AN HISTORICAL INVESTIGATION FEBRUARY 10, 2013
Original Sin
Why the GOP is and will continue to be the party of white people
BY SAM TANENHAUS
POST TO TWITTER POST With Barack Obama sworn in for a second term—the first president in either party since Ronald Reagan to be elected twice with popular majorities—the GOP is in jeopardy, the gravest since 1964, of ceasing to be a national party. The civil rights pageantry of the inauguration—Abraham Lincoln's Bible and Martin Luther King's, Justice Sonia Sotomayor's swearing in of Joe Biden, Beyoncé's slinky glamor, the verses read by the gay Cuban poet Richard Blanco—seemed not just an assertion of Democratic solidarity, but also a reminder of the GOP's ever-narrowing identity and of how long it has been in the making.
"Who needs Manhattan when we can get the electoral votes of eleven Southern states?" Kevin Phillips, the prophet of "the emerging Republican majority," asked in 1968, when he was piecing together Richard Nixon's electoral map. The eleven states, he meant, of the Old Confederacy. "Put those together with the Farm Belt and the Rocky Mountains, and we don't need the big cities. We don't even want them. Sure, Hubert [Humphrey] will carry Riverside Drive in November. La-de-dah. What will he do in Oklahoma?"
Forty-five years later, the GOP safely has Oklahoma, and Dixie, too. But Phillips's Sunbelt strategy was built for a different time, and a different America. Many have noted Mitt Romney's failure to collect a single vote in 91 precincts in New York City and 59 precincts in Philadelphia. More telling is his defeat in eleven more of the nation's 15 largest cities. Not just Chicago and Columbus, but also Indianapolis, San Diego, Houston, even Dallas—this last a reason the GOP fears that, within a generation Texas will become a swing state. Remove Texas from the vast, lightly populated Republican expanse west of the Mississippi, and the remaining 13 states yield fewer electoral votes than the West Coast triad of California, Oregon, and Washington. If those trends continue, the GOP could find itself unable to count on a single state that has as many as 20 electoral votes.
It won't do to blame it all on Romney. No doubt he was a weak candidate, but he was the best the party could muster, as the GOP's leaders insisted till the end, many of them convinced he would win, possibly in a landslide. Neither can Romney be blamed for the party's whiter-shade-of-pale legislative Rotary Club: the four Republicans among the record 20 women in the Senate, the absence of Republicans among the 42 African Americans in the House (and the GOP's absence as well among the six new members who are openly gay or lesbian). These are remarkable totals in a two-party system, and they reflect not only a failure of strategy or "outreach," but also a history of long-standing indifference, at times outright hostility, to the nation's diverse constituencies—blacks, women, Latinos, Asians, gays.
But that history, with its repeated instances of racialist political strategy dating back many decades, only partially accounts for the party's electoral woes. The true problem, as yet unaddressed by any Republican standard-bearer, originates in the ideology of modern conservatism. When the intellectual authors of the modern right created its doctrines in the 1950s, they drew on nineteenth-century political thought, borrowing explicitly from the great apologists for slavery, above all, the intellectually fierce South Carolinian John C. Calhoun. This is not to say conservatives today share Calhoun's ideas about race. It is to say instead that the Calhoun revival, based on his complex theories of constitutional democracy, became the justification for conservative politicians to resist, ignore, or even overturn the will of the electoral majority.
This is the politics of nullification, the doctrine, nearly as old as the republic itself, which holds that the states, singly or in concert, can defy federal actions by declaring them invalid or simply ignoring them. We hear the echoes of nullification in the venting of anti-government passions and also in campaigns to "starve government," curtail voter registration, repeal legislation, delegitimize presidents. There is a strong sectionalist bias in these efforts. They flourish in just the places Kevin Phillips identified as Republican strongholds—Plains, Mountain, but mainly Southern states, where change invites suspicion, especially when it seems invasive, and government is seen as an intrusive force. Yet those same resisters—most glaringly, Tea Partiers—cherish the entitlements and benefits provided by "Big Government." Their objections come when outsider groups ask for consideration, too. Even recent immigrants to this country sense the "hidden hand" of Calhoun's style of dissent, the extended lineage of rearguard politics, with its aggrieved call, heard so often today, "to take back America"—that is, to take America back to the "better" place it used to be. Today's conservatives have fully embraced this tradition, enshrining it as their own "Lost cause," redolent with the moral consolations of noble defeat.
In the 1950s, when the civil rights movement began, Republicans helped lead it. The president during this period, Dwight D. Eisenhower, was skeptical about intervening on behalf of black equality and, in his first campaign, courted segregationist officials like James F. Byrnes and Harry F. Byrd. But Eisenhower also "advocated the end of segregation in the armed forces and the District of Columbia and urged the lifting of black voter restrictions," Robert Fredrick Burk writes in The Eisenhower Administration and Black Civil Rights. It was Eisenhower, too, who appointed another Republican, his vanquished rival Earl Warren, to the Supreme Court, resulting in the Brown v. Board of Education decision that outlawed legalized segregation—a bolder step than many in either party were ready for when it came in 1954.
Eisenhower, a Republican president, stood at the forefront of civil rights in the '50s.Yet the Eisenhower campaign also saw potential advantages in Brown—and a possible route, through the nation's cities, to recapturing the House, which they had lost in 1954. "GOP strategists regard this election as a period of maximum opportunity in their dream of shattering the Roosevelt coalition and regaining the allegiance of the Negroes," James Reston wrote in The New York Times. In 1956, the GOP improved its totals in black precincts by double digits in New York and Chicago, and made gains below the Mason-Dixon Line. Overall, Eisenhower received between 35 and 40 percent of the black vote, about 5 percentage points more than he did in 1952.
In late 1955, the Eisenhower administration began drafting a civil rights bill, with voting rights at its core. Its passage through Congress took almost two years, with intense debate on a provision authorizing federal judges to enforce voter rights from the bench, instead of leaving each case up to local (often all-white) juries. It was killed by Southern Democrats, who formed an alliance that included Senator John F. Kennedy, an avowed liberal eager to appease the Dixie senators who denied him the vice presidential nomination in 1956 and might thwart his presidential plans for 1960. The weakened bill that passed, in September 1957, established the federal Civil Rights Commission and added a Civil Rights Division to the Justice Department—far short of what many hoped for, yet "incomparably the most significant domestic action of any Congress in this century," according to The New York Timeseditorial page. Not one Republican senator voted against it. All 18 No's came from Democrats. "White southerners viewed the bill as Republican legislation," Joseph Crespino writes in his recent book, Strom Thurmond's America.
The GOP is in jeopardy, the gravest since 1964, of ceasing to be a national party.
Then, within weeks, an authentic crisis arose. Arkansas's governor, Orval Faubus, defied a federal court order to desegregate Little Rock's Central High School, bringing in the National Guard to surround the school and block a group of black pupils from entering, while a shrieking mob threatened violence. Unable to compromise with Faubus, Eisenhower federalized the Guardsmen and also sent in 1,000 paratroopers from the 101st Airborne Division. For the first time since Reconstruction, U.S. government troops, armed with bayonets, "occupied" a state in the old Confederacy.
A Republican president and his party now stood at the forefront of civil rights in America. Yet within a few years, this advantage would be lost and the party would be defined thereafter by its resistance to civil rights. Why did this happen? The reason was a historical coincidence: Just as the civil rights movement became a national concern, movement conservatism was being born.
A cherished myth today, at least on the right, is that National Review (NR)arrived at a moment of widespread hostility toward conservatism. In fact, the opposite was true. Two brutally disruptive decades, the 1930s and 1940s, a time of extremist ideology and world war, had given way to the infant nuclear age and with it a universal longing for a politics of consolidation and stability. "In the thirties it was socialism that many American intellectuals adopted as their paper money. ... [I]n the fifties it seems that notes on conservatism are being printed in inflationary quantities," the British political theorist Bernard Crick wrote in July 1955. The "notes" included ambitious books by the "New Conservatives" Russell Kirk, Peter Viereck, and Clinton Rossiter, as well as important work by Leo Strauss (on "natural right") and the French conservative Bertrand de Jouvenel (on "power"). For most of these writers, conservatism was more a matter of disposition—a belief in order, tradition, the revival of humanist values—than of developing or sharpening a political program.
Some of the right's heroes supported civil rights—for instance, William Knowland, the Senate minority leader who had marshaled the GOP votes for the 1957 bill. NR's favorite politician, Knowland wrote the lead article—an attack on the Geneva summits—in its first issue, published in November 1955. And NReditors diligently promoted him for the presidency. For Knowland, beingboth anti-communist and pro–civil rights made sense, part of the "hearts and minds" campaign the United States was waging in the Third World. Eisenhower and his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, had both warned that Little Rock would feed Soviet propaganda mills.
But the intellectuals at NR interpreted all this differently. William F. Buckley Jr. had strong libertarian leanings, as did many of his colleagues. Some had come to NRby way of its predecessor The Freeman, "a fortnightly for individualists." This seemed fertile ground for making the case that Southern blacks were being denied the rudimentary means for self-advancement owing to a state-contrived caste system. Buckley, in fact, supported the first important modern civil rights protest—the Montgomery bus boycott—on the principle that blacks were "exercising, in legitimate fashion, their right to protest whatever laws or customs they deem offensive." Buckley and NRwould make the same argument in defense of the student-led boycotts and sit-ins of 1960, "a wholly defensible—we go so far as to say wholly commendable—form of protest [and] a form of social assertiveness which we must understand, and can sympathize with."
This alone was a breakthrough of sorts. Both Buckley's parents came from the South, and he and his nine siblings were raised with "culturally Southern" attitudes. The family and its servants, some of them black, wintered in Camden, South Carolina, on an estate that had once belonged to Mary Chesnut, the great Civil War diarist. Buckley's father, in particular, was an ardent segregationist and was convinced blacks were inferior. Conscious of these attitudes, and of their prevalence on the right, Buckley avoided contact with racist organizations and counseled others to do the same. He also closely guarded NR's reputation. He was incensed when a Q&A with Richard Russell, the Georgia senator leading the fight against civil rights, which read like "a fanatical and highly subjective polemic against miscegenation," made it into print. And when Strom Thurmond, a friend of Buckley's father, jointly praised NRand The American Mercury—a right-wing monthly that included articles like "Quotations from the American Jewish Yearbook" and "Rothschilds and Rockefellers: Dedicated Monopolists"—Buckley beseeched him not to lump the two publications together, since the Mercuryhad"degenerated into an irresponsible anti-Semitic sheet and has considerably embarrassed conservatives who were once associated with it."
And yet when it came to discussing the concrete realities of race in America, NR had almost nothing to say, and the little NR said did not differ much from what was appearing in the Mercury. Other small-circulation journals, including The New Republic and The Nation, sent reporters to the South, commissioned articles from Southern journalists, and combed the local press, black and white, for up-to-date information on school desegregation campaigns, sit-in strikes, and protests. But none of these were covered or even seriously discussed in the country's most ambitious and high-minded conservative journal.
Its editors were instead clarifying and reiterating two objectives, rolling back both communism abroad and the New Deal at home. Every federal action that hinted of "statism"—Brown, Little Rock, even civil rights legislation—freshly imperiled liberty, even if undertaken on behalf of those who were plainly being denied it in the South. It was a new civil war, a struggle not "between the states" or even between the states and the federal government, but rather between autonomous individuals and a homogenizing liberalism. While many saw the government moving cautiously on civil rights—with the Supreme Court, Congress, and the executive each addressing issues as they emerged—NR's editors saw an interlocking pattern of state-enforced dogma.
"'Integration' and 'Communization' are, after all, pretty closely synonymous," one of the magazine's most eminent contributors, Richard Weaver, a Southern agrarian perched at the University of Chicago, wrote in July 1957, when the civil rights bill was being debated. From this perspective, the Little Rock Nine, far from personifying the hopes of a community, were instead the "pawns and guinea pigs" of liberal social experimenters. The actual conflicts were almost irrelevant. "Segregated schooling, in terms of the larger issues involved, is about as important as Jenkin's Ear," Buckley wrote in 1956. And the judicial enforcement provision in the original 1957 Civil Rights Act, which some saw as a practical necessity, was for NR's editors a potential "extension of unchecked federal power ... without precedent in our history or in that of any Anglo-Saxon nation since the decline of the doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings."
The movement had a voice, however strident. What it lacked was an organizing principle. In America, there was just one place where rigorously conservative theory could be found: the South. In the antebellum period, it had yielded a surprisingly rich and rigorous school of political argument.
The most brilliant figure in this "reactionary enlightenment" was John C. Calhoun, the South Carolina political giant. Vice president under both John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson, he became the great philosophical defender of the South. He led the protest against the protective "Tariff of Abominations," which favored the industrial North over the agrarian South. Later, when the states divided bitterly over the issue of expanding slavery into the new western territories, he helped spur the conflict that led to the Civil War. Calhoun, "the Great Nullifier," was "Lincoln's deepest and most intransigent opponent," John Burt writes in his new book, Lincoln's Tragic Pragmatism,"and it was with Calhoun that the issue was joined whether the United States is to be a liberal society, offering civil rights and possibly even political rights to all persons by virtue of their being human, or a merely republican society, offering procedural equality only to a handful of elite players."
Calhoun's innovation was to develop a radical theory of minority-interest democracy based on his mastery of the Constitution's quirky arithmetic, which often subordinated the will of the many to the settled prejudices of the few. At the time of the constitutional convention, the total population of the Union, as reported by the most recent census, was just under 3.5 million; yet, Calhoun pointed out, the four smallest states, "with a population of only 241,490, something more than the fourteenth part of the whole, could have defeated the ratification." In other words, "numerical" or "absolute majorities" were severely limited in the actions they could take—or impose on others—especially on questions that put sectional interests at odds with the "General Government." One of Calhoun's classic arguments, the Fort Hill Address (1831)—written at and named for his home—defended South Carolina's "Ordinance of Nullification" of the tariff on the principle that the Union was a confederation of equally sovereign states, each in effect its own nation, its autonomy codified in the Tenth Amendment. And since the Constitution was itself "a compact, to which each state is a party . . . the several States, or parties, have a right to judge of its infractions" and to exercise it through the "right of interposition" (a term he got from James Madison). "Be it called what it may—State-right, veto, nullification, or by any other name [it is] the fundamental principle of our system. ... [O]n its recognition depend the stability and safety of our political institutions." In sum, each state was free to override the federal government, because local and sectional imperatives outweighed national ones.
John C. Calhoun, the brilliant political thinker who set conservatives on a path to ruin.Today, Calhoun is often described as a kind of crank—and with some reason. He called slavery "a positive good" and ridiculed the Declaration's "all men are created equal." ("Taking the proposition literally ... there is not a word of truth in it.") But in the early cold war years, when so many intellectuals, left and right, rebelled against the numbing dictates of consensus and conformism, there was a Calhoun revival. He became "the philosophic darling of students of American political thought," Louis Hartz wrote in The Liberal Tradition in America, published in 1955. A liberal like the historian Richard Hofstadter was stimulated by his bold theories on class and labor ("the Marx of the master class"), and conservatives were drawn to his protest against encroaching big government. Calhoun, Russell Kirk wrote in The Conservative Mind(1953), was "the most resolute enemy of national consolidation and of omnicompetent democratic majorities" and had valiantly uncovered "the forbidding problem of the rights of individuals and groups menaced by the will of overbearing majorities." The Calhoun apostle James J. Kilpatrick, the editor of The Richmond News Leader, wrote a defense of segregation, The Sovereign States (1957), that had an epigraph from the Fort Hill Address and exhaustively catalogued examples of "interposition" dating back to the origins of the Republic. Kilpatrick repeated the exercise in an attack on the Little Rock intervention, published in NR.
For NR, Calhoun was the Ur-theorist of a burgeoning but outnumbered conservative movement, "the principal philosopher of the losing side," whose championing of the Tenth Amendment "may have the effect of shaking inchoate states-righters out of their opportunistic stupor" and give rise to a new politics.
In his most notorious editorial, "Why the South Must Prevail," Buckley drew on Calhoun's championing of the "concurrent voice" to defend voting restrictions since "the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically," even if it meant violating the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. Buckley repeated the argument in his book Up From Liberalism(1959), suggesting that African Americans needed to be properly educated and trained before they were brought up to the level of the enfranchised whites who were holding them down. And just as Calhoun had defended the "positive good" of slavery, so Buckley defended Jim Crow as being born of "custom and tradition ... a whole set of deeply-rooted folkways and mores." As long as the South did "not exploit the fact of Negro backwardness to preserve the Negro as a servile class," segregation was acceptable.
These early writings would be forgotten had they not formed the ideology that shaped a generation of conservative politicians, including Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. Goldwater, the movement's first national leader, "was by no means the obvious man for the job," Rick Perlstein notes in his book Before the Storm. "He had gone to the 1952 convention as an Eisenhower delegate, had voted for a higher minimum wage and to extend Social Security, and had voted for the 1957 and 1960 civil rights bills." But then, partly under the influence of NR, Goldwater had become more ideological, a champion of states' rights, which he defended in terms that echoed the nullifying passions of the antebellum period. In 1959, he electrified an audience in Greenville, South Carolina, when he said the Brown decision, because it was "not based on law," ought "not be enforced by arms"—an overt reference to Little Rock. Goldwater's manifesto, The Conscience of a Conservative (1960), written by Buckley's brother-in-law (and NRcolumnist) L. Brent Bozell, had chapters on both states' rights and civil rights, elevating the first above the second whenever they came into conflict: "I therefore support all efforts by the States, excluding violence of course, to preserve their rightful powers over education."
In July 1963, Goldwater joined with Dixie senators in attacking the Pentagon's newly announced policy of shunning segregated businesses located near military bases in the South. A year later, he joined the Dixie contingent again when he opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, passed with a large bipartisan majority, including 27 out of 33 Senate Republicans. "It is at least conceivable that Goldwater would have welcomed an opportunity to vote with the majority," Richard Rovere wrote, in puzzlement, after the bill was passed. "But for Goldwater the opportunity had been all but foreclosed by Brent Bozell—or some other hand guided by the 'guiding hand'—in The Conscience of a Conservative. In that book, Goldwater allowed himself to be committed to a states'-rights position that Jefferson Davis could hardly have found acceptable."
By this time, Goldwater stood on the verge of the Republican presidential nomination, thanks to the work of campaign strategist F. Clifton White and NR's publisher, William A. Rusher. Together, they plotted a new Southern route to electoral victory—not by explicit race-baiting (which could be left to hard-core racist Democrats), but by high-minded appeals to affluent whites "in the southern cities and suburbs, where the tides of social change are tending to run fastest," as Rusher wrote in NR. The politics of defiance, tinged with nullification, might hold the seeds of an eventual majority.
But Goldwater was only one herald of a new racially driven politics in 1964. Another was the Democrat George Wallace, the Alabama governor who had become the voice of a white-supremacist populism. With his cry of "segregation now; segregation tomorrow; segregation forever" and his promise of "rebel" protest against "communistic amalgamation," Wallace entered Democratic primaries in Indiana, Maryland, and Wisconsin, and did shockingly well, especially in cities where there were inter-ethnic conflicts over schools and "fair housing," and where Wallace's promise to stand tall against what even liberals were calling "the Negro revolution" spoke directly to the anxieties of Northerners. When he ran again in 1968, this time on a third-party ticket (shades of Thurmond's Dixiecrats), he burnished his appeal with the "constitutional" language so favored by nullifiers and adopted by later GOP insurgencies.
Wallace captured five Southern states in 1968, and 13.5 percent of the popular vote, meaning Kevin Phillips's majority was an election away. Yet he presciently saw where it would come from: defecting Democrats. Whites "will desert their party in droves the minute it becomes a black party," he predicted. "Wallace is helping, too—in the long run." The axis of the realignment, based on the politics of nullification, was settling into place. "[W]atch us in [nineteen] seventy-two. Our tabulations and techniques will be perfected by then; we'll have four years to work on them, and all the resources of the federal government. I'd hate to be the opponent in that race." It was George McGovern, who absorbed one of the worst drubbings in history.
With this, Calhounism went into remission. Nixon, like Eisenhower before him, was neither nullifier nor rearguardist. True, he had appeased the right—energetically campaigning for Goldwater in 1964 when liberal Republicans had renounced him. But Nixon was an ambidextrous courter of all sections and factions. He nominated Southern judges to the Supreme Court and at the same time urged Northern unions to recruit black workers. Yet nullification didn't die. It found its new target in Nixon's policy innovations, which seemed to be advancing liberal heresy. Nixon's urban adviser, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, went so far as to say Nixon's intention was not to undo but outdothe Great Society. To an ideologue like Rusher, the GOP itself was now the enemy. Nixon had betrayed conservatives, operating from inside an establishment eager "to 'pay off' their minority-group allies with all sorts of cultural and economic goodies," including "posts in a burgeoning bureaucracy, admissions quotas in elite universities, welfare benefits of assorted kinds, quotas in the job market, etc." Rusher proposed a third party, suggesting as its tribune Ronald Reagan, who had a history of sympathy for Southern nullifiers. Early in his career, he had shared the stage with Faubus and other segregationists, and in 1980, he flew directly from the nominating convention to Philadelphia, Mississippi—where three civil rights workers had been slain in 1964. Reagan dismissed the sitting chairman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights,Arthur Flemming, who warned that the Reagan administration's handling of school desegregation cases reflected the doctrine of "separate but equal." There was a protest as well from state agencies. The chairmen of 33 of them signed a letter warning that Reagan had created a "dangerous deterioration in the Federal enforcement of civil rights."
It is not a coincidence that the resurgence of nullification is happening while our first African American president is in office.
The largest targets in these years were affirmative action programs. They had begun under Nixon with the support of some conservatives, including Buckley, who favored "preferential hiring" by businesses. So did Garry Wills. When he was at NR in the '60s, he had urged Goldwater to advocate such programs even if "some conservatives have cynically borrowed the very egalitarian professions they normally condemn in order to support a faceless 'equality' among those seeking jobs." The attack came from others on the right, the rising faction of neoconservatives, who denounced "affirmative discrimination." Liberal policymakers formed a "new class" of social engineers who had devised a "spoils system" that rigged "outcomes" and stigmatized and perhaps even harmed those who advanced through the system. This argument coincided with a new literature that revived the doctrine of black inferiority, genetic or cultural, and dominated the race debate in the 1980s and 1990s. But efforts by the Reagan administration to roll back affirmative action failed. And later attempts did, too. In 1995, Bob Dole, the GOP Senate leader, introduced legislation to end all federal affirmative action programs, only to drop the issue from his presidential campaign once polls showed that, while voters disliked "quotas" and "preferences," they supported the broader principle of inclusion and diversity, especially when they realized its beneficiaries included not only blacks but also women. Latinos, another growing population, were enjoying the advantages, too.
This was a conservative strategy built for an earlier moment, when a party could prosper by exploiting the anxieties of white America. But many now were adjusting to the reality of a diverse society, multicultural and multiracial. Modernity could not be nullified. Some Republicans recognized this. George W. Bush, for one. Conservatives who were dismayed by Romney's dismal showing with Latinos (27 percent) remember the 40 percent share of the Latino vote Bush won in 2004 and suggest that a more humane immigration policy might close the gap. But Bush's success with Hispanic voters grew out of an established record of sympathy dating back to his Texas governorship, when he proposed an innovative tax plan, including a levy on "professional partnerships" (doctors, lawyers, accountants, and more) that would have increased financing for the state's poorest (in most cases Latino) school districts. The plan was squelched by his own party, just as Bush's attempt at an amnesty program was squelched by it in 2007.
Bush, of course, was unable to build the "permanent Republican majority" envisioned by Karl Rove. Yet, it is startling how little he managed to move the rhetoric and worldview of his party, which remains largely stuck where it was a generation ago or longer. Romney seldom addressed black audiences during the campaign. When he did venture into the inner city, meeting with teachers and administrators at a charter school in Philadelphia, he suggested they instruct students in the virtues of "getting married and having families where there's a mom and a dad together. ... That's critical down the road for those that are already in a setting where they don't have two parents." Paul Ryan said much the same thing: "The best thing to help prevent violent crime in the inner cities is to bring opportunity ... to help teach people good discipline, good character."
Character, he presumably meant, like that exhibited by Republican delegates in Tampa, who thrilled to the refrain "We built it"—with the identity of the "we" all too visible to TV audiences—just as the inimical "they" were being targeted by a spurious campaign to pass voter-identification laws, a throwback to Jim Crow. Romney's disparagements of the "47 percent" and his postmortem assessment that Obama won because of the "gifts" he had lavished on blacks, young people, and women also repeat the dogma of an earlier time.
Mitt Romney received just 6 percent of the black vote.This remains the perspective of the American right, only today the minority of "concurrent voices" speak in the bitter tones of denial, as modernization and egalitarianism go forward. In retreat, the nullifying spirit has been revived as a form of governance—or, more accurately, anti-governance. Its stronghold is the Tea Party–inflected House of Representatives, whose nullifiers would plunge us all over the "fiscal cliff." We see it too in continuing challenges to "Obamacare," even after it was validated by the Roberts Court. And we see it as well in Senator Rand Paul's promise to "nullify anything the president does" to impose new gun controls. Each is presented not as a practical attempt to find a better answer, but as a "Constitutional" demand for restoration of the nation to its hallowed prior self. It is not a coincidence that the resurgence of nullification is happening while our first African American president is in office.
"American politics," Wills wrote in 1975, "is the South's revenge for the Civil War." He was referring to the rise of Southern and Sunbelt figures—the later ones would include Jimmy Carter, Reagan, Bill Clinton, and the two Bushes—whose dominance of presidential politics ended only with Obama's election in 2008. However, the two parties dealt with race differently. Carter and Clinton had pro–civil rights histories and directly courted black voters. But as the GOP continued remolding itself into a Southern party—led in the '90s by the Georgian Newt Gingrich and by the Texans Dick Armey and Tom DeLay—it resorted to an overtly nullifying politics: The rise of the Senate veto as a routine obstructionist tool, Jesse Helms's warning that Clinton "better have a bodyguard" if he ever traveled to North Carolina, the first protracted clashes over the debt ceiling, Gingrich's threat to withhold disaster relief, the government shutdown, Clinton's impeachment despite public disapproval of the trial. All this, moreover, seemed to reflect, or at least parallel, extremism in the wider culture often saturated in racism: Let's not forget Minutemen and Aryan Nation militias, nor the "anti-government" terrorist Timothy McVeigh, whom the FBI linked to white supremacists. The war on government—and against agencies like the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives—had become a metaphor for the broader "culture wars," one reason that the GOP's dwindling base is now at odds with the "absolute majority" on issues like gun control and same-sex marriage.
Reformers in the GOP insist that this course can be reversed with more intensive outreach efforts, better recruitment of minority candidates, and an immigration compromise. And a new cast of GOP leaders—Ted Cruz, Nikki Haley, Bobby Jindal, Marco Rubio—have become national favorites. But each remains tethered to movement ideology. At the recent National Review Institute conference in Washington, Cruz even urged a "partial government shutdown," recalling the glory years of the '90s, but downplaying its destructive outcome.
Denial has always been the basis of a nullifying politics. Calhoun, too, knew he was on the losing side. The arithmetic he studied most closely was the growing tally of new free territories. Eventually, they would become states, and there would be sufficient "absolute" numbers in Congress to abolish slavery. A century later, history pushed forward again. Nonetheless, conservatives, giving birth to their movement, chose to ignore these realities and to side with "the South."
Race will always be a complex issue in America. There is no total cleansing of an original sin. But the old polarizing politics is a spent force. The image of the "angry black man" still purveyed by sensationalists such as Ann Coulter and Dinesh D'Souza is anachronistic today, when blacks and even Muslims, the most conspicuous of "outsider" groups, profess optimism about America and their place in it. A politics of frustration and rage remains, but it is most evident within the GOP's dwindling base—its insurgents and anti-government crusaders, its "middle-aged white guys." They now form the party's one solid bloc, its agitated concurrent voice, struggling not only against the facts of demography, but also with the country's developing ideas of democracy and governance. We are left with the profound historical irony that the party of Lincoln—of the Gettysburg Address, with its reiteration of the Declaration's assertion of equality and its vision of a "new birth of freedom"—has found sustenance in Lincoln's principal intellectual and moral antagonist. It has become the party of Calhoun.
Sam Tanenhaus, editor of The New York Times Book Review, is working on a biography about William F. Buckley Jr.
Monday, February 11, 2013
Republican Party = White Supremacy
Today at 11:12 AM39CommentsWhite Republican Debate Continues to RageBy Jonathan Chait Sam Tanenhaus’s historical essay in the latest edition of the New Republic, on how the GOP is unalterably the party of white America, runs along many of the same lines as my story in last week's issue of New York. Tanenhaus even discusses in depth the theories of John C. Calhoun, which I mentioned briefly, as did Frank Rich in an essay in the same issue as mine. (For any New York readers surprised at the double citations in a single issue, the explanation is simple: Subscriber surveys have found that our readers want more coverage of mid-priced restaurants south of 50th Street and also much more discussion of the philosophy of John C. Calhoun.)
Tanenhaus’s piece is a great read and provides a lot of depth in areas I only touched upon, such as the deep and conscious influence of Calhoun on the twentieth-century thinkers who founded the conservative movement. But I think it also loses the thread of its argument toward the end, and in so doing, misses what’s really important and alarming about the current moment of the Republican Party.
Tanenhaus consistently runs together white racial panic and the tactics of minority rule; the two have often been linked. My piece mentions the electoral college and the two thirds clause, which represented the successful effort by the South to turn its slaves into extra representation for the slaveowners. The attacks on the franchise at the end of the nineteenth century reflected, in different forms, the same sense of racial unease. Calhoun represented the fears of the slave-owning agrarian South being outnumbered by the growing North. But the same style applies to other elites maneuvering to retain their power in the face of diminishing numbers. Michael Lind, in a Salon essay on the white South, adds a fascinating detail I wish I’d found: After the 1920 census, Congress refused to reapportion itself — the only time in American history it failed to do so. Why? Because the 1920 census recorded vast increases in urban population, and retaining the 1910-era boundaries gave rural areas disproportionate representation.
In Tanenhaus’s account, the two things are not merely linked but essentially interchangeable. This leads to a confusing passage in which Tanenhaus described Richard Nixon’s Southern Strategy as a “realignment, based on the politics of nullification” but then, in the next paragraph, asserts that after Nixon’s reelection, “Calhounism went into remission.”
I would argue that Nixon shows how Tanenhaus is running two different things together. Starting in the mid-sixties, the Democratic majority that had existed since the New Deal started to crack up, and the Republicans created a majority in its place based on the general belief among most whites that “big government” meant taking things away from them and giving them to lazy, criminal, or otherwise less deserving minorities. The time period from Nixon through George H. W. Bush was a time when the GOP most openly embraced racial politics — busing, welfare queens, Willie Horton, quotas, among others, were major elements of the party’s appeal.
That started to fade out with the election of Bill Clinton, who inoculated the party on racial issues by breaking as conspicuously as possible with his party on welfare and crime. George W. Bush reaffirmed Clinton’s political achievement by abhorring the sort of racial appeals politicians like his father employed. And in recent years, the minority population has grown to the point that Democrats can win Dukakis-esque levels of white support and still carry the national vote; therefore, a racialized politics that could beat Michael Dukakis can't beat Barack Obama.
But the key thing is that the Republican Party has now rejected its Southern Strategy and is embracing Calhounism instead. The high period of the Republican Party’s most explicit racial appeals was also the time when it had the least use for Calhounian methods of minority rule. The Southern Strategy, as a political method, was not based on Calhounism. It was closer to the opposite of Calhounism.
Why? Because Republicans were winning. They didn’t need to block the majority from working its will because they usually were the majority.
It’s only since about 2008 that Republicans have turned to the methods I describe — massively expanding the power of the Senate minority, widespread voter suppression and other schemes to rig the vote, obstructing nominees to block laws they can’t overturn, using the Courts to enforce economic policies they can’t win through legislative channels. Republicans have turned to these techniques because the party's identity as that of white people, once the cornerstone of its political dominance, has turned into a trap from which it is wriggling to escape.
Tanenhaus’s piece is a great read and provides a lot of depth in areas I only touched upon, such as the deep and conscious influence of Calhoun on the twentieth-century thinkers who founded the conservative movement. But I think it also loses the thread of its argument toward the end, and in so doing, misses what’s really important and alarming about the current moment of the Republican Party.
Tanenhaus consistently runs together white racial panic and the tactics of minority rule; the two have often been linked. My piece mentions the electoral college and the two thirds clause, which represented the successful effort by the South to turn its slaves into extra representation for the slaveowners. The attacks on the franchise at the end of the nineteenth century reflected, in different forms, the same sense of racial unease. Calhoun represented the fears of the slave-owning agrarian South being outnumbered by the growing North. But the same style applies to other elites maneuvering to retain their power in the face of diminishing numbers. Michael Lind, in a Salon essay on the white South, adds a fascinating detail I wish I’d found: After the 1920 census, Congress refused to reapportion itself — the only time in American history it failed to do so. Why? Because the 1920 census recorded vast increases in urban population, and retaining the 1910-era boundaries gave rural areas disproportionate representation.
In Tanenhaus’s account, the two things are not merely linked but essentially interchangeable. This leads to a confusing passage in which Tanenhaus described Richard Nixon’s Southern Strategy as a “realignment, based on the politics of nullification” but then, in the next paragraph, asserts that after Nixon’s reelection, “Calhounism went into remission.”
I would argue that Nixon shows how Tanenhaus is running two different things together. Starting in the mid-sixties, the Democratic majority that had existed since the New Deal started to crack up, and the Republicans created a majority in its place based on the general belief among most whites that “big government” meant taking things away from them and giving them to lazy, criminal, or otherwise less deserving minorities. The time period from Nixon through George H. W. Bush was a time when the GOP most openly embraced racial politics — busing, welfare queens, Willie Horton, quotas, among others, were major elements of the party’s appeal.
That started to fade out with the election of Bill Clinton, who inoculated the party on racial issues by breaking as conspicuously as possible with his party on welfare and crime. George W. Bush reaffirmed Clinton’s political achievement by abhorring the sort of racial appeals politicians like his father employed. And in recent years, the minority population has grown to the point that Democrats can win Dukakis-esque levels of white support and still carry the national vote; therefore, a racialized politics that could beat Michael Dukakis can't beat Barack Obama.
But the key thing is that the Republican Party has now rejected its Southern Strategy and is embracing Calhounism instead. The high period of the Republican Party’s most explicit racial appeals was also the time when it had the least use for Calhounian methods of minority rule. The Southern Strategy, as a political method, was not based on Calhounism. It was closer to the opposite of Calhounism.
Why? Because Republicans were winning. They didn’t need to block the majority from working its will because they usually were the majority.
It’s only since about 2008 that Republicans have turned to the methods I describe — massively expanding the power of the Senate minority, widespread voter suppression and other schemes to rig the vote, obstructing nominees to block laws they can’t overturn, using the Courts to enforce economic policies they can’t win through legislative channels. Republicans have turned to these techniques because the party's identity as that of white people, once the cornerstone of its political dominance, has turned into a trap from which it is wriggling to escape.
Saturday, February 9, 2013
Before I Really Get Wound Up
I just got back from a meeting in rooms full of people most of whom are roughly half my age. Occasionally I would venture to try to talk to one of them but the futility of it all quickly became apparent. I have no opinion of Beyonce because I did not watch her halftime show. Indeed, I had never heard of Beyonce before the Super Bowl. Popular culture is for the young and I checked out a long time ago. Nose and tongue rings disgust me, and I want throw up every time I see pictures of Lindsay Lohan and Brittney Spears (not very often thank goodness). When did young women take up wearing boots? I sort of like it; it's just that I find it a little weird that's all. The young men walk around in a kind of daze as if they just got off the boat and are trying to figure things out in the new country. I know, I know: our parents said the same things about us. And I'm turning into a curmudgeon. But I have to admit that in my youthful days you wouldn't see OUR elders with ponytails and wearing crazy hair hats and trying to dance with women half their age. I'd better stop here before I really get wound up.
Friday, February 8, 2013
College and the Internet
News Friday, Feb 8, 2013 06:45 AM CST
The Internet will not ruin college
As cheap online educational options spread like wildfire, critics are sounding the alarm. They're too late VIDEO
By Andrew Leonard
Topics: Video, Education, Online education, online courses, MOOCs, MOOC, coursera, udacity, edX, khan academy, Technology News, Business News
I barged into my son’s room on Wednesday afternoon to ask him when he wanted dinner, and discovered him watching a Khan Academy video to help with his chemistry homework. And I thought: that story I’ve been working on about the backlash against MOOCs (Massive Online Open Courses)? Why am I even bothering? The war is already over. Debating the value of online education at the current moment in history makes about as much sense as questioning the tactics of the losing Roman generals in the great third century B.C. battle of Cannae. Perhaps of some interest to academics, but moot. Hannibal kicked ass. End of story.
I am not arguing that we shouldn’t be looking long and hard at exactly how online courses are “disrupting” education, with special attention devoted to who plans to profit from new delivery models and how taxpayers will inevitably get screwed. What I’m saying is we have to start from the position that the tidal wave is already here. Indignation, however righteous, is beside the point. The kids who are cutting their teeth on Khan Academy videos for help with their chemistry and calculus homework will grow up correctly assuming that there will always be low-cost or free educational opportunities available to them online in virtually any field of inquiry. They will naturally migrate to the best stuff and be less and less willing to pay for crap. This will cause a lot of trauma for the educational establishment, but that’s not the problem of the next generation that wants to learn.
A friend of my son taught himself how to play the ukulele from YouTube videos last summer. Perhaps that doesn’t sound like a threat to the college education status quo, but it should. Because the principle at work is irresistible: The Internet vastly decreases the costs of distribution of anything that can be digitized, whether you want ukulele lessons or Artifical Intelligence for Robotics. We can’t help but take advantage of this fact. Right now, if you want to learn remedial algebra or study the ancient Greek idea of the hero, as taught by a Harvard classics professor, you can, for free (or at the very least, for vastly less than what it would cost at a brick-and-mortar-and-ivy campus). Tomorrow, there will only be more options.
After years of hype about how the digital revolution was going to slice and dice the ivory tower, it’s all starting to happen very fast. It’s no wonder that alarm is spreading in many quarters. 2012, reported the New York Times, was the Year of the MOOC. Venture capital-funded Stanford spinoffs such as Coursera and Udacity are growing like weeds. Hundreds of thousands of students have enrolled in classes offered by edX, the nonprofit online education project started by Harvard and MIT. Cat: out of bag. Genie: out of bottle. Pandora’s Box: wide frigging open.
In mid-January, Udacity announced a deal, partially brokered by California Gov. Jerry brown, to provide a series of “remedial and introductory” courses for incoming students who, as has been the case for years, are arriving at San Jose State University woefully unprepared for college-level courses. On Thursday morning, Coursera announced that four of its courses aimed at undergraduates, a precalculus course from the University of California, Irvine, courses in genetics and bioelectricity from Duke, and another calculus course from Penn, had been approved for college credit by the American Council on Education’s College Credit Recommendation Service.
These are important, critical steps, signs that soon students of all ages and economic backgrounds are going to be able to mix and match lesson plans that offer real college credit. But fast change is usually destabilizing, and a backlash is in full effect.
The critics of the evolving landscape are eloquent and impassioned and the points they make should not be ignored. The fact that Silicon Valley venture capitalists see a profit-making opportunity offers zero assurance that the public interest will be served. Details about the financial parameters of the Udacity-San Jose State deal are limited, but the possibility that any taxpayer money is being funneled directly to for-profit MOOCs at a time when the state university system is woefully underfunded should be sounding warning bells up and down the San Andreas Fault.
Quality assurance in the emerging MOOC world, at this point, seems pretty hit or miss. Coursera invited merciless mockery earlier this week when a professor at Georgia Tech was forced to suspend a huge online class due to operational difficulties: The topic: “Fundamentals of Online Education.” (Somewhere, Sophocles is chuckling at the irony.) There’s also little doubt that lectures delivered online to thousands of students at once, with limited capacity for feedback from educators to the educated, and huge logistical conundrums involved with assuring adequate grading and testing, are never going to be equivalent in quality to small seminars taught by brilliant professors who are able and willing to instigate vigorous classroom debate and keep copious open office hours.
One must also ask: What happens to the people who make their livings from teaching, when their jobs are replaced by online courses available for free? All we need is one superb remedial algebra course that can be effectively delivered online and, theoretically, the demand for a zillion remedial algebra courses taught at a zillion community colleges suddenly drops off a cliff. Ask the music business what happens when you can get good stuff for free instead of paying for crap. Daily newspaper journalists learned a similar lesson all too well over the past two decades. The Associated Press business model — licensing the same story to multiple outlets, doesn’t make a whole lot of sense once a single news outlet puts that AP story online for free.
For months, Clay Shirky, an academic at New York University who could be dubbed the High Priest of Inevitable Internet Disruption, and Aaron Bady, a doctoral candidate in literature at the University of California at Berkeley, have engaged in a fascinating debate about the implications of MOOCs for education. For a top-level view of the argument, readers are well served by Maria Bustillos’ distillation one week ago in the Awl, in her somewhat unfairly titled article “Venture Capital’s Massive Terrible Idea For the Future of College.” Or you can read the blow-by-blow back and forth here, here and here. (To further punctuate the timeliness of this debate, Shirky published another broadside in the Awl, “Your Massively Open Offline College is Broken” even as I was writing this piece.)
The exchange is great, not least because of the clear respect the two parties have for each other throughout (which is not always the case when the Internet’s impact on society is being debated), but also because, in my own view, neither side is necessarily wrong. Aaron Bady is absolutely right to be skeptical of the utopian protestations of people like Stanford’s Sebastian Thrun, the founder of Udacity, who has predicted that in 50 years there will be only 10 universities left in the world. The venture capitalists who are backing Thrun are looking for big returns, but big profits have never been a guarantor of a good education. And of course, all students are likely to benefit more from regular, physical interaction with vibrant student bodies and dynamic professors. Four years of education at a place like U.C. Berkeley? In a perfect world …
But Shirky is equally right to note that right now, we have an educational system packed with thousands of mediocre schools charging astronomical tuitions to offer hundreds of thousands of students mediocre educations. My own daughter is a freshman at a U.C. campus, and has already experienced lectures attended by more than 500 students with sections led by teaching assistants who are utterly uninterested in doing their job. For dollar paid, the value received is questionable, and whenever that kind of situation exists, the status quo is ripe for disruption. (It’s also worth noting, perhaps, that over 60,000 students applied for spots in a freshman class that ended up enrolling only 4,500 applicants, a sign, I think, that the brick-and-mortar university is in no imminent danger of going the way of the dinosaur.)
Shirky also has logic on his side when he notes how the disruption of education is merely the latest chapter in a book that’s been writing itself since we first started to log on in the mid-’90s. The music biz and journalism biz have been thrown into turmoil — education’s turn in the spotlight was going to come, sooner or later.
But I’d go a little further. Education, I’d argue, has always been the most likely sector of society to get transformed by the Internet, because the thing the Internet does better than anything else is distribute information. Distribution is not synonymous with learning, of course, but how could anyone argue against the premise that our ability to educate ourselves, on just about any topic, has vastly expanded in tune with the maturation of a global network of computers? It’s kind of amazing that it’s taken this long to start figuring out how to offer truly high-quality college level courses over the Web — isn’t this exactly what the damn thing is for?
Late last night, while browsing some of the various course offerings available at edX and Udacity and Coursera, I had to restrain myself from suddenly diving into The Ancient Greek Hero, Professor Gregory Nagy’s spring 2013 edX offering that promises “to use the latest technology to help students engage with poetry, songs, and stories first composed more than two millennia ago.” It strikes me as a profound realization of the fundamental goal of the university — any university — that a course taught by an icon at one of the most elite institutions in the world would be accessible to me for just the cost of a few clicks.
But it seemed like too big a commitment to make while on deadline, so I ended up browsing what the Khan Academy had to offer in “medieval and ancient history.” The six videos available right now are hopelessly eclectic: hardly the stuff of a rigorous educational program in anything, but I was titillated by one title: “Sumerian Art: Standard of Ur.” I mean, how could one resist an Internet lesson in art history appreciation of an object 4 millennia old?
And I loved it. And I wanted more. And I’m utterly certain that the Internet will give me and my descendants as much or more than we can handle.
There are sure to be bumps in the road as snake-oil capitalists try to figure out how to extract profit by exploiting a medium that excels at delivering intellectual goods at the lowest possible cost. Can Coursera or Udacity really make money by charging token amounts for “certificates” that prove a student deserves college credit for passing an online course? I have no idea. Will edX keep expanding its free online offerings to the point that for-profit bottom feeders like Corinthian College simply can’t compete? I sure hope so, but again, I don’t think anyone can say for sure how this will all play out.
But what’s absolutely clear is that a vast number of people can’t afford a good education, and many of those who are paying through the nose aren’t getting a good education, and that kind of situation provides a clear opportunity for the Internet to do what it does best: spread knowledge at low cost. Sure, we should be skeptical of the promises made by snake-oil salesmen, but we should also be very excited. For years we’ve just been scratching at the surface of what the Net can deliver. Now we’re beginning to dig deep.
The Internet will not ruin college
As cheap online educational options spread like wildfire, critics are sounding the alarm. They're too late VIDEO
By Andrew Leonard
Topics: Video, Education, Online education, online courses, MOOCs, MOOC, coursera, udacity, edX, khan academy, Technology News, Business News
I barged into my son’s room on Wednesday afternoon to ask him when he wanted dinner, and discovered him watching a Khan Academy video to help with his chemistry homework. And I thought: that story I’ve been working on about the backlash against MOOCs (Massive Online Open Courses)? Why am I even bothering? The war is already over. Debating the value of online education at the current moment in history makes about as much sense as questioning the tactics of the losing Roman generals in the great third century B.C. battle of Cannae. Perhaps of some interest to academics, but moot. Hannibal kicked ass. End of story.
I am not arguing that we shouldn’t be looking long and hard at exactly how online courses are “disrupting” education, with special attention devoted to who plans to profit from new delivery models and how taxpayers will inevitably get screwed. What I’m saying is we have to start from the position that the tidal wave is already here. Indignation, however righteous, is beside the point. The kids who are cutting their teeth on Khan Academy videos for help with their chemistry and calculus homework will grow up correctly assuming that there will always be low-cost or free educational opportunities available to them online in virtually any field of inquiry. They will naturally migrate to the best stuff and be less and less willing to pay for crap. This will cause a lot of trauma for the educational establishment, but that’s not the problem of the next generation that wants to learn.
A friend of my son taught himself how to play the ukulele from YouTube videos last summer. Perhaps that doesn’t sound like a threat to the college education status quo, but it should. Because the principle at work is irresistible: The Internet vastly decreases the costs of distribution of anything that can be digitized, whether you want ukulele lessons or Artifical Intelligence for Robotics. We can’t help but take advantage of this fact. Right now, if you want to learn remedial algebra or study the ancient Greek idea of the hero, as taught by a Harvard classics professor, you can, for free (or at the very least, for vastly less than what it would cost at a brick-and-mortar-and-ivy campus). Tomorrow, there will only be more options.
After years of hype about how the digital revolution was going to slice and dice the ivory tower, it’s all starting to happen very fast. It’s no wonder that alarm is spreading in many quarters. 2012, reported the New York Times, was the Year of the MOOC. Venture capital-funded Stanford spinoffs such as Coursera and Udacity are growing like weeds. Hundreds of thousands of students have enrolled in classes offered by edX, the nonprofit online education project started by Harvard and MIT. Cat: out of bag. Genie: out of bottle. Pandora’s Box: wide frigging open.
In mid-January, Udacity announced a deal, partially brokered by California Gov. Jerry brown, to provide a series of “remedial and introductory” courses for incoming students who, as has been the case for years, are arriving at San Jose State University woefully unprepared for college-level courses. On Thursday morning, Coursera announced that four of its courses aimed at undergraduates, a precalculus course from the University of California, Irvine, courses in genetics and bioelectricity from Duke, and another calculus course from Penn, had been approved for college credit by the American Council on Education’s College Credit Recommendation Service.
These are important, critical steps, signs that soon students of all ages and economic backgrounds are going to be able to mix and match lesson plans that offer real college credit. But fast change is usually destabilizing, and a backlash is in full effect.
The critics of the evolving landscape are eloquent and impassioned and the points they make should not be ignored. The fact that Silicon Valley venture capitalists see a profit-making opportunity offers zero assurance that the public interest will be served. Details about the financial parameters of the Udacity-San Jose State deal are limited, but the possibility that any taxpayer money is being funneled directly to for-profit MOOCs at a time when the state university system is woefully underfunded should be sounding warning bells up and down the San Andreas Fault.
Quality assurance in the emerging MOOC world, at this point, seems pretty hit or miss. Coursera invited merciless mockery earlier this week when a professor at Georgia Tech was forced to suspend a huge online class due to operational difficulties: The topic: “Fundamentals of Online Education.” (Somewhere, Sophocles is chuckling at the irony.) There’s also little doubt that lectures delivered online to thousands of students at once, with limited capacity for feedback from educators to the educated, and huge logistical conundrums involved with assuring adequate grading and testing, are never going to be equivalent in quality to small seminars taught by brilliant professors who are able and willing to instigate vigorous classroom debate and keep copious open office hours.
One must also ask: What happens to the people who make their livings from teaching, when their jobs are replaced by online courses available for free? All we need is one superb remedial algebra course that can be effectively delivered online and, theoretically, the demand for a zillion remedial algebra courses taught at a zillion community colleges suddenly drops off a cliff. Ask the music business what happens when you can get good stuff for free instead of paying for crap. Daily newspaper journalists learned a similar lesson all too well over the past two decades. The Associated Press business model — licensing the same story to multiple outlets, doesn’t make a whole lot of sense once a single news outlet puts that AP story online for free.
For months, Clay Shirky, an academic at New York University who could be dubbed the High Priest of Inevitable Internet Disruption, and Aaron Bady, a doctoral candidate in literature at the University of California at Berkeley, have engaged in a fascinating debate about the implications of MOOCs for education. For a top-level view of the argument, readers are well served by Maria Bustillos’ distillation one week ago in the Awl, in her somewhat unfairly titled article “Venture Capital’s Massive Terrible Idea For the Future of College.” Or you can read the blow-by-blow back and forth here, here and here. (To further punctuate the timeliness of this debate, Shirky published another broadside in the Awl, “Your Massively Open Offline College is Broken” even as I was writing this piece.)
The exchange is great, not least because of the clear respect the two parties have for each other throughout (which is not always the case when the Internet’s impact on society is being debated), but also because, in my own view, neither side is necessarily wrong. Aaron Bady is absolutely right to be skeptical of the utopian protestations of people like Stanford’s Sebastian Thrun, the founder of Udacity, who has predicted that in 50 years there will be only 10 universities left in the world. The venture capitalists who are backing Thrun are looking for big returns, but big profits have never been a guarantor of a good education. And of course, all students are likely to benefit more from regular, physical interaction with vibrant student bodies and dynamic professors. Four years of education at a place like U.C. Berkeley? In a perfect world …
But Shirky is equally right to note that right now, we have an educational system packed with thousands of mediocre schools charging astronomical tuitions to offer hundreds of thousands of students mediocre educations. My own daughter is a freshman at a U.C. campus, and has already experienced lectures attended by more than 500 students with sections led by teaching assistants who are utterly uninterested in doing their job. For dollar paid, the value received is questionable, and whenever that kind of situation exists, the status quo is ripe for disruption. (It’s also worth noting, perhaps, that over 60,000 students applied for spots in a freshman class that ended up enrolling only 4,500 applicants, a sign, I think, that the brick-and-mortar university is in no imminent danger of going the way of the dinosaur.)
Shirky also has logic on his side when he notes how the disruption of education is merely the latest chapter in a book that’s been writing itself since we first started to log on in the mid-’90s. The music biz and journalism biz have been thrown into turmoil — education’s turn in the spotlight was going to come, sooner or later.
But I’d go a little further. Education, I’d argue, has always been the most likely sector of society to get transformed by the Internet, because the thing the Internet does better than anything else is distribute information. Distribution is not synonymous with learning, of course, but how could anyone argue against the premise that our ability to educate ourselves, on just about any topic, has vastly expanded in tune with the maturation of a global network of computers? It’s kind of amazing that it’s taken this long to start figuring out how to offer truly high-quality college level courses over the Web — isn’t this exactly what the damn thing is for?
Late last night, while browsing some of the various course offerings available at edX and Udacity and Coursera, I had to restrain myself from suddenly diving into The Ancient Greek Hero, Professor Gregory Nagy’s spring 2013 edX offering that promises “to use the latest technology to help students engage with poetry, songs, and stories first composed more than two millennia ago.” It strikes me as a profound realization of the fundamental goal of the university — any university — that a course taught by an icon at one of the most elite institutions in the world would be accessible to me for just the cost of a few clicks.
But it seemed like too big a commitment to make while on deadline, so I ended up browsing what the Khan Academy had to offer in “medieval and ancient history.” The six videos available right now are hopelessly eclectic: hardly the stuff of a rigorous educational program in anything, but I was titillated by one title: “Sumerian Art: Standard of Ur.” I mean, how could one resist an Internet lesson in art history appreciation of an object 4 millennia old?
And I loved it. And I wanted more. And I’m utterly certain that the Internet will give me and my descendants as much or more than we can handle.
There are sure to be bumps in the road as snake-oil capitalists try to figure out how to extract profit by exploiting a medium that excels at delivering intellectual goods at the lowest possible cost. Can Coursera or Udacity really make money by charging token amounts for “certificates” that prove a student deserves college credit for passing an online course? I have no idea. Will edX keep expanding its free online offerings to the point that for-profit bottom feeders like Corinthian College simply can’t compete? I sure hope so, but again, I don’t think anyone can say for sure how this will all play out.
But what’s absolutely clear is that a vast number of people can’t afford a good education, and many of those who are paying through the nose aren’t getting a good education, and that kind of situation provides a clear opportunity for the Internet to do what it does best: spread knowledge at low cost. Sure, we should be skeptical of the promises made by snake-oil salesmen, but we should also be very excited. For years we’ve just been scratching at the surface of what the Net can deliver. Now we’re beginning to dig deep.
Sunday, February 3, 2013
Krugman Makes a Good Point
That conservatives ASSUME that liberals are their mirror opposite. Not true!
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February 3, 2013, 7:11
Despicable Me
Funny: Angry Bear finds some of the usual suspects explaining How to Debate Paul Krugman, and the answer appears to be this: invent a straw man who bears no resemblance at all to the economist/columnist of the same name, and ridicule that imaginary person.
I have to say, never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that I could play the role of History’s Greatest Monster to so many people. Thank you for the honor!
Aside from the silliness of the exercise, this little exchange is another illustration of a point I’ve noticed before: the way hard-right commentators assume that the other side must be their mirror image. They insist that no government intervention is ever justified; so liberals must support any and all government interventions. They want smaller government, as a principle; liberals must want bigger government, never mind what for. They believe that deficits and printing money are always evil; liberals must be for deficits and money-printing under all circumstances.
An hour spent browsing this blog would quickly refute all of this, together with the bizarre charge that I never look at evidence; you may not agree with my conclusions, but I sure do post a lot of numbers. But obviously looking at what I actually write would just be too painful.
Anyway, thanks guys, you made my day.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
February 3, 2013, 7:11
Despicable Me
Funny: Angry Bear finds some of the usual suspects explaining How to Debate Paul Krugman, and the answer appears to be this: invent a straw man who bears no resemblance at all to the economist/columnist of the same name, and ridicule that imaginary person.
I have to say, never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that I could play the role of History’s Greatest Monster to so many people. Thank you for the honor!
Aside from the silliness of the exercise, this little exchange is another illustration of a point I’ve noticed before: the way hard-right commentators assume that the other side must be their mirror image. They insist that no government intervention is ever justified; so liberals must support any and all government interventions. They want smaller government, as a principle; liberals must want bigger government, never mind what for. They believe that deficits and printing money are always evil; liberals must be for deficits and money-printing under all circumstances.
An hour spent browsing this blog would quickly refute all of this, together with the bizarre charge that I never look at evidence; you may not agree with my conclusions, but I sure do post a lot of numbers. But obviously looking at what I actually write would just be too painful.
Anyway, thanks guys, you made my day.
The Country is with the President
Obama Realigns, the GOP Declines: The New Political Paradigm
by Robert Shrum Feb 1, 2013 4:45 AM EST
Karl Rove's prediction of a grand political realignment has finally come true—for Obama. Robert Shrum on the four tricks the GOP might use to wrest back control.
inShare.649 It’s a word seldom heard since Karl Rove brandished it after the 2004 election. On the basis of an Electoral College win secured by the precarious margin of one state, an Ohio rife with voter suppression, “Bush’s brain”—is that a compliment to Rove?—proclaimed an era of Republican realignment. It was short-lived, rebuked in 2006 when Democrats recaptured the House and the Senate—and refuted in 2008, when Barack Obama swept to a commanding victory across an expanded range of battleground states. After a last gasp in the 2010 midterms, in a time of acute economic distress, Rove’s fantasy was demolished in 2012, when the GOP waged a backward-looking campaign directed to the American electorate of a decade and more ago—two white, too old, too rural, too Southern.
Instead, the crabbed, plutocratic, intolerant Republican appeal did succeed—in mobilizing the new America, which convincingly voted for a second Obama term. But something more has happened here than the reelection of one president, as consequential as that is. We are witnessing a Rove in reverse—but this time, an authentic and accelerating realignment in the demography, ideology, and political identity of the American mainstream. And while Obama both reflects and reinforces the impetus to realign, the befuddled, hemmed-in GOP seems doomed to decline.
The shift from hardline bravado to postdefeat stress syndrome was signaled when the party reluctantly fled the potential political fallout of a Republican-inflicted economic crisis. Congressional Republicans backed off the fiscal cliff, surrendered the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, and raised the debt ceiling rather than crashing financial markets and the full faith and credit of the United States. Paul Ryan has now conceded that the GOP won’t shut down the government to extort their preferred cuts in Social Security and Medicare—which they’re still trying to voucherize.
Following the tactical retreats of a party stubbornly clinging to its reactionary core, the president delivered his second inaugural address. Contrary to predictions that he would offer a collection of forgettable generalities, the speech was one of the great state papers in modern American history, boldly asserting political realignment without explicitly using the phrase. And it set off a great commotion in GOP ranks. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell bashed its “liberalism”—the reflex epithet Republicans have long deployed as a weapon of instant damnation. House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy told Fox’s Sean Hannity that Obama’s words showed “how out of touch he is.” Not since 1936, when FDR called for activist government to redress the shame of “one third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished,” has a second inaugural elicited such partisan vitriol. Across the board, Republicans squealed like stuck elephants.
FDR also spoke then of “a sudden changed civilization.” And in the days before and after Obama invoked “new realities” that demand “collective action,” a cascade of polling has reaffirmed that on issue after issue, mainstream America is with the president. On fundamental questions like the role of government, 61 percent of Americans favor “federal” action to deal with income inequality. In an AP-GfK survey, 80 percent agree that climate change will be “a serious problem ... if nothing is done.”
On social issues, where Republicans are imprisoned in the dogmas of the religious right, the degree of change is profound. Here is a headline from the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll: “Majority for the First Time ... Wants Abortion to Be Legal in All or Most Cases.” According to Gallup, 53 percent support same-sex marriage—and another survey reports a double-digit margin for marriage equality. Americans have joined in the journey from “Seneca Falls to Selma to Stonewall.”
Similarly, the anti-immigrant Tea types and the gun lobby, the masters of the GOP, are a dwindling minority of America. A Fox News survey, skewed conservative in most of its results, found that 66 percent of people favor “allow[ing] illegal immigrants to remain in the country and eventually qualify for U.S. citizenship.” And Gallup records 91 percent support for universal background checks for gun buyers—and 60 percent for a ban on assault weapons.
A cascade of polling has reaffirmed that on issue after issue, mainstream America is with the president.
None of this means that all of this will happen now or in the immediate future, given an obstructive Republican House that is a one-ring, right-wing circus. But it does point toward the GOP as “a permanent minority,” warns the party’s former national chairman Jim Gilmore. Ominously he adds: “I don’t think the party dies immediately.” It probably doesn’t die ever because of House members in districts purposely drawn to be solidly red—and because the two-party structure is built into the system’s institutional DNA. But if Republicans don’t move toward the mainstream, they will never—or hardly ever—prevail at the presidential level, short of Democrats being discredited by a major scandal or held responsible for an economic or national-security catastrophe. (And no, Lindsey Graham, for all your strident whining, Benghazi doesn’t qualify.)
So what’s the GOP to do? Trapped between the preconditions for electoral success and the excesses of dominant hardliners, Republicans have four apparent paths: disenfranchise the voters, disable the economy, disguise their true character, or disenthrall themselves.
The first of these—purloining the presidency by awarding electoral votes on the basis of gerrymandered congressional districts in targeted purple or even blue states—would have resulted in a 2012 Mitt Romney win of 271-267 in the Electoral College, despite losing the popular vote by 5 million votes. The scheme, endorsed by the current Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus, was launched in Virginia; it would have given Obama, who carried the state, 4 of its 13 electors, with the other 9 handed to lucky loser Romney.
The plan has now died there—and in other places like Florida, Ohio, and Michigan, despite that they have GOP governors and legislatures. The play was a conspicuous outrage, and some Republicans opposed it on the merits. Others probably rejected it out of fear. For example, Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, the far-right GOP candidate for governor this year, will have enough trouble with voters in northern Virginia without the added burden of defending a plan that would effectively disempower that region. Governors like John Kasich in Ohio don’t want to face that dissonant music either.
Grand-theft presidency is a notion still barely alive in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. And while it’s likely to expire there too, other tactics to disenfranchise, like long lines and onerous ID laws, will return next year and in 2016. They are, however, a double-edged cheat: they anger minorities and the young and motivate them to turn out.
The second path for the GOP—attempting to bring down the economy—is a clear and present possibility. That was the bookend to Paul Ryan’s disavowal of a government shutdown; instead, he said, the Republicans are ready and willing to allow the sequester—draconian, indiscriminate, and automatic cuts in defense and domestic programs that will hit March 1 unless Congress acts. The latest figures on gross domestic product preview the impact of a sequester; in the fourth quarter of last year, the economy “contracted” by one tenth of a percent. What “subtracted ... 2.6 percent from growth” was reduced government spending, along with a slowdown in filling inventories.
Austerity, cutting too deep and too fast, has now brought Britain to the brink of a triple-dip recession. It could happen here—and in 2010, a parlous American economy did give the GOP a robust midterm triumph. Afterward, Republican intransigence on jobs, infrastructure, and other measures for recovery did lead to slower growth, but not to political success in 2012. I believe that by then the tactic was too obvious—and it would be glaring this time around. Republicans have to worry that they would pay the political price.
That’s why Ryan may be shadowboxing on the sequester—as he and other GOP leaders were on the fiscal cliff, the Bush tax cuts, and the debt limit. There are also hawks in his own party who would welcome the domestic cuts, but mightily resist the defense ones. But you can’t have one without the other—and so there’s an even chance that we will have neither.
The next path forward for Republicans, an easy and false feint, is to trick America into thinking they’ve changed without changing much of what they stand for. It’s the cosmetic option—new slogans, same old substance; better communication, not better content. It’s typified by Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, who delivered a fiery sermon calling on the GOP to “stop being the stupid party.” But he didn’t say which of the party’s dumb ideas he would jettison. And then returned to Baton Rouge to promote a wildly regressive tax system that would slam the middle class and the poor to lavish more on those who already have the most. There’s a new Republican idea—right?
Like Jindal, Republican leaders generally have talked about renewal, but walked away from making real and realistic changes. The party’s challenge is not its branding, but its products. You can only traffic so long in an anodyne phrase like “entitlement reform” before Americans figure out that you’re intent on shredding Medicare, Social Security, and education.
The last, best, and perhaps impossible alternative is for Republicans to heed the counsel of Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican president: “As our situation is new, we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves.”
On gun regulation, take the prospect of a universal background check—which I’ve already noted has over 90 percent support among Americans. It could pass, and it just may—if some GOP members dare to do what’s right despite the National Rifle Association. But listening to the Senate Judiciary Committee’s January 30 hearing and the expostulations of fired-up House members, it’s possible to conclude that the GOP now stands for Guns Over People. Ironically, the more the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre batters on about turning schools into armed camps, the more he hurts his own cause and the Republicans enlisted with him.
In 1995, George H.W. Bush resigned his lifetime membership in the NRA when LaPierre defended his description of federal agents as “jackbooted thugs,” even after the Oklahoma City bombing. Seventeen years on, maybe congressional Republicans could resign their role as rubber stamps for the gun fanatics. Now that would be genuine change.
So would GOP assent to comprehensive immigration reform—with a path to citizenship. John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio have forged a compromise with Senate Democrats. Louisiana Sen. David Vitter promptly denounced Rubio as “amazingly naive.” The National Review assailed him for having “lashed himself to ... the Ted Kennedy Testimonial Immigration Plan”—presumably similar to the one Kennedy negotiated with Ronald Reagan in 1986 and then with George W. Bush in 2006.
It may be painful, but this is an acid test for Republicans. If they can’t adapt here, they won’t adapt anywhere. Yet the brutish rhetoric inevitably coming from GOP opponents will only alienate Hispanics even more than they already are. And Rubio himself may ultimately be forced to abandon the effort. He’s already promised Rush Limbaugh that he won’t be “part of a bidding war” with Obama. Rubio’s preparing to run for president in 2016. He knows Republicans can’t take the White House without appealing to Hispanics. But he also knows another basic rule: he can’t be elected without being nominated—and in the end he will have to appease anti-immigrant primary voters.
Rove has just tried to rationalize the GOP’s plight, and discount the Obama realignment, in a Wall Street Journal column that is a collection of statistics without a coherent or relevant argument. He serves up the Kool-Aid of elections past without accounting for the crucial differences in today’s electorate. He cheers that Obama received fewer votes in 2012 than in 2008. What does that prove about a president who overcame the economic headwinds Rove was certain to the last nanosecond would defeat him, as Bush’s brain resisted Fox News’s decision to call Ohio for Obama? Rove allows that the Republicans “have a perception problem” with Hispanics. If they don’t understand that their problem is more than that, look for 16 years of Barack—and say, then Hillary or Joe—in the Oval Office.
President Obama is a transformative figure in a transforming country. After his inaugural address, conservative columnist Rich Lowry complained: “He’s an unabashed liberal determined to shift our politics and our country.” Actually, he already has. Not just on the Capitol steps, but in long months of campaigning, and now day after day, he hasn’t just been speaking to America. Much as it hurts Republicans to hear it, Barack Obama has been speaking for America.
by Robert Shrum Feb 1, 2013 4:45 AM EST
Karl Rove's prediction of a grand political realignment has finally come true—for Obama. Robert Shrum on the four tricks the GOP might use to wrest back control.
inShare.649 It’s a word seldom heard since Karl Rove brandished it after the 2004 election. On the basis of an Electoral College win secured by the precarious margin of one state, an Ohio rife with voter suppression, “Bush’s brain”—is that a compliment to Rove?—proclaimed an era of Republican realignment. It was short-lived, rebuked in 2006 when Democrats recaptured the House and the Senate—and refuted in 2008, when Barack Obama swept to a commanding victory across an expanded range of battleground states. After a last gasp in the 2010 midterms, in a time of acute economic distress, Rove’s fantasy was demolished in 2012, when the GOP waged a backward-looking campaign directed to the American electorate of a decade and more ago—two white, too old, too rural, too Southern.
Instead, the crabbed, plutocratic, intolerant Republican appeal did succeed—in mobilizing the new America, which convincingly voted for a second Obama term. But something more has happened here than the reelection of one president, as consequential as that is. We are witnessing a Rove in reverse—but this time, an authentic and accelerating realignment in the demography, ideology, and political identity of the American mainstream. And while Obama both reflects and reinforces the impetus to realign, the befuddled, hemmed-in GOP seems doomed to decline.
The shift from hardline bravado to postdefeat stress syndrome was signaled when the party reluctantly fled the potential political fallout of a Republican-inflicted economic crisis. Congressional Republicans backed off the fiscal cliff, surrendered the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, and raised the debt ceiling rather than crashing financial markets and the full faith and credit of the United States. Paul Ryan has now conceded that the GOP won’t shut down the government to extort their preferred cuts in Social Security and Medicare—which they’re still trying to voucherize.
Following the tactical retreats of a party stubbornly clinging to its reactionary core, the president delivered his second inaugural address. Contrary to predictions that he would offer a collection of forgettable generalities, the speech was one of the great state papers in modern American history, boldly asserting political realignment without explicitly using the phrase. And it set off a great commotion in GOP ranks. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell bashed its “liberalism”—the reflex epithet Republicans have long deployed as a weapon of instant damnation. House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy told Fox’s Sean Hannity that Obama’s words showed “how out of touch he is.” Not since 1936, when FDR called for activist government to redress the shame of “one third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished,” has a second inaugural elicited such partisan vitriol. Across the board, Republicans squealed like stuck elephants.
FDR also spoke then of “a sudden changed civilization.” And in the days before and after Obama invoked “new realities” that demand “collective action,” a cascade of polling has reaffirmed that on issue after issue, mainstream America is with the president. On fundamental questions like the role of government, 61 percent of Americans favor “federal” action to deal with income inequality. In an AP-GfK survey, 80 percent agree that climate change will be “a serious problem ... if nothing is done.”
On social issues, where Republicans are imprisoned in the dogmas of the religious right, the degree of change is profound. Here is a headline from the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll: “Majority for the First Time ... Wants Abortion to Be Legal in All or Most Cases.” According to Gallup, 53 percent support same-sex marriage—and another survey reports a double-digit margin for marriage equality. Americans have joined in the journey from “Seneca Falls to Selma to Stonewall.”
Similarly, the anti-immigrant Tea types and the gun lobby, the masters of the GOP, are a dwindling minority of America. A Fox News survey, skewed conservative in most of its results, found that 66 percent of people favor “allow[ing] illegal immigrants to remain in the country and eventually qualify for U.S. citizenship.” And Gallup records 91 percent support for universal background checks for gun buyers—and 60 percent for a ban on assault weapons.
A cascade of polling has reaffirmed that on issue after issue, mainstream America is with the president.
None of this means that all of this will happen now or in the immediate future, given an obstructive Republican House that is a one-ring, right-wing circus. But it does point toward the GOP as “a permanent minority,” warns the party’s former national chairman Jim Gilmore. Ominously he adds: “I don’t think the party dies immediately.” It probably doesn’t die ever because of House members in districts purposely drawn to be solidly red—and because the two-party structure is built into the system’s institutional DNA. But if Republicans don’t move toward the mainstream, they will never—or hardly ever—prevail at the presidential level, short of Democrats being discredited by a major scandal or held responsible for an economic or national-security catastrophe. (And no, Lindsey Graham, for all your strident whining, Benghazi doesn’t qualify.)
So what’s the GOP to do? Trapped between the preconditions for electoral success and the excesses of dominant hardliners, Republicans have four apparent paths: disenfranchise the voters, disable the economy, disguise their true character, or disenthrall themselves.
The first of these—purloining the presidency by awarding electoral votes on the basis of gerrymandered congressional districts in targeted purple or even blue states—would have resulted in a 2012 Mitt Romney win of 271-267 in the Electoral College, despite losing the popular vote by 5 million votes. The scheme, endorsed by the current Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus, was launched in Virginia; it would have given Obama, who carried the state, 4 of its 13 electors, with the other 9 handed to lucky loser Romney.
The plan has now died there—and in other places like Florida, Ohio, and Michigan, despite that they have GOP governors and legislatures. The play was a conspicuous outrage, and some Republicans opposed it on the merits. Others probably rejected it out of fear. For example, Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, the far-right GOP candidate for governor this year, will have enough trouble with voters in northern Virginia without the added burden of defending a plan that would effectively disempower that region. Governors like John Kasich in Ohio don’t want to face that dissonant music either.
Grand-theft presidency is a notion still barely alive in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. And while it’s likely to expire there too, other tactics to disenfranchise, like long lines and onerous ID laws, will return next year and in 2016. They are, however, a double-edged cheat: they anger minorities and the young and motivate them to turn out.
The second path for the GOP—attempting to bring down the economy—is a clear and present possibility. That was the bookend to Paul Ryan’s disavowal of a government shutdown; instead, he said, the Republicans are ready and willing to allow the sequester—draconian, indiscriminate, and automatic cuts in defense and domestic programs that will hit March 1 unless Congress acts. The latest figures on gross domestic product preview the impact of a sequester; in the fourth quarter of last year, the economy “contracted” by one tenth of a percent. What “subtracted ... 2.6 percent from growth” was reduced government spending, along with a slowdown in filling inventories.
Austerity, cutting too deep and too fast, has now brought Britain to the brink of a triple-dip recession. It could happen here—and in 2010, a parlous American economy did give the GOP a robust midterm triumph. Afterward, Republican intransigence on jobs, infrastructure, and other measures for recovery did lead to slower growth, but not to political success in 2012. I believe that by then the tactic was too obvious—and it would be glaring this time around. Republicans have to worry that they would pay the political price.
That’s why Ryan may be shadowboxing on the sequester—as he and other GOP leaders were on the fiscal cliff, the Bush tax cuts, and the debt limit. There are also hawks in his own party who would welcome the domestic cuts, but mightily resist the defense ones. But you can’t have one without the other—and so there’s an even chance that we will have neither.
The next path forward for Republicans, an easy and false feint, is to trick America into thinking they’ve changed without changing much of what they stand for. It’s the cosmetic option—new slogans, same old substance; better communication, not better content. It’s typified by Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, who delivered a fiery sermon calling on the GOP to “stop being the stupid party.” But he didn’t say which of the party’s dumb ideas he would jettison. And then returned to Baton Rouge to promote a wildly regressive tax system that would slam the middle class and the poor to lavish more on those who already have the most. There’s a new Republican idea—right?
Like Jindal, Republican leaders generally have talked about renewal, but walked away from making real and realistic changes. The party’s challenge is not its branding, but its products. You can only traffic so long in an anodyne phrase like “entitlement reform” before Americans figure out that you’re intent on shredding Medicare, Social Security, and education.
The last, best, and perhaps impossible alternative is for Republicans to heed the counsel of Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican president: “As our situation is new, we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves.”
On gun regulation, take the prospect of a universal background check—which I’ve already noted has over 90 percent support among Americans. It could pass, and it just may—if some GOP members dare to do what’s right despite the National Rifle Association. But listening to the Senate Judiciary Committee’s January 30 hearing and the expostulations of fired-up House members, it’s possible to conclude that the GOP now stands for Guns Over People. Ironically, the more the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre batters on about turning schools into armed camps, the more he hurts his own cause and the Republicans enlisted with him.
In 1995, George H.W. Bush resigned his lifetime membership in the NRA when LaPierre defended his description of federal agents as “jackbooted thugs,” even after the Oklahoma City bombing. Seventeen years on, maybe congressional Republicans could resign their role as rubber stamps for the gun fanatics. Now that would be genuine change.
So would GOP assent to comprehensive immigration reform—with a path to citizenship. John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio have forged a compromise with Senate Democrats. Louisiana Sen. David Vitter promptly denounced Rubio as “amazingly naive.” The National Review assailed him for having “lashed himself to ... the Ted Kennedy Testimonial Immigration Plan”—presumably similar to the one Kennedy negotiated with Ronald Reagan in 1986 and then with George W. Bush in 2006.
It may be painful, but this is an acid test for Republicans. If they can’t adapt here, they won’t adapt anywhere. Yet the brutish rhetoric inevitably coming from GOP opponents will only alienate Hispanics even more than they already are. And Rubio himself may ultimately be forced to abandon the effort. He’s already promised Rush Limbaugh that he won’t be “part of a bidding war” with Obama. Rubio’s preparing to run for president in 2016. He knows Republicans can’t take the White House without appealing to Hispanics. But he also knows another basic rule: he can’t be elected without being nominated—and in the end he will have to appease anti-immigrant primary voters.
Rove has just tried to rationalize the GOP’s plight, and discount the Obama realignment, in a Wall Street Journal column that is a collection of statistics without a coherent or relevant argument. He serves up the Kool-Aid of elections past without accounting for the crucial differences in today’s electorate. He cheers that Obama received fewer votes in 2012 than in 2008. What does that prove about a president who overcame the economic headwinds Rove was certain to the last nanosecond would defeat him, as Bush’s brain resisted Fox News’s decision to call Ohio for Obama? Rove allows that the Republicans “have a perception problem” with Hispanics. If they don’t understand that their problem is more than that, look for 16 years of Barack—and say, then Hillary or Joe—in the Oval Office.
President Obama is a transformative figure in a transforming country. After his inaugural address, conservative columnist Rich Lowry complained: “He’s an unabashed liberal determined to shift our politics and our country.” Actually, he already has. Not just on the Capitol steps, but in long months of campaigning, and now day after day, he hasn’t just been speaking to America. Much as it hurts Republicans to hear it, Barack Obama has been speaking for America.
Friday, February 1, 2013
On Shakespeare
Why do people consider Shakespeare such a great writer? The man wrote in cliches and hackneyed phrases. Consider: All's well that ends well. Something is rotten in Denmark. To be or not to be. The sound and the fury. Let's twist again like we did last summer. Come on now! Aren't great writers supposed to avoid cliches and hackneyed phrases?
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