The Past isn't Past

Newtpocalypse Now

2012-01-23T13:02:00.000-05:00

Just as it seemed like we were about to see the Season Finale of the 2012 Republican race, we got a rerun. Newt is back. Again.

The big question is "why?"

I would like to think that Gingrich's victory was due to the fundamental questions he raised in his attacks on Romney's record at Bain Capital. But everyone who saw the two debates last week knows that it was something else, something much more base and disturbing. Newt didn't win this primary with economic populism.

If Gingrich's victory in South Carolina on Saturday was in fact a Tea Party victory--and it is repeated elsewhere--then we will have to put to rest the idea that that movement is just about taxes and spending. It will be the culture war all over again.

It was, I think, extremely revealing to see Gingrich in victory. For one brief moment at the start, he actually seemed, as he said, "humbled." It didn't last long.

Within minutes, Gingrich seemed to forget he no longer had to demagogue for votes in South Carolina. But that's because the demagoguery he used here during the last week was nothing new. It was vintage Gingrich. You see, he's on a mission to save America.

As I've noted previously, Newt Gingrich is a child of the 1960s. His is not the 1960s of the civil rights movement, the war on poverty, anti-war demonstrations, and the sexual revolution, however, but of the opposition to all of those things.

I thought the most telling lines from his speech were those that clearly referred to Newt's pining for a bygone, pre-1960s, era. He unambiguously dated the start of the decline he proposes to reverse. He attacked the "elites who have been trying for a half century to force us to quit being American and become some kind of other system."

The decline began, in other words, in the early 1960s. In Newt's world, the progressive changes of all the years since amount to an attack on--or even the destruction of--what he calls "the America that we love." The proponents of those changes, he sneered, don't like "classical America."

(Somehow, this does not constitute "dividing" Americans in his book--since, of course, those "others" don't love "the America that we love" and thus are not real Americans.)

This is unabashedly reactionary politics. For all his dabbling in futurism, candidate Gingrich has his gaze fixed firmly on the past.

Nothing Gingrich said better demonstrated how out of touch with modern America he is than his extended ode to the diversity of the current Republican field. "We produce leadership from an amazing range of places," he said. "I watched tonight the fine speeches of the other three candidates on our side and I was struck by how much they reflected the openness of the American system.... You look at the four of us and you see that anyone can come from a wide range of backgrounds."

Think about that for a moment. A 68-year-old white man with a net worth in the millions of dollars, looked around him, saw three other fairly wealthy white men also running for president, and saw diversity, a "wide range of backgrounds." In what world is that true? In the America of the 1950s, of course.

Certainly, there are differences among the four--geographic, religious, economic, etc. Only Romney was born to wealth and privilege. But compare that to the last primary contest in the Democratic Party, that came down to a battle between a white woman and a black man, neither of whom would have been able to vote 100 years ago. That's what diversity looks like in modern America. And Newt's coded message to his supporters was that is not "the America that we love."

The rest of the speech, as others have noted, was a long list of resentments against various kinds of "elites." If it weren't so despicable, I could almost admire how effortlessly Gingrich appeals to bigotry without resorting to the overtly objectionable terms that the progress of the last half century has driven from polite political discourse.

He doesn't use racial epithets, he calls President Obama a "food stamp president" who wants "your children to have a life of dependence." He doesn't call him a communist, he says Obama isn't inspired by American exceptionalism but by "the radicalism of Saul Alinsky" and the ideas of "people who don't like the classical America." And, of course, Obama has "extremist left-wing friends in San Francisco."

This is not about taxes and spending. Those topics were barely mentioned by Gingrich. He has no real answers to our economic woes, other than the tired Republican bromides of cutting taxes and abolishing regulation. So, in the grand old reactionary tradition, he rails against imaginary threats like the "growing anti-religious bigotry of our elites."

That line worked in South Carolina, but will it work outside of South Carolina? Perhaps this state will prove an aberration, and Gingrich's reactionary culture war will not play elsewhere. The answer will be telling.

No doubt, part of Gingrich's strength was due to Romney's weakness. Back in November, before the Republican debate here at Wofford, a CBS News reporter asked me about the contest here:

"If you look at politicians who've done well in South Carolina historically - Strom Thurmond, Jim DeMint - generally speaking, they're people that at least the public perceives as straight shooters," Byrnes said, "I don't think a lot of people feel comfortable that they know who [Romney] is."

I think the results Saturday reflect that fact. Romney, bless his heart, tries to tap some of the same cultural anger and resentment that Gingrich does. Saturday night, he again said that this election is a fight "for the soul of America." But to most voters here (and elsewhere, I suspect), Romney comes across as someone without a soul--or, perhaps, as someone who would sell his soul for the presidency.

By contrast, when Gingrich turned his wrath on Juan Williams and (in the disgusting words of supporters here in South Carolina) "put him in his place," he seemed all too sincere and real.

"I articulate the deepest held values of the American people," Newt solemnly intoned. For anyone remotely familiar with the facts of Gingrich's life, that assertion was jaw-dropping. "Yes, you just don't live them!" is the only reasonable response.

But as I noted last month, Gingrich sees himself as a world-historical figure. His utter shamelessness comes from that conviction. Gingrich holds himself to a different standard. "It doesn't matter what I do," he told his second wife when she called him on his hypocrisy. "People need to hear what I have to say."

He believes he is above conventional morality, because only he can save civilization. He truly believes that. That conviction served him well in South Carolina, particularly when contrasted to Romney's self-evident falseness.

The irony is that the combination of "authenticity" and willingness to place ends over means was typical of the '60s leftist radicals Newt disdains. As George Will nicely put it, Gingrich "would have made a marvelous Marxist." Tactically, he is one.

Gingrich's portrait of Obama is a fantasy, a left-wing mirror image of Gingrich himself. The Manichean divide Newt presented Saturday night exists only in his mind--because, for him, it must exist. His reactionary ideology demands it. He needs Obama to be the embodiment of everything he despises, so that he can save America from disaster.

Last week, David Brooks observed: "I sometimes wonder if the Republican Party has become the receding roar of white America as it pines for a way of life that will never return."

Gingrich's speech last night was the primal scream of that receding roar, and his current rise in the polls suggests that he and what he stands for will not go quietly.

Mitt Romney, Andrew Jackson, and the "Humble Members of Society"

2012-01-19T07:00:00.000-05:00

Pundits are understandably fixating on Mitt Romney’s admission Tuesday that the tax rate on his income is “probably closer to the 15 percent rate” and that the over $370,000 he made in speaker’s fees last year was “not very much” of his income.

Much of the coverage has, I think, been misguided. For example, on NPR’s “The Takeaway” Wednesday morning, the anchor said Romney has been criticized for only paying 15 percent. I can’t speak for others, but I don’t think that’s the problem. No one I've heard has argued that Romney did anything wrong or illegal. No one is suggesting these are ill-gotten gains.

The point is one of economic justice.

The question is not “Is Romney doing something wrong?” but “Is this the right policy?” Romney simply presents a particularly stark example of the policy. And he happens to be running for president.

This is a man who, as he jokingly put it, is “unemployed.” He has been running for president for the last 5 years, but his investment income last year was somewhere between $5.5 and $37.3 million. (Some reports state that he receives $26 million a year from Bain, even though he has not worked there in over a decade.)

As Romney explained, “my income comes overwhelmingly from investments made in the past, rather than ordinary income or rather than earned annual.” In short, Romney’s money is making money, and that gets taxed at the lower, 15 percent rate.

According to our tax laws, such income—that which comes not from work but investment—gets preferred treatment in our tax code. Should it?

The standard defense of that policy is a practical one: if we want to encourage investment, we should tax income on investment at a lower rate, thus producing more investment and (hopefully) more economic activity.

The objection, on the other hand, is moral: is it right for government to give preferential treatment to income that comes not from daily labor but from the inherent advantage that accrues to those who already have money?

This is an old question in American politics. Since the earliest days of the republic, Americans have debated the relative virtues of various means of making a living, and whether government policy should prefer one over another.

Andrew Jackson is perhaps the best example of an American president with a clear, unequivocal preference on that score. Newt Gingrich got boisterous applause from the South Carolina debate audience the other night when he said that Old Hickory’s attitude toward enemies of the US was “Kill them!” Had he cited Jackson’s attitudes toward workers, I suspect he would have gotten a rather different response.

Shortly after leaving office, Jackson wrote that unless “labor prospers, commerce and manufacturers must languish and the country be distressed. This is a government of the people, for their happiness and prosperity, and not for the sake of a few, at the expense of the many.” For Jackson, it was clear: the well-being of workers was paramount.

Jackson had a life-long disdain for people (especially bankers) who made money with money (though he was not above some land speculation himself), and for government policies that rewarded them:

It is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes…. In the full enjoyment of the gifts of Heaven and the fruits of superior industry, economy, and virtue, every man is equally entitled to protection by law; but when the laws undertake to add to these natural and just advantages artificial distinctions, to grant titles, gratuities, and exclusive privileges, to make the rich richer and more powerful, the humble members of society—the farmers, mechanics, and laborers—who have neither the time nor the means of securing like favors to themselves, have a right to complain of the injustice of their Government.

It is this question that we should be discussing: what economic policies produce justice? Newt Gingrich inadvertently began such a discussion with his attacks on Romney’s time at Bain. He has now backed off, due to the nearly unanimous condemnation of the GOP establishment, and switched to the evidently more "respectable" racial dog whistles.

This one form of income, capital gains, disproportionately benefits the wealthiest Americans. Alec MacGillis notes in The New Republic: “Half of all capital gains in the past 30 years have been claimed by the top tenth of a percent of taxpayers. (No, that's not a typo.)” Is this not an example of a law that undertakes to add an artificial distinction that makes the rich richer?

By shutting down any such debate in the primaries, the Republican Party in all likelihood is ceding this ground to President Obama in the fall campaign. They are poised to nominate a man who says, with all sincerity, that over $370,000 a year in speaking fees is “not very much” income, who proposes to lower the tax on that income from 35 percent to 25 percent, all while keeping the tax on his millions in investment income at 15 percent.

As I wrote last August, during the kerfuffle over Mitt’s new house: “the problem is not that Romney is rich. It is that he is rich and advocates policies that primarily advance the interests of the rich.”

Not only does Romney not have a good answer to the question of whether it is right to treat capital gains differently from earned income, he does not even understand the question. In his world, no one would even ask it. It is just as perplexing to him as the questions about Bain’s business tactics. Both seem self-evidently good to him, and people who challenge his views are merely envious.

Such an opponent might tempt Obama, who has already tried to claim the memory of the Republican Progressive Theodore Roosevelt, to channel Andrew Jackson, too.

As the first Democratic president, Jackson praised the “labouring classes” for taking “a noble stand against the corrupt money power.” In that, Jackson saw “ample proof that the peoples [sic] eyes are opening to the corruption of the times—the danger of their liberties from the mony [sic] power, and their determination to resist it…. Fear not, the people may be deluded for a moment, but cannot be corrupted.”

Romney, in his words, in his business record, and in his policy proposals, is emerging as the modern-day embodiment of the money power, leaving the "humble members of society" ripe for the electoral picking.

The "All-In" Mentality

2012-01-17T07:00:00.000-05:00

I'm not much of a poker player. For a few years, I played in a friendly local game, low stakes: the most anyone could lose in an evening was $10, and if that happened, you got to play for free until you won a hand. The games were often high-low, which encouraged you to play out your hand, no matter how bad it might initially seem.

On a couple of occasions, I've also played some Texas Hold 'Em. It's a different kind of game. Often, the smartest move is to fold right away and hope for a better deal on the next hand. Alternatively, you might want to go "all-in," and bet everything you have.

Now, I was never a good Texas Hold 'Em player, so I might get this wrong, but it seemed to me there were basically three reasons you might go all-in: 1) your read of the cards tells you there is a really low probability that anyone else has a better hand; 2) your read of the players is that they can easily be bluffed into folding, even if they have better hands than you do; or 3) you are desperate, and figure you've got nothing to lose.

On the day when Jon Huntsman folded his campaign, the "all-in" mentality came to mind. Huntsman, in my reading, was not an all-in kind of candidate (though I suppose one could characterize his singular focus on New Hampshire that way). When Mitt Romney reduced the America's China policy to a simple matter of getting tough in the last New Hampshire debate, for example, Huntsman answered with a more nuanced approach, citing the complexities of the US-China relationship, and said (in Mandarin!) that Romney simply didn't know what he was talking about.

These Republican primaries are no place for that kind of candidate. It's a year for going all-in.

Take Rick Perry's ridiculous comments recently about the disgraceful video of American Marines urinating on dead Taliban fighters. Perry condemned the Obama administration for "over-the-top rhetoric ... and their disdain for the military." Note the mindset Perry betrays with that remark. For him, criticizing the actions of any servicemen for even a reprehensible act shows "disdain for the military." (He repeated those comments at last night's Republican debate, in which he also said that desecration of American corpses is "despicable" while desecration of Afghan corpses is a "mistake.")

Compare that with the words of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Army Gen. Martin Dempsey: “Actions like those are not only illegal but are contrary to the values of a professional military and serve to erode the reputation of our joint force,” Dempsey said.

Perry is either too stupid or too blinded by his all-in mindset to understand that criticism of such egregious acts, even calling them illegal, does not show disdain for the military. On the contrary, it is Perry who is truly showing disdain for the military by downplaying the incident, and suggesting that it is not unusual. He tried to minimize the incident, saying "there’s a picture of General Patton doing basically the same thing in the Rhine River." Perry evidently doesn't know the difference between a river and a human corpse.

This is what the current tribal politics of the Republican Party produces in dim bulbs like Perry: an absurd reflex to condemn any criticism of the "core values." If the military is good, no criticism can be broached; all criticism signals "disdain."

Others are just as guilty. Take Romney's repeated assertion that every question about the business practices of Bain Capital constitutes "putting free markets on trial." Effectively, he is saying there are no legitimate questions, and asking one makes you an enemy of capitalism. He evinced the same attitude when asked if any questions about income inequality in America were legitimate, and he dismissed them all as "envy." At last night's debate, Romney said he would not negotiate with the Taliban, because you never negotiate with people who are trying to kill you. "Unconditional surrender" was US policy in World War II, but by that standard, most of the other wars in human history would never have ended.

All of these are conversation enders, and are meant to be. There is no interest in actual debate, a real give-and-take that might illuminate and enlighten. There is no desire to learn or deepen understanding (one's own or anyone else's). The discourse has all become about who can seem to be the most vociferous defender of the faith, and the most zealous persecutor of the heretics. (On that score, Gingrich was at his demagogic best in last night's debate.)

That's why I continue to believe that Gingrich's attempt to challenge Romney's business record, and Ron Paul's persistent questioning of the rest of the field's foreign policy myopia (particularly on Iran) are both valuable. Primaries should not be about unthinkingly reaffirming dogma, but unfortunately that's what this "all-in" campaign has been about, far more often than not.

So what does this "all-in" mentality tell us about this year's GOP field? It's possible that the candidates really, truly believe that they hold the best hand: that Obama is so unpopular, and that their core values are so in tune with the electorate, that they don't really need to examine them.

If they think that Obama can be bluffed into folding, well, they have not been paying attention for the last four years.

But I suspect the real reason is, in fact, desperation. The dogma being defended is indeed passionately held by the Republican base. That base, however, is shrinking. With the evidence and consequences of income inequality growing daily, it is getting harder and harder to win national elections by promising to cut the taxes of the wealthiest yet again. With the war in Afghanistan now in its eleventh year, it is getting harder and harder to win national elections by promising ever-continuing war. With America growing ever more diverse, it is getting harder and harder to win national elections by pandering to racial and ethnic resentments.

There were two candidates, I think, who understood all that. One dropped out yesterday, and the other is routinely ridiculed as having no chance of getting the nomination because of his views.

Today's GOP is going all-in. Deep down, I think they know they're holding a losing hand.

Romney, Bain, and the End of the Reagan Coalition

2012-01-13T07:00:00.000-05:00

Listening the last couple of days to the Republican crack-up over Mitt Romney and his time at Bain Capital has been fascinating. Conservatives have pounced on Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry for their harsh criticisms of Romney. Perry, for example, has said: "We need more venture capitalism, and less vulture capitalism."

This is an attack from the "left," observers left and right have said. It is not conservative. Rush Limbaugh sputtered in exasperation: "My gosh, that's what the people who indict capitalism say ... this sounds like left-wing social engineering." Gingrich, Rush said, "sounds like Elizabeth Warren."

I couldn't disagree more. This isn't an attack from the left, it is an attack from within the unstable marriage that has been the Republican Party for at least the last thirty years. What's happening, I think, may be nothing less than the disintegration of the Reagan coalition.

The idea that the critique of Romney and Bain is "left-wing" is only true if you conceive of modern American conservatism in extremely narrow terms. By any reasonable definition of the word "conservative," the critique (especially as made by Newt Gingrich) is in fact deeply conservative.

What we are seeing here is the tension, if not outright contradiction, between two strands of modern American conservatism. On the one hand, conservatives value tradition. They talk about small-town values: family, work, religion. But the other strand is unrestrained free-market capitalism, the single most progressive force in history. The essence of capitalism is incessant change. Everywhere it has enjoyed free rein, it has undermined traditions and traditional values.

Ever since Herbert Hoover, the Republican Party has tried to maintain a coalition that includes both strands. Hoover was the epitome of both small town values and capitalist business success: born in the heartland (Iowa), he was orphaned at age 9, overcame being shuffled around for several years, attended Stanford, became a mining engineer, sought his fortune abroad, and became a self-made millionaire. As president during the depression, he warned against the moral degeneracy of dependence on the state.

But the Republican political leader who best combined these strands was, of course, Ronald Reagan. Like Hoover, he came from humble origins. But unlike Hoover, he became "the Great Communicator," a politician who never lost the common touch. The key to his political success was winning over the so-called Reagan Democrats: white, middle-class voters who had become disaffected with 1960s liberalism, and whose economic interests had suffered in the stagflation of the 1970s.

Modern American conservatives, however, have sometimes had trouble maintaining the coalition Reagan forged, and in Romney's Bain experience, we have a stark example of why it can be so hard.

When faced with the recent criticisms, Romney has relied on the power of the free market strand of conservatism. He claims that all of the attacks on him are meant to put "free enterprise on trial." In that, he has the support of Ron Paul, conservatism's purist defender of laissez-faire capitalism: “Bankruptcy and restructuring are very important principles in free markets.”

Free markets always create the correct, and moral, result according to this doctrinaire view. If people get fired in the pursuit of greater profits, so be it. The greater economic good counter-balances whatever harm may have been done by the invisible hand.

But we all know that unemployment is socially corrosive. When people lose their jobs, families suffer. It puts tremendous strain on them, sometimes they break up. When a company goes bankrupt, it can destroy an entire community.

That is the thrust of the devastatingly effective video put out by the pro-Gingrich Super Pac.

What makes it so powerful is the testimony of real people put out of work by Bain. These are the Reagan Democrats. They come off, as Andrew Sullivan notes, not as "envious," as Romney condescendingly puts it. "They come off as bewildered, betrayed and sure that Romney's goal in all this was merely, solely to make money for himself - the kind of money that most Americans cannot even compute."

Newt's real apostasy here is that he is pointing out the contradiction that has always been there: the market is not inherently moral. The workings of free enterprise can be entirely legal and also immoral.

And, believe it or not, Gingrich is making the moral argument. Here's how he put it on MSNBC Wednesday:

A company Bain had invested $30 million in, they took $180 million out -- that's 6 to 1-- and the company went bankrupt. And you have to ask yourself, if you're going to get a 6 to 1 return when the company's going bankrupt, gee, what if you'd only taken 3 to 1? ... Just because you have the right to do something, doesn't mean it's the right thing to do.

This is the traditional values argument: doing the right thing. In the video, we see families harmed, we see good people who want to work unable to support those families. We see them sincerely question whether what Bain did was morally right.

This is a conservative case, one that harkens back to an older, pre-capitalist, communitarian ethos, one that values the stability of the community, one that seeks a balance between the interests of the individual and those of the whole.

For advancing this line of attack, Republicans and other conservatives are roundly condemning Gingrich. The president of the right-wing Club For Growth has accused Newt of engaging in “economically ignorant class warfare” and making an "attack on a basic tenet of economic freedom."

Newt has rightly countered: "Criticizing one businessman for one set of practices is not an assault on capitalism." Of course that's true. But there's a good reason today's conservatives cannot agree to that. They're all in. They have fully committed to the free market strand of conservatism.

Note how John McCain put it to Fox News: "To go after [Romney], on really what is the essence of what we Republicans believe about economy, is a serious mistake.... There's an alternative to how Bain does business. It's called communism."

In other words, the distinction Newt makes -- between the ideal of capitalist competition and the predatory practices of Bain -- simply does not exist for today's Republican Party. It is either unrestrained free market, with all of its excesses and destruction (both "creative" and not), or it is communism. There is no middle ground.

Republicans and conservatives cannot acknowledge the conservative moral legitimacy of the Gingrich critique because they have been damning it for at least the last three years. To say that Gingrich has a point would invalidate their entire critique of Barack Obama: it would expose the "Obama is a socialist" line for the idiocy that it is.

It is Obama who has been making the conservative critique of capitalism. It is Obama who has been criticizing specific businessmen and specific business practices. It is Obama who has championed Wall Street reform and consumer protection -- not because he doesn't believe in capitalism (as Republican demagoguery would have it), but because, like Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt before him, he sees that capitalism is in crisis and needs to be saved from its greatest and most self-destructive excesses.

There is no room for such a view among the power elites of the Republican Party and conservative movement. They have forgotten that the moral component of conservatism was never merely lip-service opposition to abortion or gay marriage. At its best, it has been much more than that.

Reagan knew that. As Obama has adroitly noted, his so-called "Buffett Rule," far from being "class warfare," was Reagan's idea. In 1985, Reagan said that tax loopholes "sometimes made it possible for millionaires to pay nothing, while a bus driver was paying ten percent of his salary, and that’s crazy.... Do you think the millionaire ought to pay more in taxes than the bus driver or less?"

That same year, Reagan said the following:

I told some people ... of a letter that I just received ... from a man out here in the country, an executive who's earning in six figures -- well above $100,000 a year. He wrote me in support of the tax plan because he said, “I am legally able to take advantage of the present tax code -- nothing dishonest, doing what the law prescribes -- and wind up ... paying a smaller tax than my secretary pays.” And he wrote me the letter to tell me he'd like to come to Washington and testify before Congress as to how that's possible for him to do and why it is wrong [emphasis added].

Legal, nothing dishonest -- but wrong. Reagan knew the difference, and knew how important that difference was politically. Today, in his political desperation, Newt Gingrich also knows it matters politically.

In his segment on Romney's Bain problem Wednesday night, Lawrence O'Donnell put it beautifully:

The freedom to choose our occupations, the freedom to choose what we will do for money, requires us to check, not just if it's legal, but if it is the right thing to do.... What we do for money, and what harm we do while doing it, goes a long way to define who we are.

O'Donnell is a liberal, but that is a fundamentally conservative statement: freedom is not license, freedoms come with responsibilities, and we are responsible not just to ourselves, but to others and to our communities.

This debate over Romney and Bain is not about Republicans sounding like Democrats, or about both parties trying to be economic populists: it is about the moral dimension of our politics. It's something that a significant number of Republican voters value, but that the radical individualists among the Tea Partiers and libertarians either reject or flatly deny, and the corporate elite don't even understand.

Gingrich is, of course, primarily motivated to make these attacks by personal animus to Romney due to the negative ads that killed Newt's chances in Iowa. But one of Newt's (few) political virtues is that he does sometimes see a bigger picture. In this case, he knows that the Republicans, if they nominate Mitt Romney, are handing this potent political issue to President Obama, and with it, possibly, an essential component of Republican political success over the last 30 years.

If Obama can take advantage of Romney's moral blindness and regain a significant number of Reagan Democrats, he will win re-election. If he can go further and recapture the mantle of the moral dimension of politics, he can realign American politics and fracture the Reagan coalition.

Paul & Huntsman: "Bring 'em Home" Republicans

2012-01-11T13:10:00.000-05:00

Back in November, before the GOP debate here at Wofford, I noted that one of the interesting things to look for in the debate, whose ostensible topic was foreign policy, was how large a role the historical internationalist v. isolationist split in the GOP would play: "I’ll be looking for signs that this old debate within the Republican party may be re-emerging in the 21st century."

Last night, I could not help but note that the primary in New Hampshire produced a 40% vote for two candidates who explicitly call for the US to get out of Afghanistan: Ron Paul and Jon Huntsman. Granted, Mitt Romney, who called for "overwhelming military superiority," won the primary with 38%, and if one adds in the 20% that went to the combination of Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum, that means that about 60% of voters went for candidates whose foreign policy is much more aggressive and interventionist.

It is also worth noting that voters don't generally vote on foreign policy, and this year that is probably more true than it usually is. So one can't take that 40% as a necessarily isolationist vote.

Nonetheless, it does seem fair to say this: for that 40% of New Hampshire Republican primary voters, the foreign policy views of Paul and Huntsman were not disqualifying. That is significant.

It is practically impossible to imagine that just four years ago. Then, there was only one candidate calling for such a foreign policy: Ron Paul. And he got only 7.7% of the vote in 2008. He tripled that last night. Something interesting is happening among Republican voters.

Several observers have noted the absence in this campaign of references to the last Republican president, George W. Bush. For some, that's due to the perception that he was a "big government" conservative who let spending get out of hand. But it may also be that some Republicans are recoiling from the aggressive, regime-change, nation-building foreign policy that Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld pursued.

Listening to the jingoism of Romney, Gingrich, and Santorum (especially on the topic of Iran), it is clear that the animating spirit of the Bush foreign policy is far from dead. It is also not going unchallenged.

Those two things combined add up to a meaningful split in the foreign policy consensus in the Republican Party. That makes it all the more interesting that Romney's victory speech in New Hampshire focused as much as it did on foreign policy.

He accused Obama of an "appeasement strategy" and said the president "doesn't see the need for overwhelming military superiority." If Obama is an "appeaser," then what do we call Paul and Huntsman and their supporters? Clearly, Romney is not interested in appealing to the Paul and Huntsman voters on foreign policy.

Certainly, no virulently anti-Obama voter is going to vote against Romney in the general election on foreign policy grounds. But those who find appealing the "bring 'em home" sentiment expressed by Paul and Huntsman will have no place call their own in a Republican Party led by Romney. In the long run, that could spell trouble for party unity.

Andrew Sullivan Gets Eisenhower Wrong

2012-01-10T14:28:00.000-05:00

Andrew Sullivan has an innovative video feature on his blog, The Dish, now at the Daily Beast. In "Ask Andrew Anything," Sullivan gives video replies to reader questions. These replies are an interesting way of expanding blog content, but today's installment gets some history quite wrong.

The question was "Why do you think Eisenhower was the greatest president of the 20th century?" I agree with the general thrust of the reply, which echoes the revisionist case that Ike was far more effective than people at the time realized.

However, comparing Ike to JFK, Sullivan says: "You can certainly say this thing: that Eisenhower would never, ever, ever have done the Bay of Pigs in a million years.... and I doubt would have gotten us entangled in Vietnam either."

Both of those speculative statements are contradicted by the historical record.

The Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, in which CIA-backed Cuban exiles tried to overthrow the Castro government, took place less than three months after Kennedy took office. The planning was not a Kennedy initiative, but had begun a year earlier during the Eisenhower administration, when the president approved a National Security Council paper calling for covert action to overthrow Castro. The specific Bay of Pigs plan was approved by Eisenhower after the election, in late November 1960. Kennedy inherited the operation from the Eisenhower administration. It is simply wrong to say "Eisenhower would never, ever, ever have done the Bay of Pigs in a million years." Ike approved it. It was Ike's plan.

Now, some might quibble that JFK didn't actually implement Eisenhower's plan because he did not supply American air cover. Without delving into the morass of that particular controversy, let me simply say that Sullivan's argument is based on the premise that Ike was prudent and cautious, a president who "presided," while Kennedy was rash and "radical." Ike's approval of a more provocative step than JFK took is hardly evidence of that.

On Vietnam, Sullivan might seem to be on stronger ground--his claim is less absolute ("I doubt") and since Ike was not president, we'll never know with absolute certainty.

But we do know what Ike advised LBJ to do in 1965. Johnson knew that the prestige Eisenhower enjoyed could be a politically effective tool in garnering public support for escalation. When Ike was briefed on Gen. Westmoreland's recommendation for escalation in June 1965, Eisenhower reportedly said "We have got to win."

More conclusively, thanks to LBJ's telephone conversation recordings, we have direct, irrefutable evidence of Eisenhower's thoughts. Johnson spoke to the former president on the morning of July 2, 1965. Ike said: "You've got to go along with your military advisers ... My advice is, do what you have to do." He advised LBJ to say to the Vietcong and North Vietnamese: "Hell, we're going to end this thing and win this thing.... We don't intend to fail." His final word to LBJ? "I would go ahead and ... do it as quickly as I could."

We don't have to guess what Ike thought about escalation in 1965. Sullivan's view initially seems plausible, given Eisenhower's own decision in 1954 not to bail out the French at Dienbienphu. Less than a year after ending the Korean War, Ike had no interest in getting into another land war in Asia.

But (and this is what Eisenhower admirers overlook) he did commit the United States to maintaining an independent South Vietnamese government. That commitment, the one LBJ always said his policy was meant to keep, was Eisenhower's commitment. When it came down to it, Eisenhower supported troop escalation in 1965 to keep the commitment he himself had made.

There was much that was prudent about Eisenhower's presidency. He did end the Korean War, he did avoid direct American involvement in the French war in Vietnam. But he also endorsed what in retrospect were clearly counterproductive and even reckless covert operations in Iran in 1953 and Guatemala in 1954, and those "successes" gave rise to the hubris of the Bay of Pigs. He made the ill-advised commitment to South Vietnam, leaving his successors to make good on it. In neither case do his actions fit Sullivan's admiring portrait.

Santorum and Mussolini

2012-01-04T19:28:00.000-05:00

Rick Santorum wisely saw his post-Iowa speech as a chance to introduce himself to the majority of Americans who had not previously paid much attention to the presidential race. He told a quite effective story about announcing his run in the town where his immigrant grandfather lived. He related how his grandfather had fled Mussolini's Italy in 1925, and come to America for freedom and opportunity.

So far, so good.

But then he veered off course. He said that we face the same situation today:

[The Democrats want] to talk about raising taxes on people who have been successful and redistributing money, increasing dependency in this country, promoting more Medicaid and food stamps and all sorts of social welfare programs and passing Obamacare to provide even more government subsidies. More and more dependency, more and more government — exactly what my grandfather left in 1925.

That's right. He actually compared Obama to Mussolini.

Now, for the Republican primary electorate, this probably won't hurt him. But for more rational people, it is hard to believe that most won't find such a comparison offensive.

By 1925, Mussolini, who had begun his career by working through the electoral process, had seized dictatorial powers and had come close to completely dismantling Italian democracy. Political parties (other than his Fascists) effectively had been stripped of power. They would be banned totally in 1928. His opponents were sometimes gunned down in the streets gangland style. Newspapers were censored.

It goes without saying that nothing about today's American resembles that. Comparing American today to Mussolini's Italy in 1925 is nothing short of delusional. But in the contemporary GOP, is is far from unusual. Today's conservatives, as I have noted before (here and here), seem to have a marked tendency (whether they mean to or not) to denigrate the actual tyranny suffered by other peoples. They claim they are the guardians of freedom and the enemies of tyranny. But they diminish the meaning of that term when they equate the passage of policies they don't like, such as the health care law, with real tyranny.

Up until that point, I really admired Santorum's speech. But that jarring, ahistorical demagoguery reminded me who he really is. Despite his attempt to introduce himself to the American people as a mainstream figure, he slipped. Those who were paying attention saw behind the pretense to what lies beneath.

Gingrich: Courting the Apocalyptic

2011-12-20T07:00:00.001-05:00

The last topic in my Western Civilization class this fall was Napoleon. I always use that as an occasion to introduce students to two basic views of history: the "great man" and the "great forces" theories. It is an admittedly simplistic dichotomy, but it comes down to this: does the individual make history, or does history make the individual?

Napoleon is an easy case for discussing those ideas. Historians sometimes write of the "Napoleonic Era" as if it were the product of one man, but without the "great forces" that made the French Revolution, there would have been no opportunity for there to be a "Napoleonic Era." A more sophisticated view is that certain individuals capture the spirit of the moment, and the combination of the individual and the times makes for great changes in history.

Newt Gingrich's recent rise as the latest "not-Mitt" in the Republican race has had me thinking lately about this idea, because, as Jonah Goldberg writes in the National Review: "It’s no secret [Gingrich] sees himself as a world historical figure, the last of the great statesmen." In other words, Gingrich believes he is one of those rare individuals, like Napoleon (or for Gingrich, Winston Churchill or Ronald Reagan), who uniquely understands the historical moment, seizes the mantle of leadership, and leaves an indelible mark.

Frank Bruni's piece in Sunday's New York Times on New Gingrich's massive ego nicely catalogs Gingrich's most grandiloquent expressions of his own historical significance. My personal favorite is this self-description from 1992:

"Advocate of civilization

Definer of civilization

Teacher of the Rules of Civilization

Arouser of those who Fan Civilization

Organizer of the pro-civilization activists

Leader (Possibly) of the civilizing forces"

I love the "Possibly"--that's as close as Gingrich gets to humility. As Bruni rightly notes, an arrogant egotism is effectively a prerequisite for the presidency, but Gingrich's variety "would make him a dangerous president."

But Bruni fails to focus on precisely why Gingrich would be dangerous. The death of Kim Jong-Il Sunday brought it into focus for me: in a delicate moment in international affairs such as this, how many people really wish we had a President Gingrich in charge?

For a conservative like Goldberg, the danger is that Newt's desire to make history might lead him--God forbid!--to make a grand compromise with liberals. But I think his ambitions are grander. Newt seeks to bestride the world.

When Bill Clinton (who in some ways is Gingrich's liberal, generational twin) was leaving office, there were numerous articles about how the soon-to-be ex-president was privately bemoaning the fact that no single event gave him the opportunity to seize greatness. He presided over largely prosperous times domestically, and in the lull between the end of the Cold War and 9/11 internationally. His achievements, one observer noted, came "in increments."

Clinton, for all the recklessness of his private life, was largely sober and prudent in discharging his office (one of the reasons he almost always bested Gingrich politically). Gingrich, I fear, would not accept change by increment. I can see him courting the apocalyptic in his search for "greatness."

He is certainly given to apocalyptic rhetoric. For example, in the foreword to Michael Reagan's recent book, The New Reagan Revolution, Newt writes: "Our generation will decide if America remains free--or if freedom goes extinct."

Or think for a moment of this comment from last week's debate: “if we do survive,” he ominously intoned, while discussing the possibility of Iran getting a nuclear weapon.

As a New York Times article recently noted, "Mr. Gingrich is warning of a protracted ideological struggle — and perhaps military intervention in Iran — as part of a battle of ideas in the Muslim world."

Just as the Arab Spring is sweeping away dictatorial leaders, with Al Qaeda in disarray and decapitated by the killing of Osama bin Laden, Gingrich envisions not a potentially beneficial democratic awakening in the Muslim world, but a new Cold War with Islam.

"The United States is 'about where we were in 1946' up against the Soviet Union, he said recently." The date is not coincidental. That was the year of Winston Churchill's famous "Iron Curtain" speech, which many conservatives credit with stiffening the resolve of the Truman administration to prosecute the Cold War against the Soviets.

Like so many modern American conservatives, Gingrich belongs to the cult of Churchill (the Republican House scheduled a vote Monday on a resolution that would put a statue of Churchill in the Capitol).

Churchill certainly is due credit for the role he played in the defeat of Hitler. I always point out to my Western Civ students that it is not implausible that a different Prime Minister in the summer of 1940 might have decided that it was in Britain's interests to make a deal with Hitler. Churchill's resolute defiance mattered.

But there's a difference between admiring Churchill and wanting to become Churchill. Gingrich sees himself as an American Churchill. He longs so much for his own Churchillian moment that I can easily see him creating one if history doesn't it offer it up to him.

Referring to the Palestinians, Gingrich said last week: "Somebody ought to have the courage to tell the truth. These people are terrorists. It's fundamentally time for somebody to have the guts to stand up and say, 'Enough lying about the Middle East.'"

This is Gingrich posing as Churchill, the prescient and bold truth-teller, warning about Hitler in the 1930s or Stalin in 1946. "I will tell the truth, even if it causes some confusion sometimes with the timid," he sneered in reply to Mitt Romney's criticism of him as a rhetorical bomb-thrower. I guess the only question is whether Newt thinks Romney or Obama is Neville Chamberlain.

The last thing this country needs is a president so intent on making his mark on the world that he is willing to precipitate a crisis just so that he has a chance to save civilization. As Sen. Carl Levin put it, in response to the comments on the Palestinians, "Gingrich offered no solutions — just a can of gasoline and a match."

The world today needs firemen. Gingrich is an arsonist.

Judging Newt

2011-12-18T07:00:00.000-05:00

When Newt Gingrich starts a sentence with "As a historian ...," I brace myself. You never know what's coming, but, as a historian, I worry.

So it was the other night at the final pre-Iowa caucus debate. When Megyn Kelly challenged Gingrich on his proposals for judicial "reform," noting that two former Republican attorneys general called his ideas "dangerous, ridiculous, outrageous, totally irresponsible," Gingrich said: "As a historian, I may understand this better than lawyers."

As a historian, I doubt it.

Let's examine Newt's case. He has proposed that judges should be impeached, or entire courts abolished, for issuing unpopular decisions. He cites Thomas Jefferson as precedent: "I’d ask, first of all, have they studied Jefferson, who in 1802 abolished 18 out of 35 federal judges?"

He's referring to the repeal of the Judiciary Act of 1801, which did in fact abolish recently created district and circuit courts, and thus the judges who sat on those courts were removed from office. But why was that done?

The Judiciary Act had been passed in February 1801 by a lame-duck Federalist Congress after its defeat at the hands of Jefferson's Republicans in the election of 1800. Maybe you remember hearing about the so-called "Midnight Judges" in your American history classes? They were a product of this act.

While the idea of expanding the federal judiciary had been percolating for years, the repudiation of Federalists at the polls gave added urgency to the issue. Congress passed the bill less then three weeks before Jefferson took office, allowing outgoing Federalist President John Adams to put Federalist judges in place before the Republicans took over the Congress and Presidency. One Federalist reportedly said: “it is as good to the party as an election.”

The Republicans saw the act--with some justification--as a blatant, anti-democratic attempt by the Federalists to maintain power and influence in the third branch despite having been recently trounced in elections to the first two branches. The Republicans therefore repealed the act in 1802, and thus, as Gingrich notes, abolished courts and judges.

But what Gingrich proposes is different. He wants to abolish courts to get rid of specific judges who have issued decisions he does not like. He's quite up front about it. He has stated that the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in particular should be abolished because of its decisions. Jefferson's 1802 act abolished all of the recently created circuit courts because they had been created for partisan reasons. Gingrich wants to target specific courts for making specific rulings which he opposes for partisan reasons.

To be fair to Newt, there also were attempts to similarly politicize the courts during Jefferson's presidency. A federal district court judge in New Hampshire, John Pickering, was impeached by the House and convicted and removed from office by the Senate in 1804. Gordon Wood writes that Pickering was "an alcoholic and probably insane," but his real sin was that he "had been violently partisan" on the bench.

In this instance, impeachment had been used "in effect as a mode of removal, and not as a charge and conviction of high crimes and misdemeanors." (Rather like the Clinton impeachment, I would argue, in which of course Gingrich had a big hand.) That success emboldened the Republicans to up the ante and impeach Federalist Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase.

That attempt alarmed John Marshall, who feared what he called the "modern doctrine ... that a Judge giving a legal opinion contrary to the legislature is liable to impeachment." But even the overwhelmingly Republican Senate (they held 25 of 34 seats) failed to produce the two-thirds vote needed to convict Chase, avoiding the result Marshall feared.

The Chase trial precedent was the important one. He had committed no crime. His impeachment was transparently partisan. According to Wood, John Quincy Adams "thought that the failure to convict Chase established that only actual crimes were impeachable offenses." Jefferson himself said: "Impeachment was a farce which will not be tried again."

But Thomas Jefferson never met Newt Gingrich. As an experienced practitioner of political farce, Gingrich certainly has something to teach us. As a historian, not so much.

Rick Perry's Theocratic Vision

2011-12-08T15:37:00.000-05:00

Rick Perry's new "I'm a Christian" ad is evidence that the people he's targeting do not understand something fundamental about the American system that they proclaim is so "exceptional." The mindset expressed in the ad is nothing short of theocratic.

Perry says: “there’s something wrong in this country when gays can serve openly in the military but our kids can’t openly celebrate Christmas or pray in school.” Discussing that passage, Andrew Sullivan writes:

we get a classic non-sequitur: the notion that allowing openly gay servicemembers to serve without fear of prosecution is somehow connected to the constitutional prohibition of prayer in schools. There is zero connection between the two issues - except both are objected to by Christianist fundamentalists.

I think there is a connection between the two, beyond what Sullivan says, and that the way Perry connects the two is instructive.

Perry is really saying that government, by allowing open service by gays in the military, is thereby endorsing who they are. Defending the ad today, Perry said: "President Obama has again mistaken America's tolerance for different lifestyles with an endorsement of those lifestyles."

In Perry's mind, treating people whose conduct you personally find to be contrary to your own morality as equals in the public sphere is an endorsement--it is saying that who they are and how they act is right and good. In his mind, there is no room for saying "that's none of my (or the government's) business."

In effect, he is saying that there is a moral standard (one that is set by his own view of Christianity) to qualify for equal citizenship. It is hard to imagine anything more contrary to a foundational principle of American government, expressed in the words engraved in the Supreme Court building: "equal justice under law."

Perry then makes a comparison between open service and not allowing schools to endorse Christianity via prayers and Christmas celebrations. That's why they are connected in his mind, and in the minds of those to whom he is appealing. Government, he says, is endorsing homosexuality (which it should not do), and is not endorsing Christianity, which it should do.

The common element is the idea that government has a role to play in endorsing some moral principles and condemning others. Government should not, Perry is suggesting, treat all people equally: it should endorse some and condemn others. That is a theocratic mindset.

Perry looks at the inclusiveness that a pluralistic society demands (everyone is treated equally under the law) and the refusal to endorse one religious vision (which a pluralistic society also demands) and wants us to see a contradiction. In fact, the two things are perfectly consistent with each other--if one believes (as the Founders did) that there should be no religious test for citizenship.

Perry's problem is that he either does not understand that, or does not believe in it. He thinks government should discriminate against those whose private behavior he abhors and should publicly advance his particular religious beliefs even though they are not universally held. He is saying that failing to give Christians a superior position in American society is effectively discrimination against Christians.

In this worldview, there is no room for equal protection under the law. This is truly 1984 territory: failing to discriminate against minorities is discriminating against the majority.

It is disturbing enough that an allegedly serious candidate for the presidency in 2012 could espouse such views. It is even more disturbing that he seems to think it will appeal large number of Republican primary voters. It would be most disturbing were it to turn out that he's right.

Make Room for Daddy

2011-11-30T16:48:00.000-05:00

I guess I should have known.

A year and a half ago, I wrote a couple of posts (here and here) in response to the ugly political climate in the aftermath of the passage of the health care law. Those poisoning the atmosphere with rhetoric demonizing their opponents, I argued, were “Newt’s Kids.”

Ever since, various Republican candidates for president have tried to capture the rage on the right: Bachmann, Perry, Cain. But now it has fallen to Newt, the father of them all. It was Gingrich, I argued, who wrote the Republican play book:

No cooperation. Delegitimize your political opponents. Tell the people they are losing their freedom. Smear the other side with focus-group-tested words and phrases designed to produce an emotional revulsion among the electorate.

In retrospect, it seems natural that these pretenders would have to make way for the real thing.

Consider this passage from a Gingrich speech:

This party does not need another generation of cautious, prudent, careful, bland, irrelevant, quasi-leaders who are willing as people to drift into positions because nobody else is available. What we really need are people who are tough, hard-working, energetic, willing to take risks, willing to stand up in a … slug fest and match it out with their opponent.

A recent attack on Romney? No. A speech Newt made to College Republicans.

In 1978.

Yes, 33 years ago. Give him this much: Gingrich may change positions on policy as often as Romney, but his general approach to politics is the same as it ever was.

In that speech, Gingrich reduced his critique of the GOP to its essence: “I think that one of the great problems we have in the Republican Party is that we don’t encourage you to be nasty.” Ever since that day, Newt has followed his own advice, and has been consistently nasty.

Up until this point in the primary process, however, Gingrich has been selective about it. At nearly every debate, he has saved his nastiness for two targets: President Obama and the media figures asking the questions (with the notable exception of the last CNN debate, in which the questions originated with conservative folks from the Heritage Foundation and American Enterprise Institute).

What will be interesting to see from now on is whether he continues trying to be “the adult in the room” at the debates. Romney may attack him, Perry may feel the need to the same. And one thing we learned from his battles with Bill Clinton in the 1990s is that Newt can be bated. If he can avoid that temptation, and avoid reminding people why he became so disliked by the time he resigned from Congress in 1998, he may yet emerge as the Republican nominee.

In some ways, I think that would be appropriate. Newt Gingrich is more responsible than any other Republican today for the destructive politics that plagues us all. Barack Obama, beginning with his 2004 keynote address, through his 2008 campaign, and to this day in his conduct of the presidency, has said he wants to change those destructive politics.

As I wrote last spring, Gingrich is from a different generation than Obama. He wants to re-fight the battles of the 1960s, while Obama wants to move beyond them. There are worse prospects than a presidential election over whether Americans want a future marked by Gingrich's 1960s culture wars, "Only I can save Western Civilization" approach, or Obama's "let's reason together and find common sense solutions" style. I know which I prefer, and I suspect most Americans agree.

Overtly Covert

2011-11-18T16:31:00.000-05:00

[The last in a series of events marking Wofford's hosting of last Saturday night's Republican debate was a post-mortem, held Thursday night. Below are my remarks at that forum.]

As I noted in my presentation last week, candidates often seem to forget that the whole world is listening. This was apparent, I thought, from the start of last Saturday’s debate. When asked what to do about the problem of Iran potentially getting a nuclear weapon, the several candidates (Herman Cain, Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum) suggested that covert action against Iran was the appropriate response.

This, it seems to me, raises a fairly obvious problem: once you say publicly that you intend to use secret methods to overthrow a foreign government, or interfere with its nuclear program, it is hardly "covert" anymore. Both Cain and Romney said that they would use unspecified covert action. Those, at least, were general statements.

Gingrich, however, not to be outdone, got specific—he wants Iranian scientists "taken out," that is, assassinated. And then he said, stunningly, that what he had just suggested was "all of it deniable." Gingrich also later said that the US should be working covertly to overthrow Assad in Syria. Were Gingrich to become president, and the things he has now suggested publicly were to happen, how then would they be "deniable"? This is the problem with publicly saying you will use covert action—it isn’t really that covert, or deniable, anymore.

There is a nice historical parallel to this situation, from 50 years ago. On Oct. 6, 1960, John F. Kennedy called Cuba "the most glaring failure of American foreign policy," much as Romney said that Iran was "President Obama’s greatest failing."

When in 1960 Eisenhower imposed on Cuba what Time magazine called "the most severe trade embargo imposed on any nation except for Red China," JFK called it "a dramatic but almost empty gesture." This is similar to the way the candidates, when asked what they would do differently, said they would put really harsh economic sanctions on Iran, when there are already significant economic sanctions on Iran.

In criticizing the Eisenhower administration on Cuba, Kennedy went even further, much as the candidates did on Saturday: "we must attempt to strengthen the non-Batista democratic anti-Castro forces in exile, and in Cuba itself, who offer eventual hope of overthrowing Castro. Thus far these fighters have had virtually no support from our government."

Kennedy was essentially calling for the US to covertly work for a revolution in Cuba. By the time he said that, however, the CIA plan, that would become known as the Bay of Pigs, was well along in its development. Kennedy evidently did not know this. Nixon was furious because he thought JFK did know, but in fact CIA director Allen Dulles, who had briefed Kennedy on national security issues, omitted the plan in his briefing.

What is interesting is how Nixon responded. Since he could not say that such covert activity was in fact going on, he decided to denounce Kennedy for the suggestion: "I think Sen. Kennedy’s policies and recommendations for the handling of the Castro regime are probably the most dangerously irresponsible recommendations that he’s made during the course of this campaign." Even after Kennedy backed off a bit, saying he only mean to "let the forces of freedom in Cuba" know that "the US sympathized with them," Nixon continued to hammer Kennedy, calling him "rash," "impulsive," and "shockingly reckless." "United States support for a revolution in Cuba," Nixon said, would be "a direct invitation for the Soviet Union to intervene militarily on the side of Castro." But in private, Nixon had endorsed the secret CIA plan to do just that.

Nixon was in a difficult position, knowing about covert action that he could not discuss. But thinking that Kennedy had knowingly politicized the matter, Nixon struck back, publicly taking a position that was the opposite of his private view, in order to score political points.

When I heard these calls for covert action against Iran, I could not help but wonder if we might have a similar situation today. Many people believe that the Obama administration has been covertly working to subvert the Iranian nuclear program. For example, it is possible that the Obama administration either was responsible for the Stuxnet computer worm attack on Iran's nuclear program or supported Israel in that effort.

But of course, if that IS happening, the Obama administration could hardly admit it publicly. When Rick Santorum returned to the topic of Iran later in the debate and made these comments, it seemed to me that he was suggested that is what is going on.

You can almost see Santorum trying to be careful, noting that covert activity is likely going on and that the US may well be behind it—even that he hopes it is. He seems to be trying to deal with the fact that it is possible that the US is already doing some of the things that Gingrich encouraged. There have in fact been scientists who have ended up dead, most recently this past July, and speculation that foreign intelligences services may be behind the killings.

The other aspect of this topic I’d like to discuss is the history of covert action by the US in Iran and the wisdom of publicly advocating it. As relatively few Americans know, but every Iranian knows, the US used covert action to help overthrow the government of Iran in 1953. The CIA helped engineer a coup d’etat that overthrew the Iranian Prime Minister Mossadegh, who was threatening to nationalize the oil industry, and installed the Shah as a dictator. He ruled until 1979, when he was overthrown in the Iranian revolution and replaced by the current Islamic regime. The anti-American character of that regime is due, at least in part, to that previous American covert action. That, it seems to be, might suggest that undertaking more covert action in Iran is not the best approach.

Even if you could argue that covert action in Iran would be a wise policy, saying so publicly strikes me as foolish. Mitt Romney was critical of President Obama for not being speaking more forcefully in favor of the Iranian opposition, but in the historical context of US-Iranian relations, there is a justification for that.

Romney said that Obama failed to say he was with the Iranian protesters, when Obama has denounced Iran for "gunning down and beating people who were trying to express themselves peacefully," and that the Iranian people should be allowed to "express their yearning for greater freedom and a more representative government."

When Obama was pressed to insert himself into the protests in Iran, he said: "The last thing that I want to do is to have the United States be a foil for those forces inside Iran who would love nothing better than to make this an argument about the United States."

For the opposition forces to be associated with the United States could be politically toxic for them in Iran. It would be like Occupy Wall Street associating themselves publicly with Castro’s Cuba, or Kim Jong Il’s North Korea. It could ruin their credentials as Iranian nationalists. Placing the United States fully on the side of the Iranian opposition might make for a good applause line in a debate, but that does not necessarily make it good policy. It could even backfire.

Lastly, it is not even clear that a regime change would necessarily produce the results the US wants regarding the atom bomb. Are there forces inside Iran that are in favor of giving up the nuclear program, or might the idea that Iran has a right to be a nuclear power have widespread appeal beyond the current government? If so, then it is at least possible that "regime change" might not affect Iran’s nuclear program, despite the presumption at the debate that it would.

If discussing covert action is so fraught with difficulties and complications, why did it receive so much attention on Saturday? I’d argue it is because of the complexity of the problem. There are not too many people outside Iran who look favorably on the prospect of a nuclear Iran, so declaring that "unacceptable," as Romney did, has appeal. But when Scott Pelley pressed Romney on whether it would be worth going to war over, Romney focused attention again on measures short of war—because given our overstretched military, few people really want another war, and air strikes might not get the job done.

The appeal of advocating covert operations, I suspect, is that it seems to hold out the prospect of a cost-free intervention. But as I have noted, it may not be really cost free--even if it succeeds.

Tweets from the GOP Debate

2011-11-12T23:38:00.000-05:00

[I attended tonight's Republican debate on the campus of Wofford College. While watching, I experimented with tweeting my reactions as they happened. I'll be writing something more substantive on the debate, but here, for it's worth, are my contemporaneous reactions.]

Cain doesn't answer Iran question of what he'd do that Obama isn't.

Newt just advocated assassinating scientists.

Question for Santorum. What rebel forces?

Huntsman gave the best answer so far.

Cain in over his head on Pakistan.

Perry demagogues first on foreign aid.

Bachmann first to play Israel card. Gingrich first to play Christian card.

Newt challenging moderator works its usual magic with the crowd.

Huntsman is behind a pillar from where I sit. Is he still here?

Two civilized candidates on stage both got my applause for opposing torture.

Newt went from that applause line to laugh WAY too quickly.

Was "it's murder!" during Romney's response audible on TV?

First segment, good substance. Second, not so much.

Newt advocates CIA operation in Syria. It worked really well in Iran in 1953.

Uh oh. Romney used a big word. [Hegemon]

Graham's question was about helping him get re-elected in SC.

At a liberal arts college, Romney calls for eliminating national endowment for arts and humanities. Nice.

Bachmann: US should race China to the bottom.

Cain: I have no idea. I'll ask people who do.

Romney's answer [on Pakistan] was mature and smart.

Overall, more substantive than most of these [debates] have been. Maybe the topic and the setting helped.

The Republicans are Coming! The Republicans are Coming!

2011-11-11T14:31:00.000-05:00

[Tomorrow night, Saturday, November 12, the Republican presidential candidates come to Spartanburg, SC, to the campus of my college, Wofford, for the latest of the Republican debates. The debate will be broadcast on CBS at 8 pm eastern time. I will be attending the debate, and if possible may try to live tweet from the audience (@byrnesms).

As part of a series of events leading up to the debate, I've been invited to participate in a faculty forum this afternoon and make some comments on presidential campaigns and foreign policy. Below are the remarks I will deliver.]

Since I am a historian first and a debate watcher second, I thought I’d spend my time this afternoon giving you some idea of what a historian looks for when he becomes a debate watcher.

This particular debate is supposed to focus on national security and foreign policy, and my primary area of interest is American diplomatic history, so I’d like to talk first about how foreign policy has figured in the presidential politics of the last century.

My first point is that the rhetoric of political campaigns has often been a poor indication of how a candidate will act once elected. In 1916, Woodrow Wilson ran for re-election with the campaign slogan “He kept us out of war.” At the convention that re-nominated him, the keynote speaker listed the many instances in which Wilson had resisted pressure to intervene in the Great War, and led the crowd in a chant: “What did we do? What did we do? We didn’t go to war! We didn’t go to war!” Campaigning that fall, Wilson said: “I am not expecting this country to get into war.” But when Germany resumed unrestricted submarine warfare in February 1917, circumstances changed. Less than a month after being inaugurated for his second term, Wilson went before Congress to ask for a declaration of war.

A second, and related point, is that candidates for the presidency often seem to forget they are not speaking only to American voters. At least since the United States achieved superpower status, it is undeniably true that the whole world is listening. And that can have real and serious consequences.

In 1952, General Dwight Eisenhower was running as a Republican trying to end 20 years of Democratic control of the White House. The unsatisfactory state of the cold war, in particular the inherently defensive policy of containment as it was then being practiced in the Korean War, made foreign policy a tempting issue. The GOP platform repudiated the “negative, futile and immoral policy of containment which abandons countless human beings to a despotism and godless terrorism” and pledged to achieve “genuine independence of those captive peoples” behind the iron curtain. The New Republic warned at the time of the dangers of such rhetoric: “Promises to help enslaved peoples [either] mean nothing and risk terrible misunderstandings or they mean something and risk war.”

In 1955, in a speech broadcast by Radio Free Europe and the Voice of America, Eisenhower said: “If any East European nation shows a visible opposition to Soviet oppression, it can count on our help.” But when unrest arose in Hungary in 1956, the Eisenhower administration did not help. “The Russians were scared and furious,” Eisenhower explained privately, “and nothing is more dangerous than a dictatorship in that frame of mind.” In other words, the New Republic was right: aid would have meant war, and that, Ike said, “is no way to help Hungary.” But Hungarians had been led to believe otherwise. A Radio Free Europe survey of Hungarian refugees later found that 87% of those surveyed had expected American aid and more than half of that group expected military aid.

This tendency to use foreign policy issues for political gain sometimes produces a rather cavalier attitude toward those issues. In the 1960 campaign, John F. Kennedy hammered his opponent, vice-president Richard Nixon, for being part of an administration that had allowed the establishment in Cuba of “a Communist satellite 90 miles off the coast of the United States.” How, he asked, could Republicans stand up to Khrushchev when they “have demonstrated no ability to stand up to Mr. Castro.” Privately, Kennedy admitted that he could not say what he would have done to prevent Castro’s rise to power. “What the hell, they never told us how they would have saved China,” he said, referring to Republican use of the China issue against Democrats eight years earlier.

There are many more examples I could cite: LBJ’s 1964 criticism of Barry Goldwater as a warmonger mere months before he himself would dramatically escalate the Vietnam war; Richard Nixon’s promise of “peace with honor” in 1968 followed by four more years of war; Bill Clinton’s 1992 criticism of George H. W. Bush’s “coddling of dictators” in China, followed a mere 10 months into his presidency by a meeting with the Chinese president that led the New York Times to conclude that Clinton “seems to have embraced much of the Bush approach”; George W. Bush’s 2000 campaign promise that he would “stop extending our troops all around the world in nation-building missions,” followed by Afghanistan and Iraq. But you get the drift.

Lest I leave you thinking that there is nothing to be learned from tomorrow’s debate, I'd like to make one final point. Over the last century, Republicans have often found themselves divided between internationalist and isolationist factions. In the 1919 debate over Wilson's League of Nations, GOP opposition split into two groups: internationalist reservationists led by Massachusetts senator Henry Cabot Lodge, and isolationists led by Sen. William Borah of Idaho, who argued that to join the League would be to “to abandon the creed under which [the U.S.] has grown to power and accept the creed of autocracy, the creed of repression and force.”

Twenty years later, the United States was debating involvement in World War II, and once again, stark divisions arose within the Republican party. Henry Stimson, who had served as Secretary of State for Herbert Hoover, favored aid to Great Britain and joined the Roosevelt administration as Secretary of War, while Senator Robert Taft of Ohio was dead set against any involvement in the war and said in June 1941: “the forcing of freedom and democracy on a people by brute force of war is a denial of those very democratic principles which we are trying to advance.”

Eleven years later, that same Robert Taft was one of the leading contenders for the Republican nomination. That prospect motivated Eisenhower, who bluntly told reporters: “I’ll tell you why I’m running for president. I’m running because Taft is an isolationist. His election would be a disaster.”

From Eisenhower through the first president Bush, internationalism dominated Republican presidential politics. The combination of World War II and the cold war seemingly vanquished traditional isolationism.

But the end of the cold war created cracks in forty years of foreign policy unity. In 1992, Pat Buchanan launched a primary challenge to that preeminent internationalist president, George H. W. Bush. Announcing his candidacy, Buchanan said: “All the institutions of the Cold War, from vast permanent U.S. armies on foreign soil, … to billions in foreign aid, must be re-examined…. we call for a new patriotism, where Americans begin to put the needs of Americans first.”

Buchanan is enough of a student of history to know that “America First” was the name of the leading isolationist group before World War II, and that his sentiments were harkening back to that dormant Republican tradition.

Today, with America's financial resources strained, the temptation to reduce America’s role in the world is once again present. Ron Paul forthrightly says we have “a foreign policy we can't afford” and has denounced “aggressive wars … promoted by powerful special interests that benefit from war.” By contrast, Mitt Romney harkens back to World War II-era internationalism in his call for a “new American Century,” where “America leads the free world and the free world leads the entire world.” In the middle is Jon Huntsman, who says we "must right-size our current foreign entanglements," and that "it is time to bring our brave troops home." Huntsman says “fixing America first"—there’s that phrase again—“will be my most urgent priority…. right now we should focus on America saving America.”

So rather than focusing on catchy one-liners, I’ll be looking for signs that this old debate within the Republican party may be re-emerging in the 21st century, and I encourage you to think about where you stand on that very important question.

The Revenge of the Progressives

2011-11-09T07:00:00.000-05:00

Off-year elections are often fairly dull affairs. Sometimes there is the occasional governor's race that pundits examine for potential national trends. But usually they don't mean much.

Yesterday was a little different. In two different states, voters took the legislative process into their own hands and repealed laws recently passed by their legislatures. It was direct democracy in action.

In Ohio, voters repealed the collective bargaining law limiting union rights that the new Republican governor and former Fox News contributor John Kasich pushed through the legislature. In Maine, voters repealed a law that Republicans had passed which ended same-day voter registration. In both cases, recently elected governors had legislative successes decisively rebuked by the voters within months of their passage.

This does not happen that often. When it does, it deserves some notice.

In my last post, I examined whether the current Tea Party/Occupy Wall Street activism might lead to the equivalent of the bipartisan Progressive movement of the early 20th century. What strikes me about these two votes yesterday is that they are using precisely the tool that Progressives saw as the best hope of undermining the oligarchy's control of the political process: more democracy.

Progressives took it for granted that an essential prerequisite for real reform was more democracy. With both major parties seemingly in the thrall of the big trusts, they believed that enacting measures to directly empower voters (to enact legislation, or repeal legislation, or recall office holders) was the only way to make government responsive to the people again and break the stranglehold of business.

Once legislators understood that their work would be undone, or that they could be removed from office for failing to follow the popular will, Progressives believed, some balance could be restored to the political system. Then, and only then, could government be an effective vehicle to bring about the more systematic and substantive reforms that American society so desperately needed after the massive changes wrought by the industrial revolution.

Maybe what happened yesterday marks a similar awakening for our own times. Commentators usually make too much of off-year elections, and I don't want to make that mistake. Two voter-initiated repeal efforts do not a movement make. But maybe it is a start.

Maybe what happened yesterday was a fluke, provoked by unusually maladroit overreaching by two governors who misread their voters. After all, the union-busting bill in Wisconsin still stands, and laws restricting voting rights through the disingenuous voter ID provisions are being passed in many states.

Combined with the successful state senate recall elections this summer in Wisconsin, and the potential recall of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker next year, however, it could be more than that. Voters of all political stripes have been complaining that government doesn't hear them, that it is controlled by the lobbyists and the special interests. If those discontented voters can use the powers of direct democracy that the Progressives gave them a century ago, they might pave the way for another era of real reform like that the Progressives produced.

Coxey's Bonus Army Sit-ins Occupy Wall Street

2011-10-24T07:00:00.001-04:00

The conditions which surround us best justify our co-operation; we meet in the midst of a nation brought to the verge of moral, political and material ruin. Corruption dominates the ballot-box.... The people are demoralized;... public opinion silenced.... homes covered with mortgages, labor impoverished, and the land concentrating in the hands of capitalists. The urban workmen are denied the right to organize for self-protection, imported pauperized labor beats down their wages... The fruits of the toils of millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes for a few, unprecedented in the history of mankind.... From the same prolific womb of governmental injustice we breed the two great classes: tramps and millionaires.

I've been trying to make sense of the Occupy Wall Street movement for awhile now, wondering where it fits historically.

The quotation above helped place it for me. It's an American political platform, but not from today's protests. It's from 1892.

Given that we've now had several years of relatively high unemployment, something like the Occupy protests is not at all surprising. When people feel this kind of frustration, when they feel their votes don't matter because the political system seems totally dysfunctional, they take to the streets.

It's happened here before.

During the depression of the 1890s, there was Coxey's Army, a group of unemployed Americans led by Ohio businessman Jacob Coxey. People came to Washington from all over the country (many of them marching on foot) demanding a jobs program. They called it a "petition with boots." Estimates are that at various points many thousands were headed for DC, but only about 500 reached the Capitol. Before the protest could even get under way, Coxey was arrested for trespassing and not allowed to give his planned speech.

Even more relevant would be the 1932 Bonus March. At the depths of the depression, thousands of World War I veterans went to Washington, DC and camped out, demanding that Congress pay out immediately the bonus they were eventually entitled to by law. They spent weeks camped out before they were forcibly removed, first by Washington police and then Army troops under the command of Douglas MacArthur. The spectacle of current soldiers forcibly evicting former soldiers further tarnished President Hoover's reputation only months before the 1932 election.

In both cases, dire economic circumstances prompted demonstrations demanding action by Washington. What strikes me as most interesting about what is happening today is that the focus is not on Washington, but on what the protesters consider to be the true source of our problems: Wall Street. That suggests, I think, a desire to focus not on a specific political solution, but to change the public's perception of the nature of the situation in which we find ourselves. They see the problem as the growing power of an unaccountable economic elite. (Though I also suspect that they doubt the answer is in Washington.)

I find the use of the word "occupy" interesting as well. It invokes the military metaphors of Coxey's Army and the Bonus Army, while also emulating the sit-ins of the Civil Rights movement. Despite efforts by some commentators to dismiss the protests, I suspect there is something rather significant going on today, something that has been building not just over the last three years of hard times, but the last thirty years of growing income disparity.

In the words of the old Buffalo Springfield song, "There's something happening here, what is, ain't exactly clear."

But I think it is becoming clearer.

It was easy, and tempting, to dismiss the initial protest. As the movement in New York has grown, and more importantly, has spread, it has become much harder. Those who wanted to stereotype it as a bunch of lazy hippies have had to deal with the sheer growing diversity of it, exemplified by things such as this past week's stirring impromptu lecture to the police by a Marine Sergeant named Shamar Thomas, a veteran of Iraq whose parents have also served in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the emergence of a group called OccupyMarines.

James Sinclair's diagram from his blog

And then there is the Tea Party. Yes, the agendas are different. But I also agree with this post by James Sinclair, which persuasively makes the case that there is a fair amount of overlap. This venn diagram may not be scientifically accurate, but there is some truth here. There are common sources for the angst each expresses.

The more I think about this historical moment, the more it reminds me of the emergence of the Populists in the late 1880s and early 1890s. They too could be both radically left and radically right. The quotation above is from their 1892 platform, in which they called for nationalizing the railroads (the biggest businesses of the day) and limiting immigration; they wanted a graduated income tax and fiscally conservative government finances; they supported "the efforts of organized workingmen to shorten the hours of labor" and opposed bailouts or "any subsidy or national aid to any private corporation for any purpose."

Perhaps the biggest thing the Populists had going for them was the sense that neither political party was addressing the most pressing issues of the day--the crushing debt of farmers, the pressures of massive immigration, the growth of the corporate trusts. Their 1892 platform stated:

Controlling influences dominating both ... parties have permitted the existing dreadful conditions to develop without serious effort to prevent or restrain them. Neither do they now promise any substantial reform ... They propose to sacrifice our homes, lives, and children on the alter of mammon; to destroy the multitude in order to secure corruption funds from the millionaires.

But then they were co-opted by the Democratic Party in 1896 when William Jennings Bryan stole their signature issue, silver coinage, and the Populist Party went out of existence.

But it did not end there. In many ways, the Populists were the John the Baptist of the Progressive Era. By the early 20th century, there was a bipartisan consensus that the nation needed meaningful reform, many of which the Populists had first called for 10 and 20 years earlier. Under Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, Republicans instituted their variety of Progressive reform. Then Woodrow Wilson presided over 8 years of Democratic Progressive reform. Together, they created the regulatory state: the idea that the federal government had to play a role in limiting the power of corporations in the economic and political interests of the public.

The Progressives of both parties created the regulatory state because they came to a common, central understanding: that the industrial revolution had created a new form of power--private economic power--that the Founders never anticipated. That power was unchecked. A democracy, to survive, needed to find a way to check that power. For a time, they did.

When the inevitable backlash came and laissez-faire made its return in the 1920s, and the president crowed that "the business of America is business," taxes were cut, regulators became the creatures of the regulated, and the depression came. Then FDR came in, and with the help of progressive Republicans, triumphed over the "economic royalists," and established reforms that prevented another depression for over 60 years--because both Republicans and Democrats supported the regulatory regime.

I would like to think that eventually the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street could together create a similar bipartisan commitment to reform on the part of both major parties. Maybe they will. But I am bothered by that diagram. Sinclair focuses on the overlap in the center.

I keep seeing the dichotomy.

The Populists of the 1890s saw business (Wall Street) as an enemy, and politics (Washington) as the solution. There is no such unity today. The Tea Party blames Washington, the Occupy movement blames Wall Street.

Ever since Ronald Reagan demonized the federal government in this inaugural address ("Government is not the solution to our problems; government is the problem"), the disaffected in America have had competing targets for their rage: both Wall Street (primarily Democrats) and Washington (primarily Republicans).

For thirty years, Republicans have claimed the federal government can do little well, and when they have controlled it, they have done their best to turn that into a self-fulfilling prophecy. They have diminished not the size of government, but its efficacy. They have reduced taxes to the lowest level in 50 years, all while convincing voters that they are intolerably overtaxed. They have used government to empower and enrich the wealthiest, they have dismantled as much of the regulatory state as they could. And when the lack of regulation led to the economic crash, they of course blamed the very government that their ideology had disarmed. When a Democratic president tried to use government to solve the problem, they obstructed every step of the way and claimed that the continuing poor economy showed government cannot work. For them, government is always the problem, its reduction always the solution.

So it was not surprising last week to hear the new Tea Party favorite, Herman Cain, say both that the poor and jobless have no one but themselves to blame, and that they should blame Washington. We were supposed to have a regulatory system to prevent the financial obscenities Wall Street engaged in, but most Americans probably have no idea that safeguards that worked for decades had been dismantled. So they blame Washington.

And Washington does deserve some blame. For thirty years, both parties have bowed and scraped before the new robber barons, competing with each other to cut their taxes, ease their way, and enhance their riches--Republicans because they believed in it; Democrats because they'd been cowed by Reagan into thinking they had to go along to survive politically. Washington ended the bipartisan consensus that protected the average person. And so some, like members of the Tea Party, therefore see Washington as the problem.

In the current situation, however, the Tea Party has it wrong, and Occupy Wall Street has it right. The Progressives knew that the only way to check organized economic power is through the democratic political process. They knew that more democracy was the answer. The referendum, recall, and primary, were all attempts to break the stranglehold of corporations on the political system. So was the the 17th Amendment, which provided for direct election of Senators. (These were all also first proposed by the Populists.)

The Tea Party today argues for the repeal of the 17th Amendment. It supports the union-busting efforts of Scott Walker in Wisconsin. It supports the disenfranchisement of voters via these so-called "voter ID" laws that have suddenly sprouted nearly everywhere. In a variety of ways, even if sometimes unknowingly, the Tea Party serves the interests of Wall Street, and undermines the only real hope for lasting change: a government truly responsive to the many, not the few.

Occupy Wall Street has succeeded in changing the political conversation. Changing our politics will be a lot harder.

Huntsman's "America First" v. Romney's "American Century"

2011-10-17T07:00:00.001-04:00

My previous post took Mitt Romney to task for his foreign policy address. The crux of my objection was not policy, it was politics: Romney cast doubt on the president's patriotism.

Romney said:

This is very simple: If you do not want America to be the strongest nation on Earth, I am not your President.

You have that President today.

Contrast Romney's language with this line from Jon Huntsman's foreign policy address this past week:

President Obama’s policies have weakened America, and thus diminished America’s presence on the global stage.

Both are critical of the president. But Huntsman was careful to talk about policy, not intention. He talked about results of policies. This is the difference between a statesman and a demagogue.

I think Huntsman is wrong on the substance. But I respect the fact that, unlike Romney, he did not pander to those Chris Christie called "the crazies."

On policy grounds, Huntsman's speech is interesting for the way it tries to negotiate two different strains within the Republican party: cold war era internationalism and pre-World War II "America First" isolationism. Ultimately, I think he comes down more on the side of the latter.

Hunstman offers "five planks which will comprise my administration’s foreign policy." It is more than a little note-worthy that he starts with this statement: "First and foremost, we must rebuild America’s core."

Hunstman does not equivocate here: domestic strength comes first. Not only that, he also uses a phrase few Republicans (beside Ron Paul or Pat Buchanan) have recently uttered: "fixing America first … that will be my most urgent priority."

"America First." I think Huntsman is too smart to have done this inadvertently. He seems to be consciously evoking the group led by Charles Lindbergh in 1940-1941, which opposed active American participation in the war in Europe.

Then, however, Huntsman seems to evokes the rhetoric of the neo-conservatives of recent years: "Today, we need a foreign policy based on expansion." That resemblance, however, strikes me as fleeting only, because Huntsman goes on to explain that this particular "expansion" means "the expansion of America’s competitiveness and engagement in the world through partnerships and trade agreements."

In short, it is rather like the attitude of the early Republic: that American engagement with the world should be primarily economic, not political and military.

When Huntsman goes on to argue that Americans "must right-size our current foreign entanglements," and that "it is time to bring our brave troops home," it is clear that he is for effectively abandoning the neo-conservative democracy-building project of the George W. Bush years:

Only Pakistan can save Pakistan.
Only Afghanistan can save Afghanistan.
And right now we should focus on America saving America.

Finally, much like many midwestern Republicans did the in pre-World War II and early cold war eras, Huntsman focuses on Asia. This is hardly surprising, given that he is fluent in Mandarin and was the American ambassador to China during the first two years of the Obama administration:

I have come to believe that we are embarking on a Pacific Century … in which America must and will play a dominant role. By almost any objective measure – population, economic power, military might, energy use – the center of gravity of global human activity is moving toward the Asia-Pacific region.

Huntsman is undoubtedly right here. Huntsman seems to grasp the larger picture: that we are entering a new era in world history.

By contrast, Romney's vision seems limited to little more than the potential Chinese military threat:

will they go down a darker path, intimidating their neighbors, brushing aside an inferior American Navy in the Pacific, and building a global alliance of authoritarian states?

In this instance, I see a major clear-cut difference between Hunstman and Romney. The former sees challenges in the world, while the latter sees mostly threats. Romney's address is a list of potential dangers (whose main purpose seems to be to create a sense of alarm), the answer to which is disappointingly simplistic: a "strategy of American strength."

Strength is not a strategy. Strength is a means, not an end. And what is Romney's end? Another "American Century."

This is remarkably superficial for someone who wants to be president. While Huntsman correctly notes that Americans already "spend more on defense than the rest of the world combined," Romney talks about a larger navy--without offering any strategic doctrine that explains the need and utility of that larger navy.

Romney gives lip service to the idea that the world has changed since the end of the cold war, but shows no sign that he's thought much about what that means practically. Huntsman sees a need for change:

We still have remnants of a top-heavy, post-Cold War infrastructure. It needs to be transformed to reflect the 21st Century world, and the growing asymmetric threats we face.

Finally, the shallowness of thought in Romney's speech is perhaps best exemplified by this statement: "Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon is unacceptable." Again, this is not a strategy. How would Romney prevent it? He does not say. He simply declares it "unacceptable." Evidently the mere existence of a bigger American navy will take care of that automatically.

By contrast, Huntsman said in his address: "I cannot live with a nuclear-armed Iran. If you want an example of when I would consider the use of American force, it would be that." While I have grave doubts about the utility of force in solving this particular dilemma, at least Huntsman faces the logical consequence of declaring a situation "unacceptable."

This comparison of these speeches by Huntsman and Romney is dispiriting for those of us who believe foreign policy should have a central place in a presidential campaign. The more substantive speech comes from the candidate who can't seem to gain any traction in the polls, while the supposed front-runner's address is a crude mix of demagoguery, pandering, and jingoism. The more thoughtful candidate also seems to want to return to an earlier era in which the United States did not have to pledge to "bear any burden" internationally. The shallow candidate seems to want the United States to play a leading role in the world, but seems incapable of imagining a way for it to do so that entails anything other than more spending on weapons.

If this is the best the GOP can do, President Obama looks better all the time.

Mitt Romney and Questioning Belief

2011-10-09T18:02:00.000-04:00

Mitt Romney went to the Citadel on Friday to trash the commander in chief.

Romney was ostensibly there to make a major address on foreign policy, a subject which, as the New York Times pointed out Saturday, has been woefully neglected in the Republican presidential campaign. As a student of American diplomatic history, I welcome attention being paid to the subject. A serious discussion of the role of the U.S. in the world is a good and useful thing.

But that's not what Romney was doing Friday. Instead, he was attacking the president. Not his policies--which would be legitimate--but his beliefs.

Romney began with a deliberate distortion of the President's words: "The other day I heard the President say that Americans had gone 'soft.'" This line, appearing in what was billed as a foreign policy speech, being delivered at a military academy, suggests that Obama was talking about the military. He was not. He was talking about the American economy, saying it had lost some of its competitive edge over the last few decades.

Moreover, Obama went on to say he "wouldn't trade our position with any other country on Earth" because we "still have the best universities, the best scientists, and best workers in the world. We still have the most dynamic economic system in the world."

Romney either didn't bother to find out the correct context of the president's remarks, or deliberately distorted them. And that set the tone for the whole address.

This is what passes for a foreign policy vision in Romney's speech:

But I am here today to tell you that I am guided by one overwhelming conviction and passion: This century must be an American Century. In an American Century, America has the strongest economy and the strongest military in the world.

The phrase "American Century" was coined by Henry Luce of Time magazine back in 1941, so it is hardly original. In Romney's hands, it becomes a means of smearing of Barack Obama. Not on policy, but on what Romney believes the president believes: that Obama does not want America to be strong.

Romney says: "As President of the United States, I will devote myself to an American Century. And I will never, ever apologize for America."

This is a common refrain for Romney, and it is based on the common right-wing trope that Obama has "apologized" for America. Put aside for the moment the not unreasonable question of whether or not the country might, on occasion, have something to apologize for. Let's assume, as Romney evidently does, that the United States is, and always has been, perfect.

This charge, that Obama apologizes for America, is the subject of an exhaustive report by PolitiFact, the Pulitzer Prize winning website. Its conclusion: "There’s a clear difference between changing policies and apologizing, and Obama didn’t do the latter. So we rate Romney’s statement Pants on Fire." PolitiFact has been saying Romney's charge is demonstrably false for months, and he has continued making it.

Another favorite Romney attack is that Obama does not believe in "American exceptionalism."

I believe we are an exceptional country with a unique destiny and role in the world. Not exceptional, as the President has derisively said, in the way that the British think Great Britain is exceptional or the Greeks think Greece is exceptional. In Barack Obama’s profoundly mistaken view, there is nothing unique about the United States.

That too is a deliberate distortion of Obama's words, one Romney has been peddling for months. As Greg Sargent points out, Romney's

statement is a direct falsehood, one that’s founded on a highly dishonest reading of remarks Obama made in April of 2009. In those remarks, Obama did not make the relevant claim about American exceptionalism "derisively" at all.

Romney's claim that Obama thinks "there is nothing unique about the United States" is simply a lie. In the same answer Romney refers to, Obama said:

I'm enormously proud of my country and its role and history in the world.... we have a core set of values that are enshrined in our Constitution, in our body of law, in our democratic practices, in our belief in free speech and equality, that, though imperfect, are exceptional.

That's what Obama actually said. But Romney knows what the president really believes.

Most reprehensible, however, is how Romney ended his address:

An eloquently justified surrender of world leadership is still surrender.
I will not surrender America’s role in the world. This is very simple: If you do not want America to be the strongest nation on Earth, I am not your President.
You have that President today.

This is rank demagoguery. It is one thing to argue that the sitting president has pursued policies you find unwise or mistaken. It is quite another to attribute beliefs to him that you know full well he does not have. This is Romney pretending to know what is in the president's mind and heart, and saying he has secret, anti-American beliefs.

Sure, Romney suggests, Obama would never say that he does not want America to be the strongest nation in the world. But I know what he really believes.

Romney's campaign slogan, with which he ended his speech, is "Believe in America."

The implication is clear. Romney believes in America, Obama does not. Romney is a real American, Obama is not--regardless of what he says.

The crowning irony is that on the very same day Romney was smearing Obama, he was himself the victim of exactly this kind of attack. A pastor introducing Rick Perry at the so-called "Values Summit" called Perry "a genuine follower of Jesus Christ" and then, in case anyone missed the point, said Mitt Romney "is not a Christian."

Later that day, when asked directly by Chris Matthews if Romney was a Christian, Rick Santorum said Romney "believes he is a Christian." When Matthews called him on that hedging, Santorum retreated: "I'm not an expert on Mormonism ... if they say they're Christians, as far as I'm concerned, they're Christians."

This is a variation of the Republican weasel words on whether or not President Obama is a Christian. "I take him at his word" is how they tried to avoid directly challenging the president while winking at bigots who insist he is not a Christian. And now the same smear is being used against one of their own. What goes around comes around.

When I heard the smear against Romney, my natural reflex was to sympathize with him. The bigotry of that pastor has no place in our politics. But given what Romney himself had done that day, my sympathy was decidedly limited. He played the same slimy game in his Citadel address.

You reap what you sow, Mitt.

Acting President

2011-10-04T13:49:00.000-04:00

I spent much of the month of September playing Franklin Roosevelt in the Spartanburg Little Theater's production of "Annie." Having mimicked FDR for decades, it was great fun to actually play the role.

Of course, the pedantic historian in me had to struggle mightily to refrain from pointing out how absurd the storyline involving FDR is. For those who don't know the story (I didn't before being cast), Annie accompanies Daddy Warbucks to a meeting with FDR in December 1933. FDR and his advisors are in despair over the depression, but Annie's sunny optimism rallies them and inspires the New Deal.

Needless to say, this isn't terribly accurate! The phrase "new deal" was first used by FDR in his July 1932 speech accepting the Democratic nomination for president. The famous first hundred days, beginning in March 1933, had already established the tone of the New Deal. And, as far as I know, an adorable, red-headed, 11-year-old orphan girl had nothing to do with it!

The way the play employs FDR as a dramatic device, however, got me thinking about how we perceive our presidents. At the last performance, one of my Wofford colleagues saw me on his way out of the theater, and said "Good old American optimism prevails again!"

And that really is the message. The ubiquitous "Annie" theme "Tomorrow" is the epitome of sunny optimism. So of course the play uses FDR. The image most Americans maintain of FDR is the one shown here: big grin, cigarette holder jauntily titled upward. It practically oozes optimism.

This is the "character" FDR that we recall. He is, of course, based on reality. "Annie" has FDR twice repeat the most famous line from his first inaugural: "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself."

But more important, I'd argue, is what FDR says before that famous line: "This is preeminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly. Nor need we shrink from honestly facing conditions in our country today."

FDR's was no mindless optimism. It began with a sober assessment of the real and daunting problems the country faced. It was not mere exhortation, it was a promise: "This Nation is asking for action, and action now." FDR promised action, and delivered. Even when some of those actions failed, people credited him for the effort.

The other hovering presidential presence in "Annie" is Herbert Hoover. He isn't a character, but there is a sarcastic song called "Hooverville." A group of homeless people sing, "We'd like to thank you Herbert Hoover, for really showing us the way... You made us what we are today."

The caricature of Hoover is as complete as that of FDR: he is the dour presence who failed to end the depression. What most people forget is that Hoover was relentlessly optimistic in his rhetoric, too.

In May 1930 Hoover said: "While the crash only took place six months ago, I am convinced we have now passed the worst and with continued unity of effort we shall rapidly recover. There is one certainty of the future of a people of the resources, intelligence and character of the people of the United States—that is, prosperity."

In October 1932, as the depression was approaching its worst months, he said: "the tide has turned and ... the gigantic forces of depression are today in retreat."

The American people expect optimism from their leaders, but optimism is not enough. They expect results.

Today, President Obama is trying to capture FDR's optimism, but history suggests that won't be enough to win re-election. Yes, the public likes to hear that "tomorrow, there'll be sun," but optimism is not a good election strategy.

Maybe the Republicans will nominate a candidate too extreme for independents to stomach.

Maybe the public will blame the obstructionist Republicans in Congress for preventing action.

Maybe the electorate will go for Obama again, even if the economy hasn't turned around.

Maybe.

But I wouldn't bet my bottom dollar on it.

“As a Christian, I have a clear directive to support Israel”

2011-09-21T08:00:00.000-04:00

Unquestioning support for the policies of the government of Israel (whatever they may be) has become an article of faith on the Republican right. Last May, when the right was in a frenzy over what should have been entirely uncontroversial comments made by President Obama about the shape of a peace settlement between the Israelis, Mitt Romney said that the president had "thrown Israel under the bus."

As I wrote at the time, Romney's remarks showed his utter ignorance of the most basic concept of foreign policy: that a nation pursues its national interests, and does not subsume those interests to those of another state. Romney thinks otherwise. He said that "a first principle of American foreign policy ... is to stand firm by our friends," evidently entirely unaware that George Washington said precisely the opposite in his Farewell Address in 1796.

Now Rick Perry has (predictably) gone Romney one better. While criticizing the president yesterday, Perry said: “As a Christian, I have a clear directive to support Israel.”

I heard only one very brief reference to this incredible remark on the news today. When I first heard Chris Matthews say it, I thought he must have gotten it wrong and went searching for evidence to find out the facts.

But Matthews did not get it wrong. Perry actually said that. Moreover, it is not the first or only time he's said it. This was no mistake.

This comment is so remarkable in its radicalism, so completely inappropriate for someone who presumes to become president, that it ought to disqualify Perry for the office.

Perry was effectively saying that he would let his personal religious convictions dictate his foreign policy. Think about that for a moment. He offered unquestioning, unqualified support of another country, premised not on American national interests, but on his own religious beliefs.

Imagine if, in 1960, John F. Kennedy had said: "As a Catholic, I have a clear directive to support Vatican City." It rightly would have been the end of his candidacy. (In fact, JFK explicitly opposed even sending an American ambassador to the Vatican.)

What Kennedy actually said in his famous speech in Houston, was quite different:

Whatever issue may come before me as president — on birth control, divorce, censorship, gambling or any other subject — I will make my decision ... in accordance with what my conscience tells me to be the national interest, and without regard to outside religious pressures or dictates.

That is the one and only proper standard for a president when making policy: the national interest.

No doubt Perry would say that American national interests and support for Israel are in no way contradictory. That may be. But it is not inconceivable that a situation could arise where they would not be. It has happened before.

In the 1956 Suez Crisis, when Israel cooperated with Britain and France in attacking Egypt, President Dwight Eisenhower resolutely opposed Israel. At the height of the cold war, he worked with the Soviets against not just Israel, but America's two closest European allies, and used the U.N. to force them to withdraw.

The U.S. and Israel have a close relationship, one which most Americans support. But if Israeli and American interests diverge, an American president must choose American interests. Someone who honestly believes that his religion directs him to support another nation in all circumstances has no business putting himself forward as a candidate for president.

JFK also considered the question of a conflict between personal religious belief and national interest in that speech:

But if the time should ever come — and I do not concede any conflict to be even remotely possible — when my office would require me to either violate my conscience or violate the national interest, then I would resign the office; and I hope any conscientious public servant would do the same.

With this remark, Rick Perry has shown that he does not deserve to ever be in that position. He has already told us all we need to know.

Visions of 9/11

2011-09-11T13:04:00.000-04:00

It was like a slap in the face.

I pulled the Sunday paper out of its plastic sleeve, opened it, and was hit by a photo, taking up the entire top half of the front page, of the explosion as the second plane hit the second tower. The decision by the Spartanburg Herald-Journal to run this picture was sensationalistic and tasteless. Thrusting that awful image once again before its readers was a small gift to the twisted minds that conceived of and carried out the horror of that day.

Front page of the
New York Times, 9/11/11

The New York Times did so much better. In the same place on its front page was a beautiful photo of the new memorial in New York. In subdued tones of blue and grey, it shows the engraved names of some of those who died, with raindrops splattered across the surface like so many tears.

I turned the first photo face down, and kept the second in my field of vision as I read the papers.

I did not watch the coverage of the services. I listened. It's my instinct--I'm a morning radio person. Growing up, my parents always had the radio on (WNEW-AM, 1130 in New York) as we ate breakfast. But this was a conscious decision. I thought of turning on the TV. But Saturday night, when I put it on, it was already set to a channel showing a 9/11 retrospective, and I recoiled from the images.

As I listened, Paul Simon's beautiful and moving rendition of "The Sound of Silence" explained my reaction to me:

And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains

I didn't need to see any visions. So many are planted in my brain.

The first is returning to my office after teaching my first class of the day. I was in only my second week at Wofford, still learning my way around campus.

While I had been in class, the first planes had hit New York. I learned what had happened from an email from my best friend, who was in his office in Newark, NJ, across the river. I can see the desk, the computer, the wall and doorway behind them. They seemed to swirl together as disorientation set it.

The next is being gathered in a classroom with other faculty and students, watching a TV sitting atop a rolling cart, as the first tower crumbled. For several moments, I simply refused to believe what my senses were telling me. This is not happening. This is NOT HAPPENING.

The college gave professors the personal option of canceling or holding classes the rest of the day. I decided to meet my one o'clock class, not to talk about the scheduled topic of the Renaissance, but to discuss what had happened.

That choice was reinforced by the third vision of the day. I was with some colleagues having lunch in the college cafeteria, eyes glued to the TV in the corner of the room. By that time, all of the horrors of the day had already occurred: the towers had been hit, the Pentagon had been hit, Flight 93 had crashed, the towers had fallen. But we did not know at that point if that was all. We were waiting for the next hit.

Yet it seemed to me, looking at the students around me, that they had not grasped fully what had happened. For many of them, I thought, it seemed like just another day. At least with the students in my class, I could try to help them understand it.

So I went to class, and did my best to explain what Al Qaeda was, what was known, what was unknown.

The last vision of the day is a student's face. Her name was Karen, she was a first-year student. Bright, serious, engaged, sitting up front, as such students tend to do. Her eyes wide, her countenance exuding concern, she asked me: "Are we going to war?"

Yes, I think so, I told her. I can't imagine this would not provoke a military reaction. And I saw the fear in her eyes.

I could not foresee that day that ten years later, we would still be at war. That on the morning of the tenth anniversary, I would hear the news that 77 American soldiers in Afghanistan were wounded by a truck bomb.

How we got here is a topic for another day. Today is for those names, for that new vision of the memorial, now planted in my brain.

A Third Party Bid for Palin?

2011-09-09T15:25:00.001-04:00

Observing what he calls "Palin's Populist Twist," Andrew Sullivan writes:

I wonder if she's contemplating a populist third party campaign. Or if this anti-establishment message is what she will bring to the GOP contest. Or whether she is just trying to recast her celebrity image a little. Well, we'll soon find out.

I had the same third party thought when she gave a speech that seemed meant to hit Obama, Romney, and Perry all at once. But if she does intend to do a third party challenge, we may well not soon find out.

I can see her saying she’s not in the GOP race, and then dangling the tease about a possible third party bid if the nomination contest results in a candidate who doesn’t offer a real choice. Since she has made it clear that she does not intend to ~~not~~ run according to traditional rules, she can take a long time to decide on that—maybe until there is an actual Republican nominee.

She may be so narcissistically deranged that she thinks her base would be enough to get her an electoral college win. Or maybe she is as shrewd as Sullivan says and realizes that, with her high negatives, the only way she could win is in a three-way race.

There is precedent for a candidate reviled by a large section of the public being elected president: Abraham Lincoln. He was despised in the South, but was elected president with less than 40% of the popular vote because he won heavily populated Northern states in an election with three or four major candidates (based on your definition of "major").

In 1912, in the midst of an era of Republican domination of the presidency, Democrat Woodrow Wilson won with 41.8%, because the Republicans divided between incumbent William Howard Taft and former president Theodore Roosevelt.

These two examples, however, show the problem Palin would face if she did launch an independent bid for the presidency.

Lincoln's advantage was that his vote was concentrated exclusively in the populous Northern states with lots of electoral votes. His inability to garner any votes in the South did not hurt him. Wilson's advantage was that he was running against two Republicans (though TR rebranded himself as the "Progressive" Party candidate that year). Wilson could rely on a loyal and united Democratic base.

Palin would have neither of these advantages. Her supporters are geographically scattered, and even if she portrayed herself as an independent or "Tea Party" candidate, she would be remembered by voters as the Republican vice-presidential candidate from 2008. Her vote would be drawn from those Republican and "change" votes that would otherwise go to the Republican nominee.

In other words, she'd be more likely to be the 2012 equivalent of Ross Perot, who got nearly 19% in 1992 and 8.4% in 1996.

But if Palin really burns to be president (as opposed to merely using the possibility of a run to rake in cash), a third-party bid is probably her only chance. In a poll that asked not favorable/unfavorable but gauged enthusiasm for and against candidates, an abysmal 58% said they'd never vote for Palin.

However, she also scored 15% on the question of who would vote for "enthusiastically." That doesn't sound great either, until you notice that the only other Republican who scored as well was Mitt Romney, also with 15%. Another 24% said they'd "consider" voting for Palin.

With those numbers, there is simply no way Palin could win a two-way race. However, in a hypothetical Obama-Romney race, Palin may well believe she could enter as a self-proclaimed Tea Party candidate, mobilize the Tea Party base, get votes from those not enthused about Romney, and squeak out a narrow victory.

I think that scenario is extremely unlikely, even delusional. But I also think neither of those things would matter much to Palin. And it is the only way she could win a presidential election.

Obama Should "Welcome Their Hatred"

2011-09-05T08:00:00.002-04:00

It's Labor Day, and on Thursday President Obama is scheduled to speak to a joint session of Congress about the ongoing jobs crisis. Many on the left are urging the president to "go big" and push Congress for a New Deal-style jobs program.

The attraction of the FDR model is obvious. The economy created no net jobs last month (due to continuing government layoffs that totally offset private sector hiring), making it clear that the very weak recovery that was underway has now stalled.

But as I argued over a year and half ago, the circumstances of Obama's administration are significantly different. FDR took over at the absolute depths of the depression in early 1933, while Obama's administration began in the equivalent of 1931 and helped prevent the recession from becoming another Great Depression.

Moreover, Obama's political circumstances are radically different. FDR brought in huge Democratic majorities with him in the 1932 election, and the remaining Republicans were pliant and did not represent meaningful opposition to his policies. The 1934 election enlarged the Democratic majority in the Senate to 69-25 and in the House to 322-103. With those numbers, FDR could largely get Congress to pass whatever economic recovery measures he proposed.

Obama, by contrast, has from day one faced an obstructionist minority in the Senate that has effectively created a minority veto over all legislation by abusing the rules of the Senate, and now faces a Republican majority in the House.

There is, however, one aspect of FDR's early presidency that is often overlooked by his supporters: its failure to bring about quick improvement in the economy, and FDR's political response to that failure. And here, Obama may find some instructive lessons.

The signature policy of what is often called the "first New Deal" was the National Recovery Administration, the NRA. It was a decidedly pro-big business idea, whose premise was that the main problem in the economy was over-supply of goods. The NRA suspended the anti-trust laws and created what were, for all intents and purposes, government-sanctioned cartels in major industries to limit production.

It was an abysmal failure. It combined the worst aspects of government bureaucracy with the complacency of monopolistic business. By the time the Supreme Court struck it down as unconstitutional in 1935, FDR was glad to see it go.

Politically, by 1935, FDR was under increasing pressure from the left to do more, and especially to give up trying to work with big business. Dr. Francis Townsend proposed giving the elderly $200 a month, and the popularity of his plan helped push the adoption of Social Security that same year.

Louisiana Senator Huey Long proposed the "Share Our Wealth" plan, which would have capped personal fortunes at $50 million and yearly income at $1 million. Long would then have redistributed the income among the poor. FDR feared the populist appeal of Long's plan might lead the Senator to challenge him for the presidency.

FDR believed people wanted jobs, not relief or redistribution, and in response proposed to Congress the largest single peacetime appropriation to that date: the Works Progress Administration, the WPA.

Its initial appropriation was $1.4 billion, the equivalent of about $1 trillion today. It eventually employed 8 million Americans. It never solved the unemployment problem, but it did significantly improve it.

It is the WPA people have in mind when they tell Obama to "go big."

The problem, of course, is Congress. Republicans would block any such proposal by Obama, and, given his pragmatic bent, he seems unlikely to propose something he knows will fail.

In trying to get anything at all through Congress, Obama faces roadblocks FDR simply did not have. But politically, the advantages of following FDR's approach are clear.

By 1936, the depression had not ended. Unemployment was still perhaps as high as 16-17%. But it was down from the 25% of early 1933. FDR's resounding re-election in 1936 was not because happy days were here again--it was because things were getting better, and, most importantly because people who still had not benefitted from the recovery knew Roosevelt stood for them.

In a powerful speech on the eve of the election, FDR drew the contrast with his opponents clearly:

Powerful influences strive today to restore that kind of government with its doctrine that that Government is best which is most indifferent.... We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace—business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.
They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.
Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.

FDR spent the first two years of his administration trying to placate business interests. In return, he got nothing but their enmity. By 1935, he gave up trying to win them over, and began trying to defeat them.

That is what Obama needs to do.

What FDR said in 1936 is as true today (maybe more true than) it was then.

Obama cannot make Republicans bent on his political destruction pass policies that will put people to work. He won't get from Congress what he asks for Thursday. So he might as well tell the people of this country what should be done. When Republicans say "no," as we all know they will do, he can make sure the public knows who wanted to help, and which party believes "Government is best which is most indifferent."

Memo to Mitt: It's Not the House

2011-08-25T08:00:00.001-04:00

Liberals have had some fun this week at Mitt Romney's expense after the Washington Post reported that Romney "is planning to nearly quadruple the size of his $12 million California beachfront mansion." Rachel Maddow had a segment on her program Tuesday arguing that Romney was going "full Thurston"--a reference to Thurston Howell III, the millionaire castaway played by Jim Backus on the 1960s sitcom "Gilligan's Island."

David Frum tweeted on Monday: "I hope none of those people criticizing Mitt Romney's house voted for John Kerry." Romney's net worth is somewhere between $190 and $250 million dollars, according to his campaign, and Kerry's was estimated to be at least $167 million in 2009, so the two are certainly comparable.

Frum seems to think this is an argument-ender: if you supported Kerry's candidacy, you can't be critical of Romney. But he misses something essential: the problem is not that Romney is rich. It is that he is rich and advocates policies that primarily advance the interests of the rich.

Americans have never had a problem with having wealthy political leaders. George Washington, according to biographer Joseph Ellis, had an "insatiable hunger for land" (at his death he had land in five states, the District of Columbia, and the Ohio territory) and was when he died "one of the richest men in America."

Andrew Jackson was also a wealthy man who had extensive landholdings and dabbled in a wide variety of business ventures. Robert Remini tells us that by the time he first ran for president in 1824, Jackson "was a fairly rich man." (Like Washington, Jackson also owned more than a hundred human beings held as slaves.) That is not, of course, how Americans remember Jackson: he remains the champion of the "common man." Policies, not personal wealth, are what people care about.

We see the same thing in the 20th century: three of the wealthiest presidents were Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, and John Kennedy. These are not men who, like Washington and Jackson, made their own fortunes. They were all three born to wealth (as Romney was). By and large, Americans did not hold their inherited wealth against them, precisely because they made themselves into champions of the average person.

TR made his mark as a powerful president by taking on J. P. Morgan's Northern Securities railroad trust (the case that gave him the misleading nickname of "trust-buster"). Most Americans never knew that Morgan made his peace with TR and even contributed to his campaign in 1904. They knew TR intervened in a United Mine Workers strike that resulted in higher wages and lower hours, and that he signed the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act to protect consumers.

FDR, it need hardly be pointed out, was considered a "traitor to his class" for his efforts to alleviate the ravages of the Great Depression. He denounced "business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking" and "Government by organized money." In his 1936 speech accepting the Democratic nomination, FDR said:

we will continue to seek to improve working conditions for the workers of America--to reduce hours over-long, to increase wages that spell starvation, to end the labor of children, to wipe out sweatshops. Of course we will continue every effort to end monopoly in business, to support collective bargaining, to stop unfair competition, to abolish dishonorable trade practices.

When political leaders talk (and more importantly, act) in this way, no one cares how much personal wealth they have.

JFK was also born in wealth, but he ran in 1960 as the champion of FDR's New Deal. Like his predecessors, he knew that policies exclusively favoring the wealthy were self-defeating: "If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich."

What sorts of policies does Romney advocate?

On extending unemployment benefits, he's against it: "The indisputable fact is that unemployment benefits, despite a web of regulations, actually serve to discourage some individuals from taking jobs, especially when the benefits extend across years." The implication is that there are plenty of jobs available, and people just are not taking them. He should try telling that to the thousands of people who camped out for a job fair in Atlanta last week.

On the payroll tax cut that President Obama insisted on last December: "only the employee's payroll taxes [are] reduced — the portion paid by the employer is to remain the same.... the payroll tax deal will add to the deficit." (Romney did not note that extending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, which he supports, also adds to the deficit--evidently only tax cuts for regular folks do that.)

On extending that payroll tax cut: "Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney did not flatly rule out an extra year for the payroll tax cut, but he 'would prefer to see the payroll tax cut on the employer side' to spur job growth, his campaign said." It's not clear if that means adding an employer tax cut to the worker's cut, or raising the employee's taxes and giving the break instead to the employer, but it sounds like the latter.

This is the context for the reaction to Romney's new California mansion. Americans do not begrudge their leaders their wealth. They do have a problem with people who say tax cuts are only for wealthy "job creators" and who think unemployment insurance makes people lazy. And rightly so. You reap what you sow, Mitt.

"Politics End at the Water's Edge"--Yeah, Right

2011-08-22T08:00:00.001-04:00

The old maxim "politics ends at the water's edge" has always been an exaggeration, if not a flat-out falsehood. The idea is that while Americans may quarrel among themselves about domestic politics, when it comes to foreign affairs, there is no partisanship. Americans show a united face to the rest of the world.

As a historian of American diplomacy, I can tell you that, as a rule, nothing could be further from the truth. Yes, there is a tendency to "rally around the president" in moments of crisis, but that usually ends as soon as the crisis does. And yes, there are some moments when it is true, as when Democratic president Harry Truman convinced the Republican Congress in 1947 to approve the Truman Doctrine aid to Greece and Turkey, as well as the economic development program known as the "Marshall Plan."

More often than not, however, foreign policy has proven divisive in American history. Even the most prominent example of bipartisan cooperation noted above, the Marshall Plan, proves that point. It was packaged by the Truman administration as Secretary of State George Marshall's plan precisely because, as a former general, Marshall was seen as a nonpartisan figure. They were afraid the "Truman Plan" would get voted down.

This all came to mind while watching the events in Tripoli last night. Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham released a statement, part of which reads as follows:

This achievement was made possible first and foremost by the struggle and sacrifice of countless Libyans, whose courage and perseverance we applaud. We also commend our British, French, and other allies, as well as our Arab partners, especially Qatar and the UAE, for their leadership in this conflict. Americans can be proud of the role our country has played in helping to defeat Qaddafi, but we regret that this success was so long in coming due to the failure of the United States to employ the full weight of our airpower.

As Andrew Sullivan's Dish points out, they make a point of "Praising Everyone But The Commander In Chief." President Obama's name does not appear at all in the statement. The only reference to him is the critical dig at "the failure of the United States to employ the full weight of our airpower."

The slight is reminiscent at how many conservatives pointedly refused to credit the president for getting Osama bin Laden. Conservative billionaire David Koch, for example, said "all that Obama did was say 'yea' or 'nay,' we’re going to take him out or not. I don’t think he contributed much at all." Sarah Palin credited "all the brave men and women in our military and our intelligence services" without mentioning the president, which the Guardian called "both churlish and in character."

Current Republican presidential candidates Michele Bachmann, Rick Santorum, and Herman Cain all issued statements that pointedly ignored Obama. (To their credit, Mitt Romney, Jon Huntsman, and Newt Gingrich, as well as Speaker of the House John Boehner, did congratulate the president.)

It is perfectly reasonable to question the president's policy. I had my own doubts about Obama's intervention in Libya, but it was indeed "churlish," on the day the rebellion reached Tripoli, for McCain and Graham to reiterate their policy criticism. At this point, it seems that Obama's policy, which has often been ridiculed because aides used the phrase "leading from behind" to describe it, has helped produce the successful toppling of one of the world's worst (and most bizarre) dictators. At the cost of not a single American life.

You might think that, at such a moment, the president's critics could actually let politics end at the water's edge. But you'd be wrong.

The Tea Party and "Republican Virtue"

2011-08-19T08:00:00.001-04:00

The Tea Party proclaims that it is the embodiment of the American desire to return to ideals of the founders of the United States. While strict constitutionalism is a common position of the various self-proclaimed Tea Partiers, the founding generation in fact argued quite a bit about what the Constitution meant. But there was a more fundamental concept that the founders of the United States did largely agree upon: the one I noted in my previous post, "republican virtue."

The essence of that quality was selflessness in politics, a concern not with personal interests but a devotion to the public good. As Gordon Wood puts it in his classic work, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787, "The eighteenth-century mind was thoroughly convinced that a popularly based government 'cannot be supported without Virtue.'"

Wood tells us in Empire of Liberty that the founding generation of Americans believed that "republics had to hold themselves together from the bottom up, ultimately, from their citizens' willingness to take up arms to defend their country and to sacrifice their private desires for the sake of the public good--from their 'disinterestedness,' which was a popular synonym for virtue."

Essential to this concept of the "public good" was the understanding of the interdependence of citizens:

Republicanism, with its emphasis on devotion to the transcendent public good, logically presumed a legislature in which various groups in the society would realize 'the necessary dependence and connection' each had upon the others.

There is, in this mentality, no devotion to any particular policy outcome. The devotion is to the general welfare, and a respect for the views of others in reaching an understanding of what the public good is.

It is hard to reconcile the uncompromising spirit of the Tea Party with this mindset. Take, for example, this expression of Tea Party fury over the debt ceiling deal:

I do not want to cut a deal with the people who wish to enslave me. I do not want to cut a deal with those who would take the greatness of America and flush it down the sewer. I do not want to cut a deal with those who think I only live to serve the state.

There is no "disinterestedness" here--only a single-minded determination to achieve a specific policy result at any cost, and the demonization of those with whom the author disagrees (the "Obama regime" and Republicans who "sold us out").

When we look at the state of our politics over the last eight months (since the newly-arrived members of Congress started asserting their influence), it resembles nothing more than what the revolutionary generation saw as the consequence of the lack of republican virtue:

Without some portion of this generous principle, anarchy and confusion would immediately ensue, the jarring interests of individuals, regarding themselves only, and indifferent to the welfare of others, would still further heighten the distressing scene, and with the assistance of the selfish passions, it would end in the ruin and subversion of the state.

Revisiting today this concept of republican virtue is a useful reminder of the foundational premises that lie beneath the structure created by the American Constitution. Wood tells us that the founders believed that "an equality of condition was essential for republicanism.... All took for granted that a society could not long remain republican if a tiny minority controlled most of the wealth and the bulk of the population remained dependent servants or poor landless laborers."

The great irony today is that these self-proclaimed guardians of the founding principles are putting their most fervent efforts into preserving precisely the condition that the founders themselves felt would lead to the collapse of a republican system. In their day, though not in ours, "it was commonly understood that 'the exorbitant wealth of individuals' had a 'most baneful influence' on the maintenance of republican governments and 'therefore should be carefully guarded against.'"

It is in this context that we should think about Warren Buffett's much discussed op-ed in this past Monday's New York Times. Buffet concludes clearly and unequivocally with a selfless call for "My friends and I" who "have been coddled long enough by a billionaire-friendly Congress" to be taxed. "It’s time for our government to get serious about shared sacrifice."

In rising above his personal interest, and that of his economic class, Buffett exhibits the kind of disinterestedness the founders believed essential to self-government. President Obama, in his calls this week for members of Congress to rise above party for the good of the country and in his willingness to cut programs near and dear to Democrats, has done the same.

The ones standing in the way are the Tea Partiers, who in their ignorance of the actual political values of the founders, violate those values every day with their extremism and uncompromising posturing.

" ... to select men of virtue and wisdom."

2011-08-15T08:00:00.001-04:00

My good friend, former college roommate, poet, lawyer, and blogger Bill Carleton raised an interesting issue in response to my recent posts on President Obama:

I'm a sucker for the great man theory. And I'm fascinated by the stories of US Presidents and the saga of their successions.... But I'm coming to think that our problems are structural. I'm beginning to wonder whether the dysfunction of the federal government is not a reflection of the lack of greatness or character of the men and women on the current political scene, as much as of an indication that the particular form of federalism established by the US Constitution has outlived its usefulness.

I've been giving this some thought, and while I'm grateful for (and a little embarrassed by) Bill's effusive praise of this blog, I have to say that I disagree.

First, I would say that my recent posts have not really been "great man theory" history. I am not one of those who think that Obama could, say, give a great speech and somehow solve our intractable political problems. My case is more modest--that, given the nature of the opposition, the president needs to adjust his tactics.

The structural argument, I think, is one that naturally appeals to us when we become frustrated with the way our system of governance is working (or, more appropriately, not working). But eventually, the underlying politics that created gridlock shifts, the paralysis lifts, the system works again, and we forget about the idea that the structure of government was at fault.

Probably the most recent manifestation of that mentality in our history was in the mid- to late-1970s. In the aftermath of Watergate and Vietnam, confidence in American government was at a low ebb. With rampant inflation and high unemployment ("stagflation") exacting a terrible economic toll with no obvious solution in sight, some people argued that the job of the presidency had become too big. A respondent to a CBS-New York Times poll in 1976 said: "The President of the United States isn't going to solve our problems. The problems are too big."

The multiple afflictions of the times then overwhelmed the Carter administration, furthering adding to the sense of a government that no longer worked.

Then came the political change. Ronald Reagan became president, Fed policy broke the back of inflation, the recession of the early 1980s ended, oil prices declined, and suddenly we didn't hear the structural argument anymore.

Obama himself has been understandably countering the structural argument. In his weekly address this weekend, he said: "while there’s nothing wrong with our country, there is something wrong with our politics.... what’s holding us back [is] the fact that some in Congress would rather see their opponents lose than see America win."

I think Obama is still pulling his punches. He never identifies who exactly these people in Congress are. That, to my mind, only reinforces a false equivalence and encourages an all-too-easy "a plague o' both your houses" mentality that refuses to distinguish the responsible from the reckless.

But in essence, I think Obama is correct. The problem isn't institutions, it is people. And he's got most of the founders on his side.

Bill notes as an aside in his post:

I wouldn't be thinking this way were it not for reading I am doing about the Founders and their respective attitudes about the federal government established by the Constitution. It's fascinating to realize that few of them would ever have presupposed that the structure they put in place would not have been re-visited by now.

In this, I suspect he is correct. The Constitution was created in the spirit of the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment, and as such it was self-consciously designed as an experiment, with no confidence at all that they had gotten everything right.

But I think Bill underestimates how much things have changed within their structure. In a strictly limited sense, the Tea Partiers are not entirely wrong when they assert that the founders would not recognize our government today. The federal government has gained power at the expense of the states. The presidency has gained power at the expense of the Congress. The electorate has changed dramatically.

All of that is true. However, the aspect of our current politics that most of the founders, I believe, would find most alarming (though not surprising), is not that federalism has not been re-visited. It is the lack of what they referred to as "republican virtue." Structures of government may change, they believed, but that quality was essential to successful self-government.

According to Gordon Wood, in his work Empire of Liberty, their study of history had taught the founders that "what made republican governments historically so fragile" was that they required citizens with a "capacity for self-sacrifice and impartiality of judgment." (That, I would argue, is precisely what is lacking among the Tea Partiers today.)

Bill looks at today's problems and argues: "We need to make it impossible for our national leaders, great, venal, or merely mediocre, to abdicate responsibility for governing."

This, I would counter, is something that the founders would have thought was the beyond the capacity of any constitution. They were under no illusions that they had created a system of government that could accomplish that goal. Only a virtuous citizenry could do that.

In the 1780s, James Madison said that for any republican form of government to work, the people must have the "virtue and intelligence to select men of virtue and wisdom." Otherwise, he said, "no theoretical checks, no form of government, can render us secure."

In that, I think Madison most certainly got it right. Perhaps the Carleton position that we "should be talking about changing the Constitution to equip the American government to be functional and competent on the world stage in the 21st Century" is worth pursuing. Certainly the founders would not object in principle to that suggestion.

But we should be under no illusions that tinkering with the machinery of government will ultimately save us from ourselves.

[In my next post, I will further explore how, notwithstanding their tri-corner hats, the Tea Partiers actually represent the antithesis of the "republican virtue" the founders thought essential to good government.]

The Great Compromisers

2011-08-09T08:00:00.014-04:00

As much as anything, Barack Obama has tried to cultivate an image as a reasonable man of compromise. As I noted in my last post, he has even made the case that his model for presidential leadership, Abraham Lincoln, compromised in the act of emancipation.

Lincoln himself had a political role model, Henry Clay. According to Lincoln biographer David Herbert Donald, Lincoln "almost worshipped Henry Clay." Clay was Lincoln's "beau ideal of a statesman," and Lincoln referred to himself as "an avowed Clay man."

Henry Clay, "The Great Compromiser"

Clay is best known as "The Great Compromiser" for his central role in the three most dangerous political crises of the antebellum era. In 1820, he engineered the Missouri Compromise. In 1833, he worked on a tariff compromise that allowed South Carolina to back down from its nullification and prevented the use of force against the state by Andrew Jackson. And in 1850, he put together the package of proposals that later became the Compromise of 1850.

As a Clay man and compromiser, Lincoln exhibited the same kind of frustration with ideological purity that Obama does. In 1845, he took to task the abolitionists for their purist attitude in the election of 1844. Clay was the Whig nominee, and barely lost the election to James K. Polk. New York (the largest state at the time) made the difference in the electoral college: "If the whig abolitionists of New York had voted with us last fall, Mr. Clay would now be president, whig principles in the ascendant, and Texas not annexed."

Lincoln showed clear disdain for the abolitionist rationale: "We are not to do evil that good may come." Why did they see voting for Clay as evil? Clay had, for political reasons, suggested he might be open to the annexation of Texas (thereby increasing the number of slave states), so abolitionists had opposed his candidacy and thrown their votes to a third party, thus giving the presidency to the clearly pro-annexation and pro-slavery Polk. To Lincoln, this was utterly foolish: "An evil tree cannot bring forth good fruit. If the fruit of electing Mr. Clay would have been to prevent the extension of slavery, could the act of electing have been evil?" Abolitionists, he said, "could have prevented" the evil of annexation "without violation of principle, if they had chosen."

Lincoln himself could put political expediency over his personal preferences. Four years later, in 1848, Lincoln threw his support to Gen. Zachary Taylor, favoring him over Clay for purely practical political reasons:

I am in favor of Gen. Taylor as the whig candidate for president because I am satisfied we can elect him.... I go for him, not because I think he would make a better president than Clay, but because I think he would make a better one than [any of the potential Democratic candidates] one of whom is sure to be elected if he is not.

(With murmurs of a primary challenge to Obama rising from the left, this is one Lincoln quotation the president might want to see spread widely.)

This is the Lincoln that Obama finds so appealing, because he is so much like Obama himself. We can hear in Lincoln's reproach to the abolitionists Obama's complaints about the Huffington Post, and his press secretary's grousing about the "professional left." This is the rational, deliberate, cautious politician who always keeps his eyes on the political prize, who chooses the greater, long-term good over the immediately satisfying act of self-righteousness.

Lincoln, like Obama, had faith in the ultimately rational nature of his political opponents. When he was running for president in 1860 and the fire-eaters threatened secession were he to be elected, Lincoln dismissed the possibility: "The people of the South have too much of good sense, and good temper, to attempt the ruin of the government, rather than see it administered as it was administered by the men who made it. At least, I hope and believe."

This is the same attitude Obama expressed last December when he was asked about the possibility of Republicans using the threat of not raising the debt ceiling to force acceptance of their policies: "Here's my expectation, and I'll take John Boehner at his word, that nobody, Democrat or Republican, is willing to see the full faith and credit of the United States government collapse."

Neither Lincoln nor Obama could really imagine political opponents who would not, in the end, be reasonable.

Lincoln was convinced that Southerners would never go through with secession, because secession would mean civil war, with the South losing. In a speech in Cincinnati in September 1859, Lincoln presciently explained the likely outcome of such a war:

man for man, you are not better than we are, and there are not so many of you as there are of us. You will never make much of a hand at whipping us. If we were fewer in numbers than you, I think that you could whip us; if we were equal it would likely be a drawn battle; but being inferior in numbers, you will make nothing by attempting to master us.

To Lincoln, this scenario was so obvious that it all but precluded secession--secession would be self-defeating and thus irrational--just as Obama believed that no one would risk the self-destructive consequences of failing to raise the debt ceiling.

Lincoln clung to the hope of an eventual return to rationality even after secession was a fact. According to James McPherson, during the early weeks of his presidency, prior to Fort Sumter, Lincoln agreed with Secretary of State Seward's proposal that the administration "ought to be conciliatory, forbearing and patient, and so open the way for the rise of a Union party in the seceding states which will bring them back into the Union."

"As late as July 1861," McPherson writes, "Lincoln expressed doubt 'whether there is, to-day, a majority of the legally qualified voters of any State, except perhaps South Carolina, in favor of disunion.'"

Lincoln kept hoping that reason would prevail. But it did not.

Despite two and half years of obstruction and brinksmanship, Obama remains convinced reason will prevail among Republicans in Congress. Just yesterday, he appealed yet again for "common sense and compromise." He once more tried to be bipartisan: "Republicans and Democrats on the bipartisan fiscal commission that I set up put forth good proposals. Republicans and Democrats in the Senate’s Gang of Six came up with some good proposals." The problem, he said, is "the insistence on drawing lines in the sand, a refusal to put what’s best for the country ahead of self-interest or party or ideology."

Obama seems determined to refuse to give up this belief in the possibility of compromise, no matter how unreasonable his opposition is. That is admirable. I'm sure it is what he thinks Lincoln would do. But in agreeing to Seward's appeal to be "conciliatory, forbearing and patient," Lincoln also said the following: "We mean to be as deliberate and calm about it as it is possible to be, but as firm and resolved as it is possible for men to be."

For Lincoln, that meant being unmovable on principle: he would not allow the extension of slavery into new territories (he would agree to "no compromise which assists or permits the extension") and he would not accept secession. "By no act or complicity of mine," Lincoln said during the secession crisis, "shall the Republican party become a mere sucked egg, all shell and no principle in it."

When faced with the implacable opposition of ideologues, people who had abandoned rational politics, Lincoln knew he had to stand firm.

Obama, if he is to be a successful president, needs to decide what, for him, is essential. He then needs to tell all of us, supporters and detractors alike, what that is. And he must stick to it.

Last month, in the midst of tense negotiations, Obama is reported to have said to House Minority Leader Eric Cantor: "Eric, don't call my bluff. I'm going to the American people on this." At issue was Cantor's resistance to any tax increase: "[The president] said Cantor could not have it both ways of insisting on dollar-for-dollar and still not being open to revenues."

We now know, of course, that there would be no new revenues in the deal Obama eventually accepted. Cantor called his bluff, and it was a bluff.

We can disagree on how great a compromiser Lincoln was, but one thing I think is certain: he did not bluff. He made clear what he would accept, and what he would not. Then he followed through. As his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, once put it: "He was a terribly firm man when he set his foot down."

Obama needs to emulate that side of Lincoln, too.

"Stand Firm. The Tug Has to Come": Obama, Lincoln, and the Debt Ceiling

2011-08-04T08:00:00.007-04:00

The Great Debt Ceiling Debacle is ended at last. So the angst-ridden grousing has commenced in earnest.

On what passes for the "left" in America, the main topic has been what many see as President Obama's capitulation to Republican intransigence. Many other observers, with far greater mastery of the policy details and political angles, will be hashing that matter out for weeks and months to come.

What I have found fascinating is how much Abraham Lincoln has been drawn into this. I've done it myself, in my last post.

More importantly, Obama himself did, in this video from March which the White House released in the midst of the debt ceiling negotiations.

In the most widely quoted section, Obama notes that Lincoln even compromised on the subject of slavery, since the Emancipation Proclamation exempted slaves still in the Union: "This notion that somehow if you're responsible and you compromise, that somehow you're giving up your convictions -- that's absolutely not true," Obama told the students.

Salon's Joan Walsh supported Obama on this point, despite her dissatisfaction with the then-emerging debt deal: "So if you're Obama looking to Lincoln as the man who tried to steer the United States through its worst domestic political crisis, and keep that crisis from destroying the country, what do you see? First, you see plenty of compromise."

John B. Judis in The New Republic disagreed, and argued that Obama got it wrong: "Obama turned one of Lincoln’s uncompromising acts of courage into a justification for compromise."

But Andrew Sullivan countered Judis, seeing Lincoln as a compromiser, too: "Funny, but my memory was that, for a long time, Lincoln did all he could to appease the South without conceding the whole ball-game. I see Obama in Lincoln's position. Not for the first time."

Perhaps the most eminent living historian of the Civil War, James McPherson, also backed up Obama: "Lincoln made a lot of compromises on other issues too. In fact, he was famous for knowing the art of the possible."

It is probably terribly unwise to do so, but I have to disagree (at least somewhat) with McPherson. Yes, Lincoln could and did compromise on many things. But he also knew when to stand firm. And that time is when you are faced with people who reject the legitimacy of the process.

The time when Lincoln faced the greatest pressure to compromise was actually before he became president. The mere election of a Republican president had sent the fire-eaters into a secessionist frenzy. A Congressional "Committee of Thirteen" (one more than the "super-Congress" committee set up by the debt ceiling deal) proposed a series of amendments to the Constitution meant to mollify the South (all touched on slavery, none involved a balanced budget) and which were to be, in a bizarre twist, unamendable in the future.

So what was Lincoln's attitude toward these proposals? On Dec. 10, 1860, only ten days before South Carolina would pass its ordinance of secession, he wrote to Sen. Lyman Trumbull of Illinois:

Let there be no compromise on the question of extending slavery. If there be, all our labor is lost, and ere long, must be done again.... Have none of it. Stand firm. The tug has to come, & better now, than any time hereafter.

Why was Lincoln so uncompromising? It was due to the specific stakes in this crisis. Southerners were threatening to leave the Union simply because Lincoln had been elected. They were rejecting the result of the constitutional process. That, Lincoln could not abide. On Jan. 11, 1861, he explained this to James T. Hale, a Republican member of the House from Pennsylvania:

We have just carried an election on principles fairly stated to the people. Now we are told in advance, the government shall be broken up, unless we surrender to those we have beaten, before we take the offices. In this they are either attempting to play upon us, or they are in earnest. Either way, if we surrender, it is the end of us, and of the government.

To compromise in this situation, he believed, was effectively to reverse the outcome of the election.

It would also, he argued, leave his administration open to endless repetition of the same political blackmail:

They will repeat the experiment upon us ad libitum. A year will not pass, till we shall have to take Cuba as a condition upon which they will stay in the Union.... they shall never have a more shallow pretext for breaking up the government, or extorting a compromise, than now.

Lincoln saw the proposals for compromise in those dreadful months between his election and his inauguration for what they were: extortion. And he would have none of it.

Clearly the debt ceiling nonsense does not quite rise to the same level of seriousness as secession. But the tactics used by the Tea Party right were not dissimilar. It is already apparent that the lesson conservatives have taken from this deal is the one Lincoln predicted.

The Republican Senate Minority Leader, Mitch McConnell, has already said so. This dispiriting, manufactured crisis, he said, has "set the template for the future. In the future, Neil, no president — in the near future, maybe in the distant future — is going to be able to get the debt ceiling increased without a re-ignition of the same discussion of how do we cut spending." He also made clear that the Republican representatives to the "super-Congress" committee will not agree to any tax increases.

And, largely unnoticed because of the threat of financial meltdown, a smaller version of this crisis is ongoing with the FAA which, technically, is no longer authorized to operate. Air traffic controllers remain on duty, but airfare taxes are not being collected (at a cost to the government of about $200 million a week), and construction has been halted on 200 projects.

Why? Because Republicans decided to use the heretofore routine reauthorization of the agency to force a diminution of union rights (sound familiar?). The attitude of House Republicans will come as no surprise to anyone who has followed the debt ceiling crisis: "Our position is the Senate has had our bill for weeks and they need to pass it," a senior House GOP source told Fox News. "There is no chance we'd take something different up."

We see the same utterly uncompromising attitude that typified the debt ceiling crisis: Give us what we want, or we'll shut the whole thing down. The stakes are lower (though real), but the tactic is the same.

We can expect the same thing from now on, every chance they get. Until it stops working. At some point, Obama, if he means to be like Lincoln, will need to decide that he will have none of it and stand firm. That the tug has to come, & better now, than any time hereafter.

[In my next post, I'll focus on Lincoln's compromising nature and its appeal for Obama.]

The Highwaymen of South Carolina

2011-07-30T13:27:00.000-04:00

[Y]ou will destroy the Union; and then, you say, the great crime of having destroyed it will be upon us! That is cool. A highwayman holds a pistol to my ear, and mutters through his teeth, "Stand and deliver, or I shall kill you, and then you will be a murderer!"--Abraham Lincoln, February 27, 1860, Address at Cooper Institute

Lincoln was speaking of the secessionist fire-eaters who would, with South Carolina in the lead, try to destroy the Union later that same year. Last night, that same attitude was on vivid display in the United States Congress, and once again, South Carolina played a prominent role.

All seven Republican members of Congress from South Carolina voted against Speaker John Boehner's debt ceiling bill. The bill passed the House by the bare minimum, with 22 Republicans voting against it and no Democrats voting for it. It then went to the Senate, where Senators Jim DeMint and Lindsey Graham joined the Democrats in voting it down.

Although they voted with the Democrats, they did so for different reasons. The Democrats opposed the bill primarily because it would return us to this debt ceiling nightmare again in another six months. The highwaymen of South Carolina did so because its spending cuts were not draconian enough, its demand for a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution not iron-clad enough.

On the CBS Evening News last night, the four freshmen Republican House members from South Carolina (the veteran Joe "You lie!" Wilson excepted) were featured in a story about opposition to raising the debt ceiling.

They spoke with apparent sincerity about the need to make fundamental change. Jeff Duncan spoke about the potential problems of the future: "I've got three young boys ... and I don't want them ten years from now to say, 'Dad, when y'all were at the brink, what did you do?' ... I don't want to have to answer him, 'I didn't do enough.'"

Touching as that is, it shows no concern at all for the very real consequences of failing to compromise. When asked about the potential disaster of failing to raise the debt ceiling, Trey Gowdy, who is my representative from the 4th Congressional district, rather self-righteously dismissed the question: "What is one person's intransigence is another person's deeply held conviction."

What Gowdy is really saying is that he values his own "convictions" above the national interest. He will follow his convictions, and if the result is financial disaster, and another Great Depression, that's not his responsibility. He is only responsible to his personal convictions.

Gowdy's refusal to accept any responsibility for his actions is stunning, and as I've noted before (here and here), typical of the baneful influence of South Carolina's most famous senator, John C. Calhoun.

In the same speech quoted above, Lincoln succinctly summed up this mindset:

Your purpose, then, plainly stated, is, that you will destroy the Government, unless you be allowed to construe and enforce the Constitution as you please, on all points in dispute between you and us. You will rule or ruin in all events.

This attitude is deeply, fundamentally, undemocratic. That is what is so dangerous politically about the situation in which the United States finds itself today. Above and beyond the financial dangers, we are facing a test of our political system. That system values process over any specific outcome. Whether they realize it or not, these freshmen representatives, and the rest of the Tea Party radicals, value results over process.

There is no need for the nation to be staring into the abyss of financial chaos. Like the pre-Civil War fire-eaters, they have created a crisis, confident that they can get their way--one, by the way, which they know--they know--they cannot get through the normal democratic process--by putting a gun to the nation's head.

They blithely, like Lincoln's highwayman, tell us that the rest of us will be to blame if we force them to wreck the economy because our "deeply held conviction" tells us compromise, not blackmail, is the right way to go.

There is an extremely important principle at stake here: that the American government should not be forced to function with a gun to its head. If the highwaymen get their way, they will do incalculable damage to the nation's political system. It is well past time for leaders in both parties, not just one, to recommit to process over results, and put an end to this unnecessary, dangerous, and manufactured crisis.

The Economic Equivalent of the Civil War?

2011-07-27T16:10:00.001-04:00

I made the mistake of watching some cable news while eating lunch today, and heard Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA), member of the House Tea Party Caucus, say that not only will he refuse to vote to raise the debt ceiling under any circumstances, he thinks Congress should lower it. Andrea Mitchell was dumbstruck, and like a teacher with an amazingly dense six year old student, tried to explain to him that raising the debt ceiling was necessary to account for spending already appropriated by Congress. Broun was unmoved by this appeal to reality.

Broun seems either unaware or unconcerned that his position would require an immediate cut of about 40% in government spending. And since things like interest on the debt cannot be cut, it would really mean a larger cut on the rest of government spending. Does Broun want an immediate 40+% cut in defense spending? No? Then we have to cut even more from everything else. Next week.

Tea Party activists gather on Capitol Hill for a 'Hold the Line' rally, June 27, 2011 in Washington, DC.
(Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

You could not find a single economist in the country, no matter how conservative, who would tell you such a massive and instant cut in government spending would do anything but plunge the U.S. into another Great Depression in a matter of months, if not weeks.

But Broun does not seem to care. In his world, all that matters is paying down the debt. Everything else will just work itself out. He lives in a fantasy land of ideology, where facts can be made to conform with beliefs.

Broun and other reality-denying Republicans like presidential candidate Michele Bachmann insist that the debt ceiling should not be raised. Period. They are on the verge of causing a financial cataclysm. Speaker John Boehner may not be able to pass debt ceiling his bill through the Republican-controlled House tomorrow because of them.

And it is his own fault.

Last December, in the wake of the November elections, I wrote that the GOP had become John C. Calhoun's party--the party of no compromise, of standing on principle come hell or high water, consequences be damned. I concluded then:

A decade later, Calhoun's irresponsible mindset would lead to the Civil War. Today's Republicans will not, one must hope, produce any calamity on such a dramatic and grand scale. But they embody the same narrow, anti-majoritarian, self-destructive approach to politics that the senator from South Carolina did. And the results of that will not be pretty.

Well, it has now gotten ugly. It may not be the economic equivalent of the Civil War, but it's close enough.

I noted then that Boehner had adopted the "no compromise" rhetoric of the Tea Party in his "60 Minutes" interview. That was the first sign that he would attempt to appease and co-opt rather than lead the Tea Party caucus.

Then in February on "Meet the Press," when confronted with the birther nonsense so prevalent among Republicans, he said:

It’s not my job to tell the American people what to think. Our job in Washington is to listen to the American people.... the American people have the right to think what they want to think.

No, it isn't the job of a leader to "tell the American people what to think." But it IS the job of a leader to educate people about the difference between the truth and a lie. Boehner treated the question of Obama's citizenship as a mere matter of opinion. I don't believe it, he said, but it's OK if other people do. No, it isn't. Not when we are talking about matters of fact and not of opinion.

And that bring us to where we are today. Boehner's caucus is filled with people so economically ignorant that they really don't think we need to increase the debt ceiling, that we can let it go by, only pay some bills, and thereby, by default, balance the budget now. Boehner knows that this is not true, and he has said so.

But he has spent the last 8 months appeasing the Tea Party know-nothings. He has treated matters of fact as matters of opinion. He has played their game, and now that it is coming down to the wire, he cannot suddenly get them to see reality. Today a Tea Party leader called for Boehner to be replaced as Speaker for not reducing spending right now.

Boehner will have a choice over the next few days. He can either continue to bow to the Tea Party radicals who have no sense of economic reality, or he can make common cause with Democrats and pass a bill that gets us beyond this manufactured crisis and thereby incur Tea Party wrath. He can be John C. Calhoun and go down in flames, or he can be Henry Clay and put the good of the nation first, ahead of party unity and personal ambition.

I hope he chooses the latter, but I wouldn't bet the farm on it.

Chairman Ron

2011-07-22T08:00:00.008-04:00

Six years ago, my colleague Li Qing Kinnison and I led a group of students on a three-week trip to China during the January interim. Everywhere we went, there were signs of American corporations: McDonald's, Pizza Hut, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and my favorite example of all—in Beijing, in the Forbidden City itself, a Starbucks. You could hardly ask for a clearer picture of the triumph of global capitalism.

A Starbucks in Shanghai

The other ubiquitous image, of course, was the leader of the Communist revolution, Mao Zedong. His huge portrait still looms over Tiananmen Square in Beijing, and on t-shirts, posters, and wristwatches.

The contradiction is obvious. Mao was not just a communist, he was a particularly radical one. His hostility to any semblance of capitalist enterprise nearly destroyed China, especially in the late 1950s and mid-1960s. Yet he is still venerated in China, even as the state pursues policies that would (were his body not preserved and on display) have him spinning in his grave.

So what gives? Once historical figures leave the stage, there is an inevitable tendency for the historical record to morph into myth. Memory becomes selective. We forget the part of the record that's inconvenient and elevate what is useful. So the horrors of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution disappear, and instead many Chinese remember Mao only as the leader of the revolution that ended decades of political chaos and founded the modern Chinese state.

The reason I note this now is that we are seeing a version of this, albeit a milder one, in American politics today. In the Republican Party, Ronald Reagan has been raised to sainted status. But every day, we see Republicans espousing positions and using tactics that Reagan's actual historical record directly contradicts.

The current debt ceiling debate is a case in point. As president, Reagan requested 17 increases in the debt ceiling. Not only that, but in doing so he spoke in terms indistinguishable from those used today by President Obama. On November 16, 1983, Reagan wrote to the Senate:

[T]he Treasury Department cannot guarantee that the Federal Government will have sufficient cash on hand on any one day to meet all of its mandated expenses, and thus the United States could be forced to default on its obligations for the first time in its history….The full consequences of a default—or even the serious prospect of a default—by the United States are impossible to predict and awesome to contemplate … the Senate must pass this legislation before the Congress adjourns.

In his diary, he was more direct:

Last night the Repub. Sen. very irresponsibly refused to pass an increase in the debt ceiling which is necessary if we’re to borrow & keep the govt. running…. I sounded off & told them I’d veto every d--n thing they sent down unless they gave us a clean debt ceiling bill. That ended the meeting. (The Reagan Diaries, p. 192)

In 1987, Reagan wrote in his diary:

If we don’t have an extension of the debt ceiling by the 15^th we will have to sell gold or default on bonds. D--n their hides (the Cong.), we’ll default for the first time in our history. Something has to wake those d--n prima donnas up. (The Reagan Diaries, p. 365)

On his radio broadcast that year, Reagan said:

Congress consistently brings the Government to the edge of default before facing its responsibility. This brinkmanship threatens the holders of government bonds and those who rely on Social Security and veterans benefits.

Reagan could not have been clearer: playing political games with the debt ceiling was highly irresponsible. Yet today’s Republicans, who claim to venerate Reagan, are doing precisely that, and some even call President Obama a liar for saying the same things Reagan did. Republican Rep. Joe Walsh of Illinois said:

President Obama, quit lying. You know darn well that if August 2nd comes and goes there is plenty of money to pay off our debt and cover all social security obligations. And you also know that you and only you have the discretion to make those payments.

The reason we have no deal is that Republicans refuse to entertain any compromise that includes any increase in tax revenues. But Ronald Reagan signed 11 bills raising taxes (more times than he cut them). Republicans today insist that no deal that raises any revenues, in any way, is acceptable—even if it is eliminating tax subsidies for corporations, even if those new revenues get in return tremendous spending cuts.

In 1982, writing in his diary of Rep. Jack Kemp’s opposition to one of those tax increases, Reagan said: “He is in fact unreasonable. The tax increase is the price we have to pay to get the budget cuts.” (An American Life, p. 321)

Reagan, for all of his conservative principles, was an inveterate compromiser. In his autobiography, he denounced the "radical conservatives" when he was California governor for whom "'Compromise' was a dirty word." He was impatient with their zealotry:

they wouldn't face the fact that we couldn't get all of what we wanted today. They wanted all or nothing and they wanted it all at once. If you don't get it all, some said, don't take anything…. If you got seventy-five or eighty percent of what you were asking for, I say, you take it and fight for the rest later. (An American Life, pp. 170-171)

Reagan's description fits well the deal Obama offered Republican Speaker John Boehner: $4 trillion in deficit reduction, with $3 trillion in spending cuts and $1 trillion in new revenue. He offered Republicans 75 percent. They said no, they wanted all or nothing. And they continue to raise the specter of a default that Reagan regarded as irresponsible.

Reagan's record as president would make him utterly unacceptable as a Republican candidate for office today, because Republicans today venerate not Reagan, the historical figure, but Reagan the conservative icon. The latter bears only a passing resemblance to former, and is being used in ways that the historical Reagan explicitly rejected.

Well, it could be worse. He could be on public display in Washington. At least Reagan, unlike Mao, gets to spin in his grave.

The Tea Party's Real Founder

2011-07-12T09:20:00.000-04:00

In my last post, I compared the current debt ceiling crisis to the political paralysis that led to the Compromise of 1850. It was the last slavery crisis that was resolved peacefully. The spirit of compromise was exhausted. The difficulty of resolving the issues in 1850 was a harbinger of the utter inability to find a compromise a decade later.

The most interesting part of that crisis was South Carolina Senator John C. Calhoun 's final address to Congress. Calhoun's 1850 speech was historical foreshadowing, indicating that Southern Democrats were ceasing to be "normal" (as David Brooks would put it). Ten years later, the mere election of a president without Southern votes would appear to them reason enough to destroy the Union.

The most prominent part of the address is Calhoun's utter rejection of compromise. And that makes him the Tea Party's real Founding Father.

Speaking of his section, the South, Calhoun said: "She has no compromise to offer but the Constitution, and no concession or surrender to make." He insisted that if the Union were endangered, it was not because of the atrocious institution of slavery that he spent most of his career defending, but due to the "agitation" of the opponents of slavery.

Having himself raised the specter of secession, Calhoun demanded that the North show that it loved the Union by surrendering unconditionally to southern demands.

Calhoun's tone finds its modern parallel in the current uncompromising attitude of the Tea Party Republicans on the debt ceiling. The crisis of 1850 was a crisis because slaveholders threatened secession if they did not get their way. Today the debt ceiling is a crisis because Tea Party Republicans have decided to take the previously uncontroversial vote and use it for leverage to impose an ideological agenda.

Southerners in 1850 were in the minority, but stood in the way of everything, blocking majorities from passing legislation of which they did not approve. Today, Republicans control the House, but are in the minority in the Senate and do not control the Executive branch. Yet they insist on a one-sided deal and threaten to cause default if they do not get their way.

Rather than accepting that their minority position meant that they were in no position to dictate, Southerners turned their weakness into a strength. They were willing to bring the house crashing down if they did not get their way. If the North did not give the South everything it wanted, Calhoun said, it would mean that "her love of power and aggrandizement is far greater than her love of the Union." This, coming from a man who raised the prospect of secession in the very first sentence of this speech!

For Calhoun, his support of slavery had become an inviolable principle. Any limit on the growth of the institution was, for him, a deal-breaker.

So it seems today with taxes and the Tea Party. Rep. Tom Graves, Republican and self-identified Tea Party Congressman from Georgia, said: "You know, when we hear the word 'compromise' on Capitol Hill, that's what got us into this mess over the last several decades…. This is no time for compromise."

Conventional wisdom has it that Speaker John Boehner wants a deal, and that fear of the Tea Party caucus is what prompted Majority Leader Eric Cantor's temper tantrum when taxes were raised in the bipartisan deficit reduction talks. It seems that Speaker John Boehner had to back away from a "grand bargain" this past weekend because he could not sell the Tea Partiers on a deal that included any increases in revenue.

Calhoun sought leverage in the South's willingness to destroy the unity of the nation over the issue of slavery. Today's anti-tax fanatics find leverage in their willingness to push the nation to the brink of financial disaster and debt default.

Being so committed to principle that you would prefer disaster to compromise is liberating, if reckless and irresponsible. Calhoun finished his address, and his political career, with these words: "I shall have the consolation let what will come, that I am free from all responsibility."

The next two weeks should tell whether Tea Party Republicans prefer flirting with disaster to governing with responsibility.

The Impending Crisis

2011-07-08T11:07:00.000-04:00

Washington, D.C. is full these days of talk of impending crisis and "grand bargains." For an American historian, those terms inevitably are reminiscent of the great compromises of the pre-Civil War era, all of which had something to do with the great divisive issue of the day, slavery. Can those crises tell us anything about today's events?

At first glance, the answer would seem to be "no." Slavery divided the country along sectional, not party, lines. But there are aspects of those crises that do provide some insight into the Republican, or more accurately, Tea Party approach to the debt limit.

And that pattern involves raising issues of policy to matters of dogmatic principle.

Earlier this week, New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote that if the Republicans do not take the deal that the Democrats are currently offering, it will mean that they are no longer a "normal" party. Yesterday, David Frum argued that the

coming vote [on the debt ceiling] is one where almost every House Republican will want to be on the losing side. But if they all get their wish – then they win. And of course … the country and the world loses, and loses horribly.

This idea of a compromise where everyone wants to be on the “losing side” is reminiscent of the Compromise of 1850, which preceded the Civil War by little more than 10 years. The difficulty of resolving the issues in 1850 were a harbinger of the utter inability to find a compromise a decade later.

The mindset today is similar to the one that prevailed in 1850. This morning on NPR's "On Point," Major Garrett of the National Journal said that the idea now is for a "too big to fail" or "big bang" deal; i.e., if everything is included, if all outstanding issues are addressed, then members of Congress will have to vote for it.

That was how Congress initially approached the problems of 1850. The "Great Compromiser" Henry Clay, leader of a special Senate committee, proposed what was called an "Omnibus" bill. According to James McPherson, in his Pulitzer Prize-winning Battle Cry of Freedom, "this package was designed to attract a majority from both sections by inducing each to accept the parts it did not like in order to get the parts it wanted."

It sounded like a good idea. The problem was, "as the legislators labored through the heat of a Washington summer" (sound familiar?), most congressmen "signified their intention to vote against the package in order to defeat the parts they opposed." Clay's Omnibus bill was defeated.

It is not a stretch to see the same thing happening to any "too big to fail" deal today. Republican leaders like Speaker John Boehner have been saying that a deal that includes any increase in tax revenue cannot pass the House. Minority leader Nancy Pelosi yesterday reacted strongly against any agreement that cut Social Security or Medicare.

So the prospects are not bright.

But there was a Compromise of 1850. Perhaps that holds out some path forward? Sadly, probably not.

After his bill was voted down on July 31, Clay left Washington in despair, fearing that the failure of his bill would mean disunion. Stephen Douglas, as McPherson puts it, decided to "pick up the pieces" and pass the bill--"in pieces." He divided the Omnibus into five parts, and then assembled ad hoc majorities for each of the five parts. This allowed most members of Congress to vote against the parts they did not like, while voting for those they did like.

In 1850, there were enough legislators willing to oppose the pull of sectional loyalty to make compromise possible. It is questionable whether such a strategy could prevail today. As stunning as it may be to say, today's uncompromising attitude, particularly coming from Tea Party types, seems even greater than the sectional stubbornness of 1850.

The next few weeks should tell us whether we are in worse shape than we were in 1850. Most Republicans in Congress (41 in the Senate and 236 in the House) have signed Grover Norquist's pledge not to raise any tax ever. Perhaps they will revolt, as some did in the recent vote on ethanol subsidies, and show themselves to be a "normal" party. But if not, there will be no "grand bargain."

[In my next post, I will examine the similarities between the Tea Party's demonization of compromise and the mindset of the leading opponent of compromise in 1850, John C. Calhoun.]

Michele Bachmann and the Frozen Founders

2011-07-04T11:59:00.000-04:00

Michele Bachmann's insistence that John Quincy Adams was one of the Founders produced a lot of sniggering last week. As many people have pointed out, the younger Adams was all of eight years old when the Declaration was signed 235 years ago.

The George Stephanopoulus interview was not the first time. Speaking in Iowa back in January, Bachmann said

we know there was slavery that was still tolerated when the nation began, we know that was an evil, and it was a scourge and a blot and a stain on our history. But we also know that the very founders who wrote those documents worked tirelessly until slavery was no more in the United States. And I think it is high time we recognize the contribution of our forbearers [sic] who worked tirelessly, men like John Quincy Adams, who would not rest until slavery was extinguished in the country.

Whenever a political figure insists on defending such a self-evidently wrong statement, it makes me wonder what lies beneath it. This isn't just ignorance. There is an ideological imperative she's obeying.

First, let's give Bachmann her due. John Quincy Adams was indeed an opponent of slavery. The problem is that his truly "tireless" activity on the subject came during his post-presidential career in Congress in the 1830s and 1840s. He was a figure of the second generation of American political leadership, not the first.

The irony is that there are many examples of people during the founding generation working against slavery. As Matt Yglesias has noted, actual Founders such as John Jay did fight slavery. The era of the revolution did see real progress on slavery--all of the northern states passed legislation for the gradual end to slavery within those states. So why not cite that actual history?

Because it is complicated, and Bachmann is looking for simplicity. To talk about the movement to end slavery in the northern states inevitably draws attention to the reality that the southern states not only did not follow, but over time grew more committed to maintaining slavery. The reason later generations had to work so "tirelessly" against slavery is that other Americans were working so tirelessly for it.

The reason the Founders did not end slavery in their new republic, one born with the phrase "all men are created equal," is that to insist on an end to slavery would have insured an end to the United States. As Robert Middlekauff writes in The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789, "white people in the North and South decided that for the time being at least the union that protected republican government was more important than a full-scale dedication to equality."

A truthful account of the Founders and slavery has to acknowledge this fact. They were something today's Tea Partiers say they abhor: compromisers. In the Constitutional Convention, they compromised on everything, most notably on slavery.

Another reason those later generations had to work so tirelessly to end slavery is that the Constitution so well ensconced slavery in the United States. Arguably the Constitution was the largest impediment to ending slavery. The abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison denounced the Constitution as a "covenant with death and an agreement with hell." He burned a copy of the Constitution in protest.

So to speak honestly and accurately of "the Founders" is to confront that messy reality.

Bachmann prefers her Founders simple, god-like, and unchanging. Since the Tea Party ideology deems the Constitution a sacred document, inspired by God (remember, it was Bachmann who enlisted the fraud David Barton to teach Constitution classes to Congress), those who wrote it must be responsible for all that is good. Thus she cannot be accurate. She cannot say some of the founders worked tirelessly against slavery while others defended it.

And since all good things must come from the Founders, she cannot note later Americans like Garrison who denounced the Constitution's compromises on slavery. No, abolition must trace back to "the Founders." All of them. She does not want real, fallible human beings. She wants icons, created in her own image and then frozen in time.

The alternative is simply not acceptable: she cannot admit that the Declaration, with its statement of great principles, was only imperfectly embodied in the Constitution. Because if we accept that the principles of the Founders expressed in the Declaration are renewed and reinterpreted by later generations, that the institutions we adopt to implement them change over time and are made "more perfect" in application, then the foundational idea of the Tea Party is nonsense.

Which, of course, it is. We cannot reflexively ask what "the Founders" would do or say, as if there is one objective answer to that question. The Declaration, whose adoption we celebrate today, is not only a gift to future generations. It is a burden. "The Founders" did not give us all the answers. They showed us the important questions, and challenged us to work out the answers for ourselves.

On this Independence Day, to truly honor their work, we should stop pretending we can lazily rely on them to tell us what to do, and instead take up the challenge of finding what it means in our times to strive for what "of Right ought to be."

Happy Fourth.

What DID Nixon Do? or, How NOT to Withdraw from Afghanistan

2011-06-28T15:17:00.000-04:00

When you study diplomatic history as I do, you become used to the cold-blooded calculus policymakers routinely employ in making their decisions. But an article in Sunday's New York Times was stunning even by that jaundiced standard.

The author Gideon Rose, the editor of Foreign Affairs, argues that President Obama, in looking for a way out of Afghanistan, should ask himself: "What Would Nixon Do?"

Aside from the self-evident obscenity of substituting the name "Nixon" where the popular mind is used to seeing "Jesus," the article also advocates that Obama emulate what is arguably the most cynical and dishonest part of Nixon's foreign policy record: his withdrawal from Vietnam.

It became common in the years of his post-Watergate disgrace for Nixon defenders to point to his foreign policy as a positive aspect of his presidency. Indeed, there is something to that. I would argue, for example, that the long-run effect of Nixon's policy of detente is due more credit for the end of the cold war than Ronald Reagan's military build-up in the 1980s.

But Rose takes that generally plausible point and stretches it beyond reason, asserting that "Mr. Nixon actually did a lot right in Vietnam." No, he did not.

Rose's argument is that Nixon had the right idea: "to walk away from the war ... and avoid formally betraying an ally." The key word here is "formally." Nixon knew, as Rose concedes, that "South Vietnam is never gonna survive anyway," as he said to Henry Kissinger. The objective was to make sure there was a decent interval between American withdrawal and South Vietnam's collapse, so that the U.S. would not look too bad.

This is the course Rose urges on Obama! He summarizes thus: "It will mean denying what is going on, aggressively covering the retreat and staying after leaving." To translate: lie, kill, lie some more.

Rose glosses over the costs of this policy. "Denying what is going on" helped destroy Nixon's credibility with the American public. "Aggressively covering retreat" included such things as the secret bombing of Laos and Cambodia (secret to Americans--the Laotians and Cambodians were well aware they were being bombed), the invasion of Cambodia (and subsequent destabilization that helped lead to the rise of the murderous Khmer Rouge), and unprecedented bombing of the North.

Nixon did all that, and prolonged the war for four long years, only to accept a peace that in the end was not appreciably different from the one he helped scuttle in 1968. In October, right before the election, LBJ was close to a peace agreement. Nixon's campaign sent word to the South Vietnamese president that he should not accept any LBJ-brokered agreement, because Nixon would get him a better one if elected. The negotiations collapsed, Nixon was elected, and the war dragged on.

What did Nixon accomplish in those four years? In the words of Kissinger in 1972, they found a "formula that holds the thing together for a year or two, after which ... no one will give a damn." They got that. South Vietnam collapsed in April 1975, over two years after the end of the American war.

What was the price of guarding America's image until no one gave a damn? Over 20,000 more Americans killed in action. You won't find that number anywhere in Rose's piece. Evidently that was not an important fact for him. There were about 100,000 South Vietnamese army soldiers killed in those years, even more North Vietnamese and Viet Cong. And that doesn't even count the civilian casualties.

Rose calls on Obama show more "tough-mindedness." He does not tell his readers how many people will have to die for this pointless show of machismo.

Lastly, Rose shrugs off the fact that Nixon's policy failed to in any way save the situation in South Vietnam. That, he wants us to believe, is not the product of the policy, but of the impact of Watergate and the unwillingness of Congress to support "staying after leaving." With different circumstances, he says, Obama could pull off what Nixon could not.

This is a common claim for those who continue to insist that somehow, someway, the Vietnam war really was winnable. If only Nixon hadn't been distracted by Watergate, they wail (neglecting the fact that Nixon's paranoia over the anti-war sentiment in the U.S. was directly related to the crimes we lump together as "Watergate"). If only Congress hadn't kept President Ford from bombing the North in 1975 (as if air power alone could somehow have saved that hopeless regime). Then we would have won, they say.

This is fantasy. Nixon knew that. He only wanted to save face, not save South Vietnam.

There are indeed times, especially in foreign policy, when a president must be cold-blooded, even ruthless. But he need not be stupid about it. I have serious doubts about the wisdom of Obama's Afghanistan surge, and fear what may come in the wake of the inevitable American withdrawal from that country. But I am confident he will not be foolish enough to take Rose's advice and make like Nixon.

"It may seem crazy to regard the American withdrawal from Vietnam as anything but disastrous," Rose writes. Well, at least he got that right.

Republicans Now Think Herbert Hoover was Wrong

2011-06-22T12:03:00.000-04:00

On his blog yesterday, Andrew Sullivan bemoaned the fact that Republican economic orthodoxy is preventing a reasonable deficit reduction deal:

The notion that Herbert Hoover was right has become quite a dogged meme on the reality-challenged right. It's bonkers.

He's half right--Republican orthodoxy that "government spending kills jobs" is "bonkers." But he's wrong that the right thinks Hoover was correct. It's worse than that--they think he was wrong, but not in the way we usually think.

The conservative consensus is not that Hoover was right and Franklin D. Roosevelt was wrong--it is that Hoover and Roosevelt were essentially the same and both were wrong.

The book most responsible for this "revisionism" is The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression by Amity Shlaes. Despite the subtitle, Shlaes is not a historian. She is a financial columnist. But her book on the Depression, because it fits the right's ideological predispositions, has become the conservative bible on how not to deal with economic depressions.

Shlaes, making the conservative argument against government efforts to combat depression, lumps the two presidents together:

From 1929 to 1940, from Hoover to Roosevelt, government intervention helped make the Depression Great.

While this characterization would surprise both men, it is the conventional wisdom on the right these days.

The Forgotten Man is the popularization of a position pushed by the libertarian Ludwig von Mises Institute. An article on their website, titled "Hoover's Attack on Laissez-Faire," makes this argument:

Herbert Clark Hoover must be considered the founder of the New Deal in America. Hoover, from the very start of the depression, set his course unerringly toward the violation of all the laissez-faire canons.

According to this view, there was no appreciable difference between Hoover and FDR. Both were "progressives" who together led the U.S. down the primrose path to economic perdition.

There is some kernel of truth in this. Historian Joan Hoff Wilson's book Herbert Hoover: Forgotten Progressive makes the argument that Hoover has been caricatured as a knee-jerk devotee of laissez-faire, when in fact he tried to combat the depression.

Hoover indeed had more in common with the Theodore Roosevelt progressive wing of the Republican Party than the Warren Harding/Calvin Coolidge/Andrew Mellon pro-business wing that dominated the 1920s and set the stage for the depression.

The laissez-faire right has seized upon this interpretation to explain away an inconvenient truth: the fact that the depression deepened and reached its worst depths during the presidency of a Republican, and then improved under FDR. If the New Deal was so terrible (an article of unquestioned dogma on the right), then how can this be?

The answer is to transform Hoover into the "the founder of the New Deal."

That's only half of the equation, however. By morphing Hoover into FDR, they maintain the illusion that government intervention worsened the depression. But how to prove that laissez-faire ends depressions?

Enter the "forgotten depression" of 1920. The same article quoted above compares Hoover's attack on laissez-faire to the policies of Harding and Mellon in the early 1920s:

In the 1920–1921 depression, ... wage rates were permitted to fall, and government expenditures and taxes were reduced. And this depression was over in one year — in what Dr. Benjamin M. Anderson has called "our last natural recovery to full employment."

Glenn Beck has popularized this view with videos such as this one, in which he makes the explicit case that "bailouts" and "stimulus" are precisely the wrong ways to approach economic downturns--instead, large tax cuts and draconian budget cuts are the solution.

And that, of course, is the faith-based economic policy of the Republicans today.

You could hardly ask for a better example of the influence of the popular perception of history on contemporary politics. Shlaes' book became the economic bible for Republicans in this recession. A concerted effort by libertarian economists over many decades up-ended the conventional historical wisdom.

Their view is now the orthodoxy of a political party with effective veto power over fiscal policy due to its control of the House. They control the debate. They seem poised to use the debt limit to force their view on all of us.

We may be on the verge of testing their theory. And the beauty of it all politically is that if they are wrong, they can still blame President Obama for the worsening economy, and ride the failure of their economic theory to political victory in 2012.

David Barton: The Right's Historical Propmaster

2011-06-17T12:16:00.000-04:00

David Barton is not a historian.

I know he calls himself a historian. I could call myself an astrophysicist, but I would have no right to expect anyone to take me seriously.

The problem is that while just about everyone knows that an astrophysicist needs specialized training, most people think that anyone can be a historian--you just need an interest in history, right?

No.

When I came to Wofford ten years ago, my history department colleagues decided that we needed a course in historical methods which would be a requirement for all of our majors. History is a discipline, and it has methods. There are specific skills the historian needs, and we decided we should teach them to our majors in a systematic fashion.

David Barton would fail that class.

When Barton appeared on "The Daily Show" last month, Jon Stewart helpfully pointed out that Barton is not an academic historian. Barton replied: "No, I don’t have a doctorate in that, I’ve got all the documents."

Now, documents are important--they are the foundation of every good work of history. But this is the equivalent of claiming to be an architect because you have lumber.

The most important thing we teach our history majors about documents is that they must be interpreted responsibly. We do an exercise in which we present the students with an excerpt from a book, and then ten different examples of how that material might be interpreted. In at least one example, the original material is--technically--quoted accurately, but in such a way as to misrepresent its meaning.

This is Barton's specialty. When Stewart tried to challenge Barton's interpretation of a letter by John Adams, Barton replied: "I posted that online. How can I misquote him when I put the whole letter up?" The point is that one can misinterpret without misquoting.

When Stewart tried to make that point, Barton said: "Show me some documentations where it’s taken out of context. They’ve never done that."

I've done that. As I showed in my previous post, Barton's website accurately quotes Thomas Paine's speech, but the selective editing takes Paine entirely out of context, for the clear purpose of making an ideological point. In this case, he most explicitly did not post the entire speech (or even provide a link to the entire speech). I would not accept that from an undergraduate student.

Every historian knows that looking at one document in isolation can be dangerous and misleading. That's why I looked at other examples of Paine's writing on education to see what he thought about religious influence in the classroom. When I did, it threw an entirely different light on the excerpt singled out by Barton.

Regardless of what Barton says, history is not merely the accumulation of documents. "We have 100,000 documents from before 1812," he told Stewart, as if that alone proved something. The important thing is what we do with the evidence.

Fortunately, Barton's slippery reading of documents was on full display in the Stewart interview. In arguing that the Constitution is a religiously based document, Barton says:

There are seven references in the Constitution to religion, whether it be Article Seven, and by the way, the Declaration is incorporated into the Constitution, Article Seven, so that’s four references to God.

Barton claims that there are seven references to religion in the Constitution. This is easy to check. The following words do not appear at all in the document: God, Creator, Christian. The word "religious" appears once ("no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States") as does religion ("Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof"). That's it.

So where does Barton get seven? He refers specifically to Article Seven. Here's the text of Article Seven:

The Ratification of the Conventions of nine States, shall be sufficient for the Establishment of this Constitution between the States so ratifying the same.

Confused? So was I. Then I kept reading. After Article Seven, we find this final passage:

done in Convention by the Unanimous Consent of the States present the Seventeenth Day of September in the Year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and Eighty seven and of the Independance of the United States of America the Twelfth.

Still confused? Barton counts the date language ("Year of our Lord") as the third reference to religion. The other four, he says, come from his view that "the Declaration is incorporated into the Constitution." Where does he get that?

Because the Constitution refers to the twelfth year of independence, he says, that "incorporated" all of the language of the Declaration into the Constitution. And since the Declaration has the words “Creator,” “Nature’s God,” “Supreme Judge of the World,” and “divine Providence,” that makes four references, for a total of seven in the Constitution.

You could not ask for a better example of a dishonest reading of a document. And that reading is in service of a pre-determined political position.

Fortunately, Barton himself inadvertently admitted that in the extended interview with Jon Stewart. Bragging about his access to conservative politicians, Barton said: "They call me and they say 'Is there anything in history about bailouts and stimulus?'"

Barton is the go-to guy when political conservatives need the quick quotation, probably ripped out of context, to give some legitimacy to a political position that they have already decided upon, regardless of what the Founders would think. They are not concerned with what the Founders actually thought. They want ammunition, not truth.

Barton is nothing more than the historical propmaster for political conservatives. Barton supplies what they need for their political theater. They use the prop, and when they are done, they lay it back on the prop table, awaiting the next performance.

Barton calls what he does "historical reclamation." A true historical reclamation requires that real historians expose Barton for the fraud he is, and call out cynical politicians like Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann when they call on Barton to teach Congress about the Constitution, and Mike Huckabee when they try to tell us that Barton is "single best historian in America today."

History as a Prop, Ctd: David Barton, Thomas Paine, and Creationism

2011-06-14T11:21:00.000-04:00

While I was working on my previous post on Palin and Paul Revere, I came across an article which quoted David Barton, the right's favorite faux "historian," claiming that the Founders had rejected the idea of evolution:

As far as the Founding Fathers were concerned, they'd already had the entire debate over creation and evolution, and you get Thomas Paine, who is the least religious Founding Father, saying you've got to teach Creation science in the classroom. Scientific method demands that!

Now, this didn't sound quite right to me, so I did some digging (unlike the article, which simply snarkily dismissed the idea that Paine, who died in 1809, could have rejected the ideas of Darwin, who was born in 1809).

My previous experience of Barton's claims led me to believe that he must have some basis for this statement, so I went to his website, Wallbuilders, to see what it was. Sure enough, there was a page entitled "Thomas Paine Criticizes the Current Public School Science Curriculum." And there, in a speech given in 1797 in France, Paine is in fact critical of what he calls "the error of the schools in having taught those subjects [science] as accomplishments only, and thereby separated the study of them from the Being who is the author of them."

So far, so good. Paine does say that the study of science should include reference to "the Creator" just as one studying art should "think of the extensive genius and talents of the artist." Modern-day proponents of "creation science" certainly would find some kinship with Paine there.

But I knew there was still something wrong. As Barton, in his introduction, is at pains to point out, "Thomas Paine was one of the very least religious of our Founders." So what gives?

Editing. Barton has posted only an excerpt from Paine's speech. So I did what any real historian would do, what David Barton does not want anyone to do: I found the complete speech.

The first thing a curious reader (i.e., someone sincerely looking to understand Paine's purpose, rather than trying to make a political point about "Current Public School Science Curriculum") finds is that education is not his subject. Paine is actually talking about proofs of God's existence. Such proof is not found in books of theology, he says, but in creation, in "the universe, the true Bible,—the inimitable work of God."

Barton distorts Paine's meaning, first, by editing out the introduction that shows Paine's purpose, and then by omitting the following passage which should be found in the midst of his excerpt:

The study of theology in books of opinions has often produced fanaticism, rancour, and cruelty of temper; and from hence have proceeded the numerous persecutions, the fanatical quarrels, the religious burnings and massacres, that have desolated Europe.

This is the Paine real historians know--the one who was appalled by the way religion had been used as an excuse for oppression. The scientific approach, Paine argued, leads to a different result:

we are by necessity forced into the rational comformable belief of the existence of a cause superior to matter, and that cause man calls GOD.

This is not Barton's Christian God. It is the Deist God, the original "cause."

Someone truly interested in what Paine actually thought of Christian education need not look far. In The Age of Reason, Paine had this to say about Europe's recent history:

the advocates of the Christian system of faith, could not but foresee that the continually progressive knowledge that man would gain by the aid of science, of the power and wisdom of God, manifested in the structure of the universe, and in all the works of creation, would militate against, and call into question, the truth of their system of faith; and therefore it became necessary to their purpose to cut learning down to a size less dangerous to their project ...

And what did Paine think of the creation story in the Bible?

it is certain that what is called the christian system of faith, including in it the whimsical account of the creation—the strange story of Eve, the snake, and the apple—the amphibious idea of a man-god—the corporeal idea of the death of a god—the mythological idea of a family of gods, and the christian system of arithmetic, that three are one, and one is three, are all irreconcilable, not only to the divine gift of reason, that God has given to man, but to the knowledge that man gains of the power and wisdom of God by the aid of the sciences, and by studying the structure of the universe that God has made.

In short, Paine is not even remotely making the point Barton says he is. Paine (not surprisingly) says not a word about evolution. His emphasis on "creation" is not the "creation science" of Barton's uninformed acolytes. It is the Deist's substitution of science for traditional theology, not an attempt to infuse theology into science.

Through science, Paine believed it was possible to come to a more unifying understanding of God: "the pure, unmixed, comfortable, and rational belief of a God, as manifested to us in the universe." Such an understanding, he believed, arrived at through the scientific study of creation, would unify all people and lead to the end of all religious sects, including Christianity.

As Barton and his followers show, however, Paine was too optimistic. Barton's project amounts to the creation of a false counter-history for religious/political purposes. The attempt to replace evolution with "creation science" reveals that far too many people today are just as hostile to scientific inquiry as those persecutors of Galileo whom Paine condemned for having "held it to be irreligious to study and contemplate the structure of the universe that God had made."

No, Mr. Barton, Thomas Paine didn't reject (or endorse) evolution. He did, however, disdain "the supporters or partizans of the christian system," because they, "as if dreading the result, incessantly opposed" honest scientific inquiry "and not only rejected the sciences, but persecuted the professors."

If I had to guess (and unlike Barton I actually admit that it is a guess), I suspect that Paine would prefer Darwin to Barton, in whom he would likely see the modern version of those who find it "necessary to their purpose to cut learning down to a size less dangerous to their project."

(In my next post, I'll discuss how Barton's "methodology"--really the lack thereof--makes him the foremost practitioner today of "history as a prop.")

Palin, Guns, and Paul Revere: History as a Prop

2011-06-10T00:03:00.000-04:00

Lots of people have been having lots of fun with Sarah Palin's latest adventure in American history (no one more than Stephen Colbert, whose "reenactment" of Palin's description of Paul Revere's ride is hysterically funny).

In case anyone missed it, here's how Palin described Revere and his famous ride:

"He who warned, uh, the ... the British that they weren't gonna be taking away our arms, uh, by ringing those bells and, um, by making sure that as he's riding his horse through town to send those warning shots and bells that, uh, we were gonna be secure and we were gonna be free ... and we were gonna be armed."

Watching it, I had a teacher's response. This is the student who hasn't done the reading, and doesn't know the material, but feels compelled to talk anyway. There's no need to rehash how badly Palin mangled the story (Andrew Sullivan has a good summary here). I'm more interested in why she felt the need to say anything about Revere in the first place.

In her subsequent interview with Chris Wallace, which is now infamous for Palin's refusal to admit any error, she made this revealing statement when asked what she was doing on the bus trip:

"I'm publicizing Americana ... and how important it is that we learn about our past ... we need to make sure we have a strong grasp of our foundational victories so we can move forward."

The reality, of course, is that Palin is not the least bit interested in learning about our past. She is only interested in using it for political purposes. So how was she trying to use it here?

She spoke about Revere because she wanted to make the story into a parable about the Second Amendment. She told Wallace that Revere's message to the British was

"you're not gonna take American arms. You are not gonna beat our own well-armed persons, uh, individual private militia that we have."

In this particular Palin word jumble, we can make out the language of the Second Amendment, but significantly mixed with the modern interpretation of the individual right to bear arms. The result is a new Palinism: the internally contradictory idea of the "individual private militia."

Having visited the Revere historical site, Palin had decided that the important point about Revere's ride was that armed Americans protected their arms against seizure by a tyrannical government, and one way or another, she was going to make that point, casting the Obama administration as the British, and herself, of course, as Revere.

Palin was asked: "What have you seen so far today, and what are you going to take away from your visit?" She seized upon what she now insanely calls a "gotcha" question to talk about Revere, not because she wanted to talk about history, but to make a demagogic political point about gun control.

She's not talking to people who know the Revere story, or care about telling it accurately. She's talking to people who know, despite the lack of any evidence whatsoever (or perhaps because of the lack of evidence), that the Obama administration is going to take their guns.

It is useless to try to correct Palin about the facts of history. She does not care. History, for such a person, is nothing more than a prop. It has no independent reality. It has only immediate political purpose. It can be twisted, contorted, refashioned into whatever shape the present moment demands.

Nothing speaks more eloquently to that point than the attempt by Palinistas to alter the Paul Revere Wikipedia page to conform to her version of events. They support her contemporary beliefs, and so history must be changed to fit her opinions, however mistaken they may be.

This isn't respect for history--it is contempt for history. We can only hope that history returns the favor.

Judicial Filibuster Flip-Floppery

2011-05-25T15:20:00.000-04:00

Flip-flops are fairly common in politics, but this one is a doozy.

Eight years ago, shortly after joining the Senate, Lindsey Graham considered filing a lawsuit against the Senate to challenge the constitutionality of filibustering judicial nominees.

Last week, Graham voted to filibuster a judicial nominee.

Eight years ago, of course, there was a Republican president. So Graham, along with Georgia's Saxby Chambliss, led "a charge to file a lawsuit against the very Senate they now serve in, challenging the constitutionality of Democratic filibusters of President Bush’s judicial nominees." Roll Call reported:

"Lindsey Graham and I have talked seriously and extensively about this," Chambliss said, noting that it would be some time before a final decision is made and the lawsuit actually filed. "We’re thinking through it, we’ve got people researching it."

In 2005, Graham said that "if the filibuster becomes an institutional response where 40 senators driven by special interest groups declare war on nominees in the future, the consequence will be that the judiciary will be destroyed over time."

Last week, Graham and 42 senators (41 of them Republicans) voted to filibuster President Obama's nominee, Goodwin Liu. South Carolina's other senator, Jim DeMint, who in 2005 said “denials of simple votes on judicial nominees” are “unconstitutional,” joined Graham in this "unconstitutional" vote.

This nominee has become a litmus test on the radical right. A website, Impeach Obama Campaign, has made much of this nominee, noting with outrage that "Liu has spent the last few years lecturing about his disdain for the U.S. Constitution. ‘[S]trict construction,’ he wrote in the Stanford Law Review, '[doesn't] make a lot of sense.'"

The constitutional originalists might be shocked to learn this, but you know who else thought that strict construction doesn't make a lot of sense? Alexander Hamilton. In his 1791 argument for a national bank, Hamilton skewered the Jeffersonian case based on strict construction. Writing of the necessary and proper clause, Hamilton argues that “the whole turn of the clause containing it, indicates that it was the intent of the convention, by that clause, to give a liberal latitude to the exercise of the specified powers.” Somehow the posers who claim to venerate the Founders always seem to forget that.

The assertion that opposition to strict construction is somehow radical is laughable, so Liu's opponents have take to citing Liu's strong opposition to Justice Alito's confirmation as justification for blocking an up-or-down vote. The New York Times reports that this is Graham's excuse for his hypocrisy:

“These statements about Judge Alito and the decisions he’s rendered and his philosophy are designed to basically say that people who have the philosophy of Judge Alito are uncaring, hateful and really should be despised,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina and one of the architects of the 2005 judicial compromise. “That is a bridge too far, because I share Judge Alito’s philosophy.”

And there Graham gives it away: he opposes the nominee because he disagrees with the nominee's philosophy (and he thinks the nominee insulted his own philosophy). Does he expect Barack Obama to appoint judges who share his views? Elections have consequences, and Graham's man McCain was decisively defeated in 2008.

Almost exactly six years ago, on May 24, 2005, Graham said: "we can treat our judicial nominees better, because if you institutionalize a filibuster, if every nominee is subject to having their life treated like these people have been treated, good men and women will not want to be judges; and that'd be a great loss for this country."

Evidently Graham only considers it a great loss if Republican men and women don't want to be judges. Or, perhaps, he just felt the heat from conservatives in South Carolina and decided he had to appease them with this vote. Either way, he's shown that when it comes to judicial nominations, he has no principles, just political interests.

First Principles (or, Romney Needs a History Lesson)

2011-05-20T14:35:00.000-04:00

President Obama's speech yesterday on American policy toward the Arab Spring and the Middle East has prompted a host of hysterical responses on the right, most of which suggest that the president has done something radical by saying: "The borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps, so that secure and recognized borders are established for both states."

As numerous commentators have noted, this is not anything new, but the right is so accustomed at this point to reflexively condemning any position that Obama takes as "radical" that it is hardly a surprise.

What is somewhat surprising is the following comment by Mitt Romney that Andrew Sullivan picked up on:

"[The president] has also violated a first principle of American foreign policy, which is to stand firm by our friends."

Romney needs a history lesson.

If you want to talk about first principles of American foreign policy, you can't do better than the definitive statement by George Washington in his Farewell Address. And what would Washington think about this idea that the U.S. should "stand firm by our friends"?

[N]othing is more essential, than that permanent, inveterate antipathies against particular Nations, and passionate attachments for others, should be excluded ... The Nation, which indulges towards another an habitual hatred, or an habitual fondness, is in some degree a slave. It is a slave to its animosity or to its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty and its interest.... a passionate attachment of one Nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite Nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest, in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter, without adequate inducement or justification.

Washington would be appalled at Romney's statement, but knee-jerk support for the foreign policy of the Israeli government has become yet another article of faith on the right. But nothing could be more contrary to "first principles" of American foreign policy.

Washington, of course, knew of what he spoke. He had spent the previous three years fending off American friends of France, who wanted the U.S. to do whatever it could to support revolutionary France in its wars. Washington, wisely, determined that American interests were not involved in those European conflicts and he remained uninvolved.

The pro-French faction, like Romney today, argued that the U.S. should stick by France out of friendship because of French aid in the American Revolution. It is that fundamental error that Washington noted when he argued that such a "principle" would lead Americans "to betray or sacrifice the interests of their own country."

Someone needs to tell Romney that the "first principle" of American foreign policy is, and always has been, to pursue American national interests.

Credit, Where It Isn't Due

2011-05-11T08:24:00.000-04:00

It has almost been amusing, watching the contortions of Republicans trying to reconcile their reflexive disdain for Barack Obama with the unquestionable merit of his accomplishment in the bin Laden operation. Ever since he emerged as the Democratic nominee in 2008, they have tried to paint him as unprepared, naïve, and indecisive. His measured but steely command in this instance has given the lie to those charges.

In response, Republicans have launched a campaign to argue that any success Obama may have had is due to his continuing the policies of the Bush administration. The more shameless variety has even tried to assert that the lead that eventually led to bin Laden originated from Bush-era torture. Others, like Ross Douthat of the New York Times, have made a more subtle--but no more convincing--case.

Douthat's column on Monday claims that "the daylight between the foreign policies of George W. Bush and Barack Obama has been shrinking ever since the current president took the oath of office." Not satisfied with that somewhat dubious claim, he even refers to the "Bush-Obama era."

Douthat is not completely wrong: there is a trite truth in his observation, one that seems shocking to people who pay more attention to campaign rhetoric than to policy, but is glaringly obvious to those who know our history. Students of American diplomacy know that continuity in foreign policy is more common than dramatic change, even when the presidency changes parties.

Perhaps the best example of how overheated political rhetoric can create the illusion of major policy differences comes from the 1952 campaign. Dwight Eisenhower, seeking to placate the McCarthyite right-wing of the Republican Party, suggested that he would pursue rollback of communism rather than mere containment. In reality, he did no such thing. Most famously, when the people of Hungary bravely rose up in 1956, Eisenhower did nothing. Like Harry Truman before him, he knew that acting to liberate the states of eastern Europe would mean World War III. He practiced containment too.

That does not mean, however, that there was no difference between Truman and Eisenhower. The latter feared that limited wars, like the one in Korea, would sap America's military and economic strength, and he determined to avoid them. When the French pleaded for American intervention in Vietnam in 1954, he said no. He relied far more on covert action (such as the CIA-assisted coup that brought the Shah to power in Iran) and nuclear brinksmanship to accomplish his goals.

There were continuities, to be sure. There always are: the nation's core interests do not change overnight. But there were important differences, too.

And that brings us back to Douthat's column. He asserts, seemingly in all seriousness, that "the most visible proof of this continuity" between Bush and Obama is the killing of bin Laden. The raid that killed Osama, he says, "operationalized Bush's famous 'dead or alive' dictum.'"

This is almost too silly to rebut. Bush's "dictum," as he calls it, was not a policy. It was an all-too-typical example of Bush's knee-jerk bravado, one that he did not follow up with a consistent and focused policy. When bin Laden was seemingly trapped at Tora Bora in December 2001, the necessary troops were not sent to prevent his escape, likely because the administration had already shifted its attention and resources to the coming war in Iraq.

Six months after the attacks on 9/11, Bush glibly said: "I don't know where he is, nor, I just don't spend that much time on him, to be honest with you." He said that people who were fixated on bin Laden lacked understanding: "The idea of focusing on one person really indicates to me that people don't understand the scope of the mission." By March 2002, Bush had decided "the mission" was moving on to invading Iraq.

Contrast that to Obama. He opposed the war in Iraq from the start. From the beginning of his campaign for the presidency in 2007, Obama has been saying that it was a mistake to take the nation's focus off Afghanistan, and that as president, he would finish the job against Al Qaeda there. Obama also said back in 2007 that capturing or killing Osama bin Laden would be a priority, even if he were in Pakistan (and he was roundly criticized by conservatives for that position). By that time, the Bush administration had long stopped talking about bin Laden.

It is simply not true to say, as Douthat does, that Obama was merely completing what Bush started. On the two major pieces of unfinished foreign policy business that Bush bequeathed to Obama--the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan--Obama has reversed the Bush's priorities, with positive results. He has done much to salvage something positive from the shambles he inherited.

This pathetic attempt by conservative critics to credit Bush for Obama's accomplishment does have some small merit, come to think of it. If Bush had done his job well, Obama never would have had the opportunity to clean up his predecessor's mess.

The White House and Ground Zero: Bearing Witness

2011-05-02T03:10:00.000-04:00

It was seeing the crowds that got to me.

I was a child in the sixties. Crowds gathering in front of the White House then did not come in a spirit of unity. They came in anger, anger at a war they did not believe in. Later they came to drive a crooked president from office.

Last night they came to the president's house in solidarity, in response to the news that a man who ordered the death of 3,000 Americans had died. And that he had died knowing that after nearly ten years, American soldiers were bringing the war that he declared to his doorstep. The man who so casually sent others to their deaths was himself the latest casualty in that war.

They came. By the dozen, then by the hundreds, they came. Just to be there, and to be together.

News commentators compared it to V-E or V-J day in 1945. That may be too much, but certainly it is historic. There has been nothing quite like this in my lifetime.

And then there were the people flocking to Ground Zero in New York.

I was born and raised in New Jersey, and New York is the major city I know best. I've been to the city many times since 9/11, but I never could go to Ground Zero. I knew no one who died there that day, and the idea of going there seemed like worst kind of macabre voyeurism. It was not my place.

But all kinds of people went there when they heard the news. Many had lost someone on 9/11. Others were young, and probably count not remember a time when that man and the threat he represented did not hover over them like the mushroom clouded hovered over my childhood in the years after the Cuban missile crisis.

They reclaimed that space. It will always be a place of mourning. But tonight it also became a place of vindication, one for all Americans.

The horror he started will not automatically end with his death. He was just one man. This is not a movie. Killing the bad guy does not mean it is over.

But for one night at least, Americans could take some satisfaction in knowing that the living embodiment of the evil of that awful day had to, at last, pay for his crimes. As the crowds spontaneously moving to the White House and Ground Zero said with their actions, it was an occasion for bearing witness.

The Thirty Years' War on Medicare

2011-04-25T08:21:00.000-04:00

“In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”—Ronald Reagan, First Inaugural address, Jan. 20, 1981

That line, uttered over 30 years ago, was the first shot in a political war that may be coming to a head.

Ever since Reagan turned the New Deal mentality of the Democrats on its head with that clever statement, the Republican Party has been waging a long battle against the idea that government is necessary to solve problems that the market economy has failed to.

That is the proper context for Rep. Paul Ryan's budget plan that effectively ends Medicare. It is not the product of Tea Party demands. Quite the contrary: the Tea Party is, at least in part, a result of thirty years of relentless Republican insistence that we cannot afford government programs and that taxes must always, but always, be cut.

Ryan talks about "reforming" Medicare. This needs to be stated plainly, and repeatedly: Ryan is not proposing to reform Medicare. He means to end it. Yes, he protects those currently on Medicare and those over 55 who expect to have it. But everyone else will not get it. At all. It will cease to exist. The program that began in 1965, and that pays the medical bills of the elderly, will come to an end, and in the future retired Americans will have to buy private health insurance.

It is worth remembering why LBJ proposed Medicare in the first place. As he said in his statement to Congress proposing the program, "almost half of the elderly have no health insurance at all," and "the average retired couple cannot afford the cost of adequate health protection under private health insurance." For 45 years, Medicare has solved that problem.

And now the House Republicans have voted to end that program.

The most ideological Republicans have never reconciled themselves to the existence of Medicare. In 1964, Ronald Reagan made his national political debut making a speech advocating Barry Goldwater’s candidacy: “we're against forcing all citizens, regardless of need, into a compulsory government program.”

Goldwater lost that election, getting a lower percentage of the popular vote than Herbert Hoover did in 1932. Undeterred, Reagan issued an LP recording of a speech against the passage of Medicare in 1965. He famously (and foolishly) concluded that if Medicare were not stopped,

one day . . . we will awake to find that we have socialism. And if you don't do this, and if I don't do it, one of these days, you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children, and our children's children, what it once was like in America when men were free.

But Medicare did pass, with large majorities (307-116 in the House and 70-24 in the Senate). And America is, somehow, still free.

But some Republicans have never given up the fight to do away with it. Their major problem is the overwhelming popularity of the program. When Jimmy Carter tried to hit Reagan with his earlier opposition to Medicare during their presidential debate in 1980, Reagan, sensing the danger, brushed it off with a bit of political misdirection:

When I opposed Medicare, there was another piece of legislation meeting the same problem before the Congress. I happened to favor the other piece of legislation and thought that it would be better for the senior citizens and provide better care than the one that was finally passed.

It is true that Republicans tried to thwart the passage of Medicare back in 1965 with an alternative they called "Bettercare." Historian Robert Dallek has described it as "a voluntary plan providing federal payments of insurance premiums for older persons with low incomes." In other words, it is similar to Ryan's plan to provide vouchers to buy insurance. The main difference is that the Republicans in 1965 were not pretending to reform LBJ's proposal—they aimed to prevent it. (Also, in 1965 they admitted that their plan "would leave most elderly Americans uncovered.")

The true lineage of Ryan’s plan is from Reagan, via Bob Dole and Newt Gingrich in the 1995 budget showdown with Bill Clinton.

In October 1995, then-Senate majority leader Dole boasted about his opposition to Medicare: "I was there, fighting the fight, voting against Medicare" when the plan was passed in 1965, he proudly said. Gingrich denounced Medicare as "a centralized command bureaucracy." This is how he explained the fact that Republicans were only calling for cuts in funding rather than abolition: "Now we don’t get rid of it in round one because we don't think that's politically smart…. But we believe it is going to wither on the vine because we think people are going to leave it voluntarily."

That goal has not changed, but in the last decade, Republicans have learned their lessons. They don’t denounce Medicare and take pride in voting against it, they don’t talk about it withering on the vine. Instead they call their attack "reform." (When George W. Bush pushed his plan for Social Security privatization in 2005, he too called it “reform,” though it was not significantly different from the basic vision of a voluntary opt-out also proposed in 1964 by Goldwater and Reagan.)

If there is a cause for optimism here, it is that the ideologues pushing this radical abolition of Medicare know that they cannot be honest about what they are doing. The program is simply too popular. In a recent CBS News/New York Times poll, 76% believe that providing health insurance coverage for the elderly is a responsibility of the federal government, 61% think the costs of Medicare are “worth it,” 57% think there is no need to make any changes to Medicare to help balance the budget, and 56% would rather raise taxes than reduce benefits.

But unless President Obama and the Democrats drive home the essential truth that this “reform” is actually repeal, Reagan’s dream may come true. In that same poll, a question asking if “changing” Medicare to help people buy insurance would meet their approval, 47% said yes, while 41% said no. The Republicans can only win their long war against Medicare by stealth. The defenders of Medicare must make Republicans fight out in the open, or they may lose the war.

"And the War Came"

2011-04-12T07:58:00.000-04:00

One hundred and fifty years ago today, cadets from the Citadel fired on U.S. Army soldiers at Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor, and began the American Civil War. Ironically, the first battle of the epic struggle that would take over 600,000 American lives over the next four years had no fatalities. Today, re-enactors will stage that event again, and one can only hope that they do so with a sense of commemoration rather than celebration.

While most Americans know that events at Fort Sumter began the war, few really understand what happened and why. This is no accident. Apologists for the Confederate cause have worked long and hard to cleanse the national memory of any accurate recollection of why that event began the hostilities. But on this day, of all days, it is worth remembering who fired the shots, and why they did.

While neo-Confederates to this day speak without irony of the "War of Northern Aggression," the facts of that day prove the lie inherent in that utterly false label.

Lincoln was from the start determined that he would not begin hostilities. In his first inaugural address, on March 4, 1861, he made that abundantly clear: "The government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors." He was determined that if there were to be civil war, he would not fire the first shot.

The problem was this: secession had a concrete, practical side. With a much smaller federal presence in those days, often the most common federal property in a state was the post office, which easily passed into state hands. More problematic were military bases occupied by American soldiers, of which Fort Sumter was the most prominent. South Carolina demanded it be turned over to the state. First President Buchanan, and then Lincoln, refused.

A month after Lincoln became president, the Stars and Stripes still flew over the fort, taunting the Confederates on the shore. Lincoln made clear that he would not give it up and announced that he was sending a ship with food to provision the fort. If nothing were done, the standoff could go on indefinitely.

That was Lincoln's "aggression." He refused to turn over the fort and sent food to the American soldiers stationed there.

The Confederates started the war because they feared that without an attack to take the fort, the Confederacy would flounder. It had been two months since any state seceded. Important slave states like North Carolina, Tennessee, and most significantly, Virginia, remained in the Union.

The longer Lincoln presided over the country without lifting a finger to interfere with the functioning of slavery, the more absurd the secessionist caricature of him would appear. An Alabama newspaper appealed to Jefferson Davis to take the fort by force: "Sir, unless you sprinkle blood in the face of the people of Alabama, they will be back in the Union in less than ten days!"

The Confederate decision to initiate hostilities was meant to avoid that outcome. Faced with the prospect of peaceful reconstruction of the Union, Davis decided on war. The combat had the desired result: four more states joined the Confederacy, including Virginia.

Like secession itself, the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter was self-defeating. Lincoln had publicly committed himself to take no offensive military action against the Confederacy. Without Confederate aggression at Fort Sumter, Lincoln would have been hard pressed to take any meaningful action to enforce federal authority over the Confederate states. The Confederate leadership resolved that issue for him.

The title of this post is taken from Lincoln's second inaugural (and also serves as the title of one of the classic works of history on the beginning of the Civil War by the great historian Kenneth Stampp). "Both parties deprecated war," Lincoln said in the spirit of charity that permeates the address. He did not, however, fail to note the difference between the two sides: "but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. And the war came."

The final phrase reflects Lincoln's fatalism, but not before he made clear what all Americans should remember on this day: there is an important distinction between those who make war and those who accept it.

A Policy, not a Doctrine

2011-04-05T08:17:00.001-04:00

Ever since President Obama's speech last week explaining his Libya policy, there has been much talk among pundits about a supposed "Obama Doctrine." The president, however, has steadfastly resisted such a characterization. There is no Obama Doctrine, he says. While I have many doubts about the wisdom of Obama's actions in Libya, he undoubtedly is right to resist attempts to straightjacket him with a doctrine.

Ever since Secretary of State John Quincy Adams in 1823 developed what became known as the Monroe Doctrine, Americans have become accustomed to foreign policy doctrines. In the years since World War II, we've seen a veritable explosion of such doctrines—the Truman Doctrine, the Eisenhower Doctrine, the Carter Doctrine, the Reagan Doctrine—and those are just the ones that caught on.

In each case, a specific foreign policy situation gave rise to general statement of policy meant to guide American diplomacy in other cases as well. Today, numerous voices are trying to do the same thing. But the problem with doctrines is that they tend to encourage doctrinaire behavior.

The Monroe Doctrine, for example, was prompted by American concern that the states of Latin America, which had recently become independent of Spain, might fall once again under control of European powers. The first of the American doctrines was meant to deter any such attempt by expressing American opposition:

“the American continents … are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers.”

While it was Britain's opposition (and the ability of its navy to make good on that policy) that was the more effective deterrent, the statement also proclaimed an American sphere of influence in the western hemisphere. Eighty years later, Teddy Roosevelt transformed that doctrine into a justification for American intervention in the same states the original doctrine was designed to protect from European intervention.

More recently, the Truman Doctrine had similar unintended consequences. His speech to Congress in March 1947 was prompted by specific circumstances—the need to bolster Greece and Turkey in the face of pressure from communist forces. But the administration took the opportunity to proclaim what became known as containment:

“I am fully aware of the broad implications involved if the United States extends assistance to Greece and Turkey … I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.”

The universalism of that statement went well beyond the immediate needs of the moment, and was meant to send a general message that the U.S. would resist further communist expansion in Europe.

But it did not specify Europe. It did not distinguish between vital and peripheral interests. Years later, as communists made gains in Vietnam, the existence of this "doctrine" helped to constrain the actions of future administrations. The father of containment, State Department official George F. Kennan, never intended the policy to apply to a far-off state in southeast Asia. Twenty years after Truman's speech, 500,000 American soldiers were in Vietnam.

These are the kinds of unintended consequences that doctrines can produce, and that's exactly what Obama was trying to avoid by so carefully resisting any implication that his actions in Libya are some kind of precedent for future policy.

One of the voices calling for a doctrine is former Democratic senator and presidential candidate Gary Hart: "now would be a good time President Obama to announce an 'Obama Doctrine' similar to the Truman Doctrine … We cannot simply respond in ad hoc fashion to these local and regional crises." Ironically, Hart cut his political teeth as a campaign official in George McGovern's anti-Vietnam war presidential campaign in 1972, and is now calling for a new doctrine that could well create pressure for another Vietnam.

Obama has learned this particular historical lesson better than that. He may well yet be proven wrong in Libya, but he has been right to resist a doctrinaire foreign policy that might wrongly restrict his future options and those of his successors.

Dim Bulbs, Trivializing Rights

2011-03-31T14:39:00.000-04:00

Being of a certain age, I remember when conservatives understood what freedom is and what tyranny is. They used to talk about “captive nations,” denounce the “gulag,” and declare “Tear down this wall!” Back in the 1950s, President Eisenhower signed into law a bill declaring the third week in July “Captive Nations Week,” a way of calling for the end of communist governments in Eastern Europe. You know, the kind of governments that actually denied their peoples freedom.

But in Columbia, South Carolina in the year 2011, freedom isn’t threatened by the secret police dragging dissidents to late-night interrogations. It isn’t denied via a one-party state (well, at least not officially). No, in our time, freedom means something else.

Now freedom means incandescent light bulbs.

The South Carolina legislature spent time Wednesday debating what they are calling the Incandescent Light Bulb Freedom Act. As Dave Barry likes to say when he cites something seemingly too silly to be true, I am not making this up. These brave, freedom fighter legislators are looking to protect the people of South Carolina from the assault on freedom represented by a federal energy standards law passed in 2007, which mandated greater energy efficiency in light bulbs.

The leading sponsor of this legislation, Rep. Bill Sandifer of Seneca, S.C., argues that this is a matter of rights: “These rights to have the kind of light bulbs we want and need are our rights. They are not given to the federal government.”

Have we really gotten to the point where the right wing in this state defines “rights” as being able to buy the exact kind of light bulb you want to? I rather doubt this is what John Locke had in mind when he wrote his Two Treatises of Government.

And what essential right is threatened by this electrical tyranny? Rep. Mike Pitts of Laurens, S.C. tells us: “Did you know that light bulbs that are going to be required by the federal government cannot be used in an Easy-Bake Oven?” That’s right. They are trying to preserve the freedom to use an Easy-Bake Oven. It’s what the Founders would want.

Even when we dismiss this nonsense that our rights are threatened by energy efficiency regulations, the idea that the energy efficiency law is taking away choices is simply not true. An article from July 2009 points out that the effect of the law will be innovation, not extinction, for the incandescent bulb:

Indeed, the incandescent bulb is turning into a case study of the way government mandates can spur innovation.

“There’s a massive misperception that incandescents are going away quickly,” said Chris Calwell, a researcher with Ecos Consulting who studies the bulb market. “There have been more incandescent innovations in the last three years than in the last two decades.”

In other words, the very premise of the South Carolina bill is mistaken. A portion of the AP story (edited from the version printed in the Spartanburg Herald-Journal) explains:

David Jenkins, spokesman for Republicans for Environmental Protection, said the federal legislation is misunderstood. “The government is not actually 'phasing out' incandescent light bulbs in favor of fluorescent bulbs,” Jenkins said. “The law is technology neutral; it merely establishes energy efficiency standards for bulbs -- much like the efficiency standards for appliances that were established during the Reagan Administration.”

While people knock compact fluorescent bulbs, Jenkins said, there are alternatives, including halogen and LED bulbs. He expects the LED bulbs will ultimately win over consumers as prices come down.

What this story shows is how trivial our politics has become. At a time when people all over North Africa and the Middle East are literally putting their lives on the line for freedom and standing up to actual tyranny, we in South Carolina have our elected representatives making fools of themselves by equating freedom with light bulbs. They cheapen one of the noblest concepts in human history, one that millions of people have died for, with this joke of a bill.

Like the light bulbs they love, the sponsors of this bill are both wasting energy and throwing off more heat than light.

The United States, Libya, and the "Arab 1848"

2011-03-21T08:41:00.000-04:00

A number of observers, such as Andrew Sullivan, have been calling the events of the last two months in North Africa and the Middle East the "Arab 1848." The reference is to the numerous revolutions that swept the states of Europe in 1848.

I've just recently covered that period of history in my Western Civilization class, so I've been pondering the implications of the analogy, particularly in light of last week's UN resolution authorizing the use of force against Qaddafi's Libya.

The most sobering fact about the original 1848 is the ultimate failure of most of the revolutionary movements. While the wave of revolutions in 1848 showed the enduring power of ideas like liberal ideology and nationalism, most of the early gains were wiped out by a conservative counterattack.

When examining that failure, historians usually emphasize the splits between liberals and nationalists and between the middle and working classes. Starting a revolution can be the easiest part; coming to a common understanding of its goals is often the hardest. Those divisions were exploited by conservatives who sometimes used brutal force to re-establish their power.

But there is one other factor I mention: the fact that Great Britain, the most liberal power in Europe at the time, did not intervene to aid the liberal and nationalist forces. And that's where the analogy to today kicks in again. The United States now stands in relation to the Arab revolutions as Britain did to the ones in Europe in 1848.

The British Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston, was primarily concerned with maintaining the balance of power in Europe. That had been Britain's chief objective for decades, and all players understood that by weighing in, Britain could tip the balance. According to The Cambridge History of British Foreign Policy, "Appeals poured in upon him from all sides — desperate cries for help from distressed potentates, insistent demands for aid from struggling patriots."

While Palmerston "iterated and re-iterated with a frequency that became monotonous his exhortations to the dynastic despots to make timely concessions to national democracy," he rebuffed all pleas for outright intervention for liberal or nationalist causes.

For example, when the Hungarian nationalist leader Louis Kossuth begged for British assistance in the face of Russian intervention to re-impose Austrian rule over Hungary, Palmerston resisted, even though "British public opinion ... began to express itself clearly and loudly on the Hungarian side."

Palmerston was personally appalled by the crackdown against the revolutionaries, writing privately that he thought the "Austrians are really the greatest brutes that ever called themselves by the undeserved name of civilised men." In the end, however, he contented himself with diplomacy to help save Kossuth's life, not his Hungarian regime.

Up until last week, the United States had been largely able to avoid making any such hard choices about active intervention in the Arab 1848. The protests in Tunisia and Egypt ended with repressive leaders stepping down, while other protests, such as the one in Morocco, never reached the boiling point.

And then came Libya.

Qaddafi's brutal use of military force to quell the protests and subsequent rebellion raise the specter of the conservative backlash that destroyed the revolutionary momentum of 1848.

Despite its sympathies, Britain then was not on an ideological crusade, and it remained on the sidelines. This week, the U.S., prompted ironically by Britain and France, entered the fray. While the Obama administration has avoided stating that it is now committed to the fall of the Qaddafi regime, that is the reality. Whether or not that is wise remains to be seen.

In my classes, I always say that the lack of British intervention was, compared to the splits among the revolutionaries themselves, a relatively minor factor in the outcomes of 1848. But we'll never know if a different British response might have produced a different outcome. Although there is no way truly to replay history, this intervention in Libya may be as close as we can get.

Obama Baffles the Baby Boomers

2011-03-07T08:09:00.001-05:00

Andrew Sullivan had a nice post on Friday praising President Obama's restraint and refusal to take credit for what Sullivan is calling the Arab 1848. When Mubarak left office, Obama rightly said "Today belongs to the people of Egypt." The credit, he made clear, was all theirs. According to Sullivan, Obama's "willingness not to take credit" is "part of his nature." While that's true, it is, I think, only part of the story. The rest is generational.

Baby boomers of the left and right have a common trait: they tend to see the United States at the center of everything. For far left groups like the Weather Underground in the late 1960s, the U.S. was the root of all evil. For the "love it or leave it" right, America was unquestionably the source of all good. But in either case, whatever happened in the world, for good or ill, was due to American action (or inaction).

Obama, by temperament and by generational background, eschews such extreme views, and in doing so, confounds his opponents who remain mired in the 1960s political and cultural divisions that shaped them.

Depending on how one dates the baby boomer phenomenon, Obama, who was born in 1961, is either post-boomer or late-boomer. In my view, he is our first post-boomer president. The previous, World War II generation, had a long 32 year run in the presidency. Every president from John F. Kennedy to George H.W. Bush was 18 years old or older during the war. By contrast, the two boomer presidents, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, only held the presidency for 16 years.

I define Obama as post-boomer because he came of political age after the polarizing issues of the 1960s. He was too young to be a participant in the vehement disagreements over the Vietnam war. He came of political age in a later time: the post-Watergate troubles of the late 1970s and the Reagan revolution of the 1980s.

Why does this matter? This past week, Roger Newman of the Columbia School of Journalism gave a talk at Wofford and I was invited to have dinner with him afterwards. During the dinner conversation, the topic turned to the question of when American politics became so polarized. Newman, who is of the Vietnam generation, argued that Reagan's election was the turning point. I argued that it was the Clinton-Gingrich confrontation of the early to mid-1990s that was more significant. I've been thinking about that disagreement, and I think it comes down to this: For Newman's generation, Reagan represented the conservative enemy of the 1960s coming to power to reverse the gains of that decade.

But as harsh as the criticism of Reagan was from the left in the early 1980s, I would argue that it never reached the depths of personal vilification that greeted Clinton in the early 1990s. Reagan was denounced by the left as a man of the past, even a reactionary. Clinton, on the other hand, was accused of being a draft dodger, a murderer, a drug dealer, a traitor (the last for protesting against the Vietnam war while studying abroad). These accusations almost always had their roots in the cultural and political divisions of the 1960s. He came to embody for conservatives everything that they had loathed about that decade.

Similarly, Newt Gingrich embodied the radical right's rejection of the social and cultural developments of the 1960s. While condemning the results, he often embraced the extremist tactics of the radical left: he consciously demonized the opposition in an effort to discredit them as un-American.

Beginning with Gingrich, the baby-boomer right in the U.S. developed a consistent campaign theme: their opponents were not merely wrong on the issues, they were anti-American. With figures like Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and John Kerry, the boomer right employed themes pulled directly from the cultural and political baggage of the 1960s. These tactics have proven successful enough, at least with the base, that they remain addicted to them, even when the new target, Obama, is maddeningly inappropriate for them.

Last fall, Gingrich said of Obama: "he worked very hard at being a person who is normal, reasonable, moderate, bipartisan, transparent, accommodating--none of which was true ... He was authentically dishonest." Gingrich is not describing Obama--he is describing what he wishes Obama would be: a mirror image of Gingrich.

Think back to the 2008 campaign and Sarah Palin's favorite line, that Obama "palled around with terrorists." That of course was a reference to Obama's acquaintance with 1960s radical, Bill Ayers. Obama was too young for 1960s radicalism, so they tried guilt by association. Last August, boomer Rush Limbaugh, whose rise to prominence coincided with the Clinton administration, called Obama "our first anti-American president." While hawking his new memoir, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld reiterated another common trope: that Obama "has made a practice of trying to apologize for America," a none-too-subtle suggestion that the president, like the radical left in the 1960s, thinks America is evil.

Last week, Mike Huckabee took this absurdity to new lengths for a supposedly mainstream politician by falsely stating that Obama grew up in Kenya and somehow trying to associate him with the Mau Mau revolution in Kenya. Huckabee surely knows that for Americans of a certain age, the term "Mau Mau" has a particular resonance. It was part of the anti-civil rights backlash that helped turn the solid Democratic south into the solid Republican south. The phrase came from a 1970 book by Tom Wolfe. "Mau Mauing" meant the intimidation of whites by the "angry black male" of the Black Panther variety.

No reasonable person could describe Obama in that way, and yet we hear the right do it time and again. He's socialist, he's foreign, he is not "one of us." They make themselves look utterly ridiculous by trying to fit Obama into their 1960s style preconceptions of what he should be, and yet they persist. Certainly the first African-American president can not be someone who is the epitome of the values conservatives say they cherish: hard work, education, faith, public service, devotion to family. So they recreate him in their own perverse mirror image. The more Obama proves them wrong by being truly reasonable and refusing to conform to the boomer stereotypes, the more they flail about, making increasingly absurd charges, removing themselves further and further from reality. And the more ridiculous they look, trapped in the debates of the past, the more likely they make it that Obama will be our leader for the foreseeable future.

The Walker Tape

2011-03-02T09:46:00.000-05:00

Last week, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker was punked by a website reporter claiming to be billionaire David Koch. The tape of their 20-minute phone conversation was posted on the internet, leading to an all-too-brief firestorm around Walker’s comments.

The reaction that interests me is this one, from Tim Carpenter, a Wisconsin State Senator, who wrote: “Governor Walker, this tape would make Richard Nixon blush.”

Carpenter evidently has not been listening to the Nixon tapes.

Whenever a politician is caught on tape, the Nixon analogy is the easy one. But there’s a danger in it. We have a wealth of material, thousands of hours of Nixon. What they reveal is a singularly unappealing portrait. No one tape, not even Walker’s, can live up to that record. As a result, whoever is compared to Nixon fairly comes off looking, at least comparatively, not so bad.

Nixon’s White House tapes are infamous for their revelations of Nixon’s prejudices. There are many examples, but just last December a new crop of tapes was released that included the following gems:

“Virtually every Irish I've known gets mean when he drinks. It's sort of a natural trait. Particularly the real Irish."

(I can’t help wondering if my German ancestry would disqualify me from Nixon’s concept of “real Irish.”)

"The Italians, of course, just don't have their heads screwed on tight. They are wonderful people, but . . ."

"The Jews are just a very aggressive and abrasive and obnoxious personality."

“The Jews are born spies.”

But it isn’t just prejudice that Nixon reveals in his tapes, it is his criminal proclivities.

Over the years, one of the most common red herrings of Nixon defenders has been the claim that there is no documentary proof that Nixon ordered the Watergate break-in. That is true. But we do know that he ordered a break-in of the liberal think tank the Brookings Institution:

“I want the Brookings Institution cleaned out and have it cleaned out in a way that has somebody else take the blame."

It’s hardly a stretch to think that the man we know was capable of ordering the one was also capable of ordering the other.

Now, nothing like that is present on the Walker tape. And that’s precisely the problem with Carpenter’s analogy. By using rhetoric that compares Walker’s comments to the depths of Nixon’s depravity, he gives Walker an easy out—because Walker on this tape is demonstrably not as bad as Nixon on his.

What is there in the Walker tape, however, is plenty bad enough.

Start with this simple fact: while Walker complained about a “group of protesters almost all of whom are in from other states,” he spent 20 minutes talking freely with a major campaign donor from out of state. Hardly surprising, but telling.

Also telling is Walker’s eagerness to share his strategy with the caller he believes is Koch. According to his office, Walker has never met or spoken to Koch. But the fake Koch asks one question and Walker is off to the races. A look at the transcript shows no reticence at all on Walker’s part. And what he so freely shares is revealing.

We learn that Walker intended to trick the Democratic state senators who have left the state to prevent Walker’s union busting legislation from passing. He said he intended to tell the Democrats that he would “talk” to them, get them to come back to Wisconsin, and then refuse to actually negotiate. In the meantime, the senate would have gone into session and he could get his legislation passed. In other words, he revealed that he is not to be trusted.

That, sadly, is just politics. What’s more disturbing is Walker’s reaction to the fake Koch’s suggestion of “planting some troublemakers.” Walker responded: “we thought about that.” He goes on to explain that he decided not to, but only because it might backfire politically. At no point does he offer any suggestion that deliberately provoking violence for political gain is an inherently bad idea.

Now, one of two things is true. Either Walker really did consider doing so, in which case he should resign right now, or he lied when he said he considered it. In other words, the best-case scenario is that Walker never thought about it, and merely lied to the fake Koch to avoid contradicting the rich and powerful man at the other end of the phone.

In either case, Scott Walker is no leader. He either is truly amoral and somewhat Nixonian in the tactics he considered, or so beholden to powerful interests that he will not tell them that their suggestions are both illegal and immoral.

Admittedly, pretending to agree with the criminal suggestions of a wealthy campaign contributor does not rise to the level of Nixon’s perfidy. But shouldn’t our standard for those who purport to lead us be higher than that?

The Anti-Wisconsin Idea

2011-02-21T08:06:00.000-05:00

The first time the state of Wisconsin comes up in my U.S. history survey classes is when I reach the section on the Progressive movement. You can’t really discuss the reforms of the early twentieth century without giving due credit to the leading role of Wisconsin. The reforming spirit of that state, represented in politics by the LaFolletes, became a model for the nation. Today, Republicans all over America are trying to turn it into another, and quite different, kind of model.

A hundred years ago, the “Wisconsin Idea” was shorthand for a whole series of reforms, most of which we take for granted today. It meant more direct democracy, a response to the wholesale corruption of state politics in the U.S. during the rise of big business in the late 19^th century. More democratic institutions, progressives hoped, would also produce more enlightened economic policies, and end the stranglehold trusts had over the economic life of the nation.

The direct primary (which allowed voters, not party bosses, to pick nominees) and the direct election of senators (which allowed voters, not state legislators, to pick senators) were two major political parts of the Wisconsin idea. Economically, it meant things like workers’ compensation and business regulation.

Wisconsin was in the reforming vanguard in the late 19^th century. As early as the 1880s, Wisconsin was passing worker safety and child labor laws. In 1895, as southern states were institutionalizing segregation, Wisconsin outlawed racial discrimination in public accommodations like restaurants (which is the part of the Civil Rights of 1964 that Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky today still thinks is unconstitutional).

Today, Gov. Scott Walker is trying to put Wisconsin in the vanguard again, but this time with an anti-progressive agenda. Walker’s controversial proposals to strip collective bargaining rights for state unions may be unique by virtue of the week-long protests they have provoked. But other states are pursuing similar anti-union agendas: The states of Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, New Jersey, among others, are experiencing similar attempts to use state fiscal crises as vehicles to disempower unions.

This is no coincidence. It is part and parcel of the Republican Party’s anti-government mentality that has been a dominant theme of theirs for over thirty years. If government is bad, then government employees are bad.

This is the proper context for understanding Speaker John Boehner’s Marie Antoinette moment last week. Boehner responded to the fact that budget cuts would mean that federal employees would lose their jobs by saying “if some of those jobs are lost in this, so be it. We're broke. It's time for us to get serious about how we're spending the nation's money."

Similar comments are being made in Wisconsin. At Saturday’s counter-protest, Tea Party activist Herman Cain said: "Wisconsin is broke. My question for the other side is, 'What part of broke don't you understand?'"

Wisconsin is not broke, and neither is the U.S. Wisconsin’s current budget deficit is less than the amount of pro-business tax breaks just generously handed out by the Republicans. As for the U.S. budget, as “a share of the nation's economy, Uncle Sam's take this year will be the lowest since 1950, when the Korean War began.” And yet Republicans insist our budget deficit is entirely due to spending, not to lack of tax revenue.

Yes, both the federal and state governments have real budgetary problems. But Wisconsin’s unions have agreed to the financial sacrifices, and are only insisting on the maintenance of their bargaining rights. (Don’t be fooled when Walker says they will keep those rights—the legislation takes away bargaining rights over working conditions and caps the ability to negotiate salaries to the inflation rate. In other words, unions will never actually gain ground. At best, they will tread water; at worst, fall behind.)

Yes, unions are imperfect instruments, and could use reform of their own. But the political reality is that unions are being scapegoated by Republicans for our current economic ills. Unions did not gamble billions of dollars on financial shell games and ruin the economy. Financial institutions did, but you don’t see them being called on by the GOP to sacrifice. You see them bailed out, and, unrepentant, you see them going back to business as usual and awarding themselves unconscionable bonuses.

When the Republicans start calling business out and demand that they contribute to solving our economic problems, then I’ll take them seriously. Until then, this anti-“Wisconsin idea” is simply an attack on government workers and union rights and an attempt to turn back the clock and restore the laissez-faire world of the late 19^th century.

Coin of the Realm

2011-02-14T08:02:00.000-05:00

"The Congress shall have Power ... To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin."

That would seem clear enough to most people, but not to South Carolina State Rep. Lee Bright, R-Roebuck, who according to the Spartanburg Herald-Journal "has introduced legislation that backs the creation of a new state currency that could protect the financial stability of the Palmetto State in the event of a breakdown of the Federal Reserve System."

“If there is an attempt to monetize the Fed we ought to at least have a study on record that could protect South Carolinians,” Bright said in an interview Friday.

“If folks lose faith in the dollar, we need to have some kind of backup.”

Let us, for the moment, put aside the question of the (at best) dubious constitutionality of what Bright is proposing. What is the mindset behind it?

For starters, it would seem that Bright has been spending too much time listening to Ron Paul and Glenn Beck. This idea is the political equivalent of Beck's shameless shilling for gold on his TV and radio programs. "Be afraid! The end is nigh! Protect yourself! Buy gold!"

But even more interesting to me is what this idea reveals about the default setting for Bright: that if his paranoid fears come to pass, South Carolina can go it alone and save itself while the rest of the country falls.

Does he really believe that if U.S. currency were to lose its value, that South Carolina, all by itself, would be able to reconstitute a meaningful currency that would shelter it from the resulting economic storm? The idea is self-evidently absurd.

As the Herald-Journal article rightly notes, this is part and parcel of Bright's political playbook. Last year he proposed what amounts to a nullification bill targeted at the Affordable Care Act. “If at first you don't secede, try again,” Bright said at the time.

Now, I know he was joking. But that joke is telling. Secession is no laughing matter, but seeming to take the idea of secession seriously is enough to make Bright (and by extension, South Carolina) a laughingstock. (Though a quick Google search shows his state currency idea is playing well on secessionist websites all over the country.)

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that Bright's proposal is yet another example, like the "ban foreign law" idea, of a disheartening lack of seriousness among South Carolina's elected officials. It panders to the people's fears and their desire to feel in control of events in trying times. Rather than confront actual problems facing the state, problems which good and effective government might actually be able to address, they propose these silly, time-wasting distractions from the real business of the people.

Lastly, it is sad that so many alleged "constitutional" conservatives in fact advocate such unconstitutional ideas. There was a time in American history when states had extensive control over the value of currency, under the Articles of Confederation. The Constitution (which they purport to venerate) explicitly took that power from the states. As James Madison says in Federalist 42, by doing so, "the Constitution has supplied a material omission in the articles of confederation."

Like it or not (and Bright clearly does not), one of the most important of "original intents" of the Constitution was to shift power from the states to the federal government to make for more efficient and practical governing of the United States.

Bright will no doubt argue that what he proposes is within what is allowed by the Constitution. If that is true, then what he is proposing could not possibly be capable of addressing the false specter of disaster he raises. Either way, his proposal is nonsense.

In assessing Bright's real motive then, I can do no better than quote David Ramsay, doctor and member of the Continental Congress from South Carolina and later a member of the South Carolina state senate. Writing under the name "Civis" in the February 4, 1788 edition of the Columbian Herald in Charleston, Ramsay exhorted South Carolinians to ratify the Constitution. Don't listen to what opponents say their reasons are for opposing the ideas of the Constitution, Ramsay warned. "Examine well the characters & circumstances of men" to find "the real ground" of their positions, he said, since "they may artfully cover it with a splendid profession of zeal for state privileges and general liberty."

Reagan at 100: Listen to the Music

2011-02-06T08:53:00.000-05:00

As anyone who has read this blog would know or could guess, Ronald Reagan has never been one of my favorite presidents. My first vote for president was cast in 1980, and it wasn't for him. (It wasn't for Jimmy Carter either, but for Republican Congressman John Anderson who ran as an independent.) I cut my political opinion writing teeth at my college newspaper, penning pieces often critical of Reagan.

Today is Reagan's 100th birthday, and that has prompted lots of reconsiderations of the man and his presidency. I concede that my opinion of both today is not as harsh as it was in the 1980s, though it is still predominantly negative. And what I consider to be the relatively positive aspects of his administration are ones that most modern-day conservatives either deny or ignore.

But I was listening to Chris Matthews Friday night in his commentary on Reagan, and he had one eloquent line that I agree with whole-heartedly. Reagan, he said, "heard our music even when it faded." I think that captures beautifully why the memory of the man still resonates with so many Americans, even as the details of his actual record fade into myth. He sang America's song, and many people loved him for it.

That same line, however, also captures for me what was so lacking in the man and his presidency. As an unabashed and unashamed Bruce Springsteen fanatic, I cannot hear the words "Reagan" and "music" without thinking of the infamous Reagan misuse of Springsteen's music during the 1984 campaign. Springsteen had released the "Born in the U.S.A" album, the one that would launch him into rock superstardom, in June. That fall Reagan tried to appropriate Springsteen for his campaign. While campaigning in New Jersey, Reagan said:

America's future rests in a a thousand dreams inside your hearts; it rests in the message of hope in songs so many young Americans admire: New Jersey's own Bruce Springsteen.

Now, I realize that line was written for Reagan and not something he came up with on his own. He didn't know the first thing about Springsteen or his songs, other than that he was wildly popular at the time and perhaps that his new album had the American flag on the cover.

But that's my point. Yes, Reagan heard the music. He just didn't hear the words. He didn't listen to the words, or care what they actually said. The title song of that album, despite the misinterpretations of people like George Will (and legions of superficial fans), is not a proud, patriotic anthem. It is not a song with a message of hope. It is one of rage and despair. The Vietnam veteran who narrates it ends with the line:

I'm ten years burning down the road
Nowhere to run ain't got nowhere to go

It's a song about someone who has been used up and cast aside by the country he was born in and loves. It's a song, as so many of Springsteen's songs are, about someone whose dreams have been crushed, but who desperately still wants to believe.

When told of Reagan's words, Springsteen said that while Reagan was not a bad man, he was afraid that "there are people whose dreams don't mean much to him." Those are the people Springsteen was writing about. Those are the people Mario Cuomo was talking about in his memorable 1984 convention speech: "There is despair, Mr. President, in the faces that you don't see, in the places that you don't visit in your shining city."

There are things you miss when you only hear the music. Truly great leaders need to know the words. I admire Reagan's ability to hear our music. But I want my leaders to listen to our lyrics, too.

Keep Fear Alive!

2011-02-04T09:59:00.000-05:00

Why does it so often seem that those who most loudly proclaim America’s exceptional greatness seem to also have the least faith in its traditions and principles in practice?

This week we’ve been treated to the spectacle of South Carolina Republican State Senator Mike Fair following the lead of Oklahoma in proposing an “anti-Sharia” law. At the same time, Glenn Beck has been calling events in Egypt evidence of the “coming insurrection” that will create a new caliphate from Iran across North Africa, and up into western and central Europe. In both cases, these baseless fears are grounded in the idea of the inherent fragility of western civilization’s most basic institutions (otherwise, there would be nothing to fear). What’s going on here?

This is beyond mere paranoia. These are completely manufactured, utterly irrational, and potentially self-destructive fears that tell us far more about the speakers than their targets.

According to Talking Points Memo, Fair initially admitted his bill was aimed at Sharia: "This bill has been called anti-Sharia law, and I suppose it does deal with that," Fair said. "There are some localities around the country that have imposed Sharia law in lieu of local laws." Later, perhaps realizing that he had let the cat of the bag, he retreated and stated that the target was “foreign law,” and that he didn't want his proposal to be interpreted "as anti-Sharia law and statute."

There’s one big problem here: there are no localities that have imposed Sharia law in the U.S. It’s a simple fact. Yes, I know there are many websites that claim it is true. But the only so-called “evidence” ever cited to support this crazy claim is a court case that never once mentions Sharia law. It was a case of a wife accusing her husband of sexual assault, in which a judge decided that the state of mind of the defendant was relevant and that he lacked criminal intent. And even that ruling was overturned by a higher court.

That’s it. That’s the extent of the alleged imposition of Sharia law in America.

And what about that "new caliphate"?

In his TV rants, Beck claims that the recent unrest in North Africa is a sign of the “coming insurrection” which aims to establish a new caliphate. Today Morocco and Spain, he says, are “on fire.” Having just returned from a visit to both countries, I can assure everyone that neither country is currently in flames.

Beck sees in the street protests of Tunisia, Egypt, and Yemen not popular unrest provoked by undemocratic regimes, but a larger conspiracy (one that involves everyone from both presidents Bush to Obama to ACORN) to restore the Islamic caliphate. There is about as much chance of a new caliphate in North Africa and Europe as there is of Pat Robertson becoming grand ayatollah in Iran.

What do these cases have in common (beyond the pathological paranoia)?

Projection.

Fair says that his bill was prompted by concerns over “people who are accustomed to their religion and their civil laws being inextricably connected.” You don’t need a degree in psychology to see the irony here. This is a state that banned tattoos until 2004, in part due to Biblical injunctions against the practice. (In 2006, a tattoo parlor in Columbia was initially denied a license because it was located within 1,000 feet of a church.) To this day, when I go food shopping on a Sunday, I cannot pick up beer or wine from the Bi-Lo because of religiously-inspired blue laws. And this is a state that recently re-elected Jim DeMint to the Senate, who has a 100% rating from the Christian Coalition.

Fair’s objection (and that of many South Carolinians) is not to religion and civil laws being intertwined—their problem is with the wrong religion and civil laws being intertwined.

And Beck? In his simplistic view, world events are not complicated and multifaceted, they are all explainable by a single, malevolent intent. Someone (else) is trying to impose his vision on everyone. No one is an independent actor; everyone is the tool of dark forces. Tellingly, his interpretation of events in Egypt coincides nicely with the Mubarak regime’s take—it is not authentic, spontaneous, or legitimate. It is the work of “foreign agents.”

The irony here is that Beck makes himself the mirror image of radical Islamists who see the United States behind every problem in the world, seeking to impose its control over everyone and everything. Not only that, but by darkly hinting that American presidents have been in on the plan for the new caliphate, Beck even agrees with the Islamists that ultimately America is in control of events—only in his telling, it is the “bad” Americans out to destroy the “real” America.

Both Fair and Beck represent essentially the same thing: fear of the unknown. Both feel beset by a world far too complicated for their simple minds to understand, and rather than seeking knowledge, they give in to their own ignorance and seek to make others fear as much as they do.

Egypt and the Moroccan Model

2011-02-01T08:02:00.000-05:00

Well, I certainly picked an interesting couple of weeks to be out of the country.

I recently got back from 16 days abroad in Granada, Spain and Rabat, Morocco. The revolution in Tunisia made for a particularly dramatic time for my first visit to a predominantly Muslim country.

Last Wednesday, the Wofford faculty group I traveled with had the chance to meet with Mustapha Khalfi, Director of Publication of Attajdid, one of Morocco's leading newspapers. We had an extended discussion with him about the Tunisian revolution and its possible ramifications in the Muslim world.

As a self-proclaimed moderate Islamist living under the Moroccan monarchy, Khalfi had unique insights into the recent historic events in the region.

Since I'd had a both a busy schedule and somewhat limited access to media, I was eager to hear his take on what had happened in Tunisia. I asked Khalfi if the revolt there might spread to Egypt. It was unlikely that events would follow the same pattern, he said, because in Tunisia the military sided with the protestors, while Egypt's Hosni Mubarak, who came from the military, could likely count on the support of the armed forces.

As has become apparent in the days since, the military likely is the key variable in this volatile situation. There have been signs that the protestors have embraced the military as (at least) a lesser evil than the police and security forces, and that the military has reciprocated by showing restraint. As the protests have continued—perhaps culminating in a decisive confrontation today—the military promised that it would not fire on peaceful protestors. If it abandons Mubarak, it is hard to see him staying in power, and another North African domino may fall.

Whatever the next days and weeks bring, it seems inevitable that change will come to Egypt, but what kind of change that will be is impossible to say at this point. The collapse of the regime's authority may well leave a power vacuum in Egypt, and that is where the danger lies.

It is inspiring to see people take to the streets demanding freedom. It is thrilling to imagine a dictator driven from power by the force of popular resistance. But what replaces the dictatorship? As the U.S. found out in Iraq, a functioning democracy requires more than the removal of a dictator.

This was the most compelling point that Khalfi made: the necessity of civic institutions in any democratization movement. He held forth his own country of Morocco as a model of moderate change, a people building those institutions under the relatively progressive leadership of a young monarch who has both political legitimacy as king and religious legitimacy as "Commander of the Faith."

Sadly, Mubarak has spent nearly 30 years undermining such institutions because he saw them as threats to his power. Now his power is disintegrating, and no one really knows if there will be anything to replace it that can give the Egyptian people a sustainable balance of freedom and order.

That has ever been the problem with regimes that can isolate themselves from public opinion—they seek to make themselves indispensable by destroying viable alternatives, but that tactic itself helps insure that when they finally fall, their societies lack the political resources needed to construct new institutions.

Khalfi painted a picture of Morocco as a nation aware of this pitfall, and working hard to avoid it. For his sake, and that of the other Moroccans we met on our trip, I hope he's right.

Assassination is the Real Tyranny

2011-01-10T09:43:00.000-05:00

Back in early April, in the disturbing aftermath of the passage of the healthcare bill, which included acts and threats of violence against members of Congress, I wrote two posts about the dangers of the violent rhetoric permeating the political culture (here and here).

And now a member of Congress has been shot.

As news personnel compulsively remind us, we don’t know the exact motives of this shooter. We do know that he seems to be deranged.

But that doesn’t mean that this is merely a random act with no political significance.

We take it for granted that political leaders can inspire good with their words. Many thousands, maybe millions, of baby-boomers cite JFK’s inaugural challenge (“Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country”) as the reason they went into the Peace Corps, or the military, or some other form of public service.

No one claims that Kennedy “created” idealistic people. But we do accept that his challenge helped channel their existing idealism into particular forms of service—because leadership matters.

Yet, when something awful happens, we suddenly resist the idea that the rhetoric leaders use can take the evil that exists in human hearts and channel it in a particular direction. Over and over we are told that this troubled person was going to do something awful and there was nothing anyone could do about it.

Perhaps. But we do know that this particular troubled person chose a political leader to whom he had access as his target. We know his rantings, however incoherent, had political overtones. To pretend that the toxic political atmosphere of the last two years had nothing to do with how his derangement was channeled is the worst (and most dangerous) kind of denial.

Some people seem to get this. Contrast the words of new House Speaker John Boehner now with his words then. In the wake of the incidents back in March (including an attack on the offices of Rep. Giffords), Boehner appropriately said "violence and threats are unacceptable." But he also added: "many Americans are angry over this health care bill, and angry at Democrats here in Washington for not listening." In other words, he could not limit himself to condemning the violence; he also blamed the victims. (Rep. Giffords was one of those Democrats who voted for the health care bill and who, in Boehner’s words, did not listen.)

Saturday, he rightly said: “An attack on one who serves is an attack on all who serve. Acts and threats of violence against public officials have no place in our society.” There was no “but you have to understand the anger” qualifier this time. He should have had the same clarity back then that he belated has now. It should not take a shooting to show “leaders” that you should never, in any way, excuse violent rhetoric and political violence in a representative democracy.

An assassination is the utter abnegation of democracy. It is one person thwarting the will of the electorate. It is, in that sense, the ultimate tyranny. We can only hope and pray that the demagogues and opportunists who have recklessly thrown around the word “tyranny” to describe the workings of a duly elected government for the last two years will now have the decency to keep their paranoid rantings to themselves.

Read it? Yes. Worship it? No.

2011-01-06T09:14:00.000-05:00

So they are reading the Constitution in the House today. And Michelle Bachmann has enlisted Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia to teach new members of Congress about the Constitution.

It seems odd that anyone could run for and be elected to Congress without already being fairly well-versed in the Constitution, but let’s grant that there may be some value in a refresher course for some of these people.

What’s maddening about this is not any of these acts, but the motive: it is an attempt to claim the Constitution for one political party. The Constitution does not belong to any ideology. It is our common framework of government.

But the new Republican/Tea Party does not agree. It believes that one and only interpretation of the Constitution is valid. It maintains the fiction that there is something concrete called “original intent” which leads to an objective truth about the constitutionality of any proposal.

The right has tried to elevate the Constitution to the level of holy writ. Cal Thomas, in his column this week, put it explicitly: “As with Scripture, the Constitution contains eternal truths.” These people do not see the Constitution as a great but flawed work of men—for them, it is a divine document. And only they really understand what it means.

This is a tremendously dangerous idea. The Constitution is not scripture. It is not something to be worshipped. You would think people who say they take religion seriously would know to keep sacred only that which is truly sacred.

But since they believe the Constitution contains “eternal truths,” they think if they can monopolize its meaning they can render all opposition to their ideas as inherently false.

And what meaning do they find in it? One simple idea: “limited government.” Thomas asserts that its “principles—like limited government—transcend eras.” But they never stop to ask what motive lies behind that principle. Was it “limited government” as an end in and of itself? No.

The purpose of limited government is to protect liberty. When the Constitution was written, there was only one real threat to liberty: government power. But the key political insight of the post-Civil War era has been that there are other threats to liberty.

Slavery showed that an individual could deny liberty in every sense of the word to another human being. Segregation showed that local and state governments could be greater threats to liberty than the federal government. The rise of big business showed that private economic power could be as great a threat to liberty as government ever was.

By seeing the only threat to liberty as government, these Tea Party people show that they remain stuck in the 18^th century. Our problems are not the same, and our solutions cannot be the same. Reading the Constitution and treating it as a sacred document gets us not one bit closer to solving the problems of the 21^st century. It is simple-minded posturing that masks a reactionary social and political agenda, and no worshipful reading of its text will change that.