“This week’s issue of the New York Times Book Review ranges over American politics but not, we hope, in a familiar way,” its editors write Upfront. They mean not only that their special February 10 issue, “Politics, Real and Imagined,” is devoted almost exclusively to politics, but also that it ranges across genres, from books about the politics of race, gender, and religion to memoirs and even fiction.
“There are sixteen reviews here,” my tipster wrote on Friday, “but not a one” by Peter Beinart, Paul Berman, David Brooks, Richard Brookhiser, Christopher Hitchens, Joe Klein, Leon Wieseltier, or the other pumped-up assailants of liberals whom I’d accused of turning the Sunday book section into a “neoconservative damage-control gazette” under editor Sam Tanenhaus. (Mediabistro’s Galley Cat called the section a “shadow op ed page.”
So, what gives?
I won’t reprise my critique of the Book Review here; if you’d like the “what” of it — the Book Review’s record as I’ve characterized it — read the Nation essay linked above. If you’d like the “why,” in an exegesis of Tanenhaus’ political odyssey, read (please do read!) The Guardian account. Coming home to roost | Jim Sleeper | The Guardian
This week’s “new” Book Review has some leftish reviews we’ve not seen before under Tanenhaus, if ever — Maurice Isserman and Jill Nelson on books about racial politics, for example. We also see Elsa Dixler, who actually works at the review but had been confined mostly to surveying paperbacks and fiction, reviewing, knowingly, two memoirs by the 1960s activists Carl Oglesby and Susan Sherman.
The few leftish reviewers Tanenhaus has actually published on a semi-regular basis — David Greenberg, Adam Hochschild, Tara McKelvey –are all trundled out this time, too. And Alan Ehrenhalt, a judicious conservative writer and editor who hasn’t been seen here in years, puts the neo-con apostle David Frum in his place — despite the solicitous regard for Frum which Tanenhaus showed while giving a lecture at the conservative American Enterprise Institute which I described here in December. Coming home to roost | Jim Sleeper | The Guardian
This makes the absence of Berman, Brooks, Hitchens, et al from the special Times Book Review edition on “Politics, Real and Imagined” quite striking. They’ll be back, no doubt, but more sparingly, and properly so.
The Times should publish thoughtful conservative writers to keep liberals and leftists honest. To be honest myself here, some of this week’s reviews could use more a bit more of the bite and panache the war hawks sometimes gave us. But most of the reviews are the richer and more rewarding to read for being less sardonic and melodramatic.
Judge for yourself. I’ll add only that the scrutiny the Book Review has received seems to have struck home. Tanenhaus, who I suggested here last fall was having second thoughts about how he’d borne himself politically and had skewed his reviewing assignments, undertook a charm offensive this winter on the occasion of his elevation to the editorship of the Week in Review even as he continues to oversee Books, with hands-on help from others who may have effected some of this marked shift in depth and tone.
The challenge for a general-interest Book Review such as the Times’ isn’t to swing “left,” as it did almost laughably under editor Rebecca Sinkler in the mid-1990s, but to revivify an American civic-republican literary and political spirit that isn’t a muddle between left and right. I hinted at this in The Guardian essay, Coming home to roost | Jim Sleeper | The Guardian and there is more to come.
“Solidarity forever, Solidarity forever, Solidarity fore-e-e-ver, for the union makes us strong.”
—- Neoliberals find the word “solidarity” distasteful. I’m not fond of it myself. Doesn’t solidarity collapse easily into groupthink? Shouldn’t being free mean thinking independently?
Before you answer those questions, review your own life to see if you ever actually, consciously needed the kind of solidarity that West Virginia coal-miners thought they needed when “Solidarity Forever” was written for them in 1914.
Probably, you never did. But is it really only people like the miners who do? True enough, the song’s lyrics aren’t nuanced or pretty; nor are labor unions. I’m not a union romantic. Working as a journalist in New York in the 1990s, I saw and described how badly, even disgustingly, some work-rules and pension scams compromised basic public services.
But I also learned that unions are what they are because their workers’ employers are what they are and because our society is what it is: As my one-time sparring partner Al Sharpton put it one day, “Society is basically a hustle, from top to bottom.”
Neoliberals find that observation distasteful, too. They’ve been shocked, shocked, by all the scamming and greed at the top that they discovered only in 2008 or, more recently, while watching “Inside Job.” Without union solidarity against all this, millions at the bottom would never have become strong enough even just to feed their kids, let alone think clearly.
But don’t union gains strangle job development and innovation? It’s when you look closely at how we set the rules for job-creators and job-destroyers that you really begin to understand how Sharpton can think that society is little more than a hustle at the top as much as at the bottom.
That’s precisely when solidarity’s critics look away from the top and stop thinking freely and hunt for “structural” explanations and scapegoats at the bottom. Witness David Brooks last Friday night on PBS, doing exactly what he did during the mortgage meltdown a few years earlier.
At first, Brooks took the “more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger” approach to union-bashing: Public workers have a right to organize, he said, but collective bargaining makes more sense in the private sector, where employers fight ferociously to keep “their own” money; in the public sector, by contrast, both the “employers” and the employees are fighting over other people’s money. The employers have many incentives to give that money away to the unions, “And if you do that decade after decade, then, finally, the bill comes due.”
All true, but what about the bill for investment bankers’ and CEOs’ selfish and often corrupt mismanagement of other people’s money, including their mortgages, and, with it, the American economy? That bill came due in 2008 and 2009 and 2010 and on, and Brooks wants $40,000-a-year teachers, cops, street-cleaners to play “their part” in paying it, the way private-sector workers have been paying for it by giving up wages and losing their pensions.
Brooks looked a little embarrassed as his PBS counterpart Mark Shields noted that “the only reason we have a five-day workweek, the only reason we have an eight-hour workday, the only reason we have a minimum wage law and child labor laws and pension funds is because of labor unions’ clout and skill.”
While Shields acknowledged that “unions are flawed institutions with imperfect people running them, not unlike businesses, …” he noted that “Organized labor and the G.I. Bill were the bookends of the middle-class prosperity of post-World War II America. America exploded economically, but the only reason that pie was divided was because American veterans returning had a chance to educate themselves like no generation had before…. And the only reason wages rose is because one-third of the work force was organized, and they secured those higher wages and the ripple effect across our economy.”
Most neoliberals who bridle at union “solidarity” are the offspring of people who benefited from all this, even if they weren’t in unions. But these days it often takes someone of Shields’ age to connect these dots, and no sooner had he done it, than Brooks finessed his embarrassment by looking for scapegoats:
“You have got rubber rooms in New York where they can’t fire terrible teachers because of union rules,” Brooks retorted. “You’ve got schools where you can’t — you get rid of all the really good young teachers because of these rules. You have got California prison workers who are retiring at age 55 with $130,000-a-year pensions.”
But then, I suspect, Brooks began thinking of all the rubber rooms we need for the Madoffs, Blankfeins, Rubins, Summerses, and others at the top who’ve never done anything to earn bonuses of $1.3 million, let alone pensions of $130,000. Brooks caught himself: “I’m not against unions, but when things get out of whack, when you have got these sorts of rigidities and unsustainable costs, then you have to adjust it. And I’m not saying you have to bust it the way it’s being tried, but it has to be adjusted.”
Yes, but what adjustments, exactly, David? Have unions gotten fatter and more corrupt than casino-finance and corporate welfare capitalists? Who caused public deficits to balloon? Few Americans are buying the anti-union line of your latest hero, Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, let alone the more bare-knuckled gambit of Wisconsin’s Scott Walker.
A few days after the PBS program, without Shields to correct him, Brooks charged in a column that unions and their politician-enablers, faced with yawning deficits and angry taxpayers, are cutting services to the young in order to preserve those for the old, who vote in large numbers, as children can’t. “The future has no union,” he declared.
The important question here is why Brooks has a future as a credible commentator if he can’t acknowledge that teachers, firefighters, cops, and other public workers hold more of the “future” in their hands by caring for and protecting children on the job – and that they probably have more children of their own, per capita as well as in absolute numbers, than bankers and corporate “deciders” do. Can Brooks be credible if he can’t even write that, by the way, public-sector workers are taxpayers, too?
Before Brooks shifted his attention from Wall Street bonuses to Wisconsin a couple of months ago, he often talked about the inexorable pressures of global competition upon our economy’s decision makers. He kept neglecting to mention that these deciders are members of a new elite that answers to no American polity or moral code.
They employ managers to squeeze higher rates of profit out of factories and newspapers that were making perfectly decent profits and paying workers decently, too — and were thereby sustaining civil society and “the future” – until, all of a sudden, they were told to produce 22% rates of return.
Is something “out of whack” here, too, David, or did God ordain it? You weren’t challenging the rules of finance when the mortgage meltdown threw millions of people into foreclosure. Instead, you penned a sober column, “The Culture of Debt,” blaming the little people, as usual.
To understand what Brooks and so many others are saying about public employees now, it’s a good idea to revisit what he wrote in that column about the mortgage meltdown.
He made sure to finger the specific, real-life weaknesses and moral lapses not of those who’d designed, invested in, and pushed the duplicitous,predatory “mortgages” which hard-pressed buyers latched onto, but of the buyers themselves. He cited one hapless home buyer one who, “after her divorce,… went on a shopping spree to make herself feel better.”
Actually, the most irresponsible individual decisions in this crisis were not made by homeowners or would-be buyers, but Brooks couldn’t find a single anecdote to illustrate the behavior of those who sought out his divorcee and zoomed in on her with what seemed like irresistible offers.
Ever since I wrote The Closest of Strangers after spending the better part of a decade in black north and central Brooklyn, I’ve had a reputation for not letting poor people off the hook for bad decisions that are ultimately matters of personal responsibility. Drawing from intimate experience you can read about in that book, I’ve rebuked liberals who refuse to pay disadvantaged people the compliment of holding them to the same standards of decency and self-control to which liberals hold their own children.
But Brooks abuses this principle to blame structural injustices and cultural demoralization on people at the bottom who lack the necessary standards and discipline: An “unspoken code [a culture of thrift and discipline, rather than of easy debt] has been silently eroded,” he declared during the mortgage meltdown, as he is declaring now during the public-sector union crisis.
Silently, David? Marketers of all kinds have spent billions for 40 years telling Americans they “deserve a break today” and promising to give them that break instantly. This has been the most monumental, unrelenting, intrusive, mindless and therefore irresponsible campaign in history to destroy a culture, barring perhaps the fascist and communist propaganda juggernauts and worse of the 1930s.
We are destroying neighborhoods. We are destroying hearts and minds. We are destroying our roads, rails, and basic social services. Private and public leaders alike are directing it, not just via giveaways to unions but via de-regulation and lotteries and big bailouts to shareholders who are never held responsible for their individual decisions to back these scams.
What else does Brooks need to know before he’ll make his own responsible decision to write that decency hasn’t “silently eroded” but has been clamorously assaulted from above? Hello? The year of the mortgage meltdown, we wound up saying “Hello?” four or five times an evening during the dinner hour in New Haven to callers from local mortgage lending companies trying to get us to re-finance. How hard was it for Brooks to imagine that poorly-educated people, desperate for cash and barely meeting their mortgage payments, might welcome those calls?
For Brooks, though, it was as if there were no “pushers” behind this process unleashed by corporate and finance capital and, politically, by the deregulatory, bailout, and other corporate-welfare tactics he’d defended for a decade.
Why doesn’t he even think of putting a spotlight on the pushers? In the mortgage crisis, he couldn’t tell us about, say, the stressed and, yes, morally irresponsible telemarketer who’d signed on to accelerate the storm. Not a word about the irresponsibility of the mortgage executive and his consultants and lawyers who designed the campaign.
Not an anecdote about the sharpie salesmen who visited the homes whose equity they were about to steal while sitting politely on the targets’ sofas, or of the bankers who bought up the mortgages and foreclosed.
Nothing about politicians, fed by all these predators, who eased the miscreants’ actions in more ways than I can count.
Didn’t these people make any of the individual decisions which Brooks tells us have ripple effects that produce a “culture of debt”? How can a Burkean conservative like him be silent about decisions by people who hold leadership positions?
The next time Brooks tells you that a culture of responsibility has eroded, whether among home-buyers or public-sector workers, ask him if his own silence about that erosion’s true causes and dimensions has been part of the reason for the erosion itself.
And ask him why he’s been so silent. The answer is that Brooks can’t think clearly or tell the truth because his own biography and insecurities and over-compensations have inclined him to ‘solidarity forever” with hustlers at the top. People with less power and privilege have much better reasons for solidarity with hustlers at the bottom.
The truculent conservative writer and editor Norman Podhoretz “did not… fight his way out of ‘political leftism’ to abide ‘the anti-Americanism of the Right,”‘ writes Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan on the cover of this new book; “It is America he loves, not ideology.” Thus encouraged, any reader might well open “My Love Affair With America” expecting to hear a voice of civic conscience that has been missing in this country’s ideologically riven, and increasingly inane, politics. Having broken ranks with what he called the “hate America” left in the 1960s and ended up on the right, mightn’t Podhoretz indeed break ranks again, this time to strengthen an America that has made amply, if quietly, clear since the Clinton impeachment effort that it loathes ideologues on both sides of a discredited divide? To appreciate what a let-down Podhoretz’s book actually is and why that matters, it helps to know what besides Moynihan’s encouragement might have raised expectations in the first place.
The Podhoretz who decamped prophetically, if bombastically, from liberalism had begun his career as a public intellectual with the credibility of a poor boy from immigrant-Jewish Brooklyn who’d made what he called “the brutal bargain” of assimilation to Western high culture on scholarship at Columbia University and Clare College in Cambridge, England. It had been brutal, he reported, because to be accredited one had to have cut off one’s proletarian roots. Podhoretz had done this but not without misgivings laced with muted shame: He would recall years later that upon ascending to Cambridge at 19, he was ushered into the first bedroom he’d ever had to himself, where, as the door shut behind him, he burst into tears.
Winning distinction as a student and critic just as American liberalism strode forth to change the country and the world, he found he had license to renegotiate the deal he’d made with high culture at Brooklyn’s expense. As the new, young editor of Commentary magazine after 1960, he mid-wifed a then-unknown Paul Goodman’s “Growing Up Absurd” and introduced liberals to James Baldwin, who was writing “The Fire Next Time.” In 1965, he published the civil rights leader Bayard Rustin’s argument that although black riots in Watts and other urban ghettoes were immorally and self-destructively violent, they were tortured calls for what amounted to democratic socialism.
At the same time, however, Podhoretz helped spark a role reversal in how conservatives and liberals would address race. The former had long said, in effect, “Every group in its place, with a label on its face,” while liberals had fought to transcend race legally and even culturally. Podhoretz’s 1963 essay, “My Negro Problem–And Ours,” was the much-noted bellwether of the coming conservative rebellion against a patronizing, race-drunk liberalism. Although the essay (reprinted most recently in Paul Berman’s anthology “Blacks and Jews”) ended with a then-characteristically liberal call to transcend race through miscegenation, it unloaded a quiver of barbed, proletarian truths, drawn from Podhoretz’s recollections of growing up among poor blacks, that punctured some hot-air balloons of liberal optimism about busing and other racially obsessed, quick-fix, “integration” schemes then floating across the land.
A few years later, he would help conservatives claim that in a true free-market society, the only color that mattered would be dollar green; it was liberals, he charged, who were squandering the civil rights movement’s moral capital by advocating racial preferences and other social color-coding that abdicated the struggle to rise above race.
Podhoretz was a bellwether in other ways, as well. In 1966, he edited “The Commentary Reader,” whose more than 50 essays confirmed the magazine’s acuity and sheer range of well-grounded interests. Because many of the essays had appeared before Podhoretz was editor, he rightly credited his predecessor Elliot Cohen with “an uncanny sensitivity to what may be called the representative issues–that is, the problems preying on the minds of a great many people at a given moment . . . he invariably knew where the relevant areas of discussion lay and by which writers they might be illuminated.” Podhoretz could also quite rightly have written the same about himself.
Not quite so rightly, he did just that a year later, in “Making It,” a premature memoir-cum-advertisement for himself whose purported revelations about New York literary life angered many of his admirers. “Making It” virtually celebrated what Cohen’s work had seemed to discredit: the “dirty little secret,” as Podhoretz called it, that every American writer lusts after fame, fortune and power and lies about such desires. Chronicling his own literary ups, downs and apercus with the self-infatuation of an infant discovering his toes, Podhoretz seemed to expect the kind of adoration he’d gotten from his mother and her friends. Instead, he was dismissed by “the family” of New York intellectuals who’d admitted and even anointed him a promising young critic only a few years before.
Podhoretz emerged from what he considered New York liberals’ mug and hypocritical disdain with 20-20 foresight about their conceits and a rage to drive home hard truths they’d suppressed. He would keep his “brutal bargain” with high culture by acknowledging the importance of ambition and political power. They would continue to betray the bargain, not least by disguising their own ambitions with support for “the oppressed,” whose lives he understood far better than they. For the next three decades, Podhoretz would cry that his liberal ex-friends were betraying ordinary Americans’ best hopes by indulging fantasies of Third World revolution and by romanticizing, then institutionalizing, racial and sexual identity politics that cheat their intended beneficiaries while projecting the intellectuals’ own thwarted power lusts. They were wrecking an America whose prosaic capitalist and constitutional strengths had liberated more people than all “progressive” efforts combined.
Podhoretz has kept demanding vindication of his claims so obsessively that he’s nearly made himself the Rodney Dangerfield of public intellectuals. “My Love Affair With America” is his fourth book about his conversion from liberal pietism to self-proclaimed defender of the American Truth. (The others, after the clamorous “Making It,” were the bitterly tendentious “Breaking Ranks” in 1979 and the endlessly self-justifying “Ex-Friends” in 1998.) Increasingly, and not a little vindictively, he has always counterposed his new political family of the “patriotic” right to the “hate America” left.
But now such distinctions are blurring in another great role-reversal, this one involving conceptions of American national identity itself. And Podhoretz seeks to be prophetic again, this time against an anti-Americanism among his friends on the right that, mirabile dictu, bears an unnerving resemblance to what he denounced on the left. In this book his warnings are less credible, though, because over the years he has let the enemies of his old liberal crowd become such good political “friends” that he’s in harness to their conservative movement, however uneasily. This matters, because the devil’s bargain he made with the right out of disgust for the left is typical of many ex-liberals who followed him. Yet it would be unwise for liberals to gloat over the many false notes and incoherencies in “My Love Affair With America.” The book is a sad testimony to how an ideological temperament, no matter what its doctrine, drains the political culture it claims to advance and saps the civic virtue of the ideologue himself.
II
Every month brings new indications of the nationalist role-reversal that is prompting Podhoretz’s unease: This year’s presidential primaries saw conservative leaders of a Republican Party long associated with a flag-waving patriotism scramble to discredit an American war hero who charged that a global capitalist “iron triangle” of big money, bad lobbyists, and undemocratic legislation is debasing his party and his country. Liberals, meanwhile, found themselves casting shy, admiring glances at John McCain’s insurgency: On National Public Radio, former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich marveled that McCain had electrified apathetic citizens, many of whom didn’t want patriotism left to Pat Buchanan and Oliver North. In Seattle during the meetings of the World Trade Organization demonstrators protested the fact that Third World regimes oppose the very environmental and worker protections found in American laws. “Our country has many things well worth protecting, and most . . . are social inventions, not individual factories,” commented Robert Kuttner, editor of the liberal American Prospect. “If this idea makes me a protectionist, I wear the Made-in-USA label with pride.”
These aren’t stadium shouts of “U.S.A.!,” nor is there racism or imperialism in such stirrings of national pride. McCain tapped a hunger for what the philosopher Jurgen Habermas calls the “constitutional patriotism” of Americans who joined the civil rights and anti-war movements to oppose the government on behalf of an American civic nation transcending “blood and soil” and profits. Similarly but more recently, the philosopher Richard Rorty unnerved some fellow leftists by arguing, in “Achieving Our Country,” that national pride is as important to struggles for social justice as self-respect is, and that the left has abdicated its responsibility to keep American self-respect on the sound footing set by Eugene V. Debs, Franklin D. Roosevelt, A. Philip Randolph and others who were anything but conservatives.
What better time, then, for an ideologically conciliatory “love affair with America?” Surveying the ruins of a century’s world-saving schemes, Rorty, Michael Lind (in “The Next American Nation”), the historian Benjamin Barber (in “Jihad vs. McWorld”) the sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset (in “American Exceptionalism”) and others find the United States pretty exceptional, after all. Not that the country is divinely blessed or racially superior; it’s an extraordinary experiment in post-national civic nationalism, perhaps even in democratic world citizenship. The European Union is such an experiment, too. But the United States, founded on liberal Enlightenment terms and peopled too dynamically for ethnic corralling, has become the very progenitor of the very globalism and cosmopolitanism that nudged even the European Union into being. Our flaws are ghastly, yes; but compared to whom?
Another way of making the argument would be to show that even as global forces outstrip old national identities, we still need nations. Individuals can flourish only in societies borne of distinctive narratives, customs and principles–societies in which each of us has a voice and which sometimes we must be nudged, by law, to support. Because men aren’t angels, as James Madison famously warned, they need legal and civic structures strong enough to vindicate their rights against impassioned factions and to train the young in the arts and graces of public trust. Only civic nationalism can do that for populations as diverse as America’s. Ethnic, racial and religious sub-groups can’t. The European Union, the United Nations and the World Trade Organization can’t. That leaves American citizenship the promising microcosm of a larger world project: to nourish enough social benevolence and bonds across lines of race and class to offset self-fulfilling prophecies of group mistrust that rationalize all sorts of oppression.
Ideologues, by creating the “factions” against which Madison warned, deplete civic breathing space; the leftists among them sacrifice Madison’s constitutional balance to a “cosmopolitanism” so abstract it rationalizes global enterprises fleeing environmental and worker protections. Conservatives, defending even global investments that accelerate the social decay they decry, sacrifice Madison to Madison Avenue. Each side has fought the other to a sterile peace: The left has lost the economic wars to the right, and the right has lost the culture wars to the left, making the more fortunate among us the bourgeois bohemians of David Brooks’ recent “Bobos in Paradise.” Many Americans whose lives are less charmed are left with a sinking feeling that the old decencies driving the McCain and World Trade Organization insurgencies are little more than doomed, wistful gesturings of a lost civic love.
III
Over to you, Norman Podhoretz! Alas, “My Love Affair With America” is oddly esoteric and thin, or hopelessly self-referential, oblivious of recent discourse on America’s national identity. His acuity seems played out, and in its wake, there is only maundering: Every page or so, he changes the subject to follow some other old war story that has just occurred to him–and to duck a more important insight he’d rather not follow through.
Podhoretz opens (and closes) by remarking on an “outburst of anti-Americanism” among some conservatives whom he had thought were immunized against it. “I should have known better,” he writes, “than to be surprised, familiar as I was with the traditions on which the conservatives were drawing,” such as elitism, racialism, anti-Semitism, and some para-military or terrorist-like opposition to liberal constitutional government. Seeing all this, he recounts, “I fell into a despair . . . over the possibility that I was now about to earn myself a new set of ex-friends on top of the ones I had made thirty years earlier in breaking with the Left. Fast approaching the age of seventy, I was too old to seek yet another political home.” Fortunately, he claims, right-wingers’ “passions cooled” just as he wearily buckled on his armor to defend America again.
The truth, more likely, is not that Podhoretz’s right-wing allies calmed and redeemed themselves, or that he feels “too old” to seek another home, but that his enduring resentment of the left has driven him too much into the conservative movement to permit his discovery of the real, less-ideological, America. In this, he shares the sad fate of other northeastern Jewish intellectuals–Irving and William Kristol, Gertrude Himmelfarb and, in the younger generation, David Brooks and David Frum–who awoke amid the Clinton impeachment campaign to find themselves standing beside “blood and soil” mystics, racists, religious hysterics and aristocrat-wannabes, people as “un-American” as Communists were.
Alas for his colleagues’ enlightenment, Podhoretz relives personal triumphs and hurts as if they were templates of the national political culture. Only if you were his biographer or a literary historian would you want to know, for example, how his love affair with America was shaped and shadowed by reactions to a negative review he wrote, in Commentary, in 1953, of Saul Bellow’s “The Adventures of Augie March,” which Podhoretz’s liberal intellectual “family” saw as the first novel to stake a compelling Jewish claim to full American identity. For Podhoretz, “this unquestionably desirable, and even noble, project failed as literature because it was largely willed . . , not the natural, organic outgrowth of a state of being already achieved, but rather the product of an effort on Bellow’s part to act as if he had already achieved it.” Fair enough, perhaps, but do we really need a chronicle of every major literary figure’s whispered or imagined reaction to his review, and of Podhoretz’s reactions to the reactions, and of his second-guessing of even his supporters’ motives?
What drives these ruminations about everyone else’s past failures to celebrate them with full throats and whole hearts? Perhaps it’s Podhoretz’s discomfort at finding himself yoked, or at least driven, to do some of the right’s dirty work in punishing apostates like Michael Lind (who exposed conservatives’ enthrallment to televangelists) and Glenn Loury (who exposed their “Bell Curve” racism) with graceless “good riddances” and insinuations that amount to character assassinations. Podhoretz has done this, even though he knows far better than younger colleagues who behave similarly that, whatever the renegades’ eccentricities, many of their criticisms are as valid as any he made of the left.
Worse, he has fronted for positions that intellectual and moral integrity wouldn’t abide, and this, too, must have made him uneasy. For example, he keeps circling back to anti-Semitism, gently cautioning conservatives about it. But Commentary has temporized long and tellingly about anti-Semitism on the right, from penning tortuous apologias for Jacobo Timerman’s Argentine-junta tormentors to excusing the theocratic conspiracy theories of Pat Robertson, who so loves Israel that he wants American Jews to be there for Armageddon. Podhoretz would never explain away leftist anti-Semitism so sinuously. Surely, every Brooklyn Jewish bone in his body is telling him to slam anti-Semitism wherever it shows its countenance.
Podhoretz has fronted, as well, for a sham less dramatic but more dangerous: Some conservatives’ pretense that free markets alone liberate the country’s best strengths. He writes, fairly enough, that “radicals were being driven half crazy by the refusal of America in the 1950s to fulfill their predictions of a postwar depression that would generate a new wave of social protest and discontent.” But conservatives, driven even crazier by America’s refusal to rise up against Bill Clinton during the impeachment campaign, concluded that social decay and personal irresponsibility had gone farther than they’d realized. What they can’t conclude without the help of someone as perspicacious as Podhoretz is that moral decay has advanced behind their own corporate triumphs. For Podhoretz, racial preferences and group labeling are part of the decay of personal responsibility. Worse then is the fact that what had been a liberal agenda is now being usurped by CEOs. When, for example, Washington State’s 1998 referendum against public affirmative action passed, the big defenders of preferences were such capitalist combines as Boeing and Microsoft, a fact that made some on the left wonder whether the color-coding of American identity is really so “progressive” after all, and some on the right wonder whether private-sector bureaucrats can be just as stultifying as public ones.
In another circle of Podhoretzian hell, mass marketing has so shuffled our libidinal as well as racial decks that it’s comfortable peddling sexual degradation. The Calvin Klein-cum-kiddie porn ads that showed up a few years ago on New York City buses were put there by private investors in the free market not by liberals. Podhoretz says nothing about any of this. But if it’s wrong for the left to demonize as conspiratorial and even fascist the many mindless free-market disruptions of social life, it’s wrong for conservatives not even to question corporate priorities.
Podhoretz claims that he left the left for the right because he’d seen “radicalism” through to its ugly bottom. He says he was a “radical” and a “utopian” in the early 1960s, the unwitting bearer of a social “disease” whose flushes of apparent optimism conceal the carrier’s ripeness for disillusionment and then complicity in cruelty and oppression. He writes that he naively believed that America could end the Cold War and arms race, abolish poverty and racism, loosen and liberate sexual relations without destructive effects on marriage or the rearing of children (this is the closest the book comes to discussing the feminist movement) “and so on and so on into the blinding visions of the utopian imagination. . . . I was also convinced that all this could be done through reforms ‘within the system’ and without evolutionary violence.”
Never mind that because many intelligent people did believe such things, we’ve inched closer to realizing some of them. Did Podhoretz himself truly believe them? Not if, as he also writes, he was seduced by utopian siren songs into an “infidelity” to America that has required his “repentance,” a “painful self-examination of what it was in the ideas I had held and helped to disseminate that could have given birth to the monsters [of anti-Americanism] I now hated and feared.” Had this one-time disciple of Lionel Trilling and F.R. Leavis never considered Edmund Burke or Thomas Carlyle’s accounts of the French Revolution? Did he publish Goodman and Baldwin because he was naive, or because they rode the zeitgeist and he wanted to be “with it”? “A critic with a good pair of ears once wrote that he could hear in some of Podhoretz’s essays ‘the tones of a young man who expects others to be just a little too happy with his early eminence,”‘ he tells us. And, “I discovered that . . . the ideas we had been shaping and disseminating spread faster and further than I had ever dreamed possible” — even to the Kennedy and Johnson White Houses, he recounts. Nothing utopian there. Was Commentary, by any chance, being mailed to the West Wing from Podhoretz’s office?
Fortunately, he now says of such disseminations, “[T]here were protections in America against a seizure of power by utopians” such as himself. This would be comforting if there were no other evils or sicknesses imperiling America. But the most likely peril isn’t the left’s utopian-totalitarian impulses or the right’s fascist vagaries but the bread-and-circus decadence, reminiscent more of the late Roman Empire than of the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany, coming your way relentlessly via the tube, the Internet, the casino, the sex shop and now the psychiatric clinic, where even irreducibly moral crises are medicated away. It’s driven less by the left than by the quarterly bottom line and by the marketing division. Against this, Podhoretz’s protests aren’t even feeble; they’re non-existent. “The economic system [liberals] were denouncing was itself a form of freedom,” he writes. Calvin Klein is with him there.
There’s yet another cautionary tale in the book, this one for the chattering classes: While there are times for every new group and talent to make its noisy claim to American acceptance, a full love of a country or culture needn’t be “glorified with a full throat.” The Jews’ time to do that came (and went) in the first half of the last century with Mary Antin, Israel Zangwill, Emma Lazarus and Alfred Kazin, or, more uproariously, with Bellow and Norman Mailer. By now, more Jewish writers ought to have joined Lincoln in evoking mystic chords of a larger national memory and aspiration. The best such writing (Philip Roth’s “American Pastoral”, for example) is a dance of fewer words and more telling silences. Patriotic bombast and ethnocentrism cheapen civic love.
The literary historian Daniel Aaron describes three stages in the maturing of a fully American writer in “The Hyphenated Writer,” an essay in his collection “American Notes.” There is the outsider who demands acceptance of his or her group; the more confident interpreter who builds bridges between that group and others, in an idiom all can share; and the seasoned writer who makes a fully American, if ethnically inflected, contribution to some vision of the whole. Aaron is being diagnostic, not prescriptive, but it’s hard not to think of Podhoretz as stuck somewhere between the second and third stage, which “My Love of America” shouts he’s attained but which every passage, straining for vindication or ingratiation, shows he hasn’t.
Podhoretz knows this. Lamenting years ago, in “Making It,” that his “family” of Jewish intellectuals “did not feel that they belonged to America or that America belonged to them,” he fretted that their prose “had verve, vitality, wit . . . but rarely did it exhibit a complete sureness of touch; it tended instead to be overly assertive or overly lyrical or overly refined or overly clever’–unlike the writing of older-stock Americans such as Van Wyck Brooks and Edmund Wilson, whose “sense of rootedness gave a certain music to their work.” In the 1966 Commentary Reader, Philip Rahv warned that “any attempt to enlist literature in ‘the cause of America’ is bound to impose an intolerable strain on the imaginative faculty. Far better, Rahv argued, was quieter writing like the lovely closing paragraph of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby,” which, by allusion and understatement, traces the gossamer threads of bafflement, nostalgia and keening in Nick Carraway’s dreams of America.
What a long way from demanding that America be “glorified with a full throat and a whole heart.” If Podhoretz truly loves America, where’s his contribution to a common narrative? Why these endless, pointless recyclings of old miscommunications and affronts? Why can’t he make it to Aaron’s third stage?
The answer is clearest in his closing chapter, “Dayyenu American Style,” whose Hebrew word–“Enough for Us”–is the refrain of a Passover song affirming that any one of God’s many gifts to the Jews leaving Egypt would have been more than enough. In that spirit, Podhoretz means to count his blessings, but he begins by complaining that gratitude to America has been replaced by whining, citing “the ugly hostility” that greeted William F. Buckley Jr.’s 1983 memoir, “Overdrive,” in which the author surveys his opulence and feels “obliged to be grateful.” This prompts a digression of a couple of pages on Trilling’s misapprehension that conservatism like Buckley’s was a collection of “irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.” Next, Podhoretz returns to his theme of ingratitude: He touches on old-stock aristocrats’ alienation from a society that has sidelined them; the affinity between Southern agrarian conservatives’ resentments and what Podhoretz regards as Gore Vidal’s anti-Semitism; the difference between Richard John Neuhaus’ call for conservative non-compliance with immoral Supreme Court decisions and Podhoretz’s own strident anti-Court rhetoric (concerning racial preferences).
A reader wonders where all this is leading. So, apparently, does Podhoretz. Reviewing these contretemps, he sighs, “I was not about to make any predictions as to what lay in store for this country with which I was madly in love. Having entered even by today’s standards of longevity into old age, I found it, as the elderly always have, more comfortable (and less threatening!) to look back than to look ahead.” At last, he says what he’s grateful for–for the distinctively American philanthropic ethos that gave him scholarships, and, more profoundly, for “a system in which, for the first time in history, individuals were to be treated as individuals rather than on the basis of who their fathers were. . . .”
“I know, I know,” he adds defensively, “This principle was trampled upon by slavery…. There follows a new round of regrets about race and Vietnam, more pieties, and, “looking back as a septuagenarian on my life as an American, I am again reminded of something Jewish….” Funny thing; so am I. Over the centuries, the old refrain “dayyenu” has taken on an impish inflection–“Enough, already!”–as merry seder-goers tire of the liturgy and demand to eat. But Podhoretz can’t stop his recitation. He tells us that if America had given him only the English language, then dayyenu–that would have been enough.
Had it sent him to great universities in New York and England, dayyenu–surely that would have been enough. And on and on: his chance to mingle “with some of the most interesting people of my time”; to run a magazine with complete freedom for 35 years “even when I was spending ten of them ungratefully attacking . . . America itself”; his country home, where he is “writing these very words . . . behind an unpainted wooden door that . . . snaps shut with the very same satisfying click that so mysteriously broke the dam of tears in the nineteen-year-old boy I was more than fifty years ago.”
Dayyenu, Norman. Enough, already. It’s more than 30 years since you first wrote about those tears. One of your nemeses and a mentor of mine, the late Irving Howe, didn’t room at Cambridge or sup at its high tables, but when his garment-worker father’s union won a strike, there was meat on the family table in the Bronx more than once a week for the first time in years. Right though you are about some things Howe got wrong, why not thank an America where, even today, Los Angeles janitors have rights enough to stake their own modest claim on opportunity and where your fellow septuagenarians who couldn’t win Fulbrights had the GI Bill? One needn’t be a socialist to do that; a good civic Madisonian could. Open your door a little to an America beyond both ideology and egoism, and stop giving patriotism such a small, sad name.
Introductory note:In 1982, news of serious flaws in the preparation of a pending indictment of New York Congressman (now Senator) Charles Schumer for an alleged conflict of interest fell into my lap, wholly through a conflict of interest of my own. That made the story hard for me to report. I wound up having to do it not as a journalist but as a lonely citizen, writing unpaid guest columns for a small Brooklyn weekly, The Prospect Press.
No other journalist seemed engaged or motivated enough to report the story at all, partly because it involved malfeasance by other journalists: The reason I couldn‘t tell the story in the Village Voice — where I’d been freelancing regularly — was that Voice writers were trying to gin up an indictment of Schumer, whom they disliked intensely for not being “progressive” enough. It was they who’d urged his prosecution upon an ambitious and receptive young U.S. Attorney for Brooklyn, Edward Korman, who’d recently brought down Congressman Fred Richmond, as described in one of the Voice essays linked in “A Sleeper Sampler” and elsewhere on this site.
My Voice colleagues and the prosecutor were pursuing the case for moralistic and personal reasons with scant legal justification. I knew this only for a reason that undermined my own credibility, though: My girlfriend was working in Schumer‘s office and was giving me the other side of the story.
Not surprisingly, the only people inclined to believe my account were those who had reasons of their own to distrust the Voice muckrakers and/or the U.S. Attorney. To grasp the injustice of the case, one had to shed the righteousness of “white hat” muckrakers. You had to know that the criminal justice system itself is highly susceptible to abuse if its skeleton of laws lacks a “cartilage” of extra-legal trust and integrity among prosecutors.
My columns in The Prospect Press, the small neighborhood weekly, were handed around and played a role in alerting people in the Justice Department and the courts to the flaws in the indictment. It was dropped before being formally brought, but only after a lot of publicity and controversy.
Ironically, the probe had been instigated not only by partisan Republicans but also by leftist muckrakers, and it was closed down by senior Reagan Justice Department officials after Schumer’s attorney, Arthur Liman (later the Democratic counsel to the congressional Iran-Contra commission) went to Washington and confronted them with the bizarre truth about the inquiry.
Twenty five years later, in 2007, I had a reason to tell the whole story of the Schumer case again as Schumer, by then on the Senate Judiciary Committee, was investigating the Bush Administration‘s efforts to politicize U.S. Attorneys‘ prosecutions of Democrats. Again, the “cartilage” of trust and professionalism had worn thin, but by 2007 I must have been the only reporter to recall that Schumer had been the victim of a politicized, prosecutorial investigation.Schumer has many faults, and he can certainly be criticized robustly by people to his left as well as his right. But trying to “nail” him — as the Voice reporters crowed to one another that they were doing — through selective prosecution for a minor indiscretion that many of their’ own heroes were also committing, was a miscarriage of journalism.
When Talking Points Memo published this piece in 2007, the site promoted it with a note that appears below the piece itself here. Later on, though, TPM’s founder and editor Joshua Micah Marshall “deep-sixed” this essay, along with dozens of other pieces by several TPM authors, without ever citing a single error or ethical lapse. TPM thereby violated a cardinal rule of journalism: No Orwellian Memory Holes. Fortunately, I had saved the piece in my files, and I hereby rescue it from oblivion. Perhaps TPM will rescue it and other such pieces someday — in the interest of good journalism, free of self-righteous muckraking and of suppression.
AS PUBLISHED IN 2007: The Truth About the Schumer Case (and about the dangers of self-righteous muckraking)
It would be all-too easy to cast New York senior Senator Charles Schumer’s grilling of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales today as the climax of a long-nursed, partisan grudge. Twenty-three years ago, during Ronald Reagan’s first term, the Republican U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York came within a millimeter of destroying Schumer with highly dubious criminal charges. None of the other indictment dodgers in Congress can be more sensitive to potential abuses of prosecutorial discretion and the Justice Department’s power to countenance or curb such abuses than Chuck Schumer, Gonzales’ chief inquisitor.
Now that I have your attention, let me complicate this a little. The masterminds of the long, unrelenting drive to indict Schumer (for deploying his New York State Assembly staffers in his first congressional campaign while paying them state salaries) were left-liberal Democrats and activist muckrakers hell-bent on nailing Schumer for personal, social, and ideological reasons. They tipped off and then collaborated closely with the zealous young U.S. Attorney Edward Korman (now a federal judge), whom they’d befriended and worked with for years. Irony of ironies, it was the Reagan Justice Department that called off this witch hunt at the last minute.
Why did Attorney General William French Smith exercise such restraint? Out of ethical principle? Jurisdictional caution? Some obscure political calculation? The Justice Department claimed only that Schumer’s campaign practices were a state, not federal, concern, and Smith’s deputy at the time, Rudolph Giuliani, actually apologized to Schumer for the two-year ordeal that preceded this decision. Unless you believe that Alberto Gonzales and Karl Rove and their favorites in the press would be at least that judicious now in a case against a liberal Democrat, you can understand why Schumer has been preparing for today’s hearing, which may make clear how frighteningly, if subtly, federal law enforcement has changed from what it was even under Reagan.
Schumer calls himself an “angry centrist” at least partly because the Schumer case, as it was known, ended not thanks to partisan or ideological heroes, Republican or Democrat, right or left, but thanks to a fragile, silent web of constitutional tradition and comity. More than any actual statues, that tradition of engrained ethical conduct and judgment tempers partisan passions and personal vendettas — if prosecutors and journalists have the integrity to defer to, rather than manipulate, judicial proprieties. We are talking about the political culture or cartilage of a republic here, not just about its legal skeleton.
Sad but true, some who tried to drive the Schumer case beyond all that were Village Voice muckrakers, the late Jack Newfield and Wayne Barrett, with their younger and not-yet-wiser colleague Joe Conason running interference for them. Aside from some reliable civic-republican observers – Tom Goldstein, in the Columbia Journalism Review; Tony Schwartz, in New York magazine – most journalists were too preoccupied, timid, cynical, or lazy to challenge what amounted to a public, daylight mugging of New York’s most promising young Democrat at the dawn of the Reagan ascendancy.
To summarize the relevant case law quickly: Since legislative staff communicate with constituents all the time and work irregular hours, there were no rules or laws then — and few now — against assigning such staffers to campaigns, which, after all, do involve communicating with constituents. As a Sept. 8, 1983 New York Law Journal essay put it, “Not one of the court papers filed in the [Schumer] case cite any specific federal or state law to prohibit such conduct.” The only thing illegal is putting someone on payroll who never shows up. Voice reporters also knew well that their own heroes in public office did what Schumer did, if not as egregiously when they had larger budgets and staffs than do young Assembly members.
Yet in an incredible, Kafkaesque syncopation of unannounced prosecutorial moves and eerily well-timed or prescient Voice stories, Korman would drag Schumer for more than two years through the positing and abandonment of eight different theories of guilt. This is worth looking at a little more closely to understand what’s at stake for Schumer, and all of us, in the current hearings on how Justice Department handles U.S. Attorneys.
I should say first that I played a part in derailing the Schumer indictment because I happened to be in the right places at the right times (or was it the wrong ones?!): As a regular Voice freelancer, I worked closely with Newfield & Co. on other stories and absorbed their antipathy toward Schumer. But I also grasped that something was wrong with their antipathy as I came home nightly from the Voice to my girlfriend, who was Schumer’s congressional-district chief of staff.
The dissonance was even more excruciating than it may sound, because I was a dedicated writer for the Voice’s beloved progressive community. Even after Schumer had sat in my own living room in 1983, begging me and my partner to help him break the noose which Voice reporters and prosecutors were tightening around his neck, I faced a long, hard slog toward acknowledging that he was in the right. Doing him justice, as I did by helping to break the case, involved breaking my ideological heart and some of my role models, who exacted predictable and tawdry retribution.
Toward Schumer himself I never bore much love. The brash, young Harvard Law School hot shot had won his first congressional race on the November day in 1980 when Jimmy Carter lost to Reagan and when the then-sainted Elizabeth Holtzman — Schumer’s own congressional predecessor — lost her bid for a Senate seat to Republican hit man Alfonse D’Amato, of Whitewater investigation fame. (Schumer would defeat D’Amato years later by 14 points).
Schumer thought then, as he does now, that the self-styled saints of the left (Newfield was known as “the Conscience of New York”) had lost in 1980 precisely because they’d become too saintly. He derided Holtzman – who’d endorsed him only with condescension to succeed her in the House — for having neglected nuts-and-bolts lawmaking and constituent services in her quest to be a grand scourge of Richard Nixon.
That wasn’t quite fair: Holtzman’s upwardly mobile, heavily Jewish Brooklyn district hadn’t sent its iconic daughter to Congress to fix potholes; it was Al D’Amato who’d be known as “Senator Pothole.” Soon enough, though, the defeated, embittered Holtzman would amply confirm Schumer’s biting assessment, put better by Montaigne, that there is often “a remarkable correspondence between super-celestial opinions and subterranean morals” in pretenders to political sainthood. That is the moral of this story.
Sure, liberal saints had more than a few true grievances, and real enemies besides Nixon. Both muckraker Newfield and prosecutor Korman had grown up in tough, racially-changing Brooklyn neighborhoods, but instead of blaming blacks for the decay, they’d blamed political hacks and corrujpt contractors, cheering on the interracial Dodgers and progressive unions that carried the best of New York’s proletarian civic energy. Newfield’s hero was Robert Kennedy; Korman and his predecessor David Trager became Republicans, but in the tradition of the Party of Lincoln and the outgoing liberal GOP Senator Jacob Javits, against the heavily corrupt, often racist Brooklyn Democratic machine.
As Reagan and D’Amato rode to victory in 1980, these working-class-hero writers and prosecutors, groping for traction in the conservative tide, convinced themselves that whiz-kid Schumer had survived the surge only because he’d been an ambulance-chasing publicity hound who’d truckled to the corrupt Democratic bosses. Worse, he’d been a sore winner, rubbing salt in defeated progressives’ wounds. It rankled all the more that he’d gone to Harvard College before Harvard Law; interned at the powerful Paul, Weiss, Rifkind law firm; and won election to the state Assembly at age 23 and Congress at age 29, thereby becoming an employer before he’d ever really been a worker.
By his own later, rueful admission, Schumer had had to do a lot of his growing up while in public office, driving some disgruntled staffers to Newfield and Barrett, who began assailing him in Voice articles pretty early on. The young know-it-all had been too busy climbing the greasy pole to find out who Roy Cohn was, attending a party for that aging McCarthyite thug unwittingly at the behest of a woman he was dating. Suffice it to say that Schumer and the Voice were oil and water almost from the start.
A truce of sorts with the Voice was arranged during Schumer’s 1980 congressional race against a far worse opponent in the decisive Democratic primary. For six months the paper left him alone, partly because he’d confronted Newfield about its skewed reporting and threatened to expose Newfield’s own behind-the-scenes dealings on behalf of his opponent. The paper sat on a Schumer staffer’s complaint that his Assembly Oversight and Investigations Committee staff had worked for months only on his congressional campaign.
At an election-night party that turned into a bitter wake for Democrats nationwide, a triumphal and oblivious Schumer accused Newfield of having helped the opponent he’d defeated in the primary: “Well, Jack, your anti-civil liberties, pro-death-penalty candidate lost!” Newfield had to be physically restrained. “That fuck. I’ll get him for this,” he swore then and, in similar words, later, as an affidavit by the public-relations mogul John Scanlon would confirm. “Schumer is a miserable human being. He belongs in hand-cuffs,” Newfield told me of Schumer.
And so the worm of righteous indignation began to turn, the story presaging what we’ve heard more recently about journalists like Robert Novak or the minions at Fox News; about political operatives like Karl Rove; and about ideological or partisan crusaders in the Justice Department. In December, 1980, just a few weeks after the election-night confrontation, the Voice ran a story by Wayne Barrett, “Chuck Schumer’s $taff $candal,” a purported expose of campaign practices the paper had seen fit to bury throughout the campaign itself.
Even more tellingly, the article and subsequent stories hinted at possible federal prosecution strategies: Accusing Schumer’s committee — which actually had a rather impressive record — of conducting headline-hunting investigations without even issuing subpoenas, Barrett added, “Now, the only subpoena some staff members are talking about is the subpoena they would require before they would willingly spell out the details of how Schumer used the committee.”
That article ran in tandem with Korman’s opening a preliminary investigation, and soon a grand jury was indeed summoning Schumer campaign workers, from 14-year-old volunteers on up. Barrett himself jumped out from behind a bush in front of the home of a staffer who’d not returned his calls, admonishing her, “Talk to me, or you’ll have to talk to a grand jury.” How did he know?
“Chuck Schumer is heading for cover,” Barrett announced only three months after Schumer’s election-night confrontation with Newfield, in an article headlined “Schuck Chuck Panics”: “Schumer recently hired counsel… and is reportedly digging in to defend himself against the charge that he converted virtually the entire staff of his investigatory committee into an extension of his campaign.”
In fact, Newfield and Barrett had been privy to the Schumer investigation as it was unfolding: Newfield had had little trouble making Schumer seem criminal to Korman — whom I first met at a party in Newfield’s home in April, 1982, as he was bringing down a far more wealthy, sexually wild congressman, Fred Richmond.
The muckrakers’ and prosecutors’ relationships made me think of “good old boys” in a rural county seat where the local editor whiles away summer afternoons with the district attorney at a watering hole near the courthouse. Newfield and Thomas Puccio, chief of the Eastern District’s ABSCAM Strike Force, shared a summer home at which they prepared and carried nearly to contract a proposal for a book on the scandal before the defendants even knew they’d been taped accepting bribes.
Barrett was similarly close to Korman’s predecessor, David Trager, beginning 1976 when Trager successfully prosecuted Voice charges against another politician. Another head of an Eastern District strike force sometimes welcomed Newfield (once with me), into his office on the third floor of the former Brooklyn federal building at 25 Cadman Plaza. Illegally he would play Newfield tapes made by wired informants in ongoing investigations; Newfield would identify and evaluate those heard or named on the tapes, telling prosecutors how they were connected and whether this one or that might be turned state’s evidence.
The prosecutors had faith that Newfield and Barrett would craft Voice stories carefully enough to help them only by indirection, stopping just short of violating a standard well enunciated by former Carter Justice Department official Abbe David Lowell, writing about the Schumer case in the New York Law Journal in 1983: “No First Amendment interest is served by illegal leaks of grand jury evidence, premature announcement of a criminal investigation, or by an improper alliance between a journalist and a prosecutor.”
Since the target of a grand-jury investigation is informed and consulted only at prosecutors’ discretion, it was a year before Schumer’s lawyer, Arthur Liman — for whom he’d interned at Paul, Weiss, and who would later be chief counsel to the congressional Iran-Contra investigation commission – was able to get Korman to look at case law precedents that destroyed most of his working assumptions. Korman kept recalling witnesses to show that Schumer’s Assembly committee had done no legislative work for certain months in 1980; that the legislative work the committee had in fact done wasn’t as good as work it had done in 1979; that even if staff weren’t required to do actual legislative rather than constituent-service work, they’d done only campaign work; and so on.
None of this ran afoul of any statute, but Schumer’s attorneys weren’t told the exact counts of the indictment that went to the Department of Justice for approval under Korman’s successor, Raymond Dearie (who endorsed it but played no role in the investigation). Liman was summoned twice to Washington to show why no indictment should be brought. “This is a case in search of a rationale,” Liman charged in his closing brief. “Over the last year, the Government has articulated no fewer than eight theories of why Schumer’s conduct allegedly violated the law. We have rebutted each theory in turn. Yet no sooner does the United States Attorney admit that one theory must be discarded than another rises to replace it…”
At best (and probably), the Eastern District’s prodigious efforts to indict Schumer reflect poor judgment and bad faith. Korman and his associates just couldn’t reconcile themselves to the moral limits of their considerable legal powers. Whether they pressed on anyway out of an obsession with winning, or a sense of obligation to collaborators like Newfield, or the arrogant moralism that so often attends and enshrouds power, they misdirected far more taxpayer dollars and good faith to a fruitless quest than Schumer did to his campaigns.
Finally, on January 17, 1983, nearly two years after Barrett’s “Chuck Schumer $taff $candal” story, Justice announced it had “determined that the matter is not appropriate for federal prosecution and closed the investigation.” Newfield and Barrett learned of the decision four days before it was announced. “They went ape-shit,” recalls a Voice staffer, and repeatedly they called and visited the office of by-then-District Attorney Holtzman, threatening to expose her many blunders as D.A. if she didn’t find a way to carry on a state-level investigation.
For a full year, she tried, indeed, to carry on an investigation, in a comedy of errors so awful I wish I had time and space to describe it. The American Lawyer called her Schumer probe “the most absurd case on [Holtzman’s] docket,” charging that she was “afraid to drop the case for fear of offending her supporters at The Village Voice, who first printed the ‘charges’ against Schumer.” Holtzman became tangled so embarrassingly in her own conflicts of interest, inconsistencies, and prosecutorial incompetence that, finally, lamely, she tried handing the material to the Federal Elections Commission, which had no jurisdiction whatever.
In all this time Schumer had been a far better congressman than he’d been an assemblyman, taking his legislative responsibilities seriously and serving his constituents well. Unopposed in his 1982 primary, he won the general election with close to 80 percent of the vote. After Holtzman abandoned the case and he was truly in the clear, he treated several of us, including Liman and Assembly Speaker Stanley Fink, to dinner at Peter Luger’s Steak House, and thanking us, he wept.
The righteous rage that drove Newfield, Barrett, Conason, Korman, and Holtzman is just what the justice system’s non-statutory ethics and ethos are meant to restrain. By turning their own antipathies and obsessions into a criminal prosecution, his pursuers themselves got caught, not criminally but ethically, crossing lines that divide advocacy journalism from revenge, and prosecution from political persecution. These are lines which Schumer knows that Gonzales and Rove have crossed.
The Schumer case shows us that such abuses of power aren’t peculiar to the right. Both right and left have credible claims on certain truths – the left to the need for social provision, without which none of the values which honorable conservatives cherish could flourish; the right that there are irreducibly personal responsibilities, without whose vigilant exercise even well-intentioned social engineering can turn individuals into clients, cogs or worse. But both left and right tend to cling to their claims so tightly they soon become half-truths that curdle into lies, leaving each side right only about how the other is wrong. Both get stuck in their imagined upswings against power and disappoint in the end.
That’s why we need the staying power of sheer professionalism and the civic-republican energy of “angry centrists” like Schumer, who is determined now to make sure that what happened to him at the hands of fellow liberals won’t happen in any U.S. Attorney’s office under Alberto Gonzales. So far, the only places we can feel sure it hasn’t happened were the offices of those U.S. Attorneys whom Gonzales has recently removed.
Addendum, posted April 20, 2007 – 9:21am Jim Sleeper said:
A word, if I may, to readers who think that the Schumer case must have been more substantial than I report — that he must have been doing something terribly wrong if all this prosecuting and muckraking was going on around him.
The story isn’t about my picking up some impressions from lunching with the muckrakers or from being with someone who worked for their target. It’s more about what provoked me and others, in the American Lawyer, The New York Law Journal, the Columbia Journalism Review, and New York magazine, to publish the analyses that are mentioned or quoted in my account.
And it’s about the facts, the details, which I couldn’t have laid out fully in this essay. That’s a limitation inherent in all journalism, even the longest investigative piece: At some point, you have to decide whether to trust that the writer has done what lawyers call “due diligence” and has marshalled the facts responsibly.
Politics is not a spectator sport. Its lessons are hard lessons, often very painful. What matters is to absorb and factor them into one’s thinking and political being, all while pressing on with a more constructive politics. From social movement leaders (such as Martin Luther King, Jr.) to elected politicians (Barack Obama? Al Gore?), the best have “done time” in the backrooms and even back alleys of politics and grown from the experience and learned how to move forward.
That’s how I see Schumer. In contrast, Gonzales and Rove are two moral casualties of politics; they’ve grown only in the sense that their hearts have been cankered in its back rooms and back alleys, leaving one a pathetic toady and front man and the other a malevolent genius whose perversity is now there for all to see. Like these betrayers of the American republic, Schumer’s pursuers hadn’t grown, except perversely. Fortunately, their power hadn’t grown to the proportions of Gonzales and Rove.
I say all this prompted by a couple of comments from readers that sound a bit… well, hurt. I understand. I wrote that my own experience with the Schumer case “broke my ideological heart” and deprived me of some role models. That’s how it is. One grows from it and presses on. Get used to it, and don’t give up.
Jim, don’t worry about the details, but do me a favor and fill me in on a key point. I said it’s plausible that having staff work on your campaign is a bad thing, and it’s similar to any number of more recent scandals. So what’s the exculpatory bottom line here? Did they simply quit first?
I found that Voice team’s reporting not to be too marred by outright error and bias, just very limited and too keen on taking credit beyond its limits. Say, they milked nailing Harding for so long it became filler.
There’s really no exculpatory bottom line in a case like the Schumer case, because, in New York as well as many other states, there were (and in most cases still are) no statutes on the basis of which the case should have been brought in the first place.
The only legal standard in most places is that you can’t hire complete “no shows,” put people on payroll who do no work for you. Other than that, the courts (and, self-servingly, the legislatures!) have decided not to micro-manage how legislators use their staffers, unless perhaps to do their personal housework, outside commercial ventures, etc.
That’s what made the Schumer case absurd. Few would say that he was engaged in “good government,” but he was doing what many good and effective politicians in New York, including Voice heroes in office, did all the time, without moral censure, much less charges. U.S. Attorney Korman kept asking Schumer’s lawyers, “But is what he did right?” They kept trying to tell him that it wasn’t for a prosecutor to frame questions of “rightness” but only of legality. There was simply no statute or regulation. I could go into more detail — how the NY State Legislature told every newcomer during orientation, including Schumer, that the standard was, “no No-shows,” and that he adhered to it. If he hadn’t, Korman and his Voice helpers would have found that out!
Unlike the Justice Department and its U.S. Attorneys, the rest of us are perfectly free to pose questions of rightness and to persuade voters not to tolerate practices we don’t like. The Voice writers, too, were perfectly justified in doing that. The point where they and their prosecutor pals crossed the line was in cranking up the coercive apparatus of law enforcement, with all its intimidating, moralist connotations, to smear and destroy a man for reasons that far outstripped any possible charges.
As a writer in the New York Law Journal put it, the case raised valid questions about whether the prosecutor’s intent was really to achieve a conviction, or whether he was just trying to wear Schumer down and discredit him by carrying on an endless investigation replete with regular press leaks (to The Village Voice).
That’s something Karl Rove has been only too happy to teach: The more you spread smears and lies about someone, the more people will believe that the target must have done something seriously wrong. That’s why our own skepticism should cut both ways — even against prosecutors and muckrakers, and especially when people like the Voice writers are portraying the prosecutors with such stagey reverence, as keepers of the civic flame. It’s hard for some people to imagine just how cynically they did that.
THIS INTRODUCTORY NOTE WAS POSTED BY TPM WHEN THEY CARRIED THIS PIECE IN ‘TPM CAFE’:
JOSHUA MICAH MARSHALL wrote:
Senator Schumer is grilling Alberto Gonzales. Since the beginning, he’s been out in front in asking questions and demanding answers of the DoJ. Many conservatives have attributed this to his obviously significant partisan zeal.
But Jim SleepertracesSchumer’s sensitivity to the politicization of the DoJ back to the early 80s when he himself was the target of a dubious investigation by a Republican U.S. Attorney.
Sleeper’s is a history of compromising relationships and vindictive power struggles amidst a messy urban politics. It includes Schumer, a young deputy U.S. Attorney named Rudolph Giuliani, a powerful muckraking journalist named Jack Newfield, a young reporter named Joe Conason, and Sleeper himself.
As control of the Senate hung on the Virginia tally for a day after the election, no political analyst was going to belabor a race that was done and had nothing to do with Senate control, anyway — Sen. Joe Lieberman’s victory over Iraq war opponent Ned Lamont in Connecticut. Right?
Not right, if you’ve been following the continuing fulminations about Lamont by pundits such as David Brooks. Like a weather vane snapping back and forth in a storm, the wrenching, ongoing embarrassment of Brooks’ attempted public political makeover on the New York Times’ op ed page has produced wildly varied columns throughout the run-up to the election.
One column touted Barack Obama’s deliberative mind and Periclean prospects. Another defended Rick Santorum’s war on poverty and his own potential as a philosopher king: Santorum’s “discussion of the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre… is as sophisticated as anything in Barack Obama’s recent book.”
Another Brooks column heralded the end of ideology and piously urged a new civility in public discourse, while yet another demonstrated Brooks’ own mastery of such discourse by characterizing Lamont’s “vicious,” “Sunni-Shiite style of politics,” whose “flamers… tell themselves their enemies are so vicious they have to be vicious, too.” And in Thursday’s election post-mortem, Brooks announced that Lieberman had “defeated the scion of the Daily Kos net roots, Ned Lamont.”
All this variety isn’t intelligent complexity, much less comity; it’s sophistry, driven by an odd desperation. Even the word “scion” is malicious: Lamont, the scion only of a formidable American civic-republican family tradition, was little-acquainted with bloggers and other activists who backed him.
What we have here is an obsession with more than Lamont. The Ghost of Left-Liberalism Past is what’s spooking aging neoconservative and liberal war-hawk pundits. They keep summoning it to displace a gnawing, growing anxiety borne of hypocrisies they dare not face in themselves: They’ve done a bit too well in corporate America as we know it now to challenge its increasingly swaggering and degrading seductions, its inequalities, and its outright scams. Yet they’re too well-intentioned to be comfortable defending it, either — except when they can find enemies and evils that are far worse, at home and abroad.
There are indeed such enemies, and how liberating it feels to find them! Fighting “the good fight” against Islamic fascism and its supposed domestic enablers, such as Michael Moore and Ned Lamont, excuses the critics from thinking too much about threats to the American republic and social justice coming from much closer to home.
Some of their targets do deserve criticism, indeed condemnation. Neo-cons and liberal hawks aren’t wrong to charge that the left’s economic determinism, false populism, and worse have sometimes undercut serious civic-republican challenges to the tawdry consumer marketing ethos in which we live and move and have our beings. Equally misguided (as I argued a decade ago in Liberal Racism) has been the inflated racial and sexual identity politics that collapsed struggles for justice into narrow group demands, which liberals tried to accommodate without really touching the deeper inequalities that now divide blacks from blacks and women from women, as well as blacks from whites, and women from men.
Yet however maladroit and politically self-destructive some left-liberal reactions to racism and inequality have been, they’ve been reactive, not causal. Focusing on them lets neo-cons and liberal-hawks off the hook for misconstruing the deeper causes of our national discontent and for missing the wellsprings of a stronger civic-republican center. Obsessing about what the late Michael Kelly called the left-liberal “sandalistas” is fundamentally a dodge. It only reinforces a taboo on criticizing new configurations of capital, employment and consumption that are eviscerating social trust. Tuesday’s vote was in part a protest against that evisceration, for which Republicans, their apologists and some Democratic fellow-travelers like Joe Lieberman bear a lot of responsibility and have no answers. To shout that most liberals have none, either, isn’t itself an answer.
Blaming liberals, liberals, liberals and the left remains these pundits’ first and last resort, though, and Lamont-bashing is only the most egregious recent instance of it. Three years ago, New Republic editor Peter Beinart led a pack of Iraq War supporters in bellowing that Michael Moore was more dangerous to the national anti-terrorist strategy than Donald Rumsfeld. More recently, some of the same savants cried that Harvard’s politically correct, self-protective academic faculty had martyred former Harvard President Lawrence Summers for trying to shake things up.
These were all anthropologically perfect reenactments of Salem witch-hunts of the 1690s, which (I am old enough to remember) enlisted the most prominent opinion-makers of that time in finding false targets for a community’s unexamined fears. Just as the “witches” then weren’t the real dangers to the Puritan settlement, the liberal academics at Harvard now aren’t the real threats to the academy; it wasn’t they who ousted Summers for turning liberal education into a game of money, marketing, and public perception. The New Republic’s Martin Peretz had a public meltdown over the alleged left-liberal subversion of Summers, and the Wall Street Journal’s fact-challenged editorial page likened Harvard’s faculty to the “People’s Congress at Pyongyang,” but hard reportage by Institutional Investor and Economicprincipals.com on Summers’ persistent flunking of Management 102 and Ethics 102 persuaded the high-capitalist Harvard Corporation to show him the door.
Similarly, the War on Terror has never been threatened by an anti-war movement, whether led by Michael Moore, Cindy Sheehan or Ned Lamont, as much as it has been undermined by that war’s own architects and apologists. “The Good Fight” against terror isn’t selling because Beinart and others have distorted that undertaking badly. Lamont felt revolted enough by such nonsense and Lieberman’s truly awful record of supporting it to ignite the spark that changed the national conversation.
The war in Iraq certainly is different from the one in Vietnam, but not in the ways its apologists expected. Before its first shot was fired in 2003, they were assailing “deja-vu” dissenters who predicted reruns of Vietnam’s trumped-up pretexts, massive overkill, and bottomless quagmires. The Iraq war advocates squelched or deflected such dissent so effectively that they have made the war different in ways they didn’t intend. This time, they’ll have no one to blame but themselves when the Americans and half the Malaki government are helicoptered out of the Green Zone with the desert equivalent of Vietnam boat people clinging to their heels. This time, no antiwar movement will have “forced us to fight with one hand tied behind our backs,” as Vietnam war apologists charged. This time, no Jane Fonda will have gone to Saddam’s Baghdad to lend aid and comfort and or demoralize our troops in the field. This war’s masterminds and their pundit-cheerleaders have done all that themselves. Have they ever.
No wonder they have made Lamont the ghost of George McGovern, whom they saw as a dupe or front man for Very Bad People back in 1972. That ghost was summoned the day after Lamont’s Democratic primary victory by Slate’s Jacob Weisberg, son of two Chicago Democratic Party loyalists who’d backed McGovern. Many of McGovern’s supporters imposed identity politics on the party so fully that the columnist Mike Royko likened its new color-and-gender-coded delegate-selection rules, which nearly expelled white-ethnic men, to the regimen of a person who begins a diet by shooting himself in the stomach.
Royko had a point, and here I’ve always agreed with critics of left-liberal folly. Yet I couldn’t join Brooks, Weisberg, and others on Tuesday night in applauding the tableau of a victorious Joe surrounded by beefy, placard-bearing “Firefighters for Lieberman” (“We don’t forget our friends,” one said, recalling that Lieberman had increased their funding in good old party-machine fashion.) Even the pre-McGovern northern Democratic Party which the Lieberman tableau recalled so romantically had betrayed the country in 1968 by defending a hideous war conceived and run by “tough liberal” Democrats. Like Peter Beinart now, those “tough” liberals had been eager to prove that they could fight a grave threat abroad — world Communism, whose Vietnam victory’s subsequent absorption into world Capitalism rather makes you wonder why we sacrificed 50,000 American lives fighting Ho Chi Minh in the first place.
Since the War on Terror is indeed different from the one in Vietnam, Lamont supporters have protested it and its Iraq miscarriage very differently from the way anti-war movement of the 1960s and ‘70s protested. But that hasn’t stopped Weisberg from invoking McGovern’s ghost or Brooks from claiming that Lamont supporters “rationalize their behavior by insisting that circumstances have forced them to shelve their integrity for the good of the country.”
When someone writes this way without realizing how accurately he is describing himself, he certainly isn’t going to inform his readers that Lamont lost mainly because most Republicans voted for Lieberman — who estimates that 75 percent of his voters were either unaffiliated or Republican — and that, even so, Lamont carried Connecticut’s largest, poorest and least-white cities against Lieberman overwhelmingly: Hartford by more than two to one, Bridgeport by nearly two to one, New Haven by three to two. Is that a Net roots triumph? Hardly. Does Brooks’ “comic sociology” hold the answer? Silence.
Gazing intently instead into the rear-view mirrors of their historical imaginations, Brooks et al saw nothing in Lamont’s insurgency but Vietnam-era or Sunni lunacy. That helped them not to notice that they’ve bloodied themselves up to their elbows in a lunacy of their own, a web of assumptions, rationalizations, lies, and alarums that’s unraveling like their commentary. That’s why Brooks — who urged us last spring to give up “parlor purity” and meet “savagery with savagery” in Iraq, where insurgents “create an environment in which it is difficult to survive if you are decent” — could see nothing in Lamont’s insurgency but nihilists who “tell themselves their enemies are so vicious they have to be vicious, too.”
But who set up this hall of mirrors in the first place? Who, trapped in their own illogic and then their belated discovery that the world is a place too hard for Wilsonian idealism, wound up in the arms of a Senator who’d gone hook, line, and sinker with the Bush National Security Strategy? It’s time these scribblers stopped peddling the line that Lamont was the candidate of Moore, Al Sharpton, and Moveon.org That’s not who he is or ever was, and it’s not what 40 percent of Connecticut voters endorsed. Brooks, Beinart, and Weisberg should avoid a post-mortem account that insults Lamont and his supporters by reducing them to the demons in their own fevered imaginations.
If the idiots who supported the Vietnam War in the 1960s had realized their misstake and changed course, there would have been no take-over of the Democratic Party. McGovern was right about Vietnam.
And despite how people like Beinart cover their ears and close their eyes, McGovern was right about Iraq, too. A week after Colin Powell lied to the UN Security Council about how the US knew Iraq had WMDs, McGovern was interviewed by Judy Woodruff on CNN (http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0302/13/ip.00.html) and said:
You know, I think most people would agree that had it not been for that 9/11 attack, we wouldn’t even be here talking about Saddam Hussein. The irony of that is that he had nothing to do that with that attack. Iraq had nothing to do with it. This was Osama bin Laden’s. He was the mastermind. He planned it, and his al Qaeda network, that little band of desert radical young men that he’s assembled. So I don’t see the connect between that and this march to war in Iraq. And I disagree with the president. I don’t think Iraq is a threat to the most mighty military power in the history of the world.
Would that we had a way out of Iraq like we had in Vietnam where we could just hand the mess over to the North and leave. The American public will not go along with an invasion and regime change of Iran, resulting in occupation of Iran. Our leaders are going to wind up having to deal with the Iranians, after demonizing them.
I’m pretty sure that David Brooks is the product of two Manhattan hippie parents. I remember him talking about it at a forum of some sort once. I guess he’s still chasing those ghosts, trying his best to prove his parent’s wrong.
David Brooks is desperate. Ever since they introduced Times Select, he’s been at the bottom of the pile in reads among the columnist “elite” there, and he rarely appears on the list of columnists whose entries are e-mailed to others.
He’s been trying to have it both ways to woo readers, before the editors figure out how irrelevant his voice is.
I can’t figure how they can obsess on CT without noticing that the 51st Democrat in Senate comes from Rhode Island and if that wasn’t an anti-war vote I don’t know what was!
Plus, these neo-cons types purely do not understand the Midwest either. The war is not popular out here in cities, suburbs or rural areas. Patriotic types may put out the flag and support the troops and enlist in the National Guard but they do it to defend their own country not to advance some ideologue’s utopian agenda.
A first class piece of writing. I’ve been aware that many in the neo-con pundit class are still trying to link Lamont and George McGovern, but, of course, this is nonsense. If one really chooses to select that analogy, it is Cindy Sheehan who played the role of George McGovern to Ned Lamont’s modern day Robert F. Kennedy. There hasn’t been anyone since the Kennedys to muster fanatical loyalty the way Ned Lamont has. For someone who came of age during the Kennedy era, there were even some eerie moments when Ned Lamont sounded exactly like John F. Kennedy–from his accent to the way he delivered a sentence in a speech. It must drive Brooks crazy that the NYT endorsed Lamont. It’s clear he still hasn’t gotten over it.
There is no doubt that David Brooks has an axe to grind against the very educationed upper middle class. He regularly goes after those he believes speaks for them and who ignore those who live in what once were called the edge cities.
However it, Jim, that you have your own scores to settle. You spend at least as much effort attacking Peter Beinart as David Brooks. As best as I can tell Beinart was largely right about Michael Moore. He over state Moores importance.
At one level the group that controls American politics wants to refight the 1960s. I recommend E.J. Dionne’s book “Why Americans Hate Politics. ” Obviously the Osama Bin Ladens aren’t the Soviet Union and the United States is much more powerful now than it was in the 1960s and the world is actual agreement with the United States far more now, Iraq excepted, than ever before.
You did not address the question of Lamont successfully winning over the bloggers and other anti-war Democrats but unable to carry one of the bluest of states. Was this just inexperience or did this election not hinge on only one issue?
American Jewish Stalinists of the 1930s broke with Russian Communism in lurches, as what they called their “locomotive of history” kept on derailing. Some were jolted off the train by Stalin’s unofficially but patently anti-Semitic “purge trials” of the mid-1930s. Others, who downplayed Russian Communism’s “Jewish question” out of noble or hardened faith in its professed universalism, woke up only in 1939, when Stalin signed his infamous non-aggression pact with Hitler. Still others woke up only in 1956, when the USSR rolled over the Hungarian Revolution and Nikita Khrushchev acknowledged Stalin’s totalitarian crimes.
By then, most American Jewish Stalinist thinking was on its way to neo-conservatism, a new haven for unchanging, preternatural insecurities and the over-compensatory bombast that always accompanies them. As this mindset migrated from left-universalist socialism to right-nationalist capitalism — both ends of the spectrum “religious” and Manichaean in their different ways — it disdained most American Jews, who’ve never been Stalinists and will never be neo-cons because they’ve had the intellectual and political maturity to become civic-republican liberals in the American way.
“A neoconservative is a liberal who has been mugged by reality,” claimed neo-con godfather Irving Kristol, meaning the “reality” that most people who claim to be noble are actually duped by, or strategists of, movements dark and cruel. Kristol, believing that liberals are especially naive about this, didn’t suspect that a liberal might also be a neo-conservative who’s been mugged by a reality like Glenn Beck’s attacks on George Soros. Daily Beast columnist Michelle Goldberg has rightly called Beck’s rants “a symphony of the dog whistles of anti-Semitism.”
Yes, it is happening here, and neo-conservatives are experiencing another lurch that should jolt some more of them off the right-wing train. From Norman Podhoretz to Irving Kristol’s son William, they will have to take an unequivocal stand, not just against Glenn Beck but against Fox News: Beck has no First Amendment right to be on Fox, and Fox can exercise its First Amendment right (and moral obligation) to take him and its other bigots off the air. So far, Bill Kristol and his Murdoch-owned Weekly Standard have been silent about this. Most neo-conservatives have been silent.
The sickening, acrid feeling rising in their stomachs is just the beginning of what they’ve been asking for for 30 years. Soros today, Summers tomorrow; anything but blame casino-finance, corporate-welfare capitalism itself: “Anti-Semitism is the socialism of fools,” as August Bebel put it. Little-big-man fools like Glenn Beck will have their day, and other fools, like Kristol, will pay.
Under the elder Kristol’s tutelage, neo-conservatives made a Faustian bargain with what would become Beck’s blend of right-wing Christian fundamentalism, national-security state militarism, and casino-finance capitalism. That bargain disgusts many Burkean conservatives because it exposes their own as well as neo-cons’ inability to reconcile their ardent desire for ordered liberty with their equally ardent obeisance to every whim and riptide of the casino- and corporate-welfare capitalism that are subverting all they cherish.
This false bargain’s cheerleaders have broken with it in lurches, just as the old Stalinists did. The promise of American “Free World” hegemony has been derailed not by terrorists or Islamicists but by its own bankrupting of the American republic’s economy, military, and civic culture, in ways you’d have to wrap yourself in an awfully big flag not to notice.
For some neo-cons, the wake up came around 1992 with the collapse of the Soviet Union, which they had transformed from an object of obsessive desire into an object of obsessive hatred. Suddenly, neither object was there. This equivalent of sensory deprivation owed less to their own incessant warnings across thirty years about “the present danger” of Soviet Communism and about American “failures of nerve” to confront it than it owed to wiser Americans’ policy of steady containment. That policy drew subtly on deeper republican strengths instead of drawing down the republic’s stored moral capital, in blunder after blunder, from Vietnam to the Supreme Court’s decision early this year to open the floodgates to corporate electioneering.
It was the cultivators of a more sober containment who won the Cold War, to which neo-cons brought the same manic insecurity and bombastic over-confidence that their intellectual forebears had brought to Communism and, before that, to the national greatness of the German Kaiserreich on the eve of World War I.
For years, I’ve urged American neo-cons to read Chapter 9, “War Fever,” in Amos Elon’s The Pity of It All: A Portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch, 1743-1933.But they haven’t read it, because they’ve been too busy writing it all over again with their lives. The same propensity to clamber onto the national security state in the name of a popular majority that’s actually more ambivalent about it than these courtier-consultants who live in it and off of it; the same tawdry “revolver journalism,” as Rebecca West called it, that degrades public discourse and deliberation to stampede the masses toward war.
For some American neo-cons, the wake up came in 2006, with the embarrassment of their own desperate strutting during the Iraq War and with Republican setbacks in congressional elections. Still others, such as David Brooks and David Frum, woke up when the economic meltdown and Republican National Convention of 2008 brought to the surface chilling undercurrents of “Yoo Es Ay! Yoo Es Ay!”blood-think that were coursing through a body politic degraded by decades of supply-side economics and national-security militarism. These were the naked emperors that haberdashers such as Brooks and Frum had worked so deftly and energetically to clothe.
Because the neo-cons’ rickety bargain with fundamentalism, militarism, and casino capitalism is as self-destructive as Stalin’s “Socialism in One Country,” they’re caught, like the Communists, teetering back and forth between imperial overreach and, when it fails, the scapegoating of….
The rest of the sentence is, of course, the problem, just as it was in Stalin’s Moscow and Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany. And the rest of that sentence has been writtenin the New York Times’ description of Glenn Beck’s recent programs on Soros.
All that remains to be written is the response of people like the younger Kristol, who “discovered” and commended Sarah Palin to John McCain and recently penned yet another of his strained apologias for both her and Glenn Beck in a Weekly Standard editorial on the Beck rally in Washington.
I could name many other neo-con talking machines I’m waiting to hear from. They’ll harrumph that they’ve known all along that Beck is a bit deranged, but David Bromwich was making that clear enoughin the New York Review of Books last week, when they were still denying it.
So let them speak out. No one needed to hear what the last Stalinists were telling themselves in 1992 or what the last Jewish apologists for German national greatness were thinking in 1932. But, for Jewish neo-cons, it is no longer 2006 or 2008; it is 1939. And the rest of the Jewish community, not to mention America, is listening.
This is the best (short) set of categories making up the right wing I have seen to date. I also agree with mimi-katz above. It’s damned hard to commit yourself body and soul to an ideology and its organization and then find that it totally contradicts the very reasons you committed yourself in the first place.
The usual reaction is to totally ignore the contradictions, even to the extent of attacking those who bring them up, and recommit to greater effort to achieve the goals of the organization and ideology you have joined. It takes a really important emotional event to break the commitment.
RE: Mr. Beck said he was “probably more supportive of Israel and the Jews than George Soros is.” – NYT article MY COMMENT: Whatever, Glenn. And I’ll bet that some of your best friends are Jewish. And you have a condo on the beach in Tel Aviv. Right?
Actually, most of the leading lights of neo-conservatism have neither a Trotskyist nor a Stalinist pedigree; Irving Kristol was briefly a Trotskyist in his youth, but that’s about it.
My point wasn’t that neocons as individuals have flipped from Stalinism to McCarthyism or Palinesque patriotism but that both extremes have the same mental morphology, the same habits of mind. More than a few “red diaper babies,” children or grand-children of the old, heavily Jewish New York left, have become neo-cons, because what they picked up from their elders was not a specific doctrine but a disposition to think ideologically that is harder and deeper-wired than the points of doctrine as such.
Thus it’s possible to love the Soviet Union from afar, or hate it from afar, for reasons that are strikingly similar in terms of political psychology.
That’s the point that needs to be understood about neo-cons, and, yes, I think that Jewish historical experience trying to adapt to and overcome marginality via universalism and power has a lot to do with it. That’s why Glenn Beck’s anti-Semitic imbecile rant leaves neo-cons looking so hypocritical or helpless; its very predictability makes the neo-cons seem either naive (in having sucked up to the rising power of the right) or opportunistic and clannish (if they cross their current ideological lines to defend Soros, a fellow Jew). Neo-cons aren’t visibly enough committed to a civic-republican give-and-take to get out of this looking trustworthy.
Neocons seem to have ended up in the unfortunate position of not qualifying for the position Leo Strauss’s proclamation laid out that the superior intellectually and morally men of insight and superior wisdom must rule.
RE: “…both extremes have the same mental morphology, the same habits of mind. More than a few “red diaper babies,” children or grand-children of the old, heavily Jewish New York left, have become neo-cons, because what they picked up from their elders was not a specific doctrine but a disposition to think ideologically that is harder and deeper-wired than the points of doctrine as such.” – Sleeper MY COMMENT: This is a very intriguing working hypothesis. It makes a great deal of sense to me, but I would need to see other instances of this phenomenon having operated similarly in the past. I suspect they are there, but I am not enough of a student of history to identify them. A POSSIBLE (WEAK) EXAMPLE: What about some of the formerly paleoconservative Republicans who have “flipped” (or may be in the process) to being fairly/somewhat liberal Democrats/Independents/Greens? Possibilities: John Dean, Andrew Bacevich, David Stockman, Julie Nixon Eisenhower, Bruce Fein..
Well, I don’t think that the examples of Stockman, Bacevich, et al really fit, because these people pretty clearly are thinking for themselves outside of their former ideological boxes, not just “flipping” from one ideology to another.
Perhaps more typical of what I have in mind are:
a) the “new” right-winger who’s an obsessive anti-Communist and even an anti-liberal, precisely some leftist movement broke his faithful, youthful heart — people like a Whittaker Chambers, or, in our own time, a David Horowitz, a Ronald Radosh, or maybe even a Sol Stern or a Fred Siegel, two former 1960s leftists who can’t stop acting out the drama of their disillusionment by crusading against the naivete of those who, in their view, aren’t yet as disillusioned and clear-sighted as they;
b) on the other end of the spectrum, the obsessive anti-capitalist who’s an “old money” WASP, such as Henry Wallace — a familiarly obdurate type who remains willfully blind to, and indeed clings to, the left’s fault lines and follies because he’s so preoccupied with cleansing himself of the sins of the privilege and false piety in his upbringing. WASPS who fall into this mode don’t bend; they simply transpose their intrepid Calvinist, Presbyterian or Puritan certainties into their new loyalty to “progressive” movements even those that are in fact themselves quite horrible. It’s political psychology on parade.
I’m trying to write a longer essay about this. We’ll see who’s interested!
Both characters are letting down a civic-republican ethos, and I think that some neo-cons’ cathexis onto Israel is driven by their effort to escape facing their own betrayal of that ethos here in America. ….
In Aharon Appelfeld’s novel “Badenheim 1939” the future Holocaust victims explain away the antisemitism by blaming those nasty and smelly “Ostjuden” for the problem–if it weren’t for them there wouldn’t be any prejudice against Jews. It seems that the contemporary Left plays the same kind of role in the minds of neocons–if their gentile bedfellows on the Right are so bigoted it’s really George Soros’ fault.
Yes, and I went further in 2006, when I noted that several centrist and liberal journalists who were creatures of the corporate state — from David Brooks to Jacob Weisberg — were blaming the continuing conservative hegemony of that time on the “crazy” left of Michael Moore, Ned Lamont, and Daily Kos and MoveOn, all in order to spare themselves a long look in the mirror.
An interesting theory about Stanley McChrystal’s motives and strategy — and about what Obama may have lost by dismissing him — popped up in a thread below my column yesterday, and I urged David Seaton to make the comment into a post of his own. He did so, suggesting that McChrystal — furious at Obama’s time-lines and low level of commitment of troops and resources to what the general believes should be a massive counterinsurgency, embedded in a total war — wanted to be fired, so that blame for the inevitable defeat of the present effort would be placed on Obama and his civilian team’s refusal to commit fully to win the war.
McChrystal could retire from the military after a decent interval and undertake a domestic insurgency of his own, with total commitment from Rupert Murdoch and the conservative noise machine. Neo-cons would be back in the saddle of public discourse, riding hard. As Seaton notes, the “I want my country back” crowd will march in lockstep behind McChrystal, denouncing Obama’s indecision, not the impossibility of the grand strategy itself.
Hence a Machiavellian question: Shouldn’t Obama have refused McChrystal’s resignation; made him eat humble pie in public by proclaiming his undying fealty to civilian control; and sent him back to Afghanistan? By firing McChrystal, hasn’t Obama instead punished himself for supporting our entry into Afghanistan as LBJ did our entry into Vietnam — less out of conviction than out of a desire to cover his right flank at home? Isn’t this another Greek tragedy, with McChrystal now playing the part of Obama’s Nemesis?
Well, maybe. You can see tragedy unfolding if you note how, soon after the Rolling Stone story about McChrystal’s supposed disloyalty to the Commander in Chief broke, some neo-cons’ initial “surge” on behalf of McChrystal collapsed into a very different, more sinister strategy by day’s end.
Neo-cons hoped at first to save the architect of their grand strategy in Afghanistan; I mocked their doe-eyed raptures about nation-building there some months ago in Dissent. But the only story they really want to push now is about Obama’s failure to commit us to the total war and total victory that they crave in all times and all places.
New York Times columnist David Brooks, whose counterinsurgency raptures I cited in Dissent, hides this bent with a “more in sorrow than in anger” defense of McChrystal today. This typically amnesiac and dishonest column doesn’t tell us that on one of his only trips abroad as a Times columnist (for all his Iraq War cheer-leading, he never visited Iraq) he went to Afghanistan last year and got the full McChrystal treatment. So now he casts McChrystal as a victim of the voracious “new media” culture that has turned power-holders’ private kvetches into public business.
Awash in Beltway narcissism (see Andrew Sullivan’s put-down of Brooks’ coziness and Sullivan’s defense of the Rolling Stone freelancer), Brooks tells us of a lost golden age of media restraint (apparently there was no Walter Winchell or McCarthyism), and he bypasses McChrystal’s own past efforts to play the media against Obama. He gives us St. Stanley the Innocent, being eaten alive by newshounds.
Brooks’ default position is the same as the rest of the neo-cons’: to persuade us that it is 1938 or 1940, and that everywhere (Moscow, Baghdad, Tehran, the Pashtun) is Hitler’s Berlin, and that every liberal Democrat is, sooner or later, a Neville Chamberlain, fatuously proclaiming “Peace in our time.”
That’s what Obama did last year, to hear neo-cons tell it, when he went to Cairo, Istanbul, and Moscow — and even Berlin. Why didn’t he just go to Munich? That’s what they want to know. They recite — in their sleep, in the shower, and online — Winston Churchill’s response in 1940 to a message from FDR bearing a Longfellow poem:
Sail on, Oh ship of state Sail on, Oh Union strong and great. Humanity with all its fears, With all the hopes of future years, Is hanging breathless on thy fate!
Churchill read this poem on the air to Britons, who were hanging on his every word as the Nazi threat loomed. Then he said:
“What shall be my answer, in your name, to this great man? ‘Give us the tools, and we will finish the job!’“
And what did the neo-conservative Commentary magazine’s Peter Wehner write yesterday while trying to make the best of Obama’s replacement of McChrystal with Petraeus? “Barack Obama better be all in,” Wehner warned, meaning that the president had better scrap his time-lines and ramp up the war. “If given the tools, David Petraeus — one more time — can finish the job.”
The echo of Churchill is no doubt deliberate. But is this 1940? Are the Muslim insurgents (against what, exactly?) really the Axis? There’s a debate underway about that, but, knowing all the answers as they do, neo-cons were solidly behind McChrystal until yesterday and, in some cases, even a day after the Rolling Stone story raised serious questions about his commitment to civilian control of the military.
The first neo-con to rush forward in McChrystal’s defense was Commentary’s Jennifer Rubin, one of the many, always-on-message drones who never think a serious political thought because they’re too busy lacing the line of the moment with just the right mix of solemn patriotism and tactical slime (I bold-face both below) to put “the line” across:
“Far from being evidence of McChrystal’s insubordination, the [Rolling Stone] article actually says much more about the administration’s mistakes in the course of a warto which they have committed so much American blood and treasure. If there is dissension in the ranks about some of the political and diplomatic blunders of the past year and a half, it speaks more to Obama’s own failure to exert leadership than to McChrystal’s faults.”
Obama’s leadership is a legitimate concern, whether you want total war or think that we shouldn’t have tried counterinsurgency at all and that Obama was dragged into it only as LBJ was. But neo-cons already considered McChrystal a better national leader than Obama, so out came Rubin’s unthinking, on-message reaction.
Similarly on-message was Washington Post neo-con editorial-page editor Fred Hiatt, whose page offered three reasons why McChrystal must not be fired: He had created the counterinsurgency strategy; he had good working relationships there; and now he’d outed the Obama administration’s faults, which, of course, were more grievous than his own.
Rubin, clearly delighted to be singing in Hiatt’s chorus, weighed in immediately with “a fourth reason” to keep McChrystal: “Obama needs to shed his peevish and self-absorbed persona,… and to dispel the growing perception that he’s in over his head…. (And by the way, if McChrystal does quit, won’t we hear a whole lot more from him about the civilian officials who’ve been making the military’s job harder?) “
Who did Rubin think she was advising here, and to what end? It was getting a little embarrassing, especially when the Weekly Standard announced a Message Change, moving with its hero John McCain’s statement to the effect that McChrystal must indeed be dismissed. The ostensible reason for this shift was loyalty to the republic’s cardinal principle of civilian control. The real reason, as far as people like Rubin is concerned, is a desire to have a martyr who perhaps can help to heap the blame on Obama.
Rubin began to backtrack about keeping McChrystal in Afghanistan, but only in order to stay with the Message: “Obama’s decision to accept Gen. Stanley McChyrstal’s resignation was not unexpected. By bringing back Gen. David Petraeus, he assuages the concerns from supporters of the Afghanistan mission as to whether we are committed to victory. There are two more essential changes required,” she continued: Since “McChrystal threw the curtain open on the dysfunctional and counterproductive civilian team in Afghanistan,… Richard Holbrooke and Karl Eikenberry should be canned…. Second, a wise reader likes to tell me, ‘Generals should only talk to their troops.’ What a fine idea.”
Oops, not so wise or so fine: Rubin’s Commentary online colleagues began to correct this and others of her butt-covering lurches, Max Boot informing her that, these days, generals actually need proactive public media strategies, not silence.
Finally, Peter Wehner weighed in “In Praise of Obama and Petraeus,” as linked above. What had complicated the Message was that Obama chose Petraeus, hero of the Iraq surge. Now Obama’s detractors have to drive a wedge between him and Petraeus by showing that Obama isn’t giving him the tools to finish the job. Wehner’s “praise” of Obama for appointing Petraeus will very soon be followed by his not-so-sorrowful despair at the president’s failure to follow through.
It won’t be very hard to carry this line, especially once McChrystal gives his first big, out-of-uniform speech at the American Enterprise Institute. Brace yourself for calls to escalate the war that’ll make McCain’s “Bomb, bomb, bomb/ Bomb bomb Iran” seem like the joke he only half-meant it to be.
This is no joke. It’s either 1940, and the Axis is just across the channel, or it’s 1914, and the neo-con revolver journalists are teaming up with generals, as their predecessors did then in Europe, to foment public enthusiasm for this war and another with Iran.
The problem, as Seaton suggests, is that the “I want my country back” crowd — and, I would add, many of our would-be public intellectuals, from Paul Berman to the New York Times Book Review’s increasingly creepy deputy editor Barry Gewen — have become addled and angry enough to believe that it is 1940 and that that is how the world is, and how it must be, unless we gird up our loins and unleash the dogs of torture and war. For them, there is no other way, and now Obama has given them a new martyr and champion.
This is really just an addendum to my post:
In airing this “theory” about McChrystal wanting out (not just so that he can escape blame for a failing mission, but perhaps also to make sure that the blame attaches to the administration, not the Pentagon), I’m assuming only two things.
First, that the strategy in Afghanistan is going nowhere, not just because Cassandra-like, sensationalist news media say so, but because it’s really going nowhere;
Second, that McChrystal, who drank the “soft power” kool-aid during his year at Harvard’s Kennedy School, got grandly ambitious about it, and that he has been frustrated ever since, believing that Obama and his team (Biden, Eikenberry, Holbrook) have let him down by under-funding and stage-managing everything for domestic politics. So he has felt betrayed.
I don’t say that he orchestrated his departure all that much; he may have lurched into his confrontation with Obama somewhat. But I suspect that it would have happened sooner or later, even if the Rolling Stone reporter had been a pushover and the volcano hadn’t stranded McChrystal’s staff with him for so long. McChrystal seems to have tried to outfox the civilian leadership via the media before.
So, no, I’m not thinking literally that there was a “master-stroke” on McChrystal’s part but that he did feel betrayed and is bitter and that he has a mind of his own and some ambitions. And I’m assuming that neo-cons and the “I want my country back” crowd would love to use him in any way they can to discredit Obama.
I’m not suggesting that McChrystal will run for office whenever he actually leaves the military, only that he may want to speak his mind in some way that sticks. But maybe the ghost of Ollie North is haunting me; he did run for office, and, although he lost, he remained a cause celebre and champion of the abnormally disaffected. Perhaps McChrystal is too “liberal” for that, as some are claiming, but after all that he’s been through, I’m less sanguine.
A couple of years ago The Nation’s Eric Alterman published What Liberal Media?, shredding the familiar conservative charges. It may be too soon to ask, What liberal academy? — although I’ve had fun exposing what I called “Wiley E. Coyote conservatives” who rushed off cliffs a couple of years ago blaming faculty feminists and radical leftists for ousting Lawrence Summers from Harvard’s presidency — although it was the high-capitalist Harvard Corporation that ousted him, and not for politically correct reasons — and exposing conservatives at Yale who blamed liberals there for enrolling a former Taliban spokesman as a special student, even though it was a conservative Yale foreign-policy network that blessed his admission).
In 2009 a Chronicle of Higher Education debate questioned whether and why liberal academia spurns conservative scholars. Actually, the fiscal crises gripping public and private universities influence their priorities far more powerfully than do leftist doctrines. Yet, in the Chronicle, Columbia intellectual historian Mark Lilla wrote that on many campuses a pervasive ideology normalizes “liberal” views that are narrow and arbitrary. Boston College’s Alan Wolfe agreed that colleges promote little true intellectual diversity, although he acknowledged that conservatives are part of the problem.
Others added brief observations. I noted that what’s actually normalized by the typical campus mix of political correctness and corporatist discipline isn’t very “liberal,” as most Americans use that term. Baiters of “tenured radicals” – the conservative humorist P.J. O’Rourke, the propagandist Roger Kimball, the provocateur David Horowitz – can’t claim now, as David Brooks did in 2002, that America “houses its radical lunatics … in [academic] departments that operate as nunneries for the perpetually alienated.” Not only do market forces rule; lavishly funded nunneries for failed, aging neo-cons are sprouting or entrenching themselves at Yale, Duke, George Mason, Claremont- McKenna-Pomona, Chicago, and elsewhere.
At some of these places, conservative activists and national-security functionaries teach undergraduates to read Thucydides as a prophet of the war on terror and to pursue national-security state networking through habits of discretion and public dissimulation that hobble the humanist truth-seeking conservatives claim to defend.
I support the conservative argument that colleges have to balance humanist truth-seeking with civic-republican leadership-training and that serious conservative thinkers are invaluable to it. A liberal arts college’s mission, after all, (as distinct from that of a research university in which it may be housed) isn’t to produce many scholars, much less the dray horses of the financial and legal establishments that many leafy campuses actually do produce in large herds; it’s to turn 18-year-olds into citizens who are intellectually and morally strong enough to carry on public life through deliberation and choice, not force and fraud.
Why aren’t colleges doing enough of that? Read the Chronicle discussion and my 450- word contribution to it [below here on screen] for a hint at why “liberals” really aren’t the problem.
Mark Lilla says rightly that at many liberal-arts colleges, a pervasive ideology insensibly normalizes views that are narrow and arbitrary, and Alan Wolfe says rightly that colleges promote too little intellectual diversity. But nothing very “liberal” is being normalized by today’s campus mix of political correctness and corporatist discipline.
Visit any Ivy League Economics 101 course or classes in microeconomics, statistics, computer science, and most social sciences. The homunculae economicae and the number-crunching “methodologues” at the podium may not be flag-waving conservatives, but neither are most of them liberals or leftists, except in the “color equals culture” sense that big corporations embrace for management and marketing purposes.
“Diversity” itself is an industry, and universities themselves are run like corporations whose students and faculty members are “customers,” as one unfortunate Yale memo actually put it. But, then, increasingly, students are customers: Thousands of visits per capita to vapid Internet sites and shopping malls before matriculation have annealed them against whatever campus Marxists or postmodernists could hope to impart. Before 2008, most seniors at most Ivies flocked yearly to recruiters from investment banks, consulting firms, and their ilk.
So, yes, liberal-arts colleges promote too little intellectual diversity, and, yes, a pervasive ideology (of free-marketing, self-marketing, predatory marketing) normalizes orientations that are narrow and arbitrary, indeed. Even the supposed campus leftists are pitchmen, like the Harvard Shakespearean scholar Marjorie Garber, who, in Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety and Sex and Real Estate, swings like a semioticist with marketing that’s reshuffling our libidinal and racial decks.
Other leftists administer revival meetings for penitent racists and sexists who want to feel better about making money by backing reforms that now divide blacks from blacks as well as blacks from whites and whites from whites and women from women as well as women from men and men from men. Progress, perhaps; but “progressive” it’s not.
Could conservative scholarship discipline this campus capitalist circus? America warehouses its “radical lunatics … in [academic] departments that operate as nunneries for the perpetually alienated,” David Brooks has claimed, but lavishly funded nunneries for conservative lunatics are sprouting at Yale, Duke, George Mason, Claremont McKenna, Chicago, and elsewhere, and some hire conservative activists and national-security functionaries as teachers who cast Thucydides as a prophet of the war on terror. That’s not how to balance humanist truth seeking and civic-republican leadership training.
Yet Lilla is right to want serious study of conservative ideas. I’d trade lunatic semioticists in a heartbeat for more on Adam Smith’s abhorrence of capitalist corporations, John Gray’s doubts about capitalism tout court, and Edmund Burke’s indifference to anything more religious than a state religion that’s the Tory Party at prayer.
Serious conservative scholarship would highlight American conservatism’s failure to reconcile its yearnings for ordered, sacred liberty with its obeisance to every global capitalist riptide that’s subverting liberal education more than tenured radicals ever did.
Jim Sleeper Lecturer in Political Science Yale University New Haven
Yes, it was a great State of the Union speech, the more so for its unadorned honesty, not for soaring, rhetorical cadences like those of his campaign. Yes, he told the Roberts Court to its face what damage it has done. Yes, he put Republicans on the spot over the filibuster and their nation-destroying negativity. And he hit lobbyists and even big corporations.
What has changed for me, though, is my growing (hardening) conviction that the chamber he was speaking to is stuffed to its gills with frauds. (There are exceptions.) Beyond the few measures on which there is a rare alignment of stars, nothing he called for will happen, unless his road trip unleashes a firestorm in the American people against Congress for the systemic sins mentioned above.
Most Americans didn’t watch the speech. And with good reason. They’ve heard laundry lists and fine rhetoric before. As long as most Americans’ default position in politics remains what I said it is after the Massachusetts debacle, Congress will remain unworthy of Obama’s broad wisdom and self-discipline, and it will remain wide open, therefore, to the most malign and predatory interests.
“A republic, if you can keep it,” Ben Franklin said, doubting that, in the long run, we could. I don’t want to doubt it, but of late I see very little evidence that we can or will.
But hasn’t the republic survived graver doubts than mine for more than two centuries? Certainly, from the moment King George III was gone, the Founders took a hard look at the American people and became obsessed with how a republic ends. Franklin sketched the odds at the Constitutional convention. He warned that the Constitution “can only end in Despotism as other Forms have done before it, when the People shall have become so corrupted as to need Despotic Government, being incapable of any other.”
History showed that this can happen not with a coup but a smile and a friendly swagger like George W. Bush’s, as soon as the people tire of the burdens of self-government and can be jollied along into servitude — or scared into it, when they’ve become soft enough to intimidate.
Alexander Hamilton sketched the stakes when he wrote that history had destined Americans, “by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.”
How might that happen? “History does not more clearly point out any fact than this, that nations which have lapsed from liberty, to a state of slavish subjection, have been brought to this unhappy condition, by gradual paces,” wrote Founder Richard Henry Lee.
The Founders were all reading Edward Gibbon’s then-new account of how the Roman republic had slipped, degree by self-deluding degree, into an imperial tyranny. Leaders could bedazzle citizens out of their liberties by titillating and intimidating them into becoming bread-and-circus mobs that “no longer possessed that public courage which is nourished by the love of independence, the sense of national honor, the presence of danger, and the habit of command. They received laws and governors from the will of their sovereign and trusted for their defense to a mercenary army ….”
Gibbon added pointedly that Augustus, the first emperor (I tend to think of George W. Bush when I read this passage), “wished to deceive the people by an image of civil liberty, and the armies by an image of civil government” and that he knew that “the senate and people would submit to slavery, provided they were respectfully assured that they still enjoyed their ancient freedom.” Campaigning in an open shirt, as it were, “that artful prince … humbly solicited their suffrages for himself, and for his friends, and scrupulously practiced all the duties of an ordinary candidate … . The emperors … disdained that pomp and ceremony which might offend their countrymen but could add nothing to their real power. In all the offices of life they affected to confound themselves with their subjects and maintained with them an equal intercourse of visits and entertainments.”
And so Rome became what Gibbon called “an absolute monarchy disguised by the forms of a commonwealth,” not by conspiracy but thanks to a confluence of deeper currents that had enervated people’s republican virtues and beliefs.
This, of course, is precisely what Republicans promised, for eight years — no, for 30 years, ever since Ronald Reagan’s winning campaign in 1980 — that they would save us from, with the help of God, deregulation, and martial valor. They convinced a lot of Americans that it was liberal governmentalists who wanted to coddle them into servitude and decadence.
Plenty of liberal folly reinforced that perception, and Obama wrestles with the burden of trying to dispel that perception even as he tries to make government as pro-active as it truly needs to be. But he also has the burden of most Americans’ obdurate refusal to admit that rule by big, private corporations, not government, is ever more confining, intrusive, and even degrading of our virtues and our public courage — in employment, entertainment, patterns of consumption, even the subtle skewing of public discourse (journalists, write this down!), as well as of government itself.
John Adams wasn’t blaming only government when he warned that, “[w]hen the people give way, their deceivers, betrayers, and destroyers press upon them so fast, that there is no resisting afterward. The nature of the encroachment upon the American Constitution is such as to grow every day more and more encroaching. … The people grow less steady, spirited, and virtuous, the seekers more numerous and more corrupt, and every day increases the circles of their dependents and expectants, until virtue, integrity, public spirit, simplicity, and frugality become the objects of ridicule and scorn, and vanity, luxury, foppery, selfishness, meanness, and downright venality swallow up the whole society.”
We are there, I fear. At least, that was my feeling as I watched a President who is as wise as the founders addressing a den of hogs sent there by an American people that seems more deeply beleaguered and befuddled than at any time in my life, which has been long enough to include some pretty bad times.
Over at The Daily Dish, Andrew Sullivan shares my assessment for the most part and responds to this post, adding that the time has come to fight with and for Obama against not only the special interests but the conniving legislators and Justices who serve them.
That kind of mobilization and resistance — drawing on clean anger from a civic-republican center, if you will — is what the American Revolution was about. Do we still have the public courage, the sense of national honor, and the habits of command necessary to do it again?
The slogan behind Bill Clinton’s 1992 victory — “It’s the economy, stupid” — has worked to Republicans’ advantage in 2010 for reasons we need to understand. Obama’s comment that voters don’t face facts when they’re scared was true, even if ill-advised, and it didn’t cost Democrats nearly as much as economic desperation itself.
The Tea Party’s “ideology” of rage and its floodgate funding gave Republicans new right-wing candidates, but the reason they won is more elemental and elementary: Democrats, like Republicans, are a party of casino-finance capital and corporate welfare, and their fiscal and regulatory timidity made Republican sins easier to forget.
Even were Democrats bolder, they can’t fairly be blamed for failing to undo, in just the two years since their 2008 victories, the immense damage done by Republican governance and policies. But Republicans’ congenital inability to offer more than slick demagoguery and obstruction won’t benefit hamstrung Democrats in 2012 unless voters recognize that Republicans are even more perverse than Democrats. Whether voters see that will depend a lot on the spin doctors and the big money behind them.
George Packer’s blog post in the New Yorker gets this right, but in a way that ends up being part of the problem. A few years ago, I rebuked him for chronicling “The Fall of Conservatism” in The New Yorker by giving the floor to a supposedly penitential David Brooks and other Beltway phrase-turners, without letting ordinary voters speak for themselves. Now, sounding as if he’s taking my remonstrance to heart, Packer goes out of his way to contradict Brooks and talk with voters in Virginia’s 5th congressional district.
Not only does he do that, however; he wants us to know how important it is that he did it. It’s important, he informs us, “to go to polling places and talk to actual voters, as opposed to sitting in a television studio and talking to other talkers,” because “you always come away surprised.”
So, what kind of “surprise” does he find? Well, he quotes two voters. One, a poll-watcher, gives him the predictable Republican/conservative line. The other, it turns out, has “come to vote for [Democratic congressional candidate Tom Perriello] because of Jane Mayer’s article [in The New Yorker!] on the Koch brothers (who have poured some of their money into the Fifth). This woman’s husband works for a Koch-owned company, and when they started getting inundated with company literature telling them how to vote, she became suspicious. Then Jane’s article explained it all.”
Mayer’s article was terrifically important, and it made me wish that more Americans got the kind of information she dug up. Unfortunately, the next paragraph of Packer’s post has him talking mainly to himself: “My uncle and grandfather were congressmen, and my mother always described the defeats that ended their careers as devastating. Politicians can’t help taking a loss as a direct personal rejection.”
Pundits, too, apparently. But Packer rouses himself to close with a characteristic drama:
“This midterm is the [Republican] party’s first salvo in its first order of business, to end Obama’s Presidency. There will be little mercy and a great deal of rancor. Tomorrow we’ll find out how Obama sees the next two years. I see one of the ugliest political periods in my lifetime, which has seen a few.”
George, George,….: The Republicans are dreadful. That is no surprise. We need to know why so many people are following them. Your personal testimony doesn’t tell us. What happened last night is not about you, your uncle, your grandfather, your mother, or even about the many things you have gone out and seen in your lifetime. It’s mainly about what other people think they’ve seen and heard. That tragedy remains too little reported.
Many discouraging observations have been made about Americans, some of them clearer than truth: French observers have called us les grands enfants. The late American historian Louis Hartz rued our “vast and almost charming innocence of mind.” Those are two of the nicer assessments. Some of the more-accurate ones are scarier.Although millions of us behave encouragingly every day, often in distinctively “American” ways that I assess on this website, this is no time to congratulate ourselves. But it’s also no time to consign ourselves to history’s dustbin by writing pre-mortems for the 2024 election and for the republic itself.
The following essay is a highly personal account of my reckonings with these challenges. Before you read further here, please read “About This Site” in the left-hand column on this home-page and glance at its survey of challenges now facing an American, civic-republican culture that a mentor of mine, the late literary historian Daniel Aaron, once characterized, felicitously, as “ethical and pragmatic, disciplined and free.”
I’d like to see that civic culture transcend and outlive “woke” corporate neoliberalism, authoritarian state capitalism, right-wing, racist nationalism, Marxoid economic determinism, and post-modernist escapism, all of which are responses to global riptides that are transforming humanity’s economic, technological, communicative, climatic, migratory, and other arrangements. These swift, often dark currents are driven not only by capitalism but also by human inclinations, including to greed and power-lust, that antedate capitalism by millennia and seem certain to outlast it. Neither the left nor the right seems able to block them or re-channel them, let alone to redeem us from them.
More than a few Americans actually find these currents energizing as well as disorienting. That’s partly thanks to accidents of this country’s history that have enabled its commingling of faith, innovation, fakery, and force. Americans “have all been uprooted from their several soils and ancestries and plunged together into one vortex, whirling irresistible in a space otherwise quite empty,” the philosopher George Santayana noted. “To be an American is of itself almost a moral condition, an education and a career.”
Well, maybe. The 19th-century Prussian chancellor Otto von Bismarck is reputed to have said that “God protects, fools, drunkards, and the United States of America.” The ascent of Donald Trump and of Trumpism has reinforced that impression and made many of us doubt and even despair of “American” virtues that we’d taken for granted or dedicated ourselves to upholding. I doubted our capabilities along those lines in the 1970s and more deeply in 2014, before I or anyone imagined that Trump would run for the presidency, let alone that tens of millions of Americans would be credulous and cankered enough to elect him.
“Jim Sleeper is the Jonathan Edwards of American civic culture – and that’s a compliment,” tweeted The New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg, referring to the formidable Puritan “thought leader” of the 18th Century and to my Salon essay “We, the People, are Violent and Filled with Rage,” which you can read later on this site. With Jeremiadic woe, I’d surveyed the civic-cultural damage of the 2008 financial crisis and the run of public massacres, including in Oklahoma City in 1995, Columbine in 1998, and Sandy Hook in 2012. Soon after Trump’s inauguration in 2017, I doubted America’s prospects more deeply still in “It’s Not Only a Constitutional Crisis, It’s a Civic Implosion,”a short essay for Bill Moyers’ website that you can read later on this website’s section, “A Sleeper Sampler.”
Hertzberg’s reference to my cast of mind was fortuitous, not only because the damage I mentioned has been accelerating but also because I’d grown up in Longmeadow, Massachusetts, a small town settled by Puritans in 1644 six miles north of the spot where, in 1741, Edwards would preach his (in)famous sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” Some of my Longmeadow public school classmates were direct descendants of the town’s Puritan founders. A few of my teachers seemed to have been writhing in Edwards’ congregation when he preached. Whenever some of them looked at me in school, I felt them looking into me, as if arraigning my soul before something awesome.
Their residually Calvinist, “Yankee” discipline converged with two other cultural currents in my upbringing, inclining me to look into civic-republican society’s ups and downs. The Calvinist current drew on an Hebraic biblical current of law and prophecy that was my inheritance as a grandson of four Lithuanian Jewish immigrant grandparents and that was deepened in my youthful exposure to it. Neither the Christian nor the Jewish current had disappeared in me by 1965, when, at 18, I entered Yale College, founded by Puritans who’d put the Hebrew words Urim V’Tumim, meaning, approximately, “Light and Truth” or “Illumination and Testimony,” on the seal of the college, which they envisioned as a “school of prophets.” Kingman Brewster, Jr., Yale’s president during my undergraduate years, was a lineal descendant of the minister on the Puritan Pilgrims’ ship The Mayflower, and he had been born in Longmeadow.
Fooling around at 19, my freshman yearStill fooling around in Wellesley, MA, age 23, 1971
Beyond Calvinism and Hebraism, two other cultural currents, leftish and civic-republican, followed me and surfaced at around the time I turned 30, in 1977. Like many New Englanders before me, I carried some of the region’s civic and moral presumptions (conceits? innocent hopes?) to New York City, although not to literary Manhattan but to “inner city” Brooklyn, where I ran an activist weekly newspaper before bicycling across the Brooklyn Bridge every day to work as a speechwriter for City Council President Carol Bellamy. By 1982 I was writing for The Village Voice, Dissent, Commonweal and other political magazines. From 1988 to 1995, I was an editor and columnist for the daily newspapers New York Newsday and The New York Daily News.
In 1987, my essay “Boodling, Bigotry, and Cosmopolitanism” sketched New York’s changing political culture for a special issue of Dissent magazine that I edited and that was re-published as In Search of New York. The “Boodling” essay was re-published yet again inEmpire City, a Columbia University Press anthology of 400 years of writing about the city, edited by the historian Kenneth Jackson and the master-teacher David Dunbar.
In 1990, W.W. Norton published my The Closest of Strangers: Liberalism and the Politics of Race in New York. The book, a somewhat tormented love letter to the city, sparked public debate in and beyond New York. After 1999, while continuing to live in the city and writing many of the pieces referenced and linked on this site, I taught Yale undergraduates for two decades in political science seminars with course titles such as “New Conceptions of American National Identity” and “Journalism, Liberalism, and Democracy.”
In the late 1970s I has embraced, and I still affirm, a democratic-socialist politics that, unlike Stalinism and orthodox Marxism, has a distinctively American, civic-republican orientation that rejects Communists’ opportunistic (ab)uses of civil liberties, civil rights, and democracy. Democratic socialism in the 1970s steered fairly clear of the racially essentialist “identity politics” that many of its adepts now wrongly embrace by fantasizing about “Black liberation” as the cat’s paw of an advancing Revolution. Sample my offerings in the section “Why a Skin Color isn’t a Culture or a Politics,” and you’ll encounter my conviction that although ethno-racial identities are inevitable and sometimes enriching, they’ll never be wellsprings of social hope in America unless they’re transcended by all of us as citizens in the thicker civic culture of a larger republic, if not of the world. Precisely because The United States is more complex racially, ethnically, and religiously than most “multicultural” categorizing comprehends, Americans need work overtime to identify and, yes, instill, certain shared civic and moral premises and practices that I discuss in many of the pieces on this website.
No longer fooling around. Brooklyn, age 31, 1978
Beginning in the 1990s and ever since, I’ve taken strong public stands against ethno-racialist evasions of the civic-republican mission. In 1991 I wrote a rather harsh assessment of leftist identity politics for Tikkun magazine that was re-published in Blacks and Jews: Alliances and Arguments, edited by Paul Berman. I refined and, dare I say, elevated the argument in civic-republican terms in a 1996 Harper’s magazine essay, “Toward an End of Blackness,” that identified the emptiness of American blackness and whiteness as vessels of social hope. I summarized and updated the argument again in 2021, in a Commonweal essay,“Scrapping the Color Code.” (You can find all of the essays on race that I’ve just mentioned in this website’s section on race, “Why Skin Color Isn’t Culture or Politics.”) I’ve published a lot more along these lines and debated in many public forums, some of them linked in the Commonweal essay and elsewhere on this site. (My two books on the subject are The Closest of Strangers and Liberal Racism: How Fixating on Race Subverts the American Dream (1997).
Some of this work sparked resentment among activists and academics on the left and among journalists and other writers across the political spectrum. I accused some of them of betraying a civic-republican ethos and creed that’s under assault by capitalist, neoliberal, and even radical-racialist forces, the most dangerous of them white-supremacy, but others of them are unconstructively “woke” or subtly, seductively commercial. Some of my criticisms of writers who’ve ridden these currents have been gratuitously cruel, even when they’ve been accurate.
Civic-republican strengths and susceptibilities
Although many Americans behaved admirably, even heroically, on 9/11 and in the civil-rights and anti-Vietnam War movements, what matters to a republic’s survival are the little things people do daily, when no one’s looking and no digital tracking device, cellphone camera, or journalist is recording them. Essential though a republic’s wealth and military power are to its strength, they can become parasitical on it pretty quickly if people are feeling stressed, dispossessed, and susceptible to simplistic explanations. Neither a booming economy nor massive firepower can ensure a republic’s vitality, especially if prosperity and power are dissolving civic-republican norms and practices.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned against this in his Farewell Address in 1960, condemning what he called a “military-industrial” complex. (An early draft of his address, well-known to historians, called it, rightly, a “military-industrial-academic” complex.) Ike, who was hardly a radical leftist inveighing against capitalism or a rightist railing against “the deep state,” was a deeply decent, heartland American who’d gotten to know the military-industrial-academic complex from within, as its supreme warmaker and then as Columbia University’s president. He didn’t like everything he saw there.
Even more than Eisenhower’s warning or Jonathan Edwards’ and the Hebrew prophets’ jeremiads, several developments since 9/11 have convinced me that Americans who are accustomed to think well of themselves would be better off convicting themselves of complicity in democracy’s decline. In The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the 18th century British historian Edward Gibbon noted that “a slow and secret poison” had worked its way into the vitals of ancient Rome’s republic, distorting and draining its virtues and beliefs. In our own time, faster, glaringly public poisons have been working their way into our republic. Yet most Americans, “liberal” or “conservative,” have been ingesting and pushing them without naming them honestly.
You may insist that whatever is driving Americans’ increasing resort to force, fraud and mistrust comes from human nature itself. The republic’s founders understood that argument in Calvinist terms and also from reading Gibbon’s semi-pagan assessment of human history as “little more than a record of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.” They tried to devise a republican system of self-government that “doesn’t depend on our nobility. It accounts for our imperfections and gives an order to our individual strivings,” as one of their legatees, John McCain, put it two and a half centuries later in one of his last addresses to Senate colleagues.
Assessed by these lights, Trump (who cruelly disparaged McCain) is only the most prominent carrier and pusher of poisons that the founders knew were already in us, even in those of us who deny that we’re carriers and pushers. In 2008 Barack Obama reinforced our “vast and almost charming innocence of mind” by staging a year-long equivalent of a religious revival rally for the civic-republican faith, across partisan, ideological, and ethno-racial lines. But he wasn’t only a performance artist. He embodied and radiated distinctively American strengths that fascinate people the world over — not our wealth and power or our technological affinities, which are often brutally or seductively unfair, but our classless egalitarianism, which inclines an American to say “Hi” to a stranger instead of “Heil!” to a dictator; to give that stranger a fair chance; to be optimistic and forward-looking; and, from those collective and personal strengths, to take a shot at the moon.
I don’t think that the American republic is sliding irreversibly into Nazi-style fascism, as some on the left fear and some on the alt-right hope, or that it will succumb to leftist totalitarian socialism. More likely is an accelerating dissolution of the civic-republican way of life that Daniel Aaron characterized as “ethical and pragmatic, disciplined and free.” That subtle balance of divergent qualities and of the trust and comity they engender is being routed now by global undercurrents -– economic, technological/communicative, climatic/migratory, and demographic/cultural –- that are sluicing force, fraud, and mistrust into our public and private lives. A bare majority of us are holding on to common ground.
Looking across the tracks.Illustration by Philip Toolin, a film art director/production designer who’s been doing this since he was 15.
In his foreboding 1941 prophecy, What Mein Kampf Means for America, Francis Hackett, a literary editor of The New Republic, warned that people who feel disrespected and dispossessed are easy prey for demagogic orchestrations of “the casual fact, the creative imagination, the will to believe, and, out of these three elements, a counterfeit reality to which there was a violent, instinctive response. For it is clear enough that under certain conditions men respond as powerfully to fiction as they do to realities, and that in many cases they help to create the very fictions to which they respond. The fiction is taken for truth because the fiction is badly needed.”
Edward Gibbon and Jonathan Edwards would have recognized that condition in us now. Yet its causes and subtleties often escape the notice of journalists who are busy chasing “current events” without enough historical and moral grounding to contextualize them within “undercurrent events” that are driving upheavals and horrors around us and within us. I have a thing or two to say about that myopic side of American journalism (and I have some experiences to share) in this website’s sections on “News Media, Chattering Classes, and a Phantom Public” and on “Scoops and Revelations.”
The undercurrent events that many journalists mishandle aren’t malevolent, militarized conspiracies. They’re civically mindless commercial intrusions into our public and private lives that derange our employment options, public conversations, and daily aspirations and habits. They bypass our hearts and minds relentlessly, 24/7, on their way to our lower viscera and our wallets, to attract eyeballs to their ads, to maximize the profits of swirling whorls of shareholders. These commercial riptides incentivize (and brainwash?) many Americans to behave as narrowly self-interested investors and as impulse-buying consumers, not as citizens of a republic who restrain their immediate self-interest at times to enhance the public interests of a “commonwealth.” That word is still on our legal documents and pediments, but we’re losing its meaning, along with its “ethical and pragmatic, disciplined and free” ethos.
Decay and Renewal
Imagine a former auto worker, a white man in his mid-50s whose $30-an-hour job and its benefits were replaced a decade ago by a job stocking shelves at Wal-Mart for less than half the pay and who has lost his home because he accepted a predatory mortgage scam of the kind that prompted the 2008 financial and political near-meltdown. Imagine that he winds up here:
“When the people give way,” warned John Adams (a graduate of the then-still residually Calvinist Harvard College and a self-avowed admirer of Hebrews) in 1774, “their deceivers, betrayers, and destroyers press upon them so fast, that there is no resisting afterwards. The nature of the encroachment upon the American constitution is such, as to grow every day more and more encroaching. Like a cancer, it eats faster and faster every hour…. The people grow less steady, spirited, and virtuous, the seekers more numerous and more corrupt, and every day increases the circles of their dependents and expectants, until virtue, integrity, public spirit, simplicity, and frugality, become the objects of ridicule and scorn, and vanity, luxury, foppery, selfishness, meanness, and downright venality swallow up the whole society.”
In 1787, Alexander Hamilton, urging ratification of the Constitution, wrote that history seemed to have destined Americans, “by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government through reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.”
In 1975, two centuries after James Madison, Adams, Hamilton, and others designed the republic with dry-eyed wisdom about its vulnerabilities, the political philosopher Hannah Arendt worried that “Madison Avenue tactics under the name of public relations have been permitted to invade our political life.” She characterized the then-recently exposed Pentagon Papers, which confirmed the Vietnam War’s duplicity and folly, as an example of the invasion of political life by public relations, of Madison by Madison Avenue – that is, of efforts to separate its public promises of a democratic victory in Vietnam from realities on the ground, until, finally, the official words lost their meaning and, without them, the deeds became more starkly brutal.
March on Pentagon, 1967 (National Archives and Record Administration)
What many Americans should have learned from that debacle, and what I’ve been learning ever since, reinforces Oliver Goldsmith’s warning, in 1777: “Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a’prey, when wealth accumulates and men decay.” A wealthy society may decay and implode not only because its prosperity isn’t distributed fairly but also because it’s only material and therefore weak against profit-maximizing engines such as Rupert Murdoch’s media, which prey upon the susceptibilities and resentments of stressed, dispossessed people such as the former auto worker and the Uber driver. If the manipulative engines aren’t stopped, they’ll grope, goose, titillate, intimidate, track, indebt, stupefy and regiment people, many of whom will crave easy escapes in bread-and-circus entertainments like those of Rome in its decline. They’ll join mobs that demand to be lied to with simplistic story lines that tell them who to blame for their pains and who to follow to fix them.
Perhaps with Gibbon’s slow and secret poison in mind, Alexis de Tocqueville described “the slow and quiet action of society upon itself” in the little daily interactions that matter as much as the high moments of national decision. Writing Democracy in America in 1835, he marveled, perhaps wishfully, at an American individualism that was inclined to cooperate with others to achieve goods in common that individualism couldn’t achieve on its own:
“The citizen of the United States is taught from his earliest infancy to rely upon his own exertions in order to resist the evils and the difficulties of life; he looks upon social authority with an eye of mistrust and anxiety….This habit may even be traced in the schools of the rising generation, where the children in their games are wont to submit to rules which they have themselves established…. The same spirit pervades every act of social life. If a stoppage occurs in a thoroughfare, and the circulation of the public is hindered, the neighbors immediately constitute a deliberative body; and this extemporaneous assembly gives rise to an executive power which remedies the inconvenience before anybody has thought of recurring to an authority superior to that of the persons immediately concerned.”
This civic-republican disposition — to give the other person a fair chance and to back her up as she tries, to deliberate rationally with her about shared purposes, and to reach and to keep binding commitments — relies on the elusive balance of civic values, virtues and body language that’s ethical and pragmatic, disciplined and free. You see it in a team sport whenever a player closes in on the action not to show off but to back up a teammate and help him score. You see it in how people in a contentious meeting extend trust cannily to potential adversaries in ways that elicit trust in return.
You used to see it even on Capitol Hill, as I did in 1968 while interning for my western Massachusetts Republican Congressman, Silvio O. Conte:
(That’s me in the dark jacket. standing next to then-astronaut John Glenn, who was visiting Rep. Conte (standing to his right) while planning to run for the U.S. Senate from Ohio.)
Or maybe you don’t see civic grace like that so often these days. Maybe backbiting, road rage, and the degradation of public space and cyberspace are prompting quiet heartache and withdrawal as trust in other people slips out of our public lives. Without the balance that I’m sketching here and elsewhere on this website, the United States won’t survive as a republic amid the undercurrent events that I’ve mentioned.
Civic-republican grace in writing and public life
Finding a better description of civic republicanism than I’ve offered here would require harder analysis and reportage but also more poetry, faith and, even some fakery. You can develop an ear and an eye for it, and maybe a voice for it. I’ve been following American civic republican culture’s ebbs and flows since around 1970, when I was 23, but really since World War II, because I was born on June 6, 1947, two years after the war’s end and three years, to the day, after D-Day, so and I grew up in a civic culture that seemed, at least to a child, more triumphant and coherent than it actually was or ever had been.
Some of the writing collected here records my and others’ growing disillusionment. A lot of it began for me in journalism, “the first rough draft of history” if a journalist has some grounding in history and isn’t just chasing “breaking news.” Whenever the chattering classes make cicada-like rackets over the latest Big Thing, I’ve tried to assess that noise in its historical and other contexts, remembering Emerson’s admonition “that a popgun is [only] a popgun, though the ancient and honorable of the earth affirm it to be the crack of doom.”
Contextualizing current events this way sometimes yields scoops and insights that others have missed. (See the “Scoops and Other Revelations” Section for a sampler of what I’ve found.) Some of those pieces spotlight fissures and fragilities in the republican experiment, and some assail public leaders and journalists who I believed had lost their civic-republican lenses and standards, along with virtues and beliefs necessary to wise reporting. (See also “Leaders and Misleaders”)
I’m collecting some of my essays for a book that I’ll call Somebodyhaddasayit. Some my work has prompted people to tell me they were glad that I’d written what they, too, had been thinking but were reluctant to say. Somebody really did need to say it, even when doing so made enemies not only among the “villains” but also, as George Orwell lamented, among editors and other writers who cancel honest speech that might embarrass them. “Saying it’ requires not only sound judgment and tact, but also, sometimes, courage. I’ve sometimes “said it” with too little fact or courage.
Editorial writer and editor at New York Newsday, 1992
But usually I’ve defended people who bear the American republican spirit bravely, against daunting odds. One of my pieces began in Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library in 2006, when I was looking for family background on Ned Lamont, then a little-known computer executive (now Governor of Connecticut) who was making a Democratic primary bid for the Connecticut U.S. Senate seat of Joe Lieberman, in protest against Lieberman’s unbending support for the Iraq War. I ended up writing not about Ned himself but about a long-forgotten uncle of his, Thomas W. Lamont II, whose young life and supreme sacrifice in World War II seemed to me a fata morgana, a fading mirage, of the American republic and of the citizenship that we’re losing, not at its enemies’ hands but at our own. (See the essay “Duty Bound” on this website’s section, “A Civic Republican Primer.”)
Being an American like Tommy Lamont is an art and a discipline. You can’t just run civic grace like his up a flagpole and salute it, but neither should you snark it down as just a bourgeois mystification of oppressive social relations. When the Vietnam War’s brutality and folly were at their worst and when official words had lost their credibility and official deeds had become murderous, the perennial socialist presidential candidate Norman Thomas told protestors “not to burn the American flag but to wash it.” I took his point. I work with it. Americans who consider themselves too sophisticated for that are naïve.
Although one can’t credibly call my writing “nationalist” or “conservative,” more than a little of it has been motivated by my and others’ civic-republican patriotism. I’ve written often for left-of-center sites and journals, challenging much of what’s called “conservative” in American life. But a civic-republican compass points rightward at times, and I’ve written once or twice in right-of-center venues to condemn racialist “identity politics” and ethno-racial banner-waving that passes for progressive politics even when it only compounds a racial essentialism that fuels white superracist politics more than black-power politics.
Although American national identity was developed self-critically and sometimes hypocritically in secular Enlightenment terms, ultimately it relies on something akin to religious faith, even though it doesn’t impose a particular religious doctrine. Living with that paradox requires skill and empathy, as some leftist activists learned while swaying and singing with black-church folk against armed white men in the American South. Precisely because this country is so diverse religiously, racially, and culturally, it needs to generate shared civic standards and lenses, with help from newly potent (and therefore “mythic”) civic narratives. We don’t refuse to ride horses because they’re strong enough to kill us; we learn to break them in. Some liberals need to learn something similar about religion and patriotism instead of refusing them entirely.
How (and How Not) to Think About Left and Right
Both left and right in American life offer distinctive truths that are indispensable to governing ourselves by reflection and choice instead of by accident, force, and fraud. The left understands that without public supports in a village that raises the child, the family and spiritual values that conservatives cherish cannot flourish. But the right understands that unless a society also generates and defends irreducibly individual autonomy and conscience, well-intentioned social engineering may reduce persons to clients, cogs, or cannon fodder. Each side often clings to its own truths so tightly that they become half-truths that curdle into lies, leaving each side right only about how the other is wrong.
The consequent damage to the public sphere can’t be undone by clinging to the left-vs.-right floor plan that I mentioned at the outset and that still limits many people I know. Analysis and organizing against socioeconomic inequities are indispensable, but they’re insufficient. That’s equally true of conservative affirmations of communal and religious values that bow quickly to accumulated wealth that, as Oliver Goldsmith noted, preys upon and dissolves values and bonds that conservatives claim to cherish. (See this website’s sections, “Folly on the Left” and “Conservative Contradictions.”)
Ever since Madison helped to craft a Constitution to channel and deflect such factions, the republic has needed an open, circulating elite – not a caste or an aristocracy — of “disinterested” leaders whose private or special needs don’t stop them from looking out for the public and its potential to govern itself by reflection and choice. When John McCain voted in 2017 against repealing Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act, he admonished Senate colleaguesto “learn how to trust each other again and by so doing better serve the people who elected us…Considering the injustice and cruelties inflicted by autocratic governments, and how corruptible human nature can be, the problem solving our system does make possible…and the liberty and justice it preserves, is a magnificent achievement…. It is our responsibility to preserve that, even when it requires us to do something less satisfying than ‘winning.’”
Maybe McCain had a good speechwriter, but he believed what he was saying, even though he hadn’t always lived up to it. (See the section, “Leaders and Misleaders”.) Another flawed but sincere legatee of the founders’ Constitutional project was New York Mayor Ed Koch, whom I assailed for years until I got to know him a little better.
Many Americans still do uphold the civic-republican promise –as moderators of candidates’ debates; umpires in youth sporting leagues; participants in street demonstrations; board members who aren’t afraid to say, “Now wait a minute, let me make sure that we all understand what this proposal is based on and what it entails;” and as jurors who quiet the ethno-racial voices in their own and fellow-jurors’ heads to join in finding the truth. Truth is a process as much as it’s a conclusion. It emerges not from radical pronouncements of the general will or from ecclesiastical doctrines but provisionally, from the trust-building processes of deliberative democracy. “[A]nyone who is himself willing to listen deserves to be listened to,” Brewster wrote. “If he is unwilling to open his mind to persuasion, then he forfeits his claim on the audience of others.” In politics, unlike science, the vitality of truth-seeking matters as much as the findings.
At any historical moment, one side’s claims can seem liberating against the other side’s dominant conventions and cant: In the 1930s, Orwell sought liberation in democratic-socialist movements against ascendant fascist powers, and his sympathy remained with workers, but sometimes that required him to oppose workers’ self-proclaimed champions, especially Stalinists, as well as their capitalist exploiters. Orwell “never forgot that both left and right tend to get stuck in their imagined upswings against concentrated power and to disappoint in the end: The left’s almost willful mis-readings of human nature make it falter in swift, deep currents of nationalism and religion, denying their importance yet surrendering to them abjectly and hypocritically as Soviets did by touting ‘Socialism in One Country’ (i.e., while touting Russian nationalism) and preaching Marxism as a secular eschatology” (i.e., as a religion).
The balance that we should hold out for against ideologues is like that of a person striding on both a left foot and a right one without noticing that, at any instant, all of the body’s weight is on only one foot as the other swings forward and upward in the desired direction. What matters is that the balance enables the stride. Again, it requires both a “left foot” of social equality and provision – without which the individuality and the communal bonds that conservatives claim to cherish couldn’t flourish – and a “right foot” of irreducibly personal responsibility and autonomy, without which any leftist social provision or engineering would reduce persons to passive clients, cogs, cannon fodder, or worse.
A balanced stride can be upset by differences among individuals and by the divisions within every human heart between sociable and selfish inclinations. A strong republic anticipates such imbalances. It sustains an evolving consensus without ceding ground to hatred and violence. It remains vigilant against concentrations of power because it knows how to extend trust in ways that elicit trust and reward it in return. Being ethical and pragmatic, disciplined and free, it acts on virtues and beliefs that armies alone can’t defend and that wealth can’t buy. Ultimately, and ironically, a republic’s or democracy’s strength lies in it very vulnerability, which comes with extending trust. “The presumption of innocence is not just a legal concept,” Kingman Brewster Jr. wrote, in a passage that is now the epitaph on his grave in New Haven. “In common place terms it rests on that generosity of spirit which assumes the best, not the worst, of the stranger.”
Think of Rosa Parks, refusing to move to the back of a public bus in Montgomery, presenting herself not only as a black woman craving vindication against racism but also as a decent, American working Everywoman, damning no one but defending her rights. Presenting herself that way, she lifted the civil society up instead of trashing it as irredeemably racist.
Civic grace like that is heroic, and rare. But after forty years of tracking American civic culture’s ups and downs, I believe that, ultimately, it’s all that we have.
