Santorum's Education: "What a Snob!"

This past weekend, when Rick Santorum wasn't busy saying John F. Kennedy's speech on separation of church state made him throw up, he was making this attack on President Obama on the subject of higher education:

Obama says he wants everyone to go to college. What a snob. [applause] There are good, decent men and women who go out and work hard every day and put their skills to test that aren’t taught by some liberal college professor and trying to indoctrinate them. [applause]

As is usually the case, the words Santorum uses to attack others are far more revealing of himself than of his targets.

First, Santorum's statement is simply false. The president has not said that everyone should go to college. He has said that everyone ought to have the opportunity to go, and that people with the desire and ability should not be prevented simply because they can't afford it. This, to Santorum, constitutes snobbery.

Second, there's the hypocrisy. In his failed 2006 bid for re-election to the Senate, Santorum's position was the same as Obama's. His campaign website bragged about it, in fact:

Rick ... is equally committed to ensuring that every Pennsylvanian has access to higher education. Rick Santorum has supported legislative solutions that provide loans, grants, and tax incentives to make higher education more accessible and affordable.

But that, to my mind, is far from the worst of it. What I find especially interesting (and disturbing) is what Santorum's comments reveal about his attitude toward education.

To him, college is simply indoctrination. In his universe, college is not a place for reasoned discourse, the search for truth, or the battle of ideas. There is only the imposition of ideas by those with an agenda to "remake" others in their own image. (If I recall my psychology indoctrination in college correctly, I believe this is called "projection.")

Why is college like this? Because, in Santorum's words, we are in the midst of a "spiritual war," and the "Father of Lies" has long since conquered academia. Seriously.

Santorum explained all this in a speech he gave at Ave Maria University in 2008:

Satan has [been] attacking the great institutions of America, using those great vices of pride, vanity, and sensuality as the root to attack all of the strong plants that have so deeply rooted in the American tradition.... The place where he was, in my mind, the most successful and first successful was in academia. He understood pride of smart people. He attacked them at their weakest, that they were, in fact, smarter than everybody else and could come up with something new and different. Pursue new truths, deny the existence of truth, play with it because they're smart. And so academia, a long time ago, fell.... the other structures that I'm going to talk about here had the root of their destruction because of academia. Because what academia does is educate the elites in our society, educates the leaders of our society, particularly at the college level. And they were the first to fall.

In Santorum's spiritual war of good v. evil, God v. Satan, academia is already in thrall to the Father of Lies. So what goes on there is not education, but indoctrination. And what students are indoctrinated with is evil. And the only proper response, of course, is to indoctrinate them with good.

In all the hub-bub about Santorum's remarks, people have largely ignored the significance of what he said after the attack on the president and liberal college professors:

Oh, I understand why he wants you to go to college. He wants to remake you in his image. [laughter] I want to create jobs so that people can remake their children into their image, not his.

This is, I'd argue, even more revealing. When put together with his earlier comments on academia, Santorum seems to be suggesting that Obama, by trying to get people to go to college, is doing Satan's work. God created us in His image, but Obama wants to "remake you in his image"--by sending you to institutions that have fallen to Satan.

Note, Santorum does not conceive of education as a vehicle for empowering people to make themselves into what they want to be. No, in Santorum's Manichean world, people can only be remade in the image of good or of evil.

Santorum has rather famously walked the walk on this subject, by home-schooling his own children (something he says he would continue to do as president). He has argued against government involvement in education, implying that (ideally at least) all parents would home school their children--or at least have that option--so that they may remake their children in their own image. What other godly way is there, after all? Academia has fallen to Satan.

Santorum's vision of education has no relation to my experience, either as a student or a teacher. I went to twelve years of Catholic school. We had religion classes and and went to Mass.  But I'm confident that the nun with the ashen visage who taught me chemistry in high school didn't indoctrinate me with much of anything (other than, perhaps, an aversion to science classes).

My English teachers, who taught me how to write, my history teachers, who taught me how to think critically, my math teachers, who taught me how reason my way through a problem--all of them helped me develop skills that I still use to this day. That is what education does.

I spent four years being indoctrinated by Satan's minions (i.e., liberal college professors) at Lafayette College, but among the things I remember most about that experience is debate, not indoctrination. Oh, some of them were pretty left-wing, no doubt. But they didn't teach me what to think, they taught me how to think.

(Santorum seems to have made it through the den of iniquity that is Penn State without being indoctrinated, but he doesn't feel others are able to withstand it. Evidently he thinks he is better than all those elites who succumbed. So who is the real snob?)

I recall my college advisor, who, knowing I was an Irish Catholic, made me take the side of Ulster Protestants in one debate on Northern Ireland, and later, knowing my liberal tendencies, made me defend apartheid in South Africa in another. She knew my politics, and though I am fairly confident she shared them, she did not reinforce them. She forced me to look at the other side, and take positions I found personally abhorrent because she knew that was how I would learn. She pushed me to think differently. She did the very opposite of indoctrination. Because that is what a good teacher does.

I've tried to emulate her example in my own career. Anyone who reads this blog knows where I'm coming from politically, but I take care to avoid letting my views affect my classes. I see my job as helping students to think critically, to write critically and clearly, and to argue well--not to simply mimic my point of view (and trust me, very few do).

Early in my teaching career, in 1993, I got a last-minute position teaching a graduate seminar, The United States: 1933 to the Present. More than most classes, that one engaged topics that were directly relevant to current events. If ever there was a chance to indoctrinate, this was it.

Since the class was in the evening, I had several adult students. One student was, I'd guess, not much younger than I was at the time--maybe even older. He was very bright, and very conservative. And we went back and forth for three hours every week, with the conversation sometimes continuing long after class ended.

The next year, when he was no longer my student, he got in touch with me when he heard I was applying for a full-time position at the college, and offered to to write a letter of recommendation for me. He later showed me a copy of it, in which he said he hoped the college would hire me, because no matter how much the two of us might disagree on the issues, the only thing that ever mattered in my class was the quality of his work. He had done well because he had done good work.

That's something that Rick Santorum, with his constricted, twisted concept of education, cannot understand. Maybe his version of education is indoctrination. But mine isn't, and that isn't what I learned from my mentors.

In our version, there is a battle, and there is an enemy. But the enemy isn't an opposing ideology or religion. The enemy is sloppy thinking. The enemy is bad reasoning. The enemy is lack of clarity. The enemy is assertion without evidence. The enemy is narrow-mindedness.

The enemy is ignorance.

The real "war" in education is knowledge v. ignorance, and Rick Santorum has told us all quite clearly which side he is on.

Santorum's History Lesson: "It's not OK."

Rick Santorum certainly is not squandering his moment in the spotlight.

Over the last week or so, he seems almost to be going out of his way to say things that make many voters ask incredulously: "He said what?!" There are a lot of them to choose from, but I'll stick to the "today is much like when we ignored Hitler" story.

Recently, Santorum told a crowd in Georgia that Republican voters need to wake up to the dangers of our times:

Your country needs you. It's not as clear a challenge. Obviously World War II was pretty obvious. At some point, they knew. But remember, the greatest generation for a year and a half, sat on the sidelines while Europe was under darkness. America sat from 1940 when France fell to December of '41 and did almost nothing... We’re a hopeful people. We think, well, you know it’ll get better. Yeah, he's a nice guy, it won't be near as bad as what we think. This will be OK. Maybe he's not the best guy, after a while you find out some things about this guy over in Europe who’s not so good of a guy after all. But you know what, why do we need to be involved? We'll just take care of our own problems. We'll just get our families off to work and our kids off to school and we'll be OK. That's sort of the optimistic spirit of America. But sometimes, sometimes it’s not OK. 

Leave aside the reckless and outrageous suggestion that there is any way in which President Obama represents a threat to the United States, much less one commensurate to what Hitler did in Europe.

Santorum clearly does not understand the period of American history he's talking about. I happen to be in the midst of writing a book about precisely this period, and it bears little relation to his simple-minded account.

I suppose one could reasonably say that, since the United States did not become an active belligerent until December 1941, it technically "sat on the sidelines." But the assertion that the U.S. "did almost nothing" between June 1940 and December 1941 is just laughable.

As soon as the war in Europe began, FDR stated what seemed to him to be obvious: "every battle that is fought does affect the American future." He immediately asked Congress to amend the neutrality laws to allow the sale of arms and other goods to Britain and France on a "cash and carry" basis, which it did.

In his next State of the Union address in January 1940, he proposed that Congress increase defense spending, which it did.

After the fall of France, FDR accelerated aid to Great Britain, including giving Churchill 50 old destroyers that he had requested.

When the British could no longer pay cash for the goods they ordered, FDR asked Congress to approve the Lend-Lease Act to allow the United States to provide whatever military aid it could spare for Britain's defense, which it did.

In the fall of 1941, the United States occupied Iceland, patrolled the entire western Atlantic, and convoyed British ships--all to relieve the British Navy so it could better confront Nazi Germany.

One can say--as many have since--that that was not enough. But it wasn't "almost nothing."

Santorum is certainly right when he says Americans are "a hopeful people" with an "optimistic spirit." But who were these Americans who were saying Hitler was "a nice guy" or even just "not so good"?

There were virtually none. Even those opposed to American entry into the war rarely had anything good to say about Hitler. When former president Herbert Hoover, on the very day the war began, called for the U.S. to "keep out of this war," he also made a point of saying: "The whole Nazi system is repugnant to the American people."

The vast majority of Americans, whether they supported all-out aid to Britain or opposed it, were under no illusions about Hitler. They were honestly debating the best way to deal with that threat.

Yes, they were also optimistic. Right up until Pearl Harbor, most Americans--about 70%--still hoped to avoid direct involvement in the war. But roughly the same percentage was determined to insure that Hitler did not win, even if that meant going to war eventually.

There were a few Americans with good things to say about Hitler. They were on the far right fringes of American life, people who praised Hitler as a Christian, as a bulwark against atheistic communism.

One was a woman named Elizabeth Dilling. Raised an Episcopalian, she attended Catholic schools as a girl, and considered becoming an evangelist. She called herself a "super patriot, 100 per center" who believed women should stick to "feminine pursuits." She defended the fascist Francisco Franco in Spain because he was "fighting with Spain's decent element for Christianity" against the Loyalists who destroyed churches "with the same satanic Jewish glee shown in Russia."

According to author Glen Jeansonne, she also had kind words for Hitler, because he too "had done a great deal of good ... and helped Christianity flourish." She said those urging the U.S. to fight Hitler in the war were trying to get Americans to "fight the Jews' battles all over again." Most horrifically she made this prediction, which is practically a paraphrase of Hitler's pre-war threat:

If the Jews succeed in hollering America into war, what happened to Jews in Germany might seem like a kindergarten compared to what they might get in America when the dead bodies start coming home, as Americans are a hotter-tempered people.

One of the more notorious Hitler defenders in the U.S., Gerald L. K. Smith, claimed that the "Jews hated Hitler ... because he was a Christian who believed in the Bible." Smith reprinted one of Hitler's speeches which used Biblical passages to justify his policies toward the Jews, and commented:

What good Christian American can find any fault with the above quotations? Could it be that the same Jew-controlled newspapers that lied to us about Father Coughlin and Gerald Smith failed to tell us the truth about Hitler?

This was a man Republican isolationists called to testify before Congress.

The Americans who said Hitler was "a nice guy" were the same ones who called FDR a "dictator" and called his administration the "Jew Deal." They denied Hitler was any threat to the U.S., but were quite certain that FDR was one--a mortal one. They attacked FDR as "the first Communist president," and said that he was deliberately trying to destroy Christian America.

Martin Dies, a Congressman from Texas, who created the House Committee Investigating Un-American Activities, noted in 1939 that the "Fascist-Nazi movements in the United States masquerade as Christian patriots."

Yes, these Americans existed. They were not, however, typical. The vast majority of Americans knew Hitler was the real threat, not Franklin Roosevelt. They knew their president--even if they disagreed with him politically--was not trying to ruin the United States. They knew the debate they were having was not an apocalyptic battle between those who were trying to save America and those who wanted to destroy it, but an honest disagreement about how best to defend the country.

But it seems there will always be people who masquerade as Christian patriots, who tear down the president personally, call him a communist, say he believes in a "false theology," and claim he's trying to destroy the country.

You're right, Rick. Sometimes, sometimes, it's not OK.

"Nobody Has Defined What Being Conservative Means"

Last Thursday night saw the 19th Republican debate of the primary season. It has become fairly common to complain about the proliferation of these events. How much more is there really to learn about the candidates at this point?

Many people seem to view them as sporting events (something CNN has encouraged with the singing of the national anthem at the start), and the analysis almost always uses terms from sports: who won, were there any knockouts, who hit a home run.

Speaking as both an historian (see, I've been hearing way too much from Newt) and someone who has seen most of these debates, I think there is more going on than that. Despite the superficial nature of most of the analysis (and I've been as guilty of that at times as anyone), the recent debates in particular have begun to illuminate a significant conversation among the candidates about what "conservative" means in today's American political culture.

Not too surprisingly, Ron Paul, the candidate with the clearest and most consistent ideology, was also the one to identify the centrality of that question in the last debate. We have to decide what conservative means, he said.

For Paul, the answer is fairly simple and straightforward: "Conservative means smaller government and more liberty ... not to run a welfare state and police the world."

On that last point, Paul has most effectively distinguished himself from the rest of the pack. To one degree or another, all of the other candidates have embraced the idea that the United States not only can, but should--even must--be the leader of the entire world.

Ostensibly, there is consensus among the four candidates on the first part of his formula: smaller government. But once you start getting into particulars, the waters get considerably muddied.

From a historical perspective, that's also where it gets interesting.

I see at least four different strands of domestic conservatism running through American history, all of which have appeared in these debates: libertarian, states rights, Hamiltonian activist, and, for lack of a better term, social traditionalist.

They do not consistently line up with a given candidate. The various contenders adopt a given position to take advantage of a perceived weakness in another. But the strands are there.

The libertarian strand is of course mostly associated with Ron Paul, but it also crops up in the views of the others. At the last debate, it was most clearly on display during an extended exchange between Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney on "RomneyCare" and the individual mandate, which also brought out the states rights and social traditionalist strands.

Since its passage, Republican opposition to the Affordable Care Act has focused primarily on the individual mandate to require all citizens to either have insurance or pay a fine. The principle behind this opposition is basically libertarian: government cannot require a citizen to purchase insurance, because it violates personal liberty and is an unwarranted expansion of government's power.

Because Romney signed a health insurance law with an individual mandate when he was governor of Massachusetts, his opponents have relentlessly attacked him. In response, he has tried to seek refuge in states rights. Back in September, Romney said:

States have the right to mandate. States mandate kids go to school. The federal government can’t do that. States mandate that you have to buy auto insurance. The federal government can’t do that.

Such a response, however, is not entirely satisfying from a libertarian perspective. If a government action is oppressive, whether the oppression comes from the state or federal government is not particularly important.

Under persistent pressure from Santorum last Thursday, Romney tried another strand, the social traditionalist:

If you don't want to buy insurance, then you have to help pay for the cost of the state picking up your bill, because under federal law if someone doesn't have insurance, then we have to care for them in the hospitals, give them free care. So we said, no more, no more free riders. We are insisting on personal responsibility. Either get the insurance or help pay for your care.

Romney here does a good job of making the case that, as I noted back in October 2010, the individual mandate is fundamentally a conservative idea. (Perhaps if it were known as the "no-free-rider clause" that would be more obvious.) Romney's strong argument here makes that clear: the individual mandate, with its rejection of freeloading, insists on personal responsibility--one of the cornerstones of conservative social traditionalism.

In this specific case, Santorum was taking an extreme libertarian stand, in opposition to the social traditionalist argument. On most issues, however, Santorum is a steadfast supporter of social traditionalism. While in his exchange with Romney he suggested that the individual mandate, even one implemented by a state, was oppressive ("in Massachusetts, everybody is mandated, as a condition of breathing ... to buy health insurance"), he has elsewhere argued that states should be allowed to ban birth control.

He has argued that this is a states rights issue, but it also coincides with his personal opposition to birth control (he has spoken of the "dangers of contraception" and has said that it harms women and society).

But when it comes to other issues, his social traditionalism trumps states rights. Santorum favors a federal ban on abortion and gay marriage--in other words, he opposes giving states the right to choose to allow either, even if majorities in some states approved of them, because to do so violates his social traditionalist concept of what is morally right. In such cases, he has no sympathy for the libertarian principle of personal freedom or for states rights.

Interestingly, Santorum also challenged the libertarian/free market primacy of low taxes in the January 21 debate in South Carolina:

We need a party that just doesn't talk about high finance and cutting corporate taxes or cutting the top tax rates. We need to talk about how we're going to put men and women in this country, who built this country, back to work in this country in the manufacturing sector of our economy.

Though Santorum was far from explicit about it, he was endorsing here not untrammeled free markets, but positive government efforts specifically designed to redevelop the manufacturing sector of the economy. This is a far more activist role for government than the libertarianism he embraced in the health insurance exchange with Romney.

This Hamlitonian approach has a long conservative pedigree, going back to the 19th century Republicans, as well as the Whig Party before them. It embraces the idea that government should work deliberately and actively to produce particular economic ends in the national interest (railroads, e.g.), rather than leave that to the free market.

Santorum is not, however, consistently a Hamiltonian activist. For example, he reversed course and attacked Gingrich's "grandiose" plan for a moon base because government needs to do less:

to go out there and promise new programs and big ideas, that's a great thing to maybe get votes, but it's not a responsible thing when you have to go out and say that we have to start cutting programs, not talking about how to grow them.

Gingrich, not surprisingly, reverted to Hamiltonian form, and argued that government can and should do great things:

in response to what Rick said, when we balanced the budget with the 1997 Balanced Budget Act, and ultimately had four consecutive balanced budgets, we doubled the size of the National Institutes of Health because we set priorities. It is possible to do the right things in the right order to make this a bigger, richer, more exciting country. You don't just have to be cheap everywhere. You can actually have priorities to get things done.

Gingrich neglects to note, of course, that those balanced budgets came under the Clinton era tax rates, which he and other Republicans now routinely decry as socialistic due to their reflexive obedience to the party's tax-cutting dogma. Newt's grandiose, Hamiltonian schemes would require far higher taxes than he can dare propose today.

I've written recently how Gingrich's attacks on Romney's record at Bain Capital reflected a social traditionalist challenge to a libertarian (in this case, free market) conservatism, so I won't belabor that here.

My larger point is simply this: Paul is right. Nobody has defined what being conservative means. All drama aside, these debates have served to highlight the ideological disarray in today's Republican Party.

With the exception of Paul himself, none of the candidates consistently represents a clear vision of conservatism for the 21st century. Each one has, for short-run tactical reasons, adopted whatever strand of conservatism promises to advance his immediate political prospects vis a vis the others.  If, as seems inevitable, any of those three gets the nomination, the definition of "conservative" is likely to remain hopelessly muddied.

[In my next post, I plan to examine the role the right's hatred of President Obama plays in this disarray, and how it threatens to turn the Republicans into a modern-day version of the Whig Party.]

The "All-In" Mentality

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.

Paul & Huntsman: "Bring 'em Home" Republicans

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.

Santorum and Mussolini

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.

Overtly Covert

[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.

Mitt Romney and Questioning Belief

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.