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Apply Now For the 2012 Publius Fellowship

Wed, 1 Feb 2012 00:00:00 EST

There is still a month left to apply for the Publius Fellowship—the Claremont Institute’s premier two-week seminar in American political thought and statesmanship. The fellowship will run from June 22-July 7 in Newport Beach, CA. The application deadline is March 2. To jump directly to the application, click HERE.

Pestritto on the Progressives’ Constitution

Wed, 1 Feb 2012 00:00:00 EST

Over at Liberty Fund’s new Library of Law and Liberty website, Claremont Institute Senior Fellow R.J. Pestritto discusses the Progressives’ Constitution with editor Richard Reinsch (2009 Claremont Institute Lincoln Fellow).

Redeeming Higher Education

James R. Stoner, Jr. — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 00:00:00 EST

If the newest books on the situation of the university are correct, we tenured professors are like the aristocrats of the ancien régime in the 1780s, barely conscious of the privilege that structures our lives and oblivious to the storm gathering around us. "The balance of power at universities needs to be restored. The most certain way of doing that is by eliminating tenure," concludes the journalist Naomi Schaefer Riley. "Lifelong tenure should be abolished," cry Andrew Hacker, a regular in the New York Review of Books, and Claudia Dreifus of the New York Times. "The only way for American higher education to remain competitive is to abolish tenure and impose mandatory retirement at the age of seventy," intones Professor Mark Taylor, formerly of Williams College, now of Columbia University. Only the statistical social scientists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa are more cautious, not straying from their focus on student learning. But they, too, indict faculty for a bleak situation: "Standing in the way of significant reform efforts are, of course, a set of entrenched organizational interests and deeply ingrained institutional practices." You don’t need a Ph.D. to figure out what is most entrenched and most deeply ingrained.

Where did this consensus come from, and where is it headed? In their own way, each of these books adheres to the central message of A Test of Leadership, the 2006 report of the Spellings Commission (named after U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings). Undergraduate learning is no longer central to our universities and even our colleges, it argued, with the result that the American workforce is increasingly ill-prepared for the 21st century’s challenges. Faculty indulge their passion for research, students attend to their social lives and networks rather than acquire intellectual skills and master a body of knowledge, while administrators and staff support every possible ancillary interest of faculty and students but are clueless about the essential core of higher education. Truth is, hardly anyone who spends time in a classroom can deny this crisis.

But is tenure the cause of the problems that plague higher education today? Naomi Schaefer Riley certainly thinks so, although her publisher yanked the word "tenure" from her original title and substituted the vapid The Faculty Lounges, and Other Reasons Why You Won’t Get the College Education You Paid For. It might be true that parents and students are not getting their money’s worth from colleges, but it is not because most faculty are lazy. Riley’s argument is, in fact, based on the opposite supposition: they are too busy publishing arcane research in peer-reviewed journals to care about teaching or even about learning in anything but the narrowest sense of the term. They acquire this habit on the road to tenure, and since promotion to full professor is often like "getting tenure twice," they persist in it, building the much-noted "research silos" where small groups of specialists criticize and approve each other’s houses of cards and fund each other’s grant proposals, also peer reviewed. Success that is recognized outside one’s own institution, she contends, comes from a record of publication, not from teaching, and this is the success that administrators crave—it builds the prestige of their institutions and thus enhances their own marketability—and thus what they reward.

* * *

The truth is even worse than Riley tells. Within a discipline, professors count rather than read the publications of their colleagues who are up for tenure; and once one gets outside one’s field, no one dares quarrel with a record that contains enough articles in good enough journals that are widely enough cited. Riley is put off, justifiably, by this system of self-congratulation. The experts are unaccountable, and their ever-increasing research specialization draws them ever further from the needs of the students in the classroom who are paying their bill, or the taxpayers who are providing the subsidy. Besides, she adds, most of those who benefit from this system are liberals, who seem to have invented a system for entrenching their ideology and who "love the security of statism," in the words of a Harvard professor. True, she admits, tenure protects conservatives, too, or at least those social conservatives who seem to like and use it. But listen, she advises, to educational policy analyst Chester Finn: "Protecting 411 conservatives is insufficient reason to retain a tenure system. Because it’s protecting 400,000 liberals, too."

Leaving aside the protection of conservative voices in the academy, it is not persuasive to place the entire blame for excessive specialization on tenure. Though Riley quotes social scientists Christopher Jencks and David Riesman to the effect that administrators "can be relied on to care more about teaching than professors ever would," more recent analysis suggests that administrators typically encourage precisely the sort of resumé fattening that rewards hyper-specialization. Replacing tenure with multi-year contracts makes administrators more rather than less inclined to rely on these "objective" measures of "productivity."

Riley fails to absorb the main argument of Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind (1987): the crisis of American higher education is rooted in intellectual problems, not organizational ones, and can only be addressed by thought and dialectic, not clever adjustments. The Nietzschean relativism that Bloom observed in the world at large can explain the silos, with their independent research cultures opaque to uninitiated outsiders. The undeniable success of modern science has led the humanities and social sciences to imitate its research model, with barely anyone bothering to ask whether methods that uncover causation among mute, irrational, and amoral things should be applied to explain beings with rational souls.

There is much that is useful in Riley’s book, including a discussion of how widespread use of adjuncts enables rather than contradicts the commitment to tenure, the suggestion that tenure is not appropriate in wholly technical fields, and especially the account of how unionization is beckoning on the campus scene. But even in the best parts of The Faculty Lounges it is sometimes hard to follow the author’s logic. When she notes that adjuncts "tend to give higher grades than their tenured or tenure-track peers," doesn’t that support rather than undercut the case for tenure? If all professors are contract employees rather than members of a self-governing faculty, isn’t formation of a union more likely? Good for the Olin College of Engineering, which she presents at the end as an attractive model of an innovative school without tenure. But it is not a university, however, nor is a university only for engineers.

* * *

To be fair, Riley’s book does not pretend to be more than journalism, bringing an issue before the public for debate. Not so Mark Taylor’s Crisis on Campus: A Bold Plan for Reforming Our Colleges and Universities. Taylor, chair of Columbia’s Department of Religion, expands in his book on a New York Times op-ed he wrote after the financial crisis swept the other end of Manhattan. "The education bubble is about to burst," Taylor warns. Indeed, the bubbles come from the same bottle. Parents "remortgage their houses to pay for college, only to have their young graduates return home and begin their working lives in run-of-the-mill service jobs." Universities and colleges "are overleveraged, liabilities (debts) are increasing, liquidity is drying up, costs continue to climb, their product is increasingly unaffordable and of questionable value in the marketplace, and income is declining."

Before you have overcome your astonishment that a professor of religion can actually speak about money as if he respects it, you are treated to an inside tour by a modern academic entrepreneur. Taylor tells us about the programs he founded, the joint ventures he pioneered, the new technologies he explored, the innovations he has made. The problem is specialization in the old disciplines—Taylor’s discussion is more persuasive than Riley’s, since it comes from the inside. He correctly observes that "too many courses represent what the professor wants to teach rather than what students need to learn."

Taylor’s prescription is less compelling than his diagnosis. He wants colleges to embrace the "interdisciplinary," offering cool courses, like the one he taught at Williams called "Real Fakes," about counterfeits and forgeries. Other proposals include a fourth division of the university besides the sciences, social sciences, and humanities, called "Emerging Zones"; or flexible curricula, like the one he is designing for the graduate students in his Columbia department, where the new subfields will be "Time and Modernities, Space, Transmission, Body and Media." Forget walls, think networks. Forget the distinction between public and private schools, or even between schools and businesses. Everything can be linked through the web.

What need is there for tenure among such entrepreneurs? That’s for old saps who think teaching religion requires pondering the proofs of Aquinas’s Summa, working through Calvin’s Institutes, studying the Talmud, or meditating on the paradoxes of Paul or the tribulations of Job. Yes, Taylor tells us he can do that sort of thing: he rather likes teaching a seminar on Hegel, Schelling, and Kierkegaard. Yes, "it remains absolutely essential for students to learn how to read and write in traditional ways." He feels so strongly about this that he made his own children write a three-page essay about a subject of their choice every week all summer between 6th grade and college. Yes, "teaching small classes to gifted undergraduates and seminars with committed graduate students is one of my greatest pleasures."

Here is where his book shows its true colors and becomes deeply dishonest: "I realize, however, that in the future, fewer and fewer students and faculty members will have the opportunities my students and I have enjoyed." So all that commercialized excitement was about what is second best? Mozart is dead, but Elvis lives? When Taylor writes that colleges can network, thanks to easy travel and telecommuting technology, he notes that there is absolutely no reason why every university needs a department of philosophy. Of course not: when everything is the play of shadows, who is afraid of the dark?

* * *

Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus’s Higher Education? How Colleges are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids—and What We Can Do About It is a page-turner, full of outrageous factoids and indignation that knows how to stop short of outrage. The authors are unapologetic liberals, concerned about access to higher education, stunned by inequalities among institutions, and confident that "every student has a mind and is curious about the wider world." Professors who barely teach appear here, too, along with their salaries, as do administrators with compensation packages like Wall Street parachutes. Research is "all just compost to bulk up résumés." They bristle when data confirm the "Golden Dozen" who top the ladder of prestige and most successfully place their graduates: the Ivies, plus Stanford, Duke, Amherst, and Williams.

Hacker and Dreifus seem to have been everywhere in America, not quite at random, not quite systematically. Sometimes their opinions are meant to be quirky: Queens College does without football, and so can everyone else, except as a club sport. Always the issues are serious even when the tone is light. Is it really conscionable to ask students to finance their college education by incurring significant debt? Can we expect them to study, even taste, the liberal arts that are the core of true higher education if they do?

* * *

The book earned a lot of press when it came out last year for the authors’ conclusion: "Schools We Like"—their top ten list. Usually the key is leadership: Ole Miss, for its reconciliation of the races, a surprise to the Yanks; Notre Dame, "for being true to itself," by which they mean not giving in to "anti-abortion conservatives" who think a Catholic university should not honor those who reject Catholic principles; and MIT for high pay and benefits to adjuncts. Eventually it becomes clear that Hacker and Dreifus have no brief for excellence or true distinctiveness. It isn’t just their intolerance of sport, that great mediator at public universities in the South and Midwest that earns the enthusiastic applause of ordinary people for extraordinary achievement and thus gives them a symbol if not a full appreciation of what the university as a whole is about.

Despite their fine words about what a liberal education entails, Hacker and Dreifus are in fact facile about its achievement. Speaking of regional state universities, they claim, "the students are as bright and academically committed as any." True of some, no doubt, but wouldn’t many have gone somewhere more challenging if they had the preparation, talent, ambition, or the funds? In the end, their critique of American higher education is in fact a celebration of its extraordinary diversity, and in this one can readily concur. Why then begrudge the leading institutions their role just because of their wealth, especially if, by educating those who educate the others, they hold a key to the system as a whole? If they are doing a poor job of it, then explain why, not just by complaining about their good food and high-quality gymnasiums. If a school ought to avoid "faddish trends" and "compulsive consumerism," explain the higher end to which other ends should be subordinated. But once you do, then some schools will be better and some worse at achieving it.

* * *

Who would have thought that a book by a couple of sociologists would be the best on the shelf? Richard Arum and Josipa Roska’s Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses deserves attention from administrators and those willing to work through the 144 pages explaining its findings. (And I leave to the technically adept any analysis of Adrift’s 68-page methodological appendix.) Their focus is clear and salutary—not on professors and their unpopular ways, but on what students actually learn at school.

Not much, it turns out. Arum and Roska readily acknowledge the limits of their study. They take the results of a single test, administered at the beginning of students’ freshman year and the end of their sophomore year, and see how they change. Then the researchers submit the results to multiple regression analysis across a wide range of variables, including students’ demographic and educational backgrounds, the kinds of courses they have taken, the study habits they have formed, the social lives they lead, and the selectivity of the institutions they attend.

The test is the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA), an open-ended writing instrument designed to test students’ ability to think critically, solve problems analytically, and write well. Rather than the usual multiple-choice questions with a computer-graded answer key, the CLA includes a "performance task," describing a scenario and assigning the students a memorandum detailing the goal sought and a desirable course of action.

What limits the students’ ability to improve their scores over the course of their first two years of college? Partly it’s their background, especially whether they come from a college-educated family and whether they attended a rigorous high school. But just as much depends on two characteristics of their college experience: taking rigorous courses (defined as requiring at least 40 pages of reading a week, and at least 20 pages of writing a term), and studying hard (defined as at least 15 hours a week outside of class, mostly alone rather than in a group). It is a sorry testimony to the state of university education to have to demonstrate statistically the first things a successful student learns from experience: you learn more from the teachers who challenge you, and you have to do your own hard work if you want to reap the rewards of understanding.

Nothing is easier than to point out the limits of such research: it covers only two years of college, measures only basic skills, doesn’t show what students gain from their majors, and doesn’t even differentiate the quality of the teaching, only the amount of work assigned. The authors are aware of all of these objections, and they meet them patiently. Moreover, they are cautious but clear in explaining what the data show about the influence of ethnic heritage and family background, the burden of cost and debt, and about the selectivity of the institutions they examine.

Above all, Arum and Roska are unabashed in reporting their findings. Most students neither study hard nor avail themselves of guidance about what to study and how. As a result, the modern college student is academically adrift. To anyone who went to college more than a dozen years ago and then completed an advanced degree, the report about how little time students spend on schoolwork outside class is eye-popping. I’ll no longer take it personally when students look at me as though I’m crazy for recommending at least two hours outside class for every hour inside.

* * *

Blame it on us faculty, to be sure, but not just because we’re tenured. We are cheating our students by not demanding enough of them, and that is because we are demanding the wrong things of ourselves. College has a social dimension that will inevitably shape our students’ futures, a fact these books all acknowledge and dance around, especially the serious issues concerning students’ moral formation—and corruption. Except for an occasional moment of grace, and the influence of a good example, this is largely now outside the faculty purview. That may change in the long run, but only if faculty themselves focus on what is central to our business—persuading the students to want to learn, and then supplying what they want and need.

All these books identify a crisis of student learning, and attribute it to faculty neglect. Most seem to connect that neglect to the character of contemporary scholarship, but none offers a solution or sensible reform program. I don’t think it will be found in the abolition of tenure, but rather in taking steps to restore the integrity of learning. Faculty research is indeed the ground of faculty teaching. Those who do not know cannot teach, and those who do not seek and learn cannot know. Those who claim to know must, in turn, explain how their learning fits into the great scheme of things, not according to some private theory but through dialogue with their fellow learners.

It shouldn’t be impossible evaluate research in a way that rewards those who learn something outside their specialty, maybe even outside their discipline, and sanctions those who never do. This will require administrators to read, not just count. The process cannot be managed like a business, but can be conducted in a community. Tenure is part of this community’s constitution, and if it works—if it gives scholars the confidence to think independently and reasonably, and sustains the seriousness of purpose that only a lifetime commitment can entail—then it ought to be able to foster the sort of teaching that makes possible genuine learning on the part of our students.

I speak as though we faculty must restore our own integrity before approaching students, but of course this is nonsense. Every teacher knows that one’s best ideas often come from teaching, in response to able and inquisitive minds. I started with the threat of revolution, and now am proposing something really radical: a tenured revolution that can wear the mantle of reform

New World Order?

Charles Horner — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 00:00:00 EST

Henry Kissinger, author of thirteen books in his long and distinguished career, has written another—and a long one—about China. The subject is large enough to allow Kissinger to speak of it in his many voices—professor, historian, businessman, advocate, memoirist, diplomat—but the sound of his two main voices is far from harmonious. The historian uses language to clarify, to explain, to parse, to define; the diplomat uses it to obfuscate, to conflate, to produce not clarity but consensus. "Ambiguity," Kissinger writes, "is the lifeblood of diplomacy." In life, both voices have their proper place, but employing both at the same time or moving back and forth between them can be grating. Confucius, China’s greatest sage, well understood this dilemma, and so he argued for a single mode of expression, "the rectification of names":

A superior man, in regard to what he does not know, shows a cautious reserve. If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success.
-The Analects, Book XIII, Chapter 3, [James Legge’s translation]

It is not until the book’s epilogue that we discern Kissinger’s main concern. "Does history repeat itself?" he asks. The history that haunts him is the pre-World War I rivalry between Germany and Britain, when rising Germany challenged the status quo in general and Britain’s primacy within it. The result was the West’s worst catastrophe since the fall of the Roman Empire, and the former secretary of state and national security advisor is right to worry that something comparably disastrous, this time originating in the East, could result from the United States-People’s Republic of China (PRC) rivalry.

If the epilogue had been the prologue, the reader would have been primed to expect that Kissinger—one of the most acclaimed diplomats in the history of our country—would lay out a well-reasoned strategy to avert this grim possibility, but none is forthcoming. He rejects the creation of an anti-China coalition and he also opposes what he calls an ideological crusade. Instead, he suggests the creation of a Pacific Community built on the shared interests of both countries and expresses the hope that these will emerge over time. But his discussion of how we might get there is perfunctory. In fact, his stance is in stark opposition to the Chinese worldview that he has presented in the preceding 500 pages. There, the Chinese are shrewd practitioners of Realpolitik and Weltpolitik; they think deeply, unemotionally, and above all strategically about world affairs. Thus the transformation required for Kissinger’s vision even to begin to take hold in Beijing is substantial. How can it happen? Why does Kissinger, renowned for Spenglerian rumination and Bismarckian calculation, think that it is even imaginable? Why does our country’s supreme realist flirt with Wilsonian idealism?

A strategy that can carry us forward must be more than a reworking of that spawned by George Kennan’s canonical 1947 article, "The Sources of Soviet Conduct"; Kennan’s world and ours are very different. But in On China’s 500-plus pages Kissinger might at least have tried to create something as powerful and enduring as Kennan’s 15-page masterpiece. He did not.

Kissinger launches a search for the sources of PRC conduct with a 200-page capsule history of China, especially its practice of strategy and diplomacy. This is a prelude to his secret arrival in Beijing in 1971 to arrange for President Nixon’s startling 1972 visit there. Here, the memoirist takes over from the historian and he describes what happened and what followed. He continues the story after 1976, now as a private citizen. Today, age 88, he has yet to retire. Instead, he is a marvel of stamina, still working to inject himself into the conduct of United States-China relations. His fine narrative style and his gift for epigrammatic expression, hallmarks of his brilliant memoirs of his service in the Nixon and Ford Administrations, have not left him as he recounts these unceasing efforts.

* * *

But the deficiencies of this book—as history, memoir, and policy prescription—begin to appear in its first pages. Kissinger sees China as uniquely connected to its ancient tradition, a "singularity," as he calls it. He is impressed that Chinese officials invoke events and stories of centuries ago to elucidate the contemporary scene. He ascribes to China’s old texts of strategy and politics a near-talismanic quality. Of course, we could say this about ourselves, for we start our religious education with the Old Testament and our education about strategy and warfare with Thucydides’ The Peloponnesian War. As for military tactics themselves, the Second Punic War’s Battle of Cannae is still taught at West Point. But to pass too quickly over the intervening centuries is to miss what makes the modern West tick. Similarly, in China the challenge is to understand how modern thought and experience, with which the PRC is now thoroughly suffused, interacts with inherited wisdom, how Western-created things like republicanism, Communism, human rights, rule of law, television, skyscrapers, neckties, constitutions, video games, professional basketball, and Facebook are driving the country’s future.

Moreover, Kissinger’s view of China’s grand strategy across the centuries is one-dimensional and static. The rise of the PRC’s naval power alone should tell him that Alfred Thayer Mahan has joined Sun Tzu on the Chinese strategists’ required reading list. Today, the PRC’s strategic doctrines are wide-ranging and ecumenical, for today they must cope with new contrivances like nuclear weapons and new places like cyberspace. That aside, even before the West arrived, China’s homegrown strategic concepts changed frequently, especially during the many centuries when non-Chinese ruled the country. For one telling example, Kissinger completely misses the profound change in the 18th century—the creation of a huge multiethnic, transnational, empire—which became China as we now know it. This transformation is a key to understanding how today’s PRC operates both at home and abroad.

* * *

How does this new incarnation of "China" differ from what preceded it? The last dynasty to rule from Beijing, the Qing, (1644-1912) was not Chinese at all, but the creation of Manchus, an inner Asian people. After they established control of the "China" that had been governed by the Han Chinese Ming dynasty (1368-1644), the Manchus continued to enlarge their empire by conquering Tibet, Xinjiang, Mongolia, and other places. In Manchu dynastic practice, the emperor displayed a sinified face to his Chinese subjects but, even so, he did not pretend either to them or to his non-Chinese subjects that he was himself Chinese. The enlargement of the Manchu empire was therefore not understood at all as the enlargement of "China" but as the expansion of the Manchus’ imperial portfolio. Accordingly, Qing emperors never tried to sinify newly-conquered peoples but instead respected their traditions.

The Qing dynasty collapsed in 1912 and was replaced by a Republic of China that immediately claimed the entire Manchu empire as its own. "China" in 1912 was now twice the size that it was when the Manchus arrived in 1644. For a century now, first the Republic of China and then the People’s Republic of China, have pursued the coercive sinification of non-Chinese peoples, only a small fraction of the total population, but inhabiting about half the area of the country. Decades of violence, intimidation, co-optation, and bribery have yet to produce success. "Splittism"—the PRC’s preferred term for the non-Chinese regions’ desire for the genuine self-government the PRC’s constitution promises them—remains the government’s fundamental strategic preoccupation because it is the regime’s main structural vulnerability. The PRC leaders Kissinger encountered when he showed up in Beijing in 1971 had already prosecuted wars in Tibet and Xinjiang, and ever-more expensive repression continues today.

* * *

As he recounts his discussions with Mao Zedong and the PRC’s first premier, Zhou Enlai, Kissinger is at pains to stress how these men embody the great tradition of Chinese stratagem and diplomacy. In this, he is not the first man to confuse cunning with wisdom. He says Mao is a brilliant and subtle thinker, but how could he possibly conclude that? Mao’s domestic policies had turned the PRC into a basket case and his foreign policies had totally isolated the PRC, bringing it to the brink of war—possibly nuclear war—with both the USSR and the United States simultaneously. In this, Mao was mimicing the disastrous policies of the Manchu court which, in 1900, declared war on the ten greatest powers in the world and brought the country to the brink of dismemberment. The United Sates had reasons of its own for rescuing the PRC from the calamitous consequences of Mao’s genius; a clever Mao did not trick Nixon into it. At the best, Mao may be credited with finally recognizing the need to try something else by repudiating his alliance with the USSR, once the cornerstone of the PRC’s foreign policy—but why Kissinger’s worshipful appreciation of Mao as strategist?

Kissinger’s embrace of Zhou Enlai as an exemplar of the best tradition of Chinese statecraft and as a consummate mandarin is even more distressing. China’s history is filled with the real thing—brilliant and humane officials who told the truth to the emperor and paid with their lives. Zhou does not belong in this high company. If Zhou had held a position in the Third Reich comparable to the one he held in the PRC, the Nuremberg Tribunal would have sent him to the gallows, as it did the cosmopolitan, witty, urbane, and multi-lingual Joachim von Ribbentrop. Yet Kissinger’s studied obtuseness about his interlocutors permits him to enlist Deng Xiaoping, one of Mao’s most egregious enforcers and enablers, as a character witness for Zhou. For all that he wrought after 1978, Deng, as one of Mao’s main Gauleiters, was criminally complicit in the millions of deaths that Mao caused. To be sure, we are used to the fact that regimes of the Left receive a pass when it comes to such crimes, but Kissinger, once upon a time a stalwart in the political and cultural wars, was not then in the habit of issuing them.

If Chinese strategy is, as the author describes it, a seamless blending of the internal and the external, we should also expect a discussion of the connection between the two in today’s PRC. But Kissinger passes over the strategic implications of its political system, one in which 80 million members of the Chinese Communist Party struggle every day to hold onto their unshared political power in a country of 1,340,000,000. In today’s PRC, strategic policy—that is, the amalgam of domestic and foreign policy—exists solely to preserve the Communist Party’s monopoly on power. In this, its flexibility is limitless. Mao readily reversed two decades of PRC foreign policy and, after that, Deng Xiaoping completely remade domestic society. They did what they had to do, that is, what History instructed them to do. Although in the process the party’s once world-shaking ideology has been reduced to self-parody and risible mumbo jumbo, the party—in old Maoist parlance—still controls the gun, and that is what matters. Demonstrators in Tiananmen Square learned this in 1989, and many others have learned it since.

* * *

Meanwhile, the party is pressed on many fronts. The PRC is surrounded by nuclear-armed states; it has no real friends in the world; its vaunted diplomats do not know how to build coalitions; around the world, its reach exceeds its grasp. At home, problems proliferate: rampant corruption; urban and rural social disorder; speculative bubbles; capital flight; epidemics of the physical and mental illnesses of modernity. The party itself is no longer home to high-morale cadre, but is filled with hustlers. At its summit, it has become a multi-family dynasty in which "princelings" inherit their fathers’ political power and the access to money that goes with it.

The PRC’s grand strategy is thus driven by the party’s well-founded insecurities. The government wants and needs a world that is safe for one-party dictatorships, just as the United States wants and needs a world that is safe for constitutional democracies and free societies. But Kissinger fears that focusing on the nature of the PRC’s domestic regime will undermine peaceful relations, even as his own vision for a Pacific Community will remain chimerical so long as the PRC is controlled by a Communist Party that cannot abide even a discussion of the possibility of sharing power. This explains why no one in the United States agonizes over the rise of India. No American imagines that peace with democratic India is problematic. From this perspective, human rights and the rule of law are not mere preferences; they have profound strategic implications.

* * *

Since On China appeared in May, many readers have complained that its shortcomings are somehow the product of the author’s personal failings. But a better explanation is an existential one. The emerging Asia-centric world is unfamiliar terrain. Kissinger, like the rest of us, is not as surefooted when he tries to apply what he has learned about a world driven for centuries by intra-European rivalries to a world that will now be driven by intra-Asian ones. Just as in this past decade we discovered that what we thought we knew about combating Bolshevism did not readily translate into combating Islam-based radical ideologies in West Asia, we are learning that intellectual capital we inherited from the 20th century yields even smaller returns farther east.

We once learned about European totalitarianism, the old USSR, and Eastern Europe from fine teachers and great scholars—Adam Ulam, Richard Pipes, Hannah Arendt, and others—who were products of those places. Americans prominent in the conduct of U.S. relations with that part of the globe—Kissinger, of course, and also Zbigniew Brzezinski and Madeleine Albright—were even born there.

Today, America needs to learn about Asia, not Europe, and it is from the East, not the West, that our teachers now come. A scan of faculty rosters in university catalogues shows how teaching about China in the United States is increasingly the province of people who, in one way or another, are products of the Chinese world. What does this imply both for China studies and for U.S.-China relations? The United States ambassador to the People’s Republic of China is today, for the first time, a man of Chinese heritage. His "old world" is in the East and not in the West, and this cannot be inconsequential. Is there any way to compare how a product of the old European empires thinks about America’s connection to his forebears’ home to how a scion of the Manchu Empire thinks about the same thing? In the 20th century, the European-Americans who developed our country’s Atlantic strategy were determined to save Europe from itself. In the 21st century—the Pacific Century—the Americans who will help rescue China from the PRC may be those who, because of their own unique heritage, are best prepared for the task.

The CRB is Hiring

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 00:00:00 EST

The Claremont Review of Books is looking for an entry-level, full-time Production Editor with the energy, imagination, and editorial judgment to work on the preeminent conservative book review. Applicants should have excellent editing, proofreading, and organizational skills, and either be proficient with Adobe InDesign, Illustrator, and Photoshop for Mac, or willing to learn quickly on the job.

Our Production Editor would be chiefly responsible for organizing and laying out the text, art, and ads that make up each issue of our quarterly publication, designing several "house ads" for each issue, and designing the Claremont Institute’s event-related invitations, programs, and display materials as needed. This position would also assist more generally with the daily administrative and editorial duties that go into the production of the Claremont Review of Books.

Salary commensurate with experience. If interested, please send your resume to John Kienker, Managing Editor, Claremont Review of Books, 937 W. Foothill Blvd., Claremont, CA 91711, or to jkienker@claremont.org with the subject line "CRB Production Editor."

De Luxe

Algis Valiunas — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 00:00:00 EST

Every American with a few million dollars to rub together starts thinking about getting himself a palazzo. During the Gilded Age and a bit beyond, from the 1870s to 1910, the New York architectural firm McKim, Mead & White was the purveyor of choice to those in the market for digs of surpassing splendor. Vanderbilts, Morgans, Whitneys, and Tiffanies sought the firm’s services for projects that would be as impossible to build today as the Great Pyramid. The McMansions that have sprouted in recent years from Southampton to La Jolla to Manalapan cannot compare to these in conception or craftsmanship. At best they seem ungainly knock-offs, without even the simulacrum of taste that faithful imitation or bold reinvention might almost bring off.

But then the most stunning buildings of McKim, Mead & White were also knock-offs in a sense, and the modernist fashion that succeeded them in the 1920s scorned them as such: unashamed borrowings from the genius of the European heritage, owing everything first to the Romanesque, then to the Renaissance from Francois Premier to the Cinquecento, and at last to the fount and origin in imperial Rome.

Charles Follen McKim (1847-1909), William Rutherford Mead (1846-1928), and Stanford White (1853-1906) were sons of the New York and New England upper-middle-class intelligentsia. McKim studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, Mead studied in Florence, and all three traveled in Europe with intent eyes. McKim and White served their apprenticeships with Henry Hobson Richardson, the leading American architect of his time, who was decisively formed by his own Parisian training and who built superbly in the Romanesque style.

McKim lit out on his own in 1872, and the others joined him in due course. Family connections helped them get rolling. They made their reputation by designing country and seaside houses in the plutocratic enclaves: Lenox, Massachusetts; Elberon, New Jersey; and Newport, Rhode Island. McKim was the guiding force at this point in the development of the "shingle style," which drew on Norman and American Colonial sources, and is considered by some authorities the firm’s most important work. Clients pleased with their vacation homes commissioned houses in town and commercial buildings. By the early 1880s, with Richardson’s untimely death, McKim, Mead, and White were the leading architects in the land. Theirs would become the first architectural firm in the world with so large a business.

The firm put its love of European greatness to use. For the majestic Tiffany house (1882-1885), White combined Romanesque and Palladian touches, and invented a tawny speckled brick to startling effect. For the lordly Villard houses (1882-1885), the firm’s brilliant associate Joseph Wells composed in the High Renaissance style, with the Cancelleria and the Palazzo Farnese as his models. Monument called out to monument down the ages. The Madison Square Garden tower (1887-1891), a Manhattan landmark during its too brief existence, reiterated the 12th-century Giralda Tower of the Seville Cathedral. The Low Memorial Library at Columbia University (1895) recalled the Roman Pantheon. Pennsylvania Station (1905-1910), another doomed masterwork, summoned up the Baths of Caracalla. McKim, Mead & White fulfilled over 700 commissions, and their designs tended to have the most distinguished antecedents.

* * *

Their clients wouldn’t have had it any other way. Triumvirate: McKim, Mead & White: Art, Architecture, Scandal, and Class in America’s Gilded Age is a fine and often fascinating history of the builders and the society types they built for. In it, Mosette Broderick, a professor of urban design and architecture at New York University, has more than a sharp word or two for an enterprise devoted to making the ignorant and pretentious rich believe themselves the rivals of Renaissance princes. "They built for clients who wanted to fit in with an international set and not appear as provincials. The partners could be entrusted to create buildings for their clients that would put a spin on their personas and make them, the modern Medicis, look as if they knew who the real Medicis were."

This is well put and not untrue, but Broderick’s flagrant dig at the clientele, and her scarcely more subtle one at the architects, ought to be amplified and elucidated. There are magnificos and there are magnificos, one must admit. Yet it is hard not to be impressed with, indeed overwhelmed by, even the lesser American Medicis. The energy, nerve, and shrewdness required to carve a great fortune out of a new land were often titanic. True enough, low cunning and unscrupulousness and dumb luck sometimes played their part as well; so did the very dumbest luck of being born into wealth, as a number of clients were. Of course, the real Medicis themselves had their share of the ignoble qualities, not to mention the luck of being Medicis.

But—to agree with Broderick on an essential point—that does not mean one should fail to appreciate the distinction between Lorenzo the Magnificent and, say, "Sarsaparilla" Townsend, the soda-pop tycoon. Having the wherewithal to buy an ostentatious lifestyle and living a serious life facilitated by immense wealth are very different things. It might sound as though Broderick is carping resentfully, in the honored academic manner, about the undeserving rich, including the architects who made their pile designing for financiers and mine owners and railroad barons. But in her dissatisfactions she raises important questions about what makes for an individual life of rich accomplishment and for a national culture of high worth.

* * *

Stanford White, who dominates Broderick’s book, as he inevitably does any account of the partnership, made his name to an alarming degree on his savvy self-promotion and natural-born skills at flim-flam; by far the most celebrated and most prolific of the partners, he was also the most celebrated and prolific in his social life, and the most profligate and notorious in his sexual life. The clients he attracted wanted the best that money could buy and they had little besides money to offer in appreciation. White was not unappreciative of the money, and reveled in the company of the moneyed. He belonged to every club that would have him as a member, and almost no club would think of turning him down: he designed some of the finest club buildings, including the Players Club, the Century Association, and the Metropolitan Club, the last founded by J.P. Morgan and William K. Vanderbilt in pique at the Union League Club’s decision to blackball friends of theirs. The Metropolitan, a white marble Italian palazzo with an ornate projecting cornice, shows White at his most winning, but also suggests his limitations: for all its elegance, the building remains very much a studied production, literally a design by the book.

The cognoscenti, the true nobility of taste, wanted something better than White’s second-hand house-fronts and his penchant for the overblown in interior design. The aristocrat of sterling pedigree and the finest sensibility sniffed with fastidious distaste at the showboats who bought culture in bulk and tried vainly to establish themselves as his equals. Writing to a friend in 1901, the nonpareil Henry Adams flayed New York grossness: "The new rich are impayable here, and Stanford White is their Moses, Aaron and Mahomet." In The American Scene (1907), Henry James related his impressions of his native land after decades of living abroad, and he declared one of White’s proudest monuments typically disappointing: "the lamentable little Arch of Triumph which bestrides these beginnings of Washington Square—lamentable because of its poor and lonely and unsupported and unaffiliated state." Although White’s triumphal arch in George Washington’s honor was in fact larger than any single-span arch of antiquity, what struck James was its inadequacy. The effort to impress fell flat in the absence of that genuine ambient excellence which a culture like that of England or France furnished. James’s criticism really indicted White’s career as a whole: to transplant European elegance to America was a hopeless endeavor; grandeur that assumed its correct proportions in its Old World setting was engulfed by the cultural void over here and could only appear both pretentious and pitiable.

* * *

For certain of his own colleagues, the ultimate inadequacy of White’s vocation was of a piece with the triviality of his nature, which would burst into monstrosity. Joseph Wells, perhaps the firm’s best designer, who turned down a partnership because the outfit did "so much damn bad work," came down hard but fair on White as an architect and a man:

These qualities which I recognize as the highest in our art, are just the ones he seems to care the least for. I mean simplicity, proportion and unity of effect. These qualities are especially valuable in architecture more than the other arts. I almost regard him as a brilliant decorator not an architect. He is not equal to the mental strain necessary to gradually form a good style; and from recent developments, I should say cared more to make a social figure, than [for] art or friendship.

Wells knew White only too well: they were chums at one point, charter members of the Sewer Club, whose haunts, Broderick suspects, took in a gay bar affectionately known as Paresis Hall, and whose exploits did the club’s name proud. The married White was a sexual gourmand, a Heliogabalus wannabe—Heliogabalus being the emperor who paraded naked through the streets of Rome in a golden chariot drawn by beautiful naked slave women. Although White indulged in homosexuality, teenaged actresses and chorines were the fire of his loins. His art collection included an abundance of female nudes; one learns from Paul R. Baker’s marvelous 1989 biography, Stanny: The Gilded Life of Stanford White, that White wanted his painted Psyches and Ledas and wood nymphs to possess bodies of adolescent firmness and particularly to have their "little bubs stick up." White was a man who knew what he liked; and he liked what most men like, though he liked it younger and in greater quantities.

In 1901, at the age of 47, he found what he really craved in the 16-year-old Evelyn Nesbit—dancer, actress, artist’s model, and perhaps the most celebrated beauty of her day. Suppurating charm, White wooed her with elaborate gentlemanly decorum, then drugged and raped her. Fulfilling the rapist’s fantasy, Evelyn fell in love with White. When she moved on a couple years later, it was to the reptilian embraces of Harry K. Thaw, a Pittsburgh railroad and mining heir who was as bad as they come. Evelyn married Thaw: she had come up poor, and he was rich. Cocaine binges for him and whippings for her constituted the domestic routine. Evelyn told Thaw of her rape by White and their affair, and Thaw came to hate White more than any other man alive.

In June 1906, at the tony nightspot on the roof of Madison Square Garden, Thaw gunned White down. The press coverage of the murder trial wallowed in that miasma of upper-crust decadence so revolting to the democratic public, which can’t get enough of it. A Vanity Fair headline delicately suggested, "Stanford White, Voluptuary and Pervert, Dies the Death of a Dog." Thaw wound up doing time in an asylum for the criminally insane, but would be declared sound and acquitted of all charges in 1915. Evelyn had it hard for years, but sold the movie rights to her memoirs, moved to California, and found comfort in theosophy and ceramics. In the very popular film of E.L. Doctorow’s very popular novel Ragtime, Norman Mailer played the role of Stanford White. Grandiosity, superstardom, goatishness, violence against women: the casting choice was the perfect tribute to Stanny’s brand of artistry and allure.

* * *

To leave it at that, however, would be unjust and even churlish. For McKim, Mead, and White were the outstanding American architects between the time of Thomas Jefferson and that of Frank Lloyd Wright. To those of us who might lack the aesthetic hyper-refinement of Henry James and Henry Adams, the firm’s work represents one of the glories of American art. To be sure, it can be unabashedly derivative and sometimes bombastic, especially in White’s interiors. For all that it is largely magnificent, in a way we shall not see again, exciting and imposing like 19th-century political oratory, which shames the adenoidal maunderings we endure today.

The super-rich have most always liked their elegance spectacular, and the firm gave it to them, but good. This may be a flaw, aesthetic or moral or both, but it is not a fatal one. It is right to make fine discriminations in taste, and there are respects in which McKim, Mead & White and their clientele fail to shine, and sometimes even manage to offend. Yet the triumvirate produced a good many of the handsomest buildings in America, some sadly lost, some built to endure. Though the architects banked heavily on their Old World inheritance, their triumphs have become an essential part of our own national heritage, deserving our honor and inspiring our delight.

One-Dimensional Man

Charles Murray — Mon, 9 Jan 2012 00:00:00 EST

One of the most useful services a social scientist can render is to open up the technical literature on an important topic to a lay audience. James Q. Wilson gave us an early classic in this genre with Thinking about Crime (1975), and then did it again with The Moral Sense (1993). Steven Pinker did it for cognitive science and evolutionary psychology in How the Mind Works (1997), and the late Richard J. Herrnstein and I did it for cognitive ability in The Bell Curve (1994). Enter social commentator and New York Times columnist David Brooks, who in his latest book, The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement, sets out to explain the role of the unconscious in shaping our lives.

The model for The Social Animal is Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile. But instead of Rousseau’s Emile and Sophie, Brooks gives us Harold and Erica. Harold is the son of two upper-middle-class Anglos who met in front of a Barnes & Noble. Erica is the out-of-wedlock daughter of a bipolar second-generation Chinese-American woman and a Mexican-American man. Erica’s mother gave her a disorganized childhood, occasionally rising to the middle class when things went well, then descending to rough neighborhoods and poverty when they didn’t. Brooks uses Harold to draw upon the literature about the psychological, intellectual, and social development of people in the upper middle class, and Erica to draw upon equivalent literature about the disadvantaged.

The contrasting backgrounds of this couple are a good device for didactic purposes, but let me register a complaint about Erica’s. The 5% sample of the 2000 census available for public analysis, all 14 million cases of it, reveals not even one unmarried Chinese woman living with her Chinese-Latino child. I can understand why Brooks didn’t want to make Erica lower-class white or African-American-the former being too parochial for a white author, and the latter too dangerous-but the narrative about an unmarried Chinese mother with an underclass parenting style was never convincing.

The book follows Harold and Erica until Harold’s death in old age, in the process imparting a treasure trove of information about what the psychologists and neuroscientists have learned. You name it, Brooks covers it: the development of the brain in utero and afterwards; the way that hard-wired parental responses kick in when an infant joins the household; the "map-making" young children employ to begin to make sense of the world; parenting styles and the nature of parent-child attachment; the underlying processes of academic learning; the development of temperament and its interaction with achievement; the role of culture in shaping expectations and behavior; the role of I.Q. in shaping life outcomes; how shoppers make choices; how adults make commitments; how morality develops-and that list gets you only halfway through the book.

* * *

It is an ambitious endeavor. The literatures that Brooks had to absorb sprawl over several disciplines and involve abstruse quantitative methods. Though Brooks is not a professional social scientist (he has a B.A. in history from the University of Chicago), he is a very smart guy, has done his homework and apparently acquired a sufficient working knowledge of statistics to penetrate the jargon.

He is also one of the wittiest, most engaging writers around. Here he is on the pets of America’s new upper class: "It has become fashionable in these circles to have dogs a third as tall as the ceiling heights, so members of the Composure Class have these gigantic bearlike hounds named after Jane Austen characters." On Erica’s acquisition of upper-middle-class habits: "Her clothing was so prim, precise, and neat, she began to look like a ghetto Doris Day." On the members of a presidential campaign staff and their charismatic candidate: "Because of these minor genetic differences, they’d spent their lives as hall monitors and he’d spent his life getting away with things." Wonderful stuff.

The narrative is laced with broader perspectives on the human condition that call upon the likes of Matthew Arnold, Viktor Frankl, and Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. Brooks brings the sensibility of an erudite, wise, and kindly grown-up to the array of social science findings that he lays out.

My technical quibbles are few. Among the literatures he surveys, the one I know best is the one on cognitive ability. I think Brooks is too uncritical about the evidence for malleability of I.Q. and understates the importance of differences in I.Q. at the upper levels. He uses an escape word to downplay the role of I.Q. in Harold and Erica’s success, saying they "had no extraordinary physical or mental gifts." It depends on how you define "extraordinary." Harold’s I.Q. had to have been in the top few centiles of the distribution, and Erica’s in the top decile, given the specific cognitive demands of their accomplishments. But his summaries of the relationships of I.Q. to most outcomes in life are reasonable given that his topic is the effects of cognitive ability on individuals (small), not on social trends (large, but not his topic).

Another quibble is that Brooks does not discriminate between established bodies of evidence and more isolated findings, occasionally citing results that trigger disbelief. For example, when I read that "[s]tudies in strip clubs have found that dancers’ tips plunge 45% while they are menstruating," I am skeptical that a change of that magnitude would be replicated in a carefully designed experiment. Nonetheless, Brooks’s larger point is that a variety of sexual responses in men and women are affected by subliminal awareness of the fertility cycle-and he is correct. Over almost 400 pages with dozens of synthetic characterizations of research findings, he is consistently judicious. As a survey of social science findings for a lay audience, The Social Animal succeeds brilliantly.

* * *

The conundrum posed by the social Animal is Brooks’s insistence that the lives of Harold and Erica were well lived. Here is the book’s opening paragraph:

This is the happiest story you’ve ever read. It’s about two people who led wonderfully fulfilling lives. They had engrossing careers, earned the respect of their friends, and made important contributions to their neighborhood, their country, and their world.

How could Brooks possibly be serious? Harold and Erica did have successful careers. Harold wrote historical biographies and eventually became a scholar at a Washington think tank. Erica was successively an entrepreneur, CEO, presidential advisor, and secretary of commerce. Harold also had absorbing avocations centering on his love of history. Later in life, Erica read a lot of good literature and learned to appreciate art. But that’s about it: career satisfactions, and the kinds of interests enjoyed by cerebral people. Otherwise, to my mind, they led impoverished lives.

"Earned the respect of their friends"? For a book entitled The Social Animal, friends played an exceedingly small role in Harold’s and Erica’s lives. After graduating from college, Harold had the kind of twenty-something friendships depicted in the television series Friends, but we hear nothing about the close, rock-solid friendships that can add so much to adult life. Erica had business friends who came and went with her jobs. In retirement, she reconnected with some college friends through Facebook. Big deal.

What about neighbors? Involvement in their neighborhood or community? None of that. Maybe they waited until retirement to connect with the lives of their fellow human beings? No. They retired to Aspen.

Religion? Both were secular and incurious, or worse. Given an invitation to try meditation as a path to spiritual growth, Erica recoiled:

The idea of peering directly inside herself filled her with a deep aversion. All her life she had been looking outward and trying to observe the world. Hers had been a life of motion, not tranquility. The fact is she was afraid of looking directly inside. It was a pool of dark water she did not want to plunge into.

Children? None. Here is the relevant portion of "the happiest story you’ve ever read":

Once, about five years into their marriage, [Harold] mentioned his desire to have kids, just in a normal, conversational way. "No, not now!" she screamed at him. "Don’t you ever burst in on me with that!"

He was startled and stunned. She stormed off to her office.

Those words were the only ones they had ever exchanged on the subject.

Nor was the rest of their marriage a thing of beauty. Harold and Erica got to know each other first as employee and employer. Then there was a romantic period. Shortly after they married, they began to live separate professional lives. Erica was often contemptuous of Harold’s habits. They were not companionable: "As the years went by, they fell out of the habit of really talking, or even looking each other in the eye." When they did talk, they often fought. Brooks makes them into a loving couple in their retirement, but only through narrative legerdemain that left me unconvinced. Marriages are complicated things, and I suppose some people would say Harold and Erica’s was successful. It sounded like a never-ending toothache to me.

* * *

So what is that lead sentence all about? The nickel dropped when one of my AEI colleagues found me reading The Social Animal and announced, "All conservatives need to read this book. They will understand what liberals think constitutes a happy, successful life."

He was using shorthand. Many conservatives lead the lives of Harold and Erica, and most liberals don’t, but central tendencies remain. Unpacked, my colleague’s insight goes something like this: All people for whom some combination of family, community, and faith-along with vocation-are at the core of their happiness need to read this book. They will understand what a certain group of highly educated, affluent people, disproportionately from elite schools and with the modal political philosophy of Dutch sociologists, think constitutes a life well lived: a career that makes them important or at least semi-famous.

It is a variant on what I have elsewhere called the Europe Syndrome. The Europe Syndrome consists of the belief that a human being is a collection of chemicals that activates and, after a period of years, deactivates. The purpose of life is to pass the intervening time as pleasantly as possible. David Brooks’s presentation is a variant because it assigns high value to work, a legitimate source of deep satisfactions in life. Harold and Erica both labor really hard at their vocations and at their avocations. But otherwise they are trying to pass the time as pleasantly as possible. Their lives are almost entirely devoid of the other three sources of deep satisfaction-family, community, and faith.

* * *

Toward the end of the book comes a paragraph that seems much more in tune with Brooks’s own view of life:

[Erica] was treated as a significant person wherever she went. Strangers would approach and say they were honored to meet her. This didn’t make her feel happy by itself, but it did mean that she was no longer gnawed by the sort of ambition anxiety that had driven her through much of her life. Recognition and wealth, she had learned, do not produce happiness, but they do liberate you from the worries that plague people who lack but desire those things.

Combine that insight with all the social science evidence that Brooks presents about the satisfactions of family and community (he does not try to deal with faith), along with his personal history (an observant Jew, married for 25 years, with three children), and I will bet that Brooks himself doesn’t think that vocational satisfactions are enough to constitute a life well lived. Why then did he choose to drape his intellectual tour de force about the mainsprings of human behavior on such a dreary couple?

I have a guess. David Brooks has always tried to reach across ideological lines, engaging liberal readers who would instantly stop reading if he sounded anything like the kind of conservative they despise. He continued to do that in The Social Animal. To have made Erica’s happiness center on her children, to have embedded Harold and Erica in a community or in a faith that gave them deep satisfaction, or to have made their marriage sound anything like a traditional one, would have alienated those readers. It’s only a guess. But I cannot read that lead sentence, "This is the happiest story you’ve ever read," as literal. It works too perfectly as an ironic observation about the one-dimensional vision of human happiness that is common among the readers Brooks wanted to capture-too common, for that matter, among America’s best and brightest as a whole.

The Case for Iowa

Jon Lauck — Mon, 26 Dec 2011 00:00:00 EST

A review of Grassroots Rules: How the Iowa Caucus Helps Elect American Presidents, by Christopher Hull;
The Iowa Precinct Caucuses: The Making of a Media Event, by Hugh Winebrenner and Dennis J. Goldford; and
Why Iowa?: How Caucuses and Sequential Elections Improve the Presidential Nominating Process, by David P. Redlawsk, Caroline J. Tolbert, and Todd Donovan.

Lying in the heart of the Midwest is Iowa, known as the "purest of prairie states," which through happenstance and tradition has become the launching pad of most American presidential campaigns. Over the years, commentators and analysts have rebelled against Iowa’s "first in the nation" status, but their objections seem increasingly obsolete. Political scientists are now beginning to recognize the value of Iowa and cite common-sense and fairly obvious reasons for maintaining Iowa’s first-to-vote status.

In advance of the 2008 Iowa caucuses, which propelled Barack Obama toward his historic victory, Georgetown University professor Christopher Hull published the smart and persuasive Grassroots Rules, which reviews many of the debates about the Iowa caucuses, albeit using a somewhat repetitive pattern of rhetorical questions. Hull is impressed by the grassroots nature of the caucuses, Iowans’ civic virtues, and the state’s wealth of "social capital," a measure of civic attentiveness and participation made famous by political scientist Robert Putnam. Despite the importance of the Iowa caucuses to the presidential selection process, Hull notes the paucity of scholarship on the organization of caucus campaigns.

This shortage of research has been partially remedied by two new books: the third edition of Hugh Winebrenner and Dennis Goldford’s The Iowa Precinct Caucuses (2010), and David Redlawsk, Caroline Tolbert, and Todd Donovan’s Why Iowa? (2010) Winebrenner, a retired political scientist from Drake University in Des Moines, had published his first account of the caucuses in September 1987 in advance of the lively 1988 Iowa caucuses, and for the recently released third edition, authored most of the book’s chapters. Among the rather select group of scholars who have published books on the Iowa caucuses (until now, these books have included only Christopher Hull’s Grassroots Rules, the three editions of Winebrenner’s book, and an edited volume by political scientist Peverill Squire), the Winebrenner book is a well-cited classic. With close-to-the-action analysis, it discusses the events that converged to make Iowans the first to vote in 1972 and made the caucuses a more prominent event in succeeding years. Most of his chapters focus on the unique twists and turns of each of the quadrennial caucuses.

Winebrenner, however, does little to address Iowa’s history beyond briefly mentioning that the caucus system was adopted in 1846 as a product of the Jacksonian democracy of the early 1830s. In a chapter added for the third edition, the book does discuss Iowa’s political culture, but this refers to contemporary attitudes on present day issues of perceived importance, not to the origins and historical developments that make Iowa unique. Although he reviews polling on the death penalty, gay marriage, abortion, and other hot button issues, he also notes, more interestingly, that Iowans are patriotic and self-deprecating and that they genuinely like their state and its small town orientation. He explains that "Iowa political culture fosters the idea of limited government," that the "work ethic and individual self-reliance are still firmly entrenched in the Iowa political culture," and that public service and citizenship are "viewed as the duty of citizens" of Iowa, but he does not explain why.

Winebrenner does not focus on the more important point-that Iowa is a good and decent place and thus a fine and reasonable location for the first test of presidential candidates. He notes that Iowa’s "politics are clean and competitive," that the "state is politically competitive and the political arena is fair and open," and that "Iowa is located in the geographic middle or center of the nation, and its people are politically, economically, and socially moderate." Iowa’s small-town nature fosters community and the state is characterized by high literacy rates and low crime. He also notes that many Iowans are politically independent and that voter turnout is high. In 2008, 99% of Iowans were registered to vote, compared to 74% of Americans nationally. Winebrenner concludes that in "indexes of citizen participation, Iowa consistently ranks high among the fifty states, which is further evidence of the strong moralistic influence in the state’s political culture." Thus, he makes the case, perhaps inadvertently, for Iowa’s privileged status primarily based on the seriousness with which Iowans take politics and their overall democratic spirit.

* * *

In contrast to The Iowa Precinct Caucuses’s air of doubt and foreboding, Why Iowa? straightforwardly endorses the Iowa caucuses, albeit with qualifications. In the end, the authors advance the unremarkable theses that "rules matter," meaning that campaigns tailor their approach with an eye towards promoting the grassroots organization necessary in a caucus setting. They define grassroots politics as candidate-voter meetings, campaign visits to Iowa, and canvassing through phone calls, e-mails, mailings, and candidate visits. Barack Obama was the victor in Iowa, they argue, because his grassroots organization was geared towards a caucus system, and that his strong fundraising helped finance his organizational efforts. In other words, in terms of grassroots campaigning, organization and money reinforce each other.

Moreover, they also note that the sequential nature of the presidential nomination process is important: the outcome of the first state’s primary has an effect on subsequent contests. This sequential impact of Iowa as the first state in the nation to vote is explained by noting that successful candidates then appear more "viable" to voters in following contests.

Why Iowa? proves its theses but, importantly, also provides substantial evidence demonstrating Iowa’s democratic nature and justifying Iowa’s first-to-vote status. In their study, the authors find that caucuses favor grassroots campaigning and promote thoughtfulness among voters. This process in turn improves the candidates by forcing them to "build effective organizations, spend time in living rooms and VFW halls, and engage in retail politics, meeting voters face to face." This is in contrast to the primary system, wherein candidates can depend much more on the advantages gained by money and television advertising. Furthermore, the authors argue that the caucus system requires, "a kind of campaign that seems part of a bygone era, but which ultimately strengthens successful candidates and provides more information about all candidates, not only to Iowans but to all voters." The Iowa caucuses also foster a broad participatory effect by "identifying party supporters and bringing them into the system." In 2008, for example, half of caucus-goers were first timers, and previous attendance records for both parties were shattered, showing that the caucuses were not dominated by party elites, but by ordinary Iowans. Finally, the socioeconomic profile of caucus-goers in 2008 was the same as registered Iowa voters generally, showing that the caucuses were again demonstrative of ordinary Iowans, and not dominated by party elites or political activists.

* * *

Despite the overwhelming evidence presented in Why Iowa? showing the democratic nature of Iowa and its caucuses, misgivings about the justification for Iowa’s prominent place in the nomination process have often been expressed, especially by coastal critics who question Iowa’s representative-ness. Winebrenner notes, for example, that Iowa has a strong agrarian cast and that it has fewer minorities than other states. In response to this critique, Redlawsk’s new analysis of the 2008 vote found that caucus-goers were demographically similar to non-caucus-goers; that Iowa is economically similar to the rest of the country; and that Iowa is "essentially the most average of states." The charge of activist domination occasionally leveled is also questionable. In 2008, caucus-goers said they were drawn by "candidates and issues" and 75% said they were not "particularly active in their party." Why Iowa? notes that 95% of respondents to the authors’ telephone survey said they caucused because it was "the right thing to do," meaning their participation was fostered out of a sense of civic duty. The caucuses also forced candidates to interact with the voters. In 2008, 56% of caucus-goers had actually met a presidential candidate.

Though Iowa is quite representative by several measures, pure equivalence as a standard is impossible since all states have particular dynamics and dissimilarities in their political culture. It is better to ask whether or not the process is open and fair, which few observers-if any-have questioned in regards to the Iowa caucus system. This openness, the state’s demonstrated democratic qualities, and the strong sense of civic obligation, make Iowa as good a place as any to start the presidential selection process.

The early history of the modern Iowa caucus also helps make the case. The Iowa caucuses were elevated to their current status largely by accident-because the 1972 national Democratic convention was held early, in July, and because the law required the various stages of the Iowa caucus process to be separated by thirty days. As a result, Democrats in Iowa had to hold their 1972 caucuses in January. This early schedule naturally caught the attention of presidential contenders.

The results of the Iowa caucuses since 1972 point to several contradictory conclusions: underfunded upstarts can, at times, get a boost and go on to win the nomination (George McGovern and Jimmy Carter); underfunded upstarts can get a boost out of Iowa and loose the nomination (Gary Hart and Mike Huckabee); hard work and extensive time on the ground can produce a victory (George H.W. Bush and Dick Gephardt); frontrunners can be toppled or seriously weakened (Ed Muskie, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton); perceived establishment candidates can perform well (Walter Mondale and Bob Dole); regional connections can benefit a candidate (McGovern, Mondale, Gephardt, Paul Simon, Dole, Obama); knowledge of agriculture can help a campaign (McGovern, Carter, Dole, Gephardt); late surges can happen (Lamar Alexander, John Kerry, Obama); and perceived electability can aid candidates (Alexander and George W. Bush). On the latter, one study concludes that "Iowa activists were primarily concerned with nominating a winner," belying claims about the ideological purity of caucus voters. The broader conclusion about caucus results is that they are inconclusive: any candidate can emerge the victor and the results are unpredictable. In an open process where candidates travel the state, meet voters, work hard, debate their opponents, and grapple with contingencies, one should expect nothing less.

* * *

For people in Iowa, perhaps more than in other states, a candidate’s pedigree and prejudices are relevant, and can play a role in the electoral outcome. Hillary Clinton’s contempt and snobbery in the 2008 election was surely detectable, and may have lead the former frontrunner to her distant third place finish. Being from a rural, neighboring state seems to help a candidate’s chances, which may give credence to the critics of the fairness of Iowa, but it also gives a political voice to the Midwest in campaigns which are often focused on the coasts. Long-time Des Moines Register reporter David Yepsen noted that "[o]ne pattern that appears to be developing in the Iowa caucuses is a preference for Midwestern, or at least rural-oriented candidates. George McGovern of South Dakota, Walter Mondale of Minnesota, and Richard Gephardt of Missouri have all done well in the Iowa Democratic caucuses. But so did that Georgia peanut farmer, Jimmy Carter." Yepsen recently noted that "politicians in the Midwest know how to campaign to people in the Midwest. The audiences demographically are much the same."

Presidential candidates from the prairie Midwest may have enjoyed somewhat of a regional advantage in the past, but Carter (twice), George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, and Kerry make this much less than an iron-clad rule. Even if, however, the Midwestern candidate advantage were true, this would be acceptable, since it would be good to give the Midwest a loud voice in the presidential selection process, especially in an age in which the coastal media dominates the cultural and political discourse. As Why Iowa? notes, the Iowa caucuses force coastal media elites to visit "Middle America, a place that many have never visited." Iowa serves as a proxy for the wider Midwest and helps to make the presidential selection process more representative of the interests of Middle America. Iowa bears the weight of this representation burden well, as demonstrated by its record of civic obligation, open elections, and fair politics. The historian Dorothy Schwieder says that Iowa has "a sense of rootedness...that implies stability, permanence, and continuity; there is also a centeredness that connotes balance in both perspective and behavior. At the same time, Iowans are not known for showiness, glitz, or hype." Iowans have a healthy sense of place, unlike some transient, coastal Americans. The historian Laurence Lafore once noted that "Iowans always speak of themselves as Iowans."

This sense of grounding contributes to the decency of Iowa’s political culture. The political scientist Samuel Patterson says the "dominant Iowa political style can be described as highly pragmatic, non-programmatic, cautious, and moderate", while the historian Joseph Wall properly concluded that the state could "boast proudly of the golden mean that is Iowa." Iowa is a good state, in other words, to begin the process of choosing the president of the American republic.

Roots of Pearl Harbor

Charles C. Johnson — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 00:00:00 EST

Move the date of Pearl Harbor one week one way or the other on the calendar, and I might not be here. My grandfather, Dwight Lyman Johnson, was a gunnery officer aboard the USS Oklahoma, who swapped his duty roster with a friend to spend the weekend with my grandmother on her birthday. Everyone he knew was killed on that day which shall live in infamy. The Japanese surprise attack left its mark on my grandfather, who fought in every subsequent major battle of the Pacific, winning the Silver Star, the Bronze Star, and the Navy Cross, and retiring as a rear admiral in June 1958.

But as we mark the 70th anniversary of Pearl Harbor this month, it is worth recalling that the war in the Pacific didn’t need to happen the way it did. Had politicians followed the teachings of the Declaration of Independence—that all men are created equal—and not passed racist, exclusionist laws, it needn’t have happened at all.

Racist Democrats, in league with Progressive Republicans, all but guaranteed that the American—friendly government in Tokyo would topple by emboldening the Japanese military, alienating the Japanese people, and clinging to the "new science of politics"—eugenics—successfully if narrowly pioneered by Woodrow Wilson.

In May 1913, the newly inaugurated President Wilson refused to discuss allowing Japanese-Americans to naturalize. In his campaign the previous year, Wilson had cultivated anti-Japanese and anti-Chinese prejudice, while Theodore Roosevelt emphasized fairness. Roosevelt actually won the states where that prejudice was most pronounced—California and Washington—but Wilson won the election. In short order he appointed as his commissioner-general of immigration Anthony Caminetti, the California state senator who had been a major sponsor of the anti-Japanese Webb Alien-Land Holding Law of 1913, which banned Japanese land-holding. Wilson, during the election campaign, had deliberately avoided taking a stand on California’s long proposed racist laws that limited Japanese immigrants’ rights. He argued that states had every right to pass their own laws: "Nobody can for a moment challenge the constitutional right of California to pass such land laws as she pleases."

This unwillingness to support Japanese Americans led to foreign-policy rows, just as Roosevelt had worried it might. Japanese ambassador Viscount Sutemi Chinda protested the California law in 1914; Wilson said he was constitutionally unable to do much about it. The Japanese consul general, Kametaro Ijima, alsoprotested the California law, but Wilson ignored him. (Wilson implausibly blamed the Treaty of Portsmouth, which ended the Russo-Japanese war in 1905, for the growing discord between the two nations.) Wilson’s stand was good politics—if poor constitutional thought and public policy. Wilson narrowly won California in his 1916 reelection race, defeating Charles Evans Hughes in the state by a mere 3,800 votes out of nearly a million cast. In 1920, Warren Harding made sure the normally Republican state didn’t tip to the Democrats again by endorsing anti-Japanese restrictions. He won not only California, but every county in the Pacific coast states.

Restriction was popular. Californians approved by a two-to-one margin a 1920 law tightening Japanese land restrictions—but opponents of such laws actually saw reason for hope in this, having feared that the initiative might pass by ten-to-one. The Tokyo-based American-Japanese Relations Committee went to work trying to increase "friendship and goodwill" between "the two neighboring nations of the Pacific." But it was for naught.

On the international stage, too, Wilson rebuffed the Japanese. In February 1919, Japan’s delegation to the Paris Peace Conference proposed an amendment calling for racial equality and equality among the nations: "The equality of nations being a basic principle of the League of Nations, the High Contracting Parties agree to accord as soon as possible to all alien nationals of states, members of the League, equal and just treatment in every respect making no distinction, either in law or in fact, on account of their race or nationality." The Japanese were clearly thinking of their countrymen in America. This proposal passed by a vote of 17-11-0. But Wilson, as chairman of the conference, overturned it on the grounds that due to the existence of strong opposition, a unanimous vote was required. Japanese public opinion was very much in favor of the amendment, and the Japanese press attacked Wilson, referring to his "dangerous justice," while cursing the "female demon within him." With Japanese pride so affronted, the nation’s representatives pressed its territorial grievances with a keen intensity. After giving Japan most of the former German colonies in the Pacific, the Lansing-Ishii Agreement all but ceded China to Japan. In so doing, it set the stage for the Asian war—eventually the Asian theater of World War II—that began with the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931.

And yet, progress was difficult for the Japanese and seemed to have definite limits, especially when the military, served not the civilian government, but the emperor. In 1921, the reformist Takashi was assassinated and Japan descended into a combination of military despotism and what one scholar called "government by assassination." ("The Thirties began early in Japan," another historian noted.) A government of consent gave way to a government of compulsion and violence—and the peace went with it. In 1932, when eleven naval officers assassinated Prime Minister Inukai Tsuyoshi for agreeing to the terms of a naval-limitations treaty, it signed in blood what had already become plain in fact: The Japanese military was firmly in control. The fear Capt. Frank H. Schofield expressed at Paris in 1919 turned out to be well founded: "Japan has no rival in the Pacific except America. Every ship built or acquired by Japan can have in mind only opposition to American naval strength in the Pacific."

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court and the U.S. Senate eroded whatever hope there might have been of an accommodation on the issue of the rights of the Japanese nationals in the U.S. The case of Takao Ozawa, who argued his appeal to become an American citizen all the way up to the Supreme Court in 1922, was particularly poignant; his story was well-publicized and sensationalized in Japan. Ozawa had seemingly done everything worthy of praise by the standards of the time—he spoke English at home, worked for an American company, studied at the University of California, and even attended Christian churches. But when he began applying for citizenship in 1914, successive courts denied his candidacy on the grounds that naturalization was available only to people of white or African descent. The Supreme Court conceded that Ozawa was "well qualified by character and education," also noting the "culture and enlightenment of the Japanese people," but still found against him, and them, on the grounds that the "science of ethnology" made clear that the Japanese were not Caucasians. Still, the Court made clear that it was simply following congressional intent and that its decision should not be taken as "a suggestion of individual unworthiness or racial inferiority"—which is exactly how the Japanese press took it.

California senator Hiram Johnson, a leading progressive in his day and a past candidate for the presidency, argued that the ongoing legislative efforts that restricted all immigration on an equal basis were wrongheaded because they failed to understand the distinctiveness of the Japanese. California’s other senator, Democrat James D. Phelan, agreed and pointed to what he called the "incontrovertible fact that the Japanese continue ever Japanese, and that their allegiance is always to Tokyo." Phelan also said, even more bluntly: "A Jap is a Jap"—adding that unless something was done soon, the Japanese were fully "capable of taking the place of the White man." The perceived intelligence and ethnocentrism of the Japanese would prove their undoing when, in 1924, Congress tried its hand at anti-Japanese prejudice. The House Committee, for instance, inserted a provision to bar "aliens ineligible to citizenship"—the Japanese, post-Ozawa, among them—from entering America as immigrants. It even hired its own eugenics expert. Coolidge would be forced by public opinion and by the Congress to sign the Immigration Act of 1924. He tried, behind the scenes, to defeat its anti-Japanese provision, but his efforts failed.

In 1923, Japan’s already precarious government collapsed in the anarchic aftermath of a tremendous earthquake and typhoon that hit Tokyo and Yokohama, killing more than 143,000 people and injuring over 100,000. The earthquake led to an inferno, as open-fire grills toppled over and set the ground ablaze. The government broke down and anarchy ensued, as Japanese turned against Korean laborers, accusing them of poisoning water wells. In the panic, anyone who looked Korean was massacred. In the first act of his presidency, Coolidge dispatched the Navy’s Asiatic fleet to Japan to help in that country’s time of crisis.

Coolidge also, as titular head of the American Red Cross, appealed to the American people to address the catastrophe:

While its extent has not as yet been officially reported, enough is known to justify the statement that the cities of Tokyo and Yokohama, and surrounding towns and villages, have been largely if not completely destroyed by earthquake, fire and flood, with a resultant appalling loss of life and destitution and distress, requiring measures of urgent relief. Such assistance as is within the means of the Executive Department of the government will be rendered; but realizing the great suffering which now needs relief and will need relief in the days to come, I am prompted to appeal to the American people, whose sympathies have always been so comprehensive, to contribute in aiding the unfortunate and in giving relief to the people of Japan.

Coolidge asked for $10 million in donations, and by December the American people had given $12 million—an unprecedented amount, equivalent to more than $150 million today. Some in government had even considered giving Japan control of the Philippines, but Coolidge dismissed the idea. It was far better for the American people to help the Japanese people. But while the American people helped the Japanese, their congressional representatives worked to undo years of diplomatic work.

Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes insisted that the Japanese-exclusion clause of the 1924 Immigration Act violated the terms of the "Gentleman’s Agreement" of 1907 and would lead to a diplomatic row between Japan and America, the two powers set to dominate the Pacific. The informal arrangement, negotiated at the behest of Pres. Theodore Roosevelt in response to the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco that led to the segregation of Japanese schoolchildren, provided that Japan would reduce emigration to America if Japanese children already in the U.S. were integrated in the schools. The Japanese government agreed to the deal out of fear that it would otherwise be subjected to a humiliating law akin to the Chinese Exclusion Act. The Osaka newspaper Asahi Shimbun argued that the act would be unacceptable to the Japanese precisely because the Japanese people were superior to all other Asian peoples. The Japanese people resented being "lump[ed] together with the Chinese or Hindus as undesirable aliens," journalist—and future Japanese prime minister—Tanzan Ishibashi wrote.

The 1924 Immigration Act threatened to undo important diplomatic work, as Coolidge lamented on May 26, when he told Congress:

I regret the impossibility of severing from it the exclusion provision, which, in light of existing law, affects especially the Japanese. I gladly recognize that the enactment of this provision does not imply any change in our sentiment of admiration and cordial friendship for the Japanese people, a sentiment which has had and will continue to have abundant manifestation. The bill rather expresses the determination of the Congress to exercise its prerogatives in defining by legislation the control of immigration instead of leaving it to international arrangements.

While Coolidge was clear that he supported restrictions on Japanese immigrants—and indeed all immigrants—as far as their numbers were concerned, he opposed actual exclusion. He worried that Congress had embarrassed his government in its relations with Japan. He found "this method of securing [exclusion]...unnecessary and deplorable at this time.... If the exclusion principle stood alone, I should disapprove it without hesitation, if sought in this way, at this time." Coolidge consistently stressed that the decision to exclude all Japanese was particularly bad at "this time" and that he did not want to "wound the sensibilities of a friendly nation." What remains unknown is whether Coolidge thought it a wise policy at any time. Because he supported the bill’s other provisions limiting immigration, he signed it. It was, as a historian has put it, "another step on the road to war"—something Coolidge could not have known.

On April 21, 1924, 15 major newspapers in Japan published a joint declaration condemning the law. "It is very clear that the anti-Japanese bill which was passed in both houses is unfair and immoral.... If the bill becomes a law, there will be no recourse other than to regard it as the defined will of the American people, and, as a result, it will injure deeply the traditional friendship between the nations." America’s friends in Japan were stunned. Leading pro-American intellectuals Nitobe Inazō, diplomat and author of Bushido: The Soul of Japan (1900), and Uchimura Kanzō, one of Japan’s leading Christian evangelists, were isolated. "No words can express my pain and sorrow (and indignation, too) at the grave and disastrous consequences of what I cannot but characterize as the mad and thoughtless act of the American Government in its dealing with the Japanese question," Uchimura wrote. Japan’s foreign minister, Matsui Keishirō, wrote to the British embassy that"the Japanese people...would not submit tamely to the insolence of America." A Japanese man committed hara-kiri outside the former American embassy in Tokyo. Two letters were found near his body. The first, written to the ambassador and the American people, read, "I request by my death the withdrawal of the Japanese exclusion clause." The second was far more forcible, asking his nation "to rise up to avenge the insult embodied in the action of America." The Japanese press, seizing upon the suicide and playing to their new military masters in Tokyo, predicted a great race war.

A Very Claremont Christmas

Wed, 14 Dec 2011 00:00:00 EST

First up, we are pleased to announce a book that we hope will be on everyone’s recommended reading list next year.

To celebrate our flagship publication’s tenth anniversary, we’ve gathered together some of our most distinctive essays, book reviews, and illustrations in Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness: Ten Years of the Claremont Review of Books.

Together, they diagnose a century of liberal excess and call for a renewed American conservatism, one that takes its bearings from the principles of the American Founding. And because man does not live by politics alone, our book touches, too, upon religion, architecture, music, manliness, feminism, film and television, Shakespeare, and other cultural subjects.

Our contributors include Hadley Arkes, Larry Arnn, Martha Bayles, the late William F. Buckley, Jr., Paul Cantor, James Ceaser, Joseph Epstein, Christopher Flannery, Harvey Mansfield, Wilfred McClay, Cheryl Miller, the late Jaroslav Pelikan, Joseph Tartakovsky, Peter Schramm, Michael Uhlmann, Algis Valiunas, William Voegeli, and James Q. Wilson.

The book will be out early next year and is already available for pre-order.

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Standing in the Need of Prayer

Richard E. Morgan — Mon, 5 Dec 2011 00:00:00 EST

Though the ostensible subject of this deeply strange book is the interpretation of the Constitution of the United States, its rhetoric is passionately religious. It exhorts us to believe that the American Constitution is capable of "redemption." It needs redemption because our Constitution as presently understood is profoundly unjust—a little less flagrantly than when it was interpreted to countenance slavery and the subordination of women, but intolerably unjust and sinful nevertheless.

The original sin requiring the country to redeem its national charter is the failure to embrace the crusading, pervasive egalitarianism—political, economic, and social—that its author ascribes to the Declaration of Independence. This vision of a nation committed to pay any price and bear any burden for the sake of ever greater equality appears to be the only thing he takes from the Declaration, indeed from the founding as a whole. Constitutional Redemption says nothing about the founders’ broader natural rights philosophy, and next to nothing about the rights to liberty or property, or the limitation of governmental power, subjects which continuously preoccupied America in the late 18th century.

Jack Balkin’s truncated and deformed view of the founding is not his argument’s only weakness. Although wrathful about modern America’s injustices, Redemption’s specific indictments are few and scattered—income inequality, social stratification, excessively powerful corporations, and the equal representation of unequally populous states in the Senate top its list of offenses against equality. Other charges sometimes fly over the top. What is one to make of a distinguished Yale professor of law who decries judicial holdings "that homosexuals have no constitutional rights that heterosexuals are bound to respect..."? (Emphasis added.)

It should be noted that Balkin’s is not the first major treatment of American constitutional law to explain the author’s disaffection for the American polity with the help of religious terminology. Balkin’s friend and sometime co-author, University of Texas law professor Sanford Levinson, published Constitutional Faith in 1988. "Twenty years later," Balkin explains, "Levinson gave up his constitutional faith and has since become a modern-day Garrisonian," because "hardwired" aspects of the Constitution—such as the presidential veto, two senators from each state, and the electoral college—render the system "incorrigibly undemocratic," making radical reform impossible. Apparently, for Levinson as for the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, the Constitution now stands revealed as a compact with hell.

Balkin, however, has not lost his faith, insisting redemption is possible. At one point he refers to himself as an "aspirationalist" who accepts that "our institutions and our Constitution always exist in a ‘fallen condition.’"

* * *

If faith in an egalitarian constitutional redemption is the first pillar of Balkan’s constitutionalism, historicism is the second. Not to be confused with a commitment to attaining a broad yet subtle understanding of the past’s thoughts and deeds (witness the caricature of the founding on which the book is based), Balkin’s historicism is a sunny Hegelianism. The contours of a constantly evolving Constitution expand to encompass new meanings for succeeding generations—sometimes by amendment, sometimes by judicial interpretation.

Above all, we must beware of being hobbled in our development by the "practice of constitutional fidelity." The snare of that fidelity

makes it seem natural for us to talk and think about justice in terms of the concepts and categories of our constitutional tradition. In this way, the practice of constitutional interpretation can actually skew and limit our understandings about justice, because not all claims are equally easy to state in the language of that tradition. We might call this phenomenon the stunting of political imagination.

It is a testament to the fertility of professor Balkin’s own constitutional imagination that over the past year he has appeared from time to time in the public prints arguing: 1) That the original understanding of the word "commerce" in the Commerce Clause meant all "social interaction." This being so, he concluded, the insurance mandate of Obamacare was clearly within the power of Congress to impose. 2) That the specifically delegated powers of Article I, Section 8 were understood by the members of the Great Convention as operationalizing section VI of the old Virginia Plan, which provided that the new Congress would have power to legislate in "all cases involving the general interest of the Union," or cases where the "states are separately incompetent," thus creating the heart’s desire of all real progressives, a national government of general jurisdiction. Not only is the evidence for such an understanding within the Convention thin to non-existent, if it had existed it would surely have doomed the new charter to defeat in the ratification process. 3) That Section 4 of the 14th Amendment, providing that "the public debt of the United States...shall not be questioned," which was put in place in 1867 to insure that no future Congress, controlled by returning Southern Democrats, could renege on obligations incurred by the Union in prosecuting the war against the Confederacy, could now be understood as authorizing President Obama unilaterally to authorize Treasury borrowing beyond that allowed by the debt limit statue.

* * *

Of course, Balkin understands that not all constitutional change is conducive to greater "democracy, fairness and justice." "If conservative social movements continue their ascendency and the conservative wing of the Republican Party gains and maintains its political hegemony," he worries, "constitutional common sense will be altered for good...." On the whole, however, he looks forward to a continuation of what he sometimes calls, without irony, "The Great Progressive Narrative" of American improvement.

Just how is constitutional evolution supposed to operate when our political imaginations are not "stunted"? Lawyers, not surprisingly, are central to the process, creating constitutional law through advocacy that reshapes the "Off-the-Wall, On-the-Wall...Spectrum of Plausibility." Exotic ideas initially advocated by a few extremists-that the First Amendment’s establishment clause prohibits voluntary prayer in public schools, for example—end up as "part of constitutional common sense, and those who doubt them are regarded as reactionary and themselves as off-the-wall." And although it is tiny minorities of elite lawyers who manage these imaginative journeys along the "spectrum of plausibility," Balkin emphasizes they must be supported by social movements that "open up space for new forms of constitutional imagination and new forms of constitutional utopianism...."

But of course the social movements aren’t all that social, with agendas set by small numbers of self-selected activists rather than the broad involvement of engaged citizens. To take just three constitutional innovations of the past half-century of which Balkin apparently approves, neither the school prayer decisions, nor the extremely libertarian free-speech doctrines minted after 1957 (Roth v. United States), nor the key criminal process innovations (Mapp v. Ohio [1961], Miranda v. Arizona [1966]) had widespread popular support when they came down, and little has changed since. (On this point see Public Opinion and Constitutional Controversy, edited by Nathaniel Persily, Jack Citrin, and Patrick Egan [2008].)

* * *

The strangest part of the book, however, is its final chapter, "How I Became an Originalist." Balkin, obviously an enthusiastic believer in the "living Constitution," has no use for real originalists, who insist that the public meaning of constitutional provisions when adopted should discipline and constrain the ways in which those provisions are applied today. Balkin rightly sees such folk as participating in an insurgency against the constitutional consensus of the latter 20th century, and believes they are insufficiently reconciled to the New Deal, the civil rights revolution, and the emancipation of women. The common sense of originalism makes it broadly appealing to Americans, creating a grave impediment to Balkin’s revolution from above. Ordinary Americans, when they think about it, take the Constitution seriously, opposing radical devaluations of its text by the living constitutionalists.

Balkin’s solution is to pledge allegiance to the Constitution in a manner that allows him to make it say whatever he wants it to say. His "framework originalism" extends the efforts of apologists for the vaulting innovations of the Roosevelt, Warren, and Burger Courts who invoke the words of the Constitution at meaningless levels of abstraction in order to defend judicial adventurism.

He will go no further than to accept the "original semantic meaning" of the Constitution’s words, which signifies something, of course, but not very much. Framework originalism rejects "how people at the time of adoption would have intended or expected the text to be applied, or how broadly or narrowly they would have articulated the principles and standards found in the text" as a source of meaning, thereby excluding everything important to establishing real, useable meaning. Semantic signification is minimal; useful meaning is always in the examples. Unless constitutional provisions can be articulated at some respectable level of specificity, they cannot constrain the future—which, after all, is what a constitution exists to do.

* * *

In the end, the problems with Balkin’s constitutionalism resolve themselves into one—that the Constitution of the United States, and those of the states, presuppose a particular kind of polity and society, and this conception is not infinitely plastic. Certain ideas—thoroughgoing governmental regulation of campaigns and elections, for example—must always remain "off-the-wall." And though we will endlessly debate the proper boundaries between public and private spheres, we begin from the axiom that a limited Constitution—one that created a government whose powers are few and defined—means the heavier burden of proof will be on those who wish to expand its powers. Balkin can’t or won’t grasp that a permanent campaign against every manifestation of inequality necessarily means the permanent subversion of a free society’s attempt to govern itself successfully. A war against inequality in the name of exotic, protean notions of "justice" or "fairness" betrays rather than redeems our constitutional order.

The Boitnott Doctrine

Mark Helprin — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 00:00:00 EST

According to the Charlottesville daily progress, Doris Boitnott, assistant director of the Virginia Education Association (something one might once have called a union), opined last year that employees of local government should enjoy no options in regard to their retirement funds, both to hold the workers in their jobs and because many of them lack the knowledge to make informed decisions. "If you give your kids the choice of having chocolate for dinner or having broccoli for dinner," she says in reference to her presumably adult members, "they may choose the chocolate, which may not be the best for them."

Children, teachers, you, and I may not know what is best, but not Doris Boitnott. She knows. She knows that her members are better off when told what to do, even with their own money. And in the march of creeping paternalism, she is hardly alone. More and more of each American’s livelihood, and therefore more and more of each American’s time and life’s blood, are directed away from his power of decision and disposition and into that of a diffuse collective, meaning actually a relatively small number of elites and experts who look down upon those who have raised them up. Putting in power the kind of person who believes he achieves moral elevation by compelling recalcitrants to his supposedly higher plane is like sending a beagle to an all-you-can-eat buffet. He doesn’t know where or when to stop, and, as is not the case with beagles, there is neither limit to his presumption nor a ceiling to his self-congratulation.

We are familiar with political incarnations of dirigisme throughout history that have at least given rise to an opposition that keeps them partially in check. We do not, for example, have a king. Except among movie stars, the feudal aristocracy is gone. Resistance to such overt political paternalism is alive and well, perhaps because statism—confiscating and commanding—is hard medicine to take. But the general tendency of mankind to render itself into a kind of clay to be shaped by others persists under democratic conditions, and is hardly confined to the relation of citizen to state. It is unfortunately ever active in temptations more dangerous than any the state can devise, for being sweet, habit-forming, and irresistible. Among other things, freely offered and freely accepted entanglements cannot be criticized for suppressing freedom of decision. Such criticism—the most powerful means of attack upon state encroachments—misfires.

In every sphere apart from government, individual autonomy can be eroded, diminished, and eliminated, exactly as in government, by dependency—which to be crippling need not be compelled. A vivid illustration of this is the extent to which we have run to entrust information to servers we neither own, control, see, nor even have the ability to locate. Because of a mistake, crime, or burst of electro-magnetic pulse; our financial and health records, correspondence, photographs, and, for some incautious souls, the work of a lifetime, could be wiped out in a fraction of a second and no one would even know where to look.

Apart from the question of safety and preservation, the recklessness of surrendering all our information to the custody of people we do not know in conditions we have not fully vetted or even, in most cases, bothered to ascertain, creates a potential for abuse that would make even Kim Jong Il blush. Imagine if from the time of its founding the post office had not delivered mail but kept it, letting you see it but retaining every letter and document, photograph, proposal, statement, love missive, and farewell, and then developed a way that they can to search, catalog, and cross-reference it mechanically, while knowing—from the hand-held device you cannot do without—where you are, where you have been, what you buy, with whom you associate, what you read, and so on.

Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt told the Wall Street Journal last August—and this is not a parody—"I actually think people don’t want Google to answer their questions. They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.... The power of individual targeting—the technology will be so good it will be very hard for people to watch or consume something that has not been tailored for them." But it isn’t just what you eat or what you buy. Google will control serendipity: "Serendipity—can be calculated now. We can actually produce it electronically." And the next step? "You really want to go from syntax to semantics, from what you typed to what you meant.... I think we will be the world leader in that." That is, the world leader in telling you what you meant.

* * *

Eric Schmidt, meet Doris Boitnott. You’re made for each other. Who knows? As the various types of paternalism grow, they may burst from the cocoons of government and private enterprise and marry into a new and overwhelming entity. Each seems to be led to the other by a force greater than either. Otherwise, for example, how to explain the government’s passion for expanding bandwidth? Only 1% of bandwidth is consumed by anything other than gaming (55%), and TV, movies, and video (45%). These things cultivate passivity. They root you to the chair, hold your gaze, and either entirely suppress your input or channel it into pre-programmed Hobson’s choices. Why then is expanding bandwidth a public obligation?

With the dawning of 1984, many felt relief, because—just as in the ’50s and ’60s it was assumed that by 2001 there would be hotels of a sort on the moon—they had entertained the possibility that 1984 might be a surveillance dictatorship, and it wasn’t. But now the sheep are falling all over themselves to get into the pen. Though the gates are still open, it would be so easy for the world’s Doris Boitnotts and Eric Schmidts to swing them closed, and that must not be allowed to happen.

Oprah’s World Mission

Martha Bayles — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 00:00:00 EST

On September 23, 2001, thousands of traumatized New Yorkers gathered in Yankee Stadium to pray for the victims of the World Trade Center attacks. Present were leaders from every major religion—Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism. But the master, or rather mistress, of ceremonies was not ordained in any faith. Neither was she a politician, pundit, or CEO. She was television talk show host Oprah Winfrey: the only person in America, writes one observer, with the right combination of "spiritual leadership, celebrity recognition, and consumer popularity" to preside over such a momentous occasion.

Since May, when The Oprah Winfrey Show aired its final episode, a passel of mid-size celebrities—Phil McGraw, Suze Orman, Rosie O’Donnell, Mehmet Oz, Ellen Degeneres, Gayle King, Katie Couric, Anderson Cooper—have been jostling to fill the vacuum. This is hardly surprising given Winfrey’s longevity and success. Her program was rated number one in the United States for 23 of its 25 years, and in 2010 it was being aired in 149 countries. But none of these aspiring hosts will succeed, because Winfrey is a unique, at times indigestible, blend of distinctively American ingredients that nonetheless resonates with people, especially women, in every corner of the globe.

While writing this essay, I lent my computer to a house guest, a colleague and friend from Turkey, and as I was closing the screen he spotted the title and exclaimed, "Ah, Oprah! My mother’s a big fan. She once wrote to Oprah, and was disappointed not to receive a reply." It is a measure of Winfrey’s mystique that I found this hard to believe. Surely, I thought, there is someone on the payroll who answers every letter, even one from Istanbul! But then I realized that Harpo Productions must receive thousands of letters and emails every day.

Such is the nature of a mystique: to create an aura, persuasive but illusory, of special powers not granted to ordinary mortals. Yet despite her vast popularity, Oprah has failed to enchant her many critics.

Taste-Maker

Conservatives have not forgotten Winfrey’s endorsement—nay, anointing—of Barack Obama during the 2008 Democratic primary. Even the most diehard Obama supporter must cringe when reminded of Winfrey’s prophetic announcement: "I think this is the One." Nor have the scales fallen from her eyes: she recently offered to campaign for the president in 2012. For the Right, this is enough to relegate Winfrey to the outer darkness of left-liberal hell. But unlike her old rival Phil Donahue, not to mention the usual stars with their pet causes, Winfrey has remained aloof from politics for most of her career. Her renewed eagerness to campaign for Obama surprised some Oprah-watchers, who assumed she would remain out of the limelight while her new venture, the Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN), struggles to survive the cutthroat world of cable television.

The idea of Winfrey struggling may surprise those who see her as a saleswoman able, like Midas, to turn any product into gold. To advertisers and marketers, this gift for salesmanship is her most appealing trait. Between 1996 and 2002, when her show included a regular feature called "Oprah’s Book Club," her recommendation meant instant best-sellerdom. One grateful publisher called this "Oprah effect" "the literary equivalent of inventing penicillin." The only author to refuse Winfrey’s blessing was novelist Jonathan Franzen, in October 2001. But to judge by the amount of publicity he received, at a time when the media’s attention was focused elsewhere, that gesture may have contained as much calculation as principle.

To academic critics, Winfrey’s tireless shilling is her least appealing trait. Their complaints are not without merit. Whenever Winfrey and her guests discussed a book on the show, the conversation focus soon strayed to the food, wine, and home furnishings they were enjoying (and then, of course, to their own personal histories). And whenever she urged her viewers to read or keep a journal, these activities were presented as requiring costly accessories. She once sent a "gratitude" package to a New York City police officer who had served at Ground Zero which contained not only a writing journal but also "one of my favorite pens from Rebecca Moss, that store that carries beautiful pens." At times Winfrey can seem a crass creature of the bottom line. But in her defense, her kind of commercialism has roots in the American tradition of "taste makers," stretching back to the Jacksonian era-when, as Harper’s editor Russell Lynes once wrote, the beginnings of mass production made "a great many people conscious of the niceties of taste who had never before had occasion to give the matter much thought." More than any other American (including Martha Stewart, whose TV show is seen in only 17 other countries) Winfrey represents the globalization of this taste-making tradition.

Trash Talk

Yet before clearing Winfrey of all crassness, we must admit her responsibility for the flood of vulgar, outrageous talk shows that engulfed the American airwaves in the 1990s. When her program premiered in 1986, Winfrey’s main rivals were the politically preachy Donahue and the folksy Sally Jesse Raphael. So Winfrey carved out a niche as the TV equivalent of the 19th-century "sob sister" reporter, hosting non-celebrity guests with sad, traumatic, sometimes sensationalist tales to tell. From there it was but a short step to Geraldo Rivera, Jerry Springer, Jenny Jones, Maury Povich, and Ricki Lake.

Each of these "trash talk" impresarios had a different shtick. But they all specialized in filling the screen with unhappy guests whose lives had been twisted by poverty, ignorance, and every conceivable human failing from incest to obesity, pedophilia to bestiality; then goading them to lose what little self-control they possessed. A former talk show producer described the job of finding such people:

I remember being on the phone with the mother, saying, you know, "The best thing for you to do is to come on this show and tell your story," that whole bullshit. It was going to be therapeutic, everybody’s going to learn from it. I’m a good liar. I mean, I was convincing this woman to talk about the fact that while she was getting married to this guy, he was upstairs f---ing her 5-year-old daughter and giving her HIV.

Winfrey never sank this low, but she did host a fair number of dysfunctional guests before announcing, in the mid-1990s, that she was "tired of the crud." Declaring that her purpose had never been to exploit people but to help them solve their problems, she vowed to transform her show into "Change Your Life TV." As it turned out, this was a shrewd business move. Ratings were down; large segments of the audience were ready for something new; and with the end of the Cold War and the advent of satellite TV, vast new markets were opening overseas. Today Winfrey says her decision "was bigger than money or material interest," but she does not deny that her reasons were partly commercial.

Spiritual Leader

By quitting the "crud" Winfrey assumed a very different mantle, that of lay minister to a global congregation of hundreds of millions, speaking from a pulpit the size of her vast media empire, including television, film, the internet, and print. The influence of a such a figure cannot be measured, but if it could, Winfrey would emerge as more influential in purveying "values" to Americans than any teacher or preacher, and more effective in conveying "American values" to the world than any diplomat or missionary.

Oprah’s values have provoked the most trenchant criticism. Most of her critics are Christian thinkers and American historians, who rightly place her in yet another all-American tradition: that of "mind cure" healers and "positive thinkers" from Phineas Parkhurst Quimby to Mary Baker Eddy, and from Norman Vincent Peale to Eckhart Tolle. Like many of her predecessors, Winfrey abandoned the Protestantism of her youth (she was raised a Southern Baptist) to wander in the wilderness of a free-form spirituality that has deep roots in the New World. In the 19th century it was called New Thought; in the 20th and 21st, New Age. This tradition has many variations, but in all there is a quasi-gnostic element: the idea that it is more important to connect with one’s inner spark of divinity than to beg mercy from a remote, wrathful God.

To Christian critics such as Catholic blogger Amy Wellborn, Winfrey’s preoccupation with "a higher power, spirit, soul, ‘authentic power,’ meaning, healing, affirmation, helping, miracles, meditation, journaling, and angels" is a betrayal of the true faith, whose focus ought to be on "sin, redemption, sacrifice, conversion, humility, worship, holiness, and Jesus Christ." To a certain school of American historians, Winfrey’s ministry represents, in sociologist Philip Rieff’s damning phrase, "the triumph of the therapeutic." To both sets of critics, Winfrey’s shift from God to Self is part of a more general loss of what is most valuable about the the Puritan legacy: that mindfulness of human wickedness and of the profound otherness of God, which gives the American character its starch.

Yet there is another side to the story. Historian Stephanie Muravchik writes that "these critics have not recognized the degree to which psychotherapeutic ideas and techniques changed as they were popularized." In America, God and Self have long traveled on a two-way street: "As psychology moved into the mainstream, the mainstream—with its considerable religiosity—moved into psychology. Believers harnessed therapy to their own purposes." Even the most superficial comparison between Winfrey’s style and that of most other talk show hosts reveals that, with a couple of exceptions, she’s the only one with any starch.

Unlike her erstwhile rivals in the trash genre, Winfrey has never goaded poor sinners into spilling their guts for the sake of sensation and spectacle. Rather she prods her troubled guests to admit the truth, and when they do, she tells them to get a grip. This distinction may seem shallow compared with that between Calvinism and the power of positive thinking. But it’s important nonetheless, because in every television market on earth, locally produced talk shows are now busy exposing human frailty. And they are doing it in either of two ways: the Jerry Springer way, which milks it for crude thrills and laughs; or the Oprah Winfrey way, which seeks to cure it in the context of a religious tradition, however vaguely defined.

Liberty and License

I realize this statement is a little like President Dwight Eisenhower’s comment that America must remain "founded on a deeply felt religious faith, and I don’t care what it is." But I am with Ike on this, because I have seen the alternative. At the risk of shocking libertarians who defend trash TV in the name of free speech and academics who extol it as a space for the blossoming of deviant identity, I submit the following: authoritarian regimes have no problem with trash TV, and the smarter authoritarians find it useful. In the words of journalist Arkady Ostrovsky, the Russian media under Putin use "softsoap and sensation" to "create an impression of free television where in fact there is none."

Ostrovsky recalls a segment of the Russian talk show Five Evenings, in which an 11-year-old girl confronts an 18-year-old boy who has gotten her pregnant. At one point the host exclaims, "I don’t have time for political correctness here.... Let’s say it: the boy is not Russian, the boy came from Tajikistan!" This is followed by applause, as another guest bursts out, "These people come to Moscow like locusts and abuse our women and girls!" Conceding that ugly spectacles are common in Western television, Ostrovsky observes that "in most western countries they coexist with serious TV journalism, including news and analysis," while in Russia, they "have substituted themselves for—and compromised the very concept of—free speech."

Masha Lipman of the Carnegie Moscow Center agrees. "After the 2003 elections," she writes, "Russian television no longer needs trustworthy news, free journalism, the truth in general. It only needs what the Kremlin demands." And what the Kremlin demands is not "formal censorship" but a "sophisticated" way of "dealing with the media." In the Russian context, this means "ensuring that the big media managers are loyal, then leaving some of the small outlets free to let off steam, while ensuring they remain irrelevant."

One way to let off steam is to engage in outrageous, nasty, but non-political talk. The point is not lost on those academics who describe trash TV in Foucaultian terms as "ideological labor" aimed at dampening the rage of repressed minorities and other marginalized groups. Looking at the way trash TV is used by Putin and other smart authoritarians around the world, I’m tempted to say about these academics what my father used to say about broken clocks: they are right once in a while. The smarter authoritarians have also read Foucault—and they understand very well that when it comes to discrediting liberty, license works better than repression.

Oprah’s Book Club never recommended Foucault. And compared to Five Evenings, The Oprah Winfrey Show looks positively high-minded, as well as much more entertaining. Perhaps the Voice of America could air re-runs?

Getting to Democracy

Stanley Kurtz — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 00:00:00 EST

Francis Fukuyama’s sweepingly ambitious book, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution, is a major achievement. Through it, he continues his longstanding project: the creation of a Universal History of mankind, demonstrating that human social and political life does in fact progress toward liberal democracy. Such a history could presumably contribute to human social development by laying out a plausible path to a democratic future.

Although Fukuyama, best-known for his book The End of History and the Last Man (1992), still believes that humanity is collectively headed for liberal democracy, he has far more to say than in his earlier writings about forces standing in the way. Origins begins with a story of failed democratization. When Australia granted independence to Papua New Guinea in the 1970s, it established a "Westminster" style parliamentary government with multi-party elections. Voters in such systems are supposed to make choices based on ideology and policy—whether they want a stronger welfare state or a freer market, for example. In Papua New Guinea, however, society is divided into numerous tiny tribes, nestled in isolated mountain valleys, speaking languages incomprehensible to the neighboring tribes with whom they compete. The Big Men who lead these tribes achieve their position through their ability to distribute pigs, shell money, and other resources to members of the tribe. So when a Big Man makes it to parliament, he uses his position to direct resources back to his narrow base of supporters. Political parties are insignificant in this context, as is any sense of common national destiny.

Such pork-barrel politics looks chaotic and corrupt to us, but from the standpoint of Papua New Guinea’s traditional tribal system, the Big Men are simply doing what they’ve always done. The only difference, as Fukuyama points out, is that instead of pigs and shell money Big Men now distribute revenues from mining and logging concessions.

Here, in a nutshell, is a fundamental challenge to the "end of history" thesis that made Fukuyama famous at the end of the Cold War. Fukuyama’s core argument is that the collapse of fascism and Communism as plausible ideological competitors to capitalist democracy has ended our deeper conflicts over the best form of government, leaving democracy as the world’s "default" political option. As he puts it: "Very few people around the world openly profess to admire Vladimir Putin’s petro-nationalism, or Hugo Chavez’s ‘twenty-first-century socialism,’ or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s Islamic Republic." China’s model of authoritarian capitalism defies description, much less emulation. All that, says Fukuyama, leaves democracy as the world’s only remaining governing model both widely admired and, at least in theory, replicable in a variety of social and economic circumstances.

* * *

But what if the real alternative to democracy isn’t another abstract ideological model at all? What if democracy can be challenged, hemmed in, and even undermined by a collection of powerful particularisms? Fukuyama has written The Origins of Political Order, in part, to better understand why cultural particularism and personalized politics such as we see in New Guinea impede the expansion of democracy.

His larger goal is to lay out the complex social prerequisites for democracy, highlighting how nearly miraculous it was that these elements came together in proper balance to produce liberal democracy in the first place. We take the very existence of the state for granted, although the global proliferation of failed states has reminded us that democracy cannot succeed where a functional state is weak or non-existent. Rule of law and accountable government, the more obvious prerequisites of liberal democracy, are both difficult to achieve, and more difficult still to harmonize with an efficacious state, since their purpose is to restrain its power. By tracing the development of the modern state, then showing the millennia-long process through which rule of law and accountable government managed to moderate state power in a very few places, Fukuyama aims to produce a deeper appreciation of all that democracy requires. He also intends his history to be a kind of sourcebook for developing countries now negotiating hurdles previously encountered on history’s first long march to democracy.

The result is a brilliantly conceived attempt to reveal the underpinnings of human political organization across the ages. In an era of retreat from "grand theory," when the sheer mass of specialist knowledge makes world-scale historical sociology nearly impossible to pull off, he has revived the long-defunct tradition of global historical synthesis, exemplified by thinkers like Max Weber and Emile Durkheim in sociology, Lewis Henry Morgan in anthropology, and Henry Maine in law.

The critical question is whether Fukuyama’s newly heightened appreciation for the barriers to democratization does justice to the full dimensions of the problem. Origins is ultimately an attempt to put the author’s earlier claims of irresistible democratic evolution to their sternest test, by boldly confronting all in history and culture that has stood opposed to such progress. The result, from his perspective, is an educated and measured optimism about the prospects for democratic development, at least over the long term.

But does that synthesis hold? Has Fukuyama’s acknowledgment of the culture problem effectively qualified his end of history thesis into practical irrelevance? On the other hand, has Fukuyama perhaps underestimated the deeper barriers to development, so as to keep his dream of universal democratization alive? Or has he found the golden mean? In my judgment, Fukuyama has failed to overcome the core of the culturalist challenge, while nonetheless producing one of the most creative and important contributions to the study of culture in some time. To explain this paradox, we need to consider his conception of human nature.

* * *

The End of History and the Last Man draws on Hegel’s philosophy as interpreted by the 20th-century French philosopher Alexandre Kojève. In fact, Fukuyama lets the reader know that when he says "Hegel," he is actually referring to a sort of composite philosopher who might be called "Hegel-Kojève." The End of History bases its argument on the claim that the prototypical human situation, and thus the motor of history, is described by Hegel’s dialectic of master and slave famously discussed in the Phenomenology of Spirit. At the beginning of history, one man becomes a master, and another a slave, when the former, risking his life in battle for pure prestige, subdues the latter. The slave, valuing life above prestige, submits to the master and acknowledges his conqueror’s superiority. Yet the master’s ostensible triumph turns out to be hollow, since the recognition obtained from the slave is a debased compliment from a debased admirer. Through a series of transformations, both the master and slave eventually discover that only mutual recognition of their equal dignity achieves authentic self-respect for each. In Kojève’s view, this core human dynamic prefigures, and is destined to produce, a universal egalitarian state.

Hegel’s master-slave dynamic usefully explains the emergence of democracy from Communist tyranny, but it is a flawed basis for understanding the world’s traditional societies. Traditional hierarchies are not so much master-slave relationships as they are by-products of group solidarity. Real solidarity is impossible without a leader who embodies the honor and interests of the group. Traditional societies thus tend to distribute recognition widely within a hierarchical group, with "hierarchy" here meaning not a master’s domination of a slave, but a leader’s embodiment of a larger and mutually dependent collective. In this analysis, the group is prior to the individuals who compose it. All of which suggests that human beings are naturally social creatures as well as naturally free and equal individuals. The unfolding of history reflects the interplay between these different facets of human nature.

* * *

In Origins, Fukuyama offers a broadened vision to supplement his neo-Hegelian dynamic of the master and slave, to better account for the traditional solidarities of kinship-based societies. He now postulates a fundamental human capacity to generate social norms and religious beliefs that heighten group cohesion. Though recognizing that it is instrumentally important, he still regards this capacity as fundamentally irrational. For example, he sees tribal societies (by which he means societies organized around extended systems of kinship) as held together by the irrational worship of dead ancestors. What he misses is that ancestor worship affirms and symbolizes the enduring, constitutive nature of traditional kin groups, whose customary obligations outlast and constrain its leaders. Drawing on sociobiological theory, Fukuyama also now posits a general tendency for human beings to favor kin with whom they have previously exchanged favors. This biological urge to help close relatives, sometimes extended to non-kin, explains the tendency of modern state systems to fall back into narrow favoritism, as in New Guinea.

The problem is that neither a largely irrational religious reflex nor a biological urge to favor relatives does justice to the power and complexity of man’s social nature. In the end, both devices allow Fukuyama to retain the individualism he derives from Hegel and ultimately Hobbes. That explanatory framework leads him to underestimate the appeal and staying power of traditional social solidarities.

According to Origins, human history has passed through several distinct but overlapping phases. In the earliest phases of evolution, human beings lived in small bands. Leadership in contemporary band societies (our most important clue to the past) is based on group consensus. Rather than saying, "Do this!" leaders in band societies say, "If this is done, it would be good."

After the discovery of agriculture, says Fukuyama, humans assembled into larger groups organized by extended kinship connections. He calls this the tribal phase of history, and it is characterized by what he terms the "tyranny of cousins." Now hierarchies emerge, but Fukuyama emphasizes that there is nothing natural or inevitable about this tribal system of hierarchy. If anything, the more egalitarian and consensual bands in which human beings first evolved represent our natural condition.

In Fukuyama’s view, the shift to states, the next phase of history, was an even greater setback for human freedom. At bottom, he sees the creation of the state as an only slightly revised version of the Hobbesian contract, in which tribes, rather than individuals, trade away their freedom in exchange for security under a sovereign’s rule. But Fukuyama misses the way in which the tribal nature of the participants in the earliest state—making "contracts" changes the bargain, putting the social side of our nature at the center. He discerns how the modern liberal democratic state recaptures the relative equality and the consensual nature of life in early band societies, but he fails to appreciate the degree to which the hierarchies of traditional tribes and states draw upon the collective side of social life at humanity’s point of origin.

* * *

The great paradox of Origins is that it is resistant to cultural issues while also being one of the finest, most ambitious analyses of the origins of human culture in years. This is possible because Fukuyama’s account of the rise of ancient states from earlier tribal systems is a tale of tradition transcended. Yet it turns out that history doesn’t leave the past altogether behind. As nascent states struggled for social supremacy with traditional tribal forms, a compromise of sorts was struck everywhere, one whose details turn out to be a central determinant of the character of the world’s great civilizations. Though Fukuyama’s story is told from the standpoint of progress, of the emerging state looking back on an incompletely transcended tribal past, his tale of the struggle between these dueling social models is tremendously revealing.

Take his highly original analysis of China. Using Max Weber’s criteria for identifying social modernity, Fukuyama shows convincingly that, contrary to Weber’s own view, ancient China was actually the first fully modern state. Under the pressure of constant war, early Chinese proto-states could only survive by adopting modern bureaucratic organization, mass conscription, and the dismantling of the traditional tribal leadership strata. Military self-protection forced Prussia to adopt essentially the same reforms after its defeat at Napoleon’s hands at the battle of Jena in 1806. This is the moment Hegel first identified as the "end of history," because it represented the actualization in Europe of the French Revolution’s core principles.

Yet if China’s state was effectively modern a good two millennia before Europe, it matters that the result was not democracy but a remorseless dictatorship. Western democracy rested on the existence of a prior reverence for the rule of law, which tamed the power of the newly modern state. In contrast, ancient China created a powerful bureaucratic state long before the other prerequisites of democratic governance could emerge. This "all-powerful" Chinese state struggled for centuries with a periodically renascent tribal tradition, however. The result was the staffing of China’s precociously modern state with bureaucrats imbued with Confucian family morality. Fukuyama shows how Confucian norms of social virtue, wielded by the bureaucracy, acted as de facto checks on the theoretically unlimited power of China’s emperor.

Here is where things get tricky. Fukuyama makes the point that the emperor was constrained by his need to maintain, through virtuous action, the Confucian "mandate of heaven," whose rationale Fukuyama never takes seriously in its own right. In the Confucian view, the emperor is father and mother of the people, and thus obligated to hew to the principles of proper familial morality. Loss of heaven’s mandate is conceived, not as a violation of Hobbesian individual rights, but as a dereliction of familial duty. Against the trend of his own account, however, Fukuyama insists on analyzing the Chinese emperor’s power as a variant on Hobbes’s social contract.

Hegel saw the Chinese emperor as the ultimate despot at the beginning of history, a single great master ruling a nation of slaves. Now it turns out that the ancient emperor’s despotic powers were actually a function of China’s precocious bureaucratic modernization, while such restraints on his rule as existed were traditional in character, grounded not in universal rights but in the social nature of man.

Despite these problems, Fukuyama’s analysis of Chinese political development is stunning. Again and again, he produces rich and fascinating parallels between the traditional Chinese state and its modern communist successors. Chairman Mao’s attacks on Confucianism were prefigured in China’s long authoritarian past. Chinese culture was formed by the distinctive blending of the first truly modern state and a weaker yet still significant tradition of familial morality. Fukuyama may give too little attention and credit to the underlying appeal of Confucian familism, but his striking analysis of what emerged from the tension between the first great modern absolutism and its traditionalist tribal nemesis is a significant achievement.

* * *

The same strengths and weaknesses are evident in Fukuyama’s fascinating account of Muslim state-building at the height of the Ottoman Empire, a topic with important implications for our understanding of the Middle East today. He tells the story of the Janissary corps, an elite slave caste of warriors and bureaucrats forcibly seized as children from the empire’s Christian subjects, raised as Turkish-speaking Muslims, trained to the highest standards, and forced into lifelong celibacy. He shows that in Ottoman times, as today, the extraordinary power of tribe and kin in Muslim society made it difficult to recruit bureaucrats based on merit and then prevent them from becoming corrupt. The Janissaries—plucked from their parents and forbidden to have families of their own—were the solution, the functional equivalent of ancient China’s merit-based bureaucratic examination system.

Fukuyama presents the Janissaries as real-life counterparts of the guardian class in Plato’s Republic, leaders whose absolute loyalty to the state was assured by their isolation from the private family. In time, the Janissaries grew powerful enough to stage coups and capture the state. Fukuyama draws convincing parallels between this turn of events and the outsized governing role of the military in today’s Middle East. As with the Janissaries, modern Muslim armies represent a relatively meritocratic exception to the tribal social rule.

The unusually intense in-group solidarity encouraged by Muslim kinship practices not only helps explain why the Janissary system was needed as a way out, but has a good deal more to do with current controversies over the Middle East than one might expect. Fukuyama’s initial response to 9/11 was to minimize the impact of the event. He saw the terror attacks as a rearguard action, an ultimately doomed protest emanating from a traditional part of the world threatened by modernity but lacking the resources to derail social progress for more than a brief historical moment. That argument, of course, had the effect of protecting Fukuyama’s end-of-history thesis.

As the significance of the terror war persisted, however, Fukuyama took another tack, arguing that Islamism was not a true product of Muslim religion or culture, but a strictly modern phenomenon. In this view, Islamism is a Muslim-tinged variant of European fascism, whose chief appeal is to urbanized Middle Easterners and Middle Eastern immigrants in Europe severed from their cultural roots. By treating Islamism as a pseudo-traditional phenomenon, Fukuyama minimizes the tensions between civilizations described by his mentor, the late Samuel Huntington, in The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996). Yet traditional Muslim cousin marriage persists in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where the kin-solidarities it produces weaken the state and enable our adversaries. Similarly, cousin marriage has been one of the core barriers to the assimilation of Muslim immigrants in Europe, and thus has much to do with the rise of Islamism in the West. Islamism develops tradition, while also depending upon it.

In short, Fukuyama’s study of the tensions between modernizing states and traditional systems of kinship and tribe illuminates the inner dynamics of the world’s great civilizations. Yet Fukuyama consistently underestimates the deepest barriers to democratization—as embodied in kinship and tribe—and the social side of human nature upon which those barriers rest.

* * *

The most striking part of Fukuyama’s account of democratic development in the West is his focus on the medieval Church’s role in breaking down extended kinship systems, thereby creating the individualist world democratization requires. Here Fukuyama stresses the Church’s interest in gaining property as a motive for its prohibitions on cousin marriage. Although the Bible does not prohibit such unions, marital choice is a logical outcome of the Christian tradition’s emphasis on the relationship between the individual believer and God. Material gain was far from the Church’s only motivation here.

Fukuyama’s treatment of democratic evolution in the West is filled with potential lessons for developing countries today. Yet the most important lesson of all may be that getting rid of your kinship system is the surest foundation for modern liberal democracy. The fact that no country could take such a recommendation seriously, except as a multi-generational commitment, suggests that history won’t be ending any time soon. Fukuyama promises to show in the second volume of Origins that the industrial revolution, and modern science generally, have enabled far more rapid political change than in the past. Even so, the scope of the kinship-based challenge to democratic development is formidable enough to resist these forces indefinitely.

* * *

What, then, remains of the end of history thesis? Fukuyama himself qualifies it in various ways. Though he suggests that China’s growing prosperity could bring demands for democracy from its rising middle class, for example, he also acknowledges that China’s authoritarian capitalism could persist for some time, given its cultural roots and present success. He also suggests that entrenched interest groups could block any solution to the massive fiscal challenges confronting Western democracies, leading to "political decay."

Even without discussing our current fiscal woes, Fukuyama’s own study of biological engineering, Our Posthuman Future (2002), explained the possible re-starting of history in the West. The root of the fiscal crisis is the growing number of old people, to whom promises have been made, relative to the shrinking cohort of young people, who will be expected to make good on those promises. That demographic shift, in turn, depends upon the scientific discovery of reliable birth control. Modern biological science, it would seem, has already kick-started history.

Combine Fukuyama’s own analysis with a more culturalist view of the Islamist challenge, and the world begins to resemble the future sketched out by Samuel Huntington, with rising demographically-based challenges to the West from East Asia and the Middle East. The complexities of human nature and the innovations of military and biological science may be more than sufficient to counterbalance the democratic yearnings of an ever-expanding global middle class as motors of history. Although we cannot exclude the possible emergence of liberal democratic politics as the universal destination of humanity in the distant future, Fukuyama’s vision seems to have receded to the point where it has lost its present policy relevance.

* * *

Toward the end of America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy (2006), Fukuyama expresses support for democratic elections in the Middle East, even at the risk of bringing extremists to power. He favors this policy, he emphasizes, not because it will solve the problem of terrorism, but because it is desirable in its own right. Here, I suspect, we touch something fundamental.

In The End of History, Fukuyama advocated an American foreign policy centered on promoting democracy. It has become increasingly evident since then that his ever-receding historical predictions have a utopian aspect. Democracy promotion—even to the point of risking the election of Islamist dictators—is advanced in the name of a dubious and distant future.

When he broke some years ago with American policy in Iraq, Fukuyama criticized his neoconservative colleagues for underplaying cultural barriers to democratization. Yet his less militarized posture on foreign policy still underestimates the power of tradition in the non-Western world. He and his more hawkish former colleagues have also increasingly adopted the stance that a degree of chaos in the present is an acceptable price to pay for the dream of Arab democracy generations hence. No present misfortune can undermine so distant a policy goal. Yet as Origins shows, this utopian stance can accommodate vast sophistication about the barriers to democratization in the here and now.

In the end, Fukuyama’s loyalty to the utopian hopes he shares with his intellectual ancestors has determined his policy goals, even when their relevance for the present United States is highly questionable. He is skeptical of nationalism, which he dismissed in The End of History as a fundamentally irrational form of group-based recognition destined to pass with time. Fukuyama’s patriotism is for the imagined universal human state of the future instead. That is a fearsome nationalism.

Hungering for Violence

James Kirchick — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 00:00:00 EST

In February 2009, I attended a massive rally in Beirut to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the death of Imad Mugniyah, a senior leader of the Shiite terrorist group Hezbollah assassinated in a Damascus car bomb. Thousands of people had convened in a cavernous hall, men sitting on one side and women (wearing headscarves or veils) on the other. Despite the ostensibly melancholy reason for the service, this was not a solemn affair. In the culture of Islamic "resistance," the death of a martyr is something to be celebrated, not mourned, and the event’s martial tone made clear what message Hezbollah intended to send. A giant, English-language banner overlooking the assembled crowd proclaimed, "Oh Zionists, Oh Zionists, if you want this type of war, SO BE IT." The same message, spelt in Arabic calligraphy, was in the form of a nuclear mushroom cloud. And lest there be any doubt about who controlled Hezbollah’s purse or puppet strings, a delegation of uniformed Iranian military officers sat in the front row.

Thanassis Cambanis’s A Privilege to Die: Inside Hezbollah’s Legions and Their Endless War Against Israel explores the fanatical devotion that this organization inspires, describing, from the perspective of its most passionate supporters, the group’s activities in the decade since Israel withdrew from southern Lebanon in 2000. A former reporter for the Boston Globe, Cambanis tells his story through the relationships he formed with an array of Hezbollah figures, before and after the 2006 war Israel launched against the group in retaliation for firing rockets at northern towns and kidnapping two soldiers.

The rapturous welcome that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad received upon his visit to Lebanon last October reflected the country’s eclipsing sovereignty. "Lebanon is the example and school for unwavering resistance to the world’s tyrants and a university for Jihad," Ahmadinejad told a crowd in the Dahiyeh, the Shiite Beirut suburb where I attended the Mugniyah memorial. While there, the world’s most infamous Holocaust denier received an honorary degree in political science from Lebanese University, the country’s only public institution of higher education. Ahmadinejad’s visit put the final nail in the coffin of the 2005 Cedar Revolution, the democratic uprising sparked by the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. The following month, a massive protest drew over a million people (nearly a quarter of Lebanon’s population) ultimately forcing Syria to end its three-decade-long occupation. A pro-Western governing coalition known as March 14 (named after the day the anti-Syrian demonstration commenced) came into power, and for a moment it seemed as if Lebanon’s foreign subjugation was beginning to end.

* * *

The withdrawal of Syrian troops did not restore Lebanon’s independence, though, for both Syria and Iran maintained a foothold in the country’s brutally internecine politics via Hezbollah. Political assassinations of politicians who opposed the Iran-Syria-Hezbollah axis continued unabated. In 2008, Hezbollah occupied parts of Beirut and shut down the government to protest attempts to disarm it. And though March 14 won parliamentary elections in 2009 (barely), its leader, Saad Hariri, son of the slain prime minister, had no choice but to hold a series of supplicating meetings with Ahmadinejad and Syrian dictator Basher Assad, the men whose regimes were responsible for his father’s murder.

Cambanis’s attempt to tell the story of Hezbollah through the eyes of its members works because Hezbollah is an utterly personal phenomenon: unlike secular political movements, it promises its members spiritual fulfillment and a heavenly afterlife. Hezbollah dominates every aspect of its followers’ lives. (It may also be the only terrorist group to sponsor its own think tank). Underlying the devotion of this "uncontrollable confederacy of doom seekers" is a pervasive hunger for violence. "His eyes gleamed whenever he talked of death," Cambanis writes of one Hezbollah fighter, who "envied the brothers of his friend Hamid who already had been chosen to enter paradise." Hezbollah’s supporters evince a god-like adoration of their spiritual leader, the "pudgy prodigy" Hasan Nasrallah, an esteem widely shared outside Lebanon (a recent poll found him to be the most admired leader in the Arab world) and attributable to his tenacity in waging "resistance." Although most of Lebanon’s political factions receive outside support from the region’s power players, they are parochial in nature, except for Hezbollah. Its followers "felt Lebanese but simultaneously Shia and transnational," and that international outlook is returned in kind by the popular support it receives around the world.

* * *

What at first may appear to be an overly-sympathetic treatment of a terrorist organization is belied by Cambanis’s damning conclusion: Hezbollah is a movement "marching the Middle East deeper into a war without end." A frequent rationalization for the popularity of Islamist groups like Hezbollah and Hamas is that they earn communal goodwill through their provision of social services, and that allegiance to these organizations does not necessarily imply extremism. Cambanis thinks this is hogwash: "[i]f that were the entire story, then another group, perhaps one less interested in armed struggle and religious indoctrination, could woo Hezbollah’s followers away with a package deal that promised even better services and more prosperity." His belief that "Hezbollah accomplished plenty of good" should not be mistaken for approval of its tactics or empathy with its aims; to the contrary, he writes, "ultimately it used its power to shape human hearts in service of something destructive." And Hezbollah isn’t just jeopardizing the safety of Lebanese (who will be most affected by whatever future wars it instigates); it’s simultaneously providing a successful template for Islamists around the world and discrediting moderate figures to boot.

Though many critics of American policy in the Near East claim that the true voices of democracy are Islamist organizations like Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood that claim a popular mandate and vilify sclerotic Arab regimes, Cambanis is not so credulous as to think that Hezbollah represents a genuine democratic force. Not only is the organization murderously hostile towards its proclaimed enemies; it polices its own ranks with Tehran-like authoritarianism. Hezbollah was largely a creation of the Iranian revolutionary regime, which came to power espousing a violently messianic, anti-Semitic, and anti-Western ideology. In 1982, Tehran’s newly ensconced theocrats dispatched some 1,500 members of its elite Revolutionary Guards to southern Lebanon to train cadres who would later form Hezbollah’s core membership. Today, Iranian support for Hezbollah is estimated at $100 million a year, and is not just military in nature. After the 2006 ceasefire with Israel, Hezbollah distributed $12,000 in Iranian grants to each household affected by the war. Iran has also provided funds to build a network of roads in southern Lebanon to facilitate the transport of arms (billboards proclaim "Thanks to the Iranian Council! Rebuilding our Nation"). And Iran has used Hezbollah in kind: its militants have trained Shiites in Iraq to build roadside bombs.

* * *

But A Privilege to Die is about much more than the Levant’s notoriously fractious politics. Hezbollah is but one consequence of the Iranian regime’s revolutionary ambition. Ahmadinejad’s bravado during his recent visit to Lebanon makes perfect sense when one considers the gains Iran has made over the past decade. Aside from increasing its control over Lebanon’s fate, it has proceeded apace in its nuclear program, killed coalition troops in Afghanistan and Iraq without reprisal, and frustrated the Israeli-Palestinian peace process through its support of extremist organizations like Hamas. "Theirs is not a quixotic quest for dignity, a symbolic but doomed fight for the sake of empowerment," Cambanis writes.

Hezbollah’s role here cannot be underestimated. It punches far above its weight in ways that other political-parties-cum-terrorist groups have not (witness its attacks on a Jewish Community Center in Buenos Aires in 1994) and concerns itself with more than the mere give and take of Lebanese politics (where, Cambanis notes, "everyone had been playing chess, but Hezbollah had come also prepared to box.") Hezbollah has done no less, the author argues, than radicalize the Middle East even further in "resistance" to the West, a cause that draws upon a bottomless well of resentment and fanaticism. The group has helped to transform "secular Arab militancy into a culture of Islamic Resistance."

"The only way to lose was not to fight," writes Cambanis about the ideology of Hezbollah’s early militants. Its fervency has not abated, even in the wake of a devastating war that it started, nor in light of Israeli promises—given Hezbollah’s present-day role in the Lebanese government—to bring the next war to Beirut. Most frightening, as with any militant movement that claims divine backing, is that Hezbollah brings a messianic zeal to bear on everything it does. The Party of God’s ascendance in Lebanon and popularity throughout the Muslim world have shown that extremism works; that "regional war, civil war, political brinkmanship, and uncompromising ideology" can further political aims in ways that negotiation and non-violent protest do not. Surely, Iran has learned much from its proxy, with consequences yet to come.

In Every Generation�

Michael M. Rosen — Wed, 9 Nov 2011 00:00:00 EST

"We answered the call," a young man and his wife told me in 2004, two years after the man’s sister, her husband, and their child were brutally murdered on an Israeli road, leaving nine other children orphaned. I visited with the couple, who had adopted all nine of their nieces and nephews, as part of my San Diego synagogue’s Israeli terror victim relief program, and learned first-hand of the horrific tragedy that befell their family—and the heroism it inspired.

Giulio Meotti re-tells this story from the perspective of one of the survivors in A New Shoah, his detailed exploration of the human toll exacted by terrorism in Israel over the past 15 years, a book that encapsulates small narratives of brutality yielding to loving kindness.

The cultural editor of Italy’s Il Foglio and a Wall Street Journal contributor, Meotti spent four years in Israel meeting with the families of the fallen, absorbing their stories, and marinating in their sorrow. The book lovingly and unsparingly describes the victims and survivors of Palestinian terror attacks, making flesh the abstract newspaper headlines that antiseptically summarize (and minimize) the brutal carnage. As Meotti explains, recounting these tales is nothing less than "an act of solidarity against the abandonment and dereliction of these thousands of victims, young and old, children and infants, women and men."

Both the Nazis during World War II and the Islamists today aim to eradicate not only the Jewish people, but also the Jewish name, and hope to stamp out any sense of Jewish personhood. As the author puts it, "the silence of Chelmno and the silence after a suicide bombing, the Zyklon B of the Nazis and the suicide belts of Hamas have this in common: the total destruction of the victim." And so Meotti set about "giving a voice to Israeli families destroyed by terrorism, letting them speak as the memories are beginning to fade" as "a form of incarnation like those stark walls of names at [Yad Vashem, Israel’s] Holocaust memorial," which itself means "hand and name."

A sincere non-Jewish admirer of the Jewish state, Meotti enshrines the memory of the fallen in probably the most effective way possible: by gently turning over his pen to the families themselves. Seemingly half of the book consists of direct quotations by grieving parents, siblings, and children gleaned from interviews, eulogies, and other memorial speeches. These stories are organized haphazardly, and they’re often graphic and difficult to stomach—both tendencies appear to be intentional.

Now, eight years later, insulated by the remarkably successful West Bank security fence, we easily forget the extreme anguish and mortal fear in which Israelis wallowed during the Second Intifada. In the 15 years since Oslo, 1,723 Israelis—equivalent in percentage terms to 74,000 Americans, or roughly 25 9/11’s—have perished in some 150 suicide attacks, while another 10,000 have suffered injuries.

* * *

This inhuman slaughter transcends stereotypes. From leftist kibbutzniks protesting the security fence to immigrant security guards protecting open-air markets and coffee shops to Jerusalem doctors treating and working alongside Palestinians, the victims hail from every ethnic, political, denominational, and generational demographic in the Jewish state. As Meotti observes, Islamist terror knows no bounds; it sees, and attacks, anything that "represent[s] Jewish civilization." In particular, Meotti’s heart-wrenching depiction of the ghastly 2002 Passover Night bombing of the Park Hotel in Netanya shimmers with an almost literary brilliance. The theme of blood-painted by the Israelites on their doorposts the night of their exodus from Egypt; commemorated by four cups of wine at the Seder; accused for centuries by gentiles as the key ingredient in matzah; and, in 2002, now splattered across the devastated hotel dining room—mingled hauntingly in Meotti’s telling, like the admixture of Jewish persecution during Passovers past and present.

Meotti also catalogues the hundreds of Israeli victims of terrorism whose lives were tied in some way to the Holocaust: children of survivors and even survivors themselves, dwelling tranquilly in their homeland thousands of miles from the crematoria, until fanatical Jew-hatred returned to claim their lives, only at a different latitude. He tells of a funeral of five victims of the unnerving Sbarro pizza shop bombing in central Jerusalem, where the children and grandchildren of a Dutch Bergen-Belsen survivor were mercilessly slain. At the service, a woman lamented "this isn’t a funeral, it’s a Holocaust," while the Chief Rabbi of Israel, himself interned at Buchenwald, also cried out, "How long will it last, O my God, how long? It’s been three generations."

Although such echoes of the Holocaust indeed reverberate throughout Israel’s contemporary struggle with Palestinian terror, Meotti neither defines the term "Shoah" or marches through the key similarities in an organized fashion. In this sense, his study isn’t so much an argument that Jewry today finds itself plunged into another Holocaust as an evocation of its horrors. And though this tendency allows for beautifully told stories, it also, at times, shields the author from fully appreciating just how well Jewry nowadays is surviving and thriving because of Israel.

* * *

The book contains hints of the marvel of Israel as a safe haven, including Meotti’s description of the 2003 flyover by Israeli fighter jets above Auschwitz, when the air force general leading the squadron noted that he "felt the courage of the millions who faced infinite suffering" and "understood the enormity of our responsibility, in guaranteeing the immortality of our people and bearing their greatness upon our wings." Likewise, he characterizes a charitable fund that has raised and furnished hundreds of thousands of dollars in assistance to Israel’s terror victims as "a major sign of Israel’s triumph over Islamist destruction." Still, for the most part, Meotti seems content to focus on the disturbing continuities between the Jew-killing fever of the Holocaust and the related virus that has spread to the Arab-Muslim world, while downplaying the signal discontinuity represented by a vigorous and unapologetic Jewish state.

At the same time, however, another powerful discontinuity looms just 800 miles away in Tehran, and it is Meotti’s near-obliviousness to the Iranian threat that constitutes the book’s most significant flaw. The mullahs quite literally are plotting a new Shoah, even while Ahmadinejad denies the occurrence of the original. And as Daniel Gordis observed in Commentary, Iran need only develop, not detonate, a single nuclear device to sow precisely the kind of existential angst Israel was created to dispel; the potentially paralyzing fear of a second Holocaust is nearly as valuable to the Jewish people’s enemies as its implementation.

Admittedly, Meotti’s focus is deliberately limited to actual terrorist atrocities carried out against Jews in Israel (and abroad), which is an enormous and significant topic in its own right. But to write a book entitled A New Shoah without devoting so much as a chapter on a potential Shoah-in-the-making is, however unintentionally, to minimize its grave danger.

* * *

Toward the end of his book, Meotti quotes author Naomi Ragen, who survived the Passover Netanya attack, citing the immortal passage from the Haggadah: "not only in one generation have they sought our annihilation, but rather in every generation do they seek our destruction." Tragically true, and poignantly illustrated throughout this important book.

Yet equally significant is the passage’s conclusion: "But the Holy One, Blessed Be He, rescues us from their clutches." Even though its existence hasn’t curbed (and may even have whetted) the genocidal impulse, the Jewish state—a homeland for God’s "chosen people"—stands as a firm bulwark against future Jewish annihilation. In this sense, as Meotti recognizes in his conclusion, Israel itself has answered the call for a battered, bruised people.

The Art of Persuasion

Ross Douthat — Mon, 7 Nov 2011 00:00:00 EST

The art of persuasion rarely succeeds without a leap of imaginative sympathy. Identification tends to precede assent: to embrace any worldview, any philosophical position, one must first imagine oneself as the kind of person who could become a Christian or an atheist, a Marxist or a libertarian.

Thus autobiography is often the most compelling form of argument, and few polemics are quite so potent as a well-told conversion story. Whereas lesser writers merely hector the unconverted, the intellectual convert identifies with them, and inspires identification in return. As you are, I once was, he reminds the reader—a reassurance that makes it infinitely easier to proceed with the argument that As I am, you should become.

No writer understood this better than the late Irving Kristol. He was a serial convert: "I have been a neo-Marxist, a neo-Trotskyist, a neo-socialist, a neoliberal, and finally a neoconservative," he wrote in one of the heretofore-uncollected essays included in The Neoconservative Persuasion, a compilation, assembled by his wife Gertrude Himmelfarb, and son William, spanning Kristol’s six decades in the public square. The last of those conversions was of course his most influential one, and he helped guarantee its influence by weaving elements of his conversion story into almost every public argument he made.

Most of his peers, Kristol noted wryly, regarded his Nixon-era rightward turn as "the equivalent of a Jew ostentatiously eating pork on Yom Kippur." These were precisely the people whose minds his most effective essays set out to change. By my count, 9 of the 48 pieces in The Neoconservative Persuasion are explicitly devoted to discussing why Kristol ended up a neoconservative, and what that "persuasion" means to him. (This includes the 2003 piece written at the height of liberal anxiety over the "neocon" influence in the Bush Administration, which lends the book its title.) Many more deploy his conversion more subtly: the first person singular may not explicitly intrude, but one constantly has the sense of Kristol’s own persona and life story hovering over the argument, as a perpetual reminder to the wavering reader—who is presumed to share Kristol’s cosmopolitanism, and perhaps his Jewish roots as well—that the views being urged upon them belong, not to some Orange County burgher or Bible Belt philistine, but to the very model of an Upper West Side Jewish intellectual.

Consider an essay like 1984’s "The Political Dilemma of American Jews," written during Jesse Jackson’s first presidential campaign. Addressing the widespread Jewish dismay over Jackson’s anti-Semitic forays, Kristol begins by suggesting that his co-religionists are facing an intellectual crisis that combines "the three critical stages in the life cycle of the individual," as defined by "Erik Erikson, in his biography of Martin Luther."

The explicit (and characteristically provocative) analogy here is between American Jews in the age of "Hymietown" and a Protestant reformer known for his own anti-Semitic excesses. But when Kristol quotes Erikson’s claim that "in some phases of his life cycle...man needs a new ideological orientation as surely and as sorely as he must have air and food," anyone who knows anything about the essay’s author understands that the model being invoked isn’t Martin Luther, but Kristol himself. His personal reorientation is being held up, implicitly but obviously, as the potential answer to the collective crisis of his people.

Or consider Kristol’s two essays on supply-side theory, 1977’s "Toward a ‘New’ Economics?" and 1981’s "Ideology and Supply-Side Economics." Not content simply to defend the supply-side idea against its critics, he expends as many words explaining the historical genesis of the position as he does arguing for its merits. Again, the autobiographical element is implicit but absolutely crucial. Here is how I, a man like yourself, came to embrace these controversial notions, Kristol seems to be saying. Perhaps you might consider embracing them as well.

Not every reader was swayed by such appeals, of course. (Most American Jews remain staunch Democrats, and supply-side economics never gained a mass following among the New York intelligentsia.) And somewhat fewer, perhaps, are swayed by them today. For all its strength as a polemic, the conversion story inevitably becomes a little less persuasive once the world that it describes has passed into history, and the convert himself has passed to his reward.

Without Kristol here to defend it, then, it’s not surprising that neoconservatism has fallen lately into a kind of disrepute—not only among his longtime liberal antagonists, but among many conservatives as well.

On the Left, neoconservatives get the blame for the various foreign policy debacles of the past decade, and particularly for the Wilsonian fervor that accompanied some of the Bush Administration’s lower moments. On the Right, they often get blamed for the Republican Party’s un-conservative spending record during the Bush era, which Tea Partiers and libertarians trace to neoconservatism’s unseemly comfort with the post-New Deal welfare state. (The admirers of Ron Paul, of course, advance both of these critiques at once, linking statism at home to utopianism abroad and blaming the neocons for both.)

At times, the essays in The Neoconservative Persuasion suggest that these critics have a point. Neoconservatism may not be a rigid ideology, but even as a "persuasion" it comes with certain defining attributes, which recur throughout Kristol’s repeated explanations of his worldview. In domestic policy, these include a preference for economic growth over balanced budgets, a belief that the post-New Deal welfare state should not be torn up root and branch but rather "reconstruct[ed]...along more economical and humane lines," and a sense of the importance of religion and public morals that extended naturally to a sympathy for the post-1970s Religious Right. In foreign affairs, they include an emphasis on military strength and moral clarity, a skepticism of international institutions and a hostility to anything that looks remotely like world government, and a definition of the national interest that’s both geographically expansive and includes "ideological interests in addition to more material concerns."

One need not succumb to the lazy anti-neocon paranoia of the mid-2000s to see some of the Bush Administration’s failures foreshadowed in this list. The neoconservative emphasis on growth over balanced budgets, for instance, contributed to a dangerous Republican insouciance about deficits, and a naïve assumption that tax cuts could always pay for themselves. The neoconservative preference for what Kristol termed "strong government over weak government" anticipated the expansion of federal spending and power under Bush’s "compassionate conservatism." The neoconservative insistence on the ideological element in American foreign policy helped inspire a naïveté about our ability to reshape distant societies to our liking, given voice in Bush’s implausible Second Inaugural assertion that "America’s vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one."

* * *

But a careful reading of The Neoconservative Persuasion also suggests that Kristol would be ready with two rejoinders to this indictment, were he returned to us to face it. The first would be directed at those on the Right (libertarians, Tea Partiers, Glenn Beck watchers, and so forth) inclined to dismiss neoconservatism as a kind of intellectualized RINO-ism-a hopeless sell-out to big government, a watering-down of the true conservative faith. Yes, Kristol might agree, neoconservatism is not so pure as libertarianism, and not so stalwartly anti-government as the Goldwater-era Right. But this is precisely why it has been effective, in politics and public policy alike, where other conservatisms have often failed. Most Republican politicians "could not care less about neoconservatism" as a doctrine, he wrote in 2003, but it has not passed their notice that "it is the neoconservative public policies, not the traditional Republican ones, that result in popular Republican presidencies."

As the last line rightly suggests, the Bush White House was not the first Republican administration to be informed by the neoconservative persuasion. If the neocons deserve the blame for what went wrong with Bush, then they get to claim the credit for what went right with Ronald Reagan—a president, it should be recalled, whose inaugural address included the eminently neoconservative promise not to "do away with government," but to make it "work with us, not over us; to stand by our side, not ride on our back." And not only Reagan: From Rudy Giuliani and Newt Gingrich to Mitch Daniels and Paul Ryan, the most effective conservative politicians have always heeded Kristol’s admonition that "you can’t beat a horse with no horse," and the policies they’ve championed—from supply-side economics to welfare reform to Ryan’s famous Roadmap—have generally sought to reform rather than abolish the post-New Deal edifice.

Perhaps the Tea Party will prove the exception: a case where conservatism without anything "neo" about it succeeds at finally overthrowing the welfare state entirely. But a glance at the polls showing strong Tea Party support for Medicare and Social Security suggests that even in a Rick Perry or Michele Bachmann presidency, the neoconservative persuasion will still have an important role to play.

The second plausible rejoinder to neoconservatism’s critics, meanwhile, would double as a warning to the conservative movement as a whole—to Kristol’s heirs as well as to his critics, to supply-siders and interventionists and social conservatives as well as libertarians and deficit hawks. The neoconservative impulse, Kristol might remind them, originated in a skepticism of both left-wing and right-wing orthodoxies, and a willingness to grapple with complexities that neither party platform seemed to be addressing. To the extent that neoconservatism went astray in the Bush years, it was precisely because it lost touch with this original skepticism, and became a party line unto itself—as much of a bubble, in certain ways, as the one that still encloses much of the liberal intelligentsia today.

* * *

The best way for today’s right-wingers to break out of this bubble, then, isn’t to repudiate neoconservatism entirely. Rather, they would do well to revive its heterodox spirit, and remind themselves of what Irving Kristol’s persuasion originally meant. Here certain essays in The Neoconservative Persuasion offer an excellent place to start. Today’s more zealous foreign policy hawks, for instance, would do well to revisit the Kristol who wrote, in 1993, that "a renascent nationalism" should be accompanied by "a renascent neo-realism in foreign policy," which would look somewhat askance at the Wilsonian dream of "benign humanitarian imperialism." The more naïve supply-siders would do well to note that in 1981 Kristol invoked the Laffer curve in support of cutting the top income tax from 70% to "say, 40 percent," rather than insisting that every decrease in the marginal tax rates will yield a revenue windfall. And Obama-era conservatism’s many Ayn Rand devotees might profit (if you will) from his 1979 essay "No Cheers For the Profit Motive," which defends capitalism while raising an eyebrow at the moral valorization of profit-seeking—an impulse, Kristol notes, that’s no less shadowed by original sin than the quest for sex or power or any other earthly good.

In these moments of clarity about the excesses to which conservatives are heir, no less than in his long argument with liberalism, Irving Kristol proves his great worth as a public intellectual. He was sometimes an enthusiast but rarely a pure cheerleader, and at his best he managed to advance a compelling critique of left-of-center politics without losing sight of the places where the right-wing alternative tends to go astray.

This combination, rare in our intellectual life, offers something to both critics and his comrades, and it makes the rich material in The Neoconservative Persuasion worth returning to for as long as Left and Right endure.

The Incredible Shrinking Presidency

Joseph Postell — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 00:00:00 EST

In 1952 Justice Robert H. Jackson said "the rise of administrative bodies" was "the most significant legal trend of the last half-century." That trend has continued in the ensuing 59 years, during which the administrative state lost only a handful of skirmishes while consolidating its victories and expanding its domain.

In The Executive Unbound, eminent legal scholars Eric A. Posner and Adrian Vermeule declare the contest over, and the result a triumph for executive power. Furthermore, they argue, the right side won. Modern democracies give more and more power to an unfettered executive because it’s the only way to govern complex societies. "Liberal legalists" object to the lack of legal constraints on the administrative state because they suffer from "tyrannophobia," an unwarranted and excessive fear of unrestrained executive power.

The argument of The Executive Unbound alternates between a bold and a soft formulation. The bold one, implied by the title, is that we live in a post-Madisonian republic, where the need to oblige the government to control itself is an anachronism. The softer formulation, to which the authors periodically retreat, asserts that the executive is indeed bound, but by political rather than legal constraints, which are stronger in domestic than in foreign policy, and which vanish almost entirely during emergencies. Public opinion, in their view, protects liberty better than clunky, ineffectual parchment barriers. The softer formulation, more persuasive (and more Madisonian) but certainly less controversial, results in a book whose dust jacket promises more than its pages deliver.

The Executive Unbound argues that James Madison’s Constitution contained important errors. In particular, the separation of powers was doubly flawed. First, Madison was wrong to believe that the personal motives of officials could be connected to the constitutional offices they held. Short time-horizons and collective-action problems prevent individual legislators and judges from working to augment the institutional strength of Congress and the courts. Only the executive branch is exempt from these difficulties.

Second, the separation of powers does not produce socially optimal results. The price mechanism allows the uncoordinated and decentralized decisions of economic actors to generate growing prosperity, but no invisible hand alchemizes political self-interest into the public good. "There is no general mechanism ensuring that the decentralized decisions of branches will produce the optimal level of checking," Posner and Vermeule write, "except possibly in an accidental and temporary fashion."

Beyond its flawed separation of powers, the Constitution’s Article V is too cumbersome to be an adequate vehicle for constitutional change. Madison’s arguments about the virtues of constitutional stability inadequately accounted for the importance of constitutional adaptability. The result was a structure that has relied on constitutional "showdowns" rather than legal mechanisms to effect needed corrections.

These three flaws in the Constitution rendered the rise of the administrative state inevitable and beneficial, according to The Executive Unbound.

Unfortunately for this argument, modern legislative-executive relations tend to confirm Madison’s expectations. When President Obama initiated hostilities in Libya, it was not only Republicans but also House Democrats who objected to the administration’s failure to notify Congress in advance of the attack. John Larson and Maxine Waters (among others) expressed constitutional concerns over the president’s action. (Dennis Kucinich, predictably, brought up the possibility of impeachment.) When the president used White House "czars" to increase the administration’s control of the bureaucracy, it was Russ Feingold and the late Robert C. Byrd who objected to such efforts to manage what is often thought to be the executive branch. And when Obama sought enhanced rescission authority to control lavish congressional spending projects, fellow Democrats in Congress were reluctant to fall in line.

These institutional cleavages, real and powerful, are perhaps the major cause of internal party divisions these days. Contrary to the argument of The Executive Unbound, ambitions appear to be counteracting ambitions often and reliably.

* * *

Having dismissed the Madisonian Constitution, Posner and Vermeule ask whether we might find constraints on executive power in ordinary statutes. If the Constitution is "too rickety" to constrain executive power, what about laws passed by Congress? The authors have in mind, specifically, foreign policy-related statutes, such as the War Powers Resolution, and the central statute governing the administrative state domestically, the Administrative Procedure Act (APA).

According to Posner and Vermeule, such restraints on the executive are also ineffective. The foreign affairs laws are "dead letters" and APA "contains a series of adjustable parameters that the courts use to dial up and down the intensity of their scrutiny over time." In other words, APA contains both legal "black holes" and "grey holes" that grant wide discretion to administrative agencies. For instance, the notice-and-comment procedures for agency rulemaking do not have to be followed if an agency asserts "good cause" for not doing so, and the courts frequently accept the agencies’ reasoning. Similarly, APA grants courts the authority to overturn arbitrary or capricious agency actions, a "standard" of review that is too elastic to be a standard.

These and other ambiguities in APA, the authors allege, ensure that we remain a regime with an unbound executive branch. In fact, nearly the opposite has occurred. The black holes and grey holes work to the courts’ advantage, not the president’s, since the courts can (in Posner and Vermeule’s admission) "dial up and down the intensity of their scrutiny" of agency action. Modern administrative law is a story of how the Progressives’ original vision for an unbridled administrative apparatus was thwarted by liberals who, no longer trusting agencies to act in the public interest, enlisted interest groups and courts to constrain agency activity. In this endeavor they were aided by an enthusiastic Congress, perfectly happy to reassert control over administrative agencies that constituted more and more of the federal government.

The famous decision of Massachusetts v. EPA in 2007 is instructive. The Environmental Protection Agency had determined that it was not required to regulate new automobiles’ tailpipe emissions under the Clean Air Act. Rather than getting its way, the agency was told by the Supreme Court that it had the statutory power, and perhaps the duty, to regulate these emissions. If the agency were so "unbound," how could the Court assign regulatory obligations to it?

In other words, the evidence the authors use to demonstrate an unbound executive yields exactly the opposite conclusion. In today’s administrative state the executive is comparatively powerless to control agency decision-making, but Congress (with its powers of the purse and program authorization) and the courts (through judicial review) can dramatically affect administrative outcomes.

* * *

A second fundamental error undermines the book’s contention that the expansion of the administrative state entails an expansion of executive power. Posner and Vermeule are doubtless correct that the administrative state has altered significantly the framers’ design. As they rightly explain, the original Constitution plus its amendments "does not even approximate the political terrain" of today. As Justice Byron White acknowledged in Buckley v. Valeo (1976), "the development of the administrative agency...has placed severe strain on the separation of powers principle."

But the authors go further. They not only argue that the administrative state has upset the original constitutional framework, but that it has expanded executive power beyond the reach of any legal constraints. In their view, "the facts of the modern administrative state" entail "massive delegation to the executive," threatening "to relegate legislatures and courts to the sidelines." Because there are no laws to check the power of the executive in the administrative state, the constraints of public opinion are all that remain.

Though it may be true that the administrative state has changed the constitutional landscape, it has not resulted in the expansion of executive power, because administrative power is not the same as executive power. Administrative agencies occupy a mysterious netherworld in our government, rather than fitting neatly into the executive branch. Their powers combine legislative, executive, and judicial functions.

This point was well understood by the early theoreticians of the administrative state. Herbert Croly wrote in Progressive Democracy that executive powers involve merely carrying out the clearly expressed will of a superior agent, while modern administrative powers combine all the powers of government. This is why administrators and their activities are often exempt from presidential control. As James Landis, one of Franklin Roosevelt’s most trusted advisors, explained, "the resort to the administrative process is not, as some suppose, simply an extension of executive power.... In the grant to [an agency] of that full ambit of authority necessary for it in order to plan, to promote, and to police, it presents an assemblage of rights normally exercisable by government as a whole."

Thus, for administrative agencies to "execute" a law that contains no definite rules or measures of action does not make their powers executive in nature. Modern agencies legislate, execute, and adjudicate, and are accountable to Congress, the courts, and the President, rather than to the chief executive exclusively. The delegation of power to the administrative state has resulted in a new separation of powers, between four branches of government: Congress, the president, the courts, and the agencies. The executive branch is more tightly bound as a result of this change, since the president does not have tools equal to his competitors in the ongoing struggle to steer the federal bureaucracy.

Debating the Debates

Charles R. Kesler — Sat, 22 Oct 2011 00:00:00 EST

Saturday Night Live, that reliable and now venerable source of political satire, took aim recently at the race for the Republican presidential nomination. It announced its spoof as "Either the 7th or 8th GOP Debate," nicely capturing the ennui already setting in. With nine candidates on stage, a half dozen more debates to come, and the primaries still three or four months away, why do we tune in to the spectacle, which-with Rick Perry played not by Alec Baldwin but by the real governor of Texas-is bound to be both a comedic and dramatic disappointment?

American politics has had its share of great debates, but never at the presidential level. Our proudest forensic exchanges—Webster and Hayne, Lincoln and Douglas, the debate on the annexation of the Philippines, to name a few—have taken place in constitutional conventions, Senate races, on the House or Senate floor, on Bill Buckley’s Firing Line, almost anywhere but in a platform shared by two or more candidates for the presidency.

For an office designed at least partly with George Washington in mind, debating skills were never a high priority. The president is commander-in-chief of the armed forces; has the power to make treaties and appoint ambassadors, Supreme Court justices, and cabinet officers (with the Senate’s advice and consent); and wields the veto pen and issues pardons and reprieves at his discretion. But none of these or his few other constitutionally prescribed powers and duties requires him to debate anyone. The tradition of presidential debating is not only relatively new (Kennedy-Nixon in 1960 was the first), it tests an art or aptitude that is irrelevant to the job.

In a parliamentary system, the logic is quite different. The prime minister, like every one of his cabinet members, is first of all a member of parliament, and secondly a member of his party’s majority in parliament. In Great Britain and similar countries, the executive officeholders arise out of the legislature and eventually return to it, rather than being decisively separated from it as in our arrangement. One of the glories of the British system is "question time," when the prime minister and his cabinet colleagues must answer their fellow legislators’ inquiries about government policy. Before Margaret Thatcher or Tony Blair took a turn at answering questions, however, each had spent years asking them and debating other MPs. Debate skills are honed in such service, and are a necessary, normal, and sometimes noble part of parliamentary democracy.

* * *

But there is no question time for American presidents, who answer to the people via elections but to the Congress hardly at all. (The chief exception, impeachment, is a quasi-judicial proceeding, not a legislative debate.) Woodrow Wilson disparaged this separation of the president from the Congress, regarding it as a lost opportunity for presidential leadership and for a more enlightened citizenry. He envied the soaring oratorical contests of Gladstone and Disraeli in the House of Commons, which he thought the British people followed more keenly than they did the cricket scores. As a young man, Wilson even proposed a series of constitutional amendments to turn our system into a parliamentary one, but soon abandoned the wholly impracticable scheme and settled on the notion of remaking the president into a serial speech-giver who would lead public opinion, and through public opinion would lead Congress.

If he could come back and listen to a month’s worth of Barack Obama’s speeches, he might repent of this decision. Obama’s university education, very defective by his own admission, apparently did not include the law of diminishing returns: the more he speaks, the less people listen. That’s not Wilson’s fault, but our fascination with presidential debating is, at least in part.

With one minute for answers, 30 seconds for rebuttals, a line of candidate—Rockettes each waiting to show some leg, preening questioners trying to outshine the candidates, additional queries pouring in from Facebook, Twitter, Google, and other parts of la-la land, and video clips of past "performances" at the ready—if anything resembling a debate takes place in this GOP circle of hell it’s a miracle. When Lincoln and Douglas went at it in the 1858 Senate race, they spoke for three hours-an hour-and-a-half each, on the issues as they defined them, without benefit of media clergy. The reporters stood or sat quietly in the audience and took notes. The thousands who had assembled to witness the debate (there were seven of them, up and down Illinois) had to strain to hear, for there were no microphones and loudspeakers, but the speeches were worth hearing.

So why do we tune in? Perhaps because we learn, despite the game-show distractions, a little something about the candidates and issues. Or more likely, so we’ll get the jokes on Saturday Night Live.

A New Birth of Economic Freedom

Richard A. Epstein — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 00:00:00 EST

For mainstream scholars, journalists, and intellectuals, the notorious Dred Scott decision of 1857 wins the gold medal in the Worst Supreme Court Decision Olympics. An equally broad and emphatic consensus awards the silver medal to the Supreme Court’s 1905 decision in Lochner v. New York. The supposition that these two polar opposites are linked reveals the progressive worldview’s boundless capacity to get important questions not merely wrong but exactly backwards. Dred Scott held that individuals who were born slaves could never become citizens of the United States, regardless of when and how they came to be free. By contrast, Lochner held that ordinary people, even foreign immigrants, were entitled, as autonomous human beings, to make their own decisions about how, why, and on what terms to exchange economic goods and services.

In Rehabilitating Lochner: Defending Individual Rights Against Progressive Reform, David Bernstein, a professor at the George Mason University Law School, takes on the task of demonstrating that the conventional denunciation of Lochner is both inaccurate and unfair. By dint of his hard work and meticulous research, we can say, Mission Accomplished!

At issue in Lochner was the constitutionality of a New York statute, the Bakeshop Act, which prohibited certain kinds of bakers from working more than 10 hours per day or 60 hours per week. Joseph Lochner, owner of a bakery in Utica, located in upstate New York, was convicted of a criminal offense and forced to pay a fine when he required his workers to work longer hours. Tellingly, the workers themselves never complained of ill-treatment.

Lochner offered two defenses against this prosecution, both based on the twin 14th Amendment’s guarantees that no state shall "deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." Lochner claimed, first, that the Bakeshop Act violated his rights under the Due Process Clause to enter freely into voluntary contracts with others. The police power exception meant that this liberty could be abridged only to protect the health, safety, morals, or general welfare of the public at large. Second, Lochner argued New York’s legislation denied him equal protection of the laws by imposing these restrictions only on some types of bakers, not all.

In theory, this equal protection claim is weaker than the liberty of contract claim. The state has two possible responses to successful equal protection challenges: either remove the restriction on the regulated bakers or extend it to all bakers. Each approach makes the difference between classes disappear. The Due Process Clause does not give the state that second out, since the maximum hour restrictions in the New York law, if held to be impermissible restrictions on the liberty of contract, would be unconstitutional whether they applied to all bakers or only some. The state can equalize only upward if there is a valid claim under the Due Process Clause.

* * *

It’s no wonder, therefore, that the liberty of contract claim proved to be a major battleground in the early Progressive Era. Justice Rufus Peckham, writing for the five-member Lochner majority, held that the New York statute did not fall into any of the permissible police power categories. Instead, he classified the statute as a "labor law," intended to stifle competition by one class of bakers against its economic rivals. That logic proved to have important consequences for other cases of that era. Most notably, the Lochner understanding of freedom of contract prevailed against mandatory collective bargaining regimes, whether implemented by the federal government or by the states. Those decisions held for about a generation before they were overturned in practice by the passage of the Railway Labor Act and the National Labor Relations Act, enacted in 1926 and 1935, respectively.

To the Progressive mind, Peckham’s judicial rejection of "worker protection" legislation showed how five badly out-of-touch justices failed to grasp the growing perils that industrialization posed to workers. The most powerful incarnation of the Progressive view was not in the long, elaborate dissent by Justice John Marshall Harlan, which concluded that the ten-hour limitation on bakers, like the limitation in an 1898 case on maximum hours for miners, was a health statute and thus fell within the state’s police power. Harlan, in other words, agreed with Peckham on the constitutional validity of the distinction between health and labor statutes, but drew the line in a place more favorable to the state. Yet once the overhanging health and safety issues were out of the case, it was Harlan who, in Adair v. United States (1908), struck down the federal collective bargaining statute as an unconstitutional labor law.

In Lochner the progressives’ true hero was Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., whose pithy dissent mounted a frontal attack on the entire classical liberal synthesis shared by Peckham and Harlan. Holmes asserted, without trying to demonstrate, that the maximum hours statute could be justified on grounds of health. But his larger attack was on the very notion of freedom of contract, which he dismissed as an inappropriate "shibboleth" for the modern industrial age. His most famous barb was that the 14th Amendment did not "enact Mr. Herbert Spencer’s Social Statics," even though the connection between laissez-faire economics and constitutional principles is far tighter than Holmes acknowledged.

The key point for Holmes, therefore, was his false assertion that the Constitution did not pick sides on what he perceived as a purely economic struggle between warring interest groups, which had to be resolved by political means only. Even though Holmes was a skeptic about the power of regulation to hold back strong economic forces, he thought Congress and the states could try whatever futile experiments they wanted in order to stem the tide of the perceived abuses of industrialization. It is precisely because Holmes thought the theory of limited government had no constitutional pedigree that he became a charter member in the Progressive hall of fame.

* * *

In tackling these fundamental issues, David Bernstein brings a wealth of historical information to the raging dispute over Lochner. For the most part, he does not weigh in on the critical doctrinal issues that separate Peckham (and Harlan) from Holmes. Rather he takes a more modest, but ultimately rewarding approach. He thus explains in painful and convincing detail why it was the enlightened Progressives, not the so-called reactionaries of the "Old Court," who utterly failed to appreciate the long-term social harm wrought by their own misguided reform agenda.

In developing this thesis, Bernstein resorts neither to high philosophy nor deep economic theory. Instead, he relentlessly tracks down every obscure newspaper story, tract, and pamphlet that sheds light on the extensive, prolonged union efforts to take over the baking industry. The objective was to impose burdens on non-union bakeries staffed by recent immigrants that were far heavier than those borne by their unionized competitors. The health law claims were fig leaves for their protectionist activities.

The maximum hours law neatly illustrates how a statute can be neutral on its face but discriminate between two rival classes of enterprises in the same industry. The immigrant bakers worked long single shifts, and often quite literally slept on the job after preparing loaves for baking in the evening and collecting them the next morning. These workers would be shut out of the market by an innocuous-sounding 10-hour maximum-hour law, and the rival union operations left the only ones standing, since they used two separate shifts, each of which worked less than the 10-hour maximum.

On Bernstein’s persuasive reasoning, Lochner rightly rejected the unions’ politically successful rent-seeking. He is also correct in showing how Lochner might have played out in three explosive areas: sex, race, and religion. On the first, Bernstein recounts the sad story of the 1908 case of Muller v. Oregon, in which a chivalrous Supreme Court unanimously upheld Oregon’s law prohibiting women from working more than 10 hours a day. The beneficiaries of this gallantry, the female employees of Curt Muller’s laundry business, all wound up being displaced by male Chinese immigrants not subject to the law.

Muller was also notable for Louis Brandeis’s "social science" brief that carefully sought to steer the Oregon maximum-hours law into the health and safety categories recognized under Lochner. Brandeis’s call for maximum hours laws protecting women, resting on endless recitations from learned studies about the United States and Europe, carried the day in the Supreme Court.

Unfortunately, his brief was in fact a sterile endeavor. It paid no attention whatsoever to the huge increases in life expectancy and wealth that took place where the liberty of contract was protected, in large part because his brief at no point recognized the critical proposition of all successful economies: the logic of mutual gain through voluntary exchange.

Furthermore, Brandeis’s brief could not explain why the selective restriction on women’s job options helped to advance their cause. On this issue, at least, the progressive movement has retreated from its protectionist agenda. As Bernstein notes, modern feminists rightly perceive that protective women-only legislation curtails women’s economic opportunities. For them, the truly menacing decision came in 1873 when the Court upheld, in Bradwell v. Illinois, a legal prohibition against the practice of law by women on the ground that their destiny in some larger social plan required them to serve only as wives and mothers.

Even if we suppose, for the sake of the argument, that women don’t want to work as lawyers, it should still be their decision about how they lead their own lives, not the state’s. What matters is that a sound system of laws lets men and women decide which jobs to compete for and why, free of the heavy hand of the state.

* * *

The picture on race is even bleaker, precisely because during its supposed heyday Lochner was never used to strike down segregationist laws. Bernstein is especially compelling in severing the linkage that noted liberal scholars such as Bruce Ackerman and Cass Sunstein have tried to forge between Lochner and the lamentable 1896 Supreme Court decision of Plessy v. Ferguson. Plessy’s broad reading of the police power allowed for segregation in public schools and on public transportation, and for laws that prohibited marriages between the races.

One supposed link between Plessy and Lochner is that Justice Rufus Peckham, who wrote Lochner, had previously joined the Plessy majority. But, as Bernstein notes, this dubious connection reveals only the inconsistency in Peckham’s own worldview, which is best explained by recalling that Peckham himself was a "copperhead" during the Civil War-that is, a Northerner who sympathized with the South.

Intellectually, of course, the relationship runs in the opposite direction. Lochner is most notable for recognizing limits to the state’s police power. Plessy flouted that understanding by treating coercive state laws as though they were only upholding genteel social practices. Indeed, it took a Lochner-like intervention, starting in the late 1930s, for the Supreme Court to begin to vindicate the rights of African-American citizens who for too long had been neglected in both the political and economic arenas.

* * *

Finally, the story on religion has something of a happy ending. The great defense of religious liberty is found in the 1925 decision in Pierce v. Society of Sisters, in which Justice James McReynolds (a vicious anti-Semite, no less) held that the Due Process Clause protected the liberty of parents to contract to send their children to parochial schools. With Lochner’s decline, Pierce was repackaged as a case dealing with the Free Exercise of Religion. In that area, the modern court protects individual freedom unless there are some strong interests of health and safety that justify a restriction. A prohibition on child sacrifice, and perhaps even child labor, would satisfy that restraint. At this point, the modern law narrows the scope of those interests that are subject to constitutional protection. Religious reasons now qualify to exempt children from public schooling, but objections to public education on other grounds may not. Yet once the case falls within the protected domain, the narrow police power justifications have to be satisfied to sustain the restrictions. The classical liberal synthesis thus survives, but only in limited fields of endeavor.

Bernstein’s minute dissection of the Progressive movement thus makes good on his claim that careful legal thinkers should reaffirm the principle of liberty of contract across the board. Far from being the wild invention of unprincipled judges, that doctrine links together the classical liberal protections that span contract, property, speech, and religion. In these times of economic stress and turmoil, it would be indeed welcome if the Supreme Court acknowledged the power of the classical liberal paradigm, in order to confess, and undo, its prior errors.

The Lost Decade

Angelo M. Codevilla — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 00:00:00 EST

America’s ruling class lost the "War on Terror." During the decade that began on September 11, 2001, the U.S. government’s combat operations have resulted in some 6,000 Americans killed and 30,000 crippled, caused hundreds of thousands of foreign casualties, and spent—depending on various estimates of direct and indirect costs—somewhere between 2 and 3 trillion dollars. But nothing our rulers did post-9/11 eliminated the threat from terrorists or made the world significantly less dangerous. Rather, ever-bigger government imposed unprecedented restrictions on the American people and became the arbiter of prosperity for its cronies, as well as the manager of permanent austerity for the rest. Although in 2001 many referred to the United States as "the world’s only superpower," ten years later the near-universal perception of America is that of a nation declining, perhaps irreversibly. This decade convinced a majority of Americans that the future would be worse than the past and that there is nothing to be done about it. This is the "new normal." How did this happen?

September 11’s planners could hardly have imagined that their attacks might seriously undermine what Americans had built over two centuries, what millions of immigrants from the world over had come to join and maintain. In fact, our decline happened because the War on Terror—albeit microscopic in size and destructiveness as wars go—forced upon us, as wars do, the most important questions that any society ever faces: Who are we, and who are our enemies? What kind of peace do we want? What does it take to get it? Are we able and willing to do what it takes to secure our preferred way of life, to deserve living the way we prefer? Our bipartisan ruling class’s dysfunctional responses to such questions inflicted the deepest wounds.

Wars in general increase the power of any polity’s ruling class to answer such questions in its way, and to work its will. Hard times force regimes, as they force individuals, to prove what they are made of. That is why regimes are never more themselves, at home and abroad, than during wartime. After 9/11, at home and abroad, our bipartisan ruling class did the characteristic things it had done before—just more of them, and more intensely. In short, the War on Terror empowered this ruling class to show its mettle, and it did so. Ten years later, the results speak for themselves: the terrorists’ force mineure proved to be the occasion for our own ruling elites and their ideas to plunge the country into troubles from which they cannot extricate it.

Most often, wars are won and lost by a faction of a diverse ruling class. Victories validate the winners and what they stand for. Defeats usher in competitors waiting in the wings. So for example, the defeat of Lord North’s cabinet in the American Revolutionary War empowered William Pitt the Younger’s faction, including Adam Smith. When John F. Kennedy’s old-line liberals lost the Vietnam War, their discredit empowered Democratic and Republican successors who embodied an America more collectivist at home and more timid abroad. Such changes, though big, are evolutionary because they simply bring to the fore people and ways that had been gestating within the Establishment.

When, however, the losers are a whole ruling class, and when that class is pervasive enough to have banished to society’s margins any people and ideas that diverge from it, its discredit really does put society in a revolutionary situation. For example, the Soviet regime’s loss of the Cold War plunged that country into a downward spiral because three generations of Communist rule had utterly destroyed living memory of anything but dysfunctional people and ways.

America’s current ruling class, the people who lost the War on Terror, monopolizes the upper reaches of American public life, the ranks of those who make foreign and domestic policy, including the leadership of the Republican and Democratic parties. It is more or less homogeneous socially and intellectually. In foreign affairs, the change from the Bush to the Obama Administrations was barely noticeable. In domestic matters, the differences are more quantitative than qualitative. Dissent from the ruling class is rife among the American people, but occurs mostly on the sidelines of our politics. If there is to be a reversal of the ongoing defeats, both foreign and domestic, that have discredited contemporary America’s bipartisan mainstream, heretofore marginal people will have to generate it, applying ideas and practices recalled from America’s successful past.

The world of 2011 is even less congenial to America and Americans than it was on September 10, 2001. The U.S. government is not responsible for all the ways in which the world was menacing then and is menacing now, of course. Regardless of what America did, China’s challenge to the post-1945 Peace of the Pacific was going to become more serious. Vladimir Putin’s neo-Soviet Russia was not and could not be anything but a major bother. Western Europe would be living off civilizational capital it had lost the will to replenish, irrespective of any American deeds or entreaties. The Muslim world would be choking on the dysfunctions inherent in its government and cultures.

But U.S. policy has made things worse because the liberal internationalists, realists, and neoconservatives who make up America’s foreign policy Establishment have all assumed that Americans should undertake the impossible task of changing such basic facts, rather than confining themselves to the difficult but vital work of guarding U.S. interests against them. For the Establishment, 9/11 meant opportunities to press for doing more of what they had always tried to do.

At home, the American people are less free, less prosperous, more bitterly divided, and much less hopeful in 2011 than in 2001 because a decade of the War on Terror brought a government ever bigger and more burdensome, as well as "security" measures that impede the innocent rather than focusing on wrongdoers. Our ruling class justified its ever-larger role in America’s domestic life by redefining war as a never-ending struggle against unspecified enemies for abstract objectives, and by asserting expertise far above that of ordinary Americans. After 9/11, far from deliberating on the best course to take, our rulers stayed on autopilot and hit the throttles.

We must, then, understand what our bipartisan ruling class wrought in international and domestic affairs during the post-9/11 war, and how differently the decade might have turned out had our rulers pursued the proper ends of domestic and international statecraft.

Degrading our Military

In world affairs, the most significant long-term result of the post-9/11 decade is the transformation of the U.S. armed forces into a constabulary designed to occupy unfriendly peoples while our policies attempt to "build" them into friendly nations. This shifting of the American military mind—transforming war into nation-building—started during Vietnam and accelerated in this decade. The material aspects are easy to note: whereas a generation ago the Navy had some 600 combatant ships, today it has 284—ever fewer of which are fit for controlling the open seas, the role appropriate to an island nation’s navy. Typical is the diversion of funds to a few Littoral Combat Ships, intended for small-scale penetration of hostile coasts, and away from major combatants such as the Virginia-class submarines. Small-scale penetration of Asia’s coast is irrelevant to China’s challenge, and good as the Virginia-class subs are, they no longer simply outclass the competition: the newest Russian models dive deeper, run faster, and are nearly as quiet. In short, as China extends its capacity to monopolize the Western Pacific rim, the U.S. Navy has ever fewer means to contest it, and our surface fleet can no longer venture confidently where the Russians don’t want it.

The story is the same on land and in the air. In 2002 as part of the transformation to America’s new model military, then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld canceled the Army’s new self-propelled, remote-controlled artillery system. What good would it do, so went the argument, in any situation other than combat against sophisticated, powerful enemies? It would be useless in the urban warfare into which the War on Terror had degenerated and for which America’s land forces were being refashioned. The same logic led to the 2009 cancellation of the F-22 Raptor, surely the world’s finest fighter-bomber airplane. No more than 187 would ever be built. Why? Because the Russians and Chinese were slower than expected in building comparable planes. When they do build them, the U.S. will oppose them with the F-35—a cheaper and less capable plane. But the government does not believe it will ever have to fight sophisticated opponents. And besides, it needed the money for the War on Terror.

Arguably this war’s most typical purchase has been the Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle (MRAP), some 15,000 of which were ordered at an approximate cost of $20 billion. The idea was to make it safer for our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan to live and move in places infested by powerful land mines, emplaced and replaced day after day. Such mines have inflicted the bulk of U.S. casualties in the War on Terror. Of course the MRAPs don’t work against shaped charges designed to penetrate them. In short, they cannot make sense out of the criminal nonsense of operating in perpetually replenished minefields. The point is that even had the transformation of the armed forces secured victory in that war, it still would have materially crippled America’s capacity for dealing with any other kind of war.

The armed forces’ moral decline is more serious. The quality of senior officers (as opposed to that of senior non-commissioned officers, who advance through exams) results from advancement via "efficiency reports"—that is, from pleasing superiors. It starts with generals and admirals chosen for compatibility with the ruling class rather than for winning wars. Below that, the command and general staff colleges and the war colleges help filter out the warriors at the field-grade level. The fact that more officers who have finished their initial military obligation (Army and Marine captains, Navy lieutenants) now choose to leave the military than new officers choose to join is an accurate barometer of their discontent. They, and the military families that discourage their children from becoming officers, blame the top brass for designing operations that please politicians at the cost of wasted lives and lost wars. Endorsing the military nonsense of the War on Terror has become the prerequisite for successful military careers.

From Bad to Worse

This transformation in the structure and mission of our armed forces in the War on Terror was supposed to increase our influence in the world. Instead, our ruling class’s penchant for treating its wishes about what foreign realities should be as accurate perceptions of what they are has often made bad situations worse. Immediately after 9/11 the Bush Administration gratuitously assumed that all the world’s governments were aghast at what had been done to America, and would cooperate in eradicating terrorism. At least some might have, if we had proved ourselves fearsome abroad and stout at home. Instead, the U.S. government became more pliant than ever in its foreign dealings, while at home it went on a spending binge that indebted it to the rest of the world. Disrespect has been a natural consequence.

Consider Russia. Vladimir Putin recently called America "a parasite on the world economy." In the international arena, he has shown similar contempt. While the Putin regime was eager enough to help the U.S. strike a blow at Islamists in nearby Afghanistan, it never deviated for an instant from its neo-Soviet image of itself and from its consequent antagonism toward America. The Bush team, Condoleezza Rice especially, was eager to propitiate Putin with a quiet reformulation of the U.S. missile defense program, which effectively preserved Moscow’s ability to devastate America with missiles (President George W. Bush’s legal rejection of the 1972 ABM Treaty notwithstanding). This policy only whetted Putin’s eagerness to press America for further concessions in that field, and to resent not getting them. Since 2002 the Putin regime has not passed up opportunities to embarrass Secretaries of State Rice and Hillary Clinton by making peremptory announcements of decisions against them on matters they had come to negotiate, and to lend support to America’s enemies, from opposing U.N. resolutions against Saddam Hussein to opposing meaningful sanctions against Iran’s nuclear program. And of course Russia has continued, unabated, its intimidation of Georgia and Ukraine (the former by war) to pull them back into the Soviet orbit. The U.S. government’s response was to cancel plans for missile defense cooperation with Poland and the Czech Republic and to ratify a treaty demanded by Putin under which U.S. reductions of missiles will keep pace with the natural decay of Moscow’s arsenal. Our bipartisan ruling class earned Russia’s contempt.

The same goes for China. Its long-range goal is to expel the U.S. from the Western Pacific, its immediate goal to prevent Taiwan from obtaining the wherewithal to defend itself. Because the crucible of any military struggle for Taiwan is control of the Taiwan Strait, China’s diplomacy has focused on restricting Taiwan’s acquisition of the airplanes and submarines that are essential to that control. The U.S. government responded by excluding precisely those items from its military sales to Taiwan. China’s increasingly bold warnings that the U.S. should not interfere with its pressures on other Pacific islands should surprise no one.

Iran became a major problem for the U.S. in 1979 when the Carter Administration helped overthrow its pro-Western shah, and when the Carter and Reagan Administrations and their successors answered its seizure of the U.S. embassy—a textbook act of war—with textbook demonstrations of unseriousness. They convinced countless persons that terrorism against Americans is safe. The U.S. response to Iran’s building of nuclear weapons has been typical. The Iranians—not just the regime—want nukes because they are the only Shia state in the Sunni-dominated Muslim world, and because they want to further the interests of Shia populations in Sunni dominated states. They want nukes all the more because they know that the U.S. government takes sides against the Shia in all possible situations. But American threats of military action are obviously hollow, if only because the U.S. government complains publicly that Iranians are killing American solders in Iraq—another act of war—while not responding with war. Moreover, in 2006 the U.S. government stopped Israel from answering with full-scale war the war that Iran’s pawn, Hezbollah, had started against Israel. American economic sanctions are similarly unserious because serious ones would displease the European, Russian, and Chinese governments. In short, our rulers have made Iran a worse enemy by siding with its enemies and suffering its deadly attacks, thus advertising our impotence.

AFPAK

The War on Terror is turning Pakistan’s people, long friendly to America, into enemies. Pakistan is necessarily very interested in Afghan affairs because some of the same ethnic groups, especially the Pashtun, live on both sides of the artificial border. In the 1990s, Pakistan sponsored the formation of Afghanistan’s Taliban to safeguard Pashtun and Pakistani interests after the Soviet Union’s departure. When, after 9/11, the U.S. government indicted the Taliban for having harbored some of the attack’s planners, Pakistan was quick to pull its support for the Taliban and helped the U.S. overthrow them.

But after 2002, and much more rapidly after 2008, the U.S. government literally occupied Afghanistan to "nation-build" it according to the standard recipe, including equality for women. Armed resistance to the American occupation by tribal and Islamist elements grew quickly on both sides of the border. U.S. occupiers termed it "Taliban." Regardless of the name, the Islamist opposition designated Pakistan’s government as an enemy quite as much as the U.S. Our government then began striking targets inside Pakistan, putting Pakistan’s government in the position of having to fight its own people. The U.S. helped to overthrow the country’s president, Pervez Musharraf, for insufficient alacrity in doing so. As Pakistani public opinion becomes ever more anti-American, his successors writhe in the same bind.

This leads us to consider Afghanistan. While the U.S. invasion of 2001 did America some good by showing that Americans would punish those who harbor terrorists, the subsequent occupation did America much harm by showing the extent to which our new way of war is counterproductive. In 2001 few Afghans had ever heard of the U.S. Of those who had, most knew that Americans had helped them rid themselves of the deeply hated Soviets. True, the Taliban harbored Osama bin Laden’s Afghan Arabs because they brought money and lent a little help in their fight against the Uzbeks and Tajiks. Whether any Taliban knew or cared about bin Laden’s anti-Americanism is by no means clear.

Clearly though, the Taliban were not, per se, America’s enemies. After the invasion, most Taliban switched sides and happily sold to the Americans every Arab they could find in their midst. Ten years later, after American "nation-building," involving economic aid that dwarfs Afghanistan’s GDP, millions of Afghans are America’s enemies. Through legitimate and illegitimate channels (it matters little which), American money made fortunes for countless Afghans. But that did not counterbalance the resentment of those who did not get their share of the loot; and then there was the antagonism engendered by American forces’ countless intrusions and killings, many on the basis of unsubstantiated intelligence reports. Even in the absence of such things, the mere presence of wealthy, haughty foreigners would have rubbed the Afghans the wrong way.

Iraq’s Legacy

That is roughly the story of Iraq, too. Saddam Hussein supported and advocated terrorism by paying bounties to suicide bombers, and hosting terrorist organizations’ headquarters and training facilities. The first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993 was mounted from Iraq. Some of its organizers, including Khalid Sheik Mohammed, also took part in 9/11. U.S. Intelligence still shrouds in secrecy what it knows about the deep relationship between Iraqi Intelligence, al-Qaeda, and other organizations infiltrated by it. Saddam had made himself the paladin of anti-Americanism in the Arab world. Thus the 2003 U.S. invasion that overthrew him served the American people well. Had our forces withdrawn quickly, they would have left most Iraqis grateful to America, and the rest fearful of it. But the subsequent occupation of Iraq was a multidimensional disaster.

Under the rubric of "nation-building," dressed and complicated by commitments and semi-commitments to democracy, women’s rights, and anti-terrorism, the occupation’s practical political purpose was not to leave Iraq to its Shia majority and Kurdish separatists, but rather to "stabilize" (read, to preserve) the role of its ruling Sunni minority. Its practical operational purpose was to tamp down a civil war—at first a one-sided attack by Sunni on Shia, and then a two-sided affair from which the Sunni eventually sought relief (the 2007-08 "surge" of U.S. troops that protected Sunni enclaves). The day-to-day reality of the Iraq occupation was U.S. troops driving around the country trying to disarm "insurgents," and getting blown up by roadside bombs. By the time our troops withdrew, the Kurdish north had become Kurdistan, the Shia ruled from north of Baghdad to the Persian Gulf, the Sunni enclaves were well armed, and all Iraqi sides were convinced that the next round of struggle would yield better results for them. Disrespect for America may be the occupation’s most harmful international legacy.

Iraq’s legacy in America is worse. The occupation habituated the U.S. armed forces to regard it as normal to bleed without prospect of victory. Officers who commanded their troops to operate in replenished minefields, and who enforced "rules of engagement" that make troops vulnerable to un-uniformed enemies until these took action, profited by turning their backs on soldierly ethics that are as fundamental to the profession of arms as the Hippocratic oath is to the medical profession. At home, the occupation of Iraq became an occasion for bitter partisan warfare. The Democratic Party and the major part of the ruling class denounced President Bush for applying the Democrats’ own formula of warfare to Iraq, to the point of identifying with the conspiracy theories about Bush purveyed by Michael Moore’s movie Fahrenheit 9/11. The Republican Party countered by espousing nation-building more strongly than the Democrats ever had. Some even adopted the neoconservative view that nation-building is America’s defining duty, that America exists primarily to reshape other peoples whether they like it or not. More harmful yet, the Iraq occupation sapped the patriotic generosity with which the American people had supported the War on Terror. The American people had expected the war to end the threat from terrorists. But the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan proved that our ruling class is capable only of fruitless bloodshed.

Arab Spring?

Our rulers proved unable to deal with foreign realities in part because they superimposed images of themselves on them: liberal internationalists saw peoples eager for secular technocratic progress, realists saw sober adjusters of national interests, and neoconservatives saw budding democrats. All sides, however, held fast to their longtime affections for individual foreign regimes. By this jumble of irrationalities, our rulers defined the Arab world’s turmoil of 2011 as "the Arab Spring." They were confident that it would deliver the world from the troubles that the Arabs had caused during the previous generation, and attributed this wonder in part to the War on Terror. Typical was Fouad Ajami:

This was the Arabs’ 1989, their supreme moment of historical agency, a time when younger people broke with their culture’s history of evasion and scapegoating. For once the "Arab Street" was not gripped by anti-Zionism and anti-Americanism, for once it wasn’t looking beyond its geography for alien demons.

Pedestrian explanations are better grounded. Ever since the Western powers’ post-World War II withdrawal from the Arab world, politics there has been a struggle between, on the one hand, secular Westernizing elites—ranging from Egypt’s Nasserite regime to the Syrian Baath, the Algerian and Palestinian party states, and the Saudi and Gulf monarchies—and on the other hand, Islamists, especially the Muslim Brotherhood. All these regimes are alike in that they are defined by corruption and repression, and try to refocus their peoples’ anger on outsiders. Nearly all have presided over ever-worsening economic and social conditions. Islamists have become more popular and powerful in each and every one because they are the only alternative to the regimes’ client networks. Talk of "Arab Spring" is silly because it supposes that the understanding of and desire for liberal civil society exists in the Arab world. Even sillier is the notion that the "Arab springers" who have shaken regimes from Tunisia to Syria are moved, not by the urge to put tyrants in iron cages and then to take their place (and tighten the siege on Israel, to boot), but by the notion that all human beings have equal rights because all are created in the image and likeness of God. In Islamic terms, that idea is blasphemy.

Silliness hides what ought to be the basic distinction in international affairs: between regimes antagonistic to American interests and those that respect those interests. It hides the question of what opportunities any situation might offer for advancing those interests. Thus, our ruling class helped overthrow Egypt’s regime despite its 30-year alliance with us, but did nothing to overthrow Syria’s, whose 40-year record of opposition to America includes using the terrorist group Hezbollah to kill Americans. Nor did our rulers imagine that they could exact prices from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf sheikdoms for U.S. forbearance in the face of their troubles. And when Libya’s regime was faced with armed insurrection, our rulers eschewed both a swift coup de grace and dignified quiet. Instead, our ruling class, joined by Europe’s, mounted an indecisive military campaign that, whatever else it did, earned contempt for its authors. We can gauge that contempt by noting the new Libyan authorities’ refusal to extradite Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the convicted perpetrator of the 1989 Lockerbie bombing.

The Home Front

"Homeland security" grew into a quarter-trillion-dollar public-private industry that changed life in America so quickly, with so little debate, because it followed the template established a generation earlier by the Nixon Administration’s response to the first aircraft hijackings. American leftists were hijacking planes to Cuba, and Fidel Castro was sheltering them. But because Nixon feared confronting Cuba and the American Left, he preferred to pretend that hijacking was a non-political problem to be solved by subjecting all passengers to metal detectors and prohibiting passengers from interfering with hijackers—never mind that gun-carrying passengers had thwarted some hijackings. Thus, Nixon made clear that the U.S. would be officially blind to the political responsibility for terrorism. Once that happened, Palestinian terrorists and their sponsoring governments made aircraft hijacking a major international problem. More important, this official blindness meant that thenceforth the U.S. government would consider any ordinary American to be as likely a perpetrator of terrorism as any actual terrorist or terrorist government. The pretense of value-free, politically neutral security proved to be catnip for politicians eager to evade responsibility. Businesses supported the policy because doing so meant they would be paid for providing the screening equipment to treat millions of Americans as potential hijackers or suicide bombers. For people looking for easy jobs, homeland security was a bonanza.

Has homeland security prevented something like another 9/11? No. In fact, no one has tried anything of the sort. Had they done so, nothing homeland security has put in place would have stopped them. We do not know of any operation planned and manned by professionals, as 9/11 was, that has been stopped. We do know that American society has countless inherent vulnerabilities to terrorism, which no one has taken even a little trouble to exploit. Nothing could ever stop ten people in ten states from throwing flaming gasoline bottles into ten school buses simultaneously, thus shutting down the U.S. school system. But no one has done it. Homeland security created closely packed lines of people in front of airport security checkpoints—the perfect target for explosive-laden carry-on luggage. But no one has attempted that, either, nor committed any of the other outrages so obviously feasible and requiring so little skill and organization. We don’t know why not. In short, homeland security has proven irrelevant to terrorism.

For the American people, homeland security means badges and procedures, ritual humiliations of grandmothers and children at the hands of people who would melt at the sight of an actual terrorist. Confronting terrorists is not what our "security" people sign up for. Though no one takes this security seriously, it has serious consequences. For some it has meant becoming accustomed to being herded, while others have become accustomed to doing the herding. For all, it means suppressing the knowledge that terrorists have been almost exclusively Muslims, while indulging the politically correct fantasy that one’s neighbor could be a terrorist. The facile misapplication of the term "terrorist" leads all too naturally first to labeling and then to treating domestic political competitors as enemies. Thus does war prosecuted indefinitely and incompetently against foreign enemies make for real war among fellow citizens.

As Professor John Yoo has explained at length, the legal-political basis for the post-9/11 security state is the notion that war invests any commander-in-chief with essentially enormous, almost unlimited power. The Romans had put it succinctly: salus populi suprema lex, the people’s safety is the supreme law. But when war is defined as endemic, without end, the invocation of war power becomes simply the claim that the government may do whatever it can get away with. Such law brings war home. While working in the Justice Department under George W. Bush, Yoo wrote that the president has the power to declare and treat anyone as an enemy combatant. For this and other opinions, the succeeding administration came close to treating Yoo himself as a criminal. My point is that once those who participate in politics become accustomed to the notion that political power is unlimited, they have a harder time finding reasons why they should restrain their passions. Why not push to the limit the policies that most benefit one’s own supporters? Why not first label (as Vice President Biden has done with the Tea Party) and then treat as terrorist or simply criminal whatever and whoever stands in one’s way?

Rules by Experts

The War on Terror has moved American politics and institutions further away from mutual persuasion toward antagonistic assertions of prerogative. Wars for hazy ends prosecuted without clear declaration of purpose did not begin in 2001. But never before were enemies designated by intelligence agencies, which declined to make public the bases for their judgments. Between 2001 and 2007 a bitter debate between the CIA and the Defense Department (backed by Vice President Dick Cheney’s office) bubbled to the surface over Iraq’s role in 9/11, and terrorism in general. The debate, which really was about whether and on whom we should make war, was settled intramurally by bureaucrats who used sympathetic journalists to discredit their opponents while foreclosing rebuttal. "Security of classified information" in wartime is the official reason why our ruling class thus cut Congress (and the American people) out of decisions on this and other vital matters. By the same logic, the CIA announced in 2010 that the president and his advisers had concluded that one Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen in Yemen, was so involved in terrorism that American forces would hunt him down and kill him. Of what capital crime was he accused? By whom? Who convicted and sentenced him? The experts. On the basis of what evidence? Sorry, can’t say. Classified. Wartime necessity, you know.

Decision-making by "experts" rather than by people and procedures responsible to the American people has always been American progressives’ prescription for American life. During the past decade, the pretense that America was at war has given this practice a major boost. For example, official and semi-official panels of experts from government, business, and the academy generated "studies" on the energy and health-care sectors of the economy. Based on these, the government promulgated regulations and presented Congress with demands that it approve massive legislation to "stop global warming" and to "establish universal medical care." These government-business-academic experts, i.e. this ruling class, presented their plans as demands because, they shouted, "the debate is over," and opponents are not qualified to oppose. Regardless of these demands’ merits, such claims to authority are based strictly on the proponents’ credentials. My point, however, is that these credentials are based largely on the government endowing these proponents with positions and money. As President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned in his farewell address, such expertise is a circular function of government power.

The event for which the decade is most likely to be remembered, namely the "great recession," was a similar phenomenon. When the financial bubble in mortgage-backed securities burst in 2008, the leaders of both parties, and pundits from the New York Times to the Wall Street Journal, assured Congress authoritatively that appropriating some $800 billion for the Treasury to buy up "toxic assets" would fix the problem. Three out of four Americans dissented, in part because of widespread recognition that the U.S. government’s increase in expenditures from $1.86 trillion in 2001 to $2.9 trillion in 2008, due in part to the war, was unsustainable. Yet Congress bowed to "expert" opinion. But the markets tanked, the fix did not work, and the economic collapse gathered momentum. The subsequent Democratic administration increased spending even more radically, to $3.7 trillion, roughly doubling federal expenses in a decade, and pushed the national debt over $14 trillion—almost equal to America’s GDP. By 2011, 40 cents out of every federal dollar spent had to be borrowed.

As a prescription for salvation, the very same spectrum of experts that had certified the efficacy of bailing out big banks emphasized to Congress that the country needed to borrow more money and pay more taxes. Three fourths of Americans wanted neither to borrow more nor to pay more. The experts labeled them "irresponsible" and even "terrorists." The markets tanked again, and the great recession got a second wind. The 2010 census reported that in 2009 the inflation-adjusted median family income was $49,445, down from $51,161 in 2001. Although the official unemployment rate at this writing is only 9.1%, a truer measure of America’s condition is that only 45.4% of Americans of working age are employed full time—a true definition of depression.

Whatever It Takes

The common denominator of our ruling class’s domestic and international strategy in the post-9/11 decade is its determination to double its bet on already failed policies. This self-referential mindset is the root cause of America’s decade of loss. The New York rescue worker’s shout to President Bush to do "whatever it takes" summed up the American people’s priorities: rid the world of the kind of people who trammel our way of life so that we can get back to living it. Congress’ authorization for the use of force echoed that mandate. But as the ruling class set about "doing something" in response to the attacks, it started from the premise that the American people are ignorant and hardly worth listening to. Hence there was no need to depart from the ideas and policies with which the Establishment had identified itself. Nor was there any discussion in the mainstream media about whether those ways might have violated principles of statecraft to which it might now be necessary to repair.

In statecraft as in everything, understanding the problem correctly is prerequisite for doing no harm, and maybe some good. Because the Bush Administration took CIA director George Tenet’s snap judgment that Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda were responsible "game, set, and match" for 9/11 as a warrant for identifying them with America’s terrorist problem in general, it failed to ask the classic headwaters question: what is the problem? Had it done so, it might have noticed that the 9/11 hijackers were part of a wave of deadly disrespect for America that had been growing throughout the Muslim world—and not just there—for a generation. Had the Bush team focused on the realities that fed growing images of America as "the weak horse" (to use Osama bin Laden’s words), they would have had to consider who were the major contributors to that disrespect, what they and their predecessors had done to incur it, and then to decide what actions would restore it.

That would have pointed to the Middle East’s regimes, and to our ruling class’ relationship with them, as the problem’s ultimate source. The rulers of Iran, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the Palestinian Authority had run (and continue to run) educational and media systems that demonize America. Under all of them, the Muslim Brotherhood or the Wahhabi sect spread that message in religious terms to Muslims in the West as well as at home. That message indicts America, among other things, for being weak. And indeed, ever since the 1970s U.S. policy had responded to acts of war and terrorism from the Muslim world by absolving the regimes for their subjects’ actions. For example, when Yasser Arafat’s PLO murdered U.S. ambassador Cleo Noel, our government continued building friendly relations with Arafat, and romancing the Saudi regime that was financing him. Since then the U.S. government has given $2.5 billion to the PLO. Part of the reason was unwarranted hope, part was fear, and part was the fact that many influential Americans were making money in the Arab world.

Chasing Geese

An honest assessment of America’s problem would have led the Bush team to ask: why, given how we have behaved, should any Muslim government take the trouble of restraining anyone inclined to do us harm? The local regimes know far better than we who among their subjects is inclined to do us harm. Their schools and media are anti-American because the regimes make them so. Why not change course and hold them fully responsible for any harm that comes to us from their subjects, no matter how indirectly?

Had the National Security Council, the CIA, the State Department, or the Pentagon thought in terms of forcing foreign ruling classes to live up to their responsibility to curb harm from within their jurisdictions, they would not have entertained the thought of trying to do that job for them. If a regime, say Iraq or Syria or the PLO, did not stop behaving as it had since the 1970s, the U.S. government could have overthrown it, and turned its remnants over to its domestic enemies’ tender mercies. The U.S. would not have thought in terms of "nation-building," but instead would have maintained the distinction between our business and other countries’ business. The short military operations that might have ensued would have wiped out the prominent people who are the sources of our troubles, quickly establishing massive incentives for their successors to respect America.

Instead, by supposing that America’s problem was a singular bunch of renegades called al-Qaeda, supported only by a primitive band called the Taliban, the Bush Administration began the War on Terror as in effect a chase after wild geese. Even al-Qaeda, never mind countless other terrorists, got principal support from glitzy Saudis rather than from grizzled Afghans. The Afghan wild-goose chase was all the more ridiculous because catching these geese could not fix America’s problems. Setting objectives other than the ones that rid you of your problems is the biggest mistake anyone can make in war.

After the 2001 invasion ousted the Taliban and put a substantial percentage of all "Afghan Arabs" in Guantanamo Bay prison, the number of terrorist acts for which the perpetrators claimed credit on behalf of al-Qaeda (though previously they had never heard of the group) increased geometrically. The Bush team explained that the network had "metastasized." The government thereafter simply labeled all significant terrorists "al-Qaeda." Doing this further clouded our understanding. Unlike cancer, crab grass, or the mythical Hydra, human organizations do not respond to severe cutbacks by instantly sprouting multiple new tentacles. No, more people took up anti-American terrorism after America’s initial acts in the War on Terror because these acts had shown once more the impotence of American policy.

The logical consequence of the Bush Administration’s error was that that henceforth it would be necessary to root out these previously nonexistent bands by long-term military intervention or outright occupation of foreign lands. The attempt to do jobs that only other governments can do—to mind others’ business—meant a "long war" that no one could even think of ending. It resulted in failure after failure, met by pathetic attempts to redefine success. Instead of respect, such operations earned America yet more contempt.

How could anyone have imagined that killing or imprisoning in Guantanamo hundreds of low-level persons, evidence of whose relationship with anti-American terror was usually weak and secondhand, would keep America safe from terrorists while America continued, among other things, to prop up the Wahhabist Saudi regime, financing Yasser Arafat’s PLO, and sparing Syria’s terrorist Baath? Why suppose that the armed bands roaming Iraq and Afghanistan are anti-American terrorists who must be fought in their countries lest they come and strike America, when it was perfectly obvious that Iraqis and Afghans were fighting one another for local advantage and fighting Americans insofar as they got in their way? The answer seems to be that recognizing that the regimes and the cultures that spawn terrorists are the problem would force our leaders to acknowledge how mistaken they were in fostering those regimes, and how monumental the task of dealing with them really is. By fighting small fry, our leaders can pretend to be waging patriotic war while also pretending that hostile regimes are really not so hostile and that dallying with them had been the right thing to do all along. Thus did the crafting of operations that are not part of a plan for ending the war—operations that combined intrusiveness and fecklessness—open America to worse than terrorist acts.

Public Safety

Solidity of the home front, i.e., mutual trust between the people and their government, has to be statecraft’s paramount priority. But the assumption on which our ruling class based its approach to internal security against terrorism—namely, that it is impossible to distinguish ordinary Americans from terrorists—negates the basis for mutual trust. Ordinary Americans, on whom the government imposed ever more intrusive security measures and whom it scolded for being "Islamophobes," reasonably felt that government might regard them as "violent extremists." Our rulers also went out of their way to appease the most unfriendly parts of America’s tiny Islamic population, including seeking advice on the proper attitude to take toward Muslims from the transparently anti-American Council On American Islamic Relations. But this simply gave such people more power to further their agendas, while foisting upon the American people a dispiriting political correctness. How could anyone have imagined that any people would not lose confidence in elites that seemed arguably more solicitous of enemies than of fellow citizens?

What would have happened if, instead, our ruling class had approached the problem of internal security by reminding itself that the American people had secured American society very adequately during World War II and the Cold War, against enemies far more potent and who blended into American society more easily than contemporary terrorists ever could? Honesty would also have required admitting that the hijackers of 9/11 were able to succeed partly because the U.S. government had trained a generation of Americans not to interfere with hijackings. Our bipartisan rulers might also have reconsidered whether perhaps they might have erred by configuring new public buildings and reconfiguring old ones to treat the public, whom officials are supposed to serve, as potential threats? Our rulers might have paid attention to Alexis de Tocqueville’s observation that America was much less policed than Europe, but suffered from less crime because ordinary citizens took public safety into their own hands.

Only with difficulty can we imagine post-9/11 America minus the razor wire (which anyone intent on mayhem can cut), minus the stanchions around public buildings (which any rented bulldozer can clear), minus the badges (easy to counterfeit), and minus the TSA screeners (whose uselessness is demonstrated by every "red team" test penetration). But we don’t have to imagine that the passengers of Flight 93 took matters into their own hands the moment they realized that government rules were costing them their lives, and that, ever since, aircraft passengers have policed their flights with absolute efficiency. Nor do we have to imagine that ordinary Americans naturally recoil from and protect themselves against persons who display the kind of foreignness and animosity that Islamists and their sympathizers cannot hide. The 2006 case of "the flying Imams" showed the Imams’ threatening behavior caused ordinary Americans to remove them from a flight and hence from the possibility of doing harm. Unfortunately, it also showed that the U.S. government came close to making the Americans’ immunological behavior liable to civil penalties. Again and again, the American people are forced to confront the fact that its ruling class is not on its side.

After 9/11 President George W. Bush told the American people to go shopping and behave normally. In short: forget that you will never again be free to live as before. Think about money. This advice followed naturally from the government’s decision to persist in its ways instead of lifting terrorism’s burden from America. What might have happened if, instead, Bush had told Americans that the terror threat would not last forever, because their government would now undertake some expensive military operations that would soon allow normal life to resume? To support those operations the government would have had to cut back other spending and perhaps raise some taxes. No doubt, in fall 2001 the American people would have accepted these sacrifices. But they would have demanded results. Since the administration was not about to try that, it sought to satisfy the American people with the pretend-safety of "homeland security," with images of U.S. troops in combat, and perhaps above all with domestic prosperity fueled by record-low interest rates and massive deficit-spending.

This pretend-prosperity aimed not only to anesthetize criticism of endless war, but also to feed both political parties’ many constituencies—the ruling class’s standard procedure. Both parties joined in expanding federal guarantees for sub-prime mortgages, subsidies for education, alternative fuels, and countless activities dear to well-connected players. Both parties congratulated themselves for establishing new entitlements for prescription drugs and for medical care for children. When the "great recession" began in 2007 Democrats blamed Republicans’ excessive spending on "the wars," while Republicans blamed it on Democrats’ excessive spending on everything else. Both are correct, and both are responsible.

Hard Choices

Ten years after 9/11, America is not at peace, is poorer, less civil, and less hopeful. But the experts are in charge as never before.

In the American political marketplace of 2012, the American ruling class’s stock is at a historic low. President Obama and nearly all who vie to replace him try to disassociate themselves from the decisions of the past decade. So do most of our elites. But since none explains and accuses his own errors, it is by no means clear whether any have learned from their mistakes. More important is what the rest of the country may or may not have learned. For us to understand how these mostly intelligent people could have made errors so big for so long requires understanding the principles they violated, and the moral as well as the intellectual dimensions of their errors. More difficult yet, both intellectually and morally, is the essential task of explaining the hard choices that will be required to deal with the troubles bequeathed us by this decade of defeat.

Scouts’ Honor

Kathleen Arnn — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 00:00:00 EST

Books Discussed in this Essay:

The Official Handbook for Boys, 1st Edition

Boy Scouts’ Handbook, 12th Edition

The Boy Scouts of America celebrated their hundredth anniversary last year, and this year is the centennial of The Handbook for Boys, their first official manual. Comparing it with the current edition of the handbook—the 12th, published in 2009—shows that the small outpost of civilization manned by the Scouts holds on bravely in America. But decades of aggressive political correctness have had their effect, and the Scouts have lost some of the confident American boyishness that loves heroes and makes for heroes. This is too bad for the more than 3 million boys enrolled in the Scouts today, and for the society in which they will grow up to become men.

The Original Handbook

The Boy Scouts were founded in Britain in 1907 by Robert Baden-Powell, a lieutenant-general in the British army who authored a series of military training manuals, including one for boys. Scouting was made American in 1910, and since 1911 the Boy Scout Handbook has accompanied every Scout as he ascends in rank, providing "advice in practical methods, as well as inspiring information." By the time he reaches Eagle Scout, a Scout’s handbook is dog-eared and well worn, his achievements and camping trips logged in the back.

The first edition of the handbook is beautifully written and endless fun to read. It bursts with information, featuring chapters on Scoutcraft; Woodcraft; Campcraft; Tracks, Trailing, and Signaling; Health and Endurance; Chivalry; First Aid and Life Saving; Games and Athletic Standards; and Patriotism and Citizenship. Teaching through stories and examples, it is an invitation to challenge and adventure. Reading it makes you think it no accident that 11 of the 12 men who have walked on the moon were Scouts. "Do you love the woods?" asks Chief Scout Ernest Thompson Seton at the beginning of the handbook. "Do you desire the knowledge to help the wounded quickly, and to make yourself cool and self-reliant in an emergency?" In the chapter on Scoutcraft you learn that the pioneers and the military "scouts of old...left everything behind them, comfort and peace, in order to push forward into the wilderness beyond," and the Boy Scouts must do the same.

The early pages of the 1911 handbook explain that a Scout must learn "riding, swimming, tramping, trailing, photography, first aid, camping, [and] handicraft," and nearly two thirds of the manual is devoted to teaching these outdoor skills. There are diagrams showing 15 or 20 different knots; how to make a bow and arrow; Morse, Myer, and Semaphore code; the difference between dog, cat, and muskrat tracks; the proper method for paddling a canoe; the Pleiades; and the fireman’s lift. The manual’s chapter on First Aid and Life Saving covers all manner of crises, including the usual burns, scrapes, and scalds, but also snake bite, frost bite, runaway horses, and mad dogs: "The first thing to do is kill the mad dog at once...."

Being a Scout means camping, hiking, and paddling canoes, but Scouts must learn "Life-craft as well as Wood-craft," moral virtue and patriotism along with knowledge of the outdoors. In the original handbook, Scouts’ honor is explicitly traced back to the chivalry of the ancient knights. The Pilgrims and the American pioneers carried this knightly virtue to America, and the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) have taken up their standard. Honor, as the handbook explains, is sacred to a Scout: It "will not permit of anything but the highest and the best and the manliest." "A good Scout must be chivalrous," it tells us:

[H]e should be as manly as the knights or pioneers of old. He should be unselfish. He should show courage. He must do his duty. He should show benevolence and thrift. He should be loyal to his country. He should be obedient to his parents, and show respect to those who are his superiors. He should be very courteous to women. One of his obligations is to do a good turn every day to some one.

The handbook doesn’t shrink from invoking shame to motivate Scouts. For example, under Courage: "It is horrible to be a coward. It is weak to yield to fear and heroic to face danger without flinching." There are examples, like the dying Indian who "faced death with a grim smile upon his lips and sang his own death song" and the cowardly knight who fled the battle of Agincourt, much to the disappointment of his lady at home. The original handbook teaches through heroes, providing Scouts with a host of manly examples to emulate. Above all, it cultivates spiritedness, teaching Scouts to defend their honor, their friends, and their country like the great men of the past who "were accustomed to take chances with death" for the sake of the things they loved.

The original handbook assumes that one must know something about the United States to be a citizen of it. The chapter on Patriotism and Citizenship is long and impressive. Several pages detail the first singing of the Star-Spangled Banner, the meaning of the stars and stripes, and rules for flying, folding, and retiring the flag. Much of the chapter is a lesson in American history, covering the Revolution, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, and the gradual conquest of the frontier.

We learn about America’s great moments through the heroes who lived them: George Washington, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Daniel Boone, Betsy Ross, Johnny Appleseed, and most of all, Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln is a hero among heroes, a central figure in the handbook’s discussions of patriotism and of virtue. He is "in heart, brain, and character, not only one of our greatest Americans, but one of the world’s greatest men." The manual relays the whole story of his life, from his lowly beginnings that taught him the value of hard work, to his education, and to his presidency and untimely death ("the emancipator of the slave, the friend of the whole people and the savior of our country died, a martyr to the cause of freedom.") This discussion ends with the closing paragraph of the Second Inaugural, "words with which every boy should be familiar, voicing as they do the exalted spirit of a great and good man."

After the history comes a lesson in American government, covering the role of the president, congress, and the courts; majority rule; the difference between local, state, and federal governments; and property rights. The civics lesson is mostly reliable, though written as it was at the height of American Progressivism, it shows some Progressive tendencies, for example in a brief discussion of trust-busting. But it is largely the manly and independent Progressivism of Teddy Roosevelt, an ardent supporter of the BSA and its first and only Chief Scout Citizen. Further along on the Progressive highway, the new handbook suffers from the influence of a cultural liberalism that goes much deeper and is not nearly so benign.

The New Handbook

The Boy Scouts of America have endured their share of criticism over the years, to be sure. Before the First World War, they were accused of being militaristic. More recently, they have been attacked for excluding girls, for insisting that belief in God (any god) is a requirement of citizenship, and especially for being anti-homosexual. This last indictment has taken the BSA all the way to the Supreme Court; in Boy Scouts v. Dale (2000), the Court upheld the right of the organization, as a voluntary association, to refuse to hire homosexual scoutmasters. Criticism on this theme has continued since the ruling, and seems to have gotten even nastier in the ensuing decade. The Boy Scouts today bear the scars of these attacks, and their latest handbook reveals that they have succumbed in some ways to these relentless demands for political correctness.

The new handbook retains the traditional focus on the outdoors, with much of the same information on how to camp, hike, fish, sail, and fend for oneself in the wilderness. But its discussions of these things have been pared down and lack the verve, punch, and adventurous spirit—the manliness—of the original handbook. Whereas the first edition imparts tough-minded common sense, the 12th edition brims with cautionary tales and safety checklists, emphasizing timidity rather than adventure. The front cover contains a pull-out manual for parents on How to Protect your Children from Child Abuse. It’s as if the first thought our boys should have is that they are potential victims.

The old handbook takes a soldierly approach to health and nutrition that sounds amusing to our 21st-century ears ("a boy ought to take a good soap bath at least twice a week"; "the average boy ought to have and usually does have an appetite like an ostrich.") But one has to admit that its advice is generally sound. The new handbook, concerned and cautious, includes diagrams of the food pyramid and a lesson on how to read nutrition labels. Several pages of the nutrition chapter are devoted to the dangers of smoking and drinking, including page-long infographics on how to resist peer pressure and what will happen to your lungs if you smoke. The Introduction boasts that this is the first green edition of the handbook, printed on recycled paper.

Its discussions of character and of citizenship are very different, too. Character formation is still a top priority for the BSA, but the latest handbook has largely replaced the traditional language of virtue with the progressive language of leadership, and this is not an improvement. The chapter on Chivalry has been completely removed, and the chapter on Leadership, which is presumably meant to replace it, has little to say about moral virtue beyond the Scout Oath and Law. Instead, it presents the EDGE method of teaching (explain, demonstrate, guide, and enable), describes the difference between short term and long term goals, and lists tips for using the internet to become a leader in your community. These may be tools of leadership; but tools are useless or worse in the hands of the wrong people and, compared to the original, the new handbook does little to explain how not to be the wrong kind.

Boy Scouts are still taught to follow their consciences: do the right thing, even though it may be difficult, which is sensible advice as far as it goes. But it does not go far enough. The old handbook treated the subject as if the conscience needed to be formed before it could be followed. Scouts needed to be habituated to the virtues through study and practice, dutifully doing the right thing until it became second nature. This was a stern discipline. Many would not succeed at it; those who did could be proud.

Today, there is a different approach to leadership: "success begins with a vision—picturing yourself where you want to be." And because anyone can have a vision, anyone can be a leader. "You are a collection of wonderful talents, ideas, and experiences," the new handbook’s Leadership chapter begins. "What do you want your future to look like tomorrow?"

The old handbook spoke proudly of the chivalric tradition; the new apologizes for the antiquated example of the knights. It sandwiches a few cursory paragraphs on moral virtue between a lengthy discussion of drugs and alcohol and a section on sexual responsibility. Moral choices are reduced to healthy choices. Doing the courageous thing becomes equivalent to refusing a cigarette at a party.

Instead of an exciting chapter on Patriotism and Citizenship, the handbook now offers a perfunctory discussion, re-titled just "Citizenship." In the new handbook Scouts are citizens of their country, but also of the world. There are the same detailed instructions for folding and flying the flag, but the accompanying history lesson has been shortened and stripped of its vividness. There are, by my count, four heroes in the book. They are the founders of Scouting: British founder Robert Baden Powell, the naturalist Ernest Thompson Seton, outdoorsman Daniel Carter Beard, and James E. West, who led the BSA through its first 30 years. Each gets a sentence and a picture. American heroes, so numerous and colorful in the original handbook, are almost absent. Washington and Lincoln are each mentioned one time. Here is their sentence: "We remember the sacrifices and achievements of Americans with federal holidays, including observances of the birthdays of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr."

Private associations like the Boy Scouts are precious nurseries of civic virtue, all the more precious because our public institutions have become so incapable of bolstering our democracy and teaching our citizens to make the most of their freedom. The first American Boy Scouts imagined themselves as unofficial defenders of the nation and the good things in it. Like the army scouts, a Boy Scout belonged "on the danger line...or at the outposts, protecting those of his company who confide in his care." Now it is the Boy Scouts themselves who are in danger.

Robert Mazzuca, the Chief Scout Executive of the BSA, has been quoted as saying that the organization is suffering from "a little arthritis" but is making efforts to modernize. If this means using Gore-tex boots on hikes and ripstop nylon tents instead of canvas, the Boy Scouts may be all right. If it means teaching leadership rather than moral virtue, and timidity rather than manliness, that’s another story entirely—one of obtuseness, trendiness, and decline.

Yet even today, all Boy Scouts swear the Scout Oath: "On my honor I will do my best to do my duty to God and my country, and to obey the Scout Law; To help other people at all times; To keep myself physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight." The oath is in spirit and in substance essentially the same as the oath Scouts took a hundred years ago. In this and in many other ways today’s Boy Scouts are as good as ever, and better than their handbook. But their handbook suggests what their leadership believes, and foreshadows what they may become.

Diane Ravitch Takes It All Back

William Voegeli — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 00:00:00 EST

Books discussed in this essay:

Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms, by Diane Ravitch

The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupifies Young People andJeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30), by Mark Bauerlein

The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice are Undermining Education, by Diane Ravitch

The Great School Wars, New York City, 1805-1973, by Diane Ravitch

The Death and Life of Great American Cities, by Jane Jacobs

Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, by James C. Scott

In Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms (2000), Diane Ravitch, a historian and professor of education at New York University, warned against "anything in education that is labeled a ‘movement.’" The problem, she contended, is that "there has been no shortage of innovation in American education; what is needed before broad implementation of any innovation is clear evidence of its effectiveness."

Americans have tried many innovations since A Nation at Risk, the 1983 report by President Reagan’s National Commission on Excellence in Education, which catalyzed a vigorous debate over what’s wrong with our educational system and how to fix it. One thing we haven’t tried is austerity. According to the National Education Association, the average expenditure per pupil in public elementary and secondary schools was $2,230 in 1980, and $10,589 in 2008. Adjusted by using the Department of Commerce deflator for state and local governments, real per-pupil expenditures were 62% higher in 2008 than in 1980.

It would be hard to argue that America’s educational system is working 62% better than it did 30 years ago. It’s not certain that our schools are even 1% better. A Nation at Risk relied on declining scores in the College Board’s Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) to assert that America had "squandered the gains in student achievement made in the wake of the Sputnik challenge."

Those scores haven’t improved much since 1983, however. Between 1980 and 2009 the average SAT score on the "critical reading" test has been on a plateau, fluctuating between 500 and 508, where a score of 200 is the minimum and 800 is the maximum. (The College Board changed this test in 1994, but offers a "recentered" scale that allows results since the change to be compared to ones before it.) The average score on the mathematics test increased modestly, from 492 in 1980 to 520 in 2005, before retreating to 515 in the years 2007 through 2009. It’s no shock that our high schools record few dramatic breakthroughs, given that in 2009 only one third of 8th-grade students were "proficient"—that is, demonstrated "solid academic performance"—in reading and math, according to the Department of Education’s National Assessment of Educational Progress.

Labor, Management, and Materials

We, the shareholders of Public Education, Inc., deserve an explanation for how an enterprise could increase its per-unit costs by 62% over 28 years, during which improvements in the intended outcomes were, at best, slight and equivocal. Different analysts will come up with different explanations. In general, however, they will ascribe America’s educational failures to some combination of problems with labor, management, and "materials"—the 50 million American children enrolled in an elementary or secondary school.

Labor: Conservatives deplore the teachers unions’ success in securing tenure protection for mediocre or even incompetent teachers, and the political strength that allows them to dictate terms to school districts. Even many liberals have stopped defending the unions. Joe Klein of Time magazine calls them "a reactionary force" that wields the language of professionalism to secure "a set of work rules more appropriate to factory hands," including "strict seniority rules about pay, school assignment, length of the school day and year."

Unions aside, American education benefitted during long decades when teaching was the default career for bright young women discouraged from pursuing other careers. As recently as 40 years ago, according to the American Bar Association, fewer than 10% of law school students were women. By 1992 that figure exceeded 50% and has never since dropped below 43%. Similarly, the Association of American Medical Colleges reports that women earned 48% of the M.D.s awarded in 2009-2010, nearly twice the proportion in 1982-83.

Management: American public education’s true governing structure is difficult for citizens, parents especially, to understand, influence, and—given the opportunities for self-dealing—trust. A number of critics describe it as "The Blob." It includes:

the two national teachers unions, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the National Education Association (NEA);
the school boards, district superintendents, school principals, and their professional associations;
state superintendents of education, and state boards and departments of education;
the U.S. Department of Education, established in 1979, now with 5,000 employees and a $70 billion budget;
schools of education—the U.S. News and World Report ranking lists 279—where most teachers go for training and credentials, and where new pedagogical strategies are developed and launched.

Materials: Children bring problems and shortcomings to the schoolhouse door that dwarf the ones educators were expected to cope with decades ago. A 2004 Heritage Foundation report by Patrick Fagan stated that 4 out of every 100 American births in 1950 were out of wedlock. Fifty years later, 33 were. Another 8% of those born in 1950 would see their parents divorce, while 27% born in 2000 could expect to. Students from single-parent homes get significantly lower grades in school than those raised in two-parent families, Fagan noted, and are four times more likely to be expelled. On the Left, Richard Rothstein of the Economic Policy Institute argues that not even "the best curriculum, instruction, and teacher expectations," can prevail against the problems of educating children in poor health, from economically precarious homes, or who "come to school with limited vocabularies and who are unfamiliar with books."

Even children from prosperous, well-ordered homes pose new pedagogical challenges for educators. In The Dumbest Generation (2008) Mark Bauerlein, a professor of English at Emory University, argues that even though technology, leisure, and prosperity offer today’s young Americans "extraordinary chances to gain knowledge and improve their reading/writing skills," the reality is that they are "no more learned or skillful than their predecessors, no more knowledgeable, fluent, up-to-date, or inquisitive, except in the materials of youth culture."

Ravitch Reconsiders

The latest of Diane Ravitch’s ten books, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice are Undermining Education (2010), is the most controversial volume on American education in many years. In Death and Life Ravitch switches sides, something that always draws attention when done by a prominent advocate. Ravitch was, for many years, associated with the conservative critique of, and reform agenda for, American education. During the final two years of the George H.W. Bush presidency she was assistant secretary in the Department of Education, reporting to Secretary Lamar Alexander, now a Republican senator from Tennessee.

But that was then. Now, Ravitch quotes John Maynard Keynes, who is said to have told a critic, "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?" She writes in Death and Life that she "grew increasingly disaffected from both the choice movement and the accountability movement," two essential elements of the conservative plans to recast public education.

I feared that choice would let thousands of flowers bloom but would not strengthen American education. It might even harm the public schools by removing the best students from schools in the poorest neighborhoods. I was also concerned that accountability, now a shibboleth that everyone applauds, had become mechanistic and even antithetical to good education. Testing, I realized with dismay, had become a central preoccupation in the schools and was not just a measure but an end in itself. I came to believe that accountability, as written into federal law, was not raising standards but dumbing down the schools as states and districts strived to meet unrealistic targets.

It’s no surprise, given the vigor of Ravitch’s recantation, that she once argued forcefully for positions she now rejects. In 1995 she wrote, "Parents ought to be able to send their children to the school of their choice, basing their decision on accessible, accurate information." Furthermore, "The neediest students should get scholarships to attend any accredited school, including religious schools." As for accountability, Ravitch insisted that every school should be "accountable" and "rigorously audited" for "student performance and fiscal integrity." Regarding New York City’s school system of one million students, she wrote:

The schools chancellor and the central board should set academic standards, administer citywide tests, sign performance contracts with every school and replace the managements of schools that fail to meet their own performance goals. The chancellor should have the power to close schools that consistently fail or engage in corrupt practices.

Unintended Consequences

Before considering the relationship between changing facts and Professor Ravitch’s changing opinions, it’s important to discuss the way her thinking has not changed. Ravitch was given rock-star treatment when she received the Friend of Education award at the 2010 NEA convention, and was recently described as a "liberal icon" by the Washington City Paper. Yet she was not being disingenuous when she wrote in Death and Life, "I am too ‘conservative’ to embrace an agenda whose end result is entirely speculative and uncertain.... I could not countenance any reforms that might have the effect—intended or unintended—of undermining public education."

This Burkean concern with the potential for reform agendas, derived from abstract theorizing, to have unexpected and baleful consequences is a thread running through Ravitch’s career. Her first book, The Great School Wars, New York City, 1805-1973 (1974), concludes with an account of how ideas about "community control," devised by the Ford Foundation under the leadership of McGeorge Bundy, were implemented to disastrous effect in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville section of Brooklyn. "One of the persistent ironies of reform," she wrote, "is the impossibility of predicting the full consequences of change; every school war has had outcomes which were unintended, and, in many cases, unwanted."

This wary respect for the law of unintended consequences continues to the present day. The title of Ravitch’s new book pays homage to The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), by Jane Jacobs. Jacobs gained fame as the writer and activist who thwarted massive urban renewal projects proposed by New York’s Robert Moses, the most powerful unelected state and local official of the 20th century. Jacobs, who opposed the war in Vietnam so intensely that she left America for Canada in 1968 and never returned, was nonetheless included in an anthology of conservative thought edited by William F. Buckley, Jr. The 1965 New York City mayoral candidate hailed her as "the tenacious challenger of the urban abstractionist," who defended "a city that grows as it is disposed to grow, free of the superimpositions and the great allocations of the planners."

When I asked her, by email, about the connections between the two Death and Life books, Ms. Ravitch replied, in terms similar to Buckley’s, that she was impressed by Jacobs’s defense of "the wisdom of those who are closest to the situation, as opposed to grandiose schemes that don’t take ordinary people’s ideas into account about how they want to live their lives." Her Death and Life also cites a less famous book that makes a similar argument, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (1998) by James C. Scott. It taught her, Ravitch wrote, to beware the temptations that lead to, and consequences that follow from, "looking at schools and teachers and students from an altitude of 20,000 feet and seeing them as objects to be moved around by big ideas and great plans."

Ravitch devotes a scathing chapter of Death and Life to the big ideas that convulsed the San Diego school system. Alan Bersin, a former federal prosecutor appointed school superintendent in 1998 despite having no experience as an educator or educational administrator, played the part of Robert Moses. Superintendent Bersin quickly assembled a team that "launched a radical venture in school reform," according to Ravitch, with a strategy that relied on "command-and-control methods rather than consensus" and assumed "the central planners know exactly what to do and how to do it."

Bersin attempted to reshape all of San Diego schools on the basis of "Balanced Literacy," a flavor-of-the-month pedagogical theory that "focuses mainly on reading strategies and teaching children to identify and practice them," in Ravitch’s summary. Students are encouraged to rehearse and specify these strategies by interrupting their classroom reading to announce, "I am visualizing," "I am summarizing," "I am making an inference," or "I am making a text-to-self connection." At one point Ravitch interviews one of the Balanced Literacy Kool-Aid drinkers from the San Diego central office, who says, "You won’t believe this, but we had fourth graders who didn’t know the difference between point of view and perspective." Ravitch refrained from confessing that she didn’t know the difference either.

Hayek Without Tears

The great exponent of the idea that the wisdom possessed by even the ablest, most conscientious planners is never more than a fraction of the knowledge dispersed throughout a large population was the economist Friedrich Hayek. Though Ravitch never mentions Hayek in Death and Life, she was familiar enough with his work to cite it in a 1999 City Journal article, wherein she addressed a conservative readership: "Friedrich A. Hayek explained long ago that centralized ‘command-and-control’ regulation seldom is efficient, because the people at headquarters always have a crucial deficit in information; they never know as much as the many thousands of people who are out in the field."

Hayek argued that prices, rising and falling freely in open markets, facilitate the efficiency and dynamism that planners can only compromise. Such prices convey, accurately and fluidly, changes in demand and supply—that is, in how widely and avidly people desire particular goods and services, and how easily and successfully people provide them.

Invoking a famous market theoretician would be as politically awkward for Ravitch today, given the different audience she is addressing, as it was helpful 12 years ago. Ravitch 2.0, in a 2011 blog post for Education Week magazine’s website, decries the "continuing campaign to dismantle public education, privatize it, and turn it over to entrepreneurs of various stripes." There is, she now believes, a clash of visions for American public education:

One sees the school as a community, a place of learning where there is an ethical obligation to support both staff and students, helping both to succeed. The other sees schools as one part of a free-market economy, where quality may be judged by data; if the results aren’t good enough, then fire part or all of the people and close the store, I mean, the school and pick a new location.

Having changed her mind, Ravitch has embraced a philosophy that amounts to Hayek without tears—indeed, without consequences. Ravitch 1.0 wanted parents to be able to choose their schools on the basis of accurate, accessible information, and for school systems to formulate and apply standards that could measure which schools and teachers were doing a good job, and which weren’t. For Ravitch 2.0, bad teachers’ responsibility for our educational shortcomings is minimal, but the "zeal" to fire "bad teachers" is deplorable. (The quotation marks questioning whether such teachers exist are hers.) Such terminations entail shirking "responsibility for ruining someone’s life." The thing to do with bad teachers, she writes, is to help them. If you’ve helped them, and they’re still bad teachers...then you help them some more.

In the 2.0 morality play, then, the bad guys are the ones performing the tasks considered essential in the 1.0 analysis of schools’ most urgent needs. Those who formulate and apply criteria for educational success, permitting or even encouraging parents to choose or reject schools on the basis of those criteria, have become Robert Moses-like villains, imperiously convulsing students and educators’ lives on the basis of grand theories and comprehensive plans.

Ecology and Teleology

This reversal involves something deeper than switching sides politically. Jane Jacobs’s central contention in The Death and Life of Great American Cities was that cities have an ecology. She never used the term, and I don’t employ it in the sense that became synonymous with "environmentalism" a decade after she published her book. The point, rather, is that Jacobs demonstrated that cities adapt and flourish because of the intricate, subtle interactions among the people who live and work in them. The economist Edward Glaeser wrote in a 2009 essay, "Jacobs offered an anthropological analysis of how neighborhoods actually work." Her greatest insight, according to Glaeser, "was that cities succeed by enabling people to connect with one another.... As Jacobs understood better than anyone else, the chance encounters facilitated by cities are the stuff of human progress."

Unlike a city, however, a school system has an ecology but also a teleology—a mission. The core of this mission is to contribute to the success of the American experiment in self-government by preparing young people to assume the responsibilities our republic requires. It is not sufficient for these purposes that the schools produce graduates who are literate and numerate—but it is necessary. The Ravitch 2.0 diagnosis of why our schools don’t perform their basic job better emphasizes "materials" (the schoolchildren), management (the regime of accountability, represented by No Child Left Behind and President Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s Race to the Top), and choice (especially the increasing resources and attention devoted to charter schools). Labor (teachers and principals) are victims, not perpetrators.

Thus, "If every child arrived in school well-nourished, healthy, and ready to learn, from a family with a stable home and a steady income, many of our educational problems would be solved," Ravitch wrote in the New York Times earlier this year. Writing on her blog in support of July’s "Save Our Schools" march in Washington, she called for federal programs assuring "that every pregnant woman has appropriate medical care and nutrition," and "children have high-quality early-childhood education...." Ravitch believes the Obama education policies affirm rather than repudiate No Child Left Behind (NCLB), and dismisses both approaches as "cruel." She has expressed particular concern about "the effects of 12 years of multiple-choice, standardized testing on children’s cognitive development" and the growth of "an educational system devoted to constant measurement, ranking, and rating of children." As for labor, its shortcomings are entirely attributable to management, because the "punitive approach embedded in NCLB" has "poisoned the atmosphere," Ravitch wrote in the New Republic last year, leaving educators feeling "fearful, beleaguered, and disrespected" by a "blame game that makes teachers the culprits for poor performance."

This diagnosis is unpersuasive, and the prescription it leads to is conspicuously thin. It’s undeniable that weakening family and social structures, and the general abbreviation of attention spans, leave more children less prepared to succeed in school. It’s difficult, however, to see that the correct conclusion to draw from these realities is that the schools should be excused from any expectations to perform better until a different Blob, the social welfare system, finds the resources and strategies it needs to guarantee every child’s health and happiness. Head Start, the core federal program intended to address such needs is now 45 years old, and spends $7 billion a year on preschool programs enrolling about one million poor children. The benefits, according to the "Head Start Impact Study" recently released by the Department of Health and Human Services, are negligible. Positive results "vanished by the end of first grade," according to Joe Klein’s summary in Time, while "Head Start graduates performed about the same as students of similar income and social status who were not part of the program."

The Compromise

So, yes, the schools have a tough job, and there are no obvious ways to make it much easier. This daunting challenge should make us more determined to learn whatever we can about which schools and approaches are faring especially well or poorly. It’s here where choice and accountability can help, and where the Ravitch 2.0 rejection of them is misguided. They are not, as Frederick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute argues, "ways to improve instruction—like a new curriculum or reading program." They are better understood as ways to acquire the insight and flexibility that make improvements in the organization and delivery of educational services possible. The point is not to discover the "secret sauce" that can guarantee excellence in every public school. Specific circumstances are likely to require different approaches in a nation growing larger and more diverse. Choice and accountability demonstrate their value, and refute Ravitch’s critique of them, by making it easier to "create schools and systems characterized by focus and coherence, where robust curricula, powerful pedagogy, and rich learning thrive," in Hess’s words.

Accountability can be administered badly, of course. Ravitch trains her sights on a big, ambling target in Death and Life, since by 2010 it was impossible to find anyone who believed the No Child Left Behind testing regime had been just the tonic for our schools. What she doesn’t acknowledge is that all those kids taking all those tests is not just a problem, but a reflection of a deeper problem. The political bargain that secured large majorities for NCLB in both houses of Congress when it passed in 2001 was that Republicans would accept increased federal funding for education and Democrats would accept the development of yardsticks to satisfy parents and taxpayers that the schools really were improving. On this basis liberal Democrats, led by Representative George Miller of California and the late Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, supported the bill, as did conservative Republicans who ordinarily would have opposed another federal program to throw money at our educational problems.

NCLB critics have valid arguments about mis-measuring and over-measuring our students. Beneath them, however, is a less creditable attempt to revise the political bargain that created NCLB. The position of such critics is that we should continue and increase the flow of public dollars, while trusting the educators receiving those dollars to determine whether they’re being spent effectively. Every American child deserves an education as good as the one offered at Sidwell Friends School, Ravitch told the protestors at the Save our Schools rally. Sidwell Friends, of course, is where the past two Democratic presidents enrolled their children—and where tuition exceeds $30,000 a year.

Before tripling the amount they pay for public education, however, taxpayers should be aware that the only assessments blessed by the Save Our Schools website are ones devised and applied by teachers, who know how to evaluate students informally and "are able to assess learning in multiple dimensions." As Ravitch told the rally, "Education policy should be designed by educators, not by politicians." In a democracy, politicians are responsible to voters while educators are responsible to professional standards, as applied and interpreted by...other educators. "We protest the idea that state legislatures have the wisdom to know how to evaluate teachers," she told the marchers. "It’s unprofessional!"

Some of Ravitch’s critics have pointed out that her detailed, forceful attacks on choice and accountability are accompanied by an account of the right path for the schools to follow that is meager, vague, bromidic, and nostalgic. In Death and Life she wrote:

Our schools will not improve if we continue to close neighborhood schools in the name of reform. Neighborhood schools are often the anchors of their communities, a steady presence that helps to cement the bonds of community among neighbors. Most are places with a history, laden with traditions and memories that help individuals resist fragmentation in their lives. Their graduates return and want to see their old classrooms; they want to see the trophy cases and the old photographs, to hear the echoes in the gymnasium and walk on the playing fields.

We interrupt this reverie to inform you that conservatives who opposed busing with such language 40 years ago were accused of using code words for racism. For liberals, the rhetoric of communitarianism lends itself to covertly advancing the agenda of professionalism. Diane Ravitch grew up in an "FDR-loving, Democratic family," according to Dana Goldstein’s profile in the Washington City Paper. After long years spent advancing a conservative viewpoint "she has returned to her traditional liberal home" with the publication of Death and Life, wrote Richard Kahlenberg, biographer of teachers’ union leader Albert Shanker, in the Washington Monthly.

Carrots, Sticks, and True Canards

Coming home to liberalism means coming home to the conviction that disinterested experts really are disinterested, and really are expert. No one outside the guild can fairly or competently evaluate anyone inside it. "We protest the idea that principals and teachers will work harder if they’re offered bonuses and if they live in fear of being fired," Ravitch told the Save Our Schools rally. "Carrots and sticks are for donkeys, not professionals." That hellish set of arrangements where one prospers by performing a job capably and suffers for performing it badly is what most Americans know as adulthood. In a Daily Beast article last year, "Stop Trashing Teachers!" Ravitch insisted, "The claim that ‘tenure’ is a guarantee of lifetime employment is a canard." The job protections afforded teachers do not constitute "tenure" but merely offer "due process," a guarantee that a teacher can be fired "only after a hearing by an impartial hearing officer."

It turns out, however, that the widespread belief that tenured public school teachers have lifetime job security is one of those canards that is mostly, um, true. Ravitch devotes a chapter in Death and Life to lamenting the results of the state legislature’s decision in 2002 to abolish the New York City Board of Education, which appointed and oversaw a schools chancellor, in favor of direct control of the schools by the mayor. Ravitch does not mention that in the kinder, gentler school system before mayoral control, 97% of New York City teachers received tenure after three years in the classroom, and 99% were deemed satisfactory in their annual evaluations.

In 2009 Steven Brill did mention these facts in an acclaimed New Yorker article. It made clear that the accommodation worked out over the years between the school system and the United Federation of Teachers did not guarantee merely a hearing to teachers up for dismissal. The process due to teachers under the union contract was a gauntlet, a siege, an endurance contest—a series of hearings, motions and appeals that consumed eight times as many days as the average criminal trial in the U.S. The embarrassment to the schools and the union from Brill’s article was so acute that they agreed last year to shut down the "rubber rooms," where hundreds of teachers reported every workday to sit, dozing or playing board games, collecting full pay and accumulating credit towards their pensions, while their dismissal proceedings dragged on, sometimes for years.

In the torrent of articles she has written since the publication of Death and Life, Ravitch employs communitarian language to describe healthy schools. "Teachers, principals, administrators, parents, and local communities should collaborate to create caring communities," she contends, and urges us to view schools as "cooperative enterprises, where the adults are expected to work closely with one another towards common goals." She distinguishes such communities from markets, red in tooth and claw, where educators are terrorized to teach better, and find themselves demeaned and their lives ruined if their students don’t learn enough.

Accountability

It’s hard to disparage collaboration and cooperation, as such. Context matters, however. In her Death and Life Jane Jacobs popularized the term "social capital" to describe how trust and the ease of sharing ideas strengthen a society. There may well have been more of that social capital for the great American school system to draw on decades ago, but it had a particular configuration. As recently as 1970, barely half (52.3%) of Americans aged 25 and over were high school graduates, and only a tenth (10.7%) held bachelor’s degrees. By 2009 those proportions were 86.7% and 29.5%, respectively. The collaborations in 1970 between credentialed teachers, principals, and administrators, on the one hand, and parents and other community members, on the other, had a significant degree of deference built in, as educated people deliberated education policy with, generally, less educated people.

When Ravitch and teachers union leaders talk about restoring the good old days where professional educators were stewards entrusted with a community mission, this is the quality they are most eager to recapture. In reality, that sort of deference and, therefore, that sort of collaboration is less common today. An important reason why accountability remains integral to federal education policy, even after a Democratic administration displaced a Republican one in 2009, is the depletion of social capital, the lack of trust in the Blob. The political message that parents and taxpayers deserve objective, independent evaluations of schools’ performance resonates far better with today’s increasingly educated public than the message that educators should be given the money and power to do their job as they understand it, and know-nothing amateurs should stop interfering in their work.

"Congress and state legislatures should not tell teachers how to teach," Ravitch wrote in Death and Life, "any more than they should tell surgeons how to perform operations." Suppose, however, that the vast majority of hospitals were public facilities and the vast majority of physicians were public employees. Voters would not want legislators to write surgical guidelines, any more than they want them to devise schools’ lesson plans. But they would want to know if there were some hospitals and surgeons whose patients recovered at an unusually high rate, and others whose patients were exceptionally likely to get sicker and die. Because of that data’s importance, responsible public authorities would be obligated to develop it carefully, taking into account that different hospitals serve different communities, with health problems of varying types and severity.

After allowing for factors beyond the hospitals’ and surgeons’ control, public oversight might well reveal big differences still remaining in outcomes that could be ascribed to factors within the medical professionals’ control. The public and their elected representatives would want to have access to that information. They would want to know which facilities were performing conspicuously well, in the hope that their best practices could be adopted elsewhere, and which facilities were doing conspicuously poorly, in the hope that their mistakes could be corrected. If the individuals responsible for the worst mistakes couldn’t or wouldn’t make the necessary improvements they could then be directed into lines of work that did not put patients’ lives at risk. Conscientious hospital administrators and surgeons, for whom professional standards define a calling instead of propping up a careerist racket, would welcome such standards rather than resent them as the intrusions of uninformed outsiders. As that noted right-wing demagogue, Barack Obama, once said, "If a teacher is given a chance or two chances or three chances but still does not improve, there’s no excuse for that person to continue teaching. I reject a system that rewards failure and protects a person from its consequences." One of the New York rubber room teachers Brill spoke to dismissed that position as "accountability bullshit" in favor of professional self-regulation: "We can tell if we’re doing our jobs. We love these children."

In an America where public-sector medicine was the norm we would also expect that citizens would refuse to accept a system where they were assigned to their neighborhood hospital, and could seek care in other facilities, public or private, only by navigating a bureaucratic labyrinth or at great personal expense. Rather, they would demand, to paraphrase Ravitch 1.0, the freedom to seek medical care in the hospital and with the doctors of their choice, basing their decision on accessible, accurate information. It would be no surprise if that desire to vote with their feet led to demands for patients to be able to seek medical care from any licensed doctor or hospital.

For many years Diane Ravitch understood these concerns, and expressed them cogently. She has come to view her work during those years as flawed, and the policy initiatives that resulted from the political pressure she helped generate as misbegotten. Ravitch has retracted what she views as mistakes she made in the past, but takes pride in the flexibility and empirical clarity that allows her, no dogmatist, to discard ideas that fare badly outside the seminar room and op-ed pages. Perhaps, then, she’ll reconsider the dangers of entrusting public education to professionalism that is neither checked nor balanced by citizens’ concerns and their elected representatives’ actions. Perhaps she’ll change her mind again.

Harold William Rood, RIP

Brian T. Kennedy — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 00:00:00 EST

Dr. Bill Rood, our friend and teacher, passed away at his home in Manchester, California on Thursday, October 6 after a bout with cancer. Dr. Rood was Professor Emeritus at Claremont McKenna College and a Fellow of the Claremont Institute. He received the Claremont Institute’s Salvatori Prize in the American Founding in 2007 and taught in the Claremont Institute’s Publius Fellows Program since 1979.

Dr. Rood was the author of Kingdoms of the Blind: How the Great Democracies Have Resumed the Follies That So Nearly Cost Them Their Life. He also authored numerous essays and served as Executive Editor of the Institute’s Grand Strategy: Countercurrents. He was also the author of an award-winning essay, "Distant Rampart," for the Naval Institute’s journal, Proceedings in 1967.

Dr. Rood was a private infantryman in Patton’s Third Army in World War II and was part of the Rhineland and Central Europe campaigns. He studied engineering at Stanford University as part of the Army Program. After the war he did graduate work at the London School of Economics, Oxford University, and the University of California, Berkeley where he received his PhD in Political Science.

He is survived by his wife Juanita and daughters Hillary and Elizabeth.

The Claremont Institute is planning a memorial service for Dr. Rood in the coming months.

Moderation in Pursuit of Democracy

John Zvesper — Sun, 9 Oct 2011 00:00:00 EST

This brief, approachable book, intended by its author "to be a learned essay that is accessible to citizens as such," contains sharp historical insights and intelligent comments and interesting biographical details on the writers it discusses. Its basic argument is that modern, liberal democracy cannot survive without "pre-liberal" and "extra-liberal" political and cultural traditions, which are under siege. A liberal democracy without these "conservative foundations of the liberal order" would not be a durable "order," for liberty without its "conservative" foundations—which means respectable and respected hierarchies that withstand the urge to democratize everything—is (by definition, I suppose) bound to fail.

In the preface, Daniel Mahoney, a professor of political science at Assumption College and CRB contributor, summarizes his central concern:

Democracy is prone to corruption when its principle—the liberty and equality of human beings—becomes an unreflective dogma eroding the traditions, authoritative institutions, and spiritual presuppositions that allow human beings to live free, civilized, and decent lives.

He states this concern more bluntly and clearly in a recent interview about his book in The University Bookman (Winter 2011):

It is a great illusion to think that liberty is identical with unencumbered choice and a reckless disregard for the wisdom of the past. The book is a reminder that democratic liberty can only flourish when it freely acknowledges the "continuity" of civilization—the debt of liberty in the modern world to classical and Christian presuppositions that we are increasingly tempted to disregard. I am in no way an enemy of the liberal order. But I hope to make my contemporaries more aware of the dependence of what is most valuable in liberal democracy on "conservative foundations" that it doesn’t sufficiently acknowledge and sometimes actively undermines.

Mahoney defends liberal democracy against its modern totalitarian enemies on the Left and the Right, but also—and more urgently and passionately—against its wrongheaded friends: those who unwisely try to undermine modern democracy’s foundations in Western political and cultural (particularly religious) traditions. These more insidious enemies are dedicated to freeing us from the constraints of those traditions, and are all the more dangerous because they can plausibly present themselves as democracy’s more consistent defenders. In fact, Mahoney himself accepts that they are indeed more consistent.

These "immoderate" (and false) friends define democracy and democratization as the maximum increase in individual emancipation and autonomy, and they apply this abstract theory of democracy in a destructively demanding way. Although Mahoney sees this destructive theory flourishing throughout the West since the cultural revolution that began in the 1960s, he also finds an unhealthy abstraction from political and cultural inheritances in liberal thinkers going back as far as Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. (For Mahoney, as for Edmund Burke, abstract theory is generally bad theory.)

* * *

Part one of the book—its "theoretical core"—is called "The Art of Loving Democracy Moderately." To love democracy "moderately" is the contemporary French political thinker Pierre Manent’s characterization of Alexis de Tocqueville’s advice to liberal democrats. Those who love liberty passionately (that seems to be permitted) but wisely will love democracy only moderately. They will be "chastened liberals." Mahoney follows Tocqueville’s (and Manent’s) advice to adopt "a sober and qualified appreciation of democracy." This means recognizing "the threats that unbridled democracy" poses to "the freedom and integrity of human beings"; "never losing sight of the fact that the recognition of the equality of human beings can never substitute for the cultivation of the ‘grandeur,’ ‘independence,’ and ‘quality’ of the human soul"; and being deeply concerned with the maintenance of the "pre- or extraliberal traditions and habits" that are essential to the health of liberal democracy, but are endangered by the mistaken belief in the self-sufficiency and self-sovereignty of individuals, a belief that democracies are irresistibly tempted to adopt.

It is from this position that Mahoney would have us confront the destructive "radical" or "abstract" theory of democracy that is currently advocated by many intellectuals (up to now, more effectively in Europe than in the U.S.), who succumb to what Mahoney calls in part three of his book "The False Allure of ‘Pure Democracy.’" This "corruption or radicalization of democracy" became prominent in the 1960s with the New Left’s challenges to liberal democracy sensibly understood. Today’s partisans of "pure democracy" (another expression that Mahoney takes from Manent) are the "immoderate friends" (actually the "worst enemies") of democracy.

The defining moment for these advocates of "pure democracy" was 1968. Yet this moment did not coincide with the widespread protests against liberal democracies’ unjust hierarchies and political actions, for these protests had little deep practical impact at the time, and some well-founded objections to and corrections of the rigidities of the traditional social order had appeared before 1968.The real turning point in 1968 arose from the excessive and paradoxically authoritarian way these objections and corrections were pursued thereafter, and in the radicalization of democratic theory that justified these practical excesses. "Nineteen sixty-eight was the moment when democracy became self-consciously humanitarian and postpolitical and therefore broke with the continuity of Western civilization." The civic equality that is "at the heart of democratic political life" has become "the unchallenged model for all human relations." Moreover, "a laudable respect for the accomplishments of different cultures has given way to an absolute relativism that denies the very idea of universal moral judgments and a universal human nature."

Before 1968, the new and old dispensations—liberal democracy and "older moral traditions and affirmations"—had "coexisted without too much (practical) difficulty." But a profound theoretical conflict existed nonetheless, papered over by a temporary alliance of liberals and conservatives. Opposition to 20th-century totalitarianisms had enlarged the common ground of liberals (who "rediscovered the moral law at the heart of Western civilization") and conservatives ("churchmen discovered the virtues of liberal constitutionalism"). But "1968 shattered this anti-totalitarian consensus and gave birth to "postmodern democracy." More precisely: "Nineteen sixty-eight played a central role, as both cause and effect," in the "reduction of a capacious tradition of liberty to an idea of democracy committed to a single principle: the maximization of individual autonomy and consent." Mahoney concludes from this that one important lesson of 1968 is that "the idea of democracy is never sufficient unto itself," and that as "pure abstraction or ideology, democracy risks becoming a deadly enemy of self-government,...human liberty and dignity."

* * *

Mahoney calls on many European thinkers and statesmen and a few American ones to help him define, and defend, modern liberal democracy. The book’s front cover features portraits of four of his heroes: Burke, Winston S. Churchill, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Between the book’s covers we encounter Burke’s "defense of tradition and practical reason" against ideological abstractions, Churchill’s thoughts on democracy’s limitations and the dangers of mass society, Solzhenitsyn on the fragility of the Enlightenment principles of modern liberalism and the shortcomings of "anthropocentric humanism," Michael Burleigh on terrorism, Raymond Aron on totalitarianism and conservatism, and of course Tocqueville on practically everything.

When Mahoney briefly discusses the American Founders (in fewer than three pages), it is mainly to argue that they "built better than they knew," for their thinking "presupposed a ‘hodge-podge anthropology’ [Mahoney is quoting Walker Percy] that drew unevenly upon classical and Christian wisdom, on the one hand, and Enlightenment propositions, on the other." Although this was a "fruitful tension," it was "also an unstable mixture that was likely to decay as time went on." It is not clear why.

He therefore argues that "the founders’ practical achievement was in decisive respects better than their theory." Therefore, particularly when it comes to opposing "willful claims on behalf of human autonomy," Mahoney suggests we should "remain faithful to the ‘genius’ of the founding while moving beyond the founders’ somewhat constricted theoretical horizon." He complains that their endorsement of social-contract theory was inferior to Tocqueville’s more historical—sociological approach, and conspicuously lacked the Frenchman’s appreciation of the danger that this abstract theory would be harmfully applied to "every aspect of human life."

For Mahoney, the genius of the founders lay not so much in their political theory as in the practical wisdom that led them (unlike some of the French revolutionary leaders) to avoid starting from scratch, and to respect as a historical given "America’s unwritten or ‘providential’ constitution," i.e., "the habits and mores of the American people so eloquently described by John Jay in Federalist 2." So much for Publius’s improved science of politics! Therefore—with help from Tocqueville and others—"it is up to us today to theorize [the founders’] practical wisdom and thus transcend the limits of some of their theoretical assumptions and presuppositions."

Why does Mahoney not find the founders’ mixture of ancient and modern a commendable instance of the continuity of Western civilization, rather than an unstable hodgepodge? Perhaps it is because he fails fully to take into account the deep differences between radical, nihilistic moderns (with Hobbes, Rousseau, and Hegel at the cutting edge), and moderate moderns (e.g., Locke, Montesquieu, James Madison, and John Stuart Mill), who see far less opposition than radical moderns do between nature and good human lives. (For example, unlike the founders, Mahoney often refers to the political theories of Hobbes and Locke as if they taught fundamentally the same things.) And though Mahoney does notice that the Enlightenment was "more variegated" than Solzhenitsyn suggests—"not all of its currents succumbed to atheistic fanaticism"—the author’s odd example of a "radical commitment to ‘liberation’" is Jefferson’s denunciation of the "monkish ignorance and superstition" (Jefferson’s words) that had been used to support oppressive governments. Or perhaps Mahoney does see the depth and importance of the distinction between radical and moderate moderns, but simply fears that the moderates are less viable than the radicals, and hence we need to boost the influence of traditional culture and religion, which to Mahoney means Christianity, in order to combat the power of the radicals’ appeal.

* * *

However that may be, the downsides of democracy were hardly unknown to the founders, whose writings are full of warnings about them. Nor did recognition of the social and intellectual excesses of democracy—such as those referred to in Plato’s dialogues and Aristophanes’ plays—have to wait for Tocqueville’s brilliant analyses.

As good moderate moderns, the founders would surely have agreed with Mahoney’s fine statement about the most fundamental issue of liberal democratic politics: "The law cannot be fully ‘neutral’ about the good life—about the ends and purposes of human life—without eventually subverting the idea of human nobility and the moral foundations of liberty itself." And the founding generation—and later generations even more—found in the modern emphasis on natural human equality (even though it is, as Abraham Lincoln observed, "an abstract truth") the basis of an ethics that respects respectable hierarchies, without needing so much recourse to the pre- or extra-liberal inheritances that Mahoney insists upon. That may help explain why, as he notices, hyper-democratization has affected Europe more than the United States—in spite of Europe having more old-regime survivals. Why should trying to boost pre-liberal or extra-democratic forces here at home be more effective than cultivating Americans’ liberal democratic ethics, in theory and in practice?

All the Progressives’ Men

Scott Yenor — Mon, 3 Oct 2011 00:00:00 EST

Books discussed in this essay: The American Presidents Series from Times Books

The publication begun in 2002 of the American Presidents Series by Times Books is an important event. Well-known historians, often authors of authoritative biographies on their subjects, have produced treatments both readable and brief, usually 150 to 175 pages long, distilling the most important aspects of each president’s formative experiences, political rise, term in office, and post-presidential years. Mostly unadorned by footnotes and unconcerned with the minutiae that occupy so many of today’s biographers, the American Presidents Series gets to the heart of the matter for a popular readership.

The aspiration of the series is to provide an "easy education in American history," as the late Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., the series editor, wrote in a note that forms the preface to each volume. Teaching American history through biography has advantages, bringing figures both heroic and unheroic alive. What’s more, American politicians don’t ascend to the presidency by being unrepresentative. Accordingly, the way presidents engage political controversies illuminates what Americans wanted during those years. This clarification of context is indispensable to understanding what is distinctive about the American political order as it has been revealed through our history.

The trouble with viewing political history merely through the prism of presidents’ biographies, however, is that policy debates can appear to be grounded in nothing deeper than the people’s changing needs and the government’s changing capacities. This approach reflects the conviction, integral to progressive politics and scholarship, that American democracy has a history but not really any principles, at least not any permanent or essential ones that might constrain and direct the relation between government and the citizens. The American Presidents Series presents, in short, a narrative of the inexorable growth of the state that makes limited government and constitutionalism increasingly irrelevant.

As Woodrow Wilson put it, "governments have their natural evolution and are one thing in one age, another in another." "Governments are what politicians make them," he argued, and so "it is easier to write of the President than of the presidency." Easier, but not better. Which is why it’s surprising that, in spite of itself, the American Presidents Series provides a basis for challenging two central aspects of the progressive narrative.

Chronicles and Olympian Historians

When Schlesinger died in 2007, Princeton historian Sean Wilentz became editor of the Series. He has yet to select authors for volumes on Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama. (And the volumes on John Kennedy, William Henry Harrison, and William Howard Taft are not available, yet.) Some pairings of biographer to subject are natural fits, such as Robert Remini’s John Quincy Adams, Wilentz’s Andrew Jackson, the late Roy Jenkins’s Franklin Roosevelt, and H.W. Brands’s Woodrow Wilson. Some are emphatically not, like George McGovern’s Abraham Lincoln. The volumes on the presidents since FDR are more concerned with settling partisan scores than fulfilling the Series’s central mission. Tom Wicker’s Dwight Eisenhower and Elizabeth Drew’s Richard Nixon don’t even pretend to be fair.

History, of course, is more than a chronicle of "one damn thing after another." Honest chronicling is an indispensable preparation to writing history, which brings, however, a critical perspective to the record and endows events with meaning. By explicating principles or tensions that define the human condition, historians connect isolated events to one another, and to larger contexts that reveal their import.

For example, Lincoln’s great Peoria speech in 1854 chronicled the American government’s measures touching on slavery, with the aim of showing that the founders put slavery on a course toward its ultimate extinction. Lincoln’s history is controversial, especially in light of the late historian Donald Fehrenbacher’s claim that the functioning Constitution had effectively rendered America a "slaveholding republic." Yet Lincoln’s speech assimilated evidence into a historical narrative arguing persuasively that the Kansas-Nebraska Act was a radical departure from our constitutional order’s essence. Franklin Roosevelt provides another enduring, powerful story—the progressive narrative that many of the Series’s historians embrace and even take for granted. In his "Commonwealth Club Address" during the 1932 campaign, FDR portrayed American history as the rise and fall of economic opportunity. For centuries, according to FDR, ruthless kings forged strong, central states "able to keep the peace" but eventually went too far, giving rise to popular movements, such as the American Revolution, committed to natural rights and limited government. Individualism thrived as long as labor was scarce and land plentiful.

The Industrial Revolution and the closing of the frontier imperiled these happy conditions. By the 1930s, FDR claimed, "equality of opportunity as we have known it no longer exist[ed]," as evidenced by the precarious lives endured by many Americans. He called for a "re-appraisal of values," culminating in an understanding that "financial Titans," like the feudal kings before them, had made their contribution to historical progress by building out the modern industrial plant. Now, "the day of enlightened administration has come," in which the job of government will be "modifying and controlling our economic units" by re-working the Bill of Rights to include economic or social rights.

Many writers in the American Presidents Series adopt and elaborate FDR’s story, making the central drama of American history the interplay between "the people" and "the powerful." In the early republic, runs this account, government succored the powerful through such policies as John Adams’s Alien and Sedition Acts, Nicholas Biddle’s Bank of the United States, and the Whigs’ American System. The people needed their champions, finding them in Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson. After the Civil War, the bad guys were greedy businessmen like FDR’s "economic royalists." The good guys responded by empowering government. This formula allows former Clinton advisor Ted Widmer to call FDR, who expanded government, an "ideological descendant" of Martin Van Buren, who constrained it. When writing about the 1830s, Widmer and Wilentz are constantly thinking about the 1930s. The moral is clear and simple. Presidents who failed to augment government’s capacity to regulate or redistribute wealth were prisoners of their times. Those who succeeded at expanding government were farsighted statesmen who helped lay the groundwork for the New Deal.

Examples are plentiful. Though James Ceaser has shown convincingly that Van Buren founded the modern party system mostly to fulfill the founders’ goal of restraining popular leadership, the eighth president emerges in Widmer’s account as someone who founded political parties to increase the institutional capacity of extra-constitutional national institutions. Rutherford B. Hayes recognized the growing gap between rich and poor, which makes him "an early progressive," in Hans. L. Trefousse’s view, though Hayes was merely a "child of his age" when he failed to intervene on behalf of fledgling labor unions. For Zachary Karabell, Chester Arthur’s signing of the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act reflects the "impulses that would coalesce in the early twentieth century to create the Progressive movement." William McKinley emerges from class-warrior Kevin Phillips’s volume as a "surprisingly modern" president who believed in positive government—and may have grown further in office had he lived. Even the most conservative president of that time, Grover Cleveland, "foreshadowed the antitrust fervor," according to Henry F. Graff’s interpretation.

These judgments reflect the complacent assumption that any measure requiring stronger government must be interpreted as anticipating and advancing the progressive cause, rather than as reflecting the application of America’s constitutional principles to changing realities. Similarly, the authors insist that any concern with economic inequality points forward to progressive policies of redistribution. Civil service reform is an early echo of the omnipotent administrative state, instead of a sensible limitation on a spoils system that, taken to its extreme, upsets executive energy. Trust-busting appears as something that can be justified only on progressive grounds.

The volumes on the 19th-century presidents generate great anticipation for Wilson and FDR. What emerges from Brands’s Woodrow Wilson and Jenkins’s Franklin Delano Roosevelt is therefore a bit of a letdown: the New Freedom and the New Deal are nothing revolutionary or even programmatic, but a series of unconnected attempts to solve society’s problems. Brands’s Wilson is someone whose actions speak louder than his words, even though Wilson’s writings were his most fundamental actions. Brands sees progressivism merely as a "congeries of reform which encompassed all manner of worthy causes, from conservation and corporate regulation to consumer protection and immigration restriction, from prohibition and workmen’s compensation to women’s suffrage and primary elections." For his part, Jenkins sees neither the well of ideas from which FDR drew nor the objectives toward which he was heading, though he does admit that FDR would not have ranked among the great presidents absent World War II, since Roosevelt only "semisuccessfully" pulled "America out of the Great Depression." In truth, Brands and Jenkins don’t care enough about Wilson and Roosevelt’s ideas to understand, really, these presidents’ sweeping ambitions.

Progressive Expectations

Schlesinger’s editor’s note contains a typically progressive critique of the constitutional system. "The tripartite separation of powers has an inherent tendency toward inertia and stalemate," he declared, and only the executive is "structurally capable of taking that initiative" to resist the gridlock. This makes the presidency the vital place of leadership, as presidents possess and are possessed by "a vision of an ideal America." How presidents come to have such a vision is vitally important, so an investigation of their background and experiences seems in order.

"I remain to this day a New Dealer," Schlesinger wrote in his memoirs, A Life in the 20th Century, published in 2000, "unreconstructed and unrepentant." In his scholarship as much as his politics, to whatever extent the two are distinguishable, Schlesinger was always mindful of FDR, believing presidents informed by the best social science (or at least social scientists) of the day can be expected to know the best answers to the public policy controversies they confront. These assumptions about the crucial role of executive leadership are woven into the book series. Government must be designed to bring the right sort of leaders to the presidency, and provide for a president’s ability to impose his views on Congress and the nation.

Yet the biographies in Schlesinger’s series do not bear out this theory of the presidency. In fact, the biographers commendably, if unwittingly, do more to vindicate the founders’ vision of a flexible system than to prove the need for Schlesinger’s progressive Constitution. Often it appears that public policy problems simply cannot be solved by vesting the president with sufficient power to work his magic.

Between Wilentz, who catalogues the economic folly of Andrew Jackson’s effort to destroy the Bank of the United States, and Widmer who describes Van Buren’s uncomprehending reaction to the Panic of 1837, one must recognize that flawed policies sometimes emerge because flawed leaders cannot ascertain wiser policies. Like many recent treatments of the New Deal, Roy Jenkins’s volume shows that FDR’s plan did not revive the economy, and that the president had no real idea how to do so. Blaming the constitutional separation of powers for problems actually caused by insufficient knowledge is typical of the progressive worldview, but the pages of the Schlesinger series show, despite themselves, that presidential leadership simultaneously vigorous and based on a sure grasp of all the relevant facts and theories is by far the exception, not the rule. The idea that the legislative branch is the part of the system thwarting a dynamic presidency is also refuted by the stories told in these volumes. Henry Clay forged the Missouri Compromise with behind-the-scenes help from James Monroe. Chester Arthur was a spectator as Congress passed the Pendleton Civil Service Act. Franklin Pierce signed the Kansas-Nebraska Act after Stephen Douglas provided decisive political leadership from Capitol Hill. Congress passed Reconstruction legislation over Andrew Johnson’s vetoes. Clearly, the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue can also be the "vital center" of action and innovation.

Nuggets of Narrative

None of my complaints about the biographies as history should gainsay their excellence as chronicles. Nearly every volume contains a fact one appreciates learning. Widmer shows how the term "OK" emerged from Van Buren’s re-election campaign of 1840, when "Old Kinderhook" added the letters to his signature to conjure up memories of "Old Hickory." John S.D. Eisenhower relates in Zachary Taylor that "Old Rough and Ready" is considered by some eminent historians to be the only man who might have averted the Civil War, and Eisenhower makes that seemingly far-fetched statement almost plausible. Franklin Pierce was, as Michael Holt writes, "the most handsome man ever to serve as president of the United States."

Remini’s John Quincy Adams and Josiah Bunting III’s Ulysses S. Grant are two of the best volumes, each rehabilitating its subject’s reputation. Remini portrays a nagging, controlling Abigail Adams, the only American until Barbara Bush who was one president’s wife and a second one’s mother. Abigail’s ability to make her children’s lives miserable appears to have been a significant factor in her son’s decision to volunteer for several foreign diplomatic missions. (His less fortunate siblings met early deaths that Remini connects to their mother’s meddling). This domineering Abigail contrasts with the sweet, ironic one seen in David McCullough’s bestselling biography of John Adams. By afflicting her son, Abigail helped America gain a skilled diplomat and visionary statesman. Though Remini lends credence to the conventional view that John Quincy was an apolitical, nationalist president ill-suited to the Jacksonian Zeitgeist, the author shows how Adams effectively guided American foreign policy from 1800 to 1828, always with an emphasis on containing slavery while expanding the geographical ambit of freedom. Gary Hart’s surprisingly subtle James Monroe corroborates this view, arguing that the Monroe-Adams partnership was crucial to America’s "self-definition" as an anti-imperial, expansionist power.

Bunting’s Grant faces a sterner challenge, for Grant’s presidential reputation is one of corruption, incompetence, and vacillation on the important issues of the day. Bunting’s slender volume gives full scope to the difficulties Grant faced as president and his earnest public-spiritedness in dealing with them. He came to office facing "a set of political challenges together more severe than those that have greeted all American presidents save only two"—Lincoln and FDR. Grant sought to "protect the freedmen" and "conciliate the South" at a time when the facts on the ground rendered these goals utterly incompatible. The protection of civil rights depended on executive enforcement as the means of preserving "the legacy of the terrible war that [Grant] had fought under the leadership of Abraham Lincoln." Enforcement of civil rights would require, in effect, long-term occupation of the South. When the army retreated the Southerners reverted to their old ways. Yes, Grant "vacillated," applying and relinquishing the pressure as exigencies demanded. What alternative did he have? Prevailing histories have been quietly pro-Southern in their inability to recognize this "almost insoluble" dilemma that Grant tried, yet failed, to overcome.

Two of the oddest choices in the series are former Senator George McGovern to write Abraham Lincoln (a volume originally assigned to E.L. Doctorow), and Ira Rutkow, M.D., to write James A. Garfield. The choice of McGovern, a strident Democratic partisan who earned a Ph.D. in History from Northwestern University, is immediately suspect, though it appears Larry Mansch, author of a fine book on the months between Lincoln’s election and his inauguration, ghostwrote the volume. (McGovern admits his own limits as a writer and thanks Mansch "for his assistance in both the research and the composition of the book.") What emerges, however, is a genuine achievement—a well—told, even beautiful account of Lincoln’s rise to the presidency, moderate constitutionalism, steely adherence to the Declaration of Independence, and shrewd wartime leadership. McGovern depicts a president dedicated to natural rights and a proponent of equal opportunity, not a simple precursor of FDR or Wilson. The story of Lincoln’s assassination is told with uncommon pathos and drama.

Rutkow’s biography of Garfield emphasizes the medical aspects of the 20th president’s assassination and death. Garfield, the fourth of six presidents who had served as an officer during the Civil War, achieved the rank of brigadier general. Upon entering Congress he joined the Radical Republicans in pushing Lincoln toward a more exacting policy toward the defeated Confederacy. As Northern opposition to radical Reconstruction mounted after Grant’s election, Garfield moderated and supported pulling federal troops out of the South and a less vigorous enforcement of the civil rights bill. To say, as Rutkow does, that Garfield’s opinions on the military’s role in Reconstruction "never varied" is incorrect, and the story of how Garfield changed his mind is an interesting, revealing part of Reconstruction. Such subtleties would distract Rutkow, who concentrates on the medical mishaps leading to Garfield’s sad, avoidable demise 200 days after his inauguration. The president’s attending doctor, Willard Bliss, was a Civil War surgeon whose old methods, distrust of then—current medical research into antisepsis, bacteria, and sterilization, and insistence on complete control of Garfield’s recovery, led to the president’s infection and death. The emphasis on the odd circumstances of Garfield’s death is a missed opportunity in a series otherwise focused on political history.

Toward a Constitutional History

The failings of the American Presidents Series are instructive, reminding us of the need for a constitutional history of the United States premised upon the importance of first principles. Essential elements of such a history would include an awareness of the limits of human understanding and an appreciation for the context of statesmanship. Too often the Series’s authors assume our presidents’ fundamental task is to expand the state and liberate humans from the permanent problems and tensions of political life.

In reality, administration is seldom as enlightened as it needs to be and certainly far less enlightened than progressive historians assume it can be. Aware of the problems of monopoly, favoritism, and corruption, the American Founders advocated limited government, knowing full well there would be controversies about constitutional boundaries. The superior political history we need would treat, seriously and respectfully, the problem of deciding where to establish these boundaries in concrete cases, rather than proceeding from the hoary assumption that every politician’s effort to expand government hastens the arrival, in Schlesinger’s words, of "an ideal America."

After Racism

Peter C. Myers — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 00:00:00 EST

In a provocative 2008 essay, the novelist Charles Johnson declared "the end of the black American narrative." This narrative, Johnson remarked, "is quietly in the background of every conversation we have about black people.... It is our starting point, our agreed-upon premise, our most important presupposition for dialogues about black America." But this old narrative, at the center of which is "the experience of victimization," is now, at long last, obsolete. "In the 21st century, we need new and better stories."

A story held so broadly and deeply could hardly fade away quietly. The old narrative persists, Johnson observed, "as doggedly as the Ptolemaic vision before Copernicus." It persists most stubbornly among scholars and pundits on the Left, who work endless variations on the narrative’s theme of promise and betrayal. In the current versions, the hopes for equality raised by Martin Luther King, Jr., and the civil rights movement were dashed by a conservative backlash, the same fate that met the kindred hopes raised during the American Revolution and Civil War. Decades after the civil rights era, the nation that once seemed poised to secure equal rights and liberty for all has defaulted yet again. American racism, devilishly adept at strategic retreat and self-concealment, remains alive and well.

Readers familiar with the updates of the old narrative might be forgiven for approaching Eugene Robinson’s new book with certain preconceptions. One might expect Robinson, the reliably liberal MSNBC commentator and Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the Washington Post, to provide a popularized reworking of this tale of backlash and disillusionment. Instead, he produced something genuinely interesting. Viewed in light of Charles Johnson’s suggestion, Disintegration is divided between the old and the new—a book that goes far toward answering the call for "new and better stories" about black Americans, although it recurs, at a crucial point, to the traditional narrative.

Robinson’s book is divided between old and new because black America itself is so divided. The disintegration in his arresting title reflects his main thesis: there no longer exists a single, unified black America. Instead, there are now four distinct categories of black Americans, characterized by very different experiences, conditions, and prospects relative to one another. Assessing this development, Robinson cautions against nostalgia. What sustained a bygone sentiment of racial solidarity was an experience of injury shared by nearly all black Americans. What makes the present differentiation possible is the abatement of those injuries. In short, what is disintegrating black America is the integration of America, as more and more blacks make good on hard-won opportunities to differentiate themselves by their individual talents and efforts.

For three of the four categories that Robinson identifies—to which the large majority of black Americans now belong—white racism or its legacy no longer imposes any serious encumbrance. The most numerous group he calls the Mainstream, the relatively unnoticed middle-class majority whose heroic rise he celebrates as "truly a great American success story—arguably, the greatest of all." But the most spectacular success belongs to the Transcendent, the tiny elite whose enormous wealth and power places them far above ordinary Americans of any color. For the first time, black Americans mingle among the genuine Masters of the Universe; Robinson notes with bemused pride that "two African Americans [Fannie Mae CEO Franklin Raines and Merrill Lynch CEO Stanley O’Neal] had become big enough players in the financial world to have major roles—I should say allegedly—in triggering a global economic crisis."

The most intriguing group in Robinson’s quartet, the Emergent, is itself divided into two subgroups. It includes, first, those lately arrived in the largest wave of black immigration since 1808. He characterizes these immigrant-Emergents as America’s newest model-minority—highly educated relative to native-born Americans of any color, industrious, enterprising, and animated by a strong belief in America as a land of freedom and opportunity. The second Emergent group comprises the racially mixed offspring of black and white parents, whose rapid growth in numbers elicits the author’s confident prediction: "I have seen the future, and it is beige." For Robinson this, too, is a good thing. He expects that members of this subgroup will naturally gravitate to incorporation in rather than estrangement from the American mainstream.

Inspiring much less hope, however, is the final group in Robinson’s classification scheme, the Abandoned, the underclass minority experiencing their own, distinctly negative forms of disintegration. The troubles frequently ascribed to black America as a whole are, in reality, concentrated among the Abandoned: the demise of marriage and two-parent families; the failure to persist in or benefit from the educational system; and the subsequent unemployment, poverty, and crime. This group’s prospects are as bleak as the rising black majority’s are bright, since the Abandoned have "less hope of escaping poverty and dysfunction than at any time since Reconstruction," according to Robinson. He calls on America to make the rescue of this group an urgent priority. For as long as their woes continue, Robinson insists, the Abandoned will be viewed as the authentic, representative black Americans. He updates W.E.B Du Bois: "The problem of the twenty-first century is the problem of the Abandoned."

Robinson deserves much credit for his refreshing divergence from the academic party line on race. Contrary to multiculturalists’ dogmatic insistence on preserving black identity, he affirms the justice and goodness of racial integration, happily acknowledging the "miraculous" progress black Americans and America at large have made in overcoming race-based injustice. At some points he forthrightly acknowledges that bad choices and behaviors perpetuate degradation and poverty in the black underclass. But on that crucial point he equivocates—and the independent spirit that animates much of the book falters. In his analysis and prescriptions regarding the problems of the Abandoned, the old narrative ultimately prevails.

"It is hugely significant," Robinson observes, "that in most Abandoned black neighborhoods...most households are headed by a single woman." Though well aware that "all else being equal, boys and girls from intact, two-parent families tend to do better...in all walks of life," he rules out as unrealistic efforts to rebuild marriage, and he equivocates on whether such a goal is even to be desired. Upon reporting that "a stunning 42 percent" of adult black women have never married (the corresponding figure among white women is 21%), Robinson offers the remarkably blithe comment that this phenomenon signifies not "some sort of tragedy" but "instead a fascinating process of self-invention.... Mainstream black women may be blazing another trail that the rest of American society will follow as we redefine the concepts of household and family."

This equivocation on family breakdown belongs to a broader equivocation about how moral choices and moral culture determine the underclass’s condition. "Not even the most foggy-headed or starry-eyed," Robinson remarks, "could deny that wrong choices play a huge role in keeping the Abandoned mired in their plight—and that no policies or programs can possibly succeed unless individuals make better choices." And yet the focus of both his analysis and his prescriptions is on...policies and programs. As Robinson’s terminology suggests, blame for the plight of impoverished blacks rests on negligent others—the larger society that has abandoned its most desperate members. "Since Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty was allowed to peter out in the 1980s, government policies have essentially left the Abandoned to their own devices." He describes the consequences in a chain of passive-voice or impersonal formulations: good working-class jobs disappeared, "neighborhoods fell apart, public school systems were allowed to collapse," and the Abandoned were left hopelessly overmatched by the structural and institutional forces that weigh them down.

The remedy is then to reverse the decades of public neglect. Robinson warmly but briefly praises the efforts of his former colleague William Raspberry, the retired Washington Post columnist, who has founded a nonprofit organization to assist a small town in Mississippi whose residents are predominantly poor and black. But rather than call for the multiplication of such private efforts, he calls for a resumption and expansion of the massive governmental efforts initiated by LBJ: "What is needed is a kind of Marshall Plan for the Abandoned—massive intervention in education, public safety, health, and other aspects of life." Robinson doesn’t even try to explain how such a Marshall Plan would foster the changes in individual choices and behavior that, he has argued persuasively, are indispensable for improving the condition of this class.

* * *

Robinson is hardly alone, of course, in believing that America’s great failure over the past four decades has been its retreat from the Great Society agenda of ending poverty and eradicating every consequence of slavery and racism. Sharing this view is James T. Patterson, an emeritus history professor at Brown University, who chronicles that retreat in his latest book, Freedom Is Not Enough: The Moynihan Report and America’s Struggle over Black Family Life-from LBJ to Obama.

Patterson frames his story as a great fall. It begins at the summit of liberal enthusiasm, when President Johnson declared with characteristic circumspection in December 1964, "These are the most hopeful times since Christ was born." Regarding justice for black Americans, those hopes reached far beyond fully securing civil and political rights. "Freedom is not enough," Johnson declared in his famous Howard University commencement speech the following June. "We seek...not just equality as a right and theory but equality as a fact and as a result." To achieve the comprehensive socioeconomic equality that he envisioned, however, his policymakers would need to overcome obstacles more formidable than discriminatory laws and bigoted opinion.

Enter Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Johnson’s 38-year-old assistant secretary of labor and would-be architect of the administration’s efforts to combat endemic poverty among black Americans. In a 78-page report entitled The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, Moynihan attempted to guide the administration’s efforts by applying the tools of social science analysis to the most vexing dimension of that poverty. In the report’s preface, he bluntly identified the focus of his concern: "The fundamental problem...is that of family structure. The...Negro family in the urban ghettos is crumbling.... So long as this situation persists, the cycle of poverty and disadvantage will continue to repeat itself."

And then all hell broke loose. Just as the report was first leaked to the press in August, 1965, what Patterson calls "the worst urban violence in U.S. history" erupted in Los Angeles’s predominantly black Watts neighborhood. It would have been reasonable enough to view that riot, along with the many riots that followed it in major cities in the next few years, as prompt validation for the language of alarm in Moynihan’s report. However that might be, Moynihan’s linkage of poverty and a host of other social problems with family breakdown—more precisely, with the absence of fathers—has been abundantly confirmed in subsequent decades of research. Yet the immediate response to his report, amid some measured praise, was a wave of hostile criticism from liberal academics and militant black leaders. In the minds of his most severe critics, Moynihan had violated the primary commandment of discussions of race in America: Thou shalt not blame the victim.

Those critics misrepresented his meaning, as Patterson rightly observes. Despite dramatic references to "the fundamental problem" of family breakdown and the "tangle of pathology" surrounding it, Moynihan took care in the report to avoid blaming the victim, insisting that white racism and unemployment were the underlying causes of family dissolution among impoverished blacks. But the critics’ charge stuck, and the fateful effect, according to Patterson, was that "until relatively recently...many liberals and civil rights leaders...continued to avoid talking about many black family issues."

Let us note that the regrettable effect of the controversy, as Patterson sees it, is the intimidating effect it had on liberal discussion. Anxious to avoid the charge or the offense of victim-blaming and wary, too, of licensing conservatives to engage in it, liberals in this period confined their public commentary, according to Patterson, to an increasingly feckless refrain that white racism in some form was the only cause of black troubles worth discussing. But in so confining themselves, liberals ceded the public discussion of family issues to conservatives, who emerge as the real villains—the true victim-blamers—in Patterson’s story. The rise of "family-values" conservatism in the 1970s signified not an advancement but an "obstacle to meaningful dialogue," he contends, because woven into its understanding of the family-breakdown problem as fundamentally cultural, not structural or institutional, was a moralistic denigration of the black poor as "undeserving." By this means, conservatives convinced most Americans that freedom under law actually is enough, contrary to LBJ’s, Moynihan’s, and Patterson’s conviction, thereby undermining support for the "large-scale public programs" that liberals believe are the necessary and perhaps even sufficient condition for saving impoverished blacks.

* * *

Patterson’s book is a well-researched history of public policy and debate on black family issues in this period, and it provides a fair-minded, persuasive defense of Moynihan against his critics on the Left. He agrees with Moynihan, against the doctrinaire liberals who excommunicated him, that moral culture really is a significant cause of poverty and social dysfunction among the black underclass. Aided by other independent-minded scholars, such as James Coleman and Orlando Patterson on the Left and James Q. Wilson on the Right, the vindication of Moynihan’s view of the importance of moral culture and family formation signifies a genuine advance in mainstream academic discussion.

Important as it is, however, the progress that Patterson here chronicles and exemplifies remains only partial. Moral culture plays a prominent part in Moynihan’s explanation of underclass ills, but it plays no intelligible part in the remedies that he prescribes. The "heart of [Moynihan’s] approach to social welfare," as Patterson reports, was "his longstanding advocacy of a...system of family allowances," designed to guarantee an income floor for all families and thereby to supply the vital needs of poor children. Moynihan believed this plan to be revolutionary: "the most startling proposal to help poor persons ever made by a modern democratic government."

But the connection between diagnosis and proposed remedy is elusive. How does a program of cash assistance, "generous and bureaucratically simple" as it might be, address the issues of family structure and moral culture, which Moynihan called "fundamental" to the problem of poverty among blacks? How is any program aimed at the material dimensions of poverty to assist in restoring the personal desires and disciplines that sustain marriage, parental responsibility, success in school, and industrious employment? Insofar as such policies fail to address these moral dimensions of poverty, how can they be said to supply what needy children need most desperately? That central incoherence in Moynihan’s thinking on race and poverty points up an irony that pervades Patterson’s account. When the subject turned to remedies, the man who braved a political and academic firefight over the importance of family disintegration was curiously reluctant to face the full implications of his analysis.

* * *

For an argument that shares Moynihan’s insight into causes, but shows none of his or Robinson’s reluctance to match a conservative remedy to a conservative diagnosis, we must look to the sharply argued new book by Amy L. Wax, Race, Wrongs, and Remedies: Group Justice in the 21^st Century. Wax, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, combines conceptual insights from the law of torts and remedies with a thorough reading of the scholarship on racial disparities to bring much-needed clarity to the discussion of the black man’s burden.

This clarity begins with her forthright declaration that "the taboo against blaming the victim has profoundly distorted thinking about race." She knows very well that it is unjust to blame victims for the injuries others have inflicted upon them, and agrees "that current racial inequalities are the result of historical oppression." But Wax denies vigorously that identifying malformed cultural mores as the primary present cause of black-white disparities amounts to blaming the victim. The widespread opinion to the contrary has fueled a massive effort to locate the causes of disadvantage in factors external to the behavior and mores of the disadvantaged. The result, she contends, has been a massive diversion of mental, moral, and material resources away from the only effective remedial strategy.

Common abuses of the victim-blaming charge, Wax suggests, reflect a failure to acknowledge the distinction between liabilities and remedies. She offers the elementary example of a pedestrian struck and injured by a driver who ran a red light. The driver is entirely culpable, and justice (the law of remedies) requires the driver to rectify the wrong—to make the pedestrian "whole," so far as possible. But the crash has left the pedestrian incapacitated, and his recovery will require a protracted, laborious regimen of physical rehabilitation. Thus the liability and the remedy diverge. The driver can and must compensate the pedestrian for medical expenses and monetary damages, but the pedestrian’s full recovery is beyond the driver’s power to effect; unfair as it may be, recovery is unattainable without the victim’s self-healing efforts.

The divergence between liability and remedy is particularly sharp, Wax continues, in cases in which the injuries damage the victims’ human capital by impairing capacities or distorting patterns of thinking and behavior. In particular, "social science evidence shows that enduring injuries to human capital now represent the most destructive legacy of racism." She reviews that evidence in two crucial areas. Regarding educational achievement, she argues that success depends critically on "the characteristics, behavior, and education-related attitudes of the students themselves." The same holds true in employment, where the evidence shows that "personal and behavioral attributes related to productivity are by far the most important predictors of job-market success, regardless of race."

It follows that the "dominant view" with regard to remedies—that "racial inequality can only be eliminated by eradicating racism and providing effective, well-funded social programs"—is radically mistaken. No known school-reform program has ever succeeded in transforming students’ attitudes toward studying and learning, Wax observes, just as no known job program has ever fostered the attitudes and habits needed for individuals to take available jobs and perform them well. Above all, no program of external intervention has supplied a remedy for the fundamental problem of family disintegration. Because "virtually all that ails black America today lies outside the power of others to fix," Wax concludes, "a radical shift in strategy" is needed. "The future belongs to self-help."

* * *

In reading these three books, one is impressed by the authors’ efforts to reform (Robinson and Patterson) or to replace altogether (Wax) the longstanding narrative about race in America. But no less impressive is what they convey, intentionally or not, about the difficulty of the task. Whereas Robinson, Moynihan, and Patterson fail to break entirely free of the old orthodoxy, Wax succeeds admirably in charting a new (or, in fact, much older) course; but her stark analysis and proposed remedy make clear that her strategy will face tenacious resistance.

Among the sources of that resistance, one is especially powerful. "The self-help insight," Wax concedes, "offends our deepest sense of justice." Justice pure and simple demands that the wrongdoer (1) pay for his crime and (2) repair the victim. These demands are predictably felt with special urgency in response to such massive historical wrongs as those inflicted by slavery and segregation. It is entirely understandable that many blacks would resent the self-help imperative as a means of "letting whites off the hook" and many whites would also resist that imperative out of an earnest desire to atone for a history of black subjugation. To adherents of the old narrative, blacks were for so long, so obviously and grievously victims of whites’ injustices that there simply must be a programmatic remedy available to the larger society, cost what it may. Let justice be done, the reasoning seems to say, though the heavens should fall.

As all three books make clear, however, while the search for such remedies continues, the heavens really are falling in many of America’s black neighborhoods. The urgency of this fact must be underscored, as Moynihan and Robinson do, and it must be leveraged to open more minds to alternative remedial approaches, as Wax endeavors to do. Liberals would do well in this debate to acknowledge, in a spirit of humility, the limits of our knowledge of how to help people mired in a culture of poverty, and the abundant capacity of would-be benefactors to do unintended harm. For their part, conservatives must draw their own portion of humility from an understanding of the magnitude of the historical wrongs and the depth of the psychological sensitivities involved.

Both might learn a bracing lesson from Tocqueville’s observation that white Americans tend to act, in relation to blacks, out of interest, pride, or pity. Proponents of self-help must make their stand, in the end, on the common ground of simple human dignity. Let us all recognize that to ignore or excuse blacks’ vices is to insult their virtues. The insistence on internal moral reformation must not be shunned as an affront to blacks or an evasion of white responsibility. To the contrary, it must be affirmed as the only way forward that properly respects the moral responsibility shared by all people of all colors.

Conceived in Liberty?

David K. Nichols — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 00:00:00 EST

Political theorists and historians have always had an uneasy relationship. When theorists develop elegant explanations of the American Founding or the American Civil War, for example, the historians rebuke them for getting crucial things wrong by failing to immerse themselves in the historical details where the true understanding of events can be found. George William Van Cleve and Eric Foner are both eager to correct mistaken theories and theorists. Their new books do indeed provide us with a wealth of facts that are crucial for a full understanding of the place of slavery in the thought of the American Founders and in the mind of Abraham Lincoln. In the end, however, they also engage in the suspect activity of political theorizing, and their theories do not always fit the facts they themselves have revealed.

Van Cleve, a legal scholar and historian who teaches at the University of Seattle Law School and in the University of Virginia history department, presents in A Slaveholders’ Union a mountain of facts to show that the issue of slavery was never far from the founders’ minds. Indeed, he argues, at key points in the founding period the issue of slavery decisively shaped the outcome of events. He believes both North and South feared an end to slavery, and each was complicit in establishing institutional arrangements that would not only perpetuate it, but also encourage its massive expansion. As he points out, "By early 1820...there were ten states with substantial slave populations, double the number of such states at the time of the Revolution. There were more than two and a half times as many slaves in America as there had been when the Revolution began." Moreover, "slavery emerged from the Revolution stronger as a political institution than it had been within the British Empire just prior to the Revolution."

According to Van Cleve, the 1772 decision of the King’s Court in Somerset’s Case that declared slavery to be illegal in Britain placed slavery on the road to ultimate extinction. Although the decision left slavery in place in the colonies, it created ever-increasing pressure for abolition throughout the empire. Once the American colonies separated from Britain, however, there was no central authority capable of attacking slavery. The central government under the Articles of Confederation posed no threat to the institution, and actually supported it by leaving authority over the practice of slavery with the states.

* * *

The heart of his analysis, however, focuses on the treatment of slavery at the Constitutional Convention. Beginning with the convention’s decision to allow one vote per state during its deliberations, the slave interests won on most key issues, he contends. The delegates’ embrace of the Connecticut Compromise, including a Senate where each state was equally represented regardless of population, guaranteed the subsequent, and notorious, "three-fifths" compromise to augment Southern power in the House of Representatives. Van Cleve acknowledges that there was no attempt to provide a constitutional guarantee to protect slavery in perpetuity, but argues that none was necessary. The South had such an advantage because of the configuration of the Senate and House that parchment guarantees protecting slavery would have been gratuitous.

Moreover, the convention never seriously considered the idea that slaves were persons whose rights might be protected by the Constitution. The only question it debated, according to Van Cleve, was whether or not slave property would be taxed. Even though the convention eventually decided to allow a taxation scheme based on the three-fifths compromise, he argues that the decision was irrelevant because there was never any intention of implementing such a tax.

What’s more, by allowing the slave trade to continue for 20 years after the Constitution’s ratification, the framers insured an adequate supply of slaves for generations to come. The debate over the slave trade was primarily between states such as Virginia, that had a surplus of slaves and thus wanted to limit foreign importation sooner, and states such as South Carolina, seeking to bring in more slaves as cheaply as possible. Finally, the fugitive slave clause, the Constitution’s only major provision to support federal intervention in domestic slavery, committed even Northern states to protect the property rights of slaveholders.

The conclusion that the founders defended and extended the slaveholding republic is inescapable for Van Cleve, and he prosecutes the case ably. Like most prosecutors, however, his interest in competing theories begins and ends with his desire to discredit them. He is not above choosing his facts selectively, pointing to the rapid growth of the slave population after the Revolution, for example, without mentioning that the relative size of the white and black populations in America remained constant between 1790 and 1820, or that the percent of free blacks actually doubled in this period. Though he notes that the number of states with substantial slave populations doubled between 1790 and 1820, he fails, again, to place that fact in context—a context that would, at the very least, complicate his argument. In reality, the number of free states went from five to twelve during those 30 years, whereas the number of states that allowed slavery increased by only four.

Van Cleve does his best to diminish the importance of abolition in the Northern states, concentrating on the racist attitudes of many Northern whites, the limited rights of free blacks already living in those states, and the legal barriers against free blacks attempting to migrate into them. This is the truth, but not the whole truth. Van Cleve’s argument certainly does not settle the case that America was moving to make slavery permanent and ineradicable in the first three decades under the Constitution. However halting or incomplete the abolition movements in those dozen free states, they were a clear sign that a growing portion of the citizenry was turning against slavery.

* * *

The author’s interpretation of the 1787 debates inside Independence Hall is even more tendentious. From his perspective there are no mixed motives, only selfish ones. Thus, support for free labor reveals only the bigotry of Northern white workers. Restrictions on the slave trade and the refusal to provide an explicit constitutional sanction for slavery are cynical or empty gestures. The republican guarantee clause is meant only to quash slave rebellions. The argument for equal representation of the states in the Senate has no other purpose but to protect slavery. The three-fifths compromise is a complete victory for the South. Anti-slavery arguments are always disingenuous or irrelevant, but any argument linking the Constitution to bigotry or self-interest always turns out to be the "most likely" explanation.

In spite of all the details, then, Van Cleve manages to create a flat and simplistic portrait of the founding. He doesn’t reduce the world to good guys and bad guys; in his view there are no good guys. No American at the dawn of the republic is moved or even troubled by the evil of slavery.

Van Cleve is so eager to explain the Constitution’s concessions to slavery in terms of defending the property rights of slaveholders that he ignores the fact that each of these provisions speak of slaves as "persons." Slaveholders would eventually find it necessary to repudiate this claim, but it could not so easily be struck out of the American Constitution or the American mind. The recognition of the fact that slaves were persons was at least in part responsible for the growing number of free states, the increasing number of free blacks, and the growing pressure against slavery that ultimately led to the Civil War and emancipation.

* * *

Eric Foner, a Columbia University historian, has more sympathy for Abraham Lincoln than Van Cleve has for the founders. As a result, his Fiery Trial, which won the Pulitzer Prize in history earlier this year, provides a more sophisticated and accurate treatment of its subject than Slaveholders’ Union. Foner’s Lincoln is a good if flawed individual, indispensable to the political processes that culminated in the abolition of slavery. He praises Lincoln’s ability to learn over time, and argues that by the end of his life Lincoln had overcome many of his early prejudices. Unlike Van Cleve’s founders, who possess only base motives, Foner sees Lincoln as a mixture of considerable virtues and a few vices. Nonetheless, he is unable to hide a slight impatience with Lincoln’s delay in recognizing the full truth of human equality and developing a political program that would fulfill that vision.

Foner rejects the notion that Lincoln was "a man with no deep convictions of his own, whose shifting policies and outlook arose entirely from forces outside his control." Instead, he suggests, "Much of Lincoln’s career can fruitfully be seen as a search for a reconciliation of means and ends, an attempt to identify a viable mode of antislavery action in a political and constitutional system that erected seemingly impregnable barriers to effective steps toward abolition." Foner traces Lincoln’s opposition to slavery back to his days in the Illinois legislature, noting, "When Lincoln criticized slavery as unwise and unjust, abolitionism could not have been weaker or more unpopular in Illinois." As late as the 1850s, Foner argues, it required great courage to defend the proposition that slaves had rights, but Lincoln "would not retreat from his insistence that the principles enunciated in the Declaration of Independence applied to every human being."

* * *

Lincoln’s principled arguments also had an important practical dimension. As Foner explains, Lincoln believed that American government ultimately rested on the ground of public opinion. The success of Lincoln and the Republicans therefore depended upon their ability to shape public opinion. "Republicans, he insisted, adhered to the idea, which, as always, he traced back to the revolutionary generation, of ‘the equality of men.’ Democrats sought to ‘discard that central idea’ and substitute ‘the opposite idea that slavery is right’ and therefore ought to be perpetuated and extended." Lincoln understood that political victory would ultimately go to the victor in the battle between these competing ideas.

The Republican coalition was a fragile one. Lincoln was constantly faced with the problem of "mediating disputes between former Democrats and former Whigs, nativists and immigrants, conservatives, moderates, and radicals." His solution, according to Foner, was to find the "lowest common denominator of Republican opinion"—opposition to the expansion of slavery—and focus "single-mindedly" on that issue. This focus provided the foundation upon which Lincoln built and maintained the Republican Party. Yet Foner claims that it would be a mistake "simply to anoint him as ‘a model of greatness for succeeding generations to follow.’ ...If Lincoln achieved greatness, he grew into it." Rejecting the view that Lincoln was "born with a pen in his hand ready to sign the Emancipation Proclamation or [entered] the White House with a fixed determination to preside over the end of slavery," Foner claims that in his youth Lincoln was formed in part by the racist attitudes of his community. This is why, according to Fiery Trial, Lincoln defended colonization as the answer to the problem of slavery until late in his career. It is also why he distanced himself from the abolitionists. For most of his life he did not believe that freed slaves could live in the United States as full political equals. Foner concludes, "Had [Lincoln] died early in 1862, it would be quite easy to argue today that Lincoln would never have issued a proclamation of emancipation, enrolled black soldiers in the Union army, or advocated allowing some black men to vote." For Foner, only the post-1862 Lincoln has a claim to greatness.

His evidence of Lincoln’s early racial attitudes, however, is only circumstantial. He provides evidence of what others in Lincoln’s childhood community thought, and assumes that Lincoln must have thought likewise. He asserts that Lincoln adopted abolition as a goal only after 1862, but he has no way of knowing the extent to which Lincoln’s public statements were the product of his most deeply held beliefs or the political prudence of which he provides such ample evidence.
Foner complains that "we too often tend to read Lincoln’s growth backward, as an unproblematic trajectory toward a predetermined end." Foner himself, however, may be guilty of a similar offense. He reads history backwards in order to vindicate the abolitionists, thus denying the possibility that Lincoln had a superior understanding of how the principles of the Declaration of Independence could be given political effect.

Writ of Error

John C. Eastman — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 00:00:00 EST

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less."

—Lewis Carroll

Through The Looking Glass

Although we have hardly returned to the original understanding of the Constitution, conservative scholarship has had a profound effect in the legal academy and, increasingly, in the courts of law. Nowadays, almost everyone is an originalist, or at least purports to be. Rare is the judge who will argue that the original meaning does not matter to constitutional interpretation. In cases such as Seminole Tribe of Florida v. Florida (1996), for example, Justice David Souter famously countered the originalist claims of the Rehnquist Court majority in a series of cases involving state sovereign immunity and the 11th Amendment with an alternative (and quite frankly more accurate) account of the Constitution’s original understanding. More recently, Justice John Paul Stevens dissented from the high Court’s landmark Second Amendment decision in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), not by arguing that our society and our Constitution had evolved beyond the Second Amendment (as might have been the argument in the 1960s or ’70s), but that Justice Antonin Scalia’s opinion for the Court was wrong on originalist grounds. Although Stevens’s account was much less persuasive than Scalia’s, one has to appreciate how profoundly important it is that both sides on the Court now believe they need to ground their opinions in the original understanding of the Constitution.

A similar shift has occurred in the legal academy. A spate of recent books has tried to make the case for a living, evolving Constitution by arguing not that we have grown beyond the old constitutional norms, but that the founders themselves intended the document to be infinitely malleable, clay in the hands of a wise judiciary, to be formed to meet evolving standards of decency or to confront circumstances that the founders could not have imagined. The titles themselves convey the message: Keeping Faith with the Constitution (by Goodwin Liu, Pamela S. Karlan, and Christopher H. Schroeder, 2010); It is a Constitution We Are Expounding (by the American Constitution Society, 2009); and The Constitution in 2020 (by Jack M. Balkin and Reva B. Siegel, 2009). If you are having trouble discerning how the arguments advanced in these books differ from the original living constitutionalists’ explicit repudiation of the Constitution, you are not alone. According to their authors, the "living constitution," crafted in the days of the Warren Court, was what the founders had intended all along. Apparently, the wise fathers of our nation intended nothing in our written Constitution to be binding except that nothing be binding. An interesting mix of fiction and psychoanalysis, to be sure, but hardly consistent with the evidence, as is clear to anyone who has spent even brief time toiling in the fields of the founders’ writings and debates.

The most recent submission in this genre of psychological fiction, The Conservative Assault on the Constitution, comes from Erwin Chemerinsky, one of the deans of the living Constitution movement and actual Dean of the University of California, Irvine, School of Law. Chemerinsky’s premise is obvious from the book’s title, its cover depiction of the Constitution’s "We the People" in the familiar calligraphy, and the book jacket’s blurbs about the need to "reclaim the Constitution" and preserve "our constitutional birthright." His tactic is clever: each leftward evolution of the Constitution’s meaning becomes a new fixed baseline of constitutional law, and any move to return to the original meaning amounts to a repudiation not of the wayward interpretation but of the Constitution itself. A nice exercise in intellectual jujitsu for the living Constitution crowd, if he can get away with it.

Happily, he doesn’t even come close. Indeed, anyone looking for a nuanced academic argument in defense of the living Constitution, whether naked or dressed up in the sheep’s clothing of originalism, will be sorely disappointed. The book is a partisan political diatribe, with all the spin one normally hears from politicians rather than serious scholars, complete with Orwellian doublespeak, gross hyperbole, and outright falsehood.

In Chemerinsky’s view, the Constitution began in the 1930s when the Supreme Court finally acceded to the radical expansion in federal power pushed by President Franklin Roosevelt and his New Deal, and has remained a one-way ratchet ever since. The Court’s recent, though relatively limited, efforts to rein in the federal leviathan by restoring the limits on government found in the original Constitution is therefore, in his mind, not an "assault" on the New Deal but on the Constitution itself. Humpty Dumpty would be proud.

Chemerinsky begins with a personal narrative about the loss the Supreme Court handed him in his challenge to the constitutionality of California’s Three Strikes law, first adopted by the California legislature in March 1994 and then overwhelmingly readopted by the voters in November of that same year. His former client, Leandro Andrade, "is serving a sentence of life in prison with no possibility of parole for fifty years for stealing $153 worth of videotapes from Kmart stores in Southern California," Chemerinsky tells us in the book’s opening sentence—without informing the reader until several pages later that Andrade had a string of prior convictions, including multiple residential burglaries. Instead of acknowledging that this was the very kind of repeat criminal activity the Three Strikes law aimed to prevent, Chemerinsky claims "there is no indication that California’s voters realized" that the initiative "could be applied when the third strike was a minor offense such as shoplifting or possession of a small amount of drugs."

This is false. The official ballot statement, which is mailed to every single voter in California and read by a good many of them, was quite explicit: "If the person has two or more previous serious or violent felony convictions, the mandatory sentence for any new felony conviction (not just a serious or violent felony) is life imprisonment" with a long minimum term before parole eligibility. The argument against the initiative contained in the official ballot statement and repeated extensively in the campaign’s advertising highlighted precisely this aspect of the proposed law: "The third strike does not have to be violent or serious—it can be any felony at all." Indeed, the example used by the opponents of the initiative is strikingly similar to Andrade’s own case: "A 50-year-old man who twice stole a bicycle from a garage as a teenager, and who now writes a bad check, will get a life sentence under" the law. Contrary to Chemerinsky’s assertion, the people of California were told exactly what the law would do, and by a 72% to 28% margin voted overwhelmingly to approve it.

* * *

Chemerinsky’s legal arguments are just as dubious. He notes, for example, that he headed into oral argument before the Supreme Court thinking he was on "very strong ground" in the Andrade case, and ready to argue that his client’s sentence was excessive. He claims that he had precedent on his side dating back a century, providing "well-established criteria" for determining that a sentence was "grossly disproportionate and thus cruel and unusual punishment" in violation of the Constitution’s Eighth Amendment. But the century-old case he cites held nothing of the kind. The long-standing rule was that "the length of sentence is a matter of legislative prerogative"-just the opposite of what Chemerinsky claims. His argument against lengthy sentences for third-strike offenders did find precedent in a single 1983 case, Solem v. Helm, which overruled the long-standing rule, but was repudiated by the Court eight years later in very strong terms: "Solem was simply wrong. The Eighth Amendment contains no proportionality guarantee," the Court held in Harmelin v. Michigan (1991) a dozen years before Chemerinsky argued Andrade’s case. This is not exactly "very strong ground" for Chemerinsky’s position, but his willful blindness is telling. According to his methodology, every precedent, however short-lived, that pushes the Constitution’s meaning in the preferred direction, i.e., leftward, becomes the new benchmark for what the Constitution itself says, while any precedent to the contrary is simply an "assault."

Chemerinsky concludes the doleful narrative of his defeat in the case—"I literally was in tears," he says—by admitting that he was "at a loss to think of anything" that might be done to overturn such "draconian" sentences because "there is no appeal from a Supreme Court decision." This is an interesting window into the living constitutionalist psyche, which views the courts as the sole arbiter of all things good and just, so much so that no alternative even comes to mind. As anyone even vaguely familiar with California’s Constitution and criminal justice system knows, there are several ways to address sentences, draconian or otherwise. The governor may issue a pardon if circumstances warrant. The people can repeal the Three Strikes law if they think it is leading to unjust sentences. Prosecutors can (and often do) find a way not to charge a crime as a third strike when the sentence would seem unduly harsh. Judges, too, can (and often do) find ways, such as reassessing a prior conviction, to avoid a third-strike sentence for truly inconsequential crimes. And of course Chemerinsky should remember the words of the sage Baretta (before Robert Blake, the actor who played the part, squandered his legacy), don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time.

* * *

This is just one example of the hand-wringing hyperbole and misinformation found throughout the book. President Reagan mounted "the most concerted effort in American history to remake the federal courts," we are told, with Chemerinsky adding the caveat, "in a conservative direction," so that he avoids having to compare it to FDR’s outrageous Court-packing scheme. Similarly, Chemerinsky asserts that President Bush’s defense of the nation against terrorism took "claims of unchecked presidential power to unprecedented heights," even though he later concedes that Bush was following the precedents set by other wartime presidents, including Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and Harry Truman. He claims that Bush ignored the basic constitutional premise that two branches should be involved in all major governmental actions, forgetting (or worse) that Congress authorized the use of "all necessary force" against the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11, and that it was the Court that took the unprecedented step of interfering with the detention of enemy combatants in wartime. He asserts that "the phrase, ‘enemy combatant,’" is not part of either international or American law. It is, or at least the idea of it is. American law dating to the Civil War, and international law dating at least to the Hague Convention of 1907 and repeated in the Geneva Convention of 1949, spell out the distinctions between combatants (lawful and unlawful) and civilians. He claims that during the 2000 presidential election controversy, the Florida Supreme Court "ordered the immediate counting of any uncounted ballots across the state," neglecting to mention that recounts were ordered in only four heavily Democratic counties.

His false legal claims are equally numerous. "The Fourth Amendment says that searches, including government wiretapping and electronic surveillance, require a judicially approved warrant," we are told (emphasis added), even though 73 pages later he acknowledges "there must be ‘probable cause’" for police to conduct a search, and that only "generally." Contrary to his earlier claim, the Fourth Amendment’s text does not "require a judicially approved warrant," but specifies that searches must be "reasonable," a standard that can be met in many circumstances without a warrant, as the courts have repeatedly confirmed. And on the issue raised by the recent controversy involving the Bush Administration’s warrantless surveillance of communications between terrorists abroad and their collaborators in the United States, the Supreme Court decision cited by Chemerinsky dealt with wholly domestic investigations, specifically noting that it was expressing "no opinion as to the issues which may be involved with respect to activities of foreign powers or their agents" because of the vastly different scope of presidential powers in the latter context.

Chemerinsky heartily embraces Justice Harry Blackmun’s view that the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on "cruel and unusual punishment" renders the death penalty unconstitutional in all its applications. That position, which has been rejected by the Supreme Court itself, simply cannot be squared either with the history surrounding the adoption of the Eighth Amendment or the text of the Fifth Amendment, which specifically recognizes "capital" crimes, that is, offenses that put one in "jeopardy of life." The ability to manipulate the Constitution’s text to arrive at new and radically different conclusions than originally intended is the hallmark of the "living constitution" enterprise. Opposition to the enterprise may be an "assault" on the living constitution methodology, but hardly one on the Constitution, as the author claims.

* * *

These errors and many more warrant a more complete rebuttal than can be made here. But it would be wrong to ignore a particularly troubling but brutally forthright claim that Chemerinsky makes in his discussion of the Supreme Court’s abortion jurisprudence. The key question in the abortion cases, he says, is "who should decide whether the fetus before viability is a human person: each woman for herself or the state legislature." I have never seen the Left’s position on abortion phrased quite so starkly, but it should put to rest the myth that the "progressive" view in support of a "living Constitution" is designed to advance human dignity. That anyone, individual or legislature, gets to determine the human personhood of another human being is a notion that I had thought we had buried in the ashes of the Civil War. It bears an uncanny resemblance to the claim made by slave-owners that it was their moral prerogative to determine whether blacks should be treated as property or as human beings. If "the conservative assault on the Constitution" is an assault on that proposition, then count me among the assaulters in chief. Happily, we do not need to assault the Constitution to assault that ignominious proposition; we just need to restore the Constitution to its rightful and original meaning, as a form of government designed to secure to every American, in the words of the Declaration of Independence, the unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness given to us by our Creator.

Just in Time for Constitution Day - The Claremont Institute’s "Rise and Fall of Constitutional Government"

Fri, 16 Sep 2011 00:00:00 EST

Claremont Institute Senior Fellows Thomas G. West and Douglas A. Jeffrey have revised and updated their classic primer for concerned citizens.

The Great Debate

Akhil Amar — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 00:00:00 EST

Pauline Maier’s new book, Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1788, may be her best yet—and that is saying something. A professor of American History at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Maier has written three previous books on late 18th-century American politics, each a classic in its own right: From Resistance to Revolution: Colonial Radicals and the Development of American Opposition to Britain, 1765-1776 (1972), The Old Revolutionaries: Political Lives in the Age of Samuel Adams (1980), and American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (1997). Ratification is the product of a mature historian’s mind steeped in the history and historiography of its period. Perhaps not all historians improve with age, but increased experience and expertise do help many develop deeper, broader, and subtler insights into both human nature generally and the particular facts of their fields of study.

More importantly, Ratification is not merely a book about its topic. It is the book. There is no single-authored work of scholarly heft—none—on the Great American Debate of 1787-88. The Constitution is one of the most important texts in world history, yet until now we did not have a unified narrative history of the actual day-by-day process by which it became the supreme law of the land.

True, we have had many—too many—books about how the Constitution was drafted behind closed doors in the Philadelphia Convention that met during the summer of 1787. What happened behind closed doors was that a mere proposal was drafted for the consideration of the American people. What happened in the following year—Maier’s year—is that for the first time in world history a vast continental populace got to debate and decide by a peaceful vote how they and their posterity would be governed.

This was a giant leap forward from the politics of the 1760s and 1770s, the period at the heart of Maier’s earlier books. In that period, patriots moved from resistance to revolution to war. Thus, one of the most gripping recent accounts of the American Revolution—David McCullough’s 1776 (2005)—is entirely a military history, disregarding the political and intellectual events of that fateful year. The Declaration of Independence was not put to any sort of special popular vote. Many who vigorously opposed independence in 1776 permanently exiled themselves to Britain or its North American colonies. The revolution’s opponents who chose to stay on American soil were, politically, internal exiles. With very few exceptions—typically involving those who recanted and joined the patriots before war’s end—no arch—loyalist ever went on to any position of political significance in independent America.

By contrast, in the Great American Debate that Maier’s new book brings back to life, the losers were not cast out into the political darkness. Several vigorous opponents of ratifying the Constitution went on to the highest echelons of public trust and political honor, including James Monroe, who became the fifth president; George Clinton and Elbridge Gerry, future vice presidents; and Samuel Chase, elevated to the Supreme Court by President Washington in 1796.

After ratification’s year, which featured an extraordinary series of ratification conventions and popular votes across an entire continent, the world was never the same. The possibilities of democracy on a vast scale were on display for all to see—across the globe and through the centuries. A democratic people could think hard, debate fiercely, vote (pretty) fairly, and accomplish something. The losers could graciously accept this defeat rather than resort to bullets. The winners could graciously admit that their plan could be improved by an ambitious modification. (Today we call this renovation "the Bill of Rights.")

Happier still, what was accomplished in that year ended up enduring, providing an inspirational model for later Americans and for other peoples around the world. In 1786, democracy existed in very few places on planet earth, and had never before been a dominant form of government. Today, democracy reigns over half the planet and is on the march in the other half. Seen from this angle, the story of Maier’s new book is the hinge of human history, the year that changed everything not just in America but beyond. From resistance to revolution to...ratification!

* * *

To her credit, Maier is analytical rather than triumphalist about democracy in America. Lawyers, judges, and law professors are prone to "winner’s history," since the winners generally end up writing the laws. Historians by instinct and training work hard to understand both sides—indeed, to understand that there are usually more than two sides.

Thus she generally eschews the term "Anti-Federalist" because this was an epithet-imposed on those who opposed the Constitution by the other side of the debate, the self-described "Federalists"—not the self-description chosen by most ratification opponents themselves. She also believes that the label oversimplifies, masking important differences among the Constitution’s skeptics and blurring similarities between moderate opponents and lukewarm proponents. She emphasizes that many of those who opposed the document were not entirely "Anti." Many skeptics admitted that the Philadelphia proposal might be somewhat better than the impotent Articles of Confederation, but these skeptics thought that a still-better and safer system should be crafted—a series of amendments to and revisions of the Philadelphia plan should be agreed to—before any Constitution was formally adopted. In Maier’s view, dividing the world into two tidy camps, as do the conventional labels of "Federalist" and "Anti-Federalist," obscures strong similarities among various men who ultimately ended up on different sides of the final vote—including "old revolutionaries" such as Sam Adams, who voted yes despite misgivings, and George Mason, who voted no despite having supported earlier drafts of the Constitution at Philadelphia.

Unlike Maier, who is generous to a fault to the side that lost in 1787-88, I am inclined to side more openly with the Federalists’ vision and even to accept their labels as the legitimate spoils of victory. The legalist in me says that that compared to the plan on the table in 1787 any alternative requiring the convention’s proposal to be amended or revised before it was ratified would have doomed the whole enterprise of replacing the Articles of Confederation with a viable constitutional framework. Realistically, it was yes or no, up or down.

This is often how law and legislation work. Not that the final vote is ever really final in a truly democratic society. Tomorrow is another day, and we are free to repeal and replace. But had the Constitution been voted down—had the Anti-Federalists (my harsher word) actually prevailed, the amendment rules of the Articles of Confederation, which required state unanimity, would have been utterly unworkable. Anarchy loomed as the alternative; and the "Antis" had no clear realistic program. In many cases, these naysayers were rebels (or old revolutionaries, if you prefer) without a clue. The most decisive reason to favor the Constitution was precisely that, once ratified in a clean yes vote, this document would be infinitely easier to amend in a straightforward way than would the Articles of Confederation.

* * *

It remains to ask the obvious questions: If Maier’s topic is indeed so important, why has no previous single-authored book ever tackled this topic? Why have so many individual authors focused instead on the Philadelphia convention? What does Maier’s narrative add to the multi-authored collections on the ratification process that do exist?

I suggest that Philadelphia stories generally abound simply because they are easy to write. A century ago, Max Farrand collated in three handy volumes the core primary sources—the official Philadelphia convention journal, Madison’s copious notes, and various papers from other delegates. Thus much of the primary source material that must be summarized and analyzed is within easy reach of any would-be author. And there are precious few relevant newspaper pieces or private letters to be hunted down and parsed, because the Philadelphia deliberations were secret.

By contrast, Maier’s project required her to range across the continent and to wade through an enormous pile of public and private sources—a far more difficult endeavor, and one made doable only (as she graciously acknowledges) because of the recent collation and publication of a vast array of primary sources in the 23-and-still-growing volumes of the "Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution" (DHRC) project. But DHRC and not Farrand is the right place to start, if we care about the Constitution as law. What matters for proper legal interpretation today is not what was said behind closed doors at Philadelphia, but what was said by and to ordinary citizens pondering whether they should, say, embrace the proposal that emerged from Philadelphia. (Of course, the secret drafting history might still be invaluable for nonlegal scholarly purposes; and even legal interpreters might find the Philadelphia debates of indirect evidentiary importance, containing various arguments that may well have been made publicly during ratification, but in conversations for which no reliable transcript survives.)

Before Maier, at least two prominent multi-authored books did try to give readers a sense of each of the relevant ratification conventions: The Constitution and the States, edited by Patrick T. Conley and John P. Kaminski (1988), and Ratifying the Constitution, edited by Michael Allen Gillespie and Michael Lienesch (1989). But the gains of specialization, with each chapter written by an expert in the legal history of a given state, were counterbalanced by a loss of narrative cohesion. How did the debates early on in Pennsylvania affect later deliberations? To what extent did various arguments and counterarguments evolve as the year of ratification unfolded? These and many other related questions fall between the cracks of the multi-authored volumes, but are central threads of Maier’s detailed narrative. Compared to these other scholarly works, Ratification offers a far more satisfying account of the year that Americans ratified the Constitution, a year that changed the world even more than 1776 did.

The Central Proposition

Mark Helprin — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 00:00:00 EST

For a decade, the central proposition in America’s foreign relations has been that it is possible to transform one or another Islamic nation and indeed the Arab Middle East or the entire Islamic world. We have apportioned a crippling share of our resources and attention to this project. We have tried force, diplomacy, aid, propaganda, confession, persuasion, apology, personality, and hope. And as one approach fails it is supplanted by or combined with another, the recipe depending upon who happens to be in the White House.

The initial reaction of the George W. Bush Administration and the majority of the American people—to strike hard at the audacious enemy who had attacked our warships, citizens abroad, embassies, diplomats, allies, and chief and capital cities—was admirable and correct. No nation that supported or sheltered this enemy (save Saudi Arabia) would be allowed to deploy the fictions of international law to shield itself from just retribution or timely preemption.

Though our military response could have been faster and more powerful and the aims of the campaign more carefully determined, the real problem surfaced immediately after the conventional victories in Afghanistan and Iraq. At first simply drifting, we then decided to reform and redesign these famously intractable nations, forgetting that we had conquered them in one dimension only. In this we followed the central proposition, influenced by an almost evangelical view of our role in history. Hostile as it was to the nation-building efforts of its immediate predecessor, the Bush Administration thought its decision was not a particularly sharp turnabout, given the Reagan presidency’s success in not merely containing but in collapsing the Soviet Union. It was, however, based on a highly inexact analogy.

Then President Barack Obama, albeit with different emphases, arrogantly grasped the baton and accelerated, deploying similar levels of force in the region, opening yet another front, in Libya, and making good on what had been President Bush’s half-hearted attempts to destabilize the entire Middle East in service of an idealism of astoundingly imprecise and uncertain ends. Seldom if ever in American diplomatic history have less than perfect allies been tossed from such a wildly veering sled in favor of obvious enemies.

In Egypt we have traded our second-most powerful and second-most reliable Arab ally (after Saudi Arabia and Jordan, respectively) for what is likely to be the Muslim Brotherhood linked to Iran and the terrorist infrastructure. Having tamed the lunatic Gaddhafi, we started and have fought—after binding, trussing, and blindfolding ourselves—a civil war to replace him with we know not what. Our diplomacy leans more and more heavily against Israel and less against Hamas, as National Security Council senior director Samantha Power suggests invading the former for building apartments, and we make overtures to the latter despite its conspicuous embrace of terrorism, the thing we are supposed to be fighting.

The notion for the sake of which these past ten years have seen our conventional military powers and the economy laid waste is that the transformation of the political culture of the Middle East and the vast Islamic world beyond it, sufficiently to render them harmless to us and kinder to themselves, is possible. Independently of President Bush’s lack of deep-enough thought in this regard, and President Obama’s rather embarrassing belief that he has the power to change (I would wager not much more than does Lady Gaga) the hearts of millions, the central proposition—transformation, nation-building, enlightenment—rests upon negligent and superficial interpretations of history.

Chicken and Egg

By definition, empires succeed for a time in pacifying and transforming other nations and peoples. The cost, extent, and duration of such pacification vary, but time after time the paradigm is engraved upon the historical memories of both subdued and subduer. A large imperial gallery presents many case studies of the transformative effects of dominant powers upon alien populations, but perhaps most relevant to the present are the European inroads upon the 19th-century Middle East, and the American occupations of Germany and Japan after the Second World War. These are pertinent chiefly in that integral to both were efforts to change the political ethos and forms of government in the subject countries and regions so as simultaneously to elevate and de-fang them.

What was the scale of the military effort required to dominate the region so completely after the large French and British contingents of the Napoleonic Wars had withdrawn at the very beginning of the 19th century? According to the late Albert Hourani, one of the leading historians of the region and period, the only European military presence within the periphery of the Ottoman Empire until the latter part of the century consisted of 1,500 British and 500 Austrian troops in 1840, and 6,000 French in 1860. Even if it misses an intervention or two, this information strongly suggests that the culture we now ambitiously (if weakly) engage has or has had within its genes both malleability and quiescence.

Both to vanquish and keep order in much of the world, the British often made do with tiny military contingents. This resembled Spain’s ability not only to conquer the greater part of the Western Hemisphere with just a handful of men under Cortez and Pizarro, but to hold and reinvent with so little force a large part of the earth’s surface, while speeding to senescence the vast empires there in place. And certainly the chief exhibit of the nation-builders (apart from citing Bernard Lewis probably far beyond his intent) is that of Japan and Germany—vicious, threatening, military societies that enthusiastically adopted quasi-American constitutionalism almost instantaneously, and, most important, lastingly. All this, burned into modern history like a brand, would suggest that the strategy of "clear, hold, and build" is feasible even on a grand scale, and that the answer to the rise of violent Islamism is force where required, followed by magnanimity, persuasion, and setting a good example. Would that it were so.

In presenting as a model for Iraq and Afghanistan the successful integration of Germany and Japan into the Western democratic system of alliances, the proponents of nation-building overlook a number of crucial facts. Somewhat like the question of chicken and egg, the problem is that suppression of insurgency has been defined as requiring good governance and economic development, while good governance and economic development require suppression of insurgency. Doctrinally accepting these premises, America’s only answer to the riddle is to attempt both at the same time and pray for synergy. Only rarely is such a prayer answered, because the leverage and (less precisely) force multiplication of synergy are available equally to both sides in the struggle. That is, to the extent that one half of the equation empowers the other, diminishing or eliminating it diminishes or eliminates the other.

As I have noted before in these pages, where the German and Japanese examples as paradigms for Iraq and Afghanistan are specifically derailed is that although we began to rebuild Germany and Japan after they were defeated, we defeated them first. It would have been inconceivable to attempt to transform them during hostilities. On the day of Germany’s surrender, General Eisenhower had 3 million Americans under his command—61 divisions, battle hardened. Other Western forces pushed the total to 4.5 million in 93 divisions. And then there were the Russians, who poured 2.5 million troops into the Berlin sector alone. Almost 10 million soldiers had converged upon a demoralized German population of 70 million that had suffered 4 million dead and 10 million wounded, captured, and missing. No sympathizers existed across friendly borders. The cities had been razed. Germany had been broken, but even after this was clear, more than 700,000 occupation troops remained, with millions close by. The situation in Japan was much the same: a country with a disciplined, homogenous population, no allies, sealed borders, its cities half burnt, more than three million dead, a million wounded or missing, its revered emperor having capitulated, and nearly half a million troops in occupation. And whereas both Germany and Japan had been democracies in varying degree, Iraq and Afghanistan have been ruled by autocrats since the beginning of history.

To succeed, a paradigm of "invade, reconstruct, and transform," requires the decisive defeat, disarmament, and political isolation of the enemy; the demoralization of its population; the destruction of its political ethos; and the presence, at the end of hostilities, of overwhelming force. In Iraq and Afghanistan none of these conditions was fulfilled, the opposite impression flowing mainly from our contacts predominantly with an expressive, Western-educated elite, and from our failure to understand that despite the universal human desire for freedom, equity, safety, honor, and prosperity, the operational definitions of each of these objectives can vary so much as to render the quality of universality meaningless.

Then and Now

As it spanned the centuries, European colonial history benefited from luck and conditions for the most part inaccessible today. The Europeans often found themselves accidentally at the fulcrum of power in divided, decadent polities. They surprised a good proportion of the subject nations by their very existence and then by their technology, which was often so far advanced as to be confounded with magic. They were organized, disciplined, and surging with the confidence of newly ascendant nations, their populations bursting outward like solar emanations. In short, they were white hot while the rest of the world was at rest.

This is hardly the case now. The Middle East has for centuries observed and struggled with the West, used and (however lamely) assimilated its technology, and dreamed of revanche. It has for more than half a century controlled a large share of the world’s most valuable energy resources; it has been organized into nation states for just as long; it has thrown off European suzerainty and repulsed superior militaries from the Atlantic to India; and it has learned the lessons of guerrilla warfare and insurgency from T.E. Lawrence, Mao Zedong, Frantz Fanon, and Ho Chi Minh. Not least, it has watched the power of the West decline relative to that of the rest of the world as the West slows in the growth of its economies, populations, and militaries, and as its mores by many objective measures, and certainly in the eyes of Islam, slide ever more into corruption and dissolution.

These are the factors that America has blithely ignored in its belief that it can serve as the model to which the Islamic world will mold itself willingly or with our measured compulsion. But none of these is as influential and resistant as the culture of Islam, which is the rock upon which our central proposition can only shatter.

The West has needed almost 2,000 years to make religion and governance mutually anodyne, and in so doing is most careful to refrain from judging religious principles that do not conflict with public law. This restraint has been deeply impressed after centuries of pointless theological warfare and schism. We shy, however, not only from criticism but from truthful assessment, accepting or even making absurd claims such as that Islam is a "religion of peace," or that jihad is solely a term of personal development. In light of the fact that in the name of Islam Muslims are at war in the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Chechnya, Abkhazia, Sinkiang, Iraq, Lebanon, Israel, Yemen, the Sudan, Somalia, Nigeria, Algeria, and, in terrorist mode, throughout the rest of the world; and given the many times that the most casual observers have seen excited mobs, AK-47s raised, screaming "Jihad!" such claims are indicative not only of failed judgment but of a predilection for suicide.

Although the Crusades were a reaction (and overreaction) to Islamic conquests almost to the gates of Paris, the secular West bears no resemblance to those times. Though most Muslims are peaceful, good people, the template is there to press itself upon dormant populations when opportune, starting with extremists and working its way to the normative as circumstances allow. Islam has changed little since its beginnings, as any proud Muslim will affirm in praise of the constancy, purity, absoluteness, and eternal qualities of his religion. It is perhaps the first thing that a perspicacious observer of the Middle East will note—the Manichaeism, lack of gray, and the absolute certainty that fuel passion overflowing into martyrdom.

The catalog of recent outrages and atrocities associated with Islam far outweighs that associated with contemporary Christianity, Judaism, or secularism. Christians, Jews, and the non-religious who are responsible for atrocities are almost always deranged loners with a conspicuous lack of support and association, much less endorsement, which in the case of Islamic terrorism flows from the mosque, the street, the airwaves, and even the schools. Today, as I write this, the newspapers report that al-Shabaab is slaughtering refugees fleeing the Somali famine, and blocking the delivery of food to 2.5 million starving people. The Taliban has just deliberately bombed a maternity ward. These are religious movements.

No government, command authorities, or—except in the rarest of criminal cases treated as such (if not always as vigorously as they should be)—soldier of the West now seeks to inflict harm upon innocents. In their warfare, however, tribal societies based upon clan, honor, and revenge freely take the lives of women and children lest sons grow up to avenge their fathers. In most of the Middle East this approach coexists undisturbed with Islam, and Islam’s most radical manifestations have incorporated it, as the Islamists make clear in repeatedly associating their atrocities with religious doctrine. And in regard to the severe oppression of women, physical and otherwise; popular and religious endorsement of terrorism; honor killings; casual beheadings; death sentences by fatwa for theological variance; and the division of mankind into the "world of Islam" and "the world of war"; only the protected and cowardly elites of the West see no correlation with the culture of Islam.

Reaching Critical Mass

To cite the arguments above is not to indict either Islam as a whole or all Muslims. This is one pole of a false dichotomy proffered by radical Islamists and unthinking Westerners alike, the other being to hold harmless all of Islam and all Muslims. I once attended a graduation ceremony at which the benighted speaker claimed that the number of people in the Islamic world who wanted to do us harm wouldn’t fill the gymnasium in which his words were echoing. (The number of people in Tribeca who want to do us harm is larger than that.) The argument veers unproductively from "virtually none" to "virtually all." So how can you tell? As inexact and mercurial as they may be, the polls give an indication of how Middle Eastern populations break on some of these questions.

The region is variegated and divided, and over time views change in response to changing conditions. If the armies, guerrillas, or terrorists one supports are winning, support grows, just as it decreases with difficulty, frustration, and failure. Immediately after September 11 the Middle East saw widespread celebrations. Even in 2002 with the bloom slightly off the rose after the United States had (temporarily) routed the Taliban, adding the element of consequence to the holding of opinion, support among Muslims for suicide-bombing was 74% in "moderate" Lebanon, 43% in our ally Jordan, 33% in our soon-to-be ally Pakistan, and 47% in far-away Nigeria.

As late as 2007, when it had become clear that the U.S. was prepared to punish Islamic terrorism throughout the world, support among Muslims for attacks on civilians was 43% in touristic, Gallicized Morocco, and 33% in our financial beneficiary, Egypt. In 2009, 68% of Muslims in the Palestinian Territories supported suicide-bombing, and this year approval of Islamism runs from 47% in Pakistan through approximately one third of the populations of the Palestinian Territories, Jordan, and Egypt. It is reasonable to assume that following upon success and immunity to retaliation support would climb substantially. The numbers betray divisions throughout Muslim populations, with the majorities rejecting violence, but as in most cases of political suasion and mobilization, an extreme core of the size represented by the figures cited is more than sufficient to be a controlling critical mass.

In gambling to exploit and capitalize upon the divisions nonetheless, the makers of our policy ignore or are ignorant of the decisive weight of religious immutability, doctrine, and tradition, of its inextricable integration with political life, and of the ancient patterns of action, perception, and habits of mind in the societies where they hope to exercise not merely a power of deterrence but of transformation.

True Shock and Awe

It is this central proposition that has made the longest war in our history a war without result, what T.E. Lawrence called "eating soup with a knife," and this that leads to the continued destabilization of the Middle East. Its bankruptcy is well illustrated by the stunning belief on the part of its advocates that the only alternative is surrender. Alternatives have been stated in these pages and elsewhere not only since September 11 but before, and their elements can be simply restated.

In the Judeo-Christian tradition, God limits his own omnipotence in that, like nature (His creation), He follows the rules He has decreed. In Islamic theology, God is entirely omnipotent, bound and bounded by nothing, inconsistent as He wishes, able to create wholly new universes in a split second and at His whim. This requires absolute faith and absolute surrender, which in turn and over the centuries has created, particularly among the Arabs, an extraordinary fatalism and patience, as whatever happens is Allah’s will. Though the patience thus engendered creates the ability to run out almost any clock on the impatient West, the fatalism that is its twin creates extraordinary passivity in the wake of a hard blow.

Centuries of European domination owed less to any quality of the West than to this quality in (and the division of) the Arabs particularly. Centuries of contact and influence, however, have to some extent jolted the Arabs out of this frame of mind, or at least shown them the way. But though they are torn, fatalism is more natural, deeply seated, and closer to the eternal verities with which Islam is primarily concerned.

True shock and awe following upon September 11, when the world was with us, could have pitched the Middle East (and beyond, including the Islamists) into something resembling its torpor under European domination or its shock after the Arab-Iraeli War of 1967. That is to say, pacified for a time, with attacks on the West subsiding. And if the West could have resisted the arrogance of the victor and been magnanimous, who knows for how long such a period would have been extended? Instead, we exhibit the generosity of the soon-to-be defeated, otherwise known as concession and surrender.

Comporting with the idea that if you’re going to have a war it’s a good idea to win it, and with the Powell Doctrine, General Eric Shinseki’s recommendations, the lessons of military history, the American way of war, and simple common sense, an effective response to September 11 would have required an effort of greater scale than that of the Gulf War—i.e., all in. With a full and fully prepared "punch through," we could have reached Baghdad in three days, and instead of staying there for a decade or more put compliant officials or generals in power (which is more or less what we’re doing now) and wheeled left to Damascus, smashing the Syrian army against the Israeli anvil and putting another compliant regime in place before returning to the complex of modern military bases at the northern borders of Saudi Arabia. There, our backs to the sea, which we control, and our troops hermetically sealed by the desert and safe from insurgency, we could have occupied the center of gravity in the heart of the Middle East, able to sprint with overwhelming force within a few days to either Baghdad, Damascus, or Riyadh.

Having suffered very few casualties, our forces would have been rested, well-trained, ready for deployment in other parts of the world, and able to dictate to (variously and where applicable) the Syrians, Iraqis, and Saudis that they eradicate their terrorists, stay within their borders, abandon weapons of mass destruction, break alliances with Iran and Hezbollah, keep the oil price down, and generally behave themselves. These regimes live for power, do anything for survival, and have secret police who can flush out terrorists with ruthless efficiency. Such strategy, had we adopted it, would have been demanding and imperious, yes, but not as demanding and imperious as ten years of war across much of the Middle East. Our own economy and alliances need not have been disrupted, our polity not so severely divided, and far fewer people would have suffered.

War, Not Widgets

But rather than this approach, which is not, as the record will show, hindsight, the businessmen and business-schooled officials of the Bush Administration chose to run the war according to the business principle of doing the most with as little as possible. Thus, although war demands surplus, reserves, and overkill, for it is never as predictable as selling widgets, it was deliberately and gratuitously a war of penury, and like most such wars it has lasted long and will bring a frayed and unsatisfactory end.

To compound this enormous misstep, a Republican administration that hated nation-building adopted it with the zeal of the converted because it didn’t know what else to do. The Obama Administration has now embraced this central, crippling proposition even more incoherently, preaching it more strongly and extending it promiscuously while starving it of seriousness and support. It looks at a complicated, violent, tribal, and often medieval society that has barely achieved a precarious equilibrium, and encourages its dissolution to serve Western ideals of comity and individual liberty unlikely to take root in such stony ground. Our lack of reflection and knowledge robbed us of the ability to nip this tragedy in the bud. And yet it has been just a prologue to far greater danger and heartbreak to come, for the next evolution is China, a different case entirely in which the imperative is not friendliness but balance and deterrence. And in regard to this our preparations, capacities, and strategic conceptions are less competent and promising than even those with which we founder in the Arab and Muslim worlds.

Freedom’s March

James G. Basker — Fri, 9 Sep 2011 00:00:00 EST

When it was founded in 1998, the Frederick Douglass Book Prize, awarded to the best book on the history of slavery by Yale’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, had fewer than 25 books nominated. In 2010 it had more than 90. If one measures not just books but all genres of scholarship, in all regions of the world and all languages, the increase is even more dramatic. The authoritative "Bibliography of Slavery and World Slaving" lists 379 publications in the 1950s, 4,047 in the 1980s, and an estimated 13,000 from 2000 to 2009.

Meanwhile, in addition to the Gilder Lehrman Center at Yale, there are now scholarly centers or museums devoted to slavery studies in Canada, England, Germany, France, and Senegal, as well as the online Transatlantic Slave Trade Data Base sponsored by Emory University and the DuBois Center at Harvard, and 20 or more academic conferences across the globe every year. In 2008, to commemorate the bicentennial of the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade, the British Government sponsored major exhibitions, public programs, and a website. In the United States there were events and programs too, though overall the commemoration was more muted, as if most Americans had forgotten that the U.S., under President Thomas Jefferson, had also outlawed the transatlantic slave trade—though not slavery itself—on January 1, 1808.

For more than 30 years, Seymour Drescher has been in the vanguard of this burgeoning discipline. After establishing himself as a Tocqueville scholar in the 1960s and ’70s, Professor Drescher published his landmark study Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition in 1977, refuting economic determinists’ thesis that the moral component of abolitionism was epiphenomenal because slavery was already in economic decline. Drescher demonstrated, to the contrary, that the slave trade and slave labor were still of enormous value to the British economy in the very years of the abolition campaign, and that the British public had mobilized itself and pushed for an end to the slave trade despite the damage it would do to their national wealth. (The book is still so highly regarded it was reissued in 2010 by the University of North Carolina Press, with a new foreword by David Brion Davis, himself one of the pre-eminent slavery scholars of the past 40 years.) Since then, Drescher has written or edited several other important books, including Capitalism and Antislavery: British Mobilization in Comparative Perspective (1986), The Meaning of Freedom: Economics, Politics, and Culture After Slavery (1992), A Historical Guide to World Slavery (edited with Stanley Engerman, 1998), From Slavery to Freedom: Comparative Studies in the Rise and Fall of Atlantic Slavery (1999), and The Mighty Experiment: Free Labor Versus Slavery in British Emancipation (2002)—the last of which won the Frederick Douglass Prize in 2003.

Now in Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery, Drescher has attempted his most ambitious project and made his most valuable contribution: telling the story of how the abolition of slavery emerged as an idea and, eventually, a reality in world history between the 16th and the 20th centuries. Abolition ranges over the intellectual, political, and economic history of a number of empires, countries, cultures and religions, spanning every region of the world, but with a primary focus on the rise and fall of the most infamous slave system of them all, the one that carried more than 11 million Africans into bondage in the New World between 1500 and the late 1880s. Drescher writes with admirable clarity, but the sheer density of information can be demanding. His footnotes (there is no bibliography, perhaps a gesture of friendliness to nonspecialists) provide a running survey of the most important modern scholarship in the field. Throughout its 468 pages, the book is learned, enlightening, sometimes surprising, and ultimately quite moving. Every reader who cares about slavery as a major force in world history or the positive contribution that at least one branch of Western ideas has made to modern civilization, should read this book.

* * *

Drescher starts from a simple premise: it is the rise of abolition, not slavery, that is the extraordinary historical development. In the opening chapter, aptly titled "A Perennial Institution," Drescher defines slavery as "a communally recognized right by some individuals to possess, buy, sell, discipline, transport, liberate, or otherwise dispose of the bodies and behavior of other individuals," and notes that until the 20th century, slavery in various forms had existed "across the globe and over millennia." What was exceptional was the emergence, beginning in the late 15th and early 16th centuries, of what he calls the "freedom principle"—the idea that humankind’s natural or normative condition is freedom. Having taken root in northwestern Europe (particularly England, Scotland, France, and the Netherlands), this idea—despite the massive economic power and profound brutality of the Atlantic slave system in which Europeans participated for 400 years—would eventually prevail and become universal. The markers in the progress and ascendancy of this idea include: the emergence of antislavery activism in Britain, France, and the American colonies in the late 18th century; the British and American abolition of the transatlantic slave trade in 1808, the British emancipation act of 1833; French abolition in 1848; the decades-long fight over slavery leading to the Civil War and the 13th amendment in the U.S.; the end of slavery in Brazil in 1888; the League of Nations Slavery Convention of 1926; and Mauritania’s decree abolishing slavery in 1974. As Drescher observes at the close, "by the last quarter of the twentieth century, antislavery had become the gold standard of civilization throughout the planet."

Drescher presents abolition’s examination in four sections. The first, "Extension," covers the late 15th century through the 17th, and tells three intertwining stories. First, the gradual disappearance of unfree labor and the growing awareness of the freedom principle in northern Europe. Second, the widespread existence and dynamic nature of slavery systems Europeans encountered in the Mediterranean, Middle Eastern, and African worlds. And third, the unique combination of factors—technological, economic, political, and epidemiological—that gave rise to the vast and enormously profitable Atlantic slave trade that thrived for 400 years and transformed the economies of four continents.

A key result, for Europeans, was a "cultural barrier," which enabled them to create and derive wealth from the slave trade and slave labor overseas, while refusing to allow slavery in the home country. This soon hardened into race-based slavery in the Atlantic world, codified in colonial statutes and regulations but left vague or unacknowledged by national governments. Thus in the late 1600s, John Locke could affirm basic principles of freedom in his seminal Treatises on Government while also encoding and legitimizing slavery in the Fundamental Constitutions he drafted for the colony of Carolina.

Fraught with such contradictions, this duality could not "remain in equilibrium," as Drescher puts it bluntly at the opening of the book’s second section. "Never before had the asymmetry between the legitimacy of the institution in one part of an empire and its illegitimacy in another been so jarringly juxtaposed." The result was "Crisis," the heading under which Drescher gives us superbly detailed chapters about the tensions and conflicts over slavery that erupted on both sides of the Atlantic during the age of revolution, the half century between the 1770s and 1820s. One chapter each is given to the American, Franco-American, and Latin American colonial revolutions, and another to Great Britain. These are the contexts in which a wide variety of histories played out, ranging from revolution followed by abolition (northern American colonies, Haiti), to revolution without abolition (southern American colonies, many Franco-Caribbean colonies, most Spanish colonies), to abolition without revolution (Britain and its Caribbean colonies). Drescher is masterful at keeping all the variables and contingencies in view, while also demonstrating that some small, quiet events did more to turn the tide against slavery than big violent ones. The 1772 Somerset decision in London, which granted de facto freedom to slaves by forbidding masters from taking their slaves out of England once they had landed, had a broader impact on the Anglophone world, in terms of ending slavery, than the whole of the American Revolution.

By the 1830s, in the wake of British emancipation, the global pattern was shifting. In his third major thematic section, "Contraction," Drescher examines the 90-year period from the 1830s to the 1920s in which, pushed largely by British and American but also French and other advocates, the opposition to slavery grew from separate national efforts into what emerged eventually as an international campaign. The "freedom principle" gradually became a global consensus. Drescher does not gloss over such delays and setbacks as the reversals of the 1840s and ’50s in America that galvanized Abraham Lincoln and his supporters, and the resurgence of slave imports in Cuba and Brazil after 1865.

By 1890, however, the antislavery idea has become so prevalent that a convention of Western nations in Brussels could readily agree to denounce slavery as a universal evil—enabling those same nations to add abolition to their rationales for imperial interventions in Africa and the Middle East. Still, as Drescher shows us, the abolition of slavery is one consequence of westernization and Western imperialism that is hard to regret. "With Ethiopia’s formal prohibition in 1923," he writes, "the entire world had been closed as a legal source for the slave trade."

* * *

The most surprising section of Abolition is the final one, "Reversion," in which Drescher examines 20th-century systems of slave labor, particularly those under the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, with briefer attention to the Japanese forced labor projects of World War II. By placing the Soviet Gulags and Nazi slave labor system in the historical context of comparative slavery, presenting them as serious regressions in the longer advance of the freedom principle, Drescher leaves us finally with a double lesson. One is positively uplifting: the triumph of abolition has over time fundamentally transformed the conditions of life and the expectation of civil rights for most of the human race. He sharpens this insight by briefly indulging in some "counterfactuals," such as what probably would have happened in the late 19th century had the Confederacy succeeded in leaving the Union with its slave system intact. The second lesson is cautionary: that, as the persistence of sex-trafficking, debt bondage, and child indenture continue to remind us, people remain vulnerable and freedom precarious. No matter how "civilized" it may seem, no society should allow itself to become merely complacent or self-congratulatory.

All-American

Kimberly Shankman — Thu, 8 Sep 2011 00:00:00 EST

Henry Clay presents a paradox. Modern Americans have forgotten Clay while remembering Andrew Jackson, his contemporary and rival. Clay’s remarkably long career in American government, however, made him a dominant political figure in the first half of the 19th century. Clay represented Kentucky in either the U.S. Senate or House of Representatives for most of the years from 1806 to his death in 1852, becoming Speaker of the House on three separate occasions. He was also Secretary of State under President John Quincy Adams, and unsuccessfully sought the presidency five times between 1824 and 1848.

In Henry Clay: The Essential American, Jeanne and David Heidler meet the challenge of making modern readers understand Clay’s importance. Historians who have coauthored several books on America between the Revolution and the Civil War, the Heidlers demonstrate Clay’s hold on Americans’ affections by opening with an account of his death and funeral. Tellingly, it was Clay—not Jefferson, Madison, or Jackson—who was first accorded the honor of lying in state in the Capitol rotunda.

The Heidlers go on to show that Henry Clay was an essential American in both senses of the term: he embodied qualities that characterized the new nation, and his political exertions helped the young republic survive dangerous challenges and resist destructive temptations. Americans liked what they saw in Clay because they saw so much of themselves. Though never successful in his long quest for the presidency, Clay was in no sense the Harold Stassen of his time, a politician who wore out his welcome.

Clay’s optimism and audacity helped America negotiate the end of the War of 1812 on favorable terms, despite America’s weak position at the start of the peace talks. Few Americans were unacquainted with sorrow in those decades before modern medicine, but Clay bore exceptional grief with exceptional resilience—seven of his eleven children died during his lifetime. A self-made man, Clay’s ascent to prominence resonated with a nation discarding a vestigial respect for inherited position, which still mattered after the founding era.

In his politics, Clay embodied the great tension facing America during his lifetime. He was deeply conflicted about the institution of slavery but adamant about preserving the Union. A slave owner who detested slavery, Clay was a leader of the American Colonization Society, which founded Liberia as a home where freed slaves could be "repatriated." Clay’s refutation of the "positive good" defense of slavery was so powerful that Abraham Lincoln quoted it directly, and effectively, during his debates with Stephen Douglas. At the same time, his proposals on the spread of slavery to the territories were so equivocal that Douglas cited Clay in support of his plan to relax federal limits on the expansion of slavery in the Kansas-Nebraska Act.

* * *

As bitterly divided as Lincoln and Douglas were in the decade following Clay’s death, they agreed with him and each other on a crucial point: America somehow had to resolve the slavery dilemma, and that resolution could be effected only if America remained one country rather than split into two. Clay was the architect of compromises that averted disunion, fashioning agreements that were not rigorously logical, but deftly wove together conflicting political imperatives. In addition to his famous legislative compromises in 1820 and 1850 over slavery and territorial expansion, Clay, while serving in the Senate in 1833, found a way to defuse the crisis over "nullification." After South Carolina asserted a right to nullify federal laws it disliked—in this case a tariff that would have raised the price of manufactured goods—President Jackson threatened to enforce the collection of the tariff militarily. Clay brokered a compromise that gradually reduced the tariff over several years, during which South Carolina would continue to collect it. In exchange, Congress passed the "Force Bill," a resolution authorizing the president to call out the army should South Carolina attempt to interfere with duty collections. As with many compromises, both sides thought they had come out ahead: the South had altered a hated tax on imports, and the president had reasserted federal supremacy.

Clay’s relentless and vociferous criticism of Andrew Jackson has often been dismissed as sour grapes. From the perspective of a man devoted to the perpetuation of the Union, however, one concerned that a popular military hero—an American Bonaparte—could overwhelm the fragile young republic, his opposition is more plausible and respectable. As Clay read Jackson’s character, he saw a man so governed by his own passions and so good at reflecting the people’s that he was inherently dangerous to constitutional government. The Heidlers’ portrait of Jackson argues that Clay’s fears were far from groundless.

Having seen several fledgling republics fall victim to military dictatorship, Clay believed a peaceful, stable, commercial republic was America’s only hope for enduring. It was this desire to vindicate the founding, as both a practical enterprise that would benefit Americans and a moral ideal that would inspire mankind, that made Clay "essentially American." By no means a pacifist—Clay first rose to national prominence as the leader of the fiery "War Hawk" Congress in 1811—he nevertheless recognized that the essence of America was not glory and conquest, but progress and development. Clay believed in building America’s economic system through "internal improvements" (we would call them "infrastructure"), which would bind the sections of the nation together and allow Americans to prosper by living peaceably with other nations and one another.

The prosperity Clay envisioned was not only an economic good in itself but a political one. A thriving America would be too busy, and have too much at stake, to permit disagreements over slavery to escalate into war. Instead, a prosperous nation would have the wherewithal to pursue a policy of gradual, compensated emancipation. One of the few ways Henry Clay’s story is not tragic is that he died before it became clear that this lovely dream was impossible.

Churchill at War

Justin D. Lyons — Wed, 7 Sep 2011 00:00:00 EST

We have been told more about Winston Churchill than any other human being," writes Max Hastings. Tens of thousands of people, admirers and detractors alike, from those who worked closely with him under the strain of cataclysmic events to those who merely glimpsed him in passing, have left accounts of Churchill. His more than 60 years in political life were marked by much controversy and have led to countless studies, both contemporaneous and historical.

The flow of Churchill biographies continues unabated. Carlo D’Este in Warlord: A Life of Winston Churchill at War, 1874-1945 and Max Hastings with Winston’s War: Churchill 1940-1945 have provided us two new portraits of Churchill. These authors wish us to take a step beyond the well-known elements of the Churchill story, explaining that up close, the countenance of the great man bears its share of blemishes. This is dangerous territory: to focus on imperfections is to risk losing sight of the whole. Just as painted portraits are meant to be viewed from a distance, peering too narrowly at a life can lead to false judgments. Escaping this danger is a difficulty of writing works like these, and for the most part, Hastings and D’Este examine Churchill’s mistakes without losing sight of his great accomplishment. "Warts and all," D’Este writes, "Winston Churchill nevertheless represented the indomitable spirit and symbol of a defiant nation under siege."

Their mild criticism of Churchill is but an echo of what was said during his own life. "Churchill’s wartime colleagues, above all the Chiefs of Staff," Hastings tells us, "emerged from the Second World War asserting the prime minister’s greatness as a statesman, while deploring his shortcomings as a strategist." Judging Churchill as a strategist must be done cautiously. We must be careful not to depart from historical context. After all, we have knowledge that was unavailable to those laying plans and making difficult decisions at the time. Avoiding chronological superiority is one of the purposes of Churchill’s account of his own leadership in his six-volume history The Second World War (1948-1953), as he indicates clearly in his introduction to the third volume The Grand Alliance (1950). D’Este puts it well: "History and hindsight are handmaidens that all too often demand perfection from those who have no grasp or experience of the grave burdens that fell upon Churchill’s shoulders in 1940."

* * *

The relationship between the political and the military sides of Churchill is one of the key themes of D’Este’s book. "Long before he became a statesman," he points out, "Winston Churchill was first a soldier." Churchill’s childhood fascination with military matters and his early life as a soldier shaped his wartime leadership. But it is also true that Churchill took up politics at a young age. He entered into Parliament rapidly and ascended to the higher realms of national direction for which he had been preparing himself since childhood. "War and soldiering were in his blood," but politics was in his heart. This is illustrated particularly well in Churchill’s decision to unite in himself the offices of prime minister and minister of defence. Churchill thought much about the proper organization of a war administration and was determined not to repeat the mistakes of the past. He "was convinced that a political leader must establish strategic policy: that is, where a war would be fought, what it must achieve, and how the generals, airmen, and admirals would carry it out, and not the other way around as was the case in the recent war." It is not surprising that this led him into conflict with professional military men such as Sir Alan Brooke, who considered Churchill’s military enthusiasms an intolerable interference.

Hastings seeks "to present a portrait of [Churchill’s] leadership from the day he became prime minister, May 10, 1940, set in the context of Britain’s national experience." He explores Churchill’s conduct of the war intending to bring to light underappreciated elements of the Churchill story. For example, though Churchill was a national symbol of defiance during wartime, many of his countrymen questioned his strategic judgment. Hastings explains "between the end of the Battle of Britain in 1940 and El Alamein in November 1942, not only many ordinary citizens, but also some of [Churchill’s] closest colleagues wanted operational control of the war machine to be removed from his hands." This was a period of great disappointment for Churchill, in which the inadequacies of the British army made it impossible to visit upon the enemy the pain and destruction the British had already suffered. Frustrations in North Africa combined with the losses of Hong Kong and Singapore brought him under fire in the House of Commons. Churchill was victorious in a vote of confidence and defeated a motion of censure largely because of his tremendous rhetorical ability. His search for a fighting general finally resulted in the appointment of Bernard Montgomery, who delivered the long-awaited and desperately needed victory at El Alamein.

* * *

Yet even before the fall of France, the wisdom of Churchill’s strategic decisions was called into question. The deliverance of the British Expeditionary Force from Dunkirk out of the jaws of the German war machine is well known. What is less known, Hastings points out, is that there were two Dunkirks. The second was the successful evacuation of the bulk of the British forces still in France, along with sizeable Allied contingents, more than a week after the first. In Hastings’s presentation, this miracle was necessitated by Churchill’s stubborn attachment to France. Up to the eve of the fall of Paris "perversely and indeed indefensibly, Churchill continued to dispatch more troops to France," he writes. Why did Churchill do this? Both D’Este and Hastings note that he had hopes of maintaining a beachhead in France, which would allow for a counteroffensive. But this was not the only reason. France had not yet capitulated. It was vital, in Churchill’s view, to reassure France that Britain would continue to fight. If France fell, Britain would stand alone.

Churchill exerted himself massively, and in the end unsuccessfully, attempting to breathe the spirit of resistance into the French leadership. His purposes transcended the country’s immediate military perspective. Military commanders on the scene, most notably Alan Brooke, thought Churchill pushed these things nearly to the point of lunacy. But Brooke understood Churchill’s thinking: he saw "the prime minister’s motive—to demonstrate to the French that the British army was still committed to the fight. But he rightly deplored its futility." Brooke was proven right in the end, but it is Churchill who had to bear the burden of the larger conflict, and it was Churchill who eventually agreed with Brooke’s assessment, later than Brooke would have liked, but in time.

"In two world wars," D’Este notes, "Churchill never lost his appetite for the attack, disdaining defense as an occasional necessary evil." This appetite led him to favor, in Hastings’s words "dashes, raids, skirmishes, diversions, and sallies more appropriate—as officers who often worked with him often remarked—to a Victorian cavalry subaltern than to the director of a vast industrial war effort." Military men often despaired at Churchill’s tactics. From a purely military standpoint, many of them seemed unwise, but this is not the only measure that applies. One of the most controversial was Churchill’s decision to send a British army to Greece in the spring of 1941. The British lost 12,000 men (9,000 of them taken prisoner) and achieved nothing militarily measurable. Churchill had in mind considerations broader than those on which generals must focus. He had also to take into account vital impressions on the world stage, as Hastings notes, "British passivity in the face of destruction of Greek freedom would have created a sorry impression upon the world, and especially the United States." Churchill knew that without the eventual belligerence of the United States, there would be no victory—and the United States must see Britain to be fighting. As prime minister, he had to consider the domestic scene as well. The morale of the British people had to be maintained. Giving in to inertia would lead to timidity, despair, and, ultimately, defeat. These concerns and others, such as the difficulties of working with a vital ally with its own plans and purposes after American entry into the war, must be brought to bear on any assessment of Churchill as war leader.

Both authors deserve credit for communicating that whatever mistakes Churchill made as a strategist, he never made a deadly mistake. Even Brooke, who had one of the most tempestuous relationships with Churchill, wrote "I thank God I was given an opportunity of working alongside such a man, and of having my eyes opened to the fact that occasionally such supermen exist on this earth." Churchill was the driving force Britain needed to carry it through its darkest and finest hour. It could not have been done without him.