Fear the World Cup, Ann Coulter!

Ann Coulter Is Right to Fear the World Cup

America's growing coalition of soccer fans looks a lot like the coalition that got Obama elected.

Peter Beinart

Jun 30 2014, 7:01 AM ET
Last week, Ann Coulter penned a column explaining why soccer is un-American. First, it’s collectivist. (“Individual achievement is not a big factor…blame is dispersed.”) Second, it’s effeminate. (“It’s a sport in which athletic talent finds so little expression that girls can play with boys.”) Third, it’s culturally elitist. (“The same people trying to push soccer on Americans are the ones demanding that we love HBO’s “Girls,” light-rail, Beyoncé and Hillary Clinton.”) Fourth, and most importantly, “It’s foreign…Soccer is like the metric system, which liberals also adore because it’s European.”



Soccer hatred, in other words, exemplifies American exceptionalism. For roughly two centuries, American exceptionalism has rested on the premise that there is a standard mode of national behavior, born in Europe, which America resists. Over the centuries, what constitutes that European standard—and America’s resistance to it—has changed. For some 19th-century thinkers, for instance, what made America exceptional was its refusal to partake of the European habit of fighting wars. For Coulter and many contemporary conservatives, by contrast, part of what makes America exceptional is its individualism, manliness and populism. (All of which soccer allegedly lacks).



But Coulter’s deeper point is that for America to truly be America, it must stand apart. That’s why she brings up the metric system. The main reason to resist the metric system isn’t that it’s a bad form of measurement. It’s that it’s a European form of measurement. So it is with soccer. Soccer’s alleged collectivism, effeminacy and elitism are simply markers of its foreignness. The core problem with embracing soccer is that in so doing, America would become more like the rest of the world.



So why didn’t soccer gain a foothold in the U.S. when it was gaining dominance in Europe? Precisely because it was gaining dominance in Europe.Which is why Coulter should be very afraid. Because America is embracing soccer. America’s World Cup game against Portugal attracted almost 25 million television viewers in the U.S., eight million more than watched the highest rated World Cup game in 2010, and far more than the average viewership for last year’s World Series or this year’s NBA finals. NBC now broadcasts English soccer. And America’s own league, Major League Soccer, draws as many fans to its stadiums as do the NHL and NBA.



Worse, from Coulter’s perspective, Americans like soccer for the very reason she loathes it: It connects us to the rest of the world. Earlier this year, I wrote an essay entitled “The End of American Exceptionalism,” which argued that on subjects where the United States has long been seen as different, attitudes in America increasingly resemble those in Europe. Soccer is one of the best examples yet.

To understand how the embrace of soccer undermines American exceptionalism, it’s worth understanding why Americans rejected soccer to begin with. In their 2001 book, Offside: Soccer and American Exceptionalism, Andrei Markovits and Steven Hellerman argue that in advanced industrial countries, the sports that achieved hegemony in the late 19th and early 20th centuries have generally maintained preeminence ever since.



So why didn’t soccer gain a foothold in the U.S. in the decades between the Civil War and World War I, when it was gaining dominance in Europe? Precisely because it was gaining dominance in Europe. The arbiters of taste in late 19th and early 20th century America wanted its national pastimes to be exceptional. Despite the British roots of both baseball (in rounders) and football (in rubgy), their promoters worked to cleanse them of foreign associations and market them as American originals. Basketball had the good fortune to have actually been invented in the United States.



Soccer, by contrast, was associated with foreignness in an era when mass immigration was spawning Coulter-like fears that America was losing its special character. “Soccer,” Markovits and Hellerman argue, “was perceived by both native-born Americans and immigrants as a non-American activity at a time in American history when nativism and nationalism emerged to create a distinctly American self-image … if one liked soccer, one was viewed as at least resisting—if not outright rejecting—integration into America.” Old-stock Americans, in other words, were elevating baseball, football, and basketball into symbols of America’s distinct identity. Immigrants realized that embracing those sports offered a way to claim that identity for themselves. Clinging to soccer, by contrast, was a declaration that you would not melt.



So why is interest in soccer rising now? Partly, because the United States is yet again witnessing mass immigration from soccer-mad nations. A huge chunk of the soccer fans in America today are Hispanic. According to one recent study, 56 percent of Hispanic Americans said they planned to watch the World Cup compared to only 20 percent of white non-Hispanics. Twenty-six percent of Hispanics in the U.S. call soccer their favorite game; among non-Hispanics whites, it’s three percent.



America’s sports culture has become less nativist. The difference between Hispanic immigrants today and European immigrants a century ago is that today’s newcomers don’t feel they must reject soccer to prove their Americanism. Technology makes it easier to stay connected to one’s favorite teams back home. But the key shift is that America’s sports culture is less nativist. More native-born Americans now accept that a game invented overseas can become authentically American, and that the immigrants who love it can become authentically American too. Fewer believe that to have merit, something must be invented in the United States.



This reflects a broader turn away from the exceptionalism that Coulter champions: Americans today are less likely to insist that America’s way of doing things is always best. In 2002, 60 percent of Americans told the Pew Research Center that, “our culture is superior to others.” By 2011, it was down to 49 percent. This change is being led by the young. According to that same 2011 Pew survey, Americans over the age of 50 were 15 points more likely to say “our culture is superior” than were people over 50 in Germany, Spain, Britain, and France. Americans under 30, by contrast, were actually less likely to say “our culture is superior” than their counterparts in Germany, Spain, and Britain.



It’s not surprising, therefore, that young Americans disproportionately like soccer. The average age of Americans who call baseball their favorite sport is 53. Among Americans who like football best, it’s 46. Among Americans who prefer soccer, by contrast, the average age is only 37.



Beside Hispanics and the young, the third major pro-soccer constituency is liberals. They’re willing to embrace a European sport for the same reason they’re willing to embrace a European-style health care system: because they see no inherent value in America being an exception to the global rule. According to a survey by Experian Marketing Services, American liberals were almost twice as likely to watch the 2010 World Cup as American conservatives. When the real-estate website Estately created a seven part index to determine a state’s love of soccer, it found that Washington State, Maryland, the District of Columbia, New York, and New Jersey—all bright blue—loved soccer best, while Alabama, Arkansas, North Dakota, Mississippi and Montana—all bright red—liked it least.



In fact, the soccer coalition—immigrants, liberals and the young—looks a lot like the Obama coalition. Not long ago, commentators assumed that these groups could never make soccer popular on their own. The traditional “rule of thumb,” argued Markovits and Hellerman in 2001, is that for a sport to succeed in America, it must develop strong roots among the white working class. “Soccer, on the other hand, continues to be identified as ‘yuppie’ and ‘preppy’ indulged by a mixture of suburban ‘soccer moms,’ along with Hispanic immigrants.”


But what Markovits and Hellerman didn’t anticipate is that the same demographic changes that have helped Obama win the White House without strong white working class support are helping soccer gain acceptance without it too. Soccer’s rise is part of what John Judis and Ruy Teixeira call “George McGovern’s revenge.” In 1972, McGovern won minorities, well-educated white liberals, and the young, but still lost 49 states. Since then, however, the minority share of the American electorate has risen from 11 percent to 28 percent. Whites without college degrees, by contrast, composed only 36 percent of American voters in 2012, down from 54 percent in 1988. (The only group that figures prominently in the Obama coalition but not the soccer coalition is African Americans, who disproportionately favor basketball. Sports-wise, therefore, Democrats constitute an alliance between soccer and basketball fans while Republicans disproportionately follow baseball, golf, and NASCAR. Football, by far America’s most popular sport, crosses the aisle.)



The willingness of growing numbers of Americans to embrace soccer bespeaks their willingness to imagine a different relationship with the world. Historically, conservative foreign policy has oscillated between isolationism and imperialism. America must either retreat from the world or master it. It cannot be one among equals, bound by the same rules as everyone else. Exceptionalists view sports the same way. Coulter likes football, baseball, and basketball because America either plays them by itself, or—when other countries play against us—we dominate them. (In fact, most of the other countries that play baseball do so because they were once under U.S. occupation).



Embracing soccer, by contrast, means embracing America’s role as merely one nation among many, without special privileges. It’s no coincidence that young Americans, in addition to liking soccer, also like the United Nations. In 2013, Pew found that Americans under 30 were 24 points more favorable to the U.N. than Americans over 50. According to a 2011 Pew poll, Millennials were also 23 points more likely than the elderly to say America should take its allies’ opinion into account even if means compromising our desires.



Coulter would find this deeply un-American. But it’s a healthy response to a world that America is both less able to withdraw from, and less able to dominate, than it was in the past. In embracing soccer, Americans are learning to take something we neither invented nor control, and nonetheless make it our own. It’s a skill we’re going to need in the years to come.

Another Review of Korda's Biography of Robert E. Lee

Sunday Book Review|Ghost of the Confederacy

Ghost of the Confederacy

‘Clouds of Glory,’ Michael Korda’s Robert E. Lee Biography

By FERGUS M. BORDEWICHJUNE 27, 2014

Robert E. Lee occupies a remarkable place in the pantheon of American history, combining in the minds of many, Michael Korda writes in this admiring and briskly written biography, “a strange combination of martyr, secular saint, Southern gentleman and perfect warrior.” Indeed, Korda aptly adds, “It is hard to think of any other general who had fought against his own country being so completely reintegrated into national life.”

Lee has been a popular subject of biography virtually from his death in 1870, at the age of 63, through the four magisterial volumes of Douglas Southall Freeman in the 1930s to Elizabeth Brown Pryor’s intimate 2007 study of Lee and his letters, “Reading the Man.” Korda, the author of earlier biographies of Ulysses S. Grant and Dwight D. Eisenhower, aspires to pry the marble lid off the Lee legend to reveal the human being beneath.

He draws a generally sympathetic portrait of a master strategist who was as physically fearless on the battlefield as he was reserved in personal relations. He was, Korda writes, “a perfectionist, obsessed by duty,” but also “charming, funny and flirtatious,” an animal lover, a talented cartographer and a devoted parent, as well as “a noble, tragic figure, indeed one whose bearing and dignity conferred nobility on the cause for which he fought and still does confer it in the minds of many people.”

Graduating second in his class at West Point, Lee was commissioned into the engineers, then the most prestigious branch of the Army. He spent several unremarkable decades directing the construction of coastal fortifications, including Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn, and somewhat more memorably, diverting the course of the Mississippi River at St. Louis. The Lee legend was born during the Mexican War, when he won the highest praise from the commander of the invading American army, Winfield Scott, for his bold reconnaissance behind enemy lines, during which he participated in three battles and crossed enemy territory three separate times in 36 hours — “the greatest feat of physical and moral courage” of the campaign, in Scott’s words. In 1859, when Scott was the overall commander of the United States Army, Lee was tapped to lead the company of Marines that captured John Brown at Harpers Ferry. Two years later, as state after state seceded from the Union, Lincoln offered Lee the command of the federal forces. He of course declined, and took his talents south.

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Korda portrays the Lee of 1861 as a man tragically torn between loyalty to his nation and his native state. That Lee agonized over his decision is certainly true. However, Korda does not consider the fact that Lee was also heir to an antifederalist tradition embedded deep in the political circuitry of the Virginia elite, and of his own family: 70 years earlier, in 1790, Robert’s father, the Revolutionary War hero Henry Lee, declared in response to what he considered a slighting of Southern interests, “I had rather myself submit to all the hazards of war and risk the loss of everything dear to me in life, than to live under the rule of a fixed insolent Northern majority.” Many other Southern-born officers remained unshaken in their loyalty to the Union.

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Korda provides crisp and concise, if conventional, accounts of Lee’s major engagements. We rarely hear from ordinary soldiers or feel the terror of battle amid the fog of war, but Korda is good at explaining Lee’s strategic thinking, the maneuvering of armies and the sometimes crippling limitations imposed by logistics, bad maps and worse roads.

Lee was not infallible. Although Korda generally gives him the benefit of the doubt, he admits that Lee was “not always an effective commander,” too often leaving it to his subordinates to guess at what he intended. He is too generous in his assessment of Lee’s disastrous frontal attacks at the Battle of Malvern Hill that capped the Seven Days campaign, and his equally futile assault — now famous as Pickett’s Charge — on another impregnable federal position at Gettysburg, in 1863. To Lee’s credit, as Pickett’s shattered survivors straggled back to their lines, Lee leaned from his horse to shake their hands, telling them, “All this has been my fault.” Yet without Lee, the Army of Northern Virginia would most likely have been defeated long before Appomattox.

Korda acknowledges that it is impossible to consider Lee without facing the problem of slavery. Lee owned slaves himself, and he arguably did more than any other man to try to create a country founded on slavery. Korda asserts that Lee was at least “moderate” on slavery, writing that he “was never, by any stretch of the imagination, an enthusiast for slavery.” That said, Lee did nothing to bring slavery to an end, and regarded abolitionists as troublemakers and revolutionaries. Korda quotes a revealing letter that Lee wrote to his wife, Mary, in which he described slavery as “a moral and political evil,” but went on to say, “I think it however a greater evil to the white man than to the black race. . . . The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, socially and physically. The painful discipline they are undergoing is necessary for their instruction as a race.” How long their “subjugation” would be necessary, Lee complacently concluded, “is known and ordered by a wise and Merciful Providence.” As Allen Guelzo noted in “Gettysburg: The Last Invasion,” Lee’s army systematically kidnapped both former fugitive slaves and free blacks in Pennsylvania, dragging scores, perhaps hundreds, of them back to slavery in Virginia. Lee may not have approved of this atrocity, but he did little or nothing to stop it.

“Clouds of Glory” is unfortunately marred by more than a few annoying errors of fact. Northern politicians with Southern leanings were called “doughfaces,” not “doughboys” — a 20th-century term for American soldiers in World War I. At the time of the Nat Turner rebellion in 1831, the enslaved population of the United States was about two million, not four million. The Kansas-Nebraska Act was passed in 1854, not 1845.

More troubling is a footnote in which Korda likens the burning of Atlanta in “1865” (actually 1864) and William T. Sherman’s March to the Sea to the firebombing of Dresden in 1945. “Britain’s bomber command . . . simply had more sophisticated technology than Sherman did, but the intention was the same,” Korda writes. He uncritically asserts that “Sherman introduced what a later generation would call total war, involving the burning of cities, homes and farms on a wide scale.” Although Sherman’s march was destructive of property, it was far less extensive than Lost Cause mythology claims, and was carried out with remarkably little loss of life: Perhaps fewer than 2,500 Confederate soldiers were killed in open battle, and very few civilians died. The bombing of Dresden took tens of thousands of lives, virtually all civilians. The worst war crimes of the Civil War were perpetrated by Confederates, in the savage massacres of black federal soldiers at Fort Pillow, Tenn., and by Lee’s own troops at the Crater at Petersburg, in 1864.

“Clouds of Glory” will satisfy readers who wish to be reassured that Lee was a splendid and courageous soldier, as well as the fine-mannered epitome of antebellum aristocracy. Those who might regard him as a reactionary who betrayed his country, and whose skillful generalship prolonged an unwinnable war on behalf of a cause that Grant called “one of the worst for which a people ever fought,” may find Korda’s enthusiasm less persuasive.

Bruce Allen Murphy - Scalia: A Court of One

Here is a promising biography of Justice Scalia.  We would do well as citizens to understand this man.  As I read this book I think that you pretty well understand the man if you know his history.  Judge Scalia is one man who becomes crystal clear if you know his past.     This is one scary dude.                                                                                                                                                         P.  1   On January 21, 2013 Scalia wore his Thomas More hat to President Obama's inauguration.  The hat received much commentary.  What was the justice's motive in wearing this very noticeable hat?  Was his head just cold or was he making a political statement?  Most likely he was comparing himself to More who was beheaded by Henry VIII for not annuling the king's marriage so he could marry Ann Boleyn.
P.  2   Speculation regarding his headware was rampant.  Other than the fact that Antonin Gregory Scalia likes to draw attention to himself who knows for sure.
P.  7   Born March 11, 1936 an only child in Trenton, N.J.  called Nino from the beginning.
P. 34  On the Harvard Law Review Scalia was a conservative amongst mostly liberals. 
P. 35  Harvard's law school philosophy was dominated by Felix Frankfurter.
P. 35  The interconnection between law and religion is a lifelong obsession for Scalia.
P. 38  Scalia was deeply influenced by his 1950's Harvard legal education.  The raw materials were there to develop his affinity for textual analysis and historical originalism.  He learned textual analysis from his scholarly father combined with the literal Biblical tradition favored by his faith leading to a careful textual reading and the application of ancient legal sources.
P. 42  Scalia apparently turned against JFK in 1960 because Kennedy drew a strict line between religion and politics.  JFK said his faith was private and wouldn't affect his acts as President.  Scalia disagreed in that his Catholicism was the essence of who he was.
P. 43 Scalia is a traditional Catholic estranged from Vatican II and its movements away from textual and historical approaches to understanding scripture and doctrine.  He is a minority within the "liberal" American Catholic church.
P. 68 While working in the Office of Legal Counsel in the Ford Administration in fighting the FOIA Scalia showed his legal skill in knowing the result he desired and then utilizing all resources in supporting that result he decided on ahead of time.  The author makes it clear throughout this book that Scalia is a brilliant legal mind.
P. 73 Working in the Office of Legal Counsel during the Ford Administration featured Scalia defending to the hilt the expansive power of the Executive Branch.  Scalia argued for deferring to presidential power in the areas of foreign policy and national security.  He has continued this work in his subsequent career.
P. 78 Scalia lost his job in the Justice Department the day Jimmy Carter was sworn in as President, but he had made a name for himself in defending presidential power.
P. 96 After the changeover in administrations Scalia took a teaching position at the Univ. of Chicago law school which was becoming a bastion of conservatism.  He remained for 7 years before returning East and being named to the DC court of appeals by Reagan,  one step below the Supreme Court.  Scalia was well-known in conservative legal circles.
P.100 On a liberally dominated appeals court, Scalia spoke out early and often against the liberals.
P.104 On the appeals court his clerks had a hard time working with Scalia's textual technique deriving the conclusion that the judge sought. They had to come up with the conclusion he sought with the methodology he was bound to use.
P. 131 Chief Justice Burger retires.  William Rehnquist takes his place   Scalia is confirmed by the Senate by a vote of 98 to 0 to take his place.  Scalia beats out Bork for the opening.
P. 133 Like other Supreme Court nominees before him, Scalia fooled the Senate and fooled the legal community.  Expected to be a congenial consensus builder, Scalia has been anything but as he became a court of one lashing out at his colleagues.
P. 142 From the beginning on the Court Scalia tried to dominate the court's decisions and draw attention to himself.
P. 354 In a chapter called "Opus Scotus" the author discusses the Catholic majority on the Supreme Court and its effect on rulings.  There is no doubt that the Catholicism of these five men affect their decisions.
P. 393 Scalia's Heller decision lays bare the fraudulent nature of his textual/originalist interpretation of the Constitution with the doubts of the leading early American historians like Jack Rakove.  Scalia puts himself in place of historians in discerning the meaning of the Constitution.
P. 431 Scalia has politicized the Supreme Court more than any justice in history.
P. 434 Scalia's bullying of his colleagues over the years has yielded him little in the way accomplishments.  Why he goes out of his way to alienate his colleagues is a mystery.
P. 441 Scalia continues to be obsessed with his religion and the law.
P. 451 Scalia's behavior during oral arguments for Obamacare were clownish, confrontational, and embarrassing for any objective observer of the court.
P. 457 Scalia's political partisanship from the bench in the fall of 2012 is startling and drew strong criticism.
P. 492 The judge is remarkably isolated from anyone who disagrees with him.

Good Analysis of the Tea Party

Wednesday, Jun 25, 2014 06:45 AM CDT


Tea Party’s hot mess: Inside a noisy, disenchanted movement

After Chris McDaniel's unlikely defeat in Mississippi last night, an angry movement is about to get even angrier

by Elias Isquith
In Mississippi on Tuesday, U.S. Sen. Thad Cochran defeated state Sen. Chris McDaniel in a runoff election to determine who would be the state Republican Party’s nominee for Senate in the extremely conservative state. Despite the fact that the two men were more or less indistinguishable on issue positions, the race was remarkably contentious and largely defined by dueling allegations of impropriety and fraud. Indeed, while non-conservatives may consider the differences between the so-called establishment and Tea Party wings of the GOP to be slight, the primary battle that reached its culmination last night is clear evidence that Republicans themselves strongly disagree.



On that front, if nowhere else, Mississippi GOPers have themselves an unlikely companion: University of Washington associate professor Christopher Parker, who is the author of 2013′s “Change They Can’t Believe In: The Tea Party and Reactionary Politics in America” and is a firm believer that the divisions within the GOP are significant and likely to endure. Hoping to gain a keener insight into the Tea Party mind, Salon recently called Parker to discuss his research, his recent Brookings Institution paper on the Tea Party and why he doesn’t think the kind of bickering and dysfunction we saw in Mississippi as of late is likely to go away any time soon. Our conversation is below and has been edited for clarity and length.



You make a distinction between Tea Party conservatives and establishment conservatives, even though they often support essentially the same policies. How come?





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There are a couple of really key differences, one of which has to do with change. An establishment conservative doesn’t necessarily embrace change of any kind; in fact, there’s a reason they cling to conservatism, because they prefer stability. So they don’t necessarily embrace change, but what they do do is they know that [change is] necessary in order to maintain a stable society over the long haul … What they want is, if a change is going take place, they prefer to have organic, controlled change versus revolutionary change. In other words, evolutionary versus revolutionary change. You can see that in the works of Edmund Burke, who railed against the French Revolution because it was such a drastic change and [because] he would have preferred more evolutionary change, not something so drastic that it completely overturned the foundations of society. The difference between these establishment conservatives is that they see change as a necessary “evil,” if you will, in order to maintain a stable society over the long run.



Now, a reactionary conservative, they don’t want change at all. In fact, they want to look backwards in time to a time during which their social group — their power and cultural hegemony was unquestioned. Beyond that, they will do anything they can to protest social change of any kind, up to and including breaking the law … That’s what the Klan did; that’s what the Tea Party has done on a couple of occasions with their violence. It’s not as much violence as you saw with the Klan in the 1920s, but you do see some of the ways in which they break law and order. If you’re a real conservative, you’re supposed to be all about law and order. But these reactionary conservatives — they’re not completely about law and order if it means capitulation and the loss of their social prestige.



Let me just tell you one second point: Another axis of difference between the two is that an establishment conservative will see policy differences or policy preference differences between them and progressives as merely political differences. But these reactionary conservatives see policy differences, or differences of policy preferences, as a contest between good and evil. They have this Manichaean way of looking at politics, this apocalyptic way of looking at politics. Therefore, compromise cannot be [allowed]. Compromise will not be tolerated whatsoever, because they see it as concession to evil, whereas an establishment conservative knows that compromise is necessary.



Could you expand a bit on the point you just made about Tea Party lawlessness, because one of the common claims the right makes in defense of the Tea Party is to contrast its supposed law-abiding nature with the — again, supposedly — more anarchic behavior of the Occupy Wall Street crowd.



Think about what happened in Arizona, with the attack of some of the Arizona representatives’ offices that voted in favor of the Affordable Care Act. Some of their offices were vandalized by Tea Partyers — that’s one example. A more recent example, quite honestly, is what recently happened in Nevada, those people that went on that shooting spree that killed those cops … those people were linked to the Tea Party. I’m not saying they were members of the Tea Party, but they were Tea Party sympathizers. As a matter of fact, [their victims] were draped in the Gadsden flag. So, I’m just saying … [Tea Party supporters are] not above breaking law and order. They’re not above challenging law and order.



What are some other popular conceptions about the Tea Party that you think are mistaken?



The bottom line is that a lot of people assume that the Tea Party people are just crazy … but that’s not the case. I mean, that’s really not the case, and I want to dismiss that misconception as soon as I can … Another misconception [is] that the Tea Party is really just a bunch of racist people and that their movement is about racism — and it’s really not … It’s bigger than racism. People who tend to support the Tea Party, they tend to be sexist, they tend to be homophobic, they tend to be xenophobic; so it’s not just about race. It’s about difference. It’s about anything that violates their phenotypical norm of what it’s supposed to mean to be an American: white, mainly male, middle-class, middle-aged or older, heterosexual, and native born. Anything that falls beyond that description is considered not to be a true American and therefore … these groups are encroaching on what they see as the “real” America, the America that they’ve come to know and love through their lifetime.



Would you include Christian among those things a Tea Partyer is likely to think an American is supposed to be?



Christian, writ large, yeah. I would definitely say that.



To that point, though, what would you say to Tea Party folks who would point to the popularity of women like Sarah Palin — or people of color like Ben Carson — as proof that charges of bigotry are unfounded?



They would say people like Ben Carson and Herman Cain [are] these sort of “silver-minded Negroes.” They’re the exceptions. Now if we want to talk about looking at black folks as a whole, no — they’re racist. There are some exceptional people that agree with their views whom they like and whom they want to hold out there to blunt any claims that they’re racist; they’re going to pick a couple token people. But that doesn’t absolve them of racism.



OK. So what was your other point about Tea Party misconceptions?



My other point was that [Tea Partyers are] not crazy. People want to say that they’re crazy, and they’re really not. They want to maintain their social position, their social prestige; and as Frederick Douglass once said, “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has and it never will.” So it’s rational to want to hold onto your position; it’s completely rational. It’s about the means through which [Tea Partyers] do that — that’s what the problem is.



One could say, “Maybe they need to be more educated!” But that’s another fallacy as it pertains to the Tea Party: People think they’re dumb. They’re not dumb. Twenty-six percent of all strong Tea Party identifiers have at least a bachelor’s degree. People think they’re poor, or that they’re working-class. No, they’re not. Twenty percent of all Tea Party households have at least a $100,000 of income. So they’re not dumb, and they’re not working-class or poor — and this has been the case with Birchers, this was the case with the 1920s Ku Klux Klan, this was the case with the Know-Nothing Party in the 1850s. Same demographic group, every time.



Another problem is just the double-talk that they use. They claim they’re about small government; they’re really not. They claim that they don’t like Barack Obama cause he’s a progressive; have they really looked at his legislative record? He governs as a centrist, regardless of what they believe his beliefs to be. On that, if you look at what happened on George Bush’s watch — I mean, let’s be for real: the deficit on George Bush’s … expanded 104 percent … If you look at Clinton’s tenure, it only expanded about 14 percent. If you look at the national debt, how much that expanded on George Bush’s watch; if you look at the extent to which discretionary spending in George Bush’s first term expanded — I think it expanded by like 48-49 percent. I mean, come on! We didn’t see any Tea Partyers out there at the time. We saw nothing when George Bush was doing all this stuff. George W. Bush got TARP passed. We saw nothing. Now we get Obama in, and now the world is going to shit …



If I could play devil’s advocate here, what about the argument that many Tea Party types — like Glenn Beck, for example — like to make that says George W. Bush was bad, and they didn’t like him either, but that Barack Obama’s taken everything about Bush that was bad and made it even worse?



Was there a Tea Party when Bush was in office? No. [Laughs] All right? I’m not saying that it’s not possible; all I’m saying is that, to the extent to which there was some sort of tangible push-back or counter-mobilization [on the right] against Bush, we didn’t see it when he was in office. So there might have been some people at the Heritage Foundation or the Cato Institute, and there were — especially at the Cato Institute — who had serious issues with Bush’s policy. I’m not saying that there weren’t. But we didn’t see any mass movement. We didn’t see any mobilization of this kind. Not even close to the mobilization of the Tea Party. Think about the number of people that are Tea Party members, just at the national level: We’re talking maybe 700,000 people. But if we’re talking about Tea Party sympathizers, people who strongly identify with the Tea Party, we’re talking about 45-46 million people … We didn’t see anything like this when Bush was in office, period.



That ties in with another one of your arguments, which is that the Tea Party is, fundamentally, not an astroturf phenomenon but rather a legitimate grass-roots movement.



It’s not the astroturf movement that a lot of people think it is. I said that in that Brookings piece and I’ve backed that up with some evidence. Now, we saw what happened in Virginia, right? You had this guy, Brat, who got almost zero support from national Tea Party organizations — and look what happened. So I think there’s really valid data showing that the Tea Party movement is not the astroturf movement that people think it is.



You’ve argued before that we shouldn’t expect to see the Tea Party movement dissipate so long as Barack Obama — or even Hillary Clinton — is president, because it’s fundamentally a reactionary movement driven by people who are afraid of losing privileges. That makes sense, but at the same time, if their complaints are so much about power and station rather than more abstract ideological disagreements, that doesn’t leave those of us who aren’t conservative may options when it comes to negotiating with these people. So while I get that establishment Republicans will make their peace with the Tea Party because their differences are relatively minor, what are the rest of us supposed to do?



What happens with these reactionary, right-wing movements, historically, is that they tend to coalesce whenever [the people involved] believe social change is happening too fast … So if there’s no threat to the “American way of life,” these people will go underground, as people say. But that doesn’t mean they’ll necessarily go away. For a while, they will go underground and we won’t have to deal with them. But as soon as they perceive another existential threat, then they will reappear again. It happens all the time, historically.



Something I’m wondering is, since reactionary conservatism is so tied-up with identity — specifically, a white, mostly male and Christian identity — does this mean that we can expect to see movements like the Tea Party disappear in the future, when the U.S. is projected to no longer be majority-white? (I know the whole question of what is whiteness is loaded and the definition has changed throughout American history, but let’s table that element, if we could.)



I think it’s possible, but I don’t think it’s going to happen in the near future. Maybe in 50 years … But when you see these voter-suppression efforts, and the ways in which [voter ID proponents] continue to move the goal posts in order to ensure that they get the [voters] who are, for lack of a better term, more pro-status quo … and if they continue to move the goal posts, then they will continue to extend this sense of cultural entitlement and the hegemony they feel they are supposed to have.



But they’re losing and [that dominant position] is slipping away, little by little … They’re prolonging their cultural hegemony through these shenanigans that they’ve been conducting for the last four or five years, and it’s going to continue to be that way until the demographics in this country change sufficiently so that Republicans [have] more of an incentive to start listening to the policy preferences of people that don’t look like them …



That makes me wonder something that, in all honesty, makes a me a bit uncomfortable but: If you’re correct and it’s the case that these people won’t ever back down so long as they feel their social placement threatened, would it be possible to argue that Democrats would be better off nominating candidates who are not superficially threatening — i.e., who are white guys — while still pushing the same policy goals as they would under Obama or Clinton?



It doesn’t make sense logically because — you see what the Tea Party is doing to the Republican Party right now? It’s tearing it apart. So if I were a strategist, I’d continue to pick candidates that make the Tea Party group want to remain politically viable because it’s ripping the Republican Party in half.



But what about the idea that though the Tea Party has unquestionably hurt the GOP in some ways — they’d probably control the Senate by now if not for the Tea Party, for example — it’s also helped them gain a real iron hold over the House of Representatives and many state governments? Might their effect on the Republican Party not be quite so uniformly negative, then?



I think that’s a legitimate argument … Short of having some election reform … then that’s going to continue to be the case … That’s a tough question, Elias. I think you’re right, I think it could continue to muck up the world before we can get legislation passed; and if that’s the case, then we have to get a strong president in there that’s not afraid to pass an executive order, if it comes to that.



As Obama is doing now, with his strategy of doing as much via executive order as possible.



Right. We’re probably going to have to resort to something like that.



Last question: Were you surprised to see Rep. Kevin McCarthy beat out Rep. Raúl Labrador in the vote for a new House majority leader, now that Rep. Eric Cantor is stepping down? Labrador was generally seen to be the Tea Party’s preferred candidate, but McCarthy won. Do you think this is surprising and does it mean the establishment within the GOP is more powerful than conventional wisdom implies?



To the extent that the Republicans still run the House and Boehner’s speaker of the House, I’m not surprised at all that the establishment is starting to exercise a little more of their power. Boehner has the control; he’s the speaker of the House. He has a lot of discretion and a lot of power. So while these folks are sitting in the House right now, and they know that the Republicans are more than likely to win the House again in 2014, they don’t want to run against Boehner. I don’t think they want to do that. So I’m not surprised in the least that an establishment person won. Now, we’re going to see what happens in the continuing primary season as they continue to roll along, because I think the Tea Party is going to be around and I think they are far from finished. So we’ll see. I think the real litmus test is going to be what happens in the next Congress. That’s going to be the real litmus test.

How Does it Feel?

Draft Of Bob Dylan's 'Like A Rolling Stone' Sells For $2 Million

by Scott Neuman

June 24, 2014 3:18 PM ET


A photo provided by Sotheby's shows a page from a working draft of Bob Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone." The draft sold for more than $2 million.

AP This post was updated at 5:50 p.m. ET.

Lyrics scribbled on hotel stationery circa 1965 that later became one of the most iconic rock songs of all time, Bob Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone," has fetched more than $2 million in an auction at Sotheby's.

What the auction house describes as "the only known surviving draft of the final lyrics for this transformative rock anthem" is four pages written on stationery from The Roger Smith Hotel in Washington, D.C., containing line-outs, changes and doodles.

The full 4-page draft, in a photo released by Sotheby's.

Uncredited/AP The song, written when Dylan was just 24 but already well on his way to stardom, appeared on the album Highway 61 Revisited. It rose to No. 2 on the Billboard charts, despite the reluctance of some radio stations to air it because of its length (more than six minutes at a time when most pop songs were three to four minutes long).

Besides several doodles in the margins and on the bottom that appear to be of a deer, a hat and a chicken, on page one, there are a number of semi-legible changes in the lyrics that caught our eye:

— Under "Threw the bums a dime in your prime," Dylan has scratched out: "At scene of the crime."

— In the line that was recorded as: "You used to laugh about / Everybody that was hanging out," Dylan had originally written "Everybody that was down and out?" before crossing it out.

— After "Now you don't seem so proud," is written "Voice is down" and "Head's in the cloud."

— He may also have been trying out alternative rhymes for "scrounging your next meal" — "make it real" and "your last meal" (both scratched out) and something entirely different: "like the children who play in the heat of the day."

— After the plaintive and cynical refrain "How does it feel?" Dylan has written in mixed caps: "IS IT AINT Quite ReaL."

— And "No direction home" looked tentatively to be "road back home," but in the margins with an arrow pointing to it is another, stranger, alternative: "False Knight / Night on the road. AL CAPONE

STUDY: Watching Only Fox News Makes You Less Informed Than Watching No News At All

BY Michael B. Kelley
Business Insider
22 May 2012

Media outlets such as Fox News and MSNBC have a negative impact on people’s current events knowledge while NPR and Sunday morning political talk shows are the most informative sources of news, according to Fairleigh Dickinson University’s newest PublicMind survey.

Researchers asked 1,185 random nationwide respondents what news sources they had consumed in the past week and then asked them questions about events in the U.S. and abroad.

On average, people correctly answered 1.6 of 5 questions about domestic affairs.

Because the aim of the study was to isolate the effects of each type of news source, they then controlled for variables such as other news sources, partisanship, education and other demographic factors.

They found that someone who watched only Fox News would be expected to answer 1.04 domestic questions correctly compared to 1.22 for those who watched no news at all. Those watching only "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" answered 1.42 questions correctly and people who only listened to NPR or only watched Sunday morning political talk shows answered 1.51 questions correctly.



In terms of international news, people correctly answered an average of 1.8 of 4 questions.

With all else being equal, people who watched no news were expected to answer 1.28 correctly; those watching only Sunday morning shows figured at 1.52; those watching only "The Daily Show" figured at 1.60; and those just listening to NPR were expected to correctly answer 1.97 international questions.

Those watching only MSNBC were expected to correctly answer only 1.23 out of 4, while viewers of only Fox News figured at 1.08. The study noted that the effects of Fox News, MSNBC and talk radio depended on the ideology of the consumer.

“Ideological news sources, like Fox and MSNBC, are really just talking to one audience,” Political scientist and poll analyst Dan Cassino said in a press release. “This is solid evidence that if you’re not in that audience, you’re not going to get anything out of watching them.”



Thus, those who watched no news—answering questions by guessing or relying on existing knowledge—fared much better than those who watched the most popular 24-hour cable news network (i.e. Fox News).

Cassino concluded that "the most popular of the national media sources—Fox, CNN, MSNBC—seem to be the least informative."

It is a follow-up to a 2011 survey of 612 New Jerseyans that found, among other things, that those who watched Fox News were 18 points less likely to know that Egyptians overthrew their government than those who watch no news at all.

For a Liberal Arts Education

How to Destroy College Education

Posted: 06/23/2014 12:11 pm EDT Updated: 2 hours ago

Print Article

by Michael Roth 

It is crucial to support efforts to reduce student indebtedness and increase access to higher education . However, we should beware of those who want to turn this moment of educational reform into a program of vocationalism and tracking as a substitute for liberal education. I recently made the case this in an interview on WNYC, and in the following piece in The Daily Beast.
In America we fight about education. One of the key struggles today is centered on whether we should retool the college years so that we get students to be "job ready" and tracked into some specific task needed in the economy now. This retooled version of instrumentalism is diametrically opposed to our great tradition of liberal education that envisions learning as a vehicle for social mobility and effective citizenship. This tradition stretches back to the foundation of the country. "Wherever a general knowledge and sensibility have prevailed among the people," John Adams wrote, "arbitrary government and every kind of oppression have lessened and disappeared in proportion."
But alongside commitment to education, there have always been suspicions about what really went on in colleges. As I show in Beyond the University: Why Liberal Education Matters, from Benjamin Franklin to today's Internet pundits, critics of higher education have attacked its irrelevance and elitism--often calling for more useful, more vocational instruction. Franklin skewered learning that took pride in its freedom from labor (in its uselessness) as just a mask for snobbism--learning "to exit a drawing room properly." Contemporary commentators question whether young people learn anything useful in their "four year party" that culminates (occasionally) with a diploma. Education, from this perspective, is a luxury bought with a loan.
But in his day Franklin went on to propose a compelling version of a broad education that was useful without being narrowly instrumental. And Thomas Jefferson thought that nurturing a student's capacity for life-long learning within a university structure was necessary for science and commerce while also being essential for democracy. Neither believed a university should merely train young people for jobs that old folks had already picked out for them--but neither thought that college should be merely academic.
Over the past several years, however, we have seen a new sort of criticism directed at the academy. These critics no longer claim to be in search of "true liberal learning," but instead call for an education that simply equips people to play an appropriate role in the economy. Economists wanting to limit access to education question whether it's worth it for mail carriers to have spent time and money learning about the world and themselves when they could have been saving for a house. Sociologists wonder whether increased access to college creates inappropriate expectations for a work force that will not regularly be asked to tap into independent judgment and critical thinking. And then there's the cost of a liberal education, its so-called disconnect from the real world, its political correctness. Columnists write that we must make it more relevant, while politicians growl about making it more efficient. Through "disruptive innovation," we are told, educational institutions can be "disintermediated"-- like middlemen cut out of a market transaction.
Many today are calling for us to create a much more vocational style of teaching. They claim that in today's economy we should track students earlier into specific fields for which they seem to have aptitude. This is exactly the opposite of the American tradition of liberal education. From the revolutionary war through contemporary debates about the worth of college, American thinkers have emphasized the ways that broad, pragmatic learning enhances the capacities of the whole person, allowing individuals greater freedom and an expanded range of possible choices. Liberal education in this tradition means learning to learn, creating habits of independent critical and creative thinking that would last a lifetime.
The effort today to limit higher education to only a certain class of students or to constrict the college curriculum to a neat, instrumental itinerary is a critical mistake, one that neglects this deep current of humanistic learning. Under the guise of practicality, this is old-fashioned, elitist condescension combined with a desire to protect the status quo of inequality.
Since the founding of this country, education has been closely tied to individual freedom, and to the ability to think for oneself and to contribute to society by unleashing one's creative potential. The pace of change has never been faster, and the ability to shape change and seek opportunity has never been more valuable than it is today. If we want to push back against inequality and enhance the vitality of our culture and economy, we need to support greater access to a broad, pragmatic liberal education.

A Review of Korda's Biography of Lee

How I Learned to Hate Robert E. Lee
by Christopher Dickey
Michael Korda’s superb new biography of the Confederate general, Clouds of Glory: The Life and Legend of Robert E. Lee, chisels away at the myth. You may not like what’s underneath.



All the time I was growing up in Atlanta, the face of Robert E. Lee was taking shape on the side of an enormous granite mountain just outside town. He loomed like a god above us, as much a presence as any deity, and God knows he was accepted as such. It was only much later that I began to question his sanctity, and then to hate what he stood for.



When I was in elementary school, the face of Lee on Stone Mountain was a rough-cut thing, weathering and wasting as the generation that began it in 1912—a generation that still included veterans of the Civil War 50 years before—gave way to generations with other wars to focus their attention.



Then the carving began again in 1964 in a centennial haze of romantic memories about the Old South and frenzy of fear and defiance provoked by the civil-rights movement. As Martin Luther King Jr. was marching on Washington, Confederate battle flags floated above state houses and sculptors using torches began again to carve the granite features of Lee, along with Stonewall Jackson and Jefferson Davis, taking up three vertical acres on the mountain’s face.



It is this sort of image—the bas-relief nobility of memorial sculpture—that Michael Korda chisels through in his massive and highly readable new one-volume biography: Clouds of Glory: The Life and Legend of Robert E. Lee. But, as Korda clearly recognizes, Lee himself could be almost as impenetrable as stone.



He was not cold. He was very loving with his wife and many children. He enjoyed flirting (harmlessly, it seems) with young women. He had the self-assurance of a Virginia aristocrat, albeit an impecunious one, and the bearing of a man born not only to be a soldier, but to command. He was tall for his time—at least 5’10”—and as a young man he was strikingly handsome, broad-shouldered, and Byronic.



But perhaps Lee’s most memorable feature, even in the worst of times, was his phenomenal self-control, whether in the face of triumphs or disasters. His belief in God’s will lent “a certain opaque quality” to Lee’s character, as Korda writes. Perhaps the general did not cultivate his fame as “The Marble Man,” but he earned it.



What cannot and should not be forgiven about Lee, despite his many virtues, is the cause that he defended.Lee was so much the model of a Virginia gentleman that he came to seem a hero not only of the Lost Cause in the South, but of a restored peace for the Union in the aftermath of the war. He believed in reason, good manners, and moderation in all things except battle, when his skill in defense and audacity in offense managed to keep the Confederacy’s hopes for independence alive years longer than would have—or should have—been the case.



And that is part of the problem. While the dream of the Confederacy was kept alive, the men on the battlefield on both sides perished by the tens of thousands. In his desperate effort to triumph at Gettysburg in 1863, deep in northern territory, he waged a battle that wrought more than 50,000 casualties (killed, wounded, and disappeared). By contrast, fewer than 50,000 soldiers died in all of the Vietnam War.



Lee put the blame for Gettysburg on himself, which was a rare and noble thing to do, then retreated, and kept on fighting. Almost a year later at Spotsylvania Court House, where there were 32,000 casualties, a Union officer described a scene in which the Confederate dead “were piled upon each other in some places four layers deep, exhibiting every ghastly phase of mutilation. Below the mass of fast-decaying corpses, the convulsive twitching of limbs and the writhing of bodies showed that there were wounded men still alive and struggling to extricate themselves from the horrid entombment.”



It may be unfair to criticize a general for wanting to fight on against all odds. That is what we assume generals will try to do, and Lee often put himself in as much personal danger and daily discomfort as his faithful soldiers. But it’s a plain fact that by prolonging a conflict he could not win, Lee’s brilliance and the loyalty he inspired helped destroy what was left of the South.



Korda writes that by late 1864 the Union commander Ulysses S. Grant (the subject of another Korda biography) and Lee had “created dreadful, static sieges that would postpone the end of the war by 10 painful months,” during which time Union Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman “would march through Georgia, taking Atlanta, marching from there ‘to the sea,’ and destroying everything along his way: towns, railway lines, telegraph lines, homes, farms, crops, and livestock.”



What cannot and should not be forgiven about Lee, despite his many virtues, is the cause that he defended.



Korda argues convincingly that Lee was ambivalent about slavery. His wife’s family owned more than 100 Negroes, but when her father died, Lee took pains to see that the old man’s will emancipating them after five years was executed. (That this finally took effect in 1862 does not diminish the fact that he had set the wheels in motion to free these servants and laborers years before.) Lee and his wife set up a school for the slaves, which was actually illegal in Virginia at the time. And he proposed, toward the end of the war, when the white South was bled dry, that slaves should be enlisted as soldiers and granted their freedom in the process. But that bold suggestion went nowhere with the politicians, who stalled until the idea, along with the Confederacy, was dead.



Korda is especially good at explaining why Lee, who had performed heroically in the Mexican War and served as the superintendent of West Point, turned down the command of the Union armies offered to him by the Lincoln administration in the first days of the conflict. He saw himself as a Virginian, deeply rooted in the state’s genteel culture. And while he did not support secession and thought it dangerous and revolutionary (thus anathema to his aristocratic values), he could not bring himself to lead an army that would force Virginia or any other state to remain in the Union. Once Virginia reluctantly seceded, so, also reluctantly, did Lee.



But after that decision was made, Lee’s nobility and charisma, and the carnage that he commanded, gave cover to all those incendiary Southern politicians who did not, in fact, feel ambivalent about slavery. These “fire-eaters,” as they were called, not only wanted to perpetuate their peculiar institution, they wanted to reopen the slave trade with Africa, which was recognized even at the time as a terrible holocaust banned for half a century, but rationalized by them because African slaves were just so cheap and profitable and could be so useful to those Southerners who wanted to spread their voracious cotton economy to the west and south.



‘Clouds of Glory: The Life and Legend of Robert E. Lee’ by Michael Korda. 832 p. Harper. $18.99. ()The fire-eaters were a minority then, as the Tea Partiers (their spiritual descendants) are today, but like today’s Tea Party they promoted extremist agendas and pounded down on wedge issues that sundered the nation and very nearly destroyed it.



Lee had no time for these men, and he opposed their ideas, but he fought for them year after year, battle after battle, slaughter after slaughter. Maybe that makes him in his way a fascinating and tragic leader, but readers of Korda’s balanced and detailed book will have to decide for themselves if he was a heroic one. For my part, I think not.

Marx is Back

Salon


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Sunday, Jun 22, 2014 08:00 AM CDT

Believe it or not: Karl Marx is making a comeback

It's true. The "Communist Manifesto" co-author has gotten a second life — and he has some advice for progressives

Sean McElwee
Karl Marx is on fire right now. More than a century after his death, the co-author of “The Communist Manifesto” still has the honor of being the first smear against ideas slightly to the left of Hillary Clinton. (See: Thomas Piketty.) Marx also graced the cover of the National Review as recently ast last month. Few other thinkers, and certainly few non-religious figures, can claim the honor of being so widely misappropriated by the political rearguard. But, while most people consider Marx only as a sort of intellectual boogeyman, the manifestation of everything evil on the left, he has much to offer a left increasingly divorced from the working class.



To that end, Marx actually is enjoying something of a renaissance on the left these days. Jacobin, a socialist publication that publishes many Marxist thinkers, was profiled by the the New York Times and boasts Bob Herbert as a contributor. Benjamin Kunkel’s recent compilation of essays, “Utopia or Bust,” earned that author a profile in New York magazine, and the title “The Lena Dunham of Literature.” And that’s not even to mention Thomas Piketty’s blockbuster work, “Capital in the 21st Century,” which harkens back to Marx’s multi-volume magnum opus, “Das Kapital.” The wave has even extended so far as Capitol Hill, where Sen. Bernie Sanders, D- Vermont, openly calls himself a “democratic socialist.”



Marx most certainly wasn’t right about everything, but he wasn’t wrong about as much as people think. A revival of his thought is good news for progressive America. It can give the left fresh arguments that were previously forgotten to history, and new organizing strategies that they’ve long since abandoned.


The first problem with the left that Marx might have noted is the wholesale abandonment of the working class. As Perry Anderson points out in his essay, “Considerations on Western Marxism,”



The extreme difficulty of language of much of Western Marxism in the twentieth century was never controlled by the tension of a direct or active relationship to a proletarian audience.



Increasingly, the left is dominated by what the German Marxist Rosa Luxemburg might call Kathedersozialisten – or “professorial socialists.” These thinkers, frequently drenched in academese, talk and debate in a way almost entirely designed to alienate anyone who does not already accept their conclusions. The professorial left seems to have innumerable answers for those wondering what Lacanian psychoanalysis has to offer us, but can give us little guidance as to whether the Working Families Party should support Cuomo or run its own candidate.



“Manifesto” co-author Friedrich Engels’s “The Condition of the Working Class in England” was a pioneering study of the working class. He and Marx both clearly saw the working class as the means to political power — and viewed persuading them as the most important task the left faced. When Maurice Lachatre asked Marx if he would be willing to serialize “Das Kapital,” Marx replied, “In this form the book will be more accessible to the working-class, a consideration which to me outweighs everything else.” One struggles, however, to imagine a latter-day Marxist champion like Theodor W. Adorno writing those words. The left abandoned the working class and the working class then abandoned the left. That needs to change.



Marx and Engels also offer the left a new way to discuss ideology. In his brilliant collection, “The Agony of the American Left,” Marx(ish) historian Christopher Lasch writes,



The Marxian tradition of social thought has always attached great importance to the way in which class interest takes on the quality of objective reality… Lacking an awareness of the human capacity for collective self-deception, the populists tended to postulate conspiratorial explanations of history.



Lasch is arguing that, to a large extent, humans are biased toward the state of affairs that currently exists and then work backwards to justify it to themselves. That is, we’re more likely to embrace a deeply unjust economic system, simply because it’s the one we’ve always known. A recent study bears this out, finding that market competition serves to psychologically legitimize inequalities that would otherwise be considered unjust. Because many on the left, especially populists, do not understand ideology, they often write and argue as though the entire American political system is controlled by a small cabal of business or political leaders conspiring to fool the masses.



The implications of ideology are important and numerous. The left must not fall into the trap of believing that all Americans actually do share our views, but that a conspiracy of the wealthy, or the power of GOP framing, or the influence of money are preventing us from succeeding. To some extent, these things may indeed harm the left, but widespread ideology — the automatic assumption of capitalism’s unmitigated merit, for example — is just as big a problem. We must win the war of ideas before we can win the war of democracy.



The great Italian politician Antonio Gramsci was well aware of the lure of such cabalistic conspiracies, but also of their limitations, and his idea about cultural hegemony led him to advocate for educating the working class. This task is difficult, but it will lead to more substantial progress than simply explaining away failures by complaining about the influence of the wealthy. The rich certainly have different interests than the rest of us, but Gilens and Page note in an often overlooked passage of their oft-cited paper on “American oligarchy,”



The preferences of average citizens are positively and fairly highly correlated, across issues, with the preferences of economic elites.



Groups like the Chamber of Commerce and other business-oriented organizations, on the other hand, have preferences that do not correlate with the interests of the middle class. But even with that caveat, the left should not overstate the extent to which Americans agree with the leftist economic critique. In an apt description of the American ideology, John Steinbeck noted, “Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”



Finally, Marx’s moral critique of capitalism and markets has never been fully comprehended or considered by anyone (other than the socialists, of course) but the most ardent libertarians and a strain of thinkers broadly called communitarians. Broadly speaking, Marx’s critique of capitalism resembles the Catholic church’s critique: That by relying on greed and self-interest, markets degrade humans and encourage our worst impulses. Marx quotes Shakespeare’s “Timon of Athens”:



This yellow slave



Will knit and break religions, bless the accursed;



Make the hoar leprosy adored, place thieves



And give them title, knee and approbation



With senators on the bench



Marx writes, riffing off of Shakespeare, “I am bad, dishonest, unscrupulous, stupid; but money is honoured and therefore so is its possessors. Money is the supreme good, therefore its possessor is good.” Jesus warned that the love of money is the root of all evil. This fact seems self-evident. Religious critics of capitalism have noted this core delusion for decades. Economist and Catholic E. F. Schumacher writes,



Call a thing immoral or ugly, soul-destroying or a degradation to man, a peril to the peace of the world or to the well-being of future generations: as long as you have not shown it to be ‘uneconomic’ you have not really questioned its right to exist, grow, and prosper.



With the exception of libertarians, who have tried to turn the immorality of capitalism into a sort of perverse morality (“greed is good”), most politicians and economists are entirely unconcerned with the fact that capitalism is based on a collective drawing upon our deepest desire: to exploit.



The underlying logic of capitalism is that if we all take our most primordial impulses and mix them up in the magical mechanism called “markets,” we are left with progress. Recent history suggests we may be left with only more ugliness. As G. A. Cohen writes, “the immediate motive to productive activity in a market society is (not always but) typically some mixture of greed and fear.” The participants in market transactions are not interested in fulfilling human needs — they are interested in making a profit. Fulfilling human needs is one way to make a profit — exploitation, the creation of desire through advertising or downright fraud are others. Human progress is an ancillary consideration, individual profit is the goal. Today, speaking in moral terms is not incredibly popular — inequality is seen not as a moral issue in which a small class has a dangerous amount of power, but instead as an inefficiency to be corrected with a technocratic policy.



We don’t know for certain what Marx would say about the modern left. Its radicals often foster a poisonous aversion to pragmatism in favor of pious purity, its politicians are guilty of wholesale abandonment of the working class, and many of its leading thinkers have succumbed to a dreadful technocratism. Marx failed to account for the adaptability of capitalism and left little in the way of alternatives. In the end, this void was filled by murderers and fools. Marx, a deeply humanistic thinker, would certainly have abhorred the violence in his name some half a century after his death. But rational people do not blame Christ for the Crusades, nor Muhammad for 9/11 nor Nietzsche for the Holocaust. The taboo of Marx has prevented the left from learning his most important lesson; in the words of Gil Scott-Heron, “the revolution will not be televised.”

California and Alabama

Southern boys grow up to be Southern men, leaving Momma and Daddy behind, in my case marrying a California woman, not the norm, but it all worked out. We've both learned new things along the way, things we wouldn't have learned otherwise if we had stayed within our original culture. California and Alabama. An interesting mix, don't you think?



LikeLike · · Promote · Share..Lorna Wood, Stephen Jennings, Laurie Knight Pasion and 11 others like this..View 2 more comments..RemoveRachel Stevens We've got a Minnesota/California conjunction--both grew up working-class, one Jewish, one not. Interesting mix indeed.20 hours ago · Edited · Like · 2

..RemoveFred Hudson Mix and match.17 hours ago · Like · 1

..RemoveTom Tidwell I'm even more mixed than usual, Fred Hudson. Alabama boy moves to Washington, DC, London, England, NY, NY, Houston, TX, Buffalo, NY, Atlanta, GA, Charleston, SC, and Bay Area, CA!14 hours ago · Like · 1

..RemoveFred Hudson Tom, when are you going to settle down?13 hours ago · Like · 1

The Dylan Library VIII

Now I can listen to Dylan without analyzing the lyrics.  I just listen and enjoy.  In the car player now is "John Wesley Harding," released in 1968, the year I graduated from high school.  I remember this album well.  It continues to hold up.

The President Speaks on Iraq

President Obama spoke to the nation a few minutes ago on Iraq.  I do not pretend to understand what is going on over there, but I do know that Bush and Cheney's invasion in 2003 was a major disaster and we are still picking up the pieces today.  I trust this President to make the right decisions as to US actions in Iraq.  Can you imagine ANY Republican speaking intelligently to this issue like Obama?  Well, I can't either.

Tony Gwynn IS in the HOF

Some idiot tried to tell me this afternoon that Tony Gwynn was not in the baseball Hall of Fame. I have verified that he was elected to the HOF in 2007 with 97.61% of the votes, the 7th highest percentage in HOFvoting. If I see that dude again I am going to mash his face in.

The Influence of Ulysses

Sunday, Jun 15, 2014 09:00 AM CDT

James Joyce’s lyrical, sensual literary legacy: Why so many novels steal from “Ulysses”

From Pat Conroy to Richard Russo, mainstream contemporary fiction would not exist without Joyce's novel

Robert D. Newman


In the “Wandering Rocks” episode of “Ulysses,” Tom Kernan and Leopold Bloom discuss the explosion of the passenger steamboat General Slocum in New York’s East River that happened the previous day — the greatest loss of life to occur in New York prior to 9/11. Referring to the ineffective lifeboats and fire hoses and the panicked trampling of passengers on the steamboat, Kernan states, “And America they say is the land of the free. I thought we were bad here.” To which Bloom responds, “America … What is it? The sweepings of every country including our own. Isn’t that true? That’s a fact.”



Joyce, and particularly “Ulysses,” continue to influence the distinctive hodgepodge that is American popular fiction and culture in massive, invisible ways. Garrison Keillor’s “A Prairie Home Companion” has an episode in its recurring “Lives of the Cowboys” spoof where special guest Martin Sheen plays James Joyce in a gunfight with Clint Eastwood. While English and Irish rock musicians, notably Kate Bush’s “The Sensual World” and the Clash’s “Jimmy Jazz,” pay homage to Joyce and his works, one can hear the popular New Orleans-style jazz band, Ulysses, Saturday nights at the James Joyce pub in Santa Barbara, California. While Van Morrison croons “Been too long in exile/ Just like James Joyce, Baby” in “Too Long in Exile,” Jimmy Buffet sings, “My life’s an open book/By James Joyce and Agatha Christie” in “If It All Falls Down.”



It took Kate Bush 20 years to get permission from the James Joyce estate to use lines from the conclusion of “Ulysses” in her song “The Sensual World,” renamed “Flower of the Mountain,” a phrase from Molly Bloom’s soliloquy, in its 2011 release. Joyce’s work recently passed out of copyright, ending the estate’s tyrannical reign over permissions. Bush told one concert audience, “The song was saying ‘Yes, Yes’ and when I asked for permission they said ‘No! No!’” Likewise, American biologist Craig Venter, who created the first cell with a synthetic genome in 2010, received a cease and desist letter from the Joyce estate when he encoded watermarks into his new cells including “To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life” from “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. ”


Most of the critical attention regarding the persistence of Joyce in American fiction has been in the realm of the stylistic experimentation of a William Faulkner or Thomas Wolfe, the encyclopedic sweep of a Thomas Pynchon or William Gaddis, or the wholesale rewriting of “The Dead” by Joyce Carol Oates. Joyce ghosts the pages of so much experimental fiction subsequent to him, its complexities full of both the anxiety of influence and the influence of anxiety. Whether the Wakean or Molly-like stylistic tour de force of asynchronous images, neologisms and tumbling run-on sentences or the plotted allusion like Denis Johnson’s 2007 Vietnam novel, “Tree of Smoke,” where we see a horrific Christmas dinner scene reminiscent of “A Portrait,” formal play inevitably owes a debt to Joyce. We love our technical innovations, whether encased in metal or folded within the pages of our prose.



We see several examples of recent American novels that give explicit nods to “Ulysses” while relying on traditional narrative storytelling concerned primarily with exploring the moral fiber of their well-defined characters. These novels are both popular as given testimony by their status on the New York Times bestseller list and are what Jonathan Franzen would refer to as “substantive,” based on mainstream critical attention in venues such as the New York Times, New Yorker and New York Review of Books. And a huge number of these books nod and wink toward, if not explicitly invoke, the shape and central characters of Joyce’s masterpiece.



* * *



The narrator of Richard Russo’s 2007 novel “Bridge of Sighs,” Lou Lynch, is patently Bloomian and he initially proclaims the memoir we are about to read might be called “The Dullest Story Ever Told.” In Lynch, Bloom the early 20th century Dublin ad canvasser has become the owner of convenience and video rental stores and an ice-cream shop in Thomaston, New York, near Albany. Like Bloom, he spends his time observing and embracing the ordinary, plodding through his life and daydreaming about what might have been and what might be.



Like Bloom, he has lost a child and, like Bloom, he is devoted to his wife, Sarah, whose sexual attention strays Molly-like. At one point, Russo reminds us we always are “moving through space, yes, but also through time, meeting ourselves,” invoking Stephen’s theorizing in the “Scylla and Charybdis” episode of “Ulysses” (“We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves”) without attribution. Stephen figures in the character of Bobby Marconi who has fled the emotional and intellectual constraints of Thomaston to live in the Venice of the novel’s title and develop his artistic gift. A kind of love triangle emerges between the three characters, Lynch and Sarah’s affection for Bobby driven in part by their envy of his having escaped Thomaston. At the same time, it is Bobby who undergoes the Icarean crash while Lynch’s endurance and equanimity earn Russo’s approval.



Richard Ford’s Frank Bascombe trilogy often has been compared to John Updike’s “Rabbit” novels, but the Bloomian connections hover. Ford’s trilogy, “The Sportswriter,” “Independence Day” and “The Lay of the Land,” spans 20 years in the New Jersey suburbs with Bascombe, first a sportswriter and then a real estate agent, puzzling through the mundane ups and downs of his life. In “The Lay of the Land,” published in 2006 but set during Thanksgiving 2000 while Bush v. Gore is being decided, we find him abandoned by his second wife for her first husband, presumed dead for many years but now revealed to have been living surreptitiously in Scotland, and trying to demonstrate his love for his deeply troubled adult son who is employed writing card copy for Hallmark. While the nation’s future rests on a Supreme Court decision, much of the novel’s interior action occurs in Frank’s car as he ponders his outsider status as a Southern Democrat residing in a Northern Republican town, his wife’s departure, and his recent diagnosis of prostate cancer. The death of his son in childhood, like Bloom’s Rudy, haunts all three novels and the inevitability of Bascombe’s own impending end surfaces throughout this concluding one.



Pat Conroy’s 2009 novel, “South of Broad,” is set mainly in Charleston, South Carolina. His narrator is Leopold Bloom King, the son of a Joyce scholar. The novel is framed by Bloomsdays: June 16, 1969, when Leo is 18 and a newspaper delivery boy, and 20 years later in 1989 when he is a newspaper columnist about Bloom’s age. Leo’s older brother, Stephen Dedalus King, is a suicide found by Leo when he is only 8. The death initially sends Leo to a mental institution and then steers him toward other damaged psyches, particularly the Molly of this novel, Sheba Poe, who grows up to become a Hollywood sex symbol before she is brutally murdered by her evil father who previously threatens Leo with a knife to his throat while intoning lines from Joyce.



Leo refers to “Ulysses” as “the worst book ever written by anyone”: “June 16 was the endless day when Leopold Bloom makes his nervous Nellie way, stopping at bars and consorting with whores and then returning home to his horny wife, Molly, who has a final soliloquy that goes on for what seemed like six thousand pages when my mother force-fed me the book in tenth grade. Joyce-nuts like my mother consider June 16 to be a consecrated mythical day in the Gregorian calendar. She bristled with uncontrollable fury when I threw the book out the window after I had finished it following an agonizing six months of unpleasurable reading.”



Ultimately, Leo’s passages through the trials and travails of his friends and family lead him to tame his own inner demons and to an acceptance of the immortality of Bloomsday, the fated day on which the characters of this touching but overwrought novel initially are intertwined. ”South of Broad” concludes, “and all of us can serve as witnesses that anything can happen during a Bloomsday Summer. Yes, that is it: anything can happen. Yes.”



Then there was Alison Bechdel’s 2006 graphic novel, “Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic,” both a coming-of-age and coming-out work. In it, her closeted, suicidal and emotionally distant father is depicted as Daedalus for his obsessive home restoration project. He is an English teacher and funeral director, and the “fun” home of the title is both short for “funeral” and an ironic comment on the family dysfunction within the house. Her father’s favorite book is “Ulysses” and the English professor with whom Bechdel later studies the novel while pursuing her own sexual odyssey is drawn to look like Joyce. When her father comes out to her, she describes the scene as “like fatherless Stephen and sonless Bloom having their equivocal late night cocoa at 9 Eccles Street.”



At her father’s funeral, Bechdel reminisces on Bloom’s memory of his father’s suicide, lamenting that at least Bloom’s father left him a letter. Her graphic novel concludes with musings on Ulysses’ positive erotic conclusion in contrast to her father’s sexual shame and a reflection on the heroic opposition by Sylvia Beach, Andrienne Monnier, Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap, all lesbians who “knew a thing or two about erotic truth,” to the publication ban of Joyce’s novel. A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and Time magazine’s No. 1 book of the year, “Fun Home” delivers its social realism through a pop culture lens, its protagonist’s moral odyssey tinged with Joycean allusions.



While “Ulysses” is far from the first example of moral fiction in the history of literature and its critical reception often has tended to focus on its explosion of the boundaries of traditional narrative technique as well as its cultural and historical contexts, its persistent presence in traditional plot and character within some recent mainstream American fiction presents another layer of its compelling influence on the ever-widening circle of Joyce’s heirs. “Ulysses” is indelibly embedded in contemporary American cultural expressions. Our current literary everymen shuffle along their confused and revelatory paths while tipping their hats to Bloom.

Democrats Are More United Than Republicans

by Paul Krugman

 

 

Matt Yglesias pushes back against claims, by Ross Douthat among others, that the Democratic Party is a fragile coalition held together only by Hillary Clinton’s personal popularity. He’s right; I’d just like to add a few thoughts.

As Yglesias says, Democrats are remarkably unified on policy. They want to preserve health reform; they want to preserve financial reform, even though some would want to push it further; they want action on climate change; they may be conflicted on immigration, but that’s mostly internal soul-searching rather than a division between party factions.

This policy unity has been helped by the fact that Obama has had a moderate degree of success in achieving these goals. If he had had an easy time, the party might be divided between those wanting more radical action and those not in a hurry; if he had failed utterly, the party might be divided (as it was for much of the past three decades) between a liberal faction and a Republican-lite faction. As it is, however, Obama has managed to achieve a lot of what Democrats have sought for generations, but only with great difficulty against scorched-earth opposition. This means that the conflict between “the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party” — exemplified these days by Elizabeth Warren — and the more pro-big-business wing is relatively muted: the liberal wing knows that Obama has gotten most of what could be gotten, and the actual policies haven’t been the kind that would scare off the less liberal wing.

The Wall Street tantrum of recent years also, in a peculiar way, helps party unity. Bankers who used to support Democrats have thrown their support to Republicans, whining all the way that Obama is looking at them funny; this has reduced their influence on the Democrats, leaving a workable consensus about regulation and tax policy among those left.

How do personalities matter in all this? Not so much. In the end, Obama implemented Clinton’s health plan (remember how he was against mandates?), and Clinton, if elected, will continue Obama’s legacy. The party is willing to rally around an individual because it’s unified on policy, not the other way around.

In fact, it’s the Republicans who desperately need a hero. In retrospect, they needed W much more than they realized: he combined policy fealty to the plutocrats with a personal manner that appealed to the base, in a way no Republican now manages.

Stuff happens; a recession in 2016 could sweep a Republican, any Republican, into the White House. But the Democratic coalition isn’t fragile, while the Republican coalition is.

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