If Obama were a member of an organization that sought one party rule over the nation and, indeed the world...if Obama belonged to an organization that dealt with dictators and even promoted legislation in those dictators' countries that issued life sentences to political undesirables....if Obama belonged to an organization whose leaders routinely expressed admiration for Hitler, Mao, and Stalin...

Well, I don't know what would happen. But one can be sure that Republicans would call for impeachment, and worse.

Yet over ten percent of the Senate Republicans belong to just such an organization. Scary stuff.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=106115324

The dictatorship in question is Uganda, which recently declared homosexuality a crime which carries a sentence of life imprisonment. The law was promoted by the Family.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/ugandas-anti-gay-bill-causes-commonwealth-uproar/article1376503/

http://www.boxturtlebulletin.com/2009/11/14/16671

Military History Field Trip, 11/04/2009

Our theme was the Battle of Germantown and the weeks after. After reading about the battle (and refighting it in a tabletop simulation), we retraced the steps of Washington's army from October 4 through December in 1777.

The first stop was Cliveden, the home of the Chew family in 1777. Here, British light infantry held off the main column of the Continental army, throwing a wrench into Washington's complex plan, which depended on the co-ordination of four divisions on the foggy morning of October 4. The troops here were also the ones who had perpetrated the Paoli Massacre, perhaps giving Washington added cause for reducing the Chew House before moving on.






Then, we headed to Rittenhousetown, near the site of where Washington had ordered his Pennsylvania militia to assault the Hessian positions on the other side of the Wissahickon Creek. Here, we got a sense of how terrain effects battlefield decisions. It's not surprising that the militia commander decided that an attack was not feasible.







Our next stop was St. Thomas' Church in Whitemarsh. Washington had decided to camp for the winter nearby (at a place known very well to our students) until a skirmish here convinced him that a site further away from Philadelphia would be more prudent. He chose, of course, Valley Forge.










Here, we once again surveyed the terrain to understand Washington's decisions to choose Valley Forge as a site and why he arranged the camp as he did. We inspected the winter quarters to get a sense of the ordeal the Continental Army had to endure at Valley Forge. We also chased deer, abandoned Voltaire, and goofed around on cannon.

Vive la revolution

Lynn Hunt, former president of the AHA, wrote this piece six years ago. A historian who often takes the Annalistes' approach to "small-ball" history, she offers her view of attempts to find meaning in the French Revolution.

I am posting this here because her emphasis--on the politics of fear, beliefs in conspiracies, and the clash between the ideologies of left of right for the right to define history--seems more relevant today than when this article was written.

The Politics of Spite

Hey Colleagues:
I think PK gets to the point that I was trying to make, one that I believe some of you have taken issue with during the past few days. I hope that you find this post to be of interest.
Peter


October 5, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
The Politics of Spite
By PAUL KRUGMAN
There was what President Obama likes to call a teachable moment last week, when the International Olympic Committee rejected Chicago’s bid to be host of the 2016 Summer Games.
“Cheers erupted” at the headquarters of the conservative Weekly Standard, according to a blog post by a member of the magazine’s staff, with the headline “Obama loses! Obama loses!” Rush Limbaugh declared himself “gleeful.” “World Rejects Obama,” gloated the Drudge Report. And so on.
So what did we learn from this moment? For one thing, we learned that the modern conservative movement, which dominates the modern Republican Party, has the emotional maturity of a bratty 13-year-old.
But more important, the episode illustrated an essential truth about the state of American politics: at this point, the guiding principle of one of our nation’s two great political parties is spite pure and simple. If Republicans think something might be good for the president, they’re against it — whether or not it’s good for America.
To be sure, while celebrating America’s rebuff by the Olympic Committee was puerile, it didn’t do any real harm. But the same principle of spite has determined Republican positions on more serious matters, with potentially serious consequences — in particular, in the debate over health care reform.
Now, it’s understandable that many Republicans oppose Democratic plans to extend insurance coverage — just as most Democrats opposed President Bush’s attempt to convert Social Security into a sort of giant 401(k). The two parties do, after all, have different philosophies about the appropriate role of government.
But the tactics of the two parties have been different. In 2005, when Democrats campaigned against Social Security privatization, their arguments were consistent with their underlying ideology: they argued that replacing guaranteed benefits with private accounts would expose retirees to too much risk.
The Republican campaign against health care reform, by contrast, has shown no such consistency. For the main G.O.P. line of attack is the claim — based mainly on lies about death panels and so on — that reform will undermine Medicare. And this line of attack is utterly at odds both with the party’s traditions and with what conservatives claim to believe.
Think about just how bizarre it is for Republicans to position themselves as the defenders of unrestricted Medicare spending. First of all, the modern G.O.P. considers itself the party of Ronald Reagan — and Reagan was a fierce opponent of Medicare’s creation, warning that it would destroy American freedom. (Honest.) In the 1990s, Newt Gingrich tried to force drastic cuts in Medicare financing. And in recent years, Republicans have repeatedly decried the growth in entitlement spending — growth that is largely driven by rising health care costs.
But the Obama administration’s plan to expand coverage relies in part on savings from Medicare. And since the G.O.P. opposes anything that might be good for Mr. Obama, it has become the passionate defender of ineffective medical procedures and overpayments to insurance companies.
How did one of our great political parties become so ruthless, so willing to embrace scorched-earth tactics even if so doing undermines the ability of any future administration to govern?
The key point is that ever since the Reagan years, the Republican Party has been dominated by radicals — ideologues and/or apparatchiks who, at a fundamental level, do not accept anyone else’s right to govern.
Anyone surprised by the venomous, over-the-top opposition to Mr. Obama must have forgotten the Clinton years. Remember when Rush Limbaugh suggested that Hillary Clinton was a party to murder? When Newt Gingrich shut down the federal government in an attempt to bully Bill Clinton into accepting those Medicare cuts? And let’s not even talk about the impeachment saga.
The only difference now is that the G.O.P. is in a weaker position, having lost control not just of Congress but, to a large extent, of the terms of debate. The public no longer buys conservative ideology the way it used to; the old attacks on Big Government and paeans to the magic of the marketplace have lost their resonance. Yet conservatives retain their belief that they, and only they, should govern.
The result has been a cynical, ends-justify-the-means approach. Hastening the day when the rightful governing party returns to power is all that matters, so the G.O.P. will seize any club at hand with which to beat the current administration.
It’s an ugly picture. But it’s the truth. And it’s a truth anyone trying to find solutions to America’s real problems has to understand.

Battle of Germantown Re-enactment

This year, I took my son to the re-enactment of the Battle of Germantown, which takes place at Cliveden, formerly known as the Chew House. The Chew House was the site of the battle's turning point, and it provides a great backdrop for this annual commemoration. For details of the event see revolutionarygermantown.org.

This guy is one of the best interpreters I have ever seen, period. He spins a compelling tale about the role of blacks in both the British and Continental armies. He does it with humor, insight, and showmanship. Bravo!


















Here come the generals, sharing a peaceful moment together before hostilities erupt















"May I have a photo, sir?"
"There's a price. You must name my unit."
"You're a Hessian grenadier."
"Correct. You may take your photograph."
Score!














This private from the 1st R.I. agreed to a photograph without a trivia challenge.

















It just wouldn't be a re-enactment without highlanders, now, would it? Perhaps they would paint themselves blue if I asked?

The guy in the foreground was pretty funny. He broke ranks to come chat with us punters while his unit was stationed in reserve.













Get that gun into position!
















The militia on parade.














The Pennsylvania rifles. The actual unit was positioned a few miles away, near the Rittenhouse Town mill. But we're all glad they showed up.










The Continental army makes ready to advance on the Chew House.












But the British stand ready.















Washington's army gives as good as they get.













Out boys from Pennsylvania harry the British flank.














Hold the line!












The British retreat into the Chew House.














My son, who thought the loud noises were great, was seriously worried about the welfare of the horse.











Alas, the rebels are once again stymied by the defense of the Chew House. Perhaps next year can bring a different result...

Entangled Giant - The New York Review of Books

I guess it's not so easy to roll back executive power. Here's a good short history of expanding executive power: Entangled Giant - The New York Review of Books

Shared via AddThis

We have so much work to do...

The following quote from the 9/12 rally in DC shows how deeply in need our country is of good history teachers:

But some gripes were new. I was especially struck by the tea baggers' obsession with czars. Everyone knew the number of czars Obama appointed: 37. And nobody was happy with them. "They're socialist radicals," said Davy Reeves of Kalamazoo, Mich. "I don't like the idea of all these czars," said Geri Shea of Leesburg, Va. "It's unconstitutional." (Original Slate.com article)

So now, "czar" equals "socialist." But perhaps I should not be surprised...



















I mean, they're all the same, right?

Truthiness Check on Obama

During the Election season, David turned me on to politifact.org, a nonpartisan fact-checking website that rates statements by public figures on a scale ranging from "True" to "Pants on Fire." I have found the site to be an invaluable resource as I pick my way through the claims and counter-claims of the health care debate.

Here's the link to Politifact's ratings on Obama's address to Congress on health care (and on his Heckler, Rep. Joe Wilson).

A Conservative on the Conservative Movement

Okay, let's get this Blog up & running for the 2009-2010 season. Newsweek has just published a Q&A between John Meacham, editor, and Sam Tannenhaus. Tannenhaus' responses remind us how desperately we need the traditional Republican conservatives to rediscover their voice in order for our democracy to get back on track. I for one have not been pleased with how our President has been handling himself on Health Care (and the jury is still out on Afghanistan).Here is an excerpt and the full link is below it.

...The Republicans, so intent on thwarting Obama, have vacated the field, and left it up to the sun party to accept the full burden of legislating us into the future. If the Democrats succeed, Republicans will be tagged as the party that declined even to help repair a broken system and extend fundamental protections—logical extensions of Social Security and Medicare—to some 46 million people who now don't have them. This could marginalize the right for a generation, if not longer. Rush Limbaugh's stated hope that Obama will fail seems to have become GOP doctrine. This is the attitude not of conservatives, but of radicals, who deplore the very possibility of a virtuous government....

http://www.newsweek.com/id/214253

Vive la Revolution!

Dangit. I missed this again this year.

Making Robespierre relevant

The following is an excerpt from an editorial in today's Inquirer:

Conservative unease with common law

Reject judicial activism, reject an American tradition.

By Nicholas Stephanopoulos

Who declared that a country's legal system is "poorly organized if a judge enjoys the dangerous privilege of interpreting the law or adding to its provisions"? Was it Sen. Lindsey Graham questioning Sonia Sotomayor about "judicial activism" last week? Justice Antonin Scalia in a biting dissent? No, it was the French lawyer Nicolas Bergasse in a 1789 report to France's National Assembly.

And what document said "the courts may not directly or indirectly take any part in the exercise of the legislative power" and "will always remain separate from the executive functions"? A proposal by President George W. Bush's Department of Justice? A bill submitted by congressional Republicans to prevent "legislating from the bench"? No, it was the famous Law on Judicial Organization enacted at the height of the French Revolution.

It is no coincidence that today's American conservatives sound like French revolutionaries when they talk about legal issues. To a startling degree, they have embraced continental Europe's historical skepticism of judges and courts.

The full article can be read at http://www.philly.com/inquirer/opinion/20090724_Conservative_unease_with_common_law.html

In a critique of the Freshman packet I am writing this year, Julie challenged me to be more clear about the impact of Rousseau's writing. I am always looking for ways to contrast Locke and Rousseau in ways that would be clear to freshmen, given how close they are about the idea of the "social contract." This article gets at the difference in a meaningful way, without mentioning either philosopher.

Is Historiography Valued?

The Sunday NYT Book Review (19 July 2009) published a review of Margaret McMillan's Dangerous Games - The Uses and Abuses of History by David Kennedy. Kennedy writes,

MacMillan ends by asking whether we would be worse off not knowing any history at all.... [She concludes] that history's ultimate utility does not lie in its predictive or even its explanatory value, but in its ability to teach humility, to nurture an appreciation of the limits on our capacity to see the past clearly or to know fully the historical determinants of our own brief passage in time. "If the study of history does nothing more than teach us humility, skpeticism and awareness of ourselves, then it has done something useful"....

From Kennedy's review, it sounds like an interesting read. Check out his entire review online at the NYT site.

And just on the heals of that review comes this out of Russia: President Dmitry Medvedev has proposed that "questioning the Soviet victory in World War II" become a criminal offense. He has created a commission to deal with "counteractin attempts to falsify history that are to the detriment of the interestss of Russia." Orlando Figes prize-winning book on Stalinist Russia, originally slotted for publication in Russia, has now been cancelled.

MacMillan may be correct in her conclusions.

A different kind of Palin dilemma

This week's Time magazine had an interesting essay from Nancy Gibbs on the issues faced by working women and what Palin's resignation means for others. I especially liked this line: "When a very prominent woman takes on a commitment--say, as governor of a state, whose voters are supposed to be the ones who decide if she's not long able to be effective--and then walks away, a shudder goes through every venue where women fight to assert their rights and affirm their commitment. How much easier does this make it for prospective employers, even unconsciously, to pause before hiring or promoting a woman with young children?" [Read the whole article: http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1909252,00.html]

While I'm certainly not sad to see Palin go (but do fear what other tricks she has up her sleeve), I do agree with Gibbs that this gives working women food for thought.

The Palin Dilemma

Did anyone else watch with stupification when Palin announced her retirement? Every time I hear her speak I become more and more relieved that McCain was not elected (More and more Independents are breathing a sigh of relief). I can't imagine her a heart beat away from the White House. She has had two more appearances just to clarify what she meant in her "retirement announcement," including a more honest accounting of what the law suits are ACTUALLY costing the state of Alaska.

Below is an excerpt from the most recent Newsweek from the author of Nixonland on what is happening to the conservative movement within the Republican Party:

The elite conservative fears that the temptation to woo working-class voters will, you know, shade into policies that actually advantage the working class. That fear surfaced recently when Rush Limbaugh—whom Frum himself has singled out as one of the dangerous populists dragging the Republicans down—dismissed those who criticized the AIG bonuses as "peasants with their pitchforks" who must be silenced for the sake of conservative orthodoxy. But it's harder to persuade the economically less fortunate to respect conservative orthodoxy during a recession. That's starting to make some conservatives nervous.

Another thing that makes some elite conservatives nervous in this recession is the sheer level of unhinged, even violent irrationality at the grassroots. In postwar America, a panicky, violence-prone underbrush has always been revealed in moments of liberal ascendency. In the Kennedy years, the right-wing militia known as the Minutemen armed for what they believed would be an imminent Russian takeover. In the Carter years it was the Posse Comitatus; Bill Clinton's rise saw six anti-abortion murders and the Oklahoma City bombings. Each time, the conservative mainstream was able to adroitly hive off the embarrassing fringe while laying claim to some of the grassroots anger that inspired it. Now the violence is back. But this time, the line between the violent fringe and the on-air harvesters of righteous rage has been harder to find. This spring the alleged white-supremacist cop killer in Pittsburgh, Richard Poplawski, professed allegiance to conspiracist Alex Jones, whose theories Fox TV host Glenn Beck had recently been promoting. And when Kansas doctor George Tiller was murdered in church, Fox star Bill O'Reilly was forced to devote airtime to defending himself against a charge many observers found self-evident: that O'Reilly's claim that "Tiller the baby killer" was getting away with "Nazi stuff" helped contribute to an atmosphere in which Tiller's alleged assassin believed he was doing something heroic.

At least in the past, those who wished to represent their movement as cosmopolitan and urbane could simply point to William F. Buckley as the right's most prominent spokesman. Now Buckley is gone, and the most prominent spokesmen—the Limbaughs and O'Reillys and Becks—can be heard mouthing attitudes once confined to the violent fringe. For the second time in three months, Fox heavily promoted anti-administration "tea party" events this past Fourth of July—rallies in praise of secession and the Articles of Confederation, at which speakers "joked" about a coup against the communist Muslim Barack Obama like the one against Manuel Zelaya in Honduras. "What's going on at Fox News?" Frum recently asked, excoriating Beck for passing out to followers books by the nutty far-right conspiracy theorist W. Cleon Skousen. If you were an elite conservative, you might be embarrassed too.

The conservative intellectuals once were able to work together more effectively with the conservative unwashed. Now, more and more, their recent irritation renders them akin to the Stalinist commissars mocked by poet Bertolt -Brecht, who asked if they might "dissolve the people/And elect another." The bargain the right has offered the downwardly mobile, culturally insecure traditionalist—give us your votes, and we will give you existential certitudes in a world that seems somehow to have gone crazy—is looking less like good politics all the time.

Perlstein is the author of Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America.

And now a word from our sponsor...

OK, I found a link to this ad for Blackberries off the Phillies website.

Ad for Blackberry

It's cute, and has a historical theme. But what I find interesting is how the ad plays off the expectation of ignorance on the part of the viewer. Although recent evidence suggests that skilled craftsmen were more common than slaves on the pyramid construction sites, it's a little glaring to overlook them (imagine an ad campaign set int he antebellum south without reference to slavery). And nowhere does it suggest that the pyramids were tombs. (There's even a moment where the Pharoah synchs his calendar with that of the foreman: "The boss is coming tomorrow! Get those last stones in place." My response was "Wow, those pharoahs must have been organized to schedule their own deaths like that.").

Of course, my main reaction to the premise ("What if the ancient Egyptians had Blackberries?") is not "Gosh, they would have been able to build a lot more," but "Wow, I bet they would have wasted a lot of time on Facebook."

Politics & Sex

So the great governor of SC is the latest in a long line of elected officials who have committed sexual peccadilloes. How "wonderful" is it to know that he is yet one more transgressor in the world ruled by "family values?" As a Congressman, Sanford was "morally outraged" by Clinton's transgressions and voted for impeachment (and does everyone remember what Newt Gingrich did and how he voted?). I would argue that the origins of our hyper-partisanship began with the misguided impeachment move by the Republicans against Clinton. Does anyone remember what the special prosecutor was empowered to investigate? Whitewater investments in Arkansas; NOT a cum stained dress worn by Monica Lewinsky.

Back in the gold old days our country was not hurt by the extracurricular activities of either FDR or JFK. But then along came the Moral Majority and their successors and now too many Americans hyperventilate over extramarital affairs. I don't care! Just be a good conservative, moderate, or liberal and represent us on important issues involving the economy and foreign affairs. Stay out of our bedrooms!! But I do get a good laugh every time one of the Republicans wearing the family values banner takes a hit because it will hopefully move us that much closer to ditching that old canard.

Iran vs. Tiananmen Square

Several news outlets have drawn comparisons between the current Iranian opposition movement and the Chinese students who took to the streets in 1989. Most clumsily use "Tiananmen Square" as a metaphor for "government crackdown on popular protests." Some, like THIS PIECE from NPR delve a little deeper.

In light of the virulent criticism of Obama's response to the situation (where were these proponents of "universal American values" when were were fixing electrodes to testicles?), I offer our own revolution as a lens through which to view Obama's restraint. France, easily the world's most powerful nation in 1776, waited two years before throwing its open support behind the colonists' revolt against the British crown, despite a historical rivalry with Great Britain. They waited to see if the new government and its fledgling army could stand up on its own first.

Imagine if the French had landed troops on July 5, 1776. How would that have changed global perception of the new country? How would the treaties have ended the war have been different if French intervention had been the backbone of the American army from almost the outset of the war? Domestically, how would Americans' view of their own government have been weakened by the perception that their revolution was in no small part the work of a superpower half a world away? Historically, support for France created deep divisions in the young republic. If there were even more cause to doubt the loyalties of politicians like Jefferson, how much more bitter would the infancy of American politics have been!

So take your time, Mr. President. Give the Iranians the chance our Founding Fathers had to control their destiny.

Yes, The Gilded Age IS important!

Since the mid 1980s and the rise of Ronald Reagan, I have been making a case with my students that we are living through a new era of "Gilded Age Redux." I have remained comfortable with that formulation and have persisted with it right through to the present. I still see no reason to back away from the argument and it is one of several reasons why I believe it is important to be teaching the Gilded Age in the junior year.

Here is a new NYT Book Review that supports my contention:

June 14, 2009

American Macho

By BEVERLY GAGE

REBIRTH OF A NATION

The Making of Modern America, 1877-1920

By Jackson Lears

Illustrated. 418 pp. Harper/HarperCollins Publishers. $27.99

On March 11, 2003, about a week before President George W. Bush began bombing Iraq, the cultural historian Jackson Lears published an Op-Ed article in The New York Times pleading for sanity. He sensed that it was already too late, and suggested that war opponents might be “fingering a rabbit’s foot from time to time.” As a historian, however, Lears couldn’t help asking when the “regenerative” impulse to seek national glory through war first took root. The result is “Rebirth of a Nation,” a fascinating cultural history that locates the origins of Bush-era belligerence in the anxieties and modernizing impulses of the late 19th century.

Lears describes his bookas a “synthetic reinterpretation” of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, an effort to dislodge classics like Richard Hofstadter’s “Age of Reform”(1955) and Robert Wiebe’s “Search for Order, 1877-1920”(1967). It’s an ambitious project; both books, despite legions of critics, have shown remarkable staying power. Fortunately, Lears is well qualified for the task. One of the deans of American cultural history (as well as a professor at Rutgers University), Lears has spent decades writing about turn-of-the-20th-century debates over consumerism, modernity, religion and market capitalism. With “Rebirth of a Nation,” he expands his vision to include politics, war and the presidency as well.

The book’s title — a play on D. W. Griffith’s 1915 film “The Birth of a Nation” — suggests two of Lears’s greatest revisionist concerns: the lasting influence of Civil War violence and “the rising significance of race.” Beginning in the 1870s, he argues, Americans attempted to stitch their country back together around a “militarist fantasy” of Anglo-Saxon supremacy. Yet rather than bringing the hoped-for personal and national redemption, their efforts produced tragedy. According to Lears, the same cultural logic that justified lynching in the American South and the conquest of American Indians in the West eventually led to war in Cuba, the Philippines and Europe — and, a century later, to our own mess in Iraq.

Lears is hardly the first scholar to address these themes. But he is among the most far-reaching, seeking to redefine an era known for its reformist energies as a time when militarism and racismall too often triumphed over more pacific, democratic ideals. Like any good synthesis, “Rebirth of a Nation”dutifully covers the major trends of the age: the rise of industrial capitalism, the expansion of American empire, the tightening chokehold of Jim Crow. What brings new life to this material is the book’s emphasis on how Americans’ “inner lives” came to shape their outer worlds. Events that appear to be struggles for conquest and plunder turn out, in Lears’s view, to be animated by a personal search for meaning. “The rise of total war between the Civil War and World War I was rooted in longings for release from bourgeois normality into a realm of heroic struggle,” he writes. “This was the desperate anxiety, the yearning for rebirth, that lay behind official ideologies of romantic nationalism, imperial progress and civilizing mission — and that led to the trenches of the Western Front.”

This approach can exaggerate the impact of culture (great-power diplomacy, too, led to the trenches). But “Rebirth of a Nation” captures something undeniably powerful about the nation’s psychic crisis as it recovered from the wounds of civil war. The late 19th century brought vast change at nearly every level of culture and society, from the growth of white-collar employment to the dislocations of mass immigration and urbanization. This crisis was particularly acute for white men, who found their traditional sources of power and identity challenged at every turn. In response, Lears writes, they turned to solutions ranging from the muscular Christianity of the Y.M.C.A. to the Populist struggle for self-determination to bloody conflicts on the battlefield.

Lears’s “poster boy” for this aggressive new masculinity is Teddy Roosevelt, whose blend of boosterism, progressivism and unabashed imperialism captured both its high ideals and serious dangers. Like so many reformers, Roosevelt sought to remake American society along more equitable and democratic lines. At the same time, he believed that Anglo-Saxon men possessed a God-given right to dominate the world. In both cases, Lears suggests, Roosevelt’s politics were the product of a profound internal struggle. “There must be control,” Roosevelt wrote in the 1890s. “There must be mastery, somewhere, and if there is no self-control and self-mastery, the control and the mastery will ultimately be imposed from without.” He was writing to Rudyard Kipling about the problem of governing “dark-hued” peoples, but he might as well have been writing about his own psyche.

While Roosevelt serves as the book’s protagonist, its pages are filled with lively portraits of other period figures, from the escape artist Harry Houdini to the settlement house worker and peace activist Jane Addams. Lears uses these men and women as exemplars of broad cultural trends: Houdini transformed magic “from spiritualism to strenuousness”; Addams represented “an alternative to militarism for romantic young professionals.” “Rebirth of a Nation” also includes glimpses of humbler Americans eking out lives at the margins of the era’s great conflicts. In one moving section, Lears recounts the story of Emily French, a “hard-worked woman,” in her words, whose abandonment by her husband left her nearly destitute (and who happened to keep a detailed diary of her struggles).

At times, it’s not quite clear how these disparate figures all fit into the theme of “rebirth,” a concept at once highly specific and conveniently broad. In addition, Lears never satisfyingly explains why the brutality of the Civil War spawned dreams of heroics, while World War I produced a consensus that American soldiers were “dying in vain.” But these are minor quibbles. “Rebirth of a Nation”is a major work by a leading historian at the top of his game — at once engaging and tightly argued. Like the best histories, it is also a book that speaks to our own time.

In his conclusion, Lears explicitly identifies Roosevelt as George W. Bush’s true “ideological ancestor,” a rebuttal to those who would place the universalist Woodrow Wilson first in the Iraq war’s genealogy. Still, it’s on the subject of economic culture — long a staple of Lears’s work — that “Rebirth of a Nation”delivers its most pointed critique. Lears completed his manuscript before the current financial crisis, and before the Obama administration came to power advertising its own message of “rebirth.” His descriptions of budding American consumerism nonetheless resonate strongly with present-day concerns.

In his chapter on “The Mysterious Power of Money,” Lears quotes Mark Twain satirizing the excesses of the first Gilded Age: “Beautiful credit! The foundation of modern society. Who shall say that this is not the golden age of mutual trust, of unlimited reliance upon human promises?” The reality, Lears reminds us, was far less glamorous. “A great deal of waste, fraud and corruption went into the making of the modern American economy,” he writes in a description that might be transferred wholesale to our own Gilded Age, “and much of it was concentrated on Wall Street.”

Beverly Gage, a history professor at Yale, is the author of “The Day Wall Street Exploded: A Story of America in Its First Age of Terror.”

Crying "Fire" in a Movie Theater...

I normally fall down on the libertarian side of free speech. I will normally argue that there is always a danger in limiting speech. That is why I have never agreed with the liberal political correctness mode. The Neo-Nazis were correctly permitted to march in Skokie, IL. Anti-war demonstrators should be able to burn the U.S. flag. But when does hate speech cross the line into the Supreme Court's test of "yelling fire in a movie theater?"

Frank Rich has laid out an interesting argument that the leaders within the Republican Party are irresponsibly remaining silent when people like Glen Beck uses Nazi stormtrooper archive footage as a back drop when criticizing Obama. Or when Rush Limbaugh charges that our impending Supreme Court justice is a racist and that liberals are responsible for the white supremacist murder in the National Holocaust Museum. Though I find Fox News to be a legitimate conservative voice, when you have a million + viewership or listenership (ala Rush), does it increase the possibilities for the incitement of murder? It seems to me that the Republican Party that I have admired in the past is treading on some very thin ice here....

June 14, 2009

OP-ED COLUMNIST

The Obama Haters’ Silent Enablers

By FRANK RICH

WHEN a Fox News anchor, reacting to his own network’s surging e-mail traffic, warns urgently on-camera of a rise in hate-filled, “amped up” Americans who are “taking the extra step and getting the gun out,” maybe we should listen. He has better sources in that underground than most.

The anchor was Shepard Smith, speaking after Wednesday’s mayhem at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. Unlike the bloviators at his network and elsewhere on cable, Smith is famous for his highly caffeinated news-reading, not any political agenda. But very occasionally — notably during Hurricane Katrina — he hits the Howard Beale mad-as-hell wall. Joining those at Fox who routinely disregard the network’s “We report, you decide” mantra, he both reported and decided, loudly.

What he reported was this: his e-mail from viewers had “become more and more frightening” in recent months, dating back to the election season. From Wednesday alone, he “could read a hundred” messages spewing “hate that’s not based in fact,” much of it about Barack Obama and some of it sharing the museum gunman’s canard that the president was not a naturally born citizen. These are Americans “out there in a scary place,” Smith said.

Then he brought up another recent gunman: “If you’re one who believes that abortion is murder, at what point do you go out and kill someone who’s performing abortions?” An answer, he said, was provided by Dr. George Tiller’s killer. He went on: “If you are one who believes these sorts of things about the president of the United States ...” He left the rest of that chilling sentence unsaid.

These are extraordinary words to hear on Fox. The network’s highest-rated star, Bill O’Reilly, had assailed Tiller, calling him “Tiller the baby killer” and likening him to the Nazis, on 29 of his shows before the doctor was murdered at his church in Kansas. O’Reilly was unrepentant, stating that only “pro-abortion zealots and Fox News haters” would link him to the crime. But now another Fox star, while stopping short of blaming O’Reilly, was breaching his network’s brand of political correctness: he tied the far-right loners who had gotten their guns out in Wichita and Washington to the mounting fury of Obama haters.

What is this fury about? In his scant 145 days in office, the new president has not remotely matched the Bush record in deficit creation. Nor has he repealed the right to bear arms or exacerbated the wars he inherited. He has tried more than his predecessor ever did to reach across the aisle. But none of that seems to matter. A sizable minority of Americans is irrationally fearful of the fast-moving generational, cultural and racial turnover Obama embodies — indeed, of the 21st century itself. That minority is now getting angrier in inverse relationship to his popularity with the vast majority of the country. Change can be frightening and traumatic, especially if it’s not change you can believe in.

We don’t know whether the tiny subset of domestic terrorists in this crowd is egged on by political or media demagogues — though we do tend to assume that foreign jihadists respond like Pavlov’s dogs to the words of their most fanatical leaders and polemicists. But well before the latest murderers struck — well before another “antigovernment” Obama hater went on a cop-killing rampage in Pittsburgh in April — there have been indications that this rage could spiral out of control.

This was evident during the campaign, when hotheads greeted Obama’s name with “Treason!” and “Terrorist!” at G.O.P. rallies. At first the McCain-Palin campaign fed the anger with accusations that Obama was “palling around with terrorists.” But later John McCain thought better of it anddefended his opponent’s honor to a town-hall participant who vented her fears of the Democrats’ “Arab” candidate. Although two neo-Nazi skinheadswere arrested in an assassination plot against Obama two weeks before Election Day, the fever broke after McCain exercised leadership.

That honeymoon, if it was one, is over. Conservatives have legitimate ideological beefs with Obama, rightly expressed in sharp language. But the invective in some quarters has unmistakably amped up. The writer Camille Paglia, a political independent and confessed talk-radio fan, detected a shift toward paranoia in the air waves by mid-May. When “the tone darkens toward a rhetoric of purgation and annihilation,” she observed in Salon, “there is reason for alarm.” She cited a “joke” repeated by a Rush Limbaugh fill-in host, a talk-radio jock from Dallas of all places, about how “any U.S. soldier” who found himself with only two bullets in an elevator with Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Osama bin Laden would use both shots to assassinate Pelosi and then strangle Reid and bin Laden.

This homicide-saturated vituperation is endemic among mini-Limbaughs. Glenn Beck has dipped into O’Reilly’s Holocaust analogies to liken Obama’s policy on stem-cell research to the eugenics that led to “the final solution” and the quest for “a master race.” After James von Brunn’s rampage at the Holocaust museum, Beck rushed onto Fox News to describe the Obama-hating killer as a “lone gunman nutjob.” Yet in the same show Beck also said von Brunn was a symptom that “the pot in America is boiling,” as if Beck himself were not the boiling pot cheering the kettle on.

But hyperbole from the usual suspects in the entertainment arena of TV and radio is not the whole story. What’s startling is the spillover of this poison into the conservative political establishment. Saul Anuzis, a former Michigan G.O.P. chairman who ran for the party’s national chairmanship this year, seriously suggested in April that Republicans should stop calling Obama a socialist because “it no longer has the negative connotation it had 20 years ago, or even 10 years ago.” Anuzis pushed “fascism” instead, because “everybody still thinks that’s a bad thing.” He didn’t seem to grasp that “fascism” is nonsensical as a description of the Obama administration or that there might be a risk in slurring a president with a word that most find “bad” because it evokes a mass-murderer like Hitler.

The Anuzis “fascism” solution to the Obama problem has caught fire. The president’s nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court and his speech in Cairo have only exacerbated the ugliness. The venomous personal attacks on Sotomayor have little to do with the 3,000-plus cases she’s adjudicated in nearly 17 years on the bench or her thoughts about the judgment of “a wise Latina woman.” She has been tarred as a member of “the Latino KKK” (by the former Republican presidential candidate Tom Tancredo), as well as a racist and a David Duke (by Limbaugh), and portrayed, in a bizarre two-for-one ethnic caricature, as a slant-eyed Asian on the cover of National Review. Uniting all these insults is an aggrieved note of white victimization only a shade less explicit than that in von Brunn’s white supremacist screeds.

Obama’s Cairo address, meanwhile, prompted over-the-top accusations reminiscent of those campaign rally cries of “Treason!” It was a prominent former Reagan defense official, Frank Gaffney, not some fringe crackpot, who accused Obama in The Washington Times of engaging “in the most consequential bait-and-switch since Adolf Hitler duped Neville Chamberlain.” He claimed that the president — a lifelong Christian — “may still be” a Muslim and is aligned with “the dangerous global movement known as the Muslim Brotherhood.” Gaffney linked Obama by innuendo with Islamic “charities” that “have been convicted of providing material support for terrorism.”

If this isn’t a handy rationalization for another lone nutjob to take the law into his own hands against a supposed terrorism supporter, what is? Any such nutjob can easily grab a weapon. Gun enthusiasts have been on a shopping spree since the election, with some areas of our country reporting percentage sales increases in the mid-to-high double digits, recession be damned.

The question, Shepard Smith said on Fox last week, is “if there is really a way to put a hold on” those who might run amok. We’re not about to repeal the First or Second Amendments. Hard-core haters resolutely dismiss any “mainstream media” debunking of their conspiracy theories. The only voices that might penetrate their alternative reality — I emphasize might — belong to conservative leaders with the guts and clout to step up as McCain did last fall. Where are they? The genteel public debate in right-leaning intellectual circles about the conservative movement’s future will be buried by history if these insistent alarms are met with silence.

It’s typical of this dereliction of responsibility that when the Department of Homeland Security released a plausible (and, tragically, prescient) report about far-right domestic terrorism two months ago, the conservative response was to trash it as “the height of insult,” in the words of the G.O.P. chairman Michael Steele. But as Smith also said last week, Homeland Security was “warning us for a reason.”

No matter. Last week it was business as usual, as Republican leaders nattered ad infinitum over the juvenile rivalry of Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrichat the party’s big Washington fund-raiser. Few if any mentioned, let alone questioned, the ominous script delivered by the actor Jon Voight with the G.O.P. imprimatur at that same event. Voight’s devout wish was to “bring an end to this false prophet Obama.”

This kind of rhetoric, with its pseudo-Scriptural call to action, is toxic. It is getting louder each day of the Obama presidency. No one, not even Fox News viewers, can say they weren’t warned.

Reagan Reconsidered

In today's NYT Week in Review section appears "Republicans Rethinking the Reagan Mystique." It is an interesting report about how some Republicans think that their future does not point in the direction that Reagan so successfully led his party back in the 1980s. Of particular interest is Gov. Mitch Daniels' comments, since he worked in the Reagan White House. I find it a bit ironic that President Obama may be the one leaning toward a Reagan-like White House rather than new Republican leaders standing off stage. So, I watch with curiosity as the Republicans struggle to redefine themselves. A follow-up post that I will make certainly will suggest that the strident voice within their party is something that so far the Republicans have failed to come to grips with, in my opinion.

June 14, 2009

Republicans Rethinking the Reagan Mystique

By JOHN HARWOOD

For a liberal Democrat, President Obama has offered generous praise for the most celebrated of his recent Republican predecessors.

Mr. Obama has credited Ronald Reagan with having “changed the trajectory of America” in ways Bill Clinton didn’t. “President Reagan helped as much as any president to restore a sense of optimism in our country, a spirit that transcended politics,” Mr. Obama said earlier this month while signing the Ronald Reagan Centennial Commission Act in the presence of Nancy Reagan.

It’s not surprising that Mr. Obama has embraced Mr. Reagan’s achievement since it seems akin to his own aspirations and might also ingratiate him with conservatives. What is surprising is the increasingly ambiguous position Mr. Reagan holds on the right.

Some Republicans have begun reassessing whether Mr. Reagan today affords the best example as they seek a path back to power. The economic crisis, which Mr. Obama last fall declared a “final verdict” on the anti-government philosophy that George W. Bush and Mr. Reagan shared, has made Reaganism less politically marketable than at any time in a generation.

“I don’t use him publicly as a reference point,” said Gov. Mitch Daniels of Indiana, a Republican who lately has emerged as a potential national party leader. Mr. Daniels instead has urged fellow Republicans to “let go” of Mr. Reagan as a contemporary symbol.

As Mr. Reagan’s White House political director, Mr. Daniels brings credibility to the discussion. A year ago, when he first proposed that Republicans turn the page he drew sharp criticism from Rush Limbaugh, among others. Now, Mr. Daniels observes, “I think it’s spreading.”

That’s not to say Republicans disavow Mr. Reagan’s achievements, which include cutting tax rates, presiding over the successful conclusion of the cold war and, as Mr. Obama noted, boosting morale after a period of national self-doubt. Indeed a recent video made by a conservative group includesNewt Gingrich invoking Mr. Reagan in the terms of old: “His rendezvous with destiny is a reminder that we all have a similar rendezvous,” Mr. Gingrich said, reflecting the admiration for Mr. Reagan that is still in force among the party’s conservative base.

Mr. Daniels, too, hails his former boss for “timeless” principles like suspicion of big government and appreciation of the importance of individual freedom and opportunity. As he tackles issues in Indiana — education policy lately is a hot topic — he says he asks himself whether Mr. Reagan would approve.

But “Reagan always faced forward,” the governor said. “If he were around, he’d tell Republicans to do that now. He’d be the last to want the focus on him.”

What’s needed instead, said Reihan Salam, co-author of “Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream,” is “something new — the anti-Obama, anti-Reagan.” Mr. Salam, whose co-author is Ross Douthat, an Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times, was born in 1979 — a year before Mr. Reagan was elected to his first term. Mr. Salam said he favored a new prototype of Republican leadership that projected humility rather than grandeur, understated competence rather than soaring rhetoric and vision.

Much has changed since the 2008 campaign, when the Republican contenders all were openly competing to be Mr. Reagan’s true heir. In one debate,Fred Thompson invoked Mr. Reagan on tax cuts; Mitt Romney hailed him for championing “our military,’ “our economy” and “our family values”; while John McCain linked “my dear and beloved Ronald Reagan” with his own support for free trade.

In accepting the nomination, Mr. McCain branded Republicans as the party of three heroes: Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt and Mr. Reagan. In this he followed George W. Bush, who in 2004 pointed to Mr. Reagan rather than his own father as the president whose spirit “will always define our party.”

At the time it wasn’t hard to see why. Republicans have long viewed Mr. Reagan’s presidency as vastly more successful than that of the elder Mr. Bush — or any other recent Republican president. And the public seemed to agree.

Mr. Reagan’s approval ratings rose sharply after he left office — from 53 percent in 1988, at the end of his time in office, to 73 percent by 2002, according to Gallup. But it’s not clear the Reagan election model can work in the 21st century, as America’s population has become more diverse. In 1980, Mr. Reagan thrashed Jimmy Carter by winning 55 percent of the white vote. Mr. McCain, as it happens, matched that percentage in 2008, but lost decisively to Mr. Obama. The difference, according to exit polls, is that whites represented 74 percent of the overall electorate last year, down from 88 percent in 1980. At the same time, blacks and Hispanics collectively accounted for 22 percent of the vote in 2008, up from 12 percent in 1980.

But demographics tell only part of the story. There is also the arrival of a new slate of pressing issues. It has been 20 years since Mr. Reagan’s plea to “tear down that wall” was answered by the fall of Communism. The 70 percent top income tax rate Mr. Reagan called confiscatory now stands at half that level. And the cultural appeals he made to blue-collar voters and evangelicals have lost their immediacy, displaced by economic concerns. Many remember that Mr. Reagan identified government as “the problem.” But today an increasing number of voters look to the government for security and stability.

Perhaps most important, the principal early line of attack Republicans have offered against Mr. Obama, that he is a profligate spender who will run up massive deficits, is also the area where the Reagan Revolution looks most vulnerable today, as critics on the right have pointed out. “The federal payroll was larger in 1989 than it had been in 1981,” Richard Gamble wrote last month in American Conservative magazine. “Reagan’s tax cuts, whatever their merits as short-term fiscal policy, left large and growing budget deficits when combined with increased spending, and added to the national debt.”

To be sure, Mr. Reagan’s failure to curb the cost of government reflected the enduring difficulty all presidents face in balancing the government services Americans want with the taxes they’re willing to pay. But today it seems, increasingly, that it was Mr. Reagan and his admirer, George W. Bush, who contributed most to the problem of runaway spending, at least among recent presidents.

Some Republican critics also now point to shortcomings in Mr. Reagan’s governing style. “The most dangerous legacy Reagan bequeathed his party was his legacy of cheerful indifference to detail,” the conservative thinker David Frum wrote in his recent book, “Comeback: Conservatism That Can Win Again.” “The next Republican president needs to master details, understand his options and make his decisions with care.”

Meanwhile, Democrats embrace the possibility that it is Mr. Obama who may duplicate Mr. Reagan’s political triumphs: restoring luster to the presidency after an unpopular predecessor and also fundamentally shifting the direction of American politics.

“They came at the end of a period of one-party hegemony,” David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s chief political adviser, said of his boss and of Mr. Reagan. “Both of them were major candidates of change.”

Conservatives in Academia

Having sometimes argued that there's a distinct difference between "hearing both sides" from a group of overwhelmingly liberal teachers and actually hearing both sides, I found the following to be of interest, and a challenge to that claim. The author (a prominent conservative) argues for a balanced approach to presenting liberal and conservative ideas, but rejects the idea that affirmative action should apply to the hiring of conservative faculty. I'm inclined to agree with him.

JUNE 13, 2009
Wall Street Journal
Conservatism and the University Curriculum
If they can find time for feminist theory, they can find time for Edmund Burke.

By PETER BERKOWITZ
The political science departments at elite private universities such as Harvard and Yale, at leading small liberal arts colleges like Swarthmore and Williams, and at distinguished large public universities like the University of Maryland and the University of California, Berkeley, offer undergraduates a variety of courses on a range of topics. But one topic the undergraduates at these institutions -- and at the vast majority of other universities and colleges -- are unlikely to find covered is conservatism.

There is no legitimate intellectual justification for this omission. The exclusion of conservative ideas from the curriculum contravenes the requirements of a liberal education and an objective study of political science.

Political science departments are generally divided into the subfields of American politics, comparative politics, international relations, and political theory. Conservative ideas are relevant in all four, but the obvious areas within the political science discipline to teach about the great tradition of conservative ideas and thinkers are American politics and political theory. That rarely happens today.

To be sure, a political science department may feature a course on American political thought that includes a few papers from "The Federalist" and some chapters from Alexis de Tocqueville's "Democracy in America."

But most students will hear next to nothing about the conservative tradition in American politics that stretches from John Adams to Theodore Roosevelt to William F. Buckley Jr. to Milton Friedman to Ronald Reagan. This tradition emphasizes moral and intellectual excellence, worries that democratic practices and egalitarian norms will threaten individual liberty, attends to the claims of religion and the role it can play in educating citizens for liberty, and provides both a vigorous defense of free-market capitalism and a powerful critique of capitalism's relentless overturning of established ways. It also recognized early that communism represented an implacable enemy of freedom. And for 30 years it has been animated by a fascinating quarrel between traditionalists, libertarians and neoconservatives.

While ignoring conservatism, the political theory subfield regularly offers specialized courses in liberal theory and democratic theory; African-American political thought and feminist political theory; the social theory of Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber and the neo-Marxist Frankfurt school; and numerous versions of postmodern political theory.

Students may encounter in various political theory courses an essay by the British historian and philosopher Michael Oakeshott, or a chapter from a book by the German-born American political philosopher Leo Strauss. But they will learn very little about the constellation of ideas and thinkers linked in many cases by a common concern with the dangers to liberty that stem from the excesses to which liberty and equality give rise.

That constellation begins to come into focus at the end of the 18th century with Edmund Burke's "Reflections on the Revolution in France." It draws on the conservative side of the liberal tradition, particularly Adam Smith and David Hume and includes Tocqueville's great writings on democracy and aristocracy and John Stuart Mill's classical liberalism. It gets new life in the years following World War II from Friedrich Hayek's seminal writings on liberty and limited government and Russell Kirk's reconstruction of traditionalist conservatism. And it is elevated by Michael Oakeshott's eloquent reflections on the pervasive tendency in modern politics to substitute abstract reason for experience and historical knowledge, and by Leo Strauss's deft explorations of the dependence of liberty on moral and intellectual virtue.

Without an introduction to the conservative tradition in America and the conservative dimensions of modern political philosophy, political science students are condemned to a substantially incomplete and seriously unbalanced knowledge of their subject. Courses on this tradition should be mandatory for students of politics; today they are not even an option at most American universities.

When progressives, who dominate the academy, confront arguments about the need for the curriculum to give greater attention to conservative ideas, they often hear them as a demand for affirmative action. Usually they mishear. Certainly affirmative action for conservatives is a terrible idea.

Political science departments should not seek out professors with conservative political opinions. Nor should they lower scholarly standards. That approach would embrace the very assumption that has corrupted liberal education: that to study and teach particular political ideas one's identity is more important than the breadth and depth of one's knowledge and the rigor of one's thinking.

One need not be a Puritan to study and teach colonial American religious thought, an ancient Israelite to study and teach biblical thought, or a conservative or Republican to study and teach conservative ideas. Affirmative action in university hiring for political conservatives should be firmly rejected, certainly by conservatives and defenders of liberal education.

To be sure, if political science departments were compelled to hire competent scholars to offer courses on conservative ideas and conservative thinkers, the result would be more faculty positions filled by political conservatives, since they and not progressives tend to take an interest in studying conservative thought. But there is no reason why scholars with progressive political opinions and who belong to the Democratic Party can not, out of a desire to understand American political history and modern political philosophy, study and teach conservatism in accordance with high intellectual standards. It would be good if they did.

It would also be good if every political science department offered a complementary course on the history of progressivism in America. This would discourage professors from conflating American political thought as a whole with progressivism, which they do in a variety of ways, starting with the questions they tend to ask and those they refuse to entertain.
Incorporating courses on conservatism in the curriculum may, as students graduate, disperse, and pursue their lives, yield the political benefit of an increase in mutual understanding between left and right. In this way, reforming the curriculum could diminish the polarization that afflicts our political and intellectual classes. But that benefit is admittedly distant and speculative.

In the near term, giving conservative ideas their due will have the concrete and immediate benefit of advancing liberal education's proper and commendable goal, which is the formation of free and well-furnished minds.

Mr. Berkowitz is a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.

Exams in China

Now that we have finished our exams, I found the essay questions of for China's college entrance tests to be interesting in their emphasis on creative and original thought. Here's the link to the questions:

http://www.danwei.org/scholarship_and_education/invisible_wings_2009s_college.php

If I had a pair of invisible wings, I still couldn't write comments any faster and I probably couldn't sit in a chair for a long time because that would be uncomfortable. Damn those wings...