Sunday, August 31, 2014

Marja Mills - The Mockingbird Next Door

Fact is, this book is a disappointment.  First of all, I am not greatly interested in the personal life of Nelle Harper Lee.  Why is she so reclusive?  Why did she not publish another novel?  Her goings back and forth between NYC and Monroeville?  Whatever.

Marja Mills is Yankee journalist who was sent South from Chicago to write a story on Harper Lee and ended up renting the house next door to the Lees.  This book is the result.

I see no great revelations.  Nelle and Alice, sisters, are enamored with The South, its history and mores, and that comes thru in the book.  Both love books and reading.  I was pleased to note this.  But there are no hush hush disclosures.  That's okay.  I wouldn't be interested anyway.

Alice, who is over 100 years of age, and Nelle, pushing 90, live in separate assisted living facilities in Monroeville.  I hope they are living the best they can in their final years.  I suppose it would interesting to talk to the two of them.  Since Nelle Lee chose not to tell her own story, I predict that multiple books will come out in the coming years to tell us about the "real Harper Lee."  I can wait.  No rush, please.

This book appeared quickly on the NY Times best seller list and vanished just as quickly.  I can see why now that I have read it.

Saturday, August 30, 2014

What Perlstein Says




Rick Perlstein Credit Illustration by Jillian Tamaki

Do people still read before bed? I play Words With Friends. Be that as it may, the book that’s been most monopolizing my attentions is the massive chronicle by the conservative movement activist Craig Shirley on the campaign that elected our 40th president, “Rendezvous With Destiny: Ronald Reagan and the Campaign that Changed America.” Also (though not a book; they’re online) I’ve been reading all the “Doonesbury” strips from the fall of 1976 through January of 1980, seriatim. I once heard that Anthony Trollope, after writing the last page of a novel, would immediately whip out a new sheet to start writing the next. I suppose that’s what I’m doing with these books I’ve been writing on the history of conservatism — “The Invisible Bridge,” which tells the story through the summer of 1976, is the third, and now I’m starting in on the fourth and last, which goes through November 1980.
What was the last truly great book you read? 
A volume of Chekhov’s short stories. I don’t read many popular histories like the ones I write. The building blocks for my research are scholarly monographs, and the inspiration for my storytelling style are folks like Chekhov. His masterful long short story “A Woman’s Kingdom,” about a forlorn heiress saddled against her will with the job of running the family business, precisely exemplifies what I’m aiming to accomplish in my history writing: to sympathetically reimagine the points of view of people from all genders, ideologies and social identities.
Who are the best historians writing today?
I look to historians for their power to illuminate not just the invisible lineaments of the present, but also that which is not present. What are the roads that were not taken that most shape our own time? Lately, the historian who’s been doing that best is Nelson Lichtenstein, who parlayed a career writing about midcentury capitalism and industrial unionism into extraordinarily penetrating accounts of why the economic regime we live under today is so deeply unsatisfying. One abandoned idea documented in his most recent book, “A Contest of Ideas: Capital, Politics, and Labor,” haunts me. Powerful people in the Democratic Party, like Senator Robert Wagner of New York, used to insist that the job of liberalism was to penetrate the “black box” of the corporation and turn the workplace into a more democratic institution. They believed that to leave decision-making in the great firms that dominate our lives merely to owners (as opposed to, say, the system of “co-determination” between labor and management under which the German economy now thrives) was no less than a violation of the Constitution’s 13th Amendment, which outlawed involuntary servitude. Now that such thinking is rare as a unicorn — and workers all but belong to their bosses during their working day — no wonder it’s hard to win the allegiance of the white working class to the Democrats.
And who today are the best writers on American politics? 
There are two, and they both are bloggers. One, Corey Robin of Brooklyn College, is also a political theorist; his book “The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism From Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin” provides the most convincing account about what right-wing habits of mind are ultimately all about. His humane and erudite blog — and its spirited commenters — deepen that conversation. A favorite theme is the emptiness of right-wing notions of “freedom” that actually leave us less free. See, for instance, his work on “Lavatory and Liberty,” which points out that the government doesn’t even enforce the right to bathroom breaks at work. What could be a greater insult to liberty than that? 
My other favorite political writer, Heather Parton, blogs under the name “Digby.” Daily for over 10 years she’s been unleashing a fire hose of brilliance on the fecklessness of the Democrats, the craziness of the Republicans and especially the way that what we now call the “culture wars” has been seared into our national DNA at least since the Civil War. In the acknowledgments to “Nixonland,” I called her the other half of my brain.
In researching your latest volume of history, which books were most useful to you? Any unexpected gems you came across during the process? 
There’s this lovable old curmudgeon who’s been kicking around Washington Republican circles since the 1960s, Victor Gold — he was deputy press secretary for Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign — who published a marvelous behind-the-scenes account of the 1976 campaigns, “PR as in President,” that revealed the back-room mechanics of politics more revealingly than any book since Joe McGinniss’s “The Selling of the President” (1969). I don’t think very many people read it — this I know because he reveals a secret about Ronald Reagan’s performance at the Republican National Convention that year that even the most die-hard Reagan obsessives don’t seem to know about, which let me end my book with a surprise kicker. (I could tell you what it is here, but that would be a spoiler.)
On an entirely different note, I somehow stumbled on “Bare Feet, Iron Will: Stories From the Other Side of Vietnam’s Battlefields,” an obscure book by James G. Zumwalt, the son of none other than the admiral who commanded naval forces in Vietnam, Elmo (Bud) Zumwalt. It’s a revelatory oral history of what everyday life was like on the North Vietnamese side of the war. He says he wrote it in the interests of helping American veterans heal, by humanizing the enemy, which may not work: It drives home better than any book I’ve read why the war was such a futile, impossible waste. Both the North Vietnamese and the insurgents in the South simply believed themselves to the depths of their souls to be fighting for the very survival of their way of life. Every American bomb dropped on the North, and every village the U.S. “pacified” in the South, only made them more determined: We lost when we “won.” It helped me shape a major theme of my own book: that America’s blunt confrontation with the ravages Vietnam wrought upon America’s civic soul, after the fall of Saigon in 1975, was a very healthy thing — and that the forces associated with Ronald Reagan’s rise did our nation no favors by helping citizens turn their back on that reckoning.
What kind of reader were you as a child? 
A late reader. I picked up “Go, Dog. Go!” and started reading aloud from it when I was 6 or 7. Been working on catching up since then.
If you had to name one book that made you who you are today, what would it be?
It might just be “The Marxist Minstrels: A Handbook on Communist Subversion of Music” (1974), by the fundamentalist minister David Noebel. Back when I was 16, when I should have been doing normal high school things, I availed myself of my brand new driver’s license to spend as much time as possible in Milwaukee’s Renaissance Book Shop, a tumbledown five-story warehouse that the city was finally able to close down in 2011 for safety reasons. It was my teenage paradise. There, I perused Black Panther manifestoes that spelled America with a “KKK” in the middle, and treatises like “The Marxist Ministrels,” which argued that the Beatles were a Communist plot. (Dr. Noebel is still a fixture on the Tea Party circuit.) Inhaling texts like these — along with lots and lots of Renaissance Book Shop dust — first ignited my passion for studying America’s culture wars.
If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be? 
The Book of Job, maybe. It’s the best story I know at driving home the fact that the world just isn’t always a reasonable place. Not grasping that, I think, is Barack Obama’s tragic flaw: He still seems to stubbornly believe that if he just explains clearly and calmly enough to his friends across the aisle why his ideas will bring the greatest good to the greatest number, there’ll finally be no more Red America and no more Blue America. But my 18 years studying conservatism has convinced me the right just doesn’t work that way — they’re fighting for civilization stakes, and he’s a liberal, so, Q.E.D., he’s the enemy. His longing to compromise with them just ends up driving the political center in America further to the right.
Disappointing, overrated, just not good: What book did you feel you were supposed to like, and didn’t? Do you remember the last book you put down without finishing?
I have a weird habit — I’m not proud of it — of putting down novels 50 pages or so before the end. I did it most recently with Sinclair Lewis’s “Main Street” (though I made it all the way through the book he ripped off, Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary”). I even did it with George Eliot’s “Middlemarch” — what’s up with that? Perhaps a question for the psychoanalyst’s couch.
What’s the one book you wish someone else would write?
I used to think some history graduate student looking for a dissertation topic should do a biography of Robert Welch, the founder of the John Birch Society. Back then I thought of it as akin to studying some middling Romantic poet: worthy but slightly marginal. Now I think it’s a project ripe for some top-shelf biographer’s plucking. The Birch Society is thriving within the conservative “mainstream” — did you know, for instance, that the Muslim Brotherhood has thoroughly infiltrated the Obama White House? You can read all about it in National Review 50 years after its founder, William F. Buckley, purged Birchers and their crazy conspiracies from his pages in the 1960s. 
Whom would you choose to write your life story?
Is Anton Chekhov available? Sometimes I think he knows me better than I know myself, even when he’s ostensibly writing about Russian ladies over a hundred years ago.
What do you plan to read next?
“Mad About the Seventies: The Best of the Decade,” by “the Usual Gang of Idiots.” The second half. I’ve already read the first part, up to the fall of 1976.

Does It Help to Know History?

About a year ago, I wrote about some attempts to explain why anyone would, or ought to, study English in college. The point, I thought, was not that studying English gives anyone some practical advantage on non-English majors, but that it enables us to enter, as equals, into a long existing, ongoing conversation. It isn’t productive in a tangible sense; it’s productive in a human sense. The action, whether rewarded or not, really is its own reward. The activity is the answer.
It might be worth asking similar questions about the value of studying, or at least, reading, history these days, since it is a subject that comes to mind many mornings on the op-ed page. Every writer, of every political flavor, has some neat historical analogy, or mini-lesson, with which to preface an argument for why we ought to bomb these guys or side with those guys against the guys we were bombing before. But the best argument for reading history is not that it will show us the right thing to do in one case or the other, but rather that it will show us why even doing the right thing rarely works out. The advantage of having a historical sense is not that it will lead you to some quarry of instructions, the way that Superman can regularly return to the Fortress of Solitude to get instructions from his dad, but that it will teach you that no such crystal cave exists. What history generally “teaches” is how hard it is for anyone to control it, including the people who think they’re making it.

Roger Cohen, for instance, wrote on Wednesday about all the mistakes that the United States is supposed to have made in the Middle East over the past decade, with the implicit notion that there are two histories: one recent, in which everything that the United States has done has been ill-timed and disastrous; and then some other, superior, alternate history, in which imperial Western powers sagaciously, indeed, surgically, intervened in the region, wisely picking the right sides and thoughtful leaders, promoting militants without aiding fanaticism, and generally aiding the cause of peace and prosperity. This never happened. As the Libyan intervention demonstrates, the best will in the world—and, seemingly, the best candidates for our support—can’t cure broken polities quickly. What “history” shows is that the same forces that led to the Mahdi’s rebellion in Sudan more than a century ago—rage at the presence of a colonial master; a mad turn towards an imaginary past as a means to equal the score—keep coming back and remain just as resistant to management, close up or at a distance, as they did before. ISIS is a horrible group doing horrible things, and there are many factors behind its rise. But they came to be a threat and a power less because of all we didn’t do than because of certain things we did do—foremost among them that massive, forward intervention, the Iraq War. (The historical question to which ISIS is the answer is: What could possibly be worse than Saddam Hussein?)
Another, domestic example of historical blindness is the current cult of the political hypersagacity of Lyndon B. Johnson. L.B.J. was indeed a ruthless political operator and, when he had big majorities, got big bills passed—the Civil Rights Act, for one. He also engineered, and masterfully bullied through Congress, the Vietnam War, a moral and strategic catastrophe that ripped the United States apart and, more important, visited a kind of hell on the Vietnamese. It also led American soldiers to commit war crimes, almost all left unpunished, of a kind that it still shrivels the heart to read about. Johnson did many good things, but to use him as a positive counterexample of leadership to Barack Obama or anyone else is marginally insane.
Johnson’s tragedy was critically tied to the cult of action, of being tough and not just sitting there and watching. But not doing things too disastrously is not some minimal achievement; it is a maximal achievement, rarely managed. Studying history doesn’t argue for nothing-ism, but it makes a very good case for minimalism: for doing the least violent thing possible that might help prevent more violence from happening.
The real sin that the absence of a historical sense encourages is presentism, in the sense of exaggerating our present problems out of all proportion to those that have previously existed. It lies in believing that things are much worse than they have ever been—and, thus, than they really are—or are uniquely threatening rather than familiarly difficult. Every episode becomes an epidemic, every image is turned into a permanent injury, and each crisis is a historical crisis in need of urgent aggressive handling—even if all experience shows that aggressive handling of such situations has in the past, quite often made things worse. (The history of medicine is that no matter how many interventions are badly made, the experts who intervene make more: the sixteenth-century doctors who bled and cupped their patients and watched them die just bled and cupped others more.) What history actually shows is that nothing works out as planned, and that everything has unintentional consequences. History doesn’t show that we should never go to war—sometimes there’s no better alternative. But it does show that the results are entirely uncontrollable, and that we are far more likely to be made by history than to make it. History is past, and singular, and the same year never comes round twice.
Those of us who obsess, for instance, particularly in this centennial year, on the tragedy of August, 1914—on how an optimistic and largely prosperous civilization could commit suicide—don’t believe that the trouble then was that nobody read history. The trouble was that they were reading the wrong history, a make-believe history of grand designs and chess-master-like wisdom. History, well read, is simply humility well told, in many manners. And a few sessions of humility can often prevent a series of humiliations. What should, say, the advisers to Lord Grey, the British foreign secretary, have told him a century ago? Surely something like: Let’s not lose our heads; the Germans are a growing power who can be accommodated without losing anything essential to our well-being and, perhaps, shaping their direction; Serbian nationalism is an incident, not a cause de guerre; the French are understandably determined to take back Alsace-Lorraine, but this is not terribly important to us—nor to them either, really, if they could be made to see that. And the Ottoman Empire is far from the worst arrangement of things that can be imagined in that part of the world.  We will not lose our credibility by failing to sacrifice a generation of our young men. Our credibility lies, exactly, in their continued happy existence.
Many measly compromises would have had to be made by the British; many challenges postponed; many opportunities for aggressive, forward action shirked—and the catastrophe, which set the stage and shaped the characters for the next war, would have been avoided. That is historical wisdom, the only wisdom history supplies. The most tempting lesson that history gives is to not tempt it. Those who simply repeat history are condemned to leave the rest of us to read all about that repetition in the news every morning.

Friday, August 29, 2014

The Labor Day Weekend

The official end of summer is here.  Yay!  Labor Day weekend now means the beginning of football season.  Here we go again!  I can remember back to 1968 when the first Auburn game was around September 20th.  We only played 10 games in those days.  Things have certainly changed over the years. 

Brother Faulkner

"Apparently they can learn nothing save through suffering, remember nothing save when underlined in blood."
-William Faulkner in "The Bear"
Brother Faulkner had a bead on The South.

Thursday, August 28, 2014

The Leftist Hamilton

Reading Hamilton From the Left

The Left has always favored Thomas Jefferson over Alexander Hamilton. But not only was Hamilton more progressive for his time, he has lessons for our response to climate change.

0509_hamilton_970
Two hundred years ago, Alexander Hamilton was mortally wounded by then Vice President Aaron Burr in a duel at Weehawken, New Jersey. Their conflict, stemming from essays Hamilton had penned against Burr, was an episode in a larger clash between two political ideologies: that of Thomas Jefferson and the anti-Federalists, who argued for an agrarian economy and a weak central government, versus that of Hamilton and the Federalists, who championed a strong central state and an industrial economy.
In the American political imagination, Jefferson is rural, idealistic, and democratic, while Hamilton is urban, pessimistic, and authoritarian. So, too, on the US left, where Jefferson gets the better billing. Michael Hardt recently edited a sheaf of Jefferson’s writings for the left publisher Verso.
Reading “Jefferson beyond Jefferson,” Hardt casts him as a theorist of “revolutionary transition.” We like Jefferson’s stirring words about “the tree of liberty” occasionally needing “the blood of patriots and tyrants,” and his worldview fits comfortably with a “small is beautiful” style localism. We recall Jefferson as a great democrat. When Tea Partiers echo his rhetoric, we dismiss it as a lamentable misunderstanding.
But in reality, Jefferson represented the most backward and fundamentally reactionary sector of the economy: large, patrimonial, slave-owning, agrarian elites who exported primary commodities and imported finished manufactured goods from Europe. He was a fabulously wealthy planter who lived in luxury paid for by slave labor. Worse yet, he raised slaves specifically for sale.
“I consider the labor of a breeding woman,” Jefferson wrote, “as no object, and that a child raised every 2 years is of more profit than the crop of the best laboring man.”
Even if it could somehow be dislodged from the institution of slavery, Jefferson’s vision of a weak government and an export-based agrarian economy would have been the path of political fragmentation and economic underdevelopment. His romantic notions were a veil behind which lay ossified privilege.
Hamilton was alone among the “founding fathers” in understanding that the world was witnessing two revolutions simultaneously. One was the political transformation, embodied in the rise of republican government. The other was the economic rise of modern capitalism, with its globalizing networks of production, trade, and finance. Hamilton grasped the epochal importance of applied science and machinery as forces of production.
In the face of these changes, Hamilton created (and largely executed) a plan for government-led economic development along lines that would be followed in more recent times by many countries (particularly in East Asia) that have undergone rapid industrialization. His political mission was to create a state that could facilitate, encourage, and guide the process of economic change — a policy also known as dirigisme, although the expression never entered the American political lexicon the way its antonym, laissez-faire, did.
To be sure, Hamilton was living in the era of “bourgeois” revolutions and the state he was building was a capitalist state, complete with the oppressive apparatus that always involves. Hamilton did not oppose exploitation. Like most people of his age, he saw child labor as normal and defended the rights of creditors over debtors. But regarding slavery, he firmly and consistently opposed it and was a founder of the Society for Manumission of Slaves. It was Hamilton — not Jefferson — who had the more progressive vision.
Even today, Hamilton’s ideas about state-led industrialization offer much. Consider the crisis of climate change. Alas, we do not have the luxury of making this an agenda item for our future post-capitalist assembly. Facing up to it demands getting off fossil fuels in a very short time frame. That requires a massive and immediate industrial transformation, which must be undertaken using the actually existing states and economies currently on hand. Such a project can only be led by the state — an institution that Hamilton’s writing and life’s work helps us to rethink.
Unfortunately, many environmental activists today instinctively avoid the state. They see government as part of the problem — as it undoubtedly is — but never as part of the solution. They do not seek to confront, reshape, and use state power; the idea of calling for regulation and public ownership, makes them uncomfortable.
And so green activism too often embodies the legacy of Jefferson’s antigovernment politics. It hinges on transforming individual behavior, or on making appeals to “corporate social responsibility.”
Hamilton’s work, by contrast, reveals the truth that for capital, there is no “outside of the state.” The state is the necessary but not sufficient pre-condition for capitalism’s development. There is no creative destruction, competition, innovation, and accumulation without the “shadow socialism” of the public sector and state planning. We may soon find that there is no potable water or breathable air without them, either.
At the heart of Hamilton’s thinking was a stark political fact — one that is now sometimes hard to recall. The newly created United States was a mess. Politically disorganized, economically underdeveloped, and militarily weak, its survival was in no way guaranteed.
All the more alarming was the international context. The world was dominated by the immense power of the British, French, and (admittedly declining) Spanish Empires. Hamilton saw that the colonists’ victory over Britain, won by the direct military intervention of France, would only be secured if the new nation built up its economy.
Hamilton learned the danger of weakness early on. Born of humble origins in the Caribbean, he was an “illegitimate” child and then orphaned at age thirteen. Taken in by friends, he found work as a shipping clerk. Having a prodigious intellectual talent, Hamilton also applied himself to study with fanatical discipline. Soon he was penning essays for the local press. One piece caught the attention of St. Croix notables, who in 1772 sent the young Hamilton to preparatory school in New Jersey and then to Kings College, now Columbia University.
In 1775, as conflict between British soldiers and colonial irregulars began, Hamilton joined the newly formed New York militia. Hamilton began studying artillery and then formed the New York Provincial Company of Artillery. Before long, Hamilton became Washington’s most important aide-de-camp and artillery, Hamilton’s forte, became crucial to Washington’s strategy. (Even then, the American style of warfare was capital intensive.)
Hamilton wanted to command troops in the field and disliked Washington, whom he found crass and dull. Washington nonetheless kept the young savant on as part of “the family,” as the general called his staff.
Hamilton’s time in the Continental Army included wintering at Valley Forge. It was an object lesson in the dangers of political decentralization and economic underdevelopment.
The Continental Congress, operating under the loose Articles of Confederation, would levy taxes on the states; only a fraction of the resources would be delivered, but Congress had little power to compel payment. As a result, soldiers died and went hungry, territory was lost, and the new nation gave signs of fragmenting when prominent leaders (including Jefferson) deserted Congress and Washington’s army for their respective state governments and militias.
All this shaped Hamilton’s politics. He saw his adopted nation as being in a similar position to himself — in search of strength, but profoundly weak — and he had a firm grasp on economic realities. Because Jefferson had slaves and a plantation, he could maintain the illusion of independence and write fetishistic peaens to the yeoman farmer while enjoying the luxury to which he had become accustomed. Hamilton operated with an acute sense of his own vulnerability. He depended on patrons throughout his career; he appreciated structures of power for what they were, and what they made possible, and developed the ability to adapt and graft himself on to them. Even his attraction to artillery (the mechanization of war) seems like a comment on the utility of power.
At the war’s end, Hamilton resigned his commission and studied law. Meanwhile, the country’s economy was in shambles. Officers and farmers were growing restive. Parts of the backcountry of North Carolina declared themselves an independent state, and a similar attempt at secession was made in Pennsylvania’s Wyoming Valley. By 1786-87, class tensions in western Massachusetts had boiled over in the form of Shays’ Rebellion: Armed and indebted farmers marched on the state government and were violently crushed by the militia.
In moments of despair, Hamilton predicted a future of interstate warfare and re-colonization.“A man must be far gone in Utopian speculations,” Hamilton wrote in Federalist No. 6,
who can seriously doubt, that if these States should either be wholly disunited, or only united in partial confederacies, the subdivisions into which they might be thrown would have frequent and violent contests with each other. To presume a want of motives for such contests, as an argument against their existence, would be to forget that men are ambitious, vindictive and rapacious.
Hamilton knew that economic recovery was the key to peace. In the same Federalist paper, he wrote:“If SHAYS had not been a desperate debtor it is much to be doubted whether Massachusetts would have been plunged into a civil war.” To prevent national disintegration and push the economy back into action, Hamilton sought to control the centrifugal forces of “faction” — a term which referred to both class and geographic conflict. He labored hard to draft and ratify a new Constitution and create a strong central government.
Recall the Supremacy Clause: “This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States… shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every state shall be bound thereby, anything in the constitution or laws of any state to the contrary notwithstanding.” In other words, federal law always trumps state and local laws.
In Federalist 11, Hamilton laid out the economic logic of a strong central state in terms of a defense against European imperialism:
If we continue united, we may counteract a policy so unfriendly to our prosperity in a variety of ways. By [creating] prohibitory regulations, extending, at the same time, throughout the States, we may oblige foreign countries to bid against each other, for the privileges of our markets.
Here, Hamilton is outlining the central mechanism of economic nationalism: the state creates economic conditions; it does not merely react to them. Before the Revolution, Britain’s mercantilist policies sought to maintain captive markets and thereby enforced under-development on its American colonies. Britain had banned export to America “of any tools that might assist in manufacture of cotton, linen, wool, and silk.” None of that changed with independence. And Britain was soon harassing American trade, stopping and searching ships at sea, seizing American sailors as alleged deserters.
For Hamilton, the crucial components of real independence were industrialization led by a strong federal government, combined with a permanent military that could serve both political and economic functions — defending the new nation while driving and absorbing the output of a new manufacturing sector. (It was, in effect, military Keynesianism before the fact.)
After ratification of the Constitution in 1790, Hamilton was recruited by the Washington administration to be the nation’s first Secretary of the Treasury. In this capacity, he issued a series of detailed economic reports to Congress outlining a program for the development of the US economy that rested on three core policies: federal assumption of state debts, creation of a national bank, and direct government support for domestic manufacturing.
The linchpin of his economic proposal was a system of public credit and a national money system with a government supported Bank of the United States at its center. “Public utility,” wrote Hamilton, “is more truly the object of public banks than private profit.” In 1790, three new bond issues backed by the Federal Government replaced the miscellany of various state and federal bonds that had structured the new nation’s debt. Early the following year, Congress chartered the Bank of the United States for twenty years. With that, the first two pieces of his system were in place.
But in all this, Hamilton faced the opposition of Jefferson and the Southern planter class. Comparative economic history shows that semi-feudal agricultural elites, like Jefferson’s Virginia squirearchy, hold back political and economic development. To paraphrase Perry Anderson, semi-feudal elites extract economic surplus from the immediate producers by customary forms of extra-economic violence and coercion; they do so by demanding labor services, deliveries in kind, or rents in cash, and preside over areas where free commodity exchange and labor mobility are relatively rare. They prefer stasis to change.
For Jefferson, this was expressed in his romantic praise of rural life: “Corruption of morals in the mass of cultivators is a phenomenon of which no age nor nation has furnished an example.” He condemned manufacturing as morally and politically corrosive:
While we have land to labor then, let us never wish to see our citizens occupied at a work bench… let our work shops remain in Europe. It is better to carry provisions and materials to workmen there, than bring them to the provisions and materials, and with them their manners and principles … The mobs of great cities add just so much to the support of pure government as sores do to the strength of the human body.
Put differently, Jefferson feared the proletariat.
For Hamilton, conversely, national survival depended on industrialization. He pushed Congress to foster domestic manufacturing with a program known as “the American School” that had four central policies: 1) tariffs on imports; 2) direct subsidies, or “bounties,” for domestic manufacturers; 3) a partially public-owned national bank; 4) broad public investments in infrastructure, or “internal improvements,” like roads, canals, and ports.
The young Treasury Secretary’s most famous statement of his analysis is The Report on the Subject of Manufactures, submitted to Congress on December 5, 1791. It begins with a critique of the Physiocrats — a school of thought in France that Karl Marx would call “the true fathers of modern political economy.” They established a labor theory of value, but restricted its realm to agriculture. In their view, all other labor and economic activity was parasitic upon farming. They were pioneering but myopic. In their analysis, Marx said, “bourgeois society is given a feudal semblance.”
Hamilton’s critique of the Physiocrats was sharp and devastating. “It has been maintained, that Agriculture is, not only, the most productive, but the only productive species of industry,” he wrote.
The reality of this suggestion in either aspect, has, however, not been verified… It is very conceivable, that the labor of man alone laid out upon a work, requiring great skill and art to bring it to perfection, may be more productive, in value, than the labour of nature and man combined, when directed towards more simple operations and objects.
In dismantling the Physiocrats’ fixation with agriculture, Hamilton was also taking aim at slavery and the self-delusions of the plantation elite. The Southern elites were increasingly defensive of their “peculiar institution.” Vermont outlawed slavery when it broke away from New York in 1777. Pennsylvania severely restricted slavery in 1780, while Massachusetts abolished it outright in 1783.
In reaction, Southern politicians and writers concocted a series of elaborate but inconsistent defenses. They went from arguing that slavery was a necessary evil to proclaiming it as a positive good, with Southern agrarian society as the highest form of civilization. (From this unhinged doctrine would eventually flow the South’s suicidal project of secession and offensive war against the North.)
Next, The Report addressed the laissez-faire line associated with Adam Smith. “Industry, if left to itself, will naturally find its way to the most useful and profitable employment, ” wrote Hamilton in a summary of this then-new doctrine; “whence it is inferred, that manufactures without the aid of government will grow up as soon and as fast, as the natural state of things and the interest of the community may require.”
He countered this with demands for protectionist policy, couched in arguments about what we would now call “uneven development”: “To maintain between the recent [industrial] establishments of one country and the long matured establishments of another country, a competition upon equal terms, both as to quality and price, is in most cases impracticable.”
To level the playing field, the weaker economy had to rely on“the extraordinary aid and protection of government.” And he pointed out that other governments aided their manufacturing sectors — the doctrines of British political economy notwithstanding.
Perhaps his most contemporary sounding defenses of an activist government had to do with failure and innovation. Hamilton argued that “it is of importance that the confidence of cautious sagacious capitalists both citizens and foreigners, should be excited,” and their fear of risk allayed by “a degree of countenance and support from government” so they might “be capable of overcoming the obstacles inseperable from first experiments.”
Deeper in The Report, Hamilton made a number of detailed policy recommendations. They included higher import duties on some finished products (and even, if necessary, the outright prohibition of some imports); lowering or removing duties and taxes on key raw materials; subsidies paid to whole sectors of industry; government-paid premiums for specific firms that excel at innovation and production; government assistance for the immigration of skilled workers; an almost patent–like style of artificial monopoly for the inventors and importers of new technology; the creation of national regulations for, and the regular inspection of, manufactured goods so as to improve quality; government facilitation of a single national money system; and public investment in roads and canals.
Pretty much all of this was achieved, despite Southern opposition — and it remains the basis for the growth of American capitalism.
Throughout The Report, Hamilton tried to assuage Southern fears by arguing that a rising tide lifts all boats. “If the Northern and middle states should be the principal scenes of such [manufacturing] establishments, they would immediately benefit the more southern [states], by creating a demand for… Timber, flax, Hemp, Cotton, Wool, raw silk, Indigo, iron, lead, furs, hides, skins and coals.”
And in time, his proposed tariffs would help pay for publicly funded infrastructure that would expand internal markets and lower the cost of exporting. “Good roads, canals, and navigable rivers,” Hamilton wrote “by diminishing the expense of carriage, put the remote parts of a country more nearly upon a level with those in the neighborhood of a town.”
If the private sector could not consume enough to drive rapid industrialization, the public sector would. Since few export markets could absorb American manufactured goods, military procurement would created an artificial internal market for them. America’s nascent manufacturing sector relied heavily on military consumption — products associated with shipbuilding, weapons, munitions, uniforms, and food rations. This socialized demand would drive private sector accumulation, investment, wages, and thus consumption.
Hamilton drew up the blueprints for a planned economy — a capitalist economy, to be sure, but one that would be guided by a long-range sense of the country’s problems and potentials. And that was just what worried the reactionaries of his day. The line of development that Hamilton envisioned spelled the doom of a political economy based on slavery.
One of the few who was honest about this was North Carolina’s Nathaniel Macon, who a decade after Hamilton’s death, explained to a confused, young, canal-loving Southern politician: “If Congress can make canals, they can with more propriety emancipate.”
In the decades after Hamilton, the struggle between the forces of pro-industrial modernization and the forces of agrarian underdevelopment continued. Hamilton’s “American School” of economics had it successor in the “American System” of Henry Clay of Kentucky, with its package of policy ideas drawn from The Report: a high tariff, a national bank, public funding of infrastructure or “internal improvements.”
Clay and his supporters added a commitment to maintaining artificially high public land prices. This boosted the government revenue needed to fund land surveys, roads, canals, ports, and later railroads. High public land prices also benefitted eastern manufacturing, since cheap land would draw off labor and force up wages.
Ultimately, the American System was only partially realized and more often than not at the state level, as in the famous New York state-built Erie Canal. The developmentalist camp — the largely northern, urban, manufacturing and financially-oriented interests that followed Clay — ultimately coalesced into the Whigs, and then Lincoln and the Republican Party.
Only with war and the secession of southern states did the Hamiltonian-inspired agenda make real headway with passage of the Homestead Act, opening western lands to small farmers, and the Railroad Acts which, at government expense, set off construction of the transcontinental railroad.
This American dirigiste model has had a major impact on global history. As the South Korean economist Ha-Joon Chang has pointed out, every successful case of industrialization has used some version of the Hamiltonian model. A line runs directly from it to the postwar rise of the developmental states of East Asia. During Henry Clay’s heyday as John Quincy Adams’s Secretary of State, the German political economist Fredrich List — who would formulate the developmentalist theory of “infant industry” protection — moved to Pennsylvania where he soaked up the statist ideas of Hamilton and Clay.
Now Clay’s “American System” morphed into List’s more detailed “National System.” When he finally returned to Germany in the 1830s, List and others associated with the German “Historical School” of Economics rejected Adam Smith’s fixation on the individual as a category of analysis; they held that economies were based on nations and states.
In place of classical political economy’s “general laws,” the Historical School sought a theory based on national and historical specificity. (At the level of applied policy, this meant pushing for government support for railway construction and industrialization.) Their ideas were studied closely in Meji Japan, where a state-led project of land reform and industrialization began in the early 1870s. The other classic dirigiste economies of East Asian — Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea, and now China — have also relied heavily on List and the German Historical School.
In most of the world, the real story of capitalism is not the story of laissez-faire — a doctrine the strong impose upon the weak — nor a quaint story about egalitarian local economies, but the story of the state presiding over a mixed economy. Hamiltonian developmentalism — the unnamed ideology — is amoral, pragmatic, instrumentalist, and flexible.
So what is the lesson of this attenuated tale?
Like Hamilton, we face a profound crisis rooted in an economy that demands to be remade. The old redistributive agenda is not enough. Due to its dependence on the environmental curse of fossil fuels, the economy must also be significantly rebuilt around a clean energy sector. And history is very clear on the implications: In capitalist society, moments of crisis and transformation have always involved an increased economic role for the state. We are entering one of those periods.
As the waters rise and the storms grow more intense, the state and the public sector will be called forth. What the state can or will become as it “returns” is an open question — or rather, open to being reshaped by pressure from social movements.
Unfortunately, American society is very far from facing the crisis. And a huge part of the problem is the Jeffersonian notion that “the government that governs best is the one that governs least.” While that is true as regards individual liberty, it is absolutely dangerous to think that way as regards the economy.

Wednesday, August 27, 2014

Our Republican Supreme Court

The Extreme Partisanship of John Roberts's Supreme Court

Like Barack Obama, the chief justice came into office promising an age of apolitical comity. And like the president, he has seen his dream die.
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Larry Downing/Reuters
“Politics are closely divided,” John Roberts told scholar Jeffrey Rosen after his first term as chief justice. “The same with the Congress. There ought to be some sense of some stability, if the government is not going to polarize completely. It’s a high priority to keep any kind of partisan divide out of the judiciary as well.”
No one who observes the chief justice would doubt he was sincere in his wish for greater unanimity, greater judicial modesty, a widely respected Supreme Court quietly calling “balls and strikes.” But human beings are capable of wishing for mutually incompatible things—commitment and freedom, for example, or safety and excitement. In his desire for harmony, acclaim, and legitimate hegemony, the chief was fighting himself. As he enters his 10th term, his quest for a non-partisan Court seems in retrospect like the impossible dream.
The Supreme Court’s 2013 term began with oral argument in a divisive, highly political case about campaign finance and concluded with two 5-4 decisions of divisive, highly political cases, one about public-employee unions and the other about contraceptive coverage under the Affordable Care Act. In all three cases, the result furthered a high-profile objective of the Republican Party. In all three cases, the voting precisely followed the partisan makeup of the Court, with the five Republican appointees voting one way and the four Democratic appointees bitterly dissenting. In all three cases, the chief voted with the hard-right position. By the end of the term, the polarization Roberts had seen in the nation had clearly spread to the Court. In fact, the clerk’s final gavel on June 30 did not signal even a momentary respite from the bitterness.
The day after the decision, 14 religious leaders sent a letter to President Obama asking for a new kind of religious exemption. Many religious charities provide various social services under contracts funded by the federal government. Obama had proposed rules banning government contractors from discriminating in employment against gays and lesbians. The singers wanted religious objectors to be free to continue policies of excluding them from employment. There was certainly language in the opinion to encourage those hopes. Could religious objections now override a civic commitment to equality?
That was Tuesday. On the Thursday after it left town, the Court issued an emergency order permitting a religious non-profit institution, Wheaton College, to reject for the time being the “accommodation” that the Hobby Lobby majority had hailed as the solution to religious objections to contraceptive coverage. In her Hobby Lobby dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had pointed out language in the majority opinion suggesting that the majority was not serious about this accommodation; many read the emergency order as signaling the same thing. The order also revealed a bitterly divided Court. In a dissent for herself and the Court’s other two female members, Justice Sonia Sotomayor directly accused the majority of bad faith: “Those who are bound by our decisions usually believe they can take us at our word,” she wrote. “Not so today.”
Less than a week after it left town, the Court had found new fissures within itself; those fissures had spawned fissures within the country. As a result of Hobby Lobby, the nation would no longer simply be divided into red and blue states. Now, increasingly, Americans would work for red or blue companies.
In fact, it seemed, America now has red and blue justices on its highest court.
Hobby Lobby may have been about religious belief, but it was also very much about politics, about the bitterest divide between the parties. Hobby Lobby was a challenge to the Affordable Care Act. The ACA is Barack Obama’s signature achievement. It also represents the fondest wish of the Democratic Party. Democratic presidents since Harry Truman have sought to extend medical coverage to the nation as a whole. Republicans had bitterly fought this—even in the limited form of Medicare—as “socialism.”
In applying the Religious Freedom Restoration Act broadly to the ACA, the Hobby Lobby majority did just what it had done two years before in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius. Without striking the ACA down, it weakened it, hollowed it out, and suggested that in some way it was less legitimate, less worthy of respect, than other laws. In 2012, the Court had let stand the “individual mandate,” but only as a tax, not (as most scholars had expected) as a regulation of commerce. At the same time, it had allowed the expansion of Medicaid but had empowered individual states to close their borders to federal health policy.
Now, it has empowered individual employers to thwart national health policy and deprive their female employees of health benefits the law said they had earned. Properly read, the opinion said that the contraceptive-coverage mandate might—or might not—survive the next case. After the Wheaton College order, it is hard not to suspect that the Hobby Lobby majority may, in fact, simply be setting that provision of the act up for a knockout blow.
On the Roberts Court, for the first time, the party identity of the justices seems to be the single most important determinant of their votes. The five Republican justices sometimes divide in cases (such as the scope of the federal Treaty Power or the validity of “buffer zones” around abortion clinics) that spawn purely ideological debate. But they are united and relentless in pushing for victory in cases that have a partisan valence.
In the autumn of 2005, John Roberts had hoped to lead a court that would unite the nation and burnish the Court’s legitimacy. In retrospect, that wish seems as admirable and as vain as Obama’s hope that his election in 2008 would usher in a new era when Americans would not be divided by party and mutual suspicion—the stuff that dreams are made of.
For both men, by June 2014, that dream had melted into thin air.