History Unfolding

Obama and Afghanistan

2009-12-04T17:23:00.002-05:00

As a loyal citizen and a loyal Democrat, I hope that the decision to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan will produce a good result. Yet I cannot believe that it will. At worst, it will bring us to the end of the road to hell George W. Bush started us down almost exactly 8 years ago by bringing Islamists to power in Pakistan. At best, it will tie down our resources and attention for another three or four more years, only to produce an inconclusive and unpromising outcome rather like the one we can now see in Iraq. Meanwhile, I cannot believe that it will be politically advantageous to the Administration--certainly not among the voters, as opposed to the punditocracy of Washington, D. C.

In my opinion--and I could be wrong--this latest step is a victory for Osama Bin Laden and all he represents. 9/11, I have come to believe, was, from Bin Laden's perspective, a political master stroke. He wanted above all to discredit the Muslim regimes allied with the United States--and by provoking the invasions of two Muslim countries by George W. Bush, he gave a big boost to Islamic radicalism. The loss of Taliban power in Afghanistan was a setback that has now largely been made good. The elimination of Saddam Hussein was a boon both for Bin Laden and for Iran. What Bin Laden must fear more than anything else, and certainly more than his own death, is that he might return to the obscurity he so richly deserves. President Obama's decision insures that that will not happen any time soon.

For twenty years I have been teaching courses that relentlessly harp upon the same point: the results of any military action ultimately depend on its political effects, which in turn depend on political factors. Our policy depends on two political assumptions: that Afghanistan can create a viable government, and that Pakistan will prove itself at long last a dependable ally. Try as I might, I cannot put any faith in either assumption. We still have not found our way around the great unmentionable of the situation in Afghanistan: that the Taliban has come back in large part because powerful elements within the Pakistani government want it back in power in Afghanistan. And we are also refusing to face another unmentionable: that our policies in Afghanistan and in the tribal areas of Pakistan have made the Taliban a much more significant threat within Pakistan itself.

This evening as I drove home from work I heard Secretary of State Clinton proudly announce that NATO had pledged an additional 7000 troops. I was sad to think that for the next two years at least, the senior Obama national security team will be focused upon the fate of one of the poorest and remotest nations on earth, simply because, nine years ago, a terrorist attack on the United States was plotted there. I still think that the idea that we must create friendly, cooperative states in Muslim areas where states have failed or never existed is neither justifiable nor, above all, cost-effective. Attacks can be plotted anywhere and Bin Laden is now surely living in Pakistan. As my friend Andrew Bacevich explained two mornings ago on NPR, putting American troops in Afghanistan is not the way to head off new attacks in the west.

I am also worried about the purely military problem in Afghanistan. Empires based on naval supremacy such as the British in the last three centuries and the United States in the last 60 years do best in coastal regions. Afghanistan is landlocked and our supply lines, from Pakistan and Central Asia, are politically and militarily vulnerable. The longer that we keep large forces in ungovernable Muslim areas, the more sophisticated IED's will become.

I was sad listening to President Obama the other night because it seemed at times that he was trying to be himself and George W. Bush at the same time. I was particularly shocked when he accused terrorists of defiling the Muslim religion--it may be true, but it is not the place of non-Muslims to say so. He is taking a huge gamble, counting on his already enormous worldwide prestige to lead the world to fall in behind this new step--but, like JFK at the Bay of Pigs, also betting much of it on a very questionable enterprise. And he is taking a bigger risk at home. It is not generally understood that Franklin Roosevelt in 1933 initially pulled back from world affairs, and that until at least 1938 he ran a far more isolationist Administration than Herbert Hoover. He knew his most important work was at home. So is President Obama's.

Obama's decision has already won grudging endorsements from some Republicans (although the opposite decision could have done the same.) Given the overwhelming prejudice of our foreign policy establishment towards military action, he, like Lyndon Johnson in 1965, made the consensus foreign policy decision--which does not in the least make it the wisest one. I suspect he has disappointed a great many people around the world, but I hope it all works out.

Discipline and freedom

2009-11-29T09:51:00.003-05:00

[Although the pace has slowed, people are still arriving here because they have received an email on the current state of America. If you are curious about my own views of the origins and consequences of the current crisis in American life, I recommend this link. However, the email attributed to myself comparing President Obama to Adolf Hitler, is a forgery which I did not write. All visitors may also be interested to read the following post. Meanwhile, here is the best explanation I've found of why that email is so incredibly popular.]

Last week, as often happens, a news item, read in the context of my current research, brought home to me the enormous changes in American life that have taken place during my adult life--changes that have involved significant steps forward at the individual level, but huge steps backward at the political and national economic level. The question now before us, in many ways, is whether we can manage to combine the far greater personal liberty we have achieved over the last forty years with the capacity to subordinate some of our personal beliefs to the greater good and establish some new and friendlier centers of authority.

My current research, as I have mentioned, focuses on the US preparation for, and decisions leading to, our entry into the Second World War. One cannot read very far into the archives of that era without realizing that the United States was then an entirely different country. The organizational effort that was involved in mobilization was altogether beyond anything that we would be capable of today. To go within three years from a military force of less than one million men to one of ten million was only one aspect of this. During the same period--from late 1940 to 1944--huge new industrial enterprises were built, tens of thousands of workers moved around the country to make them run, the Navy doubled in size, and the country built hundreds of merchant ships as well. Such an effort required organizational skill, which in turn depended, in large measure, on respect for authority. We understood in those days that a great undertaking required chiefs and Indians, and I frequently encounter men of all political persuasions, from Harold Ickes of the Interior Department to Frank Knudsen of General Motors (who contributed his services as one of the heads of Roosevelt's War Production Board), that no enterprise could function if a single man were not in charge. This did not mean that authority was either arbitrary or unrestrained. FDR insisted that war mobilization not involve any erosion of workers' rights and New Deal benefits, and except for voluntary no-strike pledges during the war,it did not. The same spirit continued, in many ways, through the 1950s and into the 1960s.

The great rebellion of the 1960s fought against the moral authority of a dying civilization, really the remnants of the Victorian era (and we should keep in mind that the grandparents of many Boomers were born when Victoria was still very much alive. It began as a rebellion against sexual taboos for young adults, quickly led to an explosion of divorce rates throughout society, and eventually became the most effective movement in history for women's rights, and the first for gay rights. Along with all this came a demystification of family life, acknowledging that parental influences could be very harmful, and encouraging people of all ages to acknowledge uncomfortable truths about those around them. All these changes have transformed our society. Because they have not been universally accepted, they have also become critical political issues--a most unfortunate development, in my opinion, which has diverted attention from the real business of government. But along with them, sadly, went a loss of respect for tradition and authority of all kinds. Boomer academics threw out a century of gradually acquired knowledge in the humanities and started over. Eventually Boomer bankers successfully agitated for the repeal of the New Deal legislation that their grandparents had put in place to restrain their parents. The individual, rather than the group, became our focus--a very important correction, undoubtedly, to the excesses of an era that had indeed become too standardized, too militarily threatening, and too mistrustful of human feeling. But like so many of such corrections, it has now destroyed much of the intellectual framework we need to cope with great national problems. The substitution of sound bites for any systematic analysis of them is in my opinion another manifestation of the same kind of problem.

The hook which got me thinking about all this was a story from the New York Times last Thursday about Claudette Colvin, a woman of 70 who has now been the subject of an award-winning children's book. In 1955 Ms. Colvin was a black teen-ager in Montgomery, Alabama, and it turns out that she had been arrested for refusing to yield her seat to a white woman on a city bus some months before Rosa Parks's more famous arrest, which ignited the bus boycott. According to the book about her by Philip House, however, the local NAACP decided not to make her a test case, partly because (although it is not clear from the whole story why) they did not think of her as a suitable symbol. Later, after the boycott began, Ms. Colvin's own mother, Colvin now says, told her that Rosa Parks would garner more white sympathy because her skin was lighter. I have not seen Mr. House's book, but the Times story, I can say confidently, leaves a very misleading impression about how the bus boycott actually got going and, more importantly, why it was successful.

The article mentions that Rosa Parks was, in fact, the secretary of the Montgomery branch of the NAACP, in those days by far the leading civil rights organization in the country and already a significant political power in Washington, D. C., and, though its legal defense fund, in the courts, where it had carried on a successful twenty-year campaign against segregated education culminating in Brown v. Board of Education a year before. But it doesn't mention the real difference between Rosa Park's refusal to give up her seat and that of both Claudette Colvin and another teen-ager, May Louise Smith, in the months before the crisis erupted. Colvin and Smith acted spontaneously. Rosa Parks did not. Her move was a planned first step designed to lead to controversy and to an immediate black boycott of the bus system, organized by the NAACP and by the young local pastor, Martin Luther King, Jr. The NAACP had learned from the world it lived in over the previous twenty years, becoming a formidable oganization under the leadership of Walter White and Roy Wilkins. They planned this campaign the way John L. Lewis or Walter and Victor Reuther planned union organizing campaigns. And it was a good thing that they did, because it took a full year for the boycott to lead to the negotiated end of segregated transportation in Montgomoery. The black community had to organize and maintain its own transportation network to get its people to and from work without the buses--and they did. And they very possibly did pick Rosa Parks to trigger the boycott and become its symbol because they knew and trusted her, because she was clearly a responsible middle-aged adult, and yes, conceivably, even because of her skin color. While that last factor may today make us all cringe, it would have been quite in character, in those days, for the NAACP to make such a decision based on the need to attract as much white sympathy as possible. That was how they had managed to accomplish as much as they had in the previous decades.

Indeed, it is fair to say that among no part of American society was the generational revolt more profound during the 1960s than among the black community. That was brought home to me again glancing through the autobiographies of Arthur Ashe, the great black tennis player and activist. A first-wave Boomer or last-wave Silent, born in 1943, Ashe grew up in segregated Richmond and was taught, as he explained again and again, that the only hope for black people to be successful in a white world--and in his case, that meant breaking in to the all-white world of professional tennis--was to be more accomplished, more courteous, and more dedicated to American ideals than whites. That kind of behavior had many tragic costs. In Ashe's case, I suspect, 36 years of continually suppressed rage--worsened by the trauma of losing his own mother when he was a small child--probably contributed to his early onset of heart disease, which in turn led to his contracting tranfusion AIDS and dying in his early 50s. The black rebellion of the 1960s--like the white--was above all a rebellion against the older generation's values. For young black Boomers that meant rejecting their parents' deference and respect for society's institutions. It also meant exalting spontaneity over organization. In the last forty years individual black people have advanced enormously, but the great civil rights organizations are a thing of the past.

Certain institutions within our society are still well-organized, if not always disciplined--including the new mega-banks, the drug companies, the gun lobby, evangelical Christian political groups, and the health insurance industry. There are, as far as I can see, no comparable organizations among the disadvantaged. That is the world with which President Obama and his Administration must now cope, and it is not surprising that they have so far made little impact upon it. And beyond this lies a broader question: will some future generations eventually learn to combine personal and emotional freedom on the one hand, with economic restraint on behalf of the general good on the other? Perhaps even to ask that question betrays, on my part, a somewhat naive faith in a future utopia that can combine the best of different eras from the past. Perhaps it would be better to accept that different eras inevitably highlight different aspects of human nature, both better and worse.

Living Through History

2009-11-21T21:43:00.004-05:00

The great crises of American history, from the American Revolution and the writing of the Constitution through the Civil War and onward to the Depression and Second World War, look very different in retrospect than they did at the time. We experience them over days or weeks of reading or, in the case of historians like myself, intermittent years of study, but even then, they go much more quickly in one's office or study than they did at the time. We now know what would endure and what would not, what achievements would have the greatest long-term impact, and what new problems would be left behind for future generations. Those like myself who expected the crisis may be even more disappointed than others because so many of our fellow countrymen have not yet grasped how deep our problems are--not to speak of an angry minority who, if history can be trusted, never will. Tonight marks another milestone in the Obama Administration. The Senate has voted on strict party lines to allow the health care reform bill to come to the floor, allowing us to hope that some version of it will indeed be passed. Yet during this same week, other evidence has suggested how far we have to go--and the events of the past year have also made clear how much this crisis differs from the last one.

Thus, in 1932 and in 2008, a series of catastrophes led to a change of Administration, in each case from a laissez-faire Republican to an activist Democrat. In both cases this result had been foreshadowed by the Congressional elections of two years previously, which had given the Democrats control of at least one house of Congress. Yet the timing was in many ways profoundly different. The economic crisis had lasted for three horrible years when FDR won election, but less than one when Obama won his. That has had two very different, but serious, impacts upon the Administration, the Republican opposition, and the country.

To begin with, Obama, unlike Roosevelt, did not come to power in the midst of a crisis so serious that no even halfway reasonable person could deny the need for drastic, unprecedented action. Even now unemployement is only about half what it was in March 1933. Our banking system has been threatened with collapse; theirs was collapsing, and without the backing of the FDIC. The initial New Deal measures, including the NRA--which actually gave the government the kind of coordinating power over the private sector that today's "conservatives" claim that Obama wants--sailed through with large majorities, and the country was at least as unified during 1933 as it was on the eve of war in 1941, if not more so. Things had not gone half so far in January 2009, and the Republican Party decided it could rely on a stance of total opposition, one that has gotten worse, not better, as the year has gone on. Two Republican Senators from Maine voted for the stimulus. Neither voted to allow debate on the health care reform measure tonight. In addition, as many observers (led by the excellent website fivethirtyeight.com ) have pointed out, Democrats from districts and states that rejected Obama are terribly frightened of voting for his major initiatives.

Health care reform, while desperately necessary, will do no immediate political good--it will take years to implement even the relatively modest reforms we are now talking about, and a lot longer to control costs. Jobs are even more necessary, both for the health of the nation and the political health of the President and his party. Here the Administration has been too cautious and the voters of New Jersey, in particular, seem to have taken their anger out on the Democrats. There are, however, signs that the Congress, whose rear ends are on the line, is taking note, and talk of another stimulus package. Perhaps this time it should frankly take the form of large grants to state and local governments, who are cutting back education and other services at a truly alarming rate, and therefore increasing unemployment and slowing recovery. The Administration needs to make the voters feel that it is acting on their behalf, and by the time Obama runs for re-election he will have to have presented a coherent long-term plan for the economy.

Another problem was highlighted Friday by Paul Krugman in one of his scariest columns. It explained to me, for the first time, why the big banks--apparently on the verge of collapse only a year ago--have rebounded so dramatically (although there are still big questions about Bank of America in particular.) Prominent among their worthless assets were the collateralized debt obligations and other exotic instruments they had bought from AIG--their supposed protection against an economic downturn (yes, that's right!) on which AIG could not pay off. The AIG rescue, arranged by the Bush Administration last year, it turns out, actually committed the Federal Government to pay off those obligations, rather than force the big banks to take some responsibility for their own folly and take a substantial loss. Timothy Geithner, then head of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, was apparently on board with this, and there is no sign that he wants to see the superbanks take a big hit--much less bring back something like the late, lamented Glass-Steagall Act and put them out of business. In my opinion, this leaves us with at least a 50-50 chance of another major financial crisis during the next three years or so. Meanwhile, as Krugman has pointed out, the federal government has used up an enormous amount of its resources and its political capital without bringing about any real change in a dysfunctional system. The powers that be, led by Geithner and Larry Summers, were not yet ready to acknowledge that it was necessary. Sadly, almost every other available distinguished economic policy maker would have done the same. It takes more than one year of crisis, however frightening, to bring truly new ideas into the policy arena.

And as if that were not enough, the sectional divisions within the country, while not yet quite as bad as in the 1860s when they led to actual war, are actually far worse than they were in the 1930s. The South in the 1930s was sufficiently devastated by the Depression to welcome the New Deal, and indeed, for three decades certain areas of the region--especially those served by the Tennessee Valley Authority, including both Tennessee and large parts of Alabama--sent men to Washington who were economic liberals. But politics in most of the South--including that new electoral giant, Texas--have now been dominated by social issues, race, and anti-government feeling (much of it of racial origin) for decades, and much, though not all, of the region is so far quite immune to President Obama's appeal.

Under the circumstances, we should not perhaps be surprised that things have moved so slowly. As I have already said many times and will undoubtedly have occasion to repeat again, northern abolitionists saw little to praise in the first year of Lincoln's Administration, and during 1862, many Republicans saw General McClellan--and not without reason--the same way that many liberal Democrats today see Secretary Geithner, that is, as a man with too much sympathy for the enemy. President Obama's handling of Afghanistan--still in progress as I write--suggests that he wants to base decisions upon real data. That encourages me to believe that he will look both for new measures and new men and women as things continue to get worse. But meanwhile, he also needs to put his own magic to work to change the way the country is thinking about its problems. He is not, in my opinion, making enough speeches or holding enough press conferences, particularly on domestic affairs. He has not put forth a New Deal, New Frontier or Great Society, thus giving his enemies too much power to define him. I believe that this crisis will still be continuing not just three, but eight years from now, but that gives him enough time to put the nation on a new path. Meanwhile, if anything is to be done anytime soon, the Democrats need his political magic to avoid serious losses next fall.

Echoes of Vietnam

2009-11-14T10:29:00.003-05:00

As the Administration struggles over Afghanistan, the parallels with Vietnam multiply. Two relate the country itself: the third, to developments within Washington, D.C. None of them holds out much hope of avoiding another setback, albeit on a lesser scale.

In Afghanistan since 2001, as in Vietnam after 1954, we have put our trust in one local leader: Hamid Karzai now, and Ngo Dinh Diem then. Neither one has lived up to our expectations as a worthy, modernizing third-world leader, although Diem managed to put up a better front in those more innocent days. I was reminded of the comparison a week or two ago when the New York Times ran a long story about Karzai's brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai. It revealed, first that brother Ahmed is almost universally believed to be deeply involved in the poppy trade, and secondly, that he has been on a regular retainer from the Central Intelligence Agency. A bell rang in my head.

Ngo Dinh Diem's right-hand man was his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu, his "counselor," minister of the interior, and head of various security services. Nhu did not traffic in drugs, although he was widely rumored to consume them. His beautiful wife, Madame Nhu, had political ambitions, a very sharp tongue, and an unfortunate facility with the English language, which enabled her directly to address the American people with frequently disastrous results. Nhu thought of himself as an intellectual and promulgated a philosophy called personalism, which stressed the duties of Vietnamese citizens to the state. He despised all political opposition and within a few years of 1954 had become easily the most hated man in Vietnam. With rare but critical exceptions, most Americans in Vietnam regarded him as the regime's biggest liability. Elbridge Durbrow, Eisenhower's last Ambassador there, suggested bluntly to Diem that Nhu should be appointed an Ambassador elsewhere. Even Ed Lansdale, the Air Force General and one-time CIA operative who did so much to put Diem in power in 1954-5, thought Diem would be better off without him. What Americans never seemed to realize was that Nhu was far more critical to his President/brother than Robert F. Kennedy was to his. While Diem was trotting around the globe (and visiting the US) in 1954, making friends and influencing people, Nhu was setting up the Ngo family machine (which included two other brothers as well.) Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge renewed the demand for Nhu's departure in the fall of 1963, during the Buddhist crisis, but Diem told him it was "out of the question."

Nhu had patrons, however, within the CIA, which funded many of his operations. Two stattion chiefs, William Colby (from 1959 to 1962) and John Richardson (1962-3) met with Nhu once or twice a week, developing relationships at least as important as those between Diem and successive Ambassadors. Recognizing their importance, I in 1992, when I was beginning work on American Tragedy, asked the Agency to release the accounts of all the conversations between Colby and Richardson on the one hand and Nhu on the other. The Agency replied that their records could not be searched for those documents. Imagine my surprise, earlier this year, when I discovered that the CIA had published some internally commissioned histories of its role in Vietnam, including one, "The CIA and the Ngo family," which drew on almost every page upon the exact documents that I had requested. In a somewhat testy conversation with a CIA FOIA officer, I received the distinct impression that the Agency has constructed a separate database of its files for the sole purpose of responding to FOIA requests, and that it does not include anything that they are determined not to release.

Like Ngo Dinh Nhu, who was assassinated along with his brother on November 2, 1963, Ahmed Wali Karzai seems to be both a presumed US asset and a liability to his brother, another ineffective leader. The denouement of the Afghan presidential election debacle last month also recalls Vietnam. There, too, the United States insisted after Diem's overthrow in establishing a new constitution and, eventually in 1967, a presidential election designed to ratify the rule of General Nguyen van Thieu, who had supplanted another general, Nguyen Cao Ky, as the US favorite. The CIA provided get-out-the-vote money for Thieu, but his minions apparently were lax in distributing it, and in the election, Thieu won with an embarrassing plurality of only 38%. Second in a multi-candidate field was a peace candidate, Truong Dinh Dzu, whom Thieu managed to jail a few years later. The real parallel to the recent election, however, occurred four years later, when Thieu ran for re-election. Both Nguyen Cao Ky and Duong Van Minh, the Buddhist General who had led the coup against Diem, had hopes of defeating Thieu in a three-way race, and the North Vietnamese reportedly let Henry Kissinger know that a change of president would make it much easier to conclude a peace agreement. Thieu however found a legal stratagem to bar Ky from the race, and Big Minh, as he was known, realized that he had no chance in a two-man race and withdrew himself. According to recent reports, U.S. Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker offered Minh $1 million to run in order to give the election some legitimacy, but he refused. None of this could have helped Thieu much in the struggle that really counted, the long-term battle against the Viet Cong.

Viewed from across the ocean, the election in Afghanistan seems to have turned out even worse. To begin with, the Taliban successfully prevented voters in large parts of the country from taking part. In addition, Karzai evidently defeated his main rival, Abdullah Abdullah, with the help of massive vote fraud. An international inquiry resulted, and the Americans--replaying, in a sense, the role of Ellsworth Bunker--managed to insist upon holding the election again. But Abdullah Abdullah, arguing that the second election would be just as bad as the first, withdrew--for reasons about which we can as yet only speculate. Once again the United States retains the local leader it thinks it wants--but at an obvious cost in that leader's legitimacy which cannot bode well for his future.

The other parallel relates to those two externally very similar Presidents, John F. Kennedy and Barack Obama. Kennedy did not inherit an ongoing war in Southeast Asia, but he did, as I showed clearly in American Tragedy, inherit a policy. The Eisenhower Administration had committed the US to fight for either Laos or South Vietnam in internal policy statements, and Kennedy as a result faced a flurry of recommendations to intervene in both countries--supported by his entire senior foreign policy team--almost as soon as he came into office. I shall leave aside the details regrading Laos today, but here are some of the key facts about Vietnam.

On July 28, Secretary of State Rusk, in a White House meeting, suggested that the United States prepare for ground intervention in Laos, an air attack on North Vietnam in retaliation for Viet Cong activity in South Vietnam, and a troop intervention in South Vietnam, if necessary, to deal with the consequences. Kennedy made it clear that he had no intention of intervening in Laos and that he doubted the wisdom of the attack on Hanoi. A new series of meetings a month later, also focusing on plans for intervention in Laos, had the same result. But Deputy National Security Adviser Walt Rostow continued to beat the drum for military intervention during September, and in early October, the Joint Chiefs called for sending more than 20,000 men to South Vietnam right away. The State Department endorsed these plans on October 11. Kennedy replied by agreeing to send his special military representative, General Maxwell Taylor, to South Vietnam--along with Rostow--to look into the situation--and he himself revised Taylor's instructions to make it clear that he did not want the United States to take over military responsibility in South Vietnam. Nonetheless, Taylor returned with a recommendation for a small token force that could be expanded if necessary. This, however, was quickly overtaken by a new Pentagon recommendation for a larger intervention, eventually endorsed by Rusk, Secretary McNamara, and McGeorge Bundy. After more meetings, Kennedy on November 15 finally made clear in no uncertain terms that he did not intend to put American forces in Southeast Asia. Such a war, he said, would draw little or no allied support and would be most difficult to explain to the American people. After that meeting he apparently had a talk with McGeorge Bundy, his National Security Adviser, in which he complained that none of his team seemed to understand what he wanted in Southest Asia. Bundy responded with the suggestion of making Averell Harriman--who was bringing negotiations on Laos to a successful conclusion--the Assistant Secretary of State for the Far East, while moving Rostow out of the White House. Kennedy agreed.

Press reports suggest that President Obama has beene equally dissatisfied by the proposals his team--which does not seem to have questioned the fatal flaw in the Bush Administration strategy of trying to install client regimes in the Muslim world--has been giving him for Afghanistan. Unfortunately we live in a different world, and he, unlike Kennedy, has not managed to keep the argument a secret. Thanks to the McChrystal leak, we all know what the General wants now, while very little of the pressure on Kennedy leaked through during 1961. President Obama also seems to understand that nothing the US does is going to help very much if the Karzai government, which has now been in power almost as long as Diem was before he was overthrown, cannot improve. But whether he, like Kennedy, will overrule his team is unknown. Gary Wills in the current New York Review of Books says that many believe that Obama will be a one-term President if he withdraws from both Iraq and Afghanistan. I personally think the chances are at least as good that he will be a one-term President if he does not.

The New Civil Conflict

2009-11-07T09:18:00.002-05:00

[People are still arriving here because they have received an email on the current state of America. If you are curious about my own views of the origins and consequences of the current crisis in American life, I recommend this link. However, the email attributed to myself comparing President Obama to Adolf Hitler, is a forgery which I did not write. All visitors may also be interested to read the following post. Meanwhile, here is the best explanation I've found of why that email is so incredibly popular.] For an afterword on the hoax, see the bottom of this post.

War, wrote Mao Zedong,is politics with bloodshed, and politics is war without bloodshed. He was right: the advances of our civilization have depended upon finding non-violent substitutes for violent conflict. I first began to understand this in the 1980s, when I was working intermittently on two different books, one on the case of Sacco and Vanzetti (a project I inherited from a dead friend), and the second on European conflict over several centuries, beginning in 1559. As I studied in detail how the lawyers on both sides of that famous murder case tried everything they could get away with to win (the prosecution, in particular, withheld a lot of exculpatory evidence that today they would have to reveal), I realized that contestants in the legal process would be content with no less, since they have, in effect, submitted to it rather than fight the dispute out by force of arms. Meanwhile, as I showed in Politics and War, Europe from 1559 through 1659 was inherently, continually unstable because the rich, rather than the poor, routinely took the law into their own hands and refused to submit to higher authority--a situation that began to change in the latter half the 17th century. The United States was the first modern nation based entirely upon written laws, and Lincoln in the Civil War argued that the real stake in the war was not slavery, but whether a free government could preserve itself against a violent internal threat. The answer was yes.

Today's struggles, like those of early modern Europe, deal with money, prestige, and even religious hatred. Moneyed interests, represented by our leading industries--finance and health care--are perhaps as powerful in Washington today as they were in the late nineteenth century. Today's battles, like those of the civil war, also involve sectional rivalry. Much of the South lives in a different mental universe that the Northeast and the Far West, as illustrated dramatically in a book I have begun reading, Confederates in the Attic, as well as by the behavior of Southern legislators in Congress or the Justice of the Peace who refused to grant a marriage license to a biracial couple. (He has since resigned.) This is the country that Barack Obama wants to take in a new direction. It is not clear how much of a success will be possible.

Thus, as a vote nears in the House of Representatives, today's papers report that Speaker Pelosi has given in to conservative Democrats who insist that neither the public option (which will not be an entitlement program but will be funded by premiums) or any private plan sold through a government-sponsored exchange will cover abortions, except in cases of rape, incest, or threat to the mother's life. (It will be interesting to see if that exemption survives.) That is a concession to very strong religious beliefs, which are prevailing against the law as declared (perhaps unwisely, as a I have noted) by the Supreme Court in 1973 and frequently reaffirmed since. Meanwhile, the New York Times reports, the Speaker has been attending fundraisers around the country in the company of some of the health care industry's leading lobbyists. For reasons which I do not understand, she has forbidden even a symbolic vote on the House floor on a single-payer plan. The whole process of designing the legislation, indeed, has largely been a matter of figuring out how much reform the insurance industry is willing to tolerate. Since we can save money only at their expense, this does not leave too much room for optimism about how much a new plan will do to ease the crisis in health care costs about which the President has said so much.

Some weeks ago I saw Michael Moore's new movie, Capitalism, A Love Story. It contained some wonderful footage and fascinating material, but I thought it was below his best work (including Sicko) because it was rather frenetic and, actually, contradictory. The movie began with a short love note to the 1950s, including a reference to 90% marginal tax rates, whose proceeds, Moore pointed out, went into schools, hospitals, and interstate highways (although they also went into nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles.) But at the end he argued that capitalism needed to be given up and replaced with democracy, a view which I cannot share. Capitalism can be productive economically (although even that is once again in question now), and more important, it seems in the long run to reflect human nature far better than socialism. The best solution is to allow democracy to balance the excesses of capitalism, at which the United States was reasonably successful, I would argue, from the 1930s through the 1970s. The President and much of Congress would now like to restore that balance, but it is not at all clear that they can.

Franklin Roosevelt, to be sure, managed 75 years ago to implement changes far more sweeping than anything Obama is talking about, and in so doing saved democracy, not only in the United States, but ultimately in the rest of the industrialized world. But how did he manage it? Timing is everything, and Roosevelt, unlike Obama, did not reach the White House until our great economic crisis was three years old. Because of that, he initially enjoyed majorities of 318-117 in the House and 61-35 in the Senate--and even some Republicans, in those days, supported many of those reforms. Because the initial burst of New Deal legislation did something to relieve extreme distress, he actually increased those majorities in 1934 to 332-103 in the House and 71-26 in the Senate. (These figures include two left-wing Midwestern third parties, the Farmer-Labor party of Minnesota and the Wisconsin Progressives, in FDR's column.) Those majorities allowed him to pass the Wagner Act, assuring union rights, and Social Security. And in 1936, when he carried 46 of 48 states and won 523 out of 531 electoral votes, he increased them yet again, to 347 to 88 in the House and 79-17 in the Senate. Those majorities were torn about, sadly, by his plan to pack the Supreme Court, but they did allow for the passage of the first federal wages and hours legislation before a Republican reaction occurred in the elections of 1938, two years into another new recession. And ironically, those majorities possible because race, for the most part, was not yet an issue in national politics. Because white supremacy still ruled the south, most southern whites unhesitatingly voted for FDR, whose programs literally saved many of their lives (although they also did what they could, in many instances, to prevent New Deal benefits from reaching blacks.) Because white supremacy has now been overturned, while the Democratic Party has been unable to deliver real benefits for southern whites, they now vote monolithically Republican.

This story does not bode well for Barack Obama's attempts to transform America again. Not only did he begin with considerably smaller majorities than Roosevelt, but he entered office when the bottom of the current economic crisis was years away. Now, last week's elections suggest, Democrats will bear much of the voters' anger over the economy next fall, and increases in their majorities do not seem very likely. Much may happen before then. The President may call for, and the Republicans will undoubtedly try to reject, a second stimulus package, on the very Rooseveltian grounds that the first one simply hasn't done enough. But so far his Administration, reflecting his own personality (similar in this respect to Lincoln's), has striven for relatively moderate solutions to our problems. Like Lincoln, he may find himself forced by events to take a new approach.

My mood about the political scene swings a great deal lately, rather like that of fans watching an athletic contest or soldiers in a battle. That, I realize, is altogether natural, since we are in a struggle for the future of the nation, and the outcome is not guaranteed. And to paraphrase Clausewitz, results in politics, as in war, are never final. Should the current crisis end with another Gilded Age, the new Prophet generation--which could start to be born within as little as ten years--will undoubtedly grow up with a keen sense of its injustices and a determination to set things right. I shall not live to see what they can accomplish, but history tells me that we must accept any outcome within our own lifetimes as temporary, certain that the human drama of the struggle over all our futures will continue as long as the human race.

Conservatives discover generations

2009-10-31T09:40:00.007-04:00

It's been a long time since I reviewed the basics of generational theory here, and most long-time readers must be familiar with it, but since I now have so many new ones every week, a quick summary may be in order to put this week's remarks in context.

The theory of William Strauss and Neil Howe, as I have mentioned, sees a period crisis in the life of the United States (and, I have concluded, of other nations as well) every 80 years or so (1774-1794, 1860-1872, 1929-45, 2008 - ?). Those crises are closely related to a generational rhythm that produces a new generation every twenty years. Each generation belongs to one of four archetypes, known as Prophets, Nomads, Heroes, and Artists. Each generation also has a specific name. The current generations are Boomers (Prophets, born 1943-60), Gen Xers (Nomads, born 1961-81), Millennials (Heroes, born 1982-2002?) and Homelanders (artists, who have been born for at least a few years now.) During the previous cycle the Hero generation were the GIs, now frequently known as the "Greatest" generation (born about 1904-24), and the Artist generation was the Silents, born 1925-42, many of whom are still active in public life and about whom I have written a great deal here.

Today's media and politics are dominated by Boomers and Xers--but the last election was dominated by Millennials, who voted overwhelmingly for Barack Obama and provided his margin of victory. Millennials had a very different kind of upbringing than either Boomers, who were largely left to themselves within a very stable environment(as the children of the greatest country on earth, how could they go wrong?, and Xers, who had to deal with by far the highest percentage of broken homes and got the least attention from their elders of any living generation. The parents of Millennials--led by Boomers--gave them very structured lives in which they were expected to perform, in one way or another, at least 12 hours a day. They did, for the most part, perform, but they also expected, and received, rewards. My Millennial students at Williams would do anything I asked--but they got very angry when I tried to change the rules in the middle of the game. They were extremely capable, and they had a rather frightening trust in older generations.

Now as the last election showed, Millennials are the greatest threat to the right-wing ethos and policies that gained ascendancy in the United States between 1981 and 2008. What is rather fascinating is that leading conservatives seem to be figuring this out. Here is what Glen Beck, of all people, had to say about Millennials this week.

I do know that there was a story in The Wall Street Journal yesterday about trophy kids going to work. These are the kids that we've raised and we've told them, "Who's super special? You are." And we've never told them anything bad. Well, now they are starting to enter the workforce, and I love this. We're now having these, what do you call them, consultants to help new employers adjust to the employees. Consultants are coming in and saying, "Look, you've got to adjust the way -- because you've got new employees. " Now here's a Boston-based consultant doing the other, coaching a group of college students for job interviews. Who had a consultant for a job interview? Did anyone within the sound of my voice have a consultant that you hired to help you with job interviews? My gosh. Get over yourself. Go out and get a frickin' job. Consultant, what a bunch of pansy -- I'm sorry. I digress.

Anyway, she said to them, "How do you believe your employers are going to view you?" She even gave them a clue. She said, "The word I'm looking for begins with the letter E." One student raised his hand, said "Excellent." Another student rhymed in with "Enthusiastic, energetic." Not even close. Here was the correct answer. "Entitled." The students collectively responded, "What?" Some were surprised. Others were hurt that they would be viewed as people who think they're entitled.

Here's the problem with the Millennial generation, and this is the problem -- I'm telling you, I've said this for years. You want your -- go ahead. You want to be a helicopter parent, you save them for everything, do you know what some companies now have parent day? In the corporation where your parents can come? You bring your parent to work, that's the last day you are coming to my office. I mean if they want to have a sit-down with me. If they want to come by and see your office, that's cool. You want to have a sit-down? Get the hell out of my office. I think we need more people with this theory: Get the hell out of my office. Now, we're not going to be able to do that because soon the government will be able to protect everyone so you'll not be able to fire everyone. You can live more like they live in France where, I'm not kidding you, countries have whole sections of floors dedicated to people who just sit in an office and do nothing because the state won't let them fire them. You can't fire them. So they just, "You're moving down to 12. Well, have a good time." And people just go to work and they sit in their office and they do nothing! That's where we're headed. In the meantime, until the government tells me I can't do it anymore, get the hell out of my office. Don't you feel like that? Don't you want -- some guy who would come to you when he's applying for a job and he wants to work and the next thing he's like, "Well, I've got a consultant to help me." Well, I don't know about you, but you seem to be doing fine, but I'm not going to work like that. Get the hell away from me.

The Millennials that are coming in now, employers are beginning to realize that that is the future workforce and they want to shape the job towards their life rather than have their life adapt to the workplace. I mean, that's all well and good, but... get the hell out of my office. "Although members..." this is from the Wall Street Journal. "Although members from the other generation were considered somewhat spoiled in their youth, millennials feel an unusually strong sense of entitlement. Older adults criticize the high maintenance rookies for demanding too much too soon. They want to be CEOs tomorrow. More than 85% of hiring managers and human resources executives say they feel that Millennials have such a strong sense of entitlement than older workers according to a survey," blah, blah, blah. "The generation's greatest expectations, higher pay, 75%." "What? You're paying what?" "Yeah, that's what I'm paying. Get the hell out of my office." Flexible work schedule, 61%. Promotion within a year, 56%. More vacation and personal time -- oh, I've got a lot of personal time coming your way. Get the hell... can you finish the sentence? They really do seem to want everything, and I can't decide whether it's an inability or an unwillingness to make tradeoffs," says the assistant dean and MBA and admissions director at Stanford University. A study of 18 to 28-year-olds found that nearly half had moderate to high superiority beliefs about themselves. The superiority factor was measured by responses to statements such as, quote, "I deserve favors from others." How about this one? "I know that I have more natural talent than most." They don't want to work 40 hours a week. They happen to wear clothes that are comfortable. They want to spice you will the dull workday by listening to their iPods if they want to. And, "If corporate America doesn't like it, too bad for them." Really? Get the hell out of my office. We have a problem with arrogance in this country. This is what I was talking to you about a little bit yesterday. We have a real problem with arrogance and if you are a religious person, you know what happens whenever people become arrogant. "Oh, they're destroyed." We've got to reconnect with humility. We've got to reconnect with doing the right thing. We've got to reconnect with who we are. We're going to be forced soon to reconnect with what our grandparents taught us and how my generation and older, what they learned. No, you know what, I'm sorry. I can't say my generation and older. Because the generation right before me is so damn screwed up, I don't know what the hell they're doing. The people who were raised in the Sixties, you are the people responsible for what we're living in right now. You people have -- "Oh, I care about the planet. I care..." oh, shut up. You dope-smoking hippies, look what you have brought us now. And because you were in charge of the curriculum, everybody gets a trophy. You know what? There are losers in life. There are losers in life. The losers in life are the ones who don't really try very hard because everything is owed to them. The losers in life are the ones that expect a trophy even though they're in 18th place. The winners are the ones that try. Those are the winners. They may not always exceed but they try. When you couple arrogance with the Social Security problem, when you couple the idea of, "I know I have more natural talents than most, I deserve favors from others," when you couple that with "What about the old people? Are we going to take care of the older generation?" "No, they've done nothing but stand in my way the whole time." Who's going to get the medical care when Social Security really, when it comes down to it, Medicare, Medicaid, when it comes down to universal healthcare? When you're going to have to make a decision because we can't afford good healthcare for everybody, somebody's not going to get a kidney transplant. Somebody's not going to get heart surgery. Somebody's not going to get kidney dialysis. Somebody's not going to get that surgery. Who's it going to be? Is it going to be the Millennial that doesn't give a flying crap about anybody else but themselves because they're special, look at all the trophies they won? Or is it going to be the 80-year-old who's already lived past their time? I mean, look what they have done. You know the answer of that as well as I do.

Now like everything else Beck says, this is intentionally inflammatory, and one of its major implications--that Millennials haven't had to work for what they have-is ridiculous. I would estimate that today's kids spend at least ten times as much psychic energy on the problem of getting into college, for instance, as my generation did. But what is interesting is that Beck, in a way, knows what he's talking about, and is angry for a very good reason. These kids do not share his values and they are not going to. Beck believes in the free market--including the free market in hatred, his product--because it has made him rich and famous. Millennials won't believe in it unless it delivers for them, and they shouldn't. And like the last Hero generation, the GIs, they are going to pose a huge problem for our society in an age of economic decline. They will expect us to find jobs for them, and they have the votes to make sure that we do so. They will probably save a lot more of their money than Boomers and Xers have, and they will want to make sure to provide for their old age. In short, they are going to explode the conservative fantasy that the years 1933-80 were an aberration in American history that has now been consigned to the ash-heap of history.

I was reminded as soon as I read this of another conservative comment on a Hero generation. In 2004, at the height of the campaign, Grover Norquist talked a bit indiscreetly to a Spanish reporter about the GI generation. He didn't date it quite right, but his basic point--which I quoted here at the time--was correct.

Two million people who fought in World War II and lived through the Great Depression die every year. That generation has been an exception in US history, because it has defended anti-American policies. They voted for the creation of the welfare state and for obligatory military service. They are the Democratic base, and they are dying

And we've had four more years pass where the age cohort that is most Democratic and most pro-statist, are those people who turned 21 years of age between 1932 and 1952--Great Depression, New Deal, World War II--Social Security, the draft--all that stuff. That age cohort is now between the ages of 70 and 90 years old, and every year 2 million of them die. So 8 million people from that age cohort have passed away since the last election; that means, net, maybe 1 million Democrats have disappeared…
This is an age cohort [the GIs] that voted for a draft before the war started, and allowed the draft to continue for 25 years after the war was over. Their idea of the legitimate role of the state is radically different than anything previous generations knew, or subsequent generations. Before that generation, whenever you put a draft in, there were draft riots. After that generation, there were draft riots. This generation? No problem. Why not? Of course the government moves people around like pawns on a chessboard. One side spits off labor law, one side spits off Social Security. We will all work until we’re 65 and have the same pension. You know, some Bismarck, German thing, okay? Very un-American. Very unusual for America. The reaction to Great Depression, World War II, and so on: Centralization—not as much centralization as the rest of the world got, but much more than is usual in America. We’ve spent a lot of time dismantling some of that and moving away from that level of regimentation: getting rid of the draft. . .

Norquist knew what he was talking about. The death of retired GIs probably accounted for George Bush carrying Florida by over 100,000 votes in 2004 after losing it, barely, in 2000 (according to the most thorough recount.) The GIs had not been consistently Democratic: social issues had led them to vote for Nixon and then for Ronald Reagan. But they had been protected by the federal government all their lives, from child labor legislation through lower marginal tax rates beginning in 1964 to higher Social Security benefits, and they had lobbied effectively to keep things that way.

What Norquist didn't realize, apparently, was that new Millennials were being added faster than GIs were dying. And while they apparently will not have to undergo a draft that will put 20 million of them in uniform, they will expect our government to address their particular problems at every stage of their life. And if Barack Obama can persuade them (as I don't think he has yet) that he is addressing their problems, a new Democratic majority will indeed be reborn.

In Roosevelt's day the media was controlled by Missionaries (his own prophet generation, born 1863-1884 or so), and the Nomad Lost generation, born 1885-1903. Most of them hated him. Not until after the Second World War did GIs become the dominant voice in the media. That, too, is a parallel to the situation today. But well before that, they had become the dominant force in politics--as voters, not candidates. I do not know if Republicans in the 1930s attacked them, too, as spoiled brats who needed government hand-outs--but I strongly suspect that the answer is yes.

Human achievement?

2009-10-24T14:27:00.006-04:00

For the past two weeks I have been reading most of Neil Sheehan's new book, A Fiery Peace in a Cold War. Sheehan, who won a Pulitzer Prize for securing the Pentagon papers from Daniel Ellsberg back in 1971, has now written two substantial works of recent history. The hero the the first, A Bright Shining Lie, was John Paul Vann, a fellow member of the Silent Generation, who saw the flaws in American strategy in Vietnam but could not give up the idea, after his reckless personal behavior had helped force him out of the Army, that we could win. The hero of this one is some one of whom I do not think I have ever been aware, Bernard Schriever, a German-American Air Force officer and engineer whom Sheehan regards as the founder of the American ICBM program. And although many of the events of this book took place during a time securely within my memory, they seem as remote, in many ways, as the days of Pearl Harbor and D-Day, Napoleon and Wellington, or the Thirty Years War. The book--even more than the one I am working on now on American entry into the Second World War--is about another America, one whose strengths and weaknesses become extraordinarily apparent as time goes on.

Researching my own book, I recently read a column by Drew Pearson and Robert Allen from August 1941, purporting to describe President Roosevelt's mood. The President, they said--and rightly so--was deeply engaged in preparing the nation for war, but he was less jovial than in the past. During his first eight years he had put people to work, helped build bridges and dams, and established the beginnings of the American safety net. Now circumstances forced him to tend to the construction of warships, bombers and tanks instead. That choice had been forced upon the United States by political crises in Europe and East Asia but it was not a happy one. Pearson and Allen did not know that FDR was about to make an even more fateful choice: the decision to launch the Manhattan Project, which culminated, four months after his death, in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Roosevelt had looked forward to a postwar world of peace and prosperity. Secretary of War Stimson, along with some (but clearly not all) of the scientists who had built the weapon, understood the need to bring it under international control. Meanwhile, in one of my favorite, little-known documents, some senior military officials in Washington had presciently sketched out the military situation that they expected the United States to face when the war was over. Without knowing about the atomic bomb, they anticipated a stalemate. . "After the defeat of Japan," they wrote, "the United States and Russia will be the strongest military powers in the world. . . .the relative strength and geographic positions of these two powers are such as to preclude the military defeat of one of these powers by the other, even if that power were allied with the British Empire." That in my opinion was a sound judgment both before and after the development of atomic weapons and could have provided the basis for a sensible postwar foreign policy. Unfortunately, that was not to be.

As I had occasion to discuss in an article published a couple of years ago in a collection, the first war plans formulated for a conflict against the Soviet Union, beginning in 1947, did not foresee a stalemate: they planned on an atomic strategic bombing offensive against the Soviet Union that would lead to its complete defeat. This remained our plan throughout the 1950s, even though at the outset we surely lacked, and indeed may never have attained, the capability to bring it about. Much of the responsibility surely lies with the Air Force, which secured its independent status in 1947 based upon the largely mistaken idea that strategic bombing had won the Second World War and could therefore win the wars of the future. Without ICBMS--or, until the very late 1950s, intercontinental bombers--the need to plan for such a war vastly distorted our whole foreign policy. To cite just one example, it probably led to our long, painful, and currently troubling alliance with Pakistan, simply because that nation provided bases that would allow medium-range bombers to reach targets in the Soviet Union. All the while, the Soviets--who never believed in long-range strategic bombing--were steadily improving their air defenses, which, when tried on American planes in Vietnam, turned out to be formidable indeed. The guiding spirit of the Air Force, first as chief of the Strategic Air Command and later as Chief of Staff, was Curtis LeMay, one of the villains of Sheehan's book, who not only counted upon strategic bombing to wipe out the Soviet Union (and refused to recognize that bombers might be obsolete), but also thought that it could solve other problems, like Castro's regime in Cuba or the Vietnam War, if only the Air Force were let alone to do the job.

Sheehan thinks the ICBM was the key weapon of the Cold War and his book is about the men who pushed for it and developed it. The two main heroes are Schriever, an immigrant from Germany who actually built and tested the first (though not the most useful) missiles, and John von Neumann, the Hungarian-born mathematician and refugee who made major contributions to mathematical theory, high-speed computing, and nuclear physics. Like so many Americans during that period, von Neumann viewed the Soviet Union as essentially similar to Nazi Germany--that is, bent upon world domination--and thought that it was necessary for the United States not only to deploy but to use decisive weaponry against it. He made the ICBM program happen because he predicted early in the 1950s that a sufficiently small hydrogen warhead could be developed to be delivered by a missile into the heart of the Soviet Union. That prediction proved true.

The bulk of Sheehan's book is a story of engineers at work, making this happen, while outwitting bureaucratic rivals like LeMay (who feared missiles as a threat to his beloved bomber force), circumventing the budgetary strictures upon which President Eisenhower tried to insist (with a big boost from the Sputnik launch), and overcoming one technical problem after another. Watching them solve these enormous challenges, I could not help but wonder what similar advances had taken place during the last thirty years or so. Sadly, no non-defense project has ever had so much government money and so much engineering talent focused upon it as has sophisticated weaponry. The comparable advances in recent decades, I suppose, have been in the field of computer science, transforming the use of information in ways whose consequences we cannot yet predict. Diagnostic health care has made major advances but there have been relatively few big breakthroughs in treatment or prevention like the vaccines and new drugs of the first half of the century. And we have had no comparable effort in fields like clean energy or mass transit, even though we are talking about such things now. Unfortunately the United States has changed from a country of engineers and industrialists to a country of lawyers and financial analysts; younger, hungrier countries like China and India, as well as the defeated nations of the Second World War, may be the source of the next great breakthroughs. Our private economy, certainly, has not been able to generate a demand for engineering talent, or capital to put it to work, comparable to that which was mobilized for the Second World War and the Cold War, except in the field of computer science and information technology.

And meanwhile, was the great achievement of Schriever and company worth it? Was it as valuable as Sheehan claims? As soon as the Soviet Union detonated an atomic bomb in 1949 the United States government decided that it had to develop the H-bomb as well, and from there it was only a small step to von Neumann's conclusion that we needed the means to deliver a huge number of those weapons onto Soviet cities, one against which the Soviets could not defend. One dissenter was George F. Kennan, who argued very provocatively in one of his most brilliant and least-known internal papers that before doing so, the United States should make another effort to ban atomic and nuclear weapons. The reason, he argued, was that such weapons were so purely destructive that they could never serve the positive foreign policy goals of the United States. "By and large," he wrote, "the conventional weapons of warfare have admitted and recognized the possibility of surrender and submission. For that reason, they have traditionally been designed to spare the unarmed and helpless non-combatant. . .as well as the combatant prepared to lay down his arms. This general quality of the conventional weapons of warfare implied a still more profound and vital recognition: namely that warfare should be a means to an end other than warfare, an end connected with the beliefs and the feelings and the attitudes of people, an end marked by submission to a new political will and perhaps to a new regime of life, but an end which at least did not negate the principle of life itself.
"The weapons of mass destruction do not have this quality. . . .They cannot really be reconciled with a political purpose directed to shaping, rather than destroying, the lives of the adversary. They fail to take account of the ultimate responsibility of men for one another, and even for each other’s errors and mistakes." (Readers with a free hour can read Kennan's entire argument here. I do not think they will feel they have wasted their time.)

But Kennan was overruled. So, a few years later, was General Matthew Ridgway, then Chief of Staff, when he suggested at an NSC meeting that the execution of our war plan against the Soviet Union could not possibly serve the interests of the United States. In reply, President Eisenhower himself "said he was speaking very frankly to the Council in expressing his absolute conviction that in view of the development of the new weapons of mass destruction, with the terrible significance which these involved, everything in any future war with the Soviet bloc would have to be subordinated to winning that war. This was the one thing which must constantly be borne in mind, and there was little else with respect to war objectives that needed to worry anyone very much." The work on ICBMs and other delivery systems not only went ahead, it proceeded so rapidly that by the time the first SIOP, or nuclear targeting plan, was completed by the end of the Eisenhower Administration, there were far more available warheads than targets, leading to the multiple targeting of nearly every one.

The Soviet Union, Sheehan stresses, also had an ICBM program, and gave the arms race something of a push when it launched the first earth satellite. It was however far behind ours, as it turned out, and took many years to catch up quantitatively. (What I have read in recent years suggests that it never caught up qualitatively.) In fact, the two missiles whose development takes up most of the book--the Atlas and Titan--were cumbersome, liquid-fueled vehicles of dubious military utility. It was the Minuteman, to which he devotes much less space, that became the backbone of the US deterrent. Meanwhile, before the deployment of ICBMs, our desperate desire to deploy missiles within range of our enemy led to the placing of intermediate-range missiles in Britain, in Italy, and in Turkey. And that in 1962 led the world to the brink of nuclear war when Khrushchev sent intermediate range nuclear missiles to Cuba, as well as tactical nuclear weapons. Faced with that situation, the American military and much of the American political establishment wanted an immediate invasion of Cuba. That, we now know, would have led to the detonation at least of tactical Soviet nuclear weapons (including one that would have incinerated the Guantanamo naval base), and therefore, almost surely, to a general nuclear exchange. The only reason that it did not, as Sheehan acknowledges, was that John F. Kennedy did what Kennan had hoped some one would do, and took responsibility for Khrushchev's mistake and his predecessors, first by giving Khrushchev a chance to back down and secondly by promising secretly to withdraw the missiles from Turkey and Italy.

Perhaps the American reaction to the events of 1939-49 (from the outbreak of war in Europe until the Soviet nuclear explosion) was perfectly natural. Certainly there is no undoing it now, and no denying that we emerged from the Cold War intact. Yet one of the most poignant moments in Sheehan's book was a reference to Albert Einstein, who by 1950, according to Sheehan, deeply regretted having written the 1939 letter to Franklin Roosevelt that got the Manhattan Project going, because it had now led to a nuclear arms race. "Politics," Einstein once said, "is much harder than physics," and so it proved over the next few decades. We can take comfort now that we are no longer constantly prepared to unleash thousands of nuclear warheads upon an opponent just as ready to do the same. To have reached that point was not an achievement of which the human race can be proud. The task of unleashing human creativity for more beneficial aims, and of finding a civic purpose as compelling as, but less destructive than, war, still remains.

[Regarding the hoax email circulating under my name, I have fantasized for months that some big-time conservative talk-show host woudl call me about it, since they love Obama-Hitler comparisons. (One small town host did call, but my courage failed me, and I immediately disowned it instead of waiting until she had me on the air.) Well, that hasn't happened, but something similar did. Someone posted a supposed excerpt from a hoax undergraduate thesis by Barack Obama on a blog, and conservative writer Michael Ledeen picked it up as real. Rush Limbaugh got it from him and ran with it on Friday. When Rush's researchers rather tardily found out the truth, he said--you'll never guess--that it didn't matter, because we all know Obama believes these things anyway. See mediamatters.org for the full story.

The enduring Republican victory

2009-10-17T13:03:00.006-04:00

[People are still arriving here because they have received an email attributed to myself comparing President Obama to Adolf Hitler. They are also still calling my home, contacting the public affairs office of the Naval War College, and deluging another David Kaiser with emails. I did not write, and do not agree with, that fraudulent email. You may however be interested to read the following post. Meanwhile, here is the best explanation I've found of why that email is so incredibly popular.]

The Obama Administration's difficulties on the domestic front, I think, reflect a long-term shift in American opinion. In 1968, after 35 years of largely Democratic ascendancy which had created a relatively egalitarian economy and established a strong role for the government, the Republican Party, increasingly led after 1976 by its conservative wing, began its successful campaign to establish a national majority. Their strategy had two major aspects. The first--which was largely handed to them, as Lyndon Johnson himself realized, by the great civil rights act--involved picking up the southern white vote, which became nearly as reliably Republican as it had previously been reliably Democratic. The second involved a long campaign to change Americans' minds about the proper role of government. The Republican Party has temporarily at least lost its majority--but the enormous influence of that campaign remains.

We can see that influence reflected in three major, related issues: the economy, the federal budget, and health care. Taking the first two first, our economy has been (and is still being) enormously distorted by the enormous profits available to the financial industry. Because taxes on capital gains have become so low (and because some of the biggest players in the financial game, hedge fund managers, can evidently claim nearly all their income in that form), traders and private equity firms can make, and keep,enormous profits. Meanwhile, the federal budget defect--already swelled to gigantic size by eight years of George W. Bush--has doubled again because of the recession. (I strongly suspect, and hope to show, that one reason that federal revenues have become so recession-sensitive is that they are so largely composed of payroll taxes.)

Now the solution to both of these problems, is, actually, rather obvious: a return to high marginal tax rates--something between 50%, which is common in Europe,and 90%, which the US levied from the time of the Second World War until 1965--on high incomes--say, incomes of over $2 million a year--from whatever source derived. If quick profits will go the federal government, managers will no longer seek them. There will be far more incentive, as there was half a century ago, to re-invest profits in expanded firms, actually producing more, rather than fewer jobs. And we will have a prospect of a long-term reduction in the deficit.

Yes, by historical standards, this is obvious--but thirty years of Republican propaganda and lobbyists' contributions have made this solution not just impossible, but unmentionable. This morning's Washington Post informed me, to my amazement, that the Obama Administration does not even intend to allow various Bush tax cuts to lapse! We have found that enormous, largely untaxed incomes do not stimulate the economy: higher wages for average Americans do. But we can't even talk about this solution--it's comparable to suggestions that we stage a Leninist revolution, undo women's liberation, or bring back slavery.

Something even more striking is happening with regard to health care. Everyone seems to understand that we spend too much on it and can't afford to go on at this rate. But Republicans and lobbyists seem very close to having killed the public option because it would be a cheaper form of health care.. What we need, we cannot have. The broader problem is obvious. Cheaper health car4e means that many people will make less money out of health care--especially insurance companies and drug manufacturers. I have not heard even one participant in this debate suggest that there is something immoral about profiteering on medical care. Instead, the papers are filled with stories of the ways in which lobbyists are trying to make sure that a new bill will mean no less, and perhaps more, money for health care interests.

I am concerned by all this because I think that both the political future and that of the Obama Administration depend on facing these issues squarely. A health insurance "reform" that costs even more money will eventually have huge political costs for Democrats. Endless deficits with no end in sight will pose the same problem, and the collapse of yet another Wall Street bubble could easily return the Republicans to power. We cannot solve these problems without removing some of these taboos. The press, which consistently gives the most space to the shrillest voices on the right, has been no help either. The Administration has shown the courage to defy the conventional wisdom on several foreign policy issues, including missile defense and Iran, without apparently incurring political costs. Let us hope that it finds the courage to do the same on the far more critical domestic front.

Why Obama won the prize

2009-10-10T10:10:00.004-04:00

Like everyone else, I was quite astonished yesterday morning when I went on-line and discovered that Barack Obama had won the Nobel Peace Prize. Fortunately, the topic I had planned on writing about today has become even more relevant because of that decision. Upon reflection, I think I understand the committee's choice, and indeed, am inclined to believe that it reflects a sound appreciation on its part of the turning point at which the world finds itself. This is especially hard for Americans to grasp, I would suggest, because the spectrum of opinion in America is so radically different from opinion in every other advanced industrial country, as well as in much of the third world. Indeed, when Rush Limbaugh commented yesterday that "conservatives" like himself found themselves in agreement with the Taliban that Obama did not deserve the prize, he was saying something surprisingly profound. As usual, I shall try to make my point with the help of an analogy, this one from 100 years ago.

The first President to win the Nobel prize was, of course, Theodore Roosevelt, who received it in 1906 in recognition of having mediated peace between the Russians and the Japanese, after two years of very costly war. The second was Woodrow Wilson, whom I have had a chance to study more closely in recent years, and whose career reveals a lot about how the relationship between the United States and the rest of the world has changed over the last 100 years. Wilson when he assumed office held a view, very popular among Americans not only then but for the next 25 years or so, that the world's problems stemmed from the failure of nations to act according to established laws and rules. He and his Secretary of State, William Jennings Bryan, were at the forefront of a movement to conclude arbitration treaties with various powers to provide an alternative means of settling disputes. That movement, however, had not caught on among the major European powers, who were still relying on a mix of diplomacy, alliances, and larger military establishments to secure their interests. In 1914 diplomacy failed and the First World War broke out.

Two nations, for different reasons, unleashed that war. First, Austria-Hungary--faced with a long-term threat to its existence from Serbia and other new states, which included the state-sponsored Serbian terrorism that killed the heir to the throne at Sarajevo--adopted the exact same policy that the Bush Administration embraced in 2001 after 9/11. Because the Serbian state sheltered terrorists, it had to be removed by force. The Bush Administration implemented this policy both in Afghanistan, where it at least had some plausibility, and in Iraq, where it did not. In the latter case, the Bush Administration, like Vienna in 1914, submitted an ultimatum which was clearly designed to be rejected to provide a pretext for war, and disregarded the attempts of the recipient of the ultimatum to comply. Germany, meanwhile, seized upon the Austro-Hungarian-Serbian crisis as a good chance for a trial of strength with France, Russia, and if necessary Britain, and encouraged the Austrians to proceed, blocking diplomatic attempts to find a solution and unleashing a world war. Wilson was appalled, and spent two and one-half heroic years trying to find a peaceful solution to the war. In his last attempt, his great "peace without victory" speech in January 1917, he carefully avoided any judgment of the rights and wrongs of the conflict, calling for a peace based upon impartial principles. Neither side was interested. The British bitterly reproached him for what we now call "moral equivalence," and the Germans decided on unrestricted submarine warfare in an attempt to force Britain's surrender, even though they knew that it would force Wilson into the war.

It is hard to say how much freedom of action Wilson had in 1917, but I have become convinced that his decision to enter the war was a mistake. Tragically, Wilson's estimate of the situation was right: Europe desperately needed a compromise peace, in which neither side was as yet seriously interested. Such a peace might conceivably have come about had we stayed out of the war; there was no chance that it would do so after our entry, because the Allies would trust in their increasingly superior resources. After the Armistice--one which left Germany at the Allies' mercy--Wilson tried but inevitably failed to write his principles of impartiality into the Versailles Treaty. But traditional authority had already collapsed all over central and eastern Europe--most notably in Germany and in Russia--eventually allowing totalitarian movements to take over, and unleashing an even bigger war. Still, Wilson in 1919 became the second sitting President to receive the prize.

During the last 64 years, the United States and its allies have managed, remarkably, to make Wilson's dreams reality among the industrialized nations of the world. Under a succession of Democratic and Republican Administrations from Truman through Clinton, the richer nations came together, confronted Communism, and eventually saw it fall. After three generations of peace among them, their military establishments--event our own--have fallen to historically very low levels. No wars have taken place within advanced nations in all that time. While the Third World has been the scene of terrible conflicts, virtually the entire population of the advanced nations today has lived their life untouched by war.

The Nobel Committee, it seems to me, awarded its prize to President Obama because of its concern over the trends of the last nine years. Two new elements transformed the world situation in 2001, with disastrous consequences. They were, respectively, Osama Bin Laden and Al Queda on the one hand, and the conservative Republican Administration of George W. Bush on the other. What is confusing Americans today is that while the world recognizes both of them and the ideas and strategies they represented as very serious dangers, the United States does not.

Last month, at the ninth anniversary of 9/11, I saw several commentaries arguing that Bin Laden had been a failure. They were wrong. Bin Laden, along with George W. Bush, is to date the most influential figure of the new century. I have become increasingly convinced that we have never really understood what Bin Laden was trying to do, or what his real goals are. He is not really very interested, I now believe, in what happens in the United States or even in Europe. For decades he has been fighting a civil war within the Muslim world, most notably in his native Saudi Arabia, where he hates the government partly because of its association with our own. 9/11 was an attempt, I think, to provoke the United States into direct intervention in the region, because that would provide a focal point for extremist resentment and further tend to discredit our allies there. The Bush Administration's decision to invade Afghanistan and then Iraq played into his hands, all the more so because the United States lacked sufficient forces to do either job effectively. But those decisions also represented a decisive change in American foreign policy, one that threatened the whole postwar consensus in which the world had thrived.

As I have said here many times, the decision to invade Iraq, in particular, was a repudiation of all the principles of international law for which the United States had stood, at least in theory, since Wilson. The Bush Administration's National Security strategy embraced international anarchy, by claiming the right to overthrow any regime that might develop weapons which we did not think they should have. We should not have been surprised that it received almost no international support, with Britain alone among advanced industrial countries supporting it. Since 1945 the United States had been the leading supporter of international organizations; now, under Bush, they became impediments that stood in the way of what we judged we had to do. (Last night Rachel Maddow, in an excellent feature on the prize, ran a clip of John Bolton explaining that the United States government had no interest in the United Nations except to the extent that it could promote American objectives.) Bush also extended the anarchic philosophy to our ally Israel, by declaring that Israel would keep any territory that it had settled and wanted to keep in a final peace agreement. He declared, and implemented, a policy of indefinitely detaining and torturing captives and denying them any legal recourse, in violation of numerous laws and treaties which the United States had either passed or signed and ratified. And, of course, prodded by Dick Cheney, he spent about six years threatening Iran with war if it did not desist from its nuclear program.

It is, of course, perhaps the greatest difference between the United States on the one hand and Europe and Northeast Asia on the other, that they have experienced first hand the consequences of a philosophy of international anarchy, as practiced beginning in the 1930s by Japan and Germany, while we have not. The Second World War left them destroyed and destitute while raising us to new pinnacles of prosperity and power. And thus, their commitment to an orderly world has been much stronger, and remains so--partly because the aftermath of the war lasted so much longer in those countries than here, as well. The Nobel Committee, in my opinion, was reacting to signs that the United States was indeed getting back on track before it was too late.

They were not a moment too soon. The last year has shown just how difficult it will be to reverse the damage the Bush Administration did. Although we are slowly exiting in Iraq, the situation in Afghanistan has gotten much worse, and threatens to spill over into Pakistan. Iran has made considerable nuclear progress. President Obama tried, and in effect, to withdraw the critical concession Bush made to the Israeli government in order to promote peace. And the President is disinclined to treat the torture and detention policies of the Bush Administration as crimes. Yet the President has shown by both word and deed that he believes in a different world and a different foreign policy. His speeches, like Wilson's have inspired the world. And although the media have underplayed it, the Iranian agreement to allow Russia to enrich its uranium is an absolutely critical concession for the whole non-proliferation effort. It is, indeed, exactly the solution proposed by Graham Allison in his book, Nuclear Terrorism. The prize will undoubtedly give a boost to the President's broader goal of working towards the complete elimination of nuclear weapons. The decision not to station useless anti-ballistic missiles in the heart of Europe reversed another disastrous step, one which had begun to undermine the peaceful structure of post-cold war Europe. (How many Americans realize that the Russians, in retaliation, denounced a conventional forces treaty that kept their troops away from the border?)

The reason, I think, that all this is hard to understand here in the United States, is that conservative Republican positions, which the rest of the world fears and abhors, are regarded here as mainstream. "The prize quickly loomed as a potential political liability — perhaps more burden than glory — for Mr. Obama," said today's New York Times. "Republicans contended that he had won more for his star power and oratorical skills than for his actual achievements, and even some Democrats privately questioned whether he deserved it." Yes, sadly, a large percentage of the American population--and probably a larger percentage of our punditry--still believes that unrestrained force and disregard for law are the solutions to the problems we face in the world. An entire media complex, including a whole television network and 90% of the talk radio industry, will decry the award. (No totalitarian movement ever had such a media presence before it seized power.) And thus, in the long run, both the hopes of the Nobel Committee and of the President himself depend on the development of a new American consensus--the kind of consensus that Wilson failed to develop on behalf of the League of Nations, but that Roosevelt, Truman and Eisenhower managed to build, first on behalf of intervention against the Japanese and Germans and then on behalf of the Cold War.

The world has voted. The rest is now up to us.

Afghanistan - An historical perspective

2009-10-03T10:40:00.004-04:00

[Every day, hundreds of people reach this blog thanks to an email circulating under my name, comparing President Obama to Adolf Hitler. It remains necessary for me to state that I did not write it and do not agree with it. I would appreciate anyone who has received it hitting "reply all" and passing that along. More information on the origins of the email is available here.]

Although I grew up amidst government decision-makers at various fairly high levels, I evidently decided at some unconscious level that their life was not for me. Like some of the characters in Solzhenitsyn’s First Circle, I prized time to think more than influence, and of that I have had plenty. Yet as you all know, I inevitably wish, from time to time, that I could bring a lifetime of study to bear at a critical moment. The trade off is real and clear: had I spent my life pursuing the positions that would give me influence, I would have much less to say. But I have seldom felt a stronger urge to make my views known than in the last two weeks, after the release of General McChrystal’s classified assessment of the situation in Afghanistan kicked off critical decisions in Washington about what to do.

General McChrystal’s assessment and his recommendations for the future lay out a detailed and very ambitious plan for the expansion of both American and NATO (ISAF) and Afghan forces in Afghanistan and for a change in strategy to take the initiative away from the Taliban and make major progress towards securing the country under the control of the Afghan government within several years. The unclassified version of the document, to begin with, does not specify exactly how many new forces will be needed or exactly where they will be stationed. The document boldly and courageously advocates changes in the approaches of US forces, including better language capabilities, a different relationship with the population, and more focus on governance, but some doubt whether current training and service schools generate enough troops who can perform these missions. The document also calls for a vastly increased civilian effort and we cannot know if the necessary resources will be available.

Historical examples—particularly China in the late 1940s, Vietnam, and Iraq—help put these recommendations in historical context and, in particular, raise certain questions involving both the resources that will be required from the United States on the one hand, and the political changes which must take place in Afghanistan, if such as a strategy as has been proposed is to work. More importantly, the Obama Administration has to answer questions about the broader purposes of our involvement and the consequences of various possible courses of action.

In historical perspective, perhaps the most troubling aspect of the Initial Assessment is its characterization of the insurgency on the one hand, and the Afghan National Government. Although observers with experience in Afghanistan are nearly unanimous in their belief that the bulk of the Afghan people do not want a return to Taliban rule, the Quetta Shura Taliban emerges from the assessment as a formidable, well-organized force—far more similar in its scope, organization and tactics, it seems to me, to the Viet Cong than to the various different opposition groups that we have faced in Iraq. Like the Viet Cong, it is setting up a parallel shadow government in much of the country, levying taxes, and using effective information warfare. The Afghan government, on the other hand, is described as commanding little authority and even less confidence. “The weakness of state institutions, malign actions of power-brokers, widespread corruption and abuse of power by various officials, and [US and NATO forces'] own errors, have given Afghans little reason to support their government. These problems have alienated large segments of the Afghan population. They do not trust [the Afghan government] to provide their essential needs, such as security, justice, and basic services. This crisis of confidence, coupled with a distinct lack of economic and educational opportunity, has created fertile ground for the insurgency.”

The controversy over the recent election seems to represent a further step backward for the government. The blunt assessment is commendable, but inevitably raises questions as to whether the proposed strategy can succeed. In previous cases in which the United States has successfully assisted a local government in a counterinsurgency, such as South Korea during the Korean War, El Salvador in the 1980s, or the Philippines in the 1950s, the host governments, while far from perfect by American standards, have been far more effective than the Afghan government seems to be now. The description above inspires even less confidence than contemporary evaluations of the Chinese Nationalist government in the late 1940s or the various governments of South Vietnam, which were not successful. A new long-term American commitment requires either some confidence that the Afghan government can indeed make such revolutionary changes, or alternatively, a strategy that relies on traditional local elites rather than on a central government that as yet exists only on paper.

Recognizing current political problems, the assessment calls for a new, broad, deep commitment of American and other NATO forces to live and work among the Afghan people and help establish new, effective governmental structures linked to the national government in contested areas of the country. The numbers of people involved, which the assessment does not mention, must be carefully analyzed to provide a sense of the magnitude of the task. Afghanistan has about 31 million people, of which more than 40% are Pashtuns and thus the principle targets (at least for the time being) of the Taliban. Iraq’s population is estimated to be about the same as Afghanistan’s, but the Sunni population, which posed the bulk of the security problems, is only about 33% of the country. More importantly, the population of Afghanistan is far less dense, far less urban, and far more dispersed, suggesting that the provision and supply of adequate US forces for these new tasks will pose a substantially greater problem than the attempt to secure Iraq in 2007-9. After 8 years of war and repeated deployments in both Afghanistan and Iraq, our senior leadership must ask whether we can deploy and maintain resources adequate to General McChrystal’s proposed strategy. The supply of these forces may also present serious problems, since Afghanistan is a landlocked nation whose land communications with the outside world have recently proven vulnerable to attacks. The maintenance of public support within the United States will also remain a serious and critical problem.

Why are we fighting in Afghanistan? General McChrystal’s assessment reflects the Bush Administration’s original goals for Afghanistan in 2001 and its original approach to the war on terror. Those goals demanded the establishment of cooperative regimes in countries where terrorists had previously found safe havens. Since a friendly, unified, effective government of Afghanistan remains our objective, General McChrystal did his duty in making his best determination of how that might be achieved. Yet after eight years, it seems absolutely essential for the highest authorities, both civilian and military, to ask whether that sweeping objective is the best strategy for securing the United States and its allies against terrorist attacks. One can very easily argue—as a scholar at the Army War College in Carlisle did some six years ago--that it is either impossibly utopian or far too expensive in the long run to be practical. Two weeks, suspects in a plot to make terrorist attacks within the US have been arrested. According to press reports at least one of them was trained overseas—but in Pakistan, not Afghanistan. Effective domestic intelligence and law enforcement, however, have evidently been sufficient to stop this plot here at home. The situation in Pakistan is of course also of tremendous concern to the government of the United States, but it is far from clear that our involvement in Afghanistan to date has improved it from our point of view. And indeed, as is now generally recognized, we face the continuing problem in Afghanistan that very important elements within the Pakistani government do not share our objectives there, but regard the Afghan Taliban as an important ally. More limited objectives in Afghanistan deserve attention. Taliban strength seems mostly confined to Pashtun areas, leaving the possibility of maintaining a foothold in the country, and a capability to strike against terrorist camps, without making an enormous and doubtful effort to establish the authority of the central government over the whole country.

More than 60 years ago, the Truman Administration and Congress debated the question of further US assistance to the Chinese Nationalist government, then locked in a civil war with the Chinese Communists. China at that moment was surely as important strategically to the United States as Afghanistan is today, and its eventual loss to Communist could, and most certainly did, have significant negative consequences for American foreign policy for a long time to come. Secretary of State (and former Chief of Staff) George C. Marshall—one of the very greatest strategic thinkers the United States has ever produced—knew the situation first hand when he testified in executive session before a Senate Committee in early 1948. He was entirely preoccupied with trying to secure important areas of the free world against Communism. Yet in analyzing the situation in China he spoke wisely and courageously. He began by listing the very significant aid which the United States had given the Chinese government already, and continued:

“All the foregoing means, at least to me, that a great deal must be done by the Chinese authorities themselves—and that nobody else can do it for them—if that Government is to maintain itself against the Communist forces and agrarian policies. It also means that our Government must be exceedingly careful that it does not become committed to a policy involving the absorption of its resources to an unpredictable extent once the obligations are assumed of a direct responsibility for the conduct of civil war in China or for the Chinese economy, or both. . . .
“There is a tendency to feel that wherever the Communist influence is brought to bear, we should immediately meet it, head on as it were. I think this would be a most unwise procedure for the reason that we would be, in effect, handing over the initiative to the Communists. They could, therefore, spread our influence out so think that it could be of no particular effectiveness at any one point.
“We must be prepared to face the possibility that the present Chinese government may not be successful in maintaining itself against the Communist forces or other opposition that may arise in China.”

General Marshall did not believe, in short, that dubious chances of success justified transferring the very substantial resources necessary to help the Nationalist government from other tasks, such as the establishment of the NATO alliance and the rebuilding of the European economy. And indeed it is very possible that a full-scale intervention in China—advocated at the time by powerful voices in Congress and the press—would have done incalculable harm to American foreign policy as a whole in that critical period. Both the United States and, ultimately, the Chinese people, weathered the very serious short- and medium-term consequences of the fall of China to Communism.

General McChrystal has done exactly what he was asked to do: he has provided a frank assessment of the situation in Afghanistan and of what he believes is necessary to achieve the broad objective which he has been given. But before proceeding, higher authorities must do at least three things. First, they must seek out independent assessments of the chances that this new strategy would be successful. Second, they must accurately estimate its material, human and political costs, and ask whether those costs are justified by the value of the object in comparison to other needs both foreign and domestic. And thirdly, in my view, those two exercises must inevitably lead to some re-evaluation of our goals in Afghanistan in general and our strategy in the war on terror in particular, in light of both our successes and failures during the last eight years.

Working in Washington

2009-09-26T08:51:00.005-04:00

If you have been brought here by an email attributed to myself comparing President Obama to Adolf Hitler, you need to know that it is a fraud. I did not write the email. For more information on it go here.It looks this morning as if Gary Trudeau got the email, too.

If Barack Obama is going to secure the passage of a sweeping progressive agenda, including serious health care reform, a cap and trade program, some huge new infrastructure projects, and (very possibly) big new job creation programs if unemployment, as seems likely, remains very high, then the political culture of Washington will have to undergo some significant changes. The media can help provoke such changes by bringing current practices to light. I don't spend much time listening to cable news (although I do try to catch a little talk radio every day, just to hear what's happening in the Republicanosphere), but I fortunately discovered this clip, in which Rachel Maddow discusses the financial status of Congressman Joe Ross or Arkansas at some length, the other day. Maddow is emerging as the Drew Pearson of our time, although her sources are not nearly as good as yet, and the story explained why Ross, a prominent Blue Dog Democrat, is so opposed to the public health care option. Ross owned a pharmacy in his home town, and two years ago, he sold the building and the right to operate the pharmacy to USA Drug, a drugstore chain, for a price of almost half a million, and half a million more made up of various rights fees and a consulting contract that his wife signed with them as well. This is, I have no doubt, not a unique situation, and we must hope that in today's anarchic media, popular outlets will become more and more adept at bringing such arrangements to light. (For more on the source of Representative Ross's views, look here--a very interesting site on southern politics.)

Thirty years ago I heard Barney Frank, who was just beginning his political career as a Massachusetts state legislator, talk about the problem of campaign money in politics. The salary of the Governor of Massachusetts, he noted, was about $50,000 (actually might have been even less), while a gubernatorial campaign cost about half a million. "Why don't we pay for the campaign and let corporations pay his salary?" he asked. "We'd have a bigger piece of him!" Things, of course, have gotten much worse since then--campaigns have gotten more expensive and it looks very likely that the Supreme Court is about to strike down the most recent bipartisan attempt to curtail special interest spending. Today, however, I'd like to discuss a different kind of problem in our politics today--one involving the career paths of politicians.

Let's imagine that you are a man, or woman, who became interested in public policy early in life. Whatever your particular views, you enjoy the nuts and bolts of the American system, and your ego is healthy enough (or should I say unhealthy enough?) to want to feel that you are having an important impact. Coming to Washington at a young age, you are seduced by the beauty of its historic buildings and its political buzz--although if you have arrived in the last forty years you have also been intimidated by the enormous cost of living there without a very long commute. Eventually you discover that there are two ways in which you become a mover and shaker.

In option one, you will spend your days being led around by your handlers, rather like a prize bull, listening to the widest possible variety of outraged or ardent Americans pushing their particular cause. While you will enjoy some of these encounters far more than others, you will have to be unvaryingly polite. You will fly to and from some other part of the country on almost every weekend, where your days will be similar to those spent in Washington during the week, except that you will spend more time traveling. Your finances will be known in every detail to the public. You will spend a great deal of time raising money. You will depend almost entirely on subordinates to provide you with actual knowledge about legislation in which you are interested. If you are a Republican, you will learn that any deviation from the party line--increasingly enforced by ignorant demagogues broadcasting for hours every day--is likely to be punished by the loss of your job. It is no wonder, obviously, that such a life might make a roll in the hay with a more or less anonymous member of the opposite sex appealing, but should such become known, your career will be at an end.

Now let's look at option 2. In this case you will live in Washington full time, going out of town only for working vacations in expensive resorts. Your salary will be private, and at least ten times as much as in option 1. Rather than having to raise money, you will help dispense it. You'll live in a prime Washington location. You will have all the time you need not only to study the details of legislation in which you are interested, but also to help draft it. You won't have to see anyone that you don't want to see, and the public will probably have no idea that you exist. But you will see your work reflected in dozens of pieces of legislation of tremendous import to millions of Americans. You will probably have to give up any ideas that you cherished in your youth about the public good--but at least, in comparison to option one, you won't have to pretend that you haven't given them up.

The job of option one, in today's America, is that of an elected Senator or Representative. The job of option 2 is that of a lobbyist. And can anyone be surprised that option 1 has become a stepping stone to option 2, rather than the reverse? Thus, two former leaders of the Democrats and Republicans in the House of Representatives--Dick Gephardt and Dick Armey--are now busily plying their trade as lobbyists. Gephardt, who actually ran for President on a platform of universal health care coverage, now opposes it. Tom Daschle, the former Senate Democratic leader who would have become Health and Human Services Secretary but for some financial indiscretions, is also working very hard for the health care industry. Bob Dole has had a remunerative post-Senatorial career. In this respect as in so many others, Ted Kennedy looks like the last of a dying breed, the legislator who (like Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, Sam Rayburn, Richard Russell, Emmanuel Cellar, and so many others from the past) simply can't imagine being anything else. And it is obviously no coincidence that his idealism was backed by inherited wealth, and that he faced only one serious challenge in 46 years in the Senate.

In her report on Representative Ross, Maddow noted that liberal Democrats are organizing a primary campaign against him. Democrats showed in 2008 that they could out-organized the Republicans nationwide and win the Presidency fairly handily by appealing to the interests of less well-off Americans. Delivering for those Americans, however, is turning out to be much, much harder. It will require the same kind of organization on a sustained basis. It will require the courage to turn down "compromise" legislation which will not, in fact, improve the lives of ordinary Americans at all, like the Baucus health care bill. And it will require time, which the President's rhetorical skills will have to buy. I refuse to believe that any of this is impossible, but it will be extremely difficult.

The modern United States is largely the creation of two bursts of legislative activity--the first beginning in 1933 and ending around 1945 with the GI Bill, and the second in 1964-5. The first was possible because of the catastrophic situation into which we had fallen--far worse, we must keep in mind, than what we face right now--and the second owed a great deal to an outpouring of grief over the death of John F. Kennedy, an opportunity which Lyndon Johnson seized to pass Medicare, two civil rights bills, and much more. The present moment can't be compared to either of those. Any victories over the next year will be dearly won, through hard-fought battles. If in fact the Democrats can actually gain seats at the next election--and perhaps even replace a few Blue Dogs like Congressman Ross with genuine progressives--the log jam could begin to break during the next two years. That is an optimistic scenario, but not, I think, an impossible one.

Two possibilities

2009-09-19T10:13:00.004-04:00

Over the on the web site fourthturning.com, a number of very smart and engaged people, ages ranging from teens to seventies, have been debating the present and future of American history for more than a decade. Essentially they have been trying to integrate current events into Strauss and Howe's theories--frequently through the prism of their own views. Those of us who had read those books in the 1990s when they first came out have not been surprised by the nation's descent into Crisis. Some of the longest threads on those forums have attempted to locate the beginning of the Crisis. It is becoming clear that we will only be able to answer the question of when it really began retrospectively, in twenty years or so. If we are then living in Barack Obama's vision of America we shall date the beginning from this year--but if we are living in George W. Bush's America--and I am increasingly convinced that that is quite possible--then we shall go back to dating it from 9/11, or possibly from the events of the fall of 2000 and the second theft of a presidential election in American history. The two Bush Administrations consolidated, and accelerated, critical trends in American government that had begun under Reagan (and which the Clinton years had done either little or nothing to reverse). President Obama, I am convinced, wants to reverse those trends--but his attempts to do so are showing what an enormous task that is going to be, and certainly raise real doubts as to whether he can be successful.

To explain my fears, I shall look at three critical issues in American life: health care reform (of course); corporate power and the workings of our new financial system; and whether our foreign policy will be based upon military supremacy or on the respect for, and promotion of, international law and diplomatic solutions to problems. We shall see that it is far from clear if the President has enough raw material to work with to make the changes he seems to want, and to make them stick, because so many Republican positions have become consensus positions over the last thirty years.

The health care reform effort, about which I have written a great deal, is going forward, but with less than no assurance that any meaningful change will occur. The emergence of Senator Max Baucus and his Finance Committee as the key locus of power is an interesting phenomenon--his was only one of several committees to produce a bill, and the others have produced far more important ones, including a public option. His own bill not only rejects that, but will allow insurance companies to charge premiums according to the age of their customers, and thus continue their practice of offering generous insurance to people who don't need it. Baucus has been a huge recipient of health care industry contributions for years, and they have gotten what they wanted. I am intrigued, though, that he became the focus of attention because he put together the Gang of Six and has gone through the motions of trying to put together a bill that would garner Republican support. That was hopeless, for reasons that his Senatorial colleague Jim DeMint let out of the bag months ago. As in 1993-4, the Republicans are determined to kill any bill to bring down a Democratic President--and their most powerful lobbies stand ready to fund an expensive primary campaign against any Senator who dares cast a pro-Obama vote, such as Olympia Snowe of Maine. (My own former Republican Senator Lincoln Chafee had to deal with such a challenge three years ago.) Baucus's ostensible purpose has failed, but he has meanwhile crafted the bill the health care industry wants. Meanwhile, the Republican media barrage has successfully painted the public option as equivalent to a single-payer government takeover of health care, and the media is painting the single-payer advocates in the House, who want to use Medicare to provide a much cheaper alternative to private insurance, as a fringe group. With President Obama determined above all to pass a bill, the chances are quite high, as Paul Krugman effectively acknowledged yesterday, that it won't be one that makes any real changes.

Regarding Wall Street, this week's news is rather interesting. The rest of the G-12--the world's other industrialized countries--have made up their minds about American capitalism's latest gift to the world, megabanks who pay their employees bonuses based upon short-term gains. That practice puts a premium on arranging deals for their own sake (which in turn involves the creation of new financial instruments of dubious economic value), on leveraging investments to increase profits, and on artificially bidding up the values of commodities and securities, leading, inevitably, to disastrous crashes, of which we have had two in the last decade. Their obvious solution is to put tight restrictions on such bonuses--but the Administration, according to today's New York Times, along with the British government, opposes actual caps on pay. Caps would be difficult to administer. The alternative that saw us through the Second World War and the high-growth twenty years that followed it--90% marginal tax rates that would remove any incentive to pay those bonuses--is, of course, never even mentioned, thanks to thirty years of Republican anti-tax propaganda. The Administration's economic team, in any case, is deeply implicated in the current system, which Larry Summers also defended for the managers of the Harvard Endowment, whose tens of millions (yes) of bonuses during the first half of this decade did not prevent them from losing 1/3 of the endowment's value and leaving the University lacking the case it needed to pay its bills during the last year. Like the Clinton Administration, which continued the trend towards deregulation that has left us in this mess, the Obama Administration does not seem committed to a fundamental reform or a return to the more disciplined world of our parents and grandparents.

Lastly there is foreign policy, where the President has shown the most striking break with the past, accelerating the withdrawal from Iraq slightly, demanding that Israel halt settlement construction, and now, scrapping the plan for ICBM defense sites in the Czech Republic and Poland. Taking those in reverse order, the latter is a step backward from the Bush foreign/defense policy of trying to assure American military supremacy and invulnerability, partly by undertaking preventive war to keep nations from acquiring weapons we do not think they should have. It was also a very welcome recognition of the essential fact about missile defense which Republicans have been trying to conceal for the past 25 years--that it does not work. (All this was brilliantly handled about ten years ago by Frances Fitzgerald in her book, Way out There in the Blue.) The Bush Administration's denunciation of the ABM treaty--a Republican legacy--was a terrible step backward for the US and the whole word. Sadly, it will be many years, I am sure, before anything similar is attempted again. And indeed, the Administration found it necessary to announce that it was going to work on a different missile defense system instead--although there is enough lead time to back down on that decision should they or their successors find another way out. However, the President has also branded himself an appeaser among Republicans--and his pressure on Israel will play into that as well. Here too Bush and Cheney did their work well. As I have pointed out here many times, President Bush essentially informed the world early in his first term that Israel could keep any land that it had settled in a peace treaty, and the Israelis and their American allies are now arguing that this binds future Administrations as well. It doesn't, but peace has gotten a lot less likely since then, and I'm not confident the President's well-intentioned step will have a good result.

The story of how a new generation of Republicans (very different from the Nixons, Rockefellers and even Goldwaters) managed to reverse the trend of American politics on economic, social and international issues from the 1980s until 2009 is an extraordinary one that should eventually produce some great history. In so doing they created, and relied upon, an active intellectual elite, a strong and growing presence in the media, and an emotional mass movement that now uses the techniques developed by the civil rights movement in the 1960s. For various reasons--which I shall try to take up at another time--the Democrats cannot at the moment deploy comparable forces. Franklin Roosevelt in 1933 benefited from another historical accident--he came into office after three-plus years of catastrophic depression which had given him much more freedom of action, and much bigger majorities, than President Obama has. How the next four years, and the next twenty years, will turn out, remains a very open question.

The Supreme Court in historical perspective

2009-09-12T09:06:00.002-04:00

To begin with my customary update, the President's health care speech--which I thoroughly enjoyed--seems to have had a mildly negative effect in the traffic in the scurrilous email comparing him to Hitler, fraudulently attributed to me (that's right), which as undoubtedly brought many of you hear this morning. In the build-up to the speech hits continued to rise, reaching an all-time record of 1384 on Tuesday, but since the speech they have fallen by over a third, failing to top 1000 yesterday, and promising to fall much lower today. In addition, after about half a dozen phone calls from fans over Labor Day weekend, I have had only one, I believe, in the last few days. The speech, I thought, was excellent, and the President has to find ways to give more like it. He also has to make clear that health care reform is only the first of a series of huge challenges that we have to face. This article in today's New York Times, for example, makes it very clear that the successful bail-out of Wall Street has simply encouraged all its players to go back to business as usual, more confident than ever that the federal government will rescue them the next time things go wrong. An earlier article even unveiled the hot new Wall Street product, securities based upon life insurance policies which desperate consumers have had to sell back at a discount. Pushing several reforms at once, moreover, would make it harder for Republicans to focus upon the imagined defects of any particular one, and would ram the point home to the general public that the Republicans will simply oppose anything the President wants. In a crisis era, the common belief that Presidents have just one year to put through one big initiative does not, and cannot, hold.

Instead, however, I want to turn to a new book covering the whole sweep of American history, one of the more remarkable that I have read recently--Packing the Court, by the political scientist James MacGregor Burns, whom I got to know during my year at Williams College. Because Burns has an encyclopedic knowledge of American history and because he has, as I mentioned last week, remained faithful to some of the beliefs of his youth in the 1930s, the book's 259 pages come from a unique perspective and make a unique contribution. It must certainly be one of the half-dozen best books ever written by anyone in their tenth decade and is therefore quite an inspiration to yours truly. And although its conclusion will be a hard one for younger liberals to accept, they should certainly do some thinking about it.

Anyone of liberal sympathies born between about 1935 and 1955 grew up grateful for the Supreme Court and its works. Such people first became aware of the Court while Earl Warren was its chief, and watched it strike down school segregation, eliminate significant parts of the anti-Communist legislation from the McCarthy period, order the redistricting of state legislatures, outlaw prayer in schools, vastly expand the rights of defendants, eliminate (for a time) capital punishment, legalize birth control and then abortion, expand freedom of the press, and (under Warren's successor) deliver a key ruling that led to Richard Nixon's resignation from office. Warren, Hugo Black, William O. Douglas, William Brennan, Arthur Goldberg and Thurgood Marshall were liberal heroes, and with good reason, and many of us wondered where the country would be without the Supreme Court's exercise of its powers to enforce the Constitution and strike down state and federal laws.

Burns' book strikes at this view--which he apparently never held--from two directions. First, at the theoretical level, he argues that the Framers never intended to allow the Court to strike down, at any rate, federal legislation. (I do not think he takes a clear position regarding state legislation, although he frequently criticizes individual court decisions that overturned state laws as well.) I was not entirely persuaded by his summary of the evidence of what the Founders intended that they shared his views. A most scrupulous scholar, Burns does not in fact claim that they rejected judicial supremacy, but simply notes that they rejected explicit proposals for routine judicial review of pending legislation (an option even today in several states), and argues that judicial review contradicted their basic philosophy. The key point of the book, made by the title, is that once John Marshall had asserted that power (ironically without actually exercising it) in Marbury vs. Madison, Presidents preferred to use the appointive power (a much more powerful tool in an age of shorter lifespans than our own) to shape the court according to their own views, than to challenge its powers head on either by defying it or proposing a Constitutional amendment to limit them. (Until 1869, moreover, they sometimes made strategic changes in the size of the court; not until then did Congress fix the number of justices at 9.) That he clearly regrets, since it has not only turned the Court into the single most powerful branch of government (since there is no immediate way to countermand its decisions), but also put selections to it at the center of our political life.

Burns's second point, however, is the most troubling one--especially now. The Warren Court's role was the exception in American history, not the rule. For most of our history--and especially from the end of the Civil War until FDR's court packing plan--the court has been a reactionary influence in American life, zealously defending the rights of the powerful against the weak. It played a key role in the 1870s and 1880s in dismantling the protections of new black citizens that Reconstruction had put in place. During the same era it gave corporations nearly absolute liberty against state and local governments by defining them as "persons" under the 14th Amendment whose property--that is, profits--could not be taken away by legislative restrictions that did not, in the court's view, represent "due process of law." When the Progressive era began to restrict that power, the court in the first three decades of the twentieth century repeatedly struck down state legislation regulating wages and hours and attempting to protect the public in other ways. From 1922 to 1928, the court, led by the enormously influential Chief Justice William Howard Taft (who in one way or another had managed to choose over half its members), invalidated an average of eighteen federal, state or municipal laws a year.

This process reached a climax, of course, from 1934 to 1936, when the Court, which still included five members born before the end of the Civil War, struck down a number of major pieces of New Deal legislation, including the NRA, the AAA, and a law to prevent farm foreclosures. Every piece of New Deal legislation seemed to be in jeopardy. Roosevelt at one point in 1934 had planned to defy the Court, when it threatened to overrule his decision to take the dollar of gold and effectively reduce its value by about a third, but the Court, which as we shall see seems to have a sixth sense about exactly how far to push its powers, had surprisingly allowed that to go ahead. After his enormous re-election victory in 1936, when he carried 46 out of 48 states, he decided on new legislation to allow him to appoint six new justices--one for every justice who had not retired at the age of 70--rather than propose a Constitutional amendment specifically limiting its powers. He prepared the step poorly, giving Congressional leaders no chance to weigh in, and suffered a devastating defeat from which his domestic prestige never recovered.

That, however, as Burns pointed out, was only part of the story. On March 29, 1937, just weeks after FDR had sent the court packing plan to Congress, the court, led by Chief Justice Hughes, gave in to the New Deal on two crucial decisions, upholding exactly the kind of state wages and hours law that it had thrown out a year earlier, refusing to annul a new law on farm bankruptcies which Congress had passed in response to their rejection of an earlier one, and upholding a new law on railway labor. Two weeks later the Court stunned the country by refusing to strike down the Wagner Act, then as now the federal law that guarantees unions the right to organize. After that came the resignation of the aged Willis Van Devanter, whom FDR replaced with southern liberal (but one-time KKK member) Hugo Black, my own personal court favorite, and then, in subsequent years, a slew of deaths and resignations which eventually enabled Roosevelt to replace nearly the entire court and lay the foundation for the Warren Court decision of the 1950s and 1960s and some equally controversial ones during the next decade.

Those decisions, however, had long-term consequences that are only now reaching their climax. Like their counterparts earlier in American history, conservatives, while decrying judicial supremacy initially, chose rather in the long run to turn it to their advantage by appointing justices who would reflect their views and reverse Warren and Burger Court decisions. Although Richard Nixon's attempts to put a majority in place that would halt the momentum of school desegregation failed, Roe v. Wade became the chief target of the conservative movement after 1973 and Republican Presidents, relying increasingly on Evangelical religious groups for their support, became increasingly dedicated to the cause of appointing justices that would overturn it. (To be sure, three justices--Sandra Day O'Connor, Anthony Kennedy, and David Souter--disappointed conservative Republicans on this point, but Kennedy has now apparently shifted his ground.) Recognizing the power of the Courts, the Republicans have created the Federalist Society to propagate conservative judicial ideas. Conservative justices have in addition invalidated local school board desegregation plans, given state governments immunity against suits under federal law (in direct violation of the supremacy clause), and most famously, awarded the Presidency to George W. Bush in 2000, clearly usurping powers delegated in the first instance to the state of Florida and thence to the Congress. The court now has four dedicated, unified conservatives--Thomas, Scalia, Roberts and Alito--three of them Baby Boomers who could easily serve twenty more years apiece, and one swing vote, Anthony Kennedy, who has joined them in the most recent abortion and gun control cases (the latter the subject of a lengthy commentary here.) How they will deal with legislation passed by Democratic-controlled political branches remains to be seen, but Burns obviously fears the worst.

The remedy he proposes is simple: Presidential defiance of a Supreme Court decision to strike down federal legislation, in order in effect to make that power, never explicitly mentioned in the Constitution, null and void. Perhaps, once again, because of the 30-year difference in our ages, I have mixed feelings about such a step. The whole history of the nation shows, I think, that we do need the Court as a bulwark against usurpations of the Bill of Rights, although most (but not all) of those have come from the executive rather than the legislative branch. (The Court, I am suggesting, should be free to rule both on the administration of justice, so as to protect the rights of defendants, and on the kind of assertions of unilateral executive power, not backed by statute, of which the Nixon, Reagan and Bush II Administrations were so fond.) But although Burns does not mention this, the supremacy clause, which declares the Constitution and "all laws and treaties made under it" to be "the supreme law of the land" can be read to support his position, since it puts a federal law on an equal footing with the Constitution itself and thus could be said to leave to the legislative and executive branches, acting together, the right to decide what the Constitution requires or allows. In general, one could say, the whole effect of the various overlapping jurisdictions in the US--not only within the federal government, but involving states and localities as well--has been to introduce more randomness into our political outcomes than European states, where power tends to be more centralized, generally experience. The United Kingdom has always allowed Parliament to reverse High Court decisions by passing a new act, for example. We cannot foresee the consequences of any particular institutional change, but Burns, in addition to providing a very entertaining history of our most arbitrary institution and its works, has alerted us to a long-term danger that will need to be met again.

Health care, youth and age

2009-09-05T08:42:00.003-04:00

[More than 5000 people have visited this site in the last seven days. Most of you visited because of a fradulent email comparing President Obama to Hitler, which has been circulating under my name for the last five months or so, and whose circulation has dramatically increased this month. You can read its full history here. Quite a few, however, have appreciated what they found and apparently intend to return.]

Since we have had so many interesting comments about health care, I am going to begin with that subject before moving on to something else.

I am sorry, to begin with, that the reader who described himself (I think that's the right pronoun) as a "career civil servant" has so little respect for his, and my, profession. Actually his comments illustrate the biggest problem surrounding the health care debate: the American people's colossal ignorance of the most basic facts. This is not altogether surprising. TV news has a notoriously short attention span and hardly ever provides enough information to understand a complex issue, and it is very easy to pass through even a leading university today without learning much of anything about the workings or history of government and public policy. In this case the relevant facts are as follows. The US government already runs two health care systems, Medicare and the Veterans Administration system. Both are extraordinarily cheaper than privately provided care. Nor is there any real need to worry that the proposed public option will be any different. Although I myself did not know it until yesterday, the public option in the bill being considered by the House of Representatives is simply an extension of the Medicare system to the general population. Here is the text of the letter which the progressive caucus in the House sent the White House last week--short, to the point, and far more informative than 99% of the media coverage on the subject.

Dear President Obama:

Thank you for continuing to work with Members of Congress to draft a health reform bill that will provide the real health care reform this country needs.

We look forward to meeting with you regarding retaining a robust public option in any final health reform bill and request that that meeting take place as soon as possible.

Public opinion polls continue to show that a majority of Americans want the choice ofa robust public plan and we stand in solidarity with them. We continue to support the robust public option that was reported out of the Committees on Ways and Means and Education and Labor and will not vote for a weakened bill on the House Floor or returning from a Conference with the Senate.

Any bill that does not provide, at a minimum, a public option built on the Medicare provider system and with reimbursement based on Medicare rates-not negotiated rates-is unacceptable. A plan with negotiated rates would ensure higher costs for the public plan, and would do nothing to achieve the goal ofproviding choice and competition to keep rates down. The public plan with set rates saves $75 billion, which could be lost ifrates are negotiated with providers. Further, this public option must be available immediately and must not be contingent upon any trigger.

Mr. President, the need for reform is urgent. Every day, 14,000 Americans lose their health care coverage. We must have health care reform that will effectively bring down costs and significantly expand access. A health reform bill without a robust public option will not achieve the health reform this country so desperately needs. We cannot vote for anything less.

We look forward to meeting with you to discuss the importance of your support for a robust public plan, which we encourage you to reiterate in your address to the Joint Session of Congress on Wednesday.

Lynn Woolsey
Raul Grijalva

The comment which I posted yesterday reminded me of another health care story which I heard about seven or eight years ago, involving my late friend William Strauss, the co-author of the books on generations and eras of American life upon which so much of these commentaries are based. For the last 25 or so years of his life Bill earned his living as the co-founder and co-producer of the comedy troop the Capitol Steps. The troop employed about 25 people and provided health insurance under a group policy from a private insurer. (Unfortunately I can't remember which one it was.) In 1999 Bill was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, but was given a new procedure called a Whipple, and spent at least a week in the hospital. He was initially declared cancer free, but within a few years tumors had appeared in his liver, and he had several near-fatal chemo treatments before he eventually died in 2007. (See my obit under December 2007.) Anyway, a year or two after the initial surgery, Bill told me an interesting story. The insurance company had informed the Capitol Steps that their group premium was going to be doubled or tripled--I can't remember the exact details, but it was a huge increase, big enough to make it impossible for the company to function. Their intention was obvious: to recover the entire cost of Bill's initial treatment. Fortunately he managed to drop out of the plan, easing their concerns, and get health insurance through his wife, a public servant. Had he not done so, he would either have gone bankrupt, died years earlier than he did, or both. I am sure that story is not unique.

I am beginning to see a need to collect citizens' stories about health care, and I hope that any readers here who have any that they feel are significant will also share them in comments. If that is sufficiently popular, I'm thinking about putting up a whole new blog devoted solely to posting them.

The gentleman who pointed to the lack of community spirit in the United States in comparison to other Anglo-Saxon countries (or, he might simply have said, other advanced countries) had an important point. I suggested in another forum that the Europeans, in particular, take civic responsibilities more seriously because they actually experienced the effects of Nazism first hand and know how important it is to provide basic services and a real safety net. The United States was 50 years behind Germany and about 30 years behind Britain in getting social security. More importantly, it's clear that through the New Deal era and the High that followed,a substantial Republican minority (though far from the entire Republican Party) never accepted the expanded role of the government. Then, sadly, in the 1960s, the whole issue of providing for less-well off Americans became hopelessly entangled with racial issues. The antitax movement, I am sorry to say, succeeded in much of the country because it was a movement against giving any kind of benefits to undeserving minorities. In much of the South that even translated into a prejudice against now-integrated public schools. Now President Obama and some Congressional Democrats are trying, amidst a very hostile climate, to restore some sense of public responsibility.

On another front, I began reading last night a most remarkable book, Packing the Court, by the political scientist James Macgregor Burns. While so far I have read only the first few chapters, it has already inspired quite a few reflections.

I got to know Professor Burns two years ago when I spent a year as a visitor at Williams College. He was then 89, and just had his 91st birthday. He was showing no signs of age, however, a point that is more than confirmed by this book, which does a brilliant job of condensing the entire Constitutional history of the United States into a relatively short space. I shall probably have more to say about its content when I have finished it, but one fascinating point is already clear: it is an example, like much of my own work, of how profoundly we can all be shaped by our youth.

Burns himself tells how he heard in February 1937 of President Roosevelt's plan to pack (in effect) the Supreme Court by adding six new justices--one for every justice who had reached the age of 70 without retiring. He and most other scholarship students, he reports, favored the plan. During FDR's first term the Court had struct down the National Recovery Act, the first Agricultural Adjustment Act, the Guffey-Snyder Coal Act (which regulated that basic industry), and a state minimum wage law. The ability of the "nine old men," several of whom had been born before the Civil War, to overturn the will of the President and Congress in the midst of a national emergency, appalled many Americans at the time, and created something of a scholarly backlash. Several scholars argued that the framers had never intended to give the federal courts the power to overrule federal legislation. The young James M. Burns evidently accepted that argument. What is more interesting is that he accepts it still, 70 years later--making him virtually the only American I know who would make that argument.

Although he obviously has strong convictions on this point, Burns is much too scrupulous a scholar to bend the evidence. He briefly but succinctly goes over the debates in the Constitutional convention and during the ratification process on this point, and certainly did not convince me that the Founders unequivocally shared his view. And although I must wait to finish the book before going into this in any more detail, it seems to me very arguable as to whether on the whole the Supreme Cout's power of judicial review has been a good or a bad thing. Yes, the Court overturned both much of the Reconstruction legislation that tried to give former slaves equal rights and much important work of the New Deal (although it retreated, partly because of some fortuitous vacancies, after FDR lost the court packing battle, and did not invalidate Social Security, the Wagner Act, or federal wages and hours legislation.) But I, like Burns, am marked by my youth, and I grew up under the court of Earl Warren, William O. Douglas, and Hugo Black, which outlawed segregated schools, established the Constitutional rights of defendants, and eventually even legalized abortion. (That last decision, I have come to believe, was a mistake. Abortion in 1973 was already legal in some major jurisdictions, including both New York and California, and I think that abortion rights would be more secure today had the issue been left in the hands of legislatures.) It is not easy to see how many of those changes--especially integrated schools in the South--would have come about without the Court, but at the same time, it is true that liberals came to rely far too much upon it. In addition, the Court became a rallying point for conservative activists, whose persistent efforts to establish a right-wing majority are now bearing fruit.

Burns's book, at any rate, is a great inspiration to me, since it suggests that I too might have as much as 30 years of productive historical work ahead of me--and the nation benefits from hearing such a voice, an echo of an earlier time, whose relevance may in fact be returning.

It is perhaps because Burns, like myself, is an academic, that he has had no trouble sticking to the beliefs he formed so early. In my case, the Vietnam War made me a skeptic about American third world interventions, and nothing that has happened since has changed my mind. Movers and shakers, alas, tend to change with the times. In 1962, a new foreign service officer just out of college was posted to Vietnam. Full of energy and self-confidence, he asked to be appointed the provincial adviser in Ba Xuyen province in the Mekong Delta, with a population of over one million people. This was the era of the strategic hamlet program, and Vietnamese officials immediately assured him that they had completed several hundred hamlets. When he insisted upon seeing them, however, he discovered that quite a few of them were simply neighborhoods in the largest provincial towns, while others had not had any actual work done on them. The problem, he remembered in the 1980s, was that the distribution of aid to the provincial government was tied directly to the number of completed hamlets they could report. (One of many parallel stories about today's Afghanistan can be read here.

The name of that young foreign service officer was Richard Holbrooke, who today is the President's special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan. I have been hearing a good deal lately about Afghanistan from people who have spent time on the scene, and their reports, combined with the news, suggest that the situation there is much worse than the situation in South Vietnam in 1962. While everyone agrees that the Afghan people do not want or like the Taliban, they also agree that the Taliban is by far the most dedicated and organized political force in the country. Operating in Afghanistan is a logistical nightmare without secure supply lines, and the country is simply too large and American forces too small to create a NATO presence among the whole population. The main excuse for our involvement, as stated by Secretary Clinton and by Holbrooke,is to prevent the Taliban from taking power in Pakistan, but since 1) much of the Pakistani government has always wanted the Taliban in power in Afghanistan and 2) the Taliban has grown exponentially within Pakistan since we drove them out of Afghanistan, I am not convinced that that argument makes any sense. Holbrooke's 1985 oral history effectively described his own frustration at trying to get the reality of the situation across to higher ups, including President Johnson. While I have no specific information on this point, I am afraid today younger Americans may be having the same trouble with him.

This post has already ranged widely, but I shall make one more unrelated comment. During the election campaign last fall I had one recurring thought. Every time I saw, or heard about, a small child, it occurred to me that if Obama won--as he did--the youth of America would grow up without seeing anything odd or unusual about a black President in the White House. Sadly, I see now that I was wrong. The disgraceful, hysterical response to the President's decision to make a brief speech to schoolchildren on Tuesday shows that many parents are failing a basic test of citizenship: to teach their children some essential respect for our government and those who have been elected to it. It is already clear that, like Lincoln and Roosevelt, Obama will face paranoid, utterly unreasoned opposition, derision and hatred until the day he leaves office. Yet those examples show that such opposition need not prevent the President from doing what has to be done. Meanwhile, despite their parents' opposition, some of today's youth will grow up to revere the first President whom they remember. Three years ago, James Macgregor Burns explained to me that his family were rock-ribbed Republicans.

A Guest contribution

2009-09-04T12:02:00.003-04:00

As of this moment, 324 people have visited this blog this morning, making a total of over 3500 since Monday, which I am pretty certain is a record by a wide margin. Most of them, sadly, have come here thanks to an anonymously written right-wing email that some one attributed to myself last spring. Because the hysterical campaign against the President is growing in volume, the circulation of the email is growing as well. (You can read the full history of the email here.\\

Meanwhile, however, the increased traffic has in one way or another brought interested people to the site, people with something to say about health care and other issues. One such just posted a comment--and I would like to ask everyone who gets here today to go ahead and read it and ask yourself if you are really satisfied with the health care in this country.

My thanks to the author, whose story is far more eloquent on this topic than I could ever be.

"Re NHS services in the U.K: Our daughter spent six months (2002-2003) as an undergrad student at Pembroke College in Cambridge. We were urged to purchase student health insurance coverage for her despite the presence of NHS in England, and we did so. It was a waste of money. She had one brief illness while there and did consult with a physician. As with David's experience above, she found the NHS the way to go, and also found that her "insurance" was more of a hindrance than help.

"We are a blue collar couple in our late 50's. My husband is clinging to his physically demanding job despite severe rheumatoid arthritis that leaves him in pain at the end of each work day. Every time he sees his rheumatologist he's told to quit. He stays because our health insurance is tied to his job and because I also have a chronic condition that would go untreated without insurance. We have a profoundly autistic son who was just kicked off our insurance arbitrarily at age 22, despite our repeated compliance in providing physician's forms certifying that he is never going to be able to care for himself. If his care defaults to Medi-Cal, he will not be able to see his present neurologist for care of epilepsy and our area has no other neurologists who will accept Medi-Cal as payment. He will also be refused dental care (but cannot speak to tell us when his teeth hurt). We lost our home years ago as a result of having to pay childhood medical bills for our son during the very early years of the explosion of autism--years when insurance companies classified autism as a non-covered mental illness. Doctors in every specialty including family practice who accept Medi-Cal are all but nonexistent in our area. I'll be spending today working to again prove our autistic son's disability to the insurance company.

"Meanwhile, our grad student daughter's (History, U.C. Irvine)insurance comes & goes, entirely dependent on when she is actively working as an instructor as opposed to periods of fellowship work on her PhD. She is the poster child for starving student; she's done it all on her own because she had to, but she is also only one serious illness away from losing all she has worked so hard for.

"Our oldest son followed his father into a service trade and has a wife and two children. While the trade is one that blessedly has not yet experienced deep layoffs, our greatest collective fear as a family is loss of that all important job--not because we could not eat or pay the rent (we'd figure that out) but because we'd lose our health care.

"Something must change, and I voted for change. I pray that President Obama hits this one out of the metaphorical park. We need it.

"I arrived here as a result of that awful forwarded email. I'm glad I found your blog. I'm not a regular on any blog, but I enjoy your insight and will return!"

In response I am going to share a story of my own.

William Strauss, as many of you know, was my college classmate, close friend, adn the co-author of the theory of generations and turnings upon which so many of these commentaries is based. He actually earned his living for the last 25 years or so of his life as the producer of the comedy troop, the Capitol Steps. He and his co-owner provided a health plan to all the members of the troop--about 25 of them I think.

In 1999 Bill got pancreatic cancer. Fortunately he was a candidate for a new procedure that initially restored him to full health and left his pancreas cancer-free for the rest of his life. However, within a few years the cancer was in his liver as well, and between 1999 and 2007, when he died, he had several chemotherapy treatments that required significant hospitalizations. The interesting part of the story is that just a couple of years after his operation, as I recall it, the insurance company informed the Capitol Steps that there was going to be an enormous increase in their group premium--more than 100%, as I remember. It was obvious what was happening: they wanted to recover the money they had had to pay out on Bill's treatment! Since the enterprise could not afford the increase, Bill dropped out of the plan--fortunately he was able to get insurance through his wife, a public servant. Otherwise he would have gone bankrupt, died years earlier than he did, or both.

Yes, readers, there is a very serious health care problem in America that needs--I will not shrink from the word--a radical solution.

A Report from the Trenches

2009-08-30T10:15:00.003-04:00

But I must begin once again with the matter that has quadrupled the traffic here at historyunfolding: the totally fraudulent email that has been circulating since around April, attributing a right-wing rant comparing President Obama to Adolf Hitler to myself. May I ask anyone who has received it to go back to the email they received, hit "reply all," and inform all recipients that it is a forgery whose origins are explained at snopes.com.

About ten days ago, after blogging about the failure of Democrats to organize for health care, I emailed both my Senators, Jack Reed and Sheldon Whitehouse, asking them to stand firmly for the public option. My reward last Monday was an invitation to attend a town hall in the northern part of the state which both of them planned to attend. It took place on Wednesday evening at a senior center and proved to be a most educational experience.

I arrived a little later than I had planned and only barely managed to find a parking space. A small contingent of right-wingers was on hand with signs and literature at the door, including some followers of Lyndon Larouche, who twenty years ago competed with the hare krishnas for space at unsecured airports. Spaghetti, meatballs and salad were provided, and I stood up rather than retreat into a distant corner where there might be a chair. Both Senators were in shirtsleeves and tieless. I was very proud of them both.

They began the way the argument should be done: health reform isn't an experiment or a question of doing good, it's a necessity. Whitehouse gave some of the chilling figures (I didn't take notes) on escalating costs. As I recall, our spending on health care has doubled in less than a decade and is on the pace to do the same. This has put a crippling economic burden on many businesses, led, of course, by the auto industry. Meanwhile, the number of uninsured is increasing (and that, as we learned later, is actually contributing significantly to increased costs.) Then came questions. The crowd, naturally, was composed of a majority of seniors, but included a number of young people as well.

The first question--and probably the majority of them--came from a dedicated, hostile conservative, who protested that at previous meetings, both Senators had expressed their support for the bill. While he complained bitterly that he and others did not want the bill passed and did not want the government messing in his health benefits, he (and many subsequent questioners) never acknowledged that there might be a substantial constituency of Americans who disagreed with him, or even bothered to threaten the two Democrats with a loss of support in the next election. His own righteousness, it seemed, should be enough to determine their vote. Both replied very calmly that they thought that something had to be done. Quite a few of the conservative questioners routinely mischaracterized the bill, making statements that simply assumed that it constituted a government takeover of the health care system. Some seniors talked that way too. Whitehouse and Reed did allow themselves the luxury of asking everyone what health benefit they had, and when many seniors replied, "Medicare," there were chuckles around the room.

Foreign health care systems came up. A 75-year old immigrant from Germany explained that his adult life had been evenly split between there and the United States, and spoke up for the kind of guaranteed care his homeland offered. "Many Americans," he said, "think they have insurance until they suddenly need it." He added that his wife's small business had had to stop offering coverage because it had become too expensive. But a younger woman, who had with her a young son who she said had cerebral palsy, claimed to have spent some time in Britain under the National Health system, and talked about how hard it was to get an appointment and how afraid she was to cancel it. (I began to wonder, on my way home, about that story, and whether in fact temporary residents can take advantage of British national health. Any comments would be appreciated.) The conservative opposition maintained an undertone of anger throughout the whole meeting, groaning, exclaiming, and challenging the two very unflappable elected officials at every turn.

Yet it gradually became clear that there were plenty of Administration supporters at the meeting as well--including several health care professionals. One nurse talked about the expense of care, and referred specifically to "what is done to patients, not for patients." In response, Senator Whitehouse talked about a move a few years back (when he was a state official) to upgrade intensive care units around the state. A half million dollars of new equipment, he said, could potentially save millions of dollars a year--and hospital administrators had actually said that it would not be easy for them to sacrifice such a large revenue stream! A young doctor, who supported reform and even a single-payer system, quoted an older doctor to the effect that he couldn't understand why he had been so opposed to Medicare, since it had made him so much money. He also told an amazing story of a patient without insurance who needed a month or two of continuous treatment for an infection of some time. Because he lacked insurance, the patient was not eligible for treatment at home and would spend that time in the hospital, at enormously increased cost. Several people spoke in favor of a single-payer system but the Senators said that it was simply not possible politically.

The crowd also included about five white-coated medical students from Brown University, and Whitehouse called on them. They spoke up very effectively for reform and cost control as well. It was interesting, it occurred to me, that while half a century ago doctors were leading the opposition to Medicare, now the insurance companies had become the main stumbling block to reform. I am also seeing and hearing more and more stories, including a recent one about stents on NPR, indicating a great deal of disagreement among doctors about how, and why, patients are given expensive care. By this time I was hoping to be called upon and had decided what I was going to say.

I was among the last called. The questioner before me was an elderly woman (though a most energetic one) who had printed out eight talking points from a conservative website, and who insisted upon reading them all. (By the time she got to "five" the crowd was rumbling, but the Senators made no attempt to interrupt her and she was not to be deterred.) They tried to respond to several of them. Then Whitehouse called on me.

I identified myself and my home town and said that I have been living in Rhode Island for almost 20 years (I wanted to mention that because my accent does not show it), and that I felt very lucky to have two Senators who were trying to address this very serious problem in a calm and rational manner. First, I said, I wanted to say about a word about Medicare. I was a few years away from taking advantage of it, I said, but I was old enough to remember when it was passed. A coalition of Democrats and liberal Republicans passed it over the violent objections of conservatives who said that it was socialist, un-American, and liable to take away our freedom--an argument made in particular by Ronald Reagan in one of his standard speeches. "I hope everyone in this room," I said, "especially the undecided people here--all three of you [that got a good laugh]--will think about whether we would be better off if we had listened to the Barry Goldwaters and the Ronald Reagans and the Richard Nixons and never passed Medicare." (At that point, a few younger conservatives said, "Yes!") Then I turned to my own biggest complaint: the advertising of prescription drugs. I didn't mind, I said, that my benefit contributions and Medicare contributions were paying for other peoples' Cialis and Viagara, but I most certainly did mind that they were also paying for millions and millions of ads for those products that I saw every time I watched a major sporting event. Surely, I said, patients knew when something was wrong, and doctors should be able to prescribe the proper treatment. I asked how many people realized that the drug companies spend more money on marketing than on r & d. I said I was amazed this wasn't a bigger issue in the current debate. Reed replied that the only proposal on the table was one that would tax the money the drug companies spent on ads. Several people immediately approached me to say how much they agreed with that point.

The meeting concluded shortly thereafter and Reed, who lives in my town, approached me. I said the meeting confirmed my fear about the debate--"all the intensity is on the other side." He replied that that was why Ted Kennedy had been so sorely missed this year. I said some one had to take up the slack.

Kennedy's name brings up another issue which the Republicans have successfully made it a taboo to raise--the unknown amount of money spent on dubious care in the last year of life. A Times story on Friday on Kennedy's treatment made this point very effectively. Kennedy had the most common and most lethal form of brain tumor, for which there is no cure. Treatment improved some years ago when local radiation was substituted for irradiating the whole brain. But the chemotherapy he received was approved after a study showed that it improved median survival from one year to fourteen months. That such a result can lead to the approval of a drug--instead of an instruction to the drug company to keep working in the hopes of coming up with something better--is in my opinion a very significant symptom of what is wrong with American health care. Personally I am quite confident that if I had such a diagnosis I would be sure to find out how much the treatment could be expected to extend my life--and that if it could not, at least for some time, restore me to something resembling full health, I would refuse it. (Because of some diagnostic problems of my own a few years back, incidentally, I have been close enough to that situation to have had that belief tested in real life, and it held up.) Sadly, all the Republican lies about "death panels" have made it extremely difficult to even discuss these issues, but they are a big part of the problem.

With the help of that story, I plan to raise that question at another town hall some day. Meanwhile, the experience confirmed what I have been saying here in spades. The battle for reform is a battle between reason on the one hand and raw emotion on the other. A vote on reform, I think, would have produced a pretty evenly divided result in that meeting, and quite possibly a majority in favor. An applause meter would have registered a significant majority against. Face to face with their constituents, Whitehouse and Reed kept their cool as ably as any general under fire, and for that I admired them. But Reed was right: some one has to step into the void that the death of our Massachusetts neighbor has left.

The End of an Era

2009-08-29T09:19:00.002-04:00

I have a very great deal to write about today, and may even divide it into two posts, one today and one tomorrow. But I must begin once again with the matter that has quadrupled the traffic here at historyunfolding: the totally fraudulent email that has been circulating since around April, attributing a right-wing rant comparing President Obama to Adolf Hitler to myself. In addition to making me far more widely known than any of my books, this email has given me, interestingly enough, an indicator of the strength and virulence of conservative activism. For a while back in June it had raised hits on the blog from about 90 a day to about 300, but during July they had fallen back to about 200 a day. Now, undoubtedly because of the health care controversy, they have surged again, and during the last seven days there have been more than 3500 hits here, which I think must be a new record. I am also receiving more frequent phone calls from Americans--usually elderly Americans--who want to compliment me on my supposed insights, and my namesake in another university, who also gets a few emails on the topic every week, got one that asked if I had ever thought of running for President. (For the record, no.) I keep waiting for Rush Limbaugh, who has been shamelessly pushing the Obama-Hitler comparison himself, to call me to talk it over, but perhaps his researchers are smart enough to do the quick google search that will bring them here or to snopes.com and learn the truth. In any case, conservatives are clearly agitating in cyberspace at a pace which liberals are not matching.

But the big news this week, of course, is the death of Senator Ted Kennedy, which has affected me far more than I would have thought. Of the three Kennedy brothers who at least made it to 30 he was the one I had not studied in detail, and I had never regarded him as presidential timber. His loss is however a shock because he is the only political figure of whom I had been continuously aware for more than 49 years, since I began reading about the Kennedy family in the 1960 campaign. He has been in the US Senate since I was 15, and he is a link, in many ways, to the more distant past. I shall now try to place him generationally and historically.

Two things about Teddy stand out in historical perspective: he belonged to what Strauss and Howe called an Artist or adaptive generation--those who spend their childhoods in periods of great crisis--and he was for decades a critical figure in our national legislature who never became President. The previous analogous generations in our national life were the Compromise generation, born in the last third of the eighteenth century, and the Progressive generation, born from about 1842 to 1862. It is in the Compromise generation, I think, that Kennedy's closest analogues can be found, specifically Henry Clay of Kentucky and John Quincy Adams from his own Massachusetts.

Although Adams did serve one term as President, his life shows more external parallels to Teddy's. To begin with, he owed his eminence, obviously, to his family connections, which gave him some diplomatic experience as a child (both his and Teddy's fathers represented the U.S. in London), and enabled him to reach the U.S. Senate at the age of 36. But he broke with the Federalist Party in 1808 and was soon dispatched by Madison to be Minister to Russia, where he played an important part in events leading to France's invasion of Russia in 1812 and Napoleon's downfall. Under Monroe, he became Secretary of State and is sometimes credited with the actual inspiration for the Monroe Doctrine.

Adams' first run for the Presidency in 1824 was actually not that much more successful than Teddy's only try in 1980. The party system had broken down at that point and Adams came in second, in both the popular and electoral votes, among four Democratic candidates, trailing Andrew Jackson in both. For the second and last time in our history the House of Representatives decided the election, and the fourth candidate, Henry Clay, who could not receive any votes, threw his support to Adams, who was elected. Jackson was outraged, all the more so when Clay became Adams' Secretary of State (and therefore, according to the precedent of the last quarter century, chosen successor as well.) Adams, whose Presidency therefore ranks as one of the three most disputed in our history, along with Rutherford B. Hayes and George W. Bush, never recovered from these circumstances--he was unpopular throughout his term and Jackson trounced him in 1828.

Adams' defeat was a terrible personal blow, because he believed he had found the solution to the great problem which, as he saw it, the United States had to solve: slavery. A vast national transportation system, he thought, could bring industry to the south, unify the country, and lead eventually to abolition. His defeat at the hands of a southerner seemed to put an end to such plans, but he did not retire. Instead he was elected to the House of Representatives as a Whig in 1830, and served there until his sudden death early in 1848. It is that part of his life which bears the most striking resemblance to Ted Kennedy's, especially in the last 28 years of Teddy's life.

What national health care was for Kennedy, slavery became for Adams. A few years ago I read a remarkable book by William Lee Miller, Arguing About Slavery, which focused on Adams' years in the House. The issue upon which Adams emerged as a leader was the annual presentation of anti-slavery petitions from abolitionist societies to the House of Representatives. So fearful of any frank discussion of slavery were the southern representatives that they habitually ruled such positions out of order, claiming that the subject could not be discussed by the national legislature. Over the course of more than a decade, Adams struggled to find a majority against this provision, and he eventually prevailed, opening the way for the great debates that led ultimately to the Civil War. Miller also showed, remarkably, that Adams, after much thought, had predicted how slavery would be abolished: either the federal government would be forced to intervene to subdue a widespread slave revolt, or the South would secede to preserve slavery, leading to civil war. In either case, the war power of the President would allow him to proclaim emancipation--exactly what happened when Abraham Lincoln, whose only term in the House coincided with Adams' last, came into office thirteen years after Adams' death. Meanwhile, he served as the chairman of several important committees, like Kennedy. And in 1841 he successfully argued the Amistad case before the Supreme Court, freeing a shipload of slaves who had overwhelmed their masters and managed to reach the northern United States. It is the role of Adams as the man who kept the slavery issue alive, helped bring it to the forefront of national politics, and anticipated its solution, which puts me most in mind of Ted Kennedy's role in health care, whose climax lies ahead.

Clay, born in 1777--ten years after Adams--came from very modest origins, but like Teddy, was certainly a boy wonder in politics. While Teddy was 31 when elected to the Senate in 1962, Clay was actually elected to fill out a term in 1806 when he was only 29! (He reached the legal age of 30 before Congress convened.) Elected as a Kentucky representative in 1811, he was immediately elected Speaker of the House--something that has never happened before or since--and played a major role in getting the US into the calamitous War of 1812. He remained speaker until 1824, when as we have seen his lost his first bid for the Presidency and became Secretary of State. In 1831 he was elected once again to the Senate where he remained for the rest of his life.

Clay played in the Senate the same role as Kennedy, that of the skilled legislature who worked on both sides of the aisle. He believed in a relatively strong national government, in a national transport network (what was then called "internal improvements"), and in the gradual emancipation of the slaves, which he also practiced in his own life. He enjoyed both liquor and gambling. He was the idol of a younger generation of anti-slavery Whigs, including both Horace Greeley, the newspaper editor, and Abraham Lincoln, who had begun his life in Clay's Kentucky. ("I revered Abraham Lincoln," Greeley wrote after both men were dead, "but I loved Harry Clay.") His last and most famous achievement was the Compromise of 1850, which admitted California as a free state and helped save the union for another ten years. Like Kennedy, he was the last great proponent of bipartisanship of his time, a man whose personal qualities allowed him to rise above controversy despite his own belief in issues.

For almost unique historical reasons, Edward Kennedy was that rarest of animals in modern American politics, a liberal with independent financial means and a totally safe seat. He used that position to keep the idea of liberalism alive until its time might come once again. In his last political master stroke, he realized that Barack Obama rather than Hillary Clinton held the key to the future, and helped swing the Democratic nomination Obama's way. (And although the President is weathering a heavy storm at the moment, I have not the slightest doubt that she would face opposition at least as heated, and that she would deal with it with much less grace.) And meanwhile, as so many articles have shown, he was a tireless legislator, truly interested (as his brothers never seemed to be) in the details of laws and their impacts, and enjoying the Senate for what it was.

On Wednesday night I attended a Town Hall about health care in another part of my state, hosted by both our Senators, Jack Reed and Sheldon Whitehouse. That most interesting experience will be the subject of another post, but I shall mention now that I had a chance to speak to Senator Reed. The meeting, I said, had illustrated the problem the Administration faces: while much of the country wants health reform, all the intensity seems to be on the other side. "That's where we miss Teddy," he said. So we do--and it is hard to think of any Boomer Democratic Senators whose speeches have aroused any particular attention. They must now step forward. Members of Artist generations, having been born during one crisis, almost never live through another one, and certainly not at an age when they can play a major part in events. Kennedy did what he could, and now it is up to us.

Perspectives on the Health Care Debate

2009-08-21T11:17:00.002-04:00

[I must again inform new visitors, brought here by an email circulating under my name that compares President Obama to Adolf Hitler, that I did not write that completely fraudulent email. For comments on it see the post, "A Great Fear," below. For more information on it see snopes.com/politics/soapbox/proportions.asp.
Not since 1935, the year of the Wagner Act and of Social Security, or 1964 and the great Civil Rights Act, has the Congress faced such a critical choice as it does now. The passage or failure of effective health care reform will determine the direction that the country takes for a long time. One can understand the debate from several related perspectives, both constitutional and geographic.

Ten or twenty years ago I read an interesting article in the New Republic arguing that the Senate had turned into the fatal flaw in our constitutional system, because it gave too much power to tiny states, many of which had little involvement in the great problems of modern life. Because those states were white and lacked industry, they were largely Republican, and their Senators played key roles in blocking liberal legislation and demoralizing Democrats around the country, the article argued. I thought the argument was interesting, and it certainly occurred to me in 2000 that the Senate--and the 100 electoral votes it represents--was the only thing that had made the lamentable presidential election of that year even close. George Bush beat Al Gore not only because he managed to escape with Florida's electoral votes, but because he carried 29 states to Gore's 22 (counting DC), giving him 14 more electoral votes unrelated to population. Take away those 102 electoral votes and Gore would have won. I am not sure but I suspect that is the only election in which this has occurred.

Now, however, this problem is re-emerging. The House, apportioned by population, seems ready to pass health care reform and the Democratic leadership is committed to a public option. In the Senate key positions are held by two Democrats from very small (in population) states, Max Baucus of Montana and Keith Conrad of North Dakota. Conrad in particular is trying to stop the public option and claims the votes for it are not in the Senate. When one thinks about this, especially in contrast to the two earlier great crises in American life in the 1860s and the 1930s, some interesting differences occur.

Differences between small and large states were far less significant in the mid-19th century, largely because the United States was still overwhelmingly agricultural. The main difference, of course, was between slave and free states. The smaller free states of the west opposed slavery for some of the same reasons as the larger states of the North: they wanted to preserve their own land for free labor and small farmers. (Ironically, the strength of the Democratic Party in the North was largely in urban immigrant populations, who disliked the Yankee elites and particularly despised black people.) Similarly, in the 1930s the depression had devastated farmers everywhere, enabling Roosevelt to put together a truly national coalition because he saved people all over the country from foreclosure and starvation. The paradox today is that those who need help the most--the citizens of the red states, including the smaller ones in the upper midwest and the mountain states, but especially in the South--have become most distrustful of the government and of the educated elites. The problem the President faces is to convince those people that broader, reformed health insurance will improve their lives, and it is not clear, in the current climate, that he can do so.

A second, unrelated problem may be equally serious. The New Deal, the New Frontier and the Great Society grew in tandem with the American labor movement, which provided much of the lobbying support and the votes for their programs. Over the last 40 years, as I have noted many times, unions in the private sector have suffered a spectacular decline. That is why, in my opinion, the right seems to be out-organizing the left during the health care controversy, successfully packing town meetings and turning them into bear-baitings similar to the confrontations I saw as a student more than 40 years ago between university Administrators and the SDS. (I'll be posting on that soon.)

There seem to me to be three sides to the health care debate right now. One is the insurance industry, determined once again to avoid real reform and to protect its profits, and its equally powerful allies in the drug industry. They are of course heavy contributors to all sorts of key legislators (including Max Baucus), and they are probably helping orchestrate the town hall protests (see below.) They are allied, as the President recognized on Thursday, with the Republican Party, which wants to replay the scenario of 1993-4 when its determined opposition sank the Clinton health care plan and paved the way for victory in the 1994 Congressional elections. And the strength of that party is among the roughly 30% of the population which evidently cannot reconcile itself to the election of Barack Obama and will therefore believe the most absurd accusations about him and the health care program--the ones who are providing the troops for the town hall meetings. Most of them are relatively elderly, although there are exceptions, like the young woman who asked Barney Frank why he continued to support Obama's "Nazi plan" the other day. (Frank's reply should be seen on youtube.) On the other side are younger, more educated Americans who want to see the new President bring intelligence, analysis, and sanity into various aspects of national policy. They have not found a way to make their voices heard yet.

We do not have a smoking gun regarding the health care industry's campaign, but one did emerge this week regarding another key issue, the cap and trade bill. The American Petroleum Institute has circulated a memo to all its members describing its strategy against the bill. It deserves to be quoted in full.

COPY OF EMAIL FROM AMERICAN PETROLEUM INSTITUTE TO ITS
MEMBERSHIP - OBTAINED BY GREENPEACE – AUGUST 2009
Dear API Member Company CEO/Executive,
As I have outlined in the past few editions of the weekly
“Executive Update,” API is coordinating a series of “Energy
Citizen” rallies in about 20 states across the country
during the last two weeks of Congress’s August recess. Most
of these will be held at noontime, though some may be at
different times in order to piggyback on other events.
Thanks to the leadership of API’s Executive Committee, I am
pleased to report that we have strong support for this
first-ever effort moving ahead. Now we are asking all API
members to get involved.
The objective of these rallies is to put a human face on the
impacts of unsound energy policy and to aim a loud message
at those states’ U.S. Senators to avoid the mistakes
embodied in the House climate bill and the Obama
Administration’s tax increases on our industry. Senate
Majority Leader Senator Harry Reid reportedly has pushed
back consideration of climate legislation to late September
to allow Senators time to get their constituents’ views
during the August recess. It’s important that our views be
heard.
At the rallies, we will focus our message on two points: the
adverse impacts of unsound energy policy (e.g., Waxman-
Markey-like legislation, tax increases, and access
limitations) on jobs and on consumers’ energy costs. And we
will call on the Senate to oppose unsound energy policy and
“get it right.”
Recent opinion research that Harris Interactive conducted
for API demonstrates that our messages on Waxman-Markey-like
legislation work extremely well and are very persuasive with
the general public and policy influentials. After hearing
that Waxman-Markey-like legislation could increase the costs
of gasoline to around $4 and lead to significant job losses,
these audiences changed their opinions on the bill
significantly. Opposition to the bill within the policy
influentials cohort grew 23 points, from 40% to 63%; with a
19 point increase in those who now “strongly” oppose the
legislation. The data clearly demonstrate the softness of
support of the current approach and very strong opposition
when people are educated about the potential job losses and
energy cost increases. Our expectation is to translate
peoples’ real concerns for job losses and increased energy
costs to all unsound proposals (e.g., Waxman-Markey-like
legislation, tax increases, and access limitations).
We have identified 11 states with a significant industry
presence and 10 other states where we have assets on the
ground. We also have attracted allies from a broad range of
interests: the Chamber of Commerce and NAM , the trucking
industry, the agricultural sector, small business, and many
others, including a significant number of consumer groups,
which have pledged to have their membership join in the
events in states where they have a strong presence. We also
are collaborating closely with the allied oil and natural
gas industry associations on these events.
While such efforts are never easy and the risk of failure is
always present, we must move aggressively in preparation for
the post-Labor Day debate on energy, climate and taxes.
The measure of success for these events will be the
diversity of the participants expressing the same message,
as well as turnouts of several hundred attendees. In the 11
states with an industry core, our member company local
leadership—including your facility manager’s commitment to
provide significant attendance—is essential to achieving the
participation level that Senators cannot ignore. In
addition, please include all vendors, suppliers,
contractors, retirees and others who have an interest in our
success.
To be clear, API will provide the up-front resources to
ensure logistical issues do not become a problem. This
includes contracting with a highly experienced events
management company that has produced successful rallies for
presidential campaigns, corporations and interest groups. It
also includes coordination with the other interests who
share our views on the issues, providing a field coordinator
in each state, conducting a comprehensive communications and
advocacy activation plan for each state, and serving as
central manager for all events.
We are asking all API members to assist in these August
activities. The size of the company does not matter, and
every participant adds to the strength of our collective
voice. We need two actions from each participating company.
ACTION NEEDED
Please provide us with the name of one central coordinator
for your company’s involvement in the rallies. (We will look
to this person as your representative to assist the overall
effort.) If you will let me know ASAP, we can be in touch
quickly and provide that person with additional details
about the project.
Please indicate to your company leadership your strong
support for employee participation in the rallies.
(Unfortunately, we are already experiencing some delay from
your regional people since they are not yet aware that
headquarters supports the effort.) I believe that expression
of support to your company leadership is a fundamental
predicate to organizing quickly and achieving success in
this endeavor.
The list of tentative venues is attached. Please treat this
information as sensitive and ask those in your company to do
so as well, as some of these places may be subject to
change, and we don’t want critics to know our game plan. You
can assume with confidence that the advocates for Waxman-
Markey-like legislation and the critics of oil and gas are
going to be very active, particularly during the August
recess.
Once the list of venues and exact rally dates are
determined, we will contact your company’s coordinator to
distribute the information internally and to coordinate
transportation to the venues, if required, for your
employees. In the meantime, your company’s coordinator could
assist us by telling us in which of the venues listed below
your company has facilities or employees who can
participate.
I look forward to working with you to make the August rally
project and the other advocacy steps we are undertaking to
deliver the policy outcomes we support with measurable
results. Don’t hesitate to call me with questions.
All the best,
JACK
Jack N. Gerard
President & CEO
API
Tentative Venues
Houston TX
Perry GA
Detroit MI
Roswell NM
Greensboro NC
Farmington NM
Ohio (venue being finalized)
Greeley CO
Nashville TN
Indiana (venue being finalized)
Bismarck ND
Tampa FL
Sioux Falls SD
Greenville SC
Anchorage AK
Joliet IL
Charleston WV
Fairfax VA
Philadelphia PA
Lincoln NE
Missouri TBD
Arkansas TBD

What strikes me about this is the complete lack of interest in the details of the Administration's proposal--just repeated references to "Waxman-Markey like legislation," which is by definition bad. Greenpeace, which discovered the memo, pointed out that the $4 gasoline estimate comes from a study by the Heritage Foundation, which receives much of its funding from oil companies as well. The insurance industry has presumably sent out similar instructions. Because most educated, professional Americans of liberal views are not organized and because unions have become so weak, they--like myself, for instance--aren't getting any comparable instructions. That's a problem. Roosevelt's reforms faced the same mixture of determined and hysterical opposition, much of it from older Americans as well. He however rode into office on a much bigger wave of discontent, and even increased his majorities in Congress after the first two years of the New Deal. He made the United States the first truly advanced industrial nation in economic and social policy. The question now is whether we will fall out of the ranks of those nations.

The Battle for the Soul of America

2009-08-14T09:42:00.004-04:00

14 years of acquaintance with Strauss and Howe's books prepared me for the current crisis in American life, but could not (by the nature of their theories, actually) predict exactly what form it would take. They proposed an organic theory of atrophy, death and rebirth--but the new United States now being born was as unpredictable as the personality of a new child, since it will carry, in one way or another, all our DNA in combinations we cannot predict. Meanwhile, the two previous crises in our national life--the Civil War and the Roosevelt era--provide some basis for comparison. We are off to a most depressing start, and health care reform is beginning to look like the first Battle of Bull Run, but the struggle is going to be a long one.

That we are seeing a battle of reason against emotion is becoming clearer and clearer. The President, as Paul Krugman pointed out this morning came to office believing that he could inspire a change in the tone of our politics so that we could work together to solve our very real problems. He has failed to do so, albeit through no fault of his own, because he faces a Republican opposition that has defined him and all his plans as evil by nature. Anyone who doubts this should simply listen to one hour of Rush Limbaugh. Since in his view Obama is determined to establish a dictatorship, there is no reason to believe anything that the President actually says, much less to acknowledge that he might (for instance, with the cash-for-clunkers program, which has actually given the Ford motor company a huge boost) have done some good. Millions of Americans obviously share that view--and did before Obama ever took office, as illustrated by the fraudulent email, first published the week after the election, that has brought many of you here. Nor is this all. Today's Times also included a fine piece of front-page journalism on the origins of the "death panel" rumor. That rumor had nothing to do with the text of the health care bill--it began months before one was written, fueled by the simple belief that since Obama favored abortion rights he must be in favor of genetic culling and euthanasia as well.

Sarah Palin's endorsement and inflation of that rumor, by the way, can be matched with another piece of information that surfaced this week that confirms what she really is: a professional hate-monger who enjoys being as inflammatory as possible. That information, published in a new book about the 2008 campaign, is a sequence of text messages between her and the McCain campaign staff (who apparently designated her as agitator-in-chief while keeping the candidate on the high road, in the best Eisenhower/Nixon and Nixon/Agnew manner.) The sequence--featured this week by Gary Trudeau on his Doonesbury site--follows.

"[Obama] is someone who sees America as imperfect enough to pal around with terrorists who targeted their own country."
-- text sent to Sarah Palin by McCain staff during '08 election

"Yes yes yes. Pls let me say this!!!"
-- Palin's e-mailed response

"It was awesome."
-- Palin, in another e-mail after delivering the lines

How could such a person resist the idea that the President wanted to put her child to death?

Now the impact of the "death panel" campaign does not bode well. Republicans on the Senate Finance Committee, identified this week in yet another Times story as the place where the real health care negotiations are happening, now want to drop the actual proposal, which simply would have require to pay for an end-of-life consultation if patients desired one. Today Limbaugh immediately jumped triumphantly upon this--how could the death panels have been dropped if they had never existed in the first place? In addition, the media are not helping matters, because the hostile protests at town hall meetings, rather than the content of various proposals, have now become "the story" of the hour. The Times (yet again) contributed to this on Wednesday. On the previous day the President had held a town hall in New Hampshire while Arlen Specter held one in central Pennsylvania. Specter's made page 1 while the President's was buried inside--the only possible reason being that Specter's crowd was much more hostile. This plays into the hands of the Republicans, who enjoy provoking outrageous behavior, which in turn allows them to complain that they are being misrepresented by the media (which Limbaugh now refers to as the "state-run" media.) That the atmosphere of the meetings, rather than the content of the bill, has taken over the news represents a major Republican victory.

It seems quite possible that all this may culminate in actual acts of violence. Another piece of required reading this week is the report of the Southern Poverty Law Center on the resurgent militia movement, now more closely allied than ever to white supremacists in the wake of Obama's elections. Armed men have been showing up at town hall meetings.

Meanwhile the President continues to try to remain largely above the fray. Krugman's column today, linked above, argues clearly that this simply cannot work. This is a classic generational divide. Krugman, like me, is a Boomer who enjoys calling a spade a spade rather than a shovel, and whose instincts are to meet fire with fire. That, as I showed a couple of weeks ago, was what FDR did when his achievements only aroused greater and greater hatred. But Obama is a Gen Xer who does not give in to his emotions, and his style may indeed be more appealing to the younger generations, if he can find a way for them to make their weight felt in the health care and other debates. A little-noticed Gallup poll this week showed his popularity increasing to 60%. In last year's campaign for the Democratic nomination Obama proved to that quintessential Boomer Hillary Clinton that he was the smarter and wiser of the two. He may do the same to Krugman and myself, or, he may not.

Finance capital!

2009-08-08T14:39:00.002-04:00

Marxism has become awfully unfashionable in the last four decades, and not without good reason. Its utopian experiments have failed, and even in academia, where it was very strong (though hardly dominant) when I entered graduate school in 1971, it has been overtaken by more trendy ideologies involving gender and race. The experience of countries like the Soviet Union and China suggest that its visions simply do not reflect human nature, although the Chinese experiment has shown, to the surprise of many, how surprisingly it can evolve. Yet ironically, it has occurred to me over the last couple of months, one could argue that at no time have advanced countries seemed closer to confirming certain critical Marxist-Leninist hypotheses than right now.

Let us get one thing on the table first: Marxism would never have become so influential had not Marx come up with some world-historical insights of great importance. Marx understood both the significance of the bourgeois and capitalist revolutions--which were actually only just beginning in Germany when he began studying these questions--and some of the consequences that they were destined to have. The failure of regimes based upon his thinking should not blind us to the genius of some of his thought--for instance, with respect to the relations between the newly capitalist West and the rest of the world. Here, in one of his most striking passages, is how he and Engels described that iteration in the Communist Manifesto, written in 1848.

The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilised nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.

The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation. The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.

One must keep in mind that when this passage was published in 1848, the whole gigantic process it describes had barely begun. That is evidence both of the genius and the flaws in Marxist theory: while on the one hand Marx could see where certain only embryonic developments would lead, he also committed himself to a vision of a world transformed by further processes--the proletarian revolution--that had not yet even begun. Had he stuck to analyzing bourgeois capitalism and its consequences his work might have been more enduring. As it was it provided a foundation for various political movements, the most important of which was led by V. I. Lenin.

In 1917, at the height of the First World War, Lenin published Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism., many of whose ideas were borrowed from a bourgeois English critic of imperialism, J. A. Hobson. There were, as I recall, three major parts of Lenin's argument.

First, finance, rather than industry, had become, Lenin argued, the leading sector of capitalist economies. Secondly, having exhausted opportunities for investment at home, capital was forced to seek new markets for investment abroad, most notably in Asia and Africa. And thirdly, because finance capital controlled governments, the World War had broken out because of the efforts of the leading industrial powers to control larger shares of those critical new markets in poorer countries of the world.

Like Marx's passage about the worldwide impact of capitalism, these arguments had more than a grain of truth. Tragically, although the European nations, the United States and Japan did not need to control third world countries, the desire to do so was indeed large part of the reason for the outbreak (and the persistence) of the First World War. The Second World War grew out of German and Japanese attempts to find a different solution to the problem of resources and markets, by conquering autarkic empires. The capitalists, however, learned from their mistakes. For the last 60 years the industrialized world has accepted the political and military pre-eminence of the United States and the economically privileged status of the dollar, largely, I would argue, to avoid the kind of political and economic competition that had such disastrous consequences in the first half of the last century. Competition among capitalists did not become hopeless.

At the same time, capital, and production, have been flowing steadily to the Third World for a long time now, chasing cheap labor, just as Marx and Lenin had predicted. Again some cooperative relationships have emerged: China wisely (in my opinion) takes the dollars it accumulates by producing for our needs and invests them in American securities. But this process has actually brought about something that Marx predicted for industrial economies: the gradual impoverishment of the proletariat. In the middle of the last century, shaken by Fascism and Communism, the western nations wisely promoted trade unions and a variety of benefits for ordinary people. Now, especially here in the United States, unions and the good jobs they protected have been in headlong retreat for more than thirty years. Indeed, the whole drama of our current political crisis, as I have already argued here, revolves around the issue of whether the Obama Administration will actually be able to give the American working class a better life, or whether enough of them will be moved by anger and resentments to return the Republican Party to power.

But the last and most troubling aspect of Marxist Leninism at the moment has to do with finance capital. Our economy remains a mess. The President made a serious mistake yesterday, in my opinion, to suggest that the economic news in any way suggested that we were emerging from the recession. Jobs are still down and unemployed Americans are still on the rise. The only reason the unemployment rate dropped last month was that the total of those employed and seeking work fell, as more people dropped out of the labor force. I plan to investigate this situation more thoroughly this week; suffice it to say for the moment that things are not, as yet, improving.

Yet despite this, Wall Street has been in the midst of an extraordinary rally for months, and is threatening the 10,000 barrier again. Finance capital--as embodied in the big banks, also showing renewed profits, and Wall Street--suddenly seems to me to be more or less completely disconnected from the actual productive sectors of the economy, and from the life of ordinary Americans. This is a staggering and obviously very important development. The stock market began as a place where business firms could raise money they would repay in profits, but it now seems to be something very different, a speculative futures market which will go up as long as there is money to fuel it. And that money, of which there has been more than enough for the last six months or so, is not coming from any increase in economic activity. I am afraid, in fact, that it is coming from the enormous infusions of cash the Federal Reserve Board is putting into securities markets, and I read one article from the Wall Street Journal some time ago that suggested it was coming from the stimulus. The apparent lack of much connection between the fortunes of our financial giants and the American people strikes me as worthy of more investigation. It is not reassuring.

Marxism and Leninism are not the answer to our current woes--but I do not think we know what the answer is. I am not sure anyone really understands our economy as it has evolved, or how to make it benefit the mass of Americans. I am sure we can make some progress, but only by admitting what we do not know.

The South, the poor South

2009-08-01T09:23:00.003-04:00

Slavery was America's original sin, one which four centuries of history have failed to extirpate. To be sure, the northern states secured its formal abolition in the bloodiest war in our history 150 years ago, and although the Civil War constitutional amendments failed to secure the rights of citizens for the freed slaves, the great civil rights acts finally corrected that problem. That did not, of course, end discrimination against black people, but it has allowed for enormous progress, culminating in Barack Obama's election. Yet it seems to me that slavery's most enduring effects, ironically, have fallen upon the descendants of those who owned the slaves, rather than the slaves themselves--and those effects still are a terrible burden to the American South.

One of my deepest beliefs--one which I cannot scientifically demonstrate--holds that human beings have an innate sense of equality--that they understand that the recognition we all crave depends upon extending that same recognition to others. That understanding, to be sure, eternally conflicts with other equally primal human feelings, such as the desire to rule; but it is there all the same. Although no other critic ever seems to have realized it, that belief, I argued in my undergraduate senior thesis, was the key to George Orwell's particular contribution to western thought, precisely because he had been denied that essential recognition throughout his childhood and understood its consequences. The Declaration of Independence, our founding document, specifically affirmed this in the enduring phrase that "all men are created equal"--and my blood boils at recent scholarship, by Gary Wills and others, that argues that the slaveholder Jefferson could not actually have meant what he said. The Founding Fathers were effective politicians, as well as theorists, because they could deal with contradictions between the real and the ideal. The American failure actually to implement that phrase, well known to Jefferson, did not, to him, invalidate it--it simply left us with more work to be done.

Jefferson's whole generation of slaveholders was in fact quite ambivalent about the practice, and many, like himself, freed their slaves in their wills. In the early 1800s Virginia came very close to passing a plan for gradual emancipation, but it narrowly failed. Then came two revolutionary developments: the cotton gin, and the rise of a generation of Southern Transcendentalists, who, like all Prophet generations (including Boomers) preferred to see life in absolute moral terms. They turned slavery, in their eyes, from a necessary evil to a positive good. The Southern Baptist and Southern Methodist churches split off so as to proclaim that slavery was an expression of God's law, and southern fire-eaters plotted the annexation of Cuba and the rest of Mexico to give slavery more scope. The Civil War resulted.

The South lost the war and the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment abolished slavery, but white southerners, driven perhaps by a very bad conscience as well as by economic interest, held to their beliefs on race and re-established white supremacy through insurgency and terror. With agriculture at the beginning of a long-term decline, the South already led the nation in poverty and trailed in every basic public service by 1900. It was by then pursuing a new regional economic strategy, using cheap labor (including not only blacks, but poor white children) to build a textile industry. Meanwhile, Birmingham, Alabama became an industrial center and Atlanta a commercial center--but the United States remained two nations.

The years 1933-65 now seem to me to embody a second great southern tragedy. Roosevelt's New Deal aimed to helping the poorest Americans, and many of them lived in the South. The Agricultural Adjustment Act, federal relief, and public works projects literally saved millions from possible starvation. The Rural Electrification Administration (whose work is lovingly described in the first volume of Robert Caro's biography of Lyndon Johnson) brought electric light to the South; the TVA developed a whole region. Such enormous works inevitably created a liberal white Southern constituency. Politicians like Lister Hill and Hugo Black of Alabama, Claude Pepper of Florida, Sam Rayburn and Lyndon Johnson from Texas, and quite a few more, were New Deal stalwarts. They won a number of important victories over more traditional Democrats, who saw both the New Deal and the slowly emerging civil rights movement as Communist attempts to mongrelize and destroy America--and a second generation followed. By the mid-1950s the two Senators from Tennessee, Estes Kefauver and Al Gore, Sr., were both liberal Democrats. Alabama had a Governor, Jim Folsom, who publicly championed the interests of blacks, arguing that as long as they were held down, poor whites would be held down with them. And even some of the more conservative Southern politicians of the mid-century era, such as Richard Russell of Georgia and Sam Ervin of South Carolina, were men of formidable intellect, quite capable of making real contributions to other areas of national life despite their hostility to civil rights. All this, however, did not stop the steady migration of black (and some poor white) southerners into northern industrial eras, especially during the two world wars. And on one critical point the South remained aloof--it was resolutely, implacably hostile to organized labor. According to a contemporary source, the main point of the Landrum-Griffin Act of 1959 was to make it impossible for the AFL-CIO to organize the South. It succeeded.

The civil rights acts of 1964 and 1965, sadly, turned out to have tragic consequences for the South--perhaps because too much of the white South was still not ready for them. White southerners in border and middle south states had been slowly moving towards the Republican party during the 1950s, and the civil rights movement and the legislation it secured accelerated that process. Hubert Humphrey won only one former Confederate or border state, Texas, in 1968, beginning a trend that dominated the next forty years. More importantly, "government" and "government programs" apparently became hopelessly associated in white southern minds with help for black Americans. Essentially the Reagan years spread a trend that had already begun in the south--a trend towards smaller government a lower taxes--to the country as a whole. Meanwhile, cheap labor and pro-business practices moved more and more enterprise southward, until the whole American textile and clothing industry operated below the Mason-Dixon line. That, too, is where foreign automakers began building non-union auto plants. With the decline of the rust belt, the migration trend of 1914-65 was reversed, and the South (and the Southwest) gained population and political influence. The only Democrats elected to the White House between 1964 and 2008 were southerners who could carry southern states.

In the last ten years all this has culminated in a new catastrophe--the de-industrialization of the South, thanks to NAFTA and the general movement of industry overseas. Regions that live by cheap labor, it turns out, die by cheap labor, because there is always somewhere where labor will be cheaper still. The election of 2008 drew a clear line around the deep South. Virginia and North Carolina, both of whom include substantial new urban and educated areas, voted narrowly for Obama, as did Florida, which is only partly a southern state at all. But the rest of the old Confederacy voted overwhelmingly for McCain, based on the same sad resentments that have controlled much of the poor white vote for most of the last 150 years. Republicans control all the Senator seats and the majority of the House seats from those regions--and there are no Richard Russells or Sam Ervins in this crop. The Sotomayor hearings displayed several of them before the nation, and they were of appallingly limited intellectual ability. That the Deep South now lives largely in a different mental universe is confirmed by a new poll on the question of whether Barack Obama was born in the U.S.A.--broken down by region.

Where all this has led can be seen in a front page story in today's New York Times, on the financial crisis in Jefferson County, Alabama, which may have to lay off 2/3 of its work force in the next few days. I did not recognize "Jefferson County" (as I would have recognized Fulton County, Georgia, or Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana) when I saw the headline and expected it to be depopulated and rural--but no, it includes Birmingham, and ranks as the wealthiest county in the state!. Several factors have contributed to its unprecedented crisis. The recession, of course, has hit every area of the country, but Jefferson County also lost enormous sums on a complicated financial deal designed to finance a sewer project--one that sounds a bit like Harvard's notorious interest-rate swap. In addition, the county has lost the right to levy a kind of income tax, upon which it relied beginning in the 1990s. The reporter's comments on that tax must be quoted:

"The tax that was ruled illegal, known as the occupational tax, is essentially a 0.5 percent tax on income, but the phrase “income tax” does not sit well with Alabamians. One of its peculiarities is that it exempts a long list of professionals like doctors and lawyers, as well as phrenologists, circus managers and crystal gazers. In 1999, state lawmakers from Jefferson County, who are allowed by legislative tradition to control the county’s ability to levy taxes, tried to earmark part of the money for their own projects, and the county balked.

"In response, the lawmakers voted to repeal the tax. But the county, buoyed by court rulings in its favor, continued to collect it, bringing in about $75 million last year — more than 25 percent of the county’s general fund."

Now the court has reversed itself and it is not clear that the legislature will restore it. The reporter discreetly left race out of her story almost completely, but I would assume that Jefferson County has a large black population which a Republican state legislature is not likely to want to help. What was once one of the most advanced economically (as well as the most bigoted racially) areas of the South has now been reduced, by long-standing southern political trends, to near anarchy. I suspect it will not be the last.

Crisis, in medical terms, leads either to death or to recovery, and this may be the last chance for the deep South to join the modern world. Parts seemed like they might do so during the New Deal, but sadly, racial prejudice wiped out that progress in much (though not all) of the region. Now, it seems to me, the old Confederacy faces another problem: most of its smarter folk, both black and white, have migrated away. There must somewhere be an opportunity in all this, however. If the Obama Administration can actually improve the lives of average white Southerners, it could deal a death blow to retrograde politics for a long time. If it can't, however, the possibility of a Republican resurgence remains--and that will mean that the rest of the country will move closer to the South once again, rather than the other way around.

Can reason beat emotion?

2009-07-26T09:24:00.003-04:00

The struggle over health care will, alas, take quite a while to have a significant effect on American lives no matter how it turns out--a political liability in an age of instant gratification. It represents both an attempt to begin to bring the United States closer to other major industrialized countries (and perhaps to keep the United States an industrial country at all), and an effort to restore a critical American political tradition that has been steadily eroding since the Great Society. The outcome remains extremely uncertain--and the passage of legislation this year will be only the beginning in any event--but as I watch the debate unfold, it seems clearer and clearer that our democracy's capacity to function is being tested by this remarkable struggle.

The battle between emotion and reason has been a recurring theme of these posts for years, all the more so since we have replaced a President who proudly relied almost completely upon emotion--his "instincts"--with one who turns more instinctively towards logic and reason than any President since John F. Kennedy. Indeed, the battle between the Democrats and Republicans has become largely a battle of reason against emotion, which is why the Republicans remain the strongest in the least educated parts of the country, and rely so heavily on the most primal emotions, including greed, the desire to kill (gun rights), and the fear of sex. While I remain hopeful that reason can still hold the balance in western civilization, I also believe that its triumph can never be complete. Indeed, the greatest and most destructive wars in history, the two world wars, took place at the climax of the age of reason in the first half of the twentieth century, and the combatants, as I pointed out in Politics and War, claimed, and believed themselves, that they were fighting for rational goals. The almost complete eclipse of reason in our political discourse, however, is at least as great a cause for concern--and that is what President Obama, coolly and persistently, is trying to fight. So far it looks like an uphill struggle.

The Democrats are in effect fighting with their emotional tied behind their back, because forty years of unremitting Republican propaganda have effectively discredited the emotional appeals upon which they used to rely. The experience of the last saeculum (1868-1945) was very different. Beginning in 1896 and continuing through the First World War, the distribution of wealth was a major issue of American politics, and reformers, while only intermittently successful, did not feel on the defensive. They went into an eight-year eclipse beginning in 1920, but came back stronger than ever in the midst of the depression. And so it was that Franklin Roosevelt, in the midst of his re-election campaign in 1936, had no compunction about rousing the feelings of the average American against the plutocrats who had turned against him. I quote:

"We have not come this far without a struggle and I assure you we cannot go further without a struggle.

"For twelve years this Nation was afflicted with hear-nothing, see-nothing, do-nothing Government. The Nation looked to Government but the Government looked away. Nine mocking years with the golden calf and three long years of the scourge! Nine crazy years at the ticker and three long years in the breadlines! Nine mad years of mirage and three long years of despair! Powerful influences strive today to restore that kind of government with its doctrine that that Government is best which is most indifferent.

"For nearly four years you have had an Administration which instead of twirling its thumbs has rolled up its sleeves. We will keep our sleeves rolled up.

"We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace‹business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.

"They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.

"Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me--and I welcome their hatred.

"I should like to have it said of my first Administration that in it the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match. I should like to have it said of my second Administration that in it these forces met their master."

Now Roosevelt, as I have pointed out here, actually enjoyed more bipartisan support of which Barack Obama could not even dream during his first term. The Tennessee Valley Authority, to take one example--a huge an unprecedented undertaking designed to put the government into the middle of the economic development of an impoverished region--was actually the brainchild of a great Republican Progressive, George Norris of Nebraska. Perhaps that liberated him to go after the irreconcilables among the Republicans in such emotional terms--and the electorate in 1936 rewarded him with the votes of 48 out of 50 states. Such rhetoric, however, has successfully been demonized by the Republican Party and its media propaganda arms as "class warfare," "socialism," "European-style", and so on, to such an extent that not one Democrat that I can see is speaking boldly and firmly for economic justice. Under Roosevelt marginal tax rates on the richest Americans reached 91%; now Nancy Pelosi is trying to sneak 50% rates on incomes of one million or more into the health bill, a proposal to which the President declares himself "open." The single-payer option, the real solution to our health care crisis, has been defined out of the debate as "too radical" from the beginning. Democrats seem to rely rhetorically on "reform," broader coverage, and cost-cutting (which is most certainly necessary), because true social and economic democracy has become the third rail of American politics. We have had one or two indications that high marginal tax rates might return, most notably at the time of the AIG bonuses earlier this year. If the nation is faced once again with a prolonged period of depression for the mass of the population, combined with the enrichment of the few, higher marginal rates could return. But we are nowhere near that point yet thanks to the long-term success of anti-government Republican rhetoric.
In fact, emotion lies at the heart of the health care debate in another way as well. Health care is one of the stronger sectors of our economy--most, if not all of which, I regret to say, are based upon the exploitation of the most primitive emotions. In the case of health care, the industry, backed by the resources both of the government (Medicare and Medicaid) and generous private health plans, exploits fear--the fear of pain (which gave us Vioxx, an almost completely unnecessary drug), of death (which leads to unnecessary screenings and surgeries for, for instance, prostate cancer), and even of not enough sex (which is fueling the multi-billion dollar "erectile dysfunction" industry which I encounter every time I watch a live American sports event.) The financial sector has grown by devising various forms of financial alchemy, including subprime mortgages and derivatives, both of which for a time turned lead into gold, and are now, in other ways, at work again. The defense industry fuels the fear of war (although that fear, interestingly enough, finally seems to be ebbing as a political force, as suggested by the defeat of the F-22 program.) And the food industry--about which I learned a great deal of depressing information in the film, Food, Inc.,, which I highly recommend--lives off our craving for salt, sugar, and fat. Agriculture and diet based upon health, or even genuine enjoyment of food, would look entirely different from what we have now. Meanwhile, large segments of another growth industry, academia--including the humanities such as literary criticism and history--have explicitly rejected reason in favor of emotional approaches based upon the emotional issues of the late twentieth century. The academy thrives, ironically, not because of what it teaches, but because it remains the gateway to highly paid professions.

Against this background, can President Obama succeed? He has, to be sure, critical emotional assets of his own, most notably his rhetorical skills, his own and his wife's personal charisma and his appeal to the under-30 generation, who are indeed far less emotional than their parents, who still dominate the media. And should he eventually be driven--as I think he will--to abandon bipartisanship by the unremitting hostility of the Republican Party, he will do so with a clear conscience and a good record of having tried.

Turning to other news of the week, President Obama also showed a charming ability to admit error when he substantially repudiated his initial comments about the arrest of Professor Henry Louis Gates. Refusing once again to duck a difficult issue, may I say that I think the President's second, more even-handed comment was very much in order. Most commentators are missing a critical issue in this particular episode. Professor Gates may have been a victim of racial profiling, but not by the police. The police did not initiate the incident--the young woman who saw the Professor and his chauffeur trying to force open the front door did. They were simply responding, as duty requires them to do, to a call. And to be quite frank, the manner in which Professor Gates greeted them did him no credit. The police have become far more aggressive towards everyone during my adult life, and I would suggest that anyone, regardless of race, age, or gender, who speaks to a police officer today in the way that he did is behaving very foolishly indeed. His attempt to dismiss the officers by showing them his Harvard ID, rather than his driver's license, was also unfortunate. Yes, the officer made a bad situation worse by allowing his own emotions to carry him away and putting on the handcuffs, and it would have been better if he had not. But it will indeed be fitting--and further testimony to our President's remarkable political skills--if the whole affair does indeed end with the officer, the professor and the President meeting in the White House for a beer or two. The question of how to translate such an event into the beginning of the reform of the American health care system, however, remains open.

Bad News, Good News

2009-07-18T09:49:00.002-04:00

[Although the virulence of the infection is declining, it is still necessary to inform new visitors that if they have been drawn here by an email circulating under my name comparing President Obama to Adolf Hitler--an email which generated three phone calls to my home this past week--they should know that I did not write that email, nor do I agree with it. For more information on its origins they should visit this link.

American forces are pulling back in Iraq--not a moment too soon, in my opinion--and the essential impossibility of our objectives there are finally being revealed to the entire world. Several stories last week cited the increasingly tense situation beteween the Kurdish areas--independent in all but name--and the Iraqi government, which involves key disputed territory and has nearly led to armed conflict on several recent occasions. More importantly, today's Washington Post includes a remarkable article on the consequences of the implementation of the new status of forces agreement that has mandated the withdrawal of American troops from Iraqi cities. Two years or so ago, while that agreement was being negotiated, I am reliably informed that a senior military commander dismissed problems in the talks as a matter of "Iraqi domestic politics," as if Prime Minister Maliki simply had to make a good showing of independence to satisfy his voters. Indeed it was a matter of Iraqi domestic politics, but of a more serious nature. The Iraqis for some time have wanted to reassert real control over their own affairs. The agreement now confines Americans to their bases, forbids them from moving except at night, and forbids them from patrolling except with Iraqi permission. The Post story is based largely on an angry email from an American major general, from which I quote:

The Iraqi order runs "contrary to the spirit and practice of our last several months of operations," Maj. Gen. Daniel P. Bolger, commander of the Baghdad division, wrote in an e-mail obtained by The Washington Post.

"Maybe something was 'lost in translation,' " Bolger wrote. "We are not going to hide our support role in the city. I'm sorry the Iraqi politicians lied/dissembled/spun, but we are not invisible nor should we be." He said U.S. troops intend to engage in combat operations in urban areas to avert or respond to threats, with or without help from the Iraqis.

"This is a broad right and it demands that we patrol, raid and secure routes as necessary to keep our forces safe," he wrote. "We'll do that, preferably partnered. . . .Our [Iraqi] partners burn our fuel, drive roads cleared by our Engineers, live in bases built with our money, operate vehicles fixed with our parts, eat food paid for by our contracts, watch our [surveillance] video feeds, serve citizens with our [funds], and benefit from our air cover." Some months ago, if I am not mistaken, I posted a link here to a youtube video of an American adviser--a senior enlisted man--screaming at a platoon of Iraqi policemen whom he thought were doing their job with inadequate courage and enthusiasm. I couldn't help thinking, as he called them "women" and "pussies" (words faithfully translated, I was able to verify, by his Iraqi interpreter), that many of them might have been tempted to reply that no one had asked him and his countrymen to come to Iraq. In fact many American soldiers do not agree with the spirit of the general's email, and think that we have already done everything that we can usefully do. In any case, claiming that we are owed gratitude for what we have done to Iraq--which will take a long time to recover from the last seven years--is not going to do us any good. Fortunately, as with Vietnam, our unpleasant experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan will probably sour the American public (and the American leadership) on any similar adventures for some time to come.

Yes, the attempt to creat an informal American empire in the Middle East is failing; but this, as I have been reminded all week, is a relatively minor catastrophe in the context of the last 100 years. Since Monday I have been working in the National Archives at College Park once again, investigating American military planning in the most critical 18 months of the twentieth century, the period from May 1940 through December of 1941. For the second time in thirty years, the world's most advanced countries were plunged into total war. As one of several remarkably prescient memorandums by field-grade officers noted as the Germans drove through France, we were threatened with the complete collapse of the British, French, Dutch, and Belgian empires--including the conquest of the United Kingdom itself--and by the worldwide chaos that would result. American observers were also convinced, and with good reason, that a German victory in Europe (undoubtedly coupled with new Japanese advances in the Far East) and the very probable entry of Spain, as well as Italy, into the war, would promote Fascism in Latin America as well. The possible loss of both the French and British fleets to Germany would face the US with an unprecedented threat that we were in no condition to meet. The consensus of opinion--which I now believe Franklin Roosevelt shared--was that we could not afford to commit our destiny to the survival of the British and had to focus on preparing to defend the Western Hemisphere. That, indeed, remained the focus of our military planning for most of the next eighteen months.

That the worst did not happen owed a great deal to factors beyond our control. Hitler certainly could have imposed harsher terms on France and sent troops into Spain, seizing first Gibraltar (which would be untenable with German air power nearby, as I have now discovered), and then positions in North and West Africa. He might easily have won victories against the British all over the Mediterranean, driven Churchill from power, and made peace with a new British government, even if (which was hardly certain) an actual invasion of Britain was beyond his capabilities. But fortunately, Hitler regarded the whole war in the west as an unfortuante diversion from his main goal, the invasion of the Soviet Union. His military advisers advocated most of the steps I listed above, but he insisted on postponing them until after the Soviets had been defeated. That, more than anything else, allowed Britain to survive and allowed the United States time to prepare.

Two subsequent developments have made our world, for all its problems, a relatively safe one. First, the Allied victory and the American decision to create an alliance of all the major capitalist powers put an end to the kind of warfare that had devastated the world in the first half of the century. That alliance persists, and indeed, since the collapse of Communism and the evolution of China, it now enjoys perfectly adequate relations with all the world's leading nations. Secondly, beginning with the war in Vietnam, a striking trend towards demilitarization took root in nearly every advanced country. We all know that the United States has overwhelmingly the most powerful military in the world today, but how many of us realize that our military, as a percentage of our population, is only slightly larger than it was in 1940, a moment when we think of the United States as almost completely disarmed? The rest of the world has followed suit. The only countries whose militaries represent a large portion of their population by historical standards are the two Koreas, Israel, Syria, and Iran--mostly small countries in unusually tense situations. Things may go wrong, but they simply cannot go as wrong as they did in the early part of the twentieth century. Planning for large-scale nuclear exchanges also seems to have lapsed.

How this has happened is a subject for another day. It reflects a loosening of the bonds between states and their citizenry, a trend which in the economic sphere has brought the United States within sight of new catastrophes, but which in the military sphere can only, I think, be regarded as a good thing. Much of the area that comprised the European empires that seemed in 1940 to be on the verge of collapse is now in one way or another "up for grabs"--but not up for grabs by military expansion of industrial powers. That is real progress, and keeping our problems in perspective an only help us deal with them.

How the Crisis might turn out

2009-07-11T09:13:00.003-04:00

That the United States is now in the midst of the third great crisis in our national life no longer seems in doubt. President Obama faces problems on the same scale as Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the political stakes for which we are now playing--the future, and possibly even the survival, of the United States as we know it--are just as high. His own approach to the crisis--which I would characterize as far more Lincolnesque than Rooseveltian--is also becoming clear. The question of whether it will work remains open, and probably will be for at least another three years, until he stands for re-election. All we can do now is to speculate about scenarios and assess probabilities.

As in every great crisis, the problems we face are not merely ones of mood, or national disunity--they are real problems requiring real solutions. The two that stand out, clearly, are our collapsing economy and our need to live at peace with the Muslim world, while maintaining the solidarity of the industrialized world that has now lasted for more than sixty years. Simultaneously we face a serious political problem at home: the total alienation of at least a third of the population--by and large, the least educated and affluent white portion of the population--from the Administration. The solution of the political problem, in my opinion, depends on the solution of the first two. The solution of the first two depends--once again, in my opinion--in abandoning business as usual, and that is where the Administration, to date, is not inspiring as much confidence as it might.

For the past thirty years, and especially during the past sixteen or so, the financial sector has fueled our economy. By making what turned out to be irresponsible loans--to consumers holding credit cards, to mortgagees, and, through derivatives and credit-default swaps, to each other--they generated the new wealth that spread demand through the economy. Because we were in the meantime de-industrializing more than any other major economic power, much of that demand fueled the economic growth of other nations, especially in Asia, more or less forcing Asian nations to lend the money back to us and finance our trade and budget deficits. When the impossibility of making good on trillions of dollars of those loans became apparent about 18 months ago, the economic crisis began. Unfortunately--in my view, at least--President Obama picked a mainstream economic team, led by Larry Summers and Timothy Geithner, who were heavily implicated in the policies of the last 18 years. As far as I can tell, their economic prescriptions have not yet attempted to undo any of the fundamental causes of our predicament. When they get around to proposing the restoration of something like the Glass-Steagall Act, which separated investment banking and commercial banking, I will be convinced that some one has grasped the nature of the problem: to put the awesome, inevitably destructive power to create new assets at will back within prett severe limits.

The equally important issue that has not been faced, to put it bluntly, is whether we need a largely new economy. Even as unemployment threatens to pass the 10% figure nationwide, and even as much of the American auto industry goes under for all time, the Administration, from the President on down, grasps at straws, arguing for instance that a decline in the acceleration of unemployment means that we are in some sense on our way to recovery. Such claims are, actually, only marginally more sophisticated than the arguments we heard in the 1990s that the Dow was destined to continue increasing steadily until it reached at least 36,000. It suddenly occurred to me last week exactly what they mean, mathematically: that employment could be expressed as a quadratic equation, with t (time) as the only independent variable. (Less mathematical readers can skip the rest of this paragraph.) Such an equation might postulate that in any given year t from here on out (the 1st year, the second, the third, etc.), the delta, or change in the unemployment rate(let's call it DE, since I don't know how to insert a delta into html), would look something like this:

DE = t² - 3*t

Resurrecting my high school calculus, the slope of this line, over time, would be the derivative of the equation, which would be 2t - 3 . In the first year(next year, until July 2010), the change in the rate would be -2--an additional two per cent unemployment. At the end of the following year (year 2), DE, measured from this moment, would be -4 -- the rate would not have changed. But by the third year unemployment would at last be steady (3² - 9 = 0), and in the fourth year employment would increase 4%, and so on. At any point in time the slope of the curve representing the change in unemployment would be 2t - 3--starting at -3 right now, it would fall to -1 in a year (the exact kind of decline in new unemployment claims upon which everyone is eagerly pouncing on now), and finally get over 0 -- that is, to a point of rising unemployment--in two years.

The problem is that we really don't have the slightest idea whether current increases in unemployment reflect such an incredibly simple equation--there is every reason to believe that they do not. During the Great Depression the unemployment rate did not increase and decrease smoothly. The increases in unemployment accelerated from 1930 to 1931 and again in 1932, before coming to a sudden halt in 1933, whereupon employment began to rise again. Both Paul Krugman and Bob Herbert of the New York Times have consistently argued that the stimulus wasn't big enough and that it would be necessary to ask for a lot more. It will also be necessary, in my opinion, to sell the next stimulus as, if you will, a defensive rather than an offensive measure--a way to prevent the loss of further jobs, particularly in state and local government, rather than to create entirely new ones. Meanwhile, the Administration will have to be able to make a credible case--certainly by 2012, if not by 2010--that new sectors of the economy, such as green energy projects and infrastructure, are providing hundreds of thousands of genuinely new jobs and can provide millions more. That is what Roosevelt managed to do by 1936, leading to his massive re-election. Roosevelt experimented with planning the economy during his first two years, but put a huge emphasis on public works. Not until 1935-6 did he pass the most enduring reforms of his Administration, the SEC, the Wagner Act (legalizing unions), and Social Security. Obama is beginning with his major long-term reform, health care. We do not know whether this sequencing will work--although the way in which the Democratic majorities in Congress are pushing health care along is an encouraging sign.

On the foreign scene, things will, I am afraid, get somewhat worse in the Middle East. Iraq will lapse into a more or or less violent civil war. No surge, no amount of American help, and no decline in violence (a trend that owed a lot to the completion of ethnic cleansing in much of Baghdad), has managed to undo the basic fact that Iraq is at least two, if not three, nations. The Kurds are moving more rapidly towards Independence and asserting claims to disputed territory and oil. There is good reason to believe that the Sunnis will be violently reasserting themselves within a year. I am not optimistic, as I made clear last week, about the results of the surge in Afghanistan. Iran is going to hold resolutely to its course, although I suspect that Iran, like Israel, will not actually test a nuclear weapon. A US-Israeli deadlock over settlements seems likely. That will enrage certain elements in the media and the foreign policy establishment, but I am not sure that it will have much importance politically. The public seems as sick of our Middle Eastern adventure today as the it was of the Vietnam war by 1973 or so. The real political danger is at home.

Obama, like Lincoln, is moving slowly at home--as rapidly as the political traffic would bear. Just as Lincoln spoke in to the South in terms of friendship right up until Fort Sumter, he began hoping for Republican cooperation. He has compromised on many issues already--including climate change--without getting any. Perhaps the situation at home will have to become more desperate, like the Union military situation in 1862, before he can move more decisively on various domestic fronts. But in any case there is only so much that he can do alone. Lincoln won the conventional conflict that the South chose to wage, but after his death the will was lacking to do more than enshrine legal black equality in the Constitution while allowing white supremacy to return in the South. After three decades of free market consensus, we may not have the intellectual capital to do what needs to be done for the economy, either. But it is still, as the British would say, early days. On this day in 1861 the first Battle of Bull Run was still more than a week away. This will be a long struggle--and that, perhaps, is the rhetorical change I would recommend most strongly to the President. We have been on the wrong track for a long time, and it will take ten to twenty years to rebuild a more just America. The Democrats, sadly, may have lost their only chance to repeal the 22nd Amendment during the George W. Bush Administration--which means that Obama's successors will have to carry on the work to complete it. Meanwhile, let us not, like the northern abolitionists in 1861, despair of a leader who probably has a better sense of what is and is not possible just now than we do.

The prospects in Afghanistan

2009-07-03T08:52:00.004-04:00

Last week, I attended some sessions of a conference on irregular warfare. Although it was entirely unclassified, I am not permitted specifically to identify any of the participants (their names, in any case, are not famous), but I can talk about what I learned, both from academics, and especially from several individuals who have spent a lot of time on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan, and who bring other kinds of expertise and experience to bear on the problems there. I am going to talk today about the situation in Afghanistan--a truly tragic situation, and one in which the United States, I fear, is destined to remain involved for some time, and probably without any particularly good result.
The United States is in Afghanistan now to prevent the Taliban from once again taking power in at least a great deal of that country. The Taliban, unlike Al Queda, has never declared any particular designs upon the United States or even, as I understand it, on Israel, but the Taliban regime in the late 1990s allowed Al Queda to establish itself in Afghanistan. More importantly, after the United States initially drove the Taliban out of Afghanistan in 2002, the organization began growing inside nuclear-armed Pakistan, which had previously supported the Taliban regime in Kabul and which may indeed like to see its return there even now. As I have argued before, American policy seems to have created a kind of reverse domino effect: our involvement in Afghanistan, a very poor region of no intrinsic value, has now helped lead to a Taliban threat to Pakistan, a nuclear power.
During the last few years, the Taliban, which appeared to have been completely eclipsed around 2004 in Afghanistan, has retaken large parts of the country. What I heard at the conference was truly tragic. On the one hand, I was very reliably informed by some one in whom I have complete trust, the Taliban is extremely unpopular in Afghanistan. It consists of militant ideologues determined to regulate every aspect of the people's lives, and therefore arouses resentment. In a fair, free and unfettered election, the Taliban would stand no chance.
That, unfortunately, is only half the story. Unfortunately, the rest of Afghanistan is divided into tribes and factions, most of them at least as interested in monetary gain as in coping with the Taliban or uniting among themselves. The Karzai regime, which is certain to be re-elected shortly, is hopelessly corrupt, partly because of the large amounts of U.S. cash of which it disposes. The Taliban, in short, are the most determined, unified, and best organized group inside the country, and thus would be the clear favorites, again, in a civil war. They have established control over much of the countryside mainly in two ways: first, by sheer intimidation, and second, by dispensing justice, something which the national government, despite all our assistance, has not been able to do in much of the country.
It is the great illusion of Americans that just causes triumph because of their virtue--although history repeatedly shows the contrary. What I have said about the Taliban applied just as clearly to the Bolsheviks in Russia in 1917-22, or the Chinese Communists in 1945-9, or the Viet Cong, or, for that matter, the Nazis in Germany from 1930 to 1933. (The latter case, ironically, is different because elections did play a key role in bringing the Nazis to power, too, and superior electoral mobilization was one of their main assets.) The victory of those revolutionary movements invariably meant short-run disaster for their countries, even though China and Vietnam managed to get themselves on entirely different paths within a few decades and are now doing remarkably well. Some of these movements won in part by taking advantage of existing injustices, but their victories owed far more to organization, ruthless intimidation, and military effectiveness. Although it has become unfashionable to say so, the genius of the Anglo-American world was to have established stable local and national political institutions, including law courts, by the early 18th century, allowing their people, from that time on, to live in relative peace. This is what much of the world has never managed to do.
The United States in Iraq, and now in Afghanistan, has set about drastically accelerating the process of history by trying to create modern institutions on the spot. In both countries cadres of westerners have been dispatched to train police forces, criminal justice personnel, and the military. As in South Vietnam, all this seems to be based upon an unspoken assumption that the local populations will naturally accept what we have to offer. In fact, in my opinion, the opposite is true. In a situation of civil war, is a body of uniformed men trained by a culturally alien foreign power really likely to prevail against determined local opposition? Is it indeed not more likely to be discredited by its association with foreigners? Let us be clear: what we are doing is very, very different from what British and French imperialists did in places like India, Vietnam, and much of Africa. There they themselves created and administered new modern institutions and ran them, in some cases for decades (Egypt) or even centuries (India.) That, especially in India, allowed such institutions to grow real roots and survive the end of colonialism. But the United States obviously lacks both the resources and the will to do anything like that in Iraq, which as about 25 million people, or Afghanistan, which has 40 million. (South Vietnam in 1965, by the way, had about 15 million people.)
Another irony emerged during the conference. When the modern history of Europe began to be written about 150 years ago, it tended to idealize the growth of the centralized, modern state, based on a body of written laws, the entity that had put an end to the traditional societies of the Middle Ages. In the Middle East we have encountered two huge ironies. In Iraq we began by trying to create such a state (albeit with a strongly neoconservative political orientation) from the top down. That project failed disastrously, and the security gains of the last two years occurred because we began working with traditional institutions, the Sunni tribes, whom the Green Zone bureaucrats had initially been ordered to shun. The most modern institution ever to have ruled Iraq, indeed, was the Ba'ath party, under which, I venture to say, the country was far more unified, albeit by brutal means, than it had ever been before or is likely to be again. Certainly Iraq was never more secular than under the Ba'athists. (William Kristol, assuring Terri Gross in 2003 that there would be civil war there because Iraq "has always been pretty secular," didn't realize to whom the credit ws due.) In fact, third world modernization has often taken place in opposition to the West. One conference participant actually suggested that today, one of the most modern populations in the Middle East lives in Mullah-ruled Iran, and suggested, not entirely humorously, that we might do better to let Islamists get into power and give the people a couple of generations to modernize in response to them.
Today the Times has long stories about the movement of the Marines into Helmand province, where the Taliban are strong and the people fear, not without reason, that the arrival of the Marines will bring death and destruction. (Despite all the talk about counterinsurgency, the military is still focused primarily on firepower even now, even though our new commander in Afghanistan has finally put real restrictions on air strikes.) Let us hope that our new offensive will be a replay of the French Challe offensive in Algeria in 1959, which was sufficiently successful militarily to give de Gaulle the excuse to pull out. Late in the conference some of my colleagues and I got into a discussion of why we are in Afghanistan, anyway. None of thought that it had enough intrinsic interest to keep us there, but one argued that we were in Afghanistan to keep the Taliban from getting its hands on Pakistani nuclear weapons. I dissented. The Taliban is now considerably closer to that goal than they were in 2002, and in any case, trying to recreate a country of 40 million people seems an awfully inefficient way of securing about 100 nuclear weapons. Let us hope we find a way out.