seem an unlikely match for Flaubert, with his love of metaphor and obsession with detail. In comparison to previous versions, her Bovary is decidedly stripped down—to the extent that she occasionally dampens some of the novel’s humor and irony.
Take one particularly wonderful line that shows just how dull-witted Emma’s husband is. In Davis’s version, it reads: “Charles’s conversation was as flat as a sidewalk, and everyone’s ideas walked along it in their ordinary clothes, without inspiring emotion, or laughter, or reverie.” As flat as a sidewalk … walked along it … ordinary clothes: the language is plain and uninspired. It’s even a bit plainer than the original: La conversation de Charles était plate comme un trottoir de rue, et les idées de tout le monde y défilaient dans leur costume ordinaire, sans exciter d’émotion, de rire ou de rêverie. In Flaubert’s sentence, the ideas do not simply “walk”; a better rendering for défilaient might be “paraded.” Davis’s version loses something by flattening out the ironic image of commonplace ideas flamboyantly on parade.
Elsewhere, however, Davis captures with precision the sensitivity of the novel’s language, in which Flaubert subtly expresses his sympathy for Emma’s plight. He repeatedly uses images of drowning or suffocation, for instance, to demonstrate the desperateness of her situation. When Rodolphe, one of her lovers, first meets Emma, he thinks: “Poor little woman! That one’s gasping for love like a carp for water on a kitchen table.” This isn’t a beautiful image, but it is faithful to the original (Ça bâille après l’amour, comme une carpe après l’eau sur une table de cuisine), which depicts Emma as quite literally dying for love. Later, at the dénouement of their affair, Emma is again shown to be in mortal danger:
He no longer spoke those sweet words to her that had once made her weep, nor did he offer her those fervent caresses that had once driven her wild; so that their great love, in which she lived immersed, seemed to be seeping away under her, like the waters of a river being absorbed into its own bed, and she could see the mud.
Again like a fish in water, Emma lives steeped in her love, and the undulating motion of the sentence, which mimics the movement of the water “seeping away,” reinforces her terror at the ugliness of its dwindling (“she could see the mud”).
In the end, Davis’s version—which is faithful to a fault, even to the extent of preserving awkwardnesses and infelicities that other translators have silently smoothed out—ultimately demonstrates her own empathy with Emma. When she takes one of her few liberties, it happens to be in rendering one of the novel’s most famous lines—and she does so in a way that works to emphasize its universal qualities. When the passage begins, we are again watching Rodolphe, though this time the novel itself gently expresses a judgment on his deficiencies. First, we are privy to his reflections on Emma and the many women of his past acquaintance. “He could not perceive—this man of such broad experience—the difference in feelings that might underlie similarities of expression,” the novel tells us. “Because licentious or venal lips had murmured the same words to him, he had little faith in their truthfulness ….” (It is clear from these lines that Flaubert is hardly judging Emma as “licentious” or “venal”; in contrast to Rodolphe’s past mistresses, her love is truthful.) The passage continues:
… one had to discount, he thought, exaggerated speeches that concealed mediocre affections; as if the fullness of the soul did not sometimes overflow in the emptiest of metaphors, since none of us can ever express the exact measure of our needs, or our ideas, or our sorrows, and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when we long to move the stars to pity.
Note the subtle shift in perspective in this sentence: from Rodolphe’s warning to the narrative’s immediate contradiction of it. Well familiar with the hazards of beautiful talk, Rodolphe no longer believes it can convey true emotion. But the novel itself takes the opportunity to remind us of the inadequacy of all human speech: “none of us can ever express the exact measure of our needs, or our ideas, or our sorrows….” The original is in the third person: “puisque personne, jamais, ne peut donner l’exacte mesure de ses besoins, ni de ses conceptions, ni de ses douleurs”—“since no one can ever give the exact measure of his needs.” By using the first person plural instead—“our needs … our sorrows”—Davis generalizes it to apply to all humanity, as Flaubert surely intended.
This vision of the limits of language is particularly plaintive coming from a novelist known to sit at his desk for twelve hours at a stretch, mercilessly editing his work till it met his own exact specifications. As Flaubert famously said, “Madame Bovary, c’est moi”: If Emma’s metaphors are empty in comparison with the fullness of her soul, which of us could do better?
Ruth Franklin is a senior editor at The New Republic.
The Myth of Consensus Politics
The Myth of Consensus Politics
By SAM TANENHAUS
Published: October 21, 2010
The State of Conservatism (October 24, 2010) Jonathan Alter, in his cover essay this week on liberalism, notes that the Democratic Party is split between purists and pragmatists; Christopher Caldwell, assessing the state of conservatism, warns that the Republican Party, should it gain control of Congress, will be accountable to angry insurgents aligned with the Tea Party movement.
If Alter and Caldwell are right, and the books they discuss suggest they are, then Democrats and Republicans seem destined to move even farther apart than they are now. How, then, will they forge the compromises that are the foundation of effective governance?
The answer is: They may not need to. For most of the past century, consensus in American politics has been more phantom than fact, especially when it comes to staking out ideological ground.
Even in the cold war era, a peak period of bipartisan cooperation, liberals and conservatives clashed over first principles, and the most respected spokesmen in either party were not afraid to say so.
Consider an important midcentury manifesto, “A Democrat Looks at His Party” (1955). Its author, Dean Acheson, had left government after the 1952 election, but he remained a formidable presence — perhaps the greatest of all modern secretaries of state. Yet his book, although written in courtly prose, with learned references to Renaissance history and choice aphorisms from Oliver Wendell Holmes, was an act of ideological revivalism, steeped in the glories of the New Deal.
The Democrats’ triumphs, Acheson argued, originated in their discovery that the federal government, in particular the executive branch, should be “an instrument to accomplish what needs to be done, even if this cuts across cherished doctrines,” including those stated or implied in the Constitution.
In fact, Acheson explained, the history of the Democratic Party, dating as far back as Grover Cleveland’s presidency, “is the history of America’s unwritten constitution, of the powers of the federal government, of the nature and authority of the presidential office and its relation to the legislative and judicial powers.” It climaxed in the rush of programs and agencies Democrats devised to meet the crisis of the Great Depression. These innovations required “knowledge, perceptiveness, imagination — in other words, brains,” and it was the Democratic Party that“attracts intellectuals and puts them to work.”
Republicans, meanwhile, clung to an outmoded ideal of a weak federal government: “In the name of checking . . . ‘executive aggrandizements,’ the party historically would subordinate the Executive to the Congress, and the national voice to a babel of local voices,” Acheson wrote.
The unwritten constitution? The babel of local voices? It’s hard to imagine the high-profile Democrat today who would so openly acknowledge these presumptions of modern liberalism.
Republicans in the 1950s were no less direct. Take, for instance, the ideas expressed by Arthur Larson, the under secretary of labor to President Eisenhower, in his book “A Republican Looks at His Party,” published in 1956. Responding to Acheson, Larson accused him of a “thinly veiled contempt for state and municipal government,” formed under “the influence of a school of European political theory” — specifically, the socialist theory of Harold Laski. Larson stated his party’s position in language as strident as Newt Gingrich’s. “Let us put it perfectly bluntly: the typical American is inherently a states’-righter by inclination and sentiment.” That same American had “an instinctive sense that . . . excessive centralization means the threat of ultimate loss of personal liberties, and that our constitutional division of powers between the central government, the state governments and the people is right and must be preserved at all costs.” The Democrats’ ideal of the federal leviathan, Larson warned, would place the nation on the road to “totalitarian dictatorship.”
Acheson and Larson were by no means extremists. Each stood at or near the political center. Acheson had been the architect of the cold war containment policy that included the use of loyalty oaths, enacted under Truman, to expunge suspected Communists from the government payroll, though in his manifesto he regretted this “grave mistake.”
Larson, a self-described “New Republican,” proudly pointed to the Eisenhower administration’s expansion of New Deal programs — unemployment insurance, for one — and advocated a “strong, confident center-of-the-road American consensus,” a view repudiated by the conservative wing of his own party.
The dominant political figure in the 1950s was Eisenhower, a popular president twice elected with sweeping majorities. He disdained ideological debate but it swirled all around him, at times almost paralyzing his administration. For two years, he was locked in battle with his party’s right wing, most conspicuously with a group of legislators led by Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, the ringmaster of loyalty investigations that reached deep into the executive branch. Other Republicans, exploiting wafer-thin majorities in Congress, gave less attention to major appropriations bills than to drafting constitutional amendments that might confound the most devout Tea Partier. In his 1956 book “Affairs of State: The Eisenhower Years,” Richard Rovere, The New Yorker’s Washington correspondent, counted no fewer than 107 amendments that had been submitted to Senate committees as of June 1954. They included one empowering state governors to fill “vacancies” in the House of Representatives should Washington suffer a nuclear attack, another to prevent “interference with or limitation upon the power of any state to regulate health, morals, education, marriage, and good order in the state,” and a third that would have inserted the following words in the Constitution: “This nation devoutly recognizes the authority and law of Jesus Christ, Savior and Ruler of Nations through whom are bestowed the blessings of Almighty God.”
At one point, Eisenhower, frustrated that the nation’s serious business was being ignored, considered quitting the Republican Party and starting a new party of his own.
The problem was temporarily solved by the 1954 election. It was a defeat for Congressional Republicans, but not for Eisenhower since, as Rovere reported, the election had “removed several persons whom the president found offensive and had weakened the authority of quite a few others,” most of them Republicans.
Democrats, all the while, were equally fissured, as the party nearly self-destructed over civil rights, the great social issue of the 1950s (though neither Acheson nor Larson had much to say about it). The fiercest proponents of the states’ rights ideology championed by Larson were not Republicans, but Southern Democrats. Some had already broken with the party, in 1948, when Strom Thurmond, then the governor of South Carolina, headed a third-party, states rights’ ticket, the Dixiecrats, which captured four states in the general election, the first step in the Democratic Party’s eventual loss of “the Solid South.”
Today, much of this history has been forgotten, and the Eisenhower years are remembered instead as an oasis of responsible governance and nonideological, bipartisan calm.
It is too soon to say the same about the politics of the present moment. But it is also too soon to say where we are headed or even to guess how we might get there.
By SAM TANENHAUS
Published: October 21, 2010
The State of Conservatism (October 24, 2010) Jonathan Alter, in his cover essay this week on liberalism, notes that the Democratic Party is split between purists and pragmatists; Christopher Caldwell, assessing the state of conservatism, warns that the Republican Party, should it gain control of Congress, will be accountable to angry insurgents aligned with the Tea Party movement.
If Alter and Caldwell are right, and the books they discuss suggest they are, then Democrats and Republicans seem destined to move even farther apart than they are now. How, then, will they forge the compromises that are the foundation of effective governance?
The answer is: They may not need to. For most of the past century, consensus in American politics has been more phantom than fact, especially when it comes to staking out ideological ground.
Even in the cold war era, a peak period of bipartisan cooperation, liberals and conservatives clashed over first principles, and the most respected spokesmen in either party were not afraid to say so.
Consider an important midcentury manifesto, “A Democrat Looks at His Party” (1955). Its author, Dean Acheson, had left government after the 1952 election, but he remained a formidable presence — perhaps the greatest of all modern secretaries of state. Yet his book, although written in courtly prose, with learned references to Renaissance history and choice aphorisms from Oliver Wendell Holmes, was an act of ideological revivalism, steeped in the glories of the New Deal.
The Democrats’ triumphs, Acheson argued, originated in their discovery that the federal government, in particular the executive branch, should be “an instrument to accomplish what needs to be done, even if this cuts across cherished doctrines,” including those stated or implied in the Constitution.
In fact, Acheson explained, the history of the Democratic Party, dating as far back as Grover Cleveland’s presidency, “is the history of America’s unwritten constitution, of the powers of the federal government, of the nature and authority of the presidential office and its relation to the legislative and judicial powers.” It climaxed in the rush of programs and agencies Democrats devised to meet the crisis of the Great Depression. These innovations required “knowledge, perceptiveness, imagination — in other words, brains,” and it was the Democratic Party that“attracts intellectuals and puts them to work.”
Republicans, meanwhile, clung to an outmoded ideal of a weak federal government: “In the name of checking . . . ‘executive aggrandizements,’ the party historically would subordinate the Executive to the Congress, and the national voice to a babel of local voices,” Acheson wrote.
The unwritten constitution? The babel of local voices? It’s hard to imagine the high-profile Democrat today who would so openly acknowledge these presumptions of modern liberalism.
Republicans in the 1950s were no less direct. Take, for instance, the ideas expressed by Arthur Larson, the under secretary of labor to President Eisenhower, in his book “A Republican Looks at His Party,” published in 1956. Responding to Acheson, Larson accused him of a “thinly veiled contempt for state and municipal government,” formed under “the influence of a school of European political theory” — specifically, the socialist theory of Harold Laski. Larson stated his party’s position in language as strident as Newt Gingrich’s. “Let us put it perfectly bluntly: the typical American is inherently a states’-righter by inclination and sentiment.” That same American had “an instinctive sense that . . . excessive centralization means the threat of ultimate loss of personal liberties, and that our constitutional division of powers between the central government, the state governments and the people is right and must be preserved at all costs.” The Democrats’ ideal of the federal leviathan, Larson warned, would place the nation on the road to “totalitarian dictatorship.”
Acheson and Larson were by no means extremists. Each stood at or near the political center. Acheson had been the architect of the cold war containment policy that included the use of loyalty oaths, enacted under Truman, to expunge suspected Communists from the government payroll, though in his manifesto he regretted this “grave mistake.”
Larson, a self-described “New Republican,” proudly pointed to the Eisenhower administration’s expansion of New Deal programs — unemployment insurance, for one — and advocated a “strong, confident center-of-the-road American consensus,” a view repudiated by the conservative wing of his own party.
The dominant political figure in the 1950s was Eisenhower, a popular president twice elected with sweeping majorities. He disdained ideological debate but it swirled all around him, at times almost paralyzing his administration. For two years, he was locked in battle with his party’s right wing, most conspicuously with a group of legislators led by Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, the ringmaster of loyalty investigations that reached deep into the executive branch. Other Republicans, exploiting wafer-thin majorities in Congress, gave less attention to major appropriations bills than to drafting constitutional amendments that might confound the most devout Tea Partier. In his 1956 book “Affairs of State: The Eisenhower Years,” Richard Rovere, The New Yorker’s Washington correspondent, counted no fewer than 107 amendments that had been submitted to Senate committees as of June 1954. They included one empowering state governors to fill “vacancies” in the House of Representatives should Washington suffer a nuclear attack, another to prevent “interference with or limitation upon the power of any state to regulate health, morals, education, marriage, and good order in the state,” and a third that would have inserted the following words in the Constitution: “This nation devoutly recognizes the authority and law of Jesus Christ, Savior and Ruler of Nations through whom are bestowed the blessings of Almighty God.”
At one point, Eisenhower, frustrated that the nation’s serious business was being ignored, considered quitting the Republican Party and starting a new party of his own.
The problem was temporarily solved by the 1954 election. It was a defeat for Congressional Republicans, but not for Eisenhower since, as Rovere reported, the election had “removed several persons whom the president found offensive and had weakened the authority of quite a few others,” most of them Republicans.
Democrats, all the while, were equally fissured, as the party nearly self-destructed over civil rights, the great social issue of the 1950s (though neither Acheson nor Larson had much to say about it). The fiercest proponents of the states’ rights ideology championed by Larson were not Republicans, but Southern Democrats. Some had already broken with the party, in 1948, when Strom Thurmond, then the governor of South Carolina, headed a third-party, states rights’ ticket, the Dixiecrats, which captured four states in the general election, the first step in the Democratic Party’s eventual loss of “the Solid South.”
Today, much of this history has been forgotten, and the Eisenhower years are remembered instead as an oasis of responsible governance and nonideological, bipartisan calm.
It is too soon to say the same about the politics of the present moment. But it is also too soon to say where we are headed or even to guess how we might get there.
Thursday, October 21, 2010
Defending Progressivism
Multiculturalism Debate - Terrorism - Humanitarian Crises - Social Criticism - Iraq - Darfur - Is the Conservative Era Over?
Defending Progressivism
Conor Williams - September 7, 2010
Less than two years after the beginning of a “new progressive era” in the United States, progressives face the midterm elections saddled with massive political baggage. This may seem like nothing new. Since the term gained currency in the early twentieth century, Russell Kirk, James Ceaser, Jonah Goldberg, and other conservatives have claimed that American progressives share intellectual territory with Marxists, Nazis, and other radical, intolerant atheists. Largely by their rhetorical force, they have converted progressivism into utopianism, bureaucratic technocracy, corporatism, emotivism, anti-Americanism, philosophical non-foundationalism, racism, and so on and so forth.
In other words, for the umpteenth time in the last two decades, the American Left doesn’t know what it stands for. As has become customary, progressives are waiting for their more organized opponents to define the debate, its terms, and their role in it. They are routinely on the defensive in public debate, even when the facts overwhelmingly support their positions. Progressives have been reduced to dismissing their opponents as unfair, as unenlightened, as racists, or as politically incorrect. This needn’t happen. Progressivism is not as amorphous as the current state of affairs indicates. This is no time to despair or retreat; it is a time to reengage and reassert progressive positions in more compelling ways.
So what does American progressivism mean? Start with what it’s not. The Right has long claimed that the Left represents a radical departure from traditional American understandings of individualism, liberty, equality, and justice. Just as those at Tea Party protests demand their country back from usurping politicians, conservative intellectuals have taken to maintaining that American progressivism somehow betrays the American political experiment, feeding right-wing charges that progressives are unpatriotic or out of step with the rest of the nation.
This position rests upon poor intellectual history and strained interpretations of progressive principles. The most substantive of their charges are based on small or irrelevant moments in progressive thought or history taken out of context, while their wilder charges are based on pure rhetorical frustration. Simply put: progressives are not nihilists, nor are they opposed to the American Constitution, nor are they socialists with a utopian faith in inevitable progress. Nothing could be further from the case. Let us take up each of these charges in turn.
PERHAPS THE most pernicious attack on progressivism is the charge of political (or philosophical or ethical) nihilism. With all their talk of tolerance or multiculturalism, aren’t progressives abandoning American tradition and standards for discerning right from wrong? Under no circumstances. Much of modern progressivism is founded upon American pragmatism, a homegrown school of political thought. Pragmatists argue that political rights and freedoms are founded on community traditions and shared history. Rights are not “natural,” but they are still meaningful and extremely important. The pragmatists recognized that rights mean different things in different historical contexts. The meanings of “freedom of speech,” “citizenship,” the “right to vote,” and “property” have changed over time in the United States because of important shifts in public understanding.
Thus, for most progressives, rights represent a wager we have made as a political community, a wager with our fellow citizens as to the sort of life we aim to live. In the United States, the right to vote has expanded over time to include American citizens of all races and of both sexes, because Americans came to believe that this was a better way to live as a political community. This is hardly nihilism or a claim that (in Ceaser’s words) “true democracy is foundation-less.” Progressives only argue that calling rights “natural” artificially fixes their meaning, often in troubling ways. After all, the “natural” right to property once meant a right to own other humans, and the “natural” right to vote originally was limited to white male citizens with a sufficient amount of property. Sanctifying rights as “natural” makes them convenient tools for justifying outrageous injustices.
This approach to rights informs the progressive understanding of and appreciation for the American Constitution. Above all, progressives maintain that its goals are as important as its technical sections outlining institutional design. The American Constitution aims to “form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity,” in the name of “We the People.” Constitutional protections of individual property, speech, and conscience are meaningful because they make it possible for Americans to enjoy valuable individual and community goods. They are judged by their consequences, by their fruits. Insofar as American institutions do not lead to the political goods central to the American wager, they fail in their stated purpose.
In the early twentieth century, changes in American social and economic conditions had systematically eroded the worth of constitutional protections of individual liberty. It became difficult to ignore the ways in which regnant constitutional interpretation had arbitrarily damned masses of individuals to desperate existences while rewarding others with outrageous luxuries. Progressive philosopher John Dewey asked Americans to consider the meaning of individual freedom through the following thought experiment: imagine an individual without property, education, or employment. Is this individual free to amass property? Would it matter if she was? Can this individual coherently explain her plight to those with power? Does the right to free self-expression help her obtain their ear? If they hear an inarticulate message from her, will they attend to her needs? Dewey’s point is straightforward enough: liberty is not only a matter of leaving individuals alone. At times, government must act positively to give all individuals a minimum chance to live freely. Put another way, liberty without opportunity would be a farce, if only its social, political, and economic consequences weren’t so tragic.
Dewey argued that instead of deemphasizing relevant constitutional protections of individuals, the state ought to explore ways to strengthen them against newly important corporate forces. He was among the first to note that applying private property protections to corporate and semi-public property presented a direct threat to the liberty of individuals, not to mention a tortured interpretation of constitutional property rights. Constraints upon individual liberty, he recognized, are as much social and economic as they are political. It is in response to such arguments that many conservatives determine progressives to be subconscious Marxists or secret “socialists.” The fallacy of conflating any argument suggesting that market regulation may enhance individual liberty with Marxism ought to be baldly evident. Marx saw politics withering away at the end of history, while Dewey emphasized the value of individual engagement in democratic decision-making. Concern over the use of wealth as a weapon against the less powerful does not make one a Marxist.
PROGRESSIVES’ WILLINGNESS to challenge the hegemony of “neoliberal” interpretations of property rights law often prompts the most vituperative reactions from conservatives. They charge that reconsidering the meaning of various sections of the American Constitution represents a grave threat to its original intent. Against this accusation, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. maintained that the law was meaningful as a source for ongoing interpretation, not as a set of fixed principles. While the Constitution does not permit infinite interpretation, he argued that “in a civilized state it is not the will of the sovereign that makes lawyers’ law, even when that is its source, but what a body of subjects, namely the judges, by whom it is enforced, say is his will.” If progressives revisit the meaning of American ideals, principles, or rights in response to structural changes, they are only continuing in a long-running project of American self-critique and matching legal and political revision. Like Abraham Lincoln, they realize that the letter of the Constitution is only as sacred as human interpretations of its spirit. This is hardly anti-American or anti-Constitution; rather, it is a core element of our political tradition. While there may be prudential reasons to protect changes to existing structures at particular moments (public stability, order, budgetary limits), there is no reason why the Constitution should be permanently insulated from reinterpretation.
In response to this argument, conservatives frequently claim that acceptance (and qualified endorsement) of changes in political meanings reflects the utopian optimism at the heart of the progressive intellectual tradition. If past meanings of individual liberty are constantly superseded by new and improved versions, doesn’t this imply eventual arrival at political perfection? It is true that progressives are, perhaps by definition, particularly inspired by the future’s potential, but this need not lead to perfectionism. Progressive leader and co-founder of the New Republic Herbert Croly accurately argued that the best American patriotism “combines loyalty to historical tradition and precedent with the imaginative projection of an ideal national Promise.” Progressives understand that while national political ideals are intimated in past achievements, they are never fully reached. They are those elements of political existence which guide and inspire us through the messy practice of daily politics.
Hope for the future only suggests that the future may have something better in store. To be a progressive is to believe that we can address present difficulties, and that creatively facing them is preferable to resignation. To be a progressive is to admit that dogmatic certainty has no place in a complex world with many moving parts, and that the best we can offer each other is a commitment to engage, experiment, and reevaluate our choices. American progressives are committed to working within the American tradition to solve problems prompted by changes to the American community. They argue for political change on the grounds that it is suggested by core commitments from the American past. Progressives argue that what was once considered fair or just may no longer be honestly seen as such.
For example, during the civil rights movement, progressives claimed that equal political treatment of all Americans was a core principle in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution’s Preamble, and its fourteenth and fifteenth amendments, even if the United States had in practice allowed racial segregation. This was a rejoinder to those who believed that such political problems could be solved by applying inflexible rules or by blind adherence to antiquated interpretations of natural rights. It should come as no surprise, then, that Obama’s attempts to reform significant elements of the political status quo are prompting such feverish attacks from opponents. In essence, they want desperately to believe that new problems can be solved in old ways: without change, and certainly without innovation. The interconnectedness of America’s many political problems—extensive military commitments, a struggling economy, and a growing deficit, foremost among them—makes it clear that still more substantial political reform, and imaginative projection of national ideals, is needed.
Progressive politics are founded upon a commitment to the dialogue and debate necessary for constantly refining the national project. Progressives envision democratic politics as an ongoing and committed conversation, where policy choices must be defended with considered reasons and compelling proof. It is in this vein that President Obama provides an inspiring example; in the face of unabated criticism, extremist hatred, and obstructionism, he has remained committed to discussion of the facts most relevant to the issues of each day.
But being reasonable is not enough. As E.J. Dionne Jr. recently argued, following a comment by Obama disdainful of “politicking,” “In a democracy, separating governing from ‘politicking’ is impossible. ‘Politicking’ is nothing less than the ongoing effort to persuade free citizens of the merits of a set of ideas, policies and decisions. Voters feel better about politicians who put what they are doing in a compelling context.” The commitment to open debate can come across as political weakness, and too often the Right has used this openness to attack progressivism writ large, but these strident and unfair conservative attacks demand a forceful rhetorical response, not conciliation. Progressives must show equal determination to “take back their country” from those who would define it too narrowly. This means mounting a spirited defense of progressivism on the three fronts outlined above: to defend an expansive, populist, American understanding of political rights; to believe that government action can support both liberty and equality in all spheres; and to remain committed to improvement without pursuing unreachable goals. Unless they begin this work soon, the “new progressive era” will be over almost before it began.
Defending Progressivism
Conor Williams - September 7, 2010
Less than two years after the beginning of a “new progressive era” in the United States, progressives face the midterm elections saddled with massive political baggage. This may seem like nothing new. Since the term gained currency in the early twentieth century, Russell Kirk, James Ceaser, Jonah Goldberg, and other conservatives have claimed that American progressives share intellectual territory with Marxists, Nazis, and other radical, intolerant atheists. Largely by their rhetorical force, they have converted progressivism into utopianism, bureaucratic technocracy, corporatism, emotivism, anti-Americanism, philosophical non-foundationalism, racism, and so on and so forth.
In other words, for the umpteenth time in the last two decades, the American Left doesn’t know what it stands for. As has become customary, progressives are waiting for their more organized opponents to define the debate, its terms, and their role in it. They are routinely on the defensive in public debate, even when the facts overwhelmingly support their positions. Progressives have been reduced to dismissing their opponents as unfair, as unenlightened, as racists, or as politically incorrect. This needn’t happen. Progressivism is not as amorphous as the current state of affairs indicates. This is no time to despair or retreat; it is a time to reengage and reassert progressive positions in more compelling ways.
So what does American progressivism mean? Start with what it’s not. The Right has long claimed that the Left represents a radical departure from traditional American understandings of individualism, liberty, equality, and justice. Just as those at Tea Party protests demand their country back from usurping politicians, conservative intellectuals have taken to maintaining that American progressivism somehow betrays the American political experiment, feeding right-wing charges that progressives are unpatriotic or out of step with the rest of the nation.
This position rests upon poor intellectual history and strained interpretations of progressive principles. The most substantive of their charges are based on small or irrelevant moments in progressive thought or history taken out of context, while their wilder charges are based on pure rhetorical frustration. Simply put: progressives are not nihilists, nor are they opposed to the American Constitution, nor are they socialists with a utopian faith in inevitable progress. Nothing could be further from the case. Let us take up each of these charges in turn.
PERHAPS THE most pernicious attack on progressivism is the charge of political (or philosophical or ethical) nihilism. With all their talk of tolerance or multiculturalism, aren’t progressives abandoning American tradition and standards for discerning right from wrong? Under no circumstances. Much of modern progressivism is founded upon American pragmatism, a homegrown school of political thought. Pragmatists argue that political rights and freedoms are founded on community traditions and shared history. Rights are not “natural,” but they are still meaningful and extremely important. The pragmatists recognized that rights mean different things in different historical contexts. The meanings of “freedom of speech,” “citizenship,” the “right to vote,” and “property” have changed over time in the United States because of important shifts in public understanding.
Thus, for most progressives, rights represent a wager we have made as a political community, a wager with our fellow citizens as to the sort of life we aim to live. In the United States, the right to vote has expanded over time to include American citizens of all races and of both sexes, because Americans came to believe that this was a better way to live as a political community. This is hardly nihilism or a claim that (in Ceaser’s words) “true democracy is foundation-less.” Progressives only argue that calling rights “natural” artificially fixes their meaning, often in troubling ways. After all, the “natural” right to property once meant a right to own other humans, and the “natural” right to vote originally was limited to white male citizens with a sufficient amount of property. Sanctifying rights as “natural” makes them convenient tools for justifying outrageous injustices.
This approach to rights informs the progressive understanding of and appreciation for the American Constitution. Above all, progressives maintain that its goals are as important as its technical sections outlining institutional design. The American Constitution aims to “form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity,” in the name of “We the People.” Constitutional protections of individual property, speech, and conscience are meaningful because they make it possible for Americans to enjoy valuable individual and community goods. They are judged by their consequences, by their fruits. Insofar as American institutions do not lead to the political goods central to the American wager, they fail in their stated purpose.
In the early twentieth century, changes in American social and economic conditions had systematically eroded the worth of constitutional protections of individual liberty. It became difficult to ignore the ways in which regnant constitutional interpretation had arbitrarily damned masses of individuals to desperate existences while rewarding others with outrageous luxuries. Progressive philosopher John Dewey asked Americans to consider the meaning of individual freedom through the following thought experiment: imagine an individual without property, education, or employment. Is this individual free to amass property? Would it matter if she was? Can this individual coherently explain her plight to those with power? Does the right to free self-expression help her obtain their ear? If they hear an inarticulate message from her, will they attend to her needs? Dewey’s point is straightforward enough: liberty is not only a matter of leaving individuals alone. At times, government must act positively to give all individuals a minimum chance to live freely. Put another way, liberty without opportunity would be a farce, if only its social, political, and economic consequences weren’t so tragic.
Dewey argued that instead of deemphasizing relevant constitutional protections of individuals, the state ought to explore ways to strengthen them against newly important corporate forces. He was among the first to note that applying private property protections to corporate and semi-public property presented a direct threat to the liberty of individuals, not to mention a tortured interpretation of constitutional property rights. Constraints upon individual liberty, he recognized, are as much social and economic as they are political. It is in response to such arguments that many conservatives determine progressives to be subconscious Marxists or secret “socialists.” The fallacy of conflating any argument suggesting that market regulation may enhance individual liberty with Marxism ought to be baldly evident. Marx saw politics withering away at the end of history, while Dewey emphasized the value of individual engagement in democratic decision-making. Concern over the use of wealth as a weapon against the less powerful does not make one a Marxist.
PROGRESSIVES’ WILLINGNESS to challenge the hegemony of “neoliberal” interpretations of property rights law often prompts the most vituperative reactions from conservatives. They charge that reconsidering the meaning of various sections of the American Constitution represents a grave threat to its original intent. Against this accusation, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. maintained that the law was meaningful as a source for ongoing interpretation, not as a set of fixed principles. While the Constitution does not permit infinite interpretation, he argued that “in a civilized state it is not the will of the sovereign that makes lawyers’ law, even when that is its source, but what a body of subjects, namely the judges, by whom it is enforced, say is his will.” If progressives revisit the meaning of American ideals, principles, or rights in response to structural changes, they are only continuing in a long-running project of American self-critique and matching legal and political revision. Like Abraham Lincoln, they realize that the letter of the Constitution is only as sacred as human interpretations of its spirit. This is hardly anti-American or anti-Constitution; rather, it is a core element of our political tradition. While there may be prudential reasons to protect changes to existing structures at particular moments (public stability, order, budgetary limits), there is no reason why the Constitution should be permanently insulated from reinterpretation.
In response to this argument, conservatives frequently claim that acceptance (and qualified endorsement) of changes in political meanings reflects the utopian optimism at the heart of the progressive intellectual tradition. If past meanings of individual liberty are constantly superseded by new and improved versions, doesn’t this imply eventual arrival at political perfection? It is true that progressives are, perhaps by definition, particularly inspired by the future’s potential, but this need not lead to perfectionism. Progressive leader and co-founder of the New Republic Herbert Croly accurately argued that the best American patriotism “combines loyalty to historical tradition and precedent with the imaginative projection of an ideal national Promise.” Progressives understand that while national political ideals are intimated in past achievements, they are never fully reached. They are those elements of political existence which guide and inspire us through the messy practice of daily politics.
Hope for the future only suggests that the future may have something better in store. To be a progressive is to believe that we can address present difficulties, and that creatively facing them is preferable to resignation. To be a progressive is to admit that dogmatic certainty has no place in a complex world with many moving parts, and that the best we can offer each other is a commitment to engage, experiment, and reevaluate our choices. American progressives are committed to working within the American tradition to solve problems prompted by changes to the American community. They argue for political change on the grounds that it is suggested by core commitments from the American past. Progressives argue that what was once considered fair or just may no longer be honestly seen as such.
For example, during the civil rights movement, progressives claimed that equal political treatment of all Americans was a core principle in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution’s Preamble, and its fourteenth and fifteenth amendments, even if the United States had in practice allowed racial segregation. This was a rejoinder to those who believed that such political problems could be solved by applying inflexible rules or by blind adherence to antiquated interpretations of natural rights. It should come as no surprise, then, that Obama’s attempts to reform significant elements of the political status quo are prompting such feverish attacks from opponents. In essence, they want desperately to believe that new problems can be solved in old ways: without change, and certainly without innovation. The interconnectedness of America’s many political problems—extensive military commitments, a struggling economy, and a growing deficit, foremost among them—makes it clear that still more substantial political reform, and imaginative projection of national ideals, is needed.
Progressive politics are founded upon a commitment to the dialogue and debate necessary for constantly refining the national project. Progressives envision democratic politics as an ongoing and committed conversation, where policy choices must be defended with considered reasons and compelling proof. It is in this vein that President Obama provides an inspiring example; in the face of unabated criticism, extremist hatred, and obstructionism, he has remained committed to discussion of the facts most relevant to the issues of each day.
But being reasonable is not enough. As E.J. Dionne Jr. recently argued, following a comment by Obama disdainful of “politicking,” “In a democracy, separating governing from ‘politicking’ is impossible. ‘Politicking’ is nothing less than the ongoing effort to persuade free citizens of the merits of a set of ideas, policies and decisions. Voters feel better about politicians who put what they are doing in a compelling context.” The commitment to open debate can come across as political weakness, and too often the Right has used this openness to attack progressivism writ large, but these strident and unfair conservative attacks demand a forceful rhetorical response, not conciliation. Progressives must show equal determination to “take back their country” from those who would define it too narrowly. This means mounting a spirited defense of progressivism on the three fronts outlined above: to defend an expansive, populist, American understanding of political rights; to believe that government action can support both liberty and equality in all spheres; and to remain committed to improvement without pursuing unreachable goals. Unless they begin this work soon, the “new progressive era” will be over almost before it began.
Paradise Library
"I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library," Jorge Luis Borges famously said.
Monday, October 18, 2010
From Democracy to Plutocracy
The Perfect Storm That Threatens American Democracy
by Robert Reich
It's a perfect storm. And I'm not talking about the impending dangers facing Democrats. I'm talking about the dangers facing our democracy.
First, income in America is now more concentrated in fewer hands than it's been in 80 years. Almost a quarter of total income generated in the United States is going to the top 1 percent of Americans.
The top one-tenth of one percent of Americans now earn as much as the bottom 120 million of us.
Who are these people? With the exception of a few entrepreneurs like Bill Gates, they're top executives of big corporations and Wall Street, hedge fund managers, and private equity managers. They include the Koch brothers, whose wealth increased by billions last year, and who are now funding tea party candidates across the nation.
Which gets us to the second part of the perfect storm. A relatively few Americans are buying our democracy as never before. And they're doing it completely in secret.
Hundreds of millions of dollars are pouring into advertisements for and against candidates -- without a trace of where the dollars are coming from. They're laundered through a handful of groups. Fred Maleck, whom you may remember as deputy director of Richard Nixon's notorious Committee to Reelect the President (dubbed Creep in the Watergate scandal), is running one of them. Republican operative Karl Rove runs another. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a third.
The Supreme Court's Citizens United vs. the Federal Election Commission made it possible. The Federal Election Commission says only 32 percent of groups paying for election ads are disclosing the names of their donors. By comparison, in the 2006 midterm, 97 percent disclosed; in 2008, almost half disclosed.
We're back to the late 19th century when the lackeys of robber barons literally deposited sacks of cash on the desks of friendly legislators. The public never knew who was bribing whom.
Just before it recessed the House passed a bill that would require that the names of all such donors be publicly disclosed. But it couldn't get through the Senate. Every Republican voted against it. (To see how far the GOP has come, nearly ten years ago campaign disclosure was supported by 48 of 54 Republican senators.)
Here's the third part of the perfect storm. Most Americans are in trouble. Their jobs, incomes, savings, and even homes are on the line. They need a government that's working for them, not for the privileged and the powerful.
Yet their state and local taxes are rising. And their services are being cut. Teachers and firefighters are being laid off. The roads and bridges they count on are crumbling, pipelines are leaking, schools are dilapidated, and public libraries are being shut.
There's no jobs bill to speak of. No WPA to hire those who can't find jobs in the private sector. Unemployment insurance doesn't reach half of the unemployed.
Washington says nothing can be done. There's no money left.
No money? The marginal income tax rate on the very rich is the lowest it's been in more than 80 years. Under President Dwight Eisenhower (who no one would have accused of being a radical) it was 91 percent. Now it's 36 percent. Congress is even fighting over whether to end the temporary Bush tax cut for the rich and return them to the Clinton top tax of 39 percent.
Much of the income of the highest earners is treated as capital gains, anyway -- subject to a 15 percent tax. The typical hedge-fund and private-equity manager paid only 17 percent last year. Their earnings were not exactly modest. The top 15 hedge-fund managers earned an average of $1 billion.
Congress won't even return to the estate tax in place during the Clinton administration - which applied only to those in the top 2 percent of incomes.
It won't limit the tax deductions of the very rich, which include interest payments on multimillion dollar mortgages. (Yet Wall Street refuses to allow homeowners who can't meet mortgage payments to include their primary residence in personal bankruptcy.)
There's plenty of money to help stranded Americans, just not the political will to raise it. And at the rate secret money is flooding our political system, even less political will in the future.
The perfect storm: An unprecedented concentration of income and wealth at the top; a record amount of secret money flooding our democracy; and a public becoming increasingly angry and cynical about a government that's raising its taxes, reducing its services, and unable to get it back to work.
We're losing our democracy to a different system. It's called plutocracy.
by Robert Reich
It's a perfect storm. And I'm not talking about the impending dangers facing Democrats. I'm talking about the dangers facing our democracy.
First, income in America is now more concentrated in fewer hands than it's been in 80 years. Almost a quarter of total income generated in the United States is going to the top 1 percent of Americans.
The top one-tenth of one percent of Americans now earn as much as the bottom 120 million of us.
Who are these people? With the exception of a few entrepreneurs like Bill Gates, they're top executives of big corporations and Wall Street, hedge fund managers, and private equity managers. They include the Koch brothers, whose wealth increased by billions last year, and who are now funding tea party candidates across the nation.
Which gets us to the second part of the perfect storm. A relatively few Americans are buying our democracy as never before. And they're doing it completely in secret.
Hundreds of millions of dollars are pouring into advertisements for and against candidates -- without a trace of where the dollars are coming from. They're laundered through a handful of groups. Fred Maleck, whom you may remember as deputy director of Richard Nixon's notorious Committee to Reelect the President (dubbed Creep in the Watergate scandal), is running one of them. Republican operative Karl Rove runs another. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a third.
The Supreme Court's Citizens United vs. the Federal Election Commission made it possible. The Federal Election Commission says only 32 percent of groups paying for election ads are disclosing the names of their donors. By comparison, in the 2006 midterm, 97 percent disclosed; in 2008, almost half disclosed.
We're back to the late 19th century when the lackeys of robber barons literally deposited sacks of cash on the desks of friendly legislators. The public never knew who was bribing whom.
Just before it recessed the House passed a bill that would require that the names of all such donors be publicly disclosed. But it couldn't get through the Senate. Every Republican voted against it. (To see how far the GOP has come, nearly ten years ago campaign disclosure was supported by 48 of 54 Republican senators.)
Here's the third part of the perfect storm. Most Americans are in trouble. Their jobs, incomes, savings, and even homes are on the line. They need a government that's working for them, not for the privileged and the powerful.
Yet their state and local taxes are rising. And their services are being cut. Teachers and firefighters are being laid off. The roads and bridges they count on are crumbling, pipelines are leaking, schools are dilapidated, and public libraries are being shut.
There's no jobs bill to speak of. No WPA to hire those who can't find jobs in the private sector. Unemployment insurance doesn't reach half of the unemployed.
Washington says nothing can be done. There's no money left.
No money? The marginal income tax rate on the very rich is the lowest it's been in more than 80 years. Under President Dwight Eisenhower (who no one would have accused of being a radical) it was 91 percent. Now it's 36 percent. Congress is even fighting over whether to end the temporary Bush tax cut for the rich and return them to the Clinton top tax of 39 percent.
Much of the income of the highest earners is treated as capital gains, anyway -- subject to a 15 percent tax. The typical hedge-fund and private-equity manager paid only 17 percent last year. Their earnings were not exactly modest. The top 15 hedge-fund managers earned an average of $1 billion.
Congress won't even return to the estate tax in place during the Clinton administration - which applied only to those in the top 2 percent of incomes.
It won't limit the tax deductions of the very rich, which include interest payments on multimillion dollar mortgages. (Yet Wall Street refuses to allow homeowners who can't meet mortgage payments to include their primary residence in personal bankruptcy.)
There's plenty of money to help stranded Americans, just not the political will to raise it. And at the rate secret money is flooding our political system, even less political will in the future.
The perfect storm: An unprecedented concentration of income and wealth at the top; a record amount of secret money flooding our democracy; and a public becoming increasingly angry and cynical about a government that's raising its taxes, reducing its services, and unable to get it back to work.
We're losing our democracy to a different system. It's called plutocracy.
Sunday, October 17, 2010
Robert Reich - Aftershock
In this progressive manifesto, Robert Reich, former Sec. of Labor under President Clinton and currently a professor at Berkeley, says that the cause of the recession is income inequality, the same root cause of the great depression of the 1930's. His reasoning is impeccable and totally persuasive. Until this situation---the growing disparty between the richest and the poorest and the erosion of the middle class in this country---changes the economy will continue to decline.
Under the Republicans too much national income has gone to the rich, which drives the middle class to credit, creating a bubble that inevitably burst. The situation is only getting worse.
Progressives are concerned about income inequality. You will never hear conservatives talk about this issue.
Under the Republicans too much national income has gone to the rich, which drives the middle class to credit, creating a bubble that inevitably burst. The situation is only getting worse.
Progressives are concerned about income inequality. You will never hear conservatives talk about this issue.
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
Confounding Fathers
by Sean Wilentz - Professor of History at Princeton University
From the New Yorker 10/18/10
Confounding Fathers
The Tea Party’s Cold War Roots
Glenn Beck’s view of American history stems from the paranoid politics of the fifties.
Tea Party; Glenn Beck; Conservatives; Republicans; Beck University; Fox News; Extremists A few months ago, the cable-television and radio host Glenn Beck began his Fox News show with one of his favorite props: a pipe clenched between his teeth. “I’ve got my pipe,” he told his audience, his speech slightly muddled by the stem, “because we’re going to speak about schoolish kind of things.” The theme of the day was “Restoring History,” and Beck, looking professorial in a neat dark blazer and a pink button-down shirt, began the lesson by peering at a stack of history textbooks and pronouncing them full of falsehoods, produced by “malicious progressive intent.” Progressives, he explained—liberals, socialists, Communists, the entire spectrum of the left—“knew they had to separate us from our history to be able to separate us from our Constitution and God.” For the next hour, Beck earnestly explained some of the history that “is being stolen from us”: the depression of 1920, for example, or how conservative economics saved the nation from the “near-depression” of 1946—crises that progressives don’t want you to know about. “You’ve been taught one lie, I think, your whole life,” he said.
For the fractious Tea Party movement, Beck—a former drive-time radio jockey, a recovering alcoholic, and a Mormon convert—has emerged as both a unifying figure and an intellectual guide. One opinion poll, released in July by Democracy Corps, showed that he is “the most highly regarded individual among Tea Party supporters,” seen not merely as an entertainer, like Rush Limbaugh, but as an “educator.” And in the past few months Beck has established his own institute of learning: the online, for-profit Beck University. Enrollees can take courses like Faith 102, which contends with “revisionists and secular progressives” about the separation of church and state; Hope 102, an attack on the activist federal government; and the combined Charity 101/102/103, a highly restrictive interpretation of rights, federalism, and the division of powers.
During the “Restoring History” episode, Beck twice encouraged viewers to join his Web seminars, where they can hear “lessons from the best and brightest historians and scholars that we could find.” The B.U. faculty consists of three members, including one bona-fide academic, James R. Stoner, Jr., the chair of the political-science department at Louisiana State University; the other two are the head of a management consulting firm and the founder of WallBuilders, which the Web site calls “a national pro-family organization.” Beck himself often acts as a professor, a slightly jocular one, on his Fox News program. Surrounded by charts and figures, he offers explanations of current politics and history lessons about the country’s long march to Obama-era totalitarianism. The decline, he says, began with the Progressive era of the early twentieth century, in particular with the Presidency of Woodrow Wilson, when both the Federal Reserve System and the graduated federal income tax came into existence. “Wilson,” Beck told his radio audience in August, “just despised what America was.”
from the issuecartoon banke-mail thisBeck’s claims have found an audience among Tea Party spokesmen and sympathizers. At the movement’s Freedom Summit in Washington last September, one activist told a reporter, “The election between Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson in 1912 was when it started going downhill.” And in April an angry member of the Tea Party Patriots group from Cape Fear, North Carolina, claimed on the group’s Web site that “the very things you see happening in this country today started with the Wilson Administration.”
At a Tax Day rally this past spring, the veteran conservative organizer Richard Viguerie described the Tea Party as “an unfettered new force of the middle class.” And, indeed, calling Obama a socialist in the tradition of Woodrow Wilson is audacious enough to seem like the marker of a new movement—or, at least, a new twist in the nation’s long history of conspiracy-mongering. In fact, it marks a revival of ideas that circulated on the extremist right half a century ago, especially in the John Birch Society and among its admirers.
Beck’s version of American history relies on lessons from his own acknowledged inspiration, the late right-wing writer W. Cleon Skousen, and also restates charges made by the Birch Society’s founder, Robert Welch. The political universe is, of course, very different today from what it was during the Cold War. Yet the Birchers’ politics and their view of American history—which focussed more on totalitarian threats at home than on those posed by the Soviet Union and Communist China—has proved remarkably persistent. The pressing historical question is how extremist ideas held at bay for decades inside the Republican Party have exploded anew—and why, this time, Party leaders have done virtually nothing to challenge those ideas, and a great deal to abet them.
The early nineteen-sixties were a turbulent time in American politics, for the right wing in particular. In the South, racist violence against civil-rights workers was constant, deepening sectional splits in the Democratic Party that would in time deliver the once solidly Democratic South to the Republicans. Southern elected officials, in support of what they called “massive resistance” to civil-rights laws and judicial rulings, resurrected the ideas of nullification and interposition, which claimed that individual states could void federal laws within their own borders. Others focussed on what they considered a fearsome Communist menace inside the United States. General Edwin A. Walker caused an enormous stir when he resigned from the Army in 1961, after President John F. Kennedy’s Pentagon reprimanded him for spreading right-wing propaganda among his troops and accusing prominent American officials of Communist sympathies. Senator Strom Thurmond, the Dixiecrat from South Carolina, spoke for many on the far right when he declared that various modestly liberal domestic programs “fall clearly within the category of socialism.”
The John Birch Society was one of the decade’s most controversial right-wing organizations. Founded in 1958 by Robert Welch, a candy manufacturer from Massachusetts, the society took its name from a Baptist missionary and military-intelligence officer killed by Communist Chinese forces in 1945, whom Welch called the first American casualty of the Cold War. The group was founded at a propitious time. After Senator Joseph McCarthy’s fall, in 1954, many of McCarthy’s followers felt bereft of a voice, and Welch seemed to speak for them; by the mid-sixties, his society’s membership was estimated to be as high as a hundred thousand. Welch, exploiting fears of what McCarthy had called an “immense” domestic conspiracy, declared that the federal government had already fallen into the Communists’ clutches. In a tract titled “The Politician,” he attacked President Dwight D. Eisenhower as “a dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy” who had been serving the plot “all of his adult life.” Late in 1961, after the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion, he accused the Kennedy Administration of “helping the Communists everywhere in the world while pretending to do the opposite.”
Wherever he looked, Welch saw Communist forces manipulating American economic and foreign policy on behalf of totalitarianism. But within the United States, he believed, the subversion had actually begun years before the Bolshevik Revolution. Conflating modern liberalism and totalitarianism, Welch described government as “always and inevitably an enemy of individual freedom.” Consequently, he charged, the Progressive era, which expanded the federal government’s role in curbing social and economic ills, was a dire period in our history, and Woodrow Wilson “more than any other one man started this nation on its present road to totalitarianism.”
In the nineteen-sixties, Welch became convinced that even the Communist movement was but “a tool of the total conspiracy.” This master conspiracy, he said, had forerunners in ancient Sparta, and sprang fully to life in the eighteenth century, in the “uniformly Satanic creed and program” of the Bavarian Illuminati. Run by those he called “the Insiders,” the conspiracy resided chiefly in international families of financiers, such as the Rothschilds and the Rockefellers, government agencies like the Federal Reserve System and the Internal Revenue Service, and nongovernmental organizations like the Bilderberg Group, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Trilateral Commission. Since the early twentieth century, they had done a good deal of their evil work under the guise of humanitarian uplift. “One broad avenue down which these conspiratorial forces advance was known as progressive legislation,” Welch declared in 1966. “The very same collectivist theories and demagogic pretenses which had destroyed earlier civilizations were now paraded forth in the disguise of new and modern concepts.”
In the worst case, Welch believed, military action might be necessary to dislodge the totalitarians. But for the moment a nonviolent political revolution would suffice. Accordingly, he designed the Birch Society roughly, if not explicitly, on the Marxist-Leninist model of a vanguard revolutionary party: a series of small cells that would work in secret to agitate the populace and elect right-thinking candidates to office. “It isn’t numbers we have to worry about,” Welch wrote, “but the courage on the part of our followers to stick their necks out and play rough—the same as the Communists do.”
The “Founder” himself would dictate the society’s policies, advised by a council of about two dozen businessmen and professionals, and the local cells would be overseen by unyielding commanders. “It is the leadership that is most demanding, most exacting of its followers,” Welch observed, “that achieves really dedicated support.” Welch’s group became synonymous with right-wing extremism, earning satirical blasts from critics ranging from the cartoonist Walt Kelly to the musicians Bob Dylan and Dizzy Gillespie. The trumpeter, whose actual name was John Birks Gillespie, made a humorous run for the Presidency in 1964, organizing John Birks Societies in twenty-five states.
Still, the most outlandish of the era’s right-wing anti-Communists was not Welch but Willard Cleon Skousen. A transplanted Canadian who served as a Mormon missionary in his teens, Skousen was considered so radical in the early nineteen-sixties that even J. Edgar Hoover’s F.B.I. watched him closely; one 1962 memo in his extensive F.B.I. file noted that “during the past year or so, Skousen has affiliated himself with the extreme right-wing ‘professional communists’ who are promoting their own anticommunism for obvious financial purposes.” Skousen was himself employed by the F.B.I., from 1935 until 1951, much of that time as a special agent working chiefly in administration. These desk jobs, he claimed implausibly, gave him access to confidential domestic intelligence about Communism. Skousen also maintained that he had served as Hoover’s administrative assistant; Hoover informed inquirers that there was no such position.
Skousen taught for years in the speech and religion departments at Brigham Young University, interrupted by a stint, from 1956 to 1960, as the police chief of Salt Lake City. His time in office was contentious, and after he raided a friendly card game attended by the city’s right-wing mayor, J. Bracken Lee, he was promptly fired. Lee called Skousen “a master of half truths” and said that he ran the police department “like a Gestapo”; Skousen’s supporters placed burning crosses on the Mayor’s lawn.
After losing his police job, Skousen founded a group called the All-American Society, which Time described in 1961 as an exemplar of the far-right “ultras.” Although he did not join the Birch Society, Skousen worked with its American Opinion Speakers’ Bureau, and, in 1963, wrote a rousing tract titled “The Communist Attack on the John Birch Society,” which condemned the society’s critics for “promoting the official Communist Party line.” (This was a tic of Skousen’s; he later defended the Mormon policy of denying the priesthood to blacks with a pamphlet called “The Communist Attack on the Mormons.”)
All along, Skousen’s evolving thoughts ran in tandem with Welch’s. In “The Naked Communist,” a lengthy primer published in 1958, he enlivened a survey of the worldwide leftist threat with outlandish claims, writing that F.D.R.’s adviser Harry Hopkins had treasonously delivered to the Soviets a large supply of uranium, and that the Russians built the first Sputnik with plans stolen from the United States. A year before Richard Condon’s novel “The Manchurian Candidate” appeared, Skousen announced that the Communists were creating “a regimented breed of Pavlovian men whose minds could be triggered into immediate action by signals from their masters.” A later book, “The Naked Capitalist,” decried the Ivy League Establishment, who, through the Federal Reserve, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Rockefeller Foundation, formed “the world’s secret power structure.” The conspiracy had begun, Skousen wrote, when reformers like the wealthy banker Edward M. (Colonel) House, a close adviser to President Woodrow Wilson, helped put into place the Federal Reserve and the graduated income tax.
In 1971, Skousen organized another group, the Freemen Institute, which he later renamed the National Center for Constitutional Studies. According to an article published in the Review of Religious Research, the center’s targets included “the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Federal Communication Commission’s fairness doctrine in editorial broadcasting, the federal government’s change of the gold standard in currency, all subsidies to farmers, all federal aid to education, all federal social welfare, foreign aid, social security, elimination of public school prayer and Bible reading, and (that familiar right-wing nemesis) the United Nations.”
Skousen’s pronouncements made him a pariah among most conservative activists, including some on the right-wing fringe. In 1962, the ultraconservative American Security Council threw him out, because members felt that he had “gone off the deep end.” In 1971, a review in the Mormon journal Dialogue accused Skousen of “inventing fantastic ideas and making inferences that go far beyond the bounds of honest commentary,” and advancing doctrines that came “perilously close” to Nazism. And in 1979, after Skousen called President Jimmy Carter a puppet of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Rockefeller family, the president of the Mormon church issued a national order banning announcements about his organizations.
Skousen was undeterred. In 1981, he produced “The 5,000 Year Leap,” a treatise that assembles selective quotations and groundless assertions to claim that the U.S. Constitution is rooted not in the Enlightenment but in the Bible, and that the framers believed in minimal central government. Either proposition would have astounded James Madison, often described as the guiding spirit behind the Constitution, who rejected state-established religions and, like Alexander Hamilton, proposed a central government so strong that it could veto state laws. “The 5,000 Year Leap” is not a fervid book. Instead, it is calmly, ingratiatingly misleading. Skousen quotes various eighteenth-century patriots on the evils of what Samuel Adams, in 1768, called “the Utopian schemes of leveling,” which Skousen equates with redistribution of wealth. But he does not mention the Founders’ endorsement of taxing the rich to support the general welfare. Thomas Jefferson, for example, wrote approvingly in 1811 of having federal taxes (then limited to tariffs) fall solely on the wealthy, which meant that “the farmer will see his government supported, his children educated, and the face of his country made a paradise by the contributions of the rich alone, without his being called on to spend a cent from his earnings.”
Skousen also challenges the separation of church and state, asserting that “the Founders were not indulging in any idle gesture when they adopted the motto ‘In God We Trust.’ ” In reality, the motto that came out of the Constitutional Convention was “E Pluribus Unum”: out of many, one. “In God We Trust” came much later; its use on coins was first permitted in 1864, and only in 1955, at the height of the Cold War, did Congress mandate that it appear on all currency. The following year, President Eisenhower—who Welch charged was a Communist agent—approved “In God We Trust” as the national motto.
In 1982, Skousen published a follow-up work, an ancestor-worshipping history text titled “The Making of America,” and prepared a study guide for nationwide seminars based on its contents. As Alexander Zaitchik reports in his informative study of Beck, “Common Nonsense,” the new book became an object of controversy in 1987, after the California Bicentennial Commission sold it as part of a fund-raising drive. Among its offenses was an account of slavery drawn from long-disgraced work by the historian Fred A. Shannon, which characterized slave children as “pickaninnies” and suggested that the worst victims of slavery were the slaveholders themselves. The constitutional scholar Jack Rakove, of Stanford, inspected Skousen’s book and seminars and pronounced them “a joke that no self-respecting scholar would think is worth a warm pitcher of spit.”
By the time Skousen died, in 2006, he was little remembered outside the ranks of the furthest-right Mormons. Then, in 2009, Glenn Beck began touting his work: “The Naked Communist,” “The Naked Capitalist,” and, especially, “The 5,000 Year Leap,” which he called “essential to understanding why our Founders built this Republic the way they did.” After Beck put the book in the first spot on his required-reading list—and wrote an enthusiastic new introduction for its reissue—it shot to the top of the Amazon best-seller list. In the first half of 2009, it sold more than two hundred and fifty thousand copies. Local branches of the Tea Party Patriots, the United American Tea Party, and other groups across the country have since organized study groups around it. “It is time we learn and follow the FREEDOM principles of our Founding Fathers,” a United American Tea Party video declares, referring to the principles expounded by Skousen’s book. If Beck is the movement’s teacher, “The 5,000 Year Leap” has become its primer, with “The Making of America” as a kind of 102-level text.
The popularity of Beck’s broadcasts, which now reach two million viewers each day, has brought neo-Birchite ideas to an audience beyond any that Welch or Skousen might have dreamed of. Several times a week, Beck informs his audience that socialists (whom he also sometimes calls Fascists or Communists) led by Obama have seized power, and that patriotic Americans must take their country back. His TV show for some time featured “Comrade Updates,” in which Beck described perfidy while the Soviet anthem played in the background. He attacks all the familiar bogeymen: the Federal Reserve System (which he asserts is a private conglomerate, unaccountable to the public); the Council on Foreign Relations (born of a “progressive idea” to manipulate the media in order to “let the masses know what should be done”); and a historical procession of evildoers, including Skousen’s old target Colonel House and Welch’s old target Woodrow Wilson. His sources on these matters, quite apart from Skousen’s books, can be unreliable. On September 22nd, amid a diatribe about House, Beck cited a passage from “Secrets of the Federal Reserve,” by Eustace Mullins. The book, commissioned in 1948 by Ezra Pound, is a startlingly anti-Semitic fantasy of how a Jewish-led conspiracy of all-powerful bankers established the Federal Reserve in service of their plot to dominate the world.
Part of Beck’s allure is the promise that he will reveal secret information. In one segment last year, he produced a drawing of fasces—which he described, anachronistically, as “the Roman symbol of Fascism”—and then a picture of an old Mercury dime, with fasces on the reverse side. “Who brought this dime in? It happened in 1916—Woodrow Wilson was the President,” he said. “We’ve been on the road to Fascism for a while.” Benito Mussolini, of course, didn’t adopt the ancient symbol of authority as the Fascist emblem until the nineteen-twenties; the designer of the coin, the sculptor Adolph A. Weinman, intended it to signify the nation’s military preparedness, and paired it with an olive branch to illustrate the desire for peace.
Beck’s readings of Progressive-era politics are nearly as bizarre. Whatever can be said about Theodore Roosevelt, he was not a crypto-radical. It was Roosevelt who coined the term “lunatic fringe” to describe the extreme leftists of his day, and his concept of New Nationalism—in which an activist government built a vibrant capitalism, partly by regulating big business—looked back to Alexander Hamilton, not Karl Marx. Nor was Wilson a Bolshevik; in fact, in 1917 he sent American troops to Russia to support the anti-Bolshevik White Army. At home, his reforms sought to break up monopolies in order to restore competition among small companies. “If America is not to have free enterprise,” Wilson declared, “then she can have no freedom of any sort whatever.”
In 2007, Beck, then the host of “Glenn Beck,” on CNN’s Headline News, brought to his show a John Birch Society spokesman named Sam Antonio, who warned of a government plot to abolish U.S. borders with Mexico and Canada, “and eventually all throughout the Americas.” Beck told Antonio, “When I was growing up, the John Birch Society—I thought they were a bunch of nuts.” But now, he said, “you guys are starting to make more and more sense to me.” His guest beamed. “Yes, we at the John Birch Society are not nuts,” Antonio said. “We are just exposing the truth that’s been out there for many, many years.” Since then, the Birch Society’s Web site has run clips from Beck’s Fox broadcasts, proudly pointing out similarities with their own ideas. Last June, an essay on the site described a presentation by Beck on Communism in America as “the ultimate in complete agreement between the Beck and JBS presentations of American history.”
Beck has also praised Ezra Taft Benson, one of Skousen’s close associates. Benson, the Secretary of Agriculture under President Eisenhower and the thirteenth president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, gained notoriety for a speech in 1966 in which he denounced Democratic officeholders and intellectuals (including the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.) as socialists and Communist sympathizers, warned that “the Constitution will be endangered and hang, as it were, by a single thread,” and praised the John Birch Society as “the most effective non-church organization in our fight against creeping socialism and Godless Communism.” Last June, Beck aired a clip from another Benson speech, intoning, “Ezra Taft Benson warned about what was coming.” The Birch Society’s Web site subsequently praised Beck for “getting progressively (sorry for the bad word choice) closer to presenting American history in the way that The John Birch Society has been doing it for over 50 years.”
Beck is no more the sole representative of today’s multifaceted Tea Party than Welch or Skousen was of the nineteen-sixties far right; he recently told the Times, a bit disingenuously, that he was “not involved with the Tea Party.” Why, then, have the politics of Skousen, Benson, and the John Birch Society had such a resurgence among conservative Republicans—not just through Beck but through Tea Party heroes like the Nevada Republican Senate candidate Sharron Angle? (Last month, Angle gave a warm address to a “freedom conference” in Salt Lake City, co-sponsored by the John Birch Society and Skousen’s old group, the National Center for Constitutional Studies, praising her audience as “mainstream America” and patriots who had “heard the call.”) The columnist Frank Rich, among others, has suggested that the election of a black President sowed “fears of disenfranchisement among a dwindling and threatened minority in the country.” There are signs that this is so: Republicans’ singling out of Thurgood Marshall as an “activist Justice” during Elena Kagan’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings, the warnings on Fox News about the terrible dangers posed by the minuscule New Black Panther Party. But “socialist” is not a racial slur. Jim Crow was not built out of fears of the Federal Reserve and the I.R.S. The Tea Party’s fulminations against cap-and-trade, federal-government bailouts, and big government generally play on very old themes that have nothing to do with the color of President Obama’s skin.
The current right-wing resurgence has more to do with the inner dynamics of American conservatism in the past half century. In the nineteen-fifties and nineteen-sixties, the far right was condemned by liberals, as might be expected; in November, 1961, President Kennedy devoted part of a speech in Los Angeles to denouncing those “discordant voices of extremism” that “equate the Democratic Party with the welfare state, the welfare state with socialism, and socialism with Communism.” But the Bircher right also provoked deep anxiety among conservatives, who feared being perceived as paranoids and conspiracy-mongers.
The leading intellectual spokesman and organizer of the anti-Bircher conservatives was William F. Buckley, Jr., the editor of National Review. Buckley was by no means moderate in his conservatism. He was a lifelong defender of Joseph McCarthy and a foe of New Deal liberalism. But he drew the line at claiming that the course of American government was set by a socialist conspiracy, and he feared that the ravings of the extreme right would cost more balanced, practical conservatives their chance at national power. “By 1961,” his biographer John B. Judis writes, “Buckley was beginning to worry that with the John Birch Society growing so rapidly, the right-wing upsurge in the country would take an ugly, even Fascist turn rather than leading toward the kind of conservatism National Review had promoted.” In the next two decades, with Buckley’s support and counsel, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan completed a conservative revolution that succeeded by keeping extremist elements far from the centers of power.
As confidant and adviser to leading conservative politicians, Buckley had far more political influence than might be expected from the editor of a weekly journal. Yet in the early nineteen-sixties he found fighting the Birchers and their fellow-travellers extremely difficult. Even though some of Buckley’s colleagues at National Review thought that the Birch Society went too far, they would not attack the society publicly, for fear of alienating both the Birchers and the conservatives who sympathized with their views. When Buckley wrote an editorial in 1962 that accused Welch of “distorting reality” and failing to make “the crucial moral and political distinction” between Communists and liberals, the magazine immediately lost subscriptions and financial support.
By 1960, Senator Barry Goldwater, of Arizona, was emerging as the great political hope of conservative Republicans, and he consulted closely with Buckley. At a meeting at the Breakers hotel, in Palm Beach, in January, 1962, Buckley urged Goldwater to repudiate the Birch Society. Goldwater demurred; though he conceded that some embarrassing “kooks” lurked among the Birchers, he insisted to Buckley that there were also some “nice guys,” and that it would be injudicious to attack the group in public. The Birchers’ support helped gain Goldwater the Republican Presidential nomination in 1964, and he winked at them in his acceptance speech with his famous line: “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. . . . Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”
In the general election, though, Goldwater suffered a crushing loss to Lyndon Johnson, partly because Democrats succeeded in making him look like a captive of the loony right. (To the Goldwater slogan “In Your Heart, You Know He’s Right,” the Democrats shot back, “In Your Guts, You Know He’s Nuts.”) Buckley’s fears had been confirmed. But he was undeterred in his efforts to build a respectable and viable conservative movement. In 1967, he favored Richard Nixon among a field of Republican aspirants. He liked Ronald Reagan’s politics, but considered Reagan, who had only recently been elected the governor of California, too new to national politics. George Romney, the governor of Michigan, a wishy-washy moderate, was obviously unsuitable, to say nothing of the Republican archliberal Nelson Rockefeller, of New York. Nixon was a hard-nosed Republican with strong conservative views, especially on Communism and the Cold War; he had established himself as a Communist-hunter in the nineteen-forties by pressing the charge that Alger Hiss, a former official at the State Department, had spied for the Soviets. And, promisingly, Nixon was the front-runner. “It seems to me that we ought to have a real chance of winning this year,” Buckley wrote to Goldwater around the time of the Republican National Convention. He served the campaign as an adviser, and by aiding his friend Frank Shakespeare, who had taken charge of Nixon’s media operations.
But Buckley’s candidate had a reputation for shiftiness that made him unpopular across the political spectrum. Some of the editors of National Review, recalling that Nixon had cut a deal with Rockefeller in order to secure the G.O.P. nomination in 1960, didn’t sufficiently trust him. And the Birch Society had nothing but contempt for the figure whom Welch had called one of “the slipperiest politicians that ever showed up on the American scene.” As President, in 1969, Nixon began to open diplomatic relations with Communist China, and the right wing placed him on its list of perfidious appeasers. When he visited Beijing in 1972, even Buckley was deeply offended. But when the general election took place later that year, with the antiwar Democratic candidate, George McGovern, voicing the country’s anxieties over Vietnam, Buckley and the mainstream of what he called “responsible conservatism” returned to Nixon. The purist conservatives were left to back the third-party candidacy of John Schmitz, a Republican congressman and a member of the John Birch Society.
Nixon won in a landslide, and the next year he appointed Buckley the American delegate to the United Nations. The conservative pragmatists had found the way to real power. And, despite the embarrassment of Watergate, in Nixon’s second term, their strategy proved effective over time. Nixon’s campaign against McGovern sharpened the Democrats’ internal divisions over civil rights and Vietnam, and, Buckley wrote, revealed that the Democrats had “an indifference toward national independence and a hostility toward national freedom.” Meanwhile, the Buckley mainstream, having read the Birchers out of the conservative movement, established itself as a permanent and growing force in the Republican Party and in national politics.
In 1976, Buckley and National Review supported Ronald Reagan’s primary challenge to Nixon’s successor, Gerald Ford. After two terms as governor, Reagan had matured into what Buckley considered a nearly ideal conservative politician: a shrewd leader as well as a man of principle. Reagan nearly succeeded in wresting the nomination from Ford, demonstrating how formidable a national figure he had become. The Bircher right had flourished in his political bastion of Orange County, and Reagan was adept at winning extremists’ allegiance while he pursued realistic strategies. His pragmatic side showed immediately after he finally secured the Republican nomination in 1980, when he chose the relatively moderate George H. W. Bush, his bitter foe during the primaries, as his running mate. Though the decision dismayed right-wing ideologues, it had two practical benefits: it instantly healed the divisions between Republican moderates and conservatives, and it helped dampen charges from the Democrats that Reagan was a reckless right-winger. Nobody was more pleased by Bush’s selection than his fellow Skull and Bones man William F. Buckley, who understood the political logic as clearly as Reagan had.
As President, Reagan flattered the extremists—he even delivered some admiring words about Skousen’s Freemen Institute—but he saved his political capital for his real goals: undoing the fiscal underpinnings of New Deal-style government, and redirecting U.S. foreign policy by battling the Soviet Union and its proxies around the world. He appointed moderates to positions of importance, as when he made James Baker III, Bush’s close associate, his first chief of staff, rather than the far more ideological Edwin Meese III, his former chief of staff from California. (As a top policy adviser, Meese helped Reagan stack the federal bench with conservatives, but he was otherwise eclipsed by Baker and Baker’s deputy, the pragmatic Reaganite Michael Deaver, and his crusade, as Attorney General, to roll back civil-rights legislation largely failed.) When zealots in the Administration were exposed, as in the Iran-Contra scandal, Reagan skillfully evaded responsibility and replaced them with more centrist Republicans. And, when he recognized in Mikhail Gorbachev a Soviet leader with whom he could undertake genuine efforts to reduce the nuclear threat, Reagan pushed forward, ignoring the complaints that he had become, in the hard-liner Howard Phillips’s phrase, “a useful idiot for Soviet propaganda.”
Whatever misgivings may have arisen about him on the right, Reagan achieved a dramatic conservative overhaul of the federal tax code, a profound reconfiguring of the judiciary, and a near-victory for the West in the Cold War. From the standpoint of the mainstream right, the only problem with his legacy was that no other Republican could come close to matching his public appeal and political savvy. For the party of Reagan, his departure was the beginning of a long decline, and it is the absence of a similarly totemic figure, during the past twenty years, that has allowed the current resurgence of extremism. George H. W. Bush repelled right-wingers with his moderate tendencies—not least when, in the face of fiscal calamity, he broke his campaign pledge not to raise taxes. Bill Clinton inspired them to an almost ecstatic series of attacks, and though there remained enough of an older conservative establishment, personified by Senator Bob Dole, to check some of the wildest charges, the new Republican House majority after 1994, pushed by such ideologues as Tom DeLay and Dick Armey, had little interest in maintaining the center. They harassed Clinton, forcing an impeachment even though polls showed that more than sixty per cent of the American people disapproved. George W. Bush seemed at first to have a bit of Reagan’s conservative charisma, but the right wing turned against him for failing to win the war in Iraq, for his moderate position on immigration, and for spending hundreds of millions of federal dollars to combat the financial collapse in 2008. When William F. Buckley died, during the 2008 primary season, it seemed to symbolize the end of a conservative era. David Klinghoffer, a former literary editor at National Review, lamented that “urbane visionaries and builders of institutions” such as Buckley have been replaced by media figures “who make their money by stirring fears and resentments.” Conservatism, Klinghoffer added, “has undergone a shift toward demagoguery and hucksterism,” and is now ruled by those he called “the crazy-cons.”
From the New Yorker 10/18/10
Confounding Fathers
The Tea Party’s Cold War Roots
Glenn Beck’s view of American history stems from the paranoid politics of the fifties.
Tea Party; Glenn Beck; Conservatives; Republicans; Beck University; Fox News; Extremists A few months ago, the cable-television and radio host Glenn Beck began his Fox News show with one of his favorite props: a pipe clenched between his teeth. “I’ve got my pipe,” he told his audience, his speech slightly muddled by the stem, “because we’re going to speak about schoolish kind of things.” The theme of the day was “Restoring History,” and Beck, looking professorial in a neat dark blazer and a pink button-down shirt, began the lesson by peering at a stack of history textbooks and pronouncing them full of falsehoods, produced by “malicious progressive intent.” Progressives, he explained—liberals, socialists, Communists, the entire spectrum of the left—“knew they had to separate us from our history to be able to separate us from our Constitution and God.” For the next hour, Beck earnestly explained some of the history that “is being stolen from us”: the depression of 1920, for example, or how conservative economics saved the nation from the “near-depression” of 1946—crises that progressives don’t want you to know about. “You’ve been taught one lie, I think, your whole life,” he said.
For the fractious Tea Party movement, Beck—a former drive-time radio jockey, a recovering alcoholic, and a Mormon convert—has emerged as both a unifying figure and an intellectual guide. One opinion poll, released in July by Democracy Corps, showed that he is “the most highly regarded individual among Tea Party supporters,” seen not merely as an entertainer, like Rush Limbaugh, but as an “educator.” And in the past few months Beck has established his own institute of learning: the online, for-profit Beck University. Enrollees can take courses like Faith 102, which contends with “revisionists and secular progressives” about the separation of church and state; Hope 102, an attack on the activist federal government; and the combined Charity 101/102/103, a highly restrictive interpretation of rights, federalism, and the division of powers.
During the “Restoring History” episode, Beck twice encouraged viewers to join his Web seminars, where they can hear “lessons from the best and brightest historians and scholars that we could find.” The B.U. faculty consists of three members, including one bona-fide academic, James R. Stoner, Jr., the chair of the political-science department at Louisiana State University; the other two are the head of a management consulting firm and the founder of WallBuilders, which the Web site calls “a national pro-family organization.” Beck himself often acts as a professor, a slightly jocular one, on his Fox News program. Surrounded by charts and figures, he offers explanations of current politics and history lessons about the country’s long march to Obama-era totalitarianism. The decline, he says, began with the Progressive era of the early twentieth century, in particular with the Presidency of Woodrow Wilson, when both the Federal Reserve System and the graduated federal income tax came into existence. “Wilson,” Beck told his radio audience in August, “just despised what America was.”
from the issuecartoon banke-mail thisBeck’s claims have found an audience among Tea Party spokesmen and sympathizers. At the movement’s Freedom Summit in Washington last September, one activist told a reporter, “The election between Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson in 1912 was when it started going downhill.” And in April an angry member of the Tea Party Patriots group from Cape Fear, North Carolina, claimed on the group’s Web site that “the very things you see happening in this country today started with the Wilson Administration.”
At a Tax Day rally this past spring, the veteran conservative organizer Richard Viguerie described the Tea Party as “an unfettered new force of the middle class.” And, indeed, calling Obama a socialist in the tradition of Woodrow Wilson is audacious enough to seem like the marker of a new movement—or, at least, a new twist in the nation’s long history of conspiracy-mongering. In fact, it marks a revival of ideas that circulated on the extremist right half a century ago, especially in the John Birch Society and among its admirers.
Beck’s version of American history relies on lessons from his own acknowledged inspiration, the late right-wing writer W. Cleon Skousen, and also restates charges made by the Birch Society’s founder, Robert Welch. The political universe is, of course, very different today from what it was during the Cold War. Yet the Birchers’ politics and their view of American history—which focussed more on totalitarian threats at home than on those posed by the Soviet Union and Communist China—has proved remarkably persistent. The pressing historical question is how extremist ideas held at bay for decades inside the Republican Party have exploded anew—and why, this time, Party leaders have done virtually nothing to challenge those ideas, and a great deal to abet them.
The early nineteen-sixties were a turbulent time in American politics, for the right wing in particular. In the South, racist violence against civil-rights workers was constant, deepening sectional splits in the Democratic Party that would in time deliver the once solidly Democratic South to the Republicans. Southern elected officials, in support of what they called “massive resistance” to civil-rights laws and judicial rulings, resurrected the ideas of nullification and interposition, which claimed that individual states could void federal laws within their own borders. Others focussed on what they considered a fearsome Communist menace inside the United States. General Edwin A. Walker caused an enormous stir when he resigned from the Army in 1961, after President John F. Kennedy’s Pentagon reprimanded him for spreading right-wing propaganda among his troops and accusing prominent American officials of Communist sympathies. Senator Strom Thurmond, the Dixiecrat from South Carolina, spoke for many on the far right when he declared that various modestly liberal domestic programs “fall clearly within the category of socialism.”
The John Birch Society was one of the decade’s most controversial right-wing organizations. Founded in 1958 by Robert Welch, a candy manufacturer from Massachusetts, the society took its name from a Baptist missionary and military-intelligence officer killed by Communist Chinese forces in 1945, whom Welch called the first American casualty of the Cold War. The group was founded at a propitious time. After Senator Joseph McCarthy’s fall, in 1954, many of McCarthy’s followers felt bereft of a voice, and Welch seemed to speak for them; by the mid-sixties, his society’s membership was estimated to be as high as a hundred thousand. Welch, exploiting fears of what McCarthy had called an “immense” domestic conspiracy, declared that the federal government had already fallen into the Communists’ clutches. In a tract titled “The Politician,” he attacked President Dwight D. Eisenhower as “a dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy” who had been serving the plot “all of his adult life.” Late in 1961, after the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion, he accused the Kennedy Administration of “helping the Communists everywhere in the world while pretending to do the opposite.”
Wherever he looked, Welch saw Communist forces manipulating American economic and foreign policy on behalf of totalitarianism. But within the United States, he believed, the subversion had actually begun years before the Bolshevik Revolution. Conflating modern liberalism and totalitarianism, Welch described government as “always and inevitably an enemy of individual freedom.” Consequently, he charged, the Progressive era, which expanded the federal government’s role in curbing social and economic ills, was a dire period in our history, and Woodrow Wilson “more than any other one man started this nation on its present road to totalitarianism.”
In the nineteen-sixties, Welch became convinced that even the Communist movement was but “a tool of the total conspiracy.” This master conspiracy, he said, had forerunners in ancient Sparta, and sprang fully to life in the eighteenth century, in the “uniformly Satanic creed and program” of the Bavarian Illuminati. Run by those he called “the Insiders,” the conspiracy resided chiefly in international families of financiers, such as the Rothschilds and the Rockefellers, government agencies like the Federal Reserve System and the Internal Revenue Service, and nongovernmental organizations like the Bilderberg Group, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Trilateral Commission. Since the early twentieth century, they had done a good deal of their evil work under the guise of humanitarian uplift. “One broad avenue down which these conspiratorial forces advance was known as progressive legislation,” Welch declared in 1966. “The very same collectivist theories and demagogic pretenses which had destroyed earlier civilizations were now paraded forth in the disguise of new and modern concepts.”
In the worst case, Welch believed, military action might be necessary to dislodge the totalitarians. But for the moment a nonviolent political revolution would suffice. Accordingly, he designed the Birch Society roughly, if not explicitly, on the Marxist-Leninist model of a vanguard revolutionary party: a series of small cells that would work in secret to agitate the populace and elect right-thinking candidates to office. “It isn’t numbers we have to worry about,” Welch wrote, “but the courage on the part of our followers to stick their necks out and play rough—the same as the Communists do.”
The “Founder” himself would dictate the society’s policies, advised by a council of about two dozen businessmen and professionals, and the local cells would be overseen by unyielding commanders. “It is the leadership that is most demanding, most exacting of its followers,” Welch observed, “that achieves really dedicated support.” Welch’s group became synonymous with right-wing extremism, earning satirical blasts from critics ranging from the cartoonist Walt Kelly to the musicians Bob Dylan and Dizzy Gillespie. The trumpeter, whose actual name was John Birks Gillespie, made a humorous run for the Presidency in 1964, organizing John Birks Societies in twenty-five states.
Still, the most outlandish of the era’s right-wing anti-Communists was not Welch but Willard Cleon Skousen. A transplanted Canadian who served as a Mormon missionary in his teens, Skousen was considered so radical in the early nineteen-sixties that even J. Edgar Hoover’s F.B.I. watched him closely; one 1962 memo in his extensive F.B.I. file noted that “during the past year or so, Skousen has affiliated himself with the extreme right-wing ‘professional communists’ who are promoting their own anticommunism for obvious financial purposes.” Skousen was himself employed by the F.B.I., from 1935 until 1951, much of that time as a special agent working chiefly in administration. These desk jobs, he claimed implausibly, gave him access to confidential domestic intelligence about Communism. Skousen also maintained that he had served as Hoover’s administrative assistant; Hoover informed inquirers that there was no such position.
Skousen taught for years in the speech and religion departments at Brigham Young University, interrupted by a stint, from 1956 to 1960, as the police chief of Salt Lake City. His time in office was contentious, and after he raided a friendly card game attended by the city’s right-wing mayor, J. Bracken Lee, he was promptly fired. Lee called Skousen “a master of half truths” and said that he ran the police department “like a Gestapo”; Skousen’s supporters placed burning crosses on the Mayor’s lawn.
After losing his police job, Skousen founded a group called the All-American Society, which Time described in 1961 as an exemplar of the far-right “ultras.” Although he did not join the Birch Society, Skousen worked with its American Opinion Speakers’ Bureau, and, in 1963, wrote a rousing tract titled “The Communist Attack on the John Birch Society,” which condemned the society’s critics for “promoting the official Communist Party line.” (This was a tic of Skousen’s; he later defended the Mormon policy of denying the priesthood to blacks with a pamphlet called “The Communist Attack on the Mormons.”)
All along, Skousen’s evolving thoughts ran in tandem with Welch’s. In “The Naked Communist,” a lengthy primer published in 1958, he enlivened a survey of the worldwide leftist threat with outlandish claims, writing that F.D.R.’s adviser Harry Hopkins had treasonously delivered to the Soviets a large supply of uranium, and that the Russians built the first Sputnik with plans stolen from the United States. A year before Richard Condon’s novel “The Manchurian Candidate” appeared, Skousen announced that the Communists were creating “a regimented breed of Pavlovian men whose minds could be triggered into immediate action by signals from their masters.” A later book, “The Naked Capitalist,” decried the Ivy League Establishment, who, through the Federal Reserve, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Rockefeller Foundation, formed “the world’s secret power structure.” The conspiracy had begun, Skousen wrote, when reformers like the wealthy banker Edward M. (Colonel) House, a close adviser to President Woodrow Wilson, helped put into place the Federal Reserve and the graduated income tax.
In 1971, Skousen organized another group, the Freemen Institute, which he later renamed the National Center for Constitutional Studies. According to an article published in the Review of Religious Research, the center’s targets included “the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Federal Communication Commission’s fairness doctrine in editorial broadcasting, the federal government’s change of the gold standard in currency, all subsidies to farmers, all federal aid to education, all federal social welfare, foreign aid, social security, elimination of public school prayer and Bible reading, and (that familiar right-wing nemesis) the United Nations.”
Skousen’s pronouncements made him a pariah among most conservative activists, including some on the right-wing fringe. In 1962, the ultraconservative American Security Council threw him out, because members felt that he had “gone off the deep end.” In 1971, a review in the Mormon journal Dialogue accused Skousen of “inventing fantastic ideas and making inferences that go far beyond the bounds of honest commentary,” and advancing doctrines that came “perilously close” to Nazism. And in 1979, after Skousen called President Jimmy Carter a puppet of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Rockefeller family, the president of the Mormon church issued a national order banning announcements about his organizations.
Skousen was undeterred. In 1981, he produced “The 5,000 Year Leap,” a treatise that assembles selective quotations and groundless assertions to claim that the U.S. Constitution is rooted not in the Enlightenment but in the Bible, and that the framers believed in minimal central government. Either proposition would have astounded James Madison, often described as the guiding spirit behind the Constitution, who rejected state-established religions and, like Alexander Hamilton, proposed a central government so strong that it could veto state laws. “The 5,000 Year Leap” is not a fervid book. Instead, it is calmly, ingratiatingly misleading. Skousen quotes various eighteenth-century patriots on the evils of what Samuel Adams, in 1768, called “the Utopian schemes of leveling,” which Skousen equates with redistribution of wealth. But he does not mention the Founders’ endorsement of taxing the rich to support the general welfare. Thomas Jefferson, for example, wrote approvingly in 1811 of having federal taxes (then limited to tariffs) fall solely on the wealthy, which meant that “the farmer will see his government supported, his children educated, and the face of his country made a paradise by the contributions of the rich alone, without his being called on to spend a cent from his earnings.”
Skousen also challenges the separation of church and state, asserting that “the Founders were not indulging in any idle gesture when they adopted the motto ‘In God We Trust.’ ” In reality, the motto that came out of the Constitutional Convention was “E Pluribus Unum”: out of many, one. “In God We Trust” came much later; its use on coins was first permitted in 1864, and only in 1955, at the height of the Cold War, did Congress mandate that it appear on all currency. The following year, President Eisenhower—who Welch charged was a Communist agent—approved “In God We Trust” as the national motto.
In 1982, Skousen published a follow-up work, an ancestor-worshipping history text titled “The Making of America,” and prepared a study guide for nationwide seminars based on its contents. As Alexander Zaitchik reports in his informative study of Beck, “Common Nonsense,” the new book became an object of controversy in 1987, after the California Bicentennial Commission sold it as part of a fund-raising drive. Among its offenses was an account of slavery drawn from long-disgraced work by the historian Fred A. Shannon, which characterized slave children as “pickaninnies” and suggested that the worst victims of slavery were the slaveholders themselves. The constitutional scholar Jack Rakove, of Stanford, inspected Skousen’s book and seminars and pronounced them “a joke that no self-respecting scholar would think is worth a warm pitcher of spit.”
By the time Skousen died, in 2006, he was little remembered outside the ranks of the furthest-right Mormons. Then, in 2009, Glenn Beck began touting his work: “The Naked Communist,” “The Naked Capitalist,” and, especially, “The 5,000 Year Leap,” which he called “essential to understanding why our Founders built this Republic the way they did.” After Beck put the book in the first spot on his required-reading list—and wrote an enthusiastic new introduction for its reissue—it shot to the top of the Amazon best-seller list. In the first half of 2009, it sold more than two hundred and fifty thousand copies. Local branches of the Tea Party Patriots, the United American Tea Party, and other groups across the country have since organized study groups around it. “It is time we learn and follow the FREEDOM principles of our Founding Fathers,” a United American Tea Party video declares, referring to the principles expounded by Skousen’s book. If Beck is the movement’s teacher, “The 5,000 Year Leap” has become its primer, with “The Making of America” as a kind of 102-level text.
The popularity of Beck’s broadcasts, which now reach two million viewers each day, has brought neo-Birchite ideas to an audience beyond any that Welch or Skousen might have dreamed of. Several times a week, Beck informs his audience that socialists (whom he also sometimes calls Fascists or Communists) led by Obama have seized power, and that patriotic Americans must take their country back. His TV show for some time featured “Comrade Updates,” in which Beck described perfidy while the Soviet anthem played in the background. He attacks all the familiar bogeymen: the Federal Reserve System (which he asserts is a private conglomerate, unaccountable to the public); the Council on Foreign Relations (born of a “progressive idea” to manipulate the media in order to “let the masses know what should be done”); and a historical procession of evildoers, including Skousen’s old target Colonel House and Welch’s old target Woodrow Wilson. His sources on these matters, quite apart from Skousen’s books, can be unreliable. On September 22nd, amid a diatribe about House, Beck cited a passage from “Secrets of the Federal Reserve,” by Eustace Mullins. The book, commissioned in 1948 by Ezra Pound, is a startlingly anti-Semitic fantasy of how a Jewish-led conspiracy of all-powerful bankers established the Federal Reserve in service of their plot to dominate the world.
Part of Beck’s allure is the promise that he will reveal secret information. In one segment last year, he produced a drawing of fasces—which he described, anachronistically, as “the Roman symbol of Fascism”—and then a picture of an old Mercury dime, with fasces on the reverse side. “Who brought this dime in? It happened in 1916—Woodrow Wilson was the President,” he said. “We’ve been on the road to Fascism for a while.” Benito Mussolini, of course, didn’t adopt the ancient symbol of authority as the Fascist emblem until the nineteen-twenties; the designer of the coin, the sculptor Adolph A. Weinman, intended it to signify the nation’s military preparedness, and paired it with an olive branch to illustrate the desire for peace.
Beck’s readings of Progressive-era politics are nearly as bizarre. Whatever can be said about Theodore Roosevelt, he was not a crypto-radical. It was Roosevelt who coined the term “lunatic fringe” to describe the extreme leftists of his day, and his concept of New Nationalism—in which an activist government built a vibrant capitalism, partly by regulating big business—looked back to Alexander Hamilton, not Karl Marx. Nor was Wilson a Bolshevik; in fact, in 1917 he sent American troops to Russia to support the anti-Bolshevik White Army. At home, his reforms sought to break up monopolies in order to restore competition among small companies. “If America is not to have free enterprise,” Wilson declared, “then she can have no freedom of any sort whatever.”
In 2007, Beck, then the host of “Glenn Beck,” on CNN’s Headline News, brought to his show a John Birch Society spokesman named Sam Antonio, who warned of a government plot to abolish U.S. borders with Mexico and Canada, “and eventually all throughout the Americas.” Beck told Antonio, “When I was growing up, the John Birch Society—I thought they were a bunch of nuts.” But now, he said, “you guys are starting to make more and more sense to me.” His guest beamed. “Yes, we at the John Birch Society are not nuts,” Antonio said. “We are just exposing the truth that’s been out there for many, many years.” Since then, the Birch Society’s Web site has run clips from Beck’s Fox broadcasts, proudly pointing out similarities with their own ideas. Last June, an essay on the site described a presentation by Beck on Communism in America as “the ultimate in complete agreement between the Beck and JBS presentations of American history.”
Beck has also praised Ezra Taft Benson, one of Skousen’s close associates. Benson, the Secretary of Agriculture under President Eisenhower and the thirteenth president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, gained notoriety for a speech in 1966 in which he denounced Democratic officeholders and intellectuals (including the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.) as socialists and Communist sympathizers, warned that “the Constitution will be endangered and hang, as it were, by a single thread,” and praised the John Birch Society as “the most effective non-church organization in our fight against creeping socialism and Godless Communism.” Last June, Beck aired a clip from another Benson speech, intoning, “Ezra Taft Benson warned about what was coming.” The Birch Society’s Web site subsequently praised Beck for “getting progressively (sorry for the bad word choice) closer to presenting American history in the way that The John Birch Society has been doing it for over 50 years.”
Beck is no more the sole representative of today’s multifaceted Tea Party than Welch or Skousen was of the nineteen-sixties far right; he recently told the Times, a bit disingenuously, that he was “not involved with the Tea Party.” Why, then, have the politics of Skousen, Benson, and the John Birch Society had such a resurgence among conservative Republicans—not just through Beck but through Tea Party heroes like the Nevada Republican Senate candidate Sharron Angle? (Last month, Angle gave a warm address to a “freedom conference” in Salt Lake City, co-sponsored by the John Birch Society and Skousen’s old group, the National Center for Constitutional Studies, praising her audience as “mainstream America” and patriots who had “heard the call.”) The columnist Frank Rich, among others, has suggested that the election of a black President sowed “fears of disenfranchisement among a dwindling and threatened minority in the country.” There are signs that this is so: Republicans’ singling out of Thurgood Marshall as an “activist Justice” during Elena Kagan’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings, the warnings on Fox News about the terrible dangers posed by the minuscule New Black Panther Party. But “socialist” is not a racial slur. Jim Crow was not built out of fears of the Federal Reserve and the I.R.S. The Tea Party’s fulminations against cap-and-trade, federal-government bailouts, and big government generally play on very old themes that have nothing to do with the color of President Obama’s skin.
The current right-wing resurgence has more to do with the inner dynamics of American conservatism in the past half century. In the nineteen-fifties and nineteen-sixties, the far right was condemned by liberals, as might be expected; in November, 1961, President Kennedy devoted part of a speech in Los Angeles to denouncing those “discordant voices of extremism” that “equate the Democratic Party with the welfare state, the welfare state with socialism, and socialism with Communism.” But the Bircher right also provoked deep anxiety among conservatives, who feared being perceived as paranoids and conspiracy-mongers.
The leading intellectual spokesman and organizer of the anti-Bircher conservatives was William F. Buckley, Jr., the editor of National Review. Buckley was by no means moderate in his conservatism. He was a lifelong defender of Joseph McCarthy and a foe of New Deal liberalism. But he drew the line at claiming that the course of American government was set by a socialist conspiracy, and he feared that the ravings of the extreme right would cost more balanced, practical conservatives their chance at national power. “By 1961,” his biographer John B. Judis writes, “Buckley was beginning to worry that with the John Birch Society growing so rapidly, the right-wing upsurge in the country would take an ugly, even Fascist turn rather than leading toward the kind of conservatism National Review had promoted.” In the next two decades, with Buckley’s support and counsel, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan completed a conservative revolution that succeeded by keeping extremist elements far from the centers of power.
As confidant and adviser to leading conservative politicians, Buckley had far more political influence than might be expected from the editor of a weekly journal. Yet in the early nineteen-sixties he found fighting the Birchers and their fellow-travellers extremely difficult. Even though some of Buckley’s colleagues at National Review thought that the Birch Society went too far, they would not attack the society publicly, for fear of alienating both the Birchers and the conservatives who sympathized with their views. When Buckley wrote an editorial in 1962 that accused Welch of “distorting reality” and failing to make “the crucial moral and political distinction” between Communists and liberals, the magazine immediately lost subscriptions and financial support.
By 1960, Senator Barry Goldwater, of Arizona, was emerging as the great political hope of conservative Republicans, and he consulted closely with Buckley. At a meeting at the Breakers hotel, in Palm Beach, in January, 1962, Buckley urged Goldwater to repudiate the Birch Society. Goldwater demurred; though he conceded that some embarrassing “kooks” lurked among the Birchers, he insisted to Buckley that there were also some “nice guys,” and that it would be injudicious to attack the group in public. The Birchers’ support helped gain Goldwater the Republican Presidential nomination in 1964, and he winked at them in his acceptance speech with his famous line: “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. . . . Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”
In the general election, though, Goldwater suffered a crushing loss to Lyndon Johnson, partly because Democrats succeeded in making him look like a captive of the loony right. (To the Goldwater slogan “In Your Heart, You Know He’s Right,” the Democrats shot back, “In Your Guts, You Know He’s Nuts.”) Buckley’s fears had been confirmed. But he was undeterred in his efforts to build a respectable and viable conservative movement. In 1967, he favored Richard Nixon among a field of Republican aspirants. He liked Ronald Reagan’s politics, but considered Reagan, who had only recently been elected the governor of California, too new to national politics. George Romney, the governor of Michigan, a wishy-washy moderate, was obviously unsuitable, to say nothing of the Republican archliberal Nelson Rockefeller, of New York. Nixon was a hard-nosed Republican with strong conservative views, especially on Communism and the Cold War; he had established himself as a Communist-hunter in the nineteen-forties by pressing the charge that Alger Hiss, a former official at the State Department, had spied for the Soviets. And, promisingly, Nixon was the front-runner. “It seems to me that we ought to have a real chance of winning this year,” Buckley wrote to Goldwater around the time of the Republican National Convention. He served the campaign as an adviser, and by aiding his friend Frank Shakespeare, who had taken charge of Nixon’s media operations.
But Buckley’s candidate had a reputation for shiftiness that made him unpopular across the political spectrum. Some of the editors of National Review, recalling that Nixon had cut a deal with Rockefeller in order to secure the G.O.P. nomination in 1960, didn’t sufficiently trust him. And the Birch Society had nothing but contempt for the figure whom Welch had called one of “the slipperiest politicians that ever showed up on the American scene.” As President, in 1969, Nixon began to open diplomatic relations with Communist China, and the right wing placed him on its list of perfidious appeasers. When he visited Beijing in 1972, even Buckley was deeply offended. But when the general election took place later that year, with the antiwar Democratic candidate, George McGovern, voicing the country’s anxieties over Vietnam, Buckley and the mainstream of what he called “responsible conservatism” returned to Nixon. The purist conservatives were left to back the third-party candidacy of John Schmitz, a Republican congressman and a member of the John Birch Society.
Nixon won in a landslide, and the next year he appointed Buckley the American delegate to the United Nations. The conservative pragmatists had found the way to real power. And, despite the embarrassment of Watergate, in Nixon’s second term, their strategy proved effective over time. Nixon’s campaign against McGovern sharpened the Democrats’ internal divisions over civil rights and Vietnam, and, Buckley wrote, revealed that the Democrats had “an indifference toward national independence and a hostility toward national freedom.” Meanwhile, the Buckley mainstream, having read the Birchers out of the conservative movement, established itself as a permanent and growing force in the Republican Party and in national politics.
In 1976, Buckley and National Review supported Ronald Reagan’s primary challenge to Nixon’s successor, Gerald Ford. After two terms as governor, Reagan had matured into what Buckley considered a nearly ideal conservative politician: a shrewd leader as well as a man of principle. Reagan nearly succeeded in wresting the nomination from Ford, demonstrating how formidable a national figure he had become. The Bircher right had flourished in his political bastion of Orange County, and Reagan was adept at winning extremists’ allegiance while he pursued realistic strategies. His pragmatic side showed immediately after he finally secured the Republican nomination in 1980, when he chose the relatively moderate George H. W. Bush, his bitter foe during the primaries, as his running mate. Though the decision dismayed right-wing ideologues, it had two practical benefits: it instantly healed the divisions between Republican moderates and conservatives, and it helped dampen charges from the Democrats that Reagan was a reckless right-winger. Nobody was more pleased by Bush’s selection than his fellow Skull and Bones man William F. Buckley, who understood the political logic as clearly as Reagan had.
As President, Reagan flattered the extremists—he even delivered some admiring words about Skousen’s Freemen Institute—but he saved his political capital for his real goals: undoing the fiscal underpinnings of New Deal-style government, and redirecting U.S. foreign policy by battling the Soviet Union and its proxies around the world. He appointed moderates to positions of importance, as when he made James Baker III, Bush’s close associate, his first chief of staff, rather than the far more ideological Edwin Meese III, his former chief of staff from California. (As a top policy adviser, Meese helped Reagan stack the federal bench with conservatives, but he was otherwise eclipsed by Baker and Baker’s deputy, the pragmatic Reaganite Michael Deaver, and his crusade, as Attorney General, to roll back civil-rights legislation largely failed.) When zealots in the Administration were exposed, as in the Iran-Contra scandal, Reagan skillfully evaded responsibility and replaced them with more centrist Republicans. And, when he recognized in Mikhail Gorbachev a Soviet leader with whom he could undertake genuine efforts to reduce the nuclear threat, Reagan pushed forward, ignoring the complaints that he had become, in the hard-liner Howard Phillips’s phrase, “a useful idiot for Soviet propaganda.”
Whatever misgivings may have arisen about him on the right, Reagan achieved a dramatic conservative overhaul of the federal tax code, a profound reconfiguring of the judiciary, and a near-victory for the West in the Cold War. From the standpoint of the mainstream right, the only problem with his legacy was that no other Republican could come close to matching his public appeal and political savvy. For the party of Reagan, his departure was the beginning of a long decline, and it is the absence of a similarly totemic figure, during the past twenty years, that has allowed the current resurgence of extremism. George H. W. Bush repelled right-wingers with his moderate tendencies—not least when, in the face of fiscal calamity, he broke his campaign pledge not to raise taxes. Bill Clinton inspired them to an almost ecstatic series of attacks, and though there remained enough of an older conservative establishment, personified by Senator Bob Dole, to check some of the wildest charges, the new Republican House majority after 1994, pushed by such ideologues as Tom DeLay and Dick Armey, had little interest in maintaining the center. They harassed Clinton, forcing an impeachment even though polls showed that more than sixty per cent of the American people disapproved. George W. Bush seemed at first to have a bit of Reagan’s conservative charisma, but the right wing turned against him for failing to win the war in Iraq, for his moderate position on immigration, and for spending hundreds of millions of federal dollars to combat the financial collapse in 2008. When William F. Buckley died, during the 2008 primary season, it seemed to symbolize the end of a conservative era. David Klinghoffer, a former literary editor at National Review, lamented that “urbane visionaries and builders of institutions” such as Buckley have been replaced by media figures “who make their money by stirring fears and resentments.” Conservatism, Klinghoffer added, “has undergone a shift toward demagoguery and hucksterism,” and is now ruled by those he called “the crazy-cons.”
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