Week of Feb. 5, 2007

George Soros lunched with some reporters on Saturday at Davos. He talked about spending $600 million on civil society projects during the 1990s, then trying to cut back to $300 million, and how this year it will be between $450 and $500 million. His new projects aim, in Floyd Norris's words, to promote a" common European foreign policy" (read: an anti-American foreign policy) and also to study the integration (or so he thinks) of Muslims in eleven European cities. He included among his dicta a little slight at Bill and Melinda Gates, who"have chosen public health, which is like apple pie." And then, after saying the United States was now recognizing the errors it made in Iraq, he added this comment, as reported by Norris in The New York Times' online"Davos Diary":"To what extent it recognizes the mistake will determine its future." Soros said Turkey and Japan were still hurt by a reluctance to admit to dark parts of their history and contrasted that reluctance to Germany's rejection of its Nazi-era past."America needs to follow the policies it has introduced in Germany. We have to go through a certain deNazification process."

No, you are not seeing things. He said de-Nazification. He is not saying, in the traditional manner of liberal alarmists, that the United States is now where Weimar Germany was. He is saying that the United States is now where Germany after Weimar was. Even for Davos, this was stupid. Actually, worse than stupid. There is a historical analysis, a moral claim, in Soros's word. He believes that the United States is now a Nazi country. Why else would we have to go through a" certain de-Nazification process"? I defy anybody to interpret the remark differently. The analogy between Bush's America and Hitler's Germany is not fleshed out, and one is left wondering how far he would take it. Is Bush like Hitler? If it is"de-Nazification" that we need, then in some sense Bush must be like Hitler. Was the invasion of Iraq like the invasion of Poland? Perhaps. The more one lingers over Soros's word, the more one's eyes pop from one's head. In the old days, the Amerika view of America was propagated by angry kids on their painful way to adulthood; now, it is propagated by the Maecenas of the Democratic Party.

It would be wonderful to evict George W. Bush--quite possibly the worst President in our entire history--from the White House. Thus one can readily understand the temptation to talk about impeaching him. But we should recognize that this conversation is triggered not only by Bush's own performance as President but also, and perhaps more important, by one of the greatest defects of the Constitution, the impeachment clause. Thanks to the Founders, we were given a Constitution that perversely makes us"better off" with a criminal in the White House instead of someone who is"merely" grotesquely incompetent. The reason is that the Constitution provides us with a language to get rid of a criminal President, but it provides us no language, or process, for terminating the tenure of an incompetent one.

To paraphrase the recent Brookings Institution Report from The Wilson Quarterly:

• The relentless American emphasis on making students have fun and feel good about their academic writing skills and their knowledge of history actually translates into the students’ sense that the skills and the knowledge themselves aren't that important. •

It is clear to me that if we focus on trying to make history “cool” and fun, we will be in a hopeless competition with the multi-billion-dollar entertainment industry, with some of its grand winners, such as hip-hop, Grand Theft Auto, Justin Timberlake, The Blair Witch Project, Prince formerly known as Prince, Britney, and Aqua Teen Hunger Force, with its talking box of french fries and his/her friends.

“Success” in such an endeavor to be “cool” would mean more academic failure in history and in academic writing for students.

Kids understand entertainment. Some spend as much as 6 hours and 20 minutes a day on it. They know it doesn’t count. The more we try to make history and academic writing “cool” and fun, the more they will understand that we don’t think they matter and neither should they.

[The 2008 campaign will be] the most interesting presidential election since 1968. We have two parties going through an identity crisis, and a clean slate of very interesting candidates on both sides. It's a crossroads for the country.