Roundup: Media's Take
This is where we excerpt articles from the media that take a historical approach to events in the news.
Michael Barone: Tea Party Brings Energy, Change and Tumult to GOP
Anne Applebaum: Between the U.S. and Britain, an ideological parting
Kelly Shackelford: Why the Texas Textbook Wars Matter to Every American
John Havelock: Two Perceptions of America Speed Toward Decisive Clash
John B. Judis: Obama Needs to Learn Reagan's Lessons from 1982.
Ismael Hossein-zadeh: Champions of Neoliberal Economics are Reversing New Deal Economics
E.J. Dionne Jr.: Is Gordon Brown Great Britain's Harry Truman?
Jeff Shesol: Obama Should Take Heed from FDR on the Supreme Court
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
Jeffrey Gettleman: Why Africa's Wars are Neverending
Source: Foreign Policy (4-1-10)
[Jeffrey Gettleman is East Africa bureau chief for the New York Times.]
There is a very simple reason why some of
Africa's bloodiest, most brutal wars never seem to end: They are not really wars. Not in the traditional sense, at least. The combatants don't have much of an ideology; they don't have clear goals. They couldn't care less about taking over capitals or major cities -- in fact, they prefer the deep bush, where it is far easier to commit crimes. Today's rebels seem especially uninterested in winning converts, content instead to steal other people's children, stick Kalashnikovs or axes in their hands, and make them do the killing. Look closely at some of the continent's most intractable conflicts, from the rebel-laden creeks of the Niger Delta to the inferno in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and this is what you will find.
What we are seeing is the decline of the classic African liberation movement and the proliferation of something else -- something wilder, messier, more violent, and harder to wrap our heads around. If you'd like to call this war, fine. But what is spreading across Africa like a viral pandemic is actually just opportunistic, heavily armed banditry. My job as the New York Times' East Africa bureau chief is to cover news and feature stories in 12 countries. But most of my time is spent immersed in these un-wars....
Of course, many of the last generation's independence struggles were bloody, too. South Sudan's decades-long rebellion is thought to have cost more than 2 million lives. But this is not about numbers. This is about methods and objectives, and the leaders driving them. Uganda's top guerrilla of the 1980s, Yoweri Museveni, used to fire up his rebels by telling them they were on the ground floor of a national people's army. Museveni became president in 1986, and he's still in office (another problem, another story). But his words seem downright noble compared with the best-known rebel leader from his country today, Joseph Kony, who just gives orders to burn.
Even if you could coax these men out of their jungle lairs and get them to the negotiating table, there is very little to offer them. They don't want ministries or tracts of land to govern. Their armies are often traumatized children, with experience and skills (if you can call them that) totally unsuited for civilian life. All they want is cash, guns, and a license to rampage. And they've already got all three. How do you negotiate with that?...
Michael Barone: Tea Party Brings Energy, Change and Tumult to GOP
Source: Washington Examiner (3-14-10)
[Michael Barone, The Examiner's senior political analyst, can be contacted at mbarone@washingtonexaminer.com.]
...In terms of the [tea party's] immediate effect on conventional politics and their potential for continued influence, I think the tea partiers bear an uncanny resemblance to the antiwar activists in the Vietnam War period.
Like the tea partiers, the antiwar folk did not start off affiliated with one political party. They campaigned against an incumbent Democratic president and his political heir in 1968. Four years later some supported Rep. Pete McCloskey's antiwar primary challenge to Richard Nixon. The tea partiers have plenty of corrosive things to say about the Republican politicians of the last decade and at least some of them may support like-minded Democrats.
But if they stay involved, the tea partiers are likely to gravitate to the Republican Party, just as the antiwar folk gravitated to the Democratic Party, on which they had a long-lasting and pervasive effect.
Not all of that effect was positive. Antiwar Democrats beat hawks in primaries and then lost general elections to Republicans. The disarray of the 1968 Democratic National Convention helped beat Hubert Humphrey, and the antiwar 1972 nominee George McGovern lost 49 states. Some antiwar folks voiced an anti-Americanism that turned off ordinary voters.
But antiwar Democrats supplied energy and impressive recruits to their party. Many Democrats who were motivated by dovish views and supported by dovish volunteers and contributors won breakthrough victories in 1974 elections, enabling the party to hold congressional and legislative majorities for much of the next 20 years. And even as Democrats lost support from white Southerners and blue-collar men, their antiwar tendency helped them win support from affluent and culturally liberal suburbanites who now, despite Democrats' workingman rhetoric, form the dominant part of the party base....
It's not clear whether the tea partiers' influence on Republicans will last as long as the antiwar cohort's imprint on Democrats. But their concern -- the fact that government spending is on a trajectory to increase far beyond revenues -- seems likely to persist. In which case a spontaneous movement that no one predicted and that no one person led could end up, again, reshaping one of our great political parties.
Robert Rector: Losing the War on Poverty
Source: National Review Online (3-16-10)
[Robert Rector is a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation.]
Today marks the 46th anniversary of the War on Poverty. On March 16, 1964, Pres. Lyndon Johnson announced a new government mobilization that he claimed would yield “total victory” against poverty in the United States. Johnson promised his “war” would be an “investment” that would “return its cost manifold to the entire economy.”
The War on Poverty sparked an astonishing growth in what is called “means-tested” welfare — that is, programs targeted exclusively toward poor and low-income Americans. (By contrast, programs such as Social Security and Medicare are not means-tested and provide assistance to the elderly across the entire population.) The means-tested welfare system today comprises more than 70 federal programs, including food stamps, public housing, the Earned Income Tax Credit, and Medicaid....
Means-tested welfare spending has grown enormously since President Johnson’s day. After adjusting for inflation, welfare spending today is 13 times greater than it was then. Means-tested welfare spending was 1.2 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) in 1964; by 2008, it had reached 5 percent of GDP....
What has the U.S. gained from this investment? When Lyndon Johnson launched his war, he declared that it would strike “at the causes, not just the consequences of poverty.” He added, “Our aim is not only to relieve the symptom of poverty, but to cure it and, above all, to prevent it.”
Ross Terrill: How Not to Gain China's Respect
Source: Weekly Standard (3-15-10)
[Ross Terrill, associate in research at Harvard’s Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, is the author of The New Chinese Empire and several books published in Chinese in the PRC.]
The excellent obituaries for Alexander Haig showed his many facets—four-star general, crisis manager at the White House, national security deputy to Henry Kissinger, commander of NATO, charming though prickly secretary of state—but left out his revealing collision with Beijing’s “bite your friend” syndrome in 1981-82. This syndrome, which predated Haig, lives on to threaten President Obama.
Beijing often tries to instill in any “friend of China” a feeling of obligation to do even more for the People’s Republic. Show yourself susceptible to the Middle Kingdom, and smiles lead to demands. Call it bite-your-friend. Someone known to be wary of China, by contrast, does better, as Beijing must snap to reality for the encounter.
Serving as President Carter’s national security adviser in the late 1970s, Zbigniew Brzezinski tilted dramatically toward China to draw it into an anti-Soviet phalanx. Responding, the Chinese asked more and more of Carter—and mostly got it.
As President Reagan’s secretary of state, Haig in 1981 touted China’s global strategic importance and offered to suspend Washington’s prohibition on arms sales to the PRC. China quickly demanded Hawk missiles, Mark 48 anti-submarine torpedoes, and armored personnel carriers. Haig, excited about his Oriental initiative, hoped to swap arms to Beijing for China’s acceptance of Washington’s sale of the F-X fighter plane to Taiwan, to which Reagan was committed. Haig miscalculated.
China not only angrily objected to the F-X for Taiwan, but demanded of Haig a firm date for ending all arms sales to Taiwan. Haig faced two problems. Reagan decided his secretary of state had gone too far toward accommodating Beijing. And the Chinese, noting Haig’s gesture, pushed for the extra mile.
Haig persisted. When John Holdridge, assistant secretary for East Asia, told Haig it would be difficult to get the Pentagon to agree to sell missiles and armored personnel carriers to Beijing, Haig shouted at him: “Get it through your thick head. We’re going to sell arms to China in September [1981], so we can sell arms to Taiwan in January!” Haig soon resigned, largely over this mess—and China lost a friend.
In June 1982, Haig was replaced by George Shultz, who had a less expansive view of China’s capacity to balance Moscow than Haig (or Kissinger) and felt China needed the United States more than the United States needed China. Shultz spoke of China’s important “regional role” but reserved the term “strategic” for Washington’s relationship with Japan.
It must have stunned Haig that Reagan and Shultz sharply improved relations with China. Wrote James Mann in his 1999 book About Face, “Surprisingly, between 1983 and 1988, the Reagan administration forged a closer, more extensive working relationship with China’s Communist regime than the two governments had before or have had since.”...
Michael Lind: Bring It On, Ayn Rand Geeks
Source: Salon.com (3-15-10)
[Michael Lind is the editor of New American Contract at the New America Foundation.]
A new right is being born, following the death of the older conservative movement. Fortunately for the left, the next American right is dominated by libertarians like Ron Paul and Paul Ryan, who worship at the shrine of Ayn Rand.
Why is this great news for progressives? The American conservative movement enjoyed its successes only after William F. Buckley Jr. expelled Rand and her followers from the movement in the late 1950s. Reflecting the vanity of their guru, the Randians have long insisted that "objectivists" are not libertarians. (Pssst: They are!) The non-Randian libertarians split with the mainstream conservative movement in the 1960s, complaining that conservatives were too interventionist in foreign policy and too soft on big government at home. Having lost the libertarian isolationists, the conservatives went on to success after success, dominating the presidency after 1968 and Congress in 1994.
Buckley's "movement conservatism" sought to unite the anti-communist, socially conservative and free-market wings of the right on the basis of an ideology of "fusionism" cooked up by National Review editor Frank Meyer. This did not work, and by the 1980s there were three distinct political-intellectual movements on the right: the neoconservatives (originally pro-Cold War social democrats and liberals), the religious right and the libertarians. The coalition survived the end of the Cold War, but not the presidency of George W. Bush....
It is merciful, perhaps, that Buckley did not live to see the detested Ayn Rand become the central intellectual figure on the right. Until recently the only prominent conservative known to have been influenced at one point by the Evita of the nerds was Alan Greenspan, and he was given a pass for a youthful indiscretion. Now two of the stars of the emergent right, Ron Paul and Paul Ryan, are professed disciples of the Mary Baker Eddy of egotism. "The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand," Ryan told a convention of Randians in 2005. Ron Paul named his son Rand Paul....
Consider Ryan's "Roadmap for America's Future." As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has pointed out, it would raise taxes on middle-class Americans while dramatically lowering them on the über-rich. Ryan would use a national value-added tax (a good idea) to replace income, capital gains and estate taxes (a terrible idea). He would privatize Social Security and replace Medicare with vouchers, and then allow inflation to eat away at the value of the vouchers. Oh, and despite his claims, his Rand-inspired redistribution of income upward to the virtuously selfish rich would not eliminate the deficit....
Mike Davis: Labor War in the Mojave
Source: The Nation (3-11-10)
[Mike Davis is the author of In Praise of Barbarians: Essays against Empire (Haymarket Books, 2008) and Buda's Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb (Verso, 2007). He is currently working on a book about cities, poverty, and global change.]
The biggest hole in California, with the exception of the current state budget, is Rio Tinto's huge open-pit mine at the town of Boron, near Edwards Air Force Base, eighty miles northeast of Los Angeles.
Seen from Google Earth, it is easy to imagine that the 700-foot-deep crater was blasted out of the Mojave Desert by an errant asteroid or comet. From the vantage point of Highway 58, however, the landscape is enigmatic: a mile-long rampart of ochre earth and gray mudstone, terminating at what looks like a giant chemical refinery....
According to Dean Gehring, the latest in a succession of recent mine managers, international competition compels a drastic switch to "high-performance teams that have the flexibility to do many different jobs, and we need to reward and promote our top performers. The old contract doesn't allow us to do that."
The company wants a contract that would allow it to capriciously promote or demote; to outsource union jobs; to convert full-time to part-time positions with little or no benefits; to reorganize shift schedules without warning; to eliminate existing work rules; to cut holidays, sick leave and pension payments; to impose involuntary overtime; and to heavily penalize the union if workers file grievances against the company with the National Labor Relations Board.
Rio Tinto, in essence, claims the right to rule by divine whim, to blatantly discriminate against and even fire employees for felonies like "failing to have or maintain satisfactory inter-personal relationships with Company personnel, client personnel, contractor, and visitors."...
Once upon a time, there were several thousand mining communities in North America; perhaps fewer than a hundred still exist. Boron (unincorporated, population 2,000) is one of the survivors--and all the more anomalous since it is not in the red desert of Wyoming or the hills of West Virginia but in the outer orbit of Los Angeles sprawl. In the boom days of the 1930s it was a textbook company town, where employees of what was then called Pacific Borax--many of them, like Terri Judd's grandfather, Dust Bowl Oklahomans--lived in company houses and used company scrip to shop at the company store.
Unionization (originally by an old AFL affiliate called the Borax Workers Union) ended the feudal era, but the one-employer character of the town remained intact until a bitter, often violent 132-day strike in 1974 forced blacklisted miners to seek new jobs. Some found work at a nearby rocket-test range, while others learned to polish mirrors at an Israeli-built solar power station or applied for guard jobs at the federal prison up the road.
Richard Lourie: Russia, A Country Without Icons
Source: Moscow Times (3-15-10)
[Richard Lourie is author of “The Autobiography of Joseph Stalin” and “Sakharov: A Biography.”]
In the past, Russia always had a strong sense of identity, often centered around images. When Vladimir I of Kiev baptized Kievan Rus in 988, the pagan idols were whipped, burned and hurled into the river. The Bolsheviks were iconoclasts too, turning churches into warehouses and using icons for flooring in banyas.
But the end of Soviet Russia was different from the end of pagan or tsarist Russia. True, in the initial exuberance, statues of Lenin, Stalin and others were smashed or hurled to the ground. But unlike the Christians and the Bolsheviks, no one was waiting in the wings with a ready-made ideology or new icons.
The Russian national idea, a somewhat vague and clumsy formulation, indicates a vision of goals and a system of values embraced by the state and the people to create the country’s identity at a given historical moment. Typically, it stresses the uniquely Russian elements in its opposition to the West. That identity has failed to crystallize in the new Russia in the nearly 20 years since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
That vacuum has been described in both positive and negative terms. Fyodor Lukyanov, editor of Russia In Global Affairs, says in contrast to former U.S. President George W. Bush and “the missionaries on the other side of the Atlantic … Russian policy can be criticized for many things, but it has managed so far to avoid the inclination toward ideology.” Opposition leader Gary Kasparov sees it in darker tones: “The Cold War was based on ideas — like them or not. [Prime Minister Vladimir] Putin’s only idea can be concentrated into the motto ‘Let’s steal together.’” Yabloko leader Grigory Yavlinsky terms the new Russia as “capitalism with a Stalinist face.”
Describing the present is only the beginning. The next and more difficult steps are pointing out a new vision for Russia and indicating the practical path that leads to it...
Anne Applebaum: Between the U.S. and Britain, an ideological parting
Source: WaPo (3-16-10)
[Anne Applebaum is a weekly columnist for The Post, writing on foreign affairs.]
"Two nations, divided by a common language" is how somebody once described Britain and America. "Two nations, divided by a common politics" is another way to put it. Ever since the days of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, the political fortunes of the United States and Britain have tracked and reflected one another in odd ways. For many years they moved in tandem: The harmonious center-right union of Thatcher-Reagan was followed by the equally harmonious, if less affectionate, center-left union of Tony Blair and Bill Clinton.
But then came Blair-Bush, which worked out rather badly for Blair. Now we have Brown-Obama, who barely speak to each other. And even though in Gordon Brown and Barack Obama we once again have two "center-left" candidates in charge, a distinct lack of harmony characterizes transatlantic political debates. Our health-care conversations, for example, are totally different. This became apparent last year when Republicans held up the British health-care system as an example of the nightmare that might await America if Obama's health-care proposals were passed. British conservatives -- who had been bashing their centralized system for years -- immediately rallied to its defense. David Cameron, the Conservative Party leader who is angling to become prime minister in this spring's election, has even promised to "ring-fence" health care so that it is not affected by future budget cuts.
Further evidence that the days of ideological cross-pollination are over can be seen in discussions about education. Many of the troubles of the British state school system sound familiar to American ears: Falling standards, inner-city violence, private schools outperforming their state counterparts, uneven performance in different parts of the country. To combat these ills in the United States, 48 governors have started talking about the voluntary bipartisan creation of "national standards," an idea the Obama administration and its supporters have embraced with enthusiasm, as have many conservative education reformers. This is now the cutting edge of the U.S. education debate: A child's education must not depend "primarily on ZIP code," the low standards of many school districts must be raised, and only concerted action across the nation can fix the problem.
But the British already have not only national standards but also a national curriculum and national exams. And it is precisely those curriculums and exams that the British public want to escape. Hence the popular Conservative Party proposal: Liberate state schools from "stifling state control." Allow parents and teachers to start small charter schools from scratch. Let the child's Zip code determine not only the curriculum, in other words, but the nature and philosophy of the school, the size of the classes, the methods of education. Make schools not more alike but more different. Free pupils from pointless exams.
I don't want to make too much of these examples: More than anything else, the divergence of our transatlantic debates reflects cultural differences that have always been a lot deeper than they first seem. But they do reflect some transatlantic and even global political changes...
Bret Stephens: The Israeli Settlements Aren't the Problem
Source: WSJ (3-15-10)
[Bret Stephens writes the Journal's "Global View" column on foreign affairs.]
I once got an angry letter from Baruch Goldstein's father. Goldstein, remember, was an Israeli settler who in 1994 entered the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron and gunned down 29 Muslim worshippers. A decade later, I wrote a column for the Jerusalem Post in which I described Goldstein as personifying Israel's lunatic extreme. The father insisted that his son deserved to be celebrated as a hero. Indeed, his grave site was transformed into a shrine until the Israeli army eventually tore it down.
It's easy to dislike Israel's settlements, and still easier to dislike many of the settlers. Whatever your view about the legality or justice of the enterprise, it takes a certain cast of mind to move your children to places where they are more likely to be in harm's way. In the current issue of the American Interest, former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Daniel Kurtzer persuasively spells out the many ways in which the settlement movement has undermined Israel's own rule of law, and hence its democracy. And as last week's diplomatic eruption over the prospective construction of 1,600 housing units in municipal Jerusalem shows, the settlements are a constant irritant to the United States, one friend Israel can't afford to lose.
So it would be a splendid thing for Israel to tear down its settlements, put the settlers behind its pre-1967 borders and finally reach the peace deal with the Palestinians that has been so elusive for so long.
Except for one problem: The Israeli-Palestinian conflict isn't territorial. It's existential. Israelis are now broadly prepared to live with a Palestinian state along their borders. Palestinians are not yet willing to live with a Jewish state along theirs.
That should help explain why it is that in the past decade, two Israeli prime ministers—Ehud Barak in 2000 and Ehud Olmert in 2008—have put forward comprehensive peace offers to the Palestinians, and have twice been rebuffed. In both cases, the offers included the division of Jerusalem; in the latter case, it also included international jurisdiction over Jerusalem's holy places and concessions on the subject of Palestinian refugees. Current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has also offered direct peace talks. The Palestinians have countered by withdrawing to "proximity talks" mediated by the U.S.
It also helps explain other aspects of Palestinian behavior. For Hamas, Tel Aviv is no less a "settlement" than the most makeshift Jewish outpost on the West Bank. The supposedly moderate Fatah party has joined that bandwagon, too: Last year, Mohammed Dahlan, one of Fatah's key leaders, said the party was "not bound" by the 1993 Oslo Accords through which the PLO recognized Israel.
Then there is the test case of Gaza. When Israel withdrew all of its settlements from the Strip in 2005, it was supposed to be an opportunity for Palestinians to demonstrate what they would do with a state if they got one. Instead, they quickly turned it into an Iranian-backed Hamas enclave that for nearly three years launched nonstop rocket and mortar barrages against Israeli civilians. Israel was ultimately able to contain that violence, but only at the price of a military campaign that was vehemently denounced by the very people who had urged Israel to withdraw in the first place...
Monday, March 15, 2010
Kevin R. Kosar: Have National Education Standards Arrived?
Source: www.kevinkosar.com (3-15-10)
[Kevin R. Kosar is a researcher and writer in Washington, DC. He is the author of Failing Grades: The Federal Politics of Education Standards. His writings have appeared in scholarly and professional journals, and in popular media. He received his PhD in politics from NYU.]
Skimming the news, one might get the impression that the United States now has national education standards. “National School Standards, at Last,” smiled a March 14 New York Times editorial head.
Although I count myself a supporter of national education standards, I cannot get terribly excited about the developments to date. The reason is simple—despite the progress, we are a long, long way from national education standards.
This is not to begrudge the Common Core State Standards effort. Politically, it was a savvy maneuver—have non-feds (the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers) develop the standards. Meanwhile, the Obama Administration has ponied up cash for the effort and hopes to encourage state adoption of the standards by awarding Race to the Top funds to states that commit to adopting the standards.
As I see it, a host of issues remain between where we are and a system of national education standards.
(1) The proposed standards only cover mathematics and English. This is a sound start, but a solid system of national standards also would include standards for science and history. However, with hot-headed interest groups out there with extreme ideas about evolution and American history, adopting academically credible science and history standards may prove very difficult.
(2) Tests—even if the standards are good, high quality, aligned assessments need to be created and put to use by states. If past performance is the least bit indicative of future results, well, I would not expect standards-based assessments to arrive any time soon.
(3) According to the New York Times, the Obama Administration intends to encourage adoption of the standards by adding 40 points to a state’s application for Race to the Top funds. Considering that there are 500 possible points on the application, it is not clear if offering 40 points is an adequate incentive.
(4) Already, two states—Alaska and Texas—have thumbed their noses at the Common Core Standards, and Massachusetts and Virginia may complain that they already have great education standards and that it isn’t fair for them to have to switch standards. This is not a crazy argument, and it raises the question: will the Obama Administration create a loophole that permits states with good standards also to qualify for the 40 points? If it does, then we definitely won’t have national education standards, as one state after another will belly up to claim that their standards are just as good as the Common Core Standards.
(5) What happens when the Race to the Top funds run out? Unless I am grossly misinformed, the Stimulus Act was a one-time deal. It did not create an educational entitlement nor did it provide the Secretary of Education with an endless pot of money for all time.
Hence, one can easily imagine a scenario in which states agree to adopt the standards, take the money, and then drag their feet in adopting the standards. After the Race to the Top money runs out, states might then quietly proclaim “mission accomplished.”
Kelly Shackelford: Why the Texas Textbook Wars Matter to Every American
Source: FOX News (3-11-10)
[Kelly Shackelford, Esq., is president and CEO of Liberty Institute, a post he has held since 1997.]
...Texas is in the process of adopting its social studies standards, which only happens every ten years. The standards cover U.S. Government, American History, World History, and more, and they affect how students in grades K – 12 see America, its founding principles, and its heroes for the next decade.
More than that, because Texas is one of the largest consumers of textbooks in the nation, publishers use these curriculum standards for textbooks that are distributed in nearly every state in the union. Thus, what happens in Texas will impact the nation.
Probably for that reason, a liberal onslaught has been unleashed to try to influence these education standards. An unelected review panel, not the elected members of Texas State Board of Education (SBOE), attempted to push through a number of highly questionable changes to the standards – removing Independence Day, Neil Armstrong, Daniel Boone, and Christopher Columbus – from them. They even dumped Christmas and replaced it with Diwali. You can’t make this stuff up! After a huge outcry from citizens and strong leadership by conservatives on the Texas State Board of Education, each of these changes was reversed.
Sadly, the attacks didn’t stop there. Albert Einstein and Thomas Edison were removed from World History, yet Mary Kay and Wallace Amos (of Famous Amos Cookies) were added, it appears, for more “diversity.” That’s unbelievable. Edison is the greatest inventor in American history with over 1,000 patents; oh, and by the way, that Einstein guy was pretty successful too!
Again, that’s part of why the liberals attack. They don’t like the concept of American exceptionalism, both by those who were born here and by the other great high-skilled men and women who are so attracted to the United States that they moved here from other countries.
Thankfully, the conservatives on the SBOE once again held the line. Edison and Einstein are back in World History. An attack to remove “B.C.” and “A.D.” -- denoting historical time periods before and after the birth of Christ – also lost, and, so far, the attempt to remove the statement about the religious basis of the founding of the country has failed.
These battles are not over. More votes are coming....
Gabriel Winant: Texas Messes with History
Source: Salon.com (3-14-10)
[Gabriel Winant is a freelance writer and graduate student, currently living in the United Kingdom.]
Texas chauvinists may think their state, with its past as an independent nation, has the coolest history. But they have a hell of a way of taking it out on the rest of us.
With last Friday's lopsided vote, the Texas State Board of Education has preliminarily imposed new standards for the state’s history textbooks. Because the Texas market is so large, textbook publishers from around the country have to cater to what Texas wants. And what Texas wants is right-wing history.
What the board voted for on Friday is more or less what you’d guess: less Franklin Roosevelt, more Ronald Reagan. The board will require students to learn about the key actors and moments in the rise of the New Right: the Moral Majority, Phyllis Schlafly, the Heritage Foundation and the Contract With America. Even the Tea Parties may make their way in.
The list goes on: religious deviant Thomas Jefferson no longer counts as an influential Enlightenment thinker; John Calvin and Thomas Aquinas are his replacements. In learning about economics, students will have to study the libertarian economist Friedrich von Hayek and analyze the decline of the dollar and the end of the gold standard. The board would like greater play for Confederate President Jefferson Davis, and also lengthier discussion of how the two parties broke down on civil rights in the 1960s. The American economic system will be branded "free enterprise," because calling it "capitalism" sounds scarily like something a real, professional historian might say. (Or, alternately, the Wall Street Journal.) We could keep going like this for a while....
The problem with all of this is that it takes the history out of history. The Texas board seems to imagine that all of human existence has been a static conflict between the forces of Almighty God and the Almighty Dollar on the one hand, and the secular humanist socialists on the other. This is not a tenable proposition. You can't proudly claim among your intellectual predecessors both the liberal, pro-civil rights Republicans of 1964 and also Confederate hero Jefferson Davis. You can't be for a small, unobtrusive state and also ignore the fact that "free enterprise" was created by massive government violence. Something has to give. In this case, it's any semblance of honesty in education.
John Havelock: Two Perceptions of America Speed Toward Decisive Clash
Source: Anchorage Daily News (3-13-10)
[John Havelock is a former Alaska attorney general. He lives in Anchorage.]
The uproar over extending government-sponsored medical services is a replay of a regular theme in American politics: the clash between two perceptions of America.
One view has it that America is or should be an interdependent community, bound by social ties, mutual duties and expectancies, an "American System." In the American System, the national government takes a leading role in shaping the community and defining its obligations.
The other view, let's call it the "Autonomous Citizen," has it that America is the last home of untrammeled individualism in which rights and duties arise only from personal contract. The Autonomous Citizen insists upon personal and sectional independence with the least national government possible, allowing free play to the personality and ambition of each individual....
Since [the age of Jackson] we have gone back and forth several times. The American System approach enjoyed revivals in the Civil War, in the turn of the Century Progressive Era, during the combined Great Depression and World War II and finally in the joint presidencies of John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, each time leaving new structures of "progress," each time followed by political forces bent on rolling back the changes but not entirely succeeding....
The nation is the default village. Shifting technologies as well as demographics have changed the nation. Medical science has moved beyond tucking in, keeping warm, a shot of whiskey and hoping for the best.
The conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks, looking for a middle way in the controversy over the American system of health, argues that incrementalism is the preferred approach to progress, but history is against him. The American System and the Autonomous Citizen are like tectonic plates, at rest until rising tensions fracture the social structure, awaken a country in crisis. The "Great Recession" has not yet kicked off a new age of systematic reform. But socio-economic distress continues. There will be an earthquake -- soon.
Kevin Cullen: Northern Ireland Remains a Segregated Society
Source: Boston Globe (3-14-10)
[Kevin Cullen, a Globe columnist, was the Globe’s bureau chief in Dublin and London, and covered the conflict in Northern Ireland for more than 20 years.]
For the men who killed Kieran Doherty a few weeks ago, it must have felt like old times. They bound his hands, stripped him of his clothes, and put two bullets in his head. Then they dumped his body on the Braehead Road, outside Derry, near the border, a border separating Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic whose existence has been used to justify murder for the last 90 years....
It could be the men who murdered Kieran Doherty look around and see that the supposedly new Northern Ireland looks suspiciously like the old one. It could be they see a society still so bitterly divided, still so deeply segregated, that they believe they can exploit historical animosities, that they can capitalize on an almost reflexive tendency among most people in Northern Ireland to view things along narrow sectarian lines, as “us versus them,” an “us” that remains largely defined by a combination of religion and national identity.
And they may have a point. While the vast majority of people in Northern Ireland have shown a willingness to not kill each other, they have been less enthusiastic about the prospect of actually living with each other. Northern Ireland remains very segregated, physically and psychologically. Most people live in neighborhoods that remain overwhelmingly populated by one of the two main traditions: Catholic nationalists, who aspire to unity with the Irish Republic, and Protestant unionists, who want to remain part of the United Kingdom....
In Northern Ireland, though, there is a lingering acceptance of widespread segregation that belies its role as a model for transforming historically divided societies. In 1971, Reginald Maulding, the British secretary of state for Northern Ireland, cynically suggested the security forces could contain the IRA enough to create “an acceptable level” of violence. The new Northern Ireland seems depressingly willing to countenance an acceptable level of separateness....
With segregation the status quo, there is an enormous duplication of public services, such as schools, community centers, and health clinics. The Alliance Party, the only major political party that draws substantial numbers from both sides of the divide, estimates that duplication of public services costs more than $1 billion a year, this in a place the size of Connecticut with a population of less than 2 million.
But it’s more than money that Northern Ireland is losing. It is losing the very kind of people that might change things. Some are voting with their feet, others simply not voting at all. Voting participation, which surged in the optimism following the Good Friday Agreement, has slumped. The brain drain, which saw educated young people head to England and everywhere else, slowed after everything looked possible in 1998. But it has picked up again, as a new generation that grew up without widespread violence concludes that peace is nice but not everything. So much creativity, energy, and productivity, lost across the Irish Sea....
John B. Judis: Obama Needs to Learn Reagan's Lessons from 1982.
Source: The New Republic (3-15-10)
[John B. Judis is a senior editor at The New Republic and a visiting fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.]
I have argued that rising unemployment inevitably imperils the political prospects of a president and his party. So I’m not surprised that President Barack Obama’s approval ratings have steadily fallen over the last year, or that Democrats have fared poorly in recent elections. And it’s fair to say that if unemployment continues to rise, or stays at the same elevated level, the Democrats will have trouble in the midterm elections this November.
Still, this is not an iron law. Sometimes other factors have overshadowed rising unemployment or falling wages. In 2002, Republicans were able to parlay the public’s trust in George W. Bush’s war on terror into election victories. And a president’s political acumen--his ability to put the best light on his and his party’s accomplishments--can mitigate the effects of rising unemployment. That’s what Ronald Reagan and the Republicans achieved in the 1982 midterm elections.
From January 1982 to November 1982, the unemployment rate rose from 8.6 to 10.4 percent. On election eve, unemployment was higher than it had been since the Great Depression, and many voters expected the economy to continue to decline. No party had faced a similar kind of economic downfall since Franklin Roosevelt in 1938, and in that midterm election, the Democrats had lost 72 House seats and seven Senate seats.
Using economic models, some political scientists predicted that Democrats would pick up as many as 50 House seats. The Democrats also hoped to win back the Senate, which they had lost in 1980. But when the votes were tallied, the Republicans lost 26 House seats and kept their 54 seats in the Senate. How did Reagan and the Republicans manage to contain their losses in this midterm election? That’s a question not simply of historical interest, but of direct relevance to Obama and the Democrats who are likely to face a similar, although perhaps not as severe, economic situation in November 2010....
Unlike George W. Bush and the Republicans in 2002, Reagan did not try to divert the electorate’s attention away from the economy. Foreign policy and national security played almost no role in the election. Nor did abortion or school prayer. The election was very much a referendum on Reagan and his economic policies. Many Republican candidates wanted to run on local issues, but Reagan knew that he and his economic policies were going to be more important--in the final tally 70 percent of the voters told pollsters that they were voting “for or against Ronald Reagan”--and he wanted to confront his critics....
Ismael Hossein-zadeh: Champions of Neoliberal Economics are Reversing New Deal Economics
Source: Online Journal (3-15-10)
[Ismael Hossein-zadeh, author of The Political Economy of U.S. Militarism, teaches Economics at Drake University, Des Moines, Iowa.]
The “golden” years of the U.S. economy in the immediate post-WW II period, along with the recovery and expansion of the economies of other industrialized countries, afforded the working class of these countries a decent, even middle-class, standard of living. Combined with extensive social safety-net programs such as the New Deal reforms in the U.S. and Social-Democratic reforms in Europe, the economic recovery and high employment rates of that period paved the way for a relatively cooperative relationship between the working and capitalist classes in these countries....
The laissez-faire doctrine, which firmly believed in the self-correcting ability of unbridled market mechanism, was the dominant economic principle before to the Great Depression. The financial crash of 1929 and the consequent long Depression shattered this long-held, religious-like belief. The Depression, precipitated largely by predatory loan-pushing and the resulting unsustainable bubble of asset (stock) prices, made living conditions for the overwhelming majority of people extremely difficult. The ensuing economic distress, in turn, precipitated popular unrest.
Large numbers of the discontented frequently took to the streets in the early 1930s. Their desire for change swelled the ranks of socialist, communist, and other opposition parties and groups. Left activists gained certain influence among labor ranks and workers’ movement for unionization, illegal in many industries until 1935, spread rapidly. Labor and other grassroots support for third party candidates in the 1932 presidential election resulted in unprecedented number of votes for those candidates. Third-party votes were even more impressive in congressional and local elections. “The union literature was like the labor literature of a century ago -- looking toward a successor to capitalism,” wrote the late Studs Terkel in his Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression (Pantheon Books, p. 309)....
Two principles lay at the core of the ensuing big business-government consensus reforms, which came to be known as the New Deal reforms. The first was that Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” was not capable of resuscitating the badly depressed economy; it needed government’s visible hand. The second principle was that government intervention must be limited to stimulative and distributive measures, and that the management of industries and businesses should be left to the private sector. Facilitating and maintaining a certain level of purchasing power in the market was considered crucial to the New Deal package. While this would provide relief to the economically hard pressed, and thus reduce social tension, it would also stimulate the economy and promise stable growth and rising profitability.
E.J. Dionne Jr.: Is Gordon Brown Great Britain's Harry Truman?
Source: WaPo (3-15-10)
Could Prime Minister Gordon Brown become the Harry Truman of British politics?
For many long months, Brown and his Labor Party were written off as sure losers in this year's election, likely to be set for May 6. David Cameron, the young, energetic and empathetic Conservative Party leader, was all but handed Brown's job by the chattering classes, so consistent and formidable had been his lead in the polls.
But suddenly, Cameron doesn't seem quite so inevitable. One recent poll showed Brown's party within two points of Cameron's. While other surveys show a larger Conservative lead, it is no longer an absurd idea that Brown could push his way into an unexpected new term in office. Truman won the world's most famous upset over Tom Dewey in 1948. A Brown triumph this year would be of comparable magnitude....
Britain's bookies, often better electoral prognosticators than the pollsters, are not yet convinced of the Brown comeback story and still give decent odds to Cameron. For his part, the Conservative leader has reason to count on public exhaustion with Brown and also with a Labor Party that has held power for 13 years.
So, yes, an outright win by Brown still seems a long shot. But then Harry Truman was supposed to lose, too.
James Fallows: The Danger of Romanticizing China's Past
Source: The Atlantic (3-10-10)
[James Fallows is a National Correspondent for The Atlantic. A 25-year veteran of the magazine and former speechwriter for Jimmy Carter, he is also an instrument-rated pilot and a onetime program designer at Microsoft.]
Last April, the British writer J.G. Ballard died at age 79. By chance, on a trip to Shanghai a few days earlier, I'd seen the house where Ballard had lived as a boy in the 1930s, before the Japanese invasion and the experiences that gave rise to his unforgettable novel Empire of the Sun. I described the visit here, along with photos of how the house looked, 70-plus years after the Ballard family had fled, in its new role as a fancy restaurant....
Westerners have to be careful in waxing nostalgic for China's "good old days," especially when this involves artifacts of the colonial era known as the "Hundred Years of Humiliation" in China. But it's objectively true that the early 20th-century architecture and street layout of Shanghai's old "Concession" district make the city distinctive in the world and provide much of its style and very self-aware sense of elegance....
My specific point is simply to note the fate of one structure that has a lasting role in world imaginative history. The larger point, for ongoing discussion, is the complicated relationship between a culture very aware of its thousands of years of history, and the ever-changing forces (eons of poverty, a decade of chaos in the Cultural Revolution, the dawning of a new kind of prosperity-driven chaos now) that have made people uninterested in, unsentimental about, or unable to preserve the physical artifacts of that history. I am glad that I saw this house in the "old days" -- a full 11 months ago.
Sunday, March 14, 2010
Jeff Shesol: Obama Should Take Heed from FDR on the Supreme Court
Source: NYT (3-13-10)
[Jeff Shesol is the author of the forthcoming “Supreme Power: Franklin Roosevelt vs. the Supreme Court.”]
IN his State of the Union address, when President Obama criticized the Supreme Court, Justice Samuel Alito shook his head, scowled and mouthed a two-word dissent: “Not true.” Chief Justice John Roberts, meanwhile, smiled serenely, apparently untroubled by the president’s attack.
Now we know what Chief Justice Roberts really thinks.
Last week, he fired back, describing the scene as “very troubling.” The chief justice painted a harrowing picture of “one branch of government standing up, literally surrounding the Supreme Court, cheering and hollering while the court — according to the requirements of protocol — has to sit there expressionless.”...
This sort of presidential push-and-shove with the judiciary is unlike any since the 1930s, when Franklin Roosevelt waged a very public battle with the court’s conservative majority over the fate of the New Deal — a fight that culminated in Roosevelt’s plan to enlarge and pack the court. The White House tends to welcome comparisons between Presidents Obama and Roosevelt. But in this case, it is an analogy to avoid. Roosevelt’s court fight makes clear just how much Mr. Obama stands to lose in any such protracted struggle....
In his 1937 State of the Union address, Roosevelt warned the court to toe the line, bringing Democrats to their feet in wild applause. (To his disappointment, all nine justices, in a break from precedent, boycotted the speech.) One month later, the president made his audacious proposal to increase the number of justices from 9 to 15, and to fill the new seats with liberals.
Roosevelt was not the first president to spar with the Supreme Court. A number of reform-minded presidents — Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt among them — had complained that the court was wrongheaded or reactionary. But none carried the fight as far as Franklin Roosevelt did, or paid as dearly for it. Congress defeated his proposal to expand the court. And though the court did reverse itself in 1937 — in the middle of the Senate debate on the president’s plan — Roosevelt had split the Democratic Party, reawakened the opposition and undermined his second-term agenda.
The Obama administration should keep this in mind as it escalates its war of words with the court. Even though most Americans agree with the president’s position on campaign spending by corporations, the political upside of attacking the court may be short-lived. It is one thing for a president to forcefully disagree with a decision. But to engage in a public back-and-forth with the chief justice is fraught with risk....
The court’s change in direction in 1937 endured because Roosevelt was ultimately able to replace nearly all the justices with his own appointees. If Justice John Paul Stevens retires at the end of this term, as many analysts expect, Mr. Obama will have the chance to make his second appointment. But even then, he will have to wait for an opportunity to shift the court’s balance of power. Patience, in the face of pressing national challenges, is hard. But change, as is now amply clear, does not come quickly.
Saturday, March 13, 2010
Ralph Peters: Why our 'post-modern presidents' fail
Source: New York Post (3-13-10)
[Ralph Peters has been a Post Opinion columnist since 2002.]
Since the end of World War II, our country has had three great presidents: Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan.
Their politics varied, but these giants stand in sharp contrast to our last three presidents, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and now Barack Obama. The first two presided over gravely flawed presidencies; the third is on his way to outright failure.
What makes these two presidential trios so different? A recent visit to the Truman Museum and Library in Independence, Mo., made me ask what made those great presidents great.
The answer is character. The three greats were men of great character; the three recents, men of great ambition -- driven, in their different ways, by a fateful sense of entitlement.
And you don't build character by punching your ticket at today's Ivy-League universities, then dashing straight into politics.
The people I admire most in life aren't the golden boys (or girls), but those who've come up the hard way. Frankly, failure builds character -- in those who have the gumption to get back up on their feet and fight to succeed.
Until the Reagan years, it was still possible to become president without elite credentials. Harry Truman had only a high-school diploma. Reagan graduated from the sort of college today's Washington insiders mock. Eisenhower was a Military Academy grad -- back when West Point was still an engineering school.
Most important, each man tasted bitter disappointments along the way. Young Harry Truman had to return from Kansas City to work 16-hour days on his family's troubled farm. After combat service in the First World War, he co-owned a men's store -- only to face bankruptcy in the postwar recession. Barely averting that bankruptcy, he paid each debt he owed over the years.
Eisenhower thought his career was finished when he failed to get a combat command during World War I. His peers gained medals while he trained troops Stateside. Years later, he was little more than a football coach in uniform. But he never gave up -- and worked relentlessly at his profession.
Ronald Reagan knew what it felt like to be written off, to be regarded as a second-rater. Descending through B-movies to minor television jobs, he seemed finished. He wasn't. Reagan remade himself to serve the country he loved. And the world's better and safer for it.
Each of these men -- all from rural or small-town backgrounds -- knew hardship, failure and what it was like to sweat for a living. Not one of them would stand a chance of being elected president today...
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