Republicans for RevolutionJanuary 12, 2012Mark LillaE-The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin
by Corey Robin
Oxford University Press, 290 pp., $29.95
Republican presidential candidates Ron Paul, Rick Perry, Mitt Romney, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, and Michele Bachmann during the National Anthem before a debate, Washington, D.C., November 22, 2011
In 2004, then Senator Barack Obama brought the Democratic Party convention to its feet by declaring that there is “not a liberal America and a conservative America—there’s the United States of America.” He learned differently. As Princeton historian Sean Wilentz wrote recently in The New Republic, the American fantasy of a postpartisan politics runs back to the earliest days of the republic.1 Politicians who exploited it for their own purposes did well; those who genuinely believed in it failed. And it’s a good thing, too. Modern democracy depends on distinctions among factions, principles, and programs, the clearer the better.
But the current public dissatisfaction with our parties is not just about partisanship. It also reflects a sense that the labels we use to distinguish factions, principles, and programs have lost their value. What does it mean to call oneself a liberal or conservative today? Does it make sense to distinguish “progressives” and “reactionaries,” or are those just terms of abuse and self-flattery? It’s hard to know how to talk about the new classes of rich and poor created by the global economy, and their strangely overlapping political commitments. Or where on the linguistic map to put the new populisms spawning around the world, some anti-global, some anti-immigrant, some libertarian, some authoritarian. Words are failing us.
Though it sounds dull, we actually need taxonomy. It is what renders the political present legible to us. Getting it right, though, requires a certain art, a kind of dispassionate alertness and historical perspective, a sense of the moment, and a sense that this, too, shall pass. Political scientists, intent on aping the methods of the hard sciences, stopped cultivating this art half a century ago, just as things started getting interesting, as new kinds of political movements and coalitions were developing in democratic societies. We’re in a similar moment now; we need a guide. That’s why Corey Robin’s The Reactionary Mind is a useful book to have—not as an example to follow, but one to avoid.
Robin, who teaches political science at Brooklyn College, has been writing thoughtful essays on the American right for The Nation and other publications over the past decade. The Reactionary Mind collects profiles of well-known right-wing thinkers like Ayn Rand, Barry Goldwater, and Justice Antonin Scalia, and some deserters who turned left, like John Gray and Edward Luttwak. There are also a few that look beyond our borders, including an excellent piece on Hobbes as a counterrevolutionary thinker. But the book aims to be more than a collection. It is conceived as a major statement on conservatism and reaction, from the eighteenth century to the present. And this is where it disappoints.
The problems begin in the opening paragraphs, where Robin lays out his general picture of political history. It is not overly complex:
Since the modern era began, men and women in subordinate positions have marched against their superiors in the state, church, workplace, and other hierarchical institutions. They have gathered under different banners—the labor movement, feminism, abolition, socialism—and shouted different slogans: freedom, equality, rights, democracy, revolution. In virtually every instance, their superiors have resisted them, violently and nonviolently, legally and illegally, overtly and covertly…. Despite the very real differences between them, workers in a factory are like secretaries in an office, peasants on a manor, slaves on a plantation—even wives in a marriage—in that they live and labor in conditions of unequal power.
This is history as WPA mural, and will be familiar to anyone who lived through the Thirties, remembers the Sixties, or was made to read historians like Howard Zinn, Arno Mayer, E.P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, and Christopher Hill at school. In their tableau, history’s damnés de la terre are brought together into a single heroic image of suffering and resistance. Their hats are white, immaculately so. Off in the distance are what appear to be black-hatted villains, though their features are difficult to make out. Sometimes they have little identification tags like those the personified vices wear in medieval frescoes—”capital,” “men,” “whites,” “the state,” “the old regime”—but we get no idea what they are after or what their stories are. Not that it matters. To understand the oppressed and side with them all you need to know is that there are oppressors.
What distinguishes Robin from the old-style left historians is that he’s genuinely interested in the right and wants to paint its portrait—though, again, he’s committed to keeping it simple. In fact, he thinks that much of our confusion about this subject stems from the fact that we have been taken in by conservative intellectuals who lay out benign-sounding political principles, and historians who accept them as defining different streams of right-wing thought and activity. Robin will have none of it. To his mind, the fundamental truth about the right is that it has always wanted one and only one thing: to keep down those who are already down. This is what unites Edmund Burke and Sarah Palin:
Conservatism is the theoretical voice of this animus against the agency of the subordinate classes. It provides the most consistent and profound argument as to why the lower orders should not be allowed to exercise their independent will, why they should not be allowed to govern themselves or the polity. Submission is their first duty, agency, the prerogative of the elite.
If you accept these claims, then you will have no trouble accepting what Robin says in the book’s most extraordinary paragraph:
I use the words conservative, reactionary, and counterrevolutionary interchangeably: not all counterrevolutionaries are conservative…but all conservatives are, in one way or another, counterrevolutionary. I seat philosophers, statesmen, slaveholders, scribblers, Catholics, fascists, evangelicals, businessmen, racists, and hacks at the same table: Hobbes next to Hayek, Burke across from Palin, Nietzsche between Ayn Rand and Antonin Scalia, with Adams, Calhoun, Oakeshott, Ronald Reagan, Tocqueville, Theodore Roosevelt, Margaret Thatcher, Ernst Jünger, Carl Schmitt, Winston Churchill, Phyllis Schlafly, Richard Nixon, Irving Kristol, Francis Fukuyama, and George W. Bush interspersed throughout.
Glenn Beck’s blackboard was never half this full.
Robin is a lumper, an über-lumper, which may please his beleaguered readers on the left, but makes his entire enterprise incoherent. He fails to see that it is based on a glaring fallacy of composition: he posits a class, isolates a characteristic of one of its members, and then ascribes that characteristic to every member of the class. Catholic reactionary Joseph de Maistre and George W. Bush are both on the right in Robin’s scheme; following his logic, since Maistre spoke flawless French, Bush must too. Which would be some national secret. Yet that’s exactly how Robin proceeds, until he has corralled everyone he doesn’t like into a pen and labeled them all conservatives and reactionaries and right-wingers, terms he fails to distinguish. (More on that in a moment.)
But if there’s anything we’ve learned over the past century, it is that la destra è mobile. The right used to be isolationist, then became internationalist, and to judge by recent Republican debates may be tiptoeing back to isolationism again. In the 1970s, if you thought that public schools were being used for social indoctrination, that power over them should be decentralized, and that children would be better off learning at home, that put you on the far left. Today those views put you on the right. Are we to think that these shifts were only about how best to keep power from the people?
And what about all the factionalism within the right? Isolationist paleoconservatives at magazines like The American Conservative hate “American greatness” neoconservatives at The Weekly Standard for their expansionist foreign policies and unconditional support of Israel, and the feeling is mutual. Theoconservatives at the journal First Things who resist gay marriage drive libertarians at the Cato Institute up the wall. There are serious and consequential disagreements on the right today over immigration, defense spending, the Wall Street bailouts, the tax code, state surveillance, and much else. Who wins those arguments could very well determine what this country looks like a generation from now. Robin registers none of this.
An opportunity has been missed. Robin is not wrong to think there are two tribes in modern politics, and the terms “right” and “left” are as good as any other to describe them. But within each tribe there are clans that do more than express more radical or moderate versions of the same outlook. Most of the turmoil in American politics recently is the result of changes in the clan structure of the right, with the decline of reality-based conservatives like William F. Buckley and George Will and the ascendancy of new populist reactionaries like Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter, and other Tea Party favorites. To understand why the distinction between them still matters, we need to remind ourselves what the terms “conservative” and “reactionary” originally meant.
“Liberal” and “conservative” first became labels for political tendencies in the aftermath of the French Revolution. Like all polemical terms their meaning and usage shifted around in partisan debate, but the philosophical distinction between them was settled by the mid-nineteenth century, thanks in large part to Edmund Burke. After the Revolution, Burke argued that what really separated its partisans and opponents were not atheism and faith, or democracy and aristocracy, or even equality and hierarchy, but instead two very different understandings of human nature. Burke believed that, since human beings are born into a functioning world populated by others, society is—to use a large word he wouldn’t—metaphysically prior to the individuals in it. The unit of political life is society, not individuals, who need to be seen as instances of the societies they inhabit.
What makes conservatives conservative are the implications they have drawn from Burke’s view of society. Conservatives have always seen society as a kind of inheritance we receive and are responsible for; we have obligations toward those who came before and to those who will come after, and these obligations take priority over our rights. Conservatives have also been inclined to assume, along with Burke, that this inheritance is best passed on implicitly through slow changes in custom and tradition, not through explicit political action. Conservatives loyal to Burke are not hostile to change, only to doctrines and principles that do violence to preexisting opinions and institutions, and open the door to despotism. This was the deepest basis of Burke’s critique of the French Revolution; it was not simply a defense of privilege.
Though philosophical liberalism traces its roots back to the Wars of Religion, the term “liberal” was not used as a partisan label until the Spanish constitutionalists took it over in the early nineteenth century. And it was only later, in its confrontation with conservatism, that liberalism achieved ideological clarity. Classical liberals like John Stuart Mill, in contrast to conservatives, give individuals priority over society, on anthropological as well as moral grounds. They assume that societies are genuinely constructs of human freedom, that whatever we inherit from them, they can always be unmade or remade through free human action. This assumption, more than any other, shapes the liberal temperament. It is what makes liberals suspicious of appeals to custom or tradition, given that they have so often been used to justify privilege and injustice. Liberals, like conservatives, recognize the need for constraints, but believe they must come from principles that transcend particular societies and customs. Principles are the only legitimate constraints on our freedom.
The quarrel between liberals and conservatives is essentially a quarrel over the nature of human beings and their relation to society. The quarrel between revolutionaries and reactionaries, on the other hand, has little to do with nature. It is a quarrel over history.
The term “reaction” migrated from the natural sciences into European political thought in the mid-eighteenth century, thanks to Montesquieu, who had picked it up from Newton. Originally, though, it was not associated with the concept of revolutions, which were then thought to be rare and unpredictable events, not part of some process of historical unfolding. That changed in 1789, when partisans of the French Revolution squared off against those who spoke openly of a Counter-Revolution that would set the world aright. The euphoria of rebellion, the collapse of the Old Regime, the Terror, and the subsequent rise of Napoleon gave history a secular eschatological charge, which destroyed many of the remaining moderates. For European radicals, the French Revolution was a cosmic epiphany that began an unstoppable process of collective human self-emancipation. For reactionaries, too, it was an apocalyptic event, signaling the end of a process that had placed Catholic Europe at the summit of world civilizations. One group saw a radiant future, the other saw nothing but the deluge. But revolutionaries and reactionaries did agree on one thing: that thinking seriously about politics means thinking about the course of history, not human nature.
There have always been two kinds of reactionaries, though, with different attitudes toward historical change. One type dreams of a return to some real or imaginary state of perfection that existed before a revolution. This can be any sort of revolution—political, religious, economic, or even aesthetic. French aristocrats who hoped to restore the Bourbon dynasty, Russian Old Believers who wanted to recover early Orthodox Christian rites, Pre-Raphaelite painters who rejected the conventions of Mannerism, Morrisites and Ruskinites who raged against the machine, all these were what you might call restorative reactionaries.
A second type—call them redemptive reactionaries—take for granted that the revolution is a fait accompli and that there is no going back. But they are not historical pessimists, or not entirely. They believe that the only sane response to an apocalypse is to provoke another, in hopes of starting over. Ever since the French Revolution reactionaries have seen themselves working toward counterrevolutions that would destroy the present state of affairs and transport the nation, or the faith, or the entire human race to some new Golden Age that would redeem aspects of the past without returning there.
This was the shared vision of Joseph de Maistre, the most bloody-minded of the French counterrevolutionaries, and twentieth-century European fascists. Fascists hated so many aspects of modern society—representative democracy, capitalism, cosmopolitanism, tolerance, bourgeois refinement—that we forget they were anything but nostalgic for Church and Crown. They had contempt for weak German aristocrats with their dueling scars and precious manners, and reserved their nostalgia for a new Rome to be brought into being through storms of steel. There was nothing conservative about them.
Americans’ assumptions about human nature are basically liberal today. We take it for granted that we are born free, that we constitute society, it doesn’t constitute us, and that together we legitimately govern ourselves. Most intellectuals who call themselves conservatives today accept as self-evident the truths enumerated in the Declaration of Independence, which no traditional European conservative could. Some of them have drawn from European conservatism when they write about the constructive role of civil society, the habits and mores needed to exercise liberty, and the limits of government action. But strictly speaking, they are go-slow, curb-your-enthusiasm liberals like Tocqueville, not conservatives like Burke or T.S. Eliot or Michael Oakeshott. As for those like Congressman Ron Paul who promote a minimal state and an unregulated economy, their libertarianism is actually a mutation of early liberalism, not conservatism. This is important to bear in mind.
On questions of history, however, Americans are all over the map. As we were reminded in the run-up to the last Iraq war, every now and then the prophetic strain in our political rhetoric inspires eschatological fantasies of democratic avant-gardism, with Lady Liberty replacing the French Marianne on top of history’s barricades. Then reality intrudes and Americans revert to the converse fantasy of American exceptionalism, which must be protected from history through isolation and self-purification. We have also had our share of restorative reactionaries, from Southern nostalgics for the ol’ plantation, to agrarian despisers of the great American cities, to racialist despisers of the immigrants they attracted, to no-government oddballs who think they can go it alone, to trust-fund hippies who went back to the land, to lock-and-load eco-terrorists who want to take us off the grid (after they recharge their Macs). What we have not seen much of, except on the fringes of American politics, are redemptive reactionaries who think the only way forward is to destroy what history has given us and wait for a new order to emerge out of the chaos. At least until now.
The real news on the American right is the mainstreaming of political apocalypticism. This has been brewing among intellectuals since the Nineties, but in the past four years, thanks to the right-wing media establishment and economic collapse, it has reached a wider public and transformed the Republican Party. How that happened would be a long story to tell, and central to it would be the remarkable transmutation of neoconservatism from intellectual movement to rabble-rousing Republican court ideology. The first neoconservatives were disappointed liberals like Irving Kristol and Nathan Glazer, who saw the failures of a large number of Great Society programs to deliver on the unrealistic expectations of its architects, and consequently began to appreciate the wisdom of certain conservative assumptions about human nature and politics. Kristol’s famous quip that neoconservatives were liberals who’d been mugged by reality captured the original temperament.
Sometime in the Eighties, though, neoconservative thinking took on a darker hue. The big question was no longer how to adapt liberal aspirations to the limits of politics, but how to undo the cultural revolution of the Sixties that, in their eyes, had destabilized the family, popularized drug use, made pornography widely available, and encouraged public incivility. In other words, how to undo history. At first, neoconservatives writing in publications like Commentary and The Public Interest (which I once helped to edit) portrayed themselves as standing with “ordinary Americans” against the “adversary culture of intellectuals,” and to that end promoted “family values” and religious beliefs they did not necessarily share, but thought socially useful. Yet by the Nineties, when it became apparent that lots of ordinary Americans had adjusted to the cultural changes, neoconservatives began predicting the End Times, and once-sober writers like Gertrude Himmelfarb and Robert Bork started publishing books with titles like On Looking into the Abyss and Slouching Towards Gomorrah.
The new apocalypticism reached a fever pitch in a symposium published in 1996 in the widely read theoconservative journal First Things, edited by the late Richard John Neuhaus. The special issue bore the title “The End of Democracy? The Judicial Usurpation of Politics,” and was provoked by a court decision on physician-assisted suicide. The opening editorial put the following question before readers: Given that “law, as it is presently made by the judiciary, has declared its independence from morality,” and that, due to judicial activism, “the government of the United States of America no longer governs by the consent of the governed,” have we “reached or are [we] reaching the point where conscientious citizens can no longer give moral assent to the existing regime,” and therefore must consider responses “ranging from noncompliance to resistance to civil disobedience to morally justified revolution”? To raise such a question, the editors insisted, “is in no way hyperbolic.”2
This is the voice of high-brow reaction, and it was present on the right a good decade before Glenn Beck and his fellow prophets of populist doom began ringing alarm bells about educated elites in media, government, and the universities leading a velvet socialist revolution that only “ordinary Americans” could forestall. Apocalypticism trickled down, not up, and is now what binds Republican Party elites to their hard-core base. They all agree that the country must be “taken back” from the usurpers by any means necessary, and are willing to support any candidate, no matter how unworldly or unqualified or fanatical, who shares their picture of the crisis of our time. In the early Sixties, the patrician William F. Buckley joked that he would rather be governed by the first two thousand people in the Boston phonebook than by the combined faculties of Harvard and MIT. In 2010, former Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz wrote in The Wall Street Journal that “I would rather be ruled by the Tea Party than by the Democratic Party, and I would rather have Sarah Palin sitting in the Oval Office than Barack Obama.” This from a former student of Lionel Trilling. And he wasn’t joking.
Seen in this context, the current deadlock in Washington does not look so surprising. During the 2010 congressional election campaign, Republican candidates (and some Democrats) were put under enormous pressure to sign the Americans for Tax Reform “Taxpayer Protection Pledge,” which obliges them to oppose any increase in the marginal personal or corporate tax rate, and any limits on deductions or tax credits that aren’t offset by other tax cuts. To date, all but six Republican representatives and seven senators have signed this collective suicide note, making the group’s president, Grover Norquist, nearly as successful as Reverend Jim Jones. That’s how the apocalyptic mind works, though. It convinces people that if they bring everything down around them, a phoenix will inevitably be born.
The same faith has been expressed in the Republican presidential candidate debates, where the contenders compete to demonstrate how many agencies they would abolish when in office (if they remember their names), how many programs they would cut or starve, and how much faith they have in the ingenuity of the American people to figure it out for themselves once they’re finished. What’s so disturbing is that they don’t feel compelled to explain how even a reduced government should meet the challenges of the new global economy, how our educational system should respond to them, what the geopolitical implications might be, or anything of the sort. They deliver their lines with the insouciant “what, me worry?” of Alfred E. Neuman.
All this is new—and it has little to do with the principles of conservatism, or with the aristocratic prejudice that “some are fit, and thus ought, to rule others,” which Corey Robin sees at the root of everything on the right. No, there is something darker and dystopic at work here. People who know what kind of new world they want to create through revolution are trouble enough; those who only know what they want to destroy are a curse. When I read the new reactionaries or hear them speak I’m reminded of Leo Naphta, the consumptive furloughed Jesuit in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, who prowls the corridors of a Swiss sanatorium, raging against the modern Enlightenment and looking for disciples. What infuriates Naphta is that history cannot be reversed, so he dreams of revenge against it. He speaks of a coming apocalypse, a period of cruelty and cleansing, after which man’s original ignorance will return and new forms of authority will be established. Mann did not model Naphta on Edmund Burke or Chateaubriand or Bismarck or any other figure on the traditional European right. He modeled him on George Lukács, the Hungarian Communist philosopher and onetime commissar who loathed liberals and conservatives alike. A man for our time.
Sunday, January 8, 2012
Saturday, January 7, 2012
No Time to Read?
emailpermalink 7 Jan 2012 05:05 PM The Season For Reading
Nika Knight compiles her favorite quotes about winter. A gem from David McCullough:
Once upon a time in the dead of winter in the Dakota Territory, Theodore Roosevelt took off in a makeshift boat down the Little Missouri River in pursuit of a couple of thieves who had stolen his prized rowboat. After several days on the river, he caught up and got the draw on them with his trusty Winchester, at which point they surrendered. Then Roosevelt set off in a borrowed wagon to haul the thieves cross-country to justice. They headed across the snow-covered wastes of the Badlands to the railhead at Dickinson, and Roosevelt walked the whole way, the entire 40 miles. It was an astonishing feat, what might be called a defining moment in Roosevelt’s eventful life. But what makes it especially memorable is that during that time, he managed to read all of Anna Karenina. I often think of that when I hear people say they haven’t time to read.
Nika Knight compiles her favorite quotes about winter. A gem from David McCullough:
Once upon a time in the dead of winter in the Dakota Territory, Theodore Roosevelt took off in a makeshift boat down the Little Missouri River in pursuit of a couple of thieves who had stolen his prized rowboat. After several days on the river, he caught up and got the draw on them with his trusty Winchester, at which point they surrendered. Then Roosevelt set off in a borrowed wagon to haul the thieves cross-country to justice. They headed across the snow-covered wastes of the Badlands to the railhead at Dickinson, and Roosevelt walked the whole way, the entire 40 miles. It was an astonishing feat, what might be called a defining moment in Roosevelt’s eventful life. But what makes it especially memorable is that during that time, he managed to read all of Anna Karenina. I often think of that when I hear people say they haven’t time to read.
Friday, January 6, 2012
The Disappearing Republican Moderates
The Strange Death of the Republican Moderate
By TIMOTHY NOAH
Published: January 6, 2012
Half a century ago Republicans were a respectable but slightly boring presence on the political scene. Wary of excessive government, they were nonetheless reconciled to its expansion under Franklin D. Roosevelt and were mainly concerned with keeping it lean and solvent. Their beau idéal was Dwight D. Eisenhower, who in 1952 became the first Republican in 24 years to be elected president. His principal opponent for the nomination, Senator Robert Taft of Ohio, had opposed the New Deal and was a staunch isolationist who opposed supporting Britain in the first years of World War II. Eisenhower represented a more pragmatic strain of conservatism, internationalist when it came to foreign policy and willing to accept a larger government role at home. He called it “modern Republicanism.” With Eisenhower’s landslide re-election in 1956, his gospel looked like the future, at least for the G.O.P.
The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party: From Eisenhower to the Tea Party
By Geoffrey Kabaservice
482 pp. Oxford University Press. $29.95.
THE TEA PARTY AND THE REMAKING OF REPUBLICAN CONSERVATISM
By Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson
245 pp. Oxford University Press. $24.95.
Of course it wasn’t. The familiar narrative is that William F. Buckley Jr. chipped away at it, starting in 1955, when he founded National Review; that after 1960 it was rendered irrelevant by the vitality of President John F. Kennedy and his cold war liberalism; and that it collapsed entirely in 1964 when the Republicans’ hard-right wing secured the nomination for Barry Goldwater. But were things really so simple as that? In “Rule and Ruin,” his wonderfully detailed new history of moderate Republicanism, Geoffrey Kabaservice makes a strong case that modern Republicanism was hardier than we remember. Kabaservice acknowledges its eventual defeat but argues persuasively that Republican moderates remained a powerful, even dominant, political force well into the 1970s.
The story begins at the Eisenhower era’s end. Writing in 1961 about the return of “action and political dialogue to the college campus,” the young activist Tom Hayden cited three examples. The first was the left-wing Students for a Democratic Society (which Hayden helped found), remembered today as a primary vehicle for campus protest against the Vietnam War. The second was the right-wing Young Americans for Freedom (which Buckley helped found), remembered today for advancing the political careers of Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. The third was Advance, a magazine published by two Harvard undergraduates, Bruce Chapman and George Gilder. Today no one remembers Advance. Gilder and, to a lesser extent, Chapman are familiar names, but they’re known mainly as right wingers. Back then they were Rockefeller Republicans who played a significant role in rallying Republican Congressional support for the civil rights movement. When the Civil Rights Act passed in 1964, Kabaservice reports, it had proportionally greater support among Republicans than among Democrats (who had to fend off opposition from Southern segregationists). But Goldwater, the party’s “presumptive presidential nominee,” voted against the bill.
The Goldwater forces rolled over the moderates that year, with a fervor that their Tea Party legatees would find difficult to match. At the Republicans’ California state convention, moderates barely managed to block a platform resolution to “send Negroes back to Africa.” However extreme the conspiracy-minded Glenn Beck may seem, he was outdone by Robert Welch, the conspiracy-minded founder of the John Birch Society.
Kabaservice argues that Goldwater’s landslide defeat by the incumbent, Lyndon Johnson (which also helped reduce the number of Republicans in the House to its lowest level in nearly 30 years) actually strengthened the leverage of Republican moderates. In the next few years, liberal Republicans came to the fore, including John Lindsay, who was elected mayor of New York (defeating Buckley, who ran on the Conservative Party ticket); Edward Brooke (of Massachusetts), who became the first popularly elected African-American senator; George H. W. Bush, who won a House seat in his adopted state of Texas; and Michigan Gov. George Romney (father of Mitt), who briefly posed a serious threat to Richard Nixon’s presidential ambitions — a 1966 Harris poll had him leading the Republican field and defeating Johnson 54-46 — until he blew it all by attributing his initially favorable view of the Vietnam War to “brainwashing” from generals and diplomats. “In hindsight,” Kabaservice pointedly notes, “Romney was the G.O.P. moderates’ last and best chance to elect one of their own to the presidency.”
The Nixon presidency initially seemed a boon for modern Republicans, since Nixon had been Eisenhower’s vice president. His cabinet appointments included moderates like William Rogers, Elliot Richardson, Melvin Laird and Walter Hickel. His national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, a longtime associate of Nelson Rockefeller, was widely deemed a moderate, too. And much of Nixon’s domestic agenda flirted with outright liberalism, particularly the poverty program devised by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a career Democrat. But Nixon himself was not at heart an Eisenhower Republican so much as a calculating practitioner of realpolitik, and as he increasingly honed his message to appeal to conservative Southern Democrats (aided by his ex-moderate vice president, Spiro Agnew) he grew estranged from moderate Republicans — even as he often pursued liberal policies. Then came Watergate, which alienated moderate donors in the ’70s; direct-mail campaigns for the Republican Ripon Society, an influential liberal group, soon began losing money. At the same time, wealthy conservatives like Joseph Coors, John Olin and the Koch brothers were stepping up their contributions to conservative causes. With the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, the party lurched farther right, and modern Republicans became scarcer still.
Today, nearly all political centrists are Democrats. And with the rise of the Tea Party, Republicans are experiencing another 1964 moment. Indeed, Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson report in their exceptionally informative book, “The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism,” more than a few Tea Partiers “dated their first political experience to the Goldwater campaign.” But there are important differences between the two movements. For one, the Tea Party, unlike the Goldwater insurgency, has managed to win elections and thereby obtain some power at the national and state level. For another, the Tea Partiers’ anti-government ideology is tempered by quiet support for Social Security and Medicare. That’s because the activists themselves tend to be middle-aged or older. Tea Partiers aren’t opposed to government benefits per se, according to Skocpol and Williamson; rather, they’re opposed to “unearned” government benefits, which in practice ends up meaning any benefits extended to African-Americans, Latinos, immigrants (especially undocumented ones) and the young. A poll of South Dakota Tea Party supporters found that 83 percent opposed any Social Security cuts, 78 percent opposed any cuts to Medicare prescription-drug coverage, and 79 percent opposed cuts in Medicare reimbursements to physicians and hospitals. “So much for the notion that Tea Partiers are all little Dick Armeys,” Skocpol and Williamson write. The small government Tea Partiers favor is one where I get mine and most others don’t get much at all.
This poses a particular problem for a conservative Republican like Rep. Paul Ryan, who favors privatizing Medicare and shifting more of the financial burden onto recipients. But it’s also a problem for anyone seeking to lower the budget deficit, because it’s the “earned” benefits like Social Security and Medicare that are mainly responsible for runaway government spending. On the other hand, although Tea Partiers, who tend to be comfortably middle class but not wealthy, hate paying taxes, they don’t necessarily mind when other people pay taxes; the South Dakota poll had 56 percent of Tea Party supporters favoring a 5 percent increase in income taxes for people who earn more than $1 million a year.
On some level, then, the Tea Party is a product of the very welfare-statism that the hard right sought to smother in 1964 and that so many Tea Partiers profess to loathe today. “U.S. taxpayers subsidize their incomes and well-being, and hence give them the time and capacity to organize protests and Tea Party groups,” Skocpol and Williamson observe wryly. Government supplies the leisure that makes possible fervid and angry opposition to government. The Democrats built this Rube Goldberg structure, but they couldn’t have done it without help from “modern Republicans.” In at least that narrow sense, their legacy lives on.
By TIMOTHY NOAH
Published: January 6, 2012
Half a century ago Republicans were a respectable but slightly boring presence on the political scene. Wary of excessive government, they were nonetheless reconciled to its expansion under Franklin D. Roosevelt and were mainly concerned with keeping it lean and solvent. Their beau idéal was Dwight D. Eisenhower, who in 1952 became the first Republican in 24 years to be elected president. His principal opponent for the nomination, Senator Robert Taft of Ohio, had opposed the New Deal and was a staunch isolationist who opposed supporting Britain in the first years of World War II. Eisenhower represented a more pragmatic strain of conservatism, internationalist when it came to foreign policy and willing to accept a larger government role at home. He called it “modern Republicanism.” With Eisenhower’s landslide re-election in 1956, his gospel looked like the future, at least for the G.O.P.
The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party: From Eisenhower to the Tea Party
By Geoffrey Kabaservice
482 pp. Oxford University Press. $29.95.
THE TEA PARTY AND THE REMAKING OF REPUBLICAN CONSERVATISM
By Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson
245 pp. Oxford University Press. $24.95.
Of course it wasn’t. The familiar narrative is that William F. Buckley Jr. chipped away at it, starting in 1955, when he founded National Review; that after 1960 it was rendered irrelevant by the vitality of President John F. Kennedy and his cold war liberalism; and that it collapsed entirely in 1964 when the Republicans’ hard-right wing secured the nomination for Barry Goldwater. But were things really so simple as that? In “Rule and Ruin,” his wonderfully detailed new history of moderate Republicanism, Geoffrey Kabaservice makes a strong case that modern Republicanism was hardier than we remember. Kabaservice acknowledges its eventual defeat but argues persuasively that Republican moderates remained a powerful, even dominant, political force well into the 1970s.
The story begins at the Eisenhower era’s end. Writing in 1961 about the return of “action and political dialogue to the college campus,” the young activist Tom Hayden cited three examples. The first was the left-wing Students for a Democratic Society (which Hayden helped found), remembered today as a primary vehicle for campus protest against the Vietnam War. The second was the right-wing Young Americans for Freedom (which Buckley helped found), remembered today for advancing the political careers of Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. The third was Advance, a magazine published by two Harvard undergraduates, Bruce Chapman and George Gilder. Today no one remembers Advance. Gilder and, to a lesser extent, Chapman are familiar names, but they’re known mainly as right wingers. Back then they were Rockefeller Republicans who played a significant role in rallying Republican Congressional support for the civil rights movement. When the Civil Rights Act passed in 1964, Kabaservice reports, it had proportionally greater support among Republicans than among Democrats (who had to fend off opposition from Southern segregationists). But Goldwater, the party’s “presumptive presidential nominee,” voted against the bill.
The Goldwater forces rolled over the moderates that year, with a fervor that their Tea Party legatees would find difficult to match. At the Republicans’ California state convention, moderates barely managed to block a platform resolution to “send Negroes back to Africa.” However extreme the conspiracy-minded Glenn Beck may seem, he was outdone by Robert Welch, the conspiracy-minded founder of the John Birch Society.
Kabaservice argues that Goldwater’s landslide defeat by the incumbent, Lyndon Johnson (which also helped reduce the number of Republicans in the House to its lowest level in nearly 30 years) actually strengthened the leverage of Republican moderates. In the next few years, liberal Republicans came to the fore, including John Lindsay, who was elected mayor of New York (defeating Buckley, who ran on the Conservative Party ticket); Edward Brooke (of Massachusetts), who became the first popularly elected African-American senator; George H. W. Bush, who won a House seat in his adopted state of Texas; and Michigan Gov. George Romney (father of Mitt), who briefly posed a serious threat to Richard Nixon’s presidential ambitions — a 1966 Harris poll had him leading the Republican field and defeating Johnson 54-46 — until he blew it all by attributing his initially favorable view of the Vietnam War to “brainwashing” from generals and diplomats. “In hindsight,” Kabaservice pointedly notes, “Romney was the G.O.P. moderates’ last and best chance to elect one of their own to the presidency.”
The Nixon presidency initially seemed a boon for modern Republicans, since Nixon had been Eisenhower’s vice president. His cabinet appointments included moderates like William Rogers, Elliot Richardson, Melvin Laird and Walter Hickel. His national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, a longtime associate of Nelson Rockefeller, was widely deemed a moderate, too. And much of Nixon’s domestic agenda flirted with outright liberalism, particularly the poverty program devised by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a career Democrat. But Nixon himself was not at heart an Eisenhower Republican so much as a calculating practitioner of realpolitik, and as he increasingly honed his message to appeal to conservative Southern Democrats (aided by his ex-moderate vice president, Spiro Agnew) he grew estranged from moderate Republicans — even as he often pursued liberal policies. Then came Watergate, which alienated moderate donors in the ’70s; direct-mail campaigns for the Republican Ripon Society, an influential liberal group, soon began losing money. At the same time, wealthy conservatives like Joseph Coors, John Olin and the Koch brothers were stepping up their contributions to conservative causes. With the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, the party lurched farther right, and modern Republicans became scarcer still.
Today, nearly all political centrists are Democrats. And with the rise of the Tea Party, Republicans are experiencing another 1964 moment. Indeed, Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson report in their exceptionally informative book, “The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism,” more than a few Tea Partiers “dated their first political experience to the Goldwater campaign.” But there are important differences between the two movements. For one, the Tea Party, unlike the Goldwater insurgency, has managed to win elections and thereby obtain some power at the national and state level. For another, the Tea Partiers’ anti-government ideology is tempered by quiet support for Social Security and Medicare. That’s because the activists themselves tend to be middle-aged or older. Tea Partiers aren’t opposed to government benefits per se, according to Skocpol and Williamson; rather, they’re opposed to “unearned” government benefits, which in practice ends up meaning any benefits extended to African-Americans, Latinos, immigrants (especially undocumented ones) and the young. A poll of South Dakota Tea Party supporters found that 83 percent opposed any Social Security cuts, 78 percent opposed any cuts to Medicare prescription-drug coverage, and 79 percent opposed cuts in Medicare reimbursements to physicians and hospitals. “So much for the notion that Tea Partiers are all little Dick Armeys,” Skocpol and Williamson write. The small government Tea Partiers favor is one where I get mine and most others don’t get much at all.
This poses a particular problem for a conservative Republican like Rep. Paul Ryan, who favors privatizing Medicare and shifting more of the financial burden onto recipients. But it’s also a problem for anyone seeking to lower the budget deficit, because it’s the “earned” benefits like Social Security and Medicare that are mainly responsible for runaway government spending. On the other hand, although Tea Partiers, who tend to be comfortably middle class but not wealthy, hate paying taxes, they don’t necessarily mind when other people pay taxes; the South Dakota poll had 56 percent of Tea Party supporters favoring a 5 percent increase in income taxes for people who earn more than $1 million a year.
On some level, then, the Tea Party is a product of the very welfare-statism that the hard right sought to smother in 1964 and that so many Tea Partiers profess to loathe today. “U.S. taxpayers subsidize their incomes and well-being, and hence give them the time and capacity to organize protests and Tea Party groups,” Skocpol and Williamson observe wryly. Government supplies the leisure that makes possible fervid and angry opposition to government. The Democrats built this Rube Goldberg structure, but they couldn’t have done it without help from “modern Republicans.” In at least that narrow sense, their legacy lives on.
A Review of the Thomas Frank Book
The Rise of the American Oligarchy
By MICHAEL KINSLEY
Published: January 6, 2012
Thomas Frank is the thinking person’s Michael Moore. If Moore, the left-wing filmmaker, had Frank’s Ph.D. (in history from the University of Chicago), he might produce books like this one and Frank’s previous best seller, “What’s the Matter With Kansas?”
PITY THE BILLIONAIRE
The Hard-Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right
By Thomas Frank
225 pp. Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt & Company. $25
As you can tell from its ham-fisted title, “Pity the Billionaire” is not the world’s most subtle political critique. But subtlety isn’t everything. Frank’s best moments come when his contempt boils over and his inner grouch is released.
This book is Frank’s interpretation of developments since “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” was published eight years ago. Frank’s thesis here is basically that the thesis of the old book has been confirmed. He will not persuade anybody who does not already buy the Tom Frank line. But those who do (as I do, more or less) will enjoy a very good time having their predispositions massaged.
Frank sometimes writes in an arch voice that seemed familiar when I first encountered it but that I couldn’t place. Then I read in his book-jacket bio that he writes for Harper’s Magazine, and I thought, “Zounds, Watson, the man may have Lapham’s Disease.” The symptoms of this malady, named after the longtime editor of Harper’s, Lewis H. Lapham (now of Lapham’s Quarterly), include an elevated, orotund, deeply ironic prose style that, in severe cases, reveals almost nothing about what the topic is or what the author wishes to say about it except for a general sense of superiority to everyone and everything around.
Fortunately, Frank’s case is very mild. What he retains is a healthy refusal to be intimidated by charges of “elitism.” He’s not afraid to give his chapters titles like “Mimesis.” (I looked it up. It’s a good joke.) He says of some right-wing nut who enjoyed 15 seconds of YouTube fame that he possessed “an understanding of German history that bordered on complete fantasy.” His message to liberals is: Oh, for heaven’s sake, don’t be so defensive! The other side (Republicans, financiers, business executives, billionaires) has most of the economic — and therefore political — power. Today’s conservatives wield reverse snobbery as a weapon, accusing liberals of sins like living on the East or West Coast. Frank mocks conservatives’ claims that they are victims of an all-powerful liberal establishment. He calls this “tearful weepy-woo.”
Meanwhile, things have gone from bad to worse. Conservatives continue their Sherman’s march through the landmarks of liberal government, burning and looting as they go. They’ve gone after the legacies of Lyndon Johnson (Medicare), Franklin Roosevelt (Social Security; financial regulation) and Theodore Roosevelt (environmentalism). And working people continue to be duped into supporting measures manifestly against their own self-interest. In “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” Frank attributed this to a clever bait-and-switch by conservatives, who appeal to middle- and lower-class voters on the basis of social issues like abortion and gays in the military, and values like patriotism and religion. And then they govern on the agenda of traditional Republican groups like businessmen and bankers.
With “Pity the Billionaire,” the emphasis is different and the explanation is simpler: President Obama has betrayed the voters who elected him. He ran like a populist, Frank believes, but he has governed like a plutocrat, or at least a friend of plutocrats. Frank quotes a remarkable passage from Obama’s book “The Audacity of Hope” about “people of means” whom he met at Democratic fund-raisers:
“As a rule they were smart, interesting people, knowledgeable about public policy, liberal in their politics, expecting nothing more than a hearing . . . in exchange for their checks. But they reflected, almost uniformly, the perspectives of their class. . . . They believed in the free market and an educational meritocracy. . . . They had no patience with protectionism, found unions troublesome and were not particularly sympathetic to those whose lives were upended by the movements of global capital. Most were adamantly pro-choice and anti-gun and were vaguely suspicious of deep religious sentiment.”
Obama goes on to admit that by hanging around with these people, he was becoming “more like” them, and Frank — refusing to plea-bargain this stunning confession for a milder sentence — agrees, then piles on.
It seems to me that a Democratic president who gets us health care reform and tough new financial protection for consumers, who guides the economy through its roughest period in 80 years with moderate success (who could do better?), who ends our long war in Iraq and avenges the worst insult to our sovereignty since Pearl Harbor (as his Republican predecessor manifestly failed to do, despite a lot of noise and promises); a president who faced an opposition of really spectacular intransigence and downright meanness; a president who has the self-knowledge and wisdom about Washington to write the passage quoted above, and the courage to publish it: that president deserves a bit more credit from the left than Frank is willing to give him.
Frank may also be a bit overly impressed by what the right has achieved. Evelyn Waugh complained that the British Conservative Party had failed to turn back the clock by a single second. Have the Republicans done much better? (Waugh was speaking long before the Margaret Thatcher revolution, which really did change British society enormously.) Conservatives have dominated the debate, and usually the government, for three decades now, yet they haven’t managed to abolish a single cabinet department or eliminate a single major entitlement program. Nothing big has been “privatized.” Somehow or other, against all expectations and despite a conservative Supreme Court, abortion rights and affirmative action have been preserved. Gay rights are advancing so fast that the Republican Party itself is probably ahead of where Democrats were a generation ago. The Constitution has not been amended to require a balanced budget or forbid flag-burning.
True, they’ve pretty much killed the union movement. While they are not to blame for the effects of globalization and technology on income distribution, they’ve done nothing to mitigate these. And then there are tax cuts — especially tax cuts for the wealthy. That we have had. In spades. Actually, all this tends to confirm Frank’s contention that what Republicans really care about, politically, is money, and all that other stuff is just prole meat.
Frank dates the discovery by conservatives that they are being oppressed by a liberal elite all the way back to 2010, when The American Spectator magazine published an article by Angelo Codevilla called “America’s Ruling Class.” I believe that, in fact, the funhouse-mirror class war (in which liberals and poor people are the upper class and billionaires are among the oppressed masses) has been going on longer than that — at least since Nixon’s “silent majority.” (The man was president, but he still felt oppressed.) But then Frank, as a liberal elitist, has a touching belief in the influence of words. He believes a magazine article can change the world. He quotes from obscure books and pamphlets he has picked up as if each one had been read by everyone in the Tea Party.
The two great antiheroes of “Pity the Billionaire” are Ayn Rand and Glenn Beck. You might say that Frank is intrigued by Beck, or you might say he is obsessed. He is like an intellectual stalker, following Beck around as he attends to his empire of projects, making sure we don’t miss a single lie or absurdity. Beck is influential, and he was enjoying his 15 minutes when Frank was writing this book. But is he more influential than any other radio talk-show host? I’d put my money on Rush. Or how about Grover Norquist, whose ability to pressure members of Congress into supporting his agenda is like nothing since “Red Channels” (the McCarthy-era publication that maintained the blacklist)?
Frank spends 11 out of 187 pages (before the endnotes) in this short book on an entertaining deconstruction of Ayn Rand’s masterwork, “Atlas Shrugged.” “For me,” Frank writes, “it is the political flimflam of our times wrapped up in one big package: the manifesto of the deregulators and free marketeers who caused the economic disaster.” “Atlas Shrugged” is certainly a ridiculous book, and a good illustration of the absurd self-pity of the rich that Frank so deftly skewers in “Pity the Billionaire.” But the notion that this 1,000-page novel about the breakdown of society due to a corrupt government plays any role in, say, the debate over “cap and trade” seems far-fetched.
This is not a book about policy, and Frank shouldn’t be expected to have a 10-point program for reforming the Federal Reserve Board before he allows himself a sarcastic reference to Ben Bernanke. But when he casually uses phrases like “deregulators and free marketeers” to define the bad guys, it does give one pause. For Frank, are government regulations ever excessive? Does he see no merit at all in free trade? Frank surely doesn’t oppose free-market capitalism as a general principle, however much he may dislike Glenn Beck. Or does he? It would have been nice to know a bit more about where Thomas Frank is coming from. Otherwise, he starts to sound like those Tea Party people whom he rightly mocks for being very, very angry with no idea why or what to do about it.
By MICHAEL KINSLEY
Published: January 6, 2012
Thomas Frank is the thinking person’s Michael Moore. If Moore, the left-wing filmmaker, had Frank’s Ph.D. (in history from the University of Chicago), he might produce books like this one and Frank’s previous best seller, “What’s the Matter With Kansas?”
PITY THE BILLIONAIRE
The Hard-Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right
By Thomas Frank
225 pp. Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt & Company. $25
As you can tell from its ham-fisted title, “Pity the Billionaire” is not the world’s most subtle political critique. But subtlety isn’t everything. Frank’s best moments come when his contempt boils over and his inner grouch is released.
This book is Frank’s interpretation of developments since “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” was published eight years ago. Frank’s thesis here is basically that the thesis of the old book has been confirmed. He will not persuade anybody who does not already buy the Tom Frank line. But those who do (as I do, more or less) will enjoy a very good time having their predispositions massaged.
Frank sometimes writes in an arch voice that seemed familiar when I first encountered it but that I couldn’t place. Then I read in his book-jacket bio that he writes for Harper’s Magazine, and I thought, “Zounds, Watson, the man may have Lapham’s Disease.” The symptoms of this malady, named after the longtime editor of Harper’s, Lewis H. Lapham (now of Lapham’s Quarterly), include an elevated, orotund, deeply ironic prose style that, in severe cases, reveals almost nothing about what the topic is or what the author wishes to say about it except for a general sense of superiority to everyone and everything around.
Fortunately, Frank’s case is very mild. What he retains is a healthy refusal to be intimidated by charges of “elitism.” He’s not afraid to give his chapters titles like “Mimesis.” (I looked it up. It’s a good joke.) He says of some right-wing nut who enjoyed 15 seconds of YouTube fame that he possessed “an understanding of German history that bordered on complete fantasy.” His message to liberals is: Oh, for heaven’s sake, don’t be so defensive! The other side (Republicans, financiers, business executives, billionaires) has most of the economic — and therefore political — power. Today’s conservatives wield reverse snobbery as a weapon, accusing liberals of sins like living on the East or West Coast. Frank mocks conservatives’ claims that they are victims of an all-powerful liberal establishment. He calls this “tearful weepy-woo.”
Meanwhile, things have gone from bad to worse. Conservatives continue their Sherman’s march through the landmarks of liberal government, burning and looting as they go. They’ve gone after the legacies of Lyndon Johnson (Medicare), Franklin Roosevelt (Social Security; financial regulation) and Theodore Roosevelt (environmentalism). And working people continue to be duped into supporting measures manifestly against their own self-interest. In “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” Frank attributed this to a clever bait-and-switch by conservatives, who appeal to middle- and lower-class voters on the basis of social issues like abortion and gays in the military, and values like patriotism and religion. And then they govern on the agenda of traditional Republican groups like businessmen and bankers.
With “Pity the Billionaire,” the emphasis is different and the explanation is simpler: President Obama has betrayed the voters who elected him. He ran like a populist, Frank believes, but he has governed like a plutocrat, or at least a friend of plutocrats. Frank quotes a remarkable passage from Obama’s book “The Audacity of Hope” about “people of means” whom he met at Democratic fund-raisers:
“As a rule they were smart, interesting people, knowledgeable about public policy, liberal in their politics, expecting nothing more than a hearing . . . in exchange for their checks. But they reflected, almost uniformly, the perspectives of their class. . . . They believed in the free market and an educational meritocracy. . . . They had no patience with protectionism, found unions troublesome and were not particularly sympathetic to those whose lives were upended by the movements of global capital. Most were adamantly pro-choice and anti-gun and were vaguely suspicious of deep religious sentiment.”
Obama goes on to admit that by hanging around with these people, he was becoming “more like” them, and Frank — refusing to plea-bargain this stunning confession for a milder sentence — agrees, then piles on.
It seems to me that a Democratic president who gets us health care reform and tough new financial protection for consumers, who guides the economy through its roughest period in 80 years with moderate success (who could do better?), who ends our long war in Iraq and avenges the worst insult to our sovereignty since Pearl Harbor (as his Republican predecessor manifestly failed to do, despite a lot of noise and promises); a president who faced an opposition of really spectacular intransigence and downright meanness; a president who has the self-knowledge and wisdom about Washington to write the passage quoted above, and the courage to publish it: that president deserves a bit more credit from the left than Frank is willing to give him.
Frank may also be a bit overly impressed by what the right has achieved. Evelyn Waugh complained that the British Conservative Party had failed to turn back the clock by a single second. Have the Republicans done much better? (Waugh was speaking long before the Margaret Thatcher revolution, which really did change British society enormously.) Conservatives have dominated the debate, and usually the government, for three decades now, yet they haven’t managed to abolish a single cabinet department or eliminate a single major entitlement program. Nothing big has been “privatized.” Somehow or other, against all expectations and despite a conservative Supreme Court, abortion rights and affirmative action have been preserved. Gay rights are advancing so fast that the Republican Party itself is probably ahead of where Democrats were a generation ago. The Constitution has not been amended to require a balanced budget or forbid flag-burning.
True, they’ve pretty much killed the union movement. While they are not to blame for the effects of globalization and technology on income distribution, they’ve done nothing to mitigate these. And then there are tax cuts — especially tax cuts for the wealthy. That we have had. In spades. Actually, all this tends to confirm Frank’s contention that what Republicans really care about, politically, is money, and all that other stuff is just prole meat.
Frank dates the discovery by conservatives that they are being oppressed by a liberal elite all the way back to 2010, when The American Spectator magazine published an article by Angelo Codevilla called “America’s Ruling Class.” I believe that, in fact, the funhouse-mirror class war (in which liberals and poor people are the upper class and billionaires are among the oppressed masses) has been going on longer than that — at least since Nixon’s “silent majority.” (The man was president, but he still felt oppressed.) But then Frank, as a liberal elitist, has a touching belief in the influence of words. He believes a magazine article can change the world. He quotes from obscure books and pamphlets he has picked up as if each one had been read by everyone in the Tea Party.
The two great antiheroes of “Pity the Billionaire” are Ayn Rand and Glenn Beck. You might say that Frank is intrigued by Beck, or you might say he is obsessed. He is like an intellectual stalker, following Beck around as he attends to his empire of projects, making sure we don’t miss a single lie or absurdity. Beck is influential, and he was enjoying his 15 minutes when Frank was writing this book. But is he more influential than any other radio talk-show host? I’d put my money on Rush. Or how about Grover Norquist, whose ability to pressure members of Congress into supporting his agenda is like nothing since “Red Channels” (the McCarthy-era publication that maintained the blacklist)?
Frank spends 11 out of 187 pages (before the endnotes) in this short book on an entertaining deconstruction of Ayn Rand’s masterwork, “Atlas Shrugged.” “For me,” Frank writes, “it is the political flimflam of our times wrapped up in one big package: the manifesto of the deregulators and free marketeers who caused the economic disaster.” “Atlas Shrugged” is certainly a ridiculous book, and a good illustration of the absurd self-pity of the rich that Frank so deftly skewers in “Pity the Billionaire.” But the notion that this 1,000-page novel about the breakdown of society due to a corrupt government plays any role in, say, the debate over “cap and trade” seems far-fetched.
This is not a book about policy, and Frank shouldn’t be expected to have a 10-point program for reforming the Federal Reserve Board before he allows himself a sarcastic reference to Ben Bernanke. But when he casually uses phrases like “deregulators and free marketeers” to define the bad guys, it does give one pause. For Frank, are government regulations ever excessive? Does he see no merit at all in free trade? Frank surely doesn’t oppose free-market capitalism as a general principle, however much he may dislike Glenn Beck. Or does he? It would have been nice to know a bit more about where Thomas Frank is coming from. Otherwise, he starts to sound like those Tea Party people whom he rightly mocks for being very, very angry with no idea why or what to do about it.
Georgia State Rep: ‘I’m Afraid’ Of Romney’s Mormon Faith, But ‘It’s Better Than A Muslim’
BY Zaid Jilani
Think Progress
5 January 2012
One obstacle that Mitt Romney may face as he asks for the support of Republican primary voters is bigotry against the Mormon faith.
A Marietta Daily Journal story published yesterday demonstrates the bigotry that Romney may have to overcome. The Journal quotes Republican state Rep. Judy Manning saying that she’s scared of Romney’s Mormon faith. But at least he’s “better than a Muslim”:
“I think Mitt Romney is a nice man, but I’m afraid of his Mormon faith,” Manning said. “It’s better than a Muslim. Of course, every time you look at the TV these days you find an ad on there telling us how normal they are. So why do they have to put ads on the TV just to convince us that they’re normal if they are normal? … If the Mormon faith adhered to a past philosophy of pluralism, multi-wives, that doesn’t follow the Christian faith of one man and one woman, and that concerns me.”
Manning’s criticism of Romney’s faith and her attack on Islam as an even more inferior religion — in addition to other comments she has made against LGBT rights — demonstrates an important point. Progressives and others who oppose bigotry and preach tolerance must denounce discrimination of every kind, not just because all discrimination is wrong, but because validating discrimination against one group can lead to increased discrimination against other groups in the future.
Think Progress
5 January 2012
One obstacle that Mitt Romney may face as he asks for the support of Republican primary voters is bigotry against the Mormon faith.
A Marietta Daily Journal story published yesterday demonstrates the bigotry that Romney may have to overcome. The Journal quotes Republican state Rep. Judy Manning saying that she’s scared of Romney’s Mormon faith. But at least he’s “better than a Muslim”:
“I think Mitt Romney is a nice man, but I’m afraid of his Mormon faith,” Manning said. “It’s better than a Muslim. Of course, every time you look at the TV these days you find an ad on there telling us how normal they are. So why do they have to put ads on the TV just to convince us that they’re normal if they are normal? … If the Mormon faith adhered to a past philosophy of pluralism, multi-wives, that doesn’t follow the Christian faith of one man and one woman, and that concerns me.”
Manning’s criticism of Romney’s faith and her attack on Islam as an even more inferior religion — in addition to other comments she has made against LGBT rights — demonstrates an important point. Progressives and others who oppose bigotry and preach tolerance must denounce discrimination of every kind, not just because all discrimination is wrong, but because validating discrimination against one group can lead to increased discrimination against other groups in the future.
Monday, January 2, 2012
Ron Paul: Libertarian or States Rights Advocate
I think the writer is correct.
Asher Smith1L, Yale Law
GET UPDATES FROM Asher Smith
Why Does the Media Persist in Calling Ron Paul a Libertarian?
The Iowa Caucuses are Tuesday. "Still decidedly in the mix," according to Monday's New York Times, is "Ron Paul, a libertarian-leaning congressman from Texas."
But what exactly about Ron Paul merits the oft-repeated libertarian label? The answer certainly does not lie in his personal views, or his campaign's policy positions.
The Ron Paul phenomenon -- in some pre-Caucus polls, Paul still maintains a slim lead -- represents nothing new under the sun of American politics. Paul represents not a new libertarian age, but old-fashioned American federalism -- the belief that sovereign state governments should have free rein within their borders, free from pesky federal intervention and regulation. It hardly takes a Ph.D. in American history to realize that this has been tried before.
Paul supporters seem to be yearning for a return to a pre-Civil Rights Era federal system. Prominent Iowa Republican and Paul supporter Rev. Phillip Kayser explained to Talking Points Memo last week that Paul's vote in Congress in favor of repealing "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" did not staunch his enthusiasm for Paul. Rather, Kayser believes Paul's view of the Constitution would allow states more latitude in legislating issues of social policy. "Under a Ron Paul presidency," Kayser told TPM, "states would be freed up to not have political correctness imposed on them, but obviously some state would follow what's politically correct. What he's trying to do whether he agrees with the Constitution's position or not is restrict himself to the Constitution. That is something I very much appreciate."
Not imposing "political correctness" on the states, of course, is not new policy. It was standard practice for the first 188 years of American history. It did not work.
Yet on other social issues Paul's positions are not libertarian, but federalist. Paul does not want government out of individuals' private lives -- he merely wants the federal government out. For example, Paul twice opposed the George W. Bush-sponsored Federal Marriage Amendment, but he has supported legislation ensuring federal courts will not undermine any state laws regulating marriage.
From a libertarian perspective, Paul's logic is strained. In 2004, Paul dissented from celebrations of the 40-year anniversary of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. "The federal government," explained Paul, "has no legitimate authority to infringe on the rights of private property owners to use their property as they please and to form (or not form) contracts with terms mutually agreeable to all parties. The rights of all private property owners, even those whose actions decent people find abhorrent, must be respected if we are to maintain a free society."
But why, if Paul is opposed to federal regulations necessary to curb "actions decent people find abhorrent," is he comfortable with permitting states to infringe on fundamental rights? There is no inherent reason why actions by state governments should occupy a more sacred plane than do actions by the federal government.
There is no reason, that is, if one applies a libertarian lens. Seen through the old fashioned prism of states rights, Paul's positions are entirely coherent. But while "states rights" has become a suspect rationale for current day political preferences, proclaiming oneself a "libertarian" is laden with none of the odium of previous centuries of failed policies. So the fiction continues. One wonders, however, why journalists covering the Republican campaign feel obligated to go along with it.
Asher Smith1L, Yale Law
GET UPDATES FROM Asher Smith
Why Does the Media Persist in Calling Ron Paul a Libertarian?
The Iowa Caucuses are Tuesday. "Still decidedly in the mix," according to Monday's New York Times, is "Ron Paul, a libertarian-leaning congressman from Texas."
But what exactly about Ron Paul merits the oft-repeated libertarian label? The answer certainly does not lie in his personal views, or his campaign's policy positions.
The Ron Paul phenomenon -- in some pre-Caucus polls, Paul still maintains a slim lead -- represents nothing new under the sun of American politics. Paul represents not a new libertarian age, but old-fashioned American federalism -- the belief that sovereign state governments should have free rein within their borders, free from pesky federal intervention and regulation. It hardly takes a Ph.D. in American history to realize that this has been tried before.
Paul supporters seem to be yearning for a return to a pre-Civil Rights Era federal system. Prominent Iowa Republican and Paul supporter Rev. Phillip Kayser explained to Talking Points Memo last week that Paul's vote in Congress in favor of repealing "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" did not staunch his enthusiasm for Paul. Rather, Kayser believes Paul's view of the Constitution would allow states more latitude in legislating issues of social policy. "Under a Ron Paul presidency," Kayser told TPM, "states would be freed up to not have political correctness imposed on them, but obviously some state would follow what's politically correct. What he's trying to do whether he agrees with the Constitution's position or not is restrict himself to the Constitution. That is something I very much appreciate."
Not imposing "political correctness" on the states, of course, is not new policy. It was standard practice for the first 188 years of American history. It did not work.
Yet on other social issues Paul's positions are not libertarian, but federalist. Paul does not want government out of individuals' private lives -- he merely wants the federal government out. For example, Paul twice opposed the George W. Bush-sponsored Federal Marriage Amendment, but he has supported legislation ensuring federal courts will not undermine any state laws regulating marriage.
From a libertarian perspective, Paul's logic is strained. In 2004, Paul dissented from celebrations of the 40-year anniversary of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. "The federal government," explained Paul, "has no legitimate authority to infringe on the rights of private property owners to use their property as they please and to form (or not form) contracts with terms mutually agreeable to all parties. The rights of all private property owners, even those whose actions decent people find abhorrent, must be respected if we are to maintain a free society."
But why, if Paul is opposed to federal regulations necessary to curb "actions decent people find abhorrent," is he comfortable with permitting states to infringe on fundamental rights? There is no inherent reason why actions by state governments should occupy a more sacred plane than do actions by the federal government.
There is no reason, that is, if one applies a libertarian lens. Seen through the old fashioned prism of states rights, Paul's positions are entirely coherent. But while "states rights" has become a suspect rationale for current day political preferences, proclaiming oneself a "libertarian" is laden with none of the odium of previous centuries of failed policies. So the fiction continues. One wonders, however, why journalists covering the Republican campaign feel obligated to go along with it.
The Sherlock Holmes Movie
I saw it yesterday---at least most of it. This movie is so bad I walked out before it was over.
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