Monday, October 8, 2012
Columbus Day
This is Columbus Day, a federal holiday. I agree with those who question honoring this man who brought terrorism and pestilence to the indigenous peoples of North America. I can understand the holiday as honoring Italian Americans in the past and perhaps honoring our multicultural past, but still I wonder if this is proper. History is seldom neat. Our legacy of Christopher Columbus is very historically muddy.
Friday, October 5, 2012
Jeffrey Eugenides
The author of “The Marriage Plot” and “Middlesex” says the best marriage plot novel of all time is Henry James’s “Portrait of a Lady,” because it presents an “anti-marriage” plot.
Jeffrey Eugenides
Related
By the Book: Archive (May 3, 2012) What book is on your night stand now?
Right now I’m shuttling between “The Map and the Territory,” by the French novelist Michel Houellebecq, and the Patrick Melrose novels by Edward St. Aubyn, which everyone I know seems to be reading.
Houellebecq’s known for being a provocateur. He’ll say things like “Life was expensive in the west, it was cold there; the prostitution was of poor quality.” His book “Platform,” which is about sex tourism and Islamic terrorism, got him sued in France. What’s less appreciated is how acute he is on the subjects of business and the macro effects of global capitalism. His books are the strangest confections: part Gallic anomie, part sociological analysis, part Harold Robbins. He says a lot of depressing, un-American things I get a big kick out of.
What’s the last truly great book you read?
“The Love of a Good Woman,” by Alice Munro. There’s not one story in there that isn’t perfect. Each time I finished one, I just wanted to lie down on the floor and die. My life was complete. Munro’s prose has such a surface propriety that you’re never prepared for the shocking places her stories take you. She pulls off technical feats, too, like changing the point of view in each section of a single story. This is nearly impossible to do while carrying the necessary narrative freight forward, but she makes it look easy. Most readers don’t notice how technically inventive Munro is because her storytelling and characterization overwhelm their attention.
And what’s the best marriage plot novel ever?
“The Portrait of a Lady,” by Henry James. Unlike the comedies of Austen, where the heroines all get married at the end, this book presents an anti-marriage plot. Old Mr. Touchett gives Isabel Archer a huge inheritance in order to secure her independence. The irony, however, is that the money ends up attracting the wrong suitor. James fills the book with the traditional energies of a marriage plot. You’ve got Caspar Goodwood and Lord Warburton courting Isabel, too, but here the heroine makes the wrong choice (the connoisseur!), and the question isn’t who will she marry but how will she survive her marriage. It’s much darker than anything Austen did, and it leads straight to the moral ambiguities and complexities of the modern novel.
And the most useful book you read while at Brown?
I arrived at college keen to develop a life philosophy. The idea was to begin with the Greeks and stop somewhere around Nietzsche. By reading the canonical works, I thought I could bring an order to my mind that would manifest itself in my behavior and decisions. Now, 30 years later, I look back and have to admit it didn’t happen. I’ve forgotten a lot of what I read at college. It’s all in pieces, bright patches of embroidered detail about Augustan Rome or early Islam or Renaissance Italy or the modernists, but not a complete tapestry. I’ve got Jacques Barzun’s “From Dawn to Decadence” on my bookshelf here. That’s the kind of book I’m a sucker for. I want to get it all explained in one shot. But you know what? I’ve tried to read that book three separate times, and I never get past Page 50.
In the end, it was the useless books I read at college that have stayed with me. I think of the last pages of “Lolita,” where Humbert Humbert hears children’s voices and recognizes the harm he’s brought Dolores Haze, and the sentence comes immediately back: “I stood listening to that musical vibration from my lofty slope, to those flashes of separate cries with a kind of demure murmur for background, and then I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita’s absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord.” To see a writer describe the world with such specificity, and to learn that this formulation of words went beyond words — that it taught you about pity and shame, as well as beauty, liveliness and compassion — that’s what stuck with me. Not a coherent system, maybe. But a few constellations to set my course by.
Any guilty reading pleasures — book, periodical, online?
The only thing I’m high-minded about is literature. It’s not an elitist stance; it’s temperamental. Whenever I try to read a thriller or a detective novel I get incredibly bored, both by the language and the narrative machinery. Since I’m so naturally virtuous on the literary front, I don’t see why I can’t slum elsewhere, and I do, guiltlessly. I’m the guy in the waiting room flipping through People. Bellow said that fiction was “the higher autobiography,” but really it’s the higher gossip.
What was the last book that made you cry?
“The South Beach Diet.”
The last book that made you laugh?
The Houellebecq and St. Aubyn are both making me laugh, but the St. Aubyn is more intentionally funny. And Christopher Hitchens’s memoir “Hitch-22.” There’s a line in there that goes something like, “By that time, my looks had declined to such a degree that only women would go to bed with me.”
The last book that made you furious?
It’s a while ago now, but James Atlas’s biography of Saul Bellow irked me to no end. Bellow’s talent fills Atlas with envy. And so he avoids any true accounting of the work to spend his time telling the reader that Bellow wasn’t so hot in the sack, etc. But readers of literary biographies don’t want to sleep with their subjects; they want to read them.
You grew up in Detroit. What should someone who really wants to understand the city read?
I’m trying to think how to answer this in a way that doesn’t sound self-important. Give me a minute.
You teach creative writing at Princeton. What books do you find most useful as a teacher?
I teach a writing workshop, so there’s not a big reading list. It’s “useful” (you like that word) to provide models of the form: Chekhov, Joyce’s “Dubliners,” etc. But I teach undergraduates, and sometimes they’re not ready to receive the lessons in craft that those writers exemplify. The story I assign every year that gets my students most enthralled with the idea of writing fiction is “Jon,” by George Saunders.
Your first novel was made into a film by Sofia Coppola. If “The Marriage Plot” were made into a movie and you could give the director a few words of advice, what would they be?
Well, I should be able to give the director a few words of advice, because I’m co-writing the screenplay with him. In fact, we had drinks the other day, and I said: “Forget about making a faithful adaptation. What we have to do is break the book apart and find a cinematic equivalent of its literary mechanics.” What you want, if your novel becomes a movie, is for the movie to be good. Of course, you want to tell the same story. But you have to find a new way of presenting it. Plus, I wrote the book already. It would be boring to replicate it scene by scene. As well as unwise.
What’s the one book you wish someone else would write?
My worst book. I wish someone would write that one so I won’t have to.
You’re organizing a dinner party of writers and can invite three authors, dead or alive. Who’s coming?
First I call Shakespeare. “Who else is coming?” Shakespeare asks. “Tolstoy,” I answer. “I’m busy that night,” Shakespeare says. Next I call Kafka, who agrees to come. “As long as you don’t invite Tolstoy.” “I already invited Tolstoy,” I tell him. “But Kundera’s coming. You like Milan. And you guys can speak Czech.” “I speak German,” Kafka corrects me.
When Tolstoy hears that Kundera’s coming, he drops out. (Something about an old book review.) So finally I call Joyce, who’s always available. When we get to the restaurant, Kafka wants a table in back. He’s afraid of being recognized. Joyce, who’s already plastered, says, “If anyone’s going to be recognized, it’s me.” Kundera leans over and whispers in my ear, “People might recognize us too if we went around with a cane.”
The waiter arrives. When he asks about food allergies, Kafka hands him a written list. Then he excuses himself to go to the bathroom. As soon as he’s gone, Kundera says, “The problem with Kafka is that he never got enough tail.” We all snicker. Joyce orders another bottle of wine. Finally, he turns and looks at me through his dark glasses. “I’m reading your new book,” he says. “Oh?” I say. “Yes,” says Joyce.
You’ve said your next book will be a collection of stories. Any recent short story collections you’d recommend?
How about a long story? Claire Keegan’s “Foster.” It’s told from the point of view of an Irish girl whose parents, lacking the money to care for her, send her to live with childless relatives, whom she ends up preferring. The ending is absolutely heartbreaking, every single word in the right place and pregnant with double meanings.
You can bring three books to a desert island. Which do you choose?
The King James Bible. “Anna Karenina.” And a how-to book on raft-building.
What do you plan to read next?
T. M. Luhrmann’s “When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship With God.” I’m reading this despite my aversion to books with colons in their titles. Luhrmann’s an anthropologist who teaches at Stanford. I heard an interview with her on the radio and was struck by how nonjudgmental she sounded. And it’s a subject that interests me for a lot of reasons, historical, political and artistic.
Tuesday, October 2, 2012
The State of the Presidential Race (3)
This is the day before the first debate. So much is being made of it. It is too stressful for me to watch. Paul Ryan is hopefully being recognized for the flimflam man that he is. That is one good thing going on right now.
Monday, October 1, 2012
A Review of Bill & Hillary
By JODI KANTOR
Published: September 28, 2012
How far can a presidential marriage go in explaining a presidency?
BILL AND HILLARY
The Politics of the Personal
By William H. Chafe
387 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $28
.Not far, according to most couples who occupy the White House. Life and history are smoother for them if everyone abides by the press-office fiction that the president’s spouse is more soothing accessory than sharp-eyed adviser or moral force. So while we stare endlessly at first couples, we rarely glimpse the strange vastness of their marriages: how a private conversation between two people, lying in the same bedroom where Abraham Lincoln slept, can influence an entire nation. We forget that our leaders, tossed in the maelstrom of the modern presidency, rely on their spouses as few of us ever need to, and that even first ladies who are not policy wonks still influence their husbands’ aspirations and judgments. Biographers can be complicit, often consigning wives to cameos, sometimes because the full story is just too hard to see.
The great exceptions to this rule are Bill and Hillary Clinton, who offered themselves to the nation as a package deal from the start. No one has ever doubted the influence of the Clinton marriage, but in his new book, “Bill and Hillary,” the historian William H. Chafe ups the ante, arguing that the entire Clinton presidency was powered by the psychodynamics of the Clinton union.
In his telling, Bill was a brilliant mess, Hillary gave him discipline and from this sinner-rescuer complex, the drama unfolded. “The history — good and bad — of the Clinton administration reflects the degree to which their internal dynamics shaped the choices they made at every turn,” he writes. The Clinton marriage, he argues, played a large part in Bill Clinton’s loss of the Arkansas governorship in 1980, his decision to run for the presidency in 1992, the first-term scandals and even the partisanship that hardened over Washington. That’s before the author even gets to Monica Lewinsky.
Chafe’s eagerness to talk about psychology, emotion and the political potency of marriage is refreshing, but it’s hard to say exactly why he wrote this book — an amplification of a familiar view of the Clintons, with little new reporting — and I read it worrying that he was hurting his cause by going slightly overboard. If the Clinton marriage is the key to understanding Bill’s presidency, then why have the Obamas, with a very different relationship, repeated a good chunk of the Arkansans’ history (overly ambitious first-year agenda, including a health care plan that lacked sufficient support; vicious Republican attacks; devastating midterm losses)?
Chafe is also prone to blame-Hillary-ism, repeatedly depicting her as seizing upon her husband’s mistakes for her own gain: “Hillary was an enabler who actually acquired power, and husbandly affection,” when she came to Bill’s aid. But by running for the Senate after the Lewinsky scandal, was she cynically taking advantage of her husband’s sins? Or was she finally correcting an imbalance in her marriage — the assumption that her own enormous talent, ambition and vision had to flow through her spouse? Her decision to play the principal and not the wife is a turning point for the history of women in American politics, and yet Chafe — like many before him — reduces it to payback for Bill’s affairs.
But any Clinton book is by definition a wild, perplexing tale, and “Bill and Hillary” is worth reading as a reminder that the title characters — now mellow grandparents-in-waiting — did many things that today seem almost too outlandish to be true. Chafe largely synthesizes prior books by Joe Klein, Gail Sheehy, David Maraniss and Carl Bernstein, but the episodes he recounts still have the power to startle, especially in the midst of an election with two unusually temperate contenders.
Some memorable bits: Two years before running for president in 1992, Bill Clinton fell in love with a beautiful businesswoman named Mary Jo Jenkins and asked his wife for a divorce. (She refused.) In the tangle of scandals that plagued the early Clinton White House, the first lady came alarmingly close to being indicted on a charge of obstruction of justice. After huge losses in the 1994 midterms, the Clintons installed a secret adviser — code name “Charlie,” real name Dick Morris — to steer West Wing decisions unbeknown to the rest of the staff. (Surely any president to contemplate such bizarre covert action now would pause and think: “Jeez, this would look terrible in the next installment of ‘Game Change.’ I’d better not.”)
Though Chafe never mentions it, his story suggests that the Clintons recognize even more in the Obama saga than we know. In 1993, Hillary Clinton tried to soften her image before Congress by introducing herself “as a mother, a wife, a daughter, a sister, a woman.” Fifteen years later, Michelle Obama, another blunt Ivy League-educated lawyer, recast her own image by introducing herself at the Democratic convention in Denver in almost exactly the same words.
Asked in 1994 to explain the nastiness of her critics, Hillary Clinton called them men who found women’s newfound opportunities hard to take. “It’s not me, personally, they hate — it’s the change I represent,” she told Gail Sheehy. Years later, Barack Obama said much the same thing to David Remnick about the backlash to the election of a black man. “It signifies change, . . . and there are going to be folks who don’t want to promote that understanding because they’re afraid of the future,” he said.
The action of Chafe’s book ends in 2000, with one Clinton leaving the White House and the other heading to the Senate. I wish the author had used the passage of time since then as his ally, juxtaposing Hillary present with Hillary past. In a delicious twist, the initially tin-eared first lady who offended half of Washington became, of all things, an immensely successful diplomat. Is she so good now precisely because she was so bad back then?
fter the White House, most presidential marriages retreat back into mundane privacy; the couples who once debated deployment levels and Congressional strategy start worrying again about who will walk the dog. Not the Clintons, whose marriage has kept radiating through our national life. In the spring of 2008, I followed Hillary Clinton around North Carolina and Indiana as she mounted the last, nearly hopeless stand of her presidential campaign. In thawing fields and parks, huge crowds of women gathered to cheer her even though she was almost sure to lose.
When I asked them why they had come, many said a surprising name: Monica. They had watched Hillary Clinton endure a humiliating trial, then heal and thrive. Now she was about to be humiliated again, losing to a man with more charisma and less experience, and they would not let her go through that alone. Thanks to Bill Clinton’s old indiscretions, the race for the Democratic presidential nomination lasted longer than anyone thought it would.
Two years later, a Clinton marriage stole the spotlight again, when Chelsea Clinton’s wedding became a national preoccupation. The celebrations seemed to offer some final, long-sought resolution to the drama of Bill and Hillary’s union. All of that cheating and shame would end badly, we had suspected. And yet we saw proud, long-married parents and a wholesome-looking young couple in a summer garden: not the close of one of Shakespeare’s tragedies, but one of his happy endings, and perhaps the most riveting Clinton comeback of all.
Published: September 28, 2012
How far can a presidential marriage go in explaining a presidency?
BILL AND HILLARY
The Politics of the Personal
By William H. Chafe
387 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $28
.Not far, according to most couples who occupy the White House. Life and history are smoother for them if everyone abides by the press-office fiction that the president’s spouse is more soothing accessory than sharp-eyed adviser or moral force. So while we stare endlessly at first couples, we rarely glimpse the strange vastness of their marriages: how a private conversation between two people, lying in the same bedroom where Abraham Lincoln slept, can influence an entire nation. We forget that our leaders, tossed in the maelstrom of the modern presidency, rely on their spouses as few of us ever need to, and that even first ladies who are not policy wonks still influence their husbands’ aspirations and judgments. Biographers can be complicit, often consigning wives to cameos, sometimes because the full story is just too hard to see.
The great exceptions to this rule are Bill and Hillary Clinton, who offered themselves to the nation as a package deal from the start. No one has ever doubted the influence of the Clinton marriage, but in his new book, “Bill and Hillary,” the historian William H. Chafe ups the ante, arguing that the entire Clinton presidency was powered by the psychodynamics of the Clinton union.
In his telling, Bill was a brilliant mess, Hillary gave him discipline and from this sinner-rescuer complex, the drama unfolded. “The history — good and bad — of the Clinton administration reflects the degree to which their internal dynamics shaped the choices they made at every turn,” he writes. The Clinton marriage, he argues, played a large part in Bill Clinton’s loss of the Arkansas governorship in 1980, his decision to run for the presidency in 1992, the first-term scandals and even the partisanship that hardened over Washington. That’s before the author even gets to Monica Lewinsky.
Chafe’s eagerness to talk about psychology, emotion and the political potency of marriage is refreshing, but it’s hard to say exactly why he wrote this book — an amplification of a familiar view of the Clintons, with little new reporting — and I read it worrying that he was hurting his cause by going slightly overboard. If the Clinton marriage is the key to understanding Bill’s presidency, then why have the Obamas, with a very different relationship, repeated a good chunk of the Arkansans’ history (overly ambitious first-year agenda, including a health care plan that lacked sufficient support; vicious Republican attacks; devastating midterm losses)?
Chafe is also prone to blame-Hillary-ism, repeatedly depicting her as seizing upon her husband’s mistakes for her own gain: “Hillary was an enabler who actually acquired power, and husbandly affection,” when she came to Bill’s aid. But by running for the Senate after the Lewinsky scandal, was she cynically taking advantage of her husband’s sins? Or was she finally correcting an imbalance in her marriage — the assumption that her own enormous talent, ambition and vision had to flow through her spouse? Her decision to play the principal and not the wife is a turning point for the history of women in American politics, and yet Chafe — like many before him — reduces it to payback for Bill’s affairs.
But any Clinton book is by definition a wild, perplexing tale, and “Bill and Hillary” is worth reading as a reminder that the title characters — now mellow grandparents-in-waiting — did many things that today seem almost too outlandish to be true. Chafe largely synthesizes prior books by Joe Klein, Gail Sheehy, David Maraniss and Carl Bernstein, but the episodes he recounts still have the power to startle, especially in the midst of an election with two unusually temperate contenders.
Some memorable bits: Two years before running for president in 1992, Bill Clinton fell in love with a beautiful businesswoman named Mary Jo Jenkins and asked his wife for a divorce. (She refused.) In the tangle of scandals that plagued the early Clinton White House, the first lady came alarmingly close to being indicted on a charge of obstruction of justice. After huge losses in the 1994 midterms, the Clintons installed a secret adviser — code name “Charlie,” real name Dick Morris — to steer West Wing decisions unbeknown to the rest of the staff. (Surely any president to contemplate such bizarre covert action now would pause and think: “Jeez, this would look terrible in the next installment of ‘Game Change.’ I’d better not.”)
Though Chafe never mentions it, his story suggests that the Clintons recognize even more in the Obama saga than we know. In 1993, Hillary Clinton tried to soften her image before Congress by introducing herself “as a mother, a wife, a daughter, a sister, a woman.” Fifteen years later, Michelle Obama, another blunt Ivy League-educated lawyer, recast her own image by introducing herself at the Democratic convention in Denver in almost exactly the same words.
Asked in 1994 to explain the nastiness of her critics, Hillary Clinton called them men who found women’s newfound opportunities hard to take. “It’s not me, personally, they hate — it’s the change I represent,” she told Gail Sheehy. Years later, Barack Obama said much the same thing to David Remnick about the backlash to the election of a black man. “It signifies change, . . . and there are going to be folks who don’t want to promote that understanding because they’re afraid of the future,” he said.
The action of Chafe’s book ends in 2000, with one Clinton leaving the White House and the other heading to the Senate. I wish the author had used the passage of time since then as his ally, juxtaposing Hillary present with Hillary past. In a delicious twist, the initially tin-eared first lady who offended half of Washington became, of all things, an immensely successful diplomat. Is she so good now precisely because she was so bad back then?
fter the White House, most presidential marriages retreat back into mundane privacy; the couples who once debated deployment levels and Congressional strategy start worrying again about who will walk the dog. Not the Clintons, whose marriage has kept radiating through our national life. In the spring of 2008, I followed Hillary Clinton around North Carolina and Indiana as she mounted the last, nearly hopeless stand of her presidential campaign. In thawing fields and parks, huge crowds of women gathered to cheer her even though she was almost sure to lose.
When I asked them why they had come, many said a surprising name: Monica. They had watched Hillary Clinton endure a humiliating trial, then heal and thrive. Now she was about to be humiliated again, losing to a man with more charisma and less experience, and they would not let her go through that alone. Thanks to Bill Clinton’s old indiscretions, the race for the Democratic presidential nomination lasted longer than anyone thought it would.
Two years later, a Clinton marriage stole the spotlight again, when Chelsea Clinton’s wedding became a national preoccupation. The celebrations seemed to offer some final, long-sought resolution to the drama of Bill and Hillary’s union. All of that cheating and shame would end badly, we had suspected. And yet we saw proud, long-married parents and a wholesome-looking young couple in a summer garden: not the close of one of Shakespeare’s tragedies, but one of his happy endings, and perhaps the most riveting Clinton comeback of all.
The Evangelical Left
Pro-Life, Pro-Left‘Moral Minority’ by David R. Swartz
By MOLLY WORTHEN
Published: September 28, 2012
In 1968, Mark Hatfield, one of America’s most prominent evangelical politicians, wanted to abolish the draft and clandestinely wore a Eugene McCarthy pin under his lapel. A Republican senator from Oregon, Hatfield had fans in evangelical churches around the country. When organizers of the 1973 National Prayer Breakfast invited him to address Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger and other conservative luminaries (the Vietnam War was a “national sin and disgrace,” he told them), he based his remarks on a text written by a renegade seminarian named Jim Wallis — a former member of Students for a Democratic Society who believed that being “pro-life” meant hating war and poverty as much as abortion.
The Evangelical Left in an Age of Conservatism
By David R. Swartz
Illustrated. 376 pp. University of Pennsylvania Press. $47.50.
.If the historian David R. Swartz is right, Hatfield, Wallis and their supporters were not just forgettable anomalies in the inexorable rise of the Christian right. The early 1970s were not “the Reagan Revolution-in-waiting,” he contends, but an unsettled era when evangelicals’ ambivalent political impulses had not yet hardened and left-leaning activists had prospects nearly as bright as their peers on the right. Today, in the midst of Capitol Hill gridlock and the slugging matches of partisan super PACs, “Moral Minority” jogs our historical memory and challenges our imagination: not so long ago, the American political landscape was very different.
Swartz tells his story through profiles of activists, politicians and evangelists who tried to convince fellow believers that the Gospel demands social justice. His subjects range from progressive academics like the Baptist civil rights activist and philosopher John Alexander, who roused student consciousness through his fiery teaching at Wheaton College in Illinois, to Wallis’s grungy Christian commune in Washington and the Christian World Liberation Front in Berkeley. Other people pushed evangelicals beyond their Anglo-American male comfort zone: black evangelists electrified the evangelical conference circuit; evangelical feminists decried patriarchy; Latin American preachers held Americans accountable to the needs of poor Christians in the global South. “Moral Minority” is a vivid topography of a little-understood corner of evangelical thought. It is not an account of a political movement — because there was no movement to speak of. This is a story of failures and might-have-beens, but it is just as illuminating as a history of political success.
Many of Swartz’s subjects, with their formidable facial hair and self-published protest literature, fit right in with the radicals of the secular New Left. Yet they were also typical evangelicals. For the most part they attended conservative Christian colleges and seminaries; they fielded speaking invitations from national missions conferences; evangelical bookstores stocked their treatises defending gender equality and their cookbooks advocating “simple living.” When George McGovern accepted an invitation to speak at Wheaton in 1972, he received a standing ovation.
So why did the evangelical left seem to dissolve into irrelevance? Swartz argues that evangelicals’ mass enlistment in the conservative Republicanism of the “culture wars” was not the inevitable consequence of doctrine or history: Jesus did not leave behind a clear party platform. But while members of the Christian right set aside doctrinal differences to rally around a shared cultural agenda, the left fell victim to internal identity politics and theological disputes. Black and female evangelicals argued that the left’s leadership was too white and too male. Anabaptists who emphasized nonviolence clashed with Reformed evangelicals who had ambitious plans to transform American culture. Meanwhile, secular liberals, eager to make abortion rights a nonnegotiable plank of the Democratic platform, drove anti-abortion Christians into the arms of savvy Republicans.
Progressive evangelicals tried to halt this migration: “The energy of the pro-life movement must be removed from the ideological agenda of the New Right,” Wallis warned in 1980. As conservatives transformed the fight against abortion from a “Catholic issue” into the defining battle of the culture wars, Wallis and others countered with another idea borrowed from Catholics, the “consistent life ethic” opposing poverty, war and the death penalty as well as abortion. Yet left-wing evangelicals’ measured arguments were no match for cries that abortion is murder and family values are under siege. It seems they were not so mainstream after all: efforts at fund-raising fell flat, and by the mid-’80s half of the subscriptions to Wallis’s magazine, Sojourners, went to Catholics.
Swartz suggests that progressive evangelicals’ forays into politics and their condemnation of “satanic” and “demonic” influences in America’s foreign policy and domestic inequalities had the unforeseen effect of encouraging their conservative rivals: “The evangelical left modeled a structural mode of thought, a dualistic application of moralism, a precedent of co-belligerency and an activist approach to social change. . . . The evangelical left hastened the arrival of the religious right.”
The argument is provocative but overstated. The culture warriors of the ’80s did borrow protest tactics and political techniques from the left, but their models were more likely the successes of the civil rights movement rather than small-scale operations like Evangelicals for McGovern. More important, despite apocalyptic beliefs that appeared to entrust justice to Judgment Day rather than to worldly politics, conservative evangelicals and fundamentalists had been organizing political rallies, building mailing lists and collaborating with Catholics in the name of anti-Communism since at least the ’50s.
Two cultural developments propelled the rise of the religious right: a backlash against midcentury social upheaval and a deep reservoir of anti-Communism. Conservative leaders stoked these feelings and gave them political force partly through grass-roots organization, but also by popularizing an appealing narrative. They baptized the founders as modern evangelicals’ God-fearing forebears. They amplified the cold war image of America as the Christian libertarian nation divinely anointed to hold the godless Communists at bay. The evangelical left was too divided — and too out of touch with the Sun Belt, the emerging center of political strength — to offer a competing grand narrative that would resonate with ordinary evangelicals and transform scattered sympathetic student gatherings into a national movement.
The problem was not that these activists overestimated the average evangelical’s capacity for compassion, but that they underestimated evangelicals’ fear of social change and socialism. Swartz notes one group that accused Hatfield and Wallis of “Soviet-style Communism,” but he does not make enough of this. Despite left-wing evangelicals’ efforts to distance themselves from the Marxist and Maoist excesses of the secular New Left, their communes, their opposition to the war, their criticisms of capitalism — not to mention their support of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua — allowed critics to brand them as “socialist,” the kiss of death in American politics. Progressive evangelicals too often ended up trapped in a narrative written by their opponents, one that cast them as anti-American subversives.
More than anything, the evangelical left was a casualty of the radical polarization of American politics after 1970. “Moral Minority” is a helpful complement to Geoffrey Kabaservice’s “Rule and Ruin,” an account of the demise of moderate Republicanism over the past 40 years. Both books are careful works of scholarship, but it is hard not to read them as eulogies for a political culture that might have been: a Republican Party that might have chosen to attract new voters by promoting progressive social policies rather than pandering to the resentment of Southerners and “white ethnics”; an evangelicalism more evenly split — as Catholic voters are — between the parties, and open to a wider range of solutions to our problems.
Swartz concludes on a positive note: 70 percent of evangelicals now tell pollsters they don’t identify with the religious right, and younger evangelicals often have more enthusiasm for social justice than for the culture wars. The Democrats have woken up to the importance of religion: President Obama has sought the advice of Jim Wallis. Still, a statesman like Mark Hatfield seems less a useful role model than a political animal of a distant and extinguished age. A creature from such an alien climate could never survive today.
A Country of Disunion
State of Disunion‘Our Divided Political Heart’ by E. J. Dionne Jr.
By GEOFFREY KABASERVICE
Published: September 28, 2012
The Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne Jr. has ascended to a sufficiently elevated plane of the Higher Punditry that his author’s biography no longer mentions he received a doctorate from Oxford, where he was a Rhodes scholar. Even so, he still comes across as a precocious student, bubbling with boyish charm and enthusiasm for ideas, though sometimes a bit glib and preening. His books are clever, upbeat and interesting, particularly when he examines current political concerns through the lens of history, religion and philosophy. But while readers will admire Dionne’s intellectual dexterity in diagnosing the historical origins of our present political problem of division and dysfunction, they may also wish he could make a more substantive case for how we might move beyond it.
OUR DIVIDED POLITICAL HEART
The Battle for the American Idea in an Age of Discontent
By E. J. Dionne Jr.
325 pp. Bloomsbury. $27.
.The topic Dionne has set for himself in “Our Divided Political Heart” seems to be something like this: “Pundits predicted that Barack Obama’s 2008 election would trigger a new cycle of progressivism and prosperity, yet instead it has brought political gridlock, Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street protests, and continued public unhappiness. Discuss.” Dionne offers familiar explanations, including the severity of the financial crisis; widespread fears of national decline; Republican obstruction; and Obama’s mishandling of the economic stimulus program and health care reform. But far more ambitiously, he situates our current divisions in the full sweep of American history, going back to the founders — since, as he observes, “Americans disagree about who we are because we can’t agree about who we’ve been.”
Dionne posits that American history has always been characterized by tension between the core values of individualism and community. Americans have cherished liberty, individual opportunity and self-expression while also upholding the importance of community obligation and civic virtue. The founders referred to these values as liberalism and republicanism, and the effort to balance and reconcile them has shaped the American character. Neither value is reducible to liberalism or conservatism as we now understand them, although communitarianism presumes a belief that government is at least potentially a constructive force. Dionne, a self-described “communitarian liberal,” acknowledges that he has much in common with conservative intellectuals like Robert Nisbet and the “compassionate conservatives” around George W. Bush. But Dionne argues that today’s Tea Party-influenced conservatives have broken with their communitarian traditions and become zealots for radical individualism. He pleads for a return to the balance between individual and community values that characterized most of American history.
Dionne takes a long-term historical approach partly in response to the revisionism of Tea Partyers and conservatives like Gov. Rick Perry of Texas, whose poorly informed assertions about American history and government make him a useful foil. The author draws on a wide body of historical scholarship, and the quarrels over that scholarship, in the course of revisiting past episodes and developments that bear on present controversies.
Conservatives’ contentions that the founders believed in minimal government and maximal individualism, for example, are countered by the findings of scholars like Gordon Wood that the American revolutionaries sought to create a strong federal government and conceived of a highly communal and at times anticapitalistic version of liberty. Dionne points out that conservative justices like Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas who claim to be able to discern the “original intent” of the Constitution are deluded, since the founders held conflicting views and some provisions of the Constitution “embody not timeless truths but sensitive compromises aimed at resolving (or getting around) pressing disagreements of the moment.” He scolds Republicans for abandoning the tradition of active government involvement in national economic development that was promoted by Alexander Hamilton and the Whig Party of Henry Clay, and continued with the Republicans through Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt. He cites historians like Brian Balogh to bolster his view that the laissez-faire doctrine of the Gilded Age was an aberration, and that “conservative individualists are thus trying to convert a 35-year interlude into the norm for 235 years of American history.”
Dionne also deploys history as a goad to modern liberalism, particularly in his treatment of the Populist and Progressive movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He believes that liberals need to take the populist label away from conservative movements like the Tea Party and reclaim it as their own. He welcomes Occupy Wall Street as a populist force pushing Obama in a more communitarian direction, much like the mass movements that pushed Franklin Roosevelt leftward in the 1930s. At the same time, he hopes that Occupy Wall Street will find expression in traditional politics, just as the Progressives fulfilled many Populist goals by joining them with the aspirations of the middle class. The merger of Populism and Progressivism, in Dionne’s view, laid the groundwork for “the Long Consensus”: the active-government commitment to prosperity that expanded both individual opportunity and collective security in the century after Theodore Roosevelt succeeded to the presidency in 1901. It is this consensus, along with the balance and moderation it embodied, that is threatened by a Republican Party newly converted to the cause of radical individualism.
Dionne has paid careful attention to historians’ conflicting interpretations of the American past as well as to the history itself, and he’s obviously wary of the criticism that he has written a book that votes for Obama on every page, to paraphrase a charge that has been leveled against other scholars. He shouldn’t be accused of political favoritism for diagnosing the current moment of “asymmetric polarization,” in which Republicans seek to overturn the Long Consensus while Democrats defend it. “If describing developments in American political life candidly is dismissed as a form of partisanship,” he warns, “then honest speech becomes impossible.”
Still, Dionne covers such vast swaths of history and historiography that at times his approach resembles that of a water bug skittering across a pond, and this leaves him vulnerable to the charge that he’s engaging in historical cheerleading. It may be, for example, that the New Dealers “saved the freedoms and the republican institutions that were at the heart of the founders’ achievement,” but Dionne doesn’t begin to prove it. And while he is justly critical of ideologically compromised right-wing history, he calls ideological left-wing revisionism “important,” “debunking” and thought-provoking.
Dionne declares that “the country confronts a time of decision,” one that demands more than “musty bromides” about moderation or mere procedural reforms. But it’s not clear how he wants Americans to respond other than to vote Democratic. He hopes Republicans will recover their abandoned communitarian traditions — but how will this happen? He insists that we restore enthusiasm for public service by attracting talented people to government and transforming it into a forum for citizen debate — but how exactly? The book ends with Dionne’s valentine to the Millennials, whom he finds to be the most passionately individualistic and communitarian generation, more practical than the baby boomers and more idealistic than Generation X, indeed a veritable reincarnation of the Greatest Generation (aside from the part about overcoming a depression and fighting a world war). But it’s a bit early to turn the country over to the Millennials, and even they will require concrete programs around which a new consensus can cohere. The history Dionne tells can provide inspiration and guidance, but Americans will have to find new ways of thinking and acting if they are to restore the political balance that once enabled American greatness.
Geoffrey Kabaservice is the author of “Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, From Eisenhower to the Tea Party.”
Obama vs. The Supreme Court
By GARRETT EPPS
Published: September 28, 2012
The Oct. 22, 2007, cover of Time magazine displayed a portrait of Chief Justice John Roberts above the line does the supreme court still matter? “As the dust rises and the opinions, concurrences and dissents pile up, the court turns its attention to ever smaller cases related to ever narrower points of law,” David Von Drehle lamented in the accompanying article. “The court’s ideology is playing a dwindling role in the lives of Americans.”
By Jeffrey Toobin
325 pp. Doubleday. $28.95.
.Less than five years later, not even the boldest contrarian would write those words. With Congress and the executive branch all but paralyzed, the Supreme Court today sits firmly in the center of American public life; its decisions crucially affect matters of race, sex, economics, political power and even national security. And in official Washington this fall, the most intriguing personality is neither Barack Obama nor Mitt Romney but John Glover Roberts Jr.
Roberts cemented his central position last June when, in a stunning separate opinion, he broke with his four conservative allies to affirm — even though on narrow grounds — the constitutionality of President Obama’s health care program. The decision left conservatives fuming, liberals grateful, and everyone confused.
In “The Oath,” Jeffrey Toobin recounts the last four years of the court as a duel between the chief justice and the president. As Toobin notes, they make near-perfect antagonists: “Both were products of Chicago and its environs, and both were graduates of Harvard Law School. Both even served on the Harvard Law Review, the student-run scholarly magazine.” Needless to say, their political philosophies differ. Toobin calls Roberts an “apostle of change,” seeking to move the law dramatically to the right, and Obama a “conservative” who wants the courts to leave politics alone.
From the moment Obama took office, the two men stumbled into conflict. Roberts delivered a garbled version of the presidential oath at Obama’s inauguration, leading to a hurried do-over in the White House Map Room the next day. Precisely a year later, with Roberts in the majority, the court, in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, declared all-out war on a key Democratic goal, campaign finance regulation. A few days later, Obama looked down at six of the nine justices, seated in the House chamber for the State of the Union address, and gave them an extraordinary public scolding. The decision, he said, had opened “the floodgates for special interests — including foreign corporations — to spend without limit in our elections.” Then Obama’s signature initiative, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, came under legal assault. When the justices walked into the courtroom on the last day of the 2011-12 term, it seemed that fate had delivered Obama into Roberts’s hands.
But the conflict narrative faltered. Instead of destroying “Obamacare,” the chief justice single-handedly saved his rival. The much-reviled “individual mandate” was not valid as a regulation of commerce among the states, he concluded, but it was valid as an exercise of Congress’s power “to lay and collect taxes.” In addition, Congress can offer states new funding to expand the Medicaid program, but can’t cut off all Medicaid funding to states that choose not to accept it. Roberts’s opinion did include some strong conservative rhetoric; but for all that, as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg pointedly noted from the bench, the act survived “largely unscathed.”
Toobin is one of the most talented reporters covering American law. Where else but in “The Oath” would we learn that Franklin Pierce was the only American president ever to “affirm” rather than “swear” the required oath of office — or that the only full audio file of Obama’s second swearing-in was captured by Wes Allison of The St. Petersburg Times, using his “Panasonic RR-US361 digital recorder”? The book opens with an absorbing explanation of how the oath went wrong. In Toobin’s account, the two men did not know where each planned to pause during the recitation, so Roberts was startled when Obama jumped in after the first phrase and both, off balance, then mixed up the words.
But the rest of the book is devoted to drama inside the court, which is harder to report. When oral arguments ended on March 28, most observers (including, as he gamely admits, Toobin himself) predicted that the act would be savaged. By the end of June, however, Roberts had apparently left his four conservative allies in the lurch. “The Oath” adds little to what is already known of these events, nor does Toobin tell us who was responsible for the surprising wave of leaks, mostly critical of Roberts, coming from the court before and after the decision (which could be traced, he speculates, to “petulant law clerks,” not disappointed justices).
“The Oath” does not pretend to be an inside account of the health care case. Toobin’s goal instead is to explain the evolution of the Roberts court, and to do so he must weave together an almost overwhelming number of subjects — the rise of the personal “right to bear arms”; the assault on campaign finance regulation; the administration’s inept handling of lower-court judicial nominations; the unquiet afterlives of the retired justices Sandra Day O’Connor, David Souter and John Paul Stevens; the confirmation of Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan; Virginia Thomas’s bizarre quest for an apology from Anita Hill; and Justice Antonin Scalia’s “transition from conservative intellectual to right-wing crank.” He must also summarize prodigious amounts of legal doctrine and procedural complexity to place the court’s decisions in context. At times, the reader may be daunted by it all.
Knowledgeable observers will also find much to debate in Toobin’s account of the court’s turn to the right. He entitles one chapter “The Thomas Court,” but there are two sharply divergent schools of thought about whether Clarence Thomas is actually the “intellectual pathbreaker” behind the court’s Second Amendment and campaign finance jurisprudence. And although Toobin sees Citizens United as a triumph of Roberts’s partisan agenda, the facts related in “The Oath” can be read differently — to depict a rookie chief justice, nervous about moving doctrine too fast, reluctantly hustled along by an impatient conservative bloc.
None of the above should discourage readers from plunging into “The Oath.” Not until scholars a generation hence gain access to the justices’ papers are we likely to have a more useful, or more readable, picture of this oddly assorted group of judges at this moment in history. But at the end of “The Oath,” both the court and its chief justice remain enigmas. That’s not a failure of reporting. The decision in June was not the end but the beginning of a story. The meaning of Roberts’s opinion in the health care case will be clear only when we know the next few appointees to the court. A stronger conservative majority will widen the libertarian trail he blazed in his health care opinion. A new liberal majority will have little trouble limiting his words to the vanishing point.
In either case, I suspect we won’t see much more scoffing at the court’s importance, at least during the quarter-century or so John Roberts is likely to remain its chief. He has shown himself to be comfortable with power, independent of both enemies and friends, and capable of leading the kind of long-term legal campaign that made historic figures of chief justices like John Marshall and Earl Warren. As Toobin writes at the end of “The Oath,” “it’s John Roberts’s court now.”
Garrett Epps is a professor of law at the University of Baltimore and a legal correspondent for TheAtlantic.com. His new book, “Wrong and Dangerous: Ten Right Wing Myths About Our Constitution,” has just been published.
Published: September 28, 2012
The Oct. 22, 2007, cover of Time magazine displayed a portrait of Chief Justice John Roberts above the line does the supreme court still matter? “As the dust rises and the opinions, concurrences and dissents pile up, the court turns its attention to ever smaller cases related to ever narrower points of law,” David Von Drehle lamented in the accompanying article. “The court’s ideology is playing a dwindling role in the lives of Americans.”
By Jeffrey Toobin
325 pp. Doubleday. $28.95.
.Less than five years later, not even the boldest contrarian would write those words. With Congress and the executive branch all but paralyzed, the Supreme Court today sits firmly in the center of American public life; its decisions crucially affect matters of race, sex, economics, political power and even national security. And in official Washington this fall, the most intriguing personality is neither Barack Obama nor Mitt Romney but John Glover Roberts Jr.
Roberts cemented his central position last June when, in a stunning separate opinion, he broke with his four conservative allies to affirm — even though on narrow grounds — the constitutionality of President Obama’s health care program. The decision left conservatives fuming, liberals grateful, and everyone confused.
In “The Oath,” Jeffrey Toobin recounts the last four years of the court as a duel between the chief justice and the president. As Toobin notes, they make near-perfect antagonists: “Both were products of Chicago and its environs, and both were graduates of Harvard Law School. Both even served on the Harvard Law Review, the student-run scholarly magazine.” Needless to say, their political philosophies differ. Toobin calls Roberts an “apostle of change,” seeking to move the law dramatically to the right, and Obama a “conservative” who wants the courts to leave politics alone.
From the moment Obama took office, the two men stumbled into conflict. Roberts delivered a garbled version of the presidential oath at Obama’s inauguration, leading to a hurried do-over in the White House Map Room the next day. Precisely a year later, with Roberts in the majority, the court, in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, declared all-out war on a key Democratic goal, campaign finance regulation. A few days later, Obama looked down at six of the nine justices, seated in the House chamber for the State of the Union address, and gave them an extraordinary public scolding. The decision, he said, had opened “the floodgates for special interests — including foreign corporations — to spend without limit in our elections.” Then Obama’s signature initiative, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, came under legal assault. When the justices walked into the courtroom on the last day of the 2011-12 term, it seemed that fate had delivered Obama into Roberts’s hands.
But the conflict narrative faltered. Instead of destroying “Obamacare,” the chief justice single-handedly saved his rival. The much-reviled “individual mandate” was not valid as a regulation of commerce among the states, he concluded, but it was valid as an exercise of Congress’s power “to lay and collect taxes.” In addition, Congress can offer states new funding to expand the Medicaid program, but can’t cut off all Medicaid funding to states that choose not to accept it. Roberts’s opinion did include some strong conservative rhetoric; but for all that, as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg pointedly noted from the bench, the act survived “largely unscathed.”
Toobin is one of the most talented reporters covering American law. Where else but in “The Oath” would we learn that Franklin Pierce was the only American president ever to “affirm” rather than “swear” the required oath of office — or that the only full audio file of Obama’s second swearing-in was captured by Wes Allison of The St. Petersburg Times, using his “Panasonic RR-US361 digital recorder”? The book opens with an absorbing explanation of how the oath went wrong. In Toobin’s account, the two men did not know where each planned to pause during the recitation, so Roberts was startled when Obama jumped in after the first phrase and both, off balance, then mixed up the words.
But the rest of the book is devoted to drama inside the court, which is harder to report. When oral arguments ended on March 28, most observers (including, as he gamely admits, Toobin himself) predicted that the act would be savaged. By the end of June, however, Roberts had apparently left his four conservative allies in the lurch. “The Oath” adds little to what is already known of these events, nor does Toobin tell us who was responsible for the surprising wave of leaks, mostly critical of Roberts, coming from the court before and after the decision (which could be traced, he speculates, to “petulant law clerks,” not disappointed justices).
“The Oath” does not pretend to be an inside account of the health care case. Toobin’s goal instead is to explain the evolution of the Roberts court, and to do so he must weave together an almost overwhelming number of subjects — the rise of the personal “right to bear arms”; the assault on campaign finance regulation; the administration’s inept handling of lower-court judicial nominations; the unquiet afterlives of the retired justices Sandra Day O’Connor, David Souter and John Paul Stevens; the confirmation of Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan; Virginia Thomas’s bizarre quest for an apology from Anita Hill; and Justice Antonin Scalia’s “transition from conservative intellectual to right-wing crank.” He must also summarize prodigious amounts of legal doctrine and procedural complexity to place the court’s decisions in context. At times, the reader may be daunted by it all.
Knowledgeable observers will also find much to debate in Toobin’s account of the court’s turn to the right. He entitles one chapter “The Thomas Court,” but there are two sharply divergent schools of thought about whether Clarence Thomas is actually the “intellectual pathbreaker” behind the court’s Second Amendment and campaign finance jurisprudence. And although Toobin sees Citizens United as a triumph of Roberts’s partisan agenda, the facts related in “The Oath” can be read differently — to depict a rookie chief justice, nervous about moving doctrine too fast, reluctantly hustled along by an impatient conservative bloc.
None of the above should discourage readers from plunging into “The Oath.” Not until scholars a generation hence gain access to the justices’ papers are we likely to have a more useful, or more readable, picture of this oddly assorted group of judges at this moment in history. But at the end of “The Oath,” both the court and its chief justice remain enigmas. That’s not a failure of reporting. The decision in June was not the end but the beginning of a story. The meaning of Roberts’s opinion in the health care case will be clear only when we know the next few appointees to the court. A stronger conservative majority will widen the libertarian trail he blazed in his health care opinion. A new liberal majority will have little trouble limiting his words to the vanishing point.
In either case, I suspect we won’t see much more scoffing at the court’s importance, at least during the quarter-century or so John Roberts is likely to remain its chief. He has shown himself to be comfortable with power, independent of both enemies and friends, and capable of leading the kind of long-term legal campaign that made historic figures of chief justices like John Marshall and Earl Warren. As Toobin writes at the end of “The Oath,” “it’s John Roberts’s court now.”
Garrett Epps is a professor of law at the University of Baltimore and a legal correspondent for TheAtlantic.com. His new book, “Wrong and Dangerous: Ten Right Wing Myths About Our Constitution,” has just been published.
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