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.
Lieberman and Brooks are absolutely right, but only as a stopped clock is absolutely right twice a day. Where were they in 1994, when a Brooklyn Jew, Baruch Goldstein, massacred 29 Palestinians at prayer in Hebron? Did they condemn and examine the Jewish paranoia and rage that drove him and that cranked up Holocaust victimology to excuse his deeds? They didn't, even though Lieberman was a senator then, too, and Brooks a writer (for The Weekly Standard).
This isn't a tit-for-tat point. We misunderstand it at great peril. Even before Goldstein struck, I wrote Brooks' own column for him -- concept for concept, condemnation for condemnation -- against politically correct apologetics for a deranged killer, Colin Ferguson, who'd internalized a lot of public black paranoia and rage before gunning down white riders on the Long Island Railroad.
In The New York Daily News, I presented new evidence that Ferguson's delusions had been stoked by paladins of ethno-racial revenge. And when Goldstein struck a few months later, I sketched the Jewish zealotry that had fed his delusions. "I am nothing if not consistent on this," I wrote. "This time, Jews have some soul-searching to do." Read it for yourself.
The stopped-clock metaphor means that one may be absolutely right about something even while presenting it in bad faith, for purposes unjustified or dishonestly explained. Lieberman's and Brooks' record of selective prosecution and selective silence is contemptible. It's as lethal to Jews and democracy as the Palestinian rage it provokes. Maybe there should be hearings on it.
But mightn't they be right this time? Afghanistan isn't Iraq, and Obama isn't Bush. The problem with writers like Brooks is that, in their bones, they're jingoists: Their patriotism requires enemies, and they live to fight wars with other people's blood, while currying Established Power's favor with all the determination of heat missiles seeking heat. The world is hard, dark, and cruel, as they tell us -- and some people do need to be told. But Brooks & Co. have faith in only one way to save it. Watch David run:
Then, as the Surge failed to secure very much that could outlast American occupation, Brooks began praising the "deliberative" Obama as Obama moved toward Power. But now Brooks frets over Obama's characterologically intelligent respect for the insuperable complexities Bush ignored. And Brooks flirts with General (and Possible Presidential Candidate) Stanley McChrystal.
The point I wish his admirers would take from all this is that, characterologically (by which I mean something worse than neurotically), Brooks has to do this. The common thread in all his re-positionings is a supposedly knowing, conservative apprehension of the need to use force against force. We have no choice.
Sometimes, that's true. But Iraq was a neo-con-abetted war of choice, and a disastrously wrong one for fighting terrorists. It's one big reason we've "lost" Afghanistan, even assuming we could have outdone the British or the Russians in "winning" it. (The Russian defeat has been reprised chillingly, from Soviet archives, in the Times by Victor Sebestyen. The analogies are daunting.)
Brooks tells us he's spent the last few days calling around to experts who wonder portentously, as he does, whether Obama has the tenacity to sally forth into the doom Brooks unknowingly craves.
He was craving the same thing in 2004, a year into the Iraq war:
"Come on people, let's get a grip. This week, Chicken Littles like Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd were ranting that Iraq is another Vietnam..... I've spent the last few days talking with people who've spent much of their careers studying and working in this region. ... As Charles Hill, the legendary foreign service officer who now teaches at Yale, observed, 'I've been pleasantly surprised by the boldness and resolve.'"
Brooks then touted the Rumsfeld "dead-enders" line and assured us that tenacity would bring victory.
By 2006, as I've noted, Brooks had stopped denigrating critics who'd warned in 2004 of the quagmire he'd assured us wasn't there. Now, he told us,
"Everybody denigrates pundits and armchair generals, but... the smartest of them recognized that something unexpected was happening: The US was not in the midst of a conventional war but was in the first days of a guerrilla war [and] that it was time to shelve the rosy scenarios.... In TV studios and on op-ed pages,... retired officers and columnists called for more troops and officers on the front lines saw the same thing the smart pundits saw. Donald Rumsfeld and Tommy Franks saw nothing wrong."
Neither did Brooks, of course, but by 2006 he was with those who'd called from the beginning for more troops, not less. He and all the neo-cons would support the Surge that has given us the Iraq we see now.
David the vampire had a domestic appetite, too. He'd made his name, in fact, by sidling up to confused, upscale liberals and purring, "C'mon, you know that you really love your real estate and your unearned income, and that you like circulating commodities more than ideas. And... [wink, tickle] it's okay!"
I'd never before seen a political columnist work himself into deliriums watching other people shop. Brooks seemed almost to have forgotten, except in rhetorical gestures at the end of his Bobos in Paradise, that we must be fellow-citizens as well as consumers, or else we are lost. But to be serious about citizenship is to spend a lot of time and energy nourishing a disposition to rise above narrow self-interest, especially in peacetime, not just in wars that twist and drain the very public strengths the war-makers claim to be mobilizing.
On Brooks' watch at the Times, his lusts for consumerism, for comic sociology, for war-making, and for baiting liberals who try to cultivate the softer arts of citizenship were ill-timed. His tweaking of do-gooders was accompanied by Katrina, with Blackwater patrolling the streets of New Orleans; by predatory finance capital 's transformation of real estate into unreal estate; by a pestilence of executive and Wall Street welfare queens; and -- from Enron to Cardinal Law, or from Bernie Madoff to the media's necrophilia over Michael Jackson -- by a riot from the top by America's multi-problem overclass, whose tangle of pathologies the indulgent Brooks had been too busy deriding liberals to notice.
Abroad, we sowed and reaped a whirlwind borne of displacing our anxieties about such ills into a confrontation with the unquestionably evil Saddam -- namely, a battered Iraq that the Surge hasn't saved and that we have now made ourselves too weak fiscally and morally to expand or reform.
Brooks isn't quite as far gone as William Kristol, his former mentor at the flagship neo-con Weekly Standard, who has given us such great American leaders as Alan Keyes, Dan Quayle, and Sarah Palin (whom Kristol "discovered" on a Weekly Standard cruise in Alaska and commended to John McCain). I don't really imagine Brooks bursting into applause and cheers, as Kristol's staff did, when Obama failed to win America's bid to host the Olympics in Chicago.
Facing the real disasters I've mentioned above, Brooks knew enough to start pirouetting furiously, with prophylactic applications of Malcolm Gladwell in his columns and with cuddly feelers to people who can help him buff up his image among liberals. Yet too many of his columns, especially a breathtakingly sophistical account of the mortgage meltdown, showed him still plying his intellectual usury.
Now he informs us that "Afghan villagers," unsure of "the state of Obama's resolve," are "hedging their bets, refusing to inform on Taliban force movements because they are aware that these Taliban fighters would be their masters if the U.S. withdraws."
The options are indeed grisly. But does Brooks really believe that if Obama's tenacity became as obdurate Bush's, Afghan villagers would trust thousands more white and black American guys with boots and buzz cuts? Or is he just sucking more American blood and calling it love?
Some say that a fourth Great Awakening crested in 2004 but was deflected into America's "civil religion" in 2008, thanks to Barack Obama's biblical cadences. G.K. Chesterton called the U.S. "a nation with the soul of a church," and Obama massaged it enough to win Pastor Rick Warren's blessing at the Inauguration.
But if Obama is carrying on Martin Luther King, Jr's. religious republicanism, he's also one part Harvard neo-liberal and one part Chicago pol. Only a stronger, cannier faith can get us past these parts' inadequacies right now. The faith needn't be "religious" but it must be deep enough to face down great dangers and seductions. And many of us will have to share it, as I suggest in a World Affairs Journal essay I hope (against hope?) that you'll read. Here's why.
The religious right bemoans the gaming but settles for easy answers, on earth as it does in heaven. That leaves the rest of us in a quandary: Somehow, citizens and leaders have to be nourished intensively enough to survive and resist the seductions and vagaries of the capitalist free-for all, which is really a free-for-none, graceless and corrosive of public and private dignity.
Today's conservatives can't admit this, even though it's happening all around them in ways they can't keep blaming on radicals and hippies from "The 'Sixties." No longer can conservatives finesse the contradiction between their own yearnings for a sacred, ordered liberty with their own obeisance to global capitalist riptides that disrupt and degrade the very values and communities they claim to cherish.
So they give us sermons about good behavior. And they grasp for national-security-state militarism or -- like the late Richard John Neuhaus or the young Ross Douthat -- for a religion that reconciles you to a fallen world by focusing your hopes on the next. Sometimes they even look for scapegoats in Muslims, gays, or welfare recipients (the poor ones, not the rich ones), -- anything but look to themselves and the free riders they always front for and to whom they always give absolution.
Montesquieu observed that a republic's virtues aren't Christian but classically pagan. Our republic's best founders and leaders have understood this and melded classical virtues with Christian ones, at least during interludes between Great Awakenings.
They've also drawn on Puritan traditions that Hebraized Christianity, re-introducing an Old Testament wisdom about law and community that Rome and Canterbury had forgotten. I describe this in The World Affairs Journal.
But neo-conservative Jews have miscarried this American synthesis, as is evident in books by David Gelernter, Norman Podhoretz, Elliott Abrams, and others. Most American Jews have been poster children for the best of the synthesis, and 78% of them voted for Obama against the neo-conservative miscarriage of the Hebraic contribution.
American youths have encountered the strong meld of Puritan, Hebraic, and classical, Enlightenment wisdom in crucibles of civic-republican leadership training such as the preparatory school, where FDR underwent his rites of passage. I describe such training a bit poetically in a profile of Ned Lamont's uncle, Thomas Lamont II, here.
Others have found civic faith in Methodist or - like Martin Luther King, Jr., in Baptist - traditions inflected by dark, quasi-Calvinist understandings of the human heart. Obama got some residues of this in Hawaii at the Punahou School -- founded by Calvinist missionaries from Maine, as the historian Paul Burlin explains in his fascinating Imperial Maine and Hawai'i. Obama got it also in his Trinity United Church of Christ, a black branch of the original Congregational Church that was founded by the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay.
This training is hard. It implants in its adepts a civic spine and an intelligence strong enough to understand how power really flows -- not how the supposedly powerful and their neo-conservative apologists always think it flows.
The American civic faith has to be intrepid enough to hew a stone of hope out of a mountain of despair, as King put it and as the historian David Chappell explains unforgettably in A Stone of Hope. The odds against this kind of faith always seem dauntingly long. It's not for the fainthearted.
Is Obama's civic faith as strong as FDR's and King's? Is it strong and supple enough to face down vast concentrations of power, even at the risk of his own political and personal well-being? Is it strong enough in enough of the rest of us to push and support him against bought-and-paid-for majorities in Congress?
The health-care reform battle is so important a test of this, and of us as Americans, that I hesitate to ask you to take time to read more about civic faith's hidden depths and perils. But keepers of a republic always do get thrown back onto the question of how its faith can be nourished and mobilized. I don't have The Answer, but it helps to look at those who thought they did, and sometimes really did.
Now comes a Chronicle of Higher Education debate on whether and why liberal academia still spurns conservative scholars. Never mind that the fiscal crises gripping public and private universities show them to have been far more captive to market riptides than to leftist doctrines; in the Chronicle, Columbia intellectual historian Mark Lilla writes that on many campuses a pervasive ideology still normalizes "liberal" views that are rather narrow and arbitrary. Boston College's Alan Wolfe agrees that colleges promote little true intellectual diversity, although he says conservatives are part of the problem.
Others add brief observations, mine noting that what's actually normalized by the typical campus mix of political correctness and corporatist discipline isn't very "liberal," as most Americans use the term. Baiters of tenured radicals -- the conservative humorist P.J. O'Rourke, the propagandist Roger Kimball, the provocateur David Horowitz -- can't so easily claim, as David Brooks claimed in 2002, that America "houses its radical lunatics ... in [academic] departments that operate as nunneries for the perpetually alienated." Not only do market forces rule; lavishly funded nunneries for failed, aging neo-cons are sprouting or entrenching themselves at Yale, Duke, George Mason, Claremont- McKenna-Pomona, Chicago, and elsewhere.
I support the conservative argument that colleges have to balance humanist truth-seeking with civic-republican leadership-training and that serious conservative thinkers are invaluable to it. A liberal arts college's mission, after all, (as distinct from that of a research university in which it may be housed) isn't to produce many scholars, much less the dray horses of the financial and legal establishments that many leafy campuses actually do produce in large herds; it's to turn 18-year-olds into citizens who are intellectually and morally strong enough to carry on public life through deliberation and choice, not force and fraud.
Why aren't colleges doing enough of that? Read the Chronicle discussion and my 450- word contribution to it for a hint at why "liberals" aren't really the problem.
]]>Writing about the half-century-long rivalry and friendship of arms-race "hawk" Paul Nitze and Cold War strategic "dove" George Kennan, Thompson shows that even bitter antagonists can remain friends if they care more about the civic-republican spirit that is the secret of this country's true strength than they do about themselves or their grand strategies.
It's not an obvious or easy truth, but Thompson makes it live. Let me say a few words about the old conversation, though, before taking you to the even-older one that Thompson has revived.
Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, Donald Kagan, and their sons, real and metaphorical, have sometimes been right about how left-liberals are wrong. But something in their make-up has driven them beyond the nuanced criticism that Kristol once practiced, into virtuoso college debating and nasty posturing that get this country's republican experiment wrong.
This isn't the place to reprise how the their insecurities and opportunistic alliances led them to mistake patriotic bombast for honor, decorum for dignity, loyalty for integrity, religiosity for faith, and the national-security state for the indomitable republican strength that is its near opposite and this country's only hope. Suffice it to say that neo-cons (and some neo-liberal Democrats) have bound themselves to swift, dark, corporatist, violent currents that are displacing the republic's honor, integrity, faith and civic strength with flag-lapel-pin patriotism, jejune affectations of classical virtue, lockstep loyalty to ideological comrades, rancid religiosity, and a bloated, corrupting militarism that appalls even West Point instructors and ensures its own ignominious defeat.
Neoconservatives have done this not only because they've made bad bargains with dubious allies, but also because they were drawn to them in the first place out of their zeal to discredit whatever they thought smelled of bleeding-heart liberal pietism or political correctness. Were ditzy post-modernists dismissing the humanities as the droppings of dead white males? Well, then, neo-cons would become Vulcan humanists, teaching Thucydides as if he'd masterminded the Global War on Terror. Were liberals trying to curb smoking in public places? Well, then, neo-cons would smoke like chimneys.
One of my first in-person impressions of Irving Kristol, in fact, came at a luncheon given early in the 1990s by the conservative Manhattan Institute for his wife Gertrude Himmelfarb, scholar of 18th Century political thought and crusader for a restoration of quasi-Victorian morals. Smoking in closed spaces wasn't yet illegal, but it was coming under censorious social pressure. Therefore, everyone at Kristol's and Himmelfarb's table -- and only at that table -- smoked defiantly throughout the luncheon, Kristol's cigarette ashes falling on his dessert.
The cause of his death last week was complications of lung cancer - a metaphor, perhaps, what went wrong with his faux-cheery, snide, world-weary disdain for the follies of liberals. He was prone to express it with a hint of Mephistophelean or Grand Inquisitorial satisfaction, playing knowingly to the dark side in us all that can always be relied on at some point to choose power over love. One needn't call oneself a neo-con to be drawn to this side, as many people of my age in New York have been since 9/11. Kristol was always ready and waiting, content even if they became only fellow-travelers.
I heard him express himself in these ways on two occasions. One was in the mid-1980s in Washington, at a conference devoted to the confessional "Second Thoughts" of repentant liberals who'd seen the neo-conservative light. The other was his delivery of the Manhattan Institute's Walter Wriston Memorial Lecture to a black-tied audience in a New York ballroom in 1995. Apparently well-juiced by whatever he'd been served and by Wall Street Journal editorial page editor Robert Whitewater Bartley's introduction, Kristol told a couple of scatological jokes and offered bromides consistent with his evolution from thinker to pitchman and procurer over the years.
In some ways, though, Kristol had new leftists' number, and he loved to tell them, in effect, "Been there, done that. You leftists and liberals are young, but you'll come over my way." Kristol's own number was horribly wrong, though, as became clear at the 2008 Republican National Convention, a year before his death: Neo-cons discovered too late that their eagerness to discredit and defeat the left had driven them into the arms of a right they would never instruct or tame.
Kristol had announced years earlier that a neoconservative is a liberal who's been mugged by reality. He'd cited his own first "mugging" as a young radical who'd been thrown by World War II into the company of G.I.'s who were raping and looting. "I can't build socialism with these people," he'd realized then, and he soon shed his youthful idealism to build something more sinuous and realistic with what he understood the be "the American people."
In a lecture on the future of conservatism at the American Enterprise Institute late in 2007, Sam Tanenhaus, the conservative historian, New York Times Book Review editor, and sometime neo-con fellow traveler, noted that Kristol's strategy was to lead conservatives on a long march through New Deal managerial and academic institutions, which they despised, to build an academic and managerial class of their own. In Tanenhaus' telling, Kristol showed business and conservative leaders that liberal managerialism had bred a "new class" of academic, think-tank, and media-savvy public intellectuals. He counseled his listeners to outdo liberals at this game in order to rescue liberal education and liberal democracy from liberals for the kind of capitalist democracy conservatives could profit from and enjoy. They might even secure the "national greatness" conservatism of British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli that David Brooks and Kristol's son Bill would come to adore.
The elder Kristol's auditors took his advice, funding and nurturing a conservative chattering class of "on-message" talkers, squawkers, and intimidators. As I explained on OpenDemocracy at the time of Tanenhaus' lecture, this "new class" turned American conservatism's deepest contradiction-- its inability to reconcile its yearning for an ordered, sacred liberty with its obeisance to every whim and riptide of capital -- into a tragic flaw that has poisoned conservative and Republican crusades. Those campaigns, straining to cover the conservative contradiction I've just mentioned, connive to drive Americans to fear and blame its cultural and economic consequences not only distant enemies but one another.
Knowing what this has come to, Tanenhaus hinted in his lecture that Kristol knew it, too, but that he'd become cynical and followed the money: "One could look over the trajectory of Mr. Kristol's brilliant career and see that he's in a different place in the 1990s than he was in the 1970s," Tanenhaus said, recalling that Kristol used to cite Matthew Arnold's nobler cultural visions against Milton Friedman's vindications of greed.
No more. What Kristol and neo-conservatives did instead conformed to a despicable jingoism embraced by a distempered minority of Jews in Europe for two or three centuries. Here it peaked during the run-up to the Iraq War, when they and other members of the "new class" served as catalysts and apologists for the populist stampede into Iraq.
George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and other Vulcan conservatives didn't need encouragement from neo-cons to make war, but neo-cons insinuated themselves into the warmakers' ranks, partly by playing their propagandist and grand-strategist roles to the hilt, including harassing and intimidating the war's critics.
By 2006, William F. Buckley Jr., who had despaired of the Iraq venture, made clear that he considered its neo-conservative enthusiasts to have been one of the conservative movement's misfortunes. And at the ugly 2008 GOP convention, the neo-cons' contribution to Republican populism metastasized into the political equivalent of lung cancer. Speeches by Tom Ridge, Rudy Giuliani, and Sara Palin, and the chanting from the floor, displayed a populism that had become as phony, sinister, and cynical as that of the Stalinist Popular Front of the mid-1930s that had always been Kristol's bête noire.
Observing the swift undercurrents roiling the convention, Kristol must have known that neo-cons like David Brooks and fellow travelers like Ed Koch would soon bail out. But it may not have occurred to him that some of these defectors would end up as liberals who'd been mugged by the "reality" that Kristol had helped to create with his son Bill, the discoverer of Palin, whom he'd introduced to John McCain.
The elder Kristol's epitaph should be his dictum that neo-conservatism's mission is "to explain to the American people that they are right and to the intellectuals that they are wrong." Who are "the American people"? Kristol prided himself on knowing the answer better than liberals did.But he mistreated "the people" partly because he'd become one of "the intellectuals" of his own imagining and partly because, beneath his suave, "seen-it-all" cynicism he, like his movement, was so perversely bitter and insecure.
All this becomes clearer when one compares the neo-cons' collective persona and prose to that of Nicholas Thompson, a grandson of Paul Nitze, the preeminent arms-race "hawk" of the Cold War. In the 1970s, Nitze strode arm in arm with neo-cons in their Committee on the Present Danger, inflating the Soviet threat out of proportion to reality at a time when, as we now know, the USSR was beginning to implode.
If Thompson were a tribalistic, filopietistic neo-con, he'd launch into a pugnacious, Robert Kaganesque defense of his often-militaristic forebear. And he would cast George Kennan, the apostle of Cold War "containment," as the sinister, anti-American foil that many neo-cons did make of him, as they did of others who opposed their grand strategies.
Irving Kristol could make foils of liberals even while writing about Senator Joseph McCarthy's anti-Communist hysteria in 1952, acknowledging the senator's vulgar demagoguery yet adding darkly that "the American people" knew well that McCarthy, "like them, is unequivocally anti-Communist. About the spokesmen for American liberalism, they know no such thing."
But Thompson has something deeper in mind and at heart than writing such shaming, insinuating prose that became a hall-mark of neo-conservative propaganda, as it had been of the Communist variety in Kristol's youth. Thompson, by contrast, is intent upon telling a truer, more instructive story of two patriots, each annealed in a civic-republican discipline stronger and more supple than anything Kristol and Podhoretz ever absorbed.
While Nitze grew up in comfortable circumstances (his father was a distinguished philologist at the University of Chicago), Kennan grew up almost poor after his mother died when he was an infant. Yet both men attended civic-republican training schools (Kennan the Midwestern St. John's Military Academy, Nitze the elite Hotchkiss preparatory school in northwestern Connecticut) whose brooks seemed to bubble with moral instruction and whose eight-man river rowing taught that self-denial for the common good requires first a self that has been made strong enough to deny.
These schools encouraged self-scrutiny, plain living and high thinking, an understated felicity of expression, a quiet readiness to shoulder responsibility without reward, and a capacity to bear pain with grace (if only because spiritual grace was thereby assured.) A characteristic self-deprecating humor deflected others' envy. The term "character" is ridiculed these days as shorthand for elite breeding, but these lean, bonded boys honed not only the bookish but also the kinetic and moral intelligence that counts for more than the mere "merit" or distinction whose attainment so preoccupied Podhoretz.
But you don't need to have attended a private school like Nitze's or Kennan's to have acquired civic-republican discipline and faith that have been taught in countless black church basements and Little League lots, too. Indeed, neither Kennan nor Nitze really took his civic training to heart while undergoing it: Kennan was rather too introspective and bookish, Nitze boisterous and rebellious. But something of these schools' pedagogy took root and tempered each man's pride and resentments in ways that would benefit the country: It left each man knowing throughout life that his strategic differences with the other weren't as profound as their shared commitment to a kind of republican strength that no grand strategy can nurture or ultimately even defend.
"They often inspired or enraged each other with their ideas," Thompson writes. "They did, however, greatly respect each other and admire each other's seriousness of purpose, demeanor, and dedication. They realized they shared an uncommon endurance. They also shared a similar fate: neither reached his ultimate ambitions, while many lesser men reached the positions of influence [Secretary of State or Defense] to which they both aspired."
"My research revealed two very different men who nevertheless shared a commitment to the United States and to their very different ways of serving it," Thompson also notes, and he carries that commitment forward himself in a way that gives it brighter prospects.
Such a commitment need not be elitist or naive, as aristocratic indulgences often are. A civic republican resists "solidarity" with either left or right yet draws from both, knowing that both have valid claims to certain truths: The left knows the necessity of public planning and sustenance for the village that raises the child; without that, the individual dignity and traditions that conservatives cherish would never flourish. The right knows the equally important truth that without irreducibly personal responsibility and initiative, even the best leftists social engineering can turn people into clients, cogs, or worse. A good society, like a healthy person, strides on both feet -- the left of social provision, the right of personal responsibilty -- without worrying whether all its weight is on one or the other foot at any given instant in a balanced stride. But ideologues of the left and right try to strengthen one foot at the expense of the other until it swells, each side clinging to its "own" truth until it becomes a half-truth that curdles into a lie, leaving it right only about how the other is wrong.
Thompson understands this, and he illustrates it by describing the somewhat-unlikely tributes Nitze and Kennan tendered each other, after decades of strategic rivalry, when Nitze dropped his arms-race work for a day to attend Kennan's 80th birthday party in 1984, at one of the tensest moments in the arms race.
Raising his glass, Nitze said, "George Kennan taught us to approach issue of policy, not just from the narrow immediate interest of the United States, but from a longer-range viewpoint that included the culture and interests of others, including our opponents, and a proper regard for the interests of mankind."
As Thompson tells it, "Kennan rose to respond: the main lesson he had learned from Nitze, he said, was that when one disagreed with government, 'it may be best to soldier on, and to do what one can to make the things you believe in come out right."
Kennan wasn't counseling a lockstep or "old school" loyalty without integrity. He was invoking a subtler, more tensile strength that's necessary to sustain both realism and principle in a world of imperfect institutions. But how and when to do that? Reading Thompson reinforces my belief that Kennan, although he was no democrat, understood better than Nitze that power flows not from top-down command but from bottom-up cooperation and from a voluntary acceptance of necessary authority that comes from democratic deliberation itself.
Thompson's account of the two men's trajectories also shows that both understood that the discipline citizens bring to their deliberations can come only, if at all, from a civic culture that doesn't rely on statist surveillance and coercion. Rather, it nurtures people's trust in one another and trains them to cooperate in ways that become second-nature.
By contrast, the more that a society has to rely on state enforcement to preserve "freedom," and the more that it surrenders its deliberative disciplines to a seductive, predatory consumer marketing and dog-eat-dog materialism, the more its freedom has already been lost and, with it, the strength to take a blow from outside without lashing out and squandering itself. Neo-cons are constitutionally unable to see this, because so little in their own historical memories, and therefore their temperaments, seems to confirm it.
Reading Thompson, I'm also drawn to Kennan's peculiar strengths, convictions, and writerly temperament -- and even to some of his insecurities, prejudices, and Gibbonesque despair of the republic -- though not to his anti-democratic biases. I also understand Nitze better and respect his record at least marginally more than I did before.
I've been able to reach these conclusions because Thompson's rendering of Kennan is as compelling, fair, and even sympathetic as is his portrait of his grandfather, whom he knew and loved until his death, when Thompson was 24. This book, then, is more than an effort to give a grandfather his due (or, as some will see it, more than his due) by pairing him with Kennan, whom people like me are inclined to admire more. Thompson is willing to risk my concluding that his grandfather suffers a bit in the comparison, because his true purpose is to present each man's interaction with the other -- and with world events and powers -- in a way that strengthens the civic-republican culture that is the real if elusive protagonist of the book:
"The two men were equally influential and equally important, yet vastly different. Nitze was the diligent insider, Kennan the wise outsider; Nitze the doer, Kennan the thinker. Kennan designed America's policy for the Cold War, and Nitze mastered it. With respect to America's ability to shape the world, Nitze was an idealist and Kennan a realist. In their old age, Nitze still wanted to win the Cold War, and Kennan wanted to be done with it. Their views overlapped at strange and crucial moments; but for most of their working lives, they disagreed profoundly. In [a] New Yorker article published just before his eightieth birthday party, Kennan had indirectly criticized Nitze - who marked the piece up vigorously and also sent a letter to a mutual friend complaining that the argument showed a 'complete separation from fact and logic.'"
Thompson doesn't rest with this quasi-poetic and perhaps pat balancing act. He complicates it with nuances and unexpected details as he unfolds each man's life. He never polemicizes or debates. He draws contradictory currents of perception and principle together, not as Kristol or Podhoretz would in order to swamp their enemies, but to show how the currents actually converged and buffeted one another in historical tides that always confound ideologues who think they can channel them.
Writing a book such as this takes formidable civic-republican strength, even a steely, sometimes chilly courage. It's a strength young neo-conservatives lack because their faith in the republic is over-matched by their insecuritiest. Thompson's writerly strength is palpable in spare, unadorned prose that is the more eloquent for declining to call attention to itself - an old WASP virtue that runs back to the poetry on the 18th-century gravestones standing a hundred yards from me as I write this on a weekend in western Massachusetts, where Kennan's ancestors settled in Puritan times.
Thompson's rendering is so well balanced (and maybe also ironic) that he even gives us the younger and wiser Norman Podhoretz, observing in 1968 -- in a rare moment of agreement with Kennan, who'd just written a condemnation of student militants and hippies -- that Kennan's voice is "an old-fashioned voice: cultivated, gentlemanly, poised, self-assured. There is strength in it, there is serenity in it, there is solidity in it, there is authority in it - but not the kind of authority that can easily be associated with repressiveness." That's not the kind of authority that Podhoretz's own more clamorous and churlish writing has ever achieved.
Thompson not only appreciates Kennan's quiet authority; he radiates it himself. He's not yet Kennan's equal as a writer, and I'm not an historian of the period who can second-guess his decisions about what to show us and how. But Nicholas Thompson has delivered a book that's not just a labor of love; it's a vindication of a tradition of civic-republican comity that can't be coerced but is quietly stronger than anything the republic's noisier claimants offer in this frightening, polarizing time.
Racism is at work, too, of course, and Carter's reasons for crying "Fire!" in our crowded racial theater are deeply grounded. But so are Obama's for not joining him. Carter's condemnation works only when balanced by Obama's reserve, because far more than racism is at stake.
Free of Carter's penitential moralism on the subject, Obama sees the swifter, deeper currents driving the screamers. He knows they'd be frothing just as furiously were Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, or John Kerry in the White House. In Sunday's Washington Post I explain what we risk losing by writing them off as racists. The Post has already put the column online here.
And this week the Review showcases New Republic literary editor Leon Wieseltier's equally magisterial -- and, from the Times Book Review, equally unexpected -- put-down of his old friend Norman Podhoretz's unrepentantly neo-conservative tract, Why Are Jews Liberals?
Have the Book Review and Wieseltier changed for the better? Or are the editors just doing neoconservative damage control via feints toward the left, and is Wieseltier just trying to cover his past blunders, this time by turning on a friend?
The record doesn't augur all that well, for there is more (or less) to the editors' and Wieseltier's gestures than meets the eye. Of Wieseltier's review it needs to be said that he is right about Podhoretz, but dishonestly so, while Podhoretz is honest about what he believes, but woefully wrong. Hoping for better from the Book Review and its reviewers, let's take a closer look.
More than a year and a half ago I dubbed the Book Review "The Neoconservative Damage Control Gazette" in columns here at TPM and in The Nation. Undaunted, the Review continued to embody and nourish a mindset that rejects what it thinks is soft-headed progressivism and embraces what it thinks is a tough, post-9/11, "We know better" ideology, with its self-congratulatory pretense of taking on a world much darker and crueler than any our generation anticipated.
"A neoconservative is a liberal who's been mugged by reality," as Irving Kristol once put it, and for years now that sour apothegm could have been the motto of the Times Book Review.
But this mindset is more than a bit naïve, and, for all its noisy affirmations of patriotism, honor and loyalty, it is also in bad faith. Now that the Republican Party has bared its perversity, at least some New York liberals are neoconservatives who've been mugged by reality, and Tanenhaus' and Gewen's indulgence of conservative political positioning instead of real book reviewing has provoked rising disdain from acute observers such as this one at Litkicks and from Times readers, who posted angry comments when Gewen, in a blog item, made rather too much of neo-conservatism's resilience. (Read it here, with readers' delicious responses.)
But publishing houses still defer to the Review's make-or-break power over book sales to the typical Review reader (who, Gewen instructs reviewers, is "a dentist in Scarsdale"). So they have kept on publishing neo-connish tracts such as Bruce Bawer's Appeasing Islam: Sacrificing Freedom. And these have been duly rewarded, as was Bawer's last month with a Times rave, which was rightly called "a polemic on behalf of a polemic" in a letter to the editor from Gregory White, a professor of government at Smith College.
Unfortunately for such neo-connish reviews and the editors who indulge them, many neo-conservatives and their fellow travelers are now trying to worm their way back into the Democratic Party, because the 2008 Republican National Convention and Sarah Palin rallies rattled all those who aren't as witless as Bill Kristol (who had "discovered" and commended Palin to John McCain) and the ever-truculent Podhoretz, who is still urging Jews to become or remain Republicans.
The "new" neo-cons, who dare not speak their old name, are reminding everyone that they've always really been Democrats -- "Cold War," "Scoop Jackson" liberals in foreign policy, pro-labor and even pro-welfare-state in domestic policy. Never mind that they muted or forgot the more-liberal of these convictions during their 25 years amid think-tank fleshpots in the lavish conservative Egypt on the Potomac; now the Times' showcasing of Bob Reich's review may herald neo-cons' opportunistic exhumation and buffing of their old statism, at home as well as abroad.
Surely they also feel relieved to be hustling the embarrassing Podhoretz off stage, as the penitential war hawk Peter Beinart began doing two years ago in a Times review of Podhoretz's book World War IV. But Beinart merely exposed the narcissism of his own small differences with neo-cos when he sniffed that Podhoretz writes as hysterically as if he were "dodging I.E.D.'s on his way to Zabar's."
Wieseltier is better suited to smooth this bump on war hawks' road to redemption, because he's already too convoluted to require a political makeover, as Beinart did, before turning on Podhoretz.
So here is Leon this morning, filleting Norman's Jewish nationalism and bombastic Americanism as if he has always disdained them. Never mind that, until now, Wieseltier spoke endearingly of "Norman" as his friend and that, just after 9/11, both signed a letter to George W. Bush, on the letterhead of Bill Kristol's neo-conservative Project for a New American Century, urging war on Iraq as essential to the Global War on Terror.
And never mind that Wieseltier joined Dick Cheney and Karl Rove to form the Committee to Liberate Iraq. Or that, just last year, he and Podhoretz wrote separate but parallel letters to a judge urging clemency for Cheney's malfeasant aide "Scooter" Libby.
Now Wieseltier is the tribune of the Jews who aren't following his old ally. He even makes some of the same criticisms of Podhoretz's book that I've made in BookForum (sign-in required, but free) -- that Podhoretz's history lessons are potted, that he reads world-historical currents into all his own little tiffs, that his Judaism is mainly tribal and his conservatism more partisan than principled. (Neo-cons never did understand the difference between loyalty and integrity.)
But do Wieseltier's own inveterate shape-shifting and bottom-covering really compromise this critique? Does it matter that his take-down of Podhoretz makes it easy for upper-middling intelligences like Tanenhaus and Gewen to adjust their neo-con damage-control project without even having to acknowledge its existence?
Should anyone care that Wieseltier, writing in the New Republic, lashed out recently at the self-absorbed fashion-mongers who pass for "liberals" at the Times? (See his rebuke to Times Sunday Magazine editor Gerald Marzorati.)
Unfortunately for the mitigating intent of these rhetorical questions, Wieseltier is beginning to resemble a tract of land that was stony and saline to begin with and has been exhausted by too much cultivation. His weird displays of religiosity and his compulsively alliterative sagacities in rabbinic mode make me wonder if Madonna sat at his feet on her way to Kabbalah. Religion and politics remain "braided in my head, but as a matter of conviction I endeavor to keep them apart," he tells the Book Review's useless "Up Front" section, which attempts to drape each week's big blunder in an emperor's new clothes.
But Wieseltier hasn't succeeded in his "endeavor" or borne its consequences very well by liberal standards or by biblical ones. Next month I sketch my own small understanding of the tricky but essential balance of republicanism and religion, in an essay on Puritans, Hebrews, Jews, and the American republic for the fall issue of World Affairs Journal.
Suffice it to say here that both Wieseltier and Podhoretz, along with other neo-connish pitchmen for Judaism such as David Gelernter, Elliott Abrams, and Martin Peretz, remind me of those French Muslim adolescent girls who wore their religious head scarves to public school, less to obey the commands of their patriarchal faith than to win from the liberal state some of the individual recognition and rights that young people in liberal societies crave but that their own faith didn't give them.
Similarly, neoconservatives brandish veils of Jewish tradition alongside contradictory liberal claims, demanding respect from a republican civic culture that finds its truest strengths in a kind of vulnerability they don't understand and in arts and graces of republican dialogue, more than in established power and capitalist wealth. None of these men seems to me to understand this about American civic-republican culture, or to know how to nurture or defend it. They certainly don't realize that they have drained and damaged it when they thought they were vindicating it by singing its glories.
Wieseltier does know, though -- as Podhoretz does not -- that the Right isn't a plausible alternative to the fatuities of the Left. Conservatives cannot reconcile their yearnings for an ordered, sacred liberty with their obeisance to every whim and riptide of global capital, which disrupts the communities and traditions they claim to cherish. Yet neither Wieseltier nor Podhoretz ever says anything serious about capitalism, as is evident from the first, utterly useless paragraphs of Wieseltier's review.
Wieselter does know, too - as, again, Podhoretz does not -- that both left and right have valid claims to certain truths. The left understands the necessity of public provision and planning, of strengthening the village to raise the child. Without that, the individual dignity that conservatives cherish could never flourish. But the right understands the equally important truth that without irreducibly personal responsibility and initiative, even the best leftist social engineering can turn people into clients, cogs, or cannon fodder.
A good society, like a healthy person, strides on both feet -- a left foot of social provision and a right foot of personal responsibility -- without worrying whether all its weight is on one or the other at any given point in a balanced stride. But ideologues of left and right try to strengthen one foot at the expense of the other, each side clinging to its "own" truth until it becomes a half truth that curdles into a lie and leaves each side right only about how the other is wrong.
A civic-republican ethos resists "solidarity" with left or right yet draws from both. Wieseltier has long claimed to do this, and that claim serves him well in critiquing Podhoretz. But there's a difference between an honest American synthesis of left and right and Wieseltier's faithless prevarications as a liberator of Iraq, an apologist for Scooter Libby, and a self-appointed rabbinic and mystical interpreter of Ancient Wisdom for the unwashed.
His expose of Podhoretz's short-circuited, Manichaean Jewishness and bombastic Americanism is effective, and therefore welcome. Yet something about his cultural and political arbitrage seems as dreary, even as dreadful, as the damage-control opportunism of the Book Review editors who publish him.
For one thing, it was downright inspiring -- at least to me as a civic republican -- to find the formidable conservative Justices Antonin Scalia and John Roberts so willfully ignorant of political and corporate life. Justice is properly blind, but not as small-minded as the justices, who sounded as if they had no understanding of what it takes to run for office or to run a corporation.
Liberals on the court are inexperienced at this, too (although Justice Sonia Sotomayor knows the corporate world firsthand). But it was conservatives who fastidiously lifted their hems above the muck of real political and economic life to justify sweeping away regulations that keep big-corporate money from overwhelming the democratic electoral and legislative process. They also all-but dismissed legal principles and doctrines as different as stare decisis and "original intent.
And no wonder. We, the people, brought business corporations into being in the first place; allowed them to amass wealth in uniquely advantaged ways; subsidized them when they failed; and, indeed, have every right to bar them from using shareholders' investments to skew and even coerce a democratic process that is supposed to set the very rules for their money-making by reflecting the deliberations of people who -- as citizens, not just shareholders -- don't reduce their best interests to money-making alone, as corporations must by the very laws and charters that empower them.
The state has "a compelling interest" in doing this. "I don't accept the premise that corporations have rights as citizens," said McCain. Feingold agreed, noting that if they are given such rights, "the rights of the citizens will be overrun. We saw the corruption [that came from that presumption], that's why we acted."
If the court declares such legislation unconstitutional, Feingold added, "it would prevent us from legislating" in this area thereby blocking the democratic process from regulating the corporations that it created. Worse yet, once corporations have the option of inundating campaigns with their narrowly self-interested commercials, market pressures will drive them to do it.
Justice Sotomayor wondered if, indeed, the courts' real "error to start with" hadn't been its designation of corporations - in 1886, the era of the robber barons -- as "persons" in a technically legal but truly fictive sense that has emboldened their champions to claim "rights" that properly belong only to real people.
Justice Scalia, determined to ignore the First Amendment framers' original intent to protect living speakers from encroaching interests, and determined to transform the mythical corporate "person" the court has created into something that has rights to free speech, tried several gambits.
He kept emphasizing, as he has often, that 97 percent of corporations are single-shareholder outfits, mom and pop hairdressers and new car dealers who can't overwhelm public debate or buy off legislators, yet whose free speech is "silenced" by the current law's sweeping bars on direct corporate funding of campaign messages.
Scalia had to be reminded by Solicitor General Elena Kagan, chief advocate for the existing curbs, that the hairdresser or auto dealer who is the sole owner of a business can transfer some of its resources to his or her own direct advocacy as a citizen anytime he or she wants to plunge into the electoral process, without deluding or inconveniencing anyone involved in the business.
Meanwhile, if the currrent bars on big-corporate contributions were removed, the 3 percent of corporations that are huge and "owned" only by swirling whorls of shareholders who shift in and out at the click of a broker's mouse, would be able to overwhelm public debate and elections.
Nothing daunted, Scalia next wondered aloud if it's really so cynical of him to suspect that a Congress of incumbents enacted those curbs on corporate contributions not for the sake of some noble and compelling state interest but mainly to protect its own incumbency from challenge by insurgents.
Kagan had to inform this willful ignoramus that corporations give 10 times as much to incumbents as they do to insurgents, because they find it rewarding to invest in (and inflect the behavior of) the people already in office. Apparently, Scalia the Innocent had had no idea. If anything, Kagan added humorously, eliciting chuckles in the Court, McCain-Feingold may have been "the most self-denying thing Congress has ever done."
And why has Congress done it? Because the evidence that corporations were buying legislators stank to high heaven. And all that Congress actually did was require the principals of corporations to contribute separately, as individual citizens, and below certain amounts, and openly, through public disclosure, to Political Action Committees rather than to secretive front organizations like Citizens United, creator of the swift-boating "Hillary: The Movie," whose suit had prompted this hearing.
Justice Anthony Kennedy, who sides with conservatives and business corporations on this, worried piously if such legislation, however well intentioned, has the effect of silencing corporations that, after all, are often the most knowledgeable about many of the industries and practices that Congress regulates.
Kagan had to inform Kennedy that nothing in campaign-finance legislation silences corporate lobbyists, who swarm all over the Hill, in and out of committee rooms where legislation is being drafted. By barring direct corporate contributions to campaigns against legislators who've crossed corporate interests, she said, "we're only separating persuasion [in lobbying] from coercion."
Chief Justice Roberts became exercised against claims that if big business corporations are allowed to contribute directly to campaigns against legislators they don't like, they'll use their shareholders' investments for purposes to those shareholders themselves weren't consulted about. Like Alice in wonderland, Roberts wondered if it wouldn't be "extraordinarily paternalistic" of the government assume that shareholders can't "keep track "of what the corporations they own are doing.
Moreover, he asked rhetorically, don't corporations have interests just as diverse as those of individual citizens, since corporations, too, take different sides on different issues?
I'm not sure that Kagan or the liberal justices really succeeded in explaining to Roberts that corporations are barred by their charters and by law and by competitive market pressures from pursuing interests any more diverse than the narrow and all-important one of keeping their stock prices up every quarter, whatever it takes, and that any of their managers or employees who pursue the greater public good while on the job will soon lose both their mandate and their jobs.
Corporations therefore don't deliberate in any republican sense that the framers of the First Amendment meant to protect. Only living, breathing people can do that, transcending their self-interest at times in dialogue with others.
As for using shareholders' money for electoral purposes which some shareholders wouldn't approve, Kagan had to inform Roberts that shareholders can't possibly keep track of dozens of corporations' activities when their ownership of them is shifted off and on constantly by mutual funds and retirement plans and that therefore the whole notion of republican intentionality in public deliberation is corrupted.
Our conservative guardians of the republic seem unable to understand this kind of corruption. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had to remind them that conservatives had no problem being "paternalistic" when it came to zealously "protecting" members of labor unions from having any of their dues money used in election campaigns.
After listening to all this, I'm certainly for making public these audio transcripts of our great judicial minds deliberating about the meaning and fate of the republic. As a disinterested citizen, I appreciate being able to hear Roberts stumble through realities even more basic than the presidential oath that he flubbed while he was administering it to Barack Obama. But if this is how he deliberates, I hate to imagine how big business corporations do it.
We're for free speech here, aren't we? So says the ACLU, which has joined with the National Rifle Association in this case to support Citizens United, a Trojan Horse for big, publicly traded, for-profit corporations that want to use the wealth we let them amass to "crash" public debate to enhance their own bottom lines and public subsidies protections.
That's not "free speech." It's bought, over-determined speech. Conservatives who profess loyalty to the Constitutional framers' "original intent" are being hypocritical in supporting Citizens United, which isn't remotely the kind of speaker the First Amendment's framers intended to protect. The Roberts court may turn such intentions upside down.
In the early 1990s, when Rep. Les AuCoin (D-Oregon), a gun-control supporter, contemplated a run against Sen. Bob Packwood, an NRA lobbyist paid AuCoin a polite visit and slipped a video into his office TV showing the kind of ad the NRA would run against him, 'round the clock, if he didn't vote its way. AuCoin escorted the man out, ran against Packwood, and lost, partly thanks to the NRA.
The NRA's speech was protected, however - and so was its threat to "speak" -- because it gets its money from people who contribute voluntarily because they consciously support its positions. The same is true of Political Action Committees, which, under laws now being challenged, must also disclose their donors' names and limit how much they can give.
But if the Roberts Court sides with Citizens United, the unknown elites of a corporation you bought your car or washing machine from or in which you've invested (perhaps unwittingly, through a mutual or pension fund) will be able to use profits they've earned from you to do what the NRA does, but without any mandate from you or other customers and investors.
"In a democracy, citizens are the only legitimate sources of law," writes law professor Daniel J.H. Greenwood. But not if the Roberts court decides there's no distinction between the NRA and a big, anonymous business corporation when it comes to public debate and elections.
"Just imagine the impact on a member of Congress in the midst of deciding what to do on health care or climate control or banking legislation if the member knew that dozens of companies in affected industries each could spend millions of dollars . . . on full-scale campaigns to defeat or elect the member," Fred Wertheimer of Democracy 21 told Robert Kaiser of the Washington Post.
In the Boston Globe this weekend I've made a 700-word "civic-republican" case against mistaking these quarterly bottom-liners for free, deliberating citizens. The column has drawn comments you can read and also personal messages from law profs and court reporters.
I must thank the political philosopher Michael Sandel and the legal scholars Greenwood, Milton Regan, and C. Edwin Baker, (see Baker's "Paternalism, Politics, and Citizen Freedom") for breaking this ground.
Sandel has just written me to commend also Alexander Meiklejohn's Free Speech and Its Relation to Self-Government, and he says he's worried, "from the standpoint of civic-republican ideals," that "this Supreme Court will come down on the side of corporate 'speech' and eviscerate campaign finance restrictions."
If it does, the American conservative fetish for "individualism" will subject actual American individuals to the virtual dictates of corporate bureaucracies they can't deliberate with. These vast engines' multi-billion-dollar consumer marketing campaigns -- and, now, perhaps, electoral campaigns - titillate and stampede the clueless into pretending, all the more degradingly and violently, that they're free.
Do read and share the short Globe column and this post with friends, colleagues, students, and others who should follow Wednesday's arguments in Court, as well as Obama's health-care speech in Congress.
And, even though the guys at "Car Talk" will want to drive off a cliff when they hear me say it, read this splendid New York Times editorial warning of the dangers ahead.
]]>As New York Mayor Ed Koch rose to address the American Public Health Association in 1979, demonstrators chanted, "Racist Koch, you can't hide. We charge you with genocide." As they pelted him with eggs, Nayvin Gordon, M.D., 31, and two other doctors emerged onstage and grabbed him before being wrestled down by Koch and others.
An isolated incident? Progressive "boomers" who disrupted public meetings and goosed sensation-hungry media in youth are having senior moments about it all and complaining that journalists now dignify political insanity as never before.
Not quite! To see how current protesters miss the real causes and proper targets of their misspent rage, start with a glance in the mirror. It'll show that while progressives got some things right that the right gets wrong, those differences weren't always very clear.
]]>• Google "Bright College Years" and "video" and watch a painful but riveting color documentary of Jerry Rubin's, Abbie Hoffman's, and other white radicals' descent upon Yale in 1970 to protest the murder trial of Black Panther Bobby Seale.
No voice-overs in this film obscure the amazingly vacuous, violent mediocrity of rants that will embarrass anyone who's nostalgic about disruptions at Yale and other campuses. These often preceded and sometimes all-but provoked (without provocateurs!) police crackdowns, such as those at Harvard and Columbia, that still sanctify the students' follies in some boomers' memories.
Watching the film, I understood why Dwight Macdonald, the social critic, uproarious iconoclast, and descendant of two early Yale presidents, cautioned Columbia student rebels of 1968, whom he largely supported, that trashing universities would only deepen everyone's oppression.
• Read about understandable but misdirected black rage in my The Closest of Strangers -- about how, for example, in Brooklyn in 1967, Rhody McCoy, a tweedy, pipe-puffing disciple of Malcolm X and chairman of a predominantly black school board, set a precedent for racial mau-mauing by orchestrating menacing appearances by what board minutes call "the community," in the form of the thuggish militant Sonny Carson and his retinue to intimidate white teachers' union representatives and other liberals.
This kind of protest, claiming the mantle of nobler, more effective civil disobedience, trashed democratic deliberation about race for years. Justifications for bad strategies and premises were debated earnestly in The New York Review of Books, and, later, charges like Tawana Brawley's or myths like the black-church arson epidemic were treated with great deference by mainstream journalists.
• Writing in the alternative weekly Boston Phoenix in 1973, I promoted a "tea party" protest designed to disrupt an official bicentennial commemoration of the original Boston Tea Party. A worthy goal, perhaps: Jeremy Rifkin, leader of a radical "People's Bicentennial Commission" funded by the National Council of Churches, said, "It's going to be a physical confrontation, obviously, on the docks, How the hell can they arrest people for being revolutionary at a commemoration of the Boston Tea Party?"
Not much came of that effort or of the "Days of Rage" following the police riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. But many such disruptions shocked and briefly paralyzed ordinary, middle-aged Americans, liberal as well as conservative, who weren't wielding police batons or wearing hard hats but were merely fingering Roberts' Rules of Order in town-hall rooms where no one had ever called them "Motherfucker" before.
Many of us thought that Roberts Rules was just a bourgeois mystification of oppressive social relations, but, watching the movement spin out of control, TPM contributor Todd Gitlin, an early SDS president, wrote in his book The Sixties of widespread assumptions that -- as a Weatherman communiqué put it -- "Smashing the pig means smashing the pig inside ourselves, destroying our own honkiness.... We are against everything that's 'good and decent' in honky America...."
"No alternative theory or action crystallized from the murk of the collective despair," Todd lamented. "They're crazy, one heard [of the worst militants], but you have to admit they've got guts. Anyway, are you so sure they're wrong? And what is going to bring down American imperialism? And what are you, we, going to do about it? It was hard to summon up the standing to criticize."
I'll leave aside here the lethal symmetries between leftist terrorists, black or white, and right-wing white militias and segregationist killers, because a politics of death signals only the death of politics. But note Todd's estimate that between September 1969 and May 1970 there were some 250 "bombings and attempts linkable with the white left.... the explosions amplified, as usual, by the mass media."
And note the broad atmospherics that incubated violence by crazies such as the 1993 Long Island Railroad gunman Colin Ferguson, a man steeped racial demagoguery whose incredible indulgence by progressives I described at the time. (Scroll to the second pdf on this link.)
We now pretend it wasn't so. Yet we're alarmed by the rhetorical violence at Sarah Palin rallies, the GOP 2008 convention, and health-care forums partly because it turns our senior moments about past indulgences into nightmares from a buried or sanitized past.
True enough, while today's right-wing demonstrators want to block public health care (and, weirdly, to trust vast, bureaucratic engines such as insurance companies and HMOs), most enraged demonstrators in the 1960s were trying to stop mass butchery by a military-industrial juggernaut whose "mad rationalists" were crazier than we. And it can't surprise us that as the slaughter deepened, anti-war demonstrators succumbed at times -- some terminally -- to helpless rage.
But many of today's raging demonstrators feel helpless, too, and betrayed, for reasons that progressives, of all people, should understand.
Most of us who rightly assailed "the corporate state" were young and relatively well-educated. We lived, as SDS' Port Huron statement put it, "in at least modest comfort" in a society where "going underground" could mean taking a readily available factory job.
Today's demonstrators are older and more vulnerable than we were when the draft no longer hung over our heads. Today's 55-year-old former auto or steel worker who has just become a stock clerk or burger flipper with no health insurance isn't having any senior moments about the high-paying manufacturing or managerial job with full benefits and pensions that he lost, along with a manageable mortgage. He still feels it slipping away.
Can it surprise us if he's raging at the wrong targets? We did that, too, sometimes -- at university scholars, deans, liberal public functionaries, even anyone, including our parents, who was over 30, paying taxes, and therefore as complicit as a "good German" in "fascist Amerika." Not only that: We didn't trust government much more than the right does now.
But acknowledging all this only clarifies the two big, instructive differences.
First, while our tactics became terrible, we were right to arraign corporations for wrongs that conservatives still blame almost wholly on the state and "liberals". We knew then what recent events have confirmed: that conservative and moderate Americans can't reconcile their yearnings for ordered, almost sacred liberty with their obeisance to every whim and riptide of corporate and finance capital, which mock the capitalism envisioned by a John Locke or an Ayn Rand.
Second, our protests weren't backed by any big corporations or major political parties. That 1973 "People's Bicentennial" effort to disrupt the official Boston Tea Party exposed a plastic, corporate-funded simulation of a 1773 rebellion against the true progenitor of the tea tax - the multinational corporate East India Company -- and a mercantile, imperial regime.
"'Tis time to part," Tom Paine wrote then, as Americans faced the daunting prospect of replacing the only regime they'd ever known with new, untried arrangements. We aren't yet ready to part with the current regime of finance and big-corporate capital that has arisen to consume our republic.
When push does come to shove, I'll commend the coercive non-violence I've discussed here before, the kind pioneered in the best of the last century by a new politics, from that of Gandhi and the early American Civil Rights movement to that of dissidents of the Soviet bloc, and, we can still hope, in Iran.
Our best responses to the enraged American victims of today's profiteers would be in this spirit, which takes a lot of discipline, organizing, and courage to sustain. It involves civic-republican vigilance against the corporate state, mobilized public persuasion, and disciplined moral witness -- no matter how inadequate and, yes, sometimes maddening, such responses may seem to the young rebels, the ideologues, and the most desperate among us.
About these responses, this summer's conservative provocateurs haven't a clue, but they're the responses that will work best in our time -- at least outside of Washington.
But this time I'm wondering what you make of Gail Collins' response, in a recent Times "conversation" blog, to Brooks' latest attempt at re-positioning.
In this mercifully brief exchange, he and Collins mention the pros and cons of partisanship -- a worthy subject in its own right. But, then, after all Brooks' attempted political make-overs, she tells him, especially in her last couple of sentences, to crawl back into the hole he dug so deftly for himself and credulous fans across 15 years, six at the Times.
I'm inclined to pass the torch, the microphone, the podium, the floor, and every honor of Polemicist Laureate to Collins for addressing Brooks as I've never seen a Times columnist address another Times columnist before.
Maybe I'm reading too much into her tweaking. But even if, say, Ralph Nader was right about both parties, isn't it a bit late in the day for Brooks to flutter his eyelashes and ask, "Who, me, a raving partisan?" What do you think?
But one TPM reader could, because she'd been carried across W. 121st St. on Dec. 12, 1933 by two cops after circulating anti-Nazi handbills during the speech.
She was "a blonde, hatless, quiet, and, it seemed to me, imperturbably valiant freshman [who] stood her ground firmly but undemonstratively," wrote James Wechsler, a reporter for the Columbia Spectator, years later in The Age of Suspicion. "I knew her name was Nancy Fraenkel and that her father was a Civil Liberties Union lawyer. I saw her much more frequently after that evening which, I learned later, was her seventeenth birthday. We were married the following October."
Nancy Wechsler, who died Monday, at 93, never stopped showing how to stand your ground imperturbably in an uproar - a piece of political wisdom that grows from character and civic culture more than from intelligence or ideology.
Like some other leftists, Nancy and Jimmy soon saw through Communism's tragedies, duplicities, and cruelties. But because their idealism and decency weren't phony, but rooted in personal character and civic-republican principle, their disillusionment with the Stalinist left didn't catapult them into the arms of the right, as it did some future neoconservatives, who mistake corporate capitalism's mountebanks, bounders, and blowhards for carriers of republican freedom.
Jimmy, a hard-driving liberal and wonderfully literary journalist until his death in 1983, was targeted by Senator Joseph McCarthy while he was the crusading editor of the New York Post in its intelligently pro-labor, pro-civil-rights glory days, which ended in 1977 when Rupert Murdoch bought the Post and turned it into a daily reminder that Australia was founded as a penal colony.
Nancy became a prominent public lawyer, like her father and Jimmy's brother Herbert Wechsler. Unlike them, she needed her unflappable, feisty, but disciplined manner to become one of the first women admitted to Columbia Law School and the New York Bar.
Through political and family adversities, Nancy and Jimmy sustained a redeeming, impish humor, recalling, for example, how Franklin D. Roosevelt, in a dinner at the White House, thought of nothing better to ask Nancy than whether she baked bread. They griped about each other's driving: Jimmy hated to drive; Nancy was a demon on the road and, even this summer was still driving back and forth from Manhattan to a summer home in Westport, CT. (In the city, Nancy seldom took cabs; as late as this year, she was still taking city buses daily from her home west of Lincoln Center to her firm at Madison and E. 38th Street.)
It wasn't only McCarthyism that targeted her and Jimmy's politics, though. Jimmy was also assailed by unreconstructed Stalinists who couldn't get over his decision not to take the Fifth Amendment before McCarthy's committee but to denounce McCarthy to his face, on the record, even while giving him the names of some old Communists who, Wechsler knew, were already on McCarthy's lists.
He did it for reasons he explains compellingly in The Age of Suspicion, and I think he did the right thing. That book, which also describes Nancy, is especially instructive now for two reasons:
First, it's obvious now that many leftists who assailed the Wechslers were also wrongly assailing Elie Kazan (for naming names) and defending the Soviet Union and Alger Hiss, long beyond the point where it made political, moral, or even simple cognitive sense. Jimmy's account of how he and Nancy saw through them so early is instructive.
Second, The Age of Suspicion is even more instructive because, reading now about the Stalinists of that time, you'll find yourself thinking of neo-conservatives who bear striking characterological, cultural, and even political resemblances, for reasons that are worth pondering.
While both left and right have valid claims to represent profound truths, both suffer from deformities of character that only a wiser balance of civil libertarianism and civic-republican discipline can offset.
Nancy and Jimmy Wechsler found their ways to that balance because they'd grown up with it in the first place, as indomitable, savvy New Yorkers who could bring the best of progressive commitments along with them toward a viable civic consensus.
Until a few days before her death, Nancy was at her firm, McLaughlin & Stern, LLP, working in that spirit on copyright cases, as she had for decades at Deutsch, Klagsbrun, Blasband. She knew that both left and right can seem morally noble when they're going up against the more dominant side's (and its many apologists') institutionalized carapaces and cant. But she also knew that each side tends to cling almost tribally to its fundamental truths until they become half-truths that curdle into lies, leaving each side right only about how the other side is wrong.
Thus Hitler's Nazis ("National Socialists") seemed noble to more than a few working people while on the upswing against striped-pants capitalists who'd crafted the Versailles settlement and Great Depression. On the left, Stalin seemed noble against the fascist Franco in Spain and Hitler after 1941.
But political crises demand good judgment and sometimes humor, even when one has taken a firm and fateful stand. Because Nancy Wechsler understood this, she was a brave civil-libertarian and civic-republican, from that moment in 1933 when she handed out leaflets against Hitler's ambassador to her last freedom-of-speech case. She would never have temporized for ideological reasons about Ahmadenijad's Iran.
Those of us who are sometimes hard on leftists and lawyers should keep this leftish lawyer in mind. No less than conservative Southerners like that old "country lawyer" and segregationist, Senator Sam Ervin, a hero of the Watergate hearings -- or even like Republican Lindsay Graham, at least in his pro-Sotomayor speech to the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday -- Nancy Wechsler remained rooted in and loyal to the American republic, when others were seeking political salvation elsewhere.
The case shows well that, although law is indispensable and decisive in framing, prodding, and enforcing our reckonings on race, the law and those who execute and enforce it aren't the only or even the best framers or deciders.
It's sometimes painfully necessary to remind lawyers of this, especially in matters touching race -- and precisely because, in those matters, law sometimes does offer the only hope for justice. With his phone calls, especially to Sgt. Crowley, President Obama -- a black man who is a former professor of constitutional law, activist, and legislator -- is reminding all of us that law is a vitally necessary but not a sufficient condition of justice.
So, what would be "sufficient"?
So what was the legal problem with Gates' reaction? As I wrote here yesterday, there wasn't any problem that warranted his arrest. But that's only the beginning of a discussion (like this one) that is not a litigation but a civic reckoning, without whose constant renewal law shrivels and dies.
In trying to advance that reckoning a little bit here, not as a judge or lawyer but as a writer and journalist who has seen many incidents like this (I was involved in one thirty years ago) I'm saying that it's likely and understandable that Gates' fatigue after a long flight from China, his irritation at having had trouble opening his front door, his knowledge of the black experience I've mentioned, and his all-too human and richly endowed penchant for dramatizing that history and himself (which I have witnessed), all came together upon seeing a white cop at his door. And this produced a reaction Sgt. James Crowley didn't deserve.
Yesterday I linked the best assessment I've seen, by a New York police captain who wouldn't have arrested Gates but sees both sides of the story really well.
Even if Gates' understandable reaction wasn't therefore really well-justified or appropriate, neither was Sgt. Crowley's reaction in arresting him. If Crowley is the honest, by-the-book cop he seems to be, then his own reaction, too, was understandable but inappropriate and unjustified legally -- and Crowley is, after all, an officer of the law. But he's also a human being operating under his own quotient of job stress and extensive, nuanced experience.
The biggest non-surprise of this incident is that the President of the United States had a human reaction, too, not only an official one. Recognizing quickly that he had made an inappropriate, politically and morally consequential remark by using the word "stupidly," Obama invited Crowley and Gates to the White House.
Just imagine it: Three all-too-human beings will sit down and talk their way to common ground with the whole nation following, rather than sue or assail one another!
Obama's "teachable moment" clarifies something I wish certain of my lawyer- and activist-friends would acknowledge more often: Laws work best when they're passed on the cusp of a public consensus that's been nourished by a politics of persuasion through democratic, civic dialogue (and moral witness, and sometimes exemplary civil disobedience).
That includes the dialogue we're having right here and the one I hope they'll have at the White House.(Memo to Skip Gates: Don't be too clever by half. No charming condescension, please.)
The kind of dialogue we must hope forhere is no frill. It's not just "talk." It requires a discipline that's necessary to freedom. Free citizens need to be socialized and trained for it. Civic-republican truth-seeking like that makes this country strong. People who short-circuit or distort and degrade it to reach for "higher" truths or selfish ends are dangerous - even if they're lawyers on a mission.
We can all easily over-legalize and/or over-moralize situations whose protagonists are basically decent people operating under stress and sometimes consciously bearing burdens of history. Obama is reminding us that good law grows from and depends on a civil society whose members teach one another how to extend trust in ways that elicit trust from others, outside the law, even when they disagree furiously over ends and means.
If a critical mass of citizens don't learn how to generate little self-fulfilling prophecies of civic trust in everyday ways while they're growing up, the society becomes a slippery web of legal contracts and rights and enforcers that is weak as a spider's web.
The proliferation of TV shows featuring Judge Judy or Judge Jingles and so on is sad testimony to such a society's confusion and growing desperation. Soon enough, such a society often turns to more dangerous bases of order, collapsing into the arms of false leadership that's illegal, immoral, and destructive.
The perverse illogic of mistrust and fear that generates more mistrust and fear is fed daily by Fox News and by what too much of the Republican Party and conservative movement have let themselves become. They tell us that Obama is just posturing here, not that he has better reasons to try to help the country get beyond egregious racial profiling. This is a great "teachable moment" because the profiling came from both sides.
Obama's leadership in slowing and perhaps even turning the tide of cynicism toward a logic of trust that begets trust is reinforcing civic-republican leadership and methods I could only dream of and call for -- to the annoyance and disdain of certain lawyers and activists --- as I was writing and defending The Closest of Strangers and Liberal Racism.
Lawyers and activists have indispensable roles to play, but Obama has other roles to play, as well. And so does everyone who's writing, reading, and commenting here.
Apropos which, an important note: If you've read this far, please be sure you know that this column is a sequel to my column of the day before --"Both Were Wrong, But One Was Wronger" -- in which I cite explicitly the elements of class and elitism in this case, as well as some of the relevant facts. Please do read and dsicuss that column with this one
]]>I've known more than a few very good cops, as well as some bad ones, and, based on what I've learned about Crowley, my own not-so-Solomonic assessment is that both he and Gates are decent men who behaved wrongly in a highly charged situation. Gates made it worse, but the larger wrong was Crowley's: He shouldn't have arrested Gates. We won't get anywhere, though, if we don't try to imagine why he did.
]]> On Gates' side, his Harvard colleague (and, in this matter, his lawyer) Charles Ogletree, who is black and a professor in the law school that Barack Obama attended, has often said that whenever he changes from his jacket and tie to an ordinary ski parka and stocking cap, he goes from being a law professor to being "a probable cause."Unlike Ogletree, Skip Gates is a pretty highly self-signifying guy, an academic performance artist and entrepreneur as well as an authoritative carrier of a lot of black history. At the moment when his neighbor called the police, Gates became, like Ogletree, a probable cause, a black man breaking and entering. But knowing Gates as I've described him, I don't have trouble imagining him becoming a lot more condescending and insulting than was necessary or tactically smart when dealing with an officer who was basically doing his job. (You really have to read the Crooked Timber post I've linked if you want to make your own wise assessment.)
But even if Gates was making a total ass of himself by over-determining the situation and pumping 300 years of African-American history into circumstances that didn't warrant it and that weren't at all likely to end in an arrest, that doesn't mean that the arrest itself was justified in legal or civic terms.
Comments by both Crowley and Gates make clear that by the time Crowley asked Gates to step back outside his own house, Gates was no longer a suspect, and Crowley had no good reason to assume that others were inside burglarizing the house, since Gates had already explained that it he, not someone else, had broken in.
If Crowley (and, by then, the other officers who'd arrived) understood that Gates was the homeowner and that he had indeed been the one who'd forced the front door, they should have wrapped up their visit and gone on to the next job. Even if police protocol and their own discretion warranted a pro-forma search of the house, they could have let Gates rant on while doing it. If Crowley hadn't arrested him, there'd have been no grounds for a suit.
Somehow Gates really got under the skin of an officer who was no rookie but a seasoned veteran and a trainer of other cops. If you would read the Crooked Timber post, you would understand that, as I learned in Brooklyn, most cops who become sergeants have learned to take a lot of real crap from the citizenry without losing their cool. They may still be peremptory and dictatorial in circumstances that hardly justify it, but they don't go around arresting people like Gates in circumstances like this.
If Gates laced into Crowley by accusing him of racism, he was also insulting him professionally and, implicitly, along class lines. A certain prominent Harvard Law School graduate's use of the word "stupidly" can't have helped here. Gates' verbal misbehavior wasn't grounds for an arrest, but ultimately, this is a country, not a courtroom, and both Gates and Crowley -- unlike a lot of younger or meaner people -- have been around the track often enough to know what that means in situations like this.
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