Many people think that Jewish lobbying, pressure and influence dragged a reluctant Uncle Sam into the Middle East.  Think again.

Now it’s true that American opposition to Zionism has a long and distinguished pedigree.  In the 19th century, American missionaries built a network of colleges and hospitals across what was then the Ottoman Empire and what today we call the Middle East.  The missionaries and their students helped develop modern secular Arab nationalism. The idea was that if Arabs stopped thinking of themselves as Muslims and Christians, but developed a communal inter-religious identity, this would allow Christian Arabs to play a larger role in political life and, the missionaries hoped, one day open the doors to present the gospel to the Muslims.  Many of the great leaders of Arab secular nationalism, including the (French-educated) Michel Aflaq, founder of the Ba’ath Party that once ruled Iraq and still rules Syria and whose beautiful tomb in Baghdad (at right) was built by Saddam Hussein, were Arabs of Christian origin.

For these missionaries, the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine looked like a disaster.  It radicalized and fragmented Arab politics and introduced the motifs of religious struggle that to this day divide, for example, the Palestinians between religious parties like Hamas and secular ones like Fatah.  Zionism was especially polarizing in modern Syria, Lebanon and Palestine — where some of the highest concentrations of Arab Christians were.  Moreover, the American missionaries in the Arab world identified with the Arab struggles for independence first from the Ottomans, and later from the British and the French.  They generally had a great deal of respect for Arab culture and looked to establish a close relationship between the United States and the rising Arab peoples.  The missionaries and their successors believed that the smart choice for the United States in the Middle East was to make friends with the Arabs; American support for the Jews was a foreign policy disaster that ran clearly counter to our obvious national interest.

Today when we think of missionaries we tend to think of evangelicals from what we East Coast types call the boondocks when nobody is looking, and the heartland when we are running for office, especially in the Iowa caucuses.  One hundred years ago, that wasn’t true.  Missionaries for the mainline denominations — which were the ones who predominated in the Ottoman Empire and who controlled the great missionary institutions of the day — were often extremely well connected and were sometimes well heeled members of the establishment.  Prominent business and political leaders sat on the boards of missionary colleges and missionary kids regularly returned for college at places like Yale before heading into careers in government service — and especially into the State Department.  (Missionary kids understood foreign languages and culture; they played a huge role in the expansion of America’s international presence during and after World War Two.)

The missionaries were more like the development establishment and the Ford Foundation of today than like Campus Crusade for Christ, and the young people (more than half of them women by some counts) who went into missionary service were more like Peace Corps and development workers.  They were, in other words, very much like the people in America today who are least likely to sympathize with Israel in the Middle East: well connected, well educated intellectuals and professionals from a high WASP and usually New England, background.  They generally had a wider knowledge about foreign affairs than most other Americans, and were interested in and concerned about development, democratization and women’s rights.  Their connection to Christianity was closer than that of their descendants; they believed that the promotion of social equality, economic development, rights for women and transparency in government were all intrinsically connected to the promotion of Christianity, but the missionaries and their allies were liberal upper-middle-class professionals from the mainline denominations and their descendants and heirs are very much with us now — and they still tend not to like Israel very much.

Then, as now, they thought Zionism was basically a bad idea (though once the state of Israel was a fait accompli they didn’t support its destruction), that it was bad for American foreign policy, and that the United States ought to stay as far away from it as possible.  Then, as now, they were largely clueless about why the Zionist cause was so persistently popular in Congress; then, as now, they blamed it on the Jews.  At that time, unlike today, these sentiments were often expressed in overtly and even virulently anti-Semitic language.

Although American anti-Zionists have never quite been able to figure it out, the typical pattern in the politics of American policy toward Israel dates back into the 19th century.  Public opinion is generally strongly pro-Zionist and Congress reflects that sentiment.  The diplomatic and academic establishment is much more cautious, with attitudes ranging from coolly skeptical to bitterly opposed.  Presidents occupy the middle ground, looking to harmonize the public’s support with the establishment’s unhappiness and they tilt one way or another depending on their assessment of the domestic and international politics of the day.

This, I think, is the heart of the matter:  American Jews didn’t drag reluctant American gentiles into the Middle East; it’s much more accurate to say that American gentiles pushed reluctant American Jews into the Zionist movement.  If American Jews had the power to shape American policy towards the Jews through the twentieth century, most likely there would be no state of Israel today.  This is an inconvenient truth.  Zionist myths about the Jewish past and gentile myths about American innocence are both challenged by this history.

American Jewish leaders in the old days were largely anti-Zionist for both ideological and pragmatic reasons.  read more »

I’ve done my share of Times-bashing on the climate change issue, so it’s a pleasure to see a thoughtful and sensible piece by Times writer Andrew Revkin.  Unfortunately it’s on the web rather than in the print edition where it might do more good, but Revkin makes some strong points in a post that is well worth the reading.  Essentially, he’s making the point (one familiar to readers of this site) that what we have here is less a science controversy than a policy fight.  The rules are different and a lot of climate scientists and advocates haven’t quite figured that out.

I don’t think Revkin quite gets all the dimensions of the policy failure that the climate change movement has made, but in calling the proposed global system a “Rube Goldberg” like device he’s certainly on the right track.

Anyway, read the whole thing.  If the climate change movement listens to Revkin, we will be well on the road to a more sensible and constructive debate on this issue.

I always love when a blog post can be set to music, so I was very glad to be tipped off by a linking website (HT: Irenic Thoughts) to this video.

I was a little mystified by what these young people were doing until my research associate Sam (formerly team intern here at Mead GHQ, but now ensconced in a comfier chair and with an actual salary) told me that this so-called ‘rap music’ is quite popular with the younger set.

This video is a rap parody (of Jay-Z, says Sam), channeling the energy and sentiment of my post “The Holy Crap Must Go,” only this time in the direction of the Catholic Church of 500 years ago. The video was created by and features students and faculty from my alma mater, and you can read the lyrics and see where they exercised poetic license at their website.

Enjoy the MTV treatment of Martin Luther…

1 Comment » Posted on March 9th, 2010 The Night Yasser Arafat Kissed Me Posted In: History, Islam, Judaism, Obama, U.S. Foreign Policy

The stars were sparking over Gaza on the unforgettable night when Yasser Arafat kissed me — gently, tenderly, sincerely.  I’ve rarely felt more relaxed or more comfortable with a world leader; he was kneading my shoulders and massaging my back at the time.  As the tension of a hard day drained out of me, I looked wonderingly at our reflections in the window as he closed his sensitive and expressive eyes and bent down to kiss me on the crown of my head.

It had been a hard day; a long business lunch at a fish restaurant overlooking the Mediterranean, a quick dip in the water, and one meeting after another.  In the afternoon I spent some time with Madame Arafat; she converted to Islam before marrying the leader of the Palestinian national movement, but had a beautiful, autographed biography of John Paul II on her coffee table.  She was very excited; to help with the Palestinian struggle she had planned a benefit in Paris to help Palestinian hospitals and we passed an agreeable hour as she told me of her plans.

I bring up this tranquil, tender moment when two busy lives intersected because I’m about to do something that usually makes for trouble: while continuing to blog on a range of subjects over the next week to ten days I’ll put up some more posts on the reasons why the United States supports Israel as much as we do.  I’ve touched on this subject before; my post on the “Israel Lobby Syndrome,” or ILS, that strikes some of our foreign policy specialists from time to time was not universally popular — anymore than Chairman Arafat was.  You can look at the comments page or check here and here to see some interesting responses.

Now some of the trouble I brought on myself; ‘realist’ is a word that so many people use in so many senses that I should have understood that its use in this context would only confuse matters.  I suppose I had in mind the misguided book written by two prominent ‘realist’ scholars that appeared a couple of years ago on this subject.  (Here is a link to the review of the book I wrote at the time in Foreign Affairs.)  It’s also true that some of the people whose bad advice led President Obama into the biggest and most costly foreign policy blunder of his administration so far are often called ‘realists.’  For those with short memories, these are the people who seem to have persuaded the President to issue a public demand that Israel freeze all settlement activity.  This was based on a completely unrealistic understanding of America’s leverage over Israel.  Israel rejected the President’s demand out of hand, and the rejection set President Obama’s hopes for progress toward peace in the region back by at least a year. This was bad for him, bad for the United States, bad for Israel and bad for the Palestinians.

I often hear self-described realists urging us to do completely unrealistic things when it comes to Israel, and the earlier post reflected that.  I remain genuinely puzzled why people who in other contexts have quite interesting things to say manage to trip up in such foolish and self-defeating ways when the I-word comes up, but you can’t tar all realists with that brush, and to anybody out there who felt unfairly besmirched by the association — I’m sorry.

Blogging on US-Israel relations is a political nightmare; there is so much mistrust, wounded righteousness and ill feeling on all sides that it’s hard to strike the right tone and make your points clearly enough to avoid being misunderstood.  The core points I want to make aren’t about whether American foreign policy toward Israel is a good thing or not, but this debate is so politicized that if you criticize the thesis that American policy toward Israel represents the power of American Jews people assume that you are part of the lobby. In fact, arguably the people who suffer the most from mistaking the political basis of America’s policy in the Middle East are those who want to change it.  Those who don’t understand the American politics of this issue are never going to come up with effective strategies for change.

Frankly, those who think they can make substantive changes in American policy toward Israel by attacking the Jews and the Israel lobby remind of some bulls I once saw at the bull fights in Madrid.  Bull after bull went for the red cape, not the matador.  Bull after bull went down in the dust as the crowds cheered and threw flowers.  That is pretty much what has happened to those who want to distance the US from Israel; they go for the highly visible and attractive target of the Israel lobby, and time after time they go down. I don’t think this is smart, but don’t let me stop anybody’s fun.

I’ll get into the reasons why I think the Israel lobby is more matador’s cape than matador going forward, but there’s one difficult subject that needs to be addressed up front, and that issue is anti-Semitism.  This form of prejudice is as deeply embedded in western Christian history as racism is in American culture.  As a native South Carolinian born back in the days of legally-enforced racial segregation, I have learned a lot about the subtle qualities and stubborn persistence of racist images and ideas that you take in unconsciously from the culture that shapes you.

We’ve come a long way in fighting both types of prejudice, but you’d have to be naive and ignorant to think they have just vanished away.  I am always nervous around people who stridently insist that racism has disappeared in mainstream American life and only lingers on in weirdo subcultures; I feel the same way about people who say that anti-Semitism is no longer a significant feature of western culture.  I am especially leery when people who loudly and implausibly assert that anti-Semitism isn’t a problem anymore make harsh and unbalanced criticisms about the world’s only Jewish state.

I’m not trying to grade the incommensurable suffering of people around the world, but if we compare the attention and care that the international community has extended to the Palestinians with our attention and support for other victims in other places, a disturbing pattern emerges. Whatever the wrongs of Israel’s occupation policy — and I agree that there are some — the Palestinians, especially in the West Bank but even in Gaza, live much better than many people in the world whose suffering attracts far less world attention — and whose oppressors get far less criticism.  I would much rather be a Palestinian, even in Gaza, than a member of a minority tribe in the hills of Myanmar, or almost anyone in the Eastern Congo or Darfur.  Millions of children in Pakistan and Indonesia have less food security, less educational opportunity and less access to health services than Palestinians who benefit from UN services (to which the United States is historically the largest single contributor) that poor people in other countries can only dream of.

The disproportionate reactions to Israel’s treatment of Palestinians constitutes a genuine scandal and pretty much proves that anti-Semitism did not die when Hitler shot himself underneath Berlin.  Russia treats its Chechens much worse than Israel treats its Arabs yet there are plenty of self righteous German leftists who want to disinvest from Israel but favor closer relations with Putin’s Russia.  These people will hotly deny that they are anti-Semites and get all huffy and moralistic; I am not sure that the rest of us should take them at their word.  The pious people in Turkey who have gotten so angry recently about Israeli actions in Gaza haven’t perhaps thought as deeply as they could have about Turkey’s record with the Armenians, Greeks and the Kurds.  Although life is far from perfect for Arabs in Israel, Muslim and Christian Arabs generally have more freedom, dignity and equality in Israel than Christian Arabs, Jews and non-Arab ethnic groups enjoy in many Arab countries.

I’m not trying to say that anti-Semitism is the only reason why people react with disproportionate outrage to Israeli wrongdoings.  This dispute has lasted so long and events like the last war in Gaza are covered so much more thoroughly on television than other violent episodes, and the Israelis are so much more open about allowing the world press to see what is going on that Israeli actions and their consequences are well publicized.  And for people in Europe, Israel is close at hand and seems in many ways part of the same cultural space; events there somehow seem more real than bigger problems farther way.  It is also true that some ’causes’ somehow get to be more chic and interesting than others; the Palestinian cause is ‘in’ in a way that, say, the cause of Iranian Baluchistan or of Christian tribal people in northeastern India is not.  And of course for the Palestinians and their allies, mobilizing public anger against Israel is an important tactic in the long-running dispute.

But even after making all the possible and necessary allowances, there is something disturbing about the widespread excessive fixation on Jewish shortcomings.  Almost the whole world is barking obsessively and furiously at the Jews while ignoring equal or worse problems on every side. At worst and far too frequently, this is anti-Semitism in full career: virulent, murderous, irrational, vile.  It must be opposed, and it must be called to account.

I have no doubt that most of the official criticism that Israel receives from the European Union (to take one example) is hypocritical hogwash.  If any democratic European country faced the same kinds of threats that Israel did — hostility from the region, a constant threat of suicide bombers, persistent legal and political efforts to delegitimize the state, periodic uprisings among ethnic minorities, and rocket attacks from areas just over its frontier — those tut-tutting moralists would show another side of their character and act at least as ruthlessly as Israel sometimes does.  (And sometimes, as in Israel’s case, their anger and fear would lead them to do things that were unwise and self-defeating.  No democracy under the threats and pressures that Israel has faced throughout its existence could avoid excesses and even crimes.)

Now to give them their credit, I believe that many of the individuals who denounce Israel’s policies would also denounce the tough policies that their own governments would adopt in similar circumstances.  After all, many Israeli intellectuals and others denounce some of Israel’s policies. However, stridently emotional critics of Israel’s policies who spend more time and more energy on Israel than they do on other, more serious human rights abuses around the world and who come from countries with long histories of deeply rooted anti-Semitism (which is virtually every country in Europe) should take a good hard look at that righteous rage.  Yes it feels good to let that anger run free.  But remember please that Satan likes to appear as an angel of light.  Mistaking hatred and resentment for a disinterested love of justice is one of the most common and most destructive mistakes human beings can make.

Furthermore, while I am reluctant to call out individuals, I believe that unconscious but real anti-Semitism informs many contemporary attitudes toward the Jewish state.  I’ve run across a surprisingly large number of people who believe that Israel’s right to exist is conditional: that Israel has to earn and keep re-earning its legitimacy by behaving better than other countries.  I have also been told many times that the Jews are not a “real” people.

These views are anti-Semitic, pure and simple.  The Jews are a real people, a nation, and they have the same right to self determination that other nations have.  The Jewish state is the expression of their natural right to self-determination and whether that state behaves well or badly, wisely or foolishly, it has the same right to exist as Finland, the United States or Egypt.  To deny the right of the Jews to a state is to deny them a basic human right on account of their nationality; I’m sorry, but this is anti-Semitic behavior. If you work very hard, and are very clever and exceptionally careful in your moral and political judgments, it is technically possible for a gentile to be an anti-Zionist without being an anti-Semite, but this state of mind is not as easy to achieve as many people think.  Many and perhaps most of those who insist so self-righteously on this precious distinction haven’t worked nearly hard enough to earn it.

Opposing particular Israeli policies, of course, is very different from opposing the right of the Jewish people to have a state.  Opposition to a given Israeli policy or even set of policies may be a sign of a passionate attachment to the Jewish people and their right to have and protect a state.  An article in the current American Interest by former US Ambassador to Israel David Kurtzer offers a pretty devastating critique of Israel’s settlement policy as it has been carried out. In the same way, it’s not anti-Semitic to argue that the United States should change its policy toward Israel.

Finally, the belief that only Israeli recalcitrance prevents the outbreak of peace in the Middle East strikes me as delusional.  We all want this horrible, draining and destabilizing conflict to end, but there is very little prospect for a settlement between the Israelis and the Palestinians anytime soon.  The two sides share responsibility for this situation and to some degree both sides are trapped by a logic for which neither side is fully to blame.  Certainly the desire of some ultra-Zionists to continue building settlements in the West Bank is a factor, as is the much more widespread Israeli determination to hang on to every inch of East Jerusalem that they can.  On the Palestinian side, however, the obstacles are equally deep and to make matters worse, with outside powers like Syria and Iran meddling constantly in Palestinian politics for reasons of their own.  Weak leadership, fragile institutions and a lack of a sufficiently strong consensus among Palestinians worldwide to accept partition as the final outcome to the long struggle would continue to obstruct a peace settlement even if all the Israeli obstacles were to disappear.  And if the Palestinians and Israelis reach an agreement, other countries in the Middle East are likely to continue to stir the embers of hatred for generations to come.  Even if there is a formal settlement, we are likely to see decades of continuing violence and retaliation.  Some Palestinians (and some Israelis) will reject the peaceful solution and the compromise of partition; outside powers and the Palestinian diaspora are likely to fund groups committed to armed struggle.  Bombs will go off; rockets will fire; Israel will at times retaliate.  The legacy of the struggle is too deep, too bitter to fade away all at once.

Managing unhappiness rather than building utopia is what we Americans are likely to be doing in the Middle East for the foreseeable future.  We will be trying first to reduce the ability of Palestinian-Israeli confrontations and violence to disturb our other regional interests.  Second we will be working to improve the conditions of daily life for both groups, and especially for Palestinians who need the help more.  Finally, we will be doing our poor best to develop the network of ideas, institutions and policies that can bring Israelis and Palestinians together to settle the most contentious of the issues that divide them.

Back on that scented evening during the Clinton administration as the breakers crashed on the beach and Chairman Arafat bent down to give me his kiss, I was more optimistic about the prospects of Middle East peace than ever before.  It’s all been downhill from that moment; Presidents Clinton, Bush and Obama all brought big hopes to the region.  Let’s hope Obama’s luck changes, but for now there doesn’t seem to be much sign of it.  The Iranians and the Syrians seem to be blowing off his overtures of friendship; the Saudis are confessing their disappointment to Maureen Dowd.

Given all that, I’m not going to spend precious blogging time writing new peace plans for two sides who don’t want my help.  But over the next week as I go forward with this subject I’ll try at least to make clear to Americans and others just why the United States has been and remains so supportive of the Jewish state.  In part, however, the answer is this: western anti-Semitism, while still a force in American life, is for a variety of reasons weaker in the contemporary United States than it is in other parts of the Christian and post-Christian west.

Ever since the ‘cluster of Copenhagen’ ended in open disarray I’ve been blogging about the breakdown of the movement to fight climate change through the negotiation of an international treaty.  These days, I’m increasingly wondering whether the climate meltdown is just one aspect of something much bigger.  It’s beginning to look as if the whole New World Order project could be breaking down.

The “New World Order” is an American-led, European- and Japanese-influenced attempt to build a single worldwide network of institutions and laws that would govern most aspects of the emerging international system.  From the World Trade Organization to the International Criminal Court, the thickening network of institutions and agreements would shape politics, investment, trade and energy use around the world.  The movement to monitor and regulate the world’s energy use would have been the capstone of this effort.  Energy is the lifeblood of the modern economy; establishing an international authority with the ability essentially to allocate energy use among the world’s countries would be an extraordinary historical development.

In American foreign policy, the effort to build a new world order reflected the ambitions of a globalist coalition including both the Hamiltonian and Wilsonian foreign policy schools.  Modern Hamiltonians want the United States to build a world order that promotes the interests of American business and anchors the security interests of the United States in a global network of alliances.  Wilsonians want this Hamiltonian world order to reflect American ideals; Hamiltonians get excited about the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund, but Wilsonians focus on international law, arms control and human rights.

For both Wilsonian and Hamiltonian globalists, the end of the Cold War was an opportunity to build the kind of international system they have wanted for a very long time.  During the first Bush administration and the Clinton years, this vision dominated American foreign policy.  George W. Bush was never much of a globalist; after 9/11 he set the globalist agenda aside to fight the War on Terror.  That put him at odds with most of the foreign policy establishment which continued to see the creation of the ‘New World Order’ as the most important strategic challenge facing the United States.  For globalists, it was vital to avoid polarizing world politics or alienating potential partners while the work of building the foundations of the world order went on.  By elevating the ’strategic threat’ of international terror over the ’strategic opportunity’ of building the New World Order, Bush in their view fundamentally misunderstood American interests.

Partly as a result of Bush’s failure to generate a politically sustainable base of support at home or abroad for his war policy, most of the foreign policy establishment is solidly united behind either the Hamiltonian or the Wilsonian vision of the globalist project and the Obama administration came into office determined to reinvigorate the quest for the New World Order.

There is, however, a yawning gap between what the American foreign policy establishment mostly wants and what the world can or will do.  It isn’t just climate change.  The Doha Round of trade talks at the World Trade Organization shows no sign of coming to a conclusion.  The difficulties that the United States has encountered in trying to get Security Council support for tough sanctions against Iran suggest a continued decline in the effectiveness of the United Nations.

For better or worse, I’m beginning to think that the whole sweeping and daring new world order project may have reached its limits.  It’s not simply that the complex and intrusive nature of any effective international climate change agreement makes it virtually impossible to negotiate a binding international treaty (much less get that treaty through the US Senate); it’s that the global economy is becoming too dynamic and complex, and world history is moving too quickly for the architects of the international system.

The New World Order is an artifact of the 1980s and it looks back rather than ahead.  read more »

Theodore Roosevelt may have called him a “filthy little atheist,” but Tom Paine’s pamphlet “Common Sense” got right to the heart of the American world view.  Common sense is more than a political slogan in the United States; a belief in common sense is basic to democracy as we think of it here in this country. Americans generally believe that the common people are sensible and that the most important truths are common to everybody.  The basic wisdom needed to navigate the world isn’t hidden away among small groups of experts and aristocrats; every person is gifted with a basic ability to calculate his or her own interest, understand basic religious and ethical truths, and form an educated opinion about the issues facing the community.

A strong belief in common sense was a necessary piece of mental equipment for the Americans who set out to build a new kind of government and society on the fringes of the known world.  The history of Europe was a history of institutions, of top down control over the anarchic actions of ordinary people.  An established church, linked to the state and possessing coercive powers to force conformity if not quite belief, ensured that everyone was taught proper doctrine and morals.  A strong state, anchored in the powers of society’s wealthiest members in every rural district and town, ensured that the unpropertied rabble kept its proper place.

That wouldn’t work in the United States; society was somehow going to have to run itself.  The colonial governments and, outside New England, the churches had always been weak.  Without widespread primogeniture and entail, estates tended to be divided equally among children, rendering the growth of a powerful aristocratic interest largely impossible.  The abundance of land weakened the dependence of the poor on the rich; labor was in perpetually short supply and those who felt mistreated and oppressed could always light out for the wilderness.  The Revolution had further weakened both church and state, and with the end of British attempts to restrict westward migration, the vast lands across the Appalachian mountains beckoned more invitingly than ever.

In the United States, there was really no choice: if American society was going to hold together at all, it was going to have to organize itself on a new basis.  When the Declaration of Independence said that governments depended on the consent of the governed, this wasn’t just a piece of rhetoric or a pious hope.  In the thirteen colonies, government simply could not work without that consent.

This is where the idea of common sense comes in.  British social thought in the 18th century had focused increasingly on the idea that all human beings had the ability to understand basic natural, political and moral truths.  This ‘common sense’, a set of abilities and ideas that rich and poor, educated and uneducated shared, could provide the basis for a new kind of political organization.  The average person could be trusted, most of the time, to know and to do the right thing — and the votes of the average common man could sustain a stable government that would protect the property and interests even of the rich.

In politics, this led people towards faith in Jeffersonian and Jacksonian democracy.  The honest common sense of the average person, not the special wisdom of the social and professional elites, was the safest guide for the commonwealth.  American institutions were built low to the ground, intended to be open to popular pressures so that the common sense of the people at large would shape the laws and policies of the country as far as this could be arranged.

This idea remains today the bedrock conviction of American democracy, and as always there’s a certain tension between the idea that commonsense reasoning by ‘common’ people can resolve everything, and the reality that many complex and important problems cannot be comprehended without serious study and reflection.

American religion has been as deeply shaped by the concept of common sense as American politics. read more »

Everybody should read The Communist Manifesto, and read it more than once.  Short, fast-moving and written to be understood by a wide audience, it’s a gripping read, a huge intellectual accomplishment, and a way of thinking about the world that has shaped almost everything that came after it.  It was once said that the second edition of Rousseau’s Confessions was bound in the skins of those who had laughed at the first; The Communist Manifesto has had the same kind of impact on our world.

The Manifesto is wrong, of course, but then almost everything is.  However, most of what is written is pointless and dull.  The Manifesto is anything but, and like all truly great books it is interesting and illuminating even when–or, especially when–it goes off the rails.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels dashed it off in the second half of 1847 and published it early in 1848 as revolutionary fervor was sweeping Europe.  As the first copies of The Manifesto began to circulate, King Louis-Phillipe of France felt his throne begin to shake; by the end of February he had abdicated and fled to Britain.  The next month, revolutions broke out in one small German state after the other (Germany would not be unified until 1871).  The revolutionary excitement spread into the Austrian Empire; for a few months it looked as if every king and emperor on the European mainland would be packing his bags.  Even the Pope, who at that time still ruled much of central Italy, was forced to flee Rome as the Romans proclaimed a Republic after 1900 years of imperial and papal rule.

But Marx and Engels weren’t interested in anything as trivial as making propaganda for a European revolution.  They believed that they had found the key to all history, the magic decoder ring that made sense out of everything: philosophy, religion, the rise and fall of empires, culture, art.  To this day there are millions of people all over the world who think they were right — and there are hundreds of millions more whose worldview has been shaped at least in part by this explosive little book.

I am one of them myself, though I don’t think many ‘big M’ Marxists would salute me as a comrade.

If you haven’t read the Manifesto, you should — and if you haven’t read it in a while, you should pick it up again.  The Communist Manifesto, with all its shortcomings, is on that short list of books that every educated person should keep coming back to over a lifetime of reading and thought.  Over the decades you can measure your own intellectual growth by the different ways that you read this book.

I could write a book about this book; maybe someday I will.  Actually, I could write two books on the Manifesto:  What Marx and Engels Got Right, and What Marx and Engels Got Wrong.

But for now I just want to highlight one of their breakthrough insights that is extremely useful today — and, as some of this blog’s longtime readers have surely figured out, it’s an insight that heavily influences my approach to history and ideas.  As usual, Marx and Engels pushed it a bit too far, but their core insight– that the way we are related to the economy helps shape our ideas, our sense of right and wrong and our sense of our relationship to broader trends in history–is something I think about almost every day.  I think about it when I try to understand how other people see the world, and I think about it when I’m trying to correct for my own biases and blind spots — asking myself what I’ve missed or where I’ve been unfair.

Marx and Engels weren’t the first people to have this insight, but they integrated it with an approach to the relationship of ideas and history that allowed them to criticize social thought from a new point of view.  They argued that the dominant social groups in each historical era developed a worldview that justified their pretensions to power and privilege, making their particular system the culmination of the historical process or, as The American Interest’s Frank Fukuyama taught Americans to say, the end of history.  Interest groups and power elites don’t just develop ideas and ideologies that favor their interests.  They develop worldviews that are unconscious as well as conscious, that are the foundation of cultures and ideals.  In the feudal age, the nobility and its hired hands synthesized Christianity, Germanic folk customs and classical Greco-Roman ideas into an all-encompassing world vision that stares out at us from a hundred thousand paintings, that colors the poetry of Europe for hundreds of years, and that lives on today in various forms.

In the Manifesto Marx and Engels write about the different forms of ’socialist’ ideology that were around in 1848 and tie each of these back to specific social groups.  They write about ‘feudal socialism’, the anti-capitalist writings of traditionalists who denounced capitalism for ripping up the old ‘harmonious’ social contract of the Middle Ages.  They write about various forms of ‘bourgeois’ and ‘petty bourgeois’ socialism as well: utopian ideas about a better future that aren’t grounded in any realistic view of political forces or the deep conflicts in human society.

One can only imagine how they would rip into the pompous, self-deceptive ideas and theories with which our elites surround and comfort themselves today.  The Asian Industrial Revolution, that enormous upheaval destroying the past social organizations and customs from China through India and Pakistan today, in reality is an affair of grinding poverty, immense human suffering and displacement, exploitation as naked and hideous as anything the London poor faced in the days of Charles Dickens, and vast contrasts between the lives of the working poor and the new rich.  Yet in the view of what Marx might well call the ‘Davoisie’, the new international bourgeoisie of our times, all that ugliness and suffering disappears.  It’s expected somehow that those struggling masses will go on ‘peacefully’ suffering and working without disturbing the peaceful stability of the comfortable and the rich.

Marx and Engels would mock and fillet the ideologies we have built around the word ‘development’ and they would demolish the inane models of development that our economists have been producing (and imposing on poor countries) since World War Two.  Their bitter comments on the recent Wall Street bailouts contrasted with the programs of austerity forced on people around the world who had nothing to do with the financial crisis would leap off the page and grab the reader by the lapels.

Contemporary western leftists would rub their hands in joy as Marx and Engels ripped into the smug ideologies of the Davoisie and its closest allies; they would begin to squirm, though, as the two founders of the modern Communist movement turned their attention to the labor movements, Hollywood progressives and radical intellectuals of the advanced countries. read more »

The two most successful African-American politicians in recent New York history are on the ropes.  David Paterson, the first African-American governor in the history of the Empire State, is being driven from office by wave after wave of allegations.  Charles Rangel, the most colorful New York politician since Adam Clayton Powell, and the most powerful African-American congressman in the state’s history, has ‘temporarily’ surrendered his gavel at the Ways and Means Committee.

As Joe Conason notes over at Slate.com, in a spirited though ultimately unconvincing defense of Rangel, the Harlem congressman is being hounded from high office by, primarily, The New York Times.  The same thing is true of Governor Paterson; the Times has consistently led in the publication of stories which have undermined his credibility, ruined his public character and now exposed him to criminal prosecution.

Unlike Conason, I’m not mad at the Times for uncovering these facts.  I’m hoping this signals a new era at the Times of an intense concentration on the murky world of New York City and state politics.  There is no other newspaper in this state which has the resources and the reputation to take on the entrenched cultures of corruption and incompetence which are destroying the city and state and blighting millions of lives both upstate and down.  You go, Grey Lady!

But there’s no doubt that the sudden attention paid to the sins of high-profile black officials is not going down well with everyone.  Most New Yorkers think that you can’t throw a rock in our unspeakable legislature without hitting a crook; where are the corrupt white (and Latino and Asian-American) criminals doing the perp walk on the Grey Lady’s front page?  I hope they’ll come; one way for the Times to rebuild its reputation and credibility — and incidentally perform a signal service to the city and state — is to own the story of corruption here and to undertake a major effort to clean this mess up.

Conason (one of the most consistently readable columnists in the business even when, like now, he’s wrong) seems to think that another strategy is possible: Democrats should circle the wagons around their vulnerable leaders, just as the GOP did for, say, Tom DeLay.

There are two reasons he’s wrong.  First, this didn’t work out that well for the GOP and it won’t work any better for the Dems.  Fighting to save Congressman Rangel would give every GOP candidate in the country something like a five percent boost in the polls.  Or does Conason think voters won’t notice if the Democrats stand by their ethically-challenged comrades in arms?

The second reason this won’t work is that the cause of ‘good government’ isn’t just a slogan for a significant chunk of the Democratic base.  The ‘goo-goos‘ really believe in government and they really believe that for the state to work well it must be led by the pure in heart.  It’s easy for hardened New York journalists like Conason (and, I suppose, Mead) to sneer at the delicate sensibilities of Boston blue noses and genteel civic reformers, but take the upper middle class neo-Puritan goody-goodies out of the mix and there isn’t all that much left of the Democratic Party.

These folks, spiritually if not biologically descended from the original New England Puritans, really believe that the state is here to make virtue reign among men.  In the nineteenth century they were the ‘Conscience Whigs’ who opposed Sabbath delivery of the mails, the relocation of the Cherokee Indians and slavery.  Later they supported female suffrage, Prohibition and disarmament.  Today they are against torture, tobacco and trans fats. read more »

Hillary Clinton has ruled out a run for the White House after serving as Secretary of State.  I hope she’s at least equally clear that she shouldn’t follow Tom DeLay onto the set of Dancing With The Stars; if her experiences on her recent trip to Buenos Aires are any guide, the tango isn’t her kind of event.

Let’s be clear on this: Hillary Clinton is one of our strongest secretaries of state in a long time, generally executing her difficult responsibilities in a way that does credit to her and to the country she represents.  But by (apparently) calling for talks between Britain and Argentina on the future of the disputed Falkland Islands (the Argentines call them the Malvinas), and offering her good offices to bring the two countries together, Secretary Clinton made a misstep.  It not only offends and even outrages public opinion in our closest ally; it encourages and enables exactly the kind of foolish political grandstanding in Argentina that helps keep that country frustrated and poor despite its extraordinary natural resources, its talented population and a culture and way of life that ensures that everyone who visits the country falls in love with it.

For those who don’t devote their leisure hours to the study of obscure territorial disputes in the remotest corners of the earth, the Falkland Islands (or, for the Argentines, the Malvinas), are a rough and rugged group of close to 800 mostly tiny and uninhabited islands in the wild South Atlantic wastes off the Patagonian coastlands near the southern tip of South America.  Seized from a weak and distracted Argentina by good old fashioned naked British imperialism in 1833 (an event described by Charles Darwin in The Voyage of the Beagle), the islands were settled by misguided Welsh and Scottish immigrants over the decades and about 3,100 of their descendants live there today.

The Argentines, who have a national fondness for lost causes and old territorial claims, never accepted the British occupation of the islands. In 1982 their thuggish and vicious military dictators attacked; after a brief but bloody war, Britain defeated the poorly equipped and disastrously led Argentines.  The military government had hoped that popular enthusiasm for the war would cause the Argentines to overlook its record of torture, murder, incompetence and corruption.  That seemed to work at the beginning, but as Argentina’s defeat became steadily more apparent, public opinion turned against the generals, and the dictatorship fell to be replaced by a disappointing run of bad civilian presidents lasting to the present.

The British position, which is both clear and right, is that regardless of whatever happened in 1833, no changes can be made to the status of the islands without the consent of the people who live there.  Argentina has renounced the use of force to settle the dispute, but maintains its claim to the islands — and raising the claim remains an attractive way for floundering Argentine politicians to whip up public support even as they continue to lead the country in unsustainable and destructive directions.  Argentina wants “negotiations” with Britain over the issue of sovereignty; Britain has maintained that there is nothing to negotiate.  The United States has historically been publicly neutral but really pro-British; that pretty much remains our stand today. 

Lately Argentina’s president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, has been experiencing a political condition that is unfortunately a common one in Argentine history.  After years of buying popularity with unsound economic policies and government giveaways, she’s losing her support as it becomes harder to pay for new programs.  She’s already taken over the country’s private pension industry to get more cash for government programs; more recently the head of the Central Bank quit rather than follow her orders to use the Central Bank’s reserves for short term purposes.  She found somebody new for the job, but the increasingly obvious disarray of her economic policies has undermined her popularity.  Her political allies have just lost control of the country’s Senate.  Meanwhile, the government has launched an attack on the country’s largest media company.  The government says this is for virtuous antitrust purposes, but not many people believe it.

Thank God for the Malvinas, then.  President Kirchner has been doing everything she can to focus Argentine attention on the issue.  The UN, the new association of Latin American countries that excludes the US and Canada: everywhere she can she’s trying to generate news coverage of her campaign.

To be fair to President Kirchner, something new is taking place on the islands.  Geologists have long believed there is oil under the seas around the islands; the British government has given drillers the go-ahead to start looking.  If oil is found, it’s going to be harder than ever to convince the 3,100 islanders that what they need to do is pay taxes to incompetent and corrupt Argentine politicians. To some degree, President Kirchner needed to raise the issue just to get Argentina on record stating its views; to be silent would essentially abandon Argentina’s claim to sovereignty and that is something no Argentine politician can do.

This is the quagmire into which Secretary Clinton inadvertently stepped.  Technically, her remarks were nothing new; the United States has long been willing to mediate in a dispute between two friends — if asked by both sides.  But the qualification somehow got downplayed.  The impression this created is that the United States is siding against our closest ally and with a floundering, unpopular Argentine president who has a poor and even anti-American track record in many ways.  It is a pointless piece of pandering; the United States will get nothing concrete from Argentina in exchange for this step and it does nothing to build a foundation for future US-Argentine relations.  Worse, it contributes to a dangerous trend abroad as well as at home.  People are starting to think that if you are tough and brutal to this administration — whether you are an ayatollah in Iran or a Republican in the US Senate — you will be civilly and decently treated, but that if you are its friend you will go under the bus.

It’s a small mess in the great scheme of things, but it’s a real one.  Secretary Clinton will need to mend fences with the Brits.  Substantively, a very level headed article in the Guardian points out that in fact US policy has not changed; the Guardian however is a pro-government newspaper trying to make embattled Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown look strong and globally relevant for his impending, uphill election battle.  Tory newspapers have been reveling in the government’s embarrassment, highlighting US neglect of a government they hope to defeat.  Secretary Clinton has enough real issues on her plate without distractions like this.

None of this counts as “smart diplomacy.”  The Patagonian Pander was never going to work; as the Guardian correctly pointed out, there is no way that the United States will really shift its position on this issue — and especially now, when Britain’s help in Afghanistan matters so much to us.  The  Argentines, while milking Clinton’s statement for all the political and propaganda they can, know this as well as anyone else.  They will not be fooled and are perhaps a little insulted that we tried to beguile them with such a cheap trick.  President Kirchner’s increasingly powerful political opponents will not thank us for giving her a propaganda coup at this critical time, nor will President Kirchner provide any real help to the United States or Secretary Clinton in return.  Outside Argentina, the message will also reverberate: America is rattled and on the run, hunting for friends in all the wrong places.

Secretary Clinton’s Latin American trip was not a success.  The Patagonian Pander was followed by the much more important Rio Rebuff, as Brazil’s President Lula refused to back Secretary Clinton’s request for help on Iranian sanctions at the Security Council.  These were not isolated snafus.  From Tijuana to Tierra del Fuego, our Latin America policy is breaking down.  The Secretary of State now needs to find out what has gone wrong and ask some tough questions of the advisers who got her into this mess.

This observation, famously made by Talleyrand at the Congress of Vienna as the powers debated the fate of the turncoat King of Saxony, reminded the crowned heads of Europe that all of them had at one time or another worked with Napoleon.  Talleyrand himself had served the emperor as foreign minister and trusted ally before switching to the other side as Napoleon’s power waned — and his megalomania grew.

These days, it’s The New York Times that is redefining treason.  Three weeks ago, anyone who pointed at the lack of public confidence in climate science was aiding and abetting those horrible climate ‘deniers.’  Treason against Planet Earth! You had to be some kind of dread ‘right wing blogger’ or talk radio host to point out that blunders and arrogance had undermined the credibility of climate scientists and ended any short term chance of serious global agreement on urgent measures to stop global warming.

But a story this morning by John Broder gently lets Times readers know that something has gone badly wrong.

WASHINGTON — For months, climate scientists have taken a vicious beating in the media and on the Internet, accused of hiding data, covering up errors and suppressing alternate views. Their response until now has been largely to assert the legitimacy of the vast body of climate science and to mock their critics as cranks and know-nothings.

But the volume of criticism and the depth of doubt have only grown, and many scientists now realize they are facing a crisis of public confidence and have to fight back. Tentatively and grudgingly, they are beginning to engage their critics, admit mistakes, open up their data and reshape the way they conduct their work.

Admit mistakes?  Open up their data?  Change the way the work?  You mean there was something wrong with the way climate science was operating last year?  Is the Times telling us that the climate scientists–on the basis of whose work the whole world is debating complex and far-reaching changes in its economic structure and political governance–were using slipshod and careless procedures that need to be fixed?

Gosh, one has to ask, if these terrible things were going on for such a long time, why didn’t the New York Times notice this earlier on?  Why didn’t the New York Times break this important story back when it was news, rather than lamely sweeping up at the end of the parade?  Could it be that a climate of politically-correct group-think inhibited the editors and reporters at the country’s newspaper of record from recognizing a one of the major stories of the decade? Could the environmental writers at the Times be just a teensy bit too close to their sources?

The Times seems to have forgotten the most important aspect of the news business.  For years now ’skeptic’ has been a dirty word at the Times when the subject of climate change comes up.  Excuse me, but reporters are supposed to be skeptics.  They are supposed to be cynical, hard bitten people who trust their mothers — but cut the cards.  They are supposed to think that scientists are probably too much in love with their data, that issue advocates have hidden agendas, that high-toned rhetoric is often a cover for naked self interest, that bloviating politicians have cynical motives and that heroes, even Nobel Prize laureates, have feet of clay.  That is their job; it is why we respect them and why we pay attention to what they write.

Reporters are not supposed to be wide-eyed gee-whiz college kids believing everything they hear and using the news columns of the paper to promote a social agenda. They are wet blankets, not cheerleaders, Eeyores, not Piglets and they can safely leave all the advocacy and flag-waving to the editorial writers and the op-ed pages.

This is not just a question of liberal bias.  The same wide-eyed gee-whiz culture shaped much of the reporting on the run-up to the Iraq War.  Maybe the word we are looking for when trying to describe what’s wrong with the mainstream press isn’t ‘liberal’ — maybe the term is something like ‘credulous’ or ‘naive.’  The gradual substitution of ‘professional journalists’ for the old hard boiled hacks may have given us a generation of journalists who are used to trusting reputable authority.  They honestly think that people with good credentials and good manners don’t lie.

Today’s journalists are much too well-bred and well-connected to stand there in the crowd shouting “The emperor has no clothes!”  They’ve worked with the tailors, they have had long background interviews with the tailors, they’ve been present for some of the fittings.  Of course the emperor’s new clothes are fantastic; only those rude and uncouth ‘clothing deniers’ still have any doubts.

Meanwhile, over on the aforementioned op-ed pages, our old friend Al Gore is still crying a river of denial, blaming everyone but himself for the abject failure of the world to accept his views without checking the facts for themselves.  read more »

“Do not even think about bombing Iran,” wrote Michael O’Hanlon and Bruce Reidel in yesterday’s Financial Times.  Pointing out that the US has two unpopular and unfinished wars in the region already, and that the damage from any military strikes on the Islamic Republic would be unlikely to do enough damage to its nuclear program to justify the military and political cost, and also that Iran would have many opportunities to retaliate against US interests in the region, they urge President Obama to take this option off the table completely.  Living with a nuclear Iran won’t be fun, but it’s better than the alternatives, so let’s start making plans for the inevitable.

I actually agree with O’Hanlon and Reid that military strikes against the Iranian nuclear program aren’t likely to get us anywhere good, but that doesn’t mean we can stop thinking about them. Sixty-one percent of Americans asked called Iran’s strength a ‘critical threat’ in a Gallup poll last month;  an additional 29 percent said the Iranian threat was ‘important.’  With 90 percent of the public feeling threatened by Iran — at a moment when nothing special was happening — it’s not clear to me that domestic politics will allow the Obama administration to steer clear of hostilities with Iran even if it wants to.

Maybe it’s a consequence of the Bush administration; we seem to be assuming that America can opt out of war if the White House can just keep its cool.

I wish that were true, but history suggests that it isn’t.  President McKinley wanted to stay out of Spain’s war in Cuba; he didn’t succeed.  President Madison didn’t want a war with Great Britain but the War of 1812 came all the same.  Woodrow Wilson hoped to stay out of World War One; the last thing President Truman wanted was a war in Korea, and Lyndon Johnson felt trapped by the war in Vietnam.  President Obama clearly doesn’t want a war with Iran (and, for what it’s worth, neither do I) but if history teaches anything, it’s that you can’t always get what you want.

It’s unfortunately rather easy to think of circumstances that could force the Obama administration into a war it would rather avoid.  Here’s a scenario: without asking American permission the Israelis launch attacks on Iran that bloody the regime’s nose and, while they don’t destroy the nuclear program, they do expose the regime’s inability to defend its airspace against the hated Zionist foe.  Not believing US denials or really caring whether they are true,  to distract public attention at home and abroad from its military failures against the hated Zionists,  and to capitalize on a perceived opportunity to pose as the leader of Islamic resistance to the “Crusader and Zionist alliance,” Iran retaliates against US targets — firing on our ships in the Gulf, for example, or openly attacking American forces in Iraq and/or Afghanistan.

Could President Obama turn the other cheek, or would he have to respond — and where would a cycle of tit-for-tat retaliations end up?

There are other scenarios that end up with the US and Iran with daggers drawn.   There are signs that the mullahs overestimate their clout and underestimate America’s ability to confront them.  In the past, Iranian radical factions have turned up the temperature in the US-Iranian relationship in order to improve their political standing at home. Calling on Iranians to unite against the foreign menace has worked before, isolating moderates and consolidating the radicals’ grip on power; it’s easy to see them trying this same tactic again.  Radicals used the 1979 seizure of American diplomatic hostages, for example, to discredit moderates during the Iranian Revolution.  At other times radicals have sent boats out into the Gulf to harass American shipping, and supported Iraqi groups fighting American troops.  It would be easy for radical clerics and activists to miscalculate and, intending only to stage a crisis, to overreach and set off a war.

Paradoxically, the only way to avoid scenarios like these with Iran may be to make the regime and its radical allies fear us more than they now do.

The United States genuinely does not want a war with Iran, but if Iran attacks American forces or American interests, that will change.  An attack from Iran would set off the kind of Jacksonian rage that followed Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor or indeed that transformed American foreign policy after 9/11.

Somehow the mullahs need to understand that this kind of war with the United States will involve more than a few air raids and cruise missile strikes.  A real shooting war between the two countries almost certainly means regime change in Tehran and could well bring an end to the modern Iranian state.  Instead of Iran, a large multi-ethnic and multi-faith state, the post-war period might well see the ethnic and religious minorities of Iran going off on their own — either as independent republics or as autonomous regions within a much looser and much weaker state.  The Arabs might break free to set up a new Gulf oil state on their own; the Sunni Balochs might come under Pakistani influence.  The Kurds might become as autonomous as those in Iraq; the Azeris might choose to merge with Azerbaijan or set up an authority on their own.  It’s not at all clear what would happen, but America’s priority in this kind of conflict would be to win the war decisively, not to preserve the Iranian status quo and any peace settlement would give the United States effective guarantees against any future Iranian threat.

To ensure the peace of the region, Iran needs to understand that starting a conflict with the United States is not an option.  Iran would emerge weak, divided, isolated and poor from any such conflict and, should Iranians initiate the war by an attack on American forces in the Gulf or in the region, the consequences for Iran would be unthinkable.

The Obama administration quite rightly does not want a war with Iran and it does not want to contribute unnecessarily to a crisis atmosphere.  I don’t think Washington should rattle its saber and issue hotheaded threats; that hasn’t worked in the past and there’s no reason to think it will now.  But there are cool and quiet ways of communicating a truth that for their own sakes as well as ours the Iranian leaders must never forget: that an attack on the forces of the United States would be an act of suicidal folly.

But we should not be so polite and so low key that they miss the main point.  Kaiser Wilhelm II, Hirohito and Hitler all made the same mistake: they underestimated how relentless and how powerful an enemy the United States would be.  We must not let Iran repeat their mistake.

After a rough week of paper grading, family visits and writing capsule reviews for Foreign Affairs, I’m getting back to an ambitious blogging schedule.  I’m working on a post about war with Iran that should be up by morning, planning a look at the state of the climate change movement following Al Gore’s typically unreflective and hectoring op-ed in last Sunday’s New York Times, and drafting a response to some readers who really, really didn’t like my thoughts on the inconvenient truth that it is and always has been overwhelmingly gentile public opinion rather than insidious Jewish pressure that drives American policy toward the Jewish state.  There are a few more posts up my sleeve (if that is the right way to put it) about subjects ranging from the virtues of The Communist Manifesto to the theological blind spot that affects both liberal and evangelical Protestant thought in the United States.

Thanks to everyone who is taking the time to follow these posts.  The blog is still less than six months old and I’m still feeling my way into the form, but it’s been a terrific experience to do this in such interesting company.

And for those of you who are dying for something to read in the meantime, here are a few suggestions:

• Kenneth Roth of Human Rights Watch has a piece in the new Foreign Affairs asking whether President Obama really cares about human rights.  A Wilsonian attacking Obama for Jeffersonian caution and pragmatism?  Somebody should write about this: oh, somebody already has.

• Josiah Strong’s Our Country, one of the big missionary and publishing hits from the late nineteenth century, is now available from Google books.  I teach this book in my religion and foreign policy class at Yale; it never fails to blow the students’ minds — and mine.

• Another book we’ve been reading at Yale is Nathan Hatch’s The Democratization of American Christianity.  This is a modern classic and it will change the way you think about American politics.  (At least, it did that for me!)

• Finally, my capsule reviews  are up in the new March/April Foreign Affairs.  It was an unusually rich haul of books for this issue; Gordon S. Wood’s Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 is going to be a classic.

Recently, on a trip to Washington, D.C., I stopped by the offices of The American Interest and sat down to discuss the Tea Party movement in the context of historical American populism, something I wrote about in my recent post, “Do Soldiers Drink Tea?“. Here it is:

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(You can also download the podcast (as an MP3 file) here, and subscribe to The American Interest podcasts through iTunes here.)

Apologies for the light blogging during the last few days.  I’ve been visiting family and trying to cope with a sudden flood of deadlines.  There’s lots to write about, including Al Gore’s poorly conceived op-ed in the Times, and I’ll be back be back in the saddle very soon.

The modern Democratic Party was formed out of four previously antagonistic elements in American society: urban working class and immigrant whites, Southern whites, African-Americans and upper middle class progressive reformers.  It began to take shape when Woodrow Wilson brought progressives into the mainstream of the Democratic Party; Franklin Roosevelt put all the pieces together when he built his New Deal coalition, reaching out to northern black voters while holding on to the white South.  For the first time since the Civil War, the Democrats were the natural party of government from 1932 through Nixon’s victory in 1968.

Intellectually, the progressives were the driving force of the Democratic Party of the 20th century.  Upper middle class progressive reformers, dubbed goo-goos by machine politicians offended by what they saw as an infantile and naive love of ‘good government’, are responsible for some of the greatest achievements of the twentieth centuries.  It was the goo-goos who fought for civil service reform, the development of the administrative and regulatory state, who sought to professionalize government and the academy and who generally fought (and fight) for transparency, accountability and the rule of law both at home and abroad.

Since 1968 the big story in national politics has been the gradual erosion of FDR’s grand coalition.  The white South was the first to go, alienated primarily by Lyndon Johnson’s decision to put the full weight of the party behind the civil rights movement, but also by the sympathy of many Democrats for the broader social agenda of the 1970s.  Northern working class and ethnic white voters also began to drift away from the party, turning from one of the party’s most reliable bastions of support into swing voters in the 1980s.

Today, it is mostly the goo-goos and African-Americans who constitute the rock solid core of the Democratic Party, with Hispanics and the remnants of the party’s traditional north and south white support making up the rest.  Even in decline, it’s a strong and competitive coalition and few movements can claim to have shaped American history as decisively and to have done as much good as the Wilson-Roosevelt Democrats.  As recently as last year many observers thought the Democrats were on their way to another generation of political dominance like the run they enjoyed from 1932 to 1968.

President Obama–an African-American urban candidate who is also an intellectual comfortable with elevated talk about the nuances of reform with upper middle class whites–is the ideal candidate for the new Democratic core.  One hundred years ago Woodrow Wilson played a similar role; a white southerner (and the first southerner in the White House since before the Civil War), he was also a college professor and president.

But the coalition President Obama heads is a much more fragile one.  On one side you have the old time pols of the urban machines (like House Ways and Means Committee chair Charles Rangel); on the other you have the grim and determined brigades of morally uplifting upper middle class reform.  It is a coalition of The New York Times and the contemporary version of Tammany Hall.

What holds them together is their love of the Blue Beast; good government progressives are the heirs of the old Puritan vision of the state as the moral arm of a godly community.  read more »