January 4, 2013, 6:52 pm 7 Comments
Historians Look Back, and Inward, at Annual Meeting
By JENNIFER SCHUESSLER
NEW ORLEANS — Some 4,000 historians descended on New Orleans on Thursday for the American Historical Association’s four-day annual meeting, replacing the chants of departing Sugar Bowl revelers with more sober talk of job interviews, departmental politics, and — at least in the official panels — the past itself.
As usual, the meeting’s 300-plus sessions touched on contemporary issues like climate change, the 2012 presidential election, and the Arab Spring, along with more purely scholarly topics big (“Horstory: Equines and Humans in Africa, Asia and North America”) and small (“Trash and Treasure: The Significance of Used Goods in America, 1880-1950″). But for many in attendance, the most urgent question was the state of the historical profession itself in an era of budget cuts and declining humanities enrollments.
At a panel called “The Skyscraper Index, the Hemline Index, Champagne, Nail Polish and the Dow Jones,” scholars analyzed the colorful — and usually suspect — metrics that journalists and other commentators sometimes use to track the state of the economy.
In the official conference hotels clustered on Canal Street, it was tempting to look for similarly offbeat indicators of the perennially troubled job market for history doctorates: The number of special “historian-themed cocktails” quaffed at the conference hotel bars? The profusion of sessions with titles like “The Entrepreneurial Historian” or “Exploring a Range of Careers Outside the Academy”? The rueful Twitter post noting that the meeting was generating only .5 tweets per minute, compared with the 13 per minute for the annual convention of the Modern Language Association held simultaneously in Boston?
Or perhaps it was the hearty laughter that followed when the journalist Michael Pollan, at Thursday night’s opening plenary panel, asked: “Why do people like me who use your work end up selling more books than you do?”
Tension between popular and scholarly approaches to history can get rancorous, as the recent dust-up over Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln” can attest. But Mr. Pollan’s quip wasn’t meant as a victory dance. The deep perspective offered by professional historians, he said, is an essential public good in a world where “every politician would have us forget what he said yesterday,” and too few journalists are willing (and perhaps able) to cry foul.
And there was little disagreement from his fellow panelists, four distinguished historians and one publisher who had been summoned to ponder “The Public Practice of History in a Digital Age.”
“If we were as lost in space as we are in time, we would be freaking out,” said Edward Ayers, the president of the University of Richmond and a host of the popular podcast “BackStory with the American History Guys.”
But there was less agreement over what was to blame for the marginal status of academic history in a world that gobbles heroic biographies of the Founders and turns Twitter feeds like Real Time WWII into viral sensations, but takes a pass on the kind of impersonal, analytic history that academic departments reward.
For William Cronon, a historian at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and the outgoing president of the history association, the problem is insufficient attention to basic storytelling. Historians, he said, tend to default to a dry omniscient voice that hasn’t changed since the 19th-century, despite the fact that historians no longer believe in that kind of omniscience.
“We are a deeply narrative discipline, but we give very little thought to who the narrator is,” he said.
Niko Pfund, the president of Oxford University Press, seconded the notion, pointing additionally to the history profession’s continued reliance on the scholarly monograph for tenure decisions. Historians, more than any other group of scholars, he said, remain “absolutely imprisoned in the format of the printed book,” a situation he called “borderline catastrophic.”
Not that all the panelists were ready to throw footnotes and peer-review standards out with the monograph. The designated power-blogger on the panel, Claire Potter, a professor at the New School and the author of the blog Tenured Radical, questioned the printed book’s status as a professional “fetish object,” but defended the value of traditional historical training against those who have called on departments to stop training so many doctoral students who will later find themselves without jobs.
“I think we should be educating as many Ph.D.’s as possible,” she said.
In the end, the panel seemed to agree on a loose and egalitarian notion of who counted as a “historian.” Jon Stewart, several agreed, was a good public historian simply for confronting politicians with inconvenient truths about the past. A historian, Mr. Ayers added, is simply someone who has interesting things to say about the past, and can point to the documentary record to prove them.
That why-can’t-we-get-along outlook, coming from scholars who had already run the tenure gauntlet, drew a mixed response from the audience. And it hardly seems likely to defuse intellectual turf wars like the debate over “Lincoln.”
At a packed panel earlier in the day on “The Emancipation Proclamation at 150,” a question about the film’s “great man” view of emancipation drew an awkward silence from the panel followed by a laugh.
Kate Masur, a professor at Northwestern University who wrote a much-discussed New York Times Op-Ed blasting the film for ignoring African-Americans’ active role in their own emancipation, said that her view of the film softened somewhat after she went to see it again with groups of students.
David Blight, a professor at Yale who was briefly an adviser on the film, defended it, cautiously, as delivering a useful public lesson on the 13th Amendment, even if it ended up reinforcing a simplified heroic narrative of Lincoln.
The movie, Mr. Blight said, shows us Lincoln the great abolitionist, rather than the “much messier” and more conflicted pre-1863 Lincoln who believed, among other things, that African-Americans should ultimately be “repatriated” to Africa.
“But no one is going to make that movie,” he added.
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Wednesday, January 9, 2013
Forever Free
Disunion January 7, 2013, 1:40 pm 40 Comments
(As Professor Oakes notes, the traditional understanding has always been that the war initially was only to preserve the Union, and that only gradually later on did emancipation become a necessary goal also to concluding the war victoriously for the North. Oakes challenges this view although I'm not sure he's saying anything new. Preservation of the Union and ending slavery were intertwined from the start. I think this is all he's saying and I'm not sure what difference his point of view makes.)
Forever Free
By JAMES OAKES
Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.
Two weeks after the Union garrison at Fort Sumter, S.C., surrendered to the Confederates, the New York World predicted that if Republicans persisted in their fanatical campaign against slavery, they would provoke “wide-spread negro insurrections” that would spread “horror” across the South. The World was a Democratic newspaper, and like most Northern Democrats its editors believed that slavery had no place in a war whose sole purpose was the restoration of the Union. Democrats were demanding that Republicans answer the question, “What is the object of the war?” But Republicans turned the tables and demanded that Democrats answer a very different question. “Shall the American Republic be destroyed or shall Slavery perish?” asked Horace Greeley, the most powerful Republican editor in the country. If you asked Northerners that question, he declared, their overwhelming response would be, “‘The Republic must live, even though Slavery should have to die!’”
When I first discovered Republicans saying such things, I was surprised. It’s common wisdom among historians that in the early phases of the war, Northerners, including most Republicans, disavowed any intent to interfere with slavery. Yet there were all those Republican editors and politicians, one after another, right as the war began, spelling out in broad terms the policies they expected to implement to emancipate slaves and abolish slavery. Did we, as a profession, have our timing wrong?
I was already familiar with Republican Party ideology; I recognized the arguments Republicans used to criticize slavery. Early on, Abraham Lincoln talked vaguely about putting slavery on “the course of ultimate extinction.” But what did he mean by that? Answering that question has forced me to rethink many of the things I always assumed about the way slavery was destroyed in the United States.
Like most historians, I long believed that over the course of the struggle between North and South, the “object” of the war shifted from Union to emancipation. Having initially resisted attacking slavery itself, the federal government supposedly moved slowly, hesitantly, toward grudging acceptance of emancipation. Not until the last years of the war, we were taught, did Northerners come belatedly to accept the need for slavery’s complete destruction. This is a familiar story among historians, arguably the closest thing to orthodoxy in Civil War studies. There’s even an established series of items that we check off when teaching survey courses, like groceries on a shopping list, showing that when the war began the North had no interest in freeing the slaves.
Somewhere along the way, however, the familiar story of a shift “from Union to emancipation” began to collapse beneath the weight of my research. During the secession crisis, for example, Republicans offered the South a constitutional amendment forever banning the government from abolishing slavery in the states. It turns out that nearly everybody — including most abolitionists — believed that the Constitution already prohibited the government from abolishing slavery in the states.
What about the supposedly pointless Confiscation Act, which Congress passed in early August 1861, a few months after the war began? If it freed no slaves, I wondered, why had Congress bothered to pass it? The answer to that question turned out to be a revelation. In the Congressional debates during the first summer of the war, Republicans made it clear that they intended to pass a law freeing slaves. Two days after Lincoln signed the bill his secretary of war issued the instructions for implementing the first Confiscation Act, immediately freeing hundreds of slaves, and ultimately tens of thousands.
Pretty soon nothing looked the same. Familiar events took on entirely new meanings. The Crittenden-Johnson resolution is a good example. Passed in the summer of 1861, it put Congress on record declaring that the purpose of the war was the restoration of the Union. This resolution is widely read as evidence that the North was initially unwilling to attack slavery. In fact, all the Crittenden-Johnson resolution did was to reaffirm the standard Republican position: the Constitution did not allow the government to prosecute a war for any “purpose” other than the restoration of the Union. Republicans justified their early attacks on slavery because they hated slavery and because slavery had caused the war. But the purpose of the war, at least officially, was always the restoration of the Union. This was just as true in 1865 as in 1861.
If Lincoln and the Republicans did in fact begin freeing slaves in August 1861, the president’s famous order to Gen. John C. Frémont the following month, in which he told him to rescind an order to free slaves in Missouri, can no longer stand up as evidence of Lincoln’s reluctance to emancipate. In fact, Lincoln did not prohibit the general from freeing slaves in Missouri; he merely told Frémont to rewrite his order to conform to the Confiscation Act. But that law was supposed to emancipate slaves.
And what of Lincoln’s subsequent revocation of Gen. David Hunter’s abolition order of spring 1862, applying to slaves on the South Carolina coast? Actually, Hunter issued two orders. The first emancipated slaves in the area under his control, and Lincoln let that order stand. The second abolished slavery in several states. Here was the problem: everyone agreed that the federal government had no constitutional power to abolish slavery in the states, and even if it did, generals didn’t make policy. Hunter’s first order conformed to the law as Congress passed it and as the Lincoln administration implemented it. The second order was illegal, regardless of the president’s views on slavery itself.
.So it went: Lincoln’s promise not to interfere with slavery in the states, the Crittenden resolution, the first confiscation act, the orders to Frémont and Hunter — one by one, each of these famous incidents failed to demonstrate that the North was “reluctant” to attack slavery when the war began. The familiar narrative arc taking the Civil War from Union to emancipation no longer made any sense.
If emancipation did in fact begin long before Jan. 1, 1863, when Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, what changed on that day? It’s hard to say, because the significance of that document has always been obscured by both myth and cynicism — either it freed all the slaves, or it didn’t free a single one — so much so that 150 years after it was issued we still cannot answer the simplest but most important question: what did the Emancipation Proclamation actually do?
It immediately transformed Union antislavery policy in two crucial ways. First, it lifted the ban on enticement of slaves from farms and plantations in the rebel states. Ever since the Confiscation Act of August 1861, Union soldiers were authorized to emancipate all slaves who “come within your lines” in the seceded states. But the Army was not to “entice” with slaves on peacefully functioning farms and plantations in the Union-occupied areas of the South. The Emancipation Proclamation lifted the ban on enticement. Thereafter, Northern soldiers went onto those farms, announced to the slaves that they had been emancipated and actively encouraged able-bodied men to enlist in the Union Army.
Black enlistment was the second major policy change initiated by the Emancipation Proclamation. It was justified as an “emancipation” policy, because by then everyone understood that for slavery to be abolished the North had to win the war. Eventually, Lincoln and his generals concluded that the 180,000 African-Americans who served in the Union Army were “indispensable” to Northern victory, and therefore indispensable to emancipation.
By late 1863, however, Lincoln and the Republicans realized that military emancipation would not be enough to destroy slavery completely. Contrary to their initial assumptions, slavery proved to be deeply entrenched, and slaveholders deeply committed to protecting it against all enemies. The Republicans began to worry that the war might end without slavery’s having been abolished. To prevent that from happening, the Constitution itself would have to be amended.
The Emancipation Proclamation was also crucial in a way that went beyond the specific shifts in policy. It helped create the political will that made the 13th Amendment possible. Lincoln seems to have understood that Northern voters, having accepted the Emancipation Proclamation, would have less trouble supporting an abolition amendment. The proclamation created the expectation among Northerners that when the war ended, slavery — the thing that had caused the war — would be ended as well.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(As Professor Oakes notes, the traditional understanding has always been that the war initially was only to preserve the Union, and that only gradually later on did emancipation become a necessary goal also to concluding the war victoriously for the North. Oakes challenges this view although I'm not sure he's saying anything new. Preservation of the Union and ending slavery were intertwined from the start. I think this is all he's saying and I'm not sure what difference his point of view makes.)
Forever Free
By JAMES OAKES
Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.
Two weeks after the Union garrison at Fort Sumter, S.C., surrendered to the Confederates, the New York World predicted that if Republicans persisted in their fanatical campaign against slavery, they would provoke “wide-spread negro insurrections” that would spread “horror” across the South. The World was a Democratic newspaper, and like most Northern Democrats its editors believed that slavery had no place in a war whose sole purpose was the restoration of the Union. Democrats were demanding that Republicans answer the question, “What is the object of the war?” But Republicans turned the tables and demanded that Democrats answer a very different question. “Shall the American Republic be destroyed or shall Slavery perish?” asked Horace Greeley, the most powerful Republican editor in the country. If you asked Northerners that question, he declared, their overwhelming response would be, “‘The Republic must live, even though Slavery should have to die!’”
When I first discovered Republicans saying such things, I was surprised. It’s common wisdom among historians that in the early phases of the war, Northerners, including most Republicans, disavowed any intent to interfere with slavery. Yet there were all those Republican editors and politicians, one after another, right as the war began, spelling out in broad terms the policies they expected to implement to emancipate slaves and abolish slavery. Did we, as a profession, have our timing wrong?
I was already familiar with Republican Party ideology; I recognized the arguments Republicans used to criticize slavery. Early on, Abraham Lincoln talked vaguely about putting slavery on “the course of ultimate extinction.” But what did he mean by that? Answering that question has forced me to rethink many of the things I always assumed about the way slavery was destroyed in the United States.
Like most historians, I long believed that over the course of the struggle between North and South, the “object” of the war shifted from Union to emancipation. Having initially resisted attacking slavery itself, the federal government supposedly moved slowly, hesitantly, toward grudging acceptance of emancipation. Not until the last years of the war, we were taught, did Northerners come belatedly to accept the need for slavery’s complete destruction. This is a familiar story among historians, arguably the closest thing to orthodoxy in Civil War studies. There’s even an established series of items that we check off when teaching survey courses, like groceries on a shopping list, showing that when the war began the North had no interest in freeing the slaves.
Somewhere along the way, however, the familiar story of a shift “from Union to emancipation” began to collapse beneath the weight of my research. During the secession crisis, for example, Republicans offered the South a constitutional amendment forever banning the government from abolishing slavery in the states. It turns out that nearly everybody — including most abolitionists — believed that the Constitution already prohibited the government from abolishing slavery in the states.
What about the supposedly pointless Confiscation Act, which Congress passed in early August 1861, a few months after the war began? If it freed no slaves, I wondered, why had Congress bothered to pass it? The answer to that question turned out to be a revelation. In the Congressional debates during the first summer of the war, Republicans made it clear that they intended to pass a law freeing slaves. Two days after Lincoln signed the bill his secretary of war issued the instructions for implementing the first Confiscation Act, immediately freeing hundreds of slaves, and ultimately tens of thousands.
Pretty soon nothing looked the same. Familiar events took on entirely new meanings. The Crittenden-Johnson resolution is a good example. Passed in the summer of 1861, it put Congress on record declaring that the purpose of the war was the restoration of the Union. This resolution is widely read as evidence that the North was initially unwilling to attack slavery. In fact, all the Crittenden-Johnson resolution did was to reaffirm the standard Republican position: the Constitution did not allow the government to prosecute a war for any “purpose” other than the restoration of the Union. Republicans justified their early attacks on slavery because they hated slavery and because slavery had caused the war. But the purpose of the war, at least officially, was always the restoration of the Union. This was just as true in 1865 as in 1861.
If Lincoln and the Republicans did in fact begin freeing slaves in August 1861, the president’s famous order to Gen. John C. Frémont the following month, in which he told him to rescind an order to free slaves in Missouri, can no longer stand up as evidence of Lincoln’s reluctance to emancipate. In fact, Lincoln did not prohibit the general from freeing slaves in Missouri; he merely told Frémont to rewrite his order to conform to the Confiscation Act. But that law was supposed to emancipate slaves.
And what of Lincoln’s subsequent revocation of Gen. David Hunter’s abolition order of spring 1862, applying to slaves on the South Carolina coast? Actually, Hunter issued two orders. The first emancipated slaves in the area under his control, and Lincoln let that order stand. The second abolished slavery in several states. Here was the problem: everyone agreed that the federal government had no constitutional power to abolish slavery in the states, and even if it did, generals didn’t make policy. Hunter’s first order conformed to the law as Congress passed it and as the Lincoln administration implemented it. The second order was illegal, regardless of the president’s views on slavery itself.
.So it went: Lincoln’s promise not to interfere with slavery in the states, the Crittenden resolution, the first confiscation act, the orders to Frémont and Hunter — one by one, each of these famous incidents failed to demonstrate that the North was “reluctant” to attack slavery when the war began. The familiar narrative arc taking the Civil War from Union to emancipation no longer made any sense.
If emancipation did in fact begin long before Jan. 1, 1863, when Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, what changed on that day? It’s hard to say, because the significance of that document has always been obscured by both myth and cynicism — either it freed all the slaves, or it didn’t free a single one — so much so that 150 years after it was issued we still cannot answer the simplest but most important question: what did the Emancipation Proclamation actually do?
It immediately transformed Union antislavery policy in two crucial ways. First, it lifted the ban on enticement of slaves from farms and plantations in the rebel states. Ever since the Confiscation Act of August 1861, Union soldiers were authorized to emancipate all slaves who “come within your lines” in the seceded states. But the Army was not to “entice” with slaves on peacefully functioning farms and plantations in the Union-occupied areas of the South. The Emancipation Proclamation lifted the ban on enticement. Thereafter, Northern soldiers went onto those farms, announced to the slaves that they had been emancipated and actively encouraged able-bodied men to enlist in the Union Army.
Black enlistment was the second major policy change initiated by the Emancipation Proclamation. It was justified as an “emancipation” policy, because by then everyone understood that for slavery to be abolished the North had to win the war. Eventually, Lincoln and his generals concluded that the 180,000 African-Americans who served in the Union Army were “indispensable” to Northern victory, and therefore indispensable to emancipation.
By late 1863, however, Lincoln and the Republicans realized that military emancipation would not be enough to destroy slavery completely. Contrary to their initial assumptions, slavery proved to be deeply entrenched, and slaveholders deeply committed to protecting it against all enemies. The Republicans began to worry that the war might end without slavery’s having been abolished. To prevent that from happening, the Constitution itself would have to be amended.
The Emancipation Proclamation was also crucial in a way that went beyond the specific shifts in policy. It helped create the political will that made the 13th Amendment possible. Lincoln seems to have understood that Northern voters, having accepted the Emancipation Proclamation, would have less trouble supporting an abolition amendment. The proclamation created the expectation among Northerners that when the war ended, slavery — the thing that had caused the war — would be ended as well.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sunday, January 6, 2013
Using the Constitution to Avoid the Debt Limit Issue
President Obama is being urged by some Democrats, including Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, to avoid the debt limit problem with the Republicans by citing the 14th Amendment. Here is what it says:
Amendment XIV Section 4
"The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payments of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned."
Seems clear enough to me.
Amendment XIV Section 4
"The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payments of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned."
Seems clear enough to me.
William J. Cooper - We Have The War Upon Us
Professor Cooper, who domiciles at LSU, gives us his version of the events from Novemberr, 1860, to April of 1861. The events leading up to the war have occupied scholars ever since.
The dominant Civil War scholar of the 20's, 30's, and 40's, was James G. Randall of the U of Illinois. He established the thesis that the country bumbled into war when reason and compromise failed because of fanatics on both sides. The abolitionists squared off against the Southern "fireaters," who watned secession no matter what. There was no room in the minds of these two groups for compromise. Lincoln wasn't an abolitionist, but he refused to compromise on the extension of slavery into the territories. The inevitable results of the failure of compromise was war. Randall seemed to blame the abolitionists more than the fireaters.
This work falls into this category of understanding the onset of the war. Cooper's hero is Seward, who, along with others, tried mightily to forge a compromise, willing to compromise on the extension of slavery, but thwarted by Lincoln, the party leader, he finally had to fall in line behind his President. In this book I learned for the first time that Seward would have bended on the extension of slavery into the territories.
It seems to me from what I've read over various sources that the fireaters would never have compromised; it was secession or nothing. Mr. Lincoln was right to not compromise. As he said, "the rub" had to come sooner or later.
It seems to me that Cooper presents a Southern view of the secession crisis as he seems to blame Republicans for being partisan, the root of the matter rather than Southern diehards, and what he calls the "left" in the Republican party. I have never heard another scholar refer to abolitionists and those who stood firm on not expanding slavery into the territoriesas the "left."
The bumbler advocates never talk about what would have happened if the war had been avoided by compromise. Slavery would have continued into the 20th century? No 13th, 14th, & 15th Amendments? Seems likely. It seems to me that war was, indeed, inevitable unfortunately. We are fortunate that it happened with Lincoln as President and we were able to enact those Amendments. The 14th is the cornerstone of the modern interpretation of the Constitution.
The dominant Civil War scholar of the 20's, 30's, and 40's, was James G. Randall of the U of Illinois. He established the thesis that the country bumbled into war when reason and compromise failed because of fanatics on both sides. The abolitionists squared off against the Southern "fireaters," who watned secession no matter what. There was no room in the minds of these two groups for compromise. Lincoln wasn't an abolitionist, but he refused to compromise on the extension of slavery into the territories. The inevitable results of the failure of compromise was war. Randall seemed to blame the abolitionists more than the fireaters.
This work falls into this category of understanding the onset of the war. Cooper's hero is Seward, who, along with others, tried mightily to forge a compromise, willing to compromise on the extension of slavery, but thwarted by Lincoln, the party leader, he finally had to fall in line behind his President. In this book I learned for the first time that Seward would have bended on the extension of slavery into the territories.
It seems to me from what I've read over various sources that the fireaters would never have compromised; it was secession or nothing. Mr. Lincoln was right to not compromise. As he said, "the rub" had to come sooner or later.
It seems to me that Cooper presents a Southern view of the secession crisis as he seems to blame Republicans for being partisan, the root of the matter rather than Southern diehards, and what he calls the "left" in the Republican party. I have never heard another scholar refer to abolitionists and those who stood firm on not expanding slavery into the territoriesas the "left."
The bumbler advocates never talk about what would have happened if the war had been avoided by compromise. Slavery would have continued into the 20th century? No 13th, 14th, & 15th Amendments? Seems likely. It seems to me that war was, indeed, inevitable unfortunately. We are fortunate that it happened with Lincoln as President and we were able to enact those Amendments. The 14th is the cornerstone of the modern interpretation of the Constitution.
Friday, January 4, 2013
Krugman Summarizes
As usual, Paul Krugman gives the prrogressive position on just where this country stands.
.
Battles of the BudgetBy PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: January 3, 2013 238 Comments
The centrist fantasy of a Grand Bargain on the budget never had a chance. Even if some kind of bargain had supposedly been reached, key players would soon have reneged on the deal — probably the next time a Republican occupied the White House.
For the reality is that our two major political parties are engaged in a fierce struggle over the future shape of American society. Democrats want to preserve the legacy of the New Deal and the Great Society — Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid — and add to them what every other advanced country has: a more or less universal guarantee of essential health care. Republicans want to roll all of that back, making room for drastically lower taxes on the wealthy. Yes, it’s essentially a class war.
The fight over the fiscal cliff was just one battle in that war. It ended, arguably, in a tactical victory for Democrats. The question is whether it was a Pyrrhic victory that set the stage for a larger defeat.
Why do I say that it was a tactical victory? Mainly because of what didn’t happen: There were no benefit cuts.
This was by no means a foregone conclusion. In 2011, the Obama administration was reportedly willing to raise the age of Medicare eligibility, a terrible and cruel policy idea. This time around, it was willing to cut Social Security benefits by changing the formula for cost-of-living adjustments, a less terrible idea that would nonetheless have imposed a lot of hardship — and probably have been politically disastrous as well. In the end, however, it didn’t happen. And progressives, always worried that President Obama seems much too willing to compromise about fundamentals, breathed a sigh of relief.
There were also some actual positives from a progressive point of view. Expanded unemployment benefits were given another year to run, a huge benefit to many families and a significant boost to our economic prospects (because this is money that will be spent, and hence help preserve jobs). Other benefits to lower-income families were given another five years — although, unfortunately, the payroll tax break was allowed to expire, which will hurt both working families and job creation.
The biggest progressive gripe about the legislation is that Mr. Obama extracted less revenue from the affluent than expected — about $600 billion versus $800 billion over the next decade. In perspective, however, this isn’t that big a deal. Put it this way: A reasonable estimate is that gross domestic product over the next 10 years will be around $200 trillion. So if the revenue take had matched expectations, it would still have amounted to only 0.4 percent of G.D.P.; as it turned out, this was reduced to 0.3 percent. Either way, it wouldn’t make much difference in the fights over revenue versus spending still to come.
Oh, and not only did Republicans vote for a tax increase for the first time in decades, the overall result of the tax changes now taking effect — which include new taxes associated with Obamacare as well as the new legislation — will be a significant reduction in income inequality, with the top 1 percent and even more so the top 0.1 percent taking a much bigger hit than middle-income families.
So why are many progressives — myself included — feeling very apprehensive? Because we’re worried about the confrontations to come.
According to the normal rules of politics, Republicans should have very little bargaining power at this point. With Democrats holding the White House and the Senate, the G.O.P. can’t pass legislation; and since the biggest progressive policy priority of recent years, health reform, is already law, Republicans wouldn’t seem to have many bargaining chips.
But the G.O.P. retains the power to destroy, in particular by refusing to raise the debt limit — which could cause a financial crisis. And Republicans have made it clear that they plan to use their destructive power to extract major policy concessions.
Now, the president has said that he won’t negotiate on that basis, and rightly so. Threatening to hurt tens of millions of innocent victims unless you get your way — which is what the G.O.P. strategy boils down to — shouldn’t be treated as a legitimate political tactic.
But will Mr. Obama stick to his anti-blackmail position as the moment of truth approaches? He blinked during the 2011 debt limit confrontation. And the last few days of the fiscal cliff negotiations were also marked by a clear unwillingness on his part to let the deadline expire. Since the consequences of a missed deadline on the debt limit would potentially be much worse, this bodes ill for administration resolve in the clinch.
So, as I said, in a tactical sense the fiscal cliff ended in a modest victory for the White House. But that victory could all too easily turn into defeat in just a few weeks.
.
Battles of the BudgetBy PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: January 3, 2013 238 Comments
The centrist fantasy of a Grand Bargain on the budget never had a chance. Even if some kind of bargain had supposedly been reached, key players would soon have reneged on the deal — probably the next time a Republican occupied the White House.
For the reality is that our two major political parties are engaged in a fierce struggle over the future shape of American society. Democrats want to preserve the legacy of the New Deal and the Great Society — Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid — and add to them what every other advanced country has: a more or less universal guarantee of essential health care. Republicans want to roll all of that back, making room for drastically lower taxes on the wealthy. Yes, it’s essentially a class war.
The fight over the fiscal cliff was just one battle in that war. It ended, arguably, in a tactical victory for Democrats. The question is whether it was a Pyrrhic victory that set the stage for a larger defeat.
Why do I say that it was a tactical victory? Mainly because of what didn’t happen: There were no benefit cuts.
This was by no means a foregone conclusion. In 2011, the Obama administration was reportedly willing to raise the age of Medicare eligibility, a terrible and cruel policy idea. This time around, it was willing to cut Social Security benefits by changing the formula for cost-of-living adjustments, a less terrible idea that would nonetheless have imposed a lot of hardship — and probably have been politically disastrous as well. In the end, however, it didn’t happen. And progressives, always worried that President Obama seems much too willing to compromise about fundamentals, breathed a sigh of relief.
There were also some actual positives from a progressive point of view. Expanded unemployment benefits were given another year to run, a huge benefit to many families and a significant boost to our economic prospects (because this is money that will be spent, and hence help preserve jobs). Other benefits to lower-income families were given another five years — although, unfortunately, the payroll tax break was allowed to expire, which will hurt both working families and job creation.
The biggest progressive gripe about the legislation is that Mr. Obama extracted less revenue from the affluent than expected — about $600 billion versus $800 billion over the next decade. In perspective, however, this isn’t that big a deal. Put it this way: A reasonable estimate is that gross domestic product over the next 10 years will be around $200 trillion. So if the revenue take had matched expectations, it would still have amounted to only 0.4 percent of G.D.P.; as it turned out, this was reduced to 0.3 percent. Either way, it wouldn’t make much difference in the fights over revenue versus spending still to come.
Oh, and not only did Republicans vote for a tax increase for the first time in decades, the overall result of the tax changes now taking effect — which include new taxes associated with Obamacare as well as the new legislation — will be a significant reduction in income inequality, with the top 1 percent and even more so the top 0.1 percent taking a much bigger hit than middle-income families.
So why are many progressives — myself included — feeling very apprehensive? Because we’re worried about the confrontations to come.
According to the normal rules of politics, Republicans should have very little bargaining power at this point. With Democrats holding the White House and the Senate, the G.O.P. can’t pass legislation; and since the biggest progressive policy priority of recent years, health reform, is already law, Republicans wouldn’t seem to have many bargaining chips.
But the G.O.P. retains the power to destroy, in particular by refusing to raise the debt limit — which could cause a financial crisis. And Republicans have made it clear that they plan to use their destructive power to extract major policy concessions.
Now, the president has said that he won’t negotiate on that basis, and rightly so. Threatening to hurt tens of millions of innocent victims unless you get your way — which is what the G.O.P. strategy boils down to — shouldn’t be treated as a legitimate political tactic.
But will Mr. Obama stick to his anti-blackmail position as the moment of truth approaches? He blinked during the 2011 debt limit confrontation. And the last few days of the fiscal cliff negotiations were also marked by a clear unwillingness on his part to let the deadline expire. Since the consequences of a missed deadline on the debt limit would potentially be much worse, this bodes ill for administration resolve in the clinch.
So, as I said, in a tactical sense the fiscal cliff ended in a modest victory for the White House. But that victory could all too easily turn into defeat in just a few weeks.
Thursday, January 3, 2013
Obama's Fiscal Cliff Deal
I give up. After reading various opinions, pro and con, on the President's so-called fiscal cliff deal, I realize that I cannot come to a conclusion about the result. Only time will tell if this is a good or bad deal for the American people. I do note that it is telling that most of the House members who voted nay are from the former slave states.
Wednesday, January 2, 2013
The Civil War Continues (another example)
..The Civil War Endures in the Fiscal Cliff Fight
John B. Judis
John B. JudisSenior Editorview bioNo Confidence The Civil War Endures in the Fiscal Cliff Fight Obama's Tax Hike
Republican House members from the East and the Far West strongly backed the Senate resolution. In the East, House Republicans were 24 to one in favor, with New York and Pennsylvania unanimous. In the Far West, Republicans voted by 17 to eight in favor. The Midwest was split, with 27 against and 21 for, with Michigan and Illinois in favor, and Ohio, the Speaker’s state, against 7 to 6. This back of the envelope tally suggests that, to a surprising extent, the Civil War divisions endure, and even supersede in this case the partisan divisions between Republicans and Democrats.
John B. Judis
John B. JudisSenior Editorview bioNo Confidence The Civil War Endures in the Fiscal Cliff Fight Obama's Tax Hike
Republican House members from the East and the Far West strongly backed the Senate resolution. In the East, House Republicans were 24 to one in favor, with New York and Pennsylvania unanimous. In the Far West, Republicans voted by 17 to eight in favor. The Midwest was split, with 27 against and 21 for, with Michigan and Illinois in favor, and Ohio, the Speaker’s state, against 7 to 6. This back of the envelope tally suggests that, to a surprising extent, the Civil War divisions endure, and even supersede in this case the partisan divisions between Republicans and Democrats.
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