tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-87466922024-03-16T10:12:31.670-04:00History UnfoldingA historian's comments on current events, foreign and domestic.David Kaiserhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05020082243968071584noreply@blogger.comBlogger1163125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8746692.post-89983544598783454042024-03-16T10:11:00.001-04:002024-03-16T10:11:59.331-04:00Israel and the United States<p> I have hesitated for a long time to write something like this post. Chuck Schumer's speech the other day pushed me over the edge, because it exemplified one aspect of the American-Israeli problem that no one else seems to want to talk about. I will get to that in due course, but before I begin, I want to quote a remarkable passage from the autobiography of Zora Neal Hurston. I am indebted to the podcaster Coleman Hughes for first bringing it to my attention.</p><p>“There could be something wrong with me because I see Negroes neither better nor worse than any other race. Race pride is a luxury I cannot afford. There are too many implications bend the term. Now, suppose a Negro does something really magnificent, and I glory, not in the benefit to mankind, but the fact that the doer was a Negro. Must I not also go hang my head in shame when a member of my race does something execrable? If I glory, then the obligation is laid upon me to blush also. I do glory when a Negro does something fine, I gloat because he or she has done a fine thing, but not because he was a Negro. That is incidental and accidental. It is the human achievement which I honor. I execrate a foul act of a Negro but again not on the grounds that the doer was a Negro, but because it was foul. A member of my race just happened to be the fouler of humanity. In other words, I know that I cannot accept responsibility for thirteen million people. Every tub must sit on its own bottom regardless. So 'Race Pride' in me had to go. And anyway, why should I be proud to be Negro? Why should anyone be proud to be white? Or yellow? Or red? After all, the word 'race' is a loose classification of physical characteristics. I tells nothing about the insides of people. Pointing out achievements tells nothing either. Races have never done anything. What seems race achievement is the work of individuals. The white race did not go into a laboratory and invent incandescent light. That was Edison. The Jews did not work out Relativity. That was Einstein. The Negroes did not find out the inner secrets of peanuts and sweet potatoes, nor the secret of the development of the egg. That was Carver and Just. If you are under the impression that every white man is Edison, just look around a bit. If you have the idea that every Negro is a Carver, you had better take off plenty of time to do your searching.”</p><p>I happen to agree completely with that sentiment. It was popular among minorities, I believe, in 1942 when she published it, and it was very much in the air for the two subsequent decades during which I was growing up. Martin Luther King Jr. echoed it in his remarks about the content of our character. The middle of the last century was an era of extraordinary human achievement--technological, industrial, and political. Men and women focused more naturally on human achievement then. Now they are focusing more on tribe, defined in various ways.</p><p>Now let me quote a very parallel remark from Albert Einstein--to whom Hurston referred--recording his own feelings about his own ethnic and religious group, the Jews.</p><p><span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, FreeSerif, serif; font-size: 16px;">“For me, the unadulterated Jewish religion is, like all other religions, an incarnation of primitive superstition. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong, and in whose mentality I feel profoundly anchored, still for me does not have any different kind of dignity from all other peoples. As far as my experience goes, they are in fact no better than other human groups, even if they are protected from the worst excesses by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot perceive anything ‘chosen’ about them.”</span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, FreeSerif, serif; font-size: 16px;">If you enjoyed those quotes, you may well appreciate this post. If you didn't, I doubt very much that you will. And before I go any further, I happen to be the child of a Jewish-American father and a New England/Midwestern protestant mother. They raised me without any religion at all, something that I have never regretted. And that means, as you probably know, that the state of Israel does not recognize me as a Jew or a potential citizen, which I would have no desire to become in any case. I have never had and never wanted any country but the United States, and I think that the observance of impartial laws--domestically and internationally--is the only way for the peoples of the modern world to live together in peace and happiness.</span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, FreeSerif, serif; font-size: 16px;">The decision to create the state of Israel in 1947-48 (six years before Einstein wrote those words, by the way), was an entirely understandable decision. Jews had lived as minorities for many centuries, often in very cruel conditions. Zionism had begun in the nineteenth century mainly to provide a new home for the Jews of the Russian Empire (including Poland), who were not regarded as Russian citizens, and who were already immigrating in large numbers ot the United States and elsewhere. (Two of my grandparents were among them.) Initially Zionism aroused very mixed reactions in the Jewish communities in western nations, many of whom wanted nothing more than to be treated as equals in their current homes. The rise of Nazism, the Holocaust, and the Second World War obviously changed the calculus. Almost nowhere in Europe had the Jews been safe from destruction, and the United States had shut off large-scale immigration from anywhere in the early 1930s. Perhaps in part because they could not welcome Holocaust survivors into their own country, many more American Jews now became Zionists, and the US government played in important role in the international recognition of Israel after 1948. No one, however, could force the Arabs then living in Palestine or the governments of the neighboring Arab states to accept the creation of Israel, and they did not. Israel has lived under military threat for the whole of its 75 years of existence, first from the neighboring Arab states and later from the Palestinian population of the Gaza strip and the West Bank, both of which Israel occupied after the 1967 war. Israel successfully made peace with Egypt in the late 1970s and Jordan in the 1990s, but attempts to make peace with the Palestinians in the 1990s failed, and the political organization Hamas gradually emerged as the center of Palestinian resistance, winning an election in the occupied territories in 2006 and eventually securing full control of Gaza. A parallel Shi'ite organization, Hezbollah, developed in Lebanon under the patronage of Iran, which since 1979 has been an avowed enemy of Israel as well.</span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, FreeSerif, serif; font-size: 16px;">The creation of Israel was a remarkable political and economic achievement. It also freed the Israelis from the relative powerlessness that Einstein referred to in 1954, with exactly the results that he seemed to anticipate. It is easier for weak states to be virtuous than strong ones, as Tocqueville remarked in <i>Democracy in America.</i> The Israeli government developed very significant military power and used it ruthlessly in 1956 and 1967--when it began wars with its neighbors--and in 1973, when it was attacked. (I know some readers will dispute my characterization of 1967, when Nasser in Egypt created the crisis that led to the war, but it is not at all clear that war would have occurred if Israel had not begun it.) In addition, the 1967 decision to occupy, govern, and partially resettle Gaza and the West Bank made the Israelis the rulers of a foreign people, a role that inevitably involves cruelty and injustice. The current war in Gaza--triggered, of course, by a very cruel attack upon civilians by Hamas--has confirmed Einstein's suspicions. Given enough power and provocation, any nation--including both Israel and the United States--can do terrible things. That is human nature.</span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, FreeSerif, serif; font-size: 16px;">1967 was also a key date for some elements of the American Jewish community. As historian Judith Klinghoffer pointed out in her book, <i>Vietnam, Jews, and the Middle East</i>, it deepened the feelings of many American Jews for Israel, and it helped create neoconservatism by convincing certain Jewish intellectuals that the United States had to be a strong presence all over the world because it was one of Israel's few friends. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) dated from 1959 but became much more powerful after the 1967 and 1973 wars, and by the 1980s it was using its political power to make it very difficult for elected officials to oppose anything that the State of Israel was doing. In 2006 Michael Massing wrote <a href="https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2006/06/08/the-storm-over-the-israel-lobby/">the most detailed analysis of what AIPAC had become and the power it wielded that I have ever seen,</a> and I don't think anything has changed very much since then. Massing emphasized that the small number of very wealthy individuals who controlled AIPAC were much more conservative and much friendlier to the Israeli right than the great mass of American Jews were, and that is undoubtedly still true today. Yet they remain, effectively, the voice of the Jewish community in American foreign policy all the same.</span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, FreeSerif, serif; font-size: 16px;">I am not going to review the whole history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the attempts to end it. I have said before that I doubt very much that the leadership of either side wants a peace that would recognize the rights of the other side--that is, a two-state solution. The Israeli government offered less than that in 2000, when agreement seemed to be the nearest it had ever been, and we will never know whether that Israeli government, which ruled by a very narrow margin, would have been able to get those terms accepted by its own people or not. And to the extent that various Palestinian leaders have shown a willingness to compromise, I am not convinced that this was anything more than a strategic move to get something now in order to try to get more later--the same strategy that the Zionist leadership used in 1948 when it accepted in principle the UN General Assembly's partition plan. I will return later to the question of where that leaves the Israelis and Palestinians now.</span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, FreeSerif, serif; font-size: 16px;">The current Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has explicitly rejected a two-state solution. Some weeks before the October 7 attack he displayed a map of the Middle East before the United Nations in which the territory of Israel included the entire West Bank and Gaza. In addition, several leading members of his government are calling specifically for turning most or all of the Gaza population of about two million into refugees in some foreign land and starting to resettle Gaza with Israelis. Meanwhile they are once again expanding settlements in the West Bank and allowing settlers to terrorize Palestinians. And in the five months since October 7, the Israeli air force and army have made most of Gaza almost completely uninhabitable, and are now preparing to finish the job. I don't see how anyone can rule out the possibility that the Israeli government wants to complete the ethnic cleansing of the Gaza strip, or that it carry out the same policy in the West Bank later on when a suitable provocation occurs. And I don't want the US government to support that policy either openly or tacitly.</span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, FreeSerif, serif; font-size: 16px;">Senator Schumer's very strong criticism of Netanyahu and his government took courage, but it disturbed me because it reflected a fantasy that occurs among liberal American Jews who oppose what Israel is doing but what to continue to support it. They tell themselves that Netanyahu does not represent most Israelis, that most Israelis oppose his policies, and even--as Schumer said openly in his speech--that Netanyahu has only adopted those policies to please the extreme elements of his coalition and stay in power. I do not believe that. My main source for what is happening in Israel is the liberal daily Haaretz. It violently opposes everything Netanyahu stands for, and many other Israelis do as well--but they definitely appear to be in the minority now, and the Haaretz writers know that. Netanyahu is personally unpopular, but were he to resign or be forced out of office, he might easily be replaced by someone whose views and policies were at least as extreme as his. Schumer is apparently one of a number of liberal American Jews--exactly how many, I cannot say--who need to feel that Israel is made up mostly of Jews like themselves. I do not think that that is true, and I don't think it made any sense for him to demand that the Israeli electorate choose someone else. George W. Bush demanded the same thing of the Palestinians in 2002--and four years later they elected Hamas.</span></p><p><span style="color: #444444; font-family: Times New Roman, Times, FreeSerif, serif;"><span style="background-color: white;">And what would a responsible Israeli policy look like? Peace will be impossible until both sides genuinely accept the other's right to exist. Violence will continue at least intermittently until that day--if it ever comes. Israel could in the meantime renounce the policy of making Gaza uninhabitable and stop further expansion into the West Bank--but no Israeli government has been willing to do that for a long time. What both sides can do, and have done for long periods, is to make every effort to keep the level of conflict at the lowest possible level, even when seriously provoked. Hamas would be in a much stronger position today, I think, if they had only killed Israeli soldiers on October 7. Israel had to retaliate for that attack, but not to the extent of killing nearly 30 Palestinians--most of them civilians--for every Israeli who died on that day--a total that continues to increase. Yet having stated those views, I will do what Schumer did not do, and acknowledge that neither side cares what I think or shows any signs of adopting them now. We are in the midst of a continuing tragedy. I have found all my life that tragedy, real or imagined, can be cathartic in retrospect. I don't know if there is any catharsis to be had from ongoing tragedies.</span></span></p><div class="blogger-post-footer"><a href="http://historyunfolding.blogspot.com"><i>History Unfolding</i></a></div>David Kaiserhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05020082243968071584noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8746692.post-35337549410920378072024-03-14T14:10:00.002-04:002024-03-14T14:13:37.730-04:00States of the Union<p>Early in his State of the Union address last week President Biden quoted from Franklin Roosevelt's parallel address on January 6, 1941. He repeated Roosevelt's opening words: that this was "an unprecedented moment in the history of the nation." Never before, Roosevelt said, had the security of the United States been so directly threatened from abroad. This moment, Biden said, was equally unprecedented: "Not since President Lincoln and the Civil War have freedom and democracy been under assault here at home as they are today." </p><p>A broader comparison of the two addresses makes a broader point. They were given at crucially different moments in the two presidents' tenures. FDR had just been re-elected for the second time by an impressive margin; Biden faces a very tight struggle for his own re-election. The comparison suggests that they were speaking to very different nations, whose common political system was working very differently. The differences raise profound questions about our future.</p><p>Television had just been invented and was not yet operating regularly in 1941. Roosevelt's speech was <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILwdecBs5Uo&ab_channel=CaptioningforEveryone">broadcast on radio</a> and printed in its entirety in many major newspapers. It began with a nine-paragraph summary of the country's relations with the rest of the world since 1789, insisting that " the United States as a nation has at all times maintained clear, definite opposition, to any attempt to lock us in behind an ancient Chinese wall while the procession of civilization went past." Then he proclaimed a worldwide threat to "the democratic way of life" all over the world--"assailed either by arms, or by secret spreading of poisonous propaganda by those who seek to destroy unity and promote discord in nations that are still at peace." Victory by the unnamed "assailants" on four other continents would threaten the Americas with overwhelming force. A "dictator's peace" would bring "no security for us or for our neighbors." The American people, he said, had to assist democratic forces now fighting around the world, and to increase their own armaments production dramatically. He referred to the lend-lease program he had put forward in another broadcast a few weeks earlier to supply warring nations with critical opinion without requiring payments in cash or in debt obligations. He talked in some detail about the industrial requirements of massive new arms production and the need to move more quickly in several areas. He called for higher taxes to pay for all this. He mentioned that his opponent in the recent election had not disagreed with him on the basic principles of foreign policy, and like most presidents delivering their annual address in the first 160 or so years of the nation's history, he never referred to Republicans or Democrats.</p><p>All this, he continued, allowed the nation to "look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms"--freedom of speech, "freedom of every person to worship God in his own way," "freedom from want," and "freedom from fear"--the right to live in a world of reduced armaments that would no longer allow any nation to undertake aggression against others. "This nation," he concluded, " has placed its destiny in the hands and heads and hearts of its millions of free men and women; and its faith in freedom under the guidance of God. Freedom means the supremacy of human rights everywhere. Our support goes to those who struggle to gain those rights or keep them. Our strength is our unity of purpose. To that high concept there can be <a href="https://www.amazon.com/No-End-Save-Victory-Nation/dp/0465052983">no end save victory</a>." The joint session responded during his speech with periodic, polite applause.</p><p>Biden's speech reads very differently. Roosevelt talked in short paragraphs; Biden talked mostly in one-liners. He began by listing not one, but three major problems: Putin's aggression in Ukraine, threats to democracy at home, and the attack on abortion rights and even IVF in various states. He asked Congress to approve aid to Ukraine and promised to sign a bill restoring Roe v. Wade as the law of the land if Congress would pass it. </p><p>Then came the bulk of the speech: a long list of Biden's accomplishments, as he sees them, with respect to the economy. The American people, he announced, "are writing the greatest comeback story never told." Following in the footsteps of his predecessors, he referred to progress in employment, unemployment, small business creation, health insurance, the racial wealth gap, inflation, infrastructure construction, the trade balance, chip production, lower drug prices, the Affordable Care Act, and clean energy. He praised the achievements of unions and bragged about standing on a picket line. Then he turned to the future.</p><p>Biden called for lower prices for insulin and other drugs, and promised cheaper housing costs and rents. He called for "the best education system in the world," as every president at least since George H. W. Bush has done, more preschool opportunities, and cheaper college and more college debt forgiveness. Then he called for higher taxes on corporations and the wealthy and the restoration of the pandemic-induced child care credit. He announced cuts in credit-card fees and new requirements for stating prices accurately. Then he turned to border security, and blamed the Republicans for failing to pass a recent compromise bill, referring, as he did thirteen times, to his "predecessor." He called for new voting rights protections, opposed banning books, and told transgender Americans, "I have your back." He talked about new steps to reduce gun violence. Returning to foreign affairs, he tried to strike a balance between Israel and the Palestinians in Gaza and talked about measures taken against the Houthis in response to their attacks on shipping in the Red Sea. And in conclusion, he briefly reviewed his own long life in politics and asked the American people to "build the future together."</p><p>The reception of his speech was very different from that of FDR in 1940. Democrats constantly interrupted with raucous cheers and applause, while Republicans sat stony-faced and occasionally heckled him. Vice President Harris contributed to the atmosphere by repeatedly rising to her feet while applauding. FDR aimed his words at the whole nation, threatened by war, while Biden generally aimed his at various Democratic constituencies and drew the maximum possible contrast between the two parties. It would have been very hard to draft a speech that could actually have bridged the gaps between our parties--perhaps as hard as it would have been for Lincoln on March 4, 1861. Roosevelt also faced lots of very bitter opposition both in Congress and in the country, but he could ignore it because he had just been elected for the third time by very impressive popular and electoral majorities. Much of the Republican Party, including his opponent in the late presidential election, Wendell Willkie, agreed with him about aiding other nations--particularly the British--and preparing for possible war. Fortunately for the United States and for the rest of the world, the nation in 1941 was capable of united action on a scale we could never match today.</p><p>Roosevelt also talked throughout the speech about general principles and broad currents of history. Biden focused on emotional specifics, reinforced from time to time by the identification of illustrative individuals sitting in the gallery. And Biden could not have put forward four principles like FDR's four freedoms, because even their language has become controversial. Freedom of religion, which all Americans in 1940 understood as the right to practice their own faith, now has an entirely new meaning, one endorsed by Supreme Court majorities. Freedom of speech is under attack in many Democratic-leaning institutions. All this raises a profound question. <a href="https://www.amazon.com/States-Union-David-Kaiser/dp/1732874530"> My new book shows</a> how the success of the United States in its first 200 years may well have depended on certain measured forms of discourse, on a belief in the nation's institutions that transcended partisanship, and on attempts to keep emotions under control. We are about to find out whether the American experiment can survive without those habits.</p><p>p.s. A serious family medical emergency delayed the appearance of this post. Fortunately I can report that the patient has weathered her crisis and is definitely on the mend now--although full recovery will take some time.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><div class="blogger-post-footer"><a href="http://historyunfolding.blogspot.com"><i>History Unfolding</i></a></div>David Kaiserhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05020082243968071584noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8746692.post-15164247216361027972024-03-02T13:56:00.002-05:002024-03-14T14:17:12.645-04:00Elite higher education--an undergraduate's view<p> I went to college in the late 1960s and to grad school from 1971 to 1976--both at Harvard. I taught there from 1976 through 1980. I described all these experiences in great detail in my autobiography, <i> A Life in History</i>, linked at right. The great changes that have transformed higher ed began, really, in my senior year in college, and I watched them spread throughout the country during my own teaching career from 1976 through 2013. I have written a good deal here and elsewhere about those changes, but nothing I have experienced depressed me quite as much as an article in the current Harvard Magazine--the alumni magazine--<a href="https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2024/03/university-people-the-undergraduate-balance">by a current undergraduate named Aden Barton entitled, "AWOL from Academics."</a></p><p>Let me summarize for the moment the key features, as I see them now, of the undergraduate education that I received. First, we all had to read and enormous amounts of text. One of my favorite courses--taught by a visitor from Chicago--was entitled "Dostoevsky, Camus, and Faulkner." The reading included three of Dostoevsky's four major novels; three novels by Camus; and two long, demanding works by Faulkner, <i>The Sound and the Fury</i> and <i>Light in August</i>--and some shorter works by Dostoevsky and Faulkner as well. The Slavic Department also offered a Dostoevsky course which assigned essentially all the works of Dostoevsky. In the same year, I took a course, <i>International Politics, 1919-45</i>, taught by Ernest May, who became my dissertation adviser, and my lifelong friend Sam Williamson. That reading list included two general works on the diplomacy of that tumultuous period, and major books on the US, Britain, France, Germany, the Far East, and the USSR. Almost no one did all the reading in all their courses--I certainly didn't--but we still got a lot out of it. And crucially, grade inflation had not really begun. Only 9 percent of grades were straight As, another 13 percent were A-s, and 48 percent were some sort of B, 30 percent of grades were C+ or lower. A B was a good grade that no one was ashamed to get, and many people felt they had gotten a tremendous amount out of courses in which they could manage more than a C+. Reading Period was another key aspect of the educational experience. Classes began in late September (a wonderfully civilized time) and continued for twelve weeks, but exams didn't happen until late January. Reading period, during which classes generally did not meet, took up about three weeks of January, and gave us all a chance to catch up on reading that we had not done. I learned what I was capable of during my first reading period, and I know many other people felt the same way.</p><p>Reading period was nearly abolished about twenty years ago. According to the administration, Harvard students complained that while all their friends at other institutions had finished their exams before Christmas vacation, they had not. Faculty who had gone through Harvard College protested that decision but other faculty outvoted them and accused them of being driven by nostalgia. Now the entire fall term lasts from the day after Labor Day until about December 10, including just four days of reading period, and exams last from December 11 through December 20. The winter recess lasts a month and the spring term begins on January 20, with a similar calendar. And something else has changed. Half a century ago, the three-hour final exam was another critical Harvard ritual, requiring students to display what they had learned over the last four months in cogent essays. Far fewer courses even give exams today.</p><p>And last but hardly least, the role of various disciplines has been dramatically altered. I found writing my autobiography that Harvard and Radcliffe graduated about 270 history majors in 1965, and 45 in 2017. Humanities majors (which do not include history at Harvard, where it counts as a social science) were just 12.5 percent of graduates last year, compared to 22.1 percent in the School of Engineering and Applied Science (a relatively new innovation), 28 percent in other science majors, and 37.2 percent in the social sciences. </p><p>Let me now turn<a href="https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2024/03/university-people-the-undergraduate-balance?fbclid=IwAR3kDRAMXJADQhh9t6hgQlzC2labUx9bbbQkgKOT1OYRsNkWJ5oj3zqCPeY"> to this article, "AWOL from Academics,"</a> by an undergraduate named Aden Barton, that just appeared in <i>Harvard Magazine.</i> The average college student, she reports, spent about 25 hours a week studying in 1960, but only 15 hours a week in 2015. Many students, she says, now treat academics as a very secondary preoccupation. "This fall, one of my friends did not attend a single lecture or class section until more than a month into the semester. Another spent 40 to 80 hours a week on her preprofessional club, leaving barely any time for school. A third launched a startup while enrolled, leaving studying by the wayside." Data from a <i>Crimson</i> senior survey, she says, "indicates [sic] that students devote nearly as much time collectively to extracurriculars, athletics, and employment as to their classes."</p><p>Grade inflation is another big, fateful change. In academic year 2020-21, the most recent for which I can find data, 79 percent of grades awarded were As or A-s--compared to 22 percent in 1965. Aden Barton provides an example of the results of this practice.</p><p>"Indeed, three of my friends and I took a high-level seminar one semester, and, although we knew hundreds of pages of readings would be assigned each week, we were excited about the prospect of engaging with the material. As time went on, the percentage of readings each of us did went from nearly 100 to nearly 0.</p><p>"In the final class, each student was asked to cite their favorite readings, and the professor was surprised that so many chose readings from the first few units. That wasn’t because the students happened to be most interested in those classes’ material; rather, that was the brief period of the course when everyone actually did some of the readings.</p><p>"Despite having barely engaged with the course material, we all received A’s. I don’t mean to blame the professors for our poor work ethic, but we certainly would have read more had our grades been at risk. At the time, we bemoaned our own lack of effort. By that point in the semester, though, many other commitments had started requiring more of us, so prioritizing curiosity for its own sake became difficult.</p><p>"And therein lies the second reinforcing effect of grade inflation, which not only fails to punish substandard schoolwork but actively incentivizes it, as students often rely on extracurriculars to get ahead. Amanda Claybaugh, dean of undergraduate education, made this point in a recent New York Times interview, saying that 'Students feel the need to distinguish themselves outside the classroom because they are essentially indistinguishable inside the classroom.'”</p><p>Barton works at the <i>Crimson</i>, and in fact some students in every generation have made that their first priority, but this kind of thing is much more common now. One new innovation is pre-professional clubs, which apparently get students thinking about what they are gong to do after college instead of what they might be doing while they were there. Their attitude towards courses becomes purely instrumental. A Russian Studies professor named Terry Martin put it this way.</p><p>"Professor Martin, for example, wrote to me in an email that 'students today…want to please, they want to understand what is expected of them in the course and to fulfill those expectations (as a general rule).' But that approach “comes at the cost of intellectual curiosity for its own sake and intellectual originality and even boldness.'</p><p>"Martin told me that he used to get more essays 'where the student was trying to ‘jerk your chain,’ i.e., write something that completely contradicts what you’ve been teaching,' but this is no longer as common. That certainly resonates with my own experiences. When approaching essays, I often automatically start by thinking about what my professor or teaching assistant wants to hear, rather than what I want to argue or what I have authentically learned.</p><p>"Instead of becoming wholly careless towards classes, then, students are often incredibly intentional about earning the (easy) A, at the cost of true or genuine curiosity. One of my classmates last semester, who is one of the more academically oriented people I know, told me that to get the best grade on an important essay, he simply 'regurgitated the readings' without thinking critically about the material."</p><p>There is, I think, a simple reason why nearly every faculty member has given into grade inflation. The dirty secret of higher ed nowadays is that both the faculty and the administration are terrified of student opinion. They are now charging 3-4 times as much as they did in the 1960s--adjusting for inflation--and they want to give kids their money's worth in terms of credentials. As numerous incidents in various campuses show, they take their students' feelings incredibly seriously. I was recently on a zoom with a well-known academic, a believer in the humanities, who inadvertently made that clear too. Yes, he told us, he told his students that Thomas Jefferson was a great thinker and founder of democracy, but also a "noxious racist." Challenged on that term in the Q & A by a listener who agreed that every slaveowner was evidently a racist but questioned the term "noxious racist," he replied that he had to put it that way because that was what students expected to hear. I do not think educators can do their job properly if they are afraid of their students.</p><p>There is much more in the article, and I recommend that you all read it in full. Harvard has given up the mission that drew me and my contemporaries to it: the cultivation of our minds and our exposure to the great worlds of the ancient an dmodern worlds. These problems are hardly unique either to Harvard or to elite institutions, either. The humanities are nearing extinction in many schools, and only a few small colleges such as the St. John's colleges and Hillsdale are offering a distinct product focused on the humanities. This means that the intellectual traditions I learned from are dead. New institutions like the University of Austin might revive them, but finding faculty who could actually return to traditional approaches would be extremely difficult. I realize that I have drawn enormous emotional sustenance from participating in those traditions all my life, and their disappearance is as painful as the loss of a dear friend. Eventually I do believe new generations will rebuild them, but that may take a very long time.</p><p><br /></p><p> </p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><div class="blogger-post-footer"><a href="http://historyunfolding.blogspot.com"><i>History Unfolding</i></a></div>David Kaiserhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05020082243968071584noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8746692.post-31187262742976914222024-02-24T09:53:00.001-05:002024-02-24T09:53:30.529-05:00Wealth inequality--causes and consequences<p> According to Wikipedia, five states and at least four cities have taken steps to consider reparations for black Americans on the grounds that their relatively lower levels of wealth are due to slavery, segregation, and discriminatory economic policies. Measured in the aggregate--which is how nearly everything having to do with race is measured nowadays--the wealth gap is indeed very large. The Brookings Institution reports that median black wealth was $44,890 in 2022, compared to $62,000 for "non-white Hispanic" households, $285,000 for white households, and $536,000 for Asian households. Many would argue, presumably, that black Americans have a greater claim to reparations than Hispanics--who certainly have suffered from discrimination--because most of them descend from slaves and their families have been in the United States for so much longer. Using different statistics, I would like to suggest that the use of median values (or for that matter of mean values, which I have not seen) presents a very misleading picture of the distribution of poverty and the problem of inequality in the United States. Those problems are very real, but evidence suggests that they do not have a primarily racial cause and cannot have a primarily racial solution.</p><p><a href="https://dqydj.com/net-worth-percentiles/">According to this table</a> which I found online, the poorest ten percent of households in 2020 had negative or nearly zero net worth. the poorest 40 percent had $100,000 or less of net worth, and the poorer half of our households had $200,000 or less in net worth. I now want to refer you to Figure 3 on this page maintained by the Federal Reserve, which shows the racial share of these portions of our nation's households. <a href="https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/wealth-inequality-and-the-racial-wealth-gap-20211022.html">The graph I am using</a> is the lower left one of the four graphs in that figure. It is relatively small and I have to estimate values to some extent, but nothing I say will be wildly off. Bear with me. After working with this graph for about an hour, I realize that it doesn't tell me exactly what I would like to know: the racial distribution of households in the lowest 10 percent of the population, the lowest 20 percent, etc. Instead it shows the distribution in discrete percentiles, from the first to the 100th, of the income distribution. I wish I could find the data I really was looking for, but I can't. Still, the discrete points on this one will tell us a lot.</p><p>Let's begin with the 10 percent of households that are either in debt or have no or almost no net worth. In the tenth percentile, about 45 percent of those households are white--the portion shown in blue on the graph. About 33 percent of them are black, about 18 percent of them are Hispanic, and about 4 percent ar Asian. The bottom 10 percent households totaled about 12.9 million households or 33 million people. If we assumed that the figures for the tenth percentile were valid for the whole poorest one-tenth of households in the country, we would put the number of white Americans living in those net worth-less households was 14.9 million, compared to 11 million black people, 5.9 million Hispanics, and about 520,000 Asians. Looking at the graph, however, it is clear that the percentage and thus the number of white households in the lowest five percentiles was significantly higher than in the 10th. (The poorest several percentiles owe many thousands of dollars each.) Thus, it seems clear that of the bottom 10 percent of the wealth distribution, more than half of them are white.</p><p>Let's do the same exercise for the 64 million households in the bottom half of the wealth distribution, 80 percent of whom own $100,000 or less and another 10 percent between $100,000 and $200,000. Looking at the graph, you can see that the white share of households reaches 50 percent around the 17th or 18th percentile and grows to over 70 percent by the 50th. I can't do a real calculation of the exact number of white, black and Hispanic households in the lower half of the population, but it looks as if about 60 percent of them are white, with perhaps 21 percent black and 16 percent Hispanic. Interestingly enough, at the 50th percentile the shares of black and Hispanic households approximate 15 percent, which according to the graph to the right is also quite close to their total share of households. That means that the lower half of the income distribution includes 38.6 million white households, 13.5 million black households, and 10.3 million Hispanic households. That translates to about 98 .5 million white people, 34.5 million black people, and 26 million Hispanics.</p><p>Now it seems to me there are at least two ways of looking at the inequality problem in our society. Going back to the beginning of this post, we find that the median net worth of black, white and Hispanic households in the United States are $285,000, $44,890, and $62,000. That sounds like being white is an enormous disadvantage and being black is a crippling disability. The principle reason for those disparities, however, is the overwhelming dominance of white households <i>in the upper reaches of the income distribution</i>. If we focus on the people who really need help--the lowest decile with negative or zero net worth, and the next 40 deciles with very little--we find that more than half of them turn out to be white. That raises some very important historical questions.</p><p>It is now a liberal commonplace that slavery, segregation, and discriminatory policies have caused income inequality between the races in the United States. That would imply that those factors are the reason that about 11 million black Americans live in households with no assets and 34.5 million black Americans have less than $200,000 in assets (and 80 percent of them have less than $100,000). That interpretation, however, leads us to another question: why then do 14.9 million white Americans find themselves with negative or 0 net worth, and another 83.6 million have less than $200,000? Slavery and discrimination cannot be the cause of that. I can imagine two possible explanations for this.</p><p>The first is essentially a riff on the common conservative explanation for minority poverty--that it is a matter of culture. One could argue that while slavery, segregation, and public policies are what have made black and Hispanic people poor, poor white people must suffer from serious cultural deficiencies. Actually there is good evidence that poor people <i>of all races</i> now suffer from the same social pathologies. Charles Murray has been attacked for some of his writings about black people, and at times, I think, with good reason--but I was very impressed by his book <i>Coming Apart</i>, which is about poor white people, not poor black people, around metropolitan areas. He found that in the last decades of the last century their attitudes, values, and ways of living had become increasingly dysfunctional, including breakdowns of family life, drug use, and aversion to work among many young males. The illegitimacy rate among white people is now higher than the rate among black people when Moynihan wrote his famous report in 1965, and there are more white single parents now than black. It doesn't make any sense, in my opinion, to racialize these problems. Millions of blacks and Hispanics are <i>not</i> suffering from them, while millions of white people are.</p><p>My preferred explanation for the presence of 50 percent of the population with no or very little net worth, however, is simply the evolution of the American capitalist economy since the 1970s. This is laid out very clearly in a series of charts <a href="https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/">at this remarkable web site</a>, showing what has happened to income and wealth distribution in the last 53 years, since 1971. I am going to reproduce one of its most interesting charts, one which deals specifically with race.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEi2X_arxuUtTvl38ikSx6EGoMXa5RhOQjw9-d4wLROltdins1AvCnBEllHkKihceIRTdG7TG77FnB2N4Dy84F-PcrqhGrYnVQ7WhFCnxtc-Az9yr4LgA953Vov2yRdYzfBzZcjhidsGB8_GTte0xanc3l8_Ee46Ldxr4TImWcfBcxAPi_zamcm0" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="761" data-original-width="1045" height="357" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEi2X_arxuUtTvl38ikSx6EGoMXa5RhOQjw9-d4wLROltdins1AvCnBEllHkKihceIRTdG7TG77FnB2N4Dy84F-PcrqhGrYnVQ7WhFCnxtc-Az9yr4LgA953Vov2yRdYzfBzZcjhidsGB8_GTte0xanc3l8_Ee46Ldxr4TImWcfBcxAPi_zamcm0=w491-h357" width="491" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><br />The chart shows, remarkably, that average black income as a percentage of average white income rose from 50 percent in 1948 to about 68 percent in 1971--even though for most of that period at least half of black Americans were living under legal segregation. From then until 2018, however, that progress slowed. <i>So did the progress of the whole lower half of the US population, as other carts in the web site show.</i> Thanks in particular to very high top-bracket tax rates, the strength of labor unions, and a massive housing boom--which helped everyone by increasing the stock of housing so much--GDP gains went in large measure to the lower deciles of the population. In the last half century they have gone mostly to the very top. That--not slavery from 1619 to 1865 or segregation from then until the 1960s--is the reason for the tremendous economic inequality that we all face today.<p></p><p>The insistence that began, I think, with Lyndon Johnson, that poverty is mainly a minority problem and that therefore solutions to it must focus on helping minorities, has not only failed to address our real economic problems, but has also had disastrous political consequences. The whole lower half of our population is very unhappy, and rightly so, with the state of our economy, the life it offers them, and the shrinking chances of improving their position. Most minority voters blame discrimination for their lot, apparently, and vote Democratic. But the white voters in the lower 50 percent can't blame discrimination, and they understand how public policies having nothing to do with race--such as free trade agreements and rollbacks of union rights--have hurt their position. They apparently blame Democrats more than Republicans for this, perhaps because Democrats still <i>claim</i> to be the party of the working class, without doing very much about its plight. The whites in the lower half of our wealth distribution now vote heavily Republican--<i>and there are far more of them than there are blacks and Hispanics, as we have seen.</i> In addition, recent elections and polling show blacks and Hispanics trending Republican.</p><p>The diversity movement in all our major institutions has, I am sure, increased minority representation within those institutions significantly--but it has done little or nothing for the lower half of the population because it is not attacking the real causes of its problems. In fact, we all stand or fall together, economically, politically, and the world at large. We desperately need leaders who can return to that simple creed.</p><p><br /></p><div class="blogger-post-footer"><a href="http://historyunfolding.blogspot.com"><i>History Unfolding</i></a></div>David Kaiserhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05020082243968071584noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8746692.post-87892800183934059772024-02-16T10:32:00.004-05:002024-02-16T10:32:55.621-05:00Back to Minneapolis<p> In December I posted about the controversy over the death of George Floyd and the guilt or innocence of the police officers who were convicted of his murder, drawing in part--but only in part--on two podcasts by Glenn Loury. Their position, which I endorsed to some extent, has been sharply critiqued in <a href="https://radleybalko.substack.com/p/the-retconning-of-george-floyd">a long substack post by Radley Balko</a>, an investigative journalist specializing in criminal justice. This post focused on the issue of whether the knee that Chauvin placed on Floyd's back, shoulder, and neck was part of an approved Minneapolis police technique. Balko makes a strong case that while recommended procedures included a brief use of such a technique, they did not call for the sustained use that Chauvin made. </p><p>Balko has now published another post on a much more critical question: what the original medical examiner's autopsy report actually said and what we really know about how Floyd died. This is also a well-documented discussion that argues, in effect, that a great preponderance of evidence--including evidence from other cases--tells us that Floyd died of asphyxiation caused by Chauvin's pressure on his back and/or neck, but which also confirms the original statements of the medical examiner that his autopsy--the only autopsy actually performed--found no physical evidence of asphyxiation. A prosecutor named Amy Sweasy Tamburino who spoke to Dr. Baker, the medical examiner, after his death, wrote immediately that Baker told her, “The autopsy revealed no physical evidence suggesting that Mr. Floyd died of asphyxiation,” and that “if Mr. Floyd had been found dead in his home (or anywhere else) and there were no other contributing factors he would conclude that it was an overdose death.” He also frankly expressed his worries that what he had found did not match the established "public narrative" in the case--that Chauvin had murdered Floyd. Balko defends Baker's eventual decision that his death was indeed a homicide, however, on the grounds that evidence not related to the autopsy strongly supports it.</p><p>The key to this argument is the statement, confirmed by several experts in the field, that one can die of asphyxiation without having one's airway completely cut off. One can apparently be breathing, but so shallowly that not enough oxygen gets into the body because of pressure on the diaphragm. This is among other things another commentary on how the public seizes on the most emotional explanation of events. Tens of millions of people think Floyd died because of pressure on his neck, but although Balko doesn't say this in so many words, his explanation suggests that pressure on his back, leading to pressure on his diaphragm, killed him. Balko argues that this is a more plausible explanation of Floyd's death than a fentanyl overdose, because the level of fentanyl in Floyd's body was one that an addict could tolerate and because he was not behaving like someone who had overdosed. This seems to me a strong argument, and, frankly, a conclusion that a jury should be entitled to reach, but because it falls short of a medical certainty--as Dr. Baker's comments made very clear--the controversy will continue forever.</p><p>In their last joint appearance Glenn Loury and John McWhorter repudiated, to varying degrees, some of what they said in the earlier podcasts on the case. I too now wish that I had been more skeptical about the revisionist argument and I have done my best to make u for that here. One one point, however, I still disagree with Balko. He thinks that the public reaction to Floyd's death has done good. I don't. For me, it is part of another great American tragedy.</p><div class="blogger-post-footer"><a href="http://historyunfolding.blogspot.com"><i>History Unfolding</i></a></div>David Kaiserhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05020082243968071584noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8746692.post-55206341335461896852024-02-14T08:52:00.001-05:002024-02-14T08:52:46.031-05:00The end of US foreign policy?<p> A well-functioning democracy depends upon a wide area of agreement between the political elite and the average voter. American democracy functioned very effectively from about 1933 through 1965, and continued to function at least adequately for at least a quarter-century after that. That applied particularly to foreign policy. Presidents defined, and the bulk of the public accepted, an enormous, unprecedented role in the world for the United States. Threatened by the Vietnam War, that consensus re-emerged with somewhat different ground rules in its wake. During the last quarter century it has completely fallen apart, and the United States may losing the world role that enjoyed for the last two-thirds or so of the twentieth century.</p><p>I showed in <i>No End Save Victory</i> how Franklin Roosevelt convinced the American people that they had to prepare for and fight the Second World War. He saw that war on the horizon by 1937 at the latest and probably a few years earlier, but he discovered that the country was not willing to face up to that possibility. The fall of France in the spring of 1940 changed everything. The nation accepted his analysis that a German victory over Great Britain--widely anticipated in the summer of 1940, and a possibility to be reckoned with for at least eighteen months after that--would put the western hemisphere at risk. The Germans had leapfrogged from Germany into Norway before invading France, and they could use their air power to mount similar operations into Iceland, Greenland, and then Labrador or Newfoundland. Japan also took advantage of Germany's victory over France and Holland to threaten their Far Eastern possessions, and in September 1940 Germany, Japan and Italy signed an alliance against the United States. In response Congress agreed to double the size of the Navy by 1944, increase military aircraft production by orders of magnitude, and pass a peacetime draft. Those measures eventually enabled the United States and its allies to launch decisive offensives against Germany and Japan in the middle of 1944 and end the war a year later. Meanwhile, Roosevelt also sold Congress and the American people on the idea of the United Nations.</p><p>Harry Truman initially presided over wartime demobilization and focused on domestic affairs, but in 1947 he persuaded the nation to make a costly investment in the future of Europe with aid to Greece and Turkey and the Marshall Plan. Still, the defense budget fell fairly steadily during his first term. Events in late 1949 and 1950 transformed the situation. First, the USSR exploded an atomic bomb. Then North Korea attacked South Korea--a move that the entire world assumed had been directed by Stalin. (It had in fact been approved by him, although it was Kim Il-Sung's idea.) Governments in both Western Europe and the United States immediately concluded that Stalin might make a similar attack in Europe at any moment, and the US began mobilizing for a possible new conflict on the scale of the Second World War. The country accepted that this was necessary, and as the Korean War dragged on, the most numerous dissenters asked whether an immediate atomic attack on the USSR would be best. The big war did not come, but the same view of the Soviet threat persisted into the early 1960s. Eisenhower shifted the defense budget away from ground and naval forces and towards a greater reliance on nuclear weapons of all kinds, but also expanded US commitments around the world. In 1960 neither Kennedy nor Nixon questioned any of these assumptions.</p><p>The Vietnam War soured visible parts of the Boom generation on intervention around the world, and led in 1973 to the end of the military draft. I have written here before that I believe that to have been a catastrophe--not for foreign policy reasons, but because the drafted military was a great force for unity among our population and did a remarkable job of training uneducated Americans of all kinds for modern life. The war also persuaded administrations from Ford through Clinton that ground wars had to be avoided or wound up very quickly. Yet Reagan apparently had the nation behind him when he revived the rhetoric and some of the strategy of the tensest parts of the Cold War, and he was vindicated, of course, by the collapse of Communism under Bush I.</p><p>After the fall of Communism the military downplayed possible war with other great powers and much of the military was significantly downsized--but every President from Bush through Obama endorsed the idea that the United States was now the only superpower and had a unique responsibility to shape events around the world. Until 2001, foreign policy generally remained a secondary issue. After 9/11, however, George W. Bush called upon the nation to embark upon a new crusade comparable in scope and duration to the Second World War to defeat terror and eliminate hostile regimes around the world. Barack Obama toned down the rhetoric but did not abandon his assumptions, temporarily withdrawing all American troops from Iraq but increasing the effort in Afghanistan. But by the time that Bush left office in the midst of a financial collapse, the public had lost interest in this new mission--and in 2016, Donald Trump won the presidency as the first candidate bluntly to challenge all the assumptions of post-1945 American foreign policy.</p><p>Partly because Trump continued to rely on establishment figures in leading national security roles for some time, he did not pull away from major involvements overseas until the very end of his term, when he began, but did not complete, the withdrawal from Afghanistan. He did however repudiate or undermine Obama's most important diplomatic initiatives--the Iran nuclear deal and the normalization of relations with Cuba. Trump has now run the Republican party for eight years, however, and House Republicans have now blocked aid to Ukraine, which is fighting for its life as a nation. The national security establishment still believes in defending free nations against aggression, including both Ukraine and Taiwan (whose status as a nation is less clear), but that establishment, led by the president, has abandoned the hard work of persuading the country that it is right. Like our journalistic and academic establishments, our foreign policy establishment believes so deeply in its own righteousness that it treats any opposition as the opposition's fault. </p><p>Yes, our eight decades of presumed responsibility for what happens all over the world has led us into terribly destructive, divisive mistakes, and we have often betrayed principles such as national sovereignty that we claimed to stand for. But it did allow most of the industrialized world to thrive in peace. It also gave the nation something it desperately needs: the sense of a common mission to which we can all contribute. The end of that role will mark the end of an heroic era in US history.</p><div class="blogger-post-footer"><a href="http://historyunfolding.blogspot.com"><i>History Unfolding</i></a></div>David Kaiserhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05020082243968071584noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8746692.post-44787998173791716822024-02-04T15:45:00.000-05:002024-02-04T15:45:08.893-05:00Has wokeness peaked?<p> Whenever one uses the term "woke" or "wokeness" in public, some people will argue that those terms are either meaningless or that they are conservative dog whistles--even though plenty of woke people use them. Before getting to the topic of this post I want to try to define it.</p><p>Wokeness in my opinion can be defined both specifically and generally, and I will begin with some key specifics relating to three categories: race, gender (that is, relations between men and women), and gender identity. The woke position on race holds that racial oppression is a key founding aspect of American life that persists to this day. Such oppression, it holds, is the only reason why white people have more money and power than black people and Hispanics. (Certain other minorities are now doing better than white people.) Apostles of wokeness like Robin DiAngelo argue that white people don't even understand their own contributions to racism and need training on this point. Wokeness favors large-scale reparations to correct for centuries of oppression. It also regards the criminal justice system as a conscious strategy to lock up black men.</p><p>Regarding gender, wokeness holds that the oppression of women by men is fundamental to our society in the same way, and that it, like racial oppression, relies largely on stereotypes of male and female behavior. As with race, this view holds that oppression is the only reason for different average outcomes in men's and women's lives, such as the underrepresentation of women at the top of the corporate hierarchy or in STEM. </p><p>And as for gender identity, the woke position is that being a man, a woman, or something different from either one--a "non-binary" identity--is a purely <i>emotional</i> concept, not determined by the body with which one has been born. Going further, its proponents argue that anyone who rejects the gender normally represented by their body has the right to change their body to match their preferred gender, if necessary, and should be encouraged to do so, even before the ages of 18 or 21. </p><p>Moving to the more general, woke people tend to regard the whole intellectual, social and cultural apparatus of western civilization as an oppressive machine, because it has promoted a different set of ideas about race, the role of the two sexes, and the issue of gender identity. This tends to discredit any ideas about almost anything that anyone had before about 1968, when the ideas behind wokeness began to break into the mainstream. And last but hardly least, the woke believe that their views are the only moral views on any issue that they care about, that therefore, that other views and those who hold them are simply oppressors with no right to a public platform to express themselves. For the record, I am coming to believe that that part of wokeness--its desperate attempt to silence any critics--reveals an unconscious suspicion that the ideas to which its adherents have dedicated their lives might not be true after all. Opposing views, in my opinion, do not frighten people who are confident of the truth that much.</p><p>Now when I returned to the Boston area in 2012, I was delighted to begin receiving both the <i>New York Times </i>and the <i>Boston Globe</i> on my doorstep every morning--but in the intervening years I have wondered on many days why I bother, since they both have included so much woke content, strongly influenced by the above assumptions, so often. This peaked, of course, during the racial controversy of 2020, when a long-time <i>New York Times</i> editor lost his job for greenlighting an unwoke op-ed on urban rioting by a United States Senator. Coincidentally I just discussed the influence of wokeness at another major newspaper, the <i>Washington Post</i>, last week. Today, however, the opinion sections of both my daily papers feature very unwoke articles on two of the three critical topics that I identified above--suggesting to me that their editorial leadership might have realized that the pendulum has swung much too far in one direction and that opposing views now have to be given more weight.</p><p>The <i>Globe</i> piece is written by a great favorite of mine, the podcaster Coleman Hughes, who, I believe, is only twenty-seven years old. He grew up in the very integrated community of Montclair, New Jersey, with a black father and a Puerto Rican mother, and entered Columbia University around 2014 or so. He was appalled by the wokeness of much of the education he received there, began writing for Quellette, and now is a very successful podcaster to whom I have been listening to for about four years, and which now numbers 173,000 subscribers. He combines wide-ranging curiosity and a very logical mind with an extraordinarily even emotional keel, and he has introduced me, via his podcast, to many interesting younger people such as Katie Herzog and the twitter sensation Aella, <a href="https://www.bostonglobe.com/2024/02/01/opinion/coleman-hughes-the-end-of-race-politics-excerpt/?p1=BGSearch_Overlay_Results">The <i>Globe </i>piece</a> is adapted from his new book, <i>The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America. </i>That book is a new manifesto, putting forth both a severe critique of the woke racial view and a powerful alternative one. Authors such as Robin DiAngelo, Ibram X. Kendi, and Ta Na-hesi Coates, he argues, claim that race is nothing but a social construct, yet insist upon making it the foundation of their world view and of public policy. He calls them "neoracists," and I hope that word catches on. And typically, this child of western civilization <i>recognizes</i> that human beings naturally separate themselves into groups, <i>but also prescribes</i> the antidote which can enable us to live together and thrive. I quote:</p><p>"Humans have an inbuilt tribal instinct — a tendency to identify strongly with a group, to aim empathy inward toward its members and suspicion and hatred outward. That tendency appears to be baked into each of us at a biological level. That is our 'hardware.' The question is whether we use our 'software' — cultural ideas, early childhood education, political discourse, art, media, entertainment, and so forth — to amplify our natural tendencies or tamp down on them. The neoracist mindset, wittingly or not, amplifies them."</p><p>And here, he quotes two prominent thinkers from the past in support of his view of colorblindness as an ideal:</p><p>“'The significant thing about a man is not his specificity but his fundamentum, not the texture of his hair or the color of his skin but the texture and quality of his soul,' King said.</p><p>"Likewise, on the subject of interracial marriage, King objected to the term itself. 'Properly speaking,' he wrote, 'races do not marry; individuals marry.'</p><p>"Another great antiracist, Zora Neale Hurston, author of the classic novel, <i>Their Eyes Were Watching God</i>, opposed any concept that would subordinate individuals to groups. 'Races have never done anything,' she wrote in her autobiography. 'What seems race achievement is the work of individuals.' Notions like race pride, race consciousness, and even racial solidarity, she argued, are fictions that people accept because they appeal to base instincts."</p><p>It's great news that the Penguin Group, one of our largest publishers, has taken <i>The End of Race Politics</i> on, and its also good news that the <i>Globe</i> decided to excerpt it. That hardly indicates a revolution in the <i>Globe</i> editorial offices. The same <i>Ideas</i> section includes a column by perhaps its most woke columnist, Renée Graham, protesting attacks on Representative Cori Bush of Missouri and other black women as racist and sexist. "For many Republicans," she writes, "this policing is about shaming and silencing Black women. These attacks have less to do with what or how something is said. The perceived offense is when Black women dare to speak at all or bring their full selves into corridors that have historically been spaces dominated by white men." But I was genuinely surprised to find Hughes's piece in the paper all the same. The times may be a-changin'.</p><p>The <i>New York Times </i>piece that caught my eye today is by an opinion writer, Pamela Paul--although it is very well-researched and well-reported. "Ad Kids, They Thought They Were Trans," it is entitled. "They No Longer Do." This is not the first time that Paul or the <i>Times </i> have questioned the new ideology of gender and its application, but it is by far the most forthright. Paul distinguishes the "gender dysphoria" that some people have felt from earliest childhood from something newer, which she calls "rapid-onset gender dysphoria." This reflects the view which I have heard powerfully articulated by both Katie Herzog and Coleman Hughes that social contagion, much of it through social media, is largely responsible for the explosion of gender transitions among young people in the last decade or so. And many of these young people--including some who have had major surgery to "affirm" their new chosen gender--now feel they had made a mistake. Several witnesses told her they transitioned because it seemed easier to change their gender than simply to acknowledge that they were gay. This is a very important point: because most educated older Americans accept gay people completely, they assume that children and teenagers feel the same way, but self-acceptance for gay ones may still pose big challenges. Many other kids questioning their gender are suffering from autism or depression. These are not new ideas, and many parents have reacted skeptically when their teen-agers suddenly announce that they have decided that are living in the wrong body. What is shocking and well-documented in the article, however, is that the American medical establishment appears largely to have been converted to the idea that teens suffering from gender dysphoria are at risk for suicide and should be encouraged to take medical steps to "affirm" their new view of themselves immediately. European countries, including the UK, have become more skeptical. I checked Twitter quickly, and Paul's piece has unleased violent opposition as well as a good deal of praise. As with the <i>Globe,</i> this is only one piece. If the <i>New York Times</i> ever found the courage to renounce the <i>1619 Project</i> I would be far more impressed. But both of these pieces confirm a place for forthright, systematic unwoke arguments in leading newspapers, and in the crazy world of 2024, that is good news.</p><div class="blogger-post-footer"><a href="http://historyunfolding.blogspot.com"><i>History Unfolding</i></a></div>David Kaiserhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05020082243968071584noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8746692.post-63453869524274872912024-01-27T11:47:00.005-05:002024-01-29T11:18:26.823-05:00An announcement--and an account of contemporary journalism<p> More than two weeks ago I discussed recent events at Harvard, the war in the Middle East, and my new book <i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/States-Union-David-Kaiser/dp/1732874530/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1706367860&sr=8-1">States of the Union</a> </i>with Glenn Loury of Brown University and the Manhattan Institute. The discussion went very well, and the production staff enhanced it very effectively with still photos and one critical video clip from 1963. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4Zx-FXGMwo&ab_channel=TheGlennShow">You can watch it here</a>. Enjoy!</p><p>Last week I read <i>Collision of Power</i>, retired editor Marty Baron's account of his leadership of the <i>Washington Post</i> from 2013 through 2020. Baron had previously edited the <i>Miami Herald</i> and the <i>Boston Globe</i>, and was immortalized by Liev Schreiber's laconic, low-affect portrayal of him in <i>Spotlight</i>, the Oscar-winning film about the <i>Globe</i>'s investigation of Catholic clergy sexual abuse. People who worked for Baron have confirmed that the portrait was dead on. Baron is a Boomer, born in 1954, and the only Boomer ever to run the <i>Post'</i>s newsroom. Like me, he evidently learned the classic values of his profession at an early age and stuck to them while his profession moved in a different direction. By the end of his tenure at the <i>Post,</i> the book makes clear, he had clearly lost that battle.</p><p>The <i>Post, </i>like most major newspapers, had been losing money for some time when Baron because Executive Editor, and not long afterwards, the Graham family, which had owned the paper since the 1930s, sold it to Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon. (As Baron repeatedly points out, Bezos, not Amazon, owns the <i>Post</i> now.) A year or so later Bezos replaced Katharine Weymouth of the Graham family as publisher with another Boomer, Fred Ryan, as publisher, breaking the last link with the past. Bezos emerges from the book as a most interesting character. Like Baron, he is a man of few words who expresses his own opinion clearly and bluntly. While he and Ryan weighed in critically on lots of business decisions--including the staffing of the <i>Post</i>--he never, Baron makes clear, tried to affect news coverage or opinion writing at all. He re-oriented the paper towards paid digital subscriptions, which grew very impressively under Bezos's tenure, and digital advertising, and the paper began once again to show a profit. He backed up Baron in the continual four-year battle with Donald Trump from 2017 through 2020, even after Trump began threatening (idly as it turned out) to retaliate against Amazon. Bezos has a lot in common with Gilded age (and Gilded generation) figures like Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, who created similarly gigantic fortunes. He is obviously his own man. </p><p>Confronted with the unprecedented challenge of a president who described the media in general and the <i>Post</i> in particular as corrupt enemies of the people, Baron stuck to the principles of traditional journalism. "We are not at war, we are at work," became his mantra. Rather than engage Trump on his own terms, he wanted the <i>Post </i>to remain a bastion of objective reporting, publishing only stories that would pass the same verification tests that generations of <i>Post </i>journalists had used in the past. The specific stories he discusses in some detail are the documents leaked by Edward Snowden that revealed the scope of NSA surveillance of Americans; Trump National Security Advisor Michael Flynn's misstatements to the FBI about contacts with the Russian Ambassador, which led to his conviction for lying and his pardon by Trump; sexual misconduct allegations that led to the defeat of Roy Moore in an Alabama Senate race, and similar allegations which did not keep Brett Kavanaugh off the Supreme Court. Meanwhile, the paper continually pointed out that Trump was lying about almost everything that he did. Baron also chronicles the retaliatory steps that Trump took against the <i>Post </i>and other media outlets, including a whole private investigative effort that uncovered embarrassing social media posts by various journalists, some of whom resigned as a result. Trump also took a $10 billion [sic] Pentagon contract for cloud services away from Amazon and tried to give it to Microsoft instead, a plan he was unable to execute before the Biden administration took office and parcelled the contract out to various tech giants. Reporters meanwhile became subject to constant online threats, and some of them had to hire private security. We shall inevitably see more of that this year, as Trump seems certain to secure the Republican nomination and make even more indiscriminate use of incitement than he has in the past in his all-out attempt to get back into the White House.</p><p>With Bezos behind him, Baron coped pretty successfully with Trump's attacks. In the final chapters of the book, however, we find that he was less successful in dealing with an entirely different threat to his values: the contrary attitudes of much of his own staff, which emerged in connection with controversies over reporting on sexual harassment and in the summer of 2020 after the death of George Floyd.</p><p>As Baron repeatedly makes clear, much of this conflict stemmed from entirely contradictory ideas about the role of reporters and whether they should allow their personal political views to influence their reporting. He had been raised to believe in objectivity--and idea of an impartial, evidence-based search for truth, which could only succeed if reporters were willing to follow facts wherever they led. That ethos also forbade reporters from publicly expressing their own political views, which would obviously cast doubt on their objectivity and cost them the trust of a broad, bipartisan public. At least two new pressures now called these views into question. First of all, in the digital age, clicks measured success, and reporters' social media accounts--especially on Twitter--could generate more clicks for the paper, increasingly a matter of life and death. Secondly, reporters--who, as Baron never mentions, had generally been educated at elite institutions where many professors had abandoned the idea of objective truth decades ago--increasingly accepted the idea of knowledge as political and wanted to privilege knowledge that favored their favorite causes over knowledge that did not. For many, especially those for whom gender or race were critical issues, that was not simply a right but a duty.</p><p>Now the <i>Post</i> under Baron broke some important stories of sexual misconduct, and it made at least one very important contribution to reporting on race--the database of police shootings which it updates annually. Baron describes how that database was established, but he does not mention that it has not in many ways substantiated the popular progressive view of such shootings. Every year it shows that the majority of victims of police shootings are white, and that shootings of unarmed nonwhites are a tiny fraction of the total. Regarding sexual misconduct cases, Baron tried to insist on the same verification standards that he always had. Two specific cases of disputes with reporters that Baron describes in great detail illustrate an unbridgeable gap between his values and those of some younger reporters.</p><p>The first, a black reporter named Wes Lowery who had also worked for the <i>Globe</i>, who had in fact been the leading figure in starting the police shooting database. In a long series of tweets, Lowery began blasting the mainstream media for coverage of Trump and Tea Party Republicans because it did not specifically refer to them as racists. He also made personal attacks on individual journalists. Baron tried repeatedly to get him to observe the <i>Post'</i>s official social media policies, which called for more restraint, but he refused to admit that he had done anything wrong. "Generations of black journalists, including here at <i>The Washington Post</i>," Lowery wrote during one exchange, "have served as the conscience not only of their publications but of our entire industry: their authority derive from the experience navigating the world while cloaked in black sink; their expertise earned through their own daily journalism. Often those journalists have done so by leveling public criticism of both their competitors and their own employers. News organizations often respond to such internal and external pressure." A few months after those prophetic remarks, Lowery left the <i>Post</i> to take another job.</p><p>A second controversy involving a female reporter, Felicia Sonmez, got much worse. Sonmez in her interviews with the <i>Post</i> had identified herself as "a survivor of sexual misconduct." While working in Beijing for the <i>Wall Street Journal</i>, she had accused a fellow reporter from the <i>Los Angeles Times</i> of sexual misconduct, even though her own account of the incident acknowledged her consent to sexual intercourse. (This can be found on pp. 377-8 of Baron's book, to whom I refer any skeptics.) The reporter was forced to resign as a result,. but Sonmez publicly complained that the <i>Times</i> had not done enough. Eventually, the <i>Post </i>editors decided that she could not report on sexual abuse cases because she was continuing to tweet about her own and others so provocatively, inevitably casting doubt on her objectivity. She was eventually fired in 2022 after Baron's departure. Many younger reporters from various demographics obviously believe that certain causes are sacred, that they must be pursued by any means necessary, and that traditional rules simply serve the interests of straight white males. And now, as Baron mentions, even one of predecessors as <i>Post </i>executive editor, Leonard Downie (whom he does not name), <a href="https://historyunfolding.blogspot.com/2023/02/the-woke-revolution.html">has gone on record, along with former CBS News chief Andrew Heyward</a>, stating that the news business should abandon the outmoded concept of "objectivity," which so many of its younger members reject. Baron, like me, remains an apostate.</p><p>And despite his skepticism about these cases, Baron in the last year of his tenure sympathized fully with the black staffers at the <i>Post</i> who demanded more representation, particularly among top management, in the wake of George Floyd's death. That, too, we are now learning, was an event that needed more skeptical journalism. <a href="https://historyunfolding.blogspot.com/2023/12/the-american-world-turned-upside-down.html">We really do not know </a>whether Floyd really was murdered or whether he died of a combination of heart disease and drugs--the medical examiner's original conclusion. The angry journalists who confronted Baron wanted the immediate hire of more black editors and refused to wait for vacancies to emerge. Baron would have liked to oblige, but as he explains, Bezos and publisher Ryan had adamantly insisted on keeping the editorial staff small. After Baron left at the end of 2020 the paper reversed itself and did hire a significant number of new editors. </p><p>Baron also brings up another perspective for dealing with such controversies. Do institutions such as newspapers or universities actually have a higher purpose that is bigger than any individual's interest? In today's modern world, we might restate that question as follows: Are objective journalism and objective history really anything but excuses for straight white male privilege? To that I would answer with a resounding yes--and I would add <i>that impartial principles and higher purposes are the only things that PREVENT institutions from serving the interests of particular groups.</i> Yes, human nature being what it is, reason, impartiality and objectivity will always struggle with raw emotion--but that battle need not be lost, as well as individuals will still fight it.</p><p>One more critical data point, unfortunately, shows that keeping Baron's spirit alive is probably impossible now. The <i>Post</i>, as I have mentioned, returned to profitability during his editorship, and other major publications did well during those years as well. That, we can now see, was because Donald Trump was president. The bitter emotional controversies and the rage that he triggered increased clicks and subscriptions in a way that the actual business of government cannot. Now the <i>Post </i>is in the red again. The ideas of rationality and objectivity depend for their survival on a broad commitment to them within the population. Such a commitment is, I believe the foundation of our legal and political traditions, as well as our journalistic and academic ones. And that commitment may have been lost.</p><p><br /></p><div class="blogger-post-footer"><a href="http://historyunfolding.blogspot.com"><i>History Unfolding</i></a></div>David Kaiserhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05020082243968071584noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8746692.post-5599638495966282662024-01-17T09:34:00.000-05:002024-01-17T09:34:10.168-05:00Slouching towards Bethlehem<p>Polls show that Donald Trump's decisive victory in the Iowa caucuses will be followed next week by a big victory in New Hampshire as well. Other polling suggests that his legal problems have broadened and deepened his Republican support, and since any possible conviction over the next ten months will surely be appealed, I don't see how legal processes will stop him from winning the election. I have written repeatedly that Trump's nomination and election in 2016 reflected a collapse of American politics, since neither party could find a candidate who could beat hm. The collapse has continued, and I want to talk about its causes.</p><p>Our political class, oddly, is a victim of its own success. Over the last half century or so it has created a self-perpetuating system, fueled by lax campaign financing laws, gerrymandering (on both sides), better health care for old people, and an alliance with our economic elite. These factors made incumbents extremely difficult to defeat, The average age of a Senator first reached 59 in 1990; now it is 64. In the same period the House average has risen from 51 to 59. Unlucky losers (and some who simply decide to quit) transition smoothly into very well-paid lobbying positions. Meanwhile, however, our politicians lost touch with the average voter, who did not believe that they knew or cared how ordinary people were living. Several major trends in our economy and our life--greater inequality, higher illegal immigration, and poor student performance in our schools--have continued under Republican and Democratic administrations alike. Meanwhile, with fewer and fewer races actually in play, both Republicans and Democrats have stopped appealing to voters on the other side of the aisle and have become more devoted to their bases.</p><p>Chronic voter unhappiness has created a new era in US politics. In all but one of nine national elections since 2004, either the White House or at least once house of Congress has changed hands. The Democrats won Congress in 2006 and the White House in 2008, and the Republicans won the House in 2010. After a break from the pattern in 2012, the Republicans won the Senate in 2014 and the White House in 2016. The Democrats won the House back in 2018 and won the White House and the Senate in 2020, only to lose the House again in 2022. Nothing remotely like this has happened in any earlier era of US politics. Neither Bush II, nor Obama nor Trump nor Biden have managed to rally a durable majority behind them and create any new national consensus. The Democrats have not given up on helping the American people. Obama passed Obamacare, and Biden has passed a major infrastructure bill and a climate bill with major implications--but neither of these measures had much electoral impact because they took so long to come into effect. Obamacare did not actually become available to Americans until 2013, three years after it was passed, and few new infrastructure projects have really gotten going in the last three years. </p><p>Despite Trump's defeat in 2020, he has continued the transformation of the Republican Party into a radical personality cult. Nearly every Republican officeholder who has spoken out against him has lost their job. The response among Democrats, however, has been very different. Bernie Sanders in 2016 appealed to the same kind of disaffection on the Democratic side that Trump did on the Republican side, but the Democratic establishment defeated him and handed the nomination to Joe Biden in 2020. Like Clinton and Obama before him, Biden used congressional majorities to pass some important legislation in his first two years, and then lost the House. Since 2022 he has made it clear that he will run for re-election on one platform plank: that only he can save democracy from Donald Trump. The Democratic party's only weapon against Trump seems to be legal action, which has solidified his Republican support on the one hand while moving too slowly actually to stop him on the other. </p><p>And despite our remarkable growth in employment and some victories for American labor, Biden has lost popularity because of the most severe inflation since the 1970s. Here he has been a victim of establishment thinking, which has assumed since Reagan that inflation would never be a major problem again. When in 1971 inflation threatened Richard Nixon's re-election, he imposed wage and price controls that lasted for more than two years. The nation appears to have the worst housing shortage since the immediate post-Second World War period, when bipartisan congressional majorities did a great deal to alleviate it, but Biden and the Democrats have made no proposals at all to help the younger generation this time. The higher Federal Reserve rates imposed to fight inflation have made that situation worse. Partly as a result, while our political class has gotten older, the younger generation is more and more disaffected from politics. Youth and minorities are critical parts of the Democratic base, but both are trending away from the Democrats now. </p><p>Trump also destroyed the bipartisan foreign policy consensus in favor of a unique US role in the world that lasted for more than 70 years--but Biden continues down the traditional path in Ukraine, Yemen, and in his blind support of Israel. Republicans in Congress, following Trump, have now stopped aid to Ukraine, which could lead to a Russian victory in the war. His administration's insistence that the Israeli government do things it obviously has no intention of doing is becoming a national embarrassment. The bombing of Yemen threatens a wider conflict. The Republicans are using the Ukraine issue to try to force Biden to take drastic measures against immigration--but he will apparently do so grudgingly, missing a chance to show a great many voters that he agrees with their concerns. Trump has given Biden and the Democrats too much self-confidence. They are so convinced that he must be defeated that they don't understand that they must say and do other things to win the necessary votes. Everyone seems to know that Vice President Harris is a liability on the ticket, but Biden has no intention of replacing her. </p><p>My new book details how each President has tried to rally the country behind his objectives--and by tha tmeasure, Biden ranks very low. He has given up the traditional presidential broadcast address on major domestic and foreign issues almost entirely. When he does give a major address like his Valley Forge speech last week it does not even make the front page of our most important newspapers. His age is obviously a major concern. Yet the Democratic establishment chose him and remains committed to him. The very different system that Biden stepped into as a 30-year old Senator in 1973 is gone, and Donald Trump is the only man to come up with something to replace it--however disastrous that might turn out to be.</p><div class="blogger-post-footer"><a href="http://historyunfolding.blogspot.com"><i>History Unfolding</i></a></div>David Kaiserhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05020082243968071584noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8746692.post-87887995571307140622023-12-30T11:35:00.002-05:002023-12-30T11:35:51.449-05:00The Fourteenth Amendment, Section 3I quote:<div><br /></div><div>"Section 3 Disqualification from Holding Office</div><div>"No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability."</div><div><br /></div><div>The Supreme Court of Colorado and the Secretary of State of Maine have both declared Donald Trump ineligible for the presidential ballot under this provision of the constitution. The case is already on its way to the Supreme Court, which will have to pass on it. Should the court deny the states the right to take this step, they would in my opinion betray the "originalism" which several of the justices claim to be the foundation of their jurisprudence. That is not only because of the plain meaning of these words, but because of the history of their application during the four years in which this provision remained in effect after the ratification of the 14th Amendment, from 1868 until 1872, when Congress, following the text of the provision, removed the disability from nearly all former confederates except the top leadership. That history is summarized by <a href="https://www.citizensforethics.org/reports-investigations/crew-reports/past-14th-amendment-disqualifications/">this excellent web article</a>, which I encourage you all to read in full, and which I will summarize.</div><div><br /></div><div>Critically, it is very clear that one did not have to be <i>criminally convicted</i> of insurrection in the wake of the Civil War to be disqualified from office. Almost no confederates were ever formally charged with rebellion, but thousands of them recognized the applicability of the clause to themselves, in effect, by petitioning Congress to remove their disability. The article lists six men who assumed state or federal offices and were removed from them after judicial proceedings in state courts or federal court (as has happened to Trump in Colorado); by state executive officials (as has happened to him in Maine); or because Congress refused to seat them, citing section 3. None them had been convicted of any crime relating to insurrection. The reason conviction was not necessary, the article argues, was that disqualification from office is not a criminal penalty. In addition, in one case, the Governor of Georgia refused to certify victorious candidate for the House of Representatives on the grounds that he had engaged in the rebellion, suggesting that states could act against ineligible candidates for federal office. (The House of Representatives also refused to seat that candidate, however.) The article also notes that section 3 was interpreted to apply to anyone who had advocated rebellion, whether they had specifically rebelled themselves or not. Nor does it seem out of place for me to point out that the Democratic Party in the post-Civil War era never nominated anyone from the old Confederacy for either president or vice president, even after Congress acted to remove the restriction on nearly all ex-confederates in 1872. Such people were likely to have fought for the Confederacy and remained disqualified in fact if not by law. </div><div><br /></div><div>Two men have been disqualified from holding office under the clause in subsequent eras. Victor Berger, the Socialist mayor of Milwaukee, opposed US entry into the First World War, leading to his indictment--along with many other fellow socialists, such as Eugene V. Debs--under the Espionage Act. He was elected to Congress while under indictment in November 1918, convicted in February 1919, and denied his seat by the House of Representatives when it met in December 1919 under section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment. His conviction was eventually overturned and he returned to Congress in 1923, after having been defeated in the Republican sweep of 1920. Interestingly enough, however, there seems to have been no attempt to keep Debs of the ballot in 1920, when he ran for president on the Socialist ticket while serving his sentence and won nearly one million votes. More recently, a New Mexico state court disqualified a man from holding office as a county commissioner because he had been convicted of trespassing during the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol--confirming that the clause is very much alive. </div><div><br /></div><div>The history of the application of this clause from 1868 into 1872, and more recently in New Mexico, suggests to me that the authorities in Colorado and Maine are historically well within their rights to conclude that Donald Trump participated in an insurrection and thus is now ineligible to hold any office under the United States, and therefore ineligible for the ballot for nomination or election in their state. (The argument that section 3 does not apply to the presidency is, in my opinion, utterly without merit.) Other states might do the same--but they would almost certainly be solidly blue ones, whose loss would not cost Trump any electoral votes. (The Maine ruling would have cost him one electoral vote, based on his victory in one of Maine's two congressional districts, in 2020, but Biden carried the popular vote in both Maine and Colorado quite comfortably.) Meanwhile, the denial of certain states to Trump would probably energize his supporters in the critical purple states still further. The Supreme Court will almost certainly not be asked if the <i>federal</i> courts could deny Trump the right to receive any electoral votes at all, and it is hard to imagine that this court would do so anyway. In theory either house of Congress could vote not to certify a Trump victory on the grounds that he was ineligible to serve under section 3, just as the House several times refused to seat members on those very grounds, but that, it seems to me, would almost surely result in a new civil war of some kind.</div><div><br /></div><div>The government of the United States could summarily bar many thousands of former office-holders from any role in government in 1868 because it had put down their rebellion by force during four years of almost total war. We are in danger today because our government does not now enjoy comparable prestige and the country is still deeply divided over whether Donald Trump tried to overthrow the government or not. I am not even sure that Trump's conviction for attempting to overturn the election, either in Georgia or in federal court, would change the situation very much, because even then, roughly half the country would reject attempts to disqualify him. The failure over the last twenty years to renew confidence in our Constitution and our institutions threatens terrible consequences.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><a href="http://historyunfolding.blogspot.com"><i>History Unfolding</i></a></div>David Kaiserhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05020082243968071584noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8746692.post-106369592826138972023-12-23T16:17:00.022-05:002024-01-05T18:50:17.241-05:00The Real Problems of Higher Ed<p> I am not going to try to parse the controversy over Professor Claudine Gay 's resignation from the presidency of Harvard, because she as a person is a symptom, not a cause, of what is wrong in academia. Neither her relatively modest scholarly credentials nor her public relations approach are in the least bit unusual. The days when distinguished scholars or scientists ultimately became heads of universities are long gone, and I can't name a single president of a leading private institution or flagship state university who took office with particular new educational goals that he or she wanted to implement. Our graduate schools seem less likely than ever to turn out groundbreaking young scholars in the humanities or social sciences, and nearly every college in the country suffers from the administrative bloat that makes college unaffordable. Recently <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-haven-from-the-ivy-leagues-madness-assumption-jews-antisemitism-harvard-f60d063a?mod=trending_now_opn_4">an interesting <i>Wall Street Journal </i>op-ed </a>by President Greg Weiner of Assumption University in Worcester, Mass.--who proudly identifies himself as the first Jewish president of a Catholic college--argues that Jewish students--or, he might have added, any kid with real intellectual ambition--ought to check out certain Catholic colleges like his own, that still dedicate themselves to free inquiry. Elite institutions, he says rightly, have lost their way. They cannot easily regain it. Weiner, in his mid-fifties, appears to be the kind of historically oriented political scientist who dominated that field in my youth but is very hard to find on the faculties of major institutions today. He has written books about James Madison, Abraham Lincoln, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan. He also writes powerful and sophisticated op-eds, one of of which I found <a href="http://here.">here.</a></p><p>I would today like to identify perhaps the single biggest change in the attitude towards what a college education should do over the length of my own academic career, which now spans 58 years. Until the last fifty years or so, higher education was supposed to turn a young man or woman into a visibly different person by teaching them things they had not known and exposing them to new thinkers. This included learning new languages, including, for most of the nineteenth century anyway, Latin and perhaps even Greek. Young humanists immersed themselves in the politics and the literature of the distant past, and learned new perspectives on politics and on life. College initiated them into an intellectual elite that had developed itself over the centuries.</p><p>Three developments that coincided with my own youth radically changed that attitude. The first, I think, was the enormous expansion of higher education undertaken to educate my own generation. While graduate schools were thriving in the 1950s and 1960s, the demand for new faculty rapidly outran the supply of genuine intellectuals who chose that career. The second was the Vietnam war, which told my generation that it did not have to believe anything that the older generation said. And the third and perhaps the most influential was the emergence of new groups of female, nonwhite and gay academics who took a different view of what higher education was really for. Here I have to be very clear about what I am saying. The women, nonwhites and increasingly out gays who entered academia in the 1960s and 1970s in larger numbers included quite a few, some of whom I knew very well, who were entirely faithful to earlier traditions and did excellent work. Others, however, decided for various reasons that our intellectual traditions <i>mainly</i> tended to preserve the supremacy of straight white males, and only served their interests. The attitude that the traditional curriculum revolved around straight white male concerns persists to this day--and having gone through college in the late 1960s, I think it completely misrepresents how straight white males experienced college. My Harvard class of 1969 was very well educated in high school but all of us were bowled over during the first term by the amount of work we were expected to do and by the new ideas and concepts that we had to absorb. That was so true that we were more than happy to receive Bs and even Cs and C+s in some of our courses, as I documented in <i>A Life in History</i>, and accept the Bs as genuinely good grades. </p><p>The new view held that colleges and universities had to change both the composition of their faculties and the subjects they studied to meet the needs of women and minorities--both of whom had been important parts of American higher education for quite a while. Those who pushed that view argued that politics, society, and intellectual life had simply reinforced their oppression, and that the university, as the 1962 Port Huron statement said, was the place to begin overthrowing it. Forty years or so later, this view has been institutionalized to suggest that the real purpose of universities is to narrow students' intellectual horizons, instead of broadening them. They are encouraged--not only in course work, but in freshman orientations and by new bureaucracies--to believe that they should simply be learning more about themselves, their own experiences, and people who "look like them." That more specifically means studying a new history of oppression that will teach most whites (especially straight men) that they are oppressors while teaching the rest of the students that they are oppressed and have special needs of their own that college must address. And these ideas have gone further than that now, insisting that even the sciences and professional education must change to "decenter whiteness" and replace their traditions with something new. </p><p>Something else seems to have accelerated these trends in the last twenty years or so. As bureaucracies and faculties get bigger and colleges get more expensive, they are increasingly beholden to students whom they cannot afford to offend. That means, among other things, grade inflation--who wants to pay today's prices to get a B? It means extraordinary sensitivity to student protests, and opposition to anything that might make any particular group of students uncomfortable. It means more competition among elite institutions for well-off foreign students, another increasing group. It means a great reluctance, now on display, to offend any students among protected groups, who also represent more and more of the student body, especially at public institutions. And it means that the key decisions for every university--how much to charge and what to spend the money on--are made not by outstanding faculty, but by full-time career administrators bidding in numerous ways for the students who can afford their vastly inflated prices. In these conditions college faculties cannot do much to hold off the anti-intellectual trends throughout our society--led by the simple decline of reading--that are leaving our western heritage behind.</p><p>The western world built up it intellectual tradition by training generations of scholars and teachers to take certain ideas of free inquiry seriously, and immersing them in a continually evolving canon of basic texts. All of that required dedication and years of work--which the genuine intellectuals among us, whom I have always believed are scattered at random throughout our society, put in largely out of love, not duty. Most of today's universities deny their students that experience, and that is why those traditions are very endangered species. Our leading institutions can still rely on their reputation and their role as pipelines into well-compensated professions, and therefore are unlikely to undertake drastic reforms. Perhaps some smaller institutions--many of which are threatened with financial catastrophe--could make the necessary changs, which could safe money and improve their educational product at the same time.</p><div class="blogger-post-footer"><a href="http://historyunfolding.blogspot.com"><i>History Unfolding</i></a></div>David Kaiserhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05020082243968071584noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8746692.post-23193778923978968762023-12-16T09:46:00.002-05:002023-12-16T09:46:52.672-05:00The Fall of the American Empire<p> In preparation for a big interview (you'll hear more when the time comes), I've been reviewing my own new book (see above), and have reached the period of the early Cold War, when the American government and the American people became accustomed to a worldwide role. The biggest turning point in this process was the Korean War, which moved the emerging conflict with the USSR and its new Chinese ally from a mainly political front until a military one. The Soviets, nearly all Americans believed, wanted to spread Communism all over the world, just as the Germans and Japanese had wanted to extend their domination in the Second World War. The North Korean attack--approved, we now know, by Stalin, although it was Kim Il-Sung's idea--proved that they would take advantage of any opportunity to do so by force. West Germans and western Europeans shared that view, and immediately pushed for West German rearmament and a stronger NATO. Simultaneously the Soviet explosion of an atomic weapon triggered a new race for hydrogen bombs. The young historians who argue today the Cold War was a conscious conspiracy by US elites to extend American power have shut their eyes to the impact of the two world wars. Yes, Truman and Eisenhower overreacted in certain circumstances, sometimes with tragic consequences, but their assumptions seemed quite reasonable at the time, not only to them but to the American people. That was still true when Lyndon Johnson followed those assumptions into the Vietnam War, and even when Ronald Reagan revived them in the 1980s.</p><p>My book makes something else clear as well: a new consensus has infected the foreign policy elite of both parties since the fall of Communism in 1989. That consensus holds that the United States is now the unique, indispensable world leader, capable of and responsible for the resolution of any crisis anywhere in the world. That idea has been echoed again and again by every President from the first Bush through Joe Biden--with the notable exception of Donald Trump, who at this moment seems to have the best chance of anyone of winning the next presidential election. That assumption led the first Bush into the Gulf War and Panama, Clinton into the Kosovo war and into Haiti, Bush II into his crusade in Central Asia and the Middle East, Obama into Libya and back into Iraq, and now, Biden into extensive support for Ukraine. It could also lead us into war with Iran or with China over Taiwan at almost any moment.</p><p>It is now clear, however, that there is no longer any consensus among the broader public in support of this world role. The Republican party no longer recognizes any need for the national security state as it has evolved or the policies which it supports. Republican Senators blocked military promotions for months, and have left dozens of key diplomatic posts vacant rather than approve Biden's nominees. House Republicans are blocking aid for Ukraine and Israel until they get their way on another fundamental national security issue, the control of our border and immigration. The so-called progressive wing of the Democratic party has also turned against the assumptions of the national security state, not only with respect to Israel, but in the Ukraine war as well. All this is bound to affect the attitudes of other nations, including allies, who must increasingly realize that they cannot depend on the word of the American president because the president no longer can count on the support of his nation overseas. There are two big reasons, I think, why this has happened.</p><p>The first relates to the insularity of our foreign policy establishment. From Biden on down, they are so convinced of their own righteousness that they see no need to make a big effort to justify what they are doing to the rest of the nation. (The Democratic Party has the same problem with respect to domestic issues, including climate change and immigration.) Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Nixon and Reagan all took to the airwaves regularly to explain major military and diplomatic initiatives and treat the public as a real partner in their enterprises. Biden has not done this even once, relying, wrongly, on quick sound bites from the White House to maintain public support. The prime time radio or television address, which played a critical role in US politics from FDR through Reagan, has fallen into disuse. Partly, of course, that is because Americans are now so deluged with entertainment options that they are much less likely to listen to it--but we all pay the price for that in other ways.</p><p>The second reason relates to parallel developments in domestic politics. Average Americans trusted FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Nixon and Reagan because they also believed, rightly or wrongly, that their policies were improving their own lives. These presidents routinely linked their defense of freedom overseas to their efforts to build a stronger society at home. After forty years of increasing inequality and political fragmentation, that bond too has been broken. Both parties focus their appeals on particular constituencies--their bases--and not on the needs of the nation as a whole. </p><p>Re-reading the speeches of George W. Bush, one sees clearly that he (and Karl Rove) wanted very badly to recreate the atmosphere of 1940-1 or of the early Cold War. Like FDR and Truman, he spoke of an existential worldwide threat requiring a great campaign to overcome--but he exaggerated the threat, on the one hand, and chose strategies that only made things worse, on the other. Obama stuck to the Bush game plan in Afghanistan and revived it in Libya and then Iraq, while presiding over a very slow recovery from the financial crisis. The government has failed to restore our confidence because so little of what it has done has worked. Now, in sharp contrast to Eisenhower in 1956-7 or Nixon and Kissinger in 1973, it is utterly failing to exert any real control over what is happening in the Middle East. All this relates, as I have said many times, to a general collapse of authority throughout our society that began more than half a century ago. We haven't hit bottom yet.</p><div class="blogger-post-footer"><a href="http://historyunfolding.blogspot.com"><i>History Unfolding</i></a></div>David Kaiserhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05020082243968071584noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8746692.post-10832655210529828272023-12-11T13:18:00.001-05:002023-12-11T13:18:33.900-05:00The American World Turned Upside Down?<p> In 1977, I believe, I made the acquaintance of a Boston-area rare book and art dealer named Bill Young through Steve Flink, a mutual friend. On the first of many afternoons that I spent at his house, it developed that he was an avid student of the case of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, two Italian immigrants who had been executed in 1927 for a double murder during a robbery in South Braintree, Massachusetts, in 1920. The case had been controversial for more than half a century, and I was fairly familiar with it myself. Bill, it turned out, was convinced that both men were innocent, and that the prosecution had substituted a key piece of evidence--a bullet fired from the Colt automatic Sacco was carrying when he was arrested--to make their case. Over the next few months, he convinced me that he was probably right. During that same year Governor Michael Dukakis issued what amounted to a posthumous pardon to the two men, and the state released more material that revealed that the state had falsified another key part of its case. In 1979, Bill was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and on the last day that I saw him I agreed to take over his research and try to turn it into a book. Five years later, with the help of a research assistant--a former student of mine named Michael Levitin--I turned it into a book, <i>Postmortem: New Evidence in the Case of Sacco and Vanzetti</i>, listing Bill and myself as the co-authors. It re-ignited the controversy and got a lot of favorable reaction, and for a while some law professors were using it in courses.</p><p>The case, it is fair to say, had become the most controversial criminal case in US history during the 1920s, triggering huge demonstrations both in the US and around the world, and retaliatory bombings by some of Sacco and Vanzetti's fellow anarchists. I am convinced that it was a terrible miscarriage of justice, marked by a number of instances of prosecutorial misconduct. In particular, the prosecution kept critical evidence from the defense--something that the Warren Court turned into grounds for overturning any conviction in which such things occurred. That evidence included the minutes of the grand jury inquiry into the case, which Michael Levitin discovered in the Harvard Law School library, which showed how much certain eyewitnesses had changed their story and included statements by the medical examiner tending to confirm that one bullet had been substituted by the prosecution.</p><p>Thanks to an intrepid documentary film maker named Liz Collin and her writer JC Chaix, I am inclined to believe that we have lived through a comparable miscarriage of justice over the last three years: the convictions of Derek Chauvin and three other police officers for the murder of George Floyd. The documentary, <i>The Fall of Minneapolis,</i> can be watched for free <a href="https://www.thefallofminneapolis.com/">here</a> or on youtube. I am indebted to Glenn Loury and John McWhorter for bringing it to the attention of their listeners, including myself, on Glenn's substack <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ffv4IUxkDU&pp=ygUYR2xlbm4gTG91cnkgR2VvcmdlIEZsb3lk">and youtube channel, here</a>. As usual, Glenn and John repeatedly called a spade a spade rather than referring to it metaphorically as a shovel, as Mark Twain would say. I will now try to summarize what I have learned. Collin and Chase have also <a href="They're Lying: The Media, The Left, and The Death of George Floyd">published a book laying out their findings</a>, It is selling very well on amazon but it is only in forty libraries in the United States so far, none of them within 300 miles of my home here in Watertown. Collin, it should be noted, is the wife of Bob Kroll, who at the time of Floyd's death was a the president of the Minneapolis police union.</p><p>There are two critical findings in the film, one of which casts grave doubt as to how Floyd died, and the second which may lead eventually to the dismissal of the murder case.</p><p>To begin with--and I had seen this reported before--the original autopsy report, written by the Minneapolis medical examiner who performed the autopsy on Floyd, found no evidence of asphyxiation due to pressure on his neck or elsewhere. Instead, it found that Floyd suffered from serious heart disease, and that he had methamphetamine and a large dose of fetanyl in his system when he died. Body cam footage, of which more in a moment, shows him with some kind of drug in his mouth during his argument with the police officers. The two doctors hired by the well-known attorney Benjamin Crump who said that Floyd died of asphyxiation did not in fact perform an autopsy, according to the film--they simply presented a different conclusion based on the medical examiner's data. By the time the initial official report was complete, several days after Floyd's death--it took that long to get the toxicology report--the nation and the world had already decided that Chauvin had choked him to death with his knee because of the cell phone video that a bystander had recorded, and demonstrations and riots were raging in Minneapolis and elsewhere. The film leaves the impression that the medical examiner felt he had no choice but to change his original conclusion that Floyd had died of some mixture of heart disease and the effect of the drugs he had taken. It is one of the bedrock principles of American law that no one can be convicted of murder absent clear proof of the <i>corpus delicti, </i>that is, that foul play caused the victim's death. The question of how the two independent pathologists, Michael Baden and Allecia Wilson, whom Crump hired, reached their conclusion needs final clarification. Dozens of news accounts indicated that they had performed a "second autopsy," but Collin's book, <i>They're Lying</i>, and the film, insist that they only reviewed the medical examiner's finding.</p><p>That is not all. The film presents many minutes of police body cam footage of officers' attempts to detain Floyd for at least ten minutes--before Chauvin was even on the scene. Floyd becomes extremely agitated as soon as the officers approach him in his car, and refuses all their commands. He also says, repeatedly, "I can't breathe"--well before he is under any restraint from the officers. Floyd was a large, powerful man--bigger than any of the officers--and the film shows how scary the whole encounter was for them. According to the film, much of this footage had never been shown before they put it in their movie. This is a point where I need more information--I have received Collin's book and looked for a definite statement that this footage was denied to the jury (it was definitely denied to the public before the trial), but I haven't found it. If in fact the prosecution kept this footage out of the hands of the defense, that could, it seems to me, lead to the dismissal of the entire case.</p><p>Last, but hardly least, high-ranking officers of the Minneapolis police testified that the technique Chauvin used to hold Floyd down was not part of his training or the SOPs of the police department. That, it seems, was a lie, as the film shows with pictures from a training manual. And it also shows other angles seeming to show that Chauvin's knee was on Floyd's shoulder, not his neck. We also know that Floyd had been repeating "I can't breathe" many minutes before Chauvin put him in that position. </p><p>Chauvin and his three fellow officers were eventually convicted of different offenses in both federal and state courts, and are serving concurrent sentences of 22.5 years for Chauvin and several years each for the other three men. Very recently Chauvin survived an assault in prison during which he was stabbed more than twenty times. Meanwhile, a substantial portion of the Minneapolis police force has quit in the wake of the case and the riots that followed, in which one precinct was forbidden to try to prevent rioters from taking over and destroying their building. (That is described at great length by officers who were on the scene, and who make impressive witnesses.) Crime has significantly increased in Minneapolis, even though political leaders backed away from their initial enthusiasm for "defunding the police."</p><p>The death of George Floyd and the near-unanimous conclusion that a police officer had murdered him while other officers looked on had a tremendous effect on American life. Not only did it lead to many weeks of demonstrations, some of them violent, in many American cities, but it triggered the "racial reckoning" that led to putting a new national holiday on the calendar, popularizing the 1619 project, and winning much broader acceptance for the idea of the United States as a hopelessly racist society. And yet, it seems entirely possible that Floyd wasn't murdered at all, but simply died from a combination of hypertension, heart disease, and a combination of fetanyl and meth. Because of the case's impact, the new documentary may turn the case into a Republican talking point for the foreseeable future--all the more so since both President Biden and Vice President Harris did not wait for the trial to jump on the bandwagon and claim that Floyd was a victim of police brutality and racism. And in the current climate, I cannot imagine how a new investigation could possibly enjoy the trust of large numbers of the American people, for whom the Floyd case is as settled as anything could be. The case will have far more enduing consequences than Sacco and Vanzetti ever did. Meanwhile, I urge you all to watch the movie.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><div class="blogger-post-footer"><a href="http://historyunfolding.blogspot.com"><i>History Unfolding</i></a></div>David Kaiserhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05020082243968071584noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8746692.post-17058925357912016782023-12-02T11:50:00.005-05:002023-12-03T09:54:17.891-05:00Marty Peretz, 21st-Century Man<p> Having subscribed to the <i>New Republic</i> for about thirty years and appeared in it a few times when Marty Peretz ran it, I eagerly made my way through his autobiography <i>The Controversialist </i>a week or two ago. It was apparently much in demand in the west suburbs of Boston, and it took months for the library consortium to come up with a copy for me. The book has drawn numerous reviews on line, most of which seem to make the same points about him and his career, and I will not go into those at any length. Regarding his sexuality, as they note, Peretz declares himself gay in the book but says very little about that side of his life, never mentioning a single male sexual partner--and I don't care. Nobody owes the public a thorough account of their sex life. Peretz's book deals with his contributions to American public life, just as <i>A Life in History</i> dealt almost exclusively with my career in academia. Incidentally, I have no idea if Peretz has a google alert for his name active, but if he somehow happens to read this piece, I am sure he would enjoy <i>A Life in History</i>. Like his book, it has a great deal of information about the inner workings of Harvard, with which we were both so closely associated for so long. That common association eventually brought us together for a while, but I will leave that story for the end of this piece.</p><p>Peretz was born in 1939 in the Bronx to immigrant Jewish parents from Poland. His father was a successful small businessman and landlord. Peretz graduated from Bronx High School of Science, one of New York city 's competitive high schools, and probably in the 1950s the most difficult school in the country to get into. He got into Princeton but went to Brandeis instead--and this leads me to my first relatively original observation about this book.</p><p>Peretz in his heyday at the <i>New Republic</i>, particularly from the 1980s, despised the label "neoconservative," but he certainly was a center-right figure and as he admits, his foreign policy views generally accorded with those of recognized neoconservatives. Thus many have forgotten or do not know that until the mid-1970s he ranked as a leftist--and his leftism dated from before leftism once again became fashionable. He had, he tells us, two mentors at Brandeis. The first was Herbert Marcuse, the Marxist, founder of critical theory, and prophet of the New Left, to which Peretz clearly belonged at least until a fateful conference in Chicago in 1967. He evidently had more political influence upon the young Peretz than Max Lerner, his second mentor, and a devout believer in the American experiment. Yet at no time in the book does Peretz really tell us anything substantial about his leftist beliefs in that era. The Marcuse book that hand the most influence upon him, he says, was <i>Eros and Civilization</i>--because it encouraged young people to explore their sexuality. He describes some relatively early civil rights activism, and in 1962, he joined the quixotic Senate campaign of Harvard professor H. Stuart Hughes, whom I became friendly with in graduate school, an independent run against Teddy Kennedy that called for a more reserved Cold War foreign policy. He also mentions his sympathy for Fidel Castro. In the middle of the decade, he like so many others became a committed opponent of the Vietnam War, and in 1966 he took up the cause of Biafra, the secessionist Nigerian province that the Nigerian government brutally suppressed By 1967, he was helping to organize a Chicago conference of white and black leftists who were looking for a candidate to challenge Lyndon Johnson for the Democratic nomination in 1968. By that time he had married a very wealthy heiress, Anne Deveraux Labouisse, who became his political partner and whose fortune made him a significant political contributor, at least by the more restrained standards of the 1960s. What is completely missing from this account of his youth is any indication of his views on economic questions--surely a remarkable omission from one who counted the leading Marxist of the mid-twentieth century as one of his mentors. </p><p>About twenty years ago, Judith Klinghoffer wrote an interesting book, <i>Vietnam, Jews, and the Middle East</i>, showing how the 1967 Six Day War had shifted the identities and the politics of many American Jews by awakening new feelings for Israel. Some of them, she showed, noticed that the United States emerged in that crisis as one of Israel's few friends, and therefore began to favor an aggressive US foreign policy around the world in the hope that it would make Israel more secure. Peretz makes clear in his book that his identification with Israel went back much further than 1967, but the war's aftermath changed his trajectory for another reason. At the Chicago conference of radicals, black militants took over, spurned any white input, and insisted on passing an anti-Zionist resolution. The black-Jewish alliance on civil rights was coming to an end. Peretz remained a dove on Vietnam, and indeed became a significant player (in his account at least) in the Eugene McCarthy campaign for the Democratic nomination in 1968. He also participated in the McGovern campaign in 1972--although he tells us that he wound up voting for Nixon, partly, he says, because he was sure McGovern "had [Israel] in his sights." I too supported both McCarthy and McGovern, and got to know McGovern slightly, and for what it is worth, I think he was a far superior public servant to McCarthy and a much friendlier human being.</p><p>Two years later <i>The New Republic</i> was up for sale, and Peretz bought it. He rapidly changed its personnel and its political line, from moderate left to center-right--although as he points out, some leftist material continued to appear in it on some topics for a long time. He went through a great many editors, a process he details without ever conceding that he was not an easy man to work for. He continued to teach at Harvard (more on that later), and he brought a number of former students into the magazine. He writes rather fulsomely about many of these subordinates, especially Leon Wieseltier, his long-time literary editor, whom he describes as a genius--a judgment in which I cannot concur. The <i>New Republic</i> became a very reliable supporter of Israel--although not always uncritical--and, in the 1980s, a supporter of Ronald Reagan's anti-Communist counteroffensive in the Third World. The left wing of the Democratic Party, it is fair to say, became its most common target. Yet I came away from the book feeling that Peretz's personal likes and dislikes had an extraordinary degree of influence on its political stances. Bill Clinton's policies, in retrospect, seem very similar to Peretz's preferences, and he also had elevated Peretz's former student and protégé, Al Gore, to the Vice Presidency. But Peretz clearly disliked the Clintons, and probably the worst piece ever to appear in <i>The New Republic</i> was Betsy McCaughey's scurrilous, utterly discredited attack on Clinton's health care plan--for which Peretz refuses to apologize. He did not much care for Barack Obama either, and I don't think there is any reference to Obamacare in the book at all. </p><p>What struck me more than anything else in the book, however, was Peretz's worldview--an unusual one in his youth that has become a mainstream one now, especially although not exclusively on the left which he now despises. He is an avowed, unalloyed tribalist. This is not merely with respect to his Zionism. It colors his whole world view and his reaction to numerous individuals. He is profoundly skeptical about our whole foreign policy establishment because it tries, in theory at least, to treat all the peoples of the world equally. He does not believe in an American melting pot. And his tribalism--like that of many others--emerges most strikingly in his views of other members of his own tribe--Jews whom he believes to be too little interested in their Jewishness. His list of such people includes Harvard colleagues like Adam Ulam and David Riesman, George Soros, and Madeleine Albright and John Kerry, whose Jewish forbears renounced their Judaism. (I did not know--or I had forgotten--that John Kerry's paternal grandparents were converted Jews.) This was perhaps his generational rebellion. His own father, he tells us, was a proud American, and the Jews of the GI generation (like my own father) believed for the most part in assimilation, which not a few of them changed their names to achieve. Peretz doesn't. He believed in Jewish power within the system, and that is what he was trying to achieve.</p><p>I had to laugh at one passage in the book about <i>The New Republic</i> and the personnel he brought in. It occurs at the end of a long discussion of his favorite subordinates there--Leon Wieseltier, Michael Kinsley, Rick Hertzberg, and Charles Krauthammer. Here it is.</p><p>"Together we were upstarts--young and pluralist, Jewish and intellectual, not afraid to provoke. But we also came with the imprimatur of the best institutions: Harvard, Columbia, and Oxford. We weren't like anything old Washington had ever seen We were not on anybody's invitation list in those days. What we had was their attention. And we used it.</p><p>"Those people thought they had me pegged as a smart-ass pushy Jew. But they didn't expect the heft, the sheer braininess. They didn't expect the intellectual commitment. We had in our hears the worst atrocity in recorded history, and it affected our thinking, our approach, on the issues of the day. We were something altogether new. There had never been such a widely read magazine of Jewish journalists before.</p><p>"Mike and Rick, who served as the actual editors, didn't care much about the Jewish stuff. But Charles and Leon, who identified, were the authoritative voices in the pages. So, though this was never my conscious plan, the <i>New Republic </i>was a break for identifying Jews and Zionists in Washington."</p><p>The phrase "this was never my conscious plan" reminds me of one of the funniest lines Woody Allen ever wrote, in <i>Manhattan</i>, when he is arguing with his ex-wife (played by Meryl Streep) over whether he actually tried to run her and her female lover over with his car. "What would Freud say?" she asks. "Freud would say I tried to run you over," he replies. "That's why he was a genius."</p><p>Oddly, Peretz, who prides himself on being different, was a pioneer of the trend towards tribalism that has transformed American life over the last half century. The leaders in that trend, I would suggest, were the Zionists like himself and the black radicals who took away the leadership of the left at the Chicago conference in 1967. It has now spread not only to every major ethnic group, but also to different genders and people of different sexual orientations, and it has destroyed, for the time being, the possibility of any broad consensus among Americans. Partly because I have never felt that I had a tribe, I have been immune from the trend myself. Tribalism, as Peretz seems to understand, is contrary to the lessons of the Enlightenment, which thought that reason could overcome tribal loyalty. In the middle the the last century that seemed to be happening in the United States. Now we have been on a different path, which Peretz, in his own small way, contributed to. This, I am now inclined to believe, is a natural human reaction--too much universalism breeds tribalism, and vice versa.</p><p>Ultimately, a newer tribalism struck a big blow to Peretz's reputation and self-esteem. The book ends very sadly. In 2010, he and Anne, his political and social partner for so long, divorced. In 2012 he had to sell <i>The New Republic</i> to Chris Hughes, a tech wunderkind who immediately transformed it. And in the midst of this, writing a blog, he ignited a firestorm by protesting that Muslims did not "raise their voices against . . .planned and random killings all over the Islamic world," and suggested the Muslims in America were "worthy of the privileges of the First Amendment which I have in my gut the sense that they will abuse." He apologized for that when it triggered a firestorm of criticism, but it turned a 50th anniversary event at Harvard in his honor as an opportunity for students and some faculty to blast him. </p><p>I think I have faithfully conveyed the gist of <i>The Controversialist</i>--Peretz's memoir--yet I also know that my portrait has been too negative--because of the one brief, revealing experience that I had with him myself from 1979, I believe, though 1983. This leads to his Harvard experience, and mine.</p><p>Peretz owed his career as a Harvard teacher (never a professor) to a loophole in the university's structure. He earned his Ph.D. in Government in the early 1960s, just when the new major Social Studies was developed by my future friend Stanley Hoffmann. Drawing on faculty from the Government, History, Economics and Social Relations departments, Social Studies became an elite major that annually attracted some of Harvard's best students. Its introductory sophomore tutorial revolved around Tocqueville, Marx, Durkheim, Weber, and Freud. (In recent decades, it has added Foucault and Habermas.) Peretz, along with Barrington Moore, Jr., because a permanent, although untenured, faculty member within that program, although I don't believe he ever published any scholarly work other than a few academic reviews. He also taught a full-year course, I believe, annually in the freshman seminar program, where Al Gore was his most famous student. He was evidently a very effective teacher and he kept his finger on the pulse of undergraduate life through his students.</p><p>In 1979, when I was an Assistant Professor of history at Harvard, I decided to approach Peretz to see if I could review a polemic, <i>The Real War</i>, which Richard Nixon had just published, for <i>The New Republic.</i> I simply telephoned him out of the view. "I know about you, I've heard of you," he said immediately, indicating that we had had students in common. He told me to go ahead, turning me over to his literary editor Jack Beatty(whom he later let go), and I wrote the review, which appeared. I wrote at least one more review, of <i>Dangerous Relations</i> by Adam Ulam, for them in the next year or two.</p><p>In 1983, <i>The New Republic</i> was preparing a twentieth anniversary issue devoted to John F. Kennedy. I talked to Beatty about writing a piece about how Kennedy had been misunderstood by many recent commentators, and he told me to go ahead. I wrote the piece, focusing on Kennedy's skill as a politician--but Beatty didn't like it. I appealed to Peretz, and got a call back a few days later. "Good piece!" he said, and it ran. The week that it appeared, George Higgins, a <i>Boston Globe</i> columnist, devoted part of a column to the whole issue, focusing on two of the articles in it. I quote:</p><p>"For Its Issue of November 21, The New Republic put together four extended assessments of John F. Kennedy. This Is the sort of duty which devolves upon opinionated journals about national affairs - one accedes helplessly to the argument that It Is expected of them, but still cringes slightly as the barn doors creak open once again and display the same old tired war horses snorting In their stalls.</p><p>"Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr, is the wheelhorse of that stable, naturally. He held a valid White House pass during JFK's tenancy, and he Is a trained historian. He. Is also no mean hand with the English language, and that's all to the good, of course.</p><p>"The trouble Is that Arthur Schlesinger has been around this track more times than old Tom Fool. Years ago he got wind of the reports that his President may not always have been a gentle, perfect knight. He heard there were those who thought he showed more profile than he did courage. As any friend would, Schlesinger became Incensed. He sallied forth to smite the sacrilegists, and In the heat of battle made claims for the martyred leader which would have made the man himself dissolve In gales of laughter. Mildly rebuked for those excesses, Schlesinger took umbrage and not heed, and blustered out still more extravagances.</p><p>"Now he appears to think he's stuck with them. and so we have this treatise on "What the Thousand Days Wrought," which seeks to subsume Into JFK's short years In office most of the progressive trends of the current century. It's rather embarrassing. .</p><p>"More realistic, I thought, was David Kaiser's knowing portrait of the President as a gut bucket politician, ·cozening the scribblers and hornswoggling Drew Pearson. I don't think there's any need to flounder around madly seeking reasons to beatify a smart politician, whose achievements in part rest upon his skillful use of sham. John Kennedy did not wrest the nomination out of Lyndon Johnson's grasp by yanking some damned sword out of a stone: he got It by being smarter, craftier and mean, and I think he ought to get the credit for his well-honed wits. Kaiser gives it to him, and it's quite refreshing."</p><p>I appreciated Marty Peretz's decision to run the piece, obviously, and I appreciate it even more now, having found from <i>The Controversialist</i> that he personally disliked Kennedy intensely at the time that he ran for president in 1960 and apparently never changed his mind very much. This whole story shows a side of him that I can't help admiring. He evidently trusted his student's opinion of me, and he genuinely liked what I had written for him. Unfortunately I could not manage to establish a good relationship with Leon Wieseltier when he succeed Beatty as literary editor, and I stopped writing for <i>TNR.</i> And I am sorry to report that in 2014, when it published an anthology of articles from its one hundred years of existence, it included Schlesinger's article from the JFK anniversary issue but not mine, <a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1E17lanDvgcojUOqV2F-4lcwLNf55Er2t/view?usp=sharing">which you can read here</a>.</p><p>Peretz and I were part of a particular Harvard, one where students loved the humanities and social sciences and the best faculty enjoyed bringing out the best that they had to offer. The reading lists of those years would be unheard of today--quantitatively and qualitatively. And as teachers, we both took advantage of the opportunities that that institution offered. That was why, really, those pieces of mine ever appeared in <i>The New Republic</i>, and for that I am still grateful.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><div class="blogger-post-footer"><a href="http://historyunfolding.blogspot.com"><i>History Unfolding</i></a></div>David Kaiserhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05020082243968071584noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8746692.post-32679612760678552532023-11-21T11:05:00.003-05:002023-11-21T22:42:47.258-05:00Some History of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict<p> While I am sticking to my resolve not to propose a solution to the conflict in Gaza and the West Bank between Israelis and Palestinians, I do think that understanding how the conflict began and how we got to where we are can help us all. In fact I think both parties to the conflict understand these questions much better than western observers. Underlying all this, meanwhile, is a fundamental question about the essence of the modern world--and I will begin with that.</p><p>For the last eight or nine weeks I have been reading the <i>Iliad</i> for a class of senior learners. The class is well run and the discussions have invariably been lively, often focusing on the differences between the ancient Greek world view and our own. Emotions rule the world of the <i>Iliad--</i>both the human world of Achilles, Agamemnon, Helen, Hector, Priam and all the rest, and the world of the gods, who continually intervene in earthly quarrels. Students have constantly wrestled with the obvious differences between the Greek gods and the Judeo-Christian god to whom we have all been exposed all our lives, whether we are religious or not. That latter god laid down laws and standards of virtue which he expected humans to live up to, pointing us, in many instances, towards a calmer, more peaceful and more moral world. Not only do the Greek gods not do that, but they also display all the vices of human beings. The Greek world, as a result, is almost totally chaotic. I have been something of a gadfly from the beginning of the class, frequently arguing that the Greek view might actually be a more accurate portrayal of human nature and the sources of human behavior than our own more idealistic one. Recently, indeed, it occurred to me that our whole civilization is based on the idea that reason can provide rules that will allow us to overcome the chaos that Homer identified so clearly. The history of the last few centuries certainly reveals the western experiment to be less than a complete success. The wisdom of the Enlightenment has not prevented the eruption of wars on a scale Homer could not even dream of, even as the nations of the world have tried to organize lasting peace. Perhaps, though, the experiment in rationality is worth continuing, not because it is destined to succeed completely, but because the alternative would be worse. These, it turns out, are key issues in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.</p><p>I am going to begin my analysis today with the creation of modern Israel in 1947-8. Modern Zionism had emerged as an international movement in the late nineteenth century and won its first great political victory in 1917, when the British government--then at war with the Ottoman Empire--announced that it would support the creation of a "Jewish national home"--a new concept in international law--in Palestine, with the understanding that this would not prejudice the rights of the existing Arab population. Thus was born not only the dream of a Jewish state, but the contradiction that has bedeviled it ever since. The British pledged to implement that plan when they assumed control of Palestine under a League of Nations mandate after the First World War, and it immediately led to violent conflict between Jews and Arabs, who opposed the idea from the beginning. By the late 1930s the British government had backed away from the plan and was severely limiting Jewish immigration to Palestine, even as the holocaust threatened. After the war the Jewish population of Palestine revolted against British rule, and the British in 1947 announced their intention to terminate the mandate and turned the question of Palestine's future over to the new United Nations. That body appointed a commission to study the conflict between the Jews and the Arabs and recommend a solution.</p><p>That committee recommended a partition of Palestine--that is, what is now Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank--into Jewish and Arab states. The Jewish state it envisioned was considerably smaller than Israel today, and Arabs would have comprised almost half its population. The Truman Administration endorsed the plan, and helped line up the two-thirds General Assembly majority that approved it on November 29, 1947, as UN Resolution 181. The General Assembly, however, had no power to implement the resolution, and thus asked the Security Council to take steps to do so. This attempt to resolve the issue peacefully and by legal and diplomatic means, however, collapsed at once. </p><p>The Zionist leaders in Israel welcomed the resolution, even though they did not regard the terms of the partition as satisfactory. They understood that the international endorsement of a Jewish state, however small, was perhaps the most critical step towards creating the Israel they had in mind. The Arabs, on the other hand, made a terrible mistake, from their point of view, by rejecting it completely. Within days, civil war between the Arabs and Jews had broken out in Palestine. This was a very brutal conflict, as detailed by the Israeli historian Benny Morris in his book <i>Righteous Victims</i>, and by the late spring the Jews were beginning to get the upper hand. Meanwhile, the Security Council refused to play the role the General Assembly had envisioned and could not agree to a new approach to the conflict that had emerged. The attempt to solve the problem through international agreement had failed, and the two parties on the ground were now at war.</p><p>On May 14, when British authority in Palestine lapsed, the Israeli leadership, headed by David Ben Gurion, proclaimed the new state of Israel. Neighboring Arab states--some of them newly independent as well--immediately declared war on that state and sent troops into Palestine. As far as I can see, however, the Arabs within Palestine--who suffered, as Morris points out, from poor organization--did not at this time proclaim a state of their own. In the international war that followed the Israelis managed to expand their territory far beyond what the partition plan had envisioned and beyond what they had controlled on their independence day. Meanwhile, most of the Arab population of that territory either fled or was driven out. And the territory they did not regain--the West Bank of the Jordan River, East Jerusalem, and Gaza--did not become part of a Palestinian state after the armistice of 1949, but instead came under control of the Jordanian and Egyptian governments. The UN recognized the Palestinians who had fled to Gaza, Lebanon and Jordan as refugees, but that was all. Israel, like most other modern states--including the United States of America--had established itself not via international agreement, but by force, followed by varying degrees of international recognition--though without any diplomatic recognition from its immediate neighbors. The Palestinians had been given no say in the process of redrawing the region's borders, had lost the military battle, and had now become stateless persons.</p><p>From 1949 through 1967 the Arab-Israeli conflict was a conflict among states, with Egypt leading the Arab coalition against Israel after Gamel Abdul Nasser took power there in the early 1950s. None of those states accepted the status quo as anything but temporary. The Arabs hoped to destroy Israel, and sponsored guerillas who crossed Israel's borders to commit terrorist acts. The Israelis--and this has been well documented by Morris, Conor Cruise O'Brien, and others--wanted to expand their borders. They attempted unsuccessfully to do so when they attacked Egypt in 1956 together with Britain and France and occupied the Sinai peninsula, only to have President Eisenhower force them to withdraw, and they did so more successfully in 1967, when they attacked Egypt, Jordan and Syria after Nasser had closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli ships, effectively blocking the port of Eilat. The Six Day War left them in control of the Sinai Peninsula, all of Jerusalem, the whole West Bank of the Jordan River--referred to by the Israelis as Judea and Samaria--and the Syrian Golan heights. They immediately offered to return the Sinai and the Golan in exchange for formal peace treaties with Egypt and Syria, but they did not make a parallel offer to Jordan with respect to the West Bank, which many Israelis saw part of the original grant from their god to the Jews. Instead, the Israeli government began establishing settlements in the West Bank--and the settlements have grown under every Israeli government in the last 56 years, and now include half a million people.</p><p>The years from 1967 through 1979 transformed the conflict from a mainly interstate one to a renewal of the original 1947-48 battle between the Jewish and Arab inhabitants of Palestine. The 1967 war sent more refugees from the West Bank into Jordan, and Yasir Arafat's Palestine Liberation Authority now emerged as the political representative of the Palestinian people, with some international recognition from various states and from the United Nations. International efforts to arrange peace talks between Israel and the Arab states went nowhere until 1973, when Egypt and Syria staged a surprise attack on Israel and won initial successes, and Egypt emerged having regained some of the Sinai peninsula. That led to disengagement agreements among Israel and Egypt and Syria, and then, in the late 1970s, to Anwar Sadat's peace ovetures and the conclusion of the Camp David accords in 1979, when Israel agreed to full withdrawal from the Sinai in exchange for full Egyptian diplomatic recognition. Those agreements also promised "autonomy" for the Palestinians on the West Bank, although as I have come to understand, the Israeli government of Menachem Begin believed that that meant autonomy for the <i>people</i>, but not for the <i>land</i>--that is, while the Palestinians would enjoy some form of self-rule, they would not enjoy territorial sovereignty or their own state in what Begin referred to as part of the "land of Israel." </p><p>Once again the Palestinians had taken no part in the talks and rejected any such plan. Their leadership had now headquartered in Lebanon, where they played a role in a disastrous civil war and built up a substantial military capability. That in 1982 led Israel to invade Lebanon to destroy that capability. Eleven years later came another apparent breakthrough. Just as Jimmy Carter had brought Sadat and Begin together at Camp David, Bill Clinton brought Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO leader Arafat to the White House to consummate the Oslo accords in 1993. Those accords recognized Israel's right to exist and provided for some Israeli military withdrawal from the West Bank and the creation of a Palestinian authority to take over the administration of the Arab population there and in Gaza. They did not promise a Palestinian state, but merely envisioned further negotiations between that Palestinian authority and the Israeli government to determine the "final status" of the West Bank and Gaza. Shortly thereafter, these agreements apparently enabled the government of Jordan to sign its own peace treaty with Israel. In short, the accords seemed to provide, for the first time, a framework within which Israelis and Palestinians could live together in peace, although the exact terms of their relationship remained to be worked out.</p><p>Important opposition to this new framework immediately emerged on both sides. Hamas, which had been founded to organize Palestinian resistance in the late 1980s, immediately opposed the accords and emerged as a formidable competitor with the PLO. In Israel Rabin was assassinated by a young Israeli who regarded him as a traitor for concluding the the accords in 1995. Pressed by the Clinton Administration, Arafat and Rabin's successor Ehud Barak tried to conclude a final status agreement. The parties met at Camp David, following in the footsteps of Sadat and Begin and Carter, in late 2000. Israel offered Palestinian sovereignty over much of the West Bank and Gaza, but wanted to retain key settlement blocs and to divide the Palestinian territory in various ways, while also maintaining control of its airspace and limiting its military forces. The Palestinians wanted some acknowledgement of a right of return for refugees, although exactly how it would be implemented remained unclear. The two sides also disagreed about the fate of East Jerusalem and the custody of holy places. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_Camp_David_Summit"> An excellent and very well sourced Wikipedia article</a> on the failure of the the talks suggests to me that the two sides remained very far from an agreement, and I urge all readers to look at it themselves and evaluate the responsibility for the failure of the talks. Both sides, in different ways, repudiated the process after the summit's failure. In Israel Ariel Sharon defeated Barak's center-right coalition in the the next year, and Palestinians in the West Bank launched new rebellions and terrorist campaigns, led in part by Hamas. The Israeli government concluded that they had simply used the Oslo agreements and the Israeli withdrawal to prepare for a new armed campaign against Israel. <a href="https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-11-21/ty-article/.premium/israeli-embassy-ministers-op-ed-calling-for-transfer-of-gazans-is-not-government-policy/0000018b-f103-d36e-a3cb-f15771fb0000">A panel discussion</a> organized by the <i>New York Times</i> tells a great deal about the origins of Oslo and why it failed.</p><p>The last twenty years seem to have pushed both sides farther and farther from agreement. In Israel neither Sharon nor his successor Benjamin Netanyahu have shown any interest in a two-state solution. The Bush II administration blamed Arafat for the failure of peace talks and demanded new elections in the West Bank and Gaza to elect new Palestinian leadership. To its utter amazement, Hamas won an easy victory in those elections, albeit with slightly less than 50 percent of the total vote. The Palestinian authority, now led by Mahmoud Abbas, a.k.a. Abu Mazen, refused to yield to Hamas, and has refused to hold any further elections since. Sharon did withdraw Israeli troops from Gaza in 2005, making it a separate enclave. Hamas rapidly gained power there, and Israel and Egypt have blockaded the territory ever since, controlling all its utilities. The complicated significance of that withdrawal is explained at length<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_disengagement_from_Gaza"> in another well-sourced Wikipedia article.</a></p><p>Since taking power in Gaza Hamas has built up its military capabilities there. Meanwhile, north of Israel, Hezbollah, a militant Shi'ite group backed by Iran, has become a very important political force in Lebanon and established a parallel military capability. Both Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon have built up enormous stockpiles of rockets and drones which they have periodically fired into Israel, which has defended itself with antimissile systems and carried out several punitive expeditions. Early this year, the creation of a new right-wing government in Israel, including settler activists who apparently have designs on the entire West Bank, moved the conflict into a new phase. Then came the massacre of October 7, and now, the Israeli war on Gaza.</p><p>In recent years there has been much talk, on both sides, of a one-state solution rather than a two-state solution. Since the numbers of Jewish Israelis and Arabs between the Jordan River and the sea--including Gaza--are almost equal at this point, and the Arab birth rate is higher, the militant Palestinian leadership presumably regards that as a step towards eventual takeover of the whole area, with very serious consequences for the Jews, while the Israelis see it as too big a threat to the existence of the Jewish state. Meanwhile, both sides covet territory belonging to or inhabited by the other, just as they did in 1947-48. The principles of self-determination and equality that international politics claim to have been based on at least since the First World War cannot, sadly, solve this problem, because, despite the existence of many people of good will on both sides, neither political authority respects the claims of the other. At times I find the insistence of my own government upon an eventual two-state solution somewhat pathetic, since there seems to be no possibility of it coming to pass, but thinking about last week's discussion of the <i>Iliad</i> and our times, I see that to give up on the two-state solution would be giving up on a particular vision of humanity, in this case at least, that we do not want to lose. </p><p>The October 7 invasion and massacre was the kind of terrorism the Palestinians have used since Israel's foundation, but on a larger scale. Their use of big rocket attacks from Gaza--joined by Hezbollah from Lebanon--seem designed to make at least large parts of Israel uninhabitable for the Israelis, and reports from Israel indicate that they are having some success. In response, Israel is using unprecedented tactics in Gaza, treating it and its population the way the British and Americans treated the Germans and the Japanese during the Second World War. I do not know what the goal of their bombing is, but it seems pretty certain that more than half of the Gazan population will be homeless by the time the war is over, whether it successfully destroys Hamas or not. In the last few weeks, not only Israeli right-wingers, but even people within the current government,<a href="https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-11-17/ty-article-magazine/.highlight/israeli-rightists-are-trying-to-reframe-a-gaza-population-transfer-as-a-moral-act/0000018b-d914-d423-affb-fbb7ddd30000"> have been putting forth the expulsion of all the Palestinians from Gaza--two million of them--as the only solution to Israel's long-term problem.</a> The Israeli Intelligence Minister <a href="https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-11-21/ty-article/.premium/israeli-embassy-ministers-op-ed-calling-for-transfer-of-gazans-is-not-government-policy/0000018b-f103-d36e-a3cb-f15771fb0000">just advocated resettling Gazans elsewhere publicly</a>, only to be disavowed by anonymous government spokespersons. Meanwhile, <a href="https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/twilight-zone/2023-11-18/ty-article-magazine/.highlight/population-transfer-under-cover-of-war-a-visit-to-the-forsaken-land-of-settler-militias/0000018b-df65-dffa-adef-ff6577300000">armed settler militias have emptied sixteen Palestinian villages </a>in the West Bank during this year. These steps, like the bombing, hearken back to the Second World War. The Allies at the end of that war cooperated in the expulsion of nearly twelve million Germans from territory given to Poland and the USSR, from Czechoslovakia, and from elsewhere in Eastern Europe. The Allies--utterly supreme in 1945--faced no real opposition to what they did then. We do not know what the consequences of a parallel step for Israel today would be. I hope that it does not take place.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><div class="blogger-post-footer"><a href="http://historyunfolding.blogspot.com"><i>History Unfolding</i></a></div>David Kaiserhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05020082243968071584noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8746692.post-77227124745956879722023-11-13T20:29:00.001-05:002023-11-13T20:29:32.437-05:00The Platonic Disease<p> I have never read Plato's <i>Republic</i>, but I have been aware for a long time of its idea of a state ruled by philosophers. Uncle Google has kindly supplied me with this quote:</p><p>“Unless, said I, either philosophers become kings in our states or those whom we now call our kings and rulers take to the pursuit of philosophy seriously and adequately, and there is a conjunction of these two things, political power and philosophic intelligence, while the motley horde of the natures who at present pursue either apart from the other are compulsory excluded, there can be no cessation of troubles, dear Glaucon, for our states, nor, I fancy, for the human race either." </p><p>The idea that the most educated and thoughtful people should rule has played an enormous role in modern history, partly because it has obvious appeal to the educated class that now dominates modern states. The Enlightenment theory of government seems in fact to have drawn on it, since it presumed that reason could identify and solve society's problems, and monarchs such as Voltaire's sometime friends Catherine the Great and Frederick the Great seem to have seen themselves in this way. I think that the idea has become particularly influential in some key political strata of the United States over the last half century, and that a variant of it now dominates both journalism and academia. And I fear that this is a key reason why our political system and our traditions are teetering on a precipice.</p><p>The Democratic Party remains the party committed to the idea of government as problem solver. Where do ideas on how to solve problems come from today? Some come from institutions like the JFK School of Government at Harvard, where I taught part-time in the late 1970s. That was an interesting experience. I was teaching the course The Uses of History with Ernest May and Richard Neustadt, which took a relatively traditional approach to policy making. Using actual case studies and historical readings, our students looked at some good and bad decisions from the past, and we discussed how history might have helped achieve better outcomes. I vividly remember Neustadt, who had become a good friend of mine, remarking that the course was what the students had expected from the Kennedy School when they arrived--but that the bulk of the curriculum was very different. Much of it used macroeconomic techniques to evaluate policy programs. Logic, that implied, could establish the truth--and one had to be a JFK School graduate to understand its use. Decades later I re-established contact with one of my favorite undergraduate students in those years--then a left liberal--and found to my amazement that he was now a Republican. "The Kennedy School turned me into a Republican," he told me. Class lessons seemed to him so out of touch with economic and political reality that he could not take them seriously.</p><p>This is highly relevant, it seems to me, to the Biden Administration's political problems. Drawing on many years of work in think tanks and universities, it has designed and passed potentially very important legislation to rebuild infrastructure and transform our energy future. Neither Biden nor any lesser administration figure, however, has made a serious effort to explain how the legislation will work to the American people. That is exactly what presidents like Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, Nixon, and Reagan did, mostly on radio and television, as my new book shows. Roosevelt discussed every New Deal measure at some length and put them all within the context of an attempt to build a new and far more equal society. Truman did the same with proposed new measures for civil rights and national health insurance, and although he could not pass them, he laid the foundation which Lyndon Johnson managed to complete. Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy also laid out their foreign policy programs in great detail. Nixon, ironically, played the same role in welfare reform that Truman did in health insurance. Congress turned down his family assistance plan, but the very similar earned income tax credit--although never explained at any length by Clinton and his successors--drew on the same ideas. Reagan repeatedly listed the wonderful things that his tax cuts would bring about, and even though he certainly oversold them, the reduction of inflation and the gradual economic recovery convinced the nation that he was on the right track. Clinton did sell a tax increase that eventually balanced the budget, and Obama made an effective case for expanded health insurance, but that was about as far as they went. George W. Bush promised to transform the Middle East along democratic lines, but could not do so. Trump used Twitter to dominate the news, but couldn't communicate real solutions to real problems there.</p><p>Changes in the media are part of the problem--although the media might give the president more space if he had more to say. The newspapers no longer print entire presidential addresses, and Biden's two State of the Union addresses, I believe, are the only speeches he has made that all the major networks--who are shadows of their former selves anyway--have carried. Frequently important speeches of his are relegated to inside pages of the <i>New York Times</i>, an unheard of practice in earlier decades. The other reason for this, however, is that the major media outlets no longer respect the right of elected officials to set the national agenda and propose solutions. Op-ed columnists in particular--who have emerged as the superstars of major papers--arrogate that job to themselves, whether their ideas have any chance of being implemented or not. This of course encourages their readers to adopt their ideas, even if they have no chance of being adopted.</p><p>The revolt of the late 1960s targeted authority of all kinds--social, religious, sartorial, intellectual, and political. I believe that hostility to authority has been perhaps the most enduring legacy of that era--and I have discussed many times how much further it has gone in recent decades. Our government, I am convinced, cannot function if we do not trust our elected officials to make decisions and carry them out. They may have earned our skepticism, but the depth of that skepticism prevents them from re-establishing real respect and trust.</p><p>Yesterday, Donald Trump at a rally referred to his political opponents as "vermin" trying to destroy the United States. Every story about that speech quotes some historian noting that this echoes the authoritarian leaders of the last century, with the implication that we must heed our historians to preserve our democracy. The press gives them the status of Plato's philosophers. That, alas, is no substitute for genuine faith in our democracy among our common people--large portions of whom turned to Trump in the last two elections, and may again, because they have lost that faith. A truly effective new president, I think, will have to have some understanding of what earlier presidents managed to do, and how they did it.</p><p><br /></p><div class="blogger-post-footer"><a href="http://historyunfolding.blogspot.com"><i>History Unfolding</i></a></div>David Kaiserhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05020082243968071584noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8746692.post-15624069925481440892023-11-10T09:39:00.001-05:002023-11-10T09:39:23.073-05:00Something different--pictures worth a million words<p> This week's post will take about six minutes to watch. It is a clip from a remarkable film made around 2009 in Israel, <i>Lemon Tree.</i> The plot, as you will see, revolves around a Palestinian widow living in the West Bank, whose land includes a lemon grove. The Israeli Defense Minister has moved next door, and this has immediate repercussions that the clip explains. According to Wikipedia, the plot is closely based on real events. You will find the clip here:</p><p><a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ncQ--gj3efeQ_Yoif_cCo40IUQdm8cSr/view?usp=drive_link">https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ncQ--gj3efeQ_Yoif_cCo40IUQdm8cSr/view?usp=drive_link</a></p><p>This is an avi file, a standard video format. I hope that your device will open it in its favorite video player, whatever that happens to be. I use Media Player, which I think is free.</p><p>This post is dedicated to my grandfather, Moshe Ber Kaiser, who over the strong objections of his wife moved his whole family from Ukraine to the United States--where life was better.</p><div class="blogger-post-footer"><a href="http://historyunfolding.blogspot.com"><i>History Unfolding</i></a></div>David Kaiserhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05020082243968071584noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8746692.post-5400174994715795132023-10-31T13:17:00.132-04:002023-11-05T17:40:47.799-05:00The Mideast Tragedy<p>Because of an accident while I was working on this post, it is dated October 31. It is actually going up on November 4.</p><p><br /></p><p>The Israeli invasion of Gaza, designed to avenge the deaths of 1400 Israelis and wipe out Hamas, is well underway. Benjamin Netanyahu has warned his people of a long and difficult war, while reports from Washington suggest that the administration is hoping for his downfall. Today I will try to lay out my view of the situation as it has developed in recent decades, and where it seems to be going now. </p><p>I have written here many times that both history and journalism should in my opinion focus on what was or what is, not on what the author wishes should have been or should be. There is no topic more difficult to hold to this rule than this one, but I am going to do my best. The often-heard argument, "Yes, that's what they seem to think, but they shouldn't be thinking that," leaves me cold. </p><p>The problem is a simple one: two peoples, Israelis and Palestinians, want the same land between the Jordan River and the sea. The leading political elements on the two sides--Hamas on the one hand, and the current Israeli government on the other--reject the other side's right to sovereignty in any of that territory. It's easy to feel that the Palestinians should have given up their goal long ago, but they haven't. Many Israelis and an unknown number of Palestinians would be willing to compromise, but such people have rarely if ever been able to prevail on either side. Nor is this all. As we shall see, neither side is satisfied with the current status quo. And this is not a problem of a majority and a minority, like race problems in the United States from 1865 to 1965 or the Hindu-Muslim conflict in India in 1947. The Palestinian and Israeli populations of the territory in question are very close to equal.</p><p>Since the Carter years the government of the United States has pretty consistently taken the position that while Israel has a sacred right to exist, some framework involving a two-state solution should enable the Palestinians to enjoy full political rights as well. It has never been clear whether any Palestinian leadership--or the Palestinian people as a whole--would see such a solution as anything but a stepping stone to eventual control of the whole area, achieved by any means necessary. Certainly there is no indication that Hamas would--and Hamas appears to represent at least a plurality of Palestinian opinion. When Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, Hamas took it over, and Hamas also won the election in Gaza and the West Bank handily in 2006 with 45 percent of the vote to 29 percent for Fatah, the Palestinian establishment party. There is no indication that events since 2005 have made the Palestinian authority under Mahmoud Abbas more popular. Hamas has built a military base in Gaza, largely in underground tunnels, and put together a large arsenal of rockets and other weapons there with the help of aid from Iran and elsewhere. It also apparently developed a very sophisticated military planning capability, which early this month allowed it to disable the Israeli defense system on the border completely and carry out the massacre of more than 1,400 Israelis, military and civilian.</p><p>The US government continues to suggest that a two-state solution is the only desirable solution to the conflict. In the current crisis US officials imply that such a solution might emerge after Hamas is destroyed. That seems to me very unlikely for two reasons. First of all, the Palestinians have never responded to Israeli military action against them by becoming reconciled to Israel's existence. They have only become more and more militant. And equally importantly, the Israeli government has not shown any real interest in a two-state solution for more than twenty years, and the new government has repudiated it publicly and is doing more and more to make it impossible.</p><p>Prime Minister Netanyahu is not making any secret of his view of the future. <a href="https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/politics-and-diplomacy/article-760189">Just last month, before the entire United Nations, he held up a map of the Middle East </a>with Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Sudan, the UAE, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia in green--that is, Israel plus five countries countries with which it has diplomatic relations, plus Saudi Arabia, with whom negotiations to establish them were proceeding. The map showed Israel including both Gaza and the entire West Bank, with no territory at all marked out for a Palestinian state. More than six months ago, Bezalel Smotrich, himself a West Bank settler and Netanyahu's Minister of Finance--and now responsible for the government of the West Bank--went him one better. <a href="https://www.axios.com/2023/03/20/bezalel-smotrich-jordan-greater-israel-map-palestinians">In a commemorative speech in Paris</a>, he announced that "There is no such thing as a Palestinian people"--a claim Golda Meir also made half a century ago--while his podium displayed a map showing all of Jordan, as well as the West Bank, as part of Israel. That, I remember from Ezer Weizmann's book, <i>The Battle for Peace</i>, echoed articles by Menachem Begin in the years immediately after Israel's founding, when he too argued as a member of the opposition that the East Bank of the Jordan was part of the Old Testament grant of territory to the Jews. Begin at that time looked like a fringe figure in Israeli politics. Smotrich is a central figure now.</p><p>Another front in the struggle is the West Bank itself. Just six weeks ago, an Israeli academic and peace activist, David Shulman, <a href="https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2023/10/19/heading-toward-a-second-nakba-a-day-in-the-life-of-abed-salama/">had a remarkable article in the <i>New York Review of Books</i> detailing what is happening in the West Bank now</a>: settlers emptying entire small villages of West Bank Arabs and taking over their land for new settlements, with no interference from the Israeli Army. <a href="https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/in-west-bank-israeli-settlers-step-up-attacks-against-palestinians-8104fcf4">The UN reports</a> that 237 Palestinians and 25 Israelis died in West Bank violence from January 1 to October 6, and another 123 Palestinians have been killed since October 7, some by settlers and some by the Israeli Army, while 1,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes. It is not clear to me exactly what the Israeli right expects to happen to the millions of Palestinians living in the West Bank. Anyone who asks us all to look at the Hamas Charter and what it says about the future of Israel should also look at this evidence of how the Israeli government sees the Palestinians' future. Yes, many Israelis oppose all this, including some of the journalists I have quoted in this piece, but for the time being, at least, they are helpless, and they would have to command a substantial majority to reverse current trends. </p><p>We also need to ask what the actual result of the current military campaign in Gaza will be. Few would deny the Israeli right to punish the perpetrators of the massacre that started this war, but the consequences of their tactics too enormous to ignore. The Israeli government's demand that about one million Gazans leave the northern part of the strip to leave it completely open to Israeli military operations is, as far as I know, unprecedented in modern warfare. The devastation that the air and ground campaigns are wreaking upon Gaza is obviously making large parts of it uninhabitable for the foreseeable future.. I just heard a Gazan arguing that the Israelis are trying to turn the whole Gaza population into refugees again and empty Gaza out. Who could reassure her that it isn't? Meanwhile, Arab countries refuse to take any Palestinian refugees, and the only Palestinians allowed to leave Gaza for Egypt are either critically wounded or possess dual citizenship. Today, November 5, the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/05/world/middleeast/israel-egypt-gaza.html"><i>New York Times</i> reports</a> that Israel has in fact asked Egypt to allow several hundred thousand Gazans to enter Egypt. The Egyptians refused.</p><p>Since the October 7 attacks that killed 1400 Israeli civilians and soldiers, Israeli leaders have used language reminiscent of American presidents in the last two decades. They have talked of crushing Gaza to the extent that Israel would be safe for generations, and many have compared what they plan to do to the enormously destructive American-led campaign against ISIS in northern Iraq. <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-battle-of-civilization-in-gaza-israel-hamas-3236b023?page=1">In an op-ed in the <i>Wall Street Journal,</i></a> Netanyahu himself describes the conflict as a war between civilization and barbarism. "Iran has formed an axis of terror by arming, training and financing Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen and other terror proxies throughout the Middle East and beyond," he says, echoing George W. Bush in 2001. "In fighting Hamas and the Iranian axis of terror, Israel is fighting the enemies of civilization itself." Like Bush then, he argues that the whole world must side with Israel for its own sake. The column leaves the impression that a people ruled by an evil political movement is sunk in barbarism and enjoys no real rights. It could also mean that Netanyahu wants the US and other nations to join him in a war against Iran, which the Obama Administration was reportedly quite close to doing before it reached the now-defunct nuclear agreement with Iran in the second Obama administration. The Israeli historian Benny Morris,<a href="https://historyunfolding.blogspot.com/2008/07/implications-of-history.html"> who best the drum for war with Iran in 2008-12</a>, has just encouraged the Israeli government<a href="https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2023-11-01/ty-article-opinion/.premium/there-will-never-be-a-better-time-for-israel-to-strike-in-iran/0000018b-8758-df47-a3df-ff592b2b0000"> to consider an attack on that nation again.</a></p><p>We want a world where nations live together in peace. The US government, with its feeling of responsibility for everything that happens in the world, its very close ties to Israel, and its interests in the Arab world, very naturally continues to talk as if a real solution was possible--but neither the Palestinians nor the Israeli government seem to think so. I doubt that the Israelis can crush Hamas and Gaza into submission. I wish I could see a real solution on the horizon, but I can't. </p><div class="blogger-post-footer"><a href="http://historyunfolding.blogspot.com"><i>History Unfolding</i></a></div>David Kaiserhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05020082243968071584noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8746692.post-45124549401007129442023-10-15T14:35:00.001-04:002023-10-15T15:49:46.888-04:00Ibram X Kendi's Crusade against the Enlightenment<p> This post, which was commissioned by my friend Glenn Loury, <a href="https://open.substack.com/pub/glennloury/p/ibram-kendis-crusade-against-the?r=7iiol&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email">appears here.</a> If you get a popup announcing a paywall, simply find and click the "continue reading" button and you should have no problems. Let me know if you do.</p><div class="blogger-post-footer"><a href="http://historyunfolding.blogspot.com"><i>History Unfolding</i></a></div>David Kaiserhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05020082243968071584noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8746692.post-87896515766997565922023-10-09T14:41:00.001-04:002023-10-09T20:33:39.668-04:00July 1914, October 2023<p> I have already written something on a completely different subject that will eventually be posted here, but it was for a different forum and I am waiting for them to put it up. Meanwhile, war has broken out on the borders of Israel, and I think that this could turn into a new world crisis and even a new world war. I shall explain why.</p><p>Europe in 1914 included about five great powers: Great Britain, France, Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Russia. Italy and Turkey ranked below those five. Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy belonged to the Triple Alliance, although Italy was reserving its right to decide when its alliance obligations might come into play. France and Russia had been allies since 1894, and France and Britain had reached an Entente--an understanding--in 1904 and had cooperated diplomatically in at least two crises since. The Balkans were now composed of small independent states.</p><p>The immediate cause of the outbreak of the war was, of course, the assassination of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand--the heir to the imperial throne--by young Serbian nationalists. Serbia had recently expanded its territory in a war against Turkey, and dreamed of creating what eventually became Yugoslavia. Bosnia-Herzegovina, an Austrian province, had a largely Serbian population, and the Archduke was killed on a visit to Sarajevo, its capital. The killers were actually working for Serbian Army intelligence, which was a law unto itself--rather like Pakistan's ISA--and which the Serbian government feared. Austria feared the Serbian threat because much of the population of the empire belonged to subject nationalities--Serbs, Croats, Czechs, Slovaks, Rumanians and Poles. In the wake of the archduke's assassination they decided that Serbia had to be crushed and partitioned among various powers.</p><p>Israel began life a far more homogenous national state than Austria-Hungary was, but its de facto borders now include millions of Arabs who are if anything more opposed to Israel's existence than the Serbs in Bosnia were to Austria's. About four million Palestinians are nearly evenly divided between the West Bank, which the current Israeli government appears to want to merge with Israel, and Gaza, over which the Israelis maintain various forms of control. About 1.8 million Arabs live in pre-1967 Israel, and seven million Jews live in that territory and on the West Bank. Hamas, like the Black Hand--the secret Serbian organization that dominated Serbian army intelligence--is a terrorist organization beyond the control of the Palestinian Authority, its official government. It rules Gaza. Decades of Israeli attempts to wipe out its leadership and thwart its attacks have, it must now be said, completely failed to reduce its capability. It just just mounted an operation of unprecedented scope and effect,</p><p>Thus in the current situation, in my view, Israel is playing the role of Austria-Hungary--an established power threatened by minorities and terrorist revolutionaries, which it is now determined to crush. The United States, I would suggest, is playing the role of Germany--the patron of a lesser power and longstanding ally--Israel now, Austria-Hungary then--which is unleashing a local war in response to a terrorist attack. I would suggest however that the United States government, like the German government in 1914, has other objectives besides the simple defense of Israel, which remains relatively secure.</p><p>The war in Ukraine has emerged as the first armed conflict in a struggle between three twenty-first century great powers, the United States, Russia, and China--the Oceana, Eurasia and East Asia that Orwell predicted in <i>1984.</i> While Russia is trying to destroy the post-1989 settlement that emerged in Europe after the USSR collapsed, the United States and the EU and an enlarged NATO are trying to maintain it. Meanwhile, tensions have grown steadily between the United States and China over Taiwan. In this kind of environment, the greatest powers regard any defeat by one of their allies as a potentially disastrous shift in the balance of power. That is why the United States is doing so much to support Ukraine, and it is one reason that President Biden immediately announced the strongest possible support for Israel, including conventional military support even though Israel is not facing a conventional war. </p><p>Most important of all, Iran is another player in the situation that could easily escalate it. The Israelis regard Iran as a mortal enemy and have been determined to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. The Obama Administration's attempt to remove that threat diplomatically broke down under Donald Trump, who repudiated the agreement that John Kerry had reached with the Iranians--partly, it was clear, to secure backing from powerful American Jews like the late Sheldon Adelson. The Biden administration seems to have abandoned its attempts to revive that agreement. Iran also provides important support to both Hamas and Hezbollah, the other leading terrorist organization on Israel's borders, headquartered in Lebanon--which may jump into the conflict now. (Islamic Jihad has claimed responsibility for the first terrorist incursion over the Israel-Lebanon border.) The United States, to my horror, has been trying to improve its relations with Saudi Arabia, which would definitely make Washington a partner in an anti-Iranian alliance in the Middle East. There is even talk of Israel normalizing relations with Saudi Arabia, which might draw it into such an alliance. </p><p>If Israel, the US and Saudi Arabia decided to attack Iran, Russia--which has friendly relations with Iran now--might join in on Iran's side. It would be extremely difficult for the United States to maintain its generous support for Ukraine while also fighting such a conflict ourselves. And with the United States involved in two different conflicts already, Beijing might easily decide that the time to invade Taiwan had come. Suddenly we would be in the midst of a third world war.</p><p>Germany in 1914 decided to back Austria to the hilt in its demands against Serbia because the German government wanted a trial of strength with France and Russia, whom they thought they could either humiliate diplomatically or defeat militarily. The men and women in charge of US foreign policy today clearly still believe that our will should prevail anywhere on the globe, and might not be averse to military action to make that point. President Biden might also welcome it as an attempt to unify the nation behind him as the election approaches. I am not at all sure, however, in the current climate, whether that would work. Such a war would test the cohesion of the United States.</p><p>The Arab-Israeli tragedy continues. Four generations of Palestinians have now grown up under occupation, each one at least as hostile to Israel as the last. 75 years of conflict, combined with demographic changes, have made Israel a very different country than it was before 1967. Despite its repeated failure to impose its will on the Palestinians, the Israeli government is now the verge of its most destructive effort to do so yet in Gaza. It speaks of destroying Hamas, and Netanyahu has even advised Gazans to flee--but there are about two million of them living in the most densely populated political entity on earth, and they have nowhere to flee to. A great power makes a mistake, in my opinion, when it ties its destiny to that of a smaller power in the midst of an endless war. The real responsibility of great powers is to keep in mind the ultimate objective of any war--"which is to bring about peace," as Clausewitz said. That is what Germany could and should have done in 1914, and what several American presidents tried to do in the Middle East. It does not seem to be our policy now.</p><p><br /></p><div class="blogger-post-footer"><a href="http://historyunfolding.blogspot.com"><i>History Unfolding</i></a></div>David Kaiserhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05020082243968071584noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8746692.post-14566642529834616792023-10-02T08:14:00.001-04:002023-10-02T08:14:19.569-04:00The Boomer legacy continues<p> In the last two weeks I have listened to two revealing podcasts that shed some light on the state of youthful opinion. The first, by Glenn Loury,<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_6c-2PgOiU&t=9s&ab_channel=TheGlennShow"> was mainly an interview with Sabrina Salvati,</a> a Millennial (I think) black podcaster from the left. (Glenn's wife LaJuan Loury also took part in the interview.) The second was a remarkable<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uHGmOWFsAE&ab_channel=BadFaith"> two-hour conversation between Briahna Joy Gray, a lawyer and commentator who was press secretary on one of Bernie Sanders's presidential campaigns, and Norman Finkelstein,</a> a dissident Boomer academic and the author, most recently, of <i>I'll Burn That Bridge When I Get to It, </i>a massive polemic against wokeness in general featuring a long chapter on Ibram X. Kendi, the author of <i>How to Be an Antiracist, </i>whose stewardship of a new center for antiracism at Boston University is now under attack and under investigation. Finkelstein is one of the most intellectually controversial people in the United States. Born in 1953, the child of two Polish-Jewish Holocaust survivors, he made his name as a critic of Israeli policy towards the Palestinians and of some American Jewish supporters of Israel. He accused Alan Dershowitz of plagiarizing parts of his book <i>The Case for Israel</i> from another secondary source--this controversy is discussed calmly and at great length in Finkelstein's Wikipedia entry--and Dershowitz retaliated by waging a long an successful public campaign to get DePaul University, where Finkelstein was teaching, to deny him tenure in the 2000s. Finkelstein now teaches part time, I believe, at community colleges--that is the impression I got from some of his remarks in the interview.</p><p>I suspect that Salvati and Gray represent a substantial strain of Millennial left wing opinion, although I cannot be sure. Salvati has only 900 subscribers on Substack, while Gray has almost 82,000 subscribers on her youtube channel. One striking view that they share is opposition to support for Ukraine. Both of them, particularly Salvati, seem to view the war as just another example of American imperialism and endorse the idea that we are fighting a "proxy war" against Ukraine, and that American foreign policy is controlled by "warmongers." Salvati insisted that the decision to give cluster munitions to the Ukrainians will in the long run do more harm than good for the Ukrainian people--ignoring that President Zelensky very much wanted those munitions, and that the Ukrainian people obviously overwhelmingly support his leadership in the war. That was not all. Salvati accused both Donald Trump and Joe Biden of being Fascists, and Gray ended her interview with Finkelstein--whom she has had on her podcast before, and obviously likes personally--by saying that she would vote for Marianne Williamson in the Democratic Primary and Cornel West in the general election. Gray also suggested the Biden appeared on the UAW picket line as part of a strategy devised by mysterious corporate powers that be to hide plans for hurting the UAW in an eventual agreement.</p><p>I have no sympathy whatever for those views about the Ukraine war, a genuine struggle for independence and territorial integrity against a lawless, imperialist Russia. Indeed I still regret, as I said about a year and a half ago, that NATO didn't think seriously about intervening militarily in the war as soon as it became clear that Ukraine could and would defend itself. I was skeptical about our original intervention in Afghanistan in 2001--and said so in print--and I was totally opposed to invading Iraq, but this is a completely different kind of war. What struck me about Salvati's and Gray's views in general, however, was their similarity to the views of so many of my contemporaries in the 1968-70 period. They had decided not simply that the Vietnam war was a mistake, but that it was simply one element in a completely imperialistic and wicked US foreign policy. They had also decided that there was no difference between the two parties and had taken no part in the 1968 election, except to disrupt the Democratic convention and some of Hubert Humphrey's rallies. They had contributed to some extent to Richard Nixon's victory, which as it turned out meant four more years of war in Vietnam, as well as the Watergate scandal, which we could not then foresee. </p><p>Just as Franklin Roosevelt, Harold Ickes, Harry Hopkins, Frances Perkins, and many other members of the post-Civil War Missionary generation bequeathed certain values to the GI generation that fought the war, Strauss and Howe in the 1990s expected Boomers to leave a new set of values to Millennials. I'm beginning to think that that happened, but in a far more fragmented way. Newt Gingrich and now, Donald Trump, have inspired some Millennial right wingers, and Boomer left wingers seem to have passed their views down two generations as well. Gray in the Finkelstein interview mentions that her grandfather was a Black Panther, as was the father of Gen Xer Ta Ne-hisi Coates. And, of course, many Boomer and Xer academics have passed the world view of the late 1960s on to many younger students in colleges and universities. </p><p>The Finkelstein interview was interesting from another angle. Finkelstein devoted a long chapter in <i>I'll Burn That Bridge When I Get to It </i>to Ibram X. Kendi's book, <i>Stamped from the Beginning</i>, which purported to be a history of racism in the United States and western culture generally. He points out, in great detail, the factual and logical weaknesses in Kendi's arguments, especially the argument that giants of the abolitionist and civil rights movements such as William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Frederick Douglass and W. E. B. DuBois were actually racists because, in his view, they looked down on black culture or wanted black people to join in white western civilization. Finkelstein is an interesting person. He described himself to Glenn Loury as a communist with a small c, and he is intentionally abrasive, but his conversation with Gray makes clear that he is an idealist when it comes to historical scholarship, and is therefore incensed that someone with incredibly oversimplified views of Kendi could have zoomed right to the top of the academic ladder. (Oddly, I, who like Finkelstein had a checkered career in academia, am not surprised by this: it happens all the time. He has not perhaps grasped the simple truth that the true scholars among us--who include members of all races and genders--are too few to define the ethos of our profession. The big winners in academia combine a sense of what people will like at any given moment with a talent for networking, and those appear to be Kendi's talents as well.) Finkelstein also mentions that while he has always regarded the <i>New York Times</i> as a conservative, establishment paper, he felt for several decades that he could trust it to provide true information. He no longer does, and I understand that, too.</p><p>The Ukraine issue is interesting from another perspective. Both the extreme left and the extreme right now oppose aid to Ukraine--and the extreme right in the House of Representatives has managed to delay aid to that beleaguered nation. This is a parallel to the early years of the Cold War, when both left-wing liberals--some of them with actual Communist associations--and extreme conservatives opposed it--the former because they were on the other side of it, the latter because they saw it as an excuse to expand federal power. By the mid-1950s both extremes had essentially been eliminated from Congress. The denouement of the budget crisis--which, it must be said, has only solved it for six weeks--suggests that the country might now be ruled by some kind of centrist majority. And while I am not as far from Briahna Joy Gray as you might think with respect to the current direction of the Democratic establishment, I still think that such a centrist majority would probably be the best thing for the country at this point. It is the only alternative either to endless division or an actual breakup of the country. I only wish that we had a Harry Truman or a Dwight Eisenhower to lead it, but Gen X has not produced a leader like that yet.</p><p><br /></p><div class="blogger-post-footer"><a href="http://historyunfolding.blogspot.com"><i>History Unfolding</i></a></div>David Kaiserhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05020082243968071584noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8746692.post-32492551699613243312023-09-25T10:36:00.001-04:002023-09-25T21:17:44.209-04:00Will dau tranh destroy the United States?<p> Eleven and one-half years ago, in the spring of 2012, I made one of my most important posts here. I have reposted it twice in the last three years. Now the issues it raised have entered a new phase, and I think it's time to revisit it again. Here it is.</p><h2 class="date-header" style="background-attachment: scroll; background-clip: initial; background-image: none; background-origin: initial; background-position: 0% 0%; background-repeat: no-repeat; background-size: initial; border-bottom: 1px solid transparent; border-top-left-radius: 0px; border-top-right-radius: 0px; border-top: 0px solid rgb(238, 238, 238); bottom: 100%; color: #444444; font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, FreeSerif, serif; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px -15px 1px; min-height: 0px; padding: 0px; position: static; right: 15px;"><span style="border-left: 0px solid rgb(238, 238, 238); border-right: 0px solid rgb(238, 238, 238); display: block; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; padding: 0.5em 15px;">Saturday, May 19, 2012</span></h2><div class="date-posts" style="border-top: 1px solid rgb(238, 238, 238); clear: both; color: #444444; font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, FreeSerif, serif; font-size: 16px; margin: 0px -15px; padding: 8px 15px 0px;"><div class="post-outer" style="border-bottom: none; border-top: none; margin: 0px -15px; padding: 0px 15px 10px;"><div class="post hentry uncustomized-post-template" itemprop="blogPost" itemscope="itemscope" itemtype="http://schema.org/BlogPosting" style="min-height: 0px; position: relative;"><a name="7466755940381805113"></a><h3 class="post-title entry-title" itemprop="name" style="font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 22px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; position: relative;"><a href="https://historyunfolding.blogspot.com/2012/05/struggle.html" style="color: #444444; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; text-decoration-line: none;">Struggle</a></h3><div class="post-header" style="line-height: 1.6; margin: 0px 0px 1em;"><div class="post-header-line-1"></div></div><div class="post-body entry-content" id="post-body-7466755940381805113" itemprop="description articleBody" style="line-height: 1.4; position: relative; width: 586.4px;">One of the most important readings about the Vietnam War that I have ever encountered is a chapter by the late Douglas Pike, a real authority on the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese, about <i>dau tranh</i>, or struggle, the philosophy behind the Vietnamese Communist revolution. <i>Dau tranh</i>, Pike explains, had two forms: military and political. Of the two, the political was far more important, and indeed, the Viet Cong always had several times as many active political workers as soldiers during the Vietnam War. Their mission was to rally their own troops and sow confusion among the enemy, doing whatever they could, in particular, to make the South Vietnamese government unable to function effectively. They also infiltrated that government at every level and tried to influence the views of enemy forces. Their goal, essentially, was to reduce society to chaos and allow the well-organized Communist Party to take over. The other day I raised some eyebrows in a small group setting by suggesting that the Republican Party has been practicing <i>dau tranh</i> for more than twenty years. It has now crippled government at all levels and has a good chance of reducing much of the United States to chaos in the next ten years.<br /><i>Dau transh</i> in its current form started with Newt Gingrich's all-out assault on the Democrats in the House of Representatives, whom he was determined to demonize in order to take away their majority. Grover Norquist's anti-tax pledge, now signed by almost every Republican in Congress and thousands more in state legislatures around the country, is another form of <i>dau tranh</i>. So, of course, is the ceaseless drumbeat of propaganda day after day, week after week, year after year, on Limbaugh, Hannity and the rest. So is the attack on the authority of the mainstream media, universities and scientists. Oddly, while this attack on government probably did more than anything to land us in our current economic mess, the mess also makes <i>dau tranh</i> more effective, because it undermines confidence in the government. Conservative Republicans have also waged long-term <i>dau tranh</i> within our legal system, using the Federalist society to develop a network of conservative lawyers and judges and packing the courts whenever they can. Jeffrey Toobin has analyzed the increasingly significant results of that effort in a series of articles in the <i>New Yorker.</i><br />I was moved to write this post because I have to deal with <i>dau tranh</i> almost daily myself in managing this blog. One of my regular readers is a fanatical right-winger who probably posts 50 comments a week here, week in and week out. They are not really comments, for the most part--they are links to some piece of right-wing propaganda, often accompanied with personal abuse towards myself. I think I know who he is, although we have never met face to face, and I also regard him as the prime suspect for having put my name on the Obama=Hitler email which is still circulating, even though he denied it when we were both still on the same discussion forum. (He was kicked off the forum when his <i>dau tranh</i> and personal abuse went too far.) I warn, of course, on the blog, that abusive anonymous comments will be deleted, but he berates me for doing so nonetheless. The attempt to keep the extreme Republican view of the world in the foreground is a key element of Republican <i>dau tranh</i>, just as it was for Nazis and Communists.<br />The Republicans' real target is the idea that dominated the last century--the idea that human reason can design, and create, a better world. That is why Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson have been given places in their Pantheon of villains. I'm afraid they have sufficiently discredited that idea that it no longer dominates our political life, and might be disappearing altogether. Their lust for power is much, much greater than their respect for the truth. This is the threat the nation faces. Pike also argued provocatively in one of his books that there was no known counter-strategy to <i>dau tranh</i>, and I'm afraid he may have been right. <b>[end post.]</b></div><div class="post-body entry-content" id="post-body-7466755940381805113" itemprop="description articleBody" style="line-height: 1.4; position: relative; width: 586.4px;"><b><br /></b></div><div class="post-body entry-content" id="post-body-7466755940381805113" itemprop="description articleBody" style="line-height: 1.4; position: relative; width: 586.4px;">The Republican battle against the political theory of the Enlightenment--that government must mobilize resources to secure important public goods--has a new vanguard, composed of twenty or thirty Republicans who believe that the federal government is unreservedly evil that that we would benefit if its operations came to a halt. That vanguard comes to life <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/23/us/republicans-congress-freedom-caucus.html">in a story by Carl Hulse in today's <i>New York Times</i></a>. "Most of what Congress does is not good for the American people," Charles Good, a Republican from Virginia, no less, declares in this piece. "Most of what we do as a Congress is totally unjustified." "Members of the far-right Freedom Caucus and other right-wing House members see themselves as courageously doing the people's work," Hulse writes. "They believe they are reining in government and taking on what they call a corrupt 'uniparty' of Republicans and Democrats who conspire with rich donors and special interests to bankrupt the nation and beat down the average American." And not only do they oppose the whole thrust of the last 90 years of federal domestic policy, they also are taking a stand against establishment foreign policy, including our effort to aid Ukraine. They do not care, crucially, that Republicans have only a narrow majority in the House while Democrats control the Senate and the White House, the other two equal partners in the budget-making process. It is not clear that anything will satisfy them.</div><div class="post-body entry-content" id="post-body-7466755940381805113" itemprop="description articleBody" style="line-height: 1.4; position: relative; width: 586.4px;">It seems clear that a majority of the House does <i>not</i> favor a shutdown and would live with the budget deal that Speaker Kevin McCarthy reached with the White House earlier this year--but the extreme faction that includes Matt Gaetz, Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene has intimidated McCarthy and, it seems, the rest of the Republicans, so far. They appear to have the support of Donald Trump, whom no House Republican seems to have the courage to defy any longer, For the time being, their Senate leader Mitch McConnell does not support their plans, but it is not clear how much longer he can keep his job for medical reasons, and the grass roots pressure for the Senate Republicans to replace him with another fire-eater will be intense when he steps down. Kevin McCarthy presumably could try to pass a continuing resolution with the support of the Democrats and a few Republicans, but that would probably lead to his immediate replacement, an option which the far right insisted upon when he was elected Speaker.</div><div class="post-body entry-content" id="post-body-7466755940381805113" itemprop="description articleBody" style="line-height: 1.4; position: relative; width: 586.4px;">I would like to suggest a few reasons why we have reached this point in our history--comparable in some ways to the eve of the Civil War, but with the difference that the House Republicans don't seem to want secession--they want to destroy the federal government that belongs to us all.</div><div class="post-body entry-content" id="post-body-7466755940381805113" itemprop="description articleBody" style="line-height: 1.4; position: relative; width: 586.4px;">For approximately the first two hundred years of our history our citizenry--including leading citizens of all kinds--took an intense interest in politics. They understood the novelty of the experiment that the founding fathers had begun and took great pride in trying to make it work. Large landowners, successful lawyers, and some businessmen felt an obligation to enter the political sphere, and most of them--although never all--had a commitment to our institutions that went beyond political partisanship. The last generation that showed these qualities, I think, were the GIs (born 1904-24), whose commitment to our institutions had become unshakable after they fought to preserve them in the Second World War. People like Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene--to say nothing of George Santos--did not get elected to Congress without making any name for themselves in some other endeavor. And until Donald Trump, most politicians recognized some obligation not to pander to the most extreme emotions of their voters--the tactic Trump rode right into the White House, as he may do again. Yes, Joseph McCarthy was an exception to everything I have just said, but the havoc he created lasted only four years, and his downfall discredited his kind of behavior for a very long time to come. He embodied the idea of the exception that proves the rule.</div><div class="post-body entry-content" id="post-body-7466755940381805113" itemprop="description articleBody" style="line-height: 1.4; position: relative; width: 586.4px;">There is another big reason, however, that the Republican Party won 50.6 percent of the popular vote for Congress in 2022 to the Democrats' 47.8 percent--a margin that could easily have given them a larger majority than they have now. Our highly educated ruling elite, which controls all our major national institutions--the educational system, corporate America, our professions, our traditional media outlets, and the federal bureaucracy, including the foreign policy and defense establishment--no longer cares about the lives or the views of ordinary Americans. Higher education taught them that they would graduate knowing what was best for us all, and they have carried that attitude into later life. This development has been very carefully and effectively analyzed by Yale law professor Daniel Markovitz in his book, <i>The Meritocracy Trap</i>, which is <a href="https://www.lse.ac.uk/Events/Events-Assets/PDF/2019/02-ST/20190508-The-Meritocracy-Trap.pdf">summarized in this power point presentation.</a> In the book itself Markovitz emphasized that our new elite has increased its dominance by choosing solutions to problems in areas like law, health care, and higher education that increase their numbers and their power. It is very hard for their counterparts in the media to see any of this as a problem, because they belong to the same elite. But the one-time autoworkers who have lost their jobs to Mexico, today's autoworkers who fear losing theirs in the transition to electric vehicles, the hundreds of thousands of families who have lost their farms in the last few decades, and the socially conservative and religious people of many different faiths understand this problem very well, because they have suffered from it both materially and emotionally. </div><div class="post-body entry-content" id="post-body-7466755940381805113" itemprop="description articleBody" style="line-height: 1.4; position: relative; width: 586.4px;">Surveys have shown the extraordinary numerical dominance of liberals and Democrats on college faculties and in certain newsrooms. I am not aware of any similar survey of federal, state or local bureaucrats, but I suspect that they would show a similar pattern except in the state and local bureaucracies of the reddest states. Only 41 percent of adult Americans have college degrees, but they occupy nearly all positions of any power, and they increasingly trend Democratic while those without degrees are trending Republican. The Republican vanguard has nothing to offer the country but chaos, inequality, and a completely anarchic wider world, but they are speaking for a very large number of Americans who feel no stake in our system as it has evolved. </div><div class="post-body entry-content" id="post-body-7466755940381805113" itemprop="description articleBody" style="line-height: 1.4; position: relative; width: 586.4px;"><i>Dau Tranh</i> worked for the Communists in Vietnam because the government they sought to break down was largely a creature first of the French and then of the Americans. It also worked because the Communists had the discipline and focus that their enemies lacked. Republican <i>dau tranh</i> is working, I think, because our elite no longer takes the views of the uneducated seriously. This is a very dangerous situation.</div></div></div></div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><a href="http://historyunfolding.blogspot.com"><i>History Unfolding</i></a></div>David Kaiserhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05020082243968071584noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8746692.post-6402831532925542222023-09-11T09:32:00.000-04:002023-09-11T09:32:04.484-04:00When did "the sixties" end?<p> Six months ago I reviewed <a href="https://historyunfolding.blogspot.com/2023/03/chicago-1968-54-years-later.html">a book by Heather Hendershot,</a> <i>When the News Broke,</i> about the television coverage of the turbulent Democratic Convention of 1968. The current issue of the <i>New York Review of Books</i> includes a review of the same book by the distinguished Columbia historian Eric Foner. I have some differences of opinion with Foner about the era which we both lived through, mostly about the role of leading mainstream media outlets. " For many years," he writes, especially but not exclusively in the South, the mainstream press published articles about the civil rights movement that denigrated demonstrators, defended segregation, and included the names of Black men and women who sought to register to vote, resulting frequently in economic retribution such as the loss of their jobs." I believe that nearly all the major northern media coverage of the civil rights movement in the South was very sympathetic, as were the news broadcasts of the major television networks. "Until 1968," he continues, "the news media displayed a remarkable credulity about official claims of military progress in Vietnam and failed to examine in any depth the rising tide of nationalism in the colonial world that helped explain the conflict." In fact young reporters for leading newspapers in Vietnam expressed enormous skepticism about how the war was going during the Kennedy Administration and much of the media was skeptical from the outset of the large-scale war in 1965. Foner wants us to believe that we needed <i>I.F. Stone's Weekly</i>, <i>the Nation</i>, and the new underground press to learn the truth. And that leads me to what I really want to talk about: the definition of the exact legacy and the intellectual and academic rebellion of the late 1960s, to which Foner turns at the end of his review.</p><p>Foner points out that the bulk of the television audience sided with the police, not the protesters, after watching the Chicago convention. Partly for that reason the Democratic Party--which had won more than 60 percent of the popular vote in Johnson's 1964 landslide--won just 42.7 percent of that vote in 1968, the rest divided between Nixon and George Wallace. The entire South, except Texas, went for Nixon or Wallace in that election, the beginning of the realignment that allowed the Republicans to win five of six elections from 1968 through 1988, and the next two Democrats to reach the White House were southern centrists. Reagan put an end to the New Deal order. Yet as Foner points out, that was not the whole story:<br /></p><p>"But radicalism did not suddenly disappear. By the early 1970s social movements dotted the political landscape, including the second wave of feminism, gay liberation, and environmentalism, while the Black struggle continued. All survive to this day, and all have changed American life in dramatic ways. The antiwar movement did not reach its peak until 1970 when, in the aftermath of the US invasion of Cambodia and the killing of four protesting students at Kent State University by members of the Ohio National Guard, a strike paralyzed campuses throughout the country. And in 1975 the war ended. . . .When did the decade of the Sixties end? Did it end at all? We sometimes seem to be reliving those years that did so much to shape our world."</p><p>I am convinced that the legacy of those years is far more profound than he seems to realize, and I want to explain why.</p><p>The Second World War and its aftermath were the climax of about two centuries of European and North American politics based upon a mix of the principles of the Enlightenment and the social influence of the Christian religion. The states of the North Atlantic region believed that reason and science could create better governments based on impartial principles and improve the lives of their citizens--and states did that. They did so, however, thanks to a widespread, though not universal, respect for authority among the citizens, who submitted to a great deal of discipline in nearly every area of their life. Education was based on well-defined curriculums. The laws tightly regulated questions of sex and marriage. Society defined strict roles for men and women. The continental European nations required their young men to serve in their armies, and the Anglo-Saxon nations adopted that practice as well during the two world wars. The Second World War showed what the modern state was capable, both for good and for evil, and much of the wartime atmosphere lasted for another fifteen or twenty years because of the Cold War. Meanwhile, a new generation was growing up in relative security and affluence--the Boom generation--whose parents had already begun to discipline much less, and who were not growing up in fear of war or destitution. </p><p>What holds the various political and social aspects of the sixties together is a rebellion against authority of all kinds--political, social, and cultural, and above all, generational. The percentage of young people in college was much higher than ever before, and this was perhaps the first generation--the Boom--in which everyone who could go to college was expected to do so. The 1964-5 school year was the first in which nearly all the students in college came from the Boom--and it coincided with the start of the Vietnam War, which over the next few years proved that the older generation had made a terrible mistake. Many students did not see why they should fight in that war, and that in turn encouraged them to question other forms of authority, from dress codes to parietal hours in dorms to the illegality of certain widely available drugs. </p><p>Something else was happening on campus. The academics of the Silent generation (b. 1925-42) were the most favored group in the history of American higher education. They got an excellent education and finished their degrees in the midst of a very rapidly expanding job market. And quite a few of them began making their names by questioning the most fundamental beliefs of postwar America--such as the idea that the Cold War was simply a defense of the free world against Communism. It was in 1965 that Gar Alperovitz--an economist, not an historian--published <i>Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam</i>, arguing that the United States dropped the atomic bombs on Japan to intimidate the USSR. This was one of a flood of books blaming American imperialism for the Cold War, and they all became more popular as the Vietnam War went from bad to worse. In 1973 the historian Robert James Maddox published <i>The New Left and the Origins of the Cold War</i>, showing that Alperovitz and six other historians had built their case largely on sand, but his work had little impact. The idea of American imperialism as the source of the world's evils was an idea whose time had come.</p><p>The women's movement, meanwhile, was getting off the ground as well. Female undergraduates accompanied their male contemporaries into graduate and professional schools in unprecedented numbers. The 1960s did not really discover gay rights--they are not even mentioned in the indispensable documentary, <i>Berkeley in the Sixties</i>--but the gay rights movement grew in the 1970s. To his credit, Foner does not associate the civil rights movement with the rebellion of the late 1960s. It had won its biggest successes by then, and it was being weakened by a generational rebellion of its own, led by men like Eldridge Cleaver, Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown. The black activists of the late 1960s introduced a crucial shift in liberation movements. Rather than arguing, like the earlier leaders of the NAACP and Martin Luther King, Jr., that black Americans simply deserved to be treated like white Americans, they identified the United States as hopelessly racist and corrupt, beset with evils that only revolution could remove. </p><p>The rebellion continued to make gains on campus even in the Reagan era, and women's studies (later gender studies), black studies, and gay (later LGBTQIA+ studies) became established academic fields. All of them increasingly followed in the footsteps of the antiwar and black activists of the late 1960s. Rather than simply calling for equal treatment within the existing American legal framework, they increasingly insisted--following scholars like the Frenchman Michel Foucault--that all the principles of western civilization were based on the oppression of some groups by others. By the 1990s the oppressors were identified with straight white males. I recently glanced once again at my own online archive of articles from <i>Academic Questions</i>, the journal of the National Association of Scholars, which was formed in 1987 to defend traditional intellectual values. It is amazing how closely articles from the 1990s anticipate what has become the mainstream intellectual climate today. The attitudes that rule our elite media and publishing today already ruled the campuses then, but it took two more generations for them to take over our institutions.</p><p>Foner made his name as a scholar of Reconstruction and recently wrote a book about Abraham Lincoln--yet he has apparently refused to join the courageous scholars who have pointed out the falsehoods underlying the <i>1619 Project</i>. He cannot face the idea, apparently, that the activism of the late 1960s might have done more harm than good--but that is the truth. Because I was already immersed in the writings of George Orwell--the subject of the senior thesis I wrote in 1968-9--I already had an immunity to that kind of activism, and that has stayed with me for my whole life.</p><p>The mid-twentieth century consensus, to repeat, rested on the political and intellectual principles of the Enlightenment. The rebellion against it led over the decades to the abandonment of those principles among our intellectual class. They do not believe in a single historical or social reality, but rather in multiple realities that belong to different races, genders, and people of different sexual practices. They believe that any consensus position on almost any issue is simply a vehicle by oppression by a particular group. Many of them now reject the nuclear family as a model. They cannot even accept climate change as a threat to all of us in which we have an equal stake. Something bigger, however, than leftwing activism obviously lies behind all this, because the right now feels the same way--equally entitled to believe in and act on their own reality, even when it comes to responses to new diseases. That is the real secret to what has happened in the last half century.</p><p>In the long run, the discipline of the era of the first two hundred years or so of American history turned out to be too much for humanity to endure--especially as we became more comfortable and secure economically. Nearly all of us rebelled in one way or another. Something similar may have happened to the Roman Empire, although I am too ignorant about that empire to say. Great historians, I often say, do not argue with history. Those of us in our 70s or older have lived through a profound transformation of human life--one that clearly must reflect immutable aspects of human nature. Other generations must deal with the consequences--possibly for a very long time.</p><div class="blogger-post-footer"><a href="http://historyunfolding.blogspot.com"><i>History Unfolding</i></a></div>David Kaiserhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05020082243968071584noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8746692.post-39343010560182469812023-08-28T13:41:00.004-04:002023-09-01T14:35:12.373-04:00The coming election<p> I am not going to comment at great length on the Republican candidates' debate, but I found it highly significant. Whether or not Donald Trump wins the nomination--and it certainly seems mostly likely that he will--he has irrevocably transformed the Republican Party. On three major issues--climate change, immigration, and the drive to eviscerate the federal government--nearly everyone seemed to be trying to out-Trump Trump. They competed to find reasons to avoid doing anything about emissions, they agreed on the need to destroy the administrative state, and they want more drastic measures to stop immigration and, in at least one case, to remove immigrants already here. And the scariest candidate is also the one whose popularity is rising the most quickly, Vivek Ramaswamy. I urge everyone to read his Wikipedia entry to find out how he made his money--without doing any good for anyone but himself. </p><p>Meanwhile, I am equally concerned about the future of the Democratic Party--whose establishment seems set on a losing strategy.</p><p>One poll after another shows that a majority of Americans, Republicans and Democrats, think that Joe Biden is too old to run for president again. Biden's public appearances, such as they are, are doing nothing to dispel that impression. This weekend a <i>Boston Globe </i>story detailed how a big administration-encouraged industrial project, a nest of chip factories near Columbus, Ohio, isn't winning local voters over to him, partly because he described the site--where some homes have been bulldozed to make room--as "an empty field of dreams." Kevin McCarthy made it clear over the weekend that the Republicans are quite likely to impeach Biden. Unlike every really successful president, Biden has failed to design and communicate an effective message to the American people. And his weakness is not all that we have to worry about.</p><p>In 2019-20 Kamala Harris opened her own presidential campaign attacking Biden for is opposition to school busing for integration back in the 1970s. Her campaign did not catch on and she dropped out before the New Hampshire primary, which Biden also lost. Biden revived his campaign in South Carolina thanks to Harris's withdrawal and James Clyburn's announcement--and he has foolishly rewarded South Carolina by making it the first Democratic primary state. (The Democrats should not begin the campaign with a primary in a state they cannot possibly win.) I think we will eventually find that Biden's campaign had promised Harris the vice presidential spot in return for dropping out.</p><p>In the Democratic Party, the Vice President immediately becomes the next front-runner for the nomination--see Mondale, Walter; Gore, Al; and Biden, Joe (who initially yielded the spot to Hillary Clinton, perhaps the most establishment candidate of all.) I am now seriously concerned that Biden actually knows that he cannot run again, but that he is holding off the announcement until it is too late for anyone but Harris to mount a campaign. As some of you may have seen, Governor Gavin Newsom of California--the most prominent Democratic governor in the country by far now--is negotiating to debate with Ron DeSantis. NBC news reports that this plan is making some people close to Harris very unhappy, although some Biden advisers welcome Newsom's contributions as a surrogate. </p><p>Kamala Harris has conspicuously failed to connect with the American people either as a presidential candidate or as vice president. Her demographics appeal to many Democrats but would not be an asset in a general election. I think there is an excellent chance that she would lose any Republican candidate if she replaces Biden on the ticket--and polls show a real chance that Biden could lose to Trump, too. And thanks to the Republican debate, we know that a new Republican administration would start just where the last one left off.</p><p><br /></p><div class="blogger-post-footer"><a href="http://historyunfolding.blogspot.com"><i>History Unfolding</i></a></div>David Kaiserhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05020082243968071584noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8746692.post-56663520256209302122023-08-23T13:34:00.004-04:002023-08-26T21:32:18.476-04:00Postscript to this week's post<p> According to Russian sources, Viktor Prigozhin was a passenger on a plane that has crashed near Moscow. All ten people on board died. Wallenstein would not be surprised.</p><div class="blogger-post-footer"><a href="http://historyunfolding.blogspot.com"><i>History Unfolding</i></a></div>David Kaiserhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05020082243968071584noreply@blogger.com0