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.