History Unfolding

The State of the Union

2012-01-28T10:36:00.002-05:00

Any doubt that Barack Obama wants to enter into a new version of the 1950s vanished the other night during the State of the Union. He said so virtually in his first words:

We gather tonight knowing that this generation of heroes has made the United States safer and more respected around the world. (Applause.) For the first time in nine years, there are no Americans fighting in Iraq. (Applause.) For the first time in two decades, Osama bin Laden is not a threat to this country. (Applause.) Most of al Qaeda’s top lieutenants have been defeated. The Taliban’s momentum has been broken, and some troops in Afghanistan have begun to come home.

These achievements are a testament to the courage, selflessness and teamwork of America’s Armed Forces. At a time when too many of our institutions have let us down, they exceed all expectations. They’re not consumed with personal ambition. They don’t obsess over their differences. They focus on the mission at hand. They work together.

Imagine what we could accomplish if we followed their example. (Applause.) Think about the America within our reach: A country that leads the world in educating its people. An America that attracts a new generation of high-tech manufacturing and high-paying jobs. A future where we’re in control of our own energy, and our security and prosperity aren’t so tied to unstable parts of the world. An economy built to last, where hard work pays off, and responsibility is rewarded.

We can do this. I know we can, because we’ve done it before. At the end of World War II, when another generation of heroes returned home from combat, they built the strongest economy and middle class the world has ever known. (Applause.) My grandfather, a veteran of Patton’s Army, got the chance to go to college on the GI Bill. My grandmother, who worked on a bomber assembly line, was part of a workforce that turned out the best products on Earth.

The two of them shared the optimism of a nation that had triumphed over a depression and fascism. They understood they were part of something larger; that they were contributing to a story of success that every American had a chance to share -- the basic American promise that if you worked hard, you could do well enough to raise a family, own a home, send your kids to college, and put a little away for retirement.

Those were indeed inspiring words, and we shall see in a moment that Obama has in fact been trying to move in that direction for years; but the analogy, sadly, is false. While the individual soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan have shown even more dedication than the veterans of the Second World War, measured by the number and length of the tours many of them have spent in combat, they are a tiny minority of the population compared to the ten million men who returned home in 1945. President Obama did not mention the GI bill or the housing programs that made life easier for returning veterans, much less the 91% marginal rates that topped the tax code. And while the problem in 1945 was to maintain the full employment that the war had brought about, today we are struggling with the long-term decline of employment in America driven by market forces and by a business ethos that no longer cares about the impact of decisions upon American society. One of the most important pieces of recent journalism appeared last Sunday: this New York Times account of how Apple decided to locate most of its manufacturing and assembly plants outside the US, most notably in China. It holds out little hope that things will be reversed any time soon.

An equally important piece of reportage was Ryan Lizza's piece on Obama in The New Yorker, drawing on internal White House documents, many of them including check marks and marginal notes from the President himself. The President and his staff have been entirely sincere about striking a non-partisan pose, appealing to moderate voters across the United States--I am tempted to say, all three of them--and finding ways to cut the budget. The trend continued in the state of the union. Any serious attempt to move us away from fossil fuels is obviously dead: the President opened up thousands of square miles of ocean to offshore drilling and extolled our natural gas reserves. We have apparently found the solution to our long-standing energy problems: allow the major financial institutions to bid the price of oil high enough to make domestic production profitable. The President also talked about cutting back regulations--which most of the people I know in business do believe have become much too cumbersome--and about reducing corporate taxes, which are already, in real terms, very low. He drew a surprising amount of perfunctory applause from John Boehner, sitting behind him, but I doubt there is the slightest chance of the Republican Party in Congress passing anything he puts forth. His relationship to them remains similar to that of Andrew Johnson, even though he, unlike Andrew Johnson, is more than willing to meet his radical Republicans half way. How all this will play out in November is hard to say. RealClearPolitics has just run a poll showing that every single presidential candidate has a higher disapproval than approval rating. The President's differential is the smallest, a mere 2%, and the Republican Party is paying the price both for its new style of campaigning and for the Citizens United decision as its competitors devour one another. But Obama will not get--and does not seem to want--a sweeping mandate.

Last but not least, the President has been genuinely committed to debt reduction. The Republicans turned down his grand bargain last summer, but if he wins again they may have no choice but to accept. The Pentagon really faces tremendous cuts. Our last great foreign adventure is winding down and official Pentagon policy says it will not be repeated: there will be no more "long-term, large-scale stability operations," the euphemism for the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.

The federal budget moves according to the generational cycle that Strauss and Howe identified, and our periodic national crises always show a huge increase in the national debt. So it has been this time. The debt doubled under George W. Bush and has been increasing even more rapidly ever since as a result of the economic crisis. It is nowhere near as big in real terms as it was in 1945, as I pointed out some months ago, or probably in 1865 either, but it has still become a center of national concern. The terrible thing, this time, is that we have no great achievements to show for it--not even a renewal of belief in our institutions. And now the public is weary of crusades.

The course of the President's first term, as laid out both by Ron Suskind's book which I discussed last week and by Lizza's article, effectively rules out a broad new crusade at home to put people back to work and seriously curtail the power of institutions like big banks and health insurance companies. And to the extent that global warming indeed results from burning fossil fuels--something of which I personally am not certain--it will continue. Yet I do not think the kind of unity the President dreams of is anywhere near, whether he is re-elected or not. In the campaigns of the Gilded Age, Democrats continued to label Republicans the party of tyranny and Republicans called Democrats the party of treason for decades after the war. The President has unilaterally disarmed the Democrats in the similar battle that is being waged today. We shall see whether he can bring the battle to an end, or whether his premature cease-fire will instead lead to new victories for the other side, with incalculable consequences.

At the conclusion of his speech the President returned to where he had started.

One of my proudest possessions is the flag that the SEAL Team took with them on the mission to get bin Laden. On it are each of their names. Some may be Democrats. Some may be Republicans. But that doesn’t matter. Just like it didn’t matter that day in the Situation Room, when I sat next to Bob Gates -- a man who was George Bush’s defense secretary -- and Hillary Clinton -- a woman who ran against me for president.

All that mattered that day was the mission. No one thought about politics. No one thought about themselves. One of the young men involved in the raid later told me that he didn’t deserve credit for the mission. It only succeeded, he said, because every single member of that unit did their job -- the pilot who landed the helicopter that spun out of control; the translator who kept others from entering the compound; the troops who separated the women and children from the fight; the SEALs who charged up the stairs. More than that, the mission only succeeded because every member of that unit trusted each other -- because you can’t charge up those stairs, into darkness and danger, unless you know that there’s somebody behind you, watching your back.

So it is with America. Each time I look at that flag, I’m reminded that our destiny is stitched together like those 50 stars and those 13 stripes. No one built this country on their own. This nation is great because we built it together. This nation is great because we worked as a team. This nation is great because we get each other’s backs. And if we hold fast to that truth, in this moment of trial, there is no challenge too great; no mission too hard. As long as we are joined in common purpose, as long as we maintain our common resolve, our journey moves forward, and our future is hopeful, and the state of our Union will always be strong.

To rebuild the nation together, I fear, would take far more unity, inspiration and sacrifice than we seem to have available. The re-election of Barack Obama would be far better than any alternative; but we shall continue to mark time on the issues most critical to the country. The State of our Union is not strong, but perilously tenuous. May it slowly knit it self together again as a new generation moves upward in the workplace. Mine, sadly, has had its chance.

Update

2012-01-22T08:24:00.003-05:00

My last post, which has been up about 36 hours, took a long time in coming. While I am not going to edit it in response to the events of this weekend, its prognostications, such as they are, certainly look a mite overstated this morning. I can't remember, literally, ever seeing such a violent swing on the eve of an election as has occurred in South Carolina, and Gingrich's victory certainly means that Mitt Romney is far from a sure thing. It also means that their rival PACs will be hitting each other with everything they have for weeks to come, all of which suggesting that Barack Obama could face either a critically weak (Gingrich) or seriously weakened (Romney) candidate come the fall. I also wonder whether these results show that the Tea Party rebellion might continue if Romney wins the nomination.

Yet having said that, I will also take this opportunity to make another point that emerged from Ron Suskind's book, one that I found very revealing not only about the President himself, but about the mess liberalism has gotten itself into over the last 40 years.

On several occasions during his first year in office, and especially late in 2009 when we found that unemployment had risen far more than anyone anticipated, some one asked Obama whether he was still optimistic. Of course he was, he replied--"My name is Barack Hussein Obama, and I'm sitting in the White House"--proof, evidently, that good things were bound to happen in the United States of America.

Of course that is proof that good things can happen in the United States of America, and of course the opening of high positions to women, minorities, and uncloseted gays has been a very good thing; but the time has come to recognize that it has very little to do with other equally critical aspects of the health of the American economy and society. The discriminatory part of the system has largely been fixed, but the exploitative aspects of it have gotten much, much worse. Larry Summers and Tim Geithner accept Obama as President but they don't accept serious limits on our new financial system. The system has worked personally for Barack Obama, but that doesn't mean that it is working well for his fellow Americans, male and female, black and white. I am not sure liberalism will score any truly decisive successes before it gets beyond that point.

The Tragedy of Barack Obama

2012-01-20T09:24:00.004-05:00

Three years ago, I, like so many others, felt myself fill with hope as Barack Obama was inaugurated as President, with large Democratic majorities to work with. By then I should have known better. The appointment of Larry Summers, whose path had already crossed mine and whose disastrous tenure as President of Harvard should have ruled him out of any further major responsibility, was such a shock that I went, literally, into denial over it. It was not until 18 months later, on July 4, 2010, right here, that I recognized that things had not, and probably would not, turn out as so many of us had hoped. And now we have the story, in broad lines at least, of how that happened, courtesy of Ron Suskind, the author of Confidence Men, which appeared a few months ago. The newspapers reported at the time that the book had sent the White House into a bit of a panic, and I can see why. Their campaign to reduce its impact to negligible proportions evidently succeeded. To be sure, it is very long and sometimes tedious, but the length serves the purpose of genuinely immersing the reader in the subject at hand. (I have used the same technique myself more than once.) And yes, like Woodward's books, it relies on a number of key sources, although Suskind does not make any effort to disguise who they were. I'm sure I could write 5000 words about it, but I don't have the time to do so, and thus I shall begin, as it were, not at the beginning, but with my own conclusion, based upon his facts.

We will never know what another Democratic President might have done with the opportunity of January 2009, and it is not certain that anyone could have done that much more. Neither Obama nor anyone else could match the enthusiasm that had swept him into office with an army of reformers ready to recreate the American economy. That is the result of 30 years of almost unchallenged free market orthodoxy and tax cuts on the very wealthy. In Obama's case, however, the story is very clear. While he was open to radical steps such as a government take-over of at least one major bank, he was not committed to them. And the appointments of Summers, Tim Geithner and Rahm Emmanuel ensured, in retrospect, that nothing fundamental would happen. Summers was a major architect of the deregulation of the financial sector, and nothing, including the loss of 30% of the Harvard Endowment and the economic collapse of 2008, could persuade him that he had made any major mistakes. Geithner as chief of the New York Fed had worked to insure the continued health of the big banks and continued to do so after becoming Treasury Secretary. Emmanuel, I must admit, emerged as the most contemptible type of all: a Democratic politician who evidently believes that Democratic politicians can remain in power only if they carefully avoid rocking any big boats. Together they were a disastrous triumvirate.

"First do no harm" was Geithner's and Summers's motto in dealing with Citigroup, Bank of America and the rest--and that Hippocratic metaphor says it all. To them the banks were the patients. To other Americans, including the venerable Paul Volcker, who figures memorably in the book, a few other aging veterans of the distant past, and Paul Krugman, the patient was the economy and society of the United States, and the big banks were a cancer that had to be excised to restore the patient's health. Obama is a compromiser and no compromise is possible between those two points of view. The banks won. And the banks, Suskind shows again and again, do not make any pretense of having our interests at heart. The slow recovery has revolved, at least in part, around their refusal to lend money within the United States--but as long as more profitable opportunities exist there is not the slightest reason to think that they might do so. In one of the most devastating moments of the book, Suskind quotes an anonymous banker as saying that he and his colleagues are going long on the developing world, where growth is occurring, and short on the United States. That's more than a metaphor: Mitt Romney, among others, bought several corporations with the goal of loading them up with debt and putting them out of business. Even Herbert Hoover, faced with a similar situation, started the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, which became a key institution both during the New Deal and in the Second World War. No such proposal has emanated from Washington now.

I could write pages and pages about what I learned about the financial world from this book, but I will content myself with two more topics: the regulation of derivatives, and banks' relationships with their customers. It has long been accepted that transparency and collateral are the keys to successful markets, and the whole New Deal regulatory structure was designed to bring these virtues to trading on Wall Street. For two years, Wall Street, with help from Summers and Geithner, struggled to prevent any regulation of derivatives, such as forcing them to be traded on public exchanges, with trades settled through clearinghouses. They did not completely keep such provisions out of the Dodd Frank bill, but they hedged them sufficiently as to make them, in all probability, ineffective. Why? Because it is precisely the lack of transparency in these transactions--the inability of buyers and sellers instantly to find out what the other is asking or bidding--that makes them so enormously profitable for the banks. Playing with rules is less profitable (at least in good times!) than playing without them, and two generations of graduates of our elite universities have now learned in their economics courses that profit trumps all. When they reach Wall Street, as so many of them do, that view is reinforced.

As for banks and their customers, Goldman Sachs has, as you probably remember, been sued by the SEC for having sold their customers subprime collateralized debt obligations that they knew hedge fund trader John Paulsen was shorting--and even accepting his help in deciding which mortgages to put into them. That, once again, was simply doing what comes naturally in the modern world. The complaint has not yet been settled, and it will be interesting to see how it turns out. But unless and until the banks are fundamentally restructured and their income reduced, they will remain dangerous parasites on our system.

Another fascinating fact Suskind expounded concerned "repo" money--funds which the big firms lent one another on a temporary basis to keep their operations going. His account reminded me of one of my father's favorite (though not one of his better) jokes, about a guy who borrowed $100 every other Friday from Farbstein to pay Ginsburg, and borrowed it back from Ginsburg the next Friday to pay Farbstein. I must have heard this story for the first time before I was ten, but I could see there was a problem with the scheme. But this was, apparently, the way the big firms operated, and may still be, to the tune of many millions of dollars. They managed their liquidity on a minute-to-minute basis. It's no wonder so many of them had a weakness for cocaine and paid sex.

As for health care, two issues dominated the debate: the expansion of coverage, and the reform of medical practices, using the best available data substantially to decrease the amount of money spent on health care. As I have already described here, Karen Ignagni, the health insurers' chief lobbyist in Washington, made sure early that the health care bill would include a mandate, a gift to her industry of millions of largely healthy customers. But while the bill made its way through Congress, any large-scale cost control efforts dropped out of it, partly because of Republican "death panel" propaganda. I spent last weekend in the company of a number of conservatives arguing that Obamacare was unconstitutional. I don't think that it is, but I wished I could have been defending a proposal that I believed would do some good. And that leads me to the real heart of the matter.

We are in serious trouble in the United States because the financial community and the health care industry soak up much, much too much of the Gross Domestic Product. Real reform means much less money for them--and they are not going to surrender it gladly. Roosevelt made it possible for industrial workers to get more of their firms' revenues in wages, he saved many, many farmers from foreclosure, and he tried (with how much success I am not sure) to take away some of the power of the energy industry, composed then of power companies. He knew many within these institutions would hate him for this, and he didn't care. In fact, he was proud of it, and he should have been.

Barack Obama is simply not capable of taking such a stand. Roosevelt, who met the President of the United States when he was about five years old, was an insider from the day of his birth. Obama was an outsider at least until he reached Harvard Law School, and he has gotten where he has by working with the system. Nothing has ever happened to him--except, evidently, an unfortunate lease he signed for a car, and perhaps some excessive credit card spending--to make him fundamentally distrust our institutions, or, even more importantly, the kind of men who tend to rise to the top within them and look after each other. The women in the White House, Suskind shows, consistently felt ignored and unheard. I'm sure that was true, but I'm not sure it was because they were women--I doubt very much that men who disagreed with Larry Summers and Rahm Emmanuel would have got more of a hearing. They should be proud to have been ignored for their views, rather than resentful of having been ignored because they were women.

Because they had the wrong priorities, the men in the White House have probably sunk their Administration. (The book ends with a big management shake-up after the midterms but it doesn't seem to have done much good. The new chief of staff, William Daley, lasted only a year.) They obviously had to do more to put people to work, but when that became clear in the middle of 2009, Emmanuel shut off discussion by saying that nothing more could go through Congress. (I am not even sure that is true--it could certainly have gone through the House, whose Democratic members paid the price for their President's pusillanimity in November 2010.) Even before that they had not taken enough trouble to make sure the trillion-dollar stimulus would go where it was most needed. It did not have to be their last chance.

In the next ten months Barack Obama will have to endure the most overwhelmingly hostile volley of propaganda that any sitting President has faced in an election since Herbert Hoover. Sadly, he will have no real achievements to show for it. Health Care reform was simply not the place to put his priorities in the midst of an economic crisis, even if he could have passed a good bill. The President has retreated from New Deal liberalism, as Bill Clinton also did, in a thousand ways. He cannot accomplish anything substantial domestically in the coming year and he may suffer the indignity of having his health care law declared unconstitutional. With Mitt Romney virtually assured of the Republican nomination, he is likely, as of this moment, to be President one year from today as well. The President, sadly, will have no one to blame but himself.

Health Care and the Constitution

2012-01-13T16:21:00.006-05:00

I am spending a long weekend at an academic conference on the judicial thinking of the early Republic--not my specialty, of course, but as you all know, there's very little political history I can't get interested in. The conferees include academics and lawyers and represent a very broad spectrum of opinion, and at lunch today we got into a big argument about the health care law, which many of today's conservative intellectuals feel must be declared unconstitutional so as to put some limit on governmental power. Several of them believe that health care, like everything else, should be left to market forces. It has set me thinking on a number of levels.

To begin with, for the conference we have read the opinions of Jefferson and Hamilton on Hamilton's First US Bank, which Hamilton persuaded Washington to approve. That was an interesting argument because it showed Hamilton to be clearly in favor of the modern liberal position about government: that it should exercise its powers to promote the public good. The argument turned on the clause giving the Congress the power to pass laws "necessary and proper" to carry out its enumerated powers, which included, of course, raising taxes and borrowing money. Jefferson (and Madison, in Congress) took a very strict and suspicious view of this clause, arguing that since the government could borrow money without a national bank, it was not necessary, and thus, not allowed by the Constitution. Hamilton on the other hand argued that the national bank would be able to borrow more cheaply and efficiently, thus contributing to the nation's financial health and prosperity, and that this was more than enough to make it "necessary and proper" to the carrying out of the government's enumerated functions.The great arguments over New Deal legislation were not all that different, and the argument over the health care law isn't either.

At bottom, that argument comes down to one's view of government: is it a necessary evil whose functions must be as limited as possible, or is it potentially an engine of good, which can increase the security, the prosperity, and yes, even the liberty of its citizens? Jefferson, the Republicans of the Gilded Age, 20th-century Southern Democrats (for the most part) and the modern Republican Party hold the former view; Hamilton, the two Roosevelts, Wilson, Truman, Kennedy and Johnson held the latter. The question that we spent some time on was whether the Constitution takes sides in this debate, and it is my firm belief that it does not. The "necessary and proper clause" allows for either interpretation, and thus guarantees in practice that the people and their elected representatives will interpret it according to their beliefs, the particular situation they face, and the distribution of political power at any particular moment. That has been the essence of our democracy for more than 200 years and it so remains, even though I regret to say that my side of the argument seems to be losing at the moment.

As for health care, I have begun to think that we shall never make real progress until we clearly define it not as a consumer good, but as a public necessity. We accept that we cannot use the market to provide us with an army and navy, or police forces, or roads and bridges, and thus in theory at least we try to provide those things with maximum efficiency and with the lowest cost. When we view health care in the same way--as something necessary both to individuals and to society as a whole--we will be able to make a whole series of difficult decisions relatively easily. Whether we will be forced into that decision any time soon I do not know. I am sad that President Obama did not take this aspect of the question on.

How Colleges Admit

2012-01-07T10:48:00.002-05:00

It comes as something of a shock to one like myself who has spent his entire adult life in higher education to discover how our top institutions actually work, and, critically, what they value. To be sure, I have always been a somewhat naive idealist about higher education, and I have been away from traditional university life for most of the last twenty years, and away from big-time academia since 1980. Still I have continued to follow what has gone on and for some time I cherished the forlorn hope that I might return. Now, thanks to a remarkable book by a sociologist and fellow Harvard grad named Jerome Karabel called The Chosen,, I understand how I got into big-time academia in the first place, how my classmates did, and a lot more besides.

Karabel's work is more institutional history than traditional sociology. It came out in 2005 and should have gotten a lot more attention than it did, but it's very long, detailed, and carefully researched, and few people, including reviewers, take the time to read such books any longer. I have to admit that I haven't read all of it yet. It covers essentially the whole of the twentieth century, but I focused on the period 1920-1990, roughly. It deals fairly equally with Harvard, Yale and Princeton, whose policies differed in many ways. I'm going to spend most of my time on the discussion of Harvard, which has consistently cultivated an image as a meritocratic institution. Karabel shows that that image is largely false--and false in different ways than I realized.

In the late 19th and very early twentieth centuries, Harvard was mainly a preserve of the WASP establishment, drawing heavily for its student body on the new New England private schools like Groton, St. Paul's and St. Mark's, as well as the larger and slightly more democratic ones like Andover and Exeter. This Yankee stock was leavened by some bright local boys, including my grandfather, Harvard '09, a graduate of Lexington High School, and Joseph P. Kennedy, a bright young Irishman from East Boston. It also included a miscellaneous selection of bright young men from all over the country. This was the work of Charles W. Eliot, probably the greatest of Harvard Presidents, whose tenure included most of Progressive era. In
1908, his last year in office, 45% of freshmen came from public school and 9% and 7% of them were Catholic and Jewish, respectively. Eliot put by far the highest value on intellectual ability and even quarreled with his most famous alumnus, Theodore Roosevelt, over the value of football. But he was the exception, and his successor, Abbot Lawrence Lowell,saw things very differently. Lowell's tenure coincided with another fateful development: the production of a large new class of bright young men, immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe, many of them Jews, who were congregating in large eastern cities and graduating from outstanding high schools. In fact, by 1920 Columbia was already known within the Ivy League as a school that had ruined itself by admitting so many Jews that the better sort of gentile no longer wanted to attend it.

Lowell, who was personally responsible for the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, which he recommended in 1927 to Governor Alvin Fuller, determined that Harvard should not suffer a similar fate. One fascinating thing about The Chosen is the degree to which even in the 1920s, overt, public ethnic prejudice was no longer tolerated, perhaps because millions of young men had just been drafted for the First World war. Lowell had to be coy about what he was doing, and he encountered plenty of opposition within and outside Harvard, but he devised a clever strategy which, with modifications, has been the key to Ivy League admissions policy ever since. By defining the ideal Harvard man not as an intellectual, but as a well-rounded gentleman combining brains with athletic ability, public-spiritedness, and mysterious, intangible qualities of character, Lowell provided his admissions officers with everything they needed to shape incoming classes to their liking And this they did. (Curiously, Lowell's idea of the ideal Harvard man was quite similar to Cecil Rhodes's desiderata for the recipients of his Oxford scholarships for Americans, Germans, and Commonwealth students.) In 1925, in the midst of Lowell's tenure, the freshman class was at least 28% Jewish--almost three times the proportion of Yale freshmen and almost ten times the percentage of Princeton frosh. But by 1933 (when James Bryant Conant took over as President) the percentage of Jewish freshman at Harvard was down to 12%. One casualty of this new policy, I am almost certain, was my own father, a Jewish graduate of New Utrecht High School in Brooklyn in 1930. He was evidently informed that he had done poorly on the math exam, but he was the salutatorian of his class and I frankly doubt that was the reason. On the other hand, had he been admitted, you would be doing something else at this moment, because had he not gone to the University of Wisconsin instead he would never have met my mother, whose Harvard- and Radcliffe-educated parents had settled in Madison in the 1930s.

Now it became somewhat easier for Jews to enter Harvard after the Second World War, although their numbers from the leading competitive high schools in the country, particularly Bronx Science and Stuyvesant in New York and Central High in Philadelphia, had to be severely restricted. But what is most striking about the many arguments over admissions during the 1950s and well into the 1960s, when I arrived myself (in 1965), is the continuing anti-intellectualism of most admissions officers and much of the higher administration. Again and again some one would ask whether Harvard wanted to be the American Ecole Normale--the elite national French school that trains lycee teachers--and again and again, the answer was a resounding no. Bright boys, it was said, suffered from all sorts of social disabilities, and in any case few of them ascended to the highest leadership positions in our society. (France may indeed remain unique in this respect: several "grandes ecoles" train most of the French elite, and it is my understanding that consistent, top quality academic performance remains the only way to get into them. It shows.) Carabel has a lot of data about the consequences of this policy, which was designed both to limit the number of Jews and to maintain Harvard's relationship with elite boarding schools. And here is where I got a real shock.

I went to a good private school myself, Loomis as it was then, north of Hartford, Connecticut. Loomis was not in the same league as Andover or Exeter, but it was relatively cheap, cheap enough for the average New England professional family to afford, and one-third of its students were day students, most of them from the best-off and brightest families in West Hartford. Loomis was a Yale feeder, not a Harvard one. Checking the 100 or so students in my yearbook, I find 9 who went to Yale and 5 who went to Harvard. Four of the Harvard admits, including myself, were academic standouts. Yet as I look back on it, Harvard used leadership criteria at Loomis as well. The President of the Student Council and the President of the Senior Class were almost automatic admits for Harvard, although in my year neither one decided to take advantage of the opportunity.

In any case, when I got to Harvard, various elements of my environment had brainwashed me to believe that the private school kids were, on the whole, a little smarter. Carabel has statistics showing how wrong I was. The majority of the admits from private schools--and this may even have included the two best, Andover and Exter--would have had no chance making it in from public school based on their academics. This was especially true of those from the smaller schools known collectively as "St. Grottlesex," including St. Paul's, Middlesex, and Groton, many of whom had SATs in the 1100-1200 range. Harvard was, in short, still cultivating its relations with the elite, and with alumni--largely for financial, as well as social reasons.

Did things change in the late 1960s? Yes and no. On the one hand, the civil rights movement led to an attempt to raise black admits (about 35 out of 1500 in my freshman year) to their proportion in the population, and pressure to admit more Hispanics and Asians followed. That did not however reflect any attempt to improve the overall intellectual level of the class, but rather an attempt to widen the elite which Harvard was training, partly as a matter of social justice and partly as an adjustment to new political realities. Indeed, the Asians seem to have posed a problem similar to the Jews half a century earlier--as the university admitted to the US civil rights commission in the mid-1980s, were admissions based purely on intellectual ability, there would have been more of them, not fewer.

Karabel's book, in my opinion, missed one important part of the story. While he makes it clear that all the big three catered shamelessly to the social and economic elite, he treats this mainly as a matter of "legacy" admissions, that is, the admission of children of prominent alumni. I think he missed something else: a weakness for the children of the political, cultural and economic elite, whether they had any previous ties to the admitting school or not. Karabel spends some time on the case of George W. Bush, Andover '64, Yale '68, making clear that he would never have been admitted to Yale (or probably, to Andover) but for his family connections. But he says nothing about Al Gore, a classmate of mine whom I knew as a freshman in Economics 1, and who I have plenty of reason to believe would never have been admitted had his father not been a U.S. Senator. Thus the 2000 election pitted a Yale grad against a Harvard grad--neither of whom could have gotten in on their own merits, a pattern that continued when they embarked upon their poltiical careers. This was the theme of a book by Daniel Golden, The Price of Admission: How America's Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Elite Colleges -- and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates, which appeared just a year after Karabel's. Focusing on Harvard, Brown, and Duke, Golden showed what an extraordinary advantage both celebrity children and the children of wealthy families had. Even if they have never given substantial amounts to the admitting institution, that institution is willing to bet that they will.

My own experience with universities, of course, has been of a different kind--and thus the book left me with a somewhat different insight. Clearly our top universities cater to, perpetuate, and to some degree diversify our elites--but what, exactly, does this have to do with their original educational mission? In short, it occurred to me that universities that do not primarily value intellectual ability in picking their students would find it very easy to downgrade pure intellectual ability among their faculty, as well. It has been my experience that that is, indeed, the case.

A similar era?

2011-12-29T15:50:00.006-05:00

At long last I have acted on my intention to investigate the Gilded Age, in order to find exactly how similar politics 140 years ago were to our own. My text has been a remarkable book, Twenty Years in Congress, 1861-1881, written by a distinguished participant, James G. Blaine of Maine, who came within an ace of becoming President himself in 1884 but lost by the votes of a few thousand New Yorkers and retired to write this most interesting history. There is no substitute, I have found, for investigating an era through the eyes of a participant, and Blaine combined an eye for character with a respect for primary sources, quoting the Congressional Globe and presidential addresses at great length. My read has tended to confirm that the similarities in the two eras are rather striking, largely because both are dominated by a mixture of partisanship and corruption.

I have skipped volume I for the moment and began in the wake of the Civil War, during the Presidency of Andrew Johnson, one which bears an uncomfortable similarity in some respects to the time we are passing through now. Johnson, a poor white from East Tennessee, was one of the greatest accidents in American history. A loyal union man and a "War Democrat," as they were known, he joined Abraham Lincoln on the "Unionist" (not Republican) ticket in 1864 to appeal to loyal Democrats and the border states. Like many upcountry southerners, he hated the planter class, but it turned out that he hated the newly freed slaves more. The large Republican majority in Congress was determined to preserve the results of the war by either reducing the representation of the Southern states, or by enfranchising the freedmen. The 14th amendment was written to do the first: it did not require Negro suffrage, as it was then called, but specifically promised to reduce the Congressional representation of states so as to reflect the number of voters they enfranchised. When the southern states, supported by President Johnson, refused to ratify the amendment, the Republican Congressional majority--which grew even larger in the 1866 elections--passed its own Reconstruction plan, putting the South under military rule and insisting that the southern states enfranchise Negroes in new Constitutions before they could send representatives to Congress again. Negro suffrage, sadly, was a measure well in advance of even northern opinion, and the radicals realized by 1867 that it had to be put into the Constitution in order to impose it upon the South. This the 15th Amendment did.

Johnson's dogged resistance to these measures was fully shared by the Democratic Party, northern as well as southern. In an odd echo of what we have been through for the last three years, not a single Democrat in Congress voted for either the 14th or 15th Amendments, nor did any Democratic-controlled legislatures ratify them. Meanwhile, the Republican Congress, with good reason, did not trust Johnson to use the executive branch's powers to carry out their policies, and in 1867 they passed the Tenure of Office Act, taking advantage of a Constitutional ambiguity to make the approval of the Senate mandatory to remove, as well as to appoint, federal officers. Utterly contrary to tradition and precedent, this measure was clearly unconstitutional, but the Republicans forced it through nonetheless, and it became the basis for Johnson's impeachment when he removed Secretary of War Stanton from office. The Republicans would have done much better to have impeached him for clearly attempting to subvert the laws that they had passed, but they preferred to rest their case on a technicality instead. Blaine by the time he wrote his book clearly recognized that the impeachment was a mistake, although he had voted for it as a member of the House at the time. In the end, thanks to some courageous Republicans, Johnson was acquitted by the Senate by the narrowest of margins. The Tenure of Office act controversy now parallels the battle over President Obama's recess appointments, which the Senate used parliamentary subterfuge to try to prevent.

Partisanship dominated nearly every major issue in this period. The Democrats, many of whom had never believed in the Civil War, wanted to pay off the enormous war debt in depreciated paper currency; this the Republicans refused to do, and they made impressive progress in paying it off even under Johnson. Even the admission of new western states was now pushed or rejected on partisan grounds, because they were thought to be likely to send more Republicans to the Senate and the House. Republicans often referred to "the Democracy," as it was then called, as the party of treason (another call they have taken up again), while Democrats referred to Republicans as the party of dictatorship and racial equality. It was probably fortunate that the nation had General Grant to turn to, since he could command some bipartisan support at least in the North. We have no such figure on the horizon today.

Yet I could not help noticing that despite the equally partisan divide, the Congress functioned infinitely more efficiently than it does now. The House routinely suspended its rules to rush through legislation (this required a 2/3 vote, which the Republicans could usually, but not always, get), and the filibuster seems to have been unknown even in the Senate. Committees worked quickly and efficiently--without any staff at all. The level of oratory was incomparably higher than it is today. And one senses, in speeches on all side, an acute sense that the United States was still a relatively young democratic experiment--many of the legislators, after all, would have known in their youth men and women old enough to remember the adoption of the Constitution--and an instinctive, continual resort to the first principles of Republican government. The average legislator today would find himself intellectually overmatched, should a time machine take him back 150 years.

The real issue in this period, as in the war itself, was the question of federal authority. Having strengthened it beyond imagination to win the war, the Republicans, led by Charles Sumner in the Senate, one of the few real heroes of the era, knew they must keep it strong to complete the work of the war. Only the continued occupation of the South by federal troops, even after states were re-admitted to the Union, gave the black citizenry and white Republicans (of which there were some!) any chance of exercising their franchise and securing their lives and property. The Ku Klux Klan was, very simply, a terrorist organization dedicated to re-imposing white rule by force, something it gradually managed to do. Meanwhile, Democrats North and South, and even some dissenting Republicans, argued that the Republican majority, and, after 1869, the Grant Administration, was maintaining a wartime despotism long after the time had come to restore peace. Grant won a big electoral victory in 1868, but Blaine points out that his margin was somewhat deceptive. Both New York and New Jersey voted for Horatio Seymour, the Democratic candidate, and Grant's margins in several other Democratic states were quite small. Although Grant remained personally committed to reconstruction, he was a much weaker President than he had been a general, and his Administration's corruption so undermined the confidence of many concerned citizens that he faced a liberal Republican revolt in 1872. The liberals nominated a titan of the Republican Party, the editor Horace Greeley, and the Democrats decided they had best support him. Greeley could not win their loyalty, however, and he went down to a much worse defeat than Seymour.

Turning back for a moment to the present day, the Republicans in the last four years have treated Barack Obama in the same way their ancestors treated Andrew Johnson--and, I would suggest, for the same two reasons. First, they see him as attempting to maintain an old order which they detest--the remnants of the New Deal and the Great Society. They prefer, of course, to argue that he is trying to impose a new order, socialism, but I suspect that in their hearts they know the truth. There is some truth in this, just as Andrew Johnson and the defeated white Southerners and their Northern Democratic allies meant to restore the supremacy both of the white race and the Democratic Party. But secondly, neither set of Republicans viewed, or views, the President as legitimate. Johnson they regarded as an apostate; Obama they regard as unfit, for various reasons, to sit in the White House. Having opposed everything he did for two years, and having been rewarded with control of the House of Representatives, they are now obstructing him at every turn, and doing their best, too, to deny the Presidential appointing power by refusing to confirm his nominees, regardless of their impact upon the ability of the federal government even to function. George Will, who evidently realizes that Obama has a good chance of being re-elected, calls for four more years of total obstructionism in his last column of the year.

It has now become clear to me that the United States has enjoyed only two eras of genuine political consensus in its history: from 1800 to 1824 (although in some respects that consensus persisted into the 1830s), and from about 1941 until about 1968 (although in some respects that consensus lasted at least until the 1980s.) The earlier consensus was built around white manhood suffrage, expansion into the Northwest, and attempts to keep slavery where it was. The second was based upon the New Deal and the United States' new world role. The Civil War and Reconstruction proved that the nation could pass through one of its periodic crises without creating a real consensus or even strengthening the federal government. The executive branch did not recover from the Presidency of Johnson until Teddy Roosevelt and Wilson. There is every reason to think that those of us in our sixties will not live to see a genuine consensus established again, and that the executive will continue to grow weaker for at least the next decade.

The issue of corruption at all levels of government, combined with serious economic inequality, eventually brought about the Progressive era, more than thirty years after the end of the Civil War. We too may have to wait for decades before we set about fixing government and, perhaps, restoring some of the role it played in the economy in the middle of the twentieth century. In any case, the trends of that era were clearly not fated to continue indefinitely. We have moved into a new era, one sadly reminiscent of the Gilded Age, few of whose politicians have gone down as heroic figures.

Iraq revisited

2011-12-23T09:24:00.002-05:00

In 2002, the Bush Administration decided to attack Iraq. No one really knows why, but I suspect that the main reason was that in their foreign policy scheme, no medium-size state with significant regional conventional forces hostile to the United States should be allowed to survive in the post-Cold War world, whether it was building WMD or not. More specifically, they wanted to remove a long-time threat to Israel, and at least some of the leaders of the Bush Administration regarded the attack on Iraq as the prelude to an attack on Iran. (I heard from good sources that both Paul Wolfowitz and John Bolton, the undersecretaries of State and Defense, talked freely about this.) President Bush, I think, sincerely thought that we could create a democratic Iraq that would become a model for the region. Donald Rumsfeld insisted that the whole job could be done in a matter of months, without any long-term occupation. It was no accident that the United States embarked upon this new adventure essentially at the moment when Vietnam veterans had become very rare in the senior ranks of the American military.

According to another excellent source, President Bush on the eve of the invasion had no idea of the division of Shi'ite and Sunni Muslims in Iraq. (Bill Kristol famously told Terri Gross that this would not pose a problem because "Iraq has always been pretty secular.") The neoconservatives, in one of the great self-deceptions of modern history, had not only talked themselves into the idea that a pro-American and pro-Israeli regime would automatically emerge when a dictator was toppled, but threw the power of the U.S. government behind anyone who promised to make it happen, like Ahmed Chalabi. As a noted here at the time, the very first election held after the invasion of Iraq exposed the reality of the situation: votes were cast almost entirely along religious lines. Civil war was already breaking out, and it became horribly violent in the middle of the decade, displacing four million mostly Sunni and Christian Iraqis, half of whom fled the country. Meanwhile the Sunnis and extreme Shi'ites mounted an insurgency against the American presence, eventually taking the lives of more than four thousand American soldiers.

By late 2006 the Pentagon was willing to give up, but George W. Bush was not. Showing sensible leadership, he not only insisted upon a new policy but found a man--General David Petraeus--who thought he could carry it out. Petraeus quieted the situation down by making an alliance with Sunni leaders in much of the country against Al Queda, while building up a mostly Shi'ite central government under Nouri Al-Maliki. Kurdistan, meanwhile, flourished under what amounted to independence. Not long before leaving office, the Bush Administration concluded an agreement that kept US troops in Iraq until 2012. The Obama Administration initially reduced our presence to 50,000 men, and then, after failing to extend that agreement further, withdrew them all.

I am not particularly surprised that relations between the Shi'ites and Sunnis are now breaking down, but I am a bit shaken that Maliki could not even allow us a decent interval before issuing an arrest warrant for the leading Sunni politician in the country on very suspect charges of terrorism. That step was immediately answered by an outbreak of bombings in Baghdad. The Kurds may now be forced to choose between the Sunnis and Shi'ites. We have already had trouble between the Kurds and the Turkish government. Meanwhile, the Iranian influence among the Shi'ites has continued to grow.

As it turns out, the destruction of Saddam Hussein's regime was an important straw in the wind. While I do not think it caused the Arab spring, Iraq now looms as the first of a large and growing number of Arab countries--including Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya--whose long-time authoritarian regimes have now fallen. Yet in each case the leading political force isn't western-style democracy, but some more or less moderate form of extremism. The Syrian regime is at least as threatened, and its fall will probably lead to another civil war between Shi'ites and Sunnis. We are witnessing the second stage of a process that began around 1990: the collapse of regional orders created after the First World War and the end of the Russian, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires. Peter Galbraith pointed out some years ago that three of the four multinational states created in the early 1920s--Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, and Czechoslovakia--had now disappeared. His prediction that Iraq would do the same may yet be vindicated.

In a sense these events are part of an even larger process. From the 17th century until quite recently, western civilization was on the march. The process climaxed after 1945, when two superpowers inspired by western ideas--the United States and the Soviet Union--extended their sway over most of the world, and when there was essentially no alternative to following one or the other of their models of political and economic development. That began to change in 1979, when an Islamist regime replaced an American client in Iran. Now there seems little hope of any Middle Eastern state following a genuinely western model. Western ideas are also under attack in Israel, where theocracy threatens the state on many fronts. And, of course, they are under attack in the United States, where Republicans are trying to dismantle the legacy of the Progressive Era, the New Deal, and even, in some key respects, the Enlightenment.

President Obama, whose own life has been a remarkable series of triumphs so far, made one characteristic mistake in connection with the withdrawal from Iraq, claiming that we had helped make it a democracy. So resentful were even our allies there of our presence that they could not wait a week before undermining him. The neoconservatives were already accusing him of losing Iraq by a precipitate withdrawal, ignoring, characteristically, that the government we created had simply refused to allow us to stay. These accusations will continue, but the President will do well to emulate the most underrated President of my lifetime, Gerald R. Ford, who in 1975 simply told the American people that our role in the Vietnamese drama was over as our ally fell apart. We live, as I have said many times here recently, in an era of declining governmental authority, largely because of the retreat of the Enlightenment model of a government designed to ensure its citizens' rights and improve their lot in life. That model may be preserved in certain parts of the world, but its relentless progress during the 19th and 20th centuries has been halted.

The Crisis in the US

2011-12-16T15:05:00.003-05:00

I have not had much to say about the Republican contest for President so far, in part because I find myself unable to watch more than about 15 minutes of a Republican debate. I was rather fascinated in the first one by the echoes of a Maoist party meeting. If anyone had ever said, or, worse, done anything halfway reasonable, such as Mitt Romney's introduction of universal health care, Newt Gingrich's welcoming noises towards immigrants, or Rick Perry's advocacy of mandatory HPV vaccination, they were immediately called to account for it, invited to confess their deviationism--and all did their best to take advantage of the opportunity to purge their sins and promise to do better in the future. To secure the Republican party nomination, it seems, one must now embrace numerous false propositions about our economy and society, not to mention a caricature of our President as an irresponsible socialist. The drama in the race relates to Mitt Romney's continuing inability to convince "the base" that he is their man--and the inability of any alternative candidate to sustain a boomlet. (Nate Silver now reports that Gingrich's numbers are beginning to slip.) This is one symptom of our political crisis.

A second, related one has shown up in Washington, where the Republicans in Congress can no longer think beyond political advantage and are doing their best to paralyze the government. They have stalled many presidential nominations of a quite unexceptionable character, and have even broken the much-ballyhooed agreement, reached I believe in 2007, not to filibuster nominees for federal judgeships. Now the House Republicans are trying to force the President to take a stand on the Keystone pipeline in return for extending his payroll tax cut. (On that one I have to admit that I hope they kill the deal: the payroll tax cut was a mistake and it needs to be restored as soon as possible.) I have also just noticed that the $1 trillion dollar spending bill to which they have agreed will carry the government through only until next September, the height of the election season--a recipe for further disaster. By refusing to confirm the President's choice as head of the new Consumer Protection Bureau or to fund regulatory agencies adequately, the Republicans are subverting the intentions both of the executive and of the last Congress to an unprecedented extent. Not since the last two years of the Presidency of Andrew Johnson (1867-8) has the nation seen anything similar--and that is food for more thought.

Andrew Johnson and the Radical Republicans differed over one of the great issues of American history: the shape of the postwar South and the fate of the freed slaves. Thad Stevens, Charles Sumner and the rest of the Radicals believed just as deeply as John Boehner and Jim DeMint that the President opposed true American values; indeed, they viewed him as ally of the recently defeated traitors. Yet they knew what they wanted: the enfranchisement of the Freedmen and a Republican-dominated South that would keep their party in office for a generation. Today's Republicans know only a mindless hatred of all government and of the bi-coastal elite that initially dominated postwar American politics. Their great plan for a new America begins and ends with lower taxes and no regulation, and they will do literally anything to advance it. An opinion piece in today's New York Times explains how the Republicans have emasculated the National Labor Relations Board and now threaten to cease its functioning altogether because they will not confirm President Obama's new nominees, leaving the board without a quorum. Like the SDS forty years ago, today's Republican legislators have no respect for existing law.

We are headed towards uncharted territory: a modern state and economy without effective government. The Obama Administration has slowed, not interrupted, the trend. Today's Times also reports that a new regulation will allow states to interpret the new health care law very flexibly, rather than requiring any particular coverage around the nation. This may be aimed at Anthony Kennedy, the swing vote on the Supreme Court--which may emerge as a key Republican ally in years to come as well. The Republican use of 9/11, while hardly altogether insincere, was from their standpoint brilliant: they used the mobilization of the country and the exhaustion of the resources of the federal government up in a largely futile enterprise, leaving too little left to cope with the worst economic crisis in 80 years. A different Democratic President might conceivably have rallied the country around a different position after 2009, but that will never be known. The great adventure of the Enlightenment, the design of a government to assure justice and meet the needs of the people, is for the moment at an end in the United States. We shall need a new and more flexible view of history to integrate this epochal fact into our world view.

Europe and the US

2011-12-10T09:05:00.002-05:00

Some weeks ago, I translated, posted and praised Chancellor Merkel's latest speech to the Bundestag on the crisis in the EU and the Eurozone. Weeks have passed, Merkel and Sarkoczy and trying to impose more fiscal uniformity upon the Euro zone, and now I am having second thoughts. To be sure, the Europeans are behaving more responsibly than our own politicians, and they think that they are holding themselves to a commendably high standard. I am not however so sure. The US is seriously threatened by a lack of governmental authority to do anything; Europe is threatened by possible governmental overreach. The happy medium seems to be lacking.

Germany has demonstrated admirable self-discipline for the last half century or more. The reason is clear: both Germany and the world suffered enormously during the first half of the twentieth century from the exact opposite. Both before and after reunification in 1991, the free German leadership has shown an unequaled sense of national purpose, including both political parties, business, and unions. They have kept their own fiscal house in order while focusing on production for export, and when the Euro was created the new European central bank was lodged in Frankfurt. Now, however, Merkel is staking everything on the idea that the rest of the Eurozone must be more like Germany, and this may end disastrously.

It seems to me that Germany stands in a similar relationship to the rest of the Eurozone as China stands to the US: Europe is Germany's customer, just as we are China's. To keep their industries running they hold enormous amounts of the dollars we spend on their goods. If the Germans want to keep their customers, and thus their exports, they must be willing, it seems to me, to allow the weaker countries to run current account deficits and find some way to recycle the money, as the Chinese have. Otherwise it will be necessary, as Paul Krugman has argued, to allow the weaker southern European countries to drop out of the Eurozone and return to their own freely floating currencies. Under Merkel's new plan those countries will surrender a large chunk of their sovereignty to the European Court of Justice, which will determine whether their national budgets conform to treaties. I would sympathize with any people that refused to make that sacrifice. Merkel's initiative looks all too much like Germany's and the rest of Europe's response to the Great Depression (before Hitler) to me. Germany this time doesn't have to worry about trade restrictions of foreign capital withdrawals, as it did in 1928-32, but it does have to worry about aggregate demand.

Still, the European situation remains almost inspiring in comparison to our own. To find a parallel between the relations between Congress and the President today one would have to go back to the last two years of Andrew Johnson's administration. The Republicans in both the House and the Senate remain determined not only to block any presidential legislative initiative, but essentially to make it impossible for the executive branch to function. The Senate Republicans are now preventing more and more appointments from coming to a vote. (The presidential appointment power, which the Radical Republicans tried to limit by law under Johnson, was the issue that led to Johnson's impeachment.) They are trying to put crippling restrictions on the functioning of new agencies, and they apparently want the payroll tax cut to expire on the assumption that they can blame the President. (Rising above partisanship for a moment, may I say that I hope it will expire. I said a year ago when the President proposed it that it was a terrible idea, and I still think so. But the Republicans are blocking any effective action to create jobs as well.)

The President's electoral prospects are improving daily. No one who knows Newt Gingrich thinks he can possibly survive a full general election campaign. The more we learn about him--in my case, in a wonderful interview that Terri Gross did with reporter Karen Tumulty last week--the more the contradictions in his career become apparent. He has railed against Washington cronyism while almost obsessively finding new ways to take advantage of it. Romney may overcome him, but he may be deeply damaged. The President evidently hopes to win re-election by default, and he might. What he can then do with the victory is another question altogether.

Our current crisis, to repeat, will not lead to the emergence of new totalitarian regimes in advanced countries. The era that created them is long gone. We are threatened not with too much government but with much too little. Success either in Europe or in America would offer some hope.

Ten years after

2011-12-02T19:06:00.004-05:00

Today a colleague of mine asked me whether we really can put Afghanistan in historical perspective yet. We have, he said, a new story on Iraq--it was a mistake to go in, we botched it up initially, but starting in 2007 we managed to make it work fairly well and now we're leaving--but Afghanistan is more confusing. What did I think? It set me thinking.

The Bush Administration--as I think I pointed out in my very first post here in the fall of 2004--was never very interested in Afghanistan itself. Instead, it created the Bush dcotrine--that the Taliban, which had sheltered Al Queda, had to be brought down as well as Al Queda itself--to introduce a whole new foreign policy that would lead to the invasion and conquest of both Iraq and Iran, as well. Donald Rumsfeld also saw Afghanistan, which had no modern military forces, as a laboratory for new, capital-intensive forms of warfare. Within months, the Taliban had been swept away--but the Administration had bigger things on its mind. General Franks was already ordered to plan Iraq while the first Afghan war was in progress. And I am increasingly convinced that the Bush Administration hardly cared about Al Queda, except as an excuse, at all. They could not find and kill Osama Bin Laden in seven and a half years, while Barack Obama took only two and a half. As I understand it, Bin Laden had been in his last home for roughly the last half of the Bush Administration. I am not sure that I will live to read the full story of how we located him--it may take 30 years or more to come out.

The initial invasion of Afghanistan nonetheless drove the Taliban out, and by 2005 or so level-headed American observers, including one who used to share my office, were convinced that it was gone for good. But it was reconstituting itself in Pakistan. Barack Obama entered office while the situation was deteriorating, and he had already argued that we had neglected Afghanistan in favor of Iraq. So protecting the Karzai regime from the Taliban became his goal as well. We have cleared some key areas of Taliban for the moment--just as we cleared some areas of South Vietnam of Viet Cong in 1969-71--but whether the Afghans can build a lasting foundation there remains to be seen.

The Bush Administration was, in one sense, right: Afghanistan is a remote, poor country with almost no geopolitical significance. Perhaps after Bin Laden escaped we needed some bases there to find and kill him, but the Taliban has never had broader political ambitions. The real question at stake was the political future of the Muslim world. The Bush Administration was determined, first, to show that in the post cold war world there was no room for well-armed, medium size states that had shown a willingness to act against American interests by force. They eliminated Ba'athist Iraq but could never move on to Iran. Secondly, at least some of them, including Bush himself, thought they could start the Arab world down the path to democracy. That, now, has happened too--but with results very different from what Bush had in mind.

The Egyptian elections gave two Islamist parties, the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafists, well over half the votes. Something similar has happened in Tunisia. The Egyptian brotherhood has announced that it opposes, for now at least, a coalition with the Salafists. But the significance of these developments remains enormous. A clash of civilizations looms on the horizon, because the momentum of western civilization has been halted, and then reversed, in the last half century. One hundred years ago there seemed to be no alternative to copying the west, even in the Muslim world. Even the alternatives to liberal democracy such as Communism and Fascism were clearly offshoots of the western rationalist tradition. Now all that is changed, changed utterly. Turkey, the big outpost of westernization in the region, has become much more religious and its long-time alliance with Israel is in tatters. The Egyptian colonels' regime that ruled for about 55 years is giving way to Muslim democracy. Hezbollah has become enormously influential in Lebanon and Hamas is probably the true representative of the Palestinians. But we should not be surprised. Western civilization has been under attack from the left and the right here in the United States. And Israel, founded as a socialist democracy, is tending more towards theocracy every year. A clash of civilizations looms because the hegemony of western civilization is now a thing of the past.

Israel was created by secularists in the wake of the Second World War, when no one imagined what a role religion would play in the lives of those not yet born. It dreamed, apparently, of a relatively secular Middle East in which it could co-exist with its neighbors. The peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan and the negotiations with the Palestinians in the 1990s seemed to offer hope that this was possible--but it looks much less likely now. As the New York Times courageously reported last weekend, the settler movement now has a new goal: the ethnic cleansing of Arab neighborhoods within Israel. If Egypt and even Turkey become avowed enemies again Israel will face very serious threats--and there is also the question of the Iranian nuclear program. As an American, I am concerned that renewed conflict could draw the US into a major regional war. In my opinion, it should not.

I think that in another 50 years Afghanistan will be something of a footnote to history, rather like the anarchist movements of the first half of the twentieth century, which faded into insignificance after the advent of Communism. The 21st century equivalent of the Communist challenge will be the advent of new Islamist regimes. It may be much less serious, it may require a completely different kind of response--but it is real. The events of 1979-81--the Egypt-Israel peace treaty, the Iranian revolution, and the assassination of Anwar Sadat--pointed in the direction things were going. They have a long way to go yet.

A note on the JFK assassination

2011-11-27T11:00:00.002-05:00

Dozens of people are now arriving here thanks to Salon's reprint of Jefferson Morley's assassination piece the other day, which referred to my book, The Road to Dallas. I appreciate the mention but I think I should make it clear that what he said about the book was only 50% accurate.

The book, about which you can find more at the link at right, argued that Kennedy was assassinated by a conspiracy of organized crime figures. (Oswald did kill Kennedy, but he did so on their behalf.) It specifically said in the introduction, however, that the CIA had nothing to do with the assassination. The key organized crime figure in the assassination, who acknowledged his involvement, was a man named John Martino. Martino had in fact worked with CIA operatives on at least one major operation in Florida in the spring of 1963, as is detailed in The Road to Dallas, but I did not say, and do not believe, that any of his CIA contacts were involved in the assassination of JFK.

A post from yesterday appears below.

Liberty and Authority

2011-11-26T15:28:00.002-05:00

About 34 years ago, as I recall, when I was a junior faculty member at Harvard, I attended a history department retreat to discuss the state of the department and the profession. There was some discussion of the specialization that had already taken over the historical profession. I was already revising my dissertation to become the first book at right, and it much broader than the average dissertation--and I apparently already disliked specialization. I raised my hand and commented that the purpose of specialized monographs, it seemed to me, should be to provide the raw material for better syntheses.

A senior professor named John Clive--never particularly noted for large-scale scholarly achievement--was not impressed. "But what are you going to do with synthesis?" he asked. "Stand up like Frisky Merriman at the end of History 1 (a western civilization course), take out your pocket watch, set it going back and forth on its chain like a pendulum, and explain that the two poles represented 'liberty' and 'authority?' The room broke up in hysterical laughter, and that brought that particular discussion to an end. Later, during the next break, I told a fellow assistant professor--who was destined to abandon scholarship for administration, that I thought specialized monographs should allow us to do what Merriman had done--only better. And I tried to do exactly that during the decade that followed, in the third book on the list at the right. It was a History Book Club selection, but Clive was right: it didn't make much of a professional splash. Yet, following up on last week's post, it seems to me now that Merriman is going to have the last laugh.

As I look back on those distant days against the background of everything I have learned since, I must conclude that nothing can give a people the same immense self-confidence as victory in a great war. The GIs (like Clive), Silents and Boomers at that retreat had rebelled against many aspects of the postwar consensus, but even after Vietnam, they trusted that the achievements of our parents and grandparents would naturally endure to the end of their lives and beyond. They thought, apparently, that the emotional outburst of the previous decade had simply enriched their lives by overthrowing social and intellectual restraints, without calling the structure of society into question. I shall always wonder if that might indeed have been what happened had it not been for the Vietnam War, but we will never know that. What we do know now is that not only the postwar world of the 1950s, but the entire enterprise of western political life since the late eighteenth century, were already being undermined from within, leading to a crisis of authority that is now reaching its peak and which my own generation, which has already passed the peak of its influence as I write, has utterly failed to solve.

Merriman, I now find with the help of google, laid down his burden as the History 1 instructor, prophetically enough, in 1941. A member of the Harvard class of 1896, he had evidently been born smack in the middle of the Missionary generation in 1875 or so. He died just a few days after the end of the Second World War. It turns out that Clive's own memory failed him: according to an account of his last lecture in the Christian Science Monitor published in May 1941, European society, he argued, oscillated between security and liberty. Taking a long view, he saw the religious wars of the 16th century leading to the stronger monarchies of the 18th--and the laissez-faire economics of the 19th century leading to the regulation the Progressive era and the New Deal. In that last lecture, he warned that Hitler's victory could end civilization that that the United States must enter the war as soon as possible. His audience might well have included John F. Kennedy, whom I believe was still in residence in Cambridge in the spring of 1941. But by the time he died five years later, George W. Bush, who perhaps did the most to consummate the collapse of modern authority during his eight years in office, was only weeks away from his conception in New Haven, Connecticut. Such is the way of history.

Merriman, in short, saw himself as an observer and in a way an actor in the great sweep of history, and specifically part of the rationalist experiment in western civilization dating from the 17th and 18th centuries. His whole generation was animated by the idea that reason, and law, could create a better society at home and a better world abroad. I would suggest that that idea no longer plays a significant part in our public life, and certainly not in our economic life, where the profit motive reigns supreme without any challenge. The Republican Party, largely in the ascendant for the last 40 years, has been dedicated since Reagan to the idea that government is the problem, not the solution. The economics profession lost interest in an even partially planned economy long ago. As a remarkable series of graphs in today's New York Times shows, we now have grown a new economic system in which corporate profits rise while employment and the income of the lower half of the population fall. No one is seriously discussing how this might be changed. My own historical profession has lost interest in the long-term movement of history: it is largely focused on the lives of women, minorities and gays within the society that Merriman's contemporaries and students managed to create. I strongly suspect within another 20 years those issues are going to seem a lot less important even to women, minorities and gays. We will be learning first hand about the need for effective public authority. And other generations will once again encounter the great and potentially rewarding challenge of restoring it.

The Two Sides of the 1960s

2011-11-19T08:57:00.003-05:00

Occupy Wall Street may never amount to much politically, but it has certainly set a lot of people thinking, including myself. It has been the source of a very heated and lengthy argument at fourthturning.com, and that has finally allowed me to break through some confusion and finally understand exactly what the Awakening, a.k.a. "the sixties," actually did, and why it has been so personally liberating and so politically disastrous. To understand this, we have to go back before the beginning, to the 1950s.

Let's take two movies that express the best and the worst of that decade: Twelve Angry Men, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. (The book upon which the latter was based was published in 1961 and the movie was set in 1963, but both are before the Awakening.) Twelve Angry Men is about a functioning institution, a jury in a murder case. 11 of the 12 jurors initially trust authority--the prosecution and the court--and vote for conviction and execution. One, played magnificently by Henry Fonda, disagrees. Calmly, without ever raising his voice, he manages to get a few of them thinking about some of the evidence and entertaining the possibility that the defendant might be innocent. His first few allies are equally controlled. The cast is composed entirely of white males, but racism, which plays a role in some of the guilty votes, is clearly defined as an evil. Because everyone is a white male, virtue and vice have nothing to do with race or gender in this movie. The virtuous are polite, restrained, take the job seriously, and are willing to listen. The wicked, including the last holdout, are emotional, at one point almost violent, insulting, or lazy. They also insist that their own feelings are more important than the evidence.

Now let's talk about One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. It takes place in a mental institution, and incredibly, one million Americans lived in such institutions when the book was written. There isn't much wrong with the patients upon which the film focuses, including McMurphy, played by Jack Nicholson. He explains in the opening scene why he has spent so much time in prison: "I fight and fuck too much." And that is what the movie is about: the inability of a large part of the population to submit to the emotional restraint and repression upon which society insisted in those days. That was a heavy burden, and the generation after the war threw it off. They also made One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest the third-grossing movie of 1975.

So the Awakening focused on personal liberation and the end of emotional restraints. Women, suddenly, could complain about, and leave, their husbands, and millions did. Young adults adopted new dress, new music (very emotionally unrestrained), and new values. Therapists, critically, began to drop Freud's mechanistic model and pay attention to their patients' feelings and to how those feelings grew out of their patients' individual experiences. Families no longer deserved automatic respect. By the 1970s gay Americans demanded the right to act out and legitimize their sexual feelings. All this created a new America, and a personally freer America, and that was, for the most part, a good thing in the personal realm. Unfortunately, that was only half the story.

What has finally struck me this week is that those values--spontaneity, the exaltation of individual feeling and experience, and the rejection of institutional authority--were, inevitably, politically disastrous. For one thing, the rich and powerful (and the would-be rich and powerful) seized upon them as justifications for greater economic freedom, lower taxes, and less regulation. But for another, these values worked against the values of discipline, organization, and leadership, which have been critical to effective political action since the beginning of time. And the emphasis on what divides us--on race, gender, sexual preference, religion, and values--has now almost completely destroyed any national sense of common purpose and belief, which was critical in the 1930s and 1940s to the extraordinary things our grandparents and parents accomplished and remain equally critical today. In the second post that I ever made here, seven years ago,, I showed how these same problems had affected the right--and specifically George W. Bush--just as much as the Left. It was natural for him to believe that he could transform a whole region of the world, the Middle East, by dropping bombs, and lower taxes at the same time: it all felt good, so he did it, confident that the world would bend to his feelings. His left-wing counterparts have been equally delusional, and much less effective. The attack on authority became an attack on intellectual authority as well, and both left-wing academics and religious zealots freely reject the rationalist values of western civilization.

The Boom generation, sadly, taught Generation X to think only about itself. Boomers have shown very little feeling for the values of the institutions they have run, from universities to investment banks, and my friends in various walks of life report that Gen Xers are showing even less. The Millennials have been taught to value the group, but in the world their elders have made there is little outlet for those values.

And this is why, sadly, I cannot see that Occupy Wall Street is offering anything new. It belongs to the great (?) tradition founded by the SDS in the late 1960s, the tradition of the media event, designed to dramatize the evil of the existing regime without any real idea what to do about it. (The Civil Rights protests, at least through 1965, were of a completely different character: they were well planned, well organized, and had specific goals.) And for the most part, OWS seems to be opposed to organization and discipline as well--and the Boomers who have adopted it are still convinced, of course, that that is a good thing.

Writing in the 1990s, William Strauss and Neil Howe expected their Boomer contemporaries eventually to play the role of the Missionary generation, the post-civil war Prophets who, with FDR in the lead, had led us through the great national enterprises of the New Deal and the Second World War. (To their credit, they realized that the Transcendentals, the first post-Constitutional generation who gave us the civil war, had failed to leave behind nearly as big a legacy--but it didn't occur to them to compare the Boomers to the Transcendentals. Now the comparison is unavoidable.) The Boomers did not--could not--live up to those expectations. Now the peak of their power has passed and I do not think it will return. Mitt Romney is now the man most likely to become the third Boomer President, and he is not going to lead us on a great crusade.

The Boomer legacy of emotional freedom is an important one, and the counterattack upon it from the religious right seems destined to fail. But the price we have paid politically has been enormous and we will continue paying it for a long time. It is idle even to ask whether one was more important than the other. They came together, a tribute to the endless complexities and paradoxes of human experience, and future generations, apparently, will have to restore the balance.

P.S. I am delighted by the response to this post, below.

Meanwhile, I wouldn't want anyone to miss this brilliant piece of media criticism from Slate, which picked up on something that I had been noticing myself over the last few weeks.

Eastwood misses the mark

2011-11-12T20:34:00.004-05:00

I had looked forward with considerable enthusiasm to J. Edgar, Clint Eastwood's new biopic starring Leonardo DiCaprio. Eastwood has made a couple of at least adequate historical films, including Invictus and especially Letters from Iwo Jima, which told the story of that battle from the Japanese point of view. I don't like to read reviews of movies I plan to see myself, and if you feel the same way and want to see it, you had better stop now. But it has huge problems. In particular, it shows how hard it is becoming to convey the world into which I was born in 1947--one that it some ways, sadly, seems to be lost beyond all recognition. I shall try to explain.

One would expect, of course, that the film would pay a good deal of attention to sexual issues. Hoover--the most powerful American ever who was actually born and grew up in Washington, D.C.--was indeed devoted to his mother and never married. Rumors about his sex life found their way into print even at the height of his power in the 1940s (just as they did, I have discovered, about Eleanor Roosevelt.) His long relationship with his assistant director Clyde Tolson was bound to play a big role in the movie, and so it did. (I personally thought, by the way, that the film's make-up artists did not put half as much work into the aging process of Tolson and Hoover's famous secretary Helen Gandy as they did into Hoover's own.) But Eastwood chose to make that relationship a real dramatic focus, complete with a violent lover's quarrel when Hoover announced that he was contemplating marriage--and there is no real basis for that, except his imagination. Hoover certainly does not seem to have been an active heterosexual and may well have been actively gay. That certainly brands him as a hypocrite, given that homosexuality was defined by Hoover and other security men in those days as a disqualification from government work. But for reasons that I hope to get across, I thought the emphasis on this was vastly disproportionate.

The movie is fairly accurate about the first ten or fifteen years of Hoover's directorate. He did, indeed, build up his reputation, and that of his agency, by focusing upon relatively small-time hoodlums like Baby Face Nelson and John Dillinger. He was a clever publicist who knew how to craft statistics to his advantage, and he was morbidly suspicious of any FBI agent, like Melvin Purvis, who made a name for himself. He was also a petty tyrant who once transferred an agent from Washington to Butte, Montana because he saw a photograph of him wearing something other than the FBI regulation white shirt. But that is only part of the story.

On the other hand, the movie does not remotely do justice to the historical role Hoover played--which was not all negative by any means. Here I must confess a personal prejudice: I fell in love with the FBI while writing my book, The Road to Dallas: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy. The reason was quite simple: thanks to the JFK Records Act, I and my assistants read thousands of FBI documents, and the organization was a historian's dream. It had, as the documents make clear, one main mission: the acquisition of data. Agents were diligent, wrote clearly, and followed every lead opened up by one interview right into the next one. The Bureau treated information like holy writ: everyone who should know about something, did. Information was also distributed to other agencies. The data developed on various organized crime figures, to cite only one example, was invaluable, fascinating, and could be the basis for many books besides mine. And the agents were very rarely tendentious or judgmental, even though Hoover often was in his marginal notes. They simply reported, and if they wanted to make clear that they didn't believe a certain witness they were quite clever at giving convincing reasons for not doing so, such as the opinions of the witnesses' friends and associates. The CIA, on the other hand, is a historian's nightmare. In that organization things were put on paper only when absolutely necessary, different parts of the agency kept secrets from each other, and what went on paper was often designed to conceal, rather than reveal, the truth.

The point is that Hoover must have had a great deal to do with creating that organization. The only hint one is given of that in the movie is his insistence, upon taking over in the 1920s, that agents be college graduates of good character and that they pay careful attention to their personal appearance and behavior. There is no hint of his heavy reliance on Jesuit schools as training grounds for his agents, a practice which paid off in spades. Hoover knew how easy it was for law enforcement agents to be corrupted, and he wanted the bureau to be different. That was one reason he stayed away from organized crime until the late 1950s. He feared that agents who began investigating it would be corrupted, and sadly, several amazing scandals in recent decades, most notably in Boston, have proven him right. Hoover certainly contributed to anti-Communist hysteria in the McCarthy years, and probably fed McCarthy a good deal of information, but his organization also uncovered quite a few genuine Communist spies. It also uncovered some massive white collar crimes, such as the GE-Westinghouse violations of antitrust laws in the 1950s. Hoover did not remain at his job for almost half a century merely because Presidents were afraid to remove him--although they surely were.

And indeed, Hoover's relations with Presidents--and especially the Kennedys, about which I know the most--were a great deal more complex than the film lets on. To begin with, Robert Kennedy liked to claim that it wasn't until he became Attorney General that Hoover got interested in organized crime at all--but that, I found, was not true. The famous Appalachin conclave of mobsters in late 1957 genuinely got Hoover's attention, and by 1960 he had a top hoodlum program and had transferred much of the FBI's intelligence capability, including wiretaps, to mobsters like Sam Giancana, whose romantic exploits were put on FBI tape several years' prior to those of Martin Luther King, Jr. Ample evidence indicates that Robert Kennedy was all in favor of such wiretaps--which could only be used for intelligence, not for evidence in court. More to the point, studies of RFK at Justice have shown that he was just as concerned as Hoover about Stanley Levison, Martin Luther King's friend and adviser with Communist ties, and that he clearly fully approved the tap on him. The memos of conversations between Hoover and RFK which I read having to do with organized crime suggested that they were working together enthusiastically on the problem. In the most notable, they shared their shock that the CIA had hired one of their targets, Sam Giancana, to assassinate Castro.

The Bureau under Hoover went wrong in the 1950s when it went beyond investigation to counterintelligence, specifically the COINTELPRO operation designed to disrupt and discredit organizations deemed hostile to the United States. Initially its targets were the Communist Party of the United States, the Socialist Workers' Party, and other front organizations--including, I discovered, the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. (I am convinced, as I wrote in The Road to Dallas, that Lee Harvey Oswald's fake New Orleans chapter of that organization was part of COINTELPRO, although, like much of that program, it was not run directly by the FBI, but by one of several private anti-Communist groups.) Then in the 1960s Hoover extended it to much of the Civil Rights movement and to the New Left. All of this could have opened up vast dramatic possibilities for Eastwood, all the more so since both Presidents Johnson and Nixon suspected the New Left just as much as Hoover did, but all we get from Eastwood is the impression that Hoover was running the campaign against King all by himself. In fact his assistant directors were all devoted acolytes--they could hardly have been otherwise--while some field agents had been quite skeptical about him.

Whatever Hoover's sexual preference, the great dramas of his life were not personal: they were bureaucratic. He hated anything that threatened to impinge upon his authority and feuded with the CIA, local police forces, and, when it tried to reduce his authority, the White House. He carefully cultivated the Congress. He was devoted to his job, and I know of no evidence that he ever agonized about anything he did in the way that Eastwood and DiCaprio repeatedly showing him doing. He was not an introspective man. And this leads me, finally, to my biggest point.

I have now been studying some of Hoover's contemporaries, including FDR and his main lieutenants, for several years. Yes, some of them, including FDR, had active and interesting personal lives--but all of them were devoted to their jobs in ways that few senior officials, today, seem to be. They did extraordinary things, for good or ill, and they deserve to be known for those things. Our own politics and government are now so dominated by spin, and the whole process of government has come under such ceaseless attack for 40 years now, that even a filmmaker like Eastwood, who is more than ten years older than I am, can't even imagine what public servants in those days were like--or perhaps knows that he couldn't get a true portrait onto the screen. The men of that era knew how to project self-confidence and authority, and no one did that better than Hoover. DiCaprio doesn't really even try.

Eastwood and his team were lazy. When Dallas calls Hoover to tell him that the President has been shot, Special Agent Shanklin claims that no one knows about it. In actual fact the shooting was on the AP wire in less than a minute. It then shows him calling Robert Kennedy, but it shows RFK taking the call alone in his office, when he was actually in the midst of a day-long meeting of his organized crime team at his home, Hickory Hill. The movie, in short, suffers not only from historical inaccuracy and from poorly drawn portraits, but from the great disease of our time. It doesn't take government seriously.

p.s. This morning's column by Maureen Dowd makes it clear that these aspects were mainly the responsibility of Dustin Lance Black, the screenwriter, a Gen Xer who also wrote Milk. Black struggled with his own sexuality in his youth--he was the kind of boy we see calling Milk for emotional support during that excellent movie. Black was a lot younger than Milk, but he could understand Milk's world. He couldn't understand Hoover's.

Older and younger generations

2011-11-05T08:33:00.002-04:00

I do not really enjoy being a wet blanket with respect of Occupy Wall Street. The country is in a very bad way, and the protesters are trying to call attention to very real problems. To the extent that they can prove that a constituency for economic reform exists, they might shift the political process somewhat, although I suspect the White House feels sure it has that constituency in its pocket already and need not worry too much about it. Yet I continue to feel that the rhetoric of many protesters has an all-too familiar ring, and that the state of the nation has led them into the same dead end that too many of my contemporaries encountered more than forty years ago: a belief that nothing less than a complete transformation of a hopelessly evil society will suffice. Since such a transformation is neither possible nor really desirable, I worry that the results of OWS, like those of the "student revolution" of my youth, will be largely negative.

Let my illustrate my point with a couple of texts. I'll begin with excerpts from an interview by Chris Hedges, a popular liberal blogger, with a Millennial protester in Zucotti Park.

Jon Friesen, 27, tall and lanky with a long, dirty-blond ponytail, a purple scarf and an old green fleece, is sitting on concrete at the edge of Zuccotti Park leading a coordination meeting, a gathering that takes place every morning with representatives of each of Occupy Wall Street’s roughly 40 working groups.

“Our conversation is about what it means to be a movement and what it means to be an organization,” he says to the circle. A heated discussion follows, including a debate over whether the movement should make specific demands.

I find him afterward on a low stone wall surrounding a flowerbed in the park. He decided to come to New York City, he said, from the West Coast for the 10th anniversary of 9/11. He found a ride on Craig’s List while staying at his brother’s home in Champaign, Ill.

“It was a television event when I was 17,” he says of the 2001 attacks. “I came here for the 10-year anniversary. I wanted to make it real to myself. I’d never been to New York. I’d never been to the East Coast.”

Once he reached New York City he connected with local street people to find “assets.” He slept in the parks and on the street. He arrived on the first day of the occupation in Zuccotti Park. He found other “traveler types” whose survival skills and political consciousness were as developed as his own.

In those first few days, he says, “it was the radicals and the self-identifying anarchists” who set up the encampment. Those who would come later, usually people with little experience in dumpster diving, sleeping on concrete or depending on a McDonald’s restroom, would turn to revolutionists like Friesen for survival. Zuccotti Park, like most Occupied sites, schooled the uninitiated.

“The structure and process carried out by those initial radicals,” he says with delight of the first days in the park, now have “a wide appeal.”

The Occupy movements that have swept across the country fuse the elements vital for revolt. They draw groups of veteran revolutionists whose isolated struggles, whether in the form of squatter communities or acts of defiance such as the tree-sit in Berkeley to save an oak grove on the University of California campus that ran from Dec. 2, 2006, to Sept. 9, 2008, are often unheeded by the wider culture. The Occupy movements were nurtured in small, dissident enclaves in New York, Oakland, Chicago, Denver, Boston, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Atlanta. Bands of revolutionists in these cities severed themselves from the mainstream, joined with other marginalized communities and mastered the physical techniques of surviving on the streets and in jails.

“It’s about paying attention to exactly what you need, and figuring out where I can get food and water, what time do the parks close, where I can get a shower,” Friesen says.

Friesen grew up in an apolitical middle-class home in Fullerton in Southern California’s Orange County, where systems of power were obeyed and rarely questioned. His window into political consciousness began inauspiciously enough as a teenager, with the Beatles, The Doors, and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. He found in the older music “a creative energy” and “authenticity” that he did not hear often in contemporary culture. He finished high school and got a job in a LensCrafter lab and “experienced what it’s like to slave away trying to make glasses in an hour.” He worked at a few other 9-to-5 jobs but found them “restrictive and unfulfilling.” And then he started to drift, working his way up to Berkeley, where he lived in a squatter encampment behind the UC Berkeley football stadium. He used the campus gym to take showers. By the time he reached Berkeley he had left mainstream society. He has lived outside the formal economy since 2005, the last year he filed income taxes. He was involved in the tree-sit protest and took part in the occupations of university buildings and demonstration outside the Berkeley chancellor’s campus residence to protest fee hikes and budget cuts, activities that saw him arrested and jailed. He spent time with the Navajos on Black Mesa in Arizona and two months with the Zapatistas in Mexico.*

“What I saw in the Zapatistas was a people pushed to the brink of extinction and forgetting,” he says. “Their phrases ring true: Liberty! Dignity! Democracy! Everything for Everyone! Nothing for Ourselves! The masks the Zapatistas wear check egos. People should be united in their facelessness. This prevents cults of personality.”

“I have no interest in participating in the traditional political process,” he says. “It’s bureaucratic. It’s vertical. It’s exclusive. It’s ruled by money. It’s cumbersome. This is cumbersome too, what we’re doing here, but the principles that I’m pushing and that many people are pushing to uphold here are in direct opposition to the existing structure. This is a counterpoint. This is an acknowledgment of all those things that we hate, or that I hate, which are closed and exclusive. It is about defying status and power, certification and legitimacy, institutional validation to participate. This process has infected our consciousness as far as people being allowed [to participate] or even being given credibility. The wider society creates a situation where people are excluded, people feel like they’re not worth anything. They’re not accepted. The principles here are horizontal in terms of decision-making, transparency, openness, inclusiveness, accessibility. There are people doing sign language at the general assembly now. There are clusters of deaf people that come together and do sign language together. This is an example of the inclusive nature that we want to create here. And as far as redefining participation and the democratic process, my understanding of American history is that it was a bunch of white males in power, mostly. This is radically different. If you’re a homeless person, if you’re a street person, you can be here. There’s a radical inclusion that’s going on. And if it’s not that, then I’m not going to participate.”

The park, especially at night, is a magnet for the city’s street population. The movement provides food along with basic security, overseen by designated “peacekeepers” and a “de-escalation team” that defuses conflicts. Those like Friesen who span the two cultures serve as the interlocutors.

“It draws everyone, except maybe the superrich,” he says of the park. “You’re dealing with everyone’s conditioning, everyone’s fucked-up conditioning, the kind of I’m-out-for-me-and-myself, that kind of instinct. People are unruly. People are violent. People make threats.”

“We are trying to sort this out, how to work together in a more holistic approach versus just security-checking someone—you know like tackling them,” he says. “Where else do these people have to go, these street people? They’re going to come to a place where they feel cared for, especially in immediate needs like food and shelter. We have a comfort committee. I’ve never been to a place where there’s a comfort committee. This is where you can get a blanket and a sleeping bag, if we have them. We don’t always have the resources. But everyone is being taken care of here. As long as you’re nonviolent, you’re taken care of. And when you do that you draw all sorts of people, including those people who have problematic behavior. If we scale up big enough we might be able to take care of the whole street population of Manhattan.”

Now let's go back about 42 years, to an address by an exact contemporary of mine to a mixed audience of young and old. (I don't want to give away too much, even though, google being what it is, there's no point in trying to keep it a secret and I will identify the speaker before the end of the post. Perhaps it won't take you that long.)

Many of the issues that I've mentioned -- those of sharing power and responsibility, those of assuming power and responsibility have been general concerns on campuses throughout the world. But underlying those concerns there is a theme, a theme which is so trite and so old because the words are so familiar. It talks about integrity and trust and respect. Words have a funny way of trapping our minds on the way to our tongues but there are necessary means even in this multi-media age for attempting to come to grasps with some of the inarticulate maybe even inarticulable things that we're feeling. We are, all of us, exploring a world that none of us even understands and attempting to create within that uncertainty. But there are some things we feel, feelings that our prevailing, acquisitive, and competitive corporate life, including tragically the universities, is not the way of life for us. We're searching for more immediate, ecstatic and penetrating modes of living. And so our questions, our questions about our institutions, about our colleges, about our churches, about our government continue. The questions about those institutions are familiar to all of us. We have seen heralded across the newspapers. Senator ______ has suggested some of them this morning. But along with using these words -- integrity, trust, and respect -- in regard to institutions and leaders we're perhaps harshest with them in regard to ourselves.

Every protest, every dissent, whether it's an individual academic paper, Founder's parking lot demonstration, is unabashedly an attempt to forge an identity in this particular age. That attempt at forging for many of us over the past four years has meant coming to terms with our humanness. Within the context of a society that we perceive -- now we can talk about reality, and I would like to talk about reality sometime, authentic reality, inauthentic reality, and what we have to accept of what we see -- but our perception of it is that it hovers often between the possibility of disaster and the potentiality for imaginatively responding to men's needs. There's a very strange conservative strain that goes through a lot of New Left, collegiate protests that I find very intriguing because it harkens back to a lot of the old virtues, to the fulfillment of original ideas. And it's also a very unique American experience. It's such a great adventure. If the experiment in human living doesn't work in this country, in this age, it's not going to work anywhere.

But we also know that to be educated, the goal of it must be human liberation. A liberation enabling each of us to fulfill our capacity so as to be free to create within and around ourselves. To be educated to freedom must be evidenced in action, and here again is where we ask ourselves, as we have asked our parents and our teachers, questions about integrity, trust, and respect. Those three words mean different things to all of us. Some of the things they can mean, for instance: Integrity, the courage to be whole, to try to mold an entire person in this particular context, living in relation to one another in the full poetry of existence. If the only tool we have ultimately to use is our lives, so we use it in the way we can by choosing a way to live that will demonstrate the way we feel and the way we know. Integrity -- a man like Paul Santmire. Trust. This is one word that when I asked the class at our rehearsal what it was they wanted me to say for them, everyone came up to me and said "Talk about trust, talk about the lack of trust both for us and the way we feel about others. Talk about the trust bust." What can you say about it? What can you say about a feeling that permeates a generation and that perhaps is not even understood by those who are distrusted? All they can do is keep trying again and again and again. There's that wonderful line in East Coker by Eliot about there's only the trying, again and again and again; to win again what we've lost before.

And then respect. There's that mutuality of respect between people where you don't see people as percentage points. Where you don't manipulate people. Where you're not interested in social engineering for people. The struggle for an integrated life existing in an atmosphere of communal trust and respect is one with desperately important political and social consequences. And the word "consequences" of course catapults us into the future. One of the most tragic things that happened yesterday, a beautiful day, was that I was talking to woman who said that she wouldn't want to be me for anything in the world. She wouldn't want to live today and look ahead to what it is she sees because she's afraid. Fear is always with us but we just don't have time for it. Not now.

Now I'm intrigued that John Friesen was so affected by 1960s music, because that brings up the fundamental, fatal confusion that did so much harm in those days--a confusion that might be summed up in that memorable phrase, "the personal is the political." Rock 'n Roll was a response to the emotional sterility of an age--a sterility, I now think, born of trauma, the incredible worldwide trauma of the Depression and the Second World War. It allowed a new generation to discover a depth of feeling that their parents had not bee able to teach them, because they had suppressed it. Leonard Bernstein understood this perfectly in a 1967 show he did about rock on CBS, now available on youtube. For our generation, he said, music was background--but not for these kids. Of course, emotionally sterile or crippled families still exist all around us, and maybe Friesen came from one. But the problem, then and now, was to think that the same intensity of feeling, of pure emotion, could also rule the political world. Modern political systems like our own are based upon rationality, not emotion. That is their strength. Because human beings are not, indeed, completely rational creatures, it's a struggle to hold our system up to its original rational ideals. Lately we have been failing that test. It's not the first time, and it won't be the last. But that system remains our only hope. The longing of the two young people quoted above to escape the whole thing is a fantasy, a natural fantasy to be sure, but one that leads nowhere. That is why, I think, both Friesen and Hillary Rodham in 1969--yup--both fall into inarticulate rambling when they try to describe what they are after.

And there is another link between the two, one very close to my heart. Hillary Rodham went into law and into politics. (She certainly allowed passion--falling in love with Bill Clinton--to rule her life: it took her away from everything she had ever known and sentenced her to 20 years in Arkansas, an ordeal conveyed quite well in Primary Colors.) But her contemporaries who went into academia did not have to abandon their rejection of the norms of western civilization. They could spend their careers propagating it, and they did. And now, two generations of undergraduates have passed through college without learning anything, unless they are very lucky, about what the American system is actually capable of. You will never convince me that that has not contributed, massively, to the collapse of our political life. You cannot rebuild the New Deal if you have no idea what it was or what it did.

It's natural enough, when young, to rebel against the routine and regimentation of modern life. It is, to some extent, unnatural, although it also offers its own rewards, and it's the only kind of civilization that allows people to live in such numbers as they do today. And yes, it can be improved. We could, like the Europeans, start our working lives with four weeks' vacation a year, for example, and we could have single-payer health care, a national system of day care centers, and a great deal more to make life more relaxed and rewarding. Nor can we blame the mess we are in, obviously, on the younger generation. The Millennials (b. 1982-2000?) have grown up every bit as obedient to authority as they GI grandparents were, and every bit as ready to enlist in a great crusade. The older generations have failed them by failing to offer one. They will have to undertake their own, smaller local crusades--but to have a long-term impact they will have to be within the framework of modern life, not outside it.

We are moving into a new Gilded Age. The first Gilded age had its own malcontents, many of whom fired by revolutionary enthusiasm, including Coxey's Army, Greenbackers and Grangers, the IWW, the anarchists, and many more. They have left very little behind. But the young people of the Gilded Age included W. E. B. Dubois, the founder of the NAACP; John L. Lewis, probably the most influential labor leader of the twentieth century; Henry Ford, who transformed production; Harold Ickes, Roosevelt's Interior Secretary and head of the Public Works Administration, who began life as a social worker and built dams across America; and the other titans of my current work in progress, Henry Stimson, George C. Marshall, Cordell Hull, and, of course, Franklin Roosevelt himself. They did not reject the system: they built it. Having grown up amidst chaos, they tried, with extraordinary success, to create order. The experience of the Boom generation, sadly, was the reverse. Had it not been for the Vietnam War, we might have revived America emotionally without crippling it politically. But that, we will never know.

Some years ago I did a post here about Bernhard von Bulow, the German chancellor of a century ago, who managed to avoid the danger of a new war until his fall in 1909. Reflecting on the differences between him and his successors after the catastrophe of the First World War, he remarked that he had the advantage of having lived in foreign countries that allowed him to see his country in better perspective. I lived abroad only once, but I have spent much of my adult life living in past eras and foreign countries through my work, and perhaps that has similarly distinguished me from my contemporaries. (Within universities, sadly, my fellow historians are now pretty much convinced that no one ever had a worthwhile idea before 1970 or so.) This hasn't stopped me from believing in progress. It has stopped me from believing that an outburst of enthusiasm can lead us, quickly and almost painlessly, into a new world.

What the Chancellor said

2011-10-29T20:09:00.002-04:00

[N.B.: Those who visited yesterday may wish to scrol down and go through the Chancellor's speech again. I was extremely tired when I worked on the translation yesterday morning, and I did not realize how sloppy it was. I have now smoothed it out considerably.

Chancellor Merkel's speech, in my opinion, reflects great credit on her, but far greater credit on the political culture of Germany and Europe. I do not in fact agree with the thrust of some of the policies it lays out: they emphasize austerity in Greece and elsewhere, rather than economic growth (although, as she points out, her own country at this moment has a very impressive and enviable employment record of which to boast.) But the speech promises, directly and repeatedly, to make a sustained attack upon some deep-seated problems within the EU and the Eurozone in a continuing effort to preserve the achievements of her parents' generation. And in particular, at the end of the speech, she, like Lincoln and FDR in their time, puts the current crisis in the context of previous ones. While she does not name Bismarck or Adenauer or de Gaulle, she promises that her generation shall not fail the comparable test that it faces. It is symptomatic of the wretched mess in which the United States finds itself that neither President Obama nor any Republican ever wants to make such an appeal to the past. The Boom generation of historians seems successfully to have persuaded public opinion and our elites that history began in the late 1960s.

Europe does face critical, possibly insurmountable problems. In an effort to preserve the Euro the Greeks have made genuine sacrifices of their sovereignty. This may indeed crack the Eurozone, though not the EU itself, but if it does not, it will be a critical precedent that may move European political life into a new phase. The Europeans, in any case, are still engaged in an extraordinary attempt to widen and deepen their political order. The contrast with the United States could not be clearer: we are engaged, not in saving our grandparents' and parents' achievements, but in tearing them down. And it is no accident, clearly, that Republicans now cite Europe's regulated capitalism, complete with single-payer health care and truly modern infrastructure, as some sort of catastrophe that the United States has to avoid. Europe is still the continent of the Enlightenment. Paradoxically, the United States--the first political child of the Enlightenment--is now the advanced country where its spirit is under the heaviest attack.

The transcript of Merkl's speech shows that the applause came mainly, though not exclusively, from her own coalition. Yet she did not speak as a party leader several of her most important pronouncements drew unanimous applause. This has become unheard of when the President addresses the Congress. My old friend Stanley Hoffmann, in his review of Thomas Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum's new book This Used to Be Us, suggested that European parliamentary systems are simply more effective than our own separation of powers, but I think this was an oversimplification. Presidents such as Truman and Eisenhower have accomplished great things with the help of Congresses at least partially controlled by the opposition party. We are in trouble now not because of our constitution, but because of our almost complete lack of any common civic spirit. No European leader faces an opposition determined to ensure that anything he or she does fails, but that is the situation we have been living with for three years, and it will get worse before it gets better.

Having suffered the worst of modern western civilization during the last crisis, the Europeans remain committed to a relatively strong government and a welfare state. No major European nation has de-industrialized to the same extent as the United States, either. Chancellor Merkel's positions on the regulation of financial markets--including hedge funds!--were far in advance of President Obama's. The Europeans face big problems--but their governments are addressing them. If they can succeed, they seem very likely to regain the leadership of the western world which, half a century ago, they seemed to have lost forever. That would not disturb me. The Atlantic world is a family, and one one family member goes crazy, others must step forward. That was our role 70 years ago; now it seems once again to be theirs. We are all, in any event, in this together.

Leadership lives

2011-10-29T12:04:00.004-04:00

From time to time over these last seven years I have written and posted speeches that I would like to hear an American President make. In composing them I drew upon speeches I have read from past eras. In 2006 I also posted a guest contribution, a mythical speech by John F. Kennedy showing how he might have addressed the state of our nation. Meanwhile I have become increasingly convinced that the United States is no longer capable of effective crisis leadership.

Last week it was widely but briefly reported that Chancellor Angela Merkel had given an important speech on the Eurozone crisis to the German Bundestag. Coincidentally, last weekend I had speculated once again that Europe, not the United States, would have to provide real leadership and keep the best of western values alive during the current crisis. I was thus sufficiently curious to find the complete text of Chancellor Merkel's speech. I found it in German, on the Bundestag's official web site. After a pass through the google translator program, I have worked all morning on providing the translation below, the first, it would appear, to be publicly available. (That in itself is an interesting fact that I will address tomorrow.) I am sure it is not perfectly clean but I think it will do.

I have not been a particular fan of Chancellor Merkel, and were I German, I suspect I would vote with the SPD. (I have known for 40 years, however, that the Christian Democratic party to which she belongs has consistently been to the left of our own Democratic Party, even though it represents the right there.) I am now inclined to revise my opinion. She has seized the moment in exactly the way that President Obama has failed to do. Below I reproduce the text of her speech in full, and I hope you will take the time to read it. Tomorrow I will provide my own commentary. My admiration for her has enormously increased because of something that happened since the speech: the news that she and Nicolas Sarkoczy forced the bankers to write off 50% of their Greek debt to help solve the crisis. Meanwhile I thank Chancellor Merkel for showing me that I have not been living in a completely delusional world.

Dr. Angela Merkel, Federal Chancellor
Mr. President! Ladies and gentlemen, Three years ago, the bankruptcy of investment bank Lehman Brothers triggered the biggest stock market crash of the postwar period. What began as an American real estate crisis quickly developed into a global financial crisis. Joint efforts by the Federal Government and the Bundestag had time to prevent Germany from falling into a deep recession. The crisis has demanded much of our citizenry: economic losses, but also patience and trust.

Today we can say that our joint efforts have paid off, because Germany has emerged stronger from the global financial crisis than it went into it. We can look forward to impressive economic growth. And above all, unemployment has reached a 20-year low.
It is also clear that Germany cannot do well in the long run if Europe does badly. Therefore, the main concern of the Federal Government is that Europe emerge stronger from the crisis stronger than it entered into it. The European Union must be a stabilizing union. What does that mean?

It means, firstly, that we must address the immediate crisis. We need to find viable solutions for the countries that have an excessive debt, and thus correct the mistakes of the past. At the same time we must prevent the crisis from spreading to other countries.

Secondly and equally importantly, we must take precautions for the future. We need to tackle the causes of this crisis to resolve it at its root. This is the excessive debt, but also the lack of competitiveness of some euro-member states. This means than that we need to strengthen the foundations of economic and monetary union .

Each of these two challenges is quite large in itself. But we must nonetheless find convincing answers to these challenges if the economic and currency union is to survive this test and emerge ever stronger from it.. I think we all agree: This is the greatest test of the Economic and Monetary Union that the world has ever seen.

(Voice from the Left: Probably not the last)

The deliberations of finance ministers and heads of government made a good deal of progress towards finding the answers this past weekend, and I declare this evening that we shall find workable answers. Some of the the problems that we must solve had their origins well before the onset of the current crisis. They were unfortunately ignored both by the markets and by political leaders for much too long.

The truth is this: For years it was possible to go into debt without incurring the market sanctions of increased interest or penalties which the Stability and Growth Pact called for. For years it was possible to avoid necessary reforms and fall behind in competitiveness. For the truth is also that the Structural Fund and the Cohesion fund provided by the EU to increase competitiveness led in part to unintended consequences and failed to achieve the desired result. After many years of stalled reforms, we now must struggle . It would be totally irresponsible to say that the problems could disappear overnight.

But there is also good news. Above all, Ireland is back on track, Portugal is firmly determined to implement its adjustment program, and the Greek government has begun much-need reforms in recent months. We must also note that much is demanded of the people of Greece. They deserve our respect, and they deserve above all a viable future in the euro-zone.

(Applause from the CDU / CSU, SPD, FDP and Alliance 90/The Greens)

Nevertheless, there is still much to be done to bring the problems in Greece under control. The so-called troika comprising representatives of the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund is monitoring and evaluating the implementation of the program, designed to allow Greece to carry its burden of debt. We must now draw the right conclusions from their latest report. The report draws on the experience of one and a half years a realistic picture of the situation in Greece. This is particularly thanks to the IMF and its new director, Christine Lagarde, to whom I would like to express my gratitude at this point.

(Applause from the CDU / CSU and FDP)

The Troika report shows that Greece is only at the beginning of a long and difficult journey. It also makes clear that the private sector must make a significant contribution to improve Greece's long term debt sustainability. This means that the measures that we decided upon on 21 July 2011 at the European Council are no longer viable. Our goal is that today's deliberations must design debt sustainability for Greece such that Greece in 2020 has a debt of 120 percent debt of gross domestic product. We cannot achieve this without the private sector assuming a much greater share of the burden than on 21 July 2011 was provided.

(Dr. Ilja Seifert [The Left]: That was already clear!)

Debt relief alone - let me be very clear here - no matter how it is configured, will not solve the problems of Greece. Painful and necessary structural reforms must be implemented effectively. Otherwise, in spite of debt relief we shall in a short time back to where we are today. This must always be clear.
(Applause from the CDU / CSU and FDP)

Thus, the principle which we applied from the beginning is right: there can only be help if the recipient accepts responsibility. Aid must always be tied to strict conditions.

Ladies and gentlemen, in this way we must provide Greece with security for quite some time. I believe - and we'll talk about it today - it's not enough that every three months a troika comes in and then leaves. Permanent supervision in Greece is desirable.
.
(Voice from the Left: Just like us!)

Similarly, we are obliged to do everything possible to ensure that Greece will have the opportunity to grow again. This means investments under clearly improved conditions. For this reason there is an EU mission led by the German Horst Reichenbach. For this reason, there was the trip of the Federal Economics Minister to Greece – carrying with him a variety of potential investment by German companies.

(Juergen Trittin [Alliance 90/The Greens]: As if the Greeks are dependent!)

And for this reason there will be a meeting of representatives of German and Greek cities next week. They will discuss how they can help each other.
I stress - I think I say this on your behalf - We want Greece quickly on its feet. We will do everything we can, within the framework of a German-Greek partnership.

(Applause from the CDU / CSU and the FDP and SPD deputies)

A reduced debt for Greece, including the participation of private creditors, means that we must also find a solution that avoids systemic risk, that is, that other countries from being infected due to this process . Therefore we have to do two things.

We need to ensure , first, that the banks do not lose confidence in one another. Therefore, this past weekend the Finance Ministers have decided upon a stronger recapitalization of on the basis of proposals of the European Banking Supervisors. This is an absolutely necessary and very important element to prevent such infection. We must carry out this recapitalization of the banks in the following sequence. First, banks must attempt to recapitalize on their own, and only in the second place can nation-states help, and only if the stability of the Euro itself is in danger, because a nation state can not allow the EFSF to get used to its help. This is the sequence.
.
A second important element to prevent the risk of infection is the so-called protective barrier over which we have been talking a lot. You can also call firewall if you have mastered English.

(Laughter from CDU / CSU and FDP)

I wanted to use only German, which I thought would help. (Applause from the CDU / CSU and FDP)

For this we need to - this is the second step - shield all the other countries from the risk of contagion that may emanate from Greece. To which I add: it is absolutely essential that before we erect such shields, any country that might be affected puts its house in order and takes additional measures to try to prove its own soundness. This must be the first subject of discussion.

Now we come to the form the shield will take; it has been much discussed. The EFSF now has an effective capacity of 440 billion euros, which we agreed to here. Germany takes on guarantees in the amount of 211 billion euros. Those will remain the total volume of the EFSF and the upper limit of the German guarantees.

In today's meeting we agreed that the EFSF must achieve with this capacity the maximum impact in the prevention of contagion. The effect of this shield must be large enough. There has been a full public debate on it. I say again - this is very important in this context: - All models that assume the participation of the European Central Bank are now off the table and not the subject of discussion.

(Applause from the CDU / CSU and FDP)

Such ideas contradict the European treaties. I have made clear that for the Federal German government such solutions do not come into question.

(Voice from the Left: The biggest nonsense!)

Now, two options without the participation of the European Central Bank are: firstly, the partial insurance of new government securities of the affected Eurostate and second, the possible participation of private and public investors in the financing steps taken by the EFSF. Both options can only be used within the agreed framework for EFSF action. This also ensures that existing clear EFSF principles are always applied. The Member State shall submit an application for assistance,a Memorandum of Understanding will be negotiated, and a strictly conditional aid agreed.

The German Bundestag and the Federal government must consent to the grants of aid in individual cases and agree to the application of the two options, and do so in a way that allows for parliamentary action. Today the Bundestag will decide upon the two options in principle, we will discuss them this evening at the meeting of Heads of State or Government in principle and decide upon them. . Of course, any guidelines will go through the parliamentary process here in the German Bundestag.

(Applause from the CDU / CSU and FDP MPs)

Furthermore, Europe has a consensus to hold talks with the International Monetary Fund on how the IMF can contribute further to the stabilization of the Euro-zone, drawing both on its expertise and as appropriate on its financial instruments.

I want to repeat , because it is important for today’s decision: Whoever wants private creditors to contribute to the debt sustainability of Greece, must also take care that a shield, a protection against contagion is established. Anything else is grossly irresponsible.

(Applause from the CDU / CSU and FDP)

I have said: The federal government wants the Economic and Monetary Union to become a union of stability. Therefore we must both deal with the acute crisis and provide for the future, namely by having the European member states undertake greater common responsibilities. We have already taken the first steps, for example, with the euro-plus pact with the leaders of the Euro-zone voluntarily committing to implement structural reforms. This means that competitiveness is now a top priority in the European Union. With the newly effected procedures for preventing and correcting macroeconomic imbalances, competitive weaknesses can be detected earlier and corrected. Also, the Structural and Cohesion funds must be used more this in the future, that they truly improve competitiveness.

But I also say – looking at matters from another perspective-- economic imbalances are not bad in themselves. If a surplus arises because a country is more competitive than another, it should clearly not be called into question and leveled, just as different interest rates reflect different strengths. (Applause from the CDU / CSU and the FDP and the Abg. Zöllmer Manfred [SPD])

We have tightened the Stability and Growth Pact. Sanctions come into play earlier. They are more effective. The pact now hs a lot more bite. In this respect, we have initiated a new trend.

Moreover, the French president, and I proposed - and we'll pursue it further – that national parliaments will commit themselves, if the European Commission criticizes their budgets, voluntarily to take account of the criticism, and that all euro Member States undertake to include a debt brake in their constitution.

(Applause from the CDU / CSU and FDP)

These discussions are in full swing. I find it absolutely remarkable that a country like Spain has changed its constitution to include such a debt brake shortly before elections.

(Applause from the CDU / CSU and the FDP - Dr. Barbara Hendricks [SPD]: There are Social Democrats in power there!)

Thus we tighten and improve European procedures. We complement and reinforce them by obligating ourselves, as I have just said. We thus extend the framework of existing European treaties. The problems we face today must and can be solved within this framework. But I also say this: We need more. It is my firm conviction that we must go beyond this approach.

Moreover, it is also thus: If the international community looks at us in Europe, it also wants to know where the development of the European Union will go in the medium term, because it need assurances that the euro zone stands together, improves its competitiveness and strengthens its culture of stability.

Therefore, we will need to alter the European treaties.

(Voice from the Left: Aha)
The Foreign Minister on Saturday, and I on Sunday, have begun work on this, and we gave decided that we shall ask the President of the Council to make proposals in December proposals on how the culture of stability can be better anchored. This is not a comprehensive reform of the Treaty of Lisbon – that would be too much – not is it a pooling of larger parts of our economic and financial policies,

(Juergen Trittin [Alliance 90/The Greens]: Too bad!)

but in the next step is to, first of all with regard to countries that violate continuously and repeatedly the Stability and Growth Pact, to create an opportunity to have a real sanction for their violations of the Stability and Growth Pact.

(Applause from the CDU / CSU and the FDP -
Unrest in the LEFT)

Because - because as people are muttering again - it is this: We cannot allow, as has happened over 50 times , that agreed targets in the Stability and Growth Pact are not met. We now know that a failure in one of the 17 Member States - Greece is not the largest - may jeopardize the stability of the euro overall.

(Voice from the Left: Of course!)

Therefore, these violations of the culture of stability must be more sharply sanctioned, for example, by a complaint before the European Court of Justice, if a country does not permanently adhere to the guidelines.

(Applause from the CDU / CSU and FDP)

I am very sure that the citizens in Germany, rightly burdened with many concerns, understand one thing very well. They do not merely want more Europe, they want more security for the culture of stability in Europe.

I think only when we create more of a Europe in this sense, if we continue to develop Europe further, then, we will have understood the political dimension of this crisis. Then we will have also understood that we will eliminate the weaknesses and flaws in the design of economic and monetary union now or not at all. If we eliminate them now, then we use the opportunity of this crisis. Otherwise we would fail.

(Applause from the CDU / CSU and FDP)

I am well aware of: A treaty modification always involves risks. It is a painstaking process. All 27 member states must agree. Nevertheless, it is necessary and the best way to prevent a split between the European Union's euro and non-euro countries. If we do not succeed, the euro-zone countries will have to conclude binding contracts with each other. I do not want that. I would not find it reasonable, because many countries still want to join the euro. Therefore, we must be ready to go this route.

Since we are in such an existential crisis in Europe, I ask: Where is it actually written that a treaty amendment must always take a decade? Who in the world will think we are capable of action, if we stand up and way : "After the Lisbon Treaty, there must never again be a change"? The whole world changes, and Europe must also be willing to change.

(Applause from the CDU / CSU and the FDP - Thomas Oppermann [SPD]: One year too late!)

Just as we managed in the question of German unification to conclude a two-plus-Four Treaty in six months, so will it also be be possible - the Euro should be worth enough to us – to look at amendments to the treaty.

(Applause from the CDU / CSU and FDP)

Given the dimensions of the struggle against the crisis, we must not forget: It was created largely by too little regulation. Therefore, the regulation of financial markets remains a major task, which is still far from done.

(Applause from deputies of the CDU / CSU and Alliance 90/The Greens)

Therefore, the European Council on Sunday once again took up the matter and stressed that important proposals for the regulation of derivatives, deposit insurance and capital requirements for banks now have to be adopted quickly. In this context, I want to reiterate that the federal government is committed to the introduction of a financial transaction tax, and indeed
(Call from Mr. Alexander Ulrich [The Left])
in the next few days at the G-20 summit in Cannes. We are also grateful that the European Commission presented a proposal for it. The finance ministers will discuss this proposal in early November, and Germany will do everything to make this proposal by the European Commission a success.

(Applause from the CDU / CSU and the FDP and from members of the SPD and Alliance 90/The Greens - Alexander Ulrich [The Left]: Just like here!)

It is also true: Many questions require not only a national or European response but a global response. Thus the G 20 is the appropriate forum. The G-20 represents at least two-thirds of world population and 80 percent of world economic power. Therefore, the starting point of the G-20 discussions in the rest was a better global regulation of financial markets.

One can say: We did a lot. An important step will now betaken in Cannes: Megabanks will no longer be dealt with as they were in the crisis, forcing the taxpayer to play a role. . "Too big to fail" is no more, and we shall have an international agreement on the restructuring of megabanks such as we have already carried out in Germany with the proposed restructuring law for banks.
(Juergen Trittin [Alliance 90/The Greens]: Then do it finally! Switzerland is further along than we!)

It was a long time coming, but it is good that we can now decide in Cannes.

(Applause from the CDU / CSU and FDP)

At the same time we shall take on the task of making clear, that what applies to banks, including the "shadow banks" must apply, for example, to hedge funds, because they too present as much a systemic risk to financial markets. The so-called Financial Stability Board will be addressed next.

(Applause from the CDU / CSU and FDP MPs)

In Europe we have already regulated the hedge fund. But the world has not done so sufficiently. Therefore, the topic of tax havens is n the table again, because we had planned in the G 20 at the beginning, that every instrument, every place and every player would be subject to regulation. Since we cannot do enough nationally or in Europe, that must happen worldwide. However, I also say this: With Individual measures in Germany, for example the ban on short selling, we have had good experience, because now the whole subject is discussed at least in Europe. Now we have to bring it forward even worldwide.
(Applause from the CDU / CSU and FDP MPs)

What is very important: G-20 will only work, if new resolutions are not passed every year. We committed ourselves to halve our 2013 state deficit. Germany will do it, but not all industrial countries in the G 20. I do not believe we can decide every year exactly what fits the economic situation. Rather, I believe that the G-20 has the obligation to hold itself on a long-term path to remove the cause of many difficulties. There is debt not only in Europe but also in other parts of the world such as Japan or the United States of America. Therefore, I think: It's not enough, when we exhort one another only, it's especially important that we act together.

Who is on the road these days in various countries speaking with citizens, whoever follows the demonstrations in New York, Brussels, Frankfurt or Berlin, who knows how much the debt crisis moves the people. I say that I have great sympathy. The situation is very serious. To cope with the crisis, requires persistence. We all break new ground. I have laid out the causes of the crisis. They are complex. Simple solutions, the one magic bullet, will not emerge. The issues will occupy us for years.

The documents on maximizing the lending capacity of the EFSF, the best which knowledge and conscience can now produce, now lie before you. In the public debate on this maximization we hear much of a major failure and liability risk that Germany will assume. Whether that will be, no one can ultimately assess conclusively. But I say explicitly: we can not exclude it.
(Thomas Oppermann [SPD]: the last week still sounded different!)
Therefore it is right and good that we have this enshrined in our resolution .
(Applause from the SPD and Alliance 90/The Greens)
I want to talk about it because here we are at a point where all bear who political responsibility, have to answer a simple political question. It reads: As we go into a situation like this, how do we deal with risks? Put another way: What do we consider to be acceptable risks? Can we specifically regard risk that we take with the maximization of the EFSF acceptable or not? Today this is the specific question. When I consider the risk unacceptable, then I cannot run it. If after weighing all the pros and cons I consider it reasonable, then I have to take the risk. This is exactly what distinguishes political action from other kinds of action.
(Applause from the CDU / CSU and FDP)

Regarding the maximization of the EFSF we know:

First. The German share will remain at 211 billion euros.

Second. Contracts are not broken.

Third. We are the economically strongest nation. But - and I say it- we are not the center of the world. The world looks to Europe and Germany. She looks to see whether we are willing and able to take responsibility in the hour of Europe's worst crisis since the end of World War II.

Fourth. The potential loss and liability risk is offset by the economic profit that Germany like no other country has taken from the Euro.

Fifthly. My conclusion is therefore: the risk that is associated with the maximization of the EFSF now proposed is acceptable.

(Voice from the Left: for whom?)
I go even one step further: It would not be reasonable and not responsible, not to take the risk. A better alternative, a more sensible alternative is for me, considering all the options. not available.

Dear colleagues, thank you for your past support and critical support in our efforts to protect and strengthen the euro. It is my personal goal, in close cooperation with the German Bundestag - to find solutions for the benefit of our country - with government and opposition factions.

I am convinced that the comprehensive approach that I have laid out to address the acute crisis on the one hand and take wise precautions for the future on the other, will enable us to make the Economic and Monetary Union again a union of stability. To our citizens, I say: It remains true: What is good for Europe, is also good for Germany. This is what half a century of peace and prosperity in Germany and in Europe proves.

Allow me given the situation - not only the economic situation of the debt crisis, but also the political situation in individual European countries - to end with a personal word. No one should believe that another half century of peace and prosperity in Europe is inevitable. It is not. Therefore I say: If the euro fails, then Europe fails. This must not happen.

(Applause from the CDU / CSU and the FDP and from members of the SPD and Alliance 90/The Greens)

We have an historic commitment to defend and protect, with all available means, the unification of Europe, which our forefathers put under way 50 years ago after centuries of hatred and bloodshed. None of us can foresee the consequences if it does not succeed. It must not happen—that is my deep belief—that one day it shall be said, that the generation of political leaders who bore responsibility in Europe in the second decade of the 21st century failed before history.

I find all the more valuable the political message that the German Bundestag sends today a joint request by the CDU / CSU, the SPD, the FDP and Alliance 90/The Greens, by the people of Germany, to Europe and the world. It is sending a message that goes far beyond financial policy statements . It sends the message that Germany regardless of party lines protects the European project and stands together for this goal. For that I thank all those who contributed to it. You can be sure that I will take this message with me today for the complex negotiations in Brussels.

Thank you.
(Prolonged applause from the CDU / CSU and the FDP - Applause from the SPD and Alliance 90/The Greens)

Hedging

2011-10-20T14:49:00.002-04:00

The world is awash in books on the economic crash, and I have read only a couple, which I have reviewed here. In the last week I tried another one: More Money Than God, by Sebastian Mallory, about the rise of hedge funds. Mallaby, a financial writer, has worked very hard to put together the story of hedge funds since the 1970s, relying, inevitably, on a few spectacular figures, including George Soros, Paul Tudor Jones, and the operators of Long Term Capital Management, which famously crashed and required a Fed rescue effort in the 1990s. For the first time, I have some understanding of what hedge funds do and how they do it--and why they now attract so much of the best brain power that our country has to offer. Unlike Mallaby, however, I was not convinced that they are performing a socially useful function. Indeed, I think they are a profound symptom of what is wrong with us, and represent a problem requiring a solution--one that might not be hard to apply, were any of the necessary will lacking.

A hedge fund, of course, is a private, unregulated entity that invests in all sorts of things, from common stocks to bonds, foreign currencies, and, more recently, commodities--a development that Mallaby does not discuss. The operators of hedge funds use their own and other peoples' money, charging 2% a year to customers who give them their money, as well as a substantial share of any profits. Some of them are now handling billions of dollars. And their appeal becomes rather simple as soon as one grasps a simple fact. Hedge funds might more properly be called edge funds. They do sometimes hedge, that is, bet in effect on both sides of a trade to insure against losses, but they spend most of their time looking, like other gamblers, for an edge. An edge consists of any information, or analysis, tending to show that a certain tradable instrument is valued too low or too high at a particular moment. Because they dispose of so much money and use so much leverage, hedge fund managers have been able to score hundreds of millions of dollars of gains based upon a relatively small anomaly. Some of their simplest strategies involved identifying pairs of stocks--say, two domestic US airlines--whose value tends to move in parallel, and buying or shorting whenever one of them seems to be out of whack. One extremely successful firm, Renaissance Technologies, relied on analysts who knew very little about how markets actually worked, much less about what firms actually provided, but who could treat market statistics the way some analysts treat baseball statistics: they simply looked for patterns that would allow them to predict market movements without any sense of the underlying factors involved. For some time, at least, these tactics worked.

What ordinary citizens need to understand, however, it seems to me, is that hedge funds to not simply make money out of market trends. At critical junctures they have exaggerated those trends, on several occasions with consequences affecting the lives of many millions of people. In 1992, pioneering hedger George Soros and his collaborator Stanley Druckenmiller made perhaps a billion dollars (and other fund managers made about three times that) by betting against the pound sterling. The British at that time, like all governments inside the European Union, had committed themselves to maintaining the value of sterling within certain limits, and Soros and Druckenmiller were convinced that they could not. They sold pounds short in extraordinary volume--but such was the size of their position--perhaps $10 billion worth--that this inevitably started a run on the pound and made their preferred result not only more likely, but far more costly to the Bank of England, which, sadly, wasted billions of pounds in a futile effort to stop it. Variations of this story pop up repeatedly in Mallaby's book: many hedge funds take such large positions that they critically move the market. In addition, when they become over-extended, as they often do, any sign that they might have to unload positions to raise money threatens the value of their holdings as well.

Do hedge funds, which are designed to identify prices that are too high or too low, help maintain equilibrium in markets? The answer, frequently, at least, is no, and I suspect that I, ignorant though I may be, know the answer. To begin with, when the financial world is really in a frenzy, falling all over itself to acquire tech stocks in the late 1990s or subprimes just a few years ago, nothing will stop it. Several funds were nearly wiped out shorting tech stocks because, to quote John Maynard Keynes, the market stayed irrational longer than they could stay solvent. That was not the fund managers' fault. And yet, it seems to me, there is another reason why we cannot expect fund managers to stop the worst anomalies: because they generate the largest profits. Fund manager John Paulson (not to be confused with former Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson) made several billion dollars shorting subprimes in 2007. Much of this money came from the credit-default swaps--that is, insurance on subprimes--that he had purchased. Mallaby does not explain to us where that money came from, but I would not be surprised if was part of the many billions of AIG assets which the federal government decided to make good. That was not a socially useful profit.

I use Oliver Stone's movie Wall Street (the original, not the lamentable sequel) to illustrate the influence of Boomers like Gordon Gecko on financial markets. The tragic hero of that movie--tragic for us, not for himself--is Lou Mannheim, played by Hal Holbrook, a GI nearing retirement in the mid-1980s who tries to teach Xer Bud Fox the virtues of staying in the market for the long haul and identifying stocks with real value. That kind of strategy, carefully executed and assisted by sound national fiscal policy, enabled brokers to make a handsome, but not spectacular, living over the course of their careers. Hedge fund managers are gamblers who simply aren't interested in that kind of outcome. They dream of gigantic scores. Their goals, and their lives, are addictive. They often have to get up early in the morning to react to what markets in Asia and Europe are doing. Many of them finally retire when they suddenly realize that they have no time or energy to enjoy their millions or spend any time with their families. In Politics and War, in a chapter on the French revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, I pointed out how destructive such behavior was when it became normal for European political leaders who felt free to redraw the map. I do not think it is less destructive in the economic world. Soros himself apparently had an epiphany after his sterling coup, abandoned high-stakes gambling, and began turning to philanthropy and genuine efforts to create a better world. He wrote recently that we live in increasingly irrational world. Hedge funds, I think, reflect that.

Mallaby believes in hedge funds. He notes, correctly, that their behavior was neither so reckless nor remotely so expensive as that of the big banks in the last crisis. He also cites studies claiming that hedge funds, as a group, have turned impressive profits over the last few decades, although he has to admit that such data are slippery because many losers have gone out of business without a trace. Gambling is an inherently unstable activity, and the mathematical theory of gamblers' ruin holds that every gambler will inevitably go broke sooner or later, especially if he keeps playing for higher and higher stakes. John Paulsen, the big winner in the subprime sweepstakes, has lost about 40% of the value of his fund this year. His days, too, may be numbered. Amazingly, neither in this book, nor, as far as I can see by scanning the titles of his recent columns in the Financial Times, does Mallaby have much to say about the impact hedge funds are having on the world economy right now. I would speculate (if you will pardon the term) that they have a good deal to do with the new commodities boom that has sent prices skyrocketing again, and it is inconceivable that they are not trying to profit hugely from the Greek crisis and the pressure on the Euro. If past experience is any guide, this will not help the European or world economy.

The United States, and to a lesser extent the rest of the western world, is in big trouble because of a crisis in values. The idea of a safe, steady income, so influential at almost every level of society in the middle of the last century, is now hopelessly passe. (I am here to tell you that such an income can still provide a very happy life.) Hedge funds and megabanks are still gobbling up an astonishing portion of the brain power coming out of American universities and professional schools every year--brain power that could plan better cities, improve American manufacturing, teach students who want to learn, perhaps even reform government. Clearly we will go through more financial catastrophes before we do any fundamental rethinking of where we are and how we got here. That is why I am increasingly inclined to believe that the men and women who really will put things on a new and much sounder footing may not yet have been born.

Europe, however, is still in certain respects a hold-out. In one of the more affecting passages of the book, Mallaby describes how certain funds became interested in the German economy in the 1980s and 1990s, both before and after reunification. Initially, looking at the balance sheets of German companies, they found their stocks to be drastically undervalued. But they discovered that German companies had different values: they were actually more interested in keeping more people at work than in maximizing the bottom line. Germany, of course, still focuses on such things because Germany, more than any other modern nation, experienced the consequences of catastrophic political and economic failure, whose memory survives even though the adults who lived through Nazism are now dead. The western world now depends on Europe to keep sanity alive during the current crisis, just as, 80 years ago, it depended on the United States.

Occupy Wall Street

2011-10-14T17:46:00.003-04:00

Some hundreds of people, most of them young, have been occupying a park near Wall Street for several weeks now, skirmishing occasionally with the police. Similar groups of similar sizes have sprung up in cities around the country. The group has issued manifestos about the evils of our current society, certainly with more than a grain of truth; but they have not made any specific demands, and they are not asserting anything more than the right to be where they are. Both they, and many of those who find them appealing, are proud of being non-partisan and even non-political, and some already worry that they will be "co-opted" by the Democratic Party in the way that, some say, an authentic Tea Party was co-opted by the Republicans. Because these protesters are in their heart on the same side of the political fence that I am, I wish I could find something truly encouraging in what they are doing--but I can't. What has happened to our country is not their fault, but sadly, I'm afraid the nature of their protest is another sign of how far we have fallen.

The most prominent list of demands, I believe, from the OWS protesters can be read here. It is an impressive and largely accurate litany of corporate malfeasance. I quickly counted 20 specific complaints, agreed with 14, and found 6 of them over the top. Nor, I think, is it really accurate to blame the state of America on corporations: many of our politicians are equally to blame, and not simply because of the debts they owe to corporations. The list was evidently drawn up to resemble the Declaration of Independence--but there is one difference.

The difference is that there is no punch line--no demand for specific remedies or political action of any kind. As such, it inevitably reminds me of some of the worst of late 1960s thinking--a conviction that society is intrinsically evil (which it was not) and that we can make it better simply by wishing it so. The manifesto includes no recognition that human nature might be to blame for many of our ills, much less any sense of how to control it. It simply calls for more assemblies and protests.

Strauss and Howe in 1993 identified the Millennial generation (born 1982-2002?) as the new Hero generation, parallel to the GI or "greatest" generation. But the GIs only became the heroes we knew thanks to Franklin Roosevelt and his cabinet, as well as the Lost Generation military leaders like Eisenhower, Patton, Bradley and the rest who led them into battle. The Boom and Xer generations have provided nothing like that for the Millennials, and it seems increasingly unlikely that they are going to do so. The GIs did some great things (and some not so great things as well) when they assumed power on middle age, but they were building upon the achievements of the preceding generations. The Millennials, sadly, are not being given that chance, and with government still being cut back, it's hard to see how they will be.

Nor am I anything but depressed by the new movement's aversion to traditional politics or either political party. That too is reminiscent of 1968, when so many concluded that there was no difference between Hubert Humphrey and Richard Nixon. Yes, the Democrats are nearly as in thrall to corporate power as the Republicans, but they do not share the Republican zeal for doing away with all levels of government in the United States. They are in touch with reality, which the Republicans are not. (We can hope, of course, that Mitt Romney, if elected, would revert to the sensible views he showed as Governor of Massachusetts, but that surely is grasping at straws.)

In a press conference last week the President tentatively embraced the protesters' concerns. I hope that this will be the beginning of something--that if the protests grow--and they really are very small now--they can move him to the left, and in turn supply him with a new cadre of shock troops for next year's election. But that is the best we can hope for. The United States is no longer capable--though it might at some distant point be--of embarking upon a great crusade to make a better world here at home, much less abroad. Our task now is to prevent things from getting much worse. To help, the protesters, I think, need a more realistic attitude.

The historical profession and me

2011-10-08T08:33:00.004-04:00

I have stayed away from purely academic issues for the most part here, despite occasional references to the state of the historical profession. I went into history to explore certain kinds of questions, and I have enjoyed doing so more than anyone will ever know. I am still at it and I will be, I trust, for many years to come. But it has been a struggle because of the Boomer-led transformation of the historical profession over the last 40 years, which, among other things, left no permanent place open in American university life for me. Regular readers might think a moment about exactly what that means.

I know some War College students read these posts, and one once took me to task in a comment for complaining about being there. I do not want to be misunderstood. In certain ways the War College was the ideal intellectual environment for me. It's the only place I know of where you have to know a great deal about a great many different things, and the only place where you are paid to think big. Since, as you know those were always my natural tendencies, that was a good fit. It does have its own problems, however, of which repetition is the biggest, and after 21 years, I will be leaving at the end of this year.

For the last 17 years I have been a regular participant on an internet discussion group called H-Diplo. I am reproducing, below, the post I submitted yesterday morning, which has now appeared. It is self-explanatory. Regular commentaries will resume soon.

In 1994 or 1995 I made my first post on H-Diplo, and I have certainly been one of the most active posters—perhaps, indeed, the most active—for the last 17 years. This was, at the outset, a rare and rewarding opportunity for personal expression within a very lively intellectual environment. It has also been a forum within which changes within the historical profession could be observed. Sadly, many vital aspects of the list have changed. Although the American historical profession was well into its great and disastrous transformation by the mid-1990s, it was still in a transitional phase. Many posters in those days had been born well before the Second World War. Nearly every university or liberal arts college still included in its history department at least one genuine specialist in American diplomacy, and very possibly, a scholar of European diplomacy as well. They had been trained to address, research, and study great questions of war and peace, and they had done so. They took their own and others’ opinions on those questions very seriously, and they enjoyed discussing these questions in a frank, if generally friendly spirit. I myself belonged, I can now see, to the dying days of that tradition, having earned my Ph.D. in 1976. By 1991 the vagaries of the historical profession had landed me here at the Naval War College. The internet in general, and H-Diplo in particular, arrived just in time for us to take advantage of it, and for some time, we did.

Those who take the time to go through the H-Diplo logs in the mid- and late 1990s will find, I think, a record of extraordinary intellectual vigor and curiosity. We had very long debates on major historical questions, including the decision to drop the atomic bomb, the origins of the Korean War, the reason that Pearl Harbor was such a surprise, and many more. In 2002-3 we had a long and heated discussion about the forthcoming war in Iraq. We were also joined, from time to time, by non-historians who brought something different to the discussions. The prominent neocon David Horowitz posted for an extended period. The convicted spy Morton Sobell appeared briefly at one point to proclaim his innocence—a position he has now recanted. Most importantly of all, perhaps, the historians and political scientists who posted regularly did not feel bound to confine their comments to their research specialties. We had been taught that historians have opinions on every major question, and we expressed them. Of the historians who made the list go in those days, only two seem to be left: Ed Moise and myself. And we appear much less frequently than we did then.

Later in the 1990s, if I am not mistaken, H-Diplo became the site of a series of very heated discussions about postmodernism, whose value I and some others sharply questioned. It was now clear that history was at a serious turning point indeed. I had been taught that historians used the fullest possible documentary record to make the best judgments they could about what actually happened. Now a new view was taking hold: that arguments about knowledge, as Joan Scott put it in a celebrated article, were about the interests of groups, not the opinions of individuals, and that everyone was free to reshape the past based in large part on identity politics. The arguments over this position raged for several years and I think they were intellectually productive. They have however now died down, as a younger generation that grew up with postmodernism has come to the fore.
Indeed, it seems that H-Diplo is no longer a discussion forum—it is an online journal. I do not in the least mean to slight the work of the moderators who have done a thankless job very well for all these years. The trouble is with the posters, not the moderators. A new view of history has triumphed, one which indeed denies the existence of any single truth. (I am not suggesting that truth is ever easy to find, but I do believe it exists and is well worth looking for.) Everyone, it seems, is entitled to his or her own small plot of intellectual land, within which he or she can develop a particular variety of history. A general non-aggression pact among the practitioners prevails. The idea that certain books are superior in research, argument, or scholarship to others has become most unfashionable. Dissent from these views has not in fact died out, but it has shrunk to the point that it can safely be ignored. I recall that sometime in the 1990s I tried to start a thread entitled, “What Makes a Great Historian?” I put forward some ideas of my own, but that post never drew a single reply of any kind. That question, however, has continued to interest me deeply, and that is probably the reason why I am now well into my seventh book, each of them on a very different topic from all the rest. It has occurred to me, by the way, that several of my favorite historians, including Henry Adams, W. E. B. Dubois, Charles A. Beard, and Luigi Albertini, had either a fleeting involvement in the academy or none at all. Perhaps there is a lesson there too.

The last time that I made a post questioning the conclusions of a book that had been the subject of a roundtable, I received six emails within 24 hours thanking me for what I had said. I asked each correspondent to think about posting their views on the list. Not one of them did. That is another feature of the current historical profession: historians (and political scientists) are afraid to take a stand. Having grown up with the idea that history is controversy, I am very sad about that. More recently, in a perfectly friendly spirit, I raised a serious question of fact arising from another roundtable. No one responded publicly or privately to that one. I am quite certain they would have 15 years ago.

I would like to close with two broader comments. First of all, it is a paradox that serious archival work involving exhaustive research has fallen out of fashion at a moment when the opportunities to do it are exploding. The digitization of history is a godsend to historians. The Proquest historical newspaper data base, for instance, could allow historians to write political history of a kind that would have been impossible in earlier ages. Other aspects of computer technology, particularly the excel spreadsheet, have enabled me, in my last project and in my current one, to collect, store, and organize data on a hitherto undreamed-of scale. I regret that I have had no opportunity to pass these new techniques on to younger generations of historians. On several occasions I asked friends in history departments if I might give a presentation about them, but that never happened.
My second point involves the relationship of the historical profession to politics. It is commonly asserted that left wing politics dominate the academy and the historical profession, and in a sense that is surely true. Yet I am convinced, as a lifelong student of American politics, that the changes in the academy have benefited the political right far more than the political left. Because the historical profession is no longer interested in the doings of the rich and powerful, but only in the lives of the marginalized, universities have turned out a generation of undergraduates lacking the intellectual tools to understand the world around them. One cannot understand the great crisis the United States and the world are now passing through without detailed knowledge of the American Civil War, or the Depression and the Second World War, but such knowledge is increasingly unavailable on college campuses. And because we do not understand those crises, we have been, to date, almost completely unable to cope with this one in a useful manner. The right has never lost interest in American politics and in how things actually work—and it shows.

H-Diplo probably made me better known within the historical profession than anything I have written. (My books made me better known outside it, of course.) I made more than a few friends here, and I know that many people found things I said useful and encouraging. (I would warn them against believing, however, that ideas like mine have any place in contemporary history departments.) I am continuing to write the kind of history I believe in and I am sure that I will do so for a long time to come. I also have an additional year of teaching at an excellent liberal arts college, where I know from recent experience that the students want what I have to offer, to look forward to. After that, however, my professional career—not my writing career-- will come to an end. I shall try to keep the best historical traditions alive, and I am very satisfied with what I will have left behind.

This will be my last post on H-Diplo.

Sincerely yours,

David Kaiser

A Prophecy from 1970

2011-10-01T11:11:00.002-04:00

To remain intellectually active and interested in essentially the same subjects for four or five decades opens up a broad field of rare pleasures. The books that moved you 40 years ago not only retain their original value, but add new dimensions in light of subsequent events. One such, which I finally picked up again a couple of weeks ago, was Gary Wills's Nixon Agonistes, which grew out of reporting Wills, then a recent convert from National Review conservatism to liberalism, had written for Esquire. Wills had a good Jesuit education,a doctorate in Classics, an eye for character and detail, and a flexible mind. I have been amused to note some slips that got by his editor--Woodrow Wilson died in 1924, not 1921, and Senator Millard Tydings lost the general election, not the primary, to a McCarthy-backed candidate in Maryland in 1950--but Wills has indeed filled the gap left by the modern historical profession since the death of Richard Hofstadter at about the time Nixon Agonistes was published. Despite his lack of formal historical training he became a history professor at Northwestern University in 1980, and has written long books of varying quality on Ronald Reagan, Thomas Jefferson, Henry Adams, and John Kennedy.

The theme of Nixon Agonistes, which I remembered well, was that Nixon was entering office just when the Awakening (Wills did not use the word, but much of the book is about the phenomenon) was destroying the values of his America once and for all--that Nixon's self-discipline, iron control of his negotiations, and belief in very man as master of his fate had become obsolete in the dawning Age of Aquarius. And I thought the point of this post would be how wrong Wills had turned out to be--that in fact, Nixon, following up on Goldwater's doomed campaign of 1964, had begun the revival of those values that has continued almost without let-up ever since, and that threatens today to return us to the late 19th century. I may develop that idea in a later post, but as it turned out, the first few chapters of the book, about the campaign of 1968 and Nixon's campaign in particular, gave me more than enough to talk about.

It is clear, reading Wills, that Nixon and those around him--who in 1968 included both William Safire and Pat Buchanan--were the founders of modern Republican campaigning. Drawing on Nixon's early campaigns and even on his own words in the first of Nixon's three autobiographies, Six Crises, Wills notes that Nixon always thrived upon the attack. He was elected to Congress in 1946 by tying incumbent Jerry Voorhis to Communism, and to the Senate in 1950 by doing the same to Helen Gahagan Douglas. He was the Republican attack dog in 1952, referring to Adlai Stevenson's Ph.d from Dean Acheson's "Cowardly College of Communist Containment," and he complained bitterly in Six Crises that he lost the election in 1960 because he had to defend, rather than attack, an Administration's record. "Every campaign had taught Nixon the same lesson: mobilize resentment against those in power," Wills wrote. Three subsequent generations of Republicans have taken that one to a new level, railing ceaselessly against "the government" even when they are running it.

More subtly, Nixon in 1968 actually articulated the strategy subsequently adopted by Karl Rove, who, let it be remembered, was already a leading Young Republican by 1972. (One of the keys to recent American political history, by the way, is that while the Young Republicans were spawning Rove, Abramoff, and later Grover Norquist, the Young Democrats had essentially ceased to exist, read out of existence by Lyndon Johnson because of their opposition to the Vietnam War.) In May 1968 Nixon gave a radio speech announcing his plan for "A New Alignment for American Unity"--an alignment, not a consensus. Nixon actually claimed that 1968 would be for the Republicans what 1932 was for the Democrats--and while the temporary allegiance of southern whites to George Wallace hid the magnitude of what had happened for another four years, he was right. Nixon explained that his new alignment would include five groups: 1) traditional Republicans, 2) younger liberals who wanted "participatory democracy," 3) the new South, "interpreting the old doctrine of states' rights in new ways," 4) black activists looking for opportunity rather than welfare, and 5) "the silent center, the millions of people in the middle of the American political spectrum who do not demonstrate, who do not picket or protest loudly"--in other words, older Americans disturbed by black militants, student protests, long hair, rock-and-roll, youthful premarital sex, and all the other manifestations of the Awakening.

What was critical, as Wills noted, was that these groups had nothing in common. The second and fourth, indeed, were included for show--Nixon never drew significant support from either--but the other three were united by different resentments against the establishment, now symbolized by the Democratic Party. Nixon nearly lost the election because the New Deal coalition was not yet dead and because Wallace took away so many votes in certain key northern states--but had Wallace won enough electoral votes to deny him victory, we know now that Wallace would have offered them to the candidate who promised concessions on school desegregation, and Nixon, not Humphrey, would surely have found a way to pass the test. Karl Rove later raised this strategy to a high art, looking for angry groups of undiscovered voters who could be won over by coded appeals about their favorite issue.

The book also opens with a description of a Wallace rally in Maryland. (I attended a Wallace rally myself later that year on Boston Common, where the protesters far outnumbered Wallace's supporters, moving him to suggest that Massachusetts needed a busing program to bring some balance to the political scene.) And Wallace, too, emerges a founder of key aspects of modern Republican politics. "The press says we're some kind of uncivilized racists," Wallace said, prompting his supporters to shake their fists at the press section. "Oh, not these boys," said Wallace. "They're hard-workin' reporters. I love these folks. It's their editors, back in offices, that write all that stuff." Wallace supporters came out because they thought they had no voice in the mainstream media, which in those days truly had power. This, too, was the start of something big.

Yet let us not rhetorical similarity blind us to the very real changes that have transformed the Republican Party and our politics since then. Nixon was always looking for effective political tactics. "Let's get a woman on the ticket," he said to William Safire just before his death in 1994. "It hurts the Democrats, but it would help us." That was Nixon the pro, who fought dirty campaigns in order to govern. In office he went with the flow on domestic policy, signing the bill that created the EPA, and his pursuit of detente resembled no other President so much as his great rival Kennedy. He neither attacked nor tried to undo the New Deal or the Great Society--indeed, he made social security benefits high enough to live on for the first time. For today's Boomer and Gen X Republicans attacks upon government are a religion, not a tactic, and they will not rest until they have either undone a century of American history or been marginalized by a change of opinion. They also lack all self-discipline--they will do anything to serve their cause and beliefs and pay no attention to the consequences.

Wills did not confine himself in his great work to Nixon and the right; he discussed the new left at great length as well. They would be equally influential in other spheres--but that's a topic for another week.

Morally superior?

2011-09-24T09:10:00.001-04:00

The United States, in my opinion, is likely during the next few years to lose its world leadership, albeit peacefully. Two items in Thursday's New York Times suggested to me that one reason is the infuriating attitude of moral superiority which has become second nature among American elites. The rest of the world has already largely rejected it, and our hypocrisy is now becoming too obvious to miss. It has also become a terrible obstacle to dealing with the world as it is, which remains the main task of leading power like ourselves.

The first of these two items, sadly, was President Obama's speech to the United Nations on the Middle East. 44 years after the Six Day War, the Palestinians are doing more or less exactly what the Israelis did 20 years before that: asking the United Nations to recognize their state. (I have not been able to discover, by the way, why that issue in 1947-8 was handled by the General Assembly instead of the Security Council.) This is the kind of problem the UN was created to solve, obviously, and since Israel has disclaimed any intention of making all the inhabitants of the West Bank citizens of Israel and Jordan has renounced that territory as well, it seems logical enough to acknowledge the principle of Palestinian sovereignty. In addition, the current Israeli government clearly is not interested in creating a Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders, or any state that enjoys true sovereignty, including the control of its borders. President Obama began his term by asking Israel to freeze settlement construction, a prerequisite, clearly, to such a deal, and they refused to do so. Now he is reduced to arguing that the Palestinians have to wait for their state until the Israelis are willing to give it to them, and the Palestinians are quite right, it seems to me, to conclude that that day may never come. More importantly, nearly all the rest of the world agrees with them. The President is now enjoying the worst of both worlds, since he hasn't been able to move the peace process forward but has cemented a new alliance between the Republican Party and the Israeli government. In a new low in American politics, reports state that the Administration actually enlisted Benjamin Netanyahu to convince the Republicans not to cut off all aid to the Palestinian authority--at least not yet--in retaliation for their demand for statehood. What Netanyahu giveth, he can taketh away, and there is a good chance that he will if the Palestinians get what they want fro the General Assembly. Obama also disturbed me by reading the list of Arab leaders, some of them long-time American allies, who have been overthrown in the last year. One can welcome political change in the Arab world without pointing to scalps nailed to a nearby wall. It was the business of the Arab peoples, not ours, to deal with those leaders, and they have done so.

The second item was Nicholas Kristof's op-ed, describing a remarkable interview he had with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. In a rational world, that interview, combined with other Iranian statements and recent acts--including the freeing of two American hikers--could be hailed as a sign of a possible diplomatic breakthrough. Ahmadinejad told Kristof that Iran would in fact abandon its uranium enrichment program if we would sell them uranium enriched to 20%. Kristof did welcome this statement and asked the government to pursue it, but in giving his account of the interview, he focused on the embarrassing questions he kept asking as if to show Ahmadinejad that he didn't meet American standards of statesmanship. He asked him to compare the revolts in Syria to those in Iran, had repeatedly suggested that Ahmadinejad didn't enjoy the support of the rest of the Iranian leadership, and he invited him to repeat the Iranian cover story about the famous picture of the murdered Iranian protester. Kristof routinely tries to impose his own morality on the world, and not only in commentary. Journalists like himself no longer have to respect the traditional reporters' prejudice against becoming part of the story and some years ago he treated us to several columns about his attempts to free a young Cambodian girl from a brothel. (He took her out, but, in a telling commentary on American altruism, she returned as soon as she could.) Now in fact neither he nor anyone else can turn Iran into a modern western society with our values. We have taken a stab at this once before, when Kristof and I were young, with disastrous results. The only serious question is whether, in fact, we can reach a deal regarding the Iranian nuclear program--a deal which would head off a very real possibility of a disastrous war between Iran and Israel in which other important Muslim states might now join. Iran's human rights record is not really very important compared to that, and Ahmedinejad's personality isn't either.

Under the influence of the Boom generation, both the American left and right have contributed to this tendency. The left, including Obama advisers like Samantha Power, have decided that morality trumps international law and proclaimed not only a right, but an obligation, to disregard the sovereignty of other nations. The right is now drunk on "American exceptionalism." This will leave us with fewer and fewer friends. Nicolas Sarkoczy, the most pro-American French leader in modern times, has now distanced himself from Washington over the Palestinian issue. In the 1940s we fought the Second World War for a world of impartial principles--but the include respect for national sovereignty and the rights of all peoples to choose their own forms of government. I can't see when we will return to that view.

A turning point in history

2011-09-17T09:44:00.003-04:00

[Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people still find their way every year here thanks to a scurrilous, anonymous piece of propaganda comparing President Obama to Hitler which has been circulating under my name for two and a half years. It is sad that so many people can be taken in by something whose actual author has never even come forward, but that, for reasons I discuss below, is the world we live in.]

When The Fourth Turning came out in 1996, I wrote in a review for the Boston Globe that I was both frightened excited to think that I might live through great events comparable to the Civil War and the Depression, New Deal, and Second World War. It now seems clear that, for better or for worse, the very real crisis which we are experiencing will not resemble either of those. But I now do realize that I have been living through a great historical change during the last 45 years or so, one which might conceivably turn out to be more significant, though initially less violent, than either of those. That change is nothing less than the beginning of the end, perhaps, of the rationalist era in western--perhaps, indeed, in world--civilization. There have been two such eras in western history, one in the Mediterranean world of ancient Greece and Rome, the second beginning in the Renaissance and extending into the twentieth century (frighteningly, an era of about the same length.) Only the latter parts of the second fall within my real area of expertise.

The gradual substitution of reason for faith actually can be dated in the Middle Ages, when Thomas Aquinas attempted to reconcile them, but it gathered speed in the 17th and 18th centuries, largely because of breakthroughs in science. The key steps forward, from my point of view this morning, involved the application of reason to human behavior, human conduct, and what came to be called the general welfare during the Enlightenment of the 18th century. Essentially, in Western Europe and its offshoots (such as North America) the idea took hold that the human brain could design, build, and live in institutions that would promote justice, greater wealth, and human happiness. It could also improve health and even protect against fatal disease, beginning, at the end of the 18th century, with smallpox. The Anglo-Saxon nations very fortunately grafted these ideas onto a long, existing political tradition that included elections and deliberative bodies. That allowed the US Constitution, for instance, to combine the ideas of individual rights, debates over legislation, and elections, the latter providing a regular, peaceful outlet for the public's displeasure, which of course would always be partly emotional as well as intellectual.

Rationalism seemed to be triumphant in the late 18th century, when orthodox religious belief had become extremely weak in the north Atlantic world, but the experience of the French Revolution showed that it was no guarantee against human excess, terror, and murder on a large scale--that indeed reason could be invoked as an excuse for such crimes. This in turn led to a religious revival in much of western Europe in the first half of the 19th century, but Darwin, geological research, and medical advances dealt religious belief another blow. The late 19th and early 20th centuries saw outgrowths of rationalism. In politics they included the idea of planned economies, the reformed US governments of the progressive era, Marx's purportedly "scientific socialism," and other more or less utopian ideas. And these ideas were, in one way or another, the intellectual background to the great crises that transformed Eastern Europe in the era of the First World War, and Western Europe and the United States from 1933 to 1945. These crises also revealed, particularly under National Socialism, that reason and purported science could justify almost any horror, but the victors in the Second World War were at least as dedicated to science and reason as the vanquished, and probably more so.

Nor was this all. Viewed from today's perspective an even more striking feature of the period 1870-1970 or so was the elimination of any serious rivals to rationalism in most of the world as well. Other civilizations still existed, but nations like Japan, China, and even the Ottoman Empire quickly realized that they had to adapt key aspects of western modernity to survive. The European imperial powers had extended their sovereignty over nearly all of Africa and a good portion of Asia by the early 20th century, spreading their ideas, which educated colonized peoples adopted for their own purposes. And thus, by 1950, the western educated elite--especially in the United States--was convinced that it had discovered the major secrets of social and economic life, and the United States was experiencing a remarkable degree of intellectual consensus that probably peaked around 1960.

I have reviewed key aspects of the last 50 years here many times, and I will not do so again this morning. Instead I shall simply compare today to that era of intellectual consensus, in order to see how much damage has been done to the rationalist ideal, and where the attacks upon it have come from.

Emotion is often the enemy of reason, and emotion in the middle of the 19th century was largely suppressed and very poorly understood. The whole world in the 1950s, we can see now, was suffering from various degrees of PTSD. Meanwhile, psychology was largely in the hands of Freudians, who had adopted a very mechanistic model--the drive theory--of human behavior and unhappiness. These ideas did not survive the coming of age of the postwar generation.

Rationalism has been attacked in recent decades by all major American political movements, and from at least three different angles. Probably the single most powerful attack comes from greed. The 90% marginal tax rates the richest Americans paid from the time of the Second World War until 1964 came from several causes: the government needed the money to finance the enormous effort of the Second World war, great wealth seemed unjust in an age of great poverty, and, in addition, economists genuinely believed that economic inequality stood in the way of economic progress. In the 1930s prevailing opinion held that underconsumption caused by a lack of purchasing power among the bottom half of the population had done much to cause the depression. In addition, it had clearly become necessary to restrain certain financial practices that had made certain people very rich, but at the expense of systemic economic risk. To judge from the history of the last 80 years, those economists knew what they were talking about. Economic growth was steadier, incomes were more equal, and financial markets were far more stable from 1933 until the 1980s, when tax rates really began to come down, than they have been since. Data, however, has not been allowed to stand in the way of greed. A thirty-year propaganda campaign turned Milton Friedman, an extremist in the mid-1960s, into the guru of a new orthodoxy. America discovered the glories of an unregulated free market. And even the financial catastrophe of 2008 and our movement into a new long-term depression has done almost nothing to shake the prevailing orthodoxy, which seems to be shared by all the leading figures in the Obama Administration.

We associate the greed attack from the right, but an equally significant attack has come from teh left, especially in universities. Infuriated by the older generation's certainty that even the Vietnam War must be right, the Boom generation violently attacked the idea of "reasoned discourse" in the late 1960s and began to elaborate its own theory of reality. By the 1990s the idea of verifiable truth in human affairs had nearly disappeared from the academy. Contests about knowledge, the historian Joan Wallach Scott wrote, were now understood to be not about the opinions of individuals, but the influence of groups. Men and women, whites and blacks, and straights and gays all had their own realities, and the biggest problem facing the world was the supremacy of the ideas of white males, that had to be contested and subverted in all possible ways. One of the most serious impacts of all this, we can now see, was the loss of academic interest in politics as they are actually practiced. The hiring of more women, minorities and gays in university departments became a social cause, one that drew far more attention than the economic rights of poorer Americans. It is no accident that feminism and gay rights will apparently be the only significant leftist achievements of our area. Rationally I believe, of course, that women, minorities and gays deserve equal rights, but I will never accept the idea that the political achievements of the last three centuries only, or even mainly, benefited white males.

Last but not least, rationalism is once again under attack from religion. The Muslim world had had a huge religious revival with enormous consequences, and most observers agree that the recent revolutions in the Mediterranean are going to speed it up. Turkey, the bastion of rationalism and secularism in the Muslim world, has fundamentally changed without violent revolution. And religion has achieved an almost unheard of place within American politics. No one can become a Republican candidate for President who does not profess to be deeply religious and cede an important political role to religious belief. Findings about evolution and climate change are constantly subject to political attack.

Nowhere is the decline of rationalism more apparent than in our attitude towards the press. The mainstream media of the High and the early Awakening--the three networks, the news magazines, and the New York Times and the Washington Post--reflected the rationalist consensus. It has now lost most of its circulation and even more of its influence. A whole new media purveys an alternate reality, and commands the allegiance of millions.

Where will all this go? I do not think the world will repudiate modern science--it cannot afford to. Meanwhile, the rationalist ideal is alive and well in Western Europe, which is struggling with equally serious economic problems of its own without losing its intellectual grip. But I think it will take a long time for the idea that government, using reason, can promote the general welfare to become truly influential in American politics. It has in a sense been done in, for the time being, by one of its own tenets: the idea of inevitable, continuous progress. Human beings as it turns out are too complex for that. Rationalism remains an ideal, one worthy of our dedication, but always, it seems, only one of the magnets that attract and repel the human species, guaranteeing that the drama of human existence will continue, both comically and tragically, for as long as the species still lives on earth.

Ten years after

2011-09-09T10:41:00.005-04:00

In less than a year, between November 2000 and September 2001, the United States was blind-sided by two almost unprecedented events. On the eve of the anniversary of the second of those events, I am convinced that they marked one of the great turning points in American history, one whose effects will surely be felt for the rest of my life and well beyond. Unfortunately, together they put the United States irretrievably, it would seem, on the wrong track for decades to come. That does not mean the end of America or of hope for the future, but it makes this anniversary a very sad one for national, as well as personal, reasons.

The first event, of course, was the accession of George W. Bush to the White House, in one of the two U.S. elections that was almost surely decided in defiance of the expressed wishes of the American electorate. On November 7, Al Gore won the national popular vote by over half a million votes, but the voting in Florida was microscopically close. The results had been altered in two critical ways, one purposeful, one inadvertent. The Republican candidate's brother, the Governor of Florida, had evidently encouraged a purge of the voter registration rolls, removing hundreds of people whose names approximated those of convicted felons from other states. Since most of them were black, this meant that several hundred people found themselves unable to vote. Then came the butterfly ballot in Palm Beach county, one of the great accidents of history, which led a number of Al Gore voters to cast their votes for Pat Buchanan. All that made the results close enough, on election night, for John Ellis, a cousin of George W. Bush then working at Fox News, to convince his network to call the election for Bush long before the counting in Florida was sufficiently complete. The other networks followed suit, and a Bush victory became the default result that Al Gore was trying to overturn.

In an America that still cared about civic virtue the whole process would have been held in abeyance pending a recount. I have seen this happen, in New Hampshire in the early 1970s, when a recount in a comparably close Senate election reversed what seemed to be a Republican victory. As it was Al Gore was on the defensive from the beginning and did not even push for the state-wide recount which the situation obviously demanded. Instead, he focused on four counties likely to favor himself, weakening his case. The Florida courts properly sided with him. But the Supreme Court made an unprecedented, partisan intervention in the case, stopped the recount, and handed Bush the election. Although it is not generally known, when elements of the media eventually carried out the full recount that should have been ordered, it turned out that regardless of the standards used, Gore won the state, and therefore, the election.

Had Gore won the election there would have been no first round of Bush tax cuts. I believe 9/11 would most likely have happened anyway--it was the kind of one-off, surprise event which, although detected by intelligence, rarely leads to timely counteraction in advance. But I suspect that Gore would have reacted to it in a completely different way. Rather than invading one country after another, he almost surely would have used the attack as an excuse to move away from dependence on foreign oil. Given what President Bush was able to do in the wake of the attack, he might well have succeeded. But in any event he never would have proposed the successive rounds of tax cuts that have now crippled the federal government's response to the economic crisis. (After making this post I read an outstanding article by George Packer in this week's New Yorker, entitled "Coming Apart: After 9/11 transfixed America, the country's problems were left to rot." It makes essentially the same points with the help of very detailed micro-examples. Unfortunately, for the time being, at least, it is available to subscribers only.)

Instead, George W. Bush has, on the one hand, drastically cut back the capacities of government by creating a permanent large deficit; made it impossible, as I have said many times, for his successor to respond adequately to the economic crisis; and involved us in an endless war with Middle Eastern extremists. The shifts in federal resources have had unforeseen consequences. The FBI, it turns out, moved 500 agents from white collar crime to terrorism, a large part of the reason why the greatest financial crisis since 1929 has produced virtually no prosecutions. Our involvement in Central Asia seems nearly as solidly established as part of our foreign policy now as NATO was in the 1950s (even though it is on a much smaller scale.) Although Bin Laden is finally dead and Al Queda is weakened, our tactics continually generate more terrorists. The Arab spring is almost certain to lead to more Islamist governments in the Middle East. The Middle East peace process came to a crashing halt after 9/11 and has not been effectively revived. Israel and the US are more isolated than ever. Nuclear-armed Pakistan has a tottering government and a large militant Islamic presence. Indeed it is now clear beyond any doubt that elements within the Pakistani government have been protecting Al Queda all along.

This is, in my opinion, the third great crisis of American national life, after the Civil War and the Great Depression and Second World War. It is ending like the Civil War, but lacking one positive accomplishment on the scale of the abolition of slavery. As in the 1870s, we are deeply in debt, with an unstable economy dominated by corporate giants--railroads then (I will have more to say about that soon), and big banks now. Now as then, our political system belongs to corporate money. An unhappy electorate, now as then, swings wildly from one party to the next without making anything new happen. We are again preoccupied above all else with our national debt, even though this time it is severely exaggerated, as I pointed out a month ago. A whole political party is now dedicated to the end of government as we have known it, and the question is how far they will be able to go.

The events of November 2000 and September 2001 must not be given too much weight. The trend towards corporate freedom, economic inequality, and deregulation was already well advanced before that. And the left, as well as the right, has contributed to it. But those events deepened and accelerated those trends. Still, as I survey the events of my adult lifetime, now in its 46th year, the most striking feature of it is the almost complete failure to grow a new generation of effective progressive leaders. The heirs of the New Deal took their parents' achievements for granted, turned their back on them, and then undid them. The children of the losers in the last national crisis, an the great-grandchildren of the losers in the one before that, had more to prove. They have won a series of victories; the best we can do is halt things where they are. Younger generations, including some yet born, will have to chance to revive the dreams of the Enlightenment--if they choose to do so.

Obama the Man

2011-09-03T09:14:00.002-04:00

[To new visitors: the email that has circulated for two and a half years under my name comparing President Obama to Hitler is a forgery. I do not agree with it. You are however encouraged to read a post or two here. To all posters: as I announced more than a year ago, comments that are abusive and anonymous are deleted.

After last week's post I did a great deal of thinking, and at length I have decided to address a topic I have generally stayed away from. I spent a lot of time in the early days of this blog (fall 2004) analyzing George W. Bush's personality; I have spent much less time on Barack Obama's, partly, I suppose, because I wished him success. Yet he is not succeeding, and it won't do any good to ignore elephants in the room. Barack Obama's personality is in many ways the opposite of what his bitterest opponents think, but it is getting away of effective governance all the same. And while I have never met him and probably never will, there's no reason why I shouldn't use insights from Alice Miller and elsewhere on him as well.

A year or two ago I was talking on the phone with a very interesting friend of mine and the television show The Wire came up. I asked him who his favorite character was. For the benefit of those of who who watched that amazing show, my favorite was Lester, the quiet, highly intelligent Boomer who had never wanted, or risen to, a position of authority, but who took intense pleasure in running down the details of the case. If you've ever read any of my books you'll know why I liked him. I can't remember who my friend's favorite character was, but I told him I had read recently that Barack Obama liked the show, and his favorite character was Omar. Omar was an Xer, like the President, and an anarchist. He wasn't a drug dealer, but he made his living with a couple of friends robbing drug dealers. He was also gay, and he helped kill Stringer Bell, the drug kingpin who took classes at the local business school, after Bell killed a lover of his. "Well, I can see why Obama loves Omar," my friend said, "because he obviously has a fantasy of. . .shooting everybody." I had to think about that one for a long time.

I haven't yet had time to read the biography of Obama's mother Stanley Ann Dunham, but the reviews were very informative. The childhood of many Gen Xers was marked by divorce, moves, economic turmoil, and growing up much too fast. Obama's childhood had all that, plus a few years living in a distant third world country--an experience which is not easy even if you are living in an embassy residence, as I was, and which he most certainly was not. His mother had two husbands and a number of other men, it seems, in her life. When he was ten he returned to Hawaii to live with his grandparents. Both his mother and his grandparents evidently made clear, however, that they had great hopes for him, and he responded. Punahou School is the Sidwell Friends of Hawaii, and he evidently performed well enough to go first to a good liberal arts college in California and then as a transfer student to Columbia. Then came his two years as a community organizer--which seem to have had almost no effect on him--Harvard Law School, the Harvard Law Review, and his legal and political career in Chicago.

All this sounds very easy, but I think that is profoundly misleading. Barack Obama as a child and young man had to prove that he could put up with anything and still perform as expected, and he did. He indulged in some outlaw behavior in high school but never seems to have been directly rebellious against his parent or grandparents. He became President of the Law Review by emerging a conciliator, winning support from conservative and liberal factions. Let us not kid ourselves: no one has ever run for President, ever, who did not have an enormous need for personal recognition. That often comes, as Alice Miller pointed out, from childhood trauma. And it can create highly adaptable personalities, of which Obama seems to be one.

There are at least two episodes in Obama's adult life which, while they have gotten some attention, have gotten it from the wrong angle. One is his membership in Jeremiah Wright's church. When Wright's sermons came to public attention in 2008, conservatives eagerly argued that they represented Obama's own views. They obviously didn't--but there's the problem. Wright's church was politically visible, and Obama found it expedient to join it, even though he evidently does not think like Wright at all. This was another adaptation.

The second episode is Obama's fascination with former Harvard President Larry Summers, who is known to all who have dealt with him as one of the most personally difficult people on earth. The Kennedy White House initially included some one quite similar to Summers, another economist, Walt Rostow, who knew exactly what should be done in any situation and why. Rostow lasted less than a year in the White House because JFK did not want to listen, apparently, to that kind of man. (He returned to the White House, disastrously, under LBJ.) But Obama did not mind working with Summers for two years. I was so shocked by Summers's original appointment that I really went into denial over it and hoped for the best--but Summers was very influential in selling the President on the new economic orthodoxy. He believed that only monetary problems had caused the Great Depression, and that easy monetary problems could solve the crisis we faced in 2009. He also did not want to undo any of the deregulatory reforms he had helped push through under Clinton. He was terribly wrong on both counts and Obama is paying a terrible price for listening to him.

As I think about these issues, I wonder whether Obama's accommodating nature may also be the key to his puzzling treatment of the Clintons. The appointment of Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State was surprising but many explained it in an Abraham Lincoln sort of way, as a means to co-opt his leading rival within his own party. But that was only the first of many, many key appointments of veterans of the Clinton Administration--in other words, of the Democratic establishment. Obama has not wanted to put his own stamp on things. He has not, unlike FDR or JFK, made national figures out of virtual unknowns like Robert McNamara or Harry Hopkins or Harold Ickes. He has also, as I have noted, failed to inspire those around him, many of whom have already left the Administration. Even his Supreme Court appointments are moderate liberals, well to the right of Hugo Black, William O. Douglas, or Thurgood Marshall.

Some one who has had to repress his deepest feelings all his life loses touch with them, and finds it easier to rely on conventional wisdom than on his own eyes. If like Obama he is something of an outsider, he learns to take advantage of the fear he might arouse, as he did, perhaps, at Harvard Law. But what worked with the conservatives among his fellow law students has not worked with John Boehner and Eric Cantor. Even to fight these Republicans to a draw, rather than steadily retreat before their onslaught, would have required a completely different approach, one of which, as yet, he has proven incapable. I will be delighted but very surprised if this week's speech marks a real departure.

There is no doubt that I will be voting for Barack Obama a year from November. He believes in rationality, in some measure of equality at least, in science, in the separation of church and state, and in at least some of the achievements of the Progressive Era, the New Deal, and the Great Society. He will probably face an opponent who believes in none of those things, leaving me with a very easy choice. Yet I do not think at this point that his re-election will put the United States on a new path. The best it could do would be to calm our political climate, put the disastrous crisis of the last ten years behind us, and allow for some problem solving to begin at least at the local level. But that is much much better than what a Republican victory would mean.

A great thinker

2011-08-27T09:20:00.004-04:00

Those of who who have found this page because you received a forged email, attributed to me, comparing President Obama to Hitler, should know right away that it is a forgery that does not reflect my views. I ask you however to read this entire post.

Three weeks ago, in the middle of a research trip, I dropped into Barnes and Noble and checked out the psychology section. I found a relatively new book by one of my favorite thinkers, Alice Miller, The Body Never Lies, and sure enough, my physical reaction told me that I was in the mood for it. A few days later, googling, I made the shocking discovery that Dr. Miller had died last year, and that I had evidently skipped the Times obituaries that day. The book was a good one, although not one of her best, and it set me thinking not only about my own life, but about her crucial historical insights and their relevance to what we are going through today.

The obituary and other material that has been published since her death revealed some surprising facts about her life. She lived most of her adult life in Switzerland, but because she wrote in German and her work focused extensively on Germany, I had always assumed she was German herself. She was instead born in Lwow, in Poland, in 1923--earlier than I had imagined--and according to her Wikipedia entry, written by a woman who claims to have known her well, she was in fact Jewish. Although much of her work dealt with the holocaust and its origins, she never mentioned that in any of her books, although she had some scathing things to say about the influence of the Old Testament in one of my favorites, Thou Shalt Not Be Aware.

Miller's greatest insight, in my opinion, was that children simply have no choice but to love their parents, no matter what their parents do to them, physically, emotionally, or even sexually. Those of us fortunate to have parents who actually respect us and encourage us to have our own feelings do not have to learn denial to feel that love, but they, she argued, are surely a relatively small minority. For much of western history, and certainly as late as the 18th and 19th centuries, child-rearing consisted explicitly of compelling children to affirm certain feelings and deny certain others. And even today, millions of parents punish small children, if only by isolation, for expressing certain feelings. My own experience has taught me that this is not necessary. Fortunately, I had started reading her when my own children were small, and their mother and I allowed them to express absolutely anything inside our home. I found to my amazement that they could get the most furious anger out of their system if allowed to do so in just a few minutes, and I know now they will benefit from that all their lives.

Because of feelings about their parents they must deny, Miller argued, many, many people spend their entire lives denying their true feelings about almost everything. All of society, she thought, was terrified of peoples' feelings about their parents in particular, and that went for our own profession of psychoanalysts and psychotherapists as well. She was among several who realized that Freud, tragically, had turned away from his original findings of sexual abuse among his middle-class female patients because they were simply too threatening to the society around him. Instead he decided that his patients, driven by "infantile sexuality" and fantasies common to us all, had made up their stories, thus shifting the guilt from the abusive parent to the innocent child. Now, as she mentioned in her last book, the leaders of the psychiatric profession have gone in a completely different direction: they treat their patients with drugs rather than take much interest in what actually happened to them. That is not surprising. As I well know, the most powerful drug in our society, more powerful even than alcohol or cocaine, is success. Most of those who achieve it regard it as proof that nothing that could have happened to them as children was very significant in the long run--which is, actually, often the exact opposite of the truth. Had their parents given them a genuine sense of self-worth, they would not have had to spend the rest of their lives frantically proving it with achievement and money.

Miller's work had historical significance because she dared to apply her insights both to artists and writers and to political figures--most of all, to Adolf Hitler, whose childhood and life she treated at length in For Your Own Good. Many of Hitler's biographers mentioned that his father beat him frequently, but, as she noted, nearly all of them immediately added that such treatment was normal in those days and that of course it would be a mistake to blame his crimes upon it. And indeed, in Albert Speer's memoirs one can find Hitler not only mentioning the many beatings his father gave him, but affirming that they must have done him a great deal of good. (I myself ran into that kind of censorship in the 1990s when I reviewed one of Pat Buchanan's books for an obscure journal that no longer exists. Attempting to explain Buchanan, I pointed out, and documented, that Buchanan, like Hitler, was an abused child who bragged about the good his father's beatings had done him. The publisher of the journal refused to print that.) The opposite, as Miller showed, was true. They left Hitler both with an obsession with creating great and lasting monuments, and with an endless reservoir of hatred which he could only satisfy at the expense of the lives of Jews and Poles. Stalin was also repeatedly beaten by his father. So, Miller showed, were many of Hitler's collaborators, from top Nazis on down to concentration camp guards. The racism of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries gave them the excuse they needed to treat millions of people the way they had been treated themselves.

Typically, as soon as I had discovered Miller I found a way to work her into my teaching, in a course on historical fiction about the great crisis of the first haf of the twentieth century. For several years I made students write papers using her analysis on characters in the books we were reading, and then, finally, in 1989 I summoned the courage to offer them the choice of writing about themselves. The results were quite astonishing, and led to more than one long-term friendship. But sadly, I can see now that Miller's work was suited to the Awakening, when the world was relatively stable externally and we could all focus on our inner lives. It is probably more relevant today than it was then, but it is harder to retain her perspective in the midst of yet another great political crisis. Yet we must try.

To begin with, the whole Boomer-led revolt against the world we grew up in that began in the mid-1960s was an explosion of raw emotion, a reaction against the denial our parents had resorted to, inevitably, to endure the depression and the second world war. Rock 'n Roll in the 1950s was loud, occasionally angry, and full of feeling, and older generations immediately understood its menace to their world view. That however was only the beginning. Boomers actually did a remarkable job of suppressing their feelings as children, but they made up for it as adolescents. And from then until now, their own feelings have been more important than anything else. "If it feels good, do it," has remained their motto, and that has contributed to the decline of rationalism among Boomers of all political stripes.

But beyond that, denial obviously has a lot to do with right-wing political activism today. More than once we have discovered that right-wing Republican politicians or fundamentalist clerics railing about the danger of homosexuality were actually struggling with their own feelings. And where does the strength of the anti-tax movement come from? Could it be that richer Americans regard their wealth as proof of their superior moral worth, and that any government attempt to take more of it threatens to make them confront the issue of why they needed success so badly in the first place? Are their coping mechanisms threatened by the idea that their wealth does not stem entirely from their own efforts? The answer, I think, must be yes.

It was not long before I discovered Miller that I discovered Solzhenitsyn, and The First Circle was another key text in the course that I taught. It, too, had a powerful message: that prisoners, excluded from society's system of normal rewards and punishments, were the only citizens of the Soviet Union free to discover and express their essential humanity and their true feelings. Sadly, perhaps writers like Miller--and Orwell, if he is rightly understood--will always be primarily a source of comfort to outsiders. I am no exception. I have often thought that had my life gone more as I had imagined it, the drug of success might have spared me a long confrontation with various aspects of the truth about myself. Yet it would have also left me with much less insight about a great many things, and fortunately, I must have enjoyed what I do more for its own sake than for whatever success it might have brought me. I hope younger therapists, in particular, will have the courage to pick up where Alice Miller left off, even if work like hers is destined never to become orthodoxy.

The Two-party system

2011-08-20T08:51:00.005-04:00

[Those of who who have found this page because you received a forged email, attributed to me, comparing President Obama to Hitler, should know right away that it is a forgery that does not reflect my views. I ask you however to read this entire post.]

With the exception of relatively short periods such as the 1820s, the late 1850s, and 1912, the United States has essentially had a two-party system. In the 1820s the Federalists disappeared and what drama remained took place within the Democratic Party, until in the early 1830s the Whigs formed in opposition to Andrew Jackson. About twenty years later the collapse of the Whigs, followed by a split among the Democrats in 1860, created a very confused situation that allowed Abraham Lincoln to win a sweeping electoral majority with only a little more than 40% of the popular vote, but the war turned the Republicans into the majority party at least in the North (and for a while, during Reconstruction, in some of the South as well.) In 1912 Theodore Roosevelt's attempt to return to the White House split the Republicans and Woodrow Wilson, like Lincoln, won a huge electoral majority with a popular minority. (Wilson failed again to win a popular majority in 1916, although he had a bare plurality.) Third parties won about five southern states in 1948 and in 1968 because of the civil rights movement, once again depriving the victor of a popular majority. Ross Perot played the same role in 1992 and 1996, although he won only a few electoral votes.

The two-party system has fulfilled the essential function of modern democracy: to allow the public, or that part of it whose votes cannot be counted on by either the Republicans and Democrats, to change our leadership when things go badly. William Henry Harrison, the first Whig president, defeated Martin Van Buren in 1840 because of an economic panic. Grover Cleveland came into office by a very narrow margin in 1884 because of disgust with Republican corruption. Franklin Roosevelt came in by a landslide in 1932 because of the Depression, and Dwight D. Eisenhower did the same in 1952 thanks to frustration with the seemingly endless Korean War. The civil rights movement and the Vietnam War destroyed the New Deal coalition in the mid-1960s and Richard Nixon barely made it into the White House in 1968 as a result. Watergate and the Nixon pardon brought in Jimmy Carter in 1976, but more economic problems and setbacks abroad turned him out four years later. Recession brought Bill Clinton in to power in 1992. The case of George W. Bush in 2000 was very different: the country showed no overwhelming disgust with the Democratic Party, and the best available evidence suggests that he was not really elected at all.

Most of these transfers of power, however, made relatively little difference to the country, because they took place in eras of broad consensus about the role of government. Harrison and hid immediate successor John Tyler made no attempt to bring back the Bank of the United States. Grover Cleveland's only policy difference with the Republicans involved the extent of the tariff. Franklin Roosevelt, of course, was a truly revolutionary President, but after he left the scene the Republicans did not try to undo his revolution. Indeed, Eisenhower not only left the major achievements of the New Deal alone, but also defended and continued Truman's highly controversial foreign policies. Richard Nixon made no attempt to undo the great society and even brought the EPA into being simply because he did not want to take on a Democratic Congress on that particular issue. Ronald Reagan's major contribution was to change a progressive tax system into a regressive one. Meanwhile, however, a new generation, the Boomers, was growing up without much respect for anything their elders had done.

We are now in a new crisis era, and we face a potential catastrophe because only one party--the Democrats--seems remotely capable of governing at all. That is not to say that the Democrats are doing at all well. Barack Obama's response to the economic crisis he inherited fell short in critical respects. The stimulus was not nearly large enough, nor sufficiently focused on jobs. His Justice Department and SEC decided to let the big banks and mortgage companies escape their responsibilities for the crisis unscathed. He did not take the opportunity to let the Bush tax cuts expire. After last year's elections he adopted the catastrophic idea that cutting the deficit was more important than creating jobs, and he refused to give up the fantasy that the Republicans might cooperate with him to restore the country's confidence. As a result, his approval now hovers around 40% and his re-election is anything but assured.

The country survived that kind of situation after 1932, 1952, 1968, and 1992; but should the Republicans regain the Senate and the White House next year we will truly be entering uncharted territory. Today's Republicans reject not only the American achievements of the last century, but also some of the foundations of modern western civilization. As Rick Perry explained to a New Hampshire voter last week, he believes both creationism and evolution should be part of school curriculums. (Perry actually said that Texas requires this, which is not the case.) The Washington Post reports today that while over 70% of Democrats believe in global warming, less than 40% of Republicans do. Perry, it turns out, is a genuine acolyte of Glenn Beck, who wants to undo the Progressive Era as well as the New Deal, and repeal both the 16th and 17th Amendments, ending the federal income tax and returning the election of Senators to state legislatures. All the Republican candidates, including Mitt Romney, have violently repudiated traditional American ideas of the separation of church and state. They are all committed to a fantasy world of low taxes, no government regulation, a free market for health care, and the end, more or less, of workers' rights. And we could find them in control of the government in January 2013.

How has this happened? The shift of the Republican center of gravity to the South, starting in 1968, is perhaps the biggest factor. The traditional southern distrust of government in general and the federal government in particular gave way to something new during the New Deal, but the civil rights movement restored it among white southerners. Meanwhile, the explosion of personal freedom that also began in the 1960s deeply unsettled many heartland Americans, some of whom turned to fundamentalist religion in response. Much of today's Republicanism is reactionary in the literal sense. If one listens to Rush Limbaugh for a while, the impression becomes inescapable that many Republicans reject global warming, stimulus programs, and evolution because Democrats and urban liberals believe in them. That is why the Republican Party now rejects so much of the western rational tradition--which those of us who live on the coasts or in the upper Midwest have been taking for granted for a long time.

And let there be no doubt: there is an element of racism in present-day Republicanism as well. Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma is known as a realtively sensible Republican--a doctor, as it happens, who has refused to sign Grover Norquist's no-tax-increase pledge. Yet here is what he said last week when a constituent asked him whether, in fact (as Rush limbaugh says almost every day) President Obama's policies were designed to destroy America:

“No, I don’t... He’s a very bright man. But think about his life. And think about what he was exposed to and what he saw in America. He’s only relating what his experience in life was...

“His intent isn’t to destroy. It’s to create dependency because it worked so well for him. I don’t say that critically. Look at people for what they are. Don’t assume ulterior motives. I don’t think he doesn’t love our country. I think he does.

“As an African American male, coming through the progress of everything he experienced, he got tremendous benefit through a lot of these programs. So he believes in them. I just don’t believe they work overall and in the long run they don’t help our country. But he doesn’t know that because his life experience is something different. So it’s very important not to get mad at the man. And I understand, his philosophy — there’s nothing wrong with his philosophy other than it’s goofy and wrong [laughter] — but that doesn’t make him a bad person.”

(You can actually here exactly what he said here. Barack Obama in fact graduated from law school with many thousands of dollars of student loan debt, money that was only paid off after the success of his autobiography. But Coburn must surely be speaking for millions of white Americans who refuse to believe that Obama could have honestly gotten where he is.

The Democratic Party remains a traditional American political party, with a broad spectrum of opinion and a tendency to give in to its moderate wing. The Republican party does not. Its most enthusiastic constituents, its media outlets, and nearly all its candidates are from its most radical wing. And that wing is entirely out of touch with reality.

This week about 3500 people looked at this web page. At least a thousand of you were conservatives drawn here by the fraudulent email, attributed to me, comparing President Obama to Hitler. That email has now been circulating for two and a half years, even though I and several media outlets immediately pointed out that it was a forgery. It regularly reappears on the same conservative web sites, such as freerepublic.com , and if anything it seems less likely recently that anyone on those sites will come forward to note that the forgery has been debunked again and again. To my fellow Americans who reached here because of that email I ask you to think about where you, and your country, are going. I believe you have lost your bearings and given up your judgment. Should you get what you want--should the Republican Party take over in 18 months--you will find yourselves and your children much worse off than you can possibly imagine.

Our second civil war

2011-08-13T09:07:00.002-04:00

The political weather is heating up. How do I know? Hits on this blog are at a recent high, with 400 yesterday. (For obvious reasons, they tend to peak over the weekend and on Monday and decline somewhat for the rest of the week.) But over 200 of those were directed from snopes.com and another web site exposing the fraudulent email under my name comparing Obama to Hitler. In addition, while I have been away two citizens have left voice mail messages on my home phone wanting to discuss that email. A new rise in traffic began during the debt ceiling crisis, and now it is higher still. I'm used to this, but it remains an interesting indicator of where the country is.

Two world views are at war. The first, represented rather weakly by President Obama, represents what is left of the governmental and economic structure which the Missionary (b. 1863-1883) and GI (about 1904-24) generations built up during the first half of the twentieth century. That system was a child of the Enlightenment and believed that reason, science, and research could help government improve society, and it gave us public education at all levels, city planning, strong labor unions, interstate highways, some mass transit, regulated banking and securities markets, and federal responsibility for the economy. The second world view has always been with us in some form but it entered a new phase in reaction to the triumph of the first world view in the early 1960s, and also in reaction to the civil rights movement. It professes what amounts to Social Darwinism and believes in unregulated markets of all kinds, from securities to labor, low if any taxes, and, now, religious values as the basis for our society. While it may not represent a majority, it certainly commands a majority of the enthusiasm in the country today. That is what the circulating email and the phone calls I receive show. None of my actual posts on this forum has ever gone viral, and I don't think a single stranger has ever called me to thank me for something that I have actually said. I'm not complaining, especially about no. 2, but this tells us what we need to know about the passion abroad in this country.

The Democratic Party remains a collection of interests representing an ideology which it has essentially been ashamed of, publicly at least, since Walter Mondale. The Republican Party, while it will have trouble picking a candidate, maintains an ideological discipline that would be the envy of the Communist Party of the USSR. In Thursday night's Iowa debate, any candidate who had ever done anything reasonable-- voted for a desperately needed tax increase, cooperated with Democrats, passed a health care law, or endorsed civil unions--was given an opportunity to confess, recant, and write a letter of self-criticism, and almost without exception, they did so. The determination of the Republicans has allowed them to force the debt ceiling crisis, the downgrade, and the roller coaster swing of the stock market this past week--all of which will work to the disadvantage of President Obama.

The stock market developments suggest that another crash could happen at almost any moment. We should not be surprised. It astonishes me to think that I lived the first forty years of my life--1947-87--without experiencing a single stock market panic. (The 1970s did, of course, see a long, gradual decline, but that was a very different kind of experience.) Since then we have had the S & L bust, the dot com bubble, and the housing bubble, and the story is not over yet. This is very similar to the aftermath of the Civil War. Then, too, the country was awash in money--civil war greenbacks, instead of unlimited loans from the federal reserve, today--and markets were unregulated. The system was ripe for abuse, and abuse happened.

The political market also shows many similarities. The wounds opened by the Civil War never really healed. The South took a huge step towards genuinely joining the rest of the nation under the New Deal, which won the hearts of poorer southerners of both races, but that process was reversed in much of the South in the 1950s and 1960s. The Republican Party emerged from the Civil War in a precarious state, and that was a major reason why it insisted on enfranchising the freedmen. After they began to lose the vote in the South, the two parties were more equal in strength than at any time in our history. 1876 was the first of five consecutive Presidential elections whose outcome could have been changed by the shifting of one state. The Congress also swung back and forth, violently. I still need to learn a lot more about that era, but I suspect the reason was that while millions of Americans were deeply dissatisfied with the state of the country, the political system was too corrupt to respond to their concerns. Sound familiar?

Beginning in 9/11, the Bush Administration managed to channel enormous energy into enterprises of dubious utility into the Middle East. They also managed to cripple the federal budget for the foreseeable future. The Obama Administration's failure to reverse any of these trends suggests, sadly, that under George W. Bush--whose entrance into the White House was extremely fortuitous--the Republicans won the decisive battles of the current civil war. To be sure, they provoked an electoral reaction in so doing in 2006 and 2008, but the recovered a lot of lost ground last year. Whether or not they can regain the White House, they are obviously more than sufficiently powerful now to prevent any fundamental change of national direction for some time. To take one very important example, as Paul Krugman pointed out yesterday, the Republicans have successfully moved the national debate from jobs to deficits, guaranteeing that unemployment will remain high. To take another, the Republicans may have packed the Supreme Court to the extent necessary for it to overturn the new health care law. I am inclined to believe that Anthony Kennedy will not, in fact, provide the fifth vote for that momentous decision, but I am not sure.

The period from 1868 to 1901 did not bring any candidates for Mt. Rushmore to the White House, and its only lasting legislative contribution--the Sherman Anti-trust Act--was passed more or less by accident. We can survive another such period. Alas, the generational rhythm of human life, clearly, does not allow for uninterrupted progress.

Another perspective from the past

2011-08-06T12:21:00.003-04:00

Last night came the stunning news that S & P had downgraded the obligations of the United States. I was shocked, because, as I tried to make clear last week, I do not see any evidence that the US is in any danger of meeting its day-to-day obligations, where are much less--about 40% less--than the $14 trillion figure we keep hearing. (For an explanation of that, see last week's post.) I don't know if we're likely to learn much about the internal deliberations of S & P, which, like all the rating agencies, was so dreadfully wrong about just about everything during the last decade, but I think there must be a very big story there somewhere. However, for the moment it seems better advised to wait and see what happens next week before commenting further.

Instead, today, I want to discuss an economist who died a few years ago at the age of almost 100, John Kenneth Galbraith. I knew him slightly, interviewed him a couple of times, and found him to be one of the earliest and most enthusiastic readers of my book, American Tragedy, to which he gave some unsolicited public plugs. I always enjoyed is writing very much, and in the stacks of the library the other day I happened accidentally upon a book of his essays from the 1960s and 1970s, Economics, Peace and Laughter. But the one I read this morning, "Economics as a System of Relief," paid huge dividends. Those of us who spend much of our time in the past have a great intellectual advantage: we are constantly exposed to perspectives that have become unfashionable and vanished from view that allow us to go beyond today's front pages. That is, come to think of it, the whole point of this blog.

The essential point of this essay was at the heart of Galbraith's work, embodied in three of his books: The Affluent Society, The New Industrial State, and Economics and the Public Purpose. The last one is the only one I ever read from start to finish and it was a mind-boggling experience. Essentially Galbraith argued that the classical theory of the market did not describe modern reality--if indeed it ever had. The market, as he explains again in this essay, is supposed to embody the sovereignty of the consumer, whose preferences theoretically determine what is produced. But in fact, he began arguing during the 1950s--the first great age of television advertising and mass consumption--the producer, rather than the consumer, often managed to determine in various ways what the latter would buy. Advertising helped create exactly the wants that were most profitable to satisfy. No one actually needed a new car every two years, but Detroit in those days was doing an excellent job of convincing American families that they did.

The market, then, as Galbraith saw it--especially any market dominated by large firms--was not an automatic regulator of supply and demand, but rather a game in which powerful producers had huge inherent advantages. He also noticed that because they were, inevitably, politically powerful, they could exert a lot of influence on what federal and state governments decided to spend money on. They could, and did, create a prejudice in favor of private consumption as against public goods such as mass transportation or a clean environment. If they made weapons--and it is my impression that the weapons industry was a much larger factor in our economy then than now--they could affect our foreign policy, as they certainly did as late as the 1980s, when the Reagan Administration, for example, finally brought to life the B-1 bomber, which successive Administrations had wisely rejected for more than 20 years.

Now it seems to me to be a big understatement to suggest that Galbraith was on to something. Indeed, he could not see forty years ago how far these trends were going to go. One critical symptom, it seems to me, is that marketing, rather than skill at production, has become the essence of American business strategy. Business focuses not on producing what people really need--which would be quite simple--but on making them want what they want to produce. I can see no reason why the SUV, a product I was never remotely tempted to buy, became the standard family car in the 1990s, and its promotion did enormous harm to the United States in several ways. But Detroit pushed it because it was the highest-profit item they could find, and it worked. That, however, is only the tip of the iceberg.

The energy industry, the food industry, the health care industry, and the financial industry, I have already noted, seem today to be the leading sectors of the American economy. Not only do they all create wants, but at least three of them deal in highly addictive substances. We have all read plenty and experienced a good deal of the way that the pharmaceutical companies have acquired unprecedented influence over the practice of medicine. They specialize in developing drugs of some (though often marginal) utility as palliatives for long-term conditions--because those will contribute the most, in the long run, to their balance sheets. We desperately need new antibiotics today, but I read about a year ago that no drug company wants to develop a product that will simply cure an infection in a week or so. We have an epidemic of emotional disorders now, recently discussed at length in the New York Review of Books, with a battery of drugs to treat them. Some of the hottest drugs of the last twenty years were those that enabled older men (and therefore, women) to have more sex. The food industry also pushes addictive substances like salt and sugar at every opportunity, apparently with enormous success.

The financial industry is a special case altogether. Galbraith had studied bubbles--one of his first books was about the 1929 crash--but he never imagined in the 1970s that the regulatory reforms of his youth would be undone, creating megabanks with the right to borrow from the Federal Reserve, trade stocks and options, leverage at 30 to 1, and devise unregulated financial instruments. That industry certainly created wants, not least the desire to own a home in people who could not afford one, or to take out a mortgage that was obviously going to be unsustainable. A bubble, actually, is probably the inevitable consequence of an unregulated market, particularly a financial one in which the supply of money is more or less endless. It seems that it would be hard to argue that the financial markets of the last two decades designed either the financial instruments people really wanted or the ones that were best for the general good.

Galbraith concluded his essay with some musings about the economic profession. He did not think his contemporaries would ever adopt his ideas about corporate power, because they were too subversive of traditional theory. He had more hopes for younger economists, that is, for my generation. With very rare exceptions--including his own son James!--they have let him down. He noticed that the Boom generation was rebelling against materialism in the 1960s and 1970s, but as we all know, that did not last. And indeed, Boom economists adopted Milton Friedman, not Galbraith, as their intellectual patron saint, and spent most of the last three decades elaborating free-market theories. Perhaps it will take yet more catastrophes to start a serious re-examination of economic principles.

A free market is not a self-regulating mechanism dispensing economic justice. It is a jungle in which the strong live off the weak. It can be made more just only by giving an independent agency--the state--regulatory authority and the will to use it. That is the real lesson of the last century. Sadly, it must be learned again. Galbraith always had a great sense of humor, which helped him enjoy nearly ten decades of life to the fullest. Like so many of our greatest thinkers, he seems to be most useful in allowing us, as Dr. Johnson said, better to enjoy life, and better to endure it. I miss him, but his words live on.

A manufactured crisis?

2011-07-28T10:38:00.009-04:00

The United States, we all know, owes $14.3 trillion, a staggering sum essentially equal to our GDP, one that threatens to mortgage our children's future and bankrupt us unless, to quote Yeats once again, "something drastic is done." Until this very morning I believed that too. But then, on p. A14 of my New York Times, I found the extraordinary chart above breaking down the debt, and a great many things became clear to me for the first time. (That was as legible as I could make it.)

As most of you probably know, I've been working for three years on a book on FDR and US entry into the Second World War, and I've read a great many of his speeches. They have a simple clarity that very few contemporary politicians can equal. In addition, Roosevelt never feels compelled to apologize for anything he is saying or doing, since he is so convinced that it is the logical step to take--something that certainly distinguishes him from Barack Obama. So I'm now going to take a stab at how Roosevelt would discuss the current crisis. It won't be perfect--I'm not actually going to refer back to his speeches--but I hope I can both convey some of his characteristic tone, and, more importantly, do what he would have done and make clear some critical facts.

"My friends.

"For the past few months, the Congress has been locked in struggles over raising the federal debt ceiling. That ceiling is now pegged at $14.3 trillion dollars and the government will not be able to continue operating if it is not raised. The Republican Party claims that we cannot afford it; that we must make massive cuts in federal government programs to stop or slow its growth; and even, in some cases, that we should simply let the government default on its obligations. In any storm at sea, some people are likely to lose their heads. I speak to you tonight to explain that while our economic problems are very real, our debt problems are in fact quite manageable. Here is why.

"The figure of $14.3 trillion seems daunting because it is rather close to our current estimated GDP. That is not unprecedented: in 1945, at the end of the last great crisis in our national life, our accumulated debt was considerably in excess of our GDP. That did not prevent the United States from converting from a wartime to a civilian economy and launching an era of unprecedented prosperity that lasted for several decades. There is in fact, as I shall now explain, no reason why we cannot do the same, if we see things clearly, discount counsels of fear, and take appropriate action.

"Yes, officially, the government owes $14.3 trillion--but in fact, it only needs actively to service about half that sum. Let me explain by breaking down the debt based upon whom it is owed to. $3.6 trillion of the debt is owed to you, the American people, who have wisely entrusted your savings, directly or indirectly, to the government's care. There was no reason not to do so: the 14th amendment to the Constitution, adopted at another moment at which the public debt was at an all-time high, guarantees it for all time. And indeed, as many of you know, the return on Treasury bills has compared very favorably with other assets during the last few years, because of the world's confidence in our economy.

"That, in turn, is why an even larger portion of the debt--$4.5 trillion--is held by foreign nations. They have shown no haste to unload it despite our economic crisis. This debt is the inevitable consequence of our trade deficit: since we import so much more than we export, we can only pay for the imports by borrowing either at home or abroad. But we have had no trouble doing so for decades and there is no reason why we cannot continue doing so in the future, even though there are very good and sound reasons for us to want to stop shifting production overseas and improve our trade balance.

"Simple addition will have already told many of you that our combined domestic and foreign debt, then, totals $8.1 trillion, $3.6 trillion at home and $4.5 trillion abroad. Yet the official figure for the debt is $14.3 trillion. Where, you are undoubtedly asking, can that come from? To whom can we possibly owe the additional $6.2 trillion?

"The answer, my friends, is that we owe it to ourselves--and, if we now take some simple, necessary and equitable fiscal steps, we will not need to worry about it very much.

"To begin with, $1.6 billion of the debt is held by the Federal Reserve Bank--part of their reserves. As you all know, the Federal Reserve is dedicated to the maintenance of a strong U.S. economy and currency. It is never going to use its holdings of U.S. debt to try to bring down the government of the United States.

"The remainder of the debt--$4.6 trillion--is owed to trust funds of the federal government itself. Of that sum, more than half--$2.2 trillion--is in the Social Security Trust fund. We are now entering into some complicated accounting by ways, but they are easy enough to follow, particularly if we begin with a little history of the modern Social Security system.

"In 1972, President Richard Nixon and the Congress raised social security benefits substantially. In the early 1980s it was clear that these benefits would be hard to afford several decades down the road, when the Boom generation retired, and President Reagan and a Democratic Congress led by Speaker Tip O'Neill reached an agreement to raise Social Security taxes. Indeed--and this is the key point--they raised the payroll tax, shared equally between employers and employees--well beyond the level that was needed at that time to pay the Social Security benefits that the government currently owed. Some had expected that the surplus payroll taxes would actually be saved, but that was not what happened: they went into the federal treasury and were spent to help cover the very large deficits that resulted from President Reagan's economic policies. In exchange, special non-negotiable government bonds were deposited in the Social Security Trust fund. Those were claims on the federal government to pay future benefits. For as long as payroll taxes sufficed to cover benefits, however, it was not necessary to make good on those obligations.

"Here is another chart showing debt held by the Federal Reserve (blue), by trust funds (red), and by the domestic and foreign public (green.)

"Even now, payroll tax receipts remain barely adequate to cover Social Security benefits. That situation is indeed about to change as the Boom generation retires. If however we can make appropriate adjustments to the payroll tax, and perhaps slow the annual rate at which benefits increase, we can quite easily afford benefits out of current revenues indefinitely. The easiest adjustment, which I have proposed, is to end the payroll tax exemption on incomes of more than $106,800 a year. Because of that exemption, social security taxes take up a far smaller percentage of the income of wealthier Americans than they do of those in among the poor and middle classes. There is no reason for this to continue. If we make these changes social security benefits will continue without the government having to pay off any of the bonds held by the Social Security trust fund.

"I have been talking about the problem of the Social Security trust fund, which now accounts for $2.7 trillion of the federal debt because payroll taxes have exceeded expenditures for the last 28 years. The situation in other trust funds is similar: they represent the excess of revenues over expenditures dedicated to certain federal programs, including highways. So long as we adjust revenues for those funds so as to cover current expenditures as well, we will not have to spend current income to require the debt that they hold either.

"And thus, the situation is very different from that of 1945, when our total public debt was not only larger relative to our Gross Domestic Product than it is today, but when it was composed almost entirely of real obligations to private persons or institutions, not trust funds. I would suggest that in real terms, we are twice as well off as we were then. We can easily continue refunding and servicing our current debt and even allow it to increase during the economic crisis. Indeed, in order to get out of the economic crisis, that is what we have to do.

"Our biggest problem today is not debt: it is jobs. You know it better than I. We need, once again, to put people to work. We also have plenty of work for them to do: the repairing and improvement of our nation's infrastructure. Many of our roads and bridges are in a deplorable state. High-speed rail, which is playing an important role in the economies of both Europe and Asia, has not yet even got a foothold in the United States. We have barely begun building a new generation of automobiles. Our power grid needs work. None of this should be in the least discouraging: it should be inspiring. It gives us, and especially the young people of America, a task worthy of ourselves, a task equal to the great work accomplished by earlier generations.

"Sadly, the Republican Party has for thirty years been engaged in an intermittent crusade to reduce, if not destroy, effective government in the United States. For many years their leaders appeared to recognize that much of their rhetoric was excessive and could not be reconciled with sound policy. Both Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush bit the bullet when necessary and raised taxes--not always fairly it must be said--in order to reduce huge deficits. Now, however, sadly, the party of Lincoln, Eisenhower and Reagan has lost its bearings. It would return us to the days of the late 19th century, when millions lived in poverty, when health care and public services were shamefully inadequate, and when corporations and monopolies ruled our society. The American people are too smart to follow them down that road.

"The debt crisis which the Republican Party, particularly in the House of Representatives, is trying to use to undo the work of the last century is largely illusory. We have more than adequate resources to pay the debt. When we allow the Bush II tax cuts to expire and all Americans start paying a bit more for the government much of the deficit will disappear. More will disappear with the end of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Meanwhile, our plan to rebuild America will make a dent in the unconscionable unemployment that is the real threat to our well-being.

"We have nothing to fear but fear itself."

Conservatives across the Atlantic

2011-07-24T09:02:00.002-04:00

During my European trip I passed through Heathrow airport twice. At one of the departure gates there was rack of free magazines, and the only one from the United States was The American Spectator, a venerable conservative rag of intellectual pretensions, featuring articles by editor R. Emmett Tryrrell, Jr., Ron Chernow, and Grover Norquist, among many othrs. Tyrrell proclaimed "Liberalism's Death Croak," George Gilder explained that Israeli settlments were the best thing that had ever happened to the Palestinian economy, and Joseph Shattan gave a glowing review to a book of essays by Irving Kristol, founder of neoconservatism. But the articles that really caught my eye were about Europe: a "Letter from Paris" by Joseph Harriss, and "The Rebirth of Nations" by Roger Scruton. As regular readers know, I generally reject comparisons between Fascists and American conservatives because I believe their goals are so different. This one, however, hit me in the face. Harriss' article, "The Power of Le Pen", was a paean of praise for the French National Front. Scruton went further, lauding all the neo-Fascist European parties trying to ride into power on a wave of nationalism and anti-Muslim incitement.

The focus of the article was the new leader of the National Front, Marie LePen, whom Harriss had to admit was pro-choice and twice divorced, but whom he nonetheless hopefully predicted might actually finish second in the first round of the forthcoming presidential election and first in the second round. Scruton begins with a warm paragraph about the Finnish True Finn party and proceeds to praise nationalist movements in the Netherlands, Flemisth Belgium, and Italy. (He was however careful not to praise Hungary's rightwingers, who have actually taken over the government and who are overtly anti-semitic.)

The reason for these rather troubling positions became apparent within the articles: these parties, first, are obsessed with the Islamic danger in Europe, but more importantly, they generally oppose the European Union, which has become a secular socialist bugaboo for the American right. One might have though, of course, that the twentieth century examples of Italian and German exceptionalism might have made Americans shy away from the idea of American exceptionalism, but the reverse, of course, is true. The European Union represents the most complete triumph of Enlightenment ideals in the world today, including the ideal of the perfectability of society with the help of a strong government, and thus to American conservatives it must be a bad thing. Today's American conservatives also seem to be well aware that the leaders of the European right, like Nicolas Sarkoczy, David Cameron, and Angela Merkel, are all considerably to the left of Nelson Rockefeller in their policies, and thus, if they want to find European allies, they must look further right.

The Anmerican Spectator was of course only one data point, but it was clear that rejection of the European union and praise for European nationalist movements are now part of its line. How widespread these views are among rightwing publications I do not know, but I found them very disturbing.

I have been most gratified to note that this blog now has a very noticeable readership in France--266 hits in the last week or so, for instance--and I would be very curious to hear comments from any French readers.

Meanwhile, see another post from yesterday, below.

On the brink

2011-07-23T08:43:00.003-04:00

The scenario forecast by a Congressional staffer whose interview I linked near the end of last week's post seems to be coming true. The House Republicans have become more and more detached from reality and have refused to let their Speaker agree to any tax increases as part of a compromise. Nor does it seem at all likely that they will accept the McConnell plan to allow President Obama to raise the debt ceiling for the next 18 months while they scream helplessly from the sidelines. Unable to get what they want--massive spending cuts without any tax increases--they seem likely to force the United States into default. In an interesting generational milestone, Silent George Will in yesterday's Washington Post praised the Tea Party to the skies as a transformative, revolutionary force in American politics, while begging their handmaidens in Congress to compromise now, hold off until the next election, and complete their miraculous transformation of the country under a Republican President. Will's conversion to lunacy is certainly remarkable, but he was probably trying to head of catastrophe in the only way he could think of. It may not be necessary to actually reach default, simply because the news of the weekend may be enough to send world markets into a gigantic tailspin on Monday. If not, the tailspin will be delayed until we pass the August 2 deadline. I tend to assume that the tailspin will not produce a repeat of 2008, since the balance sheets of financial institutions are now accepted as sound, and that it will be corrected when some kind of a deal is struck within another week. But I cannot be sure of that. Meanwhile, it is clear that the right wing has unleashed a new propaganda offensive in cyberspace. Various indicators show that the circulation of the fraudulent email attributed to me comparing Obama to Hitler is spiking again. It will surely spike yet again a year from this fall.

The Obama Administration has essentially been the third Clinton Administration, and it seems to be counting on a replay of 1995-6, when the brief government shutdown saved the Clinton presidency and led to his re-election. President Obama has indeed positioned himself as the rational, mature, neutral elder statesman in the crisis, and he has won some points in public opinion surveys as a result. Yet there remains one overwhelming difference between 1996 and 2011. In 1996 we were in the early stages of an economic expansion that lasted the whole of the Clinton presidency. In 2011 we are sunk in something very like a depression and there is no sign of a real recovery. And I am increasingly fearful that that will do the Obama Administration in.
This table, from today's New York Times, tells a terrifying story. (For some reason it will not upload.)

It has been a fantasy both of liberals and political consultants like James Carville that Obama won in 2008 because of a profound demographic shift that would keep the Democrats in power for a long time. The new Millennial generation is very liberal socially and, they thought, politically. It gave Obama his biggest majority. But it turns out that their loyalty--surprise, surprise--depended on his response to the economic crisis, and that response has failed to reverse the economic decline. He has offered just as little way out of our crisis as Herbert Hoover, and it seems increasingly likely that he may pay the ultimate price for that no matter who the Republican candidate is.

Even in the best case--a deal, without a market crash--the country will continue going backwards. We need more spending and more taxes; we will get less of each. President Obama does in fact have one more card he could play. After the ceiling is raised--after, that is, it is raised beyond the next election--he could announce that he will not sign any bill extending the Bush tax cuts further. We need more revenue, he could say--perfectly truthfully--and this is evidently the only way to get it. That would be good policy and conceivably, good politics. Everything we have seen about him so far, however, suggests that that will not happen.

Welcome to the new Gilded Age. I'll have another post tomorrow.

Emergency powers

2011-07-16T09:24:00.004-04:00

From time to time, I have had conversations over the last few years with a friend of mine, a historian of Weimar Germany, comparing our situation to theirs. We haven't talked for a couple of months, but a new and unmistakable parallel has emerged. It suggests that our domestic crisis is far from over, and it does not bode well for the short-term future of American democracy.

The designers of the Weimar Republic were sincere democrats who took various elements of their constitution from existing Republics. They decided on proportional representation for the Reichstag, the parliament, which probably gave an advantage to extreme parties whose support was scattered around the country. They also created a strong President elected by the popular vote, and even gave him emergency powers to carry on the essential functions of government should the legislature fail to agree. In so doing they followed a precedent from German history: Otto von Bismarck, as Prime Minister of Prussia, had successfully exercised such powers from 1861 until 1867, governing with the existing budget when Parliament refused to pass a new one. There is of course no such provision for emergency powers in either the unwritten British or the American Constitutions. The federal government can neither spend nor borrow money without an explicit authorization from the Congress.

This is as good a place as any for me to introduce a new element into the budget discussion: as far as I can tell, the United States is not in the least threatened with default if Congress does not act by August 2. The US Government is currently authorized to carry a debt of a certain amount--checking I find it is apparently $14.294 trillion--and I assume that that authorization is indefinite. Thus, even after August 2, the government would be able to borrow money every time an existing obligation came due, since that would not increase the overall debt. But it would not be able to borrow more money to make additional expenditures. Given the size of the government deficit, that is, the amount of current government expenditures not covered by revenues, that would indeed be catastrophic for government and the American people, but it would not be a default. If the Republicans really meant what they are saying they might in fact argue that the government's job is to start balancing its revenues and expenditures on August 3, but of course they haven't.

But back to the topic. The Weimar Constitution required a strong, sincerely republican president to function effectively, and German voters initially elected just such a man, Friedrich Ebert, a social democrat. Tragically, however, he died in 1925 at the age of 54, and in a close election German voters replaced him with the right wing candidate, Field Marshall Paul von Hindenburg, who did not believe in the Republic at all (and in fact asked the deposed Emperor William II for permission to run for this illegitimate office.) But as late as 1928, the Weimar government was firmly in the hands of a center-left coalition, led by another Social Democrat, Hermann Muller. That government fell in 1930 and the new Chancellor, Heinrich Bruening, called for new elections. They catastrophically increased the power of the Nazis and the Communists and made it impossible for any government to command a Reichstag majority for the rest of the Weimar Republic's short life. For the next two years, all budgets were passed under Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution, providing for emergency presidential decrees. Bruening for two years cut the budget in the midst of a depression, making it worse, increasing the Nazi vote, and paving the way for the final catastrophe.

The Nazis and Communists refused to take responsibility for governing their nation. The Republicans have been doing the same, insisting on absolutely impossible conditions before increasing the debt limit and allowing the government to function, because their House majority refuses to vote for anything that violates their principles of budget-cutting and no new taxes. Their policies, particularly the Paul Ryan budget, would return us to something like the Gilded Age once and for all. Some of them evidently would be glad to stop government borrowing right now, and they may indeed prevail over the next two weeks, although I think that is unlikely. But Mitch McConnell--who like Joe Biden belongs, barely, to the Silent Generation (b. 1942)--has lost his nerve, and I think John Boehner has as well, although he is still putting up a brave front. McConnell has come forward with a proposal designed in effect to turn the United States into something similar to the Weimar Republic in 1931-2, that is, to give the President emergency powers to deprive Congress, which refuses to do its job, of one of its most essential functions.

McConnell apparently is willing to give the President the authority to raise the debt ceiling himself, subject only to approval of one-third of each house. That will allow the government to continue to function while leaving every single Republican in Congress free to vote against what is happening. It is surely unconstitutional--I do not believe the Congress is free to abdicate its powers, although it has done so on several occasions recently already. It illustrates the inability of the majority that Fox News and Clear Channel have brought into being to face reality and be honest with themselves about the necessary role of the federal government and the need to pay for it. It also illustrates the incredible power of Grover Norquist, an unelected official who has never held any government office who can single-handedly prevent tax increases which we desperately need. The McConnell compromise no looks like the most likely solution to the crisis. President Obama yesterday signally failed to insist on a broader deal. It will allow our government to function, but it will also confirm that our democracy, like Weimar after 1930, isn't functioning at all. One reason the United States is in such trouble today is that its Boomer and Xer politicians have no respect for established traditions or laws. They care only about pleasing their backers and their constituents. It may turn out that some genuine reverence for our Constitution--something that history departments and law schools have also more or less stopped teaching--is necessary to make it work.

What happened in Weimar? In 1932 Hindenburg was barely re-elected running against Hitler. (He had now become the candidate of the Left, since he seemed to be the only man who could defeat the Nazi leader.) But as the economic crisis got worse and worse because of budget austerity, he was eventually persuaded to appoint Hitler Chancellor as head of a center-right coalition in January 1933. Hitler immediately claimed various emergency powers of his own and within a few months had convinced the Reichstag to vote itself out of existence.

I have argued before, and still believe, that today's Republicans have essentially noting in common with the Nazis from a policy point of view, even though many of their rhetorical tactics are very similar. The Nazis wanted big government and a strong state; the Republicans are moving as quickly as they can to destroy our state and federal governments. But the Republicans, like the Nazis, have scored a big enough electoral triumph thanks to the economic crisis to make the country ungovernable by traditional means. In addition--and this may turn out to be the critical point--they have moved the political debate catastrophically to the right. In the midst of the second-worst economic crisis in our history we are not arguing about whether to cut the budget, but about how much to cut it. Both the federal government and virtually every state government in America are taking steps that will make the economic situation worse, and President Obama will pay for that at the polls next year. The only question is--how much?

Politically Obama has been rather clever in trying to seize the center over the last few months, and he has won centrist pundits like David Brooks over to his side. If he could secure his grand bargain to include some (although not nearly enough) tax increases and entitlement cuts, he could actually bring the current crisis to an end, and that obviously is what he would like to do. The Republicans, however, are determined not to let him. They will neither give up their policies which will make the economy worse, nor give up their right to blame the President for everything. (This very interesting interview with a Congressional budget staffer strongly suggests that there will be no deal before August 2 for the reasons that I just cited. It's a rare glimpse into the inside of the Republican Party right now and I recommend it very highly.) Whether that works depends on what happens to the economy and I am afraid that it may actually get worse. If it does, we may indeed find ourselves in January 2013 with President Romney or Bachmann or Perry in the White House and Republican majorities in both houses. That will mean the dismantling of the entire modern government of the United States, further economic catastrophe, and a very uncertain political future.

The Regeneracy may not be televised (II)

2011-07-09T08:16:00.003-04:00

It was a year ago, on July 5, 2010, that I suggested that this crisis might well have started on September 11, 2001, that it might be nearing its end, and that it would not involve any regeneracy comparable to what the United States experienced during the Depression and the Second World War. A great deal has happened since then, including the Republican Congressional victory, the new war in Libya, the interruption of economic recovery, and the threatened debt crisis. In my opinion, as I plan to show today, most of what has happened suggested that I was right--but there are also possibilities looming on the horizon pointing in a different, and, sadly, even less inspiring direction.

The view I enunciated then, it is now clear, is most definitely shared by the President of the United States--but while I regretted the end of the crisis and the lack of any real regeneracy, he seems to be embracing it. Barack Obama is of course a Gen Xer, a Nomad in Strauss-Howe terminology, not a Boomer, or a Prophet like Lincoln (Transcendental) or FDR (Missionary.) And although he was born in the first year of JFK's presidency, he evidently dreams of emulating his fellow Nomad, Dwight D. Eisenhower. Just as Eisenhower accepted (sometimes reluctantly) the reforms of the New Deal and even the very high tax rates it bequeathed to the nation, Obama has not challenged the economic deregulation that has been going on for thirty years and reached a climax under George W. Bush. Like Eisenhower, he has embraced the (somewhat less sweeping) new foreign policy commitments that his predecessor made. (It is one thing, however, to embrace NATO, as Eisenhower did, and a completely different thing to embrace an indefinite American presence in the heart of the Muslim world.) The centerpiece phrase of Obama's State of the Union address--the "Sputnik moment"--was a clear reference to the late 1950s. The Obama Administration is playing roughly the same role in the gay rights revolution that the Eisenhower Administration played in the civil rights revolution. Nowhere, however, is Obama's affinity with Ike more obvious than in the debt reduction negotiations now taking place.

Both Eisenhower and Obama began their terms with majorities in Congress and lost them in their first mid-term election. (Obama, unlike Ike, still has a Senate majority, but given the evolution of Senate customs it is not big enough to accomplish anything.) And both have reacted by accommodating the opposition leadership to an extraordinary extent. Obama is more than happy to cut tens of billions of dollars in federal discretionary spending, putting more people out of work, and is even willing to discuss reductions in Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security benefits. He wants to use the threat of a debt crisis to forge a grand compromise, a new consensus, which will firmly establish him as a strong leader and lay the partisanship of the last forty years to rest. And just as Eisenhower evidently realized that the New Deal was here to stay, Obama does not seem to care that that grand compromise would continue to promote income inequality and leave the United States with numbers of permanently unemployed comparable to the latter stages of the Great Depression.

Can he do it? There are two threats, one political and one economic.

Republican columnist David Brooks obviously wants Obama to bring this off, and last week he criticized Congressional Republicans for not meeting the President half way. But the Republican Party has just won a smashing Congressional victory by portraying Barack Obama as a political Antichrist for two years. Taking their cue from Rush Limbaugh, they have blamed everything on him and his supposed liberal allies. (Liberals, meanwhile, are finding out, as conservative Republicans did under Ike, that Obama is not much of an ally at all. I received an email from one of my Senators this week complaining, in effect, that the President was considering Social Security and Medicare cuts.) Although John Boehner seems tempted by the possibility of emulating 1950s House Speaker Sam Rayburn, Mitch McConnell shows no sign of wanting to be the new LBJ. (Just those comparisons show how far we have sunk.) The last thing the Republicans want is to announce that they have solved the country's problems with the help of Barack Obama. Boehner's reaction to yesterday's wretched jobs news suggests that the bad economy makes a deal less likely, because he and his troops think they have Obama on the run.

I do not think, however, that the Republicans will actually dare to plunge the country into default for more than a few days. Thus we will see a series of stopgap compromises, including a catastrophic agreement to continue the cut in the social security payroll tax that Larry Summers evidently talked Obama into before he left--really one of the stupidest moves by a Democratic President in my lifetime, since it is hastening a genuine crisis in social security payments. There will be no great compromise unless Obama is re-elected, holds the Senate and makes some gains in the House. (He is not going to win a majority back there.) And it is far from clear, given the state of the economy, that that will happen.

In either case the United States's decline is going to continue. We have not got the political will or the intellectual capital to attack our real problems, including long-term job losses, the power of the energy, food, and drug industries, and the cost of health care. Some left-wingers are indeed hoping that things will get so much worse that a stronger left-wing response will be necessary. I do not share those hopes.

To begin with, there simply isn't any strong organized left ready to assume leadership. We have not elected a truly liberal President on domestic issues since Lyndon Johnson. The Democratic Party may have worse relations with Wall Street and the energy industry than the Republicans but it is not offering a real policy alternative. The right is at least as likely to benefit from a further economic deterioration as the Left.

Make no mistake: the stronger the Republicans get, the worse the economy will get. I learned in my teens and twenties that today's Republican policies made the depression worse both in Germany and the United States. In Germany they brought Hitler into power; here they brought in FDR. We have no Hitler, but we also have no FDR. Our economy is going to stagnate for a very long time. Our interest is to have it do so at the highest level of employment possible, and I think the grand compromise probably would be, on balance, a good thing.

A great author's perspective

2011-07-01T11:20:00.002-04:00

For the first selection in my vacation reading I picked a new John LeCarre novel, Our Kind of Traitor, which I found at Heathrow Airport. It was, to say the least, troubling, and it got me thinking, as his books so often do, about the tendency of recent history. (The book has just appeared in paperback in the US as well, but I do not remember seeing a single review of it, and Amazon doesn't include any from newspapers.)

John LeCarre will be 80 years old later this year. He made his name at the height of the Cold War with the extraordinary and relatively short and gripping thriller, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, whose denouement so thoroughly shocked me, at the age of 17, that it took me about fifteen minutes to realize what the book had actually said. The hero of the book, British spy Alec Leamas, was so shattered by the personal betrayal he experienced for the greater good that he effectively gave up his own life, as well as the Cold War, at the end. In the flush of youth I concluded that although Leamas was worn out, LeCarre was telling us that the broader struggle had to go on. It was about twenty years later that I realized the real point of the book, as well as of the whole Smiley series: that the intelligence battle between "the Circus" and the KGB, and perhaps the broader Cold War as well, was of very little interest to anyone other than its practitioners; that the Cold War was, in a sense, a fraud. LeCarre's books remained hymns of praise to rare men of integrity such as George Smiley. When Le Carre published A Perfect Spy in the 1980s and explained that the protagonist's criminally irresponsible father was a portrait of his own, I realized that Smiley--of the Second World War generation himself--was probably the father LeCarre would have liked to have had.

The end of the Cold War started a professional crisis for LeCarre. He had already detoured into the Middle East, angering Zionists like Norman Podhoretz, in The Little Drummer Girl,, but now he had either to write about the past or expand his horizons. He has quite successfully done the latter and he has not shrunk from what he has found. In the last ten years he has emerged as a violent critic of recent American foreign policy and of the "war on terror," and Our Kind of Traitor is a devastating commentary on contemporary Britain, which seems in his telling to be little if at all better off in its political culture than the United States.

I shall not detail the plot of the new book, which turns on the attempted defection of the leading money-launderer of the Russian mafia. His character is colorful but not inspiring. The protagonists are a young pair of British idealists, the woman a barrister, the man a successful Oxbridge academic who has (appropriately enough) become disillusioned with his profession. (LeCarre does not go into that very deeply, but take it from me,there's plenty to be disillusioned about.) The Smiley figure is a British Boomer named Hector, another man with a conscience who recently took a kind of leave from "the Service" to fight off a corporate raider's takeover of a family firm that would have done away with several hundred well-paying jobs. What Hector discovers, however, is that the Russian Mafia has managed to buy extraordinary influence in British financial, economic and political circles, and that, in the end, its allies are quite strong enough to prevent anything from happening that might jeopardize this valuable alliance. The book is obviously carefully researched, and indeed I suspect that a savvy British observer might be able to put real names on some of its characters.

The power of Russian oligarchs and Russian money--as well as Mideast oil money--was brought home to me in striking fashion early this year, when Dubai and Russia were awarded the 2018 and 2022 World Cups. Brazil will deservedly host in 2014: they are both the greatest soccer nation on earth, and a rising third world economic and political power. Dubai has no soccer tradition worth mentioning and will be a disastrous place to play--they won, presumably, with promises of money--money for FIFA, the international soccer federation, whether or not they actually bought votes. Russia has some soccer tradition--although even the Soviet Union's national team never, as I recall, managed to reach the semi-finals of a World Cup--but its political and economic life are a disgrace, and its prestige simply did not deserve this boost. In our world, however, money talks.

And that, sadly, is the real legacy of the end of the Cold War. It was not "the end of history" in a utopian sense, but rather, as it turns out, the end (for the time being) of history as a struggle among competing world principles. In the first half of the twentieth century, Fascism, Nazism, and Communism had helped move the United States, Western Europe and Japan to create genuinely more just societies, organized in many ways around the common good. Now that no longer strikes us as necessary. Britain and the United States are both on the verge of dismantling their welfare states. The whole western political world has failed to respond effectively to the excessive financial power of the banks, even in the wake of the world crisis. All over the world, practically, inequality is reaching heights not dreamed of for about a century. Only further and greater catastrophes seem likely to bring this process to an end.

I have never met LeCarre, much as I would like to, but his almost complete inability to find anything hopeful on the contemporary scene suggests to me that he would understand that last paragraph very well. Hector, the older hero of this book, is fighting a losing battle for civic virtue. Perry and Gail, his young heroes, are looking for a worthy cause. (They may return in later novels.) But LeCarre, like his contemporary George Soros, has been disappointed by the events of his old age. I can't blame him. Perhaps he, like me, now has more respect for our parents' and grandparents' generations, who did indeed leave behind something of a heroic tradition for his generation, and mine, to squander.

p.s. A regular reader has just provided this link to a long interview with LeCarre discussing aspects of the state of the world.

The disappearance of public life

2011-06-25T05:03:00.001-04:00

By the time this post appears I plan to be on vacation, but I can predict fairly confidently that Anthony Weiner will no longer be a member of Congress. The scandal surrounding his texts and photos marks a new low in American politics--a new stage in a long process that began, as I recall, in 1987, when Gary Hart was running for President--and which can only get worse as time goes on. And, not for the first time, I have not been able to find a single other commentator who seems willing to introduce some sanity into this particular discussion.

I was 40 in 1987 and I had already observed, and read about, a great deal about politics and sex. The behavior of Thomas Jefferson, Franklin Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy, and Warren Harding, to name only four, was already well known. More importantly, I had seen enough of political life first hand to know that politicians are not average people. They do a very difficult job--ministering to all our needs cheerfully, 24 hours a day and 7 days a week--and it inevitably puts a big strain on their family life. Until the 1970s a divorce was often (although not always) enough to ruin a political career. And politicians generally have large egos and radiate a certain charisma which, as Henry Kissinger mentioned to Mao Zedong, can be a strong aphrodisiac. Thus sexual escapades among politicians, I realized, could frequently be expected to occur--and history taught us that they said nothing, literally, about the politician's ability to govern.

So it was that I was genuinely shocked in 1987 when the press decided to take Gary Hart up on his challenge to "follow him around" and publish the story of him and Donna Rice, sinking his campaign. It was not that I thought Hart would be a great President or even that I planned to vote for him; I simply knew that our politics could not function if this kind of thing became a staple of front page news. And the last 24 years, I think, have vindicated my judgment in spades.

A good, if not great, President of the United States, Bill Clinton, had to spend many hundreds of hours and probably millions of dollars defending against various allegations of sexual misconduct. The law enforcement mechanism of the federal government was deployed to discover whether he had had sex with Monica Lewinsky. When Ken Starr released the "Lewinsky report" I was truly shocked to discover the not so awful truth: they had apparently not had sex, as it is normally defined. But that hardly mattered. A blow job became the basis, in effect, for the impeachment of a President. (I know technically he was impeached for lying when he said they didn't have sex, but he never should have been asked, or agreed to answer, a question like that, in the first place.) It turned out, curiously enough, that a majority of my fellow citizens evidently shared my view with regard to Clinton, and he survived, much to the frustration of the press corps that had lavished so many inches upon Whitewater and Lewinsky. But that was 12 years ago--now we have gone much further.

No one seems to care that Anthony Weiner, unlike Mark Sanford, Mark Foley, John Edwards, David Vitter, and all the rest, never actually did anything except flirt lasciviously on the internet, an exciting and usually harmless pursuit in which many millions of Americans have engaged. As a matter of fact, I think everyone should stop and think about this for a moment: such flirting, or "sexting," is almost a normal rite of passage for today's youth, and do we really want to ban a whole generation from public office on this basis? Has it occurred to anyone exactly how easy it would be for a hostile blogger like Andrew Breitbart to entrap a politician, whether liberal or conservative, into such an exchange? In one respect Weiner was noticeably indiscreet: he sent pictures. Clearly one rule we should all adopt forthwith is this: don't allow anyone, including a lover or spouse, to take fully or partially nude photos of you in the digital age. But I am not sure that the pictures were the critical variable this time, and I am quite sure that they will not be next time. We have reached an Orwellian Age: sexual thoughtcrime is enough to drive you out of office, if you have entered your thoughts as text.

Today [June 9 -- ed,], for the first time in three consecutive days, the New York Times decided that the Weiner story did not belong on p. 1, column 8. Matt Drudge of course continues to headline it. The Democratic leadership has totally abandoned Weiner, just as Agriculture Secretary Vilsack abandoned the black woman in the Agriculture Department whose speech Breitbart excerpted falsely. Weiner will not be the last politician to be destroyed in this way. The country may not miss him, but its political life has suffered enormously.

A kindred spirit

2011-06-16T08:21:00.004-04:00

Like my first intellectual hero Orwell, I've been a relatively independent thinker all my life--going back, actually, to my childhood--and I have some scars to prove it. Yet while it can be very comfortable to be in the minority, it is extremely difficult, I think, to stick to one's opinions with no support whatever. Orwell obviously thought so too. That's the point of the climax of 1984, when O'Brien terrorizes Winston not only into giving up his political apostasy, but even to betraying Julia. In the end Winston winds up loving Big Brother because he has no one else to love. No one has ever explored the Freudian implications of all this effectively, to my knowledge, but that's a story for another time.

Now for some years now, and with increasing frequency, I've been talking about the decline of rationality in our civilization. I still haven't been able to bring myself to read the book I bought years ago detailing a similar process in the early Christian era, perhaps because I'm too afraid of what I might find, but I think about this almost every day. To paraphrase Orwell once again, the freedom to say that two plus two equals four is once again under threat. So it was very comforting to pick up the current New York Review of Books a few days ago and read a most interesting article by George Soros, "My Philanthropy," beating the same drum.

I have never met Soros, although I believe my father, a former Ambassador to Hungary, knew this most prominent Hungarian-American fairly well. He does not seem to be aware of generational theory but his life bears a most interesting relation to it. Born apparently in 1930, he belongs to a small minority who actually can live through at least parts of not one, but two great world crises. As he explains, he was 13 when the Nazis brought their form of irrational terror to Hungary, and only his father's ingenuity saved him and most of his family. He made it to the United States during the High, in the 1950s and 1960s, when the prestige of science and rationality was at its height. (These of course were the years of my own childhood.) But now, for the last forty years of his life, although his own insights into the world economy have made him one of the wealthiest men in the world, he has watched the steady erosion of rationality in public life, especially in his adopted nation the United States. And, not surprisingly, he is profoundly disturbed by it.

Soros explains that he has contributed $8 billion to a series of Open Society foundations around the world, designed to develop and publicize information useful to the public and hold governments accountable. Western societies have a good many such organizations already; many others do not. But Soros is also concerned about worldwide governance, especially in the financial realm. Like me, he worries about the problem of imposing order upon chaos. As he says:

"As I see it, mankind’s ability to understand and control the forces of nature greatly exceeds our ability to govern ourselves. Our economy has become global; our governance has not. Our future and, in some respects, our survival depend on our ability to develop the appropriate global governance. This applies to a variety of fields: global warming and nuclear proliferation are the most obvious, but the threats of terrorism and infectious diseases also qualify; so do global financial markets. In the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008, it is not enough to stabilize and restart the financial markets; we must reinvent a global financial system that has broken down. Having reached this insight, I cannot afford not to address these issues."

Soros was among the minority of financiers who were not surprised by the financial crisis, and in rather chilling language he describes what he tried to do about it.

"I passionately disagreed with Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson’s plan to bail out the banks by using a public fund called the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) to help banks take toxic assets off their balance sheets. I argued that it would be much better to put the money where the hole was and replenish the equity of the banks themselves. I worked closely with the Democratic leadership in Congress to modify the TARP act so as to allow the money to be used for the purchase of equity interests. I had many other ideas that I hoped would be put into practice when Obama became president, including a fundamental reform of the mortgage system, but that did not happen. I published a series of articles in the Financial Times but got little response from the Obama administration. I had many more discussions with Larry Summers before he became the President’s economic adviser than I did afterward. My greatest disappointment was that I was unable to establish any kind of personal contact with President Obama himself."

Exactly why Barack Obama put so much more faith in Larry Summers than in older men like Soros and Paul Volcker is a question I would very much like to understand. But I digress.

The three most critical paragraphs of the essay follow and I reproduce them in full (obviously for non-commercial use only.)

"The United States has been a democracy and open society since its founding. The idea that it will cease to be one seems preposterous; yet it is a very likely prospect. After September 11, the Bush administration exploited the very real fear generated by the terrorist attack, and by declaring 'war on terror' was able to unite the nation behind the commander-in-chief, lead it to invade Iraq on false pretenses, and violate established standards of human rights in pursuing and interrogating terrorists.

"The war on terror forced me to reconsider the concept of open society. My experiences in the former Soviet Union had already taught me that the collapse of a closed society does not automatically lead to an open one; the collapse may be seemingly bottomless, to be followed by the emergence of a new regime that has a greater resemblance to the regime that collapsed than to an open society. Now I had to probe deeper into the concept of open society that I had adopted from Karl Popper in my student days, and I discovered a flaw in it.

"Popper had argued that free speech and critical thinking would lead to better laws and a better understanding of reality than any dogma. I came to realize that there was an unspoken assumption embedded in his argument, namely that the purpose of democratic discourse is to gain a better understanding of reality. It dawned on me that my own concept of reflexivity brings Popper’s hidden assumption into question. If thinking has a manipulative function as well as a cognitive one, then it may not be necessary to gain a better understanding of reality in order to obtain the laws one wants. There is a shortcut: “spinning” arguments and manipulating public opinion to get the desired results. Today our political discourse is primarily concerned with getting elected and staying in power. Popper’s hidden assumption that freedom of speech and thought will produce a better understanding of reality is valid only for the study of natural phenomena. Extending it to human affairs is part of what I have called the 'Enlightenment fallacy.'

"As it happened, the political operatives of the Bush administration became aware of the Enlightenment fallacy long before I did. People like me, misguided by that fallacy, believed that the propaganda methods described in George Orwell’s 1984 could prevail only in a dictatorship. They knew better. Frank Luntz, the well-known right-wing political consultant, proudly acknowledged that he used 1984 as his textbook in designing his catchy slogans. And Karl Rove reportedly claimed that he didn’t have to study reality; he could create it. The adoption of Orwellian techniques gave the Republican propaganda machine a competitive advantage in electoral politics. The other side has tried to catch up with them but has been hampered by a lingering attachment to the pursuit of truth."

Even though I have mixed feelings about this passage, I have no doubt that it states a very profound truth about our times. (It has never been confirmed, by the way, that Karl Rove was the Bush Administration official who talked about creating his own reality, but it was widely assumed from the beginning.) And I am increasingly convinced that the change is related to the eclipse of print media in favor first of television and then of other electronic media over the last half century. Images replaced sentences as marketing tools, first in the economy and then in politics. It is easier to excite the senses directly than to reach them through the rational part of the brain. Political consultants have understood this for a long time. The result is that, as Soros says, we now face a profound economic crisis without the capacity to carry on an intelligent public discussion about it.

What sticks in my craw in his passage is the phrase "Enlightenment fallacy." I don't know enough about the intellectual history of the 18th century to state this with any confidence, but I'm not sure that the great Enlightenment thinkers believed that reason was certain to become the predominant force in human affairs. They (like our own Founding Fathers, who came from that tradition) believed that reason could, and should, play a greater part in human affairs, but I think most of them knew that this would never be easy. It's ironic, but also very understandable, that the 1950s and early 1960s, when rationalism was at its peak, gave way so suddenly and dramatically to the emotional explosion of the Awakening, which ultimately led the humanities departments in academia to abandon the idea of the Enlightenment. I was appalled more than ten years ago when Cornel West and Henry Lewis Gates had the Boomer effrontery to criticize their Missionary counterpart, W. E. B. Dubois, for being "too seduced by the Englightenment project." On the contrary, Dubois understood that reason, however threatened by outbreaks of emotion, would always remain the only possible basis for a just society. Soros actually comes around to a position similar to this himself: "Karl Popper took it for granted that the primary purpose of political discourse is the pursuit of truth. That is not the case now; therefore we must make it so. What was a hidden assumption in Popper’s argument must be turned into an explicit requirement for open society to prevail." I actually doubt that that statement would have come as a surprise to the Englightenment figures themselves--certainly not to Rouusseau, Jefferson or Madison.

Soros has drawn the particular ire of the right because his life is a repudiation of their principles. Rich people like him are supposed to feel entitled to their wealth and not to be concerned with the broader public good. I suspect that is why he has been subjected to such scurrilous propaganda campaigns, as he mentions. Turning to the economic crisis, he argues that President Obama's non-confrontational approach and excessive optimism has given the Republicans the initiative, and that they have used Orwellian newspeak to convince the public that government caused the problem and that dismantling government is the solution.

"a What is surprising is the extent of their success. The explanation lies partly in the power of Orwell’s Newspeak and partly in the aversion of the public to facing harsh realities.

"On the one hand, Newspeak is extremely difficult to contradict because it incorporates and thereby preempts its own contradiction, as when Fox News calls itself fair and balanced. Another trick is to accuse your opponent of the behavior of which you are guilty, like Fox News accusing me of being the puppet master of a media empire. Skillful practitioners always attack the strongest point of their opponent, like the Swiftboat ads attacking John Kerry’s Vietnam War record. Facts do not provide any protection, and rejecting an accusation may serve to have it repeated; but ignoring it can be very costly, as John Kerry discovered in the 2004 election.

"On the other hand, the pursuit of truth has lost much of its appeal. When reality is unpleasant, illusions offer an attractive escape route. In difficult times unscrupulous manipulators enjoy a competitive advantage over those who seek to confront reality. Nazi propaganda prevailed in the Weimar Republic because the public had been humiliated by military defeat and disoriented by runaway inflation. In its own quite different way, the American public has been subjected to somewhat comparable experiences, first by the terrorist attacks of September 11, and then by the financial crisis, which not only caused material hardship but also seemed to seal the decline of the United States as the dominant power in the world. With the rise of China occurring concurrently, the shift in power and influence has been dramatic.

"The two trends taken together—the reluctance to face harsh reality coupled with the refinement in the techniques of deception—explain why America is failing to meet the requirements of an open society. Apparently, a society needs to be successful in order to remain open."

For the past three years I have been studying Franklin Roosevelt, and I am convinced that he understood that last point perfectly. He lived, and governed, in an age when bad political outcomes such as Stalinism and Nazism were not only possible, but seemed on their way to becoming the norm. And thus, he understood that he had to persuade the American people with both words and deeds that their system was working--and he did. And it is no coincidence, in my opinion, that Roosevelt, a born aristocrat, understood that the ordinary man had to be convinced we were on the right track, while Obama, a bright young man from a relatively modest background who was adopted, if you will, by the elite educational system, apparently does not.

Two days ago I was talking to a contemporary who remarked that she was glad to be as old as we are, and that she feared for today's youth. I have mixed feelings about that too. She is all too aware, as am I, of the decline in our political and social life that we have lived through, but I suppose I am more hopeful that the younger generations will be able at least to begin to reverse it. We can now say that the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century dream that reason could produce utopia was indeed a fallacy. Reason is simply one pole of human experience whose importance rises and falls over the centuries. It has been falling for the last forty years; it will someday stage a comeback. Recognizing that, it seems to me, holds the key to dealing with the remainder of our lives with some optimism, no matter how bad the news on the front pages seems to be.

President Obama's Problems

2011-06-11T09:15:00.007-04:00

The alternatives to a second Obama term are so frightening that one hesitates to find fault with him unduly, but this is becoming harder and harder. It became quite clear after the passage of the health care plan that Barack Obama's career as a transformational President was over and that he had no wish to resume it. I began suggesting around that time that he seemed at least as likely to become the Herbert Hoover of our present crisis as our FDR. He is clearly, I regret to say, a creature of the Establishment in a way that Roosevelt and even Kennedy were not. Academia treated him very well in his youth, and evidently earned his confidence. He has relied on conventional economic thinkers with results that are likely to be disastrous. But something else has emerged over the past few years, something which I am not nearly close enough to the situation fully to understand, but which emerges clearly from a growing body of data. In the midst of an economic crisis and an increasingly chaotic world, Barack Obama is not, it would seem, a very rewarding President to work for.

The contrast with other Presidents, and particularly with FDR, is noteworthy. Judge Samuel Rosenman was Roosevelt's principal speech drafter for the whole of this thirteen years in office. His cabinet members showed extraordinary loyalty. Secretary of State Hull, never a Roosevelt intimate, served for 11 years; Treasury Secretary Morgenthau served for the last 11; Interior Secretary Ickes and Labor Secretary Frances Perkins served for the full twelve. Harry Hopkins and Henry Wallace were close collaborators in several different capacities for the whole FDR Presidency. So did Admiral William Leahy. There were more changes within the White House, but staffers Steve Early and Pa Watson were also in attendance for a very long time. There were many reasons for this. Roosevelt spent time with all these men and women and encouraged them to compete for his favor; but more importantly, they knew they were part of a great crusade to remake America, and, then, the world. The private sector clearly offered no opportunities of comparable interest. Roosevelt's Administration included very few members of the GI (or "greatest") generation, as far as I can see, but it inspired many of them to behave similarly under Kennedy and Johnson. McNamara and Rusk stayed at their posts for seven and eight years; so did Orville Freeman at Agriculture and Stewart Udall at Interior. There were very few changes in either man's White House staff.

Barack Obama has now been President for two and a half years. He has already had two Chiefs of Staff; two press secretaries; and two National Security Advisers. In the midst of the worst long-term economic crisis in eighty years, one chairman of his Economic Council (Larry Summers) and two heads of the Council of Economic Advisers (Christina Romer and Austen Goolsbee) have left their posts. Having already changed National Security Advisers, he has now changed both the head of the CIA and the Secretary of Defense, losing Robert Gates, whose appointment was nearly the only bipartisan gesture that he managed to make work. And now rumors have surfaced that Hillary Clinton may follow in the footsteps of Robert McNamara and Paul Wolfowitz and go to the World Bank.

What this means, among other things, is that with the possible exception of Treasury Secretary Geithner (who is emerging as a major policy and public relations liability), no one has been allowed to emerge as a political force and a popular figure in his own right. Roosevelt in particular did not make that mistake. Ickes, Hopkins, Wallace, and, during the war, Secretary of War Stimson were massive public presences in their own right, inspirations to New Deal voters and lightning rods for opposition. Rumsfeld and Cheney played similar roles under Bush II. Hillary Clinton certainly might have played a similar role, but the Administration's foreign policy has been so lacking in innovation or initiative that she really has not had a chance to.

Why has all this happened, or not happened? To begin with, the President has made it clear that he would rather preside over the Eisenhower Administration than the Roosevelt one. One major reform--Health Care--and one anti-depression initiative, the stimulus, was enough for him--even though it hasn't worked. Roosevelt gave his subordinates responsibility and new worlds to conquer; Obama is fighting a largely unsuccessful battle simply to keep a federal government in place at all. Yet that cannot be the whole story. The President has always seemed to be a man of intelligence and charm, and he is legendary for never losing his temper; but sadly, he seems to lack Roosevelt's and Kennedy's knack for inspiring loyalty. Interestingly enough, while most of the men and women I mentioned above entered the national government for the first time under FDR, Obama has recruited an astonishing number of veterans of the Clinton Administration. While no adviser has betrayed, they have found it all to easy to end their relationship. There must be some reason for this, and eventually we will find out what it is.

Our crisis may be about to become much worse. Natural economic forces are not coming to our assistance, and the Republicans, it seems, may actually want to bring about a government default in the belief that any ensuing chaos will rebound to their benefit. The President has about six months to get on top of events. It is not clear that he has the necessary men and women around him to help him do so.

p.s. I of course had no idea when I did this post that the President, just a few days later, would tell the American people that he sometimes feels as if one term in office would be enough One reason people enjoyed working with FDR and JFK so much was that they couldn't wait to get to work every day. In any organization, the man or woman at the top sets the tone.

Right-wingers, then and now

2011-06-04T09:24:00.005-04:00

Yesterday a friend for whom I have a great deal of respect wrote ma an email suggesting that today's Republicans and the early Nazis have a good deal in common. The remark immediately set me thinking, because I think that at this point, it is a half truth--and it's very important for anyone with any hope for America to understand both what is true, and what is false, about that analogy. While the Tea Partiers may show many psychological parallels to early enthusiasts for National Socialism, they are, in many ways, inferior to them--and nowhere more so than among their leadership. Thus, while they may indeed have dreadful consequences for the United States, the consequences, it seems to me, will be of a very different character.
In the long scheme of history, the period from roughly the 1790s until the 1960s will be known as a great age of organization and mass human endeavor. All over the western world, and in a few nations such as Japan and China that adopted various western models, huge institutions, economic and political, sprang out of nowhere. In the late nineteenth century the largest institutions were corporate; in first two-thirds of the twentieth, they were political. Communism in Russia industrialized a backward nation and created a whole new society. In China it did something similar, before managing to mutate into something quite different. The Japanese built up an empire covering much of Asia, before their disastrous defeat by smaller powers. Germany mobilized, conquered all of Europe, and put millions of people to death. The United States rebuilt its infrastructure, put millions to work, and helped win a huge war on both sides of the globe. Britain nationalized its basic industries (although it also gave up its empire.) The defeated nations of Western Europe built the Common Market, which became the European Union.

Now this was not a smooth process. The western civilization that emerged from the 1870s was badly shaken by the First World War, especially among the losers such as Germany, and then given another huge shock by the depression. Meanwhile, by 1930, the Prophet generation born in the 1870s and 1880s was, in some areas at least, passing the peak of its influence. The Nomad generation that followed them was largely a generation of bitter cynics. All over Europe, they had made huge sacrifices in the First World War for which they received no reward. They had no commitment whatever to the achievements of their parents and grandparents, and they became the troops of the Fascist parties, first in Italy and then in Germany. A similar emotional dynamic is at work today.

Generation X, born 1961-81, did not have to lose millions of its members in the trenches, but millions of its members suffered a different kind of trauma in their childhoods--the break-up of their families. While Boomers remember watching Alan Shephard and John Glenn blast off in their classrooms, Gen X watched the Challenger explosion. Ronald Reagan seduced a good many of them with his optimistic rhetoric, but they are too young ever to have seen government accomplish great things. Their lives have taught them to look after themselves and their families--within which they tend to be actually over-protective--and to expect others to do the same. And in the last two elections they have made a dramatic debut on the highest levels of the political stage, and the consequences are now evident for all to see.

In 2008 two Xers made it on to the national ticket for the first time: Barack Obama and Sarah Palin. Although President Obama is from the very leading edge of his generation, his childhood completely fit its pattern, and he is very proud not only of not being a Boomer but of believing that Boomer concerns are not his own. (He reportedly chafed when Richard Holbrooke told him during the Afghanistan strategy review that the discussions reminded him of discussions in the LBJ White House about Vietnam.) The President however is not my main focus today.

Thanks largely to last fall's elections there are now 119 Generation Xers in the Congress. 83 of them are Republicans and 36 are Democrats. The Democrats are the party claiming to stand for the achievements of the last eighty years of American life, and they are correspondingly much older. Indeed, most of the leadership of the Democrats in Congress, including Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank, and their committee chairmen in the Senate are from the Slent generation, whose youngest members will turn 69 this year. John Boehner is a Boomer, but most important lieutenants, Paul Ryan and Eric Cantor, are Xers. We can't understand them if do not keep in mind that they feel no commitment or any allegiance to anything this country did before 1980 or so. Their attitude was summed up by one of their number after a Thursday meeting with Treasure Secretary Tim Geithner: "We didn't start this mess."

In fact, the techniques that have given the House Republicans their majority have a good deal in common with the ones that gave the Nazis a third (far fewer, let it be noted) of the Reichstag deputies between 1930 and 1932. They include the endless repetition of many slogans bearing no relation to the facts; the exploitation of resentment towards certain groups, now defined by class, education and ideology more than by religion or race; constant assertions of moral superiority; and a hatred of the political establishment. Conspiracy theories have fueled the Tea Party's rise, just as they did the Nazis. And the Tea Party, which now rules the lower house of our legislature, has gone much further much faster than the Nazis did, partly, of course, because Limbaugh and the rest have been preparing the way for decades.

But what is it that they want to do? This is where the comparison breaks down completely.

Although Hitler used more or less mindless resentment to get into power, he had no intention of returning to some imaginary paradise modeled on the distant past. The Tea Partiers revere 1890s America but he did not revere 1890s Germany. He saw himself in the forefront of modernity, he and his collaborators had great plans, and they wasted no time putting them into effect. The built superhighways and new public buildings, just as the New Deal was doing in the West. They controlled the economy and foreign currency purchases, borrowed billions, and but millions back to work. And they built a new military machine with the goal of conquering eastern Europe and emerging as a world power capable of competing with the British Empire and the United States. Fortunately for the world, Britain, the Soviet Union and the United States beat them at their own game.

The Tea Party leadership have no such ambitions. They oppose new infrastructure projects. They want to dismantle a welfare state, not create one. They want Americans (in theory at least) to provide their own retirement income, their own health insurance in old age, and their own protection by carrying firearms around in public. It is not impossible that certain states, within a few years, will begin talking about doing away with public education. (Some southern states have in effect been moving that way ever since integration back in the early 1970s.)

Only a party, and a generation, with no commitment to existing institutions can blithely talk about unleashing a worldwide financial crisis by defaulting on the obligations of the United States because "we didn't start this mess." Such a party poses a great danger to the Republic and the world. Modern civilization depends on well-organized, functioning institutions. But the threat they pose is not authoritarianism, but anarchy. The Xer in Chief in the White House has to make a forthright stand for effective authority. So far he has not--but that is a subject for another day.

Israel, Palestine, and the U.S. - Q & A

2011-05-30T13:19:00.002-04:00

"Mike" posted some questions in a comment to the above post. They were argumentative but not abusive, and thus deserve a response. To wit:

A few questions:

In what year did "Palestine" first become a sovereign country?

The UN attempted to make it one in 1948, at the same time as Israel, but Israel and Jordan assumed sovereignty over all the territory marked out for it after the war that broke out.

Can you name five "Palestinian" leaders prior to 1964?

Of the top of my head, no, but for a full discussion of Palestinian politics in the interwar period see Benny Morris, Righteous Victims, pp. 121-51.

Why did the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al Husseini, side with the Nazis during WWII? Could this have been because of the "occupied territories" of the Six-Day War?

No, it was because the British had declared his organization illegal in 1937, and he had fled Palestine. He and Hitler agreed on the objectives of defeating the British, freeing the Arabs, and stopping Jewish immigration into Palestine when they met in 1943.

Why did the Arabs of Hebron massacre 67 Jews in 1929? Could this have been because of the "occupied territories" of the Six-Day War?

I would guess for the same reason that Arabs and Jews have been killing each other since Zionism began--that they differ over who should control Israel/Palestine.

Why was there no attempt to establish an independent "Palestinian" state when the Ottoman Empire controlled the land that is now Israel?

Because the Ottoman empire governed efficiently and ruthlessly and there were no serious revolts against it in that part of the world for at least decades before the First World War.

Why was there no attempt to establish a "Palestinian" state during the British Mandate after WWI?

There was in fact a major Palestinian independence movement in those days. See Morris, supra.

Why was there no attempt to establish a "Palestinian" state after Jordan annexed Judea and Samaria (the "West Bank"), and Egypt annexed Gaza?

Because the Jordanians and Egyptians didn't want one.

Why was the Palestine Liberation Organization established in 1964? What exactly was Arafat trying to "liberate" three years before the 6-Day War?

All of Israel/Palestine. Arafat did not accept the right of Jews who arrived after 1918 to live there. Most Palestinians don't.

Isn't it true that Abu Mazen/ Mahmoud Abbas wrote his dissertation about Holocaust denial?

According to Wikipedia, no, it isn't. The article there says his dissertation was entitled, "The Other Side: The secret relations between Nazism and the leadership of the Zionist movement". I can't make any judgment of its value but I do know that at least through 1938, the Nazis wanted as many Jews to immigrate from Germany and Austria to Palestine as possible.

Thanks - I look forward to reading your answers and explanations.

There they are. There is an interesting underlying problem here. It's quite true that the Israelis don't have any greater or lesser right to the land within the 1967 boundaries than to the occupied land beyond them. (I said greater or lesser.) So the issue is really one of expediency. Israel has to choose between being a relatively homogeneous democracy within the 1967 borders; or ruling a permanent apartheid state including most or all of the West Bank; or expelling most or all of the Arab population of however much territory they want to keep; or giving up the idea of Israel altogether. I'm not an Israeli, but I think the first solution, of those four, is the best one.

Israel, Palestine and the U.S.

2011-05-29T09:13:00.003-04:00

When I began writing these posts I was determined to take on the toughest issues of the day, and one of those is certainly the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I do not know what a possible solution is at this point--indeed I would be flabbergasted to see anything like real peace in my lifetime--but I do think that it behooves us all to look at some key historical facts and, above all, to try to find some intellectual framework for a solution. The recent speeches by President Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu, alas, fail to do either, and thus require some comment.

The paradox underlying the problem is the most fundamental paradox of international relations. For centuries after the Treaty of Westphalia, western civilization tried to impose a legal framework on international relations, even though it has never made a serious attempt (and, in my opinion, should not) to create a world government. When the United Nations was created in 1945 the foundation of its legal framework was the respect for frontiers. That, it seems to me, is the only lasting basis for an international legal order, but unfortunately, no one has found a way to make governments last forever, much less to make people stay in one place. It is probably fair to say that every nation on earth was built originally by conquest. The human past includes no age of pristine innocence. Present-day historians like to picture pre-Colombian America as some kind of bucolic paradise, but in fact, its tribes made cruel war upon one another, apparently exterminated whole civilizations in their midst (the mound builders, for instance), and, in some places, at one another. And whether or not one believes that the creation of ancient Israel was divinely ordained, which I do not, it was undoubtedly bloody, sometimes mercilessly so. The history of Europe is largely a history of warfare. We must keep all this in mind when we turn to this history of a small territory on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean.

The Balfour Declaration of 1917 and the subsequent Palestine mandate must be seen in this broader context. The British, who in 1917 had no rights in the region other than rights of conquest, declared that the Jewish people should be able to create a "homeland" in Palestine without prejudice to the rights of the existing populations there. That, of course, was a contradiction in terms from the beginning, and the Arab populations realized it. After the war the League of Nations gave the British a mandate--that is, sovereignty--over Palestine, and they continued to allow some Jewish immigration while eventually concluding that it would have to be severely limited. British troops had to prevent civil war in the region during the 1920s and 1930s. American Jews in this period were highly ambivalent, to put it mildly, about the whole project. The Jewish masses of Poland and Russia (by then the Soviet Union) had never been full citizens of their countries before 1919 or so, and man wanted a new homeland. American Jews had chosen a different solution: settlement in a country that recognized no religious distinctions among its citizens. Although they faced social prejudice in the first half of the twentieth century and their opportunities at the highest levels of American society remained in many ways limited, they felt well off indeed. Phillip Roth in one of his recent books suggests that American Jews around 1940 were the most loyal of all American immigrant groups, precisely because they had no loyalty to any mother country.

Now contrary to myth, Holocaust survivors did not found Israel. The founders of Israel were Zionists settlers, most of them from further east, who had been living in Palestine for decades. They were also largely secularists and socialists. When the war came to an end, they carried on a political and military campaign against British occupation, including acts of terrorism, while also trying to bring as many Holocaust survivors to Israel as possible. Those who had survived the war and the death camps in Eastern Europe were now living in displaced persons camps, and nearly all of them ruled out returning to their former homes. The United States, alas, would not welcome them. The tough immigration laws passed in 1924 were still in effect, and there was no political will to make an exception for hundreds of thousands of Jews from eastern Europe. That, as an American of half-Jewish ancestry, is my greatest regret about the whole story. When Ernest Bevin, the anti-Zionist British foreign secretary, said that the United States wanted the Jews to go to Palestine because they did not want them to go to New York, he was, sadly, speaking the truth.

In 1947, the British, weary of their imperial burden turned the mandate back to the new United Nations. The UN sent a commission of westerners to investigate the situation, including some Americans, who returned home very sympathetic to the Jewish cause, largely because the Jews were obviously so much more westernized than the Arabs. The Arabs at that moment lacked effective political leadership, in large part because their leaders had been jailed or exiled by the British during an Arab revolt in the late 1930s. The UN eventually recommended a partition of the territory, one that would have given the Jews significantly less than what became their border after 1949. The Zionists, as authors such as Conor Cruise O'Brien and the Israeli Benny Morris have pointed out, always took the practical position that any territory was better than none, since it would provide a basis for further expansion. The Arabs did not and refused to accept the partition plan at all. In all honesty, while the Jews were surely wiser, it seems to me one can sympathize with both sides here. In the wake of the Second World War Jews naturally did not trust the protection of any non-Jewish state, with the possible exceptions of Britain and the United States, where they could not go. On the other hand, the Arabs saw no reason--and still don't--why Christians at the distant United Nations should have been able to award a large part of territory in their midst to people whose only claim was that their ancestors had lived there thousands of years ago. We obviously cannot as a general rule start redistributing territory around the world on that basis--it would be a recipe for endless war.

To secure their state the Israelis had to defeat the Palestinians within the territory allotted them, and also to hold off the neighboring Arab states who intervened, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, on the Palestinians' side. The first task was relatively easy: the Palestinians were out-organized and out-gunned. The second was harder but the Israelis, who proclaimed their state in the spring of 1948, managed it, and even moved well beyond the borders specified by the UN resolution. Most of the Arab population of the new Israel fled--a good deal of it, we know now, was forcibly ejected. In 1949 the UN negotiated an armistice between Israel and its neighbors, temporarily depriving the Palestinian Arabs of any recognition whatever while leaving most of them under Jordanian control. But the Israelis, led by Prime Minister David Ben Gurion, were not satisfied. They regarded the new lines as only the beginning. Some hoped to go all the way to the Jordan River; others, like former terrorist Menachem Begin, wanted to go further. Noting that the old testament God had promised the Jews the East Bank, as well as the West Bank, of the Jordan River, Begin in his party newspaper wrote articles in the early 1950s with titles such as "Amman too shall be ours." (I owe that deal to Ezer Weizmann, the former Israeli Defense Minister and President who helped negotiate the 1979 peace deal with Egypt.)

The Israelis got two chances to expand those frontiers over the next 20 years. In 1956 they signed on to an Anglo-French attempt to overthrow Gamel Abdul Nasser and seized the Sinai peninsula. During the next year President Eisenhower forced them to give these gains up, partly by threatening to end the tax deduction for contributions to Israel for American citizens--no idle threat in an era of 91% marginal tax rates. In 1967, it is now generally agreed, the Arabs did not want war, but Nasser, like Khrushchev in Cuba five years earlier, allowed a game of brinkmanship to go to far. The United States was too pre-occupied with Vietnam to head off the crisis, and the Israelis decided to attack. This time they occupied the Sinai, the Golan Heights, and the West Bank. In response, the Arabs recognized the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people, and eight years later Yasir Arafat addressed the UN. Four years after that Israel withdrew from the Sinai in exchange for peace with Egypt, and in the 1990s Israel made peace with Jordan, whose population is now more than half Palestinian. But attempts at peace between Israel and the Palestinians have failed.

Why?

I am sure politicians and historians will still be arguing about that for at least a century; I can only give my opinion. Neither side, in my opinion, has ever established a consensus that would moderate is claims to the extent that real peace would be possible. On the one hand, the Palestinians still claim a right of return for the families of those who left in 1948-9, and many will not formally accept Israel's acceptance at all. On the other hand, Israel has tens of thousands of settlers and some politicians, certainly including its current Foreign Minister and very possibly its current Prime Minister as well, who have not given up on establishing an almost completely Jewish state in all the territory west of the Jordan at all. That is why no Israeli government has dared put a halt to settlements. At the end of the Clinton Administration Ehud Barak seemed ready to concede nearly all the territory outside the 1949-67 border, and to compensate the Palestinians for any territory Israel retained, but because of Arafat's intransigence, we never found out whether he could have sold that deal to the Israeli people. Since then the Israeli political spectrum has moved drastically rightward.

The Palestinian people have become more militant as well. Hamas won an election in 2003 and now rules the Gaza strip. Essentially American and Israeli strategy beginning with the Bush Administration--which specifically disavowed Yasser Arafat--has been to build up a Palestinian leadership under Mahmoud Abbas that would rule Palestine with due regard to Israeli sensibilities--that is, he would renounce any right to an Army, accept the permanence of some large Israeli settlement blocs and the loss of all Jerusalem, and allow Israel to station troops on his country's eastern border. (As Hanan Ashwari, for some time in the 1990s the chief Palestinian negotiator and their international public face, put it, "To the Israelis the only acceptable Palestinian is a Zionist, one who accepts the existence of Israel and renounces the right of return." Most Palestinians are not ready to do either.) In my opinion President Obama's speech two weeks ago was designed to save this policy. He offered (to the extent that he can) the Palestinians the 1967 borders with agreed mutual adjustments--but in return, Abbas had to end his new alliance with Hamas. Abbas, I suspect, created that alliance because he could see that the current Israeli government had now intention either of returning to the 1967 borders or even of halting settlements (and thus further expansion of Israeli territory) now. He was right. And Netanyahu's reception before Congress--a bipartisan reception an American President would not even dare dream of--was proof that Obama will never be able to do what Eisenhower did and apply effective pressure on the Israeli government to bring about a deal that it does not want. Netanyahu, meanwhile, is furious because Obama repudiated Bush's public pledge that Israel would simply keep large settlement blocs in any new agreement--forgetting that what one President can promise, another can take away. AIPAC is indeed one of the most powerful lobbies in Washington, however, and I would not be surprised if Congress passes a resolution repudiating what President Obama has said. (For an earlier discussion of AIPAC's power, see the post of May 20, 2006, here.)

While the Israeli government does not formally base its claims today on any donation for a higher power, it does, it seems to me, maintain in effect that Israeli needs are paramount. Israelis have a right to live within any borders they deem necessary; Palestinians have only such rights as the Israelis are willing to let them have. Even the state which Netanyahu claims to offer them will lack many attributes of sovereignty. I can't help believing that that's why he claims to favor talks at all--he knows the Palestinians will never accept that status. Meanwhile, it certainly is not clear that conflict and terrorism would stop even in the entirely hypothetical case that the Palestinians were given the right to a state east of the 1949-67 border.

Ironically, Abbas is now going to return to where the conflict in its present form began, the General Assembly of the United Nations. It endorsed partition in 1948 and he wants it to do the same thing now, giving the Palestinians less than they would have received then but far more than Israel is willing to give them. The United States government, ironically, is proclaiming that the United Nations cannot recognize states. (The situation is of course different now because in 1948 Britain had formally turned sovereignty over to the UN.) The European states have been relatively pro-Palestinian for decades now, and many of them may go along with this. That will take the situation, to a certain extent, out of Washington's hands.

The only possible deal, it seems to me, at this point, and for decades to come, is some kind of a truce. That is how the Christian and Muslim worlds co-existed for long periods from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries on the frontiers of Eastern Europe. That is how peace was maintained in Western Europe during the Cold War, when the West German government never completely accepted the sovereignty of East Germany (while recognizing its authority beginning in 1972.) But neither side wants a truce.

I see only one piece of good news in all this. Like the Austro-Serbian conflict before 1914, the Israeli-Palestinian dispute is the kind of issue that in earlier days would have divided the great powers and perhaps led to a continental or world war. As the events in the Balkans in the 1990s showed, we have moved beyond those times. A UN resolution on Palestinian independence may divide Washington from some of its European allies, from Russia and from China, but it will not lead to great-power war. The advanced countries have uncoupled third world conflicts from issues of their own basic security. That is a huge advance for civilization, and one for which we should all be grateful.

How the world comes undone

2011-05-22T09:26:00.003-04:00

Revolution continues to sweep the Arab world but the outcome becomes more and more uncertain. The lead article in today's New York Times deals with Tunisia, Libya, Syria and Egypt, and the emerging obstacles to national unity in each of those countries. Tunisia is threatened by a split between the coastal elite and the more religious interior, which, some speculate, may lead to a military coup. In Egypt the 10% Coptic Christian minority suspects the majority, and vica verca. Libya remains riven by regional divisions, while in Syria, Assad clings to power as the leader of the Alawite Shi'ite minority (while proving that militarized authoritarian states--see the graph, below--can indeed suppress rebellions if they have the will to do so.) A successful revolution needs a measure of national unity, and many in these nations wonder where it will come from. The same problem, of course, is at the heart of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan in which the United States has so unwisely inserted itself.

A great deal of confusion prevails over these issues for many reasons, not least of them the idea behind Francis Fukuyama's The End of History that the world is naturally evolving towards capitalist democracy and that the evolutionary process is at late stage. It was always, really, a Utopian idea, every bit as much as National Socialism or Communism, but with the key difference that natural processes were supposed lead us to the promised land. Yet this has never been the case. Fukuyama assumed away the other key term in developmental equation, legitimate political authority. Because he simply assumed it he did not have to ask where it came from. Had he looked, he would have found a much more complex and much less reassuring story.

Reading the Times story today I was reminded of the French and Russian Revolutions. Both of them were based on ideas of universal equality; both swept away an old order weakened by time, by corruption, and by war. But both led immediately to division, civil war, and the deaths of tens or hundreds of thousands of people. It took a decade for Napoleon to re-establish stable political authority in France and at least six far more bloody years for Lenin to do the same in the Soviet Union. Those countries, too, lacked any shared sense of national unity, and one had to be imposed, both by governmental success and by violence. And that is often, though not always, the case in the crises that seem to hit modern societies every eighty years.

During the twentieth century the western world (including the Soviet Union) offered the rest of the world a number of models of political authority. In Turkey Kemal Ataturk created a new secular state modeled quite closely, it seems to me, on Napoleonic France. Japan adopted much of the western model even earlier, in the late nineteenth century, and easily resumed it after 1945. Independent India established a parliamentary democracy that has endured, with only one brief interruption, to this day. Meanwhile Communism provided an extraordinarily effective tool for the mobilization and seizure of political power in China, in Cuba, and in Vietnam. It has not however been able to survive more than one saeculum anywhere, and I would suggest that with the possible exceptions of Hezbollah and Hamas there are today no revolutionary movements nearly as well organized as Lenin's, or Mao's, or Ho's.

Does the West today offer a useful model for the third world, including the Muslim world? Unfortunately I must answer that question with a resounding "no."

The European Union, in my opinion, represents today the most highly developed civilization in human history. States that warred for centuries have surrendered large parts of their national sovereignty and created a single economy. Most of them use a single currency. Their governments have established some form of national health care and put a very high priority on infrastructure. Increasingly they are focusing on energy conservation. They too may face problems in the near future relating to national unity, thanks to their large Muslim populations. In addition, nationalism in Eastern Europe--one of the most destructive forces of the twentieth century--is re-emerging in several countries, including one of the most advanced, Hungary. But the Europeans surrendered so much national autonomy because they had lived through the worst of what nationalism can do. Their example cannot be immediately replicated anywhere else.

As for the United States, we have been engaged for about thirty years in a two-pronged assault on the very idea of political authority which has now paralyzed our government in the face of an economic crisis. The Republican Party since Reagan has embraced the idea that government is "the problem," and the strategy of "starving the beast" has now worked, leaving Washington with nothing to do but arguing about what to cut, since tax increases have been ruled out. Even Newt Gingrich, one of the stalwarts of the revolution, realized briefly two weeks ago that it had gone too far, although he was quickly brought back into line. But at the same time, the Left, such as it is, has also rejected political authority, based on the idea, now 45 years old, that those who exercise power are almost inevitably wicked, especially if they happen to be white males. Today's Times also includes a review of a collection of essays, Revolutionary Founders: Rebels, Radicals and Reformers in the Making of the Nation, which seems to be a compendium of newer-style history of the revolutionary period, written by another practitioner, Mary Beth Norton. None of the 22 essays in the book deal with a signer of the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution, a fact of which I am sure its editors are blushing with pride. They include Abigail Adams and Tom Paine, a number of American Indian leaders (many of which actually opposed the revolution), the rebels in Shays' and the Whiskey rebellions, and a number of very obscure folks who evidently held economic or social views that have become much more fashionable today. One such is Herman Husband, who dreamed of a new Jerusalem west of the Appalachians and whom his chronicler thinks "deserves to be remembered in the first rank of the heroes of American democracy." (Reviewer Mary Beth Norton dissents because Husband paid no attention to the rights of Indians, slaves, or women.) That actually is a good example of what a hero is to a Boomer or Boomer-trained academic: some one who held the right views, just as they have, by their own lights, for the last 40 years or so. Earlier generations thought that heroes, of whatever race or sex, did things like writing Constitutions, raising armies, fighting battles, making revolutions, and running governments. But Boomers in their youth became accustomed to thinking of those tasks as some one else's job, one unworthy of serious interest--and that goes for both the left and the right. In another interesting example of this trend, the Times also reports this morning that an education reform movement is sweeping the country--but it isn't the work of federal or state governments, but rather of Bill Gates, one of the more benevolent billionaires our new tax structure has created.

And thus Boomers are now proving themselves utterly incapable of dealing with the most fundamental task of government, passing a budget. Gen Xer Barack Obama, meanwhile, seems to feel very little urgency about the problem either--he is confident that he can make his peace with whatever outcome emerges, blessing it with a few typically eloquent words. Only in 1861, 1933 and 1940, I would argue, has the United States been so much in need of effective leadership as it is today--and I can assure you as a historian that we do not have leadership of comparable quality available.

Size of armies

2011-05-18T11:18:00.002-04:00

I am posting these slides in connection with a discussion on the Fourth Turning forums. . . They show that the world's militaries are generally quite small by historical standards.

An American Original

2011-05-14T08:54:00.006-04:00

Two weeks ago my wife gave me a new book that has every right to become a classic of American politics, Politics and Pasta, by former Providence Mayor Buddy Cianci, with help from David Fisher. (I am sure Mr. Fisher did plenty of work, but Buddy, as we call him in Rhode Island, obviously provided 95% of the information and the tone of the book.) Buddy has only intermittently made his way into the national, much less international consciousness, and I was rather shocked four years ago when it turned out that my copy editor had not heard of him even though she lives less than 100 miles away in Massachusetts. That is partly in the nature of my adopted home state, which is tucked away in one corner of New England--the smallest state, of course, territorially, although we boast more people than Wyoming, Vermont, or North Dakota. Buddy is an American original, and the book reads like a real life version of the great American classic All the King's Men. Politics and Sausage might have been a better title--if you want to know how political sausage is made, this is the book for you. It's an advanced course of city government, from snow removal to the promotion of tourism to managing the evening news.

Vincent "Buddy" Cianci was born in Providence in 1941, a second-generation Italian-American whose father--every bit as upwardly mobile as my first generation father--became a doctor. For some reason he grew up as a Republican in a highly Democratic city. He crossed cultural boundaries in his high school career, attending the elite Wasp Moses Brown school in Providence, and then went to college and to law school at Jesuit institutions. As prosecutor he indicted the most famous resident of his Federal Hill neighborhood, mob boss Raymond Patriarca, for murder, but the jury chose not to believe his one turncoat witness and Raymond got off. Like so many great political careers, his began by accident. He ran for Mayor against a split Democratic Party in 1974, one of the most Democratic years in the history of the United States, and won. The rest is history.

I must admit I was disappointed at the first 57 pages of the book, which were more cute than informative, but everything changed on p. 58, when Buddy took office. All the King's Men tells how Willie Stark, modeled on Huey Long, brought third-world Louisiana into the twentieth century. Buddy tells how Cianci rebuilt and revived a dying city. And make no mistake about it: without him, Providence might be in the same dreadful, pathetic shape as most secondary New England cities, including Bridgeport and Hartford in Connecticut, Worcester and Springfield and Lowell in Massachusetts, and our own Woonsocket and Providence. A mill town early in the 20th century, it had lost its industry and its tax base. Buildings were rapidly being demolished to become parking lots. If there is one thing that shines through almost every page of this book, it is Cianci's hopeless, overwhelming love for his native city. He wanted to revive it and give it a bright future, and during two long sojourns in City Hall (1975-84 and 1991-2002) he did. Unfortunately, both terms ended with his conviction of a serious crime--of which more later.

The story of what Buddy did for the city fills many pages. He saved old buildings and built new ones. He uncovered the Providence River. He revived the arts scene, even creating a neighborhood of the city that offered special tax breaks to artists. (I did not make that up.) One of his first alliances as mayor was with a Wasp lady from the Providence East Side, Antoinette Downing, aged 70, who had been trying to preserve old buildings since 1955. Together they preserved a great many more. I enjoyed imagining the first meeting between them: in the movie, he should be played by Danny De Vito and she should be played by Cate Blanchett in her Katharine Hepburn mode. They had nothing in common--except that they loved Providence.

Yet a far more revealing story involves the preservation of Providence's last remaining old movie palace, the downtown Loew's Theater, which subsequently became the Providence Performing Arts Center. The owner, B. A. Dario, had asked for a permit to demolish it. He found "a Waspy group" that wanted to buy and refurbish it, and he went to work making the deal happen, eventually pledging $1 million of city funds, quite possibly without the slightest idea where they would come from. Eventually he closed--or so he thought--the deal, only to get a phone call from Dario demanding an additional $40,000 on the grounds that the buyers had promised to pay him $1000 a day during negotiations. Buddy, who knows how to bargain, solved the problem by appointing Dario "artistic consultant to the city of Providence" for $25,000. "Now that," he writes, "is the kind of deal that I should have gone to jail for." That is only one of at least a dozen stories along those lines, most of them with happy endings. Buddy had to contend with a hostile city council most of his tenure, and his battles with them make for interesting reading as well.

That was only the beginning, but I was equally interested in Buddy's brief career as a national political figure. An east coast Republican mayor was a rara avis indeed in the mid-1970s, and the desperate Republican Party made use of him. He made a famous appearance at the 1976 Republican convention and became a part of President Ford's strategy committee. Never shy, he argued at one point that the party should make a major issue out of Carter's attendance at a segregated Baptist Church in Plains, Georgia. He lost that fight, and he still thinks it could have made the difference in a very close election. In 1979, he tried and failed to persuade Ford to make another try for the Republican nomination on a visit to Palm Springs. The visit also led to a dinner invitation from Frank Sinatra, who asked him, "Do you know Raymond?" "Know him!" Buddy replied. "I prosecuted him!"

Reagan, of course, won the nomination, and the Reagan campaign persuaded Buddy to run for Governor of Rhode Island to try to help the ticket. Four years earlier, in 1976, he had allowed Wasp Republican John Chafee to talk him out of running for the Senate--a decision he still regrets. He did not expect to win the election, as indeed he did not, and he negotiated delicately with John Sears and Lyn Nofziger, two Reagan aides, about a possible post-election reward should he lose, such as a Caribbean Ambassadorship. Early in these negotiations Buddy asked Sears whether Governor Reagan knew about these promises. "That's the greatest part of working for Ronald Reagan," Sears replied. "He doesn't have to know." But when Buddy was tentatively selected to be Ambassador to the Dominican Republic, Senator Chafee stopped it. The feud between Buddy and the Chafees continues to this day.

Buddy's first fall from grace, in 1984, involved his personal life. He is very frank about his first marriage, which began with an out-of-wedlock pregnancy, became very politically effective, but never, he says frankly, involved love. By 1984 it was dissolving, and in the midst of the divorce Buddy discovered his wife had been having an affair with a long-time friend of his, also married. He was even more incensed that her lover had been advising her about the divorce, which had turned out to be more expensive than he thought. Enraged, Buddy called the man over to his house, where a nasty confrontation ensued in the presence of several witnesses, including a policeman. No injuries appear to have been sustained, but Buddy admits to throwing a cigar and an ashtray. He presents convincing evidence that the other man--the target--did not want to prosecute in order to avoid the publicity, but political opponents found out about it and he was suddenly indicted on serious assault charges. He decided to plead guilty, escaped jail time, and had to leave City Hall. He initially went into the real estate business, in which he was already very well versed, and then discovered another calling as a radio talk-show host. He returned to City Hall triumphantly in 1991.

Was there corruption in Buddy's Administrations? Undoubtedly, as he admits--tens of people working for the city were convicted of crimes. Buddy is rather discreet about organized crime's tremendous presence in the city and its influence, and he is frank about soliciting campaign contributions. I must say I was suspicious about one story he told. Early in his career Buddy caught the manager of the Providence Civic Center taking kickbacks from entertainers in exchange for choice dates. Year's later, in 1980, Buddy angered younger voters, as he explained, by canceling a Who concert at the same venue. He claimed he did so because several people had been killed in a riot after a Who concert in Cincinnati, but being a suspicious bastard myself, I couldn't help wondering if the promoter had actually failed to come up with some of kind of favor--perhaps a campaign contribution--that the Mayor expected to get. Meanwhile, Buddy enjoyed throwing his weight around, and his abrasive personality got him into some very unseemly feuds, including one with Brown University that started when two nephews of his failed to gain admission. I would have been glad to explain to the Mayor that college admissions have become such a crapshoot that no one, really, has any valid grounds for complaint when admission is denied.

The racketeering conviction which sent Buddy to jail in 2002, however, raises profound questions about the state of American justice. The indictment charged him with 1 essential count of running a criminal enterprise--in this case, the city government of Providence--and 29 specific counts involving illegal acts in which he had supposedly either participated or known of. The most dramatic was a bribe accepted on video tape in City Hall by one Frank Corrente, a subordinate official, who claimed he was receiving it on Cianci's behalf. The government failed to convince the jury that Buddy was guilty of any of the 29 specific counts, but the jury--which was mostly composed of people living in surrounding cities and towns, not Providence--found him guilty on the overarching charge. The RICO law was designed by my friend Bob Blakey to convict organized crime bosses who could not be directly tied to illegal acts. I shall be curious to see what he thinks of this particular application of it, and Harvey Silverglate, a defense counsel who is a regular reader here, may have something to say as well. In any case, Buddy served four years at Fort Dix, New Jersey; re-emerged looking far, far better without his famous toupee; and resumed his talk show career. He also became the subject of a wonderful documentary film, Buddy, and I got to meet him at one of its screenings.

The late Arthur Schwartz was a songwriter who wrote many famous tunes with his collaborator lyricist Howard Dietz. He was also a close friend of my parents who enjoyed playing and singing his songs in their home. I was never more delighted than at the end of the film Buddy, when a performance of one of his songs, which could hardly have been more a propos, accompanied the credits. I can't seem to embed the video, but you can click here and end this post in exactly the same way.

Bin Laden's death

2011-05-05T18:35:00.005-04:00

Debate still rages among enthusiasts of generational theory over when the current great crisis began. Was it in 2001, on 9/11, or was it much later, perhaps in 2007 when the markets began to crash? As I made clear last July 4 in one of my most important posts, I am inclined at this point to think that 9/11 was indeed the beginning. That once again raises the question of whether Osama Bin Laden's death marks the beginning of the end.

There is no question but that George W. Bush leapt into the role of crisis leader on several levels. He declared war not only on Islamic terrorist, led by Bin Laden, but on regimes that had harbored or tolerated them. He invaded two countries, involving the United States in occupations that have lasted nearly a decade. He talked about a new spirit in the country, and he suspended, in effect, various provisions of the laws and the Constitution of the United States. But he did not mobilize the countries' resources. Instead of increasing taxes like Lincoln and FDR, he cut them. He relied on a volunteer army with a huge auxiliary force of contractors. And, sadly, he embarked upon wars whose outcome has been dubious at best. Yet he had a profound long-term impact on the country, crippling the finances of the federal government, involving us indefinitely in the Middle East, and establishing what looks like a small but permanent gulag at Guantanamo. He also mobilized new Republican constituencies, although even his re-election victory was very narrow.

Unfortunately Bush lacked the vision to turn the country's energies into productive channels, or even, it seems,to evaluate what we faced in southwest Asia. He does not seem to have been very interested in apprehending Osama Bin Laden, although it will be decades, if not longer, before we know what kind of discussions took place between the White House and the CIA about Bin Laden's whereabouts. Instead he wanted to establish the US in the heart of the Middle East in Iraq. And he seems to have accepted the fiction that Pakistan was our ally against terror, in spite of overwhelming evidence that the Pakistanis had always supported the Taliban in Afghanistan and were sheltering Bin Laden on their own soil. Bush intervened in Pakistani politics, encouraging the resignation of Pervez Musharraf and thus the election of Benazir Bhutto, who was promptly assassinated. But he refused to face these elemental facts.

The killing of Bin Laden is welcome evidence that the United States can in fact carry out a major operation. I have felt both astonished and a bit humiliated, as an American, that a man who purposely killed 3000 random Americans has remained at large for so long. Capturing him would have been disastrous. Right wingers would have called for his torture to find out what he knew. (That is not a fantasy. No less a figure than Michael Scheuer, the retired former head of the CIA's Bin Laden unit under Clinton and Bush, violently attacked President Obama for outlawing torture because it would, he thought, cripple us if Bin Laden were apprehended.) Terrorists around the world would have planned attacks to try to secure his release. Controversies would have erupted over a possible trial. I am opposed to capital punishment in domestic law, but Bin Laden had started a war with the US, and had to be killed. The outcome may even buy us some respect in the honor-based societies of the Middle East. (On the other hand, the immediate release of fragmentary information from his computer hard drive is extremely irresponsible.)

But what now? President Obama's next move will determine whether this marks the end of an era or not.

Voices on both sides of the aisle are now being raised calling for a withdrawal from Afghanistan. The circumstances of his capture vindicate the arguments of many long-standing opponents of our surge there, including myself. Al Queda has not been living in Afghanistan; its leaders, including its founder, have been sheltered by nuclear-armed Pakistan. It is impossible to believe that elements of the Pakistani Army and government did not know where Bin Laden was hiding. As long as they can stay where they are, the Al Queda leaders will not be tempted to leave. And we have shown that we can find them and kill them in Pakistan--even in the interior of the country.

The question hanging over the affair is whether, in fact, Bin Laden's death resulted from some kind of US-Pakistani deal. I am not saying that it did; it is pure speculation on my part, prompted in part, I admit, by my own long-standing advocacy of such a deal. Pakistanis and at least one blogger for Le Monde have suggested that the US has promised to withdraw from Afghanistan in return for being tipped off as to Bin Laden's whereabouts. Of course both Americans and Pakistanis are denying any such thing, but that is what one would have to expect. In any case, with or without a deal, withdrawal would make sense. Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Syria, Yemen and Bahrain all have more strategic importance than Afghanistan--and they are now in flames. I am not suggesting that our troops should be redeployed into any of those countries. They must work out their own problems and the US must be prepared to live with any outcome. But these revolutions, to paraphrase John Kenneth Galbraith, give Afghanistan a chance to return to the obscurity it so richly deserves. Ambassador Ikenberry warned the Obama Administration in late 2009 that success would depend upon the performance of the Afghan government, which he did not trust. Everything that has happened since has vindicated his judgment. Even Mohammed Karzai himself is calling for fewer American troops and less American influence, just as Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother Nhu did in 1963. This time we should let the host government have its way.

President Obama could announce that we have discovered a successful counter-terrorism recipe, involving the use of intelligence and special operations. The next target should be the American-born Imam Anwar al Awlaki, said to be living in Yemen, who has directly inspired the Nigerian shoe-bomber, the Pakistani-American who tried to set off a car bomb in Times Square, and Major Nidal Hassan, who shot up his own Army base in Texas. Such operations are much more cost-effective than attempts to remake Islamic societies with the help of tens or hundreds of thousands of American troops. Once again the President has the chance to put a key aspect of the Bush era to an end. But will he take it?

I do not know, but one another straw in the wind suggests that he might. General David Petraeus is the face of the American Army's involvement in the Middle East. He took over the Iraq effort in 2007 because he was the only general who truly believed in it, and he scored a partial success. That earned him the CENTCOM command and then the command in Afghanistan. Now he is on his way to the CIA--and many senior army officers are well aware of the enormous strain the last ten years have put on their forces, and the meager results we have to show for it, especially in Afghanistan. His new job could represent an effort to put the counterterrorist mission where it belongs.

The President remains on the defensive regarding the budget, even though some signs now suggest that the Republicans have overplayed their hand once again. He has scored a dramatic success, but he needs to keep the political initiative. The country is surely as sick of Afghanistan as it was of Vietnam in 1970, when President Nixon finally agreed to serious drawdowns. We have the chance now to declare victory and begin coming home, and I hope we take it.

Revisiting the deficit

2011-04-30T11:17:00.004-04:00

With the deficit more in the news than ever, it seems to me appropriate to revisit a post last October on the subject of where it came from and how it might be dealt with. There isn't too much new data available since then, but the political climate has of course changed enormously, and lots of new proposals are on the table. Sadly, very few of them have much to do with the underlying facts. The issue is on my mind because I took a question about it after a lecture yesterday, and having reviewed the data, I would have to revise my answer somewhat, although not fundamentally.

It is something of a shock to discover, first of all, that the budget situation improved significantly in the fiscal year that ended last September 30. The deficit, which had been projected once again to exceed 10% of GDP, fell by an entire percentage point of GDP in comparison to fiscal 2009, from 10.0% to 8.9%. The improvement reflected a fall in outlays owing to the collection of substantial TARP repayments and much lower payments to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, while revenues remained stable. Revenues will be worse this year, however, because of the 2% cut in Social Security payroll taxes put through by the Obama Administration last December.

Just ten years ago, in fiscal 2000--the last year fully within the Clinton Administration--we had a surplus of 2.4% of GDP. This still ranks as a financial revolution comparable to what happened from 1933 to 1950, or from 1979 to 1991 or so, and given how heated issues of government finance have become, it behooves us to ask how all this happened. Unfortunately, since I can't find more disaggregated data for the last complete fiscal year, I will have to use the data I used last October, which reflected a deficit for fiscal 2010 that was a full percentage point higher.

Budgets, of course, are composed of revenues (mostly taxes) and expenditures. Let us begin with taxes. In fiscal 2000, federal taxes brought in 20.6 % of GDP, including 10.2% of GDP from federal personal income taxes, 2.1% from corporate income taxes, and 6.6% from Social Security taxes. This year they are estimated to bring in 14.8% of our GDP, that is, almost 6% less. Judging from figures from the last pre-recession year of fiscal 2007, about half of that 6% is due to the Bush tax cuts and the other half is a result of our economic collapse. The composition of that 14.8% has also changed dramatically: only 6.4% of it comes from personal income taxes, 1.1% from corporate, and 6.0% from Social Security taxes. In 2000 the progressive income tax brought in about 66% more than the regressive social security tax. Now they bring in nearly the same amount of money. In short, restoring the Clinton-era level of taxation would significantly reduce the deficit, in and of itself. Howard Dean is the only political figure I have heard suggesting going back to the Clinton tax rates as a solution for everyone, however.

While taxes have gone down, outlays have gone up--way up. Federal spending was 18.2% of GDP in 2000; it is 25.4% of GDP now. We can disaggregate this 33% increase in the budget as a share of GDP. The defense budget took up 2% of GDP in 2000; it now takes up 4%, or twice as much. Most of the increase can be chalked up to the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, undertakings of most dubious utility. Spending on human resources has gone up more, from 11.4% of GDP to 17.1%, a 6.7% increase. Within that 6.7%, medicare, other health spending and social security have each added about 1% of GDP to the total, and "income security" payments have added 2% more. Those refer apparently to Supplemental Security Income, a little known program that pays disabled and poor elderly Americans from general revenues. The remaining 1% or so of the increase is divided among veterans' benefits and education.

One astonishing item caught my eye--one that certainly needs more explanation. Thanks to George W. Bush's impact on the budget, the national debt is more than twice what is was in 2000--yet interest payments are actually down as a share of GDP, down an entire point from 2.3% to 1.3%. Thanks to the growth of our economy and above all, I would guess, to the lowest interest rates in history over the last decade, we hardly pay more to service our debt now than we did ten years ago.

The source of our deficit, then, is pretty clear. About 1/4 of it is the responsibility of the Bush tax cuts and the recession, and another 1/6 is the fault of the Afghanistan and Iraq War. Yet another 1/6 comes from rising health care costs, and another 1/4 from increased social security payments and other government income maintenance. TARP initially helped balloon the deficit but TARP is now going to show a profit. And what about the notorious Obama stimulus? As of March 30, 2011, that program had included about $260 billion in tax relief--we have already accounted for that money--and $374 billion in spending over two years. The $187 billion annual spending per year amounts to about 1.2% of GDP, or about 1/8 of the total deficit.

What is to be done? We should stop talking about eliminating the deficit. Cutting it in half, to 4.5% of GDP, would bring it to roughly the normal level under recent Republican administrations, even in good times. A convenient table making this point is here. The easiest way to cut expenditures is to bring the troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan and put other limits on the growth of defense spending, which no one is talking about very much now. We must do something about health care costs, which the Obama Administration made a weak and probably unsuccessful attempt to do, and we have to change the formula for social security benefits to bring their increases in line with increased revenues. But above all, we have to raise taxes--not only by returning to the Clinton-era rates, but by raising the cap on taxable income for Social Security over the current $100,000 or so.

Indeed, the table I linked reveals a profound mystery. The recession has had a much worse effect on federal tax revenues than it has on GDP. GDP in constant dollars is now equal to what it was in 2007, but federal taxes are taking only 15% of it instead of 18% of it. Why is this? Is it because incomes are increasing at the high end of the scale, and those increases aren't being reflected in federal tax revenues? This is a mystery we need economists to answer.

The Ryan budget would make the deficit worse and take away the safety net for the elderly in another ten years. The good news is that, like Newt Gingrich's Medicare cuts in 1995-6, it seems likely to burst the Tea Party's political bubble and give the political edge to the Administration. But the Administration has also failed to make any serious proposal to deal with a very real fiscal crisis. The White House seems terrified of conforming to Republican stereotypes of Democrats as soft on defense and strong on taxes--even though right now, the country needs a smaller defense budget and, yes, higher taxes.

Collapsing authority

2011-04-23T11:35:00.002-04:00

I learned long ago that comparison is the best basis for judgements about people, societies, and historical periods. The human race has been measuring itself against ideals at least since Plato, but such measurements are actually quite arbitrary since they take no account of what is possible in real life and what is not. On the other hand, if, confronted with 100 adults, one notes four of them standing higher than the others, one can safely identify them as "tall." A batting average of .350 is outstanding because so few hitters manage to achieve it. Economic growth, unemployment, and even justice can all measure the same way.

And thus, I decided long ago, comparative history is by far the best way to make judgments about societies. One may compare in two dimensions, across space or across time. In Politics and War I did both. Now comparisons are on my mind because I am buried deeply in the early 1940s and, to a lesser extent, in the decades that proceeded them--and certain things are becoming increasingly clear to me. The United States and much of the world are suffering from a terrible crisis of authority, both because of an increasing emphasis on individual self-expression, and because the intellectual basis of authority has been destroyed. And that, I am convinced, is why we are proving largely unable to deal with the fourth great crisis in our national life.

The first half of the twentieth century, turbulent though it was, remains the great age of rationalism in American politics. Two centuries of the Enlightenment had convinced mankind that the application of science and reason could improve their lot. Americans believed in their democracy as a product of this ethos, and beginning around 1900, they began to accept the idea that reason and science could solve social problems as well. They did not, of course, go so far as Soviet Communists or German National Socialists, who claimed to use science and reason totally to transform society, economy, the gene pool, and human nature itself, but they believed in planning. Franklin Roosevelt, himself a farmer, first became interested in agricultural planning designed to match crops with the most suitable soil. Then he adopted the cause of public power, the planned development of energy resources (mainly hydroelectric power) so as to provide this new necessity at reasonable prices. And then, after the Depression struck, he adopted the idea that the nation needed economic planning to assure an essential level of prosperity. As I am discovering, his response to the Second World War also drew on careful calculations, and by 1943 his Administration was busily planning the postwar world that was to follow, including the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade.

Today the idea that reason and science can improve our lives survives, in a much less inspiring form, in graduate institutions like the John F. Kennedy School of Government, which do indeed provide a good deal of the personnel in Democratic institutions. But it is being increasingly driven out of our political life--and for this, there are at least three major reasons.

The first (not necessarily in order of importance) is the renaissance and triumph of free-market economics not only in the business and financial communities, but in the Academy. As a college student in the mid-1960s I learned that the government's role was necessary to keep employment high and prices stable. For several decades now students have learned that government intervention does nothing but harm and markets regulate themselves. We now have all the evidence we need to disprove this, but it looks to me as if the economics profession has recovered from a momentary panic in 2008-9. The idea that government does nothing but economic harm by spending too much money is increasingly the conventional wisdom, and the Republicans are scoring extraordinary successes (the scope of which will only become apparent in the next couple of years) in eliminating much of the domestic role the federal government, using the fiscal crisis as an excuse.

The second is the destruction of the rationalist ideal in the humanities. English and history departments no longer acknowledge the existence of objective reality. Language, many professors will now tell you, cannot mirror objective reality, only the feelings and interests of individual speakers, or of their gender, race, or class. In short, they have destroyed the Tower of Babel that had been built up over the past two centuries, enabling us to use a common language to speak of the common good. I don't suppose many professors who have embraced the new orthodoxy read this blog, but I can imagine them right now arguing that the rationalism which I revere simply enforced the interests of white males. But it didn't. The abolition of slavery and the advent of women's suffrage were both supported on rationalist grounds. Indeed, it was the use of language that did not acknowledge class, race or gender in the U.S. Constitution that allowed the excluded to claim their rights.

Thus, conservatives, relying on the ideal of the free market, argue that any "common good" can only come from the relentless pursuit of individual, private goods, while academic liberals argue that the very idea of the common good is an illusion. It's no wonder under the circumstances that we now accept 9.5% unemployment, almost unprecedented inequality of wealth, and the relentless movement of jobs overseas as normal. What basis is left on which to criticize these decisions? And now the control of American institutions is passing into the hands of Generation X, which with rare exceptions has never had any faith in institutions, since they grew up in an era of failing institutions, especially, in many cases, the institution most important to them, their families.

It is a great irony that participation at the highest levels of our society has been opened up to women, minorities, and gays during the same period in which the idea of "common good" has gone into eclipse. And while these changes certainly mean greater justice for minority individuals, there is not much evidence that they mean more justice for all. Last week I watched a Frontline documentary, now almost a year old, Obama's Deal, the passage of the health care bill. I learned a great deal, and I was introduced to Janet Ignagny, a Boomer who surely must be one of the ten most powerful women in America. I had not yet heard of her and I doubt many of you had either, but she is the President of the trade association of American health insurance companies, and she played a key role in the design of the health care bill, insisting that it had to include a mandate that would force every American to buy health insurance. (Candidate Barack Obama had opposed such a measure, and it is that measure that may result in the bill being declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.) She essentially sold the support of the industry in exchange for various safeguards for its interests--just as anyone in her position, man or woman, black or white, gay or straight, would have done. Women frequently argued in the 1970s that the ascendance of women to leading positions would humanize our institutions and make them run according to different, more feminine values. The evidence is now overwhelming that that will not happen. Three or our last four Secretaries of State have been women, but none of them has demonstrated any inclinations towards pacifism--Colin Powell, indeed, was more restrained in his attitude towards force than any of them.

We must take our history as it comes. To one brought up on progress in the 1950s and early 1960s the last 45 years have been a great disappointment, but they obviously represented a necessary stage. Eventually the problems of the free market will demand another serious attack. Eventually rewards in our society will be sufficiently widely distributed among genders and races so that we can once again focus on peoples' performance in office, rather than their genitalia or skin color. I hope I can be around at least to see the beginning of these changes.

How laws are passed

2011-04-16T09:27:00.004-04:00

Late in my elementary school career, I remember, we had what amounted to a civics textbook. It included a complicated diagram describing how the U.S. Congress passed laws. First they were introduced in one chamber, let us say the House of Representatives. They were referred to a committee for hearings, and the committee called witnesses, questioned them, and wrote a report. The bill went to the floor for passage (I don't think the textbook mentioned the then-crucial role of the House Rules Committee), and if it passed, it went over to the Senate. Hearings took place there, too, and after another report, the bill reached the floor for debate, possible amendment, and passage. If the two versions now differed, the leaders of the two chambers appointed a conference committee to work the differences out--and if all went well, the bill then passed.

That system operated during the greatest era of American legislative history, from 1933 to sometime in the 1970s. I saw it in action in the summer of 1963 when I worked on Capitol Hill myself. That was a momentous year in American history, and I (and many other Senators) spent many hours in two hearings in particular. While the Senate Commerce Committee considered the public accomodations portion of the Civil Rights Bill, I saw testimony from George Wallace, from the commissioners of the major American sports leagues, from Mayor Ivan Allen of Atlanta (who, in an act of supreme political courage, supported the bill), and from an unreconstructed bigot invited to testify by Strom Thurmond who quoted data on the brain weights of various races. (Even Strom realized he had gone to far that time.) Later I heard testimony on the Test Ban Treaty, including opposition from the father of the H-Bomb, Edward Teller.

Times have changed.

Less than two weeks ago, Representative Paul Ryan, the new Republican star, introduced his plan to cut, in theory, $4 trillion from the federal budget over the next decade. (That is not, by the way, nearly as much as it sounds--$400 billion a year just happens to equal the permanent deficit that George W. Bush created with a combination of tax cuts and wars.) His plan, as everyone knows by now, would turn Medicaid into a block grant to the states and make Medicare a subsidy allowing seniors to buy private insurance plans. That last provision is so outrageously bad for America that it is hard to believe it was ever adopted. Medicare's administrative costs are notoriously much lower than those of private insurance. Nor does Medicare pay its executives multi-million dollar salaries or its shareholders handsome dividends. There is no way that private insurance is going to deliver care more cheaply than Medicare does. Ryan, of course, claimed that "competition" would lower costs, but he didn't mention that the health care industry is already exempt, disgracefully, from the antitrust laws. Ryan claims to be a devotee of the free market--perhaps he should try reading Adam Smith. "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion," Smith wrote more than two hundred years ago, "but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices." The Ryan budget would not just extend the Bush tax cuts: it would cut the top marginal rate further, down to 25%.

Yesterday, just ten days after Ryan unveiled the plan, the Republican House passed it unamended. There were no hearings, no expert testimony, and virtually no debate over an attempt to undo about 80 years of American public policy. The Tea Party Republicans are acting with the fervor of the French Jacobins in the Convention (1792-94). The Republicans in Congress now consist of those who belong to the Tea Party and those terrified of primary defeat by some one who does. They have no time for discussion, for evidence, or for rational thought. They have rammed the legislation through.

Of course, it is not going to pass--although the possibility of the Republicans securing full control of the government in less than two years cannot be ruled out. But they don't care about that either. Their vote was a sound bite, a video clip, nothing more. And that is what has happened to our political system. President Obama has at last found the courage to stand up for the America he grew up in; but his speech was in its own way a sound bite as well. If anyone wanted realistically to rewrite the diagram I read in elementary school about how legislation is made, they would do it with sound bites, clips from press conferences, brief debates, and signing ceremonies. Meanwhile, the actual details of legislation are written largely by lobbyists, or in think tanks. The Republicans at the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute live in an echo chamber dominated by libertarian ideologies, and certainly can't be bothered to do a reality check on their free-market fantasies.

Now let me see if I can my own small bit to re-introduce facts into the discussion. The Ryan Plan is forcing everyone to look seriously at budget numbers, and on NPR the other day I heard Howard Dean boldly make the rather obvious statement that we would have to go back to the Clinton era tax rates not just for the wealthy, but for everyone. President Obama may indeed have to go that far in the end, as he most certainly should have last fall, because the Republican House will never pass a bill simply restoring the higher rates for the wealthy, and he will be forced to let all the Bush-era tax cuts expire. Here is a table showing the evolution of top marginal tax rates over the last 100 years.

[I wanted to put the table in the blog but I am running into a common malfunction with the blog editor and it is not adding images. If anyone knows the fix, please let me know.

The table illustrates the paradox of twentieth century history: the two world wars, catastrophic for western civilization, also gave the national government the resources to do a great deal of good. It also shows that it is possible without drastic consequences to raise the top rates in the midst of a depression even worse than this one. And look at the table, as well as the graph, to see the levels--equivalent to several million dollars at today's prices--at which income was capped during the 1950s. There were, of course, loopholes. Those who possessed a large fortune could invest it in municipal bonds tax free. But those rates corresponded with robust economic growth.

I return to the theme of last week's post. Emotion, not rationality, dominates our politics today. One of our parties has become entirely faith-based, abandoning any pretense of gathering evidence to support its propositions. The other is too beholden to corporate interests actually to put forward an alternative to social Darwinism as a world view. The Enlightenment dream, that knowledge alone would improve the world, has turned out to be false. Knowledge is not enough. But it can help.

The End of an Era?

2011-04-08T21:02:00.008-04:00

The government shutdown is in the news, but I doubt very much that it will look extremely significant thirty years from now. Yes, the Democrats may successfully save funding for Planned Parenthood, but they have already agreed to cuts big enough to do a great deal of harm to important parts of the federal government without making any significant impact upon the deficit. We all remember that Bill Clinton prevailed politically the last time we had a shutdown, but I also remember that he had reacted to the Republican victory in 1994 by announcing that the era of big government was over. Now it looks to me as if an era of American civilization--though not, perhaps, western civilization--that has lasted about a century is coming to an end.

Quite simply, that was the era in which Americans believed that they could, through their government, apply reason and science to improve their lives and insure a certain degree of justice within the framework of a modern, capitalist economy. Capitalism's extraordinary capacity to generate inequality had become apparent before the First World War, and two younger generations--the Progressives (born about 1842-62) and the Missionaries (about 1863-1884) had reacted with various reform movements. The accidental accession of Theodore Roosevelt in 1901 brought these ideas into the White House, and Roosevelt talked specifically about using the power of the executive branch and the Sherman Anti-Trust Act to curb monopoly power and give the American people a "square deal." He did not get far, but the new generation got its chance in 1932 as a result of the Depression--and as the British say, they took it. The New Deal aimed specifically at regulating the excesses of the financial system, regulating agricultural and industrial markets, insuring the rights of labor, increasing the tax burden on the wealthy even in the midst of the depression, putting the unemployed to work, and providing social security in old age. While far from a complete success, it won the support of well over half the American people and enshrined a new way of thinking. The Nomadic Lost generation (b. about 1885-1904) was not won over to the New Deal, but some of its more liberal members played key roles in it nonetheless. The sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of the GI generation in the Second World War created a new sense of government responsibility to the people, and even the Lost collaborated in the construction of a new postwar society. By the time the Republicans regained the White House in 1953 they had no real desire to undo the achievements of the last twenty years.

"When I was a young man," the great Missionary W. E. B. Dubois (1868-1963) wrote in the late 1930s, "the foundations of present culture were laid, the way was charted, the progress toward certain great goals was undoubted and inevitable. There was room for argument concerning details and methods and possible detours in the onsweep of civilization, but the fundamental facts were clear, unquestioned and unquestionable." So it was too in my youth, and especially in the first half the 1960s, when JFK and LBJ tried to extend the New Deal tradition still further. Yet as so happens, the apotheosis of that particular civilization also marked the beginning of the end. The Vietnam War, that awful product of GI hubris, accelerated the process, but perhaps it was inevitable in any case. In 2000, at the end of my book American Tragedy, I drew on Strauss and Howe and predicted some kind of crisis and civic rebirth. I was right about the former; it seems now I was wrong about the latter, and I can see why.

The United States has in many ways been on a downward path since the age of Reagan. Reagan introduced two critical new trends: the gradual erosion of our progressive tax code (Reagan did not, in fact cut taxes--he shifted them to the middle and lower classes), and the decline of union rights and the de-industrialization of America. But Reagan was a GI, as were the leaders of the Congress in the 1980s, and the process was not allowed to go that far. The deregulation of the S & L industry in the late 1980s was catastrophic, but then, at least, the perpetrators faced punishment. 5000 industry insiders drew jail time for S & L fraud; not one major player has been convicted of anything for the crash of 2007. That is because in the interim new generations have come to the fore, with completely new principles.

The Silent generation (born 1925-42) got the deregulatory ball rolling. Alan Greenspan, Robert Rubin, and many of the other key players in the process were Silents. But a Boomer President and an increasingly Boomer Republican Congress repealed the Glass-Steagall Act. The process accelerated under George W. Bush. By cutting taxes and embarking upon two very long wars at the same time, Bush created a new permanent federal deficit even in good times. That has turned out to be a critical achievement for him and those on his side of the aisle, because it has made it absolutely impossible for the federal government to respond adequately to the economic crisis that deregulation brought about.

To Prophet generations like the Boomers, Strauss and Howe argued, falls the duty of giving society a new direction when the old order collapsed. We have failed that test, and our day in power is just about over, even though the youngest Boomers have only just turned 50. Why? Conservative Boomers, like conservatives of every generation except perhaps the GIs, have been devotees of the free market, which is really another form of social Darwinism. The most transformational Boomer President was George W. Bush, who crippled the finances of the federal government and started an endless involvement in the Middle East. But what about liberal Boomers?

Forty years ago our parents viewed liberal Boomers protesting the Vietnam War as spoiled children. It turns out that they were right, although not perhaps in exactly the way we believed. Liberal Boomers--including the few liberal politicians of any importance like Bill Clinton--have pretty much abandoned the New Deal tradition. They have stood by or collaborated in the de-industrialization of America and the deregulation of the financial system. Instead, they have focused on the rights of minorities, women, and gays. Those were important issues, but they stood out in the 1960s and 1970s largely because other at least equally important economic issues had been solved by our parents. We took those achievements for granted and assumed they would go on forever. They would not. We have secured minorities' equal right to participate--but in what?

Universities were a big part of the New Deal coalition, and provided a lot of the ideas that went into social and economic reform from the 1930s through the 1960s. The economists who taught me as a freshman were focused above all on keeping employment high, the legacy of their youth. They gave way to free-marketeers who almost totally dominate the economics profession now--and who, as the film Inside Job showed, are rewarded with six-figure consulting contracts. Many historians also focused upon the role of the state in society and the economy. Now those topics are virtually ignored by the faculty of our leading colleges and universities.

And that is why, it seems to me, today, in the midst of an economic, budgetary and political crisis, there is really no counterpoint to Republicans' continuing efforts to destroy the government. Roosevelt seized on the Great Depression as an opportunity to build up the federal government. They have seized upon the Great Recession as an opportunity to destroy government at every level. The punditocracy, with virtually no exceptions, has cooperated now in promoting the idea that cutting the deficit is our most important task--and no one takes the idea of tax increases seriously any more. There will be no Boomer President to restore a stronger role of government in the economy.

Generation X has gained enormously in power during the last three years. It occupies the White House and makes up most of the Republican leadership in the House of Representatives. And Generation X has no memory either of the New Deal or the postwar High. It spent its childhood amidst collapsing institutions, particularly the institution of the family, and it emerged with a lifelong distrust. The vast majority of Gen Xers view our crisis as a purely individual matter and are not interested in uniting for the common good. A Gen X Congressman, Paul Ryan, has just introduced a plan to destroy Medicare just in time for his own generation to retire. One cannot understand how that could happen without generational theory.

The attack on government has also become an attack on reason in public life. It is no accident that the darlings of the new right have included people like Dan Quayle, Sarah Palin, and Michelle Bachmann, who actually thought that the Revolutionary War had begun in Concord, New Hampshire. Intelligence is now seen as an attribute of an out-of-touch elite. It is clear that the Republican plans for health care, the economy and the budget are catastrophic--cutting government at all levels will impede recovery, not help it, and the free market is what has gotten us where we are today. But they do not care. The rationalist impulse is only one human impulse, and not by any means the strongest one. For the time being it seems that it has had its day. We live in a world of sound bites and images, with little time for reflection and understanding, and that is making it harder and harder to deal with our problems.

The Millennial generation (born about 1982-2002) might have been the new GIs, had the older generations enlisted them, too, in a great crusade. Now it seems that will not happen. Some of them are engaged in small-scale crusades of their own, using their own brains and their cooperative spirit to solve problems. That holds out a little hope for the present and more for the future. But for the next decade or two there seems little hope for any escape from our new Gilded Age. Boomers lived through a great era of American politics. Unfortunately for them and their children and grandchildren, it came to an end as they reached adulthood. Yet we can remain faithful to the best of our past, just as Europeans like Stendhal kept alive the ideals of the French Revolution in the 1820s, secure in their faith that such times would come again--as indeed, eventually, they did.

P.S. Last night, after an agreement was reached to avert a shutdown, President Obama said that Americans of different beliefs had come together and hailed "the biggest annual spending cut in history." Yes: the Republicans won on the principle of dismantling the federal government at home, the Democrats won on funding for planned parenthood and powers for the EPA that will never be effectively applied. (As of 8:20 this morning EDT, no one seems to know whether funding for PBS survived or not.) That is a fitting commentary on the power of the two parties today, and on how President Obama increasingly sees himself: a Democrat on social issues and a moderate Republican on economic ones.

Bismarck, Kissinger, and the New York Times

2011-04-03T09:11:00.003-04:00

Yesterday the New York Times printed one of the funniest corrections that has appeared in that august paper for some time. It read:

"Because of a production error, a review on the cover of the Book Review, about 'Bismarck: A Life,' by Jonathan Steinberg, omits the byline in some copies. As noted in the table of contents and in the contributor’s biographical note, the review is by Henry A. Kissinger."

The review arrived on my doorstep this morning and I read it with interest. Henry Kissinger has never been more than a part-time historian. He was trained as a political scientist and became a Presidential adviser, diplomat, and Secretary of State. While his books, such as Diplomacy, are full of provocative observations about historical events, they do not always show, shall we say, a determination to get to the bottom of them. My late adviser Ernest R. May noted in the Times when Diplomacy appeared that it was full of errors that would have drawn a marginal comment on an undergraduate paper. To my amazement, Kissinger's review of this book also contains two such errors.

The first error is subtle, but nonetheless highly significant. Bismarck, Kissinger writes, "won over public opinion by granting universal manhood suffrage--making Prussia one of the first states in Europe to do so." Now Prussia, Bismarck's country of origin, was the largest, by far, of the German states that Bismarck forged into a single unit in 1866 and 1871. But Bismarck made no changes to the suffrage laws in Prussia. Prussia had secured "universal manhood suffrage" as a result of a revolution in 1848-9--but not universal equal manhood suffrage. The voters in Prussia were divided into three classes based upon income, and votes of members of the richest class were worth about 20 times as much as those of the majority of voters in the poorest class. Bismarck never changed this system withing Prussia. He did grant universal equal manhood suffrage for the Reichstag, the legislative body in the new North German Confederation (1866) and German Empire (1870) that he created, but limited the powers of that legislature mainly to economic issues. He made certain, in short, that Prussia itself--which included more than half of the new German state--would be dominated by conservative aristocrats like himself. To confuse so badly the distinction between Prussian institutions on the one hand, and those of the German Empire on the other, is an astonishing mistake for one of Kissinger's background to make.

Secondly, Kissinger writes, "Until Bismarck appeared on the scene, it had generally been assumed that nationalism and liberalism represented opposite poles; he rejected that proposition." The exact opposite is true. Liberalism, especially in Germany, had been completely nationalistic, and German liberals had tried and failed to unify Germany in 1848-9. Conservatism and nationalism had been thought of as opposites before Bismarck, because conservatism believed in the rights of individual monarchs, which unification would reduce or even destroy. As a contemporary observer noted, “Count Bismarck made liberal ideas and energies subservient to conservative ends.”

When one reaches a certain level of eminence one's thoughts automatically become publishable. That in turn leads to temptations to which I am glad never to have been exposed. I'm glad I was taught to get my facts straight and to read the most authoritative works on subjects of interest. None of this is designed, by the way, to make any judgment about Jonathan Steinberg's book--I doubt very much that these errors originated with him.