From NPR
Morning Edition

What Does A 'Post-American World' Look Like?
June 30, 2011



Dubai now boasts the world's largest building, Burj Khalifa. Zakaria says the world is now experiencing what he calls "the rise of the rest," where countries around the world are growing at previously unthinkable rates.
text size A A A June 30, 2011
Thirty years ago, the United States dominated the world politically, economically and scientifically. But today?

"The tallest building in the world is now in Dubai, the biggest factory in the world is in China, the largest oil refinery is in India, the largest investment fund in the world is in Abu Dhabi, the largest Ferris wheel in the world is in Singapore," notes Fareed Zakaria. "And ... more troublingly, [the United States is] also losing [its] key grip on indices such as patent creation, scientific creations and things like that — which are really harbingers of future economic growth."

Zakaria, the host of CNN's Global Public Square (GPS) and an editor at large for Time magazine, charts the fall of America's dominance and the simultaneous rise of the rest of the world in his book The Post-American World: Release 2.0, which shows how the collapse of communism and the Soviet empire — as well as the rise of global markets — has leveled the playing field for many other countries around the world.

"The result is you have countries all over the world thriving and taking advantage of the political stability they have achieved, the economic connections of a global market, the technological connection into this market," he tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "And we are all witnesses to this phenomenon."


The Post-American World: Release 2.0
By Fareed Zakaria
Hardcover, 336 pages
W.W. Norton & Co.
List Price: $26.95
Read An Excerpt

America, Zakaria says, is also starting to lag behind other countries in education, building a competitive workforce, and fostering new energy and digital infrastructure to support those workers — all markers of long-term economic growth. He says America is now heading toward what he calls a "post-American" world, in which the United States' share of the "global pie" is much smaller — as the rest of the globe begins to catch up.

"In economic terms, the rise of the rest [of the globe] is a win-win," he says. "The more countries that get rich [and] the larger the world economy, the more people there are producing, consuming, investing, saving, loaning money. ... If we didn't have the rest of the world growing, the United States economy would be in much worse shape than it is today."

But Zakaria cautions that the economic growth around the world — and the benefits that global economic stability create — do not extend to the political arena.

"Politics and power is a realm of relative influence," he says. "So as China expands its role in Asia, whose role is diminishing? Of course, the established power — the United States. It's not possible for two countries to be the leading dominant political power at the same time."

America's political system, Zakaria says, becomes mired in debate and cannot deal with the short-term deficit. "To put it in perspective, if Congress were to do nothing, the Bush tax cuts would expire next year," he says. "That by itself would yield $3.9 trillion to the federal government over the next 10 years. We would go to the bottom of the pack in terms of deficit as a percentage of GDP among the rich countries in the world — we would basically solve our fiscal problems for the short term."


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Fareed Zakaria is the host of CNN's international affairs program GPS, an editor at large for Time magazine and a columnist for The Washington Post.

W. W. Norton & Co.
Fareed Zakaria is the host of CNN's international affairs program GPS, an editor at large for Time magazine and a columnist for The Washington Post.
Interview Highlights
On the U.S. economy


"We have the leading companies and the leading sectors in the advanced industrial world, we have an incredibly dynamic society, and we have high levels of entrepreneurship. And we have the best universities in the world. ... We also have impeccable credit. What we don't have is a political system that can take the simple measures to deal with our short-term deficit."

On what might happen if the U.S. defaults on debt


"I tend to think it will be catastrophic. I think, more importantly, there is a high enough risk here that this is surely a game we don't want to play. ... There are events that economics call low-probability, high-impact events that you don't want to test. You don't want to see if this is one of those things that is an unlikely situation but once it happens could have a huge seismic global effect, because then the cost of dealing with the after-effects is just cataclysmic."

On the government's role in innovation


"We have this debate in America that is almost a theoretical debate about the role of government in the economy and whether government should be involved, and I worry that while we're having this theoretical debate, on the other side of the world, the Chinese government is vigorously promoting industry after industry, the German government is vigorously promoting its manufacturing center, the South Korean government is vigorously promoting its manufacturing sector — and by the time we've resolved our debate, there won't be any industries left to compete in. It is absolutely clear that government plays a key role, as a catalyst, in promoting long-run growth."

On Germany


"Germany is a fascinating role model. The Germans have maintained their manufacturing edge despite being a high-tax, high-regulation economy. Why? Because the government really set about ensuring that it maintained funding for technical training, technical advancements and programs. It made a concerted effort to retain high-end, complex manufacturing — the kind of BMW model, if you will. And they've done that so successfully that Germany, which has a quarter of America's population, exports more than America does."

Gordon Wood

Today on NPR I heard the esteemed historian Gordon Wood talking on the Diane Rehm Show. Professor Wood, professor emeritus at Brown University, is the most honored and respected historian of our country's origins in the 18th century. He is the author many, many books detailing the Revolutionary War and the founding of the country. After hearing him speak, I expect to read his books.

Jon Ronson - The Psychopath Test (2)

I did not know about the Scientology "war on psychiatry." Not that I've ever thought about it! As far as I'm concerned, Scientology is nonsense. I haven't checked into it thoroughly, but from what I know, there is nothing to it. Sorry, Tom Cruise.

We have to remember that this is a book about "the psychopath test" written by a journalist. I take it as entertainment, maybe factual, maybe not in some places, but entertainment only.

I've never thought much about psychopathy because as far as I know, I've never met or had to deal with a psychopath.

Knowledgeable people say psychiatry is in a "state of crisis." Maybe so, but I'm not greatly concerned with this subject anymore.

Ideology Triumphs Facts

by Paul Krugman

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
June 26, 2011, 4:03 am
Wrong Wrong Wrong
Bruce Bartlett points out something I had forgotten: the 1993 Clinton tax increase wasn’t the first time conservatives predicted doom from any rise in tax rates. They did the same in response to the Reagan tax hike of 1982 — and yes, the sainted Reagan, after cutting taxes at the beginning, raised them repeatedly thereafter.

What actually happened, of course, was a V-shaped recovery — Morning in America — which was mainly due to Fed policy, but got credited to the 1981 tax cut. And the 1982 tax hike got sent down the memory hole.

The story I knew was about that Clinton tax hike, which was supposed to send the economy into a tailspin.

Let’s also mention the Bush tax cuts, which were supposed to produce a vast boom, and ended up being followed by the weakest recovery of modern times.

The point is that these people have been wrong about everything — and yet tax-cut magic is the official religion of the GOP.

What Gay Talese Reads

From: The Atlantic


How do other people deal with the torrent of information that pours down on us all? What sources can't they live without? We regularly reach out to prominent figures in media, entertainment, politics, the arts and the literary world, to hear their answers to these questions. This is drawn from a conversation with Gay Talese, the author of "Frank Sinatra Has A Cold," "Vogueland," "Mr. Bad News," "The Silent Season of a Hero" and countless other pieces of literary journalism that could have been written by no one else. His new book Frank Sinatra Has a Cold And Other Essays is out now.

I get up around 7 a.m. My first reading each morning is The New York Times, which is delivered. It's at my door around 6:30. I try to get up and go downstairs before my wife [editor and publisher Nan Talese] so I'll have the paper read before she comes down to the dining room and turns on WQXR. I want to be halfway into the paper by the time she comes down and reads the part of the paper I'm not reading, and before the housekeeper, a French woman who's been with us for 20 years, comes to walk these two Australian terriers we have.

So the routine here is for me to have a little quiet time to concentrate on what I do, as I read the newspaper from cover-to-cover. There's a lot of time devoted to reading before 9:30. Between 7 o'clock and 9:30, I probably have about 40 minutes or half-an-hour of quietude where I make my own coffee and get as far as probably through the main front section.

I read the New York Times as I told you. What I didn't tell you is, it takes me at least two hours to read. Because I read it. I read every section of that paper. I start on page one and I go right through all the sections. I read Business Day and I read the Home section and I read the Arts section and I read the Style section. And of course, the Sports section. I always have Sports last, I don't know why it's true. The Sports section is only read by me, my wife doesn't ever look at it, so I can take that with me later on to the gym.

I used to work for the paper back in the 1950s and 1960s. My professional career with the Times began when I was 21 years old. I worked first as a copy boy for few years, went into the Army for two years, and came back in 1956 and worked as a reporter for nine years. There's hardly anybody there today that was there when I was there. But I read the paper and follow the new generation of Times people from their various assignments. I see names in European bureaus that were once in Asia. I see people like Dan Barry, who is one of my favorite writers at The Times. I remember him when he was a New York correspondent, and now he travels the United States writing about whatever he writes about. It's always very interesting, he's a very fine writer. Jeffrey Gettleman, he's in Africa, but I remember him elsewhere. You follow these names. Joyce Wadler, for example, writes for the Home section, she used to write this kind of bold-faced column. She's a very sprightly writer, I follow her. Of course, Maureen Dowd, I used to follow her when she was a Washington correspondent, before she was a columnist. Now Elisabeth Bumiller does what Maureen Dowd used to do before Maureen Dowd had her column.

As I said the dogs make it tough to read the paper. Between Bach being on WQXR and the news interrupting you have this noise. So what I usually do is, when the housekeeper arrives at 9:30, I'm out of there. I go upstairs and I take maybe the Sports section with me and I dress for the day. I then go down to where I work, which is a basement, what I call a bunker, under the house. I take a of thermos filled with the coffee that I've made upstairs downstairs to my little office beneath the house. I have a kitchenette where I can make eggs.

Then I get to work. I work on my own stuff--a book I'm working on, or maybe a magazine article that I'm doing. So I'll go down and work in the bunker where there's no phone. I'm not into the technology, as you've probably heard me say, you've probably picked it up. I do not own a cell phone. I have an old computer that's really a typewriter, it's about 20 years old. It's just something I type on. But I do have typewriters, I still have them, I still use them. I know a man who repairs typewriters, who supplies parts for typewriters, who gives you tape for typewriters. He's in his late 70s, and he's as old as I am. He just wanders around town making house calls for typewriters that are in disrepair or typewriters that are ailing from whatever typewriters ail from

Around one o'clock I go out to a gym called Equinox which is on 63rd Street, on Lexington Avenue. I'll buy the New York Post and the New York Daily News at a newsstand. There's a shoe shine stand up 62nd, off Lexington, towards Third, and there's a woman, her name is Monica. I think she's from Ecuador. She gives the best shine in New York--there's a sign outside that says 'Best shine in New York.' In this little shoe shop, a little bit larger than a telephone booth, there is this guy that repairs shoes and this woman named Monica--a hefty woman, a vigorous woman--who gives your shoes a shine you can't get anywhere else in the city of New York. Up on the stand there, she always has the New York Post and the New York Daily News, and if I haven't bought those two papers, I read them there while I'm getting my shoes shined.

Around 2 p.m. is when I usually start off my exercise on the stationary bike. That's when I finish reading The New York Times Sports section. If I haven't gone to Monica in the shoe shop, I'll read the New York Post or the New York Daily News. Sometimes there are papers left there, like the Wall Street Journal or maybe USA Today. You see them in the locker room, someone left them there, I'll pick them up and read them.

If you're reading the tabloids, you can put your little headset on and watch the little row of television sets against the wall. In my case, that's channel 53 [YES] most afternoons, I'm always watching Mike Francesa. He used to host Mike and the Mad Dog? Now the Mad Dog's gone. I watch this guy, with these maniacs that are sports fans calling in. I'm diverted by that stuff, I'm a sports fan. I'm long removed from sports writing, which I did my first two years with The Times, but a little bit of me is still back in that world. I follow the teams. I follow the Yankees mainly. I follow the Giants. I wish Plaxico Burress would come back. I followed basketball a little more last year, because of the Knickerbockers and the two stars they acquired.

What I'm trying to say is, during the early part of the day, I'm reading only newspapers. I don't read Time or Newsweek at that time if I read them at all. I don't read Esquire. Sometimes I'll read leftover magazines in the gym, like Vanity Fair maybe or GQ.

I leave the gym around 3:30 and go back to my house and return to the bunker. I work there from 4 o'clock until maybe 7 or 8. My wife comes back from the office around 7, 7:30, and we usually have something to do at night. I go out almost every night. But I'm never out too late, because I have a lot of book reading to do. This is the second phase of my reading. The morning is newspapers, the evening is books. My wife has been in the book business for all of her married life, and I've been in the book business and the newspaper business and the magazine business and the writing business for all of my life. The two of us probably know most of the active writers that live in New York, or pass through, or come from overseas. So we have a great number of acquaintances and sometimes friends and sometimes even close friends who are writers. And of course writers are always writing and telling you what they're writing and sending you what they're writing. And in my case, I have a big pressure of producing blurbs for the writers that know me personally and tell me that they've finished a book and would I read it and if I like it would I give a blurb to the publisher of that book. And I find it hard to refuse, because I know these people personally. And If I respect their work, I say yes, I'll be glad to.

In the last few months, to give you an example of the books I've been through: there's a wonderful new book by John Lithgow, the actor, I know him a little bit. It's called Drama. It's not released yet, but I read it already. I blurbed that book. And of course Oscar Hijuelos, I know him personally, he has a memoir, Thoughts Without Cigarettes. And there's a book by young Louisa Thomas, she's the great-great granddaughter of Norman Thomas who ran six or seven times as a socialist for president of the United States. Her father Evan Thomas used to be the editor of Newsweek. I read her book, it's called Conscience, it's an excellent book.

I prefer fiction to non-fiction because it's better written. From the time I was young, it was my favorite ficiton writers who inspired me to write non-fiction as if it were fiction. Not faking information or changing information or exagerrating information--the storytelling technique. It was all drawn on my enthusiasm from my favorite fiction writers--Carson McCullers and John Cheever and Hemingway and Irwin Shaw, a wonderful forgotten writer. And of course F. Scott Fitzgerald, my favorite writer of all-time.

I don't read the Washington Post with any regularity. I don't subscribe to it. I don't subscribe to any other paper except the New York Observer, which comes on Wednesdays. There's only so much you can devote in any one day to reading. But you must read. That's why I feel I must read the newspapers first. Why? Because I really want to know what is going on. But I don't have more than one main paper that I can rely upon, and that is The Times. That is the paper of record and the paper of significance. It does the best job of any paper in the whole world of covering the world. And of covering the world of the artist, and of covering the world of the athlete, and of covering the world of the interior decorator, and the statesman, and the politician, and the politician that sends pictures of himself nude to some women who don't even know him. These worlds are reflected everyday by the writers and columnists, and shaped by editors who are top analyzers of the news.

We Need Books NOW More than Ever

Johann HariColumnist, the London Independent
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In The Age of Distraction, We Need One Thing More Than Ever: Books
Posted: 06/23/11 09:59 PM ET
In the twentieth century, all the nightmare-novels of the future imagined books would be burned. In the twenty-first century, our dystopias imagine a world where books are forgotten. To pluck just one, Gary Steynghart's novel Super Sad True Love Story describes a world where everybody is obsessed with their electronic Apparat -- an even more omnivorous iPhone with a flickering stream of shopping and reality shows and porn -- and have somehow come to believe that the few remaining unread paper books let off a rank smell. The book on the book, it suggests, is closing.

I have been thinking about this because I recently moved flats, which for me meant boxing and heaving several Everests of books, accumulated obsessively since I was a kid. Ask me to throw away a book, and I begin shaking like Meryl Streep in Sophie's Choice and insist that I just couldn't bear to part company with it, no matter how unlikely it is I will ever read (say) a 1000-page biography of little-known Portuguese dictator Antonio Salazar. As I stacked my books high, and watched my friends get buried in landslides of novels or avalanches of polemics, it struck me that this scene might be incomprehensible a generation from now. Yes, a few specialists still haul their vinyl collections from house to house, but the rest of us have migrated happily to MP3s, and regard them as slightly odd. Does it matter? What was really lost?

The book -- the physical paper book -- is being circled by a shoal of sharks, with sales down 9 percent this year alone. It's being chewed by the e-book. It's being gored by the death of the bookshop and the library. And most importantly, the mental space it occupied is being eroded by the thousand Weapons of Mass Distraction that surround us all. It's hard to admit, but we all sense it: it is becoming almost physically harder to read books. I think we should start there -- because it shows why we need the physical book to survive, and hints at what we need to do to make sure it does.

In his gorgeous little book The Lost Art of Reading -- Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time, the critic David Ulin admits to a strange feeling. All his life, he had taken reading as for granted as eating -- but then, a few years ago, he "became aware, in an apartment full of books, that I could no longer find within myself the quiet necessary to read." He would sit down to do it at night, as he always had, and read a few paragraphs, then find his mind was wandering, imploring him to check his email, or Twitter, or Facebook. "What I'm struggling with," he writes, "is the encroachment of the buzz, the sense that there's something out there that merits my attention, when in fact it's mostly a series of disconnected riffs, quick takes and fragments, that add up to the anxiety of the age."

I think most of us have this sense today, if we are honest. If you read a book with your laptop thrumming at the other side of the room, it can feel like trying to read with a heavy metal band shrieking in front of you. To read, you need to slow down. You need mental silence except for the words. That's getting harder to find.

No, don't misunderstand me. I adore the web, and they will have to wrench my Twitter feed from my cold dead hands. This isn't going to turn into an antedeluvian rant against the glories of our wired world. But there's a reason why that word -- 'wired' -- means both 'connected to the internet' and 'high, frantic, unable to concentrate.'

So in the age of the internet, physical paper books are a technology we need more, not less. In the 1950s, the novelist Herman Hesse wrote: "The more the need for entertainment and mainstream education can be met by new inventions, the more the book will recover its dignity and authority. We have not yet quite reached the point where young competitors, such as radio, cinema, etc, have taken over the functions from the book it can't afford to lose."

We have now reached that point. And here's the function that the book -- the paper book that doesn't beep or flash or link or let you watch a thousand videos all at once -- does for you that nothing else will. It gives you the capacity for deep, linear concentration. As Ulin puts it: "Reading is an act of resistance in a landscape of distraction... It requires us to pace ourselves. It returns us to a reckoning with time. In the midst of a book, we have no choice but to be patient, to take each thing in its moment, to let the narrative prevail. We regain the world by withdrawing from it just a little, by stepping back from the noise."

A book has a different relationship to time than a TV show or a Facebook update. It says that something was worth taking from the endless torrent of data and laying down on an object that will still look the same a hundred years from now. The French writer Jean-Phillipe De Tonnac says "the true function of books is to safeguard the things that forgetfulness constantly threatens to destroy." It's precisely because it is not immediate -- because it doesn't know what happened five minutes ago in Kazakhstan, or in Charlie Sheen's apartment -- that the book matters.

That's why we need books, and why I believe they will survive. Because most humans have a desire to engage in deep thought and deep concentration. Those muscles are necessary for deep feeling and deep engagement. Most humans don't just want mental snacks forever; they also want meals. The twenty hours it takes to read a book require a sustained concentration it's hard to get anywhere else. Sure, you can do that with a DVD boxset too -- but your relationship to TV will always ultimately be that of a passive spectator. With any book, you are the co-creator, imagining it as you go. As Kurt Vonnegut put it, literature is the only art form in which the audience plays the score.

I'm not against e-books in principle -- I'm tempted by the Kindle -- but the more they become interactive and linked, the more they multitask and offer a hundred different functions, the less they will be able to preserve the aspects of the book that we actually need. An e-book reader that does a lot will not, in the end, be a book. The object needs to remain dull so the words -- offering you the most electric sensation of all: insight into another person's internal life -- can sing.

So how do we preserve the mental space for the book? We are the first generation to ever use the internet, and when I look at how we are reacting to it, I keep thinking of the Inuit communities I met in the Arctic, who were given alcohol and sugar for the first time a generation ago, and guzzled them so rapidly they were now sunk in obesity and alcoholism. Sugar, alcohol and the web are all amazing pleasures and joys -- but we need to know how to handle them without letting them addle us.

The idea of keeping yourself on a digital diet will, I suspect, become mainstream soon. Just as I've learned not to stock my fridge with tempting carbs, I've learned to limit my exposure to the web -- and to love it in the limited window I allow myself. I have installed the program 'Freedom' on my laptop: it will disconnect you from the web for however long you tell it to. It's the Ritalin I need for my web-induced ADHD. I make sure I activate it so I can dive into the more permanent world of the printed page for at least two hours a day, or I find myself with a sense of endless online connection that leaves you oddly disconnected from yourself.

T.S. Eliot called books "the still point of the turning world." He was right. It turns out, in the age of super-speed broadband we need dead trees to have living minds.


Johann Hari presents a regular podcast, uncovering the news you won't hear elsewhere. You can subscribe via i-Tunes or click here.

For updates on this issue and others, follow Johann on twitter at www.twitter.com/johannhari101. Johann Hari is a writer for the Independent. To read more of his articles, click here or here. You can email him at j.hari [at] independent.co.uk and follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/johannhari101




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Phony Deficit Hawks

It's amazing to me why people can't see thru the phony Republican party. Is Barack Obama a chump?


by Paul Krugman
June 24, 2011, 2:44 pm
Phony Deficit Hawks
So, just to summarize: Republicans are deeply, deeply concerned about the budget deficit; they believe that our nation’s future is at stake.

But they’re willing to sacrifice that future, not to mention risk the good faith and credit of the federal government, rather than accept so much as a single penny of tax increases as part of a deal.


So what’s it all about? The answer, of course, is that the GOP never cared about the deficit — not a bit. It has always been nothing but a club with which to beat down opposition to an ideological goal, namely the dissolution of the welfare state. They’re not interested, at all, in a genuine deficit-reduction deal if it does not serve that goal.

And everyone who has preached bipartisanship, who has called for a meeting of minds on the subject, is either a fraud or a chump.

Jon Ronson - The Psychopath Test

This book is alternately scary,entertaining, & dubious. Before reading this book, I had never thought about psychopaths. Back in the early 70's when I was consdering pursuing a Phd in clinical psychology, I thought a lot about psychiatry, though in retrospect I realize that I knew very little.

So there's the Hare Test, which is supposed to ferret out those devious and dangerous people who are glib, smooth, and so believable, but ultimately devious and potentially dangerous and violent. Obviously you can't get many real psychopaths to sit down and take the test or submit to physical tests.

Someone in the book says 1% of the population are psychopaths. Maybe so, but I would venture that this is just a ballpark guess. Someone in the book says that psychopaths inhabit the highest reaches of business and industry. Maybe so, but I don't much too much stock again in such spirited guesses. Who really knows?

I grant that psychopathy is real. I would just add that we really probably don't much about it yet.

Psychiatry has been criticized from Day One. Criticism has been especially shrill in recent years. Nothing really new here.

As far as I know, I've never met a psychopath. They are scary sounding for sure. The books is entertaining as it talks about particular psychopaths. At the same time, I am dubious about some of the claims like the 1% and psychopaths in high places and psychopaths running the world because they so active and persuasive. Just guesses I think.

On the Libertarians

Metcalf vs. The Libertarians
Jonathan Chait

Stephen Metcalf's essay on libertarianism and Robert Nozick, which I linked, has naturally provoked libertarian pushback. Reason editor Matt Welch publishes a rebuttal consisting entirely of pointing out that Ann Coulter also dislikes libertarianism, therefore Slate agrees with Coulter. (And you know who hated communism? Hitler! So anybody who hates communism agrees with Hitler.)

Cato's Jason Kuznicki easily clears the "more persuasive than Matt Welch" bar in his Metcalf reply, though this rebuttal isn't terribly strong:

Of the many errors in a long and error-ridden article, I think the worst has to be the idea that libertarians hold all concentrations of wealth to be good. As long, I infer, as we gather it in sufficiently large heaps. Metcalf writes:
But being a star athlete isn’t the only way to make money. In addition to earning a wage, one can garnish a wage, collect a fee, levy a toll, cash in a dividend, take a kickback, collect a monopoly rent, hit the superfecta, inherit Tara, insider trade, or stumble on Texas tea. For each way of conceiving wealth, there is at least one way of moralizing its distribution. The Wilt Chamberlain example is designed to corner us—quite cynically, in my view—into moralizing all of them as if they were recompense for a unique talent that gives pleasure; and to tax each of them, and regulate each of them, according to the same principle of radical noninterference suggested by a black ballplayer finally getting his due.

This is simply wrong. For a libertarian, it’s only Wilt Chamberlain’s particular type of wealth that is morally blameless, not all the rest. Which kind is his? The kind acquired through voluntary transactions, without coercion or fraud. The kind that comes from Nozick called capitalist acts between consenting adults.
Some wealth is blameless. Some isn’t. And yes, some cases are truly hard to judge: Is Wal-Mart a free-market success story? Wellll…. kind of. But what about all those special tax privileges? What about that eminent domain abuse?
Wilt Chamberlain makes a good example not because he’s a black man struggling sympathetically in a white man’s world. His example is useful because it strips away every possibility of force, fraud, corporate welfare, and government favoritism. When we do that, we can see that it’s still possible to grow wealthy through honest, voluntary methods.

No, that wasn't Metcalf's point. Metcalf's point was that Nozick was seizing upon an unusual and deeply atypical example of wealth, and used it draw draw up rules to presumptively apply to all wealth. It's like using the example of a man stealing a loaf of bread to feed his starving children as the basis for our laws about property and theft. To object to such an exercise is not to deny that morally justifiable theft can exist. It's just a bad model to build an absolute moral defense of capitalism.

The Liberty Scam

The Liberty Scam
Why even Robert Nozick, the philosophical father of libertarianism, gave up on the movement he inspired.
By Stephen Metcalf
Updated Monday, June 20, 2011, at 7:06 AM ET

Robert Nozick

Recently, I overheard a fellow Amtraker back off a conversation on politics. "You know, it's because I'm a libertarian," he said, sounding like a vegetarian politely declining offal. Later that afternoon, in the otherwise quite groovy loft I sometimes crash at in SoHo, where one might once have expected, say, Of Grammatology or at least a back issue of Elle Decor, there sat not one but two copies of something called The Libertarian Reader. "Libertarianism" places one—so believes the libertarian—not on the political spectrum but slightly above it, and this accounts for its appeal to both the tricorne fringe and owners of premium real estate. Liberty's current bedfellows include Paul Ryan (his staffers are assigned Atlas Shrugged), Glenn Beck (he flogged The Road to Serfdom onto the best-seller list), Slate's Jack Shafer, South Park, the founder of Whole Foods, this nudnik, P.J. O'Rourke, now David Mamet, and to the extent she cares for anything beyond her own naked self-interest—oh, wait, that is libertarianism—Sarah Palin.

FacebookDiggRedditStumbleUponCLOSEWith libertarianism everywhere, it's hard to remember that as recently as the 1970s, it was nowhere to be found. Once the creed of smart set rogues, H.L. Mencken among them, libertarianism all but disappeared after the Second World War. What happened? The single most comprehensive, centrally planned, coordinated governmental action in history—that's what happened. In addition to defeating fascism, the Second World War acted as a magnificent sieve, through which almost no one, libertarians included, passed unchanged. (To pick one example: Lionel Robbins, the most prominent anti-Keynesian before the war, served as director of the economic division of the British War Cabinet; after the War, Robbins presided over the massive expansion of the British higher education system.) By the '50s, with Western Europe and America free, prosperous, happy, and heavily taxed, libertarianism had lost its roguish charm. It was the Weltanschauung of itinerant cranks: Ronald Reagan warming up the Moose Lodge; Ayn Rand mesmerizing her Saturday night sycophants; the Reader's Digest economist touting an Austrian pedigree.

Libertarians will blanch at lumping their revered Vons—Mises and Hayek—in with the nutters and the shills. But between them, Von Hayek and Von Mises never seem to have held a single academic appointment that didn't involve a corporate sponsor. Even the renowned law and economics movement at the University of Chicago was, in its inception, heavily subsidized by business interests. ("Radical movements in capitalist societies," as Milton Friedman patiently explained, "have typically been supported by a few wealthy individuals.") Within academia, the philosophy of free markets in extremis was rarely embraced freely—i.e., by someone not on the dole of a wealthy benefactor. It cannot be stressed enough: In the decades after the war, a kind of levee separated polite discourse from free-market economics. The attitude is well-captured by John Maynard Keynes, whose scribble in the margins of his copy of The Road to Serfdom reads: "An extraordinary example of how, starting with a mistake, a remorseless logician can end up in Bedlam."

And then came Robert Nozick.

To my knowledge, in writing Anarchy, State, and Utopia, his breathtaking defense of libertarianism, Nozick never accepted a dime other than from his employer, the philosophy department at Harvard University. (Unless it was from the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Palo Alto, the "minimally structured academic institution bordering on individualist anarchy" as Nozick put it, where he wrote the book's early chapters.) In fact, Nozick was the disinterested intellectual that laissez-faire had been searching for since Congress passed the Emergency Banking Act of 1933. Nozick started out a classic of the type: a Brooklyn kid, one generation off the shtetl, toting a dog-eared Plato. But along the way to a full Harvard professorship, attained at the age of 30, he'd lost the socialist ardors of his upbringing. "For a while I thought: 'Well, the arguments are right, capitalism is the best system, but only bad people would think so,' " he once told a journalist. "Then, at some point, my mind and my heart were in unison."

The Times Literary Supplement ranks Anarchy, published in 1974, as one of the "100 Most Influential Books Since the War," and that, I think, is underselling it. To this day, left intellectuals remember where they were when they first heard Nozick's arguments against not just socialism but wealth redistribution of any kind. "It is no exaggeration to say," the Telegraph wrote, after Nozick died in 2002, "that Nozick, more than anyone else, embodied the new libertarian zeitgeist which, after generations of statist welfarism from Roosevelt's New Deal to Kennedy, Johnson and Carter, ushered in the era of Reagan and Bush, pere et fils." Prior to Anarchy, "liberty" was a virtual synonym for rolling back labor unions and progressive taxation, a fig leaf for the class interests of the Du Ponts and the B.F. Goodriches. After Anarchy, "liberty" was a concept as worthy of academic dignity as the categorical imperative.

As a moral philosopher, Nozick was free to stretch liberty further than even an Austrian economist. That is, he was able to separate out a normative claim (that liberty is the fundamental value of values, and should be maximized) from an empirical claim (that the most efficient method for allocating goods and services is a market economy). Free to pursue liberty as a matter of pure principle, Nozick let nothing stand in his way. Should we tax the rich to feed the poor? Absolutely not, as "taxation of earnings is on par with forced labor." (Or more precisely: "Taking the earnings of n hours of labor is like taking n hours from the person.") Well, isn't at least some redistribution necessary on the basis of need? "Need a gardener allocate his services to those lawns which need him most?"

To the entire left, Nozick, in effect, said: Your social justice comes at an unacceptable cost, namely, to my personal liberty. Most distressingly, to this end Nozick enlisted the humanist's most cherished belief: the inviolability of each human being as an end unto himself—what Nozick, drawing on Immanuel Kant, calls "the separateness of persons." For Nozick, the principle of the separateness of persons is close to sacred. It affirms, as he writes, "the underlying Kantian principle that individuals are ends and not merely means; they may not be sacrificed or used for the achieving of other ends without their consent. Individuals are inviolable."

I like to think that when Nozick published Anarchy, the levee broke, the polite Fabian consensus collapsed, and hence, in rapid succession: Hayek won the Nobel Prize in economics in 1974, followed by Milton Friedman in '75, the same year Thatcher became Leader of the Opposition, followed by the California and Massachusetts tax revolts, culminating in the election of Reagan, and … well, where it stops, nobody knows.

True, a recondite book by an obscure professor wouldn't have made any difference if it hadn't caught the drift of public feeling. But also true: Public feeling might have remained begrudging, demagogic, sub-intellectual if the public's courage hadn't been shored up (or its conscience bought off, depending on your point of view) by intellectuals like Nozick. Take Margaret Thatcher's infamous provocation—"There's no such thing as society"—with its implication that human beings are nothing more than brutishly competitive atoms. Now listen to its original formulation, in Anarchy: "But there is no social entity with a good that undergoes some sacrifice for its own good. There are only individual people, different individual people, with their own individual lives." The tone is different—it's Kantian, not Hobbesian—and so is the moral emphasis: Society is unreal not because individuals are brutish but because they are dignified.

With the solemn invocation of individual lives, the liberal humanist ought to push away from the table, take a deep breath, and ask whether any of this remarkable assault is true. Can it really be that eliminating the income tax shows maximum moral respect for others? I thought a fraction of a rich man's fortune is to the rich man only money but to a starving man is freedom. Am I a moral idiot? It is impossible without writing a book (and many have) to do Anarchy justice. Nonetheless, one argument from its pages is considered its most central, most famous, most bewitching. This is the so-called "Wilt Chamberlain" argument, and pausing to pick it apart, we can begin to see why Nozick's defense of libertarianism, as Nozick himself came to believe, collapsed.

2.

When I think with my own brain and look with my own eyes, it's obvious to me that some combination of civil rights, democratic institutions, educational capital, social trust, consumer choice, and economic opportunity make me free. This is not what Nozick is arguing. Nozick is arguing that economic rights are the only rights, and that insofar as there are political rights, they are nothing more than a framework in support of private property and freedom of contract. When I study American history, I can see why America, thanks to a dense bundle of historical accidents, is a kind of Lockean paradise, uniquely suited to holding up liberty as its paramount value. This is not what Nozick is arguing. Nozick is arguing that liberty is the sole value, and to put forward any other value is to submit individuals to coercion.

How does so supple a mind end up committed to so seemingly brittle a belief system? The leap of faith here is, no surprise, in the construal of liberty itself, which unlike other values (says the libertarian) makes no restricting or normative claims on anybody; liberty is instead like oxygen—invisible, pervasive, enabling. Every other value, meanwhile, represents someone else's deranged will-to-power by which, under the guise of high-mindedness or disinterest, he would "pattern" all of society to his own liking. "Almost every suggested principle of … justice is patterned," Nozick says, by way of setting up the Chamberlain argument. "To each according to his moral merit, or needs, or marginal product, or how hard he tries …" By way of showing us how an unpatterned, or libertarian, society is more just than any patterned one, Nozick asks the reader to consult her own preference, and choose a society patterned in any way she sees fit—Marxist, bell-curve meritocracy—you pick. Now call that pattern D1. Then, Nozick writes:

"Wilt Chamberlain is greatly in demand by basketball teams, being a great gate attraction. (Also suppose contracts run only for a year, with players being free agents.) He signs the following sort of contract with a team: In each home game twenty-five cents from the price of each ticket of admission goes to him. (We ignore the question of whether he is "gouging" the owners, letting them look out for themselves.) … Let us suppose that in one season one million persons attend his home games, and Wilt Chamberlain ends up with $250,000, a much larger sum than the average income and larger even than anyone else has. Is he entitled to his income? Is this new distribution D2 unjust?"

Nozick assumes our dream society is in some respect egalitarian; that to prevent Wilt from grossly out-earning his fellow citizens, the system we've imagined in D1 will curtail Chamberlain's right to the whole fruit of his own labor. To the liberal humanist, Nozick is saying: You don't take your finest hero, Kant, seriously, because if you did, you would never sacrifice Wilt's autonomy to the social planner's designs. To the socialist, he is saying: You don't take your own finest hero, Marx, seriously, because if you did, you would never expropriate his surplus value (via taxation) as blithely as the capitalist. And to his own fellow Harvard professors, he is saying: You don't take your own finest hero—yourself—seriously, because if you did, why would you ever curtail the prerogative of a superstar?

For all its intriguing parts, Anarchy can be thought of as one long Excuse me? in response to one Harvard colleague in particular, the political philosopher John Rawls. In A Theory of Justice, Rawls argued that our talents are not really our own, because they are not morally intrinsic to us. Rawls asked us to imagine that we know nothing about our life advantages—that how gifted, smart, attractive, charismatic we are, as well as the socio-economic status of our parents, lie behind a veil of ignorance. He then asked us to design an insurance policy against poor accidents of birth. That insurance policy would be "justice," in the form of a society that was fair even from the perspective of its least well-off citizen—who, after all, passing through the veil of ignorance, might turn out to be us.

To this, Nozick replies: All that intellectual pomp, arrayed to convince me that my talents are not mine? But my talents aren't like fire and disease. They aren't fatalities I insure against. Quite the opposite: My talents constitute the substance of who I am, and I am right to bank on them. Having cornered us with Kant, with Marx, and, most of all, with our own vanity, Nozick concludes, "No end-state principle of justice can be continuously realized without continuous interference with people's lives," confident that "interference" is sufficiently morally offensive to carry the day.


Wilt ChamberlainHere the liberal humanist needs to relax, take a second breath, and realize that, while clever, the Wilt Chamberlain argument is maybe a little too clever—i.e., what seems on first blush to be a simple case of freedom from interference is in fact a kind of connivance. Anarchy not only purports to be a defense of capitalism, but a proud defense of capitalism. And yet if Anarchy would defend capitalism unashamedly, why does its most famous argument include almost none of the defining features of capitalism—i.e., no risk capital, no capital markets, no financier? Why does it feature a basketball player and not, say, a captain of industry, a CEO, a visionary entrepreneur? The example as Nozick sets it out includes a gifted athlete (Wilt Chamberlain), paying customers (those with a dollar to see Wilt play)—and yet, other than a passing reference to the team's "owners," no capitalist!

In Nozick's example, we know what portion of every ticket (25 cents) represents the monetary equivalent of every paying customer's desire to see not the game itself but Wilt Chamberlain play in it. Bearing in mind that all thought experiments beg our indulgence without requiring our stupidity, notice that, in order to abstract out this allegiance from allegiance to the team, to the sport, etc., and give it a dollar figure, Nozick has assigned what amounts to a market price to Wilt's talents while also suggesting the price was achieved by negotiation between Wilt and the owner. Now, here we must pause, and note that "price" is not an incidental feature of a libertarian belief system—it is what obviates the need, beyond enforcing the basic rule of law, for government. To a libertarian, price is, in effect, the conscience of society finding its highest expression in every swipe of the debit card. Just as the thought experiment, "If there were purple cows on the moon, they would certainly be purple" tells us nothing about the moon, cows, or the color purple, assuming a world in which labor and management arrive at gentleman's agreements—and in which those agreements capture the precise value, down to the penny, of labor's marginal product—tells us very little about justice.

Put another way, Nozick is cornering us into answering a ridiculously loaded question: If every person were a capitalist, and every capitalist a human capitalist, and every human capitalist was compensated in exact proportion to the pleasure he or she provided others, would a world without progressive taxation be just? To arrive at this question, Nozick vanishes most of the known features of capitalism (capital, owners, means of production, labor, collective bargaining) while maximizing one feature of capitalism—its ability to funnel money to the uniquely talented. In the example, "liberty" is all but cognate with a system that efficiently compensates the superstar.

The connivance is thus hidden in plain sight. "Wilt Chamberlain" is an African-American whose talents are unique, scarce, perspicuous (points, rebounds, assists), and in high demand. We feel powerfully the man should be paid, and not to do so—to expect a black athlete to perform for (largely) white audiences without adequate compensation—raises the specter of the plantation. But being a star athlete isn't the only way to make money. In addition to earning a wage, one can garnish a wage, collect a fee, levy a toll, cash in a dividend, take a kickback, collect a monopoly rent, hit the superfecta, inherit Tara, insider trade, or stumble on Texas tea. For each way of conceiving wealth, there is at least one way of moralizing its distribution. The Wilt Chamberlain example is designed to corner us—quite cynically, in my view—into moralizing all of them as if they were recompense for a unique talent that gives pleasure; and to tax each of them, and regulate each of them, according to the same principle of radical noninterference suggested by a black ballplayer finally getting his due.

3.

To my critique of the Chamberlain example, a libertarian might respond: Given frictionless markets, rational self-maximizers, and perfect information, the market price for Wilt's services could not stay separable from the market price to see Wilt play. (Visionary entrepreneurs would create start-up leagues, competing leagues would bid up prices for the best players.) In a free-market paradise, capital will flow to talent, until rewards commensurate perfectly with utility. Maybe; and maybe in a socialist paradise, no one will catch the common cold. The essence of any utopianism is: Conjure an ideal that makes an impossible demand on reality, then announce that, until the demand is met in full, your ideal can't be fairly evaluated. Attribute any incidental successes to the halfway meeting of the demand, any failure to the halfway still to go.

How could a thinker as brilliant as Nozick stay a party to this? The answer is: He didn't. "The libertarian position I once propounded," Nozick wrote in an essay published in the late '80s, "now seems to me seriously inadequate." In Anarchy democracy was nowhere to be found; Nozick now believed that democratic institutions "express and symbolize … our equal human dignity, our autonomy and powers of self-direction." In Anarchy, the best government was the least government, a value-neutral enforcer of contracts; now, Nozick concluded, "There are some things we choose to do together through government in solemn marking of our human solidarity, served by the fact that we do them together in this official fashion ..."

We're faced then with two intriguing mysteries. Why did the Nozick of 1975 confuse capital with human capital? And why did Nozick by 1989 feel the need to disavow the Nozick of 1975? The key, I think, is recognizing the two mysteries as twin expressions of a single, primal, human fallibility: the need to attribute success to one's own moral substance, failure to sheer misfortune. The effectiveness of the Wilt Chamberlain example, after all, is best measured by how readily you identify with Wilt Chamberlain. Anarchy is nothing if not a tour-de-force, an advertisement not just for libertarianism but for the sinuous intelligence required to put over so peculiar a thought experiment. In the early '70s, Nozick—and this is audible in the writing—clearly identified with Wilt: He believed his talents could only be flattered by a free market in high value-add labor. By the late '80s, in a world gone gaga for Gordon Gekko and Esprit, he was no longer quite so sure.

Even in 1975, it took a pretty narrow view of history to think all capital is human capital, and that philosophy professors, even the especially bright ones, would thrive in the free market. But there was a historical reason for Nozick's belief: the magnificent sieve. Harvard's enrollment prior to World War II was 3,300; after the war, it was 5,300, 4,000 of whom were veterans. The GI Bill was on its way to investing more in education grants, business loans, and home loans than all previous New Deal programs combined. By 1954, with the Cold War in full swing, the U.S. government was spending 20 times what it had spent on research before the war. "Some universities," C. Wright Mills could write in the mid-'50s, "are financial branches of the military establishment." In the postwar decades, the American university grew in enrollment, budget and prestige, thanks to a substantial transfer of wealth from the private economy, under the rubric of "military Keynesianism." As a tentacle of the military-industrial octopus, academia finally lost its last remnant of colonial gentility.

At the same time the university boomed, marginal tax rates for high earners stood as high as 90 percent. This collapsed the so-called L-curve, the graphic depiction of wealth distribution in the United States. The L-curve lay at its flattest in 1970, just as Nozick was sitting down to write Anarchy. In 1970, there were nearly 500,000 employed academics, and their relative income stood at an all-time high. To the extent anyone could believe mental talent, human capital, and capital were indistinguishable, it was thanks to the greatest market distortion in the history of industrial capitalism; and because for 40 years, thanks to this distortion, talent had not been forced to compete with the old "captains of industry" with the financiers and the CEOs.

Buccaneering entrepreneurs, boom-and-bust markets, risk capital—these conveniently disappeared from Nozick's argument because they'd all but disappeared from capitalism. In a world in which J.P. Morgan and Cornelius Vanderbilt have been rendered obsolete, reduced to historical curios, to a funny old-style man, imprisoned in gilt frames, the professionals—the scientists, engineers, professors, lawyers and doctors—correspondingly rise in both power and esteem. And in a world in which the professions are gatekept by universities, which in turn select students based on their measured intelligence, the idea that talent is mental talent, and mental talent is, not only capital, but the only capital, becomes easier and easier for a humanities professor to put across. Hence the terminal irony of Anarchy: Its author's audible smugness in favor of libertarianism was underwritten by a most un-libertarian arrangement—i.e., the postwar social compact of high marginal taxation and massive transfers of private wealth in the name of the very "public good" Nozick decried as nonexistent.

And the screw takes one last turn: By allowing for the enormous rise in (relative) income and prestige of the upper white collar professions, Keynesianism created the very blind spot by which professionals turned against Keynesianism. Charging high fees as defended by their cartels, cartels defended in turn by universities, universities in turn made powerful by the military state, many upper-white-collar professionals convinced themselves their pre-eminence was not an accident of history or the product of negotiated protections from the marketplace but the result of their own unique mental talents fetching high prices in a free market for labor. Just this cocktail of vanity and delusion helped Nozick edge out Rawls in the marketplace of ideas, making Anarchy a surprise best-seller, it helped make Ronald Reagan president five years later. So it was the public good that killed off the public good.

Since 1970, the guild power of lawyers, doctors, engineers, and, yes, philosophy professors has nothing but attenuated. To take only the most pitiful example, medical doctors have evolved over this period from fee-for-service professionals totally in control of their own workplace to salaried body mechanics subject to the relentless cost-cutting mandate of a corporate employer. They've gone from being Marcus Welby—a living monument to public service through private practice—to being, as one comprehensive study put it, harried "middle management." Who can argue with a straight face that a doctor in 2011 has more liberty than his counterpart in 1970? What any good liberal Democrat with an ounce of vestigial self-respect would have said to Nozick in 1970—"Sure, Bob, but we both know what your liberty means. It means power will once again mean money, and money will be at liberty to flow to the top"—in fact happened. The irony is that as capital once again concentrates as nothing more than capital (i.e., as the immense skim of the financiers), the Nozickian illusion (that capital is human capital and human capital is the only capital) gets harder and harder to sustain.

Sustained it is, though. Just as Nozick would have us tax every dollar as if it were earned by a seven-foot demigod, apologists for laissez-faire would have us treat all outsize compensation as if it were earned by a tech revolutionary or the value-investing equivalent of Mozart (as opposed to, say, this guy, this guy, this guy, or this guy). It turns out the Wilt Chamberlain example is all but unkillable; only it might better be called the Steve Jobs example, or the Warren Buffett* example. The idea that supernormal compensation is fit reward for supernormal talent is the ideological superglue of neoliberalism, holding firm since the 1980s. It's no wonder that in the aftermath of the housing bust, with the glue showing signs of decay—with Madoff and "Government Sachs" displacing Jobs and Buffett in the headlines—"liberty" made its comeback. When the facts go against you, resort to "values." When values go against you, resort to the mother of all values. When the mother of all values swoons, reach deep into the public purse with one hand, and with the other beat the public senseless with your dog-eared copy of Atlas Shrugged.

4.

Calling yourself a libertarian is another way of saying you believe power should be held continuously answerable to the individual's capacity for creativity and free choice. By that standard, Thomas Jefferson, John Ruskin, George Orwell, Isaiah Berlin, Noam Chomsky, Michel Foucault, and even John Maynard Keynes are libertarians. (Orwell: "The real division is not between conservatives and revolutionaries but between authoritarians and libertarians." Keynes: "But above all, individualism … is the best safeguard of personal liberty in the sense that, compared with any other system, it greatly widens the field for the exercise of personal choice.") Every thinking person is to some degree a libertarian, and it is this part of all of us that is bullied or manipulated when liberty is invoked to silence our doubts about the free market. The ploy is to take libertarianism as Orwell meant it and confuse it with libertarianism as Hayek meant it; to take a faith in the individual as an irreducible unit of moral worth, and turn it into a weapon in favor of predation.

Another way to put it—and here lies the legacy of Keynes—is that a free society is an interplay between a more-or-less permanent framework of social commitments, and the oasis of economic liberty that lies within it. The nontrivial question is: What risks (to health, loss of employment, etc.) must be removed from the oasis and placed in the framework (in the form of universal health care, employment insurance, etc.) in order to keep liberty a substantive reality, and not a vacuous formality? When Hayek insists welfare is the road is to serfdom, when Nozick insists that progressive taxation is coercion, they take liberty hostage in order to prevent a reasoned discussion about public goods from ever taking place. "According to them, any intervention of the state in economic life," a prominent conservative economist once observed of the early neoliberals, "would be likely to lead, and even lead inevitably to a completely collectivist Society, Gestapo and gas chamber included." Thus we are hectored into silence, and by the very people who purport to leave us most alone.

Thanks in no small part to that silence, we have passed through the looking glass. Large-scale, speculative risk, undertaken by already grossly overcompensated bankers, is now officially part of the framework, in the form of too-big-to-fail guarantees made, implicitly and explicitly, by the Federal Reserve. Meanwhile, the "libertarian" right moves to take the risks of unemployment, disease, and, yes, accidents of birth, and devolve them entirely onto the responsibility of the individual. It is not just sad; it is repugnant.

How Hitler Could Have Won

How Hitler Could Have Won

By TIMOTHY SNYDER
Published: June 17, 2011

How did the Wehrmacht, the best fighting force, lose World War II? The reader seeking the answer to this question, posed by Andrew Roberts in his splendid history, will be treated to a brilliantly clear and accessible account of the war in all of its theaters: Asian, African and European. Roberts’s descriptions of soldiers and officers are masterly and humane, and his battlefield set pieces are as gripping as any I have ever read. He has visited many of the battlefields, and has an unusually good eye for detail as well as a painterly skill at physical description. (His nearly perfect sense of terrain and geography is marred only by his regrettable conflation of Russia with the Soviet Union, which leads to confusion about battlefield locations, German war aims and Soviet casualties.) He is just as much at home at sea as on land; from Midway to El Alamein his prose is unerringly precise and stirringly vivid. It is hard to imagine a better-told military history of World War II.

THE STORM OF WAR

A New History of the Second World War

By Andrew Roberts


Excerpt: ‘The Storm of War’ (harpercollins.com)
The title of the book, “The Storm of War,” conceals an answer to Roberts’s central question about the reasons for the German defeat. The notion of war as a storm summons up the Nazi idea of a blitzkrieg, a lightning victory that would somehow resolve all of the political and economic problems of the German state. Yet the reference in the title is not German but British, not to Hitler but rather to Churchill, who told the House of Commons on June 4, 1940, that he had every confidence Britain could “ride out the storm of war.” Lightning signals not the end but the beginning of a storm; he who escapes the flash can survive, endure, get the wind at his back and in his sails, and triumph. The Wehrmacht lost the war because the conflict was long, and it was long in part because Churchill refused to abandon the fight, but chiefly because Germany’s main war aims were impossible to attain.

Roberts, the author of several books of English history, maintains the tension in his narrative by suggesting that if the war had been a purely military rather than a political contest, fought without errors on the German side, then the Germans might have won. If one considers the categories of martial endeavor from bottom to top, from the bunker to Berlin, one can see what he means. The Germans enjoyed advantages in weaponry, engagement, tactics and sometimes strategy. But at the moments when strategy was linked to politics, the German advantage was lost. Hitler’s war aims were vast, unrealistic and inextricably enmeshed in an ideology that celebrated destruction, above all of Jews and other racial enemies, but also of Germans when they failed to win. The quick successes in Poland in 1939 and France in 1940 convinced many of the generals that Hitler was indeed a genius. But what Hitler dreamed of was a rapid victory in the Soviet Union, which would have made Germany a great racial empire.

Throughout the book, Roberts notes errors that, if avoided, might have helped the Germans to win battles and perhaps even the war itself. Hitler, he says, should have begun the war three years later than he did, in 1942 rather than 1939. He should not have allowed the British to escape at Dunkirk as France fell. He should have arranged for the Japanese to help in the invasion of the Soviet Union. Once on Soviet territory German forces should have recruited the non-Russian populations rather than repressing them, and returned farmland to peasants rather than exploiting their labor and taking their food. In September 1941, Army Group Center of the Wehrmacht should have pushed forward to Moscow rather than detouring to Kiev. Army Group South should have fought a war of maneuver rather than concentrating on Stalingrad.

Inevitably, the reader of these observations will find himself posing counterfactual questions. If we agree with Roberts, as we should, that Churchill personally helped lengthen the war by keeping Britain from seeking peace terms after the fall of France, then we are also implicitly saying that, absent Churchill, peace might have been made. The war-winning alliance of the United Kingdom, the United States and the Soviet Union was sealed only in December 1941, and could not have been achieved had Britain left the war.


How Hitler Could Have Won
Published: June 17, 2011



But even if the case for Churchill shows us the importance of this implicit counterfactual, it is still unclear just how to deal with Roberts’s explicit ones. Each depends upon careful judgment of what was thinkable in a given moment, and the fact that Roberts appears to use only English-­language sources cuts against his ability to weigh convincingly what Hitler and other Germans considered possible. If Hitler had begun the war three years later, surely very many other things would have been different, and not all of them to his favor.

THE STORM OF WAR

A New History of the Second World War

By Andrew Roberts

Illustrated. 712 pp. Harper/HarperCollins Publishers. $29.99.

In other cases, the what-if’s require too much to be altered to be really useful. The reason German forces did not befriend the non-Russian minorities and assist the hungry peasantry in the Soviet Union was that they were embarked on a war of racial colonization that was meant to kill tens of millions of Jews and Slavs. In the end, as Roberts himself concludes, that is the war Hitler wanted. And as he knows, the reason Japan did not help the Germans in the Soviet Union was that Hitler did not want Japanese help. What’s more, the Japanese themselves had already decided to move south into the Pacific rather than north into Siberia. Tokyo had been quite powerfully alienated from Berlin by the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of 1939, in which Berlin seemed to exchange its alignment with Japan for an alliance with the Soviet Union. In other words, sometimes what appears at first to be just a matter of Hitler’s own decisions in fact involves the thinking of leaders of other countries as well, which means that the exercise becomes much more complicated.

Then, too, what if Poland had agreed in 1939 to join Germany in an invasion of the Soviet Union, as Hitler wanted? If Poland had allied with Germany rather than resisting, Britain and France would not have issued territorial guarantees to Poland, and would not have had their casus belli in September 1939. It is hard to imagine that Britain and France would have declared war on Germany and Poland in order to save the Soviet Union. If Poland’s armies had joined with Germany’s, the starting line for the invasion would have been farther east than it was in June 1941, and Japan might have joined in, which would have forced some of the Red Army divisions that defended Moscow to remain in the Far East. Moscow might have been attained. In this scenario, there is no Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, and thus no alienation of Japan from Germany. In that case, no Pearl Harbor, and no American involvement. What World War II becomes is a German-Polish-Japanese victory over the Soviet Union. That, by the way, was precisely the scenario that Stalin feared.

Whether they admit it or not, every historian reasons with what-if’s. Their value is that they remind us of what we might otherwise take for granted: in this case, that Poland resisted Germany, thus beginning World War II as we know it, and as Roberts beautifully describes it. Though the counterfactuals in Roberts’s conclusion provoke thought, the real interest of his book resides in its robustly conventional virtues — scholarly dedication to the sources, humane identification with the soldiers and remarkably effective prose.


Timothy Snyder, a professor of history at Yale University, is the author, most recently, of “Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin.”

I'm OK, You're a Psychopath

Essay
I’m O.K., You’re a Psychopath
By PAUL BLOOM
Published: June 17, 2011
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Do psychopaths enjoy reading books about psychopaths? In his engagingly irreverent new best seller, The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry (Riverhead, $25.95), the journalist Jon Ronson notes that only about one in 100 people are psychopaths (there is a higher proportion in prisons and corporate boardrooms), but he wonders if this population will be overrepresented among readers of his book. After all, people do enjoy learning about themselves, and psychopaths in particular have an enhanced sense of their own importance. And they might like what Ronson has to say. He approvingly quotes experts who argue that psychopaths make “the world go around.” Despite their small numbers, they cause such chaos that they remold society — though not necessarily for the better.

Excerpt: ‘The Psychopath Test’ (Google Books)

Books of The Times: The Psychopath Test (May 17, 2011)

If you aren’t sure whether you are a psychopath, Ronson can help. He lists all the items on the standard diagnostic checklist, developed by the psychologist Robert Hare. You can score yourself on traits like “glibness/superficial charm,” “lack of remorse or guilt,” “promiscuous sexual behavior” and 17 other traits. As one psychologist tells Ronson, if you are bothered at the thought of scoring high, then don’t worry. You’re not a psychopath.

One of the traits on the checklist is “callous/lack of empathy.” This is the focus of another new book, The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty (Basic Books, $25.99), by Simon Baron-Cohen, a Cambridge psychologist best known for his research on autism. Baron-Cohen begins by telling how, at the age of 7, he learned that the Nazis turned Jews into lampshades and bars of soap, and he goes on to provide other examples of human savagery. To explain such atrocities, he offers an ambitious theory grounded in the concept of empathy, which he defines as “our ability to identify what someone else is thinking or feeling and to respond to their thoughts and feelings with an appropriate emotion.” For Baron-Cohen, evil is nothing more than “empathy erosion.”

Now, one might lack empathy for temporary reasons — you can be enraged or drunk, for instance — but Baron-Cohen is most interested in lack of empathy as an enduring trait. Once again, you might want to know where you stand, and Baron-­Cohen ends his book with a 40-question Empathy Quotient checklist.

For Baron-Cohen, psychopaths are just one population lacking in empathy. There are also narcissists, who care only about themselves, and borderlines — individuals cursed with impulsivity, an inability to control their anger and an extreme fear of abandonment. Baron-Cohen calls these three groups “Zero-Negative” because there is “nothing positive to recommend them” and they are “unequivocally bad for the sufferer and those around them.” He provides a thoughtful discussion of the usual sad tangle of bad genes and bad environments that lead to the creation of these Zero-Negative individuals.

People with autism and Asperger’s syndrome, Baron-Cohen argues, are also empathy-deficient, though he calls them “Zero-Positive.” They differ from psychopaths and the like because they possess a special gift for systemizing; they can “set aside the temporal dimension in order to see — in stark relief — the eternal repeating patterns in nature.” This capacity, he says, can lead to special abilities in domains like music, science and art. More controversially, he suggests, this systemizing impulse provides an alternative route for the development of a moral code — a strong desire to follow the rules and ensure they are applied fairly. Such individuals can thereby be moral without empathy, “through brute logic alone.”

This is an intriguing proposal, but Baron-Cohen doesn’t fully elaborate on it, much less address certain obvious objections. For one thing, if people with autism can use logic to be good without empathy, why can’t smart psychopaths do the same? And what about the many low-functioning individuals on the autism spectrum who lack special savant gifts and don’t spontaneously create moral codes? On Baron-Cohen’s analysis, they would be Zero-Negative. But this doesn’t seem right. Such individuals might be awkward or insensitive, but they are not actively malicious; they are much more likely to be the targets of cruelty than the perpetrators.

I think there’s a better approach, one that involves breaking empathy into two parts, understanding and feeling, as Baron-Cohen himself does elsewhere in his book. Individuals with autism are unable to understand the mental lives of other people. Psychopaths, by contrast, get into others’ heads just fine; they are seducers, manipulators, con men . . . and often worse. (Ronson tells how one psychopath — “good-looking, neatly dressed,” with “a bit of a twinkle in his eye” — encountered a troubled teenager and decided to provoke the kid into attacking his family with a baseball bat, killing one person.) The problem with psychopaths lies in their lack of compassion, their willingness to destroy lives out of self-interest, malice or even boredom.

Essay
I’m O.K., You’re a Psychopath
Published: June 17, 2011

Baron-Cohen intends his theory of evil to extend broadly, not just to genocides and massacres but to criminal acts like assault and murder. He discusses a 2007 case in which a woman killed her two daughters to make her ex-husband suffer, and concludes that she must be psychologically abnormal. After all, plunging a knife into your own children surely requires a shutdown of empathy. He is well aware that this isn’t the way the current diagnostic system works, but he would change that. “To me,” he writes, “the obvious conclusion is that the medical and psychiatric classification system is crying out for a category called ‘empathy disorders.’ ”If evil is empathy erosion, and empathy erosion is a form of illness, then evil turns out to be nothing more than a particularly awful psychological disorder.

This goes too far, I think. First, it misses the fact that empathy erosion can be the result of choice. Muggers, rapists, pedophiles and killers have diminished feeling toward their victims, but this is often because they have decided to ignore the suffering of others in pursuit of their own goals.

Second, it overlooks the fact that our empathy is often eroded by the situation we find ourselves in. Psychologists have run many experiments showing how social behavior can be manipulated by subtle cues. For example, people are more willing to help others if there is the smell of fresh bread in the air, and they are more likely to be rude if they just read words like “assertive” and “interrupt.” Then there are the not-so-subtle demonstrations of the power of the situation, like Stanley Milgram’s famous experiments showing that ordinary New Haven residents were willing to give people electric shocks because an authority figure in a white coat told them to. Or Philip Zimbardo’s study at Stanford in which normal students were transformed into brutal torturers simply by being given the part of prison guards. (Milgram saw his study as helping to explain the Holocaust. Zimbardo has argued that his experiment explains the events in Abu Ghraib.) In such cases, the situation is to blame: focusing on the individual is the wrong type of explanation.

But what about those individuals whose empathy is always diminished, not by choice and not by the situation, but because of their genes and their early upbringing? These are harder cases. At a psychopath-spotting class, Ronson learns about studies suggesting that a particular part of the psychopath’s brain is unusual. He later approaches a fellow attendee, and says, “You have to feel sorry for psychopaths, right? If it’s all because of their amygdalae? If it’s not their fault?” There are many answers that one could give, but it’s tempting to agree with the man’s response: Why should we care about psychopaths? They don’t care about us.

Woody Allen - "Midnight in Paris"

This is one of if not the most enjoyable movie I have ever seen. It's vintage Woody Allen. I suppose you have a taste for Allen or you don't. I have always taken part of my sense of humor from Woody Allen.

You have an engaged couple in Paris with her parents adding contemporary humor. The man is trying to finish a novel, and ends up traveling back in time to the 20's when it seemed that every great writer and artist of the time was running around Paris.

Here's Hemingway. Here are Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. Here's Picasso. And here's Kathy Bates playing Gertrude Stein. The literary references run wild, and I love every one of them!

The music and scenes of Paris are enchanting. Makes me want to hop on a plane and head over. Do the Hemingway tour and see the famous Left Bank. If I ever do cross the pond, Paris will be my destination.

This is as good as it gets. I plan to see this movie again soon.

The Unreality of Today's Conservatism

Worldview
How Today's Conservatism Lost Touch with Reality
By Fareed Zakaria Thursday, June 16, 2011


"Conservatism is true." That's what George Will told me when I interviewed him as an eager student many years ago. His formulation might have been a touch arrogant, but Will's basic point was intelligent. Conservatism, he explained, was rooted in reality. Unlike the abstract theories of Marxism and socialism, it started not from an imagined society but from the world as it actually exists. From Aristotle to Edmund Burke, the greatest conservative thinkers have said that to change societies, one must understand them, accept them as they are and help them evolve.

Watching this election campaign, one wonders what has happened to that tradition. Conservatives now espouse ideas drawn from abstract principles with little regard to the realities of America's present or past. This is a tragedy, because conservatism has an important role to play in modernizing the U.S.

Consider the debates over the economy. The Republican prescription is to cut taxes and slash government spending — then things will bounce back. Now, I would like to see lower rates in the context of tax simplification and reform, but what is the evidence that tax cuts are the best path to revive the U.S. economy? Taxes — federal and state combined — as a percentage of GDP are at their lowest level since 1950. The U.S. is among the lowest taxed of the big industrial economies. So the case that America is grinding to a halt because of high taxation is not based on facts but is simply a theoretical assertion. The rich countries that are in the best shape right now, with strong growth and low unemployment, are ones like Germany and Denmark, neither one characterized by low taxes.

Many Republican businessmen have told me that the Obama Administration is the most hostile to business in 50 years. Really? More than that of Richard Nixon, who presided over tax rates that reached 70%, regulations that spanned whole industries, and who actually instituted price and wage controls?

In fact, right now any discussion of government involvement in the economy — even to build vital infrastructure — is impossible because it is a cardinal tenet of the new conservatism that such involvement is always and forever bad. Meanwhile, across the globe, the world's fastest-growing economy, China, has managed to use government involvement to create growth and jobs for three decades. From Singapore to South Korea to Germany to Canada, evidence abounds that some strategic actions by the government can act as catalysts for free-market growth.
(See a dozen Republicans who could be the next President.)

Of course, American history suggests that as well. In the 1950s, '60s and '70s, the U.S. government made massive investments in science and technology, in state universities and in infant industries. It built infrastructure that was the envy of the rest of the world. Those investments triggered two generations of economic growth and put the U.S. on top of the world of technology and innovation.

But that history has been forgotten. When considering health care, for example, Republicans confidently assert that their ideas will lower costs, when we simply do not have much evidence for this. What we do know is that of the world's richest countries, the U.S. has by far the greatest involvement of free markets and the private sector in health care. It also consumes the largest share of GDP, with no significant gains in health on any measurable outcome. We need more market mechanisms to cut medical costs, but Republicans don't bother to study existing health care systems anywhere else in the world. They resemble the old Marxists, who refused to look around at actual experience. "I know it works in practice," the old saw goes, "but does it work in theory?"

Conservatives used to be the ones with heads firmly based in reality. Their reforms were powerful because they used the market, streamlined government and empowered individuals. Their effects were large-scale and important: think of the reform of the tax code in the 1980s, for example, which was spearheaded by conservatives. Today conservatives shy away from the sensible ideas of the Bowles-Simpson commission on deficit reduction because those ideas are too deeply rooted in, well, reality. Does anyone think we are really going to get federal spending to the level it was at under Calvin Coolidge, as Paul Ryan's plan assumes? Does anyone think we will deport 11 million people?

We need conservative ideas to modernize the U.S. economy and reform American government. But what we have instead are policies that don't reform but just cut and starve government — a strategy that pays little attention to history or best practices from around the world and is based instead on a theory. It turns out that conservatives are the woolly-headed professors after all.

Carson McCullers - The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

Reading a book the second time is rarely as good as the first time; this time is no exception. This is a powerful novel---all the more powerful given that it was written by a 23-yr. old---and deserves acclaim. My main comment on reading it the second time is that it is a STRANGE story. But strange and Carson McCullers seem to go together.

You got people who can barely communicate with each other except to a deaf mute and the people never know if he is understanding or not. Somehow the characters in the story are drawn to John Singer, and I don’t quite understand why except that Singer has some kind magnetic people charisma that makes people want to confide in him.

Jake Blount is the least realistic character. I mean we’re talking about
a “radical” socialist running around in the late 30’s (a good time for a socialist to be running around though) talking about how people don’t understand (how they are being exploited by the capitalistic economic system?). Did the author know somebody like this growing up in Columbus, Georgia?

The African-American doctor, yes I can understand him. Poor guy---estranged from his family, doing medical wonders for his people, knowing that his people don’t understand either. He names one of his sons Karl Marx. Who would dare do that to a kid?

Mick has musical interests and ambitions but is very limited in how she can exploring these things in her environment. The poor guy is bound by a small town in The South in the late 30’s.

And Biff? Pretty good fellow I think---maybe the most normal person in the novel.

Nobody understands anybody in this story. It’s all very strange.

Our Political Insanity

Our Political Insanity, in Two Paragraphs
Jonathan Cohn


The Republican Party, after converting huge surpluses into huge deficits during the Bush era, after opposing deficit-reducing health reforms, student loan reforms and big-bank taxes during the Obama era, after continuing to clamor for trillions of dollars in deficit-expanding tax cuts while gutting House pay-as-you-go rules to make it easier to expand the deficit, has somehow managed to re-brand itself as the party of fiscal responsibility. It’s a remarkable political achievement. ...
It’s not Obama’s fault that Republicans are irresponsible. But he’s not powerless. He’s not voiceless. It was no coincidence that when he laid out a strong case against GOP fiscal insanity in his George Washington speech in April, Republicans hated it, screeching that he was the meanest, nastiest, most partisan President in the history of Kenyan sharia socialism. Apparently, he touched a nerve. But he hasn’t touched it again. Ultimately, if he can’t create a political atmosphere where irresponsibility is punished, the irresponsibility will continue. And he’ll be held accountable for the consequences.

The Civil War

I particularly like The Civil War discussion. Of interest to me is the behavior of President Johnson is his revocation of William Sherman's "Four Acres And A Mule" policy in the autumn of 1865.

Eudora Welty - The Optimist's Daughter

I thought I should read some Welty so I read this novel. I was disappointed.

Laurel Hand returns to the South upon the illness & death of her father in New Orleans and rediscovers her roots in Mississippi. She as to deal with her silly stepmother and the small Missisippi town where she grew up.

Supposedly she comes to terms with her past, herself, and her parents in the last chapter, but I don't get it. The last chapter is suppoed to be "deep" and "searching," but again I don't get it. Maybe one day someone will the meaning of the novel to me.

A New Take on the Civil War

Editor: Laura Miller
Updated: TodayTopic:
History Thursday, Jun 9, 2011 09:01 ET
Joan Walsh Everything you know about the Civil War is wrong
Almost. Historian David Goldfield exposes how evangelical Protestants turned a conflict into a bloody conflagration
By Joan Walsh


On the 150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War, Americans are engaged in new debates over what it was about. Southern revisionists have long tried to claim it wasn't about slavery, but rather "Northern aggression" – which is a tough sell since they seceded from the Union despite Lincoln's attempts at compromise on slavery, and then attacked the federal Fort Sumter in South Carolina. That would be Southern aggression, by any standard.

But there's still room for smart revisionism. Instead of the traditional view that finds the Civil War a great moral and political triumph, David Goldfield calls it "America's greatest failure" in his fascinating new book, "America Aflame: How the Civil War Created a Nation." It killed a half-million Americans and devastated the South for generations, maybe through today. And while many Northern Republicans came to embrace abolishing slavery as one of the war's goals, Goldfield shows that Southerners are partly right when they say the war's main thrust was to establish Northern domination, in business and in culture. Most controversially, Goldfield argues passionately -- with strong data and argument, but not entirely convincingly -- that the Civil War was a mistake. Instead of liberating African Americans, he says, it left them subject to poverty, sharecropping and Jim Crow violence and probably retarded their progress to become free citizens.

Whether or not you accept that premise – more on that later – Goldfield shows definitively that Northern evangelical Protestants were the moral force behind the war, and once they turned it into a religious question, a matter of good v. evil, political compromise was impossible. The Second Great Awakening set its sights on purging the country of the sins of slavery, drunkenness, impiety -- as well as Catholics, particularly Irish Catholic immigrants. Better than any history I've seen, Goldfield tracks the disturbing links between abolitionism and nativism. In fact, he starts his book with the torching of the Ursuline Convent in Charlestown, Mass. in 1834, a violent attack on Catholics which Goldfield shows was "incited" by Lyman Beecher, the father of the Beecher clan, most of whom turned out to be as anti-Irish Catholic as they were anti-slavery. To evangelical Protestant nativists, Catholicism was incompatible with democracy, because its adherents allegedly gave their loyalty to the Pope, not the president, and the religion's emphasis on obeying a hierarchy made them unfit for self-government. Also, rebellious Irish Catholics didn't show the proper discipline or deference to conform to emerging industrial America. The needs of Northern business were never far from some (though not all) abolitionists' minds.

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Still, though nativism was widespread in the North, and within the Republican Party (which absorbed some old Know-Nothing and nativist Whig party remnants), abolitionism remained at the party's fringe. Most Republicans were seeking compromise, not the abolition of slavery, in the years before the war, including Abraham Lincoln. Our first Republican president didn't like slavery, and he fiercely opposed its extension to the Territories, but he also expressed doubts about African-Americans' capacity for democracy, and he opposed black suffrage. Lincoln supported the Fugitive Slave Act, which let slave-owners call on law enforcement even in free states to capture their runaway "property." (As a lawyer, he'd represented a slave owner trying to recapture a fugitive slave.)

And as a strict constitutionalist, Lincoln resisted abolitionism, because like it or not, the Constitution made room for slavery. The president disliked slavery, but his priority was the union. He famously told abolitionist Republican Horace Greeley (who later turned against Reconstruction and ran for president as a Democrat, abandoning African Americans as did too many other abolitionists): "If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that."

In fact, during Lincoln's 1860 presidential campaign, Republicans went so far as to argue that they were the real White Man's Party, because their commitment to keeping the Territories slave-free wasn't about the evils of slavery; it was about keeping the West white, so white families alone could enjoy the bounty of the frontier without competition (except from Indians, who would be eradicated.) Democrats insisted they were the White Man's Party, because slavery liberated white men to be the property owners and entrepreneurs God intended them to be, while an inferior race did their manual labor, for free. Most Republicans and Democrats agreed on white supremacy; they differed on the right way to maintain it.

Yet as the war went on, Lincoln came to see slavery as a moral cause, and he wouldn't entertain compromise armistice proposals that let the South keep black people in bondage. In a book with few heroes, Lincoln emerges as one over time, virtually alone as an American politician in blending compassion for slaves with compassion for white Southerners. It's popular to suggest that had Lincoln lived, Reconstruction would have been more successful. But Lincoln's pattern of compromise throughout his political career makes speculating on what he'd have done very difficult. Goldfield makes clear, though, that Lincoln wanted reconciliation with the South, not Southern humiliation. In his subdued Second Inaugural Address, he refused to blame the war on the Confederacy, or trumpet the righteousness of the Northern cause. Because the Founders legalized slavery, he believed the country, North and South, shared responsibility for it. Lincoln closed with words made more poignant by the fact that the outcome he envisioned didn't come to be (and still hasn't):


With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.


Lincoln even proposed a plan to compensate slaveowners for their losses. That might make our blood boil today, but it was actually the way slavery had been abolished in other countries. Clearly, the Southern economy was destroyed, and families suffered hugely. Most of the war took place on Southern battlefields, destroying farms, homes, churches, businesses. A quarter of Southern men between the ages of 20 and 40 died; more than 28 million Southerners, white as well as black, fled the devastated Confederate states in the decades after the war. And while Northern wealth increased 50 percent between 1860 and 1870, the South lost 60 percent of its wealth in those years, roughly half of it human "property." Lincoln proposed legislation establishing a $400 million fund to compensate Southerners for giving up slavery, if they would recognize national sovereignty and ratify the 13th Amendment emancipating the slaves. We don't know what Southern leaders would have said; Lincoln's own cabinet nixed the idea.

It's also possible Lincoln might not have taken from Confederate leaders the right to vote and hold office away, while giving it to former slaves, as Congress did after his death. Again, however fair that may seem from our distant (presumed) consensus that the pro-slavery Confederacy deserved whatever it had coming, it let Southern leaders complain they'd been "disenfranchised," even though the stricture only affected a fraction of the Southern male population. It was also rank hypocrisy, as eight northern states rejected black suffrage, while forcing it on the former Confederacy. But we'll never know what Lincoln would have done; he died. Meanwhile, the view of Henry Ward Beecher, staunch anti-Catholic (and a villain in this book, if it has one) prevailed: In a speech just before Lincoln's death, he gave a sermon at Fort Sumter:


The whole guilt of this war rests upon the ambitious, educated, plotting, political leaders of the South…A day will come when God will reveal judgment and arraign at his bar these mighty miscreants…And then [they] will be whirled aloft and plunged downward forever and ever in an endless retribution."


Contrast that with Lincoln's Second Inaugural, and then try to figure out which man is the actual Christian leader.

….

Goldfield's book has been well-reviewed, because if it's sympathetic to Southern whites, it depicts the savagery of slavery and post-war white terrorism with unflinching and gut-wrenching clarity. (Literally. The book's tales of slaves' abuse and Southern white post-war savagery will make you sick.) Still, this Civil War history challenges the absolutism of the "Northerners were heroes, and Southerners were vicious, violent racists" school of history. He exposes and excoriates Southern whites' violence against black people before and after the war. But he also links the war to the pro-business evangelical Protestant crusade to eradicate native American Indians, Mexicans, Irish and German Catholic immigrants, and an emerging class of landless Northern laborers – anyone who stood in the way of their vision of clean, hard-working, business-friendly American progress. And he counts the South as a victim of that Northern evangelical crusade. Southerners were another group that simply wasn't conforming to their doctrine of "Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men," as the title of Eric Foner's equally complicated and fantastic Republican Party history puts it.

Republicans were first and foremost the party of small business, an emerging class of industrialists, the nascent middle class, and anti-Catholic nativists. They despised the working class – or denied it existed. Lincoln himself talked of the emerging caste of wage-earners optimistically as "young beginners," who would work for a time, save money, then buy land and/or their own business. Republicans either couldn't imagine an America with a permanent class of laborers (like Lincoln), or they dreamed of one, but found ways to convince those workers it was all in their interest. In their defense, in the decades after the Civil War, the Horatio Alger, rags to riches story was never more true.

It's indisputable that Republican zeal for the liberation of black people was always a fringe sentiment – and even among that fringe, it was short lived. After the war, Northerners wanted to get back to business, and they did, with a vengeance. During the war, the federal government had flexed muscles of taxation, conscription and land annexation. The post-war era's emerging robber barons pointed to the Union army's successes as a justification of their march toward monopoly. "Who can buy beef the cheapest – the housewife for her family, the steward for her club or hotel, or the commissary for the army?" Standard Oil founder John D. Rockefeller asked. Oil and steel businesses boomed. The transcontinental railroad was completed -- as was the near-eradication of American Indians.

Goldfield shows how leading Union generals almost immediately became warriors on the frontier, bringing the zeal with which they decimated the backward South to the task of decimating backward "savages." That new crusade had direct ramifications for Southern blacks. Even when President Ulysses S. Grant tried to use the military to beat back white Southern paramilitary groups literally massacring African-Americans trying to execute basic rights, he couldn't, because soldiers were deployed out West in the new Civil War against Indians. One hero of the book, Mississippi Republican Gov. Adelbert Ames, tries to use his power to protect blacks from Southern Democratic violence, but there were no Federal soldiers left in his state to call upon, they were all on the anti-Indian front. As the state's "White Line" paramilitary group tore through Mississippi to violently intimidate black voters, Ames was forced to give up his governor's position and flee. Early in the book, Goldfield quotes a Northern newspaper editor proclaiming "We can have no peace in this country until the CATHOLICS ARE EXTERMINATED." Near the end, he finds a Birmingham News headline that reads: "We intend to beat the negro in the battle of life, and defeat means one thing: EXTERMINATION." That doesn't feel heavy handed; it's fact, and it's tragic.

Meanwhile, attacks on Irish Catholics continued. Although the famed Civil War Irish brigades fought bravely, the Organization of Union Veterans wouldn't include them – or black Union veterans, either. And if certain abolitionists hadn't already shamed themselves with their anti-Irish Catholic bias, they would later, when they dropped their concern for African Americans – and in fact, joined slavery advocates in concluding that blacks were unfit for self-government. After the war, Henry Ward Beecher began hawking watches and preaching "The Gospel of Prosperity;" he also wrote a novel whose hero was an industrious white Southerner, and whose main black character was a stupid, drunken man-child incapable of self-support. Beecher remained viciously anti-Irish Catholic and opposed to the emerging labor movement (those two things were connected, by the way, for quite a few abolitionists), arguing that the era's strikes showed that the working class was "unfit for the race of life." During the Great Railway Strike of 1877, he denounced the strikers in his loathsome "bread and water" sermon, where he thundered: "Man cannot live by bread alone but the man who cannot live on bread and water is not fit to live." A few days later he proclaimed: "If you are being reduced, go down boldly into poverty." I wonder if Scott Walker is an admirer.

Harriet Beecher Stowe moved to former Confederate Florida, became an Episcopalian, wrote a best-selling book about home decorating for women, and never again troubled herself about the (former) slaves. Abolitionist Horace Greeley gave up on Reconstruction and black rights quickly. His New York Tribune, which once crusaded against slavery, began to feature "exposes" of Reconstruction, including tales of black "corruption" and political incompetence. Even the Nation magazine, which we remember as a journal of abolitionism, soured on the experiment with black suffrage. Editor E.L. Godkin proclaimed that the "blackest" legislators were the worst, particularly in South Carolina, where blacks possessed an "average of intelligence but slightly above the level of animals."

Part of the problem was that at the same time, the North was experiencing its own political growing pains, which former egalitarians suddenly blamed on universal (male) suffrage. New York recoiled at the Boss Tweed corruption scandal of 1870. Tweed himself wasn't Irish, but some of his on-the-take top lieutenants were, and he relied on the votes of Irish Catholic immigrants – who produced votes in excess of their already large, pro-Democratic numbers, thanks to the Tammany machine, as vote fraud was rampant. The New York Times used Tweed's corruption as "an example of the Irish Catholic despotism that rules the City of New York." At the same time, the once-abolitionist paper blamed "ignorant Negroes" for South Carolina's corruption issues, which had of course predated black suffrage and would survive it.

Suddenly white Northern Republicans had a reason to sympathize with white Southern Democrats: Universal suffrage blighted both sides of the Civil War conflict. There's no better symbol of the transformation of Northern abolitionist sentiment than the work of cartoonist Thomas Nast: The pro-Union Harper's artist once graphically depicted the perfidy of Confederates and championed civil rights for slaves. But his most famous cartoon, from 1876, depicted Irish Catholics and African-Americans – two simian creatures labeled "Paddy" and "Sambo" -- as "The Ignorant Vote." Northerners had new appreciation for the South. It made the country whole: The North stood for reason, the South romance. Northern industrialists were happy to preserve the Old South in amber, a land of sweet magnolias and even sweeter women, who hadn't been "masculinized" by either labor or freedom, as Northern women were. It became a shrine to our agrarian past as worshipped by the founders, permanently left behind.

……….

In this same period, even a couple of liberal heroes fell down too. Mark Twain and Walt Whitman both lamented the messiness of universal suffrage. Their worries, paradoxically, came out of a certain kind of populism. Whitman concluded that "the appalling dangers of universal suffrage" seemed to be empowering a rapacious post-war business class. Likewise, Twain railed against the greed of "The Gilded Age," a searing term he coined to describe the cruel era of robber barons, but he believed poor uneducated voters were letting the rich run rampant. A dinner companion reported Twain railing against "this wicked ungodly suffrage, where the vote of a man who knew nothing was as good as the vote of a man of education and industry; this endeavor to equalize what God has made unequal was a wrong and a shame." Both troubadours of democracy believed that universal suffrage was dooming democracy, as uninformed voters backed politicians who colluded with robber barons to destroy the country. Thus they concluded, Goldfield writes, "It might be prudent to restrict democracy in order to save it."

For many reasons, Northern Republicans gave up on the early goals of Reconstruction: to grant free blacks civil and economic rights. Goldfield quotes a Northerner observing a general desire to forget the war, and particular "apathy about the Negro" – shades of the "compassion fatigue" that would be diagnosed by neoconservatives 100 years later, after the Great Society. The parallels between the backlash against Reconstruction, and the backlash against Lyndon Johnson's civil rights reforms, are unmistakable and chilling. The Republican Party of the 1860s, just like the Democratic Party of the 1960s, paid dearly for championing the rights of African Americans. And both parties backed away from their commitment to addressing the economic barriers to black inclusion once they dealt with the era's pressing moral problem: In Lincoln's case, Southern slavery, in Johnson's, violent Southern suppression of black civil and voting rights. After each morally overdue reckoning, the parties suffered, and then they changed sides. Republicans were trounced after Reconstruction, as Democrats became the party of the South; 100 years later, Democrats were trounced, and Republicans became the party of the South. The Civil War is still not over.

Here is where Goldfield's scrupulously fair and heart-breaking story softens up even the most ardent civil rights advocate, to begin to sympathetically contemplate his notion that the Civil War could have been avoided, and slavery eradicated without it. As much as I love this book, and believe anyone concerned about race relations and the country's current political stalemate should read it, I couldn't quite get there. I understand Goldfield's reasoning. In an interview with Leonard Lopate, he contended that the abolition of slavery was inevitable "in a world that was hurtling toward the Industrial Revolution." I can imagine that, had a more politically creative group of politicians tried to compromise on a way out of slavery – perhaps offering to compensate slaveholders for their slaves, the way every other country that abolished slavery did – we maybe, maybe, might have avoided the Civil War.

But that's such starry-eyed conjecture, it's hard to go there. One of the most persuasive arguments for Goldfield's theory is the fact that it took another hundred years to end Jim Crow. And almost 50 years after that, African Americans still aren't completely free: the legacy of what we lamely call "structural racism," in the criminal justice system, the health care system, the housing and job market, lives on. That makes it easy, in a way, to fantasize: Hell, yeah, there had to be a way to do this in less than 150 years!

I wish. While it's possible, I just don't see the evidence in Goldfield's meticulously researched, passionately argued book. Yes, decent Southerners had doubts about slavery, and even some of those who didn't tried desperately to save the union. Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens of Georgia was an old Whig friend of Abraham Lincoln's, and he didn't want war. But he couldn't compromise on slavery, not even when he met Lincoln for a secret peace summit early in 1865, as the Confederate Army lay bleeding after Sherman's march and Grant's late victories. And after the war, which perhaps made Southerners bitter in a way that foreclosed compromise, Goldfield depicts few if any ex-Confederates voicing contrition about their role in the war, as Lincoln did, let alone a desire for reconciliation – and certainly not support for equal rights for former slaves.

Still, with half a million Americans dead on Civil War battlefields, and 150 more years of bitter conflict, it's worth pondering Goldfield's challenge -- if only because it might give some modern visionary a way to see beyond our current social, racial and economic stalemate. I have no doubt about Goldfield's premise that we are still fighting the Civil War. We still need a way to end it. This book models the complicated, even contradictory, compassionate vision that might make that possible. Eventually.