Matt Zeitlin: Impetuous Young Whippersnapper

There are two Irving Kristols. One is the wide-ranging, detached and influential New York Intellectual of the 40s, 50s and most of the 60s. This was the man who was at the center of an intellectual culture whose scope and influence is only rivaled by Bloomsbury and 1930s Vienna. Although his colleagues produced more substantial work of lasting import (Daniel Bell, Seymour Lipset, Nathan Glazer), Kristol was hardly some intellectual dilettante.

But then in the 1970s and onward, he turned into one of the most dangerous creatures that can exist in the public sphere: the ironic, cynical ideologue. Matt Yglesias and Andrew Sullivan both point out that Kristol openly and blatantly disregarded expertise in economics when selecting supply-side pieces to be published in the Public Interest and maintained a thoroughgoing agnosticism despite publicly insisting that religion was necessary for the maintenance of the values that hold society together. Kristol himself, the philosopher king of the Republican Party, could maintain a basically faithless, cosmopolitan life among intellectual elites of all political stripes, but the masses could not. It’s not so much that he made arguments for the superiority of white-middle class values and religion in bad faith, it’s that his entire intellectual style — whatever is good for the Republican Party is true — doesn’t admit any difference between good and bad faith.  When you see his son, William, be so cynical and cavalier about the truth or any objective standards for candidates besides the ability to provide a short-term boost to a flagging Republican presidential campaign (Palin, Sarah) you are seeing the inevitable result of his father’s style.

Of course, Kristol’s heirs could use some cynicism — the conservative movement’s obscene faith in the magical ability of supple side tax cuts is nothing if not sincere — but it should be recognized that much of the synthesis that defines the conservative movement was conceived in a way that regarded intellectual honesty and skepticism as a crutch.

PS – Even if you don’t think that “ideas” or intellectuals are the driving forces of political coalition building or success, it’s still worth pointing out that the conservative movement reveres Kristol.

Finally, after electing a president who wasn’t defined by an irresponsibly belligerent response to the murder of 3,000 Americans, I think we can gain some perspective on how the events that day revealed much of America and its political leadership to be fundamentally weak, immature and irresponsible.

Many countries have seen tragedies. Many countries have been attacked by outsiders. And they have nearly all responded by drawing in on themselves and becoming more hostile to the outside world. But America is different. Our understandable anger and paranoia turned into something horrible, not only for those Americans who have seen their constitutional values destroyed and their friends and relatives sent off to die in a pointless war, but for all the Iraqis and Afghans who have died needlessly or have found themselves locked up in a Kafka-esque island fortress for being aligned with the wrong warlord in the Hindu Kush. One would hope that America’s size, strength and influence would breed a certain sense of responsibility and humility, an awareness of how our actions affect the entire world, for good as well as evil. Instead, we had a political class intent on war and the nullification of our the principles that are the supposed bedrock of our nation.

Instead of tempering our anger and fear and distrust, they played on it. The media and the public, instead of being wary of demagogues who use times of fear to advance nefarious ends, were enthralled with the idea of projecting power and strength, with little care for the consequences we’d bring upon ourselves or inflict on to others. We were hurt and humiliated, but not chastened.

In stark contrast to the collective failure of our leaders, the culture has largely recovered. Though the memory of 9/11 was manipulated by those who have nothing but contempt for our cosmopolitan, urban centers that are the driving force of our culture and our economy, the victims were largely New Yorkers. They were blue staters, living in a city whose greatness is a product of its diversity and dynamic cultural energy, values that a revanchist, hostile right can’t stand. And New York, the site of the attacks, recovered. There were those who talked about how humor and irony would be impossible after 9/11. How New Yorkers would give up their decadence, get settled down and have kids. But it never happened. New York retained its essential cosmopolitan identity. Comedy and irony, two great American values which seem to be infused into the lifeblood of our cultural capital, are still with us. New York is still New York, though scarred. It’s noteworthy how the culture of American — that ineffable product of 300 million people interacting and desiring and producing — survived the trauma of that day, while our politics, which is marked by unconscionable amount of cynicism, bad faith and utter uncaring for those hurt by the power wielded by America, could not. It suggests that while we can come under the thrall of bad people, we are still, in some sense, good.

When I first saw that Ted Kennedy had died, I had my own blog-obit already planned out. I was going to talk about despite having the least impressive natural endowments of the three political Kennedy brothers, how he actually achieved the most good of any of them (not the most original point, I know). But then Dylan, despite it being very early in the morning/late at night on the East Coast, explained his policy achievements much better than I could. Then Tim Noah’s obit went up, and yeah, that’s really what I was getting after. But here are some scattered thoughts.

I guess what’s so interesting about Kennedy is the sharp contrast between his staggering substantive accomplishments and the procedural travesty that was his political existence. To put it simply, he never really worked for anything, and none of his accomplishments — with the exception of all the legislation for which he’s responsible — were very much a reflection of anything besides the luck of his birth.

He got into Harvard because he was Kennedy, and then got kicked out for cheating. He enlisted in the Army because he was draft eligible, but through his father’s connections got a plumb job at NATO headquarters and left the service as a private. He went back to Harvard, graduated, and went on to law school. Only because he wasn’t yet old enough to become senator, he waited out a few years as a Boston assistant district attorney, and then won his first senate election at the age of 30 in what Joe Klein describes as “the closest thing to a regency appointment the Senate had ever seen.”

Then, inexplicably, when one considers anything else besides his breeding, he was considered as a presidential or vice-presidential candidate, but demurred. And then Chappaquiddick. It was through a combination of the press’s love for the Kennedy mystique and the now-baffling level of deference that the media and the public gave politicians for grave personal failings that Kennedy was able to survive politically an incident that, at best, refelcted a horrible combination of entitlement, cowardice and callousness.

The point of recounting all of this is to show that Kennedy’s rise and sustained influence reflect the type of privilige on account of birth and social standing that ought to sicken every liberal. If liberalism means anything, it’s diminishing the influence of birth on one’s chances in life. And, almost too ironically, Ted Kennedy is probably the political figure who has done the most to make that vision, that dream, to anything close to a reality in the United States.

It was because of his name that he never had to be worried about reelection. Once again, on a procedural level, Kennedy’s lifetime Senate seat was distressing, but substantively it allowed Kennedy to be bolder in his vision for American than nearly any other senator. As Matt Yglesias points out, Kennedy was  able to achieve so much through another illiberal, anachronistic feature of our political system — the cult of seniority in the Senate. Just like the deep social injustice of inherited wealth and power that allowed Kennedy to become so powerful, the seniority system in the Senate is systematically illiberal. There are far many Max Baucuses than Teddy Kennedys.

But unlike so many others who achieve so much purely on the basis of their birth and accrue so much power simply by staying around for so long, Kennedy recognized that his great power and privilege could be used for good, to help those who didn’t have the advantages Kennedy was born with. No matter how sickening the cult of Kennedys is, no matter how offensive it is to basic American values to have “political royalty,” at least Kennedy had the oblige befitting his noblesse.

Hopefully, one day, there won’t be anymore Ted Kennedys. And, if that day comes, it will be because Kennedy’s vision was finally realized.

Sally Quinn’s Post article where she elicits quotes from a bipartisan clique of Washington’s elites expressing their utter shame and dismay in response to Bill Clinton’s behavior in the Monica investigation has been criticized over and over. I won’t go line-by-line or explain why it’s so horrible — just read it – but this one quote is just so absurd in light of the events that occurred between Jan 20, 2001 and Jan 20, 2009:

Washington’s insider press corps has shown little pity for any of them. The feeling toward the president is similar.

“The judgment is harsher in Washington,” says The Post’s Broder. “We don’t like being lied to.”

The crazy thing about the collective freakout to Monica-gate and Bill Clinton more generally is how little sense it made on its own terms. It’s obvious that the press and the greater Washington elite doesn’t mind being lied to — there was no equivalent freakout about Iran Contra or the pre-war intelligence fiasco — but the fact that they were willing to cut Bush so much slack despite the fact that he, in a deep way, despised Washington as a city and as a social group is really just mind boggling.

Michael Gerson has figured out why Democrats support government subsidies for poor women who want to get the same basic medical treatments as wealthy and middle class women:

But there is another view of the disadvantaged found on the left (and not only on the left). Instead of especially valuing the experience of the disadvantaged, some hope that public policy can thin their ranks. This is no longer pursued through the eugenic decrees that Holmes admired but through the advocacy of Medicaid abortions.

It is estimated that the Hyde Amendment limiting Medicaid abortions has saved 1 million lives since its passage in 1976 — some, no doubt, became criminals and some, perhaps, lawyers and judges. It is a defining question for modern liberalism: Are these men and women “populations that we don’t want to have too many of” or are they citizens worthy of justice and capable of contribution?

Now, I think I’m more “conservative” than many liberals and feminists, in a way, in thinking that not only was the entire population control and eugenics movement horrible, but also something liberals — and especially self styled progressives — should acknowledge wasn’t just some aberration and that we should deal with this dark chapter in our history openly and honestly. That all being said, Gerson is just amazingly wrong.

The reason the overwhelming majority of liberals and progressives support family planning in all its guises is because we believe that women are truly free when they have autonomy over their bodies and reproductive lives. And so we think that when poor women can’t pay for the medical services that allow them to exercise this autonomy — i.e. abortion services — the government should help out. What the Hyde amendment did was specifically target poor women and denied them the means to get abortions by denying them any coverage through Medicaid. When Jonah Goldberg wrote this column a few days ago, he was able to scare up some old quotes from Ben Waddington and Nicholas von Hoffman saying nasty stuff, but Gerson can’t even do that.

If Gerson were right and pro-choicers were really closet eugenicists who wanted to thin the ranks of poor people, we would be trying to discourage the wealthy and middle class from getting abortions and encouraging the poor to do so. But, of course, that’s not how it works. We simply want access to medical services — especially those medical services which we think help enable autonomy and reproductive control — to be available to everyone regardless of their income.

And as a final note, this has nothing to do with Gerson, but I find it highly odd that conservatives accuse liberals and progressives of being closet eugenicists while they’re the ones who think that Charles “The Bell Curve” Murray is some amazing intellectual.

Kevin Drum, who initially had some harsh words for Matt Taibbi’s Goldman Sachs piece in Rolling Stone, recants:

It’s a very good takedown of the modern financial industry and well worth reading. There are some bits here and there that I’m not sure Taibbi gets quite right, and I do think that he made a mistake in casting Goldman Sachs as the “engineer” of every bubble in the past century rather than merely an unusually big and enthusiastic member of a predatory gang that’s been ripping us off for a long time. This gives the piece a conspiratorial air that allows Goldman to laugh it off instead of being forced to engage with it, and that’s too bad. They — and everyone else on Wall Street — should be forced to engage with it.

This doesn’t strike me as such great praise. It’s hardly a novel point that financial institutions get greedy and short sighted and then cause panics and economic downturns. It’s also not a novel point that financial instituions, because of their great wealth, often get the government to do their bidding, and that this coziness allows them to take even greater risks, make more money, become less regulated and then leave the economy in shambles when it all falls down.

What made Taibbi’s piece different — and wrong for exactly the reason Kevin Drum says — was his contention that at every turn, one financial institution, Goldman Sachs, was being especially, even deliberately, nefarious. This is what gives it that “conspiratorial air.”

Furthermore, Taibbi takes pains to argue that Goldman was always leading the way, “engineering every major market manipulation since the Great Depression,” when in nearly all the cases he outlines, they were doing doing roughly what other companies were doing for the same reasons. This doesn’t, of course, excuse their shady behavior in the 1990s during the tech boom or in any other instance, but it certainly complicates Taibbi’s central thesis. One could argue that by showering so much attention on one company, Goldman, Taibbi weakens the more general, true and important argument that it’s the financial sector as a whole that we need to be worried about.

I understand why Taibbi wanted to focus on one well known, sucessful and politically influential institution to tell his story, but just because a certain way of presenting facts allows for a good story doesn’t make it more true.

Chris Hayes has a good essay in TAP on the oddly resurgent view that recessions, and even depressions, are not just normal parts of the business cycle, but are even morally beneficial.

As his modern example of this school, he focuses on Robert Samuelson, who constantly gripes about too-high social spending, and wrote The Great Inflation and Its Aftermath, which is a history of how economic planners in the 60s and 70s believed that there was an inverse relationship between inflation and unemployment, and thus promoted inlfationary monetary policy for essentially political reasons. There was then the horrible wage-price spiral, bracket-creep and stagflation, which helped pave the way for the election of Ronald Reagan and Paul Volcker heroically plunging the economy into recession in the early 1980s to purge inflation out of the system.

That’s at least the mainstream center-left to center-right narrative. Here’s Hayes’ version of the story, which, since it’s Chris Hayes, is the smartest possible leftist/social democratic version of those events:

It’s unclear however, whether the persistent inflation of the time was the result of the nature of the social contract, or a confluence of factors: a very long debt-financed war in Vietnam, combined with a loose monetary policy. And it is almost certainly true (and hardly controversial) that stable prices, while necessary for strong economic growth, are certainly not sufficient: George W Bush presided over one of the lowest average inflation rates of any post-war American president, yet his term left average wage earners worse off while precipitating the worst financial crisis in 80 years.

But for Samuelson, inflation is enemy number one, so much so that wringing it out of a system makes recessions look not so bad. “Recessions also have often-overlooked benefits,” he wrote in his Newsweek column last year, echoing, in an albeit softer tone, Mellon and Schumpeter. “They dampen inflation. In weak markets, companies can’t easily raise prices or workers’ wages. Similarly, recessions punish reckless financial speculation and poor corporate investments. Bad bets don’t pay off.”

With the unemployment sword of Damocles hanging over their heads, workers will think twice about asking for a raise, and all of this will lead to a robust kind of capitalism for the capitalists: one with low inflation, low interest rates and very high return to capital. If that sounds familiar, it’s an apt description of the economy of at least the last two decades, a kind of capitalism recently proven far less stable than it may have appeared, but one for which Samuelson is an unapologetic partisan: “The new economic order,” Samuelson writes, “is indeed inferior to the imagined and romanticized version of the old order. But it’s superior to the old order as it actually operated.”

Chris’ larger point, at the end of the essay, is that economies require some sort of political management, and that the Chicago School/Mellonist account of depressions and recessions as natural parts of the business cycle is one that A. is simply incorrect and B. not coincidentally tends towards favoring those policies which benefit the wealthy, lending and poweful. I largely agree with him — and Paul Krugman, whose work on recessions he cites — but I think the episode Samuelson recounts is a truely exceptional case.

That’s because the recession of 1981 was, unlike the recessions and depressions that business cycle theorists and Mellonists occasionally laud, was deliberately engineered by Volcker to break the inflation that was crippling the economy. He intentionally drove interest rates up so that prices would finally fall, even if it meant a decrease in growth.  Unlike other recessions, which aren’t good for the economy and simply lead to a lot of wasted capacity and unnecessary human suffereing, the 81-82 recession was specfically designed to achieve some long-term positive results for the national economy. Most recessions, needless to say, aren’t deliberately managed by financial wizards like Paul Volcker.

While Hayes is right to say that the inflation had more causes besides the obsession with keeping unemployment down, there is no denying that acertain ignorance of the micro-foundations of macro movements in the economy played a large part in the horrible mismanagement of the economy during that time. Of course, those seeking to explain everything in the macro economy by reference to micro-foundations haven’t been very sucessful, but the case of stagflation and the Phillips Curve wasn’t only a general vindication of this approach, but a very specific example of what happens when policymakers just look at historical relationships and totally ignore how individual participants in a market will respond to their policies.

Back to Hayes more general point — that “economies need management and policy to maintain some kind of equilibrium” and moreover “it will be politics, not technical expertise, which provides the principles and rules that regulate” — I think that the early 80s are probably the best example of this. Reagan’s inflation crushing had a whole lot to do with this overall political agenda, and Volcker was only able to pursue his monetary agenda because the political circumstances favored it.

I’ve had a very progressive week. On Tuesday, I was working at Campus Progress’ Journalism in Action Day, where young aspiring journalists reported a story on health care, and then progressive writers critiqued them. Wednesday was the Campus Progress National Conference, where “Liberal Heroes Bill Clinton and Matt Yglesias Woo Interns At Conference,” and yesterday was the Campus Progress/The Nation Journalism conference. Yglesias, who flitted through the conference proceedings on the way to and from his office in the Think Progress blogcave, was basically well to the right of most of the attendees, who ranged from John “massive, explicit subsidies to newspapers” Nichols to Ana Marie “I used to write for a basically small-m Marxist publication” Cox to William “Secrets of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country” Greider. And while, and I’m being serious here, I really enjoyed all three days of conference events and was edified by every panel or discussion that I attended or somehow assisted, I need a little hardcore reaction to give some balance to this immense week of progressivism.

And for that, let me say that I agree nearly in toto with Megan McArdle’s takedown of Matt Taibbi’s infamous Goldman Sachs piece.

You should read her entire critique, but I’ll just add that the common thread between Taibbi’s examples of Goldman’s supposedly dastardly behavior is that he can’t really establish that Goldman was doing something so much worse than the rest of the big investment banking world. His desire to find one powerful, satisfying villain is the original sin of the piece. I understand why, as someone who likes writing satisfying, well constructed narratives — which Taibbi often does — he went with this approach, but it doesn’t make his piece particularly enlightening or informative.

I’m not saying that the big financial institutions aren’t responsible for our current predicament and are using their political clout to block sensible, important reforms. I’m just saying that the focus ought to be on the industry as a whole, not on just on one company that has been particularly sucessful.

I can’t think of anyone better than the former editor of Ramparts to eulogize McNamara. Here’s the best part:

But whatever his better nature, it was the stark evil he perpetrated as secretary of defense that must indelibly frame our memory of him. To not speak out fully because of respect for the deceased would be to mock the memory of the millions of innocent people McNamara caused to be maimed and killed in a war that he later freely admitted never made any sense.

Robert McNamara, who died today at the age of 93 was a very smart man who was directly culpable for one of the greatest foreign policy blunders in American history. He realized that the war in Vietnam was an immoral and unwinnable, and yet refused to speak out against it. His apologies, thirty later, only illuminated how banally monstrous he was. If you believe in a just God, you know the eternal fate of McNamara’s soul. If you don’t, then you take it upon yourself to bear witness to the horrible deeds that defined him.

In explaining why the United States has much less in the way of redistributive social and economic policy, many political scientists and economists point to the ethnic and cultural heterogeneity of the US. The theory is that people don’t mind paying high taxes that go to poor people, so long as the poor people look like them. In Sweden, for example, there’s a pretty good chance that the tax revenues are going to Swedes that look like Swedish taxpayers. And very smart social scientists think this effect is actually incredibly important. Ed Glaeser says that “As a result of American racial heterogeneity and as a result of the stability of American institutions, America is far less generous in welfare spending than other developed countries.”

Now, this argument has caused some internal angst among left-wingers. We want more social welfare funding and redistribution, but we’re not huge fans of the hemogeniety that seems to be a prerequistite. Sherri Berman, who wrote an excellent history of social democracy in Europe, tells leftists “that if you want an order based on social solidarity and the priority of social goods over individual interests, some basic sense of fellow feeling is required to get that order into place and keep it politically sustainable.”

But since doing this racially is problematic, many lefties have tried to conjure some form of acceptable, liberal nationalism that could provide a common point around which Americans would advocate for redistribution. For Richard Rorty, it was the developed, contingent moral sense that suffering and cruelty are wrong. For Barack Obama, in his race speech, it was the specter of corporations shifting jobs overseas that people of all races could unite against in pursuit of more left-wing economic policies. David Miller, a leftie political theorist in good standing, wrote an entire book justifying nationalism, including recongizing special bonds to ones countrymen, as a legitimate political and even moral stance.

In case you’re  still reading, here’s what I’ve leading up to. Over at the Monkey Cage, Henry Farrell highlighted a paper written by Moses Shayo which makes predictions that are “starkly counter-intuitive about the relationship between national identity and preferences over redistribution.” The key finding is that “in most economically advanced democracies, national identification reduces support for redistribution.” And, it’s true, the negative correlation between national identification (measured by some scale) and the amount of income that the lowest quintile gains through redistribution is “indeed striking.”

But I’m not so sure that the finding makes Shoyo’s paper ” one of the most important articles in political science over the last several years.” That’s because I don’t think anyone every really argued that it was pure, ideological nationalism or identification as a member of a nation that drove redistribution. If that were the argument Sherman or Glaeser were making, they would soon realize that the United States disproved that thesis. The United States, despite supposedly low levels of solidarity that are the reason for a paucity of redistribution among industrialized democracies, is in many ways the most nationalistic of all. Politicians deploy our symbols endlessly, we have a messianic self conception, our president refers to us as the “last, best hope of earth” and so on and so forth. And, if stereotypes about entire regions mean anything, it’s supposedly social democratic Europe where national distinctions and nationalism are falling away the quickest.

But then how do we explain Shoyo’s results? While his ingenious model (and it is quite clever) explains the correlation between his measure of nationalism and redistribution, the old Berman/Glaeser model still holds up when it comes to ethnic and social homogeniety. I don’t think very many people ever claimed that high levels of redistribution where dependent on some abstract feeling of national identity, but instead on ethnic and social commonality.

You see this distinction most readily in American politics, where the recipients of government assistance are assumed to be or depicted as lazy and undeserving. And more importantly — black (or latino), but not not-American. Now, one can argue that this type of ethnic preference is just a form of ethinc-nationalism, but that strikes me as bit too abstract. Also, the ethnic/racial thesis can explain “cross-country evidence where measures of racial diversity strongly predict lower levels of redistribution…It’s also true across U.S. states. Holding income constant, the states with the highest percentages of African Americans are the least generous to the poor.”

I think by identifying the relevant groups as “class” and “nation,” Soyo ignores the more powerful ethnic and cultural identities. Now, Shoyo’s argument may cause trouble to those theorists who have tried to craft a tolerant, solidaristic nationalism as a basis for common identity, but I don’t think many thought that nationalism or national identity were ever the explanatory factor.

Dan Senor and Christine Whiton, two former Bush Administration officials, argue in Time that all previous democratic transitions happened with Western support, and so we should more explicilty support Moussavi and the protestors in Iran. This seems like a fair point, but when you look at the actual examples they give, they are clearly irrelevant to the current situation.

First they mention the Eastern Bloc. And yes, it’s true, the United States supported opposition movements in those countries, and the Eastern Bloc was  mostly sucessful in transitioning to democracy. But the difference between, say, Poland and Iran is that Poland only had a totalitarian system because it was imposed on them by the Soviet Union. So, not only were they essentially occupied by a despised foreign nation, but once that regime became impotent, overthrowing a political and military strcuture that was dependent on Soviet support became much easier. Iran’s authoritarian leadership is not a satellite of another unpopular foreign power. This strikes me as a fairly important distinction.

Their second example is just absurd — South Korea. Senor and Whitman write that “energetic bipartisan U.S. pressure peaked in 1987 when U.S. ambassador Jim Lilley hand delivered a letter from President Reagan urging against a crackdown on protesters. The advice was heeded. Two weeks later the protesters’ demands were met, and Korean democracy was born.” But can you think of any differences between Iran and South Korea? Oh yeah, South Korea was not only a strong US ally, but there have been tens of thousands of US troops stationed there since the end of the Korean War. It seems obvious why the authoritarian leadership would be more susceptible to US pressure.

What’s worse about this piece is that when they’re done dealing with the arguments against more active US involvement against the regime, they never say exactly what Obama should do differently. This seems like a fairly important question that nearly every conservative Obama critic has been oddly silent on.

A while back, I made a point of reading Commentary’s blog — Contentions — frequently and commenting/responding/criticizing their work. For a variety of reasons, from boredom to just blogging less, I don’t do this anymore. But this head-scratcher from Martin Kramer just begged for a response:

Some of the influences on Obama bubble to the surface. There is the Third Worldism: Muslims are victims of our colonialism (Obama has read Fanon) and the Cold War (has he been reading Khalidi again?) The primacy of the West is over: “Any world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will inevitably fail.” There is the implicit comparison of the Palestinians to black Americans during segregation, a familiar trope (Carter and Condi went for it too). Israel comes across as an anomaly. There is no appreciation of Israel as a strategic asset – its ties to the United States are “cultural and historical,” and thus not entirely rational. (That validates Obama’s other former Chicago colleague, Mearsheimer.) All of this has the ring of conviction – and of a Third Worldist sensibility.

As far as I can tell, the only evidence Kramer needs to show that Obama’s claims that “muslims are victims of our colonialism..and the cold war” are wrong headed is that he can cite two left wing critics of colonial and imperial foreign policy who make these arguments. I guess in Commentary world, the mere fact that Rashid Khalidi or Frantz Fanon said something makes it necessarily not true.

But that’s not the only bizarre part of argument. There’s also the sheer amount of paranoia on display, Kramer just had to paint Obama in this absurd light as a adherent of Fanon and a “Third Worldist.” Now, why a Third Worlder would, say, expand our presence in Afghanistan or even want to become the commander-in-chief of the American military is beyond me, but whatever.

The more important thing is that what Obama said about the Muslim world’s interaction with the West and with the United States specifically is totally true, no matter if it happens to overlap with critical thinkers like Khalidi or Fanon. Would Kramer like to dispute that America played a major part in meddling with the affairs of Muslim and Middle Eastern nations before the Cold War? I mean, is there even an argument? And during the Cold War, would Richman deny that America sponsored all sorts of nasty leaders in Muslim countries, some of whom slaughtered their own people. Or that the U.S. gleefully played both sides in and helped prolong a  near-decade long war that killed or maimed nearly one million Iranians and 375,000 Iraqis? Oh yeah, and there’s the entire over throwing Mossadegh and reinstating the dictatorial Shah thing.

Neoconservatives, at their most appealing and idealistic, actually said they regretted the oil and geopolitics fueled support for these awful regimes and saw it as one of the root causes of terrorism. But I guess when a Democrat acknowledges the US’s role in all this nasty stuff (not to mention calling on Israel to comply with international law and an agreement they signed), he’s a Fanon disciple Arab-lover who’s going to sell out the Jews.  Interesting how that works.

It was originally published in 06, but Chris Hayes “The Good War on Terror,” which discusses  how a sentimentalized, didatic nostalgia for World War II not only distorted what actually happened in the War, but also informed our foreign policy debates with a reverence for nationalistic militarism seems especially appropriate on the 65th anniversary of D-Day.

I actually wrote my previous post, “America and Torture,” last night. It just so happened that Andrew Sullivan, today, wrote a post glorifying Winston Churchill’s — and the Allies in general — refusal to use torture despite the truly horrifying consequences of insufficient intelligence about Nazi Germany’s actions. And while I think Churchill is a good example of how liberal societies have a very deeply entrenched cultural norm against torture, I can’t help but be a bit troubled by Sullivan’s view that the Bush administration’s actions are a huge break from the past.

One actually can not think of a better example than Churchill, or more generally, the Allies’ behavior in World War II. Sure, they eschewed torture because that’s what civilized nations do. But for some reason or another, there wasn’t a great cultural taboo against the mass slaughter of civilians, be it by air raid or by nuclear assault. Churchill, of course, was a great supporter of civilian bombing of Germany, especially of Dresden. Bush, for all his faults, never ordered area bombings of major Iraq or Afghani cities that had no military significance. So, for his tremendous faults when it comes to torture, Bush can be seen as something of an improvement over Churchill, Roosevelt et al.

I guess I’ll see it as a truely landmark moment when the killing of innocent civilians in war is seen as alien to the liberal tradition as the torture of hardened terrorists. Until then, I just hope that we remember that immorality in times of war didn’t start with the Bush administration.

The release of the torture memos, along with the slow trickle of evidence since Abu Ghraib which has definitively confirmed that the Bush Administration acted in violation of not only American and international law, but also of  traditions that have marked liberal, civilized societies for as long as they’ve existed, has greatly upset me. It made me upset not just because torture is a horrifyingly immoral thing to do, but because it was done, in one way or another, in my name, for my sake.

But I’m slightly uncomfortable with how the torture debate has unfolded, and here’s why — much of the most impassioned and instinctually persuasive condemnations of torture have not been from the basic perspective that “America does not torture.” Or, to make a maxim out of it, America is a good country and therefore acts accordingly.

There’s a reason I felt a special thrill when Shep Smith said this with such passion. As an American, I like to see it when people condemn immoral acts from that perspective. But I can’t help but be bothered by the  historical whitewashing that’s going on here. It’s true that the Bush administration broke with centuries of precedent and tradition when he allowed the CIA and the military to torture detainees. But the tradition that he parted with wasn’t a particularly proud one. Usually, we’ve left the horrifying atrocities to our allies or clients. To put it another way, America doesn’t torture, but its Central America allies did throughout the Cold War. Or, America doesn’t torture, it kills hundreds of thousands of civilians in Vietnam. I could go on and on.

But it feels  wrong to bray about past American wrongdoing when the central moral dilemma of our time is accounting for our current and recent wrongdoing. I don’t want to lessen the horror of the war in Iraq or of the systematic torture regime the Bush Administration established. It may be that in an America where a righteous, near-Messianic self conception is an a priori commitment for anyone who, say, wants to become President or even a mainstream commentator on current affairs, the Shepherd Smith line is the best we hope for. Perhaps we have to do some strategic forgetting, so that we can create a viable consensus that the Bush years really were a descent into the Dark Side.

But it seems horribly ironic that, in a time when America has so obviously violated moral norms that, at least before 9/11, everyone agreed on, we’ve  gathered around the flag. For folks like Shepherd Smith and Andrew Sullivan, it seems like 9/11 was the first attack on America — a physical, muderous attack –and the institution of the Torture Regime was the second attack, an attack on our deepest values. And since these dual attacks seem to be understood roughly analgously ( I haven’t seen Andrew this impassioned since he called war opponents a fifth column), it makes sense that the response is basically the same.

I would hope that the torture episode would open the door to a more critical interrogation of America’s history, but it seems to have done exactly the opposite. Instead, the only way we can understand the profound evil at the heart of the Torture Regime is to imagine that nothing like it ever existed before. If only that were true.

Sam Tanenhaus, as usual, has written a perceptive essay on the historical and intellectual state of American conservatism as a movement. His basic thesis, that conservatism in a America had ping-ponged back and forth between purist, radical reactionaries seeking to remake and revise America’s basic political and economic arrangements (i.e. overthrow the New Deal, get rid of the welfare state) and, in Tanenhaus’ estimation, conservatives in the Burkean or Disraelian sense who merely want to put the breaks on radical change, work within our current civil arrangements and even slow down the vast social changes wrought by free market capitalism.  

He seems to think that, in the wake of McCain’s defeat, conservatives have adopted a permanent stance of reaction, which can be seen in the bizarre purism of House Republicans in the stimulus debate, which promises that they will either lose or, if they gain power, enact radical reforms to our social structure that will leave everyone worse off. 

There’s a lot to Tanenhaus’ thesis, and, if you view ideas and ideologies as the prime moving forces in politics, Tanenhaus has something of a definitive account of the conservative movement’s failures and sucesses since the 50s. But aside from a delightfully understated reference to Arthur Schlesinger’s observation that Russell Kirk’s preferred social policy tended to mirror “the views of the American business community,” Tanenhaus pays little attention to how certain concrete interests — those of the wealthy, much of the business community and so forth — have held great sway over conservativism.

Now, there is some obvious overlap between purist libertarian economics that ideological conservatives subscribe to and the simple expression of the business/rich people’s concrete interests. But when the rubber hits the road for actual conservative policy proposals, they have a tendency to encourage upward income distribution — cutting the capital gains tax, cutting corporate taxes, dividend taxes etc etc. The fact that the same basket of policies is always proposed can’t be explained purely by the abstract claim that there’s a branch of conservatism that wants to destroy our existing “basic structure” of social and economic arrangements. I’m not saying that Tanenhaus’ focus is wrong, but just that he’s merely presenting a part of the picture.

Jamelle has a good rejoinder to John McWhorter’s TNR piece eulogizing liberal as a descriptive for mainstream, left-wing American politics. For McWhorter, the Right has so effectively turned the phrase into a signifier for excesses of the New Left and/or the unpopular liberalism of the 70s and 80s that we can no longer rescue it. 

Jamelle makes two good points in response. For one, progressive, which is everyone’s favorite replacement term, has all sorts of nasty (and illiberal) historical associations with eugenics, scientism, racism and the like. From an intellectual standpoint, Jamelle is right: I’d much rather associate with liberals (FDR, JFK, Civil Right Movement, New Deal etc) than progressives (Teddy Roosevelt’ss wacko imperialism, eugenics, etc), but arguing over the real history of the term seems kinda pointless. Most people don’t know about or care what a certain political group was doing between 1900 and 1920 and so they don’t make the association that, say, Jamelle or I would make with the term progressive. Liberal, so says McWhorter is a different story.

But I still think we should stick with liberal for a few reasons. One, we really shouldn’t let conservatives redefine out terms for us! That’s weak, that’s bad and it just lets the conservative movement control our own self perceptions. Second, we’re stuck with it. Media outlets will always describe left of center politicians (and especially left of the center-left politicians) as liberals, so we might as well make do with what we have.

Third, I think in the time of Obama, we really could reclaim liberalism as a positive descriptor for left-wing politics. Jamelle points to a monologue from the West Wing where Jimmy Smits righteously goes through the glorious history of liberalism. The victories he lists off can be broken up into three categories. 

1. Civil and Political Equality — Women’s right to vote, Votings Rights Act, Civil Rights Movement
2. Economic equality/equal opportunity — New Deal, Social Security, Medicare
3. The Environment – Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, EPA etc

In the Age of Obama, we have, for the first time since Lyndon Johnson, a popular liberal Democrat with a mandate to implement major new policies. Now, there probably isn’t any popular Civil Rights type stuff that Obama could enact that would make liberals popular for a generation, but as far as categories two and three go, Obama has a once-in-a-lifetime confluence of opportunity, necessity, feasibility and popularity. Obama has the chance to refurbish the social safety net with universal health care and to pass major legislation on climate change. If Obama could get universal health care, then liberalism and liberals would be revived in the national consciousness (which is why conservatives fear the prospect so much). 

So, best case scenario, a successful Obama presidency does for liberalism what Reagan did for conservatism.

I know I’ve been hammering on this point for a long time, but I just wish that the Washington Post editorial board could, for example, spend a bit less debunking William Ayers’ self serving op-eds and maybe decide to devote a smidgen of coverage to Nick Turse’s article in the Nation detailing the negligent-if-not-intentional killing of civilians ("A My Lai a Month" that were the direct result of Army trying to pacify the Mekong Delta.

The weird way we treat the 1960s in America has always infuriated me. It seems like the only violence we talk about with a sense of sadness and shame is right wing political violence (church bombings, killing civil rights workers) and left-wing political violence (Weather Underground), all the while agreeing that the worst violence of the 60s – the Vietnam War – is something that we should just avoid talking about. While the right is supposed to wrent their garments over their violent opposition ot civil rights and the left is supposed to be chastened over their radicalism, we seem to think that Vietnam is something that was bad, but that we shouldn’t learn any lessons from it. The sick way this pathology played itself out was that any chastening or rethinking of America’s place in the world in light of our experiences in Vietnam was given the absurd label "Vietnam Syndrome" and was considered by arbiters of repsectable political discourse to be a mental block that America simply had to get over.

But this was always a rigged game. The right and their centrist apologists could keep on castigating liberals for engaging in political action that recalled the anti-war and progressive politics of the late 60s and early 70s, but liberals weren’t allowed to talk about Vietnam, lest they let have the Syndrome. The fact that every one, left and right, is having such a golly good time participating in the communal stoning of Ayers*, all the while neglecting just how horrible the War was seems to just perversely justify his very tactics. The way Ayers saw it, non violent protest simply wasn’t working and Americans had to be shocked into opposing the war. It goes without saying that, as far as ending the Vietnam War, the Weather Underground were absolutely disastrous. But it seems like their main point is still correct. We would really not talk about Vietnam.

*By stoning, I don’t mean that what’s happening to Ayers in the media is unjust or unfair, just that the people who are writing these editorial and blog posts excoriating him are clearly drawing some sort of satisfaction from letting everyone know how much they despise the man.

 Mark Kleiman, Brad Delong and Dave Noon all gleefully link to Hilzoy’s fierce rebuttal to Bill Ayers’ New York Times Op-Ed where he seeks to explain his past. Most of the points Hilzoy raises are quite fair, especially her last one about the “underpants gnome” theory of political violence. Basically, despite any justification the Weather Underground could cook up for their bombing campaign, it was very obvious at the time how ineffective it would be at actually ending the Vietnam war. This point seems to be the most devastating, and suggests that the biggestflaw in Ayers and Dohrn wasn’t their fondness for violence or their self-righteous, but instead their extreme narcissism. 

But I want to dispute two points that are being made against Ayers. One, I disagree with Hilzoy and Noon’s questioning of why the Times gave Ayers the Op-Ed space at all. Despite the Ayers-mongering proving that “his work in the late 1960s and early 1970s was irrelevant to the outcome of the campaign,” it’s still worth noting that this man was turned into a figure of revile and hate by the Vice Presidential nominee and much of the right-wing media, and had his story presented to the public totally stripped of context or explanation. At the very least, he should be able to present his side of what happenned.

The second point is that there is something very odd in our political discourse, where Bill Ayers, who really didn’t kill anyone (the case of Diana Oughton and the two others who died in the Greenwich  can be attributed to negligence on the part of the other people building the bomb, not malice on the part of Ayers) has to justify his being a national forum, while Henry Kissinger, who is partially responsible for the killing of some 200,00 people in Indonesia and the untold sufferings caused by some 2,756,941 tons of bombs dropped on Cambodia (the Allies dropped “just” 2 million tons of bombs in World War II) (not to mention recalling the American diplomat who documented Pakistan-committed atrocities in West Pakistan, now Bangladesh), can opine about American foreign policy in the Washington Post without any real questioning of his past activities. It seems like he has much more to answer for than Bill Ayers.