An announcement--and an account of contemporary journalism

 More than two weeks ago I discussed recent events at Harvard, the war in the Middle East, and my new book States of the Union 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.  You can watch it here.  Enjoy!

Last week I read Collision of Power, retired editor Marty Baron's account of his leadership of the Washington Post from 2013 through 2020.  Baron had previously edited the Miami Herald and the Boston Globe, and was immortalized by Liev Schreiber's laconic, low-affect portrayal of him in Spotlight, the Oscar-winning film about the Globe'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 Post'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 Post, the book makes clear, he had clearly lost that battle.

The Post, 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 Post 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 Post--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.  

Confronted with the unprecedented challenge of a president who described the media in general and the Post 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 Post to remain a bastion of objective reporting, publishing only stories that would pass the same verification tests that generations of Post 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 Post 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.

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.

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.

Now the Post 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.

The first, a black reporter named Wes Lowery who had also worked for the Globe, 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 Post'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 The Washington Post," 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 Post to take another job.

A second controversy involving a female reporter, Felicia Sonmez, got much worse. Sonmez in her interviews with the Post had identified herself as "a survivor of sexual misconduct."  While working in Beijing for the Wall Street Journal, she had accused a fellow reporter from the Los Angeles Times 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 Times had not done enough.  Eventually, the Post 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 Post executive editor, Leonard Downie (whom he does not name), has gone on record, along with former CBS News chief Andrew Heyward, 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.

And despite his skepticism about these cases, Baron in the last year of his tenure sympathized fully with the black staffers at the Post 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.  We really do not know 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. 

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 that impartial principles and higher purposes are the only things that PREVENT institutions from serving the interests of particular groups.  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.

One more critical data point, unfortunately, shows that keeping Baron's spirit alive is probably impossible now.  The Post, 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 Post 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.

Slouching towards Bethlehem

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.

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.

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. 

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. 

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.  

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.  

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.

The Fourteenth Amendment, Section 3

I quote:

"Section 3 Disqualification from Holding Office

"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."

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 this excellent web article, which I encourage you all to read in full, and which I will summarize.

Critically, it is very clear that one did not have to be criminally convicted 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. 

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.  

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 federal 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.

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.

The Real Problems of Higher Ed

 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 an interesting Wall Street Journal op-ed 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 here.

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.

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 mainly 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 A Life in History, and accept the Bs as genuinely good grades. 

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.  

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.

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.

The Fall of the American Empire

 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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.