"...[T]he delinquencies of the states have, step by step, matured themselves to an extreme which has at length arrested all the wheels of the national government... The [members of Congress] will consider the conformity of the thing proposed or required to their immediate interests or aims.... in a spirit of... suspicious scrutiny, without that knowledge of national circumstances and reasons of state which is essential to right judgment, and with that strong predilection in favor of local objects which can hardly fail to mislead the decision."

So warned Alexander Hamilton in 1787 in The Federalist, No.15, and Walter Lippmann cited this in 1922 in his Public Opinion, his now-classic remonstrance against democracy. Lippmann defended Hamilton's and Madison's desire to, as he put it, "restore government as against democracy" in order to secure "the power to make national decisions and enforce them throughout the nation; democracy [the Federalists] believed was the insistence of localities and classes upon self-determination in accordance with their immediate interests and aims." Were they wrong?

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"...[T]he delinquencies of the states have, step by step, matured themselves to an extreme which has at length arrested all the wheels of the national government... The [members of Congress] will consider the conformity of the thing proposed or required to their immediate interests or aims.... in a spirit of... suspicious scrutiny, without that knowledge of national circumstances and reasons of state which is essential to right judgment, and with that strong predilection in favor of local objects which can hardly fail to mislead the decision."

So warned Alexander Hamilton in 1787 in The Federalist, No.15, and Walter Lippmann cited this in 1922 in his Public Opinion, his now-classic remonstrance against democracy. Lippmann defended Hamilton's and Madison's desire to, as he put it, "restore government as against democracy" in order to secure "the power to make national decisions and enforce them throughout the nation; democracy [the Federalists] believed was the insistence of localities and classes upon self-determination in accordance with their immediate interests and aims." Were they wrong?

It's not a frivolous question. What Hamilton described is as important as ideologically driven obstructionism in holding up Obama's nominees and legislative proposals. He gets this from Democrats as well as Republicans who are subservient a) to local constituencies and b) to moneyed special interests that accelerate legislators' parochial pandering by promising to target investments (and, now, increasingly, political advertising) to those constituencies.

Lippmann understood Constitutional checks and balances as the Federalists' artful attempt "to substitute 'the mild influence of the magistracy'" for sectional and factional conflict "by devising an ingenious machine to neutralize local opinion." The framers of the Constitution "did not understand how to manipulate a large electorate [to endorse broader, higher goals], any more than they saw the possibility of common consent upon the basis of common information."

Well, now we have plenty of common information, easily accessible, and politicians as different as John McCain and Barack Obama propose to make earmarks still more transparent. But even Lippmann, who brought up the subject of "common information," doubted it would ever be enough. His chapter, "The Role of Force, Patronage, and Privilege" is still worth reading.

Yes, it was a great speech, the more so for its unadorned honesty, not for soaring, rhetorical cadences like those of his campaign. Yes, he told the Roberts Court to its face what damage it has done. Yes, he put Republicans on the spot over the filibuster and their nation-destroying negativity. And he hit lobbyists and even big corporations.

What has changed for me, though, is my growing (hardening) conviction that the chamber he was speaking to is stuffed to its gills with frauds. (There are exceptions.) Beyond the few measures on which there is a rare alignment of stars, nothing he called for will happen, unless his road trip unleashes a firestorm in the American people against Congress for the systemic sins mentioned above.

Most Americans didn't watch the speech. And with good reason. They've heard laundry lists and fine rhetoric before. As long as most Americans' default position in politics remains what I said it is after the Massachusetts debacle, Congress will remain unworthy of Obama's broad wisdom and self-discipline, and it will remain wide open, therefore, to the most malign and predatory interests.

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Many "progressives" (even at the ACLU) who've sympathized with the Supreme Court's rollback of almost all public regulation of corporate expenditures in elections accept the Court's declaration that it's defending "freedom of speech" against "censorship."

It isn't. Nothing in campaign-finance laws that the Court is eviscerating ever really barred big business from inundating us with its "speech" and Congress with its lobbyists. This is a coup against something else.

An unusually impassioned New York Times editorial got it exactly right, but, this morning, Times reporter David Kirkpatrick (show-cased in the Week in Review section by its editor, Sam Tanenhaus) lazily shoots down the claim that corporate election money corrupts. No one can prove it, sniffs the newshound.

Maybe not, but the bigger danger is that debate among citizens is being skewed and drowned by simulated voices of non-corporeal (often non-American) entities that can't be swayed by debate, as citizens sometimes can, to rise above their bottom lines. The First Amendment wasn't written to protect business corporations -- a fact that's only confirmed by its specific exemption of "the press" from regulation of speech. Other corporations are fair game. Citizens can speak for business interests anytime. So can corporations' paid voice-overs - when we, who created them, allow it.

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Sometimes the best way to understand current events is to follow the "undercurrent events" that drive them. To understand the Supreme Court's rollback of regulations on corporate electioneering in Citizens United, Appellant v. Federal Election Commission, follow the Court's conservative majority as it actually discussed the case on September 9.

What the Justices said was drowned out by the chatter about President Obama's big speech to Congress on health care that same day. But the consequences of this undercurrent for the United States, let alone for Obama's health-care hopes, will now swamp even Scott Brown's filibuster-boosting victory in Massachusetts.

Just compare this week's ruling with what the justices said in September, and you see that they didn't learn anything from the hearing, because they didn't intend to.

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"By the rude bridge that arched the flood, / their flag to April's breeze unfurled, / here once the embattled farmers stood / and fired the shot heard 'round the world."

I was born and brought up in Massachusetts and know people there who feel a small, proprietary stir in their hearts when they hear these lines by Emerson on the Minutemen's resisting a big government on April 19, 1775. The date was a school holiday in my youth, and - contrary to recent claims in what we laughingly call the "news" media - Massachusetts Republicans led the celebrations: governors Christian Herter, John Volpe, Frank Sargeant, William Weld; senators Leverett Saltonstall and Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr.

They were moderate Republicans, of a genus now extinct. Even Edward Brooke, the state's first black senator, was from the Party of Lincoln because Dems were mortgaged nationally to segregationists, something it took a repentant segregationist, Lyndon Johnson, to change.

Now Dems are mortgaged to corporate interests, and if it took a segregationist to flummox Jim Crow, maybe only a child of plutocracy like FDR can say of bankers, as he did in 1936, "They hate me - and I welcome their hatred." Barack Obama is no FDR, and his Dems are mortgaged to big Pharma and Wall Street. But the GOP is these interests' wholly owned subsidiary. Why don't our would-be Minutemen see this?

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Last night in Massachusetts, America didn't get what it needs. But Democrats got what they deserved.

Republicans lost in 2008 because they'd spent many years implementing clear, extreme economic and foreign policies thoroughly enough for real life to prove them bogus. They hadn't just won a big election in 1980 with "Great Communicator" Ronald Reagan's terrific campaign on behalf of their ideas; they'd actually proceeded to give us enough of what even George H.W. Bush once called "voodoo economics" and enough of national-security statism to prove what those strategies are actually worth in New Orleans and Baghdad, on Main Street and in a global economy that is no longer an American protectorate.

Democrats are losing now for an entirely different reason. Although in 2008 they, too, won a national election with a great communicator riding on the other party's implosion, the Democrats, unlike Republicans, haven't really tried to implement their promised strategies seriously enough for real life to prove them bogus -- or, like Social Security, indispensable to Americans' safety and freedom.

Why haven't they done that?

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David Brooks is doing his "culture" dance again this week, spinning profound truths about culture's real importance to economic success. But he's doing it in a slippery way that dooms him and his fans to another big fall.

On Tuesday he told us that Jews are so phenomenally successful because their culture is literate, symbolic, and mobile. Today he tells us that "Haiti... suffers from a complex web of progress-resistant cultural influences. There is the influence of the voodoo religion, which spreads the message that life is capricious and planning futile. There are high levels of social mistrust. Responsibility is often not internalized."

Let's leave aside the fact that it takes something very special to react to Haiti's disaster as Brooks is doing. It takes the special thing that Republican spin-doctor Linda Chavez showed when she reacted to the hapless desperation of black Katrina victims by saying that we were dealing there with people who sit home and wait for help to come instead of getting up and doing things. Actually, that was true of the Bush administration -- not just FEMA, but the Army Corps of Engineers and others who'd built the levees, blocked public school bus drivers from evacuating victims because private carriers were preferred, hired Blackwater guards to take care of security in New Orleans, etc.

In truth, progress-resistant cultural influences similar to those in Haiti have been soaring in America, thanks not to "third world" immigration but to a significantly white, faith-based, free-market culture that drives what George H.W. Bush once called "voodoo economics" - the extreme, free-market kind Brooks finds so liberating, even when he acknowledges its fragility.

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A couple of posts below, Bernie Avishai bears brave witness to an increasingly irresistible logic of non-violent protest in Israel-Palestine. This time it's by Jewish Israelis on behalf of Palestinians driven out of homes in East Jerusalem, but Palestinians are warming to this strategy, too, as he reports.

Some on the "people's liberation," "violent struggle" left still don't get this, any more than right-wing Zionists get it, even decades after Gandhi, King, Mandela, and dissidents in Eastern Europe showed how and when it can work. It certainly could in Israel-Palestine: In April I linked a colorful, counter-intuitive essay by the Israeli writer Gershom Gorenberg that bears reading in support and explanation of what Bernie is witnessing.

Before you scoff at this approach, you really owe it to yourself to read also "Coercive Non-violence isn't What You May Think," which notes that often power grows from voluntary consent but is doomed by violent imposition, even by violent "people's liberation" movements. Romantics of armed-struggle nationalism, Israeli or Palestinian, aren't quite wise or brave enough to recognize this and deliver on it. Avishai is both. Do read Bernie's post and its accompanying report by another participant, and forward it to anyone you know in Israel and Palestine.

David Brooks has taken all the fun out of Hanukah, which was already distended enough by three generations of overweening parental and commercial effort to assuage American-Jewish kids' loneliness at Christmas. But now Brooks, looking for both depth and political traction, makes an ironclad case for Hanukah as a celebration of... Oops! Ho Chi Minh!

He didn't mean it that way. On the surface (as most readers have taken it), this rendering of the holiday is for adults, not kids, and it's commendably complex. But it also reinforces Brooks' and neo-conservatives' gut, default position: Acts of war and terrorist savagery can be met only by savagery in ourselves. Is that true for Israel in Gaza, or America in Afghanistan? Brooks doesn't say. He just gives us his religious history lesson.

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If you're worried that this country is drifting inexorably, even under Barack Obama, from a republic to a national-security state with a President/Decider, you may have worried about his comment in Oslo that "I am the commander in chief of the military of a nation in the midst of two wars."

He is, indeed, but how did the nation get into those two wars - and an endless war on terror - when, Constitutionally, the nation is the President's commander-in-chief?

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Barack Obama is the wisest American president of my lifetime, which began during Harry Truman's presidency and includes John F. Kennedy, who might have outdone Obama had he lived, and Bill Clinton, who as president was terrifically clever but not so wise. Obama is wise in the ways a loving, seasoned sage is wise. And he's a canny strategist, playing a series of long, slow games against daunting odds and against time.

But time and those odds are not on the side of the republic he swore to preserve, protect, and defend. To say so, as I have just done, is not to underestimate or betray Obama; it is to try to face a predicament that won't be improved either by the fretting now rampant among his erstwhile supporters or by sagacious (and rather orotund) appreciations of him.

It's not about him. It's about the republic, as Benjamin Franklin put it to a bystander in the words that form the title of this possibly ill-starred post. Let me try to explain why I see it this way.

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"One of most intriguing mysteries here in recent weeks is why members of the Congressional Black Caucus have chosen to buck their party and president in trying to stall financial regulation reform," writes the New York Times' Eric Lipton. "The answer lies at least in part with an aggressive lobbying campaign by a troubled New York City-based radio broadcasting company, Inner City Broadcasting, whose co-founder is a prominent New York politician and businessman, Percy Sutton."

But there is another part of the answer, and I have it.

Lipton's part of the answer puts politely what Irving Levine, a New York City inter-group relations expert, taught me years ago: "All ethnic succession involves sharp polarization, power struggles, accommodations and trade-offs that lead to coalitions and, finally, joint ventures to make money through polite graft."

That part is true, as far as it goes: The Congressional Black Caucus doesn't care a whit about Tim Geithner's financial "reforms" or even about defending the "civil rights" of minority entrepreneurs, as it claims it's doing. No, it's holding reform hostage to secure unrelated protections for one of its big Sugar Daddies. But the gambit only gets worse from there.

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Barack Obama spent two years campaigning to become the leader of a corporatist, national-security state whose ways of wielding power aren't those of a republic. "States hover like crows over the nests that nations make," wrote the historian Robert Wiebe, and by the time Obama faced the state's gray ranks of cadets last night as their commander in chief, the crows of national security statism and finance capital had cannibalized so many of the republic's strengths that he found himself in command of the wreckage and Orwellian newspeak they've left behind.

When I say 'wreckage," I don't mean the cadets and their instructors, who put many of us to shame. I've visited with them at West Point. Those I met are deeply thoughtful and brave. In my book, that adds up to noble. How 'thoughtful'? West Point has hosted such lecturers from the "left" as Seyla Benhabib, Jeffrey Alexander,... and Noam Chomsky. Think about this for a minute.
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Obama tried, at times, to tell the truth. At least he didn't promise to do for Kabul and Kandahar what our corporate state and its corrupted polity haven't done for New Orleans or Detroit. But the concentrations of power over which he now presides, and whose language he must speak, have no more truths to tell about how economic and institutional power flow in a free society. They haven't a clue where terror comes from, or what makes a society strong enough to endure and resist terror instead of recapitulating it in its entertainments, let alone its torture protocols.

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An essay just posted in Dissent notes two ominous ironies in Gen. Stanley McChrystal's demand to add a virtual War on Poverty to his counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan.

First, it seems that this warrior-monk discovered "soft power" while on a National Security Fellowship at Harvard's Kennedy School in 1997, a decade after Barack Obama moved from community organizing to Harvard Law. (He graduated in 1991, when McChrystal was coming off Desert Storm.)

This means that while the general knows warfare better than the President, the President understands soft power more deeply. The question is whether Afghanistan is the place for a meeting of minds - and if so, with what balance of butter and guns.

The second irony is that advantages of "butter" have just been discovered by McChrystal's Dickensian neo-conservative heralds (Dr. Maximum Boot, Sir David Donnybrooks, etc.) -- and never mind that, unable to contain their partisanship, they still write as if they can't wait for Obama to rebuff McChrystal's demands so they can accuse him of betraying the country.

These jingoists, who have suddenly become such doe-eyed idealists about organizing the people that they sound like Hugo Chavez, bear a lot of responsibility for the United States' present incapacity to do for Kabul what they kept it from doing for New Orleans or Detroit.

Thanks to them and the politicians and policies they've supported, the big new swamps of rage and despair that need draining are here in America, not only there in Afghanistan. The enemy is among us and within us, at Fort Hood and in a generation pitifully unfit for military service, according to retired generals John Shalikashvili and Wesley Clark, who actually held a press conference last week to warn that 70% of potential recruits are too over-weight and/or too under-educated to serve. Indeed, the enemy is us.

Footnote: Far be it from me to credit Harvard, that bleak citadel of global management on the Charles, with an understanding of counterinsurgency more sensitive than Yale's. But things don't turn out well for Yale grand strategists who boosted Bush's gratuitous militarism in Iraq and learned even later than McChrystal that we can't advance democracy while destroying our own economy and polity. Read the Dissent essay and laugh, or cry.