10 Ways White People are More Racist than they Realize

BY Kali Holloway, AlterNet
Salon
4 March 2015

This article originally appeared on AlterNet.

AlterNet - If there’s anything our fraught national dialogue on race has taught us, it’s that there are no racists in this country. (In fact, not only do multiple studies confirm that most white Americans generally believe racism is over — just 16 percent say there’s a lot of racial discrimination — it turns out that many actually believe white people experience more discrimination than black people.) It’s a silly idea, of course, but it’s easy to delude ourselves into thinking that inequality is a result of cultural failures, racial pathology and a convoluted narrative involving black-on-black crime, hoodies, rap music and people wearing their pants too low. To admit that racism is fundamental to who we are, that it imbues our thinking in ways we wouldn’t and couldn’t believe without the application of the scientific method, is infinitely harder. And yet, there’s endless evidence to prove it.

For those who recognize racism is real and pervasive, it’s also comforting to believe that discrimination is something perpetuated by other people, overlooking the ways we are personally complicit in its perpetuation. But fruitful conversations about race require acknowledging that racism sits at the very core of our thinking. By something akin to osmosis, culturally held notions around race mold and shape the prejudices of everyone within the dominant culture. People of color unwittingly internalize these notions as well, despite the fact that doing so contributes to our own marginalization. Most of us know the destructive outcomes systemic racism produces (higher rates of poverty, incarceration, infant mortality, etc.). Accepting that implicit bias is happening at every level makes it awful hard to chalk those issues up to black and brown failure.

Here’s a look at just some of the ways our internalized biases add up to devastating consequences for lives, communities and society.

1. College professors, across race/ethnicity and gender, are more likely to respond to queries from students they believe are white males. Despite universities frequently being described as bastions of progressivism and liberal indoctrination centers, a recent study found that faculty of colleges and universities are more likely to ignore requests for mentorship from minority and/or female students. Researchers sent more than 6,500 professors at 259 schools in 89 disciplines identical letters that differed only in the name and implied race/gender of the fictitious student sender (e.g., “Mei Chen” as an Asian female; “Keisha Thomas” as a black female; “Brad Anderson” as a white male). The study found that regardless of discipline (with the sole exception of fine arts), faculty more consistently responded to perceived white males. Two notable additional findings: 1) professors at public institutions were significantly more likely than their private institution counterparts to respond to students of color, and 2) the students most discriminated against were perceived East Asian women, followed by South Asian men. You can look at the numbers up close here.

2. White people, including white children, are less moved by the pain of people of color, including children of color, than by the pain of fellow whites. Three distinct studies support this finding. The first found that around age 7, white children began to believe black children are less susceptible to pain than white children. Another study found that emergency room personnel are less likely to give African American and Latino/Hispanic children pain medication, even when they are experiencing severe abdominal pain. The same study also found that even when the same tests are ordered, black and Hispanic children face significantly longer emergency room stays. A third study found that white people feel less empathy toward black people in pain than they do for whites experiencing pain.

3. White people are more likely to have done illegal drugs than blacks or Latinos, but are far less likely to go to to jail for it. A 2011 study from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Data Archive found white people were more likely to use illegal and prescription opiates (heroin, oxycontin), hallucinogens, and cocaine than blacks and Hispanics by significant margins. Black people just edged out white people on marijuana and crack use (which incurred disproportionate sentences for decades). Yet, a 2009 Human Rights Watch study found that each year from 1980 to 2007, blacks were arrested on drug charges at rates 2.8 to 5.5 times higher than whites.

4. Black men are sentenced to far lengthier prison sentences than white men for the same crimes. A 2012 study by the United States Sentencing Commission found black men were sentenced to prison terms nearly 20 percent longer than white men for similar crimes. To break those numbers down further, from January 2005 to December 2007, sentences for black males were 15.2 percent longer than those of their white counterparts. From December 2007 to September 2011, that number actually increased, with differences in sentencing growing to 19.5 percent.

5. White people, including police, see black children as older and less innocent than white children. A UCLA psychological study surveyed mostly white, male police officers to determine “prejudice and unconscious dehumanization of black people.” Researchers found a correlation between officers who unconsciously dehumanized blacks and those who had used force against black children in custody. The study also found that white female college students saw black and white children as equally innocent until age 9, after which they perceived black boys as significantly older — by about four and half years — and less innocent than their white peers. UCLA researcher Phillip Atiba Goff wrote, “Our research found that black boys can be seen as responsible for their actions at an age when white boys still benefit from the assumption that children are essentially innocent.” Which leads right to our next stats.

6. Black children are more likely to be tried as adults and are given harsher sentences than white children. A Stanford University study uncovered this sobering information: ”[S]imply bringing to mind a black (vs. white) juvenile offender led [white study] participants to view juveniles in general as significantly more similar to adults in their inherent culpability and to express more support for severe sentencing.” That is, when white respondents thought the child on trial was black, they were more like to endorse “sentencing all juveniles to life without parole when they have committed serious violent crimes.” That might explain why, of the roughly 2,500 juveniles in the U.S. who have been sentenced to life without parole, nearly all (97 percent) were male and (60 percent) black. Interesting study note: for black kids, killing a white person was a good way to end up behind bars for their entire adult life. For white kids, killing a black person actually helped their chances of ensuring their prison stay would be temporary. From the report: “[T]he proportion of African American [juveniles sentenced to life without parole] for the killing of a white person (43.4 percent) is nearly twice the rate at which African American juveniles overall have taken a white person’s life (23.2 percent). What’s more, we find that the odds of a [juvenile life without probation] sentence for a white offender who killed a black victim are only about half as likely (3.6 percent) as the proportion of white juveniles arrested for killing blacks (6.4 percent).”

7. White people are more likely to support the criminal justice system, including the death penalty, when they think it’s disproportionately punitive toward black people. That’s right: white people agree with criminal justice outcomes more when they think race disproportionately targets black people for incarceration. According to a 2012 Stanford study conducted in “liberal” San Francisco and New York City, when white people were told that black people were unfairly impacted by punitive criminal justice policies like three-strikes laws and stop-and-frisk, they were less likely to advocate for criminal justice reform. In a similar vein, researchers found in 2007 that telling whites about racist sentencing laws made them favor harsher sentences. That is, racism made them like those sentences more. The study authors write: “[O]ur most startling finding is that many whites actually become more supportive of the death penalty upon learning that it discriminates against blacks.”

8. The more “stereotypically black” a defendant looks in a murder case, the higher the likelihood he will be sentenced to death. This is perhaps one of the most horrifying findings in a list of horrifying findings. To quote the study, “the degree to which the defendant is perceived to have a stereotypically black appearance (e.g., broad nose, thick lips, dark skin)” could mean the difference between a sentence of life or death, particularly if his victim was white. Read the whole study; it’s fascinating.

9. Conversely, white people falsely recall black men they perceive as being “smart” as being lighter-skinned. Here’s another incredible, though not entirely surprising study finding. When white people encounter the faces of African American men they are primed to believe are “educated,” they later recall those individuals as being lighter-skinned than they actually were. The researchers developed a name for this phenomenon: “skin tone memory bias.” This compulsion was chalked up to stereotypical beliefs about dark skin and its correlation with negative traits. To reckon with the cognitive dissonance created by perceiving a black man as “educated,” white participants unconsciously realigned that intelligence with skin that more closely approximated whiteness.

10. A number of studies find white people view lighter-skinned African Americans (and Latinos) as more intelligent, competent, trustworthy and reliable than their darker-skinned peers. A 2006 study found that dark-skinned black men with MBAs were less likely to be hired than lighter-skinned black men who only possessed bachelor’s degrees. A 2010 study in North Carolina found that light-skinned black women received shorter prison terms than darker-skinned black women. And a 2012 Villanova University study found that, “African American and Latino respondents with the lightest skin are several times more likely to be seen by whites as intelligent compared with those with the darkest skin.”

The implications of these findings are hugely significant, and lend credence to the often expressed feeling of tokenization by black people who are deemed smart, successful or intelligent by whites. That is, the feeling that white people perceive certain African Americans as exceptional or “not like the others.” It also adds an important layer to the conversation around colorism, which privileges light skin above darker skin both within and outside of communities of color. (And has helped skin lightening products become a booming global industry in places like India, the Philippines and some parts of Africa.)

Unfortunately, I could go on and on. About how, for example, black students — even preschoolers — are far more likely to be suspended from school than white students. (That fact is even truer for dark-skinned black students.) The same products, when displayed by black hands on the Internet, are less likely to sell than when they are held by white hands. One study even found that white people basically think black people are paranormal entities, an idea so ludicrous it begs that you read an explanation, here.

Racism is comfortable and easy; it helps us make quick, baseless decisions without the taxing act of thinking. The next time you catch yourself having a racist thought or feeling, try not brushing it off. Ask yourself where it came from, what it means and how you can unpack it. Because if the evidence above suggests anything, it’s that critical self-examination is our only hope of moving the needle at all on this thing. Stop imagining that being racist is something that only other people do, and start looking closely at your own beliefs.

Especially the ones you’ve never admitted to yourselves that you hold.

Remembering Reconstruction

There's No National Site Devoted to Reconstruction—Yet

The National Park Service, which preserves many Civil War sites, is finally looking for a way to mark the struggles that defined its legacy.

Wikimedia Commons

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• Gregory P. Downs and Kate Masur
• Apr 29, 2015

Four years ago, the sesquicentennial of the Civil War kicked off with conferences, public lectures, government proclamations, and even balls and galas. As Reconstruction's anniversary begins, however, there is no such fanfare and few signs of public reckoning, much less celebration.  

Reconstruction has long suffered such neglect. The National Park Service, steward of the nation's Civil War battlefields and a leader in interpreting the war for the public, has not a single site dedicated to that vital and controversial period. Now, on the cusp of significant Reconstruction anniversaries, the Park Service is ready to change how Americans remember Reconstruction, to help push the era—in all its complexity—back onto the map of America's collective memory.

By the spring of 1865, many veterans of the decades-long movement to end slavery felt their work was finished. Confederate generals had surrendered, giving up the dream of a nation whose cornerstone was human bondage. And Congress had passed a constitutional amendment that—once ratified—would make slavery illegal throughout the land.  Abolitionists had reason to feel satisfied.

Related Story

Reconstruction (December 1866)

At a meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society in May, however, Frederick Douglass urged them to fight on. The Thirteenth Amendment was the beginning, not the end, of the effort to remake the nation. "Slavery is not abolished until the black man has the ballot," he told the crowd. "While the Legislatures of the South retain the right to pass laws making any discrimination between black and white, slavery still lives there."  

The end of slavery, Douglass argued, would never be secured if the nation's four million ex-slaves were left to the mercies of their Southern white neighbors. State governments would use racially discriminatory legislation to impoverish and immobilize former slaves, and they would never voluntarily permit black men to vote. The antislavery movement must press forward, lobbying the government to do more to protect and empower black Southerners, lest the moment's potential be lost.  

The period known as Reconstruction was defined by the questions of race and power that Douglass identified, questions that flowed logically and continuously out of the Civil War. Those questions reverberate in many political debates today—debates over the meaning of equal protection of the law, over the right to vote, and over the limits of presidential and congressional authority, both in peacetime and in war.  

For all its significance, however, Reconstruction seems more difficult to remember than to forget. The New York Times' innovative and successful Disunion series is ending, echoing predecessors like Ken Burns's epic documentary, The Civil War, which skipped Reconstruction almost entirely.

But that may be starting to change. After commissioning a handbook on Reconstruction that will soon be available in parks, the National Park Service has begun a yearlong study of sites that could be appropriate for memorializing Reconstruction. We will be participating in that study and assessing how the nation might best commemorate this remarkable period.

There is a great deal to look at. Reconstruction was a nearly unprecedented period of transformation. While most slaveholding societies—with the exception of Haiti—refused to enfranchise ex-slave men upon emancipation, the United States extended the vote to black men, and Southern constituencies soon elected black men to Congress, state legislatures, and crucial local offices including sheriffs and assessors.  

For all its significance, Reconstruction seems more difficult to remember than to forget.

This political transformation, pressed forward by the lobbying of Douglass and hundreds of thousands of freedpeople and white Republicans, transformed the South in turn. New state governments created public schools and hospitals, and black people and their white allies founded colleges, churches, and benevolent organizations.  

Instead of facing exclusion from legal systems, some black Southerners now ran them. Once treated as property, they could now legally own property, and many struggled heroically to do so. Once prohibited from reading, they now built schools and flooded them with teachers and students. Once blocked from the legal protections of marriage, they now registered their unions and claimed the privileges commonly associated with both marriage and parenthood.

And these grassroots transformations also remade the country. New constitutional amendments refashioned American citizenship and promised new rights. After the Thirteenth Amendment ended slavery, the Fourteenth Amendment established national citizenship, protected the federal debt from repudiation, and promised individuals equal protection and due process of law. The Fifteenth Amendment attempted to outlaw racial discrimination in the right to vote. Together, these amendments were a second founding of the nation, a remaking of citizenship and rights so broad as to stand with the constitutional convention itself as a signal moment in the making of America.

At the same time, Reconstruction was also a period of disappointment and disillusionment. For the many white Southerners who had sympathized with and fought for the Confederacy, wartime defeat was compounded by the federal government's policies, which led to loss of mastery over their slaves and loss of political power as black men too were allowed to vote. Many lashed out violently. In bloody campaigns of terror, they prevented African Americans from voting, killed thousands of freedpeople, raped untold numbers of black women, and thus reestablished control. By the end of the century, many—though not all—of Reconstruction’s gains were in retreat as Southern state governments disfranchised black men and legalized the "Jim Crow" order of racial segregation and degradation. The Supreme Court quickly acquiesced in its 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision.

Amid the tumult, a search for meaning emerged among writers of all kinds, including northern news reporters dispatched to the South, white Southern memoirists striving to make sense of their commitment to a failed cause, and activists who sought with diminishing success to draw attention to the plight of black communities.  

The victors in this war of words and interpretation were those who believed Reconstruction had been a disastrous mistake. Those writers made the villains of Reconstruction almost legendary: foolish or violent black Southerners, corrupt white Northern carpetbaggers, and tyrannical Republican politicians who oversaw an era of unjust, unconstitutional federal intervention.

In the early 20th century, this view found its way into the newly professionalizing discipline of history, especially in graduate programs at Johns Hopkins and Columbia. By the time the groundbreaking film Birth of a Nation was released in 1915, Reconstruction was widely understood as a period of disastrous federal policymaking that led to the oppression and humiliation of white Americans. Among academic historians, wrote W. E. B. Du Bois in the 1930s, the study of Reconstruction was "devastated by passion and belief."

That early but remarkably resilient narrative of Reconstruction was not just a story about history; it was a justification for the Jim Crow order that prevailed in the South until the 1960s. And as Jim Crow crumbled, so, too, did the conventional story about Reconstruction. Among professional historians, a new narrative has taken shape over the last fifty years, pioneered most of all by Columbia's Eric Foner. The output has been prodigious.  

Reconstruction remains difficult to fathom and can be painful to discuss.

Historians have conducted large-scale studies of African American office-holding that dispel the myth of "negro rule" and show how difficult it was for African Americans—even during the heady days of Reconstruction—to get candidates elected to major offices. Against claims that African Americans emerged from slavery unprepared to live independently, historians have unearthed the wealth of institutions and cultural resources that people of African descent developed in slavery and cultivated after emancipation. Scholars have profiled the "carpetbaggers" as a group and as individuals, revealing that many were motivated not by crass self-interest but by a desire to help build a more democratic South. And in examining Republican congressmen, they have found not tyrants but the authors of many of the constitutional rights that Americans hold most dear.

Unfortunately, little of the new work has made it out of the halls of the academy and into public consciousness. Reconstruction remains difficult to fathom and can be painful to discuss. It is complicated to teach. The issues it raises are bracingly—but also distressingly—contemporary, and while the period has many heroes and heroines, it offers little in the way of happy endings.

Baltimore Aflame

I'm not sure what to think about it.

Libraries Are Advancing

How Libraries are Advancing and Inspiring Schools and Communities

By Holly Korbey Nov. 20, 2014

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Students learn how to take great product photographs using equipment provided by Etsy’s pilot Craft Entrepreneurship program held at the Chattanooga Public Library. (Courtesy of Mary Barnett)

It’s well known that public libraries are no longer just about the books — even e-books. Many community libraries are receiving 21st century digital-age makeovers: Numerous digital technologies, maker spaces to invite creation, even video production suites and 3-D printers now inhabit many libraries across the country.

But a report just released by the Aspen Institute Dialogue on Public Libraries asks us again to reconsider how the library can serve communities in the 21st century. “Rising to the Challenge: Re-Envisioning Public Libraries” aims to “capture the momentum and excitement of the innovations taking place in public libraries across the country, and the impact these are having on communities,” said the group’s director, Amy Garmer. The report asks: With all the new technology and layered networks, what can be done beyond current advancements?

“We are a place for the curious, for creativity, a place for learning, a place to experiment. It’s always been the mission of the library. We’re just using different tools.”

The Dialogue on Public Libraries group is supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Global Libraries Program and is made up of 34 library field leaders, business executives, government officials, education experts and community development visionaries. The group aims for more than just holding up great examples of libraries working well in the digital age.
“We want to provide a catalyst for new thinking about libraries as platforms for learning, creativity and innovation in their communities, and the creation of new networked forms of libraries,” Garmer said. If the report could spark engagement at the local, state and national levels to rethink how to use libraries and then constructively act on it, Garmer said, then the group’s goal will have been achieved.

The Chattanooga Public Library. (Courtesy of Mary Barnett)

Meeting Real-World Needs
Two cities in the state of Tennessee, Nashville and Chattanooga, were highlighted in the report for their bold reimagining of what a library could be, and how their communities have responded in overwhelmingly positive and successful ways to the changes.
When Corinne Hill got appointed executive director of the Chattanooga Public Library in 2012, the city had just received a harrowing report on the state of its library. “It was a really bad report,” Hill said. “The consultant came in and basically said the system was broken.” Because the library needed rebuilding from the ground up, she said, the board was open to doing something really different, and she saw an opportunity.

Visitors from New Zealand check out the Chattanooga Public Library’s loom, in addition to the library’s digital capabilities. (Courtesy of Mary Barnett)

At the same time, Chattanooga was undergoing a transformation. City leaders had recently provided the entire city with a one-gigabit-per-second Internet speed as a municipal utility, the first in the Western Hemisphere. Hill saw a great opportunity to leverage the brand-new “GigCity” to improve — and expand — the library.
“Having that kind of speed in a library is crazy-ridiculous-amazing,” Hill said. With the help of grants and the library’s operating budget, she invested in outfitting the downtown library with infrastructure to handle the highest-speed Internet, and then got to work on what they would offer.
The fourth floor of the library had historically been used as storage, but Hill decided to rip it all out and transform it into a space the community could use. “We emptied all of that [storage] out, and turned it into a raw space with all the appeal of a 1930s factory space, with concrete floors and everything that goes along with it,” she said. “It’s now a public space. If you’ve got an idea, you can develop it here.”
Currently, the fourth floor is home to several businesses, including a wedding-dress maker who uses the space to cut out patterns, and a writer in residence. One of Hill’s goals was not only to offer the high tech — like a popular 3-D printer available to the public — but the decidedly low tech, too. “We’ve got sewing classes, we’ve developed these popular programs about making stuff, which is a natural extension of the space,” she said. “And we’re now in the textile market! We brought in a loom and it’s really popular. We’re becoming where the community can come and make stuff. Yes, the gig is sexy, but this other stuff is very real, very much a maker movement.”

And very soon, the fourth floor will be adding the GigLab, “a separate but inclusive gig-connected space designed specifically for gigabit-related experimentation and learning,” according the website. That level of connectivity, according to Hill, will create new opportunities. “Our job then will be to help the community figure out what to do when you got a gig,” Hill said. “It’s like back in the days when electricity was new. Once you turn the lights on, what do you want to do next? What do you do with all that electricity? We’re doing the same thing.”

Nearly 700 kids and teens per day pour through the library’s second floor, which is dedicated to youth. Not only are kids enticed by the 3-D printer and video arcade, but they can also learn how to edit video using software provided by Mozilla, go to coding camp or lay down on the floor with a Chromebook and do research for a school project. Hill and her team have also joined with the online craft marketplace Etsy to help teens get their own Etsy stores off the ground. “When I was 14, I worked at a pizza place. Can you imagine if your first job can be your own shop?” Hill said.
While many parents and teachers worry that all the tech gadgets will draw students away from reading books, Hill said, she’s finding that reality is the opposite: So many students now associate technology with school that they find reading print books pure pleasure.
Much like the missions of Nashville’s Limitless Library and the Aspen Institute’s report, Hill said she hopes to transform the Chattanooga library “into a catalyst for lifelong learning, especially in the age that we live in.”
“Giving people access in a public space is a great use of tax dollars,” Hill said. “We’re not really expanding the role of libraries. It’s doing what we’ve always done, we’re just using different stuff. We are a place for the curious, for creativity, a place for learning, a place to experiment. It’s always been the mission of the library. We’re just using different tools.”
Beyond Mobile Libraries
In Nashville, Mayor Karl Dean had an idea to “break down the walls” between the public library and the public school libraries. Dean, who is also a member of the Dialogue on Libraries group, noticed that technology changed how students received information in every area of their lives, but school libraries struggled to keep up both in the quality and relevance of the materials they could offer.

Nashville Mayor Karl Dean (left) with a student at Dupont Tyler Middle School. The school participates in the Limitless Library program and recently had its library renovated through the program.

So together with then-Library Director Donna Nicely, Dean created the Limitless Libraries program, a way for public school students to access the entire public library catalog without ever having to leave school. Students can check out any material the public library has to offer — including books, music and DVDs, but also iPads and e-readers — through their school library, and the public libraries deliver the materials directly to the schools every day.
Beginning as a pilot program in 2009 with just a handful of schools, Dean can proudly say that Limitless Libraries is now available in every Nashville public school. The effects on the students and the libraries have been staggering. “Out of 28,000 students who have registered [for the program],” said Dean, “15,000 have used the public library for the first time because of Limitless Libraries. And circulation at school libraries has increased by 79 percent.”
Limitless Libraries has also helped teachers, Dean notes, by giving students access to the millions of volumes in the public libraries, which means better access to quality materials for research papers and projects. And, above all, the program gives access to books and materials to many kids who can’t afford them on their own, or have difficulty getting to a library from home.
Dean said he is a “big believer” in libraries, and they are far from becoming irrelevant. “People need to have access to computers, digital books and DVDs,” Dean said. “Libraries are also gathering places for a number of reasons,” he said, which is why he’s building two new Nashville libraries, one as part of a community center inside an abandoned shopping mall. “They’re tremendously popular, every community wants one, and the demand isn’t going away,” he said. “They’ll play an even more important role in cities going forward.”
Garmer said Dean is a “visionary leader when it comes to connecting and supporting the public library in the community,” and a great example for the report. While schools are an obvious partner for libraries, she said, because they come out of different parts of the budget and are part of two different professional communities, their “silos” are difficult to break down. “When leaders step outside of the box and really reimagine what a library is capable of doing in the community,” she said, “the new partnerships and collaborations will start to flow naturally.”
Looking to the future, Dean has even more plans for the limitless nature of Nashville’s school libraries, investing in the physical places to make them “the coolest spaces in the school,” as well as upgrading their technology. “If what you want a city to be is filled with lifelong learners, and be a creative place, you have to have libraries,” Dean said. “Libraries are the best way to get that done.”

By the Book

E-books Go Out of Fashion As Book Sales Revive

• Megan Gibson @MeganJGibson

Jan. 9, 2015

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U.K. bookstores report increased demand for physical books

British book stores have good news for bibliophiles, reporting that more people have been buying physical books recently. What’s more, sales of e-readers have apparently slumped according to their reports. Waterstones, a U.K. book store chain which also sells Amazon’s Kindle, told the Financial Times that demand for the e-reader has all but disappeared.
Sales for physical books at Waterstones were also up 5 percent last month, which the company chalked up to its store renovations and allowing store managers to take more control in order to tailor inventory to local tastes.
Meanwhile Sam Husain, the chief executive of Foyles, a London bookstore chain, also told the FT that sales of paper books were up 11 percent this Christmas over last year and that sales of Barnes & Noble’s e-reader, the Nook, were “not as impressive as one would expect them to be.”
“The rapid growth of ebook sales has quite dramatically slowed and there is some evidence it has gone into reverse,” said Douglas McCabe of Enders Analysis. Though it’s hard to say what exactly has caused the apparent slow-down of digital book sales, this does spell good news for fans of physical books in the U.K.: Waterstones now plans to open a dozen stores new stores this year.

One More Take on the Tragedy of Viet Nam

Sunday, Apr 26, 2015 10:59 AM CST

How Richard Nixon stabbed America in the back

Worried that losing Vietnam would doom his reelection, Tricky Dick opted to prolong the war — with tragic results

Ken Hughes

Richard Nixon (Credit: AP)

Excerpted from “Fatal Politics: The Nixon Tapes, the Vietnam War, and the Casualties of Reelection.”

“No event in American history is more misunderstood than the Vietnam War.” No one did more to keep it that way than the author of the preceding sentence, Richard Milhous Nixon. It’s the opening line of his 1985 best seller, No More Vietnams. In the former president’s version of events, he won the war, only to watch helplessly as Congress “proceeded to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.” One reviewer wrote that Nixon had fabricated a “stabbed in the back” myth, one all too reminiscent of the Dolchstosslegende that German militarists created to blame their defeat in World War I on their country’s civilians (rather than on the predictable shift in the balance of battlefield power caused by America’s entrance into the war on the Allied side). In the battle over history, however, Nixon had a crucial advantage over his critics. They didn’t have access to the best evidence: the classified record of Nixon’s foreign policy making, especially his secretly recorded White House tapes. The tapes covered the critical period— February 16, 1971, to July 12, 1973— when Nixon withdrew the last American troops from Vietnam, negotiated a settlement of the war with North Vietnam’s Communist government, engineered the diplomatic opening to China, established a détente with Russia, and won a landslide reelection. The tapes reveal the complex and subtle interplay between all these actions— including the ways Nixon manipulated geopolitical events for domestic political gain. Unsurprisingly, he fought until his death in 1994 to keep the American people from hearing the tapes; tragically, it took the federal government nearly two decades, until 2013, to finish declassifying these invaluable and (thanks to Nixon’s sound-activated recording system) comprehensive historical records. By then it was almost too late. Politicians, policy makers, and pundits now routinely invoke Nixon’s backstabbing myth as reason to block attempts to end America’s twenty-first-century wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They even promote Nixon-era strategy as a path to victory in both these countries.

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Nixon’s tapes reveal, however, that he merely came up with a politically acceptable substitute for victory. Neither Nixon nor any of his military or civilian advisers ever devised a workable strategy to win the war, but Nixon and National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger devised a brilliant, if ruthless, strategy to win the election. As Nixon and Kissinger saw it, victory in the presidential election did not depend on victory in Vietnam; they merely had to postpone— not prevent — the Communist takeover of South Vietnam until sometime after November 1972. To accomplish this end, Nixon kept American soldiers in Vietnam into the fourth year of his presidency, at the cost of thousands of American lives.
That was the military side of his secret strategy. Like his official, publicly announced strategy, Nixon’s secret strategy had both a military and a diplomatic side. Officially, Nixon’s strategy was “Vietnamization and negotiation.” Publicly, Nixon said Vietnamization would train and equip the South Vietnamese to defend themselves without the need for American troops. Secretly, Nixon used Vietnamization as an excuse to prolong the war long enough to delay South Vietnam’s fall past Election Day 1972.
As for the diplomatic side, Nixon said publicly that the aim of negotiations was to reach an agreement with the North guaranteeing the South’s right to choose its government by free elections. Secretly, however, he did not require the North to abandon its goal of military conquest of the South. Instead, he settled for a “decent interval”— a period of a year or two — between his final withdrawal of American troops and the Communists’ final takeover of South Vietnam. For Nixon to completely evade the blame for defeat, he had to do more than prop up the Saigon government through 1972. If it fell shortly after he brought the troops home, Americans would see that their soldiers had died in vain, and Nixon would go down in history as the first president to lose a war. Nixon could avoid this fate, however, if the Communists gave him a “decent interval.”
Nixon and Kissinger’s secret strategy, though clearly immoral, did not spring simply from the character flaws of two men. It was a logical, if extreme, outgrowth of Cold War politics. Successful Cold War politicians blamed their opponents for losing countries to the Communists — even countries where Americans and Communists had not been fighting.
Republicans gained control of both houses of Congress in 1946 in part by blaming Democrats for “losing” Eastern Europe to Communism; the GOP also picked up House and Senate seats in 1950 by blaming Democrats for “losing” China to Mao Zedong’s Communist revolutionaries. JFK won the presidency in 1960 in part by blaming Republicans for “losing” Cuba to Communist Fidel Castro. Given this political tendency, Nixon had reason to fear that if he lost Vietnam in his first term, American voters would deny him a second one. That was political reality. It doesn’t excuse what Nixon and Kissinger did; it merely shows that they acted on the basis of rational political calculation.
Just as important as how Nixon won the 1972 election is how his opponent lost. According to the Emory University professor Drew Westen, political campaigns are built, in part, on “the story your opponent is telling about himself” and “the story you are telling about your opponent.” The story Nixon told about himself— that he would keep the war going only until South Vietnam could defend itself or the North agreed to let it choose its government by free elections — was not true. Unfortunately, the story his opponent told about him wasn’t true, either.
The Democratic presidential nominee, Sen. George McGovern of South Dakota, did not accuse Nixon of prolonging the war and faking peace for political gain, of putting his reelection campaign above the lives of American soldiers, of sacrificing them for a fig leaf behind which he would secretly surrender the South to the Communists. Instead, McGovern and other liberals claimed that Nixon would never allow Saigon to fall, that a vote to reelect the president was a vote for four more years of war. Although Nixon’s tapes show that he was not the steadfast ally of Saigon that he pretended to be, McGovern’s charges counterproductively reinforced the image that Nixon had carefully cultivated.
Worse, McGovern didn’t know what to do in October 1972 when South Vietnamese president Nguyen Van Thieu publicly declared that the deal Nixon and Kissinger made with North Vietnam was a sellout and surrender to the Communists. The charge was both damning and true, but because it contradicted what McGovern had been saying, he failed to seize the opportunity it offered. Autopsies of McGovern’s campaign usually detail his parade of political pratfalls through the summer and fall of 1972, but they neglect its central strategic flaw. Vietnam was the biggest issue of the general election campaign, and McGovern fumbled it.
It didn’t have to be that way. Sen. Ted Kennedy, D- Massachusetts, provided an alternative strategy when he accurately accused Nixon of cynically using Vietnamization as a fraudulent cover for timing military withdrawal to his reelection campaign. Kennedy’s brother-in-law Sargent Shriver — McGovern’s running mate in the fall campaign — accurately accused Nixon of negotiating surrender. If McGovern had told that story throughout the campaign, not only would he have been right, but Nixon’s troop withdrawals and Thieu’s blowup would have provided the story with credible confirmation. Instead, McGovern and other liberals lost control of the foreign policy narrative, telling a story about Nixon that was both false and flattering to the man it was designed to defeat. 
Though the 1972 campaign is decades past, the myth Nixon made (and McGovern unwittingly reinforced) persists, now hallowed as if it were settled history. Right and Left agree that Nixon was determined to use American military power to preserve South Vietnam until Congress tied his hands. The Right calls that losing Vietnam, the Left calls it ending the war, but both agree that’s what happened. As we shall see, Nixon invited Congress to pass legislation denying him authority to militarily intervene in Vietnam, despite having the votes he needed to sustain a veto. Legislation barring military intervention throughout Indochina (Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia) passed with a veto-proof majority only after Nixon’s conservative supporters joined his liberal opponents and accepted his invitation. Like Nixon’s secret military and diplomatic strategy, this legislative maneuver enabled him to deny responsibility for losing Vietnam.
The danger of the backstabbing myth that Nixon spun in No More Vietnams is that it paves the way for more Vietnams. Today, no politician wants to be accused of losing Iraq or Afghanistan. That doesn’t mean any of them (or their civilian and military advisers) have ever come up with a way to win either war. Nixonian myth, however, gives them a politically acceptable alternative to admitting failure. They can hold up the false hopes that training and equipping the local armies will enable them to replace American soldiers and that a political settlement will reconcile parties who have demonstrated their inclination to fight out their differences. The cost of false hope is measured in lost and shattered lives.
Fortunately, Nixon’s myth is shattered by the evidence on Nixon’s tapes and in his White House documents. I’ve been studying Nixon’s tapes for decades, first as a journalist writing in the pages of the New York Times Magazine, Washington Post, Boston Globe Magazine,and other publications in the 1990s, and since 2000 as a researcher with the Presidential Recordings Program of the University of Virginia’s Miller Center. The tapes tell a story that is both true and, potentially, lifesaving. Once we remember this hidden part of our past, we will no longer be condemned to repeat it.
Excerpted from “Fatal Politics: The Nixon Tapes, the Vietnam War, and the Casualties of Reelection” by Ken Hughes. Copyright © 2015 by Ken Hughes. Reprinted by arrangement with University of Virginia Press. All rights reserved.

Ken Hughes is a historian at the University of Virginia's Miller Center of Public Affairs, where he heads the Presidential Recordings Project's Nixon team.

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His Filthy World: A Q&A with John Waters

BY Will Stephenson
Arkansas Times
23 April 2015

NEVER AROUND ASSHOLES: John Waters.

Last week I called John Waters and found him at home in the tastefully decorated study of his house in Baltimore, complete with thick red curtains, stacks of books and a fake cat (I've seen photos). A legendary filmmaker and writer — an iconic American personality, really — Waters divides his time between New York, San Francisco and Baltimore, his hometown, where he shot most of his early films, including "Pink Flamingos," one of the most famous low-budget movies ever made.

Since his last film, 2004's "A Dirty Shame," Waters has largely turned to writing books, including the 2010 essay collection "Role Models," and last year's "Carsick," a fiction-nonfiction hybrid about his adventures — real and imagined — hitchhiking across the country. He's a headlining speaker at this year's Arkansas Literary Festival, and will present his one-man show, "This Filthy World" at 8 p.m. Saturday at the Ron Robinson Theater.

Have you ever been to Arkansas? Are you at all worried about it?

I'm almost sure I have, because at one point in my life I went through the map and drove all five interstates across the country. But I don't think I've been to Little Rock. I don't ever have bad associations with any state, because I know from traveling so much that today my audience is always smart, always cool, and they always dress up for me. So I know my audience in Arkansas will look very similar to my audience in Paris or Fargo, North Dakota. Everybody's cool now. I'm hoping I do see some local color actually — that's what's missing when I go to all these cities. I live in Baltimore, which is the South, too, no matter what they say. I have no prejudices, especially after hitchhiking across the country, against what people call Middle America. To me, the people were all incredibly open-minded and wonderful. I'm never around assholes. I'm sure there are assholes in Arkansas, but I won't meet them. That's success. Success is, you can buy any book without looking at the price, and also you're never around assholes. Those are the key things you have to work for, and I have succeeded.

Speaking of which, it seems like it's become common for celebrities to complain about their fame, but you've always made being famous seem very fun.

I don't have the kind of fame that Justin Bieber has, where you can't leave your house. I've seen that with Johnny Depp, where he basically can't go out. I don't have that, thank God. But to be honest, I used to say to Johnny, "That's the point. Work harder and then you can never leave your house."

I've always romanticized the "midnight movies" era of films like "El Topo," "Night of the Living Dead" and your own "Pink Flamingos" — the whole social-communal aspect of that '70s film culture. Am I wrong to do so?

Well, you know, you mention the term "film culture," which was also the name of Jonas Mekas' wonderful, amazing, brilliant magazine about "underground movies," which are what came before "midnight movies." I romanticize underground movies, back when [Jack Smith's 1963] "Flaming Creatures" was playing and the police would raid and take the audience away in paddy wagons. That's going to the movies. Later, they just busted the projectionist, which, what did he do?

But romanticizing midnight movies is valid. There was no video then, so you couldn't watch a movie at home, or even watch it again. So if it played every week at midnight, like "Pink Flamingos" did, you could go see it — it was the first time you could watch something over and over. And 100 percent of the audience was smoking marijuana. But it was a communal thing. It was like Mass, it was religious. People came in costumes and would yell out the dialogue and all that. It was a social event.

So it was romantic. But the problem was, everybody thought you could get rich from this, but it was only one show a week, and tickets were $2. Nobody was getting rich. And when you say "cult movie" — that's the one thing you pray they don't call you when you're pitching to get a Hollywood job. In Hollywood, "cult" means nobody came to see it except for three smart people.

Do you still love film? What's the last Hollywood movie you enjoyed?

Oh yes. I thought the best Hollywood film last year was "Gone Girl."

What are you reading these days?

Let's see here, I'll go deep. The two best books I've read recently are coming out this summer. One is by my editor, Jonathan Galassi, called "Muse." It's a smart cliffhanger about publishing — who could ever imagine it? And the other is by Bill Clegg, who is my agent. He has a new book called "Did You Ever Have a Family." It's really, really good. That sounds ridiculous that my two favorite recent books are by my editor and my agent, but whoever heard of editors and agents writing books?

I'm really anxious to read [Karl Ove Knausgaard's] "My Struggle, Vol. 4," which I just got. I, of course, like Anne Tyler's ["A Spool of Blue Thread]. I had dinner with her the other night and I'm so happy her book is doing really, really well. What else? "The Corvo Cult" [by Robert Scoble] is a book I'm enjoying. I'm reading everything by Rachel Cusk, since I read an article about her called "The Most Hated Woman in Literature." I loved her book about how much she hated having children. She really doesn't suffer fools.

Then I'll tell you what's coming up, since we're pushing a literary festival here: "Days of Rage: America's Radical Underground" [by Bryan Burrough], "Film as Film: The Collected Writings of Gregory J. Markopoulos" and "Gods and Kings: The Rise and Fall of Alexander McQueen and John Galliano" [by Dana Thomas].

Why did you decide to include both fictional and nonfictional episodes in "Carsick"?

Before I went, everybody was so afraid for me and telling me not to do it, but I thought, what's the worst that could happen? And then I thought, that might actually be good to imagine.

I realized once I did the trip that I never could have written those [fictional] chapters after doing it for real. I just thought it was a good idea to imagine the best and imagine the worst and then do it for real, to see the difference between fantasy and reality. And what really happened was, of course, not as extreme as the best and the worst, but the people could not have been sweeter and more encouraging, and were not a disappointment. So it was interesting to see what I had in my head and what happened in real life, but I ultimately liked both.

Although standing there at 66 years old in the middle of Kansas, hitchhiking by myself, was pretty extreme. I look back and can't even believe I did that.

Would you pick up yourself hitchhiking?

It depends. If I was alone, yes. If I was with somebody, no. No one really knew it was me, and even if they thought it was, they'd drive by and think, "Why would he be standing there?" When I see pictures of what I looked like, I'm amazed anybody picked me up.

How could someone become the next John Waters today?

Today, studios are looking for people like me when I was 18. They're looking for the next kid who's made a cellphone movie. Now, they want films that cost under $1 million or $100 million. But also, I've always said that if you could just think of a way to make people nervous with no sex or violence, you would have such a hit. You have to surprise people in a new way.

Cheers

Cheers to the UAB linebacker who wore his helmet to graduation and refused to shake the president's hand. Now there's a young man with guts! Let our Millennials lead the way.

So Far

We move into late April.  The Masters Tournament is over.  Auburn's baseball team is doing better than expected.  A-Day is over.  There is sunshine today in Shelby County.  The days are getting longer.  How long till football season starts?

Zombie Republicans

The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Columnist

Zombies of 2016

APRIL 24, 2015

Paul Krugman

Last week, a zombie went to New Hampshire and staked its claim to the Republican presidential nomination. Well, O.K., it was actually Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey. But it’s pretty much the same thing.

You see, Mr. Christie gave a speech in which he tried to position himself as a tough-minded fiscal realist. In fact, however, his supposedly tough-minded policy idea was a classic zombie — an idea that should have died long ago in the face of evidence that undermines its basic premise, but somehow just keeps shambling along.

But let us not be too harsh on Mr. Christie. A deep attachment to long-refuted ideas seems to be required of all prominent Republicans. Whoever finally gets the nomination for 2016 will have multiple zombies as his running mates.

Start with Mr. Christie, who thought he was being smart and brave by proposing that we raise the age of eligibility for both Social Security and Medicare to 69. Doesn’t this make sense now that Americans are living longer?

No, it doesn’t. This whole line of argument should have died in 2007, when the Social Security Administration issued a report showing that almost all the rise in life expectancy has taken place among the affluent. The bottom half of workers, who are precisely the Americans who rely on Social Security most, have seen their life expectancy at age 65 rise only a bit more than a year since the 1970s. Furthermore, while lawyers and politicians may consider working into their late 60s no hardship, things look somewhat different to ordinary workers, many of whom still have to perform manual labor.

And while raising the retirement age would impose a great deal of hardship, it would save remarkably little money. In fact, a 2013 report from the Congressional Budget Office found that raising the Medicare age would save almost no money at all.

But Mr. Christie — like Jeb Bush, who quickly echoed his proposal — evidently knows none of this. The zombie ideas have eaten his brain.

And there are plenty of other zombies out there. Consider, for example, the zombification of the debate over health reform.

Before the Affordable Care Act went fully into effect, conservatives made a series of dire predictions about what would happen when it did. It would actually reduce the number of Americans with health insurance; it would lead to “rate shock,” as premiums soared; it would cost the government far more than projected, and blow up the deficit; it would be a huge job-destroyer.

In reality, the act has produced a dramatic drop in the number of uninsured adults; premiums have grown much more slowly than in the years before reform; the law’s cost is coming in well below projections; and 2014, the first year of full implementation, also had the best job growth since 1999.

So how has this changed the discourse? On the right, not at all. As far as I can tell, every prominent Republican talks about Obamacare as if all the predicted disasters have, in fact, come to pass.

Finally, one of the interesting political developments of this election cycle has been the triumphant return of voodoo economics, the “supply-side” claim that tax cuts for the rich stimulate the economy so much that they pay for themselves.

In the real world, this doctrine has an unblemished record of failure. Despite confident right-wing predictions of doom, neither the Clinton tax increase of 1993 nor the Obama tax increase of 2013 killed the economy (far from it), while the “Bush boom” that followed the tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 was unimpressive even before it ended in financial crisis. Kansas, whose governor promised a “real live experiment” that would prove supply-side doctrine right, has failed even to match the growth of neighboring states.

In the world of Republican politics, however, voodoo’s grip has never been stronger. Would-be presidential candidates must audition in front of prominent supply-siders to prove their fealty to failed doctrine. Tax proposals like Marco Rubio’s would create a giant hole in the budget, then claim that this hole would be filled by a miraculous economic upsurge. Supply-side economics, it’s now clear, is the ultimate zombie: no amount of evidence or logic can kill it.

So why has the Republican Party experienced a zombie apocalypse? One reason, surely, is the fact that most Republican politicians represent states or districts that will never, ever vote for a Democrat, so the only thing they fear is a challenge from the far right. Another is the need to tell Big Money what it wants to hear: a candidate saying anything realistic about Obamacare or tax cuts won’t survive the Sheldon Adelson/Koch brothers primary.

Whatever the reasons, the result is clear. Pundits will try to pretend that we’re having a serious policy debate, but, as far as issues go, 2016 is already set up to be the election of the living dead.

Bossypants by Tina Fey

This is the funniest book I have ever read. It is the autobiography of Tina Fey, who rose to fame as a cast member on Saturday Night Live. Originally, she was a writer on SNL, then later became a host of the legendary Weekend Update segment.  Later, she starred on 30 Rock, which was a popular and critical success.  She also briefly returned to SNL in 2008 to portray Sarah Palin.

The book details her childhood through 30 Rock and into motherhood.  Before SNL, she worked at a YMCA and then with the famed Second City comedy troupe in Chicago, which has produced countless famous comedians.  Alumni of Second City include John Belushi, Alan Arkin, John Candy, Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Chris Farley, Stephen Colbert, Steve Carell, and Gilda Radner. Overall, the book is easy to read and filled with nonstop humor.  Fey is self-deprecating, but her wit and talent are evident.  My only criticism is that there is too much humor.  There is so much that I feel the book lacks depth; I was wanting to learn more about her life than she reveals.  Nonetheless, it is an entertaining read.

Geography and the Constitution

Tuesday, Apr 21, 2015 07:00 AM CST

The Tea Party will never understand the Constitution: What the right misses about its favorite document

Geography and decisive action built the U.S. Constitution, Yale Law's Akhil Reed Amar tells Salon

Elias Isquith Follow

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Tea Party activist William Temple listens as Newt Gingrich addresses the Conservative Political Action Conference, February 27, 2015. (Credit: Reuters/Kevin Lamarque)

With the 2016 election cycle having kicked into first-gear already, any American who hasn’t inured themselves to the monotonous (and often ultimately meaningless) repetition of the word “Constitution” is advised to get to self-desensitizing — and quick.
Sens. Rand Paul and Ted Cruz have already made a fetishized version of the U.S.’s supreme governing document central to their campaign rhetoric; and even politicians less beloved by the supposedly Constitution-crazy Tea Party, like Jeb Bush or Hillary Clinton, are likely to soon follow suit. That’s how American politics functions now, in the era of the NSA, Guantanamo Bay, lethal drone strikes and endless war.
But as that list of questionable policies suggests, there’s an unanswered question lurking behind so much of our happy talk about the Constitution — namely, do we even understand it? As dozens of polls and public surveys will attest, the answer is, not really. And that’s one of the reasons that Yale Law School professor Akhil Reed Amar has decided to write about the rulebook so many Americans love but so few seem to understand. “The Law of the Land: A Grand Tour of our Constitutional Republic,” released earlier this month, is that project’s latest addition.
Recently, Salon spoke over the phone with Amar about the Constitution, his books, and why he sees Abraham Lincoln as perhaps the United State’s real founding father. Our conversation is below and has been edited for clarity and length.

So this book is part of a larger, multi-book project on the Constitution. The first was a biography of the document, the second was about its “unwritten” provisions, and this is the third. What’s your focus this time?

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The third book in this project is a geographical slicing of the story; ours is a vast republic of massive diversity, and the Constitution looks a little different in different states and regions. I try to show all of that that through 12 stories … each of which says something general about the United States Constitution but does so through the window of a particular state. It discusses a person or an idea or a case or an event particularly associated with that region that also casts light, more generally, on our Constitutional project.

So how did what you call “brute geography” influence the way we understand the Constitution today?

The very breadth of the American landmass and its distance from the old world were huge elements in the American founding and in the Civil War experience. The idea of creating an indivisible union in the 1780s, the idea of forming a more perfect union, was an idea powerfully influenced by these two geographic factors: a wide moat between the Old World and the New World (known as the Atlantic Ocean) would be able to protect Americans from Old World tyranny in the same way the English Channel protected Britain from much of the militarism of the European Continent…

But in 1787, as Americans looked around the world, they saw that Britain was free, and Britain was free because England and Scotland had merged, had formed an indivisible, perfect union that would protect liberty because they had gotten rid of land borders on the island and only needed a navy to protect themselves. That worked for England and that would work for America even better, because we’d have an English Channel times 50.

This will become manifest destiny and the Monroe Doctrine; we’ll control our hemisphere and we’ll be protected from Europe … Our Constitution largely succeeds because there’s no major standing army in peacetime for most of American history, and that fact is created by some brute geographic realities.

I’m speaking to you now right around the 150th anniversary of Lincoln’s assassination. He looms very large in your book; you describe him in some ways as almost prophetic. What made Lincoln’s understanding of the country and the Constitution so profound?

We live in Lincoln’s house. The Framers’ house was divided against itself; and, because of slavery, it fell. That failure is called the Civil War, and Lincoln rebuilt [the country] on a solid anti-slavery foundation, a foundation that would be strengthened after his death by the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment (which abolished slavery everywhere, irrevocably), the Fourteenth Amendment (which promised racial equality) and the Fifteenth Amendment (which promised equal voting rights).

I begin the book with Lincoln because he transformed the Union. He saved it and transformed it and … his story was very much influenced by, literally, where he came from. He has a vision of the Constitution that’s very much influenced by Illinois, in particular, and by the Midwest more generally. He comes from a part of the country that was the Northwest Territory, that was always free soil even before the Constitution, and he has a very free-soil vision.

How so?

The language of the 13th Amendment is borrowed, word-for-word, from the language of the Northwest Ordinance. Lincoln thinks that the nation created the states, which, of course, Robert E. Lee … could never buy into. Robert E. Lee would say that the states created the Union; but the Midwest [perspective] would say … before Illinois was a state, it was a territory; the Union created these new states out of nothing. That’s a very Midwestern perspective on the Constitution.

Lincoln is, far and away, the most important constitutional decision-maker of the last two centuries; and arguably the most important constitutional decision-maker and interpreter ever.

But Lincoln was never a judge nor a constitutional scholar. He was a politician.

Most people are taught in high school that the most important constitutional decision is Marbury v. Madison, but that’s not even the most important constitutional decision of 1803. The Louisiana Purchase was far more important than Marbury v. Madison, because it doubled the landmass of America and made sure that the country would survive. When you understand that, you understand that many important constitutional decisions are made not by judges but by presidents.

The two most important constitutional decisions ever are Lincoln’s decision to resist [the South's] unilateral secession, and Lincoln’s decision to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, which would lead to an end of slavery — that is transformative, and Lincoln made those decisions unilaterally as president. Had these issues reached the U.S. Supreme Court, controlled as it was [during Lincoln's time] by Roger Taney, a fierce opponent of Lincoln, the Court might very well have tried to invalidate Lincoln’s projects.

We live in a Constitution utterly transformed by the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments, and we would have none of those but for Lincoln.

Lincoln aside, though, you also argue that geography has played a big role in the Supreme Court — which, of course, is supposed to be the chief interpreter of the Constitution. How did geography influence the Court’s history?

Let’s take the most infamous judicial ruling of all time, the Dred Scott decision of 1857. It emerges from a Supreme Court that’s profoundly malapportioned: five of the nine justices on the Dred Scott court come from the slave-holding South, even though only a third of the population lives in that region.

Part of that is because entire antebellum system is skewed towards the South because of the three-fifths clause, which gives slave states extra clout in the House of Representatives and therefore the Electoral College. Presidents are picking justices, and the presidency tilts towards the South because of the three-fifths clause; almost all your early presidents are either slave-holding Southerners or “Northern men of Southern sympathies” — that is, pro-slavery Northerners.

If we view the Constitution and American history with more of a focus on the role played by geography, what are some the implications for U.S. politics today and in the near-future?

One of the things I’m trying to tell you in this book is how we can see presidential elections and our political polarization in new ways if we’re attentive to states and regions.

Our parties are polarized geographically; that this is not the first time that’s so (early on, it was the South against the North; Jefferson against Adams). The geographic alignment is remarkably similar to the geographic alignment in Lincoln’s time with this interesting twist: the Democrats have become the party of the North and the coasts and the Republicans have become the party of the former Confederacy. The parties have basically flipped, but it’s the same basic alignment…

One of the other big things I want you to see is how regions and states are hugely important in, for example, presidential politics. I talk about the significance in this book, in particular, of Ohio and Florida in the Electoral College and also of Texas. Is it a coincidence that Marco Rubio comes from Florida? That Jeb Bush is the governor of Florida who was born in Texas and whose father and brother had their political bases in Texas? That Rand Paul was born in Texas and his father ran for president from Texas? That Ted Cruz is from Texas? That Rick Perry is a former governor of Texas?

Elias Isquith is a staff writer at Salon, focusing on politics. Follow him on Twitter at @eliasisquith.

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