WeAreLiterite

James Garner - The Garner Files

2012-02-11T16:11:00.002-06:00

Some books are just for fun, and this is one of them: a memoir by the actor James Garner. I think that Jim Garner is my favorite actor of all time.

He grew up in Norman, Oklahoma. Never a scholar, he ended getting his GED. He served honorably in Korea, earning a Purple Heart.

He got into acting accidentally from knowing someone from his home state who go into movie making. He was a long-time friend of the famous actor Henry Fonda.

He was under contract with Warner Studios when he got his big break playing the lead role in the TV show "Maverick." I knew him best in the long-running TV show "The Rockford Files."

This book is a lot of fun.

Corey Robin vs. Mark Lilla

2012-02-09T10:23:00.003-06:00

by Corey Robin

Mark Lilla [“Republicans for Revolution,” NYR, January 12] makes three claims against my book The Reactionary Mind: it fails to take seriously the statements of “conservative intellectuals who lay out benign-sounding political principles”; it’s simplistic, situating the opposition between left and right in a “not overly complex” history of oppressor versus oppressed; it elides changes and cleavages on the right. It’s difficult to find my argument amid these claims, so let me restate it here.

My book argues that conservatism is a reaction against movements of the left—from the French Revolution to feminism. While this is a revisionist claim, it required no elaborate digging on my part to make it. I simply looked at what conservatives have said about themselves. Robert Peel, who practically invented Britain’s Conservative Party, defined its aim as opposition “to the restless spirit of revolutionary change.” Russell Kirk, one of the intellectual architects of the American conservative movement, described conservatism as a “system of ideas” that “has sustained men…in their resistance against radical theories and social transformation.” George Nash, court historian of that movement, identified conservatism as “resistance to certain forces perceived to be leftist, revolutionary.” All this, and more, I cite in my book.

Lilla is correct that I believe conservatives oppose these movements because they threaten public and private hierarchies of power. Again, I provide ample evidence for this. But he seriously distorts my position when he says that I depict conservatives as “black-hatted villains” whose ultimate vision is “simply a defense of privilege.” As I write in the introduction:

No simple defense of one’s own place and privileges…the conservative position stems from a genuine conviction that a world thus emancipated will be ugly, brutish, base, and dull. It will lack the excellence of a world where the better man commands the worse. When [Edmund] Burke adds…that the “great Object” of the Revolution is “to root out that thing called an Aristocrat or Nobleman and Gentleman,” he is not simply referring to the power of the nobility; he is also referring to the distinction that power brings to the world. If the power goes, the distinction goes with it.
Conservatism is a moral vision in which excellence depends upon hierarchy. Inequality is the means, not the end—that is a belief, I show, shared by everyone from Burke to Ayn Rand, the slaveholders to Ludwig von Mises.

Lilla claims that I gather the oppressed “into a single heroic image of suffering and resistance” over and against which stand the oppressors. My book explicitly argues against any such romance of the oppressed. Citing everyone from John Adams (“common beggars in the streets…plume themselves on that superiority which they have, or fancy they have, over some others”) to Phyllis Schlafly, I show that the lower orders often join, and have good reason to join, the conservative cause: in fending off a democratic movement from below, conservatism gives them a taste of lordly power they otherwise would not enjoy.

Race, as John C. Calhoun discovered, turns all whites into a ruling class:

With us the two great divisions of society are not the rich and poor, but white and black; and all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class.
In the family and the factory, fathers and foremen get to play the part of a lord. Conservatives also court those talents that can be demonstrated on the battlefield and the barricades. That’s one of the reasons it attracts outsiders, from the Irish-born Burke to the immigrant neoconservative. Far from hiving off oppressor from oppressed, I argue that the right succeeds by turning paupers into princes and beggars into Bonapartes.

Lilla finally claims that I ignore differences on the right. “La destra è mobile,” he writes. “The right used to be isolationist, then became internationalist, and to judge by recent Republican debates may be tiptoeing back to isolationism again.” I agree, which is why I wrote on page 36:

Some conservatives criticize the free market, others defend it; some oppose the state, others embrace it; some believe in God, others are atheists. Some are localists, others nationalists, and still others internationalists. Some, like Burke, are all three at the same time. But these are historical improvisations—tactical and substantive—on a theme.
The fact that conservatism is reactionary doesn’t mean it is always the same. To the contrary, it changes across time and space, in response to the movements it opposes. That’s why there are eleven chapters following my introductory essay (upon which Lilla focuses nearly all of his attention).

Given the flimsiness of Lilla’s charges, his real beef seems to be that he does not like seeing today’s Republican seated next to yesterday’s Burke. But one can only keep them apart by pretending that Burke didn’t say much of what he said. If Burke simply believed, as Lilla writes, that society is an inheritance “best passed on implicitly through slow changes in custom and tradition, not through explicit political action,” he would never have confessed that “our most salutary and most beautiful institutions yield nothing but dust and smut” or worried that the traditional features of a constitution “are the very things that make its weakness.” If he were unambiguously “hostile,” in Lilla’s words, “to doctrines and principles that do violence to preexisting opinions and institutions,” he would never have howled that his comrades lacked a “relish for the principles of the manifestoes” and the “generous wildness of Quixotism.” Nor would he have declared that “acquiescence will not do; there must be zeal,” that “the madness of the wise…is better than the sobriety of fools,” and that “every little measure is a great errour.”

But the Burke who rallied Europe against the French Revolution did say these and many other such things, as have his descendants. This may be irritating or inconvenient for Lilla, but if he doesn’t like or believe the evidence I’ve presented, he should at least explain why it’s not relevant or how I’ve gotten it wrong.

Corey Robin
Brooklyn, New York

Mark Lilla replies:
Though, as I said in my review, Corey Robin can be insightful when he writes profiles of some individuals on the right, his letter confirms my main point: when it comes to thinking about “the right” he’s hopelessly confused. The main confusion is conceptual and arises because he has no clear idea of what he means by “conservatism.” He could argue that there are genuine conservative principles that provoke conservatives’ “reaction against movements of the left,” and then criticize those principles and the people who hold them. This he does not do. Instead he argues there are no such things as conservative principles, only ideological “improvisations” for defending hierarchy and privilege shared by a heterogeneous cast of characters running from Tocqueville and Nietzsche to Carl Schmitt and Phyllis Schlafly. So his real claim can be reduced to this: “those who react against movements of the left” react against movements of the left—which is a tautology, not an argument.

The point of my review was to distinguish conceptually between conservatism, which is informed by a view of human nature; reaction, which is informed by a view of history; and the right, which is a shifting, engaged ideological family that, in this country, includes a few genuine conservatives, radical libertarians, neoconservatives, social issues reactionaries, evangelicals, foreign policy hawks, e tutti quanti, who have disagreements among themselves. (As for Burke, who was a genuine conservative but also an engaged politician, it’s not surprising that he sometimes disagreed with himself.)

Robin’s Manichaeanism distorts the historical reality of the conservative tradition, which includes the Disraeli who shepherded through the Reform Act of 1867, the Bismarck who laid the foundation for the German welfare state, and the Heritage Foundation, which first floated the idea of mandating that adult Americans all carry some form of health insurance. Though these proposals met challenges from the left, they were shaped by a recognizable conservative sensibility. Robin also ignores the liberal tradition, which gets no mention in his letter and barely a nod in his book. (The book’s index entry reads “liberalism, see left.”) There are good liberal reasons to resist “the restless spirit of revolutionary change,” too, since it can so often lead to despotism in the end (which is liberals’ great worry about the Arab Spring). Liberals stress the need for individual liberty, the rule of law, and stable constitutional structures, which are not revolutionary principles; does that make them reactionaries? In Robin’s eyes, perhaps it does.

He is correct, though, to note that I didn’t engage with his explanation of right-wing populism—for the simple reason that it was too weak and condescending to take seriously. Robin believes in false consciousness and in intellectuals’ ability to see through it; that’s why he can claim that a conservatism seeking to free the world from all that is “ugly, brutish, base, and dull” gives “the lower orders…a taste of lordly power” and gives arriviste Irishmen and Jews their Napoleonic moments in the sun. I, like most people, take the populists at their word. When figures like Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck (and now Newt Gingrich) demonize educated elites and praise the wisdom of “soccer moms” and plumbers, they mean it. And those on the bottom rung who cheer and vote for them know what they are cheering and voting for. Corey Robin’s commitment to old leftist clichés about “the lower orders” blinds him to the most important and disturbing development in our politics today, which is the apotheosis of ugliness, brutishness, baseness, and ignorance as political ideals on the American right. And if you can’t see that, what can you see?

There ARE Differencies Between Liberals and Conservatives

2012-02-09T10:01:00.003-06:00

Conservatives vs. Liberals: More Than Politics
Posted: 02/ 8/2012 9:11 am
by Thomas Edsall

The contest for power between Democrats and Republicans pits two antithetical value systems against each other; two conflicting concepts of freedom, liberty, fairness, right, and wrong; two mutually exclusive notions of the state, the individual, and the collective good.

A wide range of academic scholarship exploring political belief-formation reveals that those who identify themselves as politically conservative, for example, exhibit distinctive values underpinning their world view and their orientation towards political competition.

Conservatives, argues researcher Philip Tetlock of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, are less tolerant of compromise; see the world in "us" versus "them" terms; are more willing to use force to gain an advantage; are "more prone to rely on simple (good vs. bad) evaluative rules in interpreting policy issues;" 1 are "motivated to punish violators of social norms (e.g., deviations from traditional norms of sexuality or responsible behavior) and to deter free riders." 2

Some of these conservative values can be discerned in public opinion data.

In one September 2010 survey question, The Pew Research Center asked voters, "If you had to choose, would you rather have a smaller government providing fewer services, or a bigger government providing more services?" White Republican men chose a smaller government by a 92-7 margin and white Republican women made the same choice by an 82-12 margin. Conversely, white Democratic men chose bigger government by a 53-35 margin and white Democratic women by 56-33. This is an ideological gap between Republicans and Democrats of 57 points among white men and 49 points among white women. 3

Along similar lines, Pew asked voters to choose between "Most people who want to get ahead can make it if they're willing to work hard" and "Hard work and determination are no guarantee of success for most people." White Republican men and women both picked "hard work" by decisive margins of 78-21 and 73-24, respectively. White Democratic men and women, in contrast, were far more equivocal, supporting hard work by modest margins of 52-44 and 53-43. 4

These Pew findings demonstrate that the differences of opinion between liberals and conservatives are far greater than the differences in opinion between men and women commonly referred to as the gender gap.

* * *

The Pew questions are designed to test opinion on public policy issues. The strength of the Pew surveys and other comparable, well-designed polls is that the sample is carefully selected to be representative of either the general public or of all voters. The limitation of such surveys is that they are not designed to reveal more subtle distinctions that can be equally or more significant.

This less easily answered question has been explored by a team of academic researchers collaborating at a website -- www.YourMorals.org -- designed to test a variety of theories about the connection between views on morality and politics. Jonathan Haidt and Nicholas Winter of the University of Virginia, and Ravi Iyer of the University of Southern California, have collected and systematized very large numbers of responses to questions designed to elicit new information about political values orientation. Haidt et al. have ranked responses to a set of online public opinion surveys to show where self-described liberal/moderates differ most sharply from conservative/moderates. The strength of the YourMorals.org surveys lies in the large number of respondents; the weakness grows out of the fact that the participants are self-selected, and represent well-educated elites on the left, right, and center, with little representation of the poor, working class, or lower-middle class. 5

The findings published by Haidt et al. powerfully reinforce the paradigm of two roughly equivalent political coalitions: the first, a socially and economically dominant coalition on the right; the second, a coalition on the left composed of relatively disadvantaged (subdominant) voters in alliance with relatively well-educated, well-off, culturally liberal professionals ('information workers,' 'symbol analysts,' 'creatives,' 'knowledge workers,' etc.). 6 The Haidt et. al. data sheds new light on what it means, across a gamut of issues, when someone says he or she is a liberal or a conservative. 7

What kinds of questions and values statements provoke the sharpest divide between left and right? The team looked at responses to 107 questions and found that the most divisive questions included those in the following areas: 8

1) WAR, PEACE, VIOLENCE, EMPATHY WITH THE WORLD:

On key questions and statements in this category, liberals scored high, conservatives low: "I believe peace is extremely important"; "Understanding, appreciation, and protection for the welfare of all people and for nature"; "One of the worst things a person could do is hurt a defenseless animal"; "How close do you feel to people all over the world?"

On other key questions in this area, conservatives scored high, and liberals low: "War is sometimes the best way to solve a conflict"; "There is nothing wrong in getting back at someone who has hurt you."

2) CRIME AND PUNISHMENT; MORAL ELASTICITY; AUTHORITY:

Again, on some questions in this category, liberals scored high, conservatives low: "I believe that offenders should be provided with counseling to aid in their rehabilitation"; "What is ethical varies from one situation and society to another."

On other questions, conservatives scored high and liberals low: "People should not do things that are disgusting, even if no one is harmed"; "Respect for authority is something all children need to learn"; "I believe that 'an eye for an eye' is the correct philosophy behind punishing offenders"; "The 'old-fashioned ways' and 'old-fashioned values' still show the best way to live"; "It feels wrong when...a person commits a crime and goes unpunished."

3) THE POOR, REDISTRIBUTION, FAIRNESS:

Liberal high, conservative low: "It feels wrong when . . . an employee who needs their job, is fired"; "I think it's morally wrong that rich children inherit a lot of money while poor children inherit nothing"; "I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me."

Conservative high, liberal low: "[I place a high value on] safety, harmony, and stability of society, of relationships, and of self"; "[It's desirable when] employees [who] contribute more to the success of the company receive a larger share"; "[I value] social status and prestige, control or dominance over people and resources."

4) MORALS, HEDONISM, SELF-FULFILLMENT, HIERARCHY:

Liberals high, conservatives low: "I see myself as someone who . . . is original, comes up with new ideas"; "Pleasure or sensuous gratification for oneself"; "What is ethical varies from one situation and society to another."

Conservative high, liberal low: "If certain groups stayed in their place, we would have fewer problems;" "People should be loyal to their family members, even when they have done something wrong;" "Respect, commitment, and acceptance of the customs that traditional culture provide"; "[I favor] restraint of actions, inclinations, and impulses likely to upset or harm others and violate social expectations or norms."

Their findings show how profound the chasm is on values questions between liberals and conservatives. Generally speaking, not only do liberals place high importance on peace, mutual understanding, and empathy for those who have difficulty prevailing in competition, they demonstrate concern for equality of outcome, while conservatives place pointedly low or negative importance on such values. 9 On the other side, conservatives believe that the use of force is a legitimate method of conflict resolution across a range of domains, from war to law enforcement to the discipline of children. 10 Conservatives are more likely to believe in an "eye for an eye," are more likely to respect received tradition, and are overwhelmingly committed to the proposition that individuals are responsible for their own economic condition -- all views rejected by liberals. 11

From a different vantage point -- taking data from American National Election Studies (ANES) surveys conducted between 1972 and 2004, the University of Virginia's Nicholas Winter analyzed the words respondents used to describe the two political parties. In "Masculine Republicans and Feminine Democrats: Gender and Americans' Explicit and Implicit Images of the Political Parties," Winter categorized words respondents volunteered as stereotypically "male" or "female:"

[M]asculine men are thought to be active, independent, and decisive; feminine women are thought to be compassionate, devoted to others, emotional, and kind. These core traits are linked with a range of other features, including other traits (masculine men are aggressive, practical, tough, hardworking, and hierarchical; feminine women are gentle, submissive, soft, ladylike, and egalitarian); physical characteristics (masculine men are big, strong, and muscular; feminine women are small, weak, and soft-spoken). 12

Tinker Tailor Solider Spy

2012-02-08T13:27:00.002-06:00

I saw the movie. It was intriguing. I do not mind slower movies, although I heard fellow moviegoers afterwards murmuring about its pace. I figured the spy may be who it is, simply because the actor is the only other recognizable name (Colin Firth) I knew, besides Gary Oldman as George Smiley. I prefer intricate plots, and this movie delivers on that.

The Privatization Trap

2012-02-05T09:25:00.004-06:00

Feb 5, 2012 8:00 AM 09:23:04 CST
by Mike Konczal

The privatization trap
From schools to prisons, outsourcing government's works typically ends with cronyism, waste and unaccountability.

Privatizing the government is one of the most active projects of the early 21st century.

Everything we once expected the government to do — from education to regulatory rule-writing to military operations to healthcare services to prison management — it now does less of, preferring to support markets in which these services are done through independent, profit-maximizing agents. Tools such as contracting out, vouchering and the selling-off of state assets have been used to remake the government during our market-worshipping era.

Privatization is one of the few political projects that enjoys bipartisan support: Conservatives cheer the rollback of the state, and liberals like to claim that the virtues of the free market are being used towards the egalitarian ends of public policy. The fraud and waste that often come with outsourcing these services has been well-documented. The private management in Iraq and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and the lobbying efforts of corporate prisons have all provided horror stories of what happens when cronyism guides decision-making on behalf of the state. But privatization as standard government practice has problems that go far beyond the abuses of any single incident.

Rather than solving problems with government, privatization often amplifies those issues to new extremes. Instead of unleashing market innovation, it often introduces new parasitic partners into the decision-making process. Instead of providing a check on the power of the government, it allows the state to circumvent constitutional and democratic accountability measures by merging with the private sector. And ultimately, the practice replaces the set of choices and constraints found in democracy, with another set found in the marketplace. Today’s political conversation is blind to these problems out of a mistaken faith in the efficiency and fundamental equality of markets, contrasted to the ineffectiveness and corruptibility of the state.

What advocates miss is that the logic of markets creates private-sector coalitions capable of extracting just as much from taxpayers as the state. Corporations, lobbyists and other market actors can have just as much political agency as the government, and privatization can mobilize businesses to rewrite market practices.

This political process plays out in the quality of the services provided and the structure of the companies providing them. Privatization has sometimes meant that the most lucrative and easiest parts of these government obligations go into private hands, creating private profit, while the most difficult and dangerous parts remain with the public. This can range from the “privatizing the gains, socializing the losses” of various parts of the financial sector to the “cream-skimming” that goes on in many other industries.

If privatization is meant to put a check on the size and power of the state it often backfires, as the practice can be used to circumvent normal mechanisms that exist to hold the state accountable. A whole array of transparency laws and constitutional checks don’t carry over when the government outsources its responsibilities and activities to independent businesses.

Privatization as a way of avoiding constraints and accountability measures has two particularly troubling consequences. First, the government can use independent agents to do things that they themselves cannot do, betraying the whole point of keeping government in check. Especially in the world of surveillance, this practice can act as a way to get around constitutional protections enjoyed by citizens.

Second, accountability measures that have evolved through decades of public law are jettisoned when a service leaves the public sector, allowing companies to do the government’s work in a network of secrecy. Ways the public keeps a check on the government, from the Freedom of Information Act to the Administrative Procedure Act to whole regimes of other transparency laws, do not bind outside businesses.

The Constitution prohibits the delegation of significant state powers, but the Supreme Court currently puts few constraints on the government to outsource many of its important duties. What today’s discourse ignores is an understanding of the liberal conception of what public and democracy itself is good for — as a way to check private and government power, and promote accountability and responsiveness.

These blur into dark scenarios where private-public relationships give public agents maximum discretion in exchange for giving private agents advantages over their competition. For example, after FedEx’s CEO announced that his company would be cooperating with the government following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the firm received a number of rewards. Ranging from special access to security databases, to a prize seat on a regional terrorism task force (the only private company represented) and special state licenses, these benefits amplified the firm’s power in the marketplace over noncooperative competitors like UPS, all in exchange for amplifying the power and reach of the state.

Defenders of privatization also argue that the marketplace creates innovation. Competition, the profit motive and the “creative destruction” of the market system can be deployed to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of government services. But what this outsourcing really does is move constraints from one space to another. It transforms the strengths and weaknesses, the limits and the constraints, from government to the market.

Privatization replaces the democratic role of citizens finding solutions to collective problems and transforms it into consumers trucking and bargaining in a marketplace. Finding solutions in a public space emphasizes accountability, voice, transparency, rules and claims through reasoning that goes beyond the self. The market emphasizes cost-benefit thinking, profit-seeking strategies, bargaining and the satiation of individuals’ wants; good things in many circumstances, but not necessarily when it comes to the powers of the state.

A regime of privatization shifts the debate away from the functions of government towards the allocation of those functions. For all the talk about innovation by outside contractors, what privatization largely does is preserve the scope of government services while looking for efficiency gains. And since the scope of what the government does is held constant, the real gains come from minimizing costs.

Take prisons, for example. With the addition of privately run prisons, the debate narrowly focuses on how much to spend on prisoners. Minimizing costs here will often be the result of simply providing less of a good at a worse quality, and the debate will focus on the optimal extent of these privatization contracts. Meanwhile, the greater question of when the state should imprison people fades to the background.

What’s actually public about these responsibilities disappears from the conversation. Privatization assumes that cost quantifying solutions are more fundamental to government than any discussion of ethics or values. The move away from democratic accountability is particularly worrisome because in many of these fields, the ultimate motivator of private markets, the profit motive, is in direct conflict with the public administration. The basic values, concepts and institutions of liberal democracy — political participation, elections, equal distribution of individual liberties, checks on concentrated power — do not work towards economic competitiveness.

The ideology that the government is just one among many providers of goods and services is a seductive one in this age of markets. But the government isn’t simply just another agent in the market, and firms that are empowered to carry out the role of the state can be as abusive as the worst bureaucracy.

We need new arguments for the government, with all its strengths and weaknesses, to be allowed to do its jobs knowing that it won’t always be perfect. The alternative is government by cronyism, delegated marketplace winners exploiting what works about markets with none of the normal checks we expect on a functioning democracy. There are no doubt weaknesses in the current functions of government, but for those who resist privatization, that is a call to political reform rather than one of abandoning the public arena altogether.

About Browsing

2012-02-04T15:25:00.002-06:00

Going to Melody
Leon Wieseltier
January 11, 2012 |

In a country as injured as ours, there is something unseemly about all this sagacious talk of creative destruction. A concept that was designed to suggest the ironic cruelty of innovation has been twisted into an extenuation of economic misery—into capitalism’s theodicy. Where there are winners, there are losers: praise the Lord and pass the Kindle. I have always believed that the losers know more about life than the winners, though I wish affluence upon us all; but it does not romanticize the poor to demythologize the rich, and to propose that sometimes creative destruction is not very creative but very destructive. The brutality of large businesses toward small businesses, for example, is neither brilliant nor heroic. They do it because they can. Last week a record store in Dupont Circle announced that it was closing. The immediate cause of its demise—it had outlasted national and regional chains—was Price Check, Amazon’s new idea for exterminating competition. It is an app that allows shoppers to scan the bar code on any item in any store and transmit it to Amazon for purposes of comparison, and if it compares favorably to Amazon’s price, Amazon’s special promotion promises a discount on the same item. In this way shoppers become spies, and stores, merely by letting customers through their doors, become complicit in their own undoing. It will not do to shrug that this is capitalism, because it is a particular kind of capitalism: the kind that entertains fantasies of monopoly. For all its technological newness, Amazon’s “vision” is disgustingly familiar. (“Amazon is coming to eat me,” a small publisher of fine religious books stoically told me a few weeks ago.) Nor will it do to explain that Amazon’s app is convenient, unless one is prepared to acquiesce in a view of American existence according to which its supreme consideration must be convenience. How easy must every little thing be? A record store in your neighborhood is also convenient, and so is a bookstore. There is also a sinister side to the convenience of online shopping: hours once spent in the sensory world, in the diversified satisfaction of material needs and desires, can now be surrendered to work. It appears to be a law of American life that there shall be no respite from screens. And so Amazon’s practices raise the old question of the cultural consequences of market piggishness. For there are businesses that are not only businesses, that also have non-monetary reasons for being, that are public goods. Their devastation in the name of profit may be economically legitimate, but it is culturally calamitous. In a word, wrong.

WHEN MY FRIEND at Melody Records told me about the death of his store, I was bereft. This was in part because he is my friend—after my father died, I received a letter from the Holocaust Museum informing me that he had made a donation in my father’s memory—and now he must fend for himself and his family and his staff in the American wreckage. But my dejection was owed also to the fact that this store was one of the primary scenes of my personal cultivation. For thirty years it stimulated me, and provided a sanctuary from sadness and sterility. “Going to Melody” was a reliable way of improving my mind’s weather. The people who worked there had knowledge and taste: they apprised me of obscure pressings of Frank Martin’s chamber music, and warned me about the sound quality of certain reissues of Lucky Thompson and Don Byas, and turned me on to old salsa and new fado. They even teased me about my insane affection for Rihanna. When they added DVDs to the store, my pleasures multiplied. (Also my amusements. Not long ago Marcel Ophuls’ great film arrived in the shop, and the box declared: “Woody Allen presents The Sorrow and The Pity.” Beat that.) Of course all these discs can be found online. But the motive of my visits to the store was not acquisitiveness, it was inquisitiveness. I went there to engage in the time-honored intellectual and cultural activity known as browsing.

IT IS A MATTER OF some importance that the nature of browsing be properly understood. Browsing is a method of humanistic education. It gathers not information but impressions, and refines them by brief (but longer than 29 seconds!) immersions in sound or language. Browsing is to Amazon what flaneurie is to Google Earth. It is an immediate encounter with the actual object of curiosity. The browser (no, not that one) is the flaneur in a room. Browsing is not idleness; or rather, it is active idleness—an exploring capacity, a kind of questing non-instrumental behavior. Browsing is the opposite of “search.” Search is precise, browsing is imprecise. When you search, you find what you were looking for; when you browse, you find what you were not looking for. Search corrects your knowledge, browsing corrects your ignorance. Search narrows, browsing enlarges. It does so by means of accidents, of unexpected adjacencies and improbable associations. On Amazon, by contrast, there are no accidents. Its adjacencies are expected and its associations are probable, because it is programmed for precedents. It takes you to where you have already been—to what you have already bought or thought of buying, and to similar things. It sells similarities. After all, serendipity is a poor business model. But serendipity is how the spirit is renewed; and a record store, like a bookstore, is nothing less than an institution of spiritual renewal.

MY FATHER HAD furniture stores. I grew up with the pathos of retail: you throw all your money into a location and an inventory, you hang out a sign, you trick out a window, you unlock a door, and (if you lack the resources to advertise formidably) you wait. If they come in, you use your skill; but they have to come in. When my father was ill, I would quit the library and mind the store. One day I set a house record for sofas sold because the store was located in a neighborhood where many U.N. people lived, and I knew more than most furniture salesmen about the crises in Iran and Cyprus. Eventually the store failed. But the failure of some stores is more repercussive than the failure of other stores. The commerce of culture is a trade in ideals of beauty, goodness, and truth. A hunger for profit exploits a hunger for meaning. If the one gets too ravenous, the other may find it harder to subsist. The disappearance of our bookstores and our record stores constitutes one of the great self-inflicted wounds of this wounding time.

The Dishonestty of the Inequality Deniers

2012-02-04T12:41:00.001-06:00

by Jonathan Chait

Since the presidential campaign is revolving in large part around the question of whether or not it’s fair to increase taxes on the richest Americans, the right is circulating its cherished pseudo-facts to press its case that the rich are already uniquely overburdened with taxation. Ubiquitous right-wing misinformation-recirculator Veronique de Rugy, in the Washington Examiner, hauls out the classic standby of citing the amount of total taxes paid by the rich and pretending this represents the tax rate paid by the rich:

Contrary to common belief, the United States already has a more progressive tax system than do the most industrialized democracies worldwide. The nearby chart uses data from a recent report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development on the share of taxes (both personal income and payroll taxes combined) paid by the richest 10 percent of households in 24 industrialized countries. The bars represent the share of the total taxes collected that are paid by top earners in these 24 countries.

The richest 10 percent of U.S. households (those making $112,124 or more) contribute a greater share of taxes (45.1 percent of all income taxes) than their counterparts in any other industrialized nation.

Meanwhile, the average tax burden for the top 10 percent of households in OECD countries is 31.6 percent of the revenue collected, well below the percentage in America.

The flaw here, of course, is that de Rugy’s statistic has nothing to do with the point she attempts to make on its behalf. She claims the U.S. has a more progressive tax system than other countries. “Progressive” means the degree to which a tax system increases tax rates on higher-income earners. But her figure only shows that our rich people pay a larger share of the tax burden than the rich of other countries. But the fact that rich Americans pay a larger chunk of the total tax burden than rich people in other countries doesn’t mean rich Americans are paying a higher rate. They may be paying a higher share of the taxes because they have a higher share of the income to begin with. Which, in fact, they do.

I could not find a comprehensive comparison of the tax rate paid by the richest Americans against all other industrialized democracies. I did find a paper comparing the U.S. to the United Kingdom and France, and the U.S. tax rate for the top one percent (and the whole top 10 percent) is considerably lower.) Our rich people pay a bigger share of total taxes because, despite their low rate, they earn so much more of the income pie.

If we actually try to take de Rugy’s argument at face value, she is insisting that we can’t ask the rich to pay any more taxes because they earn so much money to begin with. It would follow, I suppose, that if something were to reverse the trend toward rising inequality, and the rich started earning a lower share of the income pie and paying a lower share of the taxes, that de Rugy’s claim would imply that we should necessarily increase their tax rate. After all, if the proper measure of a tax burden is what proportion of the total taxes a group pays, and a high proportion means they already pay too much, than a lower proportion would mean they don’t pay enough. Obviously de Rugy doesn’t believe that. Just as obviously, the role data plays in her argument is purely decorative. Of course, de Rugy is merely repeating a canard that has been floating around the right-wing misinformation chamber for years and years. I continue to be dumbfounded at the low intellectual standards of a movement which allows obvious nonsense like this to play such a major role in its intellectual case.

While we’re on the topic, the inequality denial community is up in arms over my post the other day about the Charles Murray dodge. Murray has a book arguing that declining social norms have caused working-class white people to fall behind educated elites. Inequality deniers are very excited about this argument, because it allows them to change the subject from the question of the skyrocketing share of income held by the top one percent to the smaller but also growing gap between the top 20 percent and those below.

The American Enterprise Institute’s James Pethokoukis, who considers “rising income inequality” the greatest fraud since global warming, has roused himself into a fit of uncomprehending wrath:

New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait doesn’t much like Charles Murray’s new book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010. In particular, he doesn’t like that Murray links the increasing social polarization of America to the abandonment by poor and working-class whites of the”Founding Virtues” of industriousness, honesty, marriage and religion. ... But that’s not what Chait wants Murray to write about. Chait doesn’t want Murray to write about culture. Chait wants Murray to write about rising income inequality as the driving force behind pretty much all of America’s troubles.

Sorry, no, that’s not what I wrote, at all. Charles Murray can write about the indolence of the white working class all he’d like. My point is that other pundits should stop pretending that an analysis of the gap between the bottom 80 percent and the top 20 percent is the same thing as an analysis of the gap between the top one percent and the bottom 99 percent. As I wrote, “Even if we grant, for the sake of argument, all the claims being made on Murray’s behalf, the basic point is that it is not a plausible response to the problem of income inequality.”

Likewise, the blog Political Calculations — whose work Pethokoukis has cited as refuting the “myth” of income inequality — is unhappy as well. My post pointed out that its supposed refutation of rising inequality is erroneous, because it relies on census data. The Census Department does not collect detailed information about rich people’s income, which is why inequality researchers look elsewhere when they want to study changing income among the very rich. Lane Kenworthy, an actual expert in this topic, helpfully explained the folly of the Political Calculations chart. I thought his explanation was too detailed to be of interest to readers here, but since they’re complaining, I’ll reprint a longer excerpt of his e-mail to me:

Over the period since 1994 the Census Bureau's standard Ginis for households and for families, which are the ones used in the Political Calculations chart, suggest little or no change in income inequality. So too do Ginis for earnings inequality among full-time year-round employed individuals (see IE-2 at http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/data/historical/inequality/index.html).

But it's well-known that the Census Bureau data miss what's going on at the top, because they "top code" very high earnings and incomes. What the Census data tell us, and what the Political Calculations post in effect simply reiterates, is that within the bottom 99% there has been little change in income inequality since 1994, whether we're looking at households, families, or individuals.

We can ask "Why begin in 1994?" But the bigger problem is ignoring what happened at the top of the distribution.

During this particular period, income inequality increased due to the top pulling away from the rest. According to the Census Bureau's calculations for households, there was essentially no change in inequality from 1994 (Gini .456) to 2007 (Gini .463). (Again, these are the data for households used in the Political Calculations chart.) The best source of income data for households is the CBO, which merges the Census household survey data with IRS tax record data. According to the report the CBO put out a few weeks ago, household income inequality including the top 1% actually increased sharply between 1994 and 2007. The CBO report is at http://www.cbo.gov/doc.cfm?index=12485; see Figure 11 on p. 20; the closest CBO counterpart to the Census income measure is "market income plus transfers". Eyeballing the CBO chart, it looks to me like the Gini goes from .45 in 1994 to about .52 in 2007. That's a large increase.

Pethokoukis triumphantly concludes, “Chait’s theory of the case has come apart.” In fact, “Chait’s theory of the case” also happens to be the consensus view of every expert who actually studied the issue and knows which data to examine.

Will the Sun Also Rise?

2012-02-02T19:06:00.001-06:00

The fog has lifted in Shelby County. Will the sun also rise? I am meeting Jake Barnes for lunch. He is still fretting over Lady Brett. He won't listen when I tell him the truth. Frank Sinatra puts it nicely: "The lady is a tramp." Robert Cohn was once middle weight boxing champ at Auburn. Do not think that impresses me, but it means a lot to Cohn. He won't be joining us for lunch. Neither are we going on a fishing trip. Jake is paying for lunch I hope. I am busted.

Operating Instructions by Anne Lamott

2012-01-31T13:07:00.002-06:00

This book was entertaining. It chronicles, through journal entries, a mother's experience in the first year of her son's life. The mother is author Anne Lamott, and this is her first child.

What I like is that the book is about a real person under real circumstances. I have never cared for fantasy. I prefer reading about life and the human condition. Lamott does that. She is honest about being a mother. Her perspective is not a stereotypical portrayal of motherhood being only a blessing and a joy. It is that, but also she tells us of her fears, anxieties, and worries. She wonders what kind of mother she will be. She wonders what kind of world her son will live in. She wishes that she had a companion, a father, to raise Sam with her. The honesty with which being a parent is described is what makes this book appealing.

My only complaint is that it is too long. It could cut fifty pages. I became tired of reading about the mundane goingson of Sam and how wonderful, or not so, that he is.

Daniel Farber - Lincoln's Constitution

2012-01-28T09:06:00.004-06:00

This book is a history of the Constitution and Lincoln's relation to it during the Civil War. If I were smart enough, I would read everything I could on the Constitution. The history and interpretation of our Constitution is of abiding interest to me.

Debates about the consitutionality of secession do not interest me. It happened; the war ended the discussion. The constitutionality of secession is a moot point.

Debates about Lincoln's record on civil liberties during the war does not interest me. Though an important topic, it just isn't something I care about for some reason.

The author discusses the political science question of sovereignty. I take it that sovereignty is a technical term meaning power in political terms. Where is the source of American sovereignty? The author concludes that there is no clear historical answer to this question.

The critical question comes down to this. Are we a nation of people collectively, or we a compact of states? Like all nationalists down thru the years like Hamilton, Lincoln, and FDR, I say we are a nation of people, not a confederation of states. After all, the Constitution begins with "We the people."

To be continued.

Children of Nietzsche

2012-01-27T15:10:00.002-06:00

Fulford: Carving a Nietzsche
Robert Fulford Jan 24, 2012 – 8:00 AM ET | Last Updated: Jan 24, 2012 11:44 AM ET

Whether we like it or not, “We continue to live within the intellectual shadow cast by Nietzsche.”
Friedrich Nietzsche is one of those philosophers you just can’t kill.

He’s been in his grave since 1900, having been silenced by insanity many years before. In 1898, The New York Times ran an article headed, “Interesting Revolutionary Theories from a Writer Now in the Madhouse.” He’s read, as he was then, only by a small minority, many of whom it would be flattering to call eccentric.

Nevertheless, he runs through our social bloodstream. Francis Fukuyama’s remark has the sound of truth: Whether we like it or not, “We continue to live within the intellectual shadow cast by Nietzsche.”

Our political leaders are Nietzschean heroes, fuelled by the will to power. In popular fiction and journalism we eternally reinvent the drama of Nietzschean characters who scorn tradition and prove their bravery by setting their own course, as he urged. Defiant originality is sanctified everywhere from art galleries to the business pages. Steve Jobs was perhaps the world’s most renowned Nietzschean character type.

Related
Downton Abbey and ‘the cult of the English country house’

Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad is all about the timing

Nietzsche might recognize the tone of current American politics. In the Republican primaries politicians struggle against inherited dogma (big government) while Democrats pledge to fight the ideology they fear (capitalism). But of course both parties maintain a respect for Christianity that would make Nietzsche decide he had lived in vain.

We don’t know it but Nietzsche scripted many of our conversations, putting words in our mouths. When we talk about culture (the culture of this, the culture of that) we echo him. Anyone who discusses “values” (instead of, say, ethics) is talking Nietzsche-talk.

People who claim to be in a state of “becoming” are Nietzscheans, knowingly or otherwise. He believed (now everyone believes) that we are all constantly reconstructing ourselves. In Nietzsche there’s no such thing as a permanently stable personality.

He was the original culture warrior. He laid the foundation for the struggle between traditionalism and modernism, an enduring battle. The more important a tradition, the more he wanted to see it challenged.

Through his books and articles Nietzsche’s ideas conquered America just as American influence was conquering the world. How this event in intellectual history happened is the concern of American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas_ (University of Chicago Press), a first-class academic book by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, a University of Wisconsin historian.

Nietzsche seems formidable from a distance but turns out to be surprisingly easy to read. That’s deceptive, because understanding him is hard. He’s endlessly, infuriatingly contradictory. One day he leaves us in despair about the future of humanity. On another he says the potential for liberated humanity is limitless. His tone ranges from insistent to hysterical.

Not everyone likes it. In fact, he’s as often despised as adored. Casual cruelty runs through his work, above all in his belief that most people don’t count. He callously described the common “herd” of humanity.

Fascists liked him. Decades after Nietzsche’s death Hitler claimed him as a chum even though Nietzsche maintained that anti-Semitism was a stupid German fantasy. Sadly, his sister, Elizabeth Forster-Nietzsche, having inherited control of his reputation, let the Nazis use his name.

Nietzsche placed his biggest bet on the “higher man,” the overman or Übermensch, the superior being, often translated into English as Superman. That was the word Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster borrowed in the 1930s for their creation, Superman, the comic.

Allan Bloom, the author of The Closing of the American Mind, blamed Nietzsche for the emotional deadness and intellectual sterility of university students. They learned, too easily and too soon, that God was dead and in fact they could set aside all intellectual traditions as calcified dogma, without bothering to understand them. In Bloom’s view Americans didn’t grasp the context and ended up accepting “nihilism with a happy ending.” If God is dead, relax.

Nietzsche’s great champion on this continent was H.L. Mencken, who at the age of 27 wrote the first book on Nietzsche in English. He loved the way his hero “hurled his javelin” at the authority of God and that he “broke from the crowd” of thinkers. After becoming the most famous American intellectual of the 1920s, Mencken admitted that his ideas were based on Nietzsche. “Without him, I’d never have come to them.”

The young Walter Lippmann, on his way to being the prince of political commentators, used Nietzsche’s example as a way of separating Americans from out-worn dogma in his book, _A Preface to Politics_ in 1913. Isadora Duncan, the founding genius of modern dance, claimed that “the seduction of Nietzsche’s philosophy ravished my being.” Emma Goldman, the legendary anarchist, said Nietzsche’s work took her to “undreamed-of heights.”

Jack London and Eugene O’Neill were among the major American writers who considered Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra their Bible. (“I will make company with creators, with harvesters, with rejoicers: I will show them the rainbow and the stairway to the Superman. I love him whose soul is lavish.”)

Ratner-Rosenhagen deals at affectionate length with the figure who most inspired Nietzsche, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), the American philosopher, leader of the Transcendentalist movement, champion of individualism. Beginning at the age of 17, Nietzsche was a devoted reader of Emerson.

In Nietzsche’s library four volumes of Emerson essays were worn ragged, margins frequently filled with comments. Nietzsche saw Emerson as a sovereign among intellectuals who rejected inherited ideals and developed a new conception of individualism.

Ideas have pedigrees, even if they seem commonplace, even if they sound as if your grandfather might have invented them. Inevitably, however the pedigree becomes obscure once the idea is accepted.

Consider that Emerson wrote, “Every evil to which we do not succumb is a benefactor.” Nietzsche liked that. He underscored it and later wrote a version of it that has been endlessly quoted: “What does not kill me makes me stronger.” I’ve heard people say that without having any idea that it comes from a German philosopher. Later, a thousand magazine articles developed the idea that our defeats, by teaching us, eventually produce victories.

In the 1970s, when the magazine where I worked went out of business, my father-in-law consoled me with four words of Nietzsche-inspired street English. He said I should remember what sensible people say when failure happens to them: “Every knock, a boost.”

So there we were, doing what someone else is no doubt doing at this moment, recovering from disaster under Nietzsche’s inescapable shadow.

Should Robert E. Lee Have Been Tried for Treason?

2012-01-25T21:49:00.000-06:00

Facebook is not the best vehicle for this type of discussion. I defend Lee ONLY to the extent of saying that he should not have tried for treason. Reasons 1) General Grant said no. That in itself is good enough for me. Grant was THERE ...during those years between the end of the war and Lee's death in 1870. We have the luxury of looking back over almost 150 years. Grant didn't have that luxury.2) Trying Lee and possibly hanging him would have made him a martyr. In my opinion, this would have it far worse than the cult of Lee that arose amongst our Neo-Confederates. The Lost Cause would have been a lot more lost if Lee had become a martyr to the lost South. 3) In his second innaugral Mr. Lincoln spoke eloquently of binding up the nation's wounds with "malice toward none and charity for all." Given that purpose and who can argue with it, the prosecution of Lee would have made things much worse. 4) I have read all of the in print biographies of Lee and he was not an evil man. He was a tragic figure on the wrong side of history and you can argue that he made the wrong choice and it's easy to say that but we weren't there. He was a blatant racist by today's standards, but so was Lincoln. I can criticize Lee with the best of you, but I simply say it would have been a mistake for the country to prosecute him for treason.

About Freud

2012-01-21T08:30:00.001-06:00

Freud: the last great Enlightenment thinker
John Gray 14th December 2011 — Issue 190
Sigmund Freud is out of fashion. The reason? His heroic refusal to flatter humankind

Writing to Albert Einstein in the early 1930s, Sigmund Freud suggested that “man has in him an active instinct for hatred and destruction.” Freud went on to contrast this “instinct to destroy and kill” with one he called erotic—an instinct “to conserve and unify,” an instinct for love.

Without speculating too much, Freud continued, one might suppose that these instincts function in every living being, with what he called “the death instinct”—thanatos—acting “to work its ruin and reduce life to its primal state of inert matter.” The death instinct provided “the biological justification for all those vile, pernicious propensities [to war] which we are now combating.”

To be sure, Freud concluded, all this talk of eros and thanatos might give Einstein the impression that psychoanalytic theory amounted to a “species of mythology, and a gloomy one at that.” But if so, Freud was unabashed, asking Einstein: “Does not every natural science lead ultimately to this—a sort of mythology? Is it otherwise today with your physical sciences?”

Today the idea that psychoanalysis is not a science is commonplace, but no part of Freud’s inheritance is more suspect than the theory of the death instinct. The very idea of instinct is viewed with suspicion. Talk of human instincts, or indeed of human nature, is dismissed as a form of intellectual atavism: human behaviour is seen as far more complex and at the same time more amenable to rational control than Freud believed or implied. Theories of human instinct only serve to block those impulses to progress and rationality that (for all the scorn that is directed against the very idea of human nature) are considered to be quintessentially human.

Freud’s ideas are today not simply rejected as false. They are repudiated as being dangerous or immoral; the “gloomy mythology” of warring instincts is condemned as a kind of slander on the species, the fundamental nobility of which it is sacrilege to deny. To be sure, righteous indignation has informed the response to Freud’s thought from the beginning. But its new strength helps explain one of the more remarkable features of intellectual life at the start of the 21st century, a time that in its own eyes is more enlightened than any other: the intense unpopularity of Freud, the last great Enlightenment thinker.

Born in Austria-Hungary in 1856 and dying in London in 1939, Freud is commonly known as the originator of the idea of the unconscious mind. However, the idea can be found in a number of earlier thinkers, notably the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. It would be more accurate to describe Freud as aiming to make the unconscious mind an object of scientific investigation—a prototypically Enlightenment project of extending the scientific method into previously unexplored regions. Many other 20th century thinkers aimed to examine and influence human life through science and reason, the common pursuit of the quarrelling family of intellectual movements, appearing from the 17th century onwards, that formed the Enlightenment. But by applying the Enlightenment project to forbidden regions of the human mind Freud, more than anyone else, revealed the project’s limits.

Starting with research into hysteria, where he concluded that hysterical symptoms often reflected the persisting influence of repressed memories, Freud developed psychoanalysis—a body of thought in which the idea that much of our mental life is repressed and inaccessible to conscious awareness was central.

The practice of psychotherapy that Freud began—the so-called “talking cure”—had the effect of promoting the idea that psychological conflict can be overcome by the sufferer gaining insight into the early experiences from which it may have originated. Later thinkers would attack Freud’s emphasis on early experience and the claims attributed to him regarding the therapeutic value of psychoanalysis. Yet several generations of intellectuals were in no doubt that he was a thinker of major importance. It is only recently that his ideas have been widely disparaged and dismissed. Initially rejected because of the central importance they gave to sexuality in the formation of personality, Freud’s ideas are rejected today because they imply that the human animal is ineradicably flawed. It is not Freud’s insistence on sexuality that is the source of scandal, but the claim that humans are afflicted by a destructive impulse.

The opprobrium that surrounds Freud is all the more intriguing given that the idea that humankind might be possessed by an impulse to destruction was never confined to him alone. Many thinkers entertained similar thoughts around the start of the last century, including one who was largely forgotten until an early part of her life story caught the eye of the filmmaker David Cronenberg. Sabrina Spielrein, the pivotal figure in A Dangerous Method (to be released on 10th February 2012), appears in the film as a hysterical young woman, exhibiting a predilection for sadomasochistic sex following abuse by her father, who after being confined in a mental institution receives treatment from Jung, who then becomes her lover.

The story of the film seems not far from what actually happened. Spielrein did experience a variety of personal difficulties, and was for a time confined in an institution. Whether she and Jung were lovers is not known; but the consensus among those who have studied the episode is that what happened between them went beyond what can be properly expected, then or now, in a professional relationship. Where Spielrein has been remembered, it is as a minor figure in the developing conflict between the two psychoanalytic founders.

This is a pity, for she was much more than that. Spielrein trained and practised as a psychotherapist (the developmental psychologist Jean Piaget being one of her patients) and made important contributions to psychoanalytic theory, some aspects of which are echoed in Freud’s later work. Coming from a Russian-Jewish family of doctors and psychologists, she moved to the Soviet Union in the early 1920s, where she married and had children and worked with the neurologist Alexander Luria, among others. Information about her life and work after this point is sketchy. What is known is that Spielrein’s husband and several members of her family fell victim to Stalin’s terror, while Spielrien herself was shot, along with her children and the rest of the Jewish population of her native city Rostov, after being marched through the main street by the SS in 1942. She was then buried in a mass grave along with thousands of others.

If Spielrein’s life was blighted, it was not by her encounter with Jung (though she may have regretted the relationship). She emerged from the experience to produce some of the most interesting ideas of the early years of psychoanalysis. Her paper “Destruction as a cause of coming into being,” given as a lecture to a meeting of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society chaired by Freud in 1911, prefigures Freud’s claim that human beings are ruled by two opposing instincts. Spielrein suggested that humans are driven by two basic impulses, one impelling them to independence and survival, the other to propagation and thereby (she suggested) to the loss of individuality.

Spielrein’s account differs from Freud’s in some ways—notably the link she makes between the impulse of procreation and the destruction of the individual. These differences point to the influence of Schopenhauer, who shaped much of the central European intelligentsia’s thinking at the start of the 20th century. Schopenhauer’s impact on fin-de-siècle European culture can hardly be exaggerated. His view that human intelligence is the blind servant of unconscious will informs the writings of Tolstoy, Conrad, Hardy and Proust. Schopenhauer’s most lasting impact, however, was in questioning the prevailing view of the human mind—a view that had shaped western thought at least since Aristotle, continued to be formative throughout the Christian era and underpinned the European Enlightenment.

Schopenhauer posed a major challenge to the prevailing Enlightenment worldview. In much of the western tradition, consciousness and thought were treated as being virtually one and the same; the possibility that thought might be unconscious was excluded almost by definition. But for Schopenhauer the conscious part of the human mind was only the visible surface of inner life, which obeyed the non-rational imperatives of bodily desire rather than conscious deliberation. It was Schopenhauer who, in a celebrated chapter on “The Metaphysics of Sexual Love” in The World as Will and Idea, affirmed the primary importance of sexuality in human life, suggesting that the sexual impulse operates independently of the choices and intentions of individuals, without regard for—and often at the expense of—their freedom and well-being. Schopenhauer also examined the meaning of dreams and the role of slips of the tongue in revealing repressed thoughts and emotions, ideas that Freud would make his own. Though Freud rarely mentions him, there can be little doubt that he read the philosopher closely. So most likely did Spielrein, whose account of sexuality as a threat to individual autonomy resembles Schopenhauer’s more even than does Freud’s.

From one point of view, Freud’s work was an attempt to transplant the idea of the unconscious mind posited in Schopenhauer’s philosophy into the domain of science. When Freud originated psychoanalysis, he wanted it to be a science. One reason was because achieving scientific standing for his ideas would enable them to overcome the opposition of moralising critics who objected to the central place of sexuality in psychoanalysis. Another was that, for most of his life, Freud never doubted that science was the only true repository of human knowledge. Here he revealed the influence of Ernst Mach (1838-1916), an Austrian physicist and philosopher whose ideas were pervasive in Freud’s Vienna. For Mach, science was not a mirror of nature but a method for ordering human sensations, continuing and refining the picture of the world that has been evolved in the human organism. If we perceived things as they are we would see chaos, since much of the order we perceive in the world is projected into it by the human mind.

Here Mach—like Schopenhauer—was developing the philosophy of Kant, who believed that the world we perceive is shaped by human categories. As is generally recognised, Kant is one of the greatest philosophers of the Enlightenment, who saw his task as rescuing human knowledge from the near-destruction that it had suffered under the assaults of David Hume, an Enlightenment philosopher of equal stature. What is less commonly understood is that Kant’s impact was to reinforce the scepticism he aimed to resist. Taking his point of departure from Kant, Schopenhauer came to the view that the world as understood by science was an illusion, while for Mach it was a human construction. It was against this background that Freud took for granted that science was the only source of knowledge, while at the same time accepting that science could not reveal the nature of things.

***

It is a paradoxical position, as the development of Freud’s thought illustrates. If science is a system of human constructions, useful for practical purposes but not a literal account of reality, what makes it superior to other modes of thinking? If science is also a sort of mythology—as Freud suggested in his correspondence with Einstein—what becomes of the Enlightenment project of dispelling myth through scientific inquiry? These were questions that Freud faced, and in some measure resolved, in the account of religion he developed towards the end of his life. In The Future of an Illusion (1927), he had interpreted religion largely in the standard Enlightenment fashion that has been revived in recent years, and is now so wearisomely familiar: religion was an error born of ignorance, which was bound to retreat as knowledge advanced. Never placing too much trust in reason, Freud did not expect religion to vanish; but at this point he seemed convinced that the diminishing role of religion in human life would be an altogether good thing.

The account of religion he presented ten years later in Moses and Monotheism (1937) was more complex. In the earlier book he had recognised that, answering to enduring human needs—particularly the need for consolation—religious beliefs were not scientific theories; but neither were they necessarily false. While religions might be illusions, illusions were not just errors—they could contain truth. In Moses and Monotheism, Freud went further, arguing that religion had played an essential role in the development of human inquiry. The Jewish belief in an unseen God was not a relic of ignorance without any positive value. By affirming a hidden reality, the idea of an invisible deity had encouraged inquiry into what lay behind the world that is disclosed to the senses. More, the belief in an unseen god had allowed a new kind of self-examination to develop—one that aimed to explore the inner world by looking beneath the surface of conscious awareness. Freud’s attempt to gain insight into the invisible workings of the mind may have been an extension of scientific method into new areas; but this advance was possible, Freud came to think, only because religion had prepared the ground. Without ever surrendering his uncompromising atheism, Freud acknowledged that psychoanalysis owed its existence to faith.

In accepting that illusion could be productive, Freud was retracing the steps of Schopenhauer’s errant disciple Nietzsche. At the same time Freud was making a decisive break with a dominant strand of Enlightenment thinking. According to Alasdair MacIntyre, who developed the idea in his book After Virtue (1981), Nietzsche brought the Enlightenment to a close by showing that the project of a morality that rested solely on human will was self-defeating. MacIntyre’s argument has the merit of recognising that Nietzsche was an Enlightenment thinker—rather than the crazed irrationalist of vulgar intellectual history—as well as one of the Enlightenment’s more formidable critics. It was Freud, however, who made the more radical break with Enlightenment thinking. Even if he confines its scope to the absurd figure of the Übermensch, Nietzsche remains a militant partisan of human autonomy. Freud, by contrast despite almost everything that has been written about him—aimed as much to mark the limits of human autonomy as to extend it. His words of advice to a patient indicate how much his thinking diverged from the view of open-ended human possibilities that is asserted adamantly today: “I do not doubt that it would be easier for fate to take away your suffering than it would be for me. But you will see for yourself how much has been gained if we succeed in turning your hysterical misery into common unhappiness. Having restored your inner life, you will be better able to arm yourself against that unhappiness.” The tone of this injunction—with its use of the language of fate, prohibited among progressive right-thinking people—could not be further from contemporary ways of feeling and thinking.

In some respects Freud’s conception of psychoanalysis has more in common with the ancient Stoic art of life than with any modern way of thinking. As Philip Rieff argued in Freud: the Mind of the Moralist (1959), which remains the most penetrating study of the subject, there are good reasons for thinking Freud was formulating a new version of Stoic ethics. The goal of the Stoics was self-mastery through the acceptance of a personal fate, a condition that was supposed to go with tranquillity of mind. In looking back to infancy and childhood, Freud was pointing to the fact that the choosing self—one of the central fictions of liberal humanism—is itself unchosen, formed in a state of helplessness and bearing the traces of that experience forever after. It was this beleaguered self that Freud aimed to fortify: by gaining insight into the early experiences that shape our habits of feeling, he believed, we can in some measure reorder our response to the world. This is the respect in which Freud was proposing a version of Stoic ethics. But his Stoicism differed from the ancients in at least two important ways.

In the Meditations of the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, self-mastery is achieved by identifying the self with the cosmos, a semi-divine order of things that is intrinsically rational. At bottom an uncompromisingly modern thinker, Freud had no such mystical faith in logic as the essence of the universe. The self-mastery he advocated—and practised—was not premised on the redemptive power of reason. Instead, it required accepting chaos as an ultimate fact. Here a second difference with ancient Stoicism appears: Freud never held out the hope of tranquillity. Rather, he aimed to reconcile those who entered psychoanalysis to a state of perpetual unrest. As has been argued by Adam Phillips, Freud’s most creative contemporary interpreter, psychoanalysis does not so much promise inner peace as open up a possibility of release from the fantasy that inner conflict will end. In this Freud also differed fundamentally from Schopenhauer, who never ceased to cling to a tormenting dream of salvation.

It may now be clearer, perhaps, why Freud’s thought is once again an object of scandal. His assault on the innocent verities of rationalism does not come from an avowed enemy of the Enlightenment—like that of Joseph de Maistre, say, whose attacks on reason were done in the service of revealed truth—but from one of its most resolute protagonists. An intrepid partisan of reason, Freud devoted his life to exploring reason’s limits. He was ready to accept that psychoanalysis could never be the science he had once wanted it to be. At the same time he came to accept that science might be superior to other modes of thinking only in limited ways. The myth-making impulse, which functions as the bogeyman of infantile rationalism, could not be eradicated from the human mind or from science.

Freud’s thought is a vital corrective to the scientific triumphalism that is making so much noise at the present time. But more than any other feature of his thinking, it is his acceptance of the flawed nature of human beings that is offensive today. Freud’s unforgivable sin was in locating the source of human disorder within human beings themselves. The painful conflicts in which humans have been entangled throughout their history and pre-history do not come only from oppression, poverty, inequality or lack of education. They originate in permanent flaws of the human animal. Of course Freud was not the first Enlightenment thinker to accept this fact. So did Thomas Hobbes. Like Hobbes, Freud belongs in a tradition of Enlightenment thinking that aims to understand rather than to edify. Both aimed to reduce needless conflict; but neither of them imagined that the sources of such conflict could be eliminated by any increase in human knowledge. Even more than Hobbes, Freud was clear that destructive conflict goes with being human. This, in the final analysis, is why Freud is so unpopular today.

In a well-known passage at the end of Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), Freud declared: “I have not the courage to rise up before my fellow-men as a prophet, and I bow to their reproach that I can offer them no consolation…” What is most in demand at the start of the 21st century, in contrast, is consolation and nothing else. Enlightenment fundamentalism—the insistence by writers such as Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins that our salvation lies in affirming a highly selective set of “Enlightenment values”—serves this emotional need for meaning rather than any imperative of understanding. Like the religions they disparage, but with less profundity and little evident effect, the varieties of Enlightenment thinking on offer today are balm for the uneasy soul. The scientific-sounding formulae with which they appease their anxiety—the end of history, the flat world, the inexorable but forever delayed process of secularisation—are more fantastical than anything in Freud’s “gloomy mythology.”

The incessant ranting uplift and adamant certainty of latter-day partisans of Enlightenment are symptoms of a loss of nerve. Baffled and rattled by the unfolding scene, requiring incessant reassurance if they are not to fall into mawkish despair, these evangelists of reason are engaged—no doubt unconsciously—in a kind of collective therapy. Inevitably, they find Freud an intensely discomforting figure. Among many of his followers, the practice of self-inquiry that Freud invented has been turned into a technique of psychological adjustment—the opposite, in many ways, of what he intended. In this respect, at least, contemporary hostility to Freud expresses a sound intuition. What Freud offers is a way of thinking in which the experience of being human can be seen to be more intractably difficult, and at the same time more interesting and worthwhile, than anything imagined in the cheap little gospels of progress and self-improvement that are being hawked today.

If Freud has been misunderstood, neglected or repudiated, he would have expected nothing else. He is rejected now for the same reason that he was rejected in fin-de-siècle Vienna: his heroic refusal to flatter humankind. As his correspondence with Einstein confirms, he did not share the hope that reason could deliver humankind from the “active instinct for hatred and destruction,” which was clearly at work in Europe at the time. When he left Nazi-occupied Austria to spend the last year of his life in Britain, he knew that the destruction that lay ahead could not by then be prevented. But fate could still be mocked, and so defied. When leaving Austria, Freud was required to sign a document testifying that he had been well and fairly treated. He did so, adding in his own hand: “I can most highly recommend the Gestapo to everyone.”

The Perfect Republican Candidate for President

2012-01-20T13:34:00.003-06:00

It seems to me that if you could combine Gingrich and Romney you'd have the perfect Republican candidate. Consider this:

With Gingrich you'd have 1) the old Southern white male Confederate to the core 2) a race baiter 3) someone who knows how to cry like Boehner and Glenn Beck) and the perfect moral hypocrite who talks about family values while shredding family values in his private life.

With Romney you'd have 1) the quintessential country club rich rich Republican 2) a candidate who flips on issues continually 3) and who is evasive about his taxes and finances.

Newt Romney would be perfect!

The Conservative Reaction

2012-01-19T09:55:00.002-06:00

The Conservative Reaction/ The Chronicle Review
By Corey Robin

It's been a rotten few months for the nation's wealthiest 1 percent. From the senatorial candidacy of Elizabeth Warren to Occupy Wall Street, economic elites have faced a concerted attack on their riches and power, their arrogant and unaccountable ways. And you can hear it in their voices, or at least the voices of their spokesmen. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor declared, "I, for one, am increasingly concerned about the growing mobs occupying Wall Street and the other cities across the country." Mitt Romney told an audience in Florida that "I think it's dangerous—this class warfare." So rattled is George Will that he's been forced to pull out a playbook from an older time. All but calling Warren a Communist, he accused the Oklahoma-born scholarship kid of believing that the government "is entitled to socialize—i.e., conscript—whatever portion" of an individual's property "it considers its share."

After decades of "compassionate conservatism," "a thousand points of light," and "Morning in America," dark talk of class warfare on the right can seem like a strange throwback. So accustomed are we to the sunny Reagan and the populist Tea Party that we've forgotten a basic truth about conservatism: It is a reaction to democratic movements from below, movements like Occupy Wall Street that threaten to reorder society from the bottom up, redistributing power and resources from those who have much to those who have not so much. With the roar against the ruling classes growing ever louder, the right seems to be reverting to type. It thus behooves us to take a second look at the conservative tradition, not just its current incarnation but also across time, for that tradition provides us with an understanding of why the conservative responds to Occupy Wall Street as he does.

Since the modern era began, men and women in subordinate positions have marched against their superiors. They have gathered under different banners—the labor movement, feminism, abolition, socialism—and shouted different slogans: freedom, equality, democracy, revolution. In virtually every instance, their superiors have resisted them. That march and démarche of democracy is one of the main stories of modern politics. And it is the second half of that story, the démarche, that drives the development of ideas we call conservative. For that is what conservatism is: a meditation on, and theoretical rendition of, the felt experience of having power, seeing it threatened, and trying to win it back.

Despite the very real differences among them, workers in a factory are like secretaries in an office, peasants on a manor, slaves on a plantation—even wives in a marriage—in that they live and labor in conditions of unequal power. They submit and obey, heeding the demands of their managers and masters, husbands and lords. Sometimes their lot is freely chosen—workers contract with their employers, wives with their husbands—but its entailments seldom are. What contract, after all, could ever itemize the ins and outs, the daily pains and continuing sufferance, of a job or a marriage? Throughout American history, in fact, the contract has served as a conduit to unforeseen coercion and constraint. Employment and marriage contracts have been interpreted by judges to contain all sorts of unwritten and unwanted provisions of servitude to which wives and workers tacitly consent, even when they have no knowledge of such provisions or wish to stipulate otherwise.

Until 1980, for example, it was legal in every state for a husband to rape his wife. The justification for this dates back to a 1736 treatise by the British jurist Matthew Hale. When a woman marries, he argued, she implicitly agrees to give "up herself in this kind [sexually] unto her husband." Hers is a tacit, if unknowing, consent, "which she cannot retract" for the duration of their union. Having once said yes, she can never say no. As recently as 1957, a standard legal treatise could state, "A man does not commit rape by having sexual intercourse with his lawful wife, even if he does so by force and against her will." If someone tried to write into the marriage contract a requirement that express consent had to be given in order for sex to proceed, judges were bound by common law to ignore or override it. Implicit consent was a structural feature of the contract that neither party could alter. Through that contract, women were doomed to be the sexual servants of their husbands.

Every once in a while, however, the subordinates of this world contest their fates. They protest their conditions, join movements, make demands. Their goals may be minimal and discrete, but in voicing them, they raise the specter of a more fundamental change in power. They cease to be servants or supplicants and become agents, speaking and acting on their own behalf. More than the reforms themselves, it is this assertion of agency that vexes their superiors.

American labor history is filled with complaints from employers and government officials that unionized workers are independent and self-organizing. Indeed, so potent is their self-organization that it threatens to render superfluous the employer and the state. During the Great Upheaval of 1877, striking railroad workers in St. Louis took to running the trains themselves. Fearful that the public might conclude the workers were capable of managing the railroad, the owners tried to stop them, starting a strike of their own in order to prove it was the owners, and only the owners, who could make the trains run on time. During the Seattle general strike of 1919, workers went to great lengths to provide basic government services, including law and order. So successful were they that the mayor concluded it was the workers' ability to limit violence and anarchy that posed the greatest threat to the established order:

The so-called sympathetic Seattle strike was an attempted revolution. ... True, there were no flashing guns, no bombs, no killings. Revolution, I repeat, doesn't need violence. The general strike, as practiced in Seattle, is of itself the weapon of revolution, all the more dangerous because quiet. ... That is to say, it puts the government out of operation.

Conservatism is the theoretical voice of this animus against the agency of the subordinate classes. It provides the most consistent and profound argument for why the lower orders should not be allowed to exercise their independent will, to govern themselves or the polity. Submission is their first duty; agency, the prerogative of elites. Such was the threat Edmund Burke saw in the French Revolution: not merely an expropriation of property or explosion of violence but an inversion of the obligations of deference and command. "The levelers," he claimed, "only change and pervert the natural order of things."

The occupation of an hair-dresser, or of a working tallowchandler, cannot be a matter of honour to any person—to say nothing of a number of other more servile employments. Such descriptions of men ought not to suffer oppression from the state; but the state suffers oppression, if such as they, either individually or collectively, are permitted to rule.

By virtue of membership in a polity, Burke allowed, men had certain rights—to the fruits of their labor, their inheritance, education, and more. But the one right he refused to concede to all men was a "share of power, authority, and direction" they might think they ought to have "in the management of the state."

One of the reasons the subordinate's exercise of agency agitates the conservative imagination is that it takes place in an intimate setting. Every great political blast—from the storming of the Bastille to the March on Washington—is set off by a private fuse: the contest for rights and standing in the family, the factory, and the field. Politicians and parties talk of constitution and amendment, natural rights and inherited privileges. But the real subject of their deliberations is the private life of power. "Here is the secret of the opposition to woman's equality in the state," Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote. "Men are not ready to recognize it in the home." Behind the riot in the street or debate in Parliament is the maid talking back to her mistress, the worker disobeying his boss. That is why our political arguments—not only about the family but also the welfare state, civil rights, and much else—can be so explosive: They touch upon the most personal relations of power.

When the conservative looks upon a democratic movement from below, this is what he sees: a terrible disturbance in the private life of power. "The real object" of the French Revolution, Burke told Parliament in 1790, is "to break all those connexions, natural and civil, that regulate and hold together the community by a chain of subordination; to raise soldiers against their officers; servants against their masters; tradesmen against their customers; artificers against their employers; tenants against their landlords; curates against their bishops; and children against their parents." Nothing to the Jacobins, he declared at the end of his life, was worthy "of the name of the publick virtue, unless it indicates violence on the private."

Historically, the conservative has sought to forestall the march of democracy in both the public and the private spheres, on the assumption that advances in the one necessarily spur advances in the other. Still, the more profound and prophetic stance on the right has been to cede the field of the public, if he must, but stand fast in the private. Allow men and women to become democratic citizens of the state; make sure they remain feudal subjects in the family, the factory, and the field.

No simple defense of one's own place and privileges, the conservative position stems from a genuine conviction that a world thus emancipated will be ugly, brutish, and dull. It will lack the excellence of a world where the better man commands the worse. This vision of the connection between excellence and rule is what brings together in postwar America that unlikely alliance of the capitalist, with his vision of the employer's untrammeled power in the workplace; the traditionalist, with his vision of the father's rule at home; and the statist, with his vision of a heroic leader pressing his hand upon the face of the earth. Each in his way subscribes to this statement, from the 19th century, of the conservative creed: "To obey a real superior ... is one of the most important of all virtues—a virtue absolutely essential to the attainment of anything great and lasting."

The notion that conservative ideas are a mode of reactionary practice is likely to raise some hackles. It has long been an axiom on the left that the defense of power and privilege is an enterprise devoid of ideas, that right-wing politics is an emotional swamp rather than a movement of considered opinion. Thomas Paine called counterrevolution "an obliteration of knowledge"; Lionel Trilling described American conservatism as a mélange of "irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas."

Conservatives, for their part, have tended to agree. Playing the part of the dull-witted country squire, conservatives have embraced the position of the historian F.J.C. Hearnshaw that "it is commonly sufficient for practical purposes if conservatives, without saying anything, just sit and think, or even if they merely sit." While the aristocratic overtones of that discourse no longer resonate, the conservative still holds on to the label of the untutored and the unlettered; it's part of his populist charm and demotic appeal. Yet nothing could be further from the truth. Conservatism is an idea-driven praxis, and no amount of preening from the right or polemic from the left can reduce or efface the catalog of mind one finds there.

Others will be put off by this argument for a different reason: It threatens the purity and profundity of conservative ideas. For many, the word "reaction" connotes an unthinking, lowly grab for power. But reaction is not reflex. It begins from a position of principle—that some are fit, and thus ought, to rule others—and then recalibrates that principle in light of a challenge from below. This recalibration is no easy task, for such challenges tend by their very nature to disprove the principle. After all, if a ruling class is truly fit to rule, why and how has it allowed a challenge to its power to emerge? What does the emergence of the one say about the fitness of the other?

The conservative faces an additional hurdle: how to defend a principle of rule in a world where nothing is solid, all is in flux. From the moment conservatism came onto the scene as an intellectual movement, it has had to contend with the decline of ancient and medieval ideas of an orderly universe, in which permanent hierarchies of power reflected the eternal structure of the cosmos. The overthrow of the old regime reveals not only the weakness and incompetence of its leaders but also a larger truth about the lack of design in the world. Reconstructing the old regime in the face of a declining faith in permanent hierarchies has proven to be a difficult feat. Not surprisingly, it also has produced some of the most remarkable works of modern thought.

There is another reason to be wary of the effort to dismiss the reactionary thrust of conservatism, and that is the testimony of the tradition itself. From Burke's claim that he and his ilk had been "alarmed into reflexion" by the French Revolution to Russell Kirk's admission that conservatism is a "system of ideas" that "has sustained men ... in their resistance against radical theories and social transformation," the conservative has consistently affirmed that his is a knowledge produced in response to the left. Sometimes that affirmation has been explicit. Lord Salisbury, three times prime minister of Britain, wrote in 1859 that "hostility to Radicalism, incessant, implacable hostility, is the essential definition of Conservatism." In his classic The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945, George Nash defined conservatism as "resistance to certain forces perceived to be leftist, revolutionary, and profoundly subversive of what conservatives at the time deemed worth cherishing, defending, and perhaps dying for." More recently, the Harvard political theorist Harvey Mansfield has declared, "I understand conservatism as a reaction to liberalism. It isn't a position that one takes up from the beginning but only when one is threatened by people who want to take away or harm things that deserve to be conserved."

Those are the explicit professions of the counterrevolutionary creed. More interesting are the implicit statements, where antipathy to radicalism and reform is embedded in the very syntax of the argument. Take Michael Oakeshott's famous definition in his essay "On Being Conservative":

To be conservative, then, is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss.

One cannot, it seems, enjoy fact and mystery, near and distant, laughter and bliss. One must choose. Far from affirming a simple hierarchy of preferences, Oakeshott's either/or signals that we are on existential ground, where the choice is between not something and its opposite but something and its negation. The conservative would enjoy familiar things in the absence of forces seeking their destruction, Oakeshott concedes, but his enjoyment "will be strongest when" it "is combined with evident risk of loss." And while Oakeshott suggests that such losses can be engineered by a variety of forces, the engineers invariably seem to work on the left. Marx and Engels are "the authors of the most stupendous of our political rationalisms," he writes elsewhere. "Nothing ... can compare with" their abstract utopianism.

There is more to this antagonistic structure of argument than the simple antinomies of partisan politics. As Karl Mannheim argued, what distinguishes conservatism from traditionalism—the universal "vegetative" tendency to remain attached to things as they are—is that conservatism is a deliberate, conscious effort to preserve or recall "those forms of experience which can no longer be had in an authentic way." Conservatism "becomes conscious and reflective when other ways of life and thought appear on the scene, against which it is compelled to take up arms in the ideological struggle."

Where the traditionalist takes the objects of his desire for granted, the conservative cannot. He seeks to enjoy them precisely as they are being—or have been—taken away. If he hopes to enjoy them again, he must fight for them in the public realm. He must speak of them in a language that is politically serviceable and intelligible. But as soon as those objects enter the medium of political speech, they cease to be items of lived experience and become incidents of an ideology. They get wrapped in a narrative of loss—in which the revolutionary or reformist plays a necessary part—and presented in a program of recovery. What was tacit becomes articulate, what was practice becomes polemic.

In defending hierarchical orders, the conservative invariably launches a counterrevolution, often requiring an overhaul of the very regime he is defending. "If we want things to stay as they are," in Lampedusa's classic formulation, "things will have to change." This program entails far more than clichés about preservation through renovation would suggest: Often it requires the most radical measures on the regime's behalf.

Indeed, some of the stuffiest partisans of order have been more than happy, when it has suited their purposes, to indulge in a bit of mayhem and madness. Kirk, the self-styled Burkean, wished to "espouse conservatism with the vehemence of a radical. The thinking conservative, in truth, must take on some of the outward characteristics of the radical, today: he must poke about the roots of society, in the hope of restoring vigor to an old tree half strangled in the rank undergrowth of modern passions." In God and Man at Yale, William F. Buckley declared conservatives "the new radicals."

There's a fairly simple reason for the embrace of radicalism on the right, and it has to do with the reactionary imperative that lies at the core of conservative doctrine. The conservative not only opposes the left; he also believes that the left has been in the driver's seat since, depending on who's counting, the French Revolution or the Reformation. If he is to preserve what he values, the conservative must declare war against the culture as it is. Though the spirit of militant opposition pervades the entirety of conservative discourse, Dinesh D'Souza has put the case most clearly:

Typically, the conservative attempts to conserve, to hold on to the values of the existing society. But ... what if the existing society is inherently hostile to conservative beliefs? It is foolish for a conservative to attempt to conserve that culture. Rather, he must seek to undermine it, to thwart it, to destroy it at the root level. This means that the conservative must ... be philosophically conservative but temperamentally radical.

By now it should be clear that it is not the style or pace of change that the conservative opposes. Burkean theorists like to draw a distinction between evolutionary reform and radical change. The first is slow, incremental, and adaptive; the second is fast, comprehensive, and by design. But that distinction, so dear to Burke and his followers, is often less clear in practice than the theorist allows. In the name of slow, organic, adaptive change, self-declared conservatives opposed the New Deal (Robert Nisbet, Kirk, and Whittaker Chambers) and endorsed the New Deal (Peter Viereck, Clinton Rossiter, and Whittaker Chambers). "Even Fabian Socialists," Nash tartly observes, "who believed in 'the inevitability of gradualness' might be labeled conservatives."

More often the blurriness of the distinction has allowed the conservative to oppose reform on the grounds that it either will lead to revolution or is revolution. Any demand from or on behalf of the lower orders, no matter how tepid or tardy, is too much, too soon, too fast. Reform is revolution, improvement is insurrection. "It may be good or bad," a gloomy Lord Carnarvon wrote of the Second Reform Act of 1867—a bill 20 years in the making that tripled the size of the British electorate—"but it is a revolution."

Today's conservative may have made his peace with some emancipations past. Others, like labor unions and reproductive freedom, he still contests. But that does not alter the fact that when those emancipations first arose as issues, his predecessor was in all likelihood against them. Michael Gerson, a former speechwriter for George W. Bush, is one of today's few conservatives who acknowledge the history of conservative opposition to emancipation. Where other conservatives like to lay claim to the abolitionist or civil-rights mantle, Gerson admits that "honesty requires the recognition that many conservatives, in other times, have been hostile to religiously motivated reform," and that "the conservative habit of mind once opposed most of these changes." Indeed, as Samuel Huntington suggested a half-century ago, saying no to such movements in real time may be what makes someone a conservative throughout time.

Given the reactionary thruST of conservatism, Occupy Wall Street may turn out to be the best thing that ever happened to the right. Thoughtful conservatives have long understood the symbiotic relationship between the right's intellectual—and ultimately political—vitality and insurgencies from the left. Friedrich Hayek accurately observed that the political theory of capitalism "became stationary when it was most influential" and "progressed" only when it was "on the defensive." Frank Meyer, intellectual architect of the fusion strategy that brought together the libertarian and traditionalist wings of the Republican Party, noted that it was "ironic, though not historically unprecedented," that bursts "of creative energy" on the right "should occur simultaneously with a continuing spread of the influence of liberalism in the practical political sphere."

Conversely, conservative writers like David Frum and Andrew Sullivan have worried of late about the intellectual flabbiness of the contemporary right: A movement that once seemed the emblem of heterodoxy has succumbed to stale thinking and rote incantations. But if Occupy Wall Street turns out to be a movement rather than a moment—if it has real staying power; if it moves from public squares to private institutions; if it starts to divest the elite of their privileges and powers, not just in their offshore accounts but in their backyards and board rooms—it could provide the kind of creative provocation that once produced a Burke or a Hayek. The metaphor of occupation is threatening enough; one can only imagine what might happen were it made real. And while the mavens of the right would probably prefer four more years to four good books, they might want to rethink that. They wouldn't be in the position they're in—when, even out of power, they still govern the country—had their predecessors made the same choice.

Corey Robin is an associate professor of political science at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York and CUNY's Graduate Center. He blogs at coreyrobin.com. This essay is adapted from his book The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism From Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin, published by Oxford University Press.

More on the Corey Robin Book (2)

2012-01-19T09:13:00.001-06:00

by Alan Wolfe

One Right The Power Lover The Visitor October 27, 2011 | 12:00 am Print
The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin
by Corey Robin
Oxford University Press, 304 pp., $36.75

AS THE REPUBLICAN Party lurches toward nominating a presidential candidate to run against Barack Obama, we are likely to hear talk of deep splits within the conservative movement. Tea Party activists, who hate state intervention into the economy, will be distinguished from social conservatives, who love state intervention into matters of sex. Ayn Rand’s militant atheism, so attractive to one half of the party leadership, will be contrasted to the equally warlike Christianity that appeals to the right’s other half. Pundits will discover that aggressive interventionists touched by neoconservatism are not the same thing as America-first nationalists influenced by isolationism. Some liberals will cheer. Long accustomed to divisions within their own ranks, they will for once take glee in the splits and bitter exchanges of their antagonists.

Don’t be fooled by any of this, argues Corey Robin. Against nearly all other leftists writing about rightists, Robin believes that there is only one kind of conservatism. Whether expressed in the lofty words of Burke or the rambling ravings of Palin, conservatism is always and everywhere a resentful attack on those who seek to make the world more fair. Take away the left and you destroy the rationale for the right. It is only because the modern world takes justice seriously, at least in theory, that we have thinkers and activists determined to put their bodies on the gears to stop the machinery from moving forward.

Robin treats conservatives as activists rather than as stand-patters. “Conservatism,” he writes, “has been a forward movement of restless and relentless change, partial to risk taking and ideological adventurism, militant in posture and populist in its bearings, friendly to upstarts and insurgents, outsiders and newcomers alike.” Burke, in Robin’s view, began this tradition, and figures such as de Maistre, de Bonald, and Sorel carried it forward. If we take all of them as the genuine articles, there is no need to draw a line between conservatives and reactionaries: all conservatives are reactionary. Conservatives are unified, and united in their rage. Their most passionate hate is directed at those they believe were assigned by God or nature to second-class status but still insist on their full rights as human beings.

For Robin, what began in the late eighteenth century has reached a kind of culmination in the early twenty-first century. Republicans in love with Ayn Rand express the same romantic protest against modern complexity as evangelical Christians lamenting for families of yore. Whatever their differences, both movements are counter-cultural, even counter-revolutionary. That is why they are the rightful heirs of all the European thinkers whom Robin evokes. Everything about these contemporary right-wing activists—their militant theatrics, their artificial populism, their refusal to compromise—was anticipated two centuries ago. “Far from being a recent innovation of the Christian Right or the Tea Party movement, reactionary populism runs like a red thread throughout conservative discourse from the very beginning.”

Robin adds a distinctive wrinkle to the common claim of Burke’s responsibility for modern conservatism. He says that it was not his Reflections on the Revolution in France but his Philosophical Enquiry into Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful that deserves the most attention. Power, as Robin summarizes Burke, “should never aspire to be—and can never actually be—beautiful. What great power needs is sublimity.” Owing to this emphasis on the sublime, Burke ought not to be read as a defender of the old regime. Not only had the Bourbons lost both their beauty and their sublimity, they had also become pathetic and decadent, lacking the capacity to justify themselves (and thus requiring thinkers such as Burke to carry out the thankless task).

Conservatives, says Robin, long for an imagined world too rarified ever to survive; they are theorists of loss. That is why, no matter how small the circle of privilege they defend, they have a certain appeal to the much larger collection of ordinary people whom they otherwise hold in contempt. Who has not experienced loss? Who would not want to return to an ideal world? The sacred is always more appealing than the profane. Try to make the world a more just place and you eliminate the sublime from it.

“The sublime,” Burke wrote, “is the sensation we feel in the face of extreme pain, danger or terror.” For all the emphasis on stability and tradition, conservatives admire revolutionaries because the terror they unleash gives us a glimpse of precisely such wonders. As Robin correctly points out, de Maistre preferred zealous if misguided Jacobins to lazy and self-satisfied nobles. Owing to its militancy, conservatism is zealously promoted by outsiders: Burke was Irish, de Maistre a Savoyard, Disraeli a Jew, Hamilton a West Indian. The same tendency can be witnessed today. It was not WASPs who revived the contemporary right but Jews and, downplayed by Robin, Catholics, who “helped transform the Republican Party from a cocktail party in Darien into the party of Scalia, d’Souza [sic] Gonzalez, and Yoo.”

Just as de Maistre could barely hide his Jacobin sympathies, the contemporary American right, in Robin’s account, is lock, stock, and barrel a product of the 1960s. “It’s time for God’s people to come out of the closet,” a Texas evangelist declares in Robin’s pages—a near perfect expression of the extent to which reaction against the gains of the 1960s could only be expressed in the language of the movement being denounced. Abby Hoffman prepared the way for Michele Bachmann. Mere economic protest does not get you the characters that constitute the Republican base today. For that you need people who genuinely believe that the world is coming to an end.

No other contemporary American figure captures this conservative combination of resentment and activism better than Antonin Scalia, the subject of one of Robin’s most interesting chapters. Despite talk of being faithful to texts, Robin argues, Scalia uses his power on the court to impose on the country the classic conservative mantra: the world is falling apart, and so only the obedience to rules, no matter how seemingly arbitrary and unfair, can save it from doom. “No Plato for him,” Robin writes of this intemperate and deeply reactionary judge. “He’s with Nietzsche all the way.” This at first does not seem quite right: Nietzsche is hardly a theorist of obedience to rules. But once we realize that for Scalia rule-following is only for the masses, while those on top get to do all the rule-writing, Robin’s take on the man strikes me as warranted. There are times when Scalia goes out of his way to remind us of how cruel the world can be—and how helpless we are in the face of these very cruelties. Scalia has buried himself deep inside the right-wing counterculture where winners, calling themselves victims, are given rights, while losers are instructed never to complain even as their rights are stripped from them.

I confess to being one of those who likes to divide conservatives into their parts as opposed to treating them as a whole. Robin makes a vigorous case that I am wrong, and I am tempted by his analysis—as far as it goes. To be sure, Robin exaggerates, and all too easily dismisses exceptions to his generalizations: he quotes Michael Oakeshott, and a bit too frequently, yet finally he has no choice but to throw him off the conservative bus. The very existence of such a thinker suggests that conservatism need not always be either as reactionary or as angry as Robin claims. Still, at least as regards reactionaries such as Scalia and Palin, a little rhetorical provocation seems justified. Robin is an engaging writer, and just the kind of broad-ranging public intellectual all too often missing in academic political science.

The real problem of persuasion lies elsewhere. In this book, Robin has chosen to republish essays, albeit with a comprehensive introduction, rather than to make a sustained argument. I cannot blame him for that; I have done the same myself. But at least one of the essays is so out of date that Robin repudiates it, and the entire second half of the book, while containing interesting asides on terror in Latin America or reactions to September 11, is only marginally related to the first half. Thus was lost an opportunity to develop an arresting theme, shape it with original and fresh examples, acknowledge its limits, and then make it part of our national conversation. Robin’s arguments deserve widespread attention. But they way he has presented them almost ensures that they will not get it.

More on the Corey Robin Book

2012-01-19T08:24:00.004-06:00

By JENNIFER SCHUESSLER
Published: January 18, 2012

For Corey Robin the author it’s been a bruising few months. Shortly after his essay collection “The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism From Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin” appeared last fall, The New York Times Book Review published a review by Sheri Berman dismissing the book as “a diatribe that preaches to the converted,” “so filled with exaggeration and invective that the reader’s eyes roll.” Then in late December, The New York Review of Books ran a withering assessment by Mark Lilla, who dismissed the book as “history as W.P.A. mural, ” if not the left-wing scholarly equivalent of Glenn Beck’s blackboard scribblings.

)For Corey Robin the blogger, however, the past few months have been quite excellent. Since starting CoreyRobin.com in June, Mr. Robin, an associate professor of political science at Brooklyn College, has established himself as a lively and combative online presence. He has racked up links from prominent bloggers and this month won the 2011 “best writer” award from Cliopatra, the blog of the History News Network, which called him “the quintessential public intellectual for the digital age.”

So when Mr. Lilla’s review hit the newsstands, Mr. Robin’s online admirers were ready to pounce, setting off a cycle of learned (and often lengthy) commentary and counterreviews that trickled up from smaller blogs like U.S. Intellectual History to big ones like Crooked Timber.

As one commenter on U.S. Intellectual History wrote, “Bashing Lilla’s review of Robin’s book seems to be the newest Internet meme.”

If Mr. Robin seems to be enjoying the online tumult, filing regular updates on his blog, he professes to remain puzzled by the hostile reviews that touched it all off.

“I don’t know what is driving the critics,” Mr. Robin, 44, said in a recent interview at his apartment in Park Slope, Brooklyn. “The argument itself just bothers them, and I don’t know why.”

“The Reactionary Mind” certainly cuts hard against the common view that the radical populist conservatism epitomized by Sarah Palin represents a sharp break with the cautious, reasonable, moderate, pragmatic conservatism inaugurated by the 18th-century British statesman Edmund Burke. For Mr. Robin even Burke, that great critic of the French Revolution, wasn’t a Burkean moderate, but a reactionary who celebrated the sublimity of violence and denounced the inability of flabby traditional elites to defend the existing order.

This counterrevolutionary spirit, Mr. Robin argues, animates every conservative, from the Southern slaveholders to Ayn Rand to Antonin Scalia, to name just a few of the figures he pulls into his often slashing analysis. Commitment to a limited government, devotion to the free market, or a wariness of change, Mr. Robin writes, are not the essence of conservatism but mere “byproducts” of one essential idea — “that some are fit, and thus ought, to rule others.”

These are fighting words, and to some of Mr. Robin’s readers they serve a useful purpose.

“By the standards of intellectual history it may be found wanting,” the political scientist Alan Wolfe, who gave “The Reactionary Mind” an appreciative if mixed review on The New Republic’s Web site, said in an interview. “But the argument is valuable at this moment because Robin’s analysis helps explain why there is so much fury and resentment in our politics.”

But to Mr. Lilla, a professor of humanities at Columbia, what he sees as the incoherent Manicheanism of Mr. Robin’s vision is more a symptom of our polarized politics than an explanation of it.

“He is interested in an anthropological, or maybe entomological, way of looking at how these little bugs are behaving or changing,” Mr. Lilla said. “But he can’t take conservative ideas seriously as ideas. Everything is just positioning.”

Mr. Robin counters that his own arguments are the ones that aren’t being taken seriously — or even really being read. The true subject of “The Reactionary Mind,” he said, isn’t the eternal sameness of conservatism but the way it transforms itself in response to threats to existing hierarchies, often by borrowing from the very movements it seeks to oppose.

“We see the left initiating a politics, whether it’s the French Revolution or abolition,” he said. “What’s fascinating to me is how the right reacts to that, how it learns from the left a whole capacity for political agency.”

Mr. Robin, who was the lead organizer for the graduate student union campaign at Yale while getting his doctorate there in the 1990s, dates his fascination with the right to 2000, when he got a magazine assignment to write about former free-marketeers who had become sharp critics of capitalism.

That assignment yielded some juicy sound bites, as when William F. Buckley (who was not one of the apostates) told Mr. Robin that conservative fixation on the market was as boring and repetitious as sex. But it also opened his eyes to what he calls “the agonies and ecstasies of the conservative mind,” a deep political romanticism that colleagues on the left often fail to appreciate.

Take, for example, the war in Iraq, which Mr. Robin argues was less about oil than the neoconservative longing for a project of national greatness more noble than simply making money.

“When I said that the neocon project was not about defending oil, that it was much more a Kulturkampf that goes to the heart of conservatism’s deep ambivalence about the free market, people on the left didn’t buy it,” he said. “To them it’s all just the pursuit of economic interest.”

As for his argument with Mr. Lilla, the two do find at least one point of agreement: There are few if any true Burkean political actors in American history, and certainly none anywhere near the Republican presidential primaries.

Mr. Lilla does see real Burkeans in Europe. But to Mr. Robin there is no actually existing Burkeanism anywhere, making those who cite the ideal of a reasonable, pragmatic, nonreactionary conservatism guilty of the kind of utopianism the left is more commonly faulted for.

“Their whole claim to credibility is, as William F. Buckley put it, ‘We are the politics of reality,’ ” Mr. Robin said. “But if you can only find two examples across two centuries, it’s not a political theory anymore.”

Rich Man Romney

2012-01-17T17:56:00.002-06:00

Romney Caricatures Himself

by Jonathan Chait

Mitt Romney, in all likelihood, is going to walk away with his party’s presidential nomination. Yet from the standpoint of positioning himself for the general election, the primary season has been a disaster for him. Romney’s campaign has worked hard to avoid taking any substantive positions that would unduly burden him in a race against President Obama – no (additional, post-2007) policy flip-flops and an avoidance of any positions more right-wing than necessary to skate through the primary. That part has worked reasonably well. The utter failure is that Romney has come to be defined, through a recurring series of off-the-cuff gaffes, as a callous, out-of-touch rich man.

The latest is Romney’s response to questions about his tax returns. Romney declared that he would wait until April to release his returns, but previewed the event by predicting he pays a 15 percent federal tax rate, making him the beneficiary of conservatives’ favorite tax breaks, the capital gains preference and the carried-interest loophole, both of which allow very rich investors to pay a lower tax rate on their income than many people who make a fraction of their income. Romney compounded his problems by noting, as an aside, that he gets “not very much” income from speakers’ fees, a sum that turns out to be, um, $374,327.62.

Romney declared “I like to be able to fire people who provide services to me.” He described concern about rising inequality as “envy,” suggested only people who are independently wealthy should run for office, suggested inequality should be discussed only in “quiet rooms,” laid down a $10,000 bet in a debate with Rick Perry, deemed corporations to be people, and jokingly referred to himself as “unemployed.” He has done the work of an opposition researcher on himself.

Now, Romney does not deserve to be pilloried for all these gaffes. He was right about corporations consisting of people, and his professed love of firing people was an ode to the benefits of market competition, not of Burns-esque revelry in abusing his underlings. (A service provider you can’t replace has no incentive to provide better service, as any customer of the old cable monopoly can attest.) On the other hand, he clearly does deserve whatever grief he endures for the other statements, especially his dismissal of inequality.

Whatever the merits, the total self-portrait Romney has helped craft is utterly devastating: the scion of a wealthy executive, who helped create, and benefited from, revolutions in both the market economy and in public policy in the last three decades that favored the rich over the middle class, and who appears blithe about the gap between his privilege and the lot of most Americans.

As I’ve said before, Romney has been positively associated with “electability” because he is more electable than most of his rivals. But he is the one-eyed man in the land of the politically blind. Romney, by normal standards, is a terrible candidate. He is nowhere near as formidable as John McCain was four years before. The latest poll from PPP has his favorability rating at a miserable 35 percent positive, 53 percent negative. He may win – he probably will win if the economy dips back into recession – but he is a weak candidate who in many ways embodies the public’s distrust of his party.

A View of Dickens

2012-01-16T12:49:00.003-06:00

The Whirling Sound of Planet Dickens
By VERLYN KLINKENBORG
Published: January 14, 2012

In death, Charles Dickens still keeps his greatest secret to himself — the essence of his energy. None of the physical relics he left behind betray it. The manuscripts of his novels — like “Our Mutual Friend” at the Morgan Library — look no more fevered or hectic than the manuscripts left behind by other novelists.

Two memorable characters from Charles Dickens, Micawber and the young Copperfield.
The handwritten words on the page, round and legible in blue ink, are the marks of a mind that has already settled itself to composition.

Dickens, who was born 200 years ago, wrote a long shelf of novels, 14 in all, not counting “The Mystery of Edwin Drood,” which lay half-finished at his death. They sit plump and bursting with life, spilling over with the chaos of existence itself. It’s easy to imagine writers working the way Dickens’s prolific contemporary, Anthony Trollope, did — steadily, routinely, knocking off his 2,000 words a day until, by the end of his life, he had written 47 novels. But this is not how Dickens wrote.

Find the tumultuous heart of your favorite Dickens novel, the place where 19th-century London seems to be seething, smoking, overcrowded, in a state of vulgar contradiction. Then imagine Dickens working in the midst of it — a small, brisk figure rushing past you on a dark and dirty street. He is lost in a kind of mental ventriloquism, calling up his emotions and studying them. Every night he walked a dozen miles, without which, he said, “I should just explode and perish.”

Under the pseudonym Boz, he wrote, “There is nothing we enjoy more than a little amateur vagrancy,” walking through London as though “the whole were an unknown region to our wandering mind.” Yet there was nothing remotely solitary about Dickens. One person who saw him in the highest spirits at a family party wrote that he “happily sang two or three songs, one the patter song, ‘The Dog’s Meat Man,’ and gave several successful imitations of the most distinguished actors of the day.”

It’s a wonder Dickens didn’t explode and perish long before his death in 1870, at age 58. Quite apart from the act of composing his novels, he was a whirlwind, living a life that is nearly unmatched in its vigor. He had one entire career as a magazine editor, another as an actor and manager of theatrical productions, still another as a philanthropist and social reformer. The record of his private engagements alone — dinners, outings, peregrinations with his entourage of family and friends — is exhausting to read. The novels stand out against the backdrop of hundreds of other compositions, all of them written against tight deadlines.

Dickens’s energy, which he made no effort to husband until he was nearly dead, was inexplicable. Call it metabolic if you like. Perhaps it was a reaction to the uncertainties of his childhood and the shame of his days as a child laborer, when he knew that as a precocious young entertainer he was already a spectacle well worth observing.

He was driven by gargantuan emotions, and the ferocious will needed to keep them in check, to release them in the creation of characters he loved more than some of his children. He could drive himself to anguished tears while writing the death of Little Nell, in “The Old Curiosity Shop.” And yet he could also coldly disown anyone who sided with his wife, Catherine, when they separated, including his namesake son.

Even Dickens didn’t understand his energy. He grasped that there was a wildness in him, and so did nearly everyone who knew him. When Dostoevsky met Dickens in 1862 — a meeting that is hard to imagine — Dickens explained that there were two people inside him, “one who feels as he ought to feel and one who feels the opposite.”

Out of these two people he constructed his universe of characters, good and evil. Dostoevsky’s comment is laconic and ambiguous. “Only two people?” he asked. Dickens’s public readings, which began in 1858, drew tens of thousands of people in England and America. They came not only to see the author himself but also the people who inhabited him — Scrooge and Pickwick, Micawber and Mrs. Gamp.

Those characters, and dozens more, still live with all their old vitality. And though we feel the unevenness of Dickens’s novels more plainly than when they were appearing in monthly parts, it’s easier now to see that the unevenness in most of them is symptomatic of his overpowering energy.

The man himself was uneven and could not be beaten into consistency any more than he could beat every one of his novels into perfection. The fact is that Charles Dickens was as Dickensian as the most outrageous of his characters, and he was happy to think so, too. Soon after the publication of “A Christmas Carol” in 1843, he wrote of himself to a close friend: “two and thirty years ago, the planet Dick appeared on the horizon. To the great admiration, wonder and delight of all who live, and the unspeakable happiness of mankind.” Planet Dickens feels as real as it does to us because he stalked the world around him.

And when he finally settled at his desk, he was still driving himself through a world of his own invention, peopled by characters waiting, as he said, to come “ready made to the point of the pen.”

Jean Edward Smith - Grant

2012-01-16T11:25:00.008-06:00

This is the best current biography of Ulysses S. Grant of which I am aware. The book makes me realize more than ever that we owe our country to Lincoln, Sherman, & Grant. Maybe to Grant more than anybody else. Without these 3 men, perhaps Grant most of all, the Confederacy would have succeeded and the United States as we know it today would not exist.

Jean Edward Smith is one of the foremost historical biographers of our time. A few years ago I read his biography of FDR and I see that he has a forthcoming work on Eisenhower.

It's good to see that in recent years there has been a scholarly reevaluation of Grant's presidency. For decades he had been viewed as a bad President. The scandals that occurred during his administration are still there, but how much blame can be ascribed to Grant? He was loyal to a fault to his friends, and that's the worst thing that can be said about him.

Grant was apparently a failure in life except that he was a brilliant soldier. He had a genius for leading men into battle. He has to be considered to be one of the great military leaders of all time. No doubt the North would have lost the war were it not for Ulysses S. Grant.

One big thing I learned in this biography is how progressive Grant was. He fought for Reconstruction and by the end of his administrations, he alone was fighting for the rights of the freedmen in the South. He wanted peace with Native Americans rather than war. If Grant were alive today, he'd be a Democrat.

I also learned that he might have been the Republican presidential nominee in 1880 were it not for the ham-handed mistakes of his backer Roscoe Conkling. What difference would this have made in American history? I do not know.

Grant lived his last days in unending pain from throat and mouth cancer. He finished his acclaimed memoirs literally the day before he died. Having lost all of him money when his investments failed thru fraud, he was forced to finish him memoiors in order to financially take care of his family.

The New Debate About Capitalism

2012-01-15T08:49:00.003-06:00

by Gary HartPresident, Hart International, Ltd.
GET UPDATES FROM Gary Hart

The New Debate About Capitalism
Posted: 1/12/12 07:14 PM ET

The current Republican nomination contest has revealed serious confusion over the nature of our economic system. Very conservative candidates are attacking Governor Romney because his experience at Bain Capital involved buying companies with borrowed money, firing their employees, then selling them for a profit. Many, though not all, of these companies then went bankrupt, and Mr. Romney and his partners made millions. Sounding very much like Democrats, Mr. Romney's opponents are highly critical of this kind of capitalism.

Traditional capitalism was based on the idea that business people would invest money, usually borrowed, to establish a business, hire people, and make and sell things. Risk was involved, but jobs were created and profits were made. Traditional Republicans, including those now attacking Mr. Romney, still believe, as do most Americans, that this is the way our economic system should work.

The confusion within the ranks of capitalism is stimulated by the shift in our economy from making and selling things to manipulation of money. The rise of the money culture began a couple of decades or more ago and involves mergers and acquisitions, venture capitalism, leveraged buyouts, workouts and turnarounds, currency speculation, and arbitrage. While the money culture was booming, traditional capitalism based on manufacturing was declining. The national government had to intervene to save what was left of the American auto industry.

The money culture led directly to the housing bubble and subsequent economic collapse in 2008, from which we are still struggling to emerge. Unlike traditional capitalism, it is oriented toward the short term, not the long term, and toward quick profit, not productivity. If tens of millions of dollars can be made in bundling high-risk mortgages and collateralized debt obligations in a few months, why go to the trouble of building a factory, hiring and training workers, and producing a product that is competitive in world markets with profits emerging sometime down the road?

The Tea Party blames our government for this situation, and Occupy Wall Street focuses on the money culture (Wall Street). The government did not create the money culture. And public deficits, so much the focus of the Tea Party, arise from insufficient revenues to pay for the programs, including Social Security and Medicare, that most Americans, including Tea Party members, want. The money manipulators, now the focus of Republican candidates, manage to find intriguing ways, including off-shore bank accounts, to avoid paying fair taxes.

All of this is pretty well-known. What is surprising is that it is now being discovered and strongly criticized by Republican leaders who, up to now, have been silent on this transformation of American capitalism. While struggling to convince the American public that Barack Obama is a socialist, it is very easy to overlook the drift of our market economy away from its traditional roots into something resembling a high-risk, high-rollers', fast-shuffle casino that produces nothing except massive incomes for one-percent insiders. Republican leaders are now welcome to the struggle to return our market economy to its true purpose and original intent.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy---The Movie

2012-01-14T16:35:00.003-06:00

Having tried three times to read the book and not being able to finish it, I was glad to see the movie. Spy novels are not my forte. I finally decided that in the book the densely layered plot wasn't worth my struggle to finish it. Overall the movie is pretty good.

The movie is completely plot driven with no special effects and minimal music. Hurray!

I already knew who the mole was so the ending was anti-climactic. Still I enjoyed it.

"Lefty" From a Strange Source

2012-01-13T09:07:00.002-06:00

Gingrich, Romney, and the Morality of Capitalism

by Jonathan Cohn

Gingrich, Romney, and the Morality of Capitalism Republicans v. the Unemployed

I finally got around to watching “When Mitt Romney Came to Town,” the propaganda film about Romney’s work at Bain Capital. It’s even more remarkable than advertised. The film, paid for by the Super PAC supporting Newt Gingrich, doesn't merely stake out territory that's to the left of the Republican mainstream. It also stakes out territory that's to the left of the Democratic mainstream.

At the risk of simplifying things a bit, a rough consensus about the economy has prevailed among both Democrats and Republicans for some time. It's the idea that, fundamentally, capitalism works – that, except in cases of obvious market failure like health care or environmental degradation, we’re all better off if the free market is allowed to operate without substantial interference. Capital should flow to the most profitable investments, labor should be flexible to allow the greatest efficiency, and so on. That’s the way to create the most wealth for society and, ultimately, creating the most wealth will benefit the most people – even if, in the process, some people lose their jobs or struggle in other ways.

Within this consensus, the major debate has been over treatment of the victims of this “creative destruction.” Should government intervene extensively, as Democrats prefer, by redistributing income through the tax code and building a strong safety net? Or should government do the absolute minimum, as Republicans prefer, on the theory that taxes and public programs only hold back the market's wealth-creating abilities. In other words, the focus was on dealing with the by-products of capitalism, rather than tinkering with the machinery itself.

“When Mitt Romney Came to Town” pretends, very early on, to affirm that consensus: Its first line is "Capitalism made America great." The implication is that the film is an attack on Romney's work at Bain, not capitalism itself. But the rest of the movie telegraphs a rather different message. It never grapples with the question of whether Bain’s actions made the economy more efficient (which, by the way, they may have) because it doesn't appear to consider that question relevant. Instead, it focuses on a purely moral issue: Is it fair to make huge profits by downsizing and outsourcing, as Romney and Bain frequently did.

The film's answer is apparent in many places, among them a montage of quotes from from displaced workers:

“It all ends up back at greed.”

“No matter how much they already had, they could never get enough money.”

“What do you get out of treating people like this?”

“He is there for the almighty dollar.”

Once upon a time, arguments like that were pretty common in conventional American politics. Liberals, particularly those in and around the labor movement, openly questioned the morality of business practices. Although (mostly) they didn't want to end capitalism, they were not shy about trying to control and redirect it. But with the decline of the labor movement and centrist reorientation of the Democratic Party, that language and that message have largely fallen out of style, with only outliers like Michael Moore making it loudly and consistently.

Perhaps that's starting to change, thanks in no small part to Occupy Wall Street and, now, supporters of Newt Gingrich. Yes, that's an ironic development. It's also an overdue one. The lefty critique may have flaws, but it also improves our political conversation.

Romney's Lies

2012-01-13T08:52:00.002-06:00

by Paul Krugman
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

January 13, 2012, 9:00 am
Untruths, Wholly Untrue, And Nothing But Untruths
I was deeply radicalized by the 2000 election. At first I couldn’t believe that then-candidate George W. Bush was saying so many clearly, provably false things; then I couldn’t believe that nobody in the news media was willing to point out the lies. (At the time, the Times actually told me that I couldn’t use the l-word either). That was when I formulated my “views differ on shape of planet” motto.

Now, however, Mitt Romney seems determined to rehabilitate Bush’s reputation, by running a campaign so dishonest that it makes Bush look like a model of truth-telling.

I mean, is there anything at all in Romney’s stump speech that’s true? It’s all based on attacking Obama for apologizing for America, which he didn’t, on making deep cuts in defense, which he also didn’t, and on being a radical redistributionist who wants equality of outcomes, which he isn’t. When the issue turns to jobs, Romney makes false assertions both about Obama’s record and about his own. I can’t find a single true assertion anywhere.

And he keeps finding new frontiers of falsehood. The good people at CBPP find him asserting, with regard to programs aiding low-income Americans, that

What unfortunately happens is with all the multiplicity of federal programs, you have massive overhead, with government bureaucrats in Washington administering all these programs, very little of the money that’s actually needed by those that really need help, those that can’t care for themselves, actually reaches them.

which is utterly, totally untrue. Administrative costs are actually quite small, and between 91 and 99 percent of spending, depending on the program, does in fact go to beneficiaries.

At this rate, Romney will soon start lying about his own name. Oh, wait.

The Anti-Obama Cult

2012-01-08T10:23:00.002-06:00

PartySunday, Jan 8, 2012 8:00 AM 10:18:17 CST
The anti-Obama cult
In the GOP’s hatred of the president, the rote ravings of True BelieversBy Gary Kamiya

On Wednesday morning, I opened the New York Times to read that president Hu Jin-Tao had denounced the West for launching a culture war against China. “We must clearly see that international hostile forces are intensifying the strategic plot of westernizing and dividing China, and ideological and cultural fields are the focal areas of their long-term infiltration,” Hu pronounced in “Seeking Truth,” a Communist Party magazine. “We should deeply understand the seriousness and complexity of the ideological struggle, always sound the alarms and remain vigilant, and take forceful measures to be on guard and respond.”

I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Was it really possible that such wooden slogans were still being used by the leaders of the country with the most dynamic economy on earth? “We should deeply understand”? “Always sound the alarms”? Those antique phrases sounded like they’d been torn from a poster that had been pasted up during the Cultural Revolution and somehow never taken down. It seemed that not that much had changed since soon-to-be-Chairman Mao was writing tomes rejoicing in titles like “To Be Attacked by the Enemy Is Not a Bad Thing but a Good Thing” and urging the members of the party to cut off the head of imperialist snakes. A belief system as nutty as Maoism took a long time to get out of a nation’s system. I pitied the poor 1.3 billion Chinese, living in a country so insecure, so adolescent, so in thrall to authoritarian nationalism, that its politicians felt impelled to keep the cult alive. Thank God I’m an American, I told myself. We have plenty of cults, but at least they don’t get involved with our national politics.

Then I watched Michele Bachmann’s withdrawal speech.

Bachmann’s speech was a religious testimony, informing us that on the evening of March 21, 2010, she had a divine revelation. OK, she didn’t use the word “divine,” but that was basically the idea. You see, her holy revelation started with the Founding Fathers. And for Bachmann, Washington and Jefferson, if not literally angels, are flying around in their neighborhood.

“Entrusted to every American is their responsibility to watch over our Republic,” she began her speech. “You can look back from the time of the Pilgrims to the time of William Penn, to the time of our Founding Fathers. All we have to do is look around because very clearly we are encompassed with a great cloud of witnesses that bear witness to the sacrifices that were made to establish the U.S. and the precious principle of freedom that has made it the greatest force for good that has ever been seen on the planet.”

The “great cloud of witnesses” is a biblical term. By invoking it, Bachmann moved the Founding Fathers into the company of the prophets. And then she related her own humble journey to join the saved souls atop that great cloud – an epic quest that was spurred by the near-miraculous intercession of a painting of the Founding Fathers signing the Constitution.

“Every schoolchild is familiar with this painting,” Bachmann said. “But I’ve been privileged to see it on a regular basis, doing my duties in Congress. But never were the painting’s poignant reminder more evident than on the evening of March 21, 2010. That was the evening that Obamacare was passed and staring out from the painting are the faces of the founders, and in particular the face of Ben Franklin, who served as a constant reminder of the fragile Republic that he and the founders gave to us. That day served as the inspiration for my run for the President of the United States, because I believed firmly that what Congress had done and what President Obama had done in passing Obamacare endangered the very survival of the United States of America, our Republic.”

Bachmann closed her sermon by saying, “I look forward to the next chapter in God’s plan.”

Of such blinding revelations, religions are made. And cults.

The Republican hatred of Obama has become a cult. It is typically dressed up with the trappings of Christianity, but the cult does not reflect the teachings of that Jewish heretic known as Jesus of Nazareth — unless you believe, as Bachmann appears to, that defeating “Obamacare” is an essential part of the Lord’s master plan for the universe. (Personally, I would have thought that the great soul who reached out to the poor, the sick and the despised would have preferred universal healthcare over a system devoted to swelling the profits of those modern-day money-changers known as insurance companies, but what do I know?) But that is not to say that the version of Christianity embraced by many members of the anti-Obama cult does not play a key role in the movement, in ways we shall presently explore.

The anti-Obama cult is based on an irrational, grossly excessive fear and hatred of something the cult members call “big government” or “socialism,” and an equally irrational worship of something they call “freedom” or “liberty.” The fear and hatred of big government is irrational and excessive because Obama’s innocuous heathcare bill, the passage of which cult members like Bachmann see as the beginning of the end for America, is far less momentous as a piece of “social engineering” than Social Security, Medicare, welfare or progressive taxation.

We already live in a world where government intrudes on our freedom in a multitude of ways. Moreover, other enormous, impersonal forces, mainly corporate ones, constrain our liberty even more directly. Many of the “average Americans” the cult members claim to be speaking for lost their life savings when the bubble caused by an orgy of unregulated financial speculation burst – a far greater infringement on their “freedom” than being required to carry health insurance.

As for Obama himself, he is a bland left-leaning centrist, a slightly more liberal clone of moderate Republicans like Dwight D. Eisenhower, and his “socialist” policies are part of a long American tradition that goes back to FDR.

Why, then, did the anti-Obama cult suddenly take over the entire Republican Party?

The main reason, I believe, is that the American right was backed into a corner and had no other card to play. The disastrous presidency of George W. Bush revealed the complete bankruptcy (literally) of the two core right-wing nostrums, “freedom” (good) and “big government” (bad). “Freedom” had led to the biggest meltdown since the Great Depression. And big government – which was greatly expanded by Bush, to the deafening silence of the soon-to-be-anti-Obama fanatics – had done nothing to prevent it. In the wreckage left by Bush, there was nothing for the right to do, if it wanted to live to fight another day, except deny causality (and reality) and demonize Obama. By naively reaching out to Republicans, Obama let them get away with this, and squandered a teachable moment that could have changed the face of American politics.

The right survived. But defending this indefensible position squeezed its core beliefs into a kind of black hole, a blank spot of pure resentment, devoid of content, where the laws of logic did not apply. (According to Wikipedia, “Black holes of stellar mass are expected to form when very massive stars collapse at the end of their life cycle.”) As a result, “freedom” and its evil twin, “big government,” became metaphysical concepts, so elastic and amorphous that they could mean anything or nothing. They have come to play the same role in right-wing discourse as “the bourgeoisie” and “the workers” do in Marxism – they’re catchalls that can be plugged into any situation.

Thus, “big government” mostly means “giving money to undeserving people with dark skin” – a core GOP belief, central to the party since Nixon’s Southern Strategy, that Rick Santorum was rash enough to articulate. But it also has a cultural dimension in which it means pointy-headed elites who look down on “real Americans.” And trickiest of all, it also has a personal dimension in which it means anything that limits individual freedom — which explains the appeal, to those Republicans and independents who are genuine and consistent libertarians, of Ron Paul. (It is because “freedom” does not actually mean anything in the orthodox right-wing universe that non-libertarian conservatives like Romney, Bachmann, Santorum and the rest can advocate for intrusive drug laws, anti-gay laws and massive military budgets, while wrapping themselves in the mantle of “liberty.”)

Because “big government” does not have a fixed meaning, attacking it can simultaneously serve as a rallying cry for racial resentment, an impassioned demand for personal liberation and a marker of class- and region-based solidarity. This is why when the Republican candidates inveigh against big government, which they do approximately every time they open their mouths, their rants have all the weird, malevolent imprecision of a Stalinist attack on “running dog lackeys of the bourgeoisie.” They are the ravings of True Believers, of cult members.

Also lurking in that black hole was the one right-wing card that Bush did not destroy, because it is indestructible — the “culture war.” The far right’s free-floating hatred of America’s liberal, secular culture waxes and wanes, but it never goes away, and it is responsible for the rise of Rick Santorum, the GOP’s latest Dispose-a-Candidate. For Santorum, sinful modern life is to blame for everything, and it is our duty to always sound the alarms and remain vigilant against it. Thus, when the Catholic Church’s pedophilia scandal broke, Santorum blamed, not the church that covered it up or the individual priests who disgraced themselves and abused their position, but – Boston.

He wrote:

“When the culture is sick, every element in it becomes infected. While it is no excuse for this scandal, it is no surprise that Boston, a seat of academic, political and cultural liberalism in America, lies at the center of the storm. We must clearly see that international hostile forces are intensifying the strategic plot of liberalizing and dividing America, and ideological and cultural fields are the focal areas of their long-term infiltration.”

OK, I borrowed that last sentence from the quote by Comrade Hu, but you have to admit it tracks pretty well with the thoughts of Chairman Santorum.

The implosion of right-wing ideology and the persistence of the culture war toxin might have been enough by itself to create the anti-Obama cult, but two other factors also played a role. The first was his race. For many right-wingers, Obama was a foreign object, whose unexpected entrance into the body politic activated their immune systems – hence the “birther” movement and other bizarre right-wing obsessions. Whether the right’s aversion to Obama constitutes classic racism is a Talmudic question; what is undeniable is that his race activated a horde of (literally) white cells, rushing to expel the invader. Like organisms, cults always delineate themselves by drawing sharp lines between Us and Them.

The second reason involves Christianity. As Michele Bachmann’s speech demonstrated, for many devout right-wing Christians, there is no real difference between politics and religion. If religion is the uppermost thing in one’s life, if Jesus is with one every minute of every day, then it is easy to see how a true believer like Bachmann could come to see preserving her vision of the Republic as a semi-sacred trust, and defeating “Obamacare” as an essential part of that godly mission. Moreover, devoutly literalistic Christians tend to divide the world up into Good and Evil, with the founding dyad of God and the devil lurking in the background; it is not too much of a stretch to say that for many right-wing Christians, Barack Obama is at least of the devil’s party, if not Beelzebub himself.

Let me make it clear that I am not arguing that Christianity itself is a cult, or that Christians (or adherents of any religion) are inherently drawn to cultlike thinking. I am simply making the case that the right wing’s irrational hatred of Obama is cultlike, and that the literalist Christian faith of many right-wing opponents of Obama, including many of the GOP presidential candidates, clearly plays a role in their extreme beliefs.

To be sure, much of the anti-Obama cult is just Machiavellian politics. You hunt where the ducks are, and the ducks in this case are loons. It is extremely unlikely that Mitt Romney stares at a painting of Ben Franklin every day and has celestial visions of turning back Obama’s satanic plan to destroy America — which is precisely why the True Believers can’t stand him. But things have gotten Chairman Mao-y enough in the Republican Party that Romney has been forced to do his best to pretend he is a card-carrying member of the People’s Glorious Tea Party, Determined to Kill All Wriggling Socialist Snakes. Whether a fake cult member will prove more attractive to Republican voters than the genuine article will determine who will face Obama this fall.

A Review of the Corey Robin Book

2012-01-08T09:59:00.004-06:00

Republicans for RevolutionJanuary 12, 2012Mark LillaE-The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin
by Corey Robin
Oxford University Press, 290 pp., $29.95

Republican presidential candidates Ron Paul, Rick Perry, Mitt Romney, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, and Michele Bachmann during the National Anthem before a debate, Washington, D.C., November 22, 2011
In 2004, then Senator Barack Obama brought the Democratic Party convention to its feet by declaring that there is “not a liberal America and a conservative America—there’s the United States of America.” He learned differently. As Princeton historian Sean Wilentz wrote recently in The New Republic, the American fantasy of a postpartisan politics runs back to the earliest days of the republic.1 Politicians who exploited it for their own purposes did well; those who genuinely believed in it failed. And it’s a good thing, too. Modern democracy depends on distinctions among factions, principles, and programs, the clearer the better.

But the current public dissatisfaction with our parties is not just about partisanship. It also reflects a sense that the labels we use to distinguish factions, principles, and programs have lost their value. What does it mean to call oneself a liberal or conservative today? Does it make sense to distinguish “progressives” and “reactionaries,” or are those just terms of abuse and self-flattery? It’s hard to know how to talk about the new classes of rich and poor created by the global economy, and their strangely overlapping political commitments. Or where on the linguistic map to put the new populisms spawning around the world, some anti-global, some anti-immigrant, some libertarian, some authoritarian. Words are failing us.

Though it sounds dull, we actually need taxonomy. It is what renders the political present legible to us. Getting it right, though, requires a certain art, a kind of dispassionate alertness and historical perspective, a sense of the moment, and a sense that this, too, shall pass. Political scientists, intent on aping the methods of the hard sciences, stopped cultivating this art half a century ago, just as things started getting interesting, as new kinds of political movements and coalitions were developing in democratic societies. We’re in a similar moment now; we need a guide. That’s why Corey Robin’s The Reactionary Mind is a useful book to have—not as an example to follow, but one to avoid.

Robin, who teaches political science at Brooklyn College, has been writing thoughtful essays on the American right for The Nation and other publications over the past decade. The Reactionary Mind collects profiles of well-known right-wing thinkers like Ayn Rand, Barry Goldwater, and Justice Antonin Scalia, and some deserters who turned left, like John Gray and Edward Luttwak. There are also a few that look beyond our borders, including an excellent piece on Hobbes as a counterrevolutionary thinker. But the book aims to be more than a collection. It is conceived as a major statement on conservatism and reaction, from the eighteenth century to the present. And this is where it disappoints.

The problems begin in the opening paragraphs, where Robin lays out his general picture of political history. It is not overly complex:

Since the modern era began, men and women in subordinate positions have marched against their superiors in the state, church, workplace, and other hierarchical institutions. They have gathered under different banners—the labor movement, feminism, abolition, socialism—and shouted different slogans: freedom, equality, rights, democracy, revolution. In virtually every instance, their superiors have resisted them, violently and nonviolently, legally and illegally, overtly and covertly…. Despite the very real differences between them, workers in a factory are like secretaries in an office, peasants on a manor, slaves on a plantation—even wives in a marriage—in that they live and labor in conditions of unequal power.
This is history as WPA mural, and will be familiar to anyone who lived through the Thirties, remembers the Sixties, or was made to read historians like Howard Zinn, Arno Mayer, E.P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, and Christopher Hill at school. In their tableau, history’s damnés de la terre are brought together into a single heroic image of suffering and resistance. Their hats are white, immaculately so. Off in the distance are what appear to be black-hatted villains, though their features are difficult to make out. Sometimes they have little identification tags like those the personified vices wear in medieval frescoes—”capital,” “men,” “whites,” “the state,” “the old regime”—but we get no idea what they are after or what their stories are. Not that it matters. To understand the oppressed and side with them all you need to know is that there are oppressors.

What distinguishes Robin from the old-style left historians is that he’s genuinely interested in the right and wants to paint its portrait—though, again, he’s committed to keeping it simple. In fact, he thinks that much of our confusion about this subject stems from the fact that we have been taken in by conservative intellectuals who lay out benign-sounding political principles, and historians who accept them as defining different streams of right-wing thought and activity. Robin will have none of it. To his mind, the fundamental truth about the right is that it has always wanted one and only one thing: to keep down those who are already down. This is what unites Edmund Burke and Sarah Palin:

Conservatism is the theoretical voice of this animus against the agency of the subordinate classes. It provides the most consistent and profound argument as to why the lower orders should not be allowed to exercise their independent will, why they should not be allowed to govern themselves or the polity. Submission is their first duty, agency, the prerogative of the elite.
If you accept these claims, then you will have no trouble accepting what Robin says in the book’s most extraordinary paragraph:

I use the words conservative, reactionary, and counterrevolutionary interchangeably: not all counterrevolutionaries are conservative…but all conservatives are, in one way or another, counterrevolutionary. I seat philosophers, statesmen, slaveholders, scribblers, Catholics, fascists, evangelicals, businessmen, racists, and hacks at the same table: Hobbes next to Hayek, Burke across from Palin, Nietzsche between Ayn Rand and Antonin Scalia, with Adams, Calhoun, Oakeshott, Ronald Reagan, Tocqueville, Theodore Roosevelt, Margaret Thatcher, Ernst Jünger, Carl Schmitt, Winston Churchill, Phyllis Schlafly, Richard Nixon, Irving Kristol, Francis Fukuyama, and George W. Bush interspersed throughout.
Glenn Beck’s blackboard was never half this full.

Robin is a lumper, an über-lumper, which may please his beleaguered readers on the left, but makes his entire enterprise incoherent. He fails to see that it is based on a glaring fallacy of composition: he posits a class, isolates a characteristic of one of its members, and then ascribes that characteristic to every member of the class. Catholic reactionary Joseph de Maistre and George W. Bush are both on the right in Robin’s scheme; following his logic, since Maistre spoke flawless French, Bush must too. Which would be some national secret. Yet that’s exactly how Robin proceeds, until he has corralled everyone he doesn’t like into a pen and labeled them all conservatives and reactionaries and right-wingers, terms he fails to distinguish. (More on that in a moment.)

But if there’s anything we’ve learned over the past century, it is that la destra è mobile. The right used to be isolationist, then became internationalist, and to judge by recent Republican debates may be tiptoeing back to isolationism again. In the 1970s, if you thought that public schools were being used for social indoctrination, that power over them should be decentralized, and that children would be better off learning at home, that put you on the far left. Today those views put you on the right. Are we to think that these shifts were only about how best to keep power from the people?

And what about all the factionalism within the right? Isolationist paleoconservatives at magazines like The American Conservative hate “American greatness” neoconservatives at The Weekly Standard for their expansionist foreign policies and unconditional support of Israel, and the feeling is mutual. Theoconservatives at the journal First Things who resist gay marriage drive libertarians at the Cato Institute up the wall. There are serious and consequential disagreements on the right today over immigration, defense spending, the Wall Street bailouts, the tax code, state surveillance, and much else. Who wins those arguments could very well determine what this country looks like a generation from now. Robin registers none of this.

An opportunity has been missed. Robin is not wrong to think there are two tribes in modern politics, and the terms “right” and “left” are as good as any other to describe them. But within each tribe there are clans that do more than express more radical or moderate versions of the same outlook. Most of the turmoil in American politics recently is the result of changes in the clan structure of the right, with the decline of reality-based conservatives like William F. Buckley and George Will and the ascendancy of new populist reactionaries like Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter, and other Tea Party favorites. To understand why the distinction between them still matters, we need to remind ourselves what the terms “conservative” and “reactionary” originally meant.

“Liberal” and “conservative” first became labels for political tendencies in the aftermath of the French Revolution. Like all polemical terms their meaning and usage shifted around in partisan debate, but the philosophical distinction between them was settled by the mid-nineteenth century, thanks in large part to Edmund Burke. After the Revolution, Burke argued that what really separated its partisans and opponents were not atheism and faith, or democracy and aristocracy, or even equality and hierarchy, but instead two very different understandings of human nature. Burke believed that, since human beings are born into a functioning world populated by others, society is—to use a large word he wouldn’t—metaphysically prior to the individuals in it. The unit of political life is society, not individuals, who need to be seen as instances of the societies they inhabit.

What makes conservatives conservative are the implications they have drawn from Burke’s view of society. Conservatives have always seen society as a kind of inheritance we receive and are responsible for; we have obligations toward those who came before and to those who will come after, and these obligations take priority over our rights. Conservatives have also been inclined to assume, along with Burke, that this inheritance is best passed on implicitly through slow changes in custom and tradition, not through explicit political action. Conservatives loyal to Burke are not hostile to change, only to doctrines and principles that do violence to preexisting opinions and institutions, and open the door to despotism. This was the deepest basis of Burke’s critique of the French Revolution; it was not simply a defense of privilege.

Though philosophical liberalism traces its roots back to the Wars of Religion, the term “liberal” was not used as a partisan label until the Spanish constitutionalists took it over in the early nineteenth century. And it was only later, in its confrontation with conservatism, that liberalism achieved ideological clarity. Classical liberals like John Stuart Mill, in contrast to conservatives, give individuals priority over society, on anthropological as well as moral grounds. They assume that societies are genuinely constructs of human freedom, that whatever we inherit from them, they can always be unmade or remade through free human action. This assumption, more than any other, shapes the liberal temperament. It is what makes liberals suspicious of appeals to custom or tradition, given that they have so often been used to justify privilege and injustice. Liberals, like conservatives, recognize the need for constraints, but believe they must come from principles that transcend particular societies and customs. Principles are the only legitimate constraints on our freedom.

The quarrel between liberals and conservatives is essentially a quarrel over the nature of human beings and their relation to society. The quarrel between revolutionaries and reactionaries, on the other hand, has little to do with nature. It is a quarrel over history.

The term “reaction” migrated from the natural sciences into European political thought in the mid-eighteenth century, thanks to Montesquieu, who had picked it up from Newton. Originally, though, it was not associated with the concept of revolutions, which were then thought to be rare and unpredictable events, not part of some process of historical unfolding. That changed in 1789, when partisans of the French Revolution squared off against those who spoke openly of a Counter-Revolution that would set the world aright. The euphoria of rebellion, the collapse of the Old Regime, the Terror, and the subsequent rise of Napoleon gave history a secular eschatological charge, which destroyed many of the remaining moderates. For European radicals, the French Revolution was a cosmic epiphany that began an unstoppable process of collective human self-emancipation. For reactionaries, too, it was an apocalyptic event, signaling the end of a process that had placed Catholic Europe at the summit of world civilizations. One group saw a radiant future, the other saw nothing but the deluge. But revolutionaries and reactionaries did agree on one thing: that thinking seriously about politics means thinking about the course of history, not human nature.

There have always been two kinds of reactionaries, though, with different attitudes toward historical change. One type dreams of a return to some real or imaginary state of perfection that existed before a revolution. This can be any sort of revolution—political, religious, economic, or even aesthetic. French aristocrats who hoped to restore the Bourbon dynasty, Russian Old Believers who wanted to recover early Orthodox Christian rites, Pre-Raphaelite painters who rejected the conventions of Mannerism, Morrisites and Ruskinites who raged against the machine, all these were what you might call restorative reactionaries.

A second type—call them redemptive reactionaries—take for granted that the revolution is a fait accompli and that there is no going back. But they are not historical pessimists, or not entirely. They believe that the only sane response to an apocalypse is to provoke another, in hopes of starting over. Ever since the French Revolution reactionaries have seen themselves working toward counterrevolutions that would destroy the present state of affairs and transport the nation, or the faith, or the entire human race to some new Golden Age that would redeem aspects of the past without returning there.

This was the shared vision of Joseph de Maistre, the most bloody-minded of the French counterrevolutionaries, and twentieth-century European fascists. Fascists hated so many aspects of modern society—representative democracy, capitalism, cosmopolitanism, tolerance, bourgeois refinement—that we forget they were anything but nostalgic for Church and Crown. They had contempt for weak German aristocrats with their dueling scars and precious manners, and reserved their nostalgia for a new Rome to be brought into being through storms of steel. There was nothing conservative about them.

Americans’ assumptions about human nature are basically liberal today. We take it for granted that we are born free, that we constitute society, it doesn’t constitute us, and that together we legitimately govern ourselves. Most intellectuals who call themselves conservatives today accept as self-evident the truths enumerated in the Declaration of Independence, which no traditional European conservative could. Some of them have drawn from European conservatism when they write about the constructive role of civil society, the habits and mores needed to exercise liberty, and the limits of government action. But strictly speaking, they are go-slow, curb-your-enthusiasm liberals like Tocqueville, not conservatives like Burke or T.S. Eliot or Michael Oakeshott. As for those like Congressman Ron Paul who promote a minimal state and an unregulated economy, their libertarianism is actually a mutation of early liberalism, not conservatism. This is important to bear in mind.

On questions of history, however, Americans are all over the map. As we were reminded in the run-up to the last Iraq war, every now and then the prophetic strain in our political rhetoric inspires eschatological fantasies of democratic avant-gardism, with Lady Liberty replacing the French Marianne on top of history’s barricades. Then reality intrudes and Americans revert to the converse fantasy of American exceptionalism, which must be protected from history through isolation and self-purification. We have also had our share of restorative reactionaries, from Southern nostalgics for the ol’ plantation, to agrarian despisers of the great American cities, to racialist despisers of the immigrants they attracted, to no-government oddballs who think they can go it alone, to trust-fund hippies who went back to the land, to lock-and-load eco-terrorists who want to take us off the grid (after they recharge their Macs). What we have not seen much of, except on the fringes of American politics, are redemptive reactionaries who think the only way forward is to destroy what history has given us and wait for a new order to emerge out of the chaos. At least until now.

The real news on the American right is the mainstreaming of political apocalypticism. This has been brewing among intellectuals since the Nineties, but in the past four years, thanks to the right-wing media establishment and economic collapse, it has reached a wider public and transformed the Republican Party. How that happened would be a long story to tell, and central to it would be the remarkable transmutation of neoconservatism from intellectual movement to rabble-rousing Republican court ideology. The first neoconservatives were disappointed liberals like Irving Kristol and Nathan Glazer, who saw the failures of a large number of Great Society programs to deliver on the unrealistic expectations of its architects, and consequently began to appreciate the wisdom of certain conservative assumptions about human nature and politics. Kristol’s famous quip that neoconservatives were liberals who’d been mugged by reality captured the original temperament.

Sometime in the Eighties, though, neoconservative thinking took on a darker hue. The big question was no longer how to adapt liberal aspirations to the limits of politics, but how to undo the cultural revolution of the Sixties that, in their eyes, had destabilized the family, popularized drug use, made pornography widely available, and encouraged public incivility. In other words, how to undo history. At first, neoconservatives writing in publications like Commentary and The Public Interest (which I once helped to edit) portrayed themselves as standing with “ordinary Americans” against the “adversary culture of intellectuals,” and to that end promoted “family values” and religious beliefs they did not necessarily share, but thought socially useful. Yet by the Nineties, when it became apparent that lots of ordinary Americans had adjusted to the cultural changes, neoconservatives began predicting the End Times, and once-sober writers like Gertrude Himmelfarb and Robert Bork started publishing books with titles like On Looking into the Abyss and Slouching Towards Gomorrah.

The new apocalypticism reached a fever pitch in a symposium published in 1996 in the widely read theoconservative journal First Things, edited by the late Richard John Neuhaus. The special issue bore the title “The End of Democracy? The Judicial Usurpation of Politics,” and was provoked by a court decision on physician-assisted suicide. The opening editorial put the following question before readers: Given that “law, as it is presently made by the judiciary, has declared its independence from morality,” and that, due to judicial activism, “the government of the United States of America no longer governs by the consent of the governed,” have we “reached or are [we] reaching the point where conscientious citizens can no longer give moral assent to the existing regime,” and therefore must consider responses “ranging from noncompliance to resistance to civil disobedience to morally justified revolution”? To raise such a question, the editors insisted, “is in no way hyperbolic.”2

This is the voice of high-brow reaction, and it was present on the right a good decade before Glenn Beck and his fellow prophets of populist doom began ringing alarm bells about educated elites in media, government, and the universities leading a velvet socialist revolution that only “ordinary Americans” could forestall. Apocalypticism trickled down, not up, and is now what binds Republican Party elites to their hard-core base. They all agree that the country must be “taken back” from the usurpers by any means necessary, and are willing to support any candidate, no matter how unworldly or unqualified or fanatical, who shares their picture of the crisis of our time. In the early Sixties, the patrician William F. Buckley joked that he would rather be governed by the first two thousand people in the Boston phonebook than by the combined faculties of Harvard and MIT. In 2010, former Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz wrote in The Wall Street Journal that “I would rather be ruled by the Tea Party than by the Democratic Party, and I would rather have Sarah Palin sitting in the Oval Office than Barack Obama.” This from a former student of Lionel Trilling. And he wasn’t joking.

Seen in this context, the current deadlock in Washington does not look so surprising. During the 2010 congressional election campaign, Republican candidates (and some Democrats) were put under enormous pressure to sign the Americans for Tax Reform “Taxpayer Protection Pledge,” which obliges them to oppose any increase in the marginal personal or corporate tax rate, and any limits on deductions or tax credits that aren’t offset by other tax cuts. To date, all but six Republican representatives and seven senators have signed this collective suicide note, making the group’s president, Grover Norquist, nearly as successful as Reverend Jim Jones. That’s how the apocalyptic mind works, though. It convinces people that if they bring everything down around them, a phoenix will inevitably be born.

The same faith has been expressed in the Republican presidential candidate debates, where the contenders compete to demonstrate how many agencies they would abolish when in office (if they remember their names), how many programs they would cut or starve, and how much faith they have in the ingenuity of the American people to figure it out for themselves once they’re finished. What’s so disturbing is that they don’t feel compelled to explain how even a reduced government should meet the challenges of the new global economy, how our educational system should respond to them, what the geopolitical implications might be, or anything of the sort. They deliver their lines with the insouciant “what, me worry?” of Alfred E. Neuman.

All this is new—and it has little to do with the principles of conservatism, or with the aristocratic prejudice that “some are fit, and thus ought, to rule others,” which Corey Robin sees at the root of everything on the right. No, there is something darker and dystopic at work here. People who know what kind of new world they want to create through revolution are trouble enough; those who only know what they want to destroy are a curse. When I read the new reactionaries or hear them speak I’m reminded of Leo Naphta, the consumptive furloughed Jesuit in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, who prowls the corridors of a Swiss sanatorium, raging against the modern Enlightenment and looking for disciples. What infuriates Naphta is that history cannot be reversed, so he dreams of revenge against it. He speaks of a coming apocalypse, a period of cruelty and cleansing, after which man’s original ignorance will return and new forms of authority will be established. Mann did not model Naphta on Edmund Burke or Chateaubriand or Bismarck or any other figure on the traditional European right. He modeled him on George Lukács, the Hungarian Communist philosopher and onetime commissar who loathed liberals and conservatives alike. A man for our time.

No Time to Read?

2012-01-07T17:34:00.001-06:00

emailpermalink 7 Jan 2012 05:05 PM The Season For Reading

Nika Knight compiles her favorite quotes about winter. A gem from David McCullough:

Once upon a time in the dead of winter in the Dakota Territory, Theodore Roosevelt took off in a makeshift boat down the Little Missouri River in pursuit of a couple of thieves who had stolen his prized rowboat. After several days on the river, he caught up and got the draw on them with his trusty Winchester, at which point they surrendered. Then Roosevelt set off in a borrowed wagon to haul the thieves cross-country to justice. They headed across the snow-covered wastes of the Badlands to the railhead at Dickinson, and Roosevelt walked the whole way, the entire 40 miles. It was an astonishing feat, what might be called a defining moment in Roosevelt’s eventful life. But what makes it especially memorable is that during that time, he managed to read all of Anna Karenina. I often think of that when I hear people say they haven’t time to read.

The Disappearing Republican Moderates

2012-01-06T17:39:00.002-06:00

The Strange Death of the Republican Moderate
By TIMOTHY NOAH
Published: January 6, 2012

Half a century ago Republicans were a respectable but slightly boring presence on the political scene. Wary of excessive government, they were nonetheless reconciled to its expansion under Franklin D. Roosevelt and were mainly concerned with keeping it lean and solvent. Their beau idéal was Dwight D. Eisenhower, who in 1952 became the first Republican in 24 years to be elected president. His principal opponent for the nomination, Senator Robert Taft of Ohio, had opposed the New Deal and was a staunch isolationist who opposed supporting Britain in the first years of World War II. Eisenhower represented a more pragmatic strain of conservatism, internationalist when it came to foreign policy and willing to accept a larger government role at home. He called it “modern Republicanism.” With Eisenhower’s landslide re-election in 1956, his gospel looked like the future, at least for the G.O.P.

The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party: From Eisenhower to the Tea Party

By Geoffrey Kabaservice

482 pp. Oxford University Press. $29.95.
THE TEA PARTY AND THE REMAKING OF REPUBLICAN CONSERVATISM

By Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson

245 pp. Oxford University Press. $24.95.
Of course it wasn’t. The familiar narrative is that William F. Buckley Jr. chipped away at it, starting in 1955, when he founded National Review; that after 1960 it was rendered irrelevant by the vitality of President John F. Kennedy and his cold war liberalism; and that it collapsed entirely in 1964 when the Republicans’ hard-right wing secured the nomination for Barry Goldwater. But were things really so simple as that? In “Rule and Ruin,” his wonderfully detailed new history of moderate Republicanism, Geoffrey Kabaservice makes a strong case that modern Republicanism was hardier than we remember. Kabaservice acknowledges its eventual defeat but argues persuasively that Republican moderates remained a powerful, even dominant, political force well into the 1970s.

The story begins at the Eisenhower era’s end. Writing in 1961 about the return of “action and political dialogue to the college campus,” the young activist Tom Hayden cited three examples. The first was the left-wing Students for a Democratic Society (which Hayden helped found), remembered today as a primary vehicle for campus protest against the Vietnam War. The second was the right-wing Young Americans for Freedom (which Buckley helped found), remembered today for advancing the political careers of Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. The third was Advance, a magazine published by two Harvard undergraduates, Bruce Chapman and George Gilder. Today no one remembers Advance. Gilder and, to a lesser extent, Chapman are familiar names, but they’re known mainly as right wingers. Back then they were Rockefeller Republicans who played a significant role in rallying Republican Congressional support for the civil rights movement. When the Civil Rights Act passed in 1964, Kabaservice reports, it had proportionally greater support among Republicans than among Democrats (who had to fend off opposition from Southern segregationists). But Goldwater, the party’s “presumptive presidential nominee,” voted against the bill.

The Goldwater forces rolled over the moderates that year, with a fervor that their Tea Party legatees would find difficult to match. At the Republicans’ California state convention, moderates barely managed to block a platform resolution to “send Negroes back to Africa.” However extreme the conspiracy-minded Glenn Beck may seem, he was outdone by Robert Welch, the conspiracy-minded founder of the John Birch Society.

Kabaservice argues that Goldwater’s landslide defeat by the incumbent, Lyndon Johnson (which also helped reduce the number of Republicans in the House to its lowest level in nearly 30 years) actually strengthened the leverage of Republican moderates. In the next few years, liberal Republicans came to the fore, including John Lindsay, who was elected mayor of New York (defeating Buckley, who ran on the Conservative Party ticket); Edward Brooke (of Massachusetts), who became the first popularly elected African-American senator; George H. W. Bush, who won a House seat in his adopted state of Texas; and Michigan Gov. George Romney (father of Mitt), who briefly posed a serious threat to Richard Nixon’s presidential ambitions — a 1966 Harris poll had him leading the Republican field and defeating Johnson 54-46 — until he blew it all by attributing his initially favorable view of the Vietnam War to “brainwashing” from generals and diplomats. “In hindsight,” Kabaservice pointedly notes, “Romney was the G.O.P. moderates’ last and best chance to elect one of their own to the presidency.”

The Nixon presidency initially seemed a boon for modern Republicans, since Nixon had been Eisenhower’s vice president. His cabinet appointments included moderates like William Rogers, Elliot Richardson, Melvin Laird and Walter Hickel. His national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, a longtime associate of Nelson Rockefeller, was widely deemed a moderate, too. And much of Nixon’s domestic agenda flirted with outright liberalism, particularly the poverty program devised by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a career Democrat. But Nixon himself was not at heart an Eisenhower Republican so much as a calculating practitioner of realpolitik, and as he increasingly honed his message to appeal to conservative Southern Democrats (aided by his ex-moderate vice president, Spiro Agnew) he grew estranged from moderate Republicans — even as he often pursued liberal policies. Then came Watergate, which alienated moderate donors in the ’70s; direct-mail campaigns for the Republican Ripon Society, an influential liberal group, soon began losing money. At the same time, wealthy conservatives like Joseph Coors, John Olin and the Koch brothers were stepping up their contributions to conservative causes. With the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, the party lurched farther right, and modern Republicans became scarcer still.

Today, nearly all political centrists are Democrats. And with the rise of the Tea Party, Republicans are experiencing another 1964 moment. Indeed, Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson report in their exceptionally informative book, “The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism,” more than a few Tea Partiers “dated their first political experience to the Goldwater campaign.” But there are important differences between the two movements. For one, the Tea Party, unlike the Goldwater insurgency, has managed to win elections and thereby obtain some power at the national and state level. For another, the Tea Partiers’ anti-government ideology is tempered by quiet support for Social Security and Medicare. That’s because the activists themselves tend to be middle-aged or older. Tea Partiers aren’t opposed to government benefits per se, according to Skocpol and Williamson; rather, they’re opposed to “unearned” government benefits, which in practice ends up meaning any benefits extended to African-Americans, Latinos, immigrants (especially undocumented ones) and the young. A poll of South Dakota Tea Party supporters found that 83 percent opposed any Social Security cuts, 78 percent opposed any cuts to Medicare prescription-drug coverage, and 79 percent opposed cuts in Medicare reimbursements to physicians and hospitals. “So much for the notion that Tea Partiers are all little Dick Armeys,” Skocpol and Williamson write. The small government Tea Partiers favor is one where I get mine and most others don’t get much at all.

This poses a particular problem for a conservative Republican like Rep. Paul Ryan, who favors privatizing Medicare and shifting more of the financial burden onto recipients. But it’s also a problem for anyone seeking to lower the budget deficit, because it’s the “earned” benefits like Social Security and Medicare that are mainly responsible for runaway government spending. On the other hand, although Tea Partiers, who tend to be comfortably middle class but not wealthy, hate paying taxes, they don’t necessarily mind when other people pay taxes; the South Dakota poll had 56 percent of Tea Party supporters favoring a 5 percent increase in income taxes for people who earn more than $1 million a year.

On some level, then, the Tea Party is a product of the very welfare-statism that the hard right sought to smother in 1964 and that so many Tea Partiers profess to loathe today. “U.S. taxpayers subsidize their incomes and well-being, and hence give them the time and capacity to organize protests and Tea Party groups,” Skocpol and Williamson observe wryly. Government supplies the leisure that makes possible fervid and angry opposition to government. The Democrats built this Rube Goldberg structure, but they couldn’t have done it without help from “modern Republicans.” In at least that narrow sense, their legacy lives on.

A Review of the Thomas Frank Book

2012-01-06T17:35:00.002-06:00

The Rise of the American Oligarchy
By MICHAEL KINSLEY
Published: January 6, 2012

Thomas Frank is the thinking person’s Michael Moore. If Moore, the left-wing filmmaker, had Frank’s Ph.D. (in history from the University of Chicago), he might produce books like this one and Frank’s previous best seller, “What’s the Matter With Kansas?”

PITY THE BILLIONAIRE

The Hard-Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right

By Thomas Frank

225 pp. Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt & Company. $25

As you can tell from its ham-fisted title, “Pity the Billionaire” is not the world’s most subtle political critique. But subtlety isn’t everything. Frank’s best moments come when his contempt boils over and his inner grouch is released.

This book is Frank’s interpretation of developments since “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” was published eight years ago. Frank’s thesis here is basically that the thesis of the old book has been confirmed. He will not persuade anybody who does not already buy the Tom Frank line. But those who do (as I do, more or less) will enjoy a very good time having their predispositions massaged.

Frank sometimes writes in an arch voice that seemed familiar when I first encountered it but that I couldn’t place. Then I read in his book-jacket bio that he writes for Harper’s Magazine, and I thought, “Zounds, Watson, the man may have Lapham’s Disease.” The symptoms of this malady, named after the longtime editor of Harper’s, Lewis H. Lapham (now of Lapham’s Quarterly), include an elevated, orotund, deeply ironic prose style that, in severe cases, reveals almost nothing about what the topic is or what the author wishes to say about it except for a general sense of superiority to everyone and everything around.

Fortunately, Frank’s case is very mild. What he retains is a healthy refusal to be intimidated by charges of “elitism.” He’s not afraid to give his chapters titles like “Mimesis.” (I looked it up. It’s a good joke.) He says of some right-wing nut who enjoyed 15 seconds of YouTube fame that he possessed “an understanding of German history that bordered on complete fantasy.” His message to liberals is: Oh, for heaven’s sake, don’t be so defensive! The other side (Republicans, financiers, business executives, billionaires) has most of the economic — and therefore political — power. Today’s conservatives wield reverse snobbery as a weapon, accusing liberals of sins like living on the East or West Coast. Frank mocks conservatives’ claims that they are victims of an all-powerful liberal establishment. He calls this “tearful weepy-woo.”

Meanwhile, things have gone from bad to worse. Conservatives continue their Sherman’s march through the landmarks of liberal government, burning and looting as they go. They’ve gone after the legacies of Lyndon Johnson (Medicare), Franklin Roosevelt (Social Security; financial regulation) and Theodore Roosevelt (environmentalism). And working people continue to be duped into supporting measures manifestly against their own self-interest. In “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” Frank attributed this to a clever bait-and-switch by conservatives, who appeal to middle- and lower-class voters on the basis of social issues like abortion and gays in the military, and values like patriotism and religion. And then they govern on the agenda of traditional Republican groups like businessmen and bankers.

With “Pity the Billionaire,” the emphasis is different and the explanation is simpler: President Obama has betrayed the voters who elected him. He ran like a populist, Frank believes, but he has governed like a plutocrat, or at least a friend of plutocrats. Frank quotes a remarkable passage from Obama’s book “The Audacity of Hope” about “people of means” whom he met at Democratic fund-raisers:

“As a rule they were smart, interesting people, knowledgeable about public policy, liberal in their politics, expecting nothing more than a hearing . . . in exchange for their checks. But they reflected, almost uniformly, the perspectives of their class. . . . They believed in the free market and an educational meritocracy. . . . They had no patience with protectionism, found unions troublesome and were not particularly sympathetic to those whose lives were upended by the movements of global capital. Most were adamantly pro-choice and anti-gun and were vaguely suspicious of deep religious sentiment.”

Obama goes on to admit that by hanging around with these people, he was becoming “more like” them, and Frank — refusing to plea-bargain this stunning confession for a milder sentence — agrees, then piles on.

It seems to me that a Democratic president who gets us health care reform and tough new financial protection for consumers, who guides the economy through its roughest period in 80 years with moderate success (who could do better?), who ends our long war in Iraq and avenges the worst insult to our sovereignty since Pearl Harbor (as his Republican predecessor manifestly failed to do, despite a lot of noise and promises); a president who faced an opposition of really spectacular intransigence and downright meanness; a president who has the self-knowledge and wisdom about Washington to write the passage quoted above, and the courage to publish it: that president deserves a bit more credit from the left than Frank is willing to give him.

Frank may also be a bit overly impressed by what the right has achieved. Evelyn Waugh complained that the British Conservative Party had failed to turn back the clock by a single second. Have the Republicans done much better? (Waugh was speaking long before the Margaret Thatcher revolution, which really did change British society enormously.) Conservatives have dominated the debate, and usually the government, for three decades now, yet they haven’t managed to abolish a single cabinet department or eliminate a single major entitlement program. Nothing big has been “privatized.” Somehow or other, against all expectations and despite a conservative Supreme Court, abortion rights and affirmative action have been preserved. Gay rights are advancing so fast that the Republican Party itself is probably ahead of where Democrats were a generation ago. The Constitution has not been amended to require a balanced budget or forbid flag-burning.

True, they’ve pretty much killed the union movement. While they are not to blame for the effects of globalization and technology on income distribution, they’ve done nothing to mitigate these. And then there are tax cuts — especially tax cuts for the wealthy. That we have had. In spades. Actually, all this tends to confirm Frank’s contention that what Republicans really care about, politically, is money, and all that other stuff is just prole meat.

Frank dates the discovery by conservatives that they are being oppressed by a liberal elite all the way back to 2010, when The American Spectator magazine published an article by Angelo Codevilla called “America’s Ruling Class.” I believe that, in fact, the funhouse-mirror class war (in which liberals and poor people are the upper class and billionaires are among the oppressed masses) has been going on longer than that — at least since Nixon’s “silent majority.” (The man was president, but he still felt oppressed.) But then Frank, as a liberal elitist, has a touching belief in the influence of words. He believes a magazine article can change the world. He quotes from obscure books and pamphlets he has picked up as if each one had been read by everyone in the Tea Party.

The two great antiheroes of “Pity the Billionaire” are Ayn Rand and Glenn Beck. You might say that Frank is intrigued by Beck, or you might say he is obsessed. He is like an intellectual stalker, following Beck around as he attends to his empire of projects, making sure we don’t miss a single lie or absurdity. Beck is influential, and he was enjoying his 15 minutes when Frank was writing this book. But is he more influential than any other radio talk-show host? I’d put my money on Rush. Or how about Grover Norquist, whose ability to pressure members of Congress into supporting his agenda is like nothing since “Red Channels” (the McCarthy-era publication that maintained the blacklist)?

Frank spends 11 out of 187 pages (before the endnotes) in this short book on an entertaining deconstruction of Ayn Rand’s masterwork, “Atlas Shrugged.” “For me,” Frank writes, “it is the political flimflam of our times wrapped up in one big package: the manifesto of the deregulators and free marketeers who caused the economic disaster.” “Atlas Shrugged” is certainly a ridiculous book, and a good illustration of the absurd self-pity of the rich that Frank so deftly skewers in “Pity the Billionaire.” But the notion that this 1,000-page novel about the breakdown of society due to a corrupt government plays any role in, say, the debate over “cap and trade” seems far-fetched.

This is not a book about policy, and Frank shouldn’t be expected to have a 10-point program for reforming the Federal Reserve Board before he allows himself a sarcastic reference to Ben Bernanke. But when he casually uses phrases like “deregulators and free marketeers” to define the bad guys, it does give one pause. For Frank, are government regulations ever excessive? Does he see no merit at all in free trade? Frank surely doesn’t oppose free-market capitalism as a general principle, however much he may dislike Glenn Beck. Or does he? It would have been nice to know a bit more about where Thomas Frank is coming from. Otherwise, he starts to sound like those Tea Party people whom he rightly mocks for being very, very angry with no idea why or what to do about it.

Georgia State Rep: ‘I’m Afraid’ Of Romney’s Mormon Faith, But ‘It’s Better Than A Muslim’

2012-01-06T13:43:00.001-06:00

BY Zaid Jilani
Think Progress
5 January 2012

One obstacle that Mitt Romney may face as he asks for the support of Republican primary voters is bigotry against the Mormon faith.

A Marietta Daily Journal story published yesterday demonstrates the bigotry that Romney may have to overcome. The Journal quotes Republican state Rep. Judy Manning saying that she’s scared of Romney’s Mormon faith. But at least he’s “better than a Muslim”:

“I think Mitt Romney is a nice man, but I’m afraid of his Mormon faith,” Manning said. “It’s better than a Muslim. Of course, every time you look at the TV these days you find an ad on there telling us how normal they are. So why do they have to put ads on the TV just to convince us that they’re normal if they are normal? … If the Mormon faith adhered to a past philosophy of pluralism, multi-wives, that doesn’t follow the Christian faith of one man and one woman, and that concerns me.”

Manning’s criticism of Romney’s faith and her attack on Islam as an even more inferior religion — in addition to other comments she has made against LGBT rights — demonstrates an important point. Progressives and others who oppose bigotry and preach tolerance must denounce discrimination of every kind, not just because all discrimination is wrong, but because validating discrimination against one group can lead to increased discrimination against other groups in the future.

Ron Paul: Libertarian or States Rights Advocate

2012-01-02T20:14:00.002-06:00

I think the writer is correct.

Asher Smith1L, Yale Law
GET UPDATES FROM Asher Smith

Why Does the Media Persist in Calling Ron Paul a Libertarian?

The Iowa Caucuses are Tuesday. "Still decidedly in the mix," according to Monday's New York Times, is "Ron Paul, a libertarian-leaning congressman from Texas."

But what exactly about Ron Paul merits the oft-repeated libertarian label? The answer certainly does not lie in his personal views, or his campaign's policy positions.

The Ron Paul phenomenon -- in some pre-Caucus polls, Paul still maintains a slim lead -- represents nothing new under the sun of American politics. Paul represents not a new libertarian age, but old-fashioned American federalism -- the belief that sovereign state governments should have free rein within their borders, free from pesky federal intervention and regulation. It hardly takes a Ph.D. in American history to realize that this has been tried before.

Paul supporters seem to be yearning for a return to a pre-Civil Rights Era federal system. Prominent Iowa Republican and Paul supporter Rev. Phillip Kayser explained to Talking Points Memo last week that Paul's vote in Congress in favor of repealing "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" did not staunch his enthusiasm for Paul. Rather, Kayser believes Paul's view of the Constitution would allow states more latitude in legislating issues of social policy. "Under a Ron Paul presidency," Kayser told TPM, "states would be freed up to not have political correctness imposed on them, but obviously some state would follow what's politically correct. What he's trying to do whether he agrees with the Constitution's position or not is restrict himself to the Constitution. That is something I very much appreciate."

Not imposing "political correctness" on the states, of course, is not new policy. It was standard practice for the first 188 years of American history. It did not work.

Yet on other social issues Paul's positions are not libertarian, but federalist. Paul does not want government out of individuals' private lives -- he merely wants the federal government out. For example, Paul twice opposed the George W. Bush-sponsored Federal Marriage Amendment, but he has supported legislation ensuring federal courts will not undermine any state laws regulating marriage.

From a libertarian perspective, Paul's logic is strained. In 2004, Paul dissented from celebrations of the 40-year anniversary of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. "The federal government," explained Paul, "has no legitimate authority to infringe on the rights of private property owners to use their property as they please and to form (or not form) contracts with terms mutually agreeable to all parties. The rights of all private property owners, even those whose actions decent people find abhorrent, must be respected if we are to maintain a free society."

But why, if Paul is opposed to federal regulations necessary to curb "actions decent people find abhorrent," is he comfortable with permitting states to infringe on fundamental rights? There is no inherent reason why actions by state governments should occupy a more sacred plane than do actions by the federal government.

There is no reason, that is, if one applies a libertarian lens. Seen through the old fashioned prism of states rights, Paul's positions are entirely coherent. But while "states rights" has become a suspect rationale for current day political preferences, proclaiming oneself a "libertarian" is laden with none of the odium of previous centuries of failed policies. So the fiction continues. One wonders, however, why journalists covering the Republican campaign feel obligated to go along with it.

The Sherlock Holmes Movie

2012-01-02T16:36:00.001-06:00

I saw it yesterday---at least most of it. This movie is so bad I walked out before it was over.

Internet Overload

2012-01-01T15:52:00.003-06:00

Are we on information overload?
The Internet has transformed knowledge. An expert explains why it's launched the greatest period in human history By Thomas Rogers

The last two decades have completely transformed the way we know. Thanks to the rise of the Internet, information is far more accessible than ever before. It’s more connected to other pieces of information and more open to debate. Organizations — and even governmental projects like Data.gov — are putting more previously inaccessible data on the Web than people in the pre-Internet age could possibly have imagined. But this change raises another, more ominous question: Is this deluge overwhelming our brains?

In his new book, “Too Big to Know,” David Weinberger, a senior researcher at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, attempts to answer that question by looking at the ways our newly interconnected society is transforming the media, science and our everyday lives. In an accessible yet profound work, he explains that in our new universe, facts have been replaced by “networked facts” that exist largely in the context of a digital network. As a result, Weinberger believes we have entered a new golden age, one in which technology has finally caught up with humans’ endless curiosity, and one that has the potential to revolutionize a wide swath of occupations and research fields.

Salon spoke to Weinberger over the phone about the rise of the information cloud, the demise of expert knowledge, and why this is the greatest time in human history.

In the book you mention the “smartest guy in the room” metaphor. According to your book, that’s an outdated metaphor. Now it’s the room itself that’s smart.

In the West we’ve pegged knowledge to what fits in books or gets written down. That’s been our medium for preserving and communicating knowledge. Because books are written by individuals, it has often made knowledge seem like the product of individuals, even though everybody has always understood that individuals are working within the social network. With the new medium of knowledge — the Internet — knowledge not only takes on properties of that medium but also lives at the level of the network. So rather than simply trying to cultivate smart people, we also need to be looking above the level of the individual to the network in which he or she is embedded to see where knowledge lives.

Historically, we have thought of knowledge as something that experts have on a given topic. We call on experts to explain things to us, on TV or in the news. How is this changing?

In the West, knowledge begins as a winnowing process. It goes back to ancient Greece, where the rich, free menfolk were debating politics and steering the state. Many opinions were expressed, but only some of them were true, so knowledge became the winnowing of those opinions defined to be rare gems of truth. That idea — that knowledge is what makes it through a winnowing process — not by coincidence fits perfectly with the paper medium that we used for it. Paper is expensive, libraries are small, very few people can get published. So we’ve thought of knowledge as that which makes it through a very small aperture.

Some people have described this process as a pyramid.

In 1988, Russell Ackoff, an organizational theorist, proposed a pyramid that has become really standard in many business environments. You have data at the bottom, then information, and then knowledge — and then at the top, wisdom, as if wisdom is the reduced set of knowledge. The idea is in line with our traditional idea of knowledge, which is based on the idea that there’s too much to know, there’s more than can fit into any skull, so we need to come up with strategies to deal with it. And that pyramid is the information age’s elaboration of this. In every step you get quality and value by reducing what was at lower steps, but we’ve had a reductive sense of knowledge for about 2,500 years.

In the last few years, there’s been concern that the Internet is giving us far more information than our brain can handle. But that’s not a new concern…

Yes. Clay Shirky very pithily said a few months ago, “There’s no such thing as information overload — only filter failure.” I think Clay was partly trying to provide some historical continuity so that we shouldn’t feel like we need to freak out, that we have faced this same issue over and over again, and we need to fix our filters. But filters work differently in the digital age. Physical filters work by removing that which doesn’t make it through the filter, whether it’s the manuscripts that get sent to publishers or journals that never see the light of day, or books that don’t make it into the library, or coffee grinds. Digital filters don’t remove anything; they only reduce the number of clicks that it takes to get to something.

So by “filter” you’re referring to things like, for example, a blog post about the “top 10 magazine articles of 2011.”

Yes, exactly. In the digital age we filter forward instead of filtering out. As a result, all that material is still available to us and to others to filter in their own ways, and to bring forward in other contexts. That is a very significant difference. You may filter those 10 articles, but all the other ones will still show up in a search, or tomorrow you may get them in an email from a friend or Google+ recommending that particular link. Nothing is removed. It’s all there and available. That is a huge difference.

You talk about the rise of the networked fact. What is that?

Over the past couple hundred years, we’ve had this idea that knowledge is composed of facts about the world, and together we are engaged in this multigenerational enterprise of gathering facts and posting them, and ultimately we’ll have a complete picture of the world. That view of facts as the irreducible atoms of knowledge has some benefit, but we’re seeing a different type of fact emerge on the Net as well. Traditional facts are still there. Facts are facts. But we’re seeing organizations of all sorts releasing their data, their facts, onto the Web as huge clouds of triples [another word for linked data]. They’re a connection of two ideas through some relationship — that’s why they’re called triples — but not only can they be linked together by computers, they themselves consist of links. Each of the elements of a linked atom is a pointer to some resource that disambiguates it and explains what it is.

Let’s think of an example of a fact.

OK. I’m in Edmonton, Canada, right now, so let’s say: “Edmonton is in Canada.”

OK, so, if the triple is “Edmonton is in Canada,” ideally each of those should link to some other spot on the Web that explains exactly which Edmonton, because there’s probably more than one, along with which Canada (though there’s probably only one). And “is in” is a very ambiguous statement, so you would point to some vocabulary that defines it for geography. Each of these little facts is designed not only to be linked up by computers, but it itself consists of links. It’s a very different idea than that facts are bricks that lay a firm foundation. The old metaphor for knowledge was architectural and archaeological: foundations, bricks. Now we have clouds.

One of the advantages of networked thinking is that we can harness diverse opinions in a way that was impossible before. Why is this important?

We’ve known for a long time, and I think culturally we’ve accepted, that diversity is an important thing in the work of knowledge. Doris Kearns Goodwin’s “Team of Rivals” takes Lincoln’s Cabinet as an example. Knowledge was traditionally about driving out difference and settling things, and not coincidentally the medium of knowledge was amenable to that. If you print a book, you can’t really change it. Books settle things, and so does knowledge. We don’t say we know something if there is significant debate about it. We have viewed diversity as a path to settling things and believe we get the best results if we have a diverse set of people.

But in the networked world that’s shifting a bit. It’s not simply that diversity is a good means to the ends of knowledge, but knowledge consists of a network of people and ideas that are not totally in sync, that are diverse, that disagree. Books generally have value because they encapsulate some topic and provide you with everything you know, because when you’re reading it you cannot easily leap out of the book to get to the next book. The Web only has value because it contains difference. When I link to you, I’ll say why I am linking to you and I’ll explain what the difference is between the site you’re currently reading and what I’m pointing you at. We are beginning to think of knowledge itself as having value insofar as it contains difference.

Some writers won’t hyperlink their pieces on principle, because they think it ruins the reading experience.

There are lots of ways to write, and people should write the way they want to. But if an author posts something that has no links out, it nevertheless becomes a part of the Web — other people will link to it and say what they think about it. There’s no escaping that now. But I should acknowledge I wrote a paper book. There are no hyperlinks in the paper book. There are URLs, but you can’t click on them, so apparently I do think there is still some value in writing in non-linked media.

But parts of your book are probably going to make their way online.

And I blogged about many parts of it and discussed it in my course, so it is a continuous process. Nevertheless, especially for people of my generation, books still count.

In the book you explain that one of the advantages of the Web is that it is cumulative, by which you mean that online facts will never go away. But if someone posts something that says “Thomas Rogers shot someone’s dog,” the Internet will never let me live that down, despite the fact that it’s untrue. Isn’t that a reason to be worried?

All of these blessings are highly mixed, but the good part about the Internet being cumulative is that we don’t have to take special steps in order to preserve that which is of value even if it is of minimal value, is tiny or insignificant, or only has value when it’s aggregated with tons of other pieces that may in themselves have no intrinsic value. You used to have to go to great lengths to preserve that stuff and to make it public. The Net lowers the hurdle for what we record. The good side of it is that we’re able to go through that and discover what escaped us. The bad part is that we can discover stuff that would have escaped malevolent eyes.

One of the characteristics of the Web seems to be the flattening of news. If you look at a site like Buzzfeed, it has reports about the death of Kim Jong Il right next to viral videos about cats. It’s jarring — and seems a little amoral.

You are pointing to the benefits of having a very small aperture for news. That aperture was controlled by full-time professional editors, but it means that what comes through the news hole now is anything anybody is interested in enough to post. On the other hand, when you have so few apertures for news and they’re controlled by such a similar set of people, you get a certain limited set of stories. We at least now have the opportunity to create filters that let in more than the traditional room of middle-aged white men. If we’re not reading the stuff that matters, it’s our fault.

Sites like Buzzfeed or reddit that are aggregating based upon user suggestions reflect what users are interested in. It turns out that we’re interested in is a pretty broad range of stuff, and most of it isn’t all that serious. A lot of it is just funny or in some cases distasteful, but it turns out that is what we’re interested in. The challenge is trying to educate our interests, but that’s what education is about.

In the book you talk quite a lot about Darwin as an example of an old-school information gatherer. What would a modern-day Darwin look like?

I use Darwin throughout the book because there’s no arguing with him as a deep and wonderful thinker. Darwin is also a peculiarly good example because he was so reluctant to write; he remained relatively private about his theory for decades and published only when somebody else, Wallace, was on the verge of beating him to it. So here we have Darwin working alone and talking with a refined social network (he had colleagues who were very important and helpful to him), but working slowly, spending seven years working to determine a single fact: whether barnacles were crustaceans or mollusks. The first five chapters of “The Origin of Species” explain his theory, and the next six chapters deal with objections that either had been raised or he imagines would be raised.

Darwin today would not be operating this way. He would very likely be tweeting from the Beagle. He would be announcing his findings and initial ideas online, and people would be arguing with him all along, taking his ideas, applying them elsewhere, pushing back, criticizing him deeply — all of the things we do on the Web. That work has revolutionary, incredible value, but put into the Web, it gets teased out, amplified, corrected, as well as misunderstood and degraded. Nevertheless, that Web itself has more value than the individual content, so I would expect that Darwin today would be gathering his data from clouds of linked data, trying out ideas on the Web, and drawing those ideas in the tussle. The old rhythm of knowledge and science not coincidentally is the rhythm of publishing. The Web has completely broken that rhythm.

Do you think all of these changes are good or bad?

It’s both good and bad. It’s both impossible and unhelpful to ask if it’s making us smarter or stupider. But I am actually very hopeful. Ask anybody who is in any of the traditional knowledge fields, and she or he will very likely tell you that the Internet has made them smarter. They couldn’t do their work without it; they’re doing it better than ever before, they know more; they can find more; they can run down dead ends faster than ever before. In the sciences and humanities, it’s hard to find somebody who claims the Internet is making him or her stupid, even among those who claim the Internet is making us stupid. And I believe this is the greatest time in human history.

That’s a very lofty statement.

I’m pretty confident about that one, actually. Curiosity can lead you to lots of bad directions. It can steer you wrong and waste your time, but it is fundamental. We need it more than anything else if we’re going to try to understand our world. Now we have a medium that is as broad as our curiosity.

About the Upcoming New Thomas Frank Book (2)

2011-12-31T22:48:00.001-06:00

I quickly read and finished the book today. Let it be noted that this is the last book I read in 2011.

Robert Reich on the Breakup of the Republican Party

2011-12-29T08:31:00.002-06:00

Why the Republican Crackup is Bad For America
Tuesday, December 20, 2011
Two weeks before the Iowa caucuses, the Republican crackup threatens the future of the Grand Old Party more profoundly than at any time since the GOP’s eclipse in 1932. That’s bad for America.

The crackup isn’t just Romney the smooth versus Gingrich the bomb-thrower.

Not just House Republicans who just scotched the deal to continue payroll tax relief and extended unemployment insurance benefits beyond the end of the year, versus Senate Republicans who voted overwhelmingly for it.

Not just Speaker John Boehner, who keeps making agreements he can’t keep, versus Majority Leader Eric Cantor, who keeps making trouble he can’t control.

And not just venerable Republican senators like Indiana’s Richard Lugar, a giant of foreign policy for more than three decades, versus primary challenger state treasurer Richard Mourdock, who apparently misplaced and then rediscovered $320 million in state tax revenues.

Some describe the underlying conflict as Tea Partiers versus the Republican establishment. But this just begs the question of who the Tea Partiers really are and where they came from.

The underlying conflict lies deep into the nature and structure of the Republican Party. And its roots are very old.

As Michael Lind has noted, today’s Tea Party is less an ideological movement than the latest incarnation of an angry white minority – predominantly Southern, and mainly rural – that has repeatedly attacked American democracy in order to get its way.

It’s no mere coincidence that the states responsible for putting the most Tea Party representatives in the House are all former members of the Confederacy. Of the Tea Party caucus, twelve hail from Texas, seven from Florida, five from Louisiana, and five from Georgia, and three each from South Carolina, Tennessee, and border-state Missouri.

Others are from border states with significant Southern populations and Southern ties. The four Californians in the caucus are from the inland part of the state or Orange County, whose political culture has was shaped by Oklahomans and Southerners who migrated there during the Great Depression.

This isn’t to say all Tea Partiers are white, Southern or rural Republicans – only that these characteristics define the epicenter of Tea Party Land.

And the views separating these Republicans from Republicans elsewhere mirror the split between self-described Tea Partiers and other Republicans.

In a poll of Republicans conducted for CNN last September, nearly six in ten who identified themselves with the Tea Party say global warming isn’t a proven fact; most other Republicans say it is.

Six in ten Tea Partiers say evolution is wrong; other Republicans are split on the issue. Tea Party Republicans are twice as likely as other Republicans to say abortion should be illegal in all circumstances, and half as likely to support gay marriage.

Tea Partiers are more vehement advocates of states’ rights than other Republicans. Six in ten Tea Partiers want to abolish the Department of Education; only one in five other Republicans do. And Tea Party Republicans worry more about the federal deficit than jobs, while other Republicans say reducing unemployment is more important than reducing the deficit.

In other words, the radical right wing of today’s GOP isn’t that much different from the social conservatives who began asserting themselves in the Party during the 1990s, and, before them, the “Willie Horton” conservatives of the 1980s, and, before them, Richard Nixon’s “silent majority.”

Through most of these years, though, the GOP managed to contain these white, mainly rural and mostly Southern, radicals. After all, many of them were still Democrats. The conservative mantle of the GOP remained in the West and Midwest – with the libertarian legacies of Ohio Senator Robert A. Taft and Barry Goldwater, neither of whom was a barn-burner – while the epicenter of the Party remained in New York and the East.

But after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as the South began its long shift toward the Republican Party and New York and the East became ever more solidly Democratic, it was only a matter of time. The GOP’s dominant coalition of big business, Wall Street, and Midwest and Western libertarians was losing its grip.

The watershed event was Newt Gingrich’s takeover of the House, in 1995. Suddenly, it seemed, the GOP had a personality transplant. The gentlemanly conservatism of House Minority Leader Bob Michel was replaced by the bomb-throwing antics of Gingrich, Dick Armey, and Tom DeLay.

Almost overnight Washington was transformed from a place where legislators tried to find common ground to a war zone. Compromise was replaced by brinkmanship, bargaining by obstructionism, normal legislative maneuvering by threats to close down government – which occurred at the end of 1995.

Before then, when I’d testified on the Hill as Secretary of Labor, I had come in for tough questioning from Republican senators and representatives – which was their job. After January 1995, I was verbally assaulted. “Mr. Secretary, are you a socialist?” I recall one of them asking.

But the first concrete sign that white, Southern radicals might take over the Republican Party came in the vote to impeach Bill Clinton, when two-thirds of senators from the South voted for impeachment. (A majority of the Senate, you may recall, voted to acquit.)

America has had a long history of white Southern radicals who will stop at nothing to get their way – seceding from the Union in 1861, refusing to obey Civil Rights legislation in the 1960s, shutting the government in 1995, and risking the full faith and credit of the United States in 2010.

Newt Gingrich’s recent assertion that public officials aren’t bound to follow the decisions of federal courts derives from the same tradition.

This stop-at-nothing radicalism is dangerous for the GOP because most Americans recoil from it. Gingrich himself became an object of ridicule in the late 1990s, and many Republicans today worry that if he heads the ticket the Party will suffer large losses.

It’s also dangerous for America. We need two political parties solidly grounded in the realities of governing. Our democracy can’t work any other way.

About the Upcoming New Thomas Frank Book

2011-12-28T12:52:00.001-06:00

The Tea Party’s “utopian market populism”
Tom Frank on the dream that fueled the right wing's improbable comebackBy Jefferson Morley

Thomas Frank

Topics:Wall Street, Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street
In his new book, “Pity the Billionaire,” Tom Frank turns his mordant eye on the unlikeliest political development of the Obama presidency: how the crash of 2008 served to strengthen the political right. The deregulation of Wall Street, championed for 30 years by right-wing leaders, had led to an economic catastrophe so frightening that the country elected a liberal Democrat to the presidency. Yet two years later, the most conservative faction of the Republican Party, the Tea Party, had taken effective control of the House of Representatives, the regulation of Wall Street had stalled, and the champions of economic deregulation in Washington had emerged stronger than ever.

Frank, author of the bestselling book “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” provides a pithy and nuanced explanation of what he calls the “hard-times swindle.” He spoke with Salon from his father’s home in Kansas City, Mo.

Early in the book, you describe the moment in the spring of 2009 when free-market economics had been so thoroughly discredited that Newsweek could run a cover story proclaiming, “We’re all socialists now.” What happened? Why did that moment dissipate?

I saw that cover so many times [at Tea Party events]. For these people, that rang the alarm bell. I think the AIG moment [when the bailed-out insurance behemoth used taxpayer relief to dole out huge bonuses to its executives] was in some ways the high point of the crisis, when [the politics] could have gone either way. There was this amazing public outrage, and that for me was the turning point. Newsweek had another cover, “Thinking Man’s Guide to Populism,” and I remember this feeling around the country, that people were just furious. Somehow the right captured the sense of anger. They completely captured it. You could say they had no right to it, but they did. And one of the reasons they were able to do it was because the liberals were not interested in that anger.

I’m speaking here of the liberal culture in Washington, D.C. There was no Occupy Wall Street movement [at that time] and there was only people like me on the fringes talking about it. The liberals had their leader in Barack Obama … they had their various people in Congress. But these people are completely unfamiliar with populist anger. It’s an alien thing to them. They don’t trust it, and they have trouble speaking to it. I like Barack Obama, but at the end of the day he’s a very professorial kind of guy. The liberals totally missed the opportunity, and the right was able to grab it.

Looking back on it, I feel like people like myself were part of the problem. We sort of assumed with the Democrats in power, the system would correct itself.

One of the problems with liberalism in this country is that it’s headquartered in Washington and its leaders are a very comfortable class of people. Washington is one of the richest cities in the country, maybe the richest. It’s not a place that feels the crisis, that feels the economic downturn. By and large, the real estate market stayed OK. The city continued to boom. The contracts continued to flow. What we’re talking about here is the failure of modern liberalism. At one time it was a movement of working-class people. The idea that liberals wouldn’t feel economic pain was ridiculous. That’s who liberals were. No more.

You write that after Obama took office, “market populism was the only utopian scheme available to disgruntled Americans.” There was no liberal utopian scheme that said, “Here’s how we get out of this.”

There wasn’t even a Rooseveltian scheme, which was not utopian but very practical. Just to talk about Roosevelt would have been fantastic. One of the research points in the book that I thought was really interesting … was the history of the bailouts in 1932 and 1933 — when the Hoover administration did a lot of bailouts. We don’t remember that. [These bailouts] were massively unpopular for the same reason they were unpopular this time around: really blatant cronyism. We don’t remember that a big part of Franklin Roosevelt’s campaign [in 1932] was to be against these bailouts. There were maybe five newspaper articles in 2008 that mentioned this pre-history of the bailouts. It just never came up.

It was like the party’s muscle memory of the New Deal was lost. With Obama the muscle memory of the Democratic Party is the Clintonian technocracy of the 1990s.

That’s exactly right. Their message was: The technocratic way is going to solve our problems. Just leave it up to the experts who are going to figure a way out. [Obama and the Democrats] seemed to think they didn’t need to dirty their hands by making a populist appeal. They did a lot of good things — the stimulus package of 2008 was good thing — but they didn’t realize you have to sell something like that. They were like, “We know what the answer is: Keynesian stimulus. So let’s just do it.” They didn’t understand that this nation only adopted Keynesian stimulus spending back in the 1930s amidst this terrible wrenching experience, the Depression, and an enormous campaign [by FDR] to tell the nation why this was necessary.

If you don’t sell it — if you just do this spending — well, people have a lot of suspicion of government handouts. Government debt bothers people for very obvious reasons. [Obama] didn’t make any effort to make the argument. It was just “listen to the experts.” I have a quote from [Obama economic advisor] Christy Roemer where she says, “Things would be better if we listened to the experts.” And she’s one of the good guys, one of the best people in the Obama administration. That’s their view.

You have an interesting discussion about how the Tea Party movement mimics what was once the left-wing style. This seems to be the dominant mode: The right is saying, “We’re the revolutionaries. We’re taking on the powers that be.”

At first I thought it was a peculiarity of Glenn Beck, and then I noticed it across the board. They picked up this 1930s style and language, complete with utopianism, with this intense faith in an economic system that will solve all your problems and that represents you perfectly, this miraculous economic system … So [the right] is constantly talking about this infernal elite that controls government, controls corporations, and controls the academy, and that we have to wrench ourselves free.

So maybe it is true that the Obama technocracy is the infernal elite. Maybe not in the hellish way it is portrayed on the right, but in the sense that these are the defenders of bailouts, the defenders of the system.

I wouldn’t go too far with that, because I don’t think that is a way of understanding our modern world that can bear a lot of the weight. It is true that the Democrats completely imagine themselves as being the party of the professional class, and that is an elite. It’s not the elite, but it is an elite. The Democrats very definitely identify with academia. That’s the home of the professions, where they come from.

Still, I think that the conservative idea of revolting against the ruling class by holding up the market as an ideal is completely backwards. There is a ruling class in this country. But the notion that the free market is an act of rebellion against it seems pretty fanciful. I can say it stronger than that. It is absolutely preposterous.

At one point you talk about “a cognitive withdrawal from the shared world.” It seems like the modern digital communication revolution encourages this. “A cognitive withdrawal from the shared world” — that sounds like a description of the Internet.

This is where we’re going. You can now believe things that are demonstrably false and never be challenged, directly or indirectly. You can withdraw. That’s the end that the Internet is constantly pushing us toward. That’s what modern marketing is all about.

So it’s a technological phenomenon, but it’s also an ideological phenomenon, a product of the times we’re in. You saw this in the ’30s, especially on the left. People would be so committed to this economic utopia [communism]. They believed in it, and their faith in it was so great … It is a product of economic collapse. People are desperate. They think their entire way of life is crumbling around them, and they reach for … a utopian system where everything is explained.

This is the genius of Fox News. It is fun to watch, and if you agree with them, it’s very gratifying to watch — and on a level deeper than most TV entertainment. The message is “You’ve worked really hard. You played by the rules and now they’re disrespecting you. They won’t let you say the word ‘Christmas.’”

You finished this book around the time Occupy Wall Street started. Were you surprised by the emergence of the movement?

I was surprised. I thought the left’s moment had passed. That was almost exactly three years after the crash of September 2008, and it seemed like the expiration date had come and gone. I’m very pleased, but in a lot of ways the horse has already left the barn.

Is it possible for the Occupy movement to reverse the gains of the right?

I hope so, but I honestly don’t know. At the end of the day I doubt it. My liberal friends have been doubting the right for decades. They’re always saying, “There’s no way these guys can recover now after this screw-up. People will never come back to them after this.” But they keep coming back.

The right does seems to be a little bit on the defensive at the moment. The dominant narrative of last summer — government spending is the problem — has been lost. Occupy Wall Street has injected a change in discourse. People aren’t defensive when they talk about inequality.

Tell me about it. When I started writing about inequality 10 years ago, it … was not something for NPR Book Talk. It was not quite within the bounds of the acceptable. Now it is. And that’s a huge change.

The main thing that has to change is that Democrats and liberals have to be able to speak to the outrage, and that requires a complete change in the way they look at the world. The problem is that they’ve been going the other direction for 30 years. Ever since the right-wing backlash began, liberals have been making their own move to professionalism. [To voice outrage] would require them to reverse course. I would like to see that happen, but I don’t know how it’s going to happen.

I think one thing has happened: Middle-class or upper-middle-class liberals in Washington, all of a sudden we realize we are insecure. The system is not just screwed up for people out there who we sympathize with. It’s screwed up for us. Economic insecurity is now pervasive even in the professional class.

Professionals are feeling the heat. They’re not insulated from market forces, like the way the professions are supposed to be. The system is not working like that anymore. Maybe that is where the change will come from.

Another thing that I think changed things was the debt-ceiling debacle last summer. That scared everybody, and it was so patently the doing of the Tea Party Republicans in the House. That was a huge turning point.

The hostage taking?

They were holding a gun to the head of the nation’s economy. They did ruin the nation’s bond rating. And you could have had an unthinkable catastrophe if they had done what they were threatening to do. Things like that should be off the table in our politics. That was an outrage in its own way as great as the bailouts. It was a shocking moment.

Yet at the end of the book, you contemplate the right wing in power, and you suggest they might do exactly that — take actions they know would ruin the economy.

They might. They see the financial crisis as something we deserve, that we’ve spent beyond our means, and now we have to pay. In their minds, we need a recession to get back on track. They think we’re due for something like the 1930s, so why not make it happen?

You conclude by saying say that the problems that editorialists fret about — inequality, global warming and financial bubbles — will endure, but so will this utopian market populism, which you describe as chasing “the dream more vivid than life itself.” You have shown how entrenched those impulses are in American politics. Maybe part of the American pursuit of happiness is to “chase the dream more vivid than life itself. “

The right has discovered the magic against relativism. They have long inveighed against relativism, but now they’ve discovered they can say anything. They can endlessly withdraw into this world of utopian fiction and everything can be explained away. It’s like some kid discovering a new video game. It’s so awesome.

So what gives you hope?

I was out in Wisconsin earlier this year, when you had thousands of people surrounding the capitol every day. There were big days when they had a hundred thousand people, and then there were the off days where you had “only” a couple of thousand — and this went for day after day. That was really a hopeful moment for me. It was the predecessor to the Occupy movement. Let’s see if they can make a comeback when it gets warm again. I would love to see it happen.

Wayne Flynt - Keeping the Faith

2011-12-28T10:59:00.003-06:00

A few weeks ago I finished this memoir by Wayne Flynt, the retired Auburn history professor (he retired in 2005) and liberal voice of Alabama politics. I enjoyed the book as much as I have enjoyed any recent book that I've read.

Wayne was born in Mississippi but spent most of his childhood and all of his adulthood in Alabama. Growing up he lived mostly in Pinson and Anniston. He did his undergradute work at Samford and his Phd at Florida State. Southern history is his specialty. He spent about 20 years at Auburn (moving to Auburn from the Samford faculty) and in the book writes about the ups and downs of the various administration battles during his time on the Plains. It seems that he was always in the middle of all the Auburn politics.

I wanted to list his reference to my favotite Auburn professor, Dr. Joe Harrison, who was on the Auburn history faculty for many years and under whom I had three courses. Dr. Harrison was legendary for his incredible memory. He never lectured from notes. It was all in his head. I chuckle when I read this.

"Like the graduate students, I found myself seduced by the coffee club. These professors were some of the state's brightest people and best storytellers. Some (notably Joe Harrison, Robert R. Rea, and Bill Maehl) were brilliant. Joe possessed total recall,lectured without notes, and seemingly never forgot a date, statistic, or story. No one at Auburn matched him as a raconteur. Bob Rea---distant, acerbic, sometimes terrifying to graduate students---was a fine writer and a generous writer. Bill Maehl, our German historian, looked and acted the part of a Prussian field officer." P. 126

The Influence of Ron Paul

2011-12-27T14:34:00.000-06:00

Peter Beinart: How Ron Paul Will Change the GOP in 2012

Dec 27, 2011 4:45 AM EST The libertarian upstart isn’t just stirring controversy; he’s threatening to expose profound divisions within the GOP. Peter Beinart on how Paul will change the Republican Party in 2012.

Print Email Comments (119) We haven’t even said goodbye to 2011, but I want to be first in line with my person of the year prediction for 2012: Ron Paul. I don’t think Paul is going to win the presidency, or even win the Republican nomination. But he’s going to come close enough to change the GOP forever.

Washington Republicans and political pundits keep depicting Paul as some kind of ideological mutation, the conservative equivalent of a black swan. They’re wrong. Ask any historically-minded conservative who the most conservative president of the 20th Century was, and they’ll likely say Calvin Coolidge. No president tried as hard to make the federal government irrelevant. It’s said that Coolidge was so terrified of actually doing something as president that he tried his best not even to speak. But in 1925, Silent Cal did open his mouth long enough to spell out his foreign policy vision, and what he said could be emblazoned on a Ron Paul for President poster: “The people have had all the war, all the taxation, and all the military service they want.”

Small government conservatism, the kind to which today’s Republicans swear fealty, was born in the 1920s not only in reaction to the progressive movement’s efforts to use government to regulate business, but in reaction to World War I, which conservatives rightly saw as a crucial element of the government expansion they feared. To be a small government conservative in the 1920s and 1930s was, for the most part, to vehemently oppose military spending while insisting that the US never, ever get mired in another European war.

Even after World War II, Mr. Republican—Robert Taft—opposed the creation of NATO and called the Korean War unconstitutional. Dwight Eisenhower worked feverishly to scale back the Truman-era defense spending that he feared would bankrupt America and rob it of its civil liberties. Even conservative luminaries like William F. Buckley and Barry Goldwater who embraced the global anti-communist struggle made it clear that they were doing so with a heavy heart. Global military commitments, they explained, represented a tragic departure from small government conservatism, a departure justified only by the uniquely satanic nature of the Soviet threat.

Republican presidential candidate, Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas speaks during a campaign stop in Dubuque, Iowa, Thursday, Dec. 22, 2011., Charlie Riedel / AP Photo
The cold war lasted half a century, but isolationism never left the conservative DNA. And when the Soviet Union collapsed, some of America’s most prominent conservative intellectuals—people like Irving Kristol, Jeane Kirkpatrick and Pat Buchanan—argued that the GOP should become the party of Coolidge and Taft once again. The Republican Congress of the 1990s bitterly opposed Bill Clinton’s wars in the Balkans, and Buchanan, running on an isolationist platform, briefly led the GOP presidential field in 1996. Even the pre-9/11 Bush administration was so hostile to increased military spending that the Weekly Standard called on Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to resign.

Given this history, it’s entirely predictable that in the wake of two disillusioning wars, a diminishing al Qaeda threat and mounting debt, someone like Ron Paul would come along. In Washington, Republican elites are enmeshed in a defense-industrial complex with a commercial interest in America’s global military footprint. But listen to Bill O’Reilly or Rush Limbaugh and see how often you hear them demanding that America keep fighting in Afghanistan, or even attack Iran. According to a November CBS News poll, as many Republicans said the U.S. should decrease its troop presence in Afghanistan as said America should increase it or keep it the same. In the same survey, only 22 percent of Republicans called Iran’s nuclear program “a threat that requires military action now” compared to more than fifty percent who said it “can be contained with diplomacy.” Almost three-quarters of Republicans said the U.S. should not try to change dictatorships to democracies.
The dominant storyline at the Republican convention will be figuring out how to appease Paul.

There are certainly Republicans out there who support the Bush-Cheney neo-imperialist foreign policy vision. But they’re split among the top tier presidential candidates. Paul has the isolationists all to himself. Moreover, his two top opponents—Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich—not only back a big-government foreign policy agenda, but have periodically backed a big-government domestic agenda as well. In other words, they personify the argument at the heart of Paul’s campaign: that if you love a powerful Pentagon, you’ll end up loving other parts of the government bureaucracy as well.

Since the Iowa caucuses generally reward organization and passion, I suspect Paul will win them easily. That would likely propel him to a strong showing in libertarian New Hampshire. Somehow, I think Romney and the Republican establishment will find a way to defeat him in the vicious and expensive struggle that follows. But the dominant storyline at the Republican convention will be figuring out how to appease Paul sufficiently to ensure that he doesn’t launch a third party bid. And in so doing, the GOP will legitimize its isolationist wing in a way it hasn’t since 9/11.
In truth, the modern Republican Party has always been a house divided, pulled between its desire to crusade against evil abroad and its fear that that crusade will empower the evil of big government at home. In 2012, I suspect, Ron Paul will expose that division in a way it has not been exposed in a long time. And Republicans will not soon paper it over again.

Michael Connelly - The Drop

2011-12-27T09:21:00.004-06:00

Michael Connelly seems to be one of our most successful crime writers. I usually read a crime nove or two per year. It turns out that I've read several Connelly books this year. His two continuing protagonists are Mickey Haller, the Lincoln lawyer, and Harry Bosch, the detective. This is the latest Bosch novel.

It's good. It's entertaining, mostly for the character of Bosch, a widower with a 15-yr. old daughter, who is in the last 5 years of his law enforcement career. He contines his job with passion although he occasionally looks forward to quitting.

The plot is fun but the end is dull. The novel ends with a thud rather than a flash, but that's OK. I don't expect to go back and read the earlier Bosch novels, but I am likely to read new ones going forward.

Science vs. Anti-Science

2011-12-27T08:59:00.000-06:00

The Journal of the American Enterprise Institute
ARTICLE TOOLS EMAIL THE EDITOR PRINT Share ArticleScience and the Chattering Classes
By Daniel Akst
Friday, December 16, 2011

Filed under: Science & Technology

To speak out against the anti-scientific orthodoxy that prevails among large segments of the educated class is to make yourself the skunk at the garden party.

Imagine yourself at one of those fashionable dinner parties you go to now and then—you know, the kind where everybody has retro-chic eyeglasses and au courant haircuts, and the food isn’t just vegetarian but organic.

You make the mistake of mentioning your headache and the woman on your left offers you some capsules from the health food store. Here is your side of the ensuing conversation:

“Oh, thanks, but you know I only take medications that have been subjected to rigorous double-blind testing... Really? Well, maybe, but I still kind of prefer science… Yup, I know. But hey, maybe all those chemicals are somehow good for us—maybe that’s why life expectancy goes up every year! Ha ha. Oh, gee, sorry. My wife thought it was funny, and she actually had cancer… What? Sure, some things are sacred, but… Gosh, I’m not sure I ever feel ‘spiritual.’ How will I know it when I do? Is it like sneezing?”

Pity the poor rationalist in polite company. Inevitably, diet has come up, and if the party is in Southern California, chances are somebody was “detoxifying.” But to speak out against the anti-scientific orthodoxy that prevails among large segments of the educated class is to paint a stripe down your back and make yourself the skunk at the garden party.

Technology and ignorance have succeeded where religion has failed: in draping the world in a cloak of mystery, but one we find more threatening than enchanting.Food is at the center of elites’ anxieties about science and modernity, yet the truth is that it has become a scapegoat, or perhaps I should say scapetofu, for a host of imaginary sins we associate with technology. The timing of this obsession is no surprise; never before has such complex technology occupied such a central place in the economy, to say nothing of daily life. Yet by and large, when we chew on the fruits of science, they are sweet. Thanks to science—not so much medical as industrial—life expectancy increases every year, mostly as a function of affluence. So why is science—to say nothing of the very idea of progress—so unfashionable?

One obvious reason is that, among the chattering classes, hardly anybody knows anything about it. Today’s children of the native-born bourgeoisie study cinema or gender studies or even marketing, but not so much physics or chemistry, at least in my experience. It's indicative, perhaps, that in 2006 (the most recent year for which I could find data), foreign students earned nearly two-thirds of the U.S. doctorate degrees in engineering and computer sciences, while snaring about half of those in the physical sciences and math. Mercifully, many of these foreign students stay.

But for too many Americans, science is something alien and abstract. Max Weber observed nearly a century ago that, by explaining so many natural phenomena, science has lead to the “disenchantment” of the modern world. What a difference 100 years makes! Nowadays we’re surrounded by products of technology (from gelcaps to smartphones) whose essential workings are unintelligible to all but a specialized few. The result is that technology and ignorance have succeeded where religion has failed: in draping the world in a cloak of mystery, but one we find more threatening than enchanting.

Food has become a scapegoat, or perhaps I should say scapetofu, for a host of imaginary sins we associate with technology.With its great stress on specialization, capitalism has eroded the kind of homely technological skills Americans typically possessed a generation ago. Most of us no longer work on our own cars, for instance, and given electronic fuel injection and other newfangled features, we probably couldn’t even if we wanted to. Heck, a lot of us can’t even cook our own food.

In our system, it pays for people to develop knowledge that is deep but narrow, with the consequence that more and more of what goes on around us is shrouded in a fog of intimidating complexity. Newspaper readership, that traditional barometer of the well-informed public, is on the decline, and newspapers that used to have staff expertise in science have cut it back drastically. Broadcast media are especially inept—or uninterested—in reporting on science and technology, except of course when it’s supposedly killing us.

Another reason for people’s discomfort with the products of science might be our sense of the fragility of technological life, which is underscored whenever we read about shadowy Chinese hackers or the rising threat of global warming. Sooner or later, many of us are convinced, we are destined to be hoist by our own petard, victims of the false god of technology. In our high-tech vehicles and air-conditioned homes bristling with microchips, we yearn for some mythical pre-technological innocence the way some Chekhov characters yearn for Moscow. At least until we visit the doctor, at which point we want all the technology in the world brought to bear.

Of course, suspicion of science and technology goes way back. Forbidden knowledge was at the root of our troubles back in the Garden of Eden, and England's Luddites later attacked the newfangled looms that were about to make clothes more affordable for everyone. Mary Shelley, with Frankenstein, and Robert Louis Stevenson, with Jekyll and Hyde, were just two of the most prominent writers who warned against the hazards of invention.

Today’s children of the native-born bourgeoisie study cinema or gender studies or even marketing, but not so much physics or chemistry.Science itself, or perhaps its acolytes, has given us ample reason for suspicion, too, although humanity is an awfully fickle lover. We loved science, for instance, for giving us the atom bomb and nuclear power when those things seemed essential and good; only later did we decide they were evil. Asbestos was at one time a wonder product.

In our country, progress sometimes seems a victim of its own success. If most kids are vaccinated, after all, why not exempt your own children from the infinitesimal risks associated with inoculation, in effect free-riding on the willingness of everyone else to undergo them? You're still relatively safe from disease. Vaccination fears seem to be most prevalent among the young, educated families who ought to be most receptive to the facts—and who in every other way have the most collective outlook on life.

The challenge for business, whose products will contain more and more technology as time goes on, is to increase the general level of comfort in science without making people feel they’re being taken for a ride. More and better science in the schools would be a great start. And of course, somebody needs to help the media distinguish between bogus risks (non-organic produce) and real risks (eating too few fruits and vegetables).

Food irradiation is a great example of a safe, effective technology that could save lives, if only people could get over their terror of it. It may not be true, in this arena, that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. But it’s close.

Daniel Akst is a columnist and editorial writer for Newsday.

The Reagan Soviet Union Myth

2011-12-26T13:49:00.003-06:00

by Leslie Gelb

Dec 23, 2011 11:00 PM EST This month is the 20th anniversary of its end, but few remember how it dominated our lives. What does stick in people's heads, writes Leslie H. Gelb, is wrong—that Reagan won the war with big military spending and toughness.

As the Soviet flag was lowered from atop the Kremlin 20 years ago this month for the last time, it marked the first time in modern history that major powers ended their struggles without war. After threatening American values and interests at home and abroad for nearly half a century, the Soviet Union and the Cold War simply vanished. The perilous contest died, but a dangerous myth lived and thrived-- that President Ronald Reagan won the day with unmatchable hikes in military spending and by being tough and uncompromising. Today, that myth tugs daily in wrong directions regarding the most momentous U.S. policy decisions in hotspots like Iran, North Korea, Afghanistan, and China.

The myth that military power and true grit conquer all locks every major dispute into a test of wills. It blocks the full deployment of American powers. It does no justice to the sophisticated diplomacy employed by Reagan and his successor, George H.W. Bush. Above all, it blinds today’s policymakers from seeing clearly what actually won the Cold War and what matters most in 21st-century global affairs—the strength of the U.S. economy.
Without doubt, superior arms and determination were essential in thwarting the Soviet Union. But diplomacy was at least as critical, especially as the Soviet demise neared, when the Cold War could have concluded not with a whimper, but a bang. At that moment and during the critical period that followed, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush used diplomacy not to make unrealistic demands upon Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, but to help him do what he wanted to do—dismantle the Soviet empire to save the Soviet Union itself and reform the Soviet political and economic system. Gorby was on the ropes. The Berlin Wall had fallen, Soviet troops limped out of Afghanistan, and the Soviet economy was in tatters. Almost everything Gorby wanted to do would reduce the threat to America and its allies. The trick was to help him do it, and that’s what Reagan and Bush did. Pure toughness without sensitive diplomacy would have weakened Gorby in the Kremlin and could have led to more Cold War standoffs, or to war. Toughness tendered with diplomatic compromises led to winning without war.

But the driving force underpinning U.S. military power, grit, and diplomacy was the comparative power of the U.S. economy: the Soviet economy was crashing after many decades of communist corruption, gross military spending, and over-planning, while America’s was still sparking.

Aside from Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, some CIA analysts, and Reagan himself, few saw what was really happening in the early 1980s. Most startlingly, the Soviets’ chief of the general staff, Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov, saw the writing on the wall more clearly than anyone, and saw it long before anyone could claim that Reagan’s military buildup had brought the Soviets to their knees. Here’s what he told me in a mostly off-the-record conversation in March 1983 at a huge conference table in the Soviet Defense Ministry’s conference room ringed by triumphal Soviet divisional flags: “The Cold War is over, and you have won.”

This shocking talk began with my attacking the recent buildup of Soviet missiles in Europe. “Stop the baloney, Leslie,” said the tall, red-haired general famed for his hawkishness. “You know your country has military superiority over my country, and that your superiority is growing.”

“All modern military capability is based on economic innovation, technology, and economic strength,” he continued. “And military technology is based on computers. You are far, far ahead of us with computers.” Now waving his arms, “I will take you around this ministry and you will see that even many offices here don’t have computers. In your country, every little child has a computer from age 5.”
“We are so far behind because our political leadership is afraid of computers. The political leadership in my country sees the free use of computers as fatal to their control of information and their power. So, we are far behind you today, and will be more so tomorrow.”

Ogarkov surely shared his revolutionary views with his fellow Politburo members, who fired him the year following our talk, and then consigned him to a frivolous non-post in Eastern Europe. He died in obscurity in 1994.

Reagan and Ogarkov’s insights notwithstanding, the myth prevailed: Moscow tried and failed to match the Reagan military increases, over-stretched, caved economically, then politically. But here’s the reality as seen by almost all scholars who’ve read the Soviet archives and the CIA experts: far from trying to match Reagan’s massive military buildup, the Soviets held their military expenditures roughly constant throughout the 1980s as a percent of their GDP. As for the claim that Moscow also tried and failed to match Reagan’s Star Wars missile-defense system, that’s also false. They were not starstruck by Star Wars and always felt their huge missile force could overwhelm the Star Wars shield, even in the unlikely event that it worked.

Since those years, America’s foreign policy has paid mostly lip service to the centrality of U.S. economic strength. And it hasn’t pursued politically unpopular diplomacy with bad guys with Reagan-like determination. Reagan, Bush I, Harry Truman, Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, James Baker, Brent Scowcroft, George Shultz—the great American diplomats—did not fear to negotiate, to compromise strategically, and to persist. They had the inner confidence that America’s power allowed for compromises, and that even after compromising with bad guys, the United States had the advantages to land on top. Reagan was right about Moscow being “The Evil Empire.” But that didn’t stop him or our other great statesmen from pursuing sensible compromises in America’s interests.

Castro knew the U.S. game was to use economic ties to overthrow him. Bad guys today in Tehran and Pyongyang are making the same calculus, and they aren’t wrong.
Truman and Eisenhower knew the power of economics. They made enormous economic sacrifices to help Germany and Japan after World War II. There were no guarantees these investments would pay off. And yet, for decades now, these two nations have been among America’s closest and most potent allies. Fidel Castro’s Cuba would have succumbed decades ago had Washington not feared to open up the economic spigots. Fear of being snared by American goodies was the real reason Castro himself didn’t want those spigots opened.

Castro knew the U.S. game was to use economic ties to overthrow him. Bad guys today in Tehran and Pyongyang are making the same calculus, and they aren’t wrong. To be blunt, don’t expect them to abandon their nuclear weapons or nuclear programs in return for our economic lures. They have to believe they can survive without their nukes. Convincing them will take brilliant diplomacy and compromise. Remember, the alternative is war—and perhaps after 9/11, Iraq, and Afghanistan, Americans can now glimpse its prohibitive costs and limitations.

As for China, no sane American military expert would advocate a land war in Asia. The competition and the cooperation will continue mainly along economic lines. For sure, military competition will grow as well. But which country prevails in the burgeoning global tug of war will turn directly on which economy works best.
Now, 20 years since the Cold War’s end, both Russia and the United States remain cursed—Moscow by the distracting memory of a greatness that it can never recover, and Washington by its inability to shake the myth that military power and true grit conquer all. Russia’s good fortune rests on its leaders getting over the lust for new global power and getting on with genuine democracy at home. Moscow still has a long way to go, judging by recent protests in major Russian cities over manipulated parliamentary elections. America’s good future rests in good measure on setting aside its triumphal myths and getting down to the hard business of rejuvenating its diplomacy and its economy.

About that Cabin

2011-12-26T12:48:00.002-06:00

DREW GILPIN FAUST on UNCLE TOM'S CABIN

History . Literature
Much, But Not Everything
Drew Gilpin FaustDecember 25, 2011 | 12:00 am Print
Mightier Than the Sword: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Battle for America
by David Reynolds
W.W. Norton & Company, 351 pp., $27.95

AS THE OBSOLESCENCE and even the demise of the book are widely foretold, it is all the more important—and comforting—to recognize how a book can change the world. It is hard to think of many that have done so more emphatically than Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Lincoln is famously said to have greeted its author, Harriet Beecher Stowe, in 1862 by inquiring, “So this is the little lady who started this great war?” And whether he actually ever made the remark or not, the very fact of her visit to the White House and the emergence of the legend of his respectful, if somewhat patronizing, salutation are sufficient evidence of the remarkable influence that Stowe’s words claimed in mid-nineteenth-century America.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin was at once a novel and an “event,” as Theodore Parker proclaimed soon after it appeared. Today its publication is appropriately included—along with such occurrences as the Dred Scott decision and John Brown’s raid—on timelines of incidents that propelled the nation towards civil war. In the mounting sectional conflict, words assumed the power of deeds, acts of political as well as social transformation. Originating as a serial, Uncle Tom’s Cabin appeared in book form in the spring of 1852. By mid-October, 120,000 copies had been sold; by the following spring, 310,000. In England it was even more successful, with sales of a million within a year. Michael Winship has called it “the world’s first true blockbuster.” It may also have been the first bestseller to produce spin-offs-which came to be known as “Tomitudes”: engravings, games, puzzles, songs and sheet music, dramatizations-in Europe as well as the United States. The book was a phenomenon, in its popularity and its influence.

Yet by the early twentieth century it was out of print and would remain so for decades. “Uncle Tom” became an epithet, representing not the admirable saintliness and sacrifice with which Stowe had sought to imbue her protagonist, but—in the eyes of African Americans such as W.E.B. DuBois and James Baldwin—an embarrassing embodiment of black obsequiousness and self-loathing. In the white segregated South, scorn for Stowe’s book claimed different origins: it was seen as part of a long tradition of Northern meddling in Southern racial arrangements. In South Carolina in 1900, a teacher might well make his students raise their right hands and swear never to read Uncle Tom’s Cabin—an unwitting nod to the book’s power as well as an affirmation of the white South’s racial solidarity. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was certainly never taught as literature in the North or the South, because it was seen by critics and scholars as sentimental and overwrought—less art than propaganda. Hawthorne dismissed Stowe as one of his era’s “scribbling women.”

But Stowe and Uncle Tom’s Cabin never did disappear entirely. Perhaps the first modern appreciation of her and her masterwork came from Edmund Wilson, not the easiest or the most gentle of critics. His great book Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War, which appeared in 1962 at the very outset of the conflict’s centennial, opens with a lengthy chapter on Stowe. Wilson emerges from his consideration a grudging admirer, acknowledging the prejudices he brought to the text, but demonstrating a thorough conversion. ”To expose oneself in maturity to Uncle Tom,” he confessed, was “a startling experience.” He admitted that “it is a much more impressive work than one has ever been allowed to suspect.” Wilson hailed the “vitality” of its characters, the book’s “eruptive force,” the clear evidence of the author’s “critical mind.” Comparing her favorably with Dickens and Gogol, he concluded she was “no contemptible novelist.” He became a fan in spite of himself.

The Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s drew more attention to Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a vehicle of scorn than to either the literary power or the abolitionist sympathies of the novel. It was the emergence of Second Wave feminism and the resultant growth of interest in women’s history that ultimately led to a systematic rehabilitation of the book as an essential example of the moral authority and reach of nineteenth-century American women. The cult of domesticity, the centrality of evangelical religion, the influence of social reform, and the impact of the female pen shaped mid-century society and culture in ways that reached well beyond the home. The era’s “scribbling women”—with Stowe the most successful among them—were both the cause and the result of this transformation.

The past quarter century has witnessed sustained interest in Uncle Tom’s Cabin and its author. The book’s original popularity derived in no small part from its invocation of so many of the critical concerns of nineteenth-century American culture. As a result it can serve as an almost unsurpassed point of entry into the assumptions of that historical moment. It is a marvelous book to teach—as I have done with undergraduates, graduate students, and summer seminars of high school teachers. It is a document that captures the sensibilities of people both like and unlike ourselves, and it describes a past world with voices and characters that speak to us across the barriers of space and time—Tom, Topsy, Eva, Cassy, Mrs. Bird, St. Clare, Ophelia—even Simon Legree. That Stowe achieved such influence in a period when American feminism was making its first appearances, and that she did so with a text intended to advance the anti-slavery cause, further contributes to its present day relevance, for these two nineteenth-century social movements have had modern manifestations that have shaped our age as fundamentally as they did hers.

Through the work of Jane Tompkins, Mary Kelley, and others, Uncle Tom’s Cabin has played a key role in reorienting the study of the American Renaissance to include women alongside its iconic men—Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Melville. In 1995, Joan Hedrick won a Pulitzer Prize for the first full-scale biography of Stowe in half a century. And Uncle Tom entered promptly into the digital era as well. In 1852, the book had strained the technological capacities of its time, requiring, according to its publisher, that three paper mills and more than a hundred book binders remain constantly at work to meet the demand of eager readers. Today’s technology has extended Tom’s reach through a website created at the University of Virginia that has served as a founding model for the digital humanities. “Uncle Tom’s Cabin and American Culture: A Multi Media Archive” is directed by Stephen Railton and funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, offering texts, images, songs, poems, even film that document the book’s origins, its later renditions on stage and screen, as well as assessments of its history and impact by a range of distinguished scholars. The website makes twelve editions of the book available on a virtual shelf.

David Reynolds, the author of widely read volumes on the nineteenth century, has not only joined the twenty-first century chorus of appreciation for Stowe and her novel. He has reached well beyond his predecessors in his claims for its influence. His book is true to its excessive title: it represents Uncle Tom’s Cabin as not just an influence on American life, but a force nearly unmatched in its social and cultural impact. For Reynolds, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was “central to redefining American democracy on a more egalitarian basis”; it made the Bible “relevant to contemporary life,” and it “replaced the venal religion of the churches with a new, abolitionist Christianity.” It also “established a whole new school of popular antislavery literature,” and at the same time gave rise to the pro-slavery argument, which is customarily seen as emerging in force in the 1830s but in Reynolds’s portrayal does not substantially appear until prompted by Stowe’s novel more than twenty years later.

The book’s dramatic versions were equally revolutionary, in Reynolds’s account, serving even as a “major step toward making theatergoing respectable” and leading also to the creation of the matinee and the long theatrical run. Uncle Tom’s Cabin also influenced James and Howells, and profoundly shaped realist fiction and, later, D.W. Griffiths and the emergence of realist film. By century’s end, moreover, Uncle Tom’s Cabin had set off a “chain reaction” that led to Birth of a Nation “and the revitalized Ku Klux Klan” and also “the self-assertion and protest on the part of DuBois and other African-Americans,” resulting in the establishment of the NAACP. Even more than seventy-five years after the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the appearance of Gone With the Wind was, Reynolds finds, “largely in reply to Stowe.”

This one book did all that? “Chain reaction” with its invocation of nuclear force, seems a more apt metaphor than the “sword” of Reynolds’s title to capture his assessment of the book and its might. Lincoln may have suggested that Stowe caused a war, but Reynolds offers much more: he assigns to Stowe central responsibility for the unfolding history of much of the following century. As we enter into the sesquicentennial celebration of the Civil War, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s achievement reminds us that we must remember more than battles and statesmen if we are to understand the causes, the conflict and its aftermath. But swords and statesmen and armies and governments and writers and preachers all played their complex and interdependent parts in what Reynolds calls the “Battle for America.” DuBois, Margaret Mitchell, D.W. Griffiths, and Henry James, not to mention Lee, Grant, and Lincoln, would likely be surprised to learn that the twenty-first century could imagine that the battle over race and power, not to mention culture and values, was really all about Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Irony: Obama is the Real Conservative

2011-12-25T19:06:00.002-06:00

By E.J. Dionne Jr., Updated: Sunday, December 25, 7:00 PM

At a moment when the nation wonders whether politicians can agree on anything, here is something that unites the Republican presidential candidates — and all of them with President Obama: Everyone agrees that the 2012 election will be a turning point involving one of the most momentous choices in U.S. history.

True, candidates (and columnists) regularly cast an impending election as the most important ever. Campaigning last week in Pella, Iowa, Republican Rick Santorum acknowledged as much. But he insisted that this time, the choice really was that fundamental. “The debate,” he said, “is about who we are.”

Speaking not far away, in Mount Pleasant, Newt Gingrich went even further, and was more specific. “This is the most important election since 1860,” he said, “because there’s such a dramatic difference between the best food-stamp president in history and the best paycheck candidate.” Thus did Gingrich combine historic sweep with a cheap and inaccurate attack. Nonetheless, it says a great deal that Gingrich chose to reach all the way back to the election that helped spark the Civil War.

Mitt Romney was on the same page in a speech in Bedford, N.H. “This is an election not to replace a president but to save a vision of America,” he declared. “It’s a choice between two destinies.” Sounding just like Santorum, he urged voters to ask: “Who are we as Americans, and what kind of America do we want for our children?”

Obama could not agree more. “This is not just another political debate,” the president said in his theme-setting speech in Osawatomie, Kan., earlier this month. “This is a make-or-break moment for the middle class, and for all those who are fighting to get into the middle class.”

On this one, Santorum, Gingrich, Romney and Obama all have it right. For the first time since Barry Goldwater made the effort in 1964, the Republican Party is taking a run at overturning the consensus that has governed U.S. political life since the Progressive era.

Obama is defending a tradition that sees government as an essential actor in the nation’s economy, a guarantor of fair rules of competition, a countervailing force against excessive private power, a check on the inequalities that capitalism can produce, and an instrument that can open opportunity for those born without great advantages.

Today’s Republicans cast the federal government as an oppressive force, a drag on the economy and an enemy of private initiative. Texas Gov. Rick Perry continues to promise, as he did last week during a campaign stop in Davenport, Iowa, to be a president who would make “Washington, D.C., as inconsequential in your life as he can make it.” That far-reaching word “inconsequential” implies a lot more than trims in budgets or taxes.

The GOP is engaged in a wholesale effort to redefine the government help that Americans take for granted as an effort to create a radically new, statist society. Consider Romney’s claim in his Bedford speech: “President Obama believes that government should create equal outcomes. In an entitlement society, everyone receives the same or similar rewards, regardless of education, effort and willingness to take risk. That which is earned by some is redistributed to the others. And the only people who truly enjoy any real rewards are those who do the redistributing — the government.”

Obama believes no such thing. If he did, why are so many continuing to make bundles on Wall Street? As my colleagues Greg Sargent and Paul Krugman have been insisting, Romney is saying things about the president that are flatly, grossly and shamefully untrue. But Romney’s sleight of hand is revealing: Republicans are increasingly inclined to argue that any redistribution (and Social Security, Medicare, student loans, veterans benefits and food stamps are all redistributive) is but a step down the road to some radically egalitarian dystopia.

Obama will thus be the conservative in 2012, in the truest sense of that word. He is the candidate defending the modestly redistributive and regulatory government the country has relied on since the New Deal, and that neither Ronald Reagan nor George W. Bush dismantled. The rhetoric of the 2012 Republicans suggests they want to go far beyond where Reagan or Bush ever went. And here’s the irony: By raising the stakes of 2012 so high, Republicans will be playing into Obama’s hands. The GOP might well win a referendum on the state of the economy. But if this is instead a larger-scale referendum on whether government should be “inconsequential,” Republicans will find the consequences to be very disappointing.

Living in the Multiverse

2011-12-25T14:53:00.003-06:00

The accidental universe:
Science's crisis of faith
By Alan P. Lightman

Alan Lightman, a physicist and novelist, teaches at MIT. His new book, Mr g: A Novel About the Creation, will be published in January by Pantheon.
In the fifth century B.C., the philosopher Democritus proposed that all matter was made of tiny and indivisible atoms, which came in various sizes and textures—some hard and some soft, some smooth and some thorny. The atoms themselves were taken as givens. In the nineteenth century, scientists discovered that the chemical properties of atoms repeat periodically (and created the periodic table to reflect this fact), but the origins of such patterns remained mysterious. It wasn’t until the twentieth century that scientists learned that the properties of an atom are determined by the number and placement of its electrons, the subatomic particles that orbit its nucleus. And we now know that all atoms heavier than helium were created in the nuclear furnaces of stars.

The history of science can be viewed as the recasting of phenomena that were once thought to be accidents as phenomena that can be understood in terms of fundamental causes and principles. One can add to the list of the fully explained: the hue of the sky, the orbits of planets, the angle of the wake of a boat moving through a lake, the six-sided patterns of snowflakes, the weight of a flying bustard, the temperature of boiling water, the size of raindrops, the circular shape of the sun. All these phenomena and many more, once thought to have been fixed at the beginning of time or to be the result of random events thereafter, have been explained as necessary consequences of the fundamental laws of nature—laws discovered by human beings.

This long and appealing trend may be coming to an end. Dramatic developments in cosmological findings and thought have led some of the world’s premier physicists to propose that our universe is only one of an enormous number of universes with wildly varying properties, and that some of the most basic features of our particular universe are indeed mere accidents—a random throw of the cosmic dice. In which case, there is no hope of ever explaining our universe’s features in terms of fundamental causes and principles.

It is perhaps impossible to say how far apart the different universes may be, or whether they exist simultaneously in time. Some may have stars and galaxies like ours. Some may not. Some may be finite in size. Some may be infinite. Physicists call the totality of universes the “multiverse.” Alan Guth, a pioneer in cosmological thought, says that “the multiple-universe idea severely limits our hopes to understand the world from fundamental principles.” And the philosophical ethos of science is torn from its roots. As put to me recently by Nobel Prize–winning physicist Steven Weinberg, a man as careful in his words as in his mathematical calculations, “We now find ourselves at a historic fork in the road we travel to understand the laws of nature. If the multiverse idea is correct, the style of fundamental physics will be radically changed.”

The scientists most distressed by Weinberg’s “fork in the road” are theoretical physicists. Theoretical physics is the deepest and purest branch of science. It is the outpost of science closest to philosophy, and religion. Experimental scientists occupy themselves with observing and measuring the cosmos, finding out what stuff exists, no matter how strange that stuff may be. Theoretical physicists, on the other hand, are not satisfied with observing the universe. They want to know why. They want to explain all the properties of the universe in terms of a few fundamental principles and parameters. These fundamental principles, in turn, lead to the “laws of nature,” which govern the behavior of all matter and energy. An example of a fundamental principle in physics, first proposed by Galileo in 1632 and extended by Einstein in 1905, is the following: All observers traveling at constant velocity relative to one another should witness identical laws of nature. From this principle, Einstein derived his theory of special relativity. An example of a fundamental parameter is the mass of an electron, considered one of the two dozen or so “elementary” particles of nature. As far as physicists are concerned, the fewer the fundamental principles and parameters, the better. The underlying hope and belief of this enterprise has always been that these basic principles are so restrictive that only one, self-consistent universe is possible, like a crossword puzzle with only one solution. That one universe would be, of course, the universe we live in. Theoretical physicists are Platonists. Until the past few years, they agreed that the entire universe, the one universe, is generated from a few mathematical truths and principles of symmetry, perhaps throwing in a handful of parameters like the mass of the electron. It seemed that we were closing in on a vision of our universe in which everything could be calculated, predicted, and understood.

However, two theories in physics, eternal inflation and string theory, now suggest that the same fundamental principles from which the laws of nature derive may lead to many different self-consistent universes, with many different properties. It is as if you walked into a shoe store, had your feet measured, and found that a size 5 would fit you, a size 8 would also fit, and a size 12 would fit equally well. Such wishy-washy results make theoretical physicists extremely unhappy. Evidently, the fundamental laws of nature do not pin down a single and unique universe. According to the current thinking of many physicists, we are living in one of a vast number of universes. We are living in an accidental universe. We are living in a universe uncalculable by science.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

“Back in the 1970s and 1980s,” says Alan Guth, “the feeling was that we were so smart, we almost had everything figured out.” What physicists had figured out were very accurate theories of three of the four fundamental forces of nature: the strong nuclear force that binds atomic nuclei together, the weak force that is responsible for some forms of radioactive decay, and the electromagnetic force between electrically charged particles. And there were prospects for merging the theory known as quantum physics with Einstein’s theory of the fourth force, gravity, and thus pulling all of them into the fold of what physicists called the Theory of Everything, or the Final Theory. These theories of the 1970s and 1980s required the specification of a couple dozen parameters corresponding to the masses of the elementary particles, and another half dozen or so parameters corresponding to the strengths of the fundamental forces. The next step would then have been to derive most of the elementary particle masses in terms of one or two fundamental masses and define the strengths of all the fundamental forces in terms of a single fundamental force.

There were good reasons to think that physicists were poised to take this next step. Indeed, since the time of Galileo, physics has been extremely successful in discovering principles and laws that have fewer and fewer free parameters and that are also in close agreement with the observed facts of the world. For example, the observed rotation of the ellipse of the orbit of Mercury, 0.012 degrees per century, was successfully calculated using the theory of general relativity, and the observed magnetic strength of an electron, 2.002319 magnetons, was derived using the theory of quantum electrodynamics. More than any other science, physics brims with highly accurate agreements between theory and experiment.

Guth started his physics career in this sunny scientific world. Now sixty-four years old and a professor at MIT, he was in his early thirties when he proposed a major revision to the Big Bang theory, something called inflation. We now have a great deal of evidence suggesting that our universe began as a nugget of extremely high density and temperature about 14 billion years ago and has been expanding, thinning out, and cooling ever since. The theory of inflation proposes that when our universe was only about a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second old, a peculiar type of energy caused the cosmos to expand very rapidly. A tiny fraction of a second later, the universe returned to the more leisurely rate of expansion of the standard Big Bang model. Inflation solved a number of outstanding problems in cosmology, such as why the universe appears so homogeneous on large scales.

When I visited Guth in his third-floor office at MIT one cool day in May, I could barely see him above the stacks of paper and empty Diet Coke bottles on his desk. More piles of paper and dozens of magazines littered the floor. In fact, a few years ago Guth won a contest sponsored by the Boston Globe for the messiest office in the city. The prize was the services of a professional organizer for one day. “She was actually more a nuisance than a help. She took piles of envelopes from the floor and began sorting them according to size.” He wears aviator-style eyeglasses, keeps his hair long, and chain-drinks Diet Cokes. “The reason I went into theoretical physics,” Guth tells me, “is that I liked the idea that we could understand everything—i.e., the universe—in terms of mathematics and logic.” He gives a bitter laugh. We have been talking about the multiverse.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

While challenging the Platonic dream of theoretical physicists, the multiverse idea does explain one aspect of our universe that has unsettled some scientists for years: according to various calculations, if the values of some of the fundamental parameters of our universe were a little larger or a little smaller, life could not have arisen. For example, if the nuclear force were a few percentage points stronger than it actually is, then all the hydrogen atoms in the infant universe would have fused with other hydrogen atoms to make helium, and there would be no hydrogen left. No hydrogen means no water. Although we are far from certain about what conditions are necessary for life, most biologists believe that water is necessary. On the other hand, if the nuclear force were substantially weaker than what it actually is, then the complex atoms needed for biology could not hold together. As another example, if the relationship between the strengths of the gravitational force and the electromagnetic force were not close to what it is, then the cosmos would not harbor any stars that explode and spew out life-supporting chemical elements into space or any other stars that form planets. Both kinds of stars are required for the emergence of life. The strengths of the basic forces and certain other fundamental parameters in our universe appear to be “fine-tuned” to allow the existence of life. The recognition of this finetuning led British physicist Brandon Carter to articulate what he called the anthropic principle, which states that the universe must have the parameters it does because we are here to observe it. Actually, the word anthropic, from the Greek for “man,” is a misnomer: if these fundamental parameters were much different from what they are, it is not only human beings who would not exist. No life of any kind would exist.

If such conclusions are correct, the great question, of course, is why these fundamental parameters happen to lie within the range needed for life. Does the universe care about life? Intelligent design is one answer. Indeed, a fair number of theologians, philosophers, and even some scientists have used fine-tuning and the anthropic principle as evidence of the existence of God. For example, at the 2011 Christian Scholars’ Conference at Pepperdine University, Francis Collins, a leading geneticist and director of the National Institutes of Health, said, “To get our universe, with all of its potential for complexities or any kind of potential for any kind of life-form, everything has to be precisely defined on this knife edge of improbability…. [Y]ou have to see the hands of a creator who set the parameters to be just so because the creator was interested in something a little more complicated than random particles.”

Intelligent design, however, is an answer to fine-tuning that does not appeal to most scientists. The multiverse offers another explanation. If there are countless different universes with different properties—for example, some with nuclear forces much stronger than in our universe and some with nuclear forces much weaker—then some of those universes will allow the emergence of life and some will not. Some of those universes will be dead, lifeless hulks of matter and energy, and others will permit the emergence of cells, plants and animals, minds. From the huge range of possible universes predicted by the theories, the fraction of universes with life is undoubtedly small. But that doesn’t matter. We live in one of the universes that permits life because otherwise we wouldn’t be here to ask the question.

The explanation is similar to the explanation of why we happen to live on a planet that has so many nice things for our comfortable existence: oxygen, water, a temperature between the freezing and boiling points of water, and so on. Is this happy coincidence just good luck, or an act of Providence, or what? No, it is simply that we could not live on planets without such properties. Many other planets exist that are not so hospitable to life, such as Uranus, where the temperature is –371 degrees Fahrenheit, and Venus, where it rains sulfuric acid.

The multiverse offers an explanation to the fine-tuning conundrum that does not require the presence of a Designer. As Steven Weinberg says: “Over many centuries science has weakened the hold of religion, not by disproving the existence of God but by invalidating arguments for God based on what we observe in the natural world. The multiverse idea offers an explanation of why we find ourselves in a universe favorable to life that does not rely on the benevolence of a creator, and so if correct will leave still less support for religion.”

Some physicists remain skeptical of the anthropic principle and the reliance on multiple universes to explain the values of the fundamental parameters of physics. Others, such as Weinberg and Guth, have reluctantly accepted the anthropic principle and the multiverse idea as together providing the best possible explanation for the observed facts.

If the multiverse idea is correct, then the historic mission of physics to explain all the properties of our universe in terms of fundamental principles—to explain why the properties of our universe must necessarily be what they are—is futile, a beautiful philosophical dream that simply isn’t true. Our universe is what it is because we are here. The situation could be likened to a school of intelligent fish who one day began wondering why their world is completely filled with water. Many of the fish, the theorists, hope to prove that the entire cosmos necessarily has to be filled with water. For years, they put their minds to the task but can never quite seem to prove their assertion. Then, a wizened group of fish postulates that maybe they are fooling themselves. Maybe there are, they suggest, many other worlds, some of them completely dry, and everything in between.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The most striking example of fine-tuning, and one that practically demands the multiverse to explain it, is the unexpected detection of what scientists call dark energy. Little more than a decade ago, using robotic telescopes in Arizona, Chile, Hawaii, and outer space that can comb through nearly a million galaxies a night, astronomers discovered that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. As mentioned previously, it has been known since the late 1920s that the universe is expanding; it’s a central feature of the Big Bang model. Orthodox cosmological thought held that the expansion is slowing down. After all, gravity is an attractive force; it pulls masses closer together. So it was quite a surprise in 1998 when two teams of astronomers announced that some unknown force appears to be jamming its foot down on the cosmic accelerator pedal. The expansion is speeding up. Galaxies are flying away from each other as if repelled by antigravity. Says Robert Kirshner, one of the team members who made the discovery: “This is not your father’s universe.” (In October, members of both teams were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics.)

Physicists have named the energy associated with this cosmological force dark energy. No one knows what it is. Not only invisible, dark energy apparently hides out in empty space. Yet, based on our observations of the accelerating rate of expansion, dark energy constitutes a whopping three quarters of the total energy of the universe. It is the invisible elephant in the room of science.

The amount of dark energy, or more precisely the amount of dark energy in every cubic centimeter of space, has been calculated to be about one hundred-millionth (10–8) of an erg per cubic centimeter. (For comparison, a penny dropped from waist-high hits the floor with an energy of about three hundred thousand—that is, 3 × 105—ergs.) This may not seem like much, but it adds up in the vast volumes of outer space. Astronomers were able to determine this number by measuring the rate of expansion of the universe at different epochs—if the universe is accelerating, then its rate of expansion was slower in the past. From the amount of acceleration, astronomers can calculate the amount of dark energy in the universe.

Theoretical physicists have several hypotheses about the identity of dark energy. It may be the energy of ghostly subatomic particles that can briefly appear out of nothing before selfannihilating and slipping back into the vacuum. According to quantum physics, empty space is a pandemonium of subatomic particles rushing about and then vanishing before they can be seen. Dark energy may also be associated with an as-yet-unobserved force field called the Higgs field, which is sometimes invoked to explain why certain kinds of matter have mass. (Theoretical physicists ponder things that other people do not.) And in the models proposed by string theory, dark energy may be associated with the way in which extra dimensions of space—beyond the usual length, width, and breadth—get compressed down to sizes much smaller than atoms, so that we do not notice them.

These various hypotheses give a fantastically large range for the theoretically possible amounts of dark energy in a universe, from something like 10115 ergs per cubic centimeter to –10115 ergs per cubic centimeter. (A negative value for dark energy would mean that it acts to decelerate the universe, in contrast to what is observed.) Thus, in absolute magnitude, the amount of dark energy actually present in our universe is either very, very small or very, very large compared with what it could be. This fact alone is surprising. If the theoretically possible positive values for dark energy were marked out on a ruler stretching from here to the sun, with zero at one end of the ruler and 10115 ergs per cubic centimeter at the other end, the value of dark energy actually found in our universe (10–8 ergs per cubic centimeter) would be closer to the zero end than the width of an atom.

On one thing most physicists agree: If the amount of dark energy in our universe were only a little bit different than what it actually is, then life could never have emerged. A little more and the universe would accelerate so rapidly that the matter in the young cosmos could never pull itself together to form stars and thence form the complex atoms made in stars. And, going into negative values of dark energy, a little less and the universe would decelerate so rapidly that it would recollapse before there was time to form even the simplest atoms.

Here we have a clear example of fine-tuning: out of all the possible amounts of dark energy that our universe might have, the actual amount lies in the tiny sliver of the range that allows life. There is little argument on this point. It does not depend on assumptions about whether we need liquid water for life or oxygen or particular biochemistries. As before, one is compelled to ask the question: Why does such fine-tuning occur? And the answer many physicists now believe: The multiverse. A vast number of universes may exist, with many different values of the amount of dark energy. Our particular universe is one of the universes with a small value, permitting the emergence of life. We are here, so our universe must be such a universe. We are an accident. From the cosmic lottery hat containing zillions of universes, we happened to draw a universe that allowed life. But then again, if we had not drawn such a ticket, we would not be here to ponder the odds.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The concept of the multiverse is compelling not only because it explains the problem of fine-tuning. As I mentioned earlier, the possibility of the multiverse is actually predicted by modern theories of physics. One such theory, called eternal inflation, is a revision of Guth’s inflation theory developed by Andrei Linde, Paul Steinhardt, and Alex Vilenkin in the early and mid-1980s. In regular inflation theory, the very rapid expansion of the infant universe is caused by an energy field, like dark energy, that is temporarily trapped in a condition that does not represent the lowest possible energy for the universe as a whole—like a marble sitting in a small dent on a table. The marble can stay there, but if it is jostled it will roll out of the dent, roll across the table, and then fall to the floor (which represents the lowest possible energy level). In the theory of eternal inflation, the dark energy field has many different values at different points of space, analogous to lots of marbles sitting in lots of dents on the cosmic table. Moreover, as space expands rapidly, the number of marbles increases. Each of these marbles is jostled by the random processes inherent in quantum mechanics, and some of the marbles will begin rolling across the table and onto the floor. Each marble starts a new Big Bang, essentially a new universe. Thus, the original, rapidly expanding universe spawns a multitude of new universes, in a never-ending process.

String theory, too, predicts the possibility of the multiverse. Originally conceived in the late 1960s as a theory of the strong nuclear force but soon enlarged far beyond that ambition, string theory postulates that the smallest constituents of matter are not subatomic particles like the electron but extremely tiny one-dimensional “strings” of energy. These elemental strings can vibrate at different frequencies, like the strings of a violin, and the different modes of vibration correspond to different fundamental particles and forces. String theories typically require seven dimensions of space in addition to the usual three, which are compacted down to such small sizes that we never experience them, like a three-dimensional garden hose that appears as a one-dimensional line when seen from a great distance. There are, in fact, a vast number of ways that the extra dimensions in string theory can be folded up, and each of the different ways corresponds to a different universe with different physical properties.

It was originally hoped that from a theory of these strings, with very few additional parameters, physicists would be able to explain all the forces and particles of nature—all of reality would be a manifestation of the vibrations of elemental strings. String theory would then be the ultimate realization of the Platonic ideal of a fully explicable cosmos. In the past few years, however, physicists have discovered that string theory predicts not a unique universe but a huge number of possible universes with different properties. It has been estimated that the “string landscape” contains 10500 different possible universes. For all practical purposes, that number is infinite.

It is important to point out that neither eternal inflation nor string theory has anywhere near the experimental support of many previous theories in physics, such as special relativity or quantum electrodynamics, mentioned earlier. Eternal inflation or string theory, or both, could turn out to be wrong. However, some of the world’s leading physicists have devoted their careers to the study of these two theories.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Back to the intelligent fish. The wizened old fish conjecture that there are many other worlds, some with dry land and some with water. Some of the fish grudgingly accept this explanation. Some feel relieved. Some feel like their lifelong ruminations have been pointless. And some remain deeply concerned. Because there is no way they can prove this conjecture. That same uncertainty disturbs many physicists who are adjusting to the idea of the multiverse. Not only must we accept that basic properties of our universe are accidental and uncalculable. In addition, we must believe in the existence of many other universes. But we have no conceivable way of observing these other universes and cannot prove their existence. Thus, to explain what we see in the world and in our mental deductions, we must believe in what we cannot prove.

Sound familiar? Theologians are accustomed to taking some beliefs on faith. Scientists are not. All we can do is hope that the same theories that predict the multiverse also produce many other predictions that we can test here in our own universe. But the other universes themselves will almost certainly remain a conjecture.

“We had a lot more confidence in our intuition before the discovery of dark energy and the multiverse idea,” says Guth. “There will still be a lot for us to understand, but we will miss out on the fun of figuring everything out from first principles.”

One wonders whether a young Alan Guth, considering a career in science today, would choose theoretical physics.

The West and the Rest

2011-12-25T12:53:00.002-06:00

By DONALD KAGAN
Published: November 25, 2011

This is a difficult time in which to present an account — and what amounts to a defense — of the West’s rise to pre-eminence and its unequaled influence in shaping the world today. The West is on the defensive, challenged economically by the ascent of China and politically and militarily by a wave of Islamist hatred. Perhaps as great a challenge is internal. The study of Western civilization, which dominated American education after World War II, has long been under attack, and is increasingly hard to find in our schools and colleges. When it is treated at all, the West is maligned because of its history of slavery and imperialism, an alleged addiction to war and its exclusion of women and nonwhites from its rights and privileges. Some criticize its study as narrow, limiting, arrogant and discriminatory, asserting that it has little or no value for those of non-European origins. Or it is said to be of interest chiefly as a horrible example.

CIVILIZATION

The West and the Rest

By Niall Ferguson

Books of The Times: ‘Civilization’ by Niall Ferguson (November 15, 2011) Niall Ferguson thinks otherwise. A professor at both Harvard University and the Harvard Business School, quite aware of the faults and blemishes of the West, he flatly rejects the view of those who find nothing worthwhile in it, calling their position “absurd.” He recognizes both good and bad sides and decides that in comparison with other civilizations, the better side “came out on top.”

Many of the observations in “Civilization: The West and the Rest” will not win Ferguson friends among the fashionable in today’s academy. He upbraids critics who speak scornfully of “ ‘Eurocentrism’ as if it were some distasteful prejudice.” “The scientific revolution was, by any scientific measure, wholly Eurocentric.” Ferguson pays due respect to the intellectual and scientific contributions of China and Islam, but makes it clear that modern science and technology are fundamentally Western products. He asks if any non-Western state can simply acquire scientific knowledge without accepting other key Western institutions like “private property rights, the rule of law and truly representative government.”

Ferguson is so unfashionable as to speak in defense of imperialism: “It is a truth almost universally acknowledged in the schools and colleges of the Western world that imperialism is the root cause of nearly every modern problem, . . . a convenient alibi for rapacious dictators like Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe.” Contradicting historians who “represent colonial officials as morally equivalent to Nazis or Stalinists,” he points out that in most Asian and African countries “life expectancy began to improve before the end of European colonial rule.”

Ferguson does not attempt a thorough investigation of the many charges made against the West, or a defense against them. Instead, he addresses the interesting and difficult question: “Just why, beginning around 1500, did a few small polities on the western end of the Eurasian landmass come to dominate the rest of the world?” The book’s method, he says, is to tell “a big story,” along with many little ones, but that is not a proper description. Rather than a chronological narrative, Ferguson offers six chapters of what he calls “killer apps,” each addressing a major element in his answer to the question of Western domination: 1) competition, both among and within the European states; 2) science, beginning with the scientific revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries; 3) the rule of law and representative government, based on the rights of private property and representation in elected legislatures; 4) modern medicine; 5) the consumer society that resulted from the Industrial Revolution; and 6) the work ethic. These, he argues, were crucial to the growth of the West’s power, but weak or nonexistent in other societies.

Excellence in these categories, Ferguson says, may explain the West’s remarkable rise, but late in the 19th century “the Rest,” especially Japan, began to catch up in all but internal competition and representative government. By the 1950s states in East Asia, especially and increasingly China, made great strides in economic modernization and now compete successfully against the West. At present, he says, we are experiencing “the end of 500 years of Western predominance,” and he foresees the possibility of a clash between the declining and rising forces. He wonders “whether the weaker will tip over from weakness to outright collapse.”

What’s worse, Ferguson sees the current financial crisis as “an accelerator of an already well-established trend of relative Western decline.” He worries that there may come a moment when a “seemingly random piece of bad news — perhaps a negative report by a rating agency” panics investors, who lose confidence in the credit of the United States. This could cause disaster, “for a complex adaptive system is in big trouble when a critical mass of its constituents loses faith in its viability.”

Nonetheless, Ferguson has not given up on the West; it still has more “institutional advantages than the Rest.” The lack of political competition, the rule of law, freedom of conscience and a free press help explain why countries like China, Iran and Russia “lag behind Western countries in qualitative indices that measure ‘national innovative development’ and ‘national innovative capacity.’ ” Still, his hopes for continued success do not seem very strong. Although the “Western package” offers “the best available set of economic, social and political institutions,” he questions whether Westerners are still able to recognize it.

An element central to all this is education, especially history, and Ferguson is appalled by the decline of historical teaching and knowledge in the Western world. His conclusion is not encouraging: “The biggest threat to Western civilization is posed not by other civilizations, but by our own pusillanimity — and by the historical ignorance that feeds it.”

“Civilization” is part of his solution. The book is the basis for a television series in Britain, and he told an interviewer that it aims to give a “17-year-old boy or girl . . . a lot of history in a very digestible way.” Yet it must be said that bits of history are what they get, not the kind of “big story” one requires to understand the character and development of Western and other civilizations. We still need a full account of how and why one thing followed another, of cause and consequence, of the role of chance versus the force of inherited tradition.

Over all, Ferguson calls for a return to traditional education, since “at its core, a civilization is the texts that are taught in its schools, learned by its students and recollected in times of tribulation” — by which he means Great Books, and especially Shakespeare. The greatest dangers facing us are probably not “the rise of China, Islam or CO2 emissions,” he writes, but “our own loss of faith in the civilization we inherited from our ancestors.”

How Ayn Rand Seduced Generations of Young Men and Helped Make the U.S. Into a Selfish, Greedy Nation

2011-12-23T20:16:00.002-06:00

BY Bruce E. Levine
AlterNet
15 December 2011

Ayn Rand’s “philosophy” is nearly perfect in its immorality, which makes the size of her audience all the more ominous and symptomatic as we enter a curious new phase in our society....To justify and extol human greed and egotism is to my mind not only immoral, but evil.— Gore Vidal, 1961

Only rarely in U.S. history do writers transform us to become a more caring or less caring nation. In the 1850s, Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896) was a strong force in making the United States a more humane nation, one that would abolish slavery of African Americans. A century later, Ayn Rand (1905-1982) helped make the United States into one of the most uncaring nations in the industrialized world, a neo-Dickensian society where healthcare is only for those who can afford it, and where young people are coerced into huge student-loan debt that cannot be discharged in bankruptcy.

Rand’s impact has been widespread and deep. At the iceberg’s visible tip is the influence she’s had over major political figures who have shaped American society. In the 1950s, Ayn Rand read aloud drafts of what was later to become Atlas Shrugged to her “Collective,” Rand’s ironic nickname for her inner circle of young individualists, which included Alan Greenspan, who would serve as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board from 1987 to 2006.

In 1966, Ronald Reagan wrote in a personal letter, “Am an admirer of Ayn Rand.” Today, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) credits Rand for inspiring him to go into politics, and Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) calls Atlas Shrugged his “foundation book.” Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) says Ayn Rand had a major influence on him, and his son Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) is an even bigger fan. A short list of other Rand fans includes Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas; Christopher Cox, chairman of the Security and Exchange Commission in George W. Bush’s second administration; and former South Carolina governor Mark Sanford.

But Rand’s impact on U.S. society and culture goes even deeper.

The Seduction of Nathan Blumenthal

Ayn Rand’s books such as The Virtue of Selfishness and her philosophy that celebrates self-interest and disdains altruism may well be, as Vidal assessed, “nearly perfect in its immorality.” But is Vidal right about evil? Charles Manson, who himself did not kill anyone, is the personification of evil for many of us because of his psychological success at exploiting the vulnerabilities of young people and seducing them to murder. What should we call Ayn Rand’s psychological ability to exploit the vulnerabilities of millions of young people so as to influence them not to care about anyone besides themselves?

While Greenspan (tagged “A.G.” by Rand) was the most famous name that would emerge from Rand’s Collective, the second most well-known name to emerge from the Collective was Nathaniel Branden, psychotherapist, author and “self-esteem” advocate. Before he was Nathaniel Branden, he was Nathan Blumenthal, a 14-year-old who read Rand’s The Fountainhead again and again. He later would say, “I felt hypnotized.” He describes how Rand gave him a sense that he could be powerful, that he could be a hero. He wrote one letter to his idol Rand, then a second. To his amazement, she telephoned him, and at age 20, Nathan received an invitation to Ayn Rand’s home. Shortly after, Nathan Blumenthal announced to the world that he was incorporating Rand in his new name: Nathaniel Branden. And in 1955, with Rand approaching her 50th birthday and Branden his 25th, and both in dissatisfying marriages, Ayn bedded Nathaniel.

What followed sounds straight out of Hollywood, but Rand was straight out of Hollywood, having worked for Cecil B. DeMille. Rand convened a meeting with Nathaniel, his wife Barbara (also a Collective member), and Rand’s own husband Frank. To Branden's astonishment, Rand convinced both spouses that a time-structured affair—she and Branden were to have one afternoon and one evening a week together—was “reasonable.” Within the Collective, Rand is purported to have never lost an argument. On his trysts at Rand’s New York City apartment, Branden would sometimes shake hands with Frank before he exited. Later, all discovered that Rand’s sweet but passive husband would leave for a bar, where he began his self-destructive affair with alcohol.

By 1964, the 34-year-old Nathaniel Branden had grown tired of the now 59-year-old Ayn Rand. Still sexually dissatisfied in his marriage to Barbara and afraid to end his affair with Rand, Branden began sleeping with a married 24-year-old model, Patrecia Scott. Rand, now “the woman scorned,” called Branden to appear before the Collective, whose nickname had by now lost its irony for both Barbara and Branden. Rand’s justice was swift. She humiliated Branden and then put a curse on him: “If you have one ounce of morality left in you, an ounce of psychological health—you'll be impotent for the next twenty years! And if you achieve potency sooner, you'll know it’s a sign of still worse moral degradation!”

Rand completed the evening with two welt-producing slaps across Branden’s face. Finally, in a move that Stalin and Hitler would have admired, Rand also expelled poor Barbara from the Collective, declaring her treasonous because Barbara, preoccupied by her own extramarital affair, had neglected to fill Rand in soon enough on Branden's extra-extra-marital betrayal. (If anyone doubts Alan Greenspan’s political savvy, keep in mind that he somehow stayed in Rand’s good graces even though he, fixed up by Branden with Patrecia’s twin sister, had double-dated with the outlaws.)

After being banished by Rand, Nathaniel Branden was worried that he might be assassinated by other members of the Collective, so he moved from New York to Los Angeles, where Rand fans were less fanatical. Branden established a lucrative psychotherapy practice and authored approximately 20 books, 10 of them with either “Self” or “Self-Esteem” in the title. Rand and Branden never reconciled, but he remains an admirer of her philosophy of self-interest.

Ayn Rand’s personal life was consistent with her philosophy of not giving a shit about anybody but herself. Rand was an ardent two-pack-a-day smoker, and when questioned about the dangers of smoking, she loved to light up with a defiant flourish and then scold her young questioners on the “unscientific and irrational nature of the statistical evidence.” After an x-ray showed that she had lung cancer, Rand quit smoking and had surgery for her cancer. Collective members explained to her that many people still smoked because they respected her and her assessment of the evidence; and that since she no longer smoked, she ought to tell them. They told her that she needn’t mention her lung cancer, that she could simply say she had reconsidered the evidence. Rand refused.

How Rand’s Philosophy Seduced Young Minds

When I was a kid, my reading included comic books and Rand’s The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. There wasn’t much difference between the comic books and Rand’s novels in terms of the simplicity of the heroes. What was different was that unlike Superman or Batman, Rand made selfishness heroic, and she made caring about others weakness.

Rand said, “Capitalism and altruism are incompatible....The choice is clear-cut: either a new morality of rational self-interest, with its consequences of freedom, justice, progress and man’s happiness on earth—or the primordial morality of altruism, with its consequences of slavery, brute force, stagnant terror and sacrificial furnaces.” For many young people, hearing that it is “moral” to care only about oneself can be intoxicating, and some get addicted to this idea for life.

I have known several people, professionally and socially, whose lives have been changed by those close to them who became infatuated with Ayn Rand. A common theme is something like this: “My ex-husband wasn’t a bad guy until he started reading Ayn Rand. Then he became a completely selfish jerk who destroyed our family, and our children no longer even talk to him.”

To wow her young admirers, Rand would often tell a story of how a smart-aleck book salesman had once challenged her to explain her philosophy while standing on one leg. She replied: “Metaphysics—objective reality. Epistemology—reason. Ethics—self-interest. Politics—capitalism.” How did that philosophy capture young minds?

Metaphysics—objective reality. Rand offered a narcotic for confused young people: complete certainty and a relief from their anxiety. Rand believed that an “objective reality” existed, and she knew exactly what that objective reality was. It included skyscrapers, industries, railroads, and ideas—at least her ideas. Rand’s objective reality did not include anxiety or sadness. Nor did it include much humor, at least the kind where one pokes fun at oneself. Rand assured her Collective that objective reality did not include Beethoven’s, Rembrandt’s, and Shakespeare’s realities—they were too gloomy and too tragic, basically buzzkillers. Rand preferred Mickey Spillane and, towards the end of her life, “Charlie's Angels.”

Epistemology—reason. Rand’s kind of reason was a “cool-tool” to control the universe. Rand demonized Plato, and her youthful Collective members were taught to despise him. If Rand really believed that the Socratic Method described by Plato of discovering accurate definitions and clear thinking did not qualify as “reason,” why then did she regularly attempt it with her Collective? Also oddly, while Rand mocked dark moods and despair, her “reasoning” directed that Collective members should admire Dostoyevsky, whose novels are filled with dark moods and despair. A demagogue, in addition to hypnotic glibness, must also be intellectually inconsistent, sometimes boldly so. This eliminates challenges to authority by weeding out clear-thinking young people from the flock.

Ethics—self-interest. For Rand, all altruists were manipulators. What could be more seductive to kids who discerned the motives of martyr parents, Christian missionaries and U.S. foreign aiders? Her champions, Nathaniel Branden still among them, feel that Rand’s view of “self-interest” has been horribly misrepresented. For them, self-interest is her hero architect Howard Roark turning down a commission because he couldn’t do it exactly his way. Some of Rand’s novel heroes did have integrity, however, for Rand there is no struggle to discover the distinction between true integrity and childish vanity. Rand’s integrity was her vanity, and it consisted of getting as much money and control as possible, copulating with whomever she wanted regardless of who would get hurt, and her always being right. To equate one’s selfishness, vanity, and egotism with one’s integrity liberates young people from the struggle to distinguish integrity from selfishness, vanity, and egotism.

Politics—capitalism. While Rand often disparaged Soviet totalitarian collectivism, she had little to say about corporate totalitarian collectivism, as she conveniently neglected the reality that giant U.S. corporations, like the Soviet Union, do not exactly celebrate individualism, freedom, or courage. Rand was clever and hypocritical enough to know that you don’t get rich in the United States talking about compliance and conformity within corporate America. Rather, Rand gave lectures titled: “America’s Persecuted Minority: Big Business.” So, young careerist corporatists could embrace Rand’s self-styled “radical capitalism” and feel radical — radical without risk.

Rand’s Legacy

In recent years, we have entered a phase where it is apparently okay for major political figures to publicly embrace Rand despite her contempt for Christianity. In contrast, during Ayn Rand’s life, her philosophy that celebrated self-interest was a private pleasure for the 1 percent but she was a public embarrassment for them. They used her books to congratulate themselves on the morality of their selfishness, but they publicly steered clear of Rand because of her views on religion and God. Rand, for example, had stated on national television, “I am against God. I don’t approve of religion. It is a sign of a psychological weakness. I regard it as an evil.”

Actually, again inconsistent, Rand did have a God. It was herself. She said:

I am done with the monster of “we,” the word of serfdom, of plunder, of misery, falsehood and shame. And now I see the face of god, and I raise this god over the earth, this god whom men have sought since men came into being, this god who will grant them joy and peace and pride. This god, this one word: “I.”

While Harriet Beecher Stowe shamed Americans about the United State’s dehumanization of African Americans and slavery, Ayn Rand removed Americans’ guilt for being selfish and uncaring about anyone except themselves. Not only did Rand make it “moral” for the wealthy not to pay their fair share of taxes, she “liberated” millions of other Americans from caring about the suffering of others, even the suffering of their own children.

The good news is that I’ve seen ex-Rand fans grasp the damage that Rand’s philosophy has done to their lives and to then exorcize it from their psyche. Can the United States as a nation do the same thing?

Republicans Want to End Medicare

2011-12-23T15:01:00.000-06:00

December 23, 2011, 8:57 am
More PolitiFact
by Paul Krugman

I was going to write something snarky about the attempt at self-justification, but on second thought I’ll just lay it out straight.

The background here is that Republicans voted to dismantle Medicare as we know it — a single-payer system in which the government pays essential medical bills — and replace it with a voucher scheme that, in the judgment of many health-care experts (and the Congressional Budget Office), would leave seniors having to pay large premiums out of pocket in order to afford adequate insurance; clearly, some and perhaps many would end up without adequate coverage.

This really is the end of the program we now know as Medicare. Maybe PolitiFact would like Democrats to use longer words and include qualifications, rather than saying simply that it ends Medicare — although as Brad DeLong points out, some of the Ryan plan’s supporters actually boasted that, yes, it ends Medicare as we know it. But it’s just absurd to call Democrats’ basically factual statement “Lie of the Year”.

Making that call was just a terrible decision, and it reeks of a philosophy that ranks achieving “balance” as being more important than reporting the facts.

Eric Foner - The Fiery Trial

2011-12-22T14:31:00.003-06:00

This tremendous book by the imminent Columbia historian Eric Foner is the definitve history of Abraham Lincoln and the official end of slavery in our time. According to Foner, before he died, Lincoln endorsed the final victory of abolition: the immediate, uncompensated abolition of slavery in the United States and the recognition of blacks as US citizens. I hope he is right, for most of us want to believe that Lincoln did grow in his brief Presidency, that he rose above his lifelong abstract and economic only opposition to slavery, belief in gradual and compensated abolition, and desire to colonize blacks. I am a bit dubious about all of this, for it is so easy to go beyond the evidence when you desire to think the best of Lincoln.

Eric Foner – The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery

Lincoln came from a background that viewed slavery less as a moral problem than an economic problem that hindered white economic advancement. P. 6

Hostility to slavery did not preclude deep prejudices against blacks. P. 7

Eventually, the clash between societies based on slave and free labor would come to dominate American life and shape the mature Lincoln’s political career. P. 9

It seems that Lincoln never had a deep, moral revulsion to slavery. P. 12

Lincoln always seemed to have an independent frame of mind. P. 14

The end of slavery wherever in the North did not include political and social equality for blacks. P. 15

Say what you will about the Constitution, the document did provide several protections for slavery. If the authors thought that slavery was on its way out, they were terribly wrong. P. 15

The South was home to the most powerful slave system the world has ever known. P. 17

Throughout the 19th Century until well into the Civil War, colonization was a pipe dream hope for many hoping for an all-white America. P. 17

Lincoln always said he was always a Whig. Did he ever explain exactly why he was always a Whig? P. 33
I have never understood Lincoln’s fatalistic “doctrine of necessity.” P. 35-36

Was Lincoln a Whig with democratic tendencies? P. 39

Lincoln accepted the racial boundary that excluded blacks from participation in American democracy. P. 39

Non-extension and not abolition was the only Constitutional position available to critics of slavery. P. 42

It was a long process of growth for Lincoln to see blacks not as group of people who had been unfairly removed from their countries of origin and who desired to go back to seeing them as Americans who were home. P. 61

Until well into the Civil War, Lincoln believed that blacks were entitled to the rights given to them in the Declaration of Independence, slavery should be ended gradually and with the consent of the slaveholders, and that emancipation should be coupled with colonization. P. 62

Lincoln was fixated entirely on stopping the expansion of slavery, which put him squarely in the middle of Whig/Republican politics in the 1850’s. P. 86

Amazingly in this country, until after the War there was no commonly agreed upon definition of citizenship and the rights it entailed. P. 93

Americans are bound to each other not by race or ethnicity but by principle. P. 103

Lincoln believed that compromise with the South under the threat of secession was a kind of extortion which would never end. P. 154

On his long trip from Springfield to Washington D.C. to assume the Presidency in February of 1861, Lincoln did little to mollify Southerners, refusing to endorse the Crittenden Plan, refusing to budge on slavery in the territories, and carefully positioning the Union as the victim and the South as the aggressor if hostilities broke out. Lincoln’s action during the secession winter of 1861 will be forever debated. P. 155

“By 1864, nearly 400,000 slaves had made their way to Union lines.” P. 167

In his message to Congress on July 4, 1861, Lincoln denied that the states had ever been sovereign entities. Lincoln stressed: 1) the supremacy of the national over the state governments 2) the permanence of the Union & 3) the illegality of secession. P. 172

For Lincoln the war was also about the defense of the ethos of free labor. The oblique criticism of slave labor was obvious. But his message did not mention slavery as a cause or part of the war. The only reference was to “slave states.” P. 173

The vagaries of the Confiscation Act. P. 175

The effects of Freemont’s effort to free the slaves in Missouri. P. 176-181

“You must either make yourself the great central figure of our American history for all time or your name will go down in posterity as one who. . . . proved himself unequal to the grand task.” John L. Scripps in a letter to Lincoln in 1861. P. 179

Freemont’s action galvanized the North to a discussion of slavery and divided the people into conservatives and radicals. Freemont’s proclamation opened the floodgates of public discussion of slavery. Lincoln, of course, was still a conservative on the slavery issue. P. 180

Lincoln long favored compensated emancipation and colonization. A plan to so emancipate in Delaware in the fall of 1861 failed. Hence, Lincoln’s ideas of compensated emancipation in the border states were rejected. The Northern whites did not want free blacks amongst themselves. What to do with free blacks? It is startling to think that just 150 years ago the overwhelming majority of whites in this country did not want free blacks living in their midst. P. 184

Lincoln publicly continued to support for colonization as late as December 3, 1861, in his annual message to Congress. P. 186

Anti-slavery feeling intensified in the North in 1862. Criticism increased against Lincoln for not being bolder in acting against slavery. P. 190

Gradual emancipation became national and Republican policy on March 6, 1861, when Lincoln so proposed it and Congress passed the resolution. It seems to me that was a critically important event in the march toward emancipation. Lincoln the conservative continued to favor gradual and not immediate emancipation. P. 196

The DC emancipation law allowed for compensation and colonization. P. 200

As the war continued in the summer of 1862, Lincoln continued to push for compensated, gradual emancipation. P. 212

The Emancipation Proclamation was based on military necessity, not the rights of man. P. 242

According to Foner, Lincoln eventually abandoned the idea of colonization. P. 258
Could/should Lincoln have moved more decisively against slavery, being more aggressive than his insistence that emancipation be gradual and compensated? P. 296
Lincoln grew as President----possessed the capacity for growth- and this is the essence of his greatness. P. 336

One of the saddest things in American history is that we will never know what would have happened during the Reconstruction Era if Lincoln had lived. P. 336

Gingrich: I’ll ‘ignore’ any Supreme Court ruling I disagree with

2011-12-17T18:44:00.001-06:00

BY Andrew Jones
The Raw Story
17 December 2011

Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich is doubling down from Thursday’s Fox News debate on his vow to abolish federal courts if he disagreed with their decision.

According to The Hill, in a conference call with reporters, Gingrich indicated that it was in the president’s power as commander-in-chief to deem any Supreme Court ruling irrelevant if he or she in the White House disagreed.

The former House Speaker used the Supreme Court’s ruling against the Bush administration exceeding its constitutional authority in handling suspected terrorist detainees at Guantanamo Bay in 2008 as a basis for his extreme view.

“They just ignored it,” he said. “A commander-in-chief could simply issue instructions to ignore it, and say it’s null and void and I do not accept it because it infringes on my duties as commander-in-chief to protect the country.”

Gingrich also backed his position to subpoena judges or abolish courts entirely if he thought their final rulings were wrong.

The current GOP frontrunner’s position challenges the landmark Supreme Court case of Marbury v Madison in 1803, where America’s highest court would be granted the final word on whether acts by the president or Congress are constitutional.

Market Competition Doesn't Work with Health Care

2011-12-17T10:24:00.000-06:00

December 17, 2011, 8:33 am
Ron Wyden, Useful Idiot

by Paul Krugman

I was too busy and too overstretched to weigh in on this earlier, but Sen. Ron Wyden did indeed do a bad, bad thing in his joint proposal with Paul Ryan. Ezra Klein explains why; and the devil isn’t in the details.

What Wyden did was to give cover to the fundamental fallacy of right-wing attempts to dismantle Medicare: the claim that market competition is the key to reducing health care costs. We have overwhelming evidence on this — and it just isn’t true. Looking both within the United States and across countries, if you ask which systems are best at cost control, the ranking looks like this:

Government provision as well as financing (socialized medicine) > single payer > market competition

Why doesn’t the market work here? Ken Arrow explained it all half a century ago. Patients by and large don’t have the information to evaluate medical treatments; in any case, they mainly buy insurance rather than medical care directly; and insurers profit not by providing the most cost-effective care, but by trying to insure people who won’t need care.

And it’s not as if market competition hasn’t been given a try; in this country it has been tried over and over, by politicians who won’t take no for an answer.

Oh, and if someone starts talking about how the Affordable Care Act relies on private insurers, give me a break; the reason the ACA works the way it does is the raw power of the insurance industry, which forced advocates of universal coverage to settle for an inferior system. I still think that deal was worth doing, but there’s no reason to take Medicare, which does it right — or at least closer to right — and degrade it into a worse system.

So why would anyone who isn’t a right-wing ideologue propose that kind of degradation? Inquiring minds want to know.

A Man After My Own Heart

2011-12-17T08:42:00.001-06:00

October 25, 2004

My Own Private Library
By Thomas H. Benton

I wonder whether I am afflicted with something more than a "gentle madness," as Nicholas A. Basbanes described it in his 1999 book on the history of book collecting. You see, I spend more on books than I do on food.

There are at least 700 books in my English department office. There are another 200 stashed in filing cabinets in the hallway. In my home office I estimate there are more than 2,000 on the shelves and another 300 in a pile on the floor. There are about 400 books on cooking and gardening in the kitchen. And, finally, there are about 50 books on a shelf next to my bed. Those are the ones I intend to read soon. That shelf tends to fill up during the academic year and empty out during the summer.

Nearly every trip I take seems to intersect with some site of bibliophilic pilgrimage: New England's backcountry book barns, the antiquarian booksellers of Boston, Cambridge, New Haven, New York, Chicago, Washington, Amsterdam, London, and, best of all, Hay-on-Wye -- the secondhand book kingdom -- in Wales.

In that decaying castle-turned-bookstore, I once felt like Indiana Jones delicately lifting an idol from a booby-trapped pedestal, when I presented a stack of unrecognized rarities -- marked at one pound each -- to a Welsh cashier with no clue as to their scholarly value.

I live in the rural Midwest right now, and there are no notable secondhand bookstores within 200 miles. The region has not been inhabited long enough to sustain a supply of interesting, older books besides Bibles, almanacs, and classics for children.

So I troll eBay and Bookfinder.com, looking to fill the gaps in my collections, occasionally finding an unrecognized gem or a damaged but readable copy of a rare book that would normally be out of my financial reach. Just as it did in graduate school, book collecting allows me to take a vacation from my scholarly writing without feelings of guilt. Book-collecting academics are often expert procrastinators.

My bibliophilic obsessions are not limited to old books. I am particularly vulnerable to sets and series. I think that habit was started in my adolescence when I used money earned delivering newspapers and mowing lawns to buy books from Time-Life, such as the "Old West" series bound in genuine hand-tooled Naugahyde. I also enjoyed Time-Life's series on artists, nature, and "Mysteries of the Unknown." I was taught a proper contempt for Time-Life in college, but those books were my introduction to the so-called "life of the mind."

It was probably predictable that I would acquire, once my professional interests turned to American literature, the entire Library of America.

You've probably seen those books and their glossy black jackets with a red, white, and blue stripe. Beneath the jackets, the books are tastefully covered in woven rayon with Smyth-sewn bindings, acid-free paper, and a nice ribbon book marker. According to the Library of America Web site, the size of each book is "based on the 'golden section,' which the ancient Greeks considered to be the ideal proportion." The set includes authoritative collections of the writings of major American figures such as Franklin, Hawthorne, Melville, and Twain, as well as many 20th-century writers.

The Library of America now has about 150 volumes, each of them retailing for about $35 to $40, although they can be obtained at a 20 percent discount from online booksellers. That means I've spent at least $4,000 on the set so far, and five or more new volumes come out every year.

The set already fills almost an entire wall of my department office. A student once asked me if the books belonged to the college. It was inconceivable to him that an individual might buy that many look-alike volumes. But I'm hooked. There's no way I can turn back now, even if they start publishing the collected writings of Millard Fillmore and Elbert Hubbard.

Perhaps my book acquisitions reflect some psychological disorder, an unresolved trauma of my youth. Maybe my behavior is no different from adults who collect Matchbox cars, teddy bears, or baseball cards.

It may even be less practical. It's been a heavy burden moving those books from job to job, building shelves for them, organizing and reorganizing them (by subject, by size, alphabetically, chronologically, and even by color). Sometimes I feel like I have a part-time job running a private library. But when I think about my collecting impulse, the reasons break down into several categories that don't seem entirely impractical or pathological:

Convenience. In general, it takes libraries too long to get new books. A book's moment is usually past by the time a library becomes aware of it, processes it, catalogues it, and shelves it. It's like waiting for a movie to appear at the video rental store. By the time you get it, almost no one cares about it anymore.

Still, once the buzz has subsided, I like to own a copy of every book that I anticipate needing for my scholarly writing. Having them around reinforces my knowledge of their existence -- owned-but-as-yet unread volumes are always vying for my attention. And I appreciate being able to look up something quickly without having to trek to a library, which may or may not have the book.

Pedagogy. If I recommend a book to a student, 9 times out of 10 the students will forget all about it. They are much more likely to look at a book if I can put it in their hands immediately. I also like to pass books around in my classes. If I am lecturing on the Philosophes, it's helpful to have a facsimile edition of Diderot's Encyclopédie for my class to examine.

And because I am interested in a field called the history of the book, I like to give my advanced students access to literary works in the form in which they were originally published. For example, the various permutations of Whitman's Leaves of Grass as a book tell us many things that cannot be learned from a simple reprinting of the text in a Norton anthology. It's important to me to convey a love of books to my students in the same way that reading a particularly good poem aloud is intended to convey enthusiasm for literature.

Economics. It's often cheaper to buy reading copies of many rare books than it is to travel and spend time at distant archives in expensive cities. For the price of one week at the New York Public Library, you can buy reading copies of all but the greatest rarities on almost any manageable topic. And then those books become a permanent asset for your own research, your students, and, possibly, for everyone at your institution if you are inclined to lend materials.

Also, now and then, every serious bibliophile finds an unappreciated rarity, sometimes by accident. I once bought a water-stained volume of Lincoln's portraits from a dollar bin that turned out to contain clipped autographs of secretaries of the Navy stretching back to the early 19th century. That accidental acquisition -- which I subsequently sold on eBay -- paid for my book purchases for the entire next year. The more one knows, the more often one finds treasures amid the trash of the average used book sale.

Preservation. Scholars who amass large collections of older, secondhand books often acquire the former property of famous older scholars. I have some volumes from Alfred Kazin's set of the Collected Writings of Walt Whitman. They include page after page of heavy underlining and marginalia that a book dealer thought detracted from their value.

I have several volumes on Mark Twain that once belonged to his famous biographer, Justin Kaplan. The marginalia of older books are often much more valuable than the books themselves. Many copies of 19th-century literary works were once owned by people who had important associations with the author. Multiple copies of books that are regarded by sellers as "damaged but readable" can help a scholar reconstruct the relationship between writers and their audiences.

Community. Old book collectors can meet one another and begin talking like old Red Sox fans. More often, we have unspoken, nodding acquaintance from years of passing one another in the aisles of conventions and shops like Brattle Books of Boston and the Gotham Book Mart. Of course, that world of physical contact is being replaced by the Internet in all but the biggest cities.

Increasingly, my fascination with old books makes me feel personally connected with dead writers more than living bibliophiles. Whitman understood that. He said of Leaves of Grass, "he who touches this book touches the man himself." He liked to insert photographic portraits of himself in his books, along with inscriptions, and the pledge that he had personally handled the book. People don't really "own" books; they are custodians of them for a time. Sometimes I think about who will own some of my books after I am gone, and I write short notes to them in the margins.

Aesthetics. I've always liked the image of being a rumpled, pipe-smoking don in a book-lined study. I like the way books look, and even the way they smell -- the odor of tobacco and decaying paper is the lingering aura of the golden age of the professor.

Good books have an appealing tactile quality, an animated artistry in their construction that once led me to learn bookbinding and consider a career as a conservator (a profession that is even more intensely competitive than the academy).

Nowadays, I enjoy the ritual of opening a new shipment of books from, say, Edward R. Hamilton, Daedalus, or Labyrinth, wrapping their jackets in Mylar (from Gaylord Library Supplies), and finding places for them on oak shelves that I built myself. Even if I have no immediate plans to read them, owning a selection of the best books on a variety of topics gives me a proprietary feeling over subjects which I have not yet had time to study in great detail. They are already old friends when the time comes for me to call on them.

Hope. A couple years ago a cartoon from The New Yorker depicted a man in a book-lined study sipping a martini and talking to a woman in a black party dress. The caption: "These books represent the person I once aspired to be."

Anyone who collects old books knows that most of what we call "literature" is never read. Large collections of books are fetish objects rather than authentic scholarly resources. I'm like all those architecture students who feel compelled to buy a pair of expensive and uncomfortable Barcelona chairs. I have not yet given up on my professorial aspirations, and each new book is a small investment in that future, which, with any luck, could last another 40 years.

At bottom, I suspect I am a scholar because I am a bibliophile rather than the other way around. One could scoff at that as putting the cart before the horse. But if professors and students spent more time buying many books, instead of just writing them at a furious rate, it might help to revive the endangered enterprise of scholarly publishing on which we all depend.

Or are all of these points merely the rationalizations of the gently mad?

Thomas H. Benton is the pseudonym of an assistant professor of English at a Midwestern liberal-arts college. He writes occasionally about academic culture and the tenure track and welcomes reader mail directed to his attention at careers@chronicle.com

Your Life on Facebook, in Total Recall

2011-12-16T19:08:00.001-06:00

BY Jenna Wortham
New York Times
15 December 2011

Remember those karaoke videos from three years ago that somehow wound up on Facebook? They were embarrassing for the few hours they spent at the top of your Facebook profile, and then they were buried under a cascade of new updates.

But on Thursday, Facebook started rolling out a revamped profile feature called Timeline that makes a user’s entire history of photos, links and other things shared on Facebook accessible with a single click. This may be the first moment that many of Facebook’s 800 million members realize just how many digital bread crumbs they have been leaving on the site — and on the Web in general.

For better or worse, the new format is likely to bring back a lot of old memories. But it could also make it harder to shed past identities — something people growing up with Facebook might struggle with as they move from high school to college and from there to the working world.

“There’s no act too small to record on your permanent record,” said Jonathan Zittrain, a law professor at Harvard who studies how the Internet affects society. “All of the mouse droppings that appear as we migrate around the Web will be saved.”

The old Facebook profile page shows the most recent items users have posted, along with things like photos of them posted by others. But Timeline creates a scrapbooklike montage, assembling photos, links and updates for each month and year since they signed up for Facebook.

When Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and chief executive of Facebook, introduced Timeline in September at a developer conference, he described it as a way to get a more comprehensive portrait of someone than by simply reading updates or looking at a profile picture: “We think it’s an important next step to help tell the story of your life.”

Facebook said in a blog post that users could either wait to receive a notification about Timeline on their pages or go to facebook.com/about/timeline to activate it immediately. Eventually all profiles will be switched to the new look, though the company is not saying when. And there will be no switching back.

Some adept users have been able to reach Timeline for weeks using a workaround meant for developers. They said that while the design might be attractive, it was unnerving to realize just how much information they had been feeding into Facebook.

“We’ve all been dropping status updates and photos into a void,” said Ben Werdmuller, the chief technology officer at Latakoo, a video service. “We knew we were sharing this much, of course, but it’s weird to realize they’ve been keeping this information and can serve it up for anyone to see.”

Mr. Werdmuller, who lives in Berkeley, Calif., said the experience of browsing through his social history on Facebook, complete with pictures of old flames, was emotionally evocative — not unlike unearthing an old yearbook or a shoebox filled with photographs and letters.

But while those items would probably live only on a dusty shelf in a closet, these boxes of memories are freely available online for anyone with access to your Facebook page to view.

“It’s unsettling to see the past presented as clearly as the present,” Mr. Werdmuller said. “It’s your life in context, all in one place.”

Several hundred Facebook users shared their initial reactions to Timeline on the company’s blog post. While many appeared to be the kind of denouncements that are generated by any tweak to Facebook’s site, a large percentage welcomed the changes.

“A treat for profile stalkers,” wrote a Facebook user named Mudit Goyal. Another, Joshua Bamberg, said, “If Facebook didn’t change stuff every couple months, we would still be using MySpace.”

And Tatsat Banerjee wrote: “Now our Facebook profile is almost equivalent to a personal Web site. Make no mistake, this is the best update Facebook has ever done till now.”

Analysts say Timeline is a significant evolutionary shift for Facebook. For starters, linking Facebook more closely to memories could make it harder for people to abandon the service for rivals.

To Facebook’s credit, the site lets people edit their life stories and decide which items on their Timelines to hide. And once a switch is made, a user has seven days to review what will be displayed on the page before making it public.

But Nicole B. Ellison, a professor of information studies at Michigan State University who researches how people interact online, said the average Facebook users may not understand how to edit their pages or want to be bothered with it.

“I think for someone who has been on the site for all five of its years,” she said — Facebook opened to the general public in 2006 — “that’s a big undertaking.”

Professor Ellison said the new design could make people’s relationship with Facebook more complex.

“What does it mean to not be able to reinvent yourself after high school, after college?” she said. “Or will people completely go back and edit their histories? And how will that shape the way we view ourselves and our friends?”

Analysts say this is more than just Facebook rethinking a feature or two. The site is trying to help itself to entice advertisers more easily — and to better compete with rivals like Google, said Susan Etlinger, an analyst with the Altimeter Group, a consulting firm that advises companies on how to use technology.

“There is an arms race between technology companies to know as much as possible about the people using their services,” she said.

Timeline is also set up to highlight things like which news articles people are reading, songs they are listening to and recipes they are cooking. Users can choose to have Facebook partners like The Washington Post and the music service Spotify send that information to their Facebook pages. If Facebook could advertise items like concert tickets based on that activity, those ads could be very lucrative.

One of the Facebook designers behind Timeline is Nicholas Felton, who achieved some online fame by publishing detailed annual reports examining and graphing his personal data, such as what he ate and how many miles he traveled. The reports helped him land a job at Facebook. Mr. Felton said there were benefits to seeing one’s behavior compiled in a comprehensive way.

“One year I noticed that I wasn’t going to as many concerts as I could have liked or reading that many books,” he said. “So I was able to modify my behavior around that.”

Mr. Felton said that over time, many Facebook users would come to appreciate Timeline. “Everyone is producing crazy data exhaust these days,” he said. “Showing the value of that data helps move everything forward. It’s pretty exciting and important.”

What Is College For?

2011-12-16T18:43:00.000-06:00

By Gary Gutting
New York Times
14 December 2011

Most American college students are wrapping up yet another semester this week. For many of them, and their families, the past months or years in school have likely involved considerable time, commitment, effort and expense. Was it worth it?

Some evidence suggests that it was. A Pew Research survey this year found that 74 percent of graduates from four-year colleges say that their education was “very useful in helping them grow intellectually.” Sixty-nine percent said that “it was very useful in helping them grow and mature as a person” and 55 percent claimed that “it was very useful in helping prepare them for a job or career.” Moreover, 86 percent of these graduates think “college has been a good investment for them personally.”

Nonetheless, there is incessant talk about the “failure” of higher education. (Anthony Grafton at The New York Review of Books provides an excellent survey of recent discussions.) Much of this has to do with access: it’s too expensive, admissions policies are unfair, the drop-out rate is too high. There is also dismay at the exploitation of graduate students and part-time faculty members, the over-emphasis on frills such as semi-professional athletics or fancy dorms and student centers, and the proliferation of expensive and unneeded administrators. As important as they are, these criticisms don’t contradict the Pew Survey’s favorable picture of the fundamental value of students’ core educational experience.

But, as Grafton’s discussion also makes clear, there are serious concerns about the quality of this experience. In particular, the university curriculum leaves students disengaged from the material they are supposed to be learning. They see most of their courses as intrinsically “boring,” of value only if they provide training relevant to future employment or if the teacher has a pleasing (amusing, exciting, “relevant”) way of presenting the material. As a result, students spend only as much time as they need to get what they see as acceptable grades (on average, about 12 to 14 hour a week for all courses combined). Professors have ceased to expect genuine engagement from students and often give good grades (B or better) to work that is at best minimally adequate.

This lack of academic engagement is real, even among schools with the best students and the best teachers, and it increases dramatically as the quality of the school decreases. But it results from a basic misunderstanding — by both students and teachers — of what colleges are for.

First of all, they are not simply for the education of students. This is an essential function, but the raison d’être of a college is to nourish a world of intellectual culture; that is, a world of ideas, dedicated to what we can know scientifically, understand humanistically, or express artistically. In our society, this world is mainly populated by members of college faculties: scientists, humanists, social scientists (who straddle the humanities and the sciences properly speaking), and those who study the fine arts. Law, medicine and engineering are included to the extent that they are still understood as “learned professions,” deploying practical skills that are nonetheless deeply rooted in scientific knowledge or humanistic understanding. When, as is often the case in business education and teacher training, practical skills far outweigh theoretical understanding, we are moving beyond the intellectual culture that defines higher education.

Our support for higher education makes sense only if we regard this intellectual culture as essential to our society. Otherwise, we could provide job-training and basic social and moral formation for young adults far more efficiently and cheaply, through, say, a combination of professional and trade schools, and public service programs. There would be no need to support, at great expense, the highly specialized interests of, for example, physicists, philosophers, anthropologists and art historians. Colleges and universities have no point if we do not value the knowledge and understanding to which their faculties are dedicated.

This has important consequences for how we regard what goes on in college classrooms. Teachers need to see themselves as, first of all, intellectuals, dedicated to understanding poetry, history, human psychology, physics, biology — or whatever is the focus of their discipline. But they also need to realize that this dedication expresses not just their idiosyncratic interest in certain questions but a conviction that those questions have general human significance, even apart from immediately practical applications. This is why a discipline requires not just research but also teaching. Non-experts need access to what experts have learned, and experts need to make sure that their research remains in contact with general human concerns. The classroom is the primary locus of such contact.

Students, in turn, need to recognize that their college education is above all a matter of opening themselves up to new dimensions of knowledge and understanding. Teaching is not a matter of (as we too often say) “making a subject (poetry, physics, philosophy) interesting” to students but of students coming to see how such subjects are intrinsically interesting. It is more a matter of students moving beyond their interests than of teachers fitting their subjects to interests that students already have. Good teaching does not make a course’s subject more interesting; it gives the students more interests — and so makes them more interesting.

Students readily accept the alleged wisdom that their most important learning at college takes place outside the classroom. Many faculty members — thinking of their labs, libraries or studies — would agree. But the truth is that, for both students and faculty members, the classroom is precisely where the most important learning occurs.

Lowe's pulls ads from 'All-American Muslim' after 'ordinary' portrayal protested

2011-12-13T08:56:00.001-06:00

I am glad there is outrage over this. Lowe's and the Florida Family Association are shameful. Muslims deserve more respect.

BY James Hibberd
Entertainment Weekly
9 December 2011

A TLC reality show offering a positive portrayal of Muslim life has come under protest and at least one advertiser has pulled its support.

Hardware store giant Lowe’s has yanked ads from the series after the Florida Family Association encouraged members to email the program’s advertisers.

“The show profiles only Muslims that appear to be ordinary folks while excluding many Islamic believers whose agenda poses a clear and present danger to liberties and traditional values that the majority of Americans cherish,” the group said about the show, a docu-soap chronicling everyday Muslim families in Dearborn, Michigan that debuted last month. “Clearly this program is attempting to manipulate Americans into ignoring the threat of jihad and to influence them to believe that being concerned about the jihad threat would somehow victimize these nice people in this show.”

The organization posted a letter allegedly from a Lowe’s representative agreeing to pull its ads: “While we continue to advertise on various cable networks, including TLC, there are certain programs that do not meet Lowe’s advertising guidelines, including the show you brought to our attention. Lowe’s will no longer be advertising on that program.”

Lowe’s then acknowledged and defended its decision on Twitter: “We did not pull our ads based solely on the complaints or emails of any one group. It is never our intent to alienate anyone. Lowe’s values diversity of thought in everyone, including our employees and prospective customers.”

Florida Family Association also suggested Home Depot and Sweet’n Low have been scared off, but emails posted from the companies say they only bought one ad each in the first place. All told, the organization claims its email campaign has convinced 65 companies to stop advertising with the show.

Now the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee has weighed in and is calling on its membership to support the show — and to contact Lowe’s. “Sadly corporations, such as Lowe’s, have succumbed to the idiocracy of such garbage campaigns, which are orchestrated by groups and organizations which lack credibility, legitimacy, and are founded on the basic notions of bigotry and racism reminiscent of a shameful era in this country’s history,” said the organization in a statement.

A TLC spokesperson wouldn’t discuss the protest, but told EW: “We stand behind the show All American Muslim and we’re happy the show has strong advertising support.”

The Republican Candidates for President Are All the Same

2011-12-12T12:18:00.002-06:00

Dec 11, 2011 6:00 PM 12:17:08 CST
Obama: Core Philosophy Of GOP Candidates Identical
By Jim Kuhnhenn, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — In making the case for his re-election, President Barack Obama is arguing that it doesn’t matter who the Republicans nominate to run against him because the core philosophy of the GOP candidates is the same and will stand in sharp relief with his own.

The president laid out an argument for a second term in a wide ranging interview on CBS’ “60 Minutes” that aired Sunday, bluntly saying that if voters believe in the Republican agenda of lower taxes, including for the wealthy, and weaker regulations then he will lose.

“I don’t think that’s where the American people are going to go,” he added, “because I don’t think the American people believe that based on what they’ve seen before, that’s going to work.”

For some time, Democrats and Obama allies have been anticipating that former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney will ultimately win the Republican nomination. But with former House Speaker Newt Gingrich atop many polls now, Democrats have begun to train their fire on him.

Obama argued that the two Republicans represent the same fundamental set of beliefs.

“The contrast in visions between where I want to take the country and what … where they say they want to take the country is going to be stark,” he said. “And the American people are going to have a good choice and it’s going to be a good debate.”

He rejected questioner Steve Kroft’s suggestion that the public was judging him on his performance as president. “I’m being judged against the ideal,” he said. “Joe Biden has a good expression. He says, ‘Don’t judge me against the Almighty, judge me against the alternative.’”

Obama predicted the fight to the Republican nomination won’t be resolved quickly. “I think that they will be going at it for a while,” he said.

He described both of the top GOP candidates, Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney, as political fixtures.

Of Gingrich he said: “He’s somebody who’s been around a long time, and is good on TV, is good in debates.”

“But Mitt Romney has shown himself to be somebody who’s … who’s good at politics, as well,” he said. “He’s had a lot of practice at it.”

Obama is counting on voters giving him credit for avoiding a second Great Depression, bailing out the auto industry and passing a signature health care law even while acknowledging that the public is hardly satisfied with the direction of the country.

He also listed such achievements as ending the Pentagon’s policy of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” for gay service members and the elimination of Osama bin Laden and other top al Qaida leaders.

“But when it comes to the economy, we’ve got a lot more work to do,” he conceded.

He rejected Republican criticism that his economic policies amount to class warfare, saying he is simply trying to restore an “American deal” that focuses on building a strong middle class.

In a major speech in Osawatomie, Kan., this week, Obama argued that even before the recent recession hit, Americans at the top of the income scale grew wealthier while others struggled and racked up debt. He also has called for spending on jobs initiatives and for an extension of a payroll tax cut that would be paid for by increasing taxes on taxpayers who make $1 million or more.

“There are going to be people who say, ‘This is the socialist Obama and he’s come out of the closet,’” Obama said.

But he added: “The problem is that our politics has gotten to the point, where we can’t have an honest conversation about the greatest income inequality since the 1920s. And we can’t have an honest conversation about the irresponsibility that resulted in the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, without somebody saying that somehow we’re being divisive.”

The Art of Listening

2011-12-12T11:07:00.001-06:00

BY Henning Mankell
New York Times
10 December 2011

I CAME to Africa with one purpose: I wanted to see the world outside the perspective of European egocentricity. I could have chosen Asia or South America. I ended up in Africa because the plane ticket there was cheapest.

I came and I stayed. For nearly 25 years I’ve lived off and on in Mozambique. Time has passed, and I’m no longer young; in fact, I’m approaching old age. But my motive for living this straddled existence, with one foot in African sand and the other in European snow, in the melancholy region of Norrland in Sweden where I grew up, has to do with wanting to see clearly, to understand.

The simplest way to explain what I’ve learned from my life in Africa is through a parable about why human beings have two ears but only one tongue. Why is this? Probably so that we have to listen twice as much as we speak.

In Africa listening is a guiding principle. It’s a principle that’s been lost in the constant chatter of the Western world, where no one seems to have the time or even the desire to listen to anyone else. From my own experience, I’ve noticed how much faster I have to answer a question during a TV interview than I did 10, maybe even 5, years ago. It’s as if we have completely lost the ability to listen. We talk and talk, and we end up frightened by silence, the refuge of those who are at a loss for an answer.

I’m old enough to remember when South American literature emerged in popular consciousness and changed forever our view of the human condition and what it means to be human. Now, I think it’s Africa’s turn.

Everywhere, people on the African continent write and tell stories. Soon, African literature seems likely to burst onto the world scene — much as South American literature did some years ago when Gabriel García Márquez and others led a tumultuous and highly emotional revolt against ingrained truth. Soon an African literary outpouring will offer a new perspective on the human condition. The Mozambican author Mia Couto has, for example, created an African magic realism that mixes written language with the great oral traditions of Africa.

If we are capable of listening, we’re going to discover that many African narratives have completely different structures than we’re used to. I over-simplify, of course. Yet everybody knows that there is truth in what I’m saying: Western literature is normally linear; it proceeds from beginning to end without major digressions in space or time.

That’s not the case in Africa. Here, instead of linear narrative, there is unrestrained and exuberant storytelling that skips back and forth in time and blends together past and present. Someone who may have died long ago can intervene without any fuss in a conversation between two people who are very much alive. Just as an example.

The nomads who still inhabit the Kalahari Desert are said to tell one another stories on their daylong wanderings, during which they search for edible roots and animals to hunt. Often they have more than one story going at the same time. Sometimes they have three or four stories running in parallel. But before they return to the spot where they will spend the night, they manage either to intertwine the stories or split them apart for good, giving each its own ending.

A number of years ago I sat down on a stone bench outside the Teatro Avenida in Maputo, Mozambique, where I work as an artistic consultant. It was a hot day, and we were taking a break from rehearsals so we fled outside, hoping that a cool breeze would drift past. The theater’s air-conditioning system had long since stopped functioning. It must have been over 100 degrees inside while we were working.

Two old African men were sitting on that bench, but there was room for me, too. In Africa people share more than just water in a brotherly or sisterly fashion. Even when it comes to shade, people are generous.

I heard the two men talking about a third old man who had recently died. One of them said, “I was visiting him at his home. He started to tell me an amazing story about something that had happened to him when he was young. But it was a long story. Night came, and we decided that I should come back the next day to hear the rest. But when I arrived, he was dead.”

The man fell silent. I decided not to leave that bench until I heard how the other man would respond to what he’d heard. I had an instinctive feeling that it would prove to be important.

Finally he, too, spoke.

“That’s not a good way to die — before you’ve told the end of your story.”

It struck me as I listened to those two men that a truer nomination for our species than Homo sapiens might be Homo narrans, the storytelling person. What differentiates us from animals is the fact that we can listen to other people’s dreams, fears, joys, sorrows, desires and defeats — and they in turn can listen to ours.

Many people make the mistake of confusing information with knowledge. They are not the same thing. Knowledge involves the interpretation of information. Knowledge involves listening.

So if I am right that we are storytelling creatures, and as long as we permit ourselves to be quiet for a while now and then, the eternal narrative will continue.

Many words will be written on the wind and the sand, or end up in some obscure digital vault. But the storytelling will go on until the last human being stops listening. Then we can send the great chronicle of humanity out into the endless universe.

Who knows? Maybe someone is out there, willing to listen ...

Let’s Not Talk About Inequality

2011-12-12T11:02:00.002-06:00

BY Thomas B. Edsall
New York Times
12 December 2011

Conservatism’s strength, its stress on the value of individual responsibility, is also its central weakness.

The right’s claim that liberalism creates a deterrent to personal initiative and generates an ethos of dependency has resonated powerfully among white swing voters crucial to the ascendance of the Republican Party over the last four decades.

As the aftereffects of the financial collapse of 2008 continue to batter the nation with high unemployment and low growth, however, the conservative message has run into headwinds.

How does the laid-off 55-year-old factory employee “who worked hard and played by the rules,” looking for a job in a market where there are 4.2 applicants for every opening, find comfort when he turns on the TV to see Newt Gingrich declare that “you’ve got to become more employable” or Mitt Romney arguing that

the American people, edified by American principles, will rise to the occasion again, securing our safety, our prosperity and our peace.

One of these principles is a merit-based society. In a merit-based society, people achieve success and rewards through hard work, education, risk taking and even a little luck.

The conservative response to crisis offered by Gingrich and Romney fails to address the anxiety and anger of those millions of Americans who suddenly find themselves with no job, no health insurance and no money to pay the mortgage.

This question will set the terms of the debate for the 2012 election.

With just over three weeks to go until the Iowa caucuses on Jan. 3, the narrative of the right is under challenge from a competing narrative originating on the left, a narrative that describes an American economy sharply skewed towards the affluent, with rising inequality, a dwindling middle class and the persistence of long-term unemployment.

Describing the influence of the Occupy Wall Street movement on the electorate, Frank Luntz, a conservative consultant who specializes in framing political messages, told the Republican Governors Association meeting in Orlando on Nov. 30, “I’m so scared of this anti-Wall Street effort” because “they’re having an impact on what the American people think of capitalism.”

Luntz contended that shifting voter attitudes require Republican officials to carefully monitor and change their language. The public is now favorable to raising taxes on the rich, he said, but “if you talk about government taking the money from hardworking Americans, the public says no.”

On the other side of the aisle, Democratic pollster Geoff Garin said in an interview that “2012 is going to be about two fundamentally different theories of the economy.” In a Nov. 21 memo to Senator Charles Schumer, chairman of the Democratic Policy and Communications Center, Garin wrote:

The success of the Republican Party in the 2010 midterm elections was based to a large extent on the ability of the Republicans, aided by the activism of the Tea Party movement, to focus voters’ attention on an anti-government narrative that blamed the country’s economic problems on excessive federal spending, the size of the national debt, and increased government involvement in the private economy. Recent polling, however, indicates that the Republican/Tea Party narrative about the economy has been superseded by a different narrative – one that emphasizes the need to address the growing gap between those at the very top of the economic ladder and the rest of the country.

Garin cited the findings of a Nov. 3-5 Wall Street Journal/NBC poll that asked respondents to rank their support for 1.) a set of policies generally favored by Republicans which would cut spending, eliminate regulations and reject all tax increases, or 2.) a set of policies generally favored by Democrats calling for the elimination of tax breaks for the rich and tougher regulation of major banks and corporations.

The Democratic alternative received far more backing, with 60 percent in strong agreement and 16 percent voicing mild agreement, compared to 33 percent strong support for the Republican strategy, with 20 percent giving moderate support.

An ABC/Washington Post poll provided further evidence of public attitudes on the move. More than three fifths of respondents, 61 percent, said the wealth gap between the rich and the rest of the country has grown larger. The same percentage said the federal government should “pursue policies that try to reduce the gap between wealthy and less well-off Americans,” compared to 35 percent who opposed such policies. Shifting public attitudes do not, however, represent a decisive movement to the left. Instead, the Post survey shows that right now the public is divided, with no clear advantage to either party.

The job ratings of Republicans in Congress have tanked at 74 percent negative to 19 percent favorable, dropping more steeply than Obama’s, which are 51 negative-44 positive. But the Post survey also found that congressional Republicans run neck and neck with the president when respondents are asked “who would you trust to do a better job” on handling the economy (42-42) and creating jobs (40-40). On an issue on which the public traditionally favors Democrats by wide margins, “protecting the middle class,” Obama held only a 45-41 advantage over congressional Republicans.

These mixed results point to an election in which the competition to define the substantial disagreements between the two parties will be crucial to the outcome. Will deficits and debt continue to dominate as they did in 2010, to the advantage of Republicans, or will inequality and government intervention to promote job creation be central, favoring Democrats?

Conservatives, recognizing that they may be forced by the high levels of public concern to engage on the issue of rising inequality, have already begun to develop strategies designed to shift blame back onto liberals.

Peter Wehner, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center who worked in the Reagan administration and both Bush administrations, argued in a blog post published by Commentary that a Congressional Budget Office study shows that worsening inequality results in part from the fact that government transfer payments

have become less progressive. Why? In large measure because rising entitlement payments are going to wealthier seniors at the expense of lower-earning young people. For example, in 1979, households in the lowest income quintile received 54 percent of all transfer payments; in 2007, those households received just 36 percent of transfers.

In a Nov. 15 speech at the Heritage Foundation, Paul Ryan, Republican of Wisconsin and chairman of the House Budget Committee, called for addressing inequality by means testing Medicare coverage and Social Security benefits:

Rather than raising taxes and making it more difficult for Americans to become wealthy, let’s lower the amount of government spending the wealthy now receive. The President likes to use Warren Buffett and his secretary as an example of why we should raise taxes on the rich. Well, Warren Buffett gets the same health and retirement benefits from the government as his secretary, but our proposals to modestly income-adjust Social Security and Medicare benefits have been met with sheer demagoguery by leading members of the president’s party.

The issue of inequality is inherently dangerous for Republicans who are viewed by many as the party of the upper class.

An Oct. 19-24 CBS/New York Times poll asked respondents whether the policies of the Obama administration and the policies of Republicans in Congress favor the rich, the middle class, the poor or treat everyone equally. Just 12 percent said Obama favors the rich, while 69 percent said Republicans in Congress favor the rich.

In this debate, Obama and the Democrats have another factor in their favor – the unrelenting internal pressure on Republicans to remain loyal to conservative orthodoxy, even when such orthodoxy is a liability in the general election. Republicans are now falling directly into that trap.

Romney, desperate to discredit Gingrich’s surging bid, is setting the trap by attempting to create a new conservative litmus test that Gingrich cannot pass. Romney wants to make support for the radical Ryan budget — passed earlier this year by the House but rejected by the Senate — a must for every Republican candidate.

The non-partisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reported that the Ryan plan “would result in a massive transfer of resources from the broad majority of Americans to the nation’s wealthiest individuals” and “eliminate traditional Medicare, most of Medicaid, and all of the Children’s Health Insurance Program, converting these health programs largely to vouchers that low-income households, seniors, and people with disabilities could use to help buy insurance in the private health insurance market.”

In a May appearance on Meet the Press, Gingrich described the Ryan proposal as “right wing social engineering.” Now, Romney is running an online ad, “With Friends Like Newt, Who Needs The Left.” The ad quotes prominent conservatives criticizing Gingrich, ending with Pat Buchanan describing the former Speaker as “out of the left wing of the Republican Party” and Ryan asking, “With allies like that, who needs the left?”

Democrats are delighted to see Romney put the Ryan budget once again into the headlines. “When you go through what’s in the Ryan budget to voters in focus groups, they are horrified by it,” Democratic pollster Garin said. “The inequities of the Ryan budget are not just striking, they are shocking to people. To make Medicare much less affordable while continuing to add on new tax breaks for people at the very top is mind-blowing.”

It would be difficult to imagine the Republican establishment allowing the presidential nomination contest — in a climate of stark economic adversity for millions of unemployed Americans — to be defined by a fight between Romney and Gingrich over the Ryan budget. But already that vaunted establishment has arguably damaged the party’s prospects by failing to persuade a credible, compelling and charismatic competitor to enter the nomination fight, leaving the field to candidates widely viewed by party loyalists as vulnerable.

For the Love of Books

2011-12-12T11:01:00.001-06:00

December 4, 2011

We're Still in Love With Books

By William Pannapacker

I spend a lot of time working with computers now, but much of my life is still defined by the long relationship I've maintained with books.

It's surprising how many academics who identify with the digital humanities also have ties to "the History of the Book," a field that has long been nurtured by seminars in great libraries. On the shelves of such scholars you may find the five magisterial volumes on The History of the Book in America, placed near Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination. New media emerge, but they do not immediately replace old media.

Contrary to many futuristic projections—even from bibliophiles who, as a group, enjoy melancholy reveries—the recent technological revolution has only deepened the affection that many scholars have for books and libraries, and highlighted the need for the preservation, study, and cherishing of both.

I've been gathering books for as long as I can remember. But I became a self-conscious book collector only in graduate school, when I lived amid dozens of secondhand shops in Cambridge, Boston, and the wider orbit of New England. Some of those shops survive, but many were closing toward the end of the 90s, with the rise of the Internet. Like many book lovers, I lamented that change.

Nevertheless, the 90s were an exciting time to be a bibliophile. The appearance of online dealers and services such as AbeBooks.com and eBay suddenly made millions of books available. Instead of searching through obscure book barns on the back roads of New Hampshire, you could locate exactly the book you wanted and receive it in the mail within a week. Even while hundreds of classic texts were becoming available online, free of charge, I found that I was buying more books than ever before. Instead of randomly acquiring volumes that I happened to find, I was building comprehensive collections in multiple subject areas: No bookish desire went unfulfilled for long.

Many of the recent changes in scholarly life brought by technology are improvements, but I still miss the Dickensian atmosphere of those secondhand bookshops: crowded shelves, dim light, curmudgeonly owners, tobacco smells, sleeping cats, serendipitous finds, and rarities at astonishingly low prices. I'd carry them to the counter, warily, trying to look innocent.

I was in Boston last month and pleased to find that Brattle Books is still there on West Street just off the Common. It still has outdoor discount racks where you can find almost anything that isn't valuable enough to put on the inside shelves. I picked up a dozen beautifully-bound adventure stories for boys published in the era of Jack London and Theodore Roosevelt, including The Call of the Wild—bound in emerald-green cloth—and a star-spangled copy of With Dewey in Manila that looked like the printed counterpart to a march by John Philip Sousa. They were $5 each, and I can see them on a shelf right now with their literary companions from that peculiar historical moment.

Back in west Michigan, some opportunities do arise for discoveries of that kind. Last week I was among the first to arrive—in near darkness—at a college library's annual book sale. While the dealers electronically scanned the bar codes of newer books to see if any money remained to be wrung from them, I found The Works of Hogarth (1810) in two volumes—with dozens of fine engravings, including Gin Lane and The Rake's Progress—along with a nearly perfect copy of The History of Harvard College (1848), by Samuel Eliot, bound in rich, red leather, with a perfect map folded neatly in the back. I found several other books that I didn't know I wanted, including a battered copy of The Method of Teaching and Studying the Belles Lettres (1773), containing numerous marginal drawings, annotations, and owner's signatures, including one from a former chair of my department who died decades ago.

One thick, gilded, and marbled book of sermons contained an inscription: "To my dear friend on his departure from Eton. Easter, 1847." Who were they, I wondered? What happened to them? How had that book traveled to this destination? All books are memento mori, but this was like an epitaph from Spoon River Anthology.

A librarian straightened the emptying shelves; I gestured to my stack of books and asked, "Are you sure?" She nodded gravely. I gave $24 in cash to a student working at the circulation desk.

Motivations for collecting and preserving books go beyond their easily digitized, printed contents. Books are valued for their physical qualities as works of art, their binding and typography. Every old book has a unique provenance and association. And then there is the look on the shelf of books from the same era brought together again, like a long-awaited family reunion in the afterlife. For collectors there are also the memories of great discoveries: Using one's expertise (not a handheld device) to recognize and appreciate treasures that others have neglected.

Even though I am embracing technology more and more each year, like many of my colleagues, I still try to cultivate those bookish sensibilities in my students. If I happen to be teaching Mosses From an Old Manse, I want them to handle the books as they first appeared in 1846, in chocolate brown with cream-colored pages, wide margins, and typography that transports us to Hawthorne's era much as the groovy fonts of psychedelic posters from the 60s send us to Woodstock.

So I am not worried about the end of books as material objects—in archives and private collections, at least. I think they will always be needed and valued. The changes that most college libraries are undergoing have created an era of unparalleled opportunity for collectors and teachers, like me, and who can foresee what the outcome of this reshuffling of printed materials will be? I look forward to the apocalypse as much as any romantic, but if we are witnessing new forms of creative destruction, I think we are also seeing a counterbalancing, reflexive trend toward the creative preservation of the past using both traditional and digital means.

As I've written about before, the last decade has seen a steady flow of new beautifully illustrated and well-written volumes about the material pleasures of books and their continuing role in global history. I often learn about such volumes from the displays in bookstores, particularly one in a lovely little bookshop in the Newberry Library that I visit every November. Typically, those books about books are, most of all, a pleasure to look at; they are an affective experience, rather than a purely intellectual one. And that is how I am responding to them here.

In previous years, I somehow managed to overlook Miniature Books: 4,000 Years of Tiny Treasures (Abrams, 2007), by Anne C. Bromer and Julian I. Edison. It is, to my knowledge, the best illustrated work on the subject, with hundreds of photographs of books that are no taller than three inches. It begins with an image of the "Midget Library," containing 12 volumes in a little, glass-fronted gothic bookcase; it can be held in the palm of your hand. Hundreds of examples of miniature books follow, from medieval psalters to contemporary micro-masterpieces of the bookmaker's art from many cultures, culminating in a silicon chip imprinted with 180,000 words. It reminds me of the sculptures made from single strands of human hair on display at California's Museum of Jurassic Technology.

A more recent publication, Books: A Living History (J. Paul Getty Museum, 2011), by Martyn Lyons, provides an engaging, expert overview of its subject from cuneiform to the Kindle in a series of chronologically ordered and sometimes surprising topics such as "Books of Hours," "Forbidden Books," "The Rise of the Bookstore," "Japanese Manga," and "Enemies of the Book." The illustrations are beautiful, if often familiar, and the author maintains a global perspective, making the case for the continuing value of printed matter in the developing world.

Several recent publications focus on the place of books in interior design. My favorite of that sort remains At Home With Books: How Booklovers Live With and Care for Their Libraries (Carol Southern Books, 1995), by Estelle Ellis, Caroline Seebohm, and Christopher Simon Sykes.

Still, three new entries have become indispensable companions if not rivals. Books Make a Home: Elegant Ideas for Storing and Displaying Books (Ryland Peters & Small, 2011), by Damian Thompson, considers books as decoration in various kinds of interior spaces. Books Do Furnish a Room (Merrell Holberton, 2009), by Leslie Geddes-Brown—my personal favorite of the three—includes both innovative and traditional methods for storing book collections. Some methods are minimalist; others belong in mansions; and a few are entirely achievable by the moderately skilled do-it-yourselfer. The books themselves—ancient rarities and the working libraries of scholars—are nicely featured rather than made into mere filler for shelves or color accents to go with the draperies. Only one image struck me as absurd: an inefficient stairway shelving system with a bosun's chair that you hoist with a chain. And Living With Books (Thames & Hudson, 2010), by Roland Beaufre and Dominique Dupuich, includes many gorgeous photographs of the libraries of designers, writers, journalists, and artists.

Cultivating such ruminations is an emerging series called Unpacking My Library (Yale), from which I examined Architects and Their Books (2009), edited by Jo Steffens. It includes the libraries of Michael Graves, Peter Eisenman, and Toshiko Mori, among others. Not being an architect, the book did not appeal to me as much as the others I've mentioned, but I am nevertheless looking forward to the next installment, Writers and Their Books, which was scheduled for release in late November.

Two of the best books on that subject are Writers' Houses (Vendome, 2002), by Francesca Premoli-Droulers and Erica Lennard, and American Writers at Home (The Library of America and Vendome, 2004), by J.D. McClatchy and Lennard. For a more jaundiced view of the subject—without photographs—see A Skeptic's Guide to Writer's Houses (University of Pennsylvania, 2010), by Anne Trubek.

Many of these books suggest a powerful element of voyeurism in our interest in other people's libraries, particularly those of the famous and those who share our professions. I remember standing for a long time a few weeks ago in the recreated writing parlor of Marianne Moore in the Rosenbach Museum and Library, in Philadelphia. And I've never forgotten how, 12 years ago, as part of a job interview, I was a guest of a professor whose 19th-century farmhouse included an enormous addition, filled with sofas and chairs, lined with bookshelves, and accented by brightly painted Oaxacan carvings of animals. Such rooms are fascinatingly intimate and formal, like diaries written for posterity.

Sitting before my beloved iMac, watching the news online, responding to e-mail, surrounded by books—a stack of them near to hand—I can't help but wonder: How might my own library constitute a kind of intellectual and emotional autobiography, potentially open to the public gaze?

William Pannapacker is an associate professor of English at Hope College, in Holland, Mich. Many of his previous columns were published under a pseudonym, Thomas H. Benton. For other essays by Pannapacker on books and libraries, see "Confessions of a Middlebrow Professor," "Shelf Life," "Red Hot Library Lust," "Stacks' Appeal," and "My Own Private Library." The views expressed here are his own and do not necessarily represent those of his employers.

A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

2011-12-11T16:57:00.002-06:00

I read this for a book club. Egan won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for this book. She also won a National Book Critics Circle Award, beating the hyped Freedom by Jonathan Franzen.

The chapters of the book are a series of stories focusing on a range of characters. Some of the chapters, or stories, previously were published separately, such as in The New Yorker. Whether this book is best classified as a novel or as a collection of short stories is unclear; I think of it as a novel.

The most prominent characters are Bennie, an aging music executive, and his assistant for twelve years, Sasha. The stories zip back and forth through time, from the 1960s to the future, to at least 2020. There are many characters. The book reminds me of a Robert Altman movie, with a large cast of intersecting characters. No character is more important than or at the forefront of the rest.

The book did not leave an impression with me. But I read that Egan wanted to depict the flow of time, that time is not experienced as linear. She had been reading Proust when this book was conceived; she was inspired by Proust's In Search of Lost Time.

The goon squad is time. Time affects all of the characters differently. Over time, none of them achieve the happiness or the lives they once desired in their youth. As Egan says in an interview, "time is the stealth goon, the one you ignore because you are so busy worrying about the goons right in front of you.”

What Clinton Would Do

2011-12-09T17:14:00.002-06:00

I expect to be reading this book.

By JEFF MADRICK
Published: December 9, 2011

Bill Clinton’s new book, “Back to Work,” is less a bold plan to create jobs than it is a passionate rebuttal of “our 30-year antigovernment obsession.” That obsession, he insists, is public enemy No. 1. He also seems to be sending a barely disguised message to Barack Obama to join him in confronting the antigovernment chorus.

BACK TO WORK

Why We Need Smart Government for a Strong Economy

By Bill Clinton

196 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $23.95.

Times Topic: Bill ClintonBut coming from a former president who contributed to that very antigovernment narrative in the 1990s, it is unsurprising that the substance of the case he makes is weaker than it should be. In his State of the Union address in 1996, Clinton told us with a sense of triumph that the “era of big government is over.” By absorbing the new American distaste for government after the Republican Congressional victory of 1994, he assured his re-election two years later. And in his second term Clinton was more concerned about restraining government spending and paying down the debt than investing in America.

Clinton now seems to believe the orthodoxy has finally gone too far. He argues that antigovernment zeal led to President Bush’s deep tax cuts in the early 2000s. Those cuts, he tells us, are a major cause of today’s budget deficits, while the stubborn reluctance of Republicans to agree to any tax increases at all has brought the political process to a near halt.

For all the Republican arguments, Clinton says, America did not get a better economy with the Bush tax cuts. According to the Economic Cycle Research Institute, growth in personal income even before the Great Recession was slower under Bush than in any equivalent period since World War II. In the years he was president, Clinton proudly notes, America produced more than 22 million jobs. George Bush’s America created only 2.5 million jobs. The Great Recession, which ended six months after Obama took office, cost America roughly eight million jobs.

As Clinton says, President Obama inherited not only the Great Recession but a trillion-dollar deficit thanks in good part to those tax cuts. And now the nation is in the grips of a torpid economy laden with debt and a high rate of both unemployment and underemployment — those who want and cannot get full-time jobs — that appears intransigent. Despite the recent boom in corporate profits, the typical family’s income is below its level in the late 1990s.

Clinton traces the antigovernment attitudes to Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980. But in fact, the turn in America’s attitudes goes back to the economic wreckage of the mid-1970s, when inflation and unemployment simultaneously soared and budget deficits were first starting to raise alarms. America was still a moderately progressive country in the early ’70s: citizens supported social programs and voted down efforts to cut taxes. But by the end of the decade, a full-fledged tax revolt had gotten under way, led by the overwhelming passage in 1978 of Proposition 13 in California, which cut property taxes sharply, and the growing Congressional support for the Kemp-Roth tax bill, which proposed cutting federal income taxes by 30 percent. Even before Reagan’s victory, no institution, it seemed, was distrusted more than government.

Yet Clinton concentrates only on the damage done since 2001. He believes that he bequeathed a healthy economy to Bush and that the tax cuts undid it. After all, Clinton’s major legislative achievement was to raise income taxes on the well-off in 1993. The higher taxes relieved the long-exaggerated concerns about the inflationary consequences of a growing deficit. Interest rates started to recede and the economy took off, the unemployment rate ultimately falling to 4 percent by the year 2000. Many conservatives predicted a weakening economy and they were dead wrong.

But there were other contributing factors besides Clinton’s tax increases. Alan Greenspan’s Federal Reserve sharply raised interest rates in 1994, which was a main source of falling inflationary expectations. Meantime, government spending was dampened because health care costs grew slowly as a result of the rise of H.M.O.’s. Because the cold war had ended, military spending fell as a percent of G.D.P. Perhaps most important, the Internet boom began and sparked a stock market bubble that stimulated spending by consumers, who felt ever richer.

Along the way, Clinton did pass important social legislation, like the expansion of the earned income tax credit and a family leave act, but his administration’s investments in education and infrastructure were modest compared with the growth in the economy — and so were the results. In 1998, for example, the Society of Civil Engineers gave a grade to America’s infrastructure of D. In 2001, after the Clinton investments, the grade assigned was D+. Clinton writes in “Back to Work” that the nation could have eliminated debt completely by 2013 if the Bush administration stuck to his deficit reduction plan. But why was this ever his plan? Should a C.E.O. brag that he can eliminate all his company’s debt, or should he be investing in the future?

Clinton sidesteps his role in financial deregulation. He admits he should have taken steps to control derivatives, the highly leveraged securities that were at the heart of the 2008 crisis, though he says his decision to end the Glass-Steagall Act, the New Deal legislation that separated commercial and investment banks, did not create the crisis. But in fact repeal led directly to the rise of huge financial institutions whose managers believed they could take on both highly risky investments and enormous debt as well. And his administration, along with many Congressional Democrats, was consistently soft on Wall Street in other areas at a time when there were numerous accounting frauds, scams to sell high-technology new issues and hot money racing around the world to find easy profits, destabilizing foreign economies in the process.

It is no surprise, then, that there is no Roosevelt moment in “Back to Work” — nothing equivalent to a new New Deal. Clinton’s jobs plan is largely a repetition of Obama’s recent recommendations, which include a temporary cut in payroll taxes and a reversal of the Bush tax cuts for the well-off. He also calls for an aggressive program to relieve mortgage debt. All this is a decent start, but not very likely to be enough.

Without explanation, Clinton backs proposals to balance the budget that seem to depend significantly more on spending reductions than tax increases (he never makes the calculation). He would make some cuts in Social Security and Medicare to reduce the deficit. He would cut military spending, but only cautiously. Always a good policy wonk, he knows that America’s true fiscal problems are the rising costs of health care, not Medicare and Medicaid themselves, but he continues to propose cutting entitlements spending. The 1990s Clinton is still talking.

MOst disappointing, for a man who warns us that America is falling behind other rich nations for lack of public investment, he makes no major proposal to raise taxes significantly once the economy is back on track. He tantalizingly points out that reversing all of the Bush tax cuts, including for the middle class, would come close to restoring an adequately balanced budget over the next 10 years. But he doesn’t advocate this. He mentions the possible need for a value-added tax — a national sales tax — while he is at best ambivalent about a financial transactions tax. His recommendations on transportation investment are merely to doff his cap to an infrastructure bank and a few well-worn energy initiatives. These are the big-issue problems America must ultimately face but, like most of Washington, he pushes them down the road.

Many inside the Beltway welcome Clinton’s modest pragmatism. They think it politically realistic. But if those few people who have a national megaphone — like a former president — don’t use it to influence and change America’s thinking, who will? The nation badly needs a counternarrative to the antigovernment orthodoxy Clinton describes. His is welcome. But even if we adopted all of his suggestions, America would still have a long way to go.

The Movie of a Lifetime

2011-12-09T09:31:00.000-06:00

John le Carré: “Tinker Tailor” the movie of a lifetime

Salon exclusive: The spy fiction icon calls the new film the best adaptation of his work everBy John Le Carre

Once in a lifetime, if a novelist is very lucky, he gets a movie made of one of his books that has its own life and truth. This is the achievement of Tomas Alfredson and his team.

Yet I have been asked if an American audience — accustomed to the speed and dash of most movie-making today — will have the concentration span needed to follow an intelligently paced narrative of some complexity? I believe that audiences are far better at doing this than film-makers give them credit for. This is a movie that entertains superbly and thrillingly at its own pace and rhythm — a hypnotic movie that takes you over completely. I don’t believe that any audience, once introduced to it, will be able to take its eyes off the screen.

In profound ways, it is touching and often alarming. In less profound ways, it is exciting and occasionally very funny. Its complexities are a pleasure to share, and the more so since the movie gently explains them and delivers a satisfying dénouement.

It is a work of art that stays with you, as good works of art do.