Douthat is a thoughtul Republican and writes for the NY Times. See the Krugman response.
The Liberal GloatBy ROSS DOUTHAT
Published: November 17, 2012 664 Comments
WINNING an election doesn’t just offer the chance to govern the country. It offers a chance to feel morally and intellectually superior to the party you’ve just beaten. This is an inescapable aspect of democratic culture: no matter what reason tells us about the vagaries of politics, something in the American subconscious assumes that the voice of the people really is the voice of God, and that being part of a winning coalition must be a sign that you’re His chosen one as well.
This means the losing coalition must be doomed to wander east of Eden, and liberals have been having a good time with this idea of late. “Those poor, benighted Republicans!” runs the subtext of their postelection commentary. “They can’t read polls! They can’t reach Hispanics! They don’t understand women! They don’t have a team of Silicon Valley sorcerers running their turnout operations!”
Back in 2011, the Obama White House earned some mild mockery for its “win the future” slogan. But now that the president has been re-elected, the liberal conventional wisdom is that the Democrats have done just that — that Republicans are now Radio Shack to their Apple store, “The Waltons” to their “Modern Family,” a mediocre Norman Rockwell to their digital-age mosaic.
Maybe it’s too soon to pierce this cloud of postelection smugness. But in the spirit of friendly correction — or, O.K., maybe curmudgeonly annoyance — let me point out some slightly more unpleasant truths about the future that liberalism seems to be winning.
Liberals look at the Obama majority and see a coalition bound together by enlightened values — reason rather than superstition, tolerance rather than bigotry, equality rather than hierarchy. But it’s just as easy to see a coalition created by social disintegration and unified by economic fear.
Consider the Hispanic vote. Are Democrats winning Hispanics because they put forward a more welcoming face than Republicans do — one more in keeping with America’s tradition of assimilating migrants yearning to breathe free? Yes, up to a point. But they’re also winning recent immigrants because those immigrants often aren’t assimilating successfully — or worse, are assimilating downward, thanks to rising out-of-wedlock birthrates and high dropout rates. The Democratic edge among Hispanics depends heavily on these darker trends: the weaker that families and communities are, the more necessary government support inevitably seems.
Likewise with the growing number of unmarried Americans, especially unmarried women. Yes, social issues like abortion help explain why these voters lean Democratic. But the more important explanation is that single life is generally more insecure and chaotic than married life, and single life with children — which is now commonplace for women under 30 — is almost impossible to navigate without the support the welfare state provides.
Or consider the secular vote, which has been growing swiftly and tilts heavily toward Democrats. The liberal image of a non-churchgoing American is probably the “spiritual but not religious” seeker, or the bright young atheist reading Richard Dawkins. But the typical unchurched American is just as often an underemployed working-class man, whose secularism is less an intellectual choice than a symptom of his disconnection from community in general.
What unites all of these stories is the growing failure of America’s local associations — civic, familial, religious — to foster stability, encourage solidarity and make mobility possible.
This is a crisis that the Republican Party often badly misunderstands, casting Democratic-leaning voters as lazy moochers or spoiled children seeking “gifts” (as a certain former Republican presidential nominee would have it) rather than recognizing the reality of their economic struggles.
But if conservatives don’t acknowledge the crisis’s economic component, liberalism often seems indifferent to its deeper social roots. The progressive bias toward the capital-F Future, the old left-wing suspicion of faith and domesticity, the fact that Democrats have benefited politically from these trends — all of this makes it easy for liberals to just celebrate the emerging America, to minimize the costs of disrupted families and hollowed-out communities, and to treat the places where Americans have traditionally found solidarity outside the state (like the churches threatened by the Obama White House’s contraceptive mandate) as irritants or threats.
This is a great flaw in the liberal vision, because whatever role government plays in prosperity, transfer payments are not a sufficient foundation for middle-class success. It’s not a coincidence that the economic era that many liberals pine for — the great, egalitarian post-World War II boom — was an era that social conservatives remember fondly as well: a time of leaping church attendance, rising marriage rates and birthrates, and widespread civic renewal and engagement.
No such renewal seems to be on the horizon. That isn’t a judgment on the Obama White House, necessarily. But it is a judgment on a certain kind of blithe liberal optimism, and the confidence with which many Democrats assume their newly emerged majority is a sign of progress rather than decline.
Sunday, November 18, 2012
The Insecurity Election
November 18, 2012, 2:46 pm12 Comments
The Insecurity Election
by Paul Krugman
So, looking at the most e-mailed list, I think we can safely conclude that Times readers are suffering from post-election burnout; all they seem to want to read about is food. Which is fine!
But I wanted to share some thoughts provoked by Ross Douthat’s column today, which makes a very good point — namely, that the winning Obama coalition did not for the most part consist of forward-looking, NPR-listening, culturally adventurous liberals; instead, the big numbers came from groups “unified by economic fear”. Indeed: single women, Hispanics, and, as always, African-Americans are for a stronger welfare state because people like them need the security such a welfare state can provide.
Where I would part ways with Ross is in his suggestions that (a) rising insecurity reflects “social disintegration” and that (b) turning to the welfare state is a dead end.
The truth is that while single women and members of minority groups are more insecure at any given point of time than married whites, insecurity is on the rise for everyone, driven by changes in the economy. Our industrial structure is probably less stable than it was — you can’t count on today’s big corporations to survive, let alone retain their dominance, over the course of a working lifetime. And the traditional accoutrements of a good job — a defined-benefit pension plan, a good health-care plan — have been going away across the board.
Every time you read someone extolling the dynamism of the modern economy, the virtues of risk-taking, declaring that everyone has to expect to have multiple jobs in his or her life and that you can never stop learning, etc,, etc., bear in mind that this is a portrait of an economy with no stability, no guarantees that hard work will provide a consistent living, and a constant possibility of being thrown aside simply because you happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
And nothing people can do in their personal lives or behavior can change this. Your church and your traditional marriage won’t guarantee the value of your 401(k), or make insurance affordable on the individual market.
So here’s the question: isn’t this exactly the kind of economy that should have a strong welfare state? Isn’t it much better to have guaranteed health care and a basic pension from Social Security rather than simply hanker for the corporate safety net that no longer exists? Might one not even argue that a bit of basic economic security would make our dynamic economy work better, by reducing the fear factor?
Now, none of this will bring back traditional mores — but that’s really a different issue. In Sweden, more than half of children are born out of wedlock — but they don’t seem to suffer much as a result, perhaps because the welfare state is so strong. Maybe we’ll go that way too. So?
Anyway, Ross is quite right to point out that the Obama coalition is in large part a response to fear instead of, or as well as, hope. But that’s OK.
.
The Insecurity Election
by Paul Krugman
So, looking at the most e-mailed list, I think we can safely conclude that Times readers are suffering from post-election burnout; all they seem to want to read about is food. Which is fine!
But I wanted to share some thoughts provoked by Ross Douthat’s column today, which makes a very good point — namely, that the winning Obama coalition did not for the most part consist of forward-looking, NPR-listening, culturally adventurous liberals; instead, the big numbers came from groups “unified by economic fear”. Indeed: single women, Hispanics, and, as always, African-Americans are for a stronger welfare state because people like them need the security such a welfare state can provide.
Where I would part ways with Ross is in his suggestions that (a) rising insecurity reflects “social disintegration” and that (b) turning to the welfare state is a dead end.
The truth is that while single women and members of minority groups are more insecure at any given point of time than married whites, insecurity is on the rise for everyone, driven by changes in the economy. Our industrial structure is probably less stable than it was — you can’t count on today’s big corporations to survive, let alone retain their dominance, over the course of a working lifetime. And the traditional accoutrements of a good job — a defined-benefit pension plan, a good health-care plan — have been going away across the board.
Every time you read someone extolling the dynamism of the modern economy, the virtues of risk-taking, declaring that everyone has to expect to have multiple jobs in his or her life and that you can never stop learning, etc,, etc., bear in mind that this is a portrait of an economy with no stability, no guarantees that hard work will provide a consistent living, and a constant possibility of being thrown aside simply because you happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
And nothing people can do in their personal lives or behavior can change this. Your church and your traditional marriage won’t guarantee the value of your 401(k), or make insurance affordable on the individual market.
So here’s the question: isn’t this exactly the kind of economy that should have a strong welfare state? Isn’t it much better to have guaranteed health care and a basic pension from Social Security rather than simply hanker for the corporate safety net that no longer exists? Might one not even argue that a bit of basic economic security would make our dynamic economy work better, by reducing the fear factor?
Now, none of this will bring back traditional mores — but that’s really a different issue. In Sweden, more than half of children are born out of wedlock — but they don’t seem to suffer much as a result, perhaps because the welfare state is so strong. Maybe we’ll go that way too. So?
Anyway, Ross is quite right to point out that the Obama coalition is in large part a response to fear instead of, or as well as, hope. But that’s OK.
.
The Lincoln Movie
Just saw the movie this afternoon down in Alabaster. Let me say flat out that this is a great and compelling movie. I enjoyed it immensely and will probably see it again. I don't know how anyone except maybe today's Confederate Republicans can come away from seeing it and not be moved and shaken. The 12:30 showing seemed to have mostly older adults like me, and we all filed out quietly and respectfully at the end. It's the kind of movie that makes you file out quietly for what you've just seen.
Daniel Day-Lewis will forever define how we picture Lincoln in our time. If he doens't win the Oscar they might as well discontinue the award. Sally Field likewise for playing Mary Lincoln. And while I'm at it, Tommy Lee Jones should be awarded and lauded for playing a rousing Thaddeus Stevens.
The movie focuses on the passage of the 13th Amendment outlawing slavery in this country. You might think that passage of this amendment as a result of the Civil War would be a no-brainer, but historically this is not the case. It took the support of some lameduck Democratic representatives to get it passed. (The Senate had already passsed it).
Today we might take this amendment for granted. History says otherwise. It might not have passed. The war might have ended short of its passage. History might have been quite different otherwise.
I will add to this post going forward. Just wanted to get down some immediate thoughts.
Daniel Day-Lewis will forever define how we picture Lincoln in our time. If he doens't win the Oscar they might as well discontinue the award. Sally Field likewise for playing Mary Lincoln. And while I'm at it, Tommy Lee Jones should be awarded and lauded for playing a rousing Thaddeus Stevens.
The movie focuses on the passage of the 13th Amendment outlawing slavery in this country. You might think that passage of this amendment as a result of the Civil War would be a no-brainer, but historically this is not the case. It took the support of some lameduck Democratic representatives to get it passed. (The Senate had already passsed it).
Today we might take this amendment for granted. History says otherwise. It might not have passed. The war might have ended short of its passage. History might have been quite different otherwise.
I will add to this post going forward. Just wanted to get down some immediate thoughts.
A Review of the Lincoln Movie
by Marlow Stern
Steven Spielberg’s new epic, Lincoln, has been showered with praise left and right and is considered an Oscar frontrunner. But is it just hype?
In the coming weeks, historians and political pundits will pore over the similarities between the subject of Steven Spielberg’s latest historical epic, Lincoln, and the trials and tribulations that have faced newly re-elected President Barack Obama ad nauseum. Two former lawyers from Illinois. The gift for mellifluous oration and gallows humor. A nation—and Congress—divided. Racial disharmony. The ethically murky steps each man took in stretching the bounds of presidential power for what they felt was the greater good of the nation (for Obama, see: the debt ceiling.
Spielberg, by his own admission, made the admirable decision to schedule the release date after the presidential election to depoliticize the film.
Lincoln also represents the third entry in Spielberg’s slavery triptych, following The Color Purple and Amistad. It is loosely based on historian Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book Team of Rivals, penned by Pulitzer-winning playwright Tony Kushner , who also wrote the screenplay to Spielberg’s last good film, 2005’s Munich, and stars two-time Oscar winner Daniel Day-Lewis as the eponymous Great Emancipator. The movie is one of the best-reviewed of the year and as such, has emerged as an Oscar frontrunner.
But are critics being too kind to Lincoln?
For starters, the name, Lincoln, is a bit misleading. This is not a biopic of the 16th President of the United States. Instead, the film focuses on the backdoor wheeling and dealing that went down in order to push the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution outlawing slavery through a heavily divided House of Representatives.
It opens in the middle of a battlefield sequence—the only one depicted in the film—but the exhilaration is fleeting. After a battalion of black troops bayonets a few confederate soldiers in slow-mo, the action then cuts to a black Union soldier speaking with President Lincoln about the future of his people and potentially being able to vote “in 100 years.” I personally hate when historical dramas include scenes of character’s accurately predicting their own futures. It always rings false and takes you out of the film. This sort of silly past-meets-present ruminating rears its ugly head again when Lincoln and his wife, Mary Todd (Sally Field), ponder their respective legacies during a carriage ride toward the end of the film. But this is a mild irritant.
Save a few other exterior shots—a random pan of cannon fire on Wilmington, Lincoln surveying a battlefield on horseback, and a few glances of the Capitol building—Spielberg’s film is a parlor drama, played out in meeting rooms, courthouses, and personal chambers, that could just as easily have been adapted for the Broadway stage. It’s entirely devoid of the visual grandeur that’s established him as one of cinema’s most quixotic filmmakers.
Lincoln, ever the politician, enlists a trio of churlish deputies (John Hawkes, James Spader, Tim Blake Nelson) to purchase Democratic House votes via blackmail or by offering pardons, jobs on the other side of the aisle or, in a few cases, appealing to their humanity. While the Machiavellian wheels are turning, Lincoln himself is tasked with selling the abolition idea to his cabinet, presided over by Secretary of State William Seward (David Strathairn), and striking a deal with Radical Republican Congressional leader Thaddeus Stevens (Tommy Lee Jones) to lower his expectations, support the amendment, and get the rest of the Republican Party onboard as well. Spielberg does a splendid job populating his film with an impressive array of character actors, who in turn do a commendable job of making the inherently boring bureaucratic proceedings seem mildly intriguing.
Day-Lewis, who has made a career of propping up inferior material and making it palatable—with the notable exception being the masterpiece, There Will Be Blood—is brilliant here. The actor looks like a mirror image of Lincoln and by all accounts accurately captures his body language, from his upright posture right down to his signature lumbering. His voice is high-pitched, yet wields the power to cut right through a room of telegram operators. But most of all, this Lincoln is a funny ol’ bastard, constantly cutting the tension with humorous anecdotes. Day-Lewis has been given an impossible task—giving life to a now-mythological figure—but he does such a stately job, I’d be surprised if Day-Lewis doesn’t become the first man in history to capture three Academy Awards for Best Actor.
Despite Day-Lewis’s brilliant performance, one of the film’s problems lies in Spielberg’s depiction of the Illinois Railsplitter. Lincoln is completely and utterly infallible, whether he’s restoring order in his cabinet, talking some sense into his hysteric wife, or convincing his eldest son, played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, to avoid enlisting in the Union Army. This is messianic hero-worship with Lincoln, by film’s end, dying for our racial and spiritual myopia. While Lincoln was by many accounts a great man—and by some, a pretty thorny fellow—Spielberg’s portrait would’ve been more gripping if good ol’ Honest Abe erred every once in a while.
And, at two-and-a-half-hours, Lincoln drags quite a bit. While the courtroom scenes aren’t as painful as the ones in Amistad—where Anthony Hopkins’s John Quincy Adams pontificated via a string of silly philosophical queries e.g., “What makes a man?”—these proceedings do seem pretty Hollywood-ized, with each and every “purchased” Democrat literally screaming their “YEA” to the high heavens during the final ratification vote. And the Lincoln stretches reality as the n-word is only spewed once or twice during the film’s duration.
Ultimately, Lincoln provides a nice little glimpse into one of the most important events in this nation’s short history—a history lesson, if you will—and features stellar turns by Day-Lewis and Lee Jones, who chews up scenery like a hyper-progressive pit-bull, but could have used far more visual flourish and scope to grant this momentous occasion the cinematic reverence it so strongly deserves.
Steven Spielberg’s new epic, Lincoln, has been showered with praise left and right and is considered an Oscar frontrunner. But is it just hype?
In the coming weeks, historians and political pundits will pore over the similarities between the subject of Steven Spielberg’s latest historical epic, Lincoln, and the trials and tribulations that have faced newly re-elected President Barack Obama ad nauseum. Two former lawyers from Illinois. The gift for mellifluous oration and gallows humor. A nation—and Congress—divided. Racial disharmony. The ethically murky steps each man took in stretching the bounds of presidential power for what they felt was the greater good of the nation (for Obama, see: the debt ceiling.
Spielberg, by his own admission, made the admirable decision to schedule the release date after the presidential election to depoliticize the film.
Lincoln also represents the third entry in Spielberg’s slavery triptych, following The Color Purple and Amistad. It is loosely based on historian Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book Team of Rivals, penned by Pulitzer-winning playwright Tony Kushner , who also wrote the screenplay to Spielberg’s last good film, 2005’s Munich, and stars two-time Oscar winner Daniel Day-Lewis as the eponymous Great Emancipator. The movie is one of the best-reviewed of the year and as such, has emerged as an Oscar frontrunner.
But are critics being too kind to Lincoln?
For starters, the name, Lincoln, is a bit misleading. This is not a biopic of the 16th President of the United States. Instead, the film focuses on the backdoor wheeling and dealing that went down in order to push the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution outlawing slavery through a heavily divided House of Representatives.
It opens in the middle of a battlefield sequence—the only one depicted in the film—but the exhilaration is fleeting. After a battalion of black troops bayonets a few confederate soldiers in slow-mo, the action then cuts to a black Union soldier speaking with President Lincoln about the future of his people and potentially being able to vote “in 100 years.” I personally hate when historical dramas include scenes of character’s accurately predicting their own futures. It always rings false and takes you out of the film. This sort of silly past-meets-present ruminating rears its ugly head again when Lincoln and his wife, Mary Todd (Sally Field), ponder their respective legacies during a carriage ride toward the end of the film. But this is a mild irritant.
Save a few other exterior shots—a random pan of cannon fire on Wilmington, Lincoln surveying a battlefield on horseback, and a few glances of the Capitol building—Spielberg’s film is a parlor drama, played out in meeting rooms, courthouses, and personal chambers, that could just as easily have been adapted for the Broadway stage. It’s entirely devoid of the visual grandeur that’s established him as one of cinema’s most quixotic filmmakers.
Lincoln, ever the politician, enlists a trio of churlish deputies (John Hawkes, James Spader, Tim Blake Nelson) to purchase Democratic House votes via blackmail or by offering pardons, jobs on the other side of the aisle or, in a few cases, appealing to their humanity. While the Machiavellian wheels are turning, Lincoln himself is tasked with selling the abolition idea to his cabinet, presided over by Secretary of State William Seward (David Strathairn), and striking a deal with Radical Republican Congressional leader Thaddeus Stevens (Tommy Lee Jones) to lower his expectations, support the amendment, and get the rest of the Republican Party onboard as well. Spielberg does a splendid job populating his film with an impressive array of character actors, who in turn do a commendable job of making the inherently boring bureaucratic proceedings seem mildly intriguing.
Day-Lewis, who has made a career of propping up inferior material and making it palatable—with the notable exception being the masterpiece, There Will Be Blood—is brilliant here. The actor looks like a mirror image of Lincoln and by all accounts accurately captures his body language, from his upright posture right down to his signature lumbering. His voice is high-pitched, yet wields the power to cut right through a room of telegram operators. But most of all, this Lincoln is a funny ol’ bastard, constantly cutting the tension with humorous anecdotes. Day-Lewis has been given an impossible task—giving life to a now-mythological figure—but he does such a stately job, I’d be surprised if Day-Lewis doesn’t become the first man in history to capture three Academy Awards for Best Actor.
Despite Day-Lewis’s brilliant performance, one of the film’s problems lies in Spielberg’s depiction of the Illinois Railsplitter. Lincoln is completely and utterly infallible, whether he’s restoring order in his cabinet, talking some sense into his hysteric wife, or convincing his eldest son, played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, to avoid enlisting in the Union Army. This is messianic hero-worship with Lincoln, by film’s end, dying for our racial and spiritual myopia. While Lincoln was by many accounts a great man—and by some, a pretty thorny fellow—Spielberg’s portrait would’ve been more gripping if good ol’ Honest Abe erred every once in a while.
And, at two-and-a-half-hours, Lincoln drags quite a bit. While the courtroom scenes aren’t as painful as the ones in Amistad—where Anthony Hopkins’s John Quincy Adams pontificated via a string of silly philosophical queries e.g., “What makes a man?”—these proceedings do seem pretty Hollywood-ized, with each and every “purchased” Democrat literally screaming their “YEA” to the high heavens during the final ratification vote. And the Lincoln stretches reality as the n-word is only spewed once or twice during the film’s duration.
Ultimately, Lincoln provides a nice little glimpse into one of the most important events in this nation’s short history—a history lesson, if you will—and features stellar turns by Day-Lewis and Lee Jones, who chews up scenery like a hyper-progressive pit-bull, but could have used far more visual flourish and scope to grant this momentous occasion the cinematic reverence it so strongly deserves.
The "Takers" vs. the "Makers"
Sunday, Nov 18, 2012 11:00 AM CST
Victory for strangers, heathens, wastrels!
Republicans counted on tried-and-true class warfare like never before. This time, "outsiders" were the majority
By Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg
Topics: American History, Barack Obama, Bill O'Reilly, Class warfare, Democratic Party, Elections 2012
Before we get to the persistence of class warfare in our politics, let’s talk about Skinch Painter. In 1900, when the San Francisco Examiner tracked him down, he was 78, “hale, hearty, and contented.” He hadn’t inherited a penny, but neither had he worked a day in his life. “He has never borrowed a dollar, nor stolen one,” the column read. “He has never been a tramp nor a beggar. He has never done a day’s work in exchange for money … Yet he has lived.”
One day, when he was in his teens, he said to himself, “Look here, Skinch Painter, this old world owes you a living, and all you’ve got to do is collect it.” Wandering the Ozarks of Missouri, he inhabited a cave and relied on nature for his food and clothing. He hunted, fished and gathered nuts and berries, wearing only animal skins and going barefoot.
“Labor is a useless sin,” said Skinch. “The time a man spends working is just so much time lost from living.”
We can just about see Fox News sending a camera crew out to interview Skinch, and one of its handsomely paid straight men wrapping up the piece with an offhand, “See, you don’t need government handouts. If you don’t want to work, you can do what this guy does. At least he’s not a taker. The rest of us in this country, we’ll continue to work for a living.”
Today, with the election well past, a late remark from Mitt Romney was revealed. According to the New York Times, he said (bitterly, one can only suppose) that he and Paul Ryan lost because of “gifts” generously bestowed by President Obama on blacks, Latinos and young people, especially women. They’re the new “privileged” class if you’re a Republican (and only if you’re a Republican). Republican state legislators are overheard saying that the right side would have won if only the urban vote had been suppressed through a strong voter ID law — an outcome averted because individual judges had stepped in to block it from happening. And somehow voter suppression would have been OK.
Even before the 2012 campaign began, Fox News and Republican tele-pundits were charging Democrats with the crime of class warfare. In truth, though, Republicans were always the ones playing the class card — and they’ve ramped it up since Nov. 6. With Romney’s defeat, the Republican media machine has decided to blame the voters. Ann Coulter was the first to pronounce, “Game over,” because the new electoral majority now contains “more takers than makers.” Bill O’Reilly upped the collective whine with his post-game analysis: President Obama won by appealing to all those people who “want things.” And then he clarified: “People feel they are entitled to things.” Things? Doesn’t he mean rights? Doesn’t he mean government protections? Isn’t he complaining because the non-rich people in our republic expect to be treated with a basic level of human decency?
The flip side of an obviously stupid argument is the complainers’ crude inference that only Republicans don’t want “things.” Oh, so they’re driven by altruism, are they? Class-based anger started, not with the Dems, but with the Tea Party, in 2009, when it sought to explain the collapse of the housing market by dismissing the unworthy Americans who never deserved to be homeowners. Tea Partyers had no intention of paying for others’ failure. Speaker John Boehner was on-board with this principle, because his was the party of self-reliance. So instead of directing their venom against Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac, they went after the Americans who had dared to buy a home beyond their means. There was a certain logic to this argument, but not to the underlying sentiment: They were mocking the idea of social mobility.
The Tea Party went after healthcare reform next, dismissing the uninsured as deadbeats. Romney rejected the government bailout of the auto industry on similar grounds: let the chips fall where they may. While corporations are people, my friend, when it comes to campaign donations, the people whose livelihoods depend on GM, Chrysler and Ford are expendable. At least that’s how it is in Romneyville.
Again and again, Republicans drew upon the same rhetoric, saying that the country was divided between independent Americans and worthless dependents. Dependent Americans needed big government, and the wealthiest Americans deserved tax breaks. Why? Because they were the wealth creators; they were valuable Americans; they had earned the privilege of lower taxes. For Tea Party Republicans, increasing taxes on the rich was nothing but a massive transfer of wealth from the deserving to the undeserving.
The “two Americas” that Republicans bought into was reinforced by a second line of attack. There were legitimate Americans (white and native-born) and there were outsiders, who were to be feared. They were “strangers” (immigrants); heathens (secret Muslims, secularists, gays); and wastrels (debtors, the unemployed, and the professional beggars who scammed the government into giving them “things”). These groups, representing, oh, say 47 percent of the population, demanded government intervention and rights and privileges they shouldn’t have – they somehow threatened a long-established social order. For the Tea Party, it was a zero sum game: recognizing the rights of strangers, heathens and wastrels somehow diminished the American “makers.” To put it in the words of former Texas congressman Dick Armey, chairman of FreedomWorks, Republicans alone “understand the miracle of America.”
Their compassion-free argument is not only not new, it’s not exactly American. It can be traced to an earlier British idea of vagrants, the wandering poor and worthless people who cannibalized the English economy at the time America was still a loose collection of colonies. The able-bodied poor who, in the English imagination, refused to work, the beggars who pretended to be disabled, were an early version of those whom Newt Gingrich infamously targeted when he proposed putting poor black children to work cleaning their own schools in order to learn discipline and earn their way into the workforce at an early age. For Republicans, only the “makers” sign on to the social contract. Only children with parents who are self-sufficient and self-reliant deserve good schools.
Single women don’t belong in the Republicans’ shrinking tent either. To serial husband Rush Limbaugh they are the vaginas, lusty doxies and virtual whores who want birth control so they can tramp around and avoid the consequences of pregnancy. Single women are not doing their job: reproducing the next generation of Americans. An “ad” appeared in New England newspapers during Thomas Jefferson’s presidency – it was “A Coquette’s Account of Herself,” trumpeting her “wholesome flesh,” her independent qualities, as she went languidly about searching for a husband: “I have a natural taste for extravagance and pleasure and am passionately fond of running into debt. I am, in a strict sense of the word, a bewitching girl, and very happily calculated to break a husband’s heart.” It’s the sort of joke only a Republican in 2012 would find funny. Because their level of respect for women and sensitivity on issues of gender inequality is pretty much in line with the mind-set of the white male citizens of 200 years ago. Beggars as takers, single women as takers.
The facts tell a different story. They prove that the real takers are the “red states,” all those states that are subsidized by the wealthier blue states. While the Tea Party folk insist they made it on their own, they at least have a Rick Santorum standing up for them. His father became a doctor because of the G.I. Bill, and worked in a veterans hospital. Rick Santorum went to Penn State University, a state-funded institution. His subsequent career in Congress was funded by taxpayers, and after his defeat at the polls, he was funded by think tanks and private backers. In sum, Santorum never earned an honest dollar, he never “made” anything. What exactly did he do “on his own”? A bit less than Skinch Painter, if you don’t count his procreative activity.
It seems that for the Republicans, “makers” are those who make money, and the real makers, such as autoworkers, are prospective takers. “Small business” includes corporations in Republican doublespeak, in which faceless entities are essentially the same as a mom and pop shop on Main Street (which is what Democrats think of when they aim to promote small business). The featured speakers at the Republican Convention embody the Republican mythos: Ann Romney, Chris Christie and the rest were all the proud inheritors of the gift of social mobility. They didn’t earn it. Their parents did.
Donald Trump’s inane campaign against the president was fueled by the same twisted logic. His Obama had been handed a free ride to Harvard. He didn’t earn his grades -– they were granted, and he was given a pass, because of his race. In fact, though, the undeserving students are legacies like Trump, who get into colleges on their parents’ coattails.
Republicans of 2012 kept shouting that America had been stolen from them, stolen from true Americans. They imagine that America is being invaded by strangers crossing our borders, abetted by a secret Muslim Manchurian president, and hordes of beggars running to government for “stuff” that the overtaxed Republicans will have to pay for. For how much longer will they be sticking to this illogic?
In spite of his father’s dreams for him, Mitt Romney was the mouthpiece of the Tea Party coalition. He was the friend of Trump and the servant of Limbaugh. He was a commodity purchased by Sheldon Adelson, who hated him until the superior hate-monger Newt Gingrich imploded. This is the biggest irony of all. Romney himself is not and never was his own man. As a politician, he is not a symbol of self-reliance. He’s the opposite.
Here’s what the election proved: You can’t win by hating a large portion of the electorate. Those accused of being beggars and dependents actually have a voice. And ears and eyes. They could not ignore the insults and slurs delivered by each and every Republican primary contender. A majority now believes that the richest Americans should pay their fair share of taxes, because the super-rich are the real takers. Romney’s refusal to disclose more than a sliver of his tax returns was indicative of his party’s problem. The Republican candidate was a private businessman who exhibited zero interest in putting the public good before private interest, no matter how much money he was making.
As a political chameleon, Romney was so constituted that he could never represent himself as a man of the people, and not only because voters were unable to detect what policies he represented. His party didn’t even want him to be a “man of the people.” He was, at best, a pugilist — as he showed in the first head-to-head debate. He was on that night — and ever since he won the nomination, in fact — the last of the “Great White Hopes,” in a line that extended back to heavyweight champ James Jeffries.
It was the fight of the century all over again. Romney would beat Obama in the ring and keep the hordes of beggars at bay. Millions rooting for him refused to imagine any other outcome. Guess what, folks, when the black boxer Jack Johnson beat Jeffries on July 4, 1910, civilization did not end. The world will go on now, too, because the gloom-and-doom commentators at Fox are wrong. White Americans will not become irrelevant, even if a certain breed of angry white man loses his monopoly on political succession. It’s beyond demographics. It’s democracy.
Skinch Painter didn’t vote because it was too onerous a responsibility. But in all likelihood he would have gone with the Republicans in 2012.
Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg are professors of History at LSU and coauthors of "Madison and Jefferson" (Random House),
Victory for strangers, heathens, wastrels!
Republicans counted on tried-and-true class warfare like never before. This time, "outsiders" were the majority
By Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg
Topics: American History, Barack Obama, Bill O'Reilly, Class warfare, Democratic Party, Elections 2012
Before we get to the persistence of class warfare in our politics, let’s talk about Skinch Painter. In 1900, when the San Francisco Examiner tracked him down, he was 78, “hale, hearty, and contented.” He hadn’t inherited a penny, but neither had he worked a day in his life. “He has never borrowed a dollar, nor stolen one,” the column read. “He has never been a tramp nor a beggar. He has never done a day’s work in exchange for money … Yet he has lived.”
One day, when he was in his teens, he said to himself, “Look here, Skinch Painter, this old world owes you a living, and all you’ve got to do is collect it.” Wandering the Ozarks of Missouri, he inhabited a cave and relied on nature for his food and clothing. He hunted, fished and gathered nuts and berries, wearing only animal skins and going barefoot.
“Labor is a useless sin,” said Skinch. “The time a man spends working is just so much time lost from living.”
We can just about see Fox News sending a camera crew out to interview Skinch, and one of its handsomely paid straight men wrapping up the piece with an offhand, “See, you don’t need government handouts. If you don’t want to work, you can do what this guy does. At least he’s not a taker. The rest of us in this country, we’ll continue to work for a living.”
Today, with the election well past, a late remark from Mitt Romney was revealed. According to the New York Times, he said (bitterly, one can only suppose) that he and Paul Ryan lost because of “gifts” generously bestowed by President Obama on blacks, Latinos and young people, especially women. They’re the new “privileged” class if you’re a Republican (and only if you’re a Republican). Republican state legislators are overheard saying that the right side would have won if only the urban vote had been suppressed through a strong voter ID law — an outcome averted because individual judges had stepped in to block it from happening. And somehow voter suppression would have been OK.
Even before the 2012 campaign began, Fox News and Republican tele-pundits were charging Democrats with the crime of class warfare. In truth, though, Republicans were always the ones playing the class card — and they’ve ramped it up since Nov. 6. With Romney’s defeat, the Republican media machine has decided to blame the voters. Ann Coulter was the first to pronounce, “Game over,” because the new electoral majority now contains “more takers than makers.” Bill O’Reilly upped the collective whine with his post-game analysis: President Obama won by appealing to all those people who “want things.” And then he clarified: “People feel they are entitled to things.” Things? Doesn’t he mean rights? Doesn’t he mean government protections? Isn’t he complaining because the non-rich people in our republic expect to be treated with a basic level of human decency?
The flip side of an obviously stupid argument is the complainers’ crude inference that only Republicans don’t want “things.” Oh, so they’re driven by altruism, are they? Class-based anger started, not with the Dems, but with the Tea Party, in 2009, when it sought to explain the collapse of the housing market by dismissing the unworthy Americans who never deserved to be homeowners. Tea Partyers had no intention of paying for others’ failure. Speaker John Boehner was on-board with this principle, because his was the party of self-reliance. So instead of directing their venom against Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac, they went after the Americans who had dared to buy a home beyond their means. There was a certain logic to this argument, but not to the underlying sentiment: They were mocking the idea of social mobility.
The Tea Party went after healthcare reform next, dismissing the uninsured as deadbeats. Romney rejected the government bailout of the auto industry on similar grounds: let the chips fall where they may. While corporations are people, my friend, when it comes to campaign donations, the people whose livelihoods depend on GM, Chrysler and Ford are expendable. At least that’s how it is in Romneyville.
Again and again, Republicans drew upon the same rhetoric, saying that the country was divided between independent Americans and worthless dependents. Dependent Americans needed big government, and the wealthiest Americans deserved tax breaks. Why? Because they were the wealth creators; they were valuable Americans; they had earned the privilege of lower taxes. For Tea Party Republicans, increasing taxes on the rich was nothing but a massive transfer of wealth from the deserving to the undeserving.
The “two Americas” that Republicans bought into was reinforced by a second line of attack. There were legitimate Americans (white and native-born) and there were outsiders, who were to be feared. They were “strangers” (immigrants); heathens (secret Muslims, secularists, gays); and wastrels (debtors, the unemployed, and the professional beggars who scammed the government into giving them “things”). These groups, representing, oh, say 47 percent of the population, demanded government intervention and rights and privileges they shouldn’t have – they somehow threatened a long-established social order. For the Tea Party, it was a zero sum game: recognizing the rights of strangers, heathens and wastrels somehow diminished the American “makers.” To put it in the words of former Texas congressman Dick Armey, chairman of FreedomWorks, Republicans alone “understand the miracle of America.”
Their compassion-free argument is not only not new, it’s not exactly American. It can be traced to an earlier British idea of vagrants, the wandering poor and worthless people who cannibalized the English economy at the time America was still a loose collection of colonies. The able-bodied poor who, in the English imagination, refused to work, the beggars who pretended to be disabled, were an early version of those whom Newt Gingrich infamously targeted when he proposed putting poor black children to work cleaning their own schools in order to learn discipline and earn their way into the workforce at an early age. For Republicans, only the “makers” sign on to the social contract. Only children with parents who are self-sufficient and self-reliant deserve good schools.
Single women don’t belong in the Republicans’ shrinking tent either. To serial husband Rush Limbaugh they are the vaginas, lusty doxies and virtual whores who want birth control so they can tramp around and avoid the consequences of pregnancy. Single women are not doing their job: reproducing the next generation of Americans. An “ad” appeared in New England newspapers during Thomas Jefferson’s presidency – it was “A Coquette’s Account of Herself,” trumpeting her “wholesome flesh,” her independent qualities, as she went languidly about searching for a husband: “I have a natural taste for extravagance and pleasure and am passionately fond of running into debt. I am, in a strict sense of the word, a bewitching girl, and very happily calculated to break a husband’s heart.” It’s the sort of joke only a Republican in 2012 would find funny. Because their level of respect for women and sensitivity on issues of gender inequality is pretty much in line with the mind-set of the white male citizens of 200 years ago. Beggars as takers, single women as takers.
The facts tell a different story. They prove that the real takers are the “red states,” all those states that are subsidized by the wealthier blue states. While the Tea Party folk insist they made it on their own, they at least have a Rick Santorum standing up for them. His father became a doctor because of the G.I. Bill, and worked in a veterans hospital. Rick Santorum went to Penn State University, a state-funded institution. His subsequent career in Congress was funded by taxpayers, and after his defeat at the polls, he was funded by think tanks and private backers. In sum, Santorum never earned an honest dollar, he never “made” anything. What exactly did he do “on his own”? A bit less than Skinch Painter, if you don’t count his procreative activity.
It seems that for the Republicans, “makers” are those who make money, and the real makers, such as autoworkers, are prospective takers. “Small business” includes corporations in Republican doublespeak, in which faceless entities are essentially the same as a mom and pop shop on Main Street (which is what Democrats think of when they aim to promote small business). The featured speakers at the Republican Convention embody the Republican mythos: Ann Romney, Chris Christie and the rest were all the proud inheritors of the gift of social mobility. They didn’t earn it. Their parents did.
Donald Trump’s inane campaign against the president was fueled by the same twisted logic. His Obama had been handed a free ride to Harvard. He didn’t earn his grades -– they were granted, and he was given a pass, because of his race. In fact, though, the undeserving students are legacies like Trump, who get into colleges on their parents’ coattails.
Republicans of 2012 kept shouting that America had been stolen from them, stolen from true Americans. They imagine that America is being invaded by strangers crossing our borders, abetted by a secret Muslim Manchurian president, and hordes of beggars running to government for “stuff” that the overtaxed Republicans will have to pay for. For how much longer will they be sticking to this illogic?
In spite of his father’s dreams for him, Mitt Romney was the mouthpiece of the Tea Party coalition. He was the friend of Trump and the servant of Limbaugh. He was a commodity purchased by Sheldon Adelson, who hated him until the superior hate-monger Newt Gingrich imploded. This is the biggest irony of all. Romney himself is not and never was his own man. As a politician, he is not a symbol of self-reliance. He’s the opposite.
Here’s what the election proved: You can’t win by hating a large portion of the electorate. Those accused of being beggars and dependents actually have a voice. And ears and eyes. They could not ignore the insults and slurs delivered by each and every Republican primary contender. A majority now believes that the richest Americans should pay their fair share of taxes, because the super-rich are the real takers. Romney’s refusal to disclose more than a sliver of his tax returns was indicative of his party’s problem. The Republican candidate was a private businessman who exhibited zero interest in putting the public good before private interest, no matter how much money he was making.
As a political chameleon, Romney was so constituted that he could never represent himself as a man of the people, and not only because voters were unable to detect what policies he represented. His party didn’t even want him to be a “man of the people.” He was, at best, a pugilist — as he showed in the first head-to-head debate. He was on that night — and ever since he won the nomination, in fact — the last of the “Great White Hopes,” in a line that extended back to heavyweight champ James Jeffries.
It was the fight of the century all over again. Romney would beat Obama in the ring and keep the hordes of beggars at bay. Millions rooting for him refused to imagine any other outcome. Guess what, folks, when the black boxer Jack Johnson beat Jeffries on July 4, 1910, civilization did not end. The world will go on now, too, because the gloom-and-doom commentators at Fox are wrong. White Americans will not become irrelevant, even if a certain breed of angry white man loses his monopoly on political succession. It’s beyond demographics. It’s democracy.
Skinch Painter didn’t vote because it was too onerous a responsibility. But in all likelihood he would have gone with the Republicans in 2012.
Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg are professors of History at LSU and coauthors of "Madison and Jefferson" (Random House),
Saturday, November 17, 2012
The Anna Karenina Movie
The Weirdly Familiar Politics of 'Anna Karenina'
By Rich Bellis
Less than two weeks after Election Day, it's easy to watch Joe Wright's new Tolstoy adaptation and be reminded of present-day issues of class and campaigns.
Of the two historical dramas to hit movie theaters since election night, Steven Spielberg's Lincoln is more likely to be talked about in relation to this year's campaign season. But Anna Karenina, directed by Joe Wright and starring Keira Knightley, is also a story about a house divided. Set inside a sumptuously decaying theater, the world of Tolstoy's heroine can sometimes resemble our own, where life's material dilemmas—about money, marriage, family, and the government's role in each—converge around personal passions and catastrophes. Those issues are still unsettled as the Obama era heads into its second act, and for anyone with politics on the mind, Anna Karenina will be less of a distraction from reality than a reminder of it.
'Silver Linings Playbook': A Clear-Headed Comedy About Mental Illness Wright's is the 12th feature-length film to adapt the classic Russian novel, which tells of the romance and ensuing scandal between Anna, wife to the icy middle-aged statesman Karenin (Jude Law), and a rakish young officer, Count Vronsky (Aaron Taylor-Johnson). Tom Stoppard, who wrote the movie's brisk screenplay, sees the story's broad treatment of love as the source of its endurance: "There is love, mother love, baby love, sibling love, carnal love, love of Russia, and so forth. The word 'love' is central to the book, and to our movie."
By widening their focus, the filmmakers do a credit to Tolstoy's sprawling work, most of all by returning attention to the narrative that complements the Karenina-Vronsky affair: the modest squire Levin (Domhnall Gleeson)'s pursuit of Kitty Oblonsky (Alicia Vikander), Anna's petulant young niece. Knightley's Anna Karenina is a fiercely affectionate mother whom the stirrings of extramarital desire take unaware. In the meantime Kitty, after spurning Levin's advances, undergoes a late blossoming of affection, not only for him but for the people around her. As she rises above her teenage narcissism, Anna sinks into her passion until it overcomes her.
These plotlines run parallel to each other, but you could imagine them as running against each other, too. Together, the two couples offer competing visions not only of love—one transgressive, the other conventional—but of morality in private life. As their paths diverge, it becomes clear which pair will come out on top and which one won't. After a presidential campaign as long and tedious as any Russian novel, that opposition (and its dramatic stakes) could hardly be more familiar. Stoppard insists that in transferring these love stories to the screen he set aside "those parts of the novel that might be about something else." But even with the focus on the personal, the political remains in the frame.
Readers of Anna Karenina will recall the famous lunch of Count Oblonsky, Anna's hedonist brother, whose eyes glisten like the tray of oysters he polishes off early in the novel. When Matthew Macfadyen, playing the devilishly charming philanderer, sits down to enjoy this same meal, there's no sign of indulgence or class guilt on his face: Why shouldn't there be oysters? It's the kind of moment that recalls the times during the campaign when Romney appeared vexed as to why he should have to explain that people earning more than $250,000 a year shouldn't pay higher rates on their incomes. The entitlement of the rich, Oblonsky reminds us, is old indeed.
While the film revels in these caricatures of opulence, it also uncovers its costs. Those concerns are built into its very conceit, which requires characters to bustle through the theater unaware that they're confined within its crumbling walls—a neat metaphor for the upper class's blithe superficiality. When the sated Oblonsky returns from lunch, it's to the prop closet of the theater complex, where his family nests among the bric-a-brac. It's only then that we discover he's not as solvent as his appetite requires. Wright lifts the curtain on these backstage warrens to show the rickety framework holding up such an unequal society. Aristocrats glide from one gilt salon to the next, but peasants swarm in the crawlspaces; as Tolstoy may only have guessed but the rest of us know, the empire is waning, and the most vulnerable are those who have the most to lose.
Levin listens to one of his former serfs reflect on his son's shaky job prospects after being emancipated; he could almost be a steel-mill worker after a Bain buyout. Levin is perhaps the only exception among them: always modest, uncomfortable, and underdressed inside Moscow's city limits while courting Kitty. He's more at home in the heartland, where Wright ventures from his world of pulleys and plaster to the expansive Russian steppe (or Salisbury Plain, its handy stand-in). It's not long before Levin is scything the fields with the muzhiks. His friends and servants laugh at this impulse, but we're asked to sympathize with Levin's rustic search for authenticity. Both candidates asked something similar of voters when they spurned their neckties, rolled their sleeves, and strode through the small towns of the American interior, harvesting homespun anecdotes for televised recitation. The idea that there's a fundamental divide between the country's urban coasts and open middle is cliché, but it appears to have a legitimate claim on our political imagination.
So it can be a little exasperating to find Anna Karenina indulging in some of the same hackery as the campaigns. When the day's reaping is done, Levin listens to one of his former serfs reflect on his son's shaky job prospects after being emancipated; he could almost be a steel-mill worker after a Bain buyout. There's even a dying consumptive (Levin's errant brother) who's trotted out to cough up a few bitter words about the coming revolution. All more or less desultory, these capsules of proletarian history are as brief and to-the-point as any PAC ad, and as soon as they're delivered the movie resumes its regular programming.
Which, of course, is all about Anna. As she and her husband argue over their children's legitimacy and the possibility of divorcing, their 19th-century marital squabble recalls our own battles over family politics. That Karenin is the embodiment of imperial bureaucracy only furthers this impression. He speaks in a minister's firm but measured pronouncements, each one delineating a new obstacle to his wife's freedom. After our own decades of cultural warfare over the place of women in and out of the home, Knightley's indignant grimace will be all too recognizable. Before long, a clenched jaw is all she has left, and as the prohibitions of the state grow sharper, so does the tone of public comment.
For our own imperfect union, that will be familiar, too. Every unhappy family may be unhappy in its own way, but Anna Karenina reminds us their bickering members sound alike in any language, time, or place.
By Rich Bellis
Less than two weeks after Election Day, it's easy to watch Joe Wright's new Tolstoy adaptation and be reminded of present-day issues of class and campaigns.
Of the two historical dramas to hit movie theaters since election night, Steven Spielberg's Lincoln is more likely to be talked about in relation to this year's campaign season. But Anna Karenina, directed by Joe Wright and starring Keira Knightley, is also a story about a house divided. Set inside a sumptuously decaying theater, the world of Tolstoy's heroine can sometimes resemble our own, where life's material dilemmas—about money, marriage, family, and the government's role in each—converge around personal passions and catastrophes. Those issues are still unsettled as the Obama era heads into its second act, and for anyone with politics on the mind, Anna Karenina will be less of a distraction from reality than a reminder of it.
'Silver Linings Playbook': A Clear-Headed Comedy About Mental Illness Wright's is the 12th feature-length film to adapt the classic Russian novel, which tells of the romance and ensuing scandal between Anna, wife to the icy middle-aged statesman Karenin (Jude Law), and a rakish young officer, Count Vronsky (Aaron Taylor-Johnson). Tom Stoppard, who wrote the movie's brisk screenplay, sees the story's broad treatment of love as the source of its endurance: "There is love, mother love, baby love, sibling love, carnal love, love of Russia, and so forth. The word 'love' is central to the book, and to our movie."
By widening their focus, the filmmakers do a credit to Tolstoy's sprawling work, most of all by returning attention to the narrative that complements the Karenina-Vronsky affair: the modest squire Levin (Domhnall Gleeson)'s pursuit of Kitty Oblonsky (Alicia Vikander), Anna's petulant young niece. Knightley's Anna Karenina is a fiercely affectionate mother whom the stirrings of extramarital desire take unaware. In the meantime Kitty, after spurning Levin's advances, undergoes a late blossoming of affection, not only for him but for the people around her. As she rises above her teenage narcissism, Anna sinks into her passion until it overcomes her.
These plotlines run parallel to each other, but you could imagine them as running against each other, too. Together, the two couples offer competing visions not only of love—one transgressive, the other conventional—but of morality in private life. As their paths diverge, it becomes clear which pair will come out on top and which one won't. After a presidential campaign as long and tedious as any Russian novel, that opposition (and its dramatic stakes) could hardly be more familiar. Stoppard insists that in transferring these love stories to the screen he set aside "those parts of the novel that might be about something else." But even with the focus on the personal, the political remains in the frame.
Readers of Anna Karenina will recall the famous lunch of Count Oblonsky, Anna's hedonist brother, whose eyes glisten like the tray of oysters he polishes off early in the novel. When Matthew Macfadyen, playing the devilishly charming philanderer, sits down to enjoy this same meal, there's no sign of indulgence or class guilt on his face: Why shouldn't there be oysters? It's the kind of moment that recalls the times during the campaign when Romney appeared vexed as to why he should have to explain that people earning more than $250,000 a year shouldn't pay higher rates on their incomes. The entitlement of the rich, Oblonsky reminds us, is old indeed.
While the film revels in these caricatures of opulence, it also uncovers its costs. Those concerns are built into its very conceit, which requires characters to bustle through the theater unaware that they're confined within its crumbling walls—a neat metaphor for the upper class's blithe superficiality. When the sated Oblonsky returns from lunch, it's to the prop closet of the theater complex, where his family nests among the bric-a-brac. It's only then that we discover he's not as solvent as his appetite requires. Wright lifts the curtain on these backstage warrens to show the rickety framework holding up such an unequal society. Aristocrats glide from one gilt salon to the next, but peasants swarm in the crawlspaces; as Tolstoy may only have guessed but the rest of us know, the empire is waning, and the most vulnerable are those who have the most to lose.
Levin listens to one of his former serfs reflect on his son's shaky job prospects after being emancipated; he could almost be a steel-mill worker after a Bain buyout. Levin is perhaps the only exception among them: always modest, uncomfortable, and underdressed inside Moscow's city limits while courting Kitty. He's more at home in the heartland, where Wright ventures from his world of pulleys and plaster to the expansive Russian steppe (or Salisbury Plain, its handy stand-in). It's not long before Levin is scything the fields with the muzhiks. His friends and servants laugh at this impulse, but we're asked to sympathize with Levin's rustic search for authenticity. Both candidates asked something similar of voters when they spurned their neckties, rolled their sleeves, and strode through the small towns of the American interior, harvesting homespun anecdotes for televised recitation. The idea that there's a fundamental divide between the country's urban coasts and open middle is cliché, but it appears to have a legitimate claim on our political imagination.
So it can be a little exasperating to find Anna Karenina indulging in some of the same hackery as the campaigns. When the day's reaping is done, Levin listens to one of his former serfs reflect on his son's shaky job prospects after being emancipated; he could almost be a steel-mill worker after a Bain buyout. There's even a dying consumptive (Levin's errant brother) who's trotted out to cough up a few bitter words about the coming revolution. All more or less desultory, these capsules of proletarian history are as brief and to-the-point as any PAC ad, and as soon as they're delivered the movie resumes its regular programming.
Which, of course, is all about Anna. As she and her husband argue over their children's legitimacy and the possibility of divorcing, their 19th-century marital squabble recalls our own battles over family politics. That Karenin is the embodiment of imperial bureaucracy only furthers this impression. He speaks in a minister's firm but measured pronouncements, each one delineating a new obstacle to his wife's freedom. After our own decades of cultural warfare over the place of women in and out of the home, Knightley's indignant grimace will be all too recognizable. Before long, a clenched jaw is all she has left, and as the prohibitions of the state grow sharper, so does the tone of public comment.
For our own imperfect union, that will be familiar, too. Every unhappy family may be unhappy in its own way, but Anna Karenina reminds us their bickering members sound alike in any language, time, or place.
Friday, November 16, 2012
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