The turning point

This is a big month for yours truly, marking the end of my formal full-time academic career.  But I suspect it will live in history as a critical month for another reason: the end of any hope that the Obama Administration will accomplish anything further, and, quite probably,. of the modern era of liberalism.  Several years ago I made a new friend who spent some time reading through the posts I had made since 2004, and she complimented me that so many of my predictions had come true.  I'm afraid the time has come for more predictions. The Republicans will gain a few seats in the House and Senate in 2014, and it's quite likely that they will regain the White House in 2016.  The will precede to the final dismantling of the work of the Great Society, having finished off the New Deal some time ago.

Barack Obama entered office five years ago possessed of solid majorities in the House and Senate, and facing a national crisis that everyone had to acknowledge.  But from the beginning, he chased an impossible dream: the restoration of a bipartisan spirit in Washington.  He never had the slightest success, but he has not, as we shall see, given up the dream yet.  And this was the key to the mistake he has made again and again.  This quintessentially political young man, who had parlayed his considerable assets into fame, fortune, and high office at every stage of his career, based his proposals on what could easily be passed, rather than upon what the country might in the long run really need.  Even if the stimulus was a much as he could get, he could have put more of it into infrastructure spending and less of it into tax cuts designed (hopelessly) to draw Republican support.  He appointed an entirely centrist economic team, one that saw nothing fundamentally wrong with our finance-dominated economy.  He did not realize that the whole future of his Presidency depended on improving the lot of the bulk of the American people by the time of the 2010 elections--the feat which Franklin Roosevelt accomplished in 1933-4.  And he decided after the stimulus to put all his remaining capital into health care reform, even though it would be years before it had any measurable effect.  That reform, too, was written so as not to offend any powerful interests, on the assumption that we could fix the real problems we face without offending them.

To be sure, even in his first two years Obama had much less to work with than it seemed. Both Republicans and Democrats in Congress are in thrall to financial interests.  Democrats are very weak at the state level in much of the country.  Nearly 35 years of constant anti-government, free market rhetoric have left the vision of the middle of the century behind.  To make government effective again Obama had to revive them, and this he has never really tried to do.  We will never know whether any one else could have, but it is worth noting that Obama brought many of the same people back into government that Hillary Clinton would have.

Despite Obama's re-election victory, the Republicans have been driving the national agenda since 2011.  Their debt-limit brinkmanship forced Obama into the sequester, again on the absolutely mad assumption that today's Republican Party would shrink from actually implementing the cuts involved.  In fact their only regret, as they see the federal government crippled and the country threatened with a new recession as a result, is that they did not go further.  Destroy the government and the economy and blame the Democrats has been their motto for a long time, and they were not going to abandon it for him.  The same drama is playing out in many states, although California is now back on a more responsible track.  I was shocked that Obama actually told a New York fundraiser that he thought his victory last November would "break the fever" among the Republicans and make them start working with him.  They will never work with him. They want to destroy him and, more importantly, everything he stands for.

I must admit that I thought Obama's decision to make a new stand on gun control might make political sense.  His own Generation X voted for him in the last election, but his response to the school shooting might well appeal to that generation's hyperprotective parents and thus change the political calculus for some Republicans.  Clearly, however, I was wrong.  The NRA brushed the challenge aside and the House of Representatives wasn't even forced to vote on what was, once again, a very moderate bill.  Even before the events of the past week I was very doubtful that Obama would get substantial immigration reform.  Yes, the Republicans are losing the Hispanic vote over this issue, but they might lose it even worse if the President actually gave millions of Hispanics a path to citizenship.  The mantra remains what it has been since Newt Gingrich: don't let a Democratic President accomplish anything meaningful if you can help it, because that will once again show that government can solve problems.  By making it ineffective, we can kill public faith in it.

And now, three "scandals" have given the Republicans a new life.  None of them is really very significant.  The Benghazi accusations are made almost entirely of whole cloth.  The subpoena for AP records is a troubling reminder that this is the hardest Administration on leaks in history, and it has alienated much of the Democratic base.  The IRS scandal is a perfect reminder of Talleyrand's famous words to Napoleon: "Sire, it's worse than a crime, it's a blunder."  It will re-mobilize the Republican base as nothing else could, and the Republicans, aided by the entire media, will drag it out for months and months, just as they did Whitewater.  There is already considerable talk in the House about another impeachment of the President.  Don't rule it out.

Another crisis is looming over health care.  Republicans constantly declare that many businesses will cut their workers back to part-time status so as not to have to buy insurance for them--and that might well turn out to be true.  The implementation of the reform may be a public relations disaster. 

The United States has been in a second civil war since the election of Bill Clinton.  The Republicans are winning perhaps it was because it was their historical turn--a subject for another day--but surely because they are the only side that has really been fighting.  Clinton and Obama have been status quo Presidents, offering very little that was new and almost nothing that appeared to the mass of the American people to make their lives better.  Again and again they have bee willing to compromise, while the Republicans never do.  And the growth of Republican power has indeed reduced the federal government to ineffectiveness on many levels.  A Democratic victory in 2016 is anything but assured. A recent study--and not a right-wing one--argued that only the black turnout won the election for Obama last time, and the next Democratic candidate will not be black.  Nor can we be sure that Hispanics will continue to vote Democratic if the state of the country continues to deteriorate.

Obama, it seems to me, could do the country some good by talking, at every opportunity, about the economic steps the country really needs: more spending, not less; much higher taxes on the wealthy; a reduction of the influence of the financial sector; and better public services.  The only thing he can do now is to position the Democrats for the moment when it becomes clear that things are getting worse again.  Instead, he is more likely to look for a "grand bargain" that will implicate him and his party in a new series of disasters. Meanwhile, the younger generations are completely losing faith in politics.  In my last full-time college class last week, I mentioned that Kennedy had inspired much of my generation, and Reagan had inspired Generation X.  "Has Obama inspired you?" I asked the class, which was certainly composed mainly of liberals.  A long silence followed. "Well, maybe until he was elected," one young man replied.  That, in a nutshell, is the tragedy of Barack Obama--and of the present-day United States.

Kennedys and Ambassadors

For more than a month the press has been reporting that Caroline Kennedy is going to be appointed by President Obama as Ambassador to Japan.  Nothing has happened officially yet, so perhaps a snag has developed, but I must say that I scratched my head when I heard the news and haven't been able to get it out of my mind ever since.  It's not that I have anything against Caroline Kennedy at all, on the contrary.  I once met her at a Kennedy Library event and she was as gracious and charming as she could be.  She has had an emotionally difficult life, however privileged it might have been in some respects, and she played an important role in 2008 in getting Barack Obama the Democratic nomination.  But if she is indeed appointed, it will be yet another piece of evidence of the enormous changes in the business of governing in the fifty years since her father was President.

John F. Kennedy ran for President in 1960 arguing that the United States was in a worldwide Cold War with the Soviets and Communism, one involving both the older great powers of Europe and Asia and the new emerging nations.  America's representatives in those nations, he believed, could be critical assets or liabilities in that struggle.  He also enjoyed bringing contemporaries with experience in public service into the government.  He put Chester Bowles, himself a former and future Ambassador to India, in charge of picking new Ambassadors.  His non-career appointments were different than most Presidents', as I have particular reason to know, because they had nothing to do with financial contributions to his campaign.  Instead, he and Bowles looked for smart, articulate men from journalism, the academy, and other forms of government service to sell the New Frontier.  To serve as Ambassador to India he picked the Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith, who obviously knew a great deal about economic development.  To France he sent retired General James Gavin, who had worked with foreign military leaders as the commander of the 82nd Airborne Division in the Second World War.  He brought George F. Kennan, whom John Foster Dulles had fired from the State Department, out of retirement to become Ambassador to Yugoslavia, which under Marshall Tito had declared its independence from the Soviet bloc.  My own father, Philip M. Kaiser, who had represented the United States in Geneva at meetings of the International Labor Organization for about five years, became Ambassador to Senegal, where he could put his knowledge of French to good use.  Guinea, down the coast, was a particularly sensitive nation because it had a leftist leader, Sekou Toure, and Kennedy sent William Attwood, another francophone and the Foreign Editor of Look Magazine, to Guinea.  And for Japan he chose Edwin Reischauer, a Harvard Professor who was probably the country's leading expert in Japanese politics.  Carl Rowan, one of the country's leading Negro journalists (to use the contemporary term), became Ambassador to neutral Finland.  Mercer Cook, a black professor of French at Howard University, became Ambassador to Niger and eventually succeeded my father in Senegal. Those are the ones I remember, but I know they are not the only non-career people Kennedy appointed.

It occurred to me the other day, winding up my Williams College class on Vietnam and trying to summarize the war's impact, that the Cold War had in a weird way been good for the US government and for government all over the world.  The new nations were going to need governments and might follow the US or the Soviet model.  That gave the American President a keen interest in helping them develop and making sure that they were constantly exposed to impressive and effective US representatives.  It also, of course, gave us an incentive to make our own system work which we lost when Communism collapsed.  The Congo was another battleground in 1960 and the US spent years establishing a stable government there.  That government, under Joseph Mobutu, rapidly turned into a corrupt dictatorship, but it was a government.  The Congo has now been in a state of chaos for over a decade, but since there is no longer a Cold War in progress, no one in the wider world seems to care very much.  Governments of all kinds are much weaker than they were in my youth, and I fear they may have become much too weak for the good of the citizenry.

Japan is a major economic power, on the doorstep of worrisome North Korea,. and with steadily worsening relations with China.  It needs an Ambassador who speaks Japanese and knows the history and politics of the country, and who also enjoys the confidence of Secretary Kerry and the President.  Caroline Kennedy will undoubtedly rely upon her professional staff if she is chosen, and I hope she does well.  But I can't honesty think that her knowledge or experience particularly qualifies her for a very important diplomatic role.

Telling the truth

 During the Second World War, the British Broadcasting Corporation was perhaps the allies' most important propaganda weapon in occupied Europe.  Although Britain was fighting for its life, the BBC's short-wave news broadcasts had a simple rule: tell the truth.  Britain suffered a long series of setbacks and disasters during the first three years of the war, but the BBC never tried to peddle false optimism about the campaigns in Norway, Belgium, France, North Africa, Greece, and Crete.  And therefore, when they had good news to report, their listeners believed it as well.  Meanwhile, they could note the contrast between British news reporting and the Axis propaganda they had to deal with every day.

I was reminded of this, sadly, this morning, when I picked up my newspaper and discovered that Mark Sanford had defeated Elizabeth Busch in a special South Carolina Congressional election.  Checking online, I found that the victory was a comfortable one: 54% to 46%.  And that made me rather angry--not because of the result, which didn't surprise me, but because of the barrage of emails I had received from Democratic organizations begging for a contribution to Ms. Busch's campaign.  In the last week, quite a few of them reported polls showing the race to be almost a dead heat, and I even received one of the morning of the election itself.  The key poll came from a left-wing outfit called Public Policy Polling.

The Democratic and Republican parties are at war, just as surely as the British and the Germans were--albeit nonviolently.  And even today, I would argue, truth could remain a weapon of some consequence.  I have been thinking about blogging for some time about the steady stream of requests for donations to fight the Republicans on almost every major issue that reach me every week.  In my youth the advantages of incumbency were generally enough for a President to hold his own in Congress; now it seems they are worth nothing.  Charles Krauthammer, whom I despise, raised eyebrows a couple of weeks ago by suggesting that President Obama only cares about issues like gun control because they bring in money from his supporters.  I think the President is sincere about that, but I have to conclude Krauthammer might be more broadly on to something.

In fact I was right not to give money, I think, because Busch evidently never had a chance.  In Charleston, S. C., adultery can be forgiven (and I have argued here that I think it should not be a political issue), but running on the Democratic Party label can't be.  And Ms. Busch, like so many other red state Democratic candidates, wasn't willing to support the President directly on most major issues anyway.  The Democratic Party, like the Republican, is relying on its own base, which is held together by emotion.  It is not too concerned, it seems, with appealing to the facts.

There is other bad news for the Democratic Party.  A new study of the last election suggests that the black turnout won the contest for Barack Obama.  Had black and white voters turned out in the same percentages as in 2004, Romney would have won the popular vote at least.  The Democratic candidate in 2016 will not be black.  Nor will the Democrats, I now think, be able to appeal to Hispanics on the basis of successful immigration reform. The Republicans will block it.

The United States will be in terrible trouble until at least one party has the courage to rely upon the truth.

The Fall of the American Empire

In the 1930s, in a famous essay entitled "Shooting an Elephant," George Orwell, looking back on his tour in Burma as an imperial policeman in the 1920s, shared his feelings about the British Empire. "I did not even know that the British Empire is dying, still less did I know that it is a great deal better than the younger empires that are going to supplant it," he wrote. "All I knew was that I was stuck between my hatred of the empire I served and my rage against the evil-spirited little beasts who tried to make my job impossible. With one part of my mind I thought of the British Raj as an unbreakable tyranny, as something clamped down, in saecula saeculorum, upon the will of prostrate peoples; with another part I thought that the greatest joy in the world would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest's guts. Feelings like these are the normal by-products of imperialism; ask any Anglo-Indian official, if you can catch him off duty."  Orwell was right: the British Empire as he had known it came to an end when India, Pakistan and Burma became independent a little more than ten years after he wrote his essay.  Speaking merely as a newspaper reader and not in anyway as an authority on that region, I would suggest that it still has a very significant political and economic legacy in India and Bangladesh, a very frayed legacy in what is left of Pakistan, and almost none at all in Burma, where Orwell served.  The legacy is also fraying in Egypt, the centerpiece of the British empire in the Middle East, and it was never very strong to begin with in most of British Africa.  The achievements of the British Empire were ably summarized by analogy about 35 years ago in this scene from a British film, one which Orwell would undoubtedly have enjoyed had he lived into his late 70s. (This is the first clip I have ever linked here, and it lasts about 90 seconds.)

The British Empire, of course, gave way to the American empire, a network of alliances and client states built after the Second World War to contain Communism.  Originally conceived by George F. Kennan and his boss George Marshall as a means of bringing all the non-Communist industrial centers of the world into an American-led alliance, it came during the 1950s and 1960s to include many of the newly emerging nations as well.  From the Truman through the Johnson Administrations it dispensed a great deal of foreign aid, allowing emerging nations to survive and even building some key infrastructure here and there.  Meanwhile, the Soviet Union pursued a parallel course on a lesser scale.  The two victors in the Second World War, as Stalin was the first to suggest, were inevitably spreading their social and economic systems wherever they could.  The record of US imperial management was decidedly mixed. NATO and the revival of Japan were great achievements, but many interventions in the Third World did more harm than good. The US fought the Second World War to create a world ruled by laws, but the long series of CIA-sponsored coups that began in Iran in 1953 and eventually included Guatemala, Brazil, Chile, and several others, undermined law both internationally and within those countries.  And the attempt to use hundreds of thousands of American troops to keep South Vietnam within the American sphere was a catastrophe from which the United States has never recovered internally.

In 1989-91, of course, the American empire seemed to have achieved unchallenged supremacy, as Soviet Communism collapsed.  The Clinton and Bush II Administrations tried in various ways to take advantage of the new situation to extend it still further, expanding NATO--whose original mission had now disappeared--going forward with missile defense, and, as Paul Wolfowitz reportedly put it, "cleaning out" remaining Soviet clients like the regime in Iraq.  The Bush II Administration also dreamed of spreading "democracy" and American influence through the Middle East. But that experiment is now clearly a failure, and it is time once again for me to echo Orwell.  The era of the American Empire is over.

Several historical developments are bringing it to and end, both at home and abroad.  First of all, the second great era of western rationalism has peaked.  The first such era occurred in the ancient world and the Roman Empire resulted from it.  The second began with the Renaissance and peaked sometime during the twentieth century.  Both western democracy and capitalism on the one hand, and Soviet Communism on the other, were products of that era.  But more significantly, by the middle of the twentieth century western rationalism was utterly unchallenged as the organizing principle of the world.  The new emerging nations wanted their independence within the western tradition.  Their new governments were almost all secular.  They opted for western-style democracy, some form of Marxist socialism, or authoritarian (usually military) rule.  Those were the only options. Meanwhile, the victorious nations of the Second World War maintained very large military establishments, recruited by conscription, and could always find troops to deploy when necessary within, and occasionally outside, their sphere.

What has changed? First and foremost, I would suggest, the political legacy of the Enlightenment is under serious attack.  The Soviet part of it is dead, most of all within the former Soviet Union.  But western democracy is no longer proving a very appealing model either.  Nowhere in the former Soviet Union does it seem to have taken root, and it is functioning well only in some areas of Eastern Europe   Democracy is not everywhere in retreat: it is thriving, relatively speaking, in South America, and it has scored some successes in East Asia.  But Europe's democracies are failing to cope with the new economic crisis, and American democracy is having very little success coping with our national problems.  Meanwhile, religious fundamentalism is the most important political force in a large part of the Muslim world.  Just as Communism, which claimed to represent the apex of western rationality, totally collapsed in the Soviet Union, Turkey, the Muslim nation which made the most determined effort to follow the secular western path 90 years ago, has become far more religious.  The Muslim brotherhood is contesting for power in Egypt, and Iraq and Syria are in the midst of continuing religious civil wars.  Radical Islam threatens several governments in West Africa, as well as Pakistan.  And in nations like Egypt and Pakistan, the westernized elements that ruled for decades seem to be hopelessly corrupt and without much popular appeal.

And what can the US do about all this? Essentially nothing--and this is why I am willing to declare the empire at an end.  The Bush Administration's decision to try to impose our will upon Afghanistan and Iraq while cutting taxes has left the United States bereft of military or economic resources.  The dirty secret of those interventions was that there was no way on earth that 50-150,000 American troops could impose order on nations of 25 to 35 million people.  Indeed, the growth of third world populations relative to western ones is probably the biggest single reason why old-style imperialism is dead.  The American military is now as determined to avoid further interventions as it was in the wake of the Vietnam War.  As a percentage of our population it has shrunk to an historic low.  Moreover, although the attitudes of the foreign policy establishments of the two parties remain interventionist, there is very little interventionism among the elected politicians of either party.  The Tea Party, in particular, does not care about the outside world. 

The Obama Administration's response to Syria suggests a new realism.  Although the President for months has supported, on principle, the ouster of the Assad regime, Washington is apparently realizing that the alternatives of civil war or an Islamic regime are probably worse.  But despite this, only a couple of intrepid op-ed writers have suggested promoting a settlement of the civil war that would include the Assad regime.  Some foreign policy types still dream, apparently, of using American money and arms to sponsor friendly alternative leadership.  But without any political basis for such a group, these hopes are doomed, just as they were in Iraq, where Nouri Al-Maliki is an Iranian client fighting a civil war against his own Sunnis, or Afghanistan, where Hamid Karzai has never won real legitimacy with his people.  Nor can our new weapon of choice, drones, ever build a stable empire of sphere of influence.  Like the Israelis, we may kill hostile militant leaders, but this will never help a stable political regime emerge within disputed territories. 

We would do well to revisit the early 1930s and the late 1940s.  In the first case, the United States helped to bring about, and then failed to alleviate, a devastating European economic crisis with incalculable political consequences.  In the second case the Marshall Plan ensured that the same thing would not happen again.  So far as I can see the Obama Administration is now taking an almost completely hands-off policy towards the new European crisis, while Republicans simply use it for their own political reasons.  For more than sixty years, from around 1950 to the present, the eyes of American foreign policy makers have steadily moved away from the most advanced regions of the world to the least, eventually bringing us into the remote wilds of Afghanistan.  A reversal is now in order, but it is not happening.

Many of my contemporaries, especially in academia, have resented the American empire for the last half century.  They are now getting their wish: American influence is everywhere in retreat.  It will not be replaced, as Orwell feared, by worse empires, but rather by an increasing zone of anarchy which advanced nations will be powerless to control.  The real problem of the 21st century, at home and abroad, will be the re-establishment of effective legitimate authority.  And that process may well have to begin on a small scale and work its way upward.

The American crisis

   One of the greatest accounts of the last Atlantic crisis, or fourth turning, are the first two volumes of the diaries of Harold Nicolson, covering the years 1931-9 and 1939-45, respectively.  They were brilliantly edited and published by his son Nigel in the late 1960s and I have returned to them many times. Nicolson, like his father, was a leading figure in the British Foreign Office who left his position in 1931, when he was still in his forties.  Ironically, he did so for the reason so often cited by disgraced American officials today: to spend more time with his family.  His family by then was of a somewhat unusual kind, since he and his wife, the author Vita Sackville-West, had after the birth of their two sons both turned to homosexuality, but they were intensely devoted to one another emotionally all the same.  Until her death in the early 1960s she lived at their country house, Sissinghurst, while he worked in London as a journalist and, from 1935 through 1945, as a member of Parliament.  Meanwhile, he kept a diary filled with inside political news and gossip.

Some of the most depressing entries in the diary refer, oddly, to the winter of 1939-40, the phoney war.  Nicolson had opposed appeasement and welcomed, in a sense, the coming of the war, but in those months he felt nothing around him but paralysis and drift.  The Chamberlain government had no idea either how to mobilize the nation or win the war.  Then came the utter disaster of the German invasion of Denmark and Norway, something which, according to British naval traditions, should have been absolutely impossible.  (Air power had rendered those traditions obsolete.)  And then, coinciding with the last stages of the Norway campaign, came the German invasion of Belgium, Holland, and France, and the fall of the Chamberlain government and the advent of Winston Churchill.  At that point, as often happens in politics and life, Nicolson's mood and that of his country shifted. Like nearly everyone else the world over, he and Sackville-West anticipated a German invasion that summer, and they prepared to commit suicide rather than be captured if it occurred.  But they and their countrymen were calm and determined, and inspired by Churchill's rhetoric.

My mood today, alas, corresponds more to Nicolson's mood in that fateful winter of 1939-40.  (My new book, now with my editor, takes up the very different story of how the United States reacted beginning in the same critical month of May 1940.)  The reaction to the events of the last week, combined with various news stories, suggest to me that our political system is very close to an all-time low.  Worse, we seem to be utterly incapable of uniting to meet any of our problems.  They are certainly far less serious than those Britain and the US faced in 1940, but they are still eating away at us like a cancer.

My initial prediction about the terror attack in Boston was largely borne out.  The attackers, like Faisal Shazad, Muslim immigrants. Tamerlan Tsarnaev, at least, was inspired by Jihadist videos, and he may, like Shahzad, have received some overseas training.  He may also have been a murderer at heart.  Although it has not yet been widely reported, there is reason to believe that he and his brother may be the culprits in an unsolved triple homicide in Waltham--next door to Watertown--on September 11, 2011.  Tarmlan knew at least one of the victims, who were young men from the workout culture of which he was a part.

Of the details about Tamerlan, the warnings the Russian government gave us about him, and the responses of the FBI and CIA to them, the detail that jumped out at me was this: the watch list onto which he was placed has over half a million names on it, and he was routinely dropped after a year.  Bingo.  In the frenetic atmosphere of the last dozen years, the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI and the CIA have not managed to develop a sensible strategy to deal with the threats we face.  Sorry, ladies and gentlemen, but there are NOT half a million potential violent foreign terrorist in the United States.  I would guess that there are somewhere between 5,000 and 50,000.  But because the criteria for inclusion are clearly absurdly broad, the list is useless.  We do not have the resources to track or investigate half a million people.  If we focused on people who had returned to hotbeds of terrorism and returned, we would have a much better chance of identifying the next Faisal Shazad of Tarmlan Tsarnaev.

Equally depressing, however, is the response to the event nationally.  The authorities did a great job of studying video and identifying the criminals visually within 72 hours.   Friends of the two men filled in the blank.  The biggest hero of the story so far was the Cambridge citizen who was carjacked and had the courage to flee across Memorial Drive in Cambridge after Tamerlan had identified himself as the bomber and threatened him with a gun.  Whether fortuitously or by design, he left his cell phone in his vehicle, and that was what brought the police within range of the two brothers in Watertown within a very short time.  The second hero (see above) was my Watertown neighbor who noticed that the shrink wrap on his boat was amiss and followed Freud's rule of dream interpretation: the detail that doesn't make any sense is the one you have to focus on.

But in the wider world, all I can see is politicized shrieks from both the right and left.  Ann Coulter devotes an entire column to the immgrants who have committed multiple murders in this country.  Limbaugh (see above) cries out that this proves the Obama Administration doesn't take terrorism seriously.  But I have also encountered numerous left-wing voices complaining about the further encroachment of the police state, exemplified, would you believe, by the order to residents of Watertown and surrounding towns to keep inside their homes last Friday.   May I suggest to these self-styled protectors of our rights that when a human mad dog is on the loose, some one who has shown a willingness to kill literally anyone simply for the sake of killing, this order was the only sensible one to give.  The Founding Fathers understood that emergency circumstances might require emergency measures, and they wrote at least one of them into the Constitution.  But my contemporaries in particular are convinced that, for example, since the government wrongly interned Japanese-Americans during the Second World War, any exercise of government power is oppressive. They or their children are eventually going to have to learn the hard way the lesson the founders learned between Yorktown and the meeting of the Constitutional Convention: that too little government can be just as fatal to liberty as too much.  They are the unwitting allies of the Tea Party, both out to destroy any remaining civic authority.

And meanwhile, what passes for civic authority is collaborating in its own destruction.  Another blockbuster story runs in today's New York Times. The author, Sharon LaFraniere--who deserves a Pulitzer for it--explains how in 1997 some black farmers sued the Department of Agriculture for discriminating against their credit applications.  The individuals who brought the suit had a strong case, and the Clinton Administration decided not to fight it.  But they went much further, establishing a billion-dollar program to compensate any claimed victims of such discrimination--whether they could provide any evidence of having been deprived of a loan or not.  This predictably led to an avalanche of claims, many of them obviously fraudulent.  This is so typical of Boomer reformism that it brings tears of rage to my eyes.  When the GI generation, black and white, became concerned with racial injustice, they went into the courts, made their case, and secured their rights.  But the Boomers were so convinced of the righteousness of reparation that they could not be bothered to let the legal system--developed over hundreds of years here and in Britain--ascertain the true rights and wrongs.  The results will undermine public confidence in the system still further.

Here are some of the key paragraphs of the article:

"In 16 ZIP codes in Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi and North Carolina, the number of successful claimants exceeded the total number of farms operated by people of any race in 1997, the year the lawsuit was filed. Those applicants received nearly $100 million.

"In Maple Hill, a struggling town in southeastern North Carolina, the number of people paid was nearly four times the total number of farms. More than one in nine African-American adults there received checks. In Little Rock, Ark., a confidential list of payments shows, 10 members of one extended family collected a total of $500,000, and dozens of other successful claimants shared addresses, phone numbers or close family connections.

"Thirty percent of all payments, totaling $290 million, went to predominantly urban counties — a phenomenon that supporters of the settlement say reflects black farmers’ migration during the 15 years covered by the lawsuit. Only 11 percent, or $107 million, went to what the Agriculture Department classifies as “completely rural” counties.

"A fraud hot line to the Agriculture Department’s inspector general rang off the hook. The office referred 503 cases involving 2,089 individuals to the F.B.I.

"The F.B.I. opened 60 criminal investigations, a spokesman said, but prosecutors abandoned all but a few for reasons including a lack of evidence or proof of criminal intent. Former federal officials said the bar for a successful claim was so low that it was almost impossible to show criminality."

But  the process did not stop there.  Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack seems to be auditioning for a university presidency.  He, or people working for him, became convinced that the Department's credit bureau must have discriminated not only against black farmers, but against Hispanic, "Native American" and female farmers as well.  (These groups had filed parallel suits after the original 1997 court decision.)  Or--as an interdepartmental memo actually stated--he became concerned that the department would be accused of favoring black farmers over Hispanic, "Native American" and female farmers.  It is not clear why the feelings of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender farmers did not concern him--perhaps they are being saved for later.  Even as I speak perhaps some intrepid lawyer is preparing a suit on their behalf.  The Indian case, the article explains, was extremely weak, and the Agriculture Department would probably have been able to prove that it had not discriminated in granting loans to Indians. But instead it agreed to a settlement that gives $300 million to Indian farmers and an additional $400 million to Indian nonprofit organizations--and more than $100 million to the lawyers who brought the case. Vilsack says these steps usher in “a new chapter of civil rights at U.S.D.A.,” where “we celebrate diversity instead of discriminate against it.”

The cases of Hispanics and women are so few and so weak that no court had blessed them at all.  Only 10 women and 81 Hipanic farmers had filed claims.  But the Agriculture Department under the current Administration has, literally, solicited further claims from these groups.  "So far," writes LaFraniere, "about 1,900 Hispanics and 24,000 women have sought compensation, many in states where middlemen have built a cottage industry, promising to help win payouts for a fee."  Secretary Vilsack agreed to give it to them.

Before summing up, I would like also to note that Secretary of Agriculture Vilsack, whose salary is paid out of my pocket and yours, responded to the story in the same way the Koch brothers would have:  he refused to give Sharon LaFraniere an interview.  Clearly, however, he does not seem to be suffering from an overdose of shame.

It is ironic that, less than 24 hours after posting that Rush Limbaugh had fabricated a story for political reasons, I have written a very different post--indeed, Rush will undoubtedly be reading another version of this story on the air himself within a very short time. (Drudge doesn't have it yet, but it will.)  But, that's me.  I'm doing my own small bit for my nation.  In fact, I've realized something rather profound in the last couple of days: one reason I believe so deeply in truth is that it's the only basis, ultimately, upon which a necessary minimum of national unity can be preserved.  We are in terrible trouble because both the right and left believe in their own reality, each of which excludes the other.  If I can't take on my own side, I become, to use a phrase from my youth, part of the problem, and I'm not going to do that.  I'm flabbergasted that it never occurred to Vilsack, a former Governor from a swing state, that he is handing the Republican Party a free gift of true propaganda.  He's not only hurting his country, he's hurting his party.

One of my regular readers here is a southern businessman whom I know only from cyberspace. (He will identify himself at once.)  I would describe him as a moderate Republican.  We rarely agree, but we have a lot of mutual respect.  He frequently kids me about getting too much of my news from the New York Times.  I hope that when he reads this, he will follow the link, read the whole story, and ponder that the Times hired the reporter, devoted the resources, and saved the space to get it into print--as it certainly was fit to be.