A Different Kind of Christian

A couple of months ago I heard a Terri Gross interview with a writer named Jeff Sharlet, who had just published a book entitled The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power. The Family, sometimes called The Fellowship, is an elite group of fundamentalist Christians founded in the 1930s in Seattle by Abram Vereide, and headed for several decades by Doug Coe, now thought to be in semi-retirement. Sharlet’s book is long and difficult, his writing florid and often opaque. He spends several chapters on various founders of charismatic American fundamentalism such as Jonathan Edwards (whom Strauss and Howe described as Prophet of the Awakening Generation) and Charles Finney, from the Transcendental Generation that gave us the Civil War. He also, in my opinion, exaggerates the influence that Coe and others have had on various bloody episodes in American foreign policy, such as our support for the bloody Indonesian purges after the coup of 1965 and later on the island of East Timor. (While Doug Coe may have encouraged President Suharto on his path, the cooperation of the CIA in the first case and the encouragement of Henry Kissinger in the second were far more important.) But the book remains an extremely important eye-opener to those seeking to understand contemporary political Christianity from the outside, and to grasp exactly why it has emerged as such a formidable political force.

I should perhaps interrupt my narrative with a disclaimer. Believing as I do that religion should be private manner, I always hesitate to criticize religious beliefs in print. Like many other devout agnostics tending towards atheism, I instinctively give religious people the benefit of the doubt as regards their motivation, and certainly do not begrudge them what comfort their religion offers them. I also see Christianity as one of the foundations of western civilization as it has evolved (although I have no truck with the patently false idea that it was a primary inspiration for the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution, an idea which Sharlet himself does not completely reject.) What this book showed me is that my view of Christianity is too narrow. The kind of fundamentalism preached by Doug Coe has become politically powerful precisely because it is so free of doctrinal subtlety and so focused upon this world rather than the next. It is—avowedly—a political strategy patterned after the great revolutionary movements of our time. While its divine hero is Jesus, Stalin, Mao and Hitler stand high in its Pantheon of earthly exemplars because of their “commitment” and clever political strategy. This kind of Christianity has nothing to do with humility, with rendering unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s, or which enduring the pain of this world in hopes of joy in the next. It is focused above all—like Orwell’s Party in 1984—on earthly power, and it has achieved a great deal of that.

Sharlet—who seems, like myself, to be an unreligious product of a Jewish-Christian marriage—did his original research by infiltrating the Family, specifically Ivanwald, a training camp for young men in Arlington, Virginia. (Another Family institution is C Street, the Capitol Hill townhouse that is home to various conservative Congressmen.) There he was introduced to a doctrine often summarized in half an equation: “Jesus plus nothing.” (The book spends a lot of time trying to figure out exactly what that sum is supposed to equal.) The young acolytes at Ivanwald are encouraged to engage Jesus directly, to become an extension of his will. Coe and others have delivered the same message to many prominent businessmen, to dozens of legislators on Capitol Hill (from Strom Thurmond, Frank Carlson of Kansas, Homer Capehart of Indiana, Charles Colson of Watergate fame, and other notables of my youth to Sam Brownback of Kansas, Mike Stupak of Pennsylvania, and many others today. Hillary Clinton, though not actually a member, is a kind of comet passing in and out of the Family’s orbit, and cooperated with it on one or two pieces of legislation. Just two days ago, however, at The Family's National Prayer Breakfast, both she and Barack Obama attacked Family-sponsored legislaton in Uganda that would make homosexuality a crime.)

The Family, following a Communist model, works through cells—prayer cells in its case—one of which approached Gerald Ford in 1975 to urge him to forgive the sins of Richard Nixon. (I do not doubt that this story is true, but once again I question whether it had the critical role in Nixon's pardon that Sharlet seems to give it.) It is a true fellowship, a cadre of men working to recreate the world in their own image—which they have decided, without very little scriptural foundation so far as I can see, is Jesus’s image as well. It prefers to work in secret, and no less a figure than Ronald Reagan, during his Presidency, remarked that that was why it had been so influential. (Ed Meese is another important acolyte.)

What is equally striking is what Sharlet did not find in his sojourn among these particular faithful. Although they did some daily Bible reading, it was neither thorough nor particularly penetrating. They liked sound bites, not subtlety. Nor is the family directly interested in organized Churches or in direct appeals to millions of Americans. Its power certainly has advanced in parallel with that of various megachurhes and organizations like James Dobson’s Focus on the Family, but its gaze fixes intently upon the rich and powerful. The brightest light that burst upon me as I read this book solved a mystery that had profoundly shocked me when I first learned of it a few years ago: how was it possible that George W. Bush had never regularly attended a church, not even when he was in the White House? The answer, evidently, is that he was recruited in the 1980s by a similar movement (though not, as far as Sharlet ever found out, by the Family itself), which persuaded him that a personal relationship with Jesus could make all his earthly works serve the divine order. (In a rare lapse, my favorite TV show, Jeopardy, recently repeated the myth that Billy Graham converted Bush to evangelical Christianity. In fact Bush was converted by a more eccentric figure, Arthur Blessit, who began his career in the 1960s as what was then called a "Jesus freak.") And Bush, like so many others, henceforward felt no need for data, analysis, or consensus when reaching decisions. Revelation now governed his life and his thought, elevating him far above all the professors and fellow students he could never equal at Yale. The war in Iraq was one result.

The Family’s theology, therefore, flatters the ego of various political leaders around the world—and rare is the leader whose ego suffers from an excess of humility in the first place. Because it is concerned above all with power, the Family is ecumenical, and has included Protestants, Catholics, Jews and even Muslims in its prayer cells. (Sharlet has very little to say about Israel or Zionism, but it is not surprising that political Evangelicalism has seized upon the book of Revelation as a reason to embrace Zionism as a necessary step towards the end times and Christ’s return to earth. The Family is still centered in the United States, where the Zionist lobby is a formidable ally or opponent. The same logic probably has a lot to do with its numerous alliances with big business and its “free market” theology.)

The rise of faith-based politics represents a new stage both in the development of American politics and of western civilization itself. Few Americans—and least of all fundamentalist Americans—realize that the United States came into being at one of the least religious moments in modern history. Skepticism and deism were rampant all over the North Atlantic world in the late eighteenth century, the age of Enlightenment. My own reverence for the Constitution goes to its attempt to create a lasting, free government, based not only on the principles of the British Constitution as it had evolved over the centuries, but also on their observations of human frailty and the difficulty of restraining authority, especially legitimate authority. It was no accident that the word “god” appeared nowhere in the Constitution’s text. Religion has played an important role in American politics in various times and places since the founding, of course. Both sides of the slavery controversy cited it (leading to the formation of the Southern Baptist and Southern Methodist denominations), and Protestants gave us the Prohibition movement and all its consequences. Catholicism both helped unify big-city voters and alarm many Protestants, Jews and secularists who thought Catholics wanted to exploit governmental power to further their own religious agenda (which, before Vatican II at least, was indeed sometimes the case.) But the extent to which a particular kind of fundamentalism dedicated to free markets, homophobia, opposition to birth control and a forthright foreign policy has come to dominate one of our two political parties is quite unprecedented. Should it return to power it will, I think, definitely alienate the more secular parts of the world—including most of Europe and East Asia—for a long time to come. It will also make it impossible rationally to address our domestic problems, as we managed to do 80 years ago. I am glad to have been born in the midst of another great age of rationalism, and sad that I have spent my adult life watching it fade away.

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DK

Generational Archetypes in Action

This week I wound up my Generations in Film class at the Naval War College, a class I have now taught for a dozen years, including one at Williams College. It is based mostly on movies (and has also been boiled down, in effect, to a two-hour presentation of film clips that I have not yet had an opportunity to give in public.) It includes readings as well, however, and I sent around some before the last meeting--a collection that I had been trying to complete for several years. The four generational archetypes around which generational theory revolves are, as many of you know, Prophets, Nomads, Heroes, and Artists. Today they are represented by Boomers (Prophets), born in the wake of a great Crisis; Gen Xers (Nomads), born during an Awakening; the few remaining GIs (Heroes), along with the Millennial generation, born from about 1982 until sometime early in the last decade; and artists, born during the great crises, including both the Silent generation (born 1926-42) and the new Homeland generation, which began appearing on the scene some unspecified number of years ago.

I shall now post what I came up with, with brief explanations, as a kind of generational primer. In each case I was looking for an elderly person--as it happens they are all men, although I would love to see some one come up with corresponding women--reflecting on their lives and expressing some of the essence of their archetype. (It is rather extraordinary, by the way--and even Strauss and Howe did not realize this on their own--that the four heads on Mt. Rushmore represent the four archetypes: the Nomad Washington, the Hero Jefferson, the Prophet Lincoln, and the Artist Theodore Roosevelt. As a kid I always wondered what Theodore Roosevelt was doing there; now I know.)

Mark Twain (1835-1910) was a Nomad, belonging to the Gilded generation Here, just two years before his death, he describes a conversation with a popular novelist of his day, Elinor Glyn, then 34, a British woman on the Artist-Prophet cusp who was a pioneer in modern women’s fiction. As you will see, this passage is less a reflection on his own life than a summary of accumulated Nomadic wisdom. Twain had grown up during the Second Great Awakening, a time like the 1960s, when grown-ups seemed to be going crazy in all sorts of ways. Nomads with such backgrounds become aware of the need for restraint--the reason that today's Gen Xers, whose parents often went crazy in their youth, have become such protective parents. (I apologize for the quality of this text--it was an image and this was the best I could do.)




Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) belonged to the first Hero generation of our national life, the Republicans. By the spring of 1826 he was one of three remaining signers of the Declaration of Independence and received an invitation to celebrate the anniversary in Washington. This was his reply. Like GIs reminiscing about the years from 1941 to 1965 or so, he looked back with justifiable pride on the extraordinary achievement of his generation in its younger days.

Thomas Jefferson to Roger C. Weightman
Monticello, June 24, 1826
Respected Sir, -- The kind invitation I receive from you, on the part of the citizens of the city of Washington, to be present with them at their celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of American Independence, as one of the surviving signers of an instrument pregnant with our own, and the fate of the world, is most flattering to myself, and heightened by the honorable accompaniment proposed for the comfort of such a journey. It adds sensibly to the sufferings of sickness, to be deprived by it of a personal participation in the rejoicings of that day. But acquiescence is a duty, under circumstances not placed among those we are permitted to control. I should, indeed, with peculiar delight, have met and exchanged there congratulations personally with the small band, the remnant of that host of worthies, who joined with us on that day, in the bold and doubtful election we were to make for our country, between submission or the sword; and to have enjoyed with them the consolatory fact, that our fellow citizens, after half a century of experience and prosperity, continue to approve the choice we made. May it be to the world, what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all,) the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government. That form which we have substituted, restores the free right to the unbounded exercise of reason and freedom of opinion. All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God. These are grounds of hope for others. For ourselves, let the annual return of this day forever refresh our recollections of these rights, and an undiminished devotion to them.

Henry Clay (1777-1852) was, along with his bitter rival Andrew Jackson, the most distinguished member of the Compromise generation, of the Artist Archetype. Ten years old at the time of the adoption of the Constitution, he held nearly every major national office except the Presidency (for which he was defeated) and spent most of his career in the Senate. He was the idol of many Transcendentals (Prophets), including Abraham Lincoln, and hoped slavery might be abolished through gradual emancipation with compensation, although he came from Kentucky and owned slaves himself. In 1850 the break-up of the union threatened over the question of whether California would be admitted as a free state. Here is one of the critical speeches he gave in support of the Compromise of 1850, which secured its admission in return for certain concessions to the South and postponed the Civil War for eleven more years. Nearing the end of his life, he was making a last vain attempt to preserve the great achievement of his childhood. I cannot read this without thihking of the speeches on health care that Clay's fellow Artist Ted Kennedy did not get to make last year and this.

“It has been objected against this measure that it is a compromise. It has been said that it is a compromise of principle, or of a principle. Mr. President, what is a compromise? It is a work of mutual concession - an agreement in which there are reciprocal stipulations - a work in which, for the sake of peace and concord, one party abates his extreme demands in consideration of an abatement of extreme demands by the other party: it is a measure of mutual concession - a measure of mutual sacrifice. Undoubtedly, Mr. President, in all such measures of compromise, one party would be very glad to get what he wants, and reject what he does not desire but which the other party wants. But when he comes to reflect that, from the nature of the government and its operations, and from those with whom he is dealing, it is necessary upon his part, in order to secure what he wants, to grant something to the other side, he should be reconciled to the concession which he has made in consequence of the concession which he is to receive, if there is no great principle involved, such as a violation of the Constitution of the United States. I admit that such a compromise as that ought never to be sanctioned or adopted. But I now call upon any senator in his place to point out from the beginning to the end, from California to New Mexico, a solitary provision in this bill which is violative of the Constitution of the United States.

“The responsibility of this great measure passes from the hands of the committee, and from my hands. They know, and I know, that it is an awful and tremendous responsibility. I hope that you will meet it with a just conception and a true appreciation of its magnitude, and the magnitude of the consequences that may ensue from your decision one way or the other. The alternatives, I fear, which the measure presents, are concord and increased discord. . . I believe from the bottom of my soul that the measure is the reunion of this Union. I believe it is the dove of peace, which, taking its aerial flight from the dome of the Capitol, carries the glad tidings of assured peace and restored harmony to all the remotest extremities of this distracted land. I believe that it will be attended with all these beneficent effects. And now let us discard all resentment, all passions, all petty jealousies, all personal desires, all love of place, all hankerings after the gilded crumbs which fall from the table of power. Let us forget popular fears, from whatever quarter they may spring. Let us go to the limpid fountain of unadulterated patriotism, and, performing a solemn lustration, return divested of all selfish, sinister, and sordid impurities, and think alone of our God, our country, our consciences, and our glorious Union - that Union without which we shall be torn into hostile fragments, and sooner or later become the victims of military despotism or foreign domination...

“Let us look to our country and our cause, elevate ourselves to the dignity of pure and disinterested patriots, and save our country from all impending dangers. What if, in the march of this nation to greatness and power, we should be buried beneath the wheels that propel it onward! ...

“I call upon all the South. Sir, we have had hard words, bitter words, bitter thoughts, unpleasant feelings toward each other in the progress of this great measure. Let us forget them. Let us sacrifice these feelings. Let us go to the altar of our country and swear, as the oath was taken of old, that we will stand by her; that we will support her; that we will uphold her Constitution; that we will preserve her union; and that we will pass this great, comprehensive, and healing system of measures, which will hush all the jarring elements and bring peace and tranquillity to our homes.

“Let me, Mr. President, in conclusion, say that the most disastrous consequences would occur, in my opinion, were we to go home, doing nothing to satisfy and tranquillize the country upon these great questions. What will be the judgment of mankind, what the judgment of that portion of mankind who are looking upon the progress of this scheme of self-government as being that which holds the highest hopes and expectations of amelioratirig the condition of mankind - what will their judgment be? Will not all the monarchs of the Old World pronounce our glorious republic a disgraceful failure? Will you go home and leave all in disorder and confusion - all unsettled-all open? The contentions and agitations of the past will be increased and augmented by the agitations resulting from our neglect to decide them.

“Sir, we shall stand condemned by all human judgment below, and of that above it is not for me to speak. We shall stand condemned in our own consciences, by our own constituents, and by our own country. The measure may be defeated. I have been aware that its passage for many days was not absolutely certain. ...But, if defeated, it will be a triumph of ultraism and impracticability-a triumph of a most extraordinary conjunction of extremes; a victory won by abolitionism; a victory achieved by freesoilism; a victory of discord and agitation over peace and tranquillity; and I pray to Almighty God that it may not, in consequence of the inauspicious result, lead to the most unhappy and disastrous consequences to our beloved country.”

There are few people I never knew to whom I feel closer than W. E. B. Dubois (1868-1963), who was, in word and deed, one of the outstanding representatives of the Missionary Generation. Born in western Massachusetts, he received both a B.A. and Ph.D from Harvard, becoming the first black American to achieve the latter distinction. A brilliant historian, he was also one of the founders and a long-time leader of the NAACP, and the first civil rights leader to advocate full racial equality. (Dubois and I do share one experience: having written major works of American history which our leading professional journal, the American Historical Review, declined to review in their pages, in both cases for reasons of ideological prejudice.) Sadly, he became embittered by slow racial progress and became a Communist in the 1950s, eventually emigrating to Ghana, where he died in August 1963, literally on the eve of the March on Washington. The following remarks were delivered at a 70th birthday celebration for him in 1938, and illustrate the profound truth that the best Prophets have, more than anything else, a gift for life.

“I have been favored among the majority of men in never being compelled to earn my bread and butter by doing work that was uninteresting or which I did not enjoy or of the sort in which I did not find my greatest life interest. This rendered me so content in my vocation that I seldom thought about salary or haggled over it. . .I insist that regardless of income, work worth while which one wants to do as compared with highly paid drudgery is exactly the difference between heaven and hell.
“I am especially glad of the divine gift of laughter; it has made the world human and lovable, despite all its pain and wrong. I am glad that the partial Puritanism of my upbringing has never made me afraid of life. I have lived completely, testing every normal appetite, feasting on sunset, sea and hill, and enjoying wine, women and song. I have seen the face of beauty from the Grand Canyon to the great Wall of China; from the Alps to Lake Baikal; from the African bush to the Venus of Milo.
“Perhaps above all I am proud of a straightforward clearness of reason, in part a gift of the gods, but also to no little degree due to scientific training and inner discipline. By means of this I have met life face to face, I have loved a fight and I have realized that Love is God and Work is His prophet; that His ministers are Age and Death.
“This makes it the more incomprehensible for me to see persons quite panic-stricken at the approach of their thirtieth birthday and prepared for dissolution at forty. Few of my friends have openly celebrated their fiftieth birthdays, and near none their sixtieth. Of course, one sees some reasons: the disappointment at meager accomplishment which all of us to some extent share; the haunting shadow of possible decline; the fear of death. I have been fortunate in having health and wise in keeping it. I have never shared what seems to me the essentially childish desire to live forever. Life has its pain and evil—its bitter disappointments; but I like a good novel and in healthful length of days, there is infinite joy in seeing the World, the most interesting of continued stories, unfold, even though one misses THE END.”

Towards the Gilded Age

I had intended, of course, to say something about the outcome in Massachusetts, which, though in the end rather close, has already turned out to be a decisive event in our current political struggles by unquestionably putting the momentum onto the Republican side. Twelve months too late, the President is now trying to pull populist anger to his side, but since he will now be unable to get any meaningful corporate reform through Congress, he is very unlikely to be successful. (Yesterday Paul Krugman, whom as you know I regard as one of my few allies, called upon the House of Representatives to pass the Senate health bill. Good luck, Paul--I don't think it's going to happen.) I had already predicted that younger voters would determine the outcome in Massachusetts (as they had in the last presidential election) and I was right: they gave the Republicans the election by staying home. Only about 20% of them voted (and those went heavily for Coakley), as opposed to more than half of older voters. Yet the point of this particular blog is above all to go beyond the day's events by putting them in historical perspective, and in that sense, the Supreme Court's decision on campaign financing dwarfs the significance of that particular special election. Other decisions on subjects like abortion and gay rights have also swept away long-standing precedents (mostly in state laws), but in one sense, as others have noted, Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commmission can only be compared to Dred Scott. That earlier decision overruled various laws--the Compromise of 1850, the Missouri Compromise of 1820, and even the pre-Constitutional Northwest Ordinance, going back over seventy years. This one goes back even further, undoing a critical principle of the Progressive Era--and therein lies the heart of the matter.

The Progressive era, which lasted in effect roughly from 1901 until 1917 or so, was a non-partisan experiment in reform designed to mitigate the effects of the industrial and commercial revolutions and broaden liberties. Leading Progressives included both Republicans and Democrats, including Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. Their achievements included the implementation of the Sherman Antitrust Act under TR, the Federal Reserve Board under Wilson, and constitutional amendments establishing the vote for women and the income tax. (In one of the great untold stories of American history--one very deserving of a long book--they also included an amendment to ban child labor that passed the Congress but was never ratified by the states.) They also included numerous reforms to improve (as Progressives saw it) the democratic process, including direct primaries (for both state offices and, in some states, for the nomination of Presidential candidates), recall elections, and referendums. Last, but hardly least, under Theodore Roosevelt the Congress passed a law forbidding corporations from contributing directly to political campaigns. All of this came to a crashing halt in the wake of the First World War, but various ideas developed during that era became, after the economic collapse of 1929-32, a big part of the basis for the New Deal--as I learned in my youth from various GI historians like the great Richard Hofstadter and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

Large elements of the Republican Party were never reconciled to the New Deal. Those elements, interestingly enough, did not manage even to nominate a Presidential candidate from 1933 through 1963--neither Landon nor Willkie nor Dewey nor Eisenhower or Nixon were diehard free-marketeers. When Goldwater was elected his crushing defeat proved that the United States had come to accept the New Deal consensus. That consensus, however, took a double hit from the civil rights acts of 1964-5 (which alienated the white south) and the Vietnam War (which split the Democratic Party), from which it has never recovered. Meanwhile, conservatism steadily gained ground within the Republican Party, culminating in the nomination and election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. Conservatives took a further step forward when George H. W. Bush was punished for his apostasy on taxes in the 1992 election. That, however, is politics: today I want to focus policy.

Conservative Republicans, with plenty of help from Democrats, have been hard at work since 1980 undoing not only the New Deal itself, but the social and economic structure that gave birth to it. The primary electoral muscle of the Democratic coalition came from unions, and union power was largely broken by the long recession under Reagan and the beginning of the de-industrialization of America, as well as by the movement of numerous industries into the un-unionized South. (Those same industries have now moved further south, out of the United States altogether.) Reagan also put a huge dent into the progressive taxation system that had funded the federal government since the Depression, cutting high bracket income taxes while raising the lower-bracket payroll taxes (and putting the proceeds into general revenues, as I pointed out here back in 2005.) Deregulation of S & Ls was followed under Bill Clinton (who restored some fiscal responsibility but did nothing else to fight the ongoing trend) by the repeal of Glass-Steagall and the resultant creation of huge investment banks fueled by depositors' money and credit cards.

All this made money more and more important in politics, far more important than either Republican or Democratic ideology. That is why, since the 1960s, no Democratic President has been able to put through a serious liberal reform. Democrats (at least in bluer states) talk a good game at election time, and sometimes put through legislation that looks like change, but a closer reading always reveals the work of lobbyists at play. When Bill Clinton threatened actually to reverse the decline of the government's role during his first year in office with health care reform, Boomer Republicans (led by Bill Kristol and Newt Gingrich) announced that he could not possibly be allowed to succeed and organized all-out opposition, aided by corporate allies. The same thing has happened during the last year. The increasing role of money has two related consequences: it not only insures corporate influence, but discredits the whole process. It was extremely difficult even for a lifelong Democrat like myself to swallow the compromises necessary to get the health care bill through the Senate. The Medicaid concession to the state of Nebraska was a national disgrace, as was the failure to repeal the anti-trust exemption for the health care industry. (How can anyone believe that exchanges will increase competition when the anti-trust laws do not apply?) I'm not surprised that Massachusetts voters were not impressed.

Now the Republicans have had to cope with one big problem: their policies are bad for America and bad for the American people. They have increased the gap between rich and poor and stripped working people of fundamental protections. Health care is becoming less and less affordable. Millions have fallen to predatory lending. Worst of all, economic de-regulation has brought back the frequent, devastating boom-bust cycles of the late nineteenth century. All this has led to periodic Republican setbacks at the polls, most notably in 2006 and 2008. (We must keep in mind that we are not fighting today over ideological or aesthetic preferences about the distribution of income in America: we are learning again that allowing rich people to keep too much money simply does not work for anyone but them.) They managed to moderate their effects, however, by packing the least democratic part of our system, the courts.

As James MacGregor Burns made clear in Packing the Cout, which I reviewed here some months ago, judicial activism was not an invention of the Warren Court, but has played a huge role in our history since the beginning of the Republic. The Warren Court, which almost for the first time deployed its power on behalf of minority rights, was exceptional only because it favored the Left. During the Progressive Era and New Deal the courts had thrown out literally dozens of regulatory measures, concluding, for instance, that state minimum wage laws were unconstitutional. And on no issue have Republican activists been more single-minded than bending the judiciary to their needs. They have worked at all levels, organizing the Federalist Society, for instance, to recruit young candidates. Until 2000, countervailing factors ensured that even Republican Presidents would veer from ideological orthodoxy in their appointments occasionally, as Ronald Reagan did to appoint the first female justice and George H. W. Bush did to pick the estimable David Souter. But those days are over. During the last twenty years, Republican appointments have been far more ideologically committed and considerably younger and healthier than Democratic ones. Three of the four Boomers on the Court are now Republicans, and Sonia Sotomayor, the Democratic choice, is a diabetic. This strategy first paid a gigantic dividend in the legal coup d'etat of 2000, when a 5-4 Republican majority disclaimed any interest in determining the actual wishes of Florida voters and gave the Presidency to George W. Bush. (Al Gore's ineptitude was also largely to blame, since he never even tried to insist on the full statewide recount which later studies showed would have given him the election.)

The Progressive era, one might argue, had limited impact itself, but put machinery in place to make the New Deal possible. This week the Supreme Court took apart a critical piece of that machinery by using Citizens United to outlaw any restrictions on corporate campaign spending in the name of free speech. Justice Kennedy's emphasis on "free speech" in his majority opinion, in which he professes devotion to that principle that would rival that of my own hero Hugo Black, is quite Orwellian. Here is how he explained the decision of the court not to decide in favor of Citizens United on relatively narrow grounds--as it easily could have done--but instead to eliminate a centuries-old reform.

Held:
1. Because the question whether §441b applies to Hillary cannot be resolved on other, narrower grounds without chilling political speech, this Court must consider the continuing effect of the speech suppres-sion upheld in Austin. Pp. 5–20.
(a) Citizen United’s narrower arguments—that Hillary is not an “electioneering communication” covered by §441b because it is not“publicly distributed” under 11 CFR §100.29(a)(2); that §441b maynot be applied to Hillary under Federal Election Comm’n v. Wisconsin Right to Life, Inc., 551 U. S. 449 (WRTL), which found §441b uncon-stitutional as applied to speech that was not “express advocacy or its functional equivalent,” id., at 481 (opinion of ROBERTS, C. J.), determining that a communication “is the functional equivalent of express advocacy only if [it] is susceptible of no reasonable interpretation other than as an appeal to vote for or against a specific candidate,” id., at 469–470; that §441b should be invalidated as applied to movies shown through video-on-demand because this delivery system has alower risk of distorting the political process than do television ads;and that there should be an exception to §441b’s ban for nonprofitcorporate political speech funded overwhelming by individuals—arenot sustainable under a fair reading of the statute. Pp. 5–12.
(b)Thus, this case cannot be resolved on a narrower ground without chilling political speech, speech that is central to the First Amendment’s meaning and purpose. Citizens United did not waive this challenge to Austin when it stipulated to dismissing the facial challenge below, since (1) even if such a challenge could be waived, this Court may reconsider Austin and §441b’s facial validity here be-cause the District Court “passed upon” the issue, Lebron v. National Railroad Passenger Corporation, 513 U. S. 374, 379; (2) throughoutthe litigation, Citizens United has asserted a claim that the FEC hasviolated its right to free speech; and (3) the parties cannot enter intoa stipulation that prevents the Court from considering remedies nec-essary to resolve a claim that has been preserved. Because Citizen United’s narrower arguments are not sustainable, this Court must, in an exercise of its judicial responsibility, consider §441b’s facial valid-ity. Any other course would prolong the substantial, nationwide chilling effect caused by §441b’s corporate expenditure ban. This conclusion is further supported by the following: (1) the uncertainty caused by the Government’s litigating position; (2) substantial time would be required to clarify §441b’s application on the points raised by the Government’s position in order to avoid any chilling effect caused by an improper interpretation; and (3) because speech itself is of primary importance to the integrity of the election process, anyspeech arguably within the reach of rules created for regulating political speech is chilled. The regulatory scheme at issue may not be aprior restraint in the strict sense. However, given its complexity and the deference courts show to administrative determinations, a speaker wishing to avoid criminal liability threats and the heavycosts of defending against FEC enforcement must ask a governmental agency for prior permission to speak. The restrictions thus function as the equivalent of a prior restraint, giving the FEC power analogous to the type of government practices that the First Amendment was drawn to prohibit. The ongoing chill on speech makes it necessary to invoke the earlier precedents that a statute that chills speech can and must be invalidated where its facial invalidity has been demonstrated. Pp. 12–20.
2. Austin is overruled, and thus provides no basis for allowing the Government to limit corporate independent expenditures. Hence, §441b’s restrictions on such expenditures are invalid and cannot be applied to Hillary. Given this conclusion, the part of McConnell that upheld BCRA §203’s extension of §441b’s restrictions on independent corporate expenditures is also overruled. Pp. 20–51.

Now one would think, reading this outraged language, that existing law forbade the production or distribution of a scurrilous documentary like Hillary (whom readers will remember that I did not support myself) at all. Of course it doesn't. Political speech was free, or almost free, when the first amendment was passed, in two different ways: not only did the law now protect it, but the production and distribution of written materials (the only ones then available) was extremely cheap. In the early nineteenth century, yours truly might have started and turned out a weekly broadsheet almost as easily as I now turn out this blog. The point is not whether material like Hillary can be produced--of course it can, although it testifies to the decline of American political discourse in the last half century--the point is who will have the money to advertise it and broadcast it on cable television. Just as Anatole France remarked that the law impartially forbade both the rich and the poor from sleeping under bridges, the law now impartially allows David Kaiser, the heads of Citibank and Goldman Sachs, and Glenn Beck to make their views available on television to audiences of millions. The problem is that only three of them will be able to do so. The reformers of the 1900-80 era did not need rocket science to figure out that increasingly expensive modern forms of communication would obviously give incredible advantages to the rich and powerful and thus had to be regulated to give ordinary citizens a chance to be heard. A 5-4 Supreme Court majority has now thrown out a century of tradition and returned us to a form of political Darwinism (see my earlier posts on social Darwinism several years ago, easily located by a search at the top of the page.)

The current crisis in American life, I have been saying here now for five years, will lead either to a kind of New Deal revival or to a return to the Gilded Age. Karl Rove understands this and cited William McKinley as his political hero. The court just brought us immensely closer to a return to McKinley's age.

Those like me who never have and never will abandon the New Deal principles they learned in their youth inevitably mourn the likely eclipse, for the rest of our lifetimes, of those principles. But once again my training as a European historian at least enables me to say that things could be much, much worse. Although the Republicans have frequently bent the law (most notably in 2000 and again this week), they have successfully undid the work of our parents and grandparents mainly through legal means. There is no Fascist movement or dictatorship on the horizon (although one could still emerge.) It was the America of the Gilded age to which my paternal grandfather came around 1900, making my own life possible. The liberal tradition will survive, even if will only be revived years after the Boom generation has passed from the scene. (I do not exclude the possibility that my own side might still prevail even in this crisis, but it does not look at all likely.) If the Founding Fathers managed to design a system that can preserve essential liberties and survive even severe swings to the right and left, they will still deserve our thanks.

Comic relief

Those of you feeling rather glum this week would be well advised to go to TheDailyShow.com and watch the opening monologues of Tuesday's and Wednesday's shows. I don't know why exactly, but they did make me feel a little better. More to come on the weekend. . .