How much is Trump responsible for?

 I spent the last week in Paris, which for me makes for days of restaurants, movies, bookstores, and museums.  When I was living in Cambridge and its environs in the 1970s this area was a lot like it, but it isn't anymore.  The break allowed me to think more clearly about the state of our own nation, and to perhaps get a better look at the great, ever-changing forest of American history, zooming backwards from that one orange-colored tree that so dominates our lives.  Yes, our country is in a terrible mess, and yes, we have a president who is truly, in his own way, beyond compare.  But how much of it is exactly his fault, and how many of our current misfortunes can we trace directly to him? It's an interesting question.

Trump cannot reasonably be blamed for the transformation of our economy over the last fifty years or so.  He was not even a key figure in making it happen, nor does he seem to me have benefited much from it before he entered politics.  The New Deal era began to die in the 1970s.  The Republican Party had never really favored it, although Eisenhower and Nixon had lived with and even expanded upon some of its achievements, but by 1976 Ronald Reagan, who believed that government was the solution not the problem, was very nearly the dominant figure in the Republican Party, and he definitely took it over four years later.  Something parallel had happened among the Democrats, where the new generation of 1974 had run against big government and special interests and had begun to replace the economic issues of previous decades with social ones.  Reagan introduced long-term peacetime fiscal irresponsibility into American government in order to make the rich richer, and the deregulation of financial markets began.  While Gordon Gecko was about as old as Donald Trump, he looms in retrospect as far more of a harbinger of things to come, since he worked in finance, not real estate.  George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton each took major steps to cut Reagan's deficits, and by 2000 Clinton had created a significant federal surplus, but George W. Bush immediately returned to Reagan's permanent deficits, while allowing financialization to run wild and create the housing bubble.  Barack Obama in 2009 might have revived some of the principles of the New Deal in response to the 2008 crash, but he chose not to, convinced that there was nothing fundamentally unsound about our new system.  He did cut Bush's deficits substantially--as every Democratic President since JFK had done--but he was the last Democratic president to do so.  Trump cut taxes again and the deficit ballooned again, exploding to unprecedented heights during the COVID response, and Biden did not reverse the damage.  The deficit in Biden's last fiscal year, 2024, $1.83 trillion, was nearly twice as high as the deficit in Trump's last pre-pandemic year, 2019, when it was just $984 billion.  Meanwhile the share of the richest 1 percent and ten percent of our nation has grown steadily, while the lower half of the population has been stuck at the same level.

Trump has claimed to repudiate the bipartisan consensus on foreign policy, but even this is only a half truth.  The end of the Cold War under Reagan ushered in a new idea of American indispensability and supremacy, celebrated publicly by both Bushes, Clinton, and Obama.  More specifically, 9/11 unleashed an unprecedented era of American imperialism, marked by attempts to replace hostile Middle Eastern regimes with cooperative, friendly clients.  Begun by George W. Bush in Afghanistan and Iraq, these attempts were continued by Obama in Libya and in Syria--but none of these initiatives left the target nation better off or turned it into a reliable friend of the US.  And now, two years into his second term, Trump has embarked upon what is turning into the biggest catastrophe yet, the attempt to complete the neoconservative agenda by removing or crippling the Islamic regime in Iran.  That was already orthodoxy among the Republican leadership thanks in large part to AIPAC and the pro-Israel lobby. Mitch McConnell had done everything it could to try to stop Barack Obama's nuclear deal with Iran, and essentially recognized Benjamin Netanyahu, not President Obama, as his the spokesman for his preferred middle eastern policy.  And it was Biden, not Trump, who allowed Israel completely to destroy the Gaza strip and leave its population homeless after October 7.

Writing in 1997, Bill Strauss and Neil Howe had argued in their book The Fourth Turning that during the next twenty years, a great crisis would allow a new president to mobilize the nation, solve critical problems, and build a new political consensus as FDR and Lincoln had done.  Their list of possible crises included (but was not limited to) a terrorist attack, an economic crisis, and an epidemic.  All three have now come to pass, and the first two at least did produce a broad surge of renewed patriotism, but Bush II and Obama failed to deal adequately with the first two, and the third one divided the country more than ever.  Trump understood one key point.  Disastrous consensus economic and foreign policies and the failure to respond effectively to these crises had utterly discredited the leadership of the two major parties, leaving an opening for a nationally known demagogue like himself.  A large plurality of Republicans and a near-plurality of the country voted for him in 2016 not in spite of his opposition to consensus positions but because of them.   

Trump in his second term, however, has made two kinds of changes that no one else would have made.  To begin with, in foreign policy, he has treated the nation's oldest friends as enemies and even expressed designs upon the territory of Denmark and Canada.  In Ukraine he has abandoned the role of the defender of nations against aggression that the US played for most of the twentieth century.  And while the war against Iran was already part of the neoconservative playbook, he has waged it with unprecedented fecklessness, taking no account of what was going to happen, blindly following the advice of Prime Minister Netanyahu against the views of much of his own team, and doing unprecedented harm to the world economy.  He has also crippled our foreign policy establishment, eliminating USAID and ignoring the State Department, while private citizens, including his own son-in-law, take over the most important diplomatic assignments without any oversight, and all the while using this role to build up their own economic power.  We have never seen anything remotely like this before.

And at home, Trump has purposefully, consciously degraded our entire political process in an equally unprecedented fashion.  I am not merely referring to his election denialism, but to the whole tenor of politics as he practices them.  He constantly uses contemptuous language towards the whole opposition party, towards media critics, and towards anyone who gets in his way.  This is exactly the kind of language that Washington and Jefferson, who occupied the White House at the beginning and the end of an equally contentious era, warned us against.  No president--including Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War--ever used language like his towards opponents before.  Trump also has no understanding of or respect for our Constitution and how our institutions are supposed to work.  The whole idea of bureaucracies applying rules impartially is anathema to him--perhaps because he is such a chronic rule-breaker himself--and he has filled the most sensitive positions with flunkies who understand that their job is to reward his friends and punish his enemies.  He has found numerous ways to use the presidency to make money for himself.  And now he has offered every adult American $5,000 for their votes in the upcoming election.  

Strauss and Howe showed that from 1774 to about 1794, from 1861 through 1865, and from 1933 through 1945, the United States established and then re-established confidence in our institutions and in ourselves by mobilizing effectively to deal with great national problems.  They expected their (and my) generation to produce a new Lincoln or FDR who would do the same.  According to the 80-year rhythm that they identified, that process should have been completed by now.  I expect Trump to leave office in January 2029 if not sooner.  He might be replaced by someone equally disruptive.  The two parties don't seem likely to select very impressive candidates in 2028 either, and I expect at least one tech mogul to try for the White House then.  But no matter who wins, I can't at this moment imagine how they might create some new national consensus comparable to the ones that emerged from our previous great crises.  Entropy and fragmentation may have gone too far.

What makes a radical?

 It took several months, but a copy of Dangerous, Dirty, Violent and Young, the autobiography of Zayd Ayers Dohrn, the son of late 1960s Weathermen Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, found its way to me via the local library consortium this week.  [I will continue to use Weathermen as a gender-inclusive term--not least because they themselves did.] It took me just two days to read through it.  Zayd, now hearing 50, is an academic himself (I will use his first name to avoid confusion with his mother.)  He has written a very well-researched book about his notorious parents, drawing on long talks with them and their co-revolutionaries and family members, as well as on very copious FBI files.  Despite some minor splits which only someone my age would be likely to catch--James Chaney, who was murdered along with Mickey Schwerner and Andrew Goodman in 1964 in Mississippi, was a local Mississippi man, not another student from the North, and the Book of the Month Club in the 1950s did not distribute paperbacks--he does a good job of recreating his young parents' student world.  He is also very frank about their underground activities, tentatively identifying his mother as one of two bombers of the Capitol Building in 1970 (she would neither confirm nor deny) and detailing their peripheral involvement in other famous crimes, such as the prison break that sprung Timothy Leary in California.  They were not charged for any of these crimes after turning themselves in in late 1980, because the FBI had had to close the cases after its own wrongdoing during investigations had come to light.   His mother did have to spend some months in prison not long afterwards because she had helped create fake IDs that were used in a bank robbery in New York in 1981 in which several people were killed, but the court ordered her release after she refused to talk.  Subsequently both of them re-established careers as a lawyer (Dohrn) and teacher (Ayers), remaining politically active in Chicago, and eventually becoming acquainted with Barack Obama. 

As I have mentioned many times, I saw the emergence of the New Left first hand in the late 1960s as an observer and a critic.  Two of my best college friends became deeply involved with it--although not in any illegal activity.  Both abandoned its views within a few more years.  Steve Kelman, who was one year behind me, captured the atmosphere of that time brilliantly in his early memoir, Push Comes to Shove.  Neither Kelman nor I, for different reasons, ever bought the radical line of the SDS.  He was a proud Norman Thomas socialist.  I was, first of all, a proud liberal Democrat even after I turned against the Vietnam War, and secondly, a student of Orwell, who had handed in his dissertation on the development of Orwell's thought just a couple of weeks before the Harvard SDS occupied University Hall.  The SDS reminded me too much of the totalitarian movements Orwell had polemicized against.  I was also influenced by the social psychologist Thomas Pettigrew.  I took his extraordinary course in race relations in the fall of 1968, and he talked at some length about the damage that the Black Power movement--to say nothing of the Black Panthers--had done to the civil rights movement.

I am not going to narrate the various activities of Ayers and Dohrn in any great detail, fascinating though they were, but I will talk about their early lives and the key turning points in their revolutionary careers, in order to try to get at the question I have been intermittently wondering about for 60 years: why, exactly, did a significant number of my contemporaries decide, within just a few years, that our country and its elite were irretrievably evil, and any and all possible means needed to be used to try to overthrow its government and society?  And why do significant numbers of young people still adopt such views today, even though there is no violent underground now?

Neither Dohrn nor Ayers, unlike a number of other leading student revolutionaries, were Red Diaper babies whose parents had been communists in the 1930s or 1940s.  Dorhn's father was the children of Jewish immigrants who had married two Protestants (the first one died young), changed the family's name from Ohrnstein to Dorn, and struggled with some success to reach the middle class.  He was, by his daughter's account, a racist, and voted Republican.  Bernadine, born in 1942, was the first member of her family to attend college, at Miami University of Ohio.  Bill Ayers, born two years later, was well-off--his father ran a large electric power company in Chicago, and was a typical liberal Republican of that era.  He arrived at the University of Michigan in 1963--where the SDS had been founded one year earlier. He tried to join the Freedom Summer project in Mississippi in late 1964 but found that it had come to an end, partly because of the passage of the Civil Rights Act.  He dropped out of college and spent a year in the Merchant Marine. Dohrn's boyfriend had talked her out of going to Mississippi in early 1964, and she had gone to the University of Chicago Law School in the fall of that year. In the summer of 1966 she became involved in Martin Luther King Jr.'s protests in the Chicago area, where King said he had encountered more bitter hatred than he had ever seen in the South.  She joined SDS then. She was beautiful, often provocatively dressed, and charismatic, and she almost immediately became a leading figure in the organization.

Ayers, meanwhile, returned to Michigan in the fall of 1965 as the Vietnam War was heating up, and joined SDS almost at once. After being arrested in a protest, he dropped out again and went to work at the Children's Community School in downtown Detroit. There he met his first love, a young woman from a wealthy family named Diana Oughton, who also became a revolutionary and was eventually blown up with two comrades in a bomb factory in Greenwich village in early 1970.  By the middle of 1967, with the Vietnam War getting bigger and bigger, they both quit the school to become full-time activists.

In the summer of 1969 the SDS held a famous national convention in Chicago dominated by a split between the Maoist Progressive Labor Party on the one hand--whose Harvard members had defied a majority SDS vote NOT to occupy University Hall and gone ahead a few months earlier--and a revolutionary faction led by Dohrn, which, according to Zayd, believed that white revolutionaries had to ally with the Black Panthers.  Dohrn and some of her allies then spent several weeks in Cuba which, she acknowledged much later, convinced her that revolution in the United States was still possible. Ayers and others, including Kathy Boudin, daughter of one of the leading left wing lawyers in the US, were now going through struggle sessions to enforce ideological purity and group sex orgies to break down bourgeois values.  The new group became the Weathermen, and eventually the Weather Underground.  Some also began learning how to handle dynamite, and on October 6, a big explosion in a Chicago park that destroyed a statue of a policeman kicked off the Days of Rage, several days of violent protests in which the Weathermen battled the police, who responded with mass arrests.  Two months later, Fred Hampton, the leader of Chicago's Black Panthers, was murdered in the middle of the night during a Chicago police raid.  The Weathermen, including Dohrn and Ayers, decided to go underground and go to war with the government in alliance with the Black Panthers.    Their bombings began in early January 1970, and their most destructive planned bombing--of a dance at Fort Dix, New Jersey, which might have killed dozens of soldiers and their girlfriends--never came off, because the planners, including Diana Oughton, were killed when their Greenwich Village townhouse exploded.  The bombing campaign peaked in 1970-2, including large late night explosions in both the US Capitol and the Pentagon, and tapered off until 1975.  As Zayd explains, the bombs were generally planted during the day by well-dressed young women posing as secretaries, inspired by Muslim Algerians who passed as Europeans and planted bombs in soda fountains as depicted in the film, The Battle of Algiers.  They did take precautions to try to insure that no one would be hurt, setting the bombs to explode late at night and telephoning in warnings.  That was not all.  In 1970 Ayers and Dohrn took $25,000 from friends of Timothy Leary, the former Harvard Professor turned LSD advocate, to organize his breakout from a California prison.  Smuggled out of the country, he eventually reached Algeria and moved in with fugitive Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver.  They fell out not long after, and the US government eventually caught up with Leary in Afghanistan.  

Dohrn, Ayers, and eventually their children remained on the run throughout the 1970s.  The government had to drop most of its cases against the Weathermen because of misconduct on its own part, and Dohrn and Ayers turned themselves in in 1980.  They were not charged with any further crimes. During the rest of the 1970s, however, underground Weathermen assisted the underground Black Liberation Army in carrying out bank robberies and other crimes.  They often provided white female drivers for getaway cars, whom the police were unlikely to stop.  Dohrn worked for a while an upscale baby clothing store in Manhattan, where she would ask for driver's licenses from customers who wrote checks, memorize and write down the data, and give it to underground figures who would use it to secure copies of the licenses that could be used to rent cars for robberies.  One such car was used in the robbery in Nyack, New York in 1981, in which one security guard and two policemen were killed.  The perpetrators were caught immediately, and served long sentences. Dohrn's connection to the crime was discovered but she was not charged.  The government jailed her for months to try to compel testimony, but she would not talk, and eventually a judge had to release her.

I turn now from this narrative, based on Zayd's far more detailed account, to the question of why.  My answers are speculative, based literally on decades of reading and thinking about these issues. 

Adolescence involves developing one's own world view, and Jean Piaget pointed out that many adolescents easily fall for sweeping explanations of what makes the world work.  In addition, I am now convinced, many of us carry around the effects of trauma that we have literally inherited from our parents, often without even knowing what their source was.  The trauma makes one feel that he or she must have done something terrible to warrant it.  It can also leave one with enormous unresolved anger. All these elements, in my opinion, played into late 1960s activism.

The Vietnam War  was indeed a terrible mistake that inflicted enormous cruelty on the people of Indochina. took the lives of about 58,000 young Americans, and crippled others for life.  My question, however, is why so many young people not only opposed it, but also eagerly concluded that it proved that the whole of American society was irretrievably imperialist, racist, and unjust, and that any means could properly be used to bring it down.  Following the late Alice Miller, a German Jewish psychoanalyst, I am convinced that this world view temporarily relieved its adherents of their own guilt, which they had suffered without any idea of where it came from.  It also allowed them violently to express their anger.  I saw that anger first hand in many Harvard demonstrations, and it was terrifying.  This may also explain why the SDS and the Weathermen both began terrorizing their own members, forcing them in struggle sessions to admit terrible ideological error, as Dohrn herself eventually had to do while underground, confessing to accusations of sexism herself.  Because they had no idea where their guilt and rage come from, they had to keep finding new targets upon which to vent it.  And some of them eventually decide that only by resorting to illegal violence can they prove that they are actually worthy people on the right side of history.

The Black Panthers--who have now been mythologized beyond recognition even in the mainstream media--also exemplified` this, I think, and they played a key role in the splits in the SDS.  They were waging a generational fight against their older generations, who had endured so much and worked so patiently to overcome legal segregation.  The Panthers distinguished themselves by their willingness to resort to violence, especially against the police, and the white radicals accepted their self-image as the only true representatives of the black urban population.  That is why they continued to help them carry out robberies after they had all gone underground.  The white radicals were looking for absolute virtue, and they chose to identify it with the Panthers because the Panthers claimed to be fighting racism.  It is easier for many people--and here I speak from personal experience, too--to feel pain on behalf of other people than on their own.  It is also easier to locate virtue among people that one does not know very well, and one of the enduring left wing legacies of that period is the idea that virtue can be found only among the oppressed.  That is the key to wokeness.  Indeed, in Zayd's book one finds the direct ancestors of nearly every major tenet of contemporary leftism. The ideas of white privilege and intersectionality, which had not yet been named, come up again and again.  There was a period in the late 1960s when any blow against society and its values suddenly became heroic, and Dohrn herself fell victim to this when she expressed some admiration for the daring of the Manson family. 

Despite the Vietnam War, the society that many of my contemporaries rebelled against was healthier in many ways than ours today.  It had made several decades worth of dramatic progress against racism and against economic inequality--the latter of which soon came to a screeching halt.  That however made no difference.  To me, the whole radical revolutionary movement illustrates a disease to which modern society remains vulnerable.  I have not written this  post to suggest how things might have been different or how recurrences might be avoided, but merely to provide a different perspective on why it breaks out, and to suggest that it undeniably grows out of very real aspects of human nature.

False premises

 It's an irony of my life that while I wanted as much or more than anything to belong to some kind of larger institution that shared my values, I have instead become more of an intellectual lone wolf every decade.  So it is what while I have for the last 12 years subscribed to the same newspapers that I did through the 1970s, I continually find myself taking issue both with their opinion pages and their reporting. Two noteworthy examples of this popped up during the last week.

Last Tuesday, in the New York Times, the venerable Thomas Friedman told Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, the victorious Democratic candidate for Senator in Michigan, how he should change his position on Israel and Palestine so as to win the election in the fall.  Astonishingly enough, he recommended that the candidate adopt Friedman's own position in favor of a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine, and endorsing "the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state."  Criticizing Hamas, Friedman blames them for wrecking the Saudi peace initiative that he has personally taken credit for for 24 years, a proposal for peace with Israel in exchange for a full Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories, by starting the second Intifada.  Any solution except a two-state solution, Friedman says, "is a geopolitical loser for America and a loser for Palestinians, Israelis, Arab Americans, Jewish Americans and Muslim Americans, and every other American."

That might be true, as General Giap once said, but it is also irrelevant.  It is irrelevant because the government of Israel in the last 60 years has only shown one fleeting period of interest in a two-state solution, in the mid- and late 1990s, before the second Intifada.  Yitzhak Rabin, who took the first big steps towards such a solution, was assassinated by an Israeli extremist as a result, and the final Clinton administration proposals in 2000 left the Palestinians far short of actual national sovereignty as it is usually defined.  We are not in any case dealing with the Israeli government of that era any more.  The current Israeli government, from Netanyahu on down, explicitly rejects any two-state solution.  More importantly, in my view, it has in the last three years made the entire Gaza strip virtually uninhabitable, forcing most of the remaining population to live in tents, and allowed West Bank settlers to carry out a concerted campaign of ethnic cleansing there.  Some in Israel worry openly that the Israeli government is hoping for a full-scale Palestinian uprising there so that they can treat the Palestinian areas the same way that they have treated Gaza.  They have already treated the population of a good chunk of southern Lebanon that way.  This, tragically, is what the Zionist project has become.  Opposing it is not an automatic proof of anti-Semitism.  

Friedman, like a number of others, is calling for support of Israel as he would like it to be.  I have also heard prominent liberals say that while they support Israel, they oppose the settlements,  which successive Israeli governments have continually increased since 1967.   I do not think at this point that much can be done about the situation--I suspect that the Israeli government will drive out the Palestinian population of Gaza and the West Bank in the next five or ten years.  I also doubt that most Palestinians and their leaders have ever really believed in a two state solution as anything but a step to full control of the territory for themselves.  And I doubt that many Palestinian or Israeli leaders care what Thomas Friedman thinks.  And meanwhile, Michigan's population includes roughly 245,000 Muslims and somewhere in the neighborhood of 90,000 Jews.  It's far from clear that Friedman's strategy would work electorally either.

Exhibit B is a story in the Boston Globe from last week detailing a racial wealth gap, which unfortunately cannot be shared.  It begins as follows.

"A decade ago, the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston released a shocking study that showed US-born Black Bostonians had a median net worth of just $8.

"The results reverberated widely, although the survey itself had some drawbacks. The Fed has now revisited the subject, but with a more comprehensive analysis that includes the entire state.

"And again, the results show a staggering wealth gap.

"The new report, released Wednesday, found Latino families in Massachusetts have a median net wealth of just $1,200; Black families have only slightly more, at $7,800.

"White families, on the other hand, have a median net wealth of $549,200, while Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander families are at $305,000."

Continuing, the entire article treats the wealth gap entirely as a racial problem.  The problem of wealth inequality and the problem of poverty are indeed very serious, but the use of other statistics suggests that those problems are not primarily racial at all. It turns out that of the households without any positive net worth, about 200,000 of them are white; about 88,000 are black; and about 165,000 of them are Hispanic (no detailed data, apparently, is available for Asian American, etc.)  The figures on Massachusetts residents in poverty are equally striking: 304,188 are white, 189,451 are Hispanic, 85,618 are black, and 56,222 are Asian.  The Globe piece totally ignores the white people in these categories, who represent a plurality of them in both cases.

In my opinion, these statistics show that the wealth gap and poverty are not primarily racial problems.  They derive from structural problems in our utterly unregulated capitalist economy, which has been making the rich richer while the lower half of the population holds steady or declines, for about half a century.  They do affect  higher percentages of nonwhites than whites, but they affect larger numbers of whites than any other particular group.  For anyone who believes race is at the bottom of this, I have a question: why are there so many poor whites and whites without wealth?  Since it can't be racism, is it because they are stupid, shiftless, or lazy?  The Globe's view of these issues is typical of the mainstream media and the Democratic Party, and it is the reason, I think, that poorer white people now overwhelming vote Republican.  They get the impression that the Democratic Party doesn't care about them at all.

We need a better class of pundits and of journalists.

A footnote

 Several weeks ago I commented favorably on Texas's new K-12 reading curriculum.  Here is a similar comment by a well-informed commentator on the subject.

A Texas Experiment

 Our educational establishment, it seems, has catastrophically failed the nation's public schools over the last few decades.  Despite the bipartisan No Child Left Behind bill from the George W. Bush Administration and the national testing frenzy that it mandated, basic skills of reading and math appear to have been declining, not advancing, a trend accelerated by the pandemic.  One big reason was the abandonment of phonics as the main means of teaching kids how to read, in favor of encouraging students to guess word's meanings based upon their context.  That, I have to believe, can only reflect the obsession with new generations with proving that they think they can do things better than their parents did. One remarkable bright spot is the state of Mississippi, which abandoned the new methods in 2013, and has now seen its ranking in 4th grade reading rise from 49 in that year to 9 most recently.  Now, in a very different way, the state of Texas--where public schools are under a sustained attack--is doing something equally revolutionary. 

Today's New York Times published a list of about 200 books and short selections that Texas students will be required to read in the course of the 13 years of primary and secondary education.   They begin reading in kindergarten (which I and my contemporaries did not), with popular children's works including some old fairy tells, a Berenstain Bears selection, The Cat in the Hat by Dr. Seuss, picture books about Thomas Edison and George Washington,  and much more.  The similar first grade curriculum includes some verses from the Old Testament Book of Jonah, the first of a number of biblical passages.  The youngest grades also include selections from a book by William Bennett, once President Reagan's Secretary of Education, called The Children's Book of Virtues.  Fourth grade includes children's versions of old stories like Robin Hood, Stevenson's treasure Island, and King Arthur and his knights. By fifth grade the kids will read an abridged Don Quixote, the poem Casey at the Bat, an exegesis of the Declaration of Independence, the Mayflower Compact, and a book on the Constitution--as well as the story of the burning bush from Exodus. Sixth grad includes four sections on the Civil War, including a General Order written by U. S. Grant and the Gettysburg Address. Every year now includes something from the Bible.  In seventh grade they will read the full diary of Anne Frank--that may be when I read it myself--George Washington's Letter to the Hebrew Congregation at Newport," and selected poems by Dylan Thomas, Langston Hughes, and Robert Frost. Eighth graders will read The Giver by Lois Lowry, which I don't know, and Night by Elie Wiesel.  

Things really get serious in ninth grade, where the biggest selections are Animal Farm and Great Expectations by Dickens--which I read in eleventh grade and don't feel I got much out of.  They also read Lincoln's Springfield Lyceum address, which anticipated Strauss and Howe's generational theory, as well as the Civil War.   The tenth grade list includes Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Dante's Inferno (which I have never read, and what appears to be Martin Luther King's last speech before he died. They also read substantial excerpts from the Book of Job. The long books from 11th grade are Fahrenheit 451 and The Scarlet Letter, and it includes a short nonfiction work of Ayn Rand's about capitalism and a short section that I am not familiar with by the black conservative Thomas Sowell. And in their senior year they will read Hamlet, Pride and Prejudice, a Trollope excerpt, and poems by Kipling (If, a favorite of mine), Eliot (The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock), and Emily Dickinson.  

All right,. here goes.

There are a lot of wonderful books on this list, along with a lot of basic history.  Of course all of us, including me, can think of others they would like to see included, and if I had to pick one, it would probably be To Kill a Mockingbird, but in general the quality is very high.  The list is traditional insofar as it reflects the development of modern western civilization (there is nothing, I believe, from ancient Greece or Rome, which is curious), and there is more about the Holocaust than about civil rights in the US.  It does include some black writers and women, obviously, but the authors rejected the now-popular view--reflected in the Times's own comments--that the traditional canon is an instrument of white male oppression that has to be redressed by reducing the number of white male authors to 50 percent or less. Nor do the compilers believe that Texas's Hispanic and black children need to read a critical mass of people who "look like them."  Longtime readers will not be surprised to hear that I see nothing wrong with that, believing along with many black intellectuals that our cultural heritage belongs to us all.

The Biblical passages are drawing a lot of criticism, naturally, and the Times feels compelled to point out that there is nothing form the Koran or the Bhagavad  Gita. That doesn't bother me either for the same reason that I, a completely irreligious person in the traditional sense, wasn't bothered in the slightest when one of my young sons played  a soldier in a local production of Jesus Christ Superstar or the other one got the chance to sing the lead in Amahl and the Night Visitors.   A lot, of course, will depend on how teachers present the material, but the Bible and its stories are an indelible part of our culture about which any educated person should be glad to know something about.  I would like to see them taught as the very important historical documents that they are and I'm sure that's what some teachers will do.

If in fact Texas makes its students do all these readings, it will graduate an unusually educated population from its high schools. On the whole I have to applaud what they have done, and I hope that other states, whether red or blue, might do something similar.  They are trying to keep reading serious books alive, which is no small thing.  In our divided times, I welcome any attempt to bridge the great divide among us, and to recognize, as in Mississippi, that you never know who is going to really do something about the great problems the nation now faces.