An historic day

Yesterday's crushing victory for Barack Obama in South Carolina was certainly historic from the viewpoint of the past--and portends an equally sweeping change in November.

I have recently been re-reading one of the greatest-ever works of American history, Allen Nevins' The Ordeal of the Union (whose eight volumes, I was amused to discover, began appearing in 1947, the year of my birth.) The first four volumes, on the years 1850-60, could only be compared, it seems to me, to Henry Adams' History of the United States under the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, which is another favorite of mine. Nevins researched every private collection of papers he could find and spun an extraordinary narrative. In any case, having read the chapters on 1850, I was struck that, even then, two southern states stood out as the bitterest defenders of slavery and the first to threaten secession. They were Mississippi--and South Carolina. Until just yesterday I saw no evidence that anything had changed very much. South Carolina continued to elect Strom Thurmond, a symbol of white supremacy for most of the second half of the twentieth century, right up until 2002 when he retired on the eve of his 100th birthday, and as Bob Herbert noted the State Capitol features not only a Confederate flag, but also a statue of Pitchfork Ben Tillman, as blunt a post-bellum racist as the south ever produced. Mississippi, as my son discovered in two years teaching in the Delta, is nearly as segregated as it was fifty years ago. That Barack Obama could have won the Democratic Primary with 55% of the vote--beating Hillary Clinton among women and men--simply boggles the mind, and leaves no doubt that time, births and deaths have evidently created a new South Carolina. In perhaps the most staggering statistic of all, Barack Obama won a majority of white Democratic voters under 29. John Edwards, the most economically radical candidate, won the white vote between 29 and 59; Hillary Clinton won only those over 60 (and evidently beat Edwards only because she was the second choice of the black electorate, which made up slightly more than half of the total.

Yet perhaps the more historic news involves a comparison of this primary with last week's Republican one, which was equally hard fought. South Carolina has voted for a Democratic President,only once since 1960, in 1976--but 442,000 voters cast ballots in the Republican primary, as against 535,000 in the Democratic. The figures in New Hampshire and Iowa, both of which were hotly contested in the last two elections, favored the Democrats even more dramatically. The two most significant elections of the twentieth century were 1932, when FDR swept the West and made significant inroads in the Republican East, and 1968, when the Democrats lost the entire South (except Texas) to either Nixon or Wallace. If these trends continue then 2008 could be equally astonishing and equally significant.

I have no doubt that Obama would be a far stronger candidate in November than Clinton for two somewhat related reasons. First, as I have already suggested, she would be scandaled half to death by the Republicans. But more importantly, she (like John McCain on the other side) is the old folks' candidate, and the young folks, bless their hearts, will decide the election. They did the same in 1932 and 1936 (in the latter year, fully 90% of the 21-35s may have voted for FDR.)

Obama's victory is bound to energize the African-American vote in states like New York, Missouri, and Tennessee (and to discredit black leaders in New York who tried to play it safe and jumped on the Clinton bandwagon.) But the candidates, all of whose resources have been depleted in the opening skirmishes, now face ten extraordinary days, the most dramatic days in American politics in a very long time. That, perhaps, is the most exciting fact of all--not since 1960 has the United States experienced such an extraordinary contest. I suspect a great many young Americans will remember 2008 the way my generation does 1960, as the beginning, really, of their political lives.

And now, Obama

Having given Hillary Clinton a plug on Monday, I would now like to do the same for Barack Obama by recommending that everyone watch his Monday speech at the Ebeneezer Baptist Church, available here. It confirms that he could be the most inspiring orator in our national politics since JFK, and bodes well for his candidacy--if the country can actually get to see him in this mode. The video has drawn an enormous audience on youtube.

I am off to a conference in a few minutes and should be posting again late Sunday.

A Ray of Hope

Today is the Martin Luther King holiday, and over the weekend Senator Hillary Clinton gave a long interview to David Leonhardt of the New York Times. One might have expected her (based upon the campaign to date) to use this forum for more discussion of inclusiveness, identity politics, and King's dreams, which to my disgust have become the almost exclusive focus of the campaign as she has once again become the front runner. That is not, however, what she wanted to talk about. Instead, showing herself at her policy-wonk best--and adding an impressive sense of history--she discussed the relationship between the U.S. government and U.S. economy over the last sixty years, in terms that would have been right at home in your average column by Paul Krugman or, if I do say so myself, right here at historyunfolding.com .

The government, Senator Clinton says, simply has to play more of a role in regulating the economy to restore both political and economic balance. She wants the top marginal tax rate to go back up to 39%, where it was in the pre-Bush days. (David Leonhardt, the Times reporter who interviewed her, mentions that the top rate was 70% in the 1970s, but for some reason he doesn't mention that it was over 90% in the 1950s. ) She talks about the role unions played in creating the postwar middle class, and the greater responsibility corporations showed towards communities in those days. And she talks about the need to reduce obscenely high executive compensation (the best way, of course, would be to go back to 90% tax rates, say on incomes over $3 million per year, which would have a healthy effect on professional sports, too.)

Nor is this all. Senator Clinton has interesting ideas for an anti-recession package--she wants to focus on subsidies for heating oil (as a New Englander whose bills have doubled, I can only say "amen,") and on the subprime crisis. And for that she has truly radical proposals, involving the freezing of interest rates. That reminds me of progresssive attempts to stop foreclosures of farms and houses during the New Deal, efforts that provoked howls of Republican protests of "anarchy" because such measures impaired the sacred obligation of contracts. I suspect we shall hear more such howls in the future.

It is one of the great collateral benefits of saying what one thinks that one can take credit for changing one's mind when new data appears. I haven't been very friendly to Senator Clinton here, although I have made it clear that I would certainly vote for her in November were she the candidate. If however she continues to focus on these themes, I shall do so with genuine enthusiasm. Not only is she showing that she has thought about these issues, but she is doing exactly what our contemporaries so seldom do--she has reached back into the past and acknowledged the ways in which our parents' world was genuinely superior to ours. (She deserves all the more credit because this is a particularly unusual thing for a Boomer feminist to do.) I might suggest that, if she secures the nomination in the near future, she might spend some time in Washington introducing the bills she plans to push if elected. That might even get the press and the public to pay some attention to what was happening in the Congress!

This is, of course, only a straw in the wind--but it is a very welcome one. I have rapidly been losing interest in the campaign, but this interview has reawakened it. Bravo, Senator Clinton.

Subscription update

Alas, the original code I inserted about subscriptions led to a different blog than this one--but the problem has been corrected. Simply put your email in the feedblitz logo (under the profile and list of books at the right), follow instructions, and you will receive an email whenever I make a new post. Sorry about the confusion.

Economic crisis, political rebirth?

The week's economic news makes clear that a new flock of chickens--not perhaps as large as the one that appeared in 1929, but large enough--is finally coming home to roost. The credit collapse that has begun in the housing market (and, the papers tell me, threatens to spread through unpayable credit card debt) is lowering employment, and it may get much worse. Like the two previous crises in our national life (1860-8 and 1929-45), it has been largely brought about by the unbridled ideological or economic excesses of a Prophet generation--the Transcendentals (b. 1792-1821), the Missionaries (about 1863-1884), and now, the Boomers (1943-1960.) Born into as secure an environment has humankind has been able to create, such generations begin disrupting it in young adulthood, have eaten away the foundations by mid-life, and, as they reach elderhood, have to try to find a few surviving members who can help build a new order with the help of the younger generations.

The critical issue for the Transcendentals, of course--the one that dwarfed all others in importance--was slavery. The text of the Constitution shows that the Founding Fathers had regarded slavery as an embarrassment and an anomaly, and they carefully avoided referring to it by name, much less defining more than one legal class of "persons." The Founding generations had already banned slavery in the Northwest Territories before the Constitution was adopted, and much evidence suggests that, as Transcendental Abraham Lincoln later claimed, the Founders hoped that by confining slavery, they could make it disappear. Their children, however, rejected such a practical view. Southern Transcendentals were arguing by the 1830s that slavery was a positive good, perhaps the highest form of civilization, while their northern contemporaries started a militant abolitionist movement and, eventually, the new Republican Party. The compromising spirit that had swept the issue under the rug in 1820 and again in 1850 eventually passed away along with the older generations, leading in 1860 to the split int he Democratic party between northern moderates and southern fire-eaters, Lincoln's election, secession, and civil war. Fortunately, perhaps, subsequent Prophet generations have not had to deal with a clash between two totally different ways of life, fought with a large portion of the United States as yet largely unsettled and unorganized. Unfortunately, for reasons too complex to take up now, the Civil War merely reunited the Union and abolished formal slavery, without really making the former slaves citizens for more than a very brief period for another century.

The Republican/Northern victory in the Civil War also enshrined free markets, high tariffs, and cheap unorganized labor as orthodoxies, and they remained so until the 1890s, when the Missionary generation began to make its mark. Progressivism, which did not change all that much during the first two decades of the twentieth century but did at least enshrine the idea of government as a benevolent regulator of the economy, challenged that orthodoxy, but by the 1920s it appeared to have burned itself out. Meanwhile, on Wall Street, the Missionaries were busily designing clever new schemes to inflate markets and values, including insider trading, very low margin rates (creating a massive credit pyramid), and a generally unregulated market. The 1920s saw several cycles of boom and bust (most notably in housing and in Florida land values) before the great crash of 1929-32 wiped out credit all over the country and brought us nearly to an economic halt. Missionary Herbert Hoover refused to regard the Depression as anything but a temporary aberration, and turned in the last two years of his term to solutions that made things even worse. Roosevelt in 1933 came into office without any real program or settled ideological view of what had to be done, but showed a determination to try almost anything to get the country back on its feet. Although he had only intermittent success against the Depression, he fundamentally changed the role of the government and opened the way to the mass organization of industrial labor. The drafting of more than ten million men during the war and the benefits they were granted when they returned home did as much or more than the New Deal to create a new, much more egalitarian America.

Boomers, stimulated by their GI parents' greatest mistake, burst upon the scene in the late 1960s, repudiating all the basic principles of their parents' culture, morality, and foreign policy, while taking their domestic achievements entirely for granted. They also transformed the universities and colleges they were attending, and the humanities have been declining at an accelerating rate ever since. But their real impact only became clear during the 1990s, when they achieved a plurality in the House of Representatives in 1994. (They now have done the same in the Senate.) Perhaps because left-wing Boomers had concentrated on academia and popular culture, right-wing ones turned out to have more success in politics. From 2001 until now they have taken advantage of their own determination and a series of unpredictable events--the Florida vote in 2000 and 9/11--to undo most of the New Deal and the foundations of American foreign policy in the second half of the twentieth century.

They have also been at work, obviously, on Wall Street. Many Americans do not realize the extent to which the elite American educational system has become a mechanism for identifying our brightest young men and women and funneling them into the upper layers of our financial and legal system, where they begin working 80-hour days, frequently to pay off the tens of thousands of dollars of debt they have accumulated during college. In the last twenty years they have busily designed new financial instruments, such as sub-prime mortgages and the securities that have "backed" them. We should keep in mind that this relentless drive by people who are already rich by any standard to gain yet more money is behind our present predicament--and that it will be harder to climb out of it because the mass of people who really need more money have been getting less and less of it. The Boom generation of managers has also avenged their missionary grandparents by finding new weapons against organized labor--most notably, the weapon of outsourcing.

It is not clear that the political process is ready to deal with the crisis. Last week, Boomer Mitt Romney, who fallaciously claimed that he would bring manufacturing jobs back to Michigan, defeated Silent John McCain, who courageously recognized that those jobs are not coming back. On the Democratic side, as John Edwards fades, identity politics have taken the place of any serious discussion of issues. The question I have been pondering is whether Barack Obama, who will turn 47 this year, is really the counterpart of Abraham Lincoln (who was 51 in 1860 when he was elected), or of John Charles Fremont, the 43-year old Republican candidate in 1856, who was defeated by Compromiser James Buchanan. (If McCain should beat Obama, the parallel would be exact.)

Having been born in 1947, I count as an early Prophet--and I can now see how front-loaded the benefits of such a status were. I enjoyed the best of the postwar era, and above all, I lived through the whole exciting Awakening as a young adult. But my middle years have witnessed a steady decline of every American institution, including the ones I care about the most--my own profession, and national politics. I am not surprised that my two favorite Missionaries, W. E. B. Dubois (b. 1868) and Charles A. Beard (b. 1871) found themselves totally out of sympathy with the direction of national life by the time they reached seventy, and died isolated and embittered. Having learned to understand this particular recurring cycle, I am heartened to think that I can live to see thing turn around before (like them) becoming so disillusioned as not to even recognize the change. But we may have to wait a good deal longer all the same.

Note: Earlier versions of last week's post referred to a purported conversation in Israel between Benjamin Netanyahu and President Bush, supposedly reported by Israeli radio. The two men did meet, and you can read about what supposedly transpired all over the blogosphere, but no actual news source has confirmed it as yet. (I don't know if I have any readers in Israel, but if I do, your input would be appreciated here.) Meanwhile, the Israeli press reports that Mahmoud Abbas, our chosen Palestinian instrument, has threatened to resign because Israeli strikes in Gaza and the West Bank are embarrassing him so badly in the wake of Bush's supposed peace initiative. That story, as far as I can tell, has been unreported here.