November 16, 2006
Milton Friedman Posted by John Steele Gordon at 04:00 PM EST A reporter just called to get a comment on the death of Milton Friedman this morning, thus informing me of it.
Professor Friedman was, of course, one of the giants of economics, second, perhaps, only to John Maynard Keynes among economists of the twentieth century and the most influential American economist of them all. His mantelpiece is positively stuffed with awards and honors, ranging from the John Bates Clark medal given to leading economists under the age of 40 in 1951 to the Nobel Prize in economics in 1976, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the National Science Medal in 1988.
Three of his many scholarly books and papers were extraordinarily important. Capitalism and Freedom was published in 1962. The Times Literary Supplement listed it among the hundred most important books published since World War II. The next year saw the publication of A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960, co-authored by Anna Schwartz. To give just one indication of how influential the latter book was, when the Federal Reserve received an advance copy, it immediately initiated an internal review of its own policymaking practices.
Free to Choose, coauthored with his wife, Rosa, was published in 1980 as a companion volume to a 10-part series of the same name on PBS and has never been out of print. The book and the TV series were powerful and entertaining arguments as to why free markets produce superior results over any other economic system—not just superior economic results but moral ones as well.
If you want to know why rent controls, minimum wages (“the most anti-black law on the statute books” according to Friedman), progressive taxation, and welfare (now, thanks in part to Friedman’s influence, greatly reformed) were and are such terrible ideas, Milton Friedman’s relentless logic and clear prose will tell you exactly why.
The man will be greatly missed. His influence will be with us for a very long time.
November 16, 2006
Not-So-Iron Ladies Posted by Alexander Burns at 03:05 PM EST A few days ago, Joshua Zeitz wrote about the leadership contest in the House of Representatives, which pitted Maryland’s Steny Hoyer against Pennsylvania’s John Murtha for the position of Democratic caucus leader. Early this afternoon the contest was decided in Hoyer’s favor by a vote of 149-86. The biggest loser in this election, however, was not the badly beaten Murtha. Instead, it was his most enthusiastic supporter, Speaker-elect Nancy Pelosi.
Pelosi put an awful lot of political capital on the line backing Murtha for the leadership. She publicly endorsed him. She deployed some of her closest allies, George Miller and Anna Eshoo, to whip members on Murtha’s behalf. She even tried using her ability to dole out committee assignments to pressure newly elected members, like New York’s Kirsten Gillibrand, into voting for the Pennsylvania Democrat. And yet, on a secret ballot, all of these efforts could not deliver more than 86 votes for Murtha—barely a third of the Democratic caucus. Nancy Pelosi is set to be the first female leader of the House of Representatives. If she wants to keep that position, she might do well to spend some time reflecting on the demise of another female parliamentary leader, and how to avoid her fate.
Sixteen years ago this month, Margaret Thatcher was faced with a leadership challenge from her onetime defense minister, Michael Heseltine. Thatcher had led her party through a period of consistent dominance for over a decade. But when a dispute within the Conservative ranks about Britain’s relationship to Europe resulted in an open attack on the prime minister, her power suddenly evaporated. In November of 1990 U.S. News and World Report declared that even if Thatcher survived the challenge from Heseltine, her “iron grip on the party has been broken and the aura of invincibility built by three straight election victories has been shattered.”
Heseltine failed to oust Thatcher on the first ballot, but the prime minister also failed to end his challenge by a decisive majority. By the time of the next ballot, several more candidates had entered the leadership election, including Thatcher’s eventual successor, John Major. In the interim, Thatcher had withdrawn her name from consideration and effectively ended her term in office.
Obviously there are many differences between Thatcher’s predicament and Pelosi’s. The challenge to Thatcher came at the end of a long reign, while Pelosi’s defeat comes at the very start of her term. The challenge to Thatcher was direct and personal, while this rebuke of Pelosi comes through a proxy. Thatcher was the leader of a government, whereas Pelosi has yet to take office as the leader of a single legislative body. Still, there is a lesson Pelosi would do well to learn from Thatcher’s astonishingly quick demise, and that is that one sign of weakness can be all it takes to unravel a political career.
For Pelosi, that sign of weakness has come remarkably early. If I were Steny Hoyer, I’d start thinking beyond the majority leader’s office.
November 16, 2006
Iraq and 1944 Posted by Fredric Smoler at 09:40 AM EST Julie Fenster posted tersely and eloquently on Monday, listing four of the American war dead from 1944. One of the men who died was the son of a former governor, one of an ambassador, a third the son of an assistant to the President, the fourth the son of one of the most famous American novelists. The title of the post was “Maybe That’s Why They Were in a Hurry to Win and Bring the Soldiers Home . . .” A possible implication of this list and title is that the sons and daughters of less celebrated and powerful people seem to be the ones dying in Iraq, and that an unnecessarily protracted war is the result of this change in the class of Americans doing the fighting.
If that is what the post meant, I am not sure I agree. For one thing, the path to victory during World War II led pretty directly to Berlin, Tokyo and Rome. It is not so clear where the path to victory lies in Iraq. It is not fair to say that the Bush administration cannot even define victory, because it did, even if it is now backing off that definition. Victory was initially defined as the creation of a democratic and peaceful Iraq. Many people doubt that such a victory is possible. If the Shiite majority makes Iraq peaceful by terrorizing their former Baathist (and mostly Sunni Arab) overlords into giving up their own terrorist insurgency, that might mean a kind of democracy, but the majority will probably fall out over internal disputes. Some faction may win the next fight and create peace by establishing a new tyranny, but that will not be a democratic Iraq. So the Bush administration may have invaded Iraq in pursuit of an impossible victory, which is bad enough, but it should not necessarily be indicted for being in no hurry to win because it was cynically indifferent to the lives of non-elite American soldiers. The Bush administration may fairly be accused of waging counterinsurgency very badly, but that is not the same thing as not being in a hurry. Similarly, if the administration failed to commit sufficient forces, or provide the right sort of forces, that failure seems unlikely to have been the result of sheer indifference to the duration of the war. It may be attributable to gross self-deception, but that is a different thing.
If the Sunni Arab insurgency somehow wins, which seems impossible, the peace of effective state terror may again prevail, but again, not democracy. It is (just) possible that a democratic, federal, and reasonably peaceful Iraq will evolve—with the defeat of the Sunni insurgency, compromise among the victors, who realize that no faction is strong enough to win absolute victory, and the peace of exhaustion—but if it does, it seems unlikely to happen very quickly. In that case, such an outcome, or even the arrival of the least bad achievable outcome, may well require the willingness to put off bringing the troops home. A number of people argue that American troops make a very bad situation even worse, that it is the presence of American troops that causes the violence they are dispatched to stop. That seems a bit too convenient to be true, since it means that the least immediately painful course of action would also be the most just and prudent course of action, which is a rare state of affairs. I think the debate should be about what course of action is likeliest to avert some of the worst outcomes: endless civil war, a regional war drawing in Turkish, Iranian, and Arab forces, a brutal theocracy beholden to Iran’s current rulers. It is at least possible that the goals of victory and swift withdrawal are mutually exclusive. American politicians still may wind up rating the least painful immediate course, a swift withdrawal, over any other consideration. If they do, they will probably continue the pattern of decision-making that has dogged the Iraq war since the fall of Baghdad.
November 15, 2006
Caught My Eye Posted by Julie M. Fenster at 11:00 AM EST I am reading more 1856 newspapers than 2006 ones these days—research on a lawyer named A. Lincoln. As usual, when it comes to old newspapers, I am continually haunted by the little stories off to the side. Read this one, for instance:
“A very curious instance of confusion has taken place in a family in Albany. A mother and her daughter were both confined on the same day, each having a little son. In the bustle of the moment, both babies were placed in a cradle together, and, to the confusion of the mothers, when the youngsters were taken from the cradle they were unable to tell which was the mother’s and which was the daughter’s son—a matter which of course must ever remain a mystery—the family is in great distress over the affair.”
That’s not just an article, it’s a recipe for an 800-page novel. Just add a summer on an island and a box of foolscap paper.
November 15, 2006
Premillennialism: Good for the Jews? II Posted by Fredric Smoler at 09:50 AM EST Josh Zeitz wrote yesterday about what he considered “a fascinating article in today’s New York Times about evangelical Christian support for Israel.” I must confess that I didn’t find this article fascinating. For one thing, the enthusiasm for Israel among some evangelical Christians is very far from news, and I found myself wondering why The New York Times was reporting this fact as if it were news. I have a suspicion that this remarkably well-covered story is again news because a recent theory—the one about the Jews, via the Israel lobby, having gotten us into Iraq, and being the puppeteers behind the Bush administration—looks a tad implausible in the wake of the election returns. And if you want to tar the Israelis with being backed by people Times readers are unlikely to find appealing, the evangelicals may seem a promising replacement for Jewish neocons and the Israel lobby, about whose vast powers a great deal has recently been written.
The omnipotent-Jewish-neocon theory recently surfaced in an essay by Harvard’s Stephen Walt and the University of Chicago’s John Mearsheimer, which has received a fair amount of press. Unfortunately for the coarser versions of this view, 88 percent of American Jews just voted Democratic, and if almost all of the Jews vote Democratic, it is hard to understand how the neocons and the Israel lobby control their puppets; political lobbies are normally powerful if and only if they can deliver votes. Of course, one can attempt to explain American support for Israel as the result of the power of the Really Rich and Really Cunning Jews, but since some of those folks are people like George Soros, who just spent a lot of money to elect Democrats, the theory of plutocratic Jewish dual loyalists running America looks less than plausible. So if you want to impugn the Israelis in the eyes of liberals, maybe it’s time to tag them with being the allies of another group detested on the left, the evangelicals.
In fact, there is a possible explanation for broad American support for Israelis other than hardcore Christian millenarian zealotry: On balance, many Americans may acknowledge Israel’s faults but still prefer the Israelis to their regional enemies, who have a number of profoundly unattractive qualities. In that case, evangelical Christians may have various motives for supporting the Israelis, some theological, some not, and the ones that are not may also explain non-evangelical American support for Israel. And in fact, a fair number of liberals, like many other Americans, share in that off-and-on, but usually on, support for the Israelis. If you really do not like the Israelis—and they are not the flavor of the month among most people who cover them, and have not been for a while now—attempting to wedge the liberals apart from the Israelis seems to be a very durable instinct.
Now here’s a piece of what I do consider news: Yesterday Iran publicly hanged a gay man, Shahab Darvishi, on the charge of “lavat,” which means sodomy. Publicizing this fact would probably remind my fellow liberals that we have a few enemies in common with the Israelis, and it might make some of us wonder whether the Iranian regime is the sort of crowd one wants to see armed with nuclear weapons—and if not, what we think a prudent American government might have to do about that possibility. As it happens, the public hanging of Shahab Darvishi did not make today’s New York Times. Yet that groundbreaking piece on the fact that evangelicals support Israel ran to something like 1,650 words.
It is probably worth remembering that last week Israel had a gay rights march, a very big one, in Jerusalem. I know people who will be tempted to say, with some malicious amusement, that American evangelicals back Israel, and oppose Iran, only because they are ignorant of such facts. On the strength of my very modest acquaintance with my evangelical countrymen, however, my guess is that many of them support Israel, and detest the Iranian regime, because they are aware of facts of this kind, rather than in spite of them, for in addition to being evangelicals, they are twenty-first-century Americans. What does puzzle me is why some of my friends spend a deal more time and energy excoriating the Israelis than they do reviling the Iranian government. Investigating that one might also be worth 1,650 words in the Times.
November 14, 2006
The Girl in the Black Helmet Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 08:30 PM EST Today would have marked the hundredth birthday of Louise Brooks who, along with Clara Bow and Colleen Moore, was part of Hollywood’s great flapper triumvirate in the silent-film era. If Colleen Moore was Hollywood’s archetype of the safe flapper—unthreatening, endearing, hapless, more bark than bite (see, for instance, Flaming Youth)—and if Clara Bow represented the naughty flapper who flirted and smoked a lot but could always be counted on to see the error of her fast-living ways (as was the case in her best-known film, It), Louise Brooks was the real deal. In an age of sexually liberated women, she stood out for her extremes. “I like to drink and f--k,” she announced to friends and acquaintances. Years later, she privately estimated that “at a modest 10 a year from [ages] 17 to 60,” the number of men she had “been to bed with” numbered somewhere around 430. A former Martha Graham dancer and Ziegfeld Follies performer, Brooks was a reluctant film star, an autodidact who never felt at home in Hollywood. “My [New York] friends were all literary people,” she later remarked. “And in Hollywood there were no literary people. I went to Hollywood and no one read books. I went to the bookstore on Hollywood Boulevard—it’s still there—and these Hollywood people would go in and say, ‘I have a bookshelf, and I want to buy enough books to fill up the shelves.’ And that was all the reading they did. Don’t forget, most people in pictures, they were waitresses, they were very low-class people.” Unlike many silent-era screen stars, Brooks could have survived the transition to talkies. When Paramount transitioned to sound, in 1928, Louise was one of the lucky ones. Studio chief Ben Schulberg proposed to retain her at her current salary, $750 per week. Hardly top-scale at the time, but exponentially more money than the average American family earned in half a year. Brooks stunned Schulberg and the entire industry by walking away. She traveled to Berlin, where the German director G. W. Pabst recruited her to play the lead role in his pioneering work Pandora’s Box. It was arguably the last great film of the silent era, and it was her finest performance. But the critics panned it. Louise stayed in Europe to shoot another film with Pabst, and several more in England. Then she ran out of money. She crawled back to California on her knees. But by the time she returned to Hollywood in 1930, she was persona non grata. Friends helped her secure a few minor parts here and there. By 1938, however, it was obvious that her film career was over. She moved back to Wichita and operated a dance studio for a few years. Then she returned to New York and worked behind the sales counter at Saks Fifth Avenue, picking up occasional voiceover work for radio soap operas. Salvation came in the 1950s when film buffs rediscovered the silent era. In 1955 Cinémathèque Française featured Brooks in an exhibit entitled “Sixty Years of Cinema.” The following year, with few other prospects, she accepted an invitation to move to Rochester, where she began a new career as a film historian at Eastman House. By 1979, when Kenneth Tynan revisited her early career in pages of The New Yorker (his article was entitled, simply, “The Girl in the Black Helmet,” an homage to Brooks’s distinct 1920s bob), she had been canonized as one of the most brilliant figures of the silent-film era. Louise Brooks died alone at her home in Rochester in 1985. She was 78 years old.
November 14, 2006
Premillennialism: Good for the Jews? Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 07:30 PM EST There’s a fascinating article in today’s New York Times about evangelical Christian support for Israel. As the article notes, “Many conservative Christians say they believe that the president’s support for Israel fulfills a biblical injunction to protect the Jewish state, which some of them think will play a pivotal role in the second coming.” The eschatology to which the Times refers is known as dispensational premillennialism. Based on prophetic writings in the Old and New Testaments, premillennialism holds that God deals with human beings in distinct epochs, or dispensations; that the current (sixth) dispensation—the church era, or the Gentile era—will come to a close upon the arrival of the Antichrist (known also as the Beast), who will visit incalculable terror upon unsaved human beings; that the Antichrist’s reign of seven years, called the Tribulations, will be directly preceded by the in-gathering of world Jewry back to Palestine and by a tremendous event called the Raptures, which will see saved souls, both living and dead, lifted directly from Earth to heaven; that at the end of the Tribulations Jesus Christ will lead an army of saints to do battle with the Beast; that Christ will defeat the Beast at the Battle of Armageddon and introduce a thousand-year rein of peace; and finally that at the conclusion of that millennium, Christ and Satan will engage in a final battle, resulting in Satan’s ultimate defeat The problem for Jews, of course, is that this end-of-days theology foretells a fiery and unpleasant end for the original sons of Abraham—even those who convert to Christ. Which leads to a new twist on a familiar question: Premillennialism, good for the Jews, or bad for the Jews? Should American Jews and Israelis forge a partnership with conservative evangelicals, even if their aims and expectations are so vitally different, even though the same conservative Christians subscribe to a theology that damns Jews no matter what? On this particular question, I’m inclined to throw my lot with those liberal American Jews who’d rather not make common cause, however cynically, with evangelical conservatives. But politics makes for strange bedfellows, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see the ties between both communities grow a little stronger in the coming years.
November 14, 2006
Would RFK Have Won in 1968? III Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 06:20 PM EST Fred Smoler proposes a fascinating exercise in counter-factual history: “If you want to imagine Kennedy winning the nomination, it is pretty easy to do: Simply assume that the Palestinian assassin Sirhan Sirhan murdered Humphrey rather than Kennedy. After all, Kennedy was not famous for being a sturdier supporter of Israel than Humphrey. So what might have changed? Sometimes we suspect that a failed assassination would have change a great deal: Churchill was almost killed by a taxi in 1931, and a number of assassination attempts missed Hitler. How about this one?” I think the answer is still no. Neither Robert Kennedy nor Eugene McCarthy would have garnered enough delegates to win anything approximating a majority. Together, their delegates might have constituted a large enough bloc to swing momentum in favor of an antiwar nominee, but as Dominic Sandbrook’s excellent biography of Eugene McCarthy makes clear, the two men despised each other. “Under no circumstances would I join with Kennedy to stop Hubert Humphrey,” McCarthy said. “I would have given my delegates to Hubert.” Had there been no Hubert, it seems likely that McCarthy would have brokered a deal with someone else. For his part, Kennedy thought of McCarthy as a dilettante or worse. As one of his aides explained, “We regarded Gene as a dangerous man. . . . He raised enthusiasms without following through.” A more likely scenario would have been an eleventh-hour reversal by Lyndon Johnson, whose relationships with both Kennedy and McCarthy were so strained as to make a deal with either man highly unlikely. As the incumbent President, LBJ enjoyed tight control over the unelected delegates and could have engineered renomination. How that would have played out in November is anyone’s guess. Which is the folly and fun of counterfactual history.
November 14, 2006
Schools and Historical Change II Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 05:15 PM EST Fred Smoler’s post on James Madison High School raised some interesting issues. As Fred points out, when the new Congress is sworn in next January, James Madison will count among its alumni three sitting members of the U.S. Senate (Bernie Sanders of Vermont, Norm Coleman of Minnesota, and Charles Schumer of New York) and one associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (Ruth Bader Ginsburg). Fred also notes that James Madison has produced three Nobel laureates, as has its nearby competitor, Abraham Lincoln High School.
Fred explores several possible explanations for the tremendous success of these two public schools in churning out high achievers. One quite plausible explanation is that “public schools were better when they were staffed by extremely capable women denied the chance to work in many other places, and that nursing care in public hospitals was once better for the same reason. If so, good public schools—a crucial ingredient of one vision of a just political order—depended on a linked injustice.”
Another explanation is ethnicity. In her influential history of interwar American Jewry, At Home in America: Second-Generation New York Jews, Deborah Dash Moore, a professor at Vassar College, looks particularly at Abraham Lincoln High and nearby Thomas Jefferson High and finds that the schools’ student bodies, teaching staff, and administrators were overwhelmingly Jewish by the 1930s. This remained the case well into the 1960s, when most of the aforementioned notables were in high school. Indeed, it’s worth pointing out that all of these notables are, in fact, Jewish.
Scholars have long debated the roots of American Jews’ obsession with education. Some of their explanations have verged on the chauvinistic, while others are less offensive and more plausible—for instance, because Jewish immigrants arrived in America with a particular set of skills, pursuing a high school and college education was simply a rational economic strategy.
Whatever the causes of the American Jewish love affair with education, it’s hard to deny a pattern. In my forthcoming book on postwar ethnicity, I find that as early as the 1930s Jews composed between 80 and 90 percent of the student body at City College, Hunter College, and Brooklyn College, over 90 percent at New York University, and 22 percent at Columbia University. And many Jews understood this last figure to be the result of aggressive anti-Semitic restrictions (in 1920, the proportion of Jews at Columbia had been 40 percent). As late as 1963 almost half of all Jews in New York City had continued their education beyond high school, compared with 27.5 percent and 18.2 percent in the Irish and Italian communities, respectively. Over half of all Irish New Yorkers and 60 percent of Italians did not finish high school, compared with 35 percent of the city’s Jews and only 21 percent among the native-born.
Fred invoked an amusing anecdote about his time at Cambridge University, and as a faculty member there, I have a few of my own. When I interviewed for my lectureship, a member of the hiring committee asked me why New York’s public schools were once a national gem but are now a national nightmare. Of course, this isn’t exactly right; many of New York’s high schools remain exemplars of scholarship and achievement. I suspected that he wanted me to answer, “because the schools were predominately Jewish then, and aren’t now,” but I didn’t oblige. I’m still not sure that’s the right answer, but it’s not the wrong answer, either.
November 14, 2006
Louis Brandeis Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 04:05 PM EST In a signed column on the New York Times editorial page today, Adam Cohen notes that this is Louis Brandeis’s 150th birthday. It was Brandeis who revolutionized American jurisprudence when, in 1908, he presented the Supreme Court with a brief in favor of an Oregon state law mandating a maximum 10-hour work day for women. Most observers at the time expected the court to strike down the law on grounds that it violated workers’ “freedom of contract,” a principle located somewhere in the shadow of the Fourteenth Amendment. Instead of wrangling over constitutional law, Brandeis devoted 100 pages of his brief to social science literature that established the deleterious effects of physical labor on women and only 2 pages to the constitutional questions at hand. The court unanimously upheld the law. Eight years later, Woodrow Wilson appointed Brandeis an associate justice.
As Cohen points out, not everyone approved of the use of scientific evidence in court cases. Brandeis’s prickly colleague on the Court, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., complained that Brandeis “drove a harpoon into my midriff by saying that it would be for the good of my soul to devote my next leisure to the study of some domain of fact—suggesting the textile industry.”
“I hate facts,” Holmes concluded.
But Brandeis was on the side of history. In the matter of Brown v. Board of Education, the Court ruled in 1954 that segregated public schools were inherently unconstitutional. Relying on psychological studies conducted by Kenneth Clark, which purported to show that black children who were raised and educated in segregated environments developed a crippling sense of inferiority, the Court determined that there could be no “separate but equal” schools in America. Even if all-black schools and all-white schools were granted equal funds and resources, segregation would psychologically damage black children and make it impossible for them to avail themselves of equal education resources.
Critics then and since have faulted the court for basing a large part of the Brown ruling on social science. For one, the Court’s logic inadvertently assumes that black children cannot learn outside the presence of white children, a patronizing and suspect conclusion to say the least. Moreover, Clark’s doll tests weren’t particularly well-designed. Social science literature is always in flux. How can the Court maintain a precedent if the foundations of its rulings are subject to decay?
Despite all these problems, Brandeis’s contribution to American jurisprudence remains very much intact. Today liberals and conservatives selectively draw on and criticize the use of expository evidence, slamming activist judges for stepping outside the law—except when it suits their purpose.
November 14, 2006
Would RFK Have Won in 1968? II Posted by Fredric Smoler at 11:30 AM EST Josh Zeitz posted about an upcoming film on the assassination of Robert Kennedy. Josh has the impression that the film sees RFK as “the great white hope” who would have “forged a coalition of working-class ethnics and black urbanites, won the Democratic nomination, defeated Richard Nixon in the general election, and pulled America out of Vietnam.” These promising developments are sometimes imagined to have been aborted only by the freak event of assassination. Josh is skeptical about that, pointing out that Kennedy merely offered the Vietcong a seat at the negotiating table, and he doubts that either Hanoi or Saigon would have agreed to any compromise. He also points out that Kennedy, had he swept the primaries, would still have lost the nomination to Hubert Humphrey.
I remember this recurring fascination with RFK surviving and saving the day for sixties liberalism—in fact, I was treated to a taste of it only a month ago—and I share much of Josh’s skepticism. But if you want to imagine Kennedy winning the nomination, it is pretty easy to do: Simply assume that the Palestinian assassin Sirhan Sirhan murdered Humphrey rather than Kennedy. After all, Kennedy was not famous for being a sturdier supporter of Israel than Humphrey. So what might have changed? Sometimes we suspect that a failed assassination would have change a great deal: Churchill was almost killed by a taxi in 1931, and a number of assassination attempts missed Hitler. How about this one?
I share Josh’s skepticism about RFK finding any magic way out of Vietnam, which was for a long time the core of the RFK myth. I doubt that there was any such magic way: Vietnam seems destined to have either been united by a Communist military victory or remained divided because of that victory’s being prevented by greater American tenacity. My guess is that RFK, scion of what was then a stalwartly anti-Communist political clan, would have been extremely unlikely to abandon South Vietnam any sooner than Richard Nixon did, if that is in fact what happened (Nixon claimed he’d compelled a compromise in 1972 and was unable to enforce that compromise after Watergate so weakened him). In any event, Republican pressure on RFK as a Democrat not to lose in Vietnam would have been very strong. The Vietnamese Communists would have been unable to take Saigon as long as there were significant numbers of American troops on the ground, or even significant elements of American airpower within range. My guess is that the election of Robert Kennedy would have meant South Vietnam was still there in 1976, when he left office, and maybe forever. If he had won, we might still have troops in Vietnam; after all, we still have them in South Korea.
Would he have produced a stable biracial coalition? Maybe he’d have kept Northern Catholic ethnics on board for a while, but it is very hard not to imagine a Republican South coming into being after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and at around the same time. That does not mean that Nixon would have won in 1968. That was a very close election, and my guess is that Robert Kennedy would have won it. But in the long run, how different would racial politics have been? By current standards, Nixon was actually an extremely liberal president on race and poverty: strong on affirmative action and strong on a relatively generous welfare state. I do not see Kennedy being stronger on either, given predictable Republican opposition, which would have been more militant than it was in the Nixon Presidency. And pressures on that biracial coalition would have continued to mount: rising crime would still have poisoned the atmosphere, affirmative action would still have been divisive, the successes of Great Society programs would still have been mixed. Kennedy magic might have worked wonders on northern Catholic voters in 1968, maybe even in 1972, but probably not forever. On the other hand, although it is still in my circles unfashionable to say it, racial politics is actually one of the successes of post-1945 American history It is perverse to assume that Robert Kennedy might have made this worse, but I don’t see how he could have made things come out all that much better or changed things much more quickly.
Assuming no Watergate-equivalent on Kennedy’s watch, and assuming no loss of South Vietnam, it is unlikely that anyone like Carter would have been elected President in 1976; the odds seem better for either a conventional Democrat or a Republican. That means that if the Iranian Revolution had proceeded on schedule, it is hard to imagine comparable irresolution during any hostage crisis. That still means an Iranian theocracy, but with no hostage crisis dragging on for hundreds of days and with no loss of South Vietnam, it is hard to imagine some of our future enemies so emboldened. And with no protracted hostage crisis, it is pretty hard to imagine someone who in 1978 looked as odd as Reagan did still winning a presidential election two years later. Watergate, the loss of Vietnam, and the hostage crisis all delegitimized our traditional political elites; undo those events, and that protracted legitimacy crisis might have been averted, or at least delayed. Still, after the Civil Rights Act, the Republican party would still have become more Southern and Western, and it would have had to win an election sometime.
As for the first RFK administration, a Democrat might not have had the leeway to make a deal with Communist China, which would probably have at least slightly retarded Chinese modernization. The Cold War would probably have stayed chilly, and the Russians would still have crushed the Prague Spring. With a Democrat in office, and Republicans in opposition, that might have slowed détente. When the Soviet Union approached the American President in 1969, canvassing the prospect of a preventive war with China, who knows what Robert Kennedy would have done? Very probably the same thing Nixon did, but maybe Kennedy would have bartered a free hand against China for an agreement to cut off military aid to North Vietnam. That would have changed our world unrecognizably. This is all, of course, absurdly speculative, but one thing seems clear: The two great hopes of the RFK fans, a happy ending in Vietnam and a New Deal coalition preserved in amber, seem extraordinarily unlikely.
November 14, 2006
Maybe That’s Why They Were in a Hurry to Win and Bring the Soldiers Home . . . Posted by Julie M. Fenster at 09:45 AM EST An abbreviated list of U.S. war dead in 1944:
Marine Pfc. Stephen P. Hopkins, son of Assistant to the President Harry Hopkins, at sea in the Marshall Islands.
1st Lt. Peter G. Lehman, son of U.N. administrator (and former New York Governor) Herbert Lehman, in a bomber crash in England.
Marine Sgt. Peter B. Saltonstall, son of Massachusetts Governor Leverett Saltonstall, in jungle fighting in Guam.
Joseph Kennedy, Jr., son of the former ambassador to Britain, in a plane crash off the English coast.
Lt. Wells Lewis, son of the novelist Sinclair Lewis, in fighting in France.
November 13, 2006
Spiro Agnew’s Ghost Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 03:00 PM EST Today marks the anniversary of one of the worst vice-presidential speeches in history. On this date in 1969 Richard Nixon’s Vice President, Spiro T. Agnew, issued a stinging rebuke of television network news.
Only ten days earlier, the President had taken to the airwaves to deliver his now-famous “silent majority” speech, in which the he denounced antiwar protesters—several hundred thousand of whom had participated in “moratorium” events that fall—for undercutting the American negotiating position in peace talks with North Vietnam. When the television networks realized that they had been manipulated into giving Nixon free air time under the false promise that he was primed to make an important announcement about the war effort, they spent several days focusing on the administration’s inability to reach a settlement in Southeast Asia. In turn the White House unleashed Agnew, whom Eugene McCarthy once dubbed “Nixon’s Nixon” for his intense negativity and slash-and-burn campaign tactics.
Agnew denounced network news professionals as a “tiny, enclosed fraternity of privileged men elected by no one” and slammed them for their alleged liberal bias. A year later he followed up with an even more vicious address in which he said, “In the United States today, we have more than our share of the nattering nabobs of negativism. They have formed their own 4-H club—the ‘hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history.’” (Funny that it’s always the vice presidents who are left to alliterate. In 1952, Nixon, as Dwight Eisenhower’s running-mate, denounced the Democratic presidential nominee, Adlai Stevenson, as “Adlai the appeaser . . . who got a Ph.D. degree from Acheson’s College of Cowardly Containment.)
Agnew’s speech was the opening shot of a conservative war of words against the so-called liberal media. The themes he sounded remain part of standard conservative lore to this day. Ironically, the year before, in early October 1968, Nixon had garnered 483 newspaper endorsements—five times as many as his Democratic opponent, Hubert Humphrey. But starting in the late 1960s conservatives wove a compelling story about liberal media bias that has stuck, for better or worse. In many ways, Spiro Agnew’s ghost continues to haunt us.
November 13, 2006
Lessons from the Class of ’74 Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 12:15 PM EST In an earlier post I suggested that Nancy Pelosi has been incorrectly typecast as a “San Francisco liberal,” a pejorative term that connotes all sorts of cultural extremes, when in fact she is a Baltimore white ethnic” at heart. I also wrote about the checkered past of Rep. Jack Murtha, a lead contender for Majority Leader in the next Congress. Murtha was an unindicted co-conspirator in the Abscam case some 26 years ago.
Now it seems that Pelosi has endorsed Murtha for Majority Leader, which strengthens my argument that she is more of an old-style party boss than a hippy-dippy reformer.
The last (and most famous) Democratic sweep of off-year elections occurred in 1974, when the party tapped into popular disgust over Watergate to capture 48 House seats and four Senate seats previously held by Republicans. The so-called “Watergate babies” who composed the famous Class of ’74 tended to represent affluent suburban districts in the West and Northeast and were more committed to ethics reform than to traditional liberal policies. “We are not a bunch of little Hubert Humphreys,” claimed Gary Hart, the incoming senator from Colorado and a leader of the “new politics” movement of the 1970s. In total, the Democratic freshmen numbered 75 members and became a powerful force within their caucus.
Some of the reforms pushed through by the Watergate babies augured well for a more democratic (small-d) House. For instance, by a vote of 144 to 122 the Democratic caucus wrested control of committee assignments, which had previously been doled out by the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee. The caucus also made the chairmanships of Appropriations subcommittees subject to caucus approval, thus subjecting the “cardinals”—Appropriations subcommittee chairs, who enjoy tremendous control over government funds—to popular oversight. At the same time, these reforms actually strengthened the hand of the House speaker, Carl Albert, at the expense of individual committee chairs. So it was hard to say whether a cleaner House would also be a more democratic House.
It’s ironic, to say the least, that the incoming Democratic majority, which partly owes its election victory to the public’s disgust over congressional ethics, may tap an Abscam veteran to hold its second-ranking position. Perhaps it’s too punitive to hold Murtha accountable for actions he took a quarter-century ago. But in politics, appearance is everything, and should Murtha ascend to the post of majority leader, the party is going to lose its reform luster.
November 13, 2006
Would RFK Have Won in 1968? Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 11:00 AM EST Later this month, Emilio Estevez’s new film chronicling the last day of Robert Kennedy’s life is set for general release. While I’ve not yet seen the film, the trailers would appear to suggest it follows the standard narrative line about Kennedy’s ill-fated 1968 presidential campaign, namely that had he lived, RFK would have emerged as the great white hope, forged a coalition of working-class ethnics and black urbanites, won the Democratic nomination, defeated Richard Nixon in the general election, and pulled America out of Vietnam.
There’s always been a lot wrong with this story. For one, neither Kennedy nor his chief opponent in the Democratic primaries, Senator Eugene McCarthy, called for a withdrawal from Vietnam. They were simply calling for a halt in the U.S. bombing campaign and for allowing the Vietcong/National Liberation Front a seat at the negotiating table. There is little reason to believe that the governments in Hanoi or Saigon would have agreed to a quick resolution of the conflict. For Saigon, any settlement involving a coalition government with the NLF was tantamount to defeat; for Hanoi, a protracted war increased the odds of a more favorable peace.
Diplomatic concerns aside, Kennedy could not and would not have been nominated by his party. It is true that by August 1968, when the Democratic National Convention opened in Chicago, 38.7 percent of Democratic primary voters had cast ballots for McCarthy and 30.6 percent had cast ballots for Kennedy, meaning that over two-thirds of primary voters had supported candidates who called for a negotiated settlement of the war in Southeast Asia. By contrast, only 2.2 percent of primary voters had supported Vice President Hubert Humphrey, who initially adhered to the administration’s hard line on Vietnam
But in 1968 only 15 states chose their delegates by primary. At least 57 percent of convention delegates were selected by county committeemen, state party apparatchiks, and elected officials. As early as June 2, even before Kennedy’s assassination, the vice president’s advisers had sewn up enough delegates to secure the nomination. Humphrey did not need grass-roots support to win; all he needed was the party bosses.
That said, I’m looking forward to the movie.
November 13, 2006
Schools and Historical Change Posted by Fredric Smoler at 10:00 AM EST An article in the November 10 New York Times on Brooklyn’s James Madison High School made me think a bit about the history I grew up with and its effect on my political imagination. James Madison High School is defined by the Times as “a rarity,” in that three of its alumni are now sitting U.S. Senators: Bernard Sanders of Vermont, Charles Schumer of New York, and Norm Coleman of Minnesota. Neatly enough, the first is an independent, the second a Democrat, the third a Republican. It turns out that James Madison’s alumni also include three Nobel laureates, the third being Dr. Roger D. Kornberg, who won the Nobel Prize in chemistry this year. His father, an alumnus of another Brooklyn public school, Abraham Lincoln High School, shared a Nobel in medicine in 1959, and it turns out that Abraham Lincoln High School also has three Nobel laureates among its alumni. James Madison also graduated a sitting Supreme Court Justice, Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
When reading this article, I thought of a fact I had learned when teaching at Cambridge some years ago. I was renting a house from a mathematician at Trinity College there and discovered to my amusement that the graduates of Trinity College included more Nobel laureates than did the population of France. But Trinity is an elite institution, which in addition to state support possesses an endowment of approximately 700 million pounds and insures its main college buildings for a similar sum. You can attend James Madison High School by the simple expedient of moving to a not-very-pricey neighborhood.
How does this fact resonate with American politics and American history? I remember an argument with a younger English friend, expensively educated at St. Paul’s, London, and Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. He thought my belief in the potential excellence of state schools absurd, a mark of American eccentricity, specifically New York City eccentricity, an absurdity that seemed to be fading with Americans who were closer to his age than to mine. In England, everyone know that in secondary school, anyway, you got the education you paid for, and he thought that younger Americans shared this belief, as did Americans who were not middle-aged children of people who had grown up in Depression-era New York. I think he overstated his case, but he did have a case: I have few friends whose children now attend public schools in New York City, or anywhere. My colleagues scrimp, on relatively meager pay, to send their children to private schools, because they cannot afford to buy homes in the handful of suburbs with top-notch public schools.
In my parents’ day, the public schools were good enough to prepare people for life in a meritocracy, most people knew it, and a majority of the electorate voted for a party pledged to expand state services. The memory of the state’s ability to provide good education along with other effective services has faded, and in part as a result of this, the Republican party has dominated political life. But people’s attitudes are complicated. Polls show that most people are willing to pay higher taxes for better schools, but at the same time differently phrased polling questions indicate that most people prefer lower taxes to an expanded public sector. One way to reconcile those results is to note that the second question does not state that people will get better (or even usable) services in return for more taxes, and outcome they may tend to doubt. That first polling question, which frames the issue as if-then, cuts through public pessimism.
The past was not a golden age, and it is at least possible that public schools were better when they were staffed by extremely capable women denied the chance to work in many other places, and that nursing care in public hospitals was once better for the same reason. If so, good public schools —a crucial ingredient of one vision of a just political order—depended on a linked injustice. But even if that is true, one of the historical experiences we ought to think about is whether people have had an experience of the state that persuaded them of its effectiveness, or whether they’ve had experiences that persuaded them of its inevitable ineffectiveness. The generation now disappearing saw the state appear to liquidate the Great Depression and win the Second World War, and that generation attended pretty good public high schools, which radically expanded their intake in the first decades of the last century. A majority of them not unnaturally voted Democrat for many decades. People who came of age after the 1960s have seen the erosion of the state’s apparent ability to provide desirable public goods—and began to form a Republican majority.
I do not foresee a durable Democratic majority if people don’t regain their belief in the efficacy of state action. Given this fact, I am a bit surprised to see a fair number of people on the left at best indifferent to, and in some cases very cheery about, the prospect of a conspicuous failure of the American state in Iraq. The perceived failures of the American state, in Indochina and in its own cities, were more or less simultaneous, and the rise of a Republican majority followed that double failure. It is possible that a renewed sense of American impotence abroad will be accompanied by a burst of confidence in its abilities at home. Possible, but not, I think, wholly likely.
November 11, 2006
Jack Palance and the Tides of History Posted by Fredric Smoler at 10:25 AM EST Jack Palance died yesterday at the age of 87. He was one of the great movie villains, and his performance in Shane still sticks in my mind; by a fluke, I was discussing that performance with the editor of this magazine yesterday. The obituary is informative. I had known that Jack Palance had served on a B-24 during the Second World War. In the world in which I grew up, fathers knew facts like that and passed them on. I hadn’t known that Jack Palance was born Walter Jack Palahniuk, the son of Ukrainian immigrants, that his father had worked in the Pennsylvania coal mines for 39 years until dying of black lung disease, and that Palance had bitter memories of his family buying overpriced groceries at the company store, apparently compelled by the company to do so, rather than buying food more cheaply elsewhere. In other respects, he seemed to have liked his childhood, reminiscing that “it was fine to play there in the third-growth birch and aspen, along the sides of slag piles”. These details reminded me of a conversation I had the other night. The October 26 online edition of New Republic had a link to some of the most toxic anti-immigrant TV ads put up by some Republican Congressional candidates running for seats in the South. I watched those ads with a friend, like myself the grandchild of people who had immigrated from Eastern Europe at the turn of the last century, and last night she described those ads to another couple. My friend had been simultaneously amused, shocked, and baffled by those ads; trying to describe them, she wondered, “Where do people think they came from? We’re all descended from immigrants.” Some elements within the GOP have very recently wagered that people had forgotten that fact, and although they lost the election, I am not sure they lost that particular bet. My guess is that voters were simply thinking more about other issues, rather than remaining moved by today’s immigrants replaying the dramas that are part of most family histories. I hope I’m wrong.
Jack Palance’s life was in a few respects like the lives of my family, and of my friend’s family, and the families of an awful lot of the people with whom both of us grew up. We had some immigrant grandparents, fathers who had fought in the Second World War, and relatives who had worked in factories and been in unions. What were taken to be the lessons of those experiences, which we had not ourselves experienced, were nonetheless remembered, for when we grew up they were very recent history. Those memories, direct or second hand, had been vital in creating and sustaining the New Deal coalition and kept alive hopes of its revival. Sometime between our childhood and our middle age, that coalition had fallen apart, but hopes for its revival long outlived it. By the 1990s, however, those lessons of recent American history were apparently no longer relevant to modern politics, at least for a lot of people in my generation. The “failures” of the welfare state were now the lesson that counted, and what was taken to be the lesson of Vietnam had for a lot of people replaced the lesson of Munich. A number of what had been taken to be the lessons of the Great Depression, many of them involving the necessity for extensive state regulation of the economy, also seemed outmoded. On the strength of these newer lessons, various new political coalitions were proclaimed to be the paradigm that had replaced the New Deal coalition. Reagan had led one, Clinton another, Gingrich a third, George H. W. Bush a fourth. None of these lasted as long as the New Deal coalition did, so those announcements about a new paradigm did not persuade. I do not mean to imply that some of these lessons—the earlier ones—were simply true, and the later ones false. When I was a kid, most people I knew were chary of crossing a picket line. They remembered relatives, or at least ancestors, who had themselves walked picket lines. I do not know too many people who nowadays refuse to cross a picket line. The strike is thus a weaker weapon, since a strike’s force was often in some part moral. This is not simply forgetting a lesson; some of the vices of some unions are now part of what we know. Munich was a powerful lesson, Vietnam another and perhaps opposite one, whatever its meaning; at this point neither seems universally applicable. The evidence of regulatory capture—the fact that state regulation was often used by the regulated to keep out competition, and led to various abuses—meant that some of the lessons of the Great Depression had to be revised. The assimilation of immigrants who arrived at the turn of the last century may not reliably predict the comparable assimilation of immigrants who arrive today, or who arrive today in Western Europe; history’s lessons aren’t quite like that. But reading about Jack Palance, I experienced an odd pang—the pang of remembering a time when the lessons of history seemed clear and relatively uncomplicated. And reflecting on what Palance’s generation paid for its lessons—black lung disease, simultaneously bleeding and freezing to death at 20,000 feet, facing down the local equivalent of the Pinkertons—I have the suspicion that they had more of a right to hold to them tenaciously, than we have to shriek the perdurable truth of whatever we take to be ours.
November 10, 2006
The 2006 Election III Posted by Fredric Smoler at 02:45 PM EST With respect to Josh Zeitz’s remarks on voting and income, the data I quoted on income and voting was broken down by region; in some areas, particularly the Northeast and the West Coast, Republicans now do a deal worse among high income voters than intuition and conventional wisdom say they should. Carefully controlling for race and other factors is worth doing, and I haven’t yet looked at data which does that. We do know that Republicans did much worse among Hispanic voters than they had hoped to do and had recently done, and were hopeless with African-American voters, as has been the case for a very long time (the Democrats took 89 percent of the African-American vote). The Democrats did very well among Jews, taking 88 percent of the Jewish vote. If the Democrats did well with African-American and Hispanic voters, who tend to have lower incomes, in some significant part because of issues relating to race and ethnicity, and did well with Jews, despite the generally higher income of Jewish voters, all three outcomes would tend to diminish the relative importance of income rather than other factors in explaining political outcomes. If income groups behave differently in different regions, that, too, weakens the explanatory power of income-group membership in explaining voting. Income group sometimes explains a lot of political choices; one question that interests me is when and why and how much.
If lower-income members of different racial and ethnic groups vote significantly differently, what is happening? Intuition and some evidence suggests that African-American voters suspect the Republicans of pandering to racism, and that Hispanic voters suspect the Republicans of pandering to nativism. Intuition is silent on why African-American and Hispanic religious voters were this year indifferent to appeals to culture-war politicking when voting for the House and Senate, although not necessarily when voting on other things (Webb won Virginia; a culture-war initiative also won in Virginia, and bigger than Webb did). If the war mattered a lot, and I am sure that it did, how did that affect Hispanic votes? Hispanics are over-represented in the military. In Virginia, at least, veterans voted quite disproportionately for Allen, who was prowar but never served in one, and against Webb, who was antiwar but served with distinction. Until very strong evidence shows up, I am not going to assume that Hispanic voters were moved back to the Democratic party by antiwar sentiment—but a lot of voters clearly were. My guess is that a significant percentage of the people so moved were richer white voters, but that is just a guess.
If Jews vote Democratic despite all income predictors, why do they? General liberalism is the conventional wisdom, and the conventional wisdom is usually right, which is why it becomes conventional. If Jewish liberalism explains Jewish voting, why should not African-American and Hispanic illiberalism on some questions—for example, gay rights, and church-state separation—explain their voting? This year, it did not, but Bush’s long-term electoral strategy assumed that it would. If the Republicans persist in that strategy, it may someday pay off. The poor do not always vote left. To pick an example from France: Ex-Communist white working-class voters moved over to Le Pen, over cultural and racial issues. Similar things happened in Britain. Why do Southern whites now vote Republican in such overwhelming numbers? Why do some people I know in the former coal and steel towns of Western Pennsylvania? People vote their perceived economic interests, except when they don’t, which is very often, and the left has no inevitable ability to persuade poor people that the left speaks for their economic interests.
Some other interesting things about the election: Republican moderates lost, and lost big. The Democrats picked up some seats in relatively conservative districts, but more in liberal districts. In regional terms, the Democrats did best in the Northeast and Midwest—10 seats apiece—and worse in the West and South—3 and 5 seats. Come January, the party that holds the South will not hold Congress, which will be a big change. For 48 out of the last 50 years, the party that held the South did hold Congress. One interpretation of the last 40 years is that the Republicans, shaping policy and rhetoric to gratify their now solid South, have been too pro-Southern for their own good, and they now look set to stay too pro-Southern. Here’s why:
In British politics, when you win big, you often pick up seats held by your own lunatic fringe, the ones most likely to run in such inhospitable terrain, so victory can make you crazier. That can happen in American politics, too, but this year it didn’t. The Democrats picked up some Midwestern seats where they will have to be moderate if they want to keep them, and an equal number in more liberal districts, where they may feel less pressure to be moderate, but those pressures may balance each other. The Republicans lost big, but contrary to the British pattern described above, risk becoming more rigid in defeat. The Republicans are (to some degree) peeled back to the seats held by their harder-line candidates. Such people risk nothing by refusing to moderate their language, other than a chance at a congressional majority, which is a lot, but their own jobs are not at risk if they play to the home constituency. The Republicans now have to explain defeat, the Democrats victory. The surviving Republicans will be tempted to explain defeat by the war, which has to end sometime, or to perceived corruption, or by their alleged failure to be conservative enough in cultural terms. I am betting on a strong temptation to the last choice. If they make it, I think they are going to be very sorry. The Democrats will also be tempted to explain victory by reference to the war. Depending on what they do with that interpretation, they, too, may be asking for trouble.
November 10, 2006
Abscam Revisited Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 11:00 AM EST In the wake of the 2006 congressional elections, both parties are gearing up for leadership elections. On the Democratic side, Nancy Pelosi seems likely to run unopposed for speaker, James Clyburn seems likely to run unopposed for majority whip (he may yet draw some opposition, but he remains the hands-down favorite), and Rahm Emanuel, the current chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and chief architect of the Democrats’ victory, is poised to run uncontested for Conference Chair.
The only real race among Democrats will be for the position of majority leader, the number-two spot in the House. One candidate is Stenny Hoyer, a Maryland congressman who is liberal on most issues but hawkish on the war; he is currently the Democratic whip. The other candidate is Jack Murtha, a congressman from Western Pennsylvania who is conservative on most cultural issues but a leading critic of the Bush administration’s war effort. Murtha is also a decorated combat veteran, which increases his appeal.
In an earlier post I suggested that Nancy Pelosi has been smart to make the Democratic party a safe place for Catholic voters, and including Jack Murtha in the leadership will surely only contribute to that strategy. But there’s a problem with Murtha, and I think it overrides whatever strengths he brings to the ethnic equation.
Over a quarter-century ago, Murtha was an unindicted co-conspirator in Abscam, the famous sting operation in which FBI agents posed as Arab businessmen and offered cash bribes to 31 elected officials. Ultimately, one senator (Harrison Williams of New Jersey) and five House members took the bait. Most of the other targets said no, flat-out. Murtha, however, told the undercover FBI agent that he was “not interested . . . at this point.” You can see the full surveillance tape by clicking here. (It’s about an hour long, gets really interesting after about 15 minutes, and the crucial moment comes about 32 minutes in.) It’s not a pretty sight.
To his credit, Murtha didn’t take the money. But he didn’t say no, either, and he didn’t report the offer to the authorities.
In the wake of the Ney, Delay, Cunningham, Foley, Weldon, and Harris scandals, scandals that have strained the trust between citizens and their elected officials, it would behoove the new Democratic majority to place the highest premium on ethics. I have nothing but the greatest respect for Jack Murtha’s stand on the war, but he’s no poster child for congressional ethics. And right now, that’s exactly what the country needs.
November 10, 2006
The 2006 Election II Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 09:30 AM EST Fred Smoler raises and answers an interesting rhetorical question: “The Republicans are the party of the rich, right? Well, they used to be, although even in 2004 the Democrats did a hair better than the Republicans with people earning over $100,000. In 2006 the Democrats did better still.” Fred’s thesis boils down to this: Republicans are losing their grip on high-income and wealthier voters over three issues: (1) culture wars, which presumably drive many pro-choice, pro-stem-cell-research, pro-privacy voters to the Democratic fold; (2) the war on terror, on which Republicans may have temporarily lost their edge; and (3) Iraq, which concerns voters from all demographic backgrounds. I’m not sure that I buy Fred’s argument that “Republicans risk becoming the party of lower-income white voters, and that is a losing strategy.” CNN’s national exit poll for House races shows that Democrats fared best among low-income voters and worst among high-income voters. How these numbers change when one controls for race, I don’t know, and perhaps Fred is working off of more sophisticated tab data.
From a historical perspective, Democrats experienced their worst postwar slump when they lost lower-income voters, not when they got trounced among high-income voters. In his 1978 study, Transformations of the American Party System, Everett Carl Ladd, Jr., found that in congressional races the Democrats’ share of “high status” white votes jumped from 48 percent in 1964 to 57 percent in 1974; meanwhile, the Democrats lost ground among “low status” whites, from 74 percent in 1964 to 67 percent in 1974. In presidential races, their share of low-status whites fell from 61 percent in 1960 to 53 percent in 1976.It’s not clear how Ladd defined low-status and high-status, but clearly Democrats after 1972 were appealing to more educated, higher-income voters and less to low-income voters, who had traditionally been their core base. In their influential study of post-war politics, Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights and Taxes on American Politics, Thomas and Mary Edsall cited Ladd’s study as an alarming indication that Democrats were becoming too elitist a party, and that Republicans had managed to capture the populist banner, even as their tax policies did little to benefit low-income voters. In effect, in the 1970s Democrats were at least temporarily the rich man’s party. Or, at least, the upper-middle-class party. It’s not clear that this strategy was either good or bad. They still controlled Congress by enormous margins, but they were losing their grip on the Presidency.
November 9, 2006
TR Goes to Panama Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 05:10 PM EST One hundred years ago today, Theodore Roosevelt became the first sitting President of the United States to pay an official visit to a foreign country, when he traveled southward to inspect construction progress on the Panama Canal. It’s remarkable to think that for over a century before TR’s trip, America seemed so inconsequential to the rest of the world—and/or the rest of the world seemed to inconsequential to America—that no sitting President bothered to leave the country for official purposes. As Alexander Burns explains in today’s AmericanHeritage.com feature on the trip, TR was one of the first Presidents to take an active interest in foreign relations. True, other presidents including Jefferson and Lincoln had been greatly concerned with doings in Europe. But as Alex explains, TR “was an avid interventionist who supported an expanded military role for the United States in the Western Hemisphere. In that very same year, 1906, the twenty-sixth President was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for helping to conclude a peace between the warring nations of Russia and Japan.” Were I delivering a lecture on this topic a few years ago, I might well have attributed the shift toward globalism to the Civil War, which expedited the construction of the transcontinental railroad, spurred massive industrial development to fuel the Union war effort, and furthered the cause of paper money and centralized banking. All of these developments created an economically advanced nation that increasingly traded labor, capital, resources, and goods with the rest of the world. By the time TR became President, he couldn’t help but take a more international approach to governance than his predecessors. But Eric Rauchway’s recent book Blessed Among Nations: How the World Made America, which I reviewed for AmericanHeritage.com, raises a reciprocal issue. Not only was America selling to and poaching labor from the rest of the world; the world was investing its resources in America. Britain, for instance, was a major investor in American railroads. This meant that by the time TR became President, what foreign leaders thought mattered a great deal. Of course, TR’s trip to Panama was for a specific purpose. But it’s hard to imagine it occurring 30 years before. By 1906 the world had already become a smaller place, and America, so geographically expansive and economically robust, was finding itself a larger place in that smaller world.
November 9, 2006
The 2006 Election Posted by Fredric Smoler at 01:30 PM EST The Republicans are the party of the rich, right? Well, they used to be, although even in 2004 the Democrats did a hair better than the Republicans with people earning over $100,000. In 2006 the Democrats did better still. A fascinating piece on Slate points out that on the East Coast the Democrats took 57 percent of voters with household incomes over $100,000, compared with a 49-to-48 margin in 2004. This year, 63 percent of Eastern voters earning between $150,000 and $200,000 voted Democrat, as did exactly half of Eastern voters earning more than $200,000. The same trends are visible in the West and South; Republicans do better in the Midwest. Since the rich are likelier to vote than are the poor, winning over the rich matters more than you might think (in the South, voters with household incomes exceeding $100,000 make up 23 percent of the people who actually vote). Given Republican policies, which greatly favor the rich, the rich seem oddly ungrateful. It is tempting to ascribe this to distress over Iraq, but there are other possibilities. My guess is that waging the culture war turns out to mobilize a lot of voters on both sides. Better-educated voters also increasingly trend Democrat, although it is worth working over the statistics to figure out how much education is a proxy for income. What does seem clear is that the Republicans risk becoming the party of lower-income white voters, and that is a losing strategy. My other guess is that the Republican hole card remains national security. This year a lot of voters may have thought there was no good reason to assume that Republicans are better at ensuring national security than Democrats are. My sense is that the Democrats will be well-advised to allay lingering doubts about that one. A darker possibility is that the Democrats also made gains with Midwestern working-class white voters by appealing to fears of globalization and suspicions of free trade. Since my sense is that better-educated voters are more committed free-traders and less sympathetic to economic nationalism, the Democrats may have to choose between one of their new constituencies and the other. The good news is that Republican appeals to nativism seem to have failed, so at least we may be spared a bidding contest for that constituency. As more analysis of the vote comes out, I expect some interesting blogging here.
November 9, 2006
Speaker Nancy D’Alesandro, Baltimore Democrat Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 12:20 PM EST I conducted an experiment yesterday afternoon. If you plug the key terms “Nancy Pelosi” and “San Francisco liberal” into a Lexis-Nexis search, you will find no fewer than 50 hits over the past two years in national and regional newspapers and magazines. Surely this reflects the effectiveness of the generic Republican charge that Pelosi is a left-wing, left-coast, granola-crunching Democrat who wants to raise your taxes to subsidize gay marriages for immigrant welfare queens on parole. (It goes without saying that the marriage licenses will be issued in Spanish.) Pelosi, the presumptive House Speaker in the next Congress, doesn’t seem too bothered by the caricature. She’s a professional politician, and she deals in plenty of over-the-top rhetoric herself. All’s fair in love and war—and electioneering.
But if the charge is politically fair, it’s not accurate. What pundits seem to be forgetting is that Nancy Pelosi, nee Nancy D’Alesandro, grew up in Baltimore, Maryland, where her father, Thomas D’Alesandro, Jr., was elected to five terms in Congress and two terms as the city’s mayor. Those were the days when Baltimore (like most cities in Northeast, Mid-Atlantic, and Midwest states) was a loose confederation of white ethnic neighborhoods with names like Little Italy, Pigtown, and Fells Point. For most Catholics—first and second generation immigrants from Poland, Italy, Ireland, and Germany—smaller neighborhood units were linked strongly with the church, such that city residents referred to the name of their local parish when asked where they lived (e.g., St. Leo’s instead of “Little Italy”). In his book Behind the Backlash: White Working Class Politics in Baltimore, 1940-1980, the historian Kenneth Durr revisits those neighborhoods in considerable detail, bringing back to life an era not so long ago when the church, the Democratic party, and the local neighborhood held sway over millions of white ethnic citizens.
Nancy Pelosi has lived in San Francisco for many years, and there’s little doubt that she is very liberal, both culturally and economically. But what’s fascinating about her stewardship of the House Democratic Conference is her forceful insistence that the party recommit itself to making her father’s old constituents—or, more accurately, their kids and grandkids—comfortable voting the Democratic line again.
Until 1968 white Catholics were fairly reliable Democratic voters. (That said, my forthcoming book on ethnicity and politics in postwar New York will suggest that their allegiance to the New Deal coalition weakened as early as 1944.) By 1972, however, Richard Nixon was able to pry away 58 percent of the Italian vote and 53 percent of the Irish vote. For Democrats, it was all downhill from there.
Part of the divorce between Catholic voters and the Democratic party owed to the politics of race. As John McGreevy, a Notre Dame historian, has shown, urban Catholics were particularly sensitive to racial turnover in their neighborhoods. Having invested so much emotional and financial capital in these small urban spaces, they viewed city blocks in distinctly ethnic and religious terms. Moreover, urban Catholics were often asked to bear the brunt of liberal race policies, from affirmative action in public-sector and unionized hiring, to busing policies aimed at achieving racial balance in public schools.
Much of their political defection from the Democratic party also owed to liberalism’s new interest in cultural issues after 1968. Many Catholic voters who had been happy to support the party of Franklin Roosevelt took issue with the party of George McGovern. Over the years, as the Democrats became increasingly identified with pro-choice and (later) pro-gay-marriage policies, as they became more strident supporters of the separation between church and state, and as they embraced the individual-rights revolution of the 1960s, they became less palatable to socially conservative voters, including large blocs of observant Catholics who were raised on values that emphasized the community over the individual.
This week, however, something remarkable happened. Democrats won the Catholic vote, 52 percent to 47 percent—exactly the margin by which George Bush carried Catholics in 2004. Part of this owes to general dissatisfaction with the war in Iraq, which cuts across ethnic and religious lines. But part of this shift also owes to the Democrats’ strategy of running cultural conservatives in large parts of the South and Midwest. In Pennsylvania, a heavily Catholic state, Bob Casey, Jr., a pro-life Democrat, was able to neutralize Rick Santorum’s appeal to Catholic voters. At the end of the day, these voters were able to support a candidate pledged to raise the minimum wage without compromising deeply felt religious and ethical values. The same is true of candidates in Indiana, Ohio, Florida, and North Carolina who defeated their GOP opponents by establishing their credentials as observant Christians.
In the race for Majority Leader, Pelosi is likely to lend quiet support to Jack Murtha, the culturally conservative Pennsylvania Democrat who represents a heavily Catholic district in western Pennsylvania. (Ironically, Murtha’s opponent, Stenny Hoyer, is a Maryland congressman.)
Essentially, Pelosi is inverting the logic behind Thomas Frank’s bestseller, What’s the Matter With Kansas. Frank basically argues that Republicans have hoodwinked Midwestern and Southern voters into placing cultural concerns above economic concerns. There’s something a little patronizing about this argument, which assumes that an Irish Catholic earning the minimum wage should compromise her position on abortion to secure a $2-per-hour pay raise. Having grown up in a white ethnic world, Pelosi respects and viscerally understands the worldview of observant Catholics. Rather than suggest that they wake up and smell the coffee, she is asking them, and asking the Democratic party, to forge a new consensus around issues like health care, energy independence, the environment, and the economy. Many of these issues also resonate with Catholic social teachings.
This isn’t to say that liberals will be asked to abandon their core convictions on gay rights, choice, or civil liberties. Rather, Pelosi is asking liberals to pitch a big tent. When cultural questions come before Congress, Democrats in the Pelosi conference will vote their conscience. When the minimum-wage hike comes before Congress, Pelosi will no doubt insist on strict orthodoxy.
Whether one agrees with this strategy, there’s little doubting that Nancy Pelosi isn’t quite the “San Francisco liberal” that Republicans make her out to be. She’s a Baltimore white ethnic Democrat, and for better or worse, she’s refurbishing the house that Roosevelt built.
November 9, 2006
The Quietest War? Posted by Fredric Smoler at 09:45 AM EST Kevin Baker’s lead piece on the website yesterday is from the current issue of the magazine. The piece, “The Quietest War,” compares the place World War II has in our historical consciousness with what he takes to be the absence of the war in Iraq from our political consciousness, and concludes that we should be worried about that absence. I greatly admire Kevin Baker as a novelist and as a thinker and writer about American history, but I think he may be wrong about this. Some of this is merely 20/20 hindsight: We now have the evidence of Tuesday’s election, which was not available to Kevin when he wrote. We now know that the electorate just turned over both houses of Congress to the Democrats, and the issue most voters claimed to have had on their minds when they walked into the voting booth was Iraq.
But I have another thought on one of Kevin’s points, his closing one. The close of his piece asserts that “the most disappointing realization about the war in Iraq is how little we care, how precious few demonstrators there are on either side of the issue.” I am uneasy about linking the absence of demonstrations to an absence of care, because I can think of another explanation—an absence of certainty about what to do. My guess is that there are few demonstrators against the war in Iraq because it is not clear to many people that there is an obvious path out of this mess. In Vietnam, it was widely assumed, at least by the late 1960s, that American withdrawal was obviously preferable to continued engagement, that nothing worse could happen than the protraction of the American role in that war. At the time, I was very certain that this was true. My confidence in my prescience diminished after the news of the Cambodian genocide came out. The flight of hundreds of thousands of people risking drowning, also rape and murder by Thai pirates, all apparently worth it if you could get away from Vietnam’s new rulers, also eroded my confidence in my original certitude.
This does not mean that staying in Vietnam would have been wise, just, and prudent, merely that the cost of going was stiff, although paid by Vietnamese and Cambodians rather than by Americans. Americans do forget things about wars, and what I think Americans have forgotten about Vietnam includes that cost; it is almost never mentioned by people who assume that leaving Vietnam was the absolutely clear victory of justice over injustice and of intelligence over stupidity. Is there no chance that South Vietnam could have survived? Maybe, although South Korea is still there, and after decades of brutal tyranny—we backed some pretty nasty characters in South Korea—the place is a thriving and prosperous democracy. So again, I do not know.
What I do know is that a Leninist party possessing hundreds of thousands of troops plus T 54s, MiG-21s, and heavy artillery stood poised to take power in Vietnam after we abandoned the place. By those means, that party created order, a very harsh order, but order. If we leave Iraq any time soon, such an outcome in any near term seems unlikely. What seems likely is horrific chaos and probably very protracted civil war, maybe Iranian intervention, maybe Turkish intervention, maybe a lot of things, none of them good, and some of them possibly worse than the evil we protract by staying. But maybe not. Again, I am not sure. My guess is that there are not too many demonstrations against the Iraq war because a lot of other people are not sure, either.
People may yet decide—they may decide fairly soon—that nothing could be worse than our staying. And if they do so decide they may be right, or not. If they are wrong, there will be a price, and the first installment of that price will be paid by the Iraqis. But after that first installment is paid, there may be plenty of price to go around. When you demonstrate, you are usually against something, but you are by implication for something else, some likely outcome of what will happen if the thing you oppose ceases to be. It is possible that many Americans think similarly about demonstrations. So for now, I prefer to think that most my countrymen fail to demonstrate not because they are indifferent to what happens to Iraqis, but because they are not indifferent.
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